OT: To book or to Kindle? Sometimes you gotta kindle books, too...

Still, I’ve found you can really do a lot of LC rsch now through their site (www.loc.gov), which is well run— you can get considerable info yourself, and the online staff really do answer questions. So our tax dollars are at work there, even when we’re not.

Re storage: the Estate is at the more bookshelves/bookcases stage now, but not for much longer: the available wall space is dwindling down to areas which are only “secondary access” venues (bedrooms, which often have people using them, and passageways/corridors, which really shouldn’t be narrowed for sensible fire code reasons).

So yeah, I’m beginning to wonder: should I do more bookicide — to which some family members strenuously object, regardless of the value or literal readability of the books in question — or tell the family Look, if we keep this up, you’ll have to fork over for a Book Annex. Some sort of, I dunno, self-standing shed or the like. Or maybe two of ’em, in the spirit of Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson.

It’s had more than its share of exotica, I guess. For better or worse, however, it’s never been termed “adorable.”

Although NB: if you can believe it, some family members regard the New Yorkers as simply a fire hazard. Incredible!

And yeah, a rational part of me (I think) shares your irrational fears.

“Valid response”? DCO, my friend, I’ve been on CC since 2005, and this is one my favorite posts by anyone here since then. If it’s possible to say it without sounding ironic, Thanks for sharing.

(And I wish I’d had more students like you when I was teaching high school…)

Inspired by the introduction of Apple’s iPad and what it means for other devices, like the Kindle. I was talking smack on the iPad and defending e-ink, while zknower drank the kool-aid and kba was left feeling strangely indifferent.

Your point about spatial memory — where something was on a page — rings a bell with me for sure. There’s something about the, hmm, environment of a dead-tree page, I guess, that engages a certain area of my brainpan and makes (or helps) it retain information that a screen doesn’t. I think it can be identical stuff — the same info in the same typeface — but I still will recall less of it from a screen viewing.

This may or may not be related to another visual-spatial thing: I retain much more of a text set in a page environment that features lines whose beginnings and ends are simultaenously perceptible by my peripheral vision, as opposed to a text whose lines are too long for that — as was the case with a Civ book I remember from college: it was a bound typescript on strange-sized paper, and you literally had to turn your head slightly to read a complete line of it. El braino just didn’t like things that way, even if the content was interesting.

Hey, that’s a good one: who remembers anything interesting in freshman Civ?!?

I’m impressed you had family that could read in the 1930s.

Having a family library really is a cool thing, space and maintenance problems notwithstanding. Nobody planned it, of course; the thing just grew organically — and then started sprawling the same way over recent decades, which is why we decided we had to have a Family Librarian. My campaign slogan was an inspirational “OK, if nobody else’ll do it…” Needless to say, I won in a landslide.

I figured I owed at least this much to great-grandad and to the place generally: I stay there for months at a time in the summer, rent free, natch. It’s idyllic Pennsylvania countryside (I can remember carrying cans of milk past the frog pond on the way back home from the farm down the road as a kid) — and the perfect place to decompress and detox yourself after 9 mos. in Moscow.

That may change soon, alas, since there’s a new x-factor at work now, an intrusion into the little Grandma Moses-scenic valley we’re in that may change the whole ball game: in two words, Marcellus shale. People all around us have leased their property to the nat’l gas drillers — who are neither altruists nor tidy neighbors — and the hydrofracking may become an extremely noisy interruption of several years duration in the Estate’s quiet-ever-since-1931 rural ambiance. And the family itself is also deeply split on whether we should lease our little 11 acres along with everybody else in the valley (literally) or stay out of it on anti-fossil-fuel-depletion (or other environmental) grounds.

But it hasn’t happened yet, so we’re all still keeping out fingers crossed that Chesapeake will ultimately decide not to use the land they’ve leased in our valley.

Great book, great author. My dad read another one of his books—I’ll have to ask him which one—and he said he liked it better than Catcher in the Rye. I might take a look.

It really is— or has been, rather, for the period 1931-2009. Gas drilling may make it problematic starting as early as this summer: disruptive excavations, pump noise, potential water polution, big-truck traffic and road damage, crime-rate rise (the influx of hard-drinkin’, high-snortin’ gas-industry wildcatters who work long shifts and then Ponson-relax)— it’s all very discouraging.

NY State has apparently done much better than PA in *pre*regulating the gas industry, i.e. requiring it to meet certain EPA standards before exploitation— standards that PA stupidly voted exemptions for (guess what— lobbying works).

On the other hand, Gorilla B is right: this has been an economically depressed area for decades — the family farming I remember from my childhood ceased to be a viable way of life long ago — and it’s hard to tell people “Wait, let’s let government bureaucrats [EPA] do a bunch of rule-making ‘n’ stuff for a few years instead of letting folks like you, who have been struggling to make ends meet and pay the property taxes on acreage you can’t economically farm, lease your land for sizeable fees over a multi-year period, including a percentage of the take if the well(s) on your property prove really productive.”

Our family’s internal dispute has been the most discouraging part of it all, the kind of ugly squabble you may recall from Dickens’ “Bleak House” — the bitter Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce case that is eventually resolved only by the discovery that the fortune being contested has been entirely dissipated by the legal costs of the case itself!

So far our legal fees haven’t been that great (two consultations with a specialty gas-lease lawyer) and the $ in question isn’t that big in any event (our 11 acres could bring $50 K-plus or something at signing), but the argument of the family pro-lease people is tough to counter: at this point all our valley neighbors have signed leases (at varying rates over the years), so whether we sign a lease or not, we’re still going to suffer all the consequences (noise, possible polution, etc), either directly (from horizontal effects on our property that we can’t control) or indirectly (from wells close to us coming on line)— so why on earth should we not take the $50K, which we could use either for the Estate endowment/improvement/general fund (best case) or for post-Chesapeake clean-up (worst case— the drilling company f*cks up the valley big-time, but financial relief via litigation takes years or decades (you think the gas industry has any sharp lawyers?) But the pro-side’s clincher, in any case, may be: we can sign a lease (it is alleged) that specifies no dilling on our property itself.

The anti-side points out, in turn, that neither $ now nor $ later (via litigation) is the real point in all this. To them it’s simple: are we for fossil fuel depletion? Do we want to be partnered with an earth-exploiting, quick-profits industry that doesn’t give a sh*t about what ultimately happens in and to our Valley and more than General Motors or somebody does?

So there we are, Titovs yelling at Titovs. Everybody’s “right”, of course. And great grand-dad— a Methodist clergyman who cashed in his life insurance policy in ’31 upon retirement and bought the place as something to leave the whole family in perpetutity— is no doubt greatly saddened, wherever he is, to see us throwing verbal bricks at each other, especially after so many years of good-spirited family live-and-let live.

Still, if/when this great bloody mess ever blows over, TAEotBotMS (it should be “Mighty” Susquehanna, I forgot) would indeed be a great place for a CC get-together. I and lots of other family have hosted friends at the place before— it’s part of the tradition, in fact. (I even had a Russian friend visit one summer, a historian with a short-term rsch grant at the Woodrow Wilson Ctr; he’s still something of a legend among the locals, and several of my cousins later visited him in Moscow when they came over on a tour— our little contribution to Int’l Peace ‘n’ Friendship).

I mean, we’d have to ask duck to keep the boombox volume down when playing Metallica, but other than that, it’s all pretty free-form, come-as-U-R. And of course, the field behind the big house is a great soft ball venue. Ah, many’s the time I’ve stepped to the plate, adjusted my O’s cap, spat demonstratively toward some wretched Sawx-fen Titov on the mound, pointed with my left hand to the stand of trees beyond left field and…gone down swinging.

But hey, I’ve caught a-holt of a few, too. Which is what I seem to remember most from the games of my chidhood. Go figure.

A few yrs ago in the July annual N. PA. Miss Dairy Festival pageant, one of the contestants listed under Favorite Hobby not “quliting” or “reading” or another of the traditional favorites, but…“talking.” I saw that and thought yeah, some sort of bridge has been crossed. Or we’ve leaped off it.

On the other hand, Nice rack! Er, cough-cough, pardon my French.