Hot Sunday morning, wearing enormous fluffy sweater and tiny 80’s splatter-paint short-shorts
Book about Byron has been open on my lap for over an hour while I lean awkwardly forward over it in order to research coconut body lotions on etsy
(Caribbean Coconut)
(Shea Butter)
(Phalate Free)
Should be working on chapter; should be doing yoga; should be writing article; should be reading something, anything; or writing a syllabus; or reading stupid Watson’s stupid book about DNA and how Rosalind Franklin would have been pretty if she’d just worn lipstick, there’s no explaining it, maybe she had an overbearing mother, why would any self-respecting reasonably-attractive dame want to go and invent the x-ray machine instead of having babies; or at the very least cleaning my house; or even at the even more very least at least not just sitting in here thinking about how I ought to be doing all this other stuff
Upset about Zimmerman
Upset about Napolitano
Upset about Monsanto
Towering stacks of books everywhere I look
That thing where you clear a stack of books for a visitor to sit down
Or where you stack one stack on top of another stack to make room for your coffee
where do they come from, all these damn books??
And yet I want more, always more. I would have a house filled with nothing but books
Isn’t it strange that the book has a historical arc? From nothing to nothing, from upper class niche item to totally common to upper class niche item. Ash to ash. Does everyone always prefer the thing that is the normal thing whenever they are alive? Were medieval people mad when they started having to wear Renaissance ruffs (that joke = copyright Kate Beaton). Or the villain of The Magnificent Ambersons, yelling GET A HORSE at the guy driving the car
That’s how I feel about books. GET A BOOK! Everyone on the plane with their kindles and iPads looks like the world’s biggest dipshit to me, even though I know those items are awesome and I know it’s the future and I get it, there’s 500 books on that thing and you are reading THEM ALL AT ONCE. Still: you look like a dipshit, because I am old fashioned and boring. Where’s your bluetooth earpiece you yell into while the person at the car rental desk thinks you’re talking to them; where’s your weird generic tie; where’s your vague fart smell (you are a mid-range businessman with really intense cologne)
I wonder when I will get an iPad or iPad equivalent? I know that I will; it’s just a matter of time. While I can’t imagine reading the new Dean Koontz or whatever on one of them, even now I sometimes think, if those infernal machines were actually good for pdfs I would get one this minute. These pdfs are gonna be the death of me. I am a late adopter but I always adopt. You have to, or culture leaves you completely behind and then you’re stuck and you can’t even order a pizza or make a phone call anymore and everyone laughs at you and you are reduced to standing in your yard wearing huge Reebok high-tops with wool socks and a floppy straw hat and hitting passing children with a stick when they call you a witch
(and yelling about pdfs)
DID YOU KNOW that Byron died fighting for Greek independence
even though he wasn’t Greek
and lets face it probably didn’t know a whole lot about Greece
?
And did you also know that nobody knows this anymore but it used to be the main thing you knew about Byron if you knew anything about him at all
?
To die heroically, for a cause
What could be grander
Isn’t it weird that Byron never ate Mexican food
So strange the things that compel introverts to write comments on blogs: pdfs. The iPad is da bomb for dealing with pdfs. There are apps that let you notate them, highlight, zoom, search, whatever. Other tablets probably do this too, I have no idea. I have replaced every single paper manual I have with its pdf version, and even have books, papers, etc. on there.
You are clearly a heavy duty consumer of written material, so it might not work for you, but don’t discount it!