(Still Concise) Work Blog, 11/6/09

Apparently prepping to nurse a W. Maxwell habit - I grabbed his novel They Came Like Swallows, as well as Nabokov’s oft-tipped autobio, Speak, Memory, and another Yasunari Kawabata bundle of mono no aware-pumping mental Yoga, Beauty and Sadness, on my weekly Daedelus run last night, something I don't usually do after the novelty of Finding A New Author wears off (e.g. Kobo Abe, Susan Daitch, etc.). Picked up cooking wine and capers on the way home, too, and pan-seared some tilapia with buttery white wine/caper sauce for dinner. Tutored after work, so I missed my roommate Jess moving the rest of her things out; wouldn't merit a mention per se, but the exodus included her cat/my buddy George (pictured here hanging out on my pantleg):


...which, of course, gives her move less a "Hey, isn't it weird not to have Jess around?" vibe than a depressing, Empty Nestish one. George has been my early morning co-conspirator since the day I moved to Abell, lapping from the faucet and wolfing down food and sniffing at glasses of orange juice and climbing/resting on me while jittering his safety bell; his eerie absence from the whole pre-work process today completely threw me off. Attempts to stay future-focused are already in effect - Chi and I spent some time last night idly scanning PetFinder.com for an eventual replacement (we're angling for an orange tabby) - but looking for another cat reminded me a little too much of Craigslist car hunting, so I had to drop it after a few minutes.

(Concise) Office Blog, 11/5/09

Tried to read James Salter's The Hunters over my lunch break, but it's a slow starter - unlike William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow, which read like an abbreviated version of In Cold Blood dressed up in bildungsroman togs (and, as such, kept me hypnotized pretty much 'til I finished it yesterday), the similarly poignant/pretty/elegiac/etc. elements of Salter's prose aren't shaking me awake. So, instead: borrowed some change, bought a Coke, and pruned the blogroll, which included dropping Rose and Doug. Gut says both officially fled Blogville, but I figured I'd give them a last, knowing shrug here...

Hey, apparently it's over. Time to invest in "Hip Hops Not Dead" t-shirts...


(P.S. Actually, I'm pretty sure it's not over - S F-J just has a habit of raking specious genre muck at least once per calendar year.)

I can only hope "The Week I Was Really Into Bejeweled Blitz" - along with any other era centered around a Facebook distracto puzzle (hello, GeoChallenge? Scramble?) - will be discounted when someone finally compiles my annals, festschrift, &c.* Cheever had his gay fantasias and alcohol; I've got my decade of HTML evenings. At least he got some writing done on occasion?

In contradictory news: I just published some work in SFSU's Fourteen Hills and I'm pitching nonfic all over the place this month - book reviews, record reviews, cat reviews, carriage clock reviews, hot air balloonist (and, to a lesser extent, balloon) reviews, novel recovery projects, intimate yet platonic love stories about dead friends, explanations of mid-20th century South American postmodernism packed in political excelsior, submissions to the Georgia Review's Devil's Dictionary tribute, &c. The plan is to cover the whole belles lettres magilla and it feels like a blitz strategy is warranted. If you're going to cross genre lines, you might as well work it like a deaf guy wandering into a war zone.**

Oh, and Andrew lit up McSweeney's Internet Tendency today in the classic AP style. Heroic turn, sir.

* Yeah, "&c." is yet another Foster Wallaceism, this one picked up as I finally started to grind my nose against Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinite. For all the hay made about his Kafka-shaped paragraphs, DFW books make great upscale porn for shorthand fetishists - it's jargon, yeah, but still only a few media removed from the thrilling language junk of txt messages and Prince lyrics.
** Analogy lifted from Calvino.

For R. Wilson on the Occasion of his 27th Year

To celebrate Ryan's fast-approaching Age At Which Rock Stars Tend To Die Unexpectedly (which, in theory, makes me worried for him), I’m posting my top 27 (+3) records. Your behest in action, man:

01 Sonic Youth – Daydream Nation
02 Unwound – Leaves Turn Inside You
03 Blur – 13/Radiohead – OK Computer
04 Pere Ubu – The Modern Dance/The Velvet Underground – The Velvet Underground & Nico
05 Talking Heads – Remain in Light
06 Pavement – Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
07 Wu-Tang Clan – Enter the 36 Chambers
08 Nirvana – In Utero
09 Miles Davis – Kind of Blue
10 Kate Bush – The Dreaming
11 John Fahey – The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death
12 Mogwai – Young Team/Can – Tago Mago
13 The Fiery Furnaces – Blueberry Boat
14 Fugazi – Red Medicine
15 The Olivia Tremor Control – Black Foliage (Animation Music Pt. 2)
16 Modest Mouse – The Lonesome Crowded West
17 Tortoise – TNT
18 John Coltrane – A Love Supreme
19 Rodan – Rusty
20 Lightning Bolt – Wonderful Rainbow
21 Drive Like Jehu – Yank Crime
22 Hum – Downward is Heavenward
23 Three Mile Pilot – Another Desert, Another Sea
24 Bob Dylan – The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
25 Tom Waits – Rain Dogs
26 Boards of Canada – Music Has the Right to Children
27 Caetano Veloso – Caetano Veloso (1967)/Ornette Coleman – The Shape of Jazz to Come

Taggables include Shashi, Joanna, Ryan, Hannah H., Hannah S., Doug, & Maggie (assuming she's even aware of this blog). Oh, and longtime blog hold-out Rachel, who just turned the big Two Seven herself. Happy birthday, buddy!

The Week in Review

"Yo, Hopkins kid, I’m really happy for you and Imma let you finish, but I just got to say that Hattori Hanzo¹ fashioned and wielded the best samurai swords of all time! Of all time!"

¹Yes, Joanna, I've handed Tarantino the Genius Card. But not Kanye. Never Kanye.

Anne Carson appears to be one of NYU's current "Distinguished Poets in Residence," but she's only teaching undergrad classes. What?

Aside: When did NYU's creative writing dept. begin to foam with famous people? Back when I considered/decided against applying there, Doctorow and Olds (and maybe Komunyakaa - I wasn't applying in poetry, so that's a little foggy) were the only real draws beyond the city itself, but now the perm/temp faculty head count appears to include Carson, Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Safran Foer, Zadie Smith, Charles Simic, Susan Orlean, and Jennifer Egan (another Komunyakaa-ish lacuna, as I wasn't aware of her work when I was going through my research paces). It's hard to believe all these people are actually teaching in one centralized location, let alone divvying up their duties between undergrad and MFA courses. I might have to throw together a poetry portfolio...

In other news, a new story:

Story of the Week: #2

"Kaleidoscope" by Ray Bradbury

Much like Truman Capote's "Miriam" and Graham Greene's "The Destructors," both of which I picked up tutoring (from the Junior Great Books series, no less) and ended up loving/suggesting to sundry friends and undergrads, "Kaleidoscope" entered my sphere as some random thing I had to teach to cover an hour: one of my Bryn Mawr kids was wandering her way through Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man for school and I decided to read along with her, partially because I had to (which, as motivation goes, is rarely a definite) but, perhaps more, because I was hoping to find another story as great as "All Summer in a Day" (or, alternately, an aggregate of little arguments against the didactic bullshit that made Fahrenheit 451 such a slog to revisit). It was worth the trouble, due in no small part to the giddy horror I felt reading "Kaleidoscope" for the first time as we hit the collection's mid-section. "Kaleidoscope" wasn't the first story in the collection to strike me, per se - both "The Veldt" and "The Rocket Man" were great Bradburian monsters, little machine age fables that took big ideas and shrunk them into something more bite-sized and domestic - but, in a book full of complete thoughts, it felt like the book's messy black hole of a centerpiece, a story where Bradbury finally dropped the shield of satire and confronted technology's "final frontier" on its own terms as a kind of exile/hell. Oh, and the ending's insane.

More later...