Henri Freeqy IV (founder); everyone in their heart of hearts

When my friend Sam, AKA LibraryThing user and all-round goodfellow A_Musing, suggested I use my 1000th review to recognize Le Salon, which has become for both of us*, and many others, a kind of home away from home on the internet, he was—first off—dead right, but he was also putting on me a heavy geas, an injunction to eloquent and heartfelt testimony that I treat seriously. I thought about several approaches to separate this from my usual review method, a sort of skimming-off of whatever floats to the top of my frontal lobe. But you know: screw that, man. This is not a peuple’s history. The group is much to many—more than I alone am privy to or in a position to discuss. And any pretense to comprehensiveness would also be less than what you’re going to get: a freequey free-form meditation on what the group is and has been to me. Business as yewzh, yeah?


So okay: okay. It all began when the esteemed, right honourable, wonderful and (enfant) terrible future Dictateur-for-life, recently embarked on a retirement that I hope will give him much time to fish and paint watercolours and still visit the gang from time to time, the abovelinked LT user, my friend EnriqueFreeque, started a group called “The Quest for the Last Page of Ulysses”, to which he invited a strange brew of folk, incl. yr correspondent, based on I think our reviews of Joyce’s opus magnum, as what I understand was basically meant to be a joke, a nine days’ wonder. Hack on Bloom and Dedalus a little and then go back to our lives.

Not that I know for sure, since it wasn’t till my friend, LT user Princess Paulina, pushed me to come and join the fun everyone was having with their group read of The Master and Margarita. Paulina departed, but I stayed, pleased as hell to have found a group of erudite, funny people with a cool dynamic whose slate of books TBR would force me to (as I had pledged myself on starting grad school) keep reading stuff for fun.

My first group read was Les Misérables; my first amazing new discovery from the Salon was Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star. But the reads soon became secondary to the community, at a time when I thought that communities of interest on the internet had given way definitively to weak-connection social sites like Facebook &c., and that I spent too much time on the hell damn ass comp to take part in them even if they hadn’t.

But the Salon just kept coming up with such spot-on shit. I remember getting my copy of Clarel, a huge grey brick of iambic-tetrameter verse that I carried around all winter and gleefully described to all/sundry (“the longest epic poem in the English language, about a young divinity student who goes to the Holy Land and is disappointed”) to see them recoil in horror. (It’s still my favourite review I’ve done.) I remember how pleasantly surprised I was to talk to Peter Weissman about his book I Think, Therefore Who Am I? and find he had interesting and illuminating shit to say about it, which (in my exp., lim. as it is) most authors, actually most people who make art of any sort, do not. I remember when tomcatMurr started up the spinoff Salon des Amateurs de la Langue, how rad it was to be able to go and yammer and free-associate on weird new shit I was learning in a chill and non-judgmental atmosphere (the secret history behind that comment is A LOT OF LINGUISTS ARE DICKS).

Here are the Salon’s top three virtues in my mind: 1) Friendliness. I don’t know a single other group that’s as punctilious and openhanded about welcoming in new members, putting them at their ease, collectively playing the good host—in particular, I don’t know any other thriving group that does that just out of pure good spirits, as opposed to because they’re looking for one more precious human to discuss diesel trains with or whatever. 2) Brains! Brainzzzzz! Go ahead and check, just to take one example, this and subsequent Salon threads on The Brothers Karamazov and tell me they aren’t the cleverest lit-talk you’ve seen on the internet (as well as several fathoms more accessible than the nearest competitors). 3) Equipoise. A lot of smart, passionate people, a wide range of political positions, no rules to speak of, and it’s still been rare for anyone to walk away in a huff. That’s, like, proof people can behave decently on the internet!

When I fucked up and caused a crisis in my life and the lives of dear ones, I put up a review of my thoughts/feewings, not really quite yet recognizing how public those reviews could be. It hit Hot Reviews on the strength of Salon thumbs and stayed there for a while, and it was really good for me, man, both to see it all out there in public and think that one day it would just be another shitty thing from the past, and to hear the heartfelt feedback and encouragement from LT users both intra- and extra-Salon.

LSL made me decide to name my daughter Hildy.

LSL taught me that if I were a book I’d be Lolita or Romeo and Juliet. I guess the common denominator is forbidden love?

LSL also taught me about a serious pile of great literature and gave me a poem of the day and a nature thread to talk about the weather on (today, gross and grey) and somehow tricked me not only into starting a whole thread about my reviews, which are mostly about shit with words like “cognitive” and “glottal” in the title and thank you all so much for your patience with that. It also inspired me to post 500 youtube videos—which takes a while, let me tell you—because I thought it would be a great place to share tunes and learn about more, and it was.

LSL got me into wodka and herring!

I kind of want to do a bunch of shout-outs, but do not wish to forget anyone, which I will inevitably do. But what I will do is personally thank the aforementioned E. Freeque, for creating a group unlike anything else I’ve seen online, for being the 21st century’s premiere online trickster, and for having a huge heart.

LSL kept me coming back to LibraryThing long enough to write a thousand freakin’ reviews. You should check out this group!

*(If I may presume to speak for him)… (mehr)