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Sauntering

Sauntering

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Writing a blog called A Walker in the Suburbs means I’ve become familiar with all the lovely synonyms for walking: strolling, ambling, rambling, trekking, treading and wandering. By far one of my favorites is sauntering. But until yesterday I never thought much about its derivation. It was while looking up Thoreau on another quest that I found this, from his essay “Walking”: 

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks — who had a genius, so to speak for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived ‘from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre,’ to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, ‘There goes a Sainte-Terrer,’ a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander.”

Although some would say the word “saunter” comes from “sans terre,” without land or home, Thoreau continues, this is fine, too, because being without a home can also mean being equally at home everywhere — and that in fact is the secret of successful sauntering.  

I’m looking forward to more sauntering and more Thoreau. 

Reading O’Brien

Reading O’Brien

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Ever since I saw Edna O’Brien on Ken Burns’ “Hemingway” I’ve been reading her books. I finished the Country Girls trilogy a couple days ago and am now enjoying her memoir, Country Girl.

It’s the proper order in which to read these books, I think. Not only because the latter came 52 years after the first of the trilogy volumes, but also because it’s interesting to see what she did with the raw material before actually getting to know the raw material. 

I say this because I started reading them in the opposite order and wasn’t happy about it. So I saved the memoir for last — and am glad I did. Here’s a passage from it about Drewsboro, where O’Brien grew up:

On either side of the track there were grassy banks full of wildflowers and burdock and flowering weed, bees buzzing and disporting  themselves in and out of these honeyed enclaves, and the smell of the nettles so hot. Birds swooped in random gusts, and butterflies, velvet-brown, maroon, and tortoiseshell, their ravishing colors never clashing, never gaudy, moved in the higher strata, like pieces of flying silk.

“

The Sprawl

The Sprawl

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Jason Diamond is a child of the suburbs, and in The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs, he writes about them with mixed but ultimately fond feelings, realizing the idea of comfort and security they have given him.

Which doesn’t mean he didn’t escape them as soon as he could. But he does come to terms with them, something I’ve been trying to do for years in my own, still-living-in-the-suburbs way. 

Diamond seeks to understand suburbs by visiting them — Levittown, New York; Roland Park, Maryland; Lake Forest, Illinois; and Fort Lee, New Jersey — and by analyzing movies and songs and books about them — William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Rakesh Satyal’s No One Can Pronounce My Name and one of my favorite films, “Ladybird.” 

The Sprawl is another book I picked up at the library, so serendipity was involved, and though it’s not the most lyrically written book on place, I like the no-holds-barred way Diamond describes its effect on those creative souls who grow up in places like, well, Oak Hill, Virginia: 

“Suburbs in the postwar era were built with homogeneity in mind, and nothing develops a sense of not belonging like telling somebody they have to fit into a mold. While it’s impossible to figure out the roots of each and every case of suburban alienation, stepping back and seeing that there’s something downright strange about the actual concept of the modern suburb — how it’s built and the psychological impact it can have on people — isn’t nearly as hard.”

The Alignment Problem

The Alignment Problem

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Maybe it’s because I’m going back to school in September and must get some practice reading books I don’t totally understand, but for some reason I was determined to finish The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values, by Brian Christian. I picked it up from the “New Nonfiction” shelf a couple of months ago, and thanks to my library’s liberal renewal policies, I have it still. 

I could tell from the beginning that I was in a bit over my head with this tome, which, though written engagingly, presupposes knowledge of artificial intelligence that I do not have at my fingertips. But it seemed like an important book on an important topic so I plowed through it. 

I finished it last night and, after using the index to flip back and forth to various definitions I spaced out while perusing the first time, was at least able to understand what the alignment problem is and why it’s important to solve it. 

The alignment problem is a term in computer science that refers to the divergence between the models we have created and the intentions we have when creating them, often imprecise or incomplete. It is, Christian assures us, a problem that the AI community is working to understand and rectify, but is by no means solved. 

Instead, he says, “We are in danger of losing control of the world not to AI or to machines as such but to models. To formal, often numerical specifications for what exists and what we want.”

We must be concerned, Christian says, but not grim. “Alignment will be messy. How could it be otherwise? Its story will be our story, for better or worse. How could it not?”

In Praise of Clippings

In Praise of Clippings

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This morning’s newspaper included an article about books on D.C. I did what I do with all helpful articles I think I might want to read again — pulled it out and saved it. 

We live in a digital era, but you wouldn’t know that by looking at my files. They are stuffed full of newspaper and magazine clippings, everything from recipes to book reviews to especially fetching columns I want to read again. They are messy and unwieldy — but essential, too.

I could find the same articles and bookmark them on my computer. But there’s something to be said for the physical presence of the article itself. For the touch of the paper,  complete with ripped edges and, sometimes, with notes I scribbled in the margin. 

Clippings are outdated, I suppose. But I keep them around. They are tangible reminders of the ideas they hold. 

Bedtime Stories

Bedtime Stories

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The voice is melodious, measured, often accented. The intoned words are taking me out of myself, out of the self that tosses and turns when it awakens at 3:30 or 4:20 a.m.  They are shifting my thoughts, turning them toward the drama of others. They are reminding me that the world is large. 

In my arsenal of sleep-inducing weapons I have a new favorite: Audible. I had tried using the recorded books program to this purpose more than a year ago, when I first discovered it, but I had not yet figured out the “Sleep” feature, which allows you to set a timer for anywhere from five minutes to 120. On that occasion, I lost about 30 minutes of the book and had quite a time finding my way back to the place where I lost consciousness

But now, I can set the timer to 10 minutes, certain that, even if I do fall asleep before it runs out, I will easily find my way back. No light to flip on, no pages to fumble through. The darkness of the bedroom preserved. I can plug in, listen to, and drift off as someone reads me … a bedtime story. 

The Visited Place

The Visited Place

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In his book Horizon, the late Barry Lopez talks about his fascination with the life of the British explorer Captain James Cook. Though Lopez admits that Cook’s adventures did not always bode well for indigenous people (and it was indigenous people who took Cook’s life, in Hawaii, in 1779), Lopez does not demonize the man.  Cook explored the east coast of Australia, continental Antarctica and Hawaii, all the while, Lopez believes, remaining “quietly but profoundly conflicted about the consequences of his work.” 

He tells us that Cook’s nautical charts were so detailed that his work allowed humans “to picture the entire planet, the whole of it at once, a sense of open space that, in the centuries of Western exploration before him, had eluded us. After Cook, the old cartographer’s admissions of ignorance, ‘Here Be Dragons,’ disappeared from the perimeter of world maps.”

The best way to appreciate the places Cook visited was to visit them himself, Lopez says. In fact, the best way to take in any place is not with photographs or written descriptions, but by being in the place itself. Lopez was in a better position than most to make that happen.  

“Each place on Earth goes deep. Some vestige of the old, now seemingly eclipsed place is always there to be had. The immensity of the mutable sea before me at Cape Foulweather, the faint barking of the sea lions in the air, the nearly impenetrable (surviving) groves of stout Sitka spruce behind me, the moss-bound creeks, the flocks of mew gulls circling schools of anchovies just offshore, the pummeling winds and crashing surf of late-winter storms—it’s all still there.”

(A map of Cook’s three voyages, courtesy Wikipedia)

20 Years!

20 Years!

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I learned early this morning that today is the 20th anniversary of Wikipedia. That I learned so early is noteworthy, I think, a sign of how much I rely on something I once thought was faintly ridiculous. 

A crowd-sourced encyclopedia? What of the scholar laboring in his or her attic (and let’s face it, it was usually a “his” back in the day)? What of the World Books lining the shelf? 

Through the years I’ve learned a little about the standards of Wikipedia, which, though odd, can sometimes be rigorous. Let’s just say that if you submit a PR-like entry, they will come after you. 

Plus, I’ve become lazy. I spent many years doing research in libraries, and I love the older style of knowledge acquisition. But I’ll admit, it’s pretty amazing to have such a compendium at my fingertips. 

So happy anniversary, Wikipedia! And thank you for your service!

(Photo: Wikipedia! And that’s another reason I love them. I can use their photos without fear of copyright infringement.)

The Walking Listener

The Walking Listener

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For the last year I’ve been ambling not always silently and not always with music in my ears but sometimes with words in there too.  Thanks to the gift of Audible, I’ve walked to novels and meditations and nonfiction explications of our current economic woes. 

One day a neighbor stopped me on the street. I took out my ear buds to hear what she was saying. “You must be listening to a book,” she said. 

I wondered how she could tell. Did I have a furrowed brow of concentration? 

She could tell because she does, too. There must be some sort of aura we walking listeners give off that only other walking listeners can see. 

We chatted for a moment before going on our separate ways, at which point I put my ear buds back in and discovered that since I’d forgotten to push pause, the narrator was now several “pages” ahead of where I’d stopped. Just a small problem for the walking listener. 

Free Books: Going Fast

Free Books: Going Fast

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Today, our public library returns to virtual and curbside pickup only. Since summer we’ve been able to enter our branch (fully masked and separated, of course), to browse the stacks and check out the new fiction and nonfiction sections. We could find our next great read. And often (at least in my case) serendipity was involved. I didn’t go hunting for The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel. But there it was, languishing in the new fiction section.

So much do I count on these library visits, that when I heard the news of the closure late Friday, I added another to-do for Saturday: get over to the Chantilly branch and get some books. Apparently, many folks had the same idea. By late morning the parking lot was filling up and people were dashing from building to car, bundles of books under their arms. 

A woman with a clicker monitored our arrival, to keep capacity to Covid rules. She reminded me I could only stay for 30 minutes. That was fine; I only had 10. 

But I made a beeline for the new section, and got right to browsing. There was Patti Smith’s Year of the Monkey, a memoir that’s been on my list for months. I grabbed John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened, too. It  seems a little passé by now, but I’ll give it a try. 

Into my arms went books on artificial intelligence and mindfulness and the works of Walt Whitman. If a topic seemed down my alley at all, it made the cut. 

When I left the library there were five souls waiting to get in. Free books — there’s nothing like ’em.