What I’m reading: Winesburg, Ohio
What I’m listening to: A new Mad Mix I’m finishing up.
What I’m watching: Shopgirl, which felt like Steve Martin’s poor attempt at being LA’s Woody Allen.
What I’m drinking: Death’s Door Gin & Q-Tonic
What Rufus & Otis are up to: Well, Rufus is celebrating his second anniversary in our home today, but Otis got a little too aggressive with a neighbor’s dog a few days ago and nipped the poor guy on the foreleg. That said, I warned the owner around a million times that Otis isn’t good around smaller dogs, and that it wasn’t a good idea for her to bring her pup over. No harm done (her dog has really thick, curly fur that kinda protected it), and she was the one apologizing. Also:
Where I’m going: Nowhere, although I’ve got a court appearance this Wednesday as part of the never-ending process of recovering the vet fees that resulted from Rufus’ attack lat May.
What I’m happy about: Two years of Ru without rue. Also, it’s my mom’s [cough, cough]th birthday! Congrats!
What I’m sad about: Amy won the rodering battle at her birthday dinner at Marea on Saturday night, with her Baccala antipasti. Who new salt cod, polenta and beets would whup everything else on the menu (except for the Ricci, of course).
What I’m worried about: How I’ll deal with the fact that I didn’t win an Oscar before turning 40.
What I’m pondering: What I should be doing with my reading and writing. I kinda want to write a long-form essay that would require 10 tons of reading and work, and I can’t imagine any sorta market for it.
1) How are you reacting to “Winesburg”? I loved it.
2) Why would anyone want to do a Woody Allen? Woody’s been doing a lousy job with the job of being Woody Allen for decades now.
3) Best wishes to your mom and Rufus.
1) I started it in late December and put it down part-way through the 4-part story about Jesse-become-Goliath. I’d been enjoying the heck out of it till then, but wasn’t in the mood for it for a while. I got back into it last week and zoomed through the rest. The parade of grotesques got a little tiring, but I still got a lot more out of it than I’d expected.
(I picked it up because I wanted to read it before starting Roth’s novel, Indignation, part of which takes place in “Winesburg College.”)
2) There’s still a weird respect for Woody Allen in Hollywood that I don’t really fathom, as I’ve found him unwatchable for 15 years now. But then, one of my faves of his is Another Woman, a Bergman-esque drama with Gena Rowlands. Steve Martin’s narrator/one-leg-of-romantic-triangle in Shopgirl ends with a little soliloquy about how he treated the girl so poorly and was sorta saddened by things, but ultimately says, “That was life.” Instead of the appropriate closing line, which would have been, “Wow! I was a dick!”
3) Much appreciated!
cough, cough??? hey, I’m 70 and proud of it!!!
Winesburg, as I recall was quite good, though certainly flawed (as you point out). And he did a long time ago what young writers now seem obsessed with doing: writing a novel in short story form.