Weird Things People Say In Bookshops

by Jen Campbell

I love our customers, I really do. But some days we get some strange people in our shop. Here are some gems I'd like to share.

Customer:: Hi... erm... are you a library?
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Customer: Excuse me, do you have any signed copies of Shakespeare plays?
Me: Er... do you mean signed by the people who performed the play?
Customer: No, I mean signed by William Shakespeare.
Me: .....*headdesk*
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Customer: Hi, I'd like to return this book, please.
Me: Do you have the receipt?
Customer: Here.
Me: Erm, you bought this book at Waterstone's.
Customer: Yes.
Me:.... we're not Waterstone's.
Customer: But, you're a bookshop.
Me: Yes, but we're not Waterstone's.
Customer: You're all part of the same chain.
Me: No, sorry, we're an independent bookshop.
Customer: ....
Me: Put it this way, you wouldn't buy clothes in H&M and take them back to Zara, would you?
Customer: Well, no, because they're different shops.
Me: Exactly.
Customer:... I'd like to speak to your manager.
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Person: Hi, I'm looking for a Mr. Patrick.
Me: No one of that name works here, sorry.
Person: But does he live here?
Me:... no one lives here; we're a bookshop.
Person: Are you sure?
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on the phone
Me: Hello Ripping Yarns.
Customer: Do you have any mohair wool?
Me: Sorry, we're not a yarns shop, we're a bookshop.
Customer: You're called Ripping Yarns.
Me: Yes, that's 'yarns' as in stories.
Customer: Well it's a stupid name.
Me: It's a Monty Python reference.
Customer: So you don't sell wool?
Me: No.
Customer: Hmf. Ridiculous.
Me: ...but we do sell dead parrots.
Customer: What?
Me: Parrots. Dead. Extinct. Expired. Would you like one?
Customer: Erm, no.
Me: Ok, well if you change your mind, do call back.
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Customer: Hi, if I buy a book, read it, and bring it back, could I exchange it for another book?
Me: No... because then we wouldn't make any money.
Customer: Oh.
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Me: Ok, so with postage that brings your total to £13.05. One second and I'll get the card machine."
Customer: No. No, absolutely not. I demand that you charge me £12.99. I will not pay for anything that starts with thirteen. You're trying to give me bad luck. Now, change it or I will go to a bookshop who doesn't want me to fall down a hole and die. Ok?
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Pizza Delivery Man [entering the shop with a large pile of pizzas and seeing me, the only person in the bookshop]: Hi, did you order fifteen pizzas?
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Me: Hello, Ripping Yarns Bookshop
Man: Hello, is that Ripping Yarns?
Me: Yes, it is.
Man: Are you there?
Me: How do you mean?
Man: I mean, are you at the shop now?
Me: Erm... yes, you just rang the number for the bookshop and I answered.
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Customer: Hello, I'd like a copy of 'The Water Babies,' with nice illustrations. But I don't want to pay a lot of money for it, so could you show me what editions you do have so I can look at them, and then I can go and find one online?
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Customer: Do you sell ipod chargers?
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Man: Hi, I've just self-published my art book. My friends tell me that I'm the new Van Gogh. How many copies of my book would you like to order?
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Woman: Hi, my daughter is going to come by on her way home from school to buy a book. But she seems to buy books with sex in them and she's only twelve, so can I ask you to keep an eye out for her and make sure she doesn't buy anything inappropriate for her age? I can give you a list of authors she's allowed to buy.
Me: With all due respect, would it not be easier for you to come in with your daughter?
Woman: Certainly not. She's a grown girl, she can do it herself.
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Customer: Do you have any books on the dark arts?
Me: ...No.
Customer: Do you have any idea where I could find some?
Me: Why don't you try Knockturn Alley?
Customer: Where's that?
Me: Oh, the centre of London.
Customer: Thanks, I'll keep my eyes peeled for it.
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Customer: I'm just going to nip to Tesco to do the weekly shop. I'm just going to leave my sons here, is that ok? They're three and five. They're no bother.
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Customer: I read a book in the eighties. I don't remember the author, or the title. But it was green, and it made me laugh. Do you know which one I mean?
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Man: Do you have black and white film posters?
Me: Yes, we do, over here.
Man: Do you have any posters of Adolf Hitler?
Me: Pardon?
Man: Adolf Hitler.
Me: Well, he wasn't a film star, was he.
Man: Yes, he was. He was American. Jewish, I think.
Me: ...........
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[Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops... THE BOOK]

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Why We Can Never Escape Our Siblings

by Mandy Van Devin

Sometimes a family tragedy can expose bonds you didn't know existed. That's what happened with my younger sister and me. Although just 11 months apart, we could not have been more different: I rebelled as hard as she conformed, and if you met us at a party ... well, that would never have happened, because we never went to the same parties. If we hadn't been forced to spend summers together with our dad after our parents' divorce, my sister and I would have spent scarcely any time together at all. Then my mom was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer and given less than a year to live. Suddenly, for the first time in our lives, my sister and I were not only inseparable but totally in sync.

Some patterns came naturally, since they were holdovers from when we were kids. Negotiating household chores was a breeze. I agreed to wash the dishes if she would dry and put them away. The next night, we swapped duties. Other moments of synchronicity caught us by surprise, like realizing we both avoid dealing with our emotions by taking on more responsibility. During the nine months my mother fought a losing battle for her life, she found joy in watching her daughters put aside their childhood differences and learn to appreciate each other as adults.

In "The Sibling Effect," science writer Jeffrey Kluger argues that the relationships we have with our siblings are the most important ones of our lives. From the time we gain a brother or sister, they can be both our fiercest competitors and closest confidantes. They teach us the social skills we carry for life and stand by us during our best and worst experiences -- divorce, the birth of children and our parents' deaths. In his book, Kluger uses the latest scientific findings to explain the meaning of everything from birth order to the stigma of the only child.

Salon spoke to Kluger about the enduring loyalty of siblings, why treating children the same is a bad idea, and the problem with being the middle child.

When you were researching the book, were you surprised by how intense the sibling relationship is?

The relationships I have with my siblings have always been very important in my life, but it wasn’t until 2005 that I began reading a lot of papers on the topic. The value and centrality of sibling relationships across the board was surprising to me, particularly because a lot of these dynamics are very deeply encoded. So many of the sibling dynamics we find in the home are replicated in the natural, non-human world, and so much of what I found is universal across several hundreds of species. When you get up to humans, we’ve embroidered and built on these dynamics in all kinds of elaborate ways, but human sibling relationships are deeply rooted into the evolutionary chain.

Is this why you make a strong case for people staying close to their siblings?

One of the reasons I made that case is that there is a real uniqueness to sibling relationships that people never fully appreciated before. Siblings are the only relatives, and perhaps the only people you’ll ever know, who are with you through the entire arc of your life. Your parents leave you too soon and your kids and spouse come along late, but your siblings know you when you are in your most inchoate form. Assuming you all reach a ripe old age, they’ll be with you until the very end, and for that reason, there is an intimacy and a familiarity that can’t possibly be available to you in any other relationship throughout your life. Certainly, people can get along without siblings. Single children do, and there are people who have irreparably estranged relationships with their siblings who live full and satisfying lives, but to have siblings and not make the most of that resource is squandering one of the greatest interpersonal resources you’ll ever have.

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Terminal Madness

[ed.  It seems like we've been commemorating 9/11 every day for a decade, and what a legacy it has produced:  a burdensome TSA bureaucracy (read below), two wars, hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths; normalization of torture; widespread unlawful surveillance; an assault on the 4th, 5th and 6th Amendments; Homeland inSecurity; Guantanamo; Black Sites; a hemorrhaging economy, staggering war-profiteering; an annual Pentagon budget exceeding $680 billion, the list goes on and on.  On a more fundamental level we've institutionalized and normalized fear and anxiety of terrorists, of Muslims and Arabs, of illegal immigrants, of porous borders, of color-coded threat charts, of nail clippers and shampoo bottles; and polarized the country's politics and citizenry into raging incoherence.  I can hardly wait for the next decade.]

by Patrick Smith

In America and across much of the world, the security enhancements put in place following the September 11th catastrophe have been drastic and of two kinds: those practical and effective, and those irrational and pointless. The first variety have taken place almost entirely behind the scenes. Explosives scanning for checked luggage, for instance, was long overdue and is perhaps the most welcome addition. It’s the second variety, unfortunately, that have come to dominate the air travel experience, wasting our time and money and humiliating millions of flyers on a daily basis. Nearly ten years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, airport security remains a theater of the absurd.

There are two fundamental flaws in our approach:

The first is a strategy that looks upon everybody who flies — the old and young, fit and infirm, domestic and foreign, pilot and passenger — as a potential terrorist. That is to say, we’re searching for weapons rather than specific people who might actually use them. This is an impossible, unsustainable task in a nation where some two million people travel by air each day. I’ll remind you that tough-as-nails prison guards cannot keep knives out of maximum security cell blocks, never mind the idea of TSA guards trying to root out every conceivable weapon at an overcrowded airport.

The second and related fundamental flaw is our foolish, lingering preoccupation with the tactics used by the terrorists on September 11th. To better understand, we need to revisit that Tuesday morning, and grasp exactly what it was that the 19 hijackers so easily took advantage of. Conventional wisdom says the terrorists exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling aboard boxcutters. But conventional wisdom is wrong. What they actually exploited was a weakness in our mindset — a set of presumptions based on the decades-long track record of hijackings. In years past, a takeover meant hostage negotiations and standoffs; crews were trained in the concept of “passive resistance.” What weapons the 19 men possessed mattered little; had boxcutters been on the contraband list, the men would have smuggled something else or fashioned their weapons from items on board. It didn’t matter. The success of their plan relied not on weaponry but on the element of surprise. And in this respect, their scheme was all but guaranteed not to fail.

For a number of reasons, most notably the awareness of passengers and crew, just the opposite is now true. Before the first of the Twin Towers had fallen to the ground, that element of surprise, and the boxcutters that went with it, were no longer a useful tool. Paradigm over. Hijackers today would face a planeload of frightened people ready to fight back, and thus an unaffordable probability of failure. The September 11th scheme is kaput.

In spite of this reality, we are apparently content spending billions of taxpayer dollars and untold hours of labor in a delusional attempt to thwart an attack that has already happened and cannot happen again — guards pawing through our luggage in a hunt for what are effectively harmless items: hobby knives, scissors and screwdrivers. Not to mention, even a child knows that a deadly weapon can be fashioned from virtually anything, from a ballpoint pen to a broken first class dinner plate.

The folly is much the same with respect to the restrictions on liquids and gels, put in place following the break-up of a London-based cabal that was planning to blow up jetliners using liquid explosives. Allegations surrounding the conspiracy were revealed to substantially embellished. In an August, 2006 article in the New York Times, British officials admitted that public statements made following the arrests were overcooked, inaccurate, and “unfortunate.”

On Campus, It’s One Big Commercial

by Natasha Singer

It's move-in day here at the University of North Carolina, and Leila Ismail, stuffed animals in tow, is feeling some freshman angst.

A few friendly upperclassmen spring into action.

But wait: there is something odd, or at least oddly corporate, about this welcome wagon. These U.N.C. students are all wearing identical T-shirts from American Eagle Outfitters.

Turns out three of them are working for that youth clothing chain on this late August morning, as what are known in the trade as “brand ambassadors” or “campus evangelists” — and they have recruited several dozen friends as a volunteer move-in crew. Even before Ms. Ismail can find her dorm or meet her roommate, they cheerily unload her family’s car. Then they lug her belongings to her dorm. Along the way, they dole out American Eagle coupons, American Eagle water canisters and American Eagle pens.

Ms. Ismail, 18, of Charlotte, welcomes the help. “I’ll probably always remember it,” she says.

American Eagle Outfitters certainly hopes so, as do a growing number of companies that are hiring college students to represent brands on campuses across the nation.

This fall, an estimated 10,000 American college students will be working on hundreds of campuses — for cash, swag, job experience or all three — marketing everything from Red Bull to Hewlett-Packard PCs. For the companies hiring them, the motivation is clear: college students spent about $36 billion on things like clothing, computers and cellphones during the 2010-11 school year alone, according to projections from Re:Fuel, a media and promotions firm specializing in the youth market. And who knows the students at, say, U.N.C., better than the students at U.N.C.?

Corporations have been pitching college students for decades on products from cars to credit cards. But what is happening on campuses today is without rival, in terms of commercializing everyday college life.

Companies from Microsoft on down are increasingly seeking out the big men and women on campus to influence their peers. The students most in demand are those who are popular — ones involved in athletics, music, fraternities or sororities. Thousands of Facebook friends help, too. What companies want are students with inside knowledge of school traditions and campus hotspots. In short, they want students with the cred to make brands seem cool, in ways that a TV or magazine ad never could.
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It’s a good deal for the student marketers, who can earn several hundred to several thousand dollars a semester in salary, perks, products and services, depending on the company. But the trend poses challenges for university officials, especially at a time when many schools are themselves embracing corporate sponsorships to help stage events for students.

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Bipartisanship

[ed.  Interesting analysis of political cooperation these days.]

The GOP's One-Sided War on Dems

by Michael Tomasky

As we begin the countdown toward an eventual vote on the jobs bill Barack Obama laid out Thursday night, the question is how much bipartisan support the president can really expect. Democrats and liberals, of course, complain that Republicans have been unusually uniform in their opposition to Obama’s major proposals. Conservatives sometimes rejoin that Democrats were just as firmly opposed to George W. Bush’s major plans. Centrists of the “both sides do it” school of political analysis are dedicated to the proposition that the partisan intensity of both parties is more or less equal.

I thought this might be a good time to look at some numbers and see. So I conducted a little experiment, in which I’ve settled on four signal legislative achievements of each president and studied the roll call votes in each house on those eight measures to see what the numbers tell us.

The four Bush bills I chose: the first tax cut; No Child Left Behind; the Iraq War vote; and the 2003 Medicare prescription-drug bill. The four Obama bills: the stimulus; the health-care vote; the Dodd-Frank financial reform; and the “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal. Other people might have selected others, but these just seemed to me commonsense answers to the question, “What were each president’s top legislative accomplishments?” As a country we spent a heck of a lot of time on these eight issues, so my findings must tell us something. And here’s what they tell us: levels of partisanship are not even remotely close.

Here’s how it all adds up:

            Average Democratic Senate support for Bush: 45.5 percent.

            Average Democratic House support for Bush: 36.8 percent.

            Average combined Democratic support for Bush: 41.1 percent.

            Average Republican Senate support for Obama: 8.8 percent.

            Average Republican House support for Obama: 2.7 percent.

            Average combined Republican support for Obama: 5.75 percent.

Well now. You see, both sides do do it. It just so happens that one side opposes the major proposals of the president from the other party seven times more intensely than the other side does it.

What does this history tell us? It tells us plainly that one side is usually against the other guy, but within bounds that are to be expected, while the other side is blind with rage against the other guy. I wish every American knew this. It would be a start for Democrats to tell them.

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A Memory of Webs Past

[ed.  Excerpt from an interesting article describing the massive effort involved in archiving the web.]

by Ariel Bleicher

The task of preserving what's put online has proved, to no one's surprise, monumental. And it's only getting more so as the Internet expands, as Web sites become more dynamic, and as concern grows over online privacy. Increasingly, much of what people put online is being diffused across social networks and distributed through personalized apps on smartphones and tablet computers. The classic Web site, it seems, is already starting to slide toward obsolescence. "I'm convinced the Web as we know it will be gone in a few years' time," Illien says. "What we're doing in this library is trying to capture a trace of it." But to do even that is requiring engineers to build a new, more sophisticated generation of software robots, known as crawlers, to trawl the Web's vast and varied content.

Illien sees himself as a steward of an ancient tradition; he believes he is helping pioneer a revolution in the way society documents what it does and how it thinks. He points out that since the end of the 19th century, the French National Library has been storing sales catalogs from big department stores, including the famous Galeries Lafayette. "Today," he says, "this exceptional collection…is the best record we have of how people dressed back then and who was buying what." One day, he insists, the archives of eBay will be just as valuable. Capturing them, however, is a task that's very different from anything archivists have ever done.

The Web is regularly accessed and modified by as many as 2 billion people, in every country on Earth. It's a wild bazaar of scripting languages, file formats, media players, search interfaces, hidden databases, pay walls, pop-up advertisements, untraceable comments, public broadcasts, private conversations, and applications that can be navigated in an infinite number of ways. Finding and capturing even a substantial portion of it all would require development teams and computing resources as large as, or probably larger than, Google's.

But Google, aside from saving previously indexed pages for caching, has mostly abandoned the Webs of the past—the complete set of Web pages as they existed a month, six months, a year ago, and so on, back to a site's origins. Thus the job of preserving them has fallen to nonprofit foundations and small, overworked teams of engineers and curators at national libraries. Illien, for example, manages a group of nine.

Part of the difficulty in fetching the contents of the Web is that no one really knows how much is out there to be fetched. Brewster Kahle, a U.S. computer engineer who in the late 1980s invented the Wide Area Information Servers, a pre-Web publishing system, paid a visit to AltaVista's offices in Palo Alto, Calif., in 1995. He was shocked to see that the then-popular search engine had indexed 16 million Web pages "on a set of machines that were the size of two large Coke machines," he recalls. "You could actually wrap your arms around the Web."

The apparent compactness of the Web inspired Kahle to found, in San Francisco in 1996, the nonprofit Internet Archive. Wary of infringing on copyrights, AltaVista made sure to delete old pages in its cache. But the Internet Archive, emboldened by its status as a trustworthy nonprofit, was willing to be brazen. "We have an opportunity to one-up the Greeks," Kahle says, referring to the ancient philosophers who collected hundreds of thousands of papyrus scrolls in the great Library of Alexandria. The invention of the Internet, he argues, has made it possible to create an archive of human knowledge that anyone can access from anywhere on the planet. And Kahle, for one, wasn't going to let a bunch of lawyers talk him out of it.

By March 1997, he had compiled what was arguably the first true time capsule of the global Web. In fact, a substantial portion of the French National Library's electronic archive was simply bought from Kahle's Internet Archive. One of the archive's major successes has been its online access interface, called the Wayback Machine, which lets anyone who knows the address of a Web site see archived versions of its pages. Today the Internet Archive stores more than two petabytes of Web data in a portable Sun Microsystems (now Oracle America) data center built into a shipping container. Back in 1997, Kahle had captured nearly 2 terabytes, which he calculated was about a tenth the amount of text stored in the entire U.S. Library of Congress. It was a substantial collection of the Web of the time, but it wasn't nearly everything.

Kahle knew there were still hundreds of thousands of sites and perhaps millions of "hidden" documents, images, and audio clips that his crawler program missed. It couldn't access password-protected sites, for example, or isolated pages with just a few if any hyperlinks, such as outdated product postings on eBay. More troubling, it couldn't probe "form-fronted" databases, which require typing keywords in search boxes to call up information (such databases include those at the National Climate Data Center in the United States and the British Census). Still, Kahle believed that with the right tools and enough human curators to guide the crawlers, it was possible to get almost all online data. The Web may have been big, but ultimately it was manageable.

That is no longer the case. The part of the Web indexed by search engines such as Google has ballooned from some 50 million unique URLs in 1997 to about 3 trillion today, according to the latest update last November by Majestic SEO, a search optimization service. A URL, or uniform resource locator, designates a single document, such as a JPEG image or an HTML text file. Those files, however, are just a tiny piece of the Internet. By some estimates, the total "surface" Web visible to crawlers is six times the size of the indexed Web, and the "deep" Web of hidden pages and databases is some 500 times larger still.

Counting URLs, though, has become a fairly pointless exercise. For instance, it's possible and increasingly common that a single site is capable of generating vast numbers of unique URLs, all pointing to the same content: advertisements or pornography, typically. Though engineers have devised tricks for steering crawlers away from such spam clusters, even Google's crawlers still from time to time capture billions of unique URLs redirecting to the same place.

"In reality, the Web is infinite in all the wrong ways," laments Julien Masanès, who introduced Web archiving at the French National Library in 2002 and managed the collection until 2004, when he left to start what is now the nonprofit Internet Memory Foundation, headquartered in Amsterdam and Paris.

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Where Fashion Gazes at Itself

[ed.  I use tumblr for most of my art images.  It's an amazing and addictive resource, particularly when using the archive button found on many tumblr blogs.]

by Kayleen Shaefer

When Rich Tong, the fashion director at Tumblr, the popular blogging platform, learned that the model Coco Rocha had started using it, he e-mailed her to say hello.

She later dropped by Tumblr’s Gramercy Park offices in New York, where Mr. Tong introduced her to Jamie Beck, a fashion photographer with her own Tumblr blog, fromme-toyou.tumblr.com. The two set up a photo shoot. Mr. Tong asked Oscar de la Renta, one of the first luxury fashion brands to have a Tumblr, OscarPRGirl.tumblr.com, to provide the gowns.

The resulting photographs, animated images that Ms. Beck calls “cinemagraphs,” featured an elegant Ms. Rocha in her New York apartment flicking her kohl-lined eyes or letting a balcony breeze tousle her hair. They were posted on Ms. Rocha’s blog, oh-so-coco.tumblr.com, reblogged or “liked” about 40,000 times, and viewed countless times by fashion fans around the world.

“For the most part, it’s great having things online,” Ms. Beck, 28, said of the high-fashion shoots she posts using Tumblr. “It can be shared. Ninety percent of my work isn’t a super masterpiece, but if I can reach people who can appreciate it, then it’s successful.”

Tumblr, founded four years ago, has reached out to the fashion community in a way no other social networking site has. For the second time, it has brought users to New York Fashion Week as reporters, paying for their trips and giving them access to the shows. Their coverage is being posted on a dedicated channel, tumblr.com/NYFW, made up of posts from 20 bloggers picked by Tumblr’s staff, along with contributions from magazines that have their own Tumblrs, like Vogue, GQ, T Magazine and Glamour.

Formerly a pileup of profanity-laced teenage ramblings and partly expressed emotions, at least to an outsider’s eye, Tumblr has become an image-driven platform of importance to fashion photographers — like Terry Richardson (who uses it mostly as a diary) — brands and bloggers, who have made it an integral part of their online lives.

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Paul Gauguin, Nave Nave Moe (Sacred Spring, Sweet Dreams), 1894
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Paper Tigers

by Wesley Yang

Sometimes I’ll glimpse my reflection in a window and feel astonished by what I see. Jet-black hair. Slanted eyes. A pancake-flat surface of yellow-and-green-toned skin. An expression that is nearly reptilian in its impassivity. I’ve contrived to think of this face as the equal in beauty to any other. But what I feel in these moments is its strangeness to me. It’s my face. I can’t disclaim it. But what does it have to do with me?

Here is what I sometimes suspect my face signifies to other Americans: an invisible person, barely distinguishable from a mass of faces that resemble it. A conspicuous person standing apart from the crowd and yet devoid of any individuality. An icon of so much that the culture pretends to honor but that it in fact patronizes and exploits. Not just people “who are good at math” and play the violin, but a mass of stifled, repressed, abused, conformist quasi-robots who simply do not matter, socially or culturally.

Asian-American success is typically taken to ratify the American Dream and to prove that minorities can make it in this country without handouts. Still, an undercurrent of racial panic always accompanies the consideration of Asians, and all the more so as China becomes the destination for our industrial base and the banker controlling our burgeoning debt. But if the armies of Chinese factory workers who make our fast fashion and iPads terrify us, and if the collective mass of high-­achieving Asian-American students arouse an anxiety about the laxity of American parenting, what of the Asian-American who obeyed everything his parents told him? Does this person really scare anyone?

Earlier this year, the publication of Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother incited a collective airing out of many varieties of race-based hysteria. But absent from the millions of words written in response to the book was any serious consideration of whether Asian-Americans were in fact taking over this country. If it is true that they are collectively dominating in elite high schools and universities, is it also true that Asian-Americans are dominating in the real world? My strong suspicion was that this was not so, and that the reasons would not be hard to find. If we are a collective juggernaut that inspires such awe and fear, why does it seem that so many Asians are so readily perceived to be, as I myself have felt most of my life, the products of a timid culture, easily pushed around by more assertive people, and thus basically invisible?

A few months ago, I received an e-mail from a young man named Jefferson Mao, who after attending Stuyvesant High School had recently graduated from the University of Chicago. He wanted my advice about “being an Asian writer.” This is how he described himself: “I got good grades and I love literature and I want to be a writer and an intellectual; at the same time, I’m the first person in my family to go to college, my parents don’t speak English very well, and we don’t own the apartment in Flushing that we live in. I mean, I’m proud of my parents and my neighborhood and what I perceive to be my artistic potential or whatever, but sometimes I feel like I’m jumping the gun a generation or two too early.”

One bright, cold Sunday afternoon, I ride the 7 train to its last stop in Flushing, where the storefront signs are all written in Chinese and the sidewalks are a slow-moving river of impassive faces. Mao is waiting for me at the entrance of the Main Street subway station, and together we walk to a nearby Vietnamese restaurant.

Mao has a round face, with eyes behind rectangular wire-frame glasses. Since graduating, he has been living with his parents, who emigrated from China when Mao was 8 years old. His mother is a manicurist; his father is a physical therapist’s aide. Lately, Mao has been making the familiar hour-and-a-half ride from Flushing to downtown Manhattan to tutor a white Stuyvesant freshman who lives in Tribeca. And what he feels, sometimes, in the presence of that amiable young man is a pang of regret. Now he understands better what he ought to have done back when he was a Stuyvesant freshman: “Worked half as hard and been twenty times more successful.”

Entrance to Stuyvesant, one of the most competitive public high schools in the country, is determined solely by performance on a test: The top 3.7 percent of all New York City students who take the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test hoping to go to Stuyvesant are accepted. There are no set-asides for the underprivileged or, conversely, for alumni or other privileged groups. There is no formula to encourage “diversity” or any nebulous concept of “well-­roundedness” or “character.” Here we have something like pure meritocracy. This is what it looks like: Asian-­Americans, who make up 12.6 percent of New York City, make up 72 percent of the high school.

This year, 569 Asian-Americans scored high enough to earn a slot at Stuyvesant, along with 179 whites, 13 Hispanics, and 12 blacks. Such dramatic overrepresentation, and what it may be read to imply about the intelligence of different groups of New Yorkers, has a way of making people uneasy. But intrinsic intelligence, of course, is precisely what Asians don’t believe in. They believe—and have ­proved—that the constant practice of test-taking will improve the scores of whoever commits to it. All throughout Flushing, as well as in Bayside, one can find “cram schools,” or storefront academies, that drill students in test preparation after school, on weekends, and during summer break. “Learning math is not about learning math,” an instructor at one called Ivy Prep was quoted in the New York Times as saying. “It’s about weightlifting. You are pumping the iron of math.” Mao puts it more specifically: “You learn quite simply to nail any standardized test you take.”
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Somewhere near the middle of his time at Stuyvesant, a vague sense of discontent started to emerge within Mao. He had always felt himself a part of a mob of “nameless, faceless Asian kids,” who were “like a part of the décor of the place.” He had been content to keep his head down and work toward the goal shared by everyone at Stuyvesant: Harvard. But around the beginning of his senior year, he began to wonder whether this march toward academic success was the only, or best, path.

“You can’t help but feel like there must be another way,” he explains over a bowl of phô. “It’s like, we’re being pitted against each other while there are kids out there in the Midwest who can do way less work and be in a garage band or something—and if they’re decently intelligent and work decently hard in school …”

Mao was becoming clued in to the fact that there was another hierarchy behind the official one that explained why others were getting what he never had—“a high-school sweetheart” figured prominently on this list—and that this mysterious hierarchy was going to determine what happened to him in life. “You realize there are things you really don’t understand about courtship or just acting in a certain way. Things that somehow come naturally to people who go to school in the suburbs and have parents who are culturally assimilated.” I pressed him for specifics, and he mentioned that he had visited his white girlfriend’s parents’ house the past Christmas, where the family had “sat around cooking together and playing Scrabble.” This ordinary vision of suburban-American domesticity lingered with Mao: Here, at last, was the setting in which all that implicit knowledge “about social norms and propriety” had been transmitted. There was no cram school that taught these lessons.

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Runaway Money

by Joshua Prager

Albert Edward Clarke III sits shaded by maple trees on the back porch of his shabby house in South Salem, N.Y., flipping through a children's storybook. "I read it once about three years ago," he says, bent over the bright green, red and yellow pages. "And I forgot."

That happens a lot. "It could be Alzheimer's," the 57-year-old says. He chuckles. "It could be Parkinson's. It could be punch-drunk syndrome. It could be all three."

Mr. Clarke walks to his silver Jeep parked in the gravel drive and retrieves a black canvas bag. In it are the documents that give legal proof to a family and its means: birth certificates, child-custody papers and a photocopy of an eight-page will.

"I carry it around with me just about everywhere I go," he says.

He pulls out the will and flips to a familiar passage. "I give and bequeath," begins the will's fifth clause, "all of my right, title and interest of every kind and nature in and to all books written by me and published by D.C. Heath & Co., William R. Scott Inc., Harper & Bros., Simon & Schuster, Lothrop Lee & Shepard & Co. Inc., Cadmus Books Agency, Harvill Press and Thomas I. Crowell & Co., and in and to all contracts for the publication thereof, to Albert Clarke, if he survives me."

He did.

The benefactor he survived was Margaret Wise Brown, a midcentury bohemian who wrote dozens of children's books. Fifty years later, "The Runaway Bunny" and, most famously, "Goodnight Moon," sit alongside Dr. Seuss as classics of early-childhood literature.

A third generation of parents is now reading "Goodnight Moon" to its children. The rock-music trio Shivaree included a track titled "Goodnight Moon" on its recent debut CD. A racehorse in Washington state is named Goodnight Moon. Hospitals in California and South Dakota send newborns home with a copy. On a recent campaign stop, presidential candidate George W. Bush cited "Goodnight Moon" as one of his childhood favorites.

"It's the jewel in the crown," says Pat Buckley, director of subsidiary rights of children's books at HarperCollins, publisher of "Goodnight Moon."

Mr. Clarke was a rascally nine-year-old when he inherited that jewel. Ever since, as "Goodnight Moon" has drifted toward the center of America's collective consciousness, he has floated on the fringes of society. No steady job. No fixed place of abode. Dozens of arrests. Rarely has his life traced a path through terrain even remotely resembling the world of Ms. Brown's stories. Over the years, that world has yielded to him nearly $5 million. Today, he has $27,000 in cash.

"I'm an inept bungler when it comes to business matters," Mr. Clarke says, as ash drops from his cigarette into the folds of his trousers. "If it wasn't for the fact that Margaret Wise Brown left me an inheritance, who knows? I could've been a homeless person. I could've been a poor, broken-down homeless person."

Mr. Clarke's family consists of himself and two of his children, Sharmaine, 10, and Albert, nine. They have moved seven times in the past five years, their household a jumble of cardboard boxes and photos taped to the walls. Mr. Clarke wears a gray button-down shirt so fresh from its plastic packaging that it still bears a symmetrical grid of creases. "I spend a lot of money on clothes for me and May and Aly," he says. "We wear them two or three times. When they get all wrinkly and funky, we throw them out."

The enduring constant is Ms. Brown's will, always close at hand to protect Mr. Clarke should someone try to wrest from him his inheritance. It is his ticket to flee the neighbors and real-estate agents who he says are prejudiced against his mixed-race children. Even his children's friends are suspect. Little Albert says his father "says they can come over if we want them to. But it's a better choice not to because they can get hurt and we can get sued. He's really smart." Most important, the will is Mr. Clarke's physical connection to a woman whose legacy -- he believes -- encompasses far more than money.

The lives of Ms. Brown and the Clarke family first entwined in 1935. That's when Ms. Brown met Albert's grandmother at what is now the Bank Street College of Education, a teacher-training institute in Manhattan. Soon, Ms. Brown and the woman's daughter, Joan MacCormick, both single and in their 20s, struck up a friendship, eventually summering together in Maine.

Mighty Uke

[ed,  Trailer for the documentary Mighty Uke, the Amazing Comeback of a Musical Underdog.  Looks fun!]

Lorraine Christie - Paris Remembered
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When Quoting Verse, One Must Be Terse

[ed.  My favorite topic these days: copyright - this time as it relates to quoting poetry.  Our copyright laws definitely need an overhaul, but would you trust this Congress, or any other in recent memory, to produce anything forward-looking and fair?  Yeah...me, neither.]

by David Orr

Copyright law is so often a matter of guesswork and loopholes, small print and obscure provisions. One such provision, dating from the ’70s, has recently come to the music industry’s attention. “Termination rights” allow musicians to reclaim the copyrights on their songs after 35 years — meaning songs from albums like Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove” may soon be back in the hands of George Clinton and his funkified compatriots. Late last month, Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called on Congress to clarify the statute in question in order to protect artists’ rights.

Would that the uncertainties of copyright law in my industry garnered so much attention.

American poetry criticism faces a major problem, one that has nothing to do with poetry, or readers, or anything remotely literary. The problem is that a critic who wants to quote a poem in a book has to face a permissions regime that ranges from unpredictable to plain crazy, as I discovered while working on a guidebook to modern poetry for general readers. The permissions took months to compile, and the initial estimate was nearly $20,000.

The difficulty is not so much that the copyright system is restrictive (although it can be), but that no one has any idea exactly how much of a poem can be quoted without payment. Under the “fair use” doctrine, quotation is permitted for criticism and comment, so you’d think this is where a poetry critic could hang his hat. But how much use is fair use?

If you ask publishers, the answer varies — a lot. Some think a quarter of a short poem is appropriate, some think almost an entire poem can be acceptable in the right circumstances, and many others believe you should quote only three or four lines. If you want to play it safe — and that’s what your own publisher will most likely prefer — then you’ll find yourself adhering to the three- or four-line standard.

But that standard doesn’t make much sense. Poems, like excuses, come in all shapes and sizes. They range from single lines to book length. And individual lines range from one word to whatever will fit on the page. Consequently, three or four lines can be 3 words or 70. And what about poems that aren’t lineated at all? Or visual poems? George Herbert’s “Easter Wings” is famously shaped like a pair of wings — if Herbert were alive today, could we quote a feather?

Nor does it help to say that the standard should be, say, 5 percent of a given poem. Here’s the entirety of Monica Youn’s poem “Ending”:

Freshwater stunned the beaches.

I could sleep.

What’s 5 percent of that? “Fr”?

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Andrew Wyeth, Love in the Afternoon, 1992
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Chet Baker