leave the chaff, and take the wheat.

Gordon Avenue Booksale again. I consider myself a sane, functional individual, but put me near cheap books and something happens. I stack books like physics doesn't exist, I carry loads that'd leave me gasping in the gym, I have to read every title on the shelves, and time ceases to flow. I'm sure there are other effects but I'm oblivious to them. Also, everything else.

Anyhow, I got the following:

1) The Fall (and something else I forget) by Camus. For my little brother. He likes Camus! I am proud of him, and he's obviously deeper than me. I couldn't get through The Stranger.
2) I Married Adventure- Osa Johnson's autobiography. I read parts of her work in the anthology of women travelers.
3) Isles of the South Pacific, by the National Geographic Society. Color Pictures!
4) Maps of Jerusalem, the Holy Lands, and the Ascent of Man, also National Geographic. The map of Jerusalem is a painting of the Old City- it's very beautiful. Also, of course, annotated.
5) Departmental Ditties, an old copy of Kipling with some Arts and Crafts design on the cover. I'm a sucker for Arts and Crafts, and Kipling.
6) Burmese Days, by George Orwell. (My little brother also likes Orwell!)
7) Arctic Dreams, by Barry Lopez. Travel/Nature/History of a very cold place.
8) The French Revolution, by Carlyle.
9) The King of the Fields, by Isaac Bashevis Singer. From what I grasp, this is a weird introduction to his work, but it sounded interesting on the front flap.
10) Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, by V.S. Naipaul.
11) A Hero of Our Time, by Lermontov. One of my favorites, plus it's translated by Nabokov and has a beautiful picture on the cover. It's got one of those paper bindings that just feels nice in your hands.
12) 3 Doonesbury Collections, two from the 2000s and one from 1978-1980ish. I haven't read the most recent comics, but I'd already read most of the older one from the smaller collections I have. 9/11 was covered in the more recent collections.

I'm headed to TN tomorrow to visit my grandparents and attend the regional ASME conference. I'm driving down with a friend I'll collect from Tech, and taking some people also attending the conference to meet my grandparents. They want to meet my friends, and Granddad is a Mechanical Engineer- went to Tech himself, in '46- with really cool stories about the space program and nuclear power plants. I read a biography of Werner von Braun with him- he read it and annotated it for me. That was really neat- plus, when we go to the Air and Space museum in DC, he points out the satellites he worked on himself.

Have a nice weekend.

if only

I don't subscribe to any religion persay, I don't practice anything regularly- I mean, of course I don't, I can't make it to class on time, I exercise infrequently, and that causes certain, tangible problems in the short term. I'm certainly not covering for any hypothetical future problems.

I really like going to religious rituals, though. I like being in a space where people are doing things I don't understand all because they believe something a whole lot. I feel weird being there- I feel like a taint on the thing itself- but I really enjoy services, and christenings, and prayers, and chanting, and the hey-hey-hey. It's probably just being around people who sincerely believe things. That's all sorts of refreshing. Plus, the singing is usually pretty.

just wait

The Gordon (-den?) Avenue Library Book Sale opened for two days this weekend, and begins in earnest Saturday. I exercised today by walking over there and carrying my new books back. Spoils were as follows:

1) Vol I and II of the three-volume Complete Short Stories of D.H. Lawrence. Rach says they're fine, and Lady Chatterly went down ok, so why not.
2) First on the Moon. Record of the first flight to the moon with material from the three astronauts aboard Apollo 11, and an epilogue by Arthur C. Clarke.
3) Prose and Poetry of the American West, Ed. James Work.
4) By the Bombs Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age, by Paul Boyer
5) Yevtuschenko Poems, bilingual edition tras. Herbert Marshall.

I'm almost done with a compilation of Damon Runyon's stories. I've been working through them in off moments for a few weeks. Apparently, only once in all of his stories does he ever use past tense- all the characters talk about everything in present tense. Hm. They're good mostly for the language- little twists at the end are sometimes too forced or afterthoughtish.

This week the VA Festival of the Book is going down in Charlottesville. They're showing Buster Keaton movies Wednesday, which sounds exciting, but I'll feel a bit silly going to a book festival for the movies.

gonna make a brand new start of it

Last evening of the last break to waste, and I must say I'm doing a wonderful job. Have managed to discover Dvorakian opera (Rusalka), finish Tales of the South Pacific, have dinner with daddums, and watch Trading Places and Revenge of the Nerds. Lest my goofing off impress you too much, I also did get a presentation for tomorrow put together, though it may be a moot point as I am losing my voice.

I spent the bulk of the break in NYC staying at a friend's, eating and sleeping and wandering around. It was relaxing, and made doubly so by witnessing the hubbub that I wasn't a part of in that city. I saw Grant's Tomb, a planetarium show narrated by gravelly Harrison Ford, the UN, and a lot of coffee/bakery/fancy food stores. Grant's Tomb is about the quietest place in New York, it seems, and worth a trip. Had really good vodka in Little Odessa in a store called "L'Chaim," ate meat to bursting at a Brazilian Grill, and learned all about Sarah Bernhardt at the Jewish Museum. I did a lot, but very sedately, and mostly enjoyed sitting back, maxin' relaxing and cooling. Or whatnot.

Came back early to work on my thesis, which blew up shortly before break. The lid's back on now, and I'm on schedule to finish even if I procrastinate some this week. The very nice thing is, I can continue this seclusion I enjoy so much for the next two or three weeks by telling people I can't do anything due to my thesis.

I've been waiting to write until I finished the Tales on purpose. I also finished Death in Berlin by MM Kaye and Ordinary Men by Browning. I've written a little about the Death in ___ series before, I think- with the young, beautiful, financially independent and adequately educated girls who find themselves in the middle of a killing spree and genteel English people and are neatly fished out of it by a tall, silent, capable-type man who then marries them. I only have Death in the Andamans left, and I'm saving it for a post-thesis treat. Ordinary Men was mentioned before. I was clued into it at, of all places, a particularly good party, by a history major type friend. It's all about the older men who were assigned to kill entire villages one shot at a time, and "clean out" ghettos in Poland during the height of the Final Solution. It was a bunch of history, then the final chapter was a summary of studies on how easy it is for people to rationalize hurting each other, and how easy it is to do cruel things if you don't think very hard about it. Said something good about not enough heroes and too many perpetrators and victims in that war. It's hard to point the finger afterwards when everyone seemed to have had some actions fit to be ashamed of during the thing. Death in Berlin was a fortuitous read after- cheerier, as much as a murder mystery can be, it was set in Berlin in 1953, and the repercussions of the war in Germany and the collective guilt were touched upon. Tales made it a WWII triple threat, and was really a fantastic set of stories. All the short parts add up in storyline to one big novel, but each is good enough to read alone. Taken together they're magnificent. It's all about heroes and ordinary men and the effects of war and prejudice and getting wiser and courage and waiting and doing a good job. I've never read any of Michener's other stuff- it always seemed from his section of the library that he was going for quantity rather than quality of output. Of everything I've written about here, this is the only thing I'd recommend without hesitation to anyone.

Had a chance to start Anatomy of Revolution. To the point so far. I probably ought to dig up a history of the French Revolution too, it seems I know nothing about it.