Reading Matter

Needed some books. Reading matter. New Yorker in the mailbox, but it's the weekend and I needed a couple of books. They were having a book sale at the library, so I bought several for the "Winter Reading" pile, and check out a couple of things. At the pub, Cory had a package for me, from Sara, a wonderful book on grammar and punctuation by a long-time copy editor at the New Yorker, Between You & Me, Mary Norris. Sara and I have talked for many hours about punctuation. I highly recommend this book, funny and instructive. I think about punctuation a lot. I'll finish a sentence and go off to cook dinner; or to do something, and I'll (that's the serial comma) go back over and change a word while I'm cooking onions. Later, I'll read a sentence a tenth time and drop the comma. It's all about explication, right? We have these marks, and we can use them freely in the Scrabble of language. I use question marks in clusters, which is the way they occur to me. Why, where, when. Then, finally, a period. Female farmer is not supposed to be incorrect, but it's always a lady rancher. I've pretty much dropped all of them, and I call males and females that act actors; composers, artists, heavy machinery operators and all the rest of us. He and she have become a little more problematic, you works pretty well. I get distracted by Norman Blake playing on the radio, my god he is a great guitarist, I have to listen to some Doc Watson. I have a piece of left-over steak and some steamed potato, so I make a very nice hash, with shallots. I have a friend in Georgia that raises shallots and he sends me a box every year, I buy cheap pantyhose and tie them off in the legs. Keep them separate and they don't rot. I hang them from a beam over near the cookstove, and they look like the remains of a cruel ritual. I've perfected the art of shirring eggs in a ring of hash. I serve this with ripe tomatoes drizzled with one of the vinegars. TR warns me that I don't want a bear birthing under my house, looking toward spring, after a bear had wintered under my house, but I assured him we accessed the place from different directions, and that I thought it was cool that a bear would choose my crawlspace. I do stop, on the back deck, to look around. The entire construct seems like fiction. I carry firecrackers when I walk to the Jeep. The comma, according to Mary Norris, flourished during the Renaissance. I love the image, and I love the writing. It's great when someone knows what they're talking about. Next winter I need to read all of Steven Pinker. I've hired Rodney, on a trial basis, to do some work around the place, clear some brush, open a vehicle path to the back door (to trade out the refrigerator), and to the back of the woodshed. It's a risk, hiring a depressed alcoholic to do anything, but I want to reach out, AND I need the work done, and I don't want to do it. I'm done with digging ditches and post holes. But I have dug hundreds of feet of ditches and hundreds of post holes in the past, I'm tired now, and want to rest. I don't need a friend, and I certainly can do without stupid conversation. What doesn't kill you only makes you stronger, Cedar Mesa, I have to laugh, comma, comma, semi-colon.