If we might sit until the darkness go,
Possess our souls in patience perhaps we might;
But there is always something to be done,
And no heart left to do it…
O victorious one,
Give strength to rise, go out, and meet thee in the night.
George MacDonald, Diary of an Old Soul November 4
Some time ago, the pest people came to heat the apartment and kill the bedbugs. The whole procedure started at 7:20 in the morning and ended at about 4 pm. I was gone working on my written, but the bedbug men must have been bored.
When I got back, I found these lovely specimens of magnetic poetry on my refrigerator:
At least we got some fun out of the whole bedbug tragedy.
“The time has come,” the student said, “to write of many things
Of 2D-IR spectroscopies, of polymers, o-rings,
And why three beams produce echoes and whether peaks have wings.”
As some of you know, the months of July and August were fraught for me with daily dryings, leather coats in the freezer, sleeping without my feather bed, keeping all of my clothing in plastic boxes, and a general feeling of ill-will to all creatures that go about on six legs.
Well, they’re back.
I really wanted to get rid of them when I lived in my old apartment so that I wouldn’t bring them here, where I share my apartment with someone else. Oh, well. There goes that idea.
So I’m off to the office to let them know. I have already sent a stinging and bitter e-mail to my previous apartment (not really; I wish it were their fault so I could blame them, though).
Why couldn’t they have waited to come back until my written prelim was done? Just one more month, that’s all I ask.
The best way to make jokes is to come up with the punchline first.
Like this one.
Why won’t McDonald’s ever serve Cambell’s soup?
Glencoe.
Try it. Here are some punchlines for you.
Khaki pants.
Ducks.
Hay.
The internet.
Ethanol.
Agatha Christie.
Lasers.
Cupcakes.
Or make up your own. Have fun!
It’s the birthday of Ogden Nash, for those of you who didn’t read Writer’s Almanac this morning because you lack productive activity at work other than watching glass shrink (almost as exciting as paint drying).
Ogden Nash was a poet who wrote such greats as If Anything Should Arise, It Isn’t I and We Would Refer You To Our Service Department, If We Had One and I Am Full of Previous Experience and Is Tomorrow Really Another Day or No More of the Same, Please. He was most famous for making words rhyme that don’t and paying no attention whatsoever to meter. So here, as a celebration, I give you my favorite Ogden Nash poem.
Who Did Which? or Who Indeed?
Oft in the stilly night,
When the mind is fumbling fuzzily,
I brood about how little I know,
And know that little so muzzily
Ere slumber’s chains have bound me,
I think it would suit me nicely,
If I knew one tenth of the little I know,
But knew that tenth precisely.
O Delius, Sibelius,
And What’s-his-Name Aurelius,
O Manet, O Monet,
Mrs. Siddons and the Cid!
I know each name
Has an oriflamme of fame,
I’m sure they all did something,
But I can’t think what they did.
Oft in the sleepless dawn
I feel my brain is hominy
When I try to identify famous men,
Their countries and anno Domini,
Potemkin, Pushkin, Ruskin,
Velasquez, Pulaski, Laski;
They are locked together in one gray cell,
And I seem to have lost the passkey.
OTasso, Picasso
O Talleyrand and Sally Rand,
Elijah, Elisha,
Eugene Aram, Eugene Sue,
Don Quixote, Donn Byrne,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,
Humperdinck and Rumpelstilskin,
They taunt me, two by two.
At last, in the stilly night,
When the mind is bubbling vaguely,
I grasp my history by the horns
And face it Haig and Haigly.
O, Austerlitz fought at Metternich,
And Omar Khayyam wrote Moby Dick,
Blucher invented a kind of shoe,
And Kohler of Kohler, the Waterloo;
Croesus was turned into gold by Minos,
And Thomas a Kempis was Thomas Aquinas.
Two Irish saints were Patti and Micah,
The Light Brigade rode at Balalaika,
If you seek a roue to irk your aunt,
Kubla-Khan but Immanuel Kant,
And no on has ever been transmogrified
Until by me he has been biogrified.
Gently my eyelids close;
I’d rather be good than clever;
And I’d rather have my facts all wrong
Than have no facts whatever.
If the day comes when everyone outside is playing music on their earphones, I will sing loudly in the street. And my musical world will be a lot bigger than theirs, though they might have better acoustics.
I promise someday I will update and regale you all with my woes involving bed bugs. But if you’re just looking for something interesting to read, try this.
Today, several members of my church set out on the very long flight to Kenya for a missions trip. They are keeping this blog while they are there so that those of us who were not able to go can be there in spirit. Already there are several posts giving prayer requests, tales of the packing of the computers (which I helped with some) and much more. Check it out!
It was very hot and stuffy and at first I was not sure that I had come to the right place. I saw no one eager to take the five dollars in admission that nestled inside my bag. But surely nowhere else would there be so many white-bearded men sitting solidly beside high shelves bursting at the seams with dusty-smelling books.
This was the Midwest Antiquarian Bookseller’s Association annual book fair and I was by far the youngest person there.
Eventually I found the front entrance where the friendly man behind the table took my five dollars and told me that my ticket would be good for the following day as well. I thanked him and then turned to the shelves.
Initially, it was more than a little unnerving. Rows upon rows of shelves stood, each with its own gray or white-headed guardian (in some cases two) watching with expressionless eyes all those who dared come near to their treasure. It took a full twenty minutes for me to work up the courage to even touch a book. And when I finally did, the prices scared me even more.
I had come into the building with a solitary twenty dollars, and five of that had gone for admission. Everything I looked at was, well. Out of my price range, let’s say. Or, to paraphrase the movie The Librarian, if my price range exploded, these prices wouldn’t hear the blast for 8 days.
But then I realized that no one here knew that. And, additionally, no one seemed to care. I heard no gasps of terror when I opened the first book that was priced at over $100. Or $700. The booksellers had put these out for people to touch; if it was really delicate, they would have put it into a glass case. And, for all they knew, I was not a poor grubby graduate student who happened to love books, perhaps I was a rich grubby graduate student who happened to love books. And so I picked up and held (very carefully!) beautiful, old, valuable books.
My hands (my very own hands!) have now held first editions of: Bleak House by Charles Dickens (all marbly-edged and leather-covered), Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, The Silver Chair by C. S. Lewis, All Hallow’s Eve by Charles Williams, Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury, Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, Brinkley Manor by P. G. Wodehouse, Perelandra by C. S. Lewis and The Silver Chair by C. S. Lewis. And they were lovely. I enjoyed seeing the familiar words on old pages. It was particularly odd with The Silver Chair, which I know very well and love dearly. Reading the part where Trumpkin says “Useless? I daresay he is. Is that any reason for bringing him to court?” I laughed out loud (probably getting stares from the bookseller). Then I had a thought that laughing while reading such a very expensive book should feel strange, but it didn’t. At that moment, the whole first edition thing (that it is worth so much more) seemed a little silly. I like old books, but I like old words and old ideas better.
At the same time, though, I think these old folks with their staring eyes and gloomy looks (they animate pretty quickly as soon as you talk to them) have got something right. I’m glad that they let me handle their precious first editions.
All this talk of hugely expensive books is not to say that my remaining fifteen dollars left the book fair untransformed. I did get one (slightly water-damaged and sans dust jacket) first edition, a P. G. Wodehouse I have not yet read called Biffen’s Millions. I also got a nice omnibus of the three Five Children books by E. Nesbit. So, Adelle, I will now be able to read The Phoenix and the Carpet without having to steal your copy!
Yesterday was G. K. Chesterton’s birthday. This is how I celebrated.
I went to work and attempted to get the lab printer speaking with my computer. I failed repeatedly and gave up.
“An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered”
I was able to synthesize the information in many of the papers I’ve been reading, and came up with with a few options for my immediate project.
“A scientific interest, I suppose?”
“Of a rather amateurish sort, I fear.”
I listened to the first two religious discussions among my labmates that I have heard.
“I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.”
Then, my group went to the 3M Innovation Center for the SAS poster session. The first hour we wandered around and looked at the cool technology they have made there and played with the interactive exhibits.
Then we had the poster session. It was more like a party. There was food and drink and we all sat around and talked for the first half hour and it was hard to get up again to look at the posters.
“sitting in that chair with that story I was as happy as a schoolboy on a half-holiday…Then that bell rang, and I thought for one long mortal minute that I couldn’t get out of that chair-literally, physically, muscularly couldn’t.”
I walked home and made up a silly story on the way. I wrote it out once I got home. It really needs pictures, though.
“But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.”
And then, at five minutes to midnight, I remembered that it was Mr. Chesterton’s birthday, and I read Father Brown stories before going to bed.
“Father Brown’s figure remained quite dark and still; but in that instant he had lost his head. His head was always most valuable when he had lost it. In such moments he put two and two together and made four million.”
It was also T. H. White’s birthday. There were some King Arthur references in the story I wrote.
