This appendix started out as a simple list of original sources and additional reading related to semeiognomy, but then the “home repair rule” waxed full and, well, here we are: toe bone, foot bone, leg bone, knee bone, and Parts North.
My main thought around this set of lists is that I must be forgetting something crucial and obvious, but if I wait for that very last pop, the popcorn will be burned. So, with apologies to the unpopped kernels whose artistry has slipped my frictionless mind...
There’s no possible way that I could list all of the books that I love, but these few have followed me around for years, even decades (and some new ones I already know will become familiar companions):
Backman, Fredrik (2015) A Man Called Ove. ISBN 1444775804 [This is one of the best books ever about love.]
Ball, Philip (2001) Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color. ISBN 0374116792 [I wish that there were a definitive, well-written book like this about every interesting subject of study.]
Ball, Philip (2022) The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens. ISBN 9780226795874 [And the above wish is granted when it comes to the interesting subject of minds.]
Bornstein, Ruth (1976) Little Gorilla. ISBN 0899194214 [This book represents many fond memories of family reading.]
Crowley, John (2006) Little, Big. ISBN 1568654294 [Weaving the threads of border-realm life into a (Parthian) flying carpet, this is one of the most eminently re-readable books that I have ever come across.]
Dickens, Charles (1843) A Christmas Carol. [Simply one of the best stories ever.]
Gaiman, Neil, and Pratchett, Terry (2006) Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch. ISBN 0060853969 [I find this to be a charming, lovely, silly, smart, funny, wise, fluid, literate, not-wastefully-truthful model of reality. If I could choose to be like a book, this might well be it, preferably on a coffee table where people might tend to set cookies. I greatly admire Gaiman’s novels, short stories, and Sandman, and have wandered through Pratchett’s Discworld a few times... some volumes more often than others.]
Kimmel, Haven (2001) A Girl Named Zippy. ISBN 03855499825 [No more autobiographies should be written like this because I am far too busy to read them all and I’d have to give up eating and so on to make the time. I’m also very fond of She Got Up Off the Couch, in which Kimmel chronicles her mother’s life.]
Kipfer, Barbara Ann (Ed.) (2001) Roget’s International Thesaurus, Sixth Edition. ISBN 0062736930 [This has been my favorite kind of book from a time when I was very young. It’s a huge deal to me to have been mentioned in the Foreword of this edition due to some incredibly dedicated work by Jana and Greg. One time, when lauding my proofreading skills in a cover letter for an NLP job, I deliberately misspelled “foreword” as “forward” to tank my prospects. Long story.]
Klune, TJ (2020) The House in the Cerulean Sea. ISBN 9781250217288 [This is a wonderful book about treasuring the diverse individuality in every person (particularly children), and the wonder of loving families.]
Lester, Mike (2000) A is for Salad. ISBN 0399233881 [This book invariably cheers me up. Just the fact of someone having the idea to do this makes me feel better about the world. As it happens, I collect alphabet books.]
Rosling, Hans; Rosling, Ola; and Rosling Rönnlund, Anna (2018) Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things are Better than You Think. ISBN 1250107817 [Consume information critically. Learn to differentiate fears from dangers. Be a possibilist.]
Rice, Susan (2013) Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. ISBN 0307352153 [Quiet is the reverent analog of my book. There is a version for kids and young adults entitled, Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverted Kids (2017). And if you start excavating this vein in earnest, you might also check out: Claridge, Gordon (1997) Schizotypy: Implications for Illness and Health. ISBN 019852353X]
Saberhagen, Fred (1992) The Holmes-Dracula File. ISBN 0441342450 [At base, I really like the idea itself, and that someone thought of it, and that they wrote it up for me to read about it. I’m a sucker for truly alternative Holmes in any media (although I must admit I’m not as fond of the original books for either character).]
Van Amerongen, C. (Translator) (1967) The Way Things Work. ISBN 0000913154 [I loved this book as a kid, poring over it for hours on end.]
Wolfe, Gene (1980) The Shadow of the Torturer. ISBN 0671253255 [My affection covers all three of the Book of the __ Sun series (New, Long, and Short), including the companion volume entitled The Castle of the Otter, plus most of everything else that Wolfe has written (and made available for public consumption in the domain of speculative fiction... except that I haven’t read the pirate books). Wolfe identifies Jack Vance’s Dying Earth as highly influential.]
Yourgrau, Barry (1987) Wearing Dad’s Head. ISBN 087905283X [This is autobiography in its finest written form. I’d cheerfully have to add Graham Chapman’s A Liar’s Autobiography to this class of books.]
The day after I finished writing about these books, I happened across an article by Winnie the Pooh author A. A. Milne (“A Household Book,” in Not That It Matters) in which he talks about championing an adored book among various of his acquaintances (and with anyone else who would hold still long enough). He describes this beloved work as a much-lesser-known book by Kenneth Grahame, who at the time had a couple of popular titles to his name. That unknown book was The Wind in the Willows. I feel good when those sorts of timely associations pop up, and they do so often in my life.
I think that every household should have at least one BDD (Big Damn Dictionary). Reference books in general rate high on my list, including Manguel’s Dictionary of Imaginary Places, and the Encyclopedia of Things that Never Were by Page and Ingpen.
Here are some general rules. I have long had a fascination with post-apocalyptic works, as long as it’s not just another zombified world. It would take an additional book to adequately praise Moore’s graphic novels. Comic books are awesooome (where I have an attachment to Barr and Boland’s Camelot 3000 because it was the first one that I came across that was printed on Mando stock), as are comics such as Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes. In fifth grade, the James Herriott books started to become very influential (and I still watch the series now and again); for the longest time I thought of them as strictly autobiographical, rather than realizing that they were semi-so for Wight (which of course is a fine mode as far as I’m concerned). At my leisure (when I have any) I still mainline all manner of speculative fiction (and will often fill in the odd wait-times this way), but because I absorb books so rapidly I tend to search out long series with involved realities, such as: Cook’s Black Company, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Adams’ Hitchhiker, Herbert’s Dune, Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past, Sanderson’s Mistborn, Robinson’s Mars, Asimov’s Foundation, You-Know-Who’s Harry Potter, Lewis’ Narnia, Maguire’s Oz variants, Abercrombie’s The First Law, Pratchett’s Discworld, and Ruiz Zafón’s Barcelona (i.e., his books tied to The Shadow of the Wind). Or I seek out heavier textbooks on interesting topics, such as: Bryson’s At Home (and others), Silberman’s Neurotribes, Mann’s 1491 and 1493, Shetterly’s Hidden Figures, Iacobinni’s Mirroring People, various Oliver Sacks, and the aforementioned Bright Earth by Ball.
And of course, one of my absolute most favorite books will always be Finding Fairies, which my eldest child wrote when he was very young.
My favorite movie of all time is Big Fish, followed by The Full Monty.
But right up there are (in no particular order): Blazing Saddles, Without a Clue, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Shape of Water, What Dreams May Come, Harvey, The Ruling Class, Bicentennial Man, Seven Samurai, The Taste of Tea, Welcome Back Mr. McDonald, King of Hearts, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Elf, Stranger than Fiction, 1776, Fiddler on the Roof, A Man for All Seasons, Alien Nation, Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother, Cold Comfort Farm, La Cage aux Folles, Blade Runner (without the narration), Simon, Edward Scissorhands, Being There, Forrest Gump, The Muppet Christmas Carol (and A Christmas Carol with Alistair Sim), To Kill a Mockingbird, The Quiet Earth, Kinky Boots, The Princess Bride, The History of Future Folk, The Bride, Creator, The Color Purple, Torch Song Trilogy, The Fisher King, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Labyrinth, and sundry Monty Python productions. I relied on a number of these works (plus others that no longer rank among my favorites) when I was teaching college-level argumentation and rhetorical analysis, where my topics would be the rhetoric of insanity, fantasy, or humanity.
It’s hard for me to rate all of the Disney, Pixar, Illumination, DreamWorks, and other animated movies that I can watch over and over again and enjoy every time. High on the list would be: The Incredibles, Up, Despicable Me, Wall-E, The Prince of Egypt, and almost the whole Studio Ghibli catalog. I must say that The Man Who Planted Trees stands out as special, and I love how the National Film Board of Canada has gone out of its way to make so much absorbing work in animation broadly available to the viewing public for free; there will always be a special place in my heart for Richard Condie’s Getting Started and The Big Snit, and Cordell Barker’s The Cat Came Back (with Condie sound).
There are sooo many others (including such franchises as Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Planet of the Apes, and so on), but for various reasons that I can’t fully sort out (sometimes nothing other than pure sentimentality), the ones listed above are a full five stars. I enjoy musicals, and I own several dozen soundtracks, plus it turns out that there are a whole bunch that didn’t make the list simply because I would rate them at four-and-a-half stars. And because this “internet miniseries” defies my old-timey, conventional categories, but is five stars, I will mention here Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.
This is a much shorter list: Doctor Who, Stargate Universe, Battlestar Galactica (2003), 30 Rock, Arrested Development, Mulberry, Flight of the Conchords, Angry Beavers, Sherlock, The Sing-Off, The West Wing, The Muppet Show, All Creatures Great and Small, MST3K, Somebody Feed Phil, The Incredible Dr. Pol, Slow Horses, The Gone Wrong Show, the Up documentary series, Black Books, and holiday specials from when I was a kid.
First, there’s Sean Cullen, Jake Johannsen, and Eddie Izzard. Then there’s Mitch Hedberg, Nate Bargatze, and Glen Foster. Add Duck’s Breath Mystery Theater. Yes, I know that these are all men, and I do think that women are equally funny; I mean, just look at the Mark Twain Prize for Humor. But for whatever reason, my exposure sample is not representative yet, so I have seen fewer performances by folks who aren’t men.
Too much, too much, too muuuch. Talk about a daunting task. Oh well, nothing for it but to press on. For clarity I’ll put song titles in quotes and italicize album names. And I’ll try to work from big to small. Sort of.
I like just about everything by Harry Nilsson, Danny Elfman, Da Vinci’s Notebook, Barenaked Ladies, John/Patrick/Paul/Mason Williams, ELO, Dar Williams, Patrick O’Hearn, Ben Folds, Kitaro, The Tubes, Queen, Acoustic Alchemy, Corrine Bailey Rae, The Art of Noise, Yes, 2002, and The Holliston Stops. I adore the Angelwing album The Nymphaeum (which as its cover just happens to use my favorite painting from the local museum in which I spent time as a kid, which I used as the basis for the cover of this book). I enjoy much of the work by (but not all of) David Bowie, Elton John, Imogen Heap (where I was introduced to this music by my eldest child), Mike Oldfield, Gypsy Soul (must hear “Silent Night”), The Muppets, Celtic Thunder (“Steal Away”), Nat King Cole, Suzanne Vega, Herb Alpert (thanks Dad), Laurie Anderson, Maurice Jarre, Jean-Michel Jarre, Leon Redbone, Jim Croce, and Mannheim Steamroller.
I listen to loads and loads and loads of a cappella, some of it on college radio.
Movie trailer music (e.g., albums by Corner Stone Cues) is fascinating and wonderful. TV theme songs are often sentimental favorites. I get a thrill out of movie studio themes and the clips that used to play just before a television special came on when I was a kid.
I can listen repeatedly to many, many, many soundtracks, such as Godspell, Across the Universe, Prince of Egypt, Phantom of the Opera, Forrest Gump, Doctor Dolittle (my first, when I was a little kid, with an attachment to “Beautiful Things” and “When I Look In Your Eyes”), Fame, Jesus Christ Superstar, A Chorus Line, Battlestar Galactica, Fiddler on the Roof, and music from Peanuts movies and TV specials, plus the Myst games.
I’m skipping the use of possessive apostrophe ‘-s’ in this list of individual favorite songs (that aren’t already on albums or by artists listed above): Einaudi “Divenire,” Rachmaninoff “All-Night Vigil Opus 37 Vespers” (Wieder-Atherton cello, or the St. Petersberg Chamber Choir), Lanz “Cristofori’s Dream,” Murdoch “All my Days” and “Breathe,” Vitamin String Quartet “Early Sunsets over Monroeville,” Mila Drumke “Super 8,” Blue Swede “Hooked on a Feeling,” Sakamoto’s theme from “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” Lang “Constant Craving,” Muller “My Name is not Merv Griffin,” Gershwin “Rhapsody in Blue,” OceanLab “Breaking Ties,” Wayne “Elephant Ears,” Mancini “Moon River,” Jackson “Man in the Mirror,” Aerosmith “Kings and Queens,” Rogue Traders “Voodoo Child,” Carlisle “Butterfly Kisses” (dang you Oprah), Cara “Out Here on my Own,” Air “La femme d’argent,” Street Corner Symphony covers of “Creep” and “Fix You,” Whelan “Caoineadh Cú Chulainn,” Beck cover of The Korgis “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometimes,” Young “Harvest Moon,” New Radicals “You Get What you Give,” Gaye “What’s Going On,” Puccini “Nessun Dorma,” Adkins “All I Ask for Anymore” and “You’re Gonna Miss This,” Trans-Siberian Orchestra “Christmas” (Carol of the Bells), Krauss “Jubilee” (and her version of “Baby Mine”), Sade “Mermaid,” Cagle “Chicks Dig It,” Cooke “A Change is Gonna Come,” Nesmith “Some of Shelley’s Blues,” Satie “Gymnopédie No. 1,” Holst “The Planets: Venus,” Genesis “The Brazilian,” Five for Fighting “100 Years,” Gabriel “In your Eyes,” Sigur Rós “Med sud í eyrum,” Liebert “Promise,” Poison “Something to Believe In,” Manhattan Transfer “Ray’s Rockhouse,” and They Might Be Giants “Particle Man.”
I sensorily crave music with a heavy bass line that I can feel through the floor and chair and air. That is calming for me. I’m not a dubstep fan as such, but there are dubstep versions of songs that were good in their original form that I like as remixes, such as Roksonix’ cover of Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek” (that they retitled as “Whatcha Say”). Another good example would be the Bare Noize remix of “Heartbreak” by M’Black. And I like a good power ballad.
Finally, for what it’s worth, here is my test suite for speakers:
Ten Years After, A Space in Time, “I’d Love to Change the World"
The Chieftans, Santiago, “Tears of Stone"
Foreigner, Records, “Urgent"
Edgar Winter, They Only Come Out at Night, “Frankenstein"
Boards of Canada, Music has the Right to Children, “Turquiose Hexagon Sun"
Eden Riegel / Ofra Haza, The Prince of Egypt (soundtrack), “Deliver Us"
Aargh, c’mon self, leave me alone. I’m never going to get done.
Okay, look, there’s Erté (Romain de Tirtoff), Gian Lorenzo Bernini, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Artemisia Gentileschi, John Singer Sargent, Camrin Cosimo, Kara Walker, Maurits Escher... yaigh, just forget it. There are too many.
Fantasy Role-Playing (FRP) Games commercialized somewhere around the time that I was hitting seventh grade (good ol’ Dungeons & Dragons), and they came to occupy much of my time with my friends all the way through college (and occasionally beyond). Intent on ensuring that Camrin would benefit from a dose of enhanced cultural literacy, we took a historical tour through the likes of Colossal Cave, Rogue, Might and Magic, and so onward. Among my more recent favorites (which we also played together) are Arcanum, the Myst series, Guild Wars, and City of Heroes (and Villains). Lately I’ve been enjoying “hidden object” games, where Fate’s Carnival is a particularly good example of the type.
Jeff and I used to own a Gauntlet arcade game (which wasn’t the moneymaker we thought it might be), but other than that I’ve just never been much of an arcade/console fan.
Color: “Blue. No yel- auuuuuuuugh!”
Spoonerism: “arse-paper nudicle” (courtesy of my brother)
Recipe: Rice Cake
Doctor: 9 (Companion: Donna; Episode: toss up between “Vincent and the Doctor,” “The Girl in the Fireplace,” and the ending of, “The Doctor Dances”)
Number: 8
Letter: M
City to Visit: San Francisco (and surrounds)
Season (weather): Fall
Seasoning: Paprika
Animal: Tiger
Cookie: Florentine
Advice: Principle #6 (“Adapt flexibly.”)
Rule: Rule 6 (“There is nooo... Rule 6.”)
Poem: “Pointy Birds,” by Steve Martin
Dessert: Talenti’s salted caramel gelato
Musical Instrument: Drums (taiko, kettledrums, bodhrán... not drum kits)
Flower: Iris, very dark purple (but not too close to black)
[Colophon]