In Moonsoonland

Raining hard enough this morning to drive the drops back up off the pavement, like water skittering in the bottom of a hot pan. My day off, natch. Impossible to make pictures in almost zero light and 100% humidity; just taking the Nikon out of my pocket filmed the viewscreen with condensation. Mountaineering, photography, road trip to Bellingham or Seattle? Not today. Laundry, apartment rearranging, Arthur Ransome, E. Nesbit, The Little Book of Value Investing? Check, check, check.

Gore Vidal on Nesbit, from his NYRB essay:

"I do not think it is putting the case too strongly to say that much of the poverty of our society's intellectual life is directly due to the sort of books children are encouraged to read. Practical books with facts in them may be necessary, but they are not everything. They do not serve the imagination in the same way that high invention does when it allows the mind to investigate every possibility, to free itself from the ordinary, to enter a world where paradox reigns and nothing is what it seems to be; properly engaged, the intelligent child begins to question all presuppositions, and thinks on his [sic] own. In fact, the moment he says, wouldn't it be interesting if…? he is on his way and his own imagination has begun to work at a level considerably more interesting than the usual speculation on what it will be like to own a car and make money."

(Not that speculating about making one's fortune doesn't have a creative and/or an imaginative component, adds this early admirer of Uncle Scrooge and his Duckburg money bin, now departing into the storm with a cup of coffee and Clarke, Inc.'s annual report).
- posted by cjb @ 10:46 AM