Uncle Col

My wife's Uncle Col was an amused observer of the happenings around him, and when those events weren't amusing enough he would tweak them a little to provoke their essential ridiculousness. One night in Tucson we had all had dinner at Skyline Country Club's Sunday night buffet. Col came out of the restaurant into the driveway where the valet brought departing patrons their cars and found a man standing there, dressed in a suit and fairly obviously not the parking valet. But Col had a dollar in his hand and he held it out to the man, who just stared at him for a minute before saying, "What's this?" "Aren't you the valet?" asked Col, who might have been as innocently confused as he looked. The man stiffened and pulled himself up to his full height. He said, "I'm Richard Harvill, president of the university!" "Oh, oh," mumbled Col, "thought you were the valet," and his face showed no hint of a smile.

You'll Thank Me

So here's the idea: put an ad in whatever national magazine or large regional newspaper you think might have readers likely to respond. The pitch is very simple. The ad reads, "Send me $5 and I will send you a list of all the people who responded to this ad." You might have to put a time limit on it; you might have to adjust the price. But do you see the appeal? This is a list of people who were willing to send money.

A Place to Read

Michael Cohen, A Place to Read: Life and Books (Brisbane: Interactive Publications, 2014).

MICHAEL COHEN'S ESSAYS on the reading life are a treat to read. Relaxed, personal, wide-ranging, they contain fascinating nuggets of information and lively assessments of hundreds of books, as well as a whole life’s worth of thoughtful rumination on time, love, travel, and family, as well as what it means to be, almost existentially, a reader. – Christina Thompson, Editor, Harvard Review 

Anyone who has pounded the pavement selling The Great Books of the Western World in 54 volumes and lived to tell gets my undying respect and should get yours. Michael Cohen is a book rat, not a book snob. For him, the pleasures of the book are tactile and auditory as well as psychological and philosophical. The essays in A Place to Read take on potential plate-lunch combinations in western Kentucky, the tuxedo as male uniform, the golf course as locus of friendship and humor, and Baptist theological responses to Day of the Dead practices in Michoacán, in addition to more strictly literary subjects.
– Ann Neelon, editor of New Madrid

Michael Cohen has given us a collection of personal retrospectives that deserve a place in the finest tradition of the American essay. Each is in its own way a comment on the human situation, filtered through a personal optic that is both refined and erudite.  Amusing, highly personal, insightful, they’ll make you smile, smirk, frown, and gasp, but they’ll never bore.  I promise.
– E. A. Allen, author of the Montclaire Mysteries

The Stars Are Going Out

OUR STAR PARTY coordinator made the sad announcement on Tuesday that this year's Twin Lakes Star Party, the twenty-fifth, will be the last. TLSP has been one of the most enjoyable events sponsored by the West Kentucky Amateur Astronomers, and it is not the first star party that has ceased to operate in recent years.

Why, my wife asked me at dinner that evening, have these star parties been disappearing? I gathered my thoughts to try to give some answers. She knows, having been head of a volunteer humane society, one of those answers. Star parties are run by volunteers, and in these sorts of organizations, the same people volunteer year in and year out. Eventually they wear out or their time is taken up by other matters.

Finally the problem is lack of new, young blood in amateur astronomy. And there are many reasons for fewer young people becoming interested, not all of them having to do with video games competing for their attention. More than half of America's population now lives in congested areas where the night sky is barely visible. I believe a wondrous dark sky full of stars and a visible Milky Way make as many converts to astronomy as our heroic efforts to show interesting sky objects to the public on planetarium nights and at other public outreach events. And telescopes themselves may be so good that, paradoxically, they become part of the problem. One of my friends got into astronomy sixty years ago by grinding his own 4-1/4-inch mirror for a telescope he then assembled. That time and effort invested him in amateur astronomy. And the time many of us have spent in pushing scopes around while star-hopping to things we wanted to see—that was time we spent learning the sky. You don’t learn the sky that way if a computer takes you to your target. My point is that lifelong amateur astronomers come from the ranks of people who find the night sky marvelous whether or not a telescope is anywhere around.

Thurber's Thirteen Clocks

I RECENTLY REREAD James Thurber’s delightful children’s book, The Thirteen Clocks, published in 1950. The cold aggressive Duke of Coffin Castle sets impossible tasks for the suitors for the hand of his niece Saralinda, and when they fail, he whips out the sword from his cane, slits them from their guggle to their zatch, and feeds them to his geese. “Everyone has flaws,” says the Duke. “Mine is being wicked.”

Saralinda’s is the only warm hand in the castle, where there are thirteen clocks frozen at ten ‘til five since the Duke “slew time” one snowy evening. Yet everyone is aware of time here. Knowing it would take our hero, Zorn of Zorna, ninety-nine days to get to his father’s castle, get the thousand jewels the Duke demands, and get back, the Duke gives him ninety-nine hours to do it (and to start the thirteen clocks).

Saralinda is not really the Duke’s niece, but a princess he stole, and he is under a spell to keep her safe from himself and give suitors a chance at her, but when she turns twenty-one, he’ll be free to marry her, and that day is the next one after Zorn’s time expires.

Zorn is assisted by the Golux, a hapless and forgetful wizard, who suggests the jewels can come from Hagga, who weeps jewels. Of course Zorn is successful, and the Duke is left to deal with the monster, the Todal, that he has kept in his prison to prey on others.

Thurber’s book is full of wordplay, of word invention, rhyme and other sound patterns. It begs to be read aloud. And some people just don't get it. "What slish is this?" they ask in slightly different words, but echoing the Duke's reaction when his jewels turn to tears.

You Look Like My Father, Who's in Heaven

I was sitting in the Mosaic tonight waiting for my cazuela when I noticed a couple approaching my table. They were leaving, but had veered toward me—a tallish Mexican guy, not bad-looking, and his slightly whorishly-dressed companion. The guy, who looked to be in his mid-forties, walked behind my chair and leaned over. “You look like my father, who’s in heaven,” he said. “I’m buying your dinner tonight, my friend.” And with that he pushed a fifty-dollar bill under the salsa bowl. He stuck out his hand, which I shook, but I barely had time to say “Wow, thanks” before he was gone.

What Is Your Favorite Book?

I have trouble with the question.

The book that gave me the greatest pleasure on first reading was The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and maybe that’s the one I should choose. It is also the book, along with Pride and Prejudice, The Odyssey, and Hamlet, that I’ve most often reread. Going back to a book again and again might qualify it as a favorite, though in these cases, except for the Sherlock Holmes, the rereading was for my teaching of these books. Another way to choose a favorite might be the desert island choice: if I could take only one book it would be the works of Shakespeare. If I could take two, the second one might be Don Quixote.

Okay, there are six favorites. Here are forty-four more, in no particular order. Tomorrow's list might be different.

Moby-Dick
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Six Easy Pieces
Death Comes for the Archbishop
Alice in Wonderland
Swann’s Way
Civilization and Its Discontents
Archy and Mehitabel
Richard Wilbur’s Poems
Endangered Pleasures
The World of Mr. Mulliner
The Killer Angels
How to Play Your Best Golf All the Time
Montaigne’s Essays
The Screwtape Letters
Drink to Yesterday and
A Toast to Tomorrow
Middlemarch
The Maltese Falcon
A Moveable Feast
Falling Through Space
A High Wind in Jamaica
Gargantua and Pantagruel
Treasure Island
Cry the Beloved Country
Gulliver’s Travels
Master and Commander
Ada
A Shropshire Lad
Pogo, volume 1
Poetic Meter and Poetic Form
The Moonstone
South Wind
The Importance of Being Earnest
Flannery O’Connor’s Stories
The Chronicles of Clovis
The Odes of Keats
Fathers and Sons
Catch-22
The Bookshop
The Origin of Species
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
The Oresteia
Tristram Shandy