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I have been distracted by bibliopolic endeavors of late and thus posting has been a trifle light. For your delectation, I have included here a recent philological find -- one of the earliest recorded Depression-era LOL cats.
I will also include a link to the video over which my daughter has been currently obsessing (I include a link since I cannot figure out how to embed the video); our love for the Hubley studio burns with a gem-like flame, and the unsettlingly constant allusiveness of my child's discourse has meant that we have been subjected to several days of being told that we have cockaboodies on our noses.
UPDATE: Georgia Hubley? One of the kids in the cartoon? Grew up to be the Georgia Hubley of Yo La Tengo. Who (besides the used record store employees of the nation) knew?
On the one hand, having some nice landscaping in our front yard helps keep the neighborhood property values up. On the other hand, given how I dress for the task, being seen out taking care of the landscaping is bound to drive those same values down. I suppose the only sensible thing to do is set the alarm for 3:00 AM and use the roto-tiller then.
Take any English major and put him outside with a shovel for 45 minutes and he starts mumbling to himself about Thoreau and rows of beans and then he starts playing mental games, trying to come up with all the poets who were into raising legumes for home consumption. Poets are great ones for taking a burdensome domestic task and turning it into some emblematic token of a larger truth intended to convince the reader that he (the poet) has some mystical connection to the earth (aka the mother of us all, the dust to which we all shall return, the table upon which the dice of human bones are rolled, etc.). Yeats, for instance was quite the boy for the beans.
Thought of Yeats of course lead me inexorably to dwelling on the profound and moderately embarrassing influence such wild-haired poets had on me back in the flower of my youth. My friend T., at one point a Silicon Valley engineer back in those heady days of something called "the Dot-Com Bubble," would on occasion take me to parties in Mountain View where there would be these big bowls of tortilla chips set out and all these programmers and engineers would stand around and talk shop and make dates to get together and roll around in big piles of cash. While they networked, I would pursue my usual course of drinking beer silently in a corner and growing sullen until the party reached that inevitable point where I would stand up and begin a conversation, where by "beginning a conversation" I of course mean "buttonholing some inoffensive young man or woman" and then leaning in to declare something along the lines of "Consume my heart away! Sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal, it knows not what it is!"
And then my friend would hear me declaiming from across the room realize I had gotten to that point where I was quoting Yeats* and he would come over and take me gently by the arm and tell me it was time to go.
And now look at me! A scrupulous member of the contented yeomanry!
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* Yeats meant it was time to take me home. If I had started in on quoting Matthew Arnold then things weren't quite so bad. Matthew Arnold simply meant I was growing maudlin.
"The sea of faith was once, too, at the full!" I might say. "And 'round earth's shores lay like the folds of a bright . . . of a bright . . ." (and here I would start to giggle) ". . . lay like the folds of a BRIGHT GIRDLE FURLED!"
Then I would clap my conversational partner on the shoulder and head back to the keg.
I had a fairly good day at the Ann Arbor Antiquarian Book Fair, though the piece of free ephemera promised the first reader to pronounce in my hearing at a book fair the words "Daddy Zine" remains unclaimed. The offer rolls over until the next book fair or until the whole blogging thing blows over.
Anyway, I sold nearly as much as I bought -- and I bought fairly well. I purchased my usual assortment of 19th century pamphlet material in political and social thought, as well as the fairly striking example of presidential campaign material (ca. 1976) pictured here. Dig the pendant portraits of Gerald Ford! Nothing sums up the legacy of our 38th president quite like these dignified sunglasses. Compare them to the rather staid handkerchiefs which characterized the 1892 campaign and you will soon comprehend how far we have progressed as a nation. Outlawing child coal miners and then establishing an industrial system capable of producing customized patriotic sunglasses; truly we are heirs to the legacy of Cincinnatus.
I was hanging out the laundry this afternoon and I realized that a decade ago I would have been hard pressed over the course of an entire laundry day to have come up with half as many t-shirts with associated web addresses. Now I have several in the dark load alone!
From left to right, skipping over a few:
The Cheat (from Homestar Runner).
Paul Frank does Andy Warhol.
A Daddyzine green plaid cowboy shirt (trademark pending).
And toward the far end, a Hello Kitty! nightgown.
Likely somebody with a greater aptitude for punditry could make a sweeping sociological statement from this development. I prefer to think of it as a great advance over the Big Johnson t-shirts we seemed to see everywhere a while back.
