Re: p-books persist

[Sandy Thatcher <sandy.thatcher@alumni.princeton.edu>]

I agree about cabbies. A recent cab ride in Toronto allowed me to 
discuss the British health system with an M.D. from Pakistan, who 
had once worked there--and was driving the cab.

More to the point, I'd be curious if Jim takes note of what the 
people on the planes and trains are reading, whether on screen or 
in print form. I'd be more encouraged if they were reading 
serious nonfiction or the best of recent novels, rather than 
chick lit (sorry if I've offended anyone).

Sandy Thatcher


At 6:04 PM -0400 8/24/10, Laval Hunsucker wrote:
>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