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

Independent Libraries Across the Pond

A handsome booklet arrived today from the Leeds Library, produced by the Association of Independent Libraries, titled “Historic Libraries in Partnership”.  The Independent Libraries of Great Britain are as diverse and splendid as those over here, but surpass ours in their antiquity.  

The publication, which I couldn’t locate on the internet, or would have summarily linked to, includes a map on which you’ll find the Innerpeffray Library in Scotland, founded in 1680, the Morrab Library of Cornwall, and many lovely libraries in between.  This map is all well and good, but the thing to do would be to rent a Cooper and tour them all, which Nemo has selflessly offered to do as Stacked’s foreign correspondent, as soon as he can break away from his desk for a couple of weeks.  He promises to blog from the road on what will prove to be, no doubt, a voyage of discovery.  -Ed Scripsi

Tragedy Averted on a Chili Cincinnati Thursday

On Fountain Square today, tragedy was narrowly averted by a fleet-footed Skyline worker pushing a cart full of miniature hot dogs.  Cincinnatians, no strangers to mob violence, had queued up in frigid, wet conditions and braved lengthy lines for 60 cent Coneys from Skyline Chili, in celebration of the chili chain’s 60th anniversary.  Just minutes after the P.A. announcement that the chili tents would be closing at one o’clock, however, the hot dogs ran out. Offers by quick-thinking chili servers to the panicked chili enthusiasts to provide chili cheese sandwiches in lieu of actual coneys–at best a stop-gap measure–were met with scorn and mutiny appeared imminent.  Moments later, however, reinforcements appeared, contained in a chili-spattered insulated carrier, pushed by an intrepid chili courier.  To shouts of encouragement from his fellow employees, as well as hoots from hungry, cheapskate customers, the dogs were hustled across the square to find their place on tiny white buns, under chili and cheese, with onions and mustard for companionship.  -Ed Scripsi

Byatt at the Hyatt

A.S. Byatt will be here Saturday.   If you don’t have your ticket, you have until close of business on Thursday to get one.

Dame Antonia writes long, so we parceled out the Byatt books amongst various members of the family.  The President re-read Possession, the Non-Blogger and the Maths Historian got the new one – The Children’s Book – and we, as faithful readers know, got The Virgin in the Garden.  So as not to embarrass ourselves too much if Dame A. popped a Possession question on the way in from CVG, we watched the Possession DVD starring the wooden and dopey Gwyneth Paltrow and her total opposite Jennifer Ehle Sunday, and Mrs Wolfe, who watched alongside, assured us that it was pretty close plotwise to the very thick and quite learned book version.  It will be best if that question doesn’t get popped, though.

Even though we have a long list of things we should be doing, we picked the ML copy of The Children’s Book and started reading and had the same reaction as the Maths Historian which was to be sucked straight in and want not to do anything else.

Byatt was on the wireless yesterday being grilled by a Terry Gross stand-in.  We thought she was great, but we warn anyone who is coming for round two of last year’s Baldacci event that except for the piss-up beforehand, this will be as different as it is possible to be.  Glorious.  But different.

-Nemo Wolfe

The March of Progress

Last week we brought you news of one publisher’s plan to have authors generate books in three months or so.  Today, via Boing Boing, we bring you a handy and potentially lucrative Genre Fiction Generator, which should bring that time down to a much more manageable couple of hours .

Stuck for a title?  No problem.

Writing is getting to be a piece of cake!  In fact, if you haven’t already guessed, this post was written using advanced Automatic Blogging Algorithm Software.

-Norm De Plume

Cincinnati City Directory 1819: A Blood-drenched History

Thanks to the generosity of a certain history buff in the membership, the Mercantile has come into possession of a recently adopted and re-bound copy of the City Directory for 1819.  Now I know what you’re thinking: Zzzzzzzzzzz.  Not so!    Not only does this handsomely re-bound volume contain commercial, residential and meteorological data for early Cincinnati, but also the savage, sanguine history of the little town once known as Losantaville (the author explains that John Filson, with reference to its situation opposite the Licking river named it by combining L for Licking, Latin Os, for mouth, Greek anti, and French -ville.  Who knew!)  From there, he embarks on a historical sketch, and If you think our sports franchises have a scalping problem, read on.  One unfortunate Abner Hunt, for example, was part of a company that “fell in with a body of indians”.  

Bike Books

Readers amongst the Stacked faithful who care and care deeply about our cycling posts need to know that David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries has arrived here at the nation’s most cycling friendly library and is available for your reading pleasure.  Please do not read it while cycling.  We are trying to break motorists from texting while driving, and we don’t need to be setting a bad example.  If the Byrne book is out (and we know there will be a long waiting list and that it may be necessary to buy two copies) we suggest you take a look at Jeff Mapes’s Pedaling Revolution.  If you don’t want to be the choir being preached to you may want to check out Two Billion Cars by Daniel Speering and Deborah Gordon,  or Tom Vanderbilt’s fabulous Traffic as it is always smart to know the enemy.

And speaking of the enemy, yesterday’s Enquirer had a sweet, innocent post by a nice lady runner in Monfort Heights who wondered if it might not be a good thing to have more sidewalks.  The vitriol she brings out from the always vitriolic Enquirer commenters may have you thinking about a relocation.   And if you want to poke your eye with a really sharp stick, take a look at some of the reactions to Krista Ramsey’s modest thoughts on mass transit improvements.

-Nemo Wolfe

Books in a blink

+ = ????

Right now, it takes about two years to turn a book from a glimmer in an author or publisher’s eye into a tangible object in a reader’s grubby little hands. The Daily Beast and Perseus Books are teaming up to launch Beast Books, whose goal will be to shrink that time down to a mere three months.

As Ezra Klein at the Washington Post points out, they aren’t just shrinking the time it takes to manufacture and market the book.  They’re also shrinking the time it takes to write the book, an efficiency made possible thanks to the wonders of the internet.

I’m not so sure this is a great idea.  It seems to combine all the weaknesses of blogging (necessarily thin reporting, a focus more on being quick than deep, etc.) with all the weaknesses of a physical book (costs money, have to carry it around with you, can cause paper cuts etc.)  It might make more sense- maybe even great sense- to forget about the physical books and just stick with ebooks.

-Norm De Plume

National Lexical Ambiguity Day

According to my aunt, last Thursday was that day universally feared and reviled by college freshmen: National Punctuation Day, a day so horrible that on the night previous to it, they take care to go to sleep with a pencil on their night stand.  Upon waking, they drive the pencil into a can of beer, place their mouth over the pencil hole, and pull the tab.  Why?  Because of problems like this:

Punctuate the following two sentences so that they make sense:

1. That that is is that that is not is not is not that it it is.
2. John where James had had had had had had had had had had had the teacher’s approval.

-Ed Scripsi