Return from the Monkeypox

Okay, it’s my second day mostly out of bed, and I’m feeling pretty good. Just tired. When I went to the ER two weeks ago, the nurse asked me if I’d had a pneumonia vaccine. I’m thinking, “there’s a pneumonia vaccine?” and just saying, “No.” Does everybody out there know that there’s a pneumonia vaccine? Well, now you do. You should probably get one next season.

The good thing is, besides racking up a lot of naptime, I’ve had a chance to read ten or fifteen books. My favorite during this time has to be “Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription,” from Bill Buckley’s Notes & Asides in the National Review. I probably would disagree with him at least nine times out of ten, but intelligence and a sharp wit will keep me a fan. (No, I wouldn’t be a fan of Hitler, or even Bush, if either were intelligent and/or intentionally funny. So don’t everybody pile on me.)

Besides, he looks remarkably like my great uncle Bill. He’d be the anti-Bill, but it’s captivating to me.

Genius and Perspective

“You can’t read any genuine history – as that of Herodotus or the Venerable Bede – without perceiving that our interest depends not on the subject but on the man – on the manner in which he treats the subject and the importance he gives it. A feeble writer and without genius must have what he thinks a great theme, which we are already interested in through the accounts of others, but a genius – a Shakespeare, for instance – would make the history of his parish more interesting than another’s history of the world.” – Thoreau, March 18, 1861

Somewhat later, Oscar Wilde noted that "Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter."

Both Thoreau and Wilde seem to be supporting my earlier claim that observation is as important as creation. (If they aren't, well, what’re they going to do about it?) You can’t be creative without appreciating (in the sense of noticing) your corner of the world, whether it consists of you and a cat in two rooms or you on a concert tour. But you need time and space to appreciate things, and that would seem to make a more hermetic existence richer in detail than that of “normal people,” since you’d have to zoom in on your subject instead of seeing it from far away. The globetrotter would see things from a different vantage point than the near-hermit. The astronauts who gave us pictures of an earthrise gave us a sense of ourselves in a different way, and Michael Collins (the American astronaut, not the Irishman) had a then-unique perspective: when he was orbiting the moon while Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were on the lunar surface, half the time he was on the dark side of the moon, making him further removed from the earth than anyone had ever been. Either way, though, we realize that there is another world – either a microcosm or a macrocosm – that should humble us from our egocentric universes. I’m not sure I’m capable of extracting myself from my self-centered universe, but at least reading others’ accounts of their world makes me aware of them. Perhaps genius requires observation. Or is it the other way around?

Flaubert on the Novel

"The story, the plot of a novel is of no interest to me. When I write a novel I aim at rendering a color, a shade. For instance, in my Carthaginian novel, I want to do something purple. The rest, the characters and the plot, is a mere detail. In Madame Bovary, all I wanted to do was to render a grey color, the moldy color of a wood-louse's existence. The story of the novel mattered so little to me that a few days before starting on it I still had in mind a very different Madame Bovary from the one I created: the setting and the overall tone were the same, but she was to have been a chaste and devout old maid. And then I realized that she would have been an impossible character." -- Flaubert, March 17, 1861

I've been trying to get this notion into various people's heads for a while now, and they just give me a blank look. They think a book is supposed to be about something. Not necessarily. And I know that whenever I create something, it inevitably takes on a life of its own. Sometimes it's a keeper; sometimes not. It's always a surprise.

I Swear I Am Writing My Own Obituary

Every day, the first thing Kaye does after getting dressed is run outside to get the newspaper so that she can read the obituaries. I am bemused at this. Mostly she doesn’t find anyone she knows, although that happens. I hate it when it turns out to be a 59-year-old student of hers (that happened recently). It just reminds me how old she’s getting. True, I’m aging at roughly the same rate as she is, but she has a head start on me. But today, she found a horribly hilarious obit. Some poor guy died and was survived by his “nearly devoted wife of 66 years.” I’m thinking they’d been married for almost 66 years. Maybe she wasn’t dearly devoted, but she surely was devoted to something to hang in there that long. I swear, I am writing my own obituary, sending it around to all my writing friends for proofreading and any suggestions. I will be selective about the suggestions part and avoid mentioning this to my relatives.

In case of a misprint in the newspaper, I suppose I should have fliers out for Kaye to distribute. She will be extremely devoted, bereft . . . and busy handing out fliers. Maybe she could put them under windshield wipers.

The Exasperating Simplicity of Layout Mode

I was on the verge of becoming fairly pleased with my accomplishment with this blog. Here I had written two somewhat coherent entries, if longish. My teachers in college were always telling me there had to be a paragraph break before the page ended, surely, and that sentences didn’t need to span four lines. That was when I was a Computer Science major. The day I became an English major, I started getting comments about how terse my style was. So I don’t know. But anyway, I have distracted myself from my point at hand. Partly that was because there are screaming kids in the yard next door and it’s only not even ten in the morning. At least some of these kids are old enough to be in school is what I’m thinking. I’m racking my brain, thinking, is it still Christmas break? Did somebody die a while back and now we have a holiday for it? I even got up to ask Kaye whether kids ought to be in school now or what? I mean, one of these kids has got to be what they used to call junior high. Kaye said she didn’t know. Meanwhile there’re kids I don’t even know behind the back yard, down a little cliff, in the parking lot of some apartments running around screaming. And next door on the other side, where grandparents live and their grandchildren used to be little like a meatloaf or two, now they’re up to screaming age and so what we have now is like Dolby digital surround sound screaming kids. They’ve all quieted up just now. I’m getting a little paranoid about my powers as a writer. Maybe I ought to blog a lot more. No, they just started up again.

Well my point was going to be that I spent yesterday mostly trying to make my blog sexier in a boring way, in that I was just copying everybody else, but still. I had successfully copied this insane guy’s code for the thought of the day generator and put in some new thoughts. It worked. Really. If you’d logged on between a certain time and when all hell broke loose, you could’ve seen my thoughts. But now you just see a little button below nothing saying, “Random Thought” with just a couple of blank lines above it before it moves on to the next part of my blog. The reason is that the new helpful “layout” version strips out all my thoughts. I put them in. Repeatedly. They just get taken out again.

Why, oh why did I switch to “layout” when everything was going so well? Because of the damn thought cloud or whatever you call it. You have to be in layout version to copy the code. Then it turns out the code doesn’t work, and the thing says if it doesn’t work that it’s probably because I did something wrong, like that’s useful or surprising to me. Gets them off the hook, though, I guess, and they did do all the work.

So for now, get used to a random blank thought because I have had it. Unless you have any suggestions, because at this point, I will try anything.