etc.

Nicholson Baker is a really nice guy.

You might remember him as the guy who wrote the book that Monica Lewinsky bought for Bill that resulted in the seizing of the book store’s sales records. But more importantly, Baker was responsible for Double Fold, the somewhat scathing indictment against the library practice of destroying newspapers (which he rightly considers an important part of national heritage) for the purpose of content preservation by microfilm. Understandably, Double Fold caused quite a stir in the library world and it wasn’t like he was telling librarians something they didn’t already know (that newspapers are valuable artifacts and information sources), but from a library’s standpoint, the logistical and practical concerns surrounding the preservation of newspapers in their original format makes the process cost-prohibitive.

I went into the reading last night having only heard a fraction of an interview with Baker on CBC Radio, so not knowing much about him (other than the fact that he’s not a librarian) I was fully expecting an aggressive, muckraking activist. It turns out that he’s this shy, mild-mannered gentle man, not at all the kind of person you would expect would have caused such a tizzy in the library world. He was interviewed after doing a short reading from his new book, A Box of Matches, at which point he mentioned that he is currently working on another library-related work of non-fiction, this one about a secret department in the Library of Congress that works for the US Air Force. I can hardly wait.

So after the reading was over, I got a chance to meet him and have him sign my copies of Double Fold and his new book. We were having a pleasant chat about the reading and Ian Brown, the interviewer, when I was overcome with the need to tell him that I was a librarian, only I didn’t elegantly work it into the conversation, I just sort of blurted it out right in the middle of an otherwise pleasant pause. Not pretty. But he handled this complete non sequitur graciously by first asking me where I worked and then by saying “I hope you took [Double Fold] in the manner in which it was intended and not as an incitement against your profession”, and by this point I’m feeling like a complete heel and thinking, here is this seriously nice man and I have put him on the defensive and made him feel the need to justify his work to me.

We rounded out our conversation amicably enough because at the heart of it I don’t disagree with his basic premise (nor do a lot of librarians from my understanding), but in my ideal world it would be the newspaper publishing companies who are dishing out the cash for superior newsprint so that the preservation of both form and content does not have to be such an onerous task for libraries. Baker ended our conversation by saying, “If I had it to do over again, I would be an archivist.” And a damn fine archivist he would be too.

I read The Diary of Samuel Pepys when I was 15 and it filled my impressionable teenage head with all sorts of fanciful notions of one day being a “diarist” (as opposed to a “journalist”) myself. So seventeenth-century-blogging witticisms aside, I’m thinking that this is probably a good thing. And being a fan of marginalia, I also really like the textual annotations.

Articles referenced on various magazine covers in the car dealership’s waiting room that rendered me delirious for having remembered to bring my own reading material:

• “Each Day is Valentine’s Day: Get your Gal a Valentine’s Day Gift that’s Sweet and Almost Nothing”
• “Is Fidelity Harmful?”
• “The Khaki: For Every Day, Every Occassion, and Every Man”
• “True Grit: Why the Packers Keep on Winning”
• “Does he Love you? Take the Quiz”
• “The 10 Hottest TV Guys”
• “25 Reasons you should Leave her”
• “Believe it! Pete Sampras Erases a Nightmare Season with a Grand Slam Dream Come True”
• “Oh my God! It’s 7th Heaven’s David Gallagher”
• “Bake your Honey a Sweet Valentine Treat: Edible Ways to Get to his Heart”

It’s been a while since I’ve opened my referrer logs and even longer since I’ve had a chuckle or two over the searches that lead to these pages. So I’m resurrecting an old feature: What They’re Searching For. And here is issue 7. Previous issues: 1 2 3 4 5 6.

I find the second and third searches particularly reprehensible.

I have an extra ticket to the Nicholson Baker reading this Thursday. Update: ticket has been claimed.

New front page image and arrangement. Have a look.

Ever since my commute went from a 15 minute bus/subway ride to an hour in my warm, zippy car on the highway, I have found it increasingly difficult to suffer the convenience of the TTC for any inter-city trips. So when I have to get downtown without a car, more often than not I take a taxi rather than public transit. And since I am therefore becoming a cab-saavy traveller, I was blown away by a little episode I experienced on Front Street yesterday.

If you live in this city and have cabbed in it even once, you will know that we don’t have taxi stands in Toronto, it’s purely a hail-one-of-you-see-one cab market. So when I was standing on Front Street yesterday, scanning the horizon for cabs, I was surprised to see a long line-up of people right in front of me, all collectively mumbling under their breaths about the lack of taxis. So I walked to the front of the line, and surely enough there is a post with a sign that read “Taxi Stand.” Only someone forgot to tell the cab drivers. Because, like me, there were many people along the street hailing cabs left and right, and taxis were stopping for them, but the poor chumps standing in the Taxi Stand line were being passed over because, presumably when you are standing at a Taxi Stand, you shouldn’t have to hail a cab, they should just stop for you.

So somewhat bemused, I joined the line at the Taxi Stand to wait my turn (ludicrous). I should tell you that most of the people in line were incoming tourists, the stand being right in front of Union Station, the main train station in the city. So while the line of 30 people in front of me became more and more nonplussed at the hailers getting cabs and the standers not, a taxi pulled up at the end of the line for a little old lady-hailer with her shopping in hand. Well, one of the standers had had just about enough of the iniquity of the situation by now, and while the little old lady loaded her shopping into the back seat, the agitated man reached in and started pulling the bags out, which got the little old lady very confused and resulted in a tug-of-war for the last bag and ended with her falling over in a befuddled heap on the sidewalk.

Obviously things had gone downhill very fast and while I felt some sympathy for the standers (me now being one of them), I felt even worse for the little old lady because this is Toronto – we don’t have taxi stands here.

I liked but did not love this book. It is mildly amusing not “raucously funny”, cleverish not “fearless”, and remotely annoying not “shrewd.” Of course, the references here are to some of the words of acclaim that have been showered upon this book by reviewers. I think this might have something to do with my reaction to Hornby: he is skilled and entertaining, but I’m certainly not eating him up with a spoon like most are. This one is told from the perspective of Katie, a seemingly unexotic middle-class GP, mother, and wife who lives in London with her husband and two children. When the novel opens, Katie is obviously unhappy in her marriage to a jaded, acrimonious man called David, and her one wish is to hold on to the accoutrements of her middle class life, but have David become a different person, less bitter, less poisonous. And he does. He goes though some sort of spiritual conversion at the hands of DJ GoodNews, a thirty-something healer who achieved his powers at the height of an acid-trip gone wrong. So David goes from being an unbearably sarcastic git to being an unbearably sanctimonious git, and this is where a lot of my annoyance with this book kicked in. For most of the novel Katie feels powerless and incompetent to discuss David’s newfound “goodness” on any sort of intellectual level, so a lot of well-meaning but utterly unrealistic charitable deeds are contrived and carried out to largely disastrous ends. It is only about 5 pages from the end of the last chapter that Katie musters enough gumption to voice her opinion, but by then I had been annoyed with both her and David for at least 200 pages, so her outburst was a bit too little far too late. If you manage to stay more charitable to Katie’s cause, and find both bitter David and good David funny and maybe a little interesting, you will probably enjoy this book more than I did. (swap)

Some sort of physical lassitude has kept me down for a couple of days. It hasn’t been a cold, and it hasn’t been the flu either, just a headachey bone-weariness that has been partially cured by lots of sleep and the kindness of one doting husband. It gave me enough time to finish reading two very good books, and start on a third that is also turning out to be fairly enjoyable. However, it has put me behind schedule on a couple of websites I am designing, so this weekend will probably be spent in front of my computer, once again. I also forgot all about the tickets to the Nicholson Baker reading I bought ages ago. The reading is next week and I’ve promised myself that I will set aside some time this weekend to come up with some kickass questions for the Q & A.

All is not well in the real world of technology. This book is the published version of the Massey Lectures Ursula Franklin gave at the University of Toronto in 1989, and sadly, even in 2003 the majority of Franklin’s observations and ruminations are not dated. I say sadly because what Franklin does in these lectures is try to come to some understanding of the way in which technological advances impact our “real world”, and the impact is by and large, not positive. In a richly humanistic way, Franklin examines the smallest and most insignificant of technologies, like the modern computer keyboard. Today’s keyboard is based on a layout designed by E. Remington and Sons, the typewriter manufacturer. Early typewriters were riddled with jamming hammers and keys, so Remington commissioned a study to come to an understanding of letter associations – or which letters are struck in closest and most frequent proximity to which letters. Based on the results of the study, Remington designed a keyboard that physically separated associated letters as widely as possible. Even though more conveniently designed keyboards have been produced since then, it is the Remington layout that has survived and remains in use for modern computers, even though the original constraints that led to the development of the current layout (keys and hammers jamming), have long since disappeared.

But Franklin doesn’t stop there. At the heart of these lectures, she is most concerned about the impact of technology on the environment and the role that government plays (or lack thereof) in that impact. She begins by suggesting that the lifespan and proliferation of technological devices (from cars to computers) is something that should be taken seriously, and that it is the role of government to take such things seriously. But corporations develop new technologies with little concern for their impact on the environment and history has proven that governments have led the charge in building support infrastructures for these emerging technologies, and have failed to safeguard the environment while doing so: “I made a plea that we get away from the egocentric and technocentric mindset that regards nature as an infrastructure to be adjusted and used like all other infrastructures” (118).

Ultimately, Franklin suggests that the only way to illicit change is to do it at the grassroots level, by starting small and eventually bringing the discourse into the public sphere, much in the same way that the abolition of slavery or the liberation of women began small and eventually worked their way into resounding, policy changing public discourses. Sadly, once again, 14 years later and there is little evidence that any such discourse is gaining momentum in the public sphere. I agree with and ardently salute most of what Franklin says in this book, and while I have some reservations about a few of her ideas (for example, in her utopian vision, government is trusted and granted far more control than it would in mine), it is truly one of those books that opens your eyes and makes you think about the things you take for granted in a completely changed way. This book should be required reading for every warm-blooded human being.