SR Porn

We don’t make a big deal about Christmas around our house. Often, we try to go someplace far away for the holiday, but the excitement of the trip is always tinged with melancholy. December 14th is the anniversary of the 1992 school shooting at Simon’s Rock College in which Galen was murdered. I won’t speak for the rest of my family, but for me this is an occasion to ponder the astonishing nature of a universe that could take our brave, resilient, beautiful boy and leave us with Wayne Lo, his murderer, who snapped and broke all those years ago. It’s a steep meditation.

Wayne writes to me a few times a year, usually with a small check which I deposit in the Galen Gibson Scholarship Trust. He earns the money by selling his artwork, via some guy named Zack, on the internet. This made the news for a moment in the spring of 2007 when a zealous fellow down in Houston coined the term “murderabilia” and decided to crack down on its sale. Murderers, he reasoned, should not profit from their crimes. Media people contacted me about this. I opined that donating money to a scholarship fund was one of the few ways that Wayne Lo, locked in prison for the rest of his life, could try to atone for what he’d done. Society, I told them, has been very efficient about punishment, but backward about reconciliation and rehabilitation. This was not the answer they wanted to hear, so it didn’t get much play.

This past November I got a letter from Wayne that said, in part:

There is a new book out called Ceremonial Violence: a psychological explanation of school shootings by Jonathan Fast. He devotes one chapter (chap. 2) to my crime. I had a friend send me a photocopy of that chapter alone and I discovered that Mr. Fast plagiarizes from Goneboy… He would take a sentence from one part of your book and mix it with another sentence from a different part and form a passage or paragraph… I’m just personally offended that he didn’t even attempt to interview me for the book, but that’s my narcissism speaking.

Well, that piqued my narcissism. I bought a copy of the book and read through chapter 2. I noted first and foremost that Dr. Fast had a fascination with acronyms, perhaps because he thought they made his text sound more authoritative. School shootings thus became SR (school rampage) shootings; the Children’s Gun Violence Prevention Act CGVPTA; Child Access Prevention laws CAP; even the Jefferson County Sherrif’s Office was JCSO.

Fast used several quotes from my book, Gone Boy, all properly attributed. Nonetheless, I got the feeling that he was pilfering my goods. His descriptions of people and situations sounded very like mine. The report of Wayne in prison rocking back and forth on his parents’ first visit came to me directly from Wayne’s father and was reported only in my book; Fast used it without attribution. Out of all the hundreds of pages of testimony by psychiatrists in Wayne Lo’s criminal trial, Fast repeatedly defaulted to the single characterizing sentence or phrase that I had chosen. There were half a dozen other little things, but most damningly, Fast cited and quoted from the firsthand accounts of two students, Jeremy Roberts and Rob Horowitz. Their narratives are accurate enough, but Roberts and Horowitz do not exist. I made those names up to conceal the identities behind them. Fast talked about them as if they were real people.

Perhaps Wayne Lo had a reason beyond narcissism to feel indignant. Judging by his footnotes, Jonathan Fast’s account of the Simon’s Rock case is made up almost entirely of newspaper accounts and other secondary sources. Apparently he did not take the trouble to interview any of the principals. If this was true of his work on Simon’s Rock, what did it say about the rest of his book?

There was nothing to do but read on, and I have to admit it was, in its horrible way, a compelling read. Fast recounts thirteen school shootings, with several of them described a second time in greater detail. Ironies abound. Craven school shooter Luke Woodham pleads for mercy at the end of his spree because he’d delivered a pizza the night before to the arresting officer and had discounted the price. The narratives are shot through with dramatic details. A jury’s verdict is considered during a violent thunderstorm, and then the verdict is read “by the shafts of sunlight that filtered in the courthouse windows.” We get painfully specific reports of five shootings, culminating in a nearly minute-by-minute recitation of Harris and Klebold at Columbine. As an assemblage of school shooting trivia Ceremonial Violence surpasses even the New York Times’ magisterial survey. But in the end, this ceaseless piling up of slaughtered innocents, poignant last words and hellish psychological interiors leaves the reader a little queasy.

I researched my account of the Simon’s Rock shootings from 1992 to 1999, and by the end of my work I probably knew as much as any layman about such events. I can tell you with absolute certainty that there is nothing in Dr. Jonathan Fast’s book that adds materially to what we knew about school shootings and their causes in 2000. School shooters were bullied. Many may have suffered abuse. They were unhappy kids who felt themselves to be outcasts. A not-surprising number of them wore thick glasses or dressed in black. They were all narcissists – “Drama Queens” (Dr. Fast’s term) – and they all exhibited suicidal ideation. Fast’s theory proposes a scenario in which “the candidate gets the idea of turning his suicide into a public ceremony.” He lays this theory out in three pages in his Introduction, and then we’re off to the races. Thirteen “SR” shootings later we’ve had about as much as we can handle. “I was raised in a family of storytellers,” Fast tells us (he’s the son of novelist Howard Fast). Perhaps he means it as a warning. There isn’t much here except the stories, and the stories are unrelievedly, hair-raisingly grotesque.

Back in my Navy days, when there were such things as “dirty books,” much of the smut we’d read aboard ship would be dressed up as important sociological treatises. The novel would begin with an Introduction by a Dr. Whoozits, warning us of the dangers to society inherent in lesbianism, incest, bestiality, or whatever special treat was about to be served up. Ceremonial Violence reminded me of one of those books. It is SR porn – probably a doctoral thesis that got exploited to service our seemingly bottomless fascination with such sickness. (A search for “Columbine” on Amazon.com yields 1547 results.)

Aside from his sloppy adaptation of secondary sources, Dr. Fast should be ashamed of allowing himself to be used in such a manner. Overlook Press should be ashamed of having used him, and we, I suppose, should be ashamed that school shooting books have to get written at all.

As Dr. Fast puts it,

Regardless of our beliefs about the advisability of gun control laws, it is a simple fact that school shootings are impossible without guns that are affordable, available, easy to load and fire, and capable of firing many rounds within a few seconds.

In 2007, when the reporters wanted me to talk about “murderabilia,” I asked them where they were when I wanted to talk about how easy it was for crazy people to get guns in America.

They had no answer for that one.

- Gregory Gibson

On Friday October 10, setup at the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair, booksellers were cautious about pre-fair buying, not knowing what to expect in this economy. But when the line started to form outside prior to Saturday’s opening I heard Louis Collins say: “Well they are coming to the dance. I don’t know if you will find your partner but they are coming to the dance.” Indeed they came and danced, both Saturday and Sunday. Partners were found, (even some slow dancing occured!) SOLD stickers stuck, full bags were carried out. A woman at the fair retrieved her cell phone from her checked bag. Not to price books online, but to take and send images of books and book dealer’s booths by phone to a bed ridden friend who was “at the fair” if not physically, in spirit! I saw several out of town dealers buying, lots of local booksellers who did not setup this year but were there buying. The larger fair space was bright and airy and it felt good, not only to the booksellers but the customers as well. I saw most of the Washington Book Club at the fair, also a few heavyweight buyers from England making those special purchases, the book arts were alive and well at the fair, plenty of customers both days. Canada was well represented, and I spotted the great bookbinder Richart Smart walking the fair with his family (www.oldenglishbindery.com). Matt Ruff (Winner of the Washington Book Award for Fiction this year) was also spotted among the crowd. Filming for the ABAA archive was taking place as well, all afternoon, members recording their stories that will be part of the ABAA archives at the Grolier Club in NYC (Thank you Mike Ginsberg for this great idea!). Fair promoters Louis Collins and Dave Gregor have perfected presenting this fair and it showed in all the little details. Coffee and pastry for the dealers, ample time to setup, the Book Fair dinner Friday night (sponsored by the Book Club of Washington), several birthdays were announced during the fair. One buyer suggested to me that the PA announcer should announce his Melville wants so he could go straight to a certain booth without walking the floor on his own! Seattlei-tes support of this fair, and interest in books, maps, prints, posters, ephemera and the like, was much in evidence over this weekend, a glorious fall weather weekend as well. Great location, nice building, I was impressed by the stock brought out by all the dealers, all around a very classy event. The Pacific Northwest Chapter trotted out their fancy new directory (with color printing) at this event, postcards were give out for the ABAA SF fair in February ’09, dealers were hurrying to get their deposits in for next years fair, and be sure to watch the fair website: www.seattlebookfair.com for pictures of this years event as well as interesting news about next year. If Chief Seattle himself was still around, he would have made an appearance at the fair, hoping to find some great books! See you next year in Seattle! Ed Smith, ABAA ps; 46 ABAA dealers exhibited this year in Seattle!
–
Ed Smith Books
Bainbridge Island, WA
www.edsbooks.com

Many ebay sellers are unhappy due to the unleashing of sweeping changes right before the holiday selling season – including forcing the use of paypal, setting shipping costs for books and other media, and suspending sellers if their feedback falls to merely “good.” The books category is also being swamped by a single seller, buy.com, which accounts for nearly half of all books listed (user id: buy).

This has reignited a search for alternatives that might offer fewer rules and lower fees. And they do exist. None have much reach as yet, and their book listings are nothing compared to books-only databases. But some of these alternatives are taking the “marketplace” concept in new directions, making ebay look as old as it really is (Internet years are even longer than dog years). New sites incorporate “Web 2.0” features that ebay and the databases don’t have, such as instant online communication between buyers and sellers, interactive events, and new functionalities for tagging, search, and browsing.

Sellers seem most excited about sites that recognize this is 2008, not 1998. One in particular that has caught my eye is bonanzle.com, a new start up that is seeing a record ramp up in just a few months, because it is everything ebay once was and now isn’t: fresh, simple, easy to use, and with some great new features, like smart categories and live chat. While it is still a work in progress, it has the instant usability and the viral appeal that made ebay such a phenom in its day. And it seems to be attracting the same antiquarian/vintage crowd that started ebay off.

Another important consideration is that the way people search is changing. Rather than going to a dozen different sites, a lot of people just hit up Google. So, there is much buzz about marketplaces that enable you to easily build a de facto storefront, and then automatically upload your items to search engines like Google. Ecrater.com seems to be the leader here, with 1.4 million listings. Bonanzle, buyitsellit, and blujay are other sites that offer this functionality as well.

Two other sites seem attractive on the surface because of their size, but they have issues. Ioffer.com has been around since 2001 and has 5.6 million listings; ebid.net, started in 1999, has about 1.1 million. Ioffer seems to be attracting mostly new merchandise – at least, judging by the list of buyers’ recent searches, it screams “outlet mall.” Ebid.net is primarily a UK site. It has a US overlay but little actual US business as of yet. It seems “old,” but then it is the most “ebay-like,” if you are just looking to stay in your comfort zone.

You can track metrics for some 20+ alternative sites at Power Sellers Unite. The forums on PSU also are a good place to see which sites are generating the most interest. None of the alternative sites may be the perfect answer, but they do provide some new avenues to explore as ebay moves aggressively toward a retail catalog model, and buyers (who still have no idea how to find abebooks) focus more on top-line searches.

Rebekah Bartlett, Coelacanth Books

Velma Clinton wrote:
I just lost another sale due to the high cost of mailing to foreign countries. The customer did not want to pay over $17.00 to ship a $12.00 book, and I don’t blame her. The book was too big for the Flat Rate Envelope.

If you are having the same problem, perhaps you could send a letter to your Senators and Congressional Repesentative, asking for their assistance in getting the Post Office to reinstate Surface Mail.

I sent mine the following letter (not email – I understand they pay a lot more attention to a snail mail than they do to email):

Dear Senator/Congressman:

I would like to request your assistance in persuading the US Post Office to reinstate Surface Mail for shipments to foreign countries.

I sell used books online. At least once a week, and many weeks more than once, I lose the sale of a book because the postage is too high.

When we had Surface Mail, a heavy book could mail for 5 or 6 dollars, or, with M-Bags, a really heavy book could go for $11.00. Now books weighing as little as 2 pounds cost over $17.00 to mail if they are too large to fit in the Flat Rate Envelope.

When you consider that there are thousands and thousands of online booksellers (one online listing service, Abebooks.com, alone, claims they list books for over 13,500 booksellers), you can see that the Post Office’s policy is dong serious damage to the US economy and the US balance of payments. Millions and millions of dollars are not coming into the US because Surface Mail is no longer an option.

Please use your influence to get the Post Ofice to make Surface Mail available once more.

Get your representative’s address here.
Get your senator’s address here.

Hello All,

I just returned from one of the best weeks of my life at the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar, the one often referred to as “Bookseller Bootcamp”. I arrived feeling a little bit nervous (first trip without my family with me in almost 10 years) and shy (Would I know anybody there and would they even talk to me? I am brand new in this business. Why on earth would I presume I am qualified to call myself a bookseller?) I departed knowing that bookselling is the way I want to spend the rest of the working part of my life, and knowing that there are a variety of ways it will be possible for me to do so. I also left with 62 new colleagues, people who love books as much as I do and who are willing to share information, experiences, and opinions.

From my perspective, the seminar’s strength is that it addresses almost all the levels of bookselling out there — used books and antiquarian books, internet only sellers, people with open shops, by appointment sellers, FOL sellers (and it seems to me there were quite a few seminarians who are FOL volunteers). It addressed writing a catalogue description, imaging books for the internet, and selling at book fairs. A person who is new to the trade can see all of the avenues where she (or he) might best fit in. We had a keynote address from Martin Manley of Alibris, an interesting choice given the ambivalence toward the big databases that many booksellers I know have. Whether we agreed with his opinions, we need to hear his opinions, because it would seem that internet selling is an area which cannot be ignored.

We learned everything from how to run an open shop to buying and selling on the internet to marketing to libraries. We were taught the nuts and bolts of a bookseller’s life, such as how to write a good description and how to scan or photograph our books so they appear accurately in print catalogues and on websites. We were also taught the nuances of pricing books and scouting them. All of our teachers were among the best in the business — Terry Belanger, Tom Congalton and Dan Gregory, Lois Harvey, Kevin Johnson, Chris Volk, Angela Scott, Dan DeSimone, Rob Rulon-Miller, Ed Glaser, and Michael Ginsberg. Their careers run the gamut from bibliographer to Library of Congress to open shop owner to internet bookseller to antiquarian bookseller to modern firsts specialists.

Perhaps the most important thing I will take away from this week is that I didn’t personally know too many other booksellers, and to have the gift of meeting 62 others in one week was a real thrill. My head is still spinning trying to digest all of the information, experiences, and opinions that were shared. Regardless of what type of bookseller we are or would like to be — open shop, internet only, book fair only, FOL volunteer, some combination of all of the above, used books, antiquarian books, etc., it is good to get to know all of the types of booksellers out there because our worlds are interdependent. Besides, there are few other people out there who would enthusiastically listen to discussions of our love of books without having what Terry Belanger called a MEGO (my eyes glaze over) moment.

My primary job is being mother to my two boys (ages 7 and 9), so I haven’t gotten out much (read: ever) in the last ten years, and this may make you giggle if this seminar would be just one of many exciting things you do, but FWIW: last week ranks among the best of my life. That is largely due to the friendliness and willingness of the seminarians and faculty to share information and experiences.

This past week confirmed to me what I want to do for the rest of my life, and showed me many different ways in which it is possible for me to to do so. For those of you who are, like me, working out of your home and just getting started, you feel as if you are working in a vaccuum. You might often wonder if there is anyone else out there like you. Is there anyone who is struggling to write (and lay out) a print catalogue? Is there anyone who wonders if bookselling is a financially viable career choice? Is there anyone who wishes they had other booksellers in their circle of friends? Is There is someone. In fact, there are many of them, and the Colorado Seminar would offer an excellent way for you to get to know them.

Thank you to all those on these lists who attended in years past and whose reports on the seminar encouraged me to apply and attend this year! You’ve helped me cement my decision to become a bookseller and to begin pursuing this career in earnest.

All Best,

Chris Lowenstein @ Book Hunter’s Holiday

Curling Up with a Good Ebook: A Response

Don’t get me wrong, I love books. I have lots of them. But Andrew Marr’s recent column in the Guardian about how e-texts will not replace books really bothered me. It seems designed to comfort those of us over 12 that we, and our cultural artifacts, are not on the way out.

But we are of course. Andrew, those e-text readers really aren’t meant for you and me. Sure, we may play with them, even use them regularly once they get better. But it’s the generations of tomorrow for whom they will be essential. We probably will never “get” e-texts the way someone who grows up with them will. And I don’t doubt that the future is children with brightly colored, large plastic e-text readers, students with one e-text reader rather than a backbreaking load of books, and from there a built-in base of adults who have never known anything else.

Let us imagine, for a moment, not what an e-text reader looks like compared to a book for a reader of today, but what a BOOK would look like to the e-text only reader of tomorrow:

“Today our teacher assigned us a BOOK to read. She said there was no e-text for it, so we would have to read it in the original format. Of course I’ve seen books and even read bits of them, but this is the first time I had to read one all the way through.

Let me tell you, books are a real pain!

It’s heavy and the shape is bulky – can’t slide it into my pocket!

Easy to mess up – if you spill Coke on one you can’t just wipe it off.

Using it is so slooow – turning pages, lots more words on each page, hard to keep track

You can write in it (not much space though) but you can’t search your notes or copy them automatically somewhere else, or email them.

Searching the text is tough – no search button, can’t quick arrow through highlighted terms. You have to look them up in an index in the back, then look up each page individually and read until you find the term.

No quick way to look up the meaning of words or get more info – no hyperlinks, no built-in dictionary.

Can’t cut and paste quotes from the text into your own notes or a paper.

Book doesn’t read to you, and no option for audio notes.

The pictures are OK, but you can’t email them to your friends.”

This is not my opinion, just an attempt to imagine the future, where books will be more or less “collectibles” only – like antique china or pez dispensers. Many books after all are only collectibles now – bought mainly for their historical value, their first edition/signed status, or their steel engravings, rather than as usable texts.

We should also consider that the technology of the book has never actually been stagnant. Many older books for example have typography that is very difficult for modern readers – tiny print, tight margins, cramped columns, strange fonts. Yes, plenty of us still read literature from centuries ago, but usually, while we admire an early copy, we read the text in a modern edition, with a modern layout and typography. The e-text reader will just be another step in the evolution of the book, making the content easier to use and enjoy. We should expect that e-text only users will find the technology and “ease of use” of non-electronic books ever more difficult to appreciate.

I don’t think books will disappear, of course, any more than paintings did when photography came into general use. Instead, as e-text usage expands, the value of books as art objects (and admiration for those who can make them) will likely come to predominate over their usefulness. This future might be 50 years away, but then again, it might not. I had no idea 10 years ago that I would use electronic devices exclusively to look up phone numbers, find maps, and store photos.

- Rebekah Bartlett, Coelacanth Books

Deconstruction

It’s only happened a couple of times in my reading life, and when it has, it’s always been a measure of great upheaval. It’s frightening to me; to others, I fear, it is a great danger. What I’m talking about, of course, is not-reading. It’s the rarest and busiest of days that goes by when I don’t get in my reading time, but when I don’t read, at least for a little bit, for more than two days in a row, well, that just can’t be good.

The worst outbreak of non-reading I’ve ever experienced was–let me count– sixteen years ago, in the wake, wouldn’t you know it, of a horrible break-up. I was reading Stephen Dobyns’s wonderful novel After Shocks/Near Escapes when the unnamable woman broke it off. Two months later, I finally looked over at my bedside table and realized that I hadn’t read a single page of that novel, or any other book. For TWO WHOLE MONTHS! I gave up the Jameson’s and the nightly marathon of Jeopardy, and got back to my reading. Just in time.

And a few months ago, I fell into the same thing. Not a break-up this time, but the dreaded arrival of contractors next door. These young men and their hammers and jackhammers–the new owner and contractor are one and the same–have completely gutted the interior and exterior of the house, and have revamped the foundation at least twice. There’s nothing left but the frame of the house, really. I live in San Francisco, and the houses in this neighborhood are literally wall-to-wall. It was the noise, sure, but the vibrations also, a disruption from deep in the earth. They deconstructed their new house as well as my reading life.

What I lost was my morning reading time. Our habit: I drive my daughter to school about eight, then come back and read for an hour or so with a cup of coffee before I head off into the day to do my work. I teach nights, so mornings are time off for me. And that hour of reading, snugged in the sagging, green armchair that sooner or later has to go, is the foundation of the day for me.

But it disappeared. I just couldn’t read anymore. I’ve kept up my reading through all sorts of noises and disruptions, but this deconstruction really did shake my foundation.

And I found that the work impinged on my other reading time, late at night in bed. I continued to read, but I wasn’t connected; I was waiting, oddly enough, for the sound of the deconstruction to begin again. So, I read without reading; I looked at pages and turned them, and actually finished a book or two, but took nothing in.

And got grumpy, and confused, and just not very pleasant to be around. It’s at these moments I realize how much my reading life grounds me. Why? Does it order the syntax in my brain? Does it offer relief enough from the noise of the world? Does it simply offer that orderly chaos you can’t find elsewhere? Don’t know; don’t care. I need my reading, and without it, I’m screwed, and so is, I’m afraid, everyone else around me.

Then, miracle of miracles, the deconstruction stopped. The house is still nothing but frame, protected by a black scrim and nailed up plywood. But it’s silent. Blessedly so. I read in the mornings, sometimes in the afternoons, and because of the new peace, my night-bed reading is back full force. I’m zooming through the books, and people smile at me again.

I don’t know why the deconstruction stopped–did they run out of money, are the permits all messed up, do they lack the will to continue? Don’t know; don’t care. It’s quiet, and I can read.

It’s obvious the work will start again, and probably quite soon, and that’s why I’m reading faster than ever. I’m trying to bank it. Trying to make the world, at least for now, a better place.

- Lewis Buzbee

Muirhead’s Northern Italy [1925]
Originally uploaded by retro traveler.

Johnny, my friend’s 14-year old son, is pretty sure that I am a treasure hunter. He told me this the other day, whispering it excitedly to me like one would tell another a really cool secret. He had been over to my place with his Dad for the afternoon and had been fascinated with my book collection of old guidebooks.

For the last few years, I have collected guidebooks from the Golden Age of Travel, a 50-year period between 1890 and the outbreak of World War II. I don’t care for the mint condition guidebooks, though. No, my shelves are lined with well-used books that were held by hands of a traveler. Travelers who, for instance, had their worn copy of Baedeker’s Northern Italy open while they gazed upon the Roman Coliseum and then notated the margins with just a glimpse of their thoughts: “Wonderful.” Memories of those long gone and all but forgotten are preserved in little mysterious notes and underlinings; Remnants of a time when a traveler’s confidante wore a red jacket and knew how to keep a secret. I enjoy trying to decipher these secrets, looking at each underlined word, tipped in museum ticket stub, marginal note, and marked map for hints on what the traveler experienced decades ago.

Johnny’s eyes widened when I showed him one of these maps – Florence from a 1924 copy of Muirhead’s Northern Italy Guidebook – and pointed out how the previous owner had circled and crossed out locations that he had most likely visited on his trip. He flipped through the book and noticed a sketch in the rear end paper. It was a rough sketch of a building with quick cribbles as windows and I could almost see the gears turning in Johnny’s head as he studied it, trying to deduce what it was and why the book owner drew it. “See how he drew the top at different levels? I bet it’s of a line of buildings. Maybe he was sitting at a café and liked the look of the row of buildings across the street?” I pointed out that the list on the opposite page was of train departure times from a handful of Italian cities. “Then I bet that he drew this in one of those cities!” He said this to me as if he cracked a code, ready to jump on the next plan to Italy to try to find the building.

On the way to dinner, Johnny came up with a background story for the Italian guidebook owner. He had convinced himself that the sketched building was the location of a hidden treasure. That location with an “x” in pencil on the map of Florence? It was definitely the place where the treasure still resided. I smiled and told him that I’ll go to Italy and check it out, promising to split the treasure with him if I find any. There was some truth in this, actually: I will indeed be going to Italy this winter, specifically to retrace the steps of long-departed travelers based on their marginalia and ephemera left in my books. So maybe I am a treasure hunter after all. Will “X” really mark the spot of a treasure? There’s only one adventurous way to find out!

Retro Traveler is an intrepid explorer, having been to over 20 countries in the last few years. In a few weeks he will be opening retrotravels.net, a non-commercial website that will highlight his collection of well-used guidebooks. See more of his guide book & journal photos at Flickr

Why the Hell Not? -

Lately, my wife and I have been going around saying “Why not? Why the hell not?” when we think of doing something as innocuous as emptying the trash. We’ll get over it in a day or two but might start it up again next week when Mom comes back into town (she has another doctors appointment so I’m pretty sure she’ll make it). She hates the big city (and anything with a population over 500 is a big city). She would rather live out in the middle of the woods by herself. That seems to be one of her favorite expressions – like the limb needs cutting off the tree. O.K. Why not? Why the hell not? And she ties a ladder to the tree, gets a chain saw, climbs the ladder and cuts off the limb. So what? Well, I think its about time she quit doing that since, at the age of 81, she did it and got knocked off the ladder when the limb hit her. She had just had the chain replaced/sharpened or something and the saw cut faster than she though it would. It only resulted in two fractures – one to the right knee and one to the left wrist. She was only laid up about a week before she was up and around again. Well, semi up and around. Most of the up and around was physical therapy for about 6 weeks. Not that she didn’t take advantage of being waited on since she had to stay with us in the big city, rather than at home some 75 miles away with just a few neighbors.

To get back to that “Why not?” thingy. I got to wondering where it came from. Not that Mom couldn’t have made it up herself, but it didn’t really sound like it. Well some searching around lead me to Holden in The Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger. Yep, there were the exact words. She probably read it in 1951 when it first came out or shortly there after, saw the comment, liked it and adopted it for her own use. Was that the first – probably not exactly, but it’s old enough for me to assume that’s where it came from. Oh well, she’s passed it on to me, at least sporadically. It probably won’t die out for quite a good while. Just “Google it” and you’ll see that the expression is alive and well. BTW: Did you know there was a Catcher in the Rye Award. It’s for the Advocacy for Children from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. I’m sure Holden would not have approved. But then again, he might just say “Why not? Why the hell not?”.

De

DeWayne White @ White Unicorn Books