Laila Lalami will be reading from her debut book Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits at the Harvard Bookstore tonight at 6:30. For complete details, click here.
Be there or be square. I’ll be there and I’ll be square because that’s just how I am.
Okay, waking up to the smell of burning plastic was bad. Living with it all day was worse. But the worst was when I mistakenly tried to put the Diesel nozzle in my gas tank (“Why won’t this FIT?!?!?”) and then after I realized it was already too late because I had stinky, gassy, truck driver hands for the rest of the afternoon (before I could get to a sink).
All I would have needed would have been some cigar smoke and heavy perfume and I’d be all set for a migraine.
Hey, have you bought your copy of Jim Geezil’s Sold the Home for the Tackle Box yet? You better hurry up and get one because if you don’t now then you can’t line up with me and say, “Hey, I listened to him back in the day before all of you people thought he was so great.”
Seriously, I’ve been listening to my copy of the CD over and over (because that’s how I am, obsessive) and it just gets better. If you want to try it out before you buy, you can listen to the songs here. My favorites at this point are “These Days” and “Avalon”.
Go on and buy it and support independent people making independent music. I promise you’ll be glad you did.
Woke up to the smell of burning plastic. Not good. Had run the dishwasher over night and the lid from one of my Nalgene bottles had somehow lodged itself on the bottom and gotten chewed off by the heat of the dry. Some of it is now puddled on the bottom of the dishwasher. The house reeks.
When I let Darby out to pee this morning in the still near dark, an owl swooped across the lawn into the trees. Their bodies are so substantial compared to other birds. I wonder how it feels to have their talons gripping into your soft micey flesh. Makes me shiver.
There is a strong wind blowing through knocking the remainder of the leaves off the stubborn oak trees. The lawn is all orange-brown with the leaves, the sky more visible through the trees with each minute.
And so far, this is today. A Monday in November and the birthday of my big sister, Michaela, and my Auntie Norma.
More great stuff to read:
All of these and more in Hobart Firsts and Lasts guest edited by Claudia Smith
For your reading pleasure on a Monday morning:
And for your listening pleasure:
And a reminder:
I don’t know what possessed me to pick up The Day After Tomorrow last night, as it’s certainly not something I would have ever paid to see but since it was a free library movie, I figured why not.
Okay, so had I seen this movie when it came out in 2004, I would have said, “Yeah, right. Come on, people! This shit could NEVER happen.”
And yet now, sitting here as 2005 winds down and leaves in its wake a devastating tsunami, several mind-blowingly horrible earthquakes, an unheard of hurricane season which left a major US city and port in tatters, and a cluster-fuck of an evacuation plan–this movie suddenly became important and eerily real.
Yes, there are many, many stupid parts to this movie–not just the hackneyed young love subplot, and the utterly ridiculous bit with the wolves, and the super-hero climatologist dad who walks from Philadelphia to Manhattan in temperatures that must be close to -40 below, if not colder, but also the fact that these people never really seemed COLD. Growing up in Montreal and upstate New York, I know all about cold and there was never a moment when I thought, “Yeah, those people are cold. I can see it on them.” Cold is me waiting for the school bus when it’s 30 below out. That’s cold. And they never got there despite the fact that a new ice age was upon them.
But I digress.
So what was fascinating about this movie, other than some of the striking similarities to what has gone on in the world in the past eleven months, was that the US government FINALLY decided based on the warnings of the super-hero climatologist to evacuate everyone who lived below a certain line (basically from DC to Northern California). Because the government had not listened to him sooner, it was already too late for everyone above the line (the storm was coming and the cold setting. NYC–where the son was holed up with his scholastic team in the public library–was fucked. Canada was already totally fucked as was much of Northern Europe, etc).
And where were the evacuees meant to go? Mexico. But when they got to the border, Mexico said, “Hell, no! We don’t want you!” (and who can blame them for that?) and so people started freaking out and making their way across the Rio Grande.
Whoa.
Then the US government forgave all Latin American debt and Mexico said, “Okay. Come on in,” and the people of the US set up a huge tent city. This was fascinating and in 2004 I would have said, No way! But now I’m thinking, wow, it’s possible. Well, it would be possible if there were anything like an evacuation plan anywhere in this country.
So I’m not sure that this movie taught me anything, per se, rather it reinforced my fears in regards to global warming and also, most importantly, my fears about what happens when science is stifled by bureaucracy.
It is an eerily prescient film.
If you read nothing else today, please read this amazing essay by my pal Eve Abrams, What Has Happened to Charmaine?:
Eliminating the likes of Bobby might be okay for some people. People who chose hygienic, orderly Singapore or Houston, people who are fine with gum being illegal, or who are happy without the squeegee guys. But I like a bit of mess in my life. That gritty, messy part is where the art comes from, where the intellect gets fed, where ire and resolve grow strong as weeds. In the margins, there is the time and there is the freedom from expectation to create the unexpected. I don’t want a world without mess, without creativity. I don’t want a world without New Orleans. I can’t even bear to think about it.
Go on and read it; you will be thankful you did.
Have been reading AGNI 62 and loving it. So far have read the supremely-talented Xujun Eberlin’s story, “Pivot Point”–which broke me all to pieces but left me with such a feeling of hope and triumph and Sven Birkerts beautiful essay As Above: Saul Bellow. And there is so much more to be read in this journal.
You can order a copy here. Go on and do it because you know you want to.
November is turning out to be the loveliest month of Autumn this year.
Here’s yet another photo of the crashed car in the woods.
Allen sent me this link which once again indicates why spellchecker does not replace a good editor–Pennsylvania company recalls 94,400 lbs of beef (read this first paragraph carefully):
Quaker Maid Meats Inc. on Tuesday said it would voluntarily recall 94,400 pounds of frozen ground beef panties that may be contaminated with E. coli.
It’s been a long time since there have been a whole bunch of movies that I want to see. I mentioned a few weeks ago that Capote is one of them, but here are some others:
In the movie the parents, Bernard and Joan Berkman, are played by Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney, and if that’s who it takes to play your parents, what are you complaining about? The movie centers on their troubled sons. Joan has been having an affair for four years, their father is moving out, and in theory their divorcing parents will share custody (there is even a plan for time shares of the cat). In practice, Walt (Jesse Eisenberg), who is 16, moves in with his father, and Frank (Owen Kline), who is about 10, stays in the family home with his mother.
And The Dying Gaul:
The movie is based on Craig Lucas’ play, and represents his directorial debut. His previous screenplays include “Longtime Companion” (1990), with its Oscar-nominated performance by Bruce Davison as the companion of a dying AIDS victim, and “The Secret Lives of Dentists” (2002), which also starred Campbell Scott and was about secrets and possessiveness in a marriage.
myfanwy collins 