The stereotypical library is dying -- and it's taking its shushing ladies, dank smell and endless shelves of books with it.

-- the near-future is as a hybrid, in which I hope to land work in a digital space and less-so involved with the general public. This is a pretty damn interesting article, but it's hardly news (maybe to librarians resistant to the shift). Neat that CNN gave it some attention, however.

[p. 510]

24

these people socalled were not given hearts
how should they be?their socalled hearts would think
these socalled people have no minds but if
they had their minds socalled would not exist

but if these not existing minds took life
such life could not begin to live id est
breathe but if such life could its breath would stink

and as for souls why souls are wholes not parts
but all these hundreds upon thousands of
people socalled if multiplied by twice
infinity could never equal one)

which may your million selves and my suffice
to through the only mystery of love
become while every sun goes round its moon

EE Cummings

• both Wickham and Darcy earn glory through purely violent prowess, their incremental downtime spent goading control of the survivors (and Wickham, until the end, will win their hearts - on the surface his escape-plan is sound, and he is a capable killer).


• The lesser Bennets will be left behind.


• Bingley will be charming and friendly, side with Darcy, but fail to prove himself until the end when he falls defending Jane.


• Catherine de Bourgh and her ilk will upturn their noses at the plebian ruckus and attempt to maintain their lifestyles (think "Masque of the Red Death") until, refusing to leave her neice (recently infected), is left behind.


• The Gardiners are well-defended in their warehouses.


• Pemberly becomes an ideal stronghold with sprawling greens and isolation and the resources to hold-out.

The literary subtext of a zombie apocalypse is usually that civilization is inherently fragile in the face of truly unprecedented threats and that most individuals cannot be relied upon to support the greater good if the personal cost becomes too high.

I am publicy drafting a five-part short called "The Hang Man," in which a practiced executioner - called "the dangler" or "the stringer" - loses his grip. He's too old for his high office. He has been pragmatic, but his mind has largely become abstract. I am being a little liberal with grammar, and I've got a good feeling it won't be to anyone's tastes. Ah well. I like my little existential Western.

The Hang Man

Well, the rampaging sons of the widow James—
Jack the Cutter and the Pock-Marked Kid—
had to stand naked at the bottom of the cross
and tell the Good Lord what they did. - Tom Waits

Son of the Widow James

The Dangler scritches, which is neither a brume nor color.
A ceremony in the deep of him, none see. A deep old in his fingers And slow A bone pencil aches and Hangman eyes sting as do yours and mine but he will not sleep until it's through. And, anyway, he has been thinking. Thinking how there lacks ... something –, there lacks—he thinks (grumbling "ahshit," and then, - resigning).
Lost it again, he thinks.
He eyes his lemon drink.
"—again," he thinks aloud again. And his murmur is like glutted thunder, and he is all too aware of his margins, waxing poetic. They do that sometimes.


Miss Amber graced him it—the lemon-water, not the poetry; she is the sheriff's daughter, named for her eyes, and ... – and ... —his rime is both cataract and the color of milk—and then his pencil breaks.

Until the wayWord wound-up in the gloss of his work, the dangler's lines were straight. Etched-in, descending from the wet-bough sketch by-six-by-four-feet-by-four to drop a man of thirteen stone into an ampersand. Now the cracked pencil tip mars like stray punctuation, like grit or eraser-shaves come between his conscious stream, signs of intimate error that stain the back of his hand. Outside, the weathervane is creaking to the west.


And through the large glass facade of his office, everything out-there is wartercolored and in-nighttime. His vision is poor. Wind kicks up the dust where the ghosts of the town scuffle, and there – he grumbles – "in't a soul but mine to see them." Their faces paper the walls of his workshop, ancient posters as brittle as straw; many of them the only pictures for which some have ever posed. A sedimentary memorial. The new layers plaster the old, the oldest faces forgotten. Over time, even the dangler forgets. So many look the same. Dirty faces, gaunt, dark-haired, scraggled. Faces made mean by fault of being born wrong. They are might-have-been mayors and priests staring out.


And that one in the foremost is of this boy—not as of his portrait, of course, but once-on-a-time – distantly, years since—who dared stare back, who had never looked on a dead thing yet.

They stared him cold. A dozen eyes from behind the wall. Little windows of paper fluttering.


The doorlight washed in wet and bright and spread like inksplatter, as if God Almighty were shuffling papers and accidentally tipped over the sun. The boy is silhouetted in it, sharp planes and the brim of his father's hat—maybe twelve-stone, the dangler remembers; hardpanner, he thinks, by the lank of him, his stance ... — "Hey!-I said. You come out of your revelry old man!"— how the making of demands was such foreign verbiage, which is bred from desertspeak (which come out of grit and a desertheart, so it's said).


Alright, says the younger stringer to the boy. "You got my attention, if you'll have it," and the hangman lay low the some-braided rope with which he wiled away the hour, then spits on the floor at the threshold. It marked the line between civility and threat. But the boy knew where he stood and where he didn't. A good custom.


"This one, on the wall – Jack Darby" the boy says, but names lack that spectrum of color and shape of a picture, the deep-rooted corporeal math his mama bestowed, translating to fourteen-some stone and eight-feet of rope. "Mr. John Darby, I mean ("Ay?, - what of him?") is – well, he is to be throttled in the next week. And – well I – ... I ("You'll what?") — —("My hospitality is wearing thin, son ...") I thought I , maybe, if – if you've any soul, that I could encourage you to do him right."

Plenty of souls, the Dangler rustles. (Raw collar still a stain beneath even
the Miss Becky's fine scarf.) And the boy says, "I – I can pay you," rummaging for coin, "but I han't much incentive, maybe enough for a glass ...;" the hangman fumbles with the noose.


Rope's fibers are razor-sharp and can scratch subtle like a papercut. Calluses that form are different from you workmen; not unlike a musician's. Discomfort in fine detail. A dull years-long ache becomes arthritic with old age. So, "you're a little young, son," the hangman sighed, and

his sandpaper bones

knotted and groaned

"—for Jack, that is. And only enough to burn the scare out—"

and the memory flutters a little on the wall.

112 Therefore I think and judge it for thy best
113 Thou follow me, and I will be thy guide,
114 And lead thee hence through the eternal place,

115 Where thou shalt hear the desperate lamentations,
116 Shalt see the ancient spirits disconsolate,
117 Who cry out each one for the second death;

118 And thou shalt see those who contented are
119 Within the fire, because they hope to come,
120 Whene'er it may be, to the blessed people;

121 To whom, then, if thou wishest to ascend,
122 A soul shall be for that than I more worthy;
123 With her at my departure I will leave thee.

or Gustave Dore's "Souls of Paolo and Francesca"



I just Amazoned me a copy. In other news, Happy Birthday Mrs. P.

Alfonso Cuarón was dead on. I haven't more an intellectual reaction to this article in USA Today than my non-verbal wow.

Drawn by Switzerland's reputation as a trouble-free place for foreigners to end their lives, more than 100 Germans, Britons, French, Americans and others come to this small commuter town each year to lie down on a bed in an industrial park building and drink a lethal dose of barbiturates.

But only Switzerland, in a law dating back to 1942, permits foreigners to come and kill themselves, placing few restrictions on the how, when and why. Doctors have relative freedom to prescribe a veterinary drug for that very purpose

Like Ewert, most foreigners turn to Dignitas, one of several Swiss organizations dedicated to the cause. Dignitas' founder, Ludwig A. Minelli, has built the group into a thriving nonprofit operation.

Dignitas says its members' right to self-determination is paramount. The only criteria for assisting a suicide are that the person "suffers from an illness that inevitably leads to death, or from an unacceptable disability, and wants to end their life and suffering voluntarily."

Other such organizations in Switzerland say they are cheaper and do not charge the patient directly, relying instead on membership fees and donations.

So below, their political fallout:

Officials in the canton of Zurich threatened to restrict their activities by making doctors see each patient more than once, and by limiting the supply of sodium pentobarbital. So some groups hoarded the drug, while Dignitas turned to plastic bags and helium.

The bag is placed over the head of a person who then opens a flow of helium, falls into a coma and dies "in 99.9% of cases," according to Derek Humphry, a British author whose suicide manual "Final Exit" has sold at least a million copies.

But the use of helium smacked to many Swiss of Nazi gas chambers, and made Minelli a tabloid hate figure — a sentiment widely shared in Schwerzenbach.

Like most Swiss, the townspeople support the principle of assisted suicide, but "the helium was the last straw," says Manfred Milz, who is evicting Dignitas from his building.

It has to leave by June — its third move in two years. Dignitas previously used a private home, hotel rooms, even mobile homes.

But demand continues to grow, Dignitas says.

"We can't solve all the problems of Germany, England, France and Italy," he said.