From Puddingdale to Hogglestock via Silverbridge.

From The Chronicles of Barsetshire by Anthony Trollope

Barchester is a cathedral town in imaginary Barsetshire of mid-nineteenth century England. Each of the six Barchester novels — beginning with The Warden, and continuing with Barchester Towers, Dr. Thorne, Framley Parsonage, The Small House at Allington, ending with The Last Chronicle of Barset — takes us to a different part of the county.

Trollope’s names for his people and places in the novels are chimeric and fantastic; Rev. Josiah Crawley, perpetual curate of Hogglestock Parish; Archdeacon Theophilus Grantly, rector of Plumstead Episcopi; the Duke of Omnium to Gatherum Castle; the Rev. Quiverful; the Greshams of Greshamsbury; Lady Julia Guestwick; Sir Raffle Buffle of the Income Tax Office; Lady Scatcherd of Boxall Hill; the Misses Prettyman in Silverbridge; Sir Omicron Pie of London; Sir Raffle Buffle; the Duke of Omnium at Gatherum Castle; Archdeacon Grantly of Plumstead Episcopi; and various quaintly names the villages such as Stogpingum, Puddingdale, Eiderdow, Hogglestock; and Crabtree Canonicorum. To name a few.

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On The Nightstand

Cousin Henry by Anthony Trollope

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Benjamin Franklin was a Librarian.

An illustration depicting the Junto, a literary society formed by Franklin in 1727.

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A Radical Pessimist’s Guide to the Next 10 Years

Douglas Coupland’s “Radical pessimist’s guide to the next 10 years”  is a thought-provoking, traumatizing exercise in linear predictions based on peak oil, rampant financialist malfeasance and climate change. Coupland reveals the shape of things to come, with 45 tips for surviving the messed-up future. No silver linings here. The elevator only goes down. The only solace is that the elevator will, at some point, stop.

The Pontiac Superdome, 2010.

By Douglas Coupland. From Saturday’s Globe and Mail, Friday, Oct. 08, 2010

1) It’s going to get worse

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Bookstores are Closing all Over the Valley, Where we Need Them Most.

jamie pressley, encino barnes & noble

As news of the impending closure of the Barnes & Noble store in the Encino Marketplace travels through town, Encinoites are taking up (online) arms. They are venting their anger via a Facebook page (created by resident Robin Permaul), demanding that the mall’s owner, the evil Caruso Affiliated – whose other “holdings” include The Grove and the abomination that is the Americana at Brand in Glendale  – stay the bookstore’s execution. The Encino B & N location is not just a bookseller, but a neighborhood gathering spot and a host to author appearances, readings, book clubs and community events. The local Encino Patch covers the drama. The news that a godforsaken CVS drug store is what will be replacing their bookstore adds salt to the wounds. They are rightfully taking it out on Rick Caruso, blaming him for the store’s closing. Caruso took to the Facebook page to defend himself:

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Nancy and Sluggo #149 via Cover Browser

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Ou à tes-vous, dÃcadence?

Where did the decadent novel go?

from guardian, uk

If ever an age called for the kind of self-conscious maximalism pioneered by Wilde, Baudelaire and Huysmans, it is ours. Instead, we are beset with dreary naturalism.

“What happened to the great tradition of the decadent novel”? Lee Brackstone asks in a recent blog for Faber, bemoaning the dominance of realism and naturalism in contemporary fiction. Although he finds the decadent spirit alive and well in DBC Pierre’s Lights Out in Wonderland, his question still holds: Pierre aside, can it really be that the grand heritage of the fin de siecle writers has been so short-lived, especially when their arch, satirical mode is needed now more than ever?

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Are You Still There, God? It’s Me, Blubber.


It’s Banned Books Week again and across the country, libraries, bookstores, teachers and readers are celebrating that which our founding fathers labored over quills and parchment for and our father and forefathers fought and died for, the very freedoms that we alone – as Americans – enjoy and that the terrorists hate us for, “the freedom to read.”

You may be surprised to know that one of the country’s most challenged and banned American authors is not Bradbury, Ginsberg or VC Andrews. It’s Judy Blume, renowned American chronicler of all things adolescent. Ms. Blume has seemingly been in a 40+ year battle against censorship by the religious right, ever since such dangerously provocative titles as “Deenie”, “Superfudge”,”Freckle Juice,” “Blubber” and “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” polluted the libraries and bookshelves of America. Seminal teen-bibles chronicling the rites ofadolescence, her books have been loved by girls the world over – and loathed by America’s religious right. The appeal of Blume’s books lies in her forthright storytelling, matter-of-factly relating life’s most mortifying moments, deciphering those vague, complex feelings and then pointing them out in a frank and unapologetic manner, exposing their relatability  and demystifying them. In her mould-breaking novels, Judy Blume was the one adult who seemed to get it. I still remember the punched-in-the-stomach feeling when the mean girls turn on Jill in “Blubber”. Stupid, shortsighted Jill. Crossing Wendy like that.

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Privatizing the Public Library.

from the new york times

Anger as a Private Company Takes Over Libraries

SANTA CLARITA, Calif. — A private company in Maryland has taken over public libraries in ailing cities in California, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas, growing into the country’s fifth-largest library system.

Now the company, Library Systems & Services, has been hired for the first time to run a system in a relatively healthy city, setting off an intense and often acrimonious debate about the role of outsourcing in a ravaged economy. A $4 million deal to run the three libraries here is a chance for the company to demonstrate that a dose of private management can be good for communities, whatever their financial situation. But in an era when outsourcing is most often an act of budget desperation — with janitors, police forces and even entire city halls farmed out in one town or another — the contract in Santa Clarita has touched a deep nerve and begun a round of second-guessing. Can a municipal service like a library hold so central a place that it should be entrusted to a profit-driven contractor only as a last resort — and maybe not even then?

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And Then There Were Fewer.

(spoiler alert). First, there were ten….. a curious assortment of strangers summoned as weekend guests to a remote island off the coast of Devon. Their host, an eccentric millionaire unknown to all of them, is nowhere to be found. All that the guests have in common is a skeleton in his or her closet, a wicked past they’re unwilling to reveal – a secret that will seal their fate. For each has been marked for murder. One by one they fall prey, their deaths as nominated in the titular nursery rhyme “Ten Little Indians” (which is displayed in their rooms); poisonings, axes to heads, etc. Each murder occurs in a situation where almost all the other island guests might have had opportunity to commit it. Before the weekend is out, there will be none. And only the dead are above suspicion. The guests discover that they have been brought to the island by an insane and sadistic judge, who has tried each of them in criminal court in the past, driven by an overarching sense of duty to render proper, horrific justice for each. I’ve read and reread every one of her books, and this is Agatha Christie’s masterpiece, intricately planned, genuinely bewildering, a plot that Christie herself considered “near-impossible.” It is horrifying, and an astonishingly baffling and ingenious jigsaw. There is no trickery; the reader is just bamboozled in a straightforward way from beginning to end.

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