Rose DeShaw » Publications

When Facebook Runs Out Of A Name

Rose — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 12:36:26 +0000

Promised yesterday at work that I would friend Andrew Thomson. (Odd to me that ‘friend’ has become a verb). Always half-exhausted when I get home but I dutifully went to Facebook and typed Andrew’s name into the search engine, only to find that there were 500 of the same name, mostly residing in Edinborough.
Of course he hadn’t told me what his profile picture looked like. Or if he had one. There are a number of A. Thomsons with no picture, giving them that ghost look beloved of those who are so suspicious of the net that they give it absolutely no information while stoically remaining on it anyway.
Being a woman of my word, I painfully scrolled through all 500 and then some, even to the point where the Andrew THOMSONS get so thin upon the ground that they become Courtlands and even Smiths (the way Facebook has of telling you they have run out of the name you’re seeking but here’s some leftover names you might like too. The way a grocery store lures you to other brands. (’Why not friend this Andrew Limekist? He’s probably just as good as the Andrew Thomson you can’t find’). I suppose, if I pressed them, they’d say they’re getting a new stock of Andrew Thomsons in, next week.
While I was Thomsoning, I ran across John Barlow (The Overversion Blog) analyzing Ann Coulter’s non-appearance and self-proclaimed martyrdom at the University of Ottawa. My mind went right back to the time at my Univesity when the head of the American Nazi party came to speak on campus. Wonder if it even exists now?
At any rate, this was in the sixties, that time where revolution was being explored, (before Facebook made revolution impossible, with everyone indoors pecking at their keyboards. If they’d had Facebook in the French Revolution, the guillotine would have been unneccessary, the masses simply flaming them out on the net) – but I digress.
The head of the American Nazi party spoke and we all listened relatively quietly. Heckling hadn’t become an art form then and nobody had a camera phone. I remember his black leather uniform with chains and insignia was very impressive, as though it were wearing the weedy individual inside. His last name was ‘Rockwell,’ I think. Don’t remember his first, nor his words which were simply boring and repetitive. Perhaps he wrote his own speech, bereft of ideas and simply uninspiring. The best thing the university could’ve done was let him talk. His talk was a spectacular non-event and students drifted away well before he was finished.
Meanwhile, the town, which was outraged, cancelled the lines of credit of every professor on campus, meaning they would have to either pay cash (salaries weren’t great in those days) or go over the Cascade mountains to shop, either west to Seattle or east to Spokane.
The concept of simply letting the idiots speak seems to have dropped out of favour these days. Students aren’t stupid. Ann Coulter would have bombed as thoroughly as Rockwell did that day.
As an afterword, I was offline two days this week. I returned to only 111 messages, 75% of them Facebook. The downtime made me reconsider whether or not my goal of friending to 5000 is truly worth it. If it is just a numbers game or something more? After all, I could’ve simply friended as many of the Andrew Thomsons as Facebook would allow, yesterday, then come back today and friended the rest. If I am not looking for quality but only quantity, that would put me well over 3000.
The thing is, I really like a great many of the new faces I’ve friended, people I simply would’ve known nothing about if I hadn’t done so. I really enjoy hearing from all the small presses, (with the exception of the Good Samaritan Anthologizing one which does not say it is a Vanity, Self-publisher until you get well into it. This sort of enterprise must be honest or it is doomed to be shunned. By me, anyway).
So am I going to stay the course that Facebook never intended as a goal and friend 5000 new people, presses and projects in the months leading up to June? Ii promised myself I’d stop in the summer and go sit outside in my garden and receive renku (short haiku) from the neighbours to plant on bamboo stakes in my garden, among the poppies, a much worthier enterprise if only because it is real.

Review of ‘Pleasantly Dead’ – Judith Alguire

Rose — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 14:21:34 +0000

Nowhere is it more true that a book can be like ‘a vacation in the pocket,’ than with PLEASANTLY DEAD by Judith Alguire. (Signature Editions, Doug Whiteway Ed., 185 pp. 2009).
‘The Pleasant’ is the name of an Inn in Ontario Cottage Country, the sort of place that would be packed to the rafters, if it existed. Take the food for example, lush descriptions of all the meals and what those who ate them, thought. (Asparagus crepes, Belgian Waffles, French Roast coffee and cranberry-orange muffins.
The surroundings fit the same vivid description, private cottages all named for trees as well as rooms upstairs in the rambling, well-kept building, where the dipsomaniac, hypochondriac Aunt Pearl stays. Yes, with The Pleasant, its inhabitants are the particular joy.
Oh yes, murder does occur but gently, pleasantly, if you will. While there is a distinct resemblance to Christie on one of her better forays; a romance, admirable eccentrics, no lack of suspects, the flavor is uniquely Alguire’s own.
Innkeeper Rudley and his wife, Margaret, are as oddly assorted a pair as Faulty Towers ever saw. And when Margaret goes missing, the inn is turned upside down.
Alguire has a light, insightful touch with all the little details. The cover indicates this, a red Adirondack chair struck by rays of a setting or rising sun, overlooking a grey lake and a dark shoreline. In the far right corner of the cover are a neat pair of dead feet. A fishing pole leans casually against the chair back, as though the owner had been trying to snag a trout till someone did him in (and stole his shoes).
Aunt Pearl and the Music Hall are memorable as well as very funny. There is a mesmerizing quality to the prose. Among American authors, Alguire is reminiscent of Phoebe Atwood Taylor’s Cape Cod series, an author she has never read, according to a recent interview. Among Canadian authors she has no equal though the novel reads more British than U.S.
If you want a book to lift you right out of everyday life and set you down in a fascinating world of suspicious guests, great food and lively events, now that Christie’s dead, you can’t go wrong with Rudley and company. I look forward to many more installments from the inn.

The Bookseller’s Friend

Rose — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 16:13:15 +0000

by Rose DeShaw

Oxford Universityeducated Dr. John Henry Ursell died on July 30 in the early morning, according to a hurried phone call we got that night. He was probably about 75 and was a professor emeritus of mathematics at Queen’s University. He was a member of the Irish, British and American mathematical societies, along with many other international associations. He deliver papers and attend meetings of these associations right to the end.

Some students said he was the best teacher they ever had. They trace back their understanding of mathematics to his devotion to helping them understand. Others seemed to see him as a madman.

John, like many other brilliant scholars, had bipolar disorder, perhaps coupled with Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism that, while allowing him to see the world differently, greatly hindered his forming relationships.

Not knowing his name when we first met, I labelled him “the bookseller’s friend.” The day I opened my small out-of-print bookshop for the first time, he was standing on my doorstep. Without a word, he stepped inside and went straight to the science section, where he began removing books from the shelves and piling them in stacks. A few other people had been waiting, too, and dispersed to the cookbooks and fiction sections as I tried to assess what was going on.

John was thickly built, about six feet tall, with a bush of wild, grey, curly hair, a beard and scary eyebrows. I approached him quietly and coughed.

He didn’t respond.

I moved so I was in his line of vision. He didn’t look up.

“Excuse me?” I said. He finished with the first shelf and moved to the next. I decided he must be deaf.

“COULD WE TALK?” I said, finally, as loudly as I could.

He paused and looked at me as though I’d become unhinged. “LATER!” he bellowed back. “RIGHT NOW I’M BUYING BOOKS!”

“Oh, okay,” I said softly and tiptoed away, mindful of what I’d been taught during bookseller training: “Never disturb the fish.”

Just then my youngest son began playing his Twisted Sister album upstairs at top volume. John stopped abruptly, picked up a stack of books and walked to the counter, where he began piling them up again. I reminded myself to kill the teenager upstairs when I had a chance and started adding up the total.

The phone rang. I stopped to answer it. John glared at me.

I got off hastily and started adding again. The phone rang again. I reached for it, but John was faster.

“SHE’S BUSY!” he bellowed and slammed the receiver down. I took the phone off the hook and added up the numbers more quickly, then agreed to a 20% discount, but only if he took the books with him right then.

“No car,” he said, never mincing words. “Too much to carry.”

“My husband will deliver them,” I said sweetly. “What address?” I asked, never realizing I would be the only bookseller not storing his purchases forever and ever and ever.

And that was how our long association came into being. At one point I found a builder to put an extension on his house so he could continue to buy books and have enough room for them.

During our relationship, I discovered his vast curiosity about everything in the world. A couple of years after we met, I discovered, at the Salvation Army store, a collection of lurid paperbacks from the 1950s on the reality of UFOs. I brought them home, priced them and shelved them. John discovered them with glee, bought them all and donated them to Queen’s University’s Douglas Library. “They have nothing on this topic,” he said, with an air of incredulity.

After waiting a decent interval, the library donated the whole collection back to the Salvation Army, whereupon I bought them again, gleefully noted they still had my pricing on them, and reshelved the lot.

When John discovered them back on my shelves, he was furious. He promptly bought them to re-donate them, vowing this time to keep a closer eye on the library.

I could see the four of us going on like this forever — Me, John, the Douglas Library and the Salvation Army. A nice little money-maker.

This month, John was registered to attend a meeting of the Canadian Number Theory Association at Waterloo University.

Rose DeShaw is a Kingston writer.

Article ID# 1691381
This piece appeared in the Kingston Whig Standard on August 8th