May 16, 2001

This work has a charming conception of the reader as someone possessed of boundless resources of free time and curiosity. An aristocrat, perhaps, with a strong interest in science, who would like nothing better than to spend his days scraping mineral deposits out of the vaporizer's electrodes with a toothpick.

The opening sentences grant us immediate entrance to the gracious, leisurely world of vaporizers:

Vaporizers are unique among household appliances because their performance is determined by the user much more than the designer. This is due to the tremendous variation in mineral content across the country. Water in some areas is nearly as pure as distilled water, which contains no minerals at all. This water is called soft water. Other areas have hard water which contains so much mineral that the water is colored or cloudy and has a distinctive taste: chalky, salty, soapy, or sulfury. Most of the country has water somewhere in between these extremes of soft and hard.

The manual evokes a timeless world uncluttered by worldly commitments to anything but the proper maintenance of the vaporizer. In this world there is no rushing around, no stress. In this world you don't have the clogged sinuses which caused you to buy the vaporizer in the first place. It is a leisurely afternoon in this world. The vaporizer's glow-in-the-dark casing sits peacefully in the backyard, storing light, while you are happily absorbed in determining the mineral content of your water. In this world you are a seeker of the middle path between hard and soft water, your nirvana a steady stream of steam that lasts the promised 12 hours per gallon.

The closest antecedent to the Safety-Glo Warm Mist Vaporizer User's Manual is Kakuzo Okakura's Book of Tea, a poetic meditation on the Japanese tea ceremony. Clear affinities of rhythm and outlook can be seen in the following two passages, the first by Okakura, the second by the Sunmark Corporation:

Make a delicious bowl of tea; lay the charcoal so that it heats the water; arrange the flowers as they are in the field; in summer suggest coolness; in winter, warmth; do everything ahead of time; prepare for rain

It is necessary that you reduce the mineral content of the water in your vaporizer by adding distilled water, demineralized water, rain water, or melted snow (clean) in a proportion (determined by experiment) which will require at least five minutes start-up time.

Duplicate Keys
Jane Smiley (Knopf, 1984)

I have always liked books by women that feature lots of herbal tea and conversations about relationships. Even as a teenager, I had a weird attraction to novels by the likes of Barbara Pym, Margaret Drabble, and Alice Munro.

Until I read Duplicate Keys, I didn't realize what these books were missing: guns, murder, and drug deals gone bad. To its advantage, the novel is more muder-mystery-within-relationship-novel than vice versa; proper detective novels tend be bogged down by too much introspection. If you're like me, you can't read P.D. James without hoping that damn poet-detective Dagliesh will stop brooding and punch a bad guy in the jaw.

Duplicate Keys opens with the double murder of two men in their early thirties. These men are members of a group of friends who moved from Minnesota to New York some years before. This group has continued to hang out together and put off adulthood for ten years or so, but post-adolosecent patterns of attachment have been wearing thin, and it seems the party may be over. Nothing says the party's over quite so well as a double murder.

Maybe you've been out to breakfast on a Saturday morning and spotted a similar group of veteran young people having a gathering of their tribe. They dress funky. They have creative facial hair. They embrace and joke nonstop and play out their own version of The Big Chill. Who's to say that double murder is not just the thing to get them out of their collective rut?

Glen Campbell
The Emerald Queen Casino, Tacoma, April 26

The official line on Campbell is that he has put his cokehead days behind him, found the Lord, and is currently content in his golf-playing semiretirement. But the man on stage this night did not strike any of our party as a sober man. Even if it was nothing more than 25 or so cups of coffee, he seemed to be stimulated by more than the polite, elderly crowd gathered before him.

His use of substances is between him and the Lord, though, and what was more distressing to those who had shelled thirty bucks to see him was his lack of interest in the performance. He may have seen a casino audience as unworthy of his efforts. Yet the audience showed itself to be discerning, responding enthusiastically those few times Campbell was fully present, notably on "Wichita Lineman."

But Glen Campbell on auto-pilot is still Glen Campbell. A veteran show man with great reserves of charm, he is probably incapable of putting on a truly bad show. Though his voice has little of the golden, pure tone heard on his records of the 60s and 70s, it has lost none of its range and suppleness, and may have grown even stronger in the upper registers. He showed off his mastery of a wide range of genres, from show tunes to honky-tonk, and demonstrated his chops to be firmly in place with a number of show-offy guitar solos.

All of Campbell's major hits were accounted for, from "Gentle on my Mind" to "Southern Nights." One surprise was Campbell's daughter, Debbie, who sang a number of lifeless duets with her father, but at least had the class to hang out after the show to sign autographs, unlike the man himself. Campbell held a brief gab session for the media only, then scuttled into a van bound for the airport, ignoring the plaintive cries of his fans.