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.