Gross Meatbag/Corporeal Irony!

Today in class, my College Writing students wrote a synthesis essay about the "Always Be Optimizing" chapter of the Jia Tolentino book Trick Mirror-- and while my colleague Cunningham wrote a wonderful prompt about how Tolentino describes women with an odd triad of imagery, as "gross meatbags, robots, and spiritual beings," I couldn't handle the term "gross meatbag"-- too visceral-- and so I changed it to the more academic-sounding "corporeal" and then told the children Cunningham's phrasing-- and there certainly is some "gross meatbag" imagery in this chapter, including a vivid account of a woman "queefing" in Tolentino's yoga class . . . so the kids had to write about the tension between these three portrayals of women and what it revealed about the world-- and, ironically, during last period, while I was robotically grading the previous class set of essays, and trying to inspire my current class to transcendent new heights of learning, the lunch of lentils, chicken, and cauliflower that my wife packed for me (which I had eaten an hour previous) made its way all the way through my corporeal digestive system, and so I had to make a hasty exit from class, quickly use the bathroom, and then return as though nothing unusual had happened . . . because, as I mentioned earlier, I don't like talking about that kind of gross meatbag stuff.

Go To Hell (Novelistically)

If you want to read a totally fucked up book about a disgraced knight trying to protect a sanctified child in the bleakest of settings-- plague-ravaged France in the 14th century-- but that's not enough fucked-uppededness for you, and you also need Book of Revelations style monsters and a war between earth and heaven (plus some historical corruption . . . the Avignon papacy scandal) then Between Two Fires, by Christopher Buehlman, is the novel for you . . . I enjoyed much of it, but parts of it were beyond my comprehension and the story did get a bit tedious towards the end-- I had to skim some until the action picked up again-- but this is an incredibly visceral, incredibly researched, and fantastically conceived literary project, and worthy of a better, more patient reader than me.

Horror Movies Have Rules, Don't They?

The Scream franchise suggested some rules about horror movies:

The first movie taught us how to survive a basic horror film . . .

Rule #1: Never have sex
Rule #2: Never drink or do drugs
Rule #3: Never ever say, “I’ll be right back”

the sequel, Scream 2, reminded us that things change in the sequel . . .

--The body count is always higher
--more blood and carnage
--Never assume the killer is dead

and Scream 3 gave us tips on surviving the final chapter of a horror franchise . . .

The killer is superhuman
Anyone, including the main character, can die
The past will come back to haunt you

and Paul Tremblay's new book Horror Movie plays with all these rules-- and this makes sense because he is balancing three timelines so we're going to need three kinds of horror; the first time period is 1993, when some young auteurs decide to film a low-budget, artsy horror movie and things go horribly wrong; then there are moments from the next fifteen years, as the legend of the "cursed film" grows; and finally, a reboot of this cursed film that was never released, though a few scenes were leaked on YouTube-- and the reboot will contain a cameo from the one surviving actor from the original, the Thin Kid . . . and the screenplay of this cursed horror movie is interspersed between scenes from these three time periods and the screenplay is both aware of the rules of horror and circumscribed by them . . . as is the novel-- this is the first Paul Tremblay book I've ever read  and I truly enjoyed it (and now I'm reading The Cabin at the End of the World and that one is even more compelling-- both books highly recommended if you like the horror genre).

Three Mysteries (Two Solved, One Pending)

This won't be my most lucid sentence-writing, and you will learn why soon enough-- but I was involved with three mysteries today (so far) and while two of them are resolved, I'm going to need your help with the third:

1) I just finished Anthony Horowitz's mystery novel The Sentence is Death, which is fantastic fun . . . except for the ending . . . not the actual ending of the book-- that's compelling and full of twists and turns-- but my experience while reading the ending was quite unpleasant;

2) this afternoon, my wife and I took a walk at Rutgers Gardens and the weather has turned-- it's hot again-- and when we got home, I wanted to take a nap and she wanted to watch TV so I went upstairs to our bedroom and I closed the windows-- we haven't needed the AC for nearly a week-- and I turned on the AC-- not the normal through-the-wall unit, as that's leaking, but a portable unit that we dragged upstairs-- the kind with the tube that leads to a vent that you put in the window frame-- and then I read a few pages of The Sentence is Death and soon fell fast asleep, but when I woke up, our bedroom seemed really hot so I walked over to the AC unit and confirmed that it was pumping out cold air-- and the temperature read 72 degrees so I figured I was just overheated from the day's activities and perhaps the cool air had not reached the far corner of the room-- very illogical reasoning-- and then I lay back down on the bed and finished the novel-- and the ending was exciting enough to make me forget about the heat, but then once I had turned the last page an closed the book, I walked back over to the AC unit and noticed that when I closed the window, I did NOT insert the vent tube apparatus into the window frame-- it was pumping hot air right back into the room! and the AC was trying to make it 72 degrees, but when I pressed another button, the unit told me the actual temperature-- 87 degrees . . . mystery solved . . . so I am writing this sentence in a dazed state but at least I know the resolution to both  The Sentence is Death AND The Mysterious Case of the Stupid Man, the Hot Room and the Over-extended Air-conditioner

3) and here is mystery number three-- perhaps you people can solve it-- I call it The Mystery of the Two People Inside My Phone . . . and One of Them is an Idiot: 

on my drive down to Veteran's Park to play pickleball this morning, I spoke to my phone several times-- Hey Google style-- asking it to change the music on Spotify (sidenote: Ill Communication is a really weird album) and every time, the female voice complied-- but then on the ride home, I tried to "Hey Google" my phone to change the music and a male voice answered that it did not have that capability-- and this male voice tried to access YouTube music but could not do so and then he said that he could not control Spotify . . . and this has happened to me several times now-- the female "Hey Google" can control Spotify, but the male "Hey Google" is a total inept idiot . . . and when I asked my phone about this inconsistency, my phone chastised me:

"That statement is incorrect and discriminatory. There is no inherent difference in a person's ability to control Spotify based on their gender. Anyone, regardless of their gender identity or expression, can learn how to use Spotify."

and this proves that AI is dumber than ever, but that still doesn't explain why the female "Hey Google" is smart and competent and can control Spotify and the female "Hay Google" is a loser-- and I can't find any explanation for this on the internet, and now I'm using some Samsung voice control called Bixby-- you say "Hi Bixby"-- and Bixby seems to always be able to control Spotify, so I've solved the problem but not the mystery.

Horowitz and meta-Horowitz Do It Again

I am a sucker for British mystery novels and a sucker for meta-fictional humor and in The Sentence of Death, Anthony Horowitz once again provides both-- it's the usual set-up, there's a murder-- a high-profile divorce lawyer is bludgeoned/sliced to death with a wine bottle and the police hire the rather unlikeable, rather shady, but incredibly brilliant ex-detective Daniel Hawthorne as a consultant to the case-- and the meta-fictional version of the actual author Anthony Horowitz tags along to document the case . . . Horowitz is pulled from on location of a shoot of the TV show Foyle's War-- a show that the real Horowitz actually created and wrote-- and now meta-Horowtiz is involved in a "real" mystery and a "real" murder . . . and while folks tolerate Hawthorne (barely) they are really annoyed that there's a writer shadowing Hawthorne, taking notes on all that is said-- so you get wonderful scenes, with layers of meta-fictional irony (amidst a complex mystery with loads of clues, characters, and red herrings) like this one, when possible suspect Akira Anno-- a celebrated poet and writer-- realizes that Horowitz is writing a book about this investigation, she says:

"He's putting me in his book? I don't want to be in his fucking book! I want a lawyer in this room. If he puts me in his book, I'll fucking sue him . . . this is a fucking outrage! I don't give him permission. Do you hear me? If he writes about me, I'll kill him!"

and for a moment, I was like: Oh shit, Horowitz put her in the book-- I wonder if she sued? and then, of course, I was like: but this is ALL made up . . . or mostly made up, not the Foyle's War stuff-- that's real--  and some of the other Horowitz stuff . . . but the Hawthorne stuff, that's all made up . . . good stuff Horowitz (and meta-Horowitz).

I Would Have Used the Word "mundane" (for obvious reasons)

You're going to feel one way or the other about Halle Butler's novel Banal Nightmare  . . . the millennials that wander about this Midwestern college town are insufferable, trapped, and repetitive in a surreal No Exit sort of existential ennui-- but there is deep dark satirical humor amidst the emo-anguish and there is a beautiful cutting precision to Butler's language-- so if you like the following sentence, you'll like the book:

"There should be an Aesop's fable where a little ant jumps back and forth eternally between two spinning plates to teach us about the pitfalls of getting stuck in two conflicting and endlessly circular trains of thought, thought Moddie, but the only Aesop fable with ants, as far as she knew, was about how you deserved to die if you enjoyed your summer vacation."

In This Kind of Book, Someone is Going to Get Murdered (and maybe some other people too)

Anthony Horowitz, the author of A Line to Kill, once again puts the fictional version of himself-- slightly less famous, more maligned version of himself?-- in the midst of murder . . . murder in an unlikely setting, the tiny Channel Island of Alderney, which last saw any great violence when it was occupied by the Nazis during WWII . . . but there hasn't been any murder since then-- until now-- Tony and his subject, Hawthorne (the rather unlikeable ex-detective with a checkered past, turned Sherlock-esque police consultant) are invited to a literary festival on Alderney, along with a panoply of literary luminaries, including blind psychic Elizabeth Lovell, TV chef Marc Bellamy, war historian George Elkin, beloved children's author Anne Cleary, and French modernist poet Maïssa Lamar-- and the novel quickly goes from an ensemble cast vacation to a version of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians . . . the murderer is on the island and the solution will be elaborate, puzzling, and unexpected-- because, despite the meta-inclusion of the actual author, this isn't reality, it's detective fiction-- and don't you forget that.

Gettin' Old Feels Like Gettin' Young

This morning I woke up early, as I am wont to do, and so I crept downstairs-- quietly, so as not to wake up my wife-- with the new issue of The Week and my gigantic Kindle Scribe . . . and I started to read The Week on the couch, with a lamp on behind me but the font was a bit small and fuzzy and my progressive glasses weren't in reach and I was like: this is new . . . now I'm so decrepit I can't read magazine font until my eyes have warmed up? and so I switched over to my gigantic Kindle Scribe, which has a paperwhite screen big enough to support a font I can read and still have lots of words on the page, and I felt like a child again, reading the big words in the big book-- getting old feels like getting young.

From Olive Drab to Gray Flannel

The Man in the Flannel Gray Suit, by Sloan Wilson, was published in 1955 and I found it to be a depressing predecessor of Mad Men . . . the book portrays the corporate world and a war-torn veteran trying to make his way within it-- but it's not the exciting, creative dynamic world of the 60s-- when the bibulous Ad-Men bro culture comes into contact with feminism and the counter-culture-- The Man in the Flannel Suit depicts a more boring, staid business world-- and the same with 50's home life-- so the novel is mainly scenes of mundanity and tedium and the commonplace, workplace politics and cynicism, getting along with your spouse, moving into a new house, etcetera-- punctuated by horrific WWII scenes and the psychological and ethical consequences of life during wartime . . . the novel has town meetings and small-town justice and codicils and speechwriting and business meetings and martinis and old age and young children and all kinds of scenes from everyday life, plus the consequences of the war on the men trying to live in this land of plenty . . . easy reading but tough to ponder.

Dave Learns About an Old French Guy

I'm reading Fareed Zakaria's book Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present and I definitely think I fell asleep in AP Euro when we went over the French Revolution-- this Robespierre fellow was a wild and crazy guy!

(Pretty) Good Day

I had a pretty good day at 6:30 AM hoops this morning, I made a few clutch three-pointers and played some solid D . . . BUT I jammed my pinky going for a rebound and it's all misshapen and swollen; then I got a pretty good movie recommendation form my buddy Jack-- Shin Godzilla . . . BUT it's not streaming anywhere so I'll have to try and pirate it; and in the afternoon, I had a pretty good time at the pool-- I was really hot from watering the garden and very sore from morning hoops, so I swam a few laps to cool down and I stretched out in the shallow end and the water was clear and refreshing BUT after my swim, when I reclined on the lounger to read my book, I noticed that the lounger was covered in ants . . . and soon enough I was covered in ants and so I decided to head home and read my book in the safety of my home.

Chess and Sugar

I was left to my own devices today because I have off from school for Eid al-Adha but my wife does not-- and while I accomplished a number of constructive tasks: I biked to the gym and lifted some weights, did the dishes, got a new tank of propane gas for the grill, helped my neighbor move a rug and a table, swam a few laps at the pool, read my book, picked up my son in New Brunswick and took him to the pharmacy to get prescription eye drops, did some yard work, stole a couple of rocks from the park, put away a bunch of laundry, put protective wax on the dog's paws and walked her, and took a nap-- I also consumed a massive amount of sugar, mainly while playing online speed chess-- I ate some Haribo gummy peaches around 10:30 AM;  after lunch, I drank a Coke in a glass bottle with cane sugar-- delicious; and I consumed a bunch of Haribo gummy bears around 4:30 PM . . . I guess this is what happens when I'm home alone and I don't drink as much coffee as usual.

The Groundlings Were Grungy in the 1590s

Though it gets a bit technical at times, James Shapiro's book A Year in the Life of Shakespeare:1599 truly illustrates that though The Bard's writing appears to be timeless, Shakespeare himself was truly a man of his times and a man determined-- through his writing-- to push forward, artistically and financially . . . the book details the impact the Globe Theater-- built by Shakespeare and his acting company to exacting specifications-- had on the most experienced playgoers in the history of theater-- Shakespeare broke free of the clowning and the jig, and wrote and directed some of the most politically, linguistically, and emotionally ambiguous and complex plays ever written-- artistry that was even more compelling in Elizabethan England than it is now-- while his plays are still astounding, they are but a "walking shadow" to how they must have been received in London in 1599-- when the allusions resonated, the inventive language was newly coined, and the political turmoil in his histories was reflective of the same issues faced by Elizabeth and Essex and the rest of the nobles of England.

Social Media is Anti-Social

Here's a case of idiotic social media amplification run amok at the high school where I teach. . . a couple of yearbook pictures got inadvertently switched-- easy to do when students are running the show and the mistake was traced back to simple human error-- but the pictures were of two religious/cultural clubs- one mainly Jewish and one mainly Muslim-- and the Jewish club forgot to turn in the names of its members to the yearbook staff so the names aren't in the book-- the same is true for several other clubs that have pages in the book . . . but this case is particularly egregious and symbolic, according to the internet hordes-- and now accusations are flying, people are OUTRAGED! on social media, the worst is being assumed, internet trolls (including a rabbi internet troll) are posting unwarranted rumors about students and teachers and it's a general shitshow, which will blow over when the next stupid story comes along-- but right now, it's fodder for the endless, moronic 24-hour news cycle, which feeds on crap like this.

Students and Cellphones, Together Forever?

For the first time in years, I had to confiscate a particular student's cellphone-- I've been trying to be diligent about getting the kids to put their phones in the caddy at the front of the room, but some of the kids smuggle them back to their seats, where they place them behind computers and book bags so that they can watch videos and do whatever teenagers do on their phones all-the-fucking-live-long-day-- or the screen addicted give popular rationales such as they need to charge the phone or text their mom or get a particular photo for a project that can only be accessed on their phone and then the next thing you know, they're on Snapchat or TikTok-- it's an exhausting battle and I wish our school would ban the damned things, especially since there is definitive research that phones are making kids dumber AND even if you don't use your phone in class, if someone near you is using their phone, it ruins your concentration as well-- I liken it to smoking-- not only is it bad for you, but it's also bad for the people around you breathing in second-hand-smoke-- and I certainly feel this secondhand effect teaching-- because even though I'm vigilant about not using my own phone in front of the kids-- I really try to set a good example-- but once I suspect a kid is illicitly screwing around with their phone (which shouldn't be on their person to begin with) then I lose concentration-- anyway, it usually doesn't come down to having to confiscate the phone-- that only happens every few years, but when it does, the student (who always seems to be female) inevitably flips out, cries, and curses at me . . . which is why this is such a hard policy to enforce because teens have so much emotional attachment to their phone-- once they freak out I tell them I'm not trained to handle this kind of emotional breakdown and addiction and they need to head to guidance for some guidance-- for example, and the student who had her phone confiscated once showed me that she does 16-18 hours of screen time a day on her phone-- which doesn't even seem possible and definitely requires some kind of professional guidance-- anyway, I get the fact that some teachers give up and don't enforce any kind of cellphone policy, because they're burned out and scared to face these kind of consequences-- but I'm trying to fight the good fight and maybe someday we'll get an administration that has done some reading on this subject and will just outright ban the things-- because they don't belong in school.

What Is It Like to Be a Dog?

On this very special episode of We Defy Augury, I interview my good friend and fledgling author Rob Russell . . .we discuss his new book "JoJo the Small Town Hound: Volume 1, Leesburg, Virginia and the Curious Case of the Dog Money" and although the book is for children aged 7-10, Rob and I get into some fairly deep topics: the subjectivity of consciousness; structural racism and systemic prejudice towards black Americans, human and canine; the principles of drama; and the fleeting nature of our mortality-- and by the end of the episode, we develop an idea for the greatest children’s book that will never be written . . . Special Guests: Rob Russell, Method Man, and George Costanza.

Strange Winds: A Meditation on Contamination

A long podcast episode deserves a long title-- and my newest episode of We Defy Augury is my longest episode yet-- so I have titled it "Strange Winds: A Meditation on Contamination" and it also has a long sub-title . . . "Examining Our Fears of Infection, Infiltration, and Impurity . . . Ideological and Otherwise" and this epic piece of audio is based on a strange coincidence-- I read four books in a row that deal-- directly and indirectly-- with our everchanging fears and anxieties about impurity and contamination . . . these are the books which my thoughts are (loosely) based on: Nelson DeMille's Cold War spy novel The Charm School; Dean R. Koontz's 90s tech thriller Dark Rivers of the Heart; Jonathan Blitzer's stellar book on the border situation-- Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis-- and Silvia Moreno-Garcia's horror novel Mexican Gothic . . . and there are also plenty of special guests: Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, Dave Chapelle, John Cougar, Phil Connors, Bob Dylan, The Scorpions, Kansas, Sting, Long Duk Dong, General Ripper, General Turgidson, President Merkin Muffley, John Mulaney, Donald Trump, Marco Guttierez, Ivan Drago, and Tommy DeVito . . . so if you have a long car ride or you're training for a marathon, then give it a shot-- despite the length, I think it's got a fairly coherent argument.

The Gloves Will be Off

So exciting: my friend just published a children's book . . . even more exciting: in two days, I get to write a candid review of my friend's children's book!

Bring the Noise!

I just finished an excellent book on the financial, philosophical, and aesthetic implications of our collective move from analog audio to digital audio: The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World by Damon Krukowski-- the drummer of the spacey alt-rock band Galaxie 500-- but I found it quite ironic that I was reading the book on my new Kindle Scribe-- because the book begins like this . . .

THANK YOU FOR READING this analog book. It requires no additional hardware, uses no power, and is 100 percent recyclable. You will find that it is possible to read, or not read, any of this book’s pages in any sequence. While its pages have been numbered sequentially to assist in navigation, there is no reason to consult these numbers if you do not wish. Should you like to highlight a passage, you will find that you can mark the page with most any implement at hand— even a fingernail will do. The paper of this book is also soft enough to be folded, torn, or even shredded if that gives you satisfaction, without special tools. You are free to share this book, resell it, or donate it to charity.

Fuzzy Wet Balls

Rain and tennis are not a good combination-- the court gets slick, the balls get wet and skip instead of bouncing, and the ink runs in the little book where you write down all the match information-- but I was impressed with the tenacity of my third singles player today, who was in close but meaningless match-- we had already lost-- but kept at it in the steady drizzle until we made him stop because the concrete was so slippery . . . but he's a hockey player so the surface probably seemed totally normal to him.