Do we rage or do we lol?

Cognitive dissonance: econocrushboy Paul Krugman catches one scary-ass quote. Is the correct reaction to swoon or to curl up in the fetal position and shiver?

But speaking of crushboys, don't forget that this Saturday is the Library of Congress Book Festival. No word that I've seen on whether Michael Dirda will be introducing, though it seems like he rarely misses the event. It's not a terribly strong roster this year, unfortunately, but hey, Neil Gaiman. For added random points, the black-flowered feather-in-the-hat crowd will be smushed in around the Children's pavilion this year. In what appears to be an effort to keep the man's feng shui powers of coolth from focusing too hard in any single tent, they shuffle him to a different area each year—fantasy/SF! fiction/mystery! children/teens! DIY shoggotheterica!—which to date has done nothing from keeping his signing lines from outshowing every other author's by orders of magnitude. Sure, size doesn't matter in theory, but tell that to the seven hundredth person in the Gaiman area looking wistfully at the 50 hardy souls fidgeting in the Rocco DiSpirito queue. We'd repine but it's me legs except that so many of the hardcore fans are at least worth chatting to. Wear the right button and you could even get a date out of it.

"A library is just a genteel black hole that can read"

The evidence suggests that L-space governs really good used bookstores as well. Whenever we visit Seesterperson, I wheedle a trip over to her town's bookstore, which combines the virtues of a widely varied stock, an eccentrically organized system, and a comprehensive computerized inventory: you can poke around the shelves for hours, waiting for luck or inspiration or your credit limit to strike, or you can go straight to the counter and have your prey bagged and tagged in a matter of minutes. I generally take a combination approach, bolting back to the front to ask for coordinates on anything particular that comes to mind as I stroll, collecting whatever it is (muahahaha, half-price Sapolsky books, you are mine) and then picking back up in that general area, meandering along, head turned sideways in that enquiring-Scops-owl posture so ideal for cruising the stacks. Doing this back-and-forth routine for things in the general history and sciences section has the added benefit of a quads workout, since those shelves are filed on the second floor (ground floor: sociology, children's books, comics, trade fiction in paperback; basement, hardcovers and vintage; interstitial areas, literary biographies). Should I ever go a-missing, this will be the absolute first place to check.

Tuned to a dead channel

William Gibson was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame this weekend. Took 'em bloody long enough. My generation is full of post-teen boys and girls whose minds were permanently warped by Neuromancer's opening line, "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel," and the subsequent razor-edged sadness that mixed Tom Waits melancholy with violence and a lashing of the 80s' fascination with all things Nippon. He'd written short fiction before that, but Neuromancer caught the moment when computers were starting to be imagined as glistening machines of possibility rather than slide rules in, at best, awkward android bodies, and he took it into the dystopian world with nothing but a faint pang. The oceans were screwed and the people wore plastic, but most of us wanted to visit that future and know those beautiful dysfunctional places.

I owe Gibson bigtime for introducing me to Joseph Cornell's work, but more for adding a gloss of slick strangeness to my adolescent mental landscape. These days the Sprawl seems like a wistful dream, in the face of warming seas and CO2 emissions, and his books' scope has narrowed too. But damn can that man write.