A place among the arts

Vince gave me a book for Christmas, the "Atlas of Remote Islands," by Judith Schlalansky, subtitled "Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot on and Never Will."


According to the colophon, the books was voted the most beautiful German book for 2010, and I believe it; the author not only wrote it, she set the type, drew the maps, and did the book design.


Under the doctrine of fair use, I quote from the entry for Lonely Island:


"Loneliness lies in the center of the Kara Sea in the northern Arctic Ocean. This island is worthy of its name: it is cold and barren, trapped in pack ice all  winter, with  an average annual temperature of -16 degrees; at the height of summer the temperature sometimes rises to just over freezing.


"No one lives there. A former polar observatory has sunk into the snow and abandoned buildings doze in the belly of the bay, facing the narrow spit of land beyond the frozen marsh.


"A prehistoric dragon's skeleton was found here."

the defenestration project

I've always liked the word "defenestration"--it's so Latinate and dignified, but it points to throwing something annoying out a window. It was coined in 1419, when seven town officials (selectmen to you and me) got tossed out a window in Prague (see engraving, left). This triggered the Hussite War, which had something to do with church reform and Bohemia and a bad-tempered Holy Roman Emperor. I don't understand the whole back story and don't want to.

To substitute for this amazing lack of curiosity, I just now made a short list of items that could and should go out the window and into the Vermont snow. At the top is a certain printer in my employ that does pretty much everything except print things; instead, it sends me little error messages about its various digestive issues. After replacing a few parts and cartridges, I've resigned myself to letting it sit and blink (Alarm! Alarm!) and occasionally letting it deliver up a handful of smeary pages folded like a badly-made accordion.

Next out the window is a certain co-worker, who ought to land with a very satisfying thump. Without going into a lot of unprofessional detail, I can say that as I get older my tolerance for poor work performance has worn thin. It's even thinner when a poor performance in one office means a lot more labor in another, and it becomes the blade of a small, sharp knife when I see a poor performer claiming credit, directly or indirectly, for work done quietly and competently by someone else. Out you go.

The last item for today's defenestration is a manuscript, running about 22,000 words, that is without question the worst thing I've ever written. And more's the pity--after four months of messing with it, all I've accomplished is to use up four months I could have spent braiding a rug or polishing the silver. It appears I'm not capable of writing fiction--not because I love writing the truth, but because I'm a really horrible storyteller. I get distracted; I go off on weird tangents; I let my characters do things without authorial permission. The household fantasy that I will write a potboiler murder mystery suspense horror action romance novel that will sell a lot of copies (none my nonfiction books have made much dough) is today officially toast. No satisfying thump with this one; instead, the pages should flutter upward, spiral through the winter air, and scatter artistically. All I want at this point is for the pages to be picked up, one piece at a time, by the mystified citizens of Montpelier.

Rest in peace, but rest on the sidewalk, O Calendar of Saints.