CSotD: Friday Funnies in the Book Nook
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In the category of Happy Timing, F-Minus dropped this strip on the day I finished the heavy lifting on my final week before retirement.
Writers don’t actually retire, of course: They keep writing. They just stop getting paid for it.
In this case, the fellow is right, despite the limited lesson he took away.
I used to joke that I retired at the start of my career rather than at the end, because I gave myself 15 years to make it as a novelist, and wrote two book-length manuscripts before I hit the wall at 35.
They weren’t terrible. They just weren’t very good, which is worse, because I got enough bland, vague encouragement to keep me going.
I finally sent the thing off to a for-real critic and asked him for the truth, which he sent me in five single-spaced pages which included the words “this is making my teeth hurt” as he laid down in brutal detail precisely why my writing was okay but my novel sucked, most of which boiled down to the fact that everybody’s been to college and nobody wants to read about it.
Fortunately, during those 15 years, I’d taken on an increasing amount of freelance work, in the course of which I found out I enjoyed journalism and was pretty good at it, so that by the time the clock ran out on my fiction writing, I was employed as a full-time reporter.
Granted, I’d have hit “editor” at a younger age if I’d started straight out of college, but then there’s this:
I had started the clock at 20 by taking a year off from school to write, and returned to campus with a first draft of my first novel.
I ran into a professor who said that he, too, wanted to write a novel, to which I thoughtlessly replied, “Well, the hardest part is applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair,” and immediately saw in his face that he was never going to do it.
Which he confirmed by dying at 62. It doesn’t get any more “never” than that.
I suggest confining your bucket list to things like “seeing the Grand Canyon” that don’t touch upon your dreams or, certainly, your self-esteem.
I was going to quibble with Wiley Miller over his quoting of “Tale of Two Cities” in this Non Sequitur, since it’s not a terribly long book, but then Danae and Katie aren’t terribly old kids, and I didn’t read it until the summer I was 14.
That was also the summer I read “The Once and Future King” and a few other books. A good summer for reading, one hour a day during mandatory rest period at Camp Lord O’ The Flies.
If I were a parent of small kids today, I don’t think I’d frantically monitor their screen time, but I’d sure impose some limits. Then again, both in my professional life and as a grandfather, I’ve found that kids, properly encouraged, will read.
While others will not. Which means things haven’t changed a lot, nor do we change much as we get older.
Still, I’ll refer you back to one of my very favorite columns, about the books everybody pretends to have read and how you can tell they haven’t.
The only thing worse than an intellectual snob being a phony intellectual snob.
Which brings us to another tip from Mike Lynch, this being that the Billy Ireland is furnishing Zoom backgrounds starting with Winsor McCay and George Herriman (with instructions for how to use them).
But I’ve been watching how the reporters on NFL Access — hey, I don’t watch a lot of TV — handle it, and I suspect that Aditi Kinkhabwala created a background niche in her apartment by putting two bookcases at an angle behind her.
I really like the visual effect, but whatever you stock your shelves with will reflect upon you. I don’t see a lot of Tolstoy and Colette back there.
However, she’s an avid reader and unapologetic about her love of crime novels.
Fact is, she’s unapologetic about all sorts of things.
As we all should be.
Colleen Wolfe makes a favorable impression by having both “Catch-22” and “The Boys on the Bus” on her shelf, along with a well-worn black paperback that I can’t identify but which has clearly been read several times.
And “American Tabloid” isn’t “Anna Karenina” but it’s a logical long read for a communications major, particularly one who doesn’t take herself too seriously.
I kind of suspect, however, that Andrew Siciliano is, at best, messaging and, at worst, bullshitting us, what with “Portnoy’s Complaint,” the works of Edgar Allan Poe, and “Infinite Jest” back there.
David Foster Wallace’s mother hasn’t really read “Infinite Jest,” though she’s planning to.
However, on his Twitter feed, he recommended “The Great Influenza” three days before Terry Gross had the author on “Fresh Air.”
You get major points for keeping a step ahead of Terry Gross.
And a tip of the hat to Bado for pointing out that Tom Gauld has put out a book of science-based cartoons and done an NPR interview on the topic.
Kids and Screen Time: This positive thought
Baby Blues got a chuckle, but it also raises questions of kids and clocks and screens.
It reminded me of my own kids, as teens, giving me a raft of grief for having bought a digital watch, which they felt were for 10-year-olds.
Wristwatches are an endangered technology today, though one of the boys has something that fits on his arm and alerts him when he gets email.
But digital time is a math problem, while analog time is visual.
That is, if your digital clock tells you it’s 8:47, you immediately convert to analog in your mind, because “13 minutes to 9” is otherwise meaningless.
The good news being that schools still have analog clocks on classroom walls and I promise you kids know just how many degrees of a circle the hand must travel before the bell rings.
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