Last wish

Lewis, J. Patrick. (2005). Please bury me in the library. Orlando: Harcourt.

Saw this in a display case.

Sjöwall and Wahlöö

A Peninsula Library patron told me he was looking for books on CD by these Swedish authors, back some weeks ago. He was in today, and thanked me profusely for enlightening him on accessing the OPAC online. Nice to get such feedback.

Successful Spadework

Detective-fiction readers hate saying the long goodbye. They want new cases solved by their favorite sleuths even after those heroes' author/creators have died. Publishers and estates sometimes oblige them. Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe was resuscitated at the hands of Robert B. Parker. Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe entertained more clients with the help of Robert Goldsborough. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes is ever with us, thanks to dozens of pastiche artists. But until a year ago, no writer had been allowed to summon the ghost of Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, the 1920s San Francisco private eye who starred in three short stories and the classic 1930 novel "The Maltese Falcon."

Hammett's sole surviving relative, Jo Hammett Marshall, his daughter, didn't think anyone anyone could ever do a good follow-up piece on it." 

Joe Gores, a Northern California author whose books include the 1975 novel "Hammett," and who—like Mrs. Marshall's father—worked as a detective before turning to a life of fiction. "I said, 'I can't write a sequel to it,'" he recalls telling Mrs. Marshall during a 2005 celebration marking the 75th anniversary of "Falcon"'s publication, noting that most of the book's main characters by the end are dead or in prison, except for Spade. He proposed writing a prequel instead.


"Vince Emery, the publisher who did Hammett's 'Lost Stories,' gave me a whole bunch of research books," says Mr. Gores. "Jo [Hammett Marshall] sent me books about Sun Yat-sen. That's how I came up with the plot for the Chinese girl. And there's a research librarian at the Fairfax [California] library, Theresa McGovern, who is fantastic." (In tribute, Mr. Gores has Sam Spade encounter a Bay Area librarian named Theresa McGovern.)

Judging literary prizewinners

Every so often in an attempt to expand my fiction horizon, I will pick a book from one of the literary prize lists. I am disappointed enough by these selections to wonder if I am missing something. What do the panels look for when judging whether a book is commendable?
—David Friedricks, Albany, N.Y.
 
The word "panels" is important to keep in mind when judging the judges of literature. If you have ever been on a jury or a board, you know that group decisions almost always involve negotiation and compromise. Or as David Lodge, who has been a judge for Britain's most prestigious literary prize, the Man Booker, put it, "A committee is a blunt instrument of literary criticism." Another British novelist, Julian Barnes, called the Booker "posh bingo."

The original description of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (first awarded in 1918 to the forgotten "His Family" by Ernest Poole) was for the novel "which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood." That was later changed to the novel that "shall best present the whole atmosphere of American life."

Like many people who consider themselves alert readers of fiction, I was taken by surprise by the recent announcement that "Tinkers" by Paul Harding had won this year's fiction Pulitzer. Fortunately, my library was ahead of me. I read and admired "Tinkers"—it's a small (in size), highly polished gem, a dying man's ruminations on clocks, fathers and nature. And it's unusual, a trait I suspect may be especially valued when facing down a mountain of contemporary fiction ("No! Not another disintegrating marriage! Not another kid goes bad on drugs!")

I read literary prizewinners because I like to compare my opinion to that of the judges—critics, scholars, other authors. I often applaud their choices (and sometimes am appalled). A few Pulitzer-winning novels that I also loved: "Lonesome Dove" by Larry McMurtry; "Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides; "Olive Kitteridge" by Elizabeth Strout; "Empire Falls" by Richard Russo; "The Stone Diaries" by Carol Shields; "A Thousand Acres" by Jane Smiley; and "The Known World" by Edward P. Jones.

But it's worth recalling what Sinclair Lewis wrote when he refused the 1925 Pulitzer Prize for "Arrowsmith": "By accepting the prizes and approval of these vague institutions, we are admitting their authority, publicly confirming them as the final judges of literary excellence, and I inquire whether any prize is worth that subservience."

Books read

Free For All: Oddballs, Geeks, and Gangstas in the Public Library

Clark Gable: A Biography

Homo Politicus, by Dana Milbank

Russia: A Long-shot Romance


The Producer: John Hammond and the soul of American Music

Travels with Herodotus

Shawshank Redemption

King, Stephen. Different seasons. New York: Viking Press, 1982.

Contents: Rita Hayworth and Shawshank redemption
Apt pupil
The body
The breathing method.
Genre: Horror tales.




















Wikipedia has an article about the film:

The Shawshank Redemption is a 1994 American prison drama film, written and directed by Frank Darabont, based on the Stephen King novella, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. The film stars Tim Robbins as Andrew "Andy" Dufresne and Morgan Freeman as Ellis Boyd "Red" Redding.

The film portrays Andy spending nearly two decades in Shawshank State Prison, a fictional penitentiary in Maine, and his friendship with Red, a fellow inmate. This movie exemplifies the potential gap between initial box office success and ultimate popularity. Despite a lukewarm box office reception that was barely enough to cover its budget, The Shawshank Redemption received favorable reviews from critics and has since enjoyed a remarkable life on cable television, home videotape, DVD and Blu-ray. It continues to be hailed by critics and audiences alike, 15 years after its initial release, and is ranked among the greatest films of all time.

Greatest films of all time.

One Man's Verse in No Man's Land

"Isaac Rosenberg"
By Jean Moorcroft Wilson
Northwestern University Press, 468 pages, $35


Rosenberg was introduced to the glories of English poetry, Ms. Wilson says, less by his schoolteachers than by his intellectual older sister and the free libraries of London, where his family had moved in 1897.

One great benefit of Ms. Wilson's portrait is that it allows us to encounter the Whitechapel Group, a coterie of writers, including Rosenberg, who are now overshadowed by the contemporaneous Bloomsbury set. Of course Bloomsbury's inhabitants (Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey et al.) prided themselves on their bohemian ways, but most were children of privilege. By contrast, Ms. Wilson writes, "the Whitechapel Group, all Jewish, came from far poorer backgrounds." Among their number was Stephen Winsten, who wrote a biography of George Bernard Shaw, and Joseph Leftwich, a Yiddish translator, and John Rodker, a modernist writer.


From Rosenberg's "Dead Man's Dump":

A man's brains splattered on
A stretcher-bearer's face;
His shook shoulders slipped their load,
But when they bent to look again
The drowning soul was sunk too deep
For human tenderness.

From "Break Day in the Trenches":

The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet's poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.

HWPL owns:

Rosenberg, Isaac. (1979). The collected works of Isaac Rosenberg: poetry, prose, letters, paintings, and drawings. New York: Oxford University Press.
.

Travels in the Republic of Letters

Worlds Made by Words
By Anthony Grafton
Harvard, 422 pages, $29.95

Early in the last century, when the German historian Adolf von Harnack was appointed head of the Prussian State Library in Berlin, he chose as a legend for the entranceway the Latin tag Bibliotheca docet: "The Library Teaches." This wasn't just another pompous building-decorating slogan.
Libraries still teach.

For von Harnack, the ideal library hosted on its shelves a lively, if silent, conversation of past with present. The future too was an implicit partner; after all, who knew what might prove important to generations yet to come? If the library "teaches," it does so by promoting this timeless colloquy. Von Harnack believed, too, that "one book is no book." Authors may be touchy, but books are naturally gregarious; they converse with one another and sometimes strike sparks. Only by offering the widest array of resources, von Harnack maintained, could a library provoke that tiny, unpredictable flash of insight on which all scholarship depends.

Thus, information sources interact with one another, and with the reader and researcher.

Today von Harnack's grand dream seems quixotic. Libraries are increasingly seen less as collections of printed materials and more as purveyors of access to data bases and online information.
O, drat, the future has changed the present, and nt for the better. What a common complaint. Off the mark, too.

Mr. Grafton may be steeped in the past, but he is no antiquarian. He is quick to link submerged traditions with present trends. He regards recent developments in technology, and their effects on libraries and on reading, as both a blessing and a burden. Ideally, new technologies don't displace old ones; they augment them. Cuneiform tablets, papyri, manuscripts, as well as books, remain essential to scholarship and to learning at large, if only because the look and feel of the past can be as important as its content. The larger, more troubling question is: Who will read them in the future? Sometimes Mr. Grafton sounds an elegiac note; he laments "the dull, provincial scholarship of our own sad time." He may be right to do so. Nevertheless, he himself represents the best proof that the Republic of Letters is alive and kicking.

People still read, do research, and learn.

Connections

In reading the review written by William Anthony Hay of 1848, by Mike Rapport (post below this one), I came across the name of Metternich. I know the name, but little about the person. Thus, I googled the name; the first link was Wikipedia. In the article's bibliography I found the entry: Zamoyski, A. (2007). Rites of Peace: The fall of Napoleon & the Congress of Vienna. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. HWPL owns it.

It Happened Tomorrow

A regular patron told me about this film: It Happened Tomorrow

The senator's wife, by Sue Miller

A patron asked for this one today.

Party girl

Saw the movie last night. Mary is quite the party girl, but needs money to pay the rent. She goes to see her godmother, Judy, the only family she has, who works at a public library. She gets hired as a library clerk. And, through travails and challenges, she learns to love the Dewey Decimal System. Nice movie, a little dated, by real fun.