Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

A technical breakthrough

Over the weekend, with some administrative support from his owners, the puppy implemented a new paperless home-office system. Amazingly, it has nothing to do with the internet.

The problem of bookshelves

Over at Paper Cuts, Jennifer Schuessler has joined the inter-blog conversation about bookshelf etiquette by confessing that her collection is "heavily weighted toward the unread," stockpiled for the coming era of the Kindle-toting zombies. I already spoke my piece, by blogging about all the books I've been throwing out, but for those whom the topic continues to fascinate, I recommend two books that I've been reading by the photographer Moyra Davey, Long Life Cool White, just published by Yale University Press, and The Problem of Reading, which you have to email Davey herself to buy a copy of (see the link for instructions). Both books are filled not only with Davey's moody photos of bookshelves in various states of disarray and transition but also with her thoughts on the place of reading in a creative life, and the difficulty, in managing the habit, of striking the right balance between purpose and serendipity, and between work and pleasure. "'What to read?' is a recurring dilemma in my life," she admits in The Problem of Reading, which has, among other images, a great close-up of her mother's annotations of Swann's Way. Long Life Cool White focuses more specifically on the problem of reading about photography (and writing about it). At one point in that book, Davey, like Schuessler in her anticipation of zombies, considers her bookshelves as a storehouse, similar in function to her refrigerator, only more so:

A well-stocked fridge always triggers a certain atavistic, metabolic anxiety, like that of the Neanderthal after the kill, faced with the task of needing to ingest or preserve a massive abundance of food before spoilage sets in. . . . I feel a little towards my books as I do towards the fridge, that I have to manage these as well, prioritize, determine which book is likely to give me the thing I need most at a given moment. But unlike with the fridge, I like to be surrounded by an excess of books, and to not even have a clear idea of what I own, to feel as though there's a limitless store waiting to be tapped, and that I can be surprised by what I find.

Lhude sing cuccu

With a puppy in the house, I have had occasion lately to be reminded of the poem "Cuckoo Song," also known by its first line, "Sumer is icumen in," which is the first poem in both of the editions of the Oxford Book of English Verse that I happen to own. In particular, the second verse has seemed pertinent:

Awe bleteth after lomb,
Lhouth after calve cu;
Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth,
Murie sing cuccu!

Or, to modernize it slightly, thereby ruining the rhymes:

Ewe bleats after lamb,
Cow lows after calf;
Bullock leaps, buck farts,
Merry sing cuckoo!

It's the verting of the bucke that makes the poem, in my opinion. It's so homely and unexpected—so unexpected that for a long time I've carried around in my head the notion that perhaps deer really do fart more in the early summer than at other times of the year. After all, ewes are more likely to have lambs then, and cows calves. I speculated that maybe in late spring deer start to eat grass and leaves in greater quantities, and maybe it takes their digestive systems a little while to adjust, and in thirteenth-century England, where deer and humans lived in gunpowder-free proximity, people noticed.

Maybe. But thanks to the internet, I see that a hunter in Texas heard a whitetail doe startle her fellow deer in January, and there are a couple of videos of farting deer available online, posted in October and November, so I'm guessing that deer fart year-round, not just in June, and that the poet intended for farting deer, like leaping bullocks, to signify a general, seasonless exuberance.

Recycling

On a number of recent occasions, I have fallen into déjà lu while reading blogs. A blogger presents a link to a news item that sounds very familiar. Hmm, phosphorescent foraminifera, I think. Didn't the Times already run an article on them just a few days ago? But the blogger advertises the link as new, or at least fails to apologize for linking late, and so I click through, thinking to myself, It's unusual for there to be such two articles in short order; maybe this is the week that phosphorescent foraminifera finally come into their own! . . . only to discover that in fact this is the same article on phosphorescent foraminifera that I read three or four days ago.

When it happened once, I passed on in silence. By the fourth or fifth instance, I developed a theory: It must be that these bloggers do not read the New York Times, not in print anyway, and do not expect their readers to. They read bloggers who read bloggers who read the New York Times, and when an article underplayed on the web but worth reading anyway trickles down to them three or four days after publication, they perceive it as a neglected gem that they must rescue from obscurity. Not as yesterday's news.

That was my theory: uncharitable, pessimistic, gloomy. But now I have a puppy, and all is right with the world, and now I understand. It isn't that these bloggers fail to read the New York Times for themselves. How silly! It's that they have puppies! Like me, four or five times a day, they find themselves opening a section of the Times that they don't usually open, for the sake of the kitchen floor, and happening upon articles they would have loved to read if they had been in the front section instead of in Escapes, such as "Where Greek Ideals Meet New England Charm," a lushly illustrated tour of shareholder libraries of nineteenth-century vintage, or in Business, such as "Book Lovers Ask, What's Seattle's Secret?", an analysis of Seattle's role as tastemaker in the literary ecosystem. And once you discover these interesting articles, you often find that your puppy too has noticed them, as it were, and the web edition of the Times, kept pristine by its lack of functionality in that department, really comes in handy.

New resident

Already growls at the television.