Inauguration Day!

Here's a scene from the very first inauguration day.

Wodehouse on The Art of Fiction

I enjoyed this interview with P.G. Wodehouse so much that I thought you might enjoy it too. He sounds like such a character, in fact like a character in one of his stories. In spite of being rather unfocused on the practical details of life, he managed to write 96 books, and countless short stories over a career that spanned 73 years (1902-1974).
Gerald Clark wrote this about Wodehouse in 1975, shortly before his death at 93.

Read the entire article here at the Paris Review.

When I first went to see him, I telephoned P.G. Wodehouse and asked for directions from New York to his house on Long Island. He merely chuckled, as if I had asked him to compare Euclid with Einstein or attempt some other laughably impossible task. “Oh, I can’t tell you that,” he said. “I don’t have a clue.” I learned the route anyway, and my arrival for lunch, only ten minutes late, seemed to astonish him. “You had no trouble” Oh, that is good. That’s wonderful!” His face beaming at having in his house such a certified problem-solver, a junior Jeeves almost, he led me without further to-do to a telephone, which he had been dialing all morning in a futile effort to reach a number in New York. He had, of course, done everything right but dial the area code, an addition to the Bell system that had somehow escaped his attention since he had last attempted long distance. He was intensely pleased when New York answered, and I sunned myself in the warm glow of his gratitude for the rest of the day. All of which is by way of saying that Wodehouse, who lived four months past his ninety-third birthday, had discovered his own secret of long life: He simply ignored what was worrisome, bothersome or confusing in the world around him.

BiblioMysteries

Me at Seven

I found myself relating at some level to this description of Israel Armstrong, the unlikely librarian-hero of Ian Sansom's The Case of the Missing Books. The book, set in the small Northern Ireland village of Tumdrun, is full of quirky and amusing characters. Here's a sample:

Books had spoilt him; they had curdled his brain, like cream left out on a summer’s afternoon, or eggs overbeaten with butter. He’ d been a rather bookish child. Right from the off, the youngest of four, the kind of child who seemed to start reading without anyone realizing or noticing, who raced thru non-fiction at an early age and an extraordinary rate, who read Jack Kerouac before he was in his teens, and who by the age of sixteen had covered most of the great French and Russian authors, and who as a result had matured into an intelligent, shy, passionate, sensitive soul, full of dreams and ideas, a wide ranging vocabulary, and just about no earthly good to anyone. His expectations were sky-high and his grasp of reality was minimal.
Israel had grown up in and around libraries. Libraries were where he belonged.

Libraries to Israel had always been a constant. In libraries, he’d always seemed to be able to breathe a little easier. When he walked thru the doors of a library it was like entering a sacred space, like the Holy of Holies! The beautiful hush and the shunting of the brass-handled wooden drawers holding the card catalogues, the reassurance of the reference books and the eminent OEDs, the amusing little troughs of children’s books, all human life was there. And you could borrow it and take it home for two weeks at a time, 9 books at a time.

… his pocket bulging neurotically with emergency paperbacks and newpapers. Just in case he was ever caught short without something to read…

I noticed with interest that Sansom has a new addition to the Mobile Librarian Series: The Book Stops Here: A Mobile Library Mystery. I'm adding it to my to-read list for 2009.

Happy Birthday Bud

Seventeen Years Ago today!

Where did this little guy with his Teddy go?

2009 International Year of Astronomy

These are 2 photos taken New Years evening about 7pm, looking SW, with my little Samsung Digimax digital camera. The picture on the left shows the crescent moon, and the picture on the right shows the moon (not sure what happened to the crescent, probably fuzziness because I changed the setting on the camera between the two shots.)But changing the setting also allowed Venus to show up in the picture. Anyway, one of my New Year's goals is to learn more about Astronomy.

So I noted with interest a couple of things: 1. That 2009 has been named the International Year of Astronomy. and 2. The International Year of Astronomy Reading Challenge 2009.

From: The Classical Bookworm Blog

Your mission:

Read one book from each of the categories of: History;Astronomers, Cosmology; Astrophysics, and Sci-Fi, and complete the two "extra-vehicular activities" described below.

EVA 1: Do some stargazing with a field guide and blog about it.

EVA 2: Visit your local planetarium or observatory and blog about it also.

I accept the challenge. I've been wanting to read Dava Sobel's Galileos' Daughter so that will be my selection from History and Astronomers. I bought Dava Sobel's The Planets last year but didn't finish it, so that will be my selection from Cosmology/Astrophysics. I'll have to investigate the Sci-Fi options but I'm thinking one of C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy novels.

I'm looking forward to EVA 2. I haven't been to the Griffith Park Observatory since it reopened after renovations several years ago. I've been planning to take a trip there for a while so I'll report back when the assignment is completed.

Happy New Year!

2009!

You crown the year with Your goodness,

And Your paths drip with abundance!

Wishing you and yours a year crowned with His goodness and dripping with abundance!