Sentence of Dave: December 2023

The Books Dave Read in 2023

1) The Candy House by Jennifer Egan

2) The House Across the Lake by Riley Sager

3) Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton

4) Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton

5) Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

6) Death by Video Game: Danger, Pleasure, and Obsession on the Virtual Frontline by Simon Parkin

7) The Quiet Boy by Ben H. Winters

8) Flight by Lynn Steger Strong

9) The Revolutionary: Sam Adams by Stacy Schiff

10) How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix

11) South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry

12) Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson

13) This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas

14) The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet

15) Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State by Kerry Howley

16) The Other Side of Night by Adam Hamdy

17) The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

18) Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

19) The Little Friend by Donna Tartt

20) Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It by Daniel Knowles

21) The Ghosts of Belfast by Stuart Neville

22) Shakespeare: The World as a Stage by Bill Bryson

23) 1215: The Year of Magna Carta by Danny Danziger and John Gillingham

24) If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio

25) Ringworld by Larry Niven

26) My Murder by Katie Williams

27) Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead

28) The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley

29) The Godwulf Manuscript by Robert B. Parker

30) God Save the Child by Robert B. Parker

31) Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford DeLong

32) Mortal Stakes by Robert B. Parker

33) Promised Land by Robert B. Parker

34) Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy by Colin Dickey

35) Counterweight by Djuna

36) Judas Goat by Robert B. Parker

37) The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

38) Pet by Catherine Chidgey

39) Let's Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste by Carl Wilson

40) Tourist Season by Carl Hiaasen

41) The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

42) Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith

43) Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild.

44) Wellness by Nathan Hill

45) Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse

46) All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby

47) When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole.

If you're looking for a mash-up of Alice in Wonderland, Frankenstein, and a self-reflexive, autonomous, meta-Pygmalion (with the addition of a bunch of freaky sex scenes) then Yorgos Lanthimos' movie Poor Things fits the bill . . . Emma Stone should win the Oscar for her revolutionary and evolutionary performance; Mark Ruffalo is rakishly entertaining; and Willem Dafoe does his usual creepy thing; my favorite line: "Now I must go punch that baby."

Three Better be the Magic Number

Hopefully, the proverb "bad things come in threes" is accurate-- because we had three bad things happen in rapid-fire succession today-- in a twenty minute span-- and now I hope we're in the clear . . .

Bad Thing #1: I pulled my calf muscle playing pickleball today-- totally stupid because my calf has been really tight, some kind of spasm or cramp, and despite this, I played a bunch of basketball with my son earlier in the week, which didn't help, but then I rolled it and rested it and stretched it properly and all that and it felt good today-- too good-- so I stopped taking it easy and played hard and mid-jump something snapped, so I'll be out of commission for a while;

Bad Thing #2: Cat texted her principal something that was meant for her co-teacher and NOT meant for her principal (in fact, it was about her principal) and so she had to do some back-pedaling and apologizing-- this was a movie-like bad thing where you're like "WTF?" . . . than happened?

Bad Thing 3#: while we were playing pickleball, our dog Lola did a bad thing-- when Cat walked up the hill to get the car (because I could NOT manage to walk up the hill with a pulled calf muscle) she found our kitchen and living room all amess with plastic wrappers and powdered sugar . . . Lola got up on the counter and ate an entire bag of pita bread AND a bunch of pizzelle star cookies coated in powdered sugar . . . so her stomach is eventually going to be a mess and I can't even walk her.

Gentrifiers Beware!

If you're looking for a thriller that lambastes rich white gentrifiers, pharmaceutical companies, and government-subsidized business acquisitions-- and has the wildly surreal conspiratorial feel of Jordan Peele's Get Out, check out Alyssa Cole's novel When No One Is Watching . . . but I should warn you: I thought this was going to be a more realistic take on race relations in a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood-- told from two perspectives, a black woman who grew up there and a white guy who is part of the new wave of property owners-- with a little mystery thrown in for plot . . . but this book is actually a full-fledged, over-the-top, everyone-is-in-on-it hair-raising horror story-- which, on the one hand, is a lot of fun-- with loads of Quentin Tarantino-style "Justified violence"-- but, on the other hand, the race and gentrifying issues lose all their nuance, they are sacrificed on the altar of plot, guns, and vengeance.

Moses = Moses?

As I was plodding through Rober Caro's The Power Broker yesterday morning, I wondered whether Caro will eventually pluck the low-hanging-fruit and make the pun I am anxiously awaiting-- will he compare urban planner Robert Moses, who parted the neighborhoods of New York City to make way for superhighways (including the Cross Bronx Expressway) to the Biblical Moses-- who parted the Red Sea so the Israelites could get to the Promised Land-- if he does make the pun I'll be satisfied and my expectations will be fulfilled, but I'll also be disappointed-- because Caro is such a classy writer and this is such an obvious and rather stupid pun (Robert Moses implemented his projects by learning the ins-and-outs of political bureaucracy, soft power, and acting without permission-- and not asking for forgiveness either!-- while Moses was the recipient of an Omnipotent Miracle from an All Powerful Lord) plus puns are the lowest form of humor . . . I've got 950 pages to go, so the much awaited resolution to this sentence won't be happening for a while.

A (Photographic) Xmas Miracle

Christmas morning, I remembered that months ago I had bought one of those mini-phone-tripods and never opened the box . . . so I gave myself a Christmas present that was entirely symbolic of the holiday-- I opened some random shit I ordered online in the summer and literally forgot about because we live in the land of plenty (I bought the tripod because I had an idea for a series of TikTok videos but I never really got started on them because . . . well, that's an insane thing to get started on) and when I opened the mini-tripod box, I found that not only did I get the mini-tripod, but I also got a mini-remote . . . so that we didn't have to do the phone-timer photo thing-- which is a random nightmare and rarely produces a good picture-- but instead I could trigger the phone-camera by Bluetooth-- a fucking Xmas miracle if there ever was one-- and so I was able to take these pictures and also be in the picture-- and I'm going to declare that these photos are probably my greatest photographic accomplishments in a lifetime of not really accomplishing very much photographically.

The Boys Do Good Stuff

A couple of pleasant holiday moments:

1) I picked up Alex from Rutgers yesterday-- he survived his engineering exams but in regards to them, he said, "That was the hardest thing I've done in my entire life" but then we blew off some steam playing hoops at the Piscataway Y-- last night we just shot around and this morning we kicked some butt playing three-on-three . . . despite my sore calf muscle . . . I shot from outside and let Alex handle the athletic stuff;

2) while Ian can't play basketball with us until he undergoes his ankle surgery-- a fact which makes all of us very annoyed and sad-- he still made a clutch play last night . . . he's now working on the production end at Birnn Chocolate, a venerable candy factory on the north side of town, and my wife and I put in a couple of gift orders for some dark-chocolate raspberry jellies, as they are unequivocally the best around-- but they were all out . . . Ian said maybe they were going to make some today but you can't go to Birnn on the day before a holiday-- the line is too long-- but then when he got home from work last night, red-cheeked from biking in the cold, he plopped down three boxes on the counter . . . he made the jellies himself-- obviously he knows how to do that now-- he poured out the jelly onto a sheet, used some giant cutter than makes the jelly into little rectangles, and then dipped the individual jelly rectangles into the dark chocolate . . . a Christmas miracle!

AI Won't Replace Dave . . . Yet

It seems AI will replace low-level sports journalism-- AI can already do a serviceable job summarizing and analyzing the box score of a particular event and it will only get better at these tasks-- and this had me worried so I asked Bard AI if it would also be replacing ME and my personal blog, but Bard said no, that blogs like "Sentence of Dave" contain "the human touch"-- and thats true, I often really fuck up apostrophe usage-- and Bard says that personal blogs also possess "creativity and storytelling" but I feel like AI is catching up on that front and the last thing that Bard says it can't replicate is "community" and this is probably true-- until the AI is embodied and you can meet it at the pub . . . what would this blog be without the comments? and the correcting of my apostrophes?

Good Students = Actually Having to Teach

My College Writing students are hard-working and wonderful this year, which-- on the one hand is a good thing-- but on the other hand, it means that during these last days before the essay is due, they ask me a lot of questions on how to synthesize these disparate non-fiction texts we read ("The Myth of the Ant Queen" by Steven Johnson, "The Critic and the Thought Leader" by Anand Giridharadas and "Always Be Optimizing" by Jia Tolentino) and they have me look at a lot of thesis statements and topic sentences, and so by the end of the day, my brain is swimming in ants and emergence and self-organizing systems and million-ball billiards tables and new feminism and ever-increasing beauty standards and increasing plutocratic influence and shrieking daemonic mini-programs and the costs of evolutionary solutions and the convergence of MarketWorld and decentralized ant dynamics and the polluted miracle of Industrial Revolution Manchester and the dystopian potential of the cyborg and the juxtaposition of a hundred other strange concepts and while I am wholeheartedly behind the Rutgers model of non-fiction synthesis-- of making children aware of these big contemporary ideas and having them grapple with the terminology and concepts of the post-modern world (even though Rutgers seems to be abandoning the model they created and dumbing down the course because kids have lost their minds since COVID and the cell-phone revolution) I still miss teaching books while I like the abstract and conceptual conversations we have about this stuff-- and the connections we make to reality-- the top-down and bottom-up power dynamics really applies to what is happening with abortion right now, etc.-- it will be nice to switch over to something like Twelfth Night.

Wet and Data-driven Monday

Today was very Monday, a caricature of Monday-ness, beginning with a torrential storm that soaked Lola and me thoroughly on our morning walk-- I was so wet, I actually had to change my underwear-- and then, after a long day of helping kids revise their expository essays, we had a department meeting, the most Monday of all meetings, the one where we analyze data from our grade books-- and Stacey said her reaction to looking at everyone's data-- the number of grades, the grade breakdown, the averages-- is that she either cries or acts like an asshole . . . but she did neither, so that was a win, I guess . . . anyway, we'll try it again on Tuesday.

Thus Endeth the Streak

All good things must come to an end, and so much like Linsanity, The Tommy-Devito A.K.A. The Cutlet Kid Winning Streak has run its course . . . fun while it lasted.

The Holdovers: Old Walleye Does It Again

Chalk it up to Paul Giamatti (pun intended) to portray the most curmudgeonly, yet compellingly human grouch of a private school ancient studies teacher in cinematic history . . . a bitterly disappointed educator with one glass eye, trimethylaminuria, hyperhidrosis, a tendency to drink too much, and a habit of insulting the students with various elevated vitriol-- troglodytes, fetid philistines, hormonal vulgarians, etcetera-- but despite this, and because of Giamatti's brilliance, The Holdovers has just the right amount of sentimentality and just the right amount of angst . . . the tone reminded me a bit of Catcher in the Rye, told more from someone like Old Mr. Spencer's point of view.

Dave Learns Some Shit on a Penultimate Friday in December

Here's some shit I learned today:

1. you're not going to get much done with a regular-level senior English class on the penultimate Friday before Winter Break . . . and the stupid 82-minute block period exacerbates this . . . I might have been able to maintain my patented veteran-teacher level of anger/motivation/self-deprecating humor/patience/flexibility/resilience/persistence/sardonic mockery/wittiness/intelligence for 42 minutes but there's no way to keep that shit up for 82 minutes;

2. both my wife and my older son Alex have a Pinterest page?

3. very few people know how and why the Northern Lights occur;

4. I really hate it when teachers stop in the hallways-- and they tend to be female teachers-- and complain about how overwhelming and tough the holidays are . . . because from an outside perspective, it sounds like they're complaining about how grueling it is to buy things and cook things and eat things-- but I keep my thoughts to myself (and my students, who are a captive audience and therefore must listen to my rants about the rampant materialism, environmental devastation, and unnecessary stress and traffic of the holidays . . . and complaining about this stuff is the only thing that alleviates the weird stomach-ache I have until Xmas is over and done with and we can go back to appreciating political stability and hot water and heat and basic miraculous conveniences)

5. if you do a bunch of one-legged squatting exercises from random YouTube videos, you're going to be sore for a couple of days.

A Stupidly Tilting Planet

Once again, it's the time of year when I wish I lived on the equator-- sunrise and sunset in Quito are always around 6 AM and 6 PM, respectively, which is the way to do it.

I Have a Wife Who Makes Her Own Naan

Last night my wife whipped up some Indian food-- chicken tikka masala and daal tarka and some other lentil thing-- and then she realized we didn't have enough naan in the freezer and so I suggested we use some tortillas-- chicken tikka tacos!-- and then, satisfied that I had really helped out with dinner, I went back to drinking my beer and listening to music and watching her cook . . . and then Ian got home and I talked to him for a bit and then I saw that Catherine was doing something weird with flour on the counter and I asked her what she was doing and she said, "I'm making some homemade naan from scratch" and I was like WTF? and a Troy Barnes moment from Community popped into my head: after behaving abominably in the video game competition for the inheritance, Pierce's half-brother Gilbert says "Family can make a person do a lot of crazy things" and Troy answers: "I understand . . . I have an uncle who makes his own pizza."

Blame It On the Glasses

I shot poorly again at basketball this morning, the second week in a row-- so it must be my glasses-- I haven't had an eye exam for a long time and I think my vision has gotten worse, so I booked an appointment, and there's also the fact that I'm playing in progressive lenses-- while they're great for switching from driving to reading, but they are a little weird for sports . . . my brother got LASIK surgery years ago and it worked wonder but I'm trepidatious about someone, even a licensed physician, shooting a laser at my eyes, so I don't think I'll be going that route.

Blame It On Robert Moses?

Escaping the city on Saturday night was damn near impossible-- and while my friends blamed SantaCon for the volume, there's also a more historical reason-- the power broker, himself: fucking Robert Moses . . . here's what Robert Caro has to say on it:

To build his highways, Moses threw out of their homes 250,000 persons -more people than lived in Albany or Chattanooga, or in Spokane, Tacoma, Duluth, Akron, Baton Rouge, Mobile, Nashville, or Sacramento. He tore out the hearts of a score of neighborhoods, communities the size of small cities themselves, communities that had been lively, friendly places to live, the vital parts of the city that made New York a home to its people.

By building his highways, Moses flooded the city with cars. By systematically starving the subways and the suburban commuter railroads, he swelled that flood to city-destroying dimensions. By making sure that the vast suburbs, rural and empty when he came to power, were filled on a sprawling, low-density development pattern relying primarily on roads instead of mass transportation, he insured that that flood would continue for generations if not centuries, that the New York metropolitan area would be--perhaps forever an area in which transportation--getting from one place to another would be an irritating, life-consuming concern for its 14,000,000 residents.

Blame it On SantaCon?

Approximately three years ago, in February of 2020, we went into the city for my friend Connell's 50th birthday-- we went to Turntable Chicken Jazz and sat in a low-ceilinged room and ate Korean fried chicken and drank beer and then sang karaoke in a small crowded private room in a Koreatown fifth floor karaoke bar-- several weeks later, the world shut down and it was a miracle that we all didn't get COVID from this trip to the city . . . but perhaps some of us did-- and Connell reenacted this trip last night for his wife Lynn's fiftieth and the city seemed more crowded, chaotic, noisy and crazy than usual-- the train ride was slow and crowded, Penn Station was absolutely nuts, the streets were packed, as were the bars and restaurants, our Uber ride home was through bumper-to-bumper traffic. . . we should have just waited for the train, although we did get to witness an altercation from our slow-moving cab: a young guy on foot kicked or bumped or did something to a parked Tesla and an older guy, a big older dude, got out of the car and started beating up the younger guy and pinned him to the ground and I think he was strangling him when a bystander broke it up-- and as we inched away, the peroxide blond wife was yelling at this young guy as well, for doing something to their car-- my friends blamed this ubiquitous insanity on "SantaCon," which pulls in a weird, drunkenly stumbling holiday crowd into the mix but I think quite a bit of the perceived chaos is because I am getting old.

The Most Malodorous Game

Before I left to play pickleball yesterday afternoon, I got a whiff of something stale and sweaty and I had to play a most malodorous game: what on my person was exuding a bad smell? my socks? nope, the knee brace on my right knee? nope, the knee brace on my left knee? nope, how about my shirt or my shorts?-- sometimes the laundry smells weird because it didn't fully dry . . . nope, my breath? nope, my pullover, which gets several wears before I wash it because I always take it off after three points of play? nope, my shoes? nope . . . with most of the sports I play-- basketball, soccer, and tennis-- I'm so old that I can't play them two days in a row, so most of my stuff is clean before I play again, but I can play pickleball two or three days in a row before my knees and feet give out, so sometimes my stuff starts to smell-- but I went through everything and couldn't find the odor . . . except . . . the brim of my hat? the call is coming from inside the hat! yuck . . . so I switched hats and washed the offender and next time I will check my hat first, as it is the closest thing to my nose and so if it smells, then it's going to seem like everything smells.

Rejected By the Youth

A few weeks before Winter Break, there is some festive "door decorating" in our school building and the homerooms are responsible for this; I've now been with the same homeroom for three years and I know some of the students quite well-- I've taught them in actual classes and such-- so when a pair off them volunteered to decorate our homeroom door I thought they might actually listen to my suggestions . . . I told them I wanted our door to feature a rapidly melting snowman saying to an elephant-- the symbol of the Republican party-- "There's no such thing as global warming, right?" and I also wanted a bunch of elves clear-cutting the rainforest while Santa loads the illegally sourced timber into his magic sleigh-- but they rejected both my ideas and instead decided to go with the image of a multicultural scarf with a bunch of nations on it or something . . . and they gave me three reasons why my ideas were verboten:

1) the door decorations were supposed to avoid religious imagery . . . but at this point, is Santa religious? or is he just a symbol of rampant consumer culture?

2) they decided you were probably supposed to avoid overtly political stuff as well and I conceded that this was a good point;

3) they told me I was the Grinch.

When the Cat is Away, Dave Gets Sleepy

Catherine is away on a lady-hiking-trip to the Blue Ridge Mountains, so it's just me, Ian, and Lola in the house . . . Ian is eating pizza and watching "The Regular Show" and I'm drinking a beer, and writing this sentence and then I'm going to play a game of online chess and fall asleep at 7:30 PM, most likely (I've been staying up late all week watching the second season of "Fargo" with my wife, that is one intense show).

Dave Will Soon Be Drowning (Figuratively Speaking)

A few days ago I decided to read Eleanor Catton's giant literary tour-de-force The Luminaries, but then 99% Invisible announced a year-long podcast "book club" in honor of Robert Caro's much-lauded 1200-page biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker . . . and I've always wanted to read The Power Broker but I could never pull the trigger and buy it-- it's expensive and I think you have to read it in hardcover because the font would be too small in paperback but now Conan O'Brien has convinced me so I ordered the book from Amazon as a Christmas present and soon enough I'll be reading TWO gigantic books for a long long time.

Dave Journeys From Irony to Sincerity . . . Damn!

I played 6:30 AM basketball this morning-- and I played poorly to boot, missing three lay-ups and most of my outside shots-- so I figured I'd just do a tongue-in-cheek sentence and go take a nap . . . I was going to claim, with my impeccable dry wit, that Sugar's song "Hoover Dam" is probably in the top five songs about dams (and probably the best song about the Hoover Dam) but then I got to poking around on the internet and the internet's giant digital mega brain reminded me that the song "The Highwayman" has a verse about a workman who slips and falls into the wet concrete of the Hoover Dan and is buried "in that gray tomb that knows no sound," which is as dramatic and evocative a blue-collar death as they come and so now I've got to decide if Sugar's "Hoover Dam" is a better song than "Highwayman," which is a tough one-- I certainly like Sugar's song better-- and I've been listening to "Copper Blue" quite a bit recently-- and "Highwayman" merely uses working on the Hoover Dam as one stop in a journey of reincarnation, from brigand to sailor to worker to starship captain to drop of rain-- the dam is not the main image of the song-- while Sugar's "Hoover Dam" is a vertiginous cinematic yawp about existence, purpose, and perspective that begins:

Standing on the edge of the Hoover Dam

I'm on the center line, right between two states of mind

And if the wind from the traffic should blow me away

From this altitude, it will come back to you

and then, after much existential meandering, the song ends "standing on the edge of the Hoover Dam"-- and this is repeated over and over, it's quite catchy-- and now that I've really thought about it and done some research, I am going to sincerely claim that Sugar's "Hoover Dam" is the best song about the Hoover Dam.

Dave Sets Sail into a Deep Literary Sea

Let it be noted, that I, Dave, with unwavering resolve, have determined to embark upon an arduous literary journey and read a most voluminous tome penned by Eleanor Catton-- The Luminaries-- a work upon which was bestowed the illustrious Booker Prize-- and if you would like to join me in consuming this weighty tome, I invite you to join me in a most erudite book club, which will convene in one month time on the goldfields of Hokitika-- South Island, of course-- so mark your calendars, bibliophiles, and we will unravel the threads of this intricate and byzantine literary tapestry, together, despite the obtuse astrological symbolism and the antiquated prose and when we are finished, we will achieve enlightenment of some substantial kind and content, until then there will only be the sound of turning pages.

Top "Golf"

Yesterday, in honor of my wife's birthday, we went to TopGolf . . . and while TopGolf is a fun place-- with loud music, Angry Birds style range-target games, surprisingly good food and drink, and a WIDE variety of golf swings-- the things that are happening at TopGolf are only tangentially related to the sport known as "golf."

Get Out? Or Stay In? The Choice is Yours . . .

The new episode of my pretentiously titled podcast We Defy Augury is called "Get Out? Or Stay In?" and I took some notes from the Colleague-That-Was-Formerly-Cunningham-But-Now-Goes-By-O'Grady and tried to get more organized and start in with the book sooner and then slowly delve into my bombastic tangential ramblings-- anyway, this one includes thoughts (loosely) based on Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle and the Special Guests are The Allman Brothers, The Eagles, Uncle Henry, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Andre Heyworth.

The Perfect Ending to this Piece of Shit Story

It's dark and cold and rainy and gray, but I still had to walk the dog-- so I put on my rain jacket and we took a stroll through the park and on the way home, I noticed a perfectly appropriate symbol for the moody, ominous weather: there was a dead squirrel in the road, right in front of my house . . . and so I embraced the spirit of this ugly day, went inside and found a plastic bag and put it over my hand, took our half-full garbage bag into the road, hefted the dead squirrel by the tail with my plastic-sheathed hand into the garbage bag, and tossed the bag into the trash bin . . . yuck.

Sentence of Dave