The Eye's Have It

I am composing this without my specs.  Not a big deal to most of you, but an amazing experience for one who has been wearing glasses since the sixth grade. It was at the tender age of eleven that I received my first pair of glasses and “really saw” the golf course across the street from our home, never suspecting what I had been missing beyond twelve feet.

As time passed my myopia became progressively worse. As time passed my arms grew ever shorter as presbyopia added to the mix. Oh the joys of old age! Bifocals became de rigueur. My visual world appeared increasingly smaller and farther away, rather like the side view mirrors on the car which warn that objects are closer than they appear. Unconsciously one’s depth perception adjusts to the distortions.

That is, until this month when my lenses were returned to their pre-pubescent clarity.  More and more I had been seeing through a glass darkly as cataracts progressed, but no more! Cataract replacement surgery has not only refocused increasingly scattered light, but also restored much of my distant vision. WOW! I feel like a ten-year old.

Everything is larger and nearer than I realized. Light is bright, colors clearer. It is a life-altering change, one that I am only just learning to appreciate.  It is an eye-opening experience as I am introduced to a re-sized and refocused world. Do I actually look like that? Is that what high definition TV looks like? Where are those phantom glasses I keep trying to push up on the bridge of my nose? Are you really so close?

The experience is profound enough to cause me to reflect a bit deeper into my perceptions. Have I internalized my myopia all these years, diminishing my relationships with others, holding the world at arm’s length, closing mental ranks while avoiding a world perceived as distant and stunted?  As objects receded have I emotionally withdrawn with them? Had myopia dwarfed my soul too?  I have no answers, but questions are becoming more clearly focused as my sight improves. Adjustments are required. I will need to re-evaluate more than my vision, to adjust my inner world to “objects—and people—that may be closer than they appear.”  The eyes may have it indeed!

Shakespearean Logic Puzzle

Celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday! For the occasion I thought it might be fun to create an original logic puzzle in honor of the Bard.  There is a template to help you organize the clues.  Click on it to enlarge and print a copy if you need one.  Answers are at the bottom of the post.  Enjoy!

Five Shakespearean actors live and work in London. Two are women.  Each will perform in a different play this season. One play is “The Taming of the Shrew.”  Each performance will be in a different location including the Shakespeare Globe Centre in New Zealand (SGC-NZ) and at the BBC studios near London.  Determine the first and last name of each actor, their current role, the location of this season’s play, and which play each performed in last season—one of which was “Measure for Measure.”  

1.  1. Actors include the one who plays in “Othello,” the woman who will perform in Oregon, and the one named Yorke who is sporting the red rose this season.

2.      2. One actor who has a role in a comedy this year performed in a tragedy last season; a second's current and last season roles feature characters in historical plays; and a third who has chosen Celtic plays for both seasons. 

3.      3. The actor who warns his lord to beware the green-eyed monster is not Evelyn or O’Dowd. Last year’s woman who portrayed a woman playing a man playing a woman will not perform in the UK this year.

4.      4. One performer’s first and last names have the same vowels. The last letter of one's first name begins their last name.

5.      5. This year DeBonne will plead for mercy in North America; Henry Duke of Hereford deposes under the Southern Cross; Tyler will not need to use a passport.

6.       6. Liam is not Yorke; Rome never played a princely role; Canada will resound with the wooing of “gentle Kate.”

7.      7. Arnold will lunch frequently with BBC’s Fidele.

Answers:  Evelyn Yorke—Bolingbroke—SGC-NZ—King Henry IV, Pt. 1; Howard Arnold—Iago—Globe/London—Measure for Measure; Liam O’Dowd—Petruchio—Stratford, ONT—Hamlet; Sybil DeBonne—Portia—Ashland, ORE.—As You like It; Tyler Rome—Imogen—BBC—Macbeth.                                                                                                                                          ©2013 “ettsme”

Silk Screen Philosophy

Click to enlarge

A few days before we left southern California for the frigid Midwest, we stopped for lunch at the Library Alehouse in Santa Monica.  While waiting for our food I glanced at a neighboring table, focusing on a young man sporting a tee shirt which read:  What if the Hokey Pokey IS what it’s all about?  What indeed? 

That got me thinking of the many tee shirt sayings I’ve seen in the last few years.  A short walk on the Venice Beach boardwalk provides visual and philosophical ideas worth pondering for weeks! All sorts of messages reveal all variety of viewpoints.  For years I’ve seen catalogs virtually teeming with pity sayings, silk screened on cotton blends.  I have decided to share a few samples I have cobbled together in the spirit of “Philosophy for the Masses.”

All tee shirt statements have been created in the spirit of fun only. I include some of my own idle thoughts while others are are based on quotations. The library tee shirt paraphrases the wise words of my former library director.  In the ten samples attached I chose graphics that came from “free to use” GOOGLE images or the clip art included with my MS 2010 PowerPoint software.  No commercial use is intended.

There are many other possibilities. Some un-illustrated ideas follow. Some come from catalogs, ever a source of revenue for the Postal Service.  What favorite sayings can you add  to benefit the tee shirt wearing world?

From Signals—visit website for details (www.signals.com):  1. Let’s Eat Grandma; Let’s Eat, Grandma; Commas Save Lives. 2. I dream of a society where a chicken can cross the road without its motives questioned. 3. I’m on the endangered species waiting list.

From Northern Sun—visit website for details especially because I am not a customer and have no commercial history with this company (www.northernsun.com):  1. I may be getting old but I DID get to see all the COOL bands. 2. Gardening is cheaper than therapy and you get tomatoes. 3. The Lifestyle you ordered is currently out of stock. 4. Well-behaved women seldom make history.

Some famous quotations itching for a cotton/polyester blend:  1. Angels fly because they take themselves lightly. (G.K. Chesterton) 2. Seek Simplicity…and Distrust It. (Alfred North Whitehead) 3. Wisdom has two parts—Having a lot to say, and Not saying it. 4. Accessing information is almost as good as knowing things. (from “Oliver’s Travels”) 5.  Truth—something you don’t have to lie about. 6. What is a Friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies. (Aristotle) 7. Cui bono? (Cicero) 8. I will make it a felony to drink small beer. (Shakespeare, “King Henry VI”) 9. There was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently. (Shakespeare, “Much Ado About Nothing”) 10. AGE—is a personal choice. 11. The Chicken came first. 12. A great ox stands on my tongue. (Aeschylus, “Agamemnon”) What does that mean!?!

Words, Words, Words...Can't Get Enough of Them!

It’s quiz time again so sharpen your pencils and test your mettle.  I’ve separated the words into three categories:  You’ve Seen One, Keeping Them Straight, and Word Drop Your Way to a Corner Office.  Use your knowledge of prefixes, suffixes, and Greek endings. 

You’ve Seen One

           1.       Funambulist; 2.  Menhir; 3.  Crash; 4.  Volute; 5.  Caryatid; 6.  Ziyada; 7.  Strigil; 8.  Tatterdemalion

[Choose one:  a – glutton; b – outer court of a mosque; c – tightrope walker; d – mottled markings; e – traveler; f – prehistoric monument consisting of a huge upright stone, a standing stone; g – carved female figure used as column supporting a structure; h – chemical compound used to dissolve alkaline stains; i – course open-weave cloth used in book binding as a lining for the spine; j – spiral scroll decoration used on an Ionic capital; k – person who wears raggedly clothes; l – astringent; m – curve bladed instrument used to scrape sweat and dirt from the body after exercise] Not all choices will be used.

Keeping Them Straight

1.       Exegete, exigent, exiguous

2.       Obviate, obsecrate, objurgate

3.       Apothegm, apothem, apotheosis

4.       Apotropaic, apodictic, apogee

5.       Obloquy, obliquity

6.       Ersatz, erstwhile

[All choices will have a match. a – to scold angrily; b – highest point of glory and power, elevation of human to status of a god; c – slander, defamatory statement; d – protective, warding off evil; e – former friend or supporter; f – urgent; g – make unnecessary; h – pity, terse remark; i – an imitation or inferior substitute; j – scanty, meager; k – departure from right or moral principles; l – a perpendicular from the center of a regular polygon to one of its sides; m – solemnly beseech; n – one who studies, speaks, or writes as a scriptural expert; o – certain, necessary truth; p – greatest point away from an object in orbit, farthest away]

Word Drop Your Way to a Corner Office

1.       Anosmia; 2.  Enervate; 3.  Sui generis; 4.  Naïf; 5.  Escheat; 6.  Hamartia; 7.  Obtund; 8.  Sinecure; 9.  Instantiate; 10.  Farouche; 11.  Telluric; 12.  Encomium; 13.  Apposite; 14.  Epigone; 15.  Onomastics   

[Choose one: a – position that requires little or no work but one that provides a secure salary; b – naïve person; c – reversion of property to the state after the death of  someone; d – inability to remember names; e – terrestrial, coming from the earth, soil or atmosphere; f – to invigorate; g – one of a kind, unique; h – orphaned child; i – splendid carriage used for royal parades; j – place in an adversarial position; k – inability to smell; l – to weaken or destroy physical, moral or mental vigor; m – high praise for a speech or writing; n – fatal or tragic flaw or error that brings an honorable person disproportionate harm; o – alchemist; p – pretended ignorance; q – study of meaning and origin of proper names; r – shy or awkward, unsociable; s – to blunt, deaden or dull; t – to explain using concrete example; u – relevant, well-suited; v – follower of an important artist or philosopher who is a mediocre imitator] Not all choices will be used.

And the answers are…

                You’ve Seen One:  1/c; 2/f; 3/i; 4/j; 5/g; 6/b; 7/m; 8/k

                Keeping Them Straight:   (Answers will be in the order listed) 1.  n, f, j;   2.  g, m, a;   3.  h, l, b;   4.  d, o, p;   5.  c, k;   6.  i, e.    

                Word Drop Your Way to a Corner Office:    1/k; 2/l; 3/g; 4/b; 5/c; 6/n, 7/s; 8/a; 9/t; 10/r; 11/e; 12/m; 13/u; 14/v; 15/q.

Congratulations.  Hope you enjoyed the mental calisthenics. Now go out there and amaze!

This Librarian's Ideal

Earlier this month most of us read or heard about the attempt to destroy medieval manuscripts held in trust for humanity by the citizens and librarians of Timbuktu.  Extremists, intent on eradicating the cultural heritage and communal history of those who participated in the golden age of Arabic and Medieval learning, attempted to burn or otherwise destroy the treasures of that intellectual era.

Fortunately, librarians, family guardians of personal collections, archivists in many of the mosques of Timbuktu, the Library of Congress’ digitization program, heroic citizens of Mali, and French warriors anticipated the vindictive fury and single mindedness of these mindless modern day barbarians.  Many thousands of pieces were smuggled out of the city on donkey carts.  A few were destroyed.

These treasures are irreplaceable and fortunately only a small proportion was physically destroyed. Many pieces had been digitized by forward thinking librarians; others held their preservation as a sacred duty passed through hundreds of generations by families who own private collections.  The manuscripts were protected as the privilege of family honor.  One for our side!

Victories have been few and far between as preservation of a people’s intellectual often meets a very different fate.  The physicality of books, manuscripts, and codex implies their fragility. Electronic media have uncertain permanence.  I can recommend the book The Universal History of the Destruction of Books by Fernando Baez and Alfred MacAdam to get a sense of a sometimes losing battle.

The biggest danger by far is man, especially the fanatics. Conquerors knew that the subjugation of a people required the destruction of the best their civilization has produced—ideas and narrative.  Libraries and archives are almost always targets of incoming barbarians who are intent on seeding the intellectual landscape of conquered peoples with salt.  Small victories do happen though.  Read the fictional account of a rare illustrated Hebrew work in Geraldine Brooks’ excellent People of the Book.

Miracles sometimes occur.  The Archimedes Codex by Reviel Netz and William Noel tells of the miraculous recovery of an unknown work of the Greek mathematician.  Although the scroll had been co-opted for a mediocre prayer book, modern technology was able to recover the greatness written on the palimpsest. Many other masterpieces of Western Intellectual Heritage were not so fortunate.   How many other libraries have been destroyed some in the name of religion, a few by librarians themselves?  How few have been saved?

Too few have been saved despite the aegis of dedicated librarians. Four of the chief tenets of librarianship are the Collection, Preservation, Organization and Dissemination of human knowledge in any form—paper or other media.  It is that secular sacred duty, the preservation of the seeds of knowledge that made the choice of profession for me.  If I could pass that information and means to knowledge on to others, if I could in some way preserve and protect a small portion of that heritage, then that was work worth doing.  Fiction and phone numbers aside, this was to be my real work. Every day I learned from information seekers, humbled by the vast expanse of my ignorance. What an immense intellectual world existed beyond my ken!  Every day I tried to become better, to learn more, to find the seeds of knowledge and to plant them in fertile minds.  In a career now over I hope that I helped a few. I know I fell far short, but that does not mean that the ideal does not persist.  The preservation of Timbuktu’s heritage sustains me; the heroes who risked their lives imbue me with hope.  They are my ideal and ideals are treasure beyond price.