11.09.10
THUNDERTOME: ROUND 28
SURVIVOR: black swan green (david mitchell)*
CHALLENGER: zeitoun (dave eggers)
my edition of zeitoun has a clipped cover. its unbound edge ends half an inch early to reveal a deep maroon subcover with a full-page quote from timothy egan's times review:
what zeitoun delivers is...exactly that, really. dave eggers' fiction has never really blown my hair back (his first novel, you shall know our velocity, tripped over its own feet;** the talking dog story in how we are hungry left me cold, and if there is a natural audience for talking dog stories, i am its rapporteur), but his nonfiction has an elegant vivacity i quite like: he curates a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, the story of how he raised his eight-year-old brother after their parents died, with a lot of charisma.*** the charisma's here as he presents the zeitoun family and hurricane katrina as well, but it's gotten sneakier: the exposed seams he flaunted in a heartbreaking work (so late 90's) now shape the tale invisibly. eggers uses a gorgeous syrian night fishing scene to introduce us to zeitoun (and how community and the sea are bound up for him), and he makes call after excellent call as he takes us through the family's flight to arizona, zeitoun's experience in the storm, and what happens after new orleans is overwhelmed. many reviewers speak of eggers' restraint, but that's not quite it: he does let the events speak for themselves, but it's his angles of approach (and the scenes he chooses) that really wallop. i kept whacking joe in the arm as we lay in our hotel room in montreal: "and now he's back at the house where he was feeding the starving dogs, and he looks under the window and - " "why do you tell me these things?!"****
long story short: eggers personalizes katrina and the war on terror with a lot of skill and a lot of heart. he will probably always make my snark glands go haywire, but that says more about my heart of tar than it does about him. zeitoun is wonderful.
THUNDERTOME: ROUND 28
SURVIVOR: black swan green (david mitchell)*
CHALLENGER: zeitoun (dave eggers)
my edition of zeitoun has a clipped cover. its unbound edge ends half an inch early to reveal a deep maroon subcover with a full-page quote from timothy egan's times review:
Imagine Charles Dickens, his sentimentality in check but his journalistic eyes wide open, roaming New Orleans after it was buried by Hurricane Katrina...Eggers' tone is pitch-perfect--suspense blended with just enough information to stoke reader outrage and what is likely to be a typical response: How could this happen in America?...It's the stuff of great narrative nonfiction...Fifty years from now, when people want to know what happened to this once-great city during a shameful episode of our history, they will still be talking about a family named Zeitoun.then eight more pages of review excerpts, then eggers' biography and five URLs relating to his causes and projects. (then his autograph on a second title page; my sis got the book signed for me as an early birthday present.) fifteen pages, all told, before the story begins. hang on to your lemon zinger, it says. you're in for industrial-strength edification.
what zeitoun delivers is...exactly that, really. dave eggers' fiction has never really blown my hair back (his first novel, you shall know our velocity, tripped over its own feet;** the talking dog story in how we are hungry left me cold, and if there is a natural audience for talking dog stories, i am its rapporteur), but his nonfiction has an elegant vivacity i quite like: he curates a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, the story of how he raised his eight-year-old brother after their parents died, with a lot of charisma.*** the charisma's here as he presents the zeitoun family and hurricane katrina as well, but it's gotten sneakier: the exposed seams he flaunted in a heartbreaking work (so late 90's) now shape the tale invisibly. eggers uses a gorgeous syrian night fishing scene to introduce us to zeitoun (and how community and the sea are bound up for him), and he makes call after excellent call as he takes us through the family's flight to arizona, zeitoun's experience in the storm, and what happens after new orleans is overwhelmed. many reviewers speak of eggers' restraint, but that's not quite it: he does let the events speak for themselves, but it's his angles of approach (and the scenes he chooses) that really wallop. i kept whacking joe in the arm as we lay in our hotel room in montreal: "and now he's back at the house where he was feeding the starving dogs, and he looks under the window and - " "why do you tell me these things?!"****
long story short: eggers personalizes katrina and the war on terror with a lot of skill and a lot of heart. he will probably always make my snark glands go haywire, but that says more about my heart of tar than it does about him. zeitoun is wonderful.
VICTOR: black swan green. eggers out-directs mitchell (here, at least - i have a feeling cloud atlas would have a thing or two to say to him), and his raw material is lethal - but mitchell, free to eschew realism, is still fantastic. and then there's my heart of tar.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 what's your take on dave eggers? how much slack should one cut him in promoting zeitoun, given that it benefits noble causes? if you've read it, what did you think?
02 is away we go (the john krasinski / maya rudolph movie eggers wrote with his wife) worth seeing? i'll give it a chance if i must, but my instincts tell me to run.
03 have you ever heard of a "curate's egg"? (the term bobbed to the internet's surface as i was assembling this post; i think it's marvelous, and plan to use it all the time. note that zeitoun is not a curate's egg.)
04 what's your heart made of?
*previous battle here.
**see 10.14.03.
***amusingly, the reviewer in that times piece i linked writes that "Eggers has spent perhaps one too many semesters at the David Foster Wallace school of creative writing," then goes on to assure us that eggers's gimmicks are actually far less annoying than DFW's.
****zeitoun is second only to in-cold-blood-while-we-were-scouting-oxford-for-our-wedding as awkward vacation reading.
11.07.10
woolgathering & miscellany hosted a giveaway a few weeks ago, and because halloween really is the best day of my year, gracie informed me then that i won. huzzah!
i picked out a pair of mackage studded gloves, for i am thinking about freelancing as a strangler, and having ice-cold hands is considerably less enjoyable than having an ice-cold heart, even for stranglers. i suspected said gloves should be styled with fur, and lo:
watch your ass, kate lanphear - and thanks again, gracie!
woolgathering & miscellany hosted a giveaway a few weeks ago, and because halloween really is the best day of my year, gracie informed me then that i won. huzzah!
i picked out a pair of mackage studded gloves, for i am thinking about freelancing as a strangler, and having ice-cold hands is considerably less enjoyable than having an ice-cold heart, even for stranglers. i suspected said gloves should be styled with fur, and lo:
watch your ass, kate lanphear - and thanks again, gracie!
11.04.10: canada, part III {consumption}
while joe and i have a fairly jules-in-pulp-fiction, walk-the-earth approach to vacationing in new cities - we try to do one culturiffic thing a day, and to eat at least one significant meal, and otherwise we trail like ivy - i research ahead of time, a bit. for montreal i printed out two new york times "36 hours in..." articles, a guide to local brewpubs, and the design*sponge city guide, and i dug around the apartment until i turned up the little michelin guide i bought back in 2006. (you've been a long time coming, montreal.) all of that went into a big folder we named christina, which must have been confusing to any nefarious québecois operatives rolling with us. "where is dieu du ciel again?" "i don't know, check with christina!" "oh, fine!" [subject rummages in bag.]
poutine (shocker) was our first priority, and la banquise had vegetarian gravy; alors. (full disclosure: we went back for seconds a few days later when schwartz's deli was slammed like katz's here in new york. it was even better revisited.)
we wandered from la banquise to baldwin barmacie, a cocktail place which also serves grilled cheese sandwiches. something about our off-menu request for dark and stormies with cuban rum* must have pleased our server, for he materialized with three shots of tequila as we were leaving. we said the right thing at that point as well, i suppose, as he then ran away and came back with...three more? montreal: friendly like chicago. the only irritable person we encountered up there, in fact, was the poor guy at the other end of the number my out-of-date michelin guide told me to call to buy tickets for a show.
1: hello, do you still have tickets for the monster spectacular at the stade olympique tonight?
2: non!
1: you mean you had them and now they're sold out?
2: non!
we were watching canadian tv before bed on friday night, you see, and were informed that crushstation, the lobster monster truck, would be in montreal the following night. i didn't think much of it at the time, but i woke up on saturday morning convinced that fate was guiding us to a monster truck show in canada. i mean, i'd brought my grave digger shirt and everything. samedi, samedi, samedi! nous pouvons vous vendre toute la chaise, mais vous ayez besoin seulement du bord!**
i mean, people brought vuvuzelas. it was amazing.
we spent our last afternoon buying provisions for the train at atwater market, where i had the french conversation my high school language teacher always hoped i would have ("which maple syrup is your favorite?" "it depends: are you traveling by plane or by train?" "by train! how much is this pretty one on the left?"), and we had our last dinner at l'express, where they give each table a huge jar of cornichons just because they can. i didn't even mind that the blue moon caused a bridge fire at spuyten duyvil, a tunnel fire near penn station, and a derailment, all of which meant that we had to take a bus home in place of our lovely wine train. we mightn't be back to montreal for a while - we've got a lot of places to visit for the first time - but we'll be back.
{additional excellent places: mckiernan for lunch (note the bowie bathroom), dieu du ciel for beer and, yes, nachos, boris bistro for an unrushed, seasonal dinner, hotel st. paul for lovely rooms and a superlative lobby-lounge (and ginger chocolates on our pillow each night with a handwritten card predicting the next day's weather), the mmfa for maybe-preferable-to-moma contemporary art.}
{full set here.}
while joe and i have a fairly jules-in-pulp-fiction, walk-the-earth approach to vacationing in new cities - we try to do one culturiffic thing a day, and to eat at least one significant meal, and otherwise we trail like ivy - i research ahead of time, a bit. for montreal i printed out two new york times "36 hours in..." articles, a guide to local brewpubs, and the design*sponge city guide, and i dug around the apartment until i turned up the little michelin guide i bought back in 2006. (you've been a long time coming, montreal.) all of that went into a big folder we named christina, which must have been confusing to any nefarious québecois operatives rolling with us. "where is dieu du ciel again?" "i don't know, check with christina!" "oh, fine!" [subject rummages in bag.]
poutine (shocker) was our first priority, and la banquise had vegetarian gravy; alors. (full disclosure: we went back for seconds a few days later when schwartz's deli was slammed like katz's here in new york. it was even better revisited.)
we wandered from la banquise to baldwin barmacie, a cocktail place which also serves grilled cheese sandwiches. something about our off-menu request for dark and stormies with cuban rum* must have pleased our server, for he materialized with three shots of tequila as we were leaving. we said the right thing at that point as well, i suppose, as he then ran away and came back with...three more? montreal: friendly like chicago. the only irritable person we encountered up there, in fact, was the poor guy at the other end of the number my out-of-date michelin guide told me to call to buy tickets for a show.
1: hello, do you still have tickets for the monster spectacular at the stade olympique tonight?
2: non!
1: you mean you had them and now they're sold out?
2: non!
we were watching canadian tv before bed on friday night, you see, and were informed that crushstation, the lobster monster truck, would be in montreal the following night. i didn't think much of it at the time, but i woke up on saturday morning convinced that fate was guiding us to a monster truck show in canada. i mean, i'd brought my grave digger shirt and everything. samedi, samedi, samedi! nous pouvons vous vendre toute la chaise, mais vous ayez besoin seulement du bord!**
i mean, people brought vuvuzelas. it was amazing.
we spent our last afternoon buying provisions for the train at atwater market, where i had the french conversation my high school language teacher always hoped i would have ("which maple syrup is your favorite?" "it depends: are you traveling by plane or by train?" "by train! how much is this pretty one on the left?"), and we had our last dinner at l'express, where they give each table a huge jar of cornichons just because they can. i didn't even mind that the blue moon caused a bridge fire at spuyten duyvil, a tunnel fire near penn station, and a derailment, all of which meant that we had to take a bus home in place of our lovely wine train. we mightn't be back to montreal for a while - we've got a lot of places to visit for the first time - but we'll be back.
{additional excellent places: mckiernan for lunch (note the bowie bathroom), dieu du ciel for beer and, yes, nachos, boris bistro for an unrushed, seasonal dinner, hotel st. paul for lovely rooms and a superlative lobby-lounge (and ginger chocolates on our pillow each night with a handwritten card predicting the next day's weather), the mmfa for maybe-preferable-to-moma contemporary art.}
{full set here.}
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 have you ever had poutine? would you have it again?
02 does telling your spouse they can't buy a vuvuzela mean you don't really love them?
03 would you have gone to the monster spectacular?
04 how's your french?
05 have you ever been to montreal? what did you do there?
*i made an effort to find a smugglable bottle of havana club for the train ride home, but alas. they were all gigantic.
**my french has deteriorated since college. hush.
11.02.10
THUNDERTOME: ROUND 27
SURVIVOR: black swan green (david mitchell)*
CHALLENGER: although of course you end up becoming yourself (david lipsky)
in the interest of brevity, let's give this one a few preambulatory clauses, UN-security-council-resolution-style.
the blogger,
bearing in mind that david foster wallace is my favorite author and that my feelings about him and his work mean that the emotional bioavailability of any and all DFW-related prose is in my system pretty much absolute,
fully aware that although of course you end up becoming yourself, being an annotated, five-day, rolling-stone-commissioned interview with DFW, is perhaps even more awkward in THUNDERTOME (an arena, i'm realizing, for more traditional fiction and nonfiction) than elizabeth edwards's first memoir was,**
taking note of, as david lipsky puts it,
lipsky's sympathetic, observant, and funny: seeing wallace after his second reading in new york city (at an earlier point in the book tour), he notes that he looks "abashed and excited and comfortable, like someone on a personal water slide." he's quick to attempt to identify patterns in the way his subject presents himself, and can be rather cynical about the interviewer/ee relationship (DFW calls him a "tough room"). he acquits himself well in fast-paced cultural rallies (his knowledge of other authors' stats comes in handy there, as does his father's work as an ad man). his asides about the sort of bookstore culture which still existed fourteen years ago (so many of the stops on the book tour are now gone!) are intensely depressing - did that really happen that fast? - and well-considered, given how DFW talks about writing and reading. (if it's to make us, as he and franzen put it, "become less alone inside,"**** is it any wonder that the modern reader's literal isolation feels kind of horrible? maybe it's just me.) lipsky's take on DFW's feelings about fame could be problematic, but his intentions are good, and although of course you end up becoming yourself is intensely moving - both as a snapshot of a young genius and as "that kind of stomach magic of, 'God damn, it's fun to read. I'd rather read right now than eat.'" meet dave, again.
THUNDERTOME: ROUND 27
SURVIVOR: black swan green (david mitchell)*
CHALLENGER: although of course you end up becoming yourself (david lipsky)
in the interest of brevity, let's give this one a few preambulatory clauses, UN-security-council-resolution-style.
the blogger,
bearing in mind that david foster wallace is my favorite author and that my feelings about him and his work mean that the emotional bioavailability of any and all DFW-related prose is in my system pretty much absolute,
fully aware that although of course you end up becoming yourself, being an annotated, five-day, rolling-stone-commissioned interview with DFW, is perhaps even more awkward in THUNDERTOME (an arena, i'm realizing, for more traditional fiction and nonfiction) than elizabeth edwards's first memoir was,**
taking note of, as david lipsky puts it,
[W]hat I like best about [the five days recorded in the book] is that it sounds like David's writing. He was such a natural writer that he could talk in prose; for me, this has the magic of watching a guy in a business suit, big headphones, step into a gym and sink fifty foul shots in a row. This is what David was like at thirty-four--what he calls "all the French curls and crazy circles"--at one of the moments when the world opens up to you.1. calls upon the reader to get on this book. for newcomers, as its newsweek blurb promises, it's a "conversational entry point into david foster wallace's thought process;" for devotees like me (and lipsky, and some of you), it's the next best thing to being in his company (which, by all accounts, was singular and wonderful). lipsky was just thirty in march of 1996, when he flew out to illinois for the last leg of DFW's infinite jest book tour; i don't know much about being a young fiction author (he follows other authors' careers with the zeal i associate with friends who play fantasy sports), but i've been a young magazine type for a few years, and it's weirdly easy to imagine myself in his place - though if lipsky's take on the mid-'90s literary community is correct, i'd have been in the kitchen.
"All the girls are like, 'David Foster Wallace, he's really cool.' So the guys are like, 'I hate David Foster Wallace.'"in related news, i googled tim lincecum after the giants won the world series last night and the text field helpfully added girlfriend.***
[...]
In fact, a personal hardship, my own girlfriend had been reading only him, steadily, languorously. One afternoon, she took a cigarette into the kitchen to cool off, and I found this e-mail on her computer. She'd sent questions to an editor friend, who'd written back:
Mr. Wallace is cool-looking. A big hulking guy with long stringy hair. Looks sort of like a rock star. Perspires freely. Wears a do-rag, and participates in the urban American experience thusly. Is unmarried, I believe. What were your other questions?
lipsky's sympathetic, observant, and funny: seeing wallace after his second reading in new york city (at an earlier point in the book tour), he notes that he looks "abashed and excited and comfortable, like someone on a personal water slide." he's quick to attempt to identify patterns in the way his subject presents himself, and can be rather cynical about the interviewer/ee relationship (DFW calls him a "tough room"). he acquits himself well in fast-paced cultural rallies (his knowledge of other authors' stats comes in handy there, as does his father's work as an ad man). his asides about the sort of bookstore culture which still existed fourteen years ago (so many of the stops on the book tour are now gone!) are intensely depressing - did that really happen that fast? - and well-considered, given how DFW talks about writing and reading. (if it's to make us, as he and franzen put it, "become less alone inside,"**** is it any wonder that the modern reader's literal isolation feels kind of horrible? maybe it's just me.) lipsky's take on DFW's feelings about fame could be problematic, but his intentions are good, and although of course you end up becoming yourself is intensely moving - both as a snapshot of a young genius and as "that kind of stomach magic of, 'God damn, it's fun to read. I'd rather read right now than eat.'" meet dave, again.
VICTOR: black swan green - because lipsky was the entrant, not DFW. you got lucky, mitchell.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 would you want to interview someone you idolize?
02 given the opportunity to spend time with david foster wallace, how would you want to spend it?
03 do you think the publication of lipsky's book was inappropriately opportunistic? (aside: rolling stone spiked the piece lipsky had been commissioned to write back in 1996.)
04 do books need buildings? do we need books? (do you own or want a kindle?)
05 when was the last time you skipped a meal for a book?
06 have you read the boy, an unpublished story of DFW's (transcribed from a reading in 2000) which materialized on a tumblr account last week? what did you think?
*previous battle here.
**though i would certainly THUNDERTOME the five nights jack kerouac spent with neal cassady in the third, transcript section of kerouac's visions of cody, a book i disliked so intensely that i avoided kerouac altogether for a decade. (this book amplifies your life force as forcefully as visions of cody diminishes it.)
***i have no stake in whether or not tim lincecum has a girlfriend. just so we're clear.
****"The old tricks have been exploded, and I think the language needs to find new ways to pull the reader. And my personal belief is a lot of it has to do with voice, and a feeling of intimacy between the writer and the reader. That sorta, given the atomization and loneliness of contemporary life--that's our opening, and that's our gift."
10.28.10: canada, part II {the black and white}
{phoenix @ madison square garden;* farine five roses on the lachine canal; habitat 67; crane, vieux port; HQ, société canadienne d'opérette, rue saint-denis; graffiti, vieux port}
{phoenix @ madison square garden;* farine five roses on the lachine canal; habitat 67; crane, vieux port; HQ, société canadienne d'opérette, rue saint-denis; graffiti, vieux port}
*while madison square garden is hardly in canada, the phoenix show was mere hours before our train left penn station; i consider it part of the trip. also all francophones look alike.
10.26.10: canada, part I {the eleven-hour train ride with occasional haiku}
1118h:
met a nice dc couple taking a vacation identical to ours, right down to the non-plan and false start three years ago. they smoke; are they us in the past? the sight-seeing dome car is open, just in time for the backyards of albany.
cafe car coffee,
bird's-eye view of albany.
no rock-eaters yet.
we're told montreal's punk bars are on rue st. laurent.
1129h:
it's schenectady,
the city that lights the world!
too early for wine.
1236h:
yupster uncloaking:
an amarone, vintage
backgammon, and shame.
1346h:
ticonderoga:
halfway point! the leaf-peeping
is epic, like dune.
1415h:
joe pours wine in my shoe.
1651h:
customs. our seeded crackers are not confiscated. the earnest man behind us explains to the border agents how tamarind candy is made. ("it's no longer a fruit. it's been boiled, not by me.")
1737h:
canada appears to be phoning it in re: the picturesque. bah.
1758h:
sun just set. horizon afire in a mildly scary way.
1118h:
met a nice dc couple taking a vacation identical to ours, right down to the non-plan and false start three years ago. they smoke; are they us in the past? the sight-seeing dome car is open, just in time for the backyards of albany.
cafe car coffee,
bird's-eye view of albany.
no rock-eaters yet.
we're told montreal's punk bars are on rue st. laurent.
1129h:
it's schenectady,
the city that lights the world!
too early for wine.
1236h:
yupster uncloaking:
an amarone, vintage
backgammon, and shame.
1346h:
ticonderoga:
halfway point! the leaf-peeping
is epic, like dune.
1415h:
joe pours wine in my shoe.
1651h:
customs. our seeded crackers are not confiscated. the earnest man behind us explains to the border agents how tamarind candy is made. ("it's no longer a fruit. it's been boiled, not by me.")
1737h:
canada appears to be phoning it in re: the picturesque. bah.
1758h:
sun just set. horizon afire in a mildly scary way.
10.18.10
THUNDERTOME: ROUND 26
SURVIVOR: black swan green (david mitchell)*
CHALLENGER: the unnamed (joshua ferris)
joshua ferris's debut (then we came to the end, a deft and funny novel about an embattled chicago advertising firm) read like torture porn for me: i work in an industry which hemorrhages people all the time, so the layoffs in that book made my skin crawl. the pink slips are layered between clever little renderings of the firm's collective consciousness - the book is narrated in the first-person plural, which is both weird and somehow suited to the material - so the violins never swell too loudly, at least not at first.
ferris's second novel, the unnamed, couldn't crack a donut joke at gunpoint; it's also about suits and ties (and begins in midtown manhattan, the ultimate office space), but it's more like a cross between fight club and into the wild, and far less than the sum of those parts. it begins with what we're told is a recurrence of...something: tim, a fairly uninteresting new york city lawyer, comes home from work in a state of utter desolation, tears himself out of his corporate suit, and bundles up like an arctic explorer. he's once again suffering from the "unnamed," which is (a kind of ill-fitting reference to beckett's the unnamable, which ends with "i can't go on, i'll go on," and) a mysterious condition that forces tim to walk - instantly and mindlessly, for miles, generally out into the middle of nowhere, where he collapses in a deep sleep.
as one would imagine, this makes it rather tricky for tim to be a lawyer, and a husband (and a father, and someone who consistently has skin on the soles of his feet). i like ferris best when he's concentrating on what tim's condition costs him in his marriage and his relationship with his daughter; the scenes in his office make it difficult to understand why his professional identity is so important (ferris's workplace stuff was much more interesting in then we came to the end), and the man vs. himself segments in the last third of the unnamed - when tim's condition becomes an active foe, with a voice and a deadly yet tedious need to dominate and humiliate him - add little to the story. I am Jack's Lack of Interest in Amateur Experimental Fiction.
...but that's too harsh; i loved parts of david foster wallace's grad-school novel,** the broom of the system, and even DFW himself said it was a turkey. my point is that unless an author is my favorite author (or his work is adapted by one of my favorite directors), he really needs to earn the wild stuff - and in ferris's case, it detracts from some really wonderful family scenes. tim and his daughter watching buffy the vampire slayer DVDs together nearly broke my heart, and i mean that in all seriousness. stay out of the office and off the road, ferris. you belong at home for a bit.
THUNDERTOME: ROUND 26
SURVIVOR: black swan green (david mitchell)*
CHALLENGER: the unnamed (joshua ferris)
joshua ferris's debut (then we came to the end, a deft and funny novel about an embattled chicago advertising firm) read like torture porn for me: i work in an industry which hemorrhages people all the time, so the layoffs in that book made my skin crawl. the pink slips are layered between clever little renderings of the firm's collective consciousness - the book is narrated in the first-person plural, which is both weird and somehow suited to the material - so the violins never swell too loudly, at least not at first.
ferris's second novel, the unnamed, couldn't crack a donut joke at gunpoint; it's also about suits and ties (and begins in midtown manhattan, the ultimate office space), but it's more like a cross between fight club and into the wild, and far less than the sum of those parts. it begins with what we're told is a recurrence of...something: tim, a fairly uninteresting new york city lawyer, comes home from work in a state of utter desolation, tears himself out of his corporate suit, and bundles up like an arctic explorer. he's once again suffering from the "unnamed," which is (a kind of ill-fitting reference to beckett's the unnamable, which ends with "i can't go on, i'll go on," and) a mysterious condition that forces tim to walk - instantly and mindlessly, for miles, generally out into the middle of nowhere, where he collapses in a deep sleep.
as one would imagine, this makes it rather tricky for tim to be a lawyer, and a husband (and a father, and someone who consistently has skin on the soles of his feet). i like ferris best when he's concentrating on what tim's condition costs him in his marriage and his relationship with his daughter; the scenes in his office make it difficult to understand why his professional identity is so important (ferris's workplace stuff was much more interesting in then we came to the end), and the man vs. himself segments in the last third of the unnamed - when tim's condition becomes an active foe, with a voice and a deadly yet tedious need to dominate and humiliate him - add little to the story. I am Jack's Lack of Interest in Amateur Experimental Fiction.
...but that's too harsh; i loved parts of david foster wallace's grad-school novel,** the broom of the system, and even DFW himself said it was a turkey. my point is that unless an author is my favorite author (or his work is adapted by one of my favorite directors), he really needs to earn the wild stuff - and in ferris's case, it detracts from some really wonderful family scenes. tim and his daughter watching buffy the vampire slayer DVDs together nearly broke my heart, and i mean that in all seriousness. stay out of the office and off the road, ferris. you belong at home for a bit.
VICTOR: david mitchell, who wields the spooky like he was born with it in his pocket. how can a young american - even one who wipes out flocks of birds and swarms of bees for no apparent reason - compete?
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 are you able to watch/read workplace dramas without nausea? (i still don't know if i can deal with up in the air.)
02 how do you feel about fight club? what about samuel beckett?
03 speaking of david fincher, have you seen the social network? what did you think?
04 how have you been? i've missed you, imaginary reading group.
*previous battle here.
**(written there, not written about there, thank god)
10.13.10 {go team wedding, baby jo edition}
wedding DIY is a beast to document; i was across the country as jo, her friends, and my mom did most of their prep, and for the final 72 hours i juggled photos of making things with, you know, making things. also tacos.
wedding DIY is a beast to document; i was across the country as jo, her friends, and my mom did most of their prep, and for the final 72 hours i juggled photos of making things with, you know, making things. also tacos.
mom needed something to trim the hat box in which she was giving chris and jo part of their wedding present; ten minutes and a stack of vintage book-guts later, she'd made this. (i had to mail the first part of our gift, a c.1970 ice bucket shaped like a diving bell, so i defaulted to our family's other traditional presentation method, which is to make a creepy tuneless noise and gift a thing with no wrapping at all.)
aisle garland with hand-punched paper and fishing line, wound and wound for days and days prior to our arrival; "i made it long enough to go up and down the hallway six times," said mom. someone might or might not have been lifted from the ground by their lapels on saturday when they told her the garland had slipped from the bucket and gotten too tangled to use down on the beach; i wasn't there.
i was around in plenty of time for the table numbers; jo freehanded the shapes, em lined the cutouts with rubber cement and wax paper, and i painted like a helper monkey. long night, night 2 (my mother hand-sewed the rolled grass runners in the background in that craft dungeon shot; they were too wide to load into the sewing machine).
the best man, justin, is a vintagemaster; he spent a year collecting mystery objects in and around los angeles. each of the eighteen tables had (hand-sewn, pocket-folded napkins, vials of sea salt, wee menus tucked into each napkin, and) a collection of spyglasses, scales, hurricanes, candlesticks, orbs...especially candlesticks and orbs. i believe we had three glue guns going at once (to turn the sticks into pedestals for terraria and more succulents).
justin also brought in mason jar lights for the hallway between the cocktail patio and the reception hall; kate, maid of honor extraordinaire, secured them to the ceiling. i can take or leave fashion tape, but i love a woman with an electric staple gun.
10.12.10 {go team wedding, baby jo edition}
day I, 0800h: after a late-night arrival at wedding HQ, we awaken to grueling weather and an atrocious view. it is excruciating.
day I, 0800h: after a late-night arrival at wedding HQ, we awaken to grueling weather and an atrocious view. it is excruciating.
day I, 1000h: an argument concerning the proper way to hollow out a vintage book that is to be hand-painted and planted with succulents (and who should do so) yields my favorite mother-of-the-bride quote of all time: "look, i'm stronger than you, and i can fuck up my hands."
day I, 1200h: joe realizes his main duties will be to shop for food and alcohol and to stay out of the way.
day III, 0900h: i discover that the shortcut to an amazing bridal party makeup session conversation is to ask one's artist about her work in special effects. mine (chelsea) had just wrapped a film about cyberattacks and survivalists, so we got to skip over the magic of marriage and girliness and talk about continuity with bruises and gunshots ("most of the wounded died pretty quickly, so i didn't have to advance them too much from day to day"), blood sources (unlike my college roommate the stage blood factory, chelsea preferred to purchase stuff called myblood), and plausible vomit (one of the actors had to puke onscreen, so she had to whip up something that both looked right and wouldn't taste horrible*). i wear false eyelashes for the first time.
day III, 1500h: as solo prep shots go down indoors, the bridal party turns to taking running starts and whipping tiny green apples** into the ocean from the balcony, a pastime which is significantly more popular with the throwers than it is with the purchasers of the throwers' engagement and wedding rings.
day III, 1630h: the wedding party arrives for a shoot at turk's. formalwear and our giant box of bouquets confuse local barflies; we tell them we're carrying a body. i sip my shot instead of cowboying up for photos, for i am a mean old lady. an order of onion rings is tucked in the flower box.
day III, 1730h: a girl i've known since she was six reads the same wallace stevens poem paul read at our wedding in england. my baby sister is married.
day III, 2000h: stanford beats usc with seconds to spare. the bride's family gloats.
*apple juice, oatmeal, and mashed banana, if you were wondering. the vomit i mocked up as a child to try to get out of school, by contrast, was bread crumbs and vinegar, since i merely had to point at it.
**rejects from the Tiny Caramel Apple Dessert Project, a popular but grueling wedding craft that was farmed out to professionals at the eleventh hour. (we still had to provide the apples, which was a bit weird.)
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