Multitasking Again

I am listening to Kurt Anderson's Studio 360 online, trying to write anything of consequence for a change, and keeping an ear on the Olympic boxers. I can't see the tv set and dislike boxing, so slop-over sound might not count.

Once I told one of my television production classes that humans multitask; I put a quiz in front of them, told them to take a few lecture notes, turned on a VCR and commenced to lecture on some aspect of production skill. It was a dirty trick and I shouldn't have done it. I wanted to tell them "Welcome to the world." Instead, I observed those who could handle all of it, those who felt like throwing up, and those who became red-faced angry.

Kurt Anderson graduated from the high school at which I taught. His guest, Ursula K. Le Guin, and he are discussing utopia and writing. Inverted utopias are my life. It makes me think of the sermon at St. Timothy's Lutheran this morning around the Lesson, the Gospel and the title of the play, "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change."

I subscribe to the free version of Today in Literature that arrives in my inbox on weekdays. One of the items in it Friday was Powell's Books Tenth Anniversary Essay contest which regards memorable reading experiences. Clinking into the article, I see that one of Kurt Anderson's most memorable reading experiences is Lawrence Wechsler's Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder that he says "astounded and pleased me intensely and became immediately hard-wired into my personal epistemology...The book's pleasure--its maximum memorablility--depends on a certain slow reveal of its secrets. So: trust me: read it."

When he puts it that way, I think I will finish it. It was given to me last spring by my daughter/granddaughter and my son-in-law/grandson-in-law. Those relationships are a long story and I am not going into that now. When I started thinking Mr. Wilson's museum was a real place in LA, I remembered how I looked up the National Geograpic Photographers after reading "The Bridges of Madison County" and was so embarrassed to think I got that caught up in it, I put "Mr. Wilson's Cabinet..." aside. I didn't want another of those memorable embarrassments. Reading a few reviews, I now think that it does exist on Venice Avenue.

A person would think that a librarian would know the difference between fiction and non-fiction. My inverted utopia. Clinking is a word I just coined. I mean it as clicking on links. Maybe "clinking pink" is appropriate for this blog, or "plinking."