"Cheap Priceless Editions"

Recent Reading in Books Acquired Lately

2007-02-25T14:23:00.000-05:00

Recent Reading in Books Acquired Lately

A few inter-related centres of gravity for my interests in understanding the past have emerged from what I've been reading recently. One of these centres relates to the period around 1890 to 1910; geographically the Klondike and Pacific Northwest is what I've kept 'running across' in several of the books I've just now acquired, while the other reading I've gotten into centres around Montreal.

The poet Milton Acorn fits in here somehow, but the collection of poems I've got of his is not from the Montrteal period but rather about Prince Edward Island. (There are essays specifically about PEI history as well as poems, many I am certain were written by Acorn as a young man on the island.)

Since I have got many notions about how all these writings, writers and their subjects seem to work together into something coherent, I will just post short items about them and my thoughts from time to time, without trying to wrap anything up into one neat package. (That's a benefit at least I, if not you the reader, have license to enjoy.

Although I've sold nearly everything of Jack London's I once owned, I still have Irving Stone's bio of him written in 1935. Yesterday I picked up Laura Beatrice Berton's autobiographic "I Married the Klondike". For photos mostly I've been looking through the folio format "The Streets were Paved in Gold" by Stan Cohen. Many other books and collections, including Robert Service's poems, have also influenced my thinking about the two or three poles of attraction I am thinking of here.

Two interesting points: in Dawson a Carnegie Library was built with a $25,000 donation from that foundation in the same year that Laura (née Thompson) Berton arrived to teach kindergarten - on a salary that was more than 5 times what she'd been earning in Toronto. She and the new library arrived just after the gold seams in the Klondike had run out: at least the placer deposits one or two men could get out by digging.

Nearly all the American prospectors had returned home (many a bit richer) or moved on to another Eldorado just as Dawson was being 'institutionalized' with permanent emplacements for the bank, the Mounties, the established churches and this Carnegie Library . . as well as the school where L. Berton was to teach.

I won't even attempt to tell the stories of the Klondike and these people in a post, I've barely digested the stories myself and could spend a year going over what I have here.

The Berton who Laura Thompson married was a miner-prospector, one of the Canadians who stayed on. For 20 years in the Yukon, he as a working journalist, she as a teacher and amateur novelist, they dug in in a rigorously more domestic manner than the first prospectors had accomplished. In the Yukon, the couple raised the famous-to-Canadians man-of-letters Pierre Berton. The Berton seniors settled in Oakville, Ontario in 1932.

Jack London, like Berton senior, was on the early trek up over Chilkoot Pass and up to mining territory by river raft with the first wave. They both braved the worst conditions and yet also lived the early high-times of a boom town that had struck it rich.

Robert Service arrived later. (I see that he figures in the I Married the Klondike narrative, and I cannot wait to dig into read more about how Service succeeded early as a writer-poet and started earning more from publication than the bank manager for whom he worked.)

London had a harder time of it to get good pay for what started out as 'partial publication' of the Klondike stories, even though he had already been well received in print for stories about roughing it -- both at sea and on the western plains all the way to Chicago.

(to be continued)

My Own Info-Cultural Overload

2007-02-24T09:05:00.000-05:00

John Murray Gibbon wrote and published in 1935 a history entitled "Steel of Empire" which is subtitled "A Romantic History of the Canadian Pacific, the Northwest Passage of Today". The maps and illustrations are magnificent, including the one of Canadian water and rail routes on the inside covers. No, I did not Google J. M. Gibbon or search for the book on ABE or anything -- I left that task to my friend at the bookstore, who finally sold me this 423 page tome for CAN $10 instead of the $28.95 my other friend, the bookstore owner, had marked lightly on the fly-leaf page.

Yes, I probably will also purchase and read Pierre Berton's "The Last Rail" plus a few other histories of Canadian railroads and railroading.

The really interesting of part of this visit to the neighbourhood bookstore yesterday, however, revolved less around the titles I scanned on the shelves but the conversation(s) three of us had about 'transportation' into Montreal. Turns out that the woman (I forget her name, dammit!), the one who always comes in on Fridays to buy three pop-lit titles, arrived in Montreal by rail from Halifax in 1950 -- at age 3 after a sojourn in a DP (displaced persons) camp in Eastern Europe from birth to her departure to Canada. Her family was from Lithuania and did I ever get an earful about the situation of Lithuanian immigrant to Canada following the last world war (the present 'world war', actually . . the war that never really ended . . in my humble opinion).

You would be privileged to have heard, or to have me recount here, her personal history (which is not at all a private history). But in the 45 minutes or so that we spoke, the topics ranged so widely that it would take a volume greater than Gibbons's to relate the details and enough background for anyone outside my neighbourhood to understand the facts properly. This just shows the complicated state and entertwined themes of personal, local, social, ethnic, religious, world and linguistic histories. And this is no exaggeration.

(The rapport we three experienced and our mutual interest in exchanging stories is typical of the many high-points in interaction with customers that one sees in the typical used-bookstore on a typical day, by the way. Something I find nobody has time for in the retail trade for new books.)

Such conversations, of course, stimulate my interest in finding out more, meeting other Lithuanians and having more conversations with people I've met over the years who were also DPs before arriving in Canada. In terms of piquing my interest in reading, well one doesn't even know where to begin. But is my reaction typical? Aren't most people simply overloaded with all the details and complications of life as we've lived it over the past half-century or so?

Communities of people in my immediate vicinity seem to be so fractured along linguistic, familial and political divides that the last thing that comes to my mind is that they have a common culture, a common literature. The most common literature I can think of would be a book like 'Microsoft XP for Dummies' or some guide for shopping, dining out in or simply visiting in 'City X'; tour guides to the amusement park, in other words.

Sadly, as well, it seems so typical that the notions about 'sharing stories' are mostly being mouthed by narrators who are thinking more in terms of undergrad or graduate courses in lit and creative writing than by the real DPs in our midst. Or, one day I meet an interesting Cuban and learn immediately that her family 'fled Castro' and the next day the Cuban I meet is in a cultural delegation loyal to Castro! It's the same thing with the Chinese, although none of them are formally sponsored by the present regime. The Chinese storekeeper plays the capitalist entrepreneur card AND the card-carrying Maoist card simultaneously! And where does all this leave the 2nd-gen Eastern European who fled both the communists and the fascists and whose parents got jobs with Northern Electric and whose pension and estate melted when Nortel went into free-fall? But, typically, where does this leave the person who doesn't care a damn about politics but who wishes that their parents had immigrated to Los Angeles instead of to Québec. Where do you even start?

It is no wonder that the No. 1 Target being attacked by the performance poets I've heard and seen lately has been the boob tube and/or the instant stardom 'for everybody' epitomized by " Star Academy" shows. But where would we be if the show were called 'Estonian for a Night'?

Conclusion? I guess I'm suffering from information overload just based on one 45-minute conversation in a bookstore yesterday. I think I too will turn on the boob tube and tune out for a little break or pick up an escapist novel I see on the shelf. I don't think I could handle a romantic-historical narrative about how all history revolves around circumnavigating the earth in a timeless search for oriental spices.

Photo Images, Imagination, and Hard-Pan Montreal and Urban Reality in Hindsight

2007-02-23T04:32:00.000-05:00

There is an interesting comment thread that ran yesterday on 'neath's' blog Walking Turcot Yards. It's happening under some photo images of Montreal's Sohmer Park from around 1910 and for Blogaulaire the discussion has opened up many issues (and a few books) about the history of industrialization in Canada, Québec and the world.

What's so important about Sohmer Park? Check out the post HERE first and see what it looks like in the images.

First, the park started as a private investment sort of like some amusement parks in the twentieth century - but not the kind many of us are familiar with. (I remember the Palisades Park in Council Bluffs, across the Missouri River from Omaha, Nebraska, with the big roller coaster ride, for example).

Sohmer Park gets two types of photo treatments as far as we can find: one treatment makes it look like a Manet painting, almost like a bourgeois urban paradise. The other photo treatment makes Sohmer Park look like some sort of after-birth, some sort of spectacle and fight arena as a sop to the working class out behind the rail yards out beyond the 'Chateau' Viger . . the Viger Hotel and Railway Station.

Perverse as it may seem, I am most interested in the latter view: Sohmer as a low-rent version of Madison Square Gardens for the Francophone workers. But they did hold, over the last quarter of the 19th century, higher brow concerts and orchestral performances with a resident conductor in the concert hall there. So there was a complex reality reflected.

It all has to do with how workers looked at culture and how the real bourgeoisie looked upon the workers. And, especially for Montreal, these realities are far from simple and most difficult to work out conceptually from the perspective of the 21st century.

What is traditionally projected back into time is a notion that the English lived on the west side of town and the French on the east side. Add to East versus West view the notion that the Irish lived south of the Lachine Canal, down around the Victoria Bridge (both of which the Irish came to build - not far from where thousands of them had died of 'ship fever' in the fever sheds) and you start to paint the social history of Montreal the way it has come down through the mists of time.

What such a view of social and industrial history is likely to miss is the rural penetration of piece-work at manufacturing textiles, a trade run by French Canadian entrepreneurs . . and with the total collaboration of the church hierarchy. It is a phenomenon that antedates heavy industry in Lower Canada.

When you scan photos of Montreal taken in the late 19th century or early 20th, it becomes easy to lose all distinction between light and heavy industry and to completely forget about domestic piece-work. The shoe and clothing manufactures were immense industrial operations that spread out from Old Montreal to the east and the machines were run on steam power - burning first coal and then oil. So if you look east, you see smokestack after smokestack and are likely fooled into seeing the east side as the heart of Montreal's manufacturing activities. But it doesn't matter which direction you face: from Old Montreal, look in any direction at this time and the whole thing (as a panorama) looks industrial.

You are 'looking over the heads' of the more traditional bourgeoisie of "La Cité' with any photographic panorama. The well-off districts, the homes of the notaries, the clerical establishment, even of the financiers are still concentrated near the centre of trading activity - clustered around Old Montreal and around the mountain. The manufacturing is also nearby. Textiles, though, are moving east to Hochelaga and then north to the plateau while the metallurgical industry is moving from St. Anne's parish out west along the Canal Lachine over time and with development of the railroads. But because these industries all rely on heavy generation of power in the plant (not from hydro-electric power) they are 'soiling the nest' so to speak of Montreal's urban black-frocked elite.

Photographers and those of us who keep gazing at the documentary records in the image archives may collectively think that we are staying close to the 'best' original sources. But the silver and albumin images lend themselves as easily as do any contemporary novels and belles lettres to a misreading and anachronistic projections of 21st century prejudice backward in time.

There may have been a time in the 19th century when doing piece-work or taking a job in concentrated leather manufacture was considered more dignified than working in heavy metallurgical industry. If anything, it is the trade union struggles that drove wages up in industrial manufacturing and the failure of same in textiles that drove wages down in that sector (today considered tertiary). The same could be said of mining: prospecting for gold is different from digging coal.

Sohmer Park evolved as a venue for concerts into a venue for wrestling and exhibits of brute strength by strongman Louis Cyr. The Chateau Viger moved from a luxury hotel to a bland complex of white-collar offices serving as stenographer to the beer business and the paper-pushers at City Hall and the Palais de Justice. Trying to 'understand' Sohmer Park in 1910 is NOT the same thing as trying to situate the original intent of building a concert hall east of Old Montreal in 1871, and for many reasons including the Great Fire of that year in Montreal (not to mention in Chicago).

Social and economic realities in Montreal are complex. There are elites competing for power over Lower Canada and the Maritimes whose wealth depends either on the Dominion or on more native wealth. There are those whose status depends either on Rome or on Chicago and New York. Some 'capitalists' depend on trade with the interior; others depend on trade with the Mother Country. And there are those in-between. And then there are the ex-slaves be they Black or Irish or what Pierre Vallières termed the 'white niggars of America'. Very complex, indeed!

Note: We need to keep in mind the 'vestimentary' history, i.e., what people wore in the various epochs of modern times. In fact, Charlie Chaplin playing a bum in a bowler hat in the silent film Modern Times should always be kept in mind when reading photographs. I decided to not run photos with this post, but what I could run from the Gold Rush in the Klondike would blow your mind . . . the dresses that the women in Skagway and Dawson 'packed in on their backs' in 1897 . . .

You cannot even begin to read a 19th century photograph until you understand what workers and miners thought about how 'clothes make the man'. And I most certainly include women in this remark.

And you cannot understand a thing about Québec history from photographs unless you conceptualize the competition between manufacture being legitimate IF it is in the hands of the French Catholic merchant-manufacturer versus the "illegitimate" English-Protestant focus upon producing wealth inside a Colony. This distinction, by the way, goes all the way back to the fur trade. But we tend to forget it when looking at smokestacks on the Montreal horizon as we scan photographs taken in the period 1880 - 1910. To be explicit: I am saying that a smokestack is not a smokestack; that in the popular mind it matters very much whether the smokestack bears the name Royal Electric Co.' or 'Hudon Cotton Mill.' And that in this period, more and more of the names on the plants, of light or heavy industry, become Scots, English or colonial. If Sohmer Park evolves from a watering hole for the Francophone bourgeoisie to become an amusement park for the Francophone working class, the change in status reflects more fundamental changes in the division of labour and wealth in Lower Canada generally.

Everyone knows, however, that in the rest of Canada power and population flows North-South, not straight back to the Mother Country. (After all, the railroad was not built East-West overnight. All the 'images' in the West are a reflection of the demographic centre-of-gravity south of Canada's borders.

The entertainers - even out in the backwoods of western Canada - could have come straight from New York's Broadway! And it becomes oh so vulgar compared to what Queen Victoria would have wished for her dominion!

It is like the old joke we used to play when the tour guides at St. Gabriel Farm were all nuns: 'So les filles du roi were sent over from France so that the 'colons' (the King's New France settlers) could have wives and propagate in the colony? And you say these 'filles du roi' were from the 'best families' of France? Well, what about all those abandoned children, the offspring of prostitutes on the streets of Paris and Orléans? What did the King propose to do about them?. Those were some interesting, ironic, conversations with the nuns concerning the 17th century. Back then, the Church did have the aspiration of molding the colony. But in the late 19th century, two hundred years later? Who, then, had aspirations of molding the colony? Was it another King, another Queen, or was it the Church or was it the captains of industry? Or were they all competing over the seat of power? Who?

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 23 Febuary

2007-02-23T04:26:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"There is plenty of gold around but how many white haired friends?"

. . (215) Chinese

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The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 22 Febuary

2007-02-22T20:14:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"A man does not know what poverty is until the bottom of his cooking pot burns through."

. . (207) Chinese

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Anderseed's Oilpatch Expressions Defined for the Layman (5)

2007-02-22T06:43:00.000-05:00

“We are crafting this whole process with our arms open, even for Exxon,” Ms. Palin said. “Come on in and let us know what you have in terms of a proposal to commercialize Alaska’s natural gas.”

Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska

----------------

Robert W. Service

The Spell of the Yukon

I wanted the gold, and I sought it;
I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.
Was it famine or scurvy - I fought it;
I hurled my youth into a grave.
I wanted the gold, and I got it --
Came out with a fortune last fall --
Yet somehow life's not what I thought it,
And somehow the gold isn't all.

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(Previous posts: 1) annunciator, Australian offset, bait box, bastard, bean, behind the pipe, big-inch pipeline, bird cage, and bird dog; 2) spudding bit, bituminous sand, black oil, black oils market, block tree, bobtail, bobtail plant, bogies, boll weevil, boomer, BOPD; 3) brass pounder, bristle pig, bronc, caliche, company camp, carbon black, carbon plant; 4) chatter, cheater, cheese box, churn drilling, circle jack, city gate, collar pounder or 'pecker', come-along, condemnation, core boat, crooked-hole country, crowbar connection )
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CRUMB BOSS
A person responsable for cleaning and keeping an oilfield bunkhouse supplied with towels, bed linen, and soap; a construction camp housekeeper.

DEAD OIL
Crude oil containing no dissolved gas when it is produced.

DEAD WELL
A well that will not flow and in order to produce must be put on the pump.

DEEP GAS
Gas produced from 15,000 feet or below, which commands an incentive price because of the high cost of drilling three miles deep into high-pressure formations. Such wells cost in the high-rent neighborhood of 4 to 8 million dollars, depending on the difficulties encountered.

DENSMORE, AMOS
The man who first devised a method for shipping crude oil by rail. In 1865 he mounted two iron-banded wooden tanks on a railway flatcar. (shortened)

DESK and DERRICK CLUBS
Organizations of women employed in the oil industry. Such clubs now exist in about a dozen major oil centers. The purpose of the organizations is partly educational and partly social. (added - not in Langenkamp)

DETROIT IRON
A humorous reference to a large, old car or truck.

DIRTY CARGO
Bunker fuel and other black residual oils.

DOCTOR SWEET
A term used to describe certain petroleum products that have been treated to remove sulfur compounds and mercaptans that are the sources of unpleasant odors. A product that has been so treated is said to be "sweet to the doctor test."

DOGHOUSE
A portable one-room shelter . . . serves as a lunchroom, change house, dormitory and a room for keeping small supplies and records.

DOG IT
To do less than one's share of work; to hang back; to drag one's feet.

DOG ROBBER
A loyal aid or underling who does disagreeable or slightly unorthodox (shady) jobs for his boss; a master of the "midnight requisition."

DOODLEBUG
A witching device; a twig or branch of a small tree (peach is favored by some witchers) that, when held by an "expert" practitioner as he walks over a plot of land, is supposed to bend down, locating a favorable place to drill a well; a popular term for any of the various geophysical prospecting equipment.

DRAG UP
To draw the wages one has coming and quit the job; an expression used in the oil fields by pipeline construction workers and temporary or day laborers.

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from R. D. Langenkamp. Handbook of Oil Industry Terms & Phrases. 4th Ed. Tulsa: PennWell Publ, 1984, 347 p

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 21 Febuary

2007-02-21T10:51:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

. . (207) Chinese

"Fools long for chaos; poor men hope for a riot."

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Anderseed's Oilpatch Expressions Defined for the Layman (4)

2007-02-21T07:54:00.000-05:00

from R. D. Langenkamp. Handbook of Oil Industry Terms & Phrases. 4th Ed. Tulsa: PennWell Publ, 1984, 347 p **

Ida Tarbell. "History of the Standard Oil Company," from McClure's Magazine, 1902 - 1904.

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"The price of oil has nearly tripled since President George W. Bush took office in 2001, yet the majority of the people who live in the countries from which the fuel flows still experience grinding poverty. "

Oil Trip: Nigeria, Chad, Liberia

By EMIRA WOODS

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(Previous posts: 1) annunciator, Australian offset, bait box, bastard, bean, behind the pipe, big-inch pipeline, bird cage, and bird dog, 2) spudding bit, bituminous sand, black oil, black oils market, block tree, bobtail, bobtail plant, bogies, boll weevil, boomer, BOPD, 3) brass pounder, bristle pig, bronc, caliche, company camp, carbon black, carbon plant)

CHATTER
A noisy indication that a mechanical part is behaving erratically and destructively.

CHEATER
A length of pipe used to increase the leverage of a wrench, anything used to lengthen a handle to increase the applied leverage.

CHEESE BOX
An early-day, square, box-like refining vessel; a still to heat crude oil for distilling the products in those days--kerosene, gas oil, and lubricating oil.

CHURN DRILLING
Another name for cable-tool drilling because of the up-and-down, churning motion of the drill bit.

CIRCLE JACK
A device used on the floor of a cable-tool rig to 'make up' and 'break out' (tighten and loosen) joints of drilling tools. (shortened)

CITY GATE
The measuring point at which a gas distributing utility receives gas from a gas transmission company.

COLLAR POUNDER OR 'PECKER'
A pipeline worker who beats time with a hammer on the coupling into which a joint of pipe is being screwed by a tong gang. The purpose is twofold: to keep the tong men pulling in unison and to warm up the collar so that a tighter screw joint can be made.

COME-ALONG
A lever and short lengths of chain with hooks attached to the ends of the chains used for tightening or pulling a chain. (shortened)

CONDEMNATION
The taking of land by purchase, at fair market value, for public use and benefit by state or federal government as well as by certain other agencies and utility companies having power of eminent domain.

CORE BOAT
A seagoing vessel for drilling core holes in offshore areas.

CROOKED-HOLE COUNTRY
Said of an area or field in which there has been a high incidence of crooked holes drilled, boreholes that have deviated alarmingly from the vertical . . . See Pendulum Drill Assembly; also Fanning the Bottom.

CROWBAR CONNECTION
A humorous reference to an assemblage of pipe fittings so far out of alignment that a crowbar is required to force them to fit.

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 20 Febuary

2007-02-20T11:03:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"Of the ten reasons which lead a judge to his decision, nine are not disclosed."

. . (204) Chinese

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Anderseed's Oilpatch Expressions Defined for the Layman (3)

2007-02-20T09:57:00.000-05:00

from R. D. Langenkamp. Handbook of Oil Industry Terms & Phrases. 4th Ed. Tulsa: PennWell Publ, 1984, 347 p **

Yukon Archives

Mayo (Yukon 1933) unloading a barge of oil.
Photographer: Claude Tidd
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"Whimsical looks at words used in an industry which leaves many of us unamused and whose track record few words can even begin to express."

(Previous posts: annunciator, Australian offset, bait box, bastard, bean, behind the pipe, big-inch pipeline, bird cage, and bird dog, spudding bit, bituminous sand, black oil, black oils market, block tree, bobtail, bobtail plant, bogies, boll weevil, boomer, BOPD)

BRASS POUNDER
A telegrapher, especially one who uses a telegraph key. Until the 1940s or so, much of the communication from oil patch to division and head offices was by telegraph.

BRISTLE PIG
A type of pipeline pig or scraper made of tough plastic covered with flame-hardened steel bristles. Bristle or foam pigs are easy to run, do not get hung up in the line, and are easy to "catch." They are usually run in newly constructed lines to remove ruse and mill scale.

BRONC
A new driller promoted from helper; a new toolpusher up from driller; any newly promoted oilfield worker whose performance is still untried.

CALICHE
A term used in the Southwest, New Mexico, and Arizona, particularly for a brownish, buff, or white calcareous material. (shortened)

CAMP, COMPANY
A small community of oilfield workers; a settlement of oil-company employees living on a lease in company housing. In the early days, oil companies furnished housing, lights, gas, and water free or at a nominal charge. ... Camps were known by company lease or simply the lease name, e.g., Gulf Wolf Camp, Carter Camp, and Tom Butler.

CARBON BLACK
A fine, bulky carbon obtained as soot by burning natural gas in large horizontal "ovens" with insufficient air.

CARBON PLANT
Carbon plants are located close to a source of gas and in more-or-less isolated sections of the country because of the heavy emission of smoke.

Atlantic #3 Oil Rig Blow-Out - 1948

2007-02-19T21:38:00.000-05:00

Learn the story of the worst blowout in Leduc County, Alberta, Canada.

It all happened in 1948 when Atlantic drilling rig #3 lost circulation and the well blew wild for 7 months.

All attempts to control the gusher failed.

The Alberta conservation Board took over the well and hired Imperial Oil Ltd. to control the blowout. Imperial assigned Vincent John "Tip" Moroney to the project and contracted two steam operated rigs to drill south and west directional relief wells.
The lost circulation and high flow rates caused the ground under the surface casing to rupture, and on September 6, 1948 the Atlantic No. 3 rig collapsed into a crater.

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 19 Febuary

2007-02-19T21:08:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"The laws of religion bind us like silk threads; the laws of government are as heavy as a golden yoke; but the laws of national tradition are as inflexible as an iron pillar."

. . (197) Tibetan

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

Anderseed's Oilpatch Expressions Defined for the Layperson (2)

2007-02-19T07:09:00.000-05:00

from R. D. Langenkamp. Handbook of Oil Industry Terms & Phrases. 4th Ed. Tulsa: PennWell Publ, 1984, 347 p **

"Whimsical looks at words used in an industry which leaves many of us unamused and whose track record few words can even begin to express."

A B.C. oil drilling rig built and abandoned in 1914. Credit: Gerald Kornelsen - Roadside Attractions

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

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(Previous posts: annunciator, Australian offset, bait box, bastard, bean, behind the pipe, big-inch pipeline, bird cage, and bird dog.)

BIT, SPUDDING
A large-diameter drill bit used to make the initial hole (the top hole) when putting down a well. A spudding bit may be from 15 to 36 inches in diamaeter . . . The conductor casing fits into the hole made by the spudding bit.

BITUMINOUS SAND
Tar sand, a mixture of asphalt and loose sand that, when processed, may yield as much as 12 percent asphalt.

BLACK OIL
(1) A term denoting residual oil; oil used in ships' boilers or in large heating or generating plants; bunker oil. (2) Black-colored oil used for lubricating heavy, slow-moving machinery where the use of higher-grade lubes would be impractical. (3) Asphalt-base crudes.

BLACK OILS MARKET
See Resid Market (in a later post)

BOBTAIL
A short-bodied truck.

BOBTAIL PLANT
A gas plant that extracts liquid hydrocarbons from natural gas but does not break down the liquid product into its separate components.

BOGIES
Colloquial term for small transport dollies. A low, sturdy frame or small platform with multiple wheels (4 to 8) for moving heavy objects short distances.

BLOCK TREE
A type of well-completion Christmas tree (upcoming post) in which a number of control and production valves are made as a unit in one block of steel. (shortened)

BOLL WEEVIL
An inexperienced worker or "green hand" on a drilling crew.

BOOMER
(1) A link-and-lever mechanisms used to tighten a chain or cable holding a load of pipe or other material. (2) A worker who moves from one job to another. See pipeline Cat (upcoming post)

BOPD
Barrels of oil per day: bo/d

Breaking the Grip of Mid-Winter Freeze-In and the Block of Ice around Bookstore Sales

2007-02-18T18:16:00.000-05:00

As in the Midwest and Atlantic Canada , as well as in Northern and Central New England, here in Montreal and the rest of Québec, generally, the last two weeks have been a virtual freeze-in (or snow-down if that suits your vocabulary) for bookstore owners and book buyers.

Yes, 'speaking for' my two closest bookstore friends, the crop of shoppers dropping in has been sparsely sewn on snow-packed ground regarding all but the mail carrier and closest friends. Yet, for at least two shopping afternoons, the sun did break through, for enough time to avoid a total disaster.

At present, as a sometime supplier, I do not have very many books placed on consignment in either of my friends' shops. In the locale with the most traffic (call it Jenny's), Jenny won't take on my McSweeney's titles, saying that McSweeney box sets are too sophisticated for the indigenous clientele (GRXNBX !! ?? I muttered to myself) and despite the FACT that everything she does take on consignment from me sells quite well. And Jenny gets 50% of the asking price.

Where there is less traffic, at Marilyn's, a few books that have my name tucked inside on a card have been sold and I've been rewarded at 100%. (I'd virtually written then off.) So things keep selling at 14 C below.

Two conclusions: 1) the deep of winter is not completely a 'death zone' in our neighbbourhood, where Montrealers are hardy folks who still get out in all sorts of weather, and 2) I must urgently come to a workable agreement with these bookstore owners in terms of what they will take on consignment and how we divy up the monetary returns.

There have been a couple books (entire genres perhaps) that all three of us have felt in our bones will sell fast: the nicely illustrated, clean copies of books featuring Marilyn Monroe on the cover plus and things like the Princeton Edition of the I-Ching. Search me why: we just knew they would sell.

What everybody is hoping for is that SUDDENLY the public's interest will suddenly turn toward exactly our own personal focus for some theme we each focus on in collecting old books.

Or that instead of having (as at present) only one single customer interested in, say, the Harlem Renaissance, or old poetry anthologies from circa 1925, OR EVEN anything about military insignia and regalia, OR instead of that one customer who wants and needs a book about Taoist approaches to male sexuality, . . that there be, INSTANTLY, four or five MORE customers ready and willing to buy up everything along the SAME LINE that comes into the store.

My friends and I need some sort of HANDLE of what people want in triplicate, not in dribbles and drabs.

The real question is precisely this: why, with thousands or tens of thousands of books on the shelf, must one be reduced to making money on the last and latest purchase of some handful of titles that fell out of the sky only yesterday?

All I can say to such questions is this: 'Where there is a will and a wish, there is a way.'

I would wish for a new boom of interest in African fiction authored by Africans . Or that Québec poets from the 1960s and '70s period become numero uno as a HOT ITEM. Fat chance, I know.

What I am thinking about investigating and collecting (no matter who else gives a shit) are VHS videos where there is some hero-star macho type whose job it is in the flic to put out well-head fires on oil rigs. Somehow I am convinced that there are more than one film title in this oh so specific genre. I want every one of them.

So much for my Report from the North this Sunday eve. Now YOU, for YOU my advice is to "Think layers." "Think cotton under wool under Gortex (TM) under down." Keep warm.

This is definitely not motorcycle weather: Forget the leather except for lined gloves . . And Keep Warm.

Anderseed's Oilpatch Expressions Defined for the Layperson *

2007-02-18T10:54:00.000-05:00

from R. D. Langenkamp. Handbook of Oil Industry Terms & Phrases. 4th Ed. Tulsa: PennWell Publ, 1984, 347 p **

"Whimsical looks at words used in an industry which leaves many of us unamused and whose track record few words can even begin to express."

A B.C. oil drilling rig built and abandoned in 1914. Credit: Gerald Kornelsen - Roadside Attractions

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

---------------------

---------------------

ANNUNCIATOR
An electronically controlled device that signals or sounds an alarm when conditions deviate from normal. (shortened)

AUSTRALIAN OFFSET
A humorous reference to a well drilled miles away from proven production.

BAIT BOX
A pipeliner's lunch pail.

BASTARD
(1) Any nonstandard piece of equipment. (2) A kind of file. (3) A word used in grudging admiration or as a term of approbrium.

BEAN
A choke used to regulate the flow of fluid from a well. See Flow Bean.

BEHIND THE PIPE
Refers to oil and gas reservoirs penetrated or passed through by wells but never tapped or produced. Behind the pipe refers usually to tight formations of low permeability that, although recognized, were passed through because they were uneconomical to produce at the time. Today (1984), however, with the growing scarcity of oil and high prices, many of these passed-through formations are getting a second look by producers.

BIG-INCH PIPELINE
A 24-inch pipeline from Longview, Texas, to Norris City, Illinois, built during World War II to meet the problem caused by tanker losses at sea as a result of submarine attacks. Later during the war the pipeline was extended to Pennsylvania. Following the war the line was sold to a private company and converted to a gas line.

BIRD CAGE
(1) To flatten and spread the strands of a cable or wire rope. (2) The slatted or mesh-enclosed cage used to hoist workmen from crew boats to offshore platforms.

BIRD DOG
To pay close attention to a job or to follow a person closely with the intention to learn or to help; to follow up on a job until it is finished.

-------------------------------------------------------------

** PennWell (Books: Tulsa, Oklahoma; publishers of Langenkamp's Handbook)
Since 1910 PennWell has been known for providing comprehensive coverage of several strategic markets. In those early days, PennWell was a pioneer in the emerging oil industry with Oil & Gas Journal magazine, founded in 1902. Today PennWell publishes 45 business-to-business magazines and newsletters, conducts over 60 conferences and exhibitions on six continents, and has an extensive offering of books, maps, directories and database services.

Oil & Gas

Electric Power Generation

Electric Power Delivery

Water/Wastewater

Electronics / Semiconductors

Contamination Control

Optoelectronics / Photonics

Fiber Optics / Communications

Computer Graphics / Graphic Arts

Enterprise Storage

Defense / Security

Fire / EMS

Dental

Imaging/Machine Vision

* Next year will be the centennial year for production of the very first Model T Ford and the first anniversary of the authors of CPE living without an automobile.

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 18 Febuary

2007-02-18T08:44:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"A bell must be struck before it rings and a man must be goaded into virtue."

. . (194) Chinese

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 17 Febuary

2007-02-17T13:31:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"What is said in private is heard like a peal of thunder in heaven."

. . (191) Chinese

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

An American and Canadian Crude Look at Oil

2007-02-17T04:45:00.000-05:00

Blogaulaire suspects (backed by careful observation) that the average reader of Cheap Priceless Editions is both a practical person (always on the look-out for a good deal) and a rather bookish person . . perhaps with literary tastes, endowed with a progressive outlook, worldview, et cetera.

Does looking at raw numbers give you the hives? Are you reaching for an ointment for your urticaria, after reading figures for economic projections? Relax, there won't be a test, not even answers from me about any of this.

Call the STATISTICS portion of this post laconic. Terse news. It gets right to the point of all the rest.

We are just introducing -- call it a game, call it a word feature (more on that in upcoming posts as the blog here evolves on its own course - so STAY TUNED TO THIS WEB ADDRESS). But first, the eye candy:

February 18 : Chinese New Year
Celebrated
on the grounds of
the world famous
Calgary Exhibition & Stampede

The Biggest Game in US - CAN Trade -- PETROLEUM

Crude Oil and Total Petroleum Imports Top 15 Countries:
Highlights Released; February 16, 2007

"Preliminary monthly data on the origins of crude oil imports in December 2006 has been released and it shows that three countries have each exported more than 1.20 million barrels per day to the United States.

Including those countries, a total of five countries exported over 1.00 million barrels per day of crude oil to the United States (see table below). The top five exporting countries accounted for 69 percent of United States crude oil imports in December while the top ten sources accounted for approximately 88 percent of all U.S. crude oil imports.

The top sources of US crude oil imports for December were Canada (1.829 million barrels per day), Saudi Arabia (1.471 million barrels per day), Mexico (1.245 million barrels per day), Venezuela (1.045 million barrels per day), and Nigeria (1.010 million barrels per day).

The rest of the top ten sources, in order, were Angola (0.610 million barrels per day), Algeria (0.421 million barrels per day), Iraq (0.419 million barrels per day), Ecuador (0.254 million barrels per day), and Kuwait (0.163 million barrels per day).

Total crude oil imports averaged 9.584 million barrels per day in December, which is a decrease of 0.253 million barrels per day from November 2006.

Canada remained the largest exporter of total petroleum products in December, exporting 2.409 million barrels per day to the United States, which was a slight decrease from last month (2.598 thousand barrels per day). The second largest exporter of total petroleum products was Saudi Arabia with 1.491 million barrels per day."

What do you say to all that? (Isn't it a bit odd to be reading EIA (Energy Information Administration) data practucally the day it's released?

The major exporters of oil to the US are taking in tons of cash - they are not giving this stuff away! So: if you happen to be in the commerce of words, images, books, new ideas and/or services to the people interested in same, remember the following . . .

. . . the best time to sell a farmer a new tractor is after he has harvested a bumper crop . . .

In fact, if you've got anything to sell, to offer, to provide and it happens to be right after a bumper year for growing (we're seeing fewer and fewer of them), it is the farmer who will seek you out with the cash burning through his or her very pockets.

Rod Proudfoot (far right) congratulates Rod B. and wife Dorothy!
The Winner of (Stampede Casino's) January "Casino and a Movie" draw.
Rod and Dorothy took home a 32" LCD TV and - Sony Soundsaround system. -Worth over $2,000!-

Everybody, by the way, is dependent upon oil. If you live in Mahattan (Blogaulaire is certain) then on your own streets you are seeing more oilmen dressing their part than I am just sitting here in Montreal. Oil money at the top gathers with other money, and Manhattan is still at the top, though one wonders for how much longer.

People here in Canada with little things to sell, things no bigger than a flat screen TV or monitor, things like books, are catching on to a general migration of young and not-so-young residents and members of the active workforce who are headed 'out West to Alberta' where all the jobs are. And the rest of us are saying that this energy dependence on oil can't keep going on and on without the world sinking into its own slime ball. And the people still keep Heading West.

Alberta ex-pats have always been a counter-culture theme in Montreal. These recent transfuges are less and less Bohemian, more and more bourgeois in lifestyle. Some oil patch ex-pats even have enough money to buy books from local used bookstore owners . .

Learn the language(s) of the next frontier, not the last one. Every economic development is social change. Every exploration of a thriving, dying or recycled technology requires a new vocabulary, a different lexicon of terms.

From what we all learned about export-import of oil up top, for the 5 biggest providers of petroleum to the US market, the Official Languages in the exporting nations (the ones taking in the cash as price-per-barrel rises) break down as English (2); Spanish (2); Arabic (1). If we crudely ask whether the transfer of wealth from importing states to exporters represents a shift from one linguistic centre of gravity to another.

As a Can-Am myself, aware that "American" means English, French and Spanish already, (for me at least) the numbers look totally status quo ante . . no big shift, no surprises.

There will be upcoming demographic shifts within nations, regions, and hemispheres toward the world capitals of oil production. It may, eventually, be bust and boom.

In terms of the publishing and book trade, I think that the biggest question is not about the expansion of literacy generally. Arabic, Spanish and English as spoken and read in the Middle East and Central Asia or in Central and South America, and in Western Africa ... well everywhere people will become literate. I think we should concentrate on how functional literacy will change here at home and we should be sensitive to the competition for reader in places like Canada's western provinces.
Will a literacy boom, i.e., more active readers, happen out West? Or will the people moving West just take their satellite dishes with them or have their cable service contracts switched over from Ontario and Quebec to new homes in Manitoba, Alberta and British Columbia? And for those who do read on a printed page, does the book trade have anything particularly unique to offer people as this demographic shift emerges? Tentatively, all my answers are Yes, Yes and Yes.

Will it be a boom or an echo?

Semiology 'Runs' to Catch Up with the Internet : On Book Power

2007-02-16T10:00:00.000-05:00

"About Umberto Eco"

------------------ Also quotes from a 2002 article
in The Guardian,
Saturday October 12, 2002

"Signs of the times"

by Maya Jaggi

When the former hotel building in Milan where Umberto Eco lives was converted into flats, he preserved the winding corridors as a labyrinthine library, housing some 30,000 volumes. The shrine to learning seems apt for the creator of the 14th-century monastery in The Name of the Rose (1980), the medieval murder mystery that combined metaphysics, theology and the enigma of Aristotle's "lost" tome on comedy, with poisoned monks and the twists of a Sherlock Holmes whodunnit - a "book built of books".

His paternal grandfather was a bookbinder and "socialist typographer who organised strikes". During the second world war it was one of Eco's duties to go down to the cellar with a candle and pick up the charcoal: "I spent hours opening the old books and forgetting the coal." Among books he found were works by Jules Verne and Marco Polo, and included Darwin's The Origin of Species** and piles of adventure comics. His maternal grandmother, barely schooled but a "compulsive reader" who subscribed to a mobile library, stoked this eclectic passion. "She had no real cultural discrimination: she could read dime novels as well as Dostoyevsky and Balzac."

** ( - - Note by Bogaulaire: and "The Voyage of the Beagle" was what U. E. liked most about the book . . I'll bet.)

---------

.
Photo of Umberto Eco by Robert Birnbaum

In 1978 . . Eco's career took a dramatic new turn. At a friend's invitation, he decided to write a detective story . . .
. . . He also decided to make it a demonstration of his own literary theories of an "open text" that would provide the reader with almost infinite possibilities for interpretation in the signs and clues the protagonist must decode in order to solve a mystery.

Set in a fourteenth-century monastery, The Name of the Rose is the story of a monk who tries to solve several murders while struggling to defend his quest for the truth against church officials. A main theme of the novel is Eco's own
love of books, and the solution to the murders ultimately lies in coded manuscripts and secret clues in the abbey's library. Dense with learned references and untranslated Latin, it is both an exhaustively detailed murder mystery and Eco's semiotic metaphor for the reader's own quest to derive meaning on many levels from the signs in a work of art. Its publishers expected to sell no more than 30,000 copies, but the novel became an international bestseller. In 1986 it was made into a film starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater.

. . .

In recent years Eco has become increasingly involved in debates of how electronic media and computer technologies will affect culture and society. At the International Center for Semiotic and Cognitive Science in San Marino in 1994, he organized a seminar on the future of the book that attracted hypermedia experts from around the world. His own observations on the Internet, virtual reality, and hypertext have appeared in Encyclomedia, a CD-ROM history of philosophy that he helped to develop. Recently he has become involved with the Multimedia Arcade, a complex in Bologna offering Internet access, a computer training center, and a public multimedia library.

. . .

"We are marching toward a more liberated society in which free creativity will co-exist with textual interpretation," he said, but we will need a "new form of critical competence … "a new kind of educational training, a new wisdom" to cope with the sheer quantity of information.

. . .

Writing in The Nation, he asserted that "books still represent the most economical, flexible, wash-and-wear way to transport information at very low cost." Books will remain essential not only for literature but for "any circumstance in which one needs to read carefully, not only to receive information but also to speculate and reflect about it." In his opinion, a device which allows us to invent new texts has nothing to do with our ability to interpret pre-existing texts.

. . .

Eco is an avid book collector who has apartments in Milan, Bologna, and Paris, as well as a summer home near Rimini. In addition to running the Program for Communication Sciences at the University of Bologna, he travels frequently to speak and teach. He continues to publish scholarly treatises, which number almost two dozen, and to contribute to several foreign and Italian newspapers.

. . .

See Wikipedia Article HERE.

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 16 Febuary

2007-02-16T07:49:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"Patience in a moment of anger will save you a hundred days of anguish."

. . (186) Chinese

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

Qin Rule

2007-02-15T09:34:00.000-05:00

From:

Ancient China: The Art, Culture and History of the Ancient Cathay

The AncienWeb.org

Much of what came to constitute China Proper was unified for the first time in 221 B.C. In that year the western frontier state of Qin, the most aggressive of the Warring States, subjugated the last of its rival states.

(Qin in Wade-Giles romanization is Ch'in, from which the English China probably derived.)

Once the king of Qin consolidated his power, he took the title Shi Huangdi ( First Emperor), a formulation previously reserved for deities and the mythological sage-emperors, and imposed Qin's centralized, non-hereditary bureaucratic system on his new empire. In subjugating the six other major states of Eastern Zhou, the Qin kings had relied heavily on Legalist scholar-advisers. Centralization, achieved by ruthless methods, was focused on standardizing legal codes and bureaucratic procedures, the forms of writing and coinage, and the pattern of thought and scholarship. To silence criticism of imperial rule, the kings banished or put to death many dissenting Confucian scholars and confiscated and burned their books . Qin aggrandizement was aided by frequent military expeditions pushing forward the frontiers in the north and south.

Tang Writers; Tang Tales

In the middle of the Tang Dynasty many well-known writers and poets began story writing. Their stories incorporate a wide range of subject matter and themes, reflecting various aspects of human nature, human relations and social life. In form they are not short notes or anecdotes like the tales produced before them, but well-structured stories with interesting plots and vivid characters, often several thousand words in length. Among them are many tales whose main characters are gods, ghosts, or foxes.

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 15 Febuary

2007-02-15T08:05:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"Do not dispair because there's no go-between; books can provide you with a queen more beautiful than jade."

. . (182) Chinese

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

Booksellers Do Not Have All Their Bases Covered

2007-02-14T11:56:00.000-05:00

Between finding a book and selling a book, the preservation and the display of a collection of books is an integral part of the bookseller's trade. As an important part of the trade in books, apart from the title catalog or the arrangement of displays inside his or her boutique, the bookseller also narrates stories about and educates the public regarding diverse aspects of literate culture in order to keep people interested in books; books as both artifacts of a common heritage and as worthy of their purchase price.

Despite the niche markets and categories in the book trade, booksellers elect on their own to sell books - they self-select with few gatekeepers or hurdles to jump over in becoming a bookseller. Yet, having learned their business, bookshop owners and effective dealers can rightly claim that they serve as cultural guardians and, in their realm, sentries for how people imbibe in culture and traditions through written and recorded language.

Despite how vaunted some of this description may be, how rightly or wrongly it fits the trade as a whole, book dealers as a class exercise little social or economic power and enjoy less and less social status (along with the medical profession one should add).

On an entirely different plane, each level of government, in its turn, exercises a greater and growing power over the professions and commerce.

See the post below about the City of Longueuil, Québec exercising eminent domain and dumping the half million book, document and recording titles of an impecunious bookseller into a regional landfill dump.

In response to this news, IN THIS POST, j godsey at Bibliophile Bullpen remarked,

I'm starting to get the serious feeling that our society as a whole is distrustful of anyone in possession of voluminous numbers of books, regardless of whether they are just a collector or truly a professional bookseller.

I share those feelings. I am confident the author of those remarks was much angrier than the words sound after reading the post, at least I am angrier than my words!

Why am I controlling my anger? Because I think that all of us in the book trade, now in touch with one another by email and on several websites, need to pool our thinking and our resources to come up with alternative solutions to protect the used and antiquarian booksellers from the most savage tendencies that are threatening the book trade from on high and from three sides.

It's impossible to anticipate what the future solutions will be. Will the proposed solutions favor senior dealers with proven track records or favor the new entrants, who for the first time recently uploaded a ton of books to the Internet vendors' sites? Are scholars more in need of protection than house-bound retirees earning extra cash. I do not have an answer, yet.

The simplest solution to the problem of the bankrupt bookstore I can think of is to have the means to truck away the stock in documents to a safe locale before the landlord or the local mayor hauls the entire stock to the dump. Something simple like that and something direct. I am convinced that we need to face such situations as a book-trade-wide challenge.

I have read a few posts on interesting blogs about photo-documentary projects to image bookstores across the North American continent. That is fine and good. But wouldn't it be ideal to have confidence that what happened to Paul Saindon, shown (below) standing before the Saint-Nicéphore landfill site with nearly his entire bookstore amidst the rubble . . wouldn't it be ideal to have some assurance that such a fate as this will not befall any one of today's bookstores shown in the photos with their doors open?

I can just see the 12-wheel tractor-trailer rig rolling down the Interstate with the logo emblazoned on the side: 'Another Bookstore Saved by the ASBBASN (whatever that means)!

(

In the spirit of a personal blog, but not to sound maudlin:

As I type these words, I am listening to a privately recorded 33 1/3 vinyl of a religious women's choir from Rwanda. The phonograph record was cut in a Montreal studio for a Catholic religious order. There is a photo of the choir members and the names of the arrangers and technical notes are printed on the record's sleeve. The music is beautiful.

I rescued (have not yet catalogued) this disque from a pile of familiar commercial LPs at a junk emporium. You can fill in your own blanks regarding how precious these songs may be as personal artifacts - for someone who survived the Rwanda genocide more than a decade and a half ago.

I keep asking myself: "What records of our culture were destroyed when the Saindon collection was destroyed?")

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 14 Febuary

2007-02-14T10:38:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"If you would know the road ahead ask those who have been down it."

. . (178) Chinese

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

500,000 Books and CDs are Buried in a Landfill Deliberately by the City of Longueuil, Québec

2007-02-13T17:32:00.000-05:00

La Presse

Tuesday, 13 February 2007
by Émilie Côté

500 000 livres au dépotoir

Paul Saindon, in front of the landfill site at Saint-Nicéphore where his 500,000 books and 30,000 CD disques were dumped.
Photograph Robert Mailloux,

La Presse

(Montréal)

Blogaulaire was book picking in a 'friperie'. He began discussing 'better' places (better prices)with the only other customer, a man searching titles next to him on the next shelf over. And then the guy told him about all these books being trashed on the South Shore, near Longueuil, Québec. So I am blogging this horrible story.

Yes, it is horrible and the City of Longueuil did not have to destroy this huge stock of music, literature, history . . . and who knows what other documentary treasurers! The city had possession of the material, the city was storing the entire lot on city property and decided, through its ultimate domain (and ignorance) to trash everything!

Paul Saindon had a bookstore on Chambly Road in Old Longueuil with a floor-space of 4,600 square feet. Saindon himself (Blogaulaire never visited it) describes the local as a bookmans 'Ali Baba Cave'. As is typical, the landlord raises the rent 25% after the first 5 years of operation and the bookstore owner finds cheaper digs, but smaller; in fact so small he cannot accomodate his stock.

The collection, which runs the gamut from the mid 19th centure to today and includes all the highs and lows of North American literature as well as music - - with all the greats of Québec culture represented in multiple editions and formats - - is left to the whims of an unsympathetic landlord and a city administration uncertain of its role, uncertain of anything it seems.

The city did pressure Saindon to claim his property after putting it in storage. When Saindon could not find a buyer and was unable to come into the municipal warehouse with enough helpers to sort the books, according to the City Clerk, nonprofit cultural associations in the area were offered the books free of charge.

The whole story suddenly becomes confused and cloudy. Interviews to track down who was offered what by whom seem full of contradiction. It does appear that Saindon was making an honest effort to save the collection by contacting community centres, cultural groups, probably the municipal libraries.

Whoever did or did not refuse the collection (which was a total mass of tumbling piles by now) the final decision was taken and acted upon. Everything was dumped like so much rotting refuse into the Saint-Nicéphore landfill dump and is now utterly beyond salvation.

Everything was carted off on January 29, 2007, which is close to the date that on the north side of the St. Lawrence River, Montreal was throwing George Butcher out of his apartment for stockpiling nearly 15,000 books and documents in his home. See the article HERE.

There is nothing yet that I can offer as a conlusion or summary to these stories. These situations are both personal and collective challenges in this and probably in your own community. I blog the news; I invite discussion. I will pick up this thread again.

Consider using the Google Language Tool to read the La Presse article in English if you find wading through the French text onerous. Just copy the address url of the title of this post into the 'Translate this page on the web' box under the language page options offered by Google. Most of the translation will be useful. Just prepare yourself for half a dozen 'false friends' between English and French. A couple phrases are real gems (I tried it) and you will have at least one hoot while you cry over the tragedy of this heritage being destroyed totally by mindless boobs who are paid by the public purse.

Montreal's Expozine Zine Fair

2007-02-13T07:50:00.000-05:00

Each fall, Blogaulaire keeps missing Expozine, the exposition of zines, independent small press productions, chapbooks et cetera. Ignorance is not bliss, however, when you link to photographer Denis Carl's desktop wallpapers site (see the LINKS on the right) and find his flickr.com 9-image coverage of Expozine 2006 HERE. (On flickr, I use the slideshow feature for coverage like this.)

Of course you will want to browse over to the Expozine website HERE as well.

I must be in a buy-sell frame of mind. I keep thinking of how unique and interesting those zines on the exhibitors' tables must be 'in person' or 'in paper' or 'in plasma screen' or WHATEVER.

On the Expozine website homepage, be sure to scroll down and look at all the logos for sponsors of the fair. These cultural entities - some private-sector, some nonprofit - are a sampling of who and what is active in Montreal on the publishing front.

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 13 Febuary

2007-02-13T06:41:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"Good and evil, life and death, love and separation."

. . (171) Malay

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 12 Febuary

2007-02-12T07:56:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"It is the horse that dines in the night that puts on weight."

. . (171) Chinese

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

Southwest Montreal's Friendly Recycling Centre

2007-02-11T07:41:00.000-05:00

In a post about three posts below (click on the TITLE above), Blogaulaire advocated that bookstore owners dispose of box-loads of 'overstock' that constitute nothing more than printed materials: all the magazines and books that no one will take from a bookstore or on-line dealer whether or not it is sold for a dime out of some bin left sitting on the sidewalk in front or is given away for free. (I can just see the antiquarian dealers among my thousands of daily readers shudder at the image! Ha!)

Blogaulaire wants to AVOID ANY IMPLICATION that the used bookstore dealer in a working class neighbourhood is at the very bottom of the food chain (despite what I wrote). We are NOT SAYING that once Mister or Misses bookdealer 'disposes' of a printed document at some recycling centre, that said document has been irrevocably DESTROYED.

Well I know better than that . . . because:

At the municipal recycling depots in Montreal, there are workers clustered around an entrepreneurial person who acts as gang-boss. This team almost immediately salvages the material that is dumped in the recycling bins to give it One More Chance , another opportunity to be picked over by folks who drop by driving vans or with big backpacks or saddlebags on bikes.

The recycle-cycle never ends . . . not for old televisions, not for cheap credenzas, not for nada or ninguno. All of which is an opening for CPE to upload a few images that introduce you to an area recycling centre and its environment:

All year-round, even when the snow blows off the highway overhead, somebody is there to put the recycled books and household rejects under tarps for people to come pick through . . . 'come rain or come shine'.

The recycling centre for the Southwest is between Côte St. Paul and St. Henri - halfway between the Champlain Bridge and the Turcot Interchange.

Recent immigrants from the Caribbean Islands seem to gravitate to this recycling centre for work out-of-doors and with great demands physically and to their ingenuity at fixing stuff.

Locals can feast their eyes on an acre of appliances and electronic gadgets or jump in under the tarps and dig through the National Geographics and Readers Digest Condensed Books to hunt out the leftover treasures of publishing traditions.

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 11 Febuary

2007-02-11T06:48:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"If you do not discuss the faults of others, no one will blame you for not discussing your own."

. . (168) Chinese

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

Artifacts of the opium trade _ gnarled wood of the Thai phrik khi nu chili bush

2007-02-11T06:26:00.000-05:00

Blogaulaire just couldn't resist sticking those words in a title after reading them on-line at time.com in an article from March, 2003. Here are those words again, in a full sentence:

"These pipes are part of the museum's collection, including one fashioned from the gnarled wood of the Thai phrik khi nu chili bush, which was said to impart a spicy flavor to the opium smoke."

Pipe Dreams in the Golden Triangle

By Steven Martin
Mar. 17, 2003

"High and Low: Visitors can check out facsimiles of Asia's infamous opium dens at the Thai museum"

In the early 1950s, newly communist China took draconian steps to rid its population of addicts, but the vice lingered for another decade in the expatriate-Chinese communities of Southeast Asia. Thailand was the last place in the world with licensed opium dens. In 1959 those licenses were revoked; the Heng Lak Hung on Bangkok's Charoeng Krung Road, said to be the world's largest opium den, with more than 5,000 users in residence, shut its doors, and thousands of opium pipes, lamps and other smoking equipment were burned in a massive bonfire at the royal cremation grounds near the Grand Palace.

In the past few years, however, aficionados of Asian art and antiquities have rediscovered the dens' often delightfully ornate accoutrements: pipes, oil lamps, pipe bowls, opium trays and beds. When curators began gathering artifacts for the Hall of Opium, some of the best pieces were found in the Thai Excise Department.

. . .

Patterns on pipe bowls ranged from geometrical designs, such as the Hindu swastika (also used in Buddhist art), to whimsical portraits of Chinese roosters, tigers, dragons and phoenixes, to floral renderings of bamboos, orchids and peach blossoms. To those versed in Chinese iconography, this is rich irony: these positive attributes so artfully symbolized -- longevity, strength, happiness and wealth -- were all certainly lacking in the lives of the average opium addict.

The Hall of Opium uses a multimedia approach to trace the history of opium from highly valued ingredient in the pharmacopoeia of the ancients to the scourge of addiction that brought China to its knees in the 19th and 20th centuries. There is a re-creation of a British East India Company clipper ship's hold and its cargo of opium from India destined for the South China coast and a reproduction of a typical 19th century opium den, where a visitor can take himself through the opium smoker's paces (sans opium, of course).

Patrons, according to this life-size diorama, entered through an innocuous-looking tea shop. The poorer users could choose doses of low-grade opium self-administered in spartan surroundings. Better-heeled junkies could smoke pipes of pure opium prepared by servants in opulently furnished rooms. Lest visitors get carried away amid their reveries, the curators have mounted cautionary tributes to entertainers who overdosed, such as River Phoenix and Zhu Jie.

On Cheap Priceless Enditions, we reviewed Nick Tosches. THE LAST OPIUM DEN. (Bloomsbury, January 8, 2002, $12.95, cloth) HERE.

That CPE post touched on the subject of opium as a typical theme of the grit lit genre.

Nobody is an Authority on Nuttin' - But We Try

2007-02-10T06:21:00.000-05:00

Blogaulaire likes to jerk people's heads around . . around the very same issues he finds his own head is being jerked around. I guess misery loves company, or something like that.

Perhaps I think that I am an iconoclast. I like to break up other people's preconceived notions and the icons of complacency that rule in their thinking in their little niche, their little nest. I would like to think of myself as a radical, able to 'get at' the root of, the core of, things . . without pussy-footing around with other people's preconceived notions.

But what those descriptive, value-laden words above amount to is merely one more of the most familiar North American stereotypes that are current (and have been for a long time) current among the ranks of Young Turks practicing journalism, literature and/or among today's million-member mass of the scribes who blog on the Internet today. So even THAT image of me as an iconoclast is hardly worth a hill of beans!

There are many, many challenges facing the bookselling trade today.
And there are many, many booksellers who are failing to meet these challenges while many others are succeeding financially in today's market. Where I place myself is as one who is outside this sort of mêlée yet one who can, while learning from others, see through many conceptual traps booksellers are laying down for themselves as they attempt to see through each challenge that presents itself.

Blogaulaire refuses to jump into the groove of those who complacently argue that somehow 'we' (the booksellers) will muddle through. And I see a large gap between the successful booksellers who fit neatly into their local community of book readers/bookstore patrons and the unsuccessful ones who have not made a similar organic connection with their own local book-buying public.

At times, pessimistically (with a touch of hubris, admittedly) Blogaulaire smirks at the emails on a listerv written by wise-old book purveyors who seem totally preoccupied with queries about how to connect with buyers on the Internet. I say to myself, self says I, maybe they should first start worrying about their disconnect with their own local community. In fact, I know deep down that these wizened owners of brick 'n' mortar bookstores have given up on their own local community because that particular community is no longer rushing their bookstore to buy more books!

So people who no longer have a face-to-face community are looking for a virtual community. But, wonder of wonders, it seems that everybody and her brother is searching for the same thing! They are all uploading their titles to the half-dozen or more meta-vendor websites and, generally, slashing their prices. The iconoclast in me says "Duh?". The realist in me asks "What do we do about it? How do we resolve all these obvious disconnects between these book sellers and their clienele, and the book suppliers (the pickers) who are suddenly The Competition?"

What I see that is stable and continuing to flourish surrounded by this maelstrom of turbulence is the voluntaristic approach of non-profit book fairs, such as the University of McGill's and the Sir Thomas More Institute's book sales in Montreal or any one of the even more local sales such as Verdun's St. Willibrord's Church's monthly event. (Plus, I could name a dozen mor local book fairs on the West Island).

Obviously, the worst prescription to offer to anyone working to put meat on the table is to tell that person to go out and volunteer their time and forget about earning money. Yet there are elements of the book fair that can be brought into the formula for the commercial boutique bookstore owner.

Let me just name a few for starters with the caveat that more experienced people could parse such a list better than I could discuss these issues.

Publicity. The fairs are announced in public service announcements in the local papers.

Support. Large numbers of residents attend because it is 'for a good cause.'

Price. Everybody expects bargain prices - even the pickers who intend to list their treasure discoveries on ABE and e-Bay.

Timing. The events are announced well in advance and last, at the most, a couple days.

Space. Charity events do not pay rent and they have access, normally, to vast spaces such as auditoriums and church basements.

Volunteers. The grunge work is done by unpaid, usually enthusiastic, members of the community.

Expertise. Retired leaders from the bookish professions serve as unpaid co-ordinators.

Few constraints to turn a profit or pay out a percentage. I think I'm on weaker ground on this one. Maybe there is more pressure from 'the administration' to turn in a good income than some of us realize.

I think I've listed enough elements that describe the volunteer sector of used book selling. Let me just list another, singular, element -- then I can pat myself on the back self-righteously for being an iconoclast:
----------------------------------------------

One thing that
The book fair people know --

HOW TO TAKE OUT THE TRASH
WHEN THE PARTY'S OVER !!!

I think that commercial bookstore owners have a handle on ALL of the basic elements listed above -- or at least they seem to in their own email discussions -- but that as a group they are unwilling to air-out in public purview two subjects. The following points are the dirty laundry of the book trade.

What is not being discussed, in my humble opinion, follows:

When a bookstore no longer enjoys local, public support, the owner has to be hog-tied and practically tortured to admit this is so. Not that I think all this is their own fault. But book people really do need to take personal ownership of how, why and the commercial consequences of losing the support of their local community.

This seems fundamental. Especially in communities where the book fairs thrive and the bookstores do not.

The second point is neither openly discussed by the book fair people nor by the bookstore owners, viz: How do you get rid of the left-overs at the end of the day?

Because, if and when the book event and sales venue has community backing from the grassroots, that same public will inundate you-the-bookseller with all kinds of books, including titles that no one in his or her right mind would want to purchase and take home. And to stock and store these books at your own expense will cost YOU money and/or valuable resources like floor space.

Do you send these leftover books to Africa on the next freighter out? Then pity the poor Africans is what I will add. (But of course you don't send them abroad . . that, at least, is one urban myth of the book trade we can quickly dismiss.)

There remains one final point to all this: The book fair people do try to head off the magazines, old newspapers and unsalable print material at the door before it becomes a burden to their organization. But when the commercial bookseller tries to head off 'trash' coming in from a regular, loyal customer, this puts the store owner in the role of a snarky, penny pinching and mean gatekeeper.

But who knows. Maybe the next load of books this same patron drops off will be loaded with priceless treasures?

You don't want to look mean to such a bountiful supplier as this well meaning customer, now do you?

At the end of the day and the end of this long post, what I advocate is that bricks 'n' mortar bookstore owners try to emulate that same communty-based formula that works so well in the volunteer sector I counsel all of us to remain as graciously in the good graces of even the most benighted client. Be as friendly to them as possible.

The shopkeeper must have a quick EXIT STRATEGEY. A backdoor procedure that centres around some local friend with a good pickup truck. A guy or gal who will help haul all of what is mere 'printed material' from your store's receiving end to the shipping end at the back of the store -- STRAIGHT to the collection bins at the local recycling or paper-drive collection centre!

Short of everybody closing shop and operating out of their own basement or apartment, Blogaulaire's proposal to bookstore owners about reconnecting with their communities (while still remaining Spartan about display and storage space), PLUS the idea of holding big open-door sales evebts, are topics that deserve more wide discussion by book bloggers and subscribers to bookish email listservs.

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 10 Febuary

2007-02-10T05:52:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"There's no entombment like marriage to a malevolent man."

. . (164) Chinese

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 9 Febuary

2007-02-09T08:48:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"If one son becomes a monk, nine generations will reach heaven."

. . (190) Chinese

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

An Open-Ended, Unending Rant on Used Book Selling

2007-02-08T23:00:00.000-05:00

At an open-air flea market about 6 years ago, amongst my junk on a table I had a few books. paperbacks mostly if not entirely. I put a price of $15 on my copy of Naomi Klein's book "No Logo". I just knew I would get the price I asked, never mind what I paid for the book (probably at another flea market) myself. It sold for $15.

This summer, if I sell some junk there again, it will be pretty much the same routine, though my computer parts and peripherals probably won't sell as well as they did back in 2001. I'm not certain what the $15 paperbacks will be, maybe it will include a French-language copy of Yann Martel's novel Life of Pi.

What people will want most this year in Quebec is very different from what it was 5 or 6 years ago. At a flea market I have no problemo adapting. But, in a well stocked bookstore, I can see these changes in 'taste' presenting a very serious problem. (One sells 100s of diverse titles 'all at once,' so to speak.)

I remember from days spent in Chicago a period when there was a craze over every printed title about surrealism. Maybe it was local, probably not. I remember from Montreal entire knick-knack and lit boutiques devoted to New Age, to the Cabala and crystals and tarot cards and nuatl-whatever mythology. Folk music and disco were also in, then out.

I know, there still exists a solid-selling literature that includes Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'. I hope this bedrock lit also includes Cervantes's 'Don Quixote' but I forget. I believe Octavio Paz is out today and Carlos Fuentes is in, but I'll pass on that one as well.

The bookseller people who are specialised in one genre, say science fiction or, say, comic books, probably have a better handle on these changes in taste than I do or than most used book store owners as well. And these specialist dealers know which title & author ages so well so they pop that one straight into a Mylar baggy affair. I suspect that many of the mainline booksellers, however, operate on not much more than a hope and a prayer, plus lots of shelf room, when they decide to stock a particular book. Or do they just stock everything that comes their way?

Let us not underestimate the genius of SOME used booksellers to adjust to The Long Tail (the eternity of demand), their sensitivity to local preoccupations and who is or is not a celebrity, or their grasp of the world historical trends. But from looking at sellers closely, I seem to see an equal amount of plain old good luck, like when somebody dumps freebies on one bookseller's doorstep and that lot fetches hundreds of dollars the next day!

What this world needs is a good computer program, distributed widely to the trade we are discussing, that tells sellers what to do in lock-step with what will sell well. Barring this prescriptive, management-by-prediction, hardwired map, booksellers will remain hard done by. End of paragraph.

So far, despite my appeal for a software program to solve every body's problems, I have not said one word about the Internet. Nor am I going to. It's been discussed thoroughly enough, even though you wouldn't be able to read these line without it.

Bookseller are condemned to be "overstocked" when tastes change rapidly and dramatically. Not only would efficient operations require a guerrilla army of suppliers to stay in stock with what's HOT but efficiency would also demand a guerrilla army of disposers (if not buyers) to get rid of what is NOT HOT, what is in fact quite COLD.

Publishers used to dispose of their 'overstock' at a quarter to job-lotters in the remainders trade. (Now that they print less, I guess it's up to fifty cents per book.) The used book dealer, though, living life at the bottom of the food chain, cannot pass on his stagnant paper and board to an even lower bottom-feeding odd-lotter. Wishing it were so does not make it so, so sorry.

This is why I am skeptical regarding the long tail optimistic approach toward the hoarding of books. It is so much a case of the wish being father to the thought that it borders on being pathetic. Relying on the long tail finishes up with what I saw today on Bibliophile Bullpen: an engraved tombstone reading 'The one who has the most books at the end wins.'

My post is here not to offer solutions but to offer very subjective impressions, nothing more. Here are my subjective reactions regarding book hoards.

First: that the dealer has little discriminating judgement. The stock whatever gets tossed over the transom;

Second: that I should low-ball to get the absolute dirt-cheap price for what I would otherwise pay a premium for to own;

Third: that if the entire stock is not readily at my finger tips but is in the basement or behind glassed-in cases, that it is the bookseller who is trying to cheat me and not vice versa (which is how I'd rather it be);

Fourth: (this is the hard one) I feel real repugnance at seeing row after row of titles that were once my true 'flames' but with which I have had a bitter falling-out, viz certain unnamed conspiracy theories, New Age treatments of Atlantis or Nostradamus, recent books about 'Empire', true crime fiction of the poltergeist sort, etc., etc.

I do not intend my oh so subjective list to be a put-down of anyone (I could have used more judgemental language, but held back). I'm merely underscoring some of the dangers of trying to be everything to everyone. And I think that keeping everything from every reading craze threatens being slotted in the customer's mind with being nothing to nobody.

There is a bookseller friend of mine who stocks whole sections of books in Renaissance Literature. These are equal in shelf footage to her offerings in Esoterica as well as her stock in Communism. I take that back, if you include Religion, the esoterica far outweighs the Marxism et al. And the stuff on First Nations and Judaism tends toward the occult. I don't know where to place the vegan cookbooks: do they go with the political or the religious? In any case, this is definitely an 'alternative' bookstore. But the vast majority of her trade is in popular fiction, of which she stocks more than all the other categories combined! Need I add that financially her bookstore is in ruins!

You get the picture. The bookstore might do fine on a college campus, but, unfortunately, is located in a working class district with a 50%+ high school dropout rate. Go figure!

If I had a prescription to offer the owner of a bricks 'n' mortar bookstore it would be to not attempt being all things to all people: something that your customer base is not into. Or at least to have no more than two public faces, one for the carriage trade and intellectuals and another for the local market -- but have all your stock within easy view and arranged based the target market for the books. Classics and Philosophy do not mix well with popular snuff lit and Harlequin romances. If you hve to stock Readers' Digest Condensed to get by, just forget it all!

(This post has been edited to exclude from purview all the complications arising from doing any and all of the above in two languages simultaneously.)

Has David Streitfeld at the L. A. Times Revealed to Booksellers a New Prophet-Poet? Is the Prose Proselytizer of Books Now in Print?

2007-02-08T09:32:00.000-05:00

Shop Lewis Buzbee's book "The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop," (US $17) online if you want to save mucho. Just use the form box at the top of this and every other page on Cheap Priceless Editions.

Streitfeld's piece is a remarkable one-shot summary of the crisis that metropolitan bookstores in North America have been facing over the past 6 or 7 years. Truly, this is not at all like the stereotypical occupational complaint the way hog and milk producers bitch about subsidy programs. On the other hand, there is always the trap of psychosomatic sympathetic identification with the Californication of Culture. You make up your own mind.

Maybe Ron Silliman is the new prophet-poet of what is happening in the book trade. He's at least eloquent and articulate, coming up with apt comparisons with past techno-family challenges.

Quotes from:

Bookshops' latest sad plot twist
By David Streitfeld
Los Angeles Times
February 7, 2007

QUOTE:
When sliding sales forced Cody's to close its store next to the UC Berkeley campus, the poet Ron Silliman wrote on his blog that it was once the anchor of "the best book-buying block in North America." But in the discussion that followed, the attitude was one of resignation if not indifference.

"Why would anyone want to perpetuate small independents by paying higher prices?" wondered Curtis Faville, a poet who sells rare books on the Internet. "Most of these proud little independents were poorly run anyway."

Less harshly, Silliman suggested in an e-mail that "we're simultaneously caught in the wonder of the new and true mourning for the losses of the old."

It's an unsettling if inevitable process. Half a century ago, Silliman said, he would play chess and checkers with his grandfather as they listened to the radio. "That stopped once the TV arrived, because now we all had to face the same direction," he wrote.
END QUOTE--------------

If you think everything '60s started in California, then you probably think everything '60s will end there.

Blogaulaire thinks that the last thing these California scribes will write about is the large number of ex-patriats who have left the state to discover some other New Eldorado elsewhere. Native Californians would much rather believe that Silicone Valley (with, perhaps, a little help from Seattle) still RULES; that we're all into California Dreamin, one way or the other.

On another personal note, Berkeleylost its magnetic appeal along with The Haight so long ago . . it was almost exactly on my 15th birthday. The point is: the demise of these culture icons up and down Shattuck is not the demise of The Culture ipso facto.

I'm even surprised that Cody's survived in that venue for as long it they did. (Blogaulaire still adores North Beach bistros in San Francisco.)
--Blogaulaire

QUOTE:
"The bookstore as we know it is in dire straits," said Lewis Buzbee, a novelist who spent many years working in the local shops.

"The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop," (US $17) Buzbee's loving memoir of his time as a clerk in the Bay Area (is) interspersed with a history of the bookselling trade, has become a small but genuine hit. It's just gone into its fourth printing, with enthusiastic crowds flocking to the writer's appearances.

"One thing books do is offer us concrete definitions for sometimes hazy feelings," said Buzbee, 49. "My memoir gives people a venue for sharing their emotions about bookstores."
--------
A good bookstore, he notes, is unlike any other retail space. Where else can you linger, sample the merchandise and then casually reject it if not quite right? Your local pizzeria would frown on such behavior. In a culture that worships money, bookstores are one of the few commercial institutions where cost doesn't trump all other considerations. Massive bestsellers share shelf space with the most obscure tomes.
Buzbee exalts a place where time seems to slow but hours can disappear in an instant, where browsers coexist in a companionable solitude, where a chance encounter with the exact right volume might create an explosion in your head.

"Not only could your world change, but the rest of the world could change," he told an audience at the venerable City Lights bookstore in North Beach."
END QUOTE

Violent Death by Assassination Still Haunts Ivory Coast

2007-02-08T07:12:00.000-05:00

The gunshot death two nights ago of Michel Niacel, EU officer in charge of staff security in the southern zone of Côte d'Ivoire, has turned into a civil police investigation and not an international affair involving political recriminations.

Staff writer Emmanuel Akani for the Abidjan Matin, however, exaggerates when he implies that it is typical Western paranoia and prejudice that tries to make more of a domestic murder or suicide than is warranted simply because it happens to occur in Africa. Only three days prior to the death of Niacel, there was an attempt on the life of the Ivorian commander Captain Kipré, at the headquarters of the militarised demarcation-line between northern and southern zones. His adjoint, Lieutenant Drihé, was seriously injured by a grenade rigged to explode when anyone opened a bureau drawer in Kirpé's office.

Given recent Ivorian history of violent politico-military reprisals, assassination, and even death squads controlled remotely by Ivory Coast's highest officials, every violent death of a prominent figure in the multinational peacekeeping operation becomes cause for suspicion and alarm.

We, living peaceful lives in industrially advanced countries, like to get our African Realities in movie theatres and suspence-filled novels. We give prizes to the creative authors and directors of the sort of drama that lets us shed a tear for our imaginary Africa. For us, politics goes on in Ottawa, Washington, D.C., London and Paris while what happens in African capitals is intrigue and conspiracy (frequently genocidal).

Given the shroud of doubt about the death of Michel Niaucel at age 53, while serving 'our' West in 'some part of' Africa, while he sleeps with a Western wife in his Western bedclothes . . Given the joint police investigation being closely supervised by French officials, I guess the rest of us can get back to literature and the seven arts.

We still have a raging debate to engage over which is better cinema: "Babel" or last year's "The Constant Gardener". (But first I'll have to rent one and go out to see the other.)

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 8 Febuary

2007-02-08T06:52:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"No man on a horse can remember what it is like to go on foot."

. . (154) Chinese

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 7 Febuary

2007-02-07T13:57:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"Wealth gives a man the respect due to someone thirty years his senior."

. . (152) Chinese

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

Breaking News: Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire: EU Diplomat Murdered

2007-02-07T04:45:00.000-05:00

06 to 07 February 2007
Last Night
Tuesday to Wednesday

A diplomatic representative of the European Union residing in Abidjan, Michel Niaucel (aged 53) was murdered by gunshot in his home last night. Police in the Ivorian capital did not offer a motive for the attack. The murder was officially confirmed by the foreign office in Paris overnight.

Neither Niaucel's wife nor his 13-year-old daughter were physically harmed, although both were present in the family's residence when the murder occurred.

M. Niaucel, a former commander in the French armed forces (gendarmerie), worked with the European Union commission in Abidjan and was charged with the security of staff and officials posted in that civil war torn West African nation.

Background (provided by the Agence Français de Presse) and details are quoted in French below. For the Internet source, click on this post's title.

As of 5:00 AM Atlantic Time, there were no other news releases available via Internet, not even from reliable French-language media in Abidjan.

Michel Niaucel, un ancien commandant de gendarmerie de 53 ans, était notamment chargé des questions de sécurité à la délégation de l'UE à Abidjan, selon des sources diplomatiques concordantes.

M. Niaucel a été tué par balles à son domicile, situé dans une résidence de l'UE au Plateau, le quartier des affaires d'Abidjan, dans des circonstances qui restaient obscures mercredi matin, selon ces sources.

A Paris, le ministère français des Affaires étrangères a confirmé la mort d'un ressortissant français travaillant pour la Commission européenne à Abidjan.

L'épouse et la fille de M. Niaucel, âgée de 13 ans, étaient présentes au moment des faits, selon plusieurs sources diplomatiques à Abidjan.

Aucune hypothèse -- assassinat pour des raisons politiques ou crime crapuleux ordinaire -- n'était privilégiée mercredi matin, selon plusieurs diplomates.

-----------------------------
06 - 07 February 2007

The assassination of Ivorian civil and military officials has a 'long tradition' in Ivory Coast. So do attacks against French officials. Given this West African nations present situation, divided between national forces loyal to Pres Gbagbo and the New Force 'rebels' in the northern third of the territory, all ears will be to the ground listening for rumblings of a heightened level of state or rebel-sponsored violence directed at the Gbagbo or rebel leadership.

The background below relates how French civilians were already evacuated over the past 4 years following the outbreak and fallout from the civil war. Peacekeeping military forces in Ivory Coast have reinforced a cordon sanitaire between the opposing sides, further dividing the territory geographically between a more Christian and developped south and a depressed agricultural north, where Muslims and adherents of indigenous religions are in the majority. Class, caste and revolt against French neo-colonial control are big factors that fuel violence and incidents such as the assassination of Michel Niaucel have potential to precipitate or figure into new outbreaks and fresh attempts to precipitate such outbreaks deliberately.

Les relations entre Paris et Abidjan, autrefois partenaire privilégié de la France en Afrique, se sont détériorées à la suite de la tentative de coup d'Etat des FN contre M. Gbagbo en septembre 2002. La France est depuis régulièrement accusée par les partisans du président de soutenir la rébellion.

Elles sont devenus glaciales à partir de novembre 2004, lorsqu'un bombardement de l'aviation ivoirienne a tué neuf soldat français à Bouaké (centre). En représailles, l'armée française avait détruit l'aviation ivoirienne, provoquant une série de violentes manifestations antifrançaises à Abidjan et des affrontements meurtriers entre soldats français et manifestants ivoiriens.

Près de 8.000 expatriés français avaient alors été évacués en catastrophe par l'armée française et rapatriés en France.

Environ 3.000 civils français (hors binationaux) vivent encore aujourd'hui à Abidjan, contre 50.000 dans les années 1980.

L'armée française, par l'intermédiaire de sa force Licorne, compte de son côté quelque 3.500 soldats, chargés de faire respecter le cessez-le-feu entre les FN et le camp présidentiel, qui contrôle toujours le sud du pays.

Screen-Capture of Highlight Sites on CPE's Feature Blogroll Links

2007-02-06T05:16:00.000-05:00

Blogaulaire put those links in the right-hand sidebar for our readers convenience and enjoyment. Just leaving the names and links on the right, though, serves no real purpose unless you click on them. Few of you do.

So, if you can't bring the mountain to Muhammed . . .

Here is a screen shot from the homepage at Denis-Carl Robidoux's Blog.

Screen-Capture: Today's Featured Link

Denis-Carl offers his beatiful photo images for free, to use as screensavers, backgrounds, or for scrapbooking to your own collection of borrowed art, artifacts and photographs.

Visit Denis-Carl's 'site' for an inspiring 'sight'.

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 6 Febuary

2007-02-06T04:10:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"Around a widow's door slanders gather."

. . (148) Chinese

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

"Abandoned Turcot rail yards come to life with creative vision"

2007-02-05T15:21:00.000-05:00

By, Andy Riga
The Gazette
Published: Monday, February 05, 2007

Photographs by Gordon Beck

It's a sprawling wasteland scarred by graffiti and dotted with tall, drab, decrepit concrete pillars - a scab on Montreal's landscape that grumbling commuters inch past in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

To you, maybe.

To photographer Ken McLaughlin, the Turcot interchange and abandoned rail yards in west-end Montreal are a visual feast, a hiking trail, an online passion.
To visual artist Doug Scholes, the interchange is a creative inspiration, a temple for the automobile that evokes Britain's Stonehenge.

To archaeologist Daniel Marchand, it's an unfinished work of art that he's anxious to complete, paint can in hand.

Cheap Priceless Editions could just as easily have blogged this item under the banner headline:

Local Blogger Makes The Headlines !!!

CPE has frequently called its readers attention to the blogroll (left sidebar) links. There, Blogaulaire links you to Walking Turcot Yards (WTY) as a photo-commentary site run by colleagues and friends. (There are other interesting links to check out as well)

Today, special mention should be made of one in particular.

The Montreal Gazette just now ran a piece based on interviews of the blog owner over at Walking Turcot Yards (WTY). The blogger and the site got a well deserved, long feature write up, signed by Andy Riga. CLICK on the title ABOVE and CHECK IT OUT.

The upside to all this media attention is that the publicity is clearly favourable: the text gives positive reasons to support the alternatives that concerned residents and urban reformers propose for reclaiming abandoned urban spaces to make the zone accessible, enjoyable and enriching for all local residents.

The potential downside to the attention now drawn to Turcot Yards is that it attracts still more speculators who also read The Gazette like vultures.(These real estate interests keep landing on the blog Walking Turcot Yards as well as our own Cheap Priceless Editions browsing around to check out what we post and see how all this may affect their own, self-interested commercial proposals!)

So all this increased regional attention sort of ups the ante on moving toward better alternatives for the abandoned site. Montrealers who yearn for more green spaces need to be mobilised sooner than later.

Though these considerations are no marginal matter, YOU THE READER have a nice long article to enjoy and maybe bookmark. So we shall get on with the blogged content for your own further enlightenment!

"I'm sure people driving by or stuck in traffic think, 'How can they improve this piece of s---?' " McLaughlin said during a walk on the desolate stretch that he describes as the world's largest urban abandoned space. "But a lot of people have no idea what was on the ground here."

They also probably haven't meandered underneath, appreciating the view. He realizes his walks are illegal, but he has only ever been stopped once - by a Surete du Quebec officer who warned him he risks a $142 fine.

"Image-wise, it is very interesting because it looks so different at different times of the day. I like the shapes, the lines, the lighting, the fact that you've got this huge open space in a big city," said McLaughlin.

Big Sky at Turcot Yards

"I like the dramatic sky - you see a lot of big sky at Turcot Yards," he added, pointing to an expanse that is clear blue but for a few wisps of cloud. "There are also subtle little things - the way things grow here. You're constantly seeing nature trying to grab something back."

McLaughlin has taken 1,500 photos of the place, 75 of which he has posted online: colourful graffiti on pillars; views from a now-demolished observation tower; shots of stuff he comes across - an empty suitcase, piles of rocks, locked bikes.

He also points visitors to other sites focused on Turcot, such as Urban Exploration Montreal, a group of people who trespass to explore, then document their endeavours online. At Turcot, they picked through the detritus of abandoned (now razed) buildings, then posted pictures and videos of the adventure.

On Walking Turcot Yards, visitors find historic photos and tidbits about the area's past. They also view pictures and articles about creative ways other cities are dealing with transportation and other urban projects: a colourful, functional and innovative highway/sound barrier in Melbourne, Australia; a green-and-yellow interchange in Dallas; an urban garbage dump turned into a 3-hectare public park in Cairo.

McLaughlin envisages a park at Turcot - "some kind of public space that connects to St. Henri and that has staircases coming down from N.D.G."

In the summer, he braves swarms of mosquitoes to walk a trail along the Falaise St. Jacques. The poplar-lined escarpment on the property's north perimeter is used by migratory birds and is one of the city's protected "ecoterritories."

The article also discusses St. Henri resident artist Doug Scholes's artistic renderings of Turcot Yards visions on canvas and with photo-montage.

" 'If you're on site, there is a sense of awe and wonder at its sheer size,' an experience he compares to entering a Gothic church."

Scholes, 45, lives in St. Henri, close to the interchange. He has researched its history and sees it as a symbol of 1950s and '60s urban idealism, when the raised highway was like something out of The Jetsons.

"There was always this underlying idealistic view that they were going to somehow make city living better (and) be able to move through the city freely without inhibiting or damaging the communities," he said. "In fact, it damaged the communities, creating fissures."

- emphasis adde by Blogaulaire

Links to websites

Links to websites that find interchange worth exploring

Walking Turcot Yard: http://neath.wordpress.com

Meandres Urbains Essentiels: www.meandres.org

Urban Exploration Montreal: http://uem.minimanga.com/abandoned/turcot/

Bilingualism Has Protective Effect In Delaying Onset Of Dementia By Four Years, Canadian Study Shows

2007-02-05T09:55:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Maud for posting this medical news link today on her blog and thanks to GalleyCat at Media Bistro for pointing at it.

5 February 2007

Medical News Today

Canadian scientists have found astonishing evidence that the lifelong use of two languages can help delay the onset of dementia symptoms by four years compared to people who are monolingual.

There has been much interest and growing scientific literature examining how lifestyle factors such as physical activity, education and social engagement may help build "cognitive reserve" in later years of life. Cognitive reserve refers to enhanced neural plasticity, compensatory use of alternative brain regions, and enriched brain vasculature, all of which are thought to provide a general protective function against the onset of dementia symptoms.

Now scientists with the Rotman Research Institute at the Baycrest Research Centre for Aging and the Brain have found the first evidence that another lifestyle factor, bilingualism, may help delay dementia symptoms.

. . .

"The data show a huge protective effect," adds co-investigator Dr. Craik, who cautioned that this is still a preliminary finding but nonetheless in line with a number of other recent findings about lifestyle effects on dementia.

The study is published in the February 2007 issue of Neuropsychologia (Vol.45, No.2).
(Article Date: 12 Jan 2007 - 11:00 PST)

Although this study was carried out in Canada, which has an 'Official Bilingualism' policy, you may note that, in the majority, the subjects were not people speaking French and English, but languages acquired abroad, before immigrating to North America. Maybe (probably) it is impossible to find even a few hundred speakers of Canada's two official languages close enough to Baycrest to carry out similar investigations regarding French and English bilingual fluency.

Where such positive findings, however, could have great value is on language acquisition in the home. Here parents often need encouragement to speak to their own children in the parents' own mother tongue(s), not just adopt the language which predominates in the local community and school.

It was striking recently to see and hear a French-language Radio Canada televised interview of beat author and poet Jack Kerouac taped in the early '60s. To the surprise of his Québecois audience it seems, His French was quite good, because his parents had spoken French to him at home (though at school Kerouac was taught in English). Many mill towns in New England took two generations before the French Canadian descendents all had lost their language heritage.

I see more and more of the same among many immigrants I meet today, thankfully. It's quite a contrast with what looked like a trend toward parental unilingualism to foster quick integration and cultural camouflage, particularly among southern European immigrants.

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 5 Febuary

2007-02-05T06:10:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"It is better to offend a guest than it is to starve him."

. . (144) Chinese

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 4 Febuary

2007-02-04T08:37:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"Check the weather when you venture out; check the faces when you venture in."

. . (137) Chinese

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 3 Febuary

2007-02-03T11:07:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"Beware the man who incites the dog to worry the pig."

. . (134) Chinese

Finding My Curious Niche

2007-02-03T05:35:00.000-05:00

All I want to do in this post is to make a few remarks about objects and their market value. Maybe say something about MY market values.

Everyone recognizes some objects as rare and valuable. There exists a ready market and high value for a few (rare or not) found objects. And then there are the objects that are rare yet obscure, curious or marginal to our contemporary life (appropriate for a window display but of little market value).

I will be selfish in this post, or a bit self-centred, in only looking at some of my own immediate interests. Because I do not know much of what the pro's know in these rare book circles I hear so much about; nor am I much of an adept in the pop culture or mass entertainment media surrounding us in North America -- so I'd say my own focus is there at the end, toward the obscure, the curious and the marginal.

Know Thyself

Some people are trend-setters and have the charisma to exercise great influence on the people they meet, even casually. I would be curious to know whether such a one as this has the Midas Touch - whether the curios and various tools and utensils they collect would fetch premium prices on, say, e-Bay. I would bet not. I would bet that we would find that tens of thousands of offers just like Mister & Miss's are out there driving prices down.

If your tastes run in the common groove of the millions then you should know it and take advantage of it.

Some people are educators. They want to teach people about the connections they have discovered between art and artifacts, history and institutions, demography and language - whatever. If they hold out a 'found' object for you to regard, they can then begin to tell you a long story about it.

But it is the telling that has value, not, intrinsically, the object they are holding up for view.

If you are one of these educators, I hope you find an audience and a good venue for a multimedia presentation. Or start a blog.

There are the artists. Interesting, for example, that Picasso collected objects about him in his studio as if he were stocking a prop room for the Metropolitan Opera. But artists should create, should give added esthetic value to found objects. The market for what they create is not my focus.

If you are an artist, go for it.

So, apart from dull gray men and women, and the domesticated ones as they raise a brood, or the cultivators, sailors and other adventurers (or a few brilliant mathematicians here and there) -- all we are left with is a group of merchants trying to market objects, viz: collectable found objects. Earning a living at it.

Know thyself (remember?)

Well marketing ain't enough for me. I want to work surrounded by ALL of the people I described above. And I think I have a magic formula to find MY groove. I want to have a bookstall like the ones I've heard exist on a quai by the Seine in Paris. (I don't know how I missed visiting them on my trip to Europe!)

Like the stands (kiosks) at the Old Port of Montreal down along our quai (docks). I'd like a space where all sorts of locals would hang out comfortably and maybe perform (I know a clown) for small knots of curious tourists.

One advantage of such places is that they offer ample space for displays of antiques, curios found artifacts alongside the wares on sale. A disadvantage, apart from inclement weather, would be for when I need peace and quiet - far from the maddening masses and that madhouse of marginals out begging from and pandering to all those bemused crowds.

I'll look into it. Maybe I'll join the mad men.

It takes one to know one.

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 2 Febuary

2007-02-02T10:22:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"Ignore an old man's advice and one day be a beggar."

. . (128) Chinese

Canoe floats Rogers' boat

2007-02-02T05:54:00.000-05:00

Media giants set aside rivalry for mutual gain

By TIMOTHY LERICHE, SUN MEDIA

Media rivals Rogers Publishing Limited and Canoe Inc. will join forces online to present Rogers' magazine content at Canoe's Internet portal.

And Canoe, a Quebecor Inc. company, expects to continue lining up new content and business partners in Canada and abroad to widen the scope of its canoe.ca site.

"Rogers and Quebecor are competitors, so why are we partnering?" asked Patrick Lauzon, executive vice-president of Canoe, anticipating observer questions.

"Online is a very different landscape in terms of where our competition is,"
said Lauzon " . . where we could be the best in is in managing and distributing content. We feel we can work with other publishers to build a single entry point."

. . . Rogers' publications includ(e) Chatelaine, Maclean's, Today's Parent, Flare, LouLou Magazine, Glow, Canadian Business, and Chocolat Magazine . . .

"We're taking 11 Rogers properties and putting the canoe.ca heading on all of them," said Lauzon. "It's a mutually beneficial agreement. There's a business arrangement that I can't really discuss in details."
. . .

Canoe attracts 6 ,781,000 online visitors a month -- about half in French. Its other linked services include employment, personals, autos and continuing education.

. . . Louise Clements, vice-president of digital and interactive at Rogers Consumer Publishing, (related that) the 11 Rogers sites attract about 1.25 million "unique" visitors a month -- meaning repeat visitors are not counted.

"We think it's a great fit," said Clements. "We have high quality content in both languages. We go very deep and they go very broad. Both parties are going to benefit from increased traffic and increased time on the site."
--------------
BCE (Bell) bought CTV*, didn't they, back some 5 or 6 years ago? With LCN, it's TVA who provides the news on Canoe.ca. Does that mean BCE and Quebecor are competitors but now NOT Rogers, who partners with Videotron, a Quebecor property, on cellular networks?

Who then, in media, are we NOT talking about as a participant in this media onvergence on the web at Canoe.ca? asks Blogaulaire, puzzled.

For starters, and merely skimming the surface: it's NOT ( . . probably not??) Transcontinental, CanWest Global, CBC, Telus, Murdoch, Black, Bronfman . . . AOL Time-Warner, Disney, Stronach's T.V. sports cable . . lots of empires, some very powerful Canadian ones at that, are not implicated above. But are we certain EVEN THOSE don't fit into this picture SOMEWHERE. (But how?) (Who owns Hearst?)

Well . . I guess everything and everybody in media is intertwined, inter-connected. BCE as well. We'll have to just wait and watch for more shake-outs. Like the way we've seen media constantly converge. The 'drama' has lasted now for some 30 years . . and we're still counting fewer and fewer players.

Until very recently, cross-ownership was a fairly specialized aspect of the concern over concentration in the media, but it has taken centre stage in Canada in recent months as the result of three major deals: the purchase of Hollinger daily newspapers by CanWest, owner of Global Television Network; the alliance between the Thomson group, owner of the Globe and Mail, and BCE, the new owner of the CTV network; and, finally, the acquisition of the Vidéotron group (TVA) by Quebecor.

Within a matter of a few months, following the merger of AOL and Time Warner, the Canadian media industry has undergone a profound transformation.

Media Studies (2002)

Another Harry Potter Appears in Mid-Summer

2007-02-01T13:50:00.000-05:00

The Deathly Hallows, by J. K. Rowling, which will be released in July 2007 ("A Midsummer's Night Dream" for booksellers I guess) might have side benefits for used book shops if it helps clear out the accumulated 'back list' most shops now hold in HP titles. Just buy one new title and put it in the middle of your display and see what that fetches for the surrounding dead pulp - that's my advice. (You aren't overstocked? Pardon moi.)

I really have nothing more to say, other than my pitch for carrying multilingual stock, especially in French, Spanish and German. So let us give a pitch in Espanol. (My Spanish 'language toolbar' is failing to perform on these 'n' accents, sorry!)

AP Spanish | 02/01/2007 |

'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows'
Associated Press

LONDRES - 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows', el último de los siete libros sobre las aventuras del niño mago, será publicado el 21 de julio, dijo el jueves la escritora J.K. Rowling.

Rowling anunció la fecha de la publicación en su página de internet.
Bloomsbury, su casa editora británica, dijo que publicará una edición de tapas duras de niños, una de adultos de tapas duras, y una edición especial de regalo y un audiolibro el mismo día.

Scholastic Children's Books, la casa editora en Estados Unidos, manifestó que ofrecerá una edición de tapas duras a 34,99 dólares, una edición de lujo a 65 dólares, y una edición reforzada para bibliotecas a 39,99 dólares."

Many New York City publishers are getting into their own Spanish editions for the 11 million Hispanophones in the North American continental market, so supplying the multilingual market is becoming both easier and a necessity. For used book dealers, it all depends on attracting a larger customer base by expanding your stock linguistically.

A word to the wise . . .

Oh, by the way, here at CPE we would like readers to point us toward an essay or two that compares the history of Latin American authors with UK authors 'getting the jump on' US fiction writers.¨Particulary in the genre of fantasy mixed with the quotidian (or 'magic realism'). Is not this half centuty of the English getting the jump on everyone in the genre of the pure fantastic worthy of deep thought and criticism? Tolkien and Rowling could compare, I believe, with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in their respective cultural domains. Or do you think I'm out lunching on fish 'n' chips with this one? Please comment.

Do not forget that T. S. Eliot, the St. Louis boy, became a Brit and that Ezra Pound became a Euro-whatever to go on to become the last centuries central icons in poetry. Europe is having her revenge inside the pop markets of word an song I do believe, and over a span of 50 years: except in the confessional and grit lit. Please respond.

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 1 February

2007-02-01T02:58:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"Who cares what you wear in February and August?"

. . (128) Chinese

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 31 January

2007-01-31T10:41:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"However many things you may have on your mind do not go to bed without looking in the kitchen."

. . (123) Chinese

University of Michigan 'Sees' A Post on CPE -- YIPEE !

2007-01-31T00:52:00.000-05:00

Today, proudly, Cheap Priceless Editions was given a linked mention on the University of Michigan's list of Internet sites and posts (Boxxet Links) under the category 'Education'. We made the 'Best' Box.

The university's search site of various links is updated daily and choses a different focus each day. CPE was referenced under an announcement regarding Google partnering with the University of Texas to digitize part of their library collection. A similar project, the initial one in fact, of the Google Library Project, was undertaken at the U of M in December 2004.

Blogaulaire, along with several other bloggers with far greater expertise and experience than moi, highlighted our reservations about Google having free reign in how such digitized archives are distributed outside non-profit, public foundations and universities.

The only connection Blogaulaire has with this university is that it is the one and only campus venue at which I got together with Abbie Hoffman back when we were . . .

But I digress. Maybe if the U of M knew more about that 'moment', they would not have chosen to upload a link to CPE!

I'm kidding folks. Abbie's dead and I've mellowed so much, I might as well be. :) (wry, withering smile)

See HERE !!

A Great Hollywood Writer is Dead - A long, long post to bring us trekkies up to speed . .

2007-01-30T06:33:00.000-05:00

Subtitle =
"There were T.V. scriptwriters around before Gene Roddenberry; there were Big Studios before Paramount Pictures.")

Screen & Script T.V. Writer Died on Saturday

'"I Love Lucy' writer Bob Carroll dies"

By JOHN ROGERS
Associated Press Writer

NOTA BENE: Blogaulaire - Bob Carroll worked with some of Hollywood's greats. He was there at the beginning of television, as vaudeville morphed into the electronic media.

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Bob Carroll Jr., a pioneering television writer who worked on all of Lucille Ball's TV shows, including "I Love Lucy," has died. He was 87.

Carroll, who had been in failing health for the past month, died Saturday, family friend and fellow TV writer Thomas Watson told The Associated Press on Monday.

. . . This B ackground Piece provided by browsing around . . .

When the show moved to television in 1953, Ball took her writers with her, changing the name to "I Love Lucy" and adding real-life husband Desi Arnaz to the cast.

Carroll and Pugh went on to work on every episode of the long-running show, Watson said, as well as many episodes of "The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour," "The Lucy Show," "Here's Lucy" and "Life With Lucy." The latter show went off the air in 1986, three years before Ball's death.

Many of the shows had essentially the same premise: Lucy gets involved in some routine function and, often through well-intentioned deviousness coupled with incredible clumsiness, manages to turn it into a pratfall-filled disaster.

Carroll and (Madelyn Pugh) Davis also collaborated on several other projects, including the 1968 film "Yours, Mine and Ours" and the Arnaz-produced sitcom "The Mothers-In-Law."

© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

----------------------BELOW SEE: The Museum of Broadcast Communications

Desi Arnaz with Lucille Ball

DESI (Desiderio Alberto, III) ARNAZ. Born in Santiago, Cuba, 2 March 1917. Attended Colegio Delores, Jesuit Preparatory School, Santiago, Cuba. United States Medical Corps., 1943-45. Married (1) Lucille Ball, 30 November 1940 (divorced, 1960), children: Lucie Desiree, Desiderio Alberto, IV (Desi, Jr.). Began entertainment career as singer, with Xavier Cugat Band, 1935-36; formed own band at The Conga Club, Miami, Florida, 1938, height of the "conga craze"; Broadway musical debut, Too Many Girls, 1939; RKO film version of the musical, 1940; music director for the Bob Hope radio show, 1946-47; performed with Ball in radio show, My Favorite Husband, 1947-50; produced pilot for I Love Lucy with own funds, 1951; performed as Ricky Ricardo, I Love Lucy, 1951-57; president and co-founder, Desilu Productions, 1951-62. Recipient: Best Performance of the Month, Photoplay Magazine, 1943, for Bataan.

Died in Del Mar, California 2 December 1986.

TELEVISION

1951-57 I Love Lucy (actor, producer)
1958-60 Westinghouse Playhouse (producer)
1962-65, 67 The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour (actor, producer)

FILMS

Too Many Girls (1940); Father Takes a Wife (1941); The Navy Comes Through (1942); Four Jacks and a Jill (1942); Bataan (1943); Holiday in Havana (1949); Cuban Pete (1950); The Long, Long Trailer (1954); Forever Darling (1956); The Escape Artist (1982).

PUBLICATIONS

A Book by Arnaz Desi. New York: William Morrow, 1976.

BOOKS: FURTHER READING

Anderson, Christopher. Hollywood/TV. Austin, Texas: The University of Texas Press, 1994.

Andrews, Bart. The "I Love Lucy" Book. New York: Doubleday, 1985.
(for sale on this CPE site)

Andrews, Bart, and Thomas J. Watson. Loving Lucy. New York: St. Martin's, 1980.

Brady, Kathleen. Lucille: The Life of Lucille Ball. New York: Hyperion, 1994.

Firmat, Gustavo Perez. Life On the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1994.

Harris, Warren G. Lucy & Desi: The Legendary Love Story of Television's Most Famous Couple. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

Higham, Charles. Lucy: The Life of Lucille Ball. New York: St. Martin's, 1986.

Sanders, Coyne Steven, and Tom Gilbert. Desilu: The Story of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. New York: Morrow 1993.

Schatz, Thomas. "Desilu, I Love Lucy, and the Rise of Network TV." In, Thompson, Robert, and Gary Burns, editors, Making Television: Authorship and the Production Process. New York: Praeger, 1990.

Desi Arnaz

(H)e was one of Hollywood's most perceptive, and powerful, producers in television's early years. His shrewd business skills and his realization of particular combinations of the television's technological and cultural connections enabled him to develop aspects of the medium that remain central to its economic and cultural force.

(In the early 1940s) Lucy and Desi set out on a nation-wide stage tour to designed to gauge public reaction to their working together in a comedy act. CBS was im-pressed with the positive public response to the couple as well as with a sample script for a TV series developed by the writers from My Favorite Husband.

The basics were there, including Desi as Ricky Ricardo, a struggling band leader, and Lucille as Lucy, a housewife with little talent but a giant yearning to break into show business. This homey battle-of-the-sexes premise for the show convinced the network that viewers could relate, and a pilot version of the program impressed the Philip Morris Company, which agreed to sponsor thirty-nine programs for the 1951-52 season on the CBS network Monday nights at 9:00 P.M

The Desilu Empire

Desilu logo as it showed in the ending credits of Star Trek. Desilu was a production company formed in 1951 by Lucille Ball and her husband, Desi Arnaz. The success of the television show "I Love Lucy" enabled Desilu to grow and expand, producing such programs as The Andy Griffith Show. (The downtown Mayberry set was sometimes later used for location shots for Star Trek.)

After the breakup of the Ball-Arnaz marriage Desilu remained successful. In 1961, Ball bought out Arnaz and became the first woman ever to run a major Hollywood studio. Desilu later brought forth shows like Mission: Impossible and Star Trek. Her success continued unabatedly until 1967 when Ball sold Desilu to Gulf+Western which merged it with its other production company (the studio's next-door neighbor), Paramount.

The name "Desilu" comes from Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. Desilu had a first-refusal agreement with CBS, which is why Star Trek was first pitched to that network. When CBS passed on the show, NBC was then approached.

The World's Largest Studio

From Memory Alpha, the free Star Trek reference.
(Redirected from Desilu Studios) via Anwers Com (A. C. ripped it from Wikipedia and gave proper credit.)

Carroll discussed the fact that he and his writing partner Pugh do not receive ANY compensation for the I Love Lucy re-runs, as would be standard for writers today. He has, however, kept his sense of humor over the situation telling a reporter: "Do you think I'd be sitting here if I'd had residuals?" Carroll asked. "I'd have flown you down to Cuba for this interview if I had."

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 30 January

2007-01-30T06:12:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"Old trees are hollow inside; old men see things clearly."

. . (120) Chinese

We Call Our Bus Patty Patchwork

2007-01-29T08:00:00.000-05:00

//sarcasm//
This application may not have much bandwidth but it moves faster in P2P downloads than the legacy site servers in its class.

It's like distributed computing using a needle and thread for modular interface configuration. //END SARCASM//

Two quilting buddies in southeastern Iowa wanted to open a quilting shop but couldn't decide in which town to settle. So they bought a bus for $1,200 and took their fabric on the road.

All this commercial linking in crazy-quilt patterns could spread virally, who knows?

Two quilting buddies in southeastern Iowa wanted to open a quilting shop but couldn't decide in which town to settle. So they bought a bus for $1,200 and took their fabric on the road.

More than two years ago, quilting buddies Gay Murphy and Kris Kelderman were pondering the idea of owning a quilting store when they retired.

"Being in rural Iowa, it was kind of hard to think of a place to put a quilting shop," said Murphy, 43, who lives in Eddyville, in southeastern Iowa. Kelderman, 52, is from nearby Kirkville.

That's when Murphy's childhood memories of visiting mobile libraries while living in Des Moines** sparked the idea: How about a quilt shop on wheels?

Their business, Patchwork Peddlers, has been on the move since January 2005, delivering quilting supplies to customers in rural Iowa. They also regularly park at the Hy-Vee parking lot in Albia on Mondays, and at the Hy-Vee in Ottumwa on Tuesdays.

The two women have also taken their green 1984 Ford Bluebird bus to visit quilt guilds in the state, as well as in Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri and Minnesota.

"We call our bus Patty Patchwork," Murphy said.

** - Blogaulaire: 'Been there, done that; glad it inspired someone.' And I was paid 69 cents an hour to travel with and reshelve the mobile library - not bad for a 14-year-old kid at the time. Not as good as caddying, but better than delivering newspapers.

pps: //edit added// The more I think about this Des Moines Register article, the more questions I have. Murphy and Kelderman retire 'kinda yung' wouldn't you say? So I wonder from what employment each 'retired'. Plus, they landed a damn good set of wheels for the price if they can buzz around eastern Iowa every week and go to quilt guilds from Oklahoma to Minnesota whenever they please.

A book-bus that is or was at one time operated by a non-profit group once came to a conference and book sale I attended. The vehicle was very special because it was modified to hold handcrafted chapbooks to promote the work of poets and artisans. So the load was very much lighter than with most mobile lending libraries. If anyone here know more about this, please post a link in your comment. I'll see what I can find on this end. Already, the first day it is posted, this article has proved to be very popular - several hits from interested persons.

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 29 January

2007-01-29T06:06:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"A man's breast is the best wallet for his troubles."

. . (116) Japanese

Table-Top Imaging of Books Kept Blogaulaire Busy

2007-01-28T10:20:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I did not post to my blog 'cuz I banged out 157 photo shots of books. Once I have my homemade diffusion screen 'tent' set up, once the tripod, lights and backdrop is in place, I blaze away at snapping the shutter and slapping the books in the 'saddle' to have their portrait taken.

Why So Many Books?

It was to upload an image, eventually, to the meta vendor sites where a bookseller friend has listed her entire 14,500 book inventory. Livres Bronx Books is not far from where I live, so it is easy for me to set up there or on my own table at home (and schlock the books back and forth).

Yesterday, it was partly a dry-run, partly my own books which my friend may upload on her site as reimbursement for my work, and partly her books. But don't worry, I'm not setting up to image all fourteen-and-a-half thousand books she's got. Some of those have been on-line nearly 10 years. They're dead pulp. Ready for some 25-cent or 50-cent bin out on the sidewalk (come spring, come summer) in front of her shop. (But SHE knows not to ask what I think she should do. You don't want to go there either, nor see the sparks fly . . so we'll just drop that hot potato, okay?)

As well, yesterday and early this am I registered with flickr and started uploading images as a public archive. I have not decided where I want to take those collections yet. Until I do, I'll make book-related photos public, ditto some of the urban imagery that I will share with the sites UER and Walking Turcot Yard, and make the rest private - to share on a needs-to-see basis.

Oh, I forgot to mention that another friend has opened a wool and fabric shop is St. Jean sur Richelieu. Actually she bought out the former owner. My daughter takes her newborn over to the wool and knitting boutique some days and the 'regulars' are getting to know my grandchild. I wish it was closer to where I live (it is in fact 25 km to the south). But maybe I'll relent on my 'simplicity' and buy another (the latest) in that long line of clunkers I've owned since the $50 Chevy with dual carbs (1957) which I shared with a grad student back when. I wasn't a driver in '57, that's for sure. So I'll let YOU guess how old it was. We kept a quarter barrel of motor oil - I swear, a barrel with a pump - on the back seat . . that Chev burned so much oil! Now that we are so globally warmed, I . . . 'Don't mourn, organize!' I already said that above.

Helen Hill Memorial Website Media Mention

2007-01-28T10:00:00.000-05:00

Family, friends and fellow community and cinema activists have been contributing to the pages on the webpage that links to this post's title.

The number of articles, website references and bloggers who have had something to say about the murder of Hill more than 3 weeks ago in NOLA is astounding. That someone makes the effort to pull those links together is commendable. Helen herself, I'll bet, if in her lifetime all that news coverage had highlighted her volunteer work teaching and feeding and offering support to pre- and post-Katrina residents of the Delta Region and New Orleans . . well people like Helen tend to just throw that stuff away so they can get on to the next challenge.

One focus of her impact on other people doing good volunteer work was in encouraging people in Halifax to pitch in after the flooding of NOLA. And when she lived there she influenced cinematographers to find community themes for creative experimentation with documentary film. If we started with the tens of blog posts listed on the HelenHill Org 'articles' page, it would be possible to document what it takes to pull one small community together. Was it Food Not Bombs that helped mobilize Halifax volunteers? Was it the filmmakers? Was it one individual?

In any case, thanks to the people who pulled those links together. Hopefully there will be some follow-up study and help us remember the motto: 'Don't Mourn, Organize!'

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 28 January

2007-01-28T09:55:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"It is not every day that a delicious rice-cake falls into the open mouth."

. . (110) Japanese

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 26 January

2007-01-26T08:20:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"A thousand drinks with a true friend are not enough; half a sentence with an enemy is too much."

. . (102) Chinese

Encyclopedic Archives, Books and Image Libraries : Combinations Bigger than Google

2007-01-26T06:28:00.000-05:00

Today Blogaulaire discovered two compendia tools being compiled and hosted at the University of Sherbrooke, here in Québec. The Bilan du Siècle and the Perspective Monde are searchable archives that are like textual and visual electronic encyclopedias. If I were a reference librarian working in Québec, I would have links to both on my desktop always at the ready.

Links to both sites are on the homepage of the Faculté des lettres et sciences.

A list of the images in the archives for Bilan du Siècle is HERE. You don't need your high school French to read images.

When you browse to Perspective Monde, notice the button at the top of the page for ENGLISH and you will access the micropedia sections that have been translated.

This brings me to the issue of digital libraries.

In the proper hands, it is fantastic to have documents available in a library and on the Internet for viewing on a monitor. However, the real work and brain muscle goes into putting the documents into a search tree with worthwhile structure and commentary. Then it is important to provide labels and short, topical article entries, illustrations and tables, if what is made searchable is intended for anyone other than an advanced scholar in his or her specialised field of research.

The Sherbrooke archive source: HERE

The team at the University of Sherbrooke should be praised for what they have digitized, annotated and made searchable on line. The articles and timelines, just to mention two features I stumbled upon, are well done. (I hope some of you readers will look into this. I also hope that the work has been translated into English.)

I do not think anybody working for Google is competent to accomplish the same thing. Blogaulaire is not saying that Google ever claimed that they are competent at such scholarly, educational enterprises. But many, many people are creating buzz and momentum such that Google becomes the 800-pound gorilla that crushes all the competent cage mates (the real librarians and scholarly writers) up against the bars and out of the metaphoric zoo!

There is a huge, looming problem here. There is a threat on the horizon if anybody in their right mind EVER places confidence in Google or another private corporation and pays them to take on the sort of archival and electronic publishing projects that are currently the mandate of institutionally recognised teams, such as this one, that Blogaulaire just discovered.

Why bring Google into this?

This is all about the 'Google scans the world' issue as blogger J Godsey so tersely puts it on her blog Bibliophile Bullpen.

On another blog we are about to cite below, the matter is headlined in the post title and quote we are also about to cite. Links and credits also follow.

The Digital Battle For Our Literary Heritage: The Internet Archive vs. Google

From: Book Patrol

By Michael Lieberman - Antiquarian Bookseller
From his blog on the website of the Seattle newspaper The Post Intelligencer .

Michael Lieberman also has a personal blog by the same title where you find fewer enhancements like images and less emphasis on running human interest feature articles.

QUOTE

If Google wants to digitize the collections of private institutions by all means go ahead but to venture into the realm of digitizing the content of public institutions (remember University libraries are public institutions) is a slippery slope that unfortunately we have started to slide down.

We need to do all we can to stop this digital freight train. The message is simple. For profit companies cannot digitize the content of public institutions or public libraries.

Let the Internet Archive take care of digitizing the treasures of our public institutions and libraries. We can set aside a portion of the budget for the Library of Congress (a current supporter) and the Smithsonian Institution if need be or how about a 1% digital archive tax on every new computer purchased.

The point is we need to get creative here. Fast.

We need to buy back the rights that were sold to Google (at a premium of course) and go about doing this the right way.

END QUOTE

Lieberman's post is worth blogging in extenso. And thank you, Michael Lieberman, for crediting CPE for finding one of the source articles you link in your post.

Lately two of my posts here have been 'ripped' by both electronic and print media without so much as giving Cheap Priceless Editions eve a credit line! Thanks for the one you ran on Book Patrol, sincerely.

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 25 January

2007-01-25T07:09:00.000-05:00

"It is easier to acquire great lands than it is to find a true brother ."

. . (97) Chinese

Book Patrol: A Haven for Book Lovers

2007-01-24T22:34:00.000-05:00

There is almost always something interesting to read in the Pacific Northwest's blogger's bookshop run by this guy at Book Patrol.

Both CPE's post title and the linked article title below will take you over there to finish reading this piece. (There is an image as well.) And be sure to visit all the LINKS to your right on the sidebar here.

Any time you want to search to see what a book is selling for on the Internet, type in one or more lines in the box above and click. It's that easy!

'New and Used' an exhibit of photographs by Marc Joseph:

"Opening today in The Cooley Gallery at Reed College in Portland, Oregon is the U.S. debut of 'New and Used' an exhibit of photographs by Marc Joseph. Joseph traveled across America photographing 'the spaces and objects of independent book and record stores'. Steidl has recently published these photos in the book version of 'New and Used'. "

Keeping current on news about digital bookmaking

2007-01-24T08:08:00.000-05:00

A KEYWORD 'CHEAT SHEET' for your own web crawl with hints, links and keywords to 'stay current' by searching for the e-book revolution manifesto.

I just linked over to slashdot.

A handful of regular posters over at slashdot.org have been scrutinizing news sources to decide whether Google is 'enjoying' success or failure in their touted Digitised Reading Revolution.

All the commenting and posting over there that I looked at was about this new sagaof Google entering the field of e-books while forging several partnerships with universities. Google is beginning to create vast digital libraries for these academic clients. (There are still lawsuits pending over these projects. The plaintifs, apparently, are some the the US's biggest book publishers.)

Google is being sued for an intent to engage in copyright violations by American publishing companies. Bitain's flagship publishing company Oxford) is NOT suing for divorce from Google, however; quite the contrary.

So far, this controversy is all about scanning library books.

On several other fronts, the Oxford University Press is working hand-in-glove with Google on commercial stuff like putting a Spanish dictionary on the iPod(TM). The terrain has become difficult to negotiate for casual onlookers out strolling the landscape of publishing. The paths fork and divide, some are probably dead-ends. The issue becomes complicated and contradictory.

It is at times like these - with 'dead tree' publishers facing challenges right and left - that we 'needs read' informed people's blog posts and online comments to discover what, if any analysis makes sense. The case is not yet in.

Blogaulaire offers help with a few keyword tools for your own Internet searches and for crawling the web on a news aggregator, if you use one.

Meme Theme = An e-book on my iPod'"is like an MP3 for the eyes"

- said with a sigh :)
Here are some keywords for search strings (some are meme themes) that you can search for on Technocrati, Yahoo, or the Google Blog Search option):
"book +" "search service", scan, digitize, searchable, + "library collections" +,"digital libraries", "Evan Schnittman", "book downloads" +, "Ralph Oman".

Other keywords that help zoom in on the topic are: nettamere (a regular slashdot poster) and "Google Print Program".

A QUOTE
from Elinor Mills
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: October 24, 2005

The Print Program has two components, one for publishers and one for libraries. Under the Google Publisher Program, the company is working with book publishers to make titles searchable and easy to purchase. The search result pages include advertisements if publishers want them, and most of the revenue goes to the publishers, Google said.

The controversial part of the Print Program, which has prompted two lawsuits so far, is the Print Library Project. Under the Library Project, the search giant is scanning, digitizing and making searchable parts or all of the collections from Stanford University, Harvard University, Oxford University, the University of Michigan and The New York Public Library.

from "Google's battle over library books
As the search giant pushes ahead with its book-scanning project, publishers are crying copyright foul, not fair use.

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 24 January

2007-01-24T07:46:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"Anyone who owns just three ounces of flour should never have to depend on his wife's family ."

. . (89) Japanese

Notes on blogs and the new media revolution

2007-01-23T08:37:00.000-05:00

by liza
(14 November 2006 - personal blog
on culturekitchen's site)

NOTE: CPE will be adding the main page link to the blog culturekitchen on our blogroll list in the right-hand sidebar.

We were struck by an interesting piece found at CK. If there is consistent interest shown by my readers (if people use the link), I will keep looking for stuff to blog over from the site.

Opening her post she wrote: "Tonight I have the opportunity to talk about blogs, feminism and the Web 2.0 revolution at Barnard University's Center for Research on Women."---------------------------------------------

. . . the idea of feminism as a politics of the "personal turned public". The main idea of "Las tretas del debil" is that Power is not about fixed dialectical opositions : Strong vs. Weak. Power is a process of making spaces for expression. When Ludmer writes how, this explains women writer's preference for smaller literary genres like letters, autobiographies and diaries. Styles on the margins of literary and non-literary writing, called also reality-based writing, you can see how blogs would fit nicely into the category of minor litertures where personal realities are used as power machines.

Ludmer's article owes a huge debt to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Theory and History of Literature, Vol 30). Compared to amount of pages these guys produced for their magnus opus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Kafka would seem like a piddling of a little book. I believe though it is perfect for our discussion of blogs because it synthesizes the theory and praxis of becoming minor they developed in their mammoth collaboration. In turn, the concept of becoming minor explains the current upheaval created by bloggers and it points to their possibility as power machines.

A ‘minor literature’ is political, collective, revolutionary, and even spatial —deterritorializing one terrain as it maps another.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, the ‘minor literature’ maps the passage of this deterritorialization; as such, it is a literature of the people; as such, it is also thoroughly political. “The literary machine thus becomes the relay for a revolutionary machine-to-come, not at all for ideological reasons but because the literary machine alone is determined to fill the conditions of a collective enunciation that is lacking elsewhere in this milieu: literature is the people’s concern”.

A Note from culturekitchen

culturekitchen is a community blog aimed at cultural creatives who believe progressive activism starts in the kitchen, the bedroom, the home, the wallet. It is open for all who believe the decline of progressive and libertarian values have set us back as a democratic nation.

culturekitchen is published by Liza Sabater. It's one of the top progressive and feminist blogs in the United States.

--------------------------------------------------
culturekitchen

"A snark and gravitas-filled publication focused on arts, culture, politics and technology."

Published by Liza Sabater
with various other writers

We reserve the right to 'hunt you down and slap you upside the head' if you reprint or rebroadcast our content for-profit and without our consent.

Creative Commons Licenses are cool as long as you share alike.

- (emphasis added by Blogaulaire)

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 23 January

2007-01-23T08:25:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"It takes three years before a peach tree bears fruit, but a widow is only a widow for one year ."

. . (89) Japanese

We Hesitate to Bring This Audio Program to Your Attention

2007-01-22T19:52:00.000-05:00

It would force you to download a new multimedia studio complex.

I had to struggle several hours recently because the crew here (moi) strayed from the path of voluntary simplicity. Itried to download too much BloatWare playing with audio and game downloads for your blogging enjoyment.

We can look down our noses (but rarely do) at the REAL videogame and MP3 junkies. But we look up to them, at least the ones here in Montréal.

The reason we don't look DOWN at these addicts is because the big operators, the pros, have taken residence here over the past decade and they are HQ'd in the finest of some 6 or 8 of the tallest buildings along The Main (St. Lawrence Street). So in terms of these leading-edge game coders, to look at them at all we have to look UP -- WAY UP above the 6th floor :)

But here at CPE we play games as well, when not solving all the world's problems writing our flowing prose.

Games we like are mahjong, solitaire in the Windows plain vanilla flavor, Go, Scrabble, dominoes and strategy board games with four players. Not too much electronics, but often on a computer. Sometimes on a real table with real human 'warm-body' competition.

Today, though, I had to reload new copies of old games that we erased because they had become too addictive to accomplish anything else. (I tried to find whatever was out there for free.) Some 'law' about 'you get what you (don't) pay for' kicked in . . .
. . . so two thirds of the downloads we tried were total bloatware, taking over the computer and going online to rack up scores -- and even stupider nonsense.(Later I will share one address that offers fine, slim versions of nice games - but I'm not certain how to get them in English (though advertised as bilingual) and I just take the French stuff as it comes. I will check that out later to blog on it.

The more serious project that was so rudely interrupted by bloatware relates to my idea of sharing audio files on this blog. You could be convinced, I think, that listening to performance poets and even dead poets (including T. S. Eliot) is fun and educational.

Audio literary performances for enhancing the reading experience, not replacing printed books, can and should be a powerful niche that online publishers should explore. Enhancements, both visual and auditory, not substitution on a monitor screen, is a better fit than a big move into e-books for reading on plasma screens or tiny cell phones.

Trying to listen to bookmarked readings I have, I was surprisingly obliged, for the first time in months, to upgrade RealPlayer to hear the stuff that used to work on older versions of software. The download took forever. And then it took over the computer.

How? By forcing, I'm not joking, by forcing Firefox Mozilla down the same line with the newer version of RealPlayer (TM).

Although I have nothing against Firefox's Mozilla browser, I do not want it. Not now anyhow. But NOW I certainly have something against RealPlayer - for all the bloat and for trying to jam a new browser down my throat.

Finally, if anyone knows a more user-friendly way to share a few audio clips for poetry readings through this blog, let me know. I would like all this to be much simpler for every single user and not pressure anyone to face a bloated download like we juat did. I would like it to be a mere click away.

Why isn't there something that runs straight off the blog for sound files?

Perhaps all of us should choose the leanest, simplest audio player (one that comes with the operating system) instead of stuff that imitates a broadcast station's studio monitor all jam-packed into a tiny corner of the screen as the sound screams out of the speakers.

Come on, Linux freaks, have your go at convincing of Open Source approaches.

Post your Comments.

I am nearly ready to take the Linux plunge (one more time)!

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 22 January

2007-01-22T12:18:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"Same fox, same hole."

. . (87) Japanese

The Book Business has a Symbiotic Relation with Your Local Newsprint Media

2007-01-21T15:48:00.000-05:00

Today I read The Montreal Gazette looking outside the Books 'Section K' to see if other, more 'newsy' pieces mentioned trade fiction or non-fiction titles.

In several different sections (I want to say 'cahiers' because that is how the French newspapers Le Devoir and La Presse and Le Journal de Montréal are divided) . . well, in various parts and pages I found numerous articles that mentioned 'so-and-so, author of . . .'. I even ran across whole feature pieces outside the Books section where it amounted to an author interview.

Sports jocks write books. Journalists write books. Gossip columnists are authors.

Any regular reader of a newspaper will feel driven to go check out or buy this or that book if they want to find out more about the people covered in the paper or to research facts and ideas that make headlines.

The conclusion is obvious, unless you think that radio and television also reference books as much as newsprint media. Do you think they highlight people who write books? I mean the most popular media. It bears looking into, because, if not . . .

A decline in the circulation of newspapers, or concentration of the news in the hands of media groups who make most of their money from cable and broadcast media, could be the biggest threat to the book trade.

Think about it. Blogaulaire and other boys and girls on blogs harp about digitized books. You could start to see Google as a big threatening ogre that will gobble the bookstores and the publishers in one gulp. But maybe the big ogre, if there is one, is the THING out there that is gobbling up the daily newspapers!

CLICK on the title for one example of a news article that is about a TRADE TITLE.

Trials, Attacks, Murders : Writers Are Victimized by Hysteria in Turkey

2007-01-21T14:29:00.000-05:00

Immediately upon receiving news that Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was shot and killed Friday, The Associated Press released a a timeline that shows that writers are the primary target of the state in Turkey today.

We see immediately when we review the past year's series of trials for such crimes as "insulting Turkishness" that Turkish citizens are being whipped up against Armenian-Turks -- especially against the intellectuals who defend civic and ethnic rights and who respect the 'facts of history'.

When Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos, was shot and killed last Friday, 19 January 2007 in Istanbul, it was the culmination of state sanctioned and courtroom orchestrated 'hate crimes', not an isolated murder.

See below as well. After I blog the timeline I link to another piece at Open Democracy's website, from one year ago., It was written when the trials became international news.

Hrant Dink was the judicial target. In 2006, novelist Orhan Pamuk went almost straight from his own show trial to Stockholm, Sweden to receive his Nobel Prize in Literature.
(Both the English and French versions of Pamuk's novel "Snow" are growing in popularity and are selling well in Montreal bookstores today.

In Turkey, a Year of Attacks and Trials

Jan 19th 2007
By The Associated Press

(AP) - _ Jan. 19, 2007
Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos, is slain by a gunman in Istanbul.

_ Dec. 19, 2006: Writer Ipek Calislar acquitted of insulting Turkey's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, in a biography in which she said Ataturk dressed as a woman to escape an assassination attempt.

After the timeline lists other "show trials", the AP editor traces the victimisation of writers back over 12 months (almost to the exact date one year ago). The date was
"Jan. 23, 2006: when the Turkish court droped charges of "insulting Turkishness" against author Orhan Pamuk (on a technicality).

"Pamuk was charged after discussing the deaths of Armenians in Turkey with a Swiss newspaper. He won the Nobel Prize for literature later in the year."

Orhan Pamuk and Turkey’s future

Daria Vaisman
1 - 12 - 2006

The reception of Orhan Pamuk's Nobel award in Turkey is charged with the political tensions inside the country and in its relationship with Europe, says Daria Vaisman.

Pamuk himself is at the centre of the controversy. It was he who he told the Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeige in February 2005 that "30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it" (comments which made Pamuk the most prominent target of the notorious "insult law" cases, in which individuals have been charged with "denigrating Turkishness"). Although Pamuk's case was eventually dismissed on a technicality, other writers - among them Hrant Dink, Elif Shafak, and Murat Belge - have since been tried under the same law.

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 21 January

2007-01-21T04:16:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"In the heavens, thunder; down on earth, the maternal uncle."

. . (82) Chinese

What Do the Book Digitizers Propose for Some Fine Covers Readers Love?

2007-01-20T19:26:00.000-05:00

Obviously, nobody around Cheap Priceless Editions was invited nor did we attend the conclave to hear about Unbound Books and Google's pitch for digitizing the backlist.

With a recent comment to a post below, we want to open up discussion about the artwork that covered some of the titles - specifically the books now being marketed in used bookstores and through the meta vendor websites. The very same priceless titles you can search with the box shown on every page of Cheap Priceless Editions (the AddAll search engine)..

I keep thinking of The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, but we all know that the mind boggles at all the associations we have made collectively and individually between a book and its cover. We also know that everyone (even Bogaulaire 'Oh my!') is scrounging after eye candy to work as a magnet on the Internet to increase the number of hits and click throughs to advertisers and online vendors

So we invite readers to browse over to a post that was formerly archived in draft format HERE entitled:

Campaign for the American Reader:
Books and Their Covers

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 20 January

2007-01-20T11:20:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"There is no pleasure like watching an old and valued friend fall from his roof."

. . (79) Japanese

Google opens dialogue with book publishers

2007-01-20T09:47:00.000-05:00

By Caroline McCarthy, CNET News.com
Published on ZDNet News
January 18, 2007, 6:00 PM PT

What?! Nobody Bothered to Invite Used Book Dealers Like Cory Anderseed? New York, Wake Up! Even Weegee Knew You Have to Bring the Real Action on the Streets Down to the Popular Masses.

Who is being Royally Ignored Here? You and Me, That's Who.

NEW YORK--

To anyone who thinks digital content is a threat to the book-publishing market, Google wants to tell you two things: first, you're wrong; second, its Google Book Search product is the solution, not the problem.

But in the 21st century's new-media culture, print publishing is going to have to evolve, according to those speaking at the Google-hosted 'Unbound' event held Thursday at the New York Public Library. A crowd of more than 300 people, primarily involved in the publishing industry, came to the event to hear speakers ranging from Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing co-editor and science fiction author, to representatives from major publishing outlets like Harper Collins and Cambridge University Press.

What Could be "Cheaper" than "Free"? My Local Library Card Allows Internet Access for $10 Membership -- Good for 3 Years !

2007-01-20T09:13:00.000-05:00

Quit Marketing By the Book
From ClickZ's R. Lieb

"While they didn't break their necks rushing to get with the program, media companies have nevertheless made major concessions and changes to their business models over the past couple of years.

Meanwhile, most of their counterparts in book publishing are still stubbornly digging in their heels. Google is determined to smooth their path to digital enlightenment.

Come on, Rebecca Lieb, isn't the notion of ENLIGHTENMENT a little TOO RICH ??? After all, paper-based publishers have a longer track record at this than Google, Rebecca. You have to admit that!

Why would a search engine care about all that printed and bound paper? Google Book Search is why. If Google can persuade publishers to digitize their backlists and let Google crawl them (for starters -- the best-case scenario is all new releases), Google can offer more content to searchers, and more inventory to advertisers. Perhaps it can even collect more fees from its nascent Checkout service.

So in typical Google style (big!), the search engine invited publishers in for a day of talk at The New York City Public Library. The event was dubbed Un-Bound: Advancing Book Publishing in a Digital Era.

The Web evangelist speaker line-up was nothing short of stellar (although their names may be more familiar to you than they were to most of the publishers in the audience): Wired magazine's Chris Anderson (author of 'The Long Tail'); author and marketing guru Seth Godin ; Cory Doctorow, author, BoingBoing co-editor and USC Fulbright Chair; and Tim O'Reilly ."

Blogaulaire - a minor SIC to the quote: professor Cory Doctorow 'holds' the University of California chair; he is not the 'chairman' of the Fulbright anything.

Who is eponymous versus who is a blood relative? It alway confuses us.

I always think of author E. L. Doctorow ('Daniel', 'March') and my own dear colleague Cory Anderseed every time I see Cory Doctorow's name. (Every single time I go on the Internet it seems!)

Speaking of 'Doctorow's and Cory's

I have not searched it, but still wonder whether E. L. and C. Doctorow are related.

Anybody out there know the answer?

Other than Cory Anderseed and Cory Doctorow, the only other "famous" Cory I know is is our local boy wonder from wealthy Westmount (the hometown, BTW, of poet-song-writersinger Leonard Cohen who was discovered by Columbia Records of New York, through family conn . . .
. . . But I digress . . .)

Well, the only other Cory I ever knew was Cory Hart**.

** Cory Hart is/was a pop singer -- once-upon-a-time Idol of nearly every Québecoise teeny bopper in the 1980s.

Trial Photos of a Well Illustrated Vacation Guide for Cuba : A Trial Run

2007-01-19T23:37:00.000-05:00

The style and format range in popular travel guides in the bookstores is great. This evening I shot table top shots of the Odyssey Illustrated Guide to Cuba (Hong Kong, The Guidebook Co, 1995) 314 p.

Since approximately 300 trade-sized glossy pages weigh more than a Fodor and because this guide sells in North America for double the 12 Euros of the cover price on the back, I believe it is best to illustrate at least a few of the images on the inside of the book. Guides with high quality, illustrated content are worth the average price tag of $30 (but I would settle for a secondhand pittance-priced 1995 edition and spend the $28 saved while on vacation!).

I want to experiment with setting up shots of the inside content without breaking the book's spine.

My 'table top' was merely a narrow, high back and seat on a folding IKEA bar stool, high enough so that I didn't break my own spine leaning over to make camera adjustments. Below I am sharing only two book cover shots and one inside panel from a recto-verso panoramic image.

Above - as if it fits comfortably in the side-pocket of a small backpack purse. (It won't; your guidebook practically "fills" a third of your whole bag! (The cover photo is of 'A street in Trinidad.' I know, but they ARE referring to the town in Cuba, not the island nation -- Color shift shows I need to use Photoshop or even Paint Shop Pro because my editor lacks automatically repeatable color balance settings!

Tightening up the perspective to see how this looks.

The right panel of the centrefold panoramic that shows Valle de los Ingenos.

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 19 January

2007-01-19T05:07:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"Many men who love the wild pheasant scorn the home-range chicken."

. . (75) Chinese

Rumble, young man

2007-01-18T16:42:00.000-05:00

Muhammad Ali turns 65 today
. . . with his voice muted, but his mind still clear.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MUHAMMAD

Rumble, young man
(A poem from Rumble in the Jungle)

Last night I had a dream, When I got to Africa,
I had one hell of a rumble.
I had to beat Tarzan’s behind first,
For claiming to be King of the Jungle.
For this fight, I’ve wrestled with alligators,
I’ve tustled with a whale.
I done handcuffed lightning
And put thunder in jail.
You know I’m bad.
I have murdered a rock,
I’ve injured a stone, and hospitalized a brick.
I’m so bad, I make medicine sick.
I’m so fast, man,
I can run through a hurricane and not get wet.
When George Foreman meets me,
He’ll pay his debt.
I can drown the drink of water, and kill a dead tree.
Wait till you see Muhammad Ali.

The NEXT Ali quote (below), versus the famous image of Elvis that appeared in Life Magazine showing Presley getting a haircut before starting his military enlistment - the difference in the messages conveyed by two male super-stars - explains why The Rumbler is more Blogaulaire's idol than The Rocker.

Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over.

This is the day when such evils must come to an end.

I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here.

I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.

As quoted in Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the
Spirit of the Sixties (1999) by Mike Marqusee. The quote also appeared in the International Socialist Review Issue 33 (January–February 2004)

See also "Muhammed Ali" in Wikipidia

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 18 January

2007-01-18T10:42:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"It is difficult to strike the stars with a piece of bamboo."

. . (72) Japanese

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 17 January

2007-01-17T08:58:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"Do not pass comment on the frost on your neighbour's tiles while there is still snow on your own doorway."

. . (67) Chinese

Library legacy - Reading Changed This Guy's Life

2007-01-17T05:39:00.000-05:00

Thanks to the lit-zine of the U.K., 'Spike', for the link.

Thanks 'Spike' for pointing CPE to this convincing post on the importance of reading (by Stephen Mitchelmore) - VIZ the importance of getting a new start as a motivated reader and patron of local libraries. That can be an education in and of itself but can also motivate a guy (or woman) to go on to university, get an interesting job and meet like-minded friends. Thanks . .

Before I started to read, I was unemployed, qualification-less, going nowhere, not likely to go anywhere, except Fratton Park. Then, I started using Gosport library, the one now under a pseudonym.

The Reader's Journal

This was inspired by the great Miners' Strike of 1984-85, during which deep disillusionment was bred in me (the ridiculous Falklands War two years earlier, something much closer to home, had had a preparatory effect I think). I read Michael Crick's book Scargill and the Miners. Then I read a few more, including some novels (notably Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the discovery of which I've written about before). But then in March 1987 I crossed the Rubicon (or Portsmouth Harbour as it's known) to discover the three floors of Portsmouth Central Library. Before long I had a job and was taking a couple of courses. These led to university and, eventually, an MA, a better job, a slightly brighter outlook, Spike Magazine, this blog and the great friends it and a new life has brought me.

CPE's 'Reading Nietzsche' Online while Blogaulaire Reads Aloud from the Paperback Book

2007-01-16T21:45:00.000-05:00

I have the paperback edition in my lap, as I read a completely variant translation in English of the same text: Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

The online version on my monitor is from www.bibliomania.com/ . SEE this LINK.

My trade paperback version is:

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translation by. R. J. Hollingdale (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books, 1961/69).

My memory of other translations, of other works by Nietzsche, is being thoroughly jogged as I recall debates in college over mis-translation of Nietzsche, particularly other works that seemed so important to budding 'thinkers' or whatever. I am thinking of what was published using the title "The Will to Power", translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968).

It irritates me that what I see on my screen at Bibliomania, which is the entire Zarathustra (like the book in my hands), offers NO bibliographic citations, not even the name of a translator. If there are links, the only ones I can find are ads for yogic and esoteric sites offering their own esoteric 'spins' about Nietzsche the 'madman' philosopher. Yech!

At the same moment (thanks to googling) I can hop over to Pillwebb.net and find an ample number of bibliographic citations, but none that clarify which (if of any) translation refers to the online text at Bibliomania. (See the very end of the quoted section below - see how Bibliomania vaguely takes credit for an entirely original (their own copyrighted) version of Nietzsche's classical philosophic fable!)
Another odd thing is that the online text has a style that is very Biblic, almost Old Testament. I can guess that the on-line text must be a version that antedates Hollingdale and certainly the 'modern'Kaufmann in the period when the two collaborated.

In my softcover "Hollingdale Translation" in the Penguin edition (1961/69), I read, as an example of one way his translation differs from what we'll call "the Bibliomania Translation", in HT I read the terms 'Ultimate Man' while in BT I read 'the Last Man'.

But search me, scanning all the online material displayed at Bibliomania leaves the reader completely up in the air; the links do not tempt one to consult ANYTHING, especially not the original German text. Every translator's introduction of Nietzsche under the sun and between bound covers raises such issues. But that's not the style for on-line text versions. Here it's 'Hail the accessibility of e-books'. 'Hail reading in total ignorance.' Ignorance of all issues of interpretation, translation or inter-textual disagreements between editors.

The following 'fair use' citation can be followed in HT on p 45 to p 47. You can surf over to Bibliomania's BT version at Phill Webb (dot) net

5

Alas! there cometh the time when man will no longer launch the arrow of his longing beyond man — and the string of his bow will have unlearned to whizz!

I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: ye have still chaos in you.

Alas! There cometh the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There cometh the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.
Lo! I show you the last man.

‘What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?’ So asketh the last man and blinketh.

The earth hath then become small, and on it there hoppeth the last man who maketh everything small. His species is ineradicable like that of the ground-flea; the last man liveth longest.

‘We have discovered happiness,’ say the last men, and blink thereby.

They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loveth one’s neighbour and rubbeth against him; for one needeth warmth.

Turning ill and being distrustful they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbleth over stones or men!

A little poison now and then: that maketh pleasant dreams. And much poison at last for a pleasant death.

One still worketh, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one.

One no longer becometh poor or rich; both are too burdensome. Who still wanteth to rule? Who still wanteth to obey? Both are too burdensome.

No shepherd, and one herd! Every one wanteth the same; every one is equal: he who hath other sentiments goeth voluntarily into the madhouse.

‘Formerly all the world was insane,’ say the subtlest of them, and blink thereby.
They are clever and know all that hath happened: so there is no end to their raillery. People still fall out, but are soon reconciled — otherwise it spoileth their stomachs.

They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night: but they have a regard for health.

‘We have discovered happiness,’ say the last men, and blink thereby.

And here ended the first discourse of Zarathustra, which is also called ‘The Prologue’: for at this point the shouting and mirth of the multitude interrupted him. Give us this last man, O Zarathustra, they called out. Make us into these last men! Then will we make thee a present of the Superman! And all the people exulted and smacked their lips. Zarathustra, however, turned sad, and said to his heart:
They understand me not: I am not the mouth for these ears.

Too long, perhaps, have I lived in the mountains; too much have I hearkened unto the brooks and trees: now do I speak unto them as unto the goat-herds.

Calm is my soul, and clear, like the mountains in the morning. But they think me cold, and a mocker with terrible jests.

And now do they look at me and laugh: and while they laugh they hate me too. There is ice in their laughter.

---------
The the closest Bibliomania comes to offering a credit/citation is:

How do I cite a Bibliomania work?
We do not have full bibliographic data for the texts on Bibliomania, and they were typed from scratch, repaginated and reformatted hence these works are an original edition and should be cited as copyright Bibliomania.com Ltd 2000.

What one finds for 'Zarathustra' as bibliographic references at Phillwebb.net:

Also Sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen. 1883-1885.
Thus Spoke Zarathrustra: a Book for All and None.
Trans. Graham Parkes. Oxford: OUP, 2005.
Trans. R. J. Hollingdale and Walter Kauffmann. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking, 1954.

Note - from Blogaulaire:
Do not blindly follow the links on Phillweb - you will end up with a videogame entitled 'Beyond Good and Evil' (Ubisoft).

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 16 January

2007-01-16T06:57:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"Whatever is in a baby's mind will last a hundred years."

. . (63) Japanese

"Skinfolks" and "Kinfolks" - Racial Passing in American Films 1930 - 1960

2007-01-15T18:29:00.000-05:00

Introduction:

This site, with plenty of photo images and a nice layout and page-linked design,was created by LMRT for the American Studies
Program at the University of Virginia in the summer of 2002.

I have nothing better to write, just to let you link and read . . . CLICK ON TITLE.

INTRODUCTION

Characters with a desire to become something that they are not in order to escape their realities have been present from the earliest American films to the present. The popular encyclopedia of American cinema, Videohound, categorizes films with these characters under 'Not-So-Mistaken-Identity'. Of these 'not-so-mistaken identity' films, more than half of the characters in question are black passing as white. This reflects the American obsession with race, authenticity, and reinvention.

Oscar Micheaux used film to portray his own complex judgement regarding passing and miscegenation.

Many contemporary independent black filmmakers credit Oscar Micheaux with inspiring them to create films. Micheaux was a coal miner, pullman porter, homesteader, writer, businessman, and finally, a filmmaker. Grandson of a former slave, born in Illinois in 1884, and follower of Booker T. Washington, Micheaux believed in blacks creating their own resources. He was a self-made man who was determined to expose other blacks to middle class values.

There is also an interesting section to be viewed and read about Micheaux's early 30s films VEILED ARISTOCRATS and GOD'S STEPCHILDREN . You have to browse around to find it all.

"We Discover Writers" -- The Meltdown of Big Media

2007-01-15T09:35:00.000-05:00

'Just being writers, poor, cheap . . and unwilling to shell out $85 to compete.'

quote

Dear Sobol Writers:
We regret to inform you that we did not receive a sufficient number of entries for the Sobol Award, and we decided to cancel the contest. No further manuscript submissions will be accepted. All writers who have submitted manuscripts will receive full refund of their entry fee ($85) and our copies of the manuscripts will be destroyed and deleted from our system.
We wish you success in your writing career and thank you for sharing your work with us.
The Sobol Award Staff

end quote

(For Internet archivists, you can check out the 'Official Rules of the Contest') by CLICKING inside the single quote marks.

In the words of Michael Lieberman on his Book Patrol blog:

The Meltdown of Big Media
Book Patrol
January 13, 2007
By Michael Lieberman

"I'm thinking this might be more like a Corporate Dark Age not a Cultural one."

"You can bet the crash will not be pretty but you can also be sure there will be lots of light at the end of this Dark Age."

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 15 January

2007-01-15T06:55:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"Around the base of a great tree the grass never suffers frost."

. . (57) Chinese

Desicritics.org: Wikipedia - Happy Birthday To You

2007-01-15T04:34:00.000-05:00

A Brief Description of Wikipedia from India:
By Krishna

This month Wikipedia celebrates its sixth birthday. Also, earlier in the month, the number of English articles on Wikipedia crossed 1.5 million. This number grows by almost 2000 every single day. Compared to this, the number of articles in Encyclopedia Britannica (over 122,264) is a far cry.

More than a million people visit Wikipedia every day (half of whom visit the English pages). 5 out of every 100 internet users visit Wikipedia daily. Only 11 other sites are visited by more people. Wikipedia is very often at the top of Google search results (almost always in the top 10 results) for things ranging from ideologies (communism - 1, capitalism - 1); sports (cricket - 2, football - 3); sciences (economics - 1, literature - 3); places (India - 1, France - 1, Budapest - 2); people (Sachin Tendulkar - 1, Einstein - 2); objects (water - 2, chair - 1).

Wikipedia's more than six million articles in all languages are created by registered users and they are edited by any user, not necessarily registered. To register, one simply needs to pick a login name and password. An email address is not necessary. More than three million "Wikipedians", or registered users, edited articles at least 10 times since they registered. 80,000 of these edit at least five times every month and 10,000 edit at least a hundred times a month.

Krishna is doing Ph.D in mathematics. He writes at Quasi-Coherent Ruminations.

2006: Best-Ever Online Year for Christmas Sellers | 2007: the Year for Buying Blind

2007-01-14T11:13:00.000-05:00

A Good Online 2006 Christmas: Keeping Internet Buying On Billboards All Year Long | | Guardian Unlimited Business

Bloggers, of anyone on the planet, know that for the Internet it is now more than the interface, it is distributed and virtual software: Web 2.0/3.0 that will be hot in tech news (again).

But with wireless and cellular or satellite comm expanding, there is all the more reason to push shoppers online "instantly" in 2007. This Internet access mobility, for transmiting ads AND closing the sale, will push 'impulse buying'. The scenario Blogaulaire sees coming could be very strange; almost as strange as car-hops on rollerskates were in the mid-to-late 1950s.

More advertising dollars are certain to go toward instant shopping, without even looking at the screen. Using any iThis or iThat - any of a myriad of handheld devices now closer than the horizon - Internet shopping could be as easy and without customer care as picking up a latte to go.

(Using a handheld as a price scanning and price-comparing device via satellite downloads of web searching will figure as only the most arcane of utilities. Punching in a short code on a device for instant purchase may become the most mundane application.)

In an earlier post, Blogaulaire posed the query: Is it all so 'the Establishment' now that it is boring. That's an acceptable question. But I also implied that the quality and service issues with online marketers would, in a manner of putting it, vanish. Cuz that's boring too!

Well people are people, and we have the opportunity to look back over nearly 3 weeks of 2007. And I have to make one revision. It looks like the issues of bait 'n' switch, like motel owners were accused of going back to the invention of the automobile (and used car salesmen thereafter), well those consumer protection issues, I predict, are going to stick it out in the LIVING and BUSINESS as well as ENTERTAINMENT sections of the print newspapers.

Maybe we'll see more of this:

Business News

Amazon mystery: pricing of books
A Times reporter finds fluctuating costs for his obscure chosen titles at the Internet retailer.
By David Streitfeld, Times Staff Writer
January 2, 2007

After getting 'burned' at Amazon for a title that he selected online but only decided to buy a few days later, a writer for the L. A. Times decided to do his own fantom shopper test.

David Streitfeld would add items to his basket while on Amazon and note the prices; then he would come back a few days later to 'check out' and pay. In this test, both the U.S. Amazon site and the U.K. Amazon site registered more price rises than declines for the items in Streitfeld's pre-Christmas basket.

Streitfeld was acting out the role of a buyer so rushed that first he skims through tossing stuff in a basket. Only later, after the rush of desire does he 'check out' to pay with his plastic number account. But most people in such a rush would not take the final step he took: compare initial price with check-out billing.

Instead of just name-calling, labelling the phenomenon "price gouging", the L. A. Times reporter went out and interviewed someone with expertise in the field of marketing practises:

"Sucharita Mulpuru, an e-commerce analyst at Forrester Research Inc., wondered whether Amazon was going down the path of dynamic pricing.

Dynamic pricing involves selling identical material for different amounts based on the customer's willingness to pay. In the physical world it's a common feature. Want to fly to Paris tomorrow? It's going to cost lots more than if you can wait a few weeks."

This feature business article, in a final understatement, says such business practises may be 'normal' but,

"There's also the risk of alienating customers."

Good point. Do we risk being further alienated all year long?

Will it be "Hold the steering wheel hon, I want to order 'that'," pointing to the passing billboard as the car swerves into the left lane and the driver pulls out a cellphone.

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 14 January

2007-01-14T02:58:00.000-05:00

from Justin Wintle

"To meet a good friend in bad times is like meeting the Buddha in hell."

. . (53) Japanese

Canada considering tough new copyright law?

2007-01-13T18:49:00.000-05:00

Canada considering tough new copyright law?:

"Graham Henderson, who heads the CRIA, didn't want to talk about fair use as much as he wanted to get the word out about piracy and the culture of 'free music' that he claims has developed within Canada. Legal music download services have not flourished in Canada, he tells the Canadian Press, because 'it's a big black market effect and so instead of 25 percent [of the total music market], it's 8 percent here. People are simply abandoning the marketplace altogether, and they've made the decision they'll just download the music and worry about how the artist gets paid later.'"

Click on the title.
Blogaulaire, has to agree that the country has a flair for using the back door to avoid the ticket booth, just from seeing how Canadians jumped at the chance to 'pirate' satellite signals and ignore commercial subscription packages for the past decade.

Thanks to Digg/News for pointed up and voting in this headline article on their site.

Is Amazon (Dot) Com So 'The Establishment' in 2007 -- "It's Boring All of Us?"

2007-01-13T10:44:00.000-05:00

The Scotsman, on the occasion of Amazon(dot)com's 10th birthday two years ago, nearly extolled Amazon's UK performance after a mere 3 years on the ground delivering to the Brits and Scots as well as Wales.

Scribes who, for nearly a decade, reached post-Christmas heights each New Year bitching about how customers' online orders were botched by Amazon, had already turned their sights upon online banking identity theft. Had they just dropped the poison pen and moved on because it became boring?

A quote from the Time text below:
"Books . . . are among the most highly databased items on the planet. The wholesalers even had CD-ROMs listing them," Amazon CEO Bezos.

Amazon the Pre-Teen

Boring? Books? P2P music downloads? Whatever. Who would have guessed that by today's 12th anniversary of Amazon's IPO start-up, commentators everywhere would find E-commerce so boring a theme that online shopping was barely discussed as bankruptcy loomed for the 3rd largest distributor of books on pallets to the retail outlets, viz AMS? It is as if Amazon competition in the bookbuying business is such a given, we cannot fathom that old-style distributors have not completely factored in Amazon into their daily equation of hauling books in and out of the warehouse.

If you forget history, you're forced to re-live it.
Cut and Pasted from TIME (dot) COM

11 Years Ago
Amazon launchs it's first IPO on Wallstreet

In May 1996, Amazon landed on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The story did two things: it introduced Amazon to a whole new stream of customers, and it caught the attention of rivals like Barnes & Noble and Borders Group, which hadn't yet moved online. Barnesandnoble.com would appear a year later--just before Amazon's initial public offering, which went off at a modest $18 a share. Never mind that the celebrated venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers was its biggest institutional investor before the ipo. Wall Streeters were afraid of the threat posed by the giant Barnes & Noble, whose national network of bookstores looked unbeatable, prompting George Colony, president of Forrester Research, a prominent technology-analysis firm, to pronounce the company "Amazon.toast." Other naysayers referred to it as "Amazon.org"--".org" being a domain name reserved for nonprofit companies. But Barnesandnoble.com did nothing to stall Amazon's amazing sales.

8 Years Ago

Much of the Silicon Valley/Wall Street/media complex believes the commodification of online retailing will lay their company to waste. Amazon the Web's golden child, darling of NASDAQ day traders who raise its market cap even faster than the company bleeds money, is also Amazon the avatar of all that may be ephemeral and fraudulent about the dotcom revolution.

7 Years Ago

Marcus, who joined Amazon in '96, recalls learning Web coding on the fly in order to get his reviews online. Kerry Fried sardonically references "my assistant" to refer to her endless clerical duties. Almost every Amazonian spends half his time each December wrapping packages and manning customer-service lines. "It doesn't matter what you've done before and what you're going to do later," says Moe. "You figure it out as you go along."

That even goes for where you sit. Amazon offices are scattered across Seattle: the flagship Art Deco Pacific Medical Center, the Pike Street skyscraper, the original Columbia building and so on. Stunning mountain-flanked views of Lake Washington and Puget Sound are the only luxury the spartan corporate aesthetic allows. Employees are crammed two to a bare-walled office and work at Bezos-designed desks made of old doors with legs stuck on them (design director Helen Owen bets me lunch that she will still have a door-desk in five years, even if Amazon flourishes).

"We're constantly told not to get too attached to our office," says Marcus, who has moved nine times in three years.

The Brainchild
Some 14/15 Years Ago

Bezos recalls, "I'm sitting there thinking we can be a complete first mover in e-commerce." He researched mail-order companies, figuring that things that sold well by mail would do well online. He made a list of the Top 20 mail-order products and looked for where he could create "the most value for customers." Value, in his equation, would be something customers craved: selection, say, or convenience or low prices. "Unless you could create something with a huge value proposition for the customer, it would be easier for them to do it the old way," he reasoned. And the best way to do that was "to do something that simply cannot be done any other way."

And that's what ultimately led to books. There weren't any huge mail-order book catalogs simply because a good catalog would contain thousands, if not millions of listings. The catalog would need to be as big as a phone book--too expensive to mail. That, of course, made it perfect for the Internet, which is the ideal container for limitless information.

Bezos needed to learn the book business fast. Fate was his handmaiden: the American Booksellers Association's annual convention was set for the very next day in Los Angeles. He flew out and spent the weekend roaming the aisles and taking a crash course in the business. Everything he learned encouraged him. The two big wholesalers for books were Ingram and Baker & Taylor. "So I went to their booths and told them I was thinking of doing this."

"Books, it turns out, are among the most highly databased items on the planet. The wholesalers even had CD-ROMs listing them. It seemed to Bezos as if all the stuff "had been meticulously organized so it could be put online."

Bezos realized he desperately wanted to start his own online bookstore. First he talked it over with MacKenzie. She too had graduated from Princeton, but six years after him; they met at Shaw, where she worked as a researcher. An English-literature major at the university, she had been novelist Toni Morrison's assistant and now had begun a novel of her own. MacKenzie was all for the adventure.

Between Bezos's Garage and His Wallstreet Début

The most important person Bezos hired was probably the first: Shel Kaphan, a brilliant programmer in Santa Clara, Calif., and veteran of a dozen start-ups, many of them, in fact, failures. Bezos persuaded him, over the course of a few months, to join his company in Seattle.

Back in the winter of '95-'96

To save money, Bezos went to Home Depot and bought three wooden doors. Using angle brackets and 2-by-4s, he hammered together three desks, at a cost of $60 each. (That frugality continues at Amazon to this day; every employee sits behind a door desk.)

. . On July 16, 1995, Amazon.com opened its site to the world . .

IN 2006, Amazon.com experience it's biggest Christmas buying spree yet:

See the Wednesday, 14 January Post HERE on the latest analysis.

"Watermelon No. 2" Portrayed as 'The Crash' Crop of Lowthorp Farm in Hope, Arkansas ('O.D.' Out-Did It)

2007-01-13T04:16:00.000-05:00

1930 - A.B. Turner and "Jumbo" - This was the 1st of 3 record size watermelons for the year. The final record watermelon was brought in by O.D. Middlebrooks on October 18, 1930 and it weighed 164 & 3/4 pounds. Due to the Great Despression, the 1930 festival was the last at Hope until the 1970s.
Blogaulaire - I'm outta here if Hope cancels this year's festival . . if the folks down there think the Great Depression lasted til the '70s, how long do ya figger the next one's gonna drag on fer?

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 13 January

2007-01-13T03:58:00.000-05:00

"Good luck comes like a large watermelon sitting in the middle of a freshly tidied room."

. . (49) Chinese

Photo Courtesy of Blaikie Turner

Campaign for the American Reader: Books and their covers

2007-01-13T03:33:00.000-05:00

This is a post we archived as a draft. We bring it forward because it hits on some points made in today's other posts. (By coincidence there is mention of last year's publication of the E. L. Doctorow novel "The March".

What I think is pertinent is the ease with which copyright in images is violated to put a book cover together. I am thinking about the digital book world along the lines that Google proposed to the publishing industry last Thursday (at the meeting in the New York City Library). Well I think that even for digitized fiction there will be a need for a digital cover, something attractive and a come-on to potential readers. And the whole thing being pitched as 'free' makes me conclude that all these backlist or even current titles will be 'covered' using unpaid artwork.

Marshal Zeringue could write 'steal' cover designs; Not 'reuse photography', in the text blogged below:

Books and their covers
Friday, January 12, 2007

Jeff Pierce writes at The Rap Sheet:
One of the very first posts I wrote for The Rap Sheet blog had to do with publishers and book jacket designers who, probably through inattention, reuse photography that’s previously fronted one or more other books.

Ever since, I’ve been keeping track of these “copy-cat covers,” and now present two more examples, from UK publishers.

See what he's talking about at: 'Did They Really Think Nobody Would Notice?'

Also on the subject of book covers, Pete Lit has posted on the 'Best and Worst Book Covers' of 2007. The worst cover belongs to E.L Doctorow's The March.

What a great book, what an awful cover. Click over to Pete Lit to see for yourself."

Click on the links to find the source posts mentioned above.

No Bankruptcy Court in the World Can Stay or Delay Harlequin Romance from Her Appointed Rounds

2007-01-12T18:06:00.000-05:00

King of the Castle (1978)

The Enchanting Island (nd)

The Sofa (A Belmont title) Some of the far racier stuff, also available (if it passes customs).

Bride of Zarco by Margaret Rome (c)1976

Where No Roads Go (1963), by Essie Summers. (So rare, Brinks was present.)

Simon & Schuster went to court today to release books from the limbo of possible seizure under Chapter 11 ; we posted a link about one bookseller's take on this issue earlier today.

Upon learning that some/much of what S & S is trying to 'liberate' from AMS's Indiana warehouse consists of recently released Harlequin Romance titles. That got Blogaulaire thinking about how WE could help the Big Publisher in the eventuality that the Harlequin's 'stay stuck on the pallets.

Buy Canadian! Here in the North, we consider Harlequins specifically (and Romance fiction generally) a natural resource, almost like primary resources as 'natural' as paper-pulp and raw nickel.

Canada stands ready to ship every sort of Harlequin: new, old, and middle-aged, to our American cousins in the South. Hell, anything we don't have in Popular Romance Fiction, we'll write for you on the spot we're so good. And the price is dirt cheap: as low as US$4.50 a pop per book (You're welcome to scrounge around (if you buy bulk) in some of the 40-centers, where you might find treasures that can fetch over US $150 from a true collector. You never know!

So to whet the Simon & Schuster appetite and demonstrate that Blogaulaire means business when he speaks for Canadian bookdealers from Coast to Coast all the way north to the Beaufort Sea, we hurried out to OUR warehouse and safe-deposit box for a few sample image uploads running (above) on Cheap Priceless Editions.

Radio Free PGW: PUBLISHERS GROUP WEST, 1976 - 2007

2007-01-12T11:36:00.000-05:00

RF-PGW Tutors the World About the Sales End of the American Booktrade

Blogaulaire would have blogged todays installment of Radio Free PGW instead of yesterdays. But things are moving quickly into courtroom issues, and we should all know that playing living room coach for a team in litigation is foolish at best.

But on Thursday, 11 Jan 07 the blogger on the inside gave us the dope on how Publishers Group West got its start 30 years ago and how it grew by promoting the sales of the small, independent publishers it represented. He gives names, dates and policy for guiding the sales staff at PGW. Whether this is a guidebook for success or for failure -- I'll let my own readers decide that one.

Simon & Schuster will do what they have to do to promote their own interests, their own titles. Just because their interests are bigger in dollar amount or their titles include Harlequin Romance paperbacks, for Bogaulaire, does not cut it one way or the other. You can be for the 'little guy' all the time and spend all day reading Tolstoy and Proust; in my mind neither 'prejudice' means you go to 'war' with 'pride' or with 'peace' in your heart AGAINST S & S. In fact, I hope the big publishers in this mess and the small press players help each other out at finding beneficial solutions.

A QUOTE from
Radio Free PGW

One of the great contradictions about PGW since Charlie sold it to Satan of San Diego in 2002 is that for many of us, PGW has never been better. Many of us had our best year ever in 2006. Much of the credit for that goes to new PGW president Rich Freese. He was able to take the torch from Charlie and energize an already productive PGW crew. Unfortunately, the sins of AMS would eventually be visited on PGW.

Hard-assed days . .

2007-01-12T05:02:00.000-05:00

Major Bunny Colvin got tired of all the violence in Baltimore. He got tired of all the shootings, all the innoncents getting victimed, all of the waste of time putting dope on the table. He wanted to make a real difference.

Hard-assed days . . hard-assed ways of learning to live together

Sounds like the story line for any one of a dozen episodes shot on location in Vancouver for DaVinci's Code or some television series that's gritty and real. It's a re-hash of an edisode another blogger would like to see made real in New Orleans. A re-hash with a purpose by Ashley Morris.

We are about to cut out from Cheap Priceless Editions to a blog from a citizen in New Orleans who is fed up with all the killing down there, a young NOLA resident who turns to places like Baltimore or Chicago or anywhere depicted on television or in grit-lit (but also real places) where the police mean business about protecting people's lives from that violent fringe, the craziest victims and self-deluded 'redeemers' of the hard drug trade . . carrying guns.

If you cannot bear to see the word 'fuck' on your computer monitor, THEN don't CLICK ON THE LINK. But Blogaulaire thinks that, despite all the macho-man talk (encouraged in music, pop fiction, video and the like), we all should encourage THINKING OUT solutions as down-to-earth implementation of programs: police programs, social programs, community clinics and, yes, public libraries.

A take on season three of 'The Wire' from Ashley Morris, who I thank for this:

Bunny decided he’d take a different track.

Bunny lectured his troops on how, in the 1950s, a “civic compromise” was struck between the guys drinking a 40 or some Thunderbird on the corner and the police. The drinkers would put their beverage in a bag, and the police would pretend not to notice.

No harm, no foul.

This allowed the drinkers to continue what they were doing, as long as it didn’t hurt anyone; and allowed the police to spend their time on more important issues.

To implement his plan, Bunny found an abandoned stretch of row houses. It shouldn’t be too hard to find something similar in New Orleans these days. He rounded up all the corner boys, all the dope slingers, all the mid-level dealers, and took them to this area. He told them that in this area, they could sell all the dope they wanted. The police would not interfere, and would, in fact, stand watch to make sure the place didn’t get violent. The corner boys had to leave their guns at home, though.

"Cheap Priceless Editions"

Recent Reading in Books Acquired Lately

My Own Info-Cultural Overload

Photo Images, Imagination, and Hard-Pan Montreal and Urban Reality in Hindsight

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 23 Febuary

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 22 Febuary

Anderseed's Oilpatch Expressions Defined for the Layman (5)

The Spell of the Yukon

I wanted the gold, and I sought it;I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.Was it famine or scurvy - I fought it;I hurled my youth into a grave.I wanted the gold, and I got it --Came out with a fortune last fall --Yet somehow life's not what I thought it,And somehow the gold isn't all.

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 21 Febuary

Anderseed's Oilpatch Expressions Defined for the Layman (4)

"The price of oil has nearly tripled since President George W. Bush took office in 2001, yet the majority of the people who live in the countries from which the fuel flows still experience grinding poverty. "

Oil Trip: Nigeria, Chad, Liberia

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 20 Febuary

Anderseed's Oilpatch Expressions Defined for the Layman (3)

Atlantic #3 Oil Rig Blow-Out - 1948

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 19 Febuary

Anderseed's Oilpatch Expressions Defined for the Layperson (2)

Breaking the Grip of Mid-Winter Freeze-In and the Block of Ice around Bookstore Sales

Anderseed's Oilpatch Expressions Defined for the Layperson *

Oil & GasElectric Power GenerationElectric Power DeliveryWater/WastewaterElectronics / SemiconductorsContamination ControlOptoelectronics / PhotonicsFiber Optics / CommunicationsComputer Graphics / Graphic ArtsEnterprise StorageDefense / SecurityFire / EMSDentalImaging/Machine Vision

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 18 Febuary

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 17 Febuary

An American and Canadian Crude Look at Oil

The Biggest Game in US - CAN Trade -- PETROLEUM

Semiology 'Runs' to Catch Up with the Internet : On Book Power

"About Umberto Eco"

"Signs of the times"

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 16 Febuary

Qin Rule

Ancient China: The Art, Culture and History of the Ancient Cathay

Tang Writers; Tang Tales

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 15 Febuary

Booksellers Do Not Have All Their Bases Covered

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 14 Febuary

500,000 Books and CDs are Buried in a Landfill Deliberately by the City of Longueuil, Québec

La Presse

500 000 livres au dépotoir

La Presse

Montreal's Expozine Zine Fair

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 13 Febuary

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 12 Febuary

Southwest Montreal's Friendly Recycling Centre

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 11 Febuary

Artifacts of the opium trade _ gnarled wood of the Thai phrik khi nu chili bush

Pipe Dreams in the Golden Triangle

"High and Low: Visitors can check out facsimiles of Asia's infamous opium dens at the Thai museum"

Nobody is an Authority on Nuttin' - But We Try

One thing thatThe book fair people know --

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 10 Febuary

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 9 Febuary

An Open-Ended, Unending Rant on Used Book Selling

Has David Streitfeld at the L. A. Times Revealed to Booksellers a New Prophet-Poet? Is the Prose Proselytizer of Books Now in Print?

Maybe Ron Silliman is the new prophet-poet of what is happening in the book trade. He's at least eloquent and articulate, coming up with apt comparisons with past techno-family challenges.

Violent Death by Assassination Still Haunts Ivory Coast

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 8 Febuary

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 7 Febuary

Breaking News: Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire: EU Diplomat Murdered

Screen-Capture of Highlight Sites on CPE's Feature Blogroll Links

Screen-Capture: Today's Featured Link

Visit Denis-Carl's 'site' for an inspiring 'sight'.

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 6 Febuary

"Abandoned Turcot rail yards come to life with creative vision"

Local Blogger Makes The Headlines !!!

Big Sky at Turcot Yards

Links to websites

Bilingualism Has Protective Effect In Delaying Onset Of Dementia By Four Years, Canadian Study Shows

Medical News Today

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 5 Febuary

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 4 Febuary

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 3 Febuary

Finding My Curious Niche

Know Thyself

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 2 Febuary

Canoe floats Rogers' boat

Media giants set aside rivalry for mutual gain

Another Harry Potter Appears in Mid-Summer

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 1 February

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 31 January

University of Michigan 'Sees' A Post on CPE -- YIPEE !

I wanted the gold, and I sought it;
I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.
Was it famine or scurvy - I fought it;
I hurled my youth into a grave.
I wanted the gold, and I got it --
Came out with a fortune last fall --
Yet somehow life's not what I thought it,
And somehow the gold isn't all.

One thing that
The book fair people know --

Screen & Script T.V. Writer Died on Saturday

'"I Love Lucy' writer Bob Carroll dies"

Campaign for the American Reader:
Books and Their Covers