grumbleblog

2010: The Year's Pictures

2011-08-23T12:40:00.003-04:00

The entire photo library from 2010 for Mrs. Grumble, to the tune of "Hooky" by the Silverites.

2011-01-26T13:13:00.000-05:00

Morning Blast #6

2010-06-17T13:56:00.008-04:00

He ignored the Road Closed sign and swerved around the barrier. The rattling of stones against the bottom of the car and the acrid smell of creosote slapped him into attention. He stopped when he could go no further, when block concrete and exposed rebar would have mangled the underside of the Civic.

He could still hear the ripples of piano from Schumann’s “Adagio und Allegro” seeping out from the open door of the car as he walked across the patchy field of rye. The dog followed without suspicion, eager as ever just to accompany, to be along for the ride. He found a spot where the scrappy, kudzu-covered trees grew thicker and he sat, scratched her chin one last time and took the gun from his jacket pocket.

Watercolor - Morning Blast #6 by Gary Riggin

Morning Blast #5

2010-05-18T14:22:00.004-04:00

Danny woke up from a Nyquil-induced nap and began singing a song he'd dreamt. Joanne McGraw, the girl he'd kissed when he was twelve, troubled his mind and he felt the lyrics shift into place:

She had eyes that burned like the blue flame on the stove
And a nose that twitched like a mouse
Her hair was the color of the paneling
In the basement of my parents' old house

And it gave me the chills when her tongue hit my teeth
And her hand touched the tip of my spine
I'm not sure whose gum ended up in her hair
But I think it was probably mine

The tune came out like a sea shanty and Danny rubbed his eyes to erase an image. Joanne as an adult, a mother with children, mangled in a car accident on 95. Or strung out, never married, no kids, having hooked for so long she was a worn out shell, survival instincts at a minimum.

He stood in the shower and let hot water beat a soft message into his head: A paralegal in White Plains, counting days until retirement and wishing she hadn't had the tuna melt for lunch.

Watercolor - Morning Blast #5 by Gary Riggin

Spring Watercolor from Gary

2010-05-09T09:05:00.000-04:00

Morning Blast #4

2010-04-19T09:40:00.005-04:00

Woke up this morning to the sound of a ball smacking a mitt with a deep ferocious pop that sounded like velocity. I pulled on some sweatpants and peeked out the back window. Jim Palmer stood on the new mound in my backyard and bent himself into a slow windup, unfurled and delivered another resonating blow to the hushed April morning.

To compensate for the loss when the diseased and crumbling cherry tree in our backyard had to come down, I used the unsettling new open space to install a pitcher's mound. I tended a verdant span of dwarf fescue between mound and plate and now was waiting for a dry day so the boys could try it out.

By the time I pulled a shirt on and went downstairs to go out and investigate, another pitch popped the mitt and I realized that the guy catching was Rick Dempsey. I had some kind of Field of Dreams thing going on in my backyard. And I hadn't even had to plow the corn under.

Palmer was taller than I remembered him, and tanner than he looked on television. Something odd occurred to me, though, as I stepped to the mound, all my weight forward in a poor Earl Weaver impersonation.

"Wait a minute, Palmer. You're not a ghost. You're not even dead."

He put his glove hand on a hip and looked over at Dempsey, then back at me. "We were over the Levinsons and saw your mound, thought we'd hop the fence and toss a few. I hope that's cool."

"Alright--sure," I said.

"I feel great on this mound," he said. "I haven't thrown this well in twenty years."

I smiled and told him to take as many throws as he wanted. I waved to Dempsey and went back to the house and got some coffee. I didn't have the heart to tell him that home plate was a mere forty-six feet, Little League distance, from the pitcher's mound.

Morning Blast #3

2010-03-06T08:31:00.002-05:00

Throughout the night, the sounds of the house disturbed him. He wrote it off as the settling of the wood, the easing of old joists and supports into their various roles, but he knew better. The water was finally coming for him. A long winter with multiple heavy snows, a spring beginning with a crush of steady rains--it was too much to hold back anymore. Even the dog looked worried, or does she look like that all of the time?

The fear was not for the rain pouring down the sides of the house, running down the slant of roof, but for the ground. Bubbling up through the saturated ground and into the basement floor. The yard turning into liquid and the house teetering, gliding through the muck of the neighborhood and bobbing like an ill-designed ship.

He would take the helm if necessary, jump to the back balcony and keep watch for errant telephone poles and trees that had not yet sunk or toppled in the viscous lawns. He would guide the house inland, navigating suburbs west to Pittsburgh, to Chicago, to Denver and maybe to drop anchor in the Rockies.

The Silverites!

2010-03-06T08:27:00.002-05:00

Morning Blast #2

2010-03-05T17:08:00.003-05:00

Met Carbone for lunch and at once the meal deteriorated into name calling and hurt feelings. Hack, poser, pansy,etc. Once the plates and little sake cups started flying, they threw us out of B Lounge and the fracas spilled out onto Pennsylvania Avenue. I slammed a newspaper box onto his back and that seemed to be the final straw. I left him in the soft mix of rain and snow, crawling towards York Road in hopes of making it to his car before the pain was too great to move. We've been banned from B Lounge for now. I think we'll have lunch at Souris' next week.

Morning Blast #1

2010-03-04T19:26:00.002-05:00

I didn't believe for one minute that this guy had seen the rat we were now down on our hands and knees looking for. Not that this guy hadn't seen his share of schnauzer-sized rats, working down here, but right now he's just using a bullshit distraction and I'm playing along with it because I don't know what else to do.

I shine my light down behind the cars and see nothing but some old kids' toys, broken and scattered among the trash. I haven't seen any sign of an actual kid in the four hours I've been on this block today, but that doesn't mean anything. Kids make themselves scarce when I come around just like everybody else does.

I'm not a cop. Let me get that straight right off.

Year-end Round-up

2009-12-23T08:06:00.002-05:00

I've been neglecting things here for quite a while. Here's the stuff I've been reading since the last time I mentioned the stuff I've been reading:

Lush Life by Richard Price--I think Price is the current master of crime fiction in the U.S. Lush Life touches on all facets of life on the Lower East Side with the best dialogue being written today.

Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music by Greg Kot--Great explanation of the current state of the music business and how we got here. It's mostly stuff you already knew about if you follow the scene closely, but Kot puts it all together and adds some good inside info.

Dear Everybody by Michael Kimball--An epistolary novel that follows a man's descent into depression and suicide by recounting letters he writes to everyone he's ever known in his last days. Some are very effective, ranging between humor and pathos, while some fall flat and feel a bit too forced. One of those books that I thought I would like more than I did.

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby--I generally like Hornby's books, but this one felt like he should have gone right to the screenplay and skipped the novel altogether. And it's a movie I don't think I'd pay to see.

Invisible by Paul Auster--I liked Auster's early novels, then I grew tired of his lazy style. I read somewhere that Invisible was a return to form. It wasn't.

The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker--Probably my favorite novel that I've read this year. Baker's story of a poet trying to write the introduction to a volume of rhyming poetry and relating a history of poetry in the process. It's got all the writing you love if you love Nicholson Baker and if you don't, you should.

Jernigan by David Gates--The relentless downward spiral of an alcoholic widower trying to raise his teenage son and failing miserably at everything. Funny, bitter, brutal and not a word out of place. I'm now a David Gates fan.

Black Dogs by Ian McEwan--The narrator recounts the story of his in-laws marriage against the backdrop of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The well-crafted writing we expect from McEwan with the big payoff at the end. The only problem for me was knowing the payoff was going to be there and feeling like the rest of the novel was like wading through the shallows to get to the big waves.

Grumble on the Rumpus

2009-10-05T14:17:00.002-04:00

Rumpus.net accepted my write up on Carpenter's Gothic for their "Last Book You Loved" series. Check it out here.

Our Noise

2009-09-28T09:37:00.004-04:00

Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, the Indie Label That Got Big and Stayed Small is a must for indie rock fans. Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance started Merge Records back in the late eighties to release 7" singles of their band, Superchunk, and other bands from the Chapel Hill scene. The label grew with the popularity of bands like Spoon, Arcade Fire, Neutral Milk Hotel and The Magnetic Fields. John Cook conducted interviews with McCaughan and Ballance and numerous musicians and locals from the Chapel Hill scene to put together this interesting peek into the world of indie music. Great photos and stories throughout--especially if you were a Superchunk fan back in the day. No Pocky for Kitty was a staple in six-disc cd changer and I had a crush on Laura Ballance, just like every other indie rock fanboy. For a long time, though, I thought she was the one singing in that thin, raspy voice buried in the mix.

Carpenter's Gothic

2009-09-28T08:48:00.003-04:00

William Gaddis is one of those writers I've been hearing about for years, a writer's writer of difficult but rewarding fiction, a post-modern master. The Recognitions is considered his masterpiece, but it's a huge, intimidating book, so I picked up Carpenter's Gothic not long ago with no idea what to expect.

The story involves a married couple, Paul and Elizabeth, renting a house (the Carpenter's Gothic of the title) from a mysterious divorced geologist. Paul, who once ran some shady business dealings for Elizabeth's late father, is trying to get started as the media consultant for a southern evangelist while Elizabeth wanders and frets around the house. The action never leaves the house and mainly follows Elizabeth as other characters come and go. Gaddis' genius (for me) is in the dialogue. Ninety percent of the writing is dialogue--the fragmented, digressive speech of a hyperkinetic group of characters. Characters ramble on for paragraphs, changing direction in mid-sentence, jumping to phone conversations without warning and occasionally Gaddis will even insert a stage direction without separation into the midst of a chunk of dialogue.

And it all works brilliantly. Gaddis has captured the feverish way people talk to each other, especially those closest to us who don't ever seem to require context. He also manages to touch on subjects like Christianity, colonialism (and the relationship between the two), sexuality, politics--all without ever leaving the confines of the carpenter gothic house in suburban New York.

Icelander/Last Night in Montreal

2009-08-26T23:41:00.003-04:00

I'd come across a reference to Last Night in Montreal somewhere online and when the name came up again later, I decided to check it out. The story revolves around Lilia, who has spent her life as a child abductee on the run with her father until she ventures out on her own as a young adult. She still has trouble settling in one place for too long, and when the novel opens, she has just disappeared from her boyfriend's apartment.

Emily St. John Mandel writes in a comfortably lyrical style, handily conjuring the American Southwest or a noirish frozen Montreal, where the boyfriend has gone to search for Lilia. He's led to Montreal by the daughter of the private detective who has spent much of his professional career tracking Lilia. The daughter, Michaela, has watched her parents' marriage crumble as her father spends weeks and months on the road and she eventually develops her own obsession with Lilia. This is where the novel ran into trouble--the private detective and his daughter never felt like they had much depth. Their back stories felt contrived and their dialogue never rang true. I never believed that the man would abandon his own daughter to continue his search.

St. John Mandel's flashback scenes between Lilia and her father, however, do an excellent job of evoking a growing relationship between a young girl and a father she doesn't know (he abducts her from his estranged wife's home). St. John Mandel also deftly handles the secret behind Lilia's abduction to keep me reading even though the frustration of the private detective scenes nearly drove me to bail out on the book.

Icelander is billed as an Agatha Christie mystery novel as written by Nabokov. A better comparison, I thought, was to John Barth. Dustin Long uses some of the same metafictional trickery to adorn a conventional plot line. I always felt that Barth's strength was his ability to play games with the reader and the narrative structure, yet put it within a plot dynamic enough to be a page turner. Long's approach involves a nameless heroine pulled into solving a murder mystery she has no interest in, a secret kingdom beneath the surface of Iceland (as well as its incestuous royal family), masters of disguise, anagrammatic names, doppelgangers, and even a character named Connie Lingus. Long is very good at creating a whole fabricated world of culture, complete with footnotes and asides. At times, the jokey names and winkwinknudge tricks grew tiresome, but some of the characters were intriguing enough (e.g. the dimwitted actor recounting his visit to the secret kingdom of Vinlandia) to keep the plot interesting. Long handles a variety of styles with a skilled touch--I look forward to reading something else from him.

Strength of Materials!

2009-08-26T23:31:00.004-04:00

Finished The Dog of the South this morning and now I'm scheming to get hold of everything Charles Portis has published. What a twisted genius. I can't wait.

Dr. Reo Symes

2009-08-24T10:01:00.004-04:00

From Dr. Reo Symes in Charles Portis' The Dog of the South:

The kind of people I know now don't have barbecues, Mama. They stand up alone at nights in small rooms and eat cold weenies. My so-called friends are bums. Many of them are nothing but rats. They spread T.B. and use dirty language. Some of them can even move their ears. They're wife-beaters and window peepers and night crawlers and dope fiends. They have running sores on the backs of their hands that never heal. They peer up from cracks in the floor with their small red eyes and watch for chances.

I had heard that Portis' novels were very funny, but when I started The Dog of the South, I expected something like the madcap, almost slapstick, sensibility of The Confederacy of Dunces. It's very different from that, with a more demented and subversive kind of humor. Portis has a sharp writing style that is perfectly attuned to the narrator, Ray Midge, and his random, weightless existence on the trail of his wife and her ex-husband, Guy Dupree, in the British Honduras.

Welcome Back

2009-08-16T11:03:00.002-04:00

I have been horribly negligent to the grumbleblog faithful (Hi, Mom!) and there's no way I can recap all of the books I've read and shows I've attended since (yikes) April. I don't know what the hell's wrong with me--I have no excuses. Well, I do, but I won't go into them here.

I will at least try to list some of the highlights that I can remember. I know I read the excellent Home by Marilynne Robinson and now that I've finished off all of her fictional offerings, I just have to sit back and wait for her to complete another novel. I've read Charles Baxter's The Feast of Love (good, but didn't leave a lasting impression), Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies (excellent stories), Graham Swift's book of essays, Making An Elephant (good enough to make me want to go read some of his novels) and the first volume of War and Peace. I will get back to it eventually--the drawing room scenes can be a bit of a slog, but the battle scenes are pretty amazing literary accomplishments.

The shows are more of a blur. There was the impressive Conor Oberst at the Ottobar and the amazing vocals of Neko Case at the Ramshead as well as a smattering of shows by local bands that I just can't seem to recall right now.

Oh, and this week I read The Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick, the story of Philadelphia Eagles fan Pat Peoples' attempt to assimilate back into society after a long stint in a Baltimore mental facility. His comic and heartbreaking return to his parents' house, therapy, a manic depressive new girl friend and Eagles season tickets made for a hilarious read. Highly recommended (especially for Eagles fans).

Outta Here

2009-04-14T10:16:00.002-04:00

The death of Phillies' announcer Harry Kalas yesterday affected me more than the passing of any celebrity I can remember and today I've been thinking about it and trying to figure out exactly why that is. I grew up listening to Kalas and Richie Ashburn calling games and part of going home to my parents' house is walking in the door and hearing Kalas' voice drifting in from the den.

When I was a teenager, my father and I, like many fathers and teenage sons, were often at odds. We could go for weeks at a time where we barely spoke a word to each other. I would often slink in the door late those summer evenings and my father would be the only one in the house awake, parked in his seat at the end of the sofa close to the television watching the Phillies game. I would plop into the chair farthest from him. We might or might not acknowledge each other's presence and the only sound in the room would be that rich baritone of Harry Kalas sharing an anecdote with Whitey Ashburn or providing the soundtrack to a Michael Jack Schmidt long, deep drive to left-centerfield.

Bye, Harry.

I. by Stephen Dixon

2009-03-12T09:27:00.002-04:00

I feel like I'm on speed whenever I read a Stephen Dixon book. His chapter-length paragraphs and run-on dialogue propel the narrative forward so effectively that I feel as if I can't stop. And he captures the sometimes brutal realities of everyday life in such a deceptively simple language it only adds to the amphetamine rush of words. This book, more than the other Dixon works I've read (Frog, Long Made Short, Gould) appears to be more about the act of writing--the constant sense of revision inherent in every action we make, every line we speak.

Dixon's novels and stories are strangely compelling, but I'm always exhausted by the time I finish one and feel like I need a break before tackling another one. I picked up I. bundled with End of I. from McSweeney's, but I'll be saving End of I. for later in the year. Right now I need to take a breather.

My Life as a Fake

2009-03-02T10:53:00.002-05:00

This is the first of anything I've read by Australian writer Peter Carey and I'll definitely be returning to his work--True History of the Kelly Gang is supposed to be excellent. My Life as a Fake reimagines the events of the Ern Malley hoax, in which two poets created a fictional character, Ern Malley, and passed him off as a poet savant to the pretentious editor of a literary magazine. With very authentic-sounding letters attributed to Malley's sister, she laments her deceased brothers genius that seems to have gone unnoticed (the two poets cast Malley as a mechanic).

In Carey's version, the fake poet, named Bob McCorkle, has come to life to torment his creator. Carey's narrator, the editor of a British literary magazine, has traveled to Malaysia at the request of the famous poet, John Slater, an old family friend and nemesis (she believes Slater is somehow responsible for her mother's suicide). Once there, she meets Christopher Chubb, a strange white man living a meagre existence among the Malaysians. Chubb turns out to be the perpetrator of the infamous "McCorkle hoax" and relates the story to the narrator, enticing her with a glimpse of some brilliant poetry supposedly written by the hoax come to life, Bob McCorkle.

Carey manages to weave themes of identity and the artistic process through a riveting tale that takes the reader around the Pacific Rim with a plot that involves kidnapping, murder and exile.

Sam Roberts at the Rock n Roll Hotel

2009-02-26T13:19:00.005-05:00

After the tight, new wavy sounds of Mother Mother settled and the equipment for Sam Roberts' band was being setup, a strange smell wafted through the crowd, an aroma I haven't been subjected to at a show for quite some time. A fog curled its way through the room and some of the people near me looked at each other quizzically. "Dry ice?" someone said. Yep, good old-fashioned dry ice. And a light show thrown in for good measure.

Sam Roberts had the showman thing down pretty well, with the hook-drenched songs to back him up, but there's a part of that "C'mon let's all put our hands together!" business that feels disingenuous to me. Maybe I'm just old. Roberts certainly knows how to bring a band to a blazing crescendo, but those assaults were moderated by so many breakdowns that they drained the energy from the room. Roberts' Canadian stardom worked against him in the small club setting, though a good chunk of the crowd bought the package entirely. But they seemed pretty young.

M. Ward Goes to Temple

2009-02-23T07:36:00.003-05:00

M. Ward's saturday night show at the Sixth and I Synagogue started out well enough. The acoustic set that he started the evening with worked well in the cavernous sounding room--Ward's velvety croon resonated up into the balcony. 'Fuel for Fire,' 'Let's Dance,' and the instrumental 'Duet for Guitars, No. 3' were great examples of how one guy and one guitar can be mesmerizing. When the full band came out, the acoustics of the Sixth and I took over. It's probably great to carry the voice of a cantor to the cheap seats, or for one guy and one guitar, but for a full, amplified band it was too much. Some tracks, particularly ones where Ward's voice is on prominent display, pushed through the muck, but many, like 'Magic Trick' and 'Chinese Translation,' suffered. We couldn't help but wonder how this show would have been in a sweaty, beer-smelling, sticky-floored club.

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

2009-02-18T08:16:00.003-05:00

I've been hearing for years what a great novel Housekeeping is and after reading Gilead recently, I had to check out Robinson's first novel.

Marilynne Robinson is a master. I think she may be the finest writer working in America today (I'll be reading Home, her latest, soon enough and that may clinch it). Every description, every metaphor she wields feels absolutely fresh in this story of two sisters being raised by an aunt who is slightly off-kilter.

Here's a passage from the girls skipping school and wandering near the glacial lake that their town of Fingerbone rests against:

The woods themselves disturbed us. We liked the little clearings, the burned-off places where wild strawberries grew. Buttercups are the materialization of the humid yellow light one finds in such places. (Buttercups in those mountains are rare and delicate, bright, lacquered, and big on short stems. People delve them up, earth and all, and bring them home like trophies. Newspapers give prizes for the earliest ones. In gardens they perish.) But the deep woods are as dark and stiff and as full of their own odors as the parlor of an old house. We would walk among those great legs, hearing the enthralled and incessant murmurings far above our heads, like children at a funeral.

It's the kind of book that you find something worth quoting on nearly every page. The story moves toward heartbreak when one sister decides she's had enough of the quirky household and grows more independent, more attuned to society, while the other sister, the narrator, slips into the reclusive, transient lifestyle of her aunt.

M. Ward in the NYT

2009-02-17T10:20:00.003-05:00

Nice article in Sunday's New York Times about M. Ward: A Four-Track Guy in a Digital World. I'm listening to the new album right now and it feels like vintage, tuneful, endearing-as-usual M. Ward.

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

2009-02-08T12:15:00.002-05:00

Joseph O'Neill writes a damn good sentence. His novel of post-9/11 New York has been lauded in all of the right places, most notably the cover the New York Times Book Review, and by all of the right people (James Wood, Michiko Kakutani) for good reason.

The narrator, Hans, has been displaced, along with his wife and son, from his Tribeca apartment to the Hotel Chelsea by the attack on the World Trade Center and later abandoned by the wife and son, who return to London unable to come to grips with a post-9/11 Gotham. Suffering through the loneliness of not seeing his son except for bimonthly trips across the Atlantic and his ever more distant (both literally and figuratively) wife, Hans eventually discovers a network of cricketers who play almost unnoticed at various parks around the city. He is befriended by Trinidadian Chuck Ramsikoon (Hans is usually the only white player among the cricketers) whose dream is to build a cricket stadium in Brooklyn and restore the sport to the prominence it once enjoyed in America.

Throughout Netherland, O'Neill explores the meanings of loneliness in the midst of a teaming city, relationships involving friends, race and spouses and the effects of familial memories on all of these things. And he does so with exquisitely wrought sentences that manage to never sound convoluted or pretentious.

Joyce Misremembered

2009-02-02T12:59:00.003-05:00

Not long ago, something I read prompted me to pull my old copy of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man off the shelf and read through a bit. After reading a dozen or so pages, I was thinking that none of it sounded very familiar and once I came to the excellent dinner scene with the political argument, I was sure that I had never read that far into the book before. It's one of those books that I'd always figured I'd read and then promptly forgotten everything about when, in fact, I hadn't read it at all. At least not past the first ten or twelve pages.

I was surprised to find so much discussion of Irish nationalism and politics from a writer I had always counted as apolitical. The aforementioned dinner scene and the frequent mentions of Parnell and his downfall are part of what makes up Stephen Daedalus and his journey to becoming an artist. Stephen has to cast off this troublesome Irish nationalism as well as the Catholicism that insinuates itself throughout everything in the country in order to complete his transformation.

I think anyone who was raised in the Catholic church can appreciate the desperate panic Stephen experiences when he fears dying before he can make it to confession and be absolved of his sins. Of course, Stephen adds to the tension by feeling the need to go to a church outside of his parish because the sins he must confess are so humiliating, he doesn't want his parish priest to hear them. Amen.

Rabbit at Rest

2009-01-28T16:16:00.002-05:00

From Rabbit, Run:

Rabbit comes to the curb but instead of going to his right and around the block he steps down, with as big a feeling as if this little sidestreet is a wide river, and crosses. He wants to travel to the next patch of snow. Although this block of brick three-stories is just like the one he left, something in it makes him happy; the steps and windowsills seem to twitch and shift in the corner of his eye, alive. This illusion trips him. His hands lift of their own and he feels the wind on his ears even before, his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.

Goodbye, Mr. Updike . . .

The Redbreast by Jo Nesbø

2009-01-23T08:56:00.002-05:00

Norwegian writer Jo Nesbø's taut thriller about neo-Nazis and the link to Norwegians that fought for their German occupiers in World War II was a thoroughly enjoyable read. I don't read a great deal of crime fiction (the occasional George Pelecanos, Kate Atkinson) so when I come across a well-done crime novel, I get completely wrapped up in it. Nesbø's hero, Detective Harry Hole, finds himself enmeshed in a potential assassination plot, but doesn't know who, when or where the target is, only the type of rifle (a German Märklin) to be used.

Nesbø deftly mixes in a WWII plot from Norway's Eastern Front involving Norwegians that joined the Waffen SS and were later branded as traitors when the war ended. Some of the surviving members of the unit figure into the contemporary plot as Hole scrambles to discover the details of the assassination.

Despite a few overly used phrases (characters repeatedly "pull a face" to signify displeasure) that may or may not be the result of translation slip-ups, Nesbø's writing style is sleek and well-suited to a fast-paced thriller.

Bill Frisell in the New Yorker

2009-01-22T15:01:00.002-05:00

An article about Bill Frisell is in this week's New Yorker and the online edition has a video clip with a bit of an interview and some performance from the night before we saw him. Link to the video is here and a link to the article here.

Frightened Rabbit at the Talking Head 1/20/09

2009-01-21T11:34:00.004-05:00

Excellent show at the Talking Head last night for the Scottish band Frightened Rabbit. The Hutchison brothers, Scott and Grant, brought a furious energy to the room--Grant pounding the drums with a ferocious abandon and Scott delivering his emotionally taut, intelligent lyrics with passion and keeping time with a steady, pulsing guitar strum. They covered much of the material from their latest album, The Midnight Organ Fight, as well as a couple of songs from Sing the Greys, including "Behave!"

Scott Hutchison came out on his own after the first set to do an acoustic version of "Poke" sans amplification (it's a pretty small room), casually incorporating the rumbling of the heating unit that kicked on halfway through the song. His impressive guitar work and strong, lilting vocals were the highlight of the show.

Opening bands were Baby Aspirin, featuring strong female vocals and lead guitar work, and Arc in Round, a nice combination of layered guitar and keyboards backed by solid drumming.

(Apologies for the crappy cellphone photo.)

Los Campesinos y Titus Andronicus @ the Ottobar 1/15/09

2009-01-17T13:37:00.003-05:00

Opening act Titus Andronicus launched into a full-throttle set that seemed to die between songs, such as when lead man knocked over a tower of equipment (some of which belonged to Los Campesinos apparently) and they waited on help to restack and evaluate damage. The set was sprinkled with a couple of excellent songs that made full use of the band's Stones-y riffs and caterwauling vocals, culminating in a topnotch cover of the Modern Lovers' "Roadrunner." The caterwauling vocals grew tiresome in some of the songs, but with the right amount of energy for context, like in the their self-titled, final song, it works.

Los Campesinos responded with a similar energy level, but with a sound that's both more compelling and more innocent. The adrenaline level increased throughout the set (despite the absence of the violinist, who was too ill to make the trip from Wales on this first date of the US tour). The great, building intro to "You! Me! Dancing!" was one of those magical, can't-wipe-the-smile-off-your-face show moments that make it all worthwhile.

Bill Frisell, Paul Motian, Ron Carter

2009-01-15T13:11:00.004-05:00

We made a quick dash to New York last Saturday night to catch Bill Frisell's trio with Paul Motian and Ron Carter at the Blue Note. Though I prefer the more driving style of the Frisell trio manifestations I've seen with Ken Wollesen on drums, I liked Motian's ability to play give-and-take with Frisell and Carter, and Carter's bass playing was mesmerizing.

Frisell, as always, amazed me. That distinct sound and style that somehow stays taut and plays loose at the same time. He kept the loop effects to a minimum--I like the effects, but holding them in check did make them even more powerful.

A Sunday morning train ride got us back down to the Philly area to watch the Eagles' game at my parents' house--NFC Championship Game, here we come.

The Realm of Perfection

2009-01-08T14:11:00.006-05:00

In Steven Millhauser’s essay, “The Ambition of the Short Story,” he pits short story's David against the novel’s Goliath in a paean to the perfection of smallness. “Large things tend to be unwieldy, clumsy, crude; smallness is the realm of elegance and grace. It’s also the realm of perfection.” After reading his essay over and over again the week it appeared in the New York Times Book Review, I put his latest collection of short stories, Dangerous Laughter, on my to-be-read list.

Millhauser divides his collection into three sections (plus a cartoon!). The stories fit so perfectly into these groups, that it’s almost as if Millhauser planned his collection out before the stories were written. His repetition of themes and various visual motifs add to the notion. In the first section, Vanishing Acts, he conjures a number of shy, withdrawn young women, like the title character in “The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman,” the sister who never leaves her darkened room in “The Room in the Attic,” and Clara Schuler, an unassuming, quiet girl who catches onto the fad of ecstatic laughter in the title story.

Millhauser also likes to contrast the sunny new ranch houses of a coastal New England town against the dark, multi-story homes in the established older neighborhoods across town. Everything on the new side, including the beach, seems to glisten with a technicolor shine, as if it just fell out of a David Lynch movie. In two different stories, Millhauser shows us a bright soda bottle tilted in the sand, it’s liquid appearing slanted against the glass as it seeks a new level. On the gloomy side of the town, the resemblance is closer to a Poe story. The brother and sister of “The Room in the Attic” could easily be stand-ins for the ill-fated brother and sister from “Fall of the House of Usher.”

Millhauser uses a stylized, miniature fly in the same manner in stories of the second and third sections. The miniaturist of “In the Reign of Harad IV” places a fly on the dollhouse-scaled model of an apple and becomes so enthralled with working at that scale that he begins making smaller and smaller creations until they are invisible to the naked eye. The notion of the inexhaustible attention to detail reflects Millhauser’s ability to pinpoint such precise details in his stories. Like the tactile descriptions of objects placed in the narrator’s hand in both “The Room in the Attic” and “The Wizard of West Orange.” Or this description from “The Other Town:”

the DeAngelo yard, say, with its flowered beach towels hanging over the back-porch rail and its coil of green hose next to the dented garbage cans, or the Altschuler yard with its tall sugar maple, its yellow Wiffle ball bat lying half in sun and half in shade, and its aluminum chaise lounge with strips of orange and white vinyl on which a blue eyeglass case is resting, or the Langley yard with its grass-stained soccer ball, its red-handled jump rope, its tin pie-dish for home plate, and its bags of peat moss and fertilizer leaning up against the side of the detached garage.

Several of the stories are, in fact, about details. In “The Other Town,” a small town maintains an identical, unoccupied, second town just beyond its limits in the woods. Every quotidian detail of the original town is duplicated by a team of “replicators.” In “Here at the Historical Society,” a New England town’s historical society begins to concentrate its efforts on documenting every aspect of the most recent past, with the understanding that “recent past” can refer to minutes ago.

As a fan of more realistic fiction, I found the lack of dialogue in some of Millhauser’s stories oddly disconcerting and the effect made them more memorable to me. Stories such as “A Change in Fashion” and “The Tower” and “The Dome” are presented more like tales, some strange fable from a Twilight Zone era.

Millhauser’s themes and interests of details and the vibrancy of all of the senses culminated in the final story of Dangerous Laughter, “The Wizard of West Orange.” A librarian in Thomas Edison’s West Orange Invention factory, finds himself involved in a secret experiment to test the haptograph, a machine that mimics the tactile impressions made on the body by stimulating the skin. The journal entries of the librarian’s obsession with the machine describe the experience with the devotion of a religious experience.

I found myself thinking about the stories in Dangerous Laughter days after I’d read them, wondering what part of my surroundings had triggered the connection, what detail I'd noticed that I hadn’t before. I have Millhauser’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Martin Dressler on a shelf somewhere. It’s moving into the top of the to-be-read pile.

One Manageable Story

2008-12-25T16:16:00.003-05:00

Not too long ago, I subscribed to One Story. They put out a tiny publication containing one short story every three weeks. It turns out to be the perfect flow of fiction from publisher to household. For me, anyway. Some lit periodicals arrive and I'm intimidated by the amount of fiction I have to read before the next hunk of fiction arrives. Or there's the New Yorker--only one story each issue, but it comes every week. Pressure. Stress. With One Story, not so much.

I wasn't crazy about the first story that arrived and thought maybe I had tossed my eighteen bucks, but the following issue was a slightly surreal, frenetically written story about hallucinatory water polo (!? among other things) and called "We Bluegills" by Robert Travieso. I loved it and I've loved everything I've received since.

Shakespeare Wrote for Money by Nick Hornby

2008-12-14T15:03:00.005-05:00

There's something about Nick Hornby's writing, particularly his columns in The Believer, that is addictively readable. Of course, to some degree, what I'm doing on this site is a cheap, less intelligent, less funny imitation of the Believer column that Hornby has done for the last five or so years. But in both the latest collection, Shakespeare Wrote for Money, and the first one, The Polysyllabic Spree, Hornby cast a spell that had me poring through the books over the course of a single day. Granted, they're not very long books, but still, I'm not that kind of reader. I read for an hour, I put the book down and do something relatively productive, I pick it up again later in the day and read for half an hour, etc. With Hornby's books, however, I just can't stop. Last night, I was reading Shakespeare Wrote for Money in bed, put it down and fell asleep, then woke up for a bathroom run a couple of hours later and couldn't keep myself from opening the book and finishing it right then.

I think what makes Hornby's "Stuff I've Been Reading" column so compelling, is the pure pleasure and excitement he gets from books. It's an excitement I share and, I assume, many others share (or why would his column be popular enough to assemble into collections?). His lack of pretension in the column contributes to the excitement. It's something I've tried to do and, I think, failed at. Of course this is made even worse by the fact that I don't have the intellectual prowess to back any sort of pretension up. It's a bit of a double whammy, but I'll keep on trying and maybe one day I'll reach Hornby-like status. Maybe.

Edited to add: The good folks at McSweeney's have pointed out that this is actually Hornby's third book of "Stuff I've Been Reading" columns. I somehow forgot about the second of the bunch, Housekeeping vs. the Dirt. Shame on me.

Edited again to add: Okay, honestly, no one from McSweeney's reads this blog. I was actually lying in bed this morning between snooze hits and I remembered that there was another book. Double shame on me.

City of Thieves by David Benioff

2008-12-11T09:09:00.005-05:00

A buddy-story set during the Nazi siege of Leningrad, City of Thieves is the latest novel from David Benioff, author of 25th Hour and When the Nines Roll Over (as well as various screenplays). The story throws together a dashing lothario who's gone AWOL from the Red Army and a half-Jewish seventeen-year old resident of Piter (the characters all refer to Leningrad as Piter).

In classic buddy-story style, the two characters get on each other's nerves as they trundle through the Russian winter on an impossible mission in search of a dozen eggs. Their picaresque adventure takes them from cannibals to the secret police to prison marches as they bond in their attempt to survive. The setup is a bit shopworn, but Benioff does a nice job with it. The characters are likable and believable (though some of their situations stretch the believability factor). Even the elements of the novel that were entirely predictable (it seems quite obvious early on who will not survive the adventure) were still enjoyable because of Benioff's craftiness with a story and readable style.

It's not a great novel that will change your view of literature or the world, but a well-told bit of escapist fiction.

The Verificationist by Donald Antrim

2008-12-02T09:59:00.002-05:00

I couldn't help thinking, as I struggled through the second half of Donald Antrim's novel, that it would have made an excellent short story. All of the elements of a prize-winning, lit-magazine story were there: the witty, almost ridiculing tone of psychobabble; the extremely self-conscious professional protagonist and his cohorts; the fantastical element of an otherwise realistic setting; the satiric nature of the protagonist's sexual and homoerotic concerns. But even at less than 180 pages, the tale seemed to go on for far too long.

Had Antrim been able to inject more humor into the story, it would have held me, but I kept thinking as I waded through pages of Tom, the narrator's, pseudo-sexual flight around the upper reaches of a pancake house during a departmental outing he has organized, that much of his meanderings are almost funny. That almost, and Antrim's skillful wordplay, would have been enough to carry twenty-five or thirty pages. As a novel, it's landing was long overdue.

Another Gilead Passage

2008-11-26T15:58:00.003-05:00

I have to copy another passage from Gilead because it's such a remarkable book. John Ames, knowing the end of his life is near, finds beauty in nearly everything. Mere existence is beautiful. Here's an example from early in the novel that I loved:

I really can't tell what's beautiful anymore. I passed two young fellows on the street the other day. I know who they are, they work at the garage. They're not churchgoing, either one of them, just decent rascally young fellows who have to be joking all the time, and there they were, propped against the garage wall in the sunshine, lighting up their cigarettes. They're always so black with grease and so strong with gasoline I don't know why they don't catch fire themselves. They were passing remarks back and forth the way they do and laughing that wicked way they have. And it seemed beautiful to me. It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over.

Gilead

2008-11-25T10:02:00.004-05:00

I finished Gilead last night and have to add it with Out Stealing Horses to my list of the best novels I've read in the last couple of years. Maryilynne Robinson created a fascinating character in the Reverend John Ames; a decent man caught at the end of his life with his family just beginning. It's really an epistolary novel addressed to Ames' young son for him to read later in his life. His accounts of growing up in turn of the century Iowa, dealing with the loneliness of bachelorhood and coming to terms with his distrustful feelings toward his namesake, the son of his closest friend, provide more drama and conflict than I would have thought possible.

Ames' Christianity is handled deftly by Robinson. He comes from a line of Congregationalist preachers, but he is far from a zealot. Ames's brother was an atheist, to their father's discontent, and Ames recounts his poring over the texts that his brother recommended, but it only strengthened his faith. Normally, I would be skeptical of such a devout main character, but Robinson has instilled Ames with such intelligence and insightfulness that he's the type of man you want to spend time with. Chalk this up to one that didn't appeal to me on the surface, but turned out to be a favorite. Now I'll have to read Home.

God, the audience

2008-11-17T10:48:00.003-05:00

A recitation on God that I hadn't heard before, from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson:

Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense. How well do we understand our role? With how much assurance do we perform it?

Another Ketchup - Part Two

2008-11-16T08:08:00.001-05:00

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose - I've always been a sucker for these kinds of books that mimic survey courses. This one is particularly good, helped along by the fact that Prose is a top-notch fiction writer. Her chapter on Chekov alone is worth the price of admission (though I must admit that I borrowed this one from the library).

When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson - Awful title, decent book. I fell in love with Atkinson's previous novel, One Good Turn and then went after her earlier Case Histories which I enjoyed, but not quite as much. WWTBGN? falls into that same "not quite as much" category. All three feature the same retired detective, Jackson Brodie, finding himself wrapped up in someone else's problems. In this one, the setup seemed to take forever (well over a hundred pages) and was only saved by the fact that Atkinson captured the voice and mindset of a quirky, sixteen-year old girl perfectly.

The Bible Salesman by Clyde Edgerton - I don't buy many books strictly on the advice of cover blurbs, but this one had a blurb from David Sedaris saying that he howled with laughter. I didn't howl, but it was amusing and enough of a plot to keep it interesting. It felt like Flannery O'Connor-lite.

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson - This is one of the best books I've read in the last couple of years. A beautiful style (and I guess some of the credit has to go to the translator, Anne Born) and a deceptively simple story of a man who moves to the country to find isolation for the remainder of his life. The novel manages to pull in a story of familial love, betrayal, honor and a bit of WW II intrigue.

How Fiction Works by James Wood - This book almost feels controversial now that I've read so many differing opinions on it. I fall into the camp that appreciates the perceptive insights that Wood contributes. I don't find him nearly as pedantic as some of the reviewers--he tends to affect a lofty diction, but that's just his style. Plus, he's English. I did notice that many of the examples of literature that Wood cites are the same ones that he's cited in other essays (some of the same scenes were used to illustrate points in essays from The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self). Not that there's anything wrong with that. Whether you agree with Wood's championing of "realistic" fiction or not, I think the book is worth the read. His explanation of the "free indirect style" is reason enough.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

2008-11-12T08:54:00.002-05:00

It's been over a month, but I have to mention the fantastic Nick Cave show at the 930 Club in D.C. Very likely the loudest show I've ever attended, they played a lot of material from the latest album which lent itself to a high energy show. Cave himself was mesmerizing. José mentioned something about what the two drummers were doing, but I couldn't take my eyes off of Nick Cave the entire time. He was like this shamanistic evangelist, wheeling across the stage on those impossibly long legs and gesturing to the crowd almost constantly. He even took a moment to autograph a book someone passed up to him.

Another Catch-Up

2008-11-10T14:04:00.005-05:00

Again, I've been neglecting the roundup of books. So much so that I think I'll have to break this "Catch-up" into multiple parts. Here goes part number one:

The Book Against God by James Wood - After reading a chunk of Wood's essays, I decided to check out his novel. Thomas Bunting is working on his Ph.D. but spends most of his time jotting notes in his "Book Against God" and lamenting his relationships with his wife and his father, a small town priest. As one would expect, Wood's style is lyrical and humorous and is what makes the book worth reading--otherwise it's a standard "my life is falling apart, existential crisis" novel.

The Sea by John Banville - Elegiac is the word most often used to describe this short but dense novel and that's the first that came to mind for me when attempting to describe it. I'm not sure if anyone writing in English today writes a more beautiful sentence than Banville. Sometimes it's almost too much, like a whole dinner of incredibly rich Alfredo sauce. Still, beautiful with the great little twist at the end.

Harry, Revised by Mark Sarvas - I picked this up because I read Sarvas' blog, The Elegant Variation. While I think that the review in the NYTBR was unnecessarily nasty, there were several points made that I have to agree with. Most of the "comedy" scenes played like bad television slapstick (the ball-busting exercise bike ride, the peeing out the window onto someone's head scene) and the humor in general just didn't work for me. Almost all of the character's ploys (Harry goes way out of his way to help a downtrodden waitress in order to impress her coworker) felt like they were contrived solely to advance the plot of the novel, not because they fit with the character's motivation. I wanted to like this one, because I do enjoy Sarvas' blog, but it never took hold with me.

That's it for now. I'll get to the rest later. Today? I don't know--that's kind of stretching it.

A Dementor and the Joker

2008-10-31T19:02:00.001-04:00

New David Byrne and Brian Eno

2008-08-18T07:09:00.002-04:00

I woke up this morning to an email alert from the David Byrne and Brian Eno website that their new album was ready for streaming and downloading. I clicked on the link, popped on the headphones and "Home" was already playing through them. It was a beautiful thing. I love it. Check it out.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

2008-08-11T17:50:00.005-04:00

I almost gave up on this book. After reading the initial section—made up of the journal entries of a precocious and at times dislikable young man recounting his initiation into a group of Mexico City poets—I was nearly ready to abandon the novel. The early chapters of the bulky middle section didn't help.

That middle section is told with a variety of voices—faux interviews, really. The name of the speaker, the place and date of the interview precede each interlude. Some go on for pages and some are just a paragraph. Some of the speakers are characters we've met in the first section, while others are new characters, but all of them have had some contact with our heroes, the leading poets of the visceral realist group, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. They leave Mexico City on a trek to find the original visceral realist poet, a woman who disappeared into the Sonora Desert in the 1920s, Cesarea Tinajero. When some of these interviews became bogged down with lists of obscure Latin American writers and obsessions over defunct (or entirely fictional) Mexican publications, I took a break from The Savage Detectives and read James Wood's How Fiction Works (more on that later perhaps?).

When I returned to the novel, I found myself entranced by the numerous voices that comprise the middle section. Characters began to distinguish themselves. Some were one-timers, others returned repeatedly throughout. I was captivated by Quim Font, the father of two visceral realist daughters who ends up in an asylum, by the Austrian skinhead who befriends Ulises in Israel, the female bodybuilder who lets a room to Arturo in Barcelona. Through this panoply of character portrayals, we follow the two poets across continents by the people they come in contact with. In many ways, we develop a much better picture of the numerous characters than we ever do of the two poets. Bolaño's dense pages of first person narratives, in a variety of first persons, demonstrate his genius for collecting the voices of Latin American and Spanish characters that give an intriguing portrait of an entire generation of artists, writers and scenesters.

The Big Catch-Up

2008-07-23T09:46:00.005-04:00

I've been neglecting the reading list recaps here, so I'm going to do a quick list of the stuff I've read since I last wrote about the stuff I've read. The stuff I can remember anyway.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz - This one just didn't bowl me over the way I thought it would. I appreciated Diaz's virtuosity, but it wasn't until the last third of the book that I really felt like I was reading something beyond "good."

Continental Drift by Russell Banks - Beautiful, painful, filled with striking grandiose passages that I kept wanting to copy. For my money, Banks captured an immigrant experience much better than Diaz did.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates - Artfully written; sentences I kept going back and reading again just to figure out how he made them seem so effortless.

Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O'Nan - Remarkable in the compassion we feel for this Everyman going through the motions of his work. The pride the character takes in the small details of his thankless job is heartbreaking. I loved this much more than I imagined I would.

The Book of Evidence by John Banville - My first experience with Banville; gripping, frightening, funny and deftly constructed. I can see why he's considered a master.

That's it: just quick impressions that don't do justice to these books, but all I have time for now.

Novel Wordle

2008-07-06T21:25:00.000-04:00

"Tree Guy"

2008-05-30T07:31:00.002-04:00

By Gary Riggin. 24"by 18" Oil on Canvas

This is for a sick friend (acrylic on canvas)

2008-05-22T22:56:00.002-04:00

A New Painting by Gary Riggin

2008-04-22T17:48:00.004-04:00

New Paintings from Gary

2008-03-17T13:59:00.002-04:00

That Time of Year

2008-03-06T14:44:00.003-05:00

I haven't been posting much lately, so I thought I'd throw this quick sketch up here. Baseball is upon us and the Phillies could be in for a long year with the Mets' powerhouse pitching staff (A pox on you, Johann!).

The Stories They Told

2008-03-04T06:51:00.003-05:00

I finished Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried last night (or was that the night before? this round-the-clock CoAdvil regimen is beginning to affect my thought processes) and was happy to discover the book was as much about storytelling as it was about the war. I avoided this one for a while because, between movies, television and novels, I felt I'd had a lifetime's fill of Vietnam stories.

O'Brien, however, uses his own career as a writer (fueled by his experience in Vietnam) to blur the lines between fact and fiction in this novel. In the second half of the book, he'll return to stories from the first half and admit that, well, it didn't really happen like that or that kind of happened but it didn't happen to that character, it happened to me. And throughout the novel, stories are being told by characters and their technique is critiqued by other characters. O'Brien's point seems to be that the "truth" of fact doesn't matter; it's the emotional "truth," the larger "truth," that captures our experiences.

The Third Policeman

2008-02-19T10:09:00.005-05:00

I read Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman recently and throughout this whole surreal vision of hell I couldn't help seeing it as an animated film. From the red-faced, fat policeman to the bicycles that take on some of the attributes of their owners (and vice versa) to the enormous subterranean machine known as "eternity" I saw it playing out as a dark cartoon.

I scribbled a few of images with my limited (laughable?) drafting skills.

Bridge of Sighs

2008-02-05T07:19:00.000-05:00

First, I must divulge how in love with Richard Russo's novels I am. Nobody's Fool was the first I read and I immediately went to find his two preceding books, Mohawk and The Risk Pool (which my friends Jen and Derek had recommended years before, a recommendation I, for some stupid reason, ignored). I loved everything about them: the artistic, but conversational tone; the truant and impish father figures; and, most of all, the humor. Russo's small town, upstate New York characters were people you wanted to go have a beer with because they were not only compassionate and smart, but they were witty as hell. If you can make me laugh in a novel that deals with some serious issues, I'm yours. So I could forgive a lot when it comes to Russo. Unfortunately, with Bridge of Sighs, I felt there was a lot to forgive.

While Russo keeps his traditional setting of upstate New York intact, he goes in a different direction with his main character's father issues. This time, his protagonist, Lucy Lynch (an unwelcome corruption of Lou C. Lynch) dwells on a father who is caring and ever-present. Big Lou isn't the brightest bulb, but he's a kind-hearted soul and Lucy adores him. This adoration and Lucy's instant nostalgia for every aspect of Thomaston, NY fills page after page of a memoir Lucy is working on. And Lucy, apparently, doesn't possess Russo's economy with words. The novel feels about two hundred pages too long.

There are welcome breaks in Lucy's story to recount the modern day life of his childhood friend, Bobby, who has become a famous painter, and Sarah Berg, the woman who loves both boys and eventually marries Lucy and settles in Thomaston with him. Bobby's character provides the Absent Father story line that is prevalent in so much of Russo's work, but this time the father is an abusive bully instead of the happy-go-lucky wastrels of the earlier novels.

The problem in Bridge of Sighs is with the pretext of the memoir Lucy is writing. Lucy's pie-eyed vision of his beloved hometown isn't meant to be taken at face value--he's an unreliable narrator and we depend on the stories of Bobby and Sarah to get the real scoop. In the end, it feels as if Russo has pasted these various viewpoints together once he realized that Lucy's tale wasn't much more than a wordy postcard to his town and his father. The last hundred pages nearly redeemed the book with a couple of surprises, but the saccharine ending confirmed the feelings of frustration that accompanied the rest of Bridge of Sighs.

Wildwood Days, Wildwood Nights

2008-01-30T20:42:00.000-05:00

I came across this quote today that I had copied when I was reading Philip Roth's Everyman. He has a habit of writing passages that hit home like a smack in the head from an ill-tempered nun.

But how much time could a man spend remembering the best of boyhood? What about enjoying the best of old age? Or was the best of old age just that--the longing for the best of boyhood, for the tubular sprout that was then his body and that rode the waves from way out where they began to build, rode them with his arms pointed like an arrowhead and the skinny rest of him following behind like the arrow’s shaft, rode them all the way in to where his rib cage scraped against the tiny sharp pebbles and jagged clamshells and pulverized seashells at the edge of the shore and he hustled to his feet and hurriedly turned and went lurching through the low surf until it was knee high and deep enough for him to plunge in and begin swimming madly out to the rising breakers--into the advancing, green Atlantic, rolling unstoppably toward him like the obstinate fact of the future--and, if he was lucky, make it there in time to catch the next big wave then the next and the next and the next until from the low slant of inland sunlight glittering across the water he knew it was time to go.

The beautiful part is that we still go to the Jersey shore every year and now my kids are experiencing the same thing. The same exhilaration, the same exhaustion, the same sense of joy tinged with the sad knowledge that it soon will be over.

I'm ready for summer.

Murder of Crows

2008-01-29T12:13:00.001-05:00

I was upstairs reading Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs (more on that later) when I gradually realized there was a lot of noise and activity going on outside. I pulled the blind and watched as a gang of crows gradually filled the trees in my backyard, cawing and squawking at something that I couldn't place. I grabbed my camera to shoot a couple of pictures (I've always been intrigued by crows and ravens) and saw why they were so upset. A pair of hawks had wandered in and a little territorial standoff was happening. I couldn't get a shot of the hawks, but I managed to catch some of the crows in action.

January Moon

2008-01-18T23:23:00.000-05:00

Unloading groceries from the car today, looked up and there it was.

Snow!

2008-01-17T13:00:00.001-05:00

The obligatory snow picture. Early school dismissal, snarled traffic, wet clothes--so much to look forward to today.

Retro Baseball Day

2008-01-16T18:00:00.000-05:00

I cleaned my office this weekend and among the many surprises that made their way to the surface from the depths of the piles was this team picture of the Aston Valley Pirates. According to the back, the year was 1980 and the Pirates finished in second place. And I had really great hair. And possibly the beginnings of a mustache. (You can click the image for a larger version to get a closer look.)

The office cleaning thing is not recommended. I've spent hours over the last couple of days looking for things that used to be right where I needed them. Yeah it looks good, but it's horribly inefficient. Not to worry, though. I'll have this place junked back up in no time.

Macbook Air, eh?

2008-01-15T15:28:00.000-05:00

In honor of the thinnest laptop ever, I present a photo of . . . my left hand.

Brass Portrait

2008-01-14T10:30:00.000-05:00

Did I mention there would be no POTD on Sundays? No? Especially Sundays during the playoffs?Plus there's the New York Times to get through, the Sunday Sun, The Wire, and general lethargy. So, no Sundays. Unless I feel like it.

Playoffs Galore

2008-01-12T22:23:00.000-05:00

I'm too busy watching football to go outside today, so here's a shot of the snazzy condenser mic that José let me borrow. Thanks, José, it works beautifully. Now if I could only produce something worthwhile with it.

All the Little People. And Animals.

2008-01-11T20:29:00.000-05:00

One Smithwick's, on the House

2008-01-10T16:52:00.000-05:00

I was going to post a picture of the immense pile of crap I collected today while cleaning out the office, but I decided to go with a shot of the reward for all of my hard work instead. One tall glass of Smithwick's, just begging to be sipped. Cheers.

Picture of the Day!

2008-01-09T16:00:00.000-05:00

For no good reason, I've decided to attempt a Picture of the Day post. Yes, it would have provided some good symmetry if I had started this on January 1st, but that would be very inconsistent with everything else in life I attempt. Either do it half-assed or don't do it at all.

I made it out of the house for the inaugural shot, but just barely.

Year End, Best of Brouhaha

2007-12-31T07:37:00.000-05:00

I figured I'd get myself in on some of this year-end, favorites action. Of course, this is all meaningless because I haven't made anything even close to a comprehensive examination in these topics. But, here goes:

Books: On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan; The Yiddish Policeman's Union, by Michael Chabon; Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris

Albums: The Stage Names - Okkervil River; The Shepherd's Dog - Iron & Wine; Floratone - Floratone (see below); Reunion Tour - The Weakerthans

Movies: (the least comprehensive of categories because I'm usually about a year behind on releases) Ratatouille.

When I checked the list of movies that have been released this year, I realized I had no right at all to be doing this category. The list of movies I want to see is far longer than the list of movies I've seen (No Country for Old Men, Zodiac, Michael Clayton, There Will Be Blood, When the Wind Shakes the Barley, etc.). Ah well. Maybe I'll do my Favorite Movies of 2007 in 2008. And eventually, when the kids are older, I'll be able to see movies in the actual year they're released.

The Abstinence Teacher

2007-12-27T07:07:00.000-05:00

I finished this book about a month ago, but I've avoided writing about it because of my general sense of disappointment. I've loved the other Tom Perrotta books I've read, especially Little Children. With The Abstinence Teacher, Perrotta was shooting for the same mark, but didn't quite get there. He certainly has suburban America down cold and he knows how to create sympathetic characters who might normally be difficult to like.

The big problem with The Abstinence Teacher was that both the situation and the characters felt contrived. With both the sex ed teacher who is forced to teach abstinence and the born again, recovering addict, the decisions they made felt more convenient to the story than authentic to the character. Top that off with an unsatisfying ending, and I'm left wondering if the movie version will be able to rescue this novel.

S'up, Yid?

2007-11-15T11:10:00.000-05:00

This fall is catch up on all of my favorite contemporary authors season and the first on the chopping block was Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union. I've been a fan of his since Mysteries of Pittsburgh, but I haven't read his YA novel, Summerland or the Sherlock Holmes story The Final Solution. In The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Chabon imagines a world that had post-World War II Jews settling in a chunk of Alaska lent to them by the U.S. government. Chabon uses the contemporary setting of Sitka, Alaska for a hard-boiled murder mystery complete with tough guy detectives in fedoras and plenty of Chandleresque diction.

I love the alternate world Chabon created here. Sitka has a history complete with neighborhoods and architecture and cultish religious sects. The hard-boiled language plucked my nerves a bit in the beginning, like he was trying too hard to fashion this realistic noir world in an alternate history. He mentions hot water tanks that are bound together by straps of steel "like comrades in a doomed adventure," and our hero, Meyer Landsman, "tears around Sitka like a man with his pant leg caught on a rocket" when working on a case. Either the noir-like metaphors were toned down as the novel wore on, or I just got used to them. Of course, Chabon knows his stuff, so many of the similes hit home like a dart piercing the smoke of an English pub and stiffening at the center of the board.

It comes down to the fact that Chabon weaves a good story, as usual. The artifice of the setting and the tough guy language are part of the fabric that make the whole suit real.

Latest Listening

2007-11-08T19:16:00.000-05:00

I first got tuned in to Bill Frisell when he released the Gone, Just Like a Train album. I read a review somewhere, picked it up and I was hooked. I've taken in his live show three times now at the Ramshead in Annapolis, but had to miss his recent stop in Baltimore at An Die Musik with Greg Leisz and Jenny Scheinman. Floratone is his latest studio project, a collaboration with drummer Matt Chamberlain and producer/engineers Tucker Martine and Lee Townshend. It has that unmistakable Bill Frisell guitar tone, lots of bluesy grooves and looping that creates a swampy, futuristic sound.

They've put together a cool video about them getting together to make the album.

The Weakerthans

2007-10-30T19:42:00.000-04:00

I ventured to DC with a crew on Sunday night to check out the Weakerthans at the 930 club once again. I think this is the third time I've seen them and it's been an excellent show each time. They tend to stay close to the studio versions of their songs, but there is enough energy packed into those songs to keep the pace of the show tight. The highlights for me were "Plea From a Cat Named Virtute," "Watermark," and, as always, John Samson on the stage alone doing "One Great City!"

We, We, We

2007-10-30T19:25:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I finished the National Book Award-nominated Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. The gimmick here is that the novel is told from the first person plural. The novel opens with an excellent, hilarious section and I found myself wondering if he could keep that up for the duration. With the exception of a straightforward, third person section in the middle, he does. And he does it well. Ferris manages to allow certain characters that are part of the "we" to stand out and develop without losing the feel of the storytelling situation he has set up. It's quite a feat.

Making Amends to Laura Lippman

2007-10-24T21:17:00.000-04:00

I had read numerous great reviews for Laura Lippman's work (and not just from hometown Baltimore writers) when I picked up one of her novels in a bookstore and read through the first couple of pages. It was one of the Tess Monaghan novels, possibly Baltimore Blues, her first, and I was completely disappointed. Typical genre stuff, I thought. I put it down and wrote her off. I even mentioned my disappointment to a couple of people when the subjects of books, authors, etc. came up. Still, I kept coming across praise for Lippman here and there and I just didn't get it.

A few months later, I was in a used book store right after an eye doctor's appointment--the store is in the same shopping center as my eye doctor's office--and, struggling with blurry vision from the eye drops, I wandered through the stacks with nothing jumping out at me. In fact, I had to get within centimeters of the spines to actually read the titles. Not needing any books and frustrated with my inability to see them anyway, I found myself in the Mystery section and found a mass market paperback copy of Laura Lippman's Every Secret Thing. For $2.99, how could I lose?

It turned out to be a great deal. The writing was sharp and devoid of clichés, the characters were interesting and well-formed, and the plot was tasty. Add to that the superficial thrill of familiarity with all of the locations and landmarks in the novel and I was completely hooked. At times it felt like I was watching a crime show, but it was a really good crime show. I highly recommend it and I'll be checking out some of her other non-Tess books as soon as I get through the stack of books next to my desk.

Anglo-centric Reading Lists

2007-02-23T12:00:00.000-05:00

I read Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch after finishing Line of Beauty and now reading Mark Haddon's A Spot of Bother. Not sure what has come over me, but everything I pick up to read these days seems to be from the British Isles. Kate Atkinson, Flann O'Brien were in the list recently. And I keep picking up The Power and the Glory--I haven't read it since high school and I remember almost nothing about it (it's really hot and there's a priest, right?). I realized it was getting to be a problem when I started getting cravings for tea and cookies around three each afternoon, except I mentally referred to the cookies as biscuits and quietly lamented the fact that we didn't have the equipment to make "proper" tea. Once I began attempting a North London accent, my wife decided she had to put an end to the nonsense and made me sit down with some football (American football!) videos until I snapped out of it.

NYTBR

2007-01-30T09:00:00.000-05:00

The New York Times Book Review this Sunday featured a review of a new Thomas Hardy biography on the cover. Hardy is one of those big holes (yes, there are many) in my own personal coverage of the Western Canon. I have an old Bantam Classic Paperback copy of The Return of the Native that I bought as a teenager and never finished. I believe I picked it up because Holden Caulfield mentions it in Catcher in the Rye (or does he only mention Hardy? I can't remember) and the only memory I have of it is a damp, claustrophobic opening that I came to associate with all 19th Century English literature. Maybe it's time I give it another try.

Now reading . . .

2007-01-26T13:57:00.000-05:00

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst -- I'm about midway through this 2004 Booker Prize winner (I'll catch up eventually) and thoroughly enjoying Hollinghurst’s way with sentences. He navigates the world of privileged Thatcherites with sinuous dexterity, weaving through the main character’s affairs with various men of the society. The gay sex scenes might put off some people I know, but they’re not the types I would recommend this book to anyway (I wouldn’t call the scenes graphic necessarily, but explicit).

Hollinghurst discusses Hogarth's aesthetic principles, particularly regarding the S-curve, the line of beauty of the title. I had to look it up (I'm not the art expert here). Hogarth felt that the beauty of the curved line should be used to represent objects that are alive and the straight line, whose variations are limited to length and thickness, should be used for dead objects.

Inaugural Mission

2007-01-24T17:36:00.000-05:00

On second thought, maybe this isn't such a good idea. The thoughts of two underemployed, struggling creatives with too much time on their hands might not be as interesting as we think they are. Then again, that matters not much at all.

Art, literature, politics or anything that we deem interesting enough to fill this space--that's the plan.