Posted on

And still champ!

I’ve been so busy lately, I haven’t checked the goings-on at The New York Sun. I wonder what’s in today’s Arts+ section?

  1. A review of David Lebedoff’s new book on George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh
  2. A review of Cyril Connolly’s “Enemies of Promise”
  3. A review of the best gins for G&Ts
  4. A sidebar on niche tonic-waters

I feel like Cliff Clavin on Jeopardy!, when the categories were “Civil Servants, Stamps from Around the World, Mothers and Sons, Beer, Bar Trivia, and Celibacy.”

Glad to see the Official Newspaper of Gil Roth is still earning its keep.

Posted on

Flying fish will never be able to walk

Friday’s company picnic turned out to be pretty boring. The turnout was much lower than last year’s at the same location (enjoy the 2007 slideshow!). I split around 1:30 p.m. and took a nice drive through Harriman State Park for the slightly roundabout trip home.

I’m not sure why I felt so disengaged from it; I had a couple of decent conversations with coworkers, but there were few significant others on hand for the event, which meant we were spending the day with the same people we see every day in the office. The young’uns (anyone younger than me) seemed to have a good time, playing beer-wiffleball or something, but I felt kinda intruder-y among them.

I bought the new Paul Weller record last week and it occurred to me that no one in my office would have any idea who Weller was, nor would they ever have heard the Jam or the Style Council. I don’t mean that in a snobbish way; it just struck me that my time isn’t theirs.

So I hung with some of my older coworkers, but their conversation led to a spirited game of beer-pong. I knew that the only way I’d have fun at this picnic was if I started drinking, and afternoon drinking makes me pretty sluggish. As opposed to nighttime drinking, which makes me witty, vivacious and impossibly charming. And invulnerable (to criticism).

Or maybe I was hungover from the previous day’s reading of Camp Concentration. The best books can do that. Regardless, I felt utterly out of place, and so I shot hoops for a little while with the worst basketball of all time, then started my drive home. Sorry I don’t have any fun stories or good pix to post.

* * *

On the plus side, it was a weekend of new milestones for Rufus! On Friday night, I gave him full run of the upper floor of the house (sans kitchen) for 2+ hours while I picked up Amy at her train and got dinner. I have no idea how to positively house-train a dog, and I was a little nervous that he might not be familiar enough with the lower floor, so I put a gate at the top of the stairs and lit out for Radburn.

He was typically (which is to say, unbelievably) excited when we got home, and I immediately conducted a room-by-room inspection. He’d gone up on both the sofa and my chaise (I put towels down on both to, and discovered paw-shaped impressions on them), but had no accidents! I took him outside and he relieved himself for about five minutes straight. So I’m going to take that as evidence that he’s house-trained! (Not that I’ll leave him outside of his crate for a full work-day, but at least I know I can go away for a couple of hours without a problem.)

A night later, a heavy thunderstorm rolled through the area. It woke us up around 4am on Sunday morning, and I assumed that our boy had already decamped to a corner of the guest bedroom to hide. But after another flash of lightning, I noticed that he was still curled up on his bed in our room, snoozing away. Given his past reactions to thunder, I was amazed. Especially because I was ready to hide in a corner of the guest bedroom at that point.

* * *

But it was a pretty quiet weekend. I read a ton, and now I’m trying to figure out how to get back to my Monday Morning Montaigne project without carrying around an 1,100+ page hardcover of the essays, since the edition I’m reading isn’t available on the Kindle.

Posted on

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, which made me feel worse.

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, a collection of poetry and prose by Rilke (tr. Stephen Mitchell), and flipped it open. The poet-narrator of the novel refers to Rilke and quotes him in the novel.

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.

Posted on

“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.”

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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:

  1. 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
  2. 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.

Posted on

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

  1. call for the end of the world, and
  2. pretend that now is how things are always going to be.