Syllabus #156

This is all we need to talk about.  Between the gun ruling and overturning Roe, it feels like the conservatives on the court are just slapping us on alternating sides of our faces and taunting, "stop hitting yourself, why are you hitting yourself?"  It's complete shit.

Analog Reading:

Reading Chuck Klosterman's The Nineties.  It's making me wish I could climb inside a time machine and go back to an objectively simpler, better time.

Syllabus #155

 

This is a blog post.  I got nothin.  Last week sucked.  I read some books, though.

Analog Reading:

Finished Man's Search for Meaning.  I am glad to have read it, but, and I don't think Frankl would be offended to hear this, I didn't enjoy the process of reading it.  

Engulfed all of Sarah Manguso's Very Cold People on one very hot day.  It was short and excellent.  The narrative structure reminded me of Jenny Offill's Weather, in the way that it offered short snippets and vignettes that pieced together into a larger story but didn't flow together as a continuous thread.

Fountains of Silence by Ruta Sepetys. It was excellent if you're into historical fiction that straddles the line between the YA and adult genres.  It was romance and coming of age and political intrigue against the backdrop of Franco's Madrid in 1957.  Just the sort of stimulating but not overwhelming escape I needed this week.  I enjoyed reading something set in a place I have visited, and could recognize a lot of the landmarks, including an allusion to an un-named sherry bar that I recognized from the street name and the description of the interior (it was La Venencia, legendary spot for Spanish Republicans and Ernest Hemingway).

Just started Chuck Klosterman's The Nineties:  A book and I can tell I'm going to dig it.  But not too much and not too effusively, because that would be counter to the ethos of the time period.

Syllabus #154

What was in D4 though?

I pasted a lot of meaty links into this post throughout the week and then I realized I can't summon the mental energy to comment on them, so I deleted them.  So instead, let's talk about gas stations with excellent food and restaurants that will probably have inedible food:

It's years away but it gives me LIFE to know that Wawa is on its way to Nashville.  Even though I won't be able to pull up to a gas pump on a frigid day, crack my window, and ask a pimple-faced young guy to fill it with regular, I am still gonna be first in line for a hoagie and coffee.  If you know, you know.

Also, Garth Brooks is jumping on the Broadway establishment bandwagon.  I mean as far as country dudes go, he almost doesn't even register on the Obnoxio-meter (where Hank Williams is a 0 and Morgan Wallen makes the needle jump past 10 and snap right off).  But also, "Friends in Low Places" is a little too on the nose for anything within projectile vomiting distance of Broadway.

Analog Reading:

Finished Tacky: Love letters to the worst culture we have to offer by Rax King.  It was amusing, but as I speculated in my previous post, it didn't really go anywhere.  Witty variations on a quirky theme.  

And now I'm reading Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and, wow, I need a cervical collar for this whiplash.  We went from 'let me tell you about how much I love Cheesecake Factory and casual sex with my father's coworkers' to 'let me tell you how I survived the unimaginable physical and psychological horrors of a concentration camp.'  It's brilliant and important, and it is a lot.

 

Syllabus #153

I started drafting this post on the morning of Tuesday, May 24th.  And then I couldn't bring myself to finish this vapid crap because we all know what happened later that day.  

I woke up on Tuesday morning with a huge THING on my face.  A big, angry red bump on my right cheek, in the exact area where I used to get the most horrendous, cystic acne.  I haven't had a major zit in probably 15 years or more, so this was...unsettling.  Then I realized that I am a world-renowned zit expert and this was, in fact, no zit.  It came out of nowhere without the telltale dull, throbbing lump under the skin that can only be felt and not seen from the surface for a few days.  Andy so helpfully pronounced that it must be a spider bite.  So now I sit and wait, applying cortisone cream and praying to a god I don't believe in that I don't end up like the girl in the bathtub from the Scary Stories book.

It me

And then, in a merciful anticlimax, the Spot just kind of went away?  It was probably a zit, but it did itch a little, but maybe that was psychosomatic.  At any rate, my face didn't explode in a frenzy of tiny arachnids and now it's nothing a little time and concealer can't fix.  

Here we are, two weeks after the last post, with nothing to say for ourselves.  The world is on fire, literally and figuratively, which is nothing new, but our Nomex suits are threadbare at this point and the flames are getting hotter every day.

Here's a cool oasis amongst the raging brush fires of gun violence, hate crimes, and the trampling of the freedom and bodily autonomy of female-bodied and LGBTQ people.  David Sedaris has a new book out! 

That's all I got.

Analog Reading:

The Matchmaker:  A Spy in Berlin by Paul Vidich.  Cool story, bro.  Hire an editor and proofreader next time.  The beginning of the story was very confusing, perhaps intentionally so, as our protagonist had no idea what was happening from her limited perspective.  So, okay, fine.  But there were so many distracting instances of poor copy editing (or typesetting?) where there were superfluous articles thrown into the middle of sentences, to the tune of, "She went the to the store," for example.  Also, the repetitive and unnecessary use of uncommon words on the same page or in the same paragraph is one of my pet peeves as a reader and writer.  There were multiple times when the author used the word 'canopy' to describe both the sky and the literal canopy overhanging a building's entrance, in the same paragraph.  I'm starting to hate the word canopy as a result.  I was just waiting to read a description of a rainy evening falling from a moist canopy.  I would have lost my shit and returned the book to the library unfinished.  

Then I had the distinct pleasure of reading Vladimir by Julia May Jonas.  Yes, a Russian guy, but no, none of the Vladimirs you're picturing.  Not Putin, not Lenin, not Volodymyr Zelenskyy.  A novel about a late-50s professor of English at a small liberal arts college in upstate New York, lusting after a newly hired, virile, 40-year-old Russian American colleague.  That's a gross oversimplification, but to say more would ruin the fun.  This was a ROMP and capitulated in ways both expected and unexpected.  The ending was satisfying and weirdly happy in ways the characters had probably earned, but, it could be argued, did not deserve.  I loved it. 

V. I. Lenin - Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov!

Next on the docket is the essay collection, Tacky:  Love letters to the worst culture we have to offer by Rax King.  It should be a quick read.  I'm only a couple essays in, and it's moderately amusing but also, I think I kind of get the point already.  She likes Creed, she likes Bath and Body Works, she was alive in the 90s and her taste for these oft-mocked cultural artifacts comes more from arrested development than nostalgia, it seems.