i have a phoenix

Pinky's mom assigned me Kotlowitz's There Are No Children Here when I took a high school history elective with her, and I absolutely worshipped it as only a sixteen-year-old can do. That book followed the lives of two brothers growing up in the Henry Horner Homes on Chicago's West Side, and I marveled at how different their lives were from mine, since I lived only a few miles from them and went to school twelve blocks away. There was even a passage where Kotlowitz described how many people grow up in that particular housing project, only two miles or one ten-minute bus ride from the Chicago Loop, and still have never been to the downtown area. That shocked me for a while, and then I realized I've never been to Horner either, although it would be just as easy for me to get there. Easier, because I had access to a car.

I read Kotlowitz's second book last year. It's called The Other Side of the River, and it's about a murder that happened in the twin Michigan cities of St. Joseph and Benton Harbor. It was good, because I love true crime and Mr. K., and a disappointment in a sense, because there's little resolution in the end. Still: good.

I have to say, though, that this new book goes downhill a little. It's still a good read and I look forward to the author's next book, but this one was too heavy on vignettes. I think Kotlowitz's strength lies in his ability to get in deep with the people about whom he writes, and this book didn't really give him the opportunity. When I was done, I read the back cover, and it turns out that this is one in a series of books about American cities by different famous authors, like Chuck Palahniuk on Portland and Roy Blount Jr. on New Orleans, so maybe this wasn't the way Kotlowitz envisioned the book.

I'm trying to get through a to-be-read list that dates back to 1997, when I was an earnest young women's studies major, and when this one came up I was pretty sure I'd abandon it. It seems like the kind of thing I'd have picked out when I was twenty, but that wouldn't be such a riveting read these days; it's about how schools and teachers treat girls vs. boys, and how girls experience that.

Turned out to be a real page-turner...really. It's not theory about gender education or a how-to manual for teachers; it's two long case studies and they're fascinating. Both take place at Bay Area public middle schools; one school is largely Black and Latina/o, and the other is mostly white with a big economic range. Orenstein spends her days hanging out in classrooms and playgrounds and talking to girls (and a few boys) at home, in the cafeteria, and on the phone. She also observes them talking to each other and, in one case, reads a girl's diary. She befriends lots of the students and promises them she won't ever tell their parents or teachers what she finds out, although she has to go back on this promise when she finds out a girl is suicidal. She learns all kinds of shit about how teachers with the best intentions end up rewarding girls for being quiet and raising their hands, but encourage boys to talk out of turn, and she teaches the educators some stuff as well.

Plus, I got to know a bunch of the girls through their stories, and they're so...twelve. They break your heart and then you turn around and laugh at their bullshit, but mostly you just pull for them and want to know what happened. I'd love to read a "Where are they now?" about all of them really, but especially April, LaRhonda, and Lisa. I wonder....nah, Googling doesn't turn anything up.

I picked this up because I've read and loved all Blume's juvenile and YA fiction for years, and although I didn't think much of her recent adult novel Summer Sisters, Wifey has quite a reputation. So I breezed through it. It's light and funny and way, way sexier than I'd imagined, but ultimately the best thing I can say about it is that it's very, very seventies: a woman raised to be a housewife now wishes for a world beyond her husband, her children, and the country club. A trifle.

Two thumbs down. The blurb on the box promotes this as "vegetarian chicken stir-fried in a Thai peanut satay sauce with vegetables. Wrapped in a lemon & cilantro flavored gourmet flatbread."

To dissect this piece by piece, then: The veggie chicken sucked ass. It was stringy and lean, with no flavor whatsoever. There was no peanut sauce. Really, there wasn't any at all. I would happily feed this to a child with a deathly peanut allergy. The vegetables consisted of water chestnuts, which I loathe; green bell pepper, which is a cheap way out; and carrots, which, all right, fine. The lemon-cilantro flatbread tasted like a plain flour tortilla to me. And I paid $2.69 for this shit? Never again.

I read Sleator's House of Stairs back in library school and adored it. I got into the bathtub with that and a beer, and didn't get out until I was finished. Every word was mesmerizing. Somehow, I never investigated his other books until now. Someone on PUBYAC mentioned Singularity, and so I grabbed it off our shelf one day. It's not quite as good as House of Stairs, but good enough that I'm going to work my way through the Sleator back catalogue.

Like House of Stairs, this one mixes psychological drama (rivalry between twin teenage brothers) with bizarre phenomena (an abandoned house in which time speeds up) with delicious results. The story is told by Harry, the meeker of the twins. Their parents agree to let them spend two weeks as caretakers of their deceased, eccentric uncle's house in rural Illinois. Harry hadn't wanted to go, but Barry, the bullying twin, insisted, and he always gets his way. They discover this house and its unusual properties, and then Barry threatens to go in the house and age faster than Harry so they won't be twins any more. Harry decides that he'll preempt this by spending a year (a few hours in the outside world) in the house himself. He prepares himself for a year of isolation, then waits until Barry's asleep and sets off for the house. His descriptions of being locked away from the outside world are what reminded me most of House of Stairs.

And I haven't even told you about the evil monster coming out of the sink. Just read the book, yo.

These two books are both YA novels from the 1970s, set in New York, with young teen girl protagonists and authors named Norma. Aside from that, they couldn't be more different. Mom, the Wolf Man, and Me is about twelve-year-old Brett, who's being raised by a single mom. In fact, her parents were never married at all. Some of her classmates think this is weird, but Brett loves it; she doesn't understand girls like her best friend Evelyn, who's pining for a father. Nor does she relate to women like Evelyn's mother, who puts all of her energy into finding a man. Brett loves living with a photographer mom who wears jeans all day and takes Brett with her to shoots at dog shows. When Brett's mom does meet a man she wants to marry, Brett tries to talk them out of it even though she really likes the guy; she doesn't want her pleasantly disordered life to change. "Why can't we all just live together without a wedding?" she suggests, and Mom and the Wolf Man (because he has a wolfhound) have to convince her that nothing much will change and marriage is, in this case, a Good Thing. I enjoyed reading this; Brett and her mom are refreshing, realistic characters that act as poster children for non-traditional families without preaching or weirdness.

Norma Fox Mazer is a pretty famous YA author, but I hadn't read anything by her, so I was eager to begin Saturday, the Twelfth of October. Zan (short for Alexandra) fights with her brother, is considered nerdy by her peers, and has to sleep on a cot in the kitchen in their crowded apartment. One day her brother finds her diary and reads all her most secret thoughts aloud to his friends. She's especially embarrassed because she's written all kinds of stuff about how she has breasts and pubic hair, but not her period even though she's fourteen.

Zan flees her apartment and runs to a giant boulder she often visits in a nearby park. She suddenly and inexplicably finds herself transported to the same spot thousands (millions?) of years earlier, and meets a young girl and boy from a primeval society. I had to stop reading when I found out that the little tribal girl also has tits and pubic hair but not "the bleeding time" or whatever. The book started to get too cheesy for me right then. I don't want to read some crap about two girls getting their periods together, and how this particular coming-of-age-signifier is all timeless and the feminine is eternal and blah. Screw that.

I've never seen a man interested in this book, but a handful of women have come into the library and asked whether we have it, usually with sheepish expressions. They relax when I tell them that not only is there a lengthy waiting list for the book (47 people are currently on it), but that I too am waiting breathlessly for it.

I finally got the book a couple of days ago. I'd only heard about it via patron requests; I hadn't even looked at a summary or review on Amazon. I knew only the title and subtitle. Turned out to be a big disappointment. It's less of a "journey into the lives" of these guys than it is a how-to manual for Black women to figure out if your own man is on the down low. Lewis uses the term "on the down low" or "on the DL" to refer specificially to closeted bisexual Black men. Openly bi or gay Black men are not included in this category; it means only Black men who want, and have, all the trappings of conventional heterosexuality, usually including a wife, a girlfriend, kids, and a religious community, but also like fooling around with men.

The book isn't nearly specific enough. In fact, the case studies King presents sound phony, like they might actually be composites of several different men, or fictionalized in some other way. He presents them as fact, but they just don't ring true.

Furthermore, he seems to condone cheating on one's wife with women much more than sleeping around with men. HIV is a big concern of his, and I understand that it's more prevalent in the men-sleeping-with-men community, but unsafe sex is still unsafe sex no matter which gender you're fucking. He also recommends to women that they spy on their husbands/boyfriends by hiring private investigators and/or asking a gay male friend to make passes at them and see what happens. Something about that is pretty gross. If you don't trust your partner, it's time to get rid of him, girls.

He also talks about God way too much for my taste. He's found God, God has helped him get through this painful period in his life, etc. In King's favor, though, he is now an openly bisexual man. I was afraid he was going to learn from God that fucking other men is evil, but that's not the case; he says God gave us free will and therefore will not attack our choices, but that we shouldn't deceive someone by pretending we're monogamous when we're not. I'm down with that.

Most people are familiar with Nancy Drew, amateur detective in a series of 1940s and 1950s YA mysteries, but fewer know her nurse counterpart, Cherry Ames. That must be why my library has all the Nancy books but only three Cherrys. That's too bad, really; the Nancy books veer from vapid to lurid, while the Cherry Ames series is a bit more consistent. I'm not sure why, since they were all written by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, but there you go.

This particular volume is one of the better ones in any case. It's set at Weatherly, a rural hospital struggling to survive on a low budget. Cherry's been hired as its Night Supervisor, working the 8pm-8am shift. Soon, of course, she finds herself with a mystery to solve; it involves beautiful young nurse's aide Clarice and her late father's elusive second will. It's actually sort of interesting, and plausible as these things go.

If you were a Nancy Drew or Cherry Ames fan and you haven't read Mabel Maney's delicious lesbian parodies (Nancy Clue and Cherry Aimless are girlfriends!), do that right about now.

Last month I read Audrey Niffenegger's excellent The Time Traveler's Wife; sadly, that review has been lost to history because I inadvertently forgot to save the October 2004 page of my former blog, the one from whose ashes this one sprang. I was a bit doubtful before beginning that book because of the constant perspective and time changes between pages and even paragraphs; first it would be Clare talking in 1986, and then it would be Henry from 2001, etc. I adored the book, though, and the author made the perspective changes easier by labeling each passage with the narrator's name, the date, and the ages of both protagonists.

Reading that one was good preparation for The Love Wife. The perspective switches among the five main characters: Carnegie, a second-generation Chinese immigrant and successful software developer; his wife Blondie, a white farmgirl that started a socially responsible investment firm; their two adopted daughters, conventionally rebellious fifteen-year-old Lizzy and sweet, bullied nine-year-old Wendy; and Lan.

When Carnegie's overbearing mother, who never liked Blondie much, died, her will specified that Wendy would inherit an important family heirloom if, and only if, the family agreed to sponsor distant relative Lan to come over from China and help care for the children. Blondie, often the most likeable character, wonders secretly whether Carnegie's mother intended Lan to be a modern-day concubine, but she tries hard to help Lan adapt to America.

The constant perspective changes made the book spectacular; we got to know what everyone was thinking, although Lizzy never really developed as anything other than a teenage brat. The family's struggles to live a normal life despite this intruder, and Lan's attempts to understand the family, the town and the country, were compelling as hell. The twist at the end was totally unexpected, in no small part because I hadn't guessed there would be a twist at all; it's not exactly a plot-based novel.

Pros:
1. It's literally a hundred feet from my house. It could not be any closer, really.
2. They have a hot food counter that's pretty good; it's almost all meat, but you can get vegetarian wraps for lunch and eggs for breakfast, and the salad bar is decent and includes quesadillas. And feta and walnuts and sliced almonds.
3. The produce department is big compared to the size of the store, and so is the pet area; they have several kinds of bones, rope bones even, and a couple brands of premium cat food, and a ten-pound bag of litter for $1.45.
4. They have almost every flavor of Diet Coke there is, and they sell individual beers.
5. There are little staples in the ground outside where you can tie up your dog to wait for you while you shop.

Cons:
1. They close at 8pm. Did you ever?
2. Vegetarian food is sparse. They have, like, one brand of cheese pizza, and all their homemade soups and even their potato salad and lasagna and shit all have meat in them.
3. They do not have twelve-packs of twelve-ounce cans of Diet Cherry Coke.
4. It's expensive. A box of Morningstar breakfast patties is $4.05, compared to $2.96 at Wal-Mart. On the other hand, a bottle of Yellowtail Shiraz/Cabernet blend is $5.99, compared to $7.49 at A&P.
5. They stopped carrying fresh pico de gallo, but that's sort of okay because they still have a smoky jarred salsa that works almost as well for nachos.
6. They don't carry a decent brand of tortilla chip. Tostitos are unacceptable. I still have to go to Whole Foods for tortilla chips, and since nachos are a critical element of my dietary regimen, that means I have to go to Whole Foods once a week, and that's not convenient.
7. It's a pretty big store, but much of the square footage is taken up with overpriced furniture. Like, you can furnish your entire house at this place. I seriously doubt they do enough business to warrant this; why not get rid of that shit and start stocking tofu packed in water? Yeah. They don't have tofu packed in water at a major urban grocery store. All you can get is that vacuum-packed shit that's only good for desserts.

I've just finished adding all the reviews from my old blog, which had to be hastily deleted after it got me into quite a bit of trouble at work. But that's a story for another day, a day several decades in the future when I've finally gotten over the shame of it all.

Welcome to I Have a Phoenix. I'll review a lot of random shit, mostly books. Thanks for reading.

9 out of 10. This one doesn't have all the homemade sass of their debut, but it's a lot more fun than Feminist Sweepstakes; it starts off a little slow, but the highs are so very high as to make it the best record I've heard in a long-ass time.

"On the Verge" This is one of the weaker tracks, but it sets the eighties synth-pop tone for the whole album. The shouted refrain "We're on the verge of...!" is nothing special, and neither are the other lyrics, which are supposed to confuse you about whether they discuss sex or activism.

"Seconds" Starts off a bit too Bikini Kill for my taste, but Kathleen's yelling smooths out into a more Deceptacon delivery by the middle. It ends up rocking. "You make me sick! Sick! Sick!"

"Don't Drink Poison" I wish I knew more about music so I could tell you exactly what this reminds me of. It's cute. The lyrics are about not trusting the music media or maybe the music industry.

"After Dark" I have never heard anything that sounds more like Stacy Q, and I mean that in a good way. "I got your name and number/You seem kinda surprised/Maybe it's 'cause I can be/you know, like cold as ice..." One of my favorites. Too long, though, at 3:35.

"Nanny Nanny Boo Boo" This is the album's best, I think. The lyrics are a smorgasboard of words like "Dude, Yr So Crazy," and they manage to get away with namechecking Cynthia Plastercaster in the middle of a lot of computer lingo ("batch capture," "hard drives"), but the real energy comes from Kathleen's perfectly snide delivery in the refrain: "It's just a joke, man/It's just an interview/You'll never get it/I guess this shit is too new."

"TKO" Sort of a throwaway. Nothing really special about this one.

"Tell You Now" This is a bit sad and defiant but still very pop overall. It seems to be a confrontation with a rapist or abuser, but I can't be sure.

"New Kicks" The big single. It's fun and inspiring, a collage of different activists and clips from newscasts and soundbites of girl-on-the-street interviews. I love it, sort of against my will. I don't even mind how long it goes on.

"Viz" This one is about passing as a man: "They call it climbing, I call it visibility/They call it coolness, I call it visibility." You know, this is sort of what I hoped for when I heard about Liz Phair's big pop album. That one was shit, though; this one is the shit.

"This Island" It's the "Generator" of the album, and it works as a fast-paced dance number. It seems to be about encouraging a messed-up friend to get her shit together; I guess it's a dance corollary to Ani's "Fixing Her Hair." "Stop smoking those cigarettes, baby/Next time it's your turn to save me/Splash some water on your little face 'cause you're a mess, you're a mess, you're a mess."

"I'm So Excited" Yes, it's a Pointer Sisters cover, and they did an awesome job, making the song their own while retaining the exuberance of the original. Good work, guys.

"Sixteen" Like early Madonna in a pensive moment; think "Love Don't Live Here
Any More" or "Pretender" or "Open Your Heart." The lyrics seem to indicate that the narrator was a bitch in high school and now a child of a lesser caste is dead. "So they say I was sometimes cruel/I don't know if I would say that too/I don't know about that."

"Punker Plus" "Cinna-mint, Internet, cinnamon and butter-buns!" How can you not love a song with that line and that name? It's a feisty little sketch of life on the road with the band. A-plus. (November 2, 2004)

I want to call this a parable, but it isn't; it's a story used to describe the origins of spoken language, and that's just what it seems to be, so parable isn't the right word. Myth, maybe, or folktale. I'll go with folktale.

It's fabulous. There's a bunch of cave people that mainly communicate by grunting and clubbing one another on the head. Then a little boy starts giving things names. The sun is first, then the other nouns, then adjectives and verbs, and with these tools, the cave people can communicate with one another, which makes it easier to hunt, to cook, etc. Verbs soon lead to tenses and the conditional, though, and with the ability to describe what might happen in the future and to debate what could have been done differently in the past comes planning. This is all well and good until stockpiling for the winter ahead means that the community has a surplus, and the creation of more specialized jobs (Food Divider, for example) leads to hierarchy, an' shit. And I haven't even told you about the Strange Little Girl. Read this one; it's easy and meaningful and purely enjoyable. (November 5-6, 2004)

I love spending a whole three-day weekend reading. I started Plan B late last night, and I read until my eyes got tired, which wasn't long. I woke up this morning at 8:30 and immediately grabbed the book off the nightstand and continued reading. I paused to eat a Croissant Pocket and to take the dog for a walk, but I finished just now.

I loved his The Book of Joe, and so did Becky, but this one was even better. It was more plot-based, I guess, and more like The Secret History. There's a group of five college friends, now turning 30. They all live in New York except Jack, who's an action movie star. Jack's become a bit of a cokehead, and when a classic intervention doesn't work, the other four friends kidnap him and bring him to a summer house in upstate New York to try to detox him and talk some sense into him. So they do that, but Jack's agent is trying to find him, and the press and the local cops suspect something's going on, and a little kid next door gets involved, and so on. Excellent.

As with The Book of Joe, though, I really hate the idea that everyone has to find romantic satisfaction in the end, and I particularly loathe the cliché that one's first love is the truest and can never be escaped. What.ever. (November 6-7, 2004)

I give this one a solid B. It's a slightly John Irving-esque story about a small town in Virginia. The main characters are Margaret, a dairy farmer on a family farm that's been steadily dwindling over the last hundred years; her assistant August, who's secretly in love with her and spends his free time impersonating Thomas Jefferson and delivering historical lectures; her thirteen-year-old daughter Polly, who has a crush on her vaguely leftist history teacher; and Manda, a local working-class woman who has just given birth to what can only be called a litter of eleven babies, thanks to fertility drugs.

It's an election year, and the Democratic candidate has come out strongly in favor of small family farms, proposing to grant them amnesty from all their debts in order to bail them out. Margaret campaigns hard for him, and when he wins, she and August decide to make a twelve-hundred-pound wheel of cheese and deliver it to him in person. Apparently some people did the same thing for Thomas Jefferson in 1802. But as the plans for the cheese's manufacture and transport are being made, it turns out that the President may not be going to keep his promises. And Manda's babies keep dying. And Polly's teacher kisses her. And, well, I ended up liking this one more than I thought I would. Basically, I agree with Becky. (November 7-12, 2004)

I read about this one on Caroline's blog, and I wasn't sure at first whether I'd like it. It felt a little too detached, and I couldn't really get a feel for the narrator, and I thought it might be a touch too metafiction for me, but I ended up really liking it.

It opens with this chick Ellis being held up at gunpoint in a park, and then follows what happens to her over the next couple of months. Basically, she avoids her boyfriend, sleeps with various people, visits her mom and sister, talks to her doorman and her best friend, gets little rhyming do-your-chores notes from her roommate, and tutors art history students. I particularly liked the descriptions of her dates, because she calls the boys things like "representative of the world" and "ROTC boy" not in a cutesy way, but just because they're not all that incredibly important and you get the sense that the author just didn't bother naming them, not that she was trying to say anything about the boys in question or about the narrator or about characterization in novels or anything like that. I don't know...it worked.

Also, when I finished the book, I looked at the author photo on the back flap and was surprised to see she's hot. (November 12-13, 2004)

You know one thing I really hate about the Harry Potter books? How everyone is Good or Evil depending on who their parents were. Harry's parents were heroic and wonderful, and so is Harry. Ron's are traditional and hardworking and good-humored, and so are Ron, Ginny and the twins, although admittedly not Percy. Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon are ridiculous, and so is Dudley. Lucius Malfoy and Mr. Crabbe and Mr. Goyle were all Death Eaters, and so their three sons are asshole Slytherins. Does no one transcend their evil family and become good? I'm waiting for that to happen, especially in light of the whole "you are what you choose" theme about Harry almost being sorted into Slytherin.

I'm listening to all five books on CD. I get a lot out of them that way, and sometimes I don't even want to get out of the car after work until the chapter is over. I listened to Goblet of Fire on my trip to Chicago, and as soon as I got back I got Sorcerer's Stone and now I'm halfway through Chamber of Secrets. I'm thinking of trying Lord of the Rings on CD since I've never been able to get through the print version. I think I'll listen to The Hobbit first to get me in the mood. But first I have several more CoS disks, then ten for Prisoner of Azkaban, and then twenty-fucking-three in Order of the Phoenix. (November 13, 2004)

When I was twenty-four, I fell madly in love with a beautiful redheaded grad student. Madly in love...puppy love, though, really. She was my first girlfriend and the first girl I'd ever kissed and the last person I ever loved like that, so far. I felt, well, like every other person in the entire world feels when they fall in love with their first girlfriend. It only lasted a few months, mostly because I'm a huge fuckup, but whatever.

So now I'm reading Pages for You and it's the same thing, the very same thing. Seventeen-year-old Flannery falls in love for the first time with twenty-eight-year-old Anne. Anne's a grad student, like my first girl was; she's eleven years older than Flannery, and MFG was fifteen years older than I was. They're both redheads, MFG and Anne, and Flannery is blonde like me. Anne and Flannery fall in love over the holidays, just like I did, and while Anne is short, I keep imagining her being five foot nine like MFG. So right now I'm in the middle of the book and it's the holidays and they're still in love and I have this feeling like once school starts and they have less time to spend together, everything will fall apart just like it did with me and MFG.

Most of the thoughts I've had about MFG over the last four years have been pretty negative; it was a lousy breakup really. But now, reading this book, I feel grateful toward her; the book takes me back to when everything was....you know. (November 13-14, 2004)

I had to read this new YA book because of the title, but it was really a little trifle of a book. I mean, it was all right; it held my attention throughout, but that had a lot to do with its brevity. There wasn't anything particularly new about the plot: teenage girl runs away from her abusive husband and finds a job in, of course, a diner, and she befriends a pregnant girl who's not sure whether she's going to keep her baby, but the reader is sure from the very first page, and of course the pregnant girl gives birth during a hurricane when the phones are down and of course the runaway delivers it perfectly, and then the two of them move in together with a cat, and of course at the end, the abusive husband comes back and the runaway almost goes home with him but in the end, her "self of steam" pulls her through. What.ever. If this is the kind of stuff you like to read, you might also try True Confessions of a Heartless Girl. (November 15-16, 2004)

John Case is the pseudonym of a husband-wife writing team. That concept turns me off a bit; acquire discrete hobbies, people, or at least pursue the same one separately. Give each other some room.

I loved the book, though. Alex and his wife Liz have recently separated, and their six-year-old identical twin boys are visiting Alex for a couple of weeks. They go to a Renaissance fair, and the twins disappear. When the police investigation cools off, Alex, a newscaster, takes a leave of absence from his job and searches for the boys himself.

That's a pretty standard thriller plot, but this one really did rise above the genre. The authors just got the details right, I thought. Like, the day after the abduction, when Alex and his wife make the traditional on-air plea to all of America to help them find their kids, Alex feels like his experience as a broadcast journalist makes him sound too canned, so he lets Liz take over. Something about that rang true. And you might think that Alex and Liz would get back together, or at least that one of them would make an attempt in that direction, but nothing like that happens. And while the entire voodoo angle could have been completely removed without affecting the plot -- the initiation scene with the coffin was about as
gratuitous as they get -- I loved the stuff about the old-time stage magicians, especially when I just read Carter Beats the Devil a couple of months ago. And the end is perfect. Of course Alex finds the boys -- I'm not giving anything away when I say that. This is still a genre thriller. But right after he finds them, I mean right after, like five minutes after, the book ends. There's no chapter to tie up loose ends, no seeing the kids reunite with their mom back home, no romantic interest for Alex, no media coverage, no therapy sessions for the boys, not even any description by the twins of what happened to them while they were gone. Nothing. It's awesome. (November 16-17, 2004)

Douglas is the FBI agent that invented profiling way back when, and since then he's written a jillion books about what it's like to catch serial killers. I love that stuff since I'm a true-crime fan, but I do think he's (1) a bit egotistical, although I don't really mind, and (2) too vague about how profiling actually works. This was a different kind of book, though. In it, he took on eight or ten unsolved cases, ranging from Jack the Ripper to the Lindbergh baby to JonBenet, and gave us his take on who could or couldn't have done them (e.g. he doesn't think it was JonBenet's parents, and makes a very compelling case why). (September 1-6, 2004)

So fascinating that I finished it all in one glorious day of couch-lying and bath-taking at my mom's Chicago apartment. The title says it all: Ryan describes the lives of the little-girl gymnasts and college-age figure skaters and the pressure on them to be thin and perfect, to work through injuries, to be beautiful and fashionable as well as technically perfect, etc. She lays into Bela Karolyi especially hard, and I like that.

As my college best friend Lauren once said as we watched pregame interviews during the 1998 NBA Finals, "I like behind-the-scenes looks at anything." So here's Karolyi's philosophy, in his own words, and what it's like to be one of his gymnasts:

Injuries had no place in Karolyi's carefully designed formula for producing a star every four years. He built his program around the girl with the most talent. "Your top athlete is a very strange little creature," Karolyi explains. "Of course, I never studied philosophy, but through the years these little guys taught me. We paid our dues on [our] own mistakes, praising our little guy and cheering and clapping and showing our enthusiasm and babying them. And those are the ones who turn around and show disappreciation, ignorance and even arrogance. They take advantage of your sincere urge to show your appreciation. Give them everything in the world and surely you're getting a big, big, big, big slap. She is the first to turn her back."

So Karolyi constructed a training environment that kept his star athlete questioning her worth. In selecting five other gymnasts to train with her, he carefully chose each to play a specific role. Perhaps the most torturous position was that of the secondary star: like the understudy in a play, the girl was just talented enough to present a threat to the star's status. Nadia had Teodora Ungureanu, Dianne Durham had Mary Lou Retton, Kristie Phillips had Phoebe Mills, and Kim Zmeskal had Betty Okino. The four remaining gymnasts were "the crowd," as Karolyi called them, chosen as much for their personality traits as their talents. One girl from "the crowd" was always chosen as his pet. She might be the least talented, but she possessed the qualities he wanted to reinforce in his star: hard work, discipline and stoicism. Karolyi would praise her lavishly and hold her up as an example, angering the more talented gymnasts, who resented the favoritism. Anger, Karolyi knew, was a powerful motivator. He had built his own career on it....

He would play all six girls like chess pieces, every more designed to toughen and sharpen the queen. He would pit them against one another. "If someone else wasn't getting a skill and you got it, or if someone fell and you didn't, it made you feel good," recalls one gymnast. Karolyi would shun one girl in order to teach another a lesson. He'd make one gymnast do extra work for a teammate's mistakes.

(September 6, 2004)

I picked this one up after reading an Aaron Is Not Amused post, because I thought it'd be straight-up true crime. Instead, it was really a lot of religious history, which bores me, and besides, I can't say I liked how the most extreme elements of Mormonism were highlighted in the beginning. I understand that the bizarre is what makes for interesting reading, and I was glad that Krakauer made a huge point of explaining how fundamentalist Mormons are not accepted by, let alone the same as, the members of the mainstream LDS church, but I feel a bit defensive of Mormonism because one of my best friends is a member of that church, and also as a matter of fairness because I'm an ex-Catholic, and Catholicism is, of course, an extremely bizarre Christian sect that, nonetheless, isn't seen by outsiders as being as weird as Mormonism. So I didn't get very far into this one before abandoning it. (September 8, 2004)

It was okay. Well, it really wasn't that great. It's the story of a teenage girl that fakes a brush with a serial rapist in order to get attention right before her sister's wedding, like the dark side of Sixteen Candles, but even though it's first person it's told with that narrative distance I so loathe. I want to understand why the character did it, but I don't. And I don't even care.

I'd expected to enjoy it, too, because the issue of falsely reporting rape is an important one to me, for two reasons. For one thing, I was a women's studies major and, later, a WS grad student, and one thing I always hated about taking beginning WS courses late, like as makeup courses when I was older than all the other students, was how so many of the students were so fucking retarded about, well, everything. About what feminism is, as if it means you have to stop shaving your legs, as if boys can't be feminists, as if a group exists, called "feminazis," that want people to have as many abortions as possible...but especially that most, or many, or a reasonably high percentage, of rape reports are lies. Fuck that. Fuck
Katie Roiphe, too, while you're at it.

Plus, on a totally unrelated note, my dad grew up with Gary Dotson, the man falsely accused of raping Cathy Crowell Webb. When I came across the book she wrote, Forgive Me, I ate it up. Cathy thought she might be pregnant, and to cover up that she'd been having sex, she went to a park one night after work and scratched herself up and then found a cop and told him she'd just been raped. Then she picked Dotson out of a lineup, and he went to trial and, eventually, to jail. Then Cathy found god and repented and said it wasn't really him, but no one believed her this time, ironically. Totally fascinating book. It's out of print now, I believe, but I ran across my copy tonight while cleaning out my closet. (September 6-8, 2004)

Truly excellent, but then I expected to think so. It takes place at a prestigious boys' boarding school around 1960, and the protagonist is a budding writer who idolizes Hemingway and, briefly, Ayn Rand. He's a senior, and each year, the school schedules three writing contests, the winner of each to be selected by a famous writer, who will then come to the school, be photographed and interviewed for the newspaper, and then have a private audience with the writer s/he selected. The first writer is Robert Frost, to give you an idea of the celebrity level with which we're dealing here.

It's a bit of a coming-of-age except that the boy (who I believe is unnamed) doesn't actually mature. I mean, he's pretty mature to begin with, but then he does something retarded. I guess it just seems like a coming-of-age because it's narrated by the man as an adult, looking back on high school with nostalgia and regret.

"The prose is exquisite," I want to say. Oh, I just did. I also loved the buildup of Ayn Rand as a controversial, but ultimately defensible, figure, and then her appearance at the school and the narrator's loss of respect for her. It was portrayed vividly and in, well, exquisite writing.

Weirdly, though, at the end the story takes a weird turn -- not a plot twist, but it fades into the story of Dean Makepeace, a peripheral character in the old story, and never goes back to the narrator's point of view. I'm not sure, because I haven't read very much Hemingway, but what I have read, I see mimicked in Wolff's tale...mimicked with great skill and forethought, and displaying both homage and irony, and very much relevant to a story that's itself about the idolization of authors. So I suspect this end bit is also a Hemingway twist. Is it, English majors? (September 12-13, 2004)

I read about this picture book on PUBYAC and couldn't believe the description of the plot, so I decided to check it out for myself. It's...awful, and heartbreaking, and no child should ever read it. It's a picture book about two sisters, Kate and Glory, who live with their single mother. When Kate asked her mom what happened to her dad, Mom says, "'You know he moved away when you were just this big...He didn't want a family anymore...At least he sends the checks on time...Last year he changed his mind again, and now he has a new family. But I love you, Kate....You don't need a daddy.'"

So Kate and Glory walk to their father's new home across town and find the man mowing his lawn. His new baby sits in a stroller, watching. Dad doesn't recognize Kate and Glory; he just tells them, "'Don't touch [the baby], kids," and keeps mowing. Glory asks, "'Is that the only kid you have?' [D]ad grinned. 'Just the one,' he said."

Awful, eh? Imagine if I read this one at storytime. (September 24, 2004)

I keep going back and forth between whether this one was excellent or just okay. It reads like if Douglas Adams wrote Snow Crash, and while I think both Adams and Neal Stephenson are brilliant, I had a hard time with Snow Crash and
Jennifer Government because of the constant perspective switches, especially during the action scenes near the end, and I think there were just too many characters. Barry writes in his afterword that a friend got him to completely eliminate one much-loved character and that he agrees the book needed it, but I think he could have gone a little further. Was Billy NRA really critical to the book? His sole motivation is that he wanted to go skiing, and that's not especially interesting even if it wasn't mentioned like fifteen times. And what about Claire and Buy? Were they really anything other than romantic interests for Hack and Jennifer? I hate it when a nice action-packed anti-capitalist book ends with everyone falling in love. Fuck that.

I did enjoy most of it, though, especially Violet. I liked her even though I wasn't supposed to; I particularly liked when she thought, "Hack had dallied with Claire, with shy, quiet Claire, but Claire wasn't enough for him. Hack needed someone like Violet, who could take charge of him. She'd told him that a thousand times." Heh. (September 26-29, 2004)

Good read, although I wish there were more descriptions of how exactly Douglas comes to the conclusions he does about various criminals. He's big on patting himself on the back, like he'll point out that he predicted the criminal would drive a blue or black car, have a stutter, be recently divorced and would visit the gravesite soon, and then he'll point out all the ways in which the eventually-captured murderer does in fact fit this profile. But I want to know how he got there. He talks about this a little bit, but not enough. (July 29 - August 2, 2004)

This novel is billed as an "unauthorized parody" of Gone With the Wind, but it's not really a humorous book. I sort of expected it to be poorly written like Scarlett, the unfortunate, even preposterous, Alexandra Ripley sequel for which I'd held such high hopes back in high school, but it's excellent. It's told by Cindy, the daughter of Planter (Gerald; almost all the names are changed to prevent lawsuit by the Margaret Mitchell estate) and Mammy, whose name is unchanged, and therefore is Other (Scarlett)'s half-sister. All the other characters are the ones from the book; Cindy's the only new one until later when she meets a Black Congressman as well as Frederick Douglas. It's set immediately after the original, when Other has just gone back to Cotton Farm (Tara, of course; heh) after R(hett) leaves her.

I think the parody label was a copyright requirement, and I guess I don't know the strict definition of parody, but again, this is not a funny book except for certain, sudden flashes of black humor that made me gasp and laugh simultaneously. One of these moments came when Cindy decorously tells R, now her lover, that she is aroused; she tells him so by murmuring, "The morning dew is on the southern lawn." Hee.

Yeah, the book is much too sophisticated to be a simple parody. It's more like Randall takes the original cast of characters and gives them a whole new story. This one has a great deal to do with Cindy realizing she loves R mostly because he prefers her to Other, to whom she's always in the past come out second-best. Randall also puts to work Black feminist theories about how women of color are often seen as exotic by white men, and Cindy struggles with whether to leave R, whom she does truly love, for a Black man so she can live a quiet life rather than one as a Black girl showpiece.

At the same time, Randall does toss barbs at Mitchell's work from time to time: remember how Gerald and Ellen had three baby boys that died? What really happened to them? Why did Ashley resist Scarlett's vivacity in favor of Melanie (who's called "Mealy Mouth" in this book)? Remember the poker game in which Gerald won Tara? Turns out that was fixed. These little secrets are fun to read, even though they're not the point of the book.

You might notice that in the paragraph above, I refer to stories Randall tells as if they were the "true" sequence of events that happened after Rhett left Scarlett at the end of Mitchell's book. That's because I really do feel that way. Fuck Alexandra Ripley and her stories of tea sets and extramarital sex and trips to Ireland. Boring and irrelevant. This is what really happened. (August 2-4, 2004)

The California in question refers to the Chicago street, not the state, and the book takes place in West Rogers Park, which is not quite the neighborhood I grew up in, but it was one mile away and had the closest library. In fact, a character in the book works at that library. It also mentions such adolescent haunts of mine as Gulliver's, a pizza place/Mexican and Italian restaurant bedecked with gaudy chandeliers and nude statues; Wolfy's, a hot dog stand on Peterson; Fluky's, next door to which my mom lives now; and Mather, where my sister went to high school. It even mentions the Nortown, a movie theater on Western I frequented in junior high but is now sadly closed. The book is set in 1979 and so far tells the stories of a bunch of junior high and high school kids. Pinky, it has your name written all over it, doesn't it?

The opening paragraph:

The day after an estimated seventy Americans were taken hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Jill Wasserstrom paused on the corner of North Shore and California Avenues to contemplate the accuracy of what she had proudly declared to Lana Rovner during recess at K.I.N.S. Hebrew School. What she had told Lana hadn't been quite true. She hadn't given Muley Scott Wills a big old hickey after eighth-grade phys ed at Boone Elementary School. She hadn't given Muley Scott Wills any sort of hickey at all. What had happened was that Muley Scott Wills had asked her if she wanted to go with him to Sun Drugs to pick up some items for his mother. She'd said sure, she had time before she had to go to Hebrew school, so she'd gone with him to buy a heating pad, a bottle of aspirin, two blocks of Neapolitan ice cream, three packs of Now and Later's, and a bag of Warner's spice drops, which they consumed before he said goodbye to her in front of K.I.N.S. But, Jill realized as she continued walking south on California, Muley Wills was unlikely to deny any story that made it seem as if relationship was more profound than it actually was, which was why it had been a safe bet to tell Lana Rovner she'd given Muley the hickey. If Lana -- who was always asking intrusive questions about Jill and Muley's relationship -- actually went up to Muley some day in the future and asked if Jill had given him said hickey, no doubt Muley either would say nothing or would immediately confirm the story to conceal the fact that Jill had never given him a hickey. Or anything else for that matter.

(August 6-9, 2004)

Pretty good for a summer book. It's yet another novel set fifty years ago and featuring a white Southern child discovering how racial integration can really fuck up a small town, but it's a breath of fresh air that the little girl that narrates at least has some prejudice at the start of the book. I find it less than realistic that the small white child that tells every other Civil-Rights-Act-affects-a-sleepy-Mississippi-village book is always a paradigm of color-blind innocence herself, generally due to the influence of a loving, hard-working, and, of course, "dignified" Black woman that cleans said white child's home. This little girl, though, thinks that colored people should stay with their own and not try going to white people's church, which attitude is despicable in itself but realistic for a kid in southwestern Louisiana in 1957. So apparently two Black nuns are going to begin teaching at the girl's Catholic school, so we'll see what happens. Moms yanking their kids from school and crosses aflame on campus, I wager. Also the little girl's name is actually Vivien Leigh Dubois, which pleases me. (August 13-14, 2004)

The last issue of The War Against Silence just came out. Glenn McDonald, writer of the erudite, esoteric music column, went and got married on us and has ceased weekly publication to move on into a life slightly less obsessed with bands like Smart Brown Handbags and Zeppet Store. Even though our musical tastes do not tend to overlap (I'm not much on Roxette and Kansas, and he couldn't stand Elastica's The Menace), in the cases where they do, he's far better than I'll ever be at putting into words why a band, song or his We Are Shampoo review. And we like some of the same books, at least; in particular, we're fans of Harry Potter and Elizabeth Wurtzel. Good luck, man. (August 26, 2004)

My sister Tal recommended this one almost three years ago. I loved it then, although I was sure I wouldn't, and I put a hold on it again a couple of months ago. It took this long to come in even though it was published in 1999 (generally only brand-new books have lengthy wait lists), but it was worth the wait. Go pick it up. Your library has copies, I promise, unless they've been stolen, which is actually sort of likely (many of ours have disappeared). Here are a couple of excerpts.

"Let me ask you something, Will."

"What?"

"You supposed to be a great businessman right?"

"No doubt," he said confidently.

"You watch how your money moves, look out for people tryna pinch the stash, don't want to make moves with no small-timer with small money."

"Yeah? What you tryna get at," he asked slightly aggravated.

"So why does a man who works so hard for the dough drop three Gs on a bitch like Natalie for a Chanel suit."

"Damn, that suit really got you heated, huh," he joked.

"No seriously, it's no secret that Natalie fucks around with anybody. You supposed to be a man who watches the company he keeps and look who you end up in box seat with."

Will was aggravated. "Look, you wanna get raw with me, I'ma get raw with you. I'ma talk to you like you one of my boys, now. Natalie sucks my dick like no other hoe ever sucked my dick."

"Yeah, but you could've got your dick sucked on 42nd Street."

"No, not like that. There's an art to sucking a dick. Natalie got that shit locked down. She gets the whole dick in her mouth and still finds room for my nuts. When I bust in her mouth, she swallows like it's pancake syrup. Hell, she earned that three-thousand-dollar suit." (pp. 166-167)

House of Success was a group home for teenage girls aged thirteen to eighteen...wasn't like the movies, though. In the room I was assigned to, I met all kinds. First, there was this girl from Haiti. The only thing I could say about her was that she was the greasiest person I ever saw. She had a dogged-out, uneven, jheri curl with all the grease activator and gel that comes with it. She had the jheri curl grease colliding with the Vaseline on her face. She had greasy lotions for her hands and feet, and in general always looked wet. Her name was Claudette. There was no worse nightmare than the clothes she wore. It looked like she picked a year from the past, let's say 1975, and decided all her clothes would be from that time. To make it worse, she just said fuck the color scheme. I'll wear a purple shirt with green gauchos with a yellow hat with a big pink flower on it and I'll top this shit off with some wooden platform open-toed shoes so I can show off my big maroon bunion. (pp. 176-177)

(August 26-27, 2004)

I'd heard good things about this juvenile chapter book, so I put a hold on it and when it came in I ate it up. It's about a mischievous fifth-grader that's conned by a clever teacher into giving an oral report on etymology. When he learns that language is created by people themselves, and that their conventions end up in the dictionary, he decides to stop using the word "pen" in favor of saying "frindle" instead. He's more successful than he dreamed, and...well, the last couple of chapters are especially cute. Read this one; it'll only take you half an hour. (August 26, 2004)

I remember I saw the movie Election a few years ago when I was on a movie-watching kick similar to the one I went on last July, except the 2000 version involved my VCR and gin instead of a movie theater and weed. I liked it, although I haven't really given it a thought since then. And when I requested Perrotta's Little Children via the library hold system after reading a review, I had no idea that there was a book called Election upon which the movie was based, let alone that it was by the same guy. And my library's only copy is missing, so I'll have to wait quite a while before I read it, like until I can afford to buy books or until I get around to ILLing it.

But Little Children is wonderful. I started it yesterday morning and wouldn't turn out the lights last night until I'd read the last page. I knew I was going to like it from the opening paragraph:

The young mothers were telling each other how tired they were. This was one of their favorite topics, along with the eating, sleeping, and defecating habits of their offspring, the merits of certain local nursery schools, and the difficulty of sticking to an exercise routine. Smiling politely to mask a familiar feeling of desperation, Sarah reminded herself to think like an anthropologist: I'm a researcher studying the behavior of boring suburban women. I am not a boring suburban woman myself.

(August 5, 2004)

Unexpectedly wonderful. The book tells the story of Lesley, a Kansas girl about to graduate from high school, and it's a bit of a coming-of-age novel (first boyfriend, loss of virginity, realization that high school isn't the most important thing that
ever happened to anyone, etc.) but it's set against the backdrop of her unusual family. Her second-generation Irish father works at a garage, but dreams of the day he'll have an office job and bring home paperwork to do in the evenings; in each of the family's various homes, he sets aside one bedroom as his study, even if it means Lesley and her younger sister have to share a room.

Her mother, though, is the main focus of the book (seen through Lesley's eyes). She's Hungarian and a survivor of World War II, where she was forced to procreate with Germans because of her traditional Aryan beauty. She bore two sons that she never saw again. Now she becomes obsessed with a little boy on a local farm, telling him he is her lost son (despite the fact that he's six and the son in question would be nearly forty) and that she's come to take him away from his poverty to live with her.

Then all hell breaks loose, and Lesley goes to Wales to visit a cottage where her parents lived for a short time after they got married. I don't want to spoil yall for the ending, because I really want you to read it. It's out of print, but check the library.

This is the first time I've read The Sunflower Forest even though I've read all of Torey's other books multiple times. This is her only fiction excursion, according to her Web site and my prior research, but just this week I've discovered another one via, of all things, my library's IPAC. Maybe it's a different Torey Hayden, but the plot summary reads, "David has never had a permanent home or a real friend, but when he decides to try to hatch an owl egg with the help of a classmate, his life slowly begins to change for the better," so I doubt it. Torey's nonfiction books are about her experiences as a teacher of emotionally disturbed children, particularly those with a disorder known as elective mutism, in which the child is physically able to speak but refuses to do so.

I like the Welsh part of The Sunflower Forest, though, in part because I got a kick out of the (fictional, but obviously based to some degree on Wales) country Qwghlm. Plus, Welsh is funny. And there's Welsh rarebit, which I've never had, but I believe it's a big pile of bread and melted cheese, which sounds good. (July 1-2, 2004)

The Man Who Went to the Far Side of the Moon: The Story of Apollo 11 Astronaut Michael Collins, Bea Uuma Schyffert, copyright 1999 in Swedish, 2003 in English

Through My Eyes, Ruby Bridges, 1999

After the Last Dog Died: The True-life, Hair-raising Adventure of Douglas Mawson and His 1911-1914 Antarctic Expedition, Carmen Bredeson, 2003

The best of the bunch was The Man Who Went to the Far Side of the Moon. It tells the story of Collins, the third member of the Apollo 11 trip...he stayed in the spacecraft while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked around on the moon. It's very well-told; it's fairly nonlinear, so can be picked up and read from a variety of points, but it's not just scattered bits of information, either. Text describing Michael's time in space is placed opposite black-and-white pictures of the spacecraft; this goes on for a few pages and then there's a full-color spread of Michael's wife, kids and dog, and then a chart detailing the different types of food eaten in space (freeze-dried, powdered, wet-packed and spoon-bowl) and a list of the menu (includes Canadian bacon, banana pudding and bite-sized coconut cubes). Lots of attention is paid to the way the astronauts peed in space; I guess Schyffert knew what kids would want to hear about. ALSC gave this book a Batchelder Honor award for being the best "originally published in a foreign language in a foreign country, and subsequently translated into English and published in the United States" this year.

Also good was Through My Eyes. In 1960, Ruby integrated New Orleans public schools at age six, all by herself, and now she makes a living as a speaker. She's sort of politically untouchable...everyone loves her from fundamentalists to radicals because there's no controversy involved nowadays. She was just a tiny little girl that wanted to start first grade like everyone else, and instead no white parents would let their kids come to school with her, so she had a class all to herself. Her book is well-written and full of excellent photography...Ruby in a starched white dress marching up the stairs to school, surrounded by federal marshals with huge guns; a crazy white lady, a reasonably attractive twenty-something woman, holding out a scarf and screeching that she's going to strangle Ruby; and a picture of Ruby's mother accompanying her to school on the very first day. For some reason, I expected Ruby's mother to be the age of my own mother, because Ruby's text portrayed her as wise and tough and determined to get her daughter the best education possible, but of course I'm 28 and Ruby was 6 so her mother's only about my age.

The other part I found interesting was how Ruby was selected: all the Black kids in New Orleans were tested the year before, and Ruby was one of the highest-scoring kids, so the NAACP visited Ruby's parents to try to talk them into letting Ruby attend a white school in the fall. Mr. Bridges didn't want Ruby to do it, and eventually he and Mrs. Bridges divorced (five years later) and that was part of why.

What I didn't like was the excess of sidebars, captions, and quotes that interfered with my reading flow. All of the material was interesting and I wanted to read it, but then I'd forget where I was in Ruby's narrative, and that wasn't cool.

This book won the Woodson Award for social studies and the Jane Addams Children's Book Award.

Much crappier was After the Last Dog Died. The subtitle pretty much describes what the book was about: man & crew travel through ice and snow, get hungry and cold, some people die and some survive and are treated as heroes. The problem was that it was told in a stiff, boring fashion, like a crappy social studies book. The reader doesn't get any picture of what it was actually like to be on an Arctic expedition; we are, instead, told about the bravery of the men that went. There are plenty of pictures and captions, but they often don't make sense in context and aren't nearly as powerful as the images used in Through My Eyes and Far Side of the Moon, although I guess since this book is set in 1912, it can't really be helped.

Also, the men killed their dogs and ate them in order to survive. Not only is that gross and horrible, and not at all treated with anything other than blind reverence in the book (seriously), but it makes the title seem a bit disingenuous, doesn't it? "After the last dog died," or "After I killed the last dog and ate his liver"?

This one won no awards that I know of, thank god. For a book about snowy turn-of-the-century expeditions in which dogs are depicted as the heroes they are, read The Cruelest Miles. (July 2-3, 2004)

It was my first time reading this book, oddly, and I liked it quite a bit, although it wasn't quite what I'd expected. From such snippets of pop culture as Katie John and Heathcliff, I'd thought it was simply a torrid Gothic love story that took place in the moors of England. But it turns out that one of the leads dies, like, a third of the way into the book, and it's really more of a family saga, although a good one. And Heathcliff is cruel and disturbed! I thought he was the romantic hero! I mean, I knew going in that he wasn't a sensitive guy or anything, but I thought he was just a bad boy, not a sadistic freak. (July 3-8, 2004)

FQF? That's a terrible acronym but I guess it's what you'd call the French Quarter Festival if you wished to abbreviate it. I went yesterday and it was pretty cool. Not much vegetarian food, but I had guacamole and spinach-artichoke bread. And "Oreo bread pudding," which contained exactly one mini-Oreo, the size of a penny. And I had some beer and a peachy Southern Comfort drink. There were some bands playing an' shit and some kids got their faces painted. Sort of like a smaller version of Taste of Chicago except New Orleans is smart enough to have theirs in the spring instead of Fourth of July when it's a hundred degrees in both cities. (April 16, 2004)

Okay, it's true that I've never been to the movies by myself, that I can remember. And it's true that in the last five years, I've seen about five movies at the theater, and in every case I was led by someone whose idea it was and who took care of all the details. And it's true that I've never gone to the movies in New Orleans.

Still, I didn't think I was totally retarded, but it turns out to be true. I decided on a recent patriotic holiday that what I should do on this fourth day of July was, of course, see Fahrenheit 9/11, or maybe Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban at IMAX. I wished to know at what time these events would occur, so I opened the phone book and found the number for the Prytania, the theater Ignatius frequents in A Confederacy of Dunces. I expected to be presented with a menu of choices; instead, a living person answered and said Fahrenheit 911 was not playing therein.

I was at a loss, then, for how to proceed. How the fuck do people find out where the movies are playing that they might want to see? I remembered the existence of a device called Moviefone which one calls to find out the times and locations of a variety of movies, but that was ten years ago in Chicago and I had no idea what the local phone number was or if such a thing still existed. I started making up URLs (moviefinder.com, movielocator.com, etc.) and typing them into my browser, but to no avail.

Then I remembered that when I was in junior high, one found movie information in the newspaper. I got up and went to Robért and bought the Times-Picayune and started perusing it. I got through most of the likely sections before thinking,
"Fuck it," and went to imax.com and found out the times for HP3. They don't allow online reservations, for some godforsaken reason, so I again had to dial a phone number and speak with a human, who charged me $12 for a single ticket. Parking will be an additional $4. What the fuck?

Later I found that movie information is hidden within the Living section of the Times-Pic. I'll remember that for next time. Am I a crazy old lady with no conception of what modern life is like?

Once I got to the theater, though, I was pretty happy about it, because you know what's really great? Going to a movie. You get two hours of entertainment, popcorn and candy, a big Diet Coke and a comfortable chair. It's the best. You should try it.

I have to go back, too, because you know what else is really good? Previews. So now I have to see four of the five movies whose previews I viewed: She Hate Me, Coffee and Cigarettes (why did no one tell me Jack and Meg White were in a movie?), Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, and Maria Full of Grace. I'll skip Before Sunset, though, thanks.

The movie was awesome, of course. Everything about it was great. I even went back a few days later to watch it again, and I think the only other movie I've ever seen twice at the theater was Gone with the Wind, and that was two different special showings some years apart. I've definitely never seen a movie at the theater twice within a week.

I still don't understand, though. Exactly where did all that footage of American soldiers in Iraq come from? I mean, in Fahrenheit 9/11? You know, the soldiers that listened to the "burn, motherfucker" song while they were doing their jobs of killing people, but also the other soldiers that dressed up like Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, and the ones that said, basically, "War is hell," and the one that said that he would never return to Iraq as a soldier even if he faced jail time? Where did Moore get that footage? He didn't shoot it himself, so where did it come from? His Web site doesn't tell us; the "Notes and Sources Archive" gives us all the backup about what Moore says about Bush & Co., but doesn't credit the people that shot the footage I just described. Maybe the movie credits would've helped me out if I'd stayed for them on either excursion. (July 4 and 11, 2004)

This collection of seven essays was magnificent. Fuck Steven Pinker; I now want to marry David Foster Wallace. I absolutely adored this book and I must now read every single thing he's ever written.

Each essay deserves its own review. Here we go.

"Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley"
At 18 pages, this is the second-shortest essay in the book, and it's a great way to kick things off. It consists simply of some musing about what it's like to be a teenage tennis star, on the one hand; on the other, it talks about the insane winds that sweep the prairies of east central Illinois, and how this affects one's tennis game, and how the author learned to work the winds to his advantage even though he really wasn't that great a player. I was particularly interested because I lived in Champaign, Illinois, for the three years it took me to scrape my way through library school, but I think I would have enjoyed this article even if it had been set in South Carolina or Idaho.

What the essay was really about, though, was introducing the other six. Later in the book, when I was confronted with much longer pieces about movies I hadn't seen, athletes I'd never heard of, and the nature of the author (the generic Author, not DFW), I went in with less trepidation because I knew DFW was capable of making any esoteric topic relevant, interesting, and hilarious. I also got used to the footnotes and abbreviations that are the hallmarks of his style. I wonder whether he put this short, readable essay first on purpose. If so: good choice.

"E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction"
This was my least favorite and it was very long, but I slogged my way through it. The overall premise was that since everyone hates TV but watches it anyway, they necessarily do so with ironic detachment, whether they realize it or not. This in turn has led earnestness in general to not be taken very seriously by intellectuals and creative types, including writers of fiction, and so fiction itself has become all self-referential and ironic, all because of TV.

It was in this essay that I began folding up the bottom corners of pages to mark them for later analysis. One such fold brings me to this:

TV is the epitome of Low Art in its desire to appeal to and enjoy the attention of unprecedented numbers of people. But it is not Low because it is vulgar or prurient or dumb. Television is often all these things, but this is a logical function of its need to attract and please Audience. And I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people that compose Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

This opinion struck me because just the day before, I had been reading Becky's excellent reading log and thinking about how just the opposite was true in our case: Becky and I both read tons, and we like a lot of the same, you know, "literary" books a whole lot. But for our junk reading, we have very different preferences: Becky likes chick lit and detective stories and genre sci/fi and fantasy, whereas I like true crime, detective stories but only ones with female detectives, and juvenile serial fiction, which is a polite term for Babysitters Club. So it was just a weird coincidence that DFW said something similar that I read the very next day.

A bit further on, DFW says:

Americans seemed no longer united so much by common beliefs as common images: what binds us became what we stand witness to. Nobody sees this as a good change.

I guess I do, though, on two counts: First, I don't think I want to have "common beliefs" with all other Americans. In fact, I'm sure I don't. Second, I think that's one excellent reason to be a watcher of TV: so you know what everyone else is talking about, and you have mutual references. So that when your civil service class teacher alludes to The L Word, or when the owner of the crack house around the corner talks about the commercial for allergy medicine with the cute little dog in it, or when someone calls your new haircut a Rachel, you know what the fuck they're talking about. The content of TV is knowledge almost everyone has in common, and that's cool: at least we have something in common.

DFW, by the way, wrote this essay in 1990, before there was mass consciousness of, let alone mass access to, the Internet. This is obvious when he talks about "media futurologist" George Gilder's hypothetical invention, the "telecomputer." Gilder says the big problem with TV today (fifteen years ago, really) is that the "expense and complexity of [the technology] used in television sets meant that most of the processing of signals would have to be done [at the networks, which meant that] television would be a top-down system...A few broadcasting centers would originate programs for millions of passive receivers, or 'dumb terminals.'" Gilder's solution was to create a system whereby users would control their own programming, and they'd help one another do it.

DFW describes this idea of Gilder's as "allow[ing] people's TV sets to be hooked up to one another in a kind of interactive net instead of all feeding passively at the teat of a single broadcaster." DFW doesn't think this sounds so great. He says:

It's tough to see how Gilder's soteriol [sic] vision of having more "control" over the arrangement of high-quality fantasy bits is going to ease either the dependency that is part of my relation to TV or the impotent irony I must use to pretend I'm not dependent. Whether I'm "passive" or "active" as a viewer, I still must cynically pretend, because I'm still dependent, because my real dependency here is not on a single show or a few networks any more than the hophead's is on the Turkish florist or the Marseilles refiner. My real dependence is on the fantasies and the images that enable them, and thus on any technology that can make images both available and fantastic....The more enhancing the mediation - see for instance binoculars, amplifiers, graphic equalizers, or "moving pictures hardly distinguishable from real-life images" [quoted from Gilder] -- the more direct, vivid, and real the experience seems, which is to say the more direct, vivid, and real the fantasy and dependence are.

Either DFW or I am missing the point here. I suspect it is he. The real beauty in the interconnected telecomputers is the increased potential for communication with other humans, right? I mean, I see what he's saying about the addiction of the advantages technology brings us -- here I am, sitting alone in my room typing random thoughts into a computer terminal -- but surely this view is too cynical.

Or maybe I'm the one in error here, and the real decade-later manifestation of Gilder's prediction isn't the Internet at all, but satellite and cable TV. Here the viewer does seem to have much more control, if control means choice...and here DFW is correct, because the same old master/slave metaphor fits this situation as well. The slaves have no input. I don't know. What do you think?

"Getting Away from Already Pretty Much Being Away From It All"
Heh. I loved this one. It's a hilarious narrative of DFW's trip to the Illinois State Fair. He technically has a premise here, which is referenced in the title and is pretty much that city dwellers like to go to peaceful and out-of-the-way places on vacation because they're sick of the daily rush, but that farmers and such prefer crowded events like state fairs where they can both hang out with and show off to the peers they rarely meet in such numbers in daily life.

Really, though, it's just a funny story. I didn't even fold up any page-corners in this one; I just giggled through descriptions of hostile and dumbshit carnies, all-butter fudge, cattle-judging contests, and baton-twirling competitions. If you only read one essay in this book, make it this one; and after you read this one, you'll change your mind and want to read the last one too.

"Greatly Exaggerated"
Probably everyone reading the book skips most of this one. I liked it okay, but if it had been any longer than its actual seven-page length, I would have given up. It covers, briefly, the birth of critical theory, the advent of postmodernism, and most specifically, a book by H.L. Hix called Morte d'Author: An Autopsy (1992).

Hix's work is about the fact that many contemporary literary theorists, drawing on a decades-old body of criticism of the school of realism, object to the positioning of the author of a work as somehow integral to the work's aboutness. This is hotly debated, with various people arguing about the value and role of authors. Hix proposes that instead of fighting to the death about what exactly the author does bring to his/her writing, and therefore what exactly an author is, the thing to do is to see how the term "author" is actually used and what it means in context, and go from there.

If you didn't like that paragraph, you won't like this essay, but that really is what Hix's work is about. DFW basically reviews Hix's book. His conclusion is that Hix had a good idea, but executes it poorly, but that's okay because all the author-arguing is pretty nuts anyway.

"David Lynch Keeps His Head"
This one was super-long and I almost skipped it because I'm not very interested in movies and I've never seen anything directed by David Lynch, with the exceptions of (1) Fire Walk with Me as a junior in college, while quite stoned, with several of my sorority sisters who were tripping on acid, and (2) most of the first season of Twin Peaks on TV when I was 14, only because Lara Flynn Boyle used to babysit for me (true story).

I'm so, so glad I decided not to skip this one, though. It turned out to be almost my favorite; I still like the funny ones better, but I knew I would. This essay, on the other hand, is the one that convinced me of DFW's genius, because he made me totally engrossed in a subject I had zero interest in before reading his 66 detailed pages.

Basically, DFW went to the set of Lost Highway and also got to read the shooting script and watch some of the editing, and he uses all of that as a backdrop to his story about how awesome David Lynch is, and how he felt when he first saw Blue Velvet. This was also DFW's first time on a movie set, and he makes the same kind of wry observations that he does at the Illinois State Fair in "Getting Away From Already Pretty Much Being Away From It All" and on a Caribbean cruise in "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." I folded down quite a few pages in this one. And I totally want to see Lost Highway now.

p. 148: "Mysteries of Love," by Julee Cruise, "has acquired an underground reputation as one of the great make-out tunes of all time -- well worth checking out," says DFW. KaZaA doesn't have it, though...does any of yall? I have the Twin Peaks TV show soundtrack on cassette somewhere, but I don't know whether this is on there or not.

172: This seems to be DFW's first trip to Los Angeles, and he marvels at how it lives up to all the clichés about it. He can't get enough of this. "L.A. has a big city's street musicians, but here the musicians play on median strips instead of on the sidewalk or subway, and patrons throw change and fluttering bills at them from their speeding cars, many with the casual accuracy of long practice. On the median strips between the hotel and David Lynch's sets, most of the street musicians were playing instruments like finger-cymbals and citterns. Fact: In my three days here for Premiere magazine I will meet two (2) different people named Balloon."

174-5: He goes on a long rant about Balthazar Getty that's beyond hilarious, considering that whenever I think of "Balty" I think of the enormous and longstanding crush that my best high school friend had on him back in the day (1991). Therefore I must recreate the Balty paragraphs in their entirety.

(...Balthazar Getty, about whom the less said the better, probably, except maybe to say that he looks sort of like Tom Hanks and John Cusack and Charlie Sheen all mashed together and then emptied of some vital essence. He's not particularly tall, but he looks tall in Lost Highway's footage because he has extremely poor posture and David Lynch has for some reason instructed him to exaggerate the poor posture. As a Hot Young Male Actor, Balthazar Getty is to Leonardo DiCaprio roughly what a Ford Escort is to a Lexus. His breakthrough role was as Ralph in the latest Lord of the Flies, in which he was bland and essenceless but not terrible. He was miscast and misdirected as a homeless kid in Where the Day Takes You (like how does a homeless kid manage to have fresh mousse in his hair every day?) and really good in a surly bit part in Mr. Holland's Opus.

To be frank, it's almost impossible for me to separate predictions about how good Balthazar Getty's going to be in Lost Highway from my impressions of him as a human being around the set, which latter impressions were so uniformly negative that it's probably better not to say too much about it. For just one thing, he'd annoy hell out of everybody between takes by running around trying to borrow everybody's cellular phone for an "emergency." I'll confess that I eavesdropped on some of his emergency cellular phone conversations, and in one of them he said to somebody "But what did she say about me?" three times in a row. For another thing, he was a heavy smoker but never had his own cigarettes and was always bumming cigarettes from crewpeople who you could tell were making about 1% of what he was making on this movie. I admit that none of these were exactly capital offenses, but they added up. Getty also suffered from comparison with his stand-in, who was apparently his friend and who always stood right near him, wearing an identical auto-shop jumpsuit with "Pete" sewn in cursive on the breast and an identically gruesome ersatz carbuncle on his forehead, and who was laid back and cool and very funny -- e.g. when I expressed surprise that so much time on a movie set was standing around waiting with nothing to do, Balthazar Getty's stand-in was the one who said "We actually work for free; it's the waiting around we get paid for," which maybe you had to be there but in the context of the mind-shattering boredom of standing around the set all day seemed incredibly funny.

OK, fuck it: the single most annoying thing about Balthazar Getty was that whenever David Lynch was around Getty would be very unctuous and over-respectful and asskissy, but when Lynch wasn't around Getty would make fun of him and do an unkind imitation of his distinctive speaking voice...that wasn't a very good imitation but was clearly intended to be disrespectful and mean.)

189: Okay, now this is weird. Section 15 of the essay is entitled "Addendum to (14) re Lynch and race," and it begins, "Except now for Richard Pryor [who has a role in Lost Highway, has there ever been even like one black person in a David Lynch movie?" A footnote adds, "And Richard Pryor's in the movie as Richard-Pryor-the-celebrity-who's-now-neurologically-damaged, not as a black person." Another footnote says, "(There were also, come to think of it, those two black hardware store employees (both named Ed) in Blue Velvet, but, again, their blackness was incidental to the comic-symbolic value of one Ed's blindness and the other Ed's dependence on the blind Ed's perfect memory for hardware-prices. I'm talking about characters who are, like, centrally minorityish in Lynch's movies.)"

What DFW seems to be saying is that Black characters in movies can't just be characters; they have to be characters that experience an act of racism during the movie, or fight for civil rights, or begin to ironically call themselves Nigga Number One, or something. You can't just have a Black hardware store employee? The actor, or character, somehow must symbolize her/his race? Is this really what DFW is saying? It's hard to justify, and furthermore, I'm not sure he believes it himself. I'm pretty fucking steeped in DFW prose at this point, and he seems just a bit more gimmicky and less self-assured than usual when he addresses this topic, although that may just be the white person's typical uneasiness when discussing race at all. Or it could just be me.

197: "Trivia tidbit: It is very hard for a hot director to avoid what Hollywood mental-health specialists term "Tarantino's Disorder," which involves the sustained delusion that being a good movie director entails that you will also be a good movie actor." Hee.

Also regarding page 197: Okay, you know what? You know what? I don't know who Jerry Lewis is. I have very little idea who he is, anyway. I think he's some sort of actor or comedian or both. You know what I DO know about him? That French people love him. I hear this ALL THE TIME. I'm sick to death of hearing this. Even DFW falls into the trite old trap of mentioning this in a footnote on this page.

Okay, and I had four other page-corners folded up, but upon rereading them I have no idea what the fuck I wanted to say about them.

"Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff About Choice, Freedom, Limitation, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness"
This one is much like the last in that it concerns a topic about which I know very little, but it totally drew me in. I was expecting this, though. After finishing the David Lynch chapter, I was like, "Okay, now even if the next essay is about quantum physics or rose gardening or professional wrestlers, I'm still going to love it," and I was right. DFW picked a tennis player that's world-class but not a famous superstar, and followed him through the Canadian Open.

What I liked most about this essay was how DFW made tennis seem beautiful, the way an old friend of mine taught me to look at pool. Tennis is played overtly in three dimensions; pool, most think, only happens in two, although that's actually not true -- follow and draw (top and bottom spin on the ball) make it 3-D even if you don't count jump shots -- but I loved DFW's description of the combination of variables that's necessary to make even a single shot: "Given a net that's three feet high (at the center) and two players in (unrealistically) a fixed position, the efficacy of one single shot is determined by its angle, depth, pace, and spin. And each of these determinants is influenced by still other variables -- for example, a shot's depth is determined by the height at which the ball passes over the net combined with some integrated function of pace and spin, with the ball's height over the net itself determined by the player's body position, grip on the racquet, degree of backswing, angle of racket face, and the 3-D coordinates through which the racquet face moves during that interval in which the ball is actually on the strings."

I won't bore you with a similar description of the elements that influence a pool shot, but I will say that the emotional factors DFW describes as being so critical to competitive tennis (both in this essay and in "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley") are just as relevant in pool. We poolplayers talk about "heart," or the ability to play well even with thousands of dollars/the world championship/whatever on the line, and DFW covers that too.

Another point DFW made was the enormous gap between players that are just very, very good and players that are great. He writes, "Pros simply do not make unforced errors -- or at any rate they make them so rarely that there's no way they're going to make the four unforced errors in seven points necessary for me to win a game. For another thing, they will take any shot that doesn't have simply ferocious depth and pace on it and -- given even a fractional moment to line up a shot -- hit a winner off it." I can totally relate to this. I am, of course, not a great pool player, and I'm nowhere close to being even a very, very good one, but I have played in tournaments against people that are many, many levels above me and I know how this feels. I can't miss, because my opponent will run out (make all her/his balls and win). I can't make even one error, because my opponent will always, every time, turn it into a win. My opponent, on the other hand, will never make an error that I could turn into a win, and even if s/he could, I couldn't turn it into a definite win because I'm not always, or even often, good enough to do that. It's both humbling and awe-inspiring to play a professional pool player.

The final interesting thing about this article was about how professional athletes have an extremely narrow focus, one that's probably been lifelong, and the public hates this. DFW notes that profiles of famous athletes "strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life -- outside interests and activities, charities, values beyond the sport." We can't accept someone as fully human unless they do something, anything, besides tennis/gymnastics/math. Yet the players that are the very best in the world have lived and breathed their sports since they were toddlers. Pinpoint focus is necessary to make them become what they are. Is this wrong? I guess it isn't, although up until I read this article I would have cheered for well-roundedness, I think. But now I agree with DFW that "the radical compression of [Michael Joyce's] attention and self has allowed him to become a transcendent practitioner of an art - something few of us get to be. It's allowed him to visit and test parts of his psyche that most of us do not even know we have, to manifest in concrete form virtues like courage, persistence in the face of pain or exhaustion, performance under willing scrutiny and pressure."

"A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"
This was the last one (relieved, are you?) and the longest, and probably the funniest, or at least tied with the one about the Illinois State Fair. The two essays are very similar - basically, DFW goes out of his element to visit a segment of American culture he normally wouldn't partake of, and he makes cutting but not mean observations while also offering a sociological position on the culture in question so we don't think we're just reading an especially witty diary. This, then, is David Foster Wallace on a Caribbean cruise.

The funniest parts are when he describes his fear of being sucked into the vacuum toilet attached to his cabin, and when he talks about his dinner-table companions (they stay the same for the duration of the cruise). He hates Mona, a spoiled 18-year-old that hates everything, including the grandparents that are paying her way, but (platonically) loves Alice, a college-aged girl that's sort of obsessed with her boyfriend, but in a way that makes DFW think she's just trying to let him know she's not available. Her mother, however, dislikes the boyfriend and attempts to hook up Alice and DFW, which creates all sorts of intra-table discomfort.

Most of the cruisegoers, though, are old people with pastel shirts and deluxe Cameras, and while I am now too tired to describe their exploits, I am sufficiently awake to advise you to read this essay posthaste to find out more. (July 8-14, 2004)

Why Mimi's is the best.bar.ever:

1. They have a brand-new pool table. The felt is pristine, the balls are unchipped, they provide hand chalk as well as cue chalk, and it's only fifty cents a game. The only improvements I would make are (1) hanging up a dry-erase board to keep track of who's waiting to play next, to avoid the row of anonymous quarters, and (2) moving the high-top tables away from the window side of the table so you don't have to ask people to move before you shoot.

2. They have pool players. I hung out with a couple of guys that play on a league team there and are even going to start up a weekly tournament. One of the boys I met last night brought his own cue, even, so I wasn't the only one.

3. There's plenty of street parking available, so you don't have to drive around for half an hour like you do in the Quarter, looking for a semi-legal space.

4. They have a hottie bartender that plays ESG on the stereo. ESG, for Christ's sake. I told her a long story about how I got into them via Elastica, and how I still have the case to South Bronx Story but the disc itself has mysteriously vanished, and she listened patiently and then gave me a free double Captain and Diet Coke...a $7 drink.

5. They allow dogs -- even Susie -- and, indeed, they provide a water bowl.

6. The bathroom walls feature the following items of graffiti: "Elvis died in a place not unlike this one," and "I like Soft Carrots in my butt." (July 22, 2004)

Tells the story of Alice, an eleven-year-old girl being raised by her sixteen-year-old half sister in 1976 New York. The sister has an obsession with a minor celebrity, so she takes off for L.A. to meet him and packs Alice off to art camp in North Carolina. Alice is an, um, early bloomer, and she can easily pass for sixteen, and she gets all mixed up with boys way too old for her. I thought being sixteen was difficult enough when I was sixteen, but imagine how confusing it must be for an eleven-year-old. Dierbeck does an excellent job of making Alice's world seem like that of her Lewis Carroll counterpart, drawing the parallel beautifully without ever pointing it out. Makes me want to reread Dreamhouse, Alison Habens, 1997; it features another Alice analog, this one a bride-to-be that hosts a dinner party for her family and fiancé but ends up stumbling into a costume party, accidentally dosing on acid and changing her life. (April 29 - May 1, 2004)

This one is a longtime favorite. It's the story of an Englishman named John. He's a Francophile and a professor of French history, and while on holiday in France, he runs into his double -- a Frenchman named Jean. Jean is somewhat of an opportunist, and since he's been having family and business problems, he drugs John and runs off with his wallet, car, clothes and all the possessions John has with him. This leaves John to assume Jean's identity and try to make sense of Jean's life. It's hard for me to recall another book in which I felt so deeply for the characters; when the real Jean comes back to reclaim his family and undo all the good John has done for them in his place, I wanted to scream, No! No! Go away and let them be! But I didn't. (May 2-3, 2004)

I love, love, love this book. It's about three adult siblings and their parents. The older generation, Enid and Albert, live together in the Midwestern town in which they raised their family. Enid is the most one-dimensional and the least sympathetic of the five leads; she's far more concerned with how she looks to her friends than with the realities of her families' lives. She's obsessed with Christmas decorations and she wants nothing more than to see all of her kids married and conventionally successful. She resents that her husband, Alfred, in the early stages of Parkinson's, won't be more aggressive with his investments. Alfred, for his part, wishes everyone would just leave him alone to wet his pants and take his baths and sit in his favorite old chair.

The kids are all spectacular failures, from their mother's point of view; she doesn't necessarily know the "problems" each child has, but she'd loathe it if she did. Denise, chef at a supertrendy Philadelphia restaurant, has just been fired for sleeping with her boss's wife; Chip too has been fired for sexual indiscretions, these involving a student in his Cultural Studies class, and plus he's an alcoholic; Gary has a drinking problem, an unhappy marriage, and two sons that hate him. Denise and Chip are slightly closer and more likely to confide in one another, but Gary's pretty much on his own.

The complicated lives of the five characters are interesting enough to make the book hard to put down throughout most of its 568 pages, although the Lithuania section (Chip accepts a job swindling American investors via the Web, but must go to Eastern Europe to do so, where the laws are not so strict) is a bit tedious and the part in which Enid and Alfred take a Canadian cruise feels a little false. Still, I laughed out loud throughout the book and cared about every character. Well, except not Enid so much. (May 4-8, 2004)

Brilliant. It tells the story of what might have actually taken place when the Pied Piper led one hundred thirty children out of the town of Hamelin, Germany, in 1284. That apparently really happened...it wasn't just a fairy tale. The author is a scholar of German history, and while she doesn't claim her book tells what really happened, she does suggest that it's historically possible. It involves the eating of rye grains containing a strain of mold that causes hallucinogens and lower body pain that is relieved by dancing and other leg exercises, and a flutist that brings music to a town that knew none before. It's excellent. Has a similar feel to Tale of Despereaux, this year's Newbery winner, if anyone's looking for read-alikes. (May 10, 2004)

This was one of the first young adult "problem novels," the subgenre that deals with personal and social problems kids face, everything from acne to divorce to alcoholism. Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones is about July, a sixteen-year-old that finds herself pregnant by Bo Jo, whom she dates frequently but who's not her steady boyfriend. The two decide their only option is to get married, and they run away and do so, much to the chagrin of both sets of parents. It's a classic and a good one, although my library had it shelved in adult fiction, even though it's clearly YA (I changed it when I checked it back in). I guess that when we bought the book, back when it was new, teen sex wasn't supposed to be discussed in YA novels; now, of course, no YA novel would be complete without a blow job and a crack pipe.

Humorously, there isn't even any sex in the book. The baby is conceived during an incident on the beach that's described in only one sentence and as something like "the time [the narrator] got carried away." Seriously. Good read, though. (May 9-10, 2004)

I feel incredibly stupid when confronted with art, like in a museum or something; I'm notoriously unobservant and unable to process visual information (other than text) very well, and I was looking for something that would give me an idea of what I'm supposed to be looking for in a painting, what makes a great painting great, etc. just when I was looking through an issue of (I think) School Library Journal that reviewed art books for kids. So I snagged this one.

It's easy enough for me to understand, yet complicated enough that I find it interesting. All the paintings pictured and described are in the National Gallery in London, which narrows the scope enough that the book isn't fifty thousand pages long. Each painting discussed has a section called "What's going on?" which describes the action in the painting, and one called "Making the painting" that tells about the techniques used. There's a large full-color picture of each work, with some closeups that provide detail, which is also described. Additional sections for each painting tell about unusual features of design, craftmanship, or social context. I highly recommend this to anyone age ten and up that wants an introduction to a few of the world's great paintings. (May 11, 2004)

Everyone told me I should read this one, and I resisted because while I loved his Stardust, I only liked Coraline okay, and I couldn't get into Neverwhere at all. But everyone's like, "Oh, read American Gods. Read Good Omens." But I refused until one day I was babysitting and when the parents got home, the dad caught a glimpse of my Gaiman bookmark (in an unrelated book) and insisted that I take his copy of American Gods. He would not take no for an answer. So I took it home, opened it up, and fell in love. It's incredible.

It reminds me the most of the Stephen King/Peter Straub collaboration The Talisman, but it's also got shades of Daphne du Maurier's The Scapegoat (Salim's encounter in New York); every other Stephen King book ever (the reliance on
dreams to introduce you to the demons, and the song/poem quotes that begin every chapter, and the grizzled old small-town storytellers); Douglas Adams's Mostly Harmless (the multidimensional gods); and even Donna Tartt's The Secret History and John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany (the descriptions of the funeral at Ibis and Jacquel's have echoes in both books, and besides Mr. Wednesday's interactions with various waitstaff remind me somehow of Tartt's character Henry). Gorgeous read. I might even put Good Omens on my list. (May 13-17, 2004)

Totally sucked. I read a review and apparently liked the idea enough to request a copy; I wish I knew which review so I could go back and reread it and figure out what made me want to read this book. It's about a seventeen-year-old girl that drives into a small town. She's pregnant and boyfriendless, so Lynda, the middle-aged woman that owns the local coffeeshop, takes her in; Lynda has man troubles of her own, of course, so they commiserate, and Noreen-the-knocked-up-teen starts working at the diner, and a bunch of other kindly old Southern ladies start poking their noses in, and you know by about page ten that by the end Lynda's going to get
together with the sad middle-aged man with A History (he's a recovering alcoholic and his brother died twenty years ago), and that Noreen's going to get back together with her baby daddy, and they both Relearn How to Love. Yuck.

Totally a romance, too, so I wish it'd been billed as such. The definition of romance, according to my Adult Popular Fiction class, is a book whose happy ending relies on the two main characters hooking up. This book clearly could not go any other way.

Weirder still is that it won a bunch of awards -- the CLA Young Adult Canadian Book Award (2003), the Governor General's Children's Book Award (2002), ALA Best Books 2004...I just don't get it. It's not very interesting, the ending is obvious, the characters are stereotypes, and the only message is "Love is sometimes hard." (May 11-12, 2004)

The premise is enchanting: a man has the ability to "read people out" of books, like the characters literally come to life...but something from our world disappears into the story in exchange. When his daughter Meggie, the protagonist of Inkheart, was only three, he read some villains out of their story and accidentally read his wife into the book. Now Meggie is twelve and the villains want to be read back in, so there are kidnap plots afoot, and Meggie wants to know what happened to her mother.

This has the potential for excellence, but it turns out to be mediocre. For one thing, the book is much too long. Much too long. It's 534 pages and a lot of it is filler. I think the story could be told in about one-third of the length and it's really crippling. I love long books but only when they're packed with action and/or character development, but nothing really seems to be happening to the characters in any sense. None of them are fully developed, and they're all Pure Good, so there's no room for improvement, which ruins the whole thing. (May 17-22, 2004)

Funniest.shit.ever. While I was lying on my bed reading it, I kept laughing out loud and making the dog jump on my face. It (the book, I mean) is hilarious. Biff's gospel is about the lost years of Jesus's life - his childhood and young adulthood - as told by Biff, an old buddy of his. Biff has been commissioned to write it by an angel that brought him back to life in 2000ish.

It's hilarious and heartbreaking, emphasis on the former: Biff reveals himself as the inventor of sarcasm as well as coffee with milk and sugar, and he tries to convince Joshua (Jesus) of the existence of gravity ("stickiness") and natural selection. Joshua and Biff spend the "missing years" (Jesus's birth to age 30) in India, China, and what is now Afghanistan, seeking wisdom from leaders of other religions, since Joshua knows he's the Messiah but doesn't know what he's supposed to do with that.

The funniest passages include the writing of the Beatitudes ("Okay, the meek inherit the earth, and mourners shall be comforted...what do the dumbfucks get?") and explain why rabbits are associated with Easter (Joshua thought it was a good idea when he was drunk). Mary of Magdalena (Maggie) isn't a prostitute; this is one way in which Lamb agrees with the Bible and not with pop-culture descriptions of the New Testament. She does become one of Jesus's followers, leaving her husband to do so, and the author theorizes that this may have led to her portrayal as a whore.

Only the last forty pages of the book are devoted to the Passion, Jesus's trial, death and resurrection, and they almost made me cry. I'm not religious, as anyone that knows me can tell you; I'm an avowed agnostic, if there is such a thing. But seeing the whole Jesus show get out of control and snowball into state-sponsored murder is scarily real. The end may surprise you; neither Jesus nor Judas dies the way we think they do.

Read this book now or I'll punch you in the face. (May 22-23, 2004)

Someone-I-can't-remember said this was supposed to be a lot like The Secret History, my favorite book in high school. It tells the story of two Princeton seniors that try to unravel the mysteries of a fifteenth-century Latin book. That does sound like Donna Tartt crossed with Dan Brown, doesn't it? And the authors' bio reads: "Ian Caldwell was Phi Beta Kappa in history at Princeton University. He lives in Newport News, Virginia. Dustin Thomason won the Hoopes Prize at Harvard University. He lives in New York City. They began writing The Rule of Four after graduating in 1998. The two have been best friends since they were eight years old."

Awwww. I love projects created by best friends, especially when they make themselves into characters that are also best friends. Um...Good Will Hunting. I can't think of any others actually.

Anyway, The Rule of Four is about eighty times better than The Da Vinci Code. Just a few short months ago, I declared TDVC to be one of my favorite books of 2003; since then I have pondered why I liked it so much then but consider it not even memorable now, but haven't come up with anything. Until today. The Rule of Four has made me realize that I liked The Da Vinci Code so much because of its lush subject matter -- the history of Catholicism, codebreaking, ancient books -- even though the format was standard thriller with chapter-ending cliffhangers, and even though I could break most of the codes myself, so how could they be challenging for the master cryptographers in the book?, and even though the romantic element was both obvious and gratuitous. But now, in The Rule of Four, what I've got is even better -- the same codebreaking and ancient books (I'm not sure what the Catholic tie-in is going to be yet, but the book takes place over Easter weekend, 1999), plus it happens on a college campus (Princeton, with true-to-life details like the use of the real names of their eating clubs). There are four close-knit roommates, just like in The Lords of Discipline, another of my all-time favorite books. The Secret History parallels abound as well --small group of erudite students, esoteric subject matter, professor/student intrigue, murder, elitism, worship of the old masters, etc. (May 30-31, 2004)

I love Becky, and that, to some degree, is because I love Pattern Recognition, which I'd never have read if it weren't for her. She has something like a 96% success rate when it comes to recommending books to me, and Pattern Recognition is one of the best. It's about a woman named Cayce whose job is to hang out in Camden and Manhattan and wherever, looking to see what's cool in the street-fashion world so she can report back to companies that will then turn her observations into consumable units of cool. But on her own time, she's fascinated by a mysterious movie that's been released only in small, random segments, spread out over time, and hidden in remote corners of the Internet. Then she's hired to track down the nameless creator of the film, and there's also this thing where her father disappeared on 9/11, and yeah. Read it. (May 4-6, 2004)

I read her Running Out of Time on Becky's recommendation, so I picked this one up when I saw it at the library, and it's wonderful. It begins a couple of months after (Cinder)Ella agrees to marry the prince, and now they're engaged and she lives in the royal castle and receives lessons on etiquette, protocol, geneaology, etc. Also, everyone in the castle seems to believe that the fairy godmother/coach-into-pumpkin tale is true, but really Ella got to the ball all on her own without the help of any magic. Excellent. (April 9-10, 2004)

Two twelve-year-old girls, Natalie and Zoe, conspire to get Natalie's novel published by her mother's firm without anyone knowing the identity of the author. Zoe poses as Natalie's agent and later helps her with publicity. One of my favorite elements of the book didn't have anything to do with the plot; it was the New York City setting that appealed to me. Most books about twelve-year-old girls are set in Sleepyside, New York, or Stoneybrook, Connecticut, or Farbrook, New Jersey. I always wondered when I was younger why there weren't more books set in cities and in Catholic schools; I had no idea what it was like to ride a bus to school, or what a "middle school" was, or how it was that all these kids went to schools that were all white except a token Black kid. (April 8, 2004)

This one describes a plague that kills everyone over twelve, so the kids have to get together and rebuild society. There are Evil Kids, of course, that form gangs to rob the Good Kids of their food, but the conflicts within the Good Kids' realm are especially interesting. However, I'm going to have to give this one two thumbs down. It turns into a muddled, confusing story about an egocentric child that rules all the other kids by being a bitch. She's meant to be contrasted with the gangs of bullies that threaten to take over the town (Glen Ellyn, Illinois, incidentally), but her own right to power is just as arbitrary. The book doesn't have any point and the writing is sloppy; at one point, Lisa "lays down on the bed" or something like that. (April 11-12, 2004)

This one's a Becky recommendation and is as good as hers usually are. Another YA science fiction novel, it's set fifty or so years in the future, at a time when everyone's brain has a "feed" of constantly streaming commercials, chat capability, etc. If your feed goes down, you feel isolated from the world. There's a lot of futuristic faux-teen jargon, which the author apparently spent hours in malls and chat rooms researching. I think he did a decent job, too; it's fairly realistic and while I was annoyed at first, I'm used to it now. (April 12-13, 2004)

Opening paragraph:

"This is how they looked: three dead girls propped up in three straight chairs. The fourteen-year-old sat in the middle. She was taller than the others by half a head. The two thirteen-year-olds sat on either side of her. Across the chest of each girl was an X of rope leading over her shoulders, down around her waist, and fastened in the back. All three girls were barefoot and their ankles were tied to the legs of their chairs. Even so, the ropes were loose, as if to hold their bodies erect rather than to keep their living selves prisoner: meaning they had been tied after they were dead."

Are Dobyns's others any good? This one's the closest thing to The Secret History that I've ever read -- it's still remarkably different since that book is special as hell, but this one has the erudite student group led by a strange little foreign man; the mysterious death; the one kid that doesn't quite fit in with the group; the small-town politics and closeted gays; etc.

I didn't guess the murderer, although it really doesn't matter who it is. The book was a pleasure to read because of the depiction of small-town life and politics and the interactions between the characters, and trying to decipher what the narrator's up to, not who actually killed the girls. (April 13-17, 2004)

I only picked it up because I liked his The Blackboard Jungle so much a couple of weeks ago, and the back cover of that one said this was about a heroin addict, so I put a hold on it. By the time I got around to reading it, though, I had doubts; I wasn't fresh from reading The Blackboard Jungle so I'd forgotten what I liked about that one so much: the author's voice, for one thing, and something about books written in the fifties that I've been liking lately.

Anyway, Second Ending turned out to be excellent. It's almost as good as The Church of Dead Girls in its own way. It starts a little slow -- it's 1949 and a college student, Bud, sits in his room studying when the phone rings. It's his friend Carol, wanting him to babysit their friend Andy while he kicks heroin. Bud reluctantly agrees; he's seen Andy kick too many times before and they just don't know each other that well any more, and Bud is studying for finals. Andy gets there and is loud and annoying and sick while Ben's trying to read, and then Andy escapes into the city to buy drugs, and it's pretty good but not great, and then the second section is what happened five years ago when Bud and Andy played in a jazz band together as high school students, and their first girlfriends, and....it's really good and you should go get it now. (April 17-19, 2004)

I love Tyler, but this one covered some old ground; the wife is described on the jacket flap as "impulsive, impractical, tumbles hit-or-miss through life," while the husband is "plodding, cautious, judgmental, proceeds deliberately." Sounds a hell of a lot like her Breathing Lessons (1988), which I read last month. Still, she does a ridiculously good job with these things -- a hell of a job. Also on the jacket flap is a blurb by Tom Shone of the New Yorker that says, "Her feel for character is so keen that even hardened metafictionalists -- readers who subsist on a diet of Robbe-Grillet and who would happily fry the whole notion of 'character' for breakfast -- are reduced to the role of helpless gossips, swapping avid hunches about the possible fates of the characters." Yeah, what he said. (May 25-26, 2004)

Pretty good overall...I love dogs, of course, so reading about cute canine heroes was rewarding, and I also love the whole man-struggles-against-nature theme. But the writing was a little weak. The authors are two first cousins and I think this was their first effort, and it sounds like they're more accustomed to writing academic papers or newspaper articles than telling a good yarn. The book should have been full of suspense, but it wasn't; in fact, it read a bit like they wrote it too dry at first and their editor suggested adding some suspense so they went back in and threw in sentences like, "And the next leg of the journey promised to be the most
dangerous yet," but it doesn't quite work.

I would also have liked to have been a bit more privy to the research process...the serum run in question took place in 1925, so the authors relied heavily on newspaper accounts, but (for example) one of the sled-dog drivers is named only as Jackscrew. No idea what his real name was. The authors just sort of let that slide. Why not tell me what you did to try to uncover who he really was? (April 21-24, 2004)

Why this book sucked:

It's a fucking picture book and the illustrator doesn't even get cover credit. This is unheard of, and also ridiculous since the art is excellent and almost, but not quite, redeeming.

The book is about four little girls - one white and blonde with glasses, one white and brunette, one white redhead and one Black girl. They're all jealous of a fifth girl, who is blonde without glasses and "skin like milk and honey." Could she not have selected an unconventional beauty? Even...a brunette?

The sentence "It all sounds so perfectly fun and nice."

The forced whimsy. Madonna says to the reader, "If you say [you have never been jealous], you are telling a big, fat fib and I am going to tell your mother." She continues addressing her audience in this manner throughout the book. I'm sure she thinks it's charming, but it's actually patronizing and detracts from the story, especially since there's no frame in which a narrator is established.

It's never explained why the girls are referred to as English Roses.

The moral is apparently, "Pretty girls have hard lives too." This is, of course, the message of a million fairy tales, so it's especially stupid that Madonna says she wrote the book "because there are no good children's books out there." Fuck that noise. (March 2, 2004)

Man, what a crappy book. Zoe, the narrator, is married but has three lovers (two men, with whom she's madly in lust, and a woman, whom she claims she only fucked because the chick begged her) because her husband doesn't satisfy her sexually. So she finds out that she likes sex a lot (she'd lost her virginity to her future husband, then married him when she got pregnant, so she'd only ever been with him) and seeks therapy. Her shrink tells her she's a sex addict. Later we find out this is because she was molested when she was younger by some boys in her class. There are also two murderers running around; one of them is sleeping with Zoe and one is sleeping with her best friend. It's all very convoluted and shallow and relies on pop psychology for its premises. Still, it was entertaining. I finished it, anyway. Oh, and Zoe has no umlaut, so I'm not sure how it's pronounced. (March 6-7, 2004)

Last spring I was on a true-stories-of-motherhood kick, beginning with Anne Lamott's Operating Instructions, her book about the first year of raising her son. Lamott has written several novels that I've never read, and she also wrote a guide to writing called Bird by Bird that I read while pretending that I was going to participate in what Jeff insists on calling NanuNanu. Lamott is an ex-cokehead and alcoholic and now she's found religion, which would normally irritate me but she doesn't make too big a deal out of it.

Next I read Shirley Jackson's Life Among the Savages 1948. Jackson, of course, is famous for her short story "The Lottery" and her novel The Haunting of Hill House, but my favorite of her books is We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I saw the play when I was a college student and then immediately checked the book out of the library, and later I had to buy it. It's about a family that lives on the edge of a small town and most of the family members have mysteriously died. Two sisters live in the family house now with an invalid uncle, and the younger one goes to town every week for library books and groceries; her older sister, who's suspected of poisoning the rest of the family, won't leave the house because of her reputation. It's splendid. Here's the opening paragraph:

"My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be contented with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead."

Seems like I've read another Shirley Jackson book, too...I wish I could remember the name of it. It was similar to We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Oh, and I read her The Bird's Nest back when I was on my multiple personality disorder kick. Anyway, Life Among the Savages is a memoir of raising small children. It's much sunnier and funnier than Jackson's spooky novels; in fact, it reads like a cross between Erma Bombeck and Cheaper by the Dozen. (March 14, April 6-8, and April 20, 2004)

This one was okay at best. I'd rather read a detective story with a female cop or PI like Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski or Julie Smith's Skip Langdon, and I like the old-fashioned hardboiled detective like Ridley Pearson's Lou Boldt, but Alex Rasmussen of Goofy Foot was just sort of dorky. He has all the traditional PI attributes; he's an ex-cop and a divorcee, a loner and a whiskey-drinker, and he drives an old beat-up car and doesn't understand kids these days and their crazy fictional bands like Satan Bugg. That was what irritated me the most - the character had all these interactions with teenagers and he tried to relate to them and everything, and it would have been cute if the detective got the teen slang wrong, but instead the teens (i.e. the author) got it wrong. They referred to a new nightclub as "a chill," when the author probably meant "chill" as an adjective, for example. And hackeysack was spelled "Haki Sack." And shit like that. (March 16-17, 2004)

This was one of those books in which I became so absorbed, even early on, that I didn't notice anything going on around me and then when something external happened, like the dog jumped on me, I would realize with a sad smile that this is a book that works like a drug. It's told from two different points of view and both are equally mesmerizing. There's Anna, a fifty-three-year-old widow who's estranged from her daughter Poppy. Poppy left home as a teenager to get married and Anna hasn't seen her since; she could forgive this, except that when Poppy's father was dying of cancer, Anna called her and wrote her letters and Poppy said she would come but never showed up. Anna speaks now of how sad it was to see her husband's eyes light up whenever the phone or doorbell rang, but it was never his daughter, and now he's dead. So now, years later, Poppy has left Anna several messages saying she wants to come visit. Anna considers Poppy's actions unforgivable, but agrees to let her come only because the last time she called, Anna had a friend over and didn't want to begin arguing with Poppy in front of her.

The second story, told in alternating chapters, is about a couple in their late thirties, Jack and Stuart. Stuart has been depressed lately, and Jack has been cheating, lately -- with a very young and gorgeous hooker named Hector. I'm pretty sure that soon Jack, or maybe Stuart, is going to turn up HIV positive, and I guess that will be the connection to Anna and her story, because Anna has reluctantly begun leading a support group for people with AIDS.

It's just one of those books where I loved all the characters and couldn't stop reading. Go get it now. (March 18-19, 2004)

Those of you that knew me in high school and college will remember the difficulty I used to have in speaking when I was nervous, especially words that started with a vowel sound. My throat would close up and it would be impossible for me to spit the word out.

In college, I was a customer service rep and relief receptionist for a publisher called Everyday Learning Corporation, and each time I answered the phone my throat muscles would seize up and I wouldn't be able to speak. Eventually I worked out that I could say, "This is Everyday Learning," blending "is" and "everyday" together, and I answered the phone that way for the duration of my ELC career.

In high school, Katharine and I took ballet classes at the Fine Arts Building in downtown Chicago. This historic building featured a real live elevator operator, and our class was on the eighth floor; Kath was the shy one, so I was supposed to request floor eight each time we got on board, and that too was difficult.

The strange thing is that I don't really have a stutter any more. Sometimes if I'm very excited or nervous, or hurrying because I'm talking to someone that I fear will interrupt me, I might trip over a word, but in general it seems to have worked itself out without any sort of professional. Weird.

I like this book, though, because it describes some of the same struggles I went through with planning out what I would say in advance so I wouldn't have any tough vowel-starting words, etc. Pretty cool. (March 20-21, 2004)

Went to see Liz Phair! It was awesome. I fell in love with Rachael Yamagata, the first opening act, and even squandered $8 of my beer money on her EP. I arrived in the middle of her set and she was growling like a ferocious monster on that song; then she started murmuring the second and crooning the third and I wanted to go home with her, but instead I got her to sign my new CD.

Wheat played next and I was sure I would hate them, because they're called Wheat and it seems a bit anti-Daisy, doesn't it? I liked them pretty well, though. It was like Beck with a bunch of androgynous spastic indie boys backing him up. I won't seek them out, probably, but I enjoyed listening to them during Liz Phair Prep (buying drinks, peeing, etc.)

Liz's set:

1. Flower
2. Rock Me
3. 6'1"
4. Favorite
5. Help Me Mary
6. Uncle Alvarez
7. Bionic Eyes
8. Polyester Bride
9. Chopsticks
10. Divorce Song
11. Extraordinary
12. Love/Hate
13. Stratford-on-Guy
14. Why Can't I?
15. Supernova
16. Fuck and Run
17. H.W.C.

At least, I think there were only 17 songs. I left during H.W.C., the second encore, because of my special loathing for it; I don't know whether she played anything else after that.

So that's six songs from Exile in Guyville and seven from her latest, and two each from the pair in-between. That was the right mix, achieving both what she wanted to do (promote her new album) and knew she'd have to do (play up to her older fans like me). She played the very best of her new album, as far as I'm concerned, except for "Little Digger" -- I'd have liked to hear her do that one live. But she wanted to keep the mood light, I guess -- all of her songs were the fun ones, except "Chopsticks," which she camped up by slithering behind a magically-appearing keyboard amid flashing pink and blue lights.

She was a bit of a diva - she was catered to a bit onstage, and she shook her hair back a lot and laughed and smiled right into boy fan eyes. And her voice is higher and sweeter than it sounds on the album - sort of like Joey Lauren Adams or someone else I'm forgetting this very second. She reminds me of Elizabeth Wurtzel. I wonder whether they've ever met.

I guess my ideal seventeen-song set list would include "Little Digger," "Strangeloop," "Johnny Feelgood," "Turning Japanese," "Girls' Room" and "Go On Ahead," which Liz left off, but I would also have picked many of the same ones she chose: "Stratford-on-Guy," "Divorce Song," "Uncle Alvarez," "Supernova" and "Help Me Mary" would all be on my list too.

This was my first time seeing her live, making her the musician I've liked the longest that I've never seen. Not counting ones where some of the founding members are already dead. Ooh, except Shampoo. (March 22, 2004)

Y'all should read this one. It's the life of a physicist named Shevek that lives on the planet Anarres, a moon of the planet Urras. 170 years ago, a bunch of anarchosocialists left Urras (a very Earthlike planet) and started their own colony on the previously uninhabited moon. Shevek is an accomplished scientist and has no peers on Urras, but his papers have been published there, so scholars of physics are familiar with his work and invite him to visit. He does, and the book alternates stories of his trip to Urras with chapters about his early life up to the point where he embarks upon his journey. LeGuin talks about what it's like to set up an anarchic society; the small dependencies Anarres has upon Urras; the unpopularity of Shevek's decision to visit Urras; the class and gender divisions that exist on Urras but not Anarres; the effect of Shevek's visit on the leftist communities on Urras; and much more.

Best quotes: "There were no rules of parliamentary procedure at meetings in PDC. Interruptions were sometimes more frequent than statements. The process, compared to a well-managed executive conference, was a slab of raw beef compared to a wiring diagram. Raw beef, however, functions better than a wiring diagram would, in its place -- inside a living animal."

and

"It was more than possible -- probable -- that he was burnt out, finished...He was perfectly aware that he had had the same low moods and intimations of failure in the periods just before his moments of greatest creativity. He found himself trying to encourage himself with that fact, and was furious at his own naïveté. To interpret temporal order as causal order was a pretty stupid thing for a chronosophist to do." (March 21-24, 2004)

Loved this one. Okay, I'm an ex-linguistics major with a chip on my shoulder: Everyone thinks the Eskimos have 100-plus words for snow. Everyone is wrong. They don't. Nor, friends, do we use only ten percent of our brains, nor can you stop an acid trip by drinking a glass of milk; however, since I'm not a psychologist nor a medical doctor, I don't have to field these ludicrous statements.

In this book, Pinker writes:

No discussion of language and thought would be complete without the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. Contrary to popular belief, the Eskimos do not have more words for snow than do speakers of English. They do not have four hundred words for snow, as it has been claimed in print, or two hundred, or one hundred, or forty-eight.....Counting generously, experts can come up with about a dozen, but by such standards English would not be far behind, with snow, sleet, slush, blizzard, avalanche, hail, hardpack, powder, flurry, dusting, and a coinage of Boston's WBZ-TV meteorologist Bruce Schwoegler, snizzling.

Where did the myth come from? Not from anyone who has actually studied the Yupik and Inuit-Inupiaq families of polysynthetic languages spoken from Siberia to Greenland. The anthropologist Laura Martin has documented how the story grew like an urban legend, exaggerated with each retelling. In 1911 [anthropologist Franz] Boas casually mentioned that Eskimos used four unrelated word roots for snow. [Famous linguist Benjamin Lee] Whorf embellished the count to seven and implied that there were more. His article was widely reprinted, then cited in textbooks and popular books on language, which led to successively inflated estimates in other textbooks, articles, and newspaper columns of Amazing Facts.

The linguist Geoffrey Pullum...speculates about why the story got so out of control: "The alleged lexical extravagance of the Eskimos comports so well with the many other facets of their polysynthetic perversity: rubbing noses; lending their wives to strangers; eating raw seal blubber; throwing Grandma out to be eaten by polar bears."

Excerpted from Pinker, Steven, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1994.

Later, Pinker quotes linguist Geoffrey Pullum: "Among the many depressing things about [this bizarre urban legend] is that even if there were a large number of roots for different snow types in some Arctic language, this would not, objectively, be intellectually interesting; it would be a most mundane and unremarkable fact. Horsebreeders have various names for breeds, sizes, and ages of horses; botanists have names for leaf shapes; interior designers have names for shades of mauve; printers have many different names for fonts..., naturally enough."

The book does get a lot more technical in the middle. For perhaps the first time, my linguistics background is actually useful. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 roughly correspond to introductory courses in syntax, morphology and phonetics. Chapter 7 is mostly about artificial intelligence but touches on the formal study of pragmatics. And I think this is his most layperson-friendly book. I guess I won't start the others right away. (March 24-28, 2004)

The author has an interesting premise - that the Internet contributes to what Ann Powers would call bohemian culture because it allows people with no money or power (e.g. children) to be experts. He tells the stories of a fifteen-year-old that was busted by the SEC for promoting the stock of companies in which he'd invested; a fourteen-year-old that posed as a lawyer and correctly fielded thousands of questions at a popular ask-the-experts Web site; and a British teen that helped circulate Napster successor Gnutella. Then he goes off on a separate tangent involving TiVo and how, like Napster and Gnutella, it takes power away from advertisers and big corporations.

The material was interesting but the book didn't feel especially fleshed-out. I've read a few of Lewis's books now and they all seem to be about 250 pages and not especially well-researched. I liked the interviews with the kids and their parents, but Lewis doesn't cite any secondary sources and I think he could do with some of that. He's a good writer, but he needs to back it up, even if it means sacrificing some pop readers by adding another hundred pages to each volume. (March 28-30, 2004)

A clinical study of a man whose memory is almost literally infinite. He remembers everything. The book is only 160 pages and consists mostly of descriptions of how the man does this; he sees everything as images, so if he looks at a list of one hundred numbers, the list becomes imprinted on his brain and then he must only read the numbers back off his mental sheet. I guess that's a standard description of a photographic memory. This dude also has something called synesthesia, which means that his senses overlap - he sees colors but also feels and hears them; a certain tone on the piano makes him see blue and taste salt; etc. The problem is that all of this information is constantly overwhelming him. I guess today he'd be diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome or something. The book made me want to reread The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. (January 31 - February 1, 2004)

Amusing, especially the description of how Quidditch hasn't really caught on among American wizards because of a similar broomstick game called Quodpot, but I'm glad it wasn't any longer than it was because there's only so much detail about a fictional sport I'm willing to endure. (January 31, 2004)

Liz, Liz, Liz. Your first and third albums were so magnificent and your second was decent; why have you done this to me?

Track by track:

"Extraordinary" Not that bad. "I hear a single," I might say, if I were lame. Over-produced, if I'm allowed to say that without sounding like an indie-kid purist. Sounds like something from Whip-Smart.

"Red Light Fever" Decent lyrics and delivery; stupid vocal soaring. Suffers from the same flaws as "Extraordinary," but that puts it among the best on the album.

"Why Can't I" Very Belinda Carlisle. I thought at first that it doesn't attempt to transcend its eighties pop roots, but "We haven't fucked yet but my head's spinning" does so nicely.

"It's Sweet" Title is stupid. Sounds a little like Liz's voice, but there's too much going on with the synthesizers an' shit.

"Rock Me" I sort of like this one. I wouldn't have called it "Rock Me," because that's inane. The lyrics, though, are about Liz dating/fucking a much younger man, and I sort of think (or want to think) that it's a metaphor for the new fans she's apparently courting with this album - the teenyboppers. "You don't even know who Liz Phair is," she sings to her twentysomething boy-of-the-moment, and sounds all gleeful about it. That's funny if you think of it as her speaking to her new fans; it's obnoxious if you take the song on a more literal level. "You think I'm a genius, think I'm cool/I'm starting to think that young guys rule"...same principle. How awesome would it be if she's not actually talking about some dude, but justifying this mainstream record?

"Take a Look" Again, her voice sounds a bit like the old Liz. She's not talking about anything interesting, though. Trite, stupid breakup song.

"Little Digger" Superb, for this album. Classic Liz, all grown up. Lyrics are about what her son must think of her new boyfriends (she recently divorced his dad). Sounds like a natural progression from whitechocolatespaceegg.

"Firewalker" Exile in Guyville featured a Liz that sang throatily or muttered over spare instruments. For Whip-Smart she hired a band; that was a bad idea, but I still got the feeling she sang smart shit over the musicians' noise, and she'd learned something about creating melodies. whitechocolatespaceegg finally managed to combine the two - smarter lyrics that were still honest, not a lot of loud guitar and drums getting in her way. This song shows that she hasn't learned shit in her five years off. Tons of production and insipid lyrics; the delivery occasionally seems okay but then she'll take off on a diva-esque leap. Fuck you, Liz.

"Favorite" This song is about her favorite pair of underwear. She didn't leave the metaphor mysterious, either. This is why I liked Waiting for Guffman more than Best in Show.

"Love/Hate" A bit rollicking. The mood doesn't fit the trying-to-be-political lyrics, though.

"H.W.C." Starts off promising (minimalist but perky); becomes the worst song on the album by far. Tries to be old-fashioned frank Liz, but is just gross instead. A lyric like "Gimme your hot white cum" might have worked if she muttered it in cadence like she did in "Flower."

"My Bionic Eyes" Exile delivery, Whip-Smart rock and roll, and whitechocolatespaceegg grown-up lyrics. Perfect. This is what I hoped her fourth album would sound like. Appallingly honest; "I can't feel any more/But I can
fake it forever." Right.

"Friend of Mine" I guess this is the "Divorce Song" of the record, except this time she actually got divorced before she wrote it. It's pretty good. Not as poetic as "Divorce Song," but probably more honest.

"Good Love Never Dies" One of the album's crappiest. Soaring diva vocals again, and it's a pithy breakup song. And she does a bit of speaking in the middle, which makes her sound like an aged Valley Girl. Bad closer. (February 1, 2004)

Byars is one of the funniest, most real children's/YA authors out there; The Cybill War is her best, I think. I picked up The Computer Nut because it was about kids using Apple 2s in 1984 and I thought I'd get a kick out of it. And for most of the book, Byars demonstrated her usual ability to write kids' dialogue realistically and with grand humor, but she fucked up in two essential ways.

First, she shows absolutely no comprehension of communicating via a computer. Now I know it was 1984, but why address a topic if you don't have the faintest clue? She makes the assumption that all computers are somehow connected to one another, which of course is mostly true today, but in 1984 only a few people (out of the already tiny percentage of the population that owned a computer in the first place) had modems, and the general population didn't dial into a computer with an Internet connection even if they did have a modem; they reached a specific computer with which they wanted to communicate. Also, her main character just turns on the computer and starts typing - not only is there no dialup, there's....no software application opened. Am I to believe that the messages Kate sends are typed at the command prompt? It's just sloppy.

Second, okay, the book is about mysterious "computer messages" that Kate receives from an alleged extraterrestrial. She spends most of the book trying to figure out who it really is, hoping, of course, that it's an alien that contacted her because, as his first message said, he liked the self-portrait she "drew" on the computer. So the book goes on and we learn that Kate's crush has a computer too and it can receive messages too, if Kate's over at his house. He eventually joins the hunt to find out where the messages are coming from. At the end of the book, we learn...that it's an actual alien. What the fuck? Stupid. How gay is it that it's not the crush, or at least another Earthling? I mean, what's the point of this dumbass book? (February 27, 2004)

My god. I may never eat again, not only because I'm full (and I had the omelet in question more than four hours ago), but because it's hard to imagine a foodstuff that could taste as good. Thank you, Chuck Taggart; thank you a thousand times.

First of all, it's huge. It's the size of my arm. It hangs over the edges of the plate AND it comes with a side of fries. Not standard diner fries, either - those fat, mealy, underdone limp things. These are crispy delicious golden-brown works of art. And guess what? The omelet is stuffed with them. The potatoes in the omelet are French fries. How cool is that?

This delicious egg concoction also features the perfect amount of onions, done exquisitely. The meal is suffused with the flavor of fried onions, but there's no accidental biting into a bit of undercooked onion to ruin your experience. The cheese is also delivered in an ideal quantity; no bite is cheese-free, but no bite is all cheese.

Where can you get this ridiculous bit of heaven for only $7.01 including tax (but not tip)? At the Camellia Grill here in New Orleans. Please, please go. Unless you're vegan. (January 9, 2004)

Best realistic (as in the genre) YA book I've read in ages and ages. The seven stories cover Dolores's life from childhood, where she listens to her brother's Nirvana albums and hangs out with his indie rock friends, through her teenage years, where she's the coolest kid in school but no one knows it. The highlight is "Rah," where she becomes a cheerleader but refuses to conform with the rest of the squad. (January 15-16, 2004)

Switches between the voices of Colonel Behrani, an Iranian immigrant, and Kathy, a white maid. Behrani was wealthy and respected in his old country, but since he moved to America he's worked a series of crappy jobs to keep his wife and children in fairly ritzy circumstances so he can marry his daughter off to a good family. When the book opens, the daughter is away on her honeymoon, and Behrani quits his construction and convenience-store jobs and buys a bungalow cheap, at a county auction. He moves his family in and they're suddenly happier than they've been in years: his wife is relieved because the daughter's fulfilling her familial duties and she (the wife) all of a sudden wants more sex than she's wanted in years; the teenage son is content because he's a skateboarder and they live on a big hill; and Behrani himself is delighted to begin his career as a real-estate broker, buying up homes like this one and selling them, instead of going to work construction every day and having to change into his work clothes in a parking garage because it would embarrass the family to have fellow old-money Iranians see him leave the house in anything less than an Italian suit.

The house he buys was owned by Kathy, whose husband has just left her. She's a recovering alcoholic/cokehead that's slowly falling in love with a married cop, and once she gets evicted she has to live in her car or sometimes a cheap motel. The house was taken away from her erroneously -- the county said she owed taxes she didn't in fact owe -- but she was too depressed to open her mail for months, so she didn't find out about the county auctioning off her home until it was too late.

The beauty of the book is that I honestly don't know whom to feel sorrier for. It's obviously Kathy's house, but Behrani bought it fair and square and it represents so much to him and he didn't mean to put Kathy out; he doesn't have any idea about her or her situation. (January 18-19, 2004)

The first essay in this book is entitled "Should We Burn Babar?" and I think it's a bit overwrought. The premise is that the Babar books are racist, sexist and colonialist, because they show Babar leaving the jungle, going to the city, learning how to behave in an urban manner (wearing clothes, buying stuff, driving a car) and then when he returns to the jungle, they make him king because he's had such experiences. The sexism comes in because he has a wife that they must accept as queen (no, I don't see a lot of sexism there either).

The second essay is much stronger. Entitled "The Story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott Revisited," it describes how the tale of Rosa Parks is mistold in social studies texts for children, picture books, and even adult works of nonfiction. Readers of these traditional works are made to believe that Rosa was a poor, simple seamstress that sat in the front of the bus because she was too tired to stand, when in reality she was a community activist and knew exactly what she was doing.

Of the last three articles, one explains why we need more radical children's literature; one strange one in three parts has to do with Pinocchio and storytelling; and one describes the history of education reform in America. Hmm. (January 28-31, 2004)

I love TWAS, an erudite, wordy weekly indie music review column that ended a few months ago but whose archive is still useful. However, for a software designer, author Glenn McDonald doesn't know a hell of a lot about user-friendly searching.

Actually I'm sure he does. He's that kind of guy, at least as far as I can tell from reading his reviews. But check out how ampersands and "and"s aren't cross-referenced, or more importantly, how one must include umlauts and accent marks if one wishes to search his archived articles for Björk or Sinéad O'Connor. What's up with that? Even if you know HTML, his search engine doesn't accept it. The only way I can figure to search on those artists is by cutting and pasting. Dude needs to rethink this. What's the matter with a little indexing? (January 29, 2004)

A YA about an ex-goth teenager that goes off to art school. I guess it was refreshing for a going-off-to-college novel in that it didn't focus on what Ellie left behind, since she didn't leave any friends behind, and it also didn't focus on her trying to, like, be way more popular in college than in high school. I liked it, but didn't love it; I don't think I'll seek out this author again. Maybe I'm just a little old for realistic YA novels. Nah. (December 2, 2003)

This one's about a mother that killed five of her kids and blamed it on SIDS. The true-crime aspect of that book was as good as they all are, of course, but I was also interested in the several-hundred-page history of SIDS as a diagnosis. It was a little slow in parts, but the entire theory was necessary to make the reader understand why these deaths couldn't have possibly been SIDS and yet how the murderous mom fooled the doctors into believing they were. Lots of medical politics. (November 26 - December 2, 2003)

Picked this up today because the cover story was about GLBT reference. That seemed pretty cool; the cover, marked with a big rainbow logo, promised I'd learn about "academic journals, monographs, GLBT magazines, GLBT newspapers, and grey literature" in the areas of "civil liberties, culture, employment, family, history, psychology, religion and sociology." Cool.

I flipped through the magazine and didn't turn up anything about GLBT issues. Puzzled, I examined the table of contents; again, nothing. I closed the journal and studied the cover again. This time I noticed the word "Advertisement" printed in very small type just above the giant GLBT headline, and the information at the bottom that informed me that GLBTLife was an EBSCO product indexing GLBT literature.

Library Journal sells cover space to advertisers? Cover space? How misleading and mercenary is that? (December 13, 2003)

Why is everyone so crazy about A Prairie Home Companion? I hate Garrison Keillor's smarminess; I hate his pathetic "jokes" with punch lines you can see from a mile away; I hate the saccharine musical guests; I hate the chock-full-of-stock-characters-and-1950s-punchlines skits. I hate it all.

Aha. I'm not the only one: Garrison Keillor Discussion.

But I'm almost the only one. A Google search on various negative words and "prairie home companion" turns up almost nothing relevant. Everyone loves that show. Why? (November 22, 2003)

It was okay, but not what I've come to expect from Avi based on his The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, Crispin: The Cross of Lead (2003 Newbery winner), and The Escape from Home and its sequel. It was written for a younger audience, I think. I liked the beginning idea - that the only way to steal the payroll deposit from a certain plane was to do so while the plane was in the air and then parachute out with the money - but I was much more interested in the logistics of that than in the story of the learning-disabled kid that watches the man parachute down.

And get this quote, from the very first page: "Not very tall, his dark business suit and the tie suggested a man of business."

Could no one, from the renowned children's author (Avi) to his editor to the publisher's editors (Morrow) have noticed the dangling participle before publication? And, I mean, the "business suit" suggested a "man of business"? Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. (November 24, 2003)

Slightly better than I'd anticipated. Makes me feel sorry, though, for all the rape victims that don't work for investment banking firms and therefore don't have bosses that pay their medical bills or corporate apartments they can hide out in, or personal limo service to deliver them to work, etc. I'm not saying the CPJ doesn't deserve these things, just that others do too and it's sort of gross, how rich she is. (December 29, 2003)

I don't even like Elvis all that much; I don't own any of his albums, although I've checked several out of the library recently. This two-volume series is comprehensive and covers his personal life, his music, his family, his manager, and so forth, although if you ask me, there's a little too much detail about each of his public appearances (who did the lighting, what the budget was, etc.).

I became interested in Elvis when I went to Memphis in summer 2001 with Becky, Rae, and Becky's friend Luann. We went to Graceland, of course, and I found it more compelling than I'd expected. The house was small by modern celebrity standards, but it had a billiards room with red carpeted walls.

Like I said, I was never really a fan. My mom told me once when I was little that it was either Elvis or the Beatles, and since she played "Paulie" in a broomstick-strumming four-piece girl band in high school, it was clear where her loyalty lay. Still, I got way way into the books. I feel like I know almost everything a non-family-member, non-fan can know about Elvis. Not that that's much to brag about, I guess.

He was always religious, from his early life until he died. And he loved his mama as much as any 1950s Southern male only child can, I guess. He was clean-cut for a rock star, too; he wouldn't even let his employees drink alcohol in his house for years and years. His employees were his friends and cousins, mostly; he hired all of them as security guards, drivers, personal assistants, and the like just so he could take his clique on the road. He never flew, only drove or took the train, because it worried his mother to think of him in a plane.

He was never able to sleep at night, only during the day. Even in the early years, before he'd ever touched any drugs, he would stay up all night, renting out movie theaters and go-kart tracks so that he and his friends/employees could have fun without fan interference. Then they'd sleep all day. But this was made easier when he joined the Army. The fucking military gave him speed pills so he would be alert when on guard duty or driving a tank, and he became addicted pretty quickly. When he was discharged, he kept up the pills and got all his friends hooked too. It wasn't malicious; he practically memorized the Physicians' Desk Reference and honestly thought that because of his medical knowledge, his predilection for staying up all night even when drug-free, and the legal status of the drugs he had prescribed for him, that they were all immune from addiction - even when he started taking heavy-duty sleeping pills to pass out each morning.

It's true that he fell in love with Priscilla when she was just fourteen. He was in the Army then and she was an American teenager living in Germany. Then he somehow convinced her parents to let her move to America, live with his father Vernon (his mother was dead by the time Elvis got out of the Army), and finish high school in Memphis. Crazy. I can't imagine what it must have been like for her. I should pick up her autobiography; Peter Guralnick, who wrote the biography I'm reviewing, relied heavily on it as a source for his books.

So eventually, of course, he was addicted to all these drugs and so were all of his friends and employees. His manager, the Colonel, a money-hungry ex-carny with a total genius for promotion, had a gambling addiction. Priscilla left Elvis because the newspapers constantly published reports of his girlfriends (generally one per movie and another two per tour), but he wasn't having a lot of sex, probably because of the drugs. He liked for girls, usually starlets or beauty-pageant winners in their early twenties, to come to his bedroom, get into a pair of pajamas he provided, and read to him while his sleeping pills took effect.

When he got fat, it wasn't because of his diet. He was a speed addict, for god's sake. He was bloated from injections of Demerol, and because he didn't eat much or well and because of his addictions, he had colon and kidney problems and they blew him up. He was a black belt in karate with a cocaine addiction; he wasn't eating ten fried peanut butter sandwiches a day. Trust me.

All of his friends and employees, all of his girlfriends, his doctors, his dad, his manager - they all knew he was a serious drug addict on his way to death, but no one ever stood up to him because he was Elvis. So he puked in the bathroom one morning and drowned in it. He'd been saved from choking numerous times before when he fell asleep while eating. Someone should have predicted his death. But no one had the balls to stand up to him. So he died. Fuck. (October 12 - November 6, 2003)

I remember my mom reading this back when it came out, and it (the book, I mean) was something of a sensation, if I remember correctly. I read it last year, though, because of a recommendation by Simon. He writes that the book is a "wonderful, intricate detailing of lives and society clashing in New York, chronicling the decline in fortune of a Wall Street player. The whole novel rotates, marvellously, round one single, almost imperceptible mistake."

It's absolutely excellent. There's an asshole investment banker cheating on his demure little wife while thinking of himself as a Master of the Universe - he tells himself often that he's a M of the U in order to boost his own ego - and he pretends to adore his daughter but really couldn't give a fuck about her. There's an assistant district attorney living in a tiny hovel of an apartment and wishing he made more money, but I'm not sure yet whether he's good or evil. There's a cop that misuses grammar so as to seem as streetwise as his ethnic cop friends. And there's my favorite character, an alcoholic British journalist working for a crappy tabloid and mooching off as many ugly Americans as he can. I loved it.

Even the ending was smashing, and lately I've been disappointed in endings. I recommend this one heartily, however. The twist at the end wasn't about plot; it was a deftly achieved bit of character development that worked like plot. It was guessable from the very first chapter, but never obvious, and it totally worked. (November 14-20, 2003)

One of the best I've read in a long time. It's set in Swindon, England, and is narrated by a fifteen-year-old autistic boy. Someone killed a dog belonging to one of his neighbors, and he investigates to find out why. The plot isn't really the point, though; the interesting part is seeing the world the way the boy sees it. Autistics aren't good at interpreting other people's emotions or reactions, and they don't understand idioms or jokes, so Christopher is literal and precise and childlike. The book is readable as hell and also short and y'all should read it posthaste. (November 20-22, 2003)