I don't have to make that case, though: Richards has done it for me. In advance of tonight's installment of Glide, the Washington Post pop music critic sent me YouTube links to five of his favorite new-age songs. (Comments are my own.)

JD Emmanuel, "Attaining Peace"

Emmanuel pitches his music with a lot verities about how it's a pathway to greater spiritual awareness, enlightenment, etc—last year he dubbed his music "Time Traveler" because "it can put the listener into a state where time seems to disappear." Good luck slipping into a wormhole of astral bliss here: There's something creepy and insistent amid the gentle keyboard swells and drones on this track from 1983's Wizards, like the unsettling soundtracks Popol Vuh worked up for the Werner Herzog films where Klaus Kinski slowly loses it.

Peter Davison, "Glide III"

When Windham Hill Records became a national phenomenon in the early '80s, largely on the strength of George Winston's piano solos, a door opened for relaxation-music pros like Davison, who blends Eastern-ish flutes, harp, and washes of keyboard. It's a peaceful easy feeling for sure, though it's also undone somewhat by the layer of synth figures zapping gently across the tune.

William Aura, "Come My Way"

The path from Fahey to Yanni involved a few ugly genetic mutations—its evolutionary end goal was to please PBS pledge-drive callers, after all. But while I appreciate Richards' crate-digging efforts (presumably in 25-cent bins), on the evidence of this track Aura trafficks in the Reunite-on-ice hot-tub grooves that gave the genre a bad name, from the bubbly bassy synths to the angel-chorus melodies. Released in 1987 on Windham Hill rival Higher Octave, this track appeared on an album titled Half Moon Bay, in tribute to the San Francisco peninsula rich-hippie town where it was recorded, and where I'm guessing 90 percent of the LP's owners currently live.

Steve Roach, "Reflections in Suspension"

In the liner notes for Music for Airports, Eno pointed out that he was looking for a kind of music that was "an atmosphere, a tint." Roach has the same mission, though his music is at once more colorful and more sinuous than Eno's ambient gestures, and it never sounds soporific; I've happily taken in this track's 16-plus minutes repeatedly in the past week. This comes from his 1984 album of the same title, reissued in 2001. It may be the only album that Alternative Press and Yoga Journal ever agreed on.

Swami Kriya Ramananda, "Song of the Golden Lotus, Part 1"

The intersection between jazz, Eastern, ambient, and new-age music is complicated, but its ur-text is clear: clarinetist Tony Scott's 1964 album, Music for Zen Meditation and Other Joys. Eastern flutes have been used (or exploited) in relaxation music ever since, but 1978's Song of the Golden Lotus elegantly works in cello and ocean-wave electronics while the flute goes about its chakra-alignment business. "At the conclusion of the music, remain quiet for a few moments," the liner notes read in part. Beats being told to immediately tweet about something you like.

What It Was

But go ahead and shell out: The book (Little, Brown; 256 pps.) is as smart, cooly efficient, and streetwise as any of Pelecanos’ best recent novels. Still, it’s an unusual entry in his oeuvre. Pelecanos’ previous book, The Cut, was promoted as a fresh start with a brand-new hero, Iraq War vet Spero Lucas, who navigates a revitalized, gentrifying D.C. that’s done reckoning with the ’68 riots and the crack years. When Spero takes a date to Busboys & Poets on 14th and V streets NW, he sees “all sorts of faces and types, the D.C. most folks had wanted for a long time.” Early in the book, Spero walks past the offices of investigator Derek Strange, the hero of four Pelecanos novels, and the scene seems to imply that the author himself was moving on. But here Strange is again, starring in What It Was, which is set in 1972.

So which direction does Pelecanos want to go in? He hasn’t written a book fully set in the ’70s since his 1997 breakthrough, King Suckerman. Since his 2005 novel, Drama City, he’s been committed to writing about the District as it’s lived in now; the past, when it appears, takes the form of cinematic flashback revealing some old mistake that requires correction. But read The Cut and What It Was alongside each other and it’s clear they actually both go the same way, despite the four-decade distance between their settings. The two novels represent a Pelecanos who’s increasingly optimistic about the District; he’s still fully aware of the city’s flaws, but he’s more interested in sorting out what kind of maturity (and manliness) is necessary to overcome it.

If “optimism” seems like an odd word to attach to a noirish writer, consider What It Was’ bad guy. The novel’s plot turns on Red “Fury” Jones, who spends the summer of ’72 on a crime spree, brazenly broadcasting his status in a nickname-inspiring red and white Plymouth Fury with his girlfriend’s name, Coco, stamped on the vanity plates. Working to nab him are Strange, an ex-cop who left the force after the riots, and his former MPD partner, Frank Vaughn. Without Red there’s no gunplay, but his vibe is more that of a folk hero than a civic menace. When Pelecanos enters Red’s mind, he finds a man who’s built himself up into blaxploitation film hero, complete with a “wacka-wacka-wacka-wak” soundtrack: “Jones could hear music and the lyrics, which went, ‘Red Fury, he’s the man/Try and stop him if you can.’”

As portraits of evil go, this won’t exactly make your blood run cold; inside the mind of every badass killer, apparently, is a shitty lyricist just aching to break free. Accenting Red’s narcissism instead of his brutality gives the novel a softer focus, and even the good guys think of him with an attitude not unlike tenderness. As they head to Burrville for their climactic confrontation with Red, Vaughn tells Strange that, if nothing else, Red’s motives have a certain logic: “The clock ticks. You get toward the finish line, you realize that what’s important is the name you leave behind. Red Jones gets it.”

Set that depiction of crime and pop culture in the ’70s against King Suckerman’s, and you can see how much Pelecanos’ style and attitude have changed in the past decade and a half. The somber tone of that earlier novel is set by the fake blaxploitation film of its title, about a pimp whose fearsomeness (“one stone ugly motherfucker”) has none of Red’s funk and assertiveness. The end of the film in particular is pure bummer:

The last shot of the movie had King Suckerman in his cell, wasting away from tertiary syphilis. The camera zoomed into his eyes, the hollow eyes of any scared old man lying alone in the terminal ward, waiting for death. A freeze-frame appeared then, and a slower, bluesier version of the title song ran over the end credits. By then most of the patrons had walked out of the auditorium without comment.

Pelecanos doesn’t write like that anymore, in a number of ways. That passage’s level of description is almost Proustian compared to the hard-nosed, lean sentences of What It Was and The Cut. King Suckerman’s D.C. is also grimmer, more bongheaded, and more prone to youthful stupidity. Dimitri Karras, Suckerman’s hero, is an aimless 20-something small-time dealer whose understanding of the District is largely circumscribed by WHFS and whose lack of ambition leaves him with plenty of time on his hands.

And now? The clock ticks. Pelecanos couldn’t abide a hero so lacking in the having-together of shit: He signaled that in 2008’s The Turnaround, about a middle-aged man who was paying the price for an act of youthful, race-baiting lunkheadedness as a teen in 1972, the same year in which What It Was is set. The Cut’s Spero Lucas is young, but he has a steely concentration on his job and complete impatience with wasted conversation. “I’m not gonna sit around and have drinks with people who are, you know, ironic,” he tells his date.

War is the great irony-killer for Pelecanos—that ticking clock has been much more prominent in his fiction since the Iraq war began. Spero Lucas’ Iraq stint gives him discipline but also makes him an outsider in the District; at one point he heads to an American Legion hall “to be around people who understood.” There’s a similarly empathetic moment in What It Was, as Strange talks to a Vietnam vet who witnessed one of Red Jones’ murders: “This wasn’t any street person, or drunk, or junkie. The man was a veteran who’d been in it and come out torn on the other side.”

That emphasis on upright manliness—making it through war, making a living, doing what you can to be a decent citizen—makes the bad guys seem a little less relevant to the story, even a bit cartoonish. About a third of the way through What It Was, a pair of Italian mafia thugs drives in from New York, determined to recover some missing drug money. In Pelecanos novels, out-of-towners might as well be wearing sandwich boards reading, “I am a symbol of ignorance and hubris,” but rarely have they appeared as clownlike as they do here. As they settle into a hotel to exchange racist and misogynistic banter, Pelecanos openly mocks them, observing that the room became “heavy with smoke and the sound of their thoughtful conversation.”

All of which makes What It Was feel less intense than Pelecanos’ recent novels, more of a joyride than a work of two-fisted realism. Indeed, the whole story is run through a nostalgic filter, bookended by scenes in the present day where an aging Strange describes the Red Fury legend to an aging Nick Stefanos, another old-school Pelecanos hero. For Strange, D.C. in the pre-crack ’70s is a place where he can feel upbeat, an improvement over the “rough old ghetto” he knew in 1968: He’s living in a “thrilling, glorious time,” and feels “young and in the midst of something, a music, dress, and cultural revolution that was happening with his people, in his time.”

“Just a story,” Strange tells Stefanos at the end of the novel, as if he hadn’t just delivered a raft of moral messages. Strange’s heroism in 1972 comes from his belief that the most appropriate attitude to have about the past is that you move past it; old-school cops like Vaughn, he observes, “were about to be extinct.” Race is still Problem A in the District: Strange pokes some fun at white guilt, and the District’s black residents talk to Strange, a black ex-cop, differently than they do the white Vaughn. But the novel frames the District as a place where the getting-along work on race is happening and thought about. Even Vaughn is smart enough to know that movies like Buck and the Preacher are simplistic about race, “where all the black guys were heroes and studs and the whites were racists, trashmen, or queers.”

In some places Pelecanos’ cynicism remains harder to shake: In both novels somebody cracks wise about how awful the Redskins’ owner is, and, as ever, he reminds us that the Post gives postage-stamp coverage to murders of young blacks in the District. Far Northeast in What It Was is filled with “unhealthy food establishments” and usurious retailers, while in The Cut it’s filled with “the kind of place that kept folks unhealthy, broke, and low.”

Those persistent problems, though, don’t make nearly as much noise as two young heroes’ efforts to transcend them. In the new District, be it the one circa 1972 or circa 2012, Pelecanos’ best advice is to live in the moment and get to work.

"My Meeting With Mrs. Nixon"/"I Didn’t Meet Her," from Ann Beattie, Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life. Reviewers have been cranky—if not outright pissed—at Beattie’s book for being a bait-and-switch, as if it promised to shed light on the former First Lady’s life and then failed to. But the book wasn’t never meant to be a biography of Patricia Nixon, just one writer’s study of the inherent compromises and frustrations that come with making up stories about real people. (Maybe a lot of critical frustration could’ve been avoided if the book had been titled Ann Beattie: A Novelist Imagines a Life instead.) In this pair of pieces, Beattie pulls a bait-and-switch of an endearing sort, describing meeting Pat Nixon at Woodies as a child, then revealing that no such meeting happened—in the process laying bare the trusswork of fiction (not to mention a lot of invented memoirs).

"Family Life," from Quim Monzó, Guadalajara. The opening story in the Catalan author’s collection imagines a grotesque ritual among a family in which one finger is severed from a hand on one’s ninth birthday. Armand, the story’s hero, is understandably creeped out by how easygoing everybody is about this: "They aren’t chopping your neck off. It’s only a finger, and not even the most important one at that," a cousin tells him. With perfectly tuned black humor, Monzo allegorizes the chopping (and the anxiety it causes) into a riff on the arbitrariness of tradition.

"The Staying Freight," from Alan Heathcock, Volt. Wrecked by the death of his son, a man wanders the wilderness before falling into a community where he sets himself up to be beaten for entertainment. It’s a brutal act of penance, and Heathcock makes every lash hurt: "That’s my wild man. That’s my rock," his keeper creepily exhorts. In its crazed surreality, the story lays bare a mood of misery that feels real and authentic.

"Tess," from Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories. A steady if little-known presence in literary magazines for decades, Pearlman writes beautifully about children, who amplify feelings of emotional uncertainty and unfinished-ness. The child in this heartbreaking story is an infant caught in limbo due to a terminal illness, and as the narrative shifts between the hospital counsel and the infant's mother, the story grows thick with moral frustration and emotional pain in just a handful of pages.

Chapter 22, David Foster Wallace, The Pale King. Wallace’s unfinished posthumous novel is so messy that the whole thing is hard to recommend. But there's greatness in The Pale King: You just have to skip ahead to this hundred-page chapter, which stands by itself just fine and chronicles the redemption of Chris Fogle, a directionless man who is saved—truly, with a religious intensity—to be an accountant for the IRS. "I wish to inform you that the accounting profession to which you aspire is, in fact, heroic," Fogle is told, and the miracle of the story is that it convinces you that no statement could be more true.

"We Others," from Steven Millhauser, We Others: New and Selected Stories. The ghost story that anchors this retrospective of Millhauser’s work follows one ghost’s business in granular detail. "Our desire is infused with a darker, more ferocious longing: the desire for all that we have ceased to be," the narrator tells us, stressing the point that his purgatory isn’t dissimilar from our own everyday feelings of disconnection. The passages in first person plural only bolster the creepiness. You’ll be one of us too, that "we" suggests. Just you wait.

During his early-afternoon appearance at the Fiction & Mystery Pavilion yesterday, Sherman Alexie was riffing about his childhood on a Native American reservation, particularly about a dentist who was stingy with Novocaine. If he ever sees that dentist again, Alexie said, "I'm gonna kick him in the balls."

He stopped, looked at the interpreter. "I'm just curious: How's that look signed?"

She obliged. "Balls" translates into a vaguely cupping gesture. Big laugh.

"Again. I'm gonna kick him in the balls."

Bigger laugh.

Maybe there's something about vulgarity that inspires this. A few hours later, Garrison Keillor was delivering some jokey couplets about childhood—"We ran like coyotes in big herds/And learned to smoke and say bad words"—when he stopped to look at his interpreter, who was busily keeping up.

"I'm fascinated by you," he said. "Show me 'drinking beer' again."

She did. "I represent the low end of poetry," he quipped.

It became a running gag. Mentioning the phrase, "whetted our appetite," he paused to tell the interpreter, "That's 'whetted' with an 'h.'" By the time he got to a bit of doggerel about pissing, she was fully part of the act—his verses kept returning to the phrase, "to pee, to piss, to take a leak," and she kept dutifully signing it. Signing "piss" appears to require touching your nose.

It'd be wrong to recommend that every author take advantage of the presence of interpreters, who are people with a job to do. But the tents could occasionally use a dose of humor—especially in the case of thriller/science fiction author Neal Stephenson. Stephenson has enjoyed a massive fan base ever since the release of his 1992 novel, Snow Crash, but the enthusiasm seemed to dampen once he began reading from his elephantine new novel, Reamde. As he plowed through a tedious extended passage about man turning on his cell phone, then getting into his car, then fussing with the GPS system, then thinking about the Wikipedia page about himself, particularly the accuracy of the Wikipedia page about himself, then thinking about the importance of keeping multiplayer-online-gaming servers running on the day after Thanksgiving—the pages in Stephenson's writing nook just fill themselves, I imagine—I couldn't help but wish there were somebody else for him to make a joke with. Or perhaps just somebody with a hook.

The organizers of the National Book Festival, now in its 11th year, know how to draw a crowd early. The fest has typically slated the biggest names for the opening slots, and on Saturday tents filled at 10 a.m. for PBS anchor/novelist Jim Lehrer, longtime Post columnist Eugene Robinson, and Nobel-winning novelist Toni Morrison, who took part in a spirited discussion with critic Michael Dirda before an overflow crowd. Asked whether she had ever taught her own work to students, she laughed, aghast. "[Teaching my work] defeats the whole purpose of being a critical reader," she said. "I'd be saying, 'No, I'm right, and you're wrong.'" (That got a big laugh. The picture above shows Morrison after the session, the golf cart ferrying her to the signing tent slowed by surrounding fans.)

Morrison's comment is representative of a particular kind of noise that authors often make when they're in a public forum like the National Book Festival. Writers are supposed to project a cultivated modesty regarding their work when they talk about it—they don't foist it on students, don't say the work is easy, and don't make it all about them. Russell Banks quoted one of his early mentors, Nelson Algren, who told him, "A writer who knows what he's doing doesn't know very much." Rightfully much-decorated novelist Jennifer Egan shared a few war stories about writing her awful first novel ("I literally couldn't save a word") and eagerly getting out of her own environment to write. "The worst advice I ever got was, 'Write what you know,'" she said. "I don't like to write about myself or the people I know." Before reading a few pages from his novel in progress, Dave Eggers mentioned it was only the second time he'd read it in public. "It won't sound very polished, but we're in a tent," he quipped.

The syndrome isn't unique to novelists. Asked how she decides what to write books about, Sarah Vowell smirkingly responded, "First the idea has to sound terrible." Longtime Post book critic Jonathan Yardley, discussing his book on rereading, Second Reading, copped to his own early ineptitude; his first assignment as a reviewer was Saul Bellow's Herzog, "which of course I didn't understand a word of."

That's not to say that the collective modesty was false, or that the authors were engaged in literary humblebragging. But there was a dearth of writers eager to talk a lot about themselves—among the various genres represented across the fest's six tents, memoir was absent. (Another overflow crowd showed up at the Contemporary Life tent for Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, but that book is a memoir of the most pragmatic sort, praising tough parenting instead of mining a rough childhood for humor or pathos.) So it was refreshing to see Baltimore crime writer Laura Lippman deliver a no-nonsense, assured talk about her writing process that was free of self-effacing gestures. She recalled a writer's conference where she was left fuming at a Famous Author who delivered awful advice, and how she bore down at that moment to come up with the idea for her next book. Waiting for one's muse to show up? Nuts to that. "If I waited for my muse to show up, I don't think I would've finished my first novel."

Questions for Lippman inevitably turned a couple of times to her husband, journalist and TV writer-producer David Simon. Asked which Baltimore writers' work she admired—besides him, of course—she joked, "You're presuming I like my husband's?" Well, she must: She later mentioned that she's collaborating with him and D.C. crime novelist George Pelecanos on a project that she's not yet at liberty to discuss, but which is "not anything you can possibly imagine."

Because the fest will double in length to two days (Sept. 24 and 25), organizers are expanding the range of authors. For the first time, the fest will add categories in urban fiction and graphic novels, though Library of Congress spokesperson Audrey Fischer says authors from the two genres will share one tent. The Pavilion of the States, which gathers up literacy advocates from the around the country, will hold court one day, while the Urban Fiction/Graphic Novel pavilion will use the same space on the other.

Whether that means we'll get to see Zane and Art Spiegelman share a stage is an open question—more details will be announced when the fest’s website goes live June 9, and none of the authors named so far are obvious fits in either of those genres. But it’s possible to make a few guesses at some of the other pavilions, based on the authors named so far.

The Civil War
New books about Abraham Lincoln are inescapable in any year, but the pace has accelerated in 2011, the sesquicentennial of the start of the Civil War. At least three scholars of the era will be on hand: Eric Foner (The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery), Adam Goodheart (1861: The Civil War Awakening), and James L. Swanson (Bloody Crimes: The Chase for Jefferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln’s Corpse).

Red Meat for Tea Partiers
Among the many examples conservatives give to prove President Obama’s failure as a statesman is his handling of last spring’s BP oil spill, so you can ask Post reporter Joel Achenbach some pointed questions about his new book, A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea: The Race to Kill the BP Oil Gusher. If you’re conspiracy-minded enough to believe the president personally caused the spill in order to get credit for stopping it—and he has never explicitly denied doing this—stick around for thriller author Steve Berry, whose new novel, The Jefferson Key, involves hidden messages in the text of Constitution. At last year’s CPAC convention, Glenn Beck declared Teddy Roosevelt an enemy of American values; take it up with Edmund Morris, who’s on the second volume of his biography of the president. who completed his three-volume biography of the president last year.

People Who Are Smarter Than You
Joshua Foer will discuss—or perhaps recite—Moonwalking With Einstein, about how he cultivated a ridiculously good memory while participating in the U.S. Memory Championship. Longtime Post book critic Jonathan Yardley is promoting Second Reading, about returning to some of his favorite books. Neal Stephenson, who revels in dense, thinky novels about history and technology, is pushing Reamde, a thriller about a gaming entrepreneur. And Amy Chua will discuss her controversial book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, in which she extols the virtues of no-nonsense, hypercompetitive parenting. During the Q&A period, go ahead and ask her why she didn’t get her own tent.

The National Book Festival, founded by the Library of Congress and then-First Lady Laura Bush in 2001, is also enjoying some of this largesse. Last May the Library announced that David Rubenstein, co-founder of the investment firm the Carlyle Group, pledged $5 million to help keep the fest running. What the pledge meant at the time was uncertain: A press release said only that it would help “expand the one-day festival into a fully integrated program that emphasizes books, reading, and the library as a place of discovery and learning,” Earlier this week the picture got clearer: This year’s event, scheduled for Sept. 24 and 25, will be the first time it’s been held for two days instead of one.

That’s good news for book lovers. (Though it’s displeased solar decathletes.) According to a press release, the two-day arrangement means that more than 90 authors will be included, and they'll get a little more Q&A time with the audience. That’s around 20 more writers than appeared last year, and many more than the 32 that showed up for the first one. But more authors alone isn’t necessarily an improvement. If the fest is eager to change how it’s done things, here are five more routes it might consider:

1. Give poetry its own stage back. As the fest has grown bigger, poetry’s presence has only seemed to get smaller. After having their own tent from 2003 to 2008, poets have been folded into a “Poetry & Prose” tent the past two years.

2. Surprise us. To corral big-name corporate sponsors, the fest has traditionally seemed obligated to present some big-name speakers, from Jonathan Franzen to Bob Woodward to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Even the poets who get selected, such as Rae Armantrout and Kay Ryan, are essentially the Coldplays and Lady Gagas of their field. Finding some room for lesser-known writers, and/or those from smaller presses, would go a long way toward presenting the fest as a representative cross-section of American letters.

3. Cultivate some off-site events. Multi-day festivals for film and music are generally smart enough to put together a few events that happen away from the main stages. It’s true of book fests too: The schedule for the annual meeting of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, held earlier this month in D.C., was stuffed with semi-official readings and parties well away from the Woodley Park Marriott.

4. Be more D.C. The fest has done plenty for D.C. authors, giving the stage to Thomas Mallon, Louis Bayard, E. Ethelbert Miller, George Pelecanos, Edward P. Jones, and the many historians and journalists in the area. But a little bit of outreach to the locals cultivated by journals like Barrelhouse, Poet Lore, and the long-running Gargoyle, as well as local writing organizations like 826DC, might do a bit to support the notion that area writers get a seat at the table.

5. Just give Neil Gaiman his own stage. The National Book Fest crowd eats him up, even when he says commonplace things about fans calling you out when you suck:

According to Margasak's post, the Hideout is corralling a few charter buses to bring fans to the festivities. Hope they've figured out where to park them.

For the second year in a row (2008) New & Used Vinyl LPs have outsold CDs at Crooked Beat. LPs now account for around 70% of our total sales. We will be increasing our vinyl selection even more in the coming months.

New CDs: Crooked Beat will continue to stock New CDs but on a more limited basis. Effective Immediately: we will now only primarily stock CDs from indie and import labels such as Touch & Go, Matador, Dischord, Merge, 4AD, Sub Pop, Numero, Bomp, Damaged Goods, Cherry Red, Secretly Canadian, Ace, Bear Family, Soul Jazz, Anti, etc....

Used CDs: We will now only carry Used CDs that mirror our selection of New CDs. e.g., Crooked Beat always stocks New CDs by artists such as Built To Spill, Magnetic Fields, Cat Power. Therefore, we will usually accept them as USED trade-ins provided they are in good condition.

What readers got the first time around was a polite, unprovocative column about what it was like to watch TV during the election season, with a big plug for the band Hem. Any button-pushing was reserved for a bit toward the end: ""It brings me directly to what Barack Obama said at his Democratic Convention acceptance speech in Denver. We are our brother's keeper, our sister's keeper. We have a responsibility to watch out for one another, to do the right thing. Our better selves will seek out these opportunities because our present circumstances demand it."

Pretty safe. But Carpenter's column would still have to get a lot worse to compete with Stephen King's ruminations on pop culture.