Re: May the shade of Ashton Clark hover over your right shoulder and guard your left.

On Sun, 4 Feb 2001, Norton wrote:

> I liked your piece on Samuel R. Delany's Nova,

Thanks.

> but you might do your
> readers more of a service

Than drawing their attention to it? To discussing and interesting part of
the book?

> if, instead of merely bemoaning the fact
> that it is out of print,

Well, I don't *just* bemoan it. I pointed it out to make some points.

> you pointed them to any of the sources of
> used and out of print books on the net:

Well, I agree it's a service, but it's such a *mild* service that somehow
I don't feel like much of a failure having not done it. I mean, I *hope*
that mf readres are capable of checking their used book stores and used
book store web sites.

Actually, in case you were wondering, I did consider pointing to powells,
abebooks, et al, but the nature of used books is to go out of stock,
eh? So pointing to possibly transitory links didn't seem quite worth it.

[snip]
> I hope you pass these along to your readers.

Again, individual urls/searches seem a little wrongheaded,without some
sort of dynamic updating (I intend to bemoan the out of printness of MLK's
last book too :)). But maybe we can cobble some sort of dynamic checker
that only points to actually available books. Abebooks is really quite
good that way.

>  I also invite you have a
> look at my site over at http://norton.blogspot.com.  Among the items
> that may be of interest over there is my rant about crossing paths
> with Dick Cheney a week ago:  
> http://norton.blogspot.com/archives/2001_01_28_norton_archive.html%232214239

That was pretty damn funny! "Mah heart! Must have more cheez-whiz!!!"

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.