Eccentric Flower:199908/Novelties sundries and notions II

Well, I still have coffee and the CDs are still playing, so here's more.

Let's see. What's on my little piece of paper? "Amber" ... "Women/OB-GYNs" ... "N.O. Zoo and Hurricanes/Pamie" ... "Flesh and Silver" ... "Raskin/Wrinkle in Time/Puffin" ... "Verticals citation" ... "Dog gnaws 767."

You know, I should just leave those there like that and see what kind of speculation everyone comes up with about what they mean. But no one would ever get some of them.

Amber, for example, is not fossilized sap nor a Zelazny universe but a human. She has become semi-famous around this area because she calls radio shows, especially Christopher Lydon's. The Globe wrote an article about her. She is apparently intelligent and articulate, and unafraid to joust with overinflated academics. (The Globe relates how she held forth on Shakespeare one day and made Harold Bloom gasp, "Who is this?")

Anyone who's willing to call in and spar with Camille Paglia - or puncture Bloom, for that matter - has my support. Lydon, that rare intellectual with an intact BS detector, apparently adores her. He's helped her get legally established (Amber was interviewed semi-anonymously because she is apparently not quite a legal resident of this country) and is helping her take classes at Harvard. Lydon thinks that it's a great crime that this woman didn't/couldn't go to college.

What caught my attention is that this woman is not schooled nor highflown. She is poor; she espouses views which are most common among the disenfranchised. And the main reason people are noticing what she says is that she thinks. She has ideas and she's articulate enough to express them. And it worries me.

It worries me foremost that the standard of public discussion is low enough in this country that, when someone rises above the level of a Rush Limbaugh caller, it's rare enough to send the Globe running. And it worries me that the people who are most hurt by the system rarely have anyone who is articulate enough to speak for them.

But that's enough about Amber.

Now that I get to the next notation on my pink paper, I've changed my mind about it. I'm not going to talk about why women put up with things from their doctors and gynecologists that men wouldn't tolerate. It's a dangerous subject and one that will only get me flames.

Let's move on.

The business with the New Orleans zoo and hurricanes has to do with Pamie's trip to that fine city. Tsk, Pamie, you could've asked me first. The Zoo is nowhere near the French Quarter. In fact that's its greatest strength; the tourists usually can't figure out how to get there :)

OK, that was catty, and I have nothing against tourism in general. It's just that every time I go back to New Orleans, the French Quarter looks more and more like a smutty-Disneyland imitation of itself. On the other hand, there are those who say it always was, that there was never a "real" French Quarter under the veneer ... at least, not since about 1900.

As for hurricanes, we're not talking about a weather phenomenon but a tall bright-red beverage, which tastes like Kool-Aid and is deceptively unstrong, but actually contains (I seem to recall) more than four ounces of alcohol. Two or three of them and suddenly you wonder where your feet went - as Pamie found out. Poor Pamie. Don't worry; many people have done the same trick.

Flesh and Silver is a book by Stephen Burns. I wanted to mention it because of my reaction to it. I had not heard of the author or the title, not that I could recall, but I passed it in the bookstore and saw the cover and gasped. "Oh my god," I said, "that's the emblem of a Bergmann Surgeon!"

The fact that I remembered this speaks volumes. It is from a story in Analog which I read by sheer chance (I don't subscribe). I just went and dug that issue out of the vaults: January 1985.

Indeed, this is a continuation of that story ("A Touch Beyond") and another one called "Angel" which I never read in its original form. Burns writes:

When I tried to sell Stanley Schmidt a third one, he said what this really wanted to be is a novel. But don't blame him.

Blame him? I may kiss him. I knew Schmidt had good taste, but - I ate this book in an afternoon and I think it's brilliant. I want someone to buy it and read it so I can discuss it with them, because the central conceit of the Bergmann Surgeons dovetails with something I have thought about many times. But I can't discuss it without spoiling the book.

When I wrote about Ellen Raskin the other day, some people took me to task (mildly) for not pointing out that before she ever did picture books, she had a career doing covers for other people's books.

Well, I knew that - and I didn't mention it, for two reasons. First, I expected everyone to read the bio I linked to, where that was discussed. Second, I'm not sure that her commissioned covers have the same whimsy of the art she did for her own books. I've only seen one cover she did for another book - courtesy of Eric, master of trivia. It's A Wrinkle in Time and it's the famous cover with three humans each standing in a circle. I say "famous" in the sense of well-known, because frankly it's one of the ugliest, most boring covers I've ever encountered. So if you see something like that, don't judge Raskin harshly by it.

An Ardent Reader with appropriate connections says that Puffin has the rights to her four novels, and is keeping all of them in print. Really? I replied. I haven't seen a copy of The Tattooed Potato anywhere since I bought my copy in high school. She wrote back with a correction - oops, Tattooed Potato was actually the only one out-of-print; it apparently hadn't sold well.

So if you want that one, it's off to a book-search service for you. And if you're the sort of person who craves it badly, you already know how to get to the book-search services on your own. Don't you? :)

Hmm, I think I'll try to get through my little pink paper in this entry instead of starting a third one. I'm almost done.

The "vertical" is that image over to the right. I have twenty of them, including some which haven't been used yet. They all have names. (This one is "Smug Socialite.")

So many people have asked where they come from that I will probably add an attribution to the bio page at some point. They are from a Dover collection of public domain images. It's called Women: A Pictorial Archive from Nineteenth-Century Sources, collected by Jim Harter. The other images on the site are all from it too, I believe, except possibly the mandrake.

As for "Dog Gnaws 767," that's the whole joke right there. It was the headline of a Globe story. But the dog didn't bite 767 people. He got out of his kennel in the cargo compartment of a 767 jet, began gnawing away the plastic lining of the compartment, and managed to chew up a few wires. The plane had a non-critical instrument failure, and landed safely. No punitive action is being taken against the dog :) However, the ASPCA and other such groups are using this as an example of why cargo conditions need to be improved if pets are to be routinely transported that way. After all, they point out, the dog was only trying to get out of the plane.

And since you probably want to get out of this plane by now too, I'll stop.