Re: p-books persist

[Laval Hunsucker <amoinsde@yahoo.com>]

Very nice story.

My own experience, for what it's worth, suggests that, in large 
U.S. cities, cab drivers of (sometimes great) interest are 
perhaps more the rule than the exception. And then one has to 
wonder, I guess, to just what degree they as a group, not to 
mention a single one of them, can be taken to be representative 
of 'the working man'. The last cabby I can remember having in 
N.Y.C. had a PhD in physics. Something similar seems to hold, as 
well, for barkeepers. Speaking of which and of Guyana (the 
British one, that is) -- I ran into a Guyanan barman some years 
back at a big hotel in North Carolina:  similar kind of story. 
Always refreshing, this kind of thing -- and for us types sort of 
comforting -- but I'm alas not sure it can persuade me that 
prospects for the continuing vitality of our literary traditions 
need give no cause for concern; whether it's p- or e-books (can 
the latter do this job as well in the long run? -- possibly a 
non-trivial question). Would that it were so. I doubt it ever 
will be. Doesn't it seem no less incumbent on us than ever to do 
what we can to keep up the good work?

- Laval Hunsucker
   Breukelen, Nederland

----- Original Message ----
From: James J. O'Donnell <provost@georgetown.edu>
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Sent: Mon, August 23, 2010 11:52:39 PM
Subject: p-books persist

I still prowl the aisles of planes and trains counting p- vs. e-
books, with p- well ahead.  Today I had a DC cab driver of
interest. He was, as they all are, a gentleman of mature years
driving a vehicle General Motors has forgotten why it made; I
forgot to check to see if the "service engine soon" light was lit
as DC taxi practice requires that it be.  But when I got in, he
was on the phone with his favorite daughter, and I perked up at
the comment that he'd look for something at home tonight, but
they gave away the VCR they weren't using and moved things around
and there's such a lot of books he's not sure where the something
was, but he'd find it tonight.  So when he got off the phone, I
said, I'm a professor and couldn't help noticing you said you had
a lot of books.  What kind of books do you have and do you like?
Oh, he said, smiling broadly, well, for me, really, Shakespeare
is the best, just the best, and then I have books of all kinds,
some by Caribbean authors.  Ah, I said, so do you have things by
C.L.R. James?  OH, YES!, he said, see, I am Guyanan, just like
him.  So his book about cricket, I said, the one called *Beyond a
Boundary*?  Yes, yes, he said, laughing with delight and pounding
his hands on the steering wheel.  We were just getting to
destination, and I left him saying, I wish I had known you were
interested, yes, so delightful.

Score one for the literary tradition and the working man's
commitment to it.

(Small digression:  if you *don't* know James and *Beyond a 
Boundary*, it definitely gets a Michelin third star.  It's 
notionally about cricket, but it's really about being a colonized 
British subject who buys into the British empire as 
enthusiastically as any but with ambivalences.  Just a gorgeous 
book:  I must have read it three times so far.  James grew up 
actually in Trinidad playing cricket and obsessively reading and 
rereading Thackeray, then went to the UK to ghost-write a 
cricketer's autobiography, fell in with Jomo Kenyatta, came to 
the States and got deported for general Trotskyite mopery, and 
wrote many splendid books, including The Black Jacobins (history 
of the Haitian revolution) and Mariners, Renegades, Castaways, 
and Thieves (his take on Moby-Dick, written on Ellis Island in 
detention while fighting deportation).  Patriotic enthusiasm or 
not, a taste that embraces Shakespeare and James is pretty 
commendable in any reader.)

Jim O'Donnell
Georgetown