Weekend Reading: Robert Crais’s “Suspect”

Thursday night found us on a panel of literary fringe persons seated on a stage in an auditorium where one of the Wolfe cubs used sweetly to sing when the building was a useful if rather unloved school rather than a Cultural (and Arts!) Center.  Our companions in the lineup all had more elevated tastes than we do, so it was a fairly shaming experience and when it was all over we carefully slid down Vine Street in the surprise snowfall, cursing Norm for failing to keep us out of such entanglements.  To comfort ourself we circled six times on a bed of leaves, trampling a bed into shape, and curled up with Suspect the latest crime fiction from the exceptionally fine crimewriter Robert Crais.  When we found that one of the main characters was a wounded canine Iraqui veteran we whimpered in pleasure.  We love dogs.  We love crime books.  We are too old to elevate our tastes.  Constant readers know that our pantheon includes Albert Payson Terhune.

An equally wounded LA cop shares the plot with the plucky Alsatian, and it will come as no surprise to learn that the two find ways to help each other recover from their trauma.  We thought this was Crais at his best.

-Nemo Wolfe

Yeeee-HAAA: Texas will be home to first all-digital library system

Texas’ Bexar County Library system is getting rid of its printed books to become the world’s first all-digital library system.  Here’s the article in PCWorld, which places the decision in context.   Despite being himself an unabashed book lover, the driving force behind this transformation, county judge Nelson Wolff apparently had a flash of inspiration while reading the biography of Steve Jobs (was he reading it on an electronic device that somehow delivered an unexpected jolt?).  The news set off a flurry of conversations in the library community where, on a library listserve to which I belong, someone linked to a Thomas Friedman editorial in the New York Times about the radical changes the digital revolution 2.0 (or is it 3.0 now?) have wrought and what it all means for society and the economy.  Yet as this article helpfully points out, according to a Pew Internet and American Life Project most U.S. readers still prefer old-timey books.  Whatever the case, I hope that instead of emulating the Apple store, the libraries of the future will keep some bookshelves around as, if nothing else comforting, sound-deadening, cloister-creating décor.

-Ed Scripsi

 

The Linen Hall Library

I’d love to present you with an in-depth, behind-the-scenes tour of the Linen Hall Library in Belfast, like we did for the Klau and the Lloyd Libraries, but unfortunately the Stacked travel budget is, shall we say, meager.  Or rather, it hopes to one day become meager if it eats its vegetables, exercises, and gets plenty of sleep.

Luckily, Stacked’s linking budget is still in great shape, it being the beginning of the fiscal year and all.

The Linen Hall Library is the oldest membership library in Ireland.  It looks like a pretty fantastic place.

-Norm De Plume

Weekend Reading: Bossypants

Having motored to Motor City for a richly deserved weekend with the Wolfe pack we discovered that we had brought neither novel nor Kindle, a desperate situation remedied by the Heiress’s copy of Tina Fey’s lite memoir, a trifle we devoured in perhaps an hour and forty six minutes broken up by happy moments teaching the kits to trap and dispatch voles.  We admit that we laughed aloud at early chapters, but by the end we were wondering just how big was that advance and whether this was really a book.  Once back home in the Queen City of the West we watched the first four episodes of Breaking Bad which we now have to fit into finishing up Friday Night Lights and getting current on Justified meaning that there will be no time to read Stendahl .  Ever.  The last thing we read before shutting the light was a recent Atlantic Monthly piece on the genius of Monty Python that made us feel a little cheap for having laughed so loud at Bossypants.  Then we fell asleep.

-Nemo Wolfe

A Burn’s Day Appeal: Save the Wild Haggis

A rare, threatened wild Haggis (Haggis Scotus) uses its powerful sense of smell to hunt drams, and evade club-wielding Haggis-thumpers.

Happy Burn’s Day!  While we at the Mercantile endorse all celebrations of a literary nature, we suggest that when you purchase your haggis, that you choose wisely.  While many claim that wild haggis (Haggis Scoticus) is superior in flavor the domesticated variety, the enlightened consumer ought to know that, due to hunting, habitat-loss, and predation by the hagglis’s only known enemy, the Hedgehog, populations are in decline.  Free range Haggis, is, to wild Haggis as  ”Chilean Sea Bass” is to Patagonia Toothfish.  Burns, we’re confident, would approve, given his sensitive nature, and new revelations about the poet.

-Ed Scripsi

Cinema 11 – The French New Wave

We’re full for tonight’s screening of Jean Renoir’s pre-New Wave classic Rules of the Game, I’m afraid, but luckily there is still room at next Thursday’s showing of Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (which happens to be one of ol’ Norm’s all-time favorite movies).  We’re also showing Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player on February 7th.

Seats are extremely limited, though, since it gets hard to make out the subtitles more than a few rows away from our tastefully sized screen.  If you’re interested in coming, better reserve your spot now.

Our Cinema 11 series is sponsored by Paul Franz and Shari Loo, and curated by Peter Niehoff.

-Norm De Plume

Weekend Reading: Dublin Down

Entirely by accident we found ourself at the end of the MLK (jr) holiday weekend having read two crime novels set in what became after a week there one of our favorite cities.  That would be Dublin, the slightly tatty and quite small capital of the financially chagrined Irish republic.  We read Stuart Neville’s Ratlines first, quite and quickly pleased to find that Neville had taken on the embarrassing issue of Nazis enjoying retirement in the Republic which like Sweden and Switzerland had been neutral in the second world war.  The ratlines refer to money channels running from Ireland back to Europe where hidden Nazis still lurk.  The moment in time is 1963 just before JFK’s visit to the ancestral village, making WWII less than twenty years gone and the Republic not forty years old.  Good stuff up to the jumbled end.

Vengeance is the latest Quirke and Hackett Police-Pathologist Procedural from posh writer John Banville writing as Benjamin Black.  We read these things for the atmosphere and the Irish mid-century cultural analysis, because the police end is invariably weak.  And it’s a new level of weakness here.  Still, Dublin in the fifties is a great setting.  And this time there’s an interesting thread of Catholic v. Protestant.  And now all the mid-century Dublin scenery is even more interesting knowing that Nazis could be lurking around any corner.

Both, of course, on the Mercantile New Fiction shelf.

-Nemo Wolfe

Donated: The Life of Dr. Benjamin Franklin; written by himself, to which is added his essays, HUMOUROUS, MORAL AND LITERARY, chiefly in the manner of the SPECTATOR. 1813

On the occasion of last night’s annual meeting, a generous Mercantile patron donated a splendidly well-preserved 1813 edition of The Life of Benjamin Franklin, printed in Pittsburgh by Cramer, Spear, and Eichbaum.  Franklin, ever the pragmatist and ladies’ man, wrote at the request of a young lady, “The Art of Procuring Pleasant Dreams”, which was the first thing I saw when I opened it.   Great stuff.

-Ed Scripsi

Weekend Reading: Don Winslow and Elmore Leonard

We have nearly finished all the Library’s Don Winslows.  This weekend was Way Down On The High Lonely, Winslow’s third, published in 1993.  There’s a big gap in the Winslow collection between then and now that we’ll have to look into.  Twenty years ago Winslow wasn’t writing a lot of white spaces and screen snippets, he was just writing.  Spare stuff, but not quite as spare as Elmore Leonard, whose character Raylan Givens is the lead in Justified, the Leonard-based series from FX we watch as much for crazy Walton Goggins as for heroic Timothy Olyphant.  The spirit is true to Leonard and sort of true to Kentucky even when the California cypresses and bald hillsides intrude.  We have a Raylan on the shelf somewhere, and the character also turns up in Rum Punch, which turned into the fantastic Jackie Brown movie.  Should we go for a Leonard film fest after we finish the frogs?

-Nemo Wolfe

Somebody call the cops…

… because the readers at Wednesday’s Walnut Street Poetry Society launch totally killed.  Each of our four readers- WSPS leader Norman Finkelstein, Mercantile executive director Albert Pyle, Cincinnati Magazine executive editor Linda Vaccariello, and local poet Dana Ward- took a section from Hart Crane’s epic The Bridge, and each knocked their section out of the park.  As in, into the next area code.

Despite the free high test coffee and sugar cookies, the audience was rapt and relatively fidget-free.  A brief but lively Q&A session followed.  We caught the whole thing on video, so you can expect a link sometime soon.

The Walnut Street Poetry Society, which meets at noon on the second Wednesday of each month, is tackling long-form American poetry this year.  Space is still available.  Members can grab a spot in the society for the year for $30 ($40 for non-members), entitling them to all the poetry, coffee, and discussion they can handle.

-Norm De Plume