Bike Month, y’all

May is National Bike Month, and May 12-16th is Bike-to-Work Week. So this is the perfect weekend to dust off your Schwinn and put your puppies to the pedals. We, the blogging 3/5ths of the Merc staff, vow to bike too and from work every day this week, no matter the weather. Also, Norm de Plume will attempt, riding no hands with his iBook, to blog LIVE from his morning commute. We submit, to that end, the following check list:

Tires: Pump those suckers up until your thumb won’t dent ‘em. This increases your fuel efficiency, which is great when your fuel happens to be the Wheaties you ate for breakfast because, in case you hadn’t noticed, the price of Wheaties just keeps going up.

Seat: Without a seat, you will find your bike to be Spanish Inquisition-uncomfortable.

Reflectors, lights, and bright clothing: Visibility is a plus, especially when biking around bleary Monday morning drivers, and of paramount importance if you bike in anything approaching dawn or dusk, which can be extremely dangerous, possibly even worse than night.

Ankle clips, or, roll that cuff: Nothing says “Look at me, I rode my bike to work!” like a rolled-up pant cuff . . . or chain-grease-blackened trousers. Sure, people will assume you’re riding to work because you got a DUI, but wait’ll they notice all the attention you get for sweating profusely in your cubicle. “OMG! Are you having some sort of attack?”

Toe clips: Greatly increase your efficiency. As George Clinton is fond of saying: “Get up for the down stroke.” Plus, if you’ve never seen someone fall sideways while trying to disengage their clip-in pedal shoes, it’s hilarious.

Helmet: As Mrs. Janni, the nice Polish/English lady who owned the world’s largest collection of egg cups admonished me after my second concussion: “Protect that noggin!”

Brakes: Check! This is Cincinnati! Unless you’re a fixed-gear hipster with grotesquely overdeveloped upper thighs that could stop a Metro, but even then, if you’re riding fixed-gear, we recommend a second application of the previous item, to be worn over the first. Dorky looking? You bet. But don’t forget, you’re so hip on that fixie you might make dorky the new hip. Speaking of fixed gears, check out this fixed-gear cyclist shot by Thomas Edison in 1899. -Ed Scripsi

“If one only had something to eat, just a little, on such a clear day!”

I was moving some books around the other day, and stumbled across my old copy of Hunger by Knut Hamsun. If you haven’t read it before, I recommend it. It’s like a something a beat writer might have written, only 60 or 70 years before its time. Also, it’s actually good. (Zing! Take that, beat writers.)

The plot (such as it is) revolves around a freelance writer’s attempts to make enough money writing to buy food in Kristiania, Norway in the late 1800s . The only problem is, without food he can’t think straight, so he can’t write, so he can’t by any food, so he can’t think straight, so he can’t write etc. etc. What makes the book great is the way it captures the sort of fuzzy dream logic that one might find oneself using if one was driven mad by cold and hunger, a fuzzy logic which gets more and more pronounced as the narrator gets colder and hungrier. Then, he scores a quick crust of stale bread, and he’s back to only half mad, dreaming up new things to write about, once he scrapes up enough money to buy a pencil.

Like a lot of writers I enjoy reading, Mr. Hamsun was a jerk in real life, and I’m talking about a Nazi sypathizer-type jerk in this case. Still, an interesting guy. Consider these three facts:

1. While in America in the 1880s, Hamsun was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

2. He bought a train ticket, and spent most of the trip on the roof with his mouth wide open.

3. After that, he didn’t have tuberculosis anymore.

Or so the rumor goes, anyway.

-Norm DePlume

Mysteries of the Mercantile

 

One of those intriguing fragments found folded in the pages of a Mercantile Library book that reminds you of just how many sets of eyes have traveled those pages before you.  Don’t worry, we won’t put on the blog anything you leave in a book .  Clever Betsy by Clara Louise Burnham and Sally Bishop weren’t published until 1910.  My guess is that this reading list is almost 100 years old.  Many Merc members keep reading lists today.  I’ll leave the questions of how and why we read to Sven Birkerts and friends, but certainly, we do it for many reasons and, confronted by our own mortality in relation to speed, personal vagaries and vicissitudes, trash-urge vs. trash-threshold, it amounts to a pretty complex equation that is best forgotten.  Who was Mrs. R. Levi, patron L 37, and what made her tick?  Did she ever read The Militants, or was it perhaps not to her taste? What’s on your reading list?

-Ed Scripsi

Big shipments. Really big shipments.

Much staff attention has gone into the fiendishly complicated task of rounding up funds to put what may be the nation’s last exclusively paper card catalogue into databits, but the grant application was shipped off at the first of the month, allowing the Collector to get back to the business of buying books, which he has done, which means great whacking cartons of the books America Wants to Read have been arriving and will continue to arrive for while longer until we are caught up. Here, then, are a few of the hotter titles from what may be the largest invoice we have ever had to pay. We do know, by the way, that some of you take these recommendations over to the Public, which is all well and good, but when you do that, you are missing out on the chance to chat with Norm and Ed and Nemo and the non-blogger, any one of whom would be more than delighted to drop whatever it is we’re doing to chat and advise and commiserate, none of which pleasant tasks or distractions are in the job descriptions over at the Public.

And none of that whining about parking, thank you very much. The bus comes to the door.

A Post a Day in May Update: Day 6

When your devoted web loggers set out on this insane “one post a day in May” path, we knew it would be hard. We knew we had a long, grueling month ahead of us, a month that would push us to the limits as human beings as well as bloggers. We knew it would be the challenge of a lifetime, but we never imagined it would be like this.

Readers, it’s been hell. When we made this drunken pledge to post something new every day in May, we obviously weren’t taking into account the fact that we’d actually have to think of something new to say on a daily basis for an entire month.

Still, despite the cost, despite the odds, despite the chorus of naysayers and ill-wishers, we’ve hung in there. For six whole days. Those of you who picked today for your office’s “When will they give up?” pool can officially consider yourselves out of the running.

-Norm De Plume

Covers from the Hall Collection

This cover demonstrates several more reasons not to hate the proposed Cincinnati Streetcar.

Reason #132: Streetcars are sexy.

Reason #133: Streetcars in Cincinnati have an alliterative quality.

Reason #134: Streetcars are macho.

Reason #135: Streetcars make convenient metaphors and similes.

Reason #136: The Streetcar: The Cadillac of Public Transportation

This is, of course, exactly the sort of romanticized codswallop detractors of the plan point to. But isn’t public opinion, that sine qua non to the success of a neighborhood, a people mover, or a conspicuously-consumed electronic device really partly codswallop anyway?

-Ed Scripsi

You can find more Covers from the Hall Collection here.

The Kindle has landed

A good friend of the Library (and the Librarians therein, for that matter) stopped by just now to show off her brand new Amazon Kindle. Eh? What’s that? You want to know whether your Librarians had opinions about it? Well, I’m glad you asked:

NEMO WOLFE: I was totally sucked in and pretty much have to have one even though I will probably have no reason to use it since most of what I read is readers’ copies, but I can pretend that I’m going on vacation some day, and the Kindle would be all I would take on that hypothetical holiday. I do have one tiny quibble. I am a fast reader and take in content in gulps. I wonder if the lines are wide enough for me.

ANONYMOUS- I was pleasantly surprised. This would be great to have on an airplane.

NORM DE PLUME- I loved the screen. It was easy on the eyes in the literal sense, and as close to reading print on a regular piece of paper as I’ve seen from any electronic device. Also, I wasn’t expecting it to be so small (in a good way) and sleek. The only thing holding me back is the price. At this point, I’d probably have to stick up a liquor store to come up with a disposable $399. And speaking of being a cheapskate, it’s hard to imagine paying to read blogs and/or newspapers in this day and age.

SG- I think it’s very exciting to be able to easily pick up current publications in French, whether they be books or newspapers. I really like the feel of the case, and I love the design. The ease with which you flip back and forth between pages was nice.

ED SCRIPSI- Mind-shatteringly ergonomic!!!!! The end of that paper and cardboard dinosaur, the cumbersome book, is nigh!!!!!

All in all, a positive response from the staff.

-Your Webloggers

Klangklang

Because we have friends on both sides of the tracks we have thought it best to stay out of the streetcar fracas, but since, at least for now, the plan to bring those sleek, quiet, comfortable Czech railcars to our resurgent metropolis seems to have been agreed upon to the extent that anything is agreed upon in Cincinnati City Council, we think it is now safe to say that most of us here look forward with considerable pleasure to the arrival of the tracks on the street where we live and where fully 25% of Library staff will be able to take the streetcar home for lunch and the other 75% will make use of the streetcar to reach Findlay Market for those leg of lamb and saffron runs that crop up with astonishing frequency. We have already begun to plan events for our members that will begin with drinks and/or discussion at the Library followed by opera or whatever at Music Hall, moving on to draft beer and venison in the Brewery district and then back downtown to decide that it would be better to spend the night in the Netherland than drive home.

We will admit that even though amongst us we know quite a lot of people, we don’t know anyone who has been crying out for electric transportation between the university and the city center, but we’re all prepared to be pleasantly surprised by the popularity of that uptown spur that turned out to be the political price of passage.

-Nemo Wolfe

One Post a Day in May

If there’s one thing I learned from my friend Stephen, it’s that nothing motivates bloggers like a rhyming slogan. That’s why I’m proud to announce the Stacked staff’s newest blogging initiative (see above). Yes, you inferred the meaning of that slogan correctly: my colleagues and I will attempt to… no, strike that. We WILL write at least one blog post each non-holiday weekday in the month of May, starting tomorrow.

I had this idea several weeks ago, but had to wait. “We’re post-to-the-blog-capable in April” just didn’t have the same ring.

Be sure to check back regularly to see how we do.

-Norm De Plume

“It’s around 3am, there’s a half-empty bottle of whisky on the table and Hitchens is regressing.”

Was anyone of you with me in the room the night Christopher Hitchens spoke in that big lovely green lecture hall in McMicken College? The room was packed, heavy on the heavyset vaguely ex hippie proudly un-Clairoled faculty – that naturally so, their ilk being the bulk of the tenured humanities faculty. Mr Hitchens was carrying on in his usual highly entertaining fashion. I am sure he took a certain pleasure in sailing his unexpected thoughts over that room full of expected thinking. The unlifted faces were pasted with the same smiles you spot inside trafficjammed Saturns when All Things Considered is airing which means they weren’t getting it but it didn’t matter since he had an English accent. This went on for an enchanting forty minutes or so until, in midmarvelous sentence, the great man whipped out a pack of cigarettes and without so much as a by your leave fired one up. It was a fabulous moment. Cincinnati being Cincinnati, no one said a thing, and he puffed away for the rest of his remarks and the Q and A. After the event we got something signed. I did not need to be warned to stick to the wife like glue and did, but he still managed to ogle.

Those who enjoyed that enchanted hour and that tobacco fired special moment, or those who just can’t get enough of the man should click here, taking the phone off the hook first.

-Nemo Wolfe