258 candles-day 7

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: Couple invite people to live with them.

258 candles-day 6

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: In the literal and figurative desert that's abortion rights in Texas, someone has to help poorer women get to a provider. This woman does.

258 candles-day 5

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: Today I'm celebrating myself because I don't want to forget the little humanizing touches that will never be written up for posting or linking otherwise. It was above 50 degrees today in the hub and I desperately wanted to get outside and walk in the sunshine. Although I'd walked yesterday, my body felt the familiar ache of wanting to be in motion. When I stepped outside, putting on my gloves and sunglasses, I ran smack into Alice.

Alice is an older woman I've come to know who lives literally around the corner. She will turn 87 this year, and takes a daily or nearly daily walk around the block just to keep herself in motion. Naturally, at 86 and using a cane she is very, very slow. 

Alice doesn't know my name although I've mentioned it several times, but she knows my face and my dogs and as I came down the steps she greeted me as if we'd just been talking earlier. What I did, what was so small and good, was to walk with Alice the length of the block to the corner where she peels off to her apartment building and I swung off toward the park. I shortened my stride, matching her tiny steps with half-steps, and listened to her as we walked. 

I lost perhaps five minutes of my walk, or I didn't lose those five minutes so much as I postponed them. Now, I'm not about to convince myself or you that those five minutes made any kind of difference to Alice--she's unlikely to remember having walked with me or what we talked about, and may not even remember (again) who I am. But five minutes is an awfully small price to pay to keep the wheels of human behavior lubed. There's the old quote by the otherwise awful didacticist John Bunyon that "You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you." It's true, as what we are made up of, and what makes our frail human race ultimately greater than the sum of its parts, is the coming together of those moments that, in the best sense, are forgotten by both the payer and the payee because there are simply too many of them to keep track. 

258 candles-day 4

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: Falling Fruit's interactive map of the world's forageable foods.

258 candles-day 3

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: Rescuing Kalu. (Warning: Kalu's initial appearance is disturbing. He appears better by the end, but for much of the video he can be frightening. Part of the reason for my choosing it is that, as much as I'd like to think I would do the same as these people, I'm not convinced I could overcome my revulsion.)

258 candles-day 2

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.


Today: Greek islanders rescuing refugees.

258 candles and counting

Like a lot of people, I've been watching this election cycle with dismay. Unlike a  lot of them, I have a real love for politics. I believe strongly that humanity is homo politico (or however that might shake out), a social animal that thrives on give and take. Politics, after all, comes from polis and describes how we live in proximity to one another.

That said: Yes, I repeat, a lot of people are watching this election cycle with our fingers in our mouths, afraid for what may be. For the first time since the millennium, this is the Democrats' election to lose, and lose it they seem determined. As is so often the case, they are their own destruction, because ideal is the enemy of good. Is one Democratic candidate preferable to another? Probably. Regardless, each candidate's partisans (not, I stress, the candidates themselves, who are conducting old fashioned, strong electioneering without rancor) strain themselves to proclaim that unless their candidate becomes the party's candidate, they will sit this one out.

That, of course, may hand the election over to one of three possible Republican candidates, two of which are bad enough but the third makes an absolute sham of the process. He is not a candidate in the traditional sense (for better or worse), offering positions and potential solutions to social and economic problems. He's simply saying whatever comes to his mind or what he knows will give him play in the next 24 hour news cycle. He is a boon to news directors, who really don't need to have reporters cover any of the others; they need only to play, sometimes in entirety, that guy's latest speech or conversation. In place of suggestions for how he will handle a given situation, he offers tripe suggesting that, when elected, he will do what needs to be done. He will get us the biggest, the best, the largest, the most effective government money can buy.

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about any of this. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: True Colors Residence.

"They promised us poetry! Where's the poetry!"

As I've mentioned before, I have been reading this book for over three decades. I finished it on the most recent New Year's Eve, just a few hours short of midnight, determined that I should not carry it around another year, or let it become four decades.

Do I recall much of the plot? No, but I don't think that matters much. What I retain is the flavor of post-war Paris, or at least as De Beauvoir and her circle experienced it. As I've also said before, I like to envision myself living the life of a commentator on what goes on in people's daily lives, noting the minutia of street and cafe life. I'm currently reading The Mauve Decade by Thomas Beers and Absolute Friends by John Le Carre, both of which provide glimpses into lives and times I couldn't otherwise know anything about, early 21st century cultural life in the case of the former, mid-century British post-colonial individual experience in the latter. I've often pointed out, to myself if no one else, the reason I read is to experience lives I couldn't otherwise.

This is the passage that, in my final days of reading The Mandarins, resonated most with me. In it I hear the sound of what it was like in those days in that place.

The Communist papers had announced the reading of a masterpiece in four acts and six scenes in which Lenoir "reconciles the demands of pure poetry with the concern for delivering a broadly human message to mankind." Julien intended to sabotage the meeting in the name of the old para-human group. In the articles written by Lenoir since his conversion, there was such a servile fanaticism, and he had put his friends and his own past on trial with such malignant zeal, that Henri was looking forward without displeasure to seeing him put in his place...
The auditorium was overflowing. The whole Communist intelligentsia was gathered together--all the old guard and many new recruits. A year earlier, many of those neophytes were indignantly denouncing the errors and faults of the Communists. And then suddenly, in November, they understood--they understood that it could help to belong to the Party. Henri went down the centre aisle in search of a seat and, as he passed, faces filled with hateful disdain. In that respect, Samazelle was right: they weren't the least appreciative of his honesty. All the year long, he had laboured mightily defending L'Espoir against the pressures of the Gaullists, had firmly taken his stand against the war in Indo-China, against the arrest of the Madagascan deputies, against the Marshall Plan. All in all, he had taken exactly the same position as theirs, but that didn't stop them from calling him a liar and a traitor. He went as far as the front rows. Scriassine looked up at him and smiled, but the young people grouped around Julien eyed Henri with hostility. He retraced his steps and sat down on a stairway in the back of the auditorium.

Eventually Lenoir reads a very dull, very conventional poetry/play that is broken up by shouting from Julien and his supporters, in which Henri joins. As he leaves the place later, he's joined by Lambert, a fixture at L'Espoir, who says, "I was hoping it would be more fun." Henri replies, "As a matter of fact, it wasn't any fun at all." The cause of writing and what it was meant to accomplish, and how, is deadly serious in this time and in this place, and even the disruption of an opposing faction is political and deadly serious. I can't say I miss that but being in the center of a situation where the reading of "a scene written in Alexandrine metre [in which a] young man was bemoaning his melancholy state...Parents, teachers, friends, each urged resignation, but he swept aside all bourgeois temptations while a chorus commented on his departure in sibylline stanzas..." That such an entertainment could overflow an auditorium, think of how seeing that must feel. I don't want to attribute it to some Gilded Literary Past in which the Word takes on divine powers--the audience is there more out of a sense of duty, some at witnessing the spectacle and some at making it a farce. But that enough people had read about it and cared enough to show up for whichever reason: Now there is something.

no place like Manny's

I've written before about my years working in bookselling, and as a result of those years I am registered with a Facebook page for booksellers. This morning, one member posted a photo of how one section of store looked after an evening with fewer staff than usual and more customers than usual, and the ensuing chaos that she came in to today. It got me to reminiscing about Manny's.


The photo above doesn't do justice to how chaotic Manny's Art Supply was. In the 80s in New Paltz, it was given better than half over to used books. There was no pretense at arranging books in order by type or author or anything. The story was, and I believe this to be true because I heard it from a seller who watched him do it, that Manny bought books by the boxload and then simply placed them, handfuls at a time, on whatever shelves had room.


Manny's was an institution before I ever arrived, and by the time I was there the front of the store was devoted to the eponymous art supplies for which every local art student and artist came. But the rear of the store was for me the real joy. Thousands and thousands and thousands of books on hundreds of shelves scattered everywhere. More thousands in piles on the floor. Poor, sometimes non-existent lighting; I remember postponing looking over an area until an afternoon when the sun would peek through the south-facing windows and illuminate the stacks.


The prices couldn't be beat. I bought my first Oxford Bible there, a hardcover (I still have it) from the 60s, for less than a dollar. My first acquisition to what would eventually become my collection of first edition counterculture books was Applegather by John Bart Gerald (or, as it was on the cover, johnbartgerald), and it was 25 cents. I now mourn the giving away of my copy and hope the recipient--a guy I met at a dance conference that same summer--appreciated it.


There was a method to looking for books. You never went in looking for something specific because there was no way to tell, if it was there, where it would be. You started at the first set of eight foot shelves horizontal to the eastern wall, of which there were four in pairs, then the shelves running against the rest of the east wall. Then you moved to the free-standing shelving front and back in the middle of the space. Then the shelves against the central pillar which held the aborted attempt to separate mass market paperbacks from everything else. Then the shelves running along the north wall, and up against the adjoining western wall, to the next room, where you did the same thing, in roughly the same order.


Along the way, you'd read the dozens of hand-written index cards thumbtacked to the ends of rows and along shelves. The cards would be jokes Manny had heard, little bits of everyday advice, comments about Frieda, his wife and business partner, or observations Manny made. Eventually you'd end at the far southern end of the shelving against the western wall which terminated abutting the counters of art papers. You could conceivably make the whole circuit in a single afternoon, but why would you want to? You couldn't do it and scan every title or open volumes at leisure and read a couple pages (or the back copy of books) to determine what you wanted to add to an ever-growing pile or, in my case, to determine you would stop there and buy this one today, knowing you'd find what you wanted sometime, not knowing at that time it was what you wanted. When you did complete the circuit, maybe weeks later, you'd start over again at the first shelf since, in the meantime Manny had bought dozens more books and slipped them in, sometimes a copy at a time, wherever he found room. Sometimes someone would get diligent or the fire marshal had visited and declared the piles couldn't remain on the floor, so there would be a new set of shelves erected and holding a number of books whose titles you'd only read vertically and now, reading them horizontally, you'd discover there was a book you'd always wanted to read, there was a title you couldn't get out of your head, there was an author you'd just heard of, maybe this was something good to start with.


Today, Manny's is cleaned up. The bookshelves are gone. Manny is dead, Frieda rarely has time to show up, and while it's owned and run by family, it isn't the same. It's run for profit now, which isn't a bad thing, of course. But it's not the same. It was a once-in-a-lifetime sort of place, one of those things you'd find at just the right moment of your life to accept and appreciate it.