SIX FEET UNDER

Which is, actually, where I feel like I am much of the time.  But that isn't what I meant to say.  We don't have cable, except in order to get the basic network stations and PBS, so I don't have access to HBO.  How very sad that is, too.  But what I do to compensate is rent the DVD's (yes, we actually got a DVD player!  when my nephew was here and could hook it up for us.) of HBO series when they appear on the shelves of my local Blockbuster.  So we have worked our way through a season of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," with mixed reviews, and now are working on the first season of "Six Feet Under."  I have grown totally addicted to this series.  I confess, yes, utterly hooked.  A junkie for the funeral home and its wacked-out inhabitants.  We're almost through the first season, only three more episodes to go and we can start on the second set!  How excited am I!  I understand on real TV it's now the fourth season, so I have lots more weirdness to look forward to.  Does anyone else out there in J-land watch this series?   Have favorite episodes, favorite characters?  Listen - I've even dreamed about these characters.  The whole thing is often rather like a dream, anyway, so I shouldn't be surprised.

Renting these episodes will keep me sane through the Rep convention, the new semester, the run-up to the elections, maybe even Christmas time.  Now you know how little depth there is to me.  It's out there, the truth at last.  And, just think, there's "Sex in the City" and "The Sopranos" on the shelves too.

And I'm reading in equally deep waters:  The Burglar on the Prowl, by Lawrence Block.  Sheer fluff.  But such well-written fluff.  I adore Lawrence Block, or at least two of his series:  The Matt Scudder mysteries, plumbing the dark, violent and grim depths of crime in New York City; and the Bernie Rhodenbarr Mysteries, the most recent of which I'm now reading.  Bernie is a used-book dealer in Greenwich Village, has a lesbian best-pal and sidekick, and dabbles in high-class burglary.  These books are as light and airy as the Matt Scudder series is dark and dirty.  I love them both in equal measure.

A GRACIOUS HELLO

I am NOT dead, nor have I given up on book-journaling.  I've just been too busy to get here and write about ANYthing.  I have posted a time or two in the windmills, trying to keep up.  I'm also trying to get around to other folks' journals and do some reading.  While doing that I found an entry in Paul's journal that other readers may enjoy.  Here's the link to it - I'm jealous of his job, not the administrative part  (heavens no!), but the teaching of books to AP seniors.  I teach "reading" to English as Second Language students, but it's a far cry from this sort of thing. 

A YEAR IN BOOKS

When I was in Dallas earlier this summer, I read this article in the local paper, The Dallas Morning News.  I found it so interesting that I stole that section of the paper from my brother-in-law and brought it back with me.  I have finally found it on the web, so I can insert it here in my book journal.  It's the fascinating reading log of a guy who was sick and couldn't work, so he decided to just read.  And keep track of what he had read.  It's an extremely eclectic list of books, I have to say.  And he begins with a former bosses (boss' ? how does one make that possessive?) strange speculation, similar to the Buddhist I referenced in an earlier entry, about the damage that books can do to the mind.  He reckons his own mind is gone by now, in that case.  But read on through the whole thing, past the list.  Dan Barber comes to his own conclusions on the effects of reading.

A year for the books

When ill health left a book lover with time on his hands, he made literary lemonade

07:43 PM CDT on Tuesday, July 6, 2004

By DAN R. BARBER / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

He was something of a pocket Buddha, as I recall. Flat-footed, he stood just a couple inches above 5 feet. He had chubby cheeks, a potbelly and a rascal's smile, and his eyes twinkled with mischief when pleased.

I hadn't thought about him for some time, until one day last year when he – a former boss – abruptly came to mind. Something he said more than 20 years ago began to haunt me.

This outwardly jolly man, who once boasted that he was a millionaire, said books did strange things to a human brain. In the way a responsible parent would warn a wayward adolescent not to smoke, drink or take drugs, he cautioned that he thought it possible to read too much.

Books, he said, twisted a person.

Chronicle of addiction

My mind is gone for good now, I guess. Last year, I read 101 books. It's documented, too, my yearlong descent into literary dementia. Like Sir William Ewart Gladstone, a 19th-century English prime minister and avid reader, I kept a journal of every book I read; from The Orchid Thief , the year's first, to Cold Mountain, completed on a dark winter night with just two hours remaining in 2003. Why, some might reasonably ask, would anyone want to read so much? And how would they find the time?

For me, the answer is easy. Multiple sclerosis. I can't walk through a mall without sitting down, but I now have all the time in the world to read whatever I want, something of which I once only dreamed.

So last year, I decided to see how many books I could finish in 12 months.

I should say at the outset that my literary interests are all over the map. I am unfocused. From natural history to art history, fishing, hunting and biography, literary fiction to essays on book collecting, I am, I suppose, a peripatetic, Quixotic reader. I stagger a bit when I walk and my interests are here and there, too.

Unbounded pleasures

For example, after The Orchid Thief, an account of a flower felon's escapades, I read A Country Boy in Africa, a memoir of a professional hunter's life on the savanna. Ex-Libris, which is about book collecting and libraries, was next.

Originally, I thought I would finish one book a week. Because this seemed a daunting task, I would read two, sometimes three books at once while lounging in shorts and T-shirt. I finished A Garden of Demons (fantasy) and Exploring Lewis and Clark (historical essay) on the same day.

Not that I'm high-minded. Two days later I finished Rifles and Cartridges for Large Game, just in case I ever need to shoot an elephant in my pajamas. I have a confession. To ensure that I reached my goal, I began reading short books, novels with 200 pages or less, and coffee-table size histories with photographs, such as The Buffalo Hunters.

Sometimes I was diverted by an esoteric title, though. Color-blind as well as easily distracted, I finished Color: A Natural History of the Palette – an engaging book about the natural sources of color for paints and dyes.

What was, what is

I read At the Grave of the Unknown Fisherman and Traplines , both about anglers' escapades. And because I can spend more time with a book than a fishing rod these days, I also read Sixpence House, a memoir of two bibliophiles' time in an English town filled with used books.

On and on I read. By the end of June, I had finished book 50. I reached that goal in less than six months; 100 books in a year seemed attainable. In mid-August, I finished The Lunar Men, an account of the friendship of several English inventors and booklovers, and A Good Life Wasted, another angler-author's tale. Both titles suggest my former boss might have had a point.

By Oct. 31, I had read more than 80 books, including So Many Books, So Little Time, by journalist Sara Nelson, who set out to read a book a week for a year. When I finished book 99, A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World, I felt very impressed with myself. With time to spare, I walked the literary high road until I read that Gladstone, a prime minister of England in the 1800s, had read 250 books every year of his adult life.

Now THAT'S crazy.

Priority becomes passion

I don't really mean that, of course. Books were paramount to Sir William and if I may share his limelight, they mean volumes to me as well. Reading so many books, having the time and the desire, has sustained me when the only wandering I'm likely to do these days is through bookstores.

Just how significant books have become, for me at least, didn't become clear until I was about to complete my literary safari.

While on a weekend trip last fall, I bumped into my former boss's daughter and her family. We talked about the usual things after so much time. Where do you live now? What do you do?

How's your father?

With an enigmatic Mona Lisa smile and a quick glance to the other side of the room, she said he had died.

He lost his business and, in despair, had committed suicide.

And then I remembered what he had said about reading too many books. Could reading a book, one or 100, have restored his hope?Could reading a book have sustained him in frightening, uncertain times?

Who am I to say? Perhaps, but I can't honestly speak for him.

Of this I am sure: It IS possible to be too rich or too thin, despite what some people say.

But you can't read too many books.

Writer and bibliophile Dan R. Barber tends butterfly gardens and reads in Forney; today he is finishing his 40th book of 2004.

READING 101

The 101 books in the order read by Dan Barber in 2003:

The Orchid Thief, Susan Orlean

A Country Boy in Africa, George Hoffman

Ex-Libris, Ross King

A Garden of Demons, Edward Hower

Exploring Lewis and Clark, Thomas P. Slaughter

Rifles and Cartridges for Large Game, Layne Simpson

The Buffalo Hunters, Charles M. Robinson III

Color: A Natural History of the Palette, Victoria Finlay

The Passions of Andrew Jackson, Andrew Burstein

The Book of Illusions, Paul Auster

•

On Blondes, Joanna Pitman

Eyesores, Eric Shade

Rosemary and Bitter Oranges, Patrizia Chen

Danny Boy, Malachy McCourt

Colors of Africa, James Kilgo

The Afterword, Mike Bryan

At the Grave of the Unknown Fisherman, John Gierach

Sixpence House, Paul Collins

When the Emperor Was Divine, Julie Otsuka

The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Paul Elie

•

Take Joy, Jane Yolen

Our Father Who Art in a Tree, Judy Pascoe

Rifles for Africa, Gregory Woods.

Used and Rare, Lawrence and Mary Goldstone

Best Friends, Thomas Berger

Good Faith, Jane Smiley

Life on Cripple Creek, Dean Kramer

The Bellstone, Michael N. Kalafatas

Sleep Toward Heaven, Amanda Eyre Ward

Hunger, Elise Blackwell

•

Promiscuous Unbound, Bex Brian

Ghost Rider, Neil Peart

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach

A Walk in Rome, City of the Soul, William Murray

The Fabulist, Stephen Glass

The Story of My Father, Sue Miller

Untangling My Chopsticks, Victoria Abbott Riccardi

How to Build a Tin Canoe, Robb White

Into Africa, Martin Dugard

Autobiography of a Geisha, Sayo Masuda

•

The Box Children, Sharon Wyse

The Great Wave, Christopher Benfey

The Wages of Genius, Gregory Mone

The Teammates, David Halberstam

Chasing Shakespeares, Sarah Smith

Feynman's Rainbow, Leonard Mlodinow

The Book of Dead Birds, Gayle Brandeis

Writers on Writing, Collected EssaysFrom The New York Times

The Commissariat of Enlightenment, Ken Kalfus

Traplines, John Rember

Creation, Katherine Govier

Walking a Literary Labyrinth, Nancy M. Malone

Our Own Devices, Edward Tenner

The Seashell on the Mountaintop, Alan Cutler

The Cruelest Miles, Gay Salisbury and Laney Salisbury

In the Shadow of Memory, Floyd Skloot

The Path, Chet Raymo

Reunion, Alan Lightman

The Gangster We Are All Looking For, le thi diem thuy

Come Closer, Sara Gran

Hell at the Breech, Tom Franklin

Gazelle, Rikki Ducornet

Liars and Saints, Maile Meloy

The Lunar Men, Jenny Uglow

A Good Life Wasted, Dave Ames

Born Twice, Giuseppe Pontiggia

After, Francine Prose

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon

Literary Occasions, V.S. Naipaul

Built for Speed, John A. Byers

Library, Matthew Battles

Swann's Way, Marcel Proust

Reading New York, John Tytell

Turning Bones, Lee Martin

On the Run, David DiBenedetto

An Open Book, Michael Dirda

So Many Books, So Little Time, Sara Nelson

Blindsided, Richard M. Cohen

Paradise, Larry McMurtry

Heart Shots, Mary Zeiss Stange

Elizabeth Costello, J.M Coetze

The Bookseller of Kabul, Asne Seierstad

Genesis, Jim Crace

Old School, Tobias Wolff

Siegfried, Harry Mulisch

A Gentle Madness, Nicholas A. Basbanes

City of Glass, Paul Auster

The Amulet of Samarkand, Jonathan Stroud

Ghosts, Paul Auster

Envy, Joseph Epstein

And Now You Can Go, Vendela Vida

Gluttony, Francine Prose

The Locked Room, Paul Auster

Shipwreck, Louis Begley

Orchard, Larry Watson

The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens, John Rechy

Cold Mountain: A Journey From Book to Film, introduction by Anthony Minghella

Timbuktu, Paul Auster

A Splendor of Letters, Nicholas A. Basbanes

The Great Fire, Shirley Hazzard

Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier

Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/fea/texasliving/stories/070304dnlivbooks_barber.48da7.html

DEDICATED TO THE LIBRARIANS I ALSO LOVE

 

 

I LOVE YOU, MADAME LIBRARIAN

By Kurt Vonnegut

August 6, 2004

  I, like probably most of you, have seen Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Its title is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury’s great science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. This temperature 451° Fahrenheit, is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury’s novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

And still on the subject of books: Our daily sources of news, papers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books can we find out what is really going on. I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published near the start of this humiliating, shameful blood-soaked year.

In case you haven’t noticed, and as a result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war lovers, with appallingly powerful weaponry and unopposed.

In case you haven’t noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.

With good reason.

In case you haven’t noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound and kill ’em and torture ’em and imprison ’em all we want.

Piece of cake.

In case you haven’t noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.

Send ’em anywhere. Make ’em do anything.

Piece of cake.

The O’Reilly Factor.

So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and the Chicago-based magazine you are reading, In These Times.

Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed that there were weapons of mass destruction there.

Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn’t even seen World War I. War is now a form of TV entertainment. And what made WWI so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun. Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don’t you wish you could have something named after you?

Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now am tempted to give up on people too. And, as some of you may know, this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.

My last words? "Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse."

Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.

What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without a sense of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their own?

     ***********************************************

So, that was from In These Times, a little rant by Kurt Vonnegut.  He's an elder statesman of the literary variety.  He can rant any time he wants to.  About anything he wants to. I usually put them in my other journal, but I think this one is suitable for a book journal.  The day may come again whenI actually write about the books I'm reading.  And I am reading books.  Check the sidebar - lots of 'em.
 

 

THE KERRY HAMPSTER ALSO SPEAKS

In the spirit of this weekend's assignment (mine is in the entry previous to this one) a friend in Dallas sent me this short speech (more than a sentence, however) by Licorice, the Kerry hampster.  It's pretty funny too. 

Licorice Speaks
By COLIN McENROE


My name is Licorice, and I am a hamster.

I have never shared my story before because, frankly, sometimes all a hamster has is his privacy. Thursday night, however, Alexandra Kerry described the circumstances of my rescue by her father after I had fallen off a pier in Massachusetts.

I have come forward now to set the record straight.

I was the hamster of Alexandra's sister, Vanessa, and she, on balance, was a good person, although a bit of a tickler. On this occasion, as the family gathered on the pier to depart for a vacation, somebody - I'm not saying it was Alexandra; I'm not saying it was on purpose - "bumped" my cage, and the next thing I knew, I was in the water and sinking fast.

I saw my whole life pass before my eyes. My life has not been all that interesting, so it wasn't exactly like watching "The Godfather I and II." I mean, I'm a hamster. I could see a bright light, but I seemed to be on a wheel that rotated as I ran, so I never got any closer. But I was aware of a shining, all-loving divine rodent presence telling me: "It's not time yet. You have more to do on earth."

"Like what?" I asked, but I could already feel myself back in my body, could feel strong hands yanking open my cage and pulling me upward to safety.

Yes, it was John Kerry. Help was on the way. Yes, he did perform CPR. Yes, he did perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. There is no doubt that I owe him my life. On the other hand, the water went up to his chest, O.K.? I mean, this wasn't exactly PT-109.

It's also true that I wound up suing the family. I have continuing health problems, including a partial paralysis on my right side that makes it difficult for me to drink out of a regular water bottle. And let's just say there aren't going to be any Licorice Jr.'s. One of the small pleasures of hamster life denied.

There was a settlement. I can't talk about it. I got enough to pay for a daily home health aide.

How do I feel about John Kerry? Mainly, I'm grateful he wasn't married to that Heinz woman when this happened. You think she would have allowed him to jumpin the water in his J. Press poplin slacks? Food pellets wouldn't melt in her mouth. I'd have drowned and been eaten by lobsters.

And I'm glad I wasn't a Bush family pet. Their hamsters probably have to rescue them, from the looks of things.

I might wind up speaking at the Republican convention, though. I'm opposed to stem cell research. With any kind of research, hamsters always wind up taking it right on the chin. And we barely even have chins.

Colin McEnroe is a radio talk show host and writer.