A Lecture and a True Moment

Tonight the person with whom I usually walk about half the way home from the bus stop with did not make her appearance on the bus. Without her my walk would be totally solitary. Having the totality of my walking time to myself I decided to click on the iPod portion of my iPhone. With no obligation of any kind to converse I could listen to the free Berkley lecture on modernist writers that I had down loaded earlier in the day. There are a series of lectures that apparently make up the bulk of the lecture portion of a survey course running late 1800s, Henry James and the like to the end of the 20th century, available for free at the iTunes store.

As I listened to the broadcast of this class it reminded me about how much I loved being in a college lecture hall. I was always there in my seat waiting to see what happened next. Almost all of my courses held this fascination for me. The speaker on this particular downloaded lecture was talking about the syllabus and saving money on books and the whole nine yards. Gosh what a blast of remembered moments.
It was when the professor talked about whether to buy an expensive anthology book that I hit that moment when I decided picking this particular course to listen in on made sense; it had had value if you would. The prof initially said something along the line of you can cheap out in certain ways instead of buying the text but if writing and literature turn out to be your muses than you will want to build a library. In such a library this book would be a good starting book for your collection. It was what he said next that made me smile that deep knowing smile. “Books are time capsules. You will remember where you bought them. You will remember what was going at the time you acquired them and what your life was like.” Wow, I am so there.

Ruminating here last night I talked about Kurt Vonnegut. I can tell you where I bought most of those Avon paperback editions of Vonnegut’s book, the Sun Rose Book Store in Ocean City on the north end of the island. This place was bright and cheery and run by some Deadheads. They burned incense and had books that were outside the mainstream. They carried Naked Lunch and Eyeless in Gaza.

The books I picked up here were my treasured summer reads. I spent my own money earned at Kurly Kustard on the Boardwalk (located between Ninth and Tenth Street) buying those books. My hair was longer and blonder and I was 50 pounds lighter. I hadn’t had cancer but I had a tan. Sitting on the beach in the midday sun my fingers would stain the edges of the pages because my digits had sun tan lotion residue permanently in the pores.

Ocean City summer breezes were warm and the sun was hot and a million people surrounded me as I lay on my blanket. Despite the cacophony of the Frisbee throwers, and the sand castle builders I was there in the cool slaughterhouse basement right next to Billy Pilgrim waiting for the firebombing of Dresden to end. Racing those novels I became unstuck in time and rode the wormlike trail of my life forward and backward. Funny thing I didn’t see this part of my life as I time travelled.

On the other end of the island that is Ocean City was the other bookstore. It was a place called the Bookateria Two. This was a used bookstore that had stacks and stacks of books from floor to ceiling. They had that musty smell that everything paper acquires at the beach. This was a place that was the anti Sun Rose. It was run by a crusty old guy who wanted his money. Bookateria Two was a place where I picked up books I felt I needed to read on the cheap. Shakespeare and Hardy were my favorites.

Again I would be sitting out on the beach working through those books leaving oily sandy grit on every page. What did I care these were used books. Over the course of the summer I worked my way through the old Folger editions of the comedies. As You Like It, Twelfth Night and a Midsummer Night’s Dream. If you don’t remember the old Folger editions of these books I can testify to you that they were a pain in the ass to read. On each page there would be expressions of Elizabethan English that would need a note. The notes were either in super fine text in a footer or in some of the books they were located on the backside of the page you would be reading. As a result you either you had to read the micro text (and remember I have never had better that 20/50 vision) or you were flipping back and forth. The saving grace was that after about one volume you knew the phrases and did not have to constantly be referring to the notes.

On the whole the Shakespeare has held up better in my memory. The themes were more universal, the motives more consistent with human nature taking it in a long view. I still love Vonnegut, I reread Cat’s Cradle within the past year and the plot was still a hoot. But the twists and turns in the Bard’s plays still stand out when I think back on what I learned on the beach.

I still have those books. I have hauled them from house to house. They have been boxed and unboxed any number of times. They have been shielded from yard sales on several occasions. Each time I look at a title I do remember where I got it and what was going on in my life. Hopefully there will be more in this lecture series for my brain to fix on, but this particular comment was a wonderful remark.