Image above: Screen grab of my latest method for taking notes while running and listening to audiobooks. To say “while running” is not strictly right. I stop and try to make a quick note before my pulse has a chance to plunge. As you’ll see below, I misspelled “Schulz.” I realized the mistake after a couple dozen strides but didn’t stop to correct it. My cardiovascular system thanks me. ********* People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks is off to a lush start. Look at this: I thought that the beautiful book had probably been part of the blizzard of burning pages—Ottoman land deeds, ancient Korans, Slavic scrolls—that had fallen in a warm snow upon the city after the flames of phosphorous bombs. And this: The illuminations were beautiful, but I didn’t allow myself to look at them as art. Not yet. First I had to understand them as chemicals. There was yellow, made of saffron. That beautiful autumn flower, Crocus sativus Linnaeus, each with just three tiny precious stigmas, had been a prized luxury then and remained one, still. Even if we now know that the rich color comes from a carotene, crocin, with a molecular structure of 44 carbon, 64 hydrogen, and 24 oxygen, we still haven’t synthesized a substitute as complex … And this: I know the flesh and fabrics of pages, the bright earths and lethal toxins of ancient pigments. Wheat paste—I can bore the pants off anyone about wheat paste. I spent six months in Japan, learning how to mix it for just the necessary amount of tension. Parchment, especially, I love. So durable it can last for centuries, so fragile it can be destroyed in a careless instant. One of the reasons, I’m sure, that I got this job was because I have written so many journal articles on parchment. I could tell, just from the size and scatter of the pore holes, that the parchments in front of me had been made from the skin of a now-extinct breed of thick-haired Spanish mountain sheep. You can date manuscripts from the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile to within a hundred years or so if you know when that particular breed was all the go with the local parchment makers. And this: A tiny speck of something fluttered from the binding. Carefully, with a sable brush, I moved it onto a slide and passed it under the microscope. Eureka. It was a tiny fragment of insect wing, translucent, veined. We live in a world of arthropods, and maybe the wing came from a common insect and wouldn’t tell us anything. But maybe it was a rarity … And this: Because I had been rude before, I made an effort now. A slight effort. The young country-cultural desert stuff gets very old. Australia happens to have the longest continuous artistic tradition in the world—Aboriginal people were making sophisticated art on the walls of their dwellings thirty thousand years before the people in Lascaux chewed the end off their first paintbrush. But I decided to spare him the full lecture. And this: His mouth sort of turned down and up at the same time, like a Charles Schulz drawing. And, finally, this: The buildings were small scale, as if built for halflings, and pressed together so tightly that they reminded me of tipsy friends, holding each other upright on the way home from the pub. Large parts of this area had been out of range of the Serb guns … With apologies for the long post, one more thing. I’m reading Geraldine Brooks, whose fiction I’ve never tried before, because I loved parts of her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2011. I read her introduction because Roxane Gay wrote about it here. So thank you to Roxane Gay. Click for high-res photo

Image above: Screen grab of my latest method for taking notes while running and listening to audiobooks. To say “while running” is not strictly right. I stop and try to make a quick note before my pulse has a chance to plunge. As you’ll see below, I misspelled “Schulz.” I realized the mistake after a couple dozen strides but didn’t stop to correct it. My cardiovascular system thanks me.

*********

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks is off to a lush start.

Look at this:

I thought that the beautiful book had probably been part of the blizzard of burning pages—Ottoman land deeds, ancient Korans, Slavic scrolls—that had fallen in a warm snow upon the city after the flames of phosphorous bombs.

And this:

The illuminations were beautiful, but I didn’t allow myself to look at them as art. Not yet. First I had to understand them as chemicals. There was yellow, made of saffron. That beautiful autumn flower, Crocus sativus Linnaeus, each with just three tiny precious stigmas, had been a prized luxury then and remained one, still. Even if we now know that the rich color comes from a carotene, crocin, with a molecular structure of 44 carbon, 64 hydrogen, and 24 oxygen, we still haven’t synthesized a substitute as complex …

And this:

I know the flesh and fabrics of pages, the bright earths and lethal toxins of ancient pigments. Wheat paste—I can bore the pants off anyone about wheat paste. I spent six months in Japan, learning how to mix it for just the necessary amount of tension.

Parchment, especially, I love. So durable it can last for centuries, so fragile it can be destroyed in a careless instant. One of the reasons, I’m sure, that I got this job was because I have written so many journal articles on parchment. I could tell, just from the size and scatter of the pore holes, that the parchments in front of me had been made from the skin of a now-extinct breed of thick-haired Spanish mountain sheep. You can date manuscripts from the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile to within a hundred years or so if you know when that particular breed was all the go with the local parchment makers.

And this:

A tiny speck of something fluttered from the binding. Carefully, with a sable brush, I moved it onto a slide and passed it under the microscope. Eureka. It was a tiny fragment of insect wing, translucent, veined. We live in a world of arthropods, and maybe the wing came from a common insect and wouldn’t tell us anything. But maybe it was a rarity …

And this:

Because I had been rude before, I made an effort now. A slight effort. The young country-cultural desert stuff gets very old. Australia happens to have the longest continuous artistic tradition in the world—Aboriginal people were making sophisticated art on the walls of their dwellings thirty thousand years before the people in Lascaux chewed the end off their first paintbrush. But I decided to spare him the full lecture.

And this:

His mouth sort of turned down and up at the same time, like a Charles Schulz drawing.

And, finally, this:

The buildings were small scale, as if built for halflings, and pressed together so tightly that they reminded me of tipsy friends, holding each other upright on the way home from the pub. Large parts of this area had been out of range of the Serb guns …
With apologies for the long post, one more thing. I’m reading Geraldine Brooks, whose fiction I’ve never tried before, because I loved parts of her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2011. I read her introduction because Roxane Gay wrote about it here. So thank you to Roxane Gay.

Notes

  1. davidquigg posted this