Oddments of High Unimportance

I’ve always tended to follow the poet and critic Randall Jarrell’s advice – “Read at whim! Read at whim!” I draw in books from local new and used bookstores, little free libraries, Amazon, Libby, Hoopla, and one of the few browser extensions I pay for (doesn’t work in Safari, sadly) Library Extension.

But I was caught by a reading project of Booktuber Michael K. Vaughan who challenged himself to read 500 books he already owns before buying any new ones. He tracks his progress via weekly reading reports and, after 2 years, I think, is now up to the 320s range.

No, I don’t have 500 books, but I do live in an apartment with limited space and one bookshelf.* When we moved, I kept only books that had been signed to me by author-friends, that had sentimental value, or that I knew I could not purchase easily via Amazon.

[* I actually do have a second bookshelf devoted to my graphic novel collection, but it’s out in the corridor of our floor.]

But more books have accrued over time, he wrote, passively, and I have been dragging my feet on getting through them. So while Vaughan’s project is not about reading at whim, per se, it did appeal to my whimsy. So I will instead read at whim among only the books I own, keep the ones I really like, and discard the rest.

A few ground rules for myself:

• I’m going to do this challenge from January through March. If I like the results, I’ll keep it going for Q2.
• While I’m doing the challenge, I cannot buy any new or used books. I cannot bring home books from little free libraries.
• The challenge includes physical books, ebooks (my Kindle is littered with them), and Audible audiobooks.
• Vaughan counts omnibus editions of comics towards his total* but I think that’s cheating a bit. I will count graphic novels meant to be read as single and complete works, like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Kate Beaton’s Ducks. (I can still read cartoon or comic collections, they just don’t count towards this challenge.)
• I will track what I’m reading using Micro.blog’s Epilogue app and post short reviews or appraisals to the blog.
• Some books have an expiration date: I was interested in them at the time but I’m not so interested now. So they will be discarded without being read.
• If it’s a book I only read once and I don’t remember much about it – read it again!
• When it’s time to discard a book, I will donate it to one of the many little free libraries in our neighborhood.
• I can always read library books if I want to, but my own books are preferred.

[* Vaughan reads mostly SF, fantasy, old pulp novels, and comics, though he does read the occasional classic now and then.]

How many books are we talking here? I have no idea; that’s why I’m bounding the project via the calendar rather than with any hard numbers. I won’t get through all my unread books by the end of March, but if I’m chafing to read things outside of my little pile, then I can call however many I did a Win. I can always take up the challenge again later.

When will I do all this reading? With my morning coffee in my rocking chair. And in the evening before bedtime.

Am I a fast reader? When I’m plowing through a book, like the New Bern history book I read recently, I try to read 50 pages a day, more or less. I have the time to do that now, and that number of pages means I can get through most books in a week. Fifty pages a day also keeps details, characters, events, etc. fresh in my short-term memory, and that makes the experience more pleasant for me.

Is this my idea of fun? Oh, yes!

Finished reading: New Bern History 101 by Edward Barnes Ellis 📚 Purchased from Mitchell Hardware during a Christmas stay in New Bern. Of the two popular history books on the town, this was the more substantial in terms of names, dates, and stories on the city’s colonial, Revolutionary, and Civil War history, along with the devastating 1922 fire that swept the city. It also includes extra chapters where the author both dumps his reporter’s notebook and provides key historical documents. I learned a lot but … in retrospect, I probably would have enjoyed the other book more, as it had shorter chapters, more pictures, and looked like more of a fun souvenir while telling more of the town’s quirky stories, like the one about the Taylor Sisters, who aren’t mentioned at all in the Ellis book.

Finished reading: Where Do Comedians Go When They Die? by Milton Jones 📚 A fictionalized memoir of sorts by British standup comedian Milton Jones. The narrator’s reminiscences let Jones ruminate on his craft, his colleagues, his audiences, his agents, and the emotionally brutal pasting a comic runs the risk of taking every time he goes to work. Not a great novel, but if you skim the ludicrous interludes where the narrator is held in a Chinese jail cell, you’ll pick up hard-won details of a comic’s life and art.

A recording from my iPhone’s Voice app from an after-supper walk in June. Rosehill Avenue features a large, high canopy of trees and the sound of the cicadas, tree frogs, etc. This was an experience I wanted to remember. (1m 37s)

Transcript

I have all three of the collections, but Volume III 📚 is the first I (mostly) read most of. I read this ebook mainly because my backlit Kindle provided the only readable light in our Airbnb. I also felt a grim duty to sample these literary Christmas offerings of the ages and see what if any Christmas spirit they would move in me.

As with all Delphi’s ebooks, these are public domain texts, mostly clean of scanning errors but with a few stories indifferently proofed from the scans. The ebook contains 18 pieces on Christmas themes or that have Christmas as a setting, arranged roughly chronologically and covering a wide range of authors – from the Victorians to a pair of anodyne holiday quatrains by H.P. Lovecraft (!). Alas, the quality range is narrower and, even within that tighter band, wildly variable.

The ebook’s main novelty for me was its collection of curiosities: an overwritten paean to the Pilgrims by Harriet Beecher Stowe (“The First Christmas of New England”) and a group effort (“Message from the Sea”) from 1860 by Charles Dickens and five other writers; the latter is near-interminable in its coincidences, melodramatic situations, over the top stagey characters, and annoyingly verbose omniscient voice. As this group effort is the first story in the collection, one learns from it the valuable art of skimming that will get one through the rest of the book. (Does a novella have five parts? Start at part four.)

Among the standout stories for me: Beatrix Potter’s famous “The Tailor of Gloucester.” Anthony Trollope’s “Christmas Day at Kirkby Cottage” is a smoothly written Christmas trifle of young lovers and misunderstandings, and M.E. Braddon’s “The Christmas Hirelings” is pure sentimental Victorian treacle and all the better for it. Edgar Wallace contributes two smartly done pulp stories, while M.R. James takes the book’s quality prize with two of his unsettling ghost stories, “Lost Hearts” and “The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance.”

The oddest, most provocative story was Bret Harte’s “The Haunted Man,” subtitled

A CHRISTMAS STORY.

BY CH — R — S D — CK — NS.

In it, a “Haunted Man” is plagued by a Ghost of Christmas Past and is mightily unimpressed by the spirit’s theatrics. The story’s voice and dialog viciously satirize Dickens’ style and his well-known tale:

Again the Goblin flew away with the unfortunate man, and from a strange roaring below them he judged they were above the ocean. A ship hove in sight, and the Goblin stayed its flight. “Look,” he said, squeezing his companion’s arm.

The Haunted Man yawned. “Don’t you think, Charles, you’re rather running this thing into the ground? Of course it’s very moral and instructive, and all that. But ain’t there a little too much pantomime about it? Come now!”

Harte’s “The Haunted Man” and Ambrose Bierce’s cynical “Christmas and the New Year” splash ice water into the face of readers wanting Christmas cheer and comfort. They were bracing antidotes to the other stocking stuffers.

From the New York Times article “Canadian Linguists Rise Up Against the Letter ‘S’”:

In an informal survey this year, Canadians were asked to choose a word of the year. The winner? “Maplewashing,” or the practice (properly spelled the Canadian way, of course) of making something appear more Canadian than it actually is, especially in the context of marketing products for sale to Canadians.

I was bored one evening and applied the Adbreak mod to my Kindle Oasis (10th generation). I was helped along by Dammit Jeff’s video and step-by-step instructions on the Kindle Modding wiki.

Jailbreaking devices like the Kindle are a popular pastime for folks. Getting past Amazon’s defenses allows intrepid users to customize layouts, fonts, UI, load e-books of different formats, change almost every aspect of the device’s function, etc. and add extra programs like simple games or even disabling ads.

I performed a jailbreak on my Kindle Touch back in 2012 so I could load up custom screensavers that delighted me. After a while, Amazon issued an update that broke the jailbreak and I never bothered doing it again.

Dammit Jeff pointed out some interesting apps like KindleForge and KOReader that could be installed,

KOReader was more interesting, as it promised the ability to read many more ebook formats, flow PDF text to make those files more readable, adjust the fonts and sizes of almost every aspect of the UI to your liking. and that’s great – if you want to spend a lot of time fiddling instead of reading.

Also, very few of the many apps available for download via KindleForge seemed worth spending my time on. Do I really need a Tetris clone on my Kindle? No. No, I do not.

So I backed out of the jailbreak and reset my Kindle. I felt more comfortable almost immediately.

Lord knows the Kindle is not perfect. It is a deliberately dumbed-down device with few customizations available apart from loading fonts (Hyperlegible is a good one), a so-so attitude to leading and kerning, etc. As Jason Snell often observes in his Kindle reviews, Amazon could do so much better if it cared to.

But for me, for now, my lowly Kindle Oasis (now discontinued) is fine. It’s fine. It meets my low expectations, the battery still holds a charge, and I can carry 100+ books in my hand wherever I go.

Today’s lesson: Kindles come and go. It’s the books that delight.

Our summer trip to Toronto included a stop at the wonderful McMichael Canadian Art Collection, which featured a great exhibition of First Nations, Inuit, and immigrant art plus a large permanent Group of Seven collection.

Of the landscapes that were on display, the colors and design of Tom Thomson’s landscapes grabbed me. But what has grabbed the public imagination even more than his paintings and sketches are the circumstances surrounding his death and burial(s) (yes, burials). There’s even a whole Wikipedia page on his death and the curious details around it.

Thomson died before the formation of the Group of Seven. Of all the artists from that time, Thomson seems the most singular, remote and unknowable. He preferred the outdoors over the city. He died young with his life and thoughts on art barely documented. All we have left are his paintings and the reminiscences of those who knew him.

So, interested in Thomson’s story, I picked up two books at the McMichael gift shop (art museum gift shops are the best): a novel, Canoe Lake by Roy MacGregor, and a play, Tom Thompson: On the Threshold of Magic by Barry Brodie.

In Canoe Lake, Eleanor, a young woman from Philadelphia, searches in rural Ontario for her birth mother. Her questions kick off memories in Russell, an old-timer in the village living in a residential hotel, and his friend and unrequited love Jenny, now a spinster recluse but who at one time was going to marry a visiting artist named Tom Thomson. Eleanor’s detective work digging up secrets some people want kept jostles against Russell’s memories of Jenny and Tom, and of course, those worlds will collide in Canoe Lake, the site of Thomson’s death.

It’s a terrific novel, very well done, with depth and great textures, and a sensitivity for its characters, especially the hapless Russell. Definitely worth a re-read.

In his Author’s Note, MacGregor reveals his long fascination with the facts and mysteries surrounding Thomson’s death and MacGregor’s own distant family connection to it. The novel drapes a fiction over the bones of his research, though you can feel MacGregor really savoring the conversations of Thomson’s friends as they examine his body recovered after six or seven days in Canoe Lake, and speculate on the unusual gash on his temple and the fishing line tangled – or wrapped? – around his ankle.

MacGregor returned to the subject later with a non-fiction account of the incident and the times, Northern Light: The Enduring Mystery of Tom Thomson and the Woman Who Loved Him. The Author’s Note is a précis, I think, for this fuller treatment.

Tom Thomson: On the Threshold of Magic by Barry Brodie is a poetic play with Thomson narrating his inner journey from young man to artist to his afterlife, with all the characters in trembling awe of his artistic vision. Over half of this slim book is in fact devoted to the play’s writing and initial staging, and the back-stage stuff is honestly the most interesting part.

NB: Thomson’s studio now sits on the McMichael grounds.

Note: I found this draft in a folder of old documents I’m clearing out. I have no idea when I wrote it, but between 2018 and 2022 is my best guess. I saw it was not on the blog, so am finally posting it here.

Saying “thank you” is one of the great civilized acts we do in daily life. It makes our social interactions with clerks, vendors, waitstaff, co-workers, friends, family – nearly anyone we come into contact with during our day – a little more pleasant.

“Thank you” marks the end of a transaction. We have concluded our business and I want to express my gratitude for your part in it. “Amen” is not too dissimilar in action and meaning.

But when it comes to saying “thank you” in email … aye, there’s the rub. Is it courteous to send a one-liner “thank you” email or are we burdening the recipient with yet another task and decision we have forced them to make?

My friend Bob calls these one-liners “closing the niceness loop.” We’re so obsessed with appearing “nice” that we waste our time and our recipient’s time with a one-liner email that did not need to be sent.

And if there are multiple recipients of the email on the CC line: heaven help them. Their inboxes are now filling up with one-line “thank you” emails followed by the obligatory replies of “you’re welcome” or “sure.”

Delete, delete, delete.

Fast Company, in an article on bad email habits, also condemns the puny one-liner:

Replying to an email with “Thanks” or “OK” does not advance the conversation in any way. “You don’t have to answer every email,” says Duncan, who takes a moment to analyze our email conversation. When I asked Duncan if she was free at 3 p.m. to chat, she replies yes and sent me her phone number.

“A lot of people would have replied ‘Okay, great, talk to you then’” says Duncan – an unnecessary email that simply clogs up someone’s inbox and doesn’t contribute anything to the conversation. To avoid being the victim of one-liner emails, feel free to add “no reply necessary” at the top of an email if you don’t anticipate a response.

Nick Bilton, in the NY Times Bit Blog:

Don’t these people realize that they’re wasting your time?

Of course, some people might think me the rude one for not appreciating life’s little courtesies. But many social norms just don’t make sense to people drowning in digital communication.

Take the “thank you” message. Daniel Post Senning, a great-great-grandson of Emily Post and a co-author of the 18th edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette, asked: “At what point does appreciation and showing appreciation outweigh the cost?”

That said, he added, “it gives the impression that digital natives can’t be bothered to nurture relationships, and there’s balance to be found.”

I find the one-liner thank-you a hard habit to break on our cohousing community mailing lists. We’re all volunteers in the effort so saying thank-you seems like a (cringe) nice thing to do to show appreciation. But when I look at a 15-message-long thread that contains 10-12 “thank-yous,” I cringe there too.

I favor not sending the one-liner. Those replies don’t advance the conversation, and I think they annoy all the other recipients who are eavesdropping on the thread and don’t care anyway. (In other words: it annoys me when I’m on the CC line of those threads. At some point, I mute the thread.)

Also, it’s likely I’ll see the person in real time or email with them on another topic; if a thank-you is indicated, there are plenty of opportunities to fold it in with another message.

However, there is a type of one-liner email I always send. When I’ve been assigned a task via email, I will reply with a single word – “Done” – to signal that the task has been completed. Since we’re all keeping records of our work in our email, I want everyone else’s inbox to have a record of what I did and when.

Thank you for reading.

Every Christmas, my mother gives me a subscription to Our State magazine, which, as the subtitle says, is dedicated to “celebrating North Carolina.” I like browsing each issue to find some new or unusual places to visit for a day trip or long weekend. Although I’m a native North Carolinian, there’s lots I don’t know about the state.

This year’s Christmas-themed issue delighted me more than usual. In addition to the recipes and events – Peanut Butter Cup Cookies! Christmas Flotillas! – are some really well-reported (if occasionally overwritten) articles on bits of hyperlocal history, culture, and the passing scene.

Brief excerpts from some of my favorite articles:

Christmas on Portsmouth Island - More than 50 years after the last residents of Portsmouth Island moved away, a descendant of the once-busy shipping village decks the halls in their honor.

His father — a carpenter and commercial fisherman who worshiped during homecomings in this same church — passed away about six months prior. In this moment, the loss deepens Gilgo’s connection to this place and the meaning of the Christmas season. Satisfied with the job, he turns to leave, his work now done. He may be one of only a few handfuls of people who ever see these decorations, and that is enough.

Resilience in the Ebersole Holly Garden - Once left to the weeds, a world-class holly collection in Pinehurst is thriving again, thanks to the determination of those who believe in a second season.

Most people think they can identify a holly. “You imagine that evergreen, Christmas-tree shaped bush at the corner of your house,” Bunch says.

To expand that notion, he takes visitors over to one of his favorite spots in the Ebersole Holly Garden, a section filled with massive trees, some boasting 40-foot-tall canopies. Bunch encourages them to look up. “These huge, beautiful hollies have white-and-gray bark, different from any other trees — a stark contrast to our native pines,” he says. “To get underneath them is a different experience than from looking straight on to the holly bush in your yard.”

Old Christmas in Rodanthe - For more than 200 years, villagers in the Outer Banks community have celebrated Christmas on their own terms.

As the story goes, during the [[Battle of Culloden]], a nonfatal arrow struck the 12-year-old Scottish drummer, Donald McDonald, in the left shoulder. After his recovery, he set sail to the New World, drum in tow. During the voyage, McDonald fell overboard during a storm and swam to shore using the drum as a life preserver. He arrived at the place where he’d spend the rest of his life: Rodanthe.

… The drum is folklore made material. A symbol of persistence and resistance, it bridges past and present. According to legend, decades had passed when news reached Hatteras Island that England had, in 1752, adopted the Gregorian calendar that changed Christmas from January 6 or 7 to December 25. Committed to their ways, the village of Rodanthe refused to go along with the change and continued celebrating Jesus’s birth when and how they always had.

North Carolina’s Santa School - Before the beard and belly laugh, becoming the Man in Red requires a little magic — and plenty of training — in Charlotte, where Santas go to earn their ho-ho-ho. A wonderful piece by Daniel Wallace.

On offer this weekend is a rare opportunity for Santas from all over the state and beyond to watch other Santas at work, to study their routines, and, not unlike a child at the mall getting their picture taken with the Man in Red, to ply the old pros with questions of their own, such as, well, “What do you say when they ask you where your reindeer are?” No two Santas have the exact same answer to this question, or to any question for that matter. But you need at least one.