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An interesting item in The Guardian today:
More than 9,000 books are missing from the British Library, including Renaissance treatises on theology and alchemy, a medieval text on astronomy, first editions of 19th- and 20th-century novels, and a luxury edition of Mein Kampf produced in 1939 to celebrate Hitler’s 50th birthday.
The library believes almost all have not been stolen but rather mislaid among its 650km of shelves and 150m items – although some have not been seen in well over half a century.
Now I only have around 1,100 books on a little over 100 feet of shelves and I still misplace some of them. Thus, not only can I understand how the British Library can be missing that many books, I’m actually surprised the number isn’t higher. After all, although only established in the early 1970s, the library has more than 14 million books. And if you’re like me and never understood metric, 650k is equal to 403.9 miles. That’s a lot of shelves on which to accidentally misplace a book. In fact, the library brags that if you saw just five items a day in its collection (which would include more than just the books), it would take you more than 80,000 years to see it all.
In comparison, the Library of Congress has more than 138 million items on approximately 650 miles of bookshelves. Its collections include more than 32 million books and other print materials. Of course, it also has more than a century and a half head start.
[W]hen you’re in a library it might seem really boring and dusty to most people. But for me, it was a place where I could just let my imagination roam, and you ventured into sanctuary unbounded by space or time.
Iris Chang, quoted in Finding Iris Chang
So, someone’s come up with another list of the most annoying clichés book reviewers use. There’s 20 of them compared to the last list, which contained “seven deadly words” for reviewers.
So, how big an offender am I? Here’s what a search of the 158 posts in my “Book Reviews” category shows:
- Gripping — 0
- Poignant — 0
- Compelling — 10 times since November 2005 (I now fell compelled to avoid the word.)
- Nuanced — Once, although in my defense it was not used to describe the book itself but one end of the spectrum of the writer’s humor.
- Lyrical — 0
- Tour de force — 0
- Readable — OK, shoot me. Seventeen times. Making it worse, I think most of them are preceded by “very” or “highly.” Yet I have called a portion of one book I reviewed “unreadable.”
- Haunting — 1
- Deceptively simple — 0
- Rollicking — 0
- Fully realized — 0
- At once — 0
- Timely — 0
- ” X meets X meets X” — 1, although I had only only have one style meet another, not two others.
- Page-turner — 0
- Sweeping — 1
- That said — 12
- Riveting — 0
- Unflinching — 0
- Powerful — 0
Not too bad, if I do say so myself. “That said,” I feel “compelled” to reduce even the limited use to help make things more “readable.”
It is a cliché that most clichés are true, but then like most clichés, that cliché is untrue.
Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot
Bulletin Board
Congrats to Terry Woster for the commemoration by the state House of Representatives honoring him for his contributions to the state. Among other things, it accurately recognizes his “healthy cynicism” and that he is “a rural Renaissance Man.”
A note to fellow WordPress users: Don’t be surprised if assholes with an IP address in Namibia are trying to hack into your site. An excellent security plugin made me aware of their repeated efforts and I have now eliminated the door they were trying to break open, You would be well advised to do the same.
Bookish Linkage
The National Book Critics Circle, of which I am a member, announced its book awards Thursday night. And this year I’d actually read the fiction and nonfiction winners: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 and The Forever War by Dexter Filkins, respectively. I didn’t vote for 2666 and The Forever War was fourth on my nonfiction ballot. Here’s the complete list.
Oooh, I soooo want this. Unfortunately, I don’t have a spare $116,530 laying around.
Nonbookish Linkage
Space porn: Google Mars.
Another victim of digital downloads? The BMG Music Service calls it quits.
Wisdom is not communicable.
Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
A number of the characters in the short stories that comprise Steven Millhauser’s Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories don’t look at others straight on or are even hidden in darkness. That seems appropriate. Millhauser’s work tends to present a view of parts of life and the human experience that most others don’t see or for which they lack the imagination.
This is seen from the outset of the book. Like the movies used to, it begins with a section called “Opening Cartoon.” But Millhauser’s “Cat ‘N’ Mouse” story gives a different perspective on the never-ending battle between Tom and Jerry and actually considers what each of them may be thinking. The balance of the collection consists of three themed sections, each with four stories related to or perhaps inspired by the titles of the section, “Vanishing Acts,” “Impossible Architectures” and “Heretical Histories.” Yet each section still tends to examine people, ideas and life from a somewhat uncommon perspective or one we might overlook.
That is undoubtedly part of the reason The New York Times Book Review named Dangerous Laughter one of its 10 best books of 2008, a fairly heady accomplishment for a collection of short stories. Not only are the stories well written, Millhauser skillfully handles a wide range of styles. Some stories are cast somewhere in a ground between science fiction and fable. Others take aspects of modern society to another level while still others are based in more traditional tales to which Millhauser adds a somewhat different take.
Some of the strongest are those told from the first person, such as “The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman.” Its narrator isn’t bothered just by the fact the title character disappeared from her apartment. Instead, realizing he went to school with the young woman, he struggles with his own and the community’s “failure of memory” and how that may affect being able to find her.
I felt that we were guilty of some crime. For it seemed to me that we who had seen her now and then out of the corner of our eyes, we who had seen her without seeing her, who without malice had failed to give her our full attention, were already preparing her for the fate that overtook her, were already, in a sense not yet clear to me, pushing her in the direction of disappearance.
Thus, although originally cast as a mystery of sorts, the focus is not whether the police solve the case. Instead, it asks why we so easily overlook or ignore people and things.
But Millhauser doesn’t rely only upon individuals and individual failings or problems to intrigue the reader. There is a surprisingly broad range of topics and sources for the 13 tales. “The Dome” calls to mind William Kowinski’s phrase “the malling of America” as it examines the gradual “doming of America.” Meanwhile, “The Tower” goes back further, undoubtedly having its original genesis in the Old Testament tale of the Tower of Babel. “The Other Town” examines voyeurism and reality, as well as our concepts of history, the latter also being a focus of “Here at the Historical Society.” Each of the last three carries echoes of the idea that dreams — and even what we perceive as reality — may at times be hollow or illusion, a concept explored in Millhauser’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer. Even fashion trends and a fanciful invention abandoned by Thomas Edison serve as vehicles for Millhauser’s imagination.
Almost any reader will find something to their taste in Dangerous Laughter. Yet its real strength is that readers will also find jewels they may never have anticipated or expected.
I began to wonder whether anything I had ever written was what I had wanted to write, or whether what I had wanted to write was underneath, trying to push its way through.
Steven Millhauser, “History of a Disturbance,”
Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories
Regardless of your position on stem cell research, there’s one thing South Dakotans don’t have to worry about as a result of President Obama ending restrictions on federal funding for stem cell research. No money for or research using embryonic stem cells will be here.
Nearly 18 months before President Bush restricted funding for stem cell research, South Dakota’s legislature made it illegal to conduct “nontherapeutic research” that destroys a human embryo or “subjects a human embryo to substantial risk of injury or death.” The laws undoubtedly include embryonic stem cell research. They define “nontherapeutic research” as research “not intended to help preserve the life and health of the particular embryo” and, for purposes of these laws, a human embryo includes even the “the single-celled stage” of embryonic development if not located in a woman’s body.
The bill faced few problems, passing in its final form 52-14 in the House and 34-1 in the Senate. Yet not only did it come before Bush restricted federal funding, it came before T. Denny Sanford donated $400 million to create the Sanford Project. That project has since announced that its focus will be seeking a cure for Type 1 diabetes with an emphasis on beta cell regeneration.
Will the embryonic stem cell research ban impact that project? The biology is certainly beyond me but it appears stem cell research is not the only route to investigating beta cell regeneration as a potential cure. There also seems to be differing opinions even among stem cell researchers on whether embryonic or adult stem cells are more suitable for this approach. But even with South Dakota precluding embryonic stem cell research, it may not close it down as a field of investigation for the Sanford Project.
It put a research center at the Burnham Institute for Medical Research in La Jolla, Cal. Notably, in 2004 California voters approved a Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative intended to provide $3 billion for stem cell research at California universities and research institutions. It’s also probably not a coincidence that the director of the Sanford research center at Burnham also has a “secondary appointment” to Burnham’s Stem Cell Biology and Regeneration Program.
There’s undoubtedly strong feelings on both sides of the embryonic stem cell research debate. And the Legislature couldn’t have known that such research might actually become significant to medicine and science in South Dakota. Yet you do wonder if the result would be different if the question had not been debated in the abstract but with knowledge that it would lead to sending high tech medical research and jobs to California instead of here.
We live in a society absolutely dependent on science and technology and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology.
Carl Sagan, 1994, quoted in
Conversations with Carl Sagan
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