The aftermath

Overall:

I like Roald Dahl and still really want to read more of him.

I’m starting The Skies of Pern tomorrow, or rather, continuing. I’m relieved to be reading at leisure again.

I’m surprised I haven’t already bought all of Berlinski’s other books. Reading the Short History has left me smitten and there are few crushes stronger than brain crushes.

I made a tiny little dent in my book list on goodreads. Which, if I read 80 pages per hour every hour of every day would take me over 3 years to get through.

The numbers, very approximate:
1456 pages
18.2 hours spent reading

470 words-per-minute
1.3 pages-per-minute
80 pages-per-hour

Which is far less than I’m used to. Either I’ve learned how to slow down and chew my books or I’m just getting slow. Quick! Someone get me a copy of Eye-Q!

Adjusting the time for things like getting up to get a snack or stretch my legs, which I generally forget to do while I’m reading anyway, it should take me about six or seven hours to read a four hundred page book. If I stay home for a week reading, allowing for getting through a low estimate of six-hundred pages a day, I should be able to read about ten books, of relatively high word count per page, in seven days.

Of course, none of this takes into account how much I like what I’m reading. When I “read” Moby Dick I pass out five times an hour and throw a tantrum, resulting in a words-per-minute average of about 17. If I like something I either race through it or take my time to enjoy it, as was the case with Infinite Ascent, whose numbers I had to guess at based on how quickly I was able to read a chapter over again. I also upped the average words per page to account for the relative difficulty of words such as “axiomatic” or “polynomial” as opposed to “water” or “sentences” in the Dahl books. In any case, extrapolating wildly gets me about 356 words per page (for these seven books), the text difficulty being about average.

I know that there’s no real way I can accurately predict how long it would take me to read a novel, it’s just subject to too many variables. But it’s fun trying, anyway. If I set myself the task, and focus on just reading it instead of kicking my little feet and allowing myself to be distracted, I should be able to read Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel in about nine hours. So, we’ll see. I’m going to take a little break and then give it a shot.



But right now, it's bunny time:

Come on Professor Charles Xavier, lets go eat some dark green leafy vegetables and talk about Omega Red (I hate that guy).

Infinite Ascent

In Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics, author David Berlinski gathers many basic concepts* and slowly reveals their coalescence, drawing the reader along with him as he tells the story of 2500 years of human intellectual exploration. It’s quite a ride**. He does it expressively with humor, many anecdotes, and writerly style.

And there is the Omar Khayyam of the Rubiyat, a Persian among Arabs, and so a songbird among sparrows, a mathematician of note, occupied with the solution of cubic equations, his lyrical intelligence finding in algebra the anodyne against time that time had long withheld.

His passion for mathematics is not singular. There is art in there and literature, a great deal of philosophy and science, and all of these built on one indefatigable premise, championed, he says, by Pythagoreans: “Number is the essence of all things.” Once you understand this, an entirely lucid world emerges—beautiful for its austere simplicity and elegant logic as well as for its chaotic dramas. As he coaxed into my mind the beginnings of the Cartesian map, the ghost of the third axis rising prematurely, I felt a rush similar to the first time I realized the truth of the Pythagoreans' doctrine. Numbers are every thing. They are inside everything, the bones from which we string our muscular hearts, trusting their existence, often completely unaware that they are there at all.

My uncle Marco is a doctor. I remember visiting my grandparents, once while he was there and hearing him talk about a biology lab. He looked at me (which was amazing, children were considered all but invisible when adults were talking) and asked what I wanted to be when I grew up intending, I’m sure, to make a point about staying in school. I said, “An environmental scientist or a marine biologist who saves sharks.”
I liked sharks, a lot.
He told me that I would have to study hard and learn chemistry and math. I must’ve pulled a face. He said, “You don’t like math?”

“I hate it! It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Don’t you like poetry?”
“I love poetry.”
“Math is poetry. The numbers are words. They speak—you just have to learn the language.”

I can still remember those words, clearly. It takes my breath away to think of the truth of them.

Ever since, even through struggling with a particularly horrible geometry class I had to repeat in high school, math has been a kind of poetry. I finally understood numbers, their reason and their potential… Variables, parabolas, and functions all moving sinuously together, hypnotic.

Infinite Ascent is more like watching a play than listening to a lecture. Berlinski paints a landscape of real people and their remarkable insights. They argue and create amazing things, fight and get things wrong; they live and die and breathe life into theorems and equations the beginnings of which many people see only in high school briefly and without interest. His enthusiasm and engaging writing style catch the reader’s attention and the way he builds on each concept, storytelling rather than simply throwing text on a whiteboard, draws comprehension in his wake.

If number is the essence of all things then mathematics is the language of everything, “an aspect of the mind’s conversation with itself.” A parent language, left to us to decipher ourselves and our lives, to make sense of our surroundings, and to convey our understandings, both fumbled and precise, to each other.

As the external world recedes, the mind returns to itself. I think, therefore I am. Engaged by and with itself, the mind is proof against doubt, the distinction between the way things seem and the way they are vanishing, seeming and being blessedly annealed…There is the world of matter and the world of mind. It is the individual, naked in his thoughts and alone, who must learn how to represent the external world.

This is math as poetry; as a meticulous, universal language; the history of math a prelude to its philosophy—and Infinite Ascent is a brief, beautiful introduction to all three.

Results:
Title: Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics
Author: David Berlinski
Page Count: 181
Time: I took my time and read a lot of it aloud. All day, about ten hours.


*Understanding some of the actual math requires at least a basic knowledge of advanced mathematical concepts.

**At one point I lay back, tented the book over my face and shouted, “God, I love math!” Let me know when it has the same effect on you and we’ll high five over tea and cookies.

Matilda

Matilda is a genius. It takes more than four years for anyone to notice it but she is. She teaches herself to read and understand math. She can reason and plot, and well before she turns five and a half she is outthinking her parents, though it couldn’t have been all that difficult. Once she enters school, she meets Ms. Honey, a lovely young teacher who sees the child’s potential, and eventually they become friends. They rescue each other, in fact, and are left to their own happily-ever-afters (don’t take that summary as an excuse not to read it. That’s like not watching Jurassic Park because you know it’s about dinosaurs).

Rather than tell you more about Matilda, when you really should just read it, I’ll tell you a memory about why I feel so drawn to this story.

My family would go to the library every other week or so for a fresh batch of books (my mother is a book fiend and an elementary school teacher—it’s a wonder I wasn’t born with printer’s ink in my veins). I would arrive with my arms full of returns and I would leave better burdened with new titles, all kinds. Eventually, it seemed I had read everything I could reach and I was still hungry for new books. So one day, I crossed the line; I snuck into the grown-ups’ part of the library, a vast ocean compared to the kiddie pool brimming with Dr. Suess and pastel Young Adult fiction.
I have no idea what compelled me to it but I ended up standing in front of Shakespeare. Hardcover and paperback. Fake-leather-bound and some with shiny, crinkly plastic slipped over their dust-jackets like candy wrappers. I picked out Romeo and Juliet. A librarian came along just then and asked me if I needed anything. I said I was looking for my mother, hugged the book so she couldn’t take it and ran back to the front of the library to wait. I must have only understood half of what I read over the next few days but I couldn’t get over the beauty of the words. I rolled them over and over in my mind, speaking them aloud until they clicked in place, and I knew that I was reading something amazing. Small things can change your life forever; that day changed mine. Shakespeare fan, diehard romantic, and devoted logophile in one fell swoop. A bit older than I am in that photograph, I was about seven.

Matilda’s story is sad and sweet without being saccharine and boring. She’s feisty and smart, not just intelligent, and she’s tough. Mrs. Trunchbull, the headmistress, is a prime villain. It really is a shame that she’s not listed along with the Evil Stepmother and Maleficent and all the other epic bad guys from children’s books and movies. Beyond all of my personal reasons for liking it, Matilda is excellent. It should have been required reading in the “alienate the smart-kids” class that I was sent to once a week starting in third or fourth grade. It would have made me feel more awesome than awkward, although it might have also had me staring at the glasses at the dinner table, convinced I was telekinetic (but then, what young nerd doesn’t want superpowers?). I’m going to buy a copy, keep it around and the next time I see a kid under the age of five reading the newspaper, I’ll give them this to read as well.

The fact that it's taken me so long to find Matilda astounds me. It seems that this book should have lifted itself off the shelves and thrown itself at me or that I should have struck straight at it like a match going off. It opens with Dahl telling us about parents’ insistence that their children, regardless of the truth of it, are brilliant. Most people want to think that they and/or their children are geniuses (in one poll I recently came across, around forty percent of American responders think they’re in that one-in-a-thousand club). It’s easy to follow that to the next page and think, while reading, that you are just like Matilda! I wish I could say I was spared this reaction, I might even be a little embarrassed but, I’m not.


Results:
Title: Matilda
Author: Roald Dahl
Page Count: 233, including many illustrations
Time: An hour and ten minutes, including an incredible headache migraine... Let's just call it what it is.

Sunday: TBA possibly The Skies of Pern or Berlinski's short history of mathematics.

A Clockwork Orange

In Anthony Burgess’s 1986 introduction, A Clockwork Orange Resucked, he says, referring to the “moral lesson” in his book, that it is “the weary traditional one of the fundamental importance of moral choice.” He makes a vivid example of this with Alex, the protagonist of my latest assignment. Alex is a bad bad kid. He is not likable. He does however illustrate that man, left to his own choices, can be judged based on the merits or relative lack of goodness of his actions. If man is an automaton, having had his ability to choose good or evil taken from him, he is without either virtue or guilt.

After he has gone to prison for murdering an old woman, Our Humble Narrator is chosen for a kind of reconditioning program. The directors of this program seat him in front of a screen, tape his eyes open and force him to watch movies of horrific violence and murder, set to classical compositions, having been injected with a serum that makes him feel violently ill. Simple avoidance response. He’s being hardwired to equate what he hears and sees with great discomfort. In addition to providing Stanley Kubrick with what became an iconic little bit of celluloid, this laid the groundwork for an interesting bit of character/reader transformation.

When we start getting to know Alex we learn that he enjoys classical music. He describes it to us: “The timps rolling through my guts and out again like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders...I was in such bliss, my brothers.” It actually brings him to sexual release, seeing in the music the faces of the men he’s beaten, their blood, and hearing the screams of women he has raped. The music moves him, however twisted the reasons, and he finds joy in it. As much as his destructive actions, this too is a decision, to find his own appreciation for it and it was his to corrupt or cultivate. Once his reconditioning has him released back into the world, he eventually ends up in a record shop, listening to Mozart … and feeling violently ill. His new chemically imposed morality has chained Mozart and friends to his body’s physical reactions. If he listens to music, he’ll feel so sick he wants to die.

I love classical music. I don’t say it lightly. In the way of loving something for how it makes you a better person, I love it. Because of this love I should have rejoiced when it was taken from Alex. Out if his filthy hands and now a source of pain. My reaction was the opposite. I pitied him and hated that anyone thought it was their right to take it from him (there is that reader transformation I’m talking about). I never thought I would feel anything other than revulsion towards Alex. He is no less a monster for his reconditioned state. He is no less a murderer or rapist. It is the ingrained belief that the right of man to choose his own mind is sacrosanct, inviolate, that led me to his defense. They took away his mind, his heart and his reason to live when they took what made him himself. Upon realizing that he could no longer enjoy music he tells us, “What I’d forgotten was something I shouldn’t have forgotten and now made me want to snuff it.” He eventually is driven to suicide, and his parents cry for him instead of for what he has become, gathering around his hospital bed and asking him to come home. Once his ability to choose evil is conditioned out of him, Alex is suddenly a sympathetic character, a victim.

From a twisted, murdering, sociopathic son-of-a-bitch to sympathetic victim. Not an easy trick.

A lot has been said about this book and the movie, about the language and the violence and the morality of government and social intervention. Burgess has his own words about it, in the introduction saying: “Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities,” That is, to oversimplify the matter, good versus evil. Life is our struggle between them and the absence of that struggle is a void. He continues, “It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.” Those who do not understand this are as guilty of evil as those they would “cure” of it; what else can you say of a person who attempts to take a man’s humanity from him and tells him he does him favors?

I don’t know if anyone can like this book. I don’t think I did. It wasn’t difficult and I didn’t mind the violence so much as the feeling that I was supposed to be getting some sick, childish thrill from living it vicariously. That being said, it does give the reader a lot to think about in the way of their own reactions. I was genuinely surprised by my eventual empathy towards Alex. It was interesting to find that my defense of personal freedoms is stronger than my disgust for any one character. Not a surprise, but interesting, and worth the read to discover.

Results:
Title: A Clockwork Orange, which was originally two other titles, I can explain.
Author: Anthony Burgess, which was originally Machiavelli and Twain. I had to be able to read Friday's book on the bus owing to a certain New Movie coming out. My copy of The Prince was stuck in my laptop so, a substitution had to be made.
Page count: 192
Time: Almost two hours, riding over and back on the 7. In an example of art imitating life, the 7 runs through patches of hoodlum territory and I had front line seats to two shouting matches and one kid shoving an old man. Ah, South Philly.


Saturday: Matilda, on recommendation.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

It seems amazing to me that I hadn’t read this before now. I will guess that most people know the idea of Willy Wonka, the man with the chocolate empire, but I will also guess that though many people have seen the movie, either the 1971 masterpiece or the more recent offering from Tim Burton, too small a number of those have read the book.

Roald Dahl’s gift to us is not only his imaginings but his ability to tell the story simply and with a contagious sense of fun. The hope then is that his encouragements to children and their parents are just as catching. He would like us to be respectful of ourselves and of our parents, to check our greed and selfishness. He encourages thinking and imagining, and never ever chewing gum. My favorite lesson was this, sung by the Oompa-Loompas about Mike Teavee:

‘How used they keep themselves contented
Before this monster was invented?’
Have you forgotten? Don’t you know?
We’ll say it very loud and slow:
THEY … USED … TO … READ! They’d READ and READ,
AND READ and READ, and then proceed
to READ some more. Great Scott! Gadzooks!
One half their lives was reading books!
The nursery shelves held books galore!
Books cluttered up the nursery floor!
And in the bedroom, by the bed,
More books were waiting to be read!

I only hope that this lesson is paid the attention it deserves despite being delivered much more briefly in the 1971 film as, “Why don’t you try simply reading a book, Or could you just not bear to look...You’ll get no commercials!” Dahl's verse above could have described my childhood but in this I know absolutely that I am in the minority. Even so, they don’t have to have bookshelves, boxes-full under the bed, closets filled to bursting with books, I just hope that kids today* are reading.

J.K. Rowling must have had Dahl’s spirit on her shoulder while she was writing Harry Potter. The writing style, the youthful twinkle in the eyes of the magical role model, even the form and functions of the bullies in her world echo those in Dahl’s (who was, he said, himself influenced by Kipling and Dickens, amongst others). The list of candies available in Honeyduke’s, some of them are direct translations from Wonka’s glass elevator’s buttons... Well, I would give you examples, there are many, but instead I’ll encourage you to get a copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and judge for yourself. If you haven’t read the Harry Potter books, read those too. And there is the real comparison. Rowling, over the past ten years, and Dahl, since 1943, have both actively encouraged reading by inviting in children and the young-at-heart, and showing them the power of their own imaginations.

Recently Noah Scalin, originator of the Skull-a-Day project, had his book Skulls named one of the "Top Ten Quick Picks for Reluctant Teen Readers" by the Young Adult Library Services Association. However it happens, wherever the influence, whichever book is the gateway, I am grateful that there are writers, artists and makers of great things who are encouraging people to read, and then to imagine, and from there, who knows? Incredible things happen in the mind and greater things still when we encourage our minds to grow.

*Every time I use a phrase like “kids today” or “young people” it reminds me of my grandfather. I seem to be leaping past turning into my mother and straight into turning into my grandparents. I’m cool with it.


Results:
Title: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Author: Roald Dahl
Page count: 155, with many illustrations by Quentin Blake (whose work reminds me of Al Jaffee of MAD magazine fame)
Time: An hour and twenty minutes, including a break for chocolate tea.


Friday: The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli and The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain

Anonymous Rex

I like the smell of old books, like nothing else in the world, so I get the majority of my books second-hand. Some come from Bookhaven, my favorite used book store in the city, run by my favorite booksellers. The rest are half books, trash books,* inheritances, and thrift finds. Wednesday’s entry is from a thrift store in Jamaica Plain, Mass., Boomerangs.

With a title like Anonymous Rex, of course I had to buy it. To sum up: dinosaurs didn’t go extinct, they continued to evolve and adapted to live alongside us in increasingly elaborate guises, while we remained none the wiser—for around two million years. Well, except for that dragon debacle during the dark ages. Also, herbs are drugs to a dinosaur. A quick trip to a farmer’s market and you’ve got your Stego by the tail, so to speak. The prehistoric revisionist premise is to be accepted as fact, straightaway. Garcia sidesteps the easy tactic of tedious, patronizing dialogue delivered by characters who already know the facts by which they then must pretend to be shocked,

“Well, since we’re dinosaurs, it turns out we lay eggs.”
“You shut the f- -k up, really!?”
“Yes. You’re laying one right now!”
“Well, I’ll be danged.”

I've read that sort of thing enough times that I appreciated the matter-of-fact way my suspension of disbelief was encouraged. The world reads well and nothing else is completely unbelievable. It isn’t a strange, alternate reality, (though I’ve seen that done too). There are no superpowers granted to the dinos and they’re not the behemoths they once were so I don’t have to accept hologuises or invisi-shields—I was easily taken along on the ride.

This is a typical detective tale with telltale lingo like, “At the very least, I’ll save a fin on cab fare." There’s little here however, in the way of stereotypes, that isn’t the fault of genre writing and the plot moves quickly, if a little predictably. Vincent Rubio, PI, is an embittered, substance-addicted, poor-as-a-dirt-floor detective, determined to find justice for his ex-partner if it’s the last thing he does. The twists, backstabs, and intrigues come at the expected intervals but the dinosaur element really does keep it interesting and it’s a good dose of pop-fiction. There’s energy in his writing and the glee of a longtime detective fan mixed with the excitement of a kid walking into The Museum of Natural History for the first time. His enthusiasm to be telling this story is catching and overall, it made for a fun read.

Because of the dinosaurs. I really like dinosaurs.

Aside from the terrible lizards, there was one more thing that automatically endeared him to me:

“As expected, I did not reach dreamland even once. … I would lurch back into the bedroom...and attempt to drift off into slumber, which never came. The sandman is a lazy shift-about. I hate him.”

It’s good to know that even velociraptors are insomniacs.

Results:
Title: Anonymous Rex
Author: Eric Garcia
Page count: 273
Time: almost five and a half hours! Including several breaks to be distracted by the internet, lay around with Professor Charles Xavier, and generally loaf.


Thursday: TBA, possibly Charlie and the Chocolate Factory


*"Trash-" a prefix, can be used to describe anything found on curbs, in boxes, in piles, etc. on trash night. It's a big deal around here. I have trash furniture, many trash books, and my old housemate even used to bring home trash food, which I thought was taking the second R just a bit too far.

Rain or Shine

I keep a reading list on goodreads which comprises thirty runners-up for the Pulitzer Prize, 1980 to present. I have a rather high expectation when a book is on the Loser’s List. These are the stories that almost won the Prize! Marilynne Robinson is on it, as are David Nasaw, Christopher Durang, and the author of Tuesday’s title, Cyra McFadden.

I am prone to being too harsh on personal recollections as literature: memoirs, creative nonfiction... David Sedaris. I had the same problem here. This is a family memoir. Not focusing for long on any one personality, Rain or Shine reads like someone telling you the story of “your people," and though I genuinely liked some of the devices used throughout, I was never really compelled to like the people and so never understood why I should care about their story. This has a lot to do with my aversion to the romanticism of swaggering cowboys; I’ve had enough of that real-life stereotype but the people in this book, Cyra, her mother, her stepbrothers, all idolize Cy and the rodeo world. That muddy, rough life and it’s accompanying fantasies of rugged, macho men and delicate, yet manfully strong, beautiful women. I couldn’t stop rolling my eyes about their poor judgment long enough to care about them, and so they never felt real. That being said, Cyra McFadden does have a way of choosing just the right amount of outrageousness with which to paint them. In the way of truth being better, or funnier than fiction:

Years later, also in SanFrancisco, my stepmother startled me and a nearby table of diners…Her gynecologist, she announced loudly, had said to her, “Mrs. Taillon, you have the uterus of a young girl.”

The one character I felt anything for was a surprise—Ila Mae. Her letters to Cyra, Roy, and her sister Pat, are written with endearingly earnest though misguided intent and with the grammar and punctuation of someone who was worked too hard to finish school. Though the reason is very personally specific, Ila Mae rose from the pages in my gramma Ana’s form, writing and writing, always writing to keep in touch with a family grown out of her sight and out of her reach.

The back cover of Rain or Shine proclaims it to be:

“A firebrand account of growing up rodeo...it manages to embody the spirit of the mid-century American West."

-Gail Caldwell, Boston Globe

It does that. I just didn’t take to it. I didn’t like the late-century American West when I was brought up into it. A book embodying both that and all the glory of a male chauvinist household was always going to be a gamble. As well, sometimes it feels like all I do is cull other people’s memories, from things they say and from the things they delicately avoid saying. It’s no surprise then that I own and have read many memoirs, maybe too many to allow for appreciating any one of them in its own right. For many reasons—hype, my own past, an inundation of memoirs (like a flock of birds or a shrewdness of apes)—I was bound to not enjoy this book as others might. None of those reasons had to do with the writing style, which I would characterize as journalistically straight-forward, clear and clean.

Advice to you if you are anything like me:
Put down the memoirs and child and abnormal psych books and go watch an episode of the Simpsons.

Which, I intend to do right now.

Results
Book: Rain or Shine, by Cyra McFadden
Page count: 246, including Coda. Several pages of Plates.
Time: approximately 3 hours, including several phone calls, one avocado break, and an infuriating attempt to navigate my online bank’s BillPay system.

Wednesday: Anonymous Rex

Fahrenheit 451

I never consider it too late to read the book even if I’ve already watched the flick and I’m glad. I would have missed out on Harry Potter, the first book at least. I would also have never known the work of Ray Bradbury. A friend, who always has really great recommendations and then actually lends me the books, lent me the movie after a rousing conversation about CleanFlicks and other censorship offenses. It was a natural leap. Once I dutifully enjoyed the movie, I was given the book.

Within the confines of Montag’s mind I felt disturbed by upheaval, I felt the coming revolution. He carries on a stream of thought that at first seems unnecessary. I thought, we all think those things… Until it becomes apparent that, no, not in his world. Not in this future where people have not only been taught not to think but where the non-instruction is no longer needed. People have become shells and Montag is becoming more. Painfully, at first, and slowly, he begins to think for himself.
This is exactly the sort of story that gets my fire up. On any given day you can mention a little flick called, “Idiocracy,” and I get up on my soapbox and carry on about it. How can people think it was funny? How is it not classed as a premonitory documentary? I’ve felt this way about the world for years. Perhaps most of my life. That it seems people are all sleeping, or blind, willfully so. Why don’t they care about the distance we are manufacturing between each other? Why don’t they care about the things they see? Clarisse McClellan says:

“Bet I know something else you don’t. There’s dew on the grass in the morning.”
He suddenly couldn’t remember if he had known this or not, and it made him quite irritable.
“And if you look”—she nodded at the sky—”there’s a man in the moon.”
He hadn’t looked for a long time.

She can be seen as several notes from the author. As a symbol of our collective spirit, in this future hobbled and ill-fated; as catalyst and then as an embodiment of the changes in Montag, bringing about the revolution to her way of loving life; or as the seed of that revolution in every person, in her still young and vital, not yet smothered by convenience, convention, and fear. People fear feeling and thinking. You can see it in their body language. You can hear it in the choking sound behind an awkward laugh. When you ask, a non sequitor, “Are you happy?” or “But, how do you really feel?” It amounts to the same thing. Fear, denial, autopilot. Not all people, though not only a handful, either.

This novel doesn’t leave you with a happy ending; it doesn’t leave you hopeless. It doesn't leave you; it lingers. I finished reading, dropped the book, and fell right to sleep. As I was waking, I was gathering books in my arms, reciting every word I had ever read, all of them neatly ordered into thoughts and devices, plots and dénouements. I was desperate to save them, to prove that they lived. It was nearly a nightmare. The last words I began to recite were my own but they wouldn’t come. They were fading, not burning. There was no illumination and my mind was going dark.

I worry about the state of my species. I worry that there are many more people in this country who can break down the latest season of Gossip Girl than who can explain how electricity allows them to turn on their television sets. This worries me. But the fact that many of my friends, my mother, and I worry about it, the fact that Ray Bradbury did in 1950 and probably still worries about it… Just the fact that we are thinking about it and writing about it makes me feel better despite the nightmare, not so alone in my own fear and more and more confident that the idiocracy isn’t in our future.

Results
Title: Fahrenheit 451
Author: Ray Bradbury
Page count: 176, including Afterword and Coda
Time: 1 hour, 42 minutes.

Tuesday: Rain or Shine

Testing: Speed and focus.

Later on this year I will be testing myself to see how many classics I can read in one week. Rather than be blindsided by this challenge, I'm doing a trial run of one book a day for one week.

If you have any suggestions of books I should attempt during this week or during the classics challenge, let me know. If I go bankrupt at half.com, well, it’s not like that wasn’t going to happen anyway.

Monday: Fahrenheit 451.

Two for the price of one

This is the 29th Street Experiment, huh? So where are the experiments?

Soon, soon. I need to organize, plan some things. Write out a schedule on scrap paper. Lose said scrap of paper. Agonize over the lost brilliance of the ideas on the paper, get over it and write it again. I have to get a lab coat that doesn’t make me look either like a morgue attendant or like i’m about to shoot “Faye’s Anatomy” or “Nip/**ck,” which, i hear, is practically soft-core porn anyway. 
As a side note, i never realized how difficult it would be to porn-name medical movies. They’re already doing all the work for you, making any cleverness on my part come across as trying too hard. “Lorenzo’s Oil?” “Doctor X?” Come on.
Alright, "Patch Adams" is an easy one, too easy. [sigh] Where’s my comedy writing team?

And, of course, i intend to begin with the first of the year. 2010: my year of living dangerously. Except, no Mel Gibson, no vigilante murders—though there will be a small, personal, rather enlightening struggle for independence.

But all is not Boring Town, Blogosphere until then.

I originally had all of my writings here at the 29th blog but i have split us up. Ms. Yesenia (but, yikes, don’t call me that) runs this blog along with the other Lab Coats who have write-ups to contribute. Here will be reports and behind-the-scenes making-ofs, video, photography and so on. Headquarters for our goings-on. The other blog, Yes, Melynda, will deal more with my personal life throughout the course of this venture. Including all of my side-projects, art works and personal observations into why i am generally confused by the majority of humans approximately seventy-percent of the time. There’ll be a little cross-over. If this is at all confusing, don’t think so hard. Just pick one, follow along and join in when you feel comfortable doing so.

My choir teachers used to say that, “Follow along and join in when you feel comfortable singing along.” I know now that a better lesson was learned from Mz. Hankins, my strongest, sassiest, jazziest choir leader, who believed that scatting along before you knew what was going on was the way to get your feet under you. Don’t wait until you feel comfortable. As a matter of fact, never let yourself get comfortable! Seek out the unknown, hold hands with your fellow adventurers and lift your voice.
I don't think i would use those words exactly, or Mz. Hankins' motivational, almost Christian kitty posters for that matter and i don’t necessarily believe in dodging the comforts of this life. I certainly do try to seek out the unknown, challenge myself to stand in it, turn it over and understand it. And, once it’s become old hat, to step out and do it again. Lately it's become a priority to do more than try. I aim to make myself uncomfortable. If i remember how to be the sort of sassy, outspoken punk Mz. Hankins taught to sing "My Heart Belongs to Daddy," so much the better.

So, until the Experiment begins in earnest, check out my other space and do check back in here. We'll be finding out if Cherokee's 65/35 Poly/Cotton Twill w/Soil Release can be dyed using whatever crap i can find at CVS. Can i really build a distillery from the bargain buys listed on Ebay? And just how hard is it to build a spy camera case out of an old vinyl bag? More/Most importantly, how much Latin do i really have to know to claim the cred? And will anyone recognize an Ouroborus when they see one?

Stop it, Medical Supply Manufacturers, just cut it out.

I know that everything is about sex. We are biological containers for a replicating organism and we are all driven by its insistent prompting to reproduce via sexual intercourse. Whatever. That doesn't mean that i, while shopping for a lab coat, should have to think about how hot i will look in it.
I have a pair of cat-eye glasses. I have long, shiny hair i usually wear up in a twist. I might even have bedroom eyes on occasion, mostly while alone in my bedroom. I don't think that putting on my institution-white lab gear, with pocket protector (oh, there will be pocket protectors), is going to make me swish my hair out of its coil, slide my glasses down my nose and say, "Hey, Participant, uh, Number Seven. You're looking so fine—you make me want to eschew protocol and take you right here!"

Seriously. Who are they marketing this toward?

First things first: We're not going to be able to make out today.

I am experiencing a small setback. Illness. Damn.

So, today i can hike all over creation dropping show cards for Visible Anatomy, the three person show i have up at The Flying Saucer. I will also be sniffling and coughing, trying not to give in to the urge, all too common even while not sick, to lie down on the sidewalk, in the middle of a crosswalk, under a café table...

Okay, while i was typing that little paragraph my immune system decided to give up the fight entirely. I choose option B. In the absence of flyers out in the world i will invite you personally:

Come to the closing reception. Beverages, edibles and i'll have some cards for sale, like these.

Rest assured, there will be shenanigans, as well.