The Rogue Scholar

The Most Important Person in Town

A few weeks ago I located a new copy of Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank in a Brentano's in a mall near Seaford, Long Island. It was frankly a surprise both for me and the woman behind the counter: I was under the impression that the book had been out of print (and that Brentano's had been out of business) for years and the store manager hadn't remembered it being on the shelves.  I'm into end-of-the-world stories, and this book has been on my list for some time (along with On the Beach,  Level 7 and a few other genre classics) so I snapped it up and started reading.

Alas, Babylon is a story about the end of the world.  Specifically, the world that the people of the small town called Fort Repose in Central Florida ca. 1959 have come to understand and experience as normal. It's a heavenly place of constant fresh food, electric lights, easy motoring to distant cities, air travel, plumbing, medicine, comfort, and leisure.  It is as close to Heaven on Earth as human civilization has ever come in its 100,000 years on this planet. But it's as fragile as it is comfortable and convenient, and one day it ends at the hands of Soviet bombs.

Life for many of the town's inhabitants fall apart. But there is one bright spot in all this: Alice Cooksey, the town librarian finally gets a chance to shine:

Watching the car chuff past, Alice reminded herself that this evening she must bring back new books for Ben Franklin and Peyton.  It was a surprise, and a delight, to see children devour books. Without ever knowing it, they were receiving an education.  Alice would never admit it out loud, but for the first time in her thirty years as librarian of Fort Repose she felt fulfilled, even important.

It had not been easy or remunerative to persist as librarian in Fort Repose.  She recalled how every year for eight years the town council had turned down her annual request for air conditioning.  An expensive frill, they'd said.  But without air conditioning, how could a library compete?  Drugstores, bars, restaurants, movies, the St. Johns Country Club in San Marco, the lobby of the Riverside Inn, theaters, and most homes were air conditioned.  You couldn't expect people to sit in a hot library during the humid Florida summer, which began in April and didn't end until October, when they could be sitting in an air-conditioned living room coolly and painlessly absorbing visual pablum on television.  Alice had installed a Coke machine and begged old electric fans but it had been a losing battle.

In thirty years her book budget had been raised ten percent, but the cost of books had doubled. Her magazine budget was unchanged, but the cost of magazines had tripled.  So while Fort Repose grew in population, book borrowings dwindled.  There had been so many new distractions, drive-in theaters, dashing off to the springs and beaches over the weekends, the mass hypnosis of the young every evening, and finally the craze for boating and water-skiing.  Now all this was ended.  All entertainments, all amusements, all escape, all information again centered in the library.  The fact that the library had no air conditioning made no difference now.  There were not enough chairs to accommodate her readers. They sat on the front steps, in the windows, on the floor with backs against the walls of stacks.  They read everything, even the classics.  And the children came to her, when they were free of their chores, and she guided them.  And there was useful research to do.  Randy and Doctor Gunn didn't know it, but as a result of her research they might eat better thereafter.  It was strange, she thought, pedaling steadily, that it should require a holocaust  to make her own life worth living.

This passage stopped me cold when I first encountered it and the last few lines made me positively misty-eyed. The image of a town library, long abandoned to the "distractions" of modern life, now literally packed with hungry, anxious, physically and spiritually drained survivors of a nuclear war, every one of whom is suddenly rediscovering the fact that civilization has rested upon the printed word, is beyond description.  The last line is a bit of manipulative violin-playing, but it's easy to overlook that bit in light of the larger point that Frank is making. Namely, that this, too, shall pass. The cheap, abundant electricity that powers our society is slowly ebbing and one day, we'll have no choice but to rely on our print collections as our primary--or possibly, our only--resource.  This is not to say that digital collections are a bad idea--I have created them, maintain them, and am happy to be able to say they we have them to offer--but I am saying that they may not be the be-all and end-all of librarianship.  Even if the electric current keeps running without fail for the next thousand years, our DVDs, CD-ROMs, flash drives, hard drives, etc., are doomed to fail within a few decades. There are too many moving parts, the parts are continually redesigned and the mechanisms into which they are integrated fail and need to be replaced. During that process, the mechanisms are "improved" and data are  frequently lost because of reverse compatibility issues (meaning where old data cannot be read by new mechanisms or applications).  At the very least, library directors and librarians all over the U.S. remain infatuated with the idea that new technology must by definition be better technology.  It isn't.  New tech is merely new. Better is a judgment that each librarian must make for him or herself. Added to that is the fact that electronic resources and collections rely on a very complex web of infrastructural necessities, which itself relies on nearly free and constant flows of electric current.

Granted, writing in 1959 Pat Frank had no idea about the communication medium called ARPANET that the Pentagon would soon begin funding, or that in a generation or two, it would become the backbone of the most amazing world-spanning information exchange ever built.  But he understood just how easily and suddenly all that his generation (and ours) regarded as normal could end.  He further understood that if it did end, the books would remain, and be sought after. In a word, let's not throw out our books just yet.  One day, we will need them.

Why Write Diet Books? For the Money, of Course!

I heard this story on my local National Public Radio station this morning: Lynn Neary does a pretty good job on describing the diet book business. The link lets you listen to the broadcast, and it only takes five minutes of your day so I'd encourage you to do so.

It's simple, really.  People write diet books for the money.  Other people buy them because reality, as they say, bites.  Nobody really wants to think of themselves as horribly inadequate but--being human--we all are in one way or another, and deep down, I'm pretty sure most of us realize this. But therein lies the real trouble--most of us are damned lazy. I mean mentally lazy, what A.M. Rosenthal called enormous "rolls of fat around our bodies and our brains," in a NY Times Op-Ed column I remember reading years ago.  Real problems, like the kind that plague us from childhood on often contain a spiritual component and Americans are not often considered particularly spiritual.

So we diet. It's an easy fix to complicated problems, easier certainly than enduring real self-reflection and attaining genuine self-knowledge.  George Carlin said it best on a stage long ago (as best as I can remember):

"I think [the fitness craze in this country] is a post-Vietnam guilt syndrome of some kind. America has lost its soul, so now it's going to save its body. Bullshit, dude, it doesn't work that way. It doesn't work like that."

Neary discusses a number of diets in her report and they're all roughly one part blind hope and two (or more) parts "discipline," but the one that caught my eye was The Writing Diet, by Julia Cameron. There's an excerpt in place from the book itself, which speaks to its purpose better than I could write it here:

I'm a creativity expert, not a diet expert. So why am I writing a book about weight loss? Because I have accidentally stumbled upon a weight-loss secret that works. For twenty-five years I've taught creative unblocking, a twelve-week process based on my book The Artist's Way. From the front of the classroom I've seen lives transformed — and, to my astonishment, bodies transformed as well. It took me a while to recognize what was going on, but sure enough, students who began the course on the plump side ended up visibly leaner and more fit. What's going on here? I asked myself. Was it my imagination, or was there truly a "before" and an "after"? There was!

I can't vouch for the worth of her workshop (I have never attended it) and aside from a somewhat (to me) bland writing style, it seems like a perfectly readable book. But I've been writing consistently for  over thirty years and while my weight has gone up and down in that time, writing, I'm fairly certain, had nothing to do with it. Writing has and does get me fired up in a good way, which is why I do it. And I suppose one could learn to harness that energy to do whatever one might want to be happier and more productive, but that's where it stops for me.

Diets are silly, potentially harmful to one's health, and expensive (buy the book!). I watched one diet after another wreck my mother's (and later on, my wife's) mental stability and health as they both lost hundreds of pounds over and over again across a period of decades.  You want to lose weight? Fine, here's what to do: eat food. Not the crap that comes in fancy boxes or plastic wrappers, I mean real, healthful food, the kind that comes off trees and bushes, or out of the ground, or off an animal that ate grass or bugs for a living. Exercise, too: a thirty minute walk a day should be fine for most people. Finally, don't obsess about your weight. That's all you have to do.  Keep your money in your pocket where it belongs.

Sex and Sin in the Big City

Just a fast note to those who follow such things: Ig Publishing has released another volume in their growing and truly amazing stable of non-fiction works.  This one is titled The Forbidden Apple: A Century of Sex and Sin in New York City, by Kat Long, a detailed work of history about those naughty bits we all know happen in the five boroughs every moment (to someone if not ourselves) in days past.

I haven't read the book yet but Susan Dominus of the NY Times did:

These days, pornographers, pundits and scientists are forever pondering what women want, but in 1913, at least, it was pretty clear: They wanted “The Inside of the White Slave Traffic,” a film depicting the sexual coercion of innocents into a life of brothels, and they weren’t going to let a team of New York’s finest get in their way. When the deputy police commissioner of New York brought six officers to the Park Theater to seize the film, the 500 or so women waiting to see the 9:30 screening nearly broke into a riot, waving their green tickets and making a mad dash for the door. The scene attracted several thousand protesters who joined the cause in sympathy, a crowd that dispersed only when the police brought in reinforcements. Never was a film purporting, in its own words, to “teach a great moral lesson” so ardently embraced by a group of young women. (The producers’ argument: Learn from the mistakes of our protagonist to resist the seductive ways of that dark, handsome stranger.)

There’s a great history of racy entertainment covering itself, if scantily, in a cloak of righteous education. Kat Long describes these protective measures, or ruses, in “The Forbidden Apple: A Century of Sex and Sin in New York City,” less a catalog of vice than an analysis of attempts to evade its suppression. Long promises at the outset that the book will demonstrate that “the agents for good and evil, in New York especially, are symbiotic.”

When it comes to illicit media, the agents for good and evil, even outside New York, are always symbiotic: pornography, in the experience of many moral crusaders, is like an infuriating weed that loves nothing more than a good pesticide, its strength only enhanced by efforts to tamp it down. But Long also chronicles the way that initiatives to eradicate vice only helped pave the way for its further evolution in the city. Try to eliminate drinking on Sunday by limiting it to hotels, as did the Raines Law of 1896, and suddenly every bar and saloon in Manhattan is putting up cheap dividers to create makeshift accommodations, ideal breeding grounds for prostitution, which thrived in the era of the so-called Raines Law hotels. Try to provide a place where working-class men can find a bathroom that isn’t in a bar, and from that solution — public restrooms — will come another challenge: gay (semipublic) sex. Close down the Continental Baths, a glorious, early-’70s gay pick-up spot, and make way for Plato’s Retreat, a heterosexual swinger’s club in the same location in the basement of the Ansonia Hotel.

The sexual history of 20th-century New York, as written by Long, the co-author of the guidebook “Sexy New York,” has, at times, the feel of a whirlwind tour: Step up and see the sexually free flapper of the ’20s rebelling in a post-World War I rejection of staid social values; see the burlesque theaters thrilling the Depression-era man who’s down on his luck; see the pill liberate sex from reproduction. Along the way, the tour highlights some lesser-known figures in New York’s sexual history, among them its premier peep show entrepreneur, Martin Hodas, and the young women who flocked to the city as military groupies during World War II and came to be known as the khaki whackies.

Read the review.  Buy the book.

Vonnegut's 8 Rules of Writing Fiction

I am posting these here more for self-reference than anything else. The book I wrote for this past National Novel Writing Month is in its editing phase now and having thse rules easily accessible might--I hope-- makes considerable difference in the quality of the editing.  That said, why keep them to myself?

At any rate, here they are:

Kurt Vonnegut

Eight rules for writing fiction:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

-- Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons 1999), 9-10.

Enjoy! 

The End of Publishing . . .

. . . at least according to Boris Kachka in New York magazine. Here's an excerpt:

HarperCollins occupies floors 1 through 22 of a giant steel-and-glass box on 53rd Street. But up on 26, the receptionist for a tiny offshoot of the company sits alone, gatekeeper to a few drab rows of empty cubicles. A glass container on a table holds a mysterious pile of bright-yellow lightbulbs.

“Welcome to our temporary home,” says 51-year-old publisher Bob Miller, ushering me into a colleague’s more inviting office. Inside, he and his staffers prepare to impart a cheery message: They’re going to fix publishing!

But first, a horror story. Debbie Stier, Miller’s No. 2 at HarperStudio (as this little imprint is called), has been collecting videos for their blog. “You want to see what happens to books after they go to book heaven?” she asks. On the screen of her MacBook, a giant steel shredder disgorges a ragged mess of paper and cardboard onto a conveyor belt. This is the fate of up to 25 percent of the product churned out by New York’s publishing machine.

Everyone’s eyes widen, as though watching some viral YouTube gross-out. “It’s like Wall-E,” says marketing director Sarah Burningham. “It’s depressing,” Miller adds. They had sent in a Flip camera with a warehouse worker. “You can see our books go through there,” says Stier. “The Crichton, the Ann Patchett.”

Miller recently left Hyperion, which he founded seventeen years ago, to start his own imprint at the urging of HarperCollins’s then-CEO, Jane Friedman. She was replaced in June, but HarperStudio lives on. For all its ambitions, it’s a modest outfit: Miller and three women, two of them in their twenties, hope to publish two books a month starting next May, having convinced 25 authors to forgo big advances in return for half of their books’ eventual profit. The books they’ll be doing aren’t particularly outré—Emeril Lagasse on grilling, 50 Cent is collaborating with The 48 Laws of Power author Robert Greene—but they’re hoping that their process will be revolutionary.

Over the past few weeks, Stier has turned her own Flip camera on friends and colleagues, asking them to hold up those yellow lightbulbs and share their “bright ideas” on publishing. She plays us a few of the clips, including one of a publicist who delivers Stier’s intended punch line, tentatively: “Have fewer authors and sell more books?” But the suggestion that gets the biggest laugh in the office is from Stier’s 12-year-old son, who says, “So maybe you have to turn all the books into movies so nobody has to waste their time."

Read the rest of the article here.  Enjoy!

James Bond, Tormented Drunk

In 2002 John Lanchester wrote this very perceptive review of several Ian Fleming novels (From Russia With Love, Dr. No, Goldfinger ) for the London Review of Books. About halfway through the article he gives the best reason for reading Bond books in the first place that I've encountered in a while:

So why bother reading the books? The answer to that is the same as it always was: because Fleming wrote so well. Thrillers need their undernotes of authenticity, both in the incidental details and the emotional climate: but they need their topnotes of fantasy and action, too, and Fleming was supremely skilled at these. A large part of the game is creating good baddies, and Fleming did that as well as anybody ever has: Goldfinger, Blofeld, Dr No, Rosa Klebb, Grant the red-wine drinking assassin. The action scenes are very vivid: the one I enjoyed most this time was the night-time escape on skis from Blofeld’s mountain castle in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – even though Bond does end that rather more exhausted than you’d expect from a secret agent in his prime. One thing which often happens when reading thrillers, especially by writers who wrote a series of books with the same character, is that you get about halfway through one before realising that you’ve read it before. That doesn’t happen with Fleming. Once you’ve snuck ashore on Dr No’s island hideaway, you stay snuck.

Read the whole article here.  Enjoy!

50 Best Cult Books, from the Telegraph

One good book list deserves another. The UK Telegraph has already described their version of the "perfect library" (a far, far too conservative selection for many but worthwhile selections just the same), so now they weigh in with their votes for the "50 Best Cult Books."

It's an interesting  list, considering what got in and what was left out. Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" got in, but "Atlas Shrugged" did not. (Not that I understand what the big deal about Rand's work was in the first place, but that's just me.) Kerouac's "On the Road" got in but Burroughs' "Naked Lunch" did not; neither did Ginsberg's "Howl" which, yes, I know, is not a novel, but surely it was a "cult book."  Meanwhile, "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath got in; Colin Wilson's book "The Outsider" got in, but his biography of Aleister Crowley did not, and if Crowley wasn't a cult figure, then I don't know who is. On the other hand,  "Dianetics" by L. Ron Hubbard got in but there were no biographies of him either, so maybe omitting Crowley makes sense.

Anyway, it's a fun list (although I could have done without the snippy commentary from the reviewers), and it deserves a look. Enjoy!

The Perfect Library, From The Telegraph

Rejoice, for the weekend is nearly upon us.  (Yay!) If you have some time for reading this weekend, you might take a look at the UK Telegraph's  list of "110 Books: The Perfect Library."  I'm sort of disappointed that Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash did not make the list, but I approve of what science fiction they did select.  (It's a very conservative list across all the categories they identified, but good reading none the less.)

Anyway, read! (And enjoy!)

News Flash: 3 in 4 Americans Read a Book in 2006!

I don't think there's anything to say about this story from Yahoo! News other than to suggest that it's not good news for the future of the country:

"One in four adults say that they read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday.  Of those who did read, women and seniors were most avid, and religious works, and popular fiction were the top choices."

Not that there is anything wrong with "religious works", usually meaning the Bible in one form or another, or popular fiction per se  (I admit to a guilty pleasure for Jeffrey Archer novels.)  And I suppose something like the Left Behind books would qualify as both categories in one if you consider them religious works.  (Surely they're pop fiction.)

What worries me about news stories like this is not the normal "How could so many people read those kinds of books?" that you hear from the crowd that reads, say the NY Times religiously. Referring to the above mentioned materials with the word "those"--which is always spoken with a tone of extreme derision and disgust in such circles--denotes an episode of literary snobbery.  The sort of person who would speak such a line without really thinking and with a straight face would rather die than voluntarily read a western, or a detective novel or one of those Left Behind books, or even admit they looked at the covers as they walked past the rows in the local Barnes & Nobel.   Which is a shame because there are well written westerns and detective books out there.  And, say what you like about fire and brimstone revenge fantasies like the Left Behind books but at the end of the day, boy they were fun to read (I got what I could from the library and bought the rest from used book dealers.)

What I'm referring to is the assertion that in a country of 300 million souls--out of roughly 200 million adults-- 50 million did not read a single book for an entire year.    50 million otherwise decent Americans decided to do literally anything but read for an entire year.  I'm stumped as to how that could be.  Actually, I'm not stumped because I can imagine the life of someone who's not a complete and utter reading freak--reading is time consuming, it's not always easy especially if you're not used to reading for fun, and a book  can easily demand as much devotion as a mistress without providing the obvious benefits of one.  Reading is tough! Worse, if you read you can't be social.  Reading is by definition a solitary activity. You have to enjoy being alone  with a book a lot of the time.

The good news is (of course) that if one adult in four did not read even a single bo0ok last year, then three out of four did.  And that, friends and neighbors, is reason to celebrate.   

Framing the Debate, Live & In Person

I just hitched my Typepad account to FeedBurner. I have no idea what this means in terms of what readers (all 4 of them) will see  on the off chance they actually look at what's here, and I somehow doubt that I have hordes of fans who are busily linking a number of RSS feed readers to this site. If they are, and if I've just done a majorly stupid thing that prevents access,  I apologize in advance.

All of which is a long excuse for describing how Lara and I spent last evening, listening to Jeff Feldman, author of "Framing the Debate: Famous Presidential Speeches and How Progressives Can Use Them to Change the Conversation (and Win elections)" (which got a very interesting if strange review here and an even more interesting response to that review here) and Bill Keeler, who's run for the New York Senate, utilizing those ideas.  Both gentlemen kindly agreed to a book reading event which was held at the Barnes & Nobel on 8th Street and 6th Avenue in Manhattan at the request of Robert Lasner, who owns Ig Publishing, the press that published Jeff's book.  (Disclosure: Robert's my brother-in-law and I'm an investor in Ig.  I know that disqualifies me for running for public office, but there it is.)