(photo by h)

One of the many paths that forked off in a different direction from the life I am currently living was the Ph.D in Renaissance Literature that I never pursued. I had gone on a series of interviews at Berkeley, where famous Shakespeare scholars Stephens Booth and Greenblatt taught, and managed to impress the magnificently skeptical and crabby Booth, who wrote up a nice little letter to the admissions committee, and I was all set to get my references in order and write my essay when I considered the fact that I was already fearfully overeducated and by educating myself even more I'd lose what feeble grip I had on reality and no longer be able to communicate with anyone but other Ph.Ds. The idea of being confined to the suffocating hortus conclusus of universities for the rest of my life, condemned to throw around phrases such as "hortus conclusus" to continually reassert my right to belong -- made me toss my application into the trash and head off to Arkansas, where I learned to operate an arc welder, gig frogs and frame in drywall.

Nonetheless, I still love Shakespeare.

Now, it's true that I haven't read the entire article in the New Yorker with Adam Gopnick talking about Stephen Greenblatt talking about Shakespeare, but starts out promisingly, and I really do plan on reading it as soon as I am able to get home from work, which, it now being 11 PM on a Sunday evening seems a remoter and remoter likelihood, perhaps I will never not be in front of this computer and reading, you know, books again.

Walking home from work last night many pages from a book blew past me. I almost always read things that I find in the street -- you can find the most amazing things if you keep your eyes open. This was a page from a novel by bestselling author Taylor Caldwell,Ceremony of the Innocent, 1977.

My fourth grade teacher called words such as "indolent" "fifty cent words" and recommended that we use only one per paragraph. I had forgotten this advice (and rarely abide by it) but it instantly came to mind.

Rodeo, burning man, punk, hippie, costume, DragonCon, pride, bluegrass, class, jazz, artists, geeks, baseball, goth, golf...

It's been three weeks already and no one told me that there was a Mac Version of Skype! Hooray! I only found this out because I was having an audio chat with Mark and I asked him if he'd tried Skype (which is only for Windows) and he went to the site and told me there was a Mac Version. So, amigos, email me your Skype username and I'll add you to my list.

On Brian's recommendation, I am reading the very entertaining Word Freak, about Scrabble maniacs who, when not competing at tournaments, hang out in coffeeshops, belch loudly and yell out things incomprehensible to even Jeopardy Prizewinners, such as: "GUACAMOLE with an F!" And their friends respond "CAMOUFLAGE!" or "TRANSMEDIA with an M!" : "MASTERMIND!". Pair isograms -- which have two of each letter, are also offered: AACCEEHHNNPP is HAPPENCHANCE and EEIINNSSTT is INTESTINES. MEGACHIROPTERAN has an anagram: CINEMATOGRAPHER. So does HISTRIONICS: TRICHINOSIS. Lordy. I was thrilled the time my father and I, in a game of Anagrams, stole from each other, successively: MILES, LIMERS, MILLERS, MILLINERS, MILLIONAIRES. It was the best sequence of my anagrams career thus far -- four thefts is good. But this is nothing compared to calisthenics the people in this book put their alphabets through. I'm glad I haven't met them so I can still enjoy these games.

David Chess is one of my favorite webloggers, ever. He takes a moment that is nothing and makes it everything. Is there anything greater than that? No.

Danica sends along a link to Twenty 2, which also makes beautiful hand-screened wallpaper, as well as lovely fabrics and other delightful things.

Eric just posted this photo of an organic chess set. It's tagged "josh draper" so maybe Josh made it? It appears to a chess set made of green and red apples and autumn leaves.

Mercury Theatre, a live music and video performance in Cathedral Park, at Richards and Dunsmuir, is happening again this Saturday, during Swarm, which starts tonight. I'm looking forward to Swarm, which is always a lot of fun, and Mercury Theatre the highligh. More information here.

There was no way that we were not stopping off at Powell's. We'd already hit it on the way down, briefly, while we were hanging out with Rael Dornfest (after dinner at a delicious Vietnamese restaurant), but 20 minutes isn't enough time. So on the way back up Interstate 5, we took the exit into Portland and went back. I bought: Typologies by Bernd and Hilla Becher; Constructing Modernity: The Art & Career of Naum Gabo; The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau; Desire and Delusion and Night Games by Arthur Schnitzler; and two other books I don't have next to me right now. Stewart looked at Typologies and asked, Do we really need *another* amazing book that just sits there on the table?. Duh. He was in a bad mood because he couldn't find any wifi within a three block radius of Powell's.

My friend Forrest and his family joke that when they buy a book, they're also buying the time in which to read it. I look at this pile sadly, and consider giving up sleeping.

Typologies is the first book that I'm reading -- reading and looking at, really. Page after page of black and white photographs of water towers, blast furnaces, winding towers, cooling towers and other structures associated with the coal and steel industries. The Bechers have been photographing these buildings together since 1959, in this very flat, extremely rigorous, unemphatic way. The Armin Zweite essay at the beginning of the book concludes:

Their influence is enormous. Former students include Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Candida Hofer, Thomas Ruff and Petra Wunderlich.

• '...billboard by Jenny Holzer: "Go where people sleep and see if they're safe."'
• 'Nothing frightens true entrepreneurs because nothing can be allowed to interfere with their vision. They have the same passion as artists and writers. Just as an artist creates a painting from scratch, so entrepreneurs can realize their own dreams in precisely the same way.-- by turning an idea into reality, earning a livelihood from it and, hopefully, making a profit.'

  There's something to this, but it also seems completely wrong. Then again, she also quotes this fellow:

• 'The challenge for business leaders in the twenty-first century is to assume the mantle of spiritual elder for their cultures, so that life doesn't become trivial and grey for all the people who spend most of their life at work.' -- Jim Channon

  Wasn't sure who Jim Channon is, but if he wants to continue his Corporate Consulting career, he'd best find a new site designer, and soon.

• 'The history of business...has been peppered with the narrow wisdom of the robber barons and corporate giants that have shaped the myth of amoral business. John D. Rockefeller once boasted that he was quite willing to pay someone a salary of $1 million if he displayed certain brutal characteristics: 'He must be able to glide over every moral restraint with almost childlike disregard ... and has, besides other positive qualities, no scruples whatsoever and be ready to kill thousands of victims -- without a murmur.''
• 'The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball -- the further I am rolled, the more I gain.' -- Susan B. Anthony
• 'This is... a trait no other nation seems to possess in quite the same degree that we do -- namely, a feeling of almost childish injury and resentment unless the world as a whole recognizes how innocent we are of anyting but the most generous and harmless intentions.' -- Eleanor Roosevelt
• 'What a weak barrier is truth when it stands in the way of an hypothesis.' -- Mary Wollestonecraft

From the section in Vertigo by W.G. Sebald that follows Kafka through Italy.

Living as we do in a very walkable city, we don't drive very much. We walk to work, and to the grocery store, and to restaurants and our friends' houses. We're on the second day of a six day road trip.

I have one of those minds that never turns off, a hyper-alert, information-gathering and -assessing brain. This is great for many things, but it is not very relaxing. It's hard to fall asleep, for one thing.

When I used to go rock climbing a lot, I often described it as "relaxing" which surprised many people. There is something about being entirely focused on one problem, on which my life depends, that made me very peaceful. I was in a horrendous car accident once, with a few other people, and while everyone else was crying and shouting (and the driver running away from the scene of the accident!) I found myself almost supernaturally calm and rational, flagging down a passing car, getting them to call an ambulance, tending to the injured. Maybe I should work in an emergency room?

I think this is also why I love driving.

Have to get back on the road now. More on this later.