Like Billy Pilgrim, the characters in Jennifer Egan's new novel A Visit From The Goon Squad have become unstuck in time . . . spastic in time, and like a Vonnegut novel, there are elements of post-modernism and sci-fi interwoven through the loosely connected (both in form and plot) tales of The Flaming Dildos and their associates; the book covers over forty years-- from the late 1970s into the near future-- and it covers this time-span in forms as various a story told in PowerPoint slides and an article written by one of the characters in the style of David Foster Wallace; the novel is rich and the though the plot is sometimes difficult to follow because of the form, the theme is apparent and powerful: time is a goon and it's coming for all of us, and, especially in the ever-changing styles and tempos of the music world, our inevitable decay will be shocking and painful, but maybe the wisdom we gain will make it all worth it: ten slide guitars out of ten.
Raise Your Hand If You've Done This
Occasionally, when I am waiting in line to pay for groceries, I start ogling the cleavage of the cover models of magazines such as Vogue and Cosmo, and often I forget that these are not real three-dimensional women, and crane my neck to try to see further down their skimpy blouses . . . only to realize that I am looking at a two-dimensional representation and that no matter how I tilt my head, I'm not going to see a nipple.
Bonus Picture! The Spooky Shack
A student showed me how to send a picture from my cell phone to the computer: here is the spooky shack.
A Bike In The Woods Is Scary
Yesterday I decided I would return to the strange little cabin I found in the woods because I wanted to snap some pictures-- and despite discussions of the Long Island serial killer in the English office at the end of the day, I steeled myself for my hike-- but when I got near the downed trees I saw a black bicycle parked against a tree, and like the sticks and stones in The Blair Witch Project, a black bicycle-- which isn't very scary on the street, in context, is a good deal scarier when it's standing against a leafless tree in the middle of the woods . . . but, with nerves of steel, I approached the bike, which was weathered and had a duct taped seat and some weird contraptions on it, and then walked past it and into the downed trees; I figured that the hobos had company, and that was why the bike was parked a bit outside their hidden dwelling, and so I shut off my iPod and crept closer, to the entrance-way of the fort, snapped some pictures of the house with my cell phone . . . and then I got out of there; I'm not sure if anyone was home or not and you're going to have to wait to see the pictures because I can't figure out how to connect my cell-phone to my computer to download them (and I have a new plan: I'm going to go there after the first snow and then I'll know if there's anyone inside because I'll see footprints) so this story is to be continued . . .
I Discover Something Strange
Two weeks ago I was taking a walk by the lake near my parents' house and the trail was blocked by some fallen trees, which I climbed over and then I had to traverse a little dirt hill over a log and duck my head under a branch and then I turned a corner and-- suddenly . . . almost magically-- I was inside a little fort of downed trees and there was a low slung house hidden in this fort, about two feet high with a shingled roof and steps down to a dug out door, probably four feet down into the earth, so if you were inside the house, the ceiling might have been at the height of a grown man, and there was a little basement style window set in the wood walls but no light was on (which I pointed out to my wife as proof that no one was home, but she countered with this statement: "It's not like the house has electricity!" and I must admit that she's right) and when I first saw the house I was listening to a creepy techno song by Daft Punk from the new Tron soundtrack and I didn't have the common sense to take off my headphones, and so I kept thinking someone was behind me and I left the fort fairly quickly and started to walk back to my car, but then I turned around and went back, I felt a weird and anxious need to check it out more, though it reminded me of the final scene of The Blair Witch Project (or a meth-lab or the Unabomber's cabin) and so walked back-- with my headphones still blasting-- and I took one more good look: there were several bicycles and an assortment of bike parts within the confines of the fort and a rusty boat hull attached to the roof with a bike lock and there was a padlock on the solid looking wood door; finally, I got out of there, but I still feel compelled to go back and check it out again so if I disappear without a trace, you know where to start the search.
I Retire From Professional Sports
I have always been a Giants fan, but after yesterday's epic fourth quarter meltdown (why did Matt Dodge punt it to DeSean Jackson?) I have decided to stop watching professional sports altogether, and only watch sports movies, where the team you are rooting for either wins the big game (Hoosiers, Invictus, and almost every other sports movie) or if they do lose the big game (Rocky and The Bad News Bears) then they learn a valuable lesson . . . but there's no way I can watch another event where the plot summary is this: a team led by a dog-torturer persists against all odds in the fourth quarter because of heroic play by the aforementioned dog-torturer . . . that's an absurdly unsatisfying twist with no clear theme, moral or lesson . . . and I hope it's not a resurrection of this Absurd Miracle, which was a harbinger of hard times ahead.
The Wit of the Staircase
Bill Bryson, in his new book At Home: A Short History of Private Life , gives several pages of startling statistics on the most dangerous place in the house (and the second leading cause of accidental death in the United States, behind car accidents but ahead of shark bites, flesh-eating viruses, and impalement) and if you guessed the kitchen or the bathroom, you are wrong . .. the most dangerous spot in your house is the stairs (and if you've seen the excellent documentary series The Staircase then you may have known this already) but I find this paradoxical because having stairs in your house is good for your heart and heart disease is the leading killer among men and women in the United States . . . so do you live in a ranch and miss out on the benefits of walking up and down stairs every day . . . or do you risk mishaps and live dangerously . . . I don't know the answer, but mainly what I wish is that we had an English word for this French phrase: 'esprit d'escalier, which generated the plot of a fantastic Seinfeld episode.
Greg Gillis is Girl Talk is Music
The greatest sequence in mash-up history begins at 1:24 in Girl Talk's rather profane song "Smash Your Head," when Biggie Smalls raps "Juicy" over Elton John's "Tiny Dancer," but that was only one moment (although all of Night Ripper is fantastic) and it seemed to me that this frantically looped and layered mash-up genre would be impossible to continue in an original, coherent, and listenable sense but Greg Gillis has done it again with his new album, "All Day," which is longer, more accessible, full of identifiable hooks and beats and lyrics and layers, amidst loads of clever and cleverly dirty hip-hop samples . . . and for a while I couldn't figure out what it all meant, all these samples twisted and distorted and smashed together in perfect rhythm and harmony, but on my tenth listen it hit me . . . Girl Talk means this: humans like music, lots of music, we remember it in pieces, we like it in fragments, and-- and this is in no way an insult-- maybe all the genres of popular music that we like-- from country, to hip-hop, to dance, to pop, to punk, to metal-- are more similar than we think.
Some Modicum Of Fame
So perhaps I had my fifteen minutes of fame last week; I was watching the Jets/New England game with some friends and I brought up the documentary American Teen and one of the guys said, "Oh yeah, I just read something about that," and then he thought for a moment and concluded, "on your blog," and I thought this was pretty cool, but not as cool as when a female co-worker, who is pretty hip and is my age-- so we're not talking about some young, naive student teacher here-- prefaced a story about her children with the phrase "I think this is sentence-worthy," which means that I think it's good enough to appear on your blog-- and the story certainly was sentence-worthy (it was about how her husband had to leave their four year old twins unattended in the audience of a soccer banquet while he spoke about his team, so he read them the riot act about being good, but when he looked out at them in the audience, they were touching tongues . . . not tongue kissing and not being terribly bad, but, nonetheless, sticking their tongues out-- ostensibly to measure them-- and touching them tongue-tip to tongue-tip, and apparently it's really hard to give a speech while watching your twin boys do this) but what I'm more interested in is the fact that when people speak to me now, they are trying to say something so entertaining that I feel compelled to use it on the blog, which is really nice because there are times when people bore me, so if there's some incentive to be more entertaining around me because of the modicum of fame that this blog creates, then I am all for it.
What Do George Washington and Cleopatra Have in Common?
In his new book, At Home: A Short History of Private Life, Bill Bryson points out that the paints that the colonial Americans used weren't muted as we would expect-- the time when George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were decorating Mount Vernon and Monticello coincided with the advent of bright pigments, and so to show off how rich you were (remembering that houses were lit with candles) you wanted walls as bright as possible-- and when Mount Vernon began restoring the interiors to their original colors, people were appalled, and Bryson says that now Washington and Jefferson "come across as having the decorative instincts of hippies," and this reminds me of when I was in Egypt, traveling down the Nile and touring the many ancient, eroded and sun-bleached temples covered in faded hieroglyphics, and then got to enter Nefertari's tomb in the Valley of the Queens and see the perfectly preserved hieroglyphics, which were brightly painted and detailed, and, of course, had the same revelation: the place looked like a hippy trip-out den, far from my dusty imaginings of ancient Egypt . . . will historians eventually have the same epiphany about fashions from the 1980's?
Considering We Don't Have Cable, Where Does He Get This Stuff?
On the car ride to Coco (the delicious Malaysian restaurant down Route 27), my six year old son Alex entertained us with an I Am Legend themed monologue: first he explained to his younger brother the devastation that nuclear bombs would cause if there was a war between spies, but that he had a plan: he would escape death by hiding under water and when he came out of the water there wouldn't be many animals left, except rats and he would have to eat the rats for a while, but luckily, but they would "evolve into other things that would get tastier and tastier."
Bonus: A Gheorghe-mas Song at G:TB
I received a request to write a "Gheorghe-mas Song" over at Gheorghe: The Blog (we do The 12 Days of Gheorghe-mas there every year) and this was an assignment I couldn't refuse, especially because I could express some of my Xmas Anger in the lyrics: so check it out, if you dare.
At Home With Bill Bryson . . . A Short History?
1) Thomas Jefferson bought 20,000 bottles of wine over one eight year period;
2) in the 1700's, English country clergymen subsidized by taxes and tithes had relatively few religious obligations-- and no one went to church-- and so in their spare time they produced an impressive array of intellectual accomplishments including my one of my favorite books-- The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy-- and other notable works such as An Essay on the Principle of Population (Thomas Malthus) and Bayes's Theorem (Thomas Bayes) until the The Church of England finally cracked down on them;
3) the ignorance of the female anatomy among medical men in Victorian England was so profound that Mary Toft, an illiterate rabbit breeder, convinced medical authorities that she was giving birth to live rabbits and perpetuated the hoax for a time before she admitted the fraud;
4) the baseball box score was invented by Henry Chadwick and "K" is short for "struck," which ends with a "K"
5) the treatment of working class children was abominably poor in nineteenth century England and this is exemplified by the fact that the founding of the Society of Preventing Cruelty to Animals preceded the founding of the parallel organization for children by sixty years;
6) in the 1790's it was all the rage to wear artificial moles, called mouches, and at the height of this mania, people's faces looked as if they were covered with flies, and in the 1780's it became "briefly fashionable to wear fake eyebrows made of mouse skin,"
7) I have pushed the boundaries of the sentence to its limit here, but the book is excellent, detailed, and long and deserves such a lengthy treatment . . . and in the end it reminds you that we live in wonderful times, as Bryson's main theme is that for most of history, the poor lived in horrible conditions with death looming around every corner of their dwellings, and the rich often lived absurdly, governed by bizarre styles, fashions, and social rules . . . and they didn't escape death, disease, unhygienic conditions, and general discomfort either . . . so-- if you can-- enjoy a hot shower and some clean water and a warm, lice free bed tonight with the knowledge that this wasn't always the case, but also knowing that all this convenience comes at a price-- it takes a citizen of Tanzania a year to produce the carbon emissions that the average American produces in twenty-eight hours.
Kids Misbehaving? F#$@ Santa Claus. Just Have Them Watch Shutter Island
Did I Ever Really See Dark City?
I watched Dark City on Blu-Ray the other night . . . possibly for the second time . . . it's a science-fiction film directed by Alex Proyas that is strangely similar to The Matrix (though it was released a year before in 1998) but more interesting than this comparison is the fact that I felt as if I was living parallel with the movie while watching it-- the movie begins with a naked man in a room (Rufus Sewell) with a murdered call-girl, and he has no memory of what happened to the girl or of the last three weeks of his life and he has only very dim memories of his past, and he slowly realizes-- as he makes his way through his very dark city, that aliens are manipulating not only his memories but the actual world he is living in; the movie is excellent and really looks spectacular on Blu-Ray, but I could only vaguely remember watching it in the past, and not when or where, and then Catherine came home and she couldn't remember watching it with me, and I rarely watch movies alone and it's not on my Netflix history nor have I rated it and there were only certain things that I remembered . . . like Shell Beach . . . and so I am wondering if I never really saw the movie at all, and if Kiefer Sutherland inserted it into my brain with one of his steam-punk memory injections, but now that I've got it recorded here on this blog, I'll be able to refer back to this post and foil the aliens that have been manipulating my brain (and there are the usual internet theories about how The Matrix stole from Dark City, but I find this highly unlikely, since the script for The Matrix was finished when they were shooting Dark City, and as one nut pointed out, all these ideas originated with the movie Tron . . . but at that point you might as well say that all of these type films-- ranging from The Game and The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense all the way to Bladerunner-- are an allegory for Plato's cave and forget who stole what from whom and just enjoy the special effects).
A Candid Answer To A Pressing Question
A lot of youngsters want to know what people did before the existence of the internet and cell-phones and Facebook and texting, and I'll tell you what we did: we lit things on fire.
I Am Tested On My Promised Yule-Tide Cheer
Soon after I promised my wife and students that I would exhibit more Christmas spirit, I was sorely tested on my pledge-- and I would like to think that I passed with flying colors: first, when I went to my parents to pick up my children, my mom roped me into setting up their new plastic tree . . . which I did with minimal grumbling (and without mention of the environmental hazards of PVC, dioxin, ethylene dichloride, vinyl chloride, and lead poisoning) but my mom did not like the new tree once it was erected, so I then disassembled the new tree, fit it back into the box, put the box in her car so she could return it, and lugged the old plastic tree up from the basement and assembled that one; second, after surviving that ordeal without a meltdown, I then returned home to find my wife struggling with a string of lights-- she had wound them around the porch and shrubs only to find that when she plugged them in, they did not all light, and I counseled her to simply buy some new lights and-- so I wouldn't lose my patience and melt down-- I used a scissors to remove the non-working strands and tossed them in the garbage, and then when the new string of lights my wife purchased did not all light, I removed each tiny bulb in the string until I hit upon the dead bulb and I replaced that one with a live bulb, fixing the entire string, and again, I did this with minimal grumbling so Santa Claus better bring me a lot of good loot this year because I deserve it.
This Is Why KitKat Is Spelled With A "K"
I was showing my son Ian how the name "KitKat" utilizes the double "K" sound when his older brother Alex reminded us that "Cat" is usually spelled with a "C" but in this instance, the candy-makers spelled it with a "K" to ensure that you knew you weren't "eating a dead chocolate-covered hairless cat."
Christmas Rant #2,894,987
Some of my students were appalled the other day when I revealed my Grinch-like attitude towards Christmas; I don't remember what set me off, but it always happens, the littlest reminder can send me on a long rant about wrapping paper and Christmas trees and the environment, about how Santa Claus has defeated Jesus and how awful music has defeated them both, about consumption, materialism, and the pressure to buy everyone some sort of unnecessary object, etcetera . . . and I'm not allowed to mention these feelings anywhere else-- I try to keep them from my kids and my wife will punch me in the face if I mention them to her and no one in the English office needs to hear these opinion again so I end up preaching to a captive audience . . . but my students have convinced me to have a better attitude and I even promised to help Catherine with the lights and I'm going to try to buy non-material gifts, although I did have a great idea for a personalized gift that doesn't waste any resources or cause any extra pollution: I present all of my loved ones with a personalized list of Dewey Decimal numbers that refer to books I think they would like to read . . . e.g. I might give myself Dewey Decimal number 813.54 21.
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