Daily Office:
Wednesday
¶ Matins: To somebody who loves Les Invasions barbares as much as I do, but wonders what the Gotham equivalent of a lakeside send-off might look like, the story of Marie-Dennett McGill comes as revelation.
¶ Prime: Ah, for the good old days (Mortgage Banking Division):
“We had streakers during the 1990s, but that was a joyful, happy thing,” said Mr. Lucas, who had been coming to such events for 20 years and recalled how a group of inebriated and naked bankers had once entertained the crowd. “But now everyone is blaming us for everything.”
In other developments, a woman tried to arrest Karl Rove for treason. Way to go! Jesse McKinley reports.
¶ Sext: Anne Barnard writes about the welcome that gangsta lit is getting at the city’s public libraries. Whatever gets people to read is fine with me.
Oremus…
§ Matins. It sure beats climbing to the roof of the Carlyle and jumping off!
§ Prime. Laurel and Hardy’s Sons of the Desert is there to remind us (or at least to suggest) that the naked and inebriated have always been with us. The difference is that, nowadays, Laurel and Hardy themselves are chairing the convention.
§ Sext. The story is further proof that the publishing industry’s business model is broken.
Writers like Mark Anthony — who at 35 is Ms. Miller’s contemporary and the author of “Paper Chasers,” based on his youth in Laurelton — found themselves being rejected by agents and publishers. So they paid to self-publish their books, with rudimentary design and cheap bindings, and sold them on 125th Street in Harlem, or on Jamaica Avenue in Queens, around the corner from the borough library’s main branch. Soon, a stream of people — high-school students, first-time library users, the library’s own staff — were asking for the books. And the librarians went out on the street to buy them.
To speak of a broken business model, I suspect, is just a polite way of saying that an industry is dominated by too many old-timers who have not adapted to rapid change in the marketplace.