Branching Out

Sorry.  It’s hard to blog when you’re sorting through desk vomit.  Desk vomit is the undigested and perhaps indigestible collection of salt packets, erasure crud, dead post-its, paper clips, twelve year old business cards, etc. etc. und so weiter that spills out on the new desk top when you relocate, which we did to the remarkably comfortable penthouse upstairs from the branch library (pictured) we jury-rigged over the weekend.   The desk vomit is largely gone.

The branch works fine, by the way.  Thank you for asking.  The regulars are finding their way up with not a lot of trouble.   The quarters are closer, of course.  That can’t be helped.  So the snorers may go through a little adjustment.  But it will work out.

Don’t forget to call your state Senators and Representatives to point out to them that libraries, unlike penitentiaries, are a service that many of us use, and that draconian cuts have a whiff of the old Statue of Liberty ploy.

-Nemo Wolfe

A non-literary Friday diversion- The St. Pete Times vs Scientology

VS

Before you click on the below link, please be aware of the following:  The Mercantile Library is a completely inclusive association which loves everyone equally regardless of race, creed, color, and/or political affiliation.  The Library doesn’t care whether you are atheist, agnostic, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Confucian, Cargo Cultist etc, or whether your “church”  is actually a kind tax exempt for-profit corporation run by extortionist thugs whose principal beliefs are derived from science fiction novels.  I would add that when L Ron Hubbard’s cyrogenically preserved head completes its plans for global domination, the Mercantile will welcome its new cultish yet corporate overlords.  With bells on.

Having said that, may I subtly AND WITHOUT ENDORSEMENT draw your attention to this piece of investigative journalism from the St. Petersburg Times.

-Norm De Plume

Blogreaders brainier?

We’re curious to see if Stacked readers are a little quicker than the General Public in picking up the correct – let’s repeat that – correct version of the Important News at the Library, that being that WE ARE NOT CLOSING.  Some of our very best friends have been coming up to us at the circulation desk and even on the street and asking us “So when are you closing?”  WE ARE NOT CLOSING.  The reading room is closing.  The Library is open.  It’s just open on the 12^th floor.  All your favorite periodicals, travel guides, audio books, new books will be there for the taking.  On 12.  Not on 11.  That’s how it works.  Ride the elevator to 12.  Not 11.

When?

July 1.

OK, so we are closing a little bit, starting Saturday through Tuesday.  But that’s it.  Not what anybody would call, you know, closing.  Not really.

One of the new books you should ask about is The Secret Speech, the new Tom Rob Smith.  Smith, you will remember us raving, is the author of Child 44 about which we were nuts.  Don’t take our word for it, read Dennis Lehane’s review in the NYT.  And then read Lehane’s The Given Day which we ordered you to do weeks ago.

-Nemo Wolfe

The Mercantile in the Enquirer

Read it here.  We would have chosen a headline that focused more on the renovations than the limited services, of course, but we’ll take the free ink.

-Norm De Plume

“Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,” he said, voice rising. “They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.’

If ever there was a time when America’s Public Libraries needed a vociferous proponent, that time is now, and who better than the author of Fahrenheit 451?  Oh, and he also hates the Internet, or as he would probably type it, the “internet”.  Here are a couple of stories on his pro-library-ness in The New York Times and The Guardian. -e. scripsi

The Patient Improves

We are optimists here.  We believe that the City has been quietly moving away from the moral and intellectual paralysis that stalled progress here for the final decades of the twentieth century.  We have our theories about the reasons and culprits behind the paralysis, but you will have to buy us a drink after hours for us to unburden ourselves of those theories, as this is a family-oriented blog.

Here’s a symptom of the awakening.  Next American City and the Haile Foundation are sponsoring a panel discussion at NKU featuring mighty brains discussing the possibilities afforded the city by its creativity, ideas, and energy.  We repeat:  creativity, ideas, and energy.  Read about it here.  Sign up.  See you there.

-Nemo Wolfe

Shadow Country- Peter Matthiessen

Since it won the National Book Award a few years back, there is a good chance you know the back story behind this book.  Matthiessen combined and reworked the three novels he’d written about the life and death of early Florida planter Edgar J. Watson (Killing Mr. Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone by Bone) into one mighty doorstop.  A real hoss of a book, as they say back where I come from.

Now, I am the last person you want reviewing books for you (look here and here to see what the professionals have to say), but I will go a little crazy today and state that I think this may be one of the best books I have ever read.  It was like starting at the top of a* 900 page inclined plane- I found myself barreling onward with increasing velocity the farther along I went.

By the time I got to the last book (Bone by Bone, easily my favorite of the three, although I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have liked it nearly as much if I hadn’t read the first two) it was getting ugly.  I couldn’t think about anything else.  All I wanted to do was read.  Sleep deprived as I am, I stayed up way past 1 a.m. on Sunday night because I couldn’t stop reading the damn thing.

-Norm De Plume

* Edited for clarity.  Thanks, delta99.

Writing to Change the World

Mrs. Wolfe, who is more thoroughly on top of the blogosphere than any reader we know, while still turning out superb sandwich rolls, pointed out that George Packer has been blogging important and excellent stuff about the Iranian election.  Mr Packer, who, as the 2009 Harriet Beecher Stowe lecturer, was last week’s lion at the Merc (and what a memorable night it was) has unusually good Iranian insight thanks to daily breakfast table conferences with his journalist wife whose beat for years has been Iran.  Read him.  Follow his links.  Emulate his balance.

Stacked readers who were unable to swap their opening night opera tickets for the Saturday performance, causing them to miss the lecture, can see it on CET Connect if and when it goes up, but they will not be able recapture the excellence of the hors d’oeuvres.

-Nemo Wolfe

The Librarian of Serendip

So you think life here is all skimming from the new arrivals pile?  Not so.  The non-blogger and we have been packing books preparatory to The Great Disruption.  Sometime between now and July 1, every book not in the 1903 stacks has to be removed from the shelves and boxed for the movers to pick up and store on the last Saturday of the month.

Sunday’s packing found us clearing the shelves of the Library’s great run of Atlantic magazines that begins with volume 1.  The early volumes are in terrible shape, but by the turn of the twentieth century the Library was ordering up nice stout buckram, so things are a little less messy.

Why do we keep a run of magazines that exists other places, and why do we not go the microfilm route?  Because with real bound volumes you can do as we did, open an 1894 volume, and chance on a biting piece about civil service reform (Cincinnati’s George Pendleton and Rudd Hayes were v. interested) by the young Theodore Roosevelt, which kind of accidental discovery is what libraries are really about.

Microfilm really is the devil, by the way.

-Nemo Wolfe

Authors at Book Expo America Sound Off on Summer Reading

Times being what they are, according to this fascinating Salon article, authors at Book Expo America were forced to drink on an empty stomach, then speak into the camera.   Has Mary Karr fallen off the wagon?  Is Jonathan Lethem really suggesting that he will fall asleep after reading only one page of Balzac?  -e. scripsi