Did you ever lie down thinking “I’m just going to rest for ten minutes” and wake up five hours later?

By the way, yesterday was also the third anniversary of Gerard’s death. It’s very difficult to believe it’s been that long.

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A preview of the cover:

The post Progress on the poetry book appeared first on The New Neo.

Dream on.

Then it seemed highly likely it would be ready by December 1. But then I ran into printer troubles. Trust me – you don’t want to hear the details. So the following is a very quick summary.

I didn’t want to use the print company I’d used for The Name In the Stone, even though I liked the quality of that book, because I wanted a company that would also do the mailings. I found such a company, but the quality of the photos in their proof copy was substandard. So I went back to the original company and ordered a proof from them, thinking I’d figure out a way to deal with the mailings but at least I was pretty sure the print quality would be excellent.

Today I got that proof in the mail, and the quality of the photos was bad. It was completely different from The Name In the Stone, which they had printed for me about a year ago. When I called the company to find out what’s going on, I discovered a little factoid they’d neglected to mention earlier: some time during that year, they had changed their printing machines. Often, when people make a change of that sort, it’s an improvement. They’re not even contending that this was an improvement; it was a downgrade.

Needless to say, I’m unhappy about this. I ended up ordering one more proof from them, though, this time with a different kind of paper they said should help approximate the photo quality of the essay book from last year. I wonder, but I guess I’ll find out.

I still think the poetry book might be ready before the holidays, which was certainly my original plan. But maybe not. I think it’s more important to get it looking right than to rush it for the holidays.

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It’s important to find a pot big enough. The prep requires a lot of cutting of carrots and other veggies. The cooking takes many hours, and then there’s the taking the meat off the bones once it’s pretty much falling apart. In go leftover green beans and a bit of leftover stuffing (most of the stuffing was demolished on Thanksgiving Day). Hey, let’s even dump in a scoop of leftover mashed sweet potatoes for thickening, and a spoonful of cranberry sauce. Why not? Gravy, too. Be creative – in the end, it always tastes good. And the rest of the turkey meat – there’s plenty more – makes turkey salad sandwiches for days.

While I’m doing that, I want to remind you to use the Amazon portal here for Amazon gifts. You might be interested in this book by Eric Trump; I haven’t read it, but I heard him interviewed about it. It’s an account of what the Trump family went through during the years out of power and under siege – which is the book’s title.

But I also especially want to remind you that Gerard Vanderleun’s essay book, still available through the Vanderleun Books website here, is a handsome volume that makes an entertaining read and is a great gift (if I do say so myself, which I do). It’s not political, so you can even give it to liberals on your list. There are only a couple of hardcovers left, but there are plenty of non-flimsy paperbacks.

What’s more, pretty soon the Vanderleun poetry book will be available. I know I’ve said that before, and I was hoping it would be ready by November 1. But I ran into unforeseen formatting trouble and once that was fixed I ran into some difficulties with the printer. Now I’m awaiting book proofs from two different printers, and once I make that decision – hopefully in a week or even less – I’ll make the big announcement that it’s ready for ordering.

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It turns out that formatting poetry in order to create a print hardcopy book is much more difficult than formatting prose for the same type of book. I won’t get into the descriptive weeds here and detail the problems it presents, and why. But suffice to say that, for example, if you look at a poetry book, not only do the lines have to be just so, but the margins can change dramatically from poem to poem in the book. Writing and book formatting programs often have unforeseen problems with this – unforeseen by me, anyway. For most of my life I’ve been reading poetry books and never noticed the intricacies of their printing. I sure do now.

I think – accent on the think – I’ve found an acceptable work-around. But it will take quite a few more hours.

I’m just venting here.

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Anyway, the point is that I’m close to finished with it. I also believe that fewer people will be interested in a poetry book than in the essay book, simply because fewer people are interested in poetry in general. Do you agree?

I was going through some very old photos on my computer, and found this one of Gerard from around 2008 or so. I took it in an airport parking lot; I think he was leaving for home but from where I don’t know. We went on quite a few trips. My cellphone camera was a rather primitive one compared to today’s, so it’s somewhat blurry. But I’m quite fond of it because it captures Gerard in the first couple of years of when I first knew him. He had left New York City in 2002, after living there for many decades, and he still had his city clothes and looked quite dapper; he used to say that in New York when he lived there, your overcoat was like your car in California in that it was the way you presented yourself to the world.

All those New York clothes were lost in the Paradise fire, of course. But Gerard continued to believe it was a good idea not to look like a slob when you went out.

Anyway, here’s the airport photo:

Have a great weekend!

ADDENDUM:

Commenter “RigelDog” suggested I try using a program to blur the photo’s background. And so I did. Here’s the result:

Once I got going with that, I started playing around with programs that make photos look like artwork, such as this effect called “pastel”:

And this, which is high contrast and looks like an Edward Hopper painting to me:

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Formatting the essay book wasn’t easy, but it was a piece of cake compared to formatting poetry. The settings that purport to be appropriate only work for short quotes from poems, and that just won’t do for a book. I figured out a work-around, but then the formatting is messed up for prose chapters such as an introduction and afterward.

You can have poetry or you can have prose, but the latter requires indented paragraphs in a print book (not online, of course) and the former doesn’t. I’ve had a correspondence about this with the help desk of the software program I use, and they said what I’m trying to do can’t be done. It took me ages to learn how to use this program and I’m not going to start all over again with another that might not even solve the problem.

I’ve decided to simply cut way back on any pose sections. After all, the poetry is the thing.

I’m just venting here.

The post I’ve been working on Gerard’s poetry book … appeared first on The New Neo.

Also, for those interested in Barry’s history, please see this. Apparently, Barry has been writing these Substack pieces since January. I read quite a few of them last night and laughed and laughed.

Also, that piece I just linked starts like this:

When people hear that I’m starting a Substack, the question they always ask is: “Dave Barry? Isn’t he dead?”

I’m delighted to report that the answer is: Not yet! I’m still alive, and along with an estimated 85 percent of the Earth’s population, I have a Substack, which I invite you to subscribe to.

This other piece of Barry’s tapped into something that has long bothered me – secretly, because I thought it was just me. But I”m happy to see I’m not the only one who has the difficulty he describes, although I may be an extreme case. As a nightowl, many times when I’ve been in a hotel, I’ve gone to take a shower in the wee hours of the morning and spent at least an hour trying to figure the thing out before I’ve either given up or reluctantly woken my sleeping companion to help crack the code. My husband used to be very very good at that, but perhaps it’s a facility that declines with age. Barry writes:

Hotel shower controls are so complex that they could represent a serious threat to America’s national security, and yet untrained civilians who — we repeat — maybe had a couple of vodkas the night before are expected to somehow know how to operate them. …

Anyway, the good news is that I finally did figure out how to operate that particular hotel shower. Unfortunately, I’ll probably never be in that hotel again, and whatever future hotel showers I encounter will be completely different, thanks to the strict Hotel Shower Manufacturers Official Code of Ethics, which states: “No two hotel showers, even in the same hotel, shall have the same controls.” They’re working on a new wrinkle where the shower controls in your room will actually control the shower in another guest’s room, and vice versa.

Yes, it’s an exciting time for the hotel-shower industry.

I didn’t realize I’d missed Dave Barry, but apparently I did. I’m glad he’s back. We need humor these days, perhaps more than ever.

Speaking of humor, the other day I was describing to a friend the time Gerard and I ate at this restaurant near the beautiful Columbia River Gorge. The restaurant is now defunct, so I won’t be sued for libel (I don’t think) for what I’m about to write, but despite glowing reviews I can say it was probably the worst meal I’ve ever been served in a restaurant. Both Gerard and I ordered the specialty and we had high hopes:

The general rule is the smart diner never went wrong ordering the specialty of the house. And the rule holds true here, with the original chicken ‘n dumplins ($14.50). Enough food to feed two (or one, today and tomorrow), the meal starts with your choice of soup or salad and includes chicken, dumplings and green beans. The vegetables are forgettable, but the chicken is a feast of skinless dark and white meat stewed until fork-tender; the two enormous dumplings, each larger than our fist, are shot through with rich chicken flavor; and the chicken gravy, thanks to its secret ingredient, is pure umami.

It was ghastly, and it was big. Really really big, the dumplings much bigger than my fist and even considerably bigger than Gerard’s fist, and swimming in the most tasteless and gluggy gravy imaginable. The dumplings were dense as neutron stars and even more tasteless than the gravy. The whole thing was so awful I could not eat it and neither could he, and we were not picky eaters ordinarily.

All around us, people were happily chowing down with gusto, and the restaurant was full. We couldn’t understand it at all, but the upshot was that we started to laugh and became nearly helpless with laughter. When a waiter came over and asked how we liked the food, I had to pretend to be having a coughing fit. We paid and left without eating, and got into the car and laughed for about fifteen minutes before we could drive away.

After that, all it ever took for both of us to erupt into gales of laughter was to mention that restaurant.

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That shouldn’t have been a problem. After all, I’ve got three of them, even though my place is rather small. One is a conventional one-rung stepstool that I keep in my kitchen. The second is a two-rung affair that resides in a closet in the bedroom. The third – well, I’ll get to that in a moment.

Standing on the first stepstool, I found I had to really stretch and stretch to reach that bulb. I also found that – now that I’m no longer twenty years old – I felt a bit less stable doing this than in earlier years. But although I managed to finally get that bulb out, I couldn’t quite get the new one in. The fixture kept swinging and eluded my attempts, and I realized I had to get up high enough to hold onto the side of it with one hand while I screwed the bulb in with the other.

Enter stepstool number two, the one with two rungs and a little bar on top to hold onto. I got that one out of the bedroom closet and lugged it to the kitchen. But there I discovered that I wasn’t quite high enough and also that, if I held onto the bar for stability, I still had the swinging fixture problem.

Then there was the third stepstool. That was the one I had trouble finding; I hadn’t used it in years, and it was larger. I knew it probably was in one of the closets, but they are pretty well jammed with stuff and I just couldn’t see it, even with a flashlight.

That stepstool looks like this. Note how tall. Note the high bar. A great stepstool indeed – and it was the first gift Gerard ever gave me.

Yes, an odd gift. But Gerard was no dummy; he knew what he was doing. This gift came to me in January of 2006, when he and I were somewhat acquainted but were not yet romantically involved. I had written this post about a difficult day I’d had full of petty annoyances, and it included the following:

Oh, actually, today wasn’t so bad. It’s just that when I was about to start working on today’s post at my computer, the power went out.

… Oh, right, the toilet will only have one flush in it – I forget why, but something to do with a pump. And in the winter, the cold starts seeping in within minutes, reminding me that lingering around the house would not be a good thing. The computer, the post? Fagettabout it. Time to leave and go about the other business of the day.

Ah yes, time to leave. Leave. And then I remember: that wonderfully convenient electric garage door opener has to be disabled. Now, how do I do that, again? Each time it happens, I have to learn anew–get out the manual and the flashlight (even though the day was young, it was so dark a flashlight was needed to read the diagrams).

Then, out to the garage. Piece of cake. Just pull that red lever dangling from a rope on the ceiling, and then lift the garage door manually, the old-fashioned way. But the red lever is just an inch out of my reach, even when I stand on tiptoe. I can unlock the door to the house, go back to the closet and get out the stepstool. But really, is it necessary? And by now I’m late. So I decide to jump and grab the lever at the top of my jump. I used to be quite the leaper, having been a ballet dancer/teacher not so very long ago …

Well, I guess it’s been longer than I thought between leaps. Or maybe I’m not used to leaping on a concrete floor. Because somewhere between up and down (it didn’t seem to be on the landing; it seemed to happen in the air) I got a sudden sharpish pain in the ankle that went down the foot.

Expletives undeleted, I hobbled around the garage, and found that I could at least walk, although with pain. So I set off.

There was more to the post, but that was the gist of it. About five days later a large package arrived in the mail. What could it be? It was the stepstool, with some sort of clever message from Gerard. It most definitely was an endearing thing as far as I was concerned.

Fast forward to now. I finally found the thing hiding in a closet, hauled it out, and discovered it to be the absolutely perfect instrument for installing that lightbulb. It got me way up there in a way that felt secure enough that all I had to do was to lean my legs and lower torso against that top bar, hold onto the light fixture with one hand, and screw that bulb in with the other. Voilà, mission accomplished!

The gift that keeps on giving.

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So it’s time to do it – really, past time to do it. But still difficult. That blog was his lovingly tended work, full of photos and essays and poetry and humor. There were over five thousand posts there, and the number was only that small because he’d gotten rid of everything prior to 2017 except some old favorites. Gerard could be ruthless that way; he was always pruning the blog.

If you go there now you’ll see a message that it’s closed (some strange code has snuck in, too, and I don’t know how to get rid of that so I’ll let it be). I’m busy canceling the autopays and after that the site will probably give forth a basic 404 message. But I’ve edited the essay book and I’ve got the poetry book in the works, with the latter probably due to appear in the next month or two. I’ll announce it here when it’s available for purchase.

But before I closed Gerard’s blog down I copied a bunch more of his essays into another document and I may – accent on the may – decide to put out a second essay book of his. I’m not sure yet if I will, but I’m considering it.

One of Gerard’s readers has also started a new site so that whoever wants to can continue to post and talk: here it is, in case you’re interested.

Gerard really liked the poem The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. And so do I. So for this occasion, I’ll close with a verse from it that seems appropriate:

Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly—and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.

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