In league with the devil

I have been reading “A Place for Everything” by the imaginative Judith Flanders.  She is imaginative in the way Deirdre Mask in “The Address Book” is imaginative.  They both see value and intelligence where most people don’t. The names of streets and the numbering of buildings makes addresses.  These days, too, having an address is a valuable thing to have.  In a similar way, having a place for a book in a library, a place that is related to the identity of the book, makes it much easier to locate the actual book and even to check whether that book is available from that library.  

The subject of new kinds of library materials is important in our house.  My wife was a school librarian and a professor of school librarianship.  She wrote her dissertation about the problem of new materials and libraries, such as slide-tapes, visual slides to be shown along with a tape, discussing each slide in turn.

You probably know that the mechanical process of printing a book was not invented until the 1640’s.  When Gutenberg and his business partner took a load of Bibles to sell on a Paris street corner, each copy of that important book was sold for a much cheaper price than was typical for the previous hand-written copies.  Elizabeth Eisenstein reports that people reported the men to police for being in league with the devil since every copy showed EXACTLY the same on a given page, not possible in hand-copied books.

3 Books of note

I like to mention books that have mattered to me, hoping that they may matter for somebody else.  I send these posts to about 100 people but 2 or 3 times as many people look at the blog’s web page or get it from a friend or contact.

Two books that come to mind as influential in my own thinking are “Incognito” by D. Eagleman and “The 10,000 Year Explosion” by Cochran and Harpending.  Incognito is often used to mean “in disguise” but in this book, it means the unconscious powers of our brains and nervous systems.  The 10,000 Year Explosion is about what is sometimes called the human diaspora, the time of humans spreading around the planet.  I recommend them both.

A third book at least as valuable as those two is “The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat” by Oliver Sacks.  The book is a bit mis-titled in my opinion.  The man in question is reported to have touched his wife’s HAND and attempted to drape that on his head.  He mistook her HAND, not her whole body.  This Oliver Sacks book is a challenge to read, at least for me because it is about such odd mental worlds that can develop.

Updates

The two ice storms broke many trees and branches.  The community is still clearing up, with many very large piles of tree trunks and branches to be picked up from lawn edges.  

We once had nicely functioning phones in six locations around the house but with internet changes and aging electronics, things aren’t so peachy now.  One of the main changes is the dependence of our phones, including cellphones, on the internet.  Another is the shrinking or elimination of “broadcasting” and more reliance on that same internet. All of that takes time, often years or decades and years and decades are aging agents working on us and on our electronics.  Between ice storm damage and services changes and aging, we spend several hours in our internet supplier’s office, working with a nimble-fingered young man getting our accounts, our equipment and our credentials in order. 

Changed plans

We thought we would be gone but we aren’t.  I thought I wouldn’t write today but I am.

We did drive to another town but we found that we weren’t that interested.  We talked and decided to come home.  We did.

Blog pause

I have events coming up and will pause my blog, probably until Friday of this week. There are 5960 entries already, some of which are worth re-reading.  During the pause, you read some at fearfunandfiloz.  You start your own blog but if you do, I encourage you to make notes during the day of possible themes.  I also encourage you to make a blog comment every day, not just on the days that stand out.  You may be surprised to find the inner resources you possess to see and comment.

I can write

English is the only language I know well enough to use to write.  I am confident that my studies in Latin, French and German have been sufficient for me to use some app or program or digital tool to translate writings into one of those other languages. According to OpenAI, there are about 3000 languages that have a system of writing and I suppose I could find some tools to translate this blog post into most or all of them.

Writing and speaking are special for teachers and others who attend to the inner thoughts and feelings of others.  If I am feeling grumpy and grouchy, you might conclude that by seeing my facial expression but generally what I say or write is a more incisive guide to what I feel inside and why.

I used every page in my notebook recently and I am now on the first page of a new notebook.  I imagine that in ten centuries such documents will be sold for tons of money or jewelry or property.

56 times

I taught various courses at the University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point.  Just about every spring, the radio station on campus, WWSP 90FM, 89.9FM, runs “the world’s largest trivia contest”.  It has done so 56 times.  The contest is noticeable since many cars are parked near some houses from Friday evening until midnight the following Sunday.  My son-in-law and my daughter live nearby and they host a team.  Some people have been team members for years and some have aged enough that a contest that runs from Friday at 6 PM until Sunday midnight is too long.

The contest includes 300-400 teams scattered all over the world.

Perfection problems

Ezra Bayda and Frederic Nietzsche have writings that emphasize that our lives have disappointments and troubles.  Bayda and Elizabeth Hamilton were both followers of Charlotte Beck.  Beck died in her 90’s in 2011.  She was a teacher of Zen.  

Bayda’s book “At Home in the Muddy Water” and some of the writing of Nietzsche point to learning to think of a satisfying life without imagining no troubles of any kind, with just steady ongoing bliss.  We have nervous systems built for troubles and disappointments and both men saw that disappointments and troubles and genuine “messes” are part of being alive.  When we think of moving to our favorite scenic canyon or seaside in the hope of zero messes and failures, we tend to under-appreciate our need for challenges and bringers of despair and tears.  Admittedly, it can be temporarily impossible to be thankful for troubles and pains.  But if we stay aware and open, we can come to appreciate falls, errors and bothers while striving to avoid or minimize them.  We are built to handle downers and benefit from the handling.

Greening

We didn’t have an especially cold winter but it is fully into spring now.  Plants and trees that need a bit of time to green up are visibly doing so.  Now, when I look at trees, it is not an illusion that buds and little leaves are there.  They really are.

Lawns are now green, too.  It is really spring.  We went to lunch and neither of us wore a jacket.

Yuck! A leg!

I rarely try to read something that is difficult to pay attention to.   But last evening, reading Oliver Sack’s “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Stories”, I read chapter 4, “The Man Who Fell Out of Bed”.  Sacks was a neurologist and the book in question is about unusual conditions that patients developed.  I may have fallen out of bed sometime but not lately and not often.  This chapter tells of cases of loss of the sense of proprioception, our sense of our own bodies and where our parts are, currently.  Chapter 4 is about a man who awoke only to discover a LEG in his bed!  Yuck and a half!  Some prankster must have put a severed leg in his bed.  Stressing and straining, he managed to push the repulsive thing out of his bed but as he did so, he fell out of bed, too.

Yes, it was his leg!  Nicely and properly attached to him, just as it should be.