madeline’s front room (with guitarist)

there’s only five strings on “woody” here.
not having to control the sixth makes it
easier to get a nice sound. i learned
this trick from bob sauls who says
keith richard tunes his guitar this way.
as you can see, i’m happy to be here.
madeline’s house is a lot closer to “home”
than i ever expected to feel ever again.

never at reft

more of “dekist’s hot shelves“.
science & medicine below;
litcrit above and whatever fits
in between. the “ancient med”
poster is by national geographic,
natch. i got if for next to nothing,
natch. along with most of the
fine reference works you see
here. lotsa good stuff out there
still i think but not for long maybe.
grab up the reference books
and keep ‘em in a pile in the corner.
you’ll thank me someday.

the only demand I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works

new edition of finnegans wake.

dekist’s hot shelves

bible stuff, a shakespeare, books about books, math, and various reference and mostly-lit-but-quasi-random. there’s a *lot* more math stuff in the library here, natch, most of it downstairs. most of the dovers are at madeline’s though. i’ve been spreading around drafts of three different micro-zines. once you’ve made *one*, of course, the goal becomes to fill a *whole shelf*. it’s in delany somewhere i think.

feuilletonist makes good

mclemee cracks bookforum: review of a society adrift. a wince from scott.

if bloor street could talk

book launch by the edu-factory collective.

the man went to earth and looked again

madeline made bread.

there’s nothing in the world
like fresh bread. mmm-mm!
i was barely in the kitchen at all
for the whole process but from
time to time various thoughts
about fresh bread drifted around
through my considering-apparatus.
dominant among them dorothy stewart’s
brown county loaves. dorothy was
a dear friend to our whole family.
she made much the most homemade
bread strictly-so-called that *i*’ve
ever had and boy it was good.
when i was little i wanted plain
old grocery store air bread but
i got over that. probably around
the time i found out i liked pizza.

anyhow when the loaves are cooled off
i bring one into the TV room along
with knives and butter. but first
of course… never mind the butter…
i break off a nice crusty piece
and have at. boom. i’m back just
like that in zagreb across from
the school where there was a little
shop where usually i’d get a
lollipopish thingie costing, like,
a couple dinars or something…
about a tenth of cent US at that
time… but would sometimes splurge
on a small loaf… or big roll…
tasting *just like this*
wonderful stuff right here.
and i’ve got impressions in here
of both buildings and the street
that separated ‘em and the gravel
of the school courtyard and the night
jasna got knocked out cold on the gravel
somehow (and took quite a while to come around)
and of other more playground-like goings-on
in sight of that store (though nothing
much of its *inside* at all). mainly, though?
the taste of bread. just like back in zagreb.
gee it’s good.

now this is the strange part:
it wasn’t until *after* i’d started
drafting a blog post (still in
my considering-apparatus you
understand) that i thought
of proust. imagine that.

all knowledge is found in facebook

brad dwyer covers bob oksner. thanks to alex robinson for spotting this fine blog.
richard moser on organizing (longish).
mc lemee interviews bethanne patrick.

Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization (via JohnDCook in tw’r).

cartoonist captured on video.

dangle on airborne. those are some cool-lookin pill boxen. i was just at a drugstore. i recognized the style as his right away. evidently they’re pretty popular; there’s a store-brand knockoff.

samjshah’s genesis. any math teacher here not having read this: go at once.

in these times on fred hampton.

2 Henry VI, IV.vii

everybody always cites, the first thing
we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.
but the scariest thing in cade’s rebellion
as presented in shakespeare for me is
“burn all the records of the realm.
my mouth shall be the parliament
of england.”.

because, like i keep tellin ya.
it’s a hardcopy holocaust out there
what with everything being turned into
bits and pulp and landfill.
libraries closing or turning into
data processing stations.
entire university departments…
life support systems for libraries…
being sent to retraining by
human resources zombies with
really good benefits packages.
shred your records at the earliest
opportunity was the law of the land
where *i* was last employed
and i don’t think it’s unusual.
cf whatever rant i posted a while
back about paper bank checks disappearing.

this is how “populist” dictators win.
democratic kampuchea probably the
textbook case of “purge the intellectuals”
but they all do it. it’s farenheit 451
all around us every day so dig it please
and hoard whatever books you think
anybody might want to get a look at later.