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Someday, a device that fits in your pocket will be able to store all your music and all your favorite books, and allow you listen and read with ease. As my last entry makes clear, I look forward to that day, in no small part because it will allow me, in theory, to cut down on the sheer _bulk_ of material possessions.
But whenever I contemplate the heady freedom of being able to stick all I own on my back and ride a motorcycle off into the sunset, there’s always one question that stops me short:
What about the board games?
There’s no denying that my taste in board games runs counter to my general proclivity for the portable and the unobtrusive. I adore my suitcase-sized backgammon board. I wish I owned one for “Crokinole”:http://www.crokinole.com/. I like games with lots of cool bits — preferably made of wood, not plastic. And though there are ubiquitous online places to play backgammon or chess, and even “cool places”:http://www.brettspielwelt.de/gate/jsp/base/index.jsp?nation=en to play German-style games, that just wouldn’t be the same.
Why is that the case for board games and not for books? Aren’t a game’s pieces simply a medium for transmitting the ruleset to the brain, just as book does with text? Yes, but there are at least three factors that make the physicality of a game particularly important:
1. Just as the main difficulty with an electronic format is readability with books, so too an electronic form of a game must try to match the “readability” — ease of both interaction and apprehension — that a physical structure provides. And that standard for games involves more complicated factors than proper screen size and font resolution. Having the actual game elements arranged before you engages both spatial and abstract reasoning. Physically moving pieces on a board cements what’s going on at a cognitive level.
2. Similarly, both the physical design of a book and a board game have an aesthetic component, but with a game’s many possible components and countless ways for them to interact, there are many more opportunities to achieve beauty of design.
3. Unlike reading, playing a board game has a social component; I hope it’s self-evident that whether the people you’re playing with are right there or not makes a big difference.
Of course, board games get played from a distance all the time. The ability to play online revolutionized backgammon by allowing competitive players to play around the clock if they wanted, but any serious player will tell you that while that’s great for practice, it’s no substitute for the real thing. So there’s no point in trying to scale down on the space those games take up; I might as well embrace the bulk and commit to a life of limited mobility. It’s not like there was really a choice in the first place, what with all the baby gear . . .
Incidentally, we’ve had a portable, flexible game-generating mechanism for centuries; it’s called a deck of cards. A love of bits and a bias toward complexity are what make me favor board games over card games; I get bored with Hearts rather quickly, though all-night sessions of poker or “Skat”:http://www.pagat.com/schafk/skat.html are always welcome.
According to Will Baude of “Crescat Sententia”:http://www.crescatsententia.org/, my definition of “shelfworthy” (as described “here”:http://www.polytropos.org/index.php?p=327) is a “theory of book-bigotry.” He goes on:
In some technical sense, Nate is only defining a term, so quarrelling with him seems needlessly antagonistic, but because of the notion inherent in the term (and reinforced in his comment) that one ought to shelve ones [sic] books [bookshelves?] only with books that look and feel good, I feel obliged to take issue.
Needlessly antagonistic? _Bien sur!_ Where would we bloggers be without others nitpicking our views? Ultimately I don’t think Will and I actually disagree very much, but I’ll take up the gauntlet anyway, in the spirit of needless antagonism.
First of all, the subsequent discussion by Will (“and”:http://bamber.blogspot.com/2004_05_01_bamber_archive.html#108440073337131738 “others”:http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/) has drifted into talk about the pros and cons of hardcover vs. softcover. This is a fine topic to discuss, but my definition only made a claim about _mass market_ paperbacks. I very deliberately left trade paperbacks out of it, because they are the big Grey Area when it comes to shelfworthiness. The fact that they’re of varying sizes, and that there’s usually more room for interesting design on their spines, means that TPs can very often be shelfworthy, though not always. I’m less likely to buy one than a hardcover, all else being equal, but the fact that they’re cheaper means that they outnumber hardcover titles on my shelves just like everybody else’s.
Anyway, Will’s argument centers on a book’s _usability_, best summarized here:
No question, books are made to be loved and used, but that use isn’t — or shouldn’t be — limited to sitting on a shelf and looking pretty. Ease of transport, minimization of cost, minimization of storage space — these are all real constraints that true book lovers deal with every day. Cloth-bound hardcovers aren’t always the most aesthetically pleasing books, and aesthetical-pleasingness should not be the only concern aside from content.
And he’s perfectly correct. My purchasing bias toward shelfworthy books is motivated by an impatience for the future.
When I left boarding school in Jos, Nigeria, oh-so-many years ago, I could fit everything I owned into a long military duffel that, with some difficulty, I could sling over my shoulder. It was an incredible feeling of freedom, of being unbound from material constraints. My possessions have only increased since then, making life an ongoing struggle against accumulating too much stuff. To say that that makes me anti-materialist would be a lie: it’s the _space_ that stuff takes up that gets me, not the number of items or money spent. I seriously dig miniaturization. I consider the iPod to be one of the triumphs of our technological culture, and I am eager — even impatient — for the device to come along that does for books what the mp3 player has done for music.
The important part of a book is its text. The actual physical structure is secondary — indeed, it exists as a “particularly ingenious mechanism”:http://slate.msn.com/publisher/ebooks/Magic/Hill-MagicOfReading.htm for transmitting that text to the brain. Right now, nothing can even come close to the book for the job of text-transmitting. By contrast, reading on a computer screen is abysmally difficult. eBooks, as they exist today, are only slightly better on readability and still not up to snuff on portability or durability either. But, in time, we’re going to have an electronic reading machine that’s the book’s equal on readability, portability, and durability — and will be able to store your entire library inside it, to boot.
Now, I like the musty smell of books, and the tacticity of their pages, and all the other things that people who oppose the very concept of electronic books talk about. I like them exactly enough to want to keep shelves full of books even after a real electronic book — one that you _can_ curl up on the couch with — comes on the scene. But my criteria for the ones I keep will be based on physical aesthetics and nostalgia value, not portability or efficiency. Hence, shelfworthiness.
In “Broken Engagement”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0405.clark.html, Gen. Wesley Clark argues that the only way to bring democracy to the Middle East is the same way it was brought to the Soviet bloc: not through military confrontation but through long-term, patient cultural exchange, waiting for the moment when the call for it comes from their own people.
Democracy and freedom have been ascendant in most parts of the world for at least the last 15 years, and it’s hard to imagine that they aren’t also destined to take root in the Middle East. But to play a constructive role in bringing this about, we must understand the facts on the ground and the lessons of history clearly. Our efforts should take into account not just the desire for freedom of those in the Middle East, but also their pride in their own culture and roots and their loyalty to Islam. We should work primarily with and through our allies, and be patient as we were during the four decades of the Cold War. More than anything else, we should keep in mind the primary lesson of the fall of the Soviet Union: Democracy can come to a place only when its people rise up and demand it.
Instead of brandishing military force and slogans about democracy, we must recognize what our real strengths and limitations are. In this part of the world, American power and rhetoric tend to produce countervailing reactions. Demands and direct action are appropriate in self-defense, but in a region struggling to regain its pride after centuries of perceived humiliation by the West, we should speak softly whenever possible. If we really want to encourage forms of government to emerge which we believe will better suit our own interests, then we have to set a powerful example and act indirectly and patiently — even while we take the specific actions truly necessary for our self-defense.
A fine piece by our next Secretary of Defense, maybe State. There’s an excellent section outlining neoconservative misconceptions about why we won the Cold War. The sad thing is that by taking the neocon route in Iraq we’ve set the timetable back on real, postive change by decades.
Hat tip to “Slacktivist”:http://slacktivist.typepad.com/.
UPDATE: In the comments, Dvd Avins points out that, by law, Clark _can’t_ be SecDef because he’s been an active duty officer in the past ten years. Shows what I know.
There’s only one thing worse than being stuck, with a baby, in an apartment in a building that hasn’t turned the air conditioning on yet when it’s almost 90 degrees outside . . .
. . . and that’s putting up with the heat unnecessarily because you never bothered _trying_ the air conditioning, but just assumed that the sign was right and it wasn’t on yet.
If you’ve ever been to Tulip Time in Holland, MI, you know that it could do with a few more pirates. Some enterprising students have “stepped up”:http://www.thehollandsentinel.net/stories/051204/loc_051204002.shtml/ :
Nineteen youths who dressed as pirates have been issued tickets for joining Thursday’s Kinderparade during Tulip Time because they lacked authorization to participate . . . The group of West Ottawa students, calling themselves The American Pirate Association, carried a banner and were dressed in pirate garb when they joined Thursday’s parade . . . Police dispersed the group near the intersection of Eighth Street and Pine Avenue. Most of the pirates fled when police closed in on them, but Fegel and one other “went down with the ship.”
Hat tip to Marty Wondergem, who noted in an email:
My co-worker’s son said the “captain” is a really hilarious guy, and when the police confronted him that what he was doing was illegal, he responded: “Argh, and what would ja do about it, mateys?”
I don’t have the time to get a DC chapter of the APA going, but if somebody else does, I’m in.
Brood X has “started to arrive”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16031-2004May10.html. Didn’t see any today, but if the rain falls as forecasted, they should be out in droves afterward.
In Liberia this sort of thing happens every year, on a slightly lesser scale, with the flying termites known locally as bugabugs. They’d get fried up by the hundreds and eaten as snack food. The neighbor kids brought a bunch of them by on a cookie sheet the first year my family was in Monrovia, and were highly amused by our squeamishness.
I mention this only to clarify that I’ve already done my bug eatin’ for this lifetime, so I get a pass. For the rest of you, “here’s”:http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1866011 a recipe.
It’s hard to remember what life was like before “Chowhound”:http://www.chowhound.com/. For those who don’t know, the site’s message boards are organized regionally and consist of foodies tossing recommendations back and forth endlessly. Search them for the name of the relevant restaurant or city or neighborhood and you’re bound to find a good place to visit.
I am not a foodie — I think that goes without saying, since once you have a child you can only be an ex-foodie. But I’m not even an ex-foodie, just someone who tends to appreciate foodie advice. For Suanna and I, this past weekend was an object lesson in power of Chowhound. We had a couple of nights — one in Philly and one in West Chester — where we needed a place to eat and had no clue at all where to start. Both times I hopped online and, after a few minutes of combing the boards, had solid leads on where to go. Absent the power combo of Chowhound & hotel room Internet access, we would have just picked the place down the street that looked all right, or wandered aimlessly around the neighborhood, finally settling on something at random. As it was, we ate very well both nights. Herewith are capsule reviews.
Monk’s Cafe
This pub is in Central City, near Rittenhouse Square. It’s all about Belgian beer. A good number of their many varieties are too pricey for anything but a special occasion, but they brew a killer Flemish sour ale in-house. Suanna had a wonderful drink called the Ephemere which was sort of a cross between a Belgian-style beer and a good hard cider. The food is standard bar fare, gussied up with homemade bread and gourmet cheeses. Mussels are their other big thing, which we didn’t try, but as a result ate far more cheaply than most websites suggest this place is.
Tacqueria Moroleone
I didn’t know this, but the Brandywine Valley is the mushroom capital of the U.S.A. Ergo, there’s a large population of seasonal laborers. Ergo, there’s a disproportionate number of good Mexican restaurants in the area. The one that Chowhound directed us too was Tacqueria Moroleone. There was no address online; we had to ask twice for directions, and found a very unassuming place in a dingy strip mall. Service was lousy, but the food was glorious. I had _molcajete_: basically fajitas, but with the meat and veggies served in a bowl of lava rock, simmering in sauce, instead of fresh off the grill. It was mind-blowing. A quick web search indicates that the word refers to the bowl, not the dish itself, though on the menu it was just ‘molcajete.’ Remember that word. It’s yummy.
Singh Thai
This is not a Chowhound find, but a local grapevine one that I’ve been meaning to mention for a while. It’s a new Thai restaurant in Arlington, right near Court House metro (and consequently walking distance for Suanna and I). If it’s not quite the best Thai food in DC, it is unquestionably the best _value_. It’s dirt cheap, and I just hope they can manage to stay in business while maintaining both their prices and their quality. (They did save some money by composing their menu without consulting anyone fluent in English.) They have solid Panang curry and superb pad thai. Don’t miss their froo-froo drinks, too — they have a long list of ones that come with umbrellas and the like. Great fun. Mango margarita: highly recommended. Mango martini: not so much (should have guessed).
Part of getting old is realizing that used bookstores, while very cool, are not quite as cool as you think they are when you first start browsing them in college. The realization comes gradually as you start to see many of the same books in diverse stores. Those certain titles that were wildly overprinted five and ten and twenty years ago find themselves clogging musty shelves across the country — and they’re probably not the titles you’re looking for. It’d be fun to compile a list of such books. Here’s a start: have you ever seen a fantasy/sci-fi section without at least one big blue copy of _The One Tree_ by Stephen Donaldson?
The lustre of browsing used bookstores is also tarnished somewhat when you already know of more books that you’d like to read than you’ll have time for in the rest of your days. That’s not to say that I’m not always open to new authors, only that the threshold required to pique my interest is a little higher than “seems interesting there on the shelf.”
These days, when confronting a used bookstore, I don’t so much aimlessly browse as spot-check for the things I want to add to my collection: hardcover editions of _Blood Meridian_ and _Suttree_, anything I don’t already have by W.H. Auden or Wallace Stevens, wacky editions of _1001 Nights_ or _Alice in Wonderland_. The list is longer than that, but not so long that most used bookstores fail to have that special something that I want that I don’t already have. When I moved to Arlington from Maryland a few years ago I did an exhaustive sweep of all the used bookstores in the area, and came away bitterly disappointed.
By these standards, “Baldwin’s Book Barn”:http://www.bookbarn.com/ in West Chester, PA is an exemplary place. It’s a four-storey barn full of books, emphasizing local history but with a good mix of everything else, including a surprisingly big children’s section. The best part is that they manage to fill the four stories without resorting to the sea of mass-market paperbacks that form the bulk of so many used bookstores’ stock. Almost everything there is actually shelfworthy[1].
My haul there consisted mainly of things for Ella down the road: Andrew Lang’s _The Green Fairy Book_ and _The Red Fairy Book_, along with a _Tales from the Arabian Nights_ edition by him full of educational (and often wildly politically incorrect) sidenotes. Suanna also found a couple children’s books for Ella, too. The big ka-ching, though, was the four-volume first American edition of the Mardus & Mathers translation of _A Thousand Nights and a Night_. A find like that is enough to make you start aimlessly browsing used bookstores again.
fn1. _shelfworthy_: Visually pleasing on the shelf, based on shape, texture, and spine. Mass markets are almost never shelfworthy, and clothbound editions (especially with the dust jacket off) almost always are. Unless I’m picking up something to read on the airplane, I only buy shelfworthy books anymore.
UPDATE: More on shelfworthiness in “this post”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/2004/05/in_defense_of_s.html.
The schtick is “here”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000389.html. “Glen”:http://www.engel-cox.org/ obligingly asked me three questions, answered below.
_What is your goal as a role-player? That is, why do you play RPGs and what do you get out of playing them?_
I love make-believe and always have. Every once in a while you come across someone who thinks that it’s appropriate to stop such activity at a certain age, which is nonsense. RPGs are a sort of structured collective storytelling, and thus combine three of my favorite activities in the whole world: telling stories, playing games, and hanging out with friends. It doesn’t even seem fair that it’s possible to do those three things all at once, but hey, sometimes the world is a wonderful place.
_You just won VH1′s contest for the ultimate concert. Name three currently active musical acts that you would put together for a private concert at a local venue for you and 50 of your close personal friends._
At first I tried to come up with list of three acts that would all set a similar tone for the evening. But this is going to be a very long concert, so some variety is OK and even desirable. Had I chosen three singer-songwriter-y types, the upstairs at Common Grounds would be the right venue, but as it is we’ll need a decent sound system, so it’ll have to be The Black Cat.
First set: They Might Be Giants. Among the 50 people I’d pick, at least a third of them would have a strong opinion as to what they’d like to hear the Johns play. This’d be an all-request set, with the Band of Dans there too. I’ll be fine as long as they end with “She’s an Angel.”
Second set: Radiohead. But first both bands would be up there, playing “Cyclops Rock” followed by “Killer Cars.” A year ago I might have insisted that they stick to their Bends/OK Computer material, but “having seen them live”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000050.html, they can play whatever the heck they want.
Third set: Tom Waits. But first Radiohead will stay on the stage and they’ll play together: “A Wolf at the Door” (Waits on vocals) and “Filipino Box Spring Hog” (with the band totally rocking out). I can imagine TMBG and Radiohead playing together, and Radiohead and Waits, but not TMBG and Waits, hence the order. By this time it’ll be late, so it’s OK if everybody just collapses to the floor and Tom’s up there with just his piano while we stare at the ceiling. He can play whatever he wants as long as he ends with “Anywhere I Lay My Head.”
_With the new popularity of the long form video for adapting classic books (i.e., Lord of the Rings), what book(s) would you like to see adapted next as a movie series with the same loving attention to detail?_
So . . . many . . . choices . . . I’ll just write about the first two things that came to mind as options.
_The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever_, by Stephen R. Donaldson — Probably the weakest part of this trilogy is Donaldson’s purply prose, but that’s not a problem for film as long as whoever adapts the screenplay doesn’t fall into the same trap. Hollywood’s probably not ready for the fantasy anti-hero, but there’s plenty of juicy cinematic bits to move things along. It’d be worth the price of admission just to see a cool visual treatment of the Bloodguard and of Saltheart Foamfollower.
_Snow Crash_, by Neal Stephenson — Take out the chapter-long disquisitions on the nam-shub of enki, and you have a very cinematic book here. Plus, it’d be fun at cocktail parties to let it drop that the book was written in ’92, _before_ a lot of the stuff in it was even on the horizon, whereas now a lot of it seems pretty darn topical. (Well, not the Mafia running pizza delivery, but we can dream.) On second thought, why would you ever want to be at a cocktail party attended by people who’ve never read _Snow Crash_?
_Lord of Light_, by Roger Zelazny — Because _Amber_ wouldn’t really work as a movie, but you’ve got to get that Zelazny dialogue up on the screen somehow. Vedic godlings, high tech, demon spirits, and a monkey dude: how can you go wrong?
Remember that thrill of walking around with you first laptop? “All my documents, all my email, everything I ever wrote, is _right here with me_.” I’ve finally joined the other kids on the block and taken the next step: a “USB keychain drive”:http://www.memorexthumbdrive.com/products/idx_th32507725.htm. It can’t hold _everything_, but easily stores all of it that isn’t collecting dust anyway. It saves the trouble of constantly having to sync the laptop and the desktop, and lets me access my stuff on somebody else’s computer if I need to. Plus, it’s all _right here in my pocket_. That’s so cool.
I’m still stuck on the properly cool solution to my next geeky problem, though: how to play mp3s located on my computer on the the ol’ surround-sound stereo system hooked up to the TV? Running cable is too much of a pain. A basic “FM transmitter”:http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/audio/64fb/ works fine for the car but the quality isn’t up to snuff at home — I tried. And the “Squeezebox”:http://www.slimdevices.com/, while a super-cool toy, is just too expensive. I guess I’ll have to wait until stuff like that comes down in price. Or until I run out patience — whichever comes first.
