Uncle Hugo’s and Uncle Edgar’s as they looked before last night’s fire.
Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore owner Don Blyly sent an update to subscribers on August 6 sharing how complicated it is simply to get the wreckage of his two stores torn down.
Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore and Uncle Edgar’s Mystery Bookstore were burned by vandals on May 30 while protests were happening elsewhere in Minneapolis.
To date the GoFundMe started to Help Save Uncle Hugo’s has raised $163,088 of the $500,000 goal amount.
IT TAKES TIME TO PULL PERMITS. The city has to give permission for the demolition.
A couple of weeks ago I hired a company to handle the demolition and debris removal at the Uncles site. I asked the guy when the work could be done. He warned me that even in the best of times Minneapolis never issued a demolition permit in less than 30 days, and these are not the best of times. But he got the ball rolling to get the permit. (For those who remember when the Robert’s Shoes building at the corner of Chicago and Lake burned to the ground about 3 years ago, it took the owner 4 months to get a permit to haul away the debris. Every time he thought he had provided every possible piece of paper to the city, they would demand something new.)
THE DENTIST IS ALREADY DRILLING. A neighboring business is making life complicated.
I’ve written before about the dental clinic being built in 1995 using my firewall as his firewall, which worked fine until the Uncles burned to the ground. Suddenly, the new owner of the dental clinic wanted my firewall down as fast as possible so that he could repair his wall and get his business running again. I took down the front half of the wall by hand using a hammer and crow bar on the century-old mortar, but I knew that the back half would require machinery to take down. The dentist called late last Thursday to say that his contractor said that the back half of my wall next to his wall would have to come down within the next 10 days for the contractor to get his work done on time. I explained about the demolition permit and that we would not have the permit within the next 10 days…
On Friday I explained this to my contractor, who wanted to meet with me and the dental clinic contractor at the site sometime on Monday to look over the situation and the proposed solution….
On Monday I took a carload of mail orders to the post office at 9 am and then went to the Uncles site to take measurements to be able to do a site map of the Uncles as the building was before the fire. The dental clinic contractor had already used his bobcat, but not at all like I had been told he would. He did not go through the clinic. Instead, he took down the entire back wall of the back room (which I was assured he would not touch), scooped up most of the debris in the back room and lifted it over the wall into the Uncle Edgar’s space (thereby knocking down much of the Uncle Edgar’s side wall and back wall to about the 4 foot level), and then took down the back room wall next to the clinic and pushed it over next to the Uncle Edgar’s wall. When I arrived, a workman was busy taking down the dental clinic wall and tossing it into Uncle Hugo’s basement. When I complained about this, he claimed that he would pick it all up and put it in the clinic’s dumpster whenever a new dumpster was delivered. Three days later the clinic’s dumpster has been replaced, but the clinic just keeps tossing more of their debris into Uncle Hugo’s basement and hasn’t removed any of the sheet rock tossed in there on Monday.
GOT TO PAY THE PROPERTY TAX, BUT HOW MUCH? When your property has burned down, it’s only fair that it be reassessed for a lower value.
One of the things necessary to get a demolition permit is that the entire year’s property tax must bepaid before the permit can be issued. Half of the year’s property tax is due May 15 (and was paid) and the second half is due by October 15. But Minneapolis publicized that they would be reducing the property tax for the second half of the year for buildings destroyed or significantly damaged during the rioting. I filled out the form on-line in early July, and the city promised that a tax assessor would contact me within 3 business days. Nobody ever contacted me, so on July 20 I tried to contact the city assessor’s office.
…My on-line form had arrived, but around 800 properties had requested re-assessment because of damage from the riot and the work-from-home staff was simply overwhelmed with work. The city assessor’s office had until the beginning of September to complete those 800 re-assessments and send new figures to Hennepin County so that they could come up with new property tax figures. …Certainly not an ideal situation, but I now know that I should pay the higher tax now to move a step closer to the demolition permit, and hope someday to get a partial refund.
NOBODY TURNED OFF THE WATER? Apparently, in Uncle Hugo’s debris-filled basement, the water has been leaking for two months.
I eventually received a water bill for the store, forwarded to my home (which seems to added about 7-10 days). It charged me for estimated water and sewer volumes from 6-12-20 to 7-12-20, but demanded that I call them to arrange for a meter reading. I called and explained that the building was burnt to the ground on May 30, the water meter was in the basement under many feet of rubble, and I assumed that they had turned off the water when the fire struck, just like the electrical company and the gas company had done. The first person I talked to assured me that the water had not been turned off, and that the water had probably been pouring out of a broken pipe in the basement for over 2 months, so my water bill would probably be much higher than the estimated bill….
WINDING UP THE BUSINESS. This would be complicated anyway, but now the pandemic is affecting everyone.
It is taking longer than I expected to get matters cleared up with some publishers. Immediately after the fire the publishers were all asked to put the account on hold so that no orders could be shipped to us until we were ready, cancel all the old purchase orders that had not yet been sent, and change the address from the store address to my home address to speed up communications. Then, when a new monthly statement came in I would look for invoices that we might not have received (dated late May) and request copies of them so that I could determine if we had received them.
Both UPS and the post office stopped delivering to much of south Minneapolis after May 26 because of the riots. … UPS simply returned to sender every package addressed to the Uncles and over 100 other businesses, but some of the warehouses the boxes were returned to were short-handed because of covid-19 and took months to issue credits… It was a real mess trying to figure out what I really owed and send out checks. …I hope that within another month I’ll have everything cleaned up with the cooperative publishers
A MAN AND HIS DOG. Don Blyly’s dog, who comes from a long-lived breed, misses the store.
…If Ecko lives to be 20, that means she’ll still be dragging me around on half-mile walks when I’m 81. I’m not sure what to think about that. But she really misses going to the store and greeting people.
Uncle Hugo’s and Uncle Edgar’s as they looked before the fire.
Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore owner Don Blyly sent an update to subscribers on July 9 telling them what he’s learned so far about possibly rebuilding his two stores.
Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore and Uncle Edgar’s Mystery Bookstore were burned by vandals on May 30 while protests were happening elsewhere in Minneapolis.
REQUIREMENTS TO REBUILD. Blyly has found it difficult just getting bids on the demolition and construction work that will be needed.
Don Blyly
In order to figure out what it will cost to rebuild in the old location, I will first have to get the old building demolished and the debris hauled away. I tried to get 4 bids, and only 2 companies were willing to give me bids, and they were not in agreement about what was possible. The front of the building, which housed Uncle Hugo’s, was built around 1915, with a basement. The back of the building where Uncle Edgar’s was located, was on a concrete slab, and was built in the 1950’s. The back office and storage area was also built on a concrete slab and was built around 1980. When I bought the Uncle’s building, there was a very attractive 3-story brick building om the south side, with their brick fire wall flush against my brick fire wall. That building burned around 1992, and I tried to see if I could purchase the lot for parking, but the city wanted the dental clinic to go onto the lot instead. (Much more property tax from a dental clinic than from a parking lot.)
When the dental clinic was built in 1995, the dentist got the city to agree that he could used my fire wall as his fire wall, saving him a lot of money for construction, and allowing the interior dimensions of his clinic to be a bit bigger. This worked fine until the Uncle’s building burned. There was only about an inch between my fire wall and his sheet rock wall, which he constructed right on his property line. All of the demolition people were very nervous about taking down my fire wall without doing major damage to the dental clinic, and this no doubt contributed to only two companies being willing to give me bids, and how high the bids were. So I spent 5 days (in very hot, very humid weather) with a hammer and crowbar taking down about 60 feet of fire wall. (And also got sunburned for the first time in over 50 years.) That section had mortar than was over 100 years old and came apart fairly easily. There is still about 40 more feet of fire wall along the back room, where there is about a 5 inch gap between the buildings, but that section is concrete blocks and much newer mortar, and I’m not going to try that by hand.
I’ve received different stories from the demo people about the basement. Some thought they could scoop everything out, leave the basement walls in place, and leave the hole in place (fenced off, of course) until I wanted to rebuild. Some thought that once the support beams were removed that go from the front basement wall to the back basement wall, all the basement walls would collapse into the basement, causing the sidewall to also collapse and perhaps causing the dental clinic foundation to collapse. Some thought the city would force me to take out all the basement walls even if they were sturdy enough to be left in place. Some thought that the city would force me to fill the basement hole with fill dirt immediately even if I wanted to rebuild with a basement (at a cost of an extra $30,000 to haul in the dirt, and then even more later to haul the dirt away again).
The back of the store is on concrete slabs. If all the debris could be removed without cracking the slabs, then the removal cost would be a lot less, and the rebuilding expense would be a lot less because new concrete block walls could be put up on top of the existing slabs. There was disagreement among the demo people about how likely it was that the concrete slabs could be saved, except that if the city forced me to remove the basement walls then it would be impossible to save the slabs.
Much of the debris removal cost would involve how many truckloads of debris would be hauled away and where it could be taken. Most of the debris consists of wet, partially burned books, magazines, and bookcases, but all the demo people wanted to treat everything as hazardous waste full of lead, arsenic, and asbestos, to be hauled away to a hazardous waste dump at a much higher cost.
After the debris is all gone, after I know if the basement hole is allowed to remain, after I know if the concrete slabs survived, then I’ll be able to get estimates on rebuilding in the old location. I’ve just barely begun looking at the real estate market to see about the possibility of buying an existing building as another option. But I can see that the city’s push to tear down single story buildings along major streets to be replaced by multi-story buildings has had an impact on the availability and pricing of older single story buildings.
DOING BUSINESS WITHOUT A STORE. Blyly has resumed doing some business, limited to online and mail orders. (Order t-shirts here.)
I’ve also been working on mail orders. Some people have been ordering just shirts, some people have been ordering just books, and some people have been ordering a mixture of shirts and books. I still have a lot of shirts left, but not necessarily the sizes and colors that are being ordered. Thirteen days ago I ordered another 300 shirts, a combination of special orders for odd sizes, shirts to fill orders that had come in for sizes and colors that I had run out of, and some extra copies of some of the more popular sizes and colors. I contacted the shirt printer yesterday to see when we might expect delivery. He said that the supply chain for blank shirts has been in very bad shape since the covid-19 problem started. I still have not received a few shirts from our mid-May order. He says that by this weekend he’ll be able to give me an estimate of when he’ll be able to deliver most of the recent order. As soon as I get those shipped, I’ll be ready to send him an order for another 250-300 shirts.
I ordered a bunch of Lois McMaster Bujold books from Baen Books a week ago and received about a third of the order a couple of days ago, but no sign of the rest of the order.
I ordered a bunch of her books from NESFA Press 11 days ago, but they still have not shown up. The Orphans of Raspay will supposedly be delivered by UPS later today. As soon as Orphans shows up, I haul those and whatever else has shown up by that time out to Lois’ place for signatures, and then be able to start filling a lot of orders.
I should also be receiving today a bunch of other books by other authors that people have ordered, so I’ll be able to concentrate on filling mail orders for a while instead of hanging out at the ruins of the Uncles getting more sunburn.
Uncle Hugo’s and Uncle Edgar’s as they looked before the fire.
The GoFundMe to help Uncle Hugo’s Bookstore owner Don Blyly has raised $148,684 to date.
Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore and Uncle Edgar’s Mystery Bookstore were burned by vandals on May 30 while protests were happening elsewhere in Minneapolis.
Sam Blyly-Strauss posted a long update on June 22. It includes this request from Don —
GOFUNDME: If you will feel ripped off if I decide not to open a new brick-and-mortar store, or to reopen a science fiction store but not a mystery store, please do not contribute to the GoFundMe at this time. Details here.
…I’ve had lots of people offer to donate their used books to help stock the used bookshelves for the Uncles. I’ve told them that it could take 6-12 months for me to figure out if I will be opening a new brick-and-mortar store, and I don’t have anyplace to store the thousands of books people want to contribute. If I decide that I’m likely to re-open a brick-and-mortar store, then I will rent storage and start accepting books. But I don’t want to rent storage, collect thousands of donated books, and then have no way to sell them.
There are various ways for The Uncles to move forward from here. The mail-order-only from my home is quick and easy and will bring in some cash to support me, but is not capable of doing a lot of things that a brick-and-mortar store can provide. (I haven’t had a chance to even consider how taxes or various called-for-but-not-yet-real business rescue plans might influence my decisions.) The options that I am looking at include:
1) Rebuild in the same location, if I can come up with enough money. People are used to finding us there. (When we moved there, we started telling people 6 months in advance that we were going to be moving and 3 months in advance we started telling people where and when we were going to be moving, but we were having people decades later “discovering” that we were still in business because when they saw the empty storefront at the old location they just assumed we had gone out of business.) The space was adequate. Mass transit connections (important to some of the staff and many of our customers) are pretty good and will get better over the next couple of years, but the parking situation is not very good. The property tax would probably double from $20,000 a year to $40,000 a year, and it was hard to afford $20,000. And I’d be stuck with this expensive building when I decide to retire. It would probably take about a year for this option.
2) Buy a new lot somewhere else and build a new building there. This would probably be the worst option. Nobody would know where to find The Uncles, it would be the most expensive option, it would involve the high property tax for the new building, and would be difficult for me to retire someday unless I could sell the building. It would take over a year for this option.
3) Find an older existing building, buy it, and turn it into a bookstore. This would probably cost around half as much as either of the first two options with lower property taxes than the first two options. I have no idea what the current real estate market is like, what might be available, and where I would have to move to.
4) Find an existing building and rent it. Again, I have no idea of what the existing real estate market is like or what is available. I know that around 100 small businesses are burnt out and looking for new locations to move to, and there is a sudden severe shortage of commercial buildings that have not been burnt out. On the other hand, there are a lot of businesses that are not going to survive COVID-19, so 6-12 months from now there might be more options.
5) Just stick with the mail order business and don’t open a new brick-and-mortar location. I’m 69 years old, with increasing arthritis in my hands and wrists, and my eye sight keeps slowly declining. A bunch of people, including my kids and some of my staff, are pushing this option. It would make it very easy to retire when my body forces me to. But I’ve enjoyed meeting with a lot of customers over the decades, turning people on to new authors they might otherwise never have discovered, hosting signing events, and providing tens of thousands of inexpensive used books for people who can’t afford to maintain their book addiction at new prices. I just feel happier when surrounded by thousands of books, as do many of our customers. And Ecko the store dog REALLY misses going to work and greeting customers.
(1) GETTING PAID. On Twitter today, under the #PublishingPaidMe hashtag, writers disclosed the amounts of their book advances in order to generate data that will show if there are systematic biases against writers of color and other marginalized groups.
N. K. Jemisin responded — complete thread here. Comments include:
Alyssa Cole, whose comments on RWA have been quoted here before, said it this way:
Good morning. The bottom line of the #PublishingPaidMe conversation is that many publishers clearly have the funds to pay Black authors more money, so they should pay Black authors more money. The end. pic.twitter.com/DO0zvtr6Zk
— Alyssa “mostly updates” Cole (@AlyssaColeLit) June 7, 2020
Martha Wells was one of several other sff authors who participated. Her tweets, which weren’t threaded, are here, here and here.
John Scalzi gave figures and analyzed the context in which they were paid for a post at Whatever.
Irene Gallo, Associate Publisher of Tor.com and Creative Director of Tor Books, linked the discussion to artists, as well.
Very true in illustration as well. Who can coast with art school debt while having time in the day to develop craft. https://t.co/86P5rGgPrM
…As an organization that just went through a massive crisis for many of the same reasons that underscore these protests for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, and so many more —injustice, racism, and unfairness—we acknowledge that we have turned aside from confronting difficult truths for far too long. That our authors from marginalized communities, especially our Black authors, have been treated as somehow less deserving of a seat at the table of publishing. We must admit and learn from this shameful past, while standing up for our goal and commitment to make the future better. We stand together in the fight against systemic racism….
RWA is taking the following steps in addition to our continuing work on diversity issues and continuing efforts to make our organization a safe place for Black writers:
We invite all Black authors in RWA to attend our first online conference, to be held August 28-30, at no charge. This admission will include the recordings of the conference
We will make 100 scholarships to our online conference available to non-member Black writers
We are making it a priority to find new resources to add to our Diversity and Inclusion Resources page on our website
We will direct our Academic Grants Committee to seek out Black academics studying romance to consider for RWA grants
This is a time when so many of us are terrified, alone, and feeling helpless. We offer the following links, for those who wish to learn more or find a way to contribute.
(3) UNCLE HUGO’S UPDATE: If you’re someone who wants to contribute by sending a check or money order (rather than donate online through the “Official Help Save Uncle Hugo’s Fund” GoFundMe), Don Blyly gave me an address for that purpose. Contact me at [email protected].
The GoFundMe has raised $113,269 as of today.
(4) RECOVERING. David Dyer-Bennett’s photo gallery, “Signs Over Windows”, documents the messages and art on the boarding over vandalized windows in downtown Minneapolis. Also includes images of the scorched bits of books in the rubble around Uncle Hugo’s.
In the aftermath of the Minneapolis Police killing George Floyd, Minneapolis has experienced much distress. We’re being forced to confront issues we’ve let slide for too long (or that our work has not usefully improved). There is a huge amount of anger of course, both immediate and accumulated over decades and centuries. There is despair. There are even some tendrils of hope.
I’m not a suitable person to deal with the big issues here. I’ll keep listening, and I’ll keep voting and pressuring my representatives to do what seems right, but I’m not a leader in any of this.
But the visual changes to the city around me have been striking. In some areas, most businesses have put plywood (or OSB) over all their windows and other glass. That by itself is a big change, but not visually very interesting. However, much of the plywood has been painted with slogans and war cries, straight-forwardly or artistically, or even graphic art. Both the text, and the appearance, have been catching my attention, so I started photographing these decorated sheets of plywood….
(5) TECH IMAGINED. “Ken Liu: ‘We get to define the stories we want to be told about us.’” Mary Wang interviews the author for Guernica. Tagline: “Using photos of his text editors, mapmaking software, and 3D-printed prototypes, the writer talks about technology, myth, and telling stories during a pandemic.”
… Wang: If you were a different type of writer, I might ask you how you conceive of characters and build plot. But since you talk about engineering as a language, it would make more sense for me to ask how you conceive of technologies. How do they come about, how do you then refine them, and finally, how do you incorporate them into the story?
Liu: I love talking about this stuff. My other former careers consisted of being a litigation consultant and a corporate lawyer, so I did a lot of research into the history of patents and the history of technology. That turns out to be a great way to find inspiration for fictional machines. If you go into patent databases, you’ll see tons and tons of interesting inventions that never went anywhere. But that doesn’t mean that, in an alternate universe, they couldn’t have become successful and become the progenitor of new lineages of machines.
I also get a lot of inspiration from reading about archaeological discoveries of ancient machinery. The Chinese had invented these amazing compound looms that could be programmed to create complex textile patterns, and we didn’t know how they worked because they didn’t survive. But the latest archaeological discoveries actually found some of these looms, or models of them made out of ceramic as grave goods, so archaeologists have been able to recreate them and figure them out. They were amazing, like mechanical computers that could be programmed to weave specific patterns. Similarly, archaeologists realized that Heron of Alexandria, a great Greek inventor of antiquity, had devised all sorts of machines for temple magic as part of religious rituals. That turned out to anticipate many of our modern ideas about cybernetics and autonomous control.
These lines of technology didn’t go very far, but in the fictional world I was creating, I could take it as far as I wanted to. …
(6) HIS NEXT RODEO. Congratulations to Ziv Wities (Standback) for making the grade at Podcastle.
(7) TODAY IN HISTORY.
June 7, 1997 — Perversions of Science premiered on HBO. It was a spin-off of HBO’s Tales from the Crypt. Its episodes were based off of work from EC Comics’s Incredible Science Fiction, Weird Fantasy and Weird Science titles. It would last but for one season of ten episodes. Writers adapting those stories included David S. Goyer (the Blade trilogy screenplays), David Schow (The Crow with John Shirley) and Andrew Kevin Walker (Sleepy Hollow screenplay).
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born June 7, 1844 – Robert Milne. Rediscovered by Sam Moskowitz, who helped collect RM’s stories for Into the Sun. Eleven there; fifty more not yet reprinted, e.g. “The Great Electric Diaphragm”, “A Dip into the Doings of the Four-Dimensional World”, “What the Great Instrument in the Lick Observatory Observed”. Even I found the Into the Sun stories and four more here. (Died 1899) [JH]
Born June 7, 1915 — Graham J. Ingels. Illustrator best remembered for his work in EC Comics during the Fifties, most notably on The Haunt of Fear,Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror. He illustrated one genre magazine, Planet Stories cover as you can see here. Thought didn’t do any other covers, he was a regular interior artist for both Planet Stories and Planet Comics. (Died 1991.)(CE)
Born June 7, 1924 — Jon Ewban White. Writer who was the script doctor for The Day of the Triffids. He was the writer for Witch Hunt, a dark fantasy series that ran BBC for six episodes. He even wrote an Avengers episode, “Propellent 23”. His one film screenplay was “Crack in the World” which was straight SF Sixties style story about of the end brought on by the follies of man. You can watch it here. (Died 2013.) (CE)
Born June 7, 1932 – Kit Reed. Sixteen novels in our field; a hundred forty shorter stories, three dozen in The Story Until Now; fourteen more novels. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction under Boucher. Translated into Croatian, Dutch, French, German, Italian. Guggenheim Fellow. Called herself a trans-genred writer. (Died 2017) [JH]
Born June 7, 1946 – Jon White. Fanziner and bookseller. Revived Inside in 1962, brought in Leland Sapiro who renamed it Riverside Quarterly (after a famous dwelling in New York). Here is the front cover by Arthur Thomson (“Atom”) for vol. 1 no. 2. (Died 2004) [JH]
Born June 7, 1949 – Real Musgrave. Graphic artist who has maintained a fannish connection. Artist Guest of Honor at Westercon XLI (here is the cover of its Program Book); exhibited at Magicon, the 50th Worldcon. Here is a cover for Fantasy Review. Pocket Dragons, done as drawings, figurines, animated television series. Brother of astronaut Story Musgrave. [JH]
Born June 7, 1954 – Louise Erdrich. In the first class of women admitted to Dartmouth (A.B., English; later, honorary Litt. D. and Commencement speaker). Member of Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians; her grandfather was tribal chief. National Book Award for Fiction, Lib. Cong. Prize for Amer. Fiction, Amer. Acad. Poets Prize, Pushcart Prize. Love Medicine, only début novel to win the Nat’l Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Children’s books; Scott O’Dell Award for The Game of Silence. World Fantasy Award for The Antelope Wife; three more novels in our field. Interview in December 2017 Lightspeed. [JH]
Born June 7, 1967 — Dayton Ward, 53. Writer best known for his Trek fiction which began with publication in the Strange New Worlds anthology series. To say he’s written a lot of that media tie-in fiction is an understatement as he’s written forty novels so far with the Mirror Universe and the Starfleet Corps of Engineers being but two of the subjects he tackles. He already written one novel for one of the latest series, Star Trek: Discovery: Drastic Measures. (CE)
Born June 7, 1968 — Sarah Parish, 52. In “The Runaway Bride“, a Tenth Doctor story, she got to play, with the assistance of extensive CGI, one of the nastiest Who villains to date, The Empress of the Racnoss, an oversized vicious spider with a human face. Great episode. It’s our introduction to Donna Noble, his Companion for quite some time to come. In a much lighter role, she played Pasiphaë on BBC’s Atlantis series. (CE)
Born June 7, 1974 — David Filoni, 46. Creator and an executive producer on Star Wars Rebels, a most awesome series, for all four seasons, and was supervising director and a writer on another excellent series, Star Wars: The Clone Wars. (I like the animated series far better than the live action films.) He makes his live acting debut in The Mandalorian playing Trapper Wolf, an X-Wing pilot, in “The Prisoner” episode. It’s also worth noting that he his first job was directing episodes during the first season of animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender (CE)
Born June 7, 1978 – Jesse Ball. Novelist and poet; spare, surrealistic, and strange. Went to Vassar, which would have saddened my grandmother who never wanted it to go co-ed. Guggenheim Fellowship; Illinois Author of the Year, 2015; Berlin Prize; Plimpton Prize. Gordon Burn Prize for Census; two more novels and a book of shorter stories in our field; five more novels, drawings, non-fiction. Faculty, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he got Wikipedia to believe he teaches lying, ambiguity, dreaming, walking; and maybe he does. [JH]
(9) OUT OF SORTS. Meanwhile, back at the Tingleverse:
“Knowledge sets us free… A great library is freedom,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in contemplating the sacredness of public libraries. “Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be,” her contemporary James Baldwin — who had read his way from the Harlem public library to the literary pantheon — insisted in his courageous and countercultural perspective on freedom.
Ronald McNair (October 21, 1950–January 28, 1986) was nine when he took his freedom into his own small hands.
Unlike Maya Angelou, who credited a library with saving her life, McNair’s triumphant and tragic life could not have been saved even by a library — he was the age I am now when he perished aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger before the eyes of a disbelieving nation. But his life was largely made by a library — a life equal parts inspiring and improbable against the cultural constrictions of his time and place; a life of determination that rendered him the second black person to launch into space, a decade and a half after a visionary children’s book first dared imagine the possibility….
When Raisha Doumbia, a 20-year-old swimming instructor in Roswell, Ga., first downloaded the video-sharing app TikTok, she made lighthearted posts, like her lip-syncing and dancing to a song by the British girl group Little Mix.
But Doumbia paused the playful routines after George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis. Now she is using her TikTok feed to urge followers to march for racial justice.
…All of a sudden, TikTok has become the go-to forum for burgeoning youth activism.
“Anger, dismay, disgust and unhappiness are all feelings that can be easily transmitted on a video on Tik Tok,” Aho Williamson said.
Black creators accuse TikTok of suppression
Activism arrived on TikTok just as scrutiny of its parent company, the Chinese-owned ByteDance, intensified.
As protests began to sweep the nation, black creators noticed that videos tagged #GeorgeFloyd or #BlackLivesMatter were hard to find, or looked as though no one had watched them despite a torrent of views.
To some users, it was a suspicious development, considering that ByteDance has censored videos of anti-Beijing protests in Hong Kong, in addition to having been exposed for previously suppressing posts from users deemed too unattractive or undesirable for the platform.
TikTok insists that is not what happened in posts related to Black Lives Matter. In an about-face, the company apologized and blamed the problem on a “technical glitch.”
“Nevertheless, we understand that many assumed this bug to be an intentional act to suppress the experiences and invalidate the emotions felt by the black community. And we know we have work to do to regain and repair that trust,” said Vanessa Pappas, TikTok’s general manager for the U.S.
(12) TROMPE L’OEIL. Those who got to L.A.con III may remember the debut of Omar Rayyan with some stunning fool-the-eye work. Now somebody’s doing it in public: “David Zinn: Street art that washes away in the rain” – video.
David Zinn is a professional chalk artist who’s on a mission to show that you don’t need fancy equipment to draw.
His work has appeared on subway platforms in Manhattan, village squares in Sweden and street corners in Taiwan.
(13) HIGH PRAISE.“A Master of Hidden Things” is John Banville’s tribute to a fine writer in TheNew York Review of Books.
…Revisiting Elizabeth Bowen’s Collected Stories, one realizes that there are certain literary works that, once read, make one burn with envy of those readers who have still to come to them for the first time.* There is not a story in this substantial volume, from the first to the last, that is not brought off beautifully. While it is no doubt foolhardy and certainly vulgar to choose favorites, one must mention instances in which Bowen outdid herself. These include the elusive but vividly immediate “Summer Night”; the haunting “Mysterious Kôr” and the haunted “The Demon Lover”; the trance-like wartime set pieces “Ivy Gripped the Steps” and “The Happy Autumn Fields”; the forlorn “Joining Charles”; and the merely—merely!—marvelous early tales “Daffodils” and “The Parrot.” In these and many other of the stories, Bowen reached, as Glendinning puts it, “a perfection and a unity that the sustained narrative and shifting emphases of a novel do not attempt.”
With direct flights to Wuhan and a population of 24 million people living in densely packed cities, Taiwan’s coronavirus outlook seemed grave.
But, to date, the disease has claimed just seven lives on the island, and it never went into full lockdown.
Its leaders credit masks as playing a key role, but not for the reasons you might suppose.
“Masks are something that, first, reminds you to wash your hands properly and, second, protects you from touching your mouth – that is the main benefit to the person who wears it,” explains Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s digital minister.
Taiwan’s citizens have worn face masks for health and other reasons since the 1950s, but the spread of coronavirus prompted a spate of panic-buying.
To even out demand, the masks had to be rationed while production was ramped up, from two million to 20 million items a day.
Long queues snaked back from pharmacies and other outlets – which posed a risk of contagion in themselves. So, the government decided data about each location’s stock levels should be made publicly available.
To do so, Ms Tang’s ministry launched a platform which each vendor could keep updated with their stock numbers.
Then, Taiwan’s hacking community, with whom the government had been building a strong relationship for years, stepped in.
It began drawing on the data, which had been made public, to build a series of real-time ‘mask maps’.
…Earlier this week, Chien-Jen Chen – the island’s former vice-president and a renowned epidemiologist – told British MPs that a well-designed contact tracing system and the application of strict quarantine rules to inbound visitors had also played a major role
But he too said the nature of the island’s “hyper-democracy” – and the efforts its health chiefs had made to gain the public’s trust – were the key factors in it success.
Those in power aren’t just responsive to the voices of citizens, but also the memes and other messages they share.
It helped the government counter false claims that the material used to make masks was the same as that found in toilet paper. In response Taiwan’s Premier posted a self-mocking cartoon, which showed his bottom wiggling, alongside an explanation of the different sources that toilet paper and mask paper come from.
“It went absolutely viral” says Ms Tang, of the government strategy referred to as “humour over rumour”.
[Thanks to John Hertz, Chip Hitchcock, BravoLimaPoppa, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, Andrew Porter, JJ, Michael Toman, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]
“The Uncles,” as Blyly refers to the stores, contained over 100,000 used and new volumes when they burned. There were rare signed editions and decades of collectibles. He estimated the retail value at around $1 million.
What he expects from insurance:
Both his inventory and his building were insured, and Blyly said he’s been assured by his attorney that the policy will cover the loss. But that hasn’t erased his worries.
Blyly’s old policy expired May 23, and while he renewed the policy, he hadn’t yet received an invoice for his first payment when the fire hit.
“So I’m rather nervous about this,” he said.
Like many retailers, Blyly was already struggling due to the coronavirus pandemic, which had prevented him from opening his stores to walk-in traffic since March. Four of his six employees had gone on unemployment, returning to work not long before the stores were destroyed.
While Blyly worked long hours to fill mail orders alone during the shutdown, cashflow was limited. He estimated he owes publishers about $50,000 for books delivered before the fire.
Why renting doesn’t appear to be an alternative to rebuilding.
“I have completely given up on the idea of finding a place to rent to get back into operation quickly,” Blyly added, expecting that vacant commercial storefronts will soon be in high demand.
Ultimately, he’d like to rebuild in the same locations he’s occupied since 1984.
“I’ll have to see whether or not the insurance company’s estimate of what it would take to rebuild it is close enough to the architect’s estimate,” he said.
For now, he’ll carry on as a mail order business.
In the meantime, Blyly plans to run a small mail order business out of his home. He’ll start by selling Uncle Hugo’s and Uncle Edgar’s branded T-shirts and sweatshirts; he recently ordered a two-year supply.
It will give him something to live on until he rebuilds. If he rebuilds.
“A lot of authors have offered to send me signed books, so I’ll be selling signed books on the internet,” he added. “And I’m going to start selling off my personal library one book at a time.”
Don Blyly, owner of Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore in Minneapolis, told Facebook readers today they have taken over the GoFundMe originally announced by Alexi Vandenberg and it is now the authorized fundraiser.
Straight from Don: The guy from New Jersey who set up the GoFundMe page without permission was an honest guy just trying to help, but was over-eager. Last night he transferred the site over to Uncle Hugo’s. People no longer need fear that it is a scam from New Jersey. Best, Don Blyly
So friends, feel free to donate!
Uncle Hugo’s, in business since 1974, and neighboring mystery bookstore Uncle Edgar’s, since 1980, were burned May 30.
This is Sam Blyly-Strauss, Don’s son. Alexi has turned over the GoFundMe to my dad, who is having me handle the tech end of things. We’re still not sure what form any eventual rebuild of the business will take or what the timeline might end up being, but you can all rest assured that any donations to this GoFundMe will reach Don Blyly for use in rebuilding. As my day job is managing security for a multi-building site in Downtown Minneapolis, I’m pretty swamped right now but will be placing updates here when they become available. The Uncle Hugo’s Facebook page is another good place to check for general updates. I’ll respond to any questions as I’m able, but I can’t guarantee a super fast response time with everything else going on. Thank you all for your continued support in this difficult time.
The fund has raised $23,945 from 494 donors as of this hour.
Two Minneapolis science fiction landmarks were caught up in the wave of vandalism that struck the city amid protests against the death of George Floyd. Don Blyly’s Uncle Hugo’s bookstore has been burned, and Greg Ketter’s DreamHaven was broken into and damaged.
Uncle Hugo’s and Uncle Edgar’s in 2010.
Uncle Hugo’s, in business since 1974, and neighboring mystery bookstore Uncle Edgar’s since 1980 (also burned), are located near the corner of Lake and Chicago, Uncle Hugo’s is the nation’s oldest surviving sf bookstore.
Friends: I’ve gone past heartsick into angry. This is from Don this morning: Hi Folks, There was a call from the security company around 3:30 this morning that the motion detector was showing somebody in the building. I threw on clothes and headed over there. When I was 2 blocks away I received a call that the smoke detectors were showing smoke in the store. Every single building on both sides of Chicago was blazing and dozens of people dancing around. As I pulled into the dentist’s lot I could see that flames were leaping out the front windows of the Uncles. It looked to me like they had broken every window on the front of the Uncles and then squirted accelerant through each broken window. It looked hopeless to me, but I went around to the back door to see if I could get to a fire extinguisher. As soon as I opened the back door a wave of very thick black smoke poured out, so I quickly closed the door again… Since Chicago Ave. was full of dancing rioters, broken glass, and flaming debris, I went down the alley and took Lake St. home. There were blocks of Lake St. where every building was blazing. No sign of any cops, national guard troops, or any help.
I’m pretty sure the insurance policy excludes damage from a civil insurrection, so I suspect I won’t get a cent for either the building or the contents.
I am starting to investigate the best crowdsourcing to rebuild. Any donations – well – I’ll need to find where to send them
Located about two miles away, Greg Ketter’s Dreamhaven Books, Comics and Art was vandalized but not destroyed. Glass was broken and bookcases turned over.
We have a crew at DreamHaven. They smashed the front door, came in and smashed a lot of other glass, tried to bash their way into an empty cash box, and tried to set the store on fire. They took a few things, but so much was tossed around that it will be a while before we can figure it out.
Lots of cleaning is happening, glass slivers are everywhere. If anybody nearby has an industrial vacuum cleaner, that might be good for glass slivers.
Right now, we’re trying to get some cleaning done and not answering the phone, but feel free to swing by and chip in. Many thanks to everybody who already have.
DreamHaven boarded up. Photo by Oliver Grudem.
[Thanks to Joyce Scrivner and Joe Sherry for the story.]
Don Blyly, owner of Uncle Hugo’s and Uncle Edgar’s in Minneapolis, was recently interviewed by local NBC affiliate KARE for a report on independent bookstores:
Time.com included Don Blyly’s historic Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore on a list of “50 Authentic American Experiences”, one for each state. Uncle Hugo’s of Minneapolis was named Minnesota’s authentic experience:
In this age of the world-devouring chains, an independent bookstore is as rare a sight as a first edition of Harry Potter. An independent bookstore devoted to science fiction is even rarer still. But since 1974, Uncle Hugo‘s in Minneapolis has been stocking its shelves with a huge variety of new and used sci-fi books and earning a national rep among fans of the genre. Don Blyly opened the store 34 years ago when he was in law school, and he runs it to this day. (Right next-door is Uncle Edgar’s Mystery Bookstore, also owned by Blyly.) Drop by before a Barnes & Noble puts him out of business. 2864 Chicago Ave. S., Minneapolis.
