Author: Roger

I'm a librarian. I hear music, even when it's not being played. I used to work at a comic book store, and it still informs my life. I won once on JEOPARDY! - ditto.

What Your Reading Rules Reveal About Your Personality

Maybe I like my fiction with pictures and my non-fiction without.

OK, is that a pretentious title, or what? My “personality”? My preferences, maybe.

Anyway, the meme comes from Jeanette at Book Riot. Then Jaquandor did it, and added questions (after #5). SamuraiFrog did it, and added #9.

1. Always stop at the end of a chapter. Always.

Well, I’m not hung up on that.

Certainly, I want to have a good jumping-off point, so I’ll see if there’s a natural section break.

2. Use specific bookmarks.

Oh, goodness, no. Whatever I find that’s thin enough I’ll use. A ruler, a bus schedule, the envelope from a bill, a Post-It note. It’s not that I don’t OWN bookmarks; it’s that I’m not organized enough to FIND them when I want them.

2a. No dog-earing, bending, or folding of pages.

I HATE dog-eared books; I find them inherently ugly. As a page (clerk) at the Binghamton Public Library many years ago, I noticed how people would do that, and it rather ticked me off.

2b. Weirdly enough, spine-breaking is fine, just don’t get too crazy with it.

And I REALLY hate that! I’ve had books come apart in my hand in two or three sections, held together by some strands. It was not just aesthetically unpleasing, it made the reading experience too much work. Not to mention a cost to the taxpayers.

Re: a comment on someone’s blog, no, I can’t use a book as a drink coaster, either!

3. Always read two books at once.

Depends. Generally, I get so engrossed in one book that I’ll just finish that one, then forget where I left off with the other, not physically, but emotionally.

4. No (or minimal) writing in books.

I tend to agree with this, except for some used textbooks I once had to buy back in my college days. Sometimes the previous owner even used a highlighter, and that was sometimes OK too. But in general, for most purposes, no.

5. Rereads must be earned because there are too many great books out there to read an okay one twice.

It’s been so long since I reread a book, can’t really speak to it. In my teens and twenties, I did all the time, and they weren’t necessarily “great” books, but ones that resonated with me. It’s more that I don’t have time to get through all the books I want to read, but that “earned” stuff seems like elitist snobbery to me.

Now, there are sections of books I’ll read. A Grimm fairy tale or a Shakespeare sonnet or a particularly nice passage But most of the books I have are comic books in hardcover form – Mr. Frog has been reviewing the early Marvels, BTW – or reference books on movies, TV, music, sports, and general knowledge, some of which I have NEVER read (though some histories of programs such as The Twilight Zone and The Dick Van Dyke Show, I have). In some ways, the vast majority of books I have I consider reference books, even if you would not.

6. Not finishing a book is OK.

I had a REALLY hard time with this for a LONG, LONG time. But after I passed 50, I got less driven about that. Too many books to worry about THAT one, even if I’M “supposed” to have read it to prove how well-rounded I am. Partly it’s that I don’t care to meet that amorphous expectation.

7. It is always better to take more books on a trip than you think you’ll possibly have time to read.

Seriously, it’s only in the last two years that I took ANY books on trips. It was usually periodicals I took because if they get lost/damaged, I don’t care as much. I once left a book at a motel, and to get it back, it cost more than it would have I just purchased it again. That said, I don’t get much reading of any type done on a trip, except in the car, and that HAS to be a magazine, where I can navigate and read at the same time.

8. Having a favorite genre is fine. Getting stuck in that genre is bad.

Meh. Several times I’ve tried to read fantasy, and most of the time, it just didn’t take. Indeed, most of what I read is non-fiction, and the only fiction I read last year, 11/22/63, was based on a real event. Yet, I read comic-related material for years. Maybe I like my fiction with pictures and my non-fiction without?

9. Reading on a tablet is still reading.

Well, sure. I mean I don’t do it, not likely to do it, have no interest in doing it, but I don’t find anything wrong with it. I’m more bothered that they are leasing the book to you, essentially, rather than you owning it, but that’s commerce and ownership issues, not reading issues. (Jaquandor answered this question of mine on this topic recently.)

I just listened to the Bat Segundo Show podcast with author Norman Rush. About 45 minutes in, Rush noted that what he likes to do when he visits people’s houses is to look at what’s on their bookshelves. That would be lost with the adoption of the tablet, though I suppose Good Reads, or other online reading lists, can be inadequate substitutes.

Books on tape are also reading, I decided. I mean, how else, save for braille, can the blind read? There’s REAL snobbery in this arena. If one is actively listening, as opposed to having on the background the way some people play music, then it’s reading. Love this short but sweet story.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at the Norman Rockwell Museum

“It was prophesied that nobody would sit through a cartoon an hour and a half long,” Walt Disney said. “But we had decided there was only one way we could successfully do Snow White—and that was to go for broke.”

The day after our trip to Tanglewood, we decided to go to the Norman Rockwell Museum. It was showing “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The Creation of a Classic,” which had opened on June 8 and would be available through October 27, 2013.

The exhibition “features more than 200 works of art including conceptual drawings, early character studies, detailed story sketches, and animation drawings. Also featured are delicate thumbnail layout watercolors, meticulously rendered pencil layouts, rare watercolor backgrounds, colorful cels, and vintage posters all illustrating how Walt Disney advanced the creation of an entirely new art form.

“The exhibition is organized by sequence through the progression of the movie, featuring some never-before-seen works of art.” Among the most interesting were the deleted scenes such as the soup-eating segment, which had a song attached to it, the bed building scene, and a fantasy sequence of Snow White dancing in the stars. These were fine scenes but detracted from the narrative. Dopey had a long piece when Snow “died” which also was scrapped.

It was fun looking at Marge Champion modeling for the dancing scene with Dopey and Sneezy and drawing water from a well. The exhibit, which can usually only be seen at the Disney Family Museum in San Francisco came to Massachusetts because of the historic friendship and respect between Rockwell and Disney.

One cannot overstate the importance of Snow White. “It was prophesied that nobody would sit through a cartoon an hour and a half long,” Disney said. “But we had decided there was only one way we could successfully do Snow White—and that was to go for broke—shoot the works. There could be no compromise on money, talent, or time.” He also suggested that it was not aimed at children, and that, indeed, children under the age of seven or eight ought NOT see it; instead, it was targeted at the childlike part of the adult heart.

Did I mention that when we went, it was FREE? It was part of Free Fun Fridays of cultural venues. “Highland Street is giving out a total of $650,000 in grants to open up 60 venues across the state for one Friday,” 10 in the Boston area, but the rest across the state of Massachusetts.

Should a Christian say the Pledge of Allegiance?

Is the Pledge of Allegiance a lie, idolatry or showing respect to the country?

Growing up in the 1960s in the United States, I started to wonder about the validity of saying the Pledge of Allegiance. That “liberty and justice for all” part seemed a bit, let’s just say, farfetched, with discrimination based on race, gender, economic condition, and so on. It was explained to me, though, that it was not a pledge to what is, but rather what the ideal nation could be. Hmm. Well, OK.

Back in 1940, in Minersville School District v. Gobitis, the Supreme Court “ruled that public schools could compel students—in this case, Jehovah’s Witnesses—to salute the American Flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance despite the students’ religious objections to these practices.” But a mere three years later, in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette held “that the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution protected students from being forced to do” these things. “It was a significant court victory won by Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose religion forbade them from saluting or pledging to symbols, including symbols of political institutions.”

And that was BEFORE the addition of “under God,” to the pledge in the 1950s, instigated by a sermon by a Presbyterian minister, and easily passed by a Congress in the midst of the Red scare, so that it now reads: “I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

More recently, I’ve been reading about Christians who do not, or did not, believe in saying the Pledge, and there seemed to be two overriding, and not mutually exclusive, reasons. One was like my early thinking, that it was untrue, and that one ought not to swear to a falsehood. More intriguing, though, is the idea that pledging allegiance to the flag equates to making an oath of loyalty to an earthly kingdom, a form of nationalistic idolatry.

Interestingly, the argument tends not to be a divide among the liberal/progressive church folks and evangelicals. Laurence Vance notes that “the United States is in fact about as far from being ‘under God’ as any country on the planet,” that it “leads the world in the incarceration rate, the total prison population, the divorce rate, car thefts, rapes, total crimes, illegal drug use, legal drug use, and Internet pornography production,” among other sins, reasons for refusing to say the pledge.

Conversely, as the Restored Church of God website points out: “Saluting the flag is merely a way of showing respect, and is not of and by itself an act of worship. God commands us, in Romans 13:1-7, to show honor and respect where they are deserved. We salute the flag not because it represents another god, but because it symbolizes the many blessings—freedom being just one—that the Eternal God has bestowed upon one’s nation.”

What say you? Is the Pledge of Allegiance a lie, idolatry or showing respect to the country? I’m particularly interested in how folks from beyond the US feel about similar pledges if in fact there are any in their countries.

Movie review: The Spectacular Now

But then a road trip really crystalized the narrative for me, making what has come before much more significant.

Last Friday, the Daughter was still with the neighbor, the Wife and I were back in Albany, and it’s HOT out. Let’s go to the movies at the Spectrum in Albany to see the 1 pm showing of The Spectacular Now. We’d recently seen the previews, and I knew it had reviewed well. It was directed by James Ponsoldt, and written by Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber, based on some young adult novel by Tim Tharp I had never heard of.

Sutter (Miles Teller) and Cassidy (Brie Larson) are that popular couple in high school, a fun, hard-partying duo. She breaks up with him, though, for reasons he doesn’t initially understand. He crashes into the orbit of Aimee (Shailene Woodley), a nice girl, who he befriends, somewhat out of pity, and ends up in a rebound romance with her.

Sutter believes in the spectacular now, that growing up isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. His mom won’t even tell him where his dad is, and he thinks that geometry stuff that Aimee is trying to tutor him in is useless anyway. Yet he has an interesting streak of honesty and integrity that disarms people around him.

Telling more would probably give away too much. The coming of age movie went along, interesting and pleasant enough. But then a road trip really crystalized the narrative for me, making what has come before much more significant.

The performances are great. Miles Teller I had never heard of, but Shailene Woodley was wonderful in The Descendants. Also strong were Jennifer Jason Leigh as Sutter’s mother (a long way from Fast Times at Ridgemont High), Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and Kyle Chandler. Halfway through, I didn’t think the movie was spectacular, but by the end, I thought it was at least very good.

H is for Health insurance and History (mine)

The doctor gave a very brief look at my foot and immediately sent me to bed at the infirmary.

When I moved from Schenectady to Albany in 1979, it was, in large part, to go to graduate school at the University at Albany (which may have been called SUNY Albany at the time – I forget) in the School of Public Administration.

A few days before the semester began, I went to a very nice party outdoors at a friend’s house, where I was walking in the grass with bare feet. A few days later, one of my toes on my left foot started to hurt, at first just a bit, but eventually, so badly, I thought I ought to go to a doctor. BUT I didn’t have insurance, and I WOULD in two days when I registered for classes. (Also, at that point, I didn’t even have a primary care physician, so it would have been a function of picking randomly from the phone book Yellow Pages.)

I sucked it up and somehow got through college registration, in tremendous pain. If someone had offered a wheelchair, instead of the single crutch I was using from a previous injury, I surely would have used it. That and/or whiskey. While the pain when sitting was great, the pain when standing/hobbling on one leg was almost unbearable.

Finally, I somehow made it to the college infirmary; it seemed so very far away. The doctor gave a very brief look at my foot and immediately sent me to bed at the infirmary. Seems that I got an infection beneath my toenail, it was going up my foot, and if it made it to my heart, it would have, literally, killed me. I spent the next six days in the infirmary.

This meant I was a week behind in classes, both academically and socially, from the get-go. I never caught up.

This meant two fundamental things in my life:
1) I dropped out of grad school and ended up working at a comic book store for eight and a half years.
2) I became an ardent supporter of universal health care coverage.

It’s interesting how an initially tiny pain in the foot can have life-changing consequences.

ABC Wednesday – Round 13

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