The remark about the lamented wire racks ties in to a question which occurred to me the other day. One of the great values of used book stores is serendipity. While I, like probably most of the people reading this, shop for a lot of books online, and I have loved the monumental agoric efficiency of the net (or "the web"), I wonder if there is a calculation in conventional economics to value what we're losing by not being able to have happy accidents shopping ABE or Bookfinder.
As to Julian Bond's plaint, "Falling out of print is a book's natural fate. It may be now, but does it have to be?" The answer is yes.
Simply compare the rate of growth of the total-of-everything-published to the rate of growth of the human lifespan . . .
I have been insisting that one of the real differences for potential neo-fans today versus a generaion or two ago is that the canon is exponentially larger (and out of print, closing the rhetorical circle).
What is it about Republicans and tacky sex? They can’t all be into sleaze, can they?
(wearily remounts soap box) One of the fundamental, perhaps the most fundamental, motivations of the "Right" is sexual hysteria. Look at their "issues": abortion is evil because it interferers with God's punishment for sex; homosexuals are evil altogether, and probably have more fun sex lives than we do; sex education (the surest, cheapest way to cut abortion rates) is evil because it's about sex; etc., etc.
It's about punitiveness and control. Sex is about being out of control. There is no more evil than interfering with the punishments for sex.
Wilhelm Reich used the term "emotional plague", and while he didn't have much in the way of constructive suggestions*, I really like the term.
* (Toward the beginning of the Bush II Administration, I re-read Mass Psychology of Fascism hoping for practical advice. It sharpened my understanding, but wasn't much use tactically.)
Somewhat off-topic -- I love the little gimmick with the semi-footnote.
(I've long insisted that) Bill Gaines is the most important American cultural figure of the third quarter of the Twentieth Century.
I demonstrate this with the impossibility of naming any important American creative personality from, say, the Sixties to the Nineties, who wasn't influenced by MAD.
Why is pyromania the #1 correlate of wierdness?
All myriad, divergent, little-else-in-common kinds of NOT-normal seem to be pyros.
Why?
If I can't find it on a T-shirt soon, I'll have to print one myself:
"Barrabas Won.
Get Over It."
Real Republicans believe in personal responsibility.
Real Republicans believe in acocuntability.
Real Republicans have had my sympathy since 1980, when not just their party, but their entire vocabulary was stolen.
I get to use those umpty-thousand bookmarks I've been schelpping all this time!
I'm pretty sure this is a Cacophany society thing, or offshoot.
Santarchy!
attk of the santas
Susan Palwick said But I don't visit people in prison, because -- although I have lots of friends who've been doing prison ministry for years and love it -- it scares me silly. So am I a sheep, or a goat? Is the glass half empty, or half full?
The Pirke Avot also says (2:21, paraphrased): "You can't do everything. You gotta do something."
I googled that hare-brained National Guard Brig. Gen. in the forlorn hope of finding a communication channel . . . it appears taht in civilian life, he's the superintendant of the Schools . . .
I guess it always CAN getr worse . . .
(p.s. see URL; we need it)
There was a riot in L.A. ten or twelve years ago (Rodney King verdict maybe???) where the news photos omitted the BMWs getting their trunks stuffed full at the computer stores . . .
Shame on the groupmind for not having gotten to Matt Howarth yet!
How about the Maccabees? I've only skimmed this whole thing, so I haven't pondered properly on it all yet.
Way back when, reviewing I Am Curious Yellow, Roger Ebert graced our language by creating the word "detumescent."
(*AND* in a recent essay, he said that his time in fandom was one of the things which most taught him how to write.)
. . .
hmm
You've given me more impetus to try to get to a Readercon than I've had in a long time. (Delaney & Wilhelm on one panel? Who cares about the rest of the con!!)
As to the whole "glory" thing, consider the history of the interpretations & championing of Dalton Trumbo's _Johnny Got His Gun_. It's gone back and forth from extreme right wing to extreme left wing and back; and in other directions.
Nasturtiums are an endemic weed in the (SF) Bay Area. I startled of people a couple of times by garnishing salads with them; you can pick a lovely range of colors in any nymber of back yards.
“The essential enterprise of publishing is finding texts that audiences want to read and signaling to those audiences that, hey, this is something neat,”
What the internet/web has needed the most is the editorial function. It's been great fun watching blogs develop this function, being further leveraged by such more recent experiments as technorati and de.li.ci.ous (or wherever they put the dots).
Dick: What did you do when you fell into the vat of chocolate?
Tom: I shouted "Fire!"
Dick: Why did you shout "Fire!"?
Tom: Nobody'd have come if I'd yelled "Chocolate!"
That's the album version:
"What did you do when you fell into the vat of fertilizer?"
. . . .
"Nobody'd have come if I'd yelled "Shit!'"
"rosarian"?
I am deeply ambivalent about adding this word to my vocabulary . . .
In Mary's obit, there's a passing mention of an anarchist discussion group in the early 70's . . .
That's "The Nameless Anarchist Horde", which, in addition to discussing, partied, picniced, lived together in various combinations, partied, and seemed to have only one consistent policy: a new name was invented for the group for each action (to see how many files we could get the Red Squad to open on us). (The most longlasting activity was arguing about what to call the group, which never was settled, thus the Nameless &c. (some of which was later plagiarized by Bob Asprin, but that's other stories).) Leafleting the Chicago St. Patrick's Day Parade was the James Connolly Connection; marching in Evanston's Fourth of July Parade was the St. Macchabeus Society. Shea mailed out the "Nameless Newsletter" of what was going on, or going to go on . . .
That's where I found anarchists, and most of the group are in Illuminatus! in one degree of disguise or another. (Including the kittens Clitoris, Penis, and Fred, who also were real.)
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