On My Grandfather

I have been thinking a lot about my Grandpa Mobley--my mother's father--lately. I'm not sure why. Part of it might be that, for various reasons, I have been noticing a lot of the things that both Zeke and I get from our grandfather. Little things, mostly, like quirks of phrasing, expressions, attitudes, dispositions toward certain topics, things like that. But those trivial things are just the outward evidence of what is actually a much deeper influence.

In fact, it has occurred to me that in order to fully understand me, and Zeke too, one would probably have to meet our grandfather. I'm fairly certain that a psychologist who was able to fully understand my grandfather would find it rather simple to pick apart my brother and me. However, that's assuming any psychologist could survive analyzing my grandfather without tearing out his or her hair. I find this an unlikely prospect, since I believe that what Freud said about the Irish is perfectly applicable to my grandfather: they are impossible to psychoanalyze.

Perhaps it is for this reason that, while I know I am in many ways very like my grandfather, and while I know that he is one of the people I look up to, respect, admire and wish to emulate the most in this entire world, I find it hard to pin down exactly what significant things I get from him. Perhaps it's like I say about certain authors who have come to influence my writing greatly: perhaps he has simply entered my heart and therefore my bloodstream and my very being at a microscopic level, so that he is simply a part of what I am, a part of the fabric of my very being. If there is any human goodness in me, it comes from my other grandfather, one of my grandmothers, my mom, my dad, or from him, from Grandpa Mobley.

The other day in Acting class, we were told as part of an exercise to walk like one of our grandparents--not like they actually walk, but as their personality would walk. I looked at my brother and knew he had also chosen to try to walk like Grandpa Mobley, whose personality is probably the hardest of any of our grandparents' to convey. For how do you express or embody someone who is a combination of George S. Patton, John Wayne, and the most dignified of Cherokee chiefs, someone who has utter confidence in himself, having done everything he ever set out to do, being completely satisfied with the life he has led, knowing how to be confident, comfortable, and at peace in almost any situation?

My grandfather flew airplanes in Europe during WWII; he spotted for artillery, doing a job that these days is done by satellites. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge. He flew General Patton repeatedly, was present for at least one incident that often makes it into the history books; he flew others, the likes of Churchill and possibly De Gaulle, and his dog used to play with Patton's dog. He met Ronald Reagan; he was an extra in the movies; he danced with Ingrid Bergman. He looks like John Wayne, too, and the feeling I get being in his presence is only replicated when I watch a John Wayne movie. But, did I have the chance to meet John Wayne, and General Patton, and Churchill and De Gaulle and dance with Ingrid Bergman, I'd trade it all for one evening with my grandfather.

Right

So I signed up for this. I don't know if I'll have time, or if I'll want to come Saturday, since Saturday is the only day I can usually manage to have mostly free, BUT with the amount of people I've generally felt like seeing lately (that being MOSTLY NONE) it actually sounds rather inviting at this point.

On Two Types Of People

It has struck me lately, from several quarters, that there are in at least one way two types of people in the world. In my head they have come to be called "be-ers" and "becomers," "fixers" and "sympathizers," and "idealists" and "realists."

My Anthropology class is taught by one of my favorite professors, a WELS Lutheran Pastor who grew up on an Apache Indian reservation. One day in class he said that Apaches were into "being," as opposed to modern mainstream Americans, who are into "becoming." That is, a typical American is always becoming the next thing in his life: a student becoming a teacher or an expert or whatever, a single person becoming married, etc. Apaches, on the other hand, are content with what life offers them at the present moment, and are less worried about tomorrow. Thus it becomes hard, for example, to approach an Apache about becoming a pastor, since that takes planning (one must account for college and four years of seminary), and planning of a type that Apaches are not familiar with.

In the book Soulmates, Thomas Moore writes a very philosophical, literary sort of advice pamphlet on the subject of love in the modern world. In the introduction Moore claims that he will not offer any answers, setting his book apart from pretty much every other book on the subject currently in print, and providing a refreshing change even from the better of Christian books on the subject, like Wild at Heart. Moore claims instead that he will offer alternative ways of looking at matters of the heart, ways which will hopefully shed new and helpful light on the subject. I have only managed to read two chapters, because I am busy and it is heady stuff which requires digestion, but my mind already feels like it has been twisted in knots--or turned loose from some.

In Moore's book, he talks about the legend of Daphne and Apollo. To grossly oversimplify and somewhat bastardize what Moore says: the legend goes that Daphne fled from Apollo into the forest, and Apollo pursued her. Finally, he caught her, but Artemis, the goddess of whom Daphne was an aspect, took pity on Daphne, and Daphne was turned into a tree by the side of a river, and Apollo could never reach her. Moore says that Daphne represents the "spirit," the part of us that wants to dream, to fly free, to be a world traveler, to be independent. Apollo represents the "soul," the part of us that longs for connection, that longs for companionship. The soul, according to Moore, is the valleys to the spirit's mountains; the soul is about the nitty-gritty, the stuff of real life.

Everyone apparently has some of both Daphne and Apollo in them. There is a part of all of us which wants to be free, which balks (for example) at the idea of being tied to another person. And there is another part in all of us whose greatest desire is that other person, is to be together with someone else, forever.

As will come as no surprise to those who know me, I tend to fall heavily in with the Daphne. While I love my friends, and miss them when I'm apart from them, it does not take a whole lot--very little, by some peoples' standards--for me to have a surfeit of them, and to need or at least to want to get away, to be by myself. I have too much Daphne in me to want a relationship, for its own sake; it takes a special person to make me even consider wanting to date, to court, or whatever. ('Special' doesn't always mean 'good,' but that's another topic.) Maybe I have too much of the Daphne side to be able to have a successful relationship, at least at the moment. Whatever. Not really the current point.

All this is basically prelude. The thing that has occurred to me recently to throw this into focus is a distinction that echoes or harmonizes with the above, or possibly it does both. The topic is friends, which topic tends to be at the forefront of every college student's mind (schoolwork generally running a distant second). What has occurred to me is this: there are friends who are content with you as you are, and there are friends who want to change you. (Note: I don't like the rhetorical second person accusatory, but it feels most natural here; if one didn't like it, one could change the you's to one's, and make it third person.)

I am not offering judgment here, saying that one type is better than another. I'm just observing. There are certain friends who will take you, bad habits, foot odor, nerdy references and all; and there are certain friends who, if they are good friends, will love you and be good friends but will try to get you to stop smoking and wash your feet better and not discuss the Aeneid with 8-year-olds.

Another way of stating it, one that I dislike because of the judgment implied but one which shows the distinction clearly, is this: Some people love you for who you are; some people love you for who you could be. A third category, now that I think about it, is that some people love you for who they THINK you are. This last is the genesis of many a misguided crush; in the fog of infatuation, the real shape of a person can become obscured, sometimes on purpose, and can be imagined to be whatever one wants it to be. Actually, it strikes me that this third is just a subset of the second category. But again I digress.

One of the two sides is not necessarily better than the other; mostly it's a matter of personal preference. I come down strongly on the side of be-ers, on the side of accepting people as they are, faults and flaws intact, and being accepted similarly. And while idealism is not necessarily a bad thing, and self-improvement certainly something to be sought, ultimately a good friend is going to have to do some amount of being, of accepting that we are all flawed and that some of that is not going to get better, no matter how much it should, no matter how much we might want it to. Moore says this:

We may think that "it's only right and proper" that a person change her ways and that her soul be something other than what it is, but this kind of thinking moves us away from the person's own nature. Sometimes it appears that there is more moralism in the field of psychology than there is in religion.

I find that people who have experienced depravity in one way or another--seen what great depths of sin either they or someone they love dearly can fall into--have an easier time accepting people as they are; it often takes a less experienced person to maintain high expectations of others. (This is, again, not a dig at idealists: an idealist who has been through such fire and come out still idealistic is often quite a remarkable person.)

In the end, of course, we each have our own trials. Idealists must struggle to accept sinners, and not to judge; the rest of us must struggle not to lose our values in knowing we cannot live up to them.

How Theatrical Productions Go (At Least For Me)

It varies, depending on the type of show, sometimes on the size of my role, and on the length of rehearsal, but this still tends to be pretty universal.

Pre-rehearsal. I got into the show! Yes! This is gonna rock!

Early rehearsals. This is gonna be so cool. We're, like, doing stuff, and it's cool stuff, and it'll be so great.

Middle Rehearsals. Okay. Maybe it won't be as cool as I thought. But it'll still be fun.

Week before Tech Week. Can this just be done with already?

Tech Week. UUUUUUUUUGH JUST SHOOT ME NOW.

Opening night, before show. I'M GOING TO MESS UP AND DIE.

Opening night, after show. THAT WAS SO COOL. I love this show and I love everybody at all associated with it and I love all the people who think it was cool and and and...

Closing night. This show is so great and I could perform it forever and... wait, it's over? Crap!

Week after. Emotional let-down; depression; often, getting sick.

After that. Awesome memory. Any bad parts edited out.

Storytime

[Our assignment for Acting today was to write a story based on two words we were given. My words were "road" and "bruise." I don't particularly like this story, but for the Gentle Reader it may entertainingly waste a few minutes.]

When the girl lay down on the road, all she could see were the stars. She could not see the burned, charred, black road around her, the piles of bodies, the skeletons of cars and trucks, the hulks of tanks. She could not see the road winding on and on, bleakly across a bleak world, starting nowhere and ending nowhere. Looking at the stars she could imagine she was dead, that she had finally come to peace, that she lay in a box in the earth and that the stars were her only friends. We are all made of stardust, she had been told, and she had laughed.

She had been brilliant, once. The smartest ten-year-old on the face of the earth; possibly the smartest ten-year-old who ever lived. They sent her up in the rocket ship, the one that would reach Mars, the one that would guarantee humanity’s survival when the destruction unleashed by the last war was complete. Her words, beamed from the spaceship to the ears of all humanity, just as the ship broke earth’s orbit, had become famous. People loved them and quoted them. She always thought that they did this because they made her sound like a little girl, because they made her sound human, rather than like the divine being most people imagined her to be.

“It looks… like a bruise. We’ve made the world look like a giant bruise. This was never what man was supposed to be.”

And in the six years it took them to establish the Martian colony, in the years it took her to turn from a warm, brilliant, adorable little girl to a cold, manipulative, power-hungry woman, her words had apparently touched off a war, one even worse than the previous war, one in which humanity unleashed its most horrible weapons and, finally, destroyed itself.

The Martian crew managed to find the survivors, the last several hundred humans locked deep underground. They were taken onboard the spaceship; they told the story of earth’s final six years. They blamed the girl, and rightly so. It did not take long to make the decision; and the decision was unanimous. They exiled her. They set her on the ring, the highway that man had built to encircle the earth, the scene of the worst and most brutal battles of man’s final war. They ordered her to walk it until the end of her days, to walk it until she, the last remaining human, was gone. The captain delivered the sentence; the captain knew she would never have the strength to take her own life.

Staring up at the stars, the girl heard a noise behind her. She jerked upright. The noises couldn’t be coincidence; they had been following her all day. Either someone was out there, stalking her, or she was going insane. Either way, perhaps her death would come soon.

A figure moved in the darkness. Her instincts, unwanted, flared up; she leapt and grabbed the figure and brought it down, smashing its face into the road, her hands flying and pummeling by instinct and nothing else. When the figure stopped moving, she rolled it over, perched above on the edge of the road. The sea below heaved incontinently. Her stalker was a boy, of about her own age. The boy was breathing raggedly.

“Who are you?” the girl hissed.

“You’ve… you’ve killed me…”

“Who are you?”

“I… fought against… your exile. When you left… I followed you. I lost you for a while… but now I’ve found you again.”

“Why? Why do you care? I’ve destroyed all of humanity. Everyone knows it.”

“And yet… I love you…”

“Love me? You don’t know me.”

“I grew up with you. I… always saw your face on TV.” The boy was growing more animated, starting to recover himself. He was bleeding from several places, but he ignored this. “No one ever loved you. They admired you, they feared you. But I loved…” he stopped, and began to cough. The fit prolonged itself, and he turned his head aside and spat blood. He groaned and lay his head back down with a clunk on the road.

The girl thought she had cried all of her tears away, but now she began to weep. She bent down and kissed the boy firmly on the mouth. He kissed her back. His arms closed around her and with the last of his strength he used his body to toss her, backward, over the edge of the road. He rolled over and watched her plunge toward the sea. Then he lunged after her.

For a moment the two bodies hung in midair, becoming smaller and smaller until they were specks indistinguishable from the whitecaps of the roiling sea below. Then they were swallowed up. The sea roared on, like a great bruise blotting the face of the earth.

Current Thoughts

There are certain songs, and even certain verses of certain songs, that have entered my being at a microscopic level. That is, I don't necessarily quote them or even think of them often any more--though usually I did both, once--but they are in there, in my mind and heart, as a concrete symbol of what and who I am, or at least what and who I want to be. One such verse is from "Jericho," by Wolfstone:

Don't run from the bad and the beautiful
Or all the hurting they provide
Don't hide from the sad and the cynical
Look for the diamonds inside


I've tried, Wolfstone. I've tried.

YA Authors and their Wisdom

I have been reading a slew of YA books recently, because I felt like it. And while I may have said disparaging things about YA authors in previous posts, I sometimes find them extremely wise. I think there is a certain wisdom gained by authors in any genre, who are privileged to spend a large part of their adult lives as authors; this may be particularly true of YA authors, at least of good ones, for they are writing at a level of childhood, a level where first and often lasting and affecting impressions are formed--they are writing to the people who will influence the people of tomorrow, who will become those people. Witness Susan Cooper, reflecting on her privilege in the afterword to her book Victory:

Sam Robbins's encounters with Admiral Nelson are not historical; they came out of my imagination, and I loved writing them. Perhaps I wrote this whole book only for a chance of meeting one of my greatest heroes, just as I was lucky enough to meet Shakespeare in a book called King of Shadows and Merlin, long ago, in a sequence called The Dark is Rising. Writers are fortunate people.

Another thing I notice in Cooper here is her humility. The Dark is Rising is perhaps one of the most famous of YA book series to come out in the last forty or so years, and Cooper would be justified in assuming that the type of people reading her Author's Note would be familiar with it. However, it is not famous enough to warrant the assumption of universal familiarity and her reference to "a sequence called The Dark is Rising" therefore does not come across as condescending.

Also, while I have read and loved The Dark is Rising, that note made me rather want to read King of Shadows.

Another author in whom I have noticed the latter-day presence of both wisdom and humility is Avi. This fellow has written a veritable slew of "YA" and "Teen" books over the past three or so decades. Some I have found worth my time; others I have thrown, justly or unjustly, by the wayside. But always he seems to be writing what he wants to write, and not what others want him to write, and for this I respect him.

Recently I read his The End of the Beginning and A Beginning, a Muddle and an End (2004 and 2008, respectively), which are both about a snail and an ant who have philosophical and epistemological discussions, often to arrive at counterintuitive conclusions. The books are somewhat in the tradition of Winnie the Pooh, and I found them great fun. A note at the beginning of the second book goes like this:

Some time ago one of my young readers wrote to me about writing. Among the many wise things he said was that a good story consists of "a beginning, a muddle, and an end." It was the smartest description of a story I've ever read. I wish I knew his name. Perhaps he'll read this book. If so, I thank him for giving me a title.

Besides the fact that Avi is right, this is quite a remarkable little note in a few ways. Notice the experienced writer deferring to the child who wrote to him; notice him calling the child "wise." I can think of no other living writer who would be likely to do this. Neil Gaiman, maybe. Maybe. Of fully "adult" fiction writers that I know anything about, I can picture none saying something like this. Could it be that our childrens' writers know something the rest of us are missing?

Finally we come to Kate DiCamillo. I read her books The Tale of Desperaux and The Remarkable Journey of Edward Tulane a while ago, both of which became favorites in their own way. It was not until recently that I got to reading her first couple books, Because of Winn-Dixie and The Tiger Rising. I don't know that either will become out-and-out favorites the way Desperaux and Edward did; but both are masterfully crafted, grace-filled stories.

In The Tiger Rising, a withdrawn young boy meets an angry young girl, and against all apparent odds the two become friends. There is a lot of grace in the book, especially in their burgeoning relationship. One of my favorite passages was this:

"Oh," said Sistine. And Rob realized then why he liked Sistine so much. He liked her because when she saw something beautiful, the sound of her voice changed. All the words she uttered had an oof sound to them, as if she was getting punched in the stomach... Her words sounded... as if the world, the real world, had been punched through, so that he could see something wonderful and dazzling on the other side of it.

Honestly, I don't know if this is wisdom, or folly, or simple conceit. But I love this passage. I love it because this is how I feel when I encounter overwhelming beauty. I feel as if I've been punched in the stomach; when I'm talking about it, sometimes I feel exactly as if my words have that oof sound. I don't know if this is noticeable to anybody else.

The whole of Winn-Dixie, which somewhat incredibly is the author's first novel, is littered with wisdom. It is harder to pin down than the works quoted above. One bit of wisdom is made concrete here:

"Come here, child," Gloria Dump said. She reached for me and pulled me close to her and whispered in my ear, "There ain't no way you can hold on to something that wants to go, you understand? You can only love what you got while you got it."

Recently on facebook I saw a friend of a friend of a friend (I saw this because I find facebook-stalking a good way to kill boredom) comment on someone's status. The status was of the genre of status in which the poster wishes to 'be a kid again' in one way or another; the response was something along the lines of "Childhood should be remembered well, but maturity and growing up valued more highly." This sounded like a certain genre of post comment I have encountered, that of the Thinking Christian, and the implication of every comment in this genre is that every Thinking Christian should agree. And I sort of did at the time, though something rankled me about it. And then I realized that at least one of the reasons for this rankling lay in Matthew 18; and while this as a response to the post I am referring to may be out-of-context and therefore not be fair, this all works as an illustration summing up what (if anything) I had to say in this post:

At the same time came the disciples unto Jesus, saying, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me.

An Open Letter to Barnes and Noble

Dear Sirs:

You have disgraced yourselves. I am sorry to have to be the one to inform you of this; I, who have spent many happy hours perusing the shelves of your bookstore, who was weaned, as it were, on the smell of the new books emanating from your bookshelves.

Are you catching my drift yet, noble sirs? Why would I put book in my opening paragraph so many times?

I will cease the semantics, sever the cleverness.

I am talking about this abomination you call the Nook.

Perhaps there is a place for e-readers: perhaps. I am thoroughly unconvinced on the subject, but we will grant it for the sake of argument. But if there is a place for them, and if they must be sold, this is not the way to go about it.

Placing a large, rather sleekly garish desk directly in front of the entrances to all of your stores, with sleekly cool-looking men or sexlessly attractive women with grins on their faces and a general attitude as if they are Jehovah's Witnesses here to convert all of the sheeple to their new faith is both blatant and blatantly wrongheaded. We are the descendants of people who formed a new country because the old one was forcing unwanted tea upon us: what else can you, using the abovementioned tactics, expect from these people but outright rebellion? And while rebellion is a heady topic for literature, it is not conducive to the selling of electronics.

Which brings up another point: the fact that this product is, essentially, a more useless iPod. Why are you selling such a thing in your store? The obtusely illustrative stack of books with prices comparing their print versions to their e-versions is potent advertising, it is true. But the fact remains that this product costs $149, plus the cost of whatever books one wants. The latter cost, while more affordable than new hard copies, is not much (if at all) less than one could pay for an actual book at almost any used bookstore.

This is where you are particularly wrong, I daresay even disgraceful, my good sirs. For books are, have long been, and ought always to be something for the masses. They ought to be something that not only the well-dressed businessman or working parent with more disposable income than ideas of how to spend it can afford. Their very appeal lies in the fact that they are affordable to the poor college student, the vagrant off the street, the child with his or her allowance money or hard-earned yard-raking or lawn-mowing or grifting money. There is much appeal to the fact that one can come in with a ten-dollar bill and leave with a brain-stimulating classic or a soul-satisfying romance. There is, furthermore, the fact that one can leave a seven-dollar paperback behind on a bus, or have it rained upon, and treat the matter with a shrug and conceivably buy a new copy the next day. Now, if a $149 e-reader gets left behind on a bus, or rained upon and ruined, even the increasingly small percentage of your clientèle who can afford said bauble will probably treat its demise with more agitation than that.

Speaking of agitation, I have one (or possibly two) more complaints before I post* this. What is greatly agitating is the amount of advertising for the e-reader that occurs in your store. I am often looking, in an access of perfect happiness, at a literature or a science fiction section full of good old (well, new) books, only to have thrust into my sight a sign advertising SAVE MONEY WITH THE NOOK, or similar Advertising Department drivel. The amount of signage and other advertisement begins to make your store take on the aspect of a desperate high school nerd begging a girl who is, as they say, way out of his league, to go to prom with him: PLEASE LOVE ME, the Nook ads seem to say; OR PLEASE NOTICE ME, AT LEAST! AT LEAST CONSIDER NOTICING ME! PLEASE?

Finally, there are the rumors that go around concerning the Nook. I am sure you are aware of them, and I myself am certainly aware of how outlandish are the claims they make. Still, the sheer amount and the terrier-like persistence of said rumors does make one wonder. You know the ones: The Nook eats babies, The Nook is a tool of the Devil, The Nook eats the soul of its owners. Things like that. Clearly unfounded speculation.

Sirs, I have stated my opinion. It was probably a useless thing to do, but at least it made me feel better. It is my hope that you take these things into consideration, and do not end up like the nerdy kid, sitting at home on prom night, weeping because the girl he loves went to the dance with the big dumb football player who reads actual books. But you won't let that be you. Right?

Yours Truly,
Captain Stormfield

P.S. I have a solution: Take all the money you are pouring into Nook advertisements, and invest it in installing special B&N bars next to your cafes. Think about the sheer amount of writers who have been alcoholics; probably a greater number than ever frequented coffee houses. Think of the mural! Twain and Hemingway, over their respective Scotch and Absinthe, laughing over a fallen Scott Fitzgerald, his jug of moonshine clutched to him the way he once held Zelda... Plus, if your store had a bar it would scare away those people who come to your store only to flirt because your store doesn't have a bar. All I ask is that you think about it.

*Note that "post" here can refer to the posting of mail, i.e., the traditional way to send a letter, even an open one.

Uh Fought

Good friends are like bad drugs. While they're around, in your system, it's wonderful, but when they go away the withdrawal can be a terrible thing; and the only relief for the symptoms of withdrawal is more of the drug. The only relief for the loneliness caused by the absence of friends often seems to be more friends. Often, when particular friends are missed, the only relief seems to be a return to those particular friends whether literally or somehow by proxy.

Because of friendship and the pain it causes sometimes I wish my heart was truly cold, was closed away in some sort of room where love and its contingent heartbreak was a distant reality, something that happened to other people but never came near. But always when I have these thoughts I find myself returning to the words of CS Lewis, in The Four Loves:

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

Adequate Sleep

Good grades, adequate sleep, a social life: pick two. Welcome to college.
-Overused but true adage

I have noticed a few times in the past several weeks that I have awakened in the morning to the sound of my alarm clock and have hit the snooze button not because all of my limbs felt bone-tired and my body seemed to be craving extra sleep, but because sleep simply felt nice and I wanted a bit more of it. On getting up, I then noticed that it did not feel like a war to simply stay standing up and get myself ready for the day. Midway through the day I did not feel the need to have a shot of caffeine in order to get through the rest of the day. Every time I sat down I noticed a distinct lack of attempt on my body's part to crash and go to sleep.

This "getting enough sleep" thing is certainly a new and novel experience. I can't decide if I like it or not.

On B&N

I am informed, by my mother, that Barnes and Noble is a "meat market." Apparently people go there to flirt if they don't like bars. Now, I enjoy flirting as much as the next guy--depending on who the next guy is, I very well might enjoy flirting somewhat more than he does--but if someone tries to flirt with me at the bookstore it will be a problem. See, as much as I like flirting, I like books a manifold amount more. It's not even a contest. It's like if I was a die-hard Star Trek fan, and flirting was watching Star Trek while books were meeting Leonard Nimoy, Patrick Stewart, and Gene Rodenberry all at the same time. It's not even that I wouldn't necessarily flirt back in a bookstore, though it's eminently possible that even a very cute girl flirting with me while I was looking at books would be very annoying. What is most occurring to me is that if someone tried to flirt with me while I was looking at books, I might not even notice. I'm really curious whether this has happened, actually.

Maybe I'll be more aware next time I go to a bookstore. But probably not. One new Gene Wolfe novel, and I'm lost to the world.

Pirates and Stuff

Lately I have found myself somewhat surrounded by pirates. This is not necessarily by design, though it may be a result of predeliction.

Bought The Gigantic Book of Pirate Stories, which I named (accurately, I think) Possibly the Coolest Book in the Entire Universe. It has stories, histories, ballads, poems, and other random stuff like ships' charters and a section on the last words of famous pirates. Plus I traded a bunch of stuff in to the used bookstore where I got it, so I didn't spend any money and got rid of a bunch of no-longer-wanted books in exchange for it.

Then I was reading Red Seas Under Red Skies, the second book of the Gentleman Bastards sequence, which is cool simply for combining the epic fantasy and con artist genres--really effectively--and halfway through that book turns into a sort of pirate story.

Yesterday I read the beginnings of a few different YA novels, and was reflecting on how dismal the Young Adult genre can be. Then I picked up Victory, by Susan Cooper, which Yes! is largely about sailing ships (though being much about Admiral Nelson the ships are of a less illegal variety). I read the first couple pages and sighed in relief; Cooper's writing was like diving into a swimming pool after a long time toiling in the hot sun. There's something about a good writer who has been writing for years, a writer whose sentences and paragraphs and rhythm are so self-assured that there can be no question she knows what she is doing, that is completely different from any other reading experience in the world. The sense of this crosses genres; one can get it as easily from a book intended for small children, young adults, or anyone else.

All these nautical encounters will, sooner or later, lead to a re-watching of Pirates of the Caribbean--either all three or the first one multiple times. Maybe both. I can feel it. I was thinking earlier that one of the best parts in the first one is the bit just before the Black Pearl and Barbossa's ship have at each other--when the two ships are pulling alongside each other, all stops pulled, battle about to be joined, and the crews yelling and screaming wordless hostility. It creates a moment of almost unendurable tension before that tension explodes along with the charges in the cannons.