Pepys for Sale!

Well, it was bound to happen eventually… the fabled Bennion Archive has finally outgrown its physical domain and I’ve had to make the difficult decision to start letting things go for the sake of reclaiming my modest living space. I’ve actually been in the process of that for over a year now, quietly selling off books and other small items on Amazon Marketplace (go here if you’d like to peruse what I’ve currently got in the inventory). I’ve had some degree of success with that, but I’ve also found that Amazon isn’t always the best option, depending on what exactly you’re trying to sell. So I’m exploring some other venues, including the direct approach, i.e., pitching certain items to my Loyal Readers here on Simple Tricks and Nonsense. I hope you’ll forgive me for going commercial on you; I promise the items I mention here will be things I think may be of interest to my audience, and I promise as well not to do it very often.

So, that said, the first item up in the Giant Liquidation Sale is an 11-volume set of books comprising the complete Diary of Samuel Pepys. (That’s pronounced “peeps,” for you non-English majors out there.)

If you’re not familiar with Pepys, he’s a pretty fascinating guy. I first discovered him and his famous diary in a college course on the English Restoration, the time period immediately after the British monarchy regained control from the Cromwells. It was an exciting, high-spirited time in Britain following several decades of Puritan repression. Theaters were reopened (the Puritans had had them shuttered), and the immensely popular, extremely bawdy plays they hosted would later be recognized as a distinct genre, the Restoration comedy. Women were allowed to perform onstage for the first time, social restrictions of all kinds were loosened, and there must’ve been a sense in the air that history was sweeping Britain along at immense speed toward the destiny of Empire.

As a dashing young man-about-town working for the Admiralty, Samuel Pepys was in the ideal position to witness history firsthand, and his diary is today considered a prime historical source on many notable events, particularly the Great Plague that killed 20% of London’s population in 1665-66 and the Great Fire that destroyed much of the city in 1666. But Pepys wrote about far more than the news of the day. He wrote about pretty much everything: gossip about the high-ranking people he crossed paths with, affairs of state, his own wenching and carousing, his health complaints, his marriage, the plays he saw, the coffeehouses and taverns he frequented, the whole tapestry of 17th century London. It’s fascinating, invaluable material if you’re at all interested in the period.

So, you may be wondering, if this diary is so endlessly fascinating, then why am I selling my copy of it? It all comes down to my number-one complaint: a lack of time. When I bought this set several years back, I had a lot of grandiose ideas. I had it in my head that I was a Literary Fellow not too different from Pepys himself, that I would someday own a vast library lined with built-in oak bookshelves that would be stuffed with thousands of volumes on all sorts of arcane subjects, which I would then read while sitting in a wine-colored wingback chair, wearing a favorite cardigan and smoking a pipe. You know, something like this. I imagined also that I would have time to take advantage of such a library. Well… you all can guess how that’s turned out. I haven’t smoked my pipe in years and my library is all in banker’s boxes that are kept in a cold, dark basement. I don’t own a wingback chair, and I don’t think I’m even all that literary anymore, to be honest. If I ever was. As interesting as I found that class on the Restoration, I’ve always preferred convenience-store pulp novels to the books my high-school teacher Mr. Bridge used to call “literature with a capital L.” And then there’s the matter of how much time I have at my disposal these days…

Basically, I’ve just realized that I’m not likely to ever read these books, so I’m hoping to get them into the hands of somebody who will. And who has the space to store books that I increasingly do not.

As I said, this is an 11-volume set of trade paperbacks that includes the complete text of Pepys’ diary, spanning the ten-year period 1660 to 1669, as well as a book-length index and a companion. They were published by the University of California Press in 2000, and are brand-new, still in their factory shrinkwrap, just as you see them in the picture above. I’d like to sell them as a complete set, and I’m asking $50 for the lot, a real bargain considering each volume lists for $28.95 on Amazon. If anyone reading this is interested, just shoot me a message at jason-at-jasonbennion.com (you know, of course, to replace “-at-” with “@”, right?). If you live in the Salt Lake area, we can arrange a face-to-face exchange; if you’re someplace else, let’s talk about shipping…

FYI, I’ve also got these listed for sale on craigslist, KSL.com, and eBay, so if you are interested, don’t dawdle in letting me know, because you never know when one of these other venues might produce a bite…

Nov112011

So Who Actually Won the War?

I’ll be honest, I haven’t been following the deepening economic crisis in Europe very closely… I’m dimly aware that Greece is falling apart and threatening to drag the rest of EU down with it, but that’s about all. I don’t really understand the issues involved, and I have no idea what has to be done to fix things… or at least prevent catastrophe. Which means I have no clue if Andrew Sullivan’s prediction today has any validity at all… but I thought it was some interesting food for thought, nonetheless:

My view is that at some point, Germany is going to rescue the euro,
and provide the funds necessary for it. [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel will not let the European
project die on her watch. Her country’s entire postwar identity is
rooted in it. And so a project designed to put a line against any new
wars, after Germany’s serial aggression, will end up making Europe a
German-based, German-run and German-funded country. [Emphasis mine.]

History has its ironies, does it not? But Britain, alone of the major countries, stands apart. Plus ca change.

Nov102011

Beware! Cuteness Ahead!

My friend Karen asked me recently for an update on the kitty boys, since I haven’t mentioned them in quite a while. They seem to be reasonably contented with their lives at the moment. Here’s a photo of two of them, Evinrude and Jack-Cat, cuddling with one another on my desk the other night:

Not the greatest shot from a technical standpoint, but I thought it would be enough to make folks go “awwwwwww!”

Nov102011

20 Songs

I missed out on the heyday of the “let’s see what’s on your iPod” meme by about six years — what can I say, I’m a late adopter, part of that whole “analog kind of guy” thing — but I’ve actually got an iPod now, so when I ran across a variant of this old blogging chestnut on Tumblr last night, I couldn’t resist playing along.

If this is too passe for your tastes, feel free to surf on, but I feel like I’m finally filling a hole in my soul by participating in one of these.

Okay, maybe this experience wasn’t that profound, but it was kind of fun to see what a random sampling of my musical tastes might turn up. Fun for me, at least. Maybe not so much for you. But who’s writing this blog, anyhow?

Right, so, moving on, here’s the intro/instructions:

You can learn a lot about someone by the music they listen to. Hit “shuffle” on your iPod or MP3 player and write down the first 20 songs. No cheating or skipping songs that are shameful. That is the fun!

My list:

Calling All Girls — Rick Springfield
Windy — The Association
The Harder They Come — Jimmy Cliff
Shake Your Groove Thing — Peaches & Herb
Fall from Grace — Stevie Nicks
Heaven Knows — Robert Plant
Ask the Lonely — Journey
Sweet Talkin’ Guy — The Chiffons
Listen to Your Heart — Roxette
Mule Skinner Blues — The Fendermen
The Road Home — Heart
Nothin’ at All — Heart
Some Gothic Ranch Action (instrumental from the soundtrack of Rancho Deluxe) — Jimmy Buffett
Hot Girls in Love — Loverboy
I Can’t Stand It No More — Peter Frampton
Real Man — Bruce Springsteen
Dance Hall Days — Wang Chung
Don’t Look Now — Creedence Clearwater Revival
La Bamba — Los Lobos
Son of a Preacher Man — Dusty Springfield

Okay. Interesting that the first selection was my main man. I swear I did not set that up. I do wonder, though, exactly how that Shuffle algorithm works. You see, I can go for weeks without hearing anything from a particular genre — oldies, say — and then all of a sudden the machine is kicking out “Sweet Talkin’ Guy” and “Windy” and “Mule Skinner Blues.” Not to mention two songs by the same artist coming back to back… that doesn’t seem terribly random to me. In any event, I suppose this is a reasonably good cross section of my likes: mostly ’70s and ’80s pop-rock, some older stuff, nothing newer than ’89 or ’90, and some Jimmy Buffett thrown in for good measure. Probably nothing my Loyal Readers didn’t expect, right?

Nov092011

The Beginning and the End, Together at Last

I love the notion of bookends, of events coming full-circle… of symmetry, I suppose. We’ve been taught to expect it by stories and movies and songs: lovers separated by decades miraculously find one another again, the boy avenges his father and assumes the throne, the traveler returns home after his adventures abroad and restores order… you get the idea. I think the concept has power exactly because it so rarely happens in real life, where time is inexorably linear, the center usually does not hold, and the road generally does not bring you back around to the place you started from. But every once in a while…

Consider this photo that grabbed my attention earlier today:

The two geezers — er, distinguished older gentlemen — standing in the foreground are Bob Crippen and John Young, the legendary space shuttle (and, in Young’s case, Apollo) astronauts who flew the very first mission, STS-1, way back in 1981. Standing behind them, meanwhile, are the crew of STS-135, the final shuttle mission that ended in July of this year. The beginning and the end of the space shuttle program right there, folks. Symmetry.

If you’re interested in specifics, these people are, from left to right: Doug Hurley (STS-135 pilot); Robert Crippen (STS-1 pilot); John Young (STS-1 commander); Chris Ferguson (STS-135 commander); Sandy Magnus (STS-135 mission specialist); and Rex Walheim (STS-135 mission specialist). I found the photo here, among a whole bunch of different poses; I thought this was the most striking.

Incidentally, that’s not an actual space shuttle they’re standing in front of; it’s a mock-up used for training at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas… you know, the place that didn’t get to host a real shuttle orbiter despite having been a major part of the manned spaceflight program (“Houston, we have a problem…”) going back decades. I didn’t think too much about that when the shuttle disbursements were first announced, but the more time goes by, the more it bothers me. The Intrepid Museum in New York, as cool as it is, doesn’t really deserve a shuttle. Better they go to places that have an actual connection to the program. (Los Angeles qualifies because the orbiter airframes were built there by Rockwell International.)

Speaking of the museum-bound shuttle orbiters, recent photos of them have been somewhat shocking as big pieces of them are currently missing: the main engines, obviously, but also the orbital maneuvering system (OMS) thruster pods that flank the vertical stabilizer, and the forward reaction control system (FRCS). The FRCS is the set of thrusters visible just below the orbiter’s cockpit windows; removing that system has left a big rectangular cavity in the nose that is even more disconcerting (to me) than the missing engines on the back. But now I see that Discovery, at least, has its FRCS back in place after it was thoroughly cleaned and decontaminated in White Sands, New Mexico.

In other recent news you may or may not have heard about, Boeing has signed a lease with NASA for use of one of Kennedy Space Center’s former Orbiter Processing Facilities. Boeing intends to use the building to manufacture and maintain its CST-100 spacecraft, which are under development and will look something like larger versions of the old Apollo capsules, with seating for seven astronauts instead of three. The CST-100 is intended, like pretty much every other manned spacecraft currently on the drawing boards, to ferry crew and supplies to and from the International Space Station, and also possibly to a privately owned station planned by Bigelow Aerospace. Boeing hopes to send up its first CST-100 by 2015.

Meanwhile, NASA has announced its intention to send up an unmanned test version of its Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle — another Apollo capsule on steroids — by 2014, as a first step toward sending astronauts beyond Earth orbit again.

But I think the first American spacecraft to get back up there with people aboard is most likely going to be the SpaceX Dragon capsule. There’s a Dragon at Kennedy as we speak, getting prepped for its second unmanned test flight, which is scheduled to launch on December 19. (If you’ll recall, SpaceX orbited a Dragon at this same time last year.) The goal for this next flight was to rendezvous with the International Space Station and then, on a third flight, actually dock with the ISS, but SpaceX is feeling cocky and has asked for permission to combine flights two and three. In other words, they want to go for a docking now. Dragon is currently intended as an automated cargo carrier, but SpaceX has designed the craft so it can reconfigured to carry passengers, and the company is eager to get the vehicle crew-rated. The company’s ambitious founder, Elon Musk, has even said recently he wants to send astronauts to Mars aboard one of his ships by 2020. We’ll see about that — I’ve been hearing my whole life that a manned Mars trip was only a few years off — but after all the melancholy and apparent loss of direction that accompanied the end of the shuttle, it’s good to hear somebody talking seriously about a human presence up there in the black…

Nov072011

Lethal Response!

Now this is the protection system I need for my ‘stang!

It’s also, curiously enough, the only scene from Robocop 2 that I actually remember… go figure.

Nov062011

Bastards!

Seven PM, five nights ago, the big park-n-ride lot at the southern end of the light-rail line. I’ve just spent 35 minutes riding on the train; I have another 15 or 20 to go behind the wheel of my car before I see the lights of home. I’m tired. It’s been another of those relentless-onslaught kind of days that seem to have become the default for my job, and I really don’t need any more bullshit tonight.

I don’t know how far I parked from the train platform. I’ve never been good at judging distances. Not like my dad, who can tell at a glance and with surprisingly good accuracy how far away something is, anywhere from about a half-inch up to a half-mile. The walk from the platform to my car isn’t as far as a half-mile, but it’s a lot closer to that than it is to the half-inch, and it takes me a good minute or so to make the hike, the whole time thinking about how much I just want this day to be done.

My Mustang waits for me, gleaming dully in the orange glow of the sodium-vapor lamps. It’s a welcome sight. My keys are already in my hand, and I hit the unlock button on the remote-control fob from 20 paces away. The interior lights come on, the headlamps flash twice, and the car alarm chirps four times to indicate that it has been triggered at some point during the 10 hours since I armed it this morning. But of course it has. The alarm is always going off. If the park-n-ride’s closest neighbor wasn’t a sprawling hillside cemetery, I’m sure it would be a real nuisance. As it is, I doubt more than three breathing people ever hear the damn thing as it screams at the passing birds who set it off. I never wanted a car alarm, didn’t want to be one of those guys. It was my dad’s idea — no, actually his insistence — that I get one shortly after I bought the car, because he was just certain that a Mustang convertible was bound to attract trouble. I thought he was being silly, that nothing would happen to my car and that an alarm wouldn’t stop anything if it did. But I caved eventually, the way I always do with him. And I dutifully set it every single day, and some days I even feel a little safer.

I notice the problem through the driver’s-side window as I’m reaching for the door handle. The glove box is hanging open. And the lid to the center console between the seats is standing straight up. A cold prickle races over my arms and legs at the same moment a hot flush rolls through my stomach and face. Somebody has been in my car.

Oct312011

Happy Birthday, Lady Liberty!

In case you missed it, last Friday was the 125th anniversary of the dedication of the Statue of Liberty, which was, of course, a gift from the people of France to the people of the United States back in the days when Americans and French actually had some mutual respect for one another. Hard to imagine how different things must’ve been before “freedom fries” and “surrender monkeys,” isn’t it?

Now, I’m not what most people would consider “patriotic.” I don’t feel any particular emotion when I gaze upon the flag, I’ve never liked reciting the Pledge of Allegiance going all the way back to elementary school, and that damn Lee Greenwood song that’s become a Fourth of July standard makes me want to kick puppies. But my attitude about these things is not, as many would accuse, because I hate my country. Rather, I dislike the baggage that’s become attached to the usual symbols of national pride in recent decades: sticky sentimentality combined with a strain of
belligerent jingoism that’s the exact opposite of what I consider the best about America; the social pressure to genuflect to anyone in uniform regardless of whether they truly deserve the label “hero” (motivated, I’m convinced, by collective guilt over all the home-front nastiness during the Vietnam War); and the simplistic “we’re number one” mentality that makes it nearly impossible to honestly assess our nation’s shortcomings and figure out how to improve. Not to mention the way “patriotism” has become just another blunt instrument wielded by one side of the political spectrum to accuse the other of being “un-American.” It’s hard to love the flag when some blowhard who clearly loathes me for not being just like him is wrapping himself in it and calling it his and his alone.

Nevertheless, there are some places and objects that remain unsullied by that kind of ugly mudslinging, things that penetrate my shell of pinko-liberal cynicism and cause me to reflect on the history and ideals of our nation: the sprawling Civil War battlefields of Gettysburg and Antietam; the actual Star-Spangled Banner, the one notable exception to my general feelings about flags; the words of the Gettysburg Address, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution’s Preamble; and of course a feminine colossus whose copper skin has gone green from a century’s exposure to the weather, technically entitled “Liberty Enlightening the World,” but better known as the Statue of Liberty.

Besides her aesthetic beauty and awe-inspiring scale — really, she’s big when you’re standing at the base of her — there is all that she represents: a beacon shining through the darkness to lead the downtrodden of the world to a better place… not necessarily a better physical place, although that’s how the words on Liberty’s tablet are usually interpreted, but a better social construct in which everyone is granted equal protections under the law as well as respect and dignity and a fair chance to make a good life for themselves, no matter who they are, what they believe, who they love, or what they look like. That’s what defines my America, not the military might or material wealth or Sunday-morning piety that most people think of. It’s an ideal we don’t live up to, frankly — in my opinion, we’re actually regressing away from it at the moment — and perhaps no country can live up to that. But it’s nevertheless an ideal worth striving for. We should be grateful to the people of France for providing us with such an effective and enduring symbol of what we’re supposed to be about.

So happy birthday, Lady Liberty. May your light shine on for centuries to come, until all the people of the world have finally come in out of the cold night of injustice…

If you want to see more pics like the one above, check out this slideshow at Talking Points Memo.

Oct232011

My Favorite New Show of 2011

Let us now sing the praises of my favorite new television series of the fall season… and the way the ratings have been dropping week to week, we’d probably better hurry because it’s not likely going to be around much longer. And what a damn shame that is, because I’m personally finding Pan Am to be a refreshing change from all those dour forensics shows and police procedurals, the “reality” competitions that reward the most sociopathic behavior, and of course all the boring damn variations on the amateur talent-hour.

If you don’t know it — and based on those disappointing ratings, I’m guessing you don’t — Pan Am follows the adventures of four young flight attendants and, to a lesser extent, their male counterparts up in the cockpit, as they fly around the world exploring exotic destinations and discovering their own potential and limitations. The show is set in the early 1960s, when jet airliners were the latest thing, travel still had a whiff of glamour and privilege about it, and the Cold War insinuated itself into the background of just about everything. But while Pan Am does pay lip service to the social issues of the day, particularly the ridiculous sexism that told women they shouldn’t have any dreams beyond making babies and cooking Sunday pot roasts, the show’s really not interested in examining these themes in depth. To be honest, it’s got more in common with The Love Boat than Mad Men, and the plots tend to be a little far-fetched, if not downright silly. (One of the ladies is a courier for the CIA who occasionally gets herself into some overblown intrigue; I find the stories about her sister, an insecure young woman who ran out on her own wedding, far more compelling.) That’s not to say the show is stupid or lacking in genuine poignancy, because it’s not. But it is a trifle, and deliberately so. It’s obviously intended to be a light dessert rather than a heavy meal. And honestly, that’s the very reason why the show appeals to me, because simple escapism has been out of fashion for far too long. Even the generally lighthearted Castle has done its grim serial killer story. And I’m sick and tired of grim.

The one thing Pan Am does especially well, the thing that keeps me coming back for more, is the way it captures the un-ironic optimism of an era when anything seemed possible, as well as the bubbly excitement of going some place new for the first time. The show reminds me of what it felt like to be young. It’s a welcome break from the harshness of our current-day reality.

And of course it has airplanes and pre-TSA airports, and I like seeing those things…

Oct222011

The Mighty Cave of Cool Survey

Nothing like a nice meme that you can work on a little bit at a time when your world is too crazy to allow for proper blog entries. These “quiz things,” as Jaquandor calls them, are getting harder to find; I guess they’ve become a bit passe these days, rather like blogging itself, really. But I still enjoy them, especially when, as I mentioned, I’m too busy to really do much else.

Here’s a pretty good one I found over at Michael May’s AdventureBlog…