Until I remember how to do attractive links

...here is a Scanner visit I made randomly, to the Antarctic: http://davidruth.blogspot.com/

Some of the snapshots of the interior scenes with people and brightly painted machinery make you feel like you're there. The glacier photos are too small and their subject too magnificent to have the same effect.

I've been being a SuperScanner lately, finding wonderful, copyright-free illustrations from children's books (see below)

And I've spent way too much time on the Gutenberg project site, which, if you don't already know about it, don't ask. It will ruin any Scanner's life for sure.

Also way too much on abebooks and alibris looking for books for another of my blogs (never mind).

I'm surfing, almost for the first time, it being Thanksgiving vacation and the only phone calls are from computers trying to sell something (a New Yorker's version of a quiet time) and having done good work on the proposal and even on the outline.

But the sun is shiniing this day after Thanksgiving, so I'm driven outside for a walk. Here are a couple of illustrations. I've always loved illustrations from kid's books:

How Diane Ackerman does it.

This morning with coffee I picked up one of the books* on my little desk-table in the Greek Room (a tiny room that used to be the maid's room in this 1920's-built apartment) and read an interview with Diane Ackerman** who got her graduate degrees in English and comparative literature:

"...I was always poaching in the sciences. "Physics for Poets," I remember, was one course that I took. I never could quite figure out if I wanted to be in the arts or in the sciences..."

Asked about the fact that there are identical sentences or phrases in both her prose and her poetry, and that her prose and poetry 'talk to each other,' Ackerman commented:

"...I end up writing several of my books at the same time. My muse is sufficiently miscellaneous that I might be, let's say, in the Antarctic writing an essay about that astonishing landscape and penguins for a book of essays. At the same time, I'll be noticing fascinating sensory spectacles, and that will go into the Senses book, and at the same time, there'll be some creative and emotional overspill that will go into a suite of poems set in the Antarctic. All of that seems to be happening simultaneously but in different places in my mind. I think of it as having a captain's desk with many drawers. When one drawer is open, it's completely open (the others are closed), and it has my full attention. And when that's closed, it's closed, and I open up the next one. But the drawers contain essay, personal essay, scholarly essay, poetry--whatever it's going to be--all at once."





*Natural Eloquence: Women Reinscribe Science, an anthology of writings by and about women scientists
**poet and naturalist, author of A Natural History of the Senses and The Rarest of the Rare: Vanishing Animals, Timeless Worlds

An organizing principle for Scanners

In the land of Hearsay, Tom (the hero of The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley, serialized in England in the 1860's) meets a giant who is also a naturalist: 'He was made up principally of fish bones and parchment, put together with wire and Canada balsam; and smelt strongly of spirits, though he never drank anything but water; but spirits he used somehow, there was no denying it. He had a great pair of spectacles on his nose, and a butterfly net in one hand, and a geological hammer in the other; and was hung all over with pockets, full of collecting boxes, bottles, microscopes, telescopes, barometers, ordnance maps, scalpels, forceps, photographic apparatus, and all other tackle for finding out everything about everything, and a little more too.'

The giant, obviously a kind of Scanner, has a motto some of us might find useful:

'Do the duty which lies nearest you, and catch the first beetle you come across.'

At last!

What do you do when you're suddenly passionately captivated by something -- say, the cartoons of the Teenie Weenies newspaper comics by William Donahey from your childhood that you've just discovered in a children's book by accident, or the stories of Victorian lady travellers or Mongolian movies or an amazing statement by someone that blows your hair back-- and you know perfectly well you won't stick with this subject very long before something else catches your eye and you become passionately captivated by that?

One solution is the Scanner's Daybook (also known as the daVinci notebook) but for the most part, I designed that for ideas, to be used like the tablecloth in a restaurant you write on when you've suddenly gotten this great idea and you're explaining it to a friend. The Daybook catches ideas that you might never follow up on, just so you'll realize how wonderful they are instead of being almost ashamed of them because you know you probably won't follow through on them.

But where does a Scanner play?

Why do I need a place to do this? For one thing, it feels unfinished to just see something and that's that. I can't keep all the books open and nearby, but I fear if I put them away I'll forget all about them.

But the real reason is that a blog allows me to play with them for a little while, to do something with my enthusiasm. In fact, to be honest, it gives me the *right* to do something so frivolous, puts it on a list of things I have to do: before I put it away I have to write about it on my Scanner's blog. I can't explain why that's so wonderful, but I can tell you that a Scanner rarely gets to talk about the things that currently fascinate her or him. If you try, chances are you'll bore your audience, even if they're Scanners themselves! It's a very uncomfortable feeling to sense that something you find to be of such delightful value looks like absolutely nothing to someone you're trying to tell about it. And it leaves the impulse to show and tell hanging there, truncated, unfinished.

So, this blog is where I get to talk about my 'hit-and-run obssessions' (I'll look up the name of the very clever scientist who coined this phrase next time), and have the best time, and never worry about whether they bore anyone or not. Here I can rave without explaining, quote to my heart's content, and not worry about hogging all the attention.

Next post: What's got my attention this morning.