Many of you have read my posts regarding my reading habits. The last time I went to the library, I made the mistake of looking at the non-fiction genre. It happens every time, I find an interesting nonfiction topic, and I buy into it. This time, the book is “The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.” I would be better served reading a book about finding intelligence on planet Earth. I picked it because it is short, 155 pages, and I am writing a story involving space travel. Maybe, just maybe, I will learn something.
Wrong. The first sixty pages were like reading a collection of doctoral theses on the biology involved with finding life in Martian rocks. The language is way too technical and boring. To liven my life, I began reading the second book I picked up at the same time. It is “The Secret to Happiness.” This is fiction, but the story involves dealing with depression and helping others. I finished the story in two days and loved it. Then I picked up the doctoral thesis collection to finish. I read another two chapters and decided I didn’t need, want, or enjoy this kind of education. I was about to close the book and put it into the take-it-back pile.
The little man sitting on my shoulder whispered into my ear, “Quitter.” Okay, I told myself I’ll read on, and I am glad I did. It is like the entire narrative changed gears and became interesting and understandable. The authors switched from discussing life outside of the world as a biological search to one of practical matters like all the space probes that have been sent on their way into space, and what we didn’t learn from them. Other than learning what not to do on the next space probe they have decided to get some real answers. The problem they have is that it takes so long for these space probes to get to their intended destination that many of the problems they are equipped to learn from are non-problems any more.
The final chapters have been a joy to read, but getting past the first pages was definitely a bore and a waste of time. The publisher could have saved a lot of money by not using the information.
It has been awhile since my last post, but it doesn’t mean I’ve been sleeping. Although I have slept during those hours, just not during all of them. My body odometer turned another year, I have taken multiple baby steps on my latest project and have concluded that I am ready to finish. From this point on all I want to do is to admire my completed work. The admiration will begin within the week.
I had a lovely time visiting with all three of my kids at the same time. They presented themselves as birthday gifts, and I absolutely loved it. The only one missing from the fun was their mother, but I know she was with us in spirit. On August 17th, I celebrate Barb’s twentieth year away from me. Thank God that among her last words to me were, “It’s time for you to move on with your life.” I’ve done my best, but it would have been infinitely better had we spent these past 7200 days together. Grief still appears out of nowhere, and now it comes from two directions, one from Barb and the second from Peggy. My dreams, however keep them separated from each other. I think that is a good thing.
Throughout the many visitors and celebrations I managed to continue taking baby steps on my work which I have decided to call “Libre” which translates from Spanish to “free.” I began reading again, but to give myself a vacation I have sworn off books by William Faulkner. He didn’t resonate with me. His writing style was good, but his vocabulary. dialect selection, and story lines were out of this world. I found myself hating to read. I completed “Go Down, Moses” and began a second story from the same volume called “Requiem For a Nun,” After one chapter I closed the book and returned it to the library where is will reside collecting dust until the end of time. In order to catch up with my reading goal, I have selected large print stories that were copyrighted in 2023. Both of them are stories about super human CIA warriors fighting battles in mid-eastern countries.
This morning I followed up on a pledge I made with myself to begin walking again. It wasn’t easy, but I did it. What amazes me when I am walking is that so many people pass me by. In my mind I am putting a lot of effort into speed walking, but in reality I must be doing the deed in slow motion. I guess I have to give up on competing with the youngsters, and forget about how fast I can cover the miles, and shift the focus on finishing.
My experiment to read old classics has back fired. Instead of finding a story that was mesmerizing, and intriquing I have to proclaim, that my latest read by William Faulkner is a giant bunker-buster. It took me three days to read through the chapter titled ‘Bear’, and it made no sense at all. I am reading words but comprehending zero. I will finish the read this week, but I will also give it one star because, after several chapters the story line is still not clear, and the characters not very well defined. The spoken language of niggerese only adds to the confusion. Maybe it is because I am not that familiar with the history of the period but this story is leaving me empty. I cannot recommend Go Down, Moses to anyone. At this point I will never recommend anything written by William Faulkner. */* * * * *
Faulkner’s writing style is to write a line then to define the scene by several more lines in many different ways. It is a pattern he uses throughout the story. He does well by his first showing of the idea but then goes overboard by redefining and reiterating the same scene in so many intellectual ways as to become boring. Most chapters could be just as effective by cutting them by two thirds. I had to look in my dictionary several times to define the words he used. He is a master of finding words to define explicit ideas, but in my case he left me wondering if I was so deficient in vocabulary as to not be worthy of this level of story telling. * / * * * * * Boo Hissss!
School days left me void of literature. I keep hearing about friends who read books during their early school years and even had required book lists to work from. I do not remember having such an assignment. Today, and for the past forty years I have given myself a challenge to read fifty-two books a year. To keep things interesting, I mix up fiction with non-fiction. The non-fiction category is not my favorite, but I endure it nevertheless. Then comes fiction, and I have often spoken about John Steinbeck being my favorite author. He wrote about the Great Depression and the times he lived, and I find that hearing his descriptions fascinating. Another favorite author is James Michener, who based his fiction on real history and included genealogy, geology, astronomy, astrology, ancestry, and much more in describing the era of his work. His stories were never short.
When I browse my library for material it is very easy to stay in the new fiction genre. After a few of these reads they begin to sound alike, so the next time I will head for the stacks to find an author whose name I know, but have never read. This time I decided to check out William Faulkner. His works were published in the forties, and fifties. I selected a volume which has his first four works combined into one volume. I’m reading Go Down, Moses. I suspect this story would be banned by most schools because of the use of the word ‘nigger’ to describe former black slaves who were working as free men but living like slaves in abject poverty. Faulkner does a credible job of formalizing the pronunciation of the black vocabulary, but it is not easy to read. Combine that with the very small print used to fit the four novels into one volume of 1072 pages, and it is slow and hard to comprehend.
At this point in the book I am still unable to formulate whether I like the story or the writing. I will endure this first work and move on to the next one just to save a trip to the library.
As I understand it digital currency is being hailed as something new and radical. Yet, I have been using digital currency for some fifty odd years. It is called a credit card. This new digital currency is being invented by our government and sends up a huge smoke signal warning me that it is another way for Uncle to be looking into my private life for ways to take money out of my pocket. Digital currency would help streamline money transaction, and eliminate the need for paper or coinage. It is my belief that this would be okay if the government would then abolish one of it’s bureaucratic establishments. I must be dreaming, or maybe it is the effect of the cannabis supplemented coffee sweetener that I used today, but I think I saw a bureaucracy closing its doors. Yeah, I must be dreaming. Bureaucracies never go out of business, they only grow bigger.
I just finished reading a book titled “Poverty By America” by Matthew Desmond which deals with ideas of how to abolish poverty in our country. I thought it was a collection of words which I have somehow heard before, but with a slightly new twist. The author proposes the poverty can be eliminated by giving poor people more money. Yep, you read that right. He also proposes that we should break down the walls of racism by giving people of color entry into our neighborhoods. He must not realize that the laws affecting Real Estate allow people of color to buy housing in any neighborhood they want. But, he claims we racist white people build only neighborhoods with huge homes that most people of color can’t afford. He infers that we should be building affordable housing in between the current monster houses that we live in.
When I was much younger and I spent a lot of brain power on subjects like eliminating racism through housing I came up with a scheme that would dictate the spread of races throughout all neighborhoods equally. In other words if the people of color in America are twenty percent of the population then four out of every twenty houses should be sold to blacks, but the blacks must be spread out amongst the white proportionally. Anything less than that would create areas of color density similar to what happens in neighborhoods today. My theory was that if we spread the people we don’t like around equally(every fifth house would go to a black family) throughout the country we would then learn to love our neighbors. I ditched the idea when it struck me that this would not work well with our Constitution. It would mean that We the People would be dictating where people should live. It would also necessitate another bureaucracy to manage the spread of people around the country. What would happen if the ratio was met in one city, and there were still too many people to house? Would we force the over flow of poor people to another city, state, or even to another part of the country? How would we deal with ratios going out of balance within a neighborhood if one or the other color moved leaving a gap in the spread? Would we have to import people from other cities to keep a happy balance? I abandoned the idea after I realized it would be best to let the real estate market take care of buyers and sellers without any government interference dictating who can or cannot buy a given property.
It is a fact that Uncle now requires every village, town, or city to report their ratio of affordable vs unaffordable housing. The government guidelines dictate that federal money can be withheld from communities that do not meet the requirements. I searched the published list for my town of Frankfort and saw that we are perilously deficit in offering affordable housing. In fact, there were very few towns within the Chicago area that meet the criterion. The only neighborhoods that come close to meeting the spec are those that are over sixty years old. In other words they were built at a time when homes were small.
In the last year, I have noticed a resurgence of construction in the neighboring cities of Orland Park and Tinley Park. These cities are building high density neighborhoods cramming as many single family homes and townhomes onto available land. Most likely they are trying to catch up to conform to the government requirement. The neighborhood looks terrible with crowded townhomes as many as ten units in a row, and three stories tall. Alongside are single family homes squeezed onto narrow lots with houses so close to each other that you can shake hands with a neighbor by reaching out a window. They are more packed together than the neighborhood where I grew up. Our houses where so close together that our shoulders brushed up against the buildings when we walked from the front to the back. From a social perspective the neighborhood was nice because we knew almost everyone who lived within five blocks of us. To this day, I can name the families who lived on our street from one end to the other.
Along with the crowded living came a desire to be free and in wide open spaces. Thankfully, Mom and Dad took us visit Grandpa Jim in the country for summers. It was during that time that crooner Bing Crosby came out with a hit song called “Don’t Fence Me In”.
Along with this hit song came a lifelong drive to live free away from crowded cities, and the suburbs were born. I was twenty-three years old when I finally moved from my boyhood home to the suburbs. I was motivated to live in open spaces. I was happy there for thirty years then I got the lust for more space again, and we moved to Frankfort which was a frontier town on the edge of great Illinois farms. Lots of space between buildings and lots of free space. Now, I see a new fad returning toward crowded living spaces. Are we moving forward or backward? I say backward, but the population of the country is growing as the Administration allows thousands of people to cross the borders illegally and then helps them get lost inside our borders. These people are all poor and need places to live. Most likely they will cram into the oldest sections of our great city and force the current occupants to move out. Where will they go? Anywhere there is affordable housing.
In the “good old days” property owners took advantage of the need for more housing by converting their basements and attics into apartments. Most suburbs have enacted laws to prohibit such activity by homeowners. In a typical modern suburb the houses are so huge that the owner could easily add two more families into the space and help pay for his mortgage. In my own home I already have house within my house, all it lacks is a separate entrance. Laws such as the one I just described are part of a “racial wall” described by the author. Another of his recommendations is to tear down the walls designed to prevent undesirable people from living in their neighborhoods. A few of the walls he describes are red lining neighborhoods (Banks with holding loans to people from red-lined areas), charging very high interest rates for people who have low paying jobs, stop exploiting the poor by charging high interest for payday loans, and the list goes on. As I stated above non of these things are new, they have been discussed and in some cases implemented without success.
In conclusion, I would say that this author is restating many old principles espoused by Karl Marx in his attempt to paint communism as a pretty picture.
