around the internet on a tuesday

So as I mentioned in my last post, I attended a conference at Columbia last weekend, which was very exciting on many levels, the most basic of which is that it was a chance to go hang out at my alma mater for awhile.  I stayed with a friend who is a third-year at Columbia Law on Thursday and Friday nights, which meant I could roll out of bed Friday and Saturday mornings as if almost eight years hadn't rushed on by since I graduated! Friday I spent conferencing, but by Saturday I had had enough of French academics (they are such a different breed from we Anglo-Saxons) and decided my time would be better spent in the stacks at Butler all day.  First, though, I made an obligatory visit to the Hungarian Pastry Shop (truly my favorite café in the world) and to Labyrinth Books, which was something else before it was Labyrinth but I've forgotten, and which is now no longer Labyrinth but something called Book Culture.   Seems to be exactly the same place, just with a name change.   I was in heaven-- piled onto tables, stacked onto stairs, laid out on shelves, were books you just don't see at Borders or Barnes and Noble or even at McNally's or (the New York version of) Shakespeare and Co.  Mixed in with books I'm impatient to read, like Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise and Janet Malcom's Gertrude and Alice were Franco Moretti's two-volume study of the novel and a remainder copy of The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier.  So many books tempting me,  so many books I couldn't take with me, not only because of their cost but because of their weight! I limited myself to one.  (The Monnier, if you're curious to know, came home with me. It was $6.  And directly relevant to my thesis.  I couldn't resist.) They had Irène Nemirovsky in the Gallimard poche versions.  They even had Le Canard Enchaîné. American bookstores don't get much better than this.   

And on that note, some links...

Charles McGrath thinks publishers think America is a nation of graduate students.  I think anyone who really thinks that hasn't been to America.  Or maybe I haven't been to their America.

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This is a really old article (from 1996!) but I just discovered it (don't ask how) and it's worth looking at now, 11 years on: Edward Mendelson's article "The Word and the Web," an early attempt to think about textuality and the web, where relentless hyperlinking "suggests a world where connections are everywhere but are mostly meaningless, transient, fragile and unstable." 

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A charming link via Delphine (merci!!): this Guardian article asks "What do Parisians read on the metro?" and introduces the game "Sartre." Don't worry, you don't need to have read any of his works to play. All you need is a strong sense of Gallic cliché.

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These two go nicely as a pair: In Boston, parents congratulate themselves on having oddly intelligent children. In San Francisco, they worry that this generation of kids is dumber than ever. Where do your kids fit on this wacky hyperbolized scale?

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And finally, here is my weekly shameless plug for Gridskipper: this week I wrote about the Viaduc des Arts and the Promenade Plantée in the 12th.

Comments

[Alice]

Loved the Guardian article on Parisian métro reading! What fun. Got a kick out of reading it... It is always interesting to see what people are reading in the métro.

I'm feeling guilty because for some reason recently I haven't been able to get my head around reading a novel! I don't know what's wrong with me, but I think I'm ready to give up on The Inheritance of Loss -- I just can't get into it. I need to pull out something I'm really looking forward to reading for a change.

As a result, my most recent métro reading has consisted of Elle hebdomadaire! Heck, it makes for some fun commuting distraction.

[Marjorie]

I read the McGrath review and think he may have just been reflecting on the tendency of late for publishers to fling into bookstores unedited versions of classics, as if our shadowy intellectual selves have been salivating for them for years. I'm not a Carver fan -- I've not read anything of his, but only because I haven't thought of it -- but I found the article interesting in its almost quaint description of the writer and editor at work at a time when such an intimate relationship between the two was possible, even necessary, for publication. As a writer still struggling with her first novel and reading the work of others who post their drafts online for others to review, I can appreciate the need for a good editor. Carver obviously understood the same, despite his ambivalence.

Cheers,
Marjorie

[Julie]

Reading the Guardian article made me miss Paris even more than my constant poignant longing for the place. A nation of readers! Ah, what ever am I doing on this side of the Atlantic?

[Peggy]

Thank you for the two companion pieces on whether American children are getting smarter or dumber. The answer, of course, is both. And sadly, it depends more and more on which side of the have/have not divide you find yourself on.
The public schools are dying because the "haves" have stopped educating their children among the "have nots" and do not see why they should be forced to pay to educate "other people's" children when they are paying thousands of dollars in tuition for private school to ensure that their own get a giant leg up in life. So they vote a resounding "no" on every school board initiative that comes their way. Some even have the nerve to say that throwing money at education is not then answer! (To which I reply: if that's so, then why are you spending thousands and thousands to send your own child to a private school, and thousands more on the gas needed to chauffeur him/her to and from school?)
One sad result is that a city like Seattle is now more racially segregated than it ever was before busing was imposed. Many neighborhood schools have closed, and anyone who can afford sends his or her child/children to expensive, lily white private schools, many of the Catholic (shame on the Catholic Church for taking their money). What's worse, the
level of self-delusion is so high that practically no one will admit that one of the primary "benefits" of the private education they have secured for their child is that he or she is not mixing with the wrong kind of people. The wrong kind of people being, of course, the have nots, who, in addition to being not rich, too often tend to be not white and/or too recently arrived in this country.
I'm going to have to put this subject to rest now, before it ruins the rest of my day.

[Mazarine]

Maitresse, you are becoming a most invaluable companion to me and you are, in fact, making the internet itself a much nicer place to spend time.

I had thought quite seriously that I might be stuck, as a reader, with the group of writers who provided my formative base in the early nineties. My experience with books was beginning to mirror my experience with music -- I would walk into a bookstore (for so long my favourite places in the world) and my mind would jam with the impossible number of choices, and I simply would not know which way to turn.

This comes, I think, after more than 10 years as a journalist, spending so much time writing that I lost the impetus to search out new books, and limited myself largely to re-readings from my existing collection. Having followed a number of your recommendations, starting with What I Loved (which I loved), I am keenly working my way through your longer list. On the one hand, I could feel annoyed with myself for not going and searching on my own. On the other, I'm so pleased to be finding new books to love that I'm too happy to be finding fault with the way I'm finding them. I'm instead treating them the same way as I would recommendations from a friend.

I'm now excited about getting hold of Eat, Pray, Love and The Rest is Noise.

So thank you.