To The Borrower

A Single Pebble

It was admittedly a hard read. John Hersey's naive Euro-centrism sort of tainted the text throughout A Single Pebble. But it had some hing points. He was after all the first western surveyor to visit the Three Gorges region where there is today an enormous hydroelectric dam. So the book, for all it's 1950s hubris, largely came to pass. Despite that, Hersey is a good writer, and he had some very memorable passages.

"Here was a terminal of commerce, a big shifting place of rice and salt and coal and cotton and tree oil and paper made from bamboo, and many other wanted things, and greeds and lusts and bitterness of the floating market were noisy and confusing, after the weeks of the spare, melancholy sounds of our progress up river."

It's the next best thing to being there. Which is good, because "there" no longer exists; not in the chronological sense and not in the physical sense. The face of the river was changed when it was dammed in 2009.

Burroughs

Burroughs is an icon now whose fame is nebulous, famous for begin famous, before being famous for being a writer. Tales of drug use, gunplay and a late life connection to Kurt Cobain have largely elapsed his literary legacy. He'd be both amused and concerned for us. I sometimes re-read some of his iconoclastic works to remind me why he doesn't need defending or lionizing.

"Contradictory commands are an integral part of the modern industrial environment: Stop. Go. Wait here. Go there. Come in. Stay out. Be a man. Be a woman. Be White. Be Black. Live. Die. Be your real self. Be somebody else. Be a human animal. Be a superman. Yes. No. Rebel submit. RIGHT. WRONG. Make a splendid impression. Make an awful impression. Sit down. Stand up. Take your hat off. Put your hat on. Create. Destroy. Live now. Live in the future. Live in the past. Obey the law. Break the law. Be ambitious. Be modest. Accept. Reject. Plan ahead. Be spontaneous. Decide for yourself. Listen to others. Talk. SILENCE. Save money. Spend money. Speed up. Slow down. This way. That way. Right. Left. Present. Absent. Open. Closed. Entrance. Exit. IN. OUT. etc., round the clock."

All that while in the context of comparing American media madly to an archaic Mayan calendar. Long live the king.

Handmade

I found a handmade book, bound by hand, written by hand. He quotes from Emerson and elaborates a bit for a dozen broken sparse pages. An equal number are blank. I'll probably never know where it came from.

DOWNLOAD 

HERE

FOG Index

I found this set of instructions inside a hardback set of Somerset Maugham's short stories. It concerns the FOG index, a  measure of the readability.What's interesting is that they're applying it to technical writing, a daunting task. This is the short version:

You can Download it here:
http://www.divshare.com/download/14942572-2b3

José Martí

He is probably the only writer more popular in Cuba than Hemingway. But he is relatively unknown in the US. he died in 1895, and as you might expect, his writing is a bit dated now, but more by topic than by flourish. Who writes essays about Buffalo Bill anymore? Today he's remembered more for his political writing. Martí was killed in battle against Spanish troops at the Battle of Dos Ríos. His death propelled the issue of Cuban independence, at the time from Spain but he continued to be embraced later in the revolution against Batista. His non-political writing is worth remembering.  (It's all public domain now, no reason to buy a print copy if you have an e-reader)

I quote here 2 sentences from an essay he wrote about Coney Island in New York.It reveals a revolutionary who was also awed by the scope and hustle of our largest city.

"It is a world full of stars, with Orchestras, dancing, merriment, surf sounds, human sounds, choruses of laughter, gentle breezes, barkers chanting, swift carriages, swifter trains, until the hour comes to go home. Then like a monster that vomits its contents into the hungry maw of another monster, that colossal crowd, that straining, crushing mass, forces it's way onto trains, which speed across the wastes, groaning under their burden, until they surrender it to the tremendous steamers, enlived by the sound of harps and violins, which take up the holiday throng, convey it to the piers, and debouch the weary merrymakers into the spread through slumbering New York like veins of steel."

Richard E. Byrd: Alone

He was a pilot and a naval officer. He was both an Arctic and Antarctic explorer. How many men have been to both the North and South Poles? Like Nicol Smith he traveled then returned to lecture to raise money for further adventure. Both wrote about their exploits. More here. He wrote 5 books I know of: Skyward, Little America, Discovery, Exploring With Byrd, and Alone. He's a surprisingly decent writer for an explorer.

"...I do not regret going. For I read my books—if not as many as I had counted on reading; and listened to my phonograph records—even when they seemed to intensify my suffering; and meditated—though not as cheerfully as I had hoped. All this was good, and it is mine.  What I had not counted on was discovering how closely a man could come to dying and still not  die, or want to die."