Yellowed Pages Bookstore

A little bell rang as I pushed open the door in the back of the bookstore. The familiar smell of old paper and dust greeted my nose. The most notable thing, of course, was the sight of thousands of books stacked on their wooden shelves. Music played, and it matched everything else in the store with its ancience.
I decided to head to the front of the store and start from there, so as to be able to walk through, describing it, and maybe make sense of it all. The place was like a labyrinth, it's wall made of books. One could get lost in the maze.
The old man who runs the place greeted me as I walked through. He's a friendly enough old man with white hair that seems to be yellowing just like the pages in his store, a little trim mustache, and eyes that smile behind square, black-rimmed eyeglasses. I told him that I just wanted to observe his shop for an English paper. He told me not to write about the mess.
I made it to the front of the store, the 48th street side that nobody uses. Directly in front of me were loads of records, everything from Mitch Ryder and Willie Nile to a record entitled "Gypsys, Tramps, & Thieves." Boxes littered the surrounding floor.
To the left was the Children's section, characterized by bright colors, a fun atmosphere, and generally thinner spines. A little chair stood lonely against a shelf, and looked like it would fit only the teeniest of children. To the right, a little piece of printed paper labeled the section "General Fiction."
As I walked on, turning to the left again, I came upon a little nook, a closet of a section with a doorway made of bookshelves that you could enter through and move a few feet down to you left or your right in the enclosed area. This section was the Classics. A big, white book entitled The Yale Shakespeare sat on the floor--the biggest volume I've ever seen! And ornate Harvard Classics lined the top shelf on the back wall of the little hidden section.
I walked out of the closet and turned to the right this time where I was greeted with books that had metallic, flowing letters that spelled out titles such as Almost a Lady and Savage Hope. A poster of a cloud and little white birds flying across a blue sky designated the Romance section.
And this was only the beginning of my journey through the maze of knowledge...

Video

Pocahontas in French... gorgeous. C'est manifique!

Telephones Through Time

I went to the Frank H. Woods Telephone Pioneer Museum on Sunday:

We walked into the small building and were greeted by a friendly-looking old man sitting behind the desk who said, "Welcome to our museum." Yvonne and I signed in, then wandered further into the building. There were various contraptions behind a glass wall. The first thing that caught my eye was the little machine at the upper left hand corner of the wall... the first ever telephone. ...It looked more like a little wooden box with some metal on it. I was wondering two things, 'where do speak into it at?' and 'where do you listen?'

The next room we walked into had the manicans in it representing the women who operated the old switch boards. I was thinking, wow, the telephone operaters of today have it really easy!

We continued to meander toward the back of the buiding coming into a much more open room with tons of old-fashioned telephones, offices, phone booths, circuts, and various other contraptions. I noticed the little things of course, like the "Mr. Banks hat" (named after the Mary Poppins character) hanging on a coat hanger in the mock office. It fit perfectly with the time period, because the phones in this room were the ones with the listening device that you hold to your ear while you speak into the part that stays on the wall (just like in Mary Poppins). There was even a really weird phone that was used in businesses that could be pulled far out from the wall as it was conneceted to it with a weird metal spring.

Next, we moved into a very dusty room, with an old car parked in it that fascinated Yvonne. The old man from the front desk came back to talk to us at this point. Of all the pieces of history that we saw, I think he was the most interesting. He started pointing things out in the back of the truck that Yvonne and I never would have noticed otherwise.

He was an actual telephone man. He worked for the telephone and telegraph company for 33 years! He started as a clean up kinda man and worked his way through a series of steps until he was a foreman. He had so many experiences and so much knowledge to share.

He remained our guide as we toured the rest of the place. The next room was the most visually entertaining. It had the "Phones in Colour!" for the first time. There was even a painter's palette with little tiny phones in all different colors where the paint should have been. Also, the "Eloquent Phones" made their debut in this room, featuring the dial on the bottum of the phone so you could take it all with you for convienience. There were themed phones in this room as well; everything from phones held by Mickey Mouse to apples, Harleys, Garfield, and even a ketchup bottle! Imagine if you walked into the kitchen to see someone talking with a ketchup bottle pressed to their head!

As we got ready to leave I looked more closely at the artwork. There was one depicting Alexender Graham Bell making the first long distance phone call (from Chicago to New York, I believe) with many important-looking men standing around him. Another showed a man whose name slips my mind out in a snow storm, checking the phone lines. It was about the importance of service and based on a real man who was very dedicated to the job and just recently passed away. The neatest one, in my opinion, was called "Weavers of Speech." It was of a woman stringing her tangle of lines of communication from the poles on the right side, behind her, to the city, country and suburbs on the other side. In it's time, it was in a newspaper, used for advertisment.

As we left, we said goodbye to our guide and talked about how amazing it is how fast all of this happened. In the last hundred-ish years we have gone from the very beginning of telephones to little tiny cell phones that can be carried about in a back pocket. It's strange to think that our grandchildren will laugh at home phones, which we have been so used to until just recently.

I also thought about how that old man was a living history. And I wondered, what's going to happen when all the "oldies" are gone? Who is going to tell the stories and keep the history alive in a way. Most of their stories will die with them, although the written ones will survive. It's kind-of sad in a way to think of our rapidly changing world.

Post 1: Discourse Surrounding the Essay

"Writing that has a voice is writing that has something like a personality. But whose personality is it? As with most things in art, there is no straight road from the product back to the person who made it. There are writers read and loved for their humor who are not especially funny people, and writers read and loved for their eloquence who, in conversation, swallow their words or can't seem to finish a sentance. Wisdom on the page correlates with wisdom in the writer about as frequently as a high batting average correlates with a high IQ: they just seem to have very little to do with one another."

-Louis Menand in "Voice and Personality"


As Robert Atwan states earlier, here once again we find an essay with "a conclusion in which nothing is concluded." Typical of all well-written essays, it isn't the answer that is important, but rather, the question. Menand doesn't wish to tell us, "here's the facts, here's what I want to say, cut and dry." Instead his essay makes us think; it's purpose is to stretch the mind a little bit. I found it very fascinating, because it's so true. Each different person has their own unique medium for communicating. Some are great talkers, others are amazing writers. Some prefer to communicate via phone or computer rather than talking to someone face to face. Still others communicate what they wish to say through artwork. And others just aren't great at communicating at all, but it doesn't mean they aren't intelligent people. Therefore, a person can appear one way through a certain medium while appearing completely different through another. For example, Albert Einstein himself, as brilliant as he was, would put people to sleep whenever he would get up to speak.

That being said, for all the truth in Menand's words, he fails to make the concession that quite often a person's writing personality does match their true personality. Also, I found his comparison of the batter's average to the IQ to be something of a red herring. At first glance the comparison works, but where a person's batting average and their IQ have absolutely nothing to do with one another, I believe that a person's writing personality and their real one do have something to do with each other. How could they not? If essays must be true, then it naturally follows that there must be something of the essayist in the essay.

The important thing to remember is that something a person writes is solely a snapshot of who they are, just a piece of a much bigger whole. Human beings are, after all, so incredibly complex. A reader might meet an author, as Menand states, and say, "How they write isn't how they really are." Well, it may be true: that isn't how they normally are or how they come across, but perhaps that's why they write that way. Maybe writing allows them to convey a truth about themselves that would otherwise remain undiscovered.

Test Post

First post for ENG 001 Section 7.