"Images of America Series: Bed-Stuy": Old Pictures of Old Home

This is one of the "Images from America" books they sell at bookstores all over major cities, since the market for old-timey photos of people's current neighborhoods appears to be strong. If you went to a bookstore in Manhattan, the "Images..." display would have your Greenwhich Village or Kips Bay or SoHo editions, all full of awesome period pictures. If you went a little farther uptown, you'll begin to see the Harlem edition.

If you went to bookstores in Brooklyn, you'd see the Brooklyn editions: Flatbush, Bushwick, Brooklyn Heights, Williamsburg, and even Bedford-Stuyvesant, our very own Bed-Stuy.

I remember seeing and looking thought the Williamsburg copy, thinking, the 'Burg is so close to us, and the photos are great...if only...

Right then I noticed the Bed-Stuy copy and realized that I had no choice: I had to have this book.

The picture collection is  not quite as awesome as Williamsburg, an established city that was annexed by Brooklyn back in the day and is now a neighborhood of Brooklyn, a place with it's own identity and history.  What's today known as Bed-Stuy was a provincial neighborhood first. It became famous more recently for maybe the wrong reasons, like how South Central LA is famous (now they go by South LA). Maybe because it doesn't have it's own town-center like the 'Burg it doesn't have the plethora of photos that were available to the makers. That's not to say there aren't any, there are just less, and of those, it takes a good detective's eye to know where the scene is if there wasn't a label.

In any case, that doesn't mean that Bed-Stuy's history is short. In fact, it predates Williamsburg by maybe a century.

Bedford-Stuyvesant is named for a neighborhood that historically rested between Bedford and Stuyvesant Avenues to the east and west, and Broadway to the north and Atlantic to the south. Bedford and Stuyvesant are a few miles apart, so the swath of houses inside comprises the neighborhood. Nowadays, the western terminus has been moved west a few blocks, to Saratoga, and the eastern a few blocks to Classon, and the neighborhood looks relatively the same, just a a little more muscular.

But, Bedford Avenue took its name from the north-south thoroughfare that ran through a little bedroom community called Bedford Corners. Founded in 1657 by Dutch farming families, the Corners that helped with the name were the north-south Cripplebush Road and the east-west Jamaica Turnpike, both long established native travel routes. The Bedford (originally in Dutch the name was Brevoort) Corners community was able to have both a farming element as well as able to offer services to those travelling from the Indian city of Jamaica to the southern beaches at Rockaway or heading east out along what today we call Long Island.

Cripplebush became, when the British forced their grids on everything, Bedford Ave, and the Jamaica Tpk became Fulton. Fulton is parallel with Atlantic, and this corner is definitely in the Stuy today. That's actually a little bit nicer part of the Stuy than where we lived.

In any case, the book taught me things about Brooklyn and Bed-Stuy, and eeven sent me out looking for things, like Weekeville, the first free-black settlement in the vicinity, founded by Mr. Weekes in 1825 along another Indian route, Hunterfly Road, and like Clove Road. Clove is the only real ancient footpath that is survived the English and their grids, it was set with cobblestones by the Dutch, left alone during the grid hashing, tarred over, and the tarring has since been worked free. It's still there today. You can see it here.

I can't remember at which bookstore I picked it up, it may have been that independent place on Court St, but it may have been the Barnes and Noble, also on Court St.

More a Keepsake

This is keepsake program from our trip to the Austin City Limits festival in 2010 that we bought tickets to for our friends from New York. Inside are explanations on the bands, the scheduling for the various stages, as well as some other local scene venues.

This still contains the complementary iTunes card. It was a $10 card, and since we had two copies of the program, we tried using one of them, and it turned out it was ten bucks worth of the most popular acts' most popular songs, and wasn't redeemable for anything else, so...we just left the second one inside.

Austin is a very musically minded place, and calls itself the "Live Music Capital of the World". Both ACL and SXSW are festivals that bookend the summer, South-By in the spring and ACL in the autumn, and both are international destinations. South-By-South-West has morphed into a multi-media festival, but both off those festivals drive the always busy local bar/venue music scene into nearly ridiculous heights.

On any given night, you'll be able to find some live music at some downtown Austin venue, and that's been true for undoubtedly many years.

Also, what I noticed while living in Austin is that if you're a head living in the south somewhere, a "freak" in the mold of a HST devotee, or an otherwise waster or fry, or gay, or had musical inclinations, throughout the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties, you eventually migrated to Austin. It became the hub of southern counter-culture, and a touchstone for the history of southern, south-western, and Texan "cool".

Homer, Stoker: Another Longtime Pair in the Library

I've had these two copies in my book collection for the past twenty years, give or take, and I have a hard time figuring from where I got them. They have no prices written on them anywhere and were printed and bound in Denmark. Both copies have a statement on the copyright page stating how they used non-chlorinated paper pulp and the majority of the energy used to produce the book came from hyrdoelectricity thereby conserving fossil fuels and minimizing their contribution to the "greenhouse effect". Neat.

I think I remember picking them out, specifically because I knew they were somehow important, and I had a habit of collecting things back in 1993.

I remember thinking that the handsome cover design and matching quality of the "Wordsworth Classics" branding helped me with my decision to add them to what would become a library.

I've carted these books all over the country...moving to San Luis Obispo from Sacramento, moving to Brooklyn, then to Austin, then to Long Beach...

Truthfully, I haven't read either all the way through. The first time I picked up Dracula, back in 1994, after already owning it for a year, I was confused by all the diary entries and letters. What the hell? It was the same thing with Frankenstein...letters? I never really got into it.

I started reading it again while living in New York, and my bookmark remains at the last place I got back in 2009. I think Inherent Vice came out and I ditched my fellow Irishmen for Pynchon. Maybe I started reading Sagan's The Dragons of Eden, a nice little book about dreams, fears, and evolution.

 I remember learning that T.E. Lawrence was Lawrence of Arabia, from the back of this copy of Homer's Odyssey, and I began to wonder about a person's place in time and space. It was pretty heady for my fourteen year old self.

"Motherless Brooklyn", Jonathan Lethem: Knowledge of the BK

Ms. Gonzo read this mystery first, after we'd been living in Brooklyn for some time, and it's quite obvious reading it that Lethem lived in the BK as well for a time.

It also seemed like his understanding of the driver-shop's neighborhood glossed over the actual neighborhood in which it took place. Landmarks were mostly accurate, but it was like he sat on a corner in downtown Brooklyn and conjured up a fantastic Brooklyn for the story...but what the hell's so wrong with that?

The other parts of the city (of Brooklyn) are rendered with at least a keen eye for recognizable specifics, as long as you weren't hoping to read about Bed-Stuy or Crown Heights or East New York, the black and West Indian nabes.

In Motherless Brooklyn we follow the Tourettes stricken main character, his being basically bought from an orphanage by a fatherly gangster, and then his adult life spent being a driver/gangster at a fake livery stand in downtown Brooklyn, and a mystery that unfolds and he has to solve it. It's a mystery novel, through and through, and it took me a while to figure out if Lethem is a serious writer horsing around or...or what else, I'm not sure. Some of his short fiction in The New Yorker is nice, but I've yet to be compelled to read Chronic City or Fortress of Solitude, but hey, some asshole may say the same shit about my material when it gets done.

As I was reading it, piecing the threads together, the end drawing nearer, then nearer, then closer still, then the climax, and a few threads were still floating around. It was about here in the book that a paragraph shored those suckers up--a paragraph, and you get the sense that Lethem himself had forgotten about them, and then needed a neat way to burn 'em off, and instead, took the laziest way out.

I'm not generally a fan of mysteries...well, not that really, just that I don't read a lot of mysteries. But I don't have a bias against them.

Let me make this clear: if all you read are trashy romance novels, if all you read are mysteries, if all you read are Harry Potter or Hunger Games kiddie stuff, AWESOME! Keep reading. Don't let anyone tell you you have to change your habits. I might have been that person in the past, but I realize just getting people interested in reading is hard enough.

So, back to mysteries: I don't know if red herring loose ends are supposed to be explained away in a paragraph. I expected to have the basic scenario explained away in a paragraph (and wasn't let down on that tip), but...I don't know.

Ms. Gonzo picked this book up upon the suggestion of her cousin, I believe. It's not bad, by any means, and the Tourette Syndrome main character yields some entertaining results.

One thing Lethem did nail, though, is the sense of belonging, the sense of being, and the sense of identity that living in Brooklyn imparts on her people. The Girl (because all mysteries need a Girl) asks our main character, "When was the last time you left the City?". He responds, "I was just in Manhattan yesterday!" To him, like so many others, Brooklyn is a world unto itself, and why would anyone want to go anywhere else?

For another, likely more gritty and accurate portrayal of the City, but unfortunately mostly in Manhattan, check out The Fuck-Up.

BROOKLYN!

"Without Feathers", Woody Allen: "...except for that nervous fella..."

The quote I used for the title of this post is a line spoken by Flanders in an episode of The Simpsons, where a dinner party that goes wrong has the Van Houten's dirty laundry getting aired and Luann announcing she wants a divorce. Ned Flanders answers Marge's question, "Has anyone seen the new Woodsy Allen movie?" that he likes those films, "except for that nervous fella that's always in them."

I was on a plane and was given a set of headphones--no purchasing, sweet--and kept them, leaving them in my bag that I always use for carry-on since then, and used them once on another flight. There was no show on, but there were other channels of things to listen to, and one had the comedic styles of Woody Allen. It was a record of one of his comedy shows, and it was absolutely hilarious. It was from early on in his career, like a joke from one of his earliest films:

Allen's character: "I'm working now, yeah, dressing the strippers. 20 francs a week."
Peter O'Toole's character: "That's not very much."
Allen: "That's all I could afford."

I haven't had a chance to read this book...I just bought it, a few months ago at the aforementioned Dollar Book Store. A quote from Emily Dickinson three sheets inside the front cover refers to the title: "Hope is the thing with weathers..."

I've read Woody Allen's work in The New Yorker, which is generally funny, and when I saw this book, I decided to spend one of the four singles I had on my at the time. It's on the list for being read, among other books.

"Candide" et al, Voltaire: Rabble-Rousing Frenchman

These are two copies of Voltaire. The first is the collection that has both Candide and Zadig, only I haven't read Zadig. Candide I read recently, and enjoyed. I saw a little segment on a local PBS program where Harold Ramis and other comedians were discussing how funny and great the novella is, about Candide's endless optimism throughout his outrageous world travels. From Germany to Lisbon in time for the earthquake, then off to Argentina and then finding Eldorado. Then Paris, Venice, Constantinople...Candide get's all over the place, and through his voice we see how a guy like Voltaire could really stir up the shit pile.

Voltaire was a super star writer in his time, read and liked by many of the literate luminaries of the time, including Franklin and Jefferson.

I picked up these copies while living in San Luis Obispo; they're stamped with "USED" and "El Corral" markings, the Corral being Cal Poly's campus bookstore. I can't remember the exact circumstances by which I acquired them, but it was the name, Voltaire, that I knew only as important, that inspired me to purchase (or lift).

He wasn't one of the philosophers I read for my personal studies, but I knew of him, and that was enough, apparently, for the price and for me.

I recommend Candide for anyone looking for a funny, quick adventure story that has sneaky philosophy embedded.

"Madame Bovary", Flaubert: Fond Memories

This is my copy of Flaubert's masterpiece Madame Bovary. This is a Dover Thrift Edition, one of the incredibly low-cost books our professor listed for us for this particular class. He knew of the soaring costs of books, about the racket of college book sales, and so gave us the cheap copies. This copy probably was the most expensive of the bunch at two bucks.

Aah...this class was one of my favorites. It was the Fall of 2003, and English 253, an upper division English prerequisite, was the class, taught by the pony-tail sporting poet Jim Cushing. It was Wednesday nights, 6-9. This class covered the English Romantics, Melville's "Bartleby", Elliot's Prufrock, Joyce's Dubliners, Kate Chopin and Mary Shelley and Kafka...I was riding my bike, not smoking, and just trying to finish up my last year of undergraduate studies. After the first class, I noticed that a good friend of mine was also taking it. Since he was a mechanical engineering major and I was math, we never got to share any classes. We were both surprised about seeing each other upon leaving, and decided to carpool for the rest of the quarter.

Well, for us, "carpooling" meant him driving me, but it gave us a chance to hang out regularly. Since we were graduating seniors, we were safe in the knowledge that we would be able to get the class (if it came down to it), and since we were both artists as heart (he with drawing skills, me with words), we felt comfortable that we could pay enough attention to the lectures to pass, so we...er, always had some fun before class. Like slamming a few beers, or other recreational activities.

We always sat in the front row of a large seminar style class listening intently to the lectures, trying to pay attention, sometimes getting the giggles. My friend had a different Madame Bovary copy than this. The class copy--the cheap one--was, for one reason, able to get to the price by using very small type-set and cramming everything into as small a space as possible. During the lectures, Doc Cushing would alert us to pages and passages he used as lecture fodder, but the pages never matched my friend's copy, which was 80 pages longer than ours. One night we used the remainder of the lecture deriving the equation that would tell us where in his copy we needed to look for the same passage. That was the kind of time we had. (We both passed easily, me with an A and he with an A or B.)

I've included the sheet from my notes from the class covering Flaubert. It shows the brainal wanderings of the semi-bored. One day I  produced a laugh from my friend when I put the pencil in my left hand and slowly wrote, "The left hand gets a try." You can see the sentence in my even worse left handed writing there; it took a solid few minutes to get it down on paper.

If you look close, after the left-handed sentence, you can see when I left for the "bathroom", I actually ran over to the UU, which was close by, to check up on the Yankees/Marlins World Series game that was happening that night.


That reminds me: Game 7 between the Red Sox and my Yankees in the ALCS that year (the winner was off to the World Series, the loser was done for the season) was to start right before class was to start. In other times I might have skipped class for the game, but, strangely not here. In any case, I remember getting home and wanting to see who'd won. I walked in the door and before I could ask my roommate, or even say anything, the television was on and Aaron Boone was stepping up to the plate.

"Whoa..." I said, as I threw my notebook down and checked the info on the screen: 11th inning, tie game, light-hitting Boone in as a pinch-hitter. "Earn your pinstripes, Boone!" I yelled at the screen, without taking a seat. First pitch from knuckleballer Tim Wakefield flutters in, and Boone crushes it out of right-field. Home-run, Yankees go to the World Series, just like that.

All this from a novel about the first desperate housewife. Sometimes literature is so much more than the leaves themselves...

"Charity", Mark Richard: Professor Recommended

In my senior year of college I had one particular quarter, my last quarter as an undergrad, where I had two writing classes that I took credit/no credit, which is the equivalent of taking classes that won't hurt your grades. They won't help your grades either, but they certainly won't hurt them. During this quarter I had an easy math class, my senior project class (one unit weekly meeting with my adviser about my project), and those two writing classes. They were four classes that I was mostly invested in.

I remember that last quarter being a blur of bike riding and trying to focus on my project. Those writing classes were informative and exciting, and the prose professor had a list of writers we should check out. This is the same professor that is a friend of Denis Johnson and brought him to our class, so we were inclined to believe him.

This collection of short stories has a few in particular that are written in a style that's maybe more befitting Shakespearean knockoffs. The most well known story, or at least the one seems to show up in college class anthologies, is "The Birds for Christmas", a tale about orphans and a clandestine plan to watch Hitchcock's classic film on Christmas. My favorite story is probably "Tunga Tuggo, Lingua Dingua".

I bought this copy online for a price that was more shipping than cost, and I've read different stories over and over, like "Blue is Blue" and my aforementioned favorite.

"The Gay Place", Billy Lee Brammer: Classic Unearthed in Austin

I paid seven bucks maybe, maybe three bucks for this copy of Brammer's The Gay Place at the Lamar Half-Priced Books in Austin. That was the same trip I found my first paperback edition of Gravity's Rainbow.

The Gay Place is a collection of three novels (The Flea Circus, Room Enough to Caper, and Country Pleasures) tells the story of a quaint city where the two major power institutions that control the whole town are the University and the state government. It captures the city of Austin at a magical place in its history, before the high-tech industry came in and before Texas politics devolved into what it has (as has the country in general, what with the lack of bipartisan discourse and discussion). The bombastic governor is known as "Goddamn" Fenstemaker, and was modeled after Billy Lee's good close friend (at the time) Gov. Lyndon Johnson, who went on to be Vice President, and eventually President.

Brammer has crafted a novel that ranks in the top three American political novels in history. It's too bad that it is out of print, generally hard to find, and may have caught a stigma from it's title. It is excellent.

Billy Lee Brammer had an eventual falling out with LBJ and never finished any other literature piece before or after. He died at age 48 after getting barred from the White House. After the Kennedy assassination he was tasked with a biography of the new President. That didn't work out.

Bummer. If you know Austin, I suggest the read.

"Naval History of Admiral Yi Sun-sin": Free Handout

This copy of the exploits of Adm. Yi Sun-sin, one of Korea's national heroes and the savior of the nation from a Japanese invasion in 1592, was handed out in front of the Barnes and Nobles at Union Square for free one Saturday I was working the green market.

It tells the story of one of Korea's greatest military geniuses (chosen as the greatest figure in Korean history by a 43.8% of voters in 2005) and about the rather insecure land nestled between two historical behemoths, China and Japan. The continued invasions by the close neighbors have left an indelible imprint upon the national psyche of Koreans.

This book is paperback and bound as if done at Kinko's, but the information is incredible. I can say that in American schools we learn of European explorers and the basic history of western Europe, from Greece to the Pilgrims, while glossing over thousands of years here and there. In thirty years of being alive I'd never heard of Yi Sun-sin, or, as we westerners would probably be more comfortable, Sun-sin Yi, or his great naval victories like the Battle of Hansan, or what's been labeled a Maritime Miracle, the Battle of Myongnyang.

It's an indispensable trove of history that westerners will never have heard of, and they were handing it out for free. Very cool.

"Robots Have No Tails", Henry Kuttner: Some Sci-Fi

This collection, Robots Have No Tails, was written by the married team of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, and this particular edition seems to be inscribed in blue ball point pen in a hand that looks like an elder struggling with arthritis, and signed "C.L. Moore Kuttner", so...maybe it's real. I'm not sure where I got it, but I was thinking it was either a book fair in San Luis that I went to with my dad (they sold by the stacked inch) or it was procured from the $1 shelf from Cal Poly's library.

I'm pretty sure it was the library, a shelf that had a "Sale $1" sign, but there aren't any of the markings that usually show that it was a tosser. At Cal Poly they'd put old books worthy of the trash heap out for sale for a buck, and I'd regularly peruse them and made plenty of purchases. Some were cool, about rocket telemetry, and some were nerdy, about radiation and chromosomal aberrations.

I really don't have too much science fiction in my collection, and we might have the last of it here. This book has at the heart a drunken doctor who makes a robot while he's obliterated, and can't remember why or how it works like it does. The robot has nice human frailties, like vanity and anger and pessimism, if I remember correctly. It also seems like there was one particular story that garnered attention, then a second was written to sort of be an earlier story from the canon, or prequel, but it kinda had a hard time fitting together.

The title was enough for me, and I think I found a part of the attitude it took helpful for a story I was working on a little harder back then, ten years ago.

"Zodiac", Graysmith: In the Library for Years

This copy of Zodiac, about the notorious San Francisco (and environs) serial killer, was found by me at our family's cabin near the volcanic Mt Lassen. I thought it looked interesting, and borrowed it. This was probably twenty years ago, maybe seventeen. I didn't get into it until I trucked it all the way to New York, and the movie was coming out.

The corner rip occurred as I tried to put it in my back pocket for a subway ride. I carried around other books in this fashion, but far less than I did copied of the New Yorker or Daily News. Oh how I hated to be on the train without any reading material.

Once you get past the opening scene of the Berryessa killings, twenty pages about the temperature and the clothing being worn and the clouds in the sky and eventually the gruesome details, and you get the idea that the driving thrust of the narrative is a police file (it was). The book does open up into an entertaining dive into the gritty side of police work.

The one thing I remember taking from the book was just how many sadistic molester/possible murderers there were in the Bay Area at the time. How many are around now? (Shudder)

I will be replacing it sometime soon, and I send my apologies to those who might've missed it.

"30,000 Selected Words": A Nice Tool

I found this book at a currently local bookstore called, creatively, Dollar Bookstore. It was a former Borders that was sold off and recommissioned as this new thing. This was very recently, as in the past two months.

When I first saw it, it struck me as a tool for a poet, or flowery prose writer. I loved it instantly. Here's a selection chosen at random:

(page 297)
PS /ps/ Medial -- two syllables

capsize     chapstick     chopsticks    dipstick     dropsy     gypsum

And it goes on like that for twenty-eight words! It even recognizes compound nouns like "stop sign" and "step stool". How cool is that? Am I a gigantic nerd or what?

It turns out it is a tool, but not for writers. Communication Disorder Specialists use it to teach consonant sounds in the English language.

My Bradbury Collection

These are three of my oldest books. My mom originally bought me I Sing the Body Electric when I was a kid and getting into reading, but getting too old for the kids stuff I'd been working on. Ray Bradbury was one of the world's best sci-fi guys--this is what I was told, and it's true. I knew that he had written the Martian Chronicles, and seeing at the time that I planned on being the first man on Mars, I figured that that would be my first Bradbury book.

I remember thinking that "I Sing the Body Electric" was a very cool phrase; it sparked all sorts of imaginative things in me, but I don't remember ever reading everything in this copy. Perhaps I did, but that would have been during a summer spent in Sacramento and up at our family Cabin near a volcano where there was no television.

Very soon after being seen staring at the pages of this copy, I was given two more copies of Bradbury work: The Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes.

They were of the same edition, like you can see here with the Chronicles, but somewhere I lost my copy of Something Wicked...

As time went on and as I grew older and more sophisticated, in high school we were to read Fahrenheit 451, and instead of using the school issued copy, my mom got me this copy. "It's more important than that other stuff," she told me, and here she was right.

Fast forward another five or six years and I learn what my dad had been trying to tell me: "I Sing the Body Electric", from Whitman's Leaves of Grass, from which the Bradbury borrowed, is one of the most beautiful and important things ever written by an American. Ray Bradbury, like so many others, was influenced by a master, and I gained a new perspective.

"The Catcher in the Rye": High School Copy

This is the copy I had in high school. Like most kids in high school in America during my time there, this book isn't done justice. Not because of the teachers, but because American kids just aren't experienced enough or sophisticated enough to get it. Freshmen? You can't really expect kids who can't drive to understand and feel this masterpiece.

I remember a Christmas being back fresh from the dorms or the sleazy apartment where I was living and being totally wasted and in an argument with my Auntie, who adored this book. I was trashing it, partly because I never fully got it when I had mostly skimmed it as a freshman years before. Another motivator for this confrontation was the fact that I am the oldest of our little foursome of cousins, and I wanted to show them that it's okay to disagree with your parents, that iconoclastic fights are sometimes necessary for growth.

Years later, while living in Brooklyn, this book became another subway novel, and I realized how amazing it is, and even contacted my Auntie and, having had the requisite life experiences that led to the above realization (about iconoclasm), relayed the gist of that realization to her.

She was gracious and said that everyone has their own tastes, and sometimes those tastes change, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Journey into Math History

This was a textbook for a math class I had while in college. The class was Math 419 (smirk); Math History. The book is shaped like a paperback novel and covers some of the most important Big Ideas in the history of thinkers over the centuries. It gives the context and backgrounds of the breakthroughs. Learn about how the Pythagoreans--the students of Pythagoras who likely came up with the theorem that today bears his name--took the person who discovered/realized that the square-root of two is irrational and drowned them.

Learn what happens in ancient Syracuse when you disobey direct orders, like don't kill the renowned genius Archimedes (guess what happens).

After moving to New York, there was a time when this was my subway book.

Many books that will appear here will have been subway books.

I bought the book at El Corral bookstore on campus at Cal Poly, in San Luis Obispo, in either September of 2003, January of 2004, or March of 2004. I still use it for proof clarifications on the quadrature of an arbitrary rectangle and for information on Euler. I'm trying to do something with Lenny in some fashion in my writings...

The professor for this class was an imposing old figure. He had a penchant for speaking quietly and towards the baseboards of the walls on either side of our desks, which we all felt was off, since he was large man in the shoulder and stature department. A young lady in the front row asked him, on the second day of class if he wouldn't mind speaking up, and he said, "Uhhm, no, I'm not going to be doing that."

Okay, we all sorta said to ourselves, as we prepared to strain our ears for the next ten weeks. It was a class I enjoyed and remember fondly.

Aesop's Fables: Lessons for Posterity

This copy of Aesop's Fables I'm pretty sure I acquired from the book warehouse I worked at seasonally for a few weeks in December of 1999. Depending on how many of these you read, you'll see that a non-trivial amount of my library was obtained in this manner.

This copy, at the time I obtained it, just seemed like the kind of book one should have in a library. I plan on reading things out of it to my future child.

I don't think I've really delved into it in ten years.

An Examination of a Library

Um, my library. I have lots of books...not as many as my dad, maybe, or my Auntie and Uncle nearby, but I carted most of them across the country to Brooklyn, then took them to Austin, and then returned them to my current location, back in California, back where we started, me and my books.

So, how this is going to work is I show a picture of one of my books, explain where I got it, what I got it for (if that's the case), what it's about (if it's not obvious), and what I may want to use it for.

I don't know...brief discussions about my books.