Broward County running out of money for parks, libraries

After a decade of expanding its parks and libraries, Broward County government is running out of money to keep them open.
by: Scott Wyman

FORT LAUDERDALE - At Brian Piccolo Park in Cooper City, dozens of adult softball teams take to the fields on Wednesday nights. Demand is so high that teams wait in line for hours to sign up for league play and can still wind up being turned away.

At the Fern Forest Nature Center in Coconut Creek, a lone hiker took the trail through the maple swamp on a recent muggy afternoon, while others ate lunch at nearby picnic tables.

They could all soon find the gates locked.

After a decade of expanding its parks and libraries, Broward County government is running out of money to keep them open. Nature centers and most regional parks could close two days a week, libraries could shut on Sundays and free computer classes and recreational programs might be abolished.

Laura Harker, a portrait photographer in Pompano Beach, is among those wishing the county could find some other answer. "I enjoy coming and getting some fresh air and some peace and quiet," Harker said while lunching in Fern Forest.

Like a family that used a windfall to buy a boat and then didn't have the money to fuel it, the county got in deeper than it can afford.

The county spent almost $540 million on expanding parks and libraries since 1999. Officials preserved environmentally sensitive land from development, built new parks with water playgrounds and sports fields, and constructed libraries with larger book collections and computer labs.

Voters overwhelmingly favored the work in referendums held in 1999 and 2000, but county commissioners now must cover a $109 million budget deficit and are cutting spending out of fear of a tax revolt.

Commissioners have faced criticism that the expansion projects, particularly the cricket stadium at Central Broward Regional Park in Lauderhill, are examples of government largesse. But as it moves toward approving a budget plan within the next six weeks, the commission is also facing a backlash from library and parks patrons.

County Administrator Bertha Henry and commissioners said they want to keep the library and parks system as intact as possible despite the cuts. So far in budget discussions, officials have chosen to trim hours and offerings throughout the network of 37 libraries, 18 parks and 25 natural sites rather than permanently close any location.

"Our budgets are suffering right now but it won't always be that way," Commissioner Kristin Jacobs said. "The parks and libraries are built and the land preserved, and when things get back to normal, they will still be there."

It's the second year of cuts for both parks and libraries.

Regional parks have been closed Tuesdays except during spring and summer school breaks under cuts made last year and would be closed Wednesdays as well under this year's tentative budget plans. One park in each section of the county would remain open. Holiday closures would expand with parks open next year only on Memorial Day, July 4 and Labor Day.

If libraries are closed on Sundays as suggested, hours at the county's largest libraries will have been slashed by a third over the two-year period.

Library computer labs would remain open, but administrators would drop free classes on everything from computer basics to resume-writing. The classes drew more than 47,000 participants last year. The parks department would stop programs such as Halloween parties and springtime egg hunts.

With patronage at parks and libraries topping 15 million visits a year, the cuts are among the most visible that county commissioners are considering. Public reaction has officials looking for some alternatives.

Last week, commissioners asked staff to look at higher recreation fees to keep adult leagues at Brian Piccolo Park running Wednesday nights. They also want to see if federal grants or user fees could finance the computer classes or if high-school volunteers could teach them. And, they want to explore keeping one library in each section of the county open on Sundays.

"It does seem a bit ironic, but I don't think anyone foresaw the financial shape we'd be in," said Lisa Baumbach-Reardon, an environmental activist and supporter of the 2000 parks referendum. "I know the county is in a hard place and it's very hard to weigh where to make the cuts, but these services should be a priority."

From: Sun-Sentinel

Ten Fantastic Songs Brought To You By Books

Ten Fantastic Songs Brought to You by Books
By: Justin Jacobs

Anyone decrying the death of books has only to check out the music world to see that literature is still alive and kicking, even if the authors of said work aren’t. For example, just recently we spoke to Ben Gibbard and Jay Farrar about their collaborative album based solely on beat-poet and alt-culture icon Jack Kerouac’s novel Big Sur. While the duo’s record, the October-release One Quick Move or I’m Gone, is an ode to the written word, it’s hardly the first. Here are 10 fantastic songs brought to you by books:

1. “Song for Myla Goldberg” by The Decemberists
Although Decemberists scribe Colin Meloy might as well be a librarian of classic folklore, this tune from the band’s Her Majesty is about the contemporary author of 2000’s Bee Season. Let’s hope Meloy doesn’t follow it up with “Ode to Stephenie Meyer.”

2. “Stuck Between Stations” by The Hold Steady
The lead track on The Hold Steady’s whiskey-fueled Boys and Girls in America cops its best line from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. “Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together” could be The Hold Steady’s entire catalog pared down to one line.

3. "2+2=5" by Radiohead
Thom, you sly dog, you. The title of this Hail to the Thief tune is lifted from George Orwell's 1984, in which it represents a false idea that the government could push on the public as fact. He's not saying that George W. Bush...oh, wait, yes he is.

4. "Sylvia Plath" by Ryan Adams
Adams has had his fair share of odd love interests in his day (namely, former pop princess and current Lady Adams Mandy Moore), but none so down in the dumps as Sylvia Plath. Adams' haunting piano ballad is nearly as gorgeous as Plath's writing, just, you know, not about how his dad is a Nazi.

5. "Blood and Thunder" by Mastodon
Not every metal band has the balls to write a whole album about a whale, but Mastodon isn't every metal band. Although the entirety of Leviathan is a retelling of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, "Blood and Thunder" is the pummeling introduction to the storm.

6. "Bukowski" by Modest Mouse
One grumpy guy singing about another grumpy guy. Sounds like just the song to brighten your day. Now, somebody get this man a drink.

7. "The Small Print" by Muse
While playing for several million people per venue on their tour with U2 this fall, Muse will slip in some knowledge alongside all that rock. This guitar jam from Absolution is sung from the perspective of the Devil in Christopher Marlowe's The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus.

8. "Saul Bellow" by Sufjan Stevens
This gentle ode to the Nobel Prize winning author didn't make the cut for Illinois, but appeared on Stevens' b-side follow-up The Avalanche. Includes a challenge, too: "Get in trouble with Saul Bellow."

9. “The Tain” by The Decemberists
Two Decemberists picks? Really? Yes, really. The band isn’t called “literate” by a journalist every other day for nothing. This five-song suite is based on the Irish epic poem “Tain Bo Cuailinge.”

10. A healthy portion of Led Zeppelin’s catalog
Although his long, blonde locks and groupie-baiting ways may have suggested otherwise, Robert Plant was a big nerd. Many of Zeppelin’s most beloved songs, including “Misty Mountain Hop,” “Ramble On” and “The Battle of Evermore” are based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Hobbit and Lord of the Rings books.

From: Paste Magazine (note: check the original article to listen to a few of the songs on the list)

Some copyright visualization

With the Google Books settlement coming up, a lot of people have been talking about copyright. I think this is generally speaking a really good thing. Here are some useful visualizations that may help you get your head around it.

- From the Financial Times is this article about what the Google business model could mean for out of print books and orphan works. According to their graphic [above] there are a lot of books wiht unclear status in US libraries that we should be concerned about.

- From ALA’s Copyright Advisory Network (a project of the Office of Information and Technology policy) comes a few helpful tools for looking at copyright as it pertains to libraries

Public Domain Slider
Section 108 Spinner
Exceptions for Instructors eTool
Fair Use Evaluator

by: Jessamyn at librarian.net

Just what is 'annualism'?

There seem to be an awful lot of books these days where the author shows their power of endurance by doing something odd for a year. But why?
by: Finlo Rohrer

Here's the drill.

You're thinking. How hard would it be to live on Smarties for a year? Or spend a year in a toilet cubicle? Or both?

Then you could write a book about it. You could call it LooTube. Or Under the Lid. The papers would all do features. How could any journalist resist a person spending a year in the toilet? So you get plenty of free publicity for the book.

Walk into any book shop and you'll see a slew of these books that conform to a slightly more serious but not dissimilar brief. There's Kath Kelly's How I Lived A Year On Just A Pound A Day. Or Neil Boorman's Bonfire of the Brands, in which the protagonist burned all his branded goods and then lived for a year without them. Both have featured on these pages.

Leo Hickman tried to spend a year living ethically in Life Stripped Bare.

Hephzibah Anderson has recently released her book Chastened: No More Sex in the City which details the year she spent without having sex.

The decision to abstain stemmed from a break-up that caused her to review her romantic life so far, she says.

"That was part of a sequence of events that caused me to look back over the romantic chaos of my 20s. Sexual attraction was not helping things."

So in August 2006, she decided to abstain for a year.

"Actually abstaining from sex, that got harder. It got really hard at the six to seven-month mark. [But] at the end I was wishing I had another month or two."

And the experience changed the literary journalist.

"I do take things at a slower pace. It genuinely has changed things."

Anderson says she only thought that her decision might make a good book towards the end of the year.

"I'm aware of the whole genre of things journalists did for a year," she adds.

At the opposite end of the spectrum but firmly in the same genre is Charla Muller. As a 40th birthday present for her husband, she decided they would have sex every day for a year. The undercurrent of the book is about keeping the fires lit in a marriage, rather than any effort at titillation.

"I had no intention of writing a book about that part of my life," she says.

"It was never part of my plan. My plan was to put some 'zing' into a part of my marriage and it ended up as the best year of my marriage to date. I was amazed, though, at how my experience was resonating with my girlfriends.

"As I started to share some details about the year of 'The Gift', I realised it was creating a lot of conversation about marriage and how hard it is to keep that part of marriage vibrant.

"We didn't receive a book contract until the year was over."

There have indeed been a lot of these annualist books in the past five or six years, concedes Graeme Neill of the Bookseller magazine.

"Publishing is like any form of the art. Where there has been a success, a hit will come out of nowhere, other publishers will look at it and follow it."

And there is something about these year-long ideas that entices publishers.

"It is like pitching a movie in one sentence," says Neill. "It's interesting to talk about and it makes for very readable, straightforward copy."

And of course, it's part of a wider genre where the writer features heavily in their own work, says Neill.

"It's journalists putting themselves at the centre of things. They are protagonists in their own narrative."

Liz Jones, who has written extensively in newspapers and in books about her marriage and other parts of her life, is the queen of the genre. And if Liz Jones is the queen, Danny Wallace is the king.

His books Yes Man, about his decision to say yes to everything, Join Me, about the cult he started, and Friends Like These, about his summer tracking down his old friends, have all sold well.

And of course, many would argue that there is nothing wrong with a journalist putting themselves at the centre of the story. What binds all the "annualist" titles together is that while their "year-long ordeal" might be classified as a stunt, they have serious things to say about their subject matter and its importance to society.

When a journalist goes to live in the country, or try to be environmentally-minded for a year, one can see where they are coming from.

And there is a long and honourable history of "stunt" journalism. It goes all the way back to Nellie Bly, the pioneering American journalist.

In 1887 she infiltrated an asylum by pretending to be mentally ill in order to investigate conditions there. Her expose, Ten Days in a Mad-House, outlined the grim conditions, rotten food, and beatings that constituted the life of patients. As well as being a literary sensation, it caused outcry and an investigation that led to more funding and better conditions for the asylums.

Jack London's The People of the Abyss at the beginning of the 20th Century continued this inheritance, with the American author writing about East End poverty after living in workhouses himself. George Orwell took a similar path in Down and Out in Paris and London.

A very notable modern example is Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, an exploration of life on the minimum wage as Ehrenreich gave up her life as a journalist in favour of a string of menial jobs.

But if "annualism" is really a thing of the past five or six years, then it might be suggested that the most inspirational work in the canon is Morgan Spurlock's 2004 documentary Super Size Me. Spurlock famously lived on McDonald's three times a day for a month, with consequences for his health, in order to expose the dangers of the fast-food culture.

Ultimately, we are impressed by feats of endurance. For many readers, it adds authenticity to an act of criticism.

For many of the authors of course, one "annualist" work is enough.

"It would be really nice to do something that doesn't involve the words 'I', 'me' or 'my'," says Anderson.

From: BBC News Magazine

Waiting at Heathrow, the Literary Experience

The author Alain de Botton has been named Heathrow airport's writer in residence, and will spend a week writing at a desk in the middle of a terminal there.
by: Andrew Adam Newman

TRAVELERS passing through Heathrow Airport in London this week may be surprised to encounter, in the middle of bustling Terminal 5, the writer Alain de Botton, author of popular books including “How Proust Can Change Your Life” and “The Art of Travel,” seated at a desk and tapping away at his laptop computer. His typing appears in real time on a screen behind him, and a placard explains — in what apparently is both a literary and aeronautic first — that Mr. de Botton is serving a one-week appointment as Heathrow’s “writer in residence.”

Mr. de Botton, who is bunking at the adjacent Sofitel London Heathrow, will stray from his desk to interview passengers, baggage handlers, airline executives and more. Afterward, he will return home to turn his airport reporting into a short book, “A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary,” to be published by the British publisher Profile Books in September.

On Sept. 21, the book, which will include photographs by Richard Baker, will be distributed free to 10,000 Heathrow travelers, and then be available for sale through Amazon’s British Web site and traditional bookstores for £8.99 (about $15). The author retains the rights to the book and — on all but those 10,000 free copies — will earn royalties from it.

The stunt is the brainchild of Heathrow’s public relations agency, Mischief of London, which might make creative-control purists wince. But Mr. de Botton said in a telephone interview that while Heathrow was paying him the equivalent of a book advance (he declined to reveal the amount) and paying for his hotel and meals, he was autonomous.

“Right from the start I said I can only do this if you don’t even see the text before it goes to print,” Mr. de Botton said of his negotiations with Heathrow. “I said, ‘If I find a cockroach in the restaurant, if someone drops dead at the airport, I’m going to write about it and send it to the publisher.’ They just took a big gulp and then to their credit they said, ‘Fine, yes, you can say anything you want.’ ”

•

For Heathrow, that may sound like Russian roulette, but Dan Glover, a creative director at Mischief, said in a telephone interview, “If we funded a brochure that said how wonderful the airport was, people would switch off because they’d think they’re being marketed to.”

Mr. Glover added in an e-mail message that the purpose of the campaign was to stimulate “branded conversations” among travelers “through the experience of seeing a top literary figure at the airport — and potentially being a character in the book — and by receiving an exclusive copy to read on your travels. The overarching objective is to make a passenger’s time at Heathrow the best memory of the trip.”

For Heathrow, any buzz will counter the drone of complaints about long lines, which reached a peak in March 2008, when the long-anticipated opening of Terminal 5 resulted in days of delays that The Guardian described as “chaos” and The Scotsman as “shambolic.”

“They’re not looking for someone to say the airport is brilliant,” Mr. de Botton said. “They’re looking for someone to say the airport is interesting — that the airport is more than, ‘There’s a long security queue.’ It’s almost as if their only goal is that something else is going to be said about the airport.”

As for how Mr. de Botton will deliver the manuscript to his publisher by the end of August, he said the book, which will feature many photographs and be only 112 pages, will run as short as 20,000 words (magazine articles often run over 10,000). He also said he made previous excursions to the airport and is “assembling bits now.”

One vignette provided to The New York Times describes divorced fathers waiting for children to arrive, with Mr. de Botton writing, “There were men pacing impatiently and blankly near Costa Coffee for an hour (just to be sure of not missing an unheralded early arrival), who had looked forward to this moment for half a year and could no longer restrain themselves at the sight of a small boy endowed with their own grey-green eyes and their mother’s cheeks, emerging from behind the stainless steel gate, holding the hand of an airport operative.”

•

Other writers were considered, but “Alain bit our arms off to be involved in the project,” said Cat Jordan, a Heathrow spokeswoman, adding that he had a track record, having published “The Art of Travel,” on the subject.

Heathrow will review photos before publication for “security issues,” but will be hands off with the text, she said.

“No one expects everything all of the time to be perfect,” Ms. Jordan said. “If I wanted that, I might as well pay for a traditional marketing campaign, but what I wanted here was something with a little more emotion. Heathrow doesn’t have a lot to hide, and there’s a lot of emotion here every day with people saying hello and goodbye, and we hope he captures just a little bit of that.”

Mr. de Botton said the project recalled an era when patrons underwrote artists and writers.

“That one of the largest organizations in the U.K. should take an interest in a book is almost quaint, like sponsoring a poet,” Mr. de Botton said. “On behalf of my fellow beleaguered writers, it’s nice that writers seem to matter.”

Mr. de Botton, in fact, is already fantasizing about more posts.

“I’d like to be a writer in residence at a nuclear power station,” he said.

From: the New York Times

A Dark Journey Into A Killer's 'Personal Effects'

Have you ever wished you could e-mail or telephone a character from a book you're reading? A new "multiplatform transmedia experience" by authors J.C. Hutchins and Jordan Weisman offers readers the opportunity to do just that.

Hutchings and Weisman's new interactive novel, Personal Effects: Dark Art, follows art therapist Zach Taylor as he struggles to evaluate a blind psychic serial killer. The novel unfolds in traditional chapter form, as well as via a series of "personal effects" that belong to the characters — including business cards, photos and legal documents, which are included in a pouch attached to the book's cover.

"The intent of this is to make the reader more than just a passive ingester of the entertainment, but to become an active participant in the story," Hutchins tells NPR's David Greene. "The idea was to fundamentally blur those lines between fiction and reality."

Further blurring those lines? Additional phone numbers and Web sites — including a blog created by the main character's girlfriend — that allow readers to gather more clues about the story.

Hutchins is credited with writing the novel, while Weisman was responsible for assembling all the extra content.

Weisman likens the experience of exploring the book and its additional offerings to finding a stranger's wallet on the street: "You want to return it to the person who lost it, but you feel kind of dirty just looking through it, because there's nothing more voyeuristic than looking through someone's pockets or their wallet," he explains.

"All of the sudden these characters aren't remote. These characters are much more real now because they are in your world. You're holding the contents of their wallet in your hand. You can call them on the phone; you can e-mail them and get responses," says Weisman. "It makes the story much more immediate."

Because the protagonist is an art therapist, he's not as interested in solving crime as he is in helping his patient. The sleuthing, says Hutchins, is left up to the readers, who are encouraged to gather clues from the book's additional sources.

"The reading of the book is a vicarious experience. And then there's a subtle transition into a first person-experience, where you're now going to take on the detective role yourself and solve things that Zachary Taylor didn't solve," he says.

From: NPR (you can also read an excerpt from the novel on the website)

New Talking Avatars on the MSVU Library Website

Two talking avatars -- Sarah and Suzie SitePal -- were recently added to the MSVU Library website. By adding the avatars to the site, the Library hopes to make the site more interactive and fun for new and returning students. The avatars are used to welcome students to the Library, to highlight Library resources and services, and to relay information about Library events. The SitePal software was installed by Denyse Rodrigues, and the avatars were designed and scripted by myself, the Library’s new term librarian responsible for public services. SitePal is a subscription internet service that allows users to create and customize talking avatars to add to websites. For a monthly fee, users can choose from a diverse selection of male and female avatars, can add different backgrounds, accessories, clothing, and can choose from a wide selection of players and pre-recorded voices. SitePal also allows you to record your own voice to add to the avatar. I highly recommend taking advantage of this feature because it adds a more life-like quality to the avatar. The SitePal supplied voices sound robotic and monotone and do not allow for natural inflections in language.
The SitePal design process is user-friendly and consists of a series of visual menus that you use to design your avatar by simply picking and clicking on the many styles and accessories offered. The avatars can also be updated easily, as often as you like, by logging in to your account on the SitePal website and making the necessary changes. Users have the option of creating multiple avatars at the same time, so library staff can add new life to their library website by changing the avatars periodically. The number of avatars you can create depends upon the type of account you subscribe to: Bronze, Silver, Gold, or Platinum. The designer also has control over the avatar placement on the site, and sound options. I set it up so Sarah and Suzie would not play automatically Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, vol. 3, no. 2 (2008) 2
and they are equipped with a play, pause and mute button. Students control the volume setting and can choose to play the avatars at their convenience. Embedding the avatar into your library website is also a relatively stress-free process. I tend to break out in hives at the prospect of working with code, but embedding the avatar into the MSVU Library website was as simple as cutting and pasting the code generated by the SitePal website into our website code. I did encounter a minor set-back during the launch of the avatars in September. The security features installed on the student computers in the library and in the computer labs prevented the avatars from appearing on the site because they need to be downloaded from the SitePal server and the computers were prevented from accessing the information. After a discussion with the staff in our IT&S department, Sarah and Suzie SitePal were re-launched with great success on November 1st. I would suggest that you discuss your interest in adding an avatar to your website with your IT department before you attempt to launch it. Student response to the avatars has been very favourable. We have had several comments about Sarah and Suzie SitePal posted to the library blog and it has been positive feedback. We have also received some valuable suggestions to diversify the library avatars. One student suggested that we create different avatars that reflect our diverse student population, including a more mature library avatar to reflect the great number of mature students who attend MSVU. Students are proving that they are engaged with the Library avatars and welcome their presence on the site.
To highlight the launch of the avatars, the Library is hosting a contest for MSVU students to draw attention to Sarah and Suzie’s presence on the website. Students have been asked to find Suzie SitePal on the MSVU Library website and listen to what she has to say, fill out an online ballot, and enter to win a prize. Suzie SitePal gives a brief description of an online library resource and students are asked to name the resource or service that Suzie discusses. Our hope is that students will be encouraged to explore these resources further, even though we are using the Suzie SitePal contest and the possibility of winning a prize to lure them in! We plan on highlighting a different online resource each month and due to the ease of updating the avatars within SitePal, this task will be very manageable. During the avatar design process you can also select the style of player for your avatar; I selected a player that doubles as an online ballot. I Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, vol. 3, no. 2 (2008) 3
set up a Gmail account and linked the account to Suzie SitePal’s player. Students submit their names, contact information and answers directly into the form embedded on the player. All submissions are sent directly to the Library Gmail account.
Adding Sarah and Suzie SitePal to the MSVU Library website proved to be an extremely successful endeavour. Student response has been positive and the website benefits from a fresh, new look which is inexpensive, user-friendly and efficient. If you are interested in seeing Sarah and Suzie SitePal in action, go to www.msvu.ca/library . For more information about SitePal, you can visit their website www.sitepal.com .

A Library's Approach to Books that Offend

Today, the New York Times has an interesting article about how the Brooklyn Public Library has dealt with challenges to the collection. You can read more here. However, what I thought was even more interesting is the inclusion of some of the letters of complaint the library has received, as well as the responses provided by the library.

A Classic List of Must-Read Children's Books

As summer vacations draw to a close and school-age children begin the mad scramble to fulfill their summer reading obligations, author Lesley Blume recommends a few timeless books that may not be on the required book lists.


Blume, the author of several books for young adults, says that parents owe it to their kids to introduce them to the classics.


"It is our responsibility to introduce classics to the next generation, because there's such a flood of new titles on the book market right now, especially in young adult literature, and we have to make sure that the books that we love go into the hands of our own children," Blume tells Linda Wertheimer.


Her book list includes a fair number of books about orphans, because, as Blume says, kids seem naturally drawn to stories in which the parents are absent: "Any child can relate to the fantasy of creating a kids-only utopia from scratch in the woods... This is something you see over and over again in classic literature and films. No rules, no baths, no schoolwork."

Lesley Blume's Recommended List of Classic Children's Literature:


The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner, paperback, 154 pages, Albert Whitman & Company, List Price: $4.99

The Witches by Roald Dahl, paperback, 208 pages, Puffin, List Price: $6.99

The Devil's Storybook by Natalie Babbitt, paperback, 112 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, List Price: $7.95

Daddy Long-Legs by Jean Webster, paperback, 116 pages, Aegypan, List Price: $9.95


Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers, paperback, 176 pages, HarperTeen, List Price: $5.99

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer, hardcover, 256 pages, Random House, List Price: $19.95

The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pene du Bois, paperback, 192 pages, Puffin, List Price: $6.99


From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by E.L. Konigsburg, paperback, 176 pages, Aladdin, List Price: $9.99


Watership Down by Richard Adams, paperback, 476 pages, Scribner, List Price: $16


The House with the Clock in Its Walls by John Bellairs, illustrated by Edward Gorey, paperback, 192 pages, Puffin, List Price: $5.99


From: NPR

Library asked to stock 'ex-gay' literature

Library asked to stock 'ex-gay' literature
by: Jessica Green


A Wisconsin library which was attacked earlier this year for stocking a book about a gay teenager, has now come under fire from an ex-gay group which says it is "discriminatory" for not stocking books by ex-gay authors.

In June, the curiously-named Christian Civil Liberties Union attacked the West Bend library for stocking Francesca Lia Block's Baby Be-Bop, a novel aimed at young adults. In the novel, the protagonist, Dirk, struggles to come to terms with his identity and is beaten up by a group of homophobic men.


However, Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays (PFOX) is now saying that "material written by ex-gays or with a heterosexual slant [has] been ignored" by the library while books with a positive outlook on homosexuality are welcomed.


Ex-gays are those who claim they were once gay, but have now "chosen" to become heterosexual.

Such therapy was condemned by the American Psychological Association last week. Now British therapists are being urged to abandon gay 'cure' practices.


PFOX executive director Regina Griggs said: "Apparently, the West Bend Community Memorial Library is not interested in diversity.


"We urge Michael Tyree, the library's director, to be inclusive of the ex-gay community and accept our donation of ex-gay books. According to its own policy, the library has a 'professional responsibility to be inclusive, not exclusive, in developing collections'."


"For a library to provide children's books which promote homosexuality while denying ex-gay books smacks of censorship and indoctrination of youth with a one-sided ideology," Griggs added.


"It is also contrary to the American Library Association's policy against book banning and censorship in any form.


"We call upon Deborah Caldwell-Stone, acting director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom, to publicly condemn the censoring of ex-gay books in any community. Public libraries should be for everyone."


Along with Baby Be-Bop, a book about gay penguins has frequently generated controversy.


And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, which tells the story of a gay penguin couple, has been slammed as anti-family, anti-religion and pro-gay.


In April, it topped an American Library Association's (ALA) list of the book most people want banned.


However, the ALA has been keen to defend literature from censorship and celebrates Banned Books Week every September.


From: PinkNews

The secrets of the Amazon best-seller list

The up-to-the-hour sales barometer is a tool for entrepreneurial authors doing all they can to push their books up the charts.
by: The Big Money

It's almost a philosophical riddle: Do sales drive the best-seller list, or do best-sellers get all the sales because buyers see them on the list?

As much as we'd like to believe that the crowd picks the best books, a strong presence in retail locations -- front-of-store positioning and tempting discounts -- still counts a great deal in determining how well a title sells.

Nonetheless, authors are in it for the glory, and the visibility and bragging rights of being a "best-seller" retains the glamour of years past.

In the old days, the New York Times best-seller list meant everything. But it doesn't come out until weeks after the sales take place, and it updates only on Sundays. Today's author needs a better, faster sounding board. And she's found it in Amazon.com's (AMZN, news, msgs) unblinking sales rank, the 24-hour barometer of book sales.

Indeed, it's a rare author who, as soon as the book is published, doesn't obsessively check the list these days, which is updated every hour.

Yet for all that, few people understand how the Amazon list works or its relative importance in the publishing industry. Amazon's method of ranking books remains something of a black box, with the fancy word algorithm used to describe it.

Let's look at an extreme version of what a writer can be today. The best writers take an active, entrepreneurial role in their book sales. Publishing is filled with success stories that began as self-publishing miracles.

Many of those are novels, but let me introduce you to a friend of mine, Andy Kessler, who did it in nonfiction.

Andy's a bit of an annoying guy. He's got that gene that just won't let him take anything at face value. So when he's presented with a challenge like publishing a book, he just keeps picking it apart until he feels he can do it better.

That worked to his advantage in the 1990s when he moved to the Bay Area and opened a hedge fund that invested in early-stage technology companies: real engineering-geek stuff like chip sets and drivers. Andy did well as an investor. He did so well during the tech boom from 1998 to 2000 that he found himself with plenty of free time for writing afterward.

In 2002, when Wall Street was getting pilloried in the press, he realized he had worked with some of the most notorious names from the dot-com bubble, like Mary Meeker, Frank Quattrone, Henry Blodget and Jack Grubman (remember him?).

So Andy sat down and wrote up his experiences in a book called "Wall Street Meat." He published it himself because traditional publishers were too slow and kept him too far from the action.

Kessler's experience outlines just about everything we know about the Amazon list.

1. Authors' obsession.

Like dozens of other writers, the Amazon sales rank became his daily, even hourly thermometer of success.

"The Amazon rankings are a blessing for authors, because you can really figure out how your marketing is working," Kessler says. "Just do Fox News? No change. Maybe that wasn't a good use of my time. A positive Wall Street Journal review? Wow, look at it spike. I went up 150 today. Woohoo!

"Radio interviews feel like echo chambers, 'Hello Cleveland," he recalls. "I wonder if anyone is even listening to WZIP -- they sure haven't budged the rankings."

2. Smart authors try to goose the list.

"After countless hours watching the timing and delivery of PR for my books -- radio, NPR, cable TV, broadcast TV, newspapers, magazines, blogs, newsletters -- I have picked up on the rhythm of Amazon rankings," Kessler says. "I've done the best after a week or two of decent PR followed by an e-mail newsletter (from a third party with a big, big following) with a link to click. The former sets up a base, and the latter spikes the sales within a few short hours or over the course of the day."

"My best?" Andy asks rhetorically. "I once hit No. 4 and stayed there almost all day. It was a Sunday. An e-mail newsletter had dropped on Friday night with a direct link, and I could almost hear mouses clicking all weekend.

"By Monday morning, I was back in the 20s and 30s; by Wednesday I was back to around 100. It was exhilarating."

3. The list seems to be a series of weighted averages.

I'm not sure the exact number," Kessler says of the weightings, "but my guess is 40% hour, 30% day, 20% week, and 10% month. So if you have a huge spike in sales, you don't completely dislodge books that have been in the top 10 or top 100 for months and months. Though you might pass them for a very fun hour."

An Amazon spokeswoman essentially confirms his hunch when she says, "We base rankings on all-time sales, as well as recent sales that are weighted more heavily than older sales, so that our lists are timely and aren't always dominated by all-time best-sellers like "Harry Potter."

4. There are ways to game the system, but it's not necessarily worth it.

The desire to manipulate one's Amazon ranking has given birth to a cottage industry of fixers and fudgers who will help you increase your sales through multi-tiered marketing schemes or rentable e-mail lists.

The simplest way to game the Amazon list is to gather credit card numbers directly at speaking engagements or through an e-mail offer, then turn around and plug the names and addresses into Amazon by hand.

It's raw data entry, but the applied effort can shoot a title to the top. Amazon is a "long tail" retailer. At the very top -- rankings Nos. 1 to 10 -- a book could be selling 3,000 to 10,000 copies a week through the Internet retailer. So all it takes is, say, 500 to 1,000 copies manhandled through the system on a single day to get your book into the top ranks.

What the gamers get from all of this is never clear. Manipulated sales rarely generate genuine sales momentum.

Smart manipulators don't try to return books they've ordered back to Amazon, like former Washington Post reporter David Vise, the author of a book about a turncoat FBI agent.

Amazon is smart enough to recognize bulk orders, so suspicions that Vise was goosing his rankings back in 2002 were probably off the mark. That, or the transaction costs were their own punishment for such a failed attempt.

Besides, there's no point in manipulating Amazon's sales. Getting on the New York Times best-seller list used to trigger all sorts of author benefits, from additional discounts at superstores (a practice that was discontinued a decade ago) to author bonuses based on best-seller statistics (another practice that rarely happens anymore.)

What effect does the Kindle have on all of this? Too soon to tell. Outside Amazon, USA Today has recently begun to include Kindle sales in its best-seller list. With two weeks of data, the Kindle effect remains inconclusive.

It does appear that Kindle favors books that are already best-sellers, which may be because Kindle owners are what the fast-food business would call "heavy users," or it may be a function of the $9.99 price point for best-sellers on the Kindle.

Amazon says that its own top-100 list will represent Kindle editions as it does other editions -- like when an audio book appears near the print version in the top 100 -- of a book. That means separately. And if a Kindle edition moves as many units as any of the other top titles, it will earn its own place in the top 100. But that hasn't really happened yet.

This article was reported by Marion Maneker for The Big Money.
From: MSN Money

Choose Your Own Adventure - Most Likely You'll Die

Posted by: Nathan

Rember those choose your own adventure books that you used to read as a kid? As you read through the book, you come to these points where you have to make a decision for the main character, and depending on what you chose, a tailored adventure would divulge itself. It always seemed like death was a common ending no matter what path you chose though.

Michael Niggel took a look at Journey Under the Sea, and mapped out all possible paths. It turns out that death and unfavorable endings are in fact much more likely than the rest.

That somehow seems wrong, no? I liken it to something like...even in your own fantasy, you die or end with an unfavorable outcome. Such is life, I suppose.

View the full-screen version here [PDF].

From: Flowing Data

Nick Cave sings his new book

Will Nick Cave's all-singing e-book change the novel for ever? Or is it just another Smell-O-Vision?
by: Sam Leith

There's one big question you need to ask when presented with the technological enhancement of an art form: "Is it Smell-O-Vision?" Remember Smell-O-Vision? No? Well, that's my point. This revolution in cinema was based on the idea that the experience would be more immersive if, say, a love scene was accompanied by the scent of roses being pumped through the theatre's air-conditioning; or that when the zombies showed up, the theatre would be alive with rotting haddock. Everyone hated it, of course. They emerged from cinemas smelling of fishy roses.

Likewise, there was a time around the middle of the last century when the world was briefly convinced 3D was the future of cinema. Red and blue spectacles, it was imagined, would be routinely employed to watch a film. Flat projection would be a historical curio. In the event, of course, the 3D craze gave us the nadir of the Jaws franchise and a short-lived comic strip called Adolescent Radioactive Black-Belt Hamsters.

Which brings us to Enhanced Editions, a new e-book project cooked up by Peter Collingridge of the digital design company Apt Studio, currently working in partnership with Canongate. Later this month, Nick Cave's new novel The Death of Bunny Munro – the story of a sex-maniac travelling salesman taking his last road trip – goes to market through the iPhone App Store, in an enhanced edition that is being launched before the print version.

The Enhanced Edition does some of the things we're now accustomed to seeing as standard in electronic texts: you can faff with fonts, change colour, bookmark it, and so on; and there's some smart social networking stuff attached. But it also includes enhancements that could have a noticeable effect on the experience of reading. Instead of paginating the book conventionally, it's presented as a continuous vertical scroll (one geek-pleasing trick is that you can adjust the scrolling speed with the angle of tilt of the phone), and the App includes an audiobook that syncs with the written text. Pop on the headphones, thumb the screen and Cave's voice picks up where you left off.

This is interesting. It could be regarded as a gimmick, but if it catches on, it will subtly change the way we experience fiction. If you half-read, half-listen to a book, your experience of reading will partly be shaped by the voice of the audiobook; your memories of the text will be coloured by how you took it in, passage by passage. The other thing is that it comes with a soundtrack, composed by Cave and Warren Ellis, one of his Bad Seeds. Soundtracked novels: now that really will change the experience. Could the soundtracked novel be to fiction what song is to verse? Or could it be what Smell-O-Vision was to cinema? Inevitably, some authors – like Cave – will be more suitable for the treatment than others. I can't see a huge market for an iPhone edition of Hotel du Lac, with Anita Brookner improvising scat jazz accompanied by a steel band.

So, some whiffs of roses and haddock. But the breadth of the package, it seems to me, is at the very least a weathervane. There's no ignoring the fact that the e-book will, not too far from now, compete with the paperback; and the likelihood is that some readers won't just use them to read. It's a longstanding truism to say that every reader reads a different book. As more packages like this find their way to market, the book itself, as well as its readings, will become more plural, more blurred, and less monolithically booky. Smells good to me.

From: the Guardian

did you mean "Olive skittered"? a look at what's wrong witht the OPAC

Over at In The Library With The Lead Pipe, Ross Singer has posted a interesting long-form blog post about libraries, what they're not doing so well and how they could be doing those things better. You can check it out here.

Rock 'n' Roll Library

Mick Jones, iconic guitarist and songwriter with The Clash, Big Audio Dynamite, and Carbon Silicon, has amassed an impressive collection of the paraphernalia of performance and marketing materials of the bands he has worked with. This archive sits alongside a parallel general collection of books, magazines, videos, ephemera, toys and games which mark out his life, times, and influences. In his west London recording studio and adjoining store, customised stage clothes, instruments, flight cases, records, amplifiers and recording gear, posters, books, boxes of correspondence, photographs and song lyrics, etc. all vie for attention in a kind of Aladdin's cave of popular culture.

In this exhibition, as much of the contents of his west London archive as possible will be transported lock, stock, and barrel to CHELSEA space. The installation of this material will create a remarkable visual spectacle that raises questions about the act of collecting and offers some small insight into the influences and interests of a musician and cultural icon.

For Mick Jones, this will represent a first attempt to unpack, look at, and think about a small proportion of the mass of material he has accumulated and decide what to do next. He envisages this collection one day becoming a freely available resource - a "Rock & Roll Public Library."

From: CHELSEA Space

Note: There's more about Jones in this article from the Telegraph.

Stephenie Meyer faces plagiarism claim

Lawyers acting for vampire author Jordan Scott seek damages for copyright infringement.
by: Alison Flood

Stephenie Meyer is no stranger to comparisons to JK Rowling: the obsessive fans, the midnight bookshop openings, the eye-watering sales figures. Now she can add another: accusations of plagiarism.

The Twilight author has been served with a "cease and desist" order sent to her publisher, Hachette Book Group USA, by lawyers acting for Jordan Scott. The letter claims that the latest volume in Meyer's Twilight series, Breaking Dawn, which was published last year, "shows a striking and substantial similarity" to Scott's book The Nocturne, and asks the publisher how it intends "to cease and desist from any further copyright infringement and to compensate my client for her damages."

Hachette call the claim "completely without merit" and said that any lawsuit would be "defended vigorously."

Scott's lawyer, J Craig Williams, claims that Scott's book was published and posted on the internet in 2006 and cites similarities. Among these are that both books include an after-wedding sex scene on a beach, that both contain a scene about a woman who is sick because she's pregnant with a child with evil powers, that both feature a scene in which the pregnant wife is dying, that both include a scene in which the main character sees their baby for the first time, and that both see the main character turn into a vampire. Scott also points out that in both books the main character refers to his wife as "love."

Breaking Dawn follows teh story of the vampire Edward Cullen and his girlfriend, the human teenager Bella Swan.

The news of the plagiarism accusation was broken by the website TMZ, which posted Scott's letter online.

Hachette responded with a statement which said that neither Meyer nor her representatives "had any knowledge of this writer or her supposed book prior to this claim."

"Ms. Scott's attorney has yet to furnish us with a copy of the book to support this claim as requested," the statement said. "The world of The Twilight Saga and the stories within it are entirely the creation of Ms. Meyer. Her books have been a phenomenal sensation, and perhaps it shouldn't be surprising to hear that other people may seek to rid the coattails of such success. This claim in frivolous and any lawsuit will be defended vigorously."

In 2001, American author Nancy Stouffer claimed that JK Rowling stole her ideas for Harry Potter from a series of books she had written between 1984 and 1988, starring one Larry Potter and featuring "muggles." The court found in favour of Rowling.

The Nocturne is not available from Amazon, and Scott's website lists it as "temporarily sold out." The site says she started writing the book when she was 15, after she "took some time away from writing music and working in film and television."

"I wrote The Nocturne with the intent of bringing readers into a completely new world of the fantasy and romance genres," Scott writes. "I have an award-winning script, and three other scripts in various stages. Wow. I love school, writing, music, and of course Boys."

Edible Books?

Finally, the excuse “The dog ate my homework” might gain some plausibility. A British company, committed to sustainable and eco-friendly reading material, has created school-exercise books made from a fibrous bi-product of sugarcane called Bagasse. Which makes the books edible! At least according to the BBC, who broke the story with the headline “Children able to eat their words,” though the article doesn’t confirm that children can indeed eat these books without keeling over. (I imagine it's contingent on sugarcane waste actually being digestible, and no harmful substances being added during production.)
Posted by: Menachem Kaiser
From: the New Yorker

Ask an Academic: Babysitters as Bad Girls

Ask an Academic: Babysitters as Bad Girls

posted by: Andrea Walker



Miriam Forman-Brunell is a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the author of “Babysitter: An American History,” which has just been published by New York University Press. The book considers the history of the babysitter in American culture, and why she has so frequently been perceived as a dangerous figure. An edited version of my conversation with Forman-Brunell appears below.

Why babysitting?

Babysitting has served as a formative work experience for the majority of American girls since its emergence in the nineteen-twenties. For nearly a century, the babysitter has been a prominent figure in our communities and also in the cultural imagination. But despite the fact that babysitting usually takes place without major problems, the sitter has often been portrayed, in urban legend and in the popular media, as causing danger or courting it.

Why have so many people had it in for the poor babysitter?

Teen-age girls have been contesting traditional gender ideals in highly visible ways since the nineteen-twenties. The babysitter has conveniently served as a lightning rod for adults’ uncertainties about what the limits of girls’ autonomy and empowerment should be. These uncertainties have played out in the media: for instance, unease about the influence of feminism, the sexual revolution, and the counter culture on girls’ behavior in the nineteen-sixties led to depictions of delirious babysitters who endangered children and slutty sitters who destabilized marriages in soft-core-porn novels. In the nineteen-seventies, maniacs in horror movies like “Halloween” and “When a Stranger Calls” sought vengeance on teen-age girls unwilling to curb their pursuit of personal independence. In the eighties, it was the babysitters themselves who turned murderous in made-for-TV movies, a fantasy created, perhaps, in response to girls’ uninterrupted determination to achieve authority and self-sufficiency.

But then why did parents continue to employ young girls, if they had so many anxieties?

They needed someone to watch the children (and at an affordable rate). Since the twenties, there’s been a steady decline of other child-care providers, such as household servants and parents and kin. The expansion of suburban communities, the influence of feminist ideals, and a rising divorce rate that drew more women into the formal economy also played a role. Unlike house cleaners, grandparents, and others who had historically provided childcare, teen-age girls became more readily available. While the rise of a commodity-based youth culture provided girls with a financial incentive to babysit, the expectation that, as females, girls are naturally maternal diminished parent-employers’ apprehensions about hiring teen-age girls.

What about the “Baby-sitter’s Club” series, which I thought was full of responsible young women?

The “Baby-sitters Club” featured highly capable pre-adolescent “super sitters,” as did a new generation of babysitter manuals for girls and advice literature aimed at parent-employers in desperate need of sitters during the baby boom-let of the nineteen-eighties. As teen-age girls left babysitting for service-sector jobs in malls, helpful pre-adolescent sitters became idealized in a girls’ popular culture that sought to acculturate a workforce of youthful sitters. Unlike the many transgressive teen-age babysitters in made-for-TV movies of the era, perky pre-adolescents were depicted as more endearing than dangerous.

What surprised you in the course of your research?

I was surprised to learn of the number of boy babysitters before the nineteen-sixties, and that they were depicted as more competent, reliable, and responsible than girls at babysitting. From the Great Depression to the New Millennium, Henry Aldrich, Donald Duck, Archie Andrews, Tom & Jerry, Carl the Dog, and numerous other males who babysat on radio and TV shows, in cartoons, and in children’s books, were unfailingly portrayed as helpful heroes. As such, they bolstered the more unfavorable view of teen-age girls as irresponsible, irrational, and unreliable, despite the fact that, in reality, teen-age girls are the least likely to perpetrate crimes against children in their care.

What also surprised me was the realization that girls have felt more ambivalence than enthusiasm about the job that has been the gateway to female employment in the twentieth century. In addition to deliberately turning down offers to babysit for those who gave them a “hard time,” girls in postwar America drew up manifestos and established babysitter unions that largely succeeded in eliminating housework from the field. More typically, babysitters drew upon teen-girl culture to both adjust to and contest unfavorable working conditions. The ultimate evidence of sitters’ dissatisfaction over the past century has been the frequency with which girls faced with other options turned their backs on babysitting.

From: The New Yorker

Is there a margin muse in your library book?

Marks in library books are usually moronic scrawlings or tedious displays of ego, but just occasionally you come across something fascinating.
by: Daniel Kalder

Last year I joined the library at the University of Texas, Austin, and rediscovered a literary form I hadn't encountered much since my student days: readers' inscriptions in the margins of library books. The conventions of the genre are simple: you state something obvious in a fragmentary/declaratory style, adding a question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis according to the degree of confidence you have in your perceptions.

The classic example would be my discovery of the astonishing critical insight "Satan is the hero" inscribed alongside one of Lucifer's speeches in a secondhand copy of Paradise Lost. What motivates readers to write such unnecessary, moronic comments in the margins? My guess is that since most students are young and inexperienced, they find it reassuring to physically capture the first 'critical' comment that flops into their heads as a method of coping with the fact that they are totally out of their depth.

Thanks to UT library, I have recently made several exciting discoveries in the genre. Apocalypses by Eugen Weber is an excellent history of 2000-plus years of End of Times thinking, but reading it wouldn't have been the same experience without the sarcastic remarks about dead prophets an earlier reader had scrawled throughout the book. Next to Weber's account of 12th-century monk Joachim of Fiore's idea that history progresses through three stages towards an era of universal felicity, this acerbic critic had written: "Looks like old Joachim was full of beans!" Reading his many other crappy quips, I suspected he had checked Apocalypses out purely for the purpose of displaying his contempt for religion. If his posturing before an unseen audience of future readers had been funny, I would have forgiven him. Instead, it was a tedious display of ego, like being stuck in traffic behind a car covered in bumper stickers broadcasting the driver's views on everything from Iraq to the success of his kids at high school.

I encountered a more interesting example of margin prose in an essay by historian Pauline Moffitt Watts on Christopher Columbus's obsession with his role as harbinger of the Last Days. It's easy to find evidence of this in Columbus's later life: he edited an anthology of apocalyptic texts called The Book of Prophecies, and asked his royal sponsors to support him in a new crusade for the liberation of Jerusalem prior to Christ's imminent return. However, in order to establish that the younger Columbus also longed for the End, Watts turned to a manuscript in his personal library, which he had used while preparing his first voyage. Columbus had filled the sections on the apocalypse with comments and drawings, such as a big hand pointing at the 'seven signs' of Antichrist. Thus, by studying Columbus's notations in the margins of another man's book (and combining it with other evidence), Watts claimed to have revealed the apocalyptic bent of his mind prior to the first voyage in 1492, arguing that he had always hoped his discovery of a passage to the Indies was part of the drama of the Second Coming.

From a personal perspective, however, the most fascinating example of margin prose I have encountered was inside a first edition of Alone Through the Forbidden Land, by Gustav Krist, published in 1938. The book is an account of an Austrian adventurer's clandestine journey through the states of Soviet Central Asia in the mid 1920s. At first, the marginal author was quite restrained. To Krist's claim that the few Europeans who visited Bukhara prior to its absorption into the USSR were usually sold into slavery or executed, he responded with a simple "?"

Soon, however, his comments took a turn for the pedantic. He disputed Krist's claim that the journey from Barfurush in Persia to Meshed i Sar on the Caspian Sea is a "27 or 28 mile ride" with "?Why 28? It is only 8." (Actually, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica it's 15.)

Later, when he was especially irritated, he resorted to frustrated outbursts: "Nonsense!" Or simply: "!!!" And: "???"

But Krist's book is a colourful, subjective memoir, written years after the events he described. Only a fool would expect total accuracy. This invisible dullard was misreading it so he could brag to an unseen audience: "I know better." And still I was sceptical. Central Asia in the 1920s was closed even to Soviet citizens from outside the region. Very few westerners had visited the places Krist saw before they were absorbed into the USSR, and even fewer would see them over the next seven decades. I assumed the marginal author was critiquing Krist not from experience but from a dry overfamiliarity with other texts – until I read this passage from Krist:

"The Bukhara that I knew had been an independent state under its own Amir. It had been forced to permit Russian soldiers in its frontier towns, but had successfully prevented the entry of any European into the Holy City itself."

To which the phantom reader replied: "! I have lived there as often as I wanted."

Suddenly, I realised that he was not some petty, sniping boor but, rather, another eyewitness. Texas is not exactly awash with English-speaking European refugees from central Asia, and it was even less so before 1991. Nor am I aware of any early-20th-century memoir of Bukhara written by a rancher, oilman or even UT academic. So who was he? Alas, no answer can be found in the annotations he made to Krist's book.

Nevertheless, as I read the rest of the book, this marginal author changed from a nuisance to a haunting presence; a shadow reader peering over my shoulder. I experienced his notes and Krist's text as a discussion between two experts, tinged with bitterness and jealousy on the part of the Texan, whose experience had not been preserved for posterity. So when Krist writes, "The Bukharans had a few pieces of artillery," and the Texan angrily snaps "Two", I am fascinated but also frustrated. I want to know more, but these scattered, anonymous fragments in the margins of another man's book are all that remains of the mysterious Texan of Bukhara.

From: the Guardian