I had four meetings today. The first was scheduled for me in advance. The second was scheduled for me while I was in the first meeting. Everyone knew about it, it seems, except for me. (Everyone knows more about me than me.) The third and fourth were spontaneous meetings of opportunity.
I was in no condition for any of these meetings, I think. So if my charm or humor or good answers or input were off by six percent, I apologize. I apologize and I blame the big tour I gave yesterday, an event from which I am still recovering.
Not sure how I became the tour guy, but I’m the tour guy.
I saw this bunny this morning. He is perfectly evolved to blend in with the cement. That’s an amazing summer coat, if you ask me.
The bunnies have the most curious sense of personal space. You’re fine in their eyes until you get about 18 inches away, and only then do they do the rabbit thing. Makes you wonder about how that comes to be learned. I bet each one has an experience, learning when to hop away. It’s a valuable lesson. One learned, I hope, in a not-too-painful way.2ΓπΓπ£2
I looked through some old books today. There’s often a table of books someone is willing to donate. You can pick your way through them and, if for nothing else, it is a nice momentary diversion to read the spines. I picked up one for my lovely bride, and grabbed one or two for me, as well. Not this one. There are only so many writing handbooks I can process.
But this one fits in your pocket!
Does it? Which pocket?
Or maybe your hand!
Well, sure. Most books these days do come with the ability to be manually manipulated.
And we sprung for the spiral binding!
That’s not the selling point you think it is.
Sure it is! You can distinguish it in your bookcase!
I can’t read the non-existent spine, to see if it is the book I need to pull.
But it has this wire spiral! Easy to find!
What if someone already has that in a book.
Who would have another book like that?
I have nine of them in my office bookcase alone.
Oh? Wow. Well, this one is a writing style guide!
Seven of the nine I have in my bookcase have to do with writing or style.
And you still write like this?
Look, fictional book seller —
Fictional book giver-awayer.
Fine, whatever. You’re not really making a strong case here.
I was able to make a 2010 joke this evening, which meant I needed a 2010 photo.
Turns out the specific photo was from 2011, but it fit the point perfectly. My confusion of the date of the particular photo gave me an excuse to spend a few minutes clicking through old photos of happy times, so that was a nice part of the evening.
Also tonight, we discovered the joys of grilled wings, with nothing more than a simple salt and pepper seasoning. We bought a lot of wings, recently, and we’ll probably be returning to this style. I mention it because they were good, and you should know, and we can all want some more wings together.
books / Tuesday — Comments Off on Reading stuff 26 Jul 22
Not much today, but I did want to share one little passage from this book. Juan Gonzalez and Joseph Torres wrote an important book. The blurb on the cover, “We’ve needed this book for a long time.” from the journalist and LBJ press secretary and journalist Bill Moyers seems apt. And if we needed the book when it was published in 2011 there’s no less of a need for it today.
The text has a few small problems — every book does if you pick at it long enough, and this is late night, few-pages-at-a-time reading for me — but there are so many lessons to learn.
So I was reading a bit about Jose MartΓ, a pioneer of social justice journalism — think Ida B. Wells. You have to agree with Gonzalez and Torres, his “dispatches should long ago have accorded him a special place among Americaβs nineteenth-century newsmen.”
The problem, as Gonzalez and Torres see it, is that MartΓ’s work was in Spanish so he often gets overlooked by English readers and historians. But, almost everything he wrote seems evocative. He was also a revolutionary in his native Cuba, but I think of him as a writer. And, based on a conversation with a colleague, I learned there are at least six books of his works that are translated into English.
So I guess I’ll have to buy some of those.
Why not? Nine other books I purchased just arrived this weekend — free shipping! — after all.
It might be a problem.
(But it isn’t a problem. I can not read whenever I want.)
It has been three weeks since we featured the most popular part of the blog — hey, we’ve been busy. But now we can catch up with the kitties. They’re both doing well, thank you.
Phoebe has been having a lot of cabinet meetings of late.
I’m sure there are many important policy decisions are made in those meetings. Where to map, what to scratch, how to stretch.
Probably the cabinets are a part of her routine to try to create distance between her and Poseidon, seen here showing of his regular charming nuisance.
No breakfast is safe from this guy. Mine certainly wasn’t yesterday.
Can’t say he didn’t warn us. Here he is, warning us.
“YOUR BREAKFAST IS NOT SAFE!” — Poseidon, probably.
I don’t know when I wrote the nerdiest thing I’ve ever written, but it occurred to me early this morning that this is a thing we should chart. I wrote this.
How many errors should I accept in a (good) book? Now I want to verify every anecdote and trivial bit.
1. Technically four, but I get it. 2. Missed the date. 3. You never study the messy 1876 election. Close, but no. 4. After two years in NYC. (He spent about a year in Philly.) pic.twitter.com/YqGO9j4Lay
It is a good book. It is, unequivocally, an important book. It was when it was released in 2011, and remains so today. But these little problems are compounding. Maybe it is a function of the editing process when they created the Kindle version.
Look, I’m not an expert in this area. Far from it. The first error, I knew a tiny bit about the man involved. The second was revealed as a chronological inconsistency one page, and a few paragraphs, apart. The third is an obvious error. The fourth I found because now I’m googling every name and publication in this book. I’m enjoying the book and learning a great deal. It’s just slowing me down, from the continued learning, is all.
Of course, I’m also picking up tidbits here and there about the people and their work that weren’t included in the book. When the world wide web is your footnote database …
I don’t know if this is the nerdiest thing I’ve ever written (Not by a longshot. — ed.) but it is somewhere on that list.
Come to think of it, let’s never chart the nerdiest things we’ve written. Never, ever.
And how was your summer solstice? The day was 14 hours, 55 minutes and 28 seconds here. And there’s always that guy who just can’t wait to point out that the days are doing nothing but getting shorter until December.
Around here? We hate that guy.
But we love the long days. If you stepped outside last night at 10:19 and looked west, moments before nautical twilight, it looked like this.
No camera tricks, no Photoshop treatments. That’s just the view after 10 p.m. in June.
If I ever say anything here is better than that, I am, in fact, making a secret, coded cry for help.
Since we talked about books last, I have recently finished you might be interested in. First was The Last of the Doughboys by Wall Street Journal reporter Richard Rubin.
In the earliest days of the 21st century Rubin started interviewing the surviving military veterans from World War I, all of them centenarians. He wraps his interviews around rich context about the Tin Pan Alley music of the era, and his own tours of France and a general historical overview.
Those stories are as uniques as the men and women’s experiences. Some of them colorful and sharp as they were in 1918. Some of the details had become foggy over the course of their long lives, as you might expect.
Some parts of the book are about some of the other parts of their lives. None of the people Rubin interviewed were a part of this experience, but that was up to chance and good fortune as much as anything.
I knew this particular story, but it is always surprising to think about it in the full context.
The crux of the book are those interviews, though, and memorializing those last veterans’ experiences. Rubin, in fact, had the chance to meet the last American survivor of the Great War. All of that is in the book. It’s a worthwhile read.
Now this one, Longitude by Dava Sobel. This book was a surprise hit, even for the author. She saw it go through 29 hardcover printings, translated into more than 20 languages and become a national and international bestseller. The 10th anniversary edition includes a pretty special foreword by Neil Armstrong.
Granted, the idea of a book about longitude seems like an important one. But it also seems like a daunting tome. How do you write an interesting book about invisible lines on a map? Sobel is about to show you. First, just enough of the technical to explain what she’s talking about, and why this is all so important.
And so now you know why this had been a problem for generations, and why the search for a solution was so important. As the book gets into that it quickly becomes obvious, even to land-lubbers, how most of the success of those pre-longitudinal sailors was about luck with skill. How anyone got to where they wanted to go before their supplies ran out is a mystery.
Then, we meet the people.
For whatever reason, when I opened the book I expected this to be a dense read, but, to Sobel’s great credit, it’s just about the most approachable text you can imagine. Give this a read, you’ll be pleased and surprised.
I’m leading with the cats, because they’re the big draw, but stick around for the books, which will come along in just a bit.
Phoebe felt like doing a bit of posing this week. Here she is, mid-belly rub.
And just sitting as pretty as you please in the hallway.
Poseidon is also doing well, but he has decided to play it coy. He’s in this photo, somewhere, I assure you. But he knows you can’t see him.
Sometimes being relaxed involves letting gravity take over and just sprawling wherever.
So they are both doing well and enjoying the beginning of their summer. Aren’t we all? I love the mental shift, and now I’m beginning to think that maybe the cats can sense it, too.
This must be the longest daffodil stem I’ve ever seen. It is in an almost perfect spot, removed from the lawn mower blades, reaching out for maximum sun. Just close enough to where we would walk to notice how it is showing off.
I wonder how much it will continue to grow before it gets the attention of a passing critter or bug.
We had a punchy little bike ride this evening. Good legs, good lungs, comfortable in the cockpit, and just a little droopy up one little roller. Everywhere else I could produce good power. Here, The Yankee had finally caught up to me and surged out a little ahead. She was pouring on the coals while I was fiddling with a jersey pocket. She pulled out a small gap, but I was able to shut it down. It was one of those days when most anything seemed possible.
It makes riding fun.
That makes you want to ride all the time. So tomorrow, maybe?
I finished Brilliant Beacons Saturday night. I bought this in April 2021.
I was not aware that our first lighthouses dated to colonial times. But, like many people who have visited any surviving lighthouses, I knew that automation and GPS and other technologies have improved a sailor’s circumstance such that most of the bright old lights are well beyond obsolete. This book covers much that took place between 1716 and the mid 20th century and does so in an easy, approachable manner. Not every lighthouse is dissected, but you’ll gain a terrific appreciation for some of the engineering involved at the most demanding locations. You’ll get a sense of the people that worked in the lighthouses, their steadfastness and their heroism and, sometimes, the crazed things that took place beneath the big, beaming lights. You’ll learn about the brilliant Fresnel lens (most of you have the same technology in your headlights) and you’ll come to know the different parts of the government that made lighthouses a practical fixture, long before they became a photographic fixation. Lighthouses are one of those things that, over the course of time, we got right. And if you’re at all interested in the subject matter, this book gets it right, too.
In addition to a massively overflowing bookshelf, I have too many books in my Kindle app. There were 52 books waiting there last night, all of them, of course, are of an interest to me. I bought them, after all. But which one to read next? I suppose there’s chronology. I’d probably be reading about Jamestown or the Holy See. But what about books that cover broad swaths of time? Or these other books about wood or food? So I could go with purchase date, then. No idea. Alphabetical? Reasonable enough. That’d probably create a little variation, which is desirable. But would that be alphabetical based on titles or the authors’ names?
So I did what anyone would do: I counted all the books and ran a random number generator until one number showed up a third time. And that number leads us to Last of the Doughboys, which I purchased in February last year.
Starting in 2003, reporter Richard Rubin started interviewing surviving members of the U.S. military and auxiliary services that took part in the Great War. Everyone here is more than 100 years old, because time marches on. I’ve read two chapters so far. The first was about his inspiration and the process to finding these centenarians. The second chapter was a summary of an all-but forgotten memoir of WW1, Over the Top, by Arthur Guy Empey. He wrote three other books, none as popular as the wildly successful first. He also penned a handful of popular songs, and a few silent films, acting in some of them, before the talkies drove him out. He had a bunch of magazine, pulp stories under his belt, as well.
In 1935, then in his early 50s, he helped organize a paramilitary organization in Hollywood.
It’s always been a weird place, basically.
None of this last part, the part about the rest of Empey’s life, has figured into Rubin’s Doughboys book. If you read about Empey, it’s clear he made a living on interest in the Great War right up until the public zeitgeist shifted in the mid 1930s. He had a good run of it, though, and himself lived into his 70s, dying in 1963. The rest of Rubin’s book, though, will see his peers having lived decades on.
Time and soldiers, they all know about marching. And in time we lose details. Did the right face happen here or there? Either way, we know we pivoted on this foot, because that’s the concept of the movement. The details might be forgotten, but the fundament is still there, we pivot on the ball of this foot. The non-historian remembers little of the Great War. The thoughtful person might be able to point to some of its many lasting, and continuing legacies. Most of us, at least, recall that it happened. It hardly seems enough to remember, considering the cost. But, then again, this was a century ago. Next month, it’s 105 years, in fact, since Gen. John Pershing arrived in France.
That’s history for you. Vital today, heroic tomorrow, then reunions the next week, and the mists of time after that. Before too long, the original media turns digital or dust.
This footage is the Wikipedia of newsreels, and there’s a heck of a downshift in the final quarter of the footage.
Pershing died in ’48. I bet his name gets mentioned a few times in this book, though. So far, it’s one you want to keep getting back to, eager to see who you’ll meet next.
