Hauling my reading from the heap

My reading's been all the heck over the place - marooned in the middle of four books at the same time now, and I needed something small and sharp to prod me out of it all.  Seems like Paul Auster's Sunset Park is just the thing.  Your mileage may vary.

Vic Chesnutt, rest in peace

Back in March I mentioned that we were lucky enough to have seem Vic Chesnutt perform Everybody Hurts at an REM / Athens tribute here in Nueva York.  And last month, on our way home from SeaTac we were on the same flight as a friend whose husband was on tour with Chesnutt, who played that weekend in Seattle.  Well, a few days ago came the sad news that Vic Chesnutt has died.  Article at Spinner.  Micahael Stipe on NPR re Chesnutt.

Happy Nine Eleven Day?

What's the possible greeting? Mostly folks do the knowing-look thing then ask each other how they are doing.

Nice photos at the NYTimes: The World as of 9/10/01.

Bad dream

It started with a lady doctor telling a teenage girl patient about a disease she, the patient, did not yet have but was about to have. It got weirder until it was involving dremmel cutting tools and the girl (and the dreamer) finally realize that the doctor is creating the disease in the patient. Wella, wella, wella, I woke up pretty darn quick. Dozed again and came face to face with a monstrous glob of humanity saying it had surgery for anything & everything! Love surgery! It grabbed an appendagy thing hanging from one of it's cheeks and pulled & twisted and - it blew up. Exploded. Smithereens of flesh. Alas, poor dreamer, no more sleep for the next two hours.

Lota also had trouble sleeping last night. Where I suspect my problem was a sharp psychological (or maybe pharmacological) vertigo, she thinks hers was because the room was too warm.

Well, you can bet I trudged right down to the cellar, pulled an AC unit out of mothballs, and installed it this morning. Tonight I'm gonna turn it down way chill, just in case I was only too warm last night, and not just crazy.

9200 uncatalogued pathogens found at US lab

You really have to love Ewan Callaway's lead-in:

Who hasn't found a long-lost roller skate or tennis racquet after reorganising a closet or garage?

Of course, these roller skates are filled with ebola and plague. New Scientist via Homeland Security News Wire. Because it's so much fun to be scared.

H1N1 and bacon wrapped oysters

First, why is this dish referred to as angels on horseback, and by whom? In real life, I mean.

Second, do you poach the oysters before wrapping them in bacon? Do you broil the darlings or do them in a pan of oil? Do you bread them for extra crunch?

Does properly cooked mean deliciously cooked? I hope so. Clearly it does if you are at Porchetta.
NY Restaurants Fear a Pork Pullback.

Keep your hands off my A on H, honey.

The Development (more berets) - John Barth

Back when I started studying litrichur, scratching slates with coal, etc., John Barth (and, unofficially) was an already established writer. I remember reading Floating Opera and Chimera in classes - don't remember if I first read Sotweed Factor for fun or profit. (Just thinking about it makes me want to do it again. Or Letters - maybe I'll take a crack at Letters.) But anyway, he was there then, and he's still here now, and I've just read last year's The Development. Thanks, Mr. Barth.

The ending of the second story in the book made me cry. On the subway. Generally, brothers and sisters, don't do this. Your fellow passengers assume you are, you know, crazy or unstable or just generally about to impinge on their personal space in a way that's really going to harsh their mellow - though probably make for good dinner / drinks conversation. But Mr. Barth is 79 now, and was just a few years younger I guess when writing The Development, and he was writing about the things he and his coevals are worrying about and going through - the diminishing of life, health, the shortening of days, dementia, death. It's a long life, but we do get to the end of it.

Sidenote: The Scriptorium asks, and answers:

For whom is the fiction of John Barth fun? Perhaps for lovers of complex metafictions. For people constrained by nineteenth century notions of realist literature it is a place of fear and confusion.

They're so furry, you don't have to worry about hiding the stitches

Have you seen the NYT piece on Melissa Dixon, urban taxidermist?

Shame. And fruitcake.

I imagine every marriage has a dynamic that centers on a deep, dark secret. I know mine does, and it surfaces every year at this time. It's the week before Christmas, the doorbell rings, and someone wearing brown hands you a box. A green cardboard box. A green cardboard box that has been shipped for Corsicana, Texas, and holds a Collins Street Bakery pineapple pecan cake. You blush, your stomach does a flip flop. You get back inside and you say to your wife, Hey, Craig's sent us another fruit cake, ha ha. And you know for the next week you'll be leading a life of shame. Sneaking into the kitchen each evening while your wife is a few rooms away, prizing the lid of the can open, cutting off another hunk of that sticky sickly sweet cake and shoving it into your mouth, chewing so quickly you're afraid you might bite yourself. And then you feel a little nauseous. And fat. And you want more. You want all of it.

And a week later you start wondering how you can get the tin out of the kitchen and the house without making your wife wonder, Hey, where's that fruitcake Craig sent?

Apples of no-one's eye

I came across this old crate label for Repetition Apples out of Yakima, WA., and figured it could be updated nicely.

The secret war inside my lower bracket

Is there any trend over the course of the Bush presidency for which this graph would not suffice?

I've been whacking back and forth between Bob Woodward's The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008, and Todd Downs' Bicycle Maintenance and Repair.  Both will make it to my required reading list for the imaginary boy or girl.  I tend to read Bicycle Maintenance, which  I picked up because I had an annoying creak in my bottom bracket, at night in bed so as not to cause nightmares.  The crankarm bolts turned out to be way loose, and I've tightened them now, thank you, hows your mom, but there's still a little creak and I'm wondering if I waited too long to deal with this and whether the bottom bracket now needs an overhaul.  I don't have the tools to do the overhaul, and I can barely read a chapter of Woodward's book every morning without screaming.

Oh, have I ever mentioned real life?

Gonna be a startling day in the Wall Street neighborhood of my working life. I'm thinking it'll be a good one to bring a camera. Weeping and gnashing and the rending of sackcloth. The sphincter tightening of seeing clients or peers or employers being sold or going into bankruptcy. Tens of thousands of jobs on the line. Extreme rattling of the food chain.

Gonna have thoughts like, Yo, we could have eaten for a couple of days for the price of those pedals I just put on the bike...

"I feel as though he has lost that gut connection..."

Thom Friedman's article today. I wake up screaming.
Bam Bam, shake it off!

No, really, remember the inhaler

So, I didn't remember it but did resume the commute bike ride. Result was having to rest, gasping on a bench when I got to Borough Hall - but, O what a beautiful morning!
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