Dragonfly

The sky is full of dragonflies, darting and hunting between the house and the lake, all through the morning and then later on up until the full moon rises out of the water in the evening. But, right now, out the grand, long windows of our lake house, I can't see a single one of them. It is mid afternoon and, as near as I can tell, the dragonflies are all Italians. At two in the afternoon they all close up shop and go sleep somewhere for three hours.

And why not Italians? Surely dragonflies are the sort of thing da Vinci would have designed with copious notes in one of his idiosyncratic little journals. Or better yet, Bernini would have come up with them to festoon all over some Roman fountain, all diaphanous and yet made of stone. Such a contrast would suit them well. They are half like fairyland creature and half machine purposed biplanes. They are creatures of fancy and ferocious hunters.

I have heard that a single dragonfly eats a pound of mosquitoes a day. That may not sound like much until you start thinking about what a bag of mosquitoes that weighs a pound might be like. I mean, besides really disgusting. Going from that full pound of eating one has to figure that your average dragonfly must weigh something like five pounds on its own. The way they dart about, weightless, electric, they sure don't seem to weigh five pounds, so I may have some of my facts wrong. But I am thrillingly disconnected from the Internet at this house, and though they have a prodigious number of books here I have found no copies of The Weights and Measures of All Things, which is a handy reference book someone might want to just sort of mention to the owners.

But either way dragonflies eat a surprising number of mosquitoes every day. Your standard magazine article, brochure, documentary, or book of popular natural history loves to trot out the mosquito hunting prowess of the dragonfly to impress upon us how the dragonfly is our friend, our friend because of all their mosquito eating.

I'm not so sure.

I have read a lot of these natural histories, and one common theme is always how the hunter strengthens the prey it feeds on. Wolves prey on the weak, slow, and sick moose so only the strong ones survive to pass along their healthy genes. 

So doesn't it stand to reason that the dragonflies pick off all the pokey, unalert mosquitoes, leaving the quick, savvy, and agile ones to reproduce? Doesn't it stand to reason that if not for the dragonfly there might be a good deal more mosquitoes, but they'd all be so sluggish and torpid that we could scoop them up in fine nets and see what it takes for there to be a pound of them? Wouldn't it stand to reason that if not for the dragonfly the mosquito would be far too slow and feeble to ever manage to take a bite from a human being like you or me, I mean, unless we were weak, or sick, and were getting weeded out of the gene pool?

But this doesn't mean I don't love all these Italian designed dragonflies, little WWI planes flying straight from fairyland, making wild designs in the sky, hunting our hunters and teaching us a thing or two about napping.

They are wonderful little animals, just, there's no point in getting carried away.






 

Mea culpa

The other day I was rather sharp when it came to a certain Minnesota dentist lion killer. I intimated quite strongly that he kept a pit of man eating sharks on his private island stronghold where he hunted shipwrecked human prey in a sporting, but still cruel and insane, manner. I also suggested this hunter might be found to have some billing irregularities when is came to his unusually lucrative dental practice.

But I wanted to say here that Who Am I To Judge? Who am I to judge this big game trophy hunter? Who am I to say it is so evil to bag a lion or an elk or polar bear? Who am I, sitting up here in my remote and dreamy vacation home, over the very shore of Lake Superior, to be so critical of a hunter who is ever following the thrill and danger and triumph and challenge of bringing down a ferocious beast?

I am no one to judge this dentist, no one at all. For I am a hunter too.

I am a fly hunter.

I am a hunter of flies, a hunter of the defenseless fly. And, sadly, I too understand and cannot resist the thrill of the hunt.



Like any youth I grew up making the idle, irritated swats at any number of flies. But I remember no particular accuracy or avidity in this endeavor. There was no noticeable proclivity or indication of my future. It was not an avocation that developed gradually or with any warning. It happened all at once, with a house.

In my early twenties I moved to a house in a small town in Sonoma County called Penngrove. It was a charming, albeit rundown, house, on the edge of the lovely wine country countryside. Like an astonishing number of places I have moved into, this one in Penngrove had been driven to the edge of decrepitude by its previous tenant. I have, in the past, moved into a former heroin den in Oakland, and my current house itself, now immaculate and adorable some $40,000 and 40,000 man (and woman!) hours later, had, when we moved in, gaping holes in the walls and the imprimatur of the previous long term tenant's hardcore poverty "never call the landlord" aesthetic. The last tenant of the house of my wife and I was actually so much like the last tenant in the Penngrove house that they are nearly identical in my mind. The main difference with the Penngrove tenant (we'll call him Jerome) was that he hadn't lived there as long and so had done less sustained, erosive damage than the last tenant (we'll call him Jerome) of our own house.

The Penngrove house was filthy when I moved in with my friend Patty, and, temporarily, her former boyfriend Seth. Jerome appeared to live on cheap steaks he broiled directly in the oven's broiling pan (that he never cleaned), and he dealt with the vast clouds of greasy smoke this produced by throwing open all the screenless windows in the house. As to how he dealt with the terrible, vast swarms of flies this ushered into the house, he didn't.

And thus the Penngrove house was when Seth, Patty, and I arrived late in the summer of 1988. We crossed over with Jerome, who was having himself a farewell steak. The house was smoky, filthy, and swirling with flies.

We cleaned. We built our own screens for all the windows. But the flies were a more persistent problem. They moved. They did not leave when one told them to. And they were fast, wary, and elusive. Nothing we did was very effective in ridding ourselves of them, and ever they emerged from hidden sources.

Until we hit upon the vacuum cleaner. There was an old, upright vacuum in the house. I don't know if the bottom part was gone or broken or we simply removed it, but the upright vacuum terminated in a simple tube. The tube produced a mediocre, at best, level of suction. One could not simply point the vacuum at a fly and suck it up, one had to stalk the fly, slowly. One had to get within a foot or so of the fly without startling it, and then swiftly thrust. The vacuum, thus handled, sucked up the fly into its innards and produced in its wielder a tiny burst of triumph.

Through days of careful hunting, and with improving technique, we slowly cleared our house of flies.

And a fly hunter was born.

Let us move forward in time some quarter of a century. My wife and I rent this beautiful vacation home on the shore of Lake Superior. It is ours for a week at a time. It feels a little like heaven here. And yet it also makes me think of that Penngrove house. Maybe because they're both in such uniquely pretty places. Maybe because they're the only rural houses I've ever lived in. Or maybe because they both somehow manage to produce, from out of nowhere, a slow stream of flies.

The first summer we were here I was hounded by a fly and hounded it back. I stalked and attacked it for 24 hours, until, in something akin to a miracle, I caught the fly in my bare hand and removed it to the outdoors (account here). This was clearly not a sufficient solution for the number of flies showing up in this house. I needed a clever and powerful device in the nature of Penngrove's sawed-off vacuum.

We went to a hardware store and I put my most creative, problem solving frame of mind into play. They were selling some cheap, small, very long handed plastic spatulas. These spatulas were flimsy and whippy and just the thing. I took one of these home and called it a "fly spatula". I used it to swat flies. 

This fly spatula was brilliant. I keep it nearby always. And when, as one does every hour or two, a fly shows up, I patiently track it. Then with one sharp swat I splatter the fly into whatever surface it has alighted upon. Then I clean it up with a half wet kleenex.

I am a fly hunter.

Do I enjoy all this fly hunting?

Well, yeah, sort of.

And if it were to turn out that I killed a fly that was beloved in the nearby town of Grand Marais? If they had a mascot fly that tourists came from far away to see and to buy stuffed versions of and postcards and wind up toys? If I killed that fly? If I became a notorious mascot fly killer reviled throughout all the Northlands, what defense could I mount? What could I possibly say? 

Nothing. There is nothing I could say. I would be guilty. I am a fly hunter.

So maybe I should try and go easy on that dentist lion hunter, even if he is probably a cannibal or something. I have my own crimes to speak to. I have blood on my own hands to account for, even if that blood appears to come in the color of green, and is produced in tiny, tiny, tiny amounts.

Dentist hunter

Some dentist from my own state has gone off to Africa and messily killed a very popular lion. The world is horrified and outraged. It's nice to have something in common with the world. We are both easily horrified and outraged, though not, generally, about the same things.

It turns out that the Minnesota dentist has killed many times before. He has killed  moose, polar bears, elk, bunnies, and probably people for all I know.

Of course, he's a hunter, so no doubt he only did it in a sporting manner.

"Mr. Smith, here is a lighter and a canteen full of water. You have 12 hours before I begin to track you down. Make good use of it. I do not wish for it to be, ah, too easy for me."

"My God! You must be insane! What kind of dentist are you? You can't hunt a human being!"

"Mr. Smith, I assure you I am not insane. I am a sportsman. But the clock has already started ticking so I suggest you stop arguing. Gentlemen, show Mr. Smith to the gates."

And every time this Minnesota dentist kills something it apparently cost him $50,000 in fees and permits and guides and all. I find this nearly as unsettling as all his rhino, bunny, people hunting. What kind of dentistry makes a person so much money they can be constantly dashing off for $50,000 long weekends, let alone maintaining a large island estate with henchmen for the purpose of hunting lost travelers for sport? I mean, even if the henchmen double as dental hygienists and the island estate's larder is fully stocked with frozen rhino and elephant steaks and with delicious lion chops, it's still gotta cost a fortune to maintain a helicopter and planes and a shark tank and a private satellite and a submarine and all that expensive state of the art hunting equipment. 

So I'm just saying that if we can't get this Minnesota dentist for poaching, because he's dotted all the "t's" and crossed all the "i's", we might want to send in the American Dental Association or perhaps one of the big dental insurers. He could be up to even more nefarious things than murdering endangered species. He could be overcharging.

At the beginning

Now is now, and then it's over. The mighty books of wisdom are excellent with the first part of this and stumble over the second. Why not. Our visions are not investments. Plans may save us, but when they do it will happen in the present.

At Lake Superior, largest lake in the world, I stare out at the horizon to see how far I can see. My close vision is shot at age 50, but I still pride myself on how distantly my eyes can reach. And there, peering into the horizon, I am surprised. The line where the lake meets the sky is not flat or straight or smooth or clear. It is full of dazzling illusions, false islands, waves, floating pieces of sky.

Moment to moment everything out there changes. Wonders come down like falling rain and disappear forever. Everything that is near can pierce your heart and spit you to the ground. All the far things dissolve into dreams.

Now is now. All wisdom will beg us to live here if we can because nothing can ever reconcile us to the endless things we lose in each passing second.

The lake house posts

I usually do my bit to make each blog post as much a stand alone affair as possible. Generally posts are not serialized or tightly grouped together, and there would not usually be any need for an introductory post. You may even have noticed my blog posts so much like to start out as introductions to themselves that we don't always get around to the subject matter at hand.

But this post is explicitly an introduction. It's not necessary to the 17 posts that will follow it, but I felt an urging toward the formality of it. The next 17 days of posts are almost as disparate as usual, do not (mostly) follow one upon the other (though they are more inclined to it than usual), and vary in tone, subject, and approach. But they are also like a little book to me, a discrete journal, a group of all the blog pieces I wrote at the lake house.

Clerkmanifesto, now two and a half years old, is not a strong one for following tradition or observing commemorations. It may follow the seasons, or mark occasions, but it does not have holidays, seasons, or occasions of its own.

Except perhaps the lake house.

Every year I race to get far ahead on my blog so I can safely leave it behind for the lake house. Invariably that preparation is part of the discussion itself. One post catalogs the books I am bringing to the lake house, and on return I give my accounting of them. And up at the lake I write. In a spiral notebook I write blog posts. By a roaring fire, on our sadly last night for the year here, I now write my 18th post. This is the only one, for obvious reasons, that will run out of order from the others. Written last it runs first.

Over the next 17 days? My usual array of long and short, farces, ruminations, revelations, reminiscences, satires, and left turns. Lots of left turns. But no matter their nature every one of them was written in this grand room I love, perched like the prow of a high boat over the wild shore of Lake Superior, and they belong, in their way, together. So I have written this introduction and hope you might, just a little, follow along in spirit these next 17 days.

Pull up a metaphorical chair. I must go put the last armload of wood on the fire. It will burn a little more tonight. From the lake, the great lake, I bid you greetings, and farewell.

Ambitions of oblivion

Often enough, in my life, I have started with a joke, and then seen what happens. A surprising number of jokes turn out to be serious, and a good deal of seriousness is just a joke. Or so you better notice before this life eats you whole.

When we go up to the lake house I like to bring a joke dream, a dream that is joking on the square. In years past I have spoken much on the subject of these dreams before I go. They are dreams like meeting a moose, or buying all the maple syrup of the north woods, picking wild blueberries, or taking my fragile boat of air onto the greatest lake of them all, Lake Baikal. 

Wait, I don't mean Lake Baikal! Why would I say Lake Baikal? I meant Lake Superior. It's greatness is in its very name! Lake Superior.

These are little dreams, impossible dreams, easy dreams, joke dreams. And I go with my wife to the magical house on the mysterious lake and see what the house and the lake decide to do with the dreams.

My dream this year is to be a drunken writer. My dream is to drink and write.

I realized this is my dream only as I have been packing for our trip. Or, more accurately, not packing. Nothing is packed but for a bottle of Hendricks Gin and a bottle of Elderflower Cordial. The lime spearmint honey syrup and the black and sour cherry syrup would be packed too if their refrigeration weren't an issue. I haven't been able to bother with anything else yet, no 40 gallon maple syrup tanks, no moose lures, no paper boat or dark blue blueberry nets. Just a pen and a notebook and an array of cocktail ingredients and plans.

Everything has ancient origins, and mine here is connected to the origins of our going to the lake house itself, an early, shared dream of my wife and I. It comes a little from the movie Julia. I say this now from a memory, of a movie no less, not scholarship, and we'll leave it that way because the memory is the important thing here, the dream.

Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman live in a beach house on Cape Cod. There are no neighbors to speak of. They wear sweaters and make fires on the beach. The movie is about Lillian Hellman and her friend mostly, but it's that beach house. That life. Dashiell Hammett drinks. There's water. He pokes at a fire. There are typewriters. Writing. Drinking. And a slow burn of nothing.


The first thing one finds on vacation is that nothing is where everything is.

Vacations end

Here is my experiment. It is tiny.

Today, writing you, is the first day of my vacation. For me it is a Thursday more than two weeks to your past. I am still wound up with months of responsibilities and care. I had a collection of chores to finish off today. I had a funeral to go to for a good friend's mother. In the evening my wife and I went to a lecture on Leonardo da Vinci. It was an interesting talk, but dark lecture halls always make my body desperately want to sleep. So today was, we decided around here at Start of Vacation Central, a transitioning to vacation day. With the scheduled things gone now I will just need to learn vacation. I'm rusty. I am sealed shut with rust.

Last night I woke up out of an almost sound sleep thinking that what I had to do was write a blog post for the last day of my vacation on the first day of my vacation. Somehow, at two a.m., this was an idea.

I could tell right away that it was so small an idea as to almost be nothing, but my little writer soul told me I had to do it. So I listened. And I figured I'd write, and my typing would spell out Ouija Board words that would tell me the answer to why this was important.

I think I have it.

The first day feels just like the last. All the sweet things start sad, and all the sweet things end sad too.

But the middle of the thing can be anything at all. 

So I'm going there now.

Tomorrow, time will come unstuck, and I will tell you about the future.

The early tomato report

We are bringing you live reporting from my 18 tomato plants in the Dowling Community Gardens. We at clerkmanifesto have been tirelessly updating our tomato plant status on an hourly basis for 78 consecutive days now, producing 1,872 tomato update reports.

So you should have a pretty good idea of what's going on with my tomatoes.

You probably even have a favorite tomato plant that you like to read about, perhaps "Big Red" or "The Mighty Lucy". You've been with me through thick and thin on this one, through paste and cherry, green and orange and fire engine red. Knowing that you are out there following along has meant the world to me.

Wait, what? You haven't received any of my tomato updates?

Well that doesn't sound right. Let me look.

I'm pretty sure that...

Oh no!

I didn't notice this little "send" button! All these time sensitive tomato reports are just sitting here! You missed the night I sat cowering amongst my tomatoes as violent lightning struck and I tried to shield the plants from 60 mph straight line winds. You missed the morning in May when a late frost blackened the lower leaves of my first plants. You missed my candlelight vigil as the first Sungold made its 14 hour march to ripeness and the thrilling account of my first tasting.

I'm not saying it's your fault by any means. I'm just saying there was a lot of tomato plant excitement that it now turns out you missed this summer. Although, fairly speaking, what you mostly missed looked much like this:

2:00 p.m.:

Partly cloudy. Big Red getting the most sun today on the NE quadrant. Several plants seem slightly bigger from the 1:00 p.m. report, but I may be imagining it. If no rain comes tonight will have to water by hand tomorrow evening.

Or this:

4:00 a.m.:

Desperately tired with alarm going off every hour so that I can report. Quite dark tonight still. Cannot really see the tomatoes, though that shape I vaguely see is maybe "Little Sweet Greenman". I can sort of make out its distinctive wandering Southern branch. Excited about sunrise to see if tomatoes have developed under its flowers. Too dark now. Much much too dark.


Ah well, 1,872 posts down the drain. but then, maybe the important thing was just being there.

Stitch in time

As you read this I am on vacation. I am not on the fancy lake house part of the vacation. Rather I am now fully ensconced in the foggy laying about reading novels part of the vacation. Blogging is like a toy that I fully and carefully wound up and is now contentedly operating on its coiled spring power. Still, I'm away for a long time so I thought I'd just step in today and give that toy one quick crank of its key to make sure it lasts all the way.

I am here doing as little as possible, but there is one unmistakable chore I still do roughly every other day. I do my exercises. These cannot run like the winding of a toy. They, like sleep, cannot be stored up. They simply have to be done in their pain inducing clockwork. They are essential to my good health. They are a tithe of pain. I respect them, but I softly dread them. I have eighteen days of vacation with only one thing to dread as it comes and one thing to triumph over at its completion: core training exercises.

But, besides health, there is a strange boon to all this unpleasant exercise. Focused as I am on the the bitterness of preparing to exercise, and the gloating, exultant highs of having just completed my exercising, I generally forget to even consider the upcoming, inevitably tragic end of vacation. I know it is coming eventually, but with all these brutal workout sessions between me and it, it might as well be a million miles away.

Me and my blog

I am happy writing here.

We might not know this because I like to complain on at least a weekly basis about all the people not reading my blog. I am consistently unsure of just how famous I'd like this religious tome I'm writing to be, but I never fail to be terribly irritated at what the Internet likes, and that bitter irritation is best expressed in the Internet's dark, unholy disdain for what I am doing here. 

So it might be hard for us to see all my delight in writing clerkmanifesto.

There is some part of me feels like it would not make for a satisfying blog post if I just talked about what a pleasure writing said blog post is. But a person has to let the cat out of the bag sometime, even if the cat curiously seems to like it in that bag, and one can hear it purring, a purring bag.

Don't worry cat, I will leave the bag right here and you can get back into it anytime you like. Have some cream.

The first thing is that I am drawn to the Internet. I like to roam it. But it is radioactive, and I find that the longer I roam it the sicker it makes me. I can leave and gradually recover, but only writing here cures me. A blog post is a beautiful antidote. It makes me feel pure. It burns the Internet toxins out of me. It gives purpose, shape, wholesomeness, and vision to the very act of being on the Internet. The Internet is Smaug the Great, unassailable, and I probe endlessly for a chink in its armor. Or perhaps the Internet is just a windmill, but it is an evil windmill, and my opposition gives me industry, focus, and meaning.

What about you? Out there in that irresistible wasteland. Pull out your Geiger counter. Yes you are being poisoned. But we are strong. The cancer will take decades to get a hold. And now it is weak and young. And I have made this for us, a magic potion of hate and vision and introspection and nonsense. It is my hope if we take it once a day we will, each day, live forever.



 

Waiting for Shephard's Crown

I am rereading the fourth Tiffany Aching book, by Terry Pratchett, as a preparation for reading the upcoming fifth and final book in the series. It is also Terry Pratchett's last book, The Shepherd's Crown. He died several months ago.

My wavering, hot and cold interest in this fourth book, called I Shall Wear Midnight, got me thinking about trilogies.

There's something about trilogies.

Maybe the gauntlet was thrown down sixty years ago with The Lord of the Rings. While I can't exactly think of it as the greatest or deepest reading experience I've ever had any more, it's still the most involving and transportive. Or it was, back when books were new to me and before I'd worn out the bindings of my copies, burned through the very words of it. It's just one book, really, but in three distinctive volumes, so deeply marked that it would be its own artificiality to think of them not as three. And once that monumental adventure set the blueprint, some strange law of the trilogy was hammered into literature.

Three is a magic number.

People started shooting for threes in fantasy and science fiction, and three became a sweet spot. But there is a curse too.  Everything changes after the third book.

Maybe that started with The Lord of the Rings too. The Silmarillion as far as I can tell is Tolkien taking the one weak part of his trilogy (the mostly easily skippable poetry) and spending the rest of his writing life working on that. Perhaps it's all the success and completeness of completing a trilogy that curses what comes next. Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea Trilogy is one of my favorite trilogies, but years later she came back to it for a couple of barely faded reworking additions to that world. Beware, authors and readers both, of the fourth book. J. K. Rowling wrote a charming juvenile fiction trilogy only to finish the series with four diminished young adult novels. And let's return to the Tiffany Aching books, three of the greatest books ever written that seem somehow to fade a little in the fourth. And I tremblingly await Patrick Rothfuss's third book of The Kingkiller Chronicle series. Can he join this illustrious pantheon with that third book?

Three is a magic number.

But there is no guarantee. Philip Pullman wrote two books of pure bliss and wonder in the His Dark Materials trilogy, but didn't quite stick the landing on that third one. You never know in life or art.

Maybe five is the magic number.

Of course, I speak in the grand objective tradition, but this is an entirely subjective cosmology, and so is utterly ridiculous. 

It probably has to do with this being my fourth blog post on this subject. 

The tyrrany of questions

In the last days of work, before vacation came, I was walking to work. The air was good and all the ultra violet flowers were experimenting with their colors. The houses and trees were cottages and forests and I felt free and happy. But I knew that feeling would be gone in a minute or two and I wanted to hold on to it.

Some things you can't hold. 

I didn't have a good day.

I don't know what we walk through in this life that we can go from walking in a glorious children's picture book, a fairy tale, only to climb up a hill that ends at its beginning and turns to machine. We go into the pitch black, through grief, into exhaustion, and then we forget how to walk and find ourselves kicking ourselves as we do it. Then we are into the meadow again, with the deer and the antelope, a breeze, and maybe a hand to hold.

Here then is my post it note from that walk that day. I like to have the answers, don't I? I am all over the answers here, but answers have a curious way of slipping back into questions. It is as if questions are the native form of all answers. What a way to make a world.

But I'll endeavor not to complain about that today

My post it note was just this question:

How do we not hold onto life too hard, but still squeeze the juice from it?

Set no god before me

They say that God is love. 

I beg to differ. We do not say "I God ice cream!" or "I God the smell when it first starts to rain". And most of all, when we adore someone we do not say "I God you." We say "I love you." which is a lovely thing to say, rather than godly, as far as I am concerned.

So I propose we let God be God and love be love.

And then I propose we all be forced to make a choice.

Because a slender array of choices is all we have left.

I will take love, always and forever. But then, I have been lucky.

The vacation reading list

Oh, right, I forgot that I do this. I forgot because I didn't know that I do do this. I did it last year. It turns out that I do it this year too.

Yes, I am talking about the vacation reading list.

I am a little cautious about including a lot of reading lists here at clerkmanifesto. I update a master list of my favorite books occasionally (here). And that's chock full of my taste and influences, but what I really believe in is the fervent, personally tailored, confident recommendation. That's the sort of thing that requires being well read, understanding through discussion, consideration, and comparison just what overlaps in your taste with another reader, and an unreserved regard for the book being recommended.

That all is not a "list" sort of thing.

But I know it when I see it. Marcus may recommend a hundred books to me. He is incredibly well read and we have many overlapping interests. But those are more accounts of books, mini reviews. The real recommendations feel different. And they are rare, lean. and rarely convenient. That's why all that "if you liked this you'll like that" is a bunch of artificial intelligence garbage. Play that game on your computer if you like, but you'll do better roaming the stacks of your local library looking things over. That golden book you are dreaming of is an arrow flying out of a deeper place.

Though, of course, luck can come into it too. Maybe you and me both will strike it big somewhere on today's list.

But my list isn't recommendations. It's merely the books I painstakingly gathered together in the week or two before vacation. My last lunch hour at work was not the usual blogging, rather it was editing, researching, and pouring over my gathered up piles of library books. What I do with them is I list them here. Then I report on them at the other end. Do I read them? Do I like them? Did I drop any of them in Lake Superior? What did I read that wasn't in my collection below? You'll have to tune in later for that.

1. Goblin Emperor by Addison 

Recommended to me at the library! I was cautiously convinced by the recommendation.

2. Way of Kings by Sanderson

Skeptical, almost left it behind. Looking like a longshot to me now. As a side note this book is 8 billion pages long!

3. The Troupe by Bennett

Circuses! Fire! This is one of those books I am drawn to because I keep picking up circus books that disappoint me and each one that does disappoint only seems to increase my investment and unwillingness to cut my losses.

4 and 5. Whiplash River and Gutshot Straight by Berney

Elmore Leonardesque crime thriller comedic novels. I am at a loss as to why I have two or even why I have these since it's not a sub genre that generally works out for me. Like, it's not as if I've ever successfully read Elmore Leonard. I just like him in theory.

6. Dragon's Bait by Vande Veld

Girl sacrificed to dragon. Girl and dragon get revenge. Okay. I'll bite.

7. The Sea of Tranquility by Millay

It was about, er, something. I guess I'll see if I read it. I think romance comes into it.

8. A Snicker of Magic by Lloyd

I'm totally blank here too. This is a Juvy book. It has a picture of an ice cream cone on the cover. Does that help?

9. I Shall Wear Midnight by Pratchett

Already started, this is a reread in preparation for the last in the series coming out in a month. This is book four and I have begun thinking of a blog post on my theory of trilogies.

10. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by North

I am currently reading this (it's day two of vacation for me!). It's pretty riveting, though the jury is still out. I'll be zipping upstairs to read more when I finish here.

11. Living in a Foreign Language by Tucker

One of those there moving to the idyllic countryside of Italy because I have a lot of money but not an unbelievable amount books where it turns out it's not like the dream they thought it would be until it's sort of like the dream they thought it would be. I'm always up for one of those, especially when I can read it in a place where my jealousy will be tempered by my own lush situation.





See you on the other end.

Fun with guns

Guns are not, for me, a hot button political issue. Sure, like any sensible person I think we should have a fair deal of restrictive laws about them. We should try to keep them out of the hands of people who kill. You know, people like playing children, criminals, psychopaths, police, and soldiers. And I think the power of a gun matters too. For instance, if there was a gun so powerful it could destroy all life on earth with a single shot, I don't think anyone should be able to buy that gun without a background check. Although, come to think of it, if someone came after me or my family with a gun like that I'd want an equally powerful gun to fight back with.

But despite it not being a big issue for me, I find that like much in my country, the delusional hysteria on the "Right" side of the issue can sort of leap out at you sometimes. And so it is with guns. Lately I keep walking by a car with a bumper sticker that reads:

"What gun law ever reduced the crime rate?"

It's hard for me not to stick a post it note on that bumper that says:

"Pretty much all the gun laws in the major countries that aren't America and have gun laws."

But stating what is obvious in my country tends to just lead to ridiculous arguments. So I like this response better:

"Yeah! And show me one place where Democracy ever allowed a person to vote."

Cats and dogs 2 for 1

In an almost unbelievable boon for you today I have two interconnected stories instead of one. Yes, you heard me correctly, that is two stories instead of one!

What's that you ask?

Are they any good?

Well, I tested the first story as an oral tradition story last night and, frankly, it tanked. But anything can happen in prose. Why, just look at it happening now!

The second story I thought of two minutes ago, but, right from the beginning, it seemed a tad slight to me. But please refer to my previous comment about how anything can happen in prose. Besides, my bread and butter here isn't my stories, it's my freewheeling introductory comments.

The first story is about perspectives and being so absorbed in my own that coming suddenly upon someone else's Rashomon-like, utterly different perspective, can be at once appalling, funny, and illuminating.

I was out walking, cutting through a sort of parking lot/alley, absorbed in my thoughts, when I looked up to see a woman and her dog coming the other way. The dog was not on a leash and was of a low, vicious, vacuum cleaner variety. It had a compact body of pure muscle and a giant, all jaw head that will clamp onto one's leg in a uni-directional manner, meaning it can bite down, but can't release and has to be surgically removed. The dog walker was, to me, desperately trying to get her dog on the leash before it attacked again, and I was steeling myself for a fight in which I pictured myself feverishly stomping the violent, possibly rabid animal on the head until the skull broke apart and the brains of the dog squished horrifically onto a blood soaked sidewalk.

As all this was going on I noticed someone to my right. A man was standing by a truck staring over at the killer dog with a look of besotted adoration. Nothing was easier to see in his face than a delighted exclamation of "PUPPY!".

In story two I am also walking through my neighborhood. Someone has lost some kind of black and white dog, and they're going nuts. There are signs everywhere. They tell you what to do and not do if you see the dog, where to go, and who to contact. Every time I see one of these signs, and there are dozens, I am mildly annoyed and just wish everyone would leave me alone without all their endless dog stuff. Keep your little slave animal to yourself if you have to have one so bad, and stop losing them!

Then, on a phone pole, I saw a cheap, poorly attached copy paper flapping in the breeze. "Lost Kitten" it read, and my heart cried out with love and concern.

 "KITTY!".

Prose: economy class

If one reads anything about improving one's writing one will quickly run into the fundamental tenant of good writing: economy of prose. Do not use more words than are absolutely necessary. Do not use a bigger word when a smaller one will do. Do not use extra words. Cut out everything that is superfluous and then do it again.

This is very good advice, and, like all writing advice, it never fails to irritate me.

I get a bit defensive.

I get a bit defensive because I like to say things like "I get a bit defensive" instead of "I get defensive". I get a tad, just, um, the tiniest smidgen defensive because I love words like "um". Although, come to think of it, what big time author would get all worked up about a tiny wee little word like "um"?

Most of them.

Fortunately I have a comeback. It's sort of my go-to comeback. It's very sophisticated. It goes like this:

They're all a bunch of hypocrites!

All the prose you will ever read is 99 percent superfluous ornamentation. There are a million ways to justify and defend every word every author writes, especially when it comes to nuance of feeling or to complexity of concept, but that's all just prevaricating. 

Almost nothing needs to be written. Nearly every essay, blog post, magazine article, and book you ever read could be done, in it's basics of its imparted information, in one hundredth the words. The 99 percent of the other words are just there like pickling juices. They are there to soak you in the relatively paltry amount of content. They are there to convince you that that little one percent was worth your time.

Or we can put it another way. The tiny bit of actual content that is there in writing, most of the time, is there just to let the writers, and the readers too, screw around.

Dave

My library does not work on the buddy system, but I do.

Indeed, I run a very advanced and involved version of the buddy system. Besides my standard, over arching "buddy", who, for demonstration purposes, we will call "Dave", I have a vast series of auxiliary, specialized buddies. I have a kid lit buddy, a we secretly run the circ department buddy, a life's a joke buddy, a music buddy, a deep gossip of the library buddy, a librarian buddy, a life's a party buddy, a volunteer buddy, a library system buddy, and even a patron buddy.

It's a lot of buddies!

But the main buddy is the key thing. That's the person you, day to day, secretly count on.

When one works someplace a long time, as I have, one sees many people move on. Sometimes it feels like one sees everybody move on. One loses a lot of buddies. I have analogized this passing on of co-workers to deaths, to the little deaths of all those who leave. Not for them- they are seeing a different world open out before them- only for all of us who remain. And so it is. A work life is a long war. My library life is one, epic military campaign. It is a long march. There are endless hours of boredom, of duty, of fighting and customer service, of trudging along with one's comrades in arms. If one is lucky there is an occasional two-week leave in an exotic locale before it's back to the front lines, back to the barely sufficient grub, the meandering, chatty, and confessional talks in the foxholes, the long, restless wait with one's buddies in the trenches. Then the burst of fire, the brief flurry of explosions, and a potluck goodbye party in the break room. Someone that one likes very much has fallen in the field. Someone lies bleeding out in the smoking ruins and you can't get to them. They are gone, off to another job, or another city, or more school and some finer, more ambitious career. Gone.

No, the library I work at does not work on the buddy system. We are all just fodder here. Someone goes and a new person comes. That's how it goes. And a person can't make it here if they're going to get too sentimental. It won't do for a soldier, or a clerk, or a worker, or whatever, to attach too much meaning to all these work relationships.

But it's hard going without a few buddies to watch one's back and lighten the day. So I work on the buddy system. And though I am strong, and cold, and on the long campaign, I will confess that every lost buddy is a wound. Every lost buddy adds to my dozens of purple hearts, every lost buddy hurts. And when that main buddy goes it is worst of all. It's dark, and sad, and empty.

I don't say too much. I cry fake tears for real ones. It's very different for the one leaving. Their eyes are all forward, mine on another empty space. I wish them the best and tell them it's the right thing for them to do as long as it at least partly is. And it always is. And I spend my last working days with them like any other working days with them ever, like I have no idea what's coming.

And then, in a single, undetectable moment, they're gone forever.

Dewey decimal pi

Shelving up in non fiction today I found an abandoned book, American Drawings and Watercolors from the Wadsworth Atheneum. It's a nice, if perhaps slightly less than spectacular, collection of art. I really like Arthur G. Dove, but I don't get excited.

But they don't pay me the big bucks to look at the books. I'm here to shelve, at least for this hour. So I checked out the ol' Dewey Decimal number on American Drawings and Watercolors, and that's where this book really came into its own.

The Dewey Decimal number for American Drawings and Watercolors is: 

741.97307401463 A51

It is an awesome spectacle of a Dewey Decimal number! It is a giant among Dewey Decimal numbers!

One thing that particularly enchants me about this number is how, when I shelved it, there were no other books that went beyond 741.973. The eight further digits of 07401463 on the label of American Drawings and Watercolors are entirely for the peacock finery of the thing, the Dewey Decimal system flexing its muscles.

I showed the book to my co-worker who was shelving nearby and who fully appreciated its grandeur. Then I shelved the book. But I wrote down the whole giant Dewey number and have since commenced to memorize it.

Now I just wait. It may be for five years. It may be forever. But one day, if I am very lucky, a patron is going to come to me at the desk and ask "Do you have any books of collections of American drawings and watercolors?" 

"Yes we do." I will answer dryly. "They should be upstairs in the general area of 741.97307401463. Do you need me to write that down?"

Automatic dissent

As I peruse the Internet what seems, among my reactions, to beat out wonder and interest and covetousness and boredom and frustration and inertia and entertainment and, really, anything else, is outrage.

I am outraged!

I am often so outraged that I consider writing a comment. That's pretty outraged. Then I remember that writing a comment automatically engages one in a discussion with confusing people one doesn't like. Also it's a lot of work to leave a comment. So then I leave my computer and look at flowers and breathe until I am calm or until it is time to do some plumbing or cleaning or something. But if I had a form letter for outraged comment, I could just fill it in quick, post it up, and move on, which would be much quicker, and I wouldn't have to bother the flowers.

Where could I find a form of outraged comment to fill in?

I have no idea.

Internet Comment Blank Form

(applicable to all Internet comments)

Outrage Version

I was completely 

___ Apalled
___ Enfuriated
___ Disgusted
___ Disappointed

by the above issue pertaining to

___ Income inequality.
___ Celebrities.
___ Politics.
___ The arts.
___ Race.
___ Cooking methods.
___ Library policy.
___ Global warming.
___ Religion.

It is time we stopped standing around like

___ Sheep
___ Chumps
___ Good little children
___ Zombies

while these

___ Powerful people
___ Librarians
___ Fat cats
___ So called baristas
___ Nazis. There, I said it, Nazis!
___ Arbiters of worthy culture

run roughshod over our best and most humane impulses. I, for one, plan to

___ Make my voice heard
___ Make them rue the day
___ Personally change my behavior
___ Pointlessly express my rage

by

___ Writing this comment in the comment section.
___ Contacting my Congressperson.
___ Never buying this product ever again unless it's on sale.
___ Irrationally threatening various random people.

I just hope

___ It's not too late.
___ Homeland Security is not monitoring my computer.
___ All one billion people on the Internet will agree with me exactly.
___ I still have a piece left of that really terrific sharp cheddar in the fridge.