Bi-Weekly Topic for Sept. 15, 2004
Translating the rain
By Via Negativa
Body of rain, I drink to you. Body of long grass & the dark edge of the woods. I woke up at 3:00 in the morning murmuring the words to a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, whom I have not read in years - O if we but knew what we do / When we delve or hew— / Hack and rack the growing green! / Since country is so tender / To touch, her being só slender . . . A gentle rain with crickets in it & the twittering of thrushes & warblers who have flown all night, in & out of showers, no stars to guide them. I went back to sleep on the couch with my head near the screen door, listening, & dreamed about a woman made of light whose warm regard turned the pages of books yellow, orange, scarlet, made spines of books crack & the covers warp. With a faint whispering their pages began to come loose and flutter down from the shelves in multiple reenactments of the myth of Icarus. I walked through dimly lit stacks chanting an LC call number like the name of a long-gone lover, shuffling through the fallen pages, which were already up above my ankles. This rain will go on for months. When it stops, the sky will reach all the way to the ground: an appalling brightness. We will squint & shiver, we will stamp our feet for warmth on the hard ground, swept bare by wind. Our fingers will itch for the feel of pages turning. Strained eyes will long for opaque surfaces, the darkness between the trees. Our skins will turn brittle. We will search like lizards for a flat rock in the sun.
permalink posted by Dave @ 9/15/2004 08:42:03 AM
Library Lurker
By P.
Some libraries harbor a ghastly phantom -- a woeful wraith of methane, mercaptan, hydrogen sulfide and aldehydes -- a shapeless specter of stink in the stacks.
You wander among the old, steel shelves and turn a corner -- looking for the M mysteries, perhaps. And there it is, proclaiming briefly that I HAD RED MEAT or Weeeee aaaaateeeee beeeeeaaaans!
Gaaah.
Now, it's in the nature of library stacks that if you aren't lined up exactly with them, you can't see what's down the aisles. It's as if you're entirely alone with the wisdom of the ages (if the ages be Rex Stout and Lilian Braun) as you poke around. From time to time you might hear someone move a book or rub a wet finger along the side of a balloon (why do people bring balloons into libraries? And where do they hide them?) but you never see anyone. Your neighbors have just nipped around the corner of the shelving, and they're out of sight. Maybe that's the temptation. Maybe the library is the errand everyone does right after lunch. Maybe it's a spirit of intestinal mischief that sets off little skyrockets of grossness.
Actually, I love old libraries. The one I grew up with has a 19th-century tin ceiling, dark wooden shelves and a lovely, paneled oak librarian's desk, all in a small space dominated by a picture of my hometown's namesake in his ancient navy uniform. I outgrew the kids section early and lingered for years in the tiny teen section, in the back corner where huge frosted-glass windows borrowed a little of the room's dim light for a work space behind them (and what a privilege, and what a disappointment it was to go through the dark passageway into that room as a young adult, only to find it mostly empty).
I thought the stacks in my college's 60-year-old library were fascinating -- they were all steel, with a warren of low, narrow passageways, dimly lighted, among the books. Clomping in and out among the racks, I became convinced that the floors were made of glass when I noticed that there seemed to be a light coming from below. The floors, in fact, seemed to be afterthoughts tacked onto the shelves, rising two or three stories into a gloomy old stone-and-brick barn. I spent a lot of time in there, looking for stuff and feebly studying at the tiny carrels.
The old storage system -- I have found it in public libraries, too -- is notable for something else. No ventilation. That's no doubt how I encountered the phantom, in a moment of disgust after taking a careless breath.
So, what are you going to say? All mammals do it -- Ronald Reagan once suggested we could blame global warming on cows. Perhaps it's not the principle so much as the unexpected, undesired intimacy it forces on you. The very movement of your passage dissipates the tasteless deed into the general effluvium of mildew, dust, old ink and paper that hangs about such places: There's nothing left to complain about.
One shudders to think of the condition of the older books, languishing untended on upper shelves and bathed for generations in, well, whatever is floating around.
But y'know, perhaps the unspeakable is thought of, if never mentioned. In my final year of college, 30 years ago, the school opened a gleaming new library; the next year I got to use the brand-new library at my graduate school, which was notable for its gray-and-purple color scheme and the plastic drawers in the card catalog. Downtown Cleveland boasts a dramatic new wing that strongly resembles a birthday cake stacked upon a cardboard box. My present hometown is about to renovate ITs main library (but that, heaven help us, is another tale.).
A conspicuous feature of all of them?
Massive ventilation.
Source: http://my.core.com/~pzicari/text/Books.html
Questing For Bookshops
By Feathers of Hope (Numenius)]
An entry for the Ecotone Wiki topic on Places for Books.
These next two weekends we're busy so any field trip to Powell's will have to wait for a while. But such an imagined trip leads one to ask where are the truly great bookstores, the ones worth making long journeys to visit? Powell's is clearly one, but others? Here are a couple of resources that may help.
Evelyn C. Leeper edits an annotated list of bookstores of the world. This list seems fairly comprehensive and is updated frequently.
More selectively, Robert Teeter has a personal bookstore hall of fame. I'm glad to see I've been to a few of them.
I'm sure there are other such lists out there, but this is a start.
Posted by Numenius at September 15, 2004 11:21 PM
Comments
Back of Beyond Books in Moab is one such. I mean it's not a Powell's: it's actually rather small. But it's got an amazing desert literature selection. and here's the thing: it's in Moab.
Posted by: Chris Clarke at September 16, 2004 01:24 PMThank you for the heads up on bookstore lists--back in the early 90's, I used to travel with a small paperback sold in used books stores--it was a pocket sized guide to used bookstores in California. (It was how I found Bay Books in Concord and Bonanza in Walnut Creek).
I sent an e-mail to the Evelyn Leeper, to notify her of the closing of Reede Moore in Petaluma.
I just found out last weekend.
I was told the owner retired to devote herself to full time bookbinding. Very disapointed--this was where I found some of my favorite poetry books. I had hoped to return and buy a collection of essays by Roethke on the teaching of poetry. I had found it, but passed at the time--AUUUGGHH!
I also mentioned to Evelyn that we have 3 independents in Davis, one chain, and one university bookstore. If Evelyn is open to an outside review, I let you folks know (and the local poets), and perhaps we can discuss among ourselves our opinions of our local bookstores.
(Ah, forgot the store in Woodland--and it's name!)
Posted by: Anita at September 17, 2004 11:13 AMThe Next Chapter in Woodland...
Posted by: virginia at September 17, 2004 02:11 PMBlackwell's bookshop in Oxford was my first encounter with a 'real' bookshop. For me, the real quality test of a bookshop has always been the range of bird books on offer, and Blackwell's had shelf after shelf of field guides, scientific accounts and bird folklore - it was like Christmas had come early! Add to that its labyrinthine sequence of wooden-beamed rooms and its location on a cobbled street surrounded by medieval university buildings, and you have the quintessential bookshop.
Posted by: richard at September 17, 2004 02:42 PM Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2004/09/15/questing_for_boo.html
Places for books
By Hoarded Ordinaries
As cruel fate would have it, I’ve never had enough room for books. When I lived with my parents in Ohio, I was a mad collector of dust: my bookshelves were filled with, yes, books, and model horses, and knicknacks of every stripe. Under the bed, I had boxes of bones: owl pellets, scavenged rodent jaws, a whole and entire deer skull. Crammed in my closet were scrapbooks full of clippings, stamps, bottlecaps. If it could be held, captured, or scavenged, I found a way to collect it. And if it had pages that could be turned, I wanted to read it, own it, hoard it.
Book hoarding, along with stamp and model horse collecting, became my means of escape. Growing up in a neighborhood without children my own age, I spent hours in my room reading, daydreaming, or writing. I was preternaturally precocious, wanting to know the name of every flower and the habits of every bird. Even when I myself was a child, I never got along well with children; my mind was filled with adult thoughts and concerns, my interests lying on the shelves of the grown-up section of the library. I read Lolita before I was old enough to be one of Humbert Humbert’s nymphets, and I read Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf not long after most of my classmates had moved past the Big Bad Wolf. In a word, I was a wildly weird child, and books were one expression of that weirdness. When other pubescent girls were panting after the latest teen heart-throb, I was fretting over which avian field guide was the best.
I’ve recently been sorting through my books. When Chris and I sold our house in Hillsborough and moved to Keene a little more than a year ago, my library went through a massive downsizing. Previously, my books filled two full-size (floor to ceiling) bookshelves along with a shorter chest-high shelf; I had extra books tucked above, behind, and before the ones that fit on shelves. By the time we packed to move, I’d sold over half of my books, some online, others in a massive garage sale in which we nearly gave away possessions. Although I’d resigned myself to the relinquishment involved in consciously downsizing from a 3-bedroom house to a 2-bedroom apartment, there were two garage-sale transactions that broke my heart: the sale of the overstuffed chair where the dog and I would curl up to read, and the sale (to a used book dealer) of the complete set of Thomas Merton’s journals. “Try to keep them together,” I pleaded. “Other folks have wanted to buy a single volume or two, and asked which one was the best,” I explained. “But journals should be read from beginning to end, and I never had the time…” The used book dealer nodded, sympathetic, as if we were discussing a litter of kittens looking for a good home, but we both knew the truth: good homes for esoteric books are hard to find anywhere, and Thomas Merton might struggle to find a home here in New Hampshire.
When we moved to Keene, Chris and I shared a single bookshelf, with some of my books spilling over into a living room curio cabinet and others being stashed in my office at school. Slowly, though, the collecting bug crept in again: one innocent purchase there, another here. Although I’ve acquired with practice the discipline of checking the library for a book before I buy it, there’s always the allure of ownership: if it’s mine, I can keep it, and write in it, and always refer to it. If I own it, I can have it at hand at any hour when I need it or want to refer to it or need to cite it: a scholar’s occupational hazard.
Even more difficult than downsizing a library, though, is the seemingly simple act of splitting one: there’s something heartbreaking about sorting previously shared books into stacks labeled “his” and “hers,” each destined to their own separate place. When Chris and I married, we’d both recently graduated with Bachelor’s degrees in English; having taken many of the same classes, we owned many of the same books. Back then we decided whose book to keep based upon the notes therein: my copy of the Walt Whitman Handbook stayed as did his copy of the Riverside Shakespeare. Now nearly 13 years later, we’ve gone through the same process in reverse: having continued to study American Literature first as an avocation and now as a career, I got custody of our jointly-purchased first edition Leaves of Grass facsimile whereas Chris claimed the copy of the Blue Cliff Record he’d bought for me some years back. Many of the books we split are filled with notes from happier, more innocent days, but these notes don’t necessarily correspond with who got what: my copy of the Gospel Parallels contains Chris’s neo-pagan scrawl whereas his copy of the Diamond Sutra has margins crammed with my scribblings.
One book that both Chris and I had owned before we married is The Cloud of Unknowing, a primer on prayer by an anonymous fourteenth-century English monk. It seemed obvious that I’d end up with this book: over the years Chris and I have danced on every conceivable side of the Christian/Buddhist divide, but I always naturally found myself on Christian ground, my longing for a personal God leading me smack-dab back into the arms of Christ crucified. So the other day when I checked to see whose copy of The Cloud I’d inherited in the split, it was like reuniting with an old friend to discover my maiden name signed inside its cover, my multicolored notes and underlinings covering its oft-read pages. (Click here for an enlarged view.) Who was it, I wonder, who wrote these notes: who was this 13-years-younger version of myself? I’ve had this book so long, its cracked spine lightly gives up its yellowed pages, a book I literally read to pieces. So who was that Lorianne DiSabato who thought she knew a thing or two about prayer and the God those prayers are directed to? What Cloud of Unknowing did she labor under when she thought “’til death do us part” was an attainable task?
Whoever Miss DiSabato thought she was, Dr. Schaub now tries to carry on, rearranging remaining books on lightened shelves and retrieving those that hid out for a year in an office at Keene State. Whether we have enough places for our books, they presumably have places for us, holding in their leaves old hopes crushed like dried flowers. Opening an old book, who hasn’t been surprised to find an old photograph, note, or dollar bill long forgotten, a bookmark from a long-ago, hurried moment? The books we choose to own also often choose to own us, preserving in their pages a snapshot of days gone by, the youthful dreams of selves we’d forgotten, shelved.
This post in my contribution to the Ecotone biweekly topic, Places for Books. And after you’ve perused the other postings to this topic, be sure to click on over to The Coffee Sutras to wish Kurt a happy birthday. Kurt is one of the bloggers I read before I myself started blogging, so in one sense “Hoarded Ordinaries” would not exist without “The Coffee Sutras.” So even though I’m a committed tea-drinker myself, Kurt, here’s wishing you many caffeinated refills.
Posted by Lorianne
Comments
Source: http://hoardedordinaries.wordpress.com/2004/09/page/2/
Books and attachments
By Beginner's Mind
Books are going to drag me down.
Some of my earliest memories are of watching my parents read, and wanting to read books, too. I was disappointed with first grade; it didn't teach me enough words so that I could read the big people books my parents read. And my books had pictures; my parents' books didn't have pictures.
There are books in every room of our house. I've had to take art work off the wall to make room for bookcases. On many of the bookcases the books are stacked two deep. Suffice it to say our house resembles a library.
We have books in stacks on the floor. The headboard for our bed is a bookcase type. We have books in closets, in milk crates, in cardboard boxes and in plastic bins. We have them on coffee tables, in TV stands.
Some books are here because they make great references. Some are collectors items. I'm very fond of books signed by the author.
There are entire cases dedicated to Buddhism; to fly fishing; technical books, mostly computer science. There are history books. Karen has a few bookcases with children's books. I have one bookcase dedicated to religion and mythology. There are cases with fiction, notably populated with works by Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, H.P. Lovecraft and his fellow pulp writers. We have the mysteries of Archer Mayor, Tony Hillerman, and Sue Grafton.
Earlier this summer we donated several boxes of books to the Lincoln library, which was severely damaged in the floods on 1998. You wouldn't notice anything missing.
If you come into our house, it will be obvious from the start; this is a place of books.
Music in my head: All kinds of Everly Brothers tunes.
posted by Robert @ 10:35 PM | Comments (5)
Comments
You just described my dream home.
Heh heh, mine too!
I have sold or given away probably 5000 books from my collection in the last 20 years. I still have far too many. t doesn't help that I work in a place where we get free review copies of incredible works.
My wife is looking forward to my finishing the shed-cum-office out back, with its planned 120 feet of built in shelves.
Well, Chris and Robert... it sounds like the two of you have it far worse than Keith and I. I thought we had it bad, but now I'm not so worried. I've been telling him we need far more bookshelves around here, but the boxes and stacks we have sound like nothing compared to you two. 
Thanks for easing my mind. I can relax now. And renew the memberships to Barnes and Borders...
Robert: What a wonderful attachment to have! Really, your place sounds wonderful. In my own dream, I have a house with a tower, a spiral staircase with recesses (in the middle of the tower a little alcove with a comfy chair), then a wonderful room at the top with comfy couches, a day bed, bookcases and books galore (in audio too), and beautiful casements. I can see myself holed up reading, napping, listening to stories or music, and savoring sunsets. Perhaps a small balcony with gargoyles as companions, so that I can bask in late afternoon sunlight while reading poetry.... Of course, the Vermont Fall colors! The other joy would be in sharing this with my kids! All the best to you,
Nacho
Source: http://beginnermind.blogspot.com/2004_09_01_beginnermind_archive.html#109530330742808119
placing books on memory's shelf
By alembic
This post is for the Ecotone Wiki's joint blogging topic Places for Books:
This slim volume ' a pamphlet of a post, really ' belongs on memory's bookshelf. Its place is in a library of the past where mote-filtered sunlight washes the walls, and everything they shelter, with the mild sepia tones of nostalgia.
Inside the covers of this slim volume, somewhat sticky with the grime of forgetfulness, is a story about Shakespeare, dead for centuries, and a girl, very much alive in Romania in the early 1960s.
Though I don't remember much hardship in my Romanian childhood, I do remember standing in line for bread, for flour, for butter, for sugar. In much earlier years we stood in line because that's what it took to redeem the coupons we had for our rations of bread and butter. Much later, I believe, the lines at the food stores had to do with the Cuban crisis or one threat or another of capitalist takeovers, or whatever other phrase might best serve here to mirror the 'red scare' my counterpart in a small American town had to endure, along with drills about what to do in the case of a nuclear bomb attack. (We skipped those, by the way.)
Then, there were the occasional lines at the bookstores. Every once in a while there would be a shipment of classics, not too controversial, mind you. The idea was to give the illusion of hope for change, not the means for illuminating those hopes with the clarity of ideas that could bring about that change in fact. In other words, this was a bit of bread and circus for the reading rabble to keep them distracted in the casino of words.
My mother, who back in those days was well-enough connected to get advance word of these rare book shipments, found out that a particularly beautiful two-volume edition of all of Shakespeare's works translated into Hungarian were about to arrive. She was, if not first in line, at least close enough to the door to be let in to purchase one set, which, by the way cost an awful lot of money (if I still recall this correctly).
She brought the books home. I like to think that we cleared the table, perhaps even covered it with our best linen, as if we had been graced with visitors. I like to think that we then gathered around the table and opened the books in a hushed awe. None of that happened, except for my awe, I suppose, when I first started to read Shakespeare's sonnets.
I still have this set: green leather spines with mild gold lettering, and inside the linen covers, thin, nearly transparent vellum paper ... and three silk bookmarks, bound to the spine, in green, yellow, and black. These are slightly frayed from use, which they got a lot of while the Shakespeare I knew spoke only in Hungarian to me.
What my Hungarian Shakespeare used to tempt me with was, of course, an idyllic landscape for escape and romance, courtesy of the magic carpet of words. But even back then, for me, these books were also like a library stocked with the dramatized documentaries of the kinds of persisting human follies that both build and burn libraries, depending on which way the winds of hope or despair are shifting.
Shakespeare's work was my Moebius strip. With each twist in a sonnet, with each turn in a comedy or a tragedy, yet another take, turned inside out, on the will and desires of human beings would flash in my understanding, illuminating not only the way in which art houses follies, but also the ways in which the follies of history make architects out of artists.
Posted at September 17, 2004 12:18 AM
Comments
Maria: this is a beautiful post. I love the mobius strip idea. And I love Shakespeare speaking Hungarian...
Posted by: Pica on September 17, 2004 05:49 AMWonderful.
Posted by: dale on September 24, 2004 05:40 PM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20050226172947/http://www.ashladle.org/archives/000421.html
Sep 15, 2004 at 9:51 pm
So - that’s the “official” announcement, huh? Dividing up the library. It’s only an emblem of how tough the path is.
What is spooky, looking at your images, is how many of the same books we have. I mean, Rural Hours??
There are two kinds of people in the world, I think: those who write in books and those who don’t. I, too, am a writer-in-books. If the author didn’t mean to engage you in conversation, they wouldn’t have left that white space all around the text. It’s like a pre-blog comments box.
You know you’ve given us lots of clues before today’s post that you were a weird weird child. There are worse things.
Sep 16, 2004 at 6:18 am
An official announcement? Nah, that’s too obvious…I’m all about implication and subtlety. If you can’t read between the lines, you don’t know me well enough to hear my secrets.
So, you’ve read *Rural Hours*? How wonderful! I figure if a book is good enough for Thoreau to read, it’s good enough for me, too.
I’m loving this notion of marginalia as being like blog comments…hmmm, I’m going to have to think about that. But yes, I’m bad about writing in books…I’ve even occasionally written (in pencil, lightly) in library books: shhh, don’t tell!
btw, I tried to take a shot of the shelf where *Curlew: Home* is hanging out with *Uncle Tom’s Cabin*, *Zen & Art of Motorcycle Maintenance*, and an anthology of 19th century women’s “local color” sketches, but that picture didn’t turn out. So you’ll just have to believe me when I say your book is running with a curious crowd!
Sep 16, 2004 at 10:00 am
Lorianna, sorry if this adds another darn book to the collection, but have you read ‘Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader’ by Anne Fadiman? Mentions a merger of two household libraries, too.
Sep 16, 2004 at 10:29 am
Wonderful post, Lorianne.. I get the feeling Chris and Becky could profitably start a support group for Spouses of Non-Recovering Book Addicts.
Sep 17, 2004 at 11:03 am
You can’t get rid of the Library of America books! No!
Really, those things can be addictive:P
Sep 17, 2004 at 7:28 pm
Ouch. Well, you can’t keep a good woman down… Best of luck.
Sep 17, 2004 at 9:22 pm
This was both exhilirating and deeply saddening. It was a bit like peeking into your underwear drawer (who would have guessed you had such slinky and provocative things caressing your most private parts?). It also quietly asked to be contemplated for the pain amidst the pages, although I must openly admit I was hungry for your notations. I especially appreciated your colorful distinctions, as well as your healthy question marks.
Life is about questions, and yours are fervent with the quest of knowing. Dr Schaub has become a force to be reckoned with, even as she huddles ‘neath the covers of her books.
Sep 17, 2004 at 10:54 pm
I just got back to Windsor Ontario from two days in Dayton. Along the interstate, somewhere in Ohio, I saw some books, were they yours?
It’s so hard to give our dears away.
thrive!,
O
Sep 19, 2004 at 12:04 am
Lorianne, you are most kind to wish me a happy birthday and to encourage others to do the same. When you started blogging, I knew immediately that you would be a force to be reckoned with.
My garage is becoming increasingly hard to move around in. Why? Because I’d rather buy books than bookcases. So there are boxes and boxes of them out there doing no one any good. Still, it’s hard to part with them.
When my ex and I split up, we had to figure out what to do with the CDs. Book ownership, due to differing tastes, was pretty straightforward. And since I was the only one with a turntable, I kept all the LPs, regardless.
Still, some days I’d like to invite the public in and just tell them to take whatever they want of it all. One becomes tired of the burden of book, CD, or what-have-you ownership. They represent not just the ideas of the author but the identities of our own past. From time to time, one wishes it would all just go away.
Never that simple, however, is it?
Sep 20, 2004 at 2:07 am
Lorianne-
Once again, I am awestruck by the power of the words you write…and even more so by the words you don’t write.
Sep 20, 2004 at 6:49 pm
No announcement, just the presence of splitting the library, reading the margin notes of someone who had no idea what changes were just around the corner. Very good entry.
Wild, weird reading children. When my family switched houses, it was because our library literally pushed us out of our home. Our ranch house in East Providence gave up every one of its walls and its basement to bookshelves, and when those had all been double-stacked, we moved to a Victorian house six blocks away.
So it might not be a big surprise, although it was to my teacher, to find me reading John Irving’s early novels when I was a sixth-grader.
Sep 22, 2004 at 1:18 pm
Lorianne, thanks for such a wonderful posting. There was so much in there that I could identify with. Always an enjoyable read.
Sep 22, 2004 at 3:38 pm
Oh, and another thing… did you use a RULER to underline passages or is your hand really that steady?
Oct 4, 2004 at 7:10 pm
Hey, everyone: apologies for the delay in responding!
Ivy, no, I’ve not read Fadiman’s *Ex Libris*, but it sounds great! I wish there were a book equivalent of Netflix, where you could add books to your queue and then have someone ship the next title to you whenever you were ready for a new read… In any case, I’ll add it to my mental list!
You’re right, Chris…book hoarding is no less of an addiction than other predilections requiring a 12-step program. Can you imagine a household with *two* book addicts? It defies imagination!
John, I’m keeping my Library of America books…although my Thoreau volume is a bit battered (and well notated!) from my dissertation days. But hardbacks in general are the last of my books to go, and then only under dire circumstances!
Thanks, Sylvia, for the encouraging words: it’s helpful to know people are rooting for me!
Even as I child, I was always the one who asked “troublesome” questions, and I guess I’ve never grown out of it. Someone has to ask the tough questions…might as well be me if no one else has the courage.
ntexas, you always seem to find the slinky implications between the lines: a woman after my own heart!
O, if you saw book in Ohio, *surely* they were mine!
My mother, actually, still has some of my college (undergrad) textbooks, and she bugs me to take them with me (or sell them!) each time I’m home. So maybe one of these days you’ll see *those* books by the side of the road!
Kurt, as much as it pained me to practically give away so many books, it also was a great freeing experience. Thoreau was right when he said that our possessions possess us. It would have felt better, I think, to have given my books to friends who would have cherished them…but in leiu of that, selling books (cheaply) to strangers is also cathartic.
Shane, thanks for the kind words. I tend to be wordy, so it’s good to hear that *someone* thinks I occasionally leave something unsaid!
Mumun, it doesn’t surprise me that you come from a reading/book-hoarding family. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
John, good to hear that you enjoyed the post. And yes, I used a *ruler* to do that underlining: just like the kid in *Dead Poet’s Society*!
Thanks, everyone, for the supportive comments: I’m feeling very warm & fuzzy now!