I promise I’ll do better next week.
See the whole Lost in the Supermarket series
The Fallon
Evidently, Business Insider has decided to inaugurate the launch of Jimmy Fallon’s late-night talk show with a litany of the 10 Biggest Talk Show Bombs.
I prefer to honor Mr. Fallon for his awesome parody of that Dirty Vegas video.
Monday Morning Montaigne: Of cripples
Don’t invent reasons to explain every fact. For example, just because you had really good sex with a crippled woman, it does not validate a proverb that says cripples are better in bed.
Seriously. That’s the example he chose.
On to Of physiognomy!
What It Is: 3/2/09
What I’m reading: Montaigne & Clive James. Oh, and I started Liar’s Poker, on my new Kindle!
What I’m listening to: My new Mad Mix CD, and a couple of Kate Bush records.
What I’m watching: The Darjeeling Limited, Synecdoche, New York, and Adaptation.
What I’m drinking: Blue Point Blueberry Ale, and Plymouth & Q Tonic.
What Rufus is up to: Finally playing with the other dogs on his Saturday dog-park visit! It helped that one of his grey-pals was there and sociable.
Where I’m going: Nowhere special, but we’re hoping to get into a nice restaurant next Saturday to celebrate my wife’s birthday.
What I’m happy about: I survived a weekend at home without Amy, my first since late 2005.
What I’m sad about: The death of my wife’s grandmother (the prompt for Amy to be away this weekend). She was always alright to me, even if she was a little confused about who I was sometimes.
What I’m pondering: Synecdoche, New York. I have a feeling that movie’s going to be in my head for a long time.
Apart, the Hole
I saw Synecdoche, New York on Friday afternoon and I’ve spent this weekend trying to parse what I saw, heard and felt. I’ve even been struggling with the metaphor of how it’s affected me; I don’t want to ape the ongoingly-dying lead character by saying it’s infected me like a virus. I think it’s more like ink in water, gently dispersing, ever obscuring.
I don’t feel bad that I can’t come up with the right words. Roger Ebert and Manohla Dargis both loved the movie, but neither of them seem to have the vocabulary to approach it. Ebert comes closer in this blog-post about it, but he’s still barking at cats. Robert Wilonsky named it his favorite movie of 2008, but didn’t review it for his paper. He did get in a good interview with writer/director Charlie Kaufman. (Rex Reed’s negative review is pretty funny, in its way.)
I watched Adaptation on Saturday night, in hopes that it would provide some clues into Synecdoche, since it seemed to be the most thematically similar of Mr. Kaufman’s previous screenplays. I was completely wrong, of course. Adaptation is about a man who can’t start, and Synecdoche is about a man who can’t stop. Also, Synecdoche isn’t about writing, but dying. It’s also a million times funnier than Adaptation, and the women are amazing. (Like Ebert, I won’t write about the actors or their performances.) Unfortunately, I caught a 1 p.m. screening, so the other dozen audience members were generally elderly people. They didn’t find it as humorous as I did.
For all the difficulties in the movie, I never felt like I was being sneered at by Mr. Kaufman. It felt more like he was struggling to convey the ineffable, knowing it’s ineffable. I still don’t get why Samantha Morton’s house was on fire, but this isn’t the sort of movie where misreading a symbol will derail your entire experience with it. At least, it wasn’t for me.
I almost drove back into NYC on Saturday to watch it again, but the DVD is coming out on March 10, so I preordered it. I have a feeling that I’ll ramble more about this movie in the next few months.
Unrequired Reading: Feb. 27, 2009
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Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Feb. 27, 2009”
Kindleicious
To celebrate the arrival of my new Kindle (I sold my first-gen model for $270 on Amazon last week), here are a bunch of articles about e-book pricing and why publishers are scared crapless by the example of Apple and iTunes:
- Kassia Kroszer, who writes wonderfully about this stuff on her blog, argues that $9.99 is tops for what consumers will pay. I agree, as there are a number of Kindle books that I’ve blown off because they’re priced above that, including the new translation of War & Peace (which I finally bought a minute ago after the price dropped from $22+ to $8.96).
- Here’s an interview with Ms. Kroszer!
- Here’s a publisher at HarpersStudio explaining why paper, printing and binding (PPB) only account for about $2.00 of a book’s price, and therefore why Kindle books need to cost a lot more than $10. It looks like he doesn’t account for bookstore returns in that estimate; overprinting and getting stuck with tons of unsold copies doesn’t occur with an e-verison, of course. And he may be lying.
- This guy disagrees with that guy.
- Jason Epstein still wants a high-speed machine that will make print copies of books on demand. No, seriously. Oh, and good books will be written by demented shut-ins “highly specialized individuals struggling at their desks in deep seclusion and not by linked communities of interest.”
I’m gonna go read something now.
0-fer of the Week
What better day of the week than Wednesday to show off my lack of erudition? In an act of Godelian irrelevance, I’ll try to post a significant 0-fer (as in, “I’ve never read a book, play, story or essay by [x]”) every week.
This week’s 0-fer is . . .
You’d think, in my late-teen pretentious superhero-fixated years, I’d have mistakenly read Man and Superman, but you’d be wrong.
Now why don’t you leave a comment about one author you really should have read by now but never have?
You can find past 0-fers 0-ver here!
Lost in the Supermarket: Word Disassociation
What It Is: 2/23/09
What I’m reading: Montaigne & Cultural Amnesia
What I’m listening to: A whole passel of Bill Simmons’ B.S. Report podcasts, and just shuffling through my iTunes library for a new Mad Mix.
What I’m watching: Wall•E, Eastbound & Down and The Royal Tenenbaums.
What I’m drinking: Plymouth & Stirrings.
What Rufus is up to: Having no fun at the dog park. Again.
Where I’m going: To a pre-birthday dinner with my wife this Saturday!
What I’m happy about: My dad was wrong with last year’s (70th) birthday dinner prediction of “This is my last year.”
What I’m sad about: He made the same prediction at this year’s birthday dinner.
What I’m pondering: How he took it when I said, “Well, you’re bound to be right sometime.”