L.K. Rawles

Okay, I’ve returned from my summer blog vacation, with a half-dozen more books under my belt. Oh, the fun we’ll have!

I try not to refer to my devoted literature geekdom as a “love affair with books.” First of all, it’s just a little bit sad, especially when you’re not dating anyone at the moment and you have a cat. Second of all, it would make me a total slut, because I’ll read just about anything.

No, my relationship with books is closer to that of a heroin addict on the junk. (My basic cable suddenly started showing VH1-Classic, so I’ve been watching many band-ographys of 70s musicians. Hence, “on the junk.”)

I’ve chosen books over social situations before. I become irritable when separated from my books. I spend money I can’t afford acquiring books. I frequently talk about books and try to pressure my friends into getting the same books. I have “engaged in secretive or suspicious behaviors, such as making frequent trips to the restroom, basement, or other isolated areas where [book] use would be undisturbed,” especially when I was a kid at family parties.

Ah, my misspent youth. I spent so much time holding books splayed open in one hand that I swear I got carpal tunnel syndrome. I wore out innumerable flashlight bulbs reading under my covers at night. I tried to ride my bicycle while reading books propped up on my handlebars - and I did it more than once, catastrophic bike wrecks notwithstanding. No matter where we were going, I always had at least one book with me. I remember being ticked off at my dad for refusing to let me take a book on to the field during softball games. (Hey, we were 8 years old. No one was going to hit a ball into right field, that’s why they put me there in the first place.)

Nowadays I usually have a book in my purse, but the best technological advance in my life was the iPod, chock-full of audiobooks. You can always lie and tell people that you’re listening to the Decemberists when in fact you are listening to “Assassination Vacation” for the fifth time. Actually, I’ll save my audiobooks habit for my next post.

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.

• escalators
• Cirque de Sole
• “Lost in the Supermarket” by The Clash
• Christian romance novels
• commercials starring dead people
• Justice Antonin Scalia
• the word “proactive”
• attic ladders
• French cars
• incorrect punctuation on signs
• toddlers in bikinis
• Vladimir Putin

A printing press is an extraordinarily heavy object when dropped on someone’s head. - Bob Reid, professor of journalism. R.I.P.

I’m a newcomer to graphic novels. Before three months ago, the closest I had come to reading a graphic novel was reading “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” while on vacation at my aunt’s house when I was 9. Sad, huh?

I associated graphic novels with my goth friends who had fixations on Trent Reznor and painted their fingernails black. I know. It was really snotty of me. It wasn’t Neil Gaiman’s fault that they wore too much eyeliner; they made those fashion choices on their own.

The watershed moment for me came after reading a free PDF of Bill Willingham’s series “Fables,” which I now love and adore and recommend highly. Amazon.com’s Recommended for You feature - with which I have a tempestuous relationship - then pointed me to Joe Sacco’s work.

Sacco is a journalist whose medium is comics. He has covered the Palestinian conflict and the Bosnian War, in drawings reminiscent of R. Crumb. ”Safe Area Gorazde” chronicles the time he spent in a beseiged Bosnian village, Gorazde (gor-AHJZ-duh).

There’s something very poignant about Sacco’s combination of story and artwork. I loved details like the clothing they were wearing, the ugly patterned sweaters native to the Eastern Bloc (and appropriated by Bill Cosby). Most importantly, he was able to coherently explain the major events that tore Yugoslavia apart - in a comic, no less.

The Serbians suffered horribly during WWII, and you’ll never hear me say different. But they committed terrible atrocities against the Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s. Sacco’s book reminds me why I found it so trying to copy-edit stories from the Balkans. The more you learn, the more you detest everything about the situation and everyone involved in it. The human misery is bottomless.

I still think that I could offer a pretty solid solution to the Balkan Problem, but I’ll need some nuclear weapons, the Ebola virus and a lot of salt. Carthago delenda est!

Verdict: 8 out of 10. It’s an important work of journalism and pretty heart-rending stuff. I recommend it, but it’s not a light read.

To many, the immediate consequence of this freedom [of speech] may often appear to be only verbal tumult, discord and even offensive utterance. These are, however, within established limits, in truth necessary side effects of the broader enduring values which the proccess of open debate permits us to achieve. That the air may at time seem filled with verbal cacophany is, in this sense, not a sign of weakness but of strength. - Justice John M. Harlan, Cohen v. California (1971)

p.s. Justice Kennedy, I’m very disappointed in you.

So I was just in Washington, D.C., with many of the women in my family. We took a tour of the White House, which was pretty cool, but kind of underwhelming. I’d heard that one of the British royals once refered to it as a “charming little cottage,” and I can’t disagree. It’s rather small and ever-so-slightly dingy.

But I suppose it befits a democratic nation for our leader’s house to be fairly humble. When I visited the Tower of London a few years ago, the crown jewels made me feel kind of ill. The sprinkling of gold trimmings in the White House were in the amateur leagues, like, “Awww! Look who’s trying to be a big powerful country!”

I couldn’t help thinking back to a cathedral in Prague, whose decorations can best be described as gold-plated gold dipped in gold with gold underpinnings in a gold wash. There were cherubs in there that were the art equivalent of a crime against humanity.

I was at work last night, proofreading the Opinion columns - which up until now I thought I was qualified to do - when columnist Richard Creed broke some startling news to me. Apparently, “fun” is not an adjective, and people who use it that way are uneducated troglodytes.

Most of us over 50 grew up never hearing or seeing fun used as an adjective … My wish is that it would disappear for good and never again rear its ugly little head. The juvenile sound of it is enough to keep me from reading any book in which a character talks that way. - Richard Creed, 06-09-07

That was the first of a two-part series about the use of “fun” as an adjective. This week, readers wrote back to him to comment on it. Here’s Mary Ann Peden-Coviello:

“… as a writer of fiction, I find it sometimes useful, in dialogue, to use fun [as an adjective]. I find it to be a good way to indicate the type of character about which I am writing, as is the use of ain’t or double negatives or non-agreement of subject and verb (‘they wasn’t going,’ for example).”

So saying “I went to a fun party” is like saying “I ain’t never been there?”

Okay, I know the “who/whom” and the “that/which” rules. I use “nauseated” instead of “nauseous.” I know the difference between “affect” and “effect.” I try to avoid using the word “literally.”

It’s just that dangling participles have never kept me up at night, you know? If I’m writing an email, I’ll throw caution to the wind and start a sentence with “and” and end it with “of” or “to.” That’s right, I live on the grammatical edge!

But I never knew that I was misusing “fun,” or that there were people who would judge me for it. Geez.

I just finished re-reading one of my favorites, “Cold Comfort Farm.” Written in 1932, it’s a parody of the rural genre of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence.

Yeah, sounds fun, right? Stick with me, it’s worth it. I’ve never read Thomas Hardy or D. H. Lawrence, and I loved it.

Flora Poste, an orphan at 19 with an expensive and unmarketable education, is faced with the decision of moving in with relatives. The ones she selects are the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm in Howling, Sussex.

Determined to tidy up the personal lives of her passionately dysfunctional relatives, Flora embarkes on a campaign worthy of Hannibal, encountering fierce resistance. Flora is the enemy of melodrama.

Here’s Flora meeting her cousin Reuben:

The man’s big body, etched menacingly against the bleak light stabbed in from the low windows, did not move. His thoughts swirled like a beck in spate behind the sodden grey furrows of his face. A woman…Blast! Blast! Come to wrest away from him the land whose love fermented in his veins like slow yeast. She-woman. Young, soft-colored, insolent. His gaze was suddenly edged by a fleshly taint. Break her. Break. Keep and hold fast the land. The land, the iron furrows of frosted earth under the rain-lust, the fecund spears of rain, the swelling, slow burst of seed-sheaths, the slow smell of cows and cry of cows, the trampling bride-pride of the bull in his hour. All his, all his –
“Will you have some bread and butter?” asked Flora, handing him a cup of tea. “Oh, never mind your boots. Adam can sweep the mud up afterwards. Do come in.”

Faced with the Starkadder’s monumental strangeness, Flora decides to send her cousin Amos off on a preaching tour, marry her flower-child cousin Elphine to the son of the local gentry and deal with the matriarch Aunt Ada Doom once and for all. (Aunt Ada once “saw something nasty in the woodshed” and has never been quite the same - though her madness conveniently doesn’t stop her from keeping track of the farm’s poultry earnings.)

Something about the book reminds me of my adolescence, but in a good way. In high school I had a bunch of friends whose lives needed managing (back when I was still young enough to think that I should be the one managing them.) That was also the time period that I decided that tragic, artistic souls took themselves too seriously. Also that hemp clothes do nothing for a girl’s figure and that patchouli oil cannot perform the same function as anti-perspirant. Smells Like Teen Spirit indeed.

Verdict: 9 out of 10. It’s lighthearted and bracing at the same time, and even though I don’t catch some of the 1930s British references, I love reading this book.

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there’s a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness. - Justice William O. Douglas