Author Without Borders

The writer William T. Vollmann at the Terrace Park Cemetery in Holtville, Calif., a burial place for illegal immigrants who have died crossing the border.






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William T. Vollmann, legendarily prolific, writes in a studio that used to be a restaurant in Sacramento. The place is surrounded by a big parking lot where he encourages homeless people to camp out. Inside he runs a one-man assembly line. His bibliography so far includes nine novels, including “Europe Central,” which won the National Book Award in 2005; three collections of stories; a seven-volume, 3,000-page history of violence; a book-length essay on poverty; and a travel book about hopping freight trains, a hobby of his even though his balance is so bad that he has to use a plastic bucket as a stepstool.

Mr. Vollmann’s newest book, “Imperial,” which comes out from the Viking Press on Thursday, costs $55 and is 1,300 pages long — so heavy, he observed recently, that if you dropped it, you’d break a toe. A companion volume, to be published next month by powerHouse Books, contains some 200 photographs he took while working on “Imperial,” for which he also wore a spy camera while trying to infiltrate a Mexican factory, and paddled in an inflatable raft down the New River in California, a rancid trench that is probably the most polluted stream in America. The water, he writes, tasted like the Salk polio vaccine.

Mr. Vollmann, who just turned 50, is a loner, a bit of a recluse, despite being married and the father of a daughter, and a throwback: a wandering, try-anything writer-journalist in the tradition of Steinbeck or Jack London. Some people think he’s a little nuts.

A little?

To research “The Rifles,” a novel partly about the 1845 Franklin expedition to the Arctic, Mr. Vollmann spent two weeks alone at the magnetic North Pole, where he suffered frostbite and permanently burned off his eyebrows when he accidentally set his sleeping bag on fire. But being eyebrowless has its advantages, he discovered more recently, while experimenting with cross-dressing to research a novel he’s now writing about the transgendered. He didn’t have to pluck his brows when getting made up.

Well, that's an advantage.

Slide Show

A Drive Through ‘Imperial’

“Imperial,” which is about Imperial County in California, the vast, flat and arid region in the southeastern part of the state, bordering Mexico, is an extreme Vollmann production: brilliant in places, practically unreadable in others. There are lyrical passages, and others edging over into magenta (“And change came; just as the urine of dehydrated people is turbid and dark, failing in transparency, so the evening sunlight, as if heated to exhaustion by and with itself, now lost the glaring whiteness which had characterized it since early morning, and it oozed down upon the pavement to stain it with gold”), along with scientific chapters, complete with graphs, on salinization and agricultural productivity, and 175 pages of notes. A page early on has a title warning of “Impending Aridity.”

Phew! Exhausting just reading this paragraph.

The book is a little like the Imperial Valley itself: pathless, fascinating, exhausting. Its two great themes are illegal immigration — the struggle of countless thousands of Mexicans to sneak into the United States through the Imperial Valley — and water, which has transformed the valley, or parts of it, from desert to seeming paradise but at great environmental cost.

Mr. Vollmann’s editors urged him to cut, he said, and he resisted: “We always go round and round. They want me to cut, and I argue, so they cut my royalties, and I agree never to write a long book again.” He acknowledged that the length of “Imperial” might cost him readers but said: “I don’t care. It seems like the important thing in life is pleasing ourselves. The world doesn’t owe me a living, and if the world doesn’t want to buy my books, that’s my problem.”

Good point.

On a cloudless, sun-baked day last week Mr. Vollmann, with a characteristically bad haircut, toured some of the landscapes that had inspired him, traveling from San Diego across the border to the Mexican town of Tecate, down the mountainous, hairpin road to Mexicali and then back across the border into California, through the Imperial Valley to the Salton Sea, an enormous inland lake that is the region’s agricultural sink, so hyper-saline from irrigation runoff that it is almost toxic.

Along the way, some of the secrets of Mr. Vollmann’s method began to reveal themselves. Mr. Vollmann doesn’t drive, and his Spanish is only so-so, so he was driven, as he was for most of the 12 years it took him to write the book, by Terrie Petree, who also served as an interpreter. She learned her Spanish as a Mormon missionary in northern Spain, which also prepared her, she said, for having doors shut in her face. Mr. Vollmann sat in the passenger seat, taking in everything and peppering Ms. Petree with questions. Far from manic, he was preternaturally calm and patient, dosing himself with nothing stronger than bottled water.

Being a passenger certainly allows him to observe everything. I remember that feeling when we rode the bus from Guadalajara to Melaque: I could see everything at my leisure.

Mr. Vollmann is almost excessively polite, and in conversation has a salesman’s habit of using your first name in every other sentence. He seems more innocent than worldly, driven by insatiable curiosity. In Mexicali he turned an annoying and time-consuming visit to a police station, occasioned by what appeared to be a traffic-fine shakedown, into an interview with the station’s chief of information. He also charmed a blushing secretary there and learned the name of the best taco joint in town.

And he speak Spanish poorly.

Stripping Away the Darkness as Murals Are Reborn

Slideshow

Target Can Make Sleepy Titles Into Best Sellers

At Target, Bookmarked book club titles get stickers, left, and special shelves, above. Almost one-third of the sales of “Still Alice,” by Lisa Genova, can be traced to Target.









When “Sarah’s Key,” a novel about an American journalist investigating the 1942 roundup of Jews in Paris, was published in hardcover two years ago, it dropped with a thud. According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of sales, the book sold just 2,000 copies.

Indeed, the book, by the first-time novelist Tatiana de Rosnay, was well on its way to sinking out of sight last fall when Target, the discount retailer, chose the paperback version of “Sarah’s Key” as its Bookmarked Club Pick: a choice for a program that designates titles for prominent display throughout the chain’s stores. Suddenly sales exploded.



In publishing circles Target has long been known as a place that can move many copies of discounted best sellers, as do other mass-merchant retailers like Wal-Mart and Costco. But in the last few years, much in the way it has cultivated its image as a counterintuitive purveyor of Isaac Mizrahi clothes or Michael Graves tea kettles, Target has been building itself into a tastemaker for books.

Through its book club, as well as a program it calls Bookmarked Breakout, both started in 2005, the company has highlighted largely unknown writers, helping their books find their way into shopping carts filled with paper towels, cereal and shampoo.

Target “can sell hundreds of thousands of copies of a book that is virtually unknown in the rest of the marketplace,” said Jacqueline Updike, director of adult sales at Random House, one of the world’s largest publishers.

By assembling a collection of books by unheralded authors, Target behaves more like an independent bookstore than like a mere retailer of mainstream must-haves (although, of course, Target sells its share of best-seller list regulars, like James Patterson and Janet Evanovich).

Target began its Bookmarked Club Pick and Breakout programs partly to convert “Target core guests into regular Target book shoppers,” said Jana O’Leary, a spokeswoman, in e-mailed responses to questions. Ms. O’Leary said that Target’s “core” book buyers were women, with a median age of 42 and median annual household income of $60,000. About half have completed college degrees, and some have children at home.

The books for both programs are chosen by a panel of Target employees who meet monthly to review submissions from publishers.

In a letter written for the Target edition of “The Wednesday Sisters,” Ms. Clayton connected Target with her main characters: “As women with relationships and jobs to tend to, dinners to cook, miles to run, and children to raise, where else would they go for sweatshirts, cookie pans and the alarm clocks that wake them up so they can write in the early-morning silence, before life intrudes?”

In an interview Ms. Clayton said she was more likely to go to Target herself for “teapots and toasters” and mainly bought books at local independents. Target, she figured, would expand the more typical audience for her novel. “Your book is being seen by people who aren’t necessarily there to buy books,” she said. “It makes you think that walk-by traffic is still selling books.”

Ms. de Rosnay, the author of “Sarah’s Key,” who lives in France, said she knew her paperback had a chance of much bigger sales when a friend sent her an iPhone photo of a shelf full of copies of her book at a Target. “That’s when I realized this was big — really big,” Ms. de Rosnay said.

Yiddish: NYC’s 2nd Political Language

In 1922, Fiorello H. La Guardia was re-elected to Congress after he rebutted charges of anti-Semitism by challenging a rival to debate in Yiddish. La Guardia was fluent in Yiddish. His Jewish rival was not.



July 21, 2009
Yiddish Resurfaces as City’s 2nd Political Language
By SAM ROBERTS

In 1897, Isaac Fromme, an office-seeker from the largely Jewish Lower East Side, punctuated his campaign palaver with Yiddishisms to refute insinuations that he was Irish. In 1922, Fiorello H. La Guardia was re-elected to Congress from East Harlem after he rebutted charges of anti-Semitism by challenging a rival to debate in Yiddish. La Guardia, a son of Jewish and Italian parents, was fluent in Yiddish. His Jewish rival was not.

That Yiddish remains the second language of New York politics was demonstrated yet again over the weekend in the disembodied debate between Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the State Senate.

On Friday, Mr. Bloomberg said that for the Senate to adjourn for the summer without voting to extend his control over New York City’s school system was “meshugeneh.”

To which State Senator Hiram Monserrate replied on Sunday: “We believe it would be meshugeneh not to include parents in the education of our children. As opposed to loosely using the word ‘meshugeneh,’ we would also say we don’t need a yenta on the other side of this argument and this debate.”

Neither Mr. Monserrate, who is Hispanic, nor Mr. Bloomberg, who is Jewish, was surgically precise with his Yiddishism.

But their casual embrace of an onomatopoetic language is a reminder of how universal Yiddish has become. Not only in New York, where Jews now constitute fewer than one in five mayoral election voters, but even beyond. Meshuga and yenta both appear in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The last Jewish mayor, Edward I. Koch, suggested as much on Monday when he offered an obvious reason why New York politicians drift into Yiddish. “They all want to sound like citizens of the world,” Mr. Koch said.

The comedian Jackie Mason said Mr. Bloomberg would have felt more self-conscious about using Yiddish 10 or 15 years ago. “It’s now hip to be Jewish,” he said. “A Jew used to be embarrassed at saying a Jewish word.”

Twenty years ago, Mr. Mason himself regretted being quoted as describing David N. Dinkins, the Democratic mayoral candidate, as “a fancy schvartze,” invoking a Yiddish word, often used derogatorily, for a black man. Mr. Mason later apologized. “I’m a comedian,” he said then, “not a politician.” He was criticized for calling President Obama the same word during a show this year, but told the entertainment Web site tmz.com that it was no longer a pejorative term.

In 1998, Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato referred to his Democratic opponent, Charles E. Schumer, as a “putzhead.” The backlash to Mr. D’Amato’s reference resonated because of his own reputation for crudity and because he at first denied using the slur.

“I think that Mayor Bloomberg probably used Yiddish as a way of having his kugel and eating it, too,” said Michael Wex, the author of “Born to Kvetch” and “Just Say Nu.”

“His use of meshugeneh — a not uncommon solecism, incidentally; the adverb should be meshuga — seems intended to strengthen his point at the same time as it gives his expression of it a heartfelt, rather than denunciatory, feel,” Mr. Wex said. “The idea that ‘this is crazy, pure and simple’ comes across all the more strongly by implying that English simply lacks the words to describe what he’s feeling — that in his guts, as they used to say, he knows it’s nuts.

“Rather than crossing ethnic lines here, Mayor Bloomberg seems to be presenting himself as an Everyman who, since he happens to be Jewish, expresses himself in the idiom that’s supposed to be closest to his heart,” Mr. Wex said.

“Senator Monserrate raises the stakes, though, by calling the mayor a yenta —‘a female motormouth,’ ” Mr. Wex continued. “If the senator’s earlier uses of meshugeneh were meant to show that he could play the mayor’s game, yenta is his way of proving that he can even play it better.”

Whatever the mayor’s motivation in resorting to Yiddish, the debate with some of the Democratic senators, who want to loosen mayoral control of the schools, was degenerating well beyond meshugas into a very English digression. When Mr. Bloomberg invoked Neville Chamberlain on Friday in defending his version of mayoral control over education against any compromise, was he suggesting that the senators were comparable to Adolf Hitler?

“It wasn’t an analogy at all — the mayor was talking about endless negotiations in general,” Stu Loeser, Mr. Bloomberg’s chief spokesman, explained on Monday. “The former prime minister’s name is now synonymous in the American lexicon with appeasement and endless negotiations. Since it wasn’t an analogy, the mayor wasn’t comparing anyone to anyone else.”

Gordon Waller, of Peter and Gordon

July 21, 2009
Gordon Waller, a Partner in the Band Peter and Gordon, Dies at 64
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Gordon Waller, who formed half of Peter and Gordon, a successful pop duo that followed the Beatles to America as part of the British Invasion of the 1960s and that scored a No. 1 hit with “A World Without Love,” died on Friday in Norwich, Conn. He was 64 and lived in Ledyard, Conn.

His death was announced on the official Peter and Gordon Web site, peterandgordon.net. It gave the cause as cardiac arrest.

Mr. Waller and Peter Asher played acoustic guitars and brought vocal harmonies reminiscent of the Everly Brothers to their own synthesis of folk, blues and rock ’n’ roll. An important ingredient in their success was a steady supply of songs written by Paul McCartney that the Beatles themselves did not record.

By October 1963, Mr. McCartney was dating Mr. Asher’s sister, the actress Jane Asher, and Peter and Gordon had signed a record contract with EMI. They turned to Mr. McCartney to provide a song for them. Knowing he was writing “A World Without Love,” they asked him to finish it for them so they could record it.

The tune became a Top 10 hit in Britain, where it displaced the Beatles’ own “Can’t Buy Me Love” on the charts. It was then issued on the Capitol label in the United States, where it became one of the most successful singles of 1964.

The song, a lilting, plaintive ballad, opens with the lyrics, “Please lock me away/And don’t allow the day/Here inside, where I hide with my loneliness/I don’t care what they say, I won’t stay/In a world without love.”

Peter and Gordon toured the United States and appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and other network variety shows — part of a wave of British groups that swept the United States, among them Chad and Jeremy, the Dave Clark Five and Herman’s Hermits.

Two more McCartney songs that year brought Peter and Gordon even more success: “Nobody I Know” and “I Don’t Want to See You Again.” (Though Mr. McCartney has been widely cited as having written all these songs, he shared credit with John Lennon, their practice at the time.)

Another hit for the duo was Mr. McCartney’s “Woman” (1966), which he wrote under the pseudonym Bernard Webb to see if he could score a hit without the Lennon-McCartney names attached.

Peter and Gordon toured with the Beatles and other big-name groups, like the Rolling Stones. They had at least nine hits, including Del Shannon’s “I Go to Pieces,” the Buddy Holly song “True Love Ways,” “Lady Godiva” and “Knight in Rusty Armor,” all from the mid-60s.

Gordon Trueman Riviere Waller was born in Braemar, Scotland, on June 4, 1945. He attended the Westminster School in London, where he met Mr. Asher. Of the two, Mr. Waller had the greater interest in rock ’n’ roll at first, and he converted Mr. Asher from “a snooty jazz fan to a true rock ’n’ roll believer as well,” Mr. Asher said in a statement.

The boys got guitars and were soon violating the school’s 9 p.m. curfew by sneaking out to play in coffeehouses and nightclubs. That involved climbing a 12-foot-high, spike-topped wall. They were originally known as Gordon and Peter.

“I am just a harmony guy and Gordon was the heart and soul of our duo,” Mr. Asher wrote.

By late 1967, the hits were no longer coming, and both singers were enjoying the work less, Mr. Asher said in a recent interview with classicbands.com. They split in 1968. Mr. Asher went on to manage stars like James Taylor and produce records, while Mr. Waller tried singing as a solo act.

In the 1970s, Mr. Waller played the part of Pharaoh in the musical “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” in productions in London and Australia, and released a solo album titled “and Gordon.” He later ran a music publishing business.

In recent years, Mr. Waller and Mr. Asher reunited to perform occasionally as Peter and Gordon.

Mr. Waller is survived by his wife, Jen, whom he married in 2008, and two daughters from an earlier marriage, The Guardian in London reported.

`

Jupiter, and the Moon

A large impact mark on Jupiter’s south polar region captured on Monday by NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility in Mauna Kea, Hawaii.


40 years ago yesterday, men walked on the moon. Mission to the Moon











One of several images of the impact mark on Jupiter — the dark spot at the upper right of this photograph — taken by the man who discovered it.




July 21, 2009, 8:59 am
Amateur Finds New Earth-Sized Blot on Jupiter
By Robert Mackey
NASA/JPL, via Associated Press A large impact mark on Jupiter’s south polar region captured on Monday by NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility in Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

NASA has confirmed the discovery of a new hole the size of the Earth in Jupiter’s atmosphere, apparently showing that the planet was hit by something large in recent days. The impact mark was first spotted on Monday morning by an amateur astronomer in Australia, who then drew the attention of scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to the dark mark on Jupiter’s south polar region.

The apparent impact comes almost exactly 15 years after a comet named Shoemaker-Levy 9 struck Jupiter, “sending up blazing fireballs and churning the Jovian atmosphere into dark storms, one of them as large as Earth,” as The New York Times reported on July 19, 1994.

Images of the impact mark, as seen through a NASA telescope in Hawaii, were posted on the space agency’s Web site on Monday with this explanation:

Following up on a tip by an amateur astronomer, Anthony Wesley of Australia, that a new dark “scar” had suddenly appeared on Jupiter, this morning between 3 and 9 a.m. PDT (6 a.m. and noon EDT) scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., using NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility at the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, gathered evidence indicating an impact.

New infrared images show the likely impact point was near the south polar region, with a visibly dark “scar” and bright upwelling particles in the upper atmosphere detected in near-infrared wavelengths.

Glenn Orton, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said “It could be the impact of a comet, but we don’t know for sure yet.”

Mr. Orton told New Scientist magazine that the planet could have been hit by a block of ice or a comet that was too faint for astronomers to detect before the impact. Leigh Fletcher, an astronomer at the Jet Propulsion Lab told the magazine the impact scar “is about the size of the Earth.”

In Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that the amateur astronomer, Anthony Wesley, a 44-year-old computer programmer from a village north of Canberra, made the discovery “using his backyard 14.5-inch reflecting telescope.” The Herald explained: “Wesley, who has been keen on astronomy since he was a child, said telescopes and other astronomy equipment were so inexpensive now that the hobby had become a viable pastime for just about anybody. His own equipment cost about $10,000.”

Mr. Wesley recorded the discovery of the impact mark, and posted several of the first images he took of it, in an observation report he posted online:
Anthony Wesley One of several images of the impact mark on Jupiter — the dark spot at the upper right of this photograph — taken by the man who discovered it.

I came back to the scope at about 12:40am I noticed a dark spot rotating into view in Jupiters south polar region started to get curious. When first seen close to the limb (and in poor conditions) it was only a vaguely dark spot, I thought likely to be just a normal dark polar storm. However as it rotated further into view, and the conditions improved I suddenly realised that it wasn’t just dark, it was black in all channels, meaning it was truly a black spot.

My next thought was that it must be either a dark moon (like Callisto) or a moon shadow, but it was in the wrong place and the wrong size. Also I’d noticed it was moving too slow to be a moon or shadow. As far as I could see it was rotating in sync with a nearby white oval storm that I was very familiar with - this could only mean that the back feature was at the cloud level and not a projected shadow from a moon. I started to get excited.

It took another 15 minutes to really believe that I was seeing something new - I’d imaged that exact region only 2 days earlier and checking back to that image showed no sign of any anomalous black spot.

Now I was caught between a rock and a hard place - I wanted to keep imaging but also I was aware of the importance of alerting others to this possible new event. Could it actually be an impact mark on Jupiter? I had no real idea, and the odds on that happening were so small as to be laughable, but I was really struggling to see any other possibility given the location of the mark. If it really was an impact mark then I had to start telling people, and quickly.

The Guardian reports that Mr. Wesley, who “spends about 20 hours a week on his passion of watching and photographing Jupiter,” almost missed making the discovery because he interrupted his work late on Sunday night to watch sports on television. Mr. Wesley told The Guardian:

I was imaging Jupiter until about midnight and seriously thought about packing up and going back to the house to watch the golf and the cricket. In the end I decided to just take a break and I went back to the house to watch Tom Watson almost make history.

I came back down half an hour later and I could see this black mark had turned into view.

In another interview, Mr. Wesley told the Sydney Morning Herald that spotting the impact mark on Jupiter made him glad the huge planet is in Earth’s neighborhood: “If anything like that had hit the Earth it would have been curtains for us, so we can feel very happy that Jupiter is doing its vacuum-cleaner job and hoovering up all these large pieces before they come for us.”

Times Co. Agrees to Sell WQXR Radio

The New York Times Company will sell WQXR-FM to WNYC Radio and Univision, the companies announced on Tuesday, in a complex deal that preserves WQXR as the only station devoted solely to classical music in New York City, but that could alter its character.

WQXR would move to a weaker signal near the high end of the FM band, and would become a listener-supported station, owned by WNYC, the nation’s largest public radio station. The Times Company, which has been trying to shed assets to raise cash and weather a newspaper industry downturn, would get $45 million, but would sever ties with a station it has owned since 1944.

The long-rumored sale of WQXR, at 96.3 on the dial, and the real possibility that such a move would spell the death of a major classical music purveyor on the airwaves, was a depressing thought for fans. Classical music radio stations have been dwindling in recent decades.

Talk of the sale also sent shivers through cultural institutions that rely heavily on WQXR, like the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera and the Juilliard School.

Heck, there's no full-time jazz station in New York City, either.

Rewriting history, Texas style

The fight over school curriculum in Texas, recently focused on biology, has entered a new arena, with a brewing debate over how much faith belongs in American history classrooms. The Texas Board of Education, which recently approved new science standards that made room for creationist critiques of evolution, is revising the state's social studies curriculum. In early recommendations from outside experts appointed by the board, a divide has opened over how central religious theology should be to the teaching of history.

Extending their reach, creationism creeps into history.

Three reviewers, appointed by social conservatives, have recommended revamping the K-12 curriculum to emphasize the roles of the Bible, the Christian faith and the civic virtue of religion in the study of American history. Two of them want to remove or de-emphasize references to several historical figures who have become liberal icons, such as César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall.

Liberal icons? They happen to be accomplished Americans, and also Americans of color. Coincidence the creationists want to "de-emphasize"?

"We're in an all-out moral and spiritual civil war for the soul of America, and the record of American history is right at the heart of it," said Rev. Peter Marshall, a Christian minister and one of the reviewers appointed by the conservative camp.

Well, the Rev is right, but for the wrong reasons. The record of American history includes the accomplishments of Cesar Chávez and Justice Marshall.

The three reviewers appointed by the moderate and liberal board members are all professors of history or education at Texas universities, including Mr. de la Teja, a former state historian. The reviewers appointed by conservatives include two who run conservative Christian organizations: David Barton, founder of WallBuilders, a group that promotes America's Christian heritage; and Rev. Marshall, who preaches that Watergate, the Vietnam War and Hurricane Katrina were God's judgments on the nation's sexual immorality. The third is Daniel Dreisbach, a professor of public affairs at American University.

Elmer Gantry, er, the Revattributes Watergate to sexual immorality? Was Nixon sexually immoral? Or simply immoral?

Hmm, let's see: a former state historian, chairman of the history department at Texas State University, versus a reverend who attributes a neocolonial war to sexual immorality; whom to side with? Who might be more knowledgable? Tough call.

The conservative reviewers say they believe that children must learn that America's founding principles are biblical. For instance, they say the separation of powers set forth in the Constitution stems from a scriptural understanding of man's fall and inherent sinfulness, or "radical depravity," which means he can be governed only by an intricate system of checks and balances.

Through his wickedness, man invented a constitutional system of government; interesting theory. Perhaps instead of Justice Scalia's 'originalist' theory, wherein he tries to deduce what the Revolutionary Generation of Jefferson and Washington and Madison meant, or would have meant, were they to evaluate modern questions and contemporary problems, we should have a fire-and-brimstone Supreme Court where the wicked are exhorted to repent.

Some outside observers argue that curriculum analysts should be trained academics. "It's important to have trained historians establishing the framework," said David Vigilante, associate director of the National Center for History in the Schools at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Good point, but he's from California. Suspected pointy-headed academic liberal.

The conservative Christian reviewers, in turn, are skeptical of the professional historians' emphasis on multiculturalism, views stated most forcefully by Mr. de la Teja but echoed by Ms. Hodges. Reaching for examples of achievement by different racial and ethnic groups is divisive, Mr. Barton said, and distorts history.

Divisive? Right. So their suggestion is to study the white Christian version of history, and unite everyone behind it. Brilliant.

Bells, Saffron and Elephant

Monday was the last day of a five-day ceremony reconsecrating the Ganesha Temple in Flushing, Queens.







More Photos >










As priests poured holy water on the sacred statues, the faithful rushed to catch drops. The temple honors Ganesha, the elephant-faced deity.

The Baite

A patron came in seeking interpretations (Spark Notes, she said, were fine) of John Donne's poem "The Baite." There were books of his poems at 811 Donne, and critcisms at 823 and 828 Donne. Herewith, the poem:

The Baite

COME live with mee, and bee my love,

And wee will some new pleasures prove

Of golden sands, and christall brookes:

With silken lines, and silver hookes.

There will the river whispering runne

Warm'd by thy eyes, more then the Sunne.

And there the'inamor'd fish will stay,

Begging themselves they may betray.

When thou wilt swimme in that live bath,

Each fish, which every channell hath,

Will amorously to thee swimme,

Gladder to catch thee, then thou him.

If thou, to be so seene, beest loath,

By Sunne, or Moone, thou darknest both,

And if my selfe have leave to see,

I need not their light, having thee.

Let others freeze with angling reeds,

And cut their legges, with shells and weeds,

Or treacherously poore fish beset,

With strangling snare, or windowie net:

Let coarse bold hands, from slimy nest

The bedded fish in banks out-wrest,

Or curious traitors, sleavesilke flies

Bewitch poore fishes wandring eyes.

For thee, thou needst no such deceit,

For thou thy selfe art thine owne bait;

That fish, that is not chatch'd thereby,

Alas, is wiser farre then I.




John Donne

Online Software Catch Up

Google Inc.'s plans for a new operating system based on its Chrome Web browser is a big bet that online programs can eventually surpass desktop software. Now the Internet giant is pushing hard to make that happen, enticing developers to take advantage of several technologies to improve the speed, esthetics and reliability of software running in a Web browser.

Google is trying to spur a new market for software that can run entirely in a Web browser, such as Google Docs. The search giant believes that online applications will be one of its next big businesses, as its core search and search-advertising businesses mature.

But it faces heavy competition, including from rival Microsoft Corp., which Monday announced it will offer online versions of its popular Office software to consumers free.

About time.

Google hopes to change that by accelerating the adoption of HTML 5, the acronym for an extension of the hypertext markup language that is a foundation of the Web. The proposed programming standards -- which are likely years from being finalized, and include technology from Google and others -- are designed to let developers build more advanced applications that can run within a browser.

Indeed; plugins should be a thing of the past.

Google and other backers of HTML 5 believe that over time, plug-ins won't be necessary as browsers become more powerful. A Microsoft spokeswoman said the latest version of the company's Internet Explorer browser already supports some elements of HTML 5 and that Microsoft is also a member of the working group responsible for pushing the standard along.

Guess what?

Man comes up to Information Desk and asks for these books:

The madonnas of Leningrad, Debra Dean.

The pleasures and sorrows of work, Alain de Botton.

Glenn Beck's common sense: the case against an out-of-control government, inspired by Thomas Paine.

The last best hope: restoring conservatism and America's promise, Joe Scarborough.

Then he asked for a newspaper; guess which one? (Hint: Rupert Murdoch; extra hint: not the Wall Street Journal.)