Eerily Reminiscent

Book People honcho Steve Bercu's comments to the New York Times regarding book theft are eerily reminiscent to something I wrote shortly after being laid off by Book People, where Bercu was my immediate supervisor.


From the December 16, 2009 NYT piece:

At BookPeople in Austin, Tex., the rate of theft has increased to approximately one book per hour. I asked Steve Bercu, BookPeople’s owner, what the most frequently stolen title was.

“The Bible,” he said, without pausing.

Apparently the thieves have not yet read the “Thou shalt not steal” part — or maybe they believe that Bibles don’t need to be paid for. “Some people think the word of God should be free,” Bercu said.

And from my 2002 "Geeks with Books" essay "The Five Finger Discount" (later reprinted in my 2003 book Geek Confidential):

There is a whole other class of bible thief: the one who believes the word of God should be free for all to experience. I want to get these folks bumper stickers that say "The word of God, not just for terrorists anymore." What these fools don't realize is that the price covers paper, binding, the bookstore rent, employees and a zillion other expenses.

(I added the emphasis.)

Perhaps this is just a coincidence. Bercu could have read my piece when I wrote it and the phrasing stuck in his subconscious. I know while I was working there, Bercu was a regular reader of my column. I have no idea if he continued the practice after I left.

Gmail backup

Yesterday's New York Times had a scary article about the very real possibility of being locked out of your Gmail account.

Discussion forums abound with tales of woe from Gmail customers who have found themselves locked out of their account for days or even weeks. They were innocent victims of security measures, which automatically suspend access if someone tries unsuccessfully to log on repeatedly to an account. The customers express frustration that they can’t speak with anyone at Google after filling out the company’s online forms and waiting in vain for Google to restore access to their accounts.

The best strategy to deal with this danger is backing up your Gmail account. Along those lines, the helpful folks over at Lifehacker offered up this method for Gmail backup in Windows using fetchmail.

Problem is that there are at least 15% of all computer users that don't use Windows. For the rest of us that live in the *nix (unix, linux, BSD, Mac OS X, etc.) world, I discovered George Donnelly's helpful guide.

It's important to know that Gmail limits how much can be downloaded at one time, so you might have to do your initial backup a few times to catch all your data.

Hopefully, Gmail will never be a bother, but it's always good to be prepared.

Review of Harlan Ellison Documentary

The New York Times can normally counted on for quality, well-written reviews. Nathan Lee's contribution about Erik Nelson's Dreams With Sharp Teeth, a documentary about legendary hothead Harlan Ellison, falls considerably short of the paper's usual standards. To put it bluntly, the piece reads like a catalog description with no worthwhile commentary or insights.

Directed by Erik Nelson, “Dreams” recalls the career of a runty young geek who evolved into a world-famous artist — and ladies’ man, civil rights advocate and, from the look of his Xanadu-like Hollywood hideout (aptly nicknamed the Lost Aztec Temple of Mars), a fiercely committed collector and pack rat. Mr. Ellison’s written achievement largely takes second stage to his volcanic verbal attitude, of which there’s more than enough to overflow an entire outlandish mini-series.

The movie itaself may be high art or a piece of trash. Regrettably, there is no indication of either in Lee's tepid review.

New Gods reviewed in NYT

It's too bad Kirby didn't live long enough to see his epic Fourth World reviewed in The New York Times.

It’s hard to know what a teenager would make of this. But Kirby was writing just as much for himself. He was 53 when he undertook the Fourth World, and a veteran of World War II. But as Evanier points out, and as is evident throughout this book, Kirby was deeply inspired by the young generation that was renouncing war around him. His understanding of the youth movement was perhaps idiosyncratic (in Kirby’s world, the “Hairies” built their perfect society in a giant missile carrier they called “The Mountain of Judgment”). But they too were forging a new world; and the pleasure he clearly took in their efforts seems to have balanced the bouts of Orion-like rage. In one moment, Highfather of New Genesis turns to one of the young boys in his care. “Esak,” he asks, “what is it that makes the very young — so very wise?”

“Tee hee!!” Esak replies. “It’s our defense, Highfather — against the very old!!”

This is probably the only passage in the English language containing the words “tee hee” that has actually moved me.

Continued...

The Alpha Geeks

While I don't always see eye-to-eye with David Brooks, his New York Times op-ed piece about the ascendancy of the geek is right on, albeit a little late. The change actually occured some 5-10 years ago.

He begins with an interesting bit about the origin of the word "nerd".

In 1950, Dr. Seuss published a book called If I Ran the Zoo. It contained the sentence: “I’ll sail to Ka-Troo, and bring back an IT-KUTCH, a PREEP, and a PROO, a NERKLE, a NERD, and a SEERSUCKER, too!” According to the psychologist David Anderegg, that’s believed to be the first printed use of the word “nerd” in modern English.

He, also, does a good job defining the difference between a nerd and a geek.

Among adults, the words “geek” and “nerd” exchanged status positions. A nerd was still socially tainted, but geekdom acquired its own cool counterculture. A geek possessed a certain passion for specialized knowledge, but also a high degree of cultural awareness and poise that a nerd lacked.

Geeks not only rebelled against jocks, but they distinguished themselves from alienated and self-pitying outsiders who wept with recognition when they read Catcher in the Rye. If Holden Caulfield was the sensitive loner from the age of nerd oppression, then Harry Potter was the magical leader in the age of geek empowerment.

He even acknowledges the inherent geeky-sex appeal of Tina Fey and the group's influence on fashion.

Tina Fey, who once was on the cover of Geek Monthly magazine, has emerged as a symbol of the geek who grows into a swan. There is now a cool geek fashion style, which can be found on shopping sites all over the Web (think Japanese sneakers and text-laden T-shirts). Schwinn now makes a retro-looking Sid/Nancy bicycle, which is sweet and clunky even though it has a faux-angry name. There are now millions of educated-class types guided by geek manners and status rules.

Perhaps most importantly (and accurately) Brooks reflects on the geek influence on the Presidential race.

The news that being a geek is cool has apparently not permeated either junior high schools or the Republican Party. George Bush plays an interesting role in the tale of nerd ascent. With his professed disdain for intellectual things, he’s energized and alienated the entire geek cohort, and with it most college-educated Americans under 30. Newly militant, geeks are more coherent and active than they might otherwise be.

Barack Obama has become the Prince Caspian of the iPhone hordes. They honor him with videos and posters that combine aesthetic mastery with unabashed hero-worship. People in the 1950s used to earnestly debate the role of the intellectual in modern politics. But the Lionel Trilling authority-figure has been displaced by the mass class of blog-writing culture producers.

It's hard to imagine a group who enjoys spending their Friday nights playing Kung Fu Fighting, tinkering with Linux, and deconstructing the latest Indiana Jones film as cool and trendy, but there you have it. At least as reported by The New York Times.

100 Notable Books

100 Notable Books of the Year

As the year ends, we get inundated with best of lists. Here's one that always makes me feel like an illiterate piker, the New York Times' 2007  100 Notable Books of the Year. This year I did worse than usual. So far, I've read a grand total of four--and one of those is Deathly Hallows, which I suspect the Book Review included just to keep common folks from getting shut out. 

Normally, they throw genre readers a few bones with a Stephen King or Walter Mosley's latest, but this year the NYT went strictly hardcore. No sf, mystery, or horror fiction and one graphic novel, Adrian Tomine's Shortcomings. As a result, not only is there not much on the fiction list that I have read, there's not much on there that I think I want to read. I love Richard Russo and Bridge of Sighs is waiting on my shelf. I'm sure I'll eventually read Chabon's book. Maybe the Ha Jin book when it comes out in paperback. In non-fiction, I've heard great things about the Ralph Ellison biography. That's about it.  I'd be fascinated to meet someone who'd read a significant amount of the fiction listed here. To be fair, the non-fiction seems a bit more mainstream.

Are any of you reading what our New York Times overlords are telling us to read? 

(Next up is the People Magazine year end best book list, which I always use to make myself feel smarter. And just for the record, the other books on the NYT list I'd already read, each of which I can recommend, were Schulz and Peanuts, David Michaelis' biography of Charles M.  Schulz' surprisingly melancholy life, The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross' (not that Alex Ross) history of modern classical music, and The Day of Battle, Rick Atkinson's history of the Allied invasion of Italy in World War II. Two Leni Riefenstahl biographies came out this year and of course I read the one that didn't make the NYT list.  But it was pretty good and one is enough). 

Jack Kirby in New York Times

Editorial Observer

Jack Kirby, a Comic Book Genius, Is Finally Remembered

By BRENT STAPLES

Published: August 26, 2007

The fear of being forgotten after death is endemic in the creative arts. In the case of the iconic comic book artist Jack Kirby, it happened while he was still alive. By the 1960s, Mr. Kirby had already revolutionized the comic book business more than once. Working as principal artist and in-house genius for Marvel, he created a voice and an aesthetic unmatched by any other company.

continued...

Ten years ago, I would not have imagined this type of editorial in any major newspaper, never mind one as prestigious and influential as the The New York Times. On that front, things have certainly changed for the better.

And a Kirby sidenote, be sure to check out the Jack Kirby Museum and especially the awesome online Kirby art gallery!