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

Richard Price on Charlie Rose

He was on April 16th’s show.

I’ve never read any Richard Price before, but as a former Lower East Side frequenter , I’m thinking about picking up Lush Life. On the other hand, as a die hard Wire fan, maybe I should start with Clockers.

Decisions.

-Norm De Plume

A game of Devil’s Advocate, wherein the Devil hates plays and his advocate gets into an argument about them with playwright Steven Dietz

VS.

DEVIL’S ADVOCATE: Putting on a play is a lot of work. You need actors, a script, a venue, and an audience willing to come to that venue when you tell them to. Then, once all the actors have learned their lines and rehearsed the damn thing ad nauseam, you have to get them to perform it perfectly again and again until everyone who wants to has seen your play. Depressingly, each performance disappears into the ether AS IT IS BEING PERFORMED, never to be seen again.

On the other hand, if you can scrape together a few hundred dollars for a digital camera and some rudimentary lights, you can film your dramatic work. And once you’re finished, you can easily distribute your work (via the internet) to millions of people, who are free to enjoy it whenever they want to, again and again if they choose, all in one sitting, or in bite sized chunks if they prefer. If they like it, they can easily share it with hundreds of friends and/or loved ones. Best of all, nobody has to put on a sport jacket or pay too much for cheap wine.

Filming the thing seems to win from a quality assurance standpoint as well. After all, if you record your dramatic work, you can focus the audience’s eyes on exactly on what you want them to see. Actors can act however they please, rather then being forced to act to the back row (thus overacting for everyone else in the theater). And if they flub a line, or miss a cue, or get sick, or tired, or you want to take a few hours (or a few weeks or years or decades) off, you can just take a break and start shooting again whenever you’re ready.

With digital movie making so cheap and easy these days, there’s no need to put on a play anymore, right? Wouldn’t you agree that it’s finally okay if staged drama, which has served humankind nobly for millenia, gets put out to pasture? We don’t need plays anymore, right?

STEVEN DIETZ: Au contraire.

-Norm De Plume

The Endless City

Because certain high level staffers at the Library live within walking distance of the city centre, the Mercantile is officially and vitally interested in all matters urban. The most recent manifestation of that interest is the purchase of The Endless City: The Urban Age Project by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Society. This great whacking volume of urbanist porn, replete with thousands of coloured pictures of cities around our gently warming globe and stuffed with not-too-difficult-for-English-and-design-majors to comprehend has arrived at the circulation desk and may be borrowed by urban and suburban members, who should be awfully grateful as the bloody thing cost as much as six other books. There is no mention of Cincinnati in the index, but readers will find Constantinte Doxiadis, designer of Park Town in the West End, and Don DeLillo who lectured the membership not awfully long ago.

-Nemo Wolfe

Harold Augenbraum on the Future of Literary Culture

Have we been living in a fool’s paradise here at the ML? Not worrying enough about our future when our future is so closely woven with books? Not to worry. Our friend Harold Augenbraum, the emergency literary technician who breathed so much literary life back into the comatose New York Mercantile Library that it is now the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction (they kicked out all the non-fiction before creative non-fiction could take root, thereby dodging some of the non-fictional bullets of the past decade) … where was I?… oh, yes… our friend Harold does the literary worrying for us in his latest role as the chief raccoon at the National Book Foundation, the shadowy organization upstairs from the Trilateral Commission somewhere in Gotham. Harold is as smart as any six librarians put together, so your time will be well spent reading his oration on The Future of Literary Culture here, and then perhaps you will want to go to his blog here, and then, since there is not all that time left in the day and there’s really no point in starting up another project, you could go to the New York Mercantile Library Center for Fiction site here to read up on their offerings, and then you might want to come back to Stacked to leave a comment agitating for a Proust Society here in the aging but still game Queen City.

-Nemo Wolfe

Mysteries of the Mercantile

Plantain bark, tortoise shells, sperm oil, and Manilla hats? What exactly is this shipping manifest doing deep in the Mercantile Library archives? Donated by member Martha Seaman, it bears the mark of one Nathaniel Hawthorne, who worked in the Boston Salem Custom house. Perhaps this is one of those rare cases in which “don’t quit your day job” might not be such great advice. Certainly, this glimpse into the mundane work-a-day world of such an imaginative writer is a little thrilling–what that imagination must have done with evidence of distant ships from exotic lands. Unlike Melville, who drew from his experience at sea and as a castaway of sorts, Hawthorne wrote “I have not lived, but only dreamed about living.” The evidence says otherwise. -Ed Scripsi

You can find more Mysteries of the Mercantile here.

“Would anyone have followed me if I’d turned wine into water? I don’t think so.”

I haven’t been around here long enough to know if this is a hacky old chestnut that I should be ashamed of trotting out for a cheap laugh (please let me know… not that it will stop me from trotting out hacky old chestnuts for cheap laughs in future, of course), but one of my favorite things about living in Cincinnati is seeing headlines like this one:

Christ defends practices

-Norm De Plume

The Graphic Novel Discussion Group takes on Chris Ware

The Library’s Graphic Novel Discussion Group will be back at it on Saturday, April 12, starting at 1 p.m. This month’s book is “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth“ by Chris Ware. Those of you who buy into the cliche that all comic books are incredibly depressing but fascinating novel-length ruminations on life, death, fatherhood, identity, purpose, etc. will find nothing surprising here.

Chris Ware is an interesting guy. Perhaps you’ve seen his New Yorker covers. Or maybe you noticed the cover he drew for the recent Penguin Classics edition of Candide. Ragtime enthusiasts will surely recognize him as the publisher of The Ragtime Ephemeralist.

Anyway, like yr. correspondent, the Graphic Novels discussion group is small but scrappy, so the discussion is bound to be great. Everyone is welcome… nay, encouraged to attend. There is no charge, and we sometimes even provide snacks.

Say, is the Mercantile the only library in the world with a graphic novel discussion group? I can’t be positive, but a cursory Google search seems to suggest that this may be the case.

-Norm De Plume

Books you might have missed because there are no more book sections in today’s bloody, content-poor, sad excuses for newspapers department

     Robert Harris’s The Ghost, which came out last October to no notices that I ever saw, is a slick, fast, smart political thriller about a ghost writer hired to write the “autobiography” of British prime minister Adam Lang who is so like Tony Blair that he might as well have been named Tony Blair. But that would be libelous. (Slanderous? We who live by the pen never seem to remember which is which. We leave that to the attorneys). The writer was hired for an enormous amount of money to replace the original ghost who was thrown from a ferry before he could deliver on a very short deadline. Harris, by the way, is the author of Pompeii and Imperium, so this is very much a change of pace. Successfully managed. Not just for the conspiracy theorists, either, although they will eat it up.

    Has anybody else read Robert Ferrigno’s Sins of the Assassins? Was it a forced march? Please let me know if you read the opener of the series of which this is the second volume. I am most curious to know the reaction to this creepy but seductive thriller set in America after a civil war that left the country broken up into the Islamic Republic, the Bible Belt, and the Aztlan Empire. The book is – as the reviewers like to say – richly imagined, but that should not be held against it. There’s some funny stuff and some hair raising adventures. Anyone who fears the worst from our current international misadventures will find the book totally absorbing and will suffer for weeks from very very dark nightmares. Great fun.

-Nemo Wolfe