BookStalking

This is a guest post by Christie C.

I was having one of those evenings. For the knots in my shoulders and back, I contemplated getting a massage from the Chinese folks who used to be next to the Dollar Store in Springfield Mall. (Because… well, they’re within my budget.) I quickly nixed the idea of goin’ boozin’, although that one was darkly alluring. I thought I’d maybe eat a cupcake. Or just sleep until morning, my ears plugged with conical wads of foam and the white noise of a fan drowning out the world. You know, one of those evenings.

But instead, I went out and picked up the latest issue of the New Yorker. It was more just something to look at while I, okay, ate a freakin’ cupcake. I idly skimmed the table of contents to see what this week’s short fiction was. It was a piece by someone named Allegra Goodman [she has a new novel, "The Cookbook Collector," coming out in July 2010]. Somewhere in my brain there was a flicker of recognition, but I’d never read anything by her. I gave her story a chance. I’m so glad I did.

Her story, “La Vita Nuova,” was exactly what I needed. Here was a beautiful story about someone who was sad but who lived her dismal little life with perceptiveness, occasional bursts of imaginative magic, and her own private brand of black humor. Here was a story that was spare, uncluttered, cleaned to the bone, with only what’s necessary remaining. Every sentence seemed to shimmer with poignancy.

It’s just this small-scale, short, slice-of-life, almost mundane piece, but it reminded me why I get so evangelical about short fiction. In the space of an hour, in one evening, in just a few pages–just the right words took me away from my life and into someone else’s. After I read it, it left a sort of emotional echo, melancholy but lovely.

Insomnia and stress have lately scattered my concentration; it sometimes feels as if I can only give something my rapt attention for a moment, then I’m gone. I blink, and I’m off to something else. A heartbeat, and I’m off to something else. It feels as if there’s little coherence. Reading a novel feels out of the question. That’s only one reason I’m grateful for writers who create worlds in these brilliant flashes. I could go on about short stories, but I’m off to something else–I want to share the beginning of “La Vita Nuova,” and a part from the middle:

“The day her fiance left, Amanda went walking in the Colonial cemetery off Garden Street. The gravestones were so worn that she could hardly read them. They were melting away into the weedy grass. You are a very dark person, her fiance had said.

She walked home and sat in her half-empty closet. Her vintage nineteen-fifties wedding dress hung in clear asphyxiating plastic printed ‘NOT A TOY.’

She took the dress to work. She hooked the hanger onto a grab bar on the T and the dress rustled and swayed. When she got out at Harvard Square, the guy who played guitar near the turnstiles called, ‘Congratulations.’

Work was at the Garden School, where Amanda taught art, including theatre, puppets, storytelling, drumming, dance, and now fabric painting. She spread the white satin gown on the art-room floor. Two girls glued pink feathers all along the hem. Others brushed the skirt with green and purple. A boy named Nathaniel dipped his hand in red paint and left his little handprint on the bodice as though the dress were an Indian pony. At lunchtime, the principal asked Amanda to step into her office.”

(I could pretty much go on quoting the whole story, but here’s another part I liked, from the middle.)

” ‘La Vita Nuova’ explained how to become a great poet. The secret was to fall in love with the perfect girl but never speak to her. You should weep instead. You should pretend that you love someone else. You should write sonnets in three parts. Your perfect girl should die.”

(And another… mostly because I don’t want to end on that note!)

“They went to a store called Little Russia and looked at the lacquered dolls there. ‘See, they come apart,’ Amanda told Nathaniel. ‘You pop open this lady, and inside there’s another, and another, and another.’

‘Do not touch, please,’ the saleslady told them.”

I suppose to avoid any potential libel suits, I should qualify that and say that he is not necessarily a liar; but he is a convicted misrepresenter.

This is the small tidbit describing why he was convicted of Contempt of Court, since his easy, simple diet book was essentially none of the above. I hope he tries to appeal it, as that would only be good for America.

Maybe he could try to pull a James Frey, and say that actually, the books are fiction. Maybe that would save him.

As the holiday season grows  closer, it is important to provide the truth to consumers.

My science fiction reading has woefully left me unprepared for the future. There is no elegant colony on the moon. There is no myriad of alien races to interact with. I have yet to jack in.

As far as I am concerned, the future has hit, and it is now. And it is weird.

I just listened to a Tuvan throat singer, presumably from siberia, sing “House of the Rising Sun.” And then I watched one of the groups videos. You have to be deeply high to make that kind of stuff. High on Globalization and the future.

And so I look back and say “Scifi authors, you just weren’t weird enough! Rudy Rucker, you’ve got to TRY HARDER.”

We’ve gone live today. Let’s see what starts to trickle in.

I imagine that Ringo is pretty upset that there is a scifi authors workin group that helps the us government plan how to fight future wars. He is probably muttering sullenly to himself in his underground bunker as he polishes whatever firearm is his weapon of choice. Anyway, Ringo is probably a bad choice for a policy advisor since he could easily be replaced by a magic 8-ball that had choices such as “Nuke them Now”, “Pre-emptive assault”, or “Research Lasers”. Who knows, maybe they already have one. (based off the Heinlien model that has the additional choice to “study more calculus”.

I get irked by books where the main character’ guesses, hunches, or impulsive decisions are never wrong. Like Fox Mulder. Man, he’d come up with the wildest guesses ever, and he’d be right every single time. Every single character in this book is like that. “Hey, Mars looks different.” “It’s probably alien probes self-replicating with the aim of destroying America.” Yup, they are!

Also, when faced with a global disaster, I hope that China, Russia, and maybe the rest of the world get to participate. Heck, maybe there could be a summit or something. In this book, the rest of the world does nothing. Well, they bravely nuke themselves so we don’t have to, after losing to the probes. I know we’re awesome and all, but if there is a country on Earth right now that could mount a last ditch defense with minimal use of metal, my votes for the country that doesn’t blow the budget on aircraft carriers. Seriously, the rest of the world may not exist as far as this book is concerned.

I did like the “Ret Ball” device used through the story. It was a good way to break up the otherwise unrelieved earnestness of the main story-lines. Using it more often would have made it irritating, so it was the right thing to do.

More things I thought were crazy:

-Six-plus foot black guy. Huge. Dangerous. Who nicknames him “The Gazelle?”

-Not one, but TWO brilliant research students working at Hooters. Their role is to serve beer and bounce, and sometimes think. Not as much as men though. That wouldn’t be right.

-Forgetting the rest or the world, what is America doing when the economy is nationalized and state of global emergency declared? I mean, aside from the armed forces and the rocket scientists? Everyone seems pretty calm about the destruction of the planet. No riots. No looting. No complaining.

The fight scenes are good, as they should be, since they comprise most of the book. Ringo’s global politics are terrible. His small unit tactics are pretty good.  The climactic fire-fight is exciting, full of lasers, experimental machine guns, and infinite waves of alien probes. It would be a good movie ending. Very “Independence Day”.

I would have liked a bit more closure. So we fought off some of the infinite probes on Earth. They still own Mars, and a bunch of Jupiter’s Moons. What are we gonna do about that? Also, where did they come from? What are they doing? Do we have any future plans? Perhaps this will be addressed in a future book.

The Sum up:

The plot is ludicrous, but the action scenes make up for it. It would be a decent movie or videogame plot. Not bad.

I’m working on cataloging my collection, as I do every so often. I have reached the point where I have a good idea if I have a book or not, but only a vague idea of where it is. My estimate is that there are about 2000 books in the collection, spread over six or seven bookshelves in a few different rooms.

They are totally unorganized except for a shelve dedicated solely to mass market paperbacks. It is a double stacked corner unit, good luck locating anything on it. Some other books have been arranged by my wife to suit her purposes. She has cherry picked some of the titles to put on shelves and those are the books she likes. Another few shelves have been arranged by color, which actually looks quite nice.

I have been using the Readerware program to organize my collection. It is a database program with the most notable feature of being pretty good at auto-cataloging from an ISBN. I have an old Cuecat scanner, and that makes short work of many of the recent titles. 

Unfortunately, most books before the 80′s don’t have bar codes, and they don’t even have ISBNs before the 70′s. I have a number of books before the 40′s and they don’t have LCCN’s.  That means that I have to manually enter those in the database, which can be pretty time consuming. 

I chose Readerware because it seemed tolerable enough, and it worked on Macs, Windows and Linux. I’ve bounced between the platforms and something that was cross platform seemed like the way to go. If I was to make a fresh choice now, I would probably lean towards delicious library, as it seems to be very polished looking.

My chief problem with Readerware is that it won’t let me just haul off with a SQL statement when I want to. I know that I would probably just end up trashing the database doing something ill-advised, but that’s what backups are for, right? Also, it’s pretty ugly. I’ve gotten used to a certain level of glamour from applications on the mac, and Readerware is just not a pretty program.

It’s not bad, though, and I hope to continue with the cataloging on a regular basis. I figure a few weeks of dedicated scanning and data entry ought to do it.