Category: literature

Posted on

What it is: 3/10/08

What I’m reading: Still working Love and Sleep; it’s a longish book, and I was pretty busy this weekend.

What I’m listening to: In Our Nature, by Jose Gonzalez

What I’m watching: 2nd season of The Wire

What I’m drinking: Miller’s G&T, since I found a couple of decent limes this week.

Where I’m going: up and down the stairs, trying to get Rufus to follow me.

What I’m happy about: Besides bringing Rufus into our home? That my pals Paul & Deb sent really awesome holiday gifts (since we never got around to visiting during the holidays).

What I’m sad about: that my uncle (Dad’s brother), needed emergency bypass surgery last week, just like Dad did 3 years ago. Guess I really am going to have to watch my diet and get on that treadmill more often.

What I’m pondering: how my uncle managed to become The Invisible Man. Seriously: he lives over in NYC, and yet my father had no way to contact him beyond his cell phone; no land-line, no residential address, no business address. Of course, going in for emergency surgery, he was out of cell phone contact, and Dad had no way to reach his brother’s wife, kids, business associates or friends. I tried some detective work online (trying to track down his business, then his ex-wife for any contact info she had) but came up dry. What’s awesome about this is that Dad and his brother are not estranged. They’re actually in touch and talk occasionally, and yet my father has no idea how to contact his brother.

Posted on

What it is: 3/3/08

What I’m reading: Love & Sleep, by John Crowley

What I’m listening to: Pubic Fruit, by Curve

What I’m watching: Blazing Saddles, in honor of Black History Mumf, and American Pie, because two of my buddies goofed on me for never having seen it, and threatened to beat my ass if I don’t watch it before we meet up at a conference in Philadelphia at the end of this month

What I’m drinking: Flying Dog’s Gonzo Imperial Porter, because it has Ralph Steadman’s illustration on its packaging

Where I’m going: Providence next weekend, to visit friends and get away for an overnight that doesn’t involve air-travel

What I’m happy about: Today’s my wife’s birthday! Visit her site and wish her a happy birthday!

What I’m sad about: That Thai Essence in Nutley, NJ destroyed my belief that there’s no such thing as a bad dish of pad thai

What I’m pondering: How long it took J.R. Smith to get this much ink

Posted on

The garden

This morning’s reading, from Love & Sleep, the second novel in John Crowley’s Ægypt series:

But even if those fires really were the same fire — if both had been the one that began at the Oliphant’s trash baskets beside the old garage, in that summer of 1952 — still it might have been the Salamander who started it: might have been the Salamander who snatched the burning paper from Pierce’s rake, and blew it into the waiting mulleins and the milkweed. He experienced, and not for the first time this week, this winter, the sensation that he was simply creating the story backward from this moment, reasons and all. But isn’t that what memory is always doing? Making bricks without straw, mortaring them in place one by one into a so-called past, a labyrinth actually, in which to hide a monster, or a monstrosity?

Posted on

Exit, Ghost

On the flight home from Belfast last week, I finished reading Exit Ghost, the new Zuckerman novel by Philip Roth. I didn’t enjoy very much of it, except for the scene of Zuckerman’s reunion with Amy Bellette, the woman brilliantly “fictionalized” in The Ghost Writer. It’s only in that episode that I really felt the weight of Zuckerman’s age, as he and Amy recommence a conversation they began 50 years earlier.

The rest of the novel — in which the narrator laments his lost erection as he fixates on a perfectly toned, slim, large-boobed, literary oil-heiress who has married a schlubby Jew — left me cold. At its worst, it degenerates into a bad standup routine: Zuckerman, isolated in the Berkshires for more than a decade, comes back to NYC and grouses about people using cell-phones. Fortunately, the character doesn’t have to fly anywhere, or else we could’ve been subjected to a rant about airplane food.

But I digress. Where the book did succeed for me was that one evocation of old age and loss, as characterized by Amy Bellette’s refusal to let the the love of her life go, though he’d been dead more than 40 years. And it got me thinking about how long I’ve been reading Philip Roth’s novels and how I’ll feel when he dies. Flying home, I thought, “I’m sure I’ll be sad, but I wonder if I’ll cry.”

I doubted that I would, and that got me thinking: Which living artist’s (writer, musician, actor, painter, cartoonist, etc.) death would move me to tears?

I’m having an awfully hard time thinking of one. There are contemporary artists whose work mean the world to me, but I’m not sure any of their deaths (provided they’re not killed senselessly or somehow incredibly fittingly) would make me cry.* I’m trying to puzzle out what this means, since some of the possibilities aren’t too palatable.

So I put the question to you, dear readers! In the comments section, tell me (okay, the world) “What artist’s death would bring you to tears, and why.”

(If you need to expand the field to include athletes, feel free.)

* I mean artists with whom I don’t have a personal relationship. I’m friends with a number of professional writers whose deaths would absolutely crush me. So no cheating and naming a writer who’s your dad or something.

Posted on

What it is: 2/18/08

What I’m reading: A Fan’s Notes, by Frederick Exley

What I’m listening to: Oblivion with Bells, by Underworld

What I’m watching: Gerald Green’s cupcake dunk.

What I’m drinking: Water. I’m taking a few days off from the lush life.

Where I’m going: Home!

What I’m happy about: Surprising my brother by coming out to St. Louis for his 40th birthday party last night.

What I’m sad about: Boarding my 4th Embraer ERJ 145 in a span of 52 hours. (We also had a party in Tulsa this weekend.)

What I’m pondering: This post from Donald Pittenger on great artists who hit a peak and never manage to come anywhere near it again. I thought Philip Roth’s late run makes for a good counter-example, but I know a lot of people find him irrelevant.

Posted on

What it is: 2/11/08

It’s the Belfast Special Edition of What it is!

What I’m reading: Exit Ghost by Philip Roth, and A Fan’s Notes, by Frederick Exley

What I’m listening to: District Line, by Bob Mould

What I’m watching: On the flight over to Belfast, I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Big Lebowski (more on this later)

What I’m drinking: Guinness. Duh.

Where I’m going: Perhaps I’ll get up to the Giants Causeway today. I’ll definitely be going here on Tuesday.

What I’m happy about: Getting to explore a new place.

What I’m sad about: Being apart from my wife for a few days.

What I’m pondering: Why I didn’t stop to take a picture of the three epically drunk men I saw stumbling down the street on Sunday afternoon, each drinking from what appeared to be two-liter bottles of Strongbow cider.

Posted on

Standard Operating Procedures

I’m off to Belfast tonight for a client visit. Better go over my checklist!

E-check-in, print boarding pass, dig up passport: check

Pack suit, toiletries, walking-around clothes: check

Put together electronics kit, with chargers and international outlet adapter: check

Check battery in noise-canceling headphones, charge iPod and camera: check

Find some reading material downstairs in the library: check and check

Receive e-mail from my father with a joke about a plane crashing:

check

Pack extra Xanax for flight: check

Posted on

More like “F”-mail

Back in the 1990s when Tom Spurgeon was editing The Comics Journal, he was kind enough to publish some of my short comics reviews. Since the irascible publisher of the magazine was named Gary “a man should be judged by the quality of his enemies” Groth, some people thought my byline was actually his nom de plume. This led me to write an About the Contributors note reading, “Gil Roth is not a clever pseudonym for Gary Groth. In fact, he’s not very clever at all.”

More recently, and for the same reason, I was convinced that the “comic” strip Gil Thorp is a bizarre prank targeting me, and only me. (Okay, and him and him.)

But none of these odd connections can top the incredible screwup that took place last week, when a drug company’s outside law-firm accidentally e-mailed secret documents about a government negotiation . . . to a pharma-writer at the New York Times. Portfolio, take it away!

When the New York Times broke the story last week that Eli Lilly & Co. was in confidential settlement talks with the government, angry calls flew behind the scenes as the drug giant’s executives accused federal officials of leaking the information.

As the company’s lawyers began turning over rocks closer to home, however, they discovered what could be called A Nightmare on Email Street, a pharmaceutical consultant told Portfolio.com. One of its outside lawyers at Philadelphia-based Pepper Hamilton had mistakenly emailed confidential information on the talks to Times reporter Alex Berenson instead of Bradford Berenson, her co-counsel at Sidley Austin. . . .

Proving that

  1. the auto-complete function was obviously designed by Satan (or Microsoft)
  2. a man should be judged by the quality of his mistaken identity

(hat tip to Pharmalot and S&A)

(UPDATE: Dammit! I knew this was too good to be true!)

Posted on

What it is: 2/4/08

What I’m reading: Sophocles’ Ajax, and Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha, Vol. 5

What I’m listening to: The Last Post, by Carbon / Silicon

What I’m watching: we finished with the first season of The Wire and caught The Corpse Bride and half (okay, maybe a third) of The Return of the King

What I’m drinking: Rogue’s Dead Guy Ale (because the position of the skeleton on the side of the six-pack made it look like Pogue, and I thought that was funny)

Where I’m going: We didn’t get up to Providence this weekend. Next week, I’ve got a  trip to Belfast to visit a client. I’ll have Sunday & Monday on my own, so if you have any suggestions for sights to see in Belfast & environs (I’m thinking of day-tripping up to the coast to see Giants Causeway), mention it in the comments!

What I’m happy about: THE GIANTS WON THE SUPER BOWL!

What I’m sad about: NOTHING! SEE ABOVE!

What I’m pondering: The relationship of men and their gods. Here’s a passage from Sophocles between Athena and Odysseus, after Ajax goes insane and believes that he’s killed Odysseus and the other generals:

   ATH: Do you see, Odysseus, how great the gods’ power is?

Who was more full of foresight than this man,

Or abler, do you think, to act with judgment?

    ODY: None that I know of. Yet I pity

His wretchedness, though he is my enemy,

For the terrible yoke of blindness that is on him.

I think of him, yet also of myself;

For I see the true state of all us that live —

We are dim shapes, no more, and weightless shadow.

    ATH: Look well at this, and speak no towering word

Yourself against the gods, nor walk too grandly

Because your hand is weightier than another’s,

Or your great wealth deeper founded. One short day

Inclines the balance of all human things

To sink or rise again. Know that the gods

Love men of steady sense and hate the proud.