St. Crisp, or, I'm So Glad You Asked

Someone asked me today about the title of my blog and I never really thought to explain it before.  It started out as a different kind of blog, you see, and as I told my friend today I kept the name because I don't want anyone else to use it.

This is Quentin Crisp:

He wrote several books, among them was a memoir called The Naked Civil Servant.  It's about his life as an openly gay young man in London at a time when homosexuality was illegal in England.  The title of my blog is adapted from a line from this book.  Fitzrovia was a bohemian part of London, where notables like Virginia Woolf once lived, and where Quentin hobnobbed with his friends. 

Here's another photo of Quentin, a still from a great movie called Orlando (based on the novel by Ms. Woolf):

His career seemed to really take off in his old age, with writing and acting and spoken word performances galore.  He was working past his 90th birthday.  How amazing is that?

There were two movies made about him, and John Hurt played him in both, three decades apart: The Naked Civil Servant and An Englishman in New York.  You can borrow them both from the Multnomah County Library!

Free Will vs. SAD

Thanks everybody who has been reading my silly blog, I really appreciate it.  Thanks also to my new followers.  I hope I'll have more soon, but then I forget to be an official follower of my friends' blogs so I don't really deserve it.

As much as I am loathe to I decided to dive into cataloging all the books I'm donating, I made a nice spreadsheet and it's going faster than I thought it would.  I've got to take pictures of all of them too, can you believe it?  I hope the tax man doesn't want photos someday of all the crap I gave to Goodwill this year, because I sure have a lot of receipts for it.  I am asserting my willpower over my urge to put off the book stuff, because after getting back from California last week I became acutely aware that my good spirits wouldn't last while I am procrastinating.  We've had driving rain for days, whereas when I left for the Bay Area and during my trip there'd been nothing but sunshine.  I'm trying to head off any feelings of depression this season.  I have some problems every winter, but this year I'm going to be aware of them before they happen and use some focus to work through them.  I really want to get my living room ready again to have friends over and it's hardly in that state now.

Here is a piece from a really good DVD zine from some creative folks in Canada, it's called the Winking Circle.  I found it at random at the library!

Watching stuff like this makes me feel a lot better about the world. 

In other news, two of my friends had to follow me down into the basement today so we could get to my garage & drive away.  They could see for themselves that I've been working hard! 

The Psychopath Test

I managed to make it to Goodwill and sell some books at the Hawthorne branch of Powells today.  The guy buying my books took so long that the other buyer met with at least three other individuals before I was done.  I have a lot of books left over - I plan to save them up and give a pile to Title Wave, the bookstore that raises money for the Multnomah County library system.  A lot of them might end up in the Friends of the Library booksale, which is where they started out before they ended up in my store.  The circle of life for a book.  

I've been reading a book by Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test.  I'm finding that I've already heard a few of his anecodotes from the book on This American Life, but there's a lot more to it.  Mainly it's about what personality traits make a true psychopath and where one can find them in society.  Not too surprisingly, psychiatrists who have made this their focus of study believe that some of the top corporate leaders and politicians are bona fide Patrick Batemans.  Not in the homicidal sense, but they approach work as though they were preying on weaker animals.  I can think of a couple people I've met that might fit this description, but don't worry, if you are reading this you are not one of them.  Probably.

Instead of another boring pic of my basement, I'm putting here a little collage I made of stuff that I sold on eBay earlier this year.  This should brighten up your day: