Month: August 2008

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What It Is: 8/18/08

What I’m reading: Finished that book on Steve Ditko by Blake Bell, started When Genius Failed, Roger Lowenstein’s chronicle of the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, and am continuing with Montaigne’s essays (still reading his Apology for Raymond Sebond).

What I’m listening to: Boxer, by The National, Songs from Venice Beach, by Ted Hawkins

What I’m watching: Fourth season of The Wire. And, um, Enchanted. Listen: it was just starting and I thought there might be some neat art direction to contrast the mundane world with the cartoon-fantasy world. There wasn’t, but we still had some laughs over the way Patrick Dempsey’s hairstyle changed from shot to shot. We thought it would’ve been funny if he ended up with a high-top fade in one scene, then dreadlocks in another. And I thought it was a great idea to cast Idina Menzel in a movie with musical numbers but not give her a singing role! I’m going back to the Wire. Chris just beat a dude to death.

What I’m drinking: Cerveza de la Pacifica

What Rufus is up to: Still getting freaked out by thunder, still willing to walk up to anyone he meets, tail a-wag.

Where I’m going: Nowhere special, which is sad, since the summer is just about over.

What I’m happy about: That my wife made tongue tacos for lunch on Sunday (a process she began on Saturday)! And I did some manly-ass work out in the yard, ripping up forsythia and digging up some of my dad’s illegal dumping — including cinderblocks, carpeting, paint trays, metal pipes, airplane cable, something with vacuum tubes, and gas cans — to open up space around the big-ol’ rock in the backyard.

What I’m sad about: That I consider landscape work manly.

What I’m pondering: How Russia’s invasion of Georgia may have backfired.

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Georgia Rules

I haven’t written anything about the war in Georgia because I don’t know enough about the circumstances and history, and I figure there are plenty of other places you could go for uninformed ranting.

Over at Reason’s Hit & Run blog, there’s a good piece by Matt Welch on how various commentators see the war through their own prism. While the cited examples are funny, my biggest laugh came from the comments section, where frequent contrarian commenter Joe remarked:

I agree, it’s irritating when people project their own ideological interpretation onto complex events.

OT, does anyone else think this whole episode could have been avoided if Georgia had developed a better system of light rail?

I really am easily amused.

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Morning Sun

It’s a comparatively slow day at the Official Newspaper of Gil Roth:

  1. a review of the new book by James Wood, How Fiction Works,
  2. a review of an anthology on New Criticism, and
  3. a brief history (with slideshow) of Art Deco.

So I guess I oughtta flip over to the NYObserver, which is more hit-and-miss in its Gilcentric writing:

  1. the decline of newspaper reporters in NJ, and
  2. an interview with Amtrak president/CEO Alex Kummant about transit plans in NY/NJ and the need for new rail capacity?

Looks like I have nothing to complain about.

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Victory!

I’ve never had to house-train a pet. Both of the dogs we had when I was a kid were kept outdoors, and my cats were strays, and they liked getting out of the house early and often. Rufus had a couple of accidents in his first week at home, but that’s pretty understandable.

Since we got him in March, I’ve been keeping him in his crate when I’m away at the office. I’ve felt bad about this, but was assured by a ton of people — including his vet — that it’s okay. Still, I figured that he’d be happier if he could meander around the house while I’m at work, instead of being curled up inside the crate, sleeping for hours on end, and then bursting with energy when I get home.

It’s true: I imagine that my dog actually does things when we’re not here. I mean, besides standing up on the loveseat to look out the living room window. I can just see him proudly trotting up and down the hall, selecting one toy, then another, before promenading over to our bedroom, where he promptly curls up and sleeps for hours on end.

As I mentioned in What It Is this week, I’ve been leaving him out of his crate for longer and longer stretches. I don’t let him go downstairs while we’re out, and he seems to have figured out from the first multi-hour session on his own that drinking a lot of water isn’t a smart move. I’ve tried to Rufus-proof the area, making sure there’s nothing edible around, and that our laptops are not in harm’s way.

Today, I took The Big Step and left him on his own for an entire workday.

I’m pleased to report that I came home to find no accidents, no shredded furniture, no commandeered laundry (the first time I left him alone for a few hours, in his second week with us, he tipped over our hamper and dragged our clothes over to his crate), no chewed electrical cords, no signs of pot-smoking, and one tail-wagging pooch!

I get to feel a tiny bit less angst when I go to work in the morning!

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Monday Morning Montaigne: The Reloadening!

I gave up on my Monday Morning Montaigne project a year ago for two reasons. The first one was that I reached Apology for Raymond Sebond, the central essay of the second book. This essay — the introduction to (and kindasorta defense of) Sebond’s Natural Theology, which Montaigne’s dad asked him to translate — runs almost 180 pages and, though translator Donald Frame breaks it up into several sections, I couldn’t see how I’d make it through that essay and manage to convey anything of interest to the readers of this blog.

The second reason I gave up was that I convinced myself that nothing I’d written in my Monday Morning Montaigne posts was of any interest to the readers of this blog. I don’t think I expected a rousing conversation among commenters, few of whom likely have read more than a smattering of Montaigne, and none of whom were exactly going to read along or look back into the essays to counter my points. Still, there was so little response to it, I figured no one would notice it was missing.

As it turns out, my posts were more like timed charges. In the last year, I’ve been getting hits from different colleges and universities’ IP addresses, presumably by students who are looking to cheat on their Montaigne assignments. I mean, “who are researching various critical opinions of Montaigne’s essays online (in order to cheat on their papers).”

It struck me that I put myself in a position of responsibility with this project. Without Monday Morning Montaigne, these students would have no choice but to read one of the other two million google hits for “montaigne essay opinion,” and who knows what sort of perspective they’d cobble together? Who knows when they’d get around to finding my posts, but better they rely on my flawed, rambling viewpoints than those of someone who’s actually done some research into Montaigne! With half-assed misreading comes half-assed responsibility! Excelsior!

So I decided to dive headlong into the aforementioned Apology this weekend. You can expect the first installment on Monday!

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What It Is: 8/11/08

What I’m reading: Finished The Good Rat, by Jimmy Breslin, continuing Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko, by Blake Bell, and getting back to reading Montaigne’s essays.

What I’m listening to: my iPod, endlessly shuffling among 13,000 or so songs.

What I’m watching: Fourth season of The Wire, and The Dark Knight, over at the Imax at the Palisades Center.

What I’m drinking: a rosé that my wife picked up on Saturday, and Stella Artois. Not at the same time.

What Rufus is up to: Around 6 hours on his own upstairs when I’m out! I’m still hesitant to leave him out of his crate for my full 9-hour workday, and I keep him upstairs so he doesn’t meander around down in the library, where he’s less familiar. But he seems to have figured out that he shouldn’t drink a lot of water when he’s alone in the house.

Where I’m going: Nowhere special

What I’m happy about: I’m not sure, but I’m generally elated at present. I feel a little bad that I’ve neglected friends I need to write to, but maybe I’ll have time and motivation to fix that this week.

What I’m sad about: The deaths of Bernie Mac and Isaac Hayes.

What I’m pondering: The irony that the Yankees’ healthiest and most productive pitchers this season are 38 and 36 years old.

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“The Good Rat”? Try “The Totally Freakin’ Awesome Rat”

I enjoy the heck out of Ron Rosenbaum’s essays and columns, but my track record with his book, movie, music recommendations isn’t great. Sure, he turned me — and a generation of readers — on to Charles Portis, and he also lightened my heart with Rosanne Cash.

But then there’s the Rosenbaum who contends that Domino “captures, purely with its look, the way we look” and “will be a cultural referent longer than many movies that make more money.” In fact, Domino is a terrible movie, the acid-green-iness isn’t very innovative, and it still doesn’t answer the question of whether Keira Knightley is hot.

And don’t get me started with the number of months my wife & I were sucked into the hypersaturated void of CSI:Miami on Ron’s recommendation. Sure, it was stupidly entertaining, especially with the Caruso-isms. But, dude . . . Zoroastrian undertones?

What I’m saying is, some of Ron’s suggestions are good, some are bad. And I’m telling you that he hit a home run with his recent praise for Jimmy Breslin’s new book, The Good Rat.

I downloaded the book shortly after reading Ron’s article, and I could barely put it down. I’ve gone back to reread chapters this weekend. It’s a fantastic non-fiction book about a career mobster who testifies against a pair of crooked (now retired) cops. Much of the book consists of the man’s testimony, balanced by Breslin’s wonderful interjections, his anecdotes about criminal New York’s past and dissolving present, character sketches, and his own past as a newspaperman, chronicling the city’s underworld.

The book is a sort of elegy for those early days, exploring the contradictions of the glamor, mundanity and evil of the mafia. The mobsters commit evil acts — the center of the book involves a heartbreaking story of murder-by-mistaken-identity — but they lead common lives, and Breslin is adept at drawing out these tensions. These men aspire to some sort of greatness, but they can never amount to anything more than elderly men trying to stay ahead of the feds. This may seem passe, post-Sopranos, but Breslin makes it a joy to explore this world.

Go get The Good Rat. It’s the best book I’ve read this year. (I count The Heart of Darkness as a novella, not a book.)

[As an aside, I should point out that the biggest tragedy in the death-of-the-newspaper phenomenon may be the loss of great city & political columnists like Breslin, Mike Royko and Murray Kempton (another Rosenbaum recommendation). I only read a few papers nowadays, but I can’t think of any newspaper writers working now who could reach their heights.]