Too much negativity these past few days. I should name some things (not people; that would be too personal) that I am not negative about, things I find surprisingly good:

1. The minor-key symphonies of Luigi Boccherini. My love for Haydn's symphonies reaches back 30 years. But Boccherini? I've been listening to his work on my iPod recently. His minor-key symphonic works are nearly as fine as Haydn's.



2. The Ken Holt Mysteries. Of the hundreds and hundreds of genre fiction novels I read as a kid, at least one of those Grosset & Dunlap series would not embarrass me later in life, and that is the Ken Holt series. These are surprisingly well written, with expert sentences sometimes even adding imagery to the mix of astute description and the occasional complex clause. I've just started collecting and re-reading these, and so far I haven't been disappointed.



3. The Ciabatta sandwiches at Jack-in-the-Box. Some fast food doesn't suck. I had a steak-and-cheese ciabatta sandwich the other day. Not bad at all.



4. Steak. I actually ate a steak the other day. At a restaurant called Pig-n-Pancake, of all things. It was quite good. When I was a kid, my family ate steak quite often. We raised beef. There ain't a steer within a mile of the family home now, and, like increasing numbers of Americans, I don't eat steak nearly so often as I used to. I miss it.



5. As the song says, After you've been having steaks a long time, beans, beans taste fine. Yes, beans. I like beans. An amazingly cheap food that isn't bad for you. Buying them dry means actually having to prepare in advance, but you save a lot of money, and get extremely good product. Yesterday evening I prepared a dish of red and white beans together with a small amount of rice and a sizable portion of ground elk meat. I sprinkled cayenne pepper onto the meat as I browned it, and put in slices of several cloves of garlic, two cubes of beef bullion and water in the pan, and then dumped them with the beans. After cooking for over an hour, I added two bell peppers and one hot pepper. It was a nice spicy bean dish. I experiment with this kind of food several times per week. Not a bad bean dish yet.



6. Reason's Hit and Run. This is my favorite blog. I go to the site nearly every day.



7. The idea of honor, as sanitized by a universalistic ethic and divorced from the vile precapitalist social systems of the past. My first name, Timo, hails from the Greek, timé, which means honor. Someday I may even live up to my name. I've even done some things to help bring that along.



8. Apple's OS X operating system. It's amazingly stable, and it works on computers as old as a decade. Beautiful, easy to use, and sensibly conceived. And it doesn't get viruses or worms.



9. The Sonicare electric toothbrush. Amazingly efficient, and it prompts its user to stay long enough in the toothbrushing process.



10. Tom's of Maine Fennel toothpaste: fresh, licoricey. A great taste to end the day.



11. Bucket seats from automobiles. The ones in my possession, both in and outside of cars, are very comfortable; most are. I have one in my bedroom, and I'm sitting back in it now; its back is resting against the wall, allowing me to recline. It's a great chair to sit in for reading, or for working on my laptop computer.



12. Plastic. Amazing stuff. My bedroom has lots of wood and cork; elegant plank ceilings and a nice Craftsman-style book case. But the plastic containers I use for dresser drawers, and the plastic snap-together boxes that make for my paperback bookshelves, are not only very useful, they have a sleek elegance to them. Plastic is often used as a pejorative, almost a synonym for Mencken's favorite epithet, brummagem. But I will say nothing against the plastic in my room, here. It helps make my life better.



13. Used book stores. The independent seller of used books, and the independent new-and-used bookstore, has to be one of the most civilizing institutions in society. Owning books is almost as important as reading them. A book as personal property is one of the best signs of a civilized life. The ability to go to one's own bookshelf and pull out a book one has read, and thumb through the pages to find the passage one only half remembers . . . this is what a civilized person should be able to do. I, at any rate, do it often. Were it not for bookstores selling used books I would not be able to afford the bulk of the books I own. And, let it be admitted up front: publishers cannot keep in print every book ever written (or at least they couldn't until the recent birth of on-demand printing). So the existence of the used book store is a civilizing influence, it allows those who care to keep contact with the distant past, and to live and think outside the current crest of fashion.



14. Out-of-town library membership. Where I live, there is no good public library. This is not a horrible thing, for me, since I prefer to own books, and to seek out used book stores as my ritual immersion into high culture . . . and middle-brow culture, too. But to keep up with current fashion, and for my work as an editor, it is important to have access to some books (both new and old) that I have no intention of purchasing. So the public library is now of use to me. It wasn't always so. I've often avoided public libraries. I dislike aspects of librarian culture, the lingo and the buying and discard standards. And I see diminishing reasons for libraries to be public institutions. Taking a step back from my own addiction, I note that public libraries are the only institution in society aimed to provide addicts with free fixes. Should I feel guilty about using a public library? Well, that's one guilt I needn't worry over. Since my county doesn't provide a public library (the people have voted down funding for such many times over), I pay dues to a public library in a city 44 miles away. It is not an insignificant fee. Indeed, the fee is almost certainly far higher than the marginal cost of servicing my usage. So, I get the benefit of a library and I voluntarily contribute to it as if it were an unsubsidized institution.



15. The Kennerley Monotype font, designed by Goudy. I have only one book printed, in all my library, using this typeface. But it is quite elegant, and I hope some day to obtain the font for my computer usage and printing. Oh, the book? The Austrian Philosophy of Values, by Howard O. Eaton, a classic analysis of the evaluation theories of Ehrenfels and Meinong and the Austrian School of Economics. Fascinating study.



16. Birds. Where I live, these flighted animals are making a comeback. I have seen thrushes, starlings, jays, woodpeckers, corvids, vultures, eagles, hawks, cormorants, grouse, finches, pelicans, and many other varieties this last year, and now that spring is arriving (though at present with seemingly ceaseless rain), more birds arrive to my view every day. And their song! Between caws and fanfares and whistles and rasping bursts of pinkish tone, there's always something to hear in these parts. (Much better than the sound of traffic, which never seems to stop when one lives in the city.)



17. The concerti grossi of Locatelli. That's what's playing right now on the iPod I've conntected to my stereo. Aside from the great works of the Great Bach, it is Locatelli's concerti grossi that I love the most. What wondrous music!



18. The pianoforte. The musical keyboard is the great invention of musical instrument builders. (To say this I do not dispute the fine thinking that went behind the Jew's Harp.) It allows the player and the composer to see the vertical, harmonic relationships so clearly! It's so much more helpful to the mind, for the composing of music, than either fretted or fretless stinged instruments or to wind instruments. And the sound of the instrument can be itself quite powerful. Of course, pianos are no more equal than humans. The Bösendorfer grand is the greatest, most lovely of sound, to my ear. Steinways kick out a louder sound, I guess, but aren't as lovely of tone as is the Bösendorfer. A Yamaha may be factory-made and fungible one with another, and is quite fine, and a great low-priced instrument. But it's the Bösendorfer that qualifies as the pinnacle of the instrument-maker's craft. What the Strad is to the violin, the Bösendorfer is to the piano.



19. The books of my friends and neighbors. Two friends have had books published: Jesse Walker and Brian Doherty. And two neighbors have produced books of late: Bob Pyle and Krist Novoselic. Many books are bad, or least mediocre, but I'm happy to say that the books in question cannot be faulted. Krist's book on grunge and government is really quite well done, a real surprise . . . the juxtaposition of grunge rock and the mechanisms of democracy seem unlikely co-subjects, but Krist pulls it off well. Bob's book on the valley I live in is, as my sister described it, both poetic and wonderful. Brian's recent book is a hoot, and very thorough. As I wrote a few days ago, I greatly approve of its style, my favorite touch being his love of certain uncommon words; I share his appreciation for the rarities that can be found in the dictionary. Finally, Jesse's book on radio, already a bunch of years old, is still worth reading. I was greatly pleased with it, and laughed out loud in several places (his comment on Smooth Jazz may be worth the price of the book). And I was fascinated by his historical perspective, a history that I was (unlike Brian's book) not familiar with. (You can look up the books from my other site, wirkman.com.)



20. The alphabet. Ours may not be perfect, but it allows an amazingly efficent way of storing and communicating words and ideas and stories. I may have designed a better alphabet when I was a teenager, and in the process reinvented a branch of linguistics that I could have read about at the beginning of any good dictionary, but even unimproved, our alphabet enables the literate to think better and communicate over time and distance. This is no small thing. It's the foundation of a great many other good things. (Like used book stores!)



21. The number eleven, which in base eleven looks like this: 10. I like this prime number, and I like thinking in base eleven, too. It could be that our lives cycle in groups of eleven years, not in the decades we are led by base ten to think as most significant. So, celebrate your biggest birthdays at 10 (oops: 11), 22, 33, 44, 55, 66, 77, 88, and, if you are lucky, 99. By the way, in most instances one should spell out eleven as well as ten. And twelve, too. Why? Well, the style guides say stop the spelling out after ten, but they are base-ten-biased. Well, we have seemingly non-base-ten words for 11 and 12, don't we? We don't begin counting the 'teens until 13, so perhaps we should spell out all the numbers up until 13. Are you wondering, by the way, how to write ten and eleven in base twelve? The twelve, of course, is 10. But ten and eleven? Let's see; let's count from zero: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, X, ¥, 10. There you have it. (Yes, you could say I have a yen* for eleven!)

I could also wax eloquent on the value of rain, frog choruses, elk alive and elk-as-meat, indoor heating, paper towels, the brassiere, and many other features of nature and civilization. But I'll stop at 21. It's a nice prime number. And, in base eleven, could be written as 1X.

. . .

* I actually have no idea what numerals one should use for ten and eleven in base twelve. This is just a fancy. Surely the use of A and B as suggested on Wikipedia's entry is no more elegant than X and ¥, and present just as many problems.

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