I was sorry to read on Don Herron’s site that Bill Arney has died. I mentioned him last year: he lived in Dashiell Hammett’s old apartment at 891 Post St. in San Francisco, where Hammett lived when he wrote The Maltese Falcon. In 2008 I took Don’s Hammett walking tour, and Arney let us come up so I could see the place. I was thinking about it again a couple of weeks ago when I watched John Huston’s film version again.
Overheard while out walking, spoken by two young women who were going the other way:
“I missed it when it was popular, and now it’s super-popular.”
“It was best ten years ago.”
“Now I don’t know what the next thing is.”
I learned something useful about GNOME recently: how to add my own launchers. I’m running Ubuntu on a ThinkPad that has a Windows key that Linux and Unix people call a Super key. When I tap Super, it calls up the activities overview, where I can search applications, settings, files, Unicode characters, or other things. Here’s what it looks like if I search for fi:
Firefox and Files make sense. Not only do I not know why Remmina showed, this is the first time I’ve heard of it. Could be useful, though.
Now, the two applications I use most frequently but run from downloaded tarballs, not as proper packages, are Zotero and the Tor browser. They’re set up in /usr/local/src/, and I have aliases in place so it’s easy to start them running with one command in a shell.
Both come with .desktop files that I can move to my desktop and use as launchers, but it’s much nicer to be able to hit Super-letter-letter-letter-RET and fire up what I want. I can do that for gPodder, for example. Super-g-p-o-RET and it launches.
Turns out if I put the .desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications/ then GNOME will see it and it becomes launchable. I had to tweak file paths for both, but now they work nicely. The Zotero one looks like this:
Miskatonic University Press[Desktop Entry]
Name=Zotero
Exec=bash -c "/usr/local/src/zotero/Zotero_linux-x86_64/zotero -url %U"
Icon=/usr/local/src/zotero/Zotero_linux-x86_64/chrome/icons/default/default256.png
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Super-z-o-RET and it launches.
I made one so I can pop up an expense spreadsheet I use regularly. Here LibreOffice points directly to a particular file.
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Expenses
Exec=bash -c "libreoffice ~/finance/expenses.ods"
Icon=/usr/share/icons/hicolor/128x128/mimetypes/libreoffice-oasis-spreadsheet.png
Type=Application
It looks like this in the activities overview:
There’s more about this in the offical Desktop Entry Specification but really as long as you have three or four lines it’ll work.
I’ve admired Robertson Davies and his three trilogies (Salterton, Deptford and Cornish) for decades. He is very old-fashioned now, but it was the same when he was alive. He was an Edwardian figure when I saw him strolling down Harbord Street in the late eighties, proceeding slowly and assuredly, with cape and a walking stick. Some of his attitudes were long out of date at the time, such as that Massey College, which he helped found in 1963, did not admit women until 1974. In some ways he was quite modern. Generally, though, Edwardian, but that is by no means a bad thing.
The first of the Deptford trilogy is Fifth Business (1970), which I’ve always liked, but it seems very old. Anyone writing a novel of that form now would be self-consciously recreating a work of a century ago, but that was his style fifty years ago: from fifty years before. It’s a very Canadian novel, but of a Canada that no longer exists. I still recommend it to anyone who wants to see what Canada (and Toronto) used to be like, but those who’ve read it don’t seem to like it.
The Manticore (1972) is the story of a minor character from the previous novel going through Jungian analysis in Switzerland. It’s still a wonderful introduction to Jung and his ideas about dreams and archetypes.
The last of the three is World of Wonders (1975), where Magnus Eisengrim, a magician who’s been a secondary figure in the previous books, relates in detail three episodes from his early life: in a third-rate carnival as a child in the 1920s; in a theatre company as a young man; and (briefly) repairing clockwork figures in Switzerland. He is performing the magic in a TV show about Robert-Houdin and is seized with the desire to reveal his past.
The novel is about 350 pages long, and 325 of it is Eisengrim talking. He talks and talks and talks and talks. Even allowing for the conceit of him explaining to his friends and the TV people how he became who he is, the length and language of his conversation are preposterous. Of the other 25 pages, about five are spoken by one woman, and the other twenty by the other men.
Eisengrim goes on and on and on and on, filling in many details about carnivals and touring theatre companies and magic and acting, all things I’m interested in, but he goes on and on and on and on. At great length. I had to skim. I’ll reread the other two books, but not World of Wonders. I just couldn’t take this man talking so much, trying to overwhelm us with all this erudition and these incredible experiences, be they wonderful or horrible.
I realized: This is what all of Robertson Davies is like for most people now.
Nigella Lawson likes anchovies. In Cook, Eat, Repeat she has an “anchovy elixir” recipe, and she uses it as a base in a lot of things when she starts with oil in a pan: chop up a couple of anchovies and throw them in until they sort of melt, before you add onions and such, and they add a nice base to the flavour. (See all the recipes with anchovies in them on her site.)
I tried it and it really works, and now it’s a regular part of my cooking. For a while I got Allessia anchovy fillets (imported from Italy) that come in a little jar. Recently I picked up another brand, Club des Millionnaires (from Spain), but it was a while before I noticed what was on the cardboard package around the tin.
Fish she is very small.
The story on the company’s web site says the slogan comes from something someone said to the president.
Fish she is very small.
This article has one of the finest titles in the entire library and information studies literature: May I Borrow a Stapler? Is This All Students Ask at the Service Desk in a University Library?
It was published in Evidence Based Library and Information Practice (EBLIP), a very interesting and sometimes curious journal. “The purpose of the journal is to provide a forum for librarians and other information professionals to discover research that may contribute to decision making in professional practice. EBLIP publishes original research and commentary on the topic of evidence based library and information practice, as well as reviews of previously published research (evidence summaries) on a wide number of topics.” Some summaries I’ve read were surprisingly brisk and refreshing and did a fine job distilling earlier work.
This article is by Liv Inger Lamøy and Astrid Kilvik, both at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology University Library.
Objective: The objective of the study is to increase the knowledge about what questions students ask at the library desk and what the purpose is of their use of the desk. Our focus has been on the physical meetings with the students. The aim is to contribute to the discussion on the future development of the library service desk.
Betteridge’s law of headlines says that if a question is asked in a headline, the answer is “no.” Happily, it applies here.
However, I must point back almost six years to my post about the Triple Staple:
On Wednesday 10 February 2016, at about 3:45 pm, at the ref desk at Steacie, I hit a new record: three consecutive questions about refilling staplers. We have three staplers here and they all emptied within minutes of each other. Three questions, three different staplers. I call this the Triple Staple.
There’s an unfamiliar—to me—word that I came across recently in three places in quick succession: a Georgette Heyer novel, I think Black Sheep; Mick Herron’s Slow Horses; and an episode of BBC Radio Four’s More or Less. Perhaps I’d have known it if I’d studied more philosophy. The word is nous.
I looked it up in my two favourite dictionaries. The Chambers Dictionary (thirteenth edition, 2014) says:
n intellect; talent; common sense (inf.) [Gr nous, contracted from noos]
And The Canadian Oxford Dictionary (first edition, 1998) says:
1 Brit. informal common sense; gumption 2 Philos. the mind or intellect. [Greek]
One pronunciation of it, and the one Tim Harford used on More or Less, rhymes with “mouse.”
Nous.
(The Wikipedia entry for it is one of those that’s surprisingly long and and far longer than articles that deserve more attention, for example another one I was looking at recently, Tajiks. Probably there are many fictional characters designed by large corporations purely to make money that have longer articles than either.)
UPDATE (the next day): Today I heard the Great Lives episode where Yanis Varoufakis nominated Hypatia. In it expert witness Edith Hall, says, when asked about Hypatia’s personal life, “I think she was probably a very committed Neoplatonist, so she did I think believe in a Oneness, and that was identified by Plotinian Neoplatonists also with nous, which is brain power, and logos, which is reason, so this idea that somehow being spiritual and being highly intellectual go together.” She pronounced it “noos.”
The last show of any kind I was at before the pandemic was at my favourite used bookstore, Sellers and Newel, as part of the Sellers and Newel Literary Society series. It was a great gig, with about forty people jammed together, the band up close, and all of us surrounded by books.
Eighteen months later, my next show was again put on by the Society. This time it was outside, at the end of the block, with Richard Underhill on alto, Tim Hamel on trumpet, George Koller on electric bass and Great Bob Scott on percussion.
It was a blast, sitting out on the sidewalk as they did lively uptempo takes on “Sunny,” “Cantaloupe Island,” “Lovely Day,” “Sunshine Superman” and one or two others in their first set. Nice riffing. At one point Underhill danced across College Street to pass the hat at the patios there while Hamel played in the street and the rhythm section kept the groove under the tent.
One day I’ll be back inside at a gig.
A quote from David Fechheimer, found in Sleuthing in San Francisco by Diane Manuel (Stanford Magazine, July–August 2000):
“He’s smart, fun, intellectual, well-educated and eccentric,” says David Fechheimer, a prominent San Francisco sleuth. “I’ve always felt that the people best prepared to be private investigators are former graduate students, who know how to use the library. He also has a balanced family life, which is unusual in the detective business. He’s found that it’s possible to make a good living doing serious work that’s also fun.”
Former grad students, sure. But librarians know even more.
I mentioned before that I gave a short talk at LACUNY Institute 2020/2021. A large group of my colleagues at York University Libraries were also part of the program, but they did something much bigger, a really wonderful piece of performance librarianship: Teambuilding in the time of COVID-19: A Zoom Play.
In a strange and scary time, exiled from their place of work, a group of (relative) strangers turn a wellbeing exercise into so much more. Picture this: a threat invisible to the naked eye empties out an entire 60, 000-person campus; the library locks its door with an hour’s notice; and the people who like to help are sent home indefinitely. How are they, the library people, going to survive, thrive and help the faculty and students now dispersed to the four corners of the world? This short play will tell you how.
The pandemic shut down the old ways of communicating, BUT library services still had to be available. The professional and para-professional staff in the library overcame personal, technical and other challenges to build a new team that would serve its public. BUT team building requires communication and trust. How was trust in the new team built in an online environment known for its comical awkwardness? The limitations of Zoom were turned into a strength: week by week, turn by turn, everyone got to speak and truly listen to their team members. The common launching off point was a carefully selected video on skills building, library services, accessibility and diversity. Video by video, varied insights meant that team members were visible to each other as fellow humans and co-workers! A team was born. Learn what each player in this team did to make it come alive. Come by and watch: Teambuilding in the Time of COVID: A Play
The full script is up, as is the video:
It’s exactly the kind of thing I like to see, and they did a wonderful job. My congratulations to them all.