Rock Bottom Remainders @ ALA

Final performance of the Rock Bottom Remainders at the American Library Association 2012 meeting in Anaheim. Dave Berry led the band along with Stephen King, Amy Tan and others. Special Guest Roger McGuinn jingle jangled through a number of Byrds/Dylan songs.

Martin R. Kalfatovic
udcmrk.org | udc793.org | @udcmrk

QotD: Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. They put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. (William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, 1929).

Starting a little vacation time in Brewster, Mass. One of the benefits is that I look out right over a golf course (too bad I don't play golf). So this morning, at 6:04 a.m. they were out mowing the grass ("greens"?) and such. Shortly after they finished, I heard the "pock, pock" of the driving. The sound made me think to that wonderful opening scene of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury where Luster is out with Benjy hunting for golf balls on the side of the course that was the land that properly belonged to Benjy had not the weight of being a Compson crushed down the that which was the being of Caddie and Jason, and Quentin, yes, even Quentin; Quentin that was not even Quentin. That weight, which, some would say was not the weight of being a Compson, but rather was the weight of dirt and blood that was what it was to mean The South at that point in time, or was it truly all times and only that which causes us to rail at the moil and tumult of stirrings, that causes us to think of the tomorrow and tomorrows that exist only to wreak upon us frailties of the todays and yesterday?

Happy #MarsDay, some thoughts on Ray Bradbury and pictures from @AirandSpace

Happy Mars Day! Here are some pictures I took at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum the other day. Top photo is a mock-up of the Viking Lander (which when to Mars back in the 1970s). Below is an idea (date unknown) for what a Mars spacesuit might look like.

And, how can I not include a quote or two from Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles. An amazing book (short story collection? Anthology? Prophecy?). A work, like all of the best of science fiction, tells us more about our own selves and our own times then about the future or other places.

There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves. ("Usher II")

I'm burning away a way of life, just like that way of life is being burned clean of Earth right now. Forgive me if I talk like a politician. I am, after all, a former state governor, and I was honest and they hated me for it. Life on Earth never settled down to doing anything very good. Science ran too far ahead of us too quickly, and the people got lost in the mechanical wilderness, like children making over pretty things, gadgets, helicopters, rockets; emphasizing the wrong items, emphasizing machines instead of how to run the machines. Wars got bigger and bigger and finally killed Earth. That's what the silent radio means. That's what we ran away from. ("The Million-Year Picnic") 

"Who wants to see the Future, who ever does? A man can face the Past, but to think - the pillars crumbled, you say? And the sea empty, and the canals dry, and the maidens dead, and the flowers withered?" The Martian was silent, but then he looked ahead. "But there they are. I see them. Isn't that enough for me? They wait for me now, no matter what you say." ("Night Meeting") 

It also includes the Sara Teasdale poem, "There Will Come Soft Rains", my first contact with that work.

16 June 1904, yes, I say yes again, time for Bloom to wander the streets of Dublin

Time again for Bloom, Stephen, Molly, Buck and all the rest to appear before us and celebrate Bloomsday. Here are some quotes and pictures from my visit to Dublin in 2004.

Trinity College

"His smile faded as he walked, a heavy cloud hiding the sun slowly, shadowing Trinity's surly front. Trams passed one another, ingoing, outgoing, clanging. Useless words. Things go on same, day after day: squads of police marching out, back: trams in, out. Those two loonies mooching about. Dignam carted off. Mina Purefoy swollen belly on a bed groaning to have a child tugged out of her. One born every second somewhere. Other dying every second. Since I fed the birds five minutes. Three hundred kicked the bucket. Other three hundred born, washing the blood off, all are washed in the blood of the lamb, bawling maaaaaa."  James Joyce. Ulysses (Kindle Locations 3367-3371).

The Liffey

"A skiff, a crumpled throwaway, Elijah is coming, rode lightly down the Liffey, under Loopline bridge, shooting the rapids where water chafed around the bridgepiers, sailing eastward past hulls and anchorchains, between the Customhouse old dock and George's quay." James Joyce. Ulysses (Kindle Locations 4732-4733).

Sourdough Stories by L. Chalykoff from @MacBrideMuseum

Sourdough Stories by L. Chalykoff, a photo by martin_kalfatovic on Flickr.

Just got my copy of Sourdough Stories, great reading! Learn more about the MacBride Museum of Yukon History on the museum's website.

Seen at ALA: Andre Dubus III

The New Deal Fine Arts Projects (1994) now online

A Christmas gift for you ... The New Deal Fine Arts Projects of the New Deal: A Bibliography, 1933-1992. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1994. 504 p. My second book joins the first, Nile Notes of a Howadji in the online world. You can find it online: Book page at the Internet Archive.

Or even read it online here (if the embed doesn't break).

Nile Notes of a Howadji (1992), now online

My first book, Nile Notes of a Howadji, is now 18 and it was time to set it free on the world. I recently gave Smithsonian Libraries permission to digitize the work, and so, via the Internet Archive, here you go world. Book page at Internet Archive.

QotD: "in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox"

Today, I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, well, not really, but today we can celebrate, honor, Howl. The first performance of Howl was at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on October 7, 1955. Later, it was published by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti of the famed City Lights Books in North Beach (picture at right).

If we looked out the window City Lights Books, further down Columbus Ave., towards Green Street, you'll find Club Fugazi (but not in that "desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox") which later inspired a fabulous little punk band from here in Washington, DC but which is not the Fugazzi (two ZZ's) of the poem.

Random thoughts on William Faulkner on his birthday

Happy birthday William Faulkner (September 25, 1897 - July 6, 1962)!

A hundred and thirteen years ago, William Faulkner was born. One of my all time favorite authors, the world he's created remains large and resonant in my mind (and many others!). Faulkner rose on my horizon again lately when Peter Brantley's blog post "Get in the goddamn wagon" appeared earlier this month. The post, about the failures of the top library leadership in North America, took it's title from the great short story, "The
Bear".

Since I was doing some home library cleaning, I took this time to dig out and arrange my collection of Faulkner paperbacks (see picture right). Most of them are the first copies I read (though I think this is my second copy of The Sound and the Fury).

One of Faulkner's slighter works, Knight's Gambit, a collection of short stories and the title novella, inspired my short article, “Faulkner's 'Knight's Gambit'.” Explicator 45.3 (Spring 1987): 47-48. The article examines a relationship between the novella and a now little known novel, The White Rose of Memphis (New York, G. W. Carleton & co.; 1881), by Faulkner's grandfather, William Clark Falkner.

Knight's Gambit also contains the story, "An Error in Chemistry" which is a must read for any mixologist out there and a warning to those who don't take their drink seriously!

A few more random Faulkner tidbits:

• Listen to his Nobel Prize speech
• A friend of mine who worked at the University of Virginia (where in his later years Faulkner taught) had a lovely old desk chair, salvaged from the trash, that was reputed to have one been in ole Bill's office at Mr. Jefferson's University
• Faulkner lived in New Orleans for a while (and wrote his first published novel, Soldier's Pay, while there); the house he lived in, at 624 Pirate’s Alley, is now the home of Faulkner House Books, and right near the Pirate's Alley Cafe and Absinthe Bar House, where I had my first taste of the green fairy!
• In grad school, you had to fill out 3x5 cards with some facts about you, including favorite book. I put down Absalom!, Absalom! (because I don't hate the South - Faulkner joke!)

QotD: One must imagine Sisyphus happy

The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy (La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un cœur d'homme; il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux). (The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942)

I return again and again to Camus. The fiction, particularly The Plague), but mostly the essays in the collection, The Myth of Sisyphus and the book length essay, The Rebel. More human than the (all too human) Sartre  his work captures a moment in the human experience that consistently rings true.

The final lines from the "Myth of Sisyphus" essay quoted above are a perfect summation of the 20/21st century state of being.

I try to keep Camus close at hand (literally and figuratively!), but just the other day, the always inspirational Tom Moritz happened to close an e-communication with those last lines from the Myth. Perfect timing for my state of mind.

Stately, plump, Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead ...

Coffee stained, dog eared, cover bent, now imperfect binding, ungathered gatherings slipping out rearranged the word. Yes I said yes no more the vintage cover black long ell suggestive You now new replaces worn scraps and scribbles from Security National Bank and faded receipts.

So long Ulysses, no not forever, just to my falling apart and many read copy, Vintage Books edition, published and printed in 1961, born the same year as me. Replaced with a newer copy ...

Flipping through one last time, I find some scribbles, notes, and underlines:

• "He was a man they say invented barbed wire" p. 155, p. 207
• Had I served God as I served Art, He would have not have left me like this
• Sons of Ireland , p. 329-30
• "We'll put force against force, says the citizen. We have our greater Ireland beyond the sea. They were driven out of house and home in the black 47. Their mudcabins and shielings by the roadside were laid low by the batterinram and the Times rubbed its hands and told the whitelivered Saxons there would soon be as few Irish in Ireland as redskins in America" p 329.
• From the Night Town episode: "The bells of George's church toll slowly, loud dark iron p. 471
• "Rhymes and Reasons. Mouth, south. Is the mouth south someway? Or the south a mouth?" p. 138

And so now, together with Molly, "...and yes I said yes I will Yes"

Joining the brave new world of e-readers

Kindle
Originally uploaded by martin_kalfatovic

I'd said before that I'd be far down the list of e-readers purchasers (mostly because I couldn't see adding another device to my daily carry alongs - Droid & Netbook).

I had both the Kindle and Aldiko readers on the Droid, that that was good enough for some books to carry around for reference ... but then ...

Well, but then I was offered a free Kindle (2nd gen it turns out) with my credit card. What the heck, I took it.

It arrived yesterday and only played around with it a bit (testing some publications I had converted to epub/mobi for work purposes) before my wife took off with it to read her book club book (Sinclair Lewis's Main Street).

Bloomsday, 16 June 2010

And a happy Bloomsday to all you in the great Irish diaspora ...

Same notice on the door. Sermon by the very reverend John Conmee S. J. on saint Peter Claver and the African mission. Save China's millions. Wonder how they explain it to the heathen Chinee. Prefer an ounce of opium. Celestials. Rank heresy for them. Prayers for the conversion of Gladstone they had too when he was almost unconscious. The protestants the same. Convert Dr. William J. Walsh D. D. to the true religion. Buddha their god lying on his side in the museum. Taking it easy with hand under his cheek. Josssticks burning. Not like Ecce Homo. Crown of thorns and cross. Clever idea Saint Patrick the shamrock. Chopsticks? Conmee: Martin Cunningham knows him: distinguished looking. Sorry I didn't work him about getting Molly into the choir instead of that Father Farley who looked a fool but wasn't. They're taught that. He's not going out in bluey specs with the sweat rolling off him to baptise blacks, is he? The glasses would take their fancy, flashing. Like to see them sitting round in a ring with blub lips, entranced, listening. Still life. Lap it up like milk, I suppose.

Ulysses (Episode 5: Lotus Eaters)

Moby Dick: Reimagined

August 1, 1819, Herman Melville was born.

This fabulous interpretation of Moby Dick comes from Alex Itin and was found on the If:Book blog. Be sure to take a look at Itin's Ulysses too!

June 16: Happy Bloomsday!

Happy Bloomsday!

Today, June 16, is the day that Leopold Bloom had his adventures in 1904 Dublin. Here's a wonderful rendering of Ulysses.

Kindle on the Metro: a movement?

Kindle on the Metro
Originally uploaded by martin_kalfatovic

"And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin' a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said fifty people a day walking in singin' a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may thinks it's a movement."
- Arlo Guthrie, "Alice's Restaurant"

The other day I saw someone using a Kindle on the Washington Metro during the morning commute.

A couple days later, the second person at work showed up with their Kindle. I know now four people with Kindles. Today, I saw two people on the morning commute with Kindles (the Kindle 2.0). Everyone I know with an iPhone or iTouch has the book reader app on it.

Has the mobile e-book finally turned the corner? Who will win the battle of the mobile book? Sony? (Sony saturated the Washington Metro with an ad campaign a while back - including the famous "Sexier than a Librarian" ad - but I haven't seen any on the trains!

I'm not sold on the e-book for general purpose reading (yet). The idea of having an expensive device loaded with (still) expensive books at the beach (not that I go to the beach very often) or left in a plane seatback pocket, or in a Starbucks (all of done with paperback books before) doesn't make me feel comfortable (and do I want the added stress of having to actually THINK about where it is?

And I'll miss used book stores (like I miss the used record store). The secondary retail market was my favorite shopping experience!

So, no Kindle (or Sony) for me now. My netbook is loaded with work related articles (and a few books downloaded from the big scanning projects, but as I type, I have very battered copies of Nine Stories and "Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenters" & "Seymour: An Introduction" tucked in my bag for my daily commute.

Territorial Enterprise

2007-08-27-dscn0523
Originally uploaded by martin_kalfatovic

In Virginia City, Nevada, the offices of the Territorial Enterprise are located in an interesting spot that is now part museum, part gift shop. The Territorial Enterprise is best known as the paper that Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) worked at. The museum/shop has various Twain artifacts, including the desk at which he worked.

I used to come to Virginia City as a child on field trips. In August 2007, I made my first visit back in [very long time]. Things pretty much looked as I remembered them!

The family of a woman I went to school with has run the museum/shop for all these years!

Not a Razorgirl in Sight ...

2009-02-22-IMG_0118
Originally uploaded by martin_kalfatovic

Well, Narita (NRT) was a bit of a disappointment!

I guess I've read too many William Gibson novels, but I was expecting something a little more cyberpunk here on the edge of Chiba City. So, instead of lots of glittering chrome or rusted wrecks, I found a very calm and quiet airport with the usual moving sidewalk, a couple of duty free shops, and a take-away sushi place.

Except for the duty free shops and sushi place (well, maybe not even that), I would have sworn I was in any medium town airport USA (say, Columbia, SC or Raleigh-Durham, NC).

So, Case, see you in the SimStim ...