Song For Today

From Buenos Aires. h/t to Cass and blues from down below:

In the three weeks that I have discovered the lovely Sofía Viola, a day hasn´t passed without listening to “Me han robado el mar” (They Stole the Sea from Me) at least once. Only a few nights ago did she celebrate her 22nd and already she has a collection of more than 300 songs - and they are incredible, a little bit of North Andean folklore, mixed with some 1970s American soul, some fierce jazz for good measure, all delivered with a stage presence that is absolutely electric. An essential in order to understand what´s growing in the Argentine music scene.

Boca Juniors v. River Plate on TV Today

This is why nothing is getting written. Nothing is getting done. 3 pm. Fox Espanol. This is not to be missed. El duelo de titanes en la Bombonera!

h/t nomoreonionbags

Raul Alfonsin, RIP

Raul Alfonsin (1927-2009)

The New York Times notes the passing of Raul Alfonsin:

Raúl Alfonsín, whose presidency in the 1980s symbolized the return of democracy in Argentina and other Latin American nations after an era of military dictatorships, died Tuesday at his home in Buenos Aires. He was 82....

A passionate voice for human rights, Mr. Alfonsín governed from 1983 to 1989, a time of upheaval that included three failed military coups, hyperinflation and food riots. He won praise for prosecuting the military dictators who had preceded him in office.

His government’s inability to manage a sinking economy led him to step down several months before his term was to end, but he remained a respected and influential political figure. When he handed over power to Carlos Saúl Menem, it was the first time in 61 years that an elected Argentine president had been succeeded by an elected president from a different political party.

“My inspiration comes from an ethic, rather than an ideology,” Mr. Alfonsín once said in an interview, “an ethic that believes in the freedom of man.” He liked to call himself “the most humble Argentine,” and his rumpled suits and shabby trench coat became his trademarks.

He will be remembered.

The Times Discovers Argentina. And The Internet. All At Once.

Wow! I'm breathless. Today the Times takes an excursion into pop culture, in Argentina no less, and doesn't quite notice that it's. all. about. the. marketing. How could this happen to the usually streetwise, perceptive Grey Lady?

Let's begin with today's New York Times article about world famous flogger Cumbio a/k/a Augstina Vivero, who is famous in Argentina (and probably Chile) because of her flog, that would be a foto blog, and imo because she sells stuff. Lots of stuff.

Says the Times:

She has catapulted herself to stardom and unexpected affluence by transforming Internet fame as Argentina’s most popular “flogger” into marketing muscle, signing modeling contracts, promoting dance clubs and writing a book about her life.

And she is all of 17.

Notice that the Times thinks that the teenager's famousness grew into marketing muscle, not the other way around, that the marketing muscle made her a star. The Times would make this a story about co-optation of a flogger, not simple exploitation of consumers. But I digress.

And then the Times opines:

Her unlikely popularity is also redefining stereotypes of youth celebrity in Argentina. Ms. Vivero, who is openly gay, describes herself and other floggers as “androgynous” for their unisex clothing. She is comfortable with not being model-thin, eschewing dieting and boasting of her love of junk food and chocolate — a different message in a country where women have high rates of eating disorders.

“We are breaking a lot of barriers,” she said.

I am happy to see barriers break. However, the "we" she's talking about, I suppose, are the other floggers and Cumbio, or it might be her sponsors. Why do I think it's the latter? Nah. That would be too capitalistic. Too cynical.

And the Times even calls an expert witness:

Floggers are not “like hippies or punks, who had ideals of fighting to change the world,” said María José Hooft, who wrote a book, “Tribus Urbanas,” on youth subcultures in Argentina. “Floggers don’t want to change the world. They want to survive, and they want to have the best possible time they can.”

The Cumbio craze really took off after Guillermo Tragant, president of Furia, a marketing company, discovered Ms. Vivero and the floggers last April while scouting for fresh faces for a Nike sportswear campaign. Nike wanted “real people from the streets,” Mr. Tragant said.

That's it. They don't want to change the world. They just want to have the best possible time they can, and consume lots of really neat stuff, and the "Cumbia craze" really took off AFTER the marketing guy got involved. Oy.

Congratulations, Grampa

So. Diego Maradona is now a grandfather:

Soccer great Diego Maradona says being a grandfather has given him a ''burst of youthfulness.''

Benjamin Aguero Maradona was born Feb. 19 in Madrid to Giannina Maradona and Sergio Aguero, who plays for Atletico Madrid and for Argentina's national team.

''I thought saying the word 'grandfather' was for old men,'' the 48-year-old Argentina coach said, ''but when I saw Benja, I was overcome with a burst of youthfulness.''

Asked which team his grandson will root for, Maradona said: ''He'll choose.''

That's something. Especially because for the past 32 years, the entire world of football can be divided into two parts, depending on one's view of one emblematic event, Maradona's June 22, 1986 goal in Mexico City against England:


Let the shouting begin.

This Isn't Your Grandfather's Argentina

It's about time.

Argentina has thrown out Holocaust-denying British bishop Richard Williamson, saying he must leave the country in 10 days.

The Interior Ministry said last night Williamson had failed to declare his true job as director of a seminary on immigration forms and because his comments on the Holocaust "profoundly insult Argentine society, the Jewish community and all of humanity by denying an historic truth".

Williamson's views created an uproar last month when Pope Benedict XVI lifted his excommunication ... as part of a process meant to heal a rift with ultra-conservatives.

The flap led the Vatican to demand that the clergyman recant before he could be admitted as a bishop in the Roman Catholic Church. ....

The Vatican had no comment on the Argentine action.

Although Williamson has been in Argentina since 2003, the government's secretary for religious affairs, Guillermo Oliveri, said immigration officials only realised he had made an undeclared change of jobs when the controversy hit the press.

But Mr Oliveri made clear the Holocaust uproar played a key part.

"I absolutely agree with the expulsion of a man residing in our country following his statements (denying) one of the greatest human tragedies," he said.

And the Vatican had "no comment"? That's disgraceful.

h/t to AMERICAblog

Argentina Breaks Up Farmers' Protest, Strikes Continue

Police Break Up Today's Protest

This past Spring (Fall in Argentina) Argentina's president, Cristina Kirchner, decided to raise export taxes on grains. This has led to more than three months of bitter protests by farmers, essayed here, and to shortages of meat, oil, flour and fuel. Kirchner has refused to repeal the tax increase, which she claims will cut inflation and increase food supplies to the poor. Farmers have responded by cutting off transportation routes in an effort to strike back at the government. And the government has said in response to blockades of roads by farmers that it would guarantee free travel on all roads in Argentina.

As a result, food that normally ships to Europe and Asia has not made it to port, and hundreds of thousands of gallons of spoiled milk have been dumped on rural routes, and there are huge shortages of food in the capital city and elsewhere. In other words, after more than 3 months, there remains a complete deadlock.

Please join me in Gualeguaychu.

Today, according to AP there was an escalation: the farmers' protests were forcefully broken up and 20 farmers were arrested:

Argentine authorities broke up a farmers' highway blockade Saturday, briefly arresting about 20 protesters including a prominent leader of a months' long protest against an increase in grain export taxes.

The arrests near the city of Gualeguaychu and Argentina's river border with Uruguay were broadcast on national television and threatened to inflame a tense standoff between farmers and President Cristina Fernandez's government. /snip

"The government is not going to pacify us like this — on the contrary. The protest will continue," de Angeli told Cronica TV after his release.

CNN and the photo at the top of this essay provide some details of today's confrontation:

Military police scuffled with farmers as they tried to remove them from a road that protesters had blocked with their trucks.

Protesters responded by throwing rocks at police and burning large truck tires in the road. Thick clouds of black smoke could be seen for miles.

Scenes of baton-wielding police in riot gear carrying struggling protesters away in trucks were broadcast live around the country.

The farmers are not alone in their protest. The middle class, according to CNN, supports the farmers:

Thousands took to the streets in Buenos Aires on Saturday to bang pots and pans in support of the striking farmers. They also cut off traffic at busy city intersections, waving Argentine flags, singing the national anthem and asking for dialog between the government and farmers.

And so, too, the transportation unions support the protest:

Roberto Fernandez, chief of the Tramway and Motorized Drivers Union, announced a "total halt of activities" because of the lack of an agreement between the government and farmers who have cut dozens of routes nationwide, preventing buses from passing.

Cargo truckers have been idled by three separate farm strikes and have vowed to protest indefinitely themselves until the strikes are resolved.

According to IHT,the truckers voted Thursday to protest indefinitely and to block about 200 roadways until the strike ends.

Neither side seems willing to yield in any way. There are presently no talks. And none are scheduled. The results? In addition to shortages throughout in Argentina, the protests are driving up food prices globally. Argentina is the world's third largest exporter of soy and corn, most of its exports go to China and the EU.

Corn and soy are in many processed foods, foods people in the developed world eat. If the cost of these items increase, so too will the cost of food. It's unclear whether you can expect to feel the effects of the deadlock at your local supermarket in the near future. It's more likely that the consequences will first be felt in Argentina and then in the EU. But in the global economy, the ripples of the protest will eventually be felt in the US as well.

It Can't Happen Here

It Can't Happen Here is the title of a 1935 novel by Sinclair Lewis. It raises the question whether a rightwing, fascist political party can come to power in the US. It used to be that the very idea was preposterous, unthinkable, impossible. I'm no longer so sure of that, and acknowledging the frightening possibility has changed my reading of stories about events in other countries in frightening, perplexing, alarming ways.

A short synopsis of It Can't Happen Here may help:

It features newspaperman Doremus Jessup struggling against the fascist regime of President Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, who resembles (to some extent) the flamboyantly dictatorial Huey Long of Louisiana and Gerald B. Winrod, the Kansas evangelist whose far-right views earned him the nickname "The Jayhawk Nazi". It serves as a warning that political movements akin to Nazism can come to power in countries such as the United States when people blindly support their leaders.

Hmmm. This isn't the only novel with this theme. The most recent may be Philip Roth's 2004 novel The Plot Against America:

The novel follows the fortunes of the Roth family during the Lindbergh presidency, as antisemitism becomes more accepted in American life and Jewish-American families like the Roths are persecuted on various levels.

The President Lindbergh of the book is, well, a fascist, a Nazi sympathizer decorated earlier by Nazis. And his presidency fosters nationalism, isolationism, anti-semitism and racism as if those were aspects of US patriotism.

The New York Times review described the book as "a terrific political novel" as well as "sinister, vivid, dreamlike, preposterous and, at the same time, creepily plausible."

Preposterous. Because it couldn't happen here, right? Or could it? I used to believe it couldn't happen here. I don't know what we call the trend of the last 7 years, but we cling desperately to the idea that that couldn't really happen here, not really, why, our country is constructed in a way that prevents that from happening, right? I mean, we have the Constitution and a democracy and checks and balances, don't we? Hah.

But what if you believe it could happen? Just assume for the sake of this discussion, that it could. Let's assume that what is happening now and has been happening for the past seven years (the Patriot Act, the torture, the repression, the throttling of free speech, the lawlessness, the signing statements, the extraditions, the raids on immigrants, the endless, long list of abuse of power) became even more pronounced and even more widespread and even more blatant. Then all of those stories we read about the excesses of nearby, foreign governments but dismissed as not being able to happen in the US, all of those stories might actually be read as cautionary tales, stories about what might happen in the US unless things changed, unless Constitutional government were restored.

Three stories, all from South America in the 1970's illustrate this nicely. They make it clear that horrible injustices that have occurred in other countries aren't so impossible in the US. And we need to think of them differently.

Item 1. Jacobo Timmerman:

In the decade of the 1960s, Timerman established himself as a popular journalist, and, before the decade had come to a close, he was able to found two different weekly news magazines. Later, from 1971 to 1977, Timerman edited and published the left-leaning daily La Opinión. Under his leadership, this paper publicized news and criticisms of the human rights violations of the Argentine government during the early years of the "Dirty War". On 15 April 1977, Timerman was arrested by the military. Thereafter, he was subjected to electric shock torture, beatings, and solitary confinement. These experiences were chronicled in his 1981 book , CellPrisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, and a 1983 movie by the same name. /snip

After his release from prison in September 1979, Timerman was forced into exile and sent to Tel Aviv, Israel.

Item 2. Juan Carlos Onetti:

He went on to become one of Latin America's most distinguished writers, earning Uruguay's National Prize in literature in 1962. In 1974, he and some of his colleagues were imprisoned by the military dictatorship. Their crime: as members of the jury, they had chosen Nelson Marra's short story El guardaespaldas (i.e. "The bodyguard") as the winner of Marcha's annual literary contest. Due to a series of misunderstandings (and the need to fill some space in the following day's edition), El guardaespaldas was published in Marcha, although it had been widely agreed among them that they shouldn't and wouldn't do so, knowing this would be the perfect excuse for the military to intervene Marcha, considering the subject of the story (the interior monologue of a top-rank military officer who recounts his murders and atrocious behavior, much as it was happening with the functioning regime).

Onetti left his native country (and his much-loved city of Montevideo) after being imprisoned for 6 months in Colonia Etchepare, a mental institution. A long list of world-famous writers-including Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Mario Benedetti-signed open letters addressed to the military government of Uruguay, which was unaware of the talented (and completely harmless) writer it had imprisoned and humiliated.

As soon as he was released, Onetti fled to Spain with his wife, violin player Dorotea Mühr.

Item 3. Charles Horman:

In 1972, he settled temporarily in Chile to work as a freelance writer. On September 17, 1973, six days after the US-backed military takeover, Horman was seized by Chilean soldiers and taken to the National Stadium in Santiago, which had been turned by the military into an ad hoc concentration camp, where prisoners were interrogated, tortured and executed. The whereabouts of Horman's body were presumably undetermined, at least according to the Americans, for about a month following his death, although it was later determined that, after his execution, Horman's body was buried inside a wall in the national stadium. It later turned up in a morgue in the Chilean capital.

If you read these three items with the idea that Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile aren't the US and these things just couldn't happen here, they are far away, exotic but commonplace examples of banana republic injustice. They feel like scary fiction, but fiction nonetheless.

But if you assume instead that '70's South America isn't really all that very much different from the present US, or, if you insist, from where the US is headed, the stories become chilling, frightening, and worrisome in a new way. They smell like oppression, abuse, repression, and loss of human rights. Are we protected from these things or not? Are we safe? Are we free?

This is just another reason why we simply cannot afford to continue the current trend in this country. And it's a reason why we have to take the present threats from Bushco and its allies seriously. And it's a reason why we need jealously and vigorously to protect our civil rights.

Roberto Arlt

Roberto Arlt (1900-1942)

There is no real road map for US readers to search out and discover the gems in the canon of Argentine writing. I wandered from Ricardo Piglia-- I'm not clear how I found him-- via a story in his novel, Assumed Name, Piglia wrote but attributed to Roberto Arlt, slowly to Roberto Arlt. Of course, my local library had never heard of Arlt or his first novel. But no matter, last week my favorite used book dealer, abebooks.com, delivered El juguete rabioso (1926)("Mad Toy" in English). What a treat this is!

The copy I received formerly resided in the Berkeley Public Library. It was taken out 6 times and then, poof! sold off the shelves. I don't know why this happened, but it's a partial explanation of why my local library's never heard of this book. But I digress.

Arlt was born in poverty /snip After being expelled from school at the age of eight, he learned what he could about literature and life on the streets. He worked at various times as a bookstore clerk, an apprentice to a tinsmith, a painter, a mechanic, a vulcanizer, a brick factory manager and a port worker before managing to get a job on a local newspaper. Arlt's talents for polemical journalism quickly revealed themselves, and he was soon writing a controversial daily column for a national newspaper. Given his background it was natural for Arlt to become attracted to left-wing causes, and the vague (but exciting) rumours coming from the Soviet Union led him to take an interest in Marxism.

His first novel, El juguete rabioso /snip was the semi-autobiographical story of Silvio, a school dropout who goes through a series of adventures trying to "be somebody." Narrated by Silvio's older self, the novel reflects the energy and chaos of early-20th-century Buenos Aires. The narrator's literary and sometimes poetic language contrasts sharply with the street-level slang of Mad Toy's many colorful characters.

Wiki

According to the Notes in this volume (written by the translator, Michele McKay Aynesworth), Jorge Luis Borges in 1929 praised Arlt, "For prose, Roberto Arlt stands out." Julio Cortzar (1914-1984) read Arlt "passionately" in his youth. On re-reading him 40 years later to write an introduction for a book, Cortazar found that his reaction to Arlt hadn't changed, "I find with a surprise that approaches the miraculous [that] Arlt is still the same [great] writer." And Juan Carlos Onetti wrote, "If ever anyone from these shores could be called a literary genius, his name was Roberto Arlt..." Ricardo Piglia calls Arlt "the greatest Argentinian writer of the twentieth century."

I'm not going to spoil this book. That would be extremely unfair. The writing, even in translation, is beyond wonderful. A very brief example (page 122):

And the more the heavenly dome enchanted me, the more sordid were the streets where I did business. I remember...

Those grocery stores, those butcher shops on the edge of town!

In the darkness a sunbeam would highlight the black-red flesh of animals hung on hoods and ropes hear the tin counters. The floor would be covered with sawdust, with the smell of suet in the air and black swarms of flies boiling on pieces of yellow fat, while the impressive butcher sawed away on the bones or hacked at the chops with the back of his knife...and outside... outside was the morning sky, quiet and exquisite, letting the infinite sweetness of spring fall from its bluenesss.

As I walked I was concerned only with the space, smooth as a piece of sky-blue china in its azure bounds, deep as a gulf at the zenith, a prodigious sea, high and still as could be, where my eyes seemed to see islands, seaports, marble cities surrounded by green woods, and ships with flowered masts slipping past sirens' songs toward the fairytale cities of joy.

And so I walked, shivering with delicious violence.

In this small, 1926 book (158 pages), a combination of memoir, pulp fiction, and detective story, Arlt produces gem after gem after gem. I cannot believe this book was written in 1926. I am so very happy to have found it. To me, the book resembles a small box of four exquisite chocolate truffles, something to be savored slowly, something rare, the richness increased by awareness of impermanence.

Globalization: Argentinian Farmers Strike, Food Prices Increase

Argentinian Farmers Protest

Argentinian farmers, whose strike for more than two weeks has crippled the country, have agreed temporarily to break off their strike, to negotiate with the government. Details via the BBC:

Farmers in Argentina have suspended a crippling strike called in protest at rises in export taxes on farm products.

A farmers' spokesman said the 16-day protest - which included roadblocks and caused food shortages - had been halted to allow talks with the government.

Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner had refused to negotiate with the until the action was stopped.

She says the taxes will redistribute wealth, but farmers say they and their communities will be hit hard.

Does any of this matter to the US, and if it does, where is the reportage about this strike in the traditional media?

This story is about globalization. Argentina exports food to Europe and the US. So Argentinian domestic disputes about food and taxation of food have immediate repercussions in the global market and shortly after that in your supermarket. Put another way, the policies of the Argentinian government as it attempts to handle its domestic economic crises directly affect the cost of your food.

The strike in Argentina is about excise taxes of up to 45% imposed on food products. According to the NY Times:

Argentina has been one of the world’s main beneficiaries of a global surge in commodities prices. But farmers abhor government measures like export bans and price controls, which are being put into effect to stem inflation and to increase revenue. The farmers say they intend to continue the strike as long as necessary, demanding that the government repeal a new sliding-scale export tax regime that raises levies on soy and sunflower products at current prices.

Ms. Kirchner has said the taxes help redistribute wealth in a country where nearly a quarter of people are poor.

The BBC adds:

Farmers are furious over the government's decision to introduce a new sliding scale of export taxes, raising levies in some cases up to 45%.

President Fernandez - who took office in December last year, succeeding her husband, Nestor - says the taxes are a means to raise badly-needed revenue, curb inflation and guarantee domestic supplies.

Argentina, a leading exporter of beef, corn, soya oil and soybeans, has benefited from the recent global surge in commodity prices.

Apparently, the Argentinian president recognizes that the agricultural sector of her economy is now one of the country's most profitable because of rising global demand for beef, corn, wheat and soybeans. Adding large excise taxes to food products will bring revenue to the government, but the increase in price locally and to global trading partners will also drive demand down. The farmers are, of course, furious:

As well as causing meat and dairy shortages in the shops, the strike has hit exports and triggered clashes in the capital Buenos Aires.

Protesters have stopped lorries carrying farm produce, either turning them back or dumping the goods on the road, while trade at grain and cattle markets was also disrupted.

According to the Times:

Elsewhere in Argentina, farmers blockaded highways to keep trucks from transporting agricultural goods. The government said it would clear the roads by force if necessary to get food to market.

Several suppliers of Argentine soy and soy oil declared force majeure to back off from sending cargoes to China as a result of the protest, following a similar move on soy meal shipments to Europe, traders and industry officials said.

The strike has slashed foreign currency inflows from agricultural exports, sending the local peso currency to its weakest level against the dollar in five months.

As of today, both sides are unable to move expeditiously to solve the problem. The farmers are waiting to resume their strike; the government has proposed talks for Monday. The Guardian notes that the strike is the biggest crisis Fernandez has faced since taking office in December, and says that US ships are caught in the strike waiting to be loaded.

If Argentina does not scrap the excise tax increase, and if it somehow manages to find a way to get farmers to release their goods for sale, the strike will result in further increases in the global price of food.

The strike has already led to shortages of meat and dairy products, paralyzed local grain and livestock trade and forced major exporters of Argentine soy products to renege on some contracts. And this is only the beginning if the matter isn't resolved.

A Gripping Novel

Luisa Valenzuela

I love second hand books. I ordered a copy of Luisa Valenzuela's Black Novel With Argentines from abebooks.com. It was a former library book with dustcover. It cost a couple of bucks. And it arrived quickly, bearing stamps "No Longer Property Of Tacoma Public Library" inside the front and back covers and on the plastic dustcover. This is not what riveting books are supposed to look like. Those are supposed to be comfortably sitting on shelves in the Tacoma Public Library, and in other public libraries, and are not supposed to end up in the discard heap. Maybe, I thought, it's just not in vogue in Tacoma. After all, I reasoned, what do I know about literary tastes in Tacoma?

Tacoma's loss is my gain. This 1990 novel is dark (hence, the title), riveting, sensual, and full of horror. It's not set in Buenos Aires; it's set in a New York City both the author and I know only too well, in the era when the East Village was Bohemian and Alphabet City was a war zone, the two being divided by macabre Tompkins Square Park. The books begins with an inexplicable murder of an actress by an Argentine writer living in the City, and it then travels in circles into the world of the New York fringe inhabited by his lover, her unusual friends and acquaintances.

Because Agustin, the writer, and Roberta, his lover, are both writers, they discuss writing. But Roberta, who is "working" on a novel, and Agustin, who has manuscripts and a grant, do not practice their craft. Their writing has been suspended. It's hard to know for how long. And their talk about "writing with the body" leads to more not writing. And angst. And more talk. You could easily shoot somebody for no reason.

Two Argentinian Gems

Ricardo Piglia

Ricardo Piglia is a remarkable Argentinian writer of fiction most US readers haven't heard about. He's teaching Latin American Literature at Princeton. But this isn't about his professorial occupation; I wanted to rave briefly about two of his novels I had the pleasure to read while I was away.

*Artificial Respiration is a masterpiece from 1981. Kirkus Reviews wrote

Published in Argentina in 1981 when that country still labored under authoritarian rule, Piglia's ambitious, multivalent novel explores the abrasive relationship between the human imagination and human history. Piglia, very much in the tradition of Latin American masters like Borges and Cortazar, employs a labyrinthine plot to worry knotty metaphysical and political questions. Sometimes a detective novel, sometimes a fictional probe of Argentine history, the book is plastic enough to concoct a confrontation between Kafka and Hitler. Piglia's compatriot, Ariel Dorfman, hails it as ``one of the most important Latin American novels of the last decade.''

I loved this book and wished there were a second volume. The books discusses among other things the Argentinian literary canon. This is a novel that should be a part of that canon. Don't miss it.

*Money To Burn is a 1997 true crime novel. Publisher's Weekly wrote about this book that Piglia

again delivers his signature blend of noirish crime and social commentary in this provocative tale of a 1965 Buenos Aires bank robbery and its bloody aftermath, based on a real crime. The story is simple, but Piglia gives it depth by focusing on the sexed-up, drug-abusing, reckless robbers whose actions shocked Argentina.

Telling more would be a disservice. There are surprises. Piglia's writing is taut, and the story moves rapidly. Another novel not to be missed.

How is it, you might ask, that I find these books? It's a question worthy of a real answer. Mostly, I rely on intuition. I find books and authors I like. I use Google and conversation to find books and authors who are compared to or in some way related to the ones I liked. If what I'm finding sounds at all intriguing, I invest $5 or less for a used copy of a book. I always like abebooks.com. Then I read. I'd use my local library if it had any of the books I'm searching out readily available, but it doesn't seem able to serve them up fast enough for these impulses. When I find a great book, I again Google and talk. I'm always looking for suggestions. It is simply remarkable to me how well this method works and how many wonderful books I've found and read in the past year.

In the pre-Internet world, I used this same intuition and sampling search technique to learn all about blues music and then, later, jazz. That was much, much harder: I had to find people (or libraries) with albums they'd lend.

My life has been enriched by this kind of searching. I'm amazed at how many gems I have "found." My standards remain incredibly high, and the shear volume of fantastic books, even limited to my genres of interest, means that I should never run out of new ones to rave about.