The most-pettable little K-dot at citydress once told me that one couldn't spend one's whole life sitting home watching the Noggin Channel and drinking black currant iced tea, but I'm not sure why not. The world needs to be a lot more like the Noggin Channel.

The wonderfully gaunt and clever Liz V. at nightmareteeth posted a quote from John Waters: "Don't fuck people who don't read". I agree absolutely. I can't imagine being attracted to someone who doesn't read, and I can't imagine anyone who hadn't spent her formative years living inside books ever being attracted to me.

Ginny at ginny_mccoo writes that she collects books about Western girls in Japan. She now has her own copy of Hanrahan's "Lost Girls and Love Hotels"-- a copy just arrived for her. Ginny loves the cover illustration--- something I need to ask Lissy at emigree about, too. It's a cover that needs to be compared to Zeidel's "Layover". I want to hear what Ginny has to say about "Lost Girls and Love Hotels", just as I want her to tell me what she thinks of "Stratosphere Girl".

A quick Google search brings up a site for Cambria Press. Cynthia Gralla is one of their contract authors. The bio sketch at the publisher's site says that Ms. Gralla did in fact get her PhD at Berkeley, and that she has a book (no title yet) due out in Summer of the Year Nine: Cynthia Gralla holds a PhD from University of California at Berkeley. Her book, a highly original work that explores how the physical space of the demimonde was interpreted in literary space in various 20th century Japanese texts, films and art works, is forthcoming summer 2009. It's an intriguing description, though of course I wonder if "the physical space of the demimonde" is just theory-speak for "the pleasure quarters" or Roppongi. Theory-speak always manages to flatten out life and erase any sort of specificity--- e.g, the way people become "bodies" in crit-theory accounts of historical experience. Still... it is a book by Cynthia Gralla. I fell in love with her "The Floating World" two or three years ago--- fell in love with her jacket photo as well ---and I've recommended the novel, plus her series at Salon.com on her days as a hostess in Tokyo, to a full dozen lovely wicked clever girls.

Noggin World is the world of Wonder Pets and Oobi and Max & Ruby. It's not J. Peterman World, which is the world of spring and autumn sunlight and soft, muted elegance. But it is a world where everything is kind and pettable. And we need more pettable things. We need Small Messenger Capybaras and little fez-wearing wombats. We need little Nic the Robot Parrot and our small, non-extinct Sith Thylacine friends. We need a world where everyone knows that Small Mongolian Ponies are named Edmund. Pettability is a quality that should be much more appreciated.

The most-loved little K-dot at citydress believes in Binomial Nomenclature. Her stufflings all have two names: Clarissa Trevor the small girly lion, Charlie Owen the koala, Terrence Montgomery the wombat. Stufflings are important; everyone in Noggin World knows that. Little Eva-Grace made a point of taking a tiny walrus named Jamie with her to university. Yay, little Jamie! Yay, little Eva-Grace!

I have Andre Aciman's "Out of Egypt" there on my bedside table. Aciman's family were cosmopolitan Jews in Alexandria. The memoir is about how they lost their city and their world, about how they were suddenly told that they couldn't really be Egyptian, that Alexandria was no longer a Mediterranean city with a twenty-three hundred year past, but only a provincial town in Arab Egypt.

The Copts of Egypt, the Assyrians and Chaldaeans of Iraq, the Jews of Baghdad and Persia and Alexandria (even a hundred years ago, every fourth Baghdadi was Jewish)--- all the old remnants of the Near East that go back beyond the Arab invasions are being swept away. Tibetans and Mongols, too, I suppose. It's not just monk seals and polar bears that can go extinct.

AndWeBreathe writes about Tokyo, about the city where her lover has gone: The city's name tastes clean in my mouth. I don't like it. I don't like you there. There are too many beautiful women with mechanically batting eyelashes... I do read her entries there at at _manufactured and sigh. It's been a long time since I've gone off to a new city. And even then, there was no lover from whom I'd be parting, no lover to kiss me, or promise me that she'd offer herself to me when I returned. There are J. Peterman girls at the zeppelin field, or at an Art Deco aerodrome late on a Mitteleuropa night, kissing lovers goodbye, the collars of trenchcoats turned up, their faces shadowed. I'm not someone for whom girls come out to the zeppelin field on a late-summer morning. There's no J. Peterman girl on a widow's walk for me.

I'd like to think that some Wm. Gibson girl in a Wm. Gibson city would think of me late at night as she waits in an exiles' bar. But there's no lithe and dream-haunted girl in all The Physical Space of the Demimonde to feel any longing or sorrow. I don't inspire saudade or mono-no-aware. I'm not someone who'll be a memory. CloverSt--- Lily at apparitional ---spends her nights driving along PCH in her classic Mustang, driving through memories north from La Jolla. There was girls who can feel the memories of their lovers and Pasts like summer rain. I do know that I've never been a memory.

All the more reason to be in Noggin World. I can read Eve Babitz and Joan Didion, I can read "Floating World" or "Lost Girls and Love Hotels". I can read those things--- but Noggin World is safer. I want to take time one night soon and re-read Murakami's "After Dark". The Roppongi night is always there in my dreams, in the films in my head.

Ginny at ginny_mccoo and Ioana at winterbymorning both dream of being hostesses in Tokyo, of being part of Cynthia Gralla's "The Floating World", of finding dark sex and ethereality and perfect, starved hipbones in the Roppongi night. I can admire the erotic longing. I can admire the vision of nyotaimori and Ginza neon and sex-without-names. I really can admire those things. I can certainly imagine taking either of them to love hotels and hostess bars.

But it's Noggin World that's better. It really is. Pettability, kindness, and Japanese Corporate Cuteness are a haven far beyond even the most shadow-and-sunlight Paul Bowles or Pico Iyer cities...