BOOKISH EXHIBITIONISM

posted by James Reel

    When I'm too busy or too lazy to do any original blogging, it's time to dig around in the archive of a literary e-zine for which I used to write and recycle some essay that's not too dated. Here's one for you:

Show Me The Books!

        Admit it. When you visit someone for the first time, you contrive, as soon as possible, to examine your host's library. However genuine your interest may be, book-browsing seems so intellectual; it's much more impressive than coming up with some vacuous comment about the decor. But it also reduces you to the status of a peeping tom. You're really just sneaking a peek at someone else's soul.
I do it all the time. It's gratifying to find that my friends are interested in some of the same novels I am. It's intriguing to discover what other specific books and general subjects fascinate them -- perhaps they'll fascinate me, too, or else they'll be sure signs that I've fallen in with a drudge or a lunatic. And it's frightening to realize that every house in America holds those same black-and-blue-bound 1970s book club editions of Fitzgerald and Hemingway.
It's also amusing to detect, through someone's library, some quirk of character that would otherwise remain hidden. So, this upstanding attorney turns out to be an A.A. Milne freak. So, this guy who's always talking about Charles Simic hasn't read any of Simic's collections since Dismantling the Silence. So, this other guy who's always posing as a right-wing, gun-hoarding redneck collects biographies of classical musicians. So, this woman who's stuck on Milan Kundera hasn't bothered to look into anything earlier than The Unbearable Lightness of Being. So, this fellow who once mentioned that A Confederacy of Dunces is his favorite novel was understating the case -- he owns a copy of every single edition.
Of course, our selection of front-room books reveals our conceits, too. In many households, the encyclopedia and the big coffee-table books are for display only, unread volumes designed to give a room a more intellectual air . These are merely peacock pages; the real items of interest in such homes are on the bedside table, or in a rack next to the toilet.
Few things frustrate me more than going to a house and not being able to find the books. One friend I know to be an avid reader doesn't keep a single book on the ground floor of his home. Only after I'd visited a few times did he consent to lead me upstairs into a room containing a modest shelving unit, which could not possibly constitute his entire library. He majored in English, for god's sake. He quotes the Romantic poets from memory . Where the hell are all the books? What is he trying to hide?
It's an affront, friends concealing their books from me. How am I supposed to understand these people if I can't peruse their libraries? Don't they trust me? Aren't we as close as I thought? What else are they not telling me?
Wait -- I can't take it so personally. Surely everyone keeps at least a few books private.
My wife and I, for example, used to divide our books into two groups. The nice hardcover editions we kept out in public areas; the crappy-looking paperbacks we hid away. I gradually replaced the mass-market paperbacks with more presentable versions, so now the distribution follows better logic. Shelved in the room where we first receive guests are the history and American lit, simply because they happen to fill those bookcases without having to spill into other areas. Books on art, music, anthropology and a few other subjects, as well as oversized tomes, go into the living room, where most guests eventually gather. Everything else -- mainly non-American lit and volumes on science, travel, gardening, hiking, whatever -- gets stored in the shelf-lined room we grandly refer to as the Library (which also holds all the CDs and LPs).
A tour of three rooms would give any visitor a nearly complete view of our bookish interests.
Except for those items we squirrel away elsewhere. Some are merely tattered professional journals, like the thrilling Rhetoric Society Quarterly, that really don't need to be underfoot; some are textbooks my wife uses, or used to use, in her teaching. But then there's the French-language edition of the Madonna Sex book, which my wife's daughter gave us as a joke a few years ago. We slide it onto a lower shelf in our bedroom not because of the content, which is hardly even risqué by soft porn standards, but because of the book's format: The oversized, spiral-bound metal covers just don't fit in any sort of upright position, unlike Madonna herself.
Which now reminds me of the demurely illustrated sex manual I received for review purposes from a publicist, brought home and hid under the bed, where it will be convenient if consultation ever becomes necessary (luckily, it is carefully indexed). At least I tell myself I keep it under the bed for ready access. The truth is that I put it there so it won't fall under the gaze of our housecleaners, even though they don't vacuum under the furniture and, even if they did, they certainly would not be shocked to encounter a sex manual anywhere in the house.
It's a question not of shame, but of shielding some small part of life, however innocuous, from public scrutiny. A bookshelf is more revealing than a delicate negligee, for the garment teases at laying bare nothing more than flesh. The bookshelf lays bare our minds -- our preoccupations, our aspirations, our guilty pleasures. For the sake of privacy, and sanity, everyone should stash at least one book under the bed.

HEARING AID

posted by James Reel

    We radio announcers can listen to ourselves any number of ways. Of course, there’s the old hand-cupped-to-the-ear technique made famous by Gary Owen (an actual DJ at the time) on Laugh-In back in the late 1960s. But we also have many technological options. Here in the KUAT-FM control room, I can punch one button and hear the signal from off the air, just like you do. Punch another button, and I can hear what I do in pristine mono, something I never do. Another button allows me to hear myself in “audition” mode, my voice coming back to me through my headphones without ever sullying the airwaves. The bottom button in that particular row engages the “program” monitor, which lets me hear everything that’s coming out of the control board before it goes to the equipment that sends it out over the air.
    You are no doubt captivated by this information, so here’s more. Several months ago, when our engineers installed some digital transmission equipment, there was suddenly a delay between what we do here in real time in the studio and what you hear on your radio at home. (There are good technical reasons for this; it wasn’t a mistake.) Initially, the delay was about 11 seconds, but now it’s down to just one second or less. Even so, that’s enough to create an echo when I listen to the air monitor, meaning that it’s unlistenable when I’m talking. So for many months now, we’ve been listening to everything on the program monitor, the one that eavesdrops on the signal before it goes out to the transmitter. And that means that we don’t hear problems that you hear, like our own transmitter being off the air. You’d think that when we occasionally glance at the computer screen that shows those readings that so fascinate the FCC—plate voltage, current and power output—that we’d notice if everything looked dead, but no. When the transmitter goes off without being turned off by a human being (for instance, when it’s struck by lightning, or loses juice from the electric company), the computer keeps displaying the last readings it got rather than zeroing out.
    So, as you may have guessed, I have no idea what’s going on.
    A few days ago, the engineers installed what looks like the flashing light you used to see on police vehicles, back when the light was a single dome rather than a bar across the top. There’s a big sign next to it that says “CHECK AIR MONITOR.” No doubt this would be a fine alert  … if it hadn’t been installed behind us, out of our range of vision. Let’s just hope it puts on a light show that we can’t miss, even with our backs turned.

SELF-CENTERED BUT HARMLESS DIVERSION

posted by James Reel

    According to this site, mine was the third most popular male name in the year I was born, and according to this site, it was the top-ranked name in the 1950s (at least in the United States). And yours?

ALL A-QUIVER

posted by James Reel

    As a theater critic, I don’t write raves very often, so it’s somehow a little embarrassing that I enthuse this week over a silly little farce:

    Gaslight Theatre's treatment of The Adventures of Robin Hood is by no means a straight-arrow affair. Writer-director Peter Van Slyke has pulled from his quiver one groan-inducing gag after another, yet by the end of his assault, his show has hit every mark precisely on target. Robin Hood is Gaslight's most consistently funny and entertainingly silly production in a long time.
    Van Slyke's first advantage here is that he doesn't have to come up with a plot of his own, and risk losing the narrative thread or letting it go slack. You know exactly what's going to happen; how it happens is where the inspired Gaslight lunacy comes in.

    The full review is here, in the Tucson Weekly.

MORE STRINGS ATTACHED

posted by James Reel

    I keep forgetting to link to my articles in Strings magazine, at least those that are posted at the Web site. Here’s one from the latest issue, but I’m afraid it will be of interest only to beginning and intermediate string players; it starts like this:

    Have you ever put bow to string and found, to your horror, that the instrument croaks like it’s had too much whiskey and a few packs a day too many? Where is that singing tone that made you fall in love with your stringed instrument? If you’re producing a sick sound, it’s time to visit a doctor—someone like Dr. Laura Talbott, who’s not an MD but assistant professor of violin and viola at Oklahoma State University. She knows how to cure your sound-production ailments.
    There are about as many different varieties of sick sound as there are childhood diseases; let’s consult the doctor about just two of the most common maladies. She’s diagnosed them as “stressed-out sound” and “anti-sostenuto-itis”.

    By the way, the editors moved that final period into the wrong position. In American usage, periods and commas ALWAYS go INSIDE quotation marks. NO EXCEPTIONS. EVER. Colons and semicolons, on the other hand, always go outside the quotation marks. The placement of question marks and exclamation points depends on the context.
    Anyway, other recent Strings articles of mine to which I’ve hitherto neglected to link cover how to deal with stage fright and the cello duets of Friedrich August Kummer—much more interesting pieces than you’d think.

ARTICLE ADDENDA

posted by James Reel

    It occurred to me this morning that there’s one very consistent exception to my rule about applying the definite article to names of performances spaces, and I unconsciously alluded to it in my last post. Seems that if a space is called “hall”—just “hall,” not “music hall” or “residence hall”—and is prefaced by an individualizing name, it doesn’t take the definite article. Thus: Verizon Hall, Centennial Hall, Toad Hall. Although I can imagine somebody talking about an encounter with “the Monty Hall.”
    Meanwhile, friend of the blog Michael Dauphinais sends this note about my admonition to use “theater” rather than “theatre”:

    Your blog posting mentioning this spelling variant got me thinking. I was taught once upon a time that "theatre" was the general term for the art form and that "theater" was the building. Upon re-examining a few on-line dictionaries, I can find nothing to corroborate this explanation. Most sources seem to view the two spellings as interchangeable.
    Perhaps you should have a British/Canadian spelling day on your blog? Think if the colourful language opportunities. Readers would have something new to analyse. It would be the cat's pyjamas.

    I’ll let Michael’s message serve as this blog’s effort toward Canadian Spelling Day, at least for now. Anyway, the Associated Press style book (which is ignored by the stylistically peculiar and anachronistic New York Times) tells us to prefer the “theater” spelling in all instances, except when a theater or a company’s title uses the other spelling. “Theatre” is a Britishism (borrowed, like so many English words, from the French) that is nearly but not quite as pretentious in American usage as “centre” (employed here only by certain pretentious shopping and arts centers) and “amongst.” Please, fellow Americans, use these spellings only if you really want to look like an utter twit.