In yesterday’s article, Smelling of Pencils, the comments discussion turned — as it always does — away from the main core of the argument of the article and into another realm. We shared a brief discussion about books and that conversation led me back into wondering about books and publishing and what makes up the essence of a book: The Author, the Reader, the Publisher? The book itself? The process of it all? What is a book nowadays anyway?
Is funny always funny? Or does the sense of what’s funny change with the cultural ebb-and-flow over time of what certain people find funny? In a recent thread of comments here, one regular commenter made a “joke” about work where the new management team were “Nazis” and the workers were “Jews.”
Barrymore’s Bar in Lincoln, Nebraska is unique. It is located in the backstage area of what used to be the Stuart Theatre. You enter the bar through an alley. The bar entrance was the performer’s stage door when the theatre opened in 1929.
Barrymore’s was always dark and musky and smelling of sawdust and rope. The Stuart theatre is still a performance space with seats and a stage and on the other side of the fire curtain remains Barrymore’s — still backstage — and still thriving with life and ambition and still giving off a strange ambience of being someplace you don’t belong but were always meant to be in the end.
Barrymore’s is where the radio people I used to work with would hang out before, during and after work because the station was on the eighth floor of the same building. If I joined them during the day I always had a pop while those around me would slowly make their way into the slosh. One day my friends and I were hanging out downtown after school and we decided to go into Barrymore’s.
Barrymore’s was an upper class bar. It wasn’t like the bar troughs clotted along downtown where University of Nebraska-Lincoln students would head for the cheapest buzz they could find. The five of us sat down together at a tiny round table. The waitress came over and smiled and asked what we were drinking as she placed a cocktail napkin before each of us. She said drinking in such a way we knew she mean alcohol and not pop or water.
When I was growing up in Nebraska, my family was famous for always telling its young, “Never write something you don’t want read out loud to the rest of the world.”
That sort of advice, bundled in a warning, and wrapped in a grin and punctuated by a pointing finger, was daunting for a group of nine-year-old cousins to comprehend as we scrawled our names in crayon on a Big Chief pencil tablet.
Do, you, like, to, use, commas, as, if, they, are, running, out, of, style? I don’t like commas and I avoid them.
My students, on the other hand, as well as many amateur authors, use commas as if they were free by the bushelful and need to be crammed into every bramble and sigh. I never add a comma before an “and” though many people employ a comma there.
Yesterday my young, attractive and obviously upwardly mobile neighbor — I don’t know her name and she’s lived in her apartment a year to my four years — was in the hallway with me when her Chinese food order was delivered. The delivery guy waved at me. We are good friends because he delivers a brown rice lunch special to me at least four times a week.
We don’t have a washing machine or dryer in our apartment building so every week I drop off our dirty laundry at the corner Laundromat for washing. In our Jersey City neighborhood paying someone else to wash and dry your clothes actually costs less than doing it all yourself in Manhattan.
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