09.25.13

joe and i failed to discourage occupation of the seat between us on monday night's extremely full redeye flight from phoenix to new york city—it is hard to look menacing and/or pestilential when one is simply an X on a plane diagram—and we both ended up in armrest turf skirmishes with our neighbor, a rather pushy gentleman. i eventually crossed my arms and fell asleep, so i didn't apply much of the constant, firm pressure that is my signature border control. joe, more wakeful, went for active defense via sharp jabs. who maintains their territory with open hostility like that? it never ends well.

09.20.13

CONSUMED: A PARTIAL LIST.

beautiful ruins (book). torn at the jfk jetblue terminal book kiosk between hate-reading tom wolfe's latest* and buying beautiful ruins, an unknown novel that sparkled like a stephenie meyer vampire, i went for the sparkle; it was a new york times times best book of the year, its first sentence ("The dying actress arrived in his village the only way one could come directly—in a boat that motored into the cove, lurched past the rock jetty, and bumped against the end of the pier.") seemed more promising, and it turned out (o shame!) that the author, jess walter, is a man. yes, i am apparently more likely to get past a book's glittery cover if its author is male, and i hate myself for it. ironically, my biggest disappointment with beautiful ruins (which has dazzling, complicated, david-mitchell-esque descriptions tucked all over the place) is how male it can be; that dying actress is kind of a snooze, a foil for male leads, and a prostitute's work is described so unkindly that i felt in reading about her like i'd missed the point of her character altogether. not an epic romance, this, but a solid series of travelogues. a good book to meet at the beginning of a trip to a place in the sun.

changing places (book). i've spent something like fifteen years feeling guilty for really, really hating nice work, the third novel in david lodge's "campus trilogy;" when i found the first one, changing places, at a thrift store, i felt it was time to give the old fellow another chance. i enjoy it when people make fun of berkeley, so the scenes set in the fictional bay area city of plotinus, in the state of euphoria, were mildly entertaining (the other "place" in the title is rummidge, modeled on birmingham in england; a mousy professor from rummidge trades jobs with a rock-star academic from plotinus, and what-count-as-hijinks-when-you're-an-englishman-of-a-certain-age ensue). a lot of changing places is about the titillations of wife-swapping, and while i can sort of understand why a novelist would be excited about that in 1975, it feels awfully juvenile now. a lot of changing places is also experimental (chapters written as scripts, chapters written as newspaper clippings, conclusions completely ignored), and i hated that as much here as i did when jennifer egan rocked it in goon squad. thanks but no thanks, lodge.

lost at sea (book). welsh journalist jon ronson's "mini-adventure stories" (in this collection, mostly his guardian articles) are tasty, and i appreciate his investigative vim (he followed a psychic on a mediterranean cruise for one piece and took an intense church of england evangelical course for another). i haven't yet decided how i feel about how he reacts to the weird data he collects; he doesn't always seem interested in journalistic objectivity, even in the presence of his subjects, and his pieces end abruptly, as if tipping his hand throughout each essay left him without material for conclusions. the american writer john jeremiah sullivan covers a similar variety of weird pop subjects in pulphead (compare his "on this rock," on a christian music festival, to ronson's "and god created controversy," on insane clown posse) with what feels like much greater success, because he's...writing for magazines and has more time on his hands? that seems unfair. more empathetic? no, ronson isn't unfeeling. my friend cara recommended ronson's the psychopath test, a book-length examination of "the madness industry;" i picked it up from the library this afternoon and will report back with my findings on those findings.

love's labour's lost (musical). by the last week of this year's shakespeare in the park season we were sure we wouldn't make it through the online ticket lottery, so i bit my lip, spread out a poncho in the dirt, and camped for three hours in the standby line. a bad man with a saxophone played show tunes at us for one of those hours, some acorns beaned us, and we didn't get seats until the show had been underway for ten minutes, but i think everything that needed to happen happened: the seats we eventually got were fantastic, and the show was boiled down to its essential plot points (a bunch of bros swear off women, then reconsider) and filled in with songs and pop riffs like "single ladies" and "to be with you" (this love's labour's lost is a musical), so we didn't miss, like, crucial exposition. as joe noted, the production was a bit like stoner cooking: a big mess thrown together with confidence that the end result will be satisfying. that's true both as a criticism (some of the random pop references felt like too much; i think the audience could have been trusted to appreciate the text as shakespeare wrote it, without prompting or seasoning**) and as a compliment (the show was a lot of fun, even though some of it was cheap fun; this was the summer of poutine theater, and i'm still okay with that). some of the new music is solid stuff, and "love's a gun" in particular ("in the end there's still a marriage to someone you hardly know"), minus its cheesy power-ballad ending, is a bright and painful takedown of the comedies. this show will end up on broadway, i think; my virtual-line bitching aside, i hope this means broadway audiences end up in shakespeare as well.

mooncakes (pastries). "you should get some of these at the bakery on essex," said joe, and so i did: three lotus-seed mini-cakes, one lotus-seed cake, one mixed-nut cake, and one bitter-melon cake with a salted duck egg baked into the center. according to the chinese lunar calendar, the mid-autumn festival is september 19-21 this year, and mooncakes are gifted and eaten to celebrate prosperity and the harvest, in memory of a mythical archer and his beloved, sort of. the lotus cakes tasted a bit like the japanese red-bean wagashi i've gotten from minamoto kitchoan, the nut cake tasted like a slightly-mysterious pecan pie, and the bitter-melon cake with salted duck egg tasted like a thousand years of suffering at the hands of vindictive ancestors. i will try any (vegetarian) thing once, but i would have to lose a poker game nicolas-cage-in-honeymoon-in-vegas-style before i'd take another bite of one of those.

mr. burns (play). if i can get over the idea that i might have to see a musical every now and again, joe and i might go ahead and subscribe to playwrights horizons, which has yet to present us with anything less than capital entertainment. this time around we bought almost blindly and ended up seeing mr. burns, the best post-apocalyptic love song to people who quote the simpsons i'll probably ever see. it follows a handful of scrappy nuclear-meltdown survivors who pass the time by helping each other remember "cape feare" (episode 2, season 5), in which the simpsons move to terror lake via the witness relocation program because sideshow bob has been sending bart death threats. it's eventually about everything from storytelling and memory to gilbert and sullivan and britney spears (mr. burns deploys "toxic" almost as well as jen did at her wedding last year), and it's absurd and moving and wildly clever. it was also rather splattery at our matinee: one of the actresses whacked the blood pack on her chest a bit too enthusiastically, and joe and the guy in front of him took jets of stage blood to their chests. no big; at intermission i asked the assistant stage manager how he made his blood (it was detergent-based and "very washable"). culture in a blender and an unexpected splash zone: best day ever?

savages @ webster hall (concert). silence yourself (savages' debut album, just shortlisted for the mercury prize) is one of the best albums i've brought home in a long time, and their concert was the best live event i've attended in years; jehnny beth is utterly riveting on stage, ian curtis's geometry multiplied by pj harvey's gravitational field plus siouxsie sioux's upper register and diamond-sharp red heels. savages aren't exciting because they're women, they're exciting because they're confident and uncompromising and blisteringly talented, but i'd be lying if i said it was anything less than thrilling to watch music like that pour out of people who look like me. in, you know, a very poorly-lit room.

sweet tooth (book). hooray for giving ian mcewan one last chance! his latest, a novel about a beautiful young cambridge graduate who ends up working for MI5 (the UK's domestic counterintelligence agency) and grooming a young author to write novels favorable to the government, is a cross between atonement and a pulpy old john le carré novel (fine work on an unreliable female narrator's inner life plus meditations on writing plus safe houses and mysterious scraps of paper). in the sunday book review kurt andersen called it "about as entertaining as a very intelligent novel can be and vice versa," and he's right; it's an extremely fun book that doesn't feel trashy and an extremely thoughtful book that doesn't make you want to walk into the sea. i kind of want to send it to david lodge.

the world's end (film). it's entirely possible that simply getting to spend two air-conditioned hours in a large, plush, mostly-empty, probably-VD-free southern california movie theater in which no one texted or shouted or answered their damn phone made it impossible for me to dislike the world's end, but i think i'd be a fan anyway; i liked both shaun of the dead and hot fuzz, i appreciate how simon pegg and nick frost aren't too vain to play unlikable characters who don't especially deserve happy endings, and the idea that the corporate standardization of british pubs is probably one of the more visible signs of the coming apocalypse makes total sense to me. also the fights are really spectacular. god, i'm still thinking about that air conditioning.


imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 how do you feel about tom wolfe?
02 do you judge books by their covers?
03 is following a psychic on a cruise ship the welsh version of david foster wallace's "a supposedly fun thing i'll never do again"?
04 have you ever had a mooncake? what did you think?
05 would getting splattered with stage blood upset you?
06 what made the last great concert you attended so great?
07 if you're a fan of the pegg/frost family of products, which movie is your favorite?


*delightful as his emperor-of-ice-cream suits may be, i cannot forgive tom wolfe for i am charlotte simmons. never forget, internet.

**at one point armado auditions sonnet 29 as a love note for jaquenetta, and he and his friends dismiss it immediately; the joke was solid, but it also felt like broadway pouring one out for dear, departed (traditional) productions of yore.

09.16.13

101 in 1001 {III}: 027 go to the bronx zoo [completed 09.15.13]



i spend a lot of time thinking about animal parks, which is unsurprising, given the rigors of maintaining ye olde birthday cakes for animals tumblr (it is no picnic: the panda photos really start to bleed together after the third or fourth month, and the internet still seems to lack interest in fêting reptiles*). ethics of anthropomorphism aside, we have a complicated history: when i was growing up in southern california, local heavies included a drive-through safari at which an african elephant broke free, killed one of her trainers, and forced the closure of two freeways; the san diego zoo (linked in the early '90s to hunting farms); and sea world (enough said). irresponsible animal parks are nightmarish, but conscientious ones are invaluable to conservationists. the bronx zoo is the flagship urban animal park of the wildlife conservation society, a nonprofit which receives excellent ratings from groups like charity navigator and kicks ass when it comes to, say, taking care of little snow leopards. we made a point of visiting the zoo this weekend because they've just started letting the public have a look at this five-month-old fellow, asleep with his mum five feet away from us in my photo; he's the firstborn son of leo, a leopard cub who was orphaned in the mountains of pakistan back in 2005 and rescued and hand-fed by a shepherd (seriously). thank you, bronx zoo, for being the sort of animal park that spearheads worldwide leopard-saving efforts and not the sort of animal park that plunks its big-cat exhibits right next to a shrieking merry-go-round (i'm looking at you, national zoo). the zoo's extensive grounds seemed to suit all of the animals we visited, actually, and once i have figured out how to hang out with tigers without weeping openly i will probably start making a point of going there on a regular basis. oh, tigers.

*with the notable exception of the late krakatoa, a komodo dragon who has been appreciated by like 27,000 people thus far. you fascinate me, internet, but i will probably never understand you.

09.12.13

   I'm sitting next to Evelyn, the woman with the stomach cramps. "My heart's racing to see if she calls out my name," she whispers. Evelyn has come on this cruise specifically to ask Sylvia about her stomach pain.
   "Evelyn," Sylvia calls.
   She walks up to the microphone.
   "Uh," she stammers.
   "Speak up, honey," Sylvia says.
   "Um," Evelyn says.
   Sylvia looks impatient.
   "I—uh—think I've got a poltergeist in my house because things keep moving in my dishwasher," Evelyn says quickly. "Can you tell me the poltergeist's name?"
   "The poltergeist is an older relative called Doug," Sylvia says.
   "Thank you, Sylvia," Evelyn says.
   She sits back down. I look at her. She shrugs.

(jon ronson, from lost at sea: the jon ronson mysteries)

09.11.13

"Well, [biographer Richard] Holmes is the great master of the quest, of the search. But there is the moment in Footsteps, when he is following [Robert Louis] Stevenson and finds himself on the bridge he thought Stevenson crossed, and then sees another bridge a few hundred yards away and realizes it was the other one. The point is that you can do a parallel journey, but however close you feel to the person—you've held his or her letters, seen what's been crossed out, got the journals, you've been in touch, as it were—you've got to be careful of not putting on the same clothes your subject did, of not eating the same thing. A good day's work, I think, is when at the end of the day I've written something I didn't know at the beginning.

[...]

I think I'm two people—the researcher and the writer. The researcher spends quite a lot of time going abroad, working in libraries, seeing letters. I sometimes turn to the writer, who is doing nothing at that point—who is sleeping!—and I say, Do you want this bit about [George Bernard] Shaw bicycling? And the writer doesn't know. He says, You're the researcher, you decide. So the researcher thinks, Well, that's really not important. And the researcher is always longing to be writing, getting on with the actual problem we created. Then the writer takes over, shuts the door to the world, and kicks back on this researcher who was traveling the world, meeting people, making discoveries, and he says, Why the hell is there no documentation here about Shaw and the bicycle? This part of Shaw's life is exactly about how things were happening more quickly, whereas before he was on foot."

(michael holroyd to lisa cohen, from "the art of biography no. 3," the paris review summer 2013)

09.08.13

at the risk of being the girl who insists all gatherings are better in cemeteries, i'm starting to feel like all gatherings are better in cemeteries. my little sister and esb and i rolled out to see scream* at cinespia at hollywood forever when i was out in los angeles for matty in july, and i insisted on a follow-up trip when joe and i were back in town two weeks ago. this time we saw back to the future, so hobbyists' souped-up old deloreans ant-marched around the cemetery grounds. the crowd was a bit less costumed than it had been for scream's ninetiesfest (really, los angeles? who doesn't have an old puffer vest and/or a prom dress?), but it was enthusiastic, and it seemed to appreciate our complicated picnic accessories. we planned separate menus for encampments in line and in front of the screen, swapped cheese for wine with the kids on blankets behind us, and toasted absent friends as the sun ducked like a starlet behind the mausoleums. i'll say it again: new york, please try harder.

*was skeet ulrich ever plausible as a teenager? he's that franchise's gabrielle carteris. also, esb had never seen scream. what?!

09.06.13

i'm closing in on the wild-haired and dirty-eyed final week of shipping the november issue at work and can't in good conscience write at length about our nine days in southern california (we got back this monday), but i feel like* it would be selfish to stagger into the weekend without airing this photo of my family at guelaguetza. i'm sentimental like that.

*that post (and the jezebel post it references) is actively insipid. have you ever known a thing to be actively insipid? it's both depressing and kind of impressive.

09.02.13

the dirty dozen {notes from my hometown police blotter, as reported by the oc register}*

Suspicious person/circumstance. 10:19 p.m. A male subject was sitting with a hammer in his hand.
Disturbance. 5:12 p.m. An informant in the principal's office at Hidden Hills Elementary said skateboarders were using picnic tables.
Disturbance. 6:59 p.m. A woman called about a 7-year-old child who was abusive to her dog and her daughter.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 9:15 a.m. The caller reported finding two cash registers on his lawn.
Disturbance. 6:29 p.m. The caller said six children are throwing rocks at nine ducklings along the bike trail. The caller yelled at them and is a little concerned they may come after him next.
Suspicious person. 10:46 a.m. A woman was pulling plants out of people's yards.
Suspicious person. 4:47 p.m. A gallon size plastic bag was attached to a street sign. The caller said it looked like pencils inside and said it didn't look normal.
Disturbance. 9:25 p.m. A caller reported that someone threw a gallon of milk at his house 10 minutes ago. He doesn't know who did it but there are three people standing nearby in the dark in a hallway.
Citizen assist, 3:28 p.m. Someone reported people handing out religious material to students coming out of school.
Keeping the peace, 7:42 p.m. A man said his neighbor was giving baseball lessons in his own backyard and it was too loud.
Petty theft. 10:49 a.m. A man said someone used a rock to break into the candy vending machine at a construction project he supervises and stole $50 in candy. The damage to the machine was $100.
Shoplifting. 9:05 a.m. An employee of Ralphs said a man took a 24-ounce can of Budweiser into the bathroom and drank it without paying. The loss was $1.94.

*previous installment here.

08.20.13

   When the group broke from the conversation around the table to pose for a family photo outside, they continued their easy patter on books and pop culture. Joe's corgi, McMurtry, named after the novelist Larry McMurtry, was insistently present, so that someone catching snippets, from a distance, of the family's conversation into the yard would have heard something like this: "Neil Gaiman ... Spielberg ... McMurtry! McMurtry! ... Cronenberg ... Matt Groening ... McMurtry!"
   "Did you see that picture of John Irving that ran somewhere—he was coming out of some swamp with his shirt off?" Owen asked. "He looked like a ninja."

(from susan dominus's "children of the pen," on stephen king's family)

08.15.13

the dirty dozen {notes from my hometown police blotter, as reported by the oc register}*

Suspicious person/circumstances. 9:47 p.m. The caller said a pizza delivery guy came to the door with a pizza but she didn't order any.
Found property. 5:10 p.m. The caller said he was using a metal detector and found a knife.
Disturbance. 10:47 p.m. The caller reported four men smoking out of a bong at the community center softball field.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 10:12 p.m. The caller said a "big-time drug dealer" is going to be doing a huge drug deal at the In-N-Out.
Reckless driving. 10:55 a.m. The caller reported a woman in a Jetta "hugging" the curb and hitting the sidewalk.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 12:21 a.m. The caller said all lights are on at Carl's Jr. and it's a 24-hour drive-through, but there are signs on the doors saying "closed, sorry for the inconvenience" and registers are wrapped in black trash bags.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 10:01 a.m. The caller said a man set up a tent in the Little League first base dugout area.
Keep the peace. 4:15 p.m. The caller said he negotiated a purchase of a printer on eBay and was told by the owner to drive to Beverly Hills and pick it up. When he got there, a woman was standing there with the printer and said she's handling the sale, but she's not who he spoke to and she's denying knowing that person. The caller said it's very shady.
Disturbance. 11:55 p.m. The caller said his drunken friend is not acting normal.
Assist outside agency. 6:30 a.m. A bobcat or mountain lion reportedly was spotted in a resident's back yard.
Citizen assist. 6:25 p.m. A woman said she left her driver's license and credit card in her lover's trousers. Her lover then went home to his wife, who was angry and now had both her ID and credit card, she said. She called sheriff's deputies in an attempt to retrieve her property, officials said.
Suspicious person/circumstances. 1:42 p.m. The caller reported two men mowing the lawn and thought it was suspicious because they're driving a small U-Haul instead of a truck.

*previous installment here.

08.13.13

it was nearly summertime when i passed the stacked cages of kittens at the southern end of the union square greenmarket. the rescue group's volunteer turned to me as if we were reentering a conversation much older than our acquaintance: "you'd make a good mama," she said slowly and somehow regally, and i hurried into whole foods and let the frosty air shrink me until i was small enough to hide behind the pineapples and cry.

as when jude died, years ago, petfinder was how i reminded myself that mourning wasn't the only thing: so many cats needed homes, and if i found the one who was supposed to come home to us, joe and steve and i would know what to do with the feelings that had no place to go after chuck died. i found cats who looked just like steve did when he was a baby, hemingway cats with miraculous extra toes, cats whose shelter reports were barely believable as country songs. in june i found matty.























back in march i cancelled our trip to visit my sister in southern california to stay in new york city as chuck died. matty was born in southern california then—not too far from where i myself was born—and i can't tell you how good it felt to trade in those useless plane tickets last month and fly out to bring him home.

i think sometimes of how joseph campbell describes the psychological, pedagogical functions of myth—how it carries us through crises, and helps people 'grasp the unfolding of life with integrity.' we atheists are like caddisfly larvae when it comes to myth, boy; in the absence of a collective narrative, we'll build shit to protect ourselves out of anything. at a birthday brunch in downtown los angeles, my sister's friends blinked at me: "you know there are homeless cats in new york city too, right?" "what if someone said, 'we really want to adopt a kid who's norwegian'?"

matty's foster mom named him matisse, so we called him matty in the weeks between when she told us we could adopt him and when i flew out to meet them both. it became clear that we weren't going to be able to call him anything else—he just is a matty—so we started chewing on names. matthew barney? matthew arnold? mathlete? he was found skittering around a parking lot in anaheim, his foster had told me, so we named him the matterhorn. in my myth he was in this photo all along, waiting for us.

08.09.13

CONSUMED: A PARTIAL LIST.

babayaga (book). toby barlow's book-length werewolf poem introduced me to a new breed of supernatural fiction, and i was thrilled when his follow-up novel materialized here at my office. scrappy eastern-european witches and noirish spy types in postwar paris, you guys! smoking owl pellets, turning policemen into fleas, and, er, developing ad campaigns (i'm probably ready for TB's other career in marketing to stop informing his novels)! this one (in prose, except for the witches' songs) is also wildly inventive—the subplot about the policemen who become fleas is particularly lovely, and the magic is fascinating and brutal—but it is also seriously patchy. the central love story falls kind of flat, and the main character, he of the ad campaigns, is so undercharacterized that i had a hard time caring about what happened to him. while i still think barlow's work is umpteen times more interesting that your average summer murder-in-paradise pop fiction, i also think he needs to crank up the lyrical spookiness with his next project; it's still the most exciting thing about his work.

the bling ring (film). sofia coppola's latest, based on a vanity fair true-crime piece called "the suspects wore louboutins," follows emma watson and several other sweet-and-sour young things as they burgle* their way through star-spangled los angeles. hey, there they are in paris hilton's house (seriously, coppola filmed there)! it's megan fox and brian austin green's unexpectedly-tasteful stuff! it's gavin rossdale, "acting"! i suppose one could argue that the film's anemic plot and abrupt ending double down on its characters' superficiality and junior-varsity existentialism, but let's call a spade a spade: the bling ring is exquisitely-composed television,** not a movie. i miss lost-in-translation-era sofia c.

the comedy of errors (play). shakespeare in the park is playing to the groundlings this summer: both of the public's 2013 offerings are comparatively short (90 and 100 minutes, respectively), intermission-free comedies, and the second (love's labour's lost) is a musical by the folks who brought us bloody bloody andrew jackson and peter and the starcatcher, which is probably why joe and i haven't been able to score tickets via the virtual line (for three goddamn weeks we've been trying! get out of my line, broadway types!). comedy's goofy double-mistaken-identity plot is perfect for extra-broad, scooby-doo-times-three's-company hijinks, and the cast was up for it. hamish linklater and jesse tyler ferguson are accomplished clowns, and it was satisfying to see them with a full show's worth of the sort of material shakespeare usually hands them for short riffs. 90 minutes of, like, the pyramus-and-thisbe slapstick from a midsummer night's dream is not the sort of thing i need to see every summer, but this summer it was grand. also, it began with "sigh no more" performed as a forties-era torch song! that was as satisfying as watching a nun hand out licorice (grand street, i salute you).

the dog stars (book). a world-devouring superflu has killed almost everyone on earth; now a man flies a prop plane around colorado with his trusty dog, occasionally feeding him the survivors they encounter. on paper the dog stars sounds like a touchy-feely post-apocalyptic cross between illusions and the road, and it...is, but that's not such a bad thing. peter heller is a widely-published outdoor writer, and he writes like a guy who's spent a lot of nights in a tent (i recognize this type because i spent a lot of nights in my backyard in a tent). he also writes like a guy who really loves dogs, like a guy who's taken care of a white-muzzled dog or two, and the way he describes old jasper, man-jerky-eating aside, breaks me right in half. i don't tend to recommend novels i've enjoyed to joe—raymond chandler is maybe the only writer i've gotten under his skin—but i might have a go with this one; it's an elegant alternative to those child-contestant-killing and brain-chomping ends of the world you hear so much about these days. it is also, predictably, solid in-flight reading.

great plains (book). ian frazier, dear reader, is a motherfucking delight. i think i have a crush on his curiosity: he knows just when to ignore a story's paved route and crash through the laundry lines in someone's backyard. i came out of his travels in siberia nearly as besotted with the place as he is, and this earlier account of how he cobwebbed across the US in a nasty old van in search of ghost towns and crazy horse's people makes me want to bully my stepsister into letting me drive her car to california.*** he presents watching the beautiful robinson sisters of nicodemus, kansas perform a founder's-day dance in church-lady clothes to prince's "when doves cry" as an unironic peak life experience (or platonic anamnesis, depending on where you're sitting?), and i totally buy it.

the master builder (play). i like both john turturro and ibsen, and i made the mistake of thinking i would like john turturro in ibsen (as halvard solness, the titular builder). i'm almost alright with having made this mistake, for katherine borowitz**** as his bereaved and thrown-over wife was fascinating, if not as fascinating as ibsen's other ladies. solness is supposedly tormented (the next generation is clawing at his heels! his erections, har har, are few and far between! he has an annoying and probably imaginary young friend in a petticoat!), but turturro just seemed irritated, like a guy who promised himself he'd remember to buy coffee on the way home last night and woke up to a cupboard of weird old tea. fortunately my theatregoing ladydate kinda hated the show as well, and collective indignation is a hallmark of our friendship, so the evening ended on a high note.


imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 have you ever gotten into trouble in mexico?

02 what would your version of "sigh no more" sound like?

03 blood meridian was unreadable for me. should i give cormac mccarthy another chance and read the road, or should i move on and read some young-adult vampire novels instead?

04 how many nights have you spent in a tent?

05 do you pass books on to significant others?

06 team joan or team ian. pick a side.


*emma watson's "i want to rob," pronounced in her best unskilled-british-mimic's-approximation-of-a-so-cal-accent, is funny but misleading: robbery is, say it with me now, the taking of property by force or threat of force.

**call it an extraterrestrially-gorgeous episode of the OC, perhaps one of the ones where marissa cooper gets into trouble in mexico.

***joan didion, she of the languid cigarette and the white stingray on a thousand pinterest boards, never brings me along on her "secular communion" with freeways. i'm turning into the sort of reader and perhaps the sort of writer who needs generosity in her nonfiction. and muchness.

****turturro's offstage spouse, as it happens.