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fraught, with occasional peril [ the[ thewhite white notebooksnotebooks #2 ] #2 ] The Lost Café DESCRIBE YOUR PERFECT CAFÉ. Is there such a thing? I’ve Kong currently has The Pacific Coffee Co., a good venue encountered so few that come close, yet I inhabit them as with a variety of coffees, books to borrow, free computers, much as my home, hotels or aeroplanes. plenty of seating and always open late. It would have a large front window like that in the Possibly the closest to my ideal café is in San short animated film Lost and Found (pictured, next page), Pedro, Los Angeles, called Sacred Grounds [1]. I hardly with giant capital letters COFFEE in pale paint. ever go there now because it’s a long journey from my Mine is not a slick, conveyor belt place like a usual stay in Long Beach. Spacious, community-run, a boring Starbucks chain. It has big, old Persian and focal point for San Pedro residents, old sofas, a stage, Indian carpets hanging on the walls and lighting that chess and backgammon boards, art, and a place that provides highlights in an otherwise dark and almost takes coffee seriously. Nightly events, bands, poetry and secretive place, with hidden corners, nooks and crannies. book readings for the 21st century Ginsbergs and This café must know how to do decent Turkish, Arabic Bukowskis (Bukowski used to be a down-and-out in San and Vietnamese coffees. There are shelves of books (all Pedro). short story collections or anthologies, categorised by Which cafés disappoint you? Bookstore cafés have country), magazines and comics – stuff that people would largely missed an opportunity to be a focus for local be interested in sitting down and reading for half an literary activity. Apart from author signings, it’s like the hour. There’s free soya milk for the lactose-intolerant and bookstores are actively not interested, they’re only there anyone else who dislikes cow juice. I prefer knowledge- to provide a place for people to park their backsides able staff concerning coffees and teas. while showrooming books they’ll later get cheaper on Which cafés have come close to your ideal? I Amazon. Borders on Oxford Street in London used to remember one dark but colourful café in downtown have author interviews with Pat Cadigan; although this Auckland, New Zealand, had the kind of busy, fun, wasn’t actually in the bookstore café it used to be a good interactive and deeply cultural vibe of immigrant focus that brought people in, and it’s that’s kind of thing customers who had all come to know each other via that that more bookstore cafés ought to do. But not everyone place. Damned if I can remember its name. Another in gets it wrong. Borderlands in San Francisco now has a Toronto, Canada, called The Plantation on King George cool café next door, linked through an entrance via the Street: a large square space with a high ceiling, an store. Trident in Boston’s Newbury Street also takes emphasis on service and decor revealed their ambition to coffee seriously, and is always busy for breakfast. be high-end with prices to match. Causeway Bay in Hong Hard Rock Cafés are generally a disappointment, fraught, with occasional peril [ the white notebooks #2 ] September 2558 / 2015 a print perzine for limited distribution, available for ‘the usual’ also available a month later at efanzines.com. email: [email protected] 136/200 Emerald Hill Village, Soi 6, Hua Hin, Prachuap Khiri Khan 77110, Thailand set in 9/12 Didot and Letter Gothic above: ‘Flat Black’, 2015 [ 1 ] inhabited by Lonely Planet and Rough Guide back- packers. Places to recharge a little before inevitably moving on to somewhere else. On relocating to Thailand, I imagined a small chain of franchised cafés, again on remote beaches and tourist haunts, called The Barefoot Café. I still think that’s actually doable. But so far these ideas have all just stayed in my head, never venturing any further until writing about them now. Any idea why coffee resonates with you? Not really, but I could refer you to Mary Doria Russell’s description how a gift of coffee beans broke the ice between two alien races in The Sparrow. Here, Hlavin Kitheri, an alien poet, is smelling coffee for the first time: Opening the flask, breaking its vacuum, Kitheri was met by a plume of sweetly camphoric enzyme full of expensive memorabilia, boring booths with by-products giving off notes of basil and tarragon, ketchup and mustard, serving chain restaurant food and by chocolate aromatics, sugar carbonyl and with a predictable souvenir store. They’re not interested pyridine compounds carrying the suggestion of at all in coffee, despite their ambition and despite the vanilla, by hints of nutmeg and celery seed and ‘Café’ in their name. These days I just avoid them. cumin in the products of dry distillation created The focus of community socialising in the British during roasting. And, overlaying all, the tenuous Isles has usually been the remit of pubs. Despite there odor of volatile short-chain carbons, the saline now being a Starbucks, Costa, Prêt à Manger or Caffè memorial of an alien ocean: sweat from the fingers Nero on just about every town-centre street corner in the of Emilio Sandoz. UK, again they’re just there to sell you half-decent coffee A poet with no words to describe organic and panini. The best community experience you will get beauties whose origin he could not possibly is a pinboard for local events and businesses, if that. suspect, Hlavin Kitheri knew only that he must Have you ever seriously thought about running your know more. And, because of this, lives were own café? Never. When I was generally ascetic (in fact changed again. almost hermetic) in the early 1990s I once envisaged a few cafés in remote places called The Temperance Café. From these words, I think Russell has the same Places generally as sparse as their surroundings, kind of appreciation of the meaning of coffee as myself. [1] https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sacred-Grounds/134568123254772 Rick Deckard Rides the Unicorn At age 5½ Miles had, by then, outgrown Duplo and has Miles: “No.” since preferred the intricacy of Lego minifigures and “A truck driver?” especially Mixels, which offer far more scope for his “No.” imagination. But that doesn’t stop him from occasionally “What about a policeman?” hauling out the boxes of Duplo to make giant robots and “A policeman?! Policemen don’t have unicorns!” dinosaurs with his dad. “True,” then to myself, “Well, unless you’re Rick Deckard.” In April, it was a little different: he wanted to make “Who’s Rick Deckard?” a unicorn. So we made one (above), then he wanted a “Er… a policeman who dreamed of unicorns.” Duplo figure to sit on its back and ride it. “Okay, it’s Rick Deckard. Put him there.” Me (holding up a figure): “How about a farmer?” [ 2 ] Tr a v e l s Acres of Books, Long Beach, Los Angeles IN 2014 THERE WAS much hand-wringing about the among over a million books covering every subject under destruction of the late Ray Bradbury’s house in Los the sun. The second thing that hit you was the smell: that Angeles. Apparently even the new owner had mixed familiar mustiness of used bookstores was rather more feelings about having the bulldozers clear space for his emphatic here. 6½ miles of wooden shelving and 1,500 new development. It was a telling moment in the apple crates saw to that. posthumous ‘life’ of Ray Bradbury, an author who many Filing was sometimes idiosyncratic and also looked towards for evidence that America’s more inconsistent, but with so many books to house there were innocent past could be protected from the pragmatisms some inevitable lapses of categorisation. The place also and injustices of the present and future. had a genteel humour: there used to be a handwritten sign Bradbury’s favourite bookstore was always Acres on the front desk that read something like “Please ring of Books [1] in nearby Long Beach. He immortalised the bell for service by surly assistant who doesn’t want to be store in an essay ‘I Sing the Bookstore Eclectic’ in 1982, disturbed by person ringing bell.” I’d actually describe the which, as far as I know, hasn’t yet appeared in print service as anything but surly. anywhere other than in its original form, although it was Inevitably I always gravitated towards the science on the bookstore’s website for many years (although that’s fiction section in the dark, far depths of the building now gone, too). Bradbury was a regular visitor to Acres (above). It was big and long and always fully stocked and campaigned for the store’s protection, first in the mostly with American paperbacks, but this was also the 1980s when it was under threat of demolition, and again place to pick up plenty of decently priced American when it was announced by the owners that they were hardcovers and assorted rarities as well. calling it a day in 2008. If his own house couldn’t survive The narrow aisles throughout the store never long after his death in 2012, at least he could (if he were really allowed for two people passing each other, and the around) claim better success with his favourite bookstore, further back you went into the long brick warehouse, the which after its closure was to be redeveloped into an arts more precarious the shelving seemed to become.

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