Illustrations by Maddy Kloss

In the latest issue of the Blue & White, Carolyn Ruvkun hangs with her heroes, the bubbly bibliophiles of Columbia libraries.

“We have a responsibility to posterity,” explains Karen Green, Columbia Librarian for Medieval History and Graphic Novels. In their duty to capture history before it dissolves into the unrecorded past, Columbia’s librarians are entrusted with a treasure trove of extraordinary resources—a centuries-old Buddhist sutra, John James Audubon’s “Elephant” folio edition of the Birds of America, and the Shoah Foundation’s visual history archive containing 50,000 hours of video interviews with Holocaust survivors, just to name a few.

Columbia’s librarians are not so much the stereotyped, buttoned-up shushers as bubbly bibliophiles eager to share information with students spelunking in the stacks. Donna Reed may have played a pitiful librarian in It’s a Wonderful Life, but Batgirl worked as the head librarian at the Gotham City Library when she wasn’t fighting crime. Even the reckless romantic Casanova spent a decade working as a librarian for Count Waldstein.

Librarians in today’s digital age just don’t fit the old stereotypes. Facing an era exploding with new information in modern formats, they bring rich tradition—Melvil Dewey, founder of the Dewey decimal system, used to be our chief librarian. The first academic reference department and the first school of library service were founded here. Columbia is simply steeped in library history. Read more…

The Bwog Book Club invites you to join our discussion of the first segment of Denis



Johnson’s serial noir, Nobody Move. If you missed July’s issue of Playboy, feel free to read the plot summary provided here and join us next time for a discussion of second segment published in this month’s magazine. 

Here are the main events from section one:

Jimmy Luntz, who starts off in a barbershop chorus, receives a ride from a man named Gambol. After they talk in the car and pull over at a rest stop, he realizes Gambol has been hired to hurt him because of a debt Luntz owes to a man named Juarez.  Luntz shoots Gambol, calls an ambulance, and goes after Juarez.  Meanwhile, Anita Desilvera, a woman about to divorce her husband, drinks heavily, and is good with guns, sees Luntz disposing of his weapon. Predictably, they end up sleeping together (after having sex in case you aren’t familiar with that euphemism.) Meanwhile Gambol rehabilitates with an unnamed woman, and plans to come back at Luntz.

1. For starters, Nobody Move is, of course, published as a serial in a magazine.  How much of Johnson’s writing and narrative structure do you think is determined by this?

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A while back we introduced readers to the next Bwog Book Club book, Denis Johnson’s Nobody Move, a serial noir novel published in Playboy magazine. There’s been a slight change of plans: we’re reviewing the first two sections at once, starting early next week. That means you should find the nearest newsstand to pick up the August issue of Playboy if you want to join in.



This particular series is being run by first-time book-clubbers. We’re thinking up some questions, but if you have any good suggestions, e-mail bwog with your words.

It has been a while since Bwog writers Pierce Stanley and Lucy Tang called to session a recent incarnation of the Bwog Book Club.  For those short of memory or perhaps for whom the summer has worn on maybe a bit too long, the Bwog Book Club kicked off several weeks ago with a reading of Nathaniel Rich‘s debut novel The Mayor’s Tongue. Bwog was fortunate enough to sit down recently with Mr. Rich for an interview to discuss the challenges of writing a debut novel.  Lucky for Bwog, the discussion took place in the comfort of The Paris Review‘s famed TriBeCa offices. Bwog is grateful to Mr. Rich (and The Paris Review) for hosting us so hospitably and for dedicating time for discussion of The Mayor’s Tongue. 

Bwog: We’ll start the interview with the book, The Mayor’s Tongue. It was a great debut.

Nathaniel Rich: Thanks — it took a long time to write, about five or six years. I worked on it in total secrecy for most of that period, and while I was working on it I always had other jobs, and was living in different places. There was never a sustained period where I sat down and wrote the whole novel. It was something like a process of accretion. That said, nothing in the book came about in a haphazard way — for the first two years I worked on the book, much of what I was doing was writing an outline, and planning the novel’s structure. At the beginning there was way too much planning — not enough writing. I blame it on nerves.

Bwog: Is that why there is a parallel structure to the work? It is sort of bizarre how the parallel stories never meet. Which came first? How did it all come about?

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Bwog Book Club is a “club” in which readers are encouraged to read modern works of literature, and then to read what we think about them. You can say what you think with the handy “post a comment” button. This time we’re reading the articles in soft-core porno mags.

   For the next Bwog book club, you’ll have to acquire a Playboy magazine – just like the old days. (If they don’t have it in your local corner store or gas station, you can pick it up at Border’s).  You may be buying it for the breasts, but for the purpose of the book club we’ll be discussing the Johnson that’s inserted between them – all 263 inches of it.  That’s the length of the first sec tion of Nobody Move, the new Denis Johnson novel, which will run in the July, August, September, and October issues of the magazine.  This book club is a pretty good deal – for about $20, you get a wide array of articles as well as a full novel, and an intellectually stimulating conversation as well as some visually stimulating imagery. 

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