As much as I love The Office, cumulative watching of this show strains my ability to believe that a guy as completely inept as Michael could get promoted in the first place, let alone remain in his managerial position without getting fired.
New GGK Interview
Can’t someone invent shelves with infinite space for books?
An article in the Wall Street Journal reports that a library in Virginia is apparently combating the constant problem of storage space for books by eliminating classics of literature:
“For Whom the Bell Tolls” may be one of Ernest Hemingway’s best-known books, but it isn’t exactly flying off the shelves in northern Virginia these days. Precisely nobody has checked out a copy from the Fairfax County Public Library system in the past two years, according to a front-page story in yesterday’s Washington Post.
And now the bell may toll for Hemingway. A software program developed by SirsiDynix, an Alabama-based library-technology company, informs librarians of which books are circulating and which ones aren’t. If titles remain untouched for two years, they may be discarded–permanently. “We’re being very ruthless,” boasts library director Sam Clay.
As it happens, the ruthlessness may not ultimately extend to Hemingway’s classic. “For Whom the Bell Tolls” could win a special reprieve, and, in the future, copies might remain available at certain branches. Yet lots of other volumes may not fare as well. Books by Charlotte Brontë, William Faulkner, Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust and Alexander Solzhenitsyn have recently been pulled.
Library officials explain, not unreasonably, that their shelf space is limited and that they want to satisfy the demands of the public. Every unpopular book that’s removed from circulation, after all, creates room for a new page-turner by John Grisham, David Baldacci, or James Patterson–the authors of the three most checked-out books in Fairfax County last month.
But this raises a fundamental question: What are libraries for? Are they cultural storehouses that contain the best that has been thought and said? Or are they more like actual stores, responding to whatever fickle taste or Mitch Albom tearjerker is all the rage at this very moment?
This policy is a reasonable one, it seems to me. That it also leads to rather sad results in the case of a lot of classic texts seems to indicate more a problem with the reading public than the libraries: nobody is checking these books out. Just as retail bookstores stock material based on what sells, libraries — which are, incidentally, government-funded non-profit organizations — must do something of the same.
It’s also worth noting that this particular library is a member library of a larger system, much like the Buffalo and Erie County Library, thus bringing in the collections of more than twenty branches into a much larger, shared collection. So the books removed from this branch are unlikely to now be completely unavailable to that town’s library patrons.
The problem is, of course, one of balance. What should libraries do? What service should they provide? The thing about literature is that it’s an art that doesn’t require special accommodations to appreciate. Moby Dick, to pull one example out of thin air, is one of the great works of human art, but not in the same way that, say, the Mona Lisa is. There’s only one Mona Lisa, and if you want to see it, it’s off to Paris with you. Imagine if the world contained exactly one copy of Moby Dick, and that was in a library in, say, Oslo. Luckily things aren’t like that for literature.
But the problem of making literature available to everyone still exists. Moby Dick “belongs to the human race” in the same way that the Mona Lisa does, but because it’s a book, we can all participate. So, in a way, we kind of expect libraries to be the “museums of literature”. But that’s not realistic.
I, along with my family, go to my library regularly — once a week. I’m continually baffled by people who scoff at the idea of going to the library in the Amazon.com day and age; as much as I love owning books (a trip to Borders with the family is planned for this weekend), why on Earth would I limit my reading to only those books that I could afford to buy? Putting it another way, I hate the idea of prioritizing my reading based on how much is left in this week’s paycheck after I buy the food and pay my bills and, yes, get a bottle or two of rum.
If you hate to see copies of classics removed from libraries, then check them out. There’s no law that says you have to check out the books you intend on reading! Every time you check out a book, you give that book a stay of execution. And don’t complain about aggressive collection maintenance practices if you’re likewise unmoved by the fact that libraries face funding cuts far more frequently than they do unexpected budgetary increases.
Here’s an earlier post of mine about libraries. I also strongly recommend, for people interested in the vagaries of the book world — collecting, making, storing, archiving, preserving — the books of author Nicholas Basbanes, which I mention in this post and in this GMR review.
UPDATE: Reading through this MeFi thread, I note that the library system mentioned by the WSJ responds here:
Recent media reports have misled readers to believe that we’ve eliminated all copies of classic titles from our branches. This could not be further from the truth. Although we occasionally have to trim the number of copies we offer in a particular branch, we definitely keep multiple copies of these works in the Fairfax County Public Library. In some cases, we’re even able to offer the text in multiple formats: in large print, on CD, as an e-book, or in languages other than English.
Because there’s a growing demand for more and more books in more and more formats, we have to balance the need to offer classic literature, and satisfy public demand, with the physical limitations of our finite shelf space. We are physically unable to warehouse every book that every resident may want to read. Therefore we have to make difficult decisions about what items to keep in our collection.
The WSJ article implies that the entire Fairfax County library system has pulled For Whom the Bell Tolls from its shelves (“Precisely nobody has checked out a copy from the Fairfax County Public Library system in the past two years”), but it turns out that this isn’t the case, as this MeFi commenter demonstrates:
God forbid that editorialist John J. Miller actually do any research of his own. After all, that’s what lowly reporters do, right? And heaven forfend that mere facts get in the way of a good rant.
Sadly for Miller, the Fairfax County Public Library, as do many public libraries these days, makes its catalog available online. It records 84 copies of For Whom The Bell Tolls in their system. And that’s only the print version–I didn’t count the audiobook (available on either CD or cassette) or the e-book. Of these 84, 24 are currently checked out.
Miller’s statement (attributed to a Washington Post article, as if that excuses Miller from doing the basic fact-checking it took me two minutes to accomplish) that “Precisely nobody has checked out a copy from the Fairfax County Public Library system in the past two years,” may be true if he means “there’s one particular copy which has not been checked out in the past two years.” But that interpretation wouldn’t really support his rant, now, would it? What he’s trying to imply, “no copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls has been checked out of FCPL within the past two years” is clearly and demonstrably false.
I don’t know whether 24/84 is typical of how many copies of For Whom the Bell Tolls are checked out of FCPL at any one time, but if it is, it seems entirely reasonable to get rid of some of those 84 copies. And 24 copies checked out is hardly a harbinger of the End of Civilization As We Know It.
So I think some of the handwringing, such as this, is misplaced.
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Speaker
I’m finding today’s swearing-in of Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the US House of Representatives a little bittersweet. It’s a great moment for the country and a great moment for progressives, but it saddens me a little that here we are, over two decades after Great Britain elevated a woman to its highest governmental position, and over a decade after South Africa elevated a black man to its highest governmental position, and we — the world’s bastion of freedom and equality — have only just now got round to elevating a woman to our third highest governmental position.
But enough of that — and better late than never, anyway.
Digby has a typically excellent post about Pelosi’s arrival:
Congratulations America.
It may have taken 230 years, but you finally got here. By hook or by crook, and the prodding and pushing of liberals and progressives, you always do.
Indeed!
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The crows come from miles around to feed on OUR corpses!
A few weeks ago I finally got round to reading George R.R. Martin’s A Feast for Crows, which is Book Four in the A Song of Ice and Fire series. Or should I say, Doorstop Four.
With this fourth volume, the series is really starting to take on the feel of a medieval soap opera. An extremely well-written soap opera, to be sure, but a soap opera nonetheless.
When I was a kid, I actually became for a time a huge fan of General Hospital. This was back when each summer would have a long and sometimes “action-packed” tale involving spies and espionage and intrigue of such nature, usually featuring characters like Robert Scorpio and his former wife Anna, who were both also former agents of the WSB (World Security Bureau), when they’d square off against the nefarious agents of the enemy DVX. As these storylines wended their way through the summer months, lots of other characters would see their own lives intersect with the “main summer storyline”. This was all usually quite a bit of fun, but there were characters I didn’t really care about, and thus their bits in the storyline tended to slide beneath my radar. And not all of the show’s characters would be involved in the “main summer storyline”, so once a week — usually on a Tuesday or Wednesday — there’d be an episode of GH that served only to catch us up on the characters who had nothing to do with the fun stuff. These episodes were largely boring as hell; I was watching the show for Robert Scorpio’s heroics and whatnot, and I didn’t really care one whit about Steve Hardy’s son’s relationship problems or the various infighting of the Quartermaine clan or the trials-and-tribulations of hooker-turned-straight Bobbi Whatshername. But that was the price to pay for the good stuff.
So GRRM’s massive fantasy series is getting kind of like that. Each chapter is told from the viewpoint of a different character, with that character being named in BIG LETTERS at the top of each chapter, so as soon as one chapter ends, you know just by looking at the next page where you’re going next in the story. This is classic soap opera structure, and in the first two books it was extremely effective, but I’m finding that now as we’re into our fourth book here, it’s all starting to feel the same way it felt when I’d watch GH all those years ago. “Oh, cool! An Arya chapter! Her story’s interesting!…Oh, bugger, another chapter about Sansa. Snore.” If ASoIaF were to be filmed, I think it should be as a soap opera, titled Westeros!. And if they change actors, a voiceover guy could intone, “The part of Jaime Lannister will be played on this episode by….”
It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the book, because I did, mostly. But the feel of reading this series has become eerily similar in my mind to that of watching a soap opera. I’m not sure if that’s what GRRM has in mind, but there it is.
As for this particular book, I found things fairly uneven. First of all, not a whole lot actually happens in the book. I suppose that’s by good design, since the previous volume, A Storm of Swords, left a lot of dust in the air to settle. But still, a number of the storylines followed in this book — Brienne’s, Samwell’s, and Jaime’s, for example — basically deal with following those characters from one place to another place in not-always-enthralling detail. (Readers who bounce off The Lord of the Rings because of all the walking from locale to locale will find this one maddening.) The storyline that I found the most involving, Arya’s, is left hanging more than one hundred fifty pages before the book itself ends. Another storyline, involving the machinating plots of the Princess of Dorne, never much engaged my interest at all. The tale of the succession of the King of the Iron Islands is over too soon.
The former books in this series all had a quality to them of moving the overall plot forward, but this one seems mainly concerned with resetting the stage and filling in some background details. We learn things about events gone before, such as who really poisoned King Joffrey, that cast those previous events in different light; this is often fascinating — again, in that “Oh, so that‘s who was behind ____” soap-opera way — but at other points in the book, it seems as if all anyone is doing is sitting around talking about local politics and/or harboring various resentments until they are to play out at the appropriate moment. And many of the best characters don’t even appear in this book, because GRRM basically took the giant book he was writing and, in order to get something out there onto the bookshelves, cut it in half and told “all of the story for half the characters”. Problem is, at times it feels as though there isn’t even all that much story for those characters.
I found A Feast for Crows something of a slog to get through. I have no intention of giving up on the series, but I hope that A Dance with Dragons fares better in the adrenaline department.
(And yes, there are a lot of nipples in this book.)
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Books about cooking, books about eating…but no books about cooking and eating books!
For some reason, I’ve been reading a lot of food writing lately. This isn’t completely out of the blue, as back when we actually had cable, more often than not my TV would be tuned to the Food Network if it was on, and I’ve always loved cookbooks in themselves as reading material, along with our status as long-time subscribers to Cooking Light. I’m not a foodie, per se, but I do like to read about food.
Anyway, some time ago I checked out of the library a book by Anthony Bourdain called The Nasty Bits (previously mentioned here). Since then, I’ve followed up with two more Bourdain books: Kitchen Confidential and A Cook’s Tour.
Kitchen came first, and my understanding is that this is the book that really put Bourdain on the map. It’s your basic “insider’s dish on the behind-the-scenes” book, this one taking us behind the scenes of the upscale restaurant business. Here you get to meet the motley cast of characters behind that dish of pork tenderloin and foie gras you enjoy at the local four-star eatery (yeah, like I ever go to one of those!). The notion of each meal being handcrafted by some highly skilled artisan chef turns out to be complete fiction; more likely the chef who’s name is on the awning is nowhere near the stoves (if he’s even in the building), and the food is being produced by a cadre of cooks, some of whom are not in this country on entirely legal basis, some of whom are sleeping with others, some of whom are still high from their end-of-shift hit of their preferred drug from the night before, and so on. It’s a fairly brutal book, but refreshingly blunt and honest.
After Bourdain hit it big (on the Food Network, apparently, well after we stopped getting cable), he went on a world-wide journey sampling local cuisines in many different cities and nations. A Cook’s Tour relates these traveler’s tales, as Bourdain goes in search of his “perfect meal”. Naturally, as with any quest for the “perfect” anything, he never finds it, but the quest itself is at times hilarious, and at times harrowing (some of the places Bourdain goes in search of food are utterly terrifying). The thematic undercurrent of this book is Bourdain’s frustration with the American approach to food, where cultural distinctions are to be downplayed in favor of constant consistency, so that if one desires one can drive from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific and literally eat nothing but identical food from identical purveyors. This book adds good travel writing to the allure of good food writing.
As for The Nasty Bits, this is a collection of essays Bourdain wrote over a number of years for various publications. It’s been a few months since I read it, but some parts stand out in my memory. For instance, there’s the essay in which he points out that “fast food” isn’t necessarily a bad thing, for instance, but that in most cultures “fast food” involves street vendors cooking food to order from very fresh ingredients. There’s another in which Bourdain takes an unnamed food writer to task for complaining that the Big Name Chef wasn’t actually cooking at the restaurant named for the Big Name Chef on the night the food writer visited. What makes The Nasty Bits particularly good, apart from the essays themselves, is the section in the back of the book where Bourdain meditates in brief on the theme of each essay. In some cases he’s not happy with what he’s written before (such as a particularly confrontational essay about chef-turned-reality TV star Rocco DiSpirito), while in others he illuminates motivations for writing in the first place (the afore-mentioned piece about Big Name Chefs, which Bourdain indicates is his way of apologizing for years of bashing Emeril Lagasse). I’d recommend the book for just one essay alone — the one in which Bourdain gleefully rants about Woody Harrelson in conjunction with the “raw food” craze — but everything here is first rate.
(Bourdain’s books are clearly aimed at an adult market, by the way. He swears a lot and writes a lot about sex and drugs.)
Not by Bourdain, but on a similar vein, is Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford. Buford, a writer for The New Yorker, one day decides that he wants to see just how good his self-taught cooking skills are, so he becomes an unpaid kitchen aid in Mario Batali’s restaurant. His adventures as a new kitchen employee are intertwined with a fascinating account of Batali’s life. Batali comes off as a Falstaffian figure, eating and drinking his way through a life that seems charmed to excess; in the midst of this, Buford gives a groundling’s-eye view of the life in a kitchen, where a short shift is twelve hours and where are short week is six days. Even I, having worked in the restaurant business before, was shocked at the amount of sweat and toil that goes into food at the high-end of the restaurant world. Certainly, the act of reading this book (and Kitchen Confidential as well) will forever cure one of any impulse of encouraging any person who can cook at home at all to open their own restaurant.
Last time I was in the library I saw a bunch of food books I’d like to read as well, along the same lines, but those will have to wait as I have other works I’m interested in as well. On a broader note, I’m finding that over the last couple of years, I’m valuing the first-person, personal narrative non-fiction reading experience more and more over the dryer, academic, “omniscient” style of writing. I love reading about history, but I’d much rather read about someone’s journeys through a certain part of the world, with the history thrown in as they themselves came face to face with it, than read straightforward works of history. I’ve come to love testimonials in writing, and memoirs; I’ve become fascinated with the connection to someone’s specific set of experiences. This year I hope to read a few books about World Wars One and Two, but I’d like to read personal narratives of the soldiers than comprehensive histories.
I’m coming to love reading as a personal act of communication across time and space. After all, that’s really what reading is.
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Because if I wear it anywhere else, it chafes.
In the 1980s, when the movie Real Genius came out, I really wanted to see it (based on a couple of hilarious clips I saw on Siskel and Ebert), but its theatrical engagement in the Southern Tier wasteland town in which I lived lasted less than the film’s running time, so I missed the movie entirely. I didn’t get to see it until my college years, when it became a “Beers and Movie Night” staple; a lot of its dialogue became part of the vernacular for the little circle of friends I had.
Now, wouldn’t you know it — a sequel is in the works.
I’m conflicted. Part of me wants to see if they can capture that lightning in the bottle again; the other part of me is screaming, “huh-whuh?!”. Anyway, we’ll see.
(And if you haven’t seen Real Genius, for the love of God, what are you waiting for?!)
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Sentential Links #81
It’s time again for a new year of Sentential Links. Don’t forget that I’m soliciting suggestions from The Readership (that’s you) for a kind of “Reader’s Choice best of 2006 Sentential Links), which I’d like to run for next week’s edition. See guidelines here and here, and leave your submissions in comments on either of those posts (or this post, if you have to). Or e-mail them to me. I currently have just six submissions, and I’d like a lot more than that!
And now onto my own choices for this week:
:: These are resolutions built to last.
:: The crazy news these days is that classical music is regaining popularity, and it’s time for mainstream publications such as EW, Time, and Newsweek — not to mention the TV networks — to pay heed. (Well, I’ll concede on Time and Newsweek. EW, as a magazine, is tripe all nicely stapled together.)
:: Collects third world babies like she’s trying to complete a matching set. (Who? Go look!)
:: Broken ribs still hurt less than discovering that your mother wants you to patch things up with and get back together with an ex. (I discovered this week that Paul T. Riddell was journaling again, after he gave it up some time back. Cool. As for the sentence, it suddenly occurs to me that the only girlfriend of mine that my parents ever met was the one I ended up marrying, so that worked out fairly well in my favor!)
:: Writers do not have to be readers’ pals, even if the reader really really likes their books. (I recall this man’s postings from rec.arts.sf.written some years back. He’s got some good pith and snark going.)
:: Introducing the new Bio-Optic Organized Knowledge device, trade-named “BOOK.”
All for this week. Remember, submit the best things you read in 2006!
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Arrggghhhh.
Did they execute Order 66?
Most years, we spend New Year’s Morning watching the Rose Parade. Today, though, we left the teevee off and cooked a nice pancake breakfast for ourselves.
Then I find out that George Lucas was the Grand Marshall, and that the parade had a Star Wars theme.
So I missed it. Arrrgghhhh!!!
More photos here. And a MeFi thread with some mild geek-bashing, and a typical attack on Lucas himself:
Now that the Rose Parade is over, tomorrow George Lucas will want to hold it again, adjust everyone’s colors, and call it The Rose Parade: The Director’s Cut. On Wednesday George Lucas will rearrange everyone’s placement and add a bunch of unneccessary crap and call it the The Rose Parade: The Collector’s Edition. By late June, we should have the Collector’s Edition of the Final Original Director’s Rose Parade.
Yeah, because Lucas is the only filmmaker doing anything like that!
Wow, am I feeling pouty today. Oh well.