By tom | December 2, 2005
I can’t talk to people who are … disabled Sales guy at “Miss Sixty”, 3rd Street Promenade. How’s the lice? … [in raised voice] How’s the lice in your hair? Barnes & Noble customer to older, hard of hearing (?) friend. Is that what friends do? LA has been fun for now. 5 days into [...]
By tom | November 16, 2005
Bad things happen to bad people. I was reading Andre Schiffrin’s The Business of Books (subtitled: how the international conglomerates took over publishing and changed the way we read). And it came true. The itinerary for the forthcoming vacation to the West coast would have included a visit to “Midnight Special”, a specialist (read: leftist [...]
By tom | November 6, 2005
Interesting concept. Thousands, if not tens of thousands of books, unowned by any single natural individual and free for anyone to browse and absorb, guided by an idea that books are not primarily the vehicles of accumulation but of communal participation, what is now sometimes called a “knowledge base”. If we were able to envisage [...]
By tom | November 5, 2005
We angstsy moderns wear our and everyone else’s anxieties on our sleeves. Mine jolted me out of bed this morning with a venom worthy of a jilted lover: it is not that my books will never see the light of the published day, but that they will be the ones that you see on display [...]
By tom | October 30, 2005
Happily, I do not own nor do I intend to purchase or accept as a gift, the two monstrosities of modern publishing – The Potter franchise and that “Code” book. *shudder* While cataloging my library over at LibraryThing.com this lazy Sunday afternoon, I finally noticed how few bibliophiles are complicit in these two particularly distasteful [...]
By tom | October 27, 2005
Whim-purchased The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time at the airport this afternoon, anxious not to re-live the debacle of the last trip when, ill-supplied of conjoined words, I quickly found myself without adequate mental matter. I started it during the flight to Surabaya but could not proceed beyond page 16, wherein the [...]
By tom | October 24, 2005
Look, this isn’t as easy as you think. I have to trawl through Amazon’s amazing list of amazing lists to dredge this stuff up. This week’s award goes to Laura Schlessinger’s The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands. For redress, see Corpus Argumenti Lauretti. addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fwww.writing.adancingstar.com%2F2005%2Fdumb-book-of-the-week-iii%2F’; addthis_title = ‘Dumb+book+of+the+week+iii’; addthis_pub = ”;
By tom | October 20, 2005
Prefacing always seems a peculiar, fraught experience. Recall A. W. Price’s Mental Conflicts and how he frames his work with the aid of E. M. Cioran: A work is finished when we can no longer improve it, though we know it to be inadequate and incomplete. We are so overtaxed by it that we no [...]
By tom | October 12, 2005
This extended stay in the modern capital of Persia is lacking an appropriate, nay, deserving, reading companion. I wish my tattered copy of The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire is beside me (somehow, prejudices have rallied and ruled against the online substitute). It must only be this ragged copy, of course: survivor of [...]
By tom | October 10, 2005
One of the greatest blessings of the internet is the creation of alternative distribution channels for the dumbing down democratization of standards and commodification of taste. Witness allreaders.com. It offers “detailed book reviews from many different genres of books!” and the chance of untold riches upon submission of reviews, for which allreaders.com sets stringent criteria. [...]
