Syllabus #198

This weekend, I'm mentally preparing myself for Book Fair week.  I know of no librarian on earth who doesn't wish she could just erase the concept from our cultural lexicon.  First of all, I'm in the business of letting kids borrow books for free - I don't want their money!  And really, I DON'T WANT THEIR money.  It's sticky, it's sweaty, it's crumpled, they don't know how to count it, it's a massive problem.  The DARE program in 6th grade made it sound like I'd be constantly offered drugs as a teenager and an adult.  To wit, I have never ONCE been offered cocaine!*  The nerve of people!  Never explicitly offered coke, that is.  However, I suspect that I am literally bathing in it every time I run a book fair.  

NOT the Cobra bathroom.  Wilburn Street, definitely one of my top 3 bar bathrooms. 
Come for the pool table, stay for the anthropomorphized hot dogs.

*Not even when I walked in on two dudes who failed to lock the single-toilet bathroom at the Cobra and were liberally powdering their noses when I pushed the door open to pee.  "Shame on you!" they hissed.  Yes.  Shame on me.

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Ho ho hold my Carlo Rossi!  Jay kay, I stopped drinking jugs of Charlie Red when a cashier at an Idaho Walmart, of all places, made fun of me for buying it.  A long but interesting read.

I'm not linking to the post in which this picture originally appeared.  It's buried deep, but it's there, and it has not aged well.  But damn, I used to love MS Paint!

We're all stars now.  Rest in Chaos, Jerry Springer.  I hope for his loved ones' sakes, the funeral is held somewhere with pews and not folding chairs.

Added this book to my growing list of holds at the Nashville Public Library - The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen.  

Analog Reading:

I finished Lessons in Chemistry and, y'all, I had to wipe that smirk off my face because by the end, I was allllmoooost moved to tears.  I did also have my period at the time, TMI notsorry, so maybe I would have just felt dead inside on any other day, but my assessment stands.  The best character in the book, by a country mile, was the dog, seconded by neighbor Harriet, but I kind of wanted the story to continue in order to keep hanging out with the whole unlikely crew of them.

Butts:  A back story by Heather Radke is both an illuminating study backed by deep research and thoughtful scholarship, and utterly hilarious.

Syllabus #197

Happy Sunday to everyone except the Monster Beverage Corporation.  I'm not pleased with you.

0 out of 10, do not recommend

Our friends left behind a few cans of this stuff as a parting gift, or as a talisman that would summon a demon to bring despair and misfortune to all who drink of its elixirs.  One of those two things.   At any rate,  this curious malt beverage was in my fridge for over a week, I decided to give it a whirl, and it unleashed the beast on my liver and possibly my soul.  I've never had a hangover from one drink before, but there's a first time for everything.  I wasn't sure if I needed an Excedrin or an exorcism.  I rolled the dice and went for the former, mostly out of convenience, because we had a few crusty old Excedrins kicking around in the medicine cabinet but we were fresh out of Catholic priests.  Anyway, the pill, some Liquid IV, buttered toast, and a few hours of wallowing on the couch and two episodes of dry heaving that resulted in some burst capillaries under my eyes (cute!) and I was back in fighting form.  Thanks, Monster!

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10 out of 10 do recommend the Laurel Woods hike in Beaman Park if you are local to Nashville.  Would suggest not doing it when you are wildly hungover, but it's your journey.  We did the shortcut version, which ended up being about 8 miles round trip from the parking lot.  

Dropping this book list here to remind me to request some of these from the library.

Sorry for all the NYTimes links if you're hitting a paywall, but this sounds delicious:  Farro with blistered tomatoes, pesto, and spinach.  

Another NYTimes article, but really all you need to know about this article that I honestly didn't even read, is that it's about a professor named Carlos Moreno, and how he is being severely harassed for his scholarship about how cities should be organized so that everything you need is accessible within a 15 minute walk.  I think we should give the guy a Nobel for that, it sounds great.  The other thing you should know is that in Spanish, moreno means brown.  But, the point is, why wasn't the headline, "Carlos Moreno wants to know, 'Why is everybody always picking on me?'"  Missed.  Opportunity.  Do.  Better.

Analog Reading:

Lessons in Chemistry is reminding me why I quit science after Honors Chem in 11th grade.  Too many nerds!  Actually, the nerds in this book would be fine if the author would just let them do their thing, but Bonnie Garmus must be a rebel because she's breaking the "show, don't tell" maxim of fiction writing more times than I thought humanly possible.  She's just telling and telling and telling and telling.  And telling.  And also slipping in some weird anachronisms that strike me as just lazy editing.  Despite all that, I actually kind of like the book.  The characters are growing on me, and it's amusing enough, with some fun little plot twists.  It's not capital L Literature by any means, but it's entertaining if you can overlook the flaws.

Syllabus #196

The word of the week is hubris.  I flew too close to the sun, thinking I could go out on the town and stay up late in the middle of the week, with no consequences.  100% worth it to have our oldest and greatest friends visit and show them a good time, East Nashville style.  But, one wild Tuesday night* has reminded me that I am a mere mortal, with an apparently precarious immune system, just teetering on one Jenga block, ready to topple at the slightest breeze from a child coughing in my face.  

*All I did was stay up late!  Had I been drinking, hoo boy.  I'd probably still be hungover.  I'm so fun!  Invite me to your next party!

Love - the kind you clean up with a mop and bucket

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Sunday's Wordle was apparently puzzle #666.  My first guess was SATAN, which was NOT on their word list.  Like, bro, you accepted CHODE that one time, but you won't take SATAN?  So my alternate first word was DEVIL, which was also not the word.  I guess they stopped pulling their thematic bullshit after everyone threatened to burn them at the stake for using FEAST on Thanksgiving, but I consider this a real missed opportunity.

Everything about this article on the Finnish approach to happiness checks out.  They're not an exuberant people.  They're practical - as one Finn states, "We don't whine, we just do." Perhaps this is where I get my defensive pessimism.  If you don't expect much in the first place, you're unlikely to be disappointed and maybe you'll even be pleasantly surprised. 

These book assemblages are beautiful, but as a librarian, my sphincter clenches whenever I see books arranged according to aesthetics rather than logic.  All y'all influencers can peddle your Pinterest-worthy rainbow bookshelves as long as you send me some cash to pay for therapy.  It's the least you can do just for making me think about how difficult it would be to find anything in that collection.  

Ok this lady lived in a cave for 500 days, on purpose, which, with the current state of the world, sounds solidly aight.  But my question for her is - you had 500 days of total isolation in an actual cave, with no chores to do or job to go to, and you managed to read only 60 books?  The article makes that out to be an accomplishment, too.  Lady, that's cute, I read more books than that last year and I had a job and full-on docket of grownup shit to do.  Don't come at me with arguments about the logistics of having more books in the cave, or light by which to read them.  I've got solutions for all of it.

 

In praise of walking:  "The travel writer and scholar Patrick Leigh Fermor put it succinctly when he said, 'All horsepower corrupts.'"

Analog Reading:

Last Sunday, I finally finished The Intuitionist.   I respected it, but it was not my favorite.  

Now I'm halfway through The Ice Storm by Rick Moody.  It's interesting to read this close on the heels of the Rabbit tetralogy, given that the father figure, Ben Hood, is of the same age cohort as Harry Angstrom.  Set in 1973, this book falls chronologically between Rabbit Redux and Rabbit is Rich, and turns the lens towards upper middle class New Englanders grappling with the discontent of middle age and the sad, awkward attempts of these Square Olds to appropriate sexually liberated youth culture.

Syllabus #195

I don't know how many more times I can open with a variation of, "what a week!" but I mean, come on. 

There was one bright spot.  Tuesday was National School Librarian Day and the 2nd grade classes made me a book in which every student wrote and illustrated what they think I do all day.  If you're not fluent in 7-year-old, that says, "reads cat books."  My child, you are not even a little bit wrong.

Redz cat boocs

 

What's been happening in the TN House is just wild.  The GOP was like, "Oh snap, they have a point about gun regulations, so we gotta put the focus somewhere else until they forget...what else have we got...oh yea, racism!"  It's so blatant.  "We didn't expel them because they're black...we expelled them because they aren't white!  Totally different things!"  It should be more surprising, but repubes have been telling us who they are for a long time, now they're just doing it in full view of the world, with a bullhorn and closed captioning to make sure we all get the message.

Analog Reading:

Just can't get into the The Intuitionist.  I want to like it so badly.  I love Colson Whitehead!  I think Nickel Boys is a masterpiece!  But, every time I try to pick this book up, it takes me a few pages to get into the rhythm and recall this strange noir world of vaguely pre-Civil Rights era New York City-ish setting.  And by then, my lunch break is over, or my eyelids are spontaneously closing.  Halfway through, I feel like it's either starting to pick up, or I'm giving in to the sunk cost fallacy.  I'm going to try to soldier through, but I just feel like I'm missing something.

Syllabus #194

After Monday, I thought this week in Nashville couldn't possibly get any worse.  Then I spent Friday night into the wee hours of Saturday wearing a bicycle helmet, ready to dive into a closet, and wishing we had an interior room in this stupid house.  There's a reason people call tall skinnies 'vertical trailers'.

You love to see it.  Always a comfort when the insurance company says, "Hey, maybe you'll die!"

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Why?  I find this offensive even though it's none of my business.    

I don't have a lot to say about the shooting.  Whatever I say will not be as articulate as these two summations of our failings as a society and the failings of our leaders who do nothing to prevent something that other countries have demonstrated can, in fact, be largely prevented with right regulations in place.  I don't have a lot to say, but I want everyone to know that a strip of duct tape is standing between me an active shooter, should one ever rampage inside my school.  That's apparently the best we can do.  Duct tape.  

Tots and pears.  [Betsey Phillips, Nashville Scene]

Bill Lee is, indeed, a drag.  A drag and a drip.  [Margaret Renkl, New York Times]

I made a cake about it.  Actually, the cake wasn't for me and my feelings, it was for Andy's birthday.  His real birthday isn't until Tuesday, but we're having something of a moveable fest.  

In theory, that's a 4.  This is Forty.

Analog Reading:

It had a hefty Docket of Shit to Do this week.  My reading has suffered.  I did finish Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin and it was excellent.  It was one of those books I could have read faster but I wanted to slow down and spend more time with the characters.  Their friendship was so real and so flawed.

I then started Colson Whitehead's first novel, The Intuitionist.  I want to love it, because I've loved every word Whitehead has written that I have laid eyes on, but it hasn't grabbed me yet.  Maybe I just need to spend time with it when I'm not already falling asleep.