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I’ve got a couple of articles at the draft stage that I thought I might finish tonight and post, but it doesn’t look like I’ll get them done. So I decided to try something a little different and see how it goes.
You may have noticed the LibraryThing widgets in the far right sidebar, one of which shows covers from random books in my library. I have nearly all the books I own entered in LT; the only exceptions are some antique or unique books that I’ll write more about later. You can click on the widget or the title to take a look at my library; or you can just use this convenient link to my catalog, or even this equally convenient link to my profile (which, incidentally, has a really hot picture of my dog when he returned fresh from getting his hair done).
At any given time when you visit this page, the top LT widget shows up to nine of my books. With this post, I’m going to begin another new feature, Random Quotes from My Library, where I pick several of the books shown by the widget, open to an arbitrary page, and post a quotation. So we’ll have three or four or five random quotes taken from three or four our five random books, out of a randomly generated selection of nine books. If that doesn’t unravel the mysteries of the universe, I don’t know what will. Oh, and yes, you’ll have to trust me on the selections I make, since whenever you read these posts, the widget will probably be displaying something else.
It’s already quite late here in Atlanta, so let’s go with just three books, and here they are.
From Sail Away: Stories of Escaping to Sea
The gentleman from San Francisco — nobody in either Naples or Capri could remember his name — was on his way to the Old World with his wife and daughter, there to spend two whole years devoted entirely to pleasure.
Consider how that straightforward sentence pulls you in, making it an excellent way start a short story. The mark of a fine first sentence in any piece of writing is that it encourages you to read the second sentence.
In Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe before World War II
The elemental, raw, brutal music of these works created the greatest of scandals and lasting impressions, perhaps because its deliberately primitive subject matter was expressed through the medium of the traditional, overrefined genre of the ballet.
If you have ever heard Firebird or Rite of Spring, you know Berend’s description is right on target. If you haven’t heard either one, set aside any preconceived notion about how you might react to their “primitiveness” and dive in, keeping in mind (or considering after) how such music might have been perceived around 1910.
In Cities in Civilization
Print, said McLuhan, had for five hundred years been an all-pervasive medium, whose great characteristic was that the reader remained detached and non-involved. Electric technology was different because it entered the central nervous system including the brain, making it possible for us to communicate instantly with the source; and electricity allowed people to live and work — and even think and act — independently.
These couple of sentences do hit on key elements of McLuhan’s thought, including print v. electrical technologies, technology as extension of the brain and central nervous system, the effects of instantaneous communication, the effects of speed and simultaneous interactions, and the impact of technology on how people live, work, act, and think. If you wonder if you might find McLuhan interesting, try Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
. I’m sorry to hear about plumbing problems at your house. I’m pretty sure that it is a quite distraction when you hope to be able to spend times on other interesting...