The Bookseller stays home

I’ve not been to work for three days. I’ve not stepped on public transport for that long, either, although I did buy my March bus pass, but that’s not even close to being the same thing. My laundry is done, my fridge is cleaned out, although it is not clean and there’s been some sweeping around the place that pleases me.

It occurred to me, when this vast open space of workless days all in a row presented themselves, that I would have no idea what to do with the time. Ha. Ha!

I read a lot. So much that I am not in a place where I can read anymore right now, or listen to music or lectures or even feed myself, because I’m Just That Full.

Homer has been with me this entire time.

The entire first chapter of ExtraVirginity features Odysseus and olive oil and the questions surrounding what that means to people in our version of the here and now. At the end of the chapter, someone made scented oil with roses: it smells of the Mediterranean.

Jerusalem was bound to bring the bard to mind with its layers of tragedies and homecomings. Leaders deposed, peoples massacred, livelihoods destroyed under the orders of army leaders not even attached to the city’s people or land; these echo.

I’d sort of hoped that Blood, Bones & Butter would lead me away from the violence and harshness of olive oil and sea travel and a world filled with instability and fragility and I was wrong. It left me full and vulnerable and the mere mention of oil from Puglia cast a net over this incongruous reading list and day-to-day living that I can barely begin to imagine.

Even the mystery that I read did not let me be in peace; ideas of responsibility for actions over time and human behavior and the traps of class and how education does not always allow people to get out of them finding their way through the muck of London sewers and into my nice little world view.

What is here is not what I wanted to say, and that’s alright. My feelings are definable, what they relate to is not yet real in words. I remember The Loss Library and its central story and the shelves of books that would have been written but for confidence or silence or carefulness and I must re-think my audience and consider the shape of my walls and perhaps the words that overflow will land on them.

In honor of the Catalog

The Library Catalog: that labyrinth of titles, authors, subjects, keywords, publication information, series titles and perhaps even major characters that is the map to infinite intellectual treasures. Well, it is now. When I was younger it was a torment invented by cranky old men and women who wanted nothing more than an empty room and silent students giving correct answers. Ah, the gentle nature of youth!

I am still working through Matthew Battles’s book Library: An Unquiet History, and thoroughly enjoying myself. Today, I read about Antonio Panizzi, the man who redesigned the library catalog of the British Museum and in so doing, changed the way patrons and librarians interacted with that catalog permanently. He was a young attorney who found himself in exile from his home state of Modena in Italy in 1823 after publishing an account of the trials of revolutionaries with whom he’d associated. He escaped over the Alps, was sentenced to death in absentia and eventually found himself in England where he tutored in Italian, learned English and eventually got himself appointed assistant librarian at the British Museum in 1831 (128-9).

His work “cataloging a collection of impossible complicated tracts from the English Civil War (129)” marked him as the best person to take on recreating the catalog from 1810, which in seven volumes with pages and pages of notes and addenda was becoming unusable. That catalog had been written as an inventory, in alphabetical order by book title, and Panizzi found that in many cases information was incomplete and there was no connection drawn between any of the works.

“Such crucial information as the author’s name, the publisher, and the date and place of publication might be incomplete, erroneous, or missing altogether. Panizzi developed a series of rules that reproduced these relations in the catalog, so that librarians – and crucially, readers – could trace and follow them. Unwittingly at first, he was helping to transform the library catalog from an inventory into an instrument of discovery. (130)” (emphasis mine)

In 1837 he was appointed Keeper of the Books and in seven years published one volume: A. The amount of time that it took Panizzi to create the catalog inspired a certain amount of grumbling on the part of some people, namely one Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas. Battles explains that part of his invective was to do with jealousy that Panizzi had so much influence in the library, partly there is a concern: “he is afraid that it (the complexity of the catalog) will make the reader do more work. (131)” While that reads alright, as Battles goes on, we begin to see there is something far more familiar than empathy at work.

“Early in the project, Panizzi had chosen to add the ‘pressmark’ of each book to its entry in the catalog. Like a call number on a modern library book, the gnomic pressmark indicated precisely the place where the book was to be found among the shelves of the library stacks (or ‘presses,’ as bookshelves were commonly called). (132)” The idea is that the pressmark indicates a geographic location; it does not refer to a subject or topic as Dewey call numbers do. If Dewey number 720.977 will find you in front of a book on Architecture in St. Louis, the number 230 c 9 in Panizzi’s catalog will find you looking at a book in the press (shelves) numbered 230, shelf c, position 6 (I’m thinking from the left, but that is a culturally grounded assumption).

Nicolas took offense at the amount of work a reader had to do to learn and understand all 91 rules Panizzi developed for his catalog. However, “Nicolas sensed that Panizzi was trying to produce not only a new kind of catalog but a new kind of reader as well – one more independent, more knowledgeable of library systems – and he wished to play no part in the revolution. (132-3)”

In Panizzi’s view of his catalog it was something that ‘”the public have the right to expect in such an institution”…”I want the poor student to have the same means of indulging his learned curiosity,”…”of following his rational pursuits, of consulting the same authorities, of fathoming the most intricate inquiry as the richest man in the kingdom.”(130-1)’ His work was not intended to play the part of something like a shopping list, it was meant to draw readers into the world of discovery, and to provide equal opportunity for every reader to be drawn in, not only the rich and not only the poor. His rules built bridges of connection.

I’ve never seen this catalog. I would love to. I expect that it would look fairly incomprehensible at first. Then again, I felt that way about Dewey and also about Reader’s Guides and most bibliographies.

Libraries now seem to be catering to the reader like Nicolas, who does not want to think too much about deeper questions than “is this title available and for how long can I have it?” I begin now to see catalogs grounded in the philosophy that it is not necessary for readers or librarians to draw from a diversified and intellectually stimulating range of texts and materials, rather that staying with the range of a single title will do just fine.

It is a revolutionary idea anymore that challenged and challenging inquiry is the mark of a well-grounded and developed adult. There is subversion in seeking out more than one answer to the same question. There is even more subversion in finding more than one question to go with each answer. Libraries do not have to be veiled hiding places of incomprehensible babble. They can be transparent organisms well-traveled and identified. Catalogs, well designed and maintained (not easy work, either of those), can begin to provide libraries with transparency, but they do need to be learned and translated, and that is not comfortable.

Battles, Matthew. Library: An Unquiet History. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2003. 214 pages +notes & index.

Books and Reading and Street Sounds

The library was filled the other day when I returned my books. I was the only person with a book in hand. Every person at the reading tables faced a computer, and almost all of those computers showed the familiar profile of Facebook.

For all of the focus and silence of reading, there is something less disconnected from other people about a person reading a book than about a person working on a computer. It is the same as the difference in relative realness between a long and intimate email and a short hand written note received through the mail. Interacting with the physical lends strength to physical living? Perhaps.

Perhaps it is that there is something innately comforting in the sight of a person interacting with something that is as tangible as a body. Or, that there is something discomfiting in the sight of a person interacting with something that is by definition bodiless.

The street outside is filled with the sound of shouting people. There are only three of them, but their voices are traveling through my windows with the force of a home run. There is goading and insulting and every now and then a conversation in the alley drifts across the others and I am confused, combining conversations into: “I’m walking in the alley, man!” “Are you gonna buy this?” “Where’d he go?” “Come out here! I’m on the porch, I can’t see you!”

It is all very not of me, and all very human, very physical, very much happening. The streets outside my building are quieter than I think they ought to be given the number and variety of people who inhabit these buildings and homes. A woman I spoke with suggested that once inside after supper, everyone goes to the Internet and just stays there. I don’t know if that’s true, but it could very well be. The streets are thus emptied of conversations and giggling and secrets and people walking and I don’t know if anything has taken their places. From what I hear it is quiet.  But like I said, it is really quiet.

I’ve been thinking about the dangers of isolation – about how you can go crazy always being in one place talking to almost no one else. Paranoia is easily spread in people who have no experiential proof of an outside that is not filled with cutthroats and gangsters. The more paranoid people become, the less likely they are to venture out. And the outside has room for the violent and disturbed because there is no one to provide the kind of social pressure that’s needed to keep that behavior out of the realm of public interaction.

It’s an old social dilemma. What city street has not known violence? What neighborhood has not feared for its children and elderly? How do you keep the crime off the streets where it is socially disruptive and lends to damaged people leading lives outside of a sustainable community?

Pretending that there is a way to end crime is extremely naïve and unsettling. Humans are asshats and always have been. The best you can hope for is a strong community ethic that does not have to rely on Community Contracts or fascist walled neighborhoods and prohibitive rules of behavior developed from advertisements for socially conscious economically irresponsible upper middle class families. I may not dig being poor (low-income, baby) but I have more freedom of movement and less social restrictions on my travel and activities than I remember having when the world I moved in was less, um, economically restricted.

I’m thinking that I may start going to the library just to read. I’ll pick out a book that may or may not be there the next time I go, and I’ll take notes in one of my little books for that purpose, and I’ll just read. I will be a human body interacting with a textual body in a place filled with other human bodies living their lives.

Treasures from my Reader feed.

I am never certain where to put the best of the best, but because it is just so, well, so -

This is the most surreal thing I have ever read. (and it wasn't written by Warren Ellis. go figure.)

Has anyone ever heard of or made or had this? It looks fascinating and quite pretty, but also there is vinegar in it, so I'm asking around for opinions.

PhD makes me laugh a lot today. (and yes, I am writing today for today and now, it is real-time today. for a little while, at least.)

Scatterwood continues to delight.

Three Panel Open is still on, and boy did Marley Zarcone bring it.

Coilhouse, as ever, shares the lovely and disconcerting in their piece on Leontine Greenberg. It is no secret that I have a huge culture crush on Coilhouse. They are incredible.

The British Library's science fiction blog has a piece about a novel about post-apocalyptic England that was published in 1885. Of particular note is the lengthy passage about how culture is transmitted in a world without a need or desire for books.

Christopher Wilson has been going through the massive amounts of photos he took while travelling a couple of years ago. I love all of them, but this one I love more because it is a picture of my friend and it captures for me the sense of isolation and calm self-knowledge that focused travelling can drop on you whether you like it or not.

Right. Enjoy, darlings.
It is a beautiful day.

Ambivalence and Opinion

Taking a cue from the Boris’s Cat Book of Coping, today has been productive in small and soft ways. Laundry provided me with a good, although not rigorous, cardio workout, as well as a closet filled with clean clothes. (Everything fit in the hanging shelves and on the hangers, btw. I was surprised, and very happy that I can still maintain a certain amount of control over my wardrobe.)

The math that I just did on my phone is not so soft and not really all that small, either, so I am content that tomorrow will be a day of errands and bus rides and something like expedition. I’m off to get a new phone number! I’ve not lived in Nebraska for more than a year, so maybe it’s time to act like I’m committed to not living there. Maybe.

Matthew Battles challenges me to face the ambivalence I feel when faced the constant struggle we humans undertake to make impermanent things permanent. I’ve read his book about the history of Library before and am no less pleased this time through. He has a sense of the smallness of people in the vast arrangements of books and shelves and ideals that have defined Library to various people engaged in various forms of being a Librarian over the millennia. His style is easy and engaging and I, of course, love the bibliographies and notes he provides. Yes. I am a complete bibliography nut. It is where and when he talks of antiquity and the libraries that were built as destroyed that I get all emotionally involved.

Books are beautiful and they fall apart. They age and die and suffer injury as any other living or actual thing. Even granite is not eternal. I am often bemused at attempts to preserve that which may very well be in the damn way. At the same time, there are always those people who would just as soon nothing had come before them, not simply the incredibly powerful or persuasive, but the paranoid and simple-minded as well. Bombing libraries and blowing up statues and burning books and scholars: these are nothing more than the cruel attempts of the small to make themselves seem large.

It is a simple and pithy generalization. And it is an old one. It is as old as curses on scrolls against any who would do damage or commit theft. It is as old as uncouth jokes about marriage; as people in love believing that no one has ever felt that way before; as politicians spinning every syllable to achieve their desired ends. It is not as old as death, and that is where it becomes important to remember that we humans live very short lives. We do not have the gift of awareness of the experiences of every atom in our bodies, even though the science suggests that every atom in our bodies predates us by vastly long periods of time.

We are simply one of nature’s recycling mechanisms.

And yet. We can create artifacts of immeasurable beauty and power – and we can know that they are immeasurable because we cannot conceive of the way to invent the measure of them. We do this time and again – for tens of thousands of years we have left ourselves evidence of our own existences, our own abilities. Our ancestors created and our ancestors destroyed. It would be very precious to believe that there are any of us alive who are not descended from at least a few of both.

There are times, moments on the timelines where some other force stepped in, some force not made of human DNA, and altered the expected course of things. Vesuvius blew up and rained ash over Pompeii and Herculaneum. The destruction of life and the preservation of artifacts in one go. Were it not for the volcano, what could we know of these cities, of the people who lived there, of their architecture and habits and even of their reading materials?

People occupied cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde and then disappeared, the dwellings remain, their midden heaps remain, but what do we know of the people? That they climbed to the top of the mesas to gather food, that they were smaller in stature than people of the 20^th century, that they built kivas? I have listened to lectures from people exercising every ounce of caution and meticulous research to back up an act of sheer intellectual imagination to explain anything concrete and plausible about the people who would have lived there.

We do not have to make such leaps at Pompeii – many of our questions are different there – they are about how connected one city was to another; what trade routes may have looked like; what sorts of paints or glasses or ceramics were used. Nothing particularly astonishing, and yet it is all very connected to us because we can look around and see how we live that echoes something like a pan-human experience (if such a thing is even a responsible thought).

So what happens when the repositories of our current collection of human evidences come under attack from bombs or fires or floods or earthquakes or careless management or politically based rhetoric? Do we understand the importance of maintaining connection to the stories of our pasts, our arguments, our failures and our successes? Or do we chalk it up to the life cycle?

This is where my ambivalence ends.

Any attempt to narrow the definition of human existence to one point of view or one educational ethic or one philosophical bent or one theocratic ideal is an act of dehumanization. When the right to be challenged is denied, the right to solve problems is damaged. When learning is quantified, the ability to learn is compromised. When access to the stories of creation – all of the stories of every creation that we can catalog and share – is limited because of any authoritative human philosophy, the human experience is fundamentally altered to that of a termite wearing blinders.

The paradox of a volcano destroying a city and preserving a library is not particularly compelling to me. The story of the monk who used a silk thread to begin to separate the layers of scrolls one from another in order to provide reading material for those who came after him is.

Blessings, beloveds.

The sounds of things in the world

There are many elements of my childhood that I find it almost impossible to abandon. Some of them I even enjoy - reading aloud, or being read to is definitely at the top of the list.

Winter evenings my father read to us from Tom Sawyer and the Laura Ingalls Wilder books (in the living room by the fireplace as we sat on the floor in our pajamas with the dog and our stuffed animals (you may now gag, but remember - this is my reality)) (also, hot cocoa). In the third grade, our teacher read Caddie Woodlawn to us, and my young adulthood holds afternoons spent with friends and The Phantom Tollbooth and The Princess Bride floating around in words that landed on the walls and the chairs and our hearts more real than laughter.

I loved La Lectrice (The Reader) almost instantly because of the whimsical nature of the serious business of reading aloud from the page to someone else in the room. Also, it's just funny. (aside: I saw a lot of really good movies one spring. Just a thought.)

Knitting and crochet and macrame and all of those crafts that end in -ay or something like it are enjoyable and productive and creative and kind of quiet. I am not so enamoured of my own voice that I have to be surrounded by it at all times, but I do like the sound of someone's voice. Music is almost too intense to hear while creating, but learning or landscape or mystery or magic, these are welcome to my home - not through earbuds, but played out to fill the space.

O Jerusalem turned the futon on which I knitted my poncho into a goat-skin tent with cups of gritty coffee and air thick with stories so layered no one knows where one tradition could even begin to begin.

Inkspell is sheer ear candy. The story is dark and difficult and weighty with storytelling matters and yarn turns to lace very easily to Brendan Fraser's voice.

I'd been reading the Lectures volume of the Harvard Classics out loud in the house in Maryville. The cats were not so fond of it, but I liked the exercise of speaking well turned sentences and different rhythms. My writing got better and my voice started finding more creative ways of interpreting the words on the page. I miss it.

It is a very grounding experience, something that cannot be pretended away: the sound of a voice, a human voice, making human sounds out of humanly created letters and words and sentences. It is always around a fire/kitchen table/hearth.There is a magic to the noises made, to the act of making them - I am not alone when I am reading out loud the words of someone I will never meet.

I am excited to try to participate in the BYOB events at Subterranean Books once I get to St. Louis. I loved the day long reading of Paradise Lost at UNL to commemorate Milton's 400th birthday. One of these days, I will find the time and resources to read for Librivox. The last time I checked, there were still very many titles in the public domain without recordings in the archive.


We read silently. We read publicly. We read dispassionately. There is difficulty reading aloud, it is a thing to be practiced. Fortunately, even though the cats don't like hearing me read aloud, I can always scratch that up to a deficiency in feline nature. :)

Durant & Bohemian cave artists

Once upon a time, 2009, I think it was, when I was still writing the fictions, I came up with a story for the origin of the 7 Dwarves. It fit into a poem thing, like a ballad or a really long story-song only fit for performance by Arlo Guthrie, you know? It was not long after that I found that I had been preceded in telling that story (not entirely the same, but close enough) by someone much more well known that I ever hope to want to be. (also, dead, so, yeah) Unintentionally derivative. There were feverish texts to a friend (it warranted that level of immediate attention) and finally it occurred to me that it is no shameful thing to have found a similar narrative question answerable in a similar way. Storytellers do not have the luxury of copyright on asking and answering narrative questions - we come and go, the stories last.

I read of young scholars consulting texts at random as part of a kind of prophetic parlor game with much the same sense of wonder at connection. It pleased me more than sherbet. I picked up the habit from Next Stop Wonderland, although it struck me as an entirely correct thing to do when I saw it happen in Career Girls, a movie I saw while I was trying 'dating' after my first divorce. The movie was delightful, even though the company was a bit, um, dull.

Prophecy bores me. I can never see the point of caring much how the story claims to end as eventually all books must be closed and life continues regardless. I am much more interested in the turning of the tides and the pages and all the wonderful things that get in the way while the writer is desperately trying to make an end viable or at least less contrived than the one she knows will win her an audience. Turning the pages of a book to wherever they will open allows me to delve quite briefly into something I may or may not want to pursue - it is how I decide which of two novels to purchase, whether I will commit to all of the poems in a collection or exactly how well decorated 5 or 10 minutes of my life will be in someone else's words.

All of my books thus far have one slight disadvantage: someone else wrote them or arranged them. There is this pervasive sense of order in things that gets a bit chafing. I see no reason not to discuss Egyptian philosophy and romantic capers from the 1970's in the same breath (provided a random and suspect connection). As I haven't got around to making myself a book of my own words (that I'm willing to flip through at will without the aid of tequila and King Arthur - i.e. journals don't count), I've turned one of my blank books into a quotation and bibliography collection.

This is not an academic sort of thing; there is no consistent style of bibliography and the passages I've written down are not the stuff of papers or presentations, they just make me happy.

Also, I can open the book almost (as it is not yet full) anywhere and read something like this:
Bogin, Meg. "The Women Troubadours: An Introduction to the Women Poets of the 12th-century Provence and a Collection of their Poems." WW Norton & Co. 1980 - Someone wrote this book, and it can be bought and read. What joy!

I've begun Volume I of Durant's The Story of Civilization and while there are 80 very meaningful years between him and me, I get to find and save little (some less little than others) nuggets for future random inspiration.

The whole interpretation of history as progress falters when we consider that these statues, bas-reliefs and paintings, numerous though they are, may be but an infinitesimal fraction of the art that expressed or adorned the life of primeval man. What remains is found in caves, where the elements were in some measure kept at bay; it does not follow that pre-historic men were artists only when they were in caves. They may have carved as sedulously and ubiquitously as the Japanese, and may have fashioned statuary as abundantly as the Greeks; they may have painted not only the rock in their caverns, but textiles, wood, everything - not excepting themselves. They may have created masterpieces far superior to the fragments that survive. In one grotto a tube was discovered, made from the bones of a reindeer, and filled with pigment*; in another a stone palette was picked up still thick with red ochre paint despite the transit of two hundred centuries**. Apparently the arts were highly developed and widely practised eighteen thousand years ago. Perhaps there was a class of professional artists among paleolithic men; perhaps there were Bohemians starving in the less respectable caves, denouncing the commercial bourgeoisie, plotting the death of academies and forging antiques. (97-98)

 * see page 17
** see page 45

Open Library: I love that you exist.

Molly Crabapple puts elephants on the door.

Geeks are made of win at Dragon Con.

Be well, beloveds.
I have more date with learning.

Foggy Day. With damp

Stillness is an ever absurd event. There is paralysis in stillness, and also landscape and surface and the smell of peas.

Yes. Peas.

The library is closed until Tuesday, but nothing closes sidewalks or hides the outside walls of buildings and the walking is pleasant. It is only a few blocks to the river and the lighthouse and the pier and the freezing plant for peas.

The experience of 'getting focused' is one that does not always take a whole lot of energy, but does take time and patience. I miss the writing of the last few years where words happened in a rhythm that led itself into images and impossibilities and ridiculous metaphors that required nothing more of me than my hands and a few bits of technological magic to share with the world, or whatever part of the world happened to land here for a while before heading off on stumble to some other set of recipes or book reviews or art work. It will not happen again simply because I wish it, and there is no magic spell that will turn the heartbeat back into a poetic foundation for the larger thoughts of the larger world that find such outlet in the marketplace of my inner mind and have such difficulty finding their feet in the air. Even in the air of typing.

Outside was damp. Cool and quiet. The whole town is shutting down for the weekend. Not just one day, but the whole weekend. I am unaccustomed to such diligence and find it more aggravating than I need. Next weekend sees Sputnikfest, Lobsterfest and the 9/11 Remembrance ceremony. Perhaps the town, not unlike the people in it, finds stillness in focus the way to face the days ahead.

As for me, I read.
I will grab my quote-book and add to its pages.

And occasionally find myself here, checking to see what Molly Crabapple is doing during her week in hell.

Plan ... Fibonacci

For the last few days, I've been very aware that I am starting a whole new thing in the life of me without a backup plan. I am not known for being excessively controlling, but I do like to be aware of my circumstances and the options that are available to me should the airplane I'm jumping out of decide to blow up with my purse in it. You know?

I forget about Mother Nature. She does not care that my backup plan was about a place to live. She delivered the smack down to Nodaway County in the form of a hail storm that devastated crops; dented homes, cars and picnic tables; ripped rag top roofs on cars and soaked the floor of my former workplace.

The domino effect of which is that moving is put on hold for a bit.
Not long, just a bit. (Given the struggles that many people that I know and love have to know by name, this is hardly a tragedy for me.)

It feels like one of those "One of These Days" kind of times - you know, for when you need to go through old files, or read Tolstoy, or memorize the monasteries of Ireland in the 8th century. There's that list of extremely specific things to do that require special circumstances outside of one's control. Time that is not to be spent doing anything else, as there is not enough time for it.

I have no idea what to do with the time. My list is in a box. In a storage unit (that did not get its roof blown off, thankfully).

This is the part where my issues are the most well-defined. The part where I get too thinky and not do-y enough.

Altho, there are nine more books in the series of Durant left to read, and I've got an Eco and a Le Guin in my bag.

I miss my typewriter right now.
Something a bit more personally creative may be in order.

Anyway, best to all who are packing today!
Best to all who start back to school today!

Digital Alphabet in Stone - Dom Hans van der Laan/Autobahn 2011 from autobahn on Vimeo.

Found at Wooster Collective

Untitled from Timothy Lane on Vimeo.

Found at Subterranean Books. It's a snippet from their first Whirling Gypsy Comicarouselesque Revue & Burlesque: "Featured St. Louis graphic novelists will read their works in character while projecting the novels slide by slide. It's like story time with pictures!" (The calliope music is a bit loud, but the content is good.)

The thing where nothing is really happening. Yet

Because it will be happening. It will be happening in carloads - quite physically. There will be mapping directions and planning interviews and apartment viewings and then interior figuring and domestic economy engineering and finding places for all of the books (mind you, I am only bring 9 (maybe 10) boxes of books to the new place)(not including the ones that have books as padding). This will all happen.

Starting Wednesday. Not yesterday Wednesday, next week Wednesday.

I'm also less than one hundred pages from the end of the Big Book that I'm reading and less than 200 pages from the end of the Other Big Book that I'm reading and have resorted to writing letters and thank you notes. I rewrote my cover letter once this week, and will spend time this evening and tomorrow doing the same. Probably Saturday, as well. Resumes are flexible. I am happy about this.

I don't even have enough dirty clothing to justify the 2USD expense and time of doing the laundry.

This is not my favorite thing in the world. I did this for months last fall and it was not good. People didn't like talking to me very much, or, more like, the talking to me was just confirmation that I was not enjoying things like I like. As I am not in a position to indulge in long-term bleh, I self-medicate with cat-cuddling, gentle thinking and wandering around twitter and Whitechapel for electric jolts of "If you want to do a thing, then do it" and that helps. The doubt thing - it waits outside the office door and slides in like Ethel when she wants to get something you don't want her to have. Ethel is furry and warm and sweet to me. Doubt is infinitely less so, and a terrible conversation partner.

I think it is time to see if I can find something beautiful to look at and share it. Yes?
Good.

Here: Aljoun Castle in Jordan.

Robin LeBlanc took a picture with a mantis in it.

Kickstarter shows me fun card games.

There.
Go.
Live.

Smell of a drizzly morning

It was that first feel of ozone as I left work this morning. A greeting so familiar and hoped for and so surprising.

Today would be good for ...

Icelandbob's Music mix.

Keats' Endymion

Fellini: I'm a Born Liar

wings at Carson's

Cardamom tea

Charles Lamb's Essays

Monster Commute from the beginning

Blank-it from the beginning

OR

...adventure with ninja electron wearing galoshes and rain-proof capes with neon goggles - we go to find the perfect person to run a by-the-cup tea and coffee shop in Brownville who will also have granola bars and fruit and sometimes some bean soup with carrots in it that tastes of thyme and parsley and bay leaf and who grows basil in the window for the love of it. we fly on her unicorn cat steed named Claude. we end the day with cocoa, bitter and thick, and croissants and also lasagna that someone else cooks for us. and then someone we know will draw the whole thing and then we will make it a poster and then never be recognized on account of our face-covering, but not really hiding, clever masks. maybe with feathers. made of old yarn and pipe cleaners and starch paste.


i really need to write more.

I think I will do ALL OF THIS. except for the part about all of the reading - that shit just gets in the way.

How to start reading webcomics

As happens with every personally familiar train of thought, I blithely assume that everyone I know has experience with the same set of stories, comics, formats, media, etc., albeit under individually defined circumstances.

As happens with relative frequency about this sort of thing, I am wrong. I feel it important to acknowledge that I am friends with a wonderful woman who also suffers from this forgetfulness when it comes to other people not living with the same set of references. We call each other on it frequently and I’m glad to say that I rely on her to keep my sense of perspective fairly sharp.

(It should be here noted that I am almost always right about everything else in life, although my right-ness does not ever stand on the presumption of someone else’s wrong-ness.)

It always stalls me to realize that other people do not read webcomics every day. That there are people who have been quite happy in their lives without needing to consider the differences in the visual formats of film and paper, even when a film is made to mimic a particular graphic style (à la Sin City and Lord of the Rings). I find myself stammering the names of the same three or four webcomics in no particular order or relevance with the persistence of a Star Wars nerd protesting someone else’s ignorance of The Force: “But Yoda, I mean, Obi-Wan – how could Luke have succeeded at all without it?” Empty words to people with a different context.

Also, I’ve been thinking it would be fun to revisit some of titles I started reading wa-ay back in the summer of 2002, when the world changed forever, and I discovered Sinfest and Scary-go-Round.

I started reading Sinfest and Scary-go-Round in September of 2002 on the advice of a young woman with whom I’d made friends the previous spring. We’d been in an American poetry class together (which was brilliant fun – it was good to be in a place where I could call Whitman a pompous ass and share differently voiced readings of Dickinson and swim in the images of Wallace Stevens without feeling like I’d missed something and be okay with not understanding Howl – it was a class of learning, one of those that set a foundation for future comprehension) and she and her husband were gamers who had found an online source for games that were essentially rules with a set of cards that you bought and played with pieces that came from your own board games. They were good at the cultural possibilities of the Internet, and we were, as yet, not.

One of my biggest struggles at the time was remembering that Sinfest was with a .net, and Scary-go-Round was with a .com. The world before I discovered the purpose of Bookmarks. (Oddly – I’ve still not made good friends with delicious, even though it is so exactly up my alley.)

I have played a computer video game maybe all of 20 times in my life, or, to be more specific: in the 27 years since my mother first brought computer games into the house, I have played something requiring more skill than luck and also pushing more than maybe two buttons less than once a year. And yet, I read Ctrl-Alt-Del, Penny Arcade and Little Gamers like they were the very people who spoke to my soul.

Boy On A Stick And Slither became regular reading about this time, as well.

Finding one comic from another is a piece of cake in web-world, you just follow links that look good, and in 2002 and 2003, archives were just not that long as most of the titles started in the ‘90s. Do You Know How Much That Is Now???? It’s like a month of deliberate reading! Of the same title! Every Day! Madness, I tell you. I read Girl Genius from the beginning just last month, and I thought it would take forever and do you know that it isn’t even close to being done yet and there are Complications! ahead yet! Madness! Madness! That said, I have no idea how I found these pages anymore. None.

My memory tells me that it was about spring or summer of 2003 that I started reading Goats, which kept me happy for a good long time. My generally accepted pattern is to find a new title and then read ALL of it until I’m caught up. In 2003, that meant quite a few happy weeks with Goats. And then somehow there was Something Positive and then Queen of Wands.

Friendly Hostility I found sort of on a whim, I think, and then it was Sam and Fuzzy and MacHall (which, as it happens, makes me smile just to look at (and also distracts me to this day seeing as how I keep flipping over to read more of the archives of Threepanelsoul) (GAH)).

I had time during that time to build quite a reading list, including: Achewood, Diesel Sweeties, Cat and Girl, and Ph.D.

I know that I haven’t talked at all about what makes these fun for me to read, or how they’ve contributed to my sense of culture, art, language, community and story-telling. That’s a whole other set of blogs. And I’m just getting started talking about the titles that got me hooked; y’all don’t even know the rest yet.

I’ll get around to it.

Because I can talk. Really.

Reading, 2.

How does art manifest itself in life?
How do those classes on the Humanities relate to anything lived in a life like mine: underemployed, un-ambitious, poverty level, un-consumer, un-insured, etc.
Where do those works of times past play into the world of writers of books that I can find and read, whether in my own library or the public library’s collection?
How important are they really?
And could a deliberate focus on non-fiction or a reading list comprised of an almost randomly selected group of titles be meaningful or have any connection whatsoever that would eventually lead it to be definable in some way?
*

I had and have another, much less esoteric motivation. Consistency and accomplishment have not been the defining themes of my life, though they have been the defining absences in many of my relationships (including interpersonal and scholarly). It is absolutely necessary for the success of my future self that I lose that attitude and gain something more like definition and direction. To that end, I saw this Grand Absurd Reading List as a way to delve into as many different areas of thought, time, space, geography, and style as I could without losing all potential coherence. As I write, it occurs to me that what I’ve ended up with has been a sort of Noah’s ark of cataloging. Which is a totally different story.

I’ve discovered many new ideas and ways of thinking. I’ve read books that have challenged my own self-imposed ignorance. I’ve read books that have annoyed me, and I am not done, which means that there are many more possibilities to be given life. I’ve begun to keep another list, one of movies, and another of books that I’ve read, not simply for The List.

I was keeping track of the music I listened to, and then that got to be too much, so I just keep track of it in my brain, which has a ton more room for holding onto information now that I’ve begun connecting loose bits with other loose bits and pulling ideas together, even loosely and absurdly. The patterns exist, even in books that seem totally unrelated or styles that have no rational connection whatsoever.

They are expressions of a living human, and they may just be enough.

I’ve put all of the titles that I could on my LibraryThing page.
Frida (scroll down until you see Salma Hayek) and Omkara are movies, and so excluded.

*Can you change your life without wealth, power, prestige or great beauty?

Reading, 1.

Writing reviews for my LibraryThing account has become a new sort of exercise for me. There is this struggle between how much I read and how much of that reading turns into something else, like a new link in my knowledge or a review or renewed vigor working toward a goal. It is difficult to know how to approach the desire and ability to read too much and temper it without abandoning it entirely. To that end, I have found that some requirements help. I concoct reading lists and goals and use them to gauge what I’m doing and how much of it I’m doing and then once I’ve pondered the goal I’ve reached, I make a new one that is modified and so on. It is in that relatively constant pendulum swing of thought and planning and action and result that I begin to find that my life looks like something that is more like what I believe a well-lived life is.

It is aware, involved, compassionate, decisive, disciplined, gentle, quiet, joyful and not without absurdity. I believe that moderation is a good touchstone, even when it is for itself. I believe that the best way to learn a thing is to do it, and there is no reason that a book cannot be as instructive as any other method of learning, provided that the learner take the time to give air to the words of his or her instructor as they cannot do it for themselves from within the pages of a closed or silently chewed over text.

As I considered the words I chose for my review of Journey to Portugal by Jose Saramago, it occurred to me that more than just a desire to travel to that country myself was kindled. Saramago is so infuriatingly specific with his words, particularly his terminology and architectural awareness that it almost drove me to despair. I read the book slowly, though, over a period of time that was longer in events that chronology.

The first time I read the book, I did not finish it. This had more to do with my health at the time than anything else.

By the time I got around to reading it again, I had a road map of Portugal from the 1980’s pinned to my wall and worked very hard to trace his route. My notes from the first part of that reading are just incredible, they are lists of place names and monuments and styles of architecture. I am deeply happy with them.

The third time I picked up the book, I finished it in a profound amazement.

My sense of distance from his specificity was countered very strongly by my sense of the richness of his experience and I began to ask some questions about my own experiences in the world.

Tracks in the snow

The knitting projects for the year have begun, in grand fashion. This is not to say that there is anything grand or glorious about collecting needles and yarn and pattern and focus, rather that both of the projects I will begin soon are huge and will take many months to complete. The patterns are entirely new to me, and I've decided to be smart about them (as the finished projects are gifts for other people) and make actual swatches, to scale replicas, if you will, not only for practice and note-taking purposes, but also to have some remnant of the things in my home.

Not every project must be large and impossible. There is a need for fingerless gloves and perhaps even socks. A pattern has been chosen for the cabling that I would like to use on both of them. I find the idea matching gloves with socks deeply silly and wonder where the hell it came from. I feel that thick wool boot socks and matching gloves in various shades of orange and purple and green will be a lovely addition to my winter wardrobe. One of these years.

The small projects; the ones that take an hour or two; the ones that take an hour or two every day for a week - these are the ones that keep me focused on the larger ones. I learn more about consistency. I have something to do. Results are not necessarily immediate, but they are noticeable. and I've got stuff to show off to people. Which is always the goal, na?

I've broken the big projects down as much as I can. The house, the afghan, the couch runner thing, the novel. The novel is the one that has the most little steps. I've got an idea board for it. I've got ideas. The time is a little more haphazard right now as there is much going on. That will get worked out. Because it is a nice little project to sit with the calendar and my work schedule and move around each other for a little while.

Last night I began the replica of the couch runner thing. I've altered the pattern slightly to accommodate the yarn and needles that I've to use. This will be the first project involving more than one color that I've done in a very long time, and I'm more than a bit nervous, so the color change practice is good. It is good to just jump into a thing, knowing that there are more jumps ahead, never fear about the lack of challenge.

Also - oh, yeah, there's an also - the reading. I love the reading. but there's a hell of a lot of it to do this lifetime. The library that I leave to the world will be my gift to the next me. This is my reading list. What is yours?

The world here is cold, so cold that we all wish to be fitted inside with blankets and warm drinks. Our wishes go unfulfilled and the outdoors calls with sunshine and snow and we walk around in a daze, not quite believing where we are. These are days of coffee shops and long lunches and plans for winter adventures in snow-covered cemeteries in boots and gloves and many long layers under something lovely in flowing skirt. There is quiet in the walking, even the crunch does not always travel as far as it could. We will speak of fairies and families and perfect picnics as we take pulls from flasks of liquid warm and spicy. Our feet will freeze and our noses will turn us all into shunned reindeer and when we go home and finally sleep the dreams will dance in delight because their world has been given beauty and cold and spice.

ug and unh

I am finally beginning to feel rested, although I have been having very vivid and not entirely peaceful dreams. I would blame the novels I've been reading, but that would be a lie, and I'm feeling deceitful enough lately.
How could that be?
Well, because I find that not expressing anger, particularly at the person who behaved stupidly (no, not anyone who works for the city, never), is not honest. While I have no real compunction to obsessive honesty, I do have a need to behave genuinely. There is no room on my sleeve to display my heart - I like a neon sign, or tangible vibe. I do not want there to be a question. It's a thing. I don't like deceptive people. I do not particularly enjoy being deceptive. It makes my tummy icky and my mouth all bleckgue.
At the same time, I'm lazy. I don't really want to be the Person Who Does Stuff unless it has very minimal consequences that can be readily ignored by later generations. Only, my life sucks when I don't speak up. Trust me. And then I get angry. Only my anger tends to be directed at myself as I am not used to be angry out loud at people - are you seeing a pattern? I am. The emotion is there, only because it's not being directed where I believe that it belongs, it's getting directed at me, which leads to drinking and pathetic behavior and never getting around to telling someone how much what they are doing is accomplishing nothing good. Then it's back to being the Person Who Never Does Anything. Which is far worse.
Whine moan groan complain.
Please tell me that someone else is having this day?
Gotta be something going around, can't be just me.
Light at the end of the tunnel moment: kitten chasing tail, getting distracted by her shadow. Best part of the morning. Until I realized that I had enough punches on the cards for a free frou-frou drink at the Coffee House this morning. Good things still happen, and they just won't stop, no matter what I do. Sigh.

Beautiful little story

In the midst of my recovery from The Book, I found a little small book by Jose Saramago and fell in love with it as I knelt in the aisle between the shelves not concerned with the other patrons, not feeling the need to take the little book out of the library with me, but feeling the need to finish the lovely tale before my dishy lunch with Andy.

The Tale of the Unknown Island.

It starts with a man petitioning the king for a boat.

Writing that could break through the fog that I'd walked in for two days, the beauty of it was stunning. It's a fairly quick read. A nice stop on the way to whatever else sucks.

Well, of course I was right

The Book is read from cover to cover. In that order. Was informed last night that there is to be a gathering of folk to discuss on Friday, therefore a gag order is in place until then.

Not surprisingly, I am still recovering, after spending six hours at the Coffee House, barely moving, nose in book, almost totally unaware of anything going on around me - with the minor exception of the young woman who had picked up her copy, read the first page or so and then immediately got on her cell phone to call people and tell them she was reading it (hunh?!), and the man who sat down across the end table from me who was startled every time I giggled out loud. I do that. It happies me that I do it, but I can understand how it would be startling.

Anne has it right now, and I'm doing my best not to bombard her with questions. Failing miserably, of course. So, where are you in the book? Are you liking it? Etc.

I will not go on to drop hints or give spoilers or anything. I am not that person.

I am satisfied. And I was right. It is done.