Last Friday, I got one of those 25%-off-a-single-book-regular-price-only coupons from Borders Rewards, which, naturally, I felt compelled to use. Of course, we all know that the purpose of a coupon isn’t really to give us price breaks, but to get us in stores; and I have no doubt there’s marketing research somewhere that confirms that once coupon-bearers get in stores, they do a whole lot more than purchase just what the coupon calls for. That’s true for me, anyway, especially when I go on bookstore runs, during which I usually visit several bookstores within my stomping grounds and seldom (probably never) come home empty-handed.

This bookstore run was no different; the magical coupon gave me three pleasant hours of browsing about the store that set me back about 80 bucks. The first fifteen were on there way out of my pocket as soon as I walked in and saw This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin on one of those conveniently-placed, book-filled tables just inside the door. It was the last copy from a stack that had once been there, and this blurb on the back cover totally got me:

Taking on prominent thinkers who argue that music is nothing more than an evolutionary accident, Levitin argues that music is fundamental to our species, perhaps even more so than language.

If I ever wanted to direct my energies toward something completely outside the interests that have come to dominate my life lately, I’d embark on a detailed study of music and its cultural meaning. I have believed for a long time that there was something more to the mental characteristics of music than is typically recognized; I would probably even go so far as to suggest that music is significant to human beings because it has an important relationship to the way the mind actually works — especially to the way the mind forms (and comes to understand) complex concepts. That’s way outside the scope of a short entry about a bookstore run; but I expect as I read Levitin’s book, I’ll spend some time exploring this a little more. I also just discovered that Levitin is appearing locally in Decatur, Georgia at Wordsmiths Books on September 15, so now I’ll need to see if I can get through the book by then and attend the event. I haven’t been to Wordsmiths yet, so it will be a good reason to go. (If you’re interested in learning more about the store, they have a blog, and are new enough to the Atlanta independent bookstore scene that you could even start with their opening press release, We’re proud to announce that Decatur has a new independent bookstore, from earlier this year.)

Next, I went looking for a couple of business/work/life/career books, because I had been following both authors’ blogs. I bought Marci Alboher’s One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success and Ben Casnocha’s My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley. Neither of these books is my typical fare; I haven’t read books of this type in a long time because so many of them seem filled with buzzwords, and they all sound alike. Still, from what I’ve read of Alboher’s work and from grazing through the book, I think she’s on to something with this notion of “slash careers” — and my interest in that stems from some discussions in the Science and Technology in Western Culture class I took early this year, as well as from my own thinking on the way I’ve been splitting my life into several distinct sets of activities over the past few years.

When I originally returned to school, I assumed I was preparing to replace my current career with another, but then began wondering if that was necessary, or even desirable. When I came across Alboher’s writing on The Heymarci Blog — starting with the first article I read, Slash Careers as Works in Progress — I realized there were some emerging ideas about careers that coincided with my own thinking. What had seemed like a strange notion in my head at the time suddenly became something much different. More on all of this when I read the book.

I’ve mentioned this before, but it was from Ben Casnocha that I first heard of Marci Alboher, when he wrote a short but lively review of her book. Not everything Casnocha writes is short by any means, but everything he writes is lively. I’m only about thirty pages into his book, but it reads with the same pace at which you can imagine him running through an airport, and you realize you’re following along, caught up, and not even panting. As with the other books I’ve mentioned here tonight, more on My Start-Up Life as I get further into it.

Finally, I bought a new book on writing that looked fresh and different,
Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer by Roy Peter Clark. If I can manage the time for it, I’ll write about the exercises in the book (which are definitely not typical of a writing instruction book) as I work through them. To learn more about Clark, take a look at his blog and note that he’s hosting a web seminar later in September.

About a year ago, I purchased the complete Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica from a friend of mine, who found it in old boxes in someone’s cellar while he was at an estate sale. I had no idea then that it was quite a find, historically and intellectually, as this article on Wikipedia states:

“The Encyclopedia Britannica Eleventh Edition (1910–1911) is perhaps the most famous edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the day. The articles are still of value and interest to modern scholars as cultural artifacts of the 19th and early 20th centuries….”

More on the Eleventh another time; I’ve used it often to get a peek at the past, at how something was perceived or described by thinkers of that time. For now, in honor of the day, I’d certainly send a big “thank you” across the centuries and around the world to the men and women who labored then, and labor still today, to guard our intellectual heritage and keep recreating it in even more comprehensive, substantial, and interesting forms.

Here’s the text of the “Labor Day” entry from the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, Literature and General Information, 1911, Volume XVI, page 6:

LABOR DAY, in the United States, a legal holiday in nearly all of the states and Territories, where the first Monday in September is observed by parades and meetings of labour organizations. In 1882 the Knights of Labor paraded in New York City on this day; in 1884 another parade was held, and it was decided that this day should be set apart for this purpose. In 1887 Colorado made the first Monday in September a legal holiday; and in 1909 Labor Day was observed as a holiday throughout the United States, except in Arizona and North Dakota; in Louisiana it is a holiday only in New Orleans (Orleans parish), and in Maryland, Wyoming and New Mexico it is not established as a holiday by statute, but in each may be proclaimed as such in any year by the governor.

Happy Labor Day!

Update: I hadn’t looked for articles about Labor Day by any other bloggers before posting this entry, but have since come across a few that you might find interesting:

Two Rockwells for Labor Day from History is Elementary

In Honor of Labor Day: The Top Five Myths about Work from History News Network

Labor Day from Legal History Blog

Knights of Labor from Progressive Historians

Last night, I started reading Fear: A Cultural History by Joanna Bourke. I’ve had my eye on the book for a few weeks now, and finally picked it up at Borders yesterday. It’s the type of book I like, because I enjoy writing that confidently integrates history with cultural studies. It also has some relevance to my History of Science and Technology in Western Culture class, as it discusses fears of science, technology, medical advancements, and military machinery. I’m only on page 50, and have already come across some fascinating ideas.

Bourke devotes the first section of the book to describing the fear of death and how it affected individual lives in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She illustrates how fear of death was intertwined with a fear of being prematurely buried – that is, buried alive. At the same time, she explains how closely fear of death was related to fearing poverty; and she notes how social welfare targeted at reducing poverty didn’t eradicate the fear, but only diluted its effects and changed in focus:

Rather than trembling about the effects of absolute privation, people shuddered to think about the consequences of relative impoverishment, such as being rehoused in a rougher area or forced to sell prized possessions. The providers of public assistance were determined to retain (indeed, even boost) this element of fear. After all, they reasoned, public assistance should not be made too easy in case people jettisoned all economic anxieties, thus damaging the economy. As a consequence, moral panics arose around unscrupulous individuals and groups who did not feel sufficiently apprehensive of the stigma attached to the receipt of poor relief. – pg. 27

Describing the use of fear as a public policy tool, and explaining how its boundaries were altered to reflect public reaction to policy or manipulate society, strikes me as a fairly unique perspective. I’m curious about the extent to which Bourke keeps these themes out in front, as she continues the discussion of the cultural parameters of fear.