Fairy Tale Art

Cookbook donation yesterday. Homemade Ice Cream and Cake by Food Editors of Farm Journal, 1972.
I think I will bring it home for the fun of reading ... not going to make any of the recipes because I would EAT THEM ALL. I love fluffy jell-o parfaits and the like. They're not like food at all!

I leave in fifteen minutes to meet a friend--my second get-together in 24 hours. Both of these friends are from my days in the art college library.

Before I leave I need to hang the curtains I brought home---temperatures are high (around 90) and I need to block the sun to keep the apartment cool. Luckily temps are still dropping at night to comfortable sleeping levels. I don't like the heat but as long as I can sleep at night I'm not turning on the a/c.

We're steaming in the back at work, because the large donations door is open all the time. Another stupid thing at work--there's nothing done to block the inflow of hot air, such as hanging plastic strips like grocery stores do.

I'm complaining a lot about work, but I'm really very happy there and more so lately, as I've stopped expecting anything from management (not that I don't still roll my eyes).
Last night I was talking to my art librarian friend Allan about how we work around  (under/over) management. Our former boss at the library hated Allan and cut his hours in half. Allan continued to work as much as ever for half the pay, because he loves his work. He took on more and more independent projects for staff and students.

Now at 76, Allan's still there--his current project is digitally scanning  a collection of thousands of vintage postcards with illustrations of fairy tales, belonging to fairy tale reseacher Jack Zipes--retired from the UM here.
They will go online, to be shared for free.

Zipes says,
Fairy tales "serve a meaningful social function, not just for compensation but for revelation: the worlds projected by the best of our fairy tales reveal the gaps between truth and falsehood in our immediate society".

I've been interested in fairy tales in the last couple years--flowing from my growing interest in toys and magic animals--
I told Allan about a Little Golden Book I have on display at my apartment--he immediately guessed the illustrator--Gustaf Tenggren. We ended up stopping at my place before he went home so I could lend it to him. From 1955:

Must dash!

Notes on Donations

Donors sometimes leaves notes with their donations to the thrift store--or sometimes the notes are leftovers on gifts or notes to self.
Considerate notes are some of my favorite things, counterbalancing as they do "donors" who dump their trash on the thrift store.

My Favorite Murder is a popular true-crime comedy podcast.
BELOW: The note with this puzzle:

"This puzzle has all its pieces, but it is frustratingly poorly made. I hope by donating it I can give other My Favorite Murder fans a chance to experience the cool ideaof this puzzle without them needing to pay $50 for it."

Puzzle volunteer Abby looked at the pieces and said, "Yeah, these are poorly designed--too many pointy edges--they'd be hard to work with." She priced it $1.99.

BELOW: A note in George Orwell's Burmese Days:

"You may enjoy reading this George Orwell novel, but I doubt it! It is greatly different from the ones you've already done."

BELOW: "Joe's TOASTER Christmas 1974 From Mary"
The toaster in this box was pristine.

I have an unusually busy social schedule coming up--busy for me, that is. I prefer to spread out social engagements, but for various reasons they're close together over the next couple weeks. That's okay, really. (And what I mean by "close together" is more than one a week. LOL)

But.... Oh, darn.
I just this moment got a text from Big Boss saying we're having a staff meeting (to plan SOPs for shoplifting) on Friday.
TIME FOR MORE SONNET WRITING!
I should have been doing that during the meeting with the police last week, but I'd been taking notes. More fool, me. If I hadn't paid attention, I wouldn't have gotten angry. Must practice harder.

I'd told Marz my idea to write movie reviews in sonnet form, and she wants to do it too. In a couple weeks the micro-cinema is showing Point Blank (Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson), which I've never seen but she loves---we're going to see that and write sonnets about it.

At the Rose Garden this past weekend:

Climb Up

The water was not running in the faun fountain at the Rose Garden and Bethany could climb to the top basin--about 9 feet up.
(She'd taken her dress off expecting she'd get wet, but she loves running around in her undies anyway. "They have ruffles!")

(That is to say, I could help Bethany climb up. I wouldn't mind getting wet if the fountain was on, but it'd be dangerously slippery.)
–––––––––––––––––––––––

Yesterday was Pentecost, one of the coolest and firiest of holy days, the finale of Easter when the Holy Spirit descends in tongues of flame. I went to the Basilica for Mass for the first time in years because Marz was doing a thing there.

The Basilica always does a great job with liturgy, and yesterday they pulled out all the stops--processions with banners and bells; pots of incense; full choir, organ, and brass; and at the very end, orange, yellow, and red rose petals fell from above.

I felt the same as I feel when I watch the Olympics:
EXCELLENCE IS POSSIBLE.

[UPDATE: Deleted rant about work]

HUMANS CAN CLIMB UP. (Helps if the water in the fountain is off and stays off.)

You can get 20 volunteers carrying banners to synchronize their movements. I worked at the Basilica for a year in 2002-2003, so I noticed the gestural cues--the small eye movements ("go now"), the slight finger movements ("that way")--it was so sweet to see the care and effort, just to create beauty. (There's no "just" about it---beauty heals.)
Marz says it reminds her of happy days in Band Camp, when they spend hours and hours practicing turning left.

The thing is, I am encouraged. Whatever my beleaguered workplace can or cannot do, chooses or chooses not to be aware of,
I can climb up.

I do that a lot at work, in little ways--last week, putting down a new rug and covering a bookshelf end. Whenever I do, customers say how nice it is, how much they appreciate it, and that's the best reward. Management usually doesn't notice, which means they don't stand in my way either. And so I can carry on.
Head on fire!

Find What You Love, Only More So

Ta-da, book-cover covering!
Yesterday I started to cover the raw end of the display bookshelf with old paperback covers. I got the idea from indie booksellers Magers & Quinn, whose bathroom wall is covered with covers (under plexiglass).

Closer up...

The selection was fairly random--I wanted older, worn paperbacks but of course was limited by what we happened to have on hand.

I tried to choose a range of voices. Night Mare, however, I chose just for the horse coming through a bookcase. I don't know Piers Anthony. When I got home, I looked him up and he sounds smarmy...
(The feeling I get is that sci-fi attracted a lot of male writers partly because off-planet they could have sex with all the tentacled females they wanted.)
For my purpose it's a great cover though--bookshelves on a bookshelf––and I expect most people won't know the author any more than I did.

I also double-checked that Island of the Blue Dolphins has not dated in an unfortunate way--my memory of loving it as a child 50+ years ago NOT being enough to go on.
Overall it still gets good reviews as an adventure story about a girl surviving on her own, and more about personal resilience than anything else.

I liked the perspective of this 2016 article in Slate--author Laura Miller says that applying diversity standards to this novel, pro (applauding it as feminist) or con, is a stretch:

"It isn’t really a novel about being Nicoleño or Native American because those identities have little meaning for [protaganist] Karana once she gets left behind.
Above all, Island of the Blue Dolphins is a novel about being alone..." [my bf]

Kids, including the child I was, love the Orphan trope, from Oliver Twist to Pippi Longstocking and the Boxcar Children to Harry Potter.

“We are orphans.”

 

In Heart of Darkness, is Marlowe kinda like an orphan? That is, a person alone in a world that is beyond their capability to fully understand, certainly to control. 

HoD has come in for criticism, but then... 

"The act of self-criticism is one of the highest goals and a fulfillment of Western education itself.
...
"[Hod] is an essential starting point for discussions of . . . the hypocrisies and glories of the West, and the ambiguities of 'civilization'."

--"The Trouble with Heart of Darkness", David Denby, New Yorker, October 29, 1995.

That article ^ is juicy and includes this parody of Conrad's over-freighted English--I laughed out loud, only more so:

“Silence, the silence murmurous and unquiet of a tropical night, brooded over the hut that, baked through by the sun, sweated a vapour beneath the cynical light of the stars. . . . Within the hut the form of the white man, corpulent and pale, was covered with a mosquito-net that was itself illusory like everything else, only more so.”

After 20 pages, Denby says, the reader submits, and anyway, you get to read "perhaps the most famous death scene written since Shakespeare".

As well as reminding me I want to reread Heart of Darkness, this article reminds me that I need to read for the first time  Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, who deplored HoD.

Denby loves Things Fall Apart, but he rejects Achebe's criticism of HoD:

"One has to wonder if blaming writers for what they fail to write about is not an extraordinarily wrongheaded way of reading them.
. . . Proust? Indifferent to French exploitation of North African native workers.

However, "to pretend that literature has no political component whatsoever is an equal folly."

Yes.
And that's why I am pondering the covers I put up.
I'm fine with leaving up problematic stuff. Jim Morrison was a jerk, and Janis Joplin hit him over the head with a bottle. But that's a riveting photo on his bio, and I remember my father singing along to the car radio one Saturday morning, "Come on baby light my fire".

Still, as I get more choices, I intend to balance the books better--add The Autobiography of Malcolm X when it comes in---possibly even use it to cover over Black Boy. That cover is okay for now, but most people coming into the back room are not readers and won't know the book, and Mr Furniture has shown me that for Black men the word "boy" remains a sharp stick in a soft place.

Art volunteer (white guy) greeted Mr Furniture on his birthday one year, "There's the birthday boy!"
Mr F objected, "Don't call me 'boy'."
Art argued, "I call all my friends that on their birthday."

I understand and have even shared Art's defensive reaction––"Geez, it's just a birthday greeting, not a racial slur"––but that is missing the point.
If someone doesn't like what you call them, don't call them that.

Self-criticism is a mature act.
Orphans don't have to do that: they are still wild children, one shoe off and one shoe on.

Three Years: Rise & Remember

I took a couple tiny videos [scroll down] as I biked through George Floyd Square after work yesterday, the third anniversary of the Minneapolis police murder of Floyd on May 25, 2020.
I didn't go back for the candlelight vigil that evening because I was busy (reading in bed).
I'll probably wander over on Saturday afternoon for the Rise & Remember gathering.  More info: www.georgefloydglobalmemorial.org

Below: My 5-second bike-seat view of the above ^ roll of names of people murdered by police:

Below: Biking by Floyd's angel painted on the street where he died.
"L O V E"
"STOP THE VIOLENCE"

Marcia Howard is a lead caretaker of GFS---for more info and images, check her Instagram: www.instagram.com

There's a conference this weekend too, and corporate sponsorship from the likes of Best Buy and Blue Cross--because this is America, and that's how we roll. 

Murderbot Recovered

New coworker mattdamon told me that his favorite robot is Marvin, from Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Murderbot, in Martha Wells's Murderbot Diaries, is a self-aware organic/machine construct with a sometimes snarky sense of humor like Marvin, I told mattd. I said I'd lend him the first diary--All Systems Red (2017).

 Two years ago I wrote 12 posts I tagged "Murderbot"--several of them about trying to envision the character.
The art on the dust jackets is unimaginative and unhelpful--it makes Murderbot look like a Star Wars character, and I read it as white and male ("Sorry, neither", as Uhura says--Murderbot has no gender). I'd taken the jackets off, but I'd saved them.

Last night I replaced the original illustration with a photo of a United Nations soldier from National Geographic, November 2019.
Too specific--would be better if the helmet shield were down--but much better.

 

I got in an argument with Ass't Man after the staff meeting yesterday. He was playing the "Blame Everyone Else, I'm the Victim" game he defaults to. I told him basically to man up. He got mad and told me, "You are hard to be friends with". (This isn't about friendship, it's about work). And I ended up telling him to fuck off.

Yeah, not my finest hour. This is not how I want to be--not because it's "not nice"--I don't care about that--but because it's ineffective.
But NOTHING is effective in a workplace that rewards passivity and discourages innovation.

I ignore the managers if I want to do anything (like putting the colorful rug down--all three managers said they liked it, but if I'd asked them beforehand, I believe they'd have said no, we should sell it).

There's another meeting to create an SOP next week. Groan.
I do best if I keep my head down and focus on Toys & BOOK's.

It was a stupid day. I came home and ordered a girlette with one shoe from eBay.

Things change.

"Do you take Apple Pay?" a customer asked. A young Black woman in all-black Spandex, she was holding a pair of white leather roller skates, the old fashioned kind with 4 wheels each.

I told her we didn't, and she put the skates back--she had no other way of paying the ten dollars they cost.

"Uh, wait," I said. "Let me just double check. We got a new cash resister last year."

Yes, it takes Apple Pay! She bought the skates.
I'm glad I double-checked my assumption.

Most of my coworkers are over forty, and I'm well aware I am out of the loop, culturally. I'm even wondering if I should stay on Instagram (my account deletion becomes permanent in a week) to stay aware of some of the changes.

I don't need to be hip (ha, too late for that), but I'm interested in following the shifts in culture just because they're fascinating. Living history!
Sometimes they're predictable, flowing from new attitudes to gender, sexuality, monogamy; sometimes they're unexpected shifts arising from new technology . . . or, who knows what.

For instance, the person who'd said that Coco wasn't subtitled, ascribed it to Americans not liking subtitles.
But, I had just read an article about how most Gen Zs (and a lot of the rest of us) watch media with subtitles ON. They (we) are watching on their phones, and the sound is maybe off or not that reliably good.
I've noticed that on TikToks and IG reels---subtitles are often automatic, and they're often a visually pleasing design.

So, yeah, my American baby boomer generation didn't generally like subtitles, or need them--but that's no longer true.
Hey, a lot of us have hearing loss now!
(And Pixar did subtitle Coco.)

It's never safe to make assumptions, but once we're over a certain age, don't you find that we massively do not know what we're talking about, culturally?And the Gen Zs (or older) don’t know or care about our references—people have told me they don’t know who the Beatles are; and religion is entirely irrelevant to a lot of young people I meet. It registers so little they don’t even object to it. 

And now I have to leave early for work---the police are coming to talk to us about shoplifting---an increasing (and physically dangerous) problem at the store.

Jump for Joy

In the past couple weeks, we have jumped from 40º F to 80º and everything is green.

Here's the Marzipan, jumping over her bike.

Swirl of Joy

Volunteer Art is always aetheticizing my BOOK's area--last year he hung the two paper lanterns, below, which soften the fluorescent lighting. He also mounted picture rails on top of the bookshelves, so he could set art for sale there.

Last Friday he'd asked me of a newly donated rug, "Do you want to put this in your area?"
I'd said no, but over the weekend I had a dream that we had put the rug down, and it looked great.
Yesterday I told him my dream, and he said, "Let's do it."

So we did--neither of us bothered to ask permission from any of the three managers--and it does look great, and makes me super happy!
A lot of feet walk through that door--I hope the rug's swirly pattern will disguise dirt.

BELOW: The swirls point people to the back room, where books, furniture, electronics, and hardware are. I've long thought there should be some visual invitation because people occasionally say, "I didn't know there was a back room," or, "Can I come in this room?"

I'd rescued that vintage (1970s?) wedding dress, above right, from baling (to go to textile recycling). Its underskirts of tulle and swirl poof out the skirt and make a pleasing crunchy sound--it's just gorgeous (... and tiny).
And isn't it pretty the way the customer, center, wears her scarf. (I think she's Moroccan.)

Bright Animals.

Totoro had told me about alebrijes, the fantastical painted animals featured in the movie Coco, which I've never seen. Speaking of dreams, these animals first came to artist Pedro Linares in a dream in the 1930’s. [via--"Alebrijes in Coco"].

BELOW: These are not properly alebrijes, which mix-and-match different animals, but the Mexican grocery store where I often go by the thrift store carries brightly painted animals in that style. (They are made by hand, but mass produced for sale.)

"Someone Is Wrong on the Internet." (Remember the xkcd cartoon?)

Someone recently complained that Coco was not subtitled in Spanish. I had to restrain my compulsive editorial self from commenting to this person I don't know that, in fact, Pixar did release the movie with Spanish subtitles and also dubbed in Spanish. "Why the Spanish Dub of Coco Is Even Better..."

I do try to restrain myself from fact-bombing people [🙄 me, librarian to the world].
If people want to know things, they can look them up themselves on the magic boxes we carry in our pockets.

But sometimes I do correct people at work, if it's something that matters.
The other day during the Three White Dudes' discussion of Tom Petty, two of the guys asserted that Tom Petty died of a drug overdose.
The third guy expressed distress--he said he'd thought TP had overcome his addiction.

I seemed to recall it wasn't addiction, it was pain medication.
So though these guys have smart phones, I double-checked, and yes, that's the case----Petty was touring in extreme pain, including performing with a fractured hip, and was taking a lot of bad meds, which killed him. (It's complicated, as this article discusses:
"I’ve treated scores of people like Tom Petty. Drugs are only part of their story", www.statnews.com/2018/01/23/tom-petty-accidental-overdose)

I shared that privately with Third Dude.
He said he was glad to know, and thanked me.
How you feel about the death of someone you love matters.

Cat Play

A bit of kitty silliness, made this morning before work 

Fairytale Eyes

The certificate I got for working five years in BOOK’s was blah, printed on a computer, so I added fairytale flora and fauna—only happy ones though.

Much improved. I’ll put it up in my area at work.

If I go out & about with my fairytale glasses on, life makes more sense. “Oh, of course—he’s a goblin!” Or, “I see now, there’s a magic rope encircling her ankle.” Or, “ I better take the nutritional advice of my doll here.”

I took the bus to the downtown library this warm Sunday afternoon, with PennyCooper in my bag. Downtown has emptied out since Covid, and Sundays are practically apocalyptic, with mostly the walking wounded on the streets. I checked with Penny—how did she see them?

I don’t know how the girlettes register humans—we are irrelevant to them for the most part, I sense. But PennyCooper is alert to me (unless she’s busy), and she started giving me readings on the people we saw—it was like infrared readings. “Very low battery”of one person, “high inventiveness factor” of another.

Soon she got bored—“this game is not interesting to a doll”—and started discussing snack options at the Starbucks near the library. You’d think having a doll along would mean that I’d get a gloopy  Frappuccino or something. 

But no. According to PennyCooper, “A paleo lunch box is the best choice,” and that’s what I had to accept. “You should eat chicken because it’s descended from dinosaurs.” She also approves of eating fungi and ferns, but this Starbucks doesn’t carry them. 

At the library, I asked a librarian for help checking out audiobooks on my iPhone—that’s what I’d gone to the library for, in fact, because it’s much easier for me to learn from a person in person. 

The librarian was nice and patient and even happy, it seemed, to walk me through every step. Now I’ve got the Libby app and have checked out the audiobook of Matrix by Lauren Groff—someone had told me it’s good (the book not specifically the audiobook).

I told the librarian I wanted to start to learn about non-visual options because when I got an eye floater a couple months ago I was wondering what I’d do if I went blind. The librarian was all excited to tell me about services you can access—free—if your eyes can’t read text. Through my fairytale glasses, I saw a sort of Glinda the Good Witch. Penny registered “the dusty surface of mini-marshmallows, the ones that come in different colors”.

On the bus ride home, from inside my bag PennyCooper said, “all these plants need to be watered”. There weren’t any plants, but that reminded me to stop at the store for apple cider vinegar—I like it in water, especially in summer, or kombucha, and it’s much cheaper than kombucha unless you make kombucha yourself, which only costs a few teabags (but I don’t). PennyCooper approves of fermented food. “It’s alive!” 

Mind the Pettyness

The Petty Crew

The social makeup of the back room has changed. In the past five years, it's mostly been older Black guys working the donations bay and furniture & electronics. With the hire of mattdamon maybe 6 weeks ago, now there are three middle-aged white guys.
The mood is different.

An example of a good change:
All three grew up fixing mechanical things and using power tools, and they enjoy and are eager to do that at work. Our hardware and electronics sections have never been in better shape.

A neutral example:
The three dudes were discussing Tom Petty the other day.
I like Tom Petty okay, but he's not someone my Black coworkers would play. In the 1980s, Petty had flown a Confederate flag on his Southern Accents stage tour. He regretted it--told an audience who'd thrown a flag on stage that he wouldn't do that anymore, said he realized it's like a swastika to a Jew.
So, I'm not complaining, just saying, the musical culture has changed.
(The sexism-level of the music remains unchanged.)

Not neutral:
Cock-of-the-walk energy has ticked up.  Ass't Man is a mansplainer, and new guy mattdamon is another.
Grateful-J, the third white guy, is not.

Yesterday I was in the tool room looking for painter's tape, and mattd was in electronics, around the corner.
"Do you have any painter's tape in your area?" I asked.

He came into the tool room and said, "You should look here," pointing to where I was looking, "where it usually is".

"I am literally standing here doing that," I said.

"Sorry, I'm being a total ass," he said.

So at least he knows it, unlike Ass't Man, but he does it a lot.
How fun is it to point out to someone that they're blowing in your face /flying an ugly flag, even if they're sorry?
None fun.
________

Mr Furniture, Croquette Jeff, and the other Black guys--even Big Boss, who is plenty patriarchal--aren't mansplainers.
Not that they're less sexist, overall. It's a different thing, I think:
speaking with authority to white people is not something Black men have been encouraged to do, to put it mildly.
It's entirely blatant.
Once a Fox News reporter--a white woman--interviewed Big Boss about the George Floyd uprisings.
Afterward he was fuming:
"She told me, 'Oh, you speak so well!'"

II. Book Flow

Otherwise, work is going great. My work is BOOK's, that's what I'm there for. Book donations continue to flow after a slow winter. Lots of good books too (as well as the usual crap--a box of crumpled, outdated romance novels went right into recycling).

I've kept the standard price for books at 99¢ for paperbacks, $1.99 for hardbacks--that's most of the stock.
Because of resellers, however, I've raised prices on more valuable (high interest) books, like these on display, above.
I want BOOK's to be a community resource--a place locals can enjoy browsing the books––so I aim at a price that will either put resellers off buying a book because their profit (usually reselling in bulk to Amazon) will be too small, or, if they do buy it, will at least make some money for our store.

I hated to raise prices, but for customers who buy books to read, we’re still cheaper than Half-Price Books and our selection is better than other thrift stores. Most fiction has low resale value (because so many copies are printed), so resellers leave most of it alone. Readers can still buy a pile of novels for a few bucks. Also, the store's expenses are up, yet I've never raised the prices I inherited from the former Book Lady five years ago.
And, now my blood pressure doesn't shoot up when I see resellers loading their carts with the most valuable books.

A friend and her teenage daughter are coming over to make collages in a couple hours. This is good because I like them, I like collages, and I NEED TO CLEAN MY APT.--a good side effect of having people over.
It's not too bad, but I haven't put away my laundry all week...
Off I go.
Have a great weekend, everybody!

Fu Bluey

The wind had blown Orange and Bluey out of the tree in the park where I'd left them. They'd fallen into long grass, which had protected them from the rain.
I gave fragile Orange to Emmler, and together we found a crevice for Bluey to guard over the alley. Here E is, gorilla-glueing Bluey in place.

The alleys around the store are filthy, smelly, and macro- and microscopically potentially harmful--you sure wouldn't want to walk barefoot through them, for instance. The Alley Protectors have a lot to do.
That's a bit of rosary Bluey is holding, for added apotropaic power:

Huh, I never posted my second Alley Protector--Kali Bear & Baby. Below, girlettes blessing them to go out. Mama Bear's left eye is a doll eye that really blinks. (Bear was an old, flocked plaster coin bank and was missing an eye.)

Me, having glued Bear & Baby on pole looking over the alley behind the store a couple weeks ago:

 

 

Meanwhile, inside on the Toy Bridge:

Baby Protector

The doll on the right, above, was a tourist doll in Scots garb, but she hated it! Gave her kit to Esmeralda (left), who loves it and marches about making godawful squealing noises on the bagpipes. (“I saw it at the cremation”— she means coronation). Win/win!

Now Scots doll has blue hair and an Apotropaic tummy. I might work on her more—not sure. She is not going out (into an alley); she is a Baby Protector for a baby who is dangerously unwell. (The apos are effective anywhere—time and space don’t really come into it.)

My DNA End Cap

 Ass't Man sets up great end cap displays, but he's stuck on deep, dark colors--what we see in spring before anything greens and blooms. (He's Taurus, the bull--they love beauty, consistency, and Earth.)

When AM's on vacation, I brighten up an end cap. Last week it was in the seventies and lilacs started to bloom. Enough with the brown pottery!

I was thinking about how complete DNA exists in (almost) every cell in our body. (Not in sperm or eggs, red blood cells, or the dead parts of fingernails and hair.)
If they cloned you from ear cells or a little toe, the clone would be all the things you were born with.

Would Ass't Man's clone be stuck on Earth colors and have a personality that leans toward mushroom?
I don't know--DNA can be weirdly specific, so maybe so?

I looked it up, and yeah, favorite color has to do with eye structure (heh, not astrology!)––retinal cone photoreceptors––which is DNA determined. Surely personal associations come into it too...

BELOW: 3-dimensional computer models of DNA packing in a nucleosome, from "How your body packs a metre of DNA inside every cell", Cosmos, 2017.

Book Haul (What I'm [Re]Reading)

I've been greedy this week, with the influx of book donations to the thrift store,  and brought home lots and lots. (Usually I bring home a coupla books, here and there.)

Some I already photo'd and shared yesterday.
This morning I spread out the rest on the floor to gaze upon, along with a couple I already had/am currently reading.
I'll probably take many of these back to the store after I read them (or fail to); some I'll keep.

Books, with a few notes

BELOW: I've liked some of Neil Gaiman very much (Anansi Boys)--have never read The Sandman comics--curious to try one.

The Appalachian Trail . . . It didn't just happen--people planned it. I'd like to read a book about how the Camino de Santiago was revived too (in the 1980s)--there are lots of journal articles, but I don't see a book on that topic.

I never finished the sonnet I was working on during the most recent staff meeting--maybe Will will inspire me to get on it.

N. Irish-Canadian Brian Moore is one of those authors I think I don't know, then it turns out they've written famous books, some made into famous movies (Moore's Lonely Passion of Judith Hearn, Black Robe), but each one distinct,  like, say, Walter Tevis (Color of Money, Queen's Gambit), not like, "Oh, another Stephen King".

A review of this novel, Catholics, said the main character Father Kinsella is "a sceptic who respects the beliefs of others but also ... a traditionalist in his attitude to the aesthetic and mystery of belief ...[which] will all be lost under the new dispensation [of Vatican II]".
I wonder if the novel transcends that very specific concern, but it interests me even if not.

BELOW: Re: The ReReading Project
I want to reread books that impacted me when I was young and that I barely remember now, such as Greene's Power and the Glory.

Woman in the Dunes is another--I haven't read it since high school, when I set out to read books off the library shelves in alphabetical order! I had no idea who Abé, Kobo was.
This novel was a permission slip to be small and to stay small.
(I didn't get far into the A authors though before I peeled off.)

I'm collecting covers by Edward Gorey, so I got this kid's book, A Billion for Boris. (Maybe I'll read it too.)

 

 

BELOW:  Not a fan of the early Harry Potters, but definitely a fan of illustrator Jim Kay (oh, I blogged about him before), so I nabbed this volume.
If anyone ever doubts how devastating mental illness can be, I'd point them to Kay. More than halfway through the prestigious and prodigious work of illustrating all the HP's, his bipolar disorder made it impossible to continue and he had to give up the project.

Jim Kay on mental illness: from a 2021 interview (before he gave up the HPs):

Q: Do creative professionals have pet peeves? What is yours?

Jim : Only one, and for me it’s a big one.
When people hear that you struggle with your mental health they often remark that the illness somehow benefits your creative process, or that the two are beneficially or necessarily symbiotic.

Trust me, it doesn’t and they are not. I don’t want to dwell on how much of my life I’ve lost to this, but let’s just say I would have been a far more productive illustrator without it.
I think if mental illness manifested itself as some massive distended bubble-head growth on your face, people wouldn’t say ‘yeh but it’s probably what makes your work interesting’… or maybe they would!"

Island of the Blue Dolphins is another book that influenced young me that I want to reread.

 

 

BELOW: I'm enjoying Quest for Kim: In Search of Kipling's Great Game. I've never read Kim and had  NO IDEA that it's about the orphaned boy of an Irish soldier in India whom the British recruit as a spy in their "great game" with Russia over control of Central & SE Asia in the 1800s.
The book is part retelling, part history, and part travelogue, as the author, Peter Hopkirk, retraces Kim's journey.

P.S. My god, you'd think governments would've learned the lesson about Afghanistan by now! Like marching to Russia in the winter: Don't go there.

I want to own all of the Penguin Lives series--short bios, all around 200 or fewer pages, each written by a literary writer, so when one comes along, even if I've read it, like this one on Therese of Lisieux, I get it.

BELOW: I read Boy Erased (2016) in a day--a fascinating memoir of author Garrard Conley's "voluntary" participation in gay conversion therapy when he was eighteen. Coming from a fundamentalist family, he sincerely wanted to turn straight, with the genuinely loving support of his mother. It didn't work.

 

BELOW: I ordered The Spirit of Folk Art  (out of print, but cheap online) after being inspired to MAKE TOYS by the creations at the Museum of In'tl Folk Art in Santa Fe.
According to Penny Cooper, "It was a school field trip," and it inspired her to make a papier-mache mask, too.

I doubt I'll ever make it though an abridged de Toqueville I'm dipping into, but these Vintage Books volumes are so pretty--covers by Alvin Lustig (link to more covers)––I brought them home.

Fu Lion: Stuffies at GF Memorial

 "I 🖤 you."

 

The stuffies at George Floyd Square are one of my favorite sights in the world, they are so tender and so brave.
Over time––some have been there for almost three years now (5/25/20)––they get battered by the seasons: a month ago they were locked in ice facing every which-way.

The crew that cares for the Memorial has tidied up since. The thawed toys and artificial flowers are set upright and the many other offerings arranged in groupings.

 

                  

"peace" frog

The apotropaic Fu Dog Lion I made wanted to join, when I biked past on my way to work yesterday. I tucked Fu (below, circled in lavender) among newly planted greenery--real plants, with artificial flowers stuck in.
That blue paint is the upper corner of the George Floyd painting on the pavement exactly where he died.
(The skirt on the traffic cone is my favorite bit of beautification.)

People continue to leave new offerings--the Snickers bar below and those fresh feathers, for instance.

So far as I can tell, no one harms or removes things at the site. You'd think white nationalists would have destroyed it. There have been threats and the like, yes, but I haven't seen or heard of any serious damage (like bombing or torching) to the actual memorial.

The Siege

None of this is officially sanctioned, by the way. The people who hold the square are volunteers, though that doesn't seem the right word. Revolutionaries, more like.

I've done infrequent and tiny things to prop it up---tidied the book hut, sent some money, added a couple offerings, chatted with people, shared a few photos. It's not my place to butt in. Many activists involved are not Black, and that's important; but holding GF Square is, as it properly should be, a Black-led action.

Not everyone approves of the square by a long shot, including many Black people, and I hear that people who live nearby want the intersection fully reopened. You can drive through the square now, around a roundabout with a Black power fist rising in the center, but buses, for instance, still haven't resumed their route through the intersection.

In the short term, the square is a mess and an inconvenience. You could say the toys look ugly as the sun destroys their fabric.
Yet they remain.
In historic terms, you could say that the square is protected by a band of liberty fighters holding out against a siege.

I do see it in historic terms. I love the square and its tattered remnants. I am moved by its continued existence every single time I bike through.
This is what resistance looks like over the long term, worn down by weather and time and drop in interest & support. Silly, some say. Useless.

Holding on, refusing to concede that this doesn't matter anymore, if any strategy is going to be effective, that is. We see others doing this, to great effect--sometimes to our dismay. In this case, the cause is noble.
Simply put, in spray paint:
"Stop killing us."

That's how you may win, in the long run, by sitting there like a stuffy. Or, I suppose, lose with honor––that is, knowing you have not betrayed yourself.

As for the stuffies, they say,
"We are staying here until we melt into the Earth."

Incoming/ Lit-Fic Shelves

Finally the weather has warmed up, and I'm getting a flood of book donations after a long dry season. Lots of good ones too--one batch of boxes was so good, I was worried for the donor:
Why are you giving away your library?
Are you dead?
Can I have them?
In fact, I am buying many books from this lot.

The shelves have been at low ebb since Christmas.
I haven't shelved all the new donations yet, but the Lit/Fic shelves are plumping up, so I took their pretty pictures.
The shelves need weeding too, which I didn't want to do before I had new stock. Now I can.

Here are most of the LIT/FICTION shelves, A––Z.
Crime, romance, and sci-fi are shelved separately.

Click for clearer images.