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

Internet Assisted Writing pt. II

Okay, so you’ve harnessed the tools I mentioned in my previous post to “write” your computer generated novel.  You realize you need to spice up the final pages of your opus with a thrilling twist, but you don’t want to waste a bunch of time thinking of something interesting.  Don’t worry.  As usual, the internet has provided a free and easy, if somewhat bush league, solution.

While you’re on the strange but fairly wonderful Dresden Codak site, be sure to check out the caveman science fiction.

-Norm De Plume

Sit down and be seen

Ok, so it’s no Literary Circumnavigation by Velocipede, but the Cincinnati Bike Plan interactive map at communitywalk.com is a useful and vastly entertaining tool that allows area cyclists to share their experience, as well as hopes and dreams for a bicycle-able Cincinnati.  So sit down, log in, and contribute your data.

-Ed Scripsi

Nothing Like a Dame

We spent Saturday practicing saying “Dame Antonia? How do you do” until it didn’t sound weird, and then we delivered the line to the lady at the elevator bank in the Hyatt Lobby where we were to meet her and her retired financial reporter husband Peter Duffy to take them back upstairs three floors to meet the gang. She quickly told us about the lads who rode up with them on the elevator when they checked in. Candid, they were.

“Is that champagne?” she asked at the smallish reception before the biggish one. We said it was and did she want some? “It’s the only thing I drink,” she said and then she set about meeting the fans in a very pleasant manner. No airs at all. An easy guest.

When the time came for her address, she used the opportunity to strike back at the critics who accuse her with monotonous regularity of shoveling in too many details. It’s a stupid criticism, since it’s clear within a chapter or two that that’s how she paints and that’s how she’s going to paint. And it works. She’s not an impressionist. If you hate Burne-Jones, don’t read A. S. Byatt.

Don’t miss Ed’s entry below, and be sure to follow the links. We’re going on that tour if it’s the last thing we do. But before we do, we’re going to one of our own extraordinary institutions, The Charleston Library Society, for the annual convention of anachronous libraries on the 23rd.

We should have been using this time to point out that Books By The Banks will be this weekend. Is it on your calendar? Why not? Fix that.

-Nemo Wolfe

“If they want a body, they can have John Wilkes Booth,” Mr. Jerome added.

The first time Edgar Allan Poe had a funeral, only 10 people showed up. The second time around, 350 mourners were expected, an increase of 3400%.

One factor driving up the attendance rate is that, during the 160 years since Poe’s death, his reputation has gone through a pretty thorough rehabilitation.  It also doesn’t hurt that two cities are currently duking it out for Poe City status.

I have to admit to having a horse in this race (and I am not saying which horse is mine), but I think Philadelphia’s claims are absurd, and insulting to persons of good will.  Okay, so maybe they have a National Park Service site dedicated to the man.  And maybe he did some of his most influential writing there.  But Baltimore has the actual corpse.  Possession is 9/10 of the law, and 10/10 of any serious claim to literary legacy.

Besides, according to The Wire, Baltimore is also known as Bodymore Murdaland.  Pretty scary stuff. Brotherly love?  What’s macabre about that?

-Norm De Plume