June 29, 2011
"Blackberry-picking" by Seamus Heaney
Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.
June 28, 2011
"Blackberry Eating" - Galway Kinnell
I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry -- eating in late September.
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry -- eating in late September.
June 27, 2011
June 24, 2011
June 23, 2011
"How to Be Eaten by a Lion" - Michael Johnson
If you hear the rush, the swish of mottle sand
and dust kicked up under the striving paws
its cessation, falling into the sharp and brittle grass
like tick of a tin roof under sun or a hint of rain that wakes you,
try to stand your ground. Try not to scream,
for it devalues you. That tawny head and burled
mange, the flattened ears of its sleek engine
will only seem a blur, a shock, a shadow
across your neck that leaves you cold.
It may seem soft, barely a blow,
more like a falling, an exquisite giving
of yourself to the ground, made numb
by those eyes. It may be easier just to watch,
for fighting will only prolong things,
and you will have no time to notice the sky,
the texture of dust, what incredible leaves
the trees have. Instead, focus on your life,
its crimson liquor he grows drunk on.
Notice the way the red highlights his face,
how the snub nose is softened, the lips made
fuller; notice his deft musculature, his rapture,
because in all creation there is not art
to compare with such elegance, such simplicity.
Notice this and remember it,
this way in which you became beautiful
when you thought that there was nothing more.
June 22, 2011
The Pale King - David Foster Wallace
Page 3 - A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls or cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.
Page 12 - The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you will yourself to not.
Page 14 - Above and below were a different story, but there was always something disappointing about clouds when you were inside them; they ceased to be clouds at all. It just got really foggy.
Page 15 - Sylvanshine had once been on a first date with a Xerox rep who had complex and slightly repulsive patterns of callus on her fingers from playing the banjo semi-professionally as her off-time passion; [...] and he'd been so nervous and tense that he'd yammered on and on about himself and never asked her sufficiently about herself, her history with the banjo and what it meant to her, which was why she hadn't liked him enough and they hadn't connected. He'd never given the woman with the banjo a chance, he saw now. That what appears to be egoism so often isn't.
Page 37 - The girl wore a thin old checked cotton shirt with pearl-colored snaps with the long sleeved down and she always smelled very good and clean, like something you could trust and deeply care about even if you weren't in love.
Page 85 - Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly and with our full attention.[...] I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down.
Page 94-95 - It was by far the worst feeling he had ever had in his life, and the whole attack lasted almost forty minutes, and for the rest of the day he went around in a kind of trance of shock and spent adrenaline, and that day was the actual start of the syndrome in which he understood that the worse his fear of breaking into a shattering public sweat was, the better the chances that he'd have something like what happened in World Cultures happen again, maybe every day, maybe more than once a day - and this understanding caused him more terror and frustration and inner suffering than he had ever before even dreamed that somebody could ever experience, and the total stupidity and weirdness of the whole problem just made it that much worse. [...] To raise your hand in class and ask for a bathroom pass as heads turned to look - just the thought of it filled him with total dread.
Page 130/135/136/137 - American are in a way crazy. We infantilize ourselves. We don't think of ourselves as citizens - parts of something larger to which we have profound responsibilities. We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights and privileges, but not our responsibilites. We abdicate our civic responsibilities to the government and expect the government, in effect, to legislate morality.
[...]
With the curious thing being that we hate it for appearing to usurp the very civic functions we've ceded to it. [...]
It may sound reactionary, I know. But we can all feel it. We've changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don't think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the the sense of being beneficiaries - we're actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation's responibilities to use and ensuring we get our share of the American pie. We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie. So who makes the pie?
[...]
What my problem is is the way it seems that we as individual citizens have adopted a corporate attitude. That our ultimate obligation is to ourselves. That unless it's illegal or there are direct paractical consequences for ourselves, any activity is OK.
Page 173 - He looked good in a suit - like so many men of his generation, his body almost seemed designed to fill out and support a suit.
Page 182 - If you really look at something, you can almost tell what type of wage structure the person who made it was on.
Page 202 - Given that many of the people were also holding numerous small, subdivided packages and individually purchased bags, many of the these could be seen flying up in the air and rotating or spilling their contents in various ways above the widening gap as shoppers jettisoned their purchases in an attempt to leap clear of my father's path, so that part of the appearance of the gap was the illusion that it was somehow spurting or raining consumer goods.
Page 217 - He was getting his materials out and arranging them, looking down at his desktop with a little formal smile. What he was actually doing was the teacherly thing of acknowledging the roomful of students without looking at them.
Page 219 - ...and yet was almost impossible to look away from or not feel stirred by. This was partly due to the substitute's presentation, which was rapid, organized, undramatic, and dry in the way of people who know that what they are saying to too valuable in its own right to cheapen with concern about delivery or 'connecting' with the students. In other words, the presentations had a kind of zealous integrity that manifested not as style but as the lack of it. I felt that I suddenly, for the first time, understood the meaning of my father's term 'no-nonsense,' and why it was a term of approval.
Page 222 - The truth is I was not even aware of the obvious double entendre of 'You're watching As the World Turns' until three days later - the show's almost terrifying pun about the passive waste of time.
Page 229/230/232 - Welcome to the world of reality - there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth - acutal heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested. [...] True heroism is you, alone, in a designated work space. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care - with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world. [...] In fact, the less conventionally heroic or exciting or adverting or even interesting or engaging a labor appears to be, the greater its potential as an arena for actual heroism, and therefore as a denomination of joy unequaled by any you can yet imagine. [...] The heroic frontier now lies in the ordering and deployment of those facts. Classification, organization, presentation. To put it another way, the pie has been made - the contest is now in the slicing.
Page 240 - I can remember that a few corners' stop signs had only the polygonal sign portion visible about the drifts, and several storefronts' doors had their mail slots frozen open and long tongues of windblown snow on the carpet.
Page 255 - The school smelled of adhesive paste, rubber boots, sour cafeteria foos, and a warm biotic odor of many bodies and the fixative of the tile floor as three hundred mammals slowly warmed the rooms throughout the day.
Page 292 - their eyes had passed over all the words on the page without actually having read them at all - with read here meaning internalized, comprehended, or whatever we mean by really reading vs. simply having one's eyes pass over symbols in a certain order.
Page 408 - Do you suppose it's so much easier to make conversation with someone you already know well than with someone you don't know at all primarily because of all the previously exchanged information and shared experiences between two people who know each other well, or because maybe it's only with people we already know well and who know us well that we don't go through the awkward mental process of subjecting everything we think of saying or bringing up as a topic of light conversation to a self-conscious critical analysis and evaluation that manages to make anything we think of proposing to say to the other person seem dull or stupid or banal or on the other hand maybe overly intimate or tension-producing?
Page 475 - Why not just ask the question instead of taking the time to make me say yes you can ask a question?
Page 546 - Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.
Page 12 - The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you will yourself to not.
Page 14 - Above and below were a different story, but there was always something disappointing about clouds when you were inside them; they ceased to be clouds at all. It just got really foggy.
Page 15 - Sylvanshine had once been on a first date with a Xerox rep who had complex and slightly repulsive patterns of callus on her fingers from playing the banjo semi-professionally as her off-time passion; [...] and he'd been so nervous and tense that he'd yammered on and on about himself and never asked her sufficiently about herself, her history with the banjo and what it meant to her, which was why she hadn't liked him enough and they hadn't connected. He'd never given the woman with the banjo a chance, he saw now. That what appears to be egoism so often isn't.
Page 37 - The girl wore a thin old checked cotton shirt with pearl-colored snaps with the long sleeved down and she always smelled very good and clean, like something you could trust and deeply care about even if you weren't in love.
Page 85 - Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly and with our full attention.[...] I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down.
Page 94-95 - It was by far the worst feeling he had ever had in his life, and the whole attack lasted almost forty minutes, and for the rest of the day he went around in a kind of trance of shock and spent adrenaline, and that day was the actual start of the syndrome in which he understood that the worse his fear of breaking into a shattering public sweat was, the better the chances that he'd have something like what happened in World Cultures happen again, maybe every day, maybe more than once a day - and this understanding caused him more terror and frustration and inner suffering than he had ever before even dreamed that somebody could ever experience, and the total stupidity and weirdness of the whole problem just made it that much worse. [...] To raise your hand in class and ask for a bathroom pass as heads turned to look - just the thought of it filled him with total dread.
Page 130/135/136/137 - American are in a way crazy. We infantilize ourselves. We don't think of ourselves as citizens - parts of something larger to which we have profound responsibilities. We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights and privileges, but not our responsibilites. We abdicate our civic responsibilities to the government and expect the government, in effect, to legislate morality.
[...]
With the curious thing being that we hate it for appearing to usurp the very civic functions we've ceded to it. [...]
It may sound reactionary, I know. But we can all feel it. We've changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don't think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the the sense of being beneficiaries - we're actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation's responibilities to use and ensuring we get our share of the American pie. We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie. So who makes the pie?
[...]
What my problem is is the way it seems that we as individual citizens have adopted a corporate attitude. That our ultimate obligation is to ourselves. That unless it's illegal or there are direct paractical consequences for ourselves, any activity is OK.
Page 173 - He looked good in a suit - like so many men of his generation, his body almost seemed designed to fill out and support a suit.
Page 182 - If you really look at something, you can almost tell what type of wage structure the person who made it was on.
Page 202 - Given that many of the people were also holding numerous small, subdivided packages and individually purchased bags, many of the these could be seen flying up in the air and rotating or spilling their contents in various ways above the widening gap as shoppers jettisoned their purchases in an attempt to leap clear of my father's path, so that part of the appearance of the gap was the illusion that it was somehow spurting or raining consumer goods.
Page 217 - He was getting his materials out and arranging them, looking down at his desktop with a little formal smile. What he was actually doing was the teacherly thing of acknowledging the roomful of students without looking at them.
Page 219 - ...and yet was almost impossible to look away from or not feel stirred by. This was partly due to the substitute's presentation, which was rapid, organized, undramatic, and dry in the way of people who know that what they are saying to too valuable in its own right to cheapen with concern about delivery or 'connecting' with the students. In other words, the presentations had a kind of zealous integrity that manifested not as style but as the lack of it. I felt that I suddenly, for the first time, understood the meaning of my father's term 'no-nonsense,' and why it was a term of approval.
Page 222 - The truth is I was not even aware of the obvious double entendre of 'You're watching As the World Turns' until three days later - the show's almost terrifying pun about the passive waste of time.
Page 229/230/232 - Welcome to the world of reality - there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth - acutal heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested. [...] True heroism is you, alone, in a designated work space. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care - with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world. [...] In fact, the less conventionally heroic or exciting or adverting or even interesting or engaging a labor appears to be, the greater its potential as an arena for actual heroism, and therefore as a denomination of joy unequaled by any you can yet imagine. [...] The heroic frontier now lies in the ordering and deployment of those facts. Classification, organization, presentation. To put it another way, the pie has been made - the contest is now in the slicing.
Page 240 - I can remember that a few corners' stop signs had only the polygonal sign portion visible about the drifts, and several storefronts' doors had their mail slots frozen open and long tongues of windblown snow on the carpet.
Page 255 - The school smelled of adhesive paste, rubber boots, sour cafeteria foos, and a warm biotic odor of many bodies and the fixative of the tile floor as three hundred mammals slowly warmed the rooms throughout the day.
Page 292 - their eyes had passed over all the words on the page without actually having read them at all - with read here meaning internalized, comprehended, or whatever we mean by really reading vs. simply having one's eyes pass over symbols in a certain order.
Page 408 - Do you suppose it's so much easier to make conversation with someone you already know well than with someone you don't know at all primarily because of all the previously exchanged information and shared experiences between two people who know each other well, or because maybe it's only with people we already know well and who know us well that we don't go through the awkward mental process of subjecting everything we think of saying or bringing up as a topic of light conversation to a self-conscious critical analysis and evaluation that manages to make anything we think of proposing to say to the other person seem dull or stupid or banal or on the other hand maybe overly intimate or tension-producing?
Page 475 - Why not just ask the question instead of taking the time to make me say yes you can ask a question?
Page 546 - Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.
August 23, 2010
First Day of 4AP
Well, I wasn't sure what to expect teaching 4AP this year; actually I kind of knew what to expect since I had half of my students when they were freshman. Anyway, they are clever. The students had to read a book of poetry over the summer, and then they had to write a poem introducing themselves to the class in the style of that poet and share it orally with the class.
One student's poem began:
a man with a gun
demands that I
take my pants off.
Cross-country, of course.
Clever.
One student's poem began:
a man with a gun
demands that I
take my pants off.
Cross-country, of course.
Clever.
August 13, 2010
Summer Project #6: Secret Birdhouse
There have been a lot of things thrown out to the curb in the neighorhood this summer because of all of the rain and flooded basements. At first, we had enough coming out of our own basement that I didn't want to save any of the wood (most of it perfectly good) that appeared in our alleys. When your basement floods, the last thing you worry about is trying to save parts of the furniture that have been sitting in poop-water. However, once the garage was organized and things calmed down a bit, I couldn't resist picking up pieces of two dressers that a neighbor around the corner was throwing out.
The first step was to break down the various shelves and to strip the laminate.
I attempted to give the birdhouse back to the people who originally threw it out but they didn't answer the door when I knocked this evening. Their house looked a little run-down though, and I wanted my first birdhouse to have a good home so I gave it to the neighbors down the street instead.
The first step was to break down the various shelves and to strip the laminate.
Some of it was pretty gross but most of the wood could be salvaged, sanded, or trimmed.
And this is what I ended up with...
It's a pretty standard bluebird or wren house but I tried to retain some of the elements of the original piece of furniture. The roof is the front of a drawer, the signage on the front is the stamp of the makers of the original cabinet "John and Sagan Cabinets", and the lower rails are handles.
The roof opens to allow for easy end-of-the-season cleaning.
The underside has cuts for ventiliation. I also used screws here to allow the floor to be removed in the case of a deep cleaning.
The inside has a "ladder" to allow baby birds to grip the wood to get to the exit.
A handle was repurposed.
I attempted to give the birdhouse back to the people who originally threw it out but they didn't answer the door when I knocked this evening. Their house looked a little run-down though, and I wanted my first birdhouse to have a good home so I gave it to the neighbors down the street instead.
August 7, 2010
Summer Project #5: The Garage
There are really three projects going on here and it took me the better part of three days to do everything. I built a workbench; I built a bike rack (the idea was inspired by Scott); I organzied tools (ladder, toolbox, wall organizer).
Here's the finished product.
Here's the finished product.
The bike rack on the left now stores all of the camping gear and random bike parts and pumps on the pine shelf. It can hang 5 - 6 bikes on its hooks which are connected to the pine shelf by a 2" x 6" x 4' pine board underneath the 16" x 10" brackets.
Gets everything off the floor, but keeps everything readily accessible. The bikes are locked to the brackets to discourage theft.
The workbench was built with the help of "Ask the Builder". The legs are 4x4. The bottom 3/4" plywood shelf is supported with 2x4 and the work surface is supported with 2x6. The top is 72 x 32 and is 34" off the ground which seems perfect for my height.
A good view of the sunflowers.
The yard tools are now lined up and off the floor. Plenty of room for two cars now. I'm glad I don't have a "before" picture.
August 6, 2010
Summer Project #4: Grandpa Niehaus' Pasta Sauce
I thought it would be a good idea to write this down somewhere.
2 lbs of tomatoes - peeled and seeded (I used a mix of the five varieties that I'm growing in garden)
1 med onion - chopped fine
24 oz. tomato paste
46 oz. tomato juice
12 oz. hot water
1/2 cup sugar
5-6 "toes" of garlic
A handful of oregano (dried from the garden)
A handful of basil (also dried from the garden)
2 Tbsp red pepper flakes
2 Tbsp celery flakes
2 tsp olive oil
salt and pepper to taste
1/4 bottle red wine (I used Root:1 Cabernet Sauvignon 2008 from Chile)
----
I added some bay leaves, a minced seeded jalapeno, and fine chopped green pepper.
2 lbs of tomatoes - peeled and seeded (I used a mix of the five varieties that I'm growing in garden)
1 med onion - chopped fine
24 oz. tomato paste
46 oz. tomato juice
12 oz. hot water
1/2 cup sugar
5-6 "toes" of garlic
A handful of oregano (dried from the garden)
A handful of basil (also dried from the garden)
2 Tbsp red pepper flakes
2 Tbsp celery flakes
2 tsp olive oil
salt and pepper to taste
1/4 bottle red wine (I used Root:1 Cabernet Sauvignon 2008 from Chile)
----
I added some bay leaves, a minced seeded jalapeno, and fine chopped green pepper.
All the ingredients in the pot (yes, that's Grandpa's pasta sauce pot).
Raise to a boil and then reduce to low (a constant simmer).
Six hours later. Don't underestimate the importance of the wooden spoon.
Mangia, mangia.
Summer Project #3: The Front Yard
I haven't done much to the front yard this year. Everything seems to be doing well. I added two types of Phlox and some violas. Most things have come and gone already. The daisies (from my sister's wedding) were over two feet tall and will be moved to the backyard and replaced by columbines. The rose of sharon is blooming nicely and will need a severe trimming in February. The lilac on the left probably doesn't get enough sun for its location; the burning bush in the middle has done nicely and will add some nice color at the end of the season.
The crazy Russian Sage makes the yard look like mess from this angle.
The Rose of Sharon
I thought this was going to be the last daisy of the year, but it looks like there is another one that will be ready in a couple of days.
Summer Project #2: The Mailbox
This is our old mailbox.
It is rusty and sad.
And this is our new mailbox. It came from Water Glass Studios in Canada. It is handmade and copper.
Thanks, Mom and Dad.
Summer Project #1: The Garden
Here's the far garden. New raised beds this year. The cucumbers are taking over the yard on the left, the squash (acorn and butternut) are wandering in the yard to the right. The tomatoes (celebrity and beef) are about six feet tall and producing like mad. The okra and sweet peppers are a bit small, but the sunflowers are going gangbusters and are over eight feet tall. The green onions are done for the season and the eggplant are still getting started.
A closer shot of the back garden.
Side view.
Another shot of the near garden.
View of Brussel Sprouts and Roma tomatoes.
March 7, 2008
What!?
What has happened to the real news?! I'm watching Nightline on ABC tonight and so far Terry Moran has covered how the media covers Britney Spears too much - the real coup of this report was going to a book store and asking the employee how many covers Spears is on per week. At one point, an interviewee points out how depressing it is that his content (covering Britney) is more viewed than real world news.
Commercial Break
Terry Moran comes back and starts talking about the brassy hip-hop group "Salt N Pepa". I turn off the TV.
Seriously, Terry, there isn't some sort of major crisis that almost caused a war in South America this week that you could spend a couple of minutes talking about; there isn't a war going on in Afghanistan and Iraq; there isn't a major political race happening; there isn't anything else that you could cover?
Good grief.
Commercial Break
Terry Moran comes back and starts talking about the brassy hip-hop group "Salt N Pepa". I turn off the TV.
Seriously, Terry, there isn't some sort of major crisis that almost caused a war in South America this week that you could spend a couple of minutes talking about; there isn't a war going on in Afghanistan and Iraq; there isn't a major political race happening; there isn't anything else that you could cover?
Good grief.
February 20, 2008
No, I'm in the book business
And you thought Barnes and Noble sold books...
Today I ran into Barnes and Noble, walked up the escalator, over to the 'new fiction' section, grabbed the new Chip Kidd, and headed for the cash registers. This all took approximately 2 minutes. I then had to spend at least 5 minutes explaining that,
"No, I don't have a membership"
"No, I don't want a membership"
"No, I don't want to save 6 dollars today by spending 25 dollars on a membership"
"No, I don't want a gift receipt"
"No, I haven't heard about the new return policy"....
I used to work at the Barnes and the Noble and hated (hated!) asking people if they would like a membership (so I didn't).
**But it's only 25 dollars and you save 10%! That's about the cost of tax! You can now buy books essentially tax-free for a whole year if you pay us 25 dollars now.**
See, if Barnes and Noble sells a book they make a couple bucks at the most, but if they can sucker someone into signing up as a member they make 25 dollars. So they hire people that know nothing about books but everything about pushy salesmanship. I was always disappointed when fellow employees wouldn't have an answer to the question, "What are you reading now?"
Even the cafe asks you to buy a membership for pete's sake! You can save 20 cents on this coffee if you buy a membership. Your total today? 27.00 for a small coffee. Now if you purchase all of your coffee here for the rest of the year, you just might break even.
It is the worst deal out there and they keep pushing the membership card like its some sort of revolution for the bookbuyer. I hate it so much that I usually never go to Barnes and Noble anymore because I don't want to hear about the card again.
Chip Kidd's new book better be really good.
Today I ran into Barnes and Noble, walked up the escalator, over to the 'new fiction' section, grabbed the new Chip Kidd, and headed for the cash registers. This all took approximately 2 minutes. I then had to spend at least 5 minutes explaining that,
"No, I don't have a membership"
"No, I don't want a membership"
"No, I don't want to save 6 dollars today by spending 25 dollars on a membership"
"No, I don't want a gift receipt"
"No, I haven't heard about the new return policy"....
I used to work at the Barnes and the Noble and hated (hated!) asking people if they would like a membership (so I didn't).
**But it's only 25 dollars and you save 10%! That's about the cost of tax! You can now buy books essentially tax-free for a whole year if you pay us 25 dollars now.**
See, if Barnes and Noble sells a book they make a couple bucks at the most, but if they can sucker someone into signing up as a member they make 25 dollars. So they hire people that know nothing about books but everything about pushy salesmanship. I was always disappointed when fellow employees wouldn't have an answer to the question, "What are you reading now?"
Even the cafe asks you to buy a membership for pete's sake! You can save 20 cents on this coffee if you buy a membership. Your total today? 27.00 for a small coffee. Now if you purchase all of your coffee here for the rest of the year, you just might break even.
It is the worst deal out there and they keep pushing the membership card like its some sort of revolution for the bookbuyer. I hate it so much that I usually never go to Barnes and Noble anymore because I don't want to hear about the card again.
Chip Kidd's new book better be really good.
February 2, 2008
That's Right
In an effort to make all weekend nights as fun as possible, yesterday night...
I totally fixed a toilet.
That's right, a toilet: mineral deposits and all.
It took longer than it should have because the pipe that connects the water to the tank came a little loose while I was replacing the flapper valve which caused leak number 1.
Number 1?
Yes, if you have to number the leaks, you have more than one.
For some idiotic reason, after I took the flapper valve out and installed the new one, I forgot to replace the gasket over the locknut. That is a colossal mistake.
Upon first practice flush, the entire contents of the tank found their way onto the bathroom floor. Leak #2. If you call a sudden gush of a gallon of water a leak.
At least I didn't crack the porcelain, right dad?
So the tank comes back off and the gasket gets installed. And now?
The house is quiet again,
and the toilet isn't running.
Of course, with the 10 inches of snow that were dumped on us, I'm not running either. Har-har.
I totally fixed a toilet.
That's right, a toilet: mineral deposits and all.
It took longer than it should have because the pipe that connects the water to the tank came a little loose while I was replacing the flapper valve which caused leak number 1.
Number 1?
Yes, if you have to number the leaks, you have more than one.
For some idiotic reason, after I took the flapper valve out and installed the new one, I forgot to replace the gasket over the locknut. That is a colossal mistake.
Upon first practice flush, the entire contents of the tank found their way onto the bathroom floor. Leak #2. If you call a sudden gush of a gallon of water a leak.
At least I didn't crack the porcelain, right dad?
So the tank comes back off and the gasket gets installed. And now?
The house is quiet again,
and the toilet isn't running.
Of course, with the 10 inches of snow that were dumped on us, I'm not running either. Har-har.
January 3, 2008
Best Books I Read in 2007
I didn't read as much as I'd hoped this year but I guess teaching three Honors classes and taking two grad classes a term will do that to you. Here are my favorite books from 2007 followed by a list of all the books I read - for posterity's sake.
Top 5
#5 - The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip : George Saunders
A nice, little modern fable about sharing work and being generous and whatnot. You will find a new appreciation for nice neighbors and perhaps a love of fences. The illustrations are by Lane Smith who has also done Squids will be Squids and The Stinky Cheese Man.
#4 - Icelander : Dustin Long
A crime novel where the author chronicles the murder of a detective whose life is also the subject of a fictional collection of crime stories whose author is also a character in the book so there are really fours layers of narrative to keep track of including the footnotes by the 'editor' of the Icelander but you end up forgetting about trying to figure out the murder because it's not really about that at all. The book is really a terrific romp and never seems "Barth-ian" and in its postmodern gimmicks.
#3 - The Worst Hard Time : Timothy Egan
A nonfiction account with a narrative flow of life during the Dust Bowl. There was a lot of talk about global warming this year, but if you want to see what happens when the Earth gets really pissed off, this is a book to check out and marvel at the statistics and what humans are willing to put up with in the pursuit of the land, and money, and worth.
#2 - What is the What : Dave Eggers
The autobiography of Deng, a Sudanese refugee, told by Dave Eggers is told through flashbacks when Deng attempts to make connections to Americans by telling them of the things that he's been through and how he ended up in America. Symbolically no one ever hears the tales Deng tells, much as how the plight of millions of refugees around the world are never heard.
#1 - One Hundred Years of Solitude : Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
I fell in love with Magical Realism this year. I've always liked South American culture but this is an entirely different way of writing and looking at the world than I'm used to reading. The book is brilliant and while keeping track of all the characters will the same names can get a little confusing, every page is filled with imagery and sentences that are truly fascinating and vulgar and sexy.
The Big List:
Top 5
#5 - The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip : George Saunders
A nice, little modern fable about sharing work and being generous and whatnot. You will find a new appreciation for nice neighbors and perhaps a love of fences. The illustrations are by Lane Smith who has also done Squids will be Squids and The Stinky Cheese Man.
#4 - Icelander : Dustin Long
A crime novel where the author chronicles the murder of a detective whose life is also the subject of a fictional collection of crime stories whose author is also a character in the book so there are really fours layers of narrative to keep track of including the footnotes by the 'editor' of the Icelander but you end up forgetting about trying to figure out the murder because it's not really about that at all. The book is really a terrific romp and never seems "Barth-ian" and in its postmodern gimmicks.
#3 - The Worst Hard Time : Timothy Egan
A nonfiction account with a narrative flow of life during the Dust Bowl. There was a lot of talk about global warming this year, but if you want to see what happens when the Earth gets really pissed off, this is a book to check out and marvel at the statistics and what humans are willing to put up with in the pursuit of the land, and money, and worth.
#2 - What is the What : Dave Eggers
The autobiography of Deng, a Sudanese refugee, told by Dave Eggers is told through flashbacks when Deng attempts to make connections to Americans by telling them of the things that he's been through and how he ended up in America. Symbolically no one ever hears the tales Deng tells, much as how the plight of millions of refugees around the world are never heard.
#1 - One Hundred Years of Solitude : Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
I fell in love with Magical Realism this year. I've always liked South American culture but this is an entirely different way of writing and looking at the world than I'm used to reading. The book is brilliant and while keeping track of all the characters will the same names can get a little confusing, every page is filled with imagery and sentences that are truly fascinating and vulgar and sexy.
The Big List:
- Bowl of Cherries : Kaufman
- Huck Finn : Twain
- The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming : Snicket
- One Hundred Years of Solitude : Marquez
- A Thousand Splendid Suns : Hosseini
- Nickel and Dimed : Ehrenreich
- Honky : Conley
- The Zimmerman Telegram : Tuchman
- The Facts of Winter : Poissel
- The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip : Saunders
- The Plan of Chicago : Smith
- Icelander : Long
- The Ends of the Earth : Kaplan
- The Family That Couldn't Sleep : Max
- The Day the World Ended at Little Bighorn : Marshall
- Slaughterhouse Five : Vonnegut
- Falling Man : Delillo
- The Book of Evidence : Banville
- Concept-Based Thinking Classroom : Erickson
- Jokes Told in Heaven about Babies : Thomas
- Cooperative Learning in the Classroom : Johnson
- What is the What : Eggers
- The Pharmacist's Mate : Fusselman
- The Middle Stories : Heti
- To Ruhleben -- and Back : Pyke
- This Shape We're In : Lethem
- Monkey : Wu
- The Worst Hard Time : Egan
October 21, 2007
New Bikes on Campus
North Central College, where I am taking my grad classes, has purchased 20 refurbished classic looking red bikes and given them to students. All students. All the bikes have locks with the exact same combination so if you see one on campus and want to take a ride you are welcome to. It's kind of like the bike program at University of Wisconsin - Madison. The seats are kind of high which makes getting on with a backpack kind of a challenge but the ride is oh so smooth. It's a nice little surprise to walk out of a class and see that you can take a bike ride home instead of walking.
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