I've taken my work to Madisonville Community College this morning. Various Dolphins losses had left me edgy with my ladies, so I'm expelling myself for a while.
I started out at the student center, which at MCC is a lobby area in a classroom building. I got started on my story about distributed generation of renewable energy while eavesdropping on a table of too-loud 20s. It started out with two guys and a woman and the two guys trying to outoutrageous each other, so you know what that was about: "She killed Patrick Swayze" ... "I still can't believe I got strep throat because of those blankets from the hospital" ... "Melody, thanks for saying 'hi' to us; Jesus!" ... "I come up with a stripper name for everyone I meet" ... "I didn't even know there was a 'technocountry'" ... "She had 'happy birthday' written on her stomach" ... and blah, blah, blah.
But, as this is the community college, there were islands of post20s around the student center, too: a mom outfitting her pre-teen son and daughter with Doritos and soft drinks and instructing them to "not leave this couch before I get back" and an Oxford-and-pleated-slacks man checking office voice messages from his cell phone, for example.
I've relocated to the library. The quietness here actually annoys me more than did the ancillary chatter there, but I was being distracted and tempted by the aroma of grilling cheese from the student-center lunchette. So here I am on a public machine amid the stacks. I figure all of the librarians are just waiting to dial custodial staff in anticipation of my urinating in this spinning chair.
Oh usually it's something much worse than that.
ReplyDeleteI love, love, love "Kentucky Minute."
ReplyDeleteWell, I'll leave that subject behind.
ReplyDeleteI wandered through the stacks to pick out something to flip through while procrastinating on my story. I considered a history of the United States since 1901, a collection of poetry by (Guthrie's own) Robert Penn Warren, a book that is apparently about how sex has changed (?), some old Sports Illustrateds and Nations, a big picture book about the railroads, collections of presidents' papers, Laura Ingraham's book about elites, Carl Sandburg's volumes on Abraham Lincoln, "I'm OK; You're OK," something on marketing principles and "Adventures with D.W. Griffith."
Any guesses as to which one I selected?
I'm going with the old Sports Illustrateds. However, I would urge you to read the acknowledgments in Laura's book.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, about three months ago I decided to give myself a subscription to SI in 1960. Every week, I go online and read the SI that was printed exactly 50 years ago. It's been great. We just started the NFL season -- SI likes the potential for a three-peat between the Colts and the Giants.
ReplyDeleteOh, cool. I will check out the acknowledgments. I passed over her book initially after not finding any names in the index that I recognized.
ReplyDeleteWell you're in the library, so I'll say you went with the book about sex.
ReplyDeleteThese were both solid, educated-guess hypotheses, but, in fact, I grabbed the book on (La Grange's own) David Wark Griffith.
ReplyDeleteThat should be a good book; D.W. Griffith's life story is very, very odd.
ReplyDelete"Griffith's dialect, if such it could be called, fascinated me. His was not the regional speech of Kentucky, which has a recognizable quality all its own. It was more of a personal idiom. Lillian Gish was spoken of as Miss Geeesh, very long-drawn-out. A bomb was always a boom, and a girl was always a gell. In normal conversation his voice was low, slow-paced, and assured, but at the times when he was directing and needed a certain amount of overstatement in a scene, he would become histrionic, almost hammy in his utterances."
ReplyDeleteBrown, Karl Adventures with D.W. Griffith (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973) 29.
Hey if you get a chance let me know what their collection of Alistair MacLean books is like, as well as their collection of Danny Dunn books. Also do they have one of those great picture books of golf courses or baseball fields that I loved so much as a kid?
ReplyDeleteI think I could find where they stock Alistair MacLean, but I'd need to know the Danny Dunn author. And I couldn't find any books on sports at all.
ReplyDeleteJay Williams is the author. These are things I always look for. You will almost never find any of these things at an academic library, but I still always look.
ReplyDeleteI've got tons of those golf course and baseball field books, by the way. Production of those things just exploded about 15 years ago -- about the time people our age had more money to spend.
ReplyDeleteMatthew, you should expand the Wikipedia article on Danny Dunn.
ReplyDeleteThat Wikipedia entry has made me angry. I actually took out the part about Bullfinch being an absent minded professor. Williams made a point of saying that Bullfinch was not an absent minded professor. Also they should point out that Irene was not in the first two books, I think.
ReplyDeleteWell, it has been a challenging last 45 minutes. I returned to the student center with intentions of purchasing a grilled cheese; alas, the lunchette counter closed at 1 p.m. Central. I ended up settling for some brown sugar-and-cinnamon Pop Tarts from a vending machine. I tried for a cup of coffee from another vending machine, but it only took my money. There was a cursive "out of order" Post-It Note affixed to the machine, but it appeared to be an indication that only the "Vanilla Trance" selection was unavailable--not that the whole machine was on the fritz.
ReplyDeleteI glumly ate my Pop Tarts while listening to a half-dozen college boys playing some dice game and browsing over the handbills on a bulletin board: textbooks and old prom dresses for sale, typing and cleaning services, Christian revivals and somebody named "Will Gallery" playing Friday night at something called "Rockford's Place."
So I walked back toward the library (and past some kid in a rust, rusting, rumbling Plymouth Sundance with a bumper sticker for a band, maybe, called "Tub Ring") to return unsatisfied to my renewables story and D.W. Griffith book. Except I figured I better make a pitstop, only to drop all of my story notes on the men's room floor.
Kill me.
I'm glad Matthew is on top of that Wikipedia article, and I think deadlines are awful.
ReplyDelete"The enormous, worldwide success of The Clansman was not entirely unassisted. Griffith, who was a modest and retiring gentleman of the old school of Kentucky, had three publicity men who were not. Bennie Zieman, Willard Keefe, and Jack Lloyd, directed by the master mind of Frank Woods, transmuted Griffith from the figure of a highly successful director of nickelodeon movies into a living legend, the miracle man who had done everything, originated everything, and who was now the Great Master of Masters. ...
ReplyDelete"As usual, Griffith was given great credit for many things he had not done, while he was given no credit at all for the really enormous advances he had brougth to the whole wide world of picture making.
"The greatest of these was the lifting of the lowly nickelodeon storefront theater, with its tinny honky-tonk piano and its windowless, foul-air smelliness, to the grandeur of a great auditorium with a great orchestra and a great picture that ran three hours and filled an entire evening with thrills and excitement in a setting of opulent luxury such as the great masses of working people had never dreamed possible for them. This sort of thing was for the idle rich who went to the opera to see and be seen. But after that first opening night at Clune's Auditorium in Los Angeles, anybody could be a millionaire for three hours and a Griffith snob for the rest of his life."
Brown, 97-98.
No sign of Alistair MacLean or Jay Williams, and that acknowledgment is definitely my favorite thing of Laura Ingraham's that I've ever read.
ReplyDeleteI'm hungry and sleepy, and I miss the ladies. This concludes today's Madisonville Community College episode of "Kentucky minute."
I love Kentucky Minute.
ReplyDelete