Archives for September 23, 2004

Regular readers know that when I post excerpts from my Wall Street Journal drama columns each Friday morning, I always mention that the Journal provides no free link to my pieces and suggest two alternative options, buying a paper copy of the Journal or subscribing to the online edition.

Apropos of this, a reader writes:

Cause I don’t read your blog every day & cause I don’t stay home in front of a computer all day, I always find a third option to be most effective: going to the library.

But hey, they don’t still have those things, do they? Not since everyone went online, right?

This posting made me laugh out loud, but it also reminded me of something I never think about anymore, which is that I stopped using public libraries a number of years ago. Don’t get me wrong: I love libraries. I worked in my high-school library (it was my first job, in fact), and I can’t count the hours I spent haunting big-city libraries as a young man. During the decade I spent working on The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken I had access to the closed stacks of the main branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, and I checked out books by the bagful.

Alas, I no longer go to Baltimore each week, nor do I have access to the stacks of a university library, and the branch of the New York Public Library located in my neighborhood is roughly the size of the one in Smalltown, U.S.A., on which I cut my teeth forty years ago. When I need information, I now look first to the Web, then to my personal library, which is small but choice. Should those alternatives fail to satisfy me, I walk two blocks to a very large Barnes & Noble and explore its shelves. If that doesn’t do it, I do without, or order a used copy of the book in question from amazon.com.

I wonder how common my experience is. It may well have less to do with the current state of library-going than with the fact that I live in New York City. Would I go to the library if there were a good one in my neighborhood? Probably–but I’m not so sure. When I was young I read in great shelf-emptying gulps, thereby accumulating the intellectual capital off which I’ve been living for the past quarter-century. Now I read far more selectively, concentrating on new titles, though I also re-read books habitually. I operate on the principle that any book worth reading more than twice is a book worth owning, and my shelves reflect that belief. I’m sure that the Web has cut down considerably on my library-related needs, but it may also be that libraries simply don’t have as much to offer me as they used to.

Speaking of the Web, I mentioned yesterday that my anxiety-fraught upgrade to OS X made it possible for me to use iMusic, Apple’s Web-based “record store.” Since then, I’ve bought a couple of dozen songs at ninety-nine cents a pop. Most of the ones I downloaded were singles from the Sixties and Seventies that I still remembered with great fondness (Little Feat’s “Strawberry Flats,” Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up”), together with a sprinkling of newer tunes that I’d heard in passing and wanted to own (Suzanne Vega’s “Caramel”). I also spent quite a bit of time looking through iMusic’s jazz section, which is surprisingly well-stocked, but at first glance I didn’t see anything I wanted that I didn’t already have. Frank Sinatra’s version of “Witchcraft,” the one pre-rock standard that I bought, is only available on Sinatra’s greatest-hits compilations, none of which I care to own.

In short, iMusic has yet to work a revolution in my record-buying habits, no doubt because I’m too firmly entrenched in them to make any sudden changes at this point in my life. Anyone who owns 3,000 painstakingly shelved CDs is unlikely to throw them all away overnight. I expect that for the present, I’ll mostly keep on using iMusic the way I used it last night, buying old songs that I liked a long time ago and new songs by artists to whom my younger friends have drawn my attention. Still, it’ll be interesting to see whether my own attachment to the Album as Art Object now starts to diminish. I thought, for instance, of downloading Jonatha Brooke’s live album, but I decided to wait and buy the CD version instead. I’ll let you know as soon as I loosen up enough to buy a complete album from iMusic. That’ll be the day.

P.S. Dear iTunes, would you please get with the program and make the Amazing Rhythm Aces’ “Third-Rate Romance” available for downloading?

Never turn an aesthete loose on a computer program that allows him to personalize his desktop. I was up last night fussing with my iBook until…well, I don’t want to talk about it. But I can assure you that the typefaces on my icons are exquisitely appropriate!

More to the point, I now appear to have made the jump to OS X without doing any significant damage to my person or sanity. I did lose a large part of my e-mail address file, but most of the people whose addresses went up the spout have responded to my urgent summons and written to me, so I think I’ve got a grip on that problem. Furthermore, early indications are that I won’t have any problem writing pieces in the new version of Word that I’m running. Now all I have to do is import my mp3 files, and I’ll be as happy as the day is long.

In short, “About Last Night” will be returning to normal just as soon as I stop fussing with typefaces and start writing new posts. Thanks for your forbearance.

“No one lies so boldly as the man who is indignant.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

It sure is nice to be back….

“There is a class of street-readers, whom I can never contemplate without affection–the poor gentry, who, not having wherewithal to buy or hire a book, filch a little learning at the open stalls–the owner, with his hard eye, casting envious looks at them all the while, and thinking when they will have done. Venturing tenderly, page after page, expecting every moment when he shall interpose his interdict, and yet unable to deny themselves the gratification, they ‘snatch a fearful joy.’

“Martin B., in this way, by daily fragments, got through two volumes of Clarissa, when the stall-keeper damped his laudable ambition, by asking him (it was in his younger days) whether he meant to purchase the work. M. declares, that under no circumstances in his life did he ever peruse a book with half the satisfaction which he took in those uneasy snatches.”

Charles Lamb, “Thoughts on Books and Reading” (1822)

From From the Floor:

Those of you who read Terry Teachout’s blog About Last Night (and who doesn’t?) are familiar with his Almanac feature–a choice quote of the day presented without contextual packaging.

Today I’m launching my riff on Teachout’s feature: The Anti-Almanac. These will be quotes I’ve come across that have made me stop reading and throw the book, journal, magazine, or newspaper across the room. I came up with the idea last night as I was browsing what looked like an interesting title in a used bookstore in Greenwich Village. When I read the following sentence, I closed the book, put it back on the shelf, and walked out of the shop.

So, without further delay, today’s anti-almanac….

If you’re curious–and you damned well should be–go here to read Anti-Almanac No. 1.

A reader writes, apropos of various postings on technological change and the e-book:

I fall vigorously on both sides of this debate. These days, I do the majority of my reading on-screen. I even read a lot of fiction on my Pocket PC (a Viewsonic V35).

But bookbinding is my hobby, and when I run across something I really like, something that isn’t available in hard-copy, I haul up a word-processor and a publishing program, massage the text a bit for felicity (I maintain the old distinction between its and it’s, even if the rest of the world is giving up) and print it out onto acid-free paper. And next thing you know, there it is between hardcovers, with a gold-stamped title.

A hobbyist can only bind so many blank books, after all; and this way, something I think has lasting value is locked down out of reach of format change. And this, I suspect, is why books aren’t going to vanish: they’re immune to format change.

Now there’s a true “About Last Night”-ist after my own heart!

As for the role of the library in the age of the Web, another reader writes:

I now live in Petticoat Junction. My house is bigger than our local library, and this ain’t no McMansion. I may not own more books
but I’m catching up quick. To top it off, the librarians hate me.
Which is astounding to me. Everywhere else I’ve been, librarians
have loved me. I’m an ideal patron. I borrow lots of books. I
whisper. I pay my fines. I bring my kids in and have taught them
all the proper library manners. But somehow I offended the staff
here my first day in and they’ve never forgiven me.

And still the library is a valuable resource for me. Because of inter-
library loans.

Our library belongs to an association of over a hundred libraries,
all linked by a single computer system, so I can go online at home
and borrow anything from any one of them, and have it show up
here in a couple of days. Just another way the web has made life
better in the analog as well as the virtual world.

I’ve never had trouble getting hold of a single book or video.

Except for A Terry Teachout Reader. Go figure.

Well said.

Oh, by the way, rumor has it that you can get hold of the Reader at amazon.com….