Classic Books Re-packaged

[Dave Monroe]

Not disgusting at all.  Quite touching, actually.  My
grandfather had tons of Reader's digest condensations,
I can't recall what I all went through back in the
day, but ... I'd later lend him SF novels, and he'd
type amateur legal briefs for the hell of it ...

Me, I probably ended up reading the 1972 World Book
Encyclopedia cover to cover.  Beirut was the Paris of
the Mideast, we still had Dick Nixon to kick around,
and I was probably the only kid in the city who knew
who Stefan Zweig was.  Decades later, I AM SZ's
"Buchmendel."  We fortunately lived blocks away from
the local public library branch, and made at least
monthly trips to the central branch plus the museums. 
We were always lower middle class, my parents
generally worked as programmers or systems analysts or
whatever at universities and colleges and so forth, so
I at least got to mess around with computers early on
(maybe i oughtta kept up with that ...).  Hell, my dad
would take me to the airport some weekends just so I
could watch the planes come and go ...

Once we'd inherited the house, i drowned it in books
to the point where my brothers sold it out from under
me.  144 bank boxes of 'em went into the storage the
first day of moving alone.  This went on for two
months.  But  when we were finally orphaned, I ended
up as guardian for my then 9-year-old brother.  I was
miserable at it, of course, but kept up a generally
good attitude towards keeping him in whatever culture
he was interested in: free jazz, krautrock, modernist
composer 9and this was at the time ...).  Philip K.
Dick.  Of course, he's a violent, indigent,
kleptiomaniac schizophrenic now, and I'm an
underachieving, overextended, messed, stressed and
depressed aspiring alcoholic (have been on a leaving
Las Vegas style bender of late--the middle brother, on
the other hand, is working on his doctorate in
Engineering, but it's been a while, and he has hi own
problems, so ...) .  But at least we're all relatively
well-read, well-rounded (esp. given certain genetic
predispotions that apparently have recently finally
expressed themselves in my formerly Bizarro
world--tall, thin, blond haired, grey eyed--youngest
brother, so ... ), whatever ...

Uh, I think there was supposed to be a moral there, at
any rate ...

--- Joel Katz <mittelwerk at hotmail.com> wrote:

> this is disgusting.  you should never have been
> allowed to read.  now look at you.

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com