I was trying to explain to a young man why you always, always carry a writing notebook and a pen, so I showed him this genuine, overhead-in-the-hallways, can’t-make-this-stuff-up line I had jotted down minutes earlier, and no,  I’m not telling you who said it — not here on this blog, anyway.

But every time I repeat that line  (wickedly including the source) there is much covered-mouth tittering. Not at ROB, of course, who thinks he is a Pulitzer-winning author with a gorgeous reading voice, and he would be right, and who generously gave of his time at this conference, as did Philip Gerard, Pat MacEnulty, and others. And of course, the point is made: you can’t be a writer if you aren’t ready to write good stuff down the moment you hear it.

This was my first year attending the Tallahassee Writers’ Association conference. It was much bigger and better than a conference that size would appear to be, and I really can do little else than blurt out some of my cryptic notes and say, if you are a writer in this region, be at this conference next year!

I also met with an agent, and one thing I said is why can’t I put together a collection of published/publishable writing and publish it to Kindle? Well, she asked, then why do you need me? My response was for the expertise on the things I don’t know how to do.  She had never had that question before. But why not?

Stuff Heard, and Written Down

Speaking of Mr. Who-Does-He-Think-He-Is, Robert Olen Butler told us in his keynote, “Great writing comes from the place where you dream.” The only craft you legitimately earn is the technique you have forgotten. A short-short story has as its center a character who yearns.

Butler also said the Kindle is the future of publishing. He has a Kindle II, and read from it.

Philip Gerard had many good things to share. The persistence of vision is a nearly-perfect metaphor for how scenes work. A character goes into action to satisfy a yearning or escape a fear. If we don’t care about the characters, we don’t care about the story.

“Action is character; we watch what people do and thereby we know them.” (He says this is a second-hand quote.) Plot is often derided, but he holds it dear. (I knew these notes would appear nonsensical out of context.) Setting: he thinks of this as if he were staging a show. Setting is a stage of action. Also consider the apparent subject and the deeper subject.

“Choose language carefully,” Gerard said, noting that this is something “you can rarely do in the first draft.” Be sure you “earn the emotion.” As for creative nonfiction, it has to pass the “eulogy test” (alas, I no longer recall what that is!).

On building a book, Gerard first quoted F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Every person should have a bottle of champagne chilled at all times.” The minute you give a book to someone else, you’re no longer alone. The writer’s work ethic involves a “peasant mentality” — the willingness to work a 12-hour day, all the way through.

In the first stage,  you work on the pre-vision.

What is the aboutness of the work? It can boil down to something very simple; it’s somebody in motion toward a goal.

Why do you want to write this book? Nobody can tell you what book to write. What’s in it for you?

A good ending has rectitude.

Pat MacEnulty (Sweet Fire, among other books), spoke about voice. “Once I find the voice, then the book writes itself.” “Most writers are actors,” assuming roles. As writers, we are allowed to hear voices in our heads. “Don’t censor the voices.”

Try having your characters say one thing and think another.

There are many approaches, but try layering: build a skeleton of your writing. She likes beginning with dialog and then adding action and description. For description, be sure to note the quality of light.

What is it like to be inside that character’s body?

Every scene does not need conflict and resolution, but a scene is more engaging if there’s tension in it. Let the reader experience the events.

Try writing scenes as if they were in a play (just as an exercise).

More Gerard (workshop, The Retrospective Narrator): If I’m a retrospective narrator, ask, how retrospective am I? Where am I in reference to this story?

A story is told by somebody, to an audience, at some time, for a reason.

Gerard also mentioned the Kindle. (The Kindle would come up at least four times at the conference.)

Have a business plan for your writing career.

Yet more Robert Olen Butler: Write what is authentic. Write every day. Begin close to your demographic. Go straight from sleep to writing. Use muscle memory. Listen to your writing (thrum thrum thrum… TWANG).

It’s always a struggle, but you learn how to struggle.

Books and other Writing Recommended, Seen, Desired

Pat MacEnulty, Sweet Fire

Robert Olen Butler, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain [since borrowed and read -- quite fabu]

Robert Olen Butler, Tabloid Dreams

Philip Gerard, Secret Soldiers

River Teeth – see Gerard’s essay, “Thirteenth Hour”

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But I had this link roundup written, so here you go. As more of us are on Facebook sharing links left and right, the link roundup feels a little less necessary, but there are times when I want to share links people have sent me that are more fun in the aggregate.

Bits n Pieces

I like the voice in this inaugural post on this blog from New York Public Library.  Nice job, folks (except for your craptacular URLs — just “fixed” the link so it would point to all the wobbly stuff on the end — craptacular stuff gone, thanks NYPL!).

My writing friend Thomas Peele (we were at USF together) is one of the investigative journalists who seriously rocked an unsolved Bay Area murder.  I wonder if he and his peers are reinventing journalism?

A friend forwarded this Yahoo article mocking a Virginia resident’s “stimulus” suggestion to invest in local craft brewing.  Let’s see:  local labor, local products, American grains and transportation — what’s not to like?

(Did you know homebrewing was still illegal in six states?)

True confession: until I went to Code4Lib, I thought Rhode Island was actually an island (which in my head explained why it was so small). I don’t have a link for that. Just wanted to share.

Tallahassee Sundries

Do you tweet in Tallahassee? Add the #tallahassee hashtag to relevant tweets.

The Big Read is coming to Tallahassee! It’s Fahrenheit 451, and it coincides with the TWA conference (discussed below).  Yay for Leon County Library, Tallahassee Community College, and everyone else involved! I’m going to buy a used copy of Fahrenheit 451 so I can write in it. (I had a copy… in fact, I may still have it. Hmm, no, on closer inspection, that’s Frankenstein.)

Whoa! Tallahassee Writer’s Association just had a major website makeover! Haven’t hit all the links yet, but it’s at least surface-pretty. The old website made my eyes bleed. Oh hey — blush — my Pushcart nomination even gets a mention.

Speaking of which, the upcoming TWA conference, April 3-5, will be awesome. Robert Olen Butler, Philip Gerard, many other good folks, plus a book fair that Sunday (come by and buy my books — I’ll sign them!).  Zowie! I am genuinely enthusiastic (and I’m doing a small session Sunday morning on creative nonfiction). Hope to see some of you there!

Finally, are there any local homebrewers interested in participating in The Big Brew on Saturday, May 2? I did a half-batch of Saison du Mont this weekend (extract version — all ingredients are at Homebrew Den) to see if I like it and to tinker with my technique. (Our house is now perfumed with sweet and bitter orange, slow-cooked grain, and warmed honey. I won’t know for a month or more if it tastes good, but anything the color of a bull’s-eye caramel that smells that yummy is almost worth making anyway.)

Why Homebrew?

I have realized that homebrewing takes the place of rose-gardening, which I can’t do here in Tallahassee — our house is all shade, and it’s too hot/humid anyway. It’s all the same skills and predelictions: very specific domain knowledge, lots of planning and strategizing, many subspecializations, many enjoyable hours whiled away thinking “what next,” gradual, iterative skill acquisition, interesting gadgets and equipment that can be acquired one little bit at a time — and you can spend as little or as much on it as you want and your pocketbook allows.

Plus, I consider roses and beer very practical outcomes (though I never had to exercise extra hard to work off the roses).

Regarding purchases, I do practice restraint, though it pained me not to walk out of the store this Saturday the proud owner of the Funnel of my Dreams or a gleaming stainless steel digital scale… but oh, someday when my ship comes in: between specialty baking pans, siphons of every size and shape, and a suite of funnels so large they could drain Wakulla Springs,  I’ll need a second kitchen!

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Milk Movie Poster

I wonder if years from now I will be more taken with where I saw Milk – in a weary, mostly empty theater in Tallahassee, sitting amid a small clutch of Southern gays and liberals (going at least by their Birkenstocks and hybrid cars) — than that I saw it at all.

Milk is a strong biopic, respectfully (but not too respectfully) crafted. Because I grew up in San Francisco and lived in the Castro district in in the late 1970s, a place and time where most of the movie takes place, and because I was at least a bystander for some of the public events, and knew what the principals looked like and in some cases how they spoke and moved, I have a standard for “being there” few movies could hope to match.

Yet Milk not only met and often exceeded my expectations but moved beyond the usual biopic you-are-there territory, doing justice to the idea of a portrait as a reflection of us all.

Sean Penn is distinctly Harvey, all geeky elbows and mobile, comical face (I have a poster of Harvey in a clown costume, a role he loved and a job he sometimes held). It is a remarkable performance, one which proves the phrase, “he disappeared into his role,” and if Penn does not get an Oscar, I give up on the Academy for good.

Scott Smith was off-stage to me by the time I moved to the Castro, so I accepted James Franco without question; he certainly evolves well from a gay hippie sprite to a sadder, wiser ex-lover tired of playing second fiddle to Milk’s political cravings.  However, though Emile Hirsch captures Cleve’s mop-top and puckish face, and the right words came out of Hirsch’s mouth, with all that skipping and arm-flopping, Hirsch is far more gamine than Cleve Jones as I remember him from that era, with all apologies for the rough red pen of memory. (Perhaps, among an movie-set army of Castro Clones, Cleve was recreated as the token twink.) Still, it is a brave person who agrees to have his fashion choices from the 1970s recreated with unnerving fidelity, and Hirsch’s impossibly-large glasses and tight tees were spot-on.

Alison Pill works all right for me as Ann Kronenberg, but only because she was someone I do not remember seeing close up; but I still wonder if Pill’s pudding-face captures the toughness of a biker chick who was one of very few females in a power role in the testosterone-charged gay political era of the late 1970s in San Francisco. Ann “likes women,” but is never seen with one, and when she begins working in Supervisor Milk’s office, Ann makes an unexplained shift from jeans and leather jackets to the tight sweaters and long skirts of the Mr. Goodbar era (even as Cleve is told to wear what makes him comfortable) — a point that could have been played out a beat longer, with clarification. Yet Supervisor Dan White is played with unnerving fidelity by Josh Brolin, who carefully does not go over the top and just as carefully does not hog the screen, while Harvey’s boyfriend Jack Lira, played by Diego Luna, could be any politician’s uncomfortably unstable love interest.

I had hoped for more views of the Castro neighborhood itself, but that’s because I’m greedy; any more, and the focus on Harvey and crew would have been muddled by scenery. It’s remarkable how perfectly the set of Milk recreates a vibrant, sui generis neighborhood I have known incidentally since childhood and closely as a young adult, a place I go back to again and again both in the real world and in my mind. I think every important conversation I had in my early twenties took place either while I was going door-to-door with my friend David on behalf of BACABI, the local campaign effort to defeat the Briggs Initiative, or sitting in Cafe Flore on Market Street, drinking then-exotic cappuchinos and watching the world strut by in its tight leather chaps.

The public events recorded in Milk proceed without any surprise for me, comprised as they are of rallies, marches, campaigns, and other crowd scenes I either participated in or had related to me second-hand the day after, often while standing at a bus stop at 18th and Castro. But the movie never dragged, absorbing me in every period detail, every tension among Harvey and his lovers, every new character arriving at just the right moment, every politically-fraught moment teased out on the screen for just long enough and no longer.

A meeting between Harvey and John Briggs in an abandoned lot — where Briggs refuses to shakes Harvey’s hand, and Harvey continues negotiating without losing a beat — was both new history to me and proof of Harvey’s surreal ability to set aside anger and see opportunity, as he commits Briggs to debates that though they appeared on Briggs-friendly ground had the opposite effect statewide.

(The audience was still as a winter night in a scene where Harvey fumes that the proposed “No on 6″ campaign material doesn’t once mention the word “gay.” ‘Not frightening the horses’ was the failed strategy of California’s campaign to defeat Proposition 8. Some have wished Milk had debuted several weeks earlier; with no disrespect to those involved in the movie project, just mere hindsight, I have concluded Milk was a year late.)

Milk also captures beautifully how Harvey served time and again as the balm of Gilead, refocusing an angry crowd on his themes of hope and change. This was no mere parlor trick; it was a gift crucial to Harvey’s leadership, and the stirred, fuming crowds who settle down to chant and clap along with Harvey stand in for not just the determined gay body politic of that time, but the entire, and entirely malleable, human race. Harvey, as imperfect as the rest of us, had a supremely dangerous gift, and he used it nearly every time for good.

Biopics, like all good nonfiction, concoct their alchemy from the true artifacts of the known world, and must skilfully dance around not just real people and events, who often messily refuse to fit their narratives into tidy Aristotelian boxes, but the accumulated truths that occur after the biopic’s events. The headiness of 1970s gay San Francisco had its own powerful letdown in the arrival of AIDS in the early 1980s, and the movie manages to delicately hint at the future without introducing maudlin distractions. There is just the right prefiguring in the casual references to bathhouses, casual sex (which as memory serves was hardly the exclusive provenance of gay men), and, in an early scene cut sharp as a diamond, a speech from Harvey to Cleve about a life filled with many lovers and friends.

Milk concludes with a small, deeply satisfying “return,” repeating a scene from the beginning between Scott and Harvey. In the hands of someone other than Gus Van Sant (a director who in Elephant managed to make teen-killers sympathetic) the return might have been superfluous or even intrusively annoying, but when the moment arrived, I sighed with that sense of rightness and inevitability that only a good ending can bring.

Huffington Post put a spoiler alert around part of the ending of Milk, adding a “whodunit” angle to the movie that initially baffled me, given that Milk smartly begins with the fact of Harvey’s murder, ensuring that the movie’s trajectory is toward Harvey’s life, not his death.

But though uber-reviewers such as A.O. Scott assume everyone knows the finer-grained details of Harvey’s murder (a faint whisper of Pauline Kael not knowing anyone who voted for Nixon),  I will respect Huff Post’s spoiler except to say the ending has to do with Supervisor Dan White — not just what he did, but the frightening way he did it. I had forgotten that the murder of Harvey and the man my parents called “Gorgeous George” Moscone (a dapper, smart politico played beautifully and with silken restraint by Victor Garber) was a peculiar, distant event to many in my own country, though it was as close and real to me as my own hands.

I was standing in the records-room of San Francisco Juvenile Court, sorting file cards by the window, when we heard this news, and a co-worker, pleased with jackass self, said, “See, Karen, they got another one.” The next I knew, I was in my rented room and on the phone; sad, anxious hours slid by without memory, and then I was in the candlelit march from the Castro to City Hall that in Milk both stands in for the arc of Harvey’s achievement and rightly concludes the film.

A time long ago and far away; and now, with Milk, risen again, in all of its wit, hope, pain, and beauty.

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Over on greenhybrid.com I posted this story of how Action Auto, Proctor Honda, and greenhybrid.com all done me good, in an everything-is-miscellaneous kinda way.

Tayari Jones had reached out for advice about getting back into her writing groove. I admitted I had fallen away from getting up early, and declared defeat. But since writing that, I’ve had two very successful 5 a.m. personal-writing sessions… to paraphrase a great bard, I’ve been jammin’ at the break of day.  Thank you, Tayari!

Seventeen WorldCat libraries now own The Best Creative Nonfiction Volume 2! Oooh, I can see Charlotte-Mecklenburg from my house! I sent out two postcards with Librarian Haiku — one was solicited, one wasn’t. Geeze, I can’t even GIVE away my haiku. Really, send your snail-mail to kgs at freerangelibrarian dot com and prepare to be astounded!

The local writing workshop I manage celebrates its first-year anniversary in October. Go us!

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Tallahassee Farmer’s Market

Originally uploaded by freerangelibrarian
The market up at Timberlane doesn’t look like much, if you’re accustomed to “farmer’s markets” with masseurs and string quartets — folding tables and veggies, no oompah bands — but at least a handful of farmers are there year-round.

It takes some dedication to go to the farmer’s market in the blustery months, when you’re lucky to score garlic greens and maybe some resilient spinach, but as the photo shows, we’re getting into the easy season, when it’s a joy to fill shopping bags with sun-drenched ‘maters, fancy lettuces, eggplant, peppers, green beans, Manatee Farm’s wonderful oyster mushrooms, and wickedly sweet strawberries.

I’m not all about the veggies, however, and two weekends running I’ve scored fabulous local fish. Last weekend it was clams from ABC Clam Company in Sopchoppy. I rested the clams in cold water for four hours so the clams would spit out whatever it was they had brought from the sea, then steamed them with a little white wine and butter and whisked them to the table with crusty brown bread.

I also bought some tupelo honey from the fisherman, and asked him if he had produced it. “No, I used to, but it’s too hard,” he replied. “Now I let the bees make it.” It was Easter weekend and I was splurging, so I made tupelo ice cream–just vanilla custard ice cream with tupelo honey instead of sugar. It was satin-smooth, and tasted of sunlight and spring afternoons.

At the urging of a work colleague this Sunday I went to Mike’s, an Asian food and fish store. In the past I have been underwhelmed — it seemed weary, and smelled of old fish — but something has indeed happened at Mike’s: it was bright and tidy, with only a faint, clean aquatic fragrance to tip me off that the fish counter was still there in the back of the store.

A knowledgeable young fishmonger pointed Yessum toward the grouper cheeks. (“Yessum” is who I am in many Southern establishments, as in, “Yessum, those grouper cheeks are right fresh.”) Grouper is a moderately-flavored local fish, and its cheeks are sweet delectables that bake up moist and firm; at $6.99 a pound, grouper cheeks are an insanely good deal.

Mr. Fish apologized for the shortage of other fish — apparently there was a run in the store the previous day, and their fish is the real McCoy, pulled in from our Gulf waters — but there was no need; I was a happy cook. I baked the grouper in a drizzle of olive oil, sea salt, and fresh-ground pepper, and served it over a mound of eggplant sauteed with Vidalia greens, garlic, peppers, and oyster mushrooms, accompanied with whole-wheat couscous perked up with organic parsley for color and bite.

I still eat meat now and then, but the more I learn about factory farming, the less interested I am in commodity meat — and the more I paddle toward local, sustainably-caught fish. With Southern Seafood anchoring the northern end of town and Mike’s for those of us in these parts, and rumor having it that New Leaf, when it finishes expansion, will have a fish counter, plus fine establishments such as the Shell Oyster Bar to keep us in mollusks, there’s no shortage of oceanic protein to keep us Dixievore pescetarians happy and well-fed.

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Usually I stop doing something for Lent. (Quick synopsis of this season: According to the Scripture, Jesus went into the desert. The Devil sought to tempt Jesus with worldliness, but Jesus, thrice, resisted. He came out of the desert, got whacked, and three days later rose from the dead. Notice how there are no bunnies in this story.)

My own Lents of previous years have been fairly typical. For 40 days (less a few slip-ups), I deny myself that “thing” — fat, carbohydrates, refined sugar, whatever. Then I observe the Passion of Christ, celebrate His rising, and resume my regular habits.

But Jesus didn’t go into the wilderness to take off a few pounds. He was looking for other things, such as introspection, education, and — most crucially — transformation.

This Lent I’m not looking for a quick diet or for presto abnegation. My goal this Lent is to move farther down the food chain, and closer to our local growers. I want to connect with the miracle of the food cycle right here in the Big Bend region. I want to understand where my food comes from. I want to talk to the people who grow my food. I want to know that what nourishes me supports my neighbor.

I’m not on some “test” where I do or do not “cheat.” Some days are easier than others, and travel is always tough. But I’m trying to avoid refined flour and sugar, and I’m also trying to embrace local markets, local foods, local farms, regional, seasonal products, and in general become more aware of and sensitive to the consequences of how we produce food in America. I’m trying to avoid CAFO meat and dairy, but also to embrace meat, eggs, and cheese from happy animals. I’m asking why I need to buy fruit from Peru or California when I live in an area with its own fabulous produce, and I’m also trying to understand what food should be available at this time of year — not just what we force into availability. As some of my favorite food writers have discussed, I’m trying to be a better omnivore.

Some things are easier than others. The bowls of office candy were hugely tempting for several weeks. Now I look at them and see high-fructose corn syrup and preservatives — basically, government-subsidized garbage. I already fight the tubbiness common to aging office workers; the nervous office nibbling needed to stop anyway. The more I read about our broken food system, the more repelled I am by commodity meat and dairy; I see those poor animals packed shoulder-to-shoulder in feed lots, forced to eat unnatural foods, and I don’t want to be part of that misery. I go to the market and bring home white eggplant and Vidalia onion greens grown in local farms, and my mouth waters all day as I think about how I’m going to cook them.

In a season associated with denial, I’m looking for transformation from a baby lettuce leaf. From a ruddy, hand-hefty tomato. From a sweet, crisp oyster.

Recommended reading: Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma; Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle; Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation.

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Last week’s review of Liam’s should have afforded me some comfort. It’s a relief to see coverage of a restaurant that is not a chain (why does Outback even need a review — do Blooming Onions change that much city to city?), did not last update its interior in the Eisenhower administration, and hasn’t forged new records for critical health inspection violations.

Stiff’s language was even, for once, restrained — which is, believe you-me, a Good Thing. I have written on Chowhound how painful Stiff’s writing can be when the Dem’s editors (clearly distracted by the far more important business of reporting ad infinitum on FSU’s football team) let Stiff stain their newsprint with far too many of his sappy puns, down-home yucks, and windy references to The Good Old Days of forty and fifty years ago (you remember those days, when Jim Crow reigned and women couldn’t get credit cards on their own recognizance).

I won’t even quibble that his review of the actual food at Liam’s is scant on description, as is true with most of his reviews. His background in the industrial-strength hospitality business is evident in his focus on the setting and service (not bad things to address) and his brief, sensory-limited comments that a dish is “nirvana” or that the duck is “rose-pink rare.” (With duck, the first question is always is it rubbery.)

Nor will I dink Stiff, who comments on Liam’s commitment to healthy food, for failing to observe that one current discussion in the foodie world focuses on the environmental tradeoffs to shipping organic goods long distances — as in, flying in organic duck from upstate New York. Liam’s does feature many local foods; the pea shoots that graced my (local, sustainably-caught, sweet as sugar, fresh as a splash of ocean foam) sea bass grew somewhere between here and Thomasville.

Furthermore, with respect to environmentalism, Tallahassee is so far behind on its developmental milestones — the topic is still a big yawn to many in this area, where the unapologetic guzzling of energy resources can border on the grotesque — that Liam’s may have to simply serve a high-demand food such as duck if it’s going to compete with other top-drawer restaurants. I have had duck at a number of local restaurants (Urbane’s so far was the best), and it’s only my gradual interest in ethical, environmentally responsible dining that even has me raise this question.

I will even forgive Stiff for attempting to go foodie on us in his wine discussion while not realizing that despite their small but nice wine list — a fairly new turn at Liam’s — they welcome “BYOB.” They have no corkage fee, and will store and open your wine for you.

But then — for no reason stated — Stiff gives Liam’s four and a half “hats.”

Four and a half effing hats.

Liam’s is a restaurant that is in a completely different stratosphere from most of the — I must say it — crap in this area. Liam’s is often referred to as “big-city-good,” as in, if it were suddenly transported to Manhattan, it could stand proud next to many a restaurant of its ilk. (The lone pho house in Tallahassee is only Tallahassee-good — respectable for this area, just not in a league with big-city pho houses.)

You speak of Liam’s in the same breath as Avenue Sea (in Apalachicola) and Urbane, Sage, and Cypress in Tallahassee (Kool Beanz, Clusters and Hops, and Fusion often enter this debate as well, as do some very good ethnic restaurants, rib shacks, and breakfast or oyster joints).

But based on that ludicrous Gourmet Guide — a guide based on the singularly incomprehensible food rating efforts of Stiff himself — Liam’s is half a hat above Outback and The Melting Pot — two chain restaurants!

But then again, the Tallahassee Democrat’s Gourmet Guide is top to bottom a ridiculous mess.

Sahara — with its hand-rolled dolmas, meat or vegetarian — has three hats– just like Macaroni Grill. Meanwhile, my beloved Shell Oyster Bar has three and a half hats — right up there with Stiff’s rating for The Olive Garden.

In the “light meals” category, Jenny’s Lunchbox — a cute and tasty breakfast and lunch joint — has only three hats, while Crisper’s, a forgettable chain, has three and a half.

On and on it goes, no rhyme or reason.

I have tried in this discussion to steer clear of drubbing truly local restaurants. In food reviewing, one visit should never torpedo a local business. My sense is that local reviewing can focus on what’s great and good, and leave the rest to inference or at least, where a place must get reviewed, to unavoidable conclusions backed with extensive evidence. But let’s just say that I’ve dined at enough places on the list — some of which serve what I think of as The Food You Eat When You Go To Hell– to say without any equivocation that the “Gourmet Guide” is neither gourmet nor a guide.

Read Chowhound, ask around, learn about the area. We don’t have enough great places to eat, but we do have some, and they deserve your business. Just steer clear of the Democrat’s restaurant advice, or as happened to me far too often when I was very new here, you’ll get Stiffed.

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Somehow the transmitter had separated. The tip, which constrains all the innards of the transmitter, screws off, which is a good thing if I ever need to change the fuse (I didn’t even know it had a fuse until the transmitter deconstructed), and a bad thing for someone with a purse so messy for all I know the WMD are in there.

I found four parts. The only problem is that there are actually five, and the missing part is a bespoke little spring that makes the doomaflatchy stay firm against the whatsis so the whole thing works.
So I wrote Kensington and asked them if they sold a spring or could provide one.

No, they said, they couldn’t. (This unit is being discontinued, Amazon advises.) But they could send me an entire replacement unit, assuming I could provide them with my address (easily acquired; I ran outside my house to make sure I remembered it correctly) and the serial number on the unit, which gave me a day’s pause as I rummaged through my office (strangely evocative of my purse) for the handy Brookstone magnifying glass a friend had given me two years ago. (I think the magnifying glass was a regifting thrice removed from friends who are pretending they aren’t growing old, and who will later complain that they can’t read the serial number on the back of their iPod/transmitter/Treo/computer, etc.)

Now, I’m sure Kensington doesn’t replace entire units for every customer query or problem. I’m guessing “you need an X fuse” is their most common response, and if I could fix this with a fuse, I would. I also suspect that tepid reaction to their new unit might make it good policy to send out freebies for customers with problems with the old ones.

But I already adored Kensington for the value this product had added to my life — and if you think that’s an overstatement, try driving from Tallahassee to Atlanta with only the radio as your companion (which is why it usually stays in my purse: so I have it when I rent cars).

For that matter, try driving to Publix from your home when the local public radio talk show is all a-chatter about poor picked-upon Mr. Vicks who ain’t done nuthin wrong. In exasperation against local radio programming I have used my iPod and my FM transmitter to create Radio Free Tallahassee, and I now donate directly to the public radio shows I regularly download. My iPod transmitter isn’t some miscellaneous bit of technology; it’s part of my local survival strategy (and I went through several other brands before finding one that worked).

So while I wait for the new transmitter, I shall hum to myself quite a bit — and the song shall be “If only we could all be like Kensington.” When my transmitter finally meets its maker, the chances are extremely good I’ll buy another Kensington. If the new unit is a dud, I’m going to be a lot more forgiving, and still willing to give Kensington a chance, and if I like it, I’ll coo all over Amazon. Overall, they’ve set the temperature of my warmth for their company far higher than it had been before I reached into my purse and came up with a handful of metal and plastic.

Meanwhile, in preparation for some Very Serious Work (research about research — the thought makes me dizzy), I ordered The Black Swan from the Leon County library. It arrived, but in the wrong format (CD instead of print). So I wrote the library, and guess what? I got the same service.

The library didn’t say “You ordered the wrong format!” There weren’t demands to come in to get this right or even call them (this was all by email). They immediately reassured me that the right format was on order — and guess what, they even told me when it might arrive. I know they have funky old catalog software that makes it difficult if not impossible to put this last bit of information into messages, but how wonderful that they took the time to share it with me so that I didn’t have to give up and buy the book from Amazon.

I’m always happy at that library — if they don’t have a book, they get it for me fast, and everyone is so friendly. I feel welcome there. But I felt welcome by this email exchange, as well.

The key here is understanding that it’s not the freebie or the close attention to an interlibrary loan. It’s not about the policy or the workflow. It’s about the focus on making — and keeping — happy, even passionate, customers.

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But then I looked in the cache for Bloglines and found my own Chowhound post and the one that prompted it, in reference to this discussion of Urbane, a new restaurant in Tallahassee.

It’s not even the first Chowhound post of mine that has evaporated into the net-ether. Last week I linked to my review of the Shell Oyster Bar, and that vanished. I thought, well enough: they don’t want bloggers using Chowhound as a honeypot.

But what was wrong with the following posts? (Posting dates refer to Bloglines’ feeds, not to Chowhound’s timeline.) I thought we were having a smart exchange about the nature of expression with respect to food.

And how comfortable are we about living in a world where commercial enterprises calling the shots on intellectual freedom — with nary a word to the authors? Yes, I know they say they can do that — but is that the world we want to live in?

The other poster’s comment (sorry, I don’t remember who it was!), Tue, Feb 12 2008 4:35 PM:

“Coffee & Doughnuts” sounds lifted directly from The French Laundry Cookbook. “Coffee & Doughnuts” is one Thomas Keller’s signature dishes. It is one of my most revered and treasured cookbooks. IMHO it is one thing for a recreational chef to prepare something right from a cookbook, but for a “Chef” who is paid for his creativity, technique, and talent to plaguarize…I would expect more than that. I have followed previous threads on different sites and this topic of chefs plaguarizing has been thoroughly dissected. Bascially, is it right for a chef to put a dish on his menu, take credit for it, when it has been directly lifted from another chef. Take classic dishes for example; Nicoise Salad, Beef Bourgogne, Tarte Tatin, the list is endless. These dishes are constantly replicated, however a good chef will reinterpret. In this case the classic dish is actually a cup of joe with fresh doughnuts. Thomas Keller is world renowned for his whimsical approach to classic dishes. So is it fair for another “chef” to steal his dish, even though it was published in his cookbook (meant for the home cook)?

My response (Wed, Feb 13 2008 9:54 AM):

Well — this was not a cup of joe with doughnuts (which I would not have bothered with); it was a silky mocha semifreddo topped with cream — a fake frozen latte — served with doughnut holes, really very moist, hot quasi-beignets. So if the name is borrowed but the dish is reinterpreted, is that not acceptable? In the literary world, titles of books are not copyrighted; unless someone outright trademarks them in advance, they are not protected. I can’t present the text of Pride and Prejudice as my own, but I can certainly use that title and then whimsically write my own take on this classic. To me this is not “lifting” (let alone plagiarizing) but responding. Food is a conversation. Urbane’s chef replied to Keller, “This is how *I* see this dish.” That to me is not only legitimate but delightful. Riffing on other chef’s interpretations is a way of saying we are all participating in an ongoing discussion about cuisine. Urbane’s interpretation may well be conditioned by the idea that in Tallahassee, palates are far less jaded than in the Bay Area, and a local diner might be acutely disappointed by a dish that would seem cute or whimsical for the culinary Brahmins of the world. I appreciate your erudition here, by the way — I will probably never dine at the French Laundry, but it’s nice to find out that a local dish has more classic roots than I realized. I just hope we never find ourselves dining on “Lamb Shanks French Laundry — All Rights Reserved.”

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To celebrate, I’m going to make oyster chowder tonight (I bought a pint of fresh-shucked A-Bay oysters at the Shell Oyster Bar yesterday afternoon) with the very best ingredients I can hunt down, and serve it with the best bread and wine I can find. I plan to have a nice food week, as Shrove Tuesday approacheth, and those jeans I bought four years ago, when we got very serious about South Beach for a few months, are a wee bit snug in the seat. (Cookbook idea: Skinny Bitch Localvore, Southern-Style!)

However, my brain is too numb to write and so I bring you even more link love. Let the love flow!

I had my picture taken at ALA with a cardboard Obama (note: for Sandy, not for me), but I’ll be darned if I can fish it out of this website. They scanned my card, and they know my email, but they can’t point me to my picture? Fun idea, bewildering execution.

David Lynch on watching movies on an iPhone — a priceless 30-second video.

I’m giving a talk on Tuesday about the state of the ILS, updating my presentation from last September with such news as I have gleaned about updates for Evergreen, LibraryFind, Koha, xCatalog, Aquabrowser, WorldCat, and so forth. I’ll be showing some before-and-after slides of sucky OPACs and unsucky OPACs, so suggestions welcome. I have a few but I’m always looking for the nadir of bad design, particularly where the heavy hand of librarians playing interface designer is evident.

(Incidentally, if you look at the presenter evaluations, take note that Michael Norman’s presentation was luminous; he just said some things about the future of cataloging that some folk find a twee unsettling, so you can read his ratings as polarized, versus my usual crowd-pleasing. Bravo Michael.)

In the course of looking for simple ideas to express service-oriented architecture, I found this YouTube video, “SOA this, SOA that.”

I stole my slide design from David Lee King’s talk at Peninsula Panhandle Library Access Network the previous week — white Gills san serif on dark grey, heavy on the visuals, sparing with text. Thanks, David! Great talk, too.

Dan Chudnov goes ballistic on WoGroFuBiCo, and I’m with him. The final report stinketh of typical librarian change-avoidance. We do NOT need to stop RDA; we need to implement FRBR and get it right, not “test” it more; and we do NOT need to do years more of “user testing” to teach us what we already know.

There’s been a Library 2.0 “course correction” which is both healthy and inevitable. Kate Sheehan and John Blyberg are particularly astute on this topic. This doesn’t mean that Library 2.0 is “over”; it means that people are thinking more carefully about what it means (and quite a few people have been doing that all along). My feeling was summed up Friday in a Skype chat with a wise colleague who said the driving question needs to be, “What are we trying to be successful at?” Amen, bro.

OCLC’s governance study, or at least core docs thereof, have been on the Web since mid-November, I learned last Friday. If you skim or read the recommendations, note how without fuss or muss they say meetings will be both f2f and online. No extended hand-writing, no blah blah blah. Also note that they increase the percentage of self-appointed directors on their board (hmmm), eliminate Members Council (a good thing — it has no real power anyway and is too cliquey) and establish regional member groups (fascinating).

Random thought: I like buying books. I like reading online. What I don’t like to do is use my own printer, paper, and toner to print out and staple some unwieldy PDF and try to read it, even if it’s “free.” It’s the clumsiest way to read anything: it won’t fit in my purse, the page-turning gets ridiculous, and then I can’t file it easily if I want to keep it (duh, binding?). Delivery is crucial.

I really wish NPR reporters wouldn’t get cutesy with food reporting and munch over the radio, especially while they’re talking. It’s gross and puts me off my feed. LIANE HANSEN STOP THAT NOW!

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