The books

A closer look at two of the books: an almanac and a Bible. (That's my enormous thumb holding the Bible open.)

Miniature books

Every Monday one of the museum staff gives a talk on one of the items in the collection. The talk takes place in the library, yet another beautiful reading room. The day I was there, the talk was on miniature books, including what is supposedly the smallest book in the world.

Except for that book, which was encased in a kind of petri dish and not really visible without a microscope, we could actually touch and look through the books the librarian was discussing.

You can't judge a book by its cover 2

 

On second thought, the cover for The Return of the King is just as bad.

Not only does Aragorn exude all the nobility and passion of a tax preparer finding a really good deduction, but Gandalf looks like the aging ranch hand in a really bad western.

I don't even know who those other people are supposed to be.

You really can't judge a book by its cover

 

At least where The Lord of the Rings is concerned.

This is part of a boxed set, including The Hobbit, that I've had for decades. (I'm assuming that the 50th Anniversary celebrated here is the publication of The Hobbit, which was in 1937. So I probably bought this in the late Eighties-early Nineties.)

The cover art on all of the books is truly terrible, but I think the depiction of Legolas here is by far the worst. What is with that hair? Were all the Elven barbers watching too much MTV?

If Peter Jackson had made Legolas look like that in his movies, no one would ever have hired Orlando Bloom for any project, ever again.

Saturday reflections

My big project this week was moving bookcases around to make room for a new desk. 

And my big project for today is vacuuming and dusting the resulting mess, but here are some fun reflections from glass shelves stacked against the brick wall.

Hotel Rwanda

I talk about that in the book; there’s a line where I say: ‘Maybe, if you’re reading this in the future – five, or ten or 50 years from now – you’ll be taking this book with you as you plan your vacation in Rwanda.’ And when I went back in January, tourism was booming. People were actually reading that book as they arrived there on holiday and, yes, the country is one of the safest in Africa.

But don’t get too comfortable about it. Rwanda’s still a terribly complex and problematic place. It’s not an open society. It’s not a place without violence, and obviously the incredible, appalling legacy of the genocide colours everything. And yet, the government’s project of making people live together and insisting that they must make a nation together – not just any people, but killers and survivors – is an extraordinary experiment. There really is no precedent for it in modern human history....

So, in short, I think Rwanda has gone from being the most fascinatingly torn apart country on earth to perhaps being the most complex and strangely compelling story of a country putting itself back together. I say ‘strangely’ in the sense that it simply defies all expectation – and to a large degree defies belief. There was a survivor who was talking about living with killers around, and he said to me: ‘It’s our obligation, it’s our duty, it’s our necessity, it’s the only way we can survive and I do it every day. And yet it’s incomprehensible to me.’ That sums up the national condition.

That's from an interview Philip Gourevich did with fivebooks.com (there's no date, so I'm not sure how recent it is.)

I was reading his book, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, by the pool yesterday. I can only read it in small doses -- it was unimaginably brutal, 800,000 killed in 100 days, mostly by machete -- because it frequently makes me cry, or else so angry I want to scream.

And I was keenly aware that not only was I reading this book while I was personally safe and staying in a nice hotel before heading off on an expensive tour like the privileged Westerner that I am, that nice hotel was actually a sanctuary for 1200 people during the genocide, the actual Hotel Rwanda.

They don't try to hide it -- it's on the website, and part of the information screen that pops up every time I log into the hotel wi-fi. The pictures are of the memorial on the hotel grounds for Tutsi staff who were killed; I saw similar memorials outside office buildings while I was walking around yesterday. If the situation was more complicated than the movie portrays, and Paul Rusesabagina perhaps not quite that heroic, the fact remains that more than a thousand people lived who almost certainly would have died otherwise, and that this sanctuary turned out to be actually that, unlike the hospitals and churches where some Tutsis looked for help only to find themselves delivered to the murderers.

So that's some small light in the darkness. And that Rwanda has managed to rebuild, and even thrive, in the wake of such horrors less than 25 years ago, is remarkable.

And speaking of ghosts...

Last stop on the way back to Denver was the Overlook, uh, Stanley Hotel, made famous by The Shining. I was not disappointed that there were no rivers of blood pouring out of the elevators, but these scraggly bushes  guarding the front of the hotel are a different story.

It's supposed to be a maze, but it seems to me that if you can see over the top of the hedges -- not to mention through them and between them -- it's not much of a puzzle.

Nor would it provide much of a hiding place if you were being chased by an ax-wielding failed writer driven mad by the evil spirits haunting the building, but presumably that's not one of the featured excursions on offer.

Entertainment

There were bookshelves, piles of magazines, and a hand-drawn scrabble board. The books seemed like a random selection from a small-town library sale, with a suspiciously high percentage of titles that sounded like romances.

The cans on the shelf next to the books are Gold Flake tobacco, along with matches and rolling papers.

Random things I saw in Newport

The International Tennis Hall of Fame, which occupies a large chunk of downtown Newport, and a book in a shop window that made us laugh.

If you can't read the title, it's How to Split Wood, Shuck an Oyster, and Master Other Simple Pleasures. Somehow I doubt that anyone in the market for those crystal candleholders next to it is really interested in learning how to split wood.

A hodgepodge of the rare and precious

The Malek museum has paintings and carpets and manuscripts. There's a room full of old coins, including some from the old Persian Empire that were minted for Croesus after the Persians took over Lydia, and gold coins with a profile of Alexander the Great.

There's also a room devoted to calligraphy, which is almost like abstract art if you don't read Farsi, and maybe even if you do.