• Tag Archives books

  • The Book Fort

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    79  bar falls 29.80 0mph NNE  dew-point 63   Summer, cloudy and mild

                             Last Quarter of the Flower Moon

    F- runs in the Star-Tribune daily comics section.  When it connects with me, its humor reminds me of the gold standard, Gary Larson.  It doesn’t hit that point much for me, but once in a while.

    One that didn’t hit me that way, but, in Kate’s reinforcement, has begun to reveberate featured a librarian looking between a pair of stacks.  In the back, near the corner, a man sat on the floor with books arranged around him in a rectangle and he had another book in hand to add to the walls.

    The librarian has a walkie-talkie and he says, “Book fort.  We have a book fort going up.”

    Kate looked at it, laughed, and said, “That’s what I’m going to call your study, a book fort.”   

     I laughed, too.  If you go into my study, you would first notice a small bookshelf filled with books and other books stacked up on top of it perhaps ten books high.  These are the books I may want to read soon.  To the right is a green cupboard with four shelves and glass doors.  That one is full, too, and contains books on liberal religion and liberal political thought. 

    On the wall that extends to the east from that cupboard stands another series of books cases.  These have philosophy, folk tales, folk myths and stories, aesthetics and art, and some religious books.  These are more reference volumes.  Directly across from them are a low series of bookshelves that hold my Asian collection.  It’s pretty deep in Chinese and Japanese literature, but there are volumes here on Hindu topics and Angkor Wat, too.  On top of these shelves sit my poety collection, perhaps 15 feet long.  Along the wall nearest my desk and half way along the room’s north side are travel related volumes, reference works and material on the Renaissance.  There are also books on the military, on water rights and gardening.

    Directly behind my desk is a tall bookcase filled with art history books.  I use these volumes a good deal when I prepare tours.

    So, book fort is an apt description.  But.  Forts are battlements, a place to hold out if the enemy strikes.  I do hide behind these books, retreating into my book fort to meditate, to study, to push away the enemies of distraction and human contact, except through printed words.  There is a hermetic quality to my life here in Andover, a quality I like, even prefer. 

    Fortresses though can keep one in as well as others out.  After giving it some thought, I would not trade my book fort for a trading post or a tourist venue.  In it I have the luxury of safety and a safety which protects my contemplative life.  This is not so much retreat from as it is retreat to.  If you ever come over, you are welcome inside the moat.  I’ll lower the draw bridge for you.


    📂This entry was posted in Literature Writing 📎and tagged

  • Gulf Streams Stops

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    -3  44% 17% 1mph WSW bar30.24 rises windchill-5  Winter

                     Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    The day continues cold.  We reached -15.8 this morning at 6:24AM.  Since then, we’ve gained about twelve degrees. The windchill all day has been brutal. 

    Kate finished cushions for the window seat in the kitchen.  I put Hilo on it while it was on Kate’s worktable to see if she would like it.  She seemed nervous.

    This week I’ve slept like a rock.  An odd phrase, but apt in the nothing till morning meaning I intend here.    

    Yesterday I finished Fifty Degrees, the second in Kim Stanley Robinson’s eco-thriller/near future sci-fi trilogy which begins with Forty Days of Rain and ends with Sixty Days and Counting. His Mars trilogy is better as science fiction; it’s wonderful; but, this trilogy strikes closer to home and imagines a time period when we pass some of the tipping points talked about in the news these days.  The Gulf Stream stops because the thermohaline barrier breaches.  Weather patterns swing wildly from one extreme to the other.  The West Anarctic Ice Shelf begins to leave land and drift into the ocean, causing several centimeters of sea level rise. 

    The book imagines a loose team of scientists, policy wonks and politicians who in their various spheres create solutions and fight to realize them before the worst becomes worse.  There is also some Buddhist material, too.  The characters are interesting and make the books worth reading, as was true of the Mars trilogy.  Robinson imagines, however, a science  triumphant, even dominant which I find suspicious.  It was industrialists and technocrats who got us in this mess, with our individual complicity, and to imagine that rationalism, their primary tool, will dig us out seems suspect at the core.

    The facet of it that rings true to me is the paradigmatically American approach of, keep trying until solutions come.  That the scientific will play a necessary and perhaps even lead role I don’t question.  I just don’t want an approach that leaves aside the many individual decision makers, those of us in our cars and at home with our dishwashers.  This is science-fiction, not political-fiction, or a novel of manners (though it has some aspects of this genre), so the focus is congruent, yet I want to see us stretch all the way out for solutions.


    📂This entry was posted in Great Work Politics 📎and tagged

  • Will Reading Continue to Dwindle?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    17  909%  25%  0mph W bar 29.99 steady windchill17 

    A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions–as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.
      – Friedrich Nietzsche

    The Twilight of the Books offers evidence of a decline in reading.  Here are a few excerpts to prove their point:

    “In 1937, twenty-nine per cent of American adults told the pollster George Gallup that they were reading a book. In 1955, only seventeen per cent said they were. Pollsters began asking the question with more latitude. In 1978, a survey found that fifty-five per cent of respondents had read a book in the previous six months. The question was even looser in 1998 and 2002, when the General Social Survey found that roughly seventy per cent of Americans had read a novel, a short story, a poem, or a play in the preceding twelve months. And, this August, seventy-three per cent of respondents to another poll said that they had read a book of some kind, not excluding those read for work or school, in the past year. If you didn’t read the fine print, you might think that reading was on the rise.

    In 1982, 56.9 per cent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months. The proportion fell to fifty-four per cent in 1992, and to 46.7 per cent in 2002. Last month, the N.E.A. released a follow-up report, “To Read or Not to Read,” which showed correlations between the decline of reading and social phenomena as diverse as income disparity, exercise, and voting. In his introduction, the N.E.A. chairman, Dana Gioia, wrote, “Poor reading skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement.””

    The rest of the article provides further evidence to support these contentions.  One hypothesis is that reading will return to its pre-modern era state as an activity of a specialized reading class.  Back in the 19th century that class had some caché, this article suggests that may not be the case in the future; reading will be arcane.  Fine by me, but bad for a democracy relying on an educated electorate.

    Something the article touches on only obliquely is the degree to which we may return to an image intensive culture, much like the middle ages where architecture, painting and other image creating crafts were primary teachers of the illiterate.  The article does talk about a second orality, a return to the type of communication common among pre-literate cultures where memorization and story counted for a great deal.  A potential downside of this return is diminishment of critical analysis since writing allows for side by side comparison of two ideas where in an oral culture only one notion at a time can hold sway, making critical thought difficult.

    There are, however, contradictory trends not covered in the article.  The explosion of blogs, in the tens of millions, certainly represents a degree of literacy and creative writing not explained in the dismal statistics.  It also doesn’t cover the unusual merging of image and words in manga and graphic novels, nor does it expand on the second orality which in this case will have a cultural context supportive of critical analysis and, therefore, presumably available for transmission in more oral friendly forms like you tube, tv news, podcasts.   Still, a provocative look at tomorrow. 

    Wouldn’t you know, just when I get down to serious writing…


    📂This entry was posted in GeekWorld Politics 📎and tagged