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Georgia Rules

I haven’t written anything about the war in Georgia because I don’t know enough about the circumstances and history, and I figure there are plenty of other places you could go for uninformed ranting.

Over at Reason’s Hit & Run blog, there’s a good piece by Matt Welch on how various commentators see the war through their own prism. While the cited examples are funny, my biggest laugh came from the comments section, where frequent contrarian commenter Joe remarked:

I agree, it’s irritating when people project their own ideological interpretation onto complex events.

OT, does anyone else think this whole episode could have been avoided if Georgia had developed a better system of light rail?

I really am easily amused.

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Morning Sun

It’s a comparatively slow day at the Official Newspaper of Gil Roth:

  1. a review of the new book by James Wood, How Fiction Works,
  2. a review of an anthology on New Criticism, and
  3. a brief history (with slideshow) of Art Deco.

So I guess I oughtta flip over to the NYObserver, which is more hit-and-miss in its Gilcentric writing:

  1. the decline of newspaper reporters in NJ, and
  2. an interview with Amtrak president/CEO Alex Kummant about transit plans in NY/NJ and the need for new rail capacity?

Looks like I have nothing to complain about.

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Victory!

I’ve never had to house-train a pet. Both of the dogs we had when I was a kid were kept outdoors, and my cats were strays, and they liked getting out of the house early and often. Rufus had a couple of accidents in his first week at home, but that’s pretty understandable.

Since we got him in March, I’ve been keeping him in his crate when I’m away at the office. I’ve felt bad about this, but was assured by a ton of people — including his vet — that it’s okay. Still, I figured that he’d be happier if he could meander around the house while I’m at work, instead of being curled up inside the crate, sleeping for hours on end, and then bursting with energy when I get home.

It’s true: I imagine that my dog actually does things when we’re not here. I mean, besides standing up on the loveseat to look out the living room window. I can just see him proudly trotting up and down the hall, selecting one toy, then another, before promenading over to our bedroom, where he promptly curls up and sleeps for hours on end.

As I mentioned in What It Is this week, I’ve been leaving him out of his crate for longer and longer stretches. I don’t let him go downstairs while we’re out, and he seems to have figured out from the first multi-hour session on his own that drinking a lot of water isn’t a smart move. I’ve tried to Rufus-proof the area, making sure there’s nothing edible around, and that our laptops are not in harm’s way.

Today, I took The Big Step and left him on his own for an entire workday.

I’m pleased to report that I came home to find no accidents, no shredded furniture, no commandeered laundry (the first time I left him alone for a few hours, in his second week with us, he tipped over our hamper and dragged our clothes over to his crate), no chewed electrical cords, no signs of pot-smoking, and one tail-wagging pooch!

I get to feel a tiny bit less angst when I go to work in the morning!

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Monday Morning Montaigne: The Reloadening!

I gave up on my Monday Morning Montaigne project a year ago for two reasons. The first one was that I reached Apology for Raymond Sebond, the central essay of the second book. This essay — the introduction to (and kindasorta defense of) Sebond’s Natural Theology, which Montaigne’s dad asked him to translate — runs almost 180 pages and, though translator Donald Frame breaks it up into several sections, I couldn’t see how I’d make it through that essay and manage to convey anything of interest to the readers of this blog.

The second reason I gave up was that I convinced myself that nothing I’d written in my Monday Morning Montaigne posts was of any interest to the readers of this blog. I don’t think I expected a rousing conversation among commenters, few of whom likely have read more than a smattering of Montaigne, and none of whom were exactly going to read along or look back into the essays to counter my points. Still, there was so little response to it, I figured no one would notice it was missing.

As it turns out, my posts were more like timed charges. In the last year, I’ve been getting hits from different colleges and universities’ IP addresses, presumably by students who are looking to cheat on their Montaigne assignments. I mean, “who are researching various critical opinions of Montaigne’s essays online (in order to cheat on their papers).”

It struck me that I put myself in a position of responsibility with this project. Without Monday Morning Montaigne, these students would have no choice but to read one of the other two million google hits for “montaigne essay opinion,” and who knows what sort of perspective they’d cobble together? Who knows when they’d get around to finding my posts, but better they rely on my flawed, rambling viewpoints than those of someone who’s actually done some research into Montaigne! With half-assed misreading comes half-assed responsibility! Excelsior!

So I decided to dive headlong into the aforementioned Apology this weekend. You can expect the first installment on Monday!

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What It Is: 8/11/08

What I’m reading: Finished The Good Rat, by Jimmy Breslin, continuing Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko, by Blake Bell, and getting back to reading Montaigne’s essays.

What I’m listening to: my iPod, endlessly shuffling among 13,000 or so songs.

What I’m watching: Fourth season of The Wire, and The Dark Knight, over at the Imax at the Palisades Center.

What I’m drinking: a rosé that my wife picked up on Saturday, and Stella Artois. Not at the same time.

What Rufus is up to: Around 6 hours on his own upstairs when I’m out! I’m still hesitant to leave him out of his crate for my full 9-hour workday, and I keep him upstairs so he doesn’t meander around down in the library, where he’s less familiar. But he seems to have figured out that he shouldn’t drink a lot of water when he’s alone in the house.

Where I’m going: Nowhere special

What I’m happy about: I’m not sure, but I’m generally elated at present. I feel a little bad that I’ve neglected friends I need to write to, but maybe I’ll have time and motivation to fix that this week.

What I’m sad about: The deaths of Bernie Mac and Isaac Hayes.

What I’m pondering: The irony that the Yankees’ healthiest and most productive pitchers this season are 38 and 36 years old.

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“The Good Rat”? Try “The Totally Freakin’ Awesome Rat”

I enjoy the heck out of Ron Rosenbaum’s essays and columns, but my track record with his book, movie, music recommendations isn’t great. Sure, he turned me — and a generation of readers — on to Charles Portis, and he also lightened my heart with Rosanne Cash.

But then there’s the Rosenbaum who contends that Domino “captures, purely with its look, the way we look” and “will be a cultural referent longer than many movies that make more money.” In fact, Domino is a terrible movie, the acid-green-iness isn’t very innovative, and it still doesn’t answer the question of whether Keira Knightley is hot.

And don’t get me started with the number of months my wife & I were sucked into the hypersaturated void of CSI:Miami on Ron’s recommendation. Sure, it was stupidly entertaining, especially with the Caruso-isms. But, dude . . . Zoroastrian undertones?

What I’m saying is, some of Ron’s suggestions are good, some are bad. And I’m telling you that he hit a home run with his recent praise for Jimmy Breslin’s new book, The Good Rat.

I downloaded the book shortly after reading Ron’s article, and I could barely put it down. I’ve gone back to reread chapters this weekend. It’s a fantastic non-fiction book about a career mobster who testifies against a pair of crooked (now retired) cops. Much of the book consists of the man’s testimony, balanced by Breslin’s wonderful interjections, his anecdotes about criminal New York’s past and dissolving present, character sketches, and his own past as a newspaperman, chronicling the city’s underworld.

The book is a sort of elegy for those early days, exploring the contradictions of the glamor, mundanity and evil of the mafia. The mobsters commit evil acts — the center of the book involves a heartbreaking story of murder-by-mistaken-identity — but they lead common lives, and Breslin is adept at drawing out these tensions. These men aspire to some sort of greatness, but they can never amount to anything more than elderly men trying to stay ahead of the feds. This may seem passe, post-Sopranos, but Breslin makes it a joy to explore this world.

Go get The Good Rat. It’s the best book I’ve read this year. (I count The Heart of Darkness as a novella, not a book.)

[As an aside, I should point out that the biggest tragedy in the death-of-the-newspaper phenomenon may be the loss of great city & political columnists like Breslin, Mike Royko and Murray Kempton (another Rosenbaum recommendation). I only read a few papers nowadays, but I can’t think of any newspaper writers working now who could reach their heights.]

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This is getting ridiculous

Today, the NY Sun (Official Newspaper of Gil Roth) managed to put out more articles of interest to me than any other paper would in a month:

  1. Revising our views on Arcimboldo in light of the Allegorical Head of the Four Seasons
  2. Revising our views on neoconservatism via World Affairs magazine
  3. Revising our views on Columbus Circle post-TW Center
  4. Edward Hopper: Wanna see my etchings?
  5. Death of a niche magazine shop in NYC
  6. And an art installation by my favorite electronic band, Underworld . . . ?

Talk about an embarrassment of riches! I half-expect tomorrow’s edition to include articles on Miller’s Crossing, Danny Wilson, and Roger Langridge.

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Can you smell what the rock is cooking?

Our yard has always been a disaster; my brother, our neighbors and I used to play soccer out there as kids, leaving it looking a lot like the Sea of Tranquility. When my dad moved back in in 1988, he must have sodded the whole thing, because it looked like a fairway at Augusta for a while. But then it fell into disrepair, and the 30- and 40-foot-high trees make so much shade that grass has never really taken root.

Amy & I have talked for a while about getting some real landscaping done, but I decided to launch a pre-emptive strike yesterday and start beautifyin’ on my own. Little did I realize it would lead . . . to the end of the world!

I decided that several of the trees, with their blast-radius of shade, would be best served by mulch and a ring of rocks. After walking Rufus in the morning, I moved a number of rocks from the backyard to build a little (4-foot diameter) ring around one of the trees by the street. The temperature at 7am was amenable and the work went quickly. So it made perfect Bizarro sense to take a half day from work and build a much bigger ring around an island of trees in the middle of the afternoon when it was 87 degrees!

To be fair, it was exactly one hour of non-stop work, hauling rocks from the backyard and digging out embedded rocks from around that island of trees. I thought, “I sure am glad that I’m a trade magazine editor and not a landscaper!”

I had a funny recollection of my youth during the work. As I tossed some of the heavier rocks in the back yard into my wheelbarrow, they struck each other and gave off a smell of gunpowder. I have no idea if high sulfur content is a unique aspect to rocks around here, or if the rest of you have childhood memories of smashing two rocks together in an attempt at creating an explosion. All things considered, I find it remarkable that I managed not to lose any fingers or suffer brain damage as a kid.

In the front yard, I had to dig out a dozen or so rocks that were embedded in the area that I was trying to ring off. Rather than covering them over, I figured they could be used for the ring itself. The only problem was, some of these rocks were iceberg-like, with significant mass buried under the surface. I was able to pivot some of them along the ground out to the perimeter. To others, I said, “Screw you; you’re staying. Enjoy the mulch, bitches!”

I noticed that these had more lichen on them than the others, but again, I have no idea what that means. Outside of the fact that I live in the wake of a glacier’s retreat.

But it wasn’t these lichenous rocks that portended the end of the world. Nor was it the gunpowder-laden stones and their promise of Pinto-bumper explosions. It was The Hidden Rock.

While digging, I hauled up a large ovoid rock that was half-out of the ground. It was heavy, but not impossible to lift. Looking at it, I discovered that it had several long fissures on its surface. Already inspired by my childhood, I concluded the best thing to do would be to throw it down on another rock and wish that I was wearing my safety-glasses.

And the rock shattered. Well, it didn’t actually shatter; what shattered was the exterior shell of the rock. Like some fragile matrushka doll, what remained was a smoother rock (upper right), marred slightly by the impact that freed it, beside the shards of its carapace:

Sure, I’m given to flights of fancy and maybe there’s an easy geological explanation for this occurrence. But it’s clear to me that I discovered

a) one of the sefirot, surrounded by one of the qlipot,

b) the egg of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent,

c) a meteor,

d) an early, failed attempt at the M&M concept,

e) a prehistoric spaceship, bearing small rocky people from their doomed planet, or

f) the Philosopher’s stone, which was never found because no one ever looks in New Jersey.

All we can know for sure is that it now helps round out the ring of rocks in my front yard, and that I really need to drink more water before working out in the yard in August.