Recent Reads

The Book Shop : a novel, by Penelope Fitzgerald

A kindly, intelligent, book-loving woman in a decaying English town starts a small business. In the process she renovates a derelict building, helps revitalize the local economy, provides jobs for otherwise idle teenagers and self-proclaimed intellectuals, and makes the world of books and ideas accessible to an otherwise isolated population. Naturally, someone with money and political connections is offended, and takes legal and social action to halt this dreadful menace to their ego.

It's a story of hopeful idealism versus pigheaded selfishness backed up by money, social position, and sly legalisms, and it should be required reading for anyone in the US where the Supreme Court's ruling in Kelo v. New London makes such things the law of the land for anyone who is unlucky enough to own a house, business, or any other property coveted by the local government's golfing buddies, "campaign contributors", business partners, or corporate sponsors. (See here for more background on this egregrious sellout of citizens' Constitutional rights by the Court, and what Americans who believe in Constitutional rights are doing about it.)

Recent Reads

The Last Disciple, by Hank Hanegraaff and Sigmund Brouwer

Radio's Bible Answer Man responds to the "Left Behind" phenomenon by writing (or co-writing) a fictional treatment of the Book of Revelations which adheres to a more historically-oriented interpretation than LaHaye and Jenkins. The Beast of John's prophetic vision is identified as the depraved Emperor Nero, and the Tribulation as Rome's persecution of Christians under his deranged rule.

There's plenty of dissension among Biblical scholars about the proper interpretation of Revelations, but the version put forth by Hanegraaff strikes me as far more plausible than LaHaye's and Jenkins' projections of John's visions into the present day and the future. Hanegraaff acknowledges the difficulty of interpreting mystical visions both in an explanatory epilogue and through a character in the story, a former Jewish rabbi, who notes while analyzing John's cryptic writings that a skillful user of symbols can make them encompass multiple meanings, and use them to conceal as well as reveal meaning. Hanegraaff's epilogue states that his purpose is not to "call into question the orthodoxy of the Left Behind authors", but this doesn't keep him from quoting a passage from one of their books, in which LaHaye's and Jenkins' version of AntiChrist performs a miracle by raising himself from the dead, and arguing that this literal, rather than symbolic, interpretation of certain passages in Revelations violates several basic Christian principles:

In a Christian worldview, only God has the power to raise the dead. If AntiChrist could 'raise [himself] from the dead' and control 'the earth and sky', Christianity would lose the basis for believing that Christ's resurrection vindicates His claim to deity. Further, if Satan possesses the creative power of God, this would subvert the post-resurrection appearances of Christ in that Satan could have masqueraded as the resurrecting Christ. Moreover, the notion that Satan can perform acts that are indistinguishable from genuine miracles suggests a dualistic worldview in which God and Satan are equal powers competing for dominance...." (p. 394)

Unfortunately, the plot of the story in which these ideas are presented is both predictable and plodding, the prose is unspectacular, and few of the characters are more than stereotypes. Still, the book is a useful corrective for wild theorizing of the Left-Behind variety, and it's moderately entertaining as historical fiction set in the turbulent decline of the Roman Empire and the surreptitious growth of the early Christian church.

Recent Reads

Married to a Stranger, by Nahid Rachlin

I read this because Rachlin wrote a blurb for a friend's book, and because that friend seemed to have regarded her work highly enough to include her work in an anthology and in her writing classes.

I can see some reasons why Rachlin's novel would have appealed to S. The setting in pre-revolutionary Iran and the pervasive concern with family relationships and women's status in marriage and in the society as a whole also appear in S.'s work.

However, I never really felt the kind of direct connection that I felt with S.'s descriptions of similar situations, or with graphic novels such as Maryam Satrapi's Persepolis. The story Rachlin tells is interesting enough, but the prose and the characters' emotions, with one or two exceptions, seem rather flat. Perhaps this is deliberate on the author's part, an attempt to replicate the psychological repression that comes from living in a society such as she describes.

It may also be that my lack of personal experience with the milieu of the story makes me partially deaf to the story's emotional tones and undertones. Perhaps this is further proof that one can never quite fully understand how another person perceives the world, no matter how much one wishes to do so.

Recent Reads

The King's English : Adventures of an Independent Bookseller

Betsy Burton, proprietor of the King's English bookstore in Salt Lake City, describes the trials and tribulations that she's experienced in the story's twenty-plus years of operation. Along the way, she describes what it's like to organize booksignings, dinners and other events for authors ranging from the sublime (Isabel Allende seems to be a particular favorite) to the cranky (not named, but described in excruciating detail) to the eccentric (John Mortimer and his ubiquitous bottles of champagne) to the controversial (Jon Krakauer, whose book Under the Banner of Heaven was unpopular enough with Mormon fundamentalists that many local venues were unwilling to host them, and Burton was obliged to supply security staff.) Her accounts of censorship issues in the local schools, and of her observation of suspected "vice squad" cops suspiciously prowling the shelves of the bookstore looking for something to object to, are both disturbing and funny. (She makes a point of saying that it's not the fault of the Mormons, or at least not entirely so.) Her firsthand reportage of the ongoing war between independent bookstores and big-box corporate retailers, and the strategies that they use against each other, are invaluable. I particularly enjoyed her account of how TKE dealt with the Harry Potter frenzy after being stiffed by a book wholesaler who promised to deliver the books by the Big Day and then refused to do so. Keep the customer satisfied...

For Sale: one ore dock, slightly used

My Beautiful City On The Bay contemplates what to do with the monolithic, 800-foot-long solid concrete ore dock that has sat unused in the Lower Harbor since the Soo Line railroad stopped loading ore into lake freighters twenty-five years ago. Developers propose "dividing the dock into three floors, with the top two floors renovated into about 50 apartments and the bottom floor retained for parking." I'm not sure exactly how they propose to turn the ore bins into apartments, but it certainly would be interesting to see their architectural drawings. The loading chutes might be a convenient way to get rid of unwelcome guests.

Note to Fiend: it's sort of an island....

A superior view, indeed.

From the Yooperrails listserv, a link to the website of Superior View, a business in Da Yoop that has an incredible collection of old photographs of the region and makes them available to anyone who's interested. A good-quality, "suitable-for-framing" reproduction will cost a few bucks, but their subject-categorized image index includes reduced-size images that make for interesting browsing.

A reminder, I suppose, that every once in a while the free market of eclectic individuals throws up a solution to a problem that the public sector is unable or unwilling to address.

The Oxford American : The Southern Music Issue

The Oxford American's 2005 Southern Music issue and its accompanying CD arrived a while back. For me, Sammi Smith's whisky-voiced rendition of "This Room for Rent" is the highlight of the collection. "Jesus Hits Like the Atom Bomb", from the Pilgrim Travelers, is an entertaining piece of Cold War evangelical wackiness, and I was pleased to note that the insightful profile that accompanies it is by Bob Darden, editor of the Wittenburg Door, sometime gospel-music reporter for Billboard, and one of my former professors at Thee University. Zora Neale Hurston singing "Crow Dance", a black folk song with African roots, is of some historical interest, and there's a smattering of good tracks from big names, including a live recording of Elvis Presley's first public performance of "Suspicious Minds", to go along with the usual (for the OA) selection of forgotten bluesmen and eccentric, obscure garage bands and lounge singers.

It's pleasant to listen to, but for some reason doesn't have quite the same eccentric kick as previous iterations. None of the tracks send chills down my spine like the first time I heard, say, King Pleasure's "Swan Blues" or Esther Williams' version of "No Headstone on my Grave" from the 2003 collection, or Wilco and Billy Bragg's "When the Roses Bloom Again", Dolly Parton's "Silver Dagger", or Todd Snider's "Back to the Crossroads" from the 2000 collection. Nor do any of them make me laugh like Earl Scruggs and Billy Bob Thornton's bizarre hick-hop version of "Ring of Fire" from the 2002 version, although the DeZurik Sisters' intricately playful "Arizona Yodeler" comes close. Perhaps I'm becoming jaded.

Don't let me discourage you if you have the slightest curiousity about southern music. It's still better than just about anything you're likely to hear on the radio, it's pleasantly eclectic, and the accompanying articles about the musicians are entertaining and informative. And the OA, which is currently on its third life after relocating to Little Rock, Arkansas, could use the money. (Other online reactions to the music issue, mostly positive, can be found here.)

Recent reads: The Johnstown Flood, by David G. McCullough

The events described here are almost eerily reminiscent of the recent situation in New Orleans, except that they happened over a century ago. Proof of the Eternal Return of human negligence, perhaps?

Engineers had stated for years that the dam at Lake Conemaugh, 15 miles upstream from the steel-milling town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was in need of competent repair. Those with control over the dam insisted otherwise, and performed such repairs as they did see fit to perform in a cheap, desultory and incompetent fashion. The rains came. The dam failed. And on May 31, 1889, a city died.

Some excerpts from McCullough's description of the aftermath of the flood:

Along the Frankstown Road on Green Hill some 3000 people had gathered. On the rim of Prospect Hill and on the slopes above Kernville, Woodvale, and Cambria City the crowds were nearly as big. Chilled to the bone, hungry, many of them badly injured, hundreds without shoes or only partly clothed against the biting air, they huddled under dripping trees or stood along narrow footpaths ankle-deep in mud, straining their eyes and trying hard to understand.
Spread out before them was a vast sea of muck and rubble and filthy water. Nearly all of Johnstown had been destroyed.... (p. 184)

The problems to be faced immediately were enormous and critical. People were ravenously hungry, most everyone having gone twenty-four hours or more without anything to eat, and now there was virtually no food anywhere.... Moreover, there was no water that anyone felt was safe to drink.... There was almost no dry clothing to be had and no medicines.... (p. 188

But by noon things had begun to happen, if only in a small way. Rafts had been built to cross the rivers and to get over to those buildings still surrounded by water. People on the hillsides whose houses had escaped harm and farmers from miles out in the country began coming into town bringing food, water, and clothing.... (p. 188)

That afternoon, at three, a meeting was called in Johnstown to decide what ought to be done there. Every able-bodied man who could be rounded up crowded into the Adams Street schoolhouse. The first step, it was quickly agreed, was to elect a 'dictator'.... (p. 189)

[Arthur J.] Moxham was a fortunate choice. He took charge immediately and organized citizens' committees to look after the most pressing and obvious problems. Morgues were to be established under the direction of the Reverends Beale and Chapman. Charles Zimmerman and Tom Johnson were put in charge of removing dead animals and wreckage....

Dr. Lowman and Dr. Matthews were responsible for establishing temporary hospitals. Captain Hart was to organize a police force. There was a committee for supplies and one for finance....

Captain Hart deputized some seventy-five men, most of whom were employees ofthe Johnson Company sent down from Moxham. They cut tin stars from tomato cans found in the wreckage....

As dusk gathered, the search for the living as well as the dead went on in earnest." (pp. 190-191))

A compelling story told by a skillful storyteller, with enough detail that a reader can understand how the disaster occurred, what created the danger in the first place, and how people worked together to salvage their lives afterward. Highly recommended.

Defining moments

This editorial from the Chronicle of Higher Ed. caught my attention today.

For those who don't have subscription access, I'll summarize. The author, a history professor, asked his students to identify the most important event in their fathers' life. Some listed Big Historical Events like the Vietnam War, the civil-rights movement, etc., that are discussed in typical American history textbooks. Others listed arrival in the U.S. as an immigrant, or some significant event overseas that influenced their fathers' decision to emigrate. But the majority identified, instead, some purely personal event:

In some ways the even greater challenge to the conventions of the field came from the majority (55 percent) of students who listed private matters as most decisive. A few of the answers were self-referential, whether flippant ("having me"), conventionally sentimental ("meeting between him and my mom"), or the opposite ("father not a part of my life"). More responses singled out death -- of parent, sibling, friend -- as a historical influence on their father. (One student elaborated, "death of his mother -- my dad has nine siblings, so he had to help out because they live in Poland and he lives here.") Culinary schooling in Rhode Island, admission to the Chicago Fire Department, entering the Marines, quitting drinking, getting shot, imprisonment in Texas, retirement, divorce and single parenthood, college graduation at age 50, and health and money problems rounded out a long list of life-altering events.

Before even reaching this passage, I had come to the conclusion that this was true of most of my relatives. Although I don't pretend to be able to identify *the* most important event of my father's or grandfathers' lives, I can make pretty good guesses at the two or three most likely possibilities, even after leaving aside the obvious answers like being born healthy, meeting their future spouse, or the general childhood environment that helped form their personality.

For my father, for example, the decision to finish his college education at a state university with a strong engineering program, and his later decision to go to law school after he became dissatisfied with engineering as a profession, seem to have had the most far-reaching effects in determining the course of his life. It got him off the farm and out of the Ozarks and sent him on a peripatetic career, living as far east as Pennsylvania, as far south as Texas, and taking occasional trips to countries around the world.

For my grandfather B., it's a little harder to tell. Perhaps it was his fathers' death of pneumonia when he was twelve years old, leaving him as the primary male support for his mother and his younger siblings. Or perhaps it was a genuine text-book Historical Event, the Great Depression that hit shortly thereafter, making life on a hardscrabble hill farm even more difficult than it was before. Or perhaps it was his stint in the CCC camp where he quickly became a gang foreman due to his hard-work ethic, his stubbornness, his mechanical aptitude, and the burly build that made potential troublemakers reluctant to challenge him. Perhaps the vocational course in sheet-metal working that he took on the eve of World War II, or the job that he was offered working the aluminum-shaping drophammers in an East Coast bomber plant during the war. Again we see economic considerations directing a life: that job took him out of the Ozarks and away from the hardscrabble farm country. Even today he talks about the long, long drive from Baltimore back to Kansas City, where he spent the rest of his working life in an oil refinery before retiring back to the small town in the Ozarks that he had never quite forgotten.

For my female relatives, the choice of spouse seems to have been the most dominant influence on their subsequent lives -- or at least the most obvious one that is apparent to me. (I'm not necessarily privy to all their personal experiences!) Of course, this is largely due to the fact that, whether by their own inclination or due to the prevailing social customs of the time, they had no long-term careers of their own and, to a large degree, followed their husbands and their husbands' jobs around the country.

As for myself -- well, I'm not sure that's quite obvious, even to me. Every move from one place to another, from infancy to the present, could be looked at as a critical event, since it introduced me to new people and places. Every new acquaintance who has shaped my thinking and affected me in both good ways and bad, The loss of freinds who had, over the years, become like a distant but intimate part of myself. The books and movies, etc., that have shaped my thinking. Getting a masters' degree in library science. Every change of job, including the one that took me from Texas to Michigan.

Big news events like the September 11 attacks and the war in Iraq have affected my own life mainly in indirect ways and through the way that observing them has affected my view of the world. I have been fortunate in not having any freinds or relatives who were directly affected by these events. My closest brush with a major catastrophe was a recent interview for a job at a university which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina shortly afterward. I didn't get the job -- thank God for small favors, eh?

Finding out about This Thing Called Blog must also rank somewhere among the defining events of my recent life. Heck, even a long-ago, casual decision to post a comment on the blog of somebody who lived in an entirely different country could have momentous effects....

The Nick Bantock-ization of Sherlock Holmes

Courtesy of "Professor Pangaea" by way of the FictionMags listserv: Sub Rosa, A Correspondence by Wire.

Yarns, ripping and otherwise

After Carlos mentioned the DVD release of Ripping Yarns on his blog a while back, I felt a strange, uncanny compulsion to get my own copy. I remember seeing episodes from this series on the dorm TV while doing laundry years ago at Thee U. -- that is, when there wasn't a mob of frat guys hanging around and insisting on watching MTV's Top Ten or a football game instead. I can't help but wonder whether it's really as funny as it seemed then. Will it be as appealing when I can watch it at my leisure, instead of having to catch precarious and fragmentary glimpses in between trips to the washer and dryer?

Until then, there's Tales From the Vault, the Library of Canada's tribute to Canadian adventure yarns, to tantalize a taste for delicious pulpy goodness.

Apropos of nothing

I saw a donated copy of one of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's books at the library today, and it reminded me of an e'mail that was circulated in response to her death last year.

"Elisabeth Kubler-Ross has died."
"No! Dammit! But what if.... " *Sigh*. "Okay."

Does this one belong in the category of tasteless jokes? Or is the mere fact that anyone gets it a tribute to her influence?

I almost missed it again!

Today is the feast day of St. Lawrence the Librarian, one of the patron saints of this ancyente & honourable profession. At least I'll be able to honor him in proper fashion once I get home and prepare a midnight snack. The traditional food for his feast is cold cuts.

Changed his mind

It seems that Larry McMurtry will stay in the bookselling business after all.

Things That Should Not Be

Superman Meets the Quik Bunny... Superman Meets He-Man... and my all-time favorite tale of cultures in collision, The Punisher Meets Archie. All courtesy of this link from Tech Knight, via a link from TangognaT.

I'll probably be reading TangognaT more often now that I've volunteered to order adult graphic novels for Suburban Public Library. (And for the dirty-minded among you, that's adult as in Persepolis or Sin City, not "adult" as in porn.)

What Everyone Should Know About Blog Depression

Have you experienced a loss of pleasure in the Internet? Are the intervals between your blog postings getting longer and longer? Are you occasionally sickened by your own blog?

You may be suffering from Blog Depression! Read all about it in a handy public service pamphlet from The Nonist.

(Thanks to Louise for the link.)

Rolling footnotes to history

Union Pacific recently unveiled the first examples of its "Heritage Series" of individual locomotives painted in styles reminiscent of various railroads it has absorbed. I'm no fan of the Yellow Borg, but I like the updated MoPac and WP colors and I'm sure they'll be a welcome change from the monotonous parade of Armour Yellow. It'll be interesting to see how they update the paint schemes of other UP predecessors like the MKT. I suspect they'll start with the Katy's most recent color scheme, the cheerful "John Deere" green-and-yellow of the 1970s and 1980s, rather than the monotonous red of the Deramus years or the flamboyant red-and-silver of the "Texas Special" streamliner of the 1950s.

Added comment, 8/8: A poster on a railroad history listserv speculates that UP's motivation for this project may be to preserve their trademark ownership over the logos and color schemes of the predecessor railroads, in order to collect royalties from commercial model-railroad manufacturers and railroad-book publishers who wish to reproduce them.

Is such cynicism warranted? On the one hand, UP has demonstrated long-term corporate interest in historical preservation, as with the UP Railroad Museum and their continuing steam-locomotive program. On the other hand, they've been the most aggressive of all the major railroads about demanding royalties and permissions from railroad modellers and historians.

Of sex and stacks

The pseudonymous "Thomas H. Benton" discourses upon the fate of intellectual inquiry (and other activities) in libraries when those libraries no longer offer the opportunity to immerse oneself in the printed work of previous generations.

I've commented before that some of most intriguing and life-changing moments I've experienced in my own life were the result of unstructured, free-ranging browsing in library collections. Without that kind of unstructured browsing, I would never have discovered James Branch Cabell, Lord Dunsany, or many of the other authors who have come to be part of my consciousness. I hope that similar moments of momentous serendipity are not forbidden to future generations by blinkered library administrators infatuated with shiny gadgets and ignorant of the value of the vast troves of ideas, stories, and information embodied in the printed collection of a typical university.

The Return of Gilbert Bland (and other comments on library thievery)

Several years ago, the book The Island of Lost Maps described in fascinating detail how an otherwise unremarkable antiquarian map dealer with the improbably appropriate name of Gilbert Bland sliced and smuggled his way to infamy by stealing hundreds of rare maps from atlases and other books found in the rare-books departments of libraries across the country. In the appendix to that book, the author expressed the hope that Bland's depredations would prompt libraries housing such collections to improve their security. Because the thieves won't stop coming just because one of them gets caught. Witness the recent capture of a "respected antiquarian dealer" who seems to have acquired the bulk of his inventory by stealing it in exactly the same fashion as Bland did.

Recently, a library at which I work lost an extremely expensive reference book when a thief simply requested it at the reference desk and then blithely waltzed out the door with it. The library does not require users of such materials to check them out or sign in or leave any ID at the desk while using them, and it's an open secret that the impressive-looking book-detectors at the public entrance are impotent scarecrows that are never turned on. Once the thieves figure this out, it becomes very expensive to run a library.

Moral of the story: If your library has anything in it that is worth stealing, keep it under lock and key, because no matter how innocuous they look, some of your patrons are thieving scum who will steal anything that's not bolted down.

Down memory road

This article made me feel a bit nostalgic. Perhaps I'll get other chances to go a-wandering in future summers.