A Literary Life

Tidbit No. 32

In my head and in my ear buds continuously:

There’s a hole in my neighborhood down which of late I cannot help but fall…
And I’ll bring you further roses
But it does you no good
And it does me no good
And it does you no good

More songs and more info about this British band at http://www.elbow.co.uk.

Tidbit No. 31

Colorado man gets prison for ‘borrowing’ books
He sold hundreds of books, DVDs after checking them out from libraries

DENVER - A man accused of checking out hundreds of books and DVDs from libraries around the Denver area and then trying to sell them will be doing all his library borrowing from now on behind bars.

Denver prosecutors say 34-year-old Thomas Pilaar was sentenced to 10 years in prison and ordered Tuesday to pay $53,549 in restitution. He pleaded guilty in May.

Of an estimated 1,400 books and DVDs that were taken, about 500 have been recovered.

Denver Public Library estimated it had lost $35,000, while Douglas County said it had $11,000 worth of overdue items.

Authorities were tipped off by a woman who recently bought books on Craigslist and noticed the library identification stamps.

From the Associated Press via MSNBC

Tidbit No. 30

(Via A Commonplace Book)

The National Endowment for the Arts has an initiative you may have heard of called the Big Read. According to the website, its purpose is to “restore reading to the center of American culture.” They estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. ( More commentary after the list.)

Here’s what you do:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list on your own blog.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (I’ve just read the first)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (link)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Complete? Really?)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (link)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (link)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (link)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan (link)
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (link)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt (link)
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (I tried. I failed.)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (link)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell (link)
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (link)
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole (link)
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I’ve read 62 out of 100. Not bad. But I was really surprised with how few of those I’ve actually blogged about (12) considering I’ve been reviewing every book I’ve read since January 2006.

I think there should be another category to flag: books I’ve never heard of. A Town Like Alice? No idea. But I’ll read it. Then again, I’ll read just about anything.

And one book I’m very proud to have not read: The Five People You Meet in Heaven. I did have to read his Tuesdays with Morrie for a class, but I’m proud I haven’t yet given into this best-selling shmaltz.

Tidbit No. 29

How did people ever complete home improvement tasks without MP3 players? I honestly don’t know. I suppose you could turn on the radio or stereo, and let your own thoughts fill your head. But why concoct your own thoughts when someone else could do it for you — via great podcasts, radio rebroadcasts and more pumped directly into your ear canal? (I’m sure they’re working on the directly into your prefrontal cortex option, perhaps in time for the Christmas season.)

I ask because I spent at least 16 hours of the last two days painting trim, which anyone who has attempted such a thing knows is the third circle of hell. (Dante rented, so he wasn’t aware.) That’s a lot of iPod time.

And I ran out of my normal podcasts (including This American Life, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, Radiolab, To the Best of Our Knowledge, the Bryant Park Project and few others). And although music is great, I’ve become accustomed to having voices in my head ears. Long story short, I finally broke down and signed up to try a service many I know have been raving about for years: Audible.com. It’s $7.95 a month for the first three months (one book per month) and you can cancel at any time, so I figured it was worth a shot.

So what does one want in an audio book? I pondered. On the front page, there were many books I had on my to-read list, including the new David Sedaris and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. They also had some of the non-fiction books I’d been recommended, like Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA. But the first two I knew had language I wanted to savor, and the last would probably need the parts of my brain engaged in painting if I wanted it to be more than noise. So I went for my version of brain candy: fun, fast-moving historical fiction.

I took the No. 1 most popular book in the category: The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. What the hell? It was No. 1. And it had a bonus. Where for my one credit I could have gotten 9 hours of David Sedaris, with Follett I received about 50. That’s right. Fifty hours of voices in my head, telling the epic stories of the everyday men and women constructing a cathedral in 12th century England.And by the end of the day painting, I’d already gotten through five of those hours, or 10 percent of the book, and found it to be exactly what I’d been craving. The story is light, engrossing and fun, using just enough of my brain to allow my hands to move in their repetitive tasks. For instance, here’s an excerpt of the back story of my favorite character thus far, Ellen:

Her father had been a knight, she told them; a big, strong, violent man who wanted sons with whom he could ride and hunt and wrestle, companions to drink and carouse into the night with him. In these matters he was as unlucky as a man could be, for he got Ellen … (She) grew up in what was almost an all-male household. She cut her hair short and carried a dagger, and learned not to play with kittens or care for blind old dogs. By the time she was Martha’s age she could spit on the ground and eat apple cores and kick a horse in the belly so hard that it would draw in its breath, allowing her to tighten its girth one more notch. She knew that all men who were not part of her father’s band were called cocksuckers and all women who would not go with them were called pigfuckers, although she was not quite sure — and did not much care — what these insults really meant.

It’s such great entertainment, I’m almost considering going around the house looking for other physical things to do so I can continue listening. Almost, of course. But considering that I now have an amount of entertainment exceeding the hours in a full-time work week, I think my home-improvement tasks will be a bit easier for a while to come.

Tidbit No. 28

A fellow Jack team member named Gary, who drove down from Denver for the Peak SC Rally, had a great sticker on his helmet.

Somehow, I don’t think it would be quite as entertaining if I had one that read, “WARNING: Rider has enormous breasts.” Perhaps “Rider has enormous ovaries”? No?

In addition to Gary’s testicles, scooters were decked out with all sorts of witty repartee. If memory serves, there was:

• My other ride is another Lambretta.
• Scooter girls kick it.
• 0 to naked in 6.3 beers.
• Push it like you stole it.

Tidbit No. 27

A letter-to-the-editor response to Newsweek’s recent cover story (picture at right) headlined “Obama’s Bubba Gap: Deep rooted race and class issues are changing the “hope” election,” which published May 2. (See the full article here. Read all the responses here.)

“Obama’s Bubba Gap” (May 5) asks whether Barack Obama is elitist. To be sure, I know the definition of elite, but I still chose to consult the dictionary. “Elite” refers to “a small group of people … who have more power, social standing, wealth or talent than the rest of the group.” By that definition, Hillary Clinton and John McCain are also elitist. And, I, for one, am thrilled! I want a president who is smarter, more talented and more powerful than the man next door. As an average American with a household income less than average, please give me an elitist president.

Becky Balestri Killion
Omaha, Neb.

I whole-heartedly agree. After all, we don’t want a president we can all see as a “drinking buddy,” the point of the icon of light beer on the right-hand side of the Newsweek cover. We have one of those now, and he’s just as valuable in the White House as any other neighborhood tavern drunk IMHO. Even if most the country can’t pronounce it and are frightened of its verdant, vegetably greenness, I’d still like the (left-hand icon) arugula candidate any day.

But I guess I’m not your average American Bubba, though.

Tidbit No. 25

The release on Daytrotter of some new songs from the upcoming Death Cab for Cutie album Narrowstairs (available May 13) has gotten me listening to some of their older stuff (Plans and Transatlanticism) with more frequency. I thought I’d share. Like most of my favorite bands — ok, ok, ALL of my favorite bands — Death Cab has thoughtful, intelligent lyrics. Some of my favorites should be playing above if I got my first-ever YouTube embed to work correctly.

I’ve got a hunger
Twisting my stomach into knots
That my tongue has tied off
My brain’s repeating
“If you’ve got an impulse let it out”
But they never make it past my mouth

Ba BAA! This is the sound of settling. Silence. Silence is the sound of settling.

The song also ponders aging (“I can’t wait to go gray”), one of Death Cab’s recurring themes and one I morbidly enjoy. For instance, there’s Brothers on a Hotel Bed.

You may tire of me as our December sun is setting
Because I’m not who I used to be
No longer easy on the eyes, but these wrinkles masterfully disguise
The youthful boy below
Who turned your way and saw
Something he was not looking for: both a beginning and an end

What the hell is it that makes us link love/marriage and death/aging in our minds? Is it because marriage is the death of freedom? Or because marriage will hopefully last until death? Love, which is a life-affirming emotion, is death. Even to orgasm is to experience a “tiny death” according to literary tradition.

Yes, people. This is really this kind of shit I think about when I listen to good music.

Tidbit No. 24

It’s LOL CATS for history geeks over at LOL Manuscripts, where Renaissance history PhD student Sarah Redmond photoshops Early Modern printed materials with a history-nerd wit that strikes a chord with me. (BA in History in 2002, focusing on the social history of women in 18th and 19th century Britain.) Like a giddy, punch-drunk student cooped up in the stacks too long, Sarah’s got a great way of making something so ancient so irreverent.

Now that I see the idea, it seems almost too easy to insert new words into the mouths of Early Modern prints, with their stiff formality and cartoonish nature.

“I IZ SUFFERIN LAWTS!” I love it. And if that makes me an even larger nerd than most of you already thought I was, so be it. I just can’t help laughing when someone so artfully brings academic scholarship down to my snarky level. Keep it up, Sarah. If I were your Prof, I’d totally award highest honors for this creative dissertation.

Also great? The LOL version of Shakespeare:

Hamlet (an LOLCat Translation)
2 BE, OR NOT 2 BE : DAT IZ TEH QUESHUN:
WHETHR TIS NOBLR IN DA MIND 2 SUFFR
TEH SLINGS AN ARROWS OV OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE,
OR 2 TAEK ARMS AGAINST SEA OV TROUBLEZ, AN BY OPPOSIN END THEM? 2 DYE: 2 SLEEP;
NO MOAR; AN BY SLEEP 2 SAY WE END
TEH HART-ACHE AN TEH THOUSAND NACHURAL SHOCKZ
DAT FLESH IZ HEIR 2, TIS CONSUMMASHUN
DEVOUTLY 2 BE WISHD. 2 DYE, 2 SLEEP;
2 SLEEP: PERCHANCE 2 DREAM: AY, THARS TEH RUB;
4 IN DAT SLEEP OV DEATH WUT DREAMS CUD COME
WHEN WE HAS SHUFFLD OFF DIS MORTAL COIL,
MUST GIV US PAUSE: THARS TEH RESPECT
DAT MAKEZ CALAMITY OV SO LONG LIFE…

Tidbit No. 23

And who says the ’50s were buttoned up and sexually repressed? Not me when a Marilyn Monroe sex video, picturing the curvy girl performing oral sex, has emerged and was sold at auction.

An illicit copy of the steamy, still-FBI-classified reel - 15 minutes of 16mm film footage in which the original blond bombshell performs oral sex on an unidentified man - was just sold to a New York businessman for $1.5 million, said Keya Morgan, the well-known memorabilia collector who discovered the film and brokered its purchase.

The footage appears to have been shot in the 1950s. When it came to light in the mid-’60s, then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had his agents spend two weeks futilely trying to prove that Monroe’s sex partner was either John F. Kennedy or Robert F. Kennedy, according to declassified agency documents and interviews, Morgan said.

It’s unknown, of course, if she knew she was being filmed at the time.

Tidbit No. 22

“The kids in ‘Frontrunners’ are the leading edge of what’s being called the millennials — the cohort born after 1982 — but you might call them the Look at Me Generation. Thanks to ‘The Real World,’ ‘Laguna Beach’ and the like, they’ve been documented like no group before them, most especially my themselves: on their blogs, their MySpace, Facebook and Flickr pages, and on YouTube …

But are we seeing real people, or personas? …

Sociologists have begun to question the effect of all the exhibitionism on young people. Can they form durable identities off camera, or are they so used to producing their images for outside consumption that images have replaced essences? Will a generation for whom all secrets are fair game and every private moment can become public trust each other and form intimate relationships?”

“Here’s Looking at You, Kids” By Jennie Yabroff, Newsweek, March 24, 2008

Wow, what an interesting thought… that I’m sharing in the blogosphere, thereby making my private thoughts public and exposing my personality/persona. Seriously though, the author brings up some valid considerations about the effect of life on camera, considerations it would take years to prove as fact and only paragraphs to hypothesize about.

Let’s face it. Every aging generation sees some new trend in youth that will wreck havock, soil souls, bring civilized society to its knees and END THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT! And somehow, we keep on keeping on. We’re just resilient that way. We grow, we adapt, we change. IMHO, any attempt to value such generational adaptation and change as good or evil is thin ice, reliant upon our own generation’s thought processes and values. Remember, television didn’t make us go blind and boys who play too many video games still have social lives — even with women… most the time.

If there’s anything to be done, it’s create articles like this to spark conversations and get people, including the youth in question, thinking about technology’s effect. That and the tried-and-true advice that transcends generations, that actually means something over time: Kids, be careful out there.