Oddments of High Unimportance

[R]eminiscent of John Cleese’s sharp observation (cf. Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind): “Sadly, most of us today believe that a computer is of more use to us than a wise person.”

Before the fact, wise people often look like fools. In contrast, experts often look like fools afterward.

The latest memoir we've been reading is Betty MacDonald's "The Plague and I," the 1948 follow-up to her wildly successful 1945 humorous memoir about being a chicken-farmer, "The Egg and I." (The latter book also introducing Ma and Pa Kettle into popular culture, so please appreciate the research that goes into these posts.)

"The Plague and I" is a most unusual follow-up, in that it documents the nine months MacDonald spent in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Seattle in 1938, when she was 30 years old. This was, remember, a time before antibiotics so the treatments and the martial discipline imposed on the patients to cure them seem draconian and almost inhumane today. Yet, despite the harshness and coldness of the regimen -- and, often, the nurses -- she tells the story with warmth, humor, and jaw-dropping details, and credits the sanatorium with saving her life. In the last chapter, she finds that adjusting to "normal" life proves just as difficult as her entry into the sanatorium.

One of the episodes she writes about is the institution's inane "occupational therapy" -- here, "occupational" meaning "to busy one's hands to take your mind off your troubles" rather than, as Betty hoped, "to prepare for a job when we finally make it out of here." Instead, the OT leader has her charges make what Betty calls "toecovers." Her description of toecovers had Liz in stitches so I thought it would be worth preserving here. It's a nice homely word for something this world still needs a name for.

Toecover is a family name for a useless gift. A crocheted napkin ring is a toecover. So are embroidered book marks, large figurines of a near-together-eyed shepherdess, pin-cushion covers done in French knots, a satin case for snapfasteners (with a card of snapfasteners tactfully enclosed so you won't make a mistake and think it a satin case for hooks-and-eyes or old pieces of embroidery thread), embroidered coat hangars, hand-painted shoe trees (always painted with a special paint that never dries), home-made three-legged footstools with the legs spaced unevenly so the footstool always lies on one side, cross-stitched pictures of lumpy brown houses with "The houfe by the fide of the road" worked in Olde Englishe underneath, hand-decorated celluloid soap cases for traveling with tops that once off will never fit back on the bottom, crocheted paper knife handle covers complete with tassel, bud vases made out of catsup bottles, taffeta bed pillows heavily shirred and apparently stuffed with iron filings, poorly executed dolls whose voluminous skirt are supposed to cover telephones.

A toecover is not a thing that follows economic cycles. During the depression when everyone was making her own Christmas presents, toecovers abounded. In good times toecovers are not made at home but are bought in the back of Gifte Shoppes whose main income is from the lending library in the front.

Alex Lickerman is a physician and practices Nichiren Buddhism, and he writes a weekly blog titled Happiness in this World. Each post is calm, sane, sensible, well-reasoned, and usually includes those boldface steps on things to do or remember that us blog-readers love to bookmark yet never follow up on.

His post on How to Thwart Panic struck very close to home for me as I experienced that feeling quite a bit this past spring. As he says, the mind cannot always be trusted. It has picked up habits of thought that do not serve us anymore and that we would do well to challenge.

Alex provides good basic info, but a few details to some of his points may help.

• When you feel yourself starting to panic or feel anxious, examine the thought and try to classify it based on this list of cognitive distortions. These distortions, and the idea of mentally challenging these thoughts, was popularized by David Burns' book Feeling Good. I would say that book, and a later book by Burns, When Panic Attacks, offer terrific advice and dozens of techniques to employ that will help you get over panic, procrastination, and other mental maladies.
• When in the throes of panic, stopping to rate the discomfort on a 1-10 or 1-100 scale is a good way to take a step back and look at yourself objectively. Moving from an all-or-nothing mindset to more of a continuum mindset has been very helpful for me.
• Burns has a very good and easy technique where you draw a line down the middle of a sheet of paper, write the anxiety-producing thought on the left side, and then on the right, identify the type of cognitive distortion you're using, and then write a logical refutation of the bad thought. The trick to this is that your refutation has to be something your brain will believe. It can't be a cliché; it needs to make sense. So if the bad thought is, "I'll never get this project done," I would identify that as a magnification error (or awfullizing as Albert Ellis would call it), and then write this refutation, "I have gotten many other projects done in the past, and I will certainly get *this* project done. I may not get it done in the next 5 minutes, but I can certainly work on a piece of it right now. I've found that in the past, when I start working on a project, and taking action, the anxiety tends to dissipate very quickly."

From Jo Walton at Tor.com comes the idea of The Suck Fairy, that scourge of re-reading that somehow curdles fondly remembered books upon second reading. Working alongside the Suck Fairy are her siblings the Racism Fairy, the Sexism Fairy, and the Homophobia Fairy, according to Walton.

One might add the Bad Writing Fairy; sometimes re-reading fondly remembered pulp adventures from my junior high school years (I'm looking at you, Doc Savage) highlights the sheer awfulness of the prose.

My brother's oldest son, Stuart, was asked by his teacher what he liked about school. He answered, "It's not about what I like, it's what I have to get used to."

Here's what the local newspaper's horoscope had to say for those lucky enough to be born today, whether this year or earlier:

During the next four weeks you need to keep a low profile and not take any gambles with your career or money. The stars are not dire, but your timing could be off. By the end of October, you will be rolling in the clover.

And Freewill Astrology had this nice thing to say for the upcoming week:

Albert Einstein was extremely famous during his lifetime. Although he had no publicity machine promoting him, his face became an iconic symbol for genius. "Einstein" was, in effect, a brand name that made people think of creativity, wisdom, and imagination. There were times that bothered him. "I am no Einstein," he said, preferring to be his raw self rather than the idol on a pedestal. I offer his example up to you, Libra. You can benefit from slipping away from, ignoring, and even rebelling against your image right now. Return to the source of your ever-evolving life energy.

Stevereads tackles the history of the first Star Trek books, which were collections of stories from the original series. I well remember being mesmerized by the covers and the thrill of reliving this series, whenever I liked, in book form. (Man, I'd have loved Wild Wild West novelizations too!) (interesting that those two shows were contemporaneous). Just seeing those images of worn and creased covers parts a veil in my heart and I am 11 years old and standing in front of a shelf of books at Crabtree Valley Mall's Walden Books (it was two words back then) and calculating how I could get every one of those books for my very own. The nascent collector and hoarder of books was born.

Steve Donoghue has apparently been around since the days of the first Trek fanzines and writes with authority not just about that era of human achievement. He seemingly does nothing but read and writes -- with charm, vigor, intelligence, shrewdness, and a wicked sense of humor -- about what he reads. What I love about his blog (and what has moved his posts high in my Google reader feeds) is his catholic taste in subject matter: popular magazines, comics (he's a Legion of Super-Heroes fanboy), foreign literature, Elizabethan/Victorian/Edwardian literature, and -- probably his most cherished category -- historical fiction and literature, especially Tudor-era novels. Click on any month under his Archives link and wallow in the variety and types of reading matter this fellow ingests. It makes me wonder how much he reads that he doesn't write about.

In addition to his blog, he contributes reviews to Open Letters monthly site, for which he is an editor. Recently, he wrote a long and satisfying post on Pindar, encapsulating not just the era in which Pindar wrote, but what makes Pindar worth knowing about and reading about.

But though every post promises something new I've probably never heard of before (I've added many a book to my Amazon wish list based on Steve's recommendations), it's the barbed wit that keeps me coming back. Here's one of my favorites from his Star Trek books post:

Fans ate it up, and by this point they had guaranteed the continuation of their own feeding in the only way that ever guarantees such things: they put their money where their mouth-breathing was.

Read any of his Vanity Fair or GQ posts for drive-by snipings of this week's celebrities.

And while I enjoy his whimsical reading projects - such as his reviews of romance novels on which cover model Paul Marron appears -- I like that he doesn't shy away from tackling more worthy subjects. He recently gave the National Geographic a right thrashing for its King Tut cover story and laments Christopher Hitchens, in several senses of that word. And he's not forever carping or sniping, though lord knows, there always seems to be more bad than good out there (especially in the penny press).

I enjoy his clear-eyed appreciations and opinions of well-known authors or classic works, such as Dracula and his hellspawn, Gore Vidal's essays, Howard's End and on and on. But I particularly enjoy his touching appraisals of quixotic little books that were sent out as letters in bottles, and whose delicate and touching messages found in Steve the perfect reader.

• Steve reviews Robert Graves' The Anger of Achilles, and finds more ways to say that Graves is one can short of a six-pack than I could imagine.
• Bookshelf Porn: "A collection of all the best bookshelf photos for people who *heart* bookshelves."
• The illustrated guide to a PhD. Check out the other articles on his site if you're into programming and time management. Good stuff.
• "Past the Cemetery," a poem by Charles Simic. I wonder what I'd have thought of the poem if it had been titled differently.
• A cultural historian on Batman: "Here’s a character with massive financial resources and considerable technical and intellectual knowledge whose main response to crime is to dress up in a costume and beat up street-level thugs." Please. Batman is only as mixed-up as his super-villains.
• Yiddish Theater talk-rendering of "Old Man River" (from the Mary Tyler Moore blooper reel)

Friend and colleague Lewis Shiner is a writer and novelist who has been releasing his fiction on the web for the last few years. Here's an appreciation of Lew and his site that I wrote for the SILS Galley, way back in Fall 2007:

Raleigh resident Lewis Shiner made his name in the '80s as a cyberpunk science-fiction writer, though he has worked many genres as a fictioneer: westerns, hard-boiled mystery, anarchic skateboarders, rock music, fantasy. He won the World Fantasy Award for his 1993 novel Glimpses and his most recent, Say Goodbye (1999), was a bittersweet story of a young woman's indie singing career. He’s written dozens of short stories in his 30 years as a writer, but times are changing for short-story writers. Short stories continue to be written and read, but interested readers have to search them out, and, for genre writers particularly, the short story outlets are pale shadows of what they once were. In a manifesto on his website, Fiction Liberation Front, Shiner says “that whatever future the short story has, the Internet will be involved in it. ”

Although compensation for writers is still an open question, Shiner has decided to embrace “this uncertain future” with his website, which aims to stock all of his short stories, screenplays, fugitive journalism, and other writings -- for free -- under a Creative Commons license. It’s an experiment, of course, and who knows how it will turn out.

In the meantime, read the fiction! Although Shiner is best known for his science fiction, his technical range and emotional subtlety use genre as simply another tool to tell the story. His most personal and white-hot stories center on music: “Sticks,” about a rock-band drummer, and “Perfidia,” about the mystery surrounding Glenn Miller’s death, embrace pain, loss, and personal responsibility. One of his most powerful stories is “Steam Engine Time,” a take on what would have happened if Elvis had arrived on the scene 50 years early. By contrast, “Lizard Men of Los Angeles” is a throat-grabbing thrill- ride on the old sci-fi pulp wagon.

Lew just sent an email today saying two more novels from his backlist -- Frontera and Glimpses (the latter won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1993) -- are being published by Subterranean Press. They're available through Amazon.com, your local independent bookseller, and -- of course -- the Fiction Liberation Front.