paperhaus December 4th, 2008
Being on twitter right now feels like passing notes in the class of life.
I’m sure someone else has already said that.
And it won’t stay that way for long. I mention Mad Men and hours later Betty Draper is following me. Betty? If I have to be followed by a television character, could we make it Don Draper, please?
paperhaus December 3rd, 2008
I don’t mean a public library. I mean a room in my house with shelves and books and a good reading light and a place to rest my bourbon.
Friends of mine have a library. I know it’s possible.
Laura Miller (who is the subject of this Jacket Copy post) wrote about culling her book collection in Sunday’s New York Times. She knows a couple who’ve gotten rid of most of their books; agent Ira Silverberg, who purges the books by the people he’s stopped talking to; and Jonathan Franzen, who once kept a strict read-to-unread ratio. Miller’s collection is more aspirational (may unread books, including a Dickens tome), but she tries to keep a one-book-in, one-book-out policy.
But the real issue isn’t how many books you have. It’s about how much space you have, factored against how often you have to pick up all your books and move them.
If I had a big rambling house like my grandmother did, I’d never get rid of any books. OK, some of the books that end up in my possession are throw-awayable, like one Tod Goldberg had to let go, but I would not be forced to triage books I actually want. I do not, like my grandmother, live in a big rambling house with a library — it also had a paleolithic-era TV that I think had ceased to function — I live in a small LA apartment that I will probably leave when my lease is up.
In my current space, my library is everywhere — narrow halls, living room, bedroom. I keep the unread books on a short bookshelf that actually needs to be taller. No matter how hard I try, stacks of books, usually in mid-read, form on horizontal surfaces like stalagmites.
In Pittsburgh I had a ridiculous amount of space, three stories of a skinny row house (plus basement), and I used the attic as a library. But the attic wasn’t insulated, so most of the year I only made forays up there, teeth chattering, to retrieve books as needed. I picked up bookshelves for other rooms and the library expanded. I had a newly-received branch (shelf) inside the front door; a grad-school project branch in the dining room.
Probably, no matter where I end up next — hauling boxes and boxes and many many many more boxes of books — they’ll still live everywhere. Library or not.
But I still want a library.
paperhaus December 2nd, 2008
I wrote a short blurb on the new book Posters for the People: Art of the WPA that ran in Sunday’s LA Times. The piece appeared with several illustrations; the online gallery included 13 posters - in color, even.
Everything looks so cool it makes me want to go back to then, when we were living in a depression.
No, wait, scratch that.
OK, to go back to a time when we were living in a depression and the government had these really cool workfare programs for artists and writers. Or, you know, forward to a time like that.
paperhaus November 21st, 2008
With all of California facing a budget crunch, the city of LA is facing difficult cutbacks. The first round of funding cuts has been proposed — recommended by the city’s top budget official — and will be considered by the LA City Council on Monday. On the chopping block:
* $1.45 million from the $79-million library budget
* $800,000 from the city’s tree-trimming program
* $1 million from the crossing guards program
* $650,000 from the program to install more left-turn arrow signals at city intersections.
* A freeze on new hires at the City Attorney’s Office and City Controller’s Office, with limited exceptions
* $1.92 million from the Los Angeles Police Department program to replace older squad cars
Now I’m not a city budgeteer but I can see that the targets of many of these proposed cuts are things that are considered nonessential. And it kills me that in a big, difficult city like Los Angeles, where one in five children live in poverty, that anyone thinks that public libraries are nonessential.
Just yesterday I blogged at Jacket Copy about Andrew Carnegie and his libraries. Yes, Carnegie was a bad bad capitalist. But when he turned to philanthropy, libraries were one of his top priorities. Without his work, the US wouldn’t have a tradition of free libraries. And Carnegie cared about libraries because he saw them as one of the real ways that individuals could control their own destinies.
The new Malcolm Gladwell book, Outliers, seems to imply that individuals can’t. Fuck that. People are left out of the big fat clichéd-but-I-still-love-it American dream if we leave them out. If we cut off their resources — like free libraries.
I urge the City Council to not make any cuts at all to our library budgets. Period.
But if they must, here’s an idea: Make cuts to those in the wealthiest communities first.
Someone who lives in Beverly-Hills-adjacent Brentwood is better able to drive their car for library services than the bus-bound parents of kids in, say, El Sereno. People who live in Silverlake — where the median home price is still almost $600,000, more than $400 per square foot — can afford to buy the books they want. Leave the free libraries for the households earning the county’s average income of $36,687.
This would probably be politically stupid — affluent and engaged constituents might well protest losing library hours, library projects, library staff. But that just shows they want their libraries.
Libraries are important. And they should be available to the members of our community who have the fewest resources, the hardest fight, the farthest way to go.
paperhaus November 19th, 2008
Sunday night brought another night of Vermin — the Vermin on the Mount reading series at Chinatown’s Mountain Bar. Poet Dan Kaplan, political chronicler Josh Bearman, and novelist Janet Fitch read. Guess who’s in the picture? Yeah, Janet Fitch, not so hard.
Fitch read from her new novel “Paint it Black”; she is also the author of “White Oleander,” which was an Oprah pick and a movie, too.
OK, this is not much of a report. The Mountain Bar was beautiful, as always. Host Jim Ruland was the most as always, the audience was appreciative as always, the company of Mark Sarvas and David Francis was more charming than I deserved.
I did not take notes. The photo will have to do.
Janet Fitch, author of “White Oleander,” reads from her
paperhaus November 18th, 2008
Jerry Yang is out as CEO of Yahoo. In his goodbye e-mail to all of Yahoo, he proves the concerns about the literacy of the dot-com generation are valid. “i” he types, over and over again:
i will be participating in the search for my successor, and i will continue as ceo until the board selects a new ceo. once a successor is named, i will return to my previous role as chief yahoo and continue to serve as a director on the board.
Ow, the lack of caps hurts. This is not an adolescent typing on a cell phone but the head of a multimillion dollar tech company perfectly capable of spouting CEO speak. Later in the memo:
i strongly believe that having transformed our platform and better aligned costs and revenues, we have a unique window for the right ceo to take ownership over the next wave of mission-critical decisions facing the company.
Unfortunately, he’s a lot less capabale of using the shift key. May he find a place where his crazy capz-free-stylz are appreciated.
I always appreciated the style of Rocky Gardiner, the person who wrote the LA Weekly horoscopes. They were lighthearted, popculture-y and short, about as good as you can get for horoscopes. Before today I knew nothing about Gardiner — couldn’t have told you her gender, even — but I am sorry to learn that she died on Halloween at age 70. May she find a welcoming and witty place in the firmament.
paperhaus November 12th, 2008
LA-based poet Douglas Kearney does some pretty cool work. And he just got a Whiting Award, which, at $50,000, is also pretty cool. OK, those are both understatements. I write far more articulately about him in this feature in today’s LA Times.
paperhaus November 10th, 2008
A review of The Drowned Life by Jeffrey Ford in the 11/9 paper. Here’s how it starts.
The collection “The Drowned Life” raises a banner to salute the power of the imagination. Jeffrey Ford doesn’t just invent one world with its own rules, creatures and imagery — he creates dozens in 16 dreamlike stories, which move between science fiction, fantasy and (mostly) normal backyards.
paperhaus November 7th, 2008
Mainstream media is catching on to the power of blogging in many ways, but one thing they haven’t embraced is prolific profanity. At the LA Times book blog Jacket Copy, I don’t write FUCK or SHIT or any variants thereof.
Which is perhaps why I am inordinately tickled by cursebird. It’s a site that captures all the profanity-laced tweets from twitter and spools them out as fast as they happen. Some tweets are simple, yet obscure — “this shit is taking entirely too long” says what it means, but leaves you wondering exactly what shit — could it be a line at a store, a bus home, a breakup? So many possibilities. Others are far more specific: “thank fucking gawd. sarah palin didn’t know that africa was a continent or who was in the nafta agreement http://tr.im/w9r jesus.”
There is appreciative — “Listening to ‘Death Letter’ from Son House’s Original Delta Blues. Un-bloody-believably utterly bastard brilliant.” There is oversharing: “Can I ever have a phone call w/Brad where I a) don’t have to explain the fucking obvious b) aren’t accused of being a bitch c) don’t cry.” (Does Brad follow her, you think?)
I like these tweets that imply a bigger story. “Spent the afternoon buying shitty old bikes from a city warehouse, to be welded to a giant pineapple.” Was the curseword necessary? Probably not. Do I want to know more about the giant pineapple and its welded broken bikes? I kinda do.
But then there’s this (about manga): “I fucking hate Hidan for killing Asuma but I can’t help but like how foul-mouthed he is.” It’s a loop of profanity — the cursing fan, the foul-mouthed character, the cursebird watching it all.
carolyn kellogg
and Pinky’s Paperhaus.
There are 734 Posts and 772 Comments so far.