Category: literature

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What It Is: 5/19/08

What I’m reading: Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad, and the first 8 issues of the new Omega the Unknown miniseries, sorta written by Jonathan Lethem, whose prose I’ve never tried out. I oughtta sample some of his stuff on my Kindle, because I’m that awesome.

What I’m listening to: A new Mad Mix. More to come.

What I’m watching: Game 7 of Cavs/Celts, and wondering if the LeBron/Pierce matchup was going to live up to the ‘Nique/Bird shootout in 1988. It was pretty awesome.

What I’m drinking: Wet by Beefeater.

Where I’m going: Nowhere, not even for Memorial Day weekend. Sigh.

What I’m happy about: Getting out for a fantastic meal at Saddle River Inn on Saturday night, even if Dad raised the stakes on inappropriate conversation by launching into a discourse on the method used by my mohel. Seriously.

What I’m REALLY happy about: My pal Tina got married!

What I’m sad about: The Celtics won.

What I’m pondering: Microsoft’s strategy. Post to come.

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The White Stuff

I’m sure he’s a perfectly good guy, but I was just transfixed by this combo of headshot & name in today’s WSJ:

Probably because of this guy:

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What it is: 5/12/08

What I’m reading: Lush Life, by Richard Price.

What I’m listening to: Rain, by Joe Jackson. I’m 37, and I’ve been listening to Joe Jackson for 26 years, when Steppin’ Out was a single. That’s a long time. Anyway, this new record is eschews the big production of his previous album, Volume 4. It’s just a trio: Joe on piano and vocals, bassist Graham Maby and drummer David Houghton. It sounds a lot like his Summer in the City live record, which featured a similar trio. His lyrics are still alternately witty and a little awkward, but he’s still got some delightful melodies in him. This record’s enough to make me forgive him for Night & Day II.

What I’m watching: More NBA playoffs and the third season of The Wire

What I’m drinking: Brooklyn Brewery Summer Ale.

Where I’m going: Nowhere!

What I’m happy about: That lunch on Friday still seems pretty awesome to me.

What I’m sad about: That I had to mute the broadcast of the Lakers-Jazz game on Sunday after Mike Tirico had to deliver an extended shill for the new installment of High School Musical . . . and two of its stars happen to be sitting right next to us at courtside! Great corporate synergy, DisneyABCESPN. You probably managed to ensnare a whole new audience for High School Musical: you know, hardcore hoops fans who blew off Mothers Day to watch an NBA playoff game.

What I’m pondering: A whole ton of gardening/landscaping issues, now that the tree removal guys have done their business.

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Mini Driver

I worked at home today, dear readers, in anticipation of a visit from James Maloney & Son Tree Service. In addition to getting The Raccoon Lodge removed, we contracted a whole lot of other work with them, removing some smaller trees from the front yard, getting a couple of hazardous ones removed from the side of the house, cutting too-low limbs from the big trees to get some sunlight onto the yard, and sawing down some stumps so we can begin the nefarious second phase of Operation: Livable Back Yard.

Since I’d be at home, I took Amy to the bus stop today. It’s a quirky logic, but we’re a quirky couple. Anyway, about 10 minutes before the tree guys were to arrive, I thought, “Hmm. Amy’s Mini is sitting right in the driveway, and I bet they’re going to need to get past that in order to take care of a lot of this work.”

Unfortunately, her car’s a stick-shift, and I’ve never actually driven a stick-shift, outside of the one time she tried to teach me in the bus-stop parking lot. Oh, and the time when I was 16 and my pals Jon-Eric & Todd tried to teach me, before we headed to the Kinnelon Cinema to see The Running Man.

I dug deep into that 1987 version of me and tried to recreate the experience of zooming around the parking lot of my high school, but it was to no avail.

Then I looked again into that geeky high school soul and discovered inspiration from another artifact of that era: the Miller/Mazzucchelli 7-issue run of Daredevil! In particular, I recalled this set of panels from the final installment, in which our blind superhero must get behind the wheel of a car:

Emboldened, I went out to Amy’s Mini, took off the emergency brake, put it in neutral, let it roll down to the bottom of the driveway, tried several times to get it to start, tried several times to get it in gear, and eventually made my way up into the garage!

(Where I, um, stalled out and had to push it in the rest of the way so I could close the garage door…)

(Oh, and, before-and-after pix of the yard are pending…)

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Caucasian Coincidence

Yesterday, I began reading Lush Life by Richard Price. The lead character/suspect, Eric Cash, is a hipster who’s a little too old to be hip and has to deal with losing his hyphen: as in, no longer being an actor-waiter, and just being a waiter.

At one point, he mentions how in college he got the lead in a play called The Caucasian Chalk Circle. I thought this was some sort of inside joke of a title, or a dig at the absurdities of college theater.

This morning, I received an e-mail from my local alumni association with the subject line, “Don’t miss The Caucasian Chalk Circle”! Evidently,

a) I’m a cultural moron,

b) it’s by Brecht, and

c) another alum is co-starring in it.

Anyway, here’s the website of the theater company (and a review), if you’re in NYC and wanna see one of the final performances (it finishes on Sunday).

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What It Is: 5/5/2008

What I’m reading: Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, on my Kindle via Manybooks.net. And Lush Life, Richard Price’s new novel, via Amazon’s Kindle store.

What I’m listening to: Third, by Portishead. It sounds like them, but not like them in 1995. There’s one song on the album that annoys me a bunch, but I bet it’ll turn out like Ring Road from the new Underworld record, which got all resonant for me during my Belfast trip.

What I’m watching: Juno, which was cute. And we started the third season of the wire, at last!

What I’m drinking: More G’Vine G&Ts, plus Circus Boy by Magic Hat.

Where I’m going: Nowhere this week, but I’ll be working at home mid-week when the tree-removal guys show up to clear out a bunch of the more hazardous trees in the yard. I’ll take before-and-after pix.

What I’m happy about: That my trip into NYC yesterday to donate platelets at Sloan-Kettering went off without a hitch, despite the presence of the Five Boro Bike Tour, which would shut down the southbound FDR Drive later in the day. If I’d gotten caught in that traffic on the way into the city, I’d have been quite peeved. Good thing I’m an earlybird!

What I’m sad about: That a tick managed to evade the combined efforts of Frontline and my vigilant eye, leading to a nasty-looking bite on one of Rufus’ forelegs. Now I’ve gotta get him to the vet. Grr.

What I’m pondering: When I went to that pharma-event in Atlantic City last Monday, the keynote address was given by Linda Ellerbee. She didn’t have anything to say about clinical supplies and outsourcing, but she did give a funny and warm speech about her own history, women’s roles in the workplace, cheating husbands, breast cancer, and the messed-up-edness of the media. Some of it showed a real datedness, insofar as a lot of women under 35 simply don’t have the same limits that Linda butted up against when she was trailblazing. But that’s not what I’m pondering.

No, what I’m pondering is why, of all people she could quote throughout history to illustrate the need to change one’s own ways, she went with Anwar Sadat. Now, I can understand why his words — “He who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never be able to change reality, and will never, therefore, make any progress.” — were relevant to her speech.

I just think that maybe she could’ve looked for someone whose change of thought — in this case, visiting Israel and working for peace — didn’t lead to his being assassinated by his own army.

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Sun Roth

Today’s edition of the New York Sun’s Arts+ section continues to defend its title as Official Newspaper of Gil Roth (and several other Roths, as seen in #s 1 and 2):

  1. Roth Time Redux, discussing the impact of Dieter Roth,
  2. a new exhibition on Philip Guston, with a shout-out to Philip Roth,
  3. MoMA’s screening of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West,
  4. Daphne Merkin reviewing a book on the history of crazy-ass women, and
  5. and an absolute smackdown of Benny Morris’ version of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Even better: my coworkers believe the Sun must be “too conservative,” so they avoid reading it in the lunchroom, leaving me a pristine copy! However, since the owner of our company canceled our subscription to the NYTimes, which he believes is “too liberal,” the only other choices are the Wall Street Journal and the NYPost. . .

(BONUS! Today’s Sun also has a John Stossel op-ed piece on why the FAA’s inspections of airlines (and governmental inspections in general) are useless at best.)

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Final Tale of Hofmann

When I was a student at Hampshire College, the annual Halloween tradition was known as “Trip or Treat.” Being a total square, I never partook. For a variety of reasons, I wish I’d tried acid, but it’s a bit late in life for that.

Anyway, Albert Hofmann, the man who first synthesized LSD, has died at the age of 102. But, as Acid Archie sez, “ACID NEVER DIE!”

(written by Grant Morrison, drawn by Steve Yeowell; not sure who holds the copyright, which is 1990)

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Kin and Kindle

Once upon a time, Robin Williams said, “Cocaine is God’s way of telling you that you have too much money.” This week I bought a Kindle. It costs $399 (but I had $150 in gift-credit, so I pretended it only cost $250), can download books wirelessly from Amazon, is perfectly readable in daylight, can take a 2gb SD card to store a couple bazillion books, has some neat internet functions, is a butt-ugly monstrosity of design, and is almost certainly God’s way of telling me that I’m earning too much.

(And it’s proof that I’m a tremendous geek, but it’s not like we needed more of that.)

Click on the image for pictures from the unboxening:

That’s an excerpt from Chelsea Handler’s new book, Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea. She is an awfully funny writer.

Anyway, I’ll play around with this thing for a while and report back. If it manages to become a book-version of the iPod, I’ll be a happy man. This will be predicated on how comfortable I get with reading off an e-ink screen like this, and how insecure I get at not having “the actual book” in my hands.

(Man, it sure is an awful piece of design. Makes you realize how amazing Apple is with this sorta thing.)