The reality of it is that books -- novels, I mean -- are competing with all other “entertainment” media, including You Tube, Twitter, video games, pop music, movies, television, and a few things I’m sure I haven’t heard of yet. And if this really is the case, novels probably don’t stand much of a chance against these more visual, more interactive, and less time-intensive activities (though in the aggregate, people spend much more time, or waste it, doing these things than they do reading novels). The question is, can writers find a way to refashion the novel so that it would appeal on a more visual level, or an interactive one, and pump up its competitive chops in the almighty marketplace?
I’m skeptical, to a great degree, because there’s no getting past the fact that consuming a novel is to read, not to view. And to insert, say in an ebook, video clips, musical excerpts, other sounds and images, or even the voices of characters, would be to push the novel beyond its own “novelness” and into the realm of performance.
One quintessential thing about the novel is that it is writtten by a single person; it’s not a collaborative effort. Introducing video and sound would involve other participants in the creation of the book -- directors, videographers, designers, actors -- and that would make it more of a hybrid thing, multimedia. Novels would need a production budget to get completed, and that would be a shame since writing a novel is probably the cheapest creative endeavor anyone can undertake. I happen to appreciate art that comes from the mind of a single person as opposed to a committee. Collaboration is often an avenue toward dilution, corruption (in the “less than it could be” sense), and sacrifice of quality in favor of marketability.
But it occurred to me, while reading a sample of David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, that well-placed and relevant graphics can enhance a novel in a way that might attract more readers. A hundred years ago, many novels were illustrated, a practice that probably ended because of the expense of an illustrator, but I wonder now if there isn’t such an enormous stock of public domain images available that a novel could easily be illustrated with them for next to nothing. Authors could also create their own illustrations with photography or drawing, with collage, or even their own handwriting. From what I can tell, Mitchell uses illustrations to depict certain actual things or events in the book, such as what appears to be a seventeenth or eighteenth century drawing of a breech birth. In many ways, it supports his already vivid description by showing the reader how accurate his description is.
I remember the Griffin & Sabine books of the early ‘90s, when I was impressed by the tactile experience and the vivid detail and color of the materials Neil Bantock used to accompany his words. Not every illustrated novel could be that lush.
Nor could the illustrated novel approach the comic-style graphic novel -- an entirely different beast. The idea wouldn’t be to show every moment in images, only to highlight, enhance, pique, and lead, surprising the reader every now and then with something visual to contemplate.
For instance, I’ve written a novel that takes place in California in the late 1800s, and while working on it I came across a number of photos, maps, drawings, and portraits that enabled me to visualize scenes and locations much more clearly. It would be interesting to include some of them in the book, if it ever gets published (unlikely, it seems), not so much to show a reader what a particular character looks like or to dramatize a moment but to evoke a mood and subtly guide the reader toward a certain way of interpreting the language. W. G. Sebald famously used photographs in his novels for this purpose, and one of the best examples I can recall is Kurt Vonnegut’s drawings in Breakfast of Champions. There were times when his simple Magic Marker artwork made me laugh harder than his brilliantly funny writing.
It’s been a tough task for me to admit that today’s reader is largely different from the reader I was taught to be thirty years ago. Whereas I was encouraged to use my imagination taking in a novel, readers today, especially younger ones, seem to need visual cues because they are less attuned to (or less impressed with) the language. Raised on movies, TV, music videos, and the Web, they appreciate a more literal kind of stimulation. Books, and sentences, are getting shorter. Authors are putting promo clips on You Tube, as if seeing the author is more important to readers than hearing about a book from friends or reviews. And nothing sells books like a movie version, with a major star or two. These days, the experience of a novel has to encompass things beyond the novel itself -- how it came to be written, the author’s life story, how the book relates to the reader’s life. These are elements that weren’t much of a consideration before, or at least the lack of detail in these areas didn’t prevent readers from picking up any given novel. J.D. Salinger would have died in obscurity if he’d come of writing age today.
As I acquaint myself with the Nook, and compare it to the iPad’s bling factor, I can see that the publishing industry will be forced into a more aggressively multimedia approach in the future. The image has displaced the word as our primary unit of communication, though I’m not convinced that means the novel will become obsolete. As long as there is a demand for storytelling, or I should say sophisticated storytelling (and it’s debatable that there is such a demand), there will be a pool of readers for novelists to reach.
The problem will be how to reach a larger audience that will make the novel economically viable in the competitive media marketplace. Appealing to the visual might be one way novelists can evolve with the culture.
All of this is not to say that tossing a few illustrations between a novel’s covers will bring about a renaissance of the written word. Novelists will have to be as careful with the images they use as they are with words. But when the audience has changed, and the survival of the genre itself is at stake, it seems logical and even necessary to adapt.
I don’t mean to say that all novels must have images in them from now on. Only that, sometimes, and maybe more often than we’d like to think, readers will have to be drawn in and compelled to buy a book not because the prose of the opening page is so riveting and lucent but because a picture catches their eye and speaks to them in a way -- subliminally, subtly -- that words don’t achieve on first pass anymore.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Monday, July 26, 2010
Consternatio
Being told by my agent that I’m more or less blacklisted among editors because my first novel didn’t sell well enough to give me a second chance. This is like sending a rookie up to the plate and taking him out of the game after he fouls off the first pitch. In publishing, there’s no such thing as three strikes you’re out. Now it’s one strike and you’re finished -- for good.
I’m livid. It flies in the face of the perseverance instinct every writer is supposed to have. I’d never have gotten the first book published if I’d been inclined to give up after a hundred rejections. Make that a thousand. And so my inclination now is to fight this apparent fact of life and keep going. All of us who have struggled at any kind of serious art don’t like to think that there’s no point in carrying on, and yet, the older I get, the more obvious it is that editors don’t judge a work on its merits. They judge the writer. A seven-year-old “track record” is more meaningful to them than the quality of the book in front of them and whatever potential it might have.
I’m thinking a lot of that old Woody Allen movie, The Front, lately. He plays the public face of some blacklisted writers in the 1950s, during the McCarthy purges, helping them continue to write and earn their livings. It might be time for something like that for me. If I have to outsmart the publishing industry in order to persevere (as I’ve been taught and encouraged to do all my writing life), then, what the hell, I’ll do it. And I’m not thinking of a pseudonym either, because, for one thing, my agent seems cool to the idea. For another, there’s something ironically pathetic about assuming a fictional identity to publish fiction.
No, instead I’m thinking about my wife as my front. She’d be terrific. She’s my best editor and my best reader. She gets my slant, my approach, my style, and my intentions. And to be completely honest about it, she’d be a much better public persona than I am (was). I hated readings and appearances, radio interviews, the constant BS of marketing. She was an aspiring actress when she was younger. Now’s her chance.
I suppose there are potential legal issues that could get me in trouble. I don’t care at this point. It’s the make-or-break moment when I either dig a way around the system’s obstacles or I quit. I’m not quite ready to quit.
In fact, there’s a new idea I want to start writing notes for today...
I’m livid. It flies in the face of the perseverance instinct every writer is supposed to have. I’d never have gotten the first book published if I’d been inclined to give up after a hundred rejections. Make that a thousand. And so my inclination now is to fight this apparent fact of life and keep going. All of us who have struggled at any kind of serious art don’t like to think that there’s no point in carrying on, and yet, the older I get, the more obvious it is that editors don’t judge a work on its merits. They judge the writer. A seven-year-old “track record” is more meaningful to them than the quality of the book in front of them and whatever potential it might have.
I’m thinking a lot of that old Woody Allen movie, The Front, lately. He plays the public face of some blacklisted writers in the 1950s, during the McCarthy purges, helping them continue to write and earn their livings. It might be time for something like that for me. If I have to outsmart the publishing industry in order to persevere (as I’ve been taught and encouraged to do all my writing life), then, what the hell, I’ll do it. And I’m not thinking of a pseudonym either, because, for one thing, my agent seems cool to the idea. For another, there’s something ironically pathetic about assuming a fictional identity to publish fiction.
No, instead I’m thinking about my wife as my front. She’d be terrific. She’s my best editor and my best reader. She gets my slant, my approach, my style, and my intentions. And to be completely honest about it, she’d be a much better public persona than I am (was). I hated readings and appearances, radio interviews, the constant BS of marketing. She was an aspiring actress when she was younger. Now’s her chance.
I suppose there are potential legal issues that could get me in trouble. I don’t care at this point. It’s the make-or-break moment when I either dig a way around the system’s obstacles or I quit. I’m not quite ready to quit.
In fact, there’s a new idea I want to start writing notes for today...
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Et alia
Some time ago, I read an item here or there that suggested maybe I (and a lot of other people) was tying my shoes the wrong way. At first I pshawed the idea, but in a little while I recalled some instances when my shoes had come untied for no apparent reason.
If you're like me, you learned to tie your shoes when you were about five or six, and nobody ever said you were doing it wrong. If you made a bow and got the ends of the laces more or less the same length, you were a pro. But as it turns out, most of us have been tying granny knots all along, and everyone knows a granny knot will work itself loose and come untied. Sailors don't use granny knots for just that reason. Why use them on your shoes?
So, the solution is to tie your shoes with square knots, i.e., to make that loop from the other direction (too hard to explain) than the one you've been using your entire life. It takes some practice, but I've found that I can't tie a granny now if I try. And my shoes don't come untied anymore.
All this at the age of 53.
If you're like me, you learned to tie your shoes when you were about five or six, and nobody ever said you were doing it wrong. If you made a bow and got the ends of the laces more or less the same length, you were a pro. But as it turns out, most of us have been tying granny knots all along, and everyone knows a granny knot will work itself loose and come untied. Sailors don't use granny knots for just that reason. Why use them on your shoes?
So, the solution is to tie your shoes with square knots, i.e., to make that loop from the other direction (too hard to explain) than the one you've been using your entire life. It takes some practice, but I've found that I can't tie a granny now if I try. And my shoes don't come untied anymore.
All this at the age of 53.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Consternatio
Holy Humbaba, I think my dear old friend might be a Tenther!
You know the Tenthers, right? They’re the Tea Party types (shit, he’s probably a Tea Partier too!) who think that the tenth amendment to the Constitution essentially nullifies most if not all federal programs. Usually they point to programs like Social Security, Medicare, the minimum wage, and the EPA, claiming that these tyrannical mandates are beyond the scope of federal power as described in the amendment. The amendment says just this: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Without doing volumes of research, I’ve learned that the Supreme Court has generally not swallowed the conceit that only powers named in the Constitution are due the federal government. There have been tenth amendment movements in the past, but seldom has the Court found in favor of the argument, instead landing on the strength of the Commerce Clause to justify the constitutionality of the challenged laws.
My friend -- the evangelical -- has been making Tea Party noises lately, which doesn’t surprise me, since he’s always been archly conservative. What does surprise, and trouble, me now is that this remarkably smart man is using the remarkably unsmart arguments of the TP, the Tenthers, and for all I know the Birthers to defend his positions. When I questioned his interpretation of the tenth amendment, though, he claimed he didn’t intend to imply that Social Security and Medicare were illegitimate; his beef, he said, is strictly with the new health care bill’s individual mandate. If that were the case, however, he should also be against the employer’s share of Social Security, a mandate that covers all states and all businesses.
If I had any faith in the Supreme Court’s respect for stare decisis, I wouldn’t worry about a tenth amendment challenge to the health care bill. But the Tenthers have introduced a meme, and if my friend is beaming the meme, I’m sure the Court (I mean the five conservatives) is tuned into it as well. It would provide cover for a decision that would open the door toward ending the landmark social programs of the 20th century, which, against their best interests, a large portion of the U.S. population would applaud. As I pointed out to my friend, without Social Security and Medicare millions of elderly folks would be living with their adult children and relying on them to pay for their medical needs. That would sure cramp the style of our consumer economy, wouldn’t it?
It seems to me that the Tenthers are in search of a single button to push that would relieve all their frustrations with our political system, first and foremost of which is the fact that the country is something of a democracy. They’re angry that things aren’t the way they want them, and I say, Join the frickin’ club! But what they want is capitulation of all our institutions, by means of the tenth amendment, so that we become nothing but a conglomeration of states with independent societies and fifty different sets of standards.
It’s unworkable. And I hope my friend doesn’t really see things the way those twerps in the tri-cornered hats at the Tea Party rallies do.
You know the Tenthers, right? They’re the Tea Party types (shit, he’s probably a Tea Partier too!) who think that the tenth amendment to the Constitution essentially nullifies most if not all federal programs. Usually they point to programs like Social Security, Medicare, the minimum wage, and the EPA, claiming that these tyrannical mandates are beyond the scope of federal power as described in the amendment. The amendment says just this: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Without doing volumes of research, I’ve learned that the Supreme Court has generally not swallowed the conceit that only powers named in the Constitution are due the federal government. There have been tenth amendment movements in the past, but seldom has the Court found in favor of the argument, instead landing on the strength of the Commerce Clause to justify the constitutionality of the challenged laws.
My friend -- the evangelical -- has been making Tea Party noises lately, which doesn’t surprise me, since he’s always been archly conservative. What does surprise, and trouble, me now is that this remarkably smart man is using the remarkably unsmart arguments of the TP, the Tenthers, and for all I know the Birthers to defend his positions. When I questioned his interpretation of the tenth amendment, though, he claimed he didn’t intend to imply that Social Security and Medicare were illegitimate; his beef, he said, is strictly with the new health care bill’s individual mandate. If that were the case, however, he should also be against the employer’s share of Social Security, a mandate that covers all states and all businesses.
If I had any faith in the Supreme Court’s respect for stare decisis, I wouldn’t worry about a tenth amendment challenge to the health care bill. But the Tenthers have introduced a meme, and if my friend is beaming the meme, I’m sure the Court (I mean the five conservatives) is tuned into it as well. It would provide cover for a decision that would open the door toward ending the landmark social programs of the 20th century, which, against their best interests, a large portion of the U.S. population would applaud. As I pointed out to my friend, without Social Security and Medicare millions of elderly folks would be living with their adult children and relying on them to pay for their medical needs. That would sure cramp the style of our consumer economy, wouldn’t it?
It seems to me that the Tenthers are in search of a single button to push that would relieve all their frustrations with our political system, first and foremost of which is the fact that the country is something of a democracy. They’re angry that things aren’t the way they want them, and I say, Join the frickin’ club! But what they want is capitulation of all our institutions, by means of the tenth amendment, so that we become nothing but a conglomeration of states with independent societies and fifty different sets of standards.
It’s unworkable. And I hope my friend doesn’t really see things the way those twerps in the tri-cornered hats at the Tea Party rallies do.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Et alia
Recently I had a moment of weakness in my stand against electronic book readers and ordered a Barnes & Noble Nook when the price dropped. I paid $149 for the new Wi-Fi version, a damn sight cheaper than the original price of the Nook, Amazon’s Kindle, and the Apple iPad. My opinion of these machines has changed.
The thing arrived the other day, and I’ve been playing around with it obsessively. Over the holiday weekend I was able to download a bunch of American classic literature for free at the Barnes & Noble site, a great way to familiarize myself with the Nook’s features and quirks. It does have a number of each.
First of all, the experience of reading on this little pad is quite different from reading a book. The screen is only 4” x 5”, smaller than the print width of the average hardback. Even smaller than a mass market paperback. Depending on the font size you choose, the text can look more like a newspaper column than a book page. I imagine this is something I’ll get used to.
Navigating the Nook’s menu system is a little tricky too. You can return to the main menu, which appears on the backlit touchscreen at the bottom of the unit, by tapping a touch-sensitive button just above it, yet I often find myself getting yanked out of the book I’m reading when I push a back-arrow on the touchscreen, thinking it will take me to a control panel instead. This is mainly due to my learning curve, but also partly to the software that controls the Nook. It isn’t all that user friendly, but this too shall pass. Users adapt.
B&N is touting the cover flow feature -- you can show the covers of your personal library or of books you might buy -- but I find the images to be so tiny that using them to I.D. books is almost laughable. It’s true that an image you select by touching it gets a little bigger, yet the type is still mighty small. Still, it gives you an idea of what the actual book looks like, if you were to hold it in your hands. You can imagine it while reading the electronic version, if that makes you happy.
I do appreciate the built-in dictionary and the ability to highlight passages and enter notes on the text. The control panel that handles these functions, though, along with the itty bitty touchscreen keyboard, are a bit sluggish and funky, since there’s a slight delay between your touch and the cursor’s movement. Even so, these are nice features that enhance the reading experience. If you’re the type to write marginalia in your books, this lets you do it without marring a perfectly pristine copy. You can also hide or delete any comments you’ve made.
Buying ebooks via B&N is a breeze using the on-board Wi-Fi, which communicates with your home network or any AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot (or even B&N’s in-store Wi-Fi). Once you tap the “Buy” button, the book is delivered electronically and you can start reading. Searching for books to buy is another story, though. If you know the specific title or author, you’ll have no trouble, but I tried a few searches that yielded either thousands of hits or none at all. Maybe I’m too used to the web-based approach, where I can change the search criteria more quickly.
One attraction of the Nook, or any ebook reader, is access to the hundreds of thousands of texts that have been digitized by Google. They’re all free, and they include most if not all of the Western canon going back to the ancient Greeks. I have a very hard time reading Google books online, so the Nook is a valuable tool for that purpose. The only problem is that sometimes the formatting can be odd, or special characters are misunderstood. This isn’t Nook’s fault; it’s the Google text-recognition software that reads, for instance, 1806 as 180G (in John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography.) You get what you pay for, ultimately, but at least you can stock up on the classics if you’re willing to overlook the tics.
I don’t mean to be comprehensive in this little review, but despite the minor flaws I find the Nook strangely impossible to put down. Knowing that I already have fifteen or twenty books in it, I’m giddy to think that I can take a break from Lady Chatterley’s Lover and dip into Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations for a while. Or buy something new because I feel like it. (I have my eye on Mr. Peanut.) Gradually the reading experience itself will feel completely natural, and I can foresee spending a lot more money on books than I have over the last few years.
Ebooks won’t displace tangible books for a long time -- probably not till paper gets too expensive to use for all those schlocky thrillers and vampire novels -- and not everybody will come to appreciate them. But think about what a book really is: words painstakingly arranged to deliver information or art to the reader. The ebook is as capable of that as traditional ink-on-paper. We can romanticize the physical book, just like we romanticize the neighborhood book store, but both are slowly becoming obsolete the same way hand-copied books became irrelevant after Gutenberg. There was a time when people were nostalgic for the parchment scroll, after all.
Should we fight it? Or should we accept that this is a transitional age in which new technologies will actually make it easier for people to read what they want, when they want? Or simply to read more. This is good.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Observatio
Photo: Syracuse Cultural WorkersEveryone’s growing vegetables in their yards around here. Even I’m doing it, and I’ve never been the type to follow the crowd or, for that matter, to care whether a specific plant lives or dies.
In the past, I always concentrated on tomatoes, because it’s true what they say: you can’t get a tomato in a grocery store like the ones you used to have when you were a kid. Grocery store tomatoes are red styrofoam seed-delivery devices. A tomato -- a really good one -- should bring you close to a juicy lingual orgasm. Always eat the good ones in private.
This year I’ve branched out into peppers, zucchini, green beans, beets, carrots, radishes, lettuce, cucumbers, and melons. If I’m lucky I’ll get two or three edible samples of each by the time harvest comes around. Because it’s a daily struggle to keep these goddamn things alive. The gophers, the insects, the snails, the diseases, the cats, the heat, the weeds -- my God, it feels like all of Nature wants my garden dead, and it’s only my constant, obsessive intervention that spares it. Now that I’ve eaten a few of my own carrots, I’m devoted to its survival.
What I don’t like about the home-vegetable movement, though, is how some people are going a little wild with it. A lot of our neighbors around here have dug up their front yards, installing raised beds and irrigation systems, compost heaps, trellises for the climbing plants, and even deer fencing to keep out the foragers. As practical as the idea might seem, these micro-farms are universally eyesores, especially when the “farmer” doesn’t have quite the green thumb he thinks he has. As far as landscaping goes, I’d lean toward a carpet of blooming dandelions over some of these little experiments in locavore living.
This all seems like a fad to me, and I’m guessing that this one will last another year or two, till people have a chance to compare the costs of maintaining a vegetable patch with the amount of food it actually produces for them (see Manny Howard’s cautionary tale, My Empire of Dirt). Looking at my own humble operation, I think I’ll have saved about eleven bucks all in all.
I’m not sure it’s worth it, but, damn, will those tomatoes taste good.
Friday, July 9, 2010
Et alia
If this isn't the craziest f&%$#*g thing I've ever heard. The Candwich. A sandwich in a can. You know -- for the kids!
Apparently it's not on store shelves yet, and might never be, since the creator is in some legal hot water, according to the Daily Mail. Still, I feel better just knowing a product like this might exist one day. Something to live for.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Et alia
How is future technology affecting us today?
Here and there you’ll read science fiction or speculative articles that wonder aloud about time travel and other technological advances that might come about one day. You can think yourself into dizzying loops over this stuff.
For instance, it’s conceivable, if you believe time travel will become possible in the future, that our present world -- the only one we have access to -- is being manipulated by time travelers. That would explain a lot, when you think about it (George Bush? President? Two terms?). Everyone knows, given our state of understanding, that you don’t go back in time and start changing things, because you can’t control the ripple effect that will carry forward to your own time. It’s the Law of Unintended Consequences at work, like nuclear fallout. But who’s to say that future engineers haven’t found a way around that trap? Maybe they’ve discovered how to isolate particular changes, like taking one puzzle piece out of a jigsaw and replacing it with another. The rest of the puzzle remains the same, with only the single element altered.
If this is the case and some of the weird wild stuff going on in the world today is caused by “chrononauts” (for want of a better term), all we can do is hope that their interests coincide with ours at some point, since there’s no way to engage them or negotiate if they don’t want to be detected. (Colbert and Michio Kaku went into this the other night. Invisibility cloaks!) Even if someone stood up and identified herself as a time traveler (let’s say women are the the dominant gender in the year 2525), we’d quickly have her certified and locked up in a mental hospital, no? One day, word of her escape would hit the news, but the truth is she’ll have vanished from a locked cell without a trace...
Another possibility I heard of a while back is that computing might become so advanced in the next thousand years or so that we can’t trust that we are “actual” human beings but rather avatars in a virtual reality constructed to test some theory or complex algorithm. Our behavior is being analyzed by a programmer (this would be God, one way of looking at it), who is trying to solve an existential problem in her own era.
Or we could be figures in some goofy teenager’s video game. It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes.
I wish we could have faith that the people of the future will have their priorities straight, but if human nature doesn’t evolve much over the next millennium, I’m afraid these chrononauts and software engineers will be as blind and self-destructive as we are.
Here and there you’ll read science fiction or speculative articles that wonder aloud about time travel and other technological advances that might come about one day. You can think yourself into dizzying loops over this stuff.
For instance, it’s conceivable, if you believe time travel will become possible in the future, that our present world -- the only one we have access to -- is being manipulated by time travelers. That would explain a lot, when you think about it (George Bush? President? Two terms?). Everyone knows, given our state of understanding, that you don’t go back in time and start changing things, because you can’t control the ripple effect that will carry forward to your own time. It’s the Law of Unintended Consequences at work, like nuclear fallout. But who’s to say that future engineers haven’t found a way around that trap? Maybe they’ve discovered how to isolate particular changes, like taking one puzzle piece out of a jigsaw and replacing it with another. The rest of the puzzle remains the same, with only the single element altered.
If this is the case and some of the weird wild stuff going on in the world today is caused by “chrononauts” (for want of a better term), all we can do is hope that their interests coincide with ours at some point, since there’s no way to engage them or negotiate if they don’t want to be detected. (Colbert and Michio Kaku went into this the other night. Invisibility cloaks!) Even if someone stood up and identified herself as a time traveler (let’s say women are the the dominant gender in the year 2525), we’d quickly have her certified and locked up in a mental hospital, no? One day, word of her escape would hit the news, but the truth is she’ll have vanished from a locked cell without a trace...
Another possibility I heard of a while back is that computing might become so advanced in the next thousand years or so that we can’t trust that we are “actual” human beings but rather avatars in a virtual reality constructed to test some theory or complex algorithm. Our behavior is being analyzed by a programmer (this would be God, one way of looking at it), who is trying to solve an existential problem in her own era.
Or we could be figures in some goofy teenager’s video game. It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes.
I wish we could have faith that the people of the future will have their priorities straight, but if human nature doesn’t evolve much over the next millennium, I’m afraid these chrononauts and software engineers will be as blind and self-destructive as we are.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Consternatio
In another perfect metaphor for our times, I learn today that The Beatles Complete on Ukulele has come to an abrupt end. Son of a bitch!
Oh, it was an ambitious project, to be sure, to write about and perform (on ukulele and other assorted lo-fi gear) every Beatles' tune in time for the Summer Olympics in London, '012. Roger Greenawalt and Dave Barratt, the inspired ones, have been making my Tuesdays special ever since I read about them on Boing Boing.
Israel and the Palestinians will never achieve peace in our time. Barack Obama will never fill the suit we imagined him in. The Cubs will never win the World Series, but please, boys, R & D, give me something to hope for in this wasteland of a century we're slogging through!
You know what they say: "Life is very short, and there's not ti-i-i-i-ime for fussing and fighting, my friend."
Oh, it was an ambitious project, to be sure, to write about and perform (on ukulele and other assorted lo-fi gear) every Beatles' tune in time for the Summer Olympics in London, '012. Roger Greenawalt and Dave Barratt, the inspired ones, have been making my Tuesdays special ever since I read about them on Boing Boing.
Israel and the Palestinians will never achieve peace in our time. Barack Obama will never fill the suit we imagined him in. The Cubs will never win the World Series, but please, boys, R & D, give me something to hope for in this wasteland of a century we're slogging through!
You know what they say: "Life is very short, and there's not ti-i-i-i-ime for fussing and fighting, my friend."
Monday, July 5, 2010
Observatio
It occurred to me last night that I can’t remember a lot about many of the houses I’ve lived in since I was a kid. I can easily, and in plenty of detail, recall certain parts of them all, but I can’t seem to do a mental walk-through and point out where closets were, what the baseboards were like, the window hardware, how many steps to the second floor. It’s as if my brain has erased the transitional spaces, in particular, the nooks and crannies and all those little things we take for granted every day because they’re in the background.
One house in particular is a real blur. My family lived there for only a few months when my mother couldn’t afford the mortgage on the one home we’d really gotten used to. (Not her fault, by the way.) The new place was a rental in a different part of the county, meaning that we’d be going to a different school on top of the fact that we didn’t much like the house itself. I can remember a strange divider between the living room and kitchen, a bizarre red (or amber?) Plexiglas thing, but I can’t remember which side of the room it was on. I can’t recall the kitchen cabinets or the tile -- a dull beige vinyl more than likely. I can’t remember what the front window looked like, or the color of the living room walls (white, I’m assuming), nor do I see much detail heading down the hall toward the bedrooms, of which I think there were three. How they were laid out I have no idea whatsoever. Odd.
The thing I remember most about the house was the garage, which had been converted to a bedroom. I dibbed it because I liked the idea of extra privacy, and I thought the Persian rug in there was exotic. The walls were of a rough gray stone about to waist height, then a cheap, dark-wood paneling took over to the ceiling. Where there’d once been the garage door was now an entire wall of that stone.
The unforeseen problem with the room was that it was unheated. Mom got me a second-hand space heater to use on cold nights, but I was always afraid it would burst into flames while I was asleep and I usually turned it off after a while. When I couldn’t take it any longer, I offered the room to my brother Joe, who was excited to take it off my hands.
That’s when I took over a bedroom in the back corner of the house, which I only remember because it had a window on two walls. Or did it? Maybe I’m mixing it up with another room from another house. I do know its walls were painted a sickly shade of sky blue. I hated the color but didn’t want to spend a lot of time painting it myself.
The bath tub in that house was infested for a few weeks with roly poly bugs. We had to scoop them out and flush them down the toilet before we could take a bath.
Another thing I definitely remember is the adhesive carpet squares Mom got to cover the bedroom floors, which were linoleum, I think. The carpet squares were a pukey moss green the texture and consistency of thick felt. I think I can recover the smell of them too. Not good. Armpit soup.
There are other places I’ve lived that I can’t piece together in their entirety, but this place might as well be a ghost house. Probably says more about my state of mind when I lived there than anything else. A strange feeling, though, all these years later, to realize that I walked through that door a few hundred times and remember so little about it.
A blessing?
One house in particular is a real blur. My family lived there for only a few months when my mother couldn’t afford the mortgage on the one home we’d really gotten used to. (Not her fault, by the way.) The new place was a rental in a different part of the county, meaning that we’d be going to a different school on top of the fact that we didn’t much like the house itself. I can remember a strange divider between the living room and kitchen, a bizarre red (or amber?) Plexiglas thing, but I can’t remember which side of the room it was on. I can’t recall the kitchen cabinets or the tile -- a dull beige vinyl more than likely. I can’t remember what the front window looked like, or the color of the living room walls (white, I’m assuming), nor do I see much detail heading down the hall toward the bedrooms, of which I think there were three. How they were laid out I have no idea whatsoever. Odd.
The thing I remember most about the house was the garage, which had been converted to a bedroom. I dibbed it because I liked the idea of extra privacy, and I thought the Persian rug in there was exotic. The walls were of a rough gray stone about to waist height, then a cheap, dark-wood paneling took over to the ceiling. Where there’d once been the garage door was now an entire wall of that stone.
The unforeseen problem with the room was that it was unheated. Mom got me a second-hand space heater to use on cold nights, but I was always afraid it would burst into flames while I was asleep and I usually turned it off after a while. When I couldn’t take it any longer, I offered the room to my brother Joe, who was excited to take it off my hands.
That’s when I took over a bedroom in the back corner of the house, which I only remember because it had a window on two walls. Or did it? Maybe I’m mixing it up with another room from another house. I do know its walls were painted a sickly shade of sky blue. I hated the color but didn’t want to spend a lot of time painting it myself.
The bath tub in that house was infested for a few weeks with roly poly bugs. We had to scoop them out and flush them down the toilet before we could take a bath.
Another thing I definitely remember is the adhesive carpet squares Mom got to cover the bedroom floors, which were linoleum, I think. The carpet squares were a pukey moss green the texture and consistency of thick felt. I think I can recover the smell of them too. Not good. Armpit soup.
There are other places I’ve lived that I can’t piece together in their entirety, but this place might as well be a ghost house. Probably says more about my state of mind when I lived there than anything else. A strange feeling, though, all these years later, to realize that I walked through that door a few hundred times and remember so little about it.
A blessing?
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