Compulsively Aimless

As I buy more books, I'm updating some past lists. Here's one from 2012 with a few additions. Thought this one timely since every presidential election year, Ohio gets some time to be the big man on the Electoral College Campus. And remember, lists are random and incomplete samples of what's on my shelf at a moment in time. I learned the hard way moving to the east coast that Ohio was the Rodney Dangerfield of states. Telling an east or west coaster you’re from Ohio was a guaranteed death-knell to any conversation. The usual response is "oh" followed by an excuse to find the bar for a refill. You may even feel you are suddenly invisible. This is because we lack distinctive identities. There’s no aura of New York sophistication or the hipness of California or Seattle or intellectual superiority of Cambridge. We can’t charm folks with lilting accents, distinctive hats and boots or entice pastoral romantics with our picturesque fall calendars (even though ou...

  For a couple of semesters in college I worked at the on-campus student coffee shop, The Bandersnatch, named after the creature in Lewis Carroll's famous nonsensical poem, Jabberwocky . When you work inside a Lewis Carroll nonsense poem, you start to take nonsense seriously. While I was toasting bagels and brewing coffee, I thought about it enough to create my own incomplete, nonsense hierarchy. (The lists here reflect my myopia with modern pop culture.) 1. Understandable Nonsense. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously ," is a sentence composed by the MIT Professor of Linguistics, Noam Chomsky, and the best example I can think of as nonsense where the words are all understandable but whose meaning is nonsensical. This category is not a lot of fun, mostly because it seems to be the playground for academics to make linguistic arguments.    2. Mixed-Up Nonsense. Second degree of nonsense would be a mix of the understandable and made up. Carroll's 1855 Jabborwocky i...