As Al and I walked past what had been Thai Delight and is now the promising sounding Mango, I asked a woman working there if I could snap a picture of their sign for my blog. She had me write down the url while she held Al, who may have outweighed her. So i posted this more promptly than I might have otherwise. We welcome you. We welcome your ginger roasted duck and roma spinach peanut curry.
Sunday's dream of a clean office has yet to be realized.
Is it just me or does everyone feel that working on a computer is like surfing in a three piece suit? I always feel constricted by software and I always want the freedom of the pen and the pad . I can work on a computer; in fact, I do most of my work on a computer, but I always find it hard to think on a computer. I think it is time for a resurgence of the analog--not a Luddite reaction, just an intelligent supplementing. There is something about writing with one's hand, scrawling a connection, making something a little bigger, slashing it with an underline, drawing a doodle . . . which allows thought to follow its natural pathways. As much as I hate the fetish of "creativity," true creativity has got a bit of the frolic to it. I've started to use an 11 x 17 pad to jot down and connect stray thoughts and to develop to do lists and project flows. I want that software Tom Cruise used in Minority Report where you can act like a really smart dervish. I want Microsoft Wii.
As if to mock me, my blog software–with Hal-like creepiness–insists that this post is continued. It isn't. This is it.
Continue reading "Unplugged, Possibly Unhinged: Thoughts On Software and Thinking" »
The quality you most admire in a man?
Whatever the opposite of complacency is. That, plus not being a dick.
I would add a question--what do you value in a co-worker--and when I ask that question I think of Doyle Dane Bernbach's original, pre-human resources hiring policy: 1. You need talent because without talent we can't get anything good done. 2. You can't be a bastard because life is too short to work with bastards.
The quality you most admire in a woman?
Myopia.
What do you most value in your friends?
Curiosity. Decency. I would say, "a talent for fun" but that's kind of strenuous.
Who are your favorite heroes of fiction?
Fenwick, in the movie Diner.
Who are your favorite characters in history?
Marcus Aurelius. John and Abigail Adams. George Washington. Abraham Lincoln. Virginia Woolf. Robert Jackson. Jackie Robinson.Both Justice Harlands.
What historical figure do you most identify with?
Gerald Ford.
Which living person do you most admire?
Dave Eggers.
Who are your favorite heroines in real life?
My mom. E. Tina Fey. I’m sure there are a bunch of women I’ve never heard about doing remarkable things.
Who are your favorite heroines of fiction?
Molly Dodd.
If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what do you think it would be?
Rafael Nadal. God owes me that.
My most common thought about the Sixties is, "Oh shut up about the damn sixties." If you're my age, the decade is often a club with which one is beaten and an exercise in bullshit nostalgia. But recently there have been three attempts to get at some of the decades' real artistic accomplishments and, what's really interesting, to get at the microscopic headwaters and polluted tributaries of art: Bob Dylan's memoir Chronicles, Zachary Lazar's novel Sway, and Todd Haynes' film I'm Not There. To treat them properly would require one of those lengthy New York Review of Books style essay-reviews. I'll treat them improperly, with these few notes:
All three of these attempts push their chosen form around. Function bullies form, as is proper.
Chronicles I ignores the expected timeline and the biographical greatest hits and explores three seemingly much smaller artistic incidents. Sway fictionalizes the 1960s Rolling Stones ( as well as a Manson family member and the film maker Kenneth Anger) because the book needs the freedom of fiction. 
And now I'm Not There, which we just rented last week, uses multiple actors to portray Bob Dylan and multiple modes (bio, fiction, black and white, color) to tell its story. Scrambled and gliding, it feels like a Dylan song circa Highway 61 Revisited.
What are the elements of this version of the Sixties: the scrambling suggested by drugs; the cultural richness of traditional music; the energy of an electric, high-octane world; the smear of war and murder. It's art that shakes hands with evil or, at any rate, the thoughts we're less proud of.
It is flawed art: the puns and juxtapositions and musical cascades in mid-Sixties Dylan sometimes seem to hide hateful, two-dimensional songs. Like A Rolling Stone spits at a cartoon slumming rich girl; The Ballad of A Thin Man mocks a nameless philistine. The Stones circa Beggar's Banquet are often misogynistic and sometimes just lame.
But there is something in the handful of albums Dylan and the Stones created at their peaks that I keep coming back to and which I judge all other music by.
I sometimes go on here about whether or not I should keep this blog. But I have realized that it has succeeded–for me, I'm not sure if anyone else cares–as a reading and viewing notebook. I read books more carefully if I'm going to comment on them publicly. In some ways, the way I'm approaching books won't be as meaningful to people, because I'm not reviewing them, I'm plundering their styles and strategies. I'm reading Updike fiction–On The Farm–for the first time in a long time and it is really useful to note what he does well and less well.
In what country would you like to live?
I feel comfortable in Canada and I suspect I would like Ireland.
But I learned in England that I’m an American. One Friday night, while E met a friend of ours, I brought some samosas and curry back from Waitroses, parked on the couch of our Kensintgton basement apartment, watched the DVDs of Joey and Two and A Half Men that were included in a British cereal box, and thought, “these are my people.” I want someone within me a half of mile of me saying, “we can totally do that.”
For some reason, maybe because I was avoiding real work, I started looking around for Proust Questionnaires on the web. I've decided that the whole thing is too much for one blog entry, so I will be making it a weekly feature for a while.
What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
Alcoholic relapse. There are torture victims and starving children who would disagree with that.
Where would you like to live?
In Bob Newhart’s condo in Chicago.
I’d meant to set aside Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me while I read some other, highly regarded books. But I kept coming back to it, because on almost every page there was something in the prose that rewarded my attention. A woman acting in a film, set in a corn field as makeup is applied to her face:
With my eyes shut, sounds seemed to magnify. rain tapping the corn, leaves sliding wetly, a distant grinding of thunder. I heard Thomas yelling to Speak No Evil as they tested the boom. “We’re getting static from the wind.” All of it broke, scattered the way children’s voices churn and shred in a playground, folding into the wet leaves , the sour animal smell of earth. My scalp tightened, prickling over my skull.
Compared to this Junot Diaz’s prose seemed bombastic; John Updike’s, clotted; and the vast majority of writing seems unobservant. “The way children’s voices churn and shred in a playground.” That is a precise observation I’ve never heard made before. The verbs, both engine and epiphany, are worrthy of Updike at his best.
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