Gotta admit this up front: I friggin’ love words. As an English major, a writer, a reader—pick the reason. I love them so much that I keep a list of cool words I’ve encountered that I want to remember. (*pushes up glasses*) So I’m embarking on the 400s with great vim and ebullience. Though, curiously, I’ve thus far restrained myself from owning a physical dictionary, mostly because I can’t decide which version I should have. Plus, with the OED and Merriam-Webster adding new words every year, it would soon be out of date. And I gotta have ALL THE WORDS if I have a book of them. (Erin McKean’s TEDTalk on this topic is a great one if you’re interested. And who wouldn’t be?!)
Regardless, I’m pumped—nay, aflutter—to go through this section and see all the lexical gold we will find. Shall we?
The Dew3:
A Little Book of Language
By David Crystal
Dewey: 400
Random Sentence: “The Smiths will be in their clarence.”
The Way We Talk Now: Commentaries on Language and Culture From NPR’s “Fresh Air”
By Geoffrey Nunberg
Dewey: 400
Random Sentence: “They don’t hear a lot of resemblances to Angelina Jolie, either.”
The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World
By Charles Yang
Dewey: 401.93
Random Sentence: “It would have been fun to know what Adam and Eve said to each other in Africa.”
I watched the 2011 film version of Jane Eyre and instantaneously documented my unvarnished initial thoughts and reactions. I’ve never read the original book, nor know anything about the story, so it’s entirely fresh to me.
“What is hell?” the headmaster asks Jane. A pit of fire, she replies. But she really knew, as others have discovered, that hell is other people.
The schoolmarm pauses her whipping of another girl in class as the headmaster enters. “It is your mission to render her contrite and self-denying,” he says. “Continue.” Woo boy, this is gonna get ugly.
396 No longer used—formerly Women’s position and treatment
397 No longer used—formerly outcast studies
398 Folklore
399 Customs of war & diplomacy
This section is a bit of a grab-bag. I suppose customs, etiquette, and folklore fit together under the broad category of culture, but on the shelves this looks like that one drawer in the kitchen where you throw all that miscellaneous crap that doesn’t have a standard space, like rubber bands and capless pens and scrap paper. Not at all discounting the value of these topics—because how could we live without Emily Post telling us how to behave?!—but clearly some sections are better synthesized and meant to be than others. But that’s why we love Dewey, right? There’s a reason for everything (theoretically… we hope…) so we best try to understand why.
Or these books just needed to be somewhere.
The Dew3:
Breakfast: A History
By Heather Arndt
Dewey: 394.1252
Random Sentence: “For those wanting even less human contact for their meal, there were the automats.”
Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That?: A Modern Guide to Manners
By Henry Alford
Dewey: 395
Random Sentence: “I have benign hand tumors, so don’t worry.”
Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folktales From the Gulf States
By Zora Neale Hurston
Dewey: 398.208996073
Random Sentence: “Tom told his wife, ‘Tell God I’m not here.’”
Honestly, I was surprised by how intrigued I was by this section. Typically I’m not one to fall for anything relating to commerce, but I’m officially coming back to this section to find stuff for my to-read shelf. As represented by the Dew3 picks below, I’m often fascinated by how systems, especially concrete and/or historical, come into being. So while I wouldn’t care much for systems of thought or abstract things, I’m all over the Transcontinental Railroad and space transportation, despite my highly limited knowledge of engineering. Or perhaps it’s because of that lack of knowledge that I’m interested. Knowledge rocks! As do trains!
The Dew3:
The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
By Tim Wu
Dewey: 384
Random Sentence: “Is Google destined to arrive at its Napoleonic moment?”
Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869
By Stephen Ambrose
Dewey: 385.0973
Random Sentence: “This was hard work, dangerous and claustrophobic.”
The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways
By Earl Swift
Dewey: 388.122
Random Sentence: “Even by his standards, he was stinking rich.”
I was an intern at a large advertising agency last summer. One day I was at my desk when a fellow intern stopped by. “Robin Williams is here,” he said. Ha ha, I thought. Probably just trying to prank others interns. “No really,” he said. “He’s on the next floor up.”
We had heard that he was there to research advertising firms for his then-upcoming CBS show The Crazy Ones (which was canceled after a season) so of course we got curious. My desk mate Marie and I went on the hunt, nervous yet excited about the prospect of meeting a Real Celebrity. We ran up the stairs and wandered the cubes, looking for one of the most recognizable people on earth. We came upon a corner office and saw him standing by the wall talking to someone. There weren’t many people around yet, probably because he’d been on the move and incognito. But as we bashfully approached the door, he noticed us and graciously welcomed us in.
Soon a crowd gathered, eager to get face time with the man we all loved from something. When Marie approached, she mentioned she was from France and he immediately began speaking fluent French with her as I took their picture with my phone. I’d decided that I wouldn’t get a picture with him, but I did want to shake his hand. But since I’d followed the French speaking, I said, “I’m not that exotic, but I would like to shake your hands. Thanks for everything you do.” To my dying day I will regret not telling him how rockin’ his beard was. But I’m sure he knew.
We slid past the throbbing crowd and back to our desks, reveling in the brief encounter with a legend and telling the other interns the news.
I’ve often thought about that moment, especially now that Robin has died. But I think most often not about shaking his hand, but about when he welcomed us in, knowing that yet again a crowd would develop and he’d have to hold court in that conference room for yet another round of autographs and pictures and forced conversation. To be sure, conversation never seemed forced with Robin; he always seemed to be the one fueling it with zany antics, spot-on impressions, or even heartfelt monologues. He appeared highly skilled at working the room, person by person. Yet no matter how extroverted a person is, taking the time to do that Lord knows how often has got to be draining. I’m grateful for his willingness to welcome it, for taking time for everyone there, and in every situation when celebrity duty calls. But it’s a duty I wouldn’t want for myself, and it pains me to ponder how heavy that burden feels for people who already struggle with the weight of life in general.
No one can really understand the inner turmoil that led to his demise. There were outward signs that he’s been open about, like his drug and alcohol addictions, but clearly (as always) there was more going on. It’s not our place to speculate, only to mourn and to continue living, that we may contribute a verse.
371 School management; special education; alternative education
372 Elementary education
373 Secondary education
374 Adult education
375 Curriculums
376 No longer used—formerly Education of women
377 No longer used—formerly Ethical education
378 Higher education
379 Government regulation, control, support
A fitting section to happen upon as we approach back-to-school season. It’s a time of year that is bittersweet for me: while I do miss the camaraderie and intellectual rigor of being in school, I don’t miss BSing papers, having to take math, and the peaks and valleys of semester after semester of different work. But every trip to Target these days brings all this back, especially seeing all those school supplies that would be on the list every year but that I would never use. I mean, who uses hole-punch reinforcement stickers?
Anyway, this section goes out to all those teachers returning from the sunny beach and getting back into the classroom to prepare for another year. I had a handful of terrible teachers in my day, but also some great ones. Here’s hoping for your kids’ sake that you’re the latter.
The Dew3:
How Lincoln Learned to Read: Twelve Great Americans and the Educations That Made Them
By Daniel Wolff
Dewey: 370.973
Random Sentence: “He’d sworn off that, but there was this: this hunt for ideas.”
True Notebooks: A Writer’s Year at Juvenile Hall
By Mark Salzman
Dewey: 373.11
Random Sentence: “You stealin’ my chips?”
Be Honest: And Other Advice from Students Across the Country
Edited by Ninive Calegari
Dewey: 371.8
Random Sentence: “You are not our last salvation.”
361 “General social problems”? Really, Dewey? There could (and probably should) be an entire library filled with books in that subclass. But as has been the case with the previous 300s sections, this one gets FascinationPoints™ for dealing with people themselves: the good, the bad, the insane, the pathological, the criminal… We contain multitudes, we humans and our psyches, and it’s all pretty well represented here. So dive in, if you dare, to the Human Experience. Hope you brought a swimming suit because you’re about to get drenched by humanity.
The Dew3:
Devil in the Details: Scenes From An Obsessive Girlhood
By Jennifer Traig
Dewey: 362.196852
Random Sentence: “Instead of tights, I had Torah.”
The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant: An Adoption Story
By Dan Savage
Dewey: 362.73408664
Random Sentence: “I took some more codeine.”
Catch Me If You Can
By Frank Abagnale
Dewey: 364.163
Random Sentence: “After that I was flying kites.”
Keith Houston’s 2013 book Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks is like catnip for word nerds. It’s rife with historical trivia about the more uncommon punctuation marks that have littered language history, including the pilcrow (¶), dagger (†), and interrobang (‽). It also provides background on the symbols we seen all the time, like the hash sign (#) or the ampersand (@). Intrigued? Of course you are! Learn more at shadycharacters.co.uk and read on for some notes I took while reading the book. Caution: extreme geekery ahead.
— Boustrophedon (adj. & adv.): from left to right and right to left in alternating lines (from Greek “as an ox turns in plowing”)
— Komma, kolon, and periodos were initially dots denoting short, medium, and long pauses
— The pilcrow (¶) started as a C (from the Roman capitulum, meaning “chapters”) that was filled in with a vertical line by medieval scribes
— The word pilcrow originated as the Greek paragraphos, which became pelagraphe, which became pelagreffe, whose Middle English pylcrafte turned into pilcrow.
— Alternative names for the interrobang (‽): exclamaquest (which is my favorite), interrapoint, exclarogative
— lb (for “pound”) came from the Roman libra, meaning scales or balances
— oz (for “ounce”) came from medieval Italian onza, meaning twelfth of a Roman pound
— lb with tilde above it (which was used to show a contraction), when written in haste, looked like the hash sign (#); combined with Latin pondo it became the “pound sign”
— The ampersand (@) started as Pompeian graffiti, later becoming part of the alphabet: “X, Y, Z, and per se (by itself) and” – i.e. “ampersand”
— The dagger (†), called obelos (Greek for “roasting spit”) was originally a straight line that marked superfluous lines in a text
— The asterisk (*) (from Greek asteriskos for “little star”) was used for marking genuine lines in Bible translation as opposed to added or mistranslated one
— The em dash (—) was used to censor names or curses, so “dash” became its own epithet
— Exclamation points on early typewriters were made with a period and apostrophe
— There were such things as the commash ,— and semicolash :— but they have faded from use
— Double hyphen (- -) instead of em dash was standard on typewriters; practice proliferated with spread of comics
Time to rally ‘round the flag, sound the horns, and charge into the stacks to do battle with the many books in the 350s. As a Yankee-bred Union man, I’m partial to “The Battle Cry of Freedom” but realize my counterparts below the Mason-Dixon line might prefer the equally catchy but mightily more incendiary “Dixie.” (Whichever one you pick, rest assured that people will judge you for it.)
While the Civil War is the prototypical American military story, you’ll have to head to the 900s to get history on that: this section tackles the armed forces themselves in all their diversity (as well as “public administration,” whatever that means). I’m not much of a military buff. I’m probably most familiar with World War II, whether because my familial connection to it through my grandpa or the plethora of popular and academic readings and pop-culture renderings of it. While I can’t say I’m glad that there’s a lot of interest in the armed forces, it’s certainly a huge part of American culture, and human nature for that matter.
The Dew3:
Badass Ultimate Deathmatch: Skull-crushing True Stories of the Most Hardcore Duels, Showdowns, Fistfights, Last Stands, Suicide Charges, and Military Engagements of All Time
By Ben Thompson
Dewey: 355.0092
Random Sentence: “I think we can all see that this is pretty messed up.”
The Troopers: An Informal History of the Plains Cavalry, 1865-1890
By S.E. Whitman
Dewey: 357.10973
Random Sentence: “Nor could the Republicans duck.”
The Heart and the Fist: The Education of A Humanitarian, the Making of A Navy SEAL
By Eric Greitens
Dewey: 359.984
Random Sentence: “It’s death. There is no prize for 2nd place.”
I’ve seen a face I won’t soon forget. It’s the face of an unsure redemption, of grace on the upswing. Of counting tenuous steps as tiny miracles. This face is a freshly washed used car whose surface is clean again, but whose frame within still carries the weather and rust. It’s a face leading a journey from point A to point B, its body taking those tenuous steps perhaps not for the first time, but nevertheless in abject terror. It’s a good thing this face is flexible, for its pieces can come together to form a portrait that is more pleasing and assured than the muddled innards it covers. A stoic smile, forward gaze, hopeful laughter—all evidence that the gears are turning still, that the car may be well used and probably unsellable but it is still a car on the move.
The face, you can see, is a powerful thing. I saw this power in the library the other day, on the train two years ago, and in the movie This Is Martin Bonner.
The man in the library came to the desk, to-go coffee cup in hand, with a question. “Where are your books about Alcoholics Anonymous?” I checked the catalog to see what we had in the stacks and we walked to 362, Social Welfare Problems & Services. “I have a meeting in an hour nearby and I just wanted something to read until then,” he said as I scanned the spines for what he wanted. A meeting? Oh. A meeting. He was unashamed to show that he meant AA, that these books weren’t for “a friend” or his mother. He was drinking coffee, going to the library, and then going to a meeting, all to make himself better. And he had that face in front of it all: sober in every way, clear-eyed, pragmatically hopeful, still emerging from the darkness but happy to do so.
I saw the same face on another man, but without the pat assurances of redemption. On a late train home I saw him sitting alone, he and I the only remaining riders in the barreling train car. His workman’s books, rugged jeans, and thick jacket told of hardy work and long days. His near-bald head was greyed along the sides, and his face—the face—was wrinkled by age and strain. But his eyes (isn’t it always the eyes?) told the rest of the story. They saw far beyond the train car he was riding with me through the darkness. They projected a hopeful vision of the near future, when he would leave the train and take a bus (or walk, or drive) to his final destination, a place that seemed especially trepidatious tonight. Whom was he going to see, and why? An estranged daughter he had wounded in too many ways? An ex-wife he wanted to win back? Whoever it was, they had his full attention. He clutched spiral notebooks, unfolding them now and again to sneak a peek, then closing them and trying to send his attention elsewhere. It was as if he had written carefully chosen remarks in those notebooks, a long-time-coming speech that would need to rectify whatever he was carrying that night from his past toward his approaching future. If his face indicated anything, it was his doubt of success. His fidgety hands preempted any attempt his face made to tell anything but the truth. And the truth was, as I saw it, he was terrified.
I saw the face, too, in Chad Hartigan’s This Is Martin Bonner (2013), a serene and sure film about two men with a faith problem. Martin, a recently bankrupt former church business manager, is a volunteer coordinator for a religious non-profit that prepares inmates for life on the outside through a strenuous work program. The film opens with Martin pitching an inmate on joining the program, which emphasizes rebuilding the prisoners’ “commitment to community.” The inmate balks at this prospect: “What’s in it for me?” he asks with an edge.
Martin, it seems, could ask the same thing. Divorced, separated from his adult children, working for an organization whose faith he no longer holds, he gets through each lonely day with the face we have all worn at some point—the one that says I don’t know, but I’m trying. He buys art at auction and on eBay to decorate his barren abode. He attends (at his daughter’s behest) a speed-dating event despite strong reluctance and low expectations. He sits through a promotional video filled with earnest testimonials extolling the virtues of the inmate rehabilitation program, his stoic face belying his spiritual ennui.
Yet through all of this he becomes an unlikely refuge for Travis, a freshly paroled convict whom Martin picks up from prison. They go to a cafe and Travis tastes good coffee for the first time in years. It’s here we see in Travis’ face the dim light of renewal starting to emerge, the kindling dawn that trails a long, dark night. His face, cautious and humble, tells tales learned the hard way and behind bars as only small graces like good coffee can trigger. His past self—convicted of vehicular manslaughter twelve years ago—is gone. He has a new self now, but for what?
Travis dines with his assigned mentor, who in Travis’s words is “very Christian,” well-meaning and friendly but uncomfortably certain of his role as God’s disciple. When Martin and Travis meet again, Travis shares this with Martin and asks him, only half-jokingly, if he’s “very Christian” too.
“I’ve got a degree in theology and worked for the church for many years,” Martin deadpans.
“I should have known,” says Travis, resigned to more proselytizing.
“But that shouldn’t mean anything,” Martin replies. “I had what you call a ‘crisis of faith’ a few years ago. I woke up one Sunday morning and I didn’t want to go to church anymore. I felt I’d sacrificed enough of my life to God, and I didn’t want to do it anymore. So I woke up selfish and it hasn’t gone away.”
“So you quit the church?”
“No. I got fired for getting divorced.”
“And you still wanted to work for a Christian organization?”
“Frankly, Travis, they were the only people who would hire me. I applied for a manager’s position at Starbucks and couldn’t get an interview.”
I don’t know, but I’m trying.
Every day provides new opportunities for these men to struggle for tiny victories, for just a flicker of light to illuminate their darkened paths. Martin struggles to connect (quite literally) with his adult son, who for some reason won’t return Martin’s many calls. Finally, Martin receives a gift in the mail: a painting from his son, which might as well have been an olive branch. Similarly, Travis strives toward redemption in a meeting with his estranged daughter, who in his decade-long absence has grown into a young woman who doesn’t know her father. The conversation is awkward, stilted, each fumbling to connect with someone they know ought to love but can’t, at least not right now. Travis, desperate for his new life to begin, wants to make up for lost time, but his daughter, though willing to have a relationship, still wants to take it slow.
I don’t know, but I’m trying.
I could be wrong about these men and their faces. I don’t know their lives truly. Perhaps I saw what I wanted to see, and projected onto their faces stories I wanted to believe but didn’t know for sure were true. I was happy for the man killing time in the library before another chair circle, another Serenity Prayer, and another day in the struggle, but I could be wrong about him. I was hopeful for the man on the train whose destination I did not know but whose sincerity in getting there was evident, but I could be wrong about him too. And I was glad to see the two men in This Is Martin Bonner find each other as they traversed with fear and trembling the tightrope between faith and doubt, but perhaps another viewer would see in them something entirely different.
Favorite courtroom drama? 12 Angry Men, hands down. I’m also a sucker for Aaron Sorkin’s smooth, laser-fast writing in A Few Good Men and the politically hokey yet dramatic flair of Runaway Jury. But we’re talking about real law, aren’t we. In that case, I suppose it’s time for a serious, substantive discussion about 347 Civil Procedure & Courts or 349 Law of Specific Jurisdictions & Areas. Anyone? Bueller? That’s what I thought.
Law (and I’m sure most lawyers would agree, though don’t litigate me on this because I have zero evidence to back it up) is way more boring in real life than in the movies. And what isn’t? I’m much rather watch Tom Cruise cruise his way through witty monologues than listen to civil attorneys drone on about procedure and precedent in cases from before the Civil War. Am I being unfair? Sue me.
(Please don’t sue me.)
The Dew3:
Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution
By Richard Beeman
Dewey: 342.7302
Random Sentence: “Without naming it, Wilson was calling for the creation of an electoral college.”
Don’t Pee on My Leg and Tell Me It’s Raining: America’s Toughest Family Court Judge Speaks Out
By Judy Scheindlin
Dewey: 346.7470150269
Random Sentence: “This is not Let’s Make A Deal, and I’m not Marty Hall!”
The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
By Jeffrey Toobin
Dewey: 347.7326
Random Sentence: “He dominated the arguments to an almost embarrassing degree.”
There’s new quarterback drama in Green Bay this season that will likely quicken the blood flow through the cheese-clogged arteries of Packers fans like me. We are lucky that it does not involve the health status of Aaron Rodgers, who looks yet again ready to conquer the league. Rather, it involves whether Brett Favre will be booed when he returns to Lambeau Field for the first time as a retired player.
He won’t be.
The man himself acknowledges this (or at least hopes for it), saying he’s not worried about being booed for leaving and playing for the Vikings because “I’m well aware that you can’t please everyone. Not everyone’s going to like you regardless, and you know what, so be it. But I think the 16 years that I had in Green Bay speaks for itself.” Of course, Favre was booed when he returned to Lambeau as a Viking in 2009, and under the circumstances understandably so. But those hard feelings have softened considerably since then. Why?
Because absence makes Packers fans’ hearts grow Favrer. Since the Man of Mississippi left in 2008, the team has enjoyed a Super Bowl victory, an all-star quarterback with a strong backing crew, and a long string of successful seasons; how can Packers fans not be happy? And now that Favre has been away from the game for three full seasons after a checkered post-Packers denouement, reuniting feels all the more desirable. It’s also inevitable, given the unanimous consent for Favre’s entrance into the Hall of Fame in 2016.
I think all parties involved in 2008’s acrimonious split—Favre, the Packers organization, and especially the fans—long for restoration. When I think of Favre I want to think about the 2008 divisional playoff game against the Seahawks, the audible to Andre Rison in Super Bowl XXXI, the Oakland game, and the prankster. Sure, he also brings with him the interceptions, the occasional scuzziness, and 4th-and-26. But when the prodigal son returns home, you don’t demand a confession or rehash grievances. You celebrate. You remember that football is just a game, and that players are people too.
And you, if you’re like me, eagerly anticipate Bart Starr, Brett Favre, and Aaron Rodgers standing together for the first time for a long-overdue photo-op. Packers Nation, let’s hope this happens soon.
Gotta be honest: I was not expecting to find as many interesting books in this section as I did. Like another theoretical principle involving numbers, economics scares me. (I do take great pleasure in the good work of the people at Planet Money, whose mission is to speak plainly about the economy so number-dumb English majors like me can understand what’s going on in the world.) But when I saw what “land economics” meant book-wise (essentially, how to take care of nature) and that “public finance” isn’t quite as mind-numbing as it sounds (yet I’ll still leave it to the financiers—try not to crash the world economy again!), I felt encouraged. There’s plenty to be bored by here, as with most sections, but also more than meets the perusing eye.
The Dew3:
John Muir and the Ice That Started A Fire: How A Visionary and the Glaciers of Alaska Changed America
By Kim Heacox
Dewey: 333.72
Random Sentence: “His stout muffled body seemed all one skipping muscle.”
A Sand County Almanac: With Other Essays on Conservation From Round River
By Aldo Leopold
Dewey: 333.72
Random Sentence: “There is a peculiar virtue in the music of elusive birds.”
Belching Out the Devil: Global Adventures With Coca-Cola
By Mark Thomas
Dewey: 338.766362
Random Sentence: “Are you a porn star?”
With respect to the late, great Roger Ebert, I’m taking the name of his memoir and biographical documentary and giving it instead to Richard Linklater’s new epic novel of a film, for it is Life Itself.
Boyhood chronicles the young life of Mason (Ellar Coltrane), who at the film’s beginning is a six-year-old on his back, gazing up at a blue sky. He’s in trouble at school for shoving rocks into a classroom pencil sharpener — not because he wanted to destroy it, but because, he tells his mom after she leaves the principal’s office, he thought he could make arrowheads for his burgeoning collection. Such a small moment of innocent longing comes to typify Mason and his journey, which we get to witness throughout the rest of the film’s twelve-year time frame.
Most Hollywood biopics take the “greatest hits” view of their subject’s life. They often glide over childhood to establish some running themes before skipping to adulthood to get to the “real” or familiar story: J. Edgar and Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom are recent examples of this. But Linklater, he of the intimately expansive Before series, he’s a deep-cut kind of guy. Rather than, say, making a pit stop in childhood on the way to adulthood — where supposed Important Things happen and Life Lessons are learned — it’s as if he rented a place in town so he could stay as long as necessary to really understand where he was, akin to a documentarian or journalist. Linklater the director seems not like the guy at the party who enters with a bang and works the room all night with a procession of drinks in hand, but the one in the corner talking to one person all night about everything — mutual acquaintances, pop culture arcana, and the familiar tropes of life we often don’t know we share with others until we share them with others. He has an eye trained on the truth.
Boyhood unveils its truths deliberately and episodically, year after year adding new dispatches from the front lines of Mason’s life. These dispatches are often celebratory, sometimes jarring, but mostly they catalog life’s banalities, the tiny triumphs and tragedies that accumulate into something approaching a story. In an interview with The Dissolve, Linklater says Boyhood is “all about the little things that don’t have a place in a movie. … This is all the shit they cut out of [a] movie.” This isn’t Beatles 1, a compilation of greatest hits with all the very best the band offered; it’s the Anthology series, a deep dive into the band’s catalog that juxtaposes alternate cuts of the classics hits with obscure and ordinary songs that never get radio play.
The film zooms in to the granular level and stays there, preferring to consider some of the moments that won’t make the slideshow at high school graduation. He makes a virtue out of seeing the cosmic in the quotidian, not unlike, as Brett McCracken noted, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, which considers similar connections between a Texas boyhood and the cosmos. Malick employs a much greater visual artistry than Linklater does in general, and with Boyhood specifically, but both filmmakers are concerned with the long game. They delight in capturing the beauty of detail and the rich story such details can tell.
Boyhood captures not just a person but a time and a place. The film is indeed the step-by-step story of a boy’s emerging from boyhood, but it is also a profile of a place. In the literal sense this place is Texas, where Mason — an often frustrated member of an itinerant family — lives in various homes and goes to various schools, haunting the backyards, basements, and back alleys that seem to draw boys in their restless wandering. In another sense the place of boyhood is psychological: it’s a confining, often confusing place where hyperactivity is stifled, where self-determination is chimerical, where the specter of sexuality haunts every interaction with girls and informs (poorly) the vulgar sex talks with other boys, where you’re constantly being told what to do, and where your well-being is almost always at the whim of adults who may or may not deserve such a vital power.
I’m very familiar with the place Boyhood lives in. Excepting a few key differences, I saw so many moments in Mason’s story, little and large, that harmonized with my own.
When as Mason’s mom drove him and his sister away to a new city he saw his neighborhood friend biking behind them as a last goodbye, I saw in my mind the dreadful day my childhood best friend from down the street moved away with his family, and the weekend before when we had one last sleepover and wore our Batman pajamas and wrestled with my dad.
When Mason aloofly played video games on an enormous Apple iMac G3, I saw my fifth-grade computer lab where I wrote a short story about mice playing games and found refuge from my teacher who assigned essays as punishment for peccadillos instead of for teaching us how to write better.
When Mason and his step-siblings were barred from drinking soda by an oppressive father yet in the next scene walked home from school with Cokes proudly in hand, I felt the exhilaration of sneaking to Walgreen’s one summer with my friend to buy candy forbidden by his mother and eating it all in a fury before returning home.
When Mason’s biological dad brought him to an Astros game against the Brewers, I reminisced about trips with my own dad to County Stadium (and then Miller Park) in Milwaukee to see those very Brewers and get autographs during batting practice in between stadium hot dogs.
When Mason entered middle school and hung with kids who clearly were bad influences on him yet offered friendship and camaraderie in the fight against the seeping oppression of puberty, I remembered my own struggles with peer pressure and in crafting an identity that fit in the nebulous space between family, friends, and myself.
When Mason’s high-school photography teacher lectured him condescendingly in the dark room about his aimlessness and impractically whimsical photos, I recalled clashing with a teacher freshman year who was as frustrated by my antagonistic apathy as I was by her overbearing personality.
When I saw Boyhood, I saw my life itself. I saw an hourglass full of sand that drains way too quickly. I saw how every little moment is another grain we can add to give us a little more time, but only if we take the time to appreciate them. “Love all of God’s creation,” exhorts The Tree of Life, “both the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love animals, love plants, love each thing. If you love each thing, you will perceive the mystery of God in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin tirelessly to perceive more and more of it every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an entire, universal love.”
Driving to college through the Texas desert, Mason stops at a gas station to fill up. He pulls out his camera and starts shooting the little things he sees around him: the architecture, the people, the sky… photography teacher be damned. Once again he’s the daydreaming kid considering the clouds, but now with the accumulated knowledge from a boyhood survived. He’ll soon be filing dispatches from new places — college, career, marriage, fatherhood — ever adding to the hourglass new grains of sand, each a story of life in itself.
Ah yes, politics: the second of the Banned At Thanksgiving Dinner topics is finally at hand. Personally, I’m fascinated by politics (American specifically). Notice I didn’t say I love them: as a history nut I enjoy viewing current events in historical context, and also enjoy dissecting the various political narratives that come out of them, but horse-race politics disgust me. I’m a moderate through and through, leaning left on some issues and right on others, but I’m a radical in my view that cable news is generally a vapid abomination of journalism and that politics in the U.S. is a festering swamp of ego and soul-crushing skullduggery.
All that to say that I took extra care in this section to avoid those shoddy polemics by pundits, hucksters, and otherwise annoying public figures who for some cosmically sad reason make a lot of money saying stupid and/or wrong things on TV. There are so many of those books! But there are just as many interesting, well-written ones about a variety of political issues that you ought to check out.
The Dew3:
The Black Panthers Speak
Dewey: 322.42
Random Sentence: “Whose benefit are they concerned with, Huey P. Newton’s or black lawyers?”
Freedom Summer: The Savage Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America A Democracy
By Bruce Watson
Dewey: 323.1196
Random Sentence: “Beer cans flew, and a SNCC car’s tires were slashed.”
Will the Gentleman Yield: The Congressional Record Humor Book
Dewey: 328.7300207
Random Sentence: “I await with eager anticipation my trophy.”
319 General statistics Of other parts of the world
Man… some slim pickin’s here. Besides the series of World Almanacs that go a few years back, literally the only other books my library has are the two other ones featured below. (Not even the Grays Sports Almanac? C’mon library!) On the one hand, this reveals the woeful lack of interest in statistics, which are fundamental tools for understanding our world. On the other hand, statistics are super boring (if you aren’t a Nate Silver acolyte at least), so I’m hardly weeping here.
Does anyone else’s library have a paucity of statistical representation in the stacks? And does anyone care? I’m not trying to be flippant here; public libraries have a obligation to the reading habits and desires of their local citizenry and not necessarily to a completist’s quest for ALL THE INFORMATION. So if that means, skimping on the stats, then so be it. More room for cooler stuff like history and… really anything that isn’t statistics.
The Dew3:
The World Almanac and Book of Facts, 2014
By Sarah Janssen
Dewey: 310
Random Sentence: “Illinois electricity use/cost: 770 kWh, $90.80.“
America’s Ranking Among Nations: A Global Perspective of the United States in Graphic Detail
By Michael Dulberger
Dewey: 317.3
Random Sentence: “In 2011, India had 12 times the population density (persons per square mile) as the United States.”
The Unofficial U.S. Census: Things the Official U.S. Census Doesn’t Tell You About America
By Les Krantz
Dewey: 317.3
Random Sentence: “But in the end, even Stephen Hawking says time travel is probably not going to happen.”
Welcome to the 300s! Officially designated for the social sciences, I’m calling it the Human Jungle because it gets into the thick of stuff about people and cultures. I don’t know about yours, but in my library this section went on for sooooo long. Understandably so, since the subjects are so big and broadly defined, with new research and ideas coming out of them all the time. But I was pleased to see just how diverse the books were as I walked down the aisles.
Though I had very little academic experience in sociology (English and history all the way, y’all), I’m fascinated by how people influence culture and vice versa. Though much of what we know about that becomes outdated as time goes by and new information surfaces, I like to see the variety of books in the 300s as documentation of the evolution of humans’ understanding of humanity. Such a thing has been and always will be incomplete, but that won’t be for lack of trying.
The Dew3:
Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy
By Emily Bazelon
Dewey: 302.34
Random Sentence: “I don’t know what else I can do to protect my son.”
Race Matters
By Cornel West
Dewey: 305.800973
Random Sentence: “Black anti-Semitism and Jewish antiblack racism are real, and both are as profoundly American as cherry pie.”
American Nerd: The Story of My People
By Benjamin Nugent
Dewey: 305.9085
Random Sentence: “The newt impulse exists among sci-fi fans, but in a much subtler way.”
As acknowledged back in DDC 220-229, the 200s have been overwhelmingly biased toward Christianity. But don’t fear, every other religious person reading this: your time has come! The Lords of Dewey have deigned the 290s the “Oh Crap We Forgot All The Other Religions” section. Hence Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and every other possible religious -ism bunched together in the caboose for a SparkNotes tour through ancient and modern religion and spirituality. Certainly not adequate space for the plethora of writing out there, but it’s the best Dewey is willing to do at this point.
Time for an #OccupyDewey campaign? Only the people can decide. Meanwhile, we’ve concluded what has to be the most contentious section in all of Dewey. (What’s that? The 320s are Political Science?)
The Dew3:
Buddha or Bust: In Search of Truth, Meaning, Happiness and the Man Who Found Them All By Perry Garfinkel Dewey: 294.3 Random Sentence: “Like any tourist, I was eager to visit what has been dubbed the Disneyland of Buddhist monasteries.”
Bring Me the Rhinoceros: And Other Zen Koans That Will Save Your Life By John Tarrant Dewey: 294.34432 Random Sentence: “Why can’t clear-eyed Bodhisattvas sever the red thread?”
Heaven on Earth: A Journey Through Shari’a Law From the Deserts of Ancient Arabia to the Streets of the Modern Muslim World By Sadakat Kadri Dewey: 297 Random Sentence: “Shafi’i’s vision, as amplified by later generations of students, was destined to prevail.”
