Sun and Reading

I see the sun. There is a shadow on the floor. Yes, we’re recovering. Brief Lives, from John Aubery, is an example book for people who are writing one, or more, of the “Six Books You Can and Should” write.

It is descriptions, character sketches, that kind of thing. I know a lot of people. I bet you do too. There is plenty to write about.

I have a folder on my computer ready for me to flesh it out. It remains empty. Perhaps I should describe our dog, who died earlier this year. Or the fig tree with a second crop waiting to be eaten. Or perhaps I should populate it with the files of names. I can fill it out later. Which at last leads me to a thought.

Death and the Penguin, from Andrey Kurkov, features a character who writes about people. Most of who he has never met. We learn a lot about Russian life. And how he came to have a penguin as a pet. Other people join his life. k£ If you take book recommendations this is one to read. Which leads to.

I have been reading all of your One Typed Page entries. The things you encounter and deal with is interesting. Interesting enough that I have improved my reading skills. Things are short with a variety of fonts. I had to Open This Page, adjust the zoom, and read. Now I can mostly read them as they appear on the web, as is. I have had problems reading text. If the text was small with line spacing tight I had problems reading it. Think of a paperback book, how they cram stuff in, that is the kind of stuff I had problems reading. Now it is less so. Thanks to your writings.

I think I am going to read Years of Rice and Salt again. Or perhaps If On A Winters Night A Traveler. Rereading is good.

-— MichaelRpdx :: h3k

Weather and Retirement

Yep we have got some weather. I do not like talking about weather. But we do have a humdinger of a day. Hazey day, and now our thing that has people talking about it. Winds of 15 to 30 mph. With gusts to 40 to 55 mph. I think most of the pears are going to fall off the trees. I hear crows. What are they doing? Are they flying around? Are they clinging to a power line, they like to sit in surveillance there, cawing at us as we walk by. But now we are curled up in our home watching the trees sway back and forth. The crows can go off to a safe place. We will feed them some chicken scratch in the morning.

Retiring people, Welcome To The Crowd! Retirement, especially for those of us with typewriters, is a good thing. During the shutdown of the 2020 Covid-19 so many people complained about boredom. Boredom? Did they not plan retirement, oh it is a bit of a planning exercise for them. If you were bored, especially without televised sports, you need to work on your life. Fortunately I have a grand bulk of things to do. Here they are waiting for my attention.

Now if I could work the spacebar consistently, get those spaces in.

From early August through mid October is one of my favorite, very favorite, times. We have sunny days close to what they get in the tropics. The twighlites are warm enough to be out in the dark. In shirt sleeves, it is comfortable. And if, as we have been, on vacation in this weather, well wow, we are walking in the dark ing from – little thing group to another. They seem to be isolated. Let me work on the description to another. I will come up with a better description.

— MichaelRpdx :: h3k

Books Due and Music

Oops, a library book is due to return. So this is picked out of the TBR stack. I intended to read for an hour, or maybe half of one. The intent is to improve my reading, especially the speed of it.

The book is My Private Property from Mary Ruefle. Who she is I don’t know yet. She is, however, a poet. And her poems are deep and layered. This is not the type of reading for a pace set for relaxing into some bliss of – something of your choosing. And also we will be watching The Year of Living Dangerously Which seems to be something that I had half-remembered, so the plot twists in ways unexpected. I’m not at all sure about the meaning of the two books being due at the same time.

There is music on my mind. Well, that is a bit of a stretch. I’d like to listen to the melodious sound of someone speaking a foreign language. I fiddled with one of the apps on my phone. “Simply Radio” and I cruzed around To Mexico! Tu Argentina! To France! To Morroco! What? They have what it takes to pull the channel to my place. I like it.

—- MichaelRpdx :: h3k

Starting Again Habits

When I first stopped in here, I wrote about starting on something. I quoted Austin Kleon and Kent Peterson, I had written to Austin Kleon asking if he had originated the bit about things needing to be. And then expressed no expectation of hearing from him. He had had a tough week. But Lo! Behold! he did respond. Google but his reply in Social or Promotions or Updates or some damn place that I typically ignore. Why today I didn’t do that is just a bit of luck. He had replied, Four Days Ago. Crickey.

He wrote,

As far as I know, it’s an original
phrase, though not really an original
idea…. : )

Austin

So much for my pessimism. And as stated then, it doesn’t need to be good, it just needs to be. Each day I get to get more stuff to exist.

In truth, this is my third piece of expression. I start each day with Morning Pages, ala Julia Camerson. It is handwritten. No rules to it, just write. Well, and don’t read it for at least a week? a month? Whatever, I don’t read it. Then I take to my computer and add another post to my blog. (I hate the word “blog”. But I didn’t get to choose the term so I’m stuck with it. It’s about things I find in my curiosities. And then there is this, an OTP (a name that is ok.) And all of you know more about it than I do.

Handwriting, computer bits, and typed pages. Morning pages go back to April of 20L5 more or less consistently. Blogging goes in fits and starts for, well the current one, goes back to 2013. Though the early days were pretty sporadic. Well & sure there are written journals, especially in the early 80s but what is my point here? I just keep on trying. And I do have pair of things to quote, and to make so something exists.

And another page exists.

— MichaelRpdx :: osm5

Banned Books

Banned Books, it is almost time for the annual observation of our shame. This year it runs from September 27 to October 3. It is a great time to (re)read a banned book.

Suggestions? Consider The Grapes of Wrath from John Steinbeck. For something older, The Canterbury Tales, From the venerable Geoffrey Chaucer. It was considered obscene. And to think we read it in High School. Perhaps a bit more topical is Uncle Tom’s Cabin from Harriet Beecher Stowe. Candide, Voltaire, and Elmer Gantry, Sinclair Lewis (the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature) which I have not read. Nor have I read Forever Amber, Kathleen Winsow, banned for its “bawdiness”. Americans are fond of banning sexual books. Howl, Allen Ginsberg; Naked Lunch, William S. Burroghs; Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller; Catch-22, Joseph Heller; the list goes on. And on and nn. Consider Alice’s Aventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll it was banned in China; Or the French, thought to be so open (well, in the circles I run in) Banned Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert, and Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov.

Well, that is a quick listing you can hit up Wikipedia. That also includes pages for book burning, “Challenge” which talks about “the removal, suppression, or restricted circulation of (different works)” and banned files, movies, and other media.

It is time to read, before you can’t anymore,

—- MichaelRpdx :: osm5

Lazy Cricketless Summer

What a lazy day. Jennifer had sore arms. From vaccinations. I stayed with her, we didn’t “do”: anything. Binge watching Korean soap operas. I reviewed our spending for the year to date and planned our taxes for the year. Wheee!

This typewriter is from, well I don’t remember. Wow though, pica with a nice clean type. Why have I not used it more? Perhaps more in the future. Perhaps not, it has not grabbed my attention yet. Are you a fan of the SM5 line? Tell me why.

      Are there poems here
      lurking in favorite twilight
      Waiting for it’s use

Perhaps there. Perhaps in rewritings Well, there is a lot in the rewriting. Or even in the re-thinking: Like …

Where are the crickets? This time of year they were through the evening sounds. Especially last year. No longer now.

Jupiter and Saturn are back again. In our southern night sky. And I know I have not woken too early in the morning, thanks to Venus rising. Even above the trees. She is there until the sky is brightened by the sun. All of these make for the skies through the washout of the haze of the lights of human beings. The lights that prevent people from seeing the Milky Way. Much less Andromeda.

Garrrgh.

Well, YAY! for my One Typed Page. I’ve written again. Tomorrow is another day and I’ll need to come up with more.

-~ MichaelRpdx :: osm5

Hermes Baby (Rocket?)

Hay ortos, Señor o Señoritas o Señoras aquí qué tiene Español? Tengo la lengua. Well a bit of it. A small bit. If you do, let me know.

This is the second of four typewriters. It is one of my first. That is to say my first in advanced age years. It’s portable. And right before Kent bought it, it was in Venesuleza. Arriving in the US in a pizza box. A Domino’s box, I think. It comes to life for boughts of Spanish or trips when I want a portable typewriter ahead of any other value. OK, I get it out fo# fun. It is a fun
machine to type on.

The start of a new year. What shall we do this year? Besides learnings this keyboard. Those activities will be told to you later. I have a bad habit of my telling people about something I plan to do. And then I get side tracked by another activity and it never happens.

This double spacing is an artifact of this typewriter. Type a few lines and it slips into double space mode.

OK, enough for now. Until tomorrow,

— MichaelRpdx :: hb(r)

Getting Started

A few months ago a friend started to write here and suggested that I might like it. A few weeks ago I wrote to Daniel Marleau to be sure he was the editor of this place. He replied yes and stated “it’s time for you to get a typewriter and send a page!” Yes, a few weeks ago. As my typewriters sat .idle.

Ahem.

Finally, it came down to the words I’ve tried to live up to.


“It doesn’t matter if it’s good right now,
it just heeds to exist.”
—- Austin Kleon

And more plainly stated:


“It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be.”
— Kent Peterson

I sent a note to Austin – asking if he had originated the idea. Perhaps he had stolen the idea. (As in “Steal Like An Artist” which he wrote.) He says in his weekly email that it was a lazy week. Not that he would respond anyway. But yeah, not now.

A long summer of selling a house and coming up on two years of … well, more on that later. Happy Birthday to me. It is a good day to start new habits.

I just need to make it so it can be.

—— Michael “MichalRpdx” Rasmussen