The McLemee Meme

A few days ago, Edward Pettit, one of the co-masters of The Bibliothecary Blog, invited me to take part in a meme. My first meme! I've been hanging along the wall of the gymnasium for months now, just hoping someone would ask me.

Anyway, Edward wrote:

Recently, Scott McLemee who writes the Intellectual Affairs column for Inside Higher Ed started a blog meme and tagged myself among others to continue it.  In turn, we have been asked to tag others.  I would love it if you could do it (and in turn tag a few others).

I certainly do that. I thereby tag Mr. Ray Banks, Mr. Dave White, Ms. Sarah Weinman, Mr. Paul Guyot and Ms. Christin Kuretich. Go on. I double-dog dare ya.

Here the questions, along with my answers:

(1) Imagine it’s 2015. You are visiting the library at a major research university. You go over to a computer terminal (or whatever it is they use in 2015) that gives you immediate access to any book or journal article on any topic you want. What do you look up? In other words, what do you hope somebody will have written in the meantime?

Hopefully, within 10 years, Charles Ardai over at Hard Case will have gotten his act together (kidding, Charles, kidding!) and republished every lost noir classic that I've been trying to track down, such as Black Wings Have My Angel and David Goodis' Fire in the Flesh. Come to think of it, the Complete Goodis would be nice, too, as would the Complete Charles Williams, the Complete Wade Miller, the Complete Day Keene and the Complete Gil Brewer. Oh, and the Goodis biography finally translated into English would be groovy.

And I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't check my own name. Though I'm sure the joke would be on me, and I'd discover that I'd written books with titles like California Sex Lawyer, Put a Little Love In Your Heart: The Jackie DeShannon Story and The Wheelman 2: Electric Boogaloo.

(2) What is the strangest thing you’ve ever heard or seen at a conference? No names, please. Refer to “Professor X” or “Ms. Y” if you must. Double credit if you were directly affected. Triple if you then said or did something equally weird.

This is easy. I've only been to one conference, and that was a few weeks ago. And without using names, I'd have to say it's seeing Publisher X, Classifieds Manager Y, and Editor-in-Chief Z wander into a Tijuana shithole only to be force-fed Cuervo by a voluptuous Mexican barmaid armed with a whistle and a towel. This place was so classy, it had its own mechanical bull. And even though the men's room was equipped with little more a metal trough (the bottom of which was lined with bottle caps, dessicated lime slices and cigarette cutts), the attendant manning the paper towel dispenser would frown at you if you didn't hand him a buck or two.

Yeah, that was pretty strange.

(3) Name a writer, scholar, or otherwise worthy person you admire so much that meeting him or her would probably reduce you to awestruck silence.

Donald E. West.... (shudder). See? I can't even say His Name without breaking down. Let me try it again: Donald E. Westla... ah, fuck.

(4) What are two or three blogs or other Web sites you often read that don’t seem to be on many people’s radar?

Let's see... I'm a fan of horror writer Brian Keene's blog ("Hail Saten"), which is well known in the horror community, but not too well known in mystery/crime circles. Then again, maybe it is--Brian's written a terrific heist thriller called Terminal, just out from Bantam Dell.

But the rest of my usual bookmark suspects are fairly well known (Romenesko's Media News, The New York Observer, Ed Gorman & Friends, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, etc.). I'm such a friggin lemming.