Anyone who’s ever lived in a dorm or similarly under-furnished, low-budget location will recognize these ingredients, which constitute the classic instant bookcase.
However, my intent is not to give building tips, which I think will make this nation a safer place to be. Instead, I want to think about what books I'd put on the shelves.
This isn’t exactly the proverbial “what books I would take to a desert island”. Since I am an extremely fast reader, it wouldn’t do me much good to take a stack of novels. I’d be through them in a week and end up no better off than Burgess Meredith in "Time Enough at Last”. For that situation, I think I’d need the Bible and the Baseball Encyclopedia, both of which contain enough variety and resist synopsis enough that I’d be able to get a lot of hours out of them.
Instead, I wanted to point to a few “real” books – the kind people sit down & read from cover to cover – that I really enjoyed and I felt had a special quality. I tend to read an odd combination of baseball, mysteries, and cultural history (I’m a sucker for any title with a decade in it), so I feel certain I can come up with something to bore anyone.
In the mystery field, I don’t think anything can match the novels of Raymond Chandler. He has his own distinctive style; one of my favorite lines (which he uses more than once) is, “There was nothing to say to that, so I said it.” Along with Hammett, invented the hard-boiled, and realistic, private eye.
Often imitated, never equaled, not even by Robert B. Parker, who is one of his most slavish imitators and even finished an unfinished Chandler novel AND wrote a sequel to it. To be fair, Parker not only imitates Chandler but also himself; most of his recent novels read like his early novels put through a version of the “Telephone Game”. Of course, he’s been writing Spenser so long and has written so many that he might actually have forgotten that he’s written it before. The way to tell Good Spenser from Bad Spenser: the good ones are about 150 pages in paperback, and everyone has sideburns and wide ties. The bad (i.e. recent) ones are much thicker, much bigger type, much more whitespace, and consist of about 40 3- to 5-page chapters.
I must say, I’ve never read a book quite like P.J. O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores, which manages to be a textbook on government, a conservative manifesto, and quite possibly the funniest book I’ve read. It’s also pretty close to a thesaurus, because he tends (like my favorite blogger) to use his vocabulary as a playground. I make it a policy to check out anything new that PJ comes up with.
In the same vein, I have to recommend the funniest book ever on punctuation, Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, by Lynn Truss. Very British, and not recommended for those born without a sardonic gland. This is actually a tandem entry with her follow-up, Talk to the Hand, which is a treatise on manners in the same vein.
In Part II (coming soon), a few more thoughts.....
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Saturday, February 25, 2006
Metablog: Hurling the cat out of the bag
I considered several titles for this entry, like “Outing Myself” or “An Advertisement for Myself”, but in any case the sense is, I’ve gone public.
There’s an old joke about a little girl who gets perfume and a watch for Christmas and goes around showing off her gifts all the time. Finally her parents tell her to stop pestering people. Soon company comes to the house and she’s like a cat on a griddle but she can’t say anything. At last she bursts out: “I’m not supposed to say anything, but if anybody hears anything or smells anything, it’s me!”
That’s been me the past few weeks; everything someone says leads me to note, “Hey, that reminds me of something I wrote in my blog!” Some of them are even people speaking to me at the time, although I’ll squeeze into someone else’s conversation if necessary to make my “offhand observation”. The funny, or sad, thing is that almost no one bites. Nobody says, “Gee, what a keen idea! Can I read it immediately?”
So after a couple of months of writing and posting my blog and getting absolutely no feedback at all, I couldn’t take it any more. I sent out a message to basically everyone in my address book, essentially begging them to read it. I’m pleased to say I’ve already gotten a half-dozen or so responses, and while none of them were sobbing uncontrollably & saying I’d changed their lives, it was nice to know someone besides me actually read something.
I've been checking in every couple of days, watching as my hit counter climbed all the way into the mid-teens. Unfortunately, I believe most of those were me, checking to see if my hit counter had gone up yet. And I have garnered a total of one (1) comment, by some random stranger impressed that I mentioned the Waitresses in my Christmas music piece.
When I checked tonight … hit counter 42. They can’t all be me, right? Of course, it’s a double-edged sword; if someone’s looking, now I have to make sure I’m doing interesting, good-quality stuff. I'm trying to take it as encouragement to do better, not pressure to be perfect – but it’s tempting to end up in that same mindset I wrote about in “Going Cold Turkey”. Go read that, it’s pretty good :-).
I am one of the four people across the land who don’t watch American Idol, but I know how it works. The first several shows of each season feature the most self-deluded and talentless candidates, to the point that viewers end up asking, “What was THIS bozo thinking about trying to be a singer?”
Now I think in recent seasons, it’s probably driven by cynical motives as often as not: if I’m bad enough, I’ll make it on TV. But surely for many it’s not all that different from my e-mail. I’m doing something here in the privacy of my own room that I like & I think is pretty good, but I can’t be sure how good in “absolute” terms till someone outside my own head evaluates it.
If you do choose to respond, however, I'd like it if you'd err on the side of Paula and not Simon.
There’s an old joke about a little girl who gets perfume and a watch for Christmas and goes around showing off her gifts all the time. Finally her parents tell her to stop pestering people. Soon company comes to the house and she’s like a cat on a griddle but she can’t say anything. At last she bursts out: “I’m not supposed to say anything, but if anybody hears anything or smells anything, it’s me!”
That’s been me the past few weeks; everything someone says leads me to note, “Hey, that reminds me of something I wrote in my blog!” Some of them are even people speaking to me at the time, although I’ll squeeze into someone else’s conversation if necessary to make my “offhand observation”. The funny, or sad, thing is that almost no one bites. Nobody says, “Gee, what a keen idea! Can I read it immediately?”
So after a couple of months of writing and posting my blog and getting absolutely no feedback at all, I couldn’t take it any more. I sent out a message to basically everyone in my address book, essentially begging them to read it. I’m pleased to say I’ve already gotten a half-dozen or so responses, and while none of them were sobbing uncontrollably & saying I’d changed their lives, it was nice to know someone besides me actually read something.
I've been checking in every couple of days, watching as my hit counter climbed all the way into the mid-teens. Unfortunately, I believe most of those were me, checking to see if my hit counter had gone up yet. And I have garnered a total of one (1) comment, by some random stranger impressed that I mentioned the Waitresses in my Christmas music piece.
When I checked tonight … hit counter 42. They can’t all be me, right? Of course, it’s a double-edged sword; if someone’s looking, now I have to make sure I’m doing interesting, good-quality stuff. I'm trying to take it as encouragement to do better, not pressure to be perfect – but it’s tempting to end up in that same mindset I wrote about in “Going Cold Turkey”. Go read that, it’s pretty good :-).
I am one of the four people across the land who don’t watch American Idol, but I know how it works. The first several shows of each season feature the most self-deluded and talentless candidates, to the point that viewers end up asking, “What was THIS bozo thinking about trying to be a singer?”
Now I think in recent seasons, it’s probably driven by cynical motives as often as not: if I’m bad enough, I’ll make it on TV. But surely for many it’s not all that different from my e-mail. I’m doing something here in the privacy of my own room that I like & I think is pretty good, but I can’t be sure how good in “absolute” terms till someone outside my own head evaluates it.
If you do choose to respond, however, I'd like it if you'd err on the side of Paula and not Simon.
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Just Like Looking in a Mirror
I have mentioned previously that I sometimes feel a bit… out of the mainstream. I was going to say “like an oddball”, but you know what? I’m not taking the rap for it. Maybe the mainstream are the oddballs.
In any case, it was refreshing to turn on the TV this fall and see someone that (at least in some respects) reminds me of me. I don’t know if that’s happened much since the premiere of Mad About You, which for awhile had us searching for the hidden cameras in our apartment.
My new role model/separated at birth twin is Rod Calloway, the First Gentleman played by Kyle Secor on Commander-in-Chief. I’m not going to claim “identical” twin, although if someone else wants to make the tall-dark-&-handsome comparison, I’m not going to interrupt. My identification with Rod (aside from his love of baseball) is more functional.
The First Gentleman, of course, is the husband of Mackenzie Calloway, the nation’s first female president. Rod is himself very able politically and often gives Mac advice on the big issues she faces (by the way, who watching this show or West Wing would ever want to be president? That job is just way too hard for a mortal).
I am, of course, the spouse of a pastor, and I feel that like the First Gentleman I’m often in a unique (and somewhat tightrope-like) position. I have a lifetime invested in the church, just as my wife does… with resulting ideas and opinions I’m always prepared to share.
Here’s the First Gentleman tightrope: I can have ideas, but I always have to be careful not to undercut her or make it look publicly like I’m the real power behind the throne. I can share opinions with others, but I have to make it clear that I’m not speaking for her, unless specifically authorized.
More than anything else, I think the common ground is this: I can do a lot of things behind the scenes, so to speak, to support her and make her ministry more successful. But it’s pretty astonishing how easily I can undermine her ministry. If I do something stupid, I can embarrass her and weaken her effectiveness. In fact, I can make her look bad in many more ways than I can make her look good. Maybe I’m inflating my importance, but how many professions do you know of where someone can have so much effect on how their spouse is perceived?
Apparently I'm to be denied this opportunity for video mentoring, as my local ABC affiliate has curiously stopped carrying the show. Otherwise I'd be watching Rod Calloway like a hawk, hoping to pick up some tips that will help me “do my job” better.
In any case, it was refreshing to turn on the TV this fall and see someone that (at least in some respects) reminds me of me. I don’t know if that’s happened much since the premiere of Mad About You, which for awhile had us searching for the hidden cameras in our apartment.
My new role model/separated at birth twin is Rod Calloway, the First Gentleman played by Kyle Secor on Commander-in-Chief. I’m not going to claim “identical” twin, although if someone else wants to make the tall-dark-&-handsome comparison, I’m not going to interrupt. My identification with Rod (aside from his love of baseball) is more functional.
The First Gentleman, of course, is the husband of Mackenzie Calloway, the nation’s first female president. Rod is himself very able politically and often gives Mac advice on the big issues she faces (by the way, who watching this show or West Wing would ever want to be president? That job is just way too hard for a mortal).
I am, of course, the spouse of a pastor, and I feel that like the First Gentleman I’m often in a unique (and somewhat tightrope-like) position. I have a lifetime invested in the church, just as my wife does… with resulting ideas and opinions I’m always prepared to share.
Here’s the First Gentleman tightrope: I can have ideas, but I always have to be careful not to undercut her or make it look publicly like I’m the real power behind the throne. I can share opinions with others, but I have to make it clear that I’m not speaking for her, unless specifically authorized.
More than anything else, I think the common ground is this: I can do a lot of things behind the scenes, so to speak, to support her and make her ministry more successful. But it’s pretty astonishing how easily I can undermine her ministry. If I do something stupid, I can embarrass her and weaken her effectiveness. In fact, I can make her look bad in many more ways than I can make her look good. Maybe I’m inflating my importance, but how many professions do you know of where someone can have so much effect on how their spouse is perceived?
Apparently I'm to be denied this opportunity for video mentoring, as my local ABC affiliate has curiously stopped carrying the show. Otherwise I'd be watching Rod Calloway like a hawk, hoping to pick up some tips that will help me “do my job” better.
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Locker Room: All of Our Operators Are Assisting Other Customers
I haven't been hitting my self-imposed goals for posting frequency (hey, you could call me once in awhile, you know), but my attention has been divided lately because it's my busy season. I'm not a tax preparer or a florist or even a snowplow driver (although the plow guys in our area have had a pretty restful time of it). No, I'm referring to my moonlighting gig as commissioner of a fantasy baseball league.
I admit, I'm one of Those Guys. I organized the league six years ago, I keep the Official League Records (not that anyone else even notices), and I even send out occasional e-mail newsletters. I've actually gotten a little less compulsive about that -- the first couple of years it was weekly newsletters. But I guess when you come down to it, fantasy baseball has become the 21st century equivalent to Dungeons & Dragons. It's just as well I got married before I started doing it.
Most (normal) people are not thinking too much about baseball right now; the players haven't even gone to spring training yet. But in addition to supervising the league itself, I also personally conduct the player draft. That means I have to create lists of players at each position & get them to the other "owners" so they can rank the players and pass the lists back. Then I go through the lists in a preset order & assign players to teams.
There's a lot of work involved, of course, but (as with my other ... "enthusiasms") the truly remarkable, or scary, thing is what this all does to my brain. For the next month, guaranteed, when I am in the shower I'll be thinking of how I might rank the second basemen (should Mr. X be #11 or #14?). When I'm cooking dinner, I'll be trying to think of an American League starting pitcher the other guys might have overlooked. And when I'm on the interstate, I'm sure the question of which of last year's players I should keep (we're allowed four) will induce me to miss an exit sometime. If you've ever been involved in getting something started, you won't be surprised: the actual beginning of the season will come as a relief.
I guess to be on the safe side, I'd better stay in the right hand lane for the next month or so... maybe I'd better have my flashers on for good measure.
I admit, I'm one of Those Guys. I organized the league six years ago, I keep the Official League Records (not that anyone else even notices), and I even send out occasional e-mail newsletters. I've actually gotten a little less compulsive about that -- the first couple of years it was weekly newsletters. But I guess when you come down to it, fantasy baseball has become the 21st century equivalent to Dungeons & Dragons. It's just as well I got married before I started doing it.
Most (normal) people are not thinking too much about baseball right now; the players haven't even gone to spring training yet. But in addition to supervising the league itself, I also personally conduct the player draft. That means I have to create lists of players at each position & get them to the other "owners" so they can rank the players and pass the lists back. Then I go through the lists in a preset order & assign players to teams.
There's a lot of work involved, of course, but (as with my other ... "enthusiasms") the truly remarkable, or scary, thing is what this all does to my brain. For the next month, guaranteed, when I am in the shower I'll be thinking of how I might rank the second basemen (should Mr. X be #11 or #14?). When I'm cooking dinner, I'll be trying to think of an American League starting pitcher the other guys might have overlooked. And when I'm on the interstate, I'm sure the question of which of last year's players I should keep (we're allowed four) will induce me to miss an exit sometime. If you've ever been involved in getting something started, you won't be surprised: the actual beginning of the season will come as a relief.
I guess to be on the safe side, I'd better stay in the right hand lane for the next month or so... maybe I'd better have my flashers on for good measure.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Family Room -- Fear Factor
One of my core philosophies is that you can never really teach anyone anything – they have to learn it for themselves. This may explain why my teaching career wasn’t a total success, of course, but I’m really thinking about parenting. My children are small now, but someday when they’re teenagers I hope they prove me wrong.
One of the lessons I hope I can communicate is not to let fear and anxiety get in the way of trying new things. I’m not talking about vegetables – in the case of most veggies, I think fear & anxiety is a reasonable reaction. Looking back over my life, though, I can see so many times when I missed out on something good because I was too afraid to try. Several examples:
One of the lessons I hope I can communicate is not to let fear and anxiety get in the way of trying new things. I’m not talking about vegetables – in the case of most veggies, I think fear & anxiety is a reasonable reaction. Looking back over my life, though, I can see so many times when I missed out on something good because I was too afraid to try. Several examples:
- When I was in junior high, the choir director asked me to join the choir. I put it off till high school.
- Then she asked me to go out for the school musical. Not only was I too scared to get up on stage, but I also was afraid it would screw up my schoolwork. I finally went out in my junior year and made the chorus; by senior year, I was one of the leads.
- One time the school’s athletic director asked me to be the public address announcer for the football team. I said yes, but as the week went on I started to think, “It’ll be so hard to see what’s going on. What if I mess up?” I sought him out and told him I couldn’t make it, I had “stuff to do at home.”
- It's probably only fair to note that I never asked a girl on a date till I was 16 1/2.
- When I went to college, I joined the radio station -- which in itself was a huge leap of faith for a guy like me. It took me a year after that, though, to get involved with sports broadcasting, which had always been a passion of mine (All right, don't torture me, I'll confess – it still is. If some minor league baseball team called tomorrow, I’d quit my job in a heartbeat).
OK, no major harm done – just some things I would have enjoyed that I didn’t get to enjoy till later. Bummer enough, but consider this one:
I was in high school and college at the start of the personal computer era. My mom was walking through a mall one day and, on impulse, purchased the fabled TRS-80. She quickly decided she couldn’t really use it, so it came to me.
Actually, there wasn’t that much you could do at that point with a TRS-80, but I did everything I could and loved every minute of it. I even took computer programming courses. Then the time came to declare a major……
Keep in mind, computer science as a discipline was pretty new, at least for the general public. I thought about computer science, but I kept coming back to, “Computer science is for geniuses, I could never hack it” (pun unintended). So I majored in math, minored in secondary ed, and went into teaching.
Fast forward a dozen years or so and the teaching gig isn’t going quite like I drew it up on the chalkboard. I’m teaching part-time at all sorts of colleges, trying from semester to semester to piece together a schedule. I decide once again to start taking computer science courses….
… and before you know it, I end up in a programming job, having the time of my life. It wasn’t exactly instantaneous, but probably quicker than I had a right to expect. Don’t get me wrong, there were a lot of great things about teaching, but I still kind of feel like it took me a little extra time to get it right.
My son, who is 6, told me this week that he didn't want to go to college if he had to "sleep over" -- so I can see I have my work cut out for me. There are about 800 line items in the parental job description, but this one might be in the top 10: to give your kids the chance to face the world without running away.
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