Missives from the Birdcage

To Do.....

Okay, planning a wedding is a full time task list of minutae threatening to eat your life. (Despite your life being so all consuming it's threatening to eat your wedding). And this is a casual affair, people. We're having a barbeque. In the backyard.

Though, you know, in the backyard has problems of its own. For example: Oh Crap! There's going to be a hundred of my closest family and friends in my house and I haven't gone after the dust bunnies since, uhm, never! On the upside, I've found a cake solution, have a dress/shoes/whatever to wear (though P still doesn't know what he's wearing), we have rings, I have chairs and tables reserved (people can sit! On something other than the grass!), and I've ordered lighting stuff for the yard. I'll be cooking for several days in the lead up.... which may mean dust bunnies be damned. Everyone look in the other direction, please. We haven't totally sorted out the music issue yet... but I've decided not to take this advice:

Sounds like an awesome wedding to me.

On the GW campus:

Girl: "I am going to kill the next person who has 'Another One Bites The Dust' as their wedding march. And that is only a sample of how tacky this wedding was."

Danger, mimes.

The only mime whose name you know, Marcel Marceau, has died. While I send my condolences to his friends and family, I must dance a jig of relief, as I have a bit of a mime-phobia. They are like infuriating and sneaky clowns (which I also have a thing about). Can we now, collectively, as a species, put miming to rest? Can we please bury those striped shirts, white gloves, and the white face paint? (P may disagree as Marceau is apparently the inspiration for the moonwalk, and giving moonwalk clinics is a specialty of his).

When I was living in Cambodia (and probably continuing on since then), one of the more popular t-shirts for tourists was a reprint of the minefield warning signs that used to be everywhere

Mine sign two

(and have been lessening in number for many years due to the diligent work of a group of organizations, a beautiful thing). I have one somewhere (though I can't seem to find it at the moment. Mine was pink).

Mine sign

A friend in Phnom Penh had a bunch of t-shirts made up (mine is likely packed up wherever the mine one is. I used to wear them, interchangeably, to the gym, so that I could work out next to the Nak Tom Tom drug lords. But that's a whole other story) using that sign/t-shirt as a guide. Only instead of the skull and crossbones there was a cartoon face, with beret, and floating gloved hands next to his head (a la trapped in a glass box) of a mime that was surely based on Marcel Marceau. Above in Khmer and beneath in English it said: Danger!! Mimes!! Happily for Cambodia, the French never exported Marceau and miming to Cambodia when it was part of la plus grande France, and as a result the shirts left Cambodians baffled. (As a sidenote, since mimes never made it to Cambodia I think it said something like Danger!! Actors!! in Khmer, and even it it had been possible to translate the concept clearly, the mine/mime semblance would have been lost anyway). The Westerners, however, thought it was hilarious.

Update: This post made the Express! (warning: takes a year to download). On page 36. Unfortunately, they added commas around the "like" in the opening sentence, making me sound like I'm sixteen and negating the simile construction. (No, really, I meant that they were LIKE infuriating and sneaky clowns. As in similar). But nice to see m'blog in print :)

justice delayed is justice

denied? I was surprised to read that Nuon Chea has been arrested. There was so much focus and discussion of the possibility of a tribunal while I was living in Cambodia-- it was an ubiquitous aural backdrop-- though many of the men and women who might make the list seemed to be defying the possibility of being brought to court by dying of old age in the meantime (or maybe of other things, as is often proported for Brother Number One himself, though he did live to be a ripe old age in any case). Nuon Chea. Hmmm. And Duch in custody for quite a while now (happy with himself, having confessed to Jesus, apparently). Who might be next? I recall bets on when Ieng Sary might be brought in, pardon and all.

Update: Oh no, I never noticed a thing!. Not even when my own close friends and allies disappeared forever after being told to take a trip to the country by Brother Number One. "He added that as a member of the regime's legislature he had never adopted any law allowing citizens to be killed and that he had "personally lost around 40 family members during the events of the time."" Listen, Nuon, it kind of undermines your claim to know nothing when you then say that you lost forty family members. See, forty is a lot. Something you might notice. 

kicked

There's an interesting article in the NY Times about women in Thai kickboxing. It's interesting for a lot of reasons, in particular because the kickboxing ring has traditionally been seen as male ritual space, with women being banned from it because of their potential (particularly during menstruation) for messing with the manly juju.

When I was living in Cambodia (something I've been thinking about a lot lately.... I miss it), I used to go to the kickboxing matches in Phnom Penh almost every weekend. The ones on Sunday at the Women's and Veterans' ministry arena (don't ask) were the best,

Heavyweight Champion

though I also enjoyed the occasional Saturday bout at the TV station. (Though not when the had the little guys-- seven year olds going at it "just for joking," though they were doing each other damage).

Preparing

I got a press pass at one point, so that I could take pictures, and while the TV station really didn't care where I was (I crawled all up on the edges of the ring, my press pass flying), I was sent down off the edge of the ring during the Sunday matches, press pass or no, because I was of the wrong sex. All the male photojournalists were up on the edge of the ring, but I was only allowed on the floor around the ring, as I might have sent the juju all into a tizzy. It should be noted that the TV ring also had round girls in miniskirts who walked around the ring with numerals on cards to let you know what round it was. No such thing happened on the Sunday bouts.

I was also interested in the article because I trained, ever so briefly, at a camp in Chiang Mai. I got my butt kicked. A lot. Pretty much all the time, in fact.

FS-592

And yet, I still enjoyed myself while I was there. I don't know if I could go back and do it again... though it wasn't that long ago (only five years!). *sigh* I do miss being there...

movie night, USA

Matewan

We haven't been doing much movie-watching lately, and have had the same three discs from Netflix hanging out for a looooooooong time. We finally watched Matewan a few weeks ago (I did a year of film school, so of course I'd seen it before, as John Sayles is required watching. And it's a John Sayles movie-- a morality tale, of the Manichean variety, but he does them well, generally-- with the notable exception of Silver City, which I found horribly forced, messy, about as subtle as a kick in the teeth-- a true clunker. But Lone Star, which is what I more often think of when thinking of John Sayles, is great stuff. Besides, Chris Cooper is always a joy to watch.) I enjoyed watching it again, even if it is a sad story. It's shocking to think what amazing periods of instability there are in the recent

The Magdalene Sisters [2003]

history of the country.... and how barbaric was the way in which people were treated in their workplaces, and with legal sanction.

Last week we fiiiinally watched The Magdalene Sisters, which I think we've had since (gasp) March. It was good... though, yipes, what a story. P and I spent the entire time coming up with the things we would have done to escape. P's comment at the end was that when Bernadette goes balistic at the end and bangs on the penguins' door with a giant candlestick, that would have been me. I noted that he and I both had more Bernadette than Rose or Margaret in us, though without the cruelty, to which he agreed. It's pretty horrifying to think that this stuff was based on reality... and that these places were only just shut down in 1996. I often tell P that I would not have made a good soldier. In the same vein of thought I wouldn't have made a good nun nor pentitent either.

The Wiz

Last night, after a fit of nostalgia prompted me to push it to the top of the list, we watched The Wiz. Now, I hadn't seen it since it was in theaters. In 1978, thank you very much. And in 1978 (when I was in my single digit ages), it seemed like all that and a bag of chips. Thirty years later....? Well, it is no fine wine, that is for sure. Really, it sucked. Pretty hard. As P said this morning, I guess the entertainment expectations were a bit lower then. Which is probably true, though I still enjoy watching much older films (like Alfred Hitchcock films or The Maltese Falcon or Sunset Boulevard), so there's more to it.... like the seventies were a really bad moment, but they haven't become ancient history, and therefore haven't become the kitsch that the bad stuff of earlier eras has become (see Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman). The Wiz is just bad. Bad music, bad acting, bad writing, bad editing... bad. All characters spend pretty much the entire film quivering (from either fear or rage). After thirty seconds of less of pat, quivering dialogue, someone breaks into (awful) song. Repeat. Go on for two hours. The only parts that were at all interesting were the ones that P and I both remembered: the subway and the sweat shop (Evillene's ginormous dress is something.... I want to make one for a Halloween costume). And very little else. For good reason. The only reason I was able to follow the story was because I've seen the Wizard of Oz about ten thousand times (and read the book), so I know what the structure of the story is supposed to be.... no character development, no real explanations for change, no real introduction of characters.... egads. And I just couldn't stand to watch Diana Ross, looking anorexic and spastic, shivering, quivering, quaking, on the on verge of tears for one more moment. (And as a sidebar, the ending is awful. It's such a horribly truncated piece of crap-- where's the embarassingly satisfying sweet as pie and tied up in a bow ending from the Wizard of Oz? She isn't going to wake up in the snow, stumble back to the apartment and find that the super looks suspiciously like the Tinman?)

Not that I should be expecting high art. Or low art. Or any art. But, you know, it was so much better in my memory. *sigh*

reading for pleasure

I've always loved to read. Even when I was a small child I loved to read, and was obessesive in my collecting of books. (I still am, and have more books than anyone should). Reading is pleasurable, and has always been one of my main forms of entertainment. I don't much like television (it is, admittedly, something that fascinates, at least for a while. We're all really like magpies and will stare at the shiny things when they flash at us, right?); and I like movies, but they are so expensive and I'm never free when they are playing, and I have a hard time convicing myself that I need to go to the theater at an inconvenient time to pay ten bucks to see something that... well... isn't worth ten bucks-- especially with Netflix, since their collection is so wide-ranging that I don't even often feel like I have to see the arty things because they'll never be available. (In fact... I believe the last time I went to see a movie in the theater was Fur, the Diane Arbus quasi-biopic with Nicole Kidman. Which was weird. And also many months ago.).

Murder on the Orient Express: A Hercule Poirot Mystery (Hercule Poirot)

So. I read. I enjoy reading, and enjoy reading most things. I like Literature-capital-L, I like reading art history tomes, academic histories, popular history, given time and quiet I even like reading theory. My not-so-secret brain candy is mystery novels. Who doesn't love Agatha Christie?

Sadly, there are a lot of very, very crappy mysteries and, ahem, "thrillers" to be had. (See: Code, Da Vinci) Even sadder for me, I am a bit compulsive about reading and find it almost impossible, not matter how execreble the writing, to not finish a novel once I've started it. This is how I am able to say that I actually read a Sidney Sheldon book (bought for a dime at a yard sale when I was about ten. It was large and hard cover and impressive looking. And then I read it and realized that, indeed, one CAN NOT judge a book by its cover, because, lo, it was complete crap). It's how I can claim to have actually read a couple of romance novels (given to me as a birthday gift when I turned twelve by the girl across the street, who had the same birthday as me. I felt that I had to read them-- then perhaps we could discuss? Look at the deeper meanings? They were so horrid that a) I never could see us becoming close friends-- look at what she read! What would we have in common?; and b) I've never read a romance novel again, and would likely find the experience on par with dental work.)

Admittedly, it is a bit hypocritical of me to be so snooty about romance novels when I read mysteries and (less often) science fiction... you know, when I'm not pondering Heiddegger or whatever. But sorry, I just can't stomach all those heaving bosoms and such. (and all that bad writing). Though, really, I like Jane Austen, so I suppose that I like romances after all.... but you know what I mean.

And in much the same way that I prefer my romances to be extremely well written, I'd much rather read a well put together mystery replete with well turned phrases than the dross that often passes for mysteries or thrillers (See: Code, Da Vinci). Which is why I'm so very annoyed when I end up in the middle of some horrible, horrible excuse for a book. Gladly, the one I finished the other day was a library book, so none of my funds went to the support of this thing, but still.... how does something that godawful end up being published? Particularly when I know, personally know, lots of people whose work is ten thousand times better, and can't get published for love or money (well maybe money, but, you know what I mean)? It was just the sort of stupidly, boundlessly fantastical plotline that makes you want to throw up. Look, there's suspension of disbelief, and then there's unbelievable suspension of reality. Please don't do the latter. It's annoying. The narrators all just happen to know people who just happen to have whatever outrageous skill/advantage/resouce that one needs to get out of just this improbable situation. How very convenient. *sigh* (and as a sidebar, the title would be very clever, were there, anywhere in the book, references to the manuscript as either air or shadows).

The worst part, I think to myself, is that not only does this drek end up published, not only is it purchased by a reading public, but that the majority of our fellow countrymen can't even be bothered to pull themselves away from American Idol long enough to read such drek.

Update:

As if in response to this post (well, not really, but still), the Times had a review of a new book repriting rejection letters to some of the best authors of the last century by Knopf. Perhaps that explains something....

"The rejection files, which run from the 1940s through the 1970s, include dismissive verdicts on the likes of Jorge Luis Borges (“utterly untranslatable”), Isaac Bashevis Singer (“It’s Poland and the rich Jews again”), Anaïs Nin (“There is no commercial advantage in acquiring her, and, in my opinion, no artistic”), Sylvia Plath (“There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice”) and Jack Kerouac (“His frenetic and scrambling prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don’t think so”). In a two-year stretch beginning in 1955, Knopf turned down manuscripts by Jean-Paul Sartre, Mordecai Richler, and the historians A. J. P. Taylor and Barbara Tuchman, not to mention Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” (too racy) and James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” (“hopelessly bad”)."

jamboree

I'd been planning to write something about the wetplate jamboree.... but what could possibly describe it? So I'll just put up some pictures....

portrait

There was quite a bit of portraiture going on.

red barn

Including some amusing posing with farm implements.

country livin'

And a special look at the life of a wet plate photographer in the country....

We stayed down in Watkins Glen, and I took P for a quick walk up the gorge there, which is really beautiful. We zipped over to Ithaca as we headed out (going East to Massachusetts to visit another wet plate artist and my family, ever so briefly), had lunch at one of the Korean places, and then walked a bit around the campus. It was really weird being back on my old stomping grounds, and really really weird to be back on the campus. I took P around the Arts & Sciences quad (which is where I spent most of my time), and then took him into the library to show him my erstwhile carrel-- the locked one that was the original birdcage (I used to send out emails to friends from my laptop while locked in there with my dissertation, the subject line reading: missives from the birdcage). He said it made him imagine me in an orange jumpsuit locked in there. I spent a year and a half locked in that thing, usually for something like twelve or more hours a day, six, and sometimes seven days a week. Grad school can be so ridiculous, no? Though I do deeply miss the freedom to read many hours a day without judgment. If I read that many hours a day now (books, as opposed to reports or files), I'd be considered a slackass. But in grad school I was diligent. *sigh*

Anyhoo, after squiring my dear P around the library (here are the stacks where I whiled away years, here is the carrel I had the first three years I was here-- the one with the great view), not seeing a soul I knew, I told him the story of the pumpkin appearing on the clock tower (which he spent a lot of time pondering the logistics of), and then took him through the grad housing complex where I worked in exchange for housing (an excellent deal, except when someone called you at three in the morning to say that the dryer had eaten their quarter. Uh, this phone is for emergencies. But this is and emergency-- my clothes aren't going to be dry! That is an actual conversation that I had, at three in the morning). And then we headed off, alighting briefly in New England before heading south.

Of course, the Finger Lakes are lovely for about two and a half months of the year, and we visited in the middle of that period, so it was beautiful, with perfect weather, delightful views, and all that good stuff. When I'm up there in the summer it makes me miss it a bit, and a felt a little pang of jealousy for the couple at the jamboree who are from California and bought a summer cabin on the other side of the lake that they are fixing up themselves. But, you know, it doesn't take long before I remember the Finger Lake winter and the three foot snow storms and that it is five + hours from everything.... But in the summertime you'd be hard pressed to find a lovelier spot.

busy busy bees and cake ducks

We had a chock full weekend involving art, performance, travel, and lots and lots of flarn.

Thursday we went to the opening performance of 33 Variations at Arena Stage. It was very enjoyable, alternatively moving and funny, and good performances all around. We both liked it a lot, particularly the set design and lighting design. There's an interesting article about it in the WaPo.

Friday was taken up with much wedding necessities, various flarn tasks, and then driving north. I wanted to take P on a surprise trip, and didn't want him to know where until we got there, but he figured it out when we were about 50 miles away. Of course, when booking out hotel for the evening on Travelocity, they failed to mention that the Days Inn, ahem, "near the zoo," was in fact in a rather dicey place. Pulling off the highway P said "isn't this the part of Philly where all the murders are always happening?" We rolled up to the Days Inn Ghetto at about nine at night, having passed a number of neighborhood characters along the way. What did I know? I mean, when the Fabulous Miss A lived in Philly and my parents were just across the bridge I always visited her in Center City or when into CC with my mom or whatever. I didn't spend a whole lotta time elsewhere (except for, you know, the airport).

So. We pull into the parking lot where a bottle blond woman who is clearly on the clock is leaning into an SUV while her bare booty is flashing everyone. Uh-huh. I go into the lobby to check in and wait in line behind a loud, dirty woman who smells very bad and is calling everyone either "honey," "sugar," or "baby." Behind the bullet-proof glass is a South Asian man in his forties who is angry. He won't look at anyone unless you demand that he talk to you, and even then maybe not. He seems to be thinking, "Damn all of you, I have a degree in engineering and came to America to make my fortune as an engineer and here I am dealing with the dregs of society in a hotel. I should have stayed in Lahore." He pointedly ignored me as I waited, and also pointedly ignored the man banging on his window saying, "where can I get a orange juice, man? I needs an orange juice. Where can I get a orange juice?" Smelly lady finally moved on, though stopped to tell the orange juice man, in a booming voice, "YOU CAN GET ORANGE JUICE AT THE STORE, HONEY. JUST WALK OUT HERE PAST THE IHOP AND YOU CAN GET A JUICE AT THE STORE, BABY."

The other man behind the glass was older, sporting little round glasses, it was a bit like having Ben Kingsley playing Ghandi getting your hotel key. He also seemed a bit like he may have been on a hunger strike because he was moving very very slowly. When I got back out to the parking lot the woman was still hanging her bare booty out of the SUV. We parked and went inside, contemplating whether or not the Jeep would be there in the morning.

The halls smelled of stale smoke (surprise), and the room smelled of deep seated damp. Surprisingly, we had a quiet enough sleep, mostly because the A/C ran at about 10,000 decibels. It was like having an airplane taking off continually in the bedroom. We got up early and headed into the city, thankful to find the Jeep there and in one piece.

Coffee, breakfast, I took Phil to the Mutter Museum, which was the reason why I'd decided to take him to Philly in the first place. I think I've had it on my mind recently, as I've been thinking a lot about Wunderkammers, and the Mutter is probably as close to a Wunderkammer that you can get at this point.But also because I knew that it was something that he'd be interested in (and he was).

While in Philly we saw signs up for the Franklin Institute of Science saying that they had a King Tut exhibit. Whoo! Since both of us had had a major impression on us made at a young age by King Tut mania in the sevenites, but had never had a chance to go see the actual exhibit, we were all over it. It was an interesting exhibit.... but it was also highly disappointing. If you click on the link you will see that all of their advertising has what appears to be the famous mask (it's actually a much much smaller piece that was obviously chosen for the advertising due to its resemblance to the most famous pieces from the tomb). But, while the exhibit was chock full of neat stuff that was in his tomb (canopic jars, chairs, helper statues), neither the sarcophogus nor the mask were anywhere to be found. The stuff got progressively more interesting and ornate as we went through, and we rounded that final corner thinking, well, here, at last will be the mask! And then found ourselves in the gift shop. It was a very pricey show, and falsely advertised. Not a bad show, but I think we both would have enjoyed it more if we'd known that we weren't going to see the most famous pieces-- and since they choise a piece that invokes it to be shown on all the posters and ads the implication is certainly that we should expect to see them.

We also would have enjoyed it a lot more if there were fewer people. Good gravy. Lots of people lost in their audio tours, blocking the view forever while they listen to the droning voice on the tape, stumbling like zombies through the exhibit. And lots of people with kids who were too young to really make it through an exhibit that long, one man getting angry at his seven year old for not being interested in or fascinated by the same things he was interested in and fascinated by. "Well you'd know that if you'd been paying attention, but you weren't!" Dude, he's seven. This is the sixth room of stuff. His attention isn't mature enough for that. Give the kid a break.

Also packed into the weekend were a photo trip to Arlington National Cemetery (lots and lots of people there) and a trip to the National Gallery to see the photography show on modernity in Central Europe. The show was very interesting, with some really lovely photographs, and an interesting view on the development of photography in Hungary, Czech, Slovenia, Russia, etc. It's definitely worth a trip down there to take a look-- and is closing soon, so hop to it.

marker

 

We went to the gallery with friends of ours and we all went to a new-ish Mexican place on 7th afterwards where we had a whole lotta margarits (which were very good, and made me very sleepy). Standing on the corner by the Archives metro stop afterwards, about to head in opposite directions, we chatted for a while, until a very happy man came up to the group and announced, "Someone said that there's gonna be ducks coming out of the cake!" He smiled and moved on. And with that, we headed home.

random assortment

For my birthday P got me an awesome book and just what every Dr. Birdcage needs: a beautiful 4x5 pinhole camera. We went to Richmond for part of my b-day and visited a neeeeeat cemetery there, where I tried out my new superawesome camera..... and discovered when I got the film back yesterday that the 25mm thing (he got me an extension so I can do 50mm too) is reaaaaalllllly wide. Like, wide enough to get my head in many a shot, even when I'm standing back from the camera. Note to self: step awaaaay from the camera. Such awesome gifties from my super fantastic mister. :)

gated

Then on Sunday we had a multi-birthday bbq, as we have a gaggle of friends with near-birthdays. And that, too, was superawesome and lots of fun and involved rum-soaked watermelon, so really, what more could one want?

birthday party

It also involved me using up most of the color 6x6 polaroid that I had left, which is a sad sad story since Polaroid stupidly has discontinued this format-- the format of the Holgaroid. *le sigh* But I always loved the b&w more than the color of this stuff, and will be much more distressed when my hoarde of that is gone... a day that is coming soon.

                         ***

P and I went up to Massachusetts a few weeks ago to visit family, and I got to see my parents, brother, niece (cutest. thing. ever.), grandfather, and the Fabulous Miss A and her beloved A-lo (however briefly), which was all a super fabulous thing.
 

Bunnies!

I had this brilliant idea that P, my mom, and I would swing through the Hopper exhibit at the MFA in Boston as it is mere blocks from Miss A's place, and I like Hopper (I mean, really, who doesn't?), and we were going to be in Boston to see GrF. This would have been a brilliant idea had I accepted the fact that the Hopper show was a blockbuster show and that people are really into blockbuster shows. It being the last day of the show, it was, of course, sold out. A fact deeply disappointing in and of itself, coupled with the disappointment to realize that the much beloved MFA of my youth (I used to go in there almost every day the summer I was at MassArt, since MassArt is just up the block, and I believe I got free admission with my student ID) has become outrageously expensive. It's over $20 to get into the regular museum. Though I think a lot of museums are charging outrageous sums like that these days, and my extended years of student-dom, giving me cheap/free entry into educational institutions apparently insulated me from any gradual change in cost. I likes me some art, but holy crap-- twenty-three bucks?

Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley

Judith Richardson

We didn't have enough time to spend at the museum to justify dropping that much (and as an aside, the super high entries will make it so that no one does what I used to do when I worked four blocks from the MoMA in New York and had a CUNY student ID, which at the time got you free entry: I'd go at least once a week and wander around for half an hour on my lunch break. It was great. I used to do that at the Met, too, since they have a "suggested donation," and my suggestion was that I was too poor to give more than the change in my pocket. No more nuanced understanding of collections with $20+ entries-- who could afford it? Everyone must feel compelled to see everything on one trip, never to return, so that the entire experience is like one of those see-Europe-in-ten-days-it's-Tuesday-so-it-must-be-Rome trips where people come back and haven't the foggiest idea what they saw, heard, read, tasted, or smelled, only that the doorknobs and toilets in Europe are different), so instead we went into the book store, where I picked up a book about the history of haunting in the Hudson River Valley.

It's an interesting book, and not surprisingly talks a lot about Washington Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and other Irving tales. (I'm not done with it yet, though the reliance on this one group of stories, as told by Irving and then retold by others, seems a weak point, though it's still an interesting book). It made me want to reread Irving, having not read it since I was a kid. So I went to the library.

Okay, having spent years locked away (literally, in a cage. This is where the name for the blog comes from) in an enormous research library, I admit that I am spoiled. Possessions lists numerous derivative works and travelogues and guidebooks for the Hudson Valley from the nineteenth century, and I was deeply disappointed and perplexed to find none of them in the collection of the D.C. Public Library. (Yes, okay, so it isn't a research library.) Well, at the very least, I'll get the Irving, I thought. I used their online catalogue, which is enough to make you cry. I put in Irving as the author and got back three pages of hits, 80% of which were written or created by someone other than Irving. Some of them were derivative works (Rip Van Winkle imagined as an illustrated childrens' book blah blah blah), but a significant number of them were just random works of sociology or statistics or whatever. In short, their search engine sucks.

I finally found where it would be, and set off to the library to find it. Which was a futile mission: not on the shelf (nor were any of the other books I was interested in that were all listed as being on the shelf). I ask a librarian. He says, oh that must be up in literature. Okay. I head up to literature. Where I get Not-Listening-Librarian-Dude. I explain that the book I was looking for wasn't where it was indicated to be in the computer, and that downstairs librarian has sent me upstairs. "What's the call number?" Well, there isn't one because it was listed in the popular section, where you don't do call numbers, and all of your computers up here are being used by people doing email, so I can't get into your catalogue. He then proceeds to explain to me the difference between the popular fiction section downstairs and the literature section upstairs and then how call number work and that I need to go to the card catalogue. I quickly began to lose interest in finding the book.

But he wouldn't let me go. No, he was going to explain to me what a card catalogue is, how one uses it, what purposes it has, why it's important, and how one does a search. "The only way you're going to find it is if you put in last name comma first name, see." Yes, I know. I did that. And you'll see that, in fact, your search engine does not come back with items only by Irving. It has fifty other things that I'm not looking for. I just want to find this book. "The only way you're going to find it is if you put in last name comma first name, see." He repeated that about fifty times. Every time I said, okay, thanks, gotta go, he'd call me back to look or listen to something, mostly to him repeating the basics of how to search a catalogue. Exhausted with this, bookless, I finally said, "I'm already well versed in using a library catalogue. I have a doctorate and spent years doing research in libraries. I guess the book just isn't on the

Legend of Sleepy Hollow and other Stories from the Sketch Book

shelf. Thanks for your help," and started to walk away. He called me back to show me all of hits he'd gotten for Irving in the computer, having put in last name comma first name. I pointed out that on the entire first page only one of his hits was something for which Irving was actually the author. Undaunted, he proceeded to the second page, saying, "the only way you're going to find something by a particular person is if you put in last name comma first name." I said thanks and left, ignoring his entreaties to return to look at the second page.

And people wonder why no one reads. Sheesh. I ended up breaking down and going to Barnes and Noble the next day where I was able to pick up that damn Irving book (the last copy-- apparently not a popular selection), new and mercifully inexpensive. I'd forgotten what a hapless and somewhat mercenary character Icabod Crane was (no Johnny Depp, he), and had also forgotten how enjoyable Irving can be (in my mind I've put him into the pool with other overly flourid nineteenth century writers who you assume were being paid by the word as they spend way too long on the unneccesary details and not nearly enough time on the plot). Not just enjoyable, funny. So go, go now, reread Irving. You won't regret it.