Notes from another also ran . . .

     I tweaked the sidebar. Did you notice?. This is an attempt to organize the growing list of blogs I  have marked to follow. I was a boy who used to start the school term with a beautifully tidy desk -  the old fashioned kind with the sloping lid  - which by mid-term was a hodge-podge of text books, exercise books, pencils and papers. My room still gets untidy and I now have so much more stuff to unorganize. When I look for a book I usually remember the shelf it's on. I run my fingers along that row of books until I find it.  If I don't find it I then satisfy myself that at least I have touched it and that my eyes were too quick to see it. And then I find the book in blue covers not the red I had imagined. This was always so when I went looking for dad's copy of  The Ingoldsby Legends. No good me trying to be a librarian. Oh, yes I have heard of the alphabet and the Dewey decimal system; doesn't mean I have to use them at home.

     The side bar is tidy compared to the mess of blogs I have listed under the dashboard. What criteria to use when deciding to follow a blog? Is it the page design? The pictures or the writing? Is it about a subject of which you are particularly fond? Is the writing authentic, that is, from the heart? No time to read more. Time to copy the URL or hit the follow link. Quick! follow publicly or hiddenly (Huh?) .. er .. how about covertly?

     The list under the dashboard grows until one day you try to follow a blog and blogger says, "You already follow {title of the blog}." So that one must be worthwhile if I think it's worth following more than once. Isn't it? Or I link to a blog I marked to follow and a month has gone by since the last post. I begin imagining all sorts of gory* endings to a life;  or under what circumstances one might cease blogging. One might have just got tired of it and stopped. Didn't I read somewhere (probably on another blog) that the majority of blogs last no more than one year? My sceptred isle blog lasted just the duration of the trip, and a couple of addenda. There's another category: travel blogs . . . I feel the need to go tweak some more.

     Family blogs, sports-fan blogs, cliques of memes, tagging . . . oh, like the real world it gets very messy.

*I resisted punning on Gorey and gory. No I didn't. I just did.

A misnomer

    That is what I have made the title of this blog as it has evolved with no other idea than to write whatever comes to mind about me. The 101 things non-directed exercise is far more exacting. Maybe it is easier to write about a subject other than one's self. A rather self indulgent, narcissistic exercise is this.

    The misnomer that caused me to start this post is: used book. A book may become a little shelf worn; the dust jacket may become faded, torn, chipped or lost altogether. Some readers go to the trouble of removing the dust cover from a book they are reading to protect it from damage; whilst others of us use the end papers as bookmarks. The mis-named perfect binding of paperbacks quickly breaks especially in very dry climates. Paper yellows and becomes brittle. A hard bound book's spine will become cocked if read through without care to open the book and gently release the tightness of the binding when the book is new. Insects, silverfish and book-worms; fire, water and dust - and books are very dusty things - threaten a books longevity. Fifty years is generally reckoned to be the expected life span of a common garden trade book.

    A book that has a loose binding, is bumped, scratched and is showing other signs of wear; has pages marked with notes by previous owners; has been used to the point where the owner knows the book as well as the writer does and so discards it. Read, mark, learn, inwardly digest - and then give the book away.

    Many books are now printed on archive paper, or committed to another archive medium altogether. The books we read and value now, will they last? Fashions change; new scientific discoveries are made; thinkers think and write what they think or, as in Socrates case, others write. And so with a great leap I come to tell you why I think used book is a misnomer. We read books to learn, to amuse - to distract us sometimes. Does a writer write to teach, to simply say, "This is how I see the world", or to distract? There are probably as many reasons as there are writers. It's the words on the page that matter and to a reader, no matter how old the book, the story is new.



EDIT: Thursday 17 September 2009, of course I think British usage would more likely say,"second hand." But as I've said before I do  get a little confused sometimes . . .

Book on the desk 28

I need to pay more attention to Keith 's little book, especially now he is no longer with us. The title echoes A.G. Macdonell's England, Their England; and England, My England a collection of stories by D.H. Lawrence first published in the United States in 1922. This is the second printing. The pages are yellowing. The book fits nicely into a pocket.

Good Morning

The day always starts well with several pages of ramblings beginning with the realisation that today is designated the Glorious Twelfth by those who take joy in blasting birds out of the sky. And that thought lead to this sentence in Luis Alberto Urrea's The Hummingbird's Daughter; "Gusts of butterflies flew out of the bean fields as if the wind had been painted and had shattered into white chips".

What is the opposite of 'sublimation'? Is it possible to freeze gas suddenly, directly to its solid state?

At school we were taught that descriptive writing exercises the imagination and were duly sent out to find an object to bring back to the classroom and then write about it. I brought back the umbriferous flower of a common weed.

Cleave. A word that is its own antonym.[edit monday 17 August 2009: I learn from listening to Steven Fry's BBC Radio 4 programme Fry's English Delight that this would be called a contranym.]

The only party for me happened when I reached my seventh birthday.

This bad writing is akin to poor music: random notes, no rhythm, no melody, no beat . . .

What do I hear, see, taste, smell . . . what do I feel? try this exercise: descibe colours to a blind man; music to a deaf man; taste to a man who has lost his sense of smell

An amateur musician practices a piece of music until he makes no mistakes . . . then stops. A professional musician plays until he cannot make mistakes . . . then keeps playing.

To defend myself from those who may think I'm misogynist recast the preceding sentences completely or use the ugly he/she construction.

These are the gleanings from nearly five pages of my morning writing and now back to the quotidian round of living. I shall be in the bookstore today. Come by and ask me about a book or author I don't yet know. Choir practice this evening . . .

The Quotidian Round

Why am I fond of Latinate locutions? I haven't written long enough, or simply enough. As long as I write something, somewhere, about anything at any time of day . . .
So what is this quotidian round, this day-to-day living which tends to wear me out? What are the essentials I have to take care of? Sleeping well, eating healthily, keeping clean, wearing clothes appropriate for the weather and wearing a good pair of comfortable shoes for the journey . . . sharp pencils, ink filled pens and clean paper, and reading which may spark ideas in my mind's eye . . . to be still.

QUO VADIS?

Writing without using the first person singular is a good exercise. Very much more difficult when trying to write about one's self. The photo scanning project is on hold as there are just too many pictures to review; and quite a few are duplicates. Many are of places that would have to carry the caption, "Somewhere in . . . ?"

There was yet another dusting of snow this morning; quite beautiful under the reflected light of the sun from the full moon! There have been three falls of snow here in the past two weeks each preceded by very gusty winds. "But he lives in Arizona? How can this be?" It can be at seven-thousand feet altitude in the mountains. The plants are desperate for the moisture; the wild-life, too.

QUO VADIS?