 |
| The Adventures of Simplicissimus |
Lawn Nazis
I had forgotten that Friday is landscaping day at my apartment complex. I had been working late, slept in somewhat, and woke to the gentle strains of leaf blowers directly outside my window. It was kind of these gentlemen to give me a wake up call exactly at 8:00am.
The modern corporation has solved the office smoking problem and office sexual harrassment problem by simply not having offices anymore. We all work from home. People think this is a dream job, but it isn't; much of my workday is spent finding a suitable workspace, and our lawns are the workplace of so many others. It is amazing that in an ailing economy we spend so much money keeping up the pretense of fastidiously manicured lawns. As William F Buckley once famously paraphrased La Fontaine, "Quelle est cette merde?" What indeed is this fetish about wide expanses of perfectly clipped grass? More significantly, why do we accept the attendant racket that comes with it? What is most disturbing is that no one, a la Candide, attends to their own garden anymore. Not so long ago, people raked their own damn leaves, and it was a long, meditative session of white noise--the rake scratching along the ground, puffing on a cigarette, and perhaps an Autumn breeze gusting by. Then flinging the cigarette away to set the neighborhood ablaze. Now it is done by others, hired to come and invade one's property with the shrill turbine whine of leaf blowers. The opportunity of meditation is lost, not only for you, but for all your neighbors. But to hell with them, the grounds are perfect.
With no hope of being allowed to concentrate, I dressed and went to the library to work.
The Lyceum of Grabassia
The public libraries in my upscale suburban community are well-appointed and designed in a modern, updated style of the classic Northwest mountain lodge. They have audio visual sections and meeting rooms, banks of computers, spacious sections for Children's literature, Young Adult fiction, and the newest mode, teen-only study rooms. All this unfortunately leaves only marginal space for a few carrels of books, and those are increasingly filled with thrillers, tales of gory lurid gore, bodice rippers, and the latest transcriptions of cultural bloviation.
People do not seem to read in the modern library. Why should they? There is much else to do. Answer your phone, text, tweet, chatter, surf, and scurry about in a daylong session of grabassia.
When did our libraries stop being places of of almost reverent silence and become ersatz Romper Rooms? Since when did libraries have to provide day care services? Likewise, why have large sections of libraries been cordoned off for the exclusive use of pimply, wetwired adolescents? The rest of the library is pretty much taken over by old farts such as myself and a few homeless people, who actually fit in rather better than the rest. They might smell, but they read silently and attentively, or better, doze off.
The Great Sniffer of Koryo
Chief among the annoyances, however, among the screeching brattle of unattended waifs and high whine of high-powered Mexican leaf blowers, is the Dreaded Asian Sniffer. Over the years in the diverse Northwest, I've learned much about Asian cultures--the most useful aspect of which is what Asian people do with their mucus.
To the Japanese, blowing one's nose is a gesture of such mortifying rudeness that were one to use a tissue, he would have to exile himself from refined company pretty much forever. The Japanese solution, therefore, when assaulted by the common cold, is cunningly and unobtrusively to wear a surgical mask wherever you go. And what happens behind the mask, stays behind the mask.
The Chinese, I hesitate to report, simply lay a finger aside the nose and hurl it out onto the sidewalk without further consideration. In fact in Jiangxi province it is considered an egregious insult if you do not luge on your neighbor's doorstep before entering.
The Koreans, being historically caught in the middle of these two cultures, cannot decide what the hell to do and simply sniff. In such manner, kotagji can be stored in the ko for hours on end. Oh yes, and if you believe there exists a more annoying sound in the universe, try enduring the occasional yet inevitable long uptake of a runny nose for an hour or so. No earphone or earbud piping in Metallica, can blot out the deadly sniffer.
Pornography and Invisibility
But what endears me most to the library is that, on the best days, I can almost vanish, mentally at least, from the noisome, attention-deficit world at large. To be fair, allow me to point this out: I am more attention-deficit than most. And that is why the library had in the past been for me a sort of guilty pleasure, a wandering about in a sort of Borgesian pleasure dome. Now that inner world has been replaced by the Internet. Is it trite to say it's not the same? Yes, trite.
When you're in a library, you are physically within a library. When you're in cyberspace, you're probably in your pyjamas, and I shall not conjecture further on your threadedness.
We now pretend to search by means of Googling; back in The Day ("The Day" or "ye olde days" being in my 6 year old daughter's words when queried about an ancient book, "The 80s?"), "googling" was checking out a voluptuous coed from betwixt the books of a nearby carrel. Now it is a lame exercise in which a computer tries to finish your sentence as you type, viz. when I tried to research (for purely academic purposes) the keyword string: "Asian hot" and got rather unsatisfying longtails such as:
asian hotel owners association
Essaying forth once more, I did better with:
asian hot dog eating contest winner
Which, for all practical purposes, was close enough. Bravo for Google! Yet the experience is just not the same. It is simply too... virtual for my taste. If I want exposure to porn, I only need go back to one of the larger city libraries, sit behind some good gentleman, and observe casually his online research. Why, only the other day, I sat in the Bellevue Main Library behind an upstanding African American fellow, and was surprised to see a kind of pornography I had never yet observed (and was heretofore grateful for the fact).
This fellow was in the process of "researching" photographs of extremely corpulent females. Perhaps he had mistakenly landed on a site such as celluliteplanet.com; I am not certain. He expanded a photo of the largest female bollocks imaginable; it not only eclipsed the screen, I thought it might perhaps bring the library servers down.
No such luck. However, the man sniffed not at all, nor made any sound, and it went down as one of my more productive days at the library. So I say, pipe in terabytes of porn, give library passes to the trenchcoat brigade, bring Robert Mapplethorpe himself into the library, let him sign books with... well, let him perform a book signing in his own inimitable way!
Maybe then I can get some damn work done.
