Month: February 2011

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A picture, in words

The woman was probably, oh, forty-ish. Her face was just lined enough to show that she’d been through some years, but not enough to make her look like all of her youthful days were behind her just yet. She sat at the cafe table, an unopened book and two coffee cups in front of her. She drank from one; the other was empty. She took an uninterested sip as she looked off, toward the front door of the place; then she put down the cup and ran her fingers through her shoulder-length brown hair. Her bangs were mostly held back by the sunglasses she had perched atop her head, but a few strands hung down, low and loose over her eyes; these she occasionally pushed aside but she mostly didn’t seem to care. And so she kept looking around, looking down, looking at her book, but mostly looking toward the cafe door. She would stir her coffee, even though she hadn’t put anything in it. Then she would look again toward the door.

On this went, until she finished her coffee. Then she waited five more minutes before she got up, put on her coat, and filled the empty cup that she had bought for her unmet companion before she left, book in hand and sunglasses lowered back over eyes that were filling with tears.

(Inspired by, and embellished from, a woman I saw today.)

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Something for Thursday

My favorite scene from My Neighbor Totoro. The two girls here have moved to the country, and they’ve discovered three Totoro’s living in the woods nearby. This is what happens when they wake up in the middle of the night and find the Totoros doing…something in their garden.

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Answers, the first!

OK, it’s time to start providing answers to questions posed for Ask Me Anything! 2011. Lots of good queries, as always, and I’m actually going to keep things open for questioning right up until I post the answer to the last question I receive, so feel free to keep things going! Post questions in comments to this post, or use e-mail or Facebook message.

An anonymous reader asks:

Have you ever tried a sustained use-no-electronic-gadget (banning Internet use or TV watching, for example)? If you did, what happened? If you haven’t, what’s your opinion of these attempts?

The closest I’ve come was a three month period in 2008 when I stopped blogging. I was just burned out on the whole thing, and I needed a big-time break. Those two months went quite well; I did a lot of movie watching and I did quite a bit of writing and I did quite a bit of stuff with the family. But doing without just for the sake of doing without has always seemed a pretty odd thing to do, so I’ve never had a “no teevee month” or “no Internet for a season” or anything similar.

I do cut down on my Internet usage on occasion, when I think I’m not getting enough done, and I’ve gone so far as to look for an ethernet cable with a male plug at one end and a female plug in the other, so I could disconnect the wireless router without disconnecting the Main Library Computer (named Arwen, actually), so The Wife and The Daughter can have Internet while I concentrate on other stuff. But I haven’t actually found one yet.

You live in a smaller place (i.e., not a large mansion). Does your desire to collect books cause problems? Do you have to “cull the herd” every so often?

Sigh. Yeah, it does create space issues, most definitely. And I should cull the herd more often than I do. I have a lot of books left over from my philosophy-reading days in college that I must admit I am unlikely to ever read again, for instance. Culling is hard. It really is!

I don’t really buy as many books now as I used to, with the exception being the quarterly library book sales, where I generally can’t help myself. I suppose I could start a small used book business for myself on eBay or Amazon — in fact, which is better? Anybody know? I’ve sold books on eBay before, but I tend to be less-than-consistent with it.

And so it starts! Ask Me Anything, folks! Check out my neophyte entry in Tumblr land, too!

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Still tumbl’n

I continue to dip my feet in the Tumblr water. I even came up with a name for the thing, Driftwood upon the Bosphorus. Because, unlike the shores of Byzantium themselves, the driftwood that floats by on the Strait of Bosphorus is only transitory, there one moment, and then gone by with another piece floating up soon behind it. Or something like that. It sounded more poetic earlier today, when I thought of it right after my first cup of coffee.

I also came up with a masthead image, which clearly has nothing at all to do with driftwood, water, shores, or anything else nautical. But then, I haven’t used nautically-themed mastheads round here in a long time, either, so there’s that.

Anyhow, I think I’m kind of understanding the notion of Tumblr. A Facebook and blogging friend, Steph Waller, inquired about it on FB, and I responded thus:

It looks to me like a blogging platform that is more geared to short posts, pictures, videos, and that sort of thing than Blogger or WordPress, which handle those things but are really intended for the posting of text. A lot of bloggers I know have “real” blogs and Tumblrs where they just post pictures and whatnot that doesn’t require lots of comment. Sort of a blogging “tapas bar”, to make a really bad analogy. I’m sure you can use it to market your book, though!

(Yes, she has a book to promote. Note to self: buy a copy of Steph’s book.)

When I asked yesterday what to do with the thing, I got a number of excellent responses. M.D. Jackson:

Find images that stir your soul, that speak to your very core even if you can’t figure out exactly why. Download them, scan them, snap a picture of them with your camera, then upload them to your tumblr to share with the world.

They will eventually form a collage that will tell people more truth about you than you will be able to tell with words.

Or you can just load it up with LOL cats.

OK! That’s a good answer. Also good, and much more succinct, is Roger‘s answer to “What do I do with a Tumblr page?”:

Damned if I know.

Maybe not helpful, but honest, which should never be discounted. From Paul:

I had heard of Tumblr, but had no idea what it was, so I did, you know, what you do: I Googled it. As far as I can tell, Tumblr can best be described as, “TweetBookFlickBlogr.” Is it possible to be all things to all people? Time will tell.

Lynn suggests:

I like M.D. Jackson’s idea. Or maybe you could devote it exclusively to music. The world needs more music blogs.

This sounds great, it really does, but…it should be relatively clear to anyone who reads this blog with any regularity at all to know that I can’t devote myself to exclusively anything! So Driftwood upon the Bosphorus is likely to be similar to Byzantium’s Shores, and go all over the place.

Kind of like Cal:

I agree with MD. I use them to inspire posts and to collect images for posts. I look at my archive at times and I am proud of my collection and what it says about me. Sure, lots of Selena pics but that is okay.

And finally, Blue Girl says:

I have heard mumblings and rumblings from “the kids” that they really don’t want tumblr going mainstream. They say no one should really talk about it so it doesn’t lose its *cool* factor.

And then I saw a funny tweet a week or so ago. Something like…

Tumblr is not Fight Club. Only Fight Club is Fight Club.

Sorry, kids. Us older folks are getting our grubby hands all over your shiny toy. Huzzah!!!

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Concerning pipeweed (and re-reads)

OK, so I’m re-reading The Lord of the Rings. And just in time for my entry into the book proper — I read the Prologue last night — I find this quote in a SF Signal post about re-reading books:

Of course there’s the Lord of the Rings, which is very different when you come to it at different times of life. I go back to it every six or eight years, give or take, and part of the experience is spending time with the version of myself that read it last.

True words, those!

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I believe I am quite ready for another adventure!


The Road goes ever on and on!, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

If I recall correctly, the last time I re-read The Lord of the Rings was in 2004; I was reading it when Little Quinn was born and during his initial hospital stay. I’ve generally re-read it every four or five years, so I’m actually overdue. It’s time to return to Middle Earth!

Although, actually, I’ve already been there for a week; it’s always been my practice to re-read The Hobbit first before any re-read of LOTR. A couple of years ago, when we were in Ithaca for the Apple Harvest Festival, one of my purchases at the amazing Autumn Leaves Bookstore was a pristine copy of The Annotated Hobbit, which turned out to be a fascinating read for the annotations as well as the wonderful story. It was like having a running commentary for the book, with notes on Tolkien’s thought processes, various background materials from which Tolkien drew his material, and illustrations from many foreign editions of the book.

And now, it’s on to LOTR, which makes me very happy indeed. I even bought a new copy of the book for this re-read. This is now my third copy of LOTR. Will I buy another for my tentatively-scheduled re-read in 2015? We’ll see!

The world is changing….

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