So Many Books

I have read many thousands of books. I don't say that to brag. I am not even sure if it is a thing to be vaunted or a thing to be hidden away like a teenage diary. It is perhaps a matter to regret how much time, just physical time, I have spent reading. There is so much I could have done with that time--at least theoretically. Not that I didn't do things, I did a lot of things, traveled,climbed mountains, walked beside the sea, shared good times with good people, drank way too much beer, but I could have, perhaps, done more, even, somewhat ironically, written more.

It is not like all those books were profound or life changing or even offered any new knowledge of the world, it's people, or of myself. I would say that most of them were probably the intellectual equivalent of watching a tv show or going to a popular movie. Science fiction, mysteries, thrillers, historical novels, most are disposable, offering momentary distractions from boredom or the occasional existential angst. Nothing is more comforting to me than to curl up on the end of the couch with a book. For the most part they are ways of getting lost in more interesting, more adventuresome lives without the accompanying risk and toil.

There are exceptions of course; there are always exceptions. There are some science fiction novels and stories, in particular, that will be with me forever. More on that on another day. I have also read many of the so called great books, literature, philosophy, history, science, biography, etc. Many moved me tremendously and a few bored me more than two economists talking in depth about variations in the liborg scores.

Over the years I have tended to focus or obsess on particular writers, often for years at a time. In high school it was William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot. Then, for years I focused on Ezra Pound, especially the Cantos. More on that someday. I read most of Freud and Jung. I spent years on Louis Zukofsky's "A" and The Maximus poems of Olsen. I have spent probably a decade reading and retreading the various works of Heidegger. And I spent a least five years on the cryptic poetry of Paul Celan. Other obsessions include classical poetry in Greek and Latin, with a particular obsession, for reasons I can not adequately explain, with the poetry of the Hellenistic poet Kallimachos.

My obsessions do not necessarily result in full acceptance of the work. I pretty much reject the theories of Freud and Jung and I have serious questions about most of the others. To a certain extent I just like delving into tomes, the thicker, the more obscure the better. It helps me maintain the self delusion that I am somehow smarter than the average bear to quote Yogi.

I also have read, and continue to read, many books on science and the history of science. I am especially interested in physics and astronomy, but I have read books on evolution, genetics, and information theory.

Along with all these, I have read hundreds, if not thousands, of technical books on mastering certain software, or learning programming languages.

So what does it add up to?

Probably nothing, in the end. I know too much to be sure of anything. Lately I have been wondering how to reconcile the major interests and influences in my life. How do I bring literature, philosophy, science and technology together in a way makes sense, but is not a lie, not simply an artifact of language, a book among far too many books?

That is what I am going to focus this bog on for the foreseeable future: bringing things together, making sense of it.

Another Restart

This blog has had more reboots than the Doctor on Doctor Who has had regenerations, but here is another. It is not that I haven't been busy. I have even blogged a great deal, but all on my school related blog. If you are interested you can see it at ITC blog. The most recent posts are about SQL and c#, earlier posts include java and Android.

I have also been writing, if not always what I would most want to write. I am working on the second edition of my database text book. I am also working on a proposal, at the editor's request, for a new book on systems analysis. I have, at least, three novel ideas and a plan--of sorts--for a long, very long, poem. More about all of these in later posts.

The main reason I am returning to this blog is that I have finally made some progress on spconger.com, my self publishing web site. It is still in somewhat skeletal form, but is beginning to take shape. I want to make it "responsive" in the sense that it will adapt its display to the device that is viewing it. Now it does so by just being very simple, but as I learn more css3 I hope to add some complexity. You--my few if any readers-- are free to take a look. Comments are appreciated

Chain smoking

He took the cigarette pack from his shirt pocket and hit it against the heel of his hand until two or three cigarettes were higher than the rest. He pulled out the highest, then shook the pack so the other two descended again and put it back in his pocket. He took the butt of his last cigarette, burned almost to the filter, and put it in his mouth. He put the new cigarette tip to tip with the butt. He breathed in deeply. The coal of the dying cigarette flared and lit the new one. With a jerk he took butt from his mouth and snuffed it in the already too full ash tray. He brought the new one to his lips and inhaled deeply. His fingernails and the tips of his fingers were stained yellow.

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A paragraph from my novel (at this point, only stray paragraphs exist.) An attempt to describe the chain smoking of a skitzophrenic acquaintance of mine. The attempt, as with the commuting pieces is to find a style that maps to reality.

Coming to One's Self

Only here, in rare moments when you are not absorbed in the tasks at work, the tasks at home, when you are not occupied by the mechanics of coming and going, of getting from one place to another; only here, at rest for a moment on the bus, your book still in your book bag, no one in the seat beside you, do you come to an awareness of yourself as your self, separate from any outside concern. It is not an entirely comfortable awareness. You catch your reflection, half sketched, transparent, lost like a ghost in the sea of the window's muddy glass. How did I get so old, so gray? You feel finite, unexpectedly fragile, aware of the arbitrary briefness of this, of all moments, of the infinite stretch of dark time before and after.

The continuity of the self, the narrative that we tell ourselves to connect moment to moment, day to day, year to year, is mostly illusion. When we are at work, we are the work, the task at hand absorbs us. Our awareness is of the task, of what is required for the task. In moments of relaxation, when we read, we are lost in what we are reading; when we watch TV we are lost in the television show, with it's own illusions of continuity punctuated by commercials. Even when we are doing nothing we avoid the confrontation, thinking about the past, daydreaming about some unlikely future. Our actual selves, the consciousness of self, is full of gaps, lacunae, vast swaths of memoryless, lost time. We are a collection of bright fragments like dust motes in a shaft of sunlight. Our life histories are stories we tell ourselves to connect the dots. That was me when I was in college. That was me in when I first starting work. Real memories mingle with imagination and we cannot tell the difference.

You cannot look too long at the reflection in the dirty window. It is too empty, too lonely. It brings up an emotion, nameless, but akin to the emotion that you have viewing gulls flying in silhouette over the gray surf on a desolate beach. You look away and pull a book from your bag to read.

The Accident

The car, an old orange Chevy, cut too closely in front of the bus trying to get ahead of it in the express lane. The bus struck it just behind the right fender. For a long second the bus just pushed the car down the highway, then with a screech of metal, the car broke loose and spun into the lane to the right. It hit a van that was beside the bus. The van slid into a semi truck and trailer that was in the next lane over. A pickup truck smashed into the back of the semi. Everything came to stop.

Everyone on the bus looked around at the other passengers, in a moment of shocked silence. Nobody had any obvious hurt. I had seen and heard it all unfold, but, on the bus, there was almost no feeling of impact. Pure physics, I suppose. The mass of the bus was so much greater than the car's.

People began to talk. What was that guy thinking? Is the driver hurt? A few jokes. I didn't want to go to work today anyway. It's all your fault. You sat in the wrong seat today. It disrupted the whole balance of the universe. How long do you think we will be stuck here?

The bus driver could be heard calling the accident in to the dispatcher. Then she turned to the passengers. "Everyone alright?" there are mummers of assent. "Anyone see what happened?" Several people nodded or said yes. The bus diver pulled out a small stack of white cards. "Anyone who is willing to be a witness, would you please fill out a card." Several raised their hands. She walked back through the isle passing out cards. I took one. The woman in the seat in front of me said "sorry, I was asleep."
The bus driver nodded. Finished passing out the cards she returned to the front of the bus.

There was a moment of silence as people looked over the cards, then, almost as if on a signal, people began pulling out their cell phones to call work. Hello, yes, I am on the bus. We just had an accident. I will be late getting in. I don't know how late. I'll let you know as things get figured out.

I didn't call. There wouldn't be any one in the office yet.

After the phone calls people started talking again. People who had never spoken to each other now talked freely. I have been riding for fifteen years and this is the first accident I have been in. It's my third. I was in another one one the freeway about a year ago, similar to this one. Somebody cut into close in front of the bus. I have been on buses that broke down many times, but. . .

Sirens could be heard, faint at first but getting louder. Within a couple of minutes two ambulances, a fire truck and three police cars were parked around the accident scene. Only one lane of cars was getting by on the right shoulder.

A policeman came on board the bus. "Is everyone alright here? Did anyone see what happened?" He waited for a response. If you would give me your names and a contact number, please." He came down the isle with and took names in a notebook. "Thank you. Another bus should be here in twenty or thirty minutes. We will transfer you onto that bus and you can continue on your way. Until that time please remain on the bus and be patient. Any questions?" One passenger laughed and said "thanks for riding Metro."

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What I am looking for, what I am trying to achieve in these scenes from the endless commute, is a style, a sense of a style, that can convey accurately and simply what happened, what is happening. Poetry I have thought about, form and structure, metric, language, rhetoric, genre, but I have never given such thought to prose. Now I have a novel in mind, maybe my only novel, and I find I want to actually think about sentence structure, the flow of narrative, the presentation of detail, capturing what I see, what I hear, smell and taste. My daily commute is an exercise in patience, frustration, exhaustion and now also an exercise in writing, in memory and precision. I am sure there will be as much frustration and wasted time in the written commute as in the actual, but, perhaps, in the end, something novel will come of it.

Parking Lot

Strangely, and perhaps sadly, the best part of my commute is often in the morning at the Safeway parking lot. When I emerge from the store, having purchased a tall drip coffee, black with no sugar or cream, and walk out onto the parking lot, I look up for the briefest moment and see the horizon with its clouds just brightening with the morning sun and I see the buildings around the lot and the cars on the road and a flock--a "murmuration" of starlings, a few crows, and, in that moment, feel the cool of the air on my face, and, for only a second, a certain exhilaration, the sense of what I can only describe as "the freedom of the road," the sense of new places and strange horizons, of novel destinations. It is, in short, a feeling of escape. But then I get back I'm my car and pull out onto the möbius of my daily route, taking a sip of my black and satisfyingly bitter coffee.

Roadside Crosses

Those crosses beside the highways and the country roads that mark the spot where a speeding teenager, or a drunken driver, or a driver hit by a drunken driver, or a tired driver, or a distracted driver, or a driver who was simply unlucky flew off the road and, in a variety of tragic, gruesome ways, died; I have observed them at various times over the years. At first there are flowers and balloons, teddy bears, sometimes--sometimes a portrait of the deceased printed on computer paper, scraps of a poem, some words from friends. Over time the flowers wilt and are replaced only on birthdays or anniversaries. The balloons deflate and lay in the long grass like so many latex snakes. The teddy bears are carried away by stray dogs. The pictures tear and blow away, caught in the wires of a nearby fence or in the twigs of bushes. One day the cross itself is gone and there is only grass and sky, road and fence and the muddy ditch beside the pavement.