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Mystery Achievement

Jennifer Weiner explains how to submit a Talk of the Town piece to the New Yorker.

Step eight: Paranoia. Decide that Talk of the Town assistant is twenty-two-year-old Brown graduate with size zero leather miniskirt and degree in semiotics who automatically shuns any book or short story with actual plot and unambiguous ending. Imagine Talk of the Town assistant as mean-faced girl from freshman year of college who corrected your pronunciation of “heinous” in front of a room full of classmates, including guy on whom you had a crush.

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Business as usual

According to this article, the sex-biz is back to normal in Thailand. I’m not sure which line is funnier:

“Yes, we are just as busy as before the tsunami,” said Toto, a drag queen.

or

[S]ex tourism […] accounts for 5 per cent of Thailand’s gross domestic product.

because with the latter, you can talk about just how gross that domestic product really is.

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Puts my NBA preview in a new light

The Sports Guy has a new mailbag column, and it includes a letter that made me laugh like a retard:

Q: Not that there is anything wrong with this, but have you ever noticed that most NBA team names sound like gay bars? Bulls, Bucks, Rockets, Cavaliers, Nuggets, Mavericks, Jazz, Hawks, Blazers, Warriors, Heat, Bobcats, Pistons, Spurs, Timberwolves, and Grizzlies all sound like they are catered to the leather and mustache set. I also think Magic, Wizards, Kings, 76ers, and Pacers sound like male performance enhancement pills. Rockets could also fit into that category as well.
–Scott G., Chicago, IL

Just thought I’d share.

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My City of Ruins

Theodore Dalrymple has a very thoughtful essay about Dresden in the new City Journal.

Nowhere in the world (except, perhaps, in Israel or Russia) does history weigh as heavily, as palpably, upon ordinary people as in Germany. Sixty years after the end of the Second World War, the disaster of Nazism is still unmistakably and inescapably inscribed upon almost every town and cityscape, in whichever direction you look. The urban environment of Germany, whose towns and cities were once among the most beautiful in the world, second only to Italy’s, is now a wasteland of functional yet discordant modern architecture, soulless and incapable of inspiring anything but a vague existential unease, with a sense of impermanence and unreality that mere prosperity can do nothing to dispel. Well-stocked shops do not supply meaning or purpose. Beauty, at least in its man-made form, has left the land for good; and such remnants of past glories as remain serve only as a constant, nagging reminder of what has been lost, destroyed, utterly and irretrievably smashed up.Nor are the comforts of victimhood available to the Germans as they survey the devastation of their homeland. Walking with the widow of a banker through the one small square in Frankfurt that has been restored to its medieval splendor, I remarked how beautiful a city Frankfurt must once have been, and how terrible it was that such beauty should have been lost forever.

“We started it,” she said. “We got what we deserved.”

But who was this ‘we’ of whom she spoke?

Who, indeed? Dalrymple explores that notion of culpability, that almost Greek tragic sense of a cursed house, nation-wide Atreides, shame that pre-emptively annihilates the possibility of pride.

Perhaps I’ll give Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction a read this week.

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Back

Flight from St. Louis was delayed for a while today, but I got in safe and sound.

Also, the extra time allowed me to finish The System of the World, completing Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. It was a heck of a read (started the first book at the end of September), with plenty of material to chew on. My brain’s percolating away, and I hope to write about the books sometime in the next few weeks.

I was worried, as I closed in on my home, that the snow would be drifted up 30 inches high in my driveway. I was in no mood to start shoveling around 8:30 pm, which is when I was going to reach my house.

Fortunately, the snow wasn’t as bad up here as I’d feared. It was only 8-10 inches high, and pretty powdery. My gold standard for messed-up weather is the blizzard of 1996, in which we got pasted with about 30-35 inches, so tonight’s level was officially No Big Deal.

I pulled into a neighbor’s house and started shoveling the mouth of my driveway, which was much higher and denser. Soon, my neighbor came out with his snowblower. I insisted that he didn’t need to, and that I’d just roll my Element up the driveway once I cleared this part out. But he wouldn’t take no for an answer. It was awfully kind, as he cleaned up the entire driveway, and made me realize that I really need to buy myself a nice snowblower.

So that’s about it. No witticisms, polemicisms, or politicisms. But I will share some pictures from the weekend:

A surprise birthday party for Shannon (the blonde on the left).

Doug & Brewster, the latter being an affectionate dog.

My beautiful niece, Liat.

My beautiful niece, Liat, who has dressed me up in several different scarves. It was even worse than it looks. Laugh while you can; you’ll get yours.