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sturgeonslawyer mentioned having just read Donald E. Westlake's novel, Get Real, the last one he wrote before his death in 2008 and also the final appearance of his epic character John Dortmunder. This is the same crew that was made famous by Robert Redford in the adaptation of his earlier Dortmunder book The Hot Rock, which was partly filmed in the town I grew up in, its most famous chase scene going from the county jail, past my high school and through the Modells parking lot where I would later work.
So I toodled out to find the book- and instead found Memory. Not mine (although I can always use that when it comes to library books;), but Westlake's final published novel. One he wrote in 1963, submitted to a sea of publisher ennui, and apparently just forgot about for the rest of his life. One of those early readers found the manuscript and submitted it for publication after his death. It's an amazing character study; darker, far more minimalist than his works from even the end of the 60s, and a Keyser Soze of an ending that I can't even hint at.
An ending, though, that I wanted to know more about, so once I finished, I did some googling, and found this review. It provided the publishing details above (I knew it was set in an earlier, never exactly identified time, but I did not realize it was written contemporaneous to that time), confirmed many of my own assessments, and was pretty cool. Almost as cool as seeing, in the sidebar of the entry, another review of the book published last year by my Met blogger friend Greg.
And when I commented on that review, mentioning my own feeble efforts at such Met-aphysics, the reviewer wrote right back and said, yeah, he'd already been reading mine off of links on Greg's Met blog.
If this world gets any smaller, we're going to need a bigger head of a pin for those angels to dance on.
----
Then, yesterday, I returned Memory and got the one I set out for in the first place. When I left the checkout counter, the book set off the exit gate with a distinct BEEP BEEP BEEPing.
Memory, I recalled (ironically enough), had done the same thing. Both had to be brought back to checkout to be further desensitized.
There's a reason behind this, it turns out- and not a good one.
Our embattled library system is recoding all of its books, going from traditional "tattle tape" which is just manually magnetically charged, to full-blown RFID devices which will enable a much greater level of self-serve checkout, in turn enabling our despotic County Executive to fire more librarians because His Kind Of People don't borrow books, they buy them (and hire nannies to read them to their kids). But darn, this new tecknuckle-a-gee is expensive, so they don't have enough money to recode the entire collection. The solution to THAT has been ratcheting up their "deaccession" policy and just filling dumpster after dumpster with books that haven't been taken out of the library in relatively short (2-5 year) time periods.
What short-sightedness. For one thing, it doesn't account for the amount of uncirculated browsing that just happens in the life of a living library. Plus, tomorrow's issues aren't necessarily today's, or even last year's. How many books about recent Egyptian history do you think might be sitting in those dumpsters right now, which might shed some light on what's happening in that country now?
You may answer, and many government officials have answered, that all this information is available online now. Well, yeah- but when the Bloombergs and Murdochs of the world increasingly gatekeep (often with a toll booth) access to that information, and even the likes of Amazon can wipe content off your "reader" after you've downloaded and paid for it, I shudder to think what a Palin Administration could do with that much control over the words I want to read. Paper, at least, lets off a noxious smell when you burn it.
----
I'm also less than thrilled at the environmental aspects of tagging my books with remote-activated data "pods" that do more than just set off a gate. When finally got Get Real out the library door, I took it to the gym, where I wave myself in with a keytag. Instead of its usual welcoming "da-ding," I got a nasty "woop woop" sound. Huzzat? The counter guy saw the book in my other hand and said, "Yeah, the tag on the book probably set it off; the thing reads anything that gets within a few feet of it."
At this rate, I'm gonna pick up a dumbbell, start to lift it, and have it talk back to me, "I'm afraid I can't do that, Ray." And if Daisy starts playing in my phone, I'm gonna be reallll nervous.
(Oh, as for the book itself? Great, so far. Night-and-day different in tone from Memory, with Dortmunder and his crew averaging a belly laugh a page:)
sturgeonslawyer mentioned having just read Donald E. Westlake's novel, Get Real, the last one he wrote before his death in 2008 and also the final appearance of his epic character John Dortmunder. This is the same crew that was made famous by Robert Redford in the adaptation of his earlier Dortmunder book The Hot Rock, which was partly filmed in the town I grew up in, its most famous chase scene going from the county jail, past my high school and through the Modells parking lot where I would later work.So I toodled out to find the book- and instead found Memory. Not mine (although I can always use that when it comes to library books;), but Westlake's final published novel. One he wrote in 1963, submitted to a sea of publisher ennui, and apparently just forgot about for the rest of his life. One of those early readers found the manuscript and submitted it for publication after his death. It's an amazing character study; darker, far more minimalist than his works from even the end of the 60s, and a Keyser Soze of an ending that I can't even hint at.
An ending, though, that I wanted to know more about, so once I finished, I did some googling, and found this review. It provided the publishing details above (I knew it was set in an earlier, never exactly identified time, but I did not realize it was written contemporaneous to that time), confirmed many of my own assessments, and was pretty cool. Almost as cool as seeing, in the sidebar of the entry, another review of the book published last year by my Met blogger friend Greg.
And when I commented on that review, mentioning my own feeble efforts at such Met-aphysics, the reviewer wrote right back and said, yeah, he'd already been reading mine off of links on Greg's Met blog.
If this world gets any smaller, we're going to need a bigger head of a pin for those angels to dance on.
----
Then, yesterday, I returned Memory and got the one I set out for in the first place. When I left the checkout counter, the book set off the exit gate with a distinct BEEP BEEP BEEPing.
Memory, I recalled (ironically enough), had done the same thing. Both had to be brought back to checkout to be further desensitized.
There's a reason behind this, it turns out- and not a good one.
Our embattled library system is recoding all of its books, going from traditional "tattle tape" which is just manually magnetically charged, to full-blown RFID devices which will enable a much greater level of self-serve checkout, in turn enabling our despotic County Executive to fire more librarians because His Kind Of People don't borrow books, they buy them (and hire nannies to read them to their kids). But darn, this new tecknuckle-a-gee is expensive, so they don't have enough money to recode the entire collection. The solution to THAT has been ratcheting up their "deaccession" policy and just filling dumpster after dumpster with books that haven't been taken out of the library in relatively short (2-5 year) time periods.
What short-sightedness. For one thing, it doesn't account for the amount of uncirculated browsing that just happens in the life of a living library. Plus, tomorrow's issues aren't necessarily today's, or even last year's. How many books about recent Egyptian history do you think might be sitting in those dumpsters right now, which might shed some light on what's happening in that country now?
You may answer, and many government officials have answered, that all this information is available online now. Well, yeah- but when the Bloombergs and Murdochs of the world increasingly gatekeep (often with a toll booth) access to that information, and even the likes of Amazon can wipe content off your "reader" after you've downloaded and paid for it, I shudder to think what a Palin Administration could do with that much control over the words I want to read. Paper, at least, lets off a noxious smell when you burn it.
----
I'm also less than thrilled at the environmental aspects of tagging my books with remote-activated data "pods" that do more than just set off a gate. When finally got Get Real out the library door, I took it to the gym, where I wave myself in with a keytag. Instead of its usual welcoming "da-ding," I got a nasty "woop woop" sound. Huzzat? The counter guy saw the book in my other hand and said, "Yeah, the tag on the book probably set it off; the thing reads anything that gets within a few feet of it."
At this rate, I'm gonna pick up a dumbbell, start to lift it, and have it talk back to me, "I'm afraid I can't do that, Ray." And if Daisy starts playing in my phone, I'm gonna be reallll nervous.
(Oh, as for the book itself? Great, so far. Night-and-day different in tone from Memory, with Dortmunder and his crew averaging a belly laugh a page:)