Librarians, Do Not Read This

No, I mean it. I know, you’re thinking “Oh, she means librarians other than me” or “I’m just a reference librarian” or “I used to be a librarian, but I’m not now.”

No.

I’m warning you. Do not look beneath this fold.

Self-Publishing; I Could Be Wrong

You know, we’ve had an ongoing self-publishing experiment for a while now–blogs. And I think it’s pretty uniformly understood that they heyday of the independent blogger is ending, if not ended. People are transitioning to Facebook or to group blogs or to book writing or whatever. The blog–the central thing–has become just one more tab on the website or a note on Facebook or you’re just one more person on a portal.

Honestly, I don’t think it’s wrong to look to music publishing to try to find some guidance about book publishing. But the more I think about it, the more I think we should also not overlook the lessons of blogging. Here is/was a bunch of content, free for the picking, that was going to transform and replace regular media.

And… well… kind of but not really.

I think we’d do wise to keep that in mind.

Not that I don’t think publishing is going to change rapidly. Of course it is. But it’s a bridge through fog, you know? We can’t say from here what’s over there.

Anyway, I read this.

That Uncommon Common Knowledge

Hmm.

Suddenly, it’s common knowledge that women journalists and IMF staffers took care not to be alone with him.

Funny how that works, isn’t it? Lower status women can know things, but if it doesn’t sink in to people with power, it remains unknown. The scary dude women don’t want to be alone with and warn each other away from is a grand seducer to his friends.

The Girl in the Burlap Sack

It’s funny the things that stick with you from reading. Ever since I read about girls who talk to dead people getting put in sacks and nailed to the stage floor at the decline of the Spiritualist century, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. About the itch of the burlap, about the fear if you didn’t trust the person who was nailing you down. Are you a con artist? Do you believe you can do what you are about to do?

I keep having this thought of a young gal, whose partner has turned no good, and the nails are coming closer and closer every night, between fingers, between her legs, through her hair. So, she knows she has to escape.

But how do you get out of the nailed-down sack?

This morning, I was thinking about that on my walk when I realized, my cousin J. is a magician. I don’t know how many escapes he’s done, if any. But he’d certainly know how they were done. So, I sent him the premise–how do you get a girl nailed into a sack out of the sack and off stage so that the audience and the dude who put her in the sack don’t see it?

And we’re going to talk it through tonight.