I’m fascinated by doors, windows, and any other portal between Inside and Outside. Part of it’s architectural, but over years I’ve learned I have a near obsession with any door or window which says “different” or “sturdy” or which carry an emotion perhaps symbolic of the wall it pierces. And if our eyes are windows to our soul, what then are a house’s windows?
Our first full day in Basel began with the sumptuous breakfast buffet I’ve come to expect from upscale European hotels. Afterwards we embarked on a walking tour of the historic part of Basel, reached via a short trolley ride from in front of the hotel. Several hours later I had collected six or seven dozen photos. On our second day, we wandered a little park across the street from our hotel, and trolleyed into Basel again where we visited a small but good botanical garden. So many strange doors and windows! (including these…)
Residence, Basel, Switzerland. August 2025.Converted carriage door to residence entry. Basel, Switzerland. August 2025.Clashing architecture. Basel, Switzerland. August 2025.Upscale residence (backs onto the Rhine River). Basel, Switzerland. August 2025.Overlooking the market square, Basel, Switzerland. August 2025.Entrance to a cylindrical chapel in a little park across from our hotel. Basel, Switzerland. August 2025.
OR, “I’M STILL WORKING ON MY COLLEGE READING ASSIGNMENTS!”
Literature anthology texts, college and otherwise. July 2025.
College literature texts resemble the reading equivalent of eating at an upscale buffet restaurant. You know the food will possess decent quality, but you don’t expect one of those “oh, wow, go get the chef!” moments. On the other hand, you know it isn’t Golden Corral, there won’t be questionable entrees and a lack of things which resemble lovingly prepared food. It’s therefore a safe, pleasurable experience you look forward to, but not too much. So too the literature anthology, usually targeted to college freshman and sophomores, aims higher than 50 Romance Stories For The Modern Lover but the reader doesn’t usually expect anything challenging or inclusive. There can be exceptions which prove pleasant. Sometimes, particularly in those early college years, one experiences surprises less pleasant: “But I thought that was a great story, professor!” ran through my mind a few times when my instructor somewhat condescendingly told us a piece we’d just read “was at best, B literature…good, but not great.” No matter. Turn the page. There’s something potentially better at the next station of this literary buffet.
As I’ve ditched books along the way, including texts which seemed useless for the future me, I’ve clung to nearly every anthology I’ve come across. In fact, as a teacher of English for 8th graders from 1983-1992, I accompanied my then-wife to garage sales specifically buying the college texts of other people to flesh out a reference library. In the days before e-books and a true Internet, I either had to seek these texts out from various bookstores and mail order outlets (at full price) or pounce on jewels sitting in the dross of some middle-ager who realized, “why am I carting this book around anymore?” I’m not sure, but I think I’ve only cut the ties with one, The Sagas of Icelanders, and technically it’s still in my house so have I really let it go? It’s categorically called “Purged” and fair game for donating/selling.
Let’s discuss what’s on the shelf above:
Quality Paperback Book Club rescued me when I found myself in Colville, WA, in 1983, a city of 10,000 souls 75 miles from any true city of note, and yet the largest city to the east or west for hundreds of miles. One of the final books I purchased from them before bowing to the Power of the Internet was the QPB Book of Irish Literature (copyright 1999). Beginning with Edmund Spenser and Jonathan Swift, it runs through “The Sheridans,” “The Wildes” (yes, including Oscar), and “The O’Faolains” while picking up George Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats, and James Joyce along the way. The latter is represented by the full inclusion of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Samuel Beckett has three entries including a slice of the play Waiting for Godot. A nice touch for a modern anthology was the inclusion of Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney. I’ve selectively read throughout the 900+ pages.
The Norton Anthology of English Literature remains one of the classics for this genre, and I had to have it when I found it. My college text is two books more to the right, The Norton Anthology of American Literature. The condescension of a country with about 2000 years of literary achievement can be seen here: I have only Volume 2 of the English literature, but the shorter work, American Literature, represents all of what the Norton editors consider representative and worthy.
Between the two Norton collections lies a silly conceit, fifty great short stories, a humble paperback which I’ve never read. So sue me.
Another book I’ve never read, but have consulted, is Adventures in American Literature which appears to be volume 2.
A Handbook to Literature caught my eye because it isn’t an anthology, but an alphabetical listing of literary criticism terms and themes, genres, theaters, and poetry scansion terms. Unfortunately for this book, I now realize it’s as useful as Benet’s Readers Guide which is “not at all” in this day of AI and the Internet. This book will not be rejoining the shelf. Sad.
The observant person in looking at the above photo will have noticed there are two books with the same title and author: Literature: Structure, Sound, And Sense by Laurence Perrine and in the case of one, Thomas R. Arp. The white-spined edition, the third, guided me through more than one course at Eastern Washington University which seemed to have taken pity on the budgets of its students and used it for both prose and poetry courses…or maybe my memory is faulty. I find it difficult to believe I’ve lost track of the text we used for the poetry class. The wine-colored is Perrine’s 6th edition, this time in collaboration with Arp. Not only does it have a significant number of different selections, but the best part for me? It was bound upside down! One looks with a slight smile at the cover, proud to have purchased one of the first texts ever in what will, of course, be a glorious college career, and then opens the book. Okay, we knew we purchased a used book, so Marc’s name inside the cover is okay. Wait, what’s this? The final page of the index? Upside down? Oh yeah, I would’ve bought the book even if I had no other interest in it.
The two black-colored spines toward the right end of this display belong to The Oxford Anthology of English Literature. In my world, both then and now, if it says “Oxford” it’s an immediate buy. Ironically, I’ve read not a word of either. I took a course in Medieval English literature at the University of Washington which had us buy individual copies of those significant works; reading the Oxford would be redundant. Plus, I’ve recently purchased J. R. R. Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf (and other works) which will take precedence in my hierarchy of reading. Perhaps I will one day compare the works in The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century to The Norton Anthology of English Literature to see what differs. Or not. There are hundreds of books to read, after all.
Which brings us to our final volume, The Treasure of American Short Stories. I’ve read selectively from this book, but it’s mostly redundant to the Norton one on American literature.
Part of our satisfaction for holding onto these types of books—and I know some of you didn’t even question that statement—lies in the combined meaning of memory and potential. We look at these books and they evoke our time so long ago when we sat in uncomfortable chair-desks, taking notes (or not), and experiencing aspects of literature for the first time. Decades later, discarding those memory-tokens seems almost sacrilegious. We turn then to the argument of potential: “I think I might still want to read some of these.” Hence their place still on my shelves, 40-50 years after I purchased them.
If I understood our guide correctly, all of the fully-green-shuttered buildings are a high school. Although she claimed Friedrich Nietzsche and Carl Jung attended it, Nietzsche appears to have been schooled in Germany (Prussia). Jung may not have attended here either, but he at least spent some of his youth in Basel. Basel, Switzerland, August 2025.
I’ve visited Europe only twice, and I’ve already learned to dislike the flights over and back. Flying to Basel started off with annoyance before we even left home: whether because our United flights were actually mostly on Lufthansa or because they were booked through the Viking Cruise company, I couldn’t print the boarding passes. Instead I encountered a endless loop where I was shunted from United’s website to Lufthansa’s and then back to begin the process again. Thus, we arrived at the Raleigh airport far too early to accommodate my fear it would take a lot of time to sort out after waiting in a long line. Neither supposition proved true. Our Raleigh-Washington, D.C.-Frankfurt-Basel tickets in hand we whiled away the first hour by walking the full length of the terminal twice which allowed me a moment of irritation when I saw this sign:
When quicker isn’t the way you’re going. August 2025.
Our flight to Dulles departed at 3:10. Obviously this flight would get into Frankfurt prior to ours which would leave Dulles at 6:10 p.m. for the same city. Why Viking wouldn’t book this escapes me. And as it turned out, our plane from Dulles left the gate 60 minutes late, then spent 30 minutes on the tarmac for reasons I no longer remember. We therefore landed in Frankfurt at about the same time our connecting flight took off for Basel. Our worries were minimal because we knew this would be Viking’s problem, not ours, and indeed, a Viking rep handed us new tickets as soon as we cleared the gate upon landing. Our new flight would be on Air Dolomiti, an Italian airline. The least pleasant of all our flights over and back.
Despite the comfort of our seats (premium economy with no seats in front of us, only an emergency exit and about 15 glorious feet of space), we slept fitfully and as I suspected arrived fairly tired to Basel. My first impression: “Wow, we’re landing in France!” I had not noticed Basel sits at the juncture of France, Germany, and Switzerland. Suburbs from the city lie in the other two countries—our guide lived in Germany “so I can have A/C which I can’t get in Switzerland.” Exiting the controlled area, one follows large arrows to either France or Switzerland. A stop by the Viking desk in the airport, a short wait for two other parties (who didn’t arrive), and we were shuttled the 15 minutes to our hotel close to the Rhine River, but in a newer part of the city.
I then educated my wife on my coping strategy for the six-hour time jump: drop off your luggage, find the bar, quickly enjoy some of the best beer you’ll never see in the United States, and follow it with a full, preferably heavy meal. Guaranteed to put you to sleep quickly and jump start your rhythms to the new time zone. Accordingly….
The three beers of most interest entering the bar. We started with the Schweizer Helles on the right. Hyperion Hotel, Basel, Switzerland. August 2025.An old friend from 2019, Grimbergen. This is the amber or “double amber” as it was called on our cruise. Hyperion Hotel, Basel, Switzerland, August 2025.
Perhaps now we should warn the teetotalers: there will be many references to beer in this series. It’s Europe, the cruise docked on the German side of the river, and we ended our vacation in Antwerp, Belgium, one of the most beer-obsessed countries on the planet.
Suitably sated, we toddled off to our room, marveled again at a completely computer-driven elevator system, and acquainted ourselves with a few vagaries in European plumbing (such as the toilet being on the opposite end of the room as the sinks and the shower).
In this photo from the end of 2006, my father attempts to count all the eagles we’re seeing at Lake Coeur d’Alene, ID, while my mother wonders what the heck he’s doing. December 2006.
Our parents shape our lives. Even those who abandon us leave indelible marks on our psyches. Wonderful, painful, soothing, agitating, perplexing, satisfying, loving, and even the hatred—all of our reactions to them mold us. By the time we realize this fully, chances are they’ve departed our physical lives, living only in our memories and those of others. When I reflect on my father, I’ve come to realize he formed me more than any other person. One aspect of that recurs multiple times in a day when my mind ‘blinks’ and spits out an arithmetic calculation or it juggles a jumble of letters seemingly without conscious thought and spits out a perfectly spelled word. Patterns and numbers, numbers and patterns, all a gift, a curse from my father.
My father, Howard Bliss Pilcher, loved numbers. More than that he loved doing things with them, and he did them quickly. He inherited this from his mother, and he bequeathed it me for which I’ve (mostly) been grateful all my life. This pattern-recognition talent allowed me to move from career to career doing things I had no training to do. Yet there I was. My father never fully realized that aspect of it though I think he could have. I brought dreams and abstraction to his gift, seeing patterns in just about everything. His fixation with patterns and numbers remained in the concrete, the defined, the specific.
Numbers make patterns as do letters and words. Again, my father dwelt on how the letters made words yet never scaled the heights (plumbed the depths?) of how words make sentences and sentences make Writing. Not that he couldn’t write well, but his writing never would have challenged anyone in a writing club. It’s as if playing with the nuts and bolts was so much fun, why become a mechanic? He would delight in words with odd combinations of letters or how words tripped off of the tongue. He adored knowing arcane and niche words such as triskaidekaphobia (fear of the number 13). He once stumped us all (Mom, my brother, and me) at the game Probe by playing the word eleemosynary. This word describes things related to charity including being dependent on it. In Probe, played a bit like the paper game Hangman, contestants choose words by putting letters face down on a tray with 12 spaces. If the word is smaller than 12 letters, one fills the extra spaces with blank cards. Each player takes a turn guessing specific letters of their opponents. In that way it also resembles Wheel of Fortune. My brother and I were about nine and eleven, respectively. We expected and understood that our parents would use words with which we would be familiar. We had very good vocabularies due to hanging around them and from our incessant reading. As you might surmise, however, we were unfamiliar with eleemosynary. Heck, my mother didn’t know it! When all players of Probe have had their words revealed except for one, the remaining players each have two turns to guess the word. We never came closer than thinking it was elephant. I remember nearly sixty years later being so upset as to be near tears that he would think we’d know this word! He apologized, grinning awkwardly, sputtered something about charity—but he kept the points.
But doesn’t everybody?
Around this time we learned from our Uncle Gordy, my father’s brother, that he (and maybe their parents) had teased my father for his repeated incredulity that someone didn’t know something or do something that he did. “But doesn’t everybody…” became a way to slightly dig at his recurring belief that everyone could do what he did. This caused him to try to teach me to do long division in my head when I was 8, and before it had been taught in school using paper and pencil. On top of it all, we were weeding the garden at the time. That episode ended with me crying. Some other cases in point:
Every year in the arid West the pine trees drop needles and cones. Thankfully these events do not occur simultaneously to the best of my memory. Spokane might be the capital of the Lawn Nazis, those people who will semi-innocently ask you if you need help with lawn “because I noticed it’s getting a little long” or “I see you’ve had a bit of difficulty getting to your needles.” One did not leave needles and cones lying around on the lawn! I hated raking needles which my father always seemed to pawn off on his boys. Picking up cones, however, somewhat delighted him because as he picked them up, he would count them. “We got 103 cones this year from the front yard. That’s a new record I think!” and off he’d go to check. Yes, he kept track. When we were long gone, I could tell he still did this because the new neighbor across the street knew exactly what we were talking about decades later.
Our family vacations every summer involved driving for up to two weeks to visit scenic wonders and relatives. By the time I entered high school I had visited most of the national parks in the West, though getting further south than the Grand Canyon remained for my adulthood. On these vacations my mother rarely drove (and when she did it was with white knuckles—hers, not ours). My father kept car records on a 5.5 inch by 8.5 inch piece of stock on which he manually drew lines and columns. Each gas fill-up required the date, an odometer reading, the number of gallons purchased, and then while the attendant filled up the car’s tank (ah, those were the days) he would calculate the car’s gas mileage since the previous gas stop.
On any drive, vacation or not, we would at intervals be treated to his light double-tap of the horn and announcing to the car’s passengers, “that’s fifty thousand miles!” or “look! All fives!” Yes, he celebrated when the odometer read 55,555.5 miles. Or when he got 12345.6 miles. There were many possibilities. (Unfortunately this rubbed off on me a little bit. I routinely wake during the night and say to myself, “Oh, it’s one-two-three-four” when the clock reads 12:34 a.m.)
He particularly fixated on license plates. It feels wrong to say he memorized them. My father saw license plate designations as others do names they want to remember. He didn’t know only the plates for our two cars. He knew all of his friends’ plates, too. Though usually no more than a parlor trick—”hey what were you doing downtown last night?” he could say to someone whose car he saw on the way home—once this came in handy. A family friend called one evening: “What’s the license plate on Pete’s car?” A family emergency had occurred while her husband Pete was driving across the state to Seattle. She needed to tell the state patrol his car’s license plate number so they could find him and tell him to turn around. My father dutifully answered her, and Pete returned home as quickly as possible.
My father easily multiplied two two-digit numbers in his head. I remember an evening when I made him take me to an Amway meeting to see if this would be a way to earn money for college. We both realized quickly this definitely wasn’t for me, but we were too polite to get up and leave because we had sat in the front row. At a certain point the speaker began to illustrate how much money a person could make, citing X number of units on which a person would earn Y amount of profit. Before the speaker could punch all the numbers into his calculator my father piped up with the answer. After a few such examples, the speaker quit trying to use the calculator and just turned to my father for the answer.
Typos and misspelled words irritated him. He couldn’t fathom how a person possibly would fail to see the incorrect pattern. One of his favored word games was printed in the newspaper, buried in the classified ads. (If you’re younger than 40, classifieds were really small type printed at the back of the newspaper and somewhat like Craigslist.) The game was called Jumble and ran for decades; I remember seeing it in the past 20 years. Five (four?) words were jumbled up. Playing the game required one to unjumble the words, then take certain letters indicated by circles and use those to form an answer to a tongue-in-cheek question. “Why the sculptor disappeared”; “He was BUSTED” My father didn’t do these frequently because he instantly saw the words, working more or less like a lexicological hot knife through butter.
He counted everything, knew the patterns and sequences of most common things. If he bought a rack of Presto-logs (his preferred way to burn a fire in the fireplace), he knew soon how many stood in the rack. He knew what day of the week a certain date fell on…27 years ago. He knew how many lightbulbs were on the strands of his Christmas decorative lights, how much he weighed every day, where his stock prices ended yesterday, the number of feet from here to there, and the number of miles he had driven if you asked him point blank in the middle of sun-blasted Nevada. Once we were digging around in his dresser—certainly we weren’t supposed to?—and found a slim memo book small enough to fit in a shirt pocket. It dated from his fraternity days at Washington State College. In it, he had recorded the scores of every single ping pong game he had played against his frat brothers. More interestingly, there were three pages at the end with only the first names of women and a number after them! Since we cannot fathom my father being that much of a ladies man—there had to be three or four dozen names!—we’ve been baffled what the numbers meant. Kisses? Number of dates? Both strain credulity. A rating system? Even more unlikely. He certainly got embarrassed, though, when we made a big deal about it. Maybe…maybe… He never revealed what the numbers meant, but we noted he never threw the notebook away either.
When my family celebrated the gift-giving which happens at birthdays and Christmas, we always laid gifts out on the hearth of the fireplace. When my mother turned 64, her grinning husband led her to the hearth where she found a cubical box wrapped in plain paper. It measured nearly two feet on each dimension. Every face of it had a large numeral “4” drawn on it. Baffled, she looked at him quizzically. My father said, “Well, you’re sixty-four today!” She just scrunched her brows a little bit more. “You know,” he explained, “you’re sixty-four. That’s four cubed!” His grin must have been nearly ear to ear. My mother didn’t share his enthusiasm.
Sadly, I found after his death that his obsession with patterns did not extend to how he kept track of his financial information. Files were in disarray, his migration to using spreadsheets had been less than successful, numerous lists of critical information existed but they contradicted each other, and the trivial received thorough documentation but the important didn’t always. As an example, without understanding what his accounts were and where, I didn’t know for sure how much money my parents had in their investments. Seven years after he died, and one year after my mother had joined him, my brother and I found a certificate of deposit in their safe deposit box. Nothing indicated whether it had been received into their normal cash flow when it matured, or if it might be sitting somewhere waiting to be collected. We never could track down the company which sold it to them, and decided it must have been collected—but 25 years after maturity, the CD paperwork sat in the safety deposit vaults.
When I partially wake at night to stumble toward the bathroom, I idly look at the clock. Instantly, and whether I want to or not, my mind cranks out the amount of time since I turned out the light. I remember all the times I wake to do that or to feed cats, then regurgitate them to my wife in the morning. “Well, I was up at 4:37 feeding the boys.” My father lives in me at those moments. He whispers like a schizoid voice and makes me count the cars I see on a lonely stretch of highway. He makes me frown disapprovingly when I read yet another grammatical error in what passes for our newswriting these days. He laments that I don’t figure my car’s gas mileage, stares in disbelief when I search my brain for my own car’s license plate number, and smiles when I record the amount of rainfall for yesterday. I don’t tell him it’s only because I need to know when to water the yard. And I hope he’s proud of me for all the new ways I’ve used his gift to see the numbers and patterns in quality systems and manufacturing results. He never really said one way or another while he lived.
A better barstool. The Golden Angel pub in Antwerp, Belgium. August 2025.
What a simple moment of ‘doh!’ when I saw these. Why aren’t there easy to use foot rests on every barstool? Sure, a bar rail is handy when it’s available, but many a shorter-legged person can’t reach it from a barstool. Here in Antwerp I saw several variations on this theme. C’mon, America! Get with the program.
Vacationing has meant several things over the years. As a child it meant adventure. Dad would plan a two-week sojourn through the beauty of the American West, plotting the journey for months, and utilizing guidebooks (well, the AAA one) to find both motels and sights to see along the way. By the time I reached “summer job” stage and such vacations no longer were possible, we had seen most of the national parks from the Rockies westward, plus the Grand Canyon, and the tourist hot spots of Southern California (Disneyland, the San Diego Zoo, Knott’s Berry Farm, etc.). We visited San Francisco in 1968 where I saw my great-grandmother on her deathbed and hippies in The Haight. And we always tried to loop through either Seattle or Woodburn, OR, to visit one set of grandparents. Back then, vacationing meant lots of hours in a car reading or imagining things as the countryside went by. It meant rolling with the punches when the road Dad wanted to drive was under construction or the motel he wanted looked better suited to hookers than small children. It mostly meant seeing state after state, park after park, city after city which I had never seen before, and which in my short life presented amazing memories and lessons.
I couldn’t capture that as a younger adult. Vacations at first mostly entailed going home to visit my parents and my friends. I tried a brief camping trip along the Snake and Salmon rivers, but the spectacular views couldn’t make up for my inability to build a fire and thereby have any food to eat. (Or perhaps one could say, the views couldn’t make up for my ineptness as a camper.) A bit later as a newly wedded teacher, summers were for further training, loafing at my in-law’s lake cabin a couple times, and once or twice attempting to emulate my father’s grand tours of the West. I thereby got to see parts of Arizona south of the Grand Canyon for the first time and see some lesser known but equally impressive sights. I explored my own state, Washington, better. The 10 to 11-week length of our summer breaks diluted the compressed wonder of a two-week vacation.
Life changes and a relocation to greater Philadelphia put the kibosh on traditional vacations. Just living there was a new experience. After two years there I discovered a new type of vacation which brings a different kind of satisfaction: the introductory tour. I had met a new love (who married me the next year), and I had entered corporate America where two weeks is the only significant time off you get. I took this woman on a whirlwind nine-day tour of Washington and meet-the-folks. My bride-to-be loved the state and my parents loved her. I repeated the tour in 2017 for a dear couple of friends from North Carolina.
[Disclaimer time: despite the fact I’ve lived in Washington for only four years since I left it back in 1992, I still consider it one of the best places on Earth. My values have to do with variety. In my mind only California comes close to the diversity of climactic zones and has the varied population densities ranging from the Seattle-Tacoma-Olympia wash of people to areas where it’s difficult to find the next house from the one you’re standing beside. Want desert? Check. Alpine? Check. Rainforest? Check. Scablands, Arctic, Temperate forest? Check, check, and check.]
Less than a year after our marriage in 1995, we vacationed to New Mexico for two weeks. We wandered from Albuquerque north, were unimpressed with Santa Fe and hightailed to Taos. In ’95 it had started to build up, but only a little. We stayed at an honest-to-God auto court, and breakfasted at a old West-style cafe on the square. (Revisiting in 2022 saddened me when I saw all of that charm washed away by touristy stuff.) That second week of the vacations, all my tensions dropped away as we shot into southwestern Colorado for two nights before striking to southern NM and the Carlsbad Caverns. Until a couple weeks ago, I held this up as our standard of Best Vacation Ever.
Then we cruised down the Rhine River for eight days on the Viking Hlin, and visited Basel, Switzerland, and Antwerp, Belgium, at the beginning and end of the voyage, respectively. Viking is known for catering to old folks like us (no one under 18 is allowed) and for its all-inclusive approach. We could have been very happy just eating the food, drinking the beer and wine with lunch and dinner, and taking the included tours, but it made sense for us to add two optional tours, take care of gratuities in one tidy little package, and buy the Silver Sipper beverage package so that we could drink beer, wine, and cocktails just about any time we wanted. Given the slant toward the retired and soon-to-be-retired, I must say my initial introduction to the ship gave me a jolt:
“Welcome aboard” kinda takes on a whole new meaning with a tag like that! August 2025.
I’ve nothing against people living the love lives they desire, but still I was thankful there occurred no hot gay sex (that I know of ) on the Hlin. It reinforced my initial reaction after two nights in Basel before boarding, that European cities seem to take a more blasé view about tagging. There seems to be an unwritten rule that it isn’t done on cathedrals and other historical buildings, but other than that…sure, indulge yourself.
As with my Hawaii series [tag: Hawaii] and my Virtual Vacation series [tag: Virtual Vacation] about Michigan and Ohio, this will be a lengthy series of posts recounting how two neophytes who never traveled abroad for pleasure decided to do so in retirement. For now, I’ll end with two photos about our first few hours onboard.
The appearance of swans became commonplace by the end of the cruise. They paddled up for treats just as ducks do in cities throughout the United States. Rhine River just downstream from Basel, SW. August 2025.
On the first night I met one of my new friends: Köstritzer schwarzbier. If you think you don’t like dark beers, give schwarzbier a try. Light-bodied, crisp, but it has a nice roasted taste lacking in traditional lagers. One of the handful of beers offered on board. I wish there had been more! And yes, Europeans are civilized: each beer has its dedicated glass. Viking Hlin , August 2025.
Benny began in July to prepare for August. Perhaps, given our weather in July, he just thought the calendar had turned already? Regardless, the “dog days of August” do not interest this cat. Instead he will withdraw until the temps cool down.
Benny in his basket. July 2025.
Charlie defies the heat, regards it as Finns do the sauna. He spends hours ‘on the boards’ relaxing with the moist heat penetrating his bones. His version of a cold plunge? Walking indoors for a food break and a quick nap in the A/C-cooled house before resuming the therapeutic 100+ heat indices.
Charlie soaking up the moist heat. Yes, that’s a worry-patch on his right foreleg. July 2025.
Take a Sears-Roebuck catalog, cross it with the hippie ethos, and add a large dose of product recommendations. WEC blazed a new trail. Photo, July 2025. Catalogs, Summer 1972 and sometime in 1994.
When I headed off to college in 1972 my curiosity led me to enroll in an experimental education program funded by the Ford Foundation. I hope to write of that someday, but today we consider two peculiar residents of my library: two editions of The Whole Earth Catalog. Being 18 in 1972, I didn’t exactly participate in “The Sixties” which meant I hadn’t heard of The Whole Earth Catalog until it appeared on the textbook list for that experimental program I’d enrolled in. What is it and why am I making a big deal about it? Is this just some oldster nostalgia trip? Maybe, but I think it’s much more than that.
The WEC basically laid the groundwork for what today is Wirecutter and everything like it, except…what if Wirecutter had a hefty dose of social awareness ethos baked in? And what if there were no suspicions that Wirecutter and websites like it make decisions partially based on monetary reward? Before The WEC, I’m unaware how one could have gone to a single source for information, evaluations, and recommendations on a number of topics. Everything one needed know about consuming involved a physical trip to interface with salespeople. In certain cases one could consult a dedicated publication for audio equipment, say, or fashion, but sooner or later one needed to go to a store to buy something. If I wanted information about high quality stereo equipment, I went to Huppin’s Hi-Fi downtown where all the audiophiles (a.k.a., stereo gearheads) gathered and had all the information. When one wanted furniture, one headed to a furniture store or several and bought the best of whatever you saw. The same with clothes, garden tools, hardware, books, cars, pretty much anything. Who knew if it was good? Who knew if the price here was as good as there? If you ordered something, like a car with all the options in your favorite color, you started at a dealership. Everything filtered through the salespeople.
But the WEC gathered its recommendations for just about everything which interested the Peace Generation (or whatever you want to call us), told you why it represented the best you could buy, and gave information about how to get it. Or as the Function statement on the very first page of The Last WEC said , “The WHOLE EARTH CATALOG functions as an evaluation and access device. With it, the user should know better what is worth getting and where and how to do the getting.” This “last” edition didn’t have a table of contents. After page two told you how to get the stuff, and other tips, the third page launched right into “Whole Systems” and starting with the subsection Buckminster Fuller (anything dealing with Buckminster Fuller, a near-god of social planning). Other sections dealt with land use, industry, craft, community, nomadics, communication, and learning. These were loosely defined: subsections in Learning include “Thinking,” “Serendipity,” “Psychology,” and “Free Schools”. Additionally, the lower right corner of all right-hand pages from Page 9 onward contained the story “Divine Right’s Trip” where the main character, Divine Right, experiences many adventures of the time until he lands on the Whole Earth Catalog at the very end, a sort of gold-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow thing.
I could write pages and pages about the WEC to little effect on anyone who hasn’t seen it. In its way it picked up the tradition of the old Sears-Roebuck catalogs which allowed people living in the backwaters of America to buy through the mail most of the things they could ever want for their farms, their businesses, their personal health, and to clothe their bodies. (“Through the mail” • prep phrase describing movement of written communication and goods prior to delivery services such as UPS and FedEx) The S-R catalog fell onto hard times when everyone started to get electricity and cars made it easier to get to the merchants.
After navigating the remainder of the 1970’s and all of the 1980’s, issuing a few Supplements—the informal publications which came out between editions of The WEC—founder Stewart Brand and crew decided a new edition needed to be published. Those 20 years saw the introduction and rise of the personal computer, for one thing, and the starry-eyed, inchoate idealism of The Sixties had given way to a gritty, in-the-trenches attitude by the early 90’s. Most of the casual members of the Peace Generation had left the ranks, lured by money, security, and mere existence. The title page of The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog quoted Brand from 1969: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” before explaining that good things performed by governments and other large bodies were being obscured by “gross defects”; a rising personal power needed a guide to the new tools making this possible.
Two random samples from The WEC shall suffice, one from each.
Opening The Last Whole Earth Catalog to pages 36-37, I find myself in the middle of a five-page description of something called Liferaft Earth. I’ve no personal knowledge of this, and I’m not reading all five pages of very tiny print (looks like 6-8pt type; it varies because consistency was not a strong point for The WEC). It appears to be about making sure everyone on the planet has enough to eat. Here’s a snippet from the top of the second column of page 35…
The following five pages chronicles a week-long event sponsored and organized by the CATALOG in October 1969.
Richard Brautigan saw the end of it. The beginning of it was three days I spent alone on a train with excellent hash and Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb. Ehrlich had been a teacher of mine, back in his butterfly and my tarantula days, so I knew to believe him.
—SB
“SB” was Stewart Brand who created and led the WEC publication team. Incidentally, in looking for a formal description of his title/role, I discovered the entire Last WEC was composed using an IBM Selectric typewriter. I didn’t find his role.
I left a bookmark in the Millennium edition long ago. Opening to this page brought me to the Communications section/Writing subsection. An article preceding the tools for and about writing begins, “We are swimming in a great polluted sea of language, and we wonder why we can’t write.” How much more so now! It continues:
We wonder why we don’t want to read. Even worse, we cease to wonder; we just don’t do it. It’s as though it didn’t matter anymore.
As though hammers didn’t matter; as though air didn’t matter; as though horses and balloons had disappeared.
It’s not a hardware problem; it’s not a brain-wire problem. It’s a writing problem. It’s software, it’s soft words, it’s swampish bureaucratic slide-down of mush-mouthed ass-covering prose that promotes long term despair in humans.
—Jon Carroll
This appears on page 242 of 384 pages in a book measuring 11×14.5 inches in fonts rarely bigger than 8pt. You can see how one would get lost in there, and how part of him would never come back out. Which is why more than fifty years later they remain on my bookshelves despite the hundreds (thousands?) which have not withstood the journey.
How to look up words before the Internet. July 2025.
Today I needed to move two of my bookcases because I inconveniently parked them underneath the main water shutoff valve to my house. Downstream of that valve is the Pressure Relief Valve (Pressure Regulating Valve?) or PRV which will be replaced tomorrow. Books moved include the latter half of the alphabet for authors of fiction, plus poetry, essays, books about reading and language, literary quarterlies, literature anthologies, drama, and the stuff I call “books too big to fit anywhere else”. Moving these books renewed the love affair I have with them.
I cannot claim to have coined the word bibliophilia but my spell checker doesn’t like it. Obviously a primitive type of AI with all the words at its digital fingertips would sneer at such a word. I maintain it exists, nonetheless, and I further claim it describes a condition similar to addiction in that those afflicted with it do not recognize it as a malady. Rather they proudly lean into it right up to the moment it degrades their lives into sociopathy. I never had a lot going for me in the sociopathy-avoidance spectrum; it therefore has impacted my life little.
Though I read 99% of my books electronically now, I’ve developed no attachment to them the way I have to the physical ones. Perhaps it’s because I don’t have the history with them? No matter. I realized today what a wonderful paradigm for a series of posts! Forthwith:
I’ve carted around the above two dictionaries since 1978. They were ‘useless’ even then. The one on the bottom has a copyright of 1939 on it, with 14 more copyrights stretching back to 1903 on the reverse of the title page. In 1939 my mother was 10. This must have guided her through the end of elementary school and through high school. It undoubtedly felt the fingers of my grandfather paging through it as he sought a word for some of his reports and letters. He would have been in his 40’s at the time.
As with the bottom dictionary, the one on top reminds me of a relative also. When my mother was in her early teens around 1941-1943, her Uncle Dennis came to live with his half-sister (my grandmother) and her small family. He needed to establish residency in Washington State because he planned to attend the University of Washington. I’m not sure if he worked for a year or attended high school. This dictionary is copyrighted 1942, and its title I feel reflects his academic bent. (He went to work in an athletic supply store in Seattle after graduation, eventually bought it with one or two partners, and had a very comfortable life financially. The store was called Athletic Supply.)
All my childhood I stared at these dictionaries and pulled them out again and again, every time we visited my grandparents. I’m pretty sure where my brother and I slept is where my great-uncle lived for that year. Upon graduation I guess he figured he didn’t need the dictionary anymore. My grandfather had finished off the basement in gorgeous tongue-and-groove pine boards, and he built in next to his desk the bookcase which held these two volumes.
As I may have detailed before, I purged about 400 books from our library in 2020, primarily so I could use some of the shelves to display family memorabilia. Books I felt held no special tug on my heart joined those I felt wouldn’t be read again nor would they need to be consulted. It represented a Marie Kondo approach: if the book brought joy, it almost always stayed on the shelf. The rest were boxed up and shoved in a closet. One doesn’t just throw away books unless they’re an ignorant cretin which means they likely don’t own books in the first place. (Although there was that mother/daughter pair I saw once at a giant book sale who were buying a shopping cart full of books based on how they looked! Books as interior design elements! Horrific to think such people exist.) I’ve since found an outlet in a used bookstore/coffee shop/beer & wine cafe which gives me credit for the books I drop off. Imagine that! I drop off a half dozen hardbacks, and I get to buy three pints on half-price Wednesday!
Though 400 went to live in the closet, an even 1100 remain. I can’t believe that when I look at the shelves, but that’s what my library cataloging program says. Today, just pulling down about seven shelves of books inspired such joy and memories. There are the literary quarterlies I got from Eastern Washington University while teaching English. And there are the half dozen volumes of varying size I needed to buy for my Medieval Literature class. Oh look, there’s the best book I ever read on the slipperiness of translations (Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise Of The Music Of Language by Douglas R Hofstadter who previously had won the Pulitzer Prize for Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid). Oh, my college literature texts! The glorious translation of Anna Karenina purchased on the first family vacation I organized just a couple years before my father died. And look there, the slim volume of fairy tales my parents and grandparents read to me when I and my brother were quite young.
Some of it is snob appeal. I make no apologies for that. If you can’t be proud of yourself for having read a goodly collection of great literature, if you think it a waste of your time, then I ask, why did you waste it? Didn’t you have something better to do? Like, I don’t know, trade it for a differently colored book which matches your decor better?
In the weeks ahead I’ll focus on particular books which spark that wonderful joy of reading…like the books about reading itself!
all the voices in my head 