The BOOKMARK in Dolega

A Senior Moment!  I had totally forgotten ordering Panama maps from the Canadian maker…oooh, and guess what, the price was somewhere between 75 and 80 dollars depending on exchange rates.   My apologies to everyone accused, except the two banks, who should not be so buried in corporate protocol and insularity, and become more personally connected with clients with less than 5 or 6 digit deposits.  This, of coursed, after they refund my 60 dollar annual MEMBERSHIP to Visa.

My Visa account has apparently been hacked, which means I will be unable to do book buying until I can cancel and get a card reissued.  Not a lot of money, as I keep account balance just ahead of my purchase requirements, but still….$77.65 for something called International Travel, in Richmond…who in hell is this?

And even though I buy more than three thousand dollars a month on the internet, this has never happened before.

Strangely enough, I was reading a blog two days ago, The Daily Kos, I believe, when I saw a book advertised which interested me. It was a book one of my customers would certainly want, so I forwarded from the blog, found myself on Amazon, and proceeded to purchase the book.

Yesterday, Amazon notified me that they were unable to process the order. I added more money to cc account, but this morning, I find that, instead of the book, I have paid someone 77 dollars plus 65 cents.  So, now comes the near-impossible task of trying to contact HSBC (have you EVER been able to get through on the phone?)   So I wait until Michael comes to work tomorrow, head down to David,  yell at the poor drones working there, cancel my card, request a new one, and wait…one week they say, but knowing HSBC, we are talking about sometime after Twelfth Night (Three Kings here).

I would really like to change over to Banco General for my credit card, but they have been almost as unpleasant as HSBC about granting me credit.  As it is, HSBC charges me a sixty dollar membership, for what I have no idea, though I have accumulated thousands of “Miles” in credit, which are impossible to do anything with.  And since the bank is one of the big backers of the Dubai Paradise in the Desert nonsense (but a good place to send Jihadists for vacation), I don’t expect to find much interest in someone with a limited income.  Perhaps if I had requested a billion dollars credit, I might have gained some credibility with HSBC, as well as their Banistmo predecessor.  As it is, I guess I swallow the loss, and await the big new credit card experience. if and when it becomes available.

So much for Christmas shopping.

for Professor Samuelson, whose textbook, Economics, has been the bible for generations of Econ students, and the second most important reason why I switched to a Lit major in college.  The first being accounting…anyhow, the book has been studied around the world, is still being used six decades later, teaching Keynsian economics, even today in a world that has rejected Keynes, since Kissinger, Greenspan, et al.  have promulgated market based economics, along with deregulation.  As the man who made M.I.T. the intellectual hub of the economics world, Professor Samuelson also leaves behind another legacy, or at least a familial legacy…his nephew is Larry Summers, our current you know what behind the you know who, and former president (removed) of Harvard. The world closes in on us, one revelation at a time.

Into the realm of impossibilities….you know, IF I were one of the finest athletes in the world (that is really funny), and I had earned a BILLION dollars in my lifetime (that is even funnier), known for my fine physical attributes, young, good looking and away from home most of the time, with scores of groupies after me (does anyone remember the tales from the rock and roll tours of the seventies?), I would certainly be inclined to take advantage of the opportunities offered me.

Morality, per se, is long gone down the tubes or into Facebook profiles.  Those of us, who profess the loudest of our moral standards, are also the most suspect.  I won’t even begin a litany of religious, political and corporate leaders who have “slipped” into depravity, sacrilege and /or immorality.  I have found that, in my lifetime, when I am most indignant about something, I have a secret corner of me, quietly trying to permit myself to indulge in that very sin.  Yea Brother.

And this is the dilemma many of us face.  I can only hope that out hero, Tiger, is not alone in his come-uppance.  How about the guys earning 200 million dollars a year?  Will retribution catch up with them?  Will they join Bernie Madoff in prison?  Not very bloody likely.  Sometimes Fate’s selection of victims is so random that we mourn for them, sometimes it seems justified.  We live in a world of inequalities and casuistic occurences that baffle our poorly equipped brains to search for solutions.

Me, I must force myself to quit berating others for their peccadillos, look at my own, and either correct them or shrug them off.  How’s that for a solution?  Worthy of the Washington Post, right?   Neither here nor there.

A friend recently emailed me that, having just turned 65, officially she could now be considered an old fart. Not true: the fact the she has no headaches, uses no medications, in themselves, prevent her from joining the Old Fart Movement.

When I was 65, I was still working out three days a week. and although my ears were already growing toward their current Dumbo size, I was fit as fit as a 65-year old can be. Then came my bout with pneumonia when I was seventy, from which I never really recovered.  But I don’t take medications either.  No, not true…I take cod liver oil capsules, for that omega-3 oil which keeps my gears greased, and flax seed every morning to keep the tubes greased.  That is a result of the cancer bout nearly three years ago…but I digress

It was with a small thrill of pleasure that I read this morning of the downsizing of the Washington Times, hoping that it presages the total collapse of said enterprise.  Founded by the man who claims to be the Messiah, and who has contributed millions to the Bush family, supported Nixon AFTER Watergate, owns munitions factories, sponsors mass “weddings” around the world, and most frightening of all, is the owner of United Press International (UPI)  which provides him a global outlet for his venom spitting, far to the right of Ghengis Khan.

Remember the Moonies?  Fake nurses and nuns, in every airport and train station, chasing people around for donations, they were youthful humanitarians who helped buy mansions and Mercedes  around the world  for the True Mother (he has had several) and True Father, who at ninety, still carries on his messages of loathing disguised as peace and unity…and this dude was a Presbyterian until God “spoke” to him back somewhere during the Great Depression.  Uh oh, there’s your first clue, a Presbyterian John of Arc?  I had always assumed that only pubescent girls had those itches…er, visions, that brought us so many Saints in the Church of Rome’s panoply.

But here we are now,  a decade into the new millenium, and only dimly hoping that the True Father had invested with Bernie Madoff, though of course, we know better, since this man and his church, and we assumes his newspaper, et al,  are antiSemitic as well as homophobic, pro-torture, and certainly, with his munitions and arms factories, pro-war.  Branded a cult by several nations, the True Father’s church is having its doldrums, and the fact that the man has little business sense, was okay in the days of full donation tins around the world, but now, the Moonies have pretty much dispersed, and True Father has lost two billion dollars trying to push America further right.  If only he would team up with Rupert Murdoch (wash your hands when you say that name) perhaps we could get all those Arizona and Texas border nuts to include the two of them in their Illegal Alien campaigns.  Australia is hoping to kick out foreigners, so we can give them back Rupert as one of their own, and take his communications monopoly away from him, along with True Daddy Moon back to Korea, and get the Dow Jones, the UPI, and all the other grabs back in real American hands….

hmm, I wonder if Sarah might want to take on the Washington Times.  Palin and Huckabee, with Senator Inhohe writing the Weather column(another one who talks with God).

Geez, I am glad to be here in the wilderness

BookMark sign

Test Run

Have been reading about Gore Vidal living in his “final nest” in the hills over Los Angeles, after so many years in that fabulous cliff- hanging chalet, villa, palace? in Italy.  I have always admired Vidal, his ease with language, his vibrant prose and, most of all, his self assurance.  The man has never had doubts, as far as I can tell…and how I envy that.

I am basically a waverer (now currently called dithering by the Cheney dungeon gang) and I applaud anyone who can, for a lifetime, remain true to his basic beliefs.  Strangely enough, though I had read The City and the Pillar (my first literary experience with homosexuality) as  an undergraduate, I was strongly influenced by God and Man at Yale, by William Buckley, Vidal’s lifetime nemesis. My roomie in college, who was kicked out of Princeton during wartime, (1950 Korea and the draft) had been entered at Miami University without the customary semester lapse which caused many to get drafted, the official reason being that his great-great grandfather was the university’s first president back in 1809, gave me a copy to read..  Thus my right  wing college influence, which later cost me a Fulbright, as I quoted Buckley in my American Lit paper proving that Lillian Smith was a communist, citing all the organizations (like ACLU) to which she belonged, the same information which inspired Senator McCarthy to begin his persecution of the intelligentsia. “Sophomoric” was my professor’s opinion of me to  Philip Willkie, chairman of the Fulbright Committee and a family friend.  Even that did not deter my right wind proclivities, and not until the coming of Camelot in 1960 did I begin to move in the other direction.  Vidal’s epitaph for Buckley:

I thought hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins  forever those whom he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred.

I am dithering again.  What I also respect about Vidal, is that he made himself a home, for more than thirty years, on the cliffs above the Mediterranean, where the world came to visit,  and then finally moves, for medical reasons, back to the United States, creates  another home, and tends to his partner’s  failing health, and stays put.  Me, I moved as often as the desire (or circumstances) would strike.  In my ill-fated thirteen year marriage, I moved my family from Heidelberg, Germany to Indianapolis, to Oxford, Ohio, to Urbana, Illinois, to Terre Haute, Indiana, to Columbus, Indiana, to Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and then divorced, I went off to New York, then to the Canary Islands, then Almunecar, Spain.  Back to USA, I lived in Orlando, Coral Gables, Key West, northern Michigan, finally New Orleans, where a family-owned house kept me in one place for a few years.  To Mexico in 1989, Costa Rica in 1990, and finally, Dolega, Panama…and for some reason (sobriety may have something to do with it) here I stay, apparently contented, though I will never have that assurance that someone like Vidal has.

And his writing style, use of language, how I wish I had inherited that…does that come from three hundred years of living in one place?  My De Mun ancestors came from France in the late 1600’s also, but became fur trappers in the lake region of New York, instead of going to Harvard. Is that the problem?  Fur trapping doesn’t really induce genius, and marrying into the Seneca tribe probably was an anti-intellectual move also.

My grandmother De Mun, a Scottish-Irish redhead nee Carpenter, married Mortimer De Mun, had two sons before the turn of the last century, divorced Mortimer, remarried him, divorced him again, whereas he turned around and married her cousin, who also divorced him.  This in an era when divorce didn’t happen to proper people.  Grandma noted that her elder son, Norman, wasn’t inclined to settle down (he was an ambulance driver in World War I), so when she saw my mother, who was visiting her sister Frieda in Toledo, walking down the street back in 1922, she found the perfect choice, the daughter of a German immigrant farmer, strong, a good housekeeper and cook, and she thus set the trap, possibly to get a wage- free housekeeper too, no doubt. My father, apparently a dutiful son, proposed marriage and married my mother in June 1923.

Grandma De Mun was an elegant woman, dating the owner of Tiedtke’s Department Store in Toledo, occasionally modeling in their fashion shows, and employed as a 1930’s version of store detective.  When she died at 72, I was only 11, but she had a great influence on me, and the loss was enormous, though I do believe my mother was relieved, and my father, recovering from a heart attack, was pretty self-absorbed.

My Uncle Harold, for whom I was named, had died in 1928 from nephritis, so I was a spoiled, blue-eyed towhead my dad called Dutch and grandma called Pudger.   That is another story too.

Back to Vidal.  If you have never read him, try Myra Breckenridge, that should set you off, or, if you are a freeper, read the settlement with Esquire magazine over the Buckley feud. His books on American history are all great reads, I especially like Burr and Empire.

And looking back on it all now, I wish I had never read God and Man at Yale, because I know much of the philosophy is what moves the far right today: hatred of minorities and a noblesse oblige that striates society into Us and Them, and the Us crowd is srill running the show, just ask Tim and Larry and Henry and the rest of that lot.  To work

Just finished a hundred and twenty book order, from my favorite bargain book dealer.  But that’s obscene…where am I going to put that many more books, and why in the world do I think I need The World Encyclopedia of Cars, or the Illustrated Works of Jane Austen, and particularly, how could I possibly have thought that I might someday sell a copy of Sussman’s The Last Secret of the Temple, or Tabucchi’s Dreams of Dreams and the Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa. (Does anyone here really know who Pessoa was, and if they do, do they care?)

But book buying on line has become my obsession, and though I promised Chip, the book seller, on October 15,  that my 300 book order would be my last bulk order until the new year, ( Ha ha that’s funny.  Like hiding the bottle from a drunk.)  I can’t keep away from that magic world of booksellers…who knows when that title you have been looking for the past year or two, suddenly pops up on a seller’s list, and he is unaware that there are no copies available anywhere outside of India or Australia. (Both places have gobs of good books, but the last time I bought a Palm tree encyclopedia from Australia, the postage was 48 dollars US, not Aussie).

And I can’t resist children’s classics: The Wind in the Willows, Charlotte’s Web, Hardy Boys, and Mark Twain, and Jack London, and Kipling, and Milne, and Lear’s nonsense, and Dr. Seuss, and Dickens, Treasure Island, Roald Dahl…. whoa.that’s what I mean…an obsession.

I have kept this business going for years by not permitting myself to carry any debt, cash on the spot, but the possibility and reality of getting the kiosk next door, in April of this year, sent me into a whirl of spending, furniture, tile floors, how many feet of shelving, trying to patch the tacky roof, that I am still trying to see the end of, so that is why buying 120 books at one fell swoop is a stupid, irrational, careless, unprofessional, but oh, so much fun…way of working.

What inner demons must I have, to order The Encyclopedia of Amazon Parrots, and Veterinary Care for Horses, along with Winterson’s  Sexing the Cherry,  and The Rastafarians, and The Massacre at Waco?  Am I having repeated Senior Moments, or do I really have a plan, deep seated and as yet unsurfaced?  I let Michael believe so, as he shakes his head over the latest madcap purchase…funnily enough, a customer has just come into the store looking for the Mythology books of Joseph Campbell, which I recently purchased on one of my mythology days…..along with several Books of Faeries, which Michael seems to be nonplussed about, though I told him that these are “e” and not “i” faeries, so he has put them into the fantasy section….but are they fantasy?  You have no idea how many volumes there are available, on the history, authenticity, fine art reproductions, and Irish lore of,  and probably interviews with, faeries, though I am afraid twitter, ipod, Facebook, etc. will make those interviews moot and mute…let’s see what kind of evidence the next generation comes up with.

Ha!  Just sold The Joseph Campbell Companion, and the guy is tweaked about the mythology volumes, will be back, as they are beautiful books.

Am making a real effort (until this morning’s order) to be debt-free by year’s end.  That way I can treat myself to a week in Costa Rica in January.   I love San Jose, five bookstores for me to grub through, and what wonders I come up with.  Last year, which I vowed to be my last buying trip, I brought back five hundred books, on the Tracopa bus yet, ten cartons of books, an extra twenty dollars, well worth the cost, and like opening Christmas boxes, not remembering what’s in them, as I have a tendancy to take-rather-than-reject in the bookseller’s back rooms, oh yeah!

A real pervert, I told you so!

Decided to make a mincemeat pie today ( a belated Thanksgiving treat for myself) and realized one jar of Grandmothers Traditional Mincemeat was not enough to do a decent sized pie…I made the mistake of reading the ingredients to see what more I might add:  apples, raisins, whathaveyou. Cottonseed oil? Corn sweeteners, evaporated apples?

Grandma De Mun, a world class cookie, doughnut, cake and pie maker, would go into high gear in the fall when we would return from my mother’s family farm, loaded with hickory nuts from the woods, apples, pumpkins, Concord grapes and, of course, lots of eggs, butter, a ham or two along with smoked bacon, and the ever present 10 gallon crock of lard.

“Nothing makes good doughnuts like pure lard,” grandma would almost swoon, as the new crock was opened. When she got to mincemeat, however, she had the recipe from her old notebook, wrapped in multiple rubber bands, but I am sure she knew it by heart, boneless rump roast, suet, raisins apples, citron, and all those spices, the meat cooked for hours…mincemeat is one of the few things that I remember had mace, as well as allspice, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, the works….and of course, the pie crust, made with lard, was light, tender and flaky.

The final ingredient, from grandma’s trusty medicinal brandy bottle, kept in the lower cupboard behind the pie tins and roasting pans, gave mincemeat that heady, exotic aroma (AND flavor) that made it a holiday special, and probably help start me on my youthful love for booze….so should I now blame Grandma De Mun for my years of alcoholism? No way!

I was only five when prohibition ended, but had beers set up for me at the local tavern when my godfather Charlie Smith took me along to show me off to his buddies…and that’s another story.

Back to mincemeat (without meat).

So what to add? Or better, what to take out? I don’t even think I will enjoy this pie, after re-reading the ingredients. In fact, I am going to put the jar back into the rear corner of my cupboard and save it for another occasion. Somehow, it just wouldn’t have the right flavor