Sailing: An Odd Essay

Truncated Trains

I might hop a train if the trains here still went anywhere worthwhile.  There's tracks a five minute walk back through the woods, and we can hear them rumbling by several times a day.  The heaviest train-cars shake the bones of this old house a little.  (Not so much as the tractor trailers and buses passing out front.  It does not take so much to rattle this house.)  The noise of the trains is exciting and romantic, and we don't mind it at all.

Unfortunately the trains do not go far.  The scenic dinner train runs from Hyannis to the canal and back.  It doesn't even cross the magnificent railroad bridge, as it did in my youth when I rode across it clutching my absent older brother's cheap 1970s panasonic camera.  Too much trouble, no doubt, all that lowering and raising. 

Meanwhile all the tracks in Falmouth and running up and down the lower Cape have been ripped out, paved over, and turned into bike paths.  Lovely if you've got a bicycle and a Sunday afternoon.  But what about those of us with a ticket for the conductor?  What if we get lonely in our cars and want to travel someplace together?

The trash trains get to cross the canal, though.  They haul everything from Hyannis on down, I guess, to the Semass processing plant, where it gets burned and turned into energy.  One could hop on and ride it that far, I suppose, and maybe make a decent adventure of it, huddled among the garbage.  But I'd be ready to hop the next train back.  I've already seen the Southeastern Massachusetts.

I'm tired of driving.  My car needs an oil change and a new muffler.  Every week it wants new gas. 

I miss the subways of Boston, despite and all they're falling apart.  From what I understand there's even more trains in New York.  I think we need to live there for a little while before we're dead.  I'll make a hobby of learning every station, little islands in a vast infinite world.  Little places to remember until we forget.

Not for a while, though.  All our stuff is here, and all our stuff is tired of moving around.

Hilarious Ebay Typewriter Auction

I just caught the last three minutes of an auction for an antique Royal typewriter.  I didn't win, but I did see the price get bit up from $50 to $118 in the final minute. 

Because I'm not sure how to link (or if one can link) to a completed eBay auction, I cut and pasted the item description and the question and answer section to blatantly plagiarize quote in full here.  This is the funniest thing I've read in weeks and it deserves to be preserved in something a little longer-lived than an eBay auction.  I'm sure the typosphere and retrotech folks will thank me.  (Not that they weren't all watching that auction already!)

Item Description

I've never heard of the "Royal" company, but they apparently make really wacky computers. I have no idea why they made this thing - it has no screen, I can't see where to plug it in, and there are no cables to hook it up to a hard drive. My girlfriend says this belonged to her grandfather, who used it to write ad copy. Somebody said if you got an infinite number of these, and paired them up with an infinite number of chimps, eventually one of them will come up with the script for "Avatar". I don't know if this is really possible, I can't find any chimps for sale on eBay, so we are forced to part with this machine.

Cheers! (did I mention "No Reserve"?)

Questions

Q: Hey I like the description. Funny. But does the typewriter work? What shape is the typewriter in? Thanks     Nov-21-09

A: I'm sorry, I don't think I understand your question. The photos are of the actual typewriter. If one puts in a piece of paper, one can type on that sheet of paper. But is that working? My girlfriend tells me she's done graphic design with stuff she's typed out on it - but is that any way to live? My god, man - the more I think about it, the more I think this infernal machine can render no good! Escape! Escape, I say! Before you are shackled to the tyranny of the Royal machinateur du type - free yourself from the tyranny of the "tic, tic, tic," otherwise, you may end up with a blog!

Q: Can I pick it up or meet if I bid and win?     Nov-22-09

A: Yes, I suppose if you can make it to Los Angeles California at an as yet to be determined time and location, it will be possible for you to pick it up. I'l be wearing a grey houndstooth sportcoat (think 7/8 scale version of James Garner from the seventies TV show "The Rockford Files"). Approach me and casually mention "The green canary flies at dawn." I'll reply, "I'm sorry, I'm not really familiar with Tom Stoppard." You will then know that you have found me. Oh yeah, I'll also be the guy with an antique typewriter.

Q: Sorry I did not make myself clear. But you did in fact answer my question. "If one puts in a piece of paper, one can type on that sheet of paper." That works. I am looking forward to the tic, tic, tic in time I will surely lose my mind. Just not crazy enough to end up with a blog. thanks     Nov-22-09

A: godspeed, my young viking!

Q: I was wondering if the typewriter is actually in working order or not. Thanks!     Nov-25-09

A: please refer to previous questions.

Q: Does this typewriter work?     Nov-25-09

A: Yes, this device works, recently I used it to confuse some small children (I told them it was an X-Box 360). It worked for a short amount of time, but they were very simple children.

Q: I would REALLY like it if you just tell us bidders about the typewriter and not your imagination.....Sorry. Does it have a bell? If so, does it ring at the end of each line? Could you try typing each letter and number and tell us consumers if the keys stick or if they type smoothly. Us older generation would like some straight answers. Thanks.     Nov-28-09

A: I am terribly sorry. I am only sixty myself, and I often forget what it must be like for the older generation. There is no bell that I can hear, but I'm a bit hard of hearing. As per your request, I will now try typing each letter. The "A" key reminds me of magnolias. The "B" key has a sharp, crisp ring to it. The "C" key is filled with melancholia. The "D" key is no one's fool. The "E" key says "tic". The "F" key is wondering why you use the "E" key so much. The "G" key secretly likes the "H" key. The "H" key wonders why the "G" key isn't friendlier. The "I" key pretends to like you, but says mean things behind your back. The "J" key doesn't like to wake up early in the morning. The "L" key thinks that it is better than you, even though it's only had one steady job. The "M" key is a little slow. The "N" key daydreams. A lot. The "O" key wishes it had taken better care of itself when it was younger. The "P" key works out. The "Q" key isn't really like that, and it doesn't care what those other keys said about it. The "R" key is a little stand-offish. (I know that sounds judgmental, but really, if you saw the way it acted!) The "S" key is quite agreeable. The "T" key is no one's fool. The "U" key, on the other hand, seems to be quite gullible. The "V" key doesn't take kindly to these folks, and the "W" key just doesn't understand why we can't all get along. The "X" key had too much pie for thanksgiving. The "Y" key is proud that it represents both consonants and sometimes vowels, and the "Z" key just can't be bothered, although really, how many times does one type a "Z"? I hope this helps. Cheers!

Now I can't even track down who the seller was.  But if I ever made it to Los Angeles, California, I'd sure like to have a beer with him.

The Digital, the Analog, and the Divine

One of Millions

Wow.  Back when I was hell-for-leather bent on being a concert pianist, I thought the fact that I could play the thing made me pretty damn special. 

Now it turns out that 30 million chinese kids are taking piano lessons.

Lessons are taken extremely seriously. Parents sit alongside their children while they are taught, making copious notes.

The Western concept of learning being fun is not practised here. It is about hard work and focus.

Once home, mothers and fathers will ensure their offspring practise for two or three hours a day.

This actually gives me some hope for the future.  We may soon have to bow to our new lords and masters, but maybe classical music won't be dying, after all.

Link thanks to Hugh MacLeod.

Piano Redux

So I've reached this point where I am happy with my work. I haven't a heck of a lot to complain about nor a lot of stories to share, and yet I still have this desire to do something with my fingers.  I've got three computers (none younger than three years old), six typewriters (from 40 to 60 years old), and one piano (which is 90 years old).  (I don't tend to buy a lot of new things. But that isn't the point of this story.)  Always thought I wanted to be a writer, despite not doing a hell of a lot of writing.  At some point I realized that I don't really enjoy writing so much as typing, which is probably why I end up accumulating so many qwerty keyboards. 

But now I've reached another conclusion: if I just feel the urge to transpose something from paper across a keyboard, It's a lot more satisfying to use the piano than any of those other things. 

The damn piano's been my albatross since high school.  It's a six foot grand and we've paid nearly as much to move it around as it cost in the first place.  A few moves ago we just left it in our rental property and told the tenants, "Congratulations, the place comes with a piano.  Take good care of it."  Then eventually we moved ourselves back to the piano, which is kind of funny, if you ask me. 

Damn thing started taunting me soon as we got back.  I couldn't find my sheet music.  It was all in a big box and we probably left that behind a couple of moves ago too.  You'd think I could ignore it, then, with no music.  (I can't improvise.  Maybe that's why I'm not a great storyteller.)

For some reason I started practicing scales.  Had those drilled into my well enough.  I worked my way around the circle of fifths, majors and minors, played in octaves, thirds, sixths, and tenths.  Four octaves up and down.  Accents on every other note, or every third, or every fourth.  Building velocity and strength in the fingers.  Making my hands feel seventeen again.  Crap.  You drill some of these things hard enough and they'll never go away.

Just as good the sheet music was lost, though.  I didn't want to start re-hashing the same old pieces.  Time for something different, something I hadn't studied.  I found a bunch of public domain sheet music on the internet.  Bach two-part inventions.  Clean, simple, not too clever.  Something I'd skipped over back in the day, for the most part. Too easy - ha ha - and certainly not worth the trouble in my quest to conquer Brahms and Chopin.

But now simple is right up my alley.  I don't want to be a rock star with this thing.  I just want to wiggle my fingers around a bit.

A couple of weeks later and I can do something this six year old can do.

But what the hell, it's not a race.  I've got a job. I'm just doing this for fun.  It's a lot more satisfying than playing a video game or watching television.  But I'm already jonesing for my next fix.

Sixteen years without touching the thing and now - well, I'm not really sure how this is going to turn out.

Good grief, has it been half a year since I've written anything in this damn blog?  What the heck have I been paying for every month?  Gads, even the "new post" form has changed almost beyond recognition.

A great deal of this comes from finding new work which I have been surprised and amazed to find myself quite happy at.  Guess I'm just one of those folks for whom happiness means death to word-count.

However and whatnot, I do have some plans for a successful and triumphant return.  Stay tuned.

A Little Talk Against the Literary World

I love literature.  I love stories.  Science fiction, fantasy, “literary”, mystery – I love them all.  I’d love to get paid for writing them someday, so I keep submitting to different magazines.  Entering contests.  Practicing as much as I can, as time and energy permit.  One of those dreams which waxes and wanes.  The fact that it refuses to die even as I move into comfortable middle age means I’m more or less stuck with it.  That’s fine.  There are more dangerous and expensive habits than writing stories.

It was a treat when I got a copy of Boulevard in the mail a couple days ago.  I wasn’t expecting it.  I’ve enjoyed the magazine in the past.  I guess a one-issue subscription was included in my entry fee for a contest I entered last year.  So I threw it in my bag and flipped through it on my lunch-break today.

I love stories, but I’m under no illusions that telling a good yarn is more important somehow than, say, building a house or changing a timing belt.  I’ve never forgotten what Lin Yutang wrote in the preface to Moment in Peking:

What is a novel but "a little talk," as the name hsiaoshuo implies? So, reader, listen to this little talk awhile when you have nothing better to do.

Isn’t that a lovely, remarkable, and humble statement?  He’s written a novel and he hopes you enjoy it…when you get around to it.  Novels are polite that way.  They’ll wait.

I don’t mean to say that a good story can’t be life-changing and world-altering, as well as entertaining.  But then, “a little talk” can be all those things at once as well.  (And a new timing belt can get your engine to run for another 200,000 miles!)

“Literary” types, in general, tend to take themselves a lot more seriously than Lin Yutang.  (I suppose if I paid $100,000+ for an MFA in creative writing I probably would too.) 

The Symposium that Boulevard printed in this issue (nos. 71 & 72) made me chuckle.  From the description in the table of contents:

There is a powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe is still the center of the literary world…not the United States,” Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize jury, recently said.  “The US is too isolated, too insular.  They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature…That ignorance is restraining.”  Do you agree or not?

Engdahl’s statement seems so absurd on so many levels, I can see why there might have been a temptation to use of 24 pages of a lovely journal talking about it.  But wait.  No, I can’t. 

I mean, honestly!  People in America are going to write books about Americans that appeal to other Americans because that’s what’s of interest to Americans.  Europeans are going to do the same.  Europe might have its countries crammed a little closer together and so some kind of inter-cultural dialog might come a little more naturally to them.  But to say this makes them the center of the literary world…what the hell is the “literary world?” 

I guess you could say that Europe is the center of the literary world the way that France is the center of the wine and cheese world, China is the center of the Kung-Fu movie world, India is the center of the extravagant musical world, and Japan is the center of the Sushi world.  Doesn’t mean I can’t have some pretty good sushi in Boston.

Engdahl has already said that his statements were "perhaps a bit too generalizing".  That’s fine.  We all shoot our mouths off once in a while.  It’s just a little talk.

Just seemed a shame to give 24 pages of Boulevard over to it.  I mean, my story submission could have been in there, instead.

Unlimited Growth versus Preserving Old Things

We could go back to a world where things were preserved, repaired, saved and traded.  It would be terrible for the economy.  But we're coming to understand that economic models built around assumptions of unlimited growth are doomed to fail. 

"If a business isn't growing, it is dying."  I think I read that in one of those Rich Dad, Poor Dad books, and of all the vague empty promises and crazy lies in those books, that's the line that stuck with me and bothered me the longest.  

Sure, you can interpret growth and death in those terms.  Uninterrupted decline does lead one, inevitably, to zero.  No way around that.

But how about understanding you can have ups and downs, and changes in direction, and periods that are more or less flat and peaceful?  How about acknowledging that ever greater numbers on a spreadsheet might have consequences that human beings living in a human culture might find toxic?

What's wrong with a man opening one store - a grocery, say, or a tobacconist - and having some years where he does more business and some where he does less, but over-all he manages to put aside enough to get through the lean times and keep his family and his employees fed and comfortable.

Why is it that, once the profits start trickling in, you've got to get out there and start saturating other markets?  You'd better get them covered sooner than later, or else your competitors will be moving into town to shoulder you out?  Free market capitalism is supposed to encourage survival of the fittest providers of goods and services.  Only now it seems to foster only the survival of the biggest.

What has changed in the past 30 years to five rise to the super-corporation, the franchised chain, this unlimited growth and sublimation of stores into ever-larger companies who insist on performing the same operations the same way across the entire planet?  Was it the economics of scale brought about by lowered trade barriers, ease of travel, and networked communication?  Was it that, once corporations reached a certain size, they were able to lobby and influence the legislative landscape and buy an advantage while taxing and penalizing smaller companies? 

And why have we, as a nation, concurred that this scale of enterprise - where the individual employee or investor exercises no control and has no stake in the outcome beyond his returns and his dividends - is an appropriate engine with which to drive our economy and build our communities?

* * *

Think of all the goods that are floating around the planet right now, in containers, on ships, trucks, and trains.  Think of all the wealth sitting in warehouses, stores, and homes.  With the exception of food, how long could we, as a planet, survive, if we just ceased the production of everything?  We could switch to maintaining the things we already have, repairing our cars instead of buying new ones, reading books that are already printed, communicating with the computers, telephones, and typewriters that we already have.

I don't really want to do this, of course.  I enjoy innovation, and progress, and unexpected solutions to problems like cancer and polio and intercontinental travel as much as the next guy.  Certainly if we'd stopped production 100 years ago, we wouldn't have any of these things.

What bothers me is this idea of growth for its own sake, and all the marketing and advertising that goes on in service of it.  I don't like the creation of desire, and the invention of solutions to problems nobody had before the solution was manufactured and marketed.

Ah well.  One great consolation is that we can, as individuals, step back from this whirlwind, and we can take the little bits that we need from it while letting the great mass of the storm pass us by.  Thank God for eBay, Craigslist, Freecycle, and the local dump's swap shop.  All of these wonders our economy has kicked up with their value driven down near zero, and all we have to do is pick them up again and assign them our own personal value. 

These are my old things.  Nobody else wanted them, but I'll love them.

My Wife 1950s Gal Interviewed on Australian Radio

Holy Cow!  The Wife's blog on living through 1955 is getting better and better.  She was just interviewed by a radio station in Australia about her experiences! 

You can hear the interview from the link at the bottom of this post, just above the comments.

Operation Upgrade Old PC Continues