Search Results for: Bookstore

There is no better contrast than going to Art Basel before getting on a cruise ship.

The venue in the U.S. is adjacent to Miami’s Holocaust Memorial:

A Swiss bank is a sponsor, but they’re not interested in money per se. It is more about “women are who making a difference and those who are helping to rectify imbalance across all industries”:

A one-day ticket is $60. There is no discount for identifying as female.

Each gallery has its own section of the convention center floor. Just as in a traditional art gallery, a slender person sits typing at a computer and ignores customers. (There is an episode of Absolutely Fabulous in which Edina tells a snobby art gallery clerk something like “drop the attitude; you work in a shop.”)

David Shrigley describes our house (except for the “large” and “fancy” parts):

Ai Weiwei is not impressed with the World’s Greatest Democracy (this was pre-Trump!):

Success does not require spending a lot on art supplies:

Service animals get more unusual every year:

Do not let the kids pack up for your cruise:

The motivation you’ve been needing for that standing desk:

Best-dressed visitor:

Important Hanukkah public service safety message:

They didn’t have enough neon to spell “rainforest”:

If you missed Burning Man, David Batchelor has you covered with LED sculpture:

Some airspeed and attitude issues in Matthew Brannon’s Huey:

Why isn’t the global douchebag circuit dominated by folks wearing Art Basel T-shirts? There is no gift shop! Taschen, however, operates an awesome shop with books that you wouldn’t have seen even if Amazon hadn’t killed your local bookstore. A large-format Hockney celebration and a book of Ferrari photos encased in a mock Ferrari engine ($30,000 complete with exhaust pipe stand, but sold out; the $6,000 engine-cover-only version remains available). Don’t forget the white gloves:

I would go back anytime!

A friend’s Facebook post:

We passed by Womrath, Bronxville’s bookshop, which still manages to stay in business despite Amazon. … I said to [the owners] that I appreciated that their window display featured mostly female authors. I had decided not to say anything, but then I figured that window dressing also deserved reinforcement. “That wasn’t intentional,” the woman proprietor responded. “We had no idea,” the man proprietor echoed.

Some things are getting better.

Is it obvious that things today are better? (Let’s assume that “more female” = “better”) I pointed out Hawthorne’s 1855 complaint:

America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash-and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed. What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of the ‘Lamplighter,’ and other books neither better nor worse?-worse they could not be, and better they need not be, when they sell by the 100,000.

If female authors were not featured by booksellers in 1855, why would Hawthorne have complained? And if bookstores are featuring certain authors, shouldn’t we assume that they are motivated by profits to feature books most likely to sell? Therefore it is really the customers who shape what goes into the window. Who are the customers? “The Most Likely Person to Read a Book? A College-Educated Black Woman” (Atlantic) says “Women read more books than men.” I said

This reminds me of a guy who complained to my friend about the gay-themed ads that he was seeing on Web pages. My friend had to gently inform him that ads were based on his browsing history…

Should we be patting ourselves on the back for being more enlightened than Americans of the dusty past? The Wikipedia page regarding The House of Mirth (1905):

Charles Scribner wrote [Edith] Wharton in November 1905 that the novel was showing “the most rapid sale of any book ever published by Scribner.”

A 1936 nytimes review of Gone with the Wind did not think the female gender ID of the author was worth highlighting. The book sold 30 million copies and won the Pulitzer Prize.

All of the Facebook authors’ commenting friends, most of whom are American humanities professors, agreed with the proposition that the featuring by a book merchant of female authors was an exciting new development. None expressed skepticism or asked for data.

Readers: What’s your theory about why these folks would be so interested in (a) devaluing the commercial achievements of female authors in the old days, (b) believing that commercial interest in the works of female authors is currently on the increase?

It is still Valentine’s Week so let’s consider the extremes to which people will go for love. Beautifully Cruel is mostly a story about Tracey Richter-Roberts and the lengths to which she was willing to go for cash and personal sexual fulfillment, but buried within is an interesting story about what others are willing to do for love and/or sex.

Context: Ms. Richter-Roberts sued her first husband and accused him of sexually abusing their toddler son in order to secure custody and child support cash. The second marriage, to an Australian, proceeds in a similar fashion:

Not a year into the marriage, Michael said later, Tracey was screwing around on him, having repeated affairs. This, mind you, fit into her MO; she had done the same to John Pitman. The marriage, almost from the first few months of Michael being in the States, was in shambles.

“Tracey went back to their home [from the office],” Ben [the local prosecutor] continued, “took a bubble bath and, an hour after the [fight with the husband], called the cops on Michael. When the cops got there, Tracey told her fictitious version of events and then had Bert make a statement that he, Bert, had been abused by his [step]father, Michael.” Michael spent the night in jail. Because of Bert’s allegations, Child Protective Services (CPS) conducted an investigation, which Tracey wasn’t expecting. This addition to the truth, if you will, wound up being the beginning of a situation Tracey would soon find herself in with no way out. CPS reports are, by law, given to the biological parents. So John Pitman, Tracey’s ex, received a notice that Michael had abused Bert (which was untrue). When she realized what she had done, “Tracey had Bert lie [again] and tell Child Protective Services he wasn’t referring to Michael when he said his father hit him, but rather his biological father, Dr. Pitman,” Ben Smith added. Thus, Pitman received a notice of the allegation of abuse against Bert by Michael—but also that he, too, was once again the target of a child abuse investigation. This after Pitman had fought and proved false two sexual abuse claims already by Tracey. This became, in effect, the catalyst that sparked Pitman’s filing for a change in custody in late 2000—a filing on Pitman’s behalf, Ben Smith went on to claim, that facilitated Tracey’s new plan to now make sure that Pitman lost this new child custody case.

The story that that a guy in Virginia had abused a boy in Iowa ends up having some legs and Ms. Richter-Roberts wasn’t able to stop all of the gears from turning:

Tracey’s attempts to portray Pitman as sexually abusing Bert had failed. Every single exam, every single accusation she had ever made against John Pitman over the years—thus subjecting Bert to several colonoscopy-like exams for sexual abuse—had been proven to be nothing more than unfounded nonsense, trumped up by a woman hell-bent on destroying a man and his reputation so she could keep the cash flowing. None of it worked. Tracey had made it all up, according to the state and several investigations into the alleged abuse. The court was going to side with Pitman and his new motion to gain custody of Bert.

Thus, the obvious solution to all of Tracey’s problems—potentially losing custody of Bert and all of that money associated with custody, at a time when her husband’s computer company was hemorrhaging money they did not have—was written in a narrative by a local special-needs kid. If Dr. Pitman was arrested and charged with conspiracy, Tracey’s life—that is, as she saw it—would turn around.

She persuaded a 20-year-old neighbor, Dustin Wehde, to come over to her house, write a diary in a pink(!) notebook talking about how he had been hired by the first husband to kill the man’s son, and then shot the kid 9 times, purportedly in self-defense. The diary was conveniently left in the kid’s car, which he parked in the driveway during what was supposedly a home invasion (the second husband was away on a business trip). Despite all of the inconsistencies and absurdities in the heavily armed woman’s story about how she happened to kill an unarmed young man, it took the authorities 10 years before they arrested her and put her on trial.

Here’s the love story part of the book:

Thirty-year-old John Pitman, in his fourth year of medical school, was working a rotation at the hospital one night as a medical student, when he crossed paths with a woman claiming to be a radiographer, who caught his eye. She was simply breathtaking then: long, dark, thick mane of hair, all teased up into a 1980s metal-band do. She wore loose-fitting hospital scrubs and smelled of the sweetest perfume. She smiled and seemed nice. “Tracey . . . Tracey Richter,” she said. Tracey was twenty years old; John Pitman nearly ten years her senior. With her perfectly sculpted body and full face, high cheekbones and plump lips some women pay lots of money for, it was clear to John, like many men Tracey had come in contact with, that she could have chosen any guy she wanted.

Later, John would assess the dating portion of their relationship and find that Tracey had represented a picture and persona of a woman who’d had a tough life at home, didn’t get along with her father, and seemed to yearn for the sympathy that narrative would get her.

When they got back [from skiing in Vail], John and his roommate were in the kitchen talking about the incident earlier. The roommate was saying if Tracey, like everyone else, had taken skiing lessons, then the entire situation could have been avoided. But Tracey had refused to take the lessons. Tracey must have been eavesdropping, because she came storming into the kitchen at that point. She had heard what the roommate said and was clearly pissed. She got right into the roommate’s face. A vile, angry look washed over her. “It was wrong of you to expect us to wait for you,” the roommate said. “You are acting like a crybaby!” Tracey became enraged and charged the man, sticking him in the face with her right hand, and then striking him “fairly hard . . . sending” his glasses “flying across the room.”

John finished medical school in June 1987. The University of Colorado was up next. “I’m going back to Chicago, John,” Tracey said one night before they were scheduled to leave. She’d made up her mind. “I’ll decide while in Chicago whether I’m coming out to Denver or not.” What could he do? They packed and left for Chicago. John told Tracey he would drop her off and head to Denver. If she wanted to come out, great; if not, was there anything he could do to change her mind? It seemed as though they had been through so much. Tracey was a lot to deal with. Very needy. Very sensitive. Very dramatic. Tracey had always wanted dogs, as did John. They both wanted a home. As they were driving out to Chicago, John indicated he had something to say. He wanted to give the relationship one more shot. “Will you marry me?” Tracey accepted.

In early 1991, Tracey had spent thousands of the family’s dollars on breast implants. It was April 1992 and Tracey was showing off her new breasts to a friend and the Pitmans’ new babysitter, Monica (pseudonym).

Tracey had been working at a medical facility and “began an affair with a man” who worked there. She blamed him, claiming he was obsessed with her and one day cornered her in a dark room and forced himself on her. She loved the attention, at first, she later admitted. It was something she was not getting, according to her, at home. So she “had intercourse with him” two times and then “called it quits,” leaving her job. At home, to John, it was a different story. “I’m being sexually harassed,” [#MeToo] she told him. Tracey said the guy was someone closely connected to the owners of the company. “He is possibly even following me. He asked me out one day and I refused. Since I said no, the company has been complaining about my job performance.”

Monica found an issue with Tracey’s mothering skills. “Bert was often dirty and/or inappropriately dressed,” Monica reported later. Because of this and several other things Monica uncovered about Tracey, their relationship deteriorated. The one major problem Monica had was that Tracey got involved with several “shady characters” she had met at the strip clubs, both male and female strippers who used drugs “and possibly engaged in other illegal activities.” Tracey seemed to be drawn to people like this.

Beyond those incidents, there were all the men, Monica said, claiming Tracey was not only having an affair with a guy she worked with, but a male dancer and another man—all at the same time. “She even sold one of their dogs and told John that it had been run over by a car,” Monica told authorities.

When Tracey found out Monica was onto her, she spun it and claimed Monica couldn’t be trusted because she was having an affair with John at the time.

“I wish you were dead,” Tracey said one night to John during a fight. “I wish that you had gone to Desert Storm [the husband was in a military program] and died.” She slapped him across the face.

TRACEY GOT A NEW JOB and worked part-time during the day. John felt a bit less stressed; however, he worried what she was going to do next. Then the behavior started all over again. He never saw any of the money Tracey earned, nor had he any idea what she did with it.

Then she fell in with a new group of people—and with that came another affair. John suspected this when, with Tracey working what was only about twenty hours a week, she was never at home. She was always out, gone, always hiring a babysitter. … When he did run into Tracey at home or talked to her on the phone, John would ask where she was going. “Work,” Tracey would say. But she was dressed like a $500-an-hour hooker—dolled up in tight, short skirts, wads of makeup lathered on her face, skintight blouses showing off her large breast implants.

Tracey was sleeping with a man—maybe even two or three—fairly regularly by this point, even buying him gifts. Skis. Weekend getaways. All on John’s credit cards, mind you. When John questioned the charges, Tracey gave her husband the guy’s name and said he must have stolen the numbers from her pocketbook at work. John called the credit card company, which then tracked the man down. Of course, he said Tracey had bought the items for him. He told the credit card company he and Tracey had been dating for four months.

By March 1992, after John suffered a nasty back injury while sledding with Tracey and Bert, having been in a back brace for three months, the marriage, hanging on by a thread as it was, deteriorated into dust. At this point, Tracey did not even hide what she was doing anymore. She did whatever she wanted, went out whenever she wanted, slept with whomever she wanted, spent whatever amount of money she needed. Each job Tracey took on always turned into a drama and ended with her leaving or being fired “on a note of controversy,” John later said in a report.

By early summer 1992, Tracey agreed to move to Chicago so John could begin a plastic surgery fellowship at Northwestern University. Perhaps this was the final chance for their marriage.

Then John thought about something else: before leaving for Toronto [for a medical conference], Tracey had demanded he “up [his] life insurance.”

John decided to call the private investigator his parents had used to look into the credit

Before the current rage for encouraging women and dark-skinned Americans to take up dreary STEM majors and jobs there was a rage for encouraging all Americans, regardless of gender ID or skin color, to toil in the sci-tech mines.

I’m wondering if we have objective evidence of the futility of these efforts from the observed complete lack of interest of Americans in how everyday machines work.

What’s the greatest technological advance that has happened within a middle-aged American’s lifetime? As a computer programmer, I’m going to argue that it is the realization in silicon of the ideas of Alonzo Church, Emil Post, and Alan Turing. These machines are readily available to most Americans: the notebook computer, the desktop computer, the smartphone (plus hundreds of others strewn around the house and car, but they are tougher to poke at). There are great free online tutorials explaining every aspect of these machines from the sandy beach up. But how many people voluntarily learn about wafer fabrication? About transistors and digital logic? About machine language and compilers? About operating systems? To a first approximation, nobody cares. If Americans don’t care about this machine that has transformed their lives, why would it work to exhort them to care about more esoteric subjects?

Separately, I’m wondering if we can measure a falling curiosity about how automobiles work. Back in the 1970s I remember that a lot of people were interested to learn about the cycles of a four-stroke engine, the mechanisms within the transmission, steering, and brakes of a car, etc. Bookstores featured books on these subjects reasonably prominently and these were separate from the practical “here’s how you can fix it yourself” books. I wonder if today’s Honda Accord owner has the same level of knowledge about the vehicle that the average Chevrolet Nova owner had back in the 1970s (and what a great car the Nova was!).

Readers: if the building blocks of computers and computer networking aren’t interesting enough for people to crack a book or browse a web page on the subject, what hope is there to increase the number of Americans interested in the building blocks of other stuff?

“Dear Mrs. Trump” is a letter from a Cambridge Public School librarian to Melania Trump, who sent some Dr. Seuss titles to our fair city:

Our beautiful and diverse student body is made up of children from all over the world; from different socioeconomic statuses; with a spectrum of gender expressions and identities; with a range of abilities; and of varied racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds.

Yearly per-pupil spending in Cambridge is well over $20,000 [the statistic is correct, but most of the money is spent on administration and pensions; actual in-classroom spending is a small fraction of the total]

we still struggle to close the achievement gap, retain teachers of color, and dismantle the systemic white supremacy in our institution. [but if white students achieve more than students of color in the Cambridge Public Schools, isn’t the system actually working to increase “systematic white supremacy”?]

You may not be aware of this, but Dr. Seuss is a bit of a cliché, a tired and worn ambassador for children’s literature. … Another fact that many people are unaware of is that Dr. Seuss’s illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes. … Scholar Philip Nel’s new book, Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books, further explores and shines a spotlight on the systemic racism and oppression in education and literature.

The librarian offers a list of ten books in return, e.g., “In this gentle story, Haitian American Saya’s mother is incarcerated because she has no papers. … doesn’t shy away from the realities … the trauma of saying goodbye at the detention facility.” and Separate Is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez & Her Family’s Fight for Desegregation. Transgender issues are represented by The Boy & the Bindi. (She left off Yo Soy Muslim: A Father’s Letter to His Daughter, prominently featured at the Harvard Bookstore last night.)

[Separately, the librarian complains that “many of us can’t afford to live in the city in which we teach,” but of course if she didn’t have a job she would be entitled to free apartment from the Cambridge Housing Authority. Alternatively, any school employee who studied Massachusetts family law should have been able to figure out a way to live anywhere in Massachusetts without working.]

Readers: Was the Cat in the Hat black? What about Thing 1 and Thing 2? Also, how did the Cat get hold of the alien robot technology that he used to clean up the house after his visit?

Related:

• Cambridge Public Schools: perspective from a new teacher
• Teacher explains why public schools are so bad

What are readers doing to prepare for the 2017 total eclipse?

I went to Harvard Bookstore and, amidst the social justice titles (featured prominently were She Persisted, for children, MAD About Trump: A Brilliant Look at Our Brainless President, and An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, which turned out not to be about the limitations of MySQL compared to Oracle) found Totality: The Great American Eclipses of 2017 and 2024, which I recommend ordering in hardcopy (too many illustrations and photos to be handled gracefully by the Kindle).

Totality explains clearly why there are more solar eclipses than lunar and why there are more annular eclipses than total solar eclipses. It also contains some practical information for eclipse viewing.

[It seems that most of the text of this book is lifted from a 2009 version, at which point the topic of gender ID for science nerds wasn’t front and center for the public. So the book is missing the discussion of female astronomers that occupies much of a more recent work that I reviewed. On the plus side, leaving out the chapters on female victimhood left room for actual explanations of the orbital mechanics. Note that these are non-mathematical and heavily illustrated so you don’t have to bend your mind around Calculus 101-type material.]

My personal plans are to fly from KBED to KCKV, KCEU, or KCAE, depending on which has the best forecast. All of these airports are in the path of totality. I would be delighted to meet any readers who find themselves at one of these airports.

Readers: How are your eclipse plans shaping up?

Related:

• Inspiration to watch the eclipse on August 21
• Watch the Great American Eclipse of 2017 from a light airplane?