Bunnies on a Trampoline Portend Doom

Daniel Boorstin was worried about "pseudo-events" and manipulative imagery back in 1962 and expressed this in his classic treatise The Image, but things have gotten far worse and far more absurd than he could imagine-- if you can't trust security cam footage of joyful bunnies jumping on a trampoline, then there is no image you can trust-- which will perhaps move people back towards reading books?-- books can be fictitious, fabricated, and meretricious as well, but you have more time to parse the logic and research the examples and maybe the book is published by an organization you trust?-- who fucking knows, but we are headed into fuzzy and ambiguous times.

 

Tana French is The Bomb

I just finished The Trespasser by Irish-American mystery writer Tana French-- this is the sixth book in her "Dublin Murder Squad" series-- but each book is from the perspective of a different detective, so she does away with that whole "Sherlock Holmes genius detective trope" and instead focuses on how each case affects (and is affected by) the particular detective working the murder . . . and while I've read her books in no particular order (I also read Faithful Place and In the Woods in the Murder Squad series and her stand-alone novels The Wych Elm and The Searcher and I just started Broken Harbor) I am realizing that she is perhaps the best living mystery writer-- she is definitely a cut above Ruth Ware, although I love a Ruth Ware thriller-- so if you haven't read a Tana French novel, pick one at random and give it a shot, I doubt you'll be disappointed.

Salt Life

A cool, cloudy day here at the beach so I'm back at the coffee shop-- but this time, taking some advice from my wife, I have ordered my coffee "for here," and so I get it in a little blue mug, and then I can get a refill . . . anyway, lots of adventures in the past two days-- I oculd really get used to living down here:

1) yesterday, Stacey came to visit, and we spent some time at the beach, and then we went out for drinks and food in Asbury Park;

2) we visited the Black Swan for all-day Tuesday happy hour-- all alcohol is half off-- so we had some fancy drinks and apps . . . get this, in ANOTHER refurbished bank-- so I'm writing this sentence in a refurbished bank in Ocean Grove and we had drinks in a refurbished bank in Asbury-- fucking wild-- and while the food and drinks were great, Stacey and I did feel a strange and very random tapping on the metal foot rail but we couldn't exactly figure out which bar patron had the nervous feet;

3) then we went to Barrio Costero, the upscale Mexican joint, for Taco Tuesday-- three tacos and a spicy margarite for $15-- which is a deal at this place-- and there was no room at the bar so the hostess seated us at the "chef's counter" and we watched the kitchen in action-- it was quite impressive and I certainly got my money's worth-- I asked the head chef a lot of questions (she was saying "hands!" not "hits!" and the spritzer was full of lime juice) and we noticed that EVERYTHING was prepped and labeled, so they were really just assembling and cooking, for the most part-- an excellent experience;

4)  this morning, I shook off the alcohol and took Lola to the Asbury dog beach-- she enjoyed that . . .

5) after the dog park, I geared up and made the short drive to Wardell Park for some pickleball-- as usual, everything was organized and there were some decent players-- I ended up playing for nearly three hours;

6) post-pickleball, I cooked up some leftovers, collapsed on the couch and I read my Tana French novel until I fell asleep-- 

7) Catherine got home from her book club outing in Bradley Beach, and she's making some eggplant parm in our tiny kitchen-- she made the sauce yesterday with tomatoes from her garden and now she's prepping the white eggplants (also homegrown) and I took a lovely picture of this-- it's not easy to work in this little kitchen so that's why I cleared out (too many cooks=no good) and I did get a free coffee refill (but the AC in this old bank sucks).

Let's Move It Along

Yesterday, I finished my first (and perhaps last) P.D. James mystery novel, A Taste for Death, and while I enjoyed the central mystery and grisly murder, the book became a bit of a bombastic slog in the middle-- too much furniture and interior description, too many interviews, too many characters-- I guess I enjoy my crime fiction a little less realistic, a little more meta, and much faster paced . . . because I am certainly not going to crack the case, so I don't want to spend forever reading about it.

The Me Detonate a Bomb Generation

If you've forgotten-- or are not familiar-- with the spate of terroristic bombings that beset the United States in the early 1970s and instead you think of the 70s as an age of disco, drugs, and glam rock, then you are suffering from a case of misinformation or rose-tinted nostalgia and need to read the Bryan Burrough book Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence . . . I don't remember any of this, but apparently I was born into a political maelstrom of protest against racism and the Vietnam War.

I've Got a Perfect Puzzle For You

Until I listened to Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History episode "Nooks and Crannies"—which is about the legality surrounding trade secrets, particularly the recipe for Thomas's English Muffins—I never contemplated a serious moral dilemma from my youth: were the original Oompa-Loompas slave labor? . . . in the first edition of the book, the one I read, Roald Dahl described the Oompa-Loompas as a tribe of African Pygmy people whom Willy Wonka shipped to England to work forever in his factory--protecting his valuable trade secrets, which were previously being stolen by corporate spies-- and the Oompa-Loompas worked in exchange for cocoa beans . . . so this set-up sounds super sketchy . . . Wonka claims that the Oompa-Loompa's country of origin was a horrible place and the Oompa-Loompas were vulnerable to predators such as the Snozzwangers and Wangdoodles and so they are better off working in his factory but at the very least this sounds colonialist and certainly Wonka is breaking numerous labor laws and the worst case scenario is that the Oompa-Loompas have been taken against their will and detained indefinitely, without passport, currency, or any way to return home and have no choice but to work for cocoa beans.

Pure Innocent Fun

Ira Madison's collection of pop culture essays, Pure Innocent Fun, is the elder millennial Black gay man's dishier version of Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs-- a book that Madison says inspired him-- and while Klosterman is around my age and evrything he writes about resonates with me, Ira Madison-- who is 39-- came of age in a slightly different pop culture environment and I was not familiar with all pop culture touchstones-- according to Madison, Gen Xers watched Beavis and Butthead while Madison connected with Daria . . . we do both love Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but for Madison, Buffy is a bad-ass bitch who is also in a secret club-- which he related to as a closeted gay Black man at a very white and preppy high school in Milwaukee . . . Madison is also a fan of soap operas-- which I never watched-- and the film Soapdish, which I remember loving but I haven't seen it in a long time . . . and he has inspired me to watch the movie Bring It On, which he claims "might seem to be a frivolous cheerleading movie" but it is "one of the only good films about cultural appropriation that’s ever been made and most certainly one of the best films about race in America"-- I hope this is true because I love a good sports movie . . . we shall see.

Something Happened

When I was young, you specified the thing you were listening to, watching, or reading: I'm reading the new Stephen King book; I'm listening to the new God Lives Underwater album; I'm watching Melrose Place . . . but now I people often mention the platform they are using instead of the specific content: I'm watching Netflix/YouTube/TikTok, I'm listening to Spotify, I'm going to sit down and read my Kindle-- I'm sure Marshall McLuhan would have a field day with this trend-- the delivery method and the algorithm are more important than the content; we don't own content any more-- we just breeze though it, separate from everyone else and because of media fragmentation, no one is watching/reading/listening to the same thing . . . and I find this is a little sad and scary.

Good Ideas . . . What the Fuck?

 

My new episode of We Defy Augury philosophical, literary, and musical meditation on creativity and good ideas; the working title is "The Serendipitous Miracle of Creativity: Part 1" and my thoughts are (loosely) inspired by Jonah Lehrer's article "Groupthink," Plutarch's "The Ship of Theseus Dilemma," and Steven Johnson's book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation . . . the topic got too long and unwieldy for one episode, so hopefully I will finish part two sometime soon.

Boy's Life

Horror and mystery writer Robert R. McCammon's 1991 novel Boy's Life is something weird and different and special and I highly recommend it if you're looking for a sprawling tale to get lost in . . . the book is set in the 1960s and has Southern Gothic elements, a sprinkling of magical realism, a murder mystery, and an eccentric cast of characters in a small town in Alabama-- but it's really a coming-of-age story and the end of innocence in America: Southern charm and the Civil Rights movement butt heads and the narrator tries to maintain his childlike innocence in a world determined to screw with him and his emotions in every way feasible-- plus there's a rampant dinosaur.

Prophetic Fallacy

I am teaching my sophomores The Great Gatsby and today we acted out scenes from Chapter Five-- the section when Nick arranges for Gatsby to meet with Daisy at Nick's little house for tea, the first time they've seen each other in five years-- and at first Gatsby and Daisy are awkward and embarrassed, while it is raining-- but then: pathetic fallacy alert!-- then the old chemistry comes back and the sun, empathetic to their emotions-- starts to shine (which is a fallacy, the weather does not give a shit about your emotions) so I made sure to have a student play the weather in that scene-- and he's a tall kid so he loomed over the other two actors, it was fantastic-- and then the natural world reflected the book; I stayed up to late last night watching the Knicks' epic comeback against Boston, then dragged myself out of bed for 6:30 AM basketball-- and it was a dark and rainy gloomy day and I was tired and hungry and had a headache from the humidity-- but I went to acupuncture after school, which usually loosens me up and when I got out of acupunture, lo and behind! the sun was shining, and there was a cool breeze, and I was able to sit on the deck in the sun and read my thoroughly joyful and entertaining book (Boy's Life by Robert R. McCammon) so perhaps the pathetic fallacy is not a complete fallacy, it's just selective and relative-- the weather is always expressing someone's emotions, it just might not be yours.

This Novel Has Got It All!

If you're a sucker for dinosaurs and charismatic megafauna, and you are curious about the legal and political ramifications of time travel, then Clifford D. Simak's sci-fi novel Mastodonia is the book for you.

Dave's New Favorite Bible Story!

Though I once read the entire Bible-- back when my wife and I lived in Syria and were visiting many of the sites mentioned in the Good Book-- I must have skimmed over the story of Elisha and the bears, which a student mentioned today in class in regards to my shaved (mainly) bald head . . . so to summarize, in 2 Kings 2:23-2, the prophet Elisha is minding his own business, heading to Bethel and some small boys (or, more likely, young men) jeer at him and his bald head and tell him to go up to Heaven like Elijah and begone, and Elisha curses these young men in the name of the Lord and in a flash, two she-bears emerge from the woods and maul forty-two of the boys . . . and as a high school teacher of annoying teenagers, who often ask, "Did you ever have hair?" this is now my favorite Bible story and while I understand there is separation of Chruch and State, I think I can teach this particular story because the East Brunswick mascot is a bear and perhaps this bear is interested in protecting bald men from ridicule.

A Whale of a Prank

Today in my Grade 10 Honors English class, I distributed copies of Moby Dick-- which I found mouldering away on a high shelf in the book room-- and then counted the days of Spring Break on my fingers and did some long division on the board: eleven divided by 822 . . . the days of Spring Break divided by the number to pages in this great behemoth of a novel and I arrived at 74 pages a day . . . but I told them that would be the easy part of their Spring Break assignment-- the hard part would be the vocabulary in the enovel, which is erudite, recondite, and archaic-- and I told them I was halfway through and already the vocab list was over 150 words, and they would be quizzed on those words (and the entirety of the novel)on the day we returned from break . . . and then a couple kids started laughing and the rest of the class realized that I was April fooling them . . . but I did convince a couple of kids to actually take the novel and give it a shot-- I promised them the opening hundred pages would not disappoint, but then they might want to "skip a bit, brother" and make their way to the final sequence-- and perhaps this reverse psychology might work, the joke assignment might be more appealing than an authentic, graded task-- one kid said, "Better this book sits on my shelf than on a shelf in some closet."

The Secret Hours is Like Gretchen Wiener's Hair: Full of Secrets

If you are a fan of Jackson Lamb and the show Slow Horses, then you need to read Mick Herron's standalone prequel The Secret Hours-- this book fills in a lot of the gaps and backstory of the misfit MI5 gang of Slough House and does it in brilliant fashion: the novel centers on a government inquiry into some wild and nasty business in Berlin just after the wall fell and the spies came out of the cold . . . and while it seems to be all codenames and obfuscation, if you're a fan you will start to recognize many of the characters and plot strands from the show . . . very entertaining and very illuminating but you certainly want to watch Slow Horses or read a few Slough House books before you dive into this one.

The Week Begins, as Literacy Ends

It is Monday, it's butt-ass cold, the double birthday weekend is over, Donald Trump is aligning himself with Vladimir Putin's vision of the new world order, and apparently-- according to the new episode of Derek Thompson's podcast Plain English-- reading an entire book is a dying art.

My Students Are Amazing (AI) Writers!

Earlier this week in my Creative Writing class we did an exercise where we voted on a topic and then everyone-- either alone or collaboratively-- wrote a piece on this topic, executing a particular literary technique . . . fun and simple and the topic the class chose was ripe for reflection: gossip . . . so once the kids finished, a student-- just a regular, run-of-the-mill standard sixteen-year-old-- read aloud his piece . . . and at the start there was some dialogue, which seemed a little too perfectly punctuated, and then he read aloud this symbolic sentence:

The weight of a secret, too heavy for two lips, was shared from hand to hand like a dog-eared book from the library—pages folded, words smudged, the original story lost.

and I played it cool (even though I knew no sixteen boy in 2025 would express such a sentiment in such a style) and I asked, with as much faux-sincerity as I could muster, just how he thought of such an interesting metaphor for a rumor-- a dog-eared library book-- 

and he said, "Oh, um . . . I didn't think of that part . . . my friend told me to write that" 

and I said, "Is your friend named ChatGPT?" 

and then when I was able to talk to him alone I asked him if he even knew what a dog-eared book was (he did not) and I told him to write his own stuff as it was insulting for me to have to read AI bullshit and he apologized and we left it at that and while I didn't want to embarrass him anymore than I already did, I loved the sentence so much that I used it as a cautionary example in my other classes-- so I read it to them and then I asked my students why this sentence set off so many AI alarm bells and the kids didn't fully understand so I had to explain to them that this metaphor was incredibly antiquated and specific and the best way I could explain it was that back when I was in elementary school-- Judd School-- our library had a copy of the Judy Blume book Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, and there's a part in the book where Margaret gets her period-- salacious!-- and someone would dog-ear this page (one of my students said she thought dog-earing a library book was a criminal act) and then pass the book along and the next person would be able to turn right to the salacious part and read it-- and explained to them that in 1982, a world without digital screens and cell-phones and readily-available smut on the internet, this is what passed for racy content . . . and the bizzaro ending to this story is that, despite all the readily available smut online, available at a moment's notice, one click away, Florida's Martin County banned a Judy Blume book (Forever) and so while this sounds problematic, it is Florida so what do you expect-- but when you ban something, it becomes more attractive (and more well known) and so maybe the ban will entice kids to read again and dog-ear some salacious pages and pass that book on, like a rumor, distorted, smudged, and heavy with secrets.

The Best Genre, Hands Down, Knives Out

I've been doing some heavy reading lately--I read an extremely challenging historical literary mystery by Matthew Pearl, The Dante Club, which inspired me to re-read Dante's Inferno and I've also been slogging my way through the last book in Rick Perlstein's masterful political trilogy Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 and The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China by Robert D. Kaplan-- but whenever I get too deep into the shit, over my head in literary shit, so to speak-- like the flatterers in the eighth circle of hell-- then I circle back to the best genre, really the only genre-- a modern procedural mystery story-- there is no question that this is the best genre of fiction ever invented (thanks Edgar Allan Poe!) and whenever I'm struggling to find something to really engrossing, I get a hold of a well-written crime mystery . . . this time it's Never Tell by Lisa Gardner, apprently this one is based on a real case (which I haven't delved into because I don't want to spoil the mystery) but it's gripping, detailed, well-paced, and each chapter is written from a different point-of-view, yet Gardner still maintains the mystery-- while I'm not sure which genre of music is the best-- I love hyperpop, alt-country, jazz fusion, hip-hop, post-rock, and many others-- I am certain that the mystery story is the king of all literary genres, bowing down to no other.

Presidents' Day . . . Take It Easy

My wife and I did NOT buy a mattress on our day off today, but we did go to the gym (though my wife and I were both very sore from working out too hard yesterday and walking around like very old people) and then we went out to lunch, but while I took the next reasonable step in this progression and took a nap, my wife-- who was starting on this bent at lunch, showing me Pinterest pictures and saying things like "I work hard"--appeared in our bedroom while I was mid-nap . . . with a tape measure!-- she's got some grand plans for our bedroom, which I like to keep in the style of Jay Gatsby-- "the simplest room in the house"--  and while I already talked her out of a plant wall over our heads at lunch-- although I love a plant wall-- because I don't want a plant falling on me while I'm sleeping . . . and now I think she's calmed down for the time being and found a book to read on her Kindle and is getting into the spirit of a random day off.

Hump Day Existentialism

 Today we started a new text in College Writing, a chapter from Rebecca Solnit's book Wanderlust entitled "The Aerobic Sisyphus and the Suburbanized Psyche" and so I took the kids through the myth of Sisyphus and how in Greek times, the Sisyphean task of rolling the boulder was punitive, but then how Camus adopted Sisyphus as the mascot of existentialism and the idea that "the realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning" and then I challenged the kids to come up with ideas of how our lives are absurd searches for meaning and identity because-- unlike back in the old days, when if your dad made barrels, then you were probably fated to make barrels . . . which, on the one hand is rather restrictive, but on the other hand, relieves you of a lot of doubt and anxiety-- but we are modern humans and our fate, according to Satre, is wide open and there's no higher power to guide us, so our existence precedes our essence, which he explains thusly:

What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing – as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism.

and then I challenged the students to come up with examples of how our lives are absurd searches for our essence-- but my examples were the best:

-- I'm going to Harvard to play football!

-- I just drove my car to the gym and I got so tired working out that I can't get any of this yard work done.