The Kind of Barber I Want

The last time I went to a barbershop for a hair cut, I was 15. In the 8 years since then, I've cut my hair myself with a little help from my friends and mom (to trim up the back) and have even handed over the scissors to my girlfriend to do the whole thing. Reading Arabian Nights, I came across a barber who makes his customer miserable with endless talk. He says this about himself:

God in His bounty has provided you with a barber who is also an astrologer, a chemist, an expert in natural magic, grammar, morphology, philology, rhetoric, eloquence, logic, arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, religious law, the traditions of the Prophet and the interpretation of the Quran. I have read the relevant books and studied them; I have a practical knowledge of affairs; I have commited to heart a perfect knowledge of the sciences; I am a theoretical and practical master of technical skill. There is nothing that I have not organized and undertaken.

Now that's the kind of barber I'm looking for. I've considered a few barbers at various times, but at the moment of decision I've never gone through with it. If I found a barber shop that was open at 3 in the morning, an all-night barber shop, I would have gone a long time ago.

Night Walks

Since I was a teenager I've enjoyed walking around at night. Most nights while vacationing on the Gulf of Thailand, I'd walk up and down the beach and, while visiting other cities, I loved walking around the night bazaars and streets to see what was happening. I kept this up when I moved to the States for college, but I was disappointed to find that not much happens in Seattle outside, after dark.

Charles Dickens was a big walker, and a big night walker, and started out a piece on the subject this way:

Some years ago, a temporary inability to sleep, referable to a distressing impression caused me to walk about the streets all night, for a series of several nights The disorder might have taken a long time to conquer, if it had been faintly experimented on in bed, but, it was soon defeated by the brisk treatment of getting up directly after lying down, and going out, and coming home tired at sunrise.

I think he was on to something. All of last year, when I was working on my project on Dickens, Darwin, and Nietzsche, I suspected that I would have breezed through it if I'd written all through the night, rather than trying to write during the day. I never had the guts to do it.

architecture

…but another aspect (or spectre) of architecture is how sedimentary it is, either the different buildings in a neighborhood or city, or the difference in the building (renovations, I guess). And what is sedimentary? Differences of materials used for construction, the money and means available to whoever was bankrolling the project, restrictions that speak to different building codes at different times, the technologies first included or added on afterwards (some more successfully than others). And then there’s the history that gets wrapped up in a building through fire, earthquakes, vehicular accidents, etc.

Returning to Thailand after the economic crash in 1997, one of the first things I noticed was how many buildings were left half-built after the funding disappeared. Most of them are still unfinished.

And, of course, while we often know who rents or even owns a building, the designers and, especially, the builders disappear.

Many other professions depend on form, materials, and aesthetics working together, but a lot more depends on the structural integrity of, say, a 6-story apartment complex, or a half-mile suspension bridge than on the structural integrity of a 12-string guitar.

a little vision of hell

The man's girlfriend pretends to be pregnant so that he'll marry her. They come to hate each other. They raise a pig and when the butcher is late, slaughter it themselves. After that she starts throwing his books around the house

'Leave my books alone!' he said. 'You might have thrown them aside if you had liked, but as to soiling them like that, it is disgusting!' In the operation of making lard Arabella's hands had become smeared with the hot grease, and her fingers consequently left very perceptible imprints on the book-covers. She continued deliberately to toss the books severally upon the floor, till Jude, incensed beyond bearing, caught her by the arms to make her leave off.

Jude the Obscure is off to a great start.

a partial list of books I own but haven't read

Pickwick Papers - Dickens
Pictures from Italy - Dickens
The Mill on the Floss - George Eliot
Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
Jude the Obscure - Hardy
Lord Jim - Joseph Conrad
The Persian Expedition - Xenophon
The Ticklish Subject - Zizek
The Plague of Fantasies - Zizek
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Hardy
The Long Valley - Steinbeck
The Storm - Daniel Defoe
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane
Lost Illusions - Balzac
The Wings of the Dove - Henry James
Mardi - Herman Melville
The Confidence Man - Herman Melville
Letters from My Windmill - Daudet
The Three Musketeers - Dumas
The Bostonians - Henry James
The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal
Spring Currents - Turgenev
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
McTeague - Frank Norris
The Secret Agent - Conrad
The Octopus - Frank Norris
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Annals of Imperial Rome - Tacitus
Barchester Towers - Trollope
Moll Flanders - Defoe
A Pair of Blue Eyes - Hardy
The Nature of the Universe - Lucretius
Felix Holt - George Eliot
Jonathan Wild - Henry Fielding
Vanity Fair - Thackeray

And the list goes on.

One of my teachers in high school told me that he really didn't start reading until after college. While I'm still reading a lot, I don't think many of my friends do. Some of them have embraced the book totally as an aesthetic object, used mostly for design purposes in a room. A full shelf looks good. A full shelf of good books in good condition, even if you've never read the books to know they're good, looks great.

The real question is how the hell I got so many Thomas Hardy books when I didn't even really like the one book of his I did read, the Mayor of Casterbridge. Jude the Obscure I picked up in Vancouver, CA while on a trip with friends. Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess I bought because I thought I'd have to read them in Oxford. a Pair of Blue Eyes I grabbed off a free table in a hospital...