Present Tense

A second set of John Updike clips on Charlie Rose included Updike's comment that the present tense in the "Rabbit" books was lightening and freeing.

People comment that internet content lacks contextual clues of time and place that are inherent in books and other physical objects with information content.

A reference question bounced between a couple of us on the library

staff took us to a local history book, several phone books of the late 1940s through

early 1960s, and a cemetery index compiled by Genealogical Society volunters a quarter century ago.

In these physical objects we confront time's flow. We imagine an individual human life based on a few obsolete phone numbers on aging pages, dates on a headstone, and a few scattered newspaper paragraphs reduced to images on rolls of microfilm. Not too surprising for a village hardware merchant. But what about famous folks or instantly recognizable objects?

Only a handful of libraries have the leather bound 1879 Patent Gazette or the microfilm copies of that volume containing this forgotten facet of a milestone of American history -- but it is readily available on any net-connected electronic device (if you just know how to find it!)

Retrospective

Charlie Rose's hour is a retrospective devoted to the late John Updike. (The second link brings up a menu of past interview clips.) The whole discussion is how multifaceted and prolific Updike's output truly was. A novel a year, plus essays, poetry, short stories, and over 800 pieces in the New Yorker during his 50-year career. His last pieces, yet to be published, reflect on his impending death.

Many who produce things over a span of time, or experience things over a span of time, have the opportunity to look back and examine the past.

As noted in the top banner for this blog, posts are subject to revision. Earlier this evening, I went back through the past three and a half months' posts, and made some subtle emendations. Most of them were revising the .html behind the images in the early posts, and inserting additional links in the text. Nothing substantive.

I am mildly bemused that the most often viewed image of the over 800 posted on FLICKR is one showing the south side of 6th Street, taken from the roof of the City Auditorium on the day the buildings that formerly occupied the Kilgore Memorial Library site were scheduled for demolition. A quarter century has passed since that chilly morning.