Yes, David Cross is spanking Jonathan Ames

And who, if asked, wouldn't?
I was too slow to get my own camera out, and maybe too slack-jawed. This pic is from the faster shutter of chobotic. You sort of had to be there to get the full flavor. Nothing like a Brooklyn Book Fest. It could make a person want to read a book.

Ne te quaesiveris extra

There is nothing like a Harold Bloom op-ed piece, there is nothing like a Grateful Dead concert, and there is no similarity between a Grateful Dead concert and a Harold Bloom op-ed piece - is there? Certainly I know which one I'd rather be involved in if I were, uh, schnockered. Anyway, HB's piece in the Times today makes me want to go back and re-read Emerson's Self Reliance. While listening to all 6 sides of Europe '72.

(Ne te quaesiveris extra... unless you have to.)

Arts & Letters Daily

Friend & neighbor, DL, reminds me about the Arts & Letters Daily - Gadzooks!  Seems impossible for so much stuff to be crammed into one place at one time.  Juju might enjoy this one of bazillions of entries:

David Foster Wallace’s voice was the voice in your own head. But what was the voice in his head?...A.O. Scott ... Morgan Meis ... Joshua Ferris ... Tim Kreider ... Michiko Kakutani ... Monica Hesse ...Colby Cosh ... Mark Caro ... Sam Anderson ...Christopher Hays ... Richard Woodward ... Tim Martin ... Steve Almond ... Peter Craven ... Julian Gough ... Lev Grossman ... Sven Birkerts, Joyce Carol Oates, et al. ... Fritz Lanham ... Elizabeth Wurtzel ...Verlyn Klinkenborg ... Alex Rose ... satire

Timothy

I've been re-reading "Timothy: or, Notes of an Abject Reptile," by Verlyn Klinkenborg. It's based on the observations of 18th century naturalist Gilbert White as recorded in his own, "The Natural History of Selbourne" and it's told from the point of view of Timothy, the (female) tortoise carried away from her home in the Greek isles by an English sailor, sold for half a crown on the docks of Chichester, and eventually settling in as a permanent resident of White's garden in Selbourne, England.

As caretaker of the enigmatic Ak (a Russian tortoise I purchased at the Petland Discount seven years ago for $40 US), certain passages of the book fill me with guilt. For example, Timothy describing the years spent confined in the brick-walled courtyard of her first mistress, Mrs. Rebecca Snooke.

Kin by close blood, Mrs. Rebecca Snooke. Mr. Gilbert White's father's sister. (So precise they are in the degrees of kinship!) And yet how these humans differ in appearance, compared to the resemblance of tortoises one to another, kin or no kin. Mr. Gilbert White was always struck by the fact that I recognized Mrs. Rebecca Snooke.

She comes into the courtyard waving a lettuce-leaf.

Calling from on high, "Timothy! Timothy!"

Who else could it have been? In forty years only a few humans ever entered that courtyard. Gardeners, maids, young Whites, select friends, Mr. Manning, the doctor. Each one as different as a rook from a redbreast.

Was Mr. Gilbert White never struck by the fact that Mrs. Rebecca Snooke recognized me? If another of my kind had walked up to her on that pebbled path, could she have told the difference? Or would that tortoise have been Timothy too? She knew little enough about me in the end.

"I was much taken," Mr. Gilbert White wrote of me, "with its sagacity in discerning those that do it kind offices: for, as soon as the good old lady comes in sight who has waited on it for more than thirty years, it hobbles towards its benefactress with awkward alacrity; but remains inattentive to strangers. Thus not only 'the ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib,' but the most abject reptile and torpid of beings distinguishes the hand that feeds it, and is touched with the feelings of gratitude!"

Good old lady she was. Yet consider the levity, the dry prolixity, of Mr. Gilbert White's words. The casual human irony when talking about animals. "Awkward alacrity" -- "most abject reptile and torpid of beings" -- this I expect. "Ox" or "ass" I pass by, as I do "owner" and "master." Such words come naturally to humans. Students of property as well as kinship. Kinship a property in each other.

But place Mrs. Rebecca Snooke in a brick box apart from her natural kind. Where she cannot eat her natural food or dig her natural bed. Let her be fed twice a day, albeit cheerfully, by one who keeps her there. Be kind and withhold the drowning rains, the killing frosts. Year after year for forty years. Would she say she has been waited on? Or would another word occur to her?

Jedgar

Two small coincidences yesterday.

I finished reading Benjamin Black's The Lemur, and started Don Delillo's Underworld. And there was J. Edgar Hoover in both of them. As the likely murderer of a CIA big in the first, and as the fourth amigo in the box (with Sinatra, Gleason and Toots Shor) at the Bobby Thompson game three of the Dodgers Giants playoff.

And where was I reading Underworld and what happened? In the lou, just off our kitchen, when at exactly 6 o'clock ante meridian, the coffee maker turned on and it started raining hard outside, the glurgy-poppy sound of the maker and the sussuruss of the rain mixing together all at once. But, you know, something didn't seem right, something I half remembered, and a few minutes later I went checking clocks and it turns out that the timer on the coffee maker was 6 minutes fast. So it all happened at 5:54, which somehow then seemed a little less special. And the rain stopped.

But 3:58 PM remains an interesting time for older New Yorkers.

I am distracted, but my face smells good

Finding it hard to concentrate, and my reading is all jumpy. Am grazing through Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends, Leslie Day's Field Guide to the Natural World of New York City (and more about that on a day when I have it more together), and Jim Sheeler's Obit: Inspiring Stories of Ordinary People Who Led Extraordinary Lives. Obit and Field Guide are, clearly, bathroom books, while Maps is a subway book.

The news is, after more than a year of using a brush and soap to shave, I've tried a bar of Lightfoot's Pine Shave Creme Soap, and WOW! I climbed a couple of flights of stairs yesterday morning, working up the slightest sheen of perspiration, and was overcome with the sense of piney freshness all around me. I looked left and right, wondering where it was coming from. Then I realized: it was coming from my face.

Can't wait to get a whiff of myself on the bike ride down town.

Willa Cather

Scout Report notes the Willa Cather archive today. Death Comes for the Archbishop stands out in my dimming memory as a book that was important to me. (If I could only remember why... damn. I'll have to read it again.)

Full text of DCFTAb, written 78 years ago, is on line in Austria. Willa Cather died 61 years ago. You will go blind, become sterile, and be an enemy of the state if you were to read the book at this not-in-America site while sitting at a computer in these United States. So don't. Ever. Because someone is still squeezing blood from that stone. Mickey will find you.

Alexandre Dumas' face

Eco is killing me, as I continue to read the books he's speaking about in his Six Walks. But it's great fun. A semester's schooling for the cost of some paperbacks and downloads.   And without the school, which is a giant plus for me.  So now I've jumped into Dumas' The Three Musketeers.

The copy of the Musketeers I picked up is the Penguin edition, translated by Richard Pevear and with cartoons on the cover by Tom Gauld. Gauld's has a caricature of Dumas on the back cover, from a photo of Dumas the taking of which Gauld draws & writes about on the back inside flap of the book. I looked at that drawing and I realized, I saw a print of this photo two weeks ago! It was at the AIPAD show. And I remember that when I saw the photo at the show I said to myself, That is one funny looking dude!