Blue-Footed Musings

One thing I enjoyed about Three Things You Need to Know About Rockets by Jessica A. Fox was that the author included a quote at the head of every chapter. Before giving the book away, I paged through it and created this list of quotes that I particularly liked. Note: I did not verify the quotes, but I modified a few for length and/or to match online sources.

1. “When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don’t take are snuffed out like candles, as if they’d never existed.” —Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass
2. “He folded his fear into a perfect rose. He held it out in the palm of his hand. She took it from him and put it in her hair.”—Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
3. “Imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.” —John Keats, from a letter to Percy Bysshe Shelley
4. “Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what’s so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there, and what’s so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be.”— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
5. “It will come sometime. Some beautiful morning she will just wake up and find it is Tomorrow. Not Today but Tomorrow. And then things will happen . . . wonderful things.”—L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island
6. “Now behind the eyes and secrets of the dreamers in the streets rocked to sleep by the sea, see the titbits and topsyturvies, bobs and buttontops, bags and bones, ash and rind and dandruff and nailparings, saliva and snowflakes and moulted feathers of dreams, the wrecks and sprats and shells and fishbones, whale-juice and moonshine and small salt fry dished up by the hidden sea.”—Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood
7. “We are all filled with a longing for the wild. There are few culturally sanctioned antidotes for this yearning. We were taught to feel shame for such a desire. We grew our hair long and used it to hide our feelings. But the shadow of Wild Woman still lurks behind us during our days and in our nights. No matter where we are, the shadow that trots behind us is definitely four-footed.”–Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
8. “Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”—Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
9. “When you’re young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You’re your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don’t yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.”—Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
10. “That great mystery of TIME, were there no other; the illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the Universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not….”—Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History

Plus one more for good measure:

“God created a world full of small worlds.”—Yiddish Proverb

We Learn Nothing by Tim Kreider

Grade: B+

Tim Kreider is an essayist and cartoonist, and We Learn Nothing is a collection of essays and related cartoons. The book begins with the essay “Reprieve,” which is about how he felt about life after being stabbed in the neck and nearly dying. He writes,

Maybe people who have lived with the reality of their own mortality for months or years are permanently changed by it, but getting stabbed was more like getting struck by lightning, over almost as soon as it happened, and the illumination didn’t last. You can’t feel crazily grateful to be alive your whole life any more than you can stay passionately in love forever—or grieve forever, for that matter. Time makes us all betray ourselves and get back to the busywork of living. Before a year had gone by, the same everyday anxieties and frustrations began creeping back.

This excerpt should give you an idea of his writing style, but the essay is an exception within the collection, in a way, because the jumping-off-point is an event (the stabbing). Many of the other essays focus on people from his life, including Skelly (a good friend who lies all the time), Ken (who’s obsessed with the idea of “peak oil”), Jim who transitions into Jenny, his half sisters (unknown to him until he was in his 40s), his mother, and his Uncle Lee (the black sheep of the family). It’s an interesting cast of characters.

Kreider is close in age to me, liberal, introspective, and slightly immature, so we got along pretty well as author and reader. I enjoyed the collection as a whole, cartoons included. Sometimes I even laughed out loud and shared excerpts with my husband.

But some of the essays were too long and self-absorbed. One essay completely failed to capture my interest, and I didn’t finish reading it. There were a few times when Kreider seemed to deliberately leave out the juicy details that he knew we’d want to read (like how and why he got stabbed, for starters). So my feelings about the book are mixed, which is why I gave it a B-level grade.

On a side note, Kreider deserves special credit for using the word “elide” no less than five times within the book. I see the word often in crosswords, but rarely anywhere else, so five usages is remarkable. Bravo!

From The New York Times, August 16, 2018, by Ben Dolnick:

“War With the Newts,” published in 1936, is a funny, bizarre, dystopian masterpiece, and [its author Karel Capek] deserves a place on the Mount Rushmore of authorial seers, right alongside George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Margaret Atwood. To the extent that Capek is remembered today, it is largely by crossword puzzlers who know that he invented the word “robot” (and even this is dubious: Capek credits the term to his brother).

Capek was a Czech author, with many books to his name, including War With the Newts, which he wrote during the 1930s. I have worked on a great many crosswords, but the name doesn’t sound familiar, so I don’t think that I had ever heard of Capek, either as an author or the coiner of the word “robot,” before reading this article. I’m intrigued now, so I’ve ordered Capek’s War With the Newts and Nine Fairy Tales: and One More Thrown in for Good Measure from my public library. I am looking forward to reading them. I will probably have to wait a while for WWtN, though, because there are already four holds on the next available copy. I suspect I’m not the only person in town who’s been delving into the inky depths of the The New York Times and coming up with treasure.