Josh Hanagarne's Blog, page 10

Leiningen Versus The Ants!

Hi all, an offhand remark from a friend this morning reminded me of one of my favorite short stories. Not quite horror, but very intense, Leiningen Versus The Ants was written by Carl Stephenson.

It’s about a crazed ant attack on a plantation, and the only man who could stop the madness, Leiningen!

Read it here. Always makes me smile.

An Offer For Parents Of A Child With Tourette Syndrome

Hi all,

I’m going to spend the rest of December sending hand-written letters to kids with Tourette’s. If you have a child with Tourette Syndrome, and you think a note from me could be a good thing, please contact me and provide:

A mailing address
The child’s name and age
Tell me something about the child, and how he or she is handling TS

I’m hoping to write and mail everything by Christmas, but I’ll go for however long it takes if the response is larger than anticipated.

thanks!

Josh

Worst Christmas Song Part Five

Hey all, it’s that time of year again. Each December on the blog I’ve taken nominations for the worst Christmas song you think of. It can be old, new, pop, traditional, whatever. It just has to set your teeth on edge.

I say this as someone who loves a lot of Christmas music. I could listen to the melodies for Silent Night and Greensleeves every day for the rest of my life with a big smile on my face.

Once again this year, I’m despairing. The Cat Carol is still the worst Christmas song of all time for me.

The Little Drummer Boy is the most droney and monotonous.

The Christmas Shoes is probably still the sappiest.

I want to scream when the kids start yowling at the end of Happy Xmas (War Is Over).

The opening of Simply Having A Wonderful Christmas Time, well, we shan’t speak of it.

And that Chipmunks song? Shiver.

But The Cat Carol is still the worst for this librarian.

Vote now! What’s got you up in arms?

 

NPR’s Best Books of 2013

Hi all, just learned that The World’s Strongest Librarian selected as one of NPR’s Best Books of 2013. How cool is that? I’ve been looking at the other books, and I remain both a- and bemused that I find myself in such august company.

On the reading front, I’ve been enjoying Jonathan Tropper’s This Is Where I Leave You and I’m re-reading parts of Adventures In Reading Cormac McCarthy by Peter Josyph.

Mr. Tropper’s book is hilarious. It’s about a dysfunctional family (are there any novels about well-adjusted families) reconvening to sit shiva after their father’s death. It contains the best cake scene of all time. Mark my words. Mark them!

Mr. Josyph’s books is for pervs like me who need to read McCarthy’s books, then read everything else about them has ever been written. If you’re like me, step out onto the fringe and read Adventures. It’s insightful and might make you feel less alone in your McCarthy mania.

 

 

Goodreads Results!

Hi all, the Goodreads results came out today. The World’s Strongest Librarian came in third in the voting, so thank you for the support!

My book–and all the other memoirs–got absolutely stomped by I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up For Education And Was Shot By The Taliban.

Malala had over 32,000 votes. The Ducky Dynasty memoir was second, with over 9,000, I believe, and my book had nearly 8,000 votes. I’m pretty pleased, to say the least, you were all so great. Thank you!

And please read Malala’s book.

Elevators Of Fury! AKA: An Adorable Fistfight

Warning: Details have been changed to ensure maximum hilarity. This may have actually happened. I can’t be sure. But I wrote this bit of semi-fiction down just in case.

The noises of fussing began twenty feet below me, then louder, louder, until the elevator doors opened and here they were, two man-sized creatures doing their damnedest to impersonate infants.

“Becase bwa bwa bwuh bwuh!” said the smaller of the two angry men. They stepped off the elevator nearly shoulder to shoulder, but were obviously each trying to be the first through the door.

“Well der der der,” said the other man, leaning down into the little man’s face and making angry noises signifying nothing. Before I knew what was happening I was between them saying “Hey, what’s going on? I mean, fellas, yo!” (I didn’t and don’t say yo).

The little guy was about 5’5”, white, sporting stylish glasses with sleek, futuristic gray frames. he was wearing one of those tracksuits that whisper when you walk and hiss loudly when you’re really strutting.  “I was just telling this freak that I don’t liked to be talked to, but he, hey! Don’t you look at me like–”

The other guy was walking away, but still looking back at us. His black hair was very messy and he looked sleepy. “Yeah yeah, you bitch! You better just run along or I don’t even know what I’ll–”

“You can’t call him names,” I said.

“I didn’t!”

“You called him a bitch.”

“Well that’s not a name, it’s a fact. And anyway, I called him a little bitch, weirdo.” His eyes open and shut rapidly as he sprinted for the finish in some blinking contest I wasn’t aware of.

“See! See!” The little guy stomped his foot. I’d never seen someone actually do this. I wanted to put him in my pocket.  “I mean, can’t I Just ride in the elevator without some freak talking to me?”

The other guy was gone. Where did he go?

“I’m going to call security,” I said, “And you can tell them what you told me and we’ll get it sorted out.”

“Yeah yeah yeah you do that,” he said, voice rising with every word. He was starting right into my eyes, then he took a step towards me, so I’d really get it, I guess.  “I’ll tell them. I’ll tell them!” I still didn’t know just what had happened, if anything, but he was way more intense that made any sense.

“This is Josh on Level three,’ I said into the phone.

“Hey! Hey! Just in case that guy comes back while you’re on the phone I’m going to be over here because I don’t want him to come back while I’m right here or I’ll totally mess him up so I’ll be right over here. Or I mean, I’ll just totally wreck him.”

“Hello?” said the security guard on the phone.

“This isn’t urgent yet,” I said, “but please come up to level three as–”

“I said I’ll be right over here!” The guy jumped up and down. His arms performed a spastic semaphore. I waved a hand at him, but that only made him wave harder.

“–as soon as you can. I need you to hear one guy’s story and then another guy’s story. I have no idea what happened.”

The security guards arrived. When I pointed at the first gentleman they each rolled their eyes. “Sir,” I said to him, “Will you please tell them what happened? And for you two,” I said to the guards, “I didn’t see the whole thing, so I’ll just listen. It did seem like the other guy was being more aggressive, though.”

And so commenced a fiery and fierce oration. He really committed. He was so intense with his tone and gestures that I wondered if he might implode. I wondered if I would ever care about anything as much as he cared about the injustice he had suffered.

Here came the other guy, slouching through the aisle. “Sir,” I said, waving him over. “Can you come over here and talk to these two please?”

“I got nothing to say.” He walked faster.

“Sir, please come here,” said one of the guards.

The guy came closer and the two heroes reinvested themselves in the clash and clatter of battle.

“I just think it’s okay for me not to be spoken to in the elevator! I mean can’t I just get in the elevator without someone talking to me!”

“I wasn’t talking to you you little bitch! You wanna take it outside?”

“Please don’t threaten each other,” said the guard. “Can you two just stay away from each other?”

“I can. I was. but then he started talking to me.”

“He, the other guy, did actually seem more aggressive,” I said.

The other guy looked at me. “What’d you say, weirdo? You wanna take it outside too?”

“No,” I said. “Let’s stay in here. Well, I’ll stay in here. But I think we’re done for the day. We can try again tomorrow. Please show him out,” I said to the guards.

“Sure.”

“Have a good night,” I said.

He turned so quickly that I could almost hear the wind whistling around him. “Good night? Good night? What are you talking about you damn weirdo? It’s eleven in the morning!”

“You’re right,” I said. He was right. I have no idea why I said have a good night. “But I didn’t say it to agitate you.”

By this point the two guys were both heading down the stairs. “You can’t agitate me, you little bitch weirdo. Try it!”

I walked away, but the sounds of their fury lingered, lingered, and lingered until it grew faint enough that I knew they had left the building. I walked to the window to see where they might go. They were walking shoulder to shoulder across the crosswalk. They walked with great purpose. They stopped underneath a tree on the other side of the street, near the steps of the Courthouse building. Some signal occurred and they began swinging and flailing at each other in the most half-hearted fistfight I’ve ever seen. Very few of the blows were landing, and those that were lacked conviction. Soon they were each bent over, hands on knees, gasping. They looked up at each other from this position. Another signal. They entered the crosswalk again, heading to the library.

The guards met them at the library doors. There was much shouting and gesticulating. Then someone came to my desk and I had work to do. A few minutes later the guards approached, laughing. “What on earth happened?”

 “Well, I don’t know if you saw, but they went across the street and tried to have a fight. Then they came back over and tried to come back in. At that point they’d both been kicked out for a month for threatening each other, and us, and you, while they were leaving. When I said they couldn’t come back in they started yelling at me. But then they started screaming at each other again and I think they went off to have another fight.”

“Who do you think won?” I said.

He just shook his head and laughed. “Oh man,” he said. “That’s the wrong question.”

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/25103209@N06/

Perhaps The Best Tourette’s Question Yet

This Sunday past, I was taking a cab home from the airport at 1 AM. The driver asked for my address, shook my hand, and told me that he was from Pakistan. He likes driving a cab here, because the roads are so nice compared to Pakistan.

As we talked, I was having small tics. If you’re unfamiliar with Tourette’s, it produces involuntary noises. I was making a noise that sounded kind of like a cross between a hiccup and a throat clearing. After perhaps ten minutes of this he said:

“Sir, what is this silly phenomenon? What on earth is happening to you?”

I explained.

“No, we all have that,” he said. “Everyone can have the hiccup. So I ask you again: what is this silly phenomenon? Why would you do such a thing?”

We had a very lively chat. Given how tired and airplane-weary I was, it was a pretty good ride home.

First Bookless Library Opens In San Antonio: A Few Thoughts

Some Background on this piece: I heard about the Bexar County Digital Library earlier this year and wrote the following, which I never published. Now the library has actually opened, which you can read about here. Someone on Twitter asked what I thought about it, so I thought I’d go ahead and just publish the piece. 

For me, today, the mission of libraries is more important than what libraries look like. I am committed to libraries because I believe there is no downside to a more informed, literate society. Literacy has many forms, which is beyond the scope of what I’ll write today, but for me, there are many ways for libraries to go about their missions and serve their communities. 

That said, here’s the piece, as I originally wrote it. 

In a BBC Radio series called The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Future, author Douglas Adams said, “Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food.”  I’m a book-loving public librarian in Salt Lake City and I agree.

My library has hundreds of thousands of print books, and print-based library work pays my bills.  And yet, I’m not someone who will fuss too hard if paper books vanish.  I love print books and I’ll be sad when/if they go, but when it comes right down to it, for me, libraries have never been about books.  It’s the stories and ideas in the tomes that I need.  I want free access to as many titles as possible.

The County of Bexar, Texas recently announced that it was authorizing an all-digital library, Bibliotech. Coming to you in the fall of 2013, the library will offer computers, study rooms, one hundred e-readers that can be loaned like books, and an e-book collection starting with 10,000 titles. Most articles I read about it made sure I knew that BiblioTech would resemble an Apple Store. This seemed crucial. I don’t have anything against Apple Stores but my life won’t be less full if I never go in one again. I can’t say the same about libraries.

My first reaction to the Bexar news was purely selfish: Yuck, I’m glad I don’t work there.

But it was the relentless reader in me who felt the true spasm of horror. I’ve read several books a week for the past 30 years and all I could think was, “Not every book is available digitally to libraries! Not every book is even offered digitally! If it’s all digital why do you need a building anyway! What kind of sick mind dreamed up this nonsense?”

To repeat: not every book is available digitally, and that matters when we’re talking about a library trying to represent the greatest breadth of ideas, in accordance with the interests of the community it serves. When a library’s format limits the choices it can offer, the possibilities for discovery are diminished.

I reread the Bexar article and relaxed; the digital library was going to be an “enhancement” to an existing library system, not a replacement. I love the idea of the digital library as an enhancement to existing services.  I detest it as a replacement for the library, and all I have to do to reaffirm this stance is to walk through my library and laugh at the idea of replacing the books, activities, programs, and patron interactions with a soulless, sleek computer lab and a relative handful of e-books. I’m all for experimenting, but if there’s a clamor for this particular innovation, it hasn’t yet reached our community.

However, the enhancement angle made the whole experiment—and I was happy to see it being billed as an experiment— a lot more intriguing and less distressing. Maybe this would be exactly what the BexarCounty community needed.

Other librarians I spoke with that day, online and off, weren’t as composed. I work in a profession where hand-wringing and fretting is practically part of the job description. What do you think about Bexar? Are we in trouble? Is this going to happen everywhere?

My answer was and is: “Not yet.”  Digital libraries might be (almost certainly are) the future, but the public—whose taxes pay for the library—will be involved in the decision.  Despite what you might hear from librarians, the mission of a public library is to create happy patrons, not perfect jobs for the staff and their respective visions of what libraries should be.  If the majority of library patrons want digital libraries and they’re willing to vote for it, that’s what’s going to happen.  But I’m not going to worry until patrons start mobbing the reference desk, saying, “Good grief, I walk into the library and I see nothing but books! Get with the times! It could not feel less like an Apple Store in here!”

That day isn’t here yet. When and if it comes, I’ll support anything that truly enhances a library system and offers its patrons something they can’t get anywhere else. Or else I’ll need to get a new job. But this early into the experiment, I don’t see BiblioTech as a threat.  I hope it becomes a wonderful service for the citizens of BexarCounty and teaches the library world something useful.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

PS: if you’d like some further reading on print vs electronic books, here’s something Will Schwalbe had to say.

Josh

 

 

A Poignant Response To Books Vs E-books, Courtesy of Will Schwalbe

On Sunday I was on a panel called The Power of Books at the Miami Book Fair. My co-panelists were Will Schwalbe, author of The End Of Your Life Book Club, and Dani Shapiro, who has written too many wonderful things to list. Her most recent is Still Writing: The Pleasures And Perils of a Creative Life. 

Will Schwalbe might be the most instantly likable treasure of a person that I have ever met. Just having him in the room made me happy.

We each did a reading from our respective books, then took questions. Will’s reading of his book almost brought me to tears, which happened on just about every page of his book as well.

One person asked which format we each read the most on, and which we preferred. So this was the “How do you feel about print books vs electronic books?” question.

I’ll include badly paraphrased versions of each of our responses below.

Me: My response was that what I need from books is the stories and the ideas that they contain. That isn’t format-specific, but the words are the words for me, not the wrapper. Books are tools. The format I prefer currently depends on the work I’m doing. If I’m reading for fun, Kindle is fine (unless I’m reading something with lovely illustrations and I want to see color), and it’s definitely more convenient while traveling. I read several hundred pages a day, and packing those books on long trips gets cumbersome.

But if I’m trying to use a cookbook, or doing research, I don’t want to be dicking around with an electronic screen, scrolling back and forth and trying to pretend it’s as easy to make annotations on the awful Kindle keyboard as it is with a pencil.

Don’t get me wrong. I love print books to death. I’d be very sad if they went away, but there’s NO reason to think that’s happening anytime soon, or possibly even in my lifetime. I just don’t know, so I’m not going to get all hysterical today while I’m sitting in a building with over 500,000 books in it.

Dani: Dani said that when she reads, she really engages with a book and has a dialogue with it. “I mark my books up like crazy. I find it very hard to converse with, or engage with, a book in electronic format.” Dani, if I got that wrong, let me know.

Will: (cue portentous music and swelling strings). If you haven’t read The End Of Your Life Book Club, it’s about the book Will and his mother read while she was dying of pancreatic cancer. It’s sad, of course, but it’s also a gorgeous tribute to the life of a woman who was so precious to her son.

He gave a lengthy answer, but this is the part I’ll never forget, paraphrased inadequately, I’m sure.

“I was there with mom for the last two days, and then when she died, I looked around the room. I looked at the book shelf and slowly panned across, reading the titles on the spines. It was a lovely, heartbreaking, but uplifting and physical example of who she had been and the books she and I had loved together. And the love we had shared.” Then he smiled and said, “It gave me a comfort that I don’t know that I can ever get from a screen.”

Now I’m crying so I’m going to stop. But Will and Dani, thank you both so much for being so kind to me, and Will, thank you for answering that question better than anyone ever will.

Dancing With Brian Boitano! Spanked by Amy Tan! Taken Down A Notch by Dave Barry! Rock Bottom Remainders Recap.

I spent last week in Miami at the book fair. The highlight, which will surprise no one who reads this blog, was that I got to perform on stage with the Rock Bottom Remainders. RBR is an all-author band. When I started writing seriously about ten years ago, I made a goal. It wasn’t money, or fame, thankfully, because those haven’t panned out. I wrote One day I will get invited to play a show with the Rock Bottom Remainders. 

Fast forward a decade or so and I’m strolling along the walkway at the book fair when I see the World Stage, where I would be playing with the band a few hours later. My hair stood on end and I thought How is this possible? 

Surely it was a dream. But no. In the author’s hospitality suite later I ran into Sam Barry, part of the band. He grabbed me and said “Hey, you know Roy Blount Jr., right?” Um, no. I didn’t. However, I knew that he was one of my favorite authors. So suddenly I’m shaking hands with Mr. Blount and grinning hard enough to realize that I don’t practice smiling enough.

“So you’re playing with us tonight?” said Roy.

And again, I thought, How is this happening? But I nodded.

A few hours later I went to the stage, showed my badge, and was suddenly back behind the stage. I was practically hyperventilating. The chairs were full of people waiting for the show. The techs were up doing sound check stuff. Then I realized that’s not a sound tech, that’s Greg Iles. Oh, and that’s Ridley Pearson. 

Then Mitch Albom walked by.

Then I turned around and this happened.

AMY TAN!

She walked right up and shook my hand and smiled and I thought…That’s Amy Tan. What am I doing here? 

“Josh! Come here!” I turned and Sam Barry was waving me over to introduce me to…Dave Barry, Pulitzer winner, guitarist, one of my favorite writers, hilarious guy.  I’m not really a starstruck type, at all, but I’d never had these folks coming at me from all angles. I was getting fidgety and wild. So I had to grab him as well.

“Will you do something for me?” he said.

“Anything!”

“Will you not be so fucking tall?”

“Yes! I’ll try!” I tried. It didn’t work.

I heard someone talking about The Good Lord Bird by James McBride, which had just won the National Book Award. I turned around to say “I know that book! I love it!” But I stopped because James McBride, National Book Award Winner, was standing there. So I just screamed and shook his hand and then I had to go get some water.

But that didn’t help, because Scott Turow was in the tent, along with Erasmo Paolo, an incredible saxophone player.

“HI SCOTT TUROW!!!”  I bellowed. Good grief, he was so nice to me.

Then it was time to go on stage. We each got introduced one by one and the first song started. But just before it did, a good looking man standing next to me said “Hey, do you know what we’re supposed to do next?”

“No,” I said. “They just said ‘get up here’.”

“Okay, me too,” he said.

“Who are you?” I said.

But then the song started and we were all dancing really hard. I’m the giant fool on the left, standing next to James McBride, National Book Award Winner.

And that was when I looked over at Amy Tan, who wanted to do the hip bump. And I thought that’s Amy Tan. And then James McBride was right next to me playing a saxophone solo. I’m not a very good dancer, but I do commit.

“Great moves!” said the aforementioned man when we left the stage.

“You too,” I said. “Who are you?”

“Brian Boitano,” he said.

“WHAT!!!”

A few songs later I got up to actually sing.

Amy Tan appeared backstage, having changed outfits. She had a cop’s hat, a riding crop, and dark sunglasses. She spanked me when she walked by.  I’m fine with Amy Tan spanking me.

For the final song, everyone got up and sang Wild Thing.

I have never had so much fun in my life. And I’ll never stop thinking What am I doing here? 

To the Rock Bottom Remainders: you all said that playing with you was a lousy dream. But it was my dream, and I got it, and it was better than I ever would have imagined. Thank you all so much, and I will continue to force your books on everyone who comes to the library.

AMY TAN!!!