I heard someone on the radio say that people like me, who find particular sounds and noises to be acutely, severely irritating, have been found to have some kind of brain defect. I was bummed to hear that it was considered a defect. Are not certain noises genuinely and truly irritating as hell? The condition has a name: MISOPHONIA.
The dilemma of being irritated by noise just passed through my mind as I made the decision to leave a library and go to another one. How the myth that libraries are quiet places endures is a mystery to me. But this was not noise. I mean any unwanted or irritating sound can be called noise. But I generally reserve the term for cacophonous crackle, such as the steam valve explosion of a few weeks ago, or the grinding gnash of a tree stump chewer.
The noise I found so objectionable was someone talking on his cell phone, in full voice. This is a library, right? As irritating as it was I also felt some sadness for this person. He sounded like he was drowning in poverty and neglect. He was struggling to summon sympathy from whoever he was talking to, and apparently he was failing miserably to do so. Aside from a few coherent sentiments I could only distinguish a word here or there. He complained that he had so much to worry about, and that having to go in for surgery was among them. He sounded like a child to me. He might have started crying but I could not tell for sure.
He had me asking myself: each and every one of us, are we always a child? Or is it true that we never really were, and that there is no child inside?
Childhood, traditionally relegated to youth, implies that it is something we grow out of. But in my mind the person is born fully formed, lacking only a vocabulary and life’s experiences to elucidate their opinions and beliefs.
This man sounded like a vulnerable, lonely child. It seemed was irritating as hell to me, but to no one else.
…
Today’s random book off the shelf is by #1 New York Times bestselling author Janet Evanovich: Tricky Twenty-Two, a Stephanie Plum novel. The author, in a photograph on the back cover, looks a tiny bit like a woman I barely know. The book cover is bright red and yellow. The book is set in Trenton, New Jersey. Stephanie Plum is a bounty hunter. Page 61 is the second page of chapter 7, and finds the narrator (Ms. Plum, I assume) and someone named Ranger in a Porsche, driving to 2121 Banyan Street. They are surveilling a woman who lives in apartment 2B. I live in apartment 2B, but I know nothing of Banyan Street or Trenton. I live in an alternate 2B. The floor on which apartments in my building are located is indicated by the letter, not the number. So 5D is on the 4th floor, not the fifth. There is no fifth floor. I only recently learned that this numbering scheme is not unique to my building, at least in the AsLIC part of New York. I happen to be in one of the few apartments where it would cause no confusion which floor I was on. 2B, regardless of which character you default to, would be on the second floor.
I do not regard the matter with mere idle interest. When I was responsible for my father’s rental apartment building in Daytona Beach I received a letter from the city’s department of buildings (I think) informing me that the apartments had to be renumbered. At the time I think they were numbered by letters (hah), A through D. This, the city said, could cause confusion for firefighters and EMTs and such who might be called to respond to an emergency. Seconds spent figuring out what apartment was B or C could be fatal. So I had to renumber the apartments, thus basically changing the home address of the residents, to something like 1A and 1B for the first floor and 2A and 2B for the second floor.
I did not do this. I had a management company that took care of it. But I felt like the residents got a bit of a raw deal. Public records might make it look as if they had moved to a new location, for whatever impact that might have on their credit report. I was not losing sleep over this but it seemed like a needless bother.
But in my building and in others around here it seems like those precious seconds could be wasted if EMTs have to stop and think about where apartment 5D is in a 4-story building.
Page 181 is the first page of chapter 19. This finds the narrator talking to her grandmother (I spelled that “grenademother” at first) about a boy named Kenny. Grandmother explains that she had to “cut loose” from him because he was too young. Implied but not spoken is the difference in sexual appetites of the young versus the old. Grandma says “I’m pretty good but there’s a lot of maintenance you got to do with a younger man.” She adds that she cuts men off at 50.
What seems a little off to me about this conversation is that grandma suggests that the narrator “take a look” at Kenny. I cannot determine the narrator’s age from just two pages, but dating your grandmother’s ex sounds very 1970s. Or maybe not. This does not appear to be a tawdry romance novel, like another book I plucked from these shelves last week.
Page 207 is a conversation between the narrator and Morelli, who appears to have revealed in a previous page that he is ill with some kind of flu bug or something. He says that he doe not talk about such things because he is a “macho man” and that “cramping and diarrhea aren’t on the checklist of ways to get laid.”
Dazzling dialogue? Not really. Book closed.
…
Conversation with a friend the other night touched upon the fact that I was either 22 or 23 when we met in 1991. I would have inserted “Tricky Twenty-Two” into the conversation had I known of that book’s existence.
Alan, who used to do bookings for concerts at the NY Public Library, found an amusing relic among his old files, which he was given last week upon a visit to his old work place. It was a hand written letter from me, written in 1990, to a Dr. Henderson, who was a concerts organizer at the library before Alan. In my letter I apologized for the fact that the letter was hand written, as the formality of the day would have required it to be typed. I guess I arrived in New York without a typewriter and, as far as I knew, any access to one. Copies of my audition cassette tapes were pretty precious to me, though I remember now that a picture of room 317 at the Parc Lincoln showed a boom box with dual cassette recorders. Styling…
The letter is both amusing and embarrassing to me. I was a kid pianist trying to establish a concert schedule for myself. The tone of the letter sounds like that of a foreigner. Not a nation-based foreigner but that of a person outside of my body, or my life. It reminded me a bit of hearing my own voice as I speak into my various devices for speech-to-text note taking. I sound stilted and alien, not at all my usual sound or what I perhaps incorrectly imagine that to be.
The hand writtenness of the letter could possibly have been avoided if the NYPL had, like they do in San Francisco, a typewriter room. Maybe they did back then, in 1990. But today I don’t think you can find those anywhere. There was a much-used typewriter in my high school library. I don’t remember one from college but there was a word processing/computer center.
There should be typewriter rooms at all public libraries today. I think there should also be public telephone rooms, for free limited-duration phone calls within the U.S.
…
Feeling an anxiety attack coming on. Had a good conversation at a bar last night. I had not heard the word “anthropomorphize” since the last time I used it years ago. Been carrying the anxiety pills everywhere with me these days, but have not used one since last week.
…
The first salvo at populating Flaneur.NYC was pretty much the clusterfuck I anticipated. Outsmarted myself into thinking the import was not happening but it was, though I could be forgiven for thinking otherwise since the only messages showing up on the screen were various varieties of error. So I posted
everything twice. Now I have to delete everything and start the fuck over. That’s way more tedious than it might sound.
…
Going out to find something. Will I know when I find it? I don’t know.
