Reading and Tangents

 

Books I've read during the pandemic shown above. I'm a slow reader. Plus I usually only read books at night in bed before drifting off to sleep. (This usually results in reading all or part of a page or two when I pick it up the next night, too.) 

The books I read often lead me to other books. Years ago I read Last Train From Berlin by Howard K. Smith, a book published in 1942 that I borrowed from my in-laws. I found the first-person narrative of the World War II era in Europe so fascinating that I bought and read lots of old books published in the same time frame in the same vein. That slim volume entitled Skin and Bones is one I purchased in January at the Strand bookstore (in NYC) about a French WWII prisoner of war. Erik Larson's The Splendid and the Vile is in the WWII era vein but instead of being published in that era was published this year. However, it was drawn entirely from first-person letters, diaries, and reports and it is an absolutely stunning account of life in England during the blitz. 

The other slim volume is a translation from the French of a book published in 1795 wherein a man is confined to his rooms and makes a journey of it. (I bought this long ago. How appropriate to read during the plague!) 

The Biggest Bluff and The Improbability Principle are examples of what I like to call 'popular math' books. I love reading them. The former is about poker and the people who play it but also touches on chance and probability. The latter book is about the chances of rare things happening. I was able to use what I learned in formulating my COVID-19 risk spreadsheet. Even if there are only 4500 infected people out of 1.3 million, you have an 8% chance of encountering one in a group of 25. If you encounter 250 then the chance exceeds 50%.

Leaving the Gay Place is a biography of Billy Lee Brammer who wrote the quintessential Texas political novel The Gay Place. It was very interesting to track this infamous character and all the other characters one has heard of through Texas and D.C. 

Lastly, the book I just finished Flâneuse is one that really created tangents. Anyone who follows me on Facebook knows that I enjoy walking as a meditation and creative act as well as exercise. This book was both highly personal and off into literary tangents. The author, Lauren Elkin, had her own experiences in Tokyo, Venice, Paris, New York, and London. But she talks at length about other women including ones I'd explored a lot before (Martha Gellhorn, Virginia Woolf) and ones I'd barely been cognizant of before. For example, she explores the French filmmaker Agnès Varda. I'd watched one of her films on the Criterion Channel (Cléo de 5 à 7) but reading about others caused me to subject my husband to a couple more last night and this morning. (He said he enjoyed them.) Odd French films are a great tangent to take one away from pandemic land.

I guess this is goodbye to Holidailies. It's been fun.

Degrees, Honorifics, Misogyny and Books I've Read

 

I have a BA. A Bachelor of Arts. In Mathematics with a minor in French. My skills in those two subjects being woefully absent in my old age, I don't brag about it too much. I wish I remembered more about differential equations. I wish I'd ever even studied topology. Occasionally I read popular books that touch on mathematics and desperately try to revive something of my training. I have mastered enough French to never stumble over ici, mer, and such in my crosswords. Every year I buy a page-a-day calendar with a French sentence or note about something French six pages a week. (You only get one page for the weekend. It's a cheat.) I went back to college for classes in mathematics, accounting, and business. I never completed any other degree. Therefore, you won't find me bragging about my education or using a title or honorific. And I didn't attend Harvard or anything for that one degree. North Texas State University. Now the University of North Texas. (Why the name change? I don't know.)

Much has been made on social media about an editorial by Joseph Epstein in The Wall Street Journal in which he excoriates Dr. Jill Biden for using the title. It is dismissive of her because she isn't a medical doctor, has a Doctorate in Education, and wrote a dissertation he described as 'unpromising' perhaps because it mentioned "Community College."

In this editorial, he admits that he has only a BA and an honorary doctorate. He excoriates his honorary doctorate a bit, but also that of others. He brags about, despite his lack of real degrees, being a lecturer at the prestigious Northwestern and the editor of The American Scholar. 

In a world where we have so many problems that should light up the editorial pages of our major newspapers and social media, this editorial should never have been written. It smacks of misogyny, elitism, whatever. He might have missed that Jill, married to a politician all these years, might want some way to say "I am a woman who has accomplished something in my field, education, not just by getting an advanced degree, but by furthering student's accomplishments."

But. No, there's not really a but. They shouldn't have published it. It just doesn't matter what he thinks about her use of the title. Like his lack of an advanced degree doesn't matter. 

However. Yes, maybe there is a, however. Around 1999 or 2000 I picked up a book while browsing in a bookstore. "Narcissus Leaves the Pool" by Joseph Epstein. I loved the title and the cover. (Above.) I might have glanced inside at some of the essays. (The title one is about growing old and accepting that one's body will eventually betray our 'getting better every day' mantra.) I read it while we were on a staycation at a local Bed and Breakfast. I loved it. His way with words. His choice of topics. I hadn't thought about it until this controversy arose and, I confess, I didn't remember many specifics about the essays. I never bought another of his books or read him elsewhere that I remember.

I hunted up the book. Now, I remember. One essay "So to Speak" was about mispronouncing words and names and how embarrassing that can be. I related to that. I grew up maybe reading but never hearing a lot of words. I was excoriated for my Texas accent. I did mispronounce things and it embarrassed me greatly. Once, in Canada (eh) I told my students in a class about Natural Language for a computer system, that the system 'parsed' the words they wrote in the language in a certain way. Someone said I meant passed, haha, and I said 'no, parsed.' Because this person was ignorant of the word parse and they could hear an accent of some kind (eh) they assumed I was adding an 'r' to pass. And yet if they hadn't also been ignorant of accents they would have known that Texans didn't add and subtract 'r's like Bostonians. See how fast we can lash out at others because of our own failings and sensitivities?

In another essay ("Trivial Pursuits") he talks about giving up watching sports. As some of you may know, I started boycotting football at every level about four years ago. I don't watch news reports (unless it's about the reasons for the boycott) or one down of any game or any ads associated with such broadcasts. I know that it makes no difference. However, I no longer feel complicit in the horrors of the destruction of young men (CTE, joints, undervaluing education), the overshadowing of academics in schools, the turning the other way when crimes are committed, the societal implications that the sport is the ultimate and therefore that women, who only cheer or play an instrument or dance at half time cannot be the best. I feel better for my boycott. I wonder now if this essay allowed me to start the thought process that---after fifty years of watching football (and, yes, enjoying it) and sometimes living and dying (so to speak) with the fortunes of these boys or men---led to this turning away which has been very pleasant.

Joseph Epstein writes good essays. (And has been richly rewarded, it seems, for that.) He could have written an essay on the sometimes meaningless honorifics and degrees without the ad hominem attack on Dr. Jill Biden. It's obviously something he has thought about a lot since he 'only' has a (real) BA. Like me. When I first worked in computers in the early seventies, I had just graduated from college. But over the years I met a lot of people (especially women) who got into the field from 'traditional' women's jobs in companies that were just acquiring computers and went on to careers every bit as successful as mine or the younger people with degrees in Computer Science. (My university did not offer such a degree when I was there.) This unbalance in potential success and degrees or advanced degrees is a worthy topic. Since Jill has studied Community College education, it is one that she is probably prepared to address as well. 

When the firestorm over this OPED started my husband located this book (which he had never read) and wanted to get rid of it. After having glanced through it to see why I had, in fact, enjoyed it, I think I'd like to read it again. No offense to Dr. Biden. 

Tennis

Yes, I know it's Holidailies and I have to eventually get around to writing about the season. But I've been wanting to write about tennis for a while. And I played today so I thought it would be a good time to write about it. I didn't wear throwback tennis wear or play with a wooden racquet but there was a wooden racquet tournament going on so I snapped this picture of our head pro at my club dressed and equipped for the occasion.

I play three days a week usually. Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Usually from 9 until we finish three social sets. The constant companion in these games (she usually misses only two or three times a year) is an 86-year-old woman. We play social doubles according to rules she's established. Over the years I've played other social games (singles and doubles) and casual leagues. I enjoy watching tennis. I like to read about tennis and have a small collection of classic books on the subject.

I also like to occasionally reread a John McPhee two-article from the New Yorker, published in 1969 about Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner called "Levels of the Game." It was also published as a book which I don't believe I own. Maybe I should own it. (And, by the way, David Foster Wallace's annotated copy of McPhee's book is housed at the Harry Ransom Center at UT.)

While I love tennis, I wouldn't say I'm addicted to it. I would say I'm addicted to puzzles, coffee, and cheese. Maybe other stuff. I'll get to addictions as a topic this month. Have a need to explore that, too.

I restrict myself to watching mostly Grand Slams on TV. But I do watch many hours during these four two-week periods. I'm happy to take a vacation and skip tennis while gone. But it is something I wouldn't like to give up entirely. Playing these regular games gets me out of the apartment, outside and moving a bit. (I wouldn't really call it exercise. But I try to trot after the ball both when it's in play and not. And there is at least some bending and stretching.) I enjoy looking at the sky, observing the weather. (Something I also enjoy during walks, another favorite activity.) I enjoy seeing glimpses of activity around the courts, seeing an occasional hawk fly by or peacocks wandering from a nearby park. I enjoy observing the foibles of the ladies who play with me, both to win points against them (Don't like your backhand? I'll try to hit to it.) and just to observe their habits. There are the ladies who always foot fault (we give that a pass in our games). There is the lady that stands mere inches from the service court when her partner is receiving. On changeovers, I enjoy hearing about things I don't have in my life. Children, Bridge, mahjong, debutante dances, Sorority and Fraternity activities. The latter two are for the kids as well. We don't play with really young people. We play with some ladies younger than I by around twenty years, though.

Tennis, as casual as my play and attention to the sport is, remains one of my favorite activities. I hope I never have to give it up.

Keep Learning, Keep Doing, One More Day

Another Pithy Quote from the rocks at Butler Park.

The Visible Woman...learns.

When I am wasting time I try to pass it off as something useful. 

Playing tennis? Every day I can stay on my feet is good, right? "Trot over and pick up that ball," I tell myself. "It's cool you can still trap the ball between your tennis shoe and your racket and smoothly make it bounce into your hand," I marvel. It may seem to others, and some days to me, that I'm not learning anything new. But I am, I swear. My 82-year-old companion for tennis (it is almost always us and two other people) has recently (in the last year I think) begun to aggressively play the net biding her time and making a great angle volley. On her serve I have her go forward. We are old ladies and we are stuck in many habits, but we can evolve.

Wasting time on the puzzles in the newspapers? But...you can learn a new word or fact. Yesterday's The Wall Street Journal crossword (Friday is the only day The WSJ  has a puzzle I like) reminded me of a word. 

abscissa, n.  Mathematics (in plane Cartesian coordinates) the x-coordinate of a point: its distance from the y-axis measured parallel to the x-axis.

I say 'reminded' because, with a degree in mathematics surely I knew this word at one time! I love knowing this even if I only remember for a few hours or until it pops up on Jeopardy! 

Clearning? Around here a lot of cleaning is dusting and straightening books and magazines. I stop and open them at random occasionally just like I do in the book store and read a paragraph or two.

As long as you are learning (and forgetting and learning) you are alive. I know it won't keep the grim reaper (18 down in yesterday's WSJ puzzle: death personified) permanently at bay. I read the obituaries. Mortality is always at hand. No, it just makes still being alive worthwhile.

Wasted Days and Wasted Nights

It is not that I never accomplish anything. Slowly, slowly I get things done.

When we aren't out of town I make a little progress managing our financial life every day. I'll pay a bill, record stuff on spreadsheets and Quickbooks, balance with the banks, verify credit card bills.

I move stuff around. I almost never leave a room without picking up shoes, a cup, a glass, something that belongs somewhere else.

And I clean. Why just the other day I cleaned off the stove top. We keep our main pots and pans there and we don't cook much. The lids get dusty or spotted with stuff from the one burner we use. I cleaned everything thoroughly including the stove top itself with the special cleaner. For a bonus I scrubbed out the microwave, cleaned the door and washed the gclass turn table. This took longer than it should.

Today I almost cleaned the master bath. I did everything but use glass cleaner on the shower enclosure and rinse out the tub we never use. (Like the stove top it gets dusty!) This took longer than it should.

I move forward but my pace is just slow. Also I have to claim as accomplishments taking a walk or meeting up with friends.

I even seem to read more slowly than ever, not getting through the papers until late in the day and slowly plowing through my books.

Ah, well. Tomorrow I'm going to accomplish one cleaning task while FFP goes for a massage. And I'm going to 'waste' time reading or working puzzles or taking a walk or going to the gym. After all, I'm retired.

What Are You Reading?

I have piles of books. Books I've read. Books FFP has read. Books we've both read. And many neither of us have even started. These, however, are not ours and were on one of the bookshelves in Tatzu Nishi's Columbus living room. I intentionally shot and cropped it to show the pages and obvious signs of someone reading them. Virginia Woolf, Doris Lesing, Bob Dylan, etc. How were they chosen?

We bought three books at Book People day before yesterday. One off the remainder table about the Dallas Cowboys. Another is about WW II and D-Day. Another is about Leonard Cohen's song "Hallelujah". There is a biography out about him, too, but this book is just about the song. FFP is reading that first one as I write.

I mentioned to FFP yesterday that we had no plans for Christmas Day. He said, "It's a shame because we don't have anything to read." Ha. We do have one wrapped present. It's from him to me. It looks like a book. It definitely is since I know he got it at Book People.

I have trouble keeping up with my newspapers. Not because I read them all that thoroughly but because I stop to work puzzles or read one or two articles completely. And I always feel like I should dispense with the newspapers before I read a book although I almost always read part of a book before falling asleep when I go to bed. And I often read a book on an airplane.

I need to read more and spend less time on the computer. I hope Columbus got a little reading done while he was allowed to have a living room and books. He's all alone again, up there on his pedestal in the cold, with nothing to read at night when the city snoozes a little.

Flânerie

Flânerie? Is it a kind of stone work as above? Just a squishy French word that the Blogger spell check doesn't recognize even though a good English dictionary will have a listing? Am I a flâneur? Is that a confession I should make on the Internet?

Got an e-mail a couple of days ago that Michael Barnes, the uber-social blogger and columnist over at the Austin American-Statesman, had posted a blurb about a book about walking. In it, says he, this Brit Geoff Nicholson talks about synonyms for walking. One of which is flânerie. Anyway my friend who alerted me to the post is a friend that I used to have lunch with monthly. We still have a monthly lunch but we add a stroll to it before and/or after. I have been familiar with flanerie for a long time. It's not really about walking. It's about the the kind of observation you can only usually do while walking. Or sitting in a public place. I like to walk around with my digital camera and, if I'm alone, perhaps with a notebook. Sure I'm motivating on my feet but, more importantly taking in images (whether actual ones or just mental observations) and ideas. The stone wall above is interesting. It's tucked away in a walkway behind Book People. Only walkers would probably ever see it.

I already own two books (one read, one unread) about Flânerie. This one and this one. Starting small book collections about an obscure subject and perhaps reading (or pretending to read) them in a cafe or sitting on a wall...that's very much in the spirit of the flâneur. It's all related in my mind to the dilettante. Something I've frequently written about. And even wrote a poem about.

Yesterday I had a walk and a lunch with my flânerie friend. It was random and fulfilling. As such things should be. And this morning this vain attempt to write about how I feel about these things I have wasted time that should have been devoted to cleaning, exercise, finances or, at least, some reading. But somehow that's OK with me. And what would we expect from a dilettante fan of flânerie. Now I' m thinking that since FFP has taken the dilettante mantle (he has 'Consulting Dilettante" on his business card) that I should make some new cards that say "Flâneur." (Right now mine say 'Pretending to Write but Really Just Blogging.' Much less pithy if funny and accurate.)

Me and My Papers

Newspapers as we know them are dying. My friend over at Insomniactive has pulled a lot of info on this issue.

This has implications for all of us. Even those of you who, like the others on my hallway (see above) don't get newsprint versions, are relying on the reportage of newspapers even if you consume it online or secondhand. I guess. Unless you only read blogs for info. And just stupid ones like this instead of ones created by legitimate journalists who research things and know how to write. Not to denigrate reading blogs, but nothing beats guys and gals going out and getting stories for a living and bringing them back to us, coherent and thorough and allegedly without bias. (Although it helps to get several as we do, see above.) Reading blogs is a drill down into individual brains but newspaper reporters often bring us the more sweeping issues.

And yes, I know most of the content goes to the WEB for free, no trees involved.

The death of the clumps of paper with fresh news, pictures, charts and figures, delivered to our door is going to hurt me. Even though I'm drowning in papers and even though recycling is a pain and even though, yes, I can find it all on my computer I suppose.

The form isn't the same. Sitting over a meal with FFP (we almost always read at meals when it's just the two of us), or on the exercise bike, I turn the pages guided by the headlines. I pause at photos or maps. I even look at ads. The structure is predictable and comforting. Inside the front page section of The New York Times there is a summary of news (recently expanded to two pages for the age of ADD). There are also ads for luxury jewelry and watches and knick-knacks. Yes, still. On Tuesday there is Science Times. On Wednesday, Dining In Out. The Austin-American Statesman has XLent on Thursday. I skip Sports Sections, mostly, unless there is really big tennis news. I occasionally flip the Statesman Sports over to see if there is a Fry's ad. I look at Fry's ads in that paper and J&R and others in The Times mostly to see what gadgets are out there, what they are going for. I am tempted by the crosswords. So the leisure sections get pulled out. I like to read about plays, movies, books, dance, opera, etc, too. When I'm looking at a new section of newspaper I know it's fresh content. Well, sort of. If you read three newspapers then you may see the same story. It may even be exactly the same story.

FFP goes directly to the editorial and letters pages, I think. I don't usually read these. I would rather get opinion on blogs. We both peruse obituaries. The local ones to see if someone we know died. But all obits to see the fallen, how old they were and what got them. (In The New York Times obits the cause of death is usally paragraph two. After para one which tells you why the dead is newsworthy.) The obits in the local rag are mostly paid ads. Relatives pay hundreds or thousands to run some stuff for a few days. There are also short blurbs from funeral homes that are a 'public service' and, of course, news stories on the deaths of the locally famous or infamous.

There are so many predictable, wonderful things in my papers. Oh, they change things sometimes. I remember when the Times never used color. (I also remember when authors' names in The New Yorker were at the end of articles and they sometimes continued articles over multiple issues.)

Well, I have been trying to write this for two days. While newspapers piled up. And, shudder, we bought three books at Book People today and there two others I've been intending to start and...oh well. Enough of writing about newspapers. I'm going to go read.

Reading, Writing, Words, Memory

A while back I wrote about my unwritten books and called out a book by George Steiner that I wanted to buy with that very title. (But didn't because the unread around here is threatening enough already.)

Last night we were headed out to watch the UT Women's Basketball team take on an early, hapless opponent at Erwin Center and, as we were planning to walk, I looked around for a small, intense bit of reading material. What should I find but Marcel Bénabou's Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books, translated from the French by David Kornacker. (Have I mentioned that, if only I knew a foreign language well and wasn't ADD, that I think I would make a great translator?) But, yeah, digression...that's why it's in parentheses. I didn't remember owning this book, let alone reading it. (I'm pretty sure I hadn't cracked the cover.) Plus, for a moment I thought it might be the book that I was talking about in that other entry. That's hard to admit. I write and research stuff and then forget it. (I forget my own life in this way, in large measure. I've recently been rereading online journal entries from September 2001. There are many things in there I forgot I did and felt. Sadly I linked to places that were interesting that are gone from the Internet. I did not, by the way, go back to these entries because of 9/11. No I was looking for something else that, it turns out, occurred around that time.) But I really digress.

So I found Bénabou's book and took it to the basketball game and read some of it while keeping an eye on the action. You know, the downtime of time outs, half time, etc. Anyway. It's a very interesting book. Unfortunately I was reading it away from computer or dictionary, though, because there were words I didn't know. I like reading books with words I don't know, but I am frustrated if I'm dictionary-less at the moment of reading. For example, prolegomenon. Geez, one guesses it's like a prologue in spite of looking like a word for a person favoring certain Danish toy bricks.

It's funny but certain books I own I sort of remember reading while not watching basketball. (Even if I remember none of the contents.)

Is this forgetting of the particular in favor of some other kind of memory? Does it support remembering definitions of words in books, general knowledge of behavior and assumptions? I don't know. As I attack the NY Times Magazine puzzle this morning, I wonder. Where is all this stuff kept in my pitiful head? And why is some of it gone or impossible to access? And, if I wrote a book, would I forget it to an extent that I could read it (like the books of others) and have it feel fresh all over again.

In that vein, I'm going to type another bit of my unwritten novel here, assuming I can find the scrap I wrote it on in a book I'm not reading.

The harried woman scurried away as they emerged from the jetway. He was loitering, staying to the right of other rushed travelers. The woman was now chatting into one of the two phones she'd retrieved from her bag while they stood, unavoidably touching, in the crush of the aisle a few minutes ago. He paused by three newspaper boxes, one each for the Austin, Houston and Dallas papers. The Austin paper said in large type "Two Austin Men Dead in Berlin Attack."

I reread the paragraph I blogged before prior to typing this in. And I wondered about changing a word. The paragraph above I typed faithfully from the scrap I wrote in on in the coffee shop on Wednesday. (Did I mention I in this entry that I did that? Anyway. Somewhere I thought I mentioned it.)

What's the point of this entry then? I think to give you a chance to see inside my brain on a Sunday morning. It's a mess, isn't it?

My Unwritten Books

One reason I've never written any of my books, leaving them all unwritten is that I have a fear of plagiarism. Will I unwittingly think some sentence or phrase or idea is my own and fail to faithfully attribute it?

Of course, My Unwritten Books is a book by George Steiner so the title of this entry is itself a plagiarism. [How many people, do you think, can spell plagiarism without looking it up? Digression. That's another enemy of my book writing.]

I'm itching to buy Mr. Steiner's book from Amazon. So it could join all the other unread books around here.

Mr. Steiner is a polyglot and polymath, according to Wikipedia. That assertion makes me envious and makes me feel small as the speaker of 1.1 languages (I speak enough French to qualify as a backward toddler) and the master of virtually no field of endeavor.

I was moved to write about what I have not written by a couple of clippings I found in a box of photos that I was sorting. One, from a 2002 New York Times OP-ED page was by Joseph Epstein. Entitled "Think you have a book in you? Think Again" he argues to not, as he puts it "add to the schlock pile." (It should be noted that Mr. Epstein has himself contributed several books to the publishing stream. I have actually read one of them and I think it is somewhere in this condo.)

The other article, from the Book Review in that same paper from the very next day's issue, was a celebration by Bruce McCall of his brother-in-law, John Jerome, who wrote books that never brought him fame, but who celebrated and loved the writing itself. The non-fiction books, their titles at least, speak of mastery and research and care for details. (I haven't read any of them, but On Turing Sixty-Five sounds tempting since I'm now old enough to realize that I'll reach that age without writing a book!)

But, what have I failed to write?

• A novel (or a screenplay...it is such a nascent work it really doesn't matter) about a woman and the effect when this woman dies in a plane crash leaving behind a husband, elderly parents and in-laws and a trusted assistant, all dependent on her for one thing or another. She is a bit autobiographical but neatly avoids most or maybe all of my own failings. Called 'Hole in the Water' the novel refers to the site of the crash (the ocean) and to the woman's absence from a water aerobics class. The entire book (or screenplay) may or may not be set after the event. Or maybe it's a flashback.
• A novel called Pogonip. The eponymous title character has a surname that is actually an obscure word meaning ice fog. He has run from tragedy into wealth until he can maintain multiple homes around the world and spend lots of money sending friends on elaborate 'games' using the map of the earth as the playing board. He doesn't really engage thoroughly with people in person, but his arm's length approach to life is interrupted when several players go to Berlin instead of Paris in the midst of one of the games he has financed and invented and are the unwitting victims of a terrorist bombing. This piece has been hanging over my head, necessitating a trip to Berlin to see in person something that was constructed since I was last there. It has its roots in intentional encounters with friends in faraway places.
  
• A short story which grew into a novel because, you know, if you don't actually write something it keeps growing. It explores the nature of truth beginning with the chance witnessing of a hit and run accident by someone who is somewhere they are not, technically, supposed to be. A serious crime witnessed by someone committing a misdemeanor. This one didn't have a name, I didn't think. It was originally in a collection of unwritten short stories that included one about a stone wall, I knew that. I thought that they were mostly in my head, titles and ideas included. I've considered combining this one with the one above in a giant novel for the purposes of not writing. At some point, the protagonist and the victim of the hit and run were revealed to me as being natives of Odessa. Odessa, Texas that is. And I needed to take a trip there to lend authenticity to a couple of ideas. [It turns out that I'd actually saved a document containing proposed titles and blurbs about the stories in that original, unwritten collection. When I found it on my computer just now, I only vaguely remembered the other story ideas besides the two mentioned. The title of this one that has grown out of control in my head was to be "Behind the Screen." There was another story in there called "Avalanche" based on something that happened to me as a kid. Another called "No Load-Bearing Walls" was vaguely familiar. Another entitled "The Next Apartment" had this blurb: "On relationships and envy of same." Although one (you or I) can imagine the story, I remember not one thing about its potential structure.]
  
• A screenplay that is technically not mine but a friend's (I was just helping or hindering or encouraging with some tasks like organizing a time line and dialog bits). She doesn't want the plot revealed so enough said about that. I think the material is on a WEB page with a logon and password I've forgotten. As you see above, I'm not so squeamish about telling what I remember of unwritten plots and would say even more about the ones above but you would only laugh. Laugh more than you are already laughing. And I would be making stuff up on the fly that I don't really remember committing to in the ephemeral plot in my imagination.
  
• A self-help book about packing, traveling and divesting oneself of unnecessary things. Seriously, I thought I could help others in this regard. Ha.

There must be others. Can this really be a life's collection of unwritten works!? How sad there can't be more when actually writing them, let alone getting them published, isn't required. However, my restraint, it turns out, is admirable. Joseph Epstein says in the above-mentioned article:

Misjudging one's ability to knock out a book can only be a serious and time-consuming mistake. Save the typing, save the trees, save the high tax on your own vanity. Don't write that book, my advice is, don't even think about it. Keep it inside you, where it belongs.

Good advice, I think. I think I'll let my self-help advice be just that and let my characters continue to grow and mature and change inside my head. It'll save me a trip to Berlin not to mention Odessa.

[Today's photo was taken on W. Sixth using a gift shop there as a lens. One wonders how many shops selling what we call 'gee-gaws' will be shuttered in the current economic crisis.]

My New Neighborhood

One of the first things we did when we moved downtown was make dates with some couples who already lived downtown. We'd met them downtown for meals before or visited in their places, but this was to inaugurate downtown friendships in this new way: WE LIVE DOWNTOWN, TOO! One couple mentioned how many places they walked to and it seemed like they really walked a long way. Since the weather was moving into the teeth of summer, it surprised me. But the longer we are down here, the more we realize how easy and fun it is to roam around on your feet.

When I walked to The Tavern on Tuesday for my friend's book signing, I realized how easy it was to roam over to things in that stretch of Lamar. Not just the venerable Tavern but Wink Wine Bar, an interesting looking health food snack bar, Betty Sport (sport stuff for the ladies) and Twelfth Street Books. The latter (where the picture was taken) is a real live (as opposed to WEB only) erudite secondhand bookstore. Most of those don't maintain a storefront anymore. (I saw my friend David at Momo's the other night and he used to run a great place called State House Books. He is still in the business. Only just virtually.) Which reminds me: my dad and I somehow got on the topic of 'book rate' postage and wondered if it still exists. And, yes, it does.

But I digress. My new neighborhood. Yesterday I only got out in the neighborhood for that walk over to the Four Seasons. I felt cooped up because, for the rest of the day, the closest I got to getting out was going to the parking garage to get some books out of my car and going to the concierge to get a package. I ordered some bookends. Given our decoration strategy (bookshelves, bookshelves, bookshelves with art and artifacts and gewgaws mixed in, all artfully arranged in the aesthetic of devil may care modern collector), our decorator said 'bookends are our friends.' However, only the right bookends work, in my opinion, so we gave some away, saved ones we thought would work and have used things that aren't really bookends. It looks nice, but we are still in the market for a few cool bookends.

But, yeah, digression from new neighborhood and walking in it. Did I mention that I'm stuck inside again today with workmen doing my 'final' AV stuff and motorized shades? Did I mention that Hurricane Ike has promised some stormy weather late tomorrow and early Saturday?

But really the possibilities for things to be walked to are endless. When we moved in, a friend who had been leasing in the Brown Building waiting for his place in this building, turned us on to the delights of Torchy's Tacos which had a trailer in Little Woodrow's parking lot a hop and skip down the street. But they moved! To S. First, I believe. Some people we had turned on to Torchy's just walked the mile and a half each way to satisfy their Torchy desires. Cool.

So, yeah I'm stuck inside getting stuff that makes you stay inside: fancy shades to block the early morning sun and fancy AV equipment. So, you know, you can stick in a Blu-Ray disk at seven in the morning and watch Blu-Ray DVDs all day long with surround sound. I've never seen a Blu-ray disk played (except maybe by accident in a store) and I've never owned a flat screen HD television bigger than the nineteen inch one I bought for a temporary one back in June. I don't own a Blu-ray disk. I thought of buying one (1) Blu-ray Disk but I couldn't find one at Costco. I didn't look too hard.

I wish I were out walking. Guys measuring and drilling in my condo make me palpably nervous. Forrest finds errands to do although I don't think it makes him as nervous. He knows I ordered this stuff and I have to answer questions. Although I can't imagine I'd know the answers.

There are so many places I could walk to. Even to the University on a good day. Or take the 'Dillo up there and then walk around. I could go to the Harry Ransom Center or the Blanton, shop on the drag. Heck for the price of the AV and shades, I could take a limo up there every day for a year or two probably and have them wait while I had a burger at Dirty Martin's.

We proved the other day that walking to toney SoCo is no problem. I could shop for weird bookends at Uncommon Objects. We could explore South Lamar, North Lamar (see above) and S. First. We could wander in old West Austin and Clarksville like we did the other day. Of course, downtown offers many wandering options. The library is on Guadalupe, not far away. It's true that the homeless population has made the Central Library a home away from no home, but there are still books there for ordinary people. Wait! I have enough books in the condo (after furious downsizing of them and with a few boxes pending at my dad's house) to last a reader a lifetime. Especially a reader who gets The New Yorker (fifty issues or so a year) and who has subscriptions to two seven-day-a-week newspapers, one six-day-a-week newspaper and one weekly newspaper and who occasionally picks up at least one free weekly. Ruined by Reading. Which is the title of a book that I don't think I gave away. I think it's still in a box at Dad's house.

I could walk to a myriad of coffee shops and write on my laptop or in a journal and look literary. I could walk to the Capitol and take a tour.

But today I sit, logged onto the Internet and worry at the sounds of drilling in the next room. Maybe I'll pop the DVDs of all issues of The New Yorker from 1925 through April 30, 2007 into my iMac and browse around. But I'd sort of rather be walking.

Countdown

I snapped this reflection of my outline against a mural being painted in a space that I guess is going to be a design studio last night. After a hard day of moving, we were walking to have a good meal and a glass of wine. We are exhausted with the effort to move every last thing we want to keep from the big house by Thursday night. The new owners say we can take our time, but things work out better in a sale if you make a clean break of it. We are now working our way through rooms, only leaving things we are giving to the new owners, tools that we are using (tape, scissors, packing, boxes, bags, etc.) and things we need to give special attention to. I am feeling more like the black outline of myself than the colorful swirl of the mural. But that will change. Soon I'll have one home and although I'll be surrounded by boxes of books and artifacts that haven't found a place, they will be books I love, books that survived sifting and sorting up to ten times to make the move and artifacts that escaped, over and over, a trip to a charity sale. All will be well. But must survive the week.

Evidence

I am transferring all my archives from my old machine to my new environment. For some reason I feel it is necessary to photograph the messy shelves arond my house. This picture was taken in 2001. A lot of stuff in this photograph is gone. Various books. The toy pinball machine. The shelves themselves are virtually empty and I have on my 'to do' list to take them apart so that they will be out of the way when we refinish the floors. We are putting that off until we are closer to being out of the house so we don't have a chance to mess them up again.

Today I got depressed going through ancient financial stuff. Even investments that worked out well weighed on me somehow in the sorting. Never mind the fiascos. I actually found the unused payment coupons from the year we moved from a house down the street to this house. They were IBM punch cards and the payments were less than ninety dollars a month. FFP thought that was very amusing. Life was simpler once, that's for sure.

Time to Read

Except for nodding off before bed and the (I confess) occasional bathroom read, I haven't been keeping up with reading. Partly this is due to the fact that I am missing in action in the gym. On the recumbent bike I usually catch up with the three newspapers we get every day (only the Wall Street Journal doesn't come on Sunday). Yesterday I did make it to the gym, but I read an article in The New Yorker that a friend recommended over dinner the other night. I thought he was talking about an earlier piece and then I thought that the piece was more serious than it actually was. Well, if you can say that a piece is humorous or 'occasional' if the author is not Woody Allen and the grim reaper is the subject. Anyway, I loved the article and I think I need to write about death again in the Journal of Unintended Consequences. But I won't be getting to that just now because I have to spend most of the day at the hospital with my dad and while I could take my laptop and hook up to their wireless and write something to entertain my four readers it seems like a lot of trouble and I think that I will, instead, catch up on my reading. So I have a backpack to take along with some of those pesky unread papers and a couple of books I need to finish.

Out of There! TODAY!

This is picture taken in the middle of March of a bookcase in my office. I'm typing this from my desktop in FFP's office. But my old office is still full of books and stuff and I have to get out of there soon because the painting project is moving inexorably toward this room. Yikes. Well, tennis got canceled today and the oak pollen seems to have given me less vertigo this morning so...I'm going in! Wish me luck.

The Seduction of Words

As much as I love pictures (I have a problem posting a blog entry with words alone and love to see pictures elsewhere, too), I love letters and the infinite possibility of words and sentences. Every book represents to me the times that I've felt the binding and paper on my fingers and have been thrust into another world by the squiggles on the page.

I also have a soft spot for blank paper, for the possibility of filling the pages with brilliant sketches and words.

The picture, before I continue this ramble, is from inside The Arthouse at Jones Center on Congress Avenue. They are doing a show on a collaboration between Ballet Austin, the artist Trenton Doyle Hancock and the composer Graham Reynolds called Cult of Color: Call to Color. Trenton Doyle Hancock's art is an elaborate story. He has written some of the story on the window of the museum, writing backwards on the inside. I found it very compelling. Especially taking pictures of the street through the words. I like pictures of letters and words!

I've been going through books with a vengeance. It's slow work. I look up availability of the book through online sources and what the editions and prices are. If I haven't read the book (the majority I'm afraid) I have to flip it open and read bits of it. If I feel I'd like to read it any time soon, I have trouble tossing it. If I decide to keep the book, I try to catalog it in my database and on Library Thing. I am leaving a lot of them on my database even though we are giving them away. That way the info is there should I decide I need to order a copy at a later time.

But back to blank paper. I found a box full of blank books plus a few more that were partially full of scribbles. Even though I have all these that I either bought or other people gifted me with because they know I'm a sucker for them if I see some cool ones in a store I have trouble resisting. Weird, huh? Of course the notebooks written in and the lined tablet sheets filled with doodles or notes are hard to discard. Some I've transcribed and managed to eliminate. I've even scanned a few. If I were a famous writer or artist, someone down at the Harry Ransom Center would have to carefully catalog them one day. But I'm not. Famous. Or a writer or artist. So they are just cubic feet of 'stuff' I suppose. Where am I going with all this? I'm not sure. I've been working on this entry sporadically over two days and I don't seem to know where I'm going! So I think I'll wind it up by saying that a blank book, not yet written in, is like starting life all over again.

The Space is Shrinking

We are actively moving out of rooms. This makes the shrinking of space palpable. And frightening. We are moving to a small space in a big building. (This picture was taken from Colorado Street, I believe, looking west. Our new place will be around the tiny red triangle.) In twelve hundred square feet, there isn't room for frivolous stuff. Like. Too. Many. Books. I am becoming more ruthless about giving them away. Read it? Would you read again? Haven't read it? Is a decent-looking copy available at Alibris, Amazon or Powell's that you could get if the time comes that you make the time to read it? Still, it's hard. There are so many. We must get out of the way of the painting and floor refinishing so we are shrinking down to where we can be living and storing things. Maybe this is good. A way to see what will fit.

The Romance of Paper

My doomsday title of yesterday's post ("The End of Paper") sent my most loyal reader (well, the most loyal commenter for sure) scurrying for an article she read in a publication in defense of paper. Now, I'm sure paper will survive. Print is becoming, however, a companion to bits and bytes and sound waves. I read the actual newspapers on the exercise bike while glancing up at the five television they provide at the gym. (I rarely plug into the sound, just looking at stock quotes and those handy running news feeds.) When I find something interesting in the actual New York Times like I did yesterday, I can refer you to the online article. I can e-mail it to people, too. And I can save it, electronically, in a sort of virtual clip file.

As I sort through books, unable to give up a (too large) number of them, I go down rabbit holes of reading. The above scan is of the cover of a book I bought some years ago in a second-hand store. I read it and found it intriguing because this escaped German POW who turned himself in forty years later got this book published before turning himself in. When I got this book, probably around 1993, online research was in its infancy. So I never found out the story's end...what happened when he turned himself in. I lent the book to my dad in 2001 to read and then stumbled on it in 2003 again while looking for books for him to read. Then I did some research with the Internet capabilities of ten years later. Here is an excerpt from my 2003 journal about that:

I started collecting first person accounts from World War II over twenty years ago. I picked up a book (Howard K. Smith's Last Train from Berlin) at my in-laws' house and read it. It was so interesting reading abuot events just before I was born and seeing the events through the eyes of one person in the vortex of history. The story had such individual urgency and yet the events were sweeping the whole world along. I went to the secondhand book stores and searched out similar books. A lot of them were like this copy of Smith's book. They were printed during the war or just after and were now old and musty, especially since the best quality paper couldn't be used. There were stories by refugees and journalists, foot soldiers and pilots, resistance fighters and civilians in the way of war. There were harrowing accounts of concentration camps, POW camps, fox holes and war rooms. There were touching accounts of lives touching, caroming off and spinning away from each other forever. Sometimes I felt that a big patchwork quilt of a story was being told to me, adding up to something like the truth. If truth is chaos and confusion. Sometimes the stories touched, recounting the same event from two sides or the people actually met.

About ten years ago I picked up a more recent book that still fit the genre. I bought it at Half Price Books for $2.98. It was published in 1985. The book was Hitler's Last Soldier in America by Georg Gaertner with Arnold Krammer. Georg was a member of Rommel's Afrika Corps and was captured and sent to New Mexico. He escaped from the POW camp in 1945 when the war was over. He was afraid of being repatriated into Russian hands. He lived without detection until 1985 when he published a book. The book implied that he would turn himself in, in conjunction with the publication.

As Dad and I talked about the book, I told him that I'd never found out what happened to the guy when he turned himself in. It had been a while since I'd tried to search and I'd never been that serious about it. I had tried the Internet once, I think, a few years ago. I gave it another shot and found the resume of the co-author, a professor at Texas A&M. I clicked on his e-mail and told him about buying the book and wondering. He wrote back in short order. Amazing. I printed his e-mail and put it in the book.

Georg's story is so improbable. You live in Germany, there is a war, you end up in the U.S. living a life. Your hometown is now in Poland. Life goes on for forty years and then you admit that you are not just a ski instructor, tennis player and amateur painter, but this last unaccounted for POW.

But everyone's history is interesting when you dig into it and see what happened and how and when. How some things seemed to be choice and some events just steamrolled the person. And how the generatons come and go, considered less than you might think by children and grand children.

Yesterday I found the book again. I was pretty sure I'd keep it, but I decided to see how easy it would be to replace if I didn't. This is something I often do. I'll say "yeah I might read this some day" and then I'll see that I could get one secondhand on the Internet easily. So I'll give it away and figure I'll buy one if I ever want to read or reread it. Well, Georg Gaertner's story wasn't that available. Powell's offered to let me know if they got one. A couple of dealers offered them at high prices. I decided to keep it. The e-mail from his writing collaborator is printed on paper and tucked inside. The reason I scanned the cover is so that my Library Thing bookshelf could show the cover. (By the way, on Library Thing, four other people have cataloged the book.)

As I sort through the books some have wonderful covers, beautiful paper (although the WWII era ones alluded to above are on awful wartime paper) and great inset pictures. It's hard to beat the experience of a book. Or a newspaper. I still like to fill in the crossword on the newsprint even though I have access to the fancy online crosswords.

The end of paper? No, paper and pixels will blend. Your book will come with a WEB page. As most do today. You will research things online and then buy an obscure book from a store across the country or find out online that it is in your library down the street or across town.

The End of Paper

I was reading the Sunday New York Times yesterday (I know, I'm a little slow). I was reading it on paper, too. While riding the recumbent exercise bike. This article was interesting. If you don't care to jump over to their WEB site and read it, it was all about the slow but sure death of the printed encyclopedia. The publishers are moving online.

I remember the last encyclopedia I owned. It was my childhood one, purchased at great sacrifice by my parents, no doubt. It had a few years worth of 'yearbooks' which were attempts to update the thing with the changing times. The set fit into a coffee table with room for the basic volumes under glass at two ends with slots for the volumes and room on the sides for yearbooks and other books. My parents gave us that coffee table with the books and we had it in the house for a long time until we decided it was in the way of our plans. We sold it to some young college kids in a garage sale who packed it in the trunk of some old '50's car they'd restored. I think anyway. Wonder what every happened to it? I don't even remember the brand. Not the high end Britannica for sure. My parents couldn't afford that. But not the World Book either.

The end of paper has been predicted for some time. (The photo was taken this morning of a shelf in the office I'm trying to clean out. I know. Don't say it.)

In small ways we are escaping to bits and bytes. We don't get paper statements for some accounts now. One bank sends statements, but, at least, they print facsimiles of the checks and don't send them back. I have a couple of cubic feet of old statements and checks (from the early '90's) from our business that I've been shredding. Even though the bank accounts don't exist anymore. Still there are our signatures.

I'm still tossing magazines apace. I have no problem letting go of some titles. And The New Yorker I have on DVD up through February 2007 which makes it easier to toss any that are a little old. Well, easy is too strong.

I have about three cubic feet of old journals. Written in longhand on paper. I have an idea that scanning and/or transcribing can shrink this. But maybe not in my lifetime. So maybe I'll move a couple of boxes to storage. That's not so bad. If it wasn't for the books. Right now I'd say that we have about thirty cubic feet of books, if not more, that we haven't agreed among ourselves to get rid of.

The end of paper won't happen on our watch, I guess.

Down, Down Downsizing

Yesterday seemed silly in a lot of ways. (Almost as silly as this shop window picture. Thanks Uncommon Objects.)

We paid the extra careful movers to move what can best be described as some junky furniture from our house to our parents' abodes. I was thinking I should recommend the extra careful movers to my friends moving to the condo and then thought better of it because it's hard enough to get an appointment anyway.

I had this old dresser that belonged to my grandparents (my mother's parents) and maybe my great grandparents. We displayed various art and awards on it in what we thought was an artistic way. It had occupied three different spots in our house, four if you count being in what we call the 'store room' while we remodeled the master. These movers had moved it to the store room for us, carefully taking the mirror part off and then moved it back to the location it occupied until yesterday. I'm a little sentimental about it because as a kid I would stay with my grandmother and sleep in her bed and go to sleep and wake up seeing it and I thought the top decoration was a face. So it reminds me of my grandmother and how much I loved her. It has no place in our stripped-down condo lifestyle and I would have been OK with selling it. Rather than face the wrath of any other family members on that point, though, I decided to put it in my dad's house (which is really ours, deed-wise) and keep it in the family a bit longer. Delaying the inevitable, I guess. We won't be collecting a lot of antiques, family or otherwise, in a 1200 square foot contemporary condo.

I moved some other furniture to Dad's because I thought that they were a bit better, all-in-all, than what was there. Now I have to get rid of some of the stuff that is there, but that's another day.

My in-laws would not hear to us getting rid of a breakfront and dining table and chairs that FFP had kept in his houses for almost forty years. (He lived down the street from here when we married and we lived there together for over a year before buying this place.) We talked about getting a new table and buffet and a couple of times were inches from pulling the trigger. I guess it's good we didn't do it because, of course, we would have probably chosen something that didn't go with our condo lifestyle, in size or design. But the in-laws made room for this stuff in their tiny cottage. I hope by getting rid of something else but I suspect not. I kept telling FFP it was easier to pay to move it over there than to argue.

This activity was sad-making, that's for sure. It is a little sad when we just give something away to someone who needs it. But just shuffling it around is even sadder.

We are also getting to the point that paring down the knick-knacks and books is painful. At first it was easy to find books we didn't want and get the other to quickly agree. Now it's harder. One person or the other "always intended to read it" or "was thinking of reading it again." I have to admit that I am amazed at some of the books we have and wonder that we thought we had to buy them and would find time to read them. I have to adopt the strategy now that I keep books that will be hard to find again. This is easier said than done, of course. I also want to have a small collection of books whose titles, together or separately, will amuse someone who stops to inspect a shelf. I'm losing books, but not my sense of humor, by going to the condo. But a second pass through things does yield some good candidates for the thrift store, especially given the old "cubic foot" rule where you look not at what it is or what you paid for it but only how much space it occupies. Reference books, too, are sort of redundant in the digital age although I have insisted on keeping my giant French/English and German/English dictionaries in paper form. So far.

The funny thing about downsizing is that it can get you down. Or up. It all depends. Yesterday was a down.