favorite birthday memory

30 years ago today. The present from my parents was a very small box. I opened it and found a plane ticket to Washington, D.C., where my grandparents were visiting my aunt and uncle and two of my cousins for the summer.

You have to understand that Washington to me at the time was a hyper-exotic destination. My parents were rather sedentary hippies, so we never went anywhere (though my father did travel quite a bit around the U.S. for work sometimes). Most of my childhood travels were simply back and forth between Iowa and Chicago. I’d been to Wisconsin a couple of times and Missouri just once.

So, it was a rather restricted geography for me early on. (Little did I know what was coming in later years.) Washington was my first break-out from the Midwest, and it was a wonderful shock to the nervous system at the time.

Blackwell

I need more books like I need the proverbial hole in the head, but of course I’m not going to visit Oxford without going into Blackwell and buying enough to put my luggage over the weight limit.

There’s that fantastic scene in Kafka’s The Trial where Josef K. passes through a non-descript, rather small-looking door, and finds himself suddenly inside a vast courtroom packed with spectators. (In fact, I think it’s one of the best scenes in all of literature.)

That’s sort of the feeling I get every time I enter Blackwell in Oxford. It looks like a fairly small bookshop when you enter, but then you go down one flight of steps and you may as well be in an open pit copper mine, so numerous are the books spread out before you.

purchased while here

A number of books, one of which was an entire book by Steven Nadler on Occasionalism, copyright 2011. I’ve read many of his articles on the subject, of course. Actually, a lot of them are in here, but there are some I’ve never seen as well.

I was also in an Alban Berg mood for some reason, and picked up recordings of both “Wozzek” and “Lulu.” I hope they don’t make me nervous.