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€
Word up!
A Chip off the Old Karadzic
Last weekend, I wrote about my Sunday sidewalk brunch with Samuel Delany. I should have known something was wrong, the way Chip kept looking down the sidewalk and back into the restaurant, the way he kept nervously fingering his beard, the way he patted me down and confiscated my phone before we sat at the table.
But I didn’t understand why he kept trying to explain how the biggest influence on Dhalgren was actually the poetry of Dragan Dabic, in between complaints about how Marko Jaric was disastrously underused by the Timberwolves last season.
Now it all becomes clear: I wasn’t having lunch with Chip Delany! I was having lunch with Radovan Karadzic!
We’ve gone through the looking-glass, people.
F*** You, You Whining F***: 7/21/08
In today’s Wall Street Journal, there’s an article about how customers are asking Starbucks not to close their favorite locations, following the chain’s disclosure of the 600 stores is plans to close. The two complainants in the article come from different worlds, Bloomfield, NM and Manhattan. The person from NM contends that her townspeople won’t miss the store itself, but that its absence may keep other businesses from seeing the town as a good place to set up shop. Since I live in a town that has no Starbucks but does have a Chinese restaurants where, in the words of my wife, “it doesn’t even taste like food,” I can understand that business stigma.
However, the other person they interviewed was priceless:
Ms. Walker is in charge of consolidating 525 people from seven of her company’s New York offices into a new building in January. The Starbucks inside that building, at Madison Avenue and 44th Street, “was something that we were using to psych people up” about the move, she said.
Her hopes were dashed last week when Starbucks released the list of the stores it plans to close. She jumped on the Internet to find a phone number for the company’s main office so she can ask officials to reconsider. “Knowing Starbucks, there’s probably [another] one within a few blocks,” she said. “But that’s probably two blocks too far.”
Two things for Ms. Walker:
- go to the Starbucks Store Locator and you’ll see that there’s a Starbucks across the street from your building as well as another one down the block on your side of the street, and
- f*** you, you whining f***.
I’m hoping to make this the first installment in a series of smackdowns. If you can think of a better title for this, please send it over.
It’s always the end of the world for somebody
Courtesy of Hit & Run, here’s a neat article from World Affairs on how the current crop of “America-in-decline” books & articles is nothing new:
As with the pessimistic intellectual troughs that followed the Depression, Vietnam, and the stagflation of the late 1970s and early 1980s, there is a tendency among declinists to over-extrapolate from a momentous but singular event—in this case, the Iraq War, whose wake propels many of their gloomy forecasts.
It’s always easier to
- call for the end of the world, and
- pretend that now is how things are always going to be.
What It Is: 7/21/08
What I’m reading: Against the Gods
What I’m listening to: Court and Spark
What I’m watching: Dazed and Confused, and Sunshine (not the 87-hour Ralph Fiennes movie of the same title)
What I’m drinking: Rogue Dead Guy Ale
Where I’m going: A mini-class reunion in Philadelphia next Thursday night, allegedly. I write, “allegedly,” because it’s taking place a hipster bowling alley, and I know of only one other attendee. I thought about using my frequent-flyer miles to take a 30-hour Fri-Sat round trip to San Diego for the Comic-Con, but decided against it, in favor of hitting my company picnic on Friday and trying to have another quiet weekend like this past one.
What I’m happy about: A new Paul Weller album
What I’m sad about: My dad almost destroyed his car by getting gas from one of those discount stations. On the plus side, he saved 8 cents per gallon, which would add up to a whole dollar in savings, based on the fuel tank in my car.
What I’m pondering: Why Roche had to go and bid for the remaining shares of Genentech about a day or so before my Top Companies issue comes out, in which I praise Roche for leaving Genentech independent. (I realize the integration is more about back-office functions, while letting the R&D functions stand on their own, but that trick never works.)