A Literary Life

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.

Tidbit No. 21

Black Guy Asks Nation For Change

… for the meter.
… for the tooth fairy.
… for a vending-machine snack.
… to finish up his laundry.
… for a $100 bill
… for the tollway.

I listened to a great podcast with the writers of the Onion who explained how they choose their headlines each week. Check it out over at WNYC’s Radio Lab.

Tidbit No. 20

Warning: Mature content. The F-bomb will be dropped. Gasp.

“Ooh, touchy! You must be on the rag!” — First we need to deal with the fact that anyone who says this is an idiot, and not just because they have the emotional maturity of a zygote. The misogynistic “joke” here is predicated on the concept that women are “moody” when they have PMS, which stands for premenstrual syndrome. Pre. As in before. As in not having her period yet. For many PMS-sufferers, getting one’s period alleviates some of all symptoms of PMS, particularly as regards irritability and tension. So the whole “on the rag” thing doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense, for a whole lot of women. I suppose the sort of fuck-knuckle who uses a “joke” like this isn’t too concerned about its medical accuracy, but I’m a pedant, so there you go.

- Melissa McEwan, reigning blog goddess over at Shakespeare’s Sister/Shakesville

Ok, not only is Melissa right about the semantics of ON the rag as opposed to BEFORE the rag, she just makes up the best damn insult phrases EVER! Fuck-knuckle. I’m still laughing. And ever since she jogged my memory with the term “wankstain” in this post, I’ve been trying to integrate it back into my vocabulary. But not at the workplace — where I might be thought of as “on the rag” if I let that one fly too often.

Tidbit No. 19

I’ve often thought about the psychological ramification of TOO MUCH choice, and have used that argument when talking about mid-life — and even quarter-life — crises. Jeez, who hasn’t thought about how many freakin’ choices we have in a world where your child’s elementary school could change what college they get into or where there are a dozen varieties of margarine on the shelves at local groceries.

But Violent Acres distills this angst better than I ever could:

My Grandmother, who was born in 1908 constantly referred to the 20’s as the ‘good ol days.’ Often, she’d tell me stories of her youth. As a child, she spent 12 hours a day working in a tire factory for pocket change that she had turn over to her parents at the end of the week. Her family consisted of 6 people, all crammed into a minuscule house and they ate chicken and cornbread almost every night. They lacked creature comforts like radios, televisions, and air hockey tables. Listening to my Grandmother’s tales, I found myself constantly wondering what was so fucking good about the ‘good ol days?’ As I saw it, the only indication I ever had that I wasn’t listening to a fucking horror story was the dreamy expression on my Grandmother’s face.

Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the mostly autobiographical ‘Little House’ series, wrote about her life in the late 1800’s/early 1900’s in a shockingly uplifting, joyously nostalgic tone. Furthermore, this was not something she did purposely in order to sell more books, either. People who knew the author personally insisted that Laura sincerely enjoyed growing up on the wild frontier.

It all sounds so preposterous, doesn’t it? After all, what could possibly be fun about living in a one room shack in the middle of nowhere without electricity or plumbing? What is so damn great about working all day, every day just to get by? How could anyone possibly describe a life full of famine, disease, poverty, oppression, and war as part of the ‘good ol days?’

In comparison, we have everything. Yet…yet…they were the happy ones. It doesn’t make sense. What did they have that we don’t?

I’ll tell you what they had: fewer choices to make. In the early 1900’s you could either become a farmer or you could run a shop. Typically, you picked the one you preferred and even if you were only somewhat successful, you considered yourself blessed. Everyone got married, had children, attended the only church available to them and called it a life well lived. No one stayed awake all night wondering what alternative path they could have taken out of millions simply because there weren’t a whole hell of lot of paths to take. Modern day life lacks the same simplicity and overall sense of well being our forefathers enjoyed.

Now we can go anywhere, we can be anything, and we can try everything. But instead of this making us feel liberated and free, it imprisons us.

Read the whole post, which covers the topic in more detail, here.