The Bookkook

Brief Musical Interlude

2011-09-10T00:54:00.000-04:00

Currently obsessed with nectarines, good, strong green tea and:

Sigur Rós - Sæglópur

Adele - Setting Fire to the Rain

Florence and the Machine - The Dog Days are Over

Bright Eyes - The Arc of Time (Time Code 3)

We Are Animal - Luminous Nights

Pogo - Living Island (H.R. Pufnstuf Remix)

Unkle - Burn My Shadow

Frightened Rabbit - Swim Till You Can't See Land

Summer Anniversaries

2011-06-10T14:09:00.003-04:00

One of the best pieces of wiring advice I’ve read was from an unnamed poster on a news forum I visit. He was a technical writer and said he doesn’t keep a blog or a diary as if those sap the writing he does for work. Writing has a finite energy output. Amen to that.

If I’m writing in one format, I find I have a lot less energy for other outlets, like a blog, facebook, a journal. I’ve always envied those writers who could sit down and release page after page after page of material with little effort, for whom good writing was unforced and effortless. Usually those kinds of writers end up in some combination of burned out, drunk, crazy and dead so I’ll accept my little war with paper and the keyboard for what it is.

Aside from this blog, I have some writing projects which come and go (usually go). I also keep a journal which celebrated its anniversary just a few days ago. I started it when on the cusp of 16 and filled it it with the very badly written stuff you’d expect from a 15 year old. Hey, we all can’t be a good writer as Anne Frank at that age.

In the almost 11,000 days since I’ve started it, my journal has been a place to confide and put a shape the issues I dealt with at various times. It’s been a confidant, a sounding board, a commonplace book, a dream recorder, a record of my thoughts and creativity and a place for me to practice putting words together. Mostly it’s been the impressionable record of various periods of my life (which makes it a journal rather than a diary - the daily record of events).

I reread occasionally, sometimes painfully on how badly written is can be. Even after 3,000 plus pages it still is an imperfect autobiography with the occasional insight or clever phrase but after 30 years I am still wondering who I am writing for. Posterity? Myself? That nameless reader years from now? I'm never sure. Until I figure it out I guess I'll have to be my own audience.

(Right: the opening page of my journal for March 11th, 1999. Poem: "here's to opening and upward" by e. e. cummings)

Recommendations of great diaries or books on diaries:

Thomas Mallon, A Book of One's Own
Pepys Diary - Samuel Pepys diaries from London in the 1660s. Still very a very readable account of a likable social climbing, skirt chasing scoundrel.
The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon - millennia old musings and observations of a courtesan in the Japanese Imperial court.
Alec Guinness's very funny and well written diaries - Blessings in Disguise, My Name Escapes Me and A Positively Final Appearance.

The Night I Almost Died

2010-04-05T22:36:00.007-04:00

Ten years ago I was living in this cute third floor attic apartment in New Haven.

(Sunny Norton Street)

A decade ago, on April 5th, 2000, I was heading to bed late that night after staying up late going through photos and letters I was sending to Ireland. My family and I were about a month home from my cousin James’ wedding in Newcastle and I was sending off copies of photos I took to the sundry relatives. Around midnight I realized I had to be up early the next morning and hurried off to bed. My cat, Pye, was in heat so rather than have her mewling all night, I put her in her cat-tote and went to bed.

About an hour later, I was awoken by noises that sounded like wood being picked apart. My first thought was of the hippies on the floor below me, who were partying early that night, and that maybe some drunk was trying to get into my apartment by breaking the door. I put my glasses and slippers on and reached for the lamp by the bed. When it didn’t turn on and neither did the room light, I grabbed a flashlight I had by the bed and headed to the large closet next to my bedroom that served as a utility closet and storage space and housed the breakers and the hot water heater. I opened the door and BLOOOOM! A cloud of smoke and flame shot out at me - the wall and roof of the closet were wreathed with Fire.

I stood there, dumbfounded for about ten seconds while the concept that my home was on Fire slid into my brain and then a half second of wondering if the water spray nozzle from the sink could have reached here, when the realization that the Fire was in the same room as the gas heater slapped me awake. I ran for the door, grabbing the cat-tote and the cell phone, madly dialing 911.

“911.”

“My house is on Fire!!!!”

911 told me the fire department was on the way and to get everyone out of the house. I knew that the Fire probably cut the power so I started banging on the first floor door and then running back up to the second floor and pounded as loud as I could on their door. Smoke was now descending from my third floor door to the landing on the second. It could have only been about 60 seconds from my discovery to that moment, but already the smoke was making it difficult to see so when the smoke pushed me back, I headed to the porch. The girls on the first floor cracked their door open giving me a wary eye until I yelled that the place was on Fire! (I remember being frantic - they later told me I was very calm). One of the girls said the hippies on the second floor had gone out earlier so they probably where not home.

We stood across the street. In the 5 minutes it took the fire department to arrive, thick smoke was now billowing out of my closed windows and climbing skyward. I saw light on the roof, the roof above my bed, that was the Fire breaking through to the outside. Suddenly the cold freezing April morning hit me and I wished I took a coat or my keys or a blanket or even my wallet and I stood there shivering in my T-shirt and pajamas.

We watched the firemen pour into the house. At one point I turned to someone and said “the roof - the roof is on fire!” and laughed at my unintentional reference. A ladder truck dropped men onto the roof where they started attacking the roof with axes. Inside, they started breaking all the windows. The shattering of glass with fire axes sounds just like it does in movies.

One of the hippies’ girlfriend suddenly appeared next to us. She had been asleep on the second floor and woke up to an apartment full of smoke and firemen. Everyone in our normally quiet neighborhood was now up. The old drunk who in the house next to us muttered “ain’t it awful when bad t’ings happen to good people?” before tottering back to his place, next to our still burning house.

I started to shiver hard now, my teeth chattering, from the cold and from nerves. A few of the firemen slipped on the front stoop when water from their hoses leaked and froze. A neighbor, who I never met, gave us sweaters and in all that craziness I don’t know if I ever thanked her for that spot of kindness. And there were a few times I stood there, ready to retch and release that knot in my stomach that kept rising, especially when I saw through my skylight how the fire was all over the ceiling and walls in my apartment.

20 minutes in, the commissary truck arrived giving out water and lemonade to the exhausted firemen. I overheard one of them talk about how hot and intense the Fire was. Some of the firemen apologized for not saving things like the large collection of comics I had. They were all very gracious. They told me they tried to save all the photo albums and pictures I had and took stuff off the wall and put tarps over them to protect them.

An hour later it was over. They told us that the inspector would be there soon to check out the place and would allow us to go in an get a few things. I made a call to my parents that started out “Dad? It’s me. Listen. I’m all right but my house was on Fire and the cat and I will need to come up in a little while. No you don’t have to come down.”

About 3 am they let the first floor in. Then the second. Then me.

It was a holocaust. Worse than I thought. What the Fire didn’t burn nor the smoke did not scorch and stain, the water drowned and axes broke. I walked around carefully in a daze, stepping through my soggy wet house wondering what to take. My journals. My photo albums. My clothes. Keys. Wallet. Coat. Check book. Camera. Glasses. A certain 20 books out of 1200. I now know the answer to the question of what I would take from a burning building.

When left the house, my parents were standing there waiting for me, having driven down from Bethany to get me. I lost it then. Packed my cat and what I had and they took me home.

April Is National Poetry Month

2010-04-03T01:06:00.000-04:00

The Poem as a verbal illuminated manuscript.

I met Amy Clampitt at an underattended reading in college. She was small and slight, but had such a robust way with words that made her seem bigger. Years pass, but I can still recall this small woman reciting this poem and letting each image unfold before us, word by word.

http://www.amyclampitt.org/index.html

The Kingfisher

In a year the nightingales were said to be so loud 

they drowned out slumber, and peafowl strolled screaming

 beside the ruined nunnery, through the long evening

 of a dazzled pub crawl, the halcyon color, portholed

 by those eye-spots’ stunning tapestry, unsettled 

the pastoral nightfall with amazements opening.

Months later, intermission in a pub on Fifty-fifth Street

 found one of them still breathless, the other quizzical,

 acting the philistine, puncturing Stravinsky—“Tell

 me, what was that racket in the orchestra about?”— 

hauling down the Firebird, harum-scarum, like a kite,

 a burnished, breathing wreck that didn’t hurt at all.

Among the Bronx Zoo’s exiled jungle fowl, they heard

 through the headphones of a separating panic, the bellbird 

reiterate its single chong, a scream nobody answered. 

When he mourned, “The poetry is gone,” she quailed,

 seeing how his hands shook, sobered into feeling old.

 By midnight, yet another fifth would have been killed.

A Sunday morning, the November of their cataclysm

 (Dylan Thomas brought in in extremis to St. Vincent’s,  

that same week, a symptomatic datum) found them

 wandering a downtown churchyard. Among its headstones, 

while from unruined choirs the noise of Christendom

 poured over Wall Street, a benison in vestments,

a late thrush paused, in transit from some grizzled 

spruce bog to the humid equatorial fireside: berry-

 eyed, bark-brown above, with dark hints of trauma

 in the stigmata of its underparts—or so, too bruised

 just then to have invented anything so fancy, 

later, re-embroidering a retrospect, she had supposed.

In gray England, years of muted recrimination (then 

dead silence) later, she could not have said how many

 spoiled takeoffs, how many entanglements gone sodden,

 how many gaudy evenings made frantic by just one

 insomniac nightingale, how many liaisons gone down s

creaming in a stroll beside the ruined nunnery;

a kingfisher’s burnished plunge, the color

 of felicity afire, came glancing like an arrow 

through landscapes of untended memory: ardor 

illuminating with its terrifying currency 

now no mere glimpse, no porthole vista 

but, down on down, the uninhabitable sorrow.

- Amy Clampitt

April is National Poetry Month

2010-04-02T13:08:00.003-04:00

I like this poem because it typifies Neruda's incredible imagination and how poetry can come from the most mundane things. Just look around you and see "the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower..."

Ode to the Table

I worked out my odes
on a four-legged table,
laying before me bread and wine
and roast meet
(that block boat
of our dreams).
Sometimes I set out scissors cups and nails,
hammer and carnations.

Tables are trustworthy:
titanic quadrupeds,
they sustain
our hopes and our daily like.

The rich man's table,
scrolled and shining,
is
a fabulous ship
bearing bunches of fruit
Gluttony's table in a wonder,
piled high with Gothic lobsters,
and there is also a lonesome
table in our aunt's dining room,
is summer. They've closed
the curtains,
and a single ray of summer light
strikes like a sword
upon this table sitting in the dark
and greets the plum's transparent peace.
And there is a faraway table, a humble table,
where they're weaving
a wreath
for a dead miner.

That table gives off the chilling odor
of a man's wasted pain.
There's a table
in a shadowy room nearby
that love sets ablaze with its flames.
A woman's glove was left behind there,
trembling like a husk of fire.

The world
is a table
engulfed in honey and smoke,
smothered by apples and blood.
The table is already set,
and we know the truth
as soon as we are called:
whether we're called to war or to dinner
we will have to choose sides,
have to know
how we'll dress
to sit
at the long table,
whether we'll wear the pants of hate
or the shirt of love, freshly laundered.
It's time to decide,
they're calling:
boys and girls,
let's eat!

-Pablo Neruda

April is National Poetry Month

2010-04-01T22:45:00.009-04:00

And in celebration, I'm posting some of my favorite poems or just ones that have a personal meaning.

The picture left contains a view of most of my poetry books. Not sure if you can see everything, but there's a little forest of note paper sprouting up from the top edges of the books to mark a particularly favorite poem. Sometimes I'll go a wandering through my library and rediscover an old poem which, like a song or a smell or taste, can transport me back in a memory to a specific time and place.

The e.e.cummings poem I'm sharing is one of my favorites and particularly appropriate on a gloriously beautiful April day like today. And after The Fire, it was a reminder just how beautiful the world can be.

i thank you God for most this amazing

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
wich is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

-e. e. cummings

I recommend you all go out and try to memorize at least one poem.

Grace turns 4

2010-03-28T08:49:00.000-04:00

Wow - my lil princess is getting older. Sigh.

Grace just a few hours old.

Grace on her first birthday.

Her Majesty on her second birthday.

Around her third birthday, her head now covered in golden curls.

Grace at four and already a diva.

And as always, a chance to get the tribe lined up for a photo.

(Sarah, Molly, Grace, Aiden & Ryan)

Bangers & Mash

2010-03-17T20:57:00.009-04:00

I spent St. Patrick’s Day as I usually do. I took the day off, avoided wearing green (I feel I don’t have to wear green to say I’m Irish) and I dropped by WNHU’s radio station where my parents played Irish music and took requests from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. today.

I know I'm biased but my parents do a great job with their biweekly program, Echoes of Erin. Amid the Irish traditional céilidh and showband music they give history, recipes and even an Irish language lesson courtesy of my mother’s Irish Language schooling. I have this love/hate thing with St. Patrick’s Day. While I am fiercely proud of my Irishness, I hate that being Irish gets reduced to the caricature of leprechauns, shades of greens that don’t occur in nature and binge drinking. I've very proud that my parents, who are tea-totalers by the way, show there's more to being Irish than green beer and shamrocks.

And then there is the whole corned beef and cabbage thing. Just for the record, corned beef and cabbage ain’t what they eat in Ireland. At least not till Americans started coming to Ireland and bringing it with them. The big Sunday or holiday dinner is usually boiled “bacon and cabbage” – bacon being ham or back bacon. What we think of as bacon, the Irish call rashers, which are halfway between Canadian bacon and ours.

But the other day, I discovered that the local Whole Foods carried Irish style bangers! $4.99 a pound!! Made fresh in Massachusetts!!!! I picked up some and, after giving half to my parents, made a meal of bangers & mash for myself.

The bangers cook like any sausage. I don’t do milk so I used chicken stock in its place in the mashed potatoes with a little Kerrygold Irish butter (again, thank you, Whole Foods) and served it with baked beans. You can have bangers & mash with onion gravy which is a little nicer, but baked beans are what my grandmothers Josie Kennedy and Nora Boles fed me and that’s what I had.

Irish bangers are usually smaller and greasier and not as nice as the Whole Foods ones, but let me tell you after a few bites I was transported to my grannies’ kitchens in Clonmel town and the countryside of Ardfinnan, recalling with tears in my eyes the smells and the sounds of their homes, like Proust and his madelines.

Bliss. Greasy, starchy bliss.

"What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?" - Lin Yutang

Music of Ireland

2010-03-17T14:45:00.001-04:00

While my parents are on WNHU today playing Irish music, I thought I would share some of my favorite Irish musicians with you. Growing up in an Irish household, you are surrounded by music and "talk" and develop a love of both music and language.

Clannad - Nín Sé In Lá (It is not yet day - an old Irish drinking song)

Clannad - Two Sisters

Mary Black - A Song for Ireland

Sinéad O'Connor - She Moved Through the Fair

Declan O'Rourke - No Place to Hide

Iarla Ó Lionáird - Caoineadh na dtri Mhuire (Lament for the Three Marys)

Luka Bloom - Sunny Sailor Boy

Kieran Goss - Out of My Head

Paddy Casey - Lucky One

and Fear (thanks Alan!)

Pierce Turner - The Sky and the Ground

The Waterboys - The Whole of the Moon

Van Morrison - Did Ye Get Healed?

Visions of Ireland

2010-03-17T14:18:00.001-04:00

Random pictures.

The way to Clonmel from Newcastle is, apparently, every way.

Scenes from Dublin around O'Connell St. & the Ha'Penny Bridge.

Beal Loch and the Knockmealdown Mountains (view from my grandfather's house). Beal Loch is the dimpled bit of the mountain in the center.

Visions of Ireland: The Rock of Cashel & Cahir Castle

2010-03-15T13:10:00.002-04:00

The Rock of Cashel is a large ruined church on a small rocky outcrop in Cashel, Tipperary. While the site was originally a pagan site, with the arrival of Christianity, like many other things in Ireland, it was given a whitewash of the Church and was the seat of the Kings of Munster ever since St. Patrick converted the then king.

It has some the best examples of Celtic and early Medieval architecture in Europe and is often called "Ireland's Acropolis".

This bit fell off from the picture before a few years prior, causing some concerns about safety. Here my brother Rob shows us why he needed back surgery years later.

Me walking up...

and looking back down the "Pilgrim's Path."

My cousin Tom and his fiancée Caroline, to give you some idea of scale.

And yes that is my thumb as I was adjusting the camera....

Cahir castle, in the nearby town of Cahir, was built in 1142 by Conor O'Brien, Prince of Thomond. It ended up in the Butler family until the last ancestor died in 1961 when it was taken over by the government. It was up until then an actual residence. The Butler family actually lived there.

If it looks familiar, it was used extensively for the filming of the movie Excalibur.

The town of Cahir, like most areas with castles, sprung up around it.

Notice the murder hole above the door. If you didn't like who was knocking on your door, demanding entry, you could drop boiling oil, boiling water, hot tar, or excrement on them. Now that's a deterrent for telemarketers!

Visions of Ireland: Around the town of Newcastle, Tipperary

2010-03-15T12:44:00.002-04:00

Newcastle, Co. Tipperary, (Caisleán Nua in Irish) is a small town of 201 people (according to the 2002 Irish Census), about 21 miles southwest of the larger town of Clonmel, nestled between the lush River Suir valley and the soft Knockmealdown Mountains on the Tip/Waterford border. When we are in Ireland, this peaceful little village is our home.

Heading down from Ardfinnan, over the River Suir to the town. Our house is in the cleft of where the brown mountain slopes down to the left.

The center of Newcastle town.

The old Norman fort, built around the 1100s which gave Newcastle it's name.

Behind the castle is the old church, which was burned with people in it, by Oliver Cromwell during his march across Ireland.

Because the church is still hallowed ground, it's now used as a burial ground, inside and out.

My father standing in the church. I've called this his record album cover.

My mother gets one too.

We head out of town a few miles towards the house. The sounds of the water rushing down the glen (Glen Bui or the Yellow Glen) behind the house gets louder.

The view from the mountain looking down at the house.

And looking into the Knockmealdown mountains. This was in February (spring in Ireland) which accounts for the brown colors.

On the mountain.

A paleolithic tomb marker on the mountain looking over the fields and towns to the north, below. The orientation seems to be east-west, the path of the sun. The hills and fields of this area are dotted with Christian and Pagan sites.

The village of Newcastle in the center-left.

Heading into the mountains towards Mount Mellery Abbey.

The remnants of what is called a "famine cottage". People lived here until the time of the Famine and either emigrated to America or England or died.

Looking back down the road. Dewy & damp seem the best adjectives. This was taken in May when the yellow furze was in bloom.

Visions of Ireland: the Road to Tipperary

2010-03-10T21:46:00.004-05:00

After arriving in Shannon, we head towards Limerick, then down the N24 through Tipperary Town towards Clonmel, before heading south to Newcastle.

Old ruin by the side of the road in Pallas.

Ireland is full of ruins. People seem quite happy to have

something centuries old staring at them everyday.

The sign welcoming us to County Tipperary,

always brings memories of previous trips and how

close we are to Clonmel

Famine Graveyard, Tipperary Town

Ghosts of the famine are everywhere.

In seven years, from 1845-1852, Ireland's population

decreased by 20-25% and has never recovered since.

This graveyard had a famine hospital next to it

where the dying could see where they would soon sleep.

There's also a memorial to unbaptized babies who were not allowed

to be buried on consecrated ground.

Families either buried them on the fence next to the graveyard,

or secretly in the graveyard, in the dark of night.

Abandoned (and since rebuilt) cottage in Newcastle, Tipperary.

Visions of Ireland - Flying In

2010-03-09T11:02:00.003-05:00

A night flight towards the east.

Meeting the Dawn over the North Atlantic

The Kingdom of Clouds

First sight of the Aran Islands. I think that's Inis Mór, the big island.

Descending to land in dewy Shannon Airport

The sky above Clare

Being diverted to Dublin - the midlands of Ireland

Dublin harbor & the ferry to Holyhead, Wales

Howth Head, from Joyce's Ulysses.

Coming in for the final approach

30 Days of Recommendations: NO PAIN

2010-03-08T22:53:00.004-05:00

Sorry folks, my back went out big time and for about a week I could barely walk, let alone stand or sit, without being in excruciating pain. I could not straighten myself up or move and had to drag out my old canes (one pictured left) to hobble around the house.

Needless to say, sitting to write at a computer was impossible. And so 30 Days of Recommendations had to become 19. Since I planned for other things in the next few weeks, I'll continue or restart my block of recommendations another time. Hope you got some good stuff from the books I did recommend. There are some really great reads there.

30 Days of Recommendations: Collected Poems of Donald Justice

2010-02-19T01:19:00.003-05:00

Collected Poems

by Donald Justice

What’s it about: the collected poetical works from the 60 year career of the award winning poet Donald Justice.

Why you should read it: again I will let another writer speak for me - "Donald Justice is likely to be remembered as a poet who gave his age a quiet but compelling insight into loss and distance, and who set a standard for craftsmanship, attention to detail, and subtleties of rhythm.” -Marvin Bell.

I discovered Donald Justice’s work reading John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire, where his work is liberally quoted by one of the characters. "Who is this Donald Justice and how come everything he says applies to us?” another asks. Indeed. There are times I feel he talks directly to me, as his work is concerned with the quotidian, the quiet poetry of the mundane. I've even committed a few to memory.

Justice, who died in 2004, in his career won the Lamont Poetry Prize, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, and the Lannan Literary Award. Collected Poems was nominated for the National Book Award.

Selection:

A Map Of Love

Your face more than others' faces
Maps the half-remembered places
I have come to I while I slept—
Continents a dream had kept
Secret from all waking folk
Till to your face I awoke,
And remembered then the shore,
And the dark interior.

To A Ten-Months' Child

Late arrival, no
One would think of blaming you
For hesitating so.

Who, setting his hand to knock
At a door so strange as this one,
Might not draw back?

Men at Thirty

Thirty today, I saw
The trees flare briefly like
The candles upon a cake
As the sun went down the sky,
A momentary flash
Yet there was time to wish

Before the break light could die
If I had known what to wish
As once I must have known
Bending above the clean candlelit tablecloth
To blow them out with a breath

Men at Forty

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father's tie there in secret

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

The Thin Man

I indulge myself
In rich refusals.
Nothing suffices.
I hone myself to
this edge. Asleep, I
Am a horizon.

30 Days of Recommendations: Black Gold of the Sun

2010-02-18T14:21:00.003-05:00

Black Gold of the Sun

by Ekow Eshun

What’s it about: London born, Ghanaian raised Eshun returns to his African homeland in search of his roots and his identity.

Why you should read it: because it’s a compellingly written personal account of a person caught between the worlds of the immigrant and the assimilated, history and the future, innocence and corruption. Eshun discovers a Ghana unchanged in centuries in some places and modern in others, and a disturbing fact that some of his ancestors were themselves slave traders. An intriguing read about personal identity and cultural politcs.

Excerpt:

“My name is Ekow Eshun. That's a story in itself. Ekow means 'born on a Thursday'. The Ghanaian pronunciation of it is Eh-kor and that would be fine if I'd grown up there instead of London where, to the ears of friends, Ehkor became Echo. Throughout my childhood I was pestered by schoolyard wags who thought it hilarious to call after me in descending volume: 'Echo, echo, echo.' It was my first lesson in duality. Who you are is determined by where you are.

My parents arrived in London from Ghana in 1963. They never meant to stay. And even though they have spent most of the past forty years in Britain, Ghana is still their home. When I was a child growing up in London, its sounds and smells pervaded our house. Ghana was there in the hot pepper scent of palm nut soup tickling your nostrils as you entered the house; the highlife songs rising from the stereo; the sound of my mother shouting down a capricious telephone line to her sister in Accra.

But Ghana was their home, not mine. I knew this from experience. I was born in 1968 in a red-brick terraced house in Wembley, north London. I was the youngest of four children. When I was two my parents moved the family to Ghana. We lived in Accra for three years. In 1974, we returned to London. I was five years old. I didn't plan to go back.

My last sight of the place was a country in meltdown. A military junta had taken power shortly before we left. I remembered long speeches by generals on a black-and white television. The hourly price rises for a bag of rice. Strikes and shortages and demonstrations. What was there to return to?”

30 Days of Recommendations: Sway

2010-02-17T01:33:00.000-05:00

Sway

By Zachary Lazar

What’s it about: three vaguely intertwined stories of real figures (Rolling Stone Brian Jones, underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger, Manson family member Bobby Beausoleil) that tell of the excesses and loss of innocence that were the turbulent 60s.

Why should you read it: extremely well written, vivid accounts of fictional occurrences of real people (one hopes Lazar has good lawyers) and jump cuts in the narrative make for a dizzying and at times nightmarish read about the violent end of cultural myths.

Excerpt:

“It was spring, 1966. Anger would go for walks in his new neighborhood, a slum taken over by young people, and try to make sense of the odd mishmash of deterioration and adornment: broken stairways with freshly painted railings, run-down porches crawling with morning glories or draped with a faded American flag. He saw young people holding hands and whispering to each other, or sitting on the sidewalk playing guitars, barefoot, the muscles moving solemnly in their shoulders and arms. In Golden Gate Park, he saw streams of soap bubbles drifting over the lawn, flashing prisms of light, and in the distance behind them there might be anything: a group of truant schoolkids, a girl with a German shepherd, a cross-eyed boy in black body paint juggling a set of knives. Everyone under thirty had decided to be an exception: a musician, a runaway, an artist, a star.”

30 Days of Recommendations: The Moviegoer

2010-02-16T02:27:00.000-05:00

The Moviegoer

By Walker Percy

What’s it about: the improbably named Binx Bolling, a young man from a moneyed Southern family, and his search for…love? …happiness? …. meaning? while living at the movies in post Korean War New Orleans.

Why should you read it: this modern classic of 20^th Century American fiction deftly balances existential and spiritual themes with a thrilling plot as Binx involves his fragile cousin Kate in his mad search.

Winner of the 1961 National Book Award and rated #60 of the 100 Best English Language Novels of the 20th century by the Modern Library and on Time Magazine's 100 Best English Language Novels 1923-Present.

Excerpt:

"What do you seek -- God? you ask with a smile.

I hesitate to answer, since all other Americans have settled the matter for themselves and to give such an answer would amount to setting myself a goal which everyone else has reached -- and therefore raising a question in which no one has the slightest interest. Who wants to be dead last among one hundred and eighty million Americans? For, as everyone knows, the polls report that 98% of Americans believe in God and the remaining 2% are atheists and agnostics -- which leaves not a single percentage point for a seeker. For myself, I enjoy answering polls as much as anyone and take pleasure in giving intelligent replies to all questions.

Truthfully, it is the fear of exposing my own ignorance which constrains me from mentioning the object of my search. For, to begin with, I cannot even answer this, the simplest and most basic of all questions: Am I, in my search, a hundred miles ahead of my fellow Americans or a hundred miles behind them? That is to say: Have 98% of Americans already found what I seek or are they so sunk in everydayness that not even the possibility of a search has occurred to them?

On my honor, I do not know the answer."

Google Books version here.

30 Days of Recommendations: The Book of Job

2010-02-15T20:38:00.005-05:00

The Book of Job

Translated by Stephen Mitchell

What’s it about: a modern translation of one of the most philosophically loaded books of the Old Testament, the Book of Job, from master translator Stephen Mitchell.

Why you should read it: because Job, with his inexplicable punishment from God, sounds even more modern in this translation as he tries to make sense of God and faith in a world of suffering.

Excerpt:

"He [God] does not care; so I say
he murders both the pure and the wicked.
When the plague brings sudden death,
he laughs at the anguish of the innocent.
He hands the earth to the wicked
and blindfolds its judges’ eyes.
Who does it, if not he?”

Google Books version, here.

30 Days of Recommendations: How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

2010-02-14T18:18:00.003-05:00

How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter

by Sherwin Nuland

What’s it about: Yale School of Medicine’s Nuland’s precise description of how we die from old age, cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's, accidents, heart disease, and stroke.

Why you should read it: with effortless prose, Nuland has produced a book about death that is factual, calm and surprisingly reassuring in describing the mechanism of death. What’s the most painful way to go? Drowning.

Winner of the 1996 National Book Award for Non Fiction.

Excerpt:

"These days we don't learn about death firsthand as we did when I was a small boy, when most people died at home. Death is no longer a part of life, that old cliche, but that true cliche. Most people learn about death by reading about it in novels, going to the movies, where the patriarch lies in bed surrounded by those who love him and he gives his final blessing and says his last words, closes his eyes. . ."

Google Books version here

30 Days of Recommendations: Ask the Dust

2010-02-13T13:06:00.001-05:00

Ask the Dust

by John Fante

What’s it about: struggling writer Artuto Bandini trying to survive in Depression Era Los Angeles while falling for an intriguing beauty.

Why you should read it: Published in 1938, it’s a gritty, compelling novel, full of the poetry of the lives of those who strive in poverty. Seedy and beautiful, there’s a singular mind of a writer there who left a handful of works in the 1930s and 1980s and under different circumstances could have been one of America's greatest writeres. Read it once, and it stays with you forever like all good cult novels.

It was turned into an unsuccessful film in 2006 with Colin Farrell.

How Ask the Dust nearly missed greatness.

Ask the Dust by John Fante at Post Road Magazine

Opening Lines:

"One night I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room on Bunker Hill, down in the very middle of Los Angeles. It was an important night in my life, because I had to make a decision about the hotel. Either I paid up or I got out. that was what the note said, the note the landlady had put under my door. A great problem, deserving acute attention. I solved it by turning out the lights and going to bed.

In the morning I awoke, decided that I should do more physical exercise, and began at once. I did several bending exercises. Then I washed my teeth, tasted blood, saw pink on the toothbrush, remembered the advertisements, and decided to go out and get some coffee.

I went to the restaurant where I always went to the restaurant and I sat down on the stool before the long counter and ordered coffee. It tasted pretty much like coffee, but it wasn't worth the nickel. Sitting there I smoked a couple of cigarets, read the box scores of the American League games, scrupulously avoided the box scores of National League games, and noted with satisfaction that Joe DiMaggio was still a credit to the Italian people, because he was leading the league in batting.

A great hitter, that DiMaggio. I walked out of the restaurant, stood before an imaginary pitcher, and swatted ahome run over the fence. Then I walked down the street toward Angel's Flight, wondering what I would do that day. But there was nothing to do, and so I decided to walk around the town.

I walked down Olive Street past a dirty yellow apartment house that was still wet like a blotter from last night's fog, and I thought of my friends Ethie and Carl, who were from Detroit and had lived there, and I remembered the night Carl hit Ethie because she was going to have a baby, and he didn't want a baby. But they had the baby and that's all there was to that. And I remembered the inside of that apartment, how it smelled of mice and dust, and the old women who sat in the lobby on hot afternoons, and the old woman with the pretty legs. Then there was the elevator man, a broken man from Milwaukee, who seemed to sneer every time you called your floor, as though you were such a fool for choosing that particular floor, the elevator man who always had a tray of sandwiches in the elevator, and a pulp magazine."

30 Days of Recommendations: Jitterbug Perfume

2010-02-12T10:14:00.005-05:00

Jitterbug Perfume

by Tom Robbins

What’s it about: Beets, immortality and the god Pan (that’s about as best as I can make it for you).

Why should you read it: Because it’s wacky fun and a great read from its opening paean on the humble beet to the secrets of perfumers and Bohemian kings, this is a madcap, but substantial and thoroughly enjoyable experience. I recall reading a whole chunk of this book in the bookstore and being so enthralled I bought it and finished it in a marathon reading within a few days.

Opening Lines:

"TODAY'S SPECIAL

The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip . . .

The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.

The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.

In Europe there is grown widely a large beet they call the mangel-wurzel. Perhaps it is mangel-wurzel that we see in Rasputin. Certainly there is mangel-wurzel in the music of Wagner, although it is another composer whose name begins, B-e-e-t—.

Of course, there are white beets, beets that ooze sugar water instead of blood, but it is the red beet with which we are concerned; the variety that blushes and swells like a hemorrhoid, a hemorrhoid for which there is no cure. (Actually, there is one remedy: commission a potter to make you a ceramic a$$%@#&—and when you aren't sitting on it, you can use it as a bowl for borscht.)

An old Ukranian proverb warns, "A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil."

That is a risk we have to take.”

30 Days of Recommendations: The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

2010-02-11T02:10:00.000-05:00

The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

by Breece D'J Pancake

What’s it about: a collection of wonderful and very American short stories from the tragically short career of Breece D'J Pancake who took his own life at age 27.

Why should you read it: I’ll let another writer tell you.

"As for Breece D'J Pancake: I give you my word of honor that he is merely the best writer, the most sincere writer I've ever read. What I suspect is that it hurt too much, was no fun at all to be that good. You and I will never know."

--Kurt Vonnegut in a letter to John Casey

Opening Lines from “Trilobites”:

“I open the truck's door, step onto the brick side street. I look at Company Hill again, all sort of worn down and round. A long time ago it was real craggy, and stood like an island in the Teays River. It took over a million years to make that smooth little hill, and I've looked all over it for trilobites. I think how it has always been there and always will be, least for as long as it matters. The air is smoky with summertime. A bunch of starlings swim over me. I was born in this country and I have never very much wanted to leave. I remember Pop's dead eyes looking at me. They were real dry, and that took something out of me. I shut the door, head for the café.”

Read the rest of the story here.

30 Days of Recommendations: Collected Poems by Stevie Smith

2010-02-10T20:59:00.004-05:00

Collected Poems

by Stevie Smith

What’s it about: the complete poems and doodles of eccentric English poet Stevie Smith (1902-1971).

Why you should read it: because of her ability to tackle a serious subject, plainly and playfully (think - the love child of Emily Dickinson and Ogden Nash) and with a healthy dose of irony. Funny and wise, aching and ironic, Smith’s nimble poems dance their way across themes of War, Death and human interaction. I keep this book on the nightstand to steal a quick, enjoyable read.

*Smith was the subject of a play, Stevie, which was turned into a 1978 film starring Glenda Jackson.

Selection:

Not Waving but Drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,

But still he lay moaning:

I was much further out than you thought

And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking

And now he's dead

It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,

They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always

(Still the dead one lay moaning)

I was much too far out all my life

And not waving but drowning.

Audio link to a BBC site of Smith reading the poem.

The Jungle Husband

Dearest Evelyn, I often think of you

Out with the guns in the jungle stew

Yesterday I hittapotamus

I put the measurements down for you but they got lost in the fuss

It's not a good thing to drink out here

You know, I've practically given it up dear.

Tomorrow I am going alone a long way

Into the jungle. It is all grey

But green on top

Only sometimes when a tree has fallen

The sun comes down plop, it is quite appalling.

You never want to go in a jungle pool

In the hot sun, it would be the act of a fool

Because it's always full of anacondas, Evelyn, not looking ill-fed

I'll say. So no more now, from your loving husband Wilfred.

30 Days of Recommendations: The Grass Harp

2010-02-09T21:51:00.004-05:00

The Grass Harp

by Truman Capote

What’s is about: After his parents die, young Collin Fenwick is sent to live with his maiden aunts, the dippy Dolly and the serious Verena. An argument between the aunts breaks out over the production of Dolly’s home medicine, and Collin, Dolly and a servant Catherine run away to live in a Chinaberry tree and inciting a battle between the two sisters’ temperaments.

Why should you read it: An early Capote novel written when he was only 26, this is another of his lyrical, poignant novels of the South, full of vibrant, fully living characters and vivid description. The conflict between the sisters may seem small, but hides a battle about the joys of life verses conformity. An often overlooked gem amid Capote's other books.

Made into a play and a 1991 film. Often this short novel is collected with A Tree of Night and Other Stories.

Excerpt:

“A waterfall of color flowed across the dry and strumming leaves; and I wanted then for the Judge to hear what Dolly had told me: that it was a grass harp, gathering, telling, a harp of voices remembering a story."

30 Days of Recommendations: Into Thin Air

2010-02-08T23:38:00.004-05:00

Into Thin Air

by Jon Krakauer

What’s it about: Krakauer’s harrowing, first person account of the May 1996 disaster on Mount Everest, where eight climbers died near the summit after a freak storm popped up.

Why you should read it: One of the best adventure/nature books you will ever read, Krakauer’s clear, concise prose makes you feel all the effects of a high altitude climb without you actually putting yourself in danger. Anyone reading this riveting account, and deciding to try to ascend Everest, needs to have their head examined.

Krakauer was the author of Into the Wild and an writer for Outside Magazine where this book was first an article.

Excerpt:

"In March 1996, Outside Magazine sent me to Nepal to participate in, and write about, a guided ascent of Mount Everest. I went as one of eight clients on an expedition led by a well-known guide from New Zealand named Rob Hall. On May 10 I arrived on top of the mountain, but the summit came at a terrible cost.

Among my five teammates who reached the top, four, including Hall, perished in a rogue storm that blew in without warning while we were still high on the peak. By the time I'd descended to Base Camp nine climbers from four expeditions were dead, and three more lives would be lost before the month was out.

The expedition left me badly shaken, and the article was difficult to write. Nevertheless, five weeks after I returned from Nepal I delivered a manuscript to Outside, and it was published in the September issue of the magazine. Upon its completion I attempted to put Everest out of my mind and get on with my life, but that turned out to be impossible. Through a fog of messy emotions, I continued trying to make sense of what had happened up there, and I obsessively mulled the circumstances of my companions' deaths."

30 Days of Recommendations: Always Coming Home

2010-02-07T20:31:00.005-05:00

Always Coming Home

by Ursula K. Le Guin

What’s it about: “the archeology of the future.” It’s the cultural examination of the Kesh, a tribe of vaguely Native American people who "might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California” from the viewpoint of a woman called Stone Telling, replete with stories, songs, myths, recipes and even a language (take that Elvish & Klingon).

Why you should read it: because Le Guin weaves her obsessions with myth and anthropology, Taoism and modern civilization into the compelling story of an invented people living in a wholly believable utopia.

Selection: from “Dira”

“Heya hey heya, hey heya heya, in that time that place, in the dark cold time, the dark cold place, she was going along, this woman, a human woman, walking in the hills, looking for something to eat. She was looking for brodiaea and calochortus bulbs before they bloomed, and putting out snares for brush rabbit, and gathering anything that could be food, because her people were hungry and so was she. Those were times when people had to work all day for enough to eat, times when even so they didn't have enough to eat, and people died of hunger, human and animal, they died of hunger and cold, so they say.

She was hunting and gathering in the hills, then, and started down into a canyon where she thought she saw some cattail down by the creek. She got into buckbrush and scrub oak and thorn, and had to push her way along; there weren't any deer trails, not even rabbit trails. She pushed along through the brush, trying to get down into the canyon. It was very dark, like it was going to rain. She thought, "Oh, before I get out of this brush, this time of year, I'll be covered with ticks!" She kept brushing at her neck and arms and feeling in her hair for ticks, trying to keep them from sticking to her. She didn't find any cattails. There was nothing to eat down in the canyon. She started to go along downstream, pushing through that thick underbrush, tearing her shirt and scratching her skin on the buckbrush and the thorn. She came into a place where the yellow broom grew very tall and close together. Nothing else grew there. The broom was half dead and grey-looking, without flowers yet. She pushed her way into the broom thicket, and ahead of her there, in the middle of the thicket, she saw a person standing. It was a wide, thin, dark person, with a little head, and one hand without fingers, just two prongs, like pliers or pincers. It stood there waiting. It had no eyes, they say. “

30 Days of Recommendations: The Haunting of Hill House

2010-02-06T22:44:00.005-05:00

The Haunting of Hill House

by Shirley Jackson

What’s it about: a researcher collects a small group of misfits to investigate the possibility of the supernatural at a cursed New England home. What starts as a lighthearted romp through an old house, turns sinister and frightening once the sun goes down and the lights dim.

Why you should read it: one of the truly frightening and very influential (Stephen King borrowed heavily from it for The Shining) haunted house stories in fiction, filled with scenes of things that not only go bump in the night, but touch your hand and call your name. This highly literary novel was filmed very successfully in 1963 and very badly thirty years later, both times as The Haunting.

Not to be read alone in the dark. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Opening Lines:

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill house, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for 80 years and might for 80 more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."

30 Days of Recommendations: The End of the Affair

2010-02-05T22:26:00.005-05:00

The End of the Affair

By Graham Greene

What’s it about: Writer Maurice Bendrix has an affair with married Sarah Miles during the London Blitz. After one barely escaping a bombardment attack, Sarah abruptly breaks things off with the stunned Bendrix. Two years later, a jealous and bitter Bendrix runs into Sarah’s milquetoast husband, Henry, who tells him he suspects his wife of having an affair and asks him to investigate who it might be, never realizing they both had a rival neither had a hope of overcoming.

Why you should read it: because it’s one of the best books by Greene, who was constantly overlooked by the Nobel Prize committee, and because of his ability to get inside the head of the obsessive Bendrix, boiling between rage and love while the object of his obsession wrestles with faith and fate. Anyone who has been disappointed in love, or those who like good writing and a good mystery, will appreciate this moving work.

Opening Lines:

"A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. I say 'one chooses' with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who—when he has been seriously noted at all—has been praised for his technical ability, but do I in fact of my own will choose that black wet January night on the Common, in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did these images choose me? It is convenient, it is correct according to the rules of my craft to begin just there, but if I had believed then in a God, I could also have believed in a hand, plucking at my elbow, a suggestion, 'Speak to him: he hasnt seen you yet.'

For why should I have spoken to him? If hate is not too large a term to use in relation to any human being, I hated Henry—I hated his wife Sarah too. And he, I suppose, came soon after the events of that evening to hate me: as he surely at times must have hated his wife and that other, in whom in those days we were lucky enough not to believe. So this is a record of hate far more than of love, and if I come to say anything in favour of Henry and Sarah I can be trusted: I am writing against the bias because it is my professional pride to prefer the near-truth, even to the expression of my near-hate."

30 Days of Recommendations: The World According to Garp

2010-02-04T23:27:00.007-05:00

The World According to Garp

by John Irving

What’s it about: The short, raucously funny life of writer and wrestler T. S. Garp, from his birth to single parent and reluctant proto-feminist Jenny Fields, to his legacy, both literary and familial, beyond his violent death.

Why should you read it: because the novel switches between tragedy and comedy in an instant, leaving you laughing one minute and breaking your heart the next.

Filled with examinations on life, gender, sex, violence and literature, this book was instrumental in my own developing reading sensibilities, showing me that literature could be about real life. One of my top ten all timers.

Just beware of the Under Toad!

From the first chapter:

"In the theater, it was not her purse that the soldier wanted. He touched her knee. Jenny spoke up fairly clearly. "Get your stinking hand off me," she said. Several people turned around.

"Oh, come on," the soldier moaned, and his hand shot quickly under her uniform; he found her thighs locked tightly together--he found his whole arm, from his shoulder to his wrist, suddenly sliced open like a soft melon. Jenny had cut cleanly through his insignia and his shirt, cleanly through his skin and muscles, baring his bones at the joint of his elbow. ("If I'd wanted to kill him," she told the police, later, "I'd have slit his wrist. I'm a nurse. I know how people bleed.")

The soldier screamed. On his feet and falling back, he swiped at Jenny's head with his uncut arm, boxing her ear so sharply that her head sang. She pawed at him with the scalpel, removing a piece of his upper lip the approximate shape and thinness of a thumbnail. (I was not trying to slash his throat," she told the police, later. "I was trying to cut his nose off but I missed.")

Crying, on all fours, the soldier groped his way to the theater aisle and headed toward the safety of the light in the lobby. Someone else in the theater was whimpering, in fright.

Jenny wiped her scalpel on the movie seat, returned it to her purse, and covered the blade with the thermometer cap. Then she went to the lobby, where keen wailings could be heard and the manager was calling through the lobby doors over the dark audience, "Is there a doctor here? Please! Is someone a doctor?"

Someone was a nurse, and she went to lend what assistance she could. When the soldier saw her, he fainted; it was not really from loss of blood. Jenny knew how facial wounds bled; they were deceptive. The deeper gash on his arm was of course in need of immediate attention, but the soldier was not bleeding to death. No one but Jenny seemed to know that--there was so much blood, and so much of it was on her white nurse's uniform. They quickly realized she had done it. The theater lackeys would not let her touch the fainted soldier, and someone took her purse from her. The mad nurse! The crazed slasher! Jenny Fields was calm. She thought it was only a matter of waiting for the true authorities to comprehend the situation. But the police were not very nice to her, either."

30 Days of Recommendations: Sleeping In Flame

2010-02-03T22:31:00.006-05:00

Sleeping In Flame

by Jonathan Carroll

What’s it about: Walker, an expatriate American living in Vienna, meets Maris, an artist escaping an abusive lover. As they fall in love, they discover Walker has a secret to his identity and are threatened by malevolent forces right out of the Brothers Grimm.

Why you should read this: Because of the compelling plot, likeable characters and writing worthy of any magic realist. As with every genre-crossing book by Carroll, this novel is filled with magic and suspense. You find yourself falling in love with the characters as they fall in love and in danger. A great, escapist read for mystery, fantasy and literary readers.

Opening Lines:

"It took me less than half a lifetime to realize that regret is one of the few guaranteed certainties. Sooner or later everything is touched by it, despite our naive and senseless hope that just this time we will be spared its cold hand on our heart.

The day after we met, Maris York told me I had saved her life. We were in a café, and she said this through the folds of a black sweater she was pulling over her head. I was glad she was lost in the middle of that pullover because the statement, although true, made me feel much too brave and adult and embarrassed. I didn’t know what to answer.

“It’s quite true, Walker. The next time I saw him he would have killed me.”

“Maybe he just wanted to go on scaring you.”

“No, he would have tried to kill me.”

The voice carried no emotion. Her big hands lay open and still on the pink and blue marble table. I wondered if the stone was cold under her palms. If I had been really brave I would have covered her hand with mine. I didn’t."

30 Days of Recommendations: The Brief History of the Dead

2010-02-02T22:52:00.007-05:00

The Brief History of the Dead

by Kevin Brockmeier

What’s it about: When you die, you go to the City, a place where all the recently dead go, and stay there until the last living person who remembers you dies and then passes into the City themselves. Where you go after that is a mystery.

Meanwhile, in the world of the Living, a virus is released that starts killing everyone on earth until the last person alive is Laura, a research scientist in Antarctica. The City begins to be filled with people she remembers – her parents, old boyfriends, a panhandler she once gave money to, her dentist, people important and on the periphery of her life – and who slowly come to realize their common link to Laura and her survival.

Why you should read it: lyrical and moving, this novel will haunt you long after you finish it. Booklust author Nancy Pearl (whose review got me to read this book) said that there’s not a week that went by after she finished it that she does not return to it again and again. A favorite book of mine in 2006.

Opening lines:

"When the blind man arrived in the city, he claimed that he had traveled across a desert of living sand. First he had died, he said, and then–snap!–the desert. He told the story to everyone who would listen, bobbing his head to follow the sound of their footsteps. Showers of red grit fell from his beard. He said that the desert was bare and lonesome and that it had hissed at him like a snake. He had walked for days and days, until the dunes broke apart beneath his feet, surging up around him to lash at his face. Then everything went still and began to beat like a heart. The sound was as clear as any he had ever heard. It was only at that moment, he said, with a million arrow points of sand striking his skin, that he truly realized he was dead."

30 Days of Recommendations: A Confederacy of Dunces

2010-02-01T23:46:00.015-05:00

A Confederacy of Dunces

by John Kennedy Toole

What’s it about: Ignatius J. Reilly, a comical rotund failure with a philosopher’s soul and exaggerated sense of his own genius, living with his mother in New Orleans and an eccentric cast of characters.

Why should you read it: The funniest book you will ever read from an author who committed suicide because he couldn’t get this book published, 11 years before it won him a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981. Scenes of laugh out loud hilarity alongside references to heavy philosophical topics. Think Oliver Hardy by way of Erasmus. Also, very evocative of New Orleans (there’s even a statue of Ignatius on Canal Street). One of my all time favorite books and one I can remember laughing out loud as I read the whole first chapter in a bookstore.

Opening lines:

"A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs."

2010-01-26T01:40:00.002-05:00

Some of my favorite musicians are releasing new music very soon (or have released music news of which never made it to me, sigh) so I thought a music post would be nice.

Peter Gabriel's version of David Bowie's Heroes from his album of cover tunes, Scratch My Back & http://www.musicforrelief.org/ for Haiti:

Sade's Solider of Love (which I didn't like at first but it has grown on me considerably).

I wasn't a fan of her early work, but man o man did I wear grooves into the cds of Lover's Rock and Love Deluxe!

The very creative, but delightfully odd, Joanna Newsom The Sprout & the Bean

The indescribable Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds funky Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!

Haiti Update

2010-01-20T00:38:00.002-05:00

Because some of you asked, the man who was trying to reach his pregnant wife did make contact with her. She hurt her leg but is otherwise alright and he is on his way to Haiti.

The woman who didn't hear from her young daughter has heard from her. She and her immediate family members are battered but fine.

Others had cousins, uncles, aunts who died in the quake. Another man told me he had heard that cousins & acquaintances buried in rubble text-messaged from their cell phones that they were alive only to die, still buried, still unrescued.

And Pat Robertson, for all his un-Christlike non-charity, can go to hell.

Pray for Haiti

2010-01-17T23:47:00.005-05:00

I am a self-professed info junkie, but the images coming from Haiti have been too awful, too much to bear. I’ve been avoiding them best I can, scanning headlines and catching just the quick bits of details off the various infostreams. How can your heart not break seeing such things?

The good folks at work are collecting for AmeriCares (which is getting 100% of what we collect) while our customers are being so very big hearted and generous as Americans are.

It’s easy for us to get worked up about asking every customer for a donation as this awful event hits home particularly strongly since a number of our fellow employees are from Haiti.

One man told me he has many deaths in his family before walking away, trying to regain his composure. A woman told me she hasn’t heard from her young daughter or parents and had to come to work to get away from thinking about it. Another man, who’s been trying to get a plane to Haiti to find his wife who is 8 month pregnant, told me one day he had 6 bodies waiting for him and the next day he now had 8 bodies waiting for him.

I don’t know how they do it. The anguish is written so deep on their faces, but they go on. I am reminded of Stanley Kunitz’s poem “The Testing Tree”:

In a murderous time

the heart breaks and breaks

and lives by breaking.

It is necessary to go

through dark and deeper dark

and not to turn.

Links:

AmeriCares

AmeriCares on Charity Navigator

Madison Scott Bell’s NYT article Haiti in Ink and Tears: A Literary Sampler

Nothing like a nice clean desktop....

2010-01-15T02:06:00.002-05:00

It's the little things in life.

Have A Happy New Year!

2009-12-31T02:03:00.003-05:00

Ten years ago tonight, my thoughts were of Millennium and disaster. I knew the year 2000 neither began the 21^st century nor the 3^rd Millennium, but it always excites me to see the odometer slip into multiple zeros.

I had decided to see in 2000 alone, thoughtfully and quietly. I bought bottled water – my only acquiescence to Y2K fears that had people hording food and money and guns – and planned an evening of reflection and reserved celebration. Around 11:00 p.m., I turned off the tv and listened to music while my New Haven apartment was lit only by candle light.

For the last half hour of 1999, I blew out a candle every 5 minutes until only one remained to be blown out at midnight. Then I sat in my quiet dark apartment and heard the sound of the year 2000 beginning: cold quiet broken by the sound of some idiot firing a gun into the night off in the distance.

And thus began my own annus horribilis, the beginning of one of the worst periods in my life. More on that another time. I'm here to wish you well.

I wish you all, a Happy and Wonderful 2010. I am planning on having a great one too. It's on my "To Do" list.

Here. Some music to start your New Year:

("I'm still very obsessed with this song)

And a Magnetic Field's song by Tracey Thorn & Jens Lenkman

Have a Happy!

Merry Christmas

2009-12-24T12:14:00.002-05:00

Two months without a word and you are probably thinking that I have been too busy to blog, and you’d be right.

After months of unemployment and even running out the twice extended unemployment benefits and not getting a nibble on the job market, I finally landed a new job with what seems to be so far a decent company. And while it’s not with books, it is with one of my other loves: food.

I was quite neurotic about getting the new position, fearing that my mouth would somehow jinx me until I walked in the front door for training, I told just my parents and one other person before descending into silent worry-and-don’t-sleep mode.

It’s been such a hard year for so many people including myself, hunkering down in the depths of the twin Depressions, Financial and Emotional. My new company is progressive and socially conscious and worked with the state Department of Labor to interview people who were out of work for ages. So many of my new coworkers also needed jobs too and it’s great that now they do.

I’m going to stop here before I tear up (like Frank McCourt my “bladder is in my eye”). I do promise to write more, but it’s been great having a very good reason not to be.

A very Merry Christmas to you all!

Songs stuck in my head

2009-10-13T16:00:00.005-04:00

Since the art of the mix tape is lost to us all...

Dog Phone Art

2009-10-09T11:45:00.005-04:00

Cell phone photos are rarely great works of art, but there is something very reminiscent of English drawing room pets portraits in how these came out.

Perhaps my artist friends (Susan, Pahl, Catherine, Michael, Dawn etc) can tell me what painter these vaguely copy.

Céilí is my parent's dog. She was born in Ireland, a "timpiste" - an accident, which is what I wanted to call her - an unintentional mating of a West Highland terrier and something else. My father and I brought her to the US when she could just fit in my hand. Happy accident she is, indeed.

The Mind, intractable thing

2009-09-30T03:25:00.009-04:00

The Mind, intractable thing

even with its own axe to grind, sometimes

helps others. Why can't it help me?

-Marianne Moore

That I suffer from periodic bouts of insomnia is well known to family & friends. It’s the result of bad sleeping habits, an irregular schedule, stress and an overactive mind that takes a while to shut down all its spinning wheels.

Over the years, I’ve developed some effective tactics against insomnia that don’t involve sedatives. Having a firm, comfortable mattress in a cool, dark bedroom. No caffeine after 4 p.m. Nothing to eat after 8 p.m. No excitable television (e.g. news, action movies, horror movies, etc.) before bed. No running mentally through the next day’s events, “to do” lists or preparation steps. A little quiet time before bed. Creative visualization when the mind is running wild.

Sometimes I use melatonin, which helps shorten the time it takes to fall asleep and deepen the sleep I get (no matter how small) but which gives me odd dreams.

But at some point of tossing and turning, I give up, get up and stop fighting war against IT. I resort to reading from few books that reliably relax me. Not that they are boring, soporific books, it’s just that, for what ever quality they possess, they drain away the insomnia.

The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton. I have a small Modern Library edition from the 1940s I keep near the bed. The descriptive prose and the involved plot, made familiar by repeated viewings of the Scorese film and rereads of the book itself, are so comfortingly evocative of 1880s New York society that it’s like falling into a John Singer Sargent painting.

I also love slipping into any of the many collections I have of Guy de Maupassant’s Short Stories, the master of the short story set during the Franco-Prussian War. Although some of his stories have a twist or a barb at the end, it’s his unrushed telling of them that I like.

Collected Short Stories of Eudora Welty. I usually go for the less showy authors after midnight, like Welty or any other of the New Yorker short story school, like William Maxwell, John Cheever, etc.

Any work by Australian writer, Peter Carey. Carey, who won the Booker Prize for Oscar & Lucinda, writes with this intelligent, precise prose that it’s easy to get lost in for a few hours.

Sometimes I’ll pick up one of my favorite children’s novels, like The Magician’s Nephew by C. S. Lewis, or The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, or Padraic Colum’s telling of the Norse myths, Nordic Gods and Heroes, complete with art nouveau illustrations.

Then there is the anthology The Literary Insomniac, edited by Elyse Cheney and Wendy Hubbert which is chock-a-block with tales of sleeplessness by famous writers. My favorite entry is "Waking Up" by E. Annie Proulx, who, when she gets up in the middle of the night, does literary research, reads her weeks old recently delivered New York Times or clog dances (she lives alone).

If I’m desperate, there’s the various technical reading I have. The manuals for my Mac, for Office 2008, for my camera, for my phone. Some pedestrian nonfiction on a subject I like. Grammarians. Trivia and fact books. Books to learn a foreign language.

And if those fail, I get up at 2:35 a.m. and write.

Wanderreading...

2009-09-28T15:33:00.009-04:00

My reading has been directionless and serendipitous lately. One of the movie channels ran a series of films based on great books and so after my stint with the Spanish Flu, William Maxwell’s They Came Like Swallows, (which was slightly disappointing compared to his great short story collections and the magnificent So Long, See You Tomorrow), and Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, I let this cable station steer my literary rudder.

Triggered by the films I’ve seen, I read or reread E.M. Forster’s Howards End and A Room With a View, then Peter Carey’s wonderful Oscar and Lucinda. Merchant and Ivory managed to perfectly capture Forster’s spare prose and deceptively simple plots but Gillian Armstrong could not visually paint the magical language of the Booker Prize winning Oscar and Lucinda, despite starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett as the leads.

Into the Wild on HBO shamed me into finally reading a book I’ve been hand selling for years to parents of “boys who don’t like to read but like outdoors stuff”. Kind of funny, considering how I devoured Jon Krakauer’s other book about the fatal to climb Mount Everest, Into Thin Air, in my drafty third floor apartment in New Haven under a quilt during a bitter cold snap. Better there, than on Everest.

I had an advanced reader’s copy of Into the Wild, a prepublication edition sent by the publishers to reviewers and booksellers, which means I’ve been putting off reading it for 13 years. It was well worth it. Sean Penn’s adaptation really just focuses on Christopher McCandless’s journey across America and makes it look epic, but the book has a much larger scope and, of course, more material about the people McCandless met in his journey. It’s short, just under 180 pages - very non-threatening to some kid who thinks reading is agony - but it’s also very well written.

Then I stumbled across some very schlocky film adaptations of some H.P. Lovecraft stories, which drove me to reread from my collections of his schlocky works. Lovecraft is one of those writers whose ideas sound great on paper and are very influential in horror fiction, but whose images just look silly on film . Neil Gaiman said something once about how Lovecraft’s great monster, "the green, sticky spawn of the stars", part dragon, part octopus, part demon, Cthulhu looks absolutely ridiculous when depicted on screen. They sometimes look silly on paper too.

After this reading sherbet, time for a bigger project.

With the first hint of the cooler fall weather...

2009-09-19T16:12:00.002-04:00

I think of this poem:

As imperceptibly as Grief
The Summer lapsed away—
Too imperceptible at last
To seem like Perfidy—
A Quietness distilled
As Twilight long begun,
Or Nature spending with herself
Sequestered Afternoon—
The Dusk drew earlier in—
The Morning foreign shone—
A courteous, yet harrowing Grace,
As Guest, that would be gone—
And thus, without a Wing
Or service of a Keel
Our Summer made her light escape
Into the Beautiful.

Emily Dickinson

Labor Day 2009, by the numbers...

2009-09-07T11:45:00.001-04:00

September 7, 2009 | An EPI Fact Sheet

compiled by Anna Turner

Note that all numbers are current as of September 4, 2009.

Print-friendly PDF format

TOTAL JOBS LOST DURING THE RECESSION: 6.9 MILLION

• New jobs needed per month to keep up with population growth: 127,000
• Jobs lost in August 2009: 216,000
• Jobs needed to regain pre-recession unemployment levels: 9.4 million
• Manufacturing jobs lost since the start of the recession: 2.0 million (14.6% of sector’s jobs)
• Construction jobs lost in the recession: 1.4 million (19%, nearly one in five construction jobs)
• Mass layoffs (50 or more people by a single employer) in July 2009: 2,157; jobs lost: 206,791

UNEMPLOYMENT RATE: 9.7%

• Number unemployed: 14.9 million (up from 7.5 million in December 2007)
• Underemployment rate: 16.8%; Share of workers un- or underemployed: roughly 1 in 6
• Under- and unemployed, marginally attached and involuntary part-time workers: 26.4 million
• Unemployment rate, ages 16 to 24: 18.2%
• Male unemployment: 10.9%; female unemployment: 8.2%
• White unemployment: 8.9%; black unemployment: 15.1%; Hispanic unemployment: 13%
• Unemployment rate, young college graduates: 5.9% (2nd worst on record); Worst recorded unemployment rate for young college graduates: 6.2% (1983)
• Traditional ratio of young college grads’ unemployment to overall rate: 50%; Current ratio: 70%
• Portion of unemployed who have been jobless more than six months: one third
• Average weekly unemployment benefit in July (including additional $25 per week from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act): $332

STATES WITH DOUBLE-DIGIT UNEMPLOYMENT IN JULY, 2009: 16; WHEN THIS LAST HAPPENED: 1983

• Highest unemployment rate: Michigan, 15.0%; lowest: North Dakota, 4.2%
• When California’s Hispanic unemployment surpassed black unemployment: 2nd quarter, 2009
• Projected African American unemployment for Michigan, 2nd quarter of 2010: 24.9%

INCREASE IN AVERAGE U.S. WORKER’S PRODUCTIVITY, 2000-07: 19.2%

• Decrease in all prime-aged worker’s real median weekly wages, 2000-2007: $1; Decrease for African Americans: $3
• Annual growth rate of private-sector workers’ wages, last three months: 2.6%
• Annual growth of wages in managerial, professional, and related occupations, 2009, 2nd quarter: 0%
• Annual growth rate of real (inflation-adjusted), average, hourly wages since June 2000: 0.70%*
• Ratio of average CEO’s pay to typical worker’s pay in 1979: 27 to 1; Ratio in 2007: 275 to 1

EXPECTED NEW SPENDING (12-MONTHS) FROM THE NEW $7.25 MINIMUM WAGE: $5.5 BILLION

• Share of minimum wage workers with high school diploma in 1979: 57.5%: Share in 2008: 72%
• Workers getting a raise from latest minimum wage increase: 4.5 million
• Share of affected workers with annual family income below $35,000: 57.1%; Share working at least 20 hours a week: 81.6%
• Extent to which the minimum wage’s real value is lower than in 1968: 17%

AMERICANS UNINSURED IN 2007: 45 MILLION

• Drop in children covered through parents’ employers, 2000 to 2007: 3.4 million
• Share of people under 65, with incomes in the top 20%, covered by employers in 2007: 86.4%; Share with incomes in the bottom 20%, covered by employers: 21.9%
• Share of Hispanic workers who are uninsured: 39.8%
• Percentage of under-65 Americans with employer-sponsored health insurance in 2000: 68.3%; In 2007: 62.9%
• Average monthly cost of COBRA with American Recovery and Reinvestment Act subsidy: $370; Without American Recovery and Reinvestment Act subsidy: $1,057
• Rise in out-of-pocket spending for the 1% of adults with the greatest medical expenses, 2004-2007: 42%
• Increase in health care premiums since 1999: 119%
• Amount by which U.S. private health insurance administrative costs exceeded all Canadian national health spending in 2007: $25 billion**
• Share of total U.S. health care costs paid by private insurers in 2007: 35%
• Share of total health care costs paid by U.S. government in 2007: 46%

SHARE OF PEOPLE NEAR RETIREMENT AGE WITH A 401(K) BALANCE UNDER $40,000 IN 2007: 50%

• Percentage of amount needed to maintain living standards that is held by average 401(k) participant approaching retirement: 20-40%
• Share of 401(k) assets estimated to be lost since 2007: 29%

WORKPLACES WITH NO CONTRACT MORE THAN THREE YEARS AFTER ELECTION IS WON: 25%

• Share of employers that interrogate workers in mandatory one-on-one meetings, 1999-2003: 63%; Share of employers that threaten workers in such meetings, 1999-2003: 54%
• Increase in likelihood that firm will fail if unionized: 0%
• U.S. manufacturing workers ranking on “value-added per employee,” compared to 16 nations with higher compensation: 2

ANNUALIZED RATE OF ECONOMIC CONTRACTION, 2nd QUARTER, 2009: 1%

• Likely size of this contraction without the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: 3-4%
• Jobs lost with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, 2nd quarter, 2009: 1.3 million
• Jobs that would have been lost without the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, 2nd quarter, 2009: 1.8 million at least***

* EPI analysis of CPS and BLS data
**EPI analysis of HHS CMS, OECD, and World Bank data
***Mark Zandi, Moody’s Economy.com

http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/labor_day_by_the_numbers/#When:05:05:54Z

幸せな光沢がある猿マジック時間*

2009-08-26T01:14:00.006-04:00

Happy Shiny Monkey Magic Time!

(*Happiness the monkey magic time which has gloss)

I have to confess to an obsession with strange Japanese game shows.

Remember this is from a culture who think little kids fighting a zombie is funny.

I do think Pan-Kun, the chimp, comes out better than the magician. Or it could be the pro-chimp bias of the Japanese media.

Via Japan Probe

**Update: evidently, there are a host of Pan-Kun videos. Look here and here. He's quite the celebrity.

***Update-update: since I seem to be in cute video mode, here's a video a couple did of a picture every day for their son's first year :

and Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, the likable young leads from 500 Days of Summer dancing and being utterly charming:

Clouds

2009-08-22T21:30:00.002-04:00

I was up at dawn this morning and saw the most amazing cloud formations in between thunder storms. Like cloud volcanos...

A politcal moment

2009-08-11T03:19:00.003-04:00

I don't usually get political on this blog as I find discussions on politics can be as personal and as emotion rousing as ones on religion. Persons wishing to remain in polite society should avoid both.

Yet, the recent uptick of insurance industry supported scream fests of the tea bagger conservatives with incorrect facts loudly disrupting townhall meetings with cries of "take back our country!!!" (From what exactly? From the democratically elected black guy running it?) "death panels!!" and the painting of health care reformers as wanting to control the world are, ironically, frighteningly parallel to Hitler's strong armed seizures of government meetings in Bavaria in the 1920s.

From wikipedia:

On 14 September 1921, Hitler and a substantial number of SA members and other Nazi party adherents disrupted a meeting at the Lowenbraukeller of the Bavarian League. This federalist organization objected to the centralism of the Weimar Constitution, but accepted its social program. The League was led by Otto Ballerstedt, an engineer whom Hitler regarded as "my most dangerous opponent." One Nazi, Hermann Esser, climbed upon a chair and shouted that the Jews were to blame for the misfortunes of Bavaria, and the Nazis shouted demands that Ballerstedt yield the floor to Hitler. ^[26]

The Nazis beat up Ballerstedt and shoved him off the stage into the audience. Both Hitler and Esser were arrested, and Hitler commented notoriously to the police commissioner, "It's all right. We got what we wanted. Ballerstedt did not speak." ^[27] Hitler was eventually sentenced to 3 months imprisonment and ended up serving only a little over one month.

Fear and lies are powerful weapons. It's with this concern that I post the following video:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Now, you may not like Keith Olbermann (especially if you are a right winger) but of the major partisan commentators, he has never called for someone's injury and has never rallied his viewers to violence or fear, just to a sense of injustice and exasperation. Try to find someone like that on Fox.

Haiku Update

2009-08-10T00:27:00.001-04:00

Not writing. Reading
books on the Spanish Flu while
sick. Chasing bullfrogs.

I swear I had nothing to do with this!

2009-06-28T15:21:00.000-04:00

Billy Mays, OxiClean pitchman, found dead.

Favorites

2009-06-18T17:22:00.006-04:00

Today is my birthday, and I am sick in bed trying to get over the flu that rebounded over last weekend. It’s not a major birthday year so I’m not too upset that I’m not indulging my sweet tooth or stuffing my maw with things that are no longer good for me and stay with me longer than I would like. It’s not the worst birthday either. That was my 19^th birthday when my beloved grandfather (whom I was named after) died in Ireland with my father just making the 3000 mile journey within a hour before my grandfather passed away. Despite the years in between, and ignoring my name and my birth date, I think about him, and all my grandparents, a lot. Barely a week goes by that I don’t think of all them.

Since today I am being a bed-to-couch-to-bed slug, I thought I would share some favorite things.

1. Books. Well duh!

I finally finished entering all my books into a media cataloging program called Delicious Library. It saved me the task of actually counting my books, which I traditionally do on my birthday. The total as of today is (excluding 50 blank books and 100 stripped cover mass markets) 1,961.

Entering books into Delicious Library took longer than expected as I often stopped to reacquaint myself with a book, usually baring the distresses of smoke and water from the Fire, and losing myself within it for a few hours. It’s a wonderful thing to have a few hours of quiet to read a good book.

2. Food.

I used to be a thin man until I discovered I like to eat. Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything was very instrumental in making me unafraid of cooking as well as enlarging my waistline.

In fact, Bittman got me brave enough to try recipes from tv shows. Here’s one of my absolute favorites recipes – it’s EXTREMELY easy and EXTREMELY good.

I don’t make it that often as I end up eating it right out of the pan. It’s been a while since I last made it so, the FIRST person to contact me about this will win: me cooking this for you (and helping you eat it).

Pork Scallopine with Tomato Basil Sauce

Martha Stewart & Chris Schlesinger of the East Coast Grill in Cambridge, Mass.

INGREDIENTS

Makes 2 servings.

• 1 pork tenderloin, about 10 to 14 ounces, cut into 4 pieces, crosswise

• 3 tablespoons olive oil

• Coarse salt and freshly ground pepper

• 1 shallot, minced

• 1 tablespoon cognac

• 1/4 cup Homemade Chicken Stock

• 1 tablespoon grainy mustard

• 3 tablespoons heavy cream

• 2 tablespoons finely chopped plum tomato

• 1 tablespoon finely chopped basil

• 2 heads radicchio, quartered

• 1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar

DIRECTIONS

i. Stand pork tenderloin pieces on end between two layers of plastic wrap. Pound meat to a 1/4-inch thickness with a rolling pin; set aside.

ii. Heat 1 tablespoon olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat until just smoking. Season pork on both sides with salt and pepper. Add meat to pan, and cook until browned. (There will be a release of juices on the surface of the meat after it has been turned, 2 to 3 minutes per side.) Transfer meat to a platter, and keep warm. Pour off any excess fat from skillet, and discard. Meanwhile, heat a grill pan over medium-high heat.

iii. Return skillet to heat, add the shallot, and cook for about 1 minute. Remove skillet from heat, and deglaze with cognac. Return skillet to stove, and carefully ignite with a match. When flames subside, add chicken stock and mustard; reduce to thicken, 1 to 2 minutes. Add heavy cream, tomato, basil, and salt and pepper to taste. Cook until heated through, about 1 minute. Remove from heat, and serve sauce over pork.

iv. Meanwhile, toss radicchio with remaining 2 tablespoons olive oil and salt and pepper to taste. Place on preheated grill pan, turning as it begins to color. Remove from grill pan, drizzle with balsamic vinegar, and serve with pork scaloppine.

3. Movies.

Top 3 favorite movies of all time: Vertigo, The Third Man, Wings of Desire.

But oftentimes, the trailer is the best thing about a movie. Not sure why, but I love this trailer to Where the Wild Things Are.

4. Stories.

Three of my favorite FREE podcasts are from National Public Radio and involve the telling to stories.

Selected Shorts, which is an hour-long reading of various kinds of short stories by famous actors.

This American Life. Which looks at true stories united by the barest of common themes and can be funny and heartbreaking and very, very human at the same time.

The Moth Storytelling Project: An amateur storytelling “jam” where someone tells a story under 15 minutes, live and without notes. Just last week I heard the second story by Ed Gavagan, “Victims’ Impact” continuing his account of when he was stabbed in New York City. It goes to a different place then what you would expect and had me weeping at the end in how a little grace and a little forgiveness overcomes a lot of evil.

Drowing on Sullivan Street

Victim's Impact

5. The little faces that run smiling to me when I visit my nieces & nephews.

God, I think that adds years to my life.

Old Photos

2009-06-14T17:14:00.016-04:00

One of the many personal projects I've been working on is scanning the many old photos I have. The Fire in 2000 that burned down my apartment, also took the collected negatives of every photo I had. Thankfully, one of the first things the firemen did was to pile photo albums and other irreplaceable stuff on the floor and throw a waterproof tarp over them to protect them so the photos were saved. Go Firemen!

About two years ago, I read a fascinating article in the New Yorker about a professor at Carnegie Mellon, Gordon Bell, who was scanning or digitizing every photo, letter, email, book, web-page, phone calls etc. that he took, looked at, or took part in, turning it into a digital file and storing it paperlessly, rather than being surrounded by the clutter of his life.

Not a bad idea. We seem to be moving towards electronic document storage anyway. The Kindle, Amazon.com's paperless electronic reader for books and magazines, seems to be a big hit. Like most people, I have an iPod with 10,000 songs and a closet full of boxes of CD that have been turned into mp3s. Like most people, I have a digital camera and thousands of photos on my computer and backed up on disks.

I plan to scan old writings I have lying about (old poems, scribbling, my 2,500 + page journal I've kept for 28 years) but since I lack a replacement format for photos, it's best if I start with them first.

Here is a small selection of some random photos I've scanned. The photo above is of my bookshelves, circa 1988.

Beal Loch, near our home in the Knockmealdown Mountains, covered in rhododendrons. The loch is allegedly bottomless and haunted by the ghost of "Petticoat Loose" condemned to empty it with a thimble for eternity.

A shot of Manhattan circa 1986 from the Circle Line boat tours. Not depicted are the legions of little old blue haired ladies who nattered on without stop for the entire three hour ride.

Muir Woods, looking straight up into the sky at the canopy of redwood trees, several hundred feet high.

Famed City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, home to, and first publisher of, many of the Beat Poets, like Allen Ginsburg and owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti. First publishers of Ginsberg's famous "Howl."

City Light's Office Site & Wikipedia entry.

San Francisco's famous Transamerica Pyramid from its base looking up.

The Green Dog Table.

There's a long story about this I'll save for another time.

The sounds of dogs howling

2009-06-13T14:55:00.003-04:00

Only a few of you know this about me. If I’m watching TV and a commercial comes on with Billy Mays BLARING IN HIS SHRILL CRASS SMOKED OUT VOICE ABOUT THE MERITS OF SOME CHEAP PIECE OF CRAP PRODUCT!!!!!!! I get an almost emotional and physical, averse reaction to the sound of his voice that I feel in my teeth or in my spine.

It’s so bad I am compelled to change channels immediately (whether it’s my home or not) or mute the loud hairy troll and have been known to walk out of a room and even cover my ears and hum until his sonic assault is over.

My reaction is so strong, so substantial that I’ve likened myself to one of those killer trained dogs in some bad TV movie who are fine one minute, then hear their trigger word and turn into frothing, growling carnivores, except my trigger word is the sound of Billy May’s voice BELLOWING ABOUT PRODUCT X.

Even here I’ve tried to convey his ALL BUT SCREAMING voice typographically. The man is a walking, talking car siren at 4 a.m., a living alarm clock buzz, a human pop-up window advertising something plastic and cheap in an amped up voice that has clearly been altered to make it louder than the show you were just watching.

I don't care if he makes money for whatever fly by night product he's shilling, he contributes to the unnecessary increase of noise pollution. And gets on my damn nerves!

Which is why I take great pleasure in this:

http://gizmodo.com/5288765/congress-pushing-for-bill-to-reduce-the-volume-of-tv-advertising

Congress Pushing For Bill To Reduce The Volume Of TV Advertising

Under a new proposal taken up today, Congress would give the FCC power to limit the volume of commercial advertising to match the average decibels of the show being watched.

Under current laws, TV ads must not exceed the loudest peak in a show—but anyone who has ever been scared half to death by Billy Mays exploding onto the screen for Oxi Clean knows that is generally unacceptable.

Naturally, broadcasters and advertisers want to set their own standards—they even have their own plan to reduce ad volume set to take effect within a couple of months. Many believe that the Congressional bill with pass, but it may not be necessary if the broadcasters set acceptable limits. Either way, it looks as though loud pitchmen are going to be the only ones losing out on this. [York Daily Record]

Cough, cough. Sniffle, sniffle...

2009-06-03T23:31:00.007-04:00

Not sure if allergies triggered it, or if I got a case of the frog flu, but I've been laid up with some nasty summer cold.

And suddenly I realized I don't know the symptoms of the H1N1 (aka Swine Flu) virus and looked it up.

The symptoms of this new H1N1 flu virus in people are similar to the symptoms of seasonal flu and include fever, cough, sore throat, runny or stuffy nose, body aches, headache, chills and fatigue. A significant number of people who have been infected with this virus also have reported diarrhea and vomiting. Also, like seasonal flu, severe illnesses and death has occurred as a result of illness associated with this virus. From the CDC

Going now, to drown in my own juices.

Screaming Frogs

2009-05-31T16:28:00.005-04:00

I babysat Ryan & Grace yesterday on this glorious late spring Saturday - one of those days when the world is all blue and gold, bright and beautiful - one of those days you want to live in forever. We took a short walk up the road to chase frogs at Peck Pond, which was once the local swimming hole and now a nature preserve stocked with fish by the town.

It was late afternoon when we got there and the pond was half in shade. There were thousands upon thousands upon thousands of tadpoles with bellies about the size of a pinky nail, hiding in the little coves of shallow water near the shore. They still lacked any limbs other than a tail, like flattened out commas, but their faces were staring to take on a froggy shape.

We could hear the adult bullfrogs gulp and rmrrrrr-rou, and I, able to manage a pretty good ability to mimic (yes, I know –I am a man of many talents), started calling them out. Rounding the sunny side we found a big bullfrog, a bit larger than a kitten, sunning himself on a rock and giving the kids an enormous amount of excitement when he leapt into the pond away from us and managed to elude a hungry perch as well as two little kids and an uncle.

I did manage to capture one little guy (another talent) and passed him around to Ryan and Grace who were just silly with excitement over this poor creature. Before I returned him to his pond, Ryan reminded me of the screaming frogs.

A while back, when Ryan was in animal phase, and before his all consuming Star Wars phase, I stumbled over many videos on YouTube of screaming frogs. All the times, as a kid, I caught frogs in Peck Pond myself, I never even knew frogs could scream, let alone do anything other than croak or leap, but that’s the internet for you: showing you things you never knew existed on which other people have spent lifetimes obsessing.

They are just so hysterical in a weird/funny way.

Those are some ticked off frogs.

The Cruelest Month

2009-05-28T00:18:00.005-04:00

“April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.”
- T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”

Recently an old friend of mine flew out from California for the funeral of his wonderfully funny and sweet mother. As with most funerals people reacquaint themselves with old friends and after the business of transporting the deceased to her resting place, I spent some time with Fred, recounting the exploits of our twenties and updating each other on our current lives.

Fred is a programmer and I am interested in tech so the conversation steered towards the topics of Facebook, Twitter, blogging etc. When I commented on how I don’t see the usefulness in Twitter, microblogging the minutiae of your life, as I had a blog I keep forgetting to update, he responded with a “yes, I know. I stopped following it because you stopped posting.”

Oops. Let me explain.

I had not intended to let April pass by with few or no posts, but April began to get a little weird on me and I decided to wait it out.

Wait it out? Yes. April and I have a bad history together.

I’m not sure when I became aware of my dysfunctional relationship with April, but I do remember hearing a seemingly happy girl at a party in early October some years ago relate how bad things happened in October to her. A parent’s death. An eviction. A boyfriend in jail. Several relationships dissolving into mess. A car accident where she was injured and hospitalized for two months, bones broken, etc… She seemed to be not so much confessing these things happened than warning us just to wait, it’s coming, the next bad October thing.

Years later I’ve forgotten that girl’s name, and even some of the details of the party, but I distinctly remember her sitting on a blue futon, in a yellow sweater and white shirt and having a eureka moment: “Aha! That’s me and April.”

Despite March ending as a lion or a lamb, despite beginning with April Fool’s day, having Shakespeare’s birthday, National Poetry Month, Earth Day and usually Easter, April contains Tax Day, cold April showers, Hitler’s birthday (a national holiday for the ultra right nuts in the US), the anniversary of Colombine, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, and the Oklahoma City Bombing.

But for me, the first creeping of warmer New England weather brings bad, bad things. I have my own history of fights, break ups, friendship ending confrontations, depressive episodes, long periods of insomnia, car crashes, job drama, injuries great and small and a mass of other misfortunes occurring in April. When I die, it will probably be in some April, hopefully, years from now.

Twenty-one years ago a friend of mine killed herself in April and her death left me in shock for a weekend and emotionally bruised for years. And in 2000, when my apartment caught fire with me in it and destroyed or ruined or marked every single thing I owned, it was in April, damnable April, that it occurred.

After that I decided April cannot brutalize me anymore and has no more evil to do to me. But late this March, I kept seeing coincidences that were either remembrances or foreshadowing of unpleasant events, so I decided to go to earth, as it were, and keep a low profile till May came.

Nothing bad happened, knock wood, and I should have poked my head out of by blogger hole in early May when I saw lilac trees blooming. We’ve always had some lilac trees growing up in our home in Connecticut. They bloom regularly, early to mid May, for only two weeks. Their appearance and the powerful sent of their tiny blossoms are the sign that the dark clouds of April are gone and the beauty of May is here.

I have no excuse for not posting in May, however.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

2009-03-17T10:24:00.004-04:00

Amid all the faux Irish stuff floating around today, my parents will be on the radio playing authentic Irish music on WNHU 88.7 FM, out of the University of New Haven in West Haven CT.

You can listen to them live streaming here.

Another of my favorite Irish poems, this one by Austin Clarke (the Irish poet, not the Canadian novelist)

The Blackbird Of Derrycairn

Stop, stop and listen for the bough top
Is whistling and the sun is brighter
Than God's own shadow in the cup now!
Forget the hour-bell. Mournful matins
Will sound, Patric, as well at nightfall.

Faintly through mist of broken water
Fionn heard my melody in Norway.
He found the forest track, he brought back
This beak to gild the branch and tell, there,
Why men must welcome in the daylight.

He loved the breeze that warns the black grouse,
The shouts of gillies in the morning
When packs are counted and the swans cloud
Loch Erne, but more than all those voices
My throat rejoicing from the hawthorn.

In little cells behind a cashel,
Patric, no handbell gives a glad sound.
But knowledge is found among the branches.
Listen! That song that shakes my feathers
Will thong the leather of your satchels.

Beannachtai na Feile Padraig!

2009-03-15T19:14:00.001-04:00

With St. Patrick’s Day nearly upon us, I though I would take time to share some of my favorite examples of Irish poets in English and Irish.

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill is probably one of the best-known poets writing in the Irish language today. I heard her do a reading at the cavernous Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale years ago and despite her small stature, she captivated her audience with her strong voice and ready sense of humor. Her poems are often a mix of culture, history, and femininity. She says she cannot write poetry in English and relies on others, often major poets themselves, to translate her work. The English version here was translated by poet Paul Muldoon.

Ceist na Teangan

Cuirim mo dhóchas ar snámh
i mbáidin teangan
faoi mar a leagfá naíonán
i gcliabhán
a bheadh fite fuaite
de dhuilleoga feileastraim
is bitiúman agus pic
bheith cuimilte lena thóin

ansan é a leagadh síos
i measc na ngiolcach
is coigeal na mban sí
le taobh na habhann,
féachaint n'fheaclaraís
cá dtabharfaidh an sruth é,
féachaint, dála Mhaoise,
an bhfóirfidh iníon Fharoinn?

The Language Issue

I place my hope in the water
in this little boat
of the language, the way a body might put
an infant

in a basket of intertwined
iris leaves,
its underside proofed
with bitumen and pitch

then set the whole thing down amidst
the sedge
and bullrushes by the edge
of a river

only to have it borne hither and thither
not knowing where it may end up;
in the lap, perhaps,
of some Pharaoh's daughter.

Another favorite poet of mine, is William Butler Yeats. Here are two shorter examples of his work.

Brown Penny

I whispered, 'I am too young,'
And then, 'I am old enough';
Wherefore I threw a penny
To find out if I might love.
'Go and love, go and love, young man,
If the lady be young and fair.'
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
I am looped in the loops of her hair.

O love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
One cannot begin it too soon.

and the more popular:

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

“Mais ou sont les Blog Entries d’antan?”

2009-03-14T18:29:00.008-04:00

Yes, I know I’ve left all you BookKook fans in limbo wondering where I’ve been. While I would rather confess that I was off tramping around the Lost City of Atlantis using Google Maps - Viola! -sadly, I was not.

Like everyone else in the bloggosphere, I hit the great blank wall of midwinter and decided to ride out bleak February until more hopeful spring arrived. I have been busy reading and writing. I did learn some things in the interim:

That a little snow can shut down Ireland & Great Britain!

What the Stimulus Bill means to my home state of Connecticut (according to Senator Chris Dodd) Here.

That even before the horrible attack in Stamford, no one should own a pet chimp: (warning:disturbing images) and (more here too).

That Shakespeare looks a little like me: (oh go on, yes he does!)

That the Kindle is the next iPod: (although it is NOT a book and CAN NEVER replace it, EVER!!)

That only four times in U.S. history has a president asked a poet for an Inaugural Poem:

-John F. Kennedy of Robert Frost

-Bill Clinton of Maya Angelou in 1993

-Bill Clinton of Miller Williams in 1997

-and Barak Obama of Elizabeth Alexander in 2009

(What’s the matter? Are Republicans anti-poetry? Well, honestly, only Maya Angelou’s poem is any good.)

What a Mondagreen is.

And immediately found an example.

That the Kepler Space telescope, looking 3000 light years up our spiral arm of the Milky Way could discover Earth like planets. Hello!

That the Japanese love of transforming robots has now crossed over to aviculture.

And even a wild animal has a heart..

And most importantly, I’ve discovered what Anthony Bourdain really thinks of his fellow chefs. Sorry, Rachel Ray!

Just what our challenging times need: a young, smart, history making Irishman in the White House!

2009-01-20T12:05:00.002-05:00

Wish this man luck. He's gonna need it!

Barry O'Bama from Offally (Well, actually, a Fulmuth Kearney from Moneygall):

Photos I forgot were on my cell phone... (click 'em)

2009-01-13T23:43:00.006-05:00

Ryan the Star Wars Kid - Christmas 2008

2008-12-31T03:23:00.001-05:00

Happy Holidays!

2008-12-31T03:01:00.006-05:00

Christmas came and for once I was not exhausted, lethargic, emotional, over worked, resentful, disgusted, fearful, etc. … all the emotions of working the holiday season in retail. Since I did the majority of my shopping on “Black Friday” I felt I missed a little of the Christmas rush and did a spot of shopping on Christmas Eve just to “feel” the holiday season a bit more. It was quiet odd that this holiday season, even with the present economic uncertainty, seemed to be unrushed and, in fact, calm.

I even got up early Christmas morning and drove to Ryan’s house about 9 a.m. to wallow in the joy of watching the kids on Christmas morning. A few waves of visitors and my other brother showed up with his cute kids and the third wave of opening presents commenced. I brought two cameras with me (one digital and one film) and snapped a few hundred shots of the kids ripping through gift wrap or playing together peacefully. We even got a family photo, the first with all twelve of us (so far + one dumb mutt).

These people are what I am thankful for.

The Whole Clan:

Ryan using his light saber to protect Xmas from the evil Sith Lords:

Aiden wondering what the heck I'm doing:

Molly more interested the in the toy oven than anything else:

Grace in a bag (no, we are not trying to regift her):

And little Sarah who was more outgoing and less shy this time around.

Happy Holidays to all!

End of the year books...

2008-12-23T01:26:00.004-05:00

Like everywhere else, the economic tsunami is also hitting the book industry hard. At a time when different sources are publishing their Best of 2008 lists (like The NYTimes and and NPR ), dire news has been coming from all levels of the book business (NYT). Many of the big name publishers announced staff cuts (including last week, nice timing) and booksellers announced the lowest sales for the holiday period, ever. A few publishers also announced they were not accepting new manuscripts at the present time (!) which hopefully appears to be a temporary thing - you can’t make money without new product.

In fact, sales have been so bad that an informal group of authors and celebrities have been pushing books as an inexpensive, and lifelong, gift. Read what Salman Rushdie and Fred Armisen and others recommend here.

One other issue the publishing houses have rumbling about within all the economic bad news is the practice of publisher returns. Publisher returns means that when books are sent out to a bookseller, the bookseller can return unsold copies en mass for a full refund. Ironically enough this was started in the Great Depression to convince booksellers to take chances on lesser known authors. Currently, publishers take back about 40% of their books and either pulp them or resell them as remainders. 40% of a run of thousands of books is a lot of waste and expense and the way the most of the big publishing houses are talking about it means that it will soon change.

I was going to write my list of my top books of 2008, but as I only saw a few newer titles and read or reread a lot of my older titles from my own library (why my cataloging took so long) I felt I am a little out of sync with some newer titles. I will however give you my list of the best book I read (and in some cases RE-read) this year:

Farewell My Lovely – Raymond Chandler. The second Philip Marlowe novel, peppered with lines like: "He looked as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake."

Over by the River and other stories – William Maxwell. Incomparable short stories by the master of the form and author of my favorite novel, So Long See You Tomorrow.

Novel in Three Lines – Félix Fénéon. A collection of a thousand three line reports Fénéon wrote for Le Matin in 1906 with wit and economy and a sense of the absurd.

In Cold Blood – Truman Capote. One of those books I am embarrassed to say I never read till now, after being prompted by the films Capote and Infamous and a similar home invasion/murder in a nearby sleepy town.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – Jean-Dominique Bauby. See my review a few posts back.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Díaz. Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and well worth it!

Netherland – Joseph O’Neill, about cricket and a post 9/11 world.

But the best book I read last year was E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, Winner of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. A wonderful stylist on Newfoundland, the sea, winter, knots etc etc etc. Just made me shake my head in wonder on how well it was written. Here's a favorite bit:

"Suddenly, he could see his father, see the trail of ground cherry husks leading from the garden around the edge of the lawn where he walked while he ate them. The man had a passion for fruit. Quoyle remembered purple-brown seckle pears the size and shape of figs, his father taking the meat off with pecking bites, the smell of fruit in their house, litter of cores and peels in the ashtrays, the grape cluster skeletons, peach stones like hens' brains on the windowsill, the glove of banana peel on the car dashboard."

Snowtime

2008-12-19T17:25:00.006-05:00

A big snow storm barreled in today, quickly dumping a pile of snow on us. As is typical of New Englanders, all the local news channels quickly became weather howler monkeys, hooting incessantly on any aspect of this storm they could find to yatter on about for 5 minutes. While we expect to get 5-10 inches (12-25 centimeters for my metric friends) plus across the state (with "embedded thundersnow" no less), I took some time to walk out in it a bit and enjoy the sight of snow falling everywhere. I also slipped and fell on my @$$. So much for winter's beauty.

The view out my window:

Noon

1 p.m.

2 p.m.

3 p.m.

4 p.m.

Christmas Tree O Christmas Tree, can't you put up your own branches....

2008-12-18T03:19:00.008-05:00

Yes, still alive. My cold continued past the date of my last posting and when I upped my arsenal against it by going to medicine of the pseudoephedrine family, I spent three nights watching the clock ticking the night away. Thank you side effects.

In any case, I had this debate about when to put up my Christmas tree and decorations. As this is “The Non-Retail Year”, I’ve fought putting it up too early and settled on December 13th - St. Lucy’s Day in Scandinavian countries. That gives me just shy of two weeks of full on Christmas decorations. In the past, if the tree didn’t go up right after Thanksgiving, it ain’t going up at all. I was too exhausted and too Christmased out by that point. (Remember: I’ve stated how on the 6th busiest day before one Christmas, I logged in 7 miles just running around in my store.)

As I was too out of it from the cold and the cold medicine to clean first, my tree has yet to go up. I was starting to wonder if by delaying it, I was somehow missing something or was behind in the season somehow. Most everyone I know has put his or hers up, if not Thanksgiving weekend, then by the first week in December. But in that fog of congestion I was fighting, I caught several versions of The Christmas Carol. In each one, according to Victorian tradition, the tree and decorations went up on Christmas Eve.

The joke in my retail days was just how earlier and earlier each year the holiday merchandise would arrive. Last year we had Christmas books arrive in store in July. Often I was physically exhausted from work that I would often see Christmas Day as a chance to sleep in late. One Christmas Eve, I actually fell asleep on my couch with my coat on when I was due at a party. As much as I love the season, it was work and commerce. This year I plan to celebrate the holiday season and enjoy it like Scrooge finally does. The damned tree will go up in it’s own time!

Some photos:

Christmas Lights on Saks 5th Avenue, NYC

The Christmas Tree in Rockefeller Center

The Body Betrays Me

2008-12-10T11:10:00.011-05:00

Sorry for the gap but I was sick as a dog all last week. I brought chocolate cherry trifle to my brother’s house and left with his in-law’s flu from D.C. - I got gypped on the deal. I thought that considering I wasn’t in retail this winter I would be spared the run of the cold & flu season where I am usually the first or last to contract it.

After little sleep, I got up at 5:30 a.m. to hit the stores on “Black Friday” something I have never done before. Usually I was working and passing snide remarks on those that did get up far to early to shop. Being on the other side of the counter for this was quite the experience. I drove to Wal-Mart armed with an annotated shopping list and some HOT black tea, and saw the parking lots for the nearby Kohl’s (opened at 4 a.m.), Target (opening at 6 a.m.) and Wal-Mart (opened at 5 a.m.) were all full to capacity.

Inside, Wal-Mart was just a few gunshots shy of a riot. I had gone for one specific unmentionable item, for certain readers of this blog, but there was a huge line to get that item and my arms were already full with extra bargains I discovered along my way. Most of the lines were for the HD TVs and Wii and Xbox stuff (or so it seemed, I know nothing about electronic games and wasn’t buying any) but since I wasn’t buying that stuff I was in and out pretty fast. I then stopped at Target where I ran into a very tired Nonnie. By then it was 7:30 a.m. and I realized quite happily that my Christmas shopping was about 95% done! I got some great stuff for the kiddies and spent about 1/3rd the money I would normally have spent so all in all it was worth the little sleep.

Later that day I picked up Ryan and took him to the other brother’s “after Thanksgiving brunch” with said trifle and said D.C. flu. The food was very good and the affair was loud and fun. There were about 13 kids, all 5 years old and under and all in various states of running, toddling, crawling around. The trifle was a hit, of course, although everyone kept calling it "Death by Chocolate".

It took a few days for the cold to waylay me and left me alternately drowning in my own fluids or too zoned out to do almost anything but crawl from couch to bed to medicine cabinet and back again. I reread one of my favorite books, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby and finished watching the excellent film adaptation by painter Julian Schnabel. At age 42, Bauby who was the editor of French Elle, suffered a massive stroke that left him speechless and paralyzed, except for his left eye. He literally blinked his dictation for this memoir letter by letter, relating being locked in his body (the diving bell) but having his mind unaffected and free to take “flight like a butterfly”. With its upbeat and life affirming elegant tone, and the fact that it is fairly short, I used to recommend this great book to people looking for a book club read or high school students who needed a quick biography subject for a report.

The film is also an amazing achievement. Aside from being a visually beautiful, poetic film, Schnabel was able to capture the first person viewpoint of a prisoner in a dead body whose mind was free to roam the world of his imagination and memory. Both highly recommended.

Lastly, I started adding little snippets of videos to my Youtube account. Take a gander and let me know what you think.

Bloated and content...

2008-11-27T22:52:00.006-05:00

Oh, sweet tryptophan!

Hope your Thanksgiving was grand. Mine was.

Ate lots. Then waddled home to make the trifle for tomorrow. Not too bad. Bit too much chocolate pudding and I could only find regular and chocolate loaves of pound cake. Polish black cherry jam dripped everywhere in the kitchen. The cocoa on top looks more like a muddy road than a "dusting" but it'll do. It may not be Nigella pretty but I am proud of my ugly child.

Here's the baby:

Chocolate Covered Gluttony

2008-11-26T18:22:00.007-05:00

Thanksgiving crept up on me, thanks to not being worked to death with holiday prep. For the first time both parents are in Ireland instead of just my dad, and I am spending Thanksgiving at my sister in law Andrea's family, just around the corner from me. My sister in law's mother is an awesome cook as is Andrea who is cooking the turkey this year. I've offered to bring food but was told just to show up and eat. I feel bloated already.

The other brother called me up out of the blue and invited me to his house for brunch on Friday. I am bringing my version of an incredible dessert from my one of my favorite chefs Nigella Lawson from her cookbook Feasts. Chocolate Cherry Trifle. Nigella writes "Let people fall upon it with greed and gratitude. They will go home happy."

She ain't kiddin'. I made this last year for work and got these amazed and blissful thank yous from my coworkers. Here is her recipe:

Chocolate Cherry Trifle:

2 (approximately 12 ounces each) chocolate pound cakes
1/2 cup black cherry jam
1/2 cup cherry brandy
2 cups drained bottled sour cherries (recommended: Morello)

Custard:
4 ounces bittersweet chocolate, minimum 70 percent cocoa solids, chopped
1 1/3 cups plus 1 tablespoon milk
1 1/3 cups plus 1 tablespoon heavy cream
8 egg yolks
1/2 cup plus 1 tablespoon sugar
1/3 cup cocoa

Topping:
3 cups heavy cream
1-ounce bittersweet chocolate
Special Equipment: Large wide trifle bowl

Directions
Slice the chocolate pound cake and make jam sandwiches with the cherry jam, and layer the bottom of a large wide trifle bowl. Pour over the cherry brandy so that the cake soaks it up, and then top with the drained cherries. Cover with cling wrap and leave to macerate while you make the custard.

Melt the chocolate on low to medium heat in the microwave, checking after 2 minutes, though it will probably need 4 minutes. Or you can place it in a bowl over a pan of simmering water. Once the chocolate is melted, ser aside while you get on with the custard.

In a saucepan warm the milk and cream. Whisk the egg yolks, sugar, and cocoa in a large bowl. Pour the warm milk and cream into the bowl whisking it into the yolks and sugar mixture. Stir in the melted chocolate, scraping the sides well with a rubber spatula to get all of it in, and pour the custard back into the rinsed saucepan. Cook over a medium heat until the custard thickens, stirring all the time. Make sure it doesn't boil, as it will split and curdle. Keep a sink full of cold water so that if you get scared you can plunge the bottom of the custard pan into the cold water and whisk like mad, which will avert possible crisis.

The custard will get darker as it cooks and the flecks of chocolate will melt once the custard has thickened. And you do need this thick, so don't panic so much that you stop cooking while it is still runny. Admittedly, it continues to thicken as it cools and also when it's chilling in the refrigerator. Once it is ready, pour into a bowl to cool and cover the top of the custard with cling wrap to prevent a skin from forming.

When the custard is cold, pour and spread it over the chocolate cake layer in the trifle bowl, and leave in the refrigerator to set, covered in cling wrap overnight.

When you are ready to decorate, softly whip the cream for the topping and spread it gently over the layer of custard. Grate the chocolate over the top. Let people fall upon it with greed and gratitude. They will go home happy.

You can substitute chocolate cake for chocolate pound cake to make it lighter, and good chocolate pudding for custard. I add Hershey's Cherry Cordial Kisses for decoration.

Meteor over Edmonton

2008-11-22T14:19:00.001-05:00

I saw this and yelled "ohhhhh NEATO!" I really did.

Scary Movie

2008-11-21T18:09:00.005-05:00

When I was a kid, WPIX Channel 11 from New York would run Chiller Theatre from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Saturday nights, playing sci-fi and horror movies. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed this mix of schlocky 60s Japanese monster movies and the bloodier baroque horrors coming from Europe.

WPIX would always show a trailer at 10 p.m. right before the nightly news for a horror movie opening that weekend. I can distinctly remembering being absolutely scared out of my socks by the trailer for Dario Argento’s 1977 horror movie Suspiria. Evidently I could only stand to watch the first 20 seconds, probably running to hide under my bed once the woman brushing her hair turns around to the camera, as THAT is the only part I remember at all.

For some reason, I never did get to see the film. It had a reputation for being another of those misogynistic slasher films that is more about half naked women trying to escape some slow walking maniac with a knife than anything with intelligence. But last weekend Turner Movie Classics showed Suspiria on its TCM Underground program and I stayed up to the wee hours watching it and found myself actually enjoying it.

Aside from the gory, elaborate colorful deaths (this was the last film made using the Technicolor process) there is a fairy tale aspect to this story of a young dancer being sent to a ballet school run by a coven of evil witches. Think The Red Shoes by way of The Omen. It has a wild soundtrack by the group Goblin, gorgeous set design and some pretty horrific scenes, like a woman falling into a room filled with razor wire. The film ends up on a lot of best of lists and while I would not compare it to more dramatically tighter horror films like The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby, it has a certain loud originality and charm that cannot be overlooked.

Susan: this is not a film for you.

Two deaths and a Red Rabbit

2008-11-17T22:41:00.010-05:00

Michael Crichton died on Nov. 4th and I did not mention it (bad Bookkook, bad!). Crichton was one of the world’s most popular, tallest and richest authors and if he did not invent the science thriller, he certainly was the master of it. I recommend Jurassic Park, The Lost World, most of Sphere, all of Prey and The Andromeda Strain. I also very highly recommend the medical thriller Coma, one of the several films he directed. About 10 years ago I met Crichton at a book signing I did at one of the local colleges. At 6’9” (2.06 meters) he quite literally stood out in the crowd, easily head, shoulders, armpit and chest above anyone else in the room. He was very guarded during the informal Q&A and after he complained how difficult writing a novel was, someone asked him why does he do it (this was after the huge success of Jurassic Park) he gave a 10 minute answer that came down to: “so my grandkids don’t have to work.”

Peruvian chanteuse Yma Sumac died Nov. 1st but I only just heard about it. Born Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo in Peru in 1922, Sumac had a five octave range singing voice and became a cult sensation in the 1950s with her “Incan” flavored lounge music. Her albums are a lot of campy fun so fire up the lava lamp, put on your best leopard print suit and have a few hi balls and zen out the groovy song songstress, Yma Sumac.

Someone who is not dead (last I heard) is my friend Pahl Hluchan. Pahl is a painter, filmmaker, sculptor – a general Renaissance man – who has made some interesting films about a bratty Red Rabbit and eggs. Barney by way of Freud. I'll have to find some of his paintings to post.

Years ago, Pahl took a tune I made up and added some lyrics and made a stop motion animated short using it. After putting the brain of a chicken into a toaster oven, some mutants broke out singing my tune like a post apocalyptic Busby Berkeley number. Fun little film which gave me a music credit in a film and had talking cheese.

Before and After

2008-11-05T14:45:00.003-05:00

All politics aside, America - you did a very great thing last night.

You once again proved to the world that indeed your democracy works by showing how your government is ultimately answerable to its people and how that government can be changed by the articulation of the will of your people.

You also showed, indeed, “that all men are created equal” – one of the tenets of your very birth - and that which makes us different from one another does not define us alone nor does it limit us.

I am an American by choice and I have always loved you my adopted country. I have defended you to people who forgot how truly wonderful an Idea you are. I have also expressed my criticism of you when you needed it and when your actions were incongruous with your ideals.

But tonight you did something great, not only for yourself, but for the whole world. Today millions of African Americans descended from those you once enslaved are weeping with joy to see that the last barrier for them broken and that your promise of equality that took so long to get here, is true and alive. And your example shines across this world as it has often done again and again.

Our problems are not solved completely. We have not put behind us ages of bigotry and hatred. But after yesterday, no child born in America can say “I cannot do this” or I cannot be that” anymore.

Call me Kreskin, here's my prediction.

2008-11-02T12:06:00.008-05:00

Going with the New York TImes interactive map and a host of polling sites, I'm calling swing states North Carolina, Florida and Ohio to Obama, Missouri and Indiana to McCain.

353 electoral votes to Obama, 185 to McCain.

Popular vote: 50% Obama, 43% McCain and I'm being conservative.

link: http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/president/whos-ahead/key-states/map.html#/map=eMb_M

DON'T FORGET TO VOTE ON TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 4TH!

just found this link. Amazon posted a link of books the candidates say they have recommended or recently been seen reading:

link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/185-7689588-2403019?ie=UTF8&plgroup=2&docId=1000266291

Interesting that both are reading For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway