Computers, Reading Glasses, and Mercury
Ron Carlson’s \\At the Jim Bridger: Stories\\.
Mr. Carlson was teaching at Arizona State when I was an undergraduate. During his tenure, one of his stories got picked up by \\Playboy\\, and that put him, the university, and its programs on the map. He has three or four collections of short stories available, and I’ve always enjoyed them. There’s a bittersweet quality to the tales, each one is seems to be handcrafted, and sometimes, there’s a theme, and sometimes, the individual stories lack coherence. Inherent to the works, though, there’s a rhythm and some of the prose reads like poetry.
Hit the used bookstores to find a copy of his “News of the World,” a 1987 or so collection. I think it’s a classic. As I pulled a couple of copies of his books off the shelf, I discovered that his stories had a long history of publication in various respected magazines.
The funny tale I have, when his story came out in \\Playboy\\, I did buy a copy of the magazine, and my roommate [Scorpio> at the time, laughing, “You really **do** read the articles!”
While I was working my way through college, in Arizona, at that state university, I did fancy I knew something about typography as I was spending a lot of time typesetting materials. So with some books, I just assumed it was the print that was too small, or it was a typeface I didn’t like. I’m overly unfond of heavy serifs and the highly stylized text. But I might be getting old, as I recently purchased a pair of cheap plastic reading glasses. I can’t see anything out side of the printed page, and I don’t need glasses for driving, but I found, especially on late nights, in the dark of the night, when I’m already pretty tired, those glasses now make the difference between me enjoying the text or thinking that the typesetter was favoring form at the expense of content.
I spent a greater portion of the morning finally fixing the computer problem, in the process learning more about file structure and directories than I wanted to ever learn. So everything is right with the world. A late afternoon jaunt was cut short, as I noticed a huge thunderhead rolling in, just in time for rush hour. Austin must have some kind of karmic connection with weather – it always waits until the worst time to rain, almost as if it’s trying to cause the maximum amount of damage. Rain usually occurs at 8 or 9 in the morning, then again at 5, and sometimes, after midnight, just to confuse the drunks who aren’t supposed to be on the roads in the first place.
