… of why I quit the book-publishing game.
Bookends
Some of you have goofed on me for keeping that list of every book I’ve finished since 1989. I’m not sure how I feel about the fact that Art Garfunkel has been keeping a list of every book he’s read since 1968.
2006-2007 NFL Playoff Challenge, round 2
It’s do-or-die time, dear readers! I went 1-3 vs. the spread last week, while rival Ron Rosenbaum went 2-2. There’s no denying it: Ron reached mediocrity before I did!
I need to catch up in a hurry, since there are only 3 more games after this weekend, so this week’s picks will take some daring. It’d be easy to go with the home favorite in all 4 games, but that’s just the sort of strategy Mr. “What do our interpretations of Long Island say about our views on Hitler?” would engage in. Or maybe not.
Without further ado:
RAVENS by 4 over Colts. The Colts were bad last week, but were out-terrible-d by Kansas City. The Ravens evidently have restored that monstrous defense they had when they won the Superbowl in 2000. Still, this is one of those X-factor instances, where everything in my head says that the Ravens are going to cripple the Colts, but my animosity toward Brian Billick makes it tough for me to clearly pick the game. It’s like that passage in The Western Canon
Robert Lowell and Philip Larkin are here [on this list of modern canonical writers] because I seem to be the only critic alive who regards them as over-esteemed, and so I am probably wrong and must assume that I am blinded by extra-aesthetic considerations, which I abhor and try to avoid.
In that spirit, I’m going with the Ravens to wipe out the Colts and start the “re-evaluating Peyton Manning” vibe that leads to off-the-record comments about how his enormous contract is restricting the Colts from bringing in difference-makers. So it’s Ravens minus 4 points.
SAINTS by 5 over Eagles. My wife is a lifetime Saints “fan,” so she’s expecting the bottom to fall out on this miracle run. It was bad when the Saints played well and won their first few games, because she knew her family would start talking playoffs four weeks into the season. Since then, they earned a bye-week, which will help Reggie Bush and Marques Colston recover from nagging injuries. Plus, they get Hollis Thomas back, although his 4-week suspension may have affected his conditioning (ha-ha). Anyway, Amy’s still expecting Carney to honk a big field goal attempt, but I’m enough of an optimist to believe that the Saints will ride this miracle season for another week at least. Especially since the New Orleans factor (lots of alcohol and shellfish) could take its toll on the already depleted Eagles. Take the Saints minus 5 over Philly.
Bears by 8.5 over Seahawks. It’s either a testament to how shaky the Bears QB is or a testament to how little I’ve followed either team, but I actually dithered over this pick for 15 seconds. Sure, Rex Grossman is a terrible QB, but Seattle’s defense is godawful, and only one of the most embarrassing mistakes in the history of the NFL (combined with an amazing tackle) got the Seahawks into the second round. So I’m going to have to go with the Bears in a rout, although this could be a game where their defense and special teams scores more points than their offense. Take the Bears minus 8.5.
CHARGERS by 5 over Patriots. I’m not even going to discuss this game, except to say that I’ve finally learned my lesson: Don’t bet against Bill Belichick in the playoffs. Take the Patriots plus 5 points.
In this week’s picks, Ron tries to guess what Philip Roth would bet on. In response, next week I’ll try to get NFL conference championship picks from Thane Rosenbaum.
Low-res
Well, it looks like my New Year’s resolution of posting every day is already shot. That’s what I get for having a modicum of ambition.
Amy wrote about our quiet New Year’s Eve celebration over on her site: she cooked a nice meal, we watched Annie Hall & some South Park episodes, and we barely made it to midnight.
We “watched the ball drop” (huh-huh-huh) on Dick Clark’s show, if only to remind ourselves of our mortality during the celebration. Yesterday, Howard Stern read the overnight TV ratings for the New Year’s Eve shows. It turns out that a stroke-impaired Dick Clark still drew twice the audience that Carson Daly drew. Make your own joke.
I didn’t really think up any good resolutions for this year, outside of the aforementioned “post interesting stuff every day” one. It’d be nice if I could keep up with my correspondences with my far-flung friends; I tend to let those slide when work gets too pressing, and it bothers me, because I pride myself on being a good friend.
I would resolve to keep up with the self-taught yoga I started practicing this fall, but that’s just a continuation of something I’m already doing. Howzabout: “I resolve to post a picture of me holding the standing bow-and-arrow pose”? Maybe not this extreme a hold, but hey.
I don’t think there’s any reading resolutions I can make. I’ve read an awful lot of books in recent years, and I’m happy with my ability to stick with significant works like Proust and that Robert Moses biography
Which, of course, opens a whole can of worms for me. I’ve been hemming and hawing about writing fiction for a decade-plus. Mainly it’s because I’m afraid I’d actually suck at it, although I’ve come up with lots of other excuses to keep from trying. I’ve received plenty of encouragement from laymen and established writers alike, but I’ve tormented myself pretty neurotically. I mean, “flat-out crippled myself,” actually.
So here’s my resolution: stop doing that, and start writing a novel. Or collection of interconnected short stories. Whatever.
In closing, here’s a piece from A German Requiem
I thanked him and left him to his Engineer of Urban Conduits and Conservancy. That was presumably what you called yourself if you were one of the city’s plumbers. What sort of title, I wondered, did the private investigators give themselves? Balanced on the outside of the tram car back to town, I kept my mind off my precarious position by constructing a number of elegant titles for my rather vulgar profession: Practitioner of Solitary Masculine Lifestyle; Non-metaphysical Inquiry Agent; Interrogative Intermediary to the Perplexed and Anxious; Confidential Solicitor for the Displaced and Misplaced; Bespoke Grail-Finder; Seeker After Truth. I liked the last one best of all. But, at least as far my client in the particular case before me was concerned, there was nothing which seemed properly to reflect the sense of working for a lost cause that might have deterred even the most dogmatic Flat Earther.
Alright, maybe that’s too depressing a note upon which to start the year. Since my iTunes just shuffled up a “duet” of sorts with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Lori Carson, I’m going to share something from that. It’s about seven minutes of the Khan’s qawwali chanting, followed by a few moments of Lori’s breathy reading of some lyrics by Rumi:
The door is open
Let the beauty we love be what we do
Don’t go back to sleep
Don’t go back to sleep
It was divine!
Not having a ton of family in these parts, I use the time off during the holidays to visit friends. On Friday, Amy & I went down to Lumberton, NJ to visit friends of hers who were in the area for their own holiday family-tour. We had an entertaining afternoon, centering around a lengthy meal at a P.F. Chang and a discussion of why Shawn Bradley never panned out in the NBA. Good times were had by me, which counts for a lot.
Yesterday, we drove up to Providence, RI to visit my friends Paul & Deb. They’d been having plenty of family get-togethers during the week, so it was a nice change of pace for them to get a visit from their weird friends in NJ.
I always love seeing Paul & Deb, because they have an awful lot of diverse interests and are quite passionate about them. We exchanged some holiday gifts — we brought back some neat tea from our Paris trip, and I also made them copies of a few Mad Mix CDs, while they gave us books, fancy knitting yarn, and unique coffee mugs from a local artist, before deciding we also needed to take back an amaryllis and some paperwhite bulbs. And a loaf of sweet bread from a Portuguese bakery.
In between these two bouts of gift-giving, the four of us drove over to the museum at RISD (Rhode Island School of Design), which was exhibiting Wunderground: a collection of Providence poster art from the past decade, and a sculptural village called Shangri-la-la Land. I took a ton of pictures of the exhibit, before a staffer ran up to tell me that I wasn’t permitted to snap pix in the exhibition. I apologized and pretended I’d just taken one. Here’s a collection of 19 shots from the show. (The sculpture area was dimly lit, so I tried a few shots without flash, but gave up and started snapping away. I included both types.)
Comics Reporter and official VM buddy Tom Spurgeon wrote a great (and lengthy) article about Fort Thunder, one of the main groups of the Providence arts scene during that period:
Fort Thunder was different. The Providence, RI group has achieved importance not just for the sum total of its considerable artists but for its collective impact and its value as a symbol of unfettered artistic expression. The key to understanding Fort Thunder is that it was not just a group of cartoonists who lived near each other, obsessed about comics and socialized. It was a group of artists, many of whom pursued comics among other kinds of media, who lived together and shared the same workspace.
As an outgrowth of the Rhode Island School of Design [RISD] where nearly all of them attended (some even graduating), Fort Thunder provided a common setting for creation that imposed almost no economic imperative to conform to commercial standards or to change in an attempt to catch the next big wave. They were young, rents were cheap, and incidental money could be had by dipping into other more commercial areas of artistic enterprise such as silk-screening rock posters. Fort Thunder was also fairly isolated, both in terms of influences that breached its walls and how that work was released to the outside world. This allowed its artists to produce a significant body of work that most people have yet to see. It also fueled the group’s lasting mystique. The urge — even seven years after discovering the group — is not to dig too deeply, so as not to uncover the grim and probably unromantic particulars.
We had a great time in the exhibition. Over the years, Paul & Deb had snagged several of the posters from lampposts and walls in town, but they told us that most of the posters were stuck with pretty heavy glue, making it impossible to take home these amazing pieces. I figured it said something about the confluence of art, commerce and paste, but I say that about everything. I think it was also the first museum exhibition I’d been to where the art was held up by thumbtacks.
Before visiting the museum, Paul wanted to show us one of his favorite places in town, the Providence Atheneum. It’s America’s 4th oldest library (est. 1753) and requires an annual membership. Paul pays it gladly, because he loves coming to the place, reading magazines and newspapers, checking out the great collection, and soaking in the ambience.
After the Atheneum and the Wunderground exhibition, we were off to a Portuguese restaurant where I ordered the Shish-Kebab of Damocles, evidently an Iberian specialty.
If you’ve read this site for any length of time, you probably realize that a day that includes
- a comics-related art exhibition,
- an old library,
- some bizarre cuisine, and
- conversation with good friends
is pretty much as good as it gets.
(If you want to see pix from the whole day, go here. If you just want that Wunderground set, head over here. And you can check out Amy’s pix from that day over here.)
Eco Chamber
I finished the Berlin Noir trilogy on Christmas morning. They’re fantastic novels, and I recommend them highly. I don’t read many mystery novels, but these were amazing (and are highly recommended by Ron Rosenbaum), and I devoured the 830 pages from Thursday to Monday. I’ll hit my local library next week to see if they have the fourth novel in the series, which came out a little while ago.
Finishing the novels meant that I had to choose my next read from the Christmas gifts I would receive that day. (I’d decided against reading that copy of Ajax I brought with me, for reasons I can’t explain to myself.)
The Beckett, I thought, was out. No way was I starting that up in New Year’s week.
No Crime & Punishment, either. (One of Amy’s cousins wanted to get me something from my wish list, but couldn’t find Demons, so he picked up C&P instead)
No Chris Rose’s 1 Dead in Attic. I was heading out of New Orleans for a while.
What I decided to read was Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano
“Here’s my big chance!” I thought. “I’ll employ The Eco Strategy and finally read this book!”
See, unlike my experiences with Nightwood, I didn’t stop reading Under the Volcano because I didn’t enjoy the book. Rather, I stopped reading it because it is a difficult book and because I have too many other things to read on hand.
Ah, but The Eco Strategy! First employed in July 2004, when I visited Budapest for my friends’ wedding! At that time, I finished the two books that I brought along for the trip: Trainspotting and Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. “Whatever will I do?” I thought. “I have another day here, plus a long trip home!”
I visited a nearby bookstore and realized that this was the only possible scenario in which I would finally read Foucault’s Pendulum! “If I can’t get through that book now, I’ll never make it through!”
My attention focused on Eco’s book, I found it smooth sailing and awfully rewarding.
Similarly, I passed the mysterious 40-page barrier that had stopped me in my previous attempts at reading Under the Volcano, a novel praised so highly by William Gass that I was embarrassed not to be able to read it further. At 130 pages, it’s become quite “easier,” although it’s no page-turner a la Berlin Noir.
Still, I plan on finishing up Rosenbaum’s Shakespeare book tonight or tomorrow morning, then plunging back into Geoffrey Firmin’s last day.
Then, I might start exploring this, for That Thing I’m Trying To Write.
Tryout
Got back from Louisiana last night, after a 2.5-hour delay due to weather problems up here at Newark. Spent the “day off” dealing with a plumber and running yet more errands.
One of these errands involved stopping by my office and picking up a new 13.3″ MacBook to try out for a few days. We ordered a bunch of refurbished models for editors’ use during travel, and I was interested in seeing how they feel. My G4 PowerBook (12″) is getting kinda long in the tooth, although it’s still fine for travel and all. Still, it’d be nice to have another laptop in the house, so the official VM wife (who’ll likely make me the official MI husband) and I can blog away in the living room, sneaking sidelong glances at each other’s posts.
Or not. I’ll see how the holiday bonus looks, since most of our money’s going into plans for fixing up the house in 2007 (starting with that aforementioned plumber’s visit today).
The holiday trip went alright. On Christmas afternoon, I was deluged by presents. I can’t fault Amy’s parents for using my Amazon wish list to guide their purchases, but I wish they’d pay a little more attention to the size & weight of some of the items. For example, while I was quite happy to receive the four-volume, hardcover, slipcased edition of Samuel Beckett’s works, I wasn’t so happy about lugging it home in my suitcase.
Still, it’s a minor complaint, considering I could’ve shipped it home Tuesday morning.
Anyway, its nowhere near as interesting a gift as the small wooden case they gave me. It has a slide-off lid, and it’s nowhere near long enough for a pen, prompting me to ask, “Am I supposed to hide weed in this?”
That’s the Christmas spirit, I guess. I’ll process my pix from the trip this evening, and try to get those posted.
Happy Holiday
Have a great Christmas, dear gentile readers! I don’t know why you’re on the internet on Christmas, instead of in the family room, ripping through the gift-wrap on your presents, but that’s your problem.
Amy’s busy putting together a drum-kit for her godson, so his parents will hate us forever. I’ll go give her a hand in a minute.
If you still don’t wanna join your family for a few minutes, read some of the curiously touching Christmas memories Tom Spurgeon posted in “Wallowing In Nostalgia Chapter 146”. And have a good holiday.
It’s only the river
Amy & I meandered through the French Quarter yesterday, in search of cheap novelties (some voodoo dolls at the French Market), some holiday presents (a couple of higher-end masks at Rumors, and a sweatshirt from the local Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville, which my boss contends has the best margaritas around), and coffee and beignets at Café Du Monde.
We took a ton of pictures yesterday, but I forgot to bring the cable for my camera along for the trip, so mine will have to wait till we’re home next week. Amy has been working much more diligently on hers, and has demonstrated an eye for photography that leaves me jealous. She’s also willing to spend time with Photoshop and Lightroom to improve her pix, while my point-and-click mentality seems to carry over to many aspects of my life.
Anyway, the Quarter was pretty full of people, even though we got in pretty early (around 9am). The New Orleans Bowl football game between Rice and Troy had been the night before, so partisans for those two schools were everywhere. In fact, CDM was completely packed when we arrived. The weather was in the mid-50s, and Amy pointed out that you could tell which people were locals because they were the ones wearing scarves and gloves.
After breakfast, we began taking pictures. I brought my laptop along, in hopes that the citywide WiFi service was actually functioning, but the Earthlink-provided network didn’t show up on my menu when we were sitting in Jackson Square, so I dropped the laptop off in our car. Sorry, no liveblogging from the streets of NO,LA, dear readers. Maybe next trip.
When Amy gets her pix posted, you’ll get an idea of how gorgeous the morning light can be in the Quarter. It was the first sunny day since we arrived on Thursday, which got Amy in a good mood. The rain and drear can bring a body down, like it has today.
(In fact, we’ve spent a good chunk of time just hanging out in her parents’ living room. Since I just crossed the 700-page mark in that Berlin Noir omnibus I brought along for the trip, I can attest that we’ve, um, had some time on our hands.)
During our walk yesterday, we stopped at Faulkner House Books in Pirate Alley (yarr!), where I picked up a small collection of post-Katrina columns by Times-Picayune writer Chris Rose, who’s been chronicling the human costs of the catastrophe as well as anybody. I’ll probably read it after I finish the remaining 130 pages of Berlin Noir today.
It turns out the bookstore’s doing pretty well, at least if some of the comments I heard from the manager about the prices they fetched for a few rarities is true. I’m being deliberately vague, but it sounds like they made some serious scratch from selling a couple of New Orleans-related literary memorabilia. It warms my heart that there’s a market for the stuff.
I can’t offer much of an assessment on the city’s recovery. The French Quarter isn’t like the rest of the area and, while there were plenty more tourists than our last trip in July, that’s not adding much to the conversation. During the coverage of the New Orleans Bowl on ESPN, the commentators talked about “how little has been done” down here for the people, and showed a short clip of the student-athletes taking a bus tour through the lower Ninth Ward.
As Amy & I walked through the Quarter, we reminisced about our wedding weekend down here. There are so many landmarks for me (and even more for Amy, who spent so many years in the city), so many resonances, so many reminiscences, that it’s hard for me to imagine that it can go away for good, within our lifetimes.
Last night, at the home of Amy’s grandmother, some family members railed against FEMA, the local contractors, and the state’s governor, who evidently finished a legislative session unable to pass a bill to spend the state’s $2 billion surlplus. Since it’s not their district, these in-laws didn’t directly lambaste the re-elections of Ray Nagin or Rep. Jefferson, who was recently caught with $90,000 dollars in bribe money in his freezer, but they weren’t happy about either of those developments.
After we got back from her grandmother’s place (we were dropping off some leftover chicken tenders & cream cheese wrapped in bacon), we found a documentary about New Zealand on the Travel Channel. There was a segment on Napier, the art-deco city on the north island. It spent a little time showing off the buildings, then explained how it all resulted from a massive earthquake and fire in 1931 that wiped out the city. (In fact, the whole documentary was along these lines: each segment started out with beautiful images and descriptions of wonder and grandeur, then segued into “the dark secret behind it.”)
The third novel in that Berlin Noir omnibus jumps 9 years from the end of the second, from 1938 to 1947. Berlin is in ruins, and the Russians are starting to separate the east section of the city from the west. It made me wonder what the city’s like today, how it integrated in the last 15 years.
The rain’s heavy again today, and they’re issuing flood warnings. Nothing cataclysmic, of course: just enough to overrun the various drainage systems for a while.
Just a couple for the road
I have about 50 pages remaining in Ron Rosenbaum’s Shakespeare Wars, but I don’t wanna carry that along this trip, so I’ll finish reading it when I’m home.
Instead, I’m bringing along Berlin Noir, an omnibus of the first three Philip Kerr detective novels about Bernie Gunther, and Sophocles’ Ajax, which pertains to This Thing I’m Trying To Write. I imagine that I’ll receive some books from my Amazon wish list as gifts while I’m down in Louisiana, so I’m trying to pack light.