055. Open Stacks

on the largeness libraries, people who survive by reading, John McGahern, Jeannette Winterson, an Internet Princess, Doodle Dispatches, a new Notebook + SBB is on Facebook now

It seems to me that being the right size for your world—knowing that both you and your world are not by any means fixed dimensions—is a valuable clue to learning how to live.

Jeannette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal

So, you’re sitting around in some social setting or another, doing the awkward things you do when you’re trying to conduct ordinary discourse with ordinary humans, when the person you’re talking to drops a clue. Maybe it’s a word choice that is slightly out of place in, say, a dive bar—something like sclerotic or evanescent—not so odd that the person is obviously in the writing trade, but notable. Or maybe they mispronounce a word in the way of people who learned vocabulary from seeing the words, not hearing them, like thinking that you pronounce the ‘c’ in the word indict.

Sometimes it happens when you stumble on something you recognize: as when someone has a mattress, lamp, plant and bookshelf, but no other furniture, or a copy of a certain kind of novel…