4 royal cubits make an orguia, the distance from middle fingertip to middle fingertip when you stretch out your arms. A trasarenu is the smallest possible thing: the dust mote you see when the sun shines through a lattice.  A meal is the volume of milk that can be gotten from a cow at a single milking, and soma the amount of firewood a mule can carry in Umbria. Stunden are the hours it will take to cover a certain amount of ground by foot, depending on elevation. An ounce, as proposed by Jefferson, would be the weight of a cubic inch of rainwater.

The length of the Harvard Bridge in 1958 is 364.4 Smoots, where fraternity pledge Oliver R. Smoot is the unit of length. Oncia is measure of silkworm eggs; adarme a weight of silver. There are 2 kinderkins in a coomb, 2 coombs in a hogshead, & 2 hogsheads in a puncheon. A funiculus is 1/6,000th of the Earth’s meridian; a chi is ninety black millet grains, or the length of a huangzhong pitch pipe, and Confucius’ father, who stood 10 chi, was thought as tall as a human could be. A perch is longer than an ell. Double scruples weigh far less than mites or demi-grains. A millihelen is the degree of beauty that can launch a single ship.

______________

Composed using notes taken while reading World in the Balance, Robert P. Crease (2011).

Our natural stomachs and intestinal systems are considered forms of intelligence, as they posess 1/10th the number of neurons as the human brain and share many of the same neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, serotonin, and epinephrine.

§

He’d wandered around Rochester, pacing along the busy Erie Canal, and up Buffalo Street where the deafening steam-powered flour mills, whirring and grinding, generated a mist of pulverized flour, which hung in the air like fine snow.

§

Ascot. October 16, 1881. Sunday.
I am utterly consummately intense wearing sunflowers and poppies and dahlias in my buttonhole.

“In the 1860s and 1870s, Thomas Montgomerie, a British surveyor working in India, deployed one of the most extensive and rigorous applications of body measures in mapping Tibet and other areas of central Asia. [...] Montgomerie recruited two Himalayan cousins, Nain and Mani Singh, and spent two years teaching them surveying techniques. He trained them to walk with a pace of exactly 33 inches, or about 2,000 paces per mile, regardless of terrain. Disguised as Hindu lamas, or pundits, a Hindu term for “holy men,” the Singhs kept track of distance with counters camouflaged as Buddhist rosary wheels. The wheels were equipped with 100 beads instead of 108, the traditional number on a rosary, and the Singhs dropped one bead every 100 paces. Using such methods, Nain in particular managed to measure large sections of Tibet including Llasa. The resulting information helped Montgomerie compile a map of Tibet and central Asia, which among other purposes assisted the British in their brutal invasion of Tibet four decades later.”

— World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement, Robert P. Crease (2011)

This I find interesting — pundits used to be holy men! The ‘pace of exactly 33 inches.’ How on earth do you train for two years to regulate your pace “regardless of terrain”? What’s the curriculum?

But then, that kicker — “. . . four decades later.” Space, once measured & surveyed, can be taken. Anything with a grid reminds me of Haussman’s boulevards: the poor’s Paris barricades impossible; the artillery has a good line-of-sight. Rosaries used to have 108 beads, but it was a useless number, and did not serve. The whole idea of surveying & standardized measurement as prerequisite to conquest seems to me like those old, old tales where to know someone’s name & speak it aloud is the most powerful magic, the one that grants you absolute control.

You and your cousin: you spend two years training your body to mimic the regular precision of a machine, and press yourself up against the country so that it can be measured, and a generation later . . .

Price of “Invisible Jim,” an empty doll-shaped package, from a U.S. toy manufacturer: $3

— Harper’s Index, Aug ’01

Working on becoming visible any day now.

The only book I have left here in Tarnów (tourist slogan: Polski biegun ciepła — The warmest city in Poland, finally in the mid-60s & sunny today, a few tentative green buds, tulips being sold out of plastic buckets) is the first volume of the letters of Samuel Beckett (thanks sis!) — and paging through at random I find him, in December of 1931:

Dear Tom,
Forgive me for not having replied to you before this. All kinds of imaginary melancholy circumstances to excuse me.

And a year later, in August:

Dear Tom,
Forgive me for not answering the first of your last two letters. I did write, but it turned out such a jeremiad that I refrained from posting it.

And, oh, let’s say May of 1938:

Dear Tom
Forgive my not writing before. It has been people, people, people, until I wonder what horrible thing has happened to me that I have so little peace any more.

So here we are, and the only way to break silence is abruptly, like dropping a glass on the floor, so that I’m too busy scrambling around with a broom & pan to waste too much time with apologies.

I’ve been here, teaching English full-time at a private school in this small, provincial city (an hour and twenty minutes by train from Kraków) since the beginning of January, and I’m faced now with the distinctly odd feeling of having to measure cultural difference against two different baselines — not just Stateside but Spain, as well.

Generally I can’t be the wide-eyed cultural spelunker I was when I lived in Jaén or Bilbao; I don’t speak the language, I can’t pick up a newspaper, I’m nearly always in a classroom. But here are a few things I can tell you about Poland, if you like.

I am a child here, a rank beginner — after three months, I can finally order things off of menus intelligibly, and say that it’s sunny, or My mother is intelligent & friendly or How much is a ticket from Kraków to Tarnów? or The red blouse is made of silk. I can say Excuse me and I don’t speak Polish and I’m an English teacher.  But for most of my first few weeks I functioned in virtual silence in public, smiling and nodding and occasionally reverting accidentally to Spanish, getting my point with grimaces, gestures, yes, no, please.

Polish is western Slavic — closest to Czech and Slovakian, same general family as eastern Slavic languages like Russian or Ukrainian, and southern Slavic like Serbo-Croatian or Bulgarian. A funny thing happens when you talk to Bosnians — Polish has an all-purpose profanity, curwa, which gets used as punctuation in the same way as the Irish use fucking or the Spanish say coño, and it literally means something like whore. In Bosnian Serbo-Croatian (related language!) it’s basically a clinical term for prostitute, or at least that’s what some Erasmus students from Bosnia-Herzegovina told me in a hostel in Kraków. And young urban Poles use it, again, almost every other word. It was to these backpackers as though everyone in Kraków were wandering around calling everything — inanimate objects, themselves, any conceivable action — whores. (A possible exemplary sentence: Whore, Danka, I can’t get whoring up this whore of a bed.) I’m trying to think of something in English and its many dialects that works alike — something that’s obscene but technical in one place, and multifarious & interchangeably profane in another — but I can’t quite find an analogue.

What else? The Polish currency, złoty, is literally the word for gold — imagine plopping down pieces-of-eight every time you buy a loaf of bread. Peppery and spicy are the same word, which gives you an idea of how hot Polish food is. (Not at all. Lots of pepper cloves, though.) Hungarian goulash is widely served on potato pancakes, but the Poles have taken the half-dozen or so types of paprika that Hunagrians use and revised them down to blandest possible. Other foods: Gołąbki is pork-stuffed cabbage, but it literally means pigeon. Żurek is this sour white soup — kielbasa, potato, other things — that packs a kick, a little like salmorejo in Andalucía. With salmorejo the mysterious kick is vinegar; in żurek, it’s fermented rye.

At first glance, Polish has so few cognates with English that it’s totally indecipherable — I’ve had an easier time reading menus written in Swedish than figuring out what I’m ordering in a Polish restaurant. But sometimes you get a welcome surprise — the Spanish word for Belgian waffles is gofre, and the first thing I bought on my way to my first day on the job in January was from a shop with a sign reading GOFRY — all right, I thought, this I can handle.

What else? I’ll wade, reluctantly — acknowledging I’m completely out of my depth here — into culture. You can’t talk about Poland, really, without getting into religion & post-Communism and I can’t really do this any other way than ham-fisted, gesturing at it. So here we go.

Spain is a Catholic country, in that it’d been held in a traditional religious timewarp by Franco until the 70s, and nine out of ten people self-define as Catholic, and in March of 2008 someone left the severed head of a pig on the construction site of a new mosque in Sevilla, and starting this week the streets fill up with the baroque pageantry of Semana Santa, flowers raining from the sky, Holy Mother & crucifixion tableaux swaying down the streets, hooded co-fraternity brothers carrying lit tapers and walking barefoot, trumpets echoing off every wall.

But people don’t go to church in Spain (El País did an infographic on the precipitous decline in church weddings, with the notable exception of heartland-type Real Spain holdouts — Jaén, La Mancha). And the saints’ days & festivals, the hiking up to the Castillo de Santa Catalina to fry sardines & drink beer, the burning of olive bonfires for San Antón, the fallas in Valencia — these are as much cultural as religious for most people. More, I’d argue.

Here, in Tarnów? The churches throng, bars close early for each of the 40 days of Lent. The seminary in Tarnów has giant residential dormitories with pointed towers; I see young people in a clerical collars every day on my way to school. There is, of course, John Paul II — streets, statues, pictures.

What else? Communism, of course. All of my students over the age of 35 studied Russian in high school. In classes when we study past tense, my adult students talk ration booklets and waiting in line for 6 hours as children in front of dingy storefronts to get food. As you’ve imagined, anything built in the last fifty years is concrete, and the 60s-era districts of Poland are distinctly unlovely — Tarnów’s Renaissance main square and Kraków’s undestroyed city center set aside.

And — I can’t not mention this, but it’s properly the subject for a very carefully written essay — all of this is not even to begin to scratch the huge, unmentionable warping of Polish culture since the Holocaust. The first shipment to Auschwitz was out of Tarnów, which pre-WWII was 70% Jewish. Three-fourths of the fucking city! It’s not just the death, although that’s horrific enough.

Ellipses are the only conceivable response. Writing about it is like trying to write a void.

I have class in an hour, but I’ll try — with the inevitable apologizing — to correspond better, and more often.

On Marinus’ desk is  folio volume: Osteographia by William Cheselden.
“See who’s waiting inside for you,” says the doctor.
Jacob contemplates the details, and the devil plants a seed.
What if this engine of bones — the seed germinates — is a man’s entirety …
Wind wallops the walls like a dozen tree trunks tumbling.
… and divine love is a mere means of extracting baby engines of bones?
Jacob thinks about Abbot Enomoto’s questions at their one meeting.
“Doctor, do you believe in the soul’s existence?”
Marinus prepares, the clerk expects, an erudite and arcane reply. “Yes.”
“Then where” —Jacbon indicates the pious, profane skeleton— “is it?”
“The soul is a verb.” He impales a lit candle on a spike. “Not a noun.”
Eelattu brings two beakers of bitter beer and sweet dried figs.

— The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell (p. 146)

So it’s autumn again, I’m unemployed & adrift in western Michigan, there’s applesauce boiling on the stove. Cut grass, fallen leaves, cicadas humming — I’m even driving cars now. Midwestern reversion. Parking lots, no bakeries within walking distance. Silver lining: I’ve got plenty of spare time to catch up on my reading list.

Mitchell, then. I finished this a week or two ago, after finally getting my hands on a copy. It was checked out & reserved for weeks in the local library, all branches, which I find kind of heartening — he’s not on the cover of Time, but Mitchell’s a writer of literary fiction who has maybe penetrated the cultural conversation.

I like this passage for a couple of reasons: the nice, epigraphical kicker, eminently quotable, almost a punchline; the necessary (there’s a reason I scanned the page) illustration, which is the sort of thing that crops up from time to time throughout; and, lastly, the way it showcases the book’s unusual rhythms.

Look at those line breaks — practically every sentence, breaking even in the middle of a thought. So heavily syncopated that when I read this I hear jazz in my head. Granular detail is unfailingly interspersed, & the way the lines are broken means that every line is not only a kind of self-sufficient, fully populated world, it also seems to be happening at the same time as the action it interrupts.

Critics (1) are writing that this is Mitchell doing straight historical realism, no formalist innovation involved, but I think they’re not paying attention. The writing isn’t just limpid & well-wrought, although it is that. Mitchell’s not being as showy as in Cloudy Atlas, sure, but something about the prose here — its idiosyncratic atomic structure, the way it shifts voice & narrative perspective, its flashes of what I’ll call for brevity’s sake magical realism —  has a very thought-out determinism that only superficially resembles something as similar in theory as, I don’t know, James Clavell’s Shogun. And Mitchell has hinted at readings that this is the first in a trilogy spanning centuries, which, potentially, makes it not a ‘straight-up realist’ outlier, but instead Cloud Atlas writ large. (2)

_________________________

1. Dave Eggers writes in his New York Times review: “This new book is a straight-up, linear, third-person historical novel . . .” And James Wood echoes that (“a formidable marvel . . . [but] still a conventional historical novel,“) in an irritating New Yorker essay that I’ll address, I hope, sometime in the next couple of weeks

2. Capital: At a reading in the West Village, “Mitchell announced news that he claimed he hadn’t even yet shared with his publisher: that Jacob de Zoet will be followed by two more books dealing with the theme of immortality and delving further into the realm of speculative fiction . . .”

“Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth.”

“With so much of the information we use today stored in “the cloud” it can be easy to forget that out there, somewhere, there’s energy being used to power thousands of servers in massive data centers. Facebook just announced that it’s going to build its first data center in Oregon. And while Google and Microsoft precede them in the state, they take advantage of cheaper and cleaner hydro power, while it looks like Facebook will be using mostly coal power from Idaho.

[….]

Apparently it is an issue of cost. Starting in 2012, the days of super cheap hydro from Bonneville Power Administration, which Google and Microsoft cashed in on, will draw to a close. And faced with a tiered rate structure from Bonneville, Facebook decided to put down roots in the high desert area of Pineville and get its juice from Pacific Power in a mostly coal package. Of course there were some nice tax breaks thrown into the equation, too, and it looks like the community can use all the jobs they can get. The area has 17 percent unemployment and the schools are considering a 4-day week to cut costs.” [2]

Back in the States, sweltering in a Brooklyn loft until Tuesday. The culture shock’s easier the second time around, although it’s still weird to be in crowded urban spaces & hear English everywhere.

Sometime in the last two years, while I was away, smartphones apparently became not an esoteric toy for day traders & political types but an everyday accessory for anybody sufficiently middle-class to afford Ray-Bans. I haven’t had internet in my apartment since spring 2008; all of my Stateside friends now seem to swim in the stuff, a kind of invisible mesh draped over everything, and I find this degree of hyper-connected digital mediation deeply weird.

I scrounged a month-old issue of the New Yorker in the coffeeshop this morning (coffeeshops!— another thing Spain doesn’t have) & came across a profile of “invention engine” & MacArthur genius grant-winner Saul Griffith (3), an ecologically-minded tinkerer with a doctorate from MIT summed up at one point as a  “prime exemplar of ‘maker culture’—a community of sophisticated do-it-yourselfers . . . who believe that making, modifying, and repairing things can be an antidote to throwaway consumerism.”

Inventions are listed or described, playful & somehow homemade-seeming even when they’re massive in scale (roadways paved with photovoltaic panels) that range from frivolous to apparently game-changing: a machine that turns digital designs into three-dimensional chocolate objects, puck-sized plastic components that assemble themselves on an air hockey table, homemade kitesurfing boards, a compact electricity generator powered by swinging it around your head like an Aboriginal bull-roarer, an electricity-assisted tricycle, a hand-cranked cellphone charger, building materials made from recycled fabrics & plastic waste, an electric rope with sensors that detect changes in load, paper window insulation based on origami, a small device that cranks out any prescription lens in a few minutes (it looks like a tiny springform cake pan between adjustable membranes), a flying wind power generator that is a single rigid wing tethered to a tower (a utility-scale version would have “a wingspan of roughly a hundred feet and would have a peak generation rate of a megawatt, or enough to power five hundred houses” — a wind farm would look like “a bunch of very large kites, flying in circles all day, two thousand feet above the ground”).

The catch, in these last two cases, is as interesting as the inventiveness that they showcase. Griffith won the genius grant for the lens machine, an “inexpensive desktop device with which a minimally trained operator could turn a fast-hardening liquid into a finished lens in a few minutes” that was supposed to replace huge, expensive lens factories for the developing world— but as it turned out, the machine never found a market. Why?

“‘It turned out,’ [Griffith said], ‘that we were solving the wrong problem. A lens factory is expensive to build & equip,  but once you’ve got one you can deliver them anywhere in the world for a dollar or two in postage.’ In effect, Griffith’s invention addressed a problem that had been solved years before, at lower cost, by Chinese labor and global shipping.”

Why buy an ingenious machine when you can rely on cheap factory labor across oceans and (for the time being) cheaper global shipping? Why make it yourself when you could just send away for it? The problem turns out to be not building the lenses but instead the availability of optometrists to test eyes and write accurate prescriptions in countries with no medical system.

The flying wind turbine project is run by Makani Power, headquartered on an old US Naval Air Station outside of San Francisco that was declared a Superfund site in 1999 & consists of “un-used runways, crumbling streets, empty parking lots, and post-apocalyptic-looking semi-abandoned buildings.”

“Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org, invested ten million dollars in Makani in 2006 and an additional five million in 2008, making it the company’s biggest financial backer. [...] Google is interested in energy mainly because the company’s server farms, along with the rest of the Internet, use a huge and rapidly growing amount of power. Searching, accessing, and storing an ever-increasing volume of Web pages, family snapshots, emails, old books, tweets, “cloud” applications, humorous videos, television shows, feature films, pornography, and everything else that can be found online requires electricity, and most of that electricity is currently generated by burning coal. The Internet’s energy and carbon footprints now probably exceed those of air travel, Griffith told me, perhaps by as much as a factor of two, and they are growing faster than those of almost all other human activities. In February, the federal government made the decision to allow a Google subsidiary to participate directly in energy markets, on an equal footing with utilities.

Even with Google’s backing, though, the cloud will not be wind-powered, not even this inventively, for a long, long time. “Even if I came to you tomorrow with the perfect energy idea,” says Griffith, “the reality is that to go from that idea to doing utility-scale power generation would be a minimum cost of entry of a hundred million dollars, and a minimum lead time of five to ten years.” And the article makes the point, through Griffith, that things like a hand-cranked cell phone battery depend not on the ingenuity of the tech but on the culture of use & behavior we cultivate around the objects we consume.

In the meantime, the cloud— invisible & omnipresent, the data we swim in— comes from a place in the real world, and it feeds on something: coal, server farms, economically devastated towns in the middle of the country.

__________________

1. Image found at Roberts & Tilton. Artist found via iheartmyart. Believer interview with Robyn O’Neil. Artist’s website. A better sense of the scale of the pieces here & here.
2. “Every time you update your Facebok status, a baby polar bear dies,” Tara Lohan (Change.org – 11 February ’10)
3. “The Inventor’s Dilemma” (abstract), David Owen (The New Yorker – 17 May ’10); a compendium of do-it-yourself projects set up by Squid Labs, Instructables.com; the homepage for Makani Power.

Leaving an apartment. Vacating the scene. Decamping. Clearing up. Clearing out.
Making an inventory   tidying up   sorting out   going through
Eliminating   throwing away   palming off on
Breaking
Burning
Taking down   unfastening   unnailing   unsticking   unscrewing   unhooking
Unplugging   detaching   cutting   pulling   dismantling   folding up   cutting off
Rolling up
Wrapping up   packing away   strapping up   tying   piling up   assembling   heaping up   fastening   wrapping   protecting   covering   surrounding   locking
Removing   carrying   lifting
Sweeping
Closing
Leaving

- p. 34, Species of Spaces & Other Pieces, Georges Perec (trans. John Sturrock)

But the interesting thing is how easy it is not to work. Yes, writing is a necessity and often a pleasure, but at the same time, it can be a great burden and a terrible struggle. In my own case, I certainly don’t walk into my room and sit down at my desk feeling like a boxer ready to go ten rounds with Joe Louis. I tiptoe in. I procrastinate. I delay. I take care of little business that I don’t have to do at that moment. I come in sideways, kind of sliding through the door. I don’t burst into the saloon with my six-shooter ready. If I did, I’d probably shoot myself in the foot.

— Paul Auster, interviewed by Jonathan Lethem in The Believer (February ’05).

&

It may sound like I’ve got some sort of formula by which I write. Hell, no! You’re out there completely on your own — all you’ve got to do is write. OK, it’s nine in the morning. All I’ve got to do is write. But I go hours before I’m able to write a word. I make tea. I mean, I used to make tea all day long. And exercise, I do that every other day. I sharpened pencils in the old days when pencils were sharpened. I just ran pencils down. Ten, eleven, twelve, one, two, three, four — this is every day. This is damn near every day. It’s four-thirty and I’m beginning to panic. It’s like a coiling spring. I’m really unhappy. I mean, you’re going to lose the day if you keep this up long enough. Five: I start to write. Seven: I go home. That happens over and over and over again. So why don’t I work at a bank and then come in at five and start writing? Because I need those seven hours of gonging around. I’m just not that disciplined. I don’t write in the morning — I just try to write.

— John McPhee, interviewed in this spring’s Paris Review.

— Atlas Sheet 10, Gerhard Richter (1962).

Thinking about this & that, but none of it seems worth a whole piece of writing. I keep running into groups of British tourists stranded in northern Spain by the Icelandic volcano, and I imagine a world in which planes are forever grounded, England inaccessible apart from tunnel & ferry. Strawberries & lilies are in season, & my morning paper reports a new round of ETA-related arrests — 10 people in Bilbao, including lawyers & members of the organization’s political apparatus.

What else? I’ve been checking out a movie a day from that library, too. Very few Spanish films to choose from — with notable exceptions, the bulk of the collection is newish American movies & John Wayne westerns.

The Dark Knight (2008) — Spanish title is El Caballero Oscuro, which if you translate it backwards comes out something like The Shadowy Gentlemen. Rewatching it, I realized I’d forgotten Alfred’s colonial Burmese past, in all of its glancingly referenced weirdness — even to the point of his euphemistic reason for being there (“my friends and I were working for the local government”). And how does one fit together the dour punchline of the first anecdote (“Some men just want to see the world burn”) with the second (“We burned the forest down”)? Just who, exactly, is just looking to see the world burn? And why is there no other sane option for raiding British-sponsored caravans aside from wanting jewels, as though anticolonial insurgents must be either greedy or insane? — of course, if you can’t reason with them, there’s nothing to be done but lock them up on islands indefinitely. I always forget whether this film wants to make me think the Joker is a member of Al-Qaeda.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) — Speaking of insurgencies against the British motivated by neither rubies nor world-burning. I saw the first fifteen minutes of this on Spanish television last year, and it’s radically deformed by dubbing, even more so than usual — Gaellic & English are both rendered in equally accented Castellano, which flattens the film immeasurably & turns that opening scene senseless. Very, very difficult to watch violence rendered with such naturalism — no music, lots of clumsy fumbling, few cuts. I watched Syriana last night, too, which means that I’ve seen men have their fingernails pulled off with pliers twice in the last week.

The Maltese Falcon (1941) — The final shot, holding that lead bird & saying that it’s the “stuff dreams are made of”! Not having seen it before, I was surprised, actually, at how much of an unmoored asshole Sam Spade is allowed to be, even accounting for noir-typical misogyny. Usually when your partner dies, it’s supposed to be a blow, not an excuse to avoid his wife & repaint the windows. Poor Peter Lorre — I always see him playing the same variant on the creepy, unspecified foreigner. I guess being a Hungarian Jew means that in 1940s Hollywood you might as well be from Anywhere.

And finally, an attempt at cataloging the English-language books in the Bilbao municipal library, Casco Viejo branch:

There are 85 books in the collection. They include a surprising smattering of recently published literary fiction — to wit: Amy Bloom’s Away, Peter Carey’s Oscar & Lucinda, Ha Jin’s War Trash, Marilynne Robinson’s Gideon, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace — that makes me picture a single reader, some expat who ended up donating the books because they weighed too much. Also, The Confederacy of Dunces. No canonized modernists of the kind taught in high schools (Hemingway, Joyce, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Woolf), no Twain or James, no poetry of any kind. Of David Foster Wallace’s Great Male Narcissists (Roth, Mailer, Updike), we have one Updike novel — Marry Me — and no David Foster Wallace, either. Aside from Coetzee, no postmodernists of any stripe, actually, not even Paul Auster, who’s very popular here in translation. No African-Americans, not even Ellison or Baldwin or Morrison. No Orwell, & no dystopias not Orwellian. The British 19th century is represented by a single copy of Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities — no Austen, no Eliot, no Brontë, no Shelley, etc. etc.

This has, inadvertently, become a catalogue of omission (and the catalogue of omissions will itself be incomplete, & inadvertently reveal my own blindnesses). So what is there? Genre fiction, of course: 1 Patricia Cornwell, 1 Sue Grafton, 1 Robert Ludlum, 1 Michael Connelly. But — no Clancy, no Michener, not even a pure hack like Balducci, and, in the collection I surveyed, no hint of Dan Brown. No Dick Francis, no Agatha Christie. No fantasy or science fiction that I recognized (not even Tolkein, not even Bradbury).

Perhaps most unnerving: among this catalogue of omissions & recognitions, I’ve only been able to name 12 books. (I should correct: 14. I checked out an omnibus collection of three John Banville novels and Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire). In other words, 71 of the books are unrecognizable to me to the point that I can’t even arrange or classify them. These 71 nameless, unclassifiable books include what looks like a trilogy of romance novels set in ancient Egypt, and a book whose cover design suggests that I should know it but don’t. The next time I sit down to emend this catalogue (I’ve been reading too much Perec), it’ll already be a futile gesture; books will have been checked out & returned in the interim, and who knows what I’ll find?

Now that I’ve got some detritus out of my system, we’ll see if I can’t write something with a throughline soon.