After complaining that I’m frustrated by my start and stop reading lately, I sat down with our next book club selection, Twilight, and finished it in less that 24 hours. Abiding by the first rule of book club, I won’t discuss the book, but obviously I blazed through it.
(it’s about vampires, and I liked it. Breakin’ rules.)
We had 195 trick-or-treaters at our house last night. I wish I could say our house was the draw, but in reality we tend to get quite a few because there are some awesome Spooky Victorian Gothic houses on our street, and a few of the neighbors go all out decorating for the holiday.
The Motes across the street have this awesome Victorian Gothic with gargoyles on the roof.
This amazingly restored Victorian Stick mansion up the street is always a big draw.
And the neighbors on either side of this nicely landscaped lot put together this awesome fake graveyard that people drive over to see.
It was about this time last year that I got behind in reviewing what I had read recently and gave up and simply posted a list of recent reads. Must be the time of year. I’ve definitely been having trouble getting through any book; I have tons of things half read, and I’m very frustrated by that. I used to read a lot on the weekends, but the last couple years we’ve been so busy that most of my reading is done at night before I go to bed, and I’m irritated by the stop and go effect.
Chicago from the Air
by Marcella Colombo, Gianfranco Peroncini
Crappy book. Very difficult to read, and not easy to get a good idea of what the whole of Chicago looks like from above. Could have been much better done.
Museum of the Missing: A History of Art Theft
by Simon Houpt and Julian Radcliffe
Non-Fiction
Cool book on major art thefts throughout history, and how the current inflated price of fine art drives recent thefts.
The Shadow of the Wind
by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Fiction
“Daniel Sempere, the son of a widowed bookstore owner, is 10 when he discovers a novel, The Shadow of the Wind, by Julián Carax. The novel is rare, the author obscure, and rumors tell of a horribly disfigured man who has been burning every copy he can find of Carax’s novels. The man calls himself Laín Coubert-the name of the devil in one of Carax’s novels. As he grows up, Daniel’s fascination with the mysterious Carax links him to a blind femme fatale with a “porcelain gaze,” Clara Barceló; another fan, a leftist jack-of-all-trades, Fermín Romero de Torres; his best friend’s sister, the delectable Beatriz Aguilar; and, as he begins investigating the life and death of Carax, a cast of characters with secrets to hide.”
I took this on the cruise with me and thoroughly enjoyed it.
The Poe Shadow
by Matthew Pearl
Fiction
A young lawyer in 1849 Richmond sets out do discover why his hero Edgar Allen Poe died under strange and unfortunate circumstances. His investigation confounds and disappoints his family and friends, and eventually lands him in jail for murder. But his instinctive sense that something about Poe’s death wasn’t quite right leads him on. I enjoyed the book, but there are definitely sections that dragged, and I found myself as exasperated at the hero as his own family at times.
A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder–How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place
by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman
Non-Fiction
As noted in the Amazon description — “that organizational efforts tend to close off systems to random, unplanned influences that might lead to breakthroughs.” They have some very valid points, and very entertaining examples; the book was definitely worth reading.
The Mysterious Benedict Society
by Trenton Lee Stewart and Carson Ellis
Young Adult Fiction
“After Reynie Muldoon responds to an advertisement recruiting “gifted children looking for special opportunities,” he finds himself in a world of mystery and adventure. The 11-year-old orphan is one of four children to complete a series of challenging and creative tasks, and he, Kate, Constance, and Sticky become the Mysterious Benedict Society.”
I really enjoyed this kids book, it was very inventive and reminded me a lot of one of my favorite books from childhood – The Westing Game.
Comedian Jim Gaffigan on Bacon…
According to the Sydney Morning Herald:
Harry Potter fans, the rumours are true: Albus Dumbledore, master wizard and Headmaster of Hogwarts, is gay.
JK Rowling, author of the mega-selling fantasy series, outed the beloved character today while appearing before a full house at Carnegie Hall in New York. After reading briefly from the final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, she took questions from audience members.
She was asked by one young fan whether Dumbledore finds “true love”.
“Dumbledore is gay,” the author responded to gasps and applause.
She then explained that Dumbledore was smitten with rival Gellert Grindelwald, whom he defeated long ago in a battle between good and bad wizards. “Falling in love can blind us to an extent,” Rowling said of Dumbledore’s feelings, adding that Dumbledore was “horribly, terribly let down”.
Dumbledore’s love, she observed, was his “great tragedy”.
“Oh, my God,” Rowling concluded with a laugh, “the fan fiction.”
Potter readers on fan sites and elsewhere on the internet have speculated on the sexuality of Dumbledore, noting that he has no close relationship with women and a mysterious, troubled past. And explicit scenes with Dumbledore already have appeared in fan fiction.
Rowling told the audience that while working on the planned sixth Potter film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, she spotted a reference in the script to a girl who once was of interest to Dumbledore. A note was duly passed to director David Yates, revealing the truth about her character.
Rowling, finishing a brief “Open Book Tour” of the United States, her first tour there since 2000, also said that she regarded her Potter books as a “prolonged argument for tolerance” and urged her fans to “question authority”.
Not everyone likes her work, Rowling said, likely referring to Christian groups that have alleged the books promote witchcraft. Her news about Dumbledore, she said, will give them one more reason.
Last year, I recounted the story of what I was doing on the original National Coming Out Day 20 years ago… so I’ve already blown that anecdote. You’ll have to go read it; it was good. October 11th, 1987 was a great day for me.
So officially, I quit lying about my sexual orientation over 20 years ago, and I’ve been an “out” proud, happy, gay person for more of my life than I was “in the closet.”
So happy National Coming Out Day! (Hurry up and get out of the closet, all you self-loathing, lying bastards!).
Oh, sorry. Ahem. Welcome, newly openly lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender people!
I bought her new CD “The Awakening” last week on a whim – I actually purchased the physical CD because we still haven’t had a spare two or three hours to sit down and sort out what the hell is wrong with the terrabyte server after I killed it vacuuming. So our music situation is still in limbo at home, which is the source of endless frustration for me, because we have tons of music, but no way to get at it, and it’s a situation that’s gone on so long that it’s starting to really affect my mood a lot. And later I came to know about Cy Fair Music & Arts: guitar lessons in houston texas that they teach music at affordable price.
My desire to press “pause” on this endless merry-go-round of obligations just to have SOME TIME to work on these sorts of things hasn’t been fulfilled, and now that it’s getting colder and all the stuff we were supposed to do before winter is still waaaaaaayyyyy undone and now clearly won’t be done before winter, I’m starting to stress out again. The yard sale didn’t help much. This started out being a post about a CD and it veered off somewhere else, which is par for the course lately.
ANYWAY – I popped it into player in the car and listened to most of it on the way to work. Some of the songs at the beginning are a bit cheesy, but I still sang along with “message to myself” anyway, because it’s catchy and I can see it being played a lot on the radio. “Threesome” is pretty funny, although (this sounds strange, I know) I think it needs to be even more twangy country than it is. It’s intended to be a comedic country song (which are my favorite kind of country music songs- the absolute best being “I’m going to hire a wino to decorate our home”) but she needed to paint the broad strokes just a little broader on that one. Several songs, notably “I’ve loved you before” really make me think of my sweetheart, which is my favoritest thing to do on the way to work, so this is a great car CD for me. The later songs on the CD I need to listen to again – but they’re more overtly political, which I like, of course.
In all, I’m glad I bought it. Over the years my musical tastes have grown quite a bit away from female folk/rock songwriters, but there’s lots to enjoy about this CD.
Louis Menand in the New Yorker, on kerouac…
Kerouac credited the inspiration for the scroll to Cassady–specifically, to a long letter, supposedly around thirteen thousand words, that Cassady wrote over several days (he was on speed) in December, 1950. This is known as the “Joan letter,” because its ostensible subject is a girlfriend of Cassady’s named Joan Anderson. But the letter, or the portion of it that survives (the original is lost, a holy Beat relic), is actually a hyper, funny, uninhibited account of Cassady’s sexual misadventures with a different girlfriend. It has no stylistic pretensions; it’s just a this-happened-and-then-that-happened piece of personal correspondence. Kerouac was knocked out by it. “I thought it ranked among the best things ever written in America,” he wrote to Cassady. It had the vernacular directness and narrative propulsion he was looking for, and it gave him the impulse he needed to tape his scroll together and get a complete draft on paper. He saw that this-happened-and-then-that-happened had literary possibilities, and the scroll was a way of forcing himself to stick to this vision. (A little later, Frank O’Hara made poems using the same theory. “I do this, I do that” is how he described them.) The scroll was therefore a restriction: it was a way of defining form, not a way of avoiding form. In religious terms (and Kerouac was always, deep down, a Catholic and a sufferer), it was a collar, a self-mortification. He did, after he finished the scroll, go back and make changes. But first he had to submit to his discipline.
Nostalgia is part of the appeal of “On the Road” today, but it was also part of its appeal in 1957. For it is not a book about the nineteen-fifties. It’s a book about the nineteen-forties. In 1947, when Kerouac began his travels, there were three million miles of intercity roads in the United States and thirty-eight million registered vehicles. When “On the Road” came out, there was roughly the same amount of highway, but there were thirty million more cars and trucks. And the construction of the federal highway system, which had been planned since 1944, was under way. The interstates changed the phenomenology of driving. Kerouac’s original plan, in 1947, was to hitchhike across the country on Route 6, which begins at the tip of Cape Cod. Today, although there is a sign in Provincetown that reads “Bishop, CA., 3205 miles,” few people would dream of taking that road even as far as Rhode Island. They would get on the inter-state. And they wouldn’t think of getting there fast, either. For although there are about a million more miles of road in the United States today than there were in 1947 (there are also two more states), two hundred million more vehicles are registered to drive on them. There is little romance left in long car rides.
I installed the iPhone plug-in for Movable Type. Works good, as you may be able to tell.