Xmas loot!

Christmas gifts 2011 –

Two interesting fountain pens, a slender jade green Pelikan from Gay, that replaces one I lost a few years ago, and a new kind from Barbara, a TWSBI Diamond 500, made of transparent Lucite – a marvelous fat barrel that looks like it will hold a couple of chapters’ worth of ink. Barbara also gave me an ink-mixing set; two pipettes and ten vials along with four basic colors of Noodler’s ink for mixing.  I’ll have fun with that!

Anyhow, I filled the Pelikan with Noodler’s Seminole Sepia, and the TWSBI with North African Violet, two of my favorite inks. They’ll go into the novel Monday and Tuesday.

With some trepidation I asked for a strange electronic pseudo-guitar, a “You Rock Guitar,” which has a fingerboard that senses where your left-hand fingers are and plays the note that would sound if there were a string there. The right hand can fingerpick or strum six short strings that serve as sensors.  Its little guitar brain can do all sorts of things that probably mean something to a kid who knows modern rock.  I’ll just go in blind and see what happens.  (The fret positions read the same as a regular guitar, as a default, but you can fiddle [so to speak] with it.)  It has 25 “guitar sound” settings and 50 “synth sounds,” with 25 Rock Mode titles.  Runs on 4 AA batteries, or you can plug it into your computer through a USB port.

It has a gig bag, in case I feel in need of a second career and want to take it on the road.

Of the buying of books there is no end, of course.  I got Tuscany:  The Beautiful Cookbook, which completes my set of those.  Three Hemingway books:  The Complete Letters, V. 1, Hemingway and Vonnegut:  Writers at War, and Hemingway’s Boat, all of which I’ve been waiting for.  Raymond Carver:  A Writer’s Life.  New novels Lost in Shangri-La and The Pugilist at Rest.  A fascinating two-volume boxed set, American Fantastic Tales, edited by Peter Straub.  (Might be a reasonable text for Genre Fiction next fall, if it comes out in paperback.) 

In non-literary books I got My Brain is Open <> The Mathematical Journeys of Paul Erdos, Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches by Marvin Harris (the anthropologist who did the wonderful Cannibals and Kings), Charles Mann’s 1491 and 1493, and the huge Oxford History of Western Art.  Lance Armstrong’s Comeback 2.0 and A Tea-Lover’s Travel Diary.  And Drawing for Dummies, not to be despised.  I’ve done a lot of drawing and painting but have never had formal training.

Gay got me the complete Deadwood series, which we missed.  That will be cool; we’ll go through them slowly, as we did The Sopranos, at our own pace.

A good morning’s present-opening orgy, after cooking breakfast for an hour or so.  Now a half-hour nap and on with prepping dinner.

Joe