Nine Tenths of the Law

We will be generous and expansive here and say that modernism was a legitimate moment in literary time and that there are good reasons for reading The Sound and the Fury, but we will tell you straight up that we are still not through with it – it sits in its lumpen green cover on the piano waiting to go either upstairs to bed or over to the club chair but obviously not in any hurry to go anywhere. It’s a punishing read. It just is. And we think the world of some of its biggest advocates, including the spectacularly charming emeritus professor from Miami who Actually Met Faulkner.

But then there’s Possession. Mrs Wolfe warned us off of Possession twenty years ago. We seem to recall that she thought it was too clever by half or at least so erudite that it would irritate. But then we read The Virgin in the Garden which wore us down to where we caved in and liked it in the end, and then we met ASB and she was awfully nice even though she bored our daughter senseless, and we were in the middle of The Children’s Book when the Dame came to dine, so we understood what it was she was defending from the majestic Hyatt lectern. So since Mrs Wolfe had trundled out the family copy of Possession to have it signed and since it hasn’t yet been put away because we are v. v. slow to shelve in the Wolfe household, we have taken to reading it. And, unlike The S & The F we genuinely look forward to picking it up and spending time on the great doorstop even though it is not modern and even though you have to read every last detail to get the picture she’s drawing for you and even though it keeps interfering with our career as a thriller reader, and we will keep at it with pleasure until it is done.

If there is anyone else out there in the Stacked universe who has tackled both Faulkner and Byatt and lived to tell the tale, we would be really really curious to see some comments about why we should finish that ridiculous book.

-Nemo Wolfe

“… at best a short story sketch, at worst a collection of 138 index cards…”

The reviews are in for The Original of Laura, Nabokov’s posthumous “novel,” (which has been covered extensively on this web log)  and the consensus seems to be that, in the unlikely event he has not already done so,  Dimitry Nabokov should prepare himself for a vigorous haunting by the irate ghost of his late father.

It sounds like this thing isn’t anywhere close to being a novel.  Which makes sense.  You can only fit so much onto 138 index cards.

I’m still looking forward to the Library’s copy showing up.  Hopefully, staff will be allowed to punch out and play with the perforated copies of the cards on each page.

-Norm De Plume

Who knows what lies in the cards?

Completely inadvertently, I am poised to finish Pale Fire just four days before the release of the much-grumbled over and anticipated The Original of Laura (Dying is Fun), Nabokov’s posthumous fragmentary novel, so it’s impossible not to equate John Shade’s scribbled cards with Nabokov’s own M.O.   Further, I can’t escape the inkling that this is one last trick by the playful master, given that the last card of the manuscript  ”. . . is a poignant list of synonyms for ‘efface’—expunge, erase, delete, rub out, wipe out, obliterate… ”  If so, his son Dimitri is probably not amused.  Ethical questions aside (this case clearly demonstrates that a hungry market and audience could give a rip about respecting the wishes of the object of their veneration, an aspect of human nature Nabokov might well have anticipated), Nabokov fans can’t help but be thrilled.  The parenthetical subtitle says a lot.  Here is, I believe, one of the cards published in Die Zeit.   -E. Scripsi

Dogs on bikes

How happy are we about the improved chance of a streetcar stop across from our front door? We are very happy indeed. We don’t, as a rule, prognosticate, but we had gotten the feeling that citizens of the city proper were feeling just a little irritation at the assumption that they were incapable of seeing the ramifications of government by plebiscite and that they would bring that irritation to the ballot box. Or ballot thingy. Whatever you call that chadfree gizmo we use now. And we were right.

When the street car does stop at 414, we will be looking for the first passenger off to be member Casey Coston, flaneur in residence at Soapbox whose extremely sensible take on dogs in the city center is, as is always the case when he is given space, the most important piece in the magazine. Perhaps it is not too soon to be working on the authorities to make sure that when the route opens, dogs will be every bit as welcome as bicycles.

Did we all see that Seattle elected the bike guy instead of the business guy to be the next mayor?

And have we all read the v. good rant on greenwashing in Sustainable Cyclist?

And speaking of bicycles, there was an immensely interesting flap and counterflap between Urbanophile Aaron Renn and Ta-Nehisi Coates involving cities, bikes, race and other subjects of immediate interest to readers of this blog. But read Casey first.

-Nemo Wolfe

Phoned-In Friday: The Books

In addition to being The Things that arrived in The Box here at at The Library, The Books are a musical duo who blend spare vocals and acoustic instrumentation with aural collages of “found sound”. The results are highly- and some might say surprisingly- listenable.

- The Books homepage
- The Books Wikipedia page
- A profile of the band in from the Boston Globe
- A Q&A with NY Magazine
- Great write up in the Independent

I recommend The Lemon of Pink and Prefuse 73 Reads the Books.

- Norm De Plume

Bizarro World Mercantile

. . . and I’m not talking about the The Mercantile Library Center for Fiction.  We’re the Bizarro World version of that fine institution.  Having been inspired by the addition to our collection of Boston Atheneum director Richard Wendorf’’s excellent books The Literature of Collecting and Bicentennial Essays, my curiosity about the varieties of the independent library experience led to stumbling across The Poet’s House, which includes The Constance Laibe Hays Children’s Room at Poets House (right).  Of course, with membership fees at close to our affordable price, perhaps we’re not so different after all.  Favorite line from The Literature of Collecting, thusfar, and I’m only on page 7.

“I consider the founding document in the literature of collecting to be Jean Baudrillard’s essay ‘Le Systeme marginal: la collection,’ . . . My colleagues at the Boston Athenaeum resisted Baudrillard at every turn, finding his essay to be dogmatic, illogical, inconsistent, melodramatic, and sexist — and so it is.  But Baudrillard also manages, within the space of a few pages, to raise virtually all of the issues that inform critical discussions of collecting as well as the various fictions devoted to it.  If his essay needs to be taken with a good pinch of Gallic salt, so much the better, for it is ultimately more provocative than it is systematic.”

Mr. Wendorf, who last year gave an excellent presentation here at the Mercantile on another book he has edited, America’s Membership Libraries, clearly has quite  a few surprises up his sleeve.    -Ed Scripsi

Kindling with Newspapers

So if we read Norm correctly, Apple is making its own Kindle type device for reading, among other things, newspapers, something Kindle readers have been doing for years. As an Apple product, it will cost even more than the overpriced Kindle, but everyone on the streetcar – everyone who counts – everyone who has a modicum of chic – will recognize the Apple reader as being hipper than the downmarket Amazon device. For what that’s worth.

Neither device will satisfy the tactile and/or olfactory reader. Tactile and olfactory readers jump into Kindle conversations with “But don’t you miss the feeling of a book in your hands?” We know we’re supposed to feel like a clodpole, but we actually don’t miss that feeling. We’re all about content. We do miss good illustrations. That’s a problem with the Kindle, and it will probably plague the Apple device. But that’s minor.

What we should be worrying about is how much authors get as their share of that low electronic edition price.

Olfactory readers? Those are the readers who come into the ML and start rhapsodizing about the smell of books and how much they love it. Sometimes we explain that they are getting a whiff of red rot, mould, and decaying leather. Sometimes we just wait for them to get dewy eyed over the card catalogue. (Soon not to be a problem)

-Nemo Wolfe

Apple vs. the inevitable

If reports out of Australia and New York are to be believed, Apple is working closely with newspaper publishers as it prepares to release its long-rumored tablet computer into the wild.

This can’t be bad news for the newspapers, but how good is it? As you probably know, things are looking increasingly grim for the industry. Can a sleek, Apple-branded device turn things around, or at least de-steepify the colorful lines on this chart?  Presumably, owners of the device would pay cash money to subscribe to iTablet versions of their favorite papers.  Yet it’s hard to imagine Apple creating a tablet that wasn’t able to access the internet, and thus the free copies of the newspapers that live there.  Perhaps Apple and the newspapers are banking on readers paying extra money to read an iTablet optimized version of the paper.

Rumor further has it that the new device will provide an easy way to purchase and read books, magazines, and textbooks.  Not bad, especially coming from a company run by a guy who thinks “people don’t read anymore.”

-Norm De Plume

The Mercantile’s Guide to Style: The Dirty Realism School

Better late than never, I ran across this NY Times review of Books by the Banks author Mark Garvey’s, Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, and am filled with remorse at not having actually met him, since I lingered over his book.  E. B. White got a D in English!  He hated grammer?  He drank diluted beer!? Clearly, this book needs to be read, if not by you then by me.   I understand that book reviews are more conventionally written after the book has been read, but why let convention get you down.  Which brings me to my point: if these guys can spout off about style, so can any jerk with two fingers and a cardigan. With that I give you two words with the power to change the course of your career.  Dirty. Realism.  That’s right, Dirty Realism, as practiced by those bad boys, the Dirty Realists, is both dirty and real, exactly what your business writing needs to stay a cut above the  Namby Pamby competition.  Get yours today.  Here’s what you need:

-This online essay, brought to your screen by the fine folks at the English Dept of Rice University, “On Writing” by the master, Raymond Carver.

-1 typewriter with ribbon and paper

-1 fifth Old Crow or other brand of cheap, exceptionally smelly bourbon

-1 1970’s poster of Telly Salavalas as “Kojak“–it’s important that this not be of the later Kojak, because later Kojak, having eaten too many lolly pops and been promoted, got soft.  Let’s begin.

Find a desk and pin the Kojak poster to the wall.  Drink some whiskey.  Next, read the essay.  Read it again.  No adverbs?  Check.  Clear, concise writing, to imbue the most mundane subject matter with some sort of literary magic?  Check.  Tension?  Check.  Drink more whiskey while staring directly into Kojak’s eyes.  Can you feel it?  As quickly and minimally as possible, pound out your business correspondence, spritz liberally with “spilled” whiskey, fold savagely into an envelope and, before the whiskey dries, mail.  This will seal in the impression that you are a hateful, hard-boiled not-to-be-trifled with dirty realist.  These steps ensure that you can put your feet up on that desk and toast Telly, confident that your business correspondence will strike terror into the hearts of your unwitting correspondents.      -Ed Scripsi

Nemo roves

We have seen the future, and it is the 211 year old Charleston Library Society, where the dauntingly capable new director and her exceptionally good natured staff have taken a dart here and raised a seam there, keeping an eye on the oven and pulsing the blender as necessary, spending next to nothing in the process, to turn the architecturally significant institution from beingThe Library That Time And Most of South Carolina Forgot to Sufficient Reason to Drive 620 Miles Just To See What’s Cooking. No kidding. Sure, it’s always had holdings to knock one’s socks off, but one could live and die a block away without ever knowing that, say, John Locke’s handwritten Carolina Constitution lay in the Society vault alongside countless items of similar interest. Self effacement? The place had it down to a science. But the new watchword is “welcome”. Good news for Charleston.

We came home from Charleston to find our own much less inexpensive makeover proceeding apace. All that steel that came through the window has been bolted together by a gang of deft but oddly aloof ironworkers, and we can finally see what the south stacks will look like. They will look like cool.

Finally, it had to be pointed out to us that there had been no blogmention of the mad success of Books By The Banks. In our defense we will say that mention had not occurred to us because we were sure that every Cincinnatian who reads was thoroughly aware of the great leap the city’s book fair has taken from its modest early days to near juggernauthood. Gratifying crowds poured into the author pavilion at the Duke Energy center thumbing their noses at the financial panic, spending twice as much on books as they did last year. At our august level we had little to do other than sign proclamations and pose for ribbon cuttings. The heavy lifting was done by teams of bookish, highly skilled employees from the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, the University of Cincinnati Department of Libraries, Cincinnati Magazine, Joseph-Beth Booksellers, and your own Mercantile Library with support from the Friends of the Public Library, the Public Library Foundation, and (new this year) Northern Kentucky University’s Steely Library, and the public libraries of Boone, Kenton, and Campbell County. It would be wrong to single anyone out for his or her effort, but if you run into Sandy Bolek at the Public, prostrate yourselves at her feet.

-Nemo Wolfe