Bookpusher

I catch Keith Olbermann’s “Countdown” whenever I can. Sometimes I’m either working or busy when his show comes on, and in this day and age there are times when I can’t take an entire hour of news, even with the funny parts thrown in. But there are times, especially when doing political commentary, that “Countdown” isn’t only informative and entertaining, but also transcendent.

I was lucky enough to catch this live the other night. Go see and be inspired, courtesy of Crooks & Liars.

It’s always amazing how I run across new authors. Word of mouth, mostly. I often look at the back cover of a book that I like to see what other authors supplied blurbs for it. Perhaps I’ll pick up a new author in a book review in a newspaper article or online. Or I’ll scan my librarian listservs and something pops out. I’ve never read Martin Cruz Smith, even though he’s been around forever. (He first got attention with “Gorky Park” back in the 80s.) But his name came up on a listserv, and we happened to have one of his books, and I took it off the shelf on a whim.

Damn good book. December 6 is a historical novel, taking place in Tokyo the day before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The protagonist is Harry, born to Christian missionaries and raised on the decadent streets of Tokyo. He learns his craft running errands for prostitutes and deubached artists, and by the time the novel takes place, he’s a wheeler and a dealer, trying to keep his neck on his shoulders between the Japanese who think he is a spy and the Americans who aren’t sure he’s even one of them any more. He runs a swinging nightclub - the parallels between Harry and Humphrey Bogart’s character from “Casablanca” end there – and he seems to have a line on everyone, from bar waitresses to the highest ranking ambassadors.

He’s made several enemies, especially in the Japanese military, and his manipulating comes to a head over the course of the novel. Cruz excels at weaving a delicious sense of time and place – I cringe at how much research must have gone in to writing this novel, as the book is written as if Cruz himself had lived there. Tokyo before the waris a heady mix of freewheeling modernism and harsh jingoism, the nation poised to take control over their part of the globe. Harry juggles his responsibilities and his enemies and his romances, and comes within inches of getting killed. He’s a memorable character, a romantic who is in love with the Japanese culture and sees in it something greater than himself.

Make no mistake – this isn’t a mere thriller or mystery. This isn’t genre. This book has heft. It’s literary. It’s a book that warms the cockles of the hearts of the New York Times Book Review editors. So if you’re looking for something on that level, you’ll love it. But just the same, it’s an absorbing and compelling read, and you’ll like it if you’re just looking for a good book, too.

When I first went away to college, I had a miserable time of it. I wasn’t emotionally ready to go away to school. I was terminally shy and didn’t know how to provide for myself. To make myself feel better, I would drive the two hours back to my old high school and hang around with some of my friends from the theater department. I was able to play the conquering alum, basking in the glory of Being Away at College, pretending that I was having a great time. But even in the state I was in, I eventually realized that what I was doing was unhealthy, bordering on pathetic, and ever since I’ve had a severe reaction against going back to the places that I came from.

I bring this up because today I’m filling in at a library that’s right next to my old place of work. I used to come in to this library during breaks to escape and write on my old livejournal site. Despite some of my bad memories, I still know good people there, and I’m wondering if I should go back, pop my head in, and say hi.

I think I’m going to. There’s no good reason why I shouldn’t. And I certainly don’t want that place to have a hold on me. Somebody on a documentary I was watching recently said that whenever his body told him not to do something, he knew right then that it was something he needed to do, to face your fears and insecurities and to make sure they don’t conquer you.

Good rule of thumb, really. Except if you’re a mountain climber.

Me? I’m on the third floor of Visser Hall on the campus of Emporia State, waiting for my class to begin at nine, enjoying the nice juicy wireless access the school has provided for me. And enjoying this fabulous article on class warfare in the television show Veronica Mars. If you’re not a fan of this show, you should be, and DVD sets of the first season are available, so no excuses.

School’s going good thus far. Everybody in my class seems nice and there’s lots of people from different backgrounds and with different interests, but we’re all excited to be librarians. Ask me later, though, as today’s the all-day slog. I’m totally going to have to find a bar after this.

My good friend Josh asked an excellent question a post or two down about what classes I’m taking at Emporia State this semester. The lineup:

LI 513XA: Technology Skills for Graduate Students. One credit hour. This is a strictly online class that makes sure we know the finer points of how to use Blackboard, Emporia State’s online thingy we use to download assignments, submit papers, get lectures and the syllabus from the instructors, and communicate with other students. There will be some PowerPoint and basic web design here as well.

LI 801: Foundations of Information Transfer. Two credit hours. First class out of the box and the one I’ll be going to this weekend. This focuses on what it means to be a librarian; the social history, responsibility, and ethics of the profession, as well as current trends.

LI 803XR: Information Transfer and the Knowledge Society. Two credit hours. Thankfully, this class takes place in Overland Park so I won’t have to schlep down to Emporia. Something called the information transfer cycle will be discussed, and I get the feeling it isn’t referring to your local library’s book drop. Also: theories, models, and strategies of knowledge creation.

Just heard that Pluto got kicked to the curb. It’s really all for the best – there’s really nothing special about it. School textbooks will deal just fine with it – actually, it should promote discussion of the planets and get more kids aware of what’s out there. And it’s not as if this is the first time this kind of thing has happened: Ceres, a particularly large asteroid between Mars and Jupiter, was considered to be a planet for about fifty years back in the 1800s.

Go international science community! Thank goodness they resisted the Pluto lobby. I’m sure Disney’ll lodge a lawsuit any day now.

Like everyone else, I have prejudices against certain writers, my reasons completely irrational and sometimes even unexplainable. For example, I’ve always hated Carl Hiaasen even though people have praised his writing. I can’t explain why, except that my boss at my previous job loved all things South Florida. (She constantly searched for pirated recordings of Jimmy Buffett performances over the internet.) This love included the books of Carl Hiaasen, which she’d read when she wasn’t micromanaging staff or being argumentative with patrons. She was easily the worst boss I ever had, and my dislike of her bled over to include her taste in music and novels.

So when someone even mentioned the name to me, I’d involuntarily shudder with revulsion and run the other direction. No rational reason for it, but there is was.

Hiaasen was featured on an episode of “60 Minutes” several months ago, and he seemed like a cool guy, someone to share a beer with. Since I’ve long since fled the place of my previous employment, I figured it was time to give Carl a shot. And I was glad I did, because Skinny Dip is a wonderful little read.

If you’ve ever read an Elmore Leonard book, you’ll realize the setup instantly: eccentric lowlifes armed with wickedly clever dialogue get involved with a caper of some sort where many plots intertwine; hilarity ensues. Same deal here. Hiassen is a former journalist and he knows the almost instinctual bizarreness of his fellow Floridians, and with a stunning ear for dialogue, his characters are just absurd enough to still be believable.

The plot revolves around a young wife thrown overboard a cruise ship by her husband on her second anniversary. She survives not only because of her background as a collegiate swimmer, but by coming across a floating bale of pot dropped by a Jamaican drug smuggler. She’s rescued by a retired investigator living off the Florida Keys and they plot to get revenge on her scheming husband, who works as an environmental scientist for the state who’s in the pocket of an industrialist millionaire who has a oft-naked bear of a man as a bodyguard who’s addicted to painkillers because of a bullet lodged underneath the crack of his ass and who feeds his addiction by disguising himself as an orderly in nursing homes, peeling the medication patches off of comatose patients.

Really, the plot’s not important – Hiaasen’s an excellent read, funny enough to get your inner curmudgeon smiling.

Grad school craziness starts this Friday. Actually, it’s already started; the school uses a special online database where we can post our homework, hold discussion groups, and download assignments and reading material. It’s called Blackboard, and I’m taking a class online that teaches me how to use all this stuff properly. The system is user-friendly and fairly easy to navigate, with lessens the terror only marginally.

I think it’s because my undergrad experience was so lousy. I wasn’t engaged with my school and it in turn didn’t bother trying to engage with me. UMKC was (is) a commuter school so there was no reason to join any groups or get active in the social community, since the only people who stuck around were those that had no choice. Here, with Emporia State’s MLS program, it’s mostly online, so the procrastination and lax attitude that followed me throughout my academic career will absolutely kill me here.

This weekend will be my first real test. I’ll be in class all day Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I’ve got my books, I’ve got my schedule, the hotel’s reserved, my pencils and pens are ready to go. It’s been a while since my first day of school. No matter how old you get, the terror still hasn’t gone away.

But, secretly, it’s all kinda fun, too.

Most people by now are familiar with an outfit by the name of the International Astronomical Union which proposed this week that we expand the definition of the word “planet” to encompass things other than the traditional list of planets everyone memorized in grade school. (That is, the ones that actually paid attention.)

If this proposal is accepted, we’ll gain at least three more planets: a large asteroid between Mars and Jupiter by the name of Ceres, Pluto’s ‘moon’, Charon, and a rock out in the boonies of the solar system by the name of UB313, which sounds more like the name of a reggae band out of England than the name of an actual planet.

The problem with this is that the universe is a big place – we’ve only seen a fraction of what’s out there, and that’s just in our immediate neighborhood. If we lower the bar of what can be called a planet, there could potentially be hundreds of undiscovered planets out there. As it stands now, we already know of at least a dozen.

Funny thing is, there’s one thing out there that’s screwing up this whole equation: Pluto. If Pluto is defined as an actual honest-to-god, according-to-Hoyle planet, then we have to let all these other loser asteroids in, too. But, if we decide to drop Pluto, we can just go ahead and define every tiny floating ball of rock outside of Uranus as what they are: tiny floating balls of rock. It’s nice to know they are all out there, but they’re certainly not something we should trouble our fifth-grade textbooks with.

It’s time to drop Pluto. I realize it was discovered by a Kansan and I understand there’s a Disney character named after it, but this is Science we’re talking about. And the beauty of science is that definitions last only as long as they apply – as we learn more about something, we can reevaluate our positions on it and change our minds. Disease isn’t caused by an overbalance of humors, they’re caused by bacteria and viruses. The sun doesn’t revolve around the earth, we revolve around the sun.

And Pluto - and any other ball of rock out there in the boonies – isn’t a planet. It’s a Pretender.

This is a good one, gang. I read this on the plane back from Hawaii and, after finishing it, got the same feeling I did when I finished “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay”, which is one of my all-time desert island books. This is a rare gem – one of those books that takes an overdone genre (detective noir) and elevates it to High Art.

The protagonist here isn’t a detective. Not a proper one, anyway. Lionel Essrog is an orphan who fell in with a group of friends as a kid doing scutwork for a low-level Brooklyn mobster, Frank Minna. After he’s forced to leave the city for several years, Minna comes back, remaking himself and his crew into amateur detectives. He’s mysteriously killed while on a stakeout one night, and Lionel resolves to find his mentor’s killer.

There’s one catch – Lionel has Tourette’s Syndrome.

I know it soulds like a setup for a bad Farrelly Brothers film, but it works. Lionel’s mind is obsessive, endlessly seeking patterns out of what he sees and hears, which is exactly what a detective does. He has to uravel Frank Minna’s past while dealing with his disease, tapping people on the shoulders and blurting out the words that dance in his head. It almost works to his advantage, actually, as he’s seen by people he meets as a mere freakshow, not capable of figuring things out.

The city of Brooklyn is not only the setting of the novel but a participant itself – the romanticized city of Essrog’s past competes with its present-day counterpart, the former mobster’s paradise reluctantly forcing itself to change and evolve with the city around it. Lethem writes urban poetry that can be taken either as a good detective yarn as well as something much greater. One of my best reads of the year and worth checking out from your library.