The Self-Guided Auto Tour to Local Libraries
Posted on July 29th, 2009 by admin. Filed under the stacks.
Writing possesses a moral component because writing demonstrates a belief by its own practice: the words on the page, the composition of thoughts, and the tone of voice all embody a belief in the value of writing. A belief defines a value and becomes an aspect of a person’s morality. Writing isn’t easy; if you didn’t like to do it, then you probably wouldn’t.
But if what you value is writing itself, if writing represents a value you hold supreme, and if you write something you don’t believe in, then you’ve polluted the entire moral purpose.
My experience as a technical writer has led me to this conclusion.
Don’t waste your time doing something you don’t believe in.
technical paradox
Posted on July 24th, 2009 by admin. Filed under life in a cube.
Writing fiction, it seems, requires a certain paradox: in order to tell the truth a writer must conjure a believable world made of lies. In other words, the lie has to be persuasive enough in order to reveal the underlying truth. I enjoy reading fiction, so I don’t have a problem with this paradox.
Writing technical reports require just the opposite: I must refrain from embellishment and hyperbole and stick to the facts, but what I write is an obfuscation, a partial truth because facts don’t equal truth, which is a different type of paradox, the mirrored opposite of writing fiction. This type of paradox troubles me.
Case in point: Fahrenheit 451 and my documentation report on cell phone applications.
Burning Libraries
Posted on July 15th, 2009 by admin. Filed under random book impressions.
When I returned home from vacation, I was greeted in the doorway by my eighteen boxes of books — my library — sitting in the dark of my condominium. Returning home to this condominium-village has made me realize I need to escape this environment. The moving truck sat like a permanent fixture in the driveway of our association “common” area; someone was always moving away while another displaced temporary resident wandered in to take his or her place.
My journey into my library can be seen as an abstract expedition, but it’s also a physical one: boring a hole through a moat of fiction which is the only barrier now between me and the outside world.
Banyan Trees
Posted on July 9th, 2009 by admin. Filed under reading life.
Banyan Trees are planted along the road outside my hotel; some planted on special occasions when famous people spent the night in Hilo, Hawaii. There are trees planted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart and Pat Nixon.
Banyan tress throw shadows on the ground that haunt me as I take my evening walk into downtown Hilo.
It’s been a dream living in Hilo for twelve uninterrupted days. It’s the type of nightmare I could get used to. Part of me wonders what would happen if I never went back to my job, but instead, remained here in Hilo and built a new life.
Here is Fernando Pessoa talking about The Book of Disquiet
This piece belongs to a book of mine for which I’ve written other, still unpublished passages, but I have a long way to go before finishing it. The book is called The Book of Disquiet, since restlessness and uncertainty are the dominant note. This is evident in the one published passage. What is apparently the narration of a mere dream, or daydream, is actually – and the reader feels this at the outset and should, if I’ve been successful, feel it throughout his entire reading – a dreamed confession of the painful, sterile rage and utter uselessness of dreaming.
Imagine writing a novel whose theme is the “utter uselessness of dreaming.”
Hilo, Hawaii
Posted on June 29th, 2009 by admin. Filed under reading life.
The meditative act of reading can resize the world, open a curtain of consciousness, or demonstrate an understanding buried deep within one’s own soul. A book, I believe, holds the potential to change a reader’s direction in life, his fate, or perhaps his demise.
That’s no kidding.
Not many applications can make that boast.
If a reader opens him or herself to that possibility, the act of reading requires no guru, no priest, no drugs, no complicated path. Just a book and a few minutes free from what distracts us.
White Herons
Posted on June 17th, 2009 by admin. Filed under the stacks.
Before leaving for vacation, I took a stroll around my neighborhood.
Usually I don’t see much of my condominium village; only early in the morning or late at night, coming and going from work. I never knew until recently the most amazing white herons – blinding white feathers and toothpick legs – inhabited the shores of the bay-water canals that surrounded my complex. These birds made me jump because I rarely saw people here — just parked cars and muffled lights behind draped windows.
I started walking in the mornings before work, so I thought I’d continue before I left for vacation. I knew there was a public library about a mile from where I lived. I had with me my copy of Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. I hoped to find a chair where I could sit and read my book in the early morning.
heteronyms
Posted on June 10th, 2009 by admin. Filed under reading life.
Many have written asking the nature of this blog-project, and honestly, at times, I can’t explain the purpose of this blog even to myself. The nature of the writing can’t be easily defined because I’ve never written anything like this blog. I’m a person who considers himself shy and hesitant to express his feelings. I expected that when I began this project my library would distract me and deliver me into the world again; in fact, the opposite has happened: my library has become a mirror which reflects my life, and this blog has become a channel to express what I’ve read and felt.
The two elements are inseparable.
Reading and writing.
And initially, all I wanted to do was to run as far away from me as possible.
Latest message from my library: The Book of Disquiet
Posted on June 4th, 2009 by admin. Filed under random book impressions.
I felt some relief finding this book in my library this morning before I left for work. Here’s another novel I never finished, but I may be forgiven as The Book of Disquiet is not a novel that one reads quickly. The book has been translated from Portuguese and is considered both a “finished” and “unfinished” work of art.
I bought it several years ago because I liked the cover and because I had never heard of Fernando Pessoa. He might be the type of writer discussed in the pages of The New York Review of Books or perhaps he’s not discussed here in the United States. Either way, I was intrigued and I recall the beginning pages of a “memoir” of a young man working in a banking office in Lisbon.
So I dive again into my library once again.
epiphany
Posted on June 3rd, 2009 by admin. Filed under life in a cube.
Fiction-reading is an illusion created and absorbed by those persons who believe – or want to believe — in worlds that don’t exist. Therefore, reading feeds a perpetuation of a false reality that has no bearing on the facts: you live, you die. What happens in between becomes a fiction of your own making, but nonetheless, a definite movement towards decay and ultimately death. Why pretend to indulge in something else other than the basic truth?
Novels help you form the fiction of your own life, those places in between because novels help us learn how to pretend. That’s all.
literary malfunctions
Posted on May 28th, 2009 by admin. Filed under reading life.
As a reader, I want to say that Lancelot is a failure of a novel, but who am I to judge? A novel is a novel; it exists without my judgment. Failure is too strong a word. Perhaps “literary malfunction” is more appropriate.
Judgments come too easily, especially negative judgments. No doubt Lancelot by Walker Percy affected me; I’ve been depressed during its entire reading. I found after reading a few pages, I needed something to eat. So I stuffed myself on crackers while trudging through its pages. In that sense the novel succeeded because its themes are depressing ones. While immersed in the novel, I felt the tug of its difficult and dark universe.
Emma Bovary
Posted on May 20th, 2009 by admin. Filed under writing.
From The New York Review of Books, a review of Colm Toibin’s novel Brooklyn by Claire Messud.
She begins the review discussing the death of a neighbor named Mr. Berniss, a man who lived next door and the mystery of his unknown life allows her to talk about the role of literature:
In my youth, foolishly, I believed that a life had a trajectory, an arc, and that arc had significance, that its meaning could be ascertained. I retained this belief for a long time, in spite of all the evidence, because literature – like, but in lieu of, religion – allowed me, even encouraged me, to do so. In this sense, I have been like Emma Bovary, struggling fruitlessly to make reality conform to my literary ideals. Still in some corner of myself, I am unwilling to renounce this conviction because I do not know what to make of a life without purpose, a life that has no arc but merely a continuing, and then, like Mr. Berniss’s, one day an end. I am old enough to realize that such a life – the mild, meandering flat line of a life – being real (as opposed to a literary fiction) should not fill me with despair; but I seem not yet mature enough to accept this.
In this context, Mr. Berniss’s days upon months upon years upon his porch, at home, apparently at peace, with his compromises – a life, in short, without any apparent philosophical neurosis, without the literary bolster of articulated longing – incites my fascination. Raised to insist that the unreflected life was not worth living, and yet aware that the reflection may impede the living, I have long struggled to imagine, even momentarily to inhabit, such a psyche. In our efforts more broadly to grasp life’s diversity, we turn to literature; but literature provides readers with characters like ourselves. Emma Bovary, that infamous self-conscious aspirant malcontent, is but one of a multitude; whereas Mr. Berniss is a rare protagonist indeed.
Such an incredible tandem of paragraphs which leads her to review the main character of Mr. Toibin’s novel and at the same time discuss the value of literature as a way of investigating the lives of those who perhaps present no access.
reading in airports
Posted on May 14th, 2009 by admin. Filed under reading life.
Someday a noted sociologist will write a definitive study of readers in airports, those quietly possessed souls engrossed in paperbacks waiting for their planes to depart. And if I ever had the nerve to form a book club, I would hold it inside the corner lounge of the dilapidated polyester and vinyl pit outside the gates of Delta Airlines at four o’clock in the afternoon when the stench of sweat and desperation in the atmosphere makes the moment essential for diving into the pages of a good novel.
Walker Percy
Posted on May 6th, 2009 by admin. Filed under writing.
random book impression
Posted on May 5th, 2009 by admin. Filed under random book impressions, reading life, writing.
The bookstore experience continues to fascinate because even though I don’t purchase new books, I enjoy walking the aisles of bookstores looking over titles. I like to browse for the sake of browsing with nothing on my mind, no decisions to make, waiting for something to catch my eye.
I had in my hand a copy of Lancelot by Walker Percy, the latest book to emerge from my personal library. I read this novel years ago when I was in my twenties, a period of time I spent more or less fascinated by Percy’s first novel, The Moviegoer.
Unfortunately, I picked out Lancelot, a novel that maybe isn’t one of Percy’s strongest. I’ve read most of Percy’s novels, and the only one I completed reading was The Moviegoer. The other novels lost narrative steam. I’m pretty certain I didn’t make it to the end of Lancelot.
I’m wondering how appropriate it is to admit on a blog about reading, but there are some books that just can’t be read from start to finish.
marginalia: on blogs
Posted on May 1st, 2009 by admin. Filed under writing.
Outside of my reading life, I compose tech reports and have begun to write this blog. I’m not a person who thinks blogs matter very much. On the other hand, I don’t believe they’re invisible either.
I think of watching television and picture myself reaching for the volume control.
Anywhere I venture, I hear music, commercials, and more music.
On hold. In line. Online. My bank ATM!
Yesterday, at a gas station filling up my roving reading room, my Honda Prelude, I listened to music blast over the Quick Stop while I pumped gas. The experience made me uneasy. The main sensation inhaled at a gas station should be noxious fumes, not noxious music.
But blogs are different.
Hopefully.
Torture as Starbucks literature
Posted on April 28th, 2009 by admin. Filed under reading life, the stacks.
I have always believed in the real and present danger of paperwork. Every memo in my email box lurks like an assassin with a hidden, deadly agenda.
My moment of clarity arrived in line at Starbucks when I asked for a “medium” coffee and was informed that Starbucks has no “medium” only “grande.” I’d been informed of this word choice on previous visits, but never had a barista insisted I speak the language of Starbucks.
I didn’t object. Like most of the nation, my head was filled with reports coming from the Justice Department and the release of the torture memos rather than the protocol at Starbucks. Specifically, the torture memo signed by Jay Bybee of the Justice Department in 2002 stands as one of the most remarkable pieces of writing I’ve ever encountered. And though this memo does not inhabit a place in my library, it now occupies a place in my consciousness.
From a certain point of view, the Bybee memo reads like a breathtaking work of modern literature.
true confession
Posted on April 24th, 2009 by admin. Filed under reading life.
When I reached into boxes for my next reading assignment, I picked out Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded by Henry Fielding. Here is a book I’ve carried around for several decades, required reading from a college literature class, and a book whose subject matter seemed far too distant for my interests to sustain me.
But my premise here is that my library knows more than me. My library is wiser than me. So why don’t I read it now? Maybe I missed something the first time out. Perhaps my initial assumptions were incorrect.
So I sat down on the carpet of my empty living room (still no couch or chairs here in my condo) and thumbed through a few pages to remind myself what I missed.
Maybe it’s the ridiculous book cover or my lack of enthusiasm for British literature, but I can’t simply bring myself to read Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded.
But neither can I discard it.
invisible writer
Posted on April 21st, 2009 by admin. Filed under reading life, writing.
Jerzy Kosinski left behind an impressive body of work alongside a mysterious biographical story which – just judging from the broad outlines of his life — appear contradictory enough to resemble one of the novels he’s accused of plagiarizing.
reading in Phoenix
Posted on April 14th, 2009 by admin. Filed under reading life.
Roaming the Sonoran desert feels like walking across an empty page. Something happens to my imagination when I come to the desert: my thoughts sharpen, my senses quicken. It’s as if the world flattened and all that remains are the essentials: a few boulders, the wide open sky, and a thirst that can never be quenched.
I traveled to Phoenix this week for business, and rather than spending time in the convention center exchanging business cards, I took some time to go walking.
Phoenix is an empty place, a natural setting filled with the most unnatural feeling. The valley seems both haunted and charmed. And yet I could fall in love with a place like Phoenix, not because of its beauty, but because Phoenix lacks a type of soul, a certain charm or flair. And though it’s unpleasantly pleasant, I find Phoenix and the surrounding valley intriguing and mysterious to inhabit, if only briefly and if only for a few hours or days.
I believe there is a bit of Phoenix inside everyone.
Pinball by Jerzy Kosinski
Posted on April 7th, 2009 by admin. Filed under random book impressions.
My boss Chad Swann told me reading was like hiking or walking.
“How so?” I asked.
Once again, Chad and I were having our breakfast literary-chat in the cafeteria before digging into our piles of work. Talking about books is our way of pretending we weren’t simply technical writers whose current job was translating the work of engineers into something that resembled English. Lately, our work had become ghoulish. No other way to put it.
Motivation to begin our work came more easily after a plate of sausage and eggs.
And three cups of coffee.
“There are some people who when they walk or hike insist on taking loops.”
“What’s their theory?” I asked.
“They don’t enjoy travelling the same road twice.”
“True,” I said. “I guess I belong with that group. I always drive a different way home every night.”
“The problem is that not every path is a loop.”
“True again.”
“And if you think about it, when you walk and retrace your steps, your view is completely different. If you walk out to a specific point, then turn around and retrace your steps, the hike is not exactly the same. You approach the scenery from the opposite perspective.”
“So it’s not the same road twice?”
“It is the same road,” he explained, “It’s your perspective that’s different.”
I wished Chad Swann would either give me a raise or fire me. It was a far greater torture to listen to his literary theories and realize he was right.
Case in point: my latest discovery in my labyrinth of books: Jerzy Kosinski’s Pinball.
