A Desultory Habit

“Nothing perhaps increases by indulgence more than a desultory habit of reading, especially under such opportunities of gratifying it.” -- Walter Scott, Waverley.

I should write more, but for reading.  There's some irony in this, considering.  Plunged up to my eyes in Walter Scott -- life and works -- I've found little time lately in which to write for anything better than work.  Instead, at my stray hours scheduled at the information desk, I've penciled pictures to fill this space, and talked away what little I might have written.  You may rest assured that this constitutes no loss to literature, or even to my few friends here who might be just as happy with a doodle or a sketch.  If my purpose is to amuse, and primarily it is, then I'd do as well to draw a loud customer complaining on the phone as a seagull or the features of a favorite author as to write either.  Still, my idea when I took this enterprise up was to write about books, and that I now do too little.  Here's another year gone, my sixth since I started here, and how much have I had to say?

Of course, some of it, after six years has been said.  More than once.  More than needs be, I'd imagine.  But then no one's ever said I was someone upon whom one may rely for surprise or innovation.  It is, or has been anyway, enough I hope that I continue to strive to keep up my end of the conversation, and a curious business it's been.

You'd think that someone who makes a calendar every year would know how to read one, or at least remember to keep one at his desk, but no.  And so somehow I missed my anniversary, here I mean. Usedbuyer2.0 turned six a week or two ago and I forgot.  It has become my habit to mark the occasion with at least a drawing and some sort of review; how many readings posted to date, how many caricatures, quotes, doodles, how much doggerel, etc.  Again, I've rather missed my chance, so this will have to do.

Since the turn of the year, I've now read more than eight hundred pages of Edgar Johnson's massy life of of Sir Walter Scott, nearly the whole of Scott's poems, and more than half of his second novel Guy Mannering.  I've read other books as well, of subject as it were.  Of nearly all of this I've found I might as easily say what I had to say in the podcast I now do once a week with my friend, N.  I have of course been watching television all this time, and movies, and working at the bookstore too, to earn my cable-fees and the price of my bread and sausage.  My mind and imagination though have been mostly at Abbotsford and wandering the border.

Just the other day I got an email message announcing my first "Twitterversary," so it seems I've been doing that this year as well. Again, that's been mostly in support of my actual job, though I have come at last to enjoy it a bit, having narrowed my reading of "tweets" to just those folks I find amusing or helpful.  (I find that platform perhaps the least informative but strangely most addicting of any of the social media I've yet explored.  Needs constant watching to not be constantly watching.  Still working on it.)   That announcement of my "Twitterversary" was at least a reminder, if nothing else, of just how far and how fast I have travelled since I first took up with the brave new world of virtual participation.

Just as another reminder then, roughly six years ago I started this thing.  As I've said here (and at least once a year for six years now,) I had no very clear idea of what I wanted to do with it.  I called it  Usedbuyer2.0, to mark the new day, having been so unceremoniously booted from my last roost.  Basically, I just wanted to keep doing what I had by then been doing elsewhere for awhile, writing about books on a blog.  This would be mine.  I could write and draw and read what I liked and, as it's proved, say any damned thing that came into my head.  When I took up with the Internet, it was an extension of my job.  Usedbuyer2.0 would be a more personal.  Now, six years and more than two thousand daily quotations later, I'm still here. (Alright, one vague statistic at least.)

It is now so deeply ingrained a habit, this business of daily blogging, that when I neglect it, I feel guilty, which is frankly ridiculous as I am, with the exception of a very few regular readers and friends, the only one who would notice if I stopped.  (Thanks, by the way.  You know who you are, dear readers.) The idea that I should turn from my book -- from any good book -- because I've not met my own arbitrary deadline again seems to me tonight the height of self-delusion.  Why ever should I not be reading a long narrative poem right now if I so wish, rather than burbling here about blogging or my day at the Used Books Desk?  No reason in the world.  That's the answer.  

But on the off chance that anyone's checking in, and before I get back to the smugglers' siege at Mannering's house (I forget the name,) let me apologize for still doing no better after six years than I did that night in January, 2009 when I started.  I promise, faithful reader, to go on just as long as I'm able -- in questionably readable or interesting prose -- burbling about books.

Meanwhile, I've reading to do.

Thanks for sticking around while I do it.