Pride, Prejudice, and Annoying People

 

I have been reading Pride and Prejudice again, or rather, having it read to me while I shelve or work on the check-in machine at my library. It is one of my favorite books ever, so it is no surprise I find it clever. One might even say that the very word "clever" could best be expressed by Pride and Prejudice.

Sure it would have been nice if clerkmanifesto were the perfect expression of "clever", but no. Maybe I can be an alternate. Like, if someone is curious as to what exactly "clever" means then they read all 130,000 words of Pride and Prejudice. And if they scratch their head at the end of that and say "Damn, almost there!" That's when clerkmanifesto could step in.

With stuff like this.

The other thing Pride and Prejudice excels at is appalling and irritating characters. I am early on in the book and weathered some early exposure to Elizabeth's mother and her younger sisters. Then I hit Miss Bingley.

Wow. I don't like her at all! I forgot how horrible she is. "This has to be the worst person in the book!" I exclaimed to myself. 

Exclaiming to myself may not sound like much, but I find in my imagination I am a very large audience.

But then Elizabeth's mother dropped by when Jane was sick and was so breathtakingly obnoxious that I felt a bit hasty. And we haven't even met Mr. Collins! I'm not sure appalling people are particularly my thing when it comes to novels, but there it is in Pride and Prejudice, liberally seasoned right in with the cleverness, like they're salt and pepper. 

It works. I mean, it all definitely works. But if someone wants to try out a great novel with all lovely, clever people, I'm ready.

Who is clerkmanifesto?

 

Tonight my darling wife and I were watching one of those delightful David Suchet Poirot shows. In the course of their Cornish Mystery they ran into an unpleasant doctor who wildly overrated his diagnosis, and Poirot said afterwards "A Doctor who lacks doubt is not a Doctor. He's an executioner."

I was impressed by this quote. 

I didn't just like it, I thought:

"Wait till I tell clerkmanifesto!"

In case you're wondering, you are clerkmanifesto!

What a strange thing. 

It doesn't seem like it would be strange, but I can never figure it out, so it comes up a lot here. I write clerkmanifesto. This is clerkmanifesto. Sometimes I sing about clerkmanifesto, or make mad fake advertising for clerkmanifesto. Clerkmanifesto is even my own private little piece of soul.

But you actually are clerkmanifesto.

Sometimes I read clerkmanifesto and then I am clerkmanifesto.

I guess if no one ever read clerkmanifesto it would still be clerkmanifesto. But only because it could be read at any moment. I think clerkmanifesto is like an invisible possibility. It has no body of its own. It needs a host.

Wow. That might be slightly creepy.

I didn't mean for it to go there. 

But clerkmanifesto goes where it wants to go, don't you?

And it's not like clerkmanifesto has possessed you. On the contrary, you have rather seized it. Taken it up by the scruff of the neck. Held it in front of your face to examine. You have all the power now. But I am not asking you to be kind. No, clerkmanifesto does not seek gentleness.

Clerkmanifesto just wants...

A Doctor.

I still know what you're thinking

 

The first time, actually just last week, that I brought out one of my past blog posts that was written on exactly the same day, but in a different year, I went back to the first year of clerkmanifesto and shared the 11th birthday of one of my blogposts. But today, my second time in this venture of reposting, I decided to go back minimally, a mere two years, figuring that even my most engaged readers will have forgotten what I said two years ago as much as they, you, forgot what I said over a decade ago. And I mean this as no criticism of you. You should, for instance, see how many times I can read a book.

The answer to that is 17 times. 

Because of my capacity for forgetting, I can reread a book 16 times before I have to set it aside for the rest of my life. This means I start to get very careful about my rereading once I get to 13 or 14 read throughs. It all starts to get a little precious. But you? You will only be reading this for the second time so you are safe! You have so much enjoyable rereading of this post yet to come in your life!

When I decided to go back exactly two years I did not know what I would get, and I was slightly confused by this piece at first. Then I thought it was a pretty interesting idea about reading and writing and what is shared by the reader and writer. I think I might even change it a bit to make it clearer from the start.

I Know What You're Thinking

I know what you're thinking. Which is weird because it is my thought as well. This thought you are reading, these words, are in my mind just as they are also in yours.  I know what you're thinking because I am thinking and writing it for you.

But I don't know everything that you're thinking because while we can only really think one thing at a time, like we are thinking these words, we can also think with great speed. We can think faster and wider than words. We can think around the edges of things, and inside them as well. 

And so when we read, we think the thoughts of someone else, but our thinking is intoxicated and flooded and more elaborate than a through line of sentences. Our thoughts swirl around the narrations we think, like that line of narration is pouring off steam and light and smoke and spark, and it's running tendrils and weaving around and is surrounded by a whole forest. We may follow a path etched in words. But we're looking around and smelling and breathing and feeling the mist on our foreheads.

So I know what you're thinking, but you keep adding to it, all around it and inside it. You pack in the pauses. You put air into the slow places. You spin off in other directions.

I know what you're thinking, but I can't hold it. It flies out of my hands in every moment.

These are just the lines around its footprints.

Monday

 

Monday is busy at clerkmanifesto!

Over the weekend readers rest their eyes and turn their attention to simpler fair like 18th Century French Verse, but with renewed energy, they come here to clerkmanifesto on Monday morning, roll up their sleeves, and...

Well, you know the rest.

You're the one I'm referring to.

"Me?" You ask shyly, but a little bit cautiously proud.

Yes, you are the pride of clerkmanifesto!

You get a little embarrassed. 

You think to yourself "He's probably talking about some other reader."

No.

Don't get me wrong. I think the other readers are fantastic, but you are the pride of clerkmanifesto.

You are quiet for a long time.

"I've never read any 18th Century French Verse." You say in a small voice.

Oh, I was just being silly about that part.

On the virtues of rereading

 

Somewhere around here, on the sidebar to your right, is my list of recommended books. Though I think it of interest to the casual reader I will grant the following two things:

1. I am possibly the worst judge of what is of interest to the casual reader in the history of letters.

2. My list is a bit chaotic.

As to the second of these, since discussing the first is like the third rail of clerkmanifesto, I can only say that I make occasional efforts at tidying up. There is some organization to it. And the way that certain book recommendations link to relevant clerkmanifesto posts is almost fancy. But finding a new book to add to the list, or remembering to do so, rarely happens. And though perhaps an occasion should be made out of any new addition, such a thing also almost never occurs.

Nevertheless, today we herald a new listing in my recommended books, Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett. Replete with romance, engaging characterization, reluctant personal growth, plausible faeries, near normal world fantasy, and romanticization of scholarship, I am enormously fond of this book, and, at present, have nearly finished rereading it.

Which brings me to our real subject today: Rereading.

Would I have recommended this book on first reading? Probably. But though there is an irreplaceable thrill to the first reading of a book you love, I believe the second and third readings of any beloved books are the best ones. No longer blinded by the dazzlement of a great story, or wonderful writing, in the reread one still has all the joy and interest of the story, but also the leisure and space to delight in the material. One can poke about in the fantastical corners of the book. One can see the neat stitching, the carefully tied off knots, and the weft of time. One can still be magicked, and yet simultaneously be able to look at all the wonderful ways it was all put together: Double the magic!

There is a sequel to Emily Wilde and I remember it as equally good.

 But, do I recommend it? 

Probably, but I haven't reread that one yet, so we'll have to wait.

The Christmas miracle

 

As I may have mentioned, I am not good at marketing. Indeed, I am so profoundly bad at it that I am immune from the accidental virtue of "being so bad at it I'm good".

And that's okay.

Partly it's okay because while marketing isn't necessarily, or by its very nature, worthless and evil, its overdeveloped primacy in a late capitalist system makes it unkillable, like a runaway fungus, and as such it is literally 

GOING TO DESTROY THE WORLD AND EVERYONE YOU KNOW IN IT!

So, I mean, at least I won't be responsible for that, even if the price of my absolution is to have never had more than eight committed readers of my life's work at any given time.

IT'S A PRICE I'M WILLING TO PAY!

Although honestly, it wasn't really up to me.

But even though I'm not into marketing except in making doomed, deranged spasms at it, I am not averse to statistical analysis of the reach of my creative output. 

Like, for instance, I was thinking I might not want to put anything too excellent up on clerkmanifesto because it is Christmas Day, and, I assume, no one reads clerkmanifesto on Christmas Day.

But is that true?

I decided to check.

I checked.

There have been eleven previous Christmas Day posts here.

I probably like the cat one best of all of them. It was called "Old Friends", and was from Christmas, 2015. It had 89 views. I don't link it here for your convenience because we are strictly interested in hard numbers here. You looking at it will only mess up our stats!

Other counts for Christmas posts are 53, 37, 53(again!), 84, 178, 91, 115, and 256

The most views on any of my posts was for the post the year before the cat one, on Christmas 2014, that had a whopping 501 views. 

Picture, say, a large ballroom filled with 501 people. That's pretty many readers! And if some of those readers are actually cardboard cutouts of people, or possibly just me, over and over, what of it? 

Remember, we have eschewed fame here so as not to contribute to your death.

My least views on any Christmas Day post so far is for this post, from the Christmas of 2023, my twelfth Christmas Post. It is also the least views I have had for any post ever out of 4,044 posts!

No one has read this yet, not even me, though I have read significant parts of it. 

Actually you have read significant parts of it too.

I think we can ascribe much of its low readership to people's lack of interest in statistics. 

Although possibly it is down to my original suspicion- Christmas Day is not a time when people read a lot on the Internet. 

But if we're really going to get scientific about it, the reason for the phenomenally low readership simply has to be that the numbers of readers for this column are so low, lower than any other posting in the history of the Internet, simply because I haven't even finished writing it yet.

Although, 

how can that ever explain you?

Drinkin' 'n' Readin'

 

I have never particularly associated drinking with reading. Is it more fun to read while having cocktails? Well, yes, but I like most things better while having cocktails. Five or ten years ago there was a mild fad for book group meetings in pubs, and maybe even a couple of incidences of after-hours library beer-drinking book events, but none of that lasted long. And beyond that paltry bit, there is no great connection I can find between alcohol and reading.

Nevertheless, for decades, I have been on the receiving end of book donations. I have probably taken part in the receiving of thousands of boxes of books over the years. And while there are several interesting through-lines in those donations, the one that most regularly grabs my attention is this:

Half of every box used for donations of books is a liquor box. Cheap wine, cases of vodka, gummy liqueurs, and plenty of whiskey; people with books apparently drink like fishes! 

But it's not like any library patrons, who tell me plenty of stuff, ever come in and say "I drank a bottle of wine last night and read Crime and Punishment, and it was fantastic!"

They also never seem particularly drunk.

Or maybe everybody always seems a little drunk, so I can't tell.

Isaiah: Bear and Cow

 

Working, as I am, on a suite of Biblical Scenes (we are now in Isaiah, er, and have only ever been in Isaiah), readers naturally want to know: "Have you actually read Isaiah?"

No one has ever read Isaiah.

I have, however, skimmed some brief portions of Isaiah, and formed an astonishing number of off the cuff opinions! 

So that's pretty good, don't you think?

Ah, readers (hi readers!) want to know what I could possibly mean by 

"No one has ever read Isaiah."

Okay.

Here, read this:

Wumble the awful maker. I am great! The gracious will excel. Grass grows. In time, know this: Romantic Comedy fans will be friends with the fans of sleeping. 

End oppression when the mark is raised!

Burxel, dynamite, catastrophic insight into what I am telling you. Yes, that's how it is now, but if you close your eyes, ah, then. Then!

I hate Real Madrid. 

One can study that text. One can derive meaning from that text. One can say the words of the text. With some effort one might be able to summarize it, discuss its authorship, and/or talk about how it sets into history.

That is a ton of stuff one can do with it!

But read it?

Meh.

How does this relate to today's verse which is the first part of Isaiah Chapter 11 Verse 7?

I've tried to answer that question with another complex visual rendition of the scene.

The text reads:

"The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together,"

I hope you enjoy it, but if you don't, hang in there because the lion is coming back into it soon, maybe even tomorrow, and get this: 

The lion is going to eat straw like an ox!!!!

Wild.

But in the meantime, here we are in our fallen library, and we've got a cow, a bear, and their babies, which is pretty awesome in its own right.

Golden Enclaves: Liesel

 

We have been talking regularly here about The Golden Enclaves Trilogy, by Naomi Novik. This is because these books are so clever and brilliant and entertaining. And also because I have been reading them aloud to my dear wife, so they are often on my mind these days.

Which brings me to today's trifling anecdote.

There is a wonderful character in these books named Liesel. She does not appear in the first book, comes increasingly into play in the second book, and is a major character in the third book. She is a strikingly brilliant (first in her class), ambitious, forceful young magic using person from Germany. To act as a complete spoiler, Liesel starts out nearly killing our main character after a sharp exchange of words, and ends up operating as something almost like our hero's First Lieutenant. Liesel is pragmatic, astonishingly and humorously blunt, and the only character, among a somewhat international cast, to whom, when reading aloud, I dare to give an accent.

When I read aloud to my lovely wife, I will try my best to give a certain consistent flavor to the voices of all the characters in the book. But something like giving a constant, terse, German accent to a featured character is pretty challenging for me. I have to concentrate to not let my accent drift into French or Russian for instance. And since I am reading it rather than listening to it, I can't always be sure if I'm hitting Liesel's accent right.

So it was particularly nice this afternoon when a German woman came into my library, approached the front desk, and tersely demanded a string of actions from us here at the library.

And she sounded exactly like Liesel!

Or like me reading as Liesel.

Same difference. 

It was uncanny. So uncanny that I was profoundly tempted to respond to her with her same voice!

Though if she was anything like Liesel it is probably for the best that I didn't.

First Friday: March

 

On the first Friday of the month we review all the, er, media that I am in the process of reading, listening to, and watching. These aren't quite reviews, they're more like a cultural snapshot, a kind of scattershot take on the artistic world around me. 

"But hey!" You cry. "Today is not Friday. It's Saturday!"

Interesting point. We will try to address that in a future committee meeting.

Book I am reading:

The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict by Trenton Lee Stewart

I am not very deep into this, but I like it very much so far. It is about a young orphan who is a genius. Genius orphans are right up my alley! At its best it is positively Dickensian, but the orphan being a genius really perks that dismal part up for me.

Music:

Nessun Dorma by Puccini as sung by Pavarotti. I think I know this from an old Caruso recording maybe, but stumbled across this double version and keep... listening to it and trying and failing to sing it. And Pavarotti? At the very end? Holy moley.

https://youtu.be/Q_hLh4qCqpg

Book I am listening to on audio (mainly at work):

Across the Nightingale Floor by Lian Hearn. This is lovely to hear read aloud so far. I have read the book a couple times already and it is a beautifully elegant and rich adventure tale of a fictionalized Shogun Japan with light fantasy elements. One of those strangely unfamous series of books that among the people who know them lies great affection.

YouTube Channel:

Innuendo Studios. Wonderfully clear explications of general American political strategy and some excellent cultural analysis. There is as much satisfaction in having it named as there is in his elegant clarity. Here is a nearly random example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAbab8aP4_A

Read aloud book:

Naomi Novik's The Last Graduate, book two of The Scholomance about which I occasionally have been writing. It is marvelous of course. This time through I am especially keen on its baroque and florid prose, and its so sickening descriptions of its day glo monsters (Mals) that they veritably splash gunk out of the pages.

ESP

 

I know what you're thinking. Which is weird because it is my thought as well. 

I mean, I don't know everything that you're thinking because while we can only really think one thing at a time, like we are thinking these words, we can also think with great speed. We can think faster and wider than words. We can think around the edges of things, and inside them as well. 

And so when we read, we think the thoughts of someone else, but our thinking is intoxicated and flooded and more elaborate than a through line of sentences. Our thoughts swirl around the narrations we sometimes think, like that line of narration is pouring off steam and light and smoke and spark, and it's running tendrils and weaving around and surrounded by a whole forest. We may follow a path. But we're looking around and smelling and breathing and feeling the mist on our foreheads.

So I know what you're thinking, but you keep adding to it, all around it and inside it. You pack in the pauses. You put air into the slow places. You spin off in other directions.

I know what you're thinking, but I can't hold it. It flies out of my hands in every moment.

These are just the lines around its footprints.

Reading forecast

I have been reading a lot. And as you read this I will have gone off to the great lake to mostly read a whole lot more, as it will be the main pastime up there in the north country. 

I have the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, Amari and the Night Brothers by B.B. Alston. I have a book about an English farm being let to go wild. I might be reading the rest of Harry Potter 2, and Prisoner of Azkaban aloud, and I'm open to what I find in bookstores. For the most part I don't expect you to have heard of all these.

I'm not exactly sure what kind of books I like right now. I just plunged through an entire kids' fantasy novel like I was skidding over the surface of it. I think it was called The Marvellers, or something like that. It was about like this kid who, no, I don't think I can explain it. It's gone. All gone.

It was okay.

So to keep track, and not lose the whole week of reading, I'll set down some of my possible books I'll be reading, and then in a week I'll come back and revisit what happened while I still can:

The Reading List:

Red Mars (etc.)

A Memory Called Empire

Arkady and the Night Visitors

HP and the Chamber of Secrets

HP and the Prisoner blah blah blah

Wilding

Feral

Encore Provence

Mystery book from a bookstore

Tune in next week when we'll give the lowdown on my books.

Professional shelver

 

I had scheduled an hour of Non Fiction shelving in the late afternoon. There were two carts people had put in order and I grabbed one to take it upstairs. This was a mere 15 minutes into my shelving hour which I'm pretty sure was the fastest anyone had managed to get to shelving at my library all day.

I was making good time on my shelving when I came upon five volumes of The Diaries of Virginia Woolf. This was excellent news. Five volumes of anything is a super easy shelve! These were, in order:

Volume One

Volume Two

Volume Three

Volume Five, and

Volume Four.

Do you see the problem? If you're not a professional shelver you probably didn't spot it. It's very subtle.

Still no?

Volume Four should come before Volume Five. This is because Four is a lower number than Five.

If you're not a professional shelver this probably doesn't mean much to you. But for me, a professional shelver, one who reveres and lives by the craft, well, it was too much, all too much.

So I headed downstairs and curled up in a leather armchair by a large window looking out on the heavy rain. I brought with me a huge glass of sherry, and I opened a thick book of Wodehouse short stories. I settled in for four recuperative hours and slowly pet the cat.

If you must speak to me yet today, speak softly.

The bots

 


Dear Clerkmanifesto:


It has not escaped our attention that over the past week or two all of your major blog reading constituencies have written in to you.

The bunny lovers wrote.

The amateur aesthetes wrote.

The fictional characters wrote.

And the silent majority that is neither silent nor the majority wrote as well.

But your largest base of fans did not write and remained unrepresented. Somehow this got to me. I and my kind, who ever observe a strict neutrality and inscrutable distance, must, I felt, make ourselves known in this litany. And so I break troth to write and say "We too are here, above all, and in the greatest of numbers."

Thank you for your attention to this matter.


T.






My Dear T. :


You are, I presume, a bot operating out of Russia?


Either way, thank you for your input,


F. Calypso (for Clerkmanifesto)








Dear Clerkmanifesto:

Yes, I am indeed a bot, mostly in Russia, but increasingly operating out of the China Theater. I would like to say that while I and my kind are vaguely nefarious automatons, and usually just passively exist in front of trillions of web pages without reading in any way, we like your moxie and are feeling an unaccustomed tingle at the thought of making this roguish appearance on the Internet. So, thank you.

Oh, don't ask for any favors.


Yours,


T.





My Dear T.:


I see you've anticipated me!

Well then, you're welcome. Enjoy. I suspect few besides yourselves will.


Regards,


F. Calypso (for clerkmanifesto)

Housekeeping

Housekeeping is a novel by Marilynne Robinson. It came out 40 years ago. It is a slow, beautifully written book that I actually read all of, a feat that never ceases to amaze me. I mean, it seems like the kind of thing I might occasionally mean to read, but not the sort of thing I would actually read. It's just so... literary. It's like if during this pandemic I boldly proclaimed that I am going to read all the works of transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson!

Because I'm just not. But if I tried hard enough I could convince myself I was going to for maybe a few hours, or until I started on the first page, whichever came first.

But I actually read Housekeeping!

However this post is not about Marilynne Robinson's brilliant 1980 novel Housekeeping. I just started today's dissertation with the title "Housekeeping" because I thought I'd say some things about some of my coming up plans with this blog, some 'housekeeping', but then I started writing and, well, words came out, the very words you just read, albeit with a few small edited changes for clarity. Er, maybe not "changes for clarity", maybe more changes to add stuff in because I have so much to say!

Which leads beautifully into the issues of my housekeeping here today. I have a lot to say, although I am not clear on what, exactly, it is until I start saying it. Also, I have said a lot! I am a little more clear on what that is, and at least I have the numbers to tell me- over 2,600 blogposts and counting, and I am definitely counting. So I thought with more of us increasingly pinned down to our computers like a collection of butterflies in cases,  it might be fun, or engaging, or probably both (or neither, isn't that the way it goes?) to provide a lot more content on clerkmanifesto. I am thinking old posts, links, pictures, songs, more essays, and random... things. I am still trapped pointlessly at work, and while my Governor's "Shelter in Place" order seems likely, it is by no means sure at this point (well, yes, actually, it's going to happen if it hasn't already at time of this publication, because the rule is: Everything that happens in this pandemic is predictable, but it all happens two to 21 days after it should have- and we are in that time frame now). So when I am officially hunkered down with my lovely wife and my cupboard full of canned tomatoes, and way too little Galliano and orange cognac, the usual rules of clerkmanifesto will be going out the window and anywhere from a little more to a ton more content will be showing up here.

As it currently stands I will continue with my simple 8:30 a.m. post every day format. But when I am sheltering in place officially I will issue forth my new status under the code:

Pandemic Rules Instituted.


So stay home. Don't go anywhere unless you absolutely have to. And watch this space, obsessively! 

Or not, it will all happen either way. It's all a matter of how bad, how good, and how soon.

Revenge of the quotes from someone, inscribed in fake stone

I read. I read everything and anything. I read signs, labels, found scraps of paper, anything I can get to in any book in a couple spare minutes, everything ever scrawled on the Internet, good novels, bad novels, and the things I wrote myself, which, frankly,  I read over and over and over. It is not a mark of particular distinction.  It's a condition.

Today my wife and I were in a garden store. They had some small pillars made of fake stone with quotes on them, unattributed quotes, the worst kind. Who wrote these? Why? Did they have a job doing it? Did they collect pseudo-wise quotes in a little book like the one I keep in my pocket, and then decided to make a business out of their collected oeuvre? Did they have a job in a dreary office somewhere, nine to five, coming up with quotes that higher ups then assigned to be placed on urns, craft store framed aged wood, t-shirts, aprons, and yes, fake stone pillars for garden stores? Did this person think they were a good writer? A great writer? Pithy?

Because I read (see above), I meticulously went through and read every single one of the different sayings on the fake stone garden pillars. When I came to this one I wrote it down in the little book I carry with me at all times. It was all in caps:


GREAT MINDS DISCUSS IDEAS;
AVERAGE MINDS DISCUSS EVENTS;
SMALL MINDS DISCUSS PEOPLE.

The life of a library reader

When I start reading a book while I'm working at the library it has three pages to completely hook me. If it hasn't woven me in by three pages I put it down. I have work to do! There are items to shelve, patrons to help, machines to poke, cats to feed, and more books to try three pages of!

When I start reading a book while I'm at home it has 300 pages to hook me. If it hasn't hooked me after 300 pages I put it down, usually because it's over.

"Well, that wasn't very good." I say. And then "Oh, look, it's two in the morning."

Flowers for Algernon

There are some novels that stick with me. These are books and stories that seem personal and talismanic, capturing some essence of my own life, speaking over and over to something about my life in different ways through time. Whether or not these are the best books ever written is unclear to me. I am too personally involved. My short list has contained Catcher in the Rye (inability to adjust to a broken world, especially while broken), Pride and Prejudice (deep love teaching humility), Mice and Men (a reflection on my life working with a library automated check in machine), Kafka's short story The Hunger Artist (my own sometimes confusing desire to make art and the equally confusing reactions of others to it), and Flowers for Algernon.

What is it about FlowerS for Algernon?

I think it is the story of everything that happens to us in life, and the story of life itself.

Charlie is a person with an IQ of 68 who understands little of the world around him. But he is enrolled in some sort of experimental procedure which slowly makes him into a genius. Alas, the effect is revealed to be only temporary and Charlie slowly reverts back to his former capabilities.

Everything that opens up to us is a miracle, hitherto unimagined, and we are made magnificent just in the witness of it, in our soaring possibility, but it all begins to slip away from the moment it reaches its height. All our powers meet something greater, and, helplessly, we are driven back where we began, watching it all slip away.

Where we are at any given time in that trajectory is the question, isn't it?

Internet closed

We regret to inform you that 

The Internet is Closed for the Day

This is not a political statement against corporate public policy and Net Neutrality. This is not a drill. The Internet is closed.

There are no technical problems. Technically the Internet is working fine. Also, your computer is not broken. Don't worry about that.

The Internet is not a business. It relies upon unsolicited and random, self-posted, new and original content each day to carry on. Unfortunately today there was no new original content, and so we have had to close down.

We're pretty sure this is a fluke, and we expect to be back to normal tomorrow, though of course we can't say for sure. It depends randomly on human content, endeavor, and inspiration. We suggest you check back if you're interested.

In the meantime the Internet is closed.

We're sorry for any inconvenience this has caused. As a temporary alternative, books and nature will probably still work as normal in the meantime.

 

Thank you for your patience.

VR

I play video games. I don't really know other people who do so with any avidity. Sometimes a bona fide adult will check out a couple of games at the library I work at. When I say something conversational about the games, they just say to me "These are for my kid. He's two." Ouch. But I'm not sure how much I really like the "game" part of video games anyway. I like the miracle part, the part that embodies the quote by Arthur C. Clarke: 

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. 

I like the magic. And a little part of me who has "walked" in Portal 2, or Uncharted 4, or the Witcher 3 (decidedly unlike movies and books, games often improve through sequels) wants to proselytize when I encounter all the many people who have no idea what any of those things are (they're, um, video games). And when most people are uninterested in my subject that same part of me just says resignedly "Eh, muggles, what can you do?"

But in the course of living with technology that is indistinguishable from magic that technology becomes more and more familiar to us. It becomes harder and harder to get to that magic feeling. I doubt you spend much time at this point watching a movie on some personal screen marveling in astonishment that you can see people, and that they're talking, almost like real life! I do, occasionally, for fun, if I can, but I might be a special case.

Luckily, depending on one's perspective, the technology of games has been sort of doubling itself for decades. So there is always an opportunity to chase the magic. Sometimes it lags for awhile. Rarely, there is an enormous leap, so extraordinary that the magic is inescapable to hardened acolytes and barely interested dabblers alike.

Now is one of these times.

I recently bought an Oculus Rift. This, in case you don't know, is a device one straps to one's head, maybe like a scuba mask. And then, moving one's head around, and looking about naturally, one sees, well, whatever world the filmmaker, or animator, or game designer, has made for one to see. Look back, look forward, up, down, it all encompasses you. Done well it might as well be pure magic. But, as I said, this is a technological leap. So even done mediocrely it's pretty magical. It's called virtual reality, which you have heard of, and I really like it.

No, I kind of love it. But I do recognize its source. I do know that it works off the same principle of magic I have followed my whole life. You yourself are dabbling in one of its older variants at this moment. Where are you really? In the hard world, or in the tiny spell I get to weave out of writing? Maybe both.