Cantara’s (Social) Notebook

Vivian and Marian Brown, San Francisco There are only two cities in the world where women are allowed to grow old beautifully. One is Paris, the other is San Francisco. There is a misconception that you need a lot of cash to look good—the older you get, the more cash you need. Nothing of the sort. You need know-how and a sense of self. The women of Paris know how to tie a scarf seventeen ways. They start their style from their cheekbones. They know when to wear and when not to wear their grandmother’s brooch. They know how to wring Hollywood art out of a drugstore lipstick. Artistry, then, is the operative word for the women of Paris—artistry that accentuates depth. Here in the city by the Bay, along with knowhow and sense of self—those two most important rewards of maturity—another important element is added: a sense of fun. Conformity like a dank fog may be settling here like everywhere else in the country, but San Francisco is still a city of eccentrics. There’s no dressin...

The three books passed around most by the girls when I went to high school in Minneapolis in the late 60s: Peyton Place Valley of the Dolls Coffee, Tea or Me? I can’t say the boys shared “real” books, but they were into comic books, chiefly: All the permutations of Weird Tales Anything by Robert Crumb

In my teens I had an enormous crush on Tony Perkins and it's easy to see why—his boyish vulnerability was devastating to thousands of girls besides me, not to mention an equal number of boys. He won my heart playing Gary Cooper's nervous-around-women son in a lovely period drama called Friendly Persuasion , lost it with Psycho , but won it again with Psycho II . Boyish men you want to simultaneously feed cookies to and jump are devastating to me, I guess. But my favorite is Goodbye Again , which was based on Francoise Sagan's Aimez-Vous Brahms?

Cantarabooks, it should be noted, is not the first literary PDF ebook publisher on the internet. That honor goes to Electron Press, a solo operation started by Philip Harris back in 1997. Philip, by profession an IT consultant, saw the possibilities the internet offered early on and started Electron; and because at the time web publishing was such an intriguing frontier, he was able to acquire the works of varied and veteran authors such as Barry Malzberg, Arthur Herzog and James Ridgeway. I worked for Philip for a few months about five years ago as a special-projects editor when he still had his office in Manhattan (the last news of him was that he relocated to Connecticut), and a great deal of what I know about e-publishing I learned from working for him. Thirteen years into the so-called Internet Revolution, the only two literary PDF ebook publishers I know of in the entire world at present are Electron Press and Cantarabooks. The only two literary PDF magazines I know of are...