A fine bookstore, Burton Lysecki Books, sits just around the corner from us. It is literally two blocks away. It took me seven months to turn the corner, past the all-day 7-11, and walk into the store. What I found was relatively astounding. Like many Winnipeg institutions, the outside is extremely unprepossessing. Half-finished siding, a hand-lettered sign, dirty windows and sidewalks filled with sand and snow decorate the store’s exterior. Once inside, I was faced with thousands upon thousands of books, most of them immediately old, aging, and beautifully produced. Whole shelves were filled with now-ancient encyclopedias published by companies that are no longer extant. Other shelves were stacked neatly with gold-edged, leather-bound, small books, at one time issued in series. At the top of one shelf, I saw the entire works of Emerson. I couldn’t reach high enough to pull one of those works down, which seemed apropros. Multiple rooms led to other rooms, some more cramped and claustrophobic and some more open. There were “art” books (with none on “design”) as well as a large area dedicated to “science” and other to “ideas.” (This is the first time I’ve seen a used bookstore with a category called “ideas.”) Sure, there were stacks devoted to science fiction, Penguin fiction, new paperpack fiction, and erotica. There was even, wonderfully amidst the arcania, a collection of 1980s-vintage Playboys, wrapped together in groups of 4 or 5.
Lysecki Books isn’t the only used bookstore in North America. The store, though, is renowned for its superb collections and, from what I understand, well respected among academics and collectors in this city. I used to make a habit of visiting used bookstores years ago in all of the places I’ve resided and visited: Philadelphia; Providence; Boston; Paris; Washington, DC; Krakow; Warsaw; Berlin; Albany; Troy; Brooklyn and Manhattan. I loved feeling the weight of old hardcovers in my hands and knowing that that book held recoverable knowledge that would soon, perhaps, be secretly mine. I loved knowing that troves of information were being archived by the used booksellers of the world and that these purveyors of the written were also the private guards of our collected knowledge.
Today, I felt the immense weight of two bookends squeezing stores just like the one I visited. One bookend is a collection of companies that go by the names of Amazon.com, Chapters, Barnes & Noble and eBay. The other bookend includes the huge, uber-friendly and coffee scented chain stores like Chapters, Barnes & Noble and local large scale retailers. It took me seven months to visit Lysecki Books because I visit, honor, and take tremendous pleasure in the bookends.
All posts by Andrew Boardman
Truck.
After waking my computer up from a long night of sleep, the monitors starting looking kind of fuzzy and then, a few moments later, lots of lines and dots and dashes in patterns of many colors and sizes started appearing, out of nowhere, all over the screens. I have two monitors, side by side. And they typically work wonderfully, providing lots of visual real estate for my Photoshop and email habits. But today, well, it looked like techno-Santa came to roost in my machine. It’s kind of pretty. Lines moving across the horizon, vertical greens and pretty reds on one monitor dancing along with black dashes in bunches of ten flickering on the other monitor. Through the haze of the digital miasma I could still see my desktop and look at my files so I knew that the underlying hard drive was okay. I called Apple (I have three months remaining on my AppleCare insurance, which gives me about, oh, twelve weeks to start looking for a new computer) and, after having to speak the words “PowerMac G4” a number of times into the phone and saying twice that I’m not an educational customer, was put through to Raj in India. At least, I assume it was in India. It could have been Pakistan or the Phillipines. My assumption of geographical identity is based on the last telephone call I had with AppleCare about one year ago. I recall asking John where he was located and he laughed politely and said, “India, sir.” I didn’t feel like knowing more. Today I didn’t feeling like knowing anything except how to get the linear test patterns off my flat screens. I had a feeling it was a dead video card and, indeed, it was (or is). (FYI, yes, I ran Disk Utility from the startup disks and then used DiskWarrior to rebuild and nothing would take care of it so I was pretty sure it was non-disk hardware.) Now, and until tomorrow, I can’t use the computer unless I want to squint through the linear maelstrom.
Luckily, I’ve got my little backup laptop and that’s where I’m at.
Actually, I was at the parking lot of a supermarket just an hour ago and learned something. I’d like to buy a truck. In particular, I’d like to get a Ford F-150 pickup. I know what you’re thinking: Andy with a fricking truck. Yeah. It would be great. I watched a man step out of his F-150 in the parking lot. By the look of him, he was probably going to go purchase some steak and a few loaves of bread and some apples. But that truck, man, it was nice. Lots of height in the cab. A nice sized, black cargo box situated at the rear of the cab, perfect for holding tools and whatever else I needed to keep protected from the elements. A large but not pretentious wheel base that wouldn’t throw other vehicles off the road. Couple that with a 4.2L V6 and 17″ machined aluminimum wheels and you’re talking lots of possibility. It would suit my new personality, which is all about expedience, certainty and manufactured optimism. And it would allow me to haul things, whatever those might be and whenever they might need hauling. The best part of owning a small pickup is that you’re riding high and no one can fault you. No one knows whether you’re a cowboy, a farmhand, a machinist or a Rotarian. With a car, people know you’re a wuss. In an SUV, people assume you’re a waste of natural resources. With a minivan, they know someone calls you dad. With a large truck, they know you’re in heavy industry. They just know from your pickup that you have a need for hauling some shit. Sure, if you got one of those Cadillac pickups, it’s easy to tell who you are. But with a regular pickup, no one knows. Pure anonymity and the likely perception from afar that you’re tougher than most. I realize I might have to change my appearance some, bulk up, and lose the glasses, but I’m into it.
The Bears.
Bears are big news here in Manitoba. Now, it seems, they’re news everywhere, in part because they may not exist for much longer.
Purim.
We went today to a local synaogogue’s Purim celebration for kids. It was incredibly well-organized and thought-out. Volunteers from all segments of the congration, including teenagers and staff and those from the sisterhood and brotherhood were on hand to make balloon animals for kids, paint their faces, help them throw rings around small objects, and watch them jump up and down in one large and one small bouncing air machine thing. Drawing and crafts abounded. The rabbi (I think it was the rabbi because it typically is for some reason) got to have sponges thrown at his face while staring through a Daffy Duck cutout. He took it serenely and with good humor.
I thought that his response to having small (and some not so small) kids throwing sloppy, wet objects at his face was the response that I would like to have to general setbacks. How do you get that? I figure it comes with a bunch of humility mixed in with nerve, self-confidence, a belief in goodness coupled with a sense of complicity with the most honest facets of the world. Mix in a little humor, a love for innocence and an acceptance of self-violation as well as a bit of sheer naivite and you’ve got a mensch.
Happy Purim.
.ca
I recently purchased the domain name manoverboard.ca.
The whole process was very uninteresting, except that, during checkout at my online registrar, I had to check off one box from the following list so that the Canadian authorities could ensure that my ownership of a national domain is legitimate.
Corporation (Canada or Canadian province or territory)
Canadian Citizen
Permanent Resident of Canada
Government or government entity in Canada
Canadian Educational Institution
Canadian Unincorporated Association
Canadian Hospital
Partnership Registered in Canada
Trade-mark registered in Canada (by a non-Canadian owner)
Canadian Trade Union
Canadian Political Party
Canadian Library, Archive or Museum
Trust established in Canada
Aboriginal Peoples (individuals or groups) indigenous to Canada
Indian Band recognized by the Indian Act of Canada
Legal Representative of a Canadian Citizen or Permanent Resident
Official mark registered in Canada
Her Majesty the Queen
This list says more about contemporary Canada than most books out there on the subject.
Curlin.
On Saturday night, we went curling. It’s a fine old sport. Granted, Canadians are awfully good at it and deserve the credit for keeping this originally Scottish activity alive and well.
We went to a rink called “Heather” here in Winnipeg. Heather was nice. There were about 6 courts. Well, they’re called “rinks” but I prefer to think of them as courts because they look, to my jaded American eyes, like shuffleboard courts, despite the fact that ice covers them.
I did pretty well. That is, I stank. But I was able to get the rock (I mean, “stone”) to the other side. And my form was pretty good, despite the fact that I fell once on one knee, hard. Then I fell on my chest and arm. And I then fell on my side and knee again, which is pretty black and blue but looks, according to my daughter, like a lightening rod.
The stone itself is very easy to push across the ice. The hard part is pushing it across the ice so that it doesn’t either fly to the other side. That combined with not knocking your own team’s rock too hard.
And sweeping the ice in front of the stone is a pretty odd endeavor. I tried hard to sweep when requested (“hard” when screamed means “sweep hard”) but the skeptic in me kept thinking that sweeping in front of the rocks to make it go further was pointless. Was my brush-pushing actually doing anything at all? It was hard to tell but I’m a good sport.
Mostly, it was just good fun for eight people to get together, throw some rocks (sorry, “stones”) and see what the sport is all about. I would definitely to it again in a few months, though I doubt I’d get a membership at a local curling club. It is tempting, though. Curling does strike me (no pun) as a sport where no conversations can be had and friends can be made. I have a huge new respect for the sport because, man, it’s hard!
Manitoba’s first settlers, in 1812, made curling stones from oak blocks. Curling exploded in the west, turning Winnipeg into the center of curling, with more clubs in Manitoba than in Quebec and Ontario combined. The Manitoba Branch of the Royal Caledonian was established in 1888 and curlers from all parts of Canada and the U.S.A. flocked to the Winnipeg Curling Club, with 62 rinks participating in the bonspiel that year.
– Gleaned from icing.org.
Manitoba, the province in which I reside, has a very strong Curling Association. There must be a few hundred clubs listed. I, however, quite liked Heather.
After the game, the eight of us went upstairs to drink beer and talk about our curling.
Today, there were 78 comments on a post called “The Greatest Curling Shot Ever” on Metafilter. I don’t know enough, yet, to say the video there is really the greatest but it’s an inspired bit of play.
A good friend of a good friend of mine made a movie about curling that is as hilariously informative as it is beautiful. It’s called History of the Hogline.
End of a Time
It looks like Jason Kottke has called it quits to his year-old and brilliant micropatron experiment. It’s too bad. I was really rooting for him and hoping that collecting small individual contributions would be a kind of antidote for advertising on blogs. Not that Kottke is going to go ad. But no sadness here – Jason will prevail.
It is quite interesting that nearly 100% of his funding came during the first three weeks of his fund drive. It goes to the issue of novelty, of course, but, perhaps more importantly, it highlights the importance of clearly communicating “marketing” goals from the outset, particularly on the Web. I’d love to see Jason do a “case study” or a “lessons learned” analysis. I’ll follow up this post with lessons learned about another kind of Web experiment.
I Love …
There are a lot of people I love. They pretty go unmentioned on a blog, and rightly so.
Here are the things I love (I mean I really love) that are not people (in no particular order):
- The ease of death.
- Domain names that end with .ca.
- Slippers in the winter.
- Owning a small business.
- Collapsing discarded food cartons.
- Coloring within the lines.
- Bryant Park.
- The smell of spring.
- Designing with Web standards.
- Animal rights.
- Contemporary Judaism.
- The activity of reading well-kept blogs.
- The quiet of night.
- Margins.
- Documentaries about political success.
- The sky’s light.
- Multiple moons.
- Cement highways.
- Slab serif fonts.
- Any magazine.
- Walking straight.
- Smooth skin.
- Blackness.
- Large ships I don’t have to get on.
Skin on Metal.
I actually couldn’t write about this last week.
Sometime on Thursday morning, it was minus 53 degree Fahrenheit here (wind chill factor). I sh*t you not. I wrote it correctly, but just to be sure (and just so I’m sure): It was -53 F.
The temperature reading in the car on the day before (which is pretty much my thermometer because, when I went to Home Depot to look for outdoor thermometers, every single one of them were butt-ugly), said -25 C, which amounts to -13 F.
I listen to WNYC.org pretty much every day of the week and on weekends whenever I can. I found it thrilling and sordid that the radio announcer was telling its New York audience (of which I used to be a very happy member) to button up.
On Thursday, I took out the garbage. When I came back, momentarily sans gloves, I brilliantly put my hand on the steel metal door handle. It went red.
It was the coldest day of my life.
New Rules for Vice Presidents.
Mr. Cheney came “out” today, saying that he shot his “wad” in the face of his friend.
I’ve been thinking about some new rules for the Vice President’s Office that may be applicable now that this transgression is (maybe, possibly) over:
- Don’t shoot guns. They could hurt someone–even someone you like.
- Don’t kill animals that can’t kill you. It’s just kind of bad karma, dude.
- If you have to be out with a gun, try to keep the thing above your head. Lots of shit can happen when you carry guns and stuff.
- If, for whatever reason, you shoot someone in the head, tell the police and be manly. It’s hard to admit shooting someone in the head, I know. But it’s important that you explain what happened, if it does happen.
- Try rubber bullets. They’re pretty cool and they can still kill things. Sometimes they kill people even though they’re, like, rubber.
- Don’t tell folks, after you shot someone, that you wish the person you shot well. It’s probably better if you kind of hang out at their hospital bed for a few days and make amends.
- If the person doesn’t get better soon, send a card. But make it a personal one and don’t have your press secretary make jokes or anything.
- If you really do want to shoot guns and stuff, overall you can be a lot more useful in places like Iraq or Iran where they need the help. But if you can’t make it that far, that’s cool. Get your kids to go do that shit.</li.