Sorry about the lack of posts today, dear readers! I was getting tons of work done so I could get out of the office early, meet up with my brother, and head over to Giants Stadium for the Springsteen show! More later!
And still champ!
I’ve been so busy lately, I haven’t checked the goings-on at The New York Sun. I wonder what’s in today’s Arts+ section?
- A review of David Lebedoff’s new book on George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh
- A review of Cyril Connolly’s “Enemies of Promise”
- A review of the best gins for G&Ts
- A sidebar on niche tonic-waters
I feel like Cliff Clavin on Jeopardy!, when the categories were “Civil Servants, Stamps from Around the World, Mothers and Sons, Beer, Bar Trivia, and Celibacy.”
Glad to see the Official Newspaper of Gil Roth is still earning its keep.
Gone fishin’
My brother, our pal Cathi & I are at the shore (Sea Bright)…
Flying fish will never be able to walk
Friday’s company picnic turned out to be pretty boring. The turnout was much lower than last year’s at the same location (enjoy the 2007 slideshow!). I split around 1:30 p.m. and took a nice drive through Harriman State Park for the slightly roundabout trip home.
I’m not sure why I felt so disengaged from it; I had a couple of decent conversations with coworkers, but there were few significant others on hand for the event, which meant we were spending the day with the same people we see every day in the office. The young’uns (anyone younger than me) seemed to have a good time, playing beer-wiffleball or something, but I felt kinda intruder-y among them.
I bought the new Paul Weller record last week and it occurred to me that no one in my office would have any idea who Weller was, nor would they ever have heard the Jam or the Style Council. I don’t mean that in a snobbish way; it just struck me that my time isn’t theirs.
So I hung with some of my older coworkers, but their conversation led to a spirited game of beer-pong. I knew that the only way I’d have fun at this picnic was if I started drinking, and afternoon drinking makes me pretty sluggish. As opposed to nighttime drinking, which makes me witty, vivacious and impossibly charming. And invulnerable (to criticism).
Or maybe I was hungover from the previous day’s reading of Camp Concentration. The best books can do that. Regardless, I felt utterly out of place, and so I shot hoops for a little while with the worst basketball of all time, then started my drive home. Sorry I don’t have any fun stories or good pix to post.
* * *
On the plus side, it was a weekend of new milestones for Rufus! On Friday night, I gave him full run of the upper floor of the house (sans kitchen) for 2+ hours while I picked up Amy at her train and got dinner. I have no idea how to positively house-train a dog, and I was a little nervous that he might not be familiar enough with the lower floor, so I put a gate at the top of the stairs and lit out for Radburn.
He was typically (which is to say, unbelievably) excited when we got home, and I immediately conducted a room-by-room inspection. He’d gone up on both the sofa and my chaise (I put towels down on both to, and discovered paw-shaped impressions on them), but had no accidents! I took him outside and he relieved himself for about five minutes straight. So I’m going to take that as evidence that he’s house-trained! (Not that I’ll leave him outside of his crate for a full work-day, but at least I know I can go away for a couple of hours without a problem.)
A night later, a heavy thunderstorm rolled through the area. It woke us up around 4am on Sunday morning, and I assumed that our boy had already decamped to a corner of the guest bedroom to hide. But after another flash of lightning, I noticed that he was still curled up on his bed in our room, snoozing away. Given his past reactions to thunder, I was amazed. Especially because I was ready to hide in a corner of the guest bedroom at that point.
* * *
But it was a pretty quiet weekend. I read a ton, and now I’m trying to figure out how to get back to my Monday Morning Montaigne project without carrying around an 1,100+ page hardcover of the essays, since the edition I’m reading isn’t available on the Kindle.
What It Is: 7/28/08
What I’m reading: Finished Against the Gods
What I’m listening to: 22 Dreams
What I’m watching: Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (eh), Yankees-Red Sox and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.
What I’m drinking: Red Stripe
Where I’m going: Allegedly, I’ll be going to the shore on Tuesday and the Springsteen show at Giants Stadium on Thursday.
What I’m happy about: That I truly am Jersey. And that my brother’s visiting (hence the Springsteen/shore stuff)!
What I’m sad about: That I truly am Jersey.
What I’m pondering: Can I get shots for this?
Unrequired Reading: July 25, 2008
That’s the sound of the men, working on the link gang. . .
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: July 25, 2008”
I think in circles and circles are hard to break
After dropping Amy off at the bus stop this morning, I came home and realized I was on the precipice of nausea and that a 20- or 25-minute drive to the office likely would’ve pushed me over the edge. So I wrote in sick, went back to bed for 3+ hours, and found myself feeling better.
Then I spent the afternoon rereading Camp Concentration
It’s a short, frightening novel about a drug that unlocks genius (at a price). With its unending state of war and secret prison camps, the book has plenty of contemporary resonance (published in 1968). I wasn’t thinking about its political issues when I picked it up; my reason for rereading it was the author’s recent suicide.
Beyond the horrifying vision of America, I was captivated by the romance of art and mortality as portrayed by narrator-poet Louis Sacchetti. I doubt I was too aware of the sheer Germanness of this worldview back when I first read it at the age 18, but 37 is a different story.
After I finished, I decided to sprawl out on a different sofa, so I went downstairs to my library and stared at the wall of books. I picked up Ahead of All Parting
I like Mitchell’s translation of my favorite Rilke poem, Archaic Torso of Apollo, but I was disappointed to find that this collection is set in a font that’s remarkably similar to that of the Choose Your Own Adventure books I used to read as a kid. I found myself looking for breaks like
If you ignore Lou Andreas-Salome’s Freudian analysis of how your mother dressed you in girls’ clothes as a child, turn to page 32
Anyway, I decided to look at the Duino Elegies, which I’ve never read. As it turns out, one of the key passages in Camp Concentration comes from the first elegy:
For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.
It sends me back 16 years to my Attic Greek class, where I was first exposed to the word deinos, that which is both beautiful and dreadful (or wondrous and terrible, depending on what my brother offers up by way of translation).
So that’s what I do on my sick days. I’m gonna go get more rest, then embarrass myself or others at our company picnic tomorrow.
Missing the point?
If your presidential campaign has problems convincing Jewish voters that you’re on their side, I’m not sure it’s in your best interest to assemble a rally of 200,000 Germans. I’m just sayin’. . .
Is this on?
I’m just testing out this WordPress app to see if I can really write posts directly from my iPhone, bitches!
“Also, it bumps into stuff and has a hard time shaving.”
There’s an article in the NYTimes today about how the police in Providence, RI have to deal with antiterrorism guidelines instead of, y’know, crime. The chief of police has one of the more bizarre quotes I’ve read this week:
“Our nation, that I love, is like a great giant that can deal with a problem when it focuses on it,†said Colonel Esserman, who has been chief since 2003, when he was hired by Mayor David N. Cicilline. “But it seems like that giant of a nation is like a Cyclops, with but one eye, that can focus only on one problem at a time.â€