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Oxford Exchange.


I came across this list, from the ABA, of the new, indie bookstores that opened up last year.

I scrolled through, looking for places I’d lived. Dover, Delaware has a new bookstore. That’s good. My sister in Delaware is moving to Shanghai and the kids are all grown and almost finally out of little, ol’ Delaware, so I won’t be going back so much, but it’s still good to think that, should I find myself returning, there will be a new bookstore to replace some of the one’s lost (Atlantic Books, I knew him Horatio!).

Then, lo and behold, Tampa! Oxford Exchange opened up near the University of Tampa (where my Delaware sister’s youngest child has applied to attend).

If you clicked on the link, you’ll see that they are really just advertising their food.

But I sent my parents there on a scouting expedition. My mother is a radical anglophile and so I suggested that father take advantage of the English style afternoon teas they offer and get on my mother’s good side.

He took my advice and I was assured that the tea came with scones and clotted cream and all that good stuff.

Also, that it’s a good bookstore. The clerk was knowledgeable, had some suggestions based on my mother’s affection for pre-war novels from England.

So, going to have to take a road trip some day soon.

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Richard III


So, the body found beneath a car park in Leicester is, in fact, Richard the Third.

When I was fourteen or so, I developed an odd obsession with the Shakespeare play about Richard. I bought a beautiful little hardback, blue cloth bound copy and memorized the opening soliloquy (I can still do a great deal of it today) and stayed up late to record on VHS, Laurence Olivier’s movie version of the play from WEDU (our PBS affiliate).

Rest in peace, Your Grace.

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The Chief Glory Of Every People Arises From Its Authors


photo-2What a marvelous sentiment!

‘The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.’

I took this picture while visiting the Jefferson building of the Library of Congress with my better half’s father.

Is it true?

In a thousand years, will people remember George W. Bush? Steve Jobs?

Or will they remember Mark Twain?

The glory of Greece and Rome is as much in Homer, Cicero, Plato, and the idea of a Republic and Democracy as it in roads, aqueducts, and temples, however glorious.

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It Could Have Been Different


Maybe if San Francisco had named their team after an American literary icon instead of an era of rampant greed and pillaging of the land, things might have gone differently.

The San Francisco Beats, perhaps?

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Crossroads Of Twilight (New Year’s Resolution, Book Five)


9780812571332They’re getting longer. Book ten clocks in at almost forty pages longer than book nine. If I was reading this in hardback, I could kill man or stop a bullet. As it is, the paperback barely fits in my copious coat pocket, and a genre novel that were incapable of so fitting would seem like a betrayal of the trust between the reader and the author/publisher/editor.

As you may recall, after finishing the last book in the series, I was so excited that the taint had been cleansed from saidin (I don’t have time to explain all this to you; read about it on wikipedia). And while Rand may have become less of a whiny little punk, he’s also kind of absent. He gets a girl pregnant and not much else.

Crossroads of Twilight also reminded one of how Jordan loves to drag things out. In particular, I was reminded of the terrible absence of communication between people who, if they could have just spoken, would have solved a number longstanding, thorny issues in good order and moved on with saving the world from evil. To make matters worse, many of these people actually grew up together and have known each other their whole lives. Others actually meet and talk, yet somehow manage not to share the key data points that would illuminate things for each other. I know that this is medieval fantasy and there are no telephones, but I think that making a greater effort to explain things to your friend since infancy who also happens to be the prophesied savior of the world… well, it just makes sense.

Following that long rant, I’m going to give some credit to this book, the penultimate novel by Robert Jordan.

He left us on a rip roaring cliffhanger. I could tell you what happened, but it wouldn’t sound special out of context (Egwene is captured, I think by supporters of Elaida in Tar Valon; see, I told you it wouldn’t sound special). For some reason, this particular cliffhanger really struck me. I thought to myself, this is exciting. I want to know what comes next and not just because sheer volume of pages and books has bludgeoned me into wanting to doggedly finish. But, instead, actually kind of wanting to know what the heck is going to happen.

I feel sure that the next book will ruin that for me.

While I will be finishing the Wheel of Time this year and more than that, probably before the end of April, I’m not going to be reading book eleven (The Knife of Dreams, if you must know) for next week. I’m leaning towards a happy medium between genre fiction and literary fiction: C.S. Lewis.

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Capsule Coffee


The artisans versus the cyborgs is what this article is about – Joy in the task: Even the finest restaurants are serving coffee made with capsules. Have we completely lost faith in the human touch?

Basically, a taste test of a very high end automatic espresso machine (Nespresso), versus hand pulled espresso, versus c–p stuff from some place down the street. Obviously, the last wasn’t a serious contender.

I tend to fall on the same side as the author. The Nespresso machine may have won the taste test, but the sameness was noted.

Several years ago, I remember the president of Starbucks convening a bunch of baristas because he felt that the coffee chain had lost something in the systemization and automation of the process: the individual touch and character of a quality barista.

Also, I worked in an office that had a Keurig and frankly, it made terrible, terrible coffee. Maybe it just wasn’t a good enough machine, but I just couldn’t pick out any particularly redeeming qualities. After all, it wasn’t so much easier than just making some coffee the normal way.

Finally, finding good coffee, like finding a good anything, should be a quest. Choosing to walk up to Peregrine Espresso, rather than settling for the Starbucks stand in the grocery store next door. Comparing Peregrine’s coffee with Pound the Hill (note: Peregrine has retaken the title in that fight). Sometimes taking the trip to Sova in the Atlas District or to Chinatown Coffee to explore what distinctions other coffeehouses can offer.

It’s not more about the journey than it is about the destination because, after all, if the destination is c–p coffee, than the whole experience will have kind of sucked. But the journey matters, doesn’t it?

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Why Did No One Tell Me?


It’s James Joyce’s birthday. Wouldn’t kill all my so-called friends to call me up and say, ‘Hey, dude, don’t forget – today is the b day of a modernist giant. Read a chapter of Finegans Wake in his memory, good friend.’

Instead, I got nothing.

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Obama Is Unconstitutional Because Skeet Shooting


Obama needs to be impeached immediately. If America had known he had only gone skeet shooting a few times instead of many times, he could never have been elected.

Not only does this make his entire presidency unconstitutional, it also makes any future (and obviously fixed, using ACORN voter fraud muslim ninja thugs) election of a non-white president also unconstitutional because the second amendment.

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Why We Need Bookstores


So, according to this, only 7% of book discovery occurs online. In other words, more books are discovered in book and mortar bookstores than are every discovered through Amazon’s inane recommendations.

Amazon’s already poor financial results would be even worse without the old fashioned bookstores they (with our assistance) are driving out of business.

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The Cloisters


photo-4The Cloisters are a beautiful museum, filled with some of the most amazing sacred art from the high middle ages.

The entire place left me feeling uncomfortable.

Did you know that I’m vegetarian? Did you know why? I was in college and I stopped by my father’s house to raid the fridge and when I opened the freezer, looking for a tv dinner, I saw shelf after shelf filled with great, red chunks of meat. It seemed as if an entire cow might have been slaughtered and stashed in that fridge. The sheer mass of it struck me, by driving home the truth that a living, feeling creature had died so that we might have beef three times a week. That was when I quit.

The picture you see is off an apse taken from a Spanish church. The entire apse disassembled, removed, and then reassembled in New York.

The building is filled with such things. Columns. Door ways. Cloisters. Meeting rooms.

Also altars. Lecterns. Reliquaries.

More. Hundreds of items.

Things taken from churches and monasteries across Europe. Items that were, literally and formally blessed and sanctified. And not just formally, but objects used in the worship and devotion of how many generations? Taken from monasteries sanctified not just from a bishops prayer and holy water, but by the blood and bodies of thousands of monks and nuns who lived and died in those abbeys.

There was an altar and all its trappings and chairs were set up for those who wished to formally respect it. There was a picture of the church from whence they were taken. It was still standing. That church hadn’t been otherwise destroyed. That altar could still have been used for worship, had it not been moved.

The volume was overwhelming and, for me, with rare exceptions, the place felt very secular.

Only a single spot, some art on the wall above a doorway, felt at all holy to me.photo-3

The art was beautiful and I’m glad I came, but…

I went to the Rubin Museum later during my visit to New York City. The Rubin is a museum dedicated to Himalayan art. Essentially, Tibetan art (some work from Nepal and Bhutan and India, but Tibetan culture is at the center of the museum). I realized that the act of collecting the sacred art that was exhibited in that museum was different because of the unique and tragic nature of Tibet’s occupation by China and the Chinese government’s efforts to eradicate Tibetan culture, particularly it’s religious culture. Collecting and preserving that art could be viewed as a means to protect it from destruction or at least usurpation and shameful manipulation by the Chinese government.

But last I checked, western Europe was relatively free from Chinese occupation, excepting tourists.