Pulled another all-nighter…
Category Archives: Book as Object
Books Books Books
Last semester, I had one textbook. I remembered textbook costs being astronomical when I was an undergrad, so I was pleasantly surprised that I only had to drop €30 on one book.
This semester is more complicated. In two of my courses we are reading a book each week, and in a third course the professor is e-mailing PDFs that he is scanning from the out-of-print book he wants to use for the course. It is so much more complicated than it needs to be.
I’m trying to get into a routine and – most importantly – stay on top of the reading, but right now, things are weird. I have this web stretching from the college library to the city library to my Kindle to my iPhone to Charlie Byrne’s to the campus bookstore to the college library’s website and back again.
For today’s reading, one professor said he would make copies of the excerpts he wanted us to read, but the copier broke so he couldn’t make enough copies. I found the books he was using in the campus library and the city library, but I didn’t know which passages he had assigned so I just started reading the complete books. I read much more than I needed to, and it was tough to bring my thoughts back to the specific passages we were discussing in class.
It is nice that half of the books are in the public domain, but in order to get the free Kindle version, I have to pay the international delivery charge because my Kindle is registered in the States. The charge is usually about $3 and for some reason Amazon always sends a nasty message to my Kindle reminding me that I have a monthly limit on download charges. I can get the same public domain books free on my iPhone, but I haven’t tried reading on that yet.
I go to Charlie Byrne’s every couple of days and squirrel away a few of the books on the syllabi. I’ll go in at some point and make a big credit card purchase. I guess the rest will come from the campus bookstore.
It’s a pain. Today, for example, I finally got confirmation that I get to take the class that was giving me so much trouble last week. Our book for next week is Kim by Rudyard Kipling, which I actually read as an undergrad but I also drank a lot as an undergrad so I should probably reread it. A group of us went to the college library after class and all the copies were already checked out. Charlie Byrne’s doesn’t have it, so I downloaded it on my iPhone for free. Still, I wanted a hard copy, so I decided to check the city library when I went there for an event tonight. Mistakenly, I sat through my whole event and then approached the lady at the circulation desk, who told me their only copy had just been checked out tonight.
Face. Palm.
Mall + Library
We tried to get up early and go to the National Leprechaun Museum this morning, but the the tour schedule didn’t mesh with our travel plans, so we just bought some leprechaun gold from the machine out front.
Since we had some free time, I wanted to check out something I’d seen in passing on a previous visit to Dublin.
Basically, there’s a public library inside a shopping mall. I think this is genius, and really fascinating. As a former mall rat, I really could have used an arrangement like this.
We were both surprised to find every possible seat full – with jobseekers, I’m guessing – so I found a shelf to browse while my boyfriend started reading a book about war.
I kept returning to this German edition of Skippy Dies.
It was a box set of three paperback volumes, which is not how I read Skippy Dies, but is actually very loyal to the story and the structure of the book.
I suppressed the urge to pocket this handy little bookmark, which introduces all of the major characters (in German!), and left it in the case for the next reader – which should count as my good deed for the day, because it was really difficult for me.
The Chi at Charlie Byrne’s
For as long as I can remember (at least eight years), Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop has wrapped around another small shop in the Cornstore. You could enter the bookshop from the street, browse the displays in the main room, skirt along the edge of the shelves into fiction, step down into the history/art history/travel room, backtrack through fiction to classics and literary criticism, take a quick glance around health/psychology, move into Irish Interest, and giggle at the children’s books on your way out the back door.
The bookstore recently expanded into the space formerly occupied by the smaller shop. There is now an entire room of Irish interest, with its own entrance, located between the history/art history/travel room and the kids’ section. Book-browsing in Galway has a much more circular flow these days.
Oh, and they’re having a sale all weekend to celebrate.
Ní thuigim.
Ever since college, an entire decade ago, I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a tattoo. I’ve never done it, because I couldn’t commit to any image long enough to want it permanently inked on my body. The closest I’ve gotten is an idea for a phrase in Irish, tattooed on my wrist.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, probably because I’m back in school and I’m trying to learn Irish. One of the girls in my postgraduate programme has a wrist tattoo, and she says it wasn’t very painful. For about a week, I was seriously prepping myself to get a tattoo when I graduate next fall.
Then, in our last Irish for Beginners class meeting, the instructor told us how an American undergrad had come to visit him in his office. She wasn’t a student in his class, hadn’t even taken an Irish language course while she was studying abroad here, but had a list of phrases she needed help translating into Irish. He said it was fairly obvious they were “tattoos in the making.”
He went on to caution us – heavily – against having misspellings or improper grammar tattooed on our persons. It was something of a wake-up call for me. Not only that I should probably wait until I become fluent in the Irish language (which is unlikely to happen) before I try to get any Irish ink, but also that my Gaeilge tattoo idea isn’t even remotely original.
***On a related note, my boyfriend is here visiting and he had a dream last night that I got a neck tattoo, which somehow combined the “Hi How Are You?” frog in Austin with some genitalia graffiti that has popped up in Galway over the past few days. In the dream, I told him I was drunk and “they” talked me into it, that I was regretting the tattoo but trying to learn to like it. The first thing he said to me when he woke up was “don’t ever get a tattoo on your neck.”
Giving Trees
One trend we’ve been discussing in Contemporary Publishing is the rise of the boutique publisher, who crafts books as beautiful objects in an age when everything is going digital. I was just reading an article on this subject, about books with hand-stitched binding, and while I agree that we shouldn’t be cutting down trees to print more paperbacks, I was confused as to why they would brag about making their books with recyclable paper. Recycled paper, I get. That would make sense, and would be noble enough to deserve some bragging. But if the book is a lovingly crafted object, then why would anyone care if the pages were recyclable?
It is one of life’s little cruelties that I feel this quiet affinity with trees… which are cut down to make books. I’ve been told in the past that recycled paper makes for terrible printing, but maybe someday we’ll come up with an alternative. Or we’ll buy ebooks of “disposable” titles, quit printing so much dross, and only kill trees for really special books. I dunno yet.
I was going through my photos from the Deireadh Seachtaine Gaeltachta (Gaeltacht Weekend) and I realized that all my favorites contain trees. So here you go, some scenes from the Ballynahinch Estate in Connemara:
I have been slacking on the writing – I will try to be better, but I can’t make any promises. Final exams and essays are looming. But I’ll try.
“He treats objects like women, man.”
Forewarning: Tonight I purchased a ticket for Ruby Sparks fully prepared to hate it. I was not disappointed.
Creative Commons Attribution: Georges Biard
Ahem.
I admit to having a thing for Paul Dano. I overlooked him the first time I saw Little Miss Sunshine, but There Will be Blood piqued my interest and now the color-blind Nietzsche fanboy is totally my cup of tea. I even sat through Meek’s Cutoff for him.
He plays a yellow-livered coward in Cowboys & Aliens and more recently in Looper. Meek’s, Blood, and Cowboys were all westerns, and Looper is supposed to be a sort of reimagining of the western. I’m glad he’s getting roles, but I didn’t really like the idea of Paul Dano being typecast.
So when Being Flynn was closely followed by Ruby Sparks, I was kind of worried. I haven’t liked a movie about “the writing life” since I graduated from college, so I get kind of annoyed with previews that portray writer’s block. Paul Dano has that writerly look about him, but I would almost rather see him play supporting roles in westerns for the rest of his career than watch him stare winsomely at one more typewriter.
Being Flynn just seemed like a write-through-the-pain father/son story, but Ruby Sparks looked borderline offensive. He can manipulate a woman’s behavior? A woman whose purple tights barely cover her lady bits when he picks her up and carries her caveman-style down the street?
It was Ruby’s first lines in the preview that irked me the most:
I missed you in bed last night.
D’you get some good writing done?
[childishly licks spoon]
How… dumb. How thoroughly dumb.
Finding out that his female co-star wrote the film did not help matters. To clarify: Zoe Kazan wrote a screenplay where a man creates the perfect woman, and she cast herself as that perfect woman. Yeah, I want to see a film about the writing life according to Zoe Kazan.
This kind of reminds me of the kerfuffle about Lena Dunham when Girls premiered. People were annoyed that these privileged Gen Y-ers were essentially filming their lives and calling it art. Their defense was that someone can grow up rich and still have something meaningful to say, but I think what we’re getting at here is that normal people can’t get away with this. The rest of us go to public schools and get that sort of behavior beaten out of us by the other kids. We’re jealous, yeah, but it’s not of their money or their talent; it’s of their sheltered lives where this sort of thing is allowed, even praised.
Did I forget to mention that Zoe Kazan has rich, well-connected parents? And grandparents? And she’s – sigh – dating Paul Dano?
Over the past week, I did this whole thing where I read some Nick Flynn, then rented Being Flynn on iTunes, and finally dragged myself to the cinema to sit through Ruby Sparks (it opened later in Ireland than in the US, but it’s about to close here.) I treated it like an assignment, and boy did it feel like one.
A few weeks ago, Hadley Freeman tweeted:
All three of these films were excrutiatingly painful to watch. I don’t know if I’m just getting old, but they felt so formulaic: Wallflower had a checklist of teen-angsty issues that had to be crammed into the plot, and I liked Liberal Arts better when it was released 10 years ago and starred Zach Braff.
As for Ruby Sparks, well, the actress is a girl named Zooey Zoe, right? And by way of introduction, we see her riding a vintage bicycle rollerskating in sunlight while a voiceover describes her attributes and she’s from somewhere that’s not Los Angeles, like maybe Michigan Ohio and ohmygod we get a quick peek at her high school yearbook photo! Then there’s a scene where she and her love interest run around Ikea an arcade because they are just so twee and in love! But maybe he’s not seeing her clearly? Just like his sister brother cautioned? Conflict arises. And when it’s all over, he meets a new girl, but she’s kind of the same girl, because her name is the next season in the annual cycle purposefully left out of his latest novel.
Hadley does this better than I ever could, but I needed to get it off my chest. I walked home upset that people get to create vanity projects like Ruby Sparks while some really good ideas go underfunded. Luckily, Paul Dano pretty much disappeared into his role, so in my eyes, he made it through this movie unscathed.
Ink Stains
I finally got rid of the box that carried my fairy wings from Texas to Ireland (although I did save the pretty address calligraphy). It occurred to me, as I was bagging up the recycling, that even though my research on Kirkus Media led me to articles by Joe Gross and Michael Barnes, this packing material is the only edition of the Stateman I’ve touched in the past two months.
“Just like a paperback novel”
I saw The Perks of Being a Wallflower today… honestly, it would have been a better movie if it had been edited down to just clips of Paul Rudd recommending battered paperbacks.
My Day in Writing
(Emails, newspaper articles, academic photocopies, foreign and “non-widely spoken” languages, workbooks, homework, laptops, iPhones, literary journals, post-its, expired ephemera, postal parcels, scripted address labels, television subtitles, blog.)
I was late for my first class because I was sitting in the Irish-language cafe shooting off emails to sources for my first article in the student newspaper.
I arrived at Irish for Beginners and my professor gave me some materials he’d photocopied for me after I requested he expand on the “Irish terms for writing technology” topic. Of the three documents, one was in Irish, one in English, and one in French.
I realized I had forgotten my practice book and, alas, my homework. I took notes in my notebook, which is almost full (three out of five subjects have no more room for notes). Last week’s homework was returned to us and I got full marks!
My laptop battery was dead so I read the reply emails on my iPhone. One source crapped out on me, but the other proved extremely useful.
Camped out in the library to use WiFi. Got a rare email from my father, which is always good for a giggle.
Fiddled around with PayPal, essentially opening a third account because I couldn’t add my Irish shipping address to an account opened in the States, so I could subscribe to The Stinging Fly. This is the first time I’ve ever subscribed to a literary journal, but since I’ll be here for a year and I just met the editor on Friday, I thought it would be a wise use of my money (only 20 euro!).
Downloaded free (and legal!) PDF version of Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity to my desktop.
Searched catalogue for book I should read before next week. It’s locked away somewhere confusing, so I’ll try again tomorrow.
Rifled through all the schwag I picked up at the event I was covering to compare what I expected to see with what I actually did see. Revised the newspaper article.
Went to the postgrad room and printed the article for a final edit. Also printed materials for class.
Received email from Contemporary Publishing professor detailing materials needed for tomorrow’s class: post-its, markers, old copies of ROPES and any other literary magazines we like.
Borrowed a few literary magazines from the postgrad room (Granta, The Stinging Fly, and An Sionnach). Also “borrowed” some expired ephemera off a bulletin board, which is now decorating my apartment.
Went back to the library to find old copies of ROPES, which cannot be removed from the library. Kicked myself for not bringing the 2010 edition I have at home and for not buying the 2009 edition I saw in Charlie Byrne’s last week. Sat on the floor in the stacks and flipped through every single old copy the library had (all 20). Wrote down the prices, printers, and the names of famous contributors.
Got a lift from a friend to the faraway post office to pick up a package. Admired the fancy script my friend back home used to write my name and address.
Break for meal (salad with herring), exercise (walk around the horse-racing track!), and TV (old episodes of Malcolm in the Middle and Cold Case).
Came home and submitted the article for the newspaper.
Kept the TV tuned to TG4 (it’s not my fault they air Gossip Girl in English) and got my evening’s dose of Gaeilge while writing the world’s most pointless blog entry.
The Galway Train 