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Mindgum: Rolling smokes

Link: Mindgum: Rolling smokes. Mindgum, Kilter's web log, has a great clip of the credits for Thank You for Smoking, which the post notes "cherrfully reference a golden age in package design and topography."

On Memorial Day

I would like to recommend a book about grief, written by one of the great Christian believers as he hit a wall of unbelief. C.S. Lewis, more famous for The Chronicles of Narnia, wrote A Grief Observed to somehow quiet the midnight rages he felt when his beloved wife died. I suspect that one can only read A Grief Observed at a  certain time: when one is grieving, it may be too raw; when one is not, it may be too morbid. But there may be transitional times, or anniversaries of loss, when its bruised wisdom may be just what you need to hear. You know that you will encounter something precise and thus reverent when you read its first sentence: "No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear."

The Road Les Nessman Taken

When I was in Winona on Friday, I hiked the Bronk trail, which follows the top of the hills that separate Winona and Minnesota City.  I felt terribly out of shape, but very glad that I no longer have the kind of back problems that would have, a year ago, prevented me from even attempting the hike. It was not a pure wilderness experience: parts of the state forest there are used as a tree farm; there were too-uniform stands of spruce and stump-pocked harvested areas; people had exercised their constitutional right to shoot holes in signs; what I hiked felt more like a logging road than a trail, leading me to think I'd missed something, and I never quite got to the hill near Minnesota City where I camped as a kid. But the sky was brilliantly blue; some of the views of the farm valley, where you suddenly feel the sweep of your vision, were breathtaking, and I saw a wild turkey flush.    

Drippy, yet Starchy

Thinking about Flaubert, I realize that I like prose that makes its own gravy. Dickens, Woolf, Bellow. And that's the best I can do to explain that.

A tentative heresy: on a sentimental education

Speaking of greatness, I’m about forty pages into A Sentimental Education, and I’m not digging it. I mean that in the specialized sense of “not digging it”: the translated prose is strangely anonymous, the protaganist oddly sympathy-repellent. I don’t think I’m looking for anything as a simple as “goodness” or “likeability”; I mean he’s not my new yellow pages sales rep; I mean a kind of scent and sense that I want to come through in the prose, a quality of infusion. 

Why, Hello, Mr. Caped Crusader

Having people working on the side of our building makes me appreciate the equanimity of the apartment dwellers on Batman. When you're sitting on your couch, watching SportsCenter, and having lunch, it's disconcerting to have a hardhat appear and a person ascend in your window. 

The workers go up and down not via bat hooks but a Genie Z80/60 cherry picker.  (Is the first number for height and the latter for horizontal reach?)

Greatest Paragraph Disparaging Greatness?

"All this tends to confirm something cramped and anxious about our reading habits, which probably traces back to schooldays. 'Milton is the greatest poet of the seventeenth century. His greatest achievement was . . . " Enough.  Eventually you have to tell your son that this was not the longest ball game ever played or maybe even the best.  It is fatally flawed in the ninth inning.  However, it's the only game we happen to have right now, and it fills the moment  as a great game would, even sharing some of the same textures. If you don't enjoy it, you wouldn't enjoy a great game either, except for its damn greatness."

Wilfrid Sheed, The Good Word and Other Words, "The Art of Reviewing"

And yet the kind of rankings that the NY Times just did of American fiction have a kind of itchy, ignoble  attraction. Or is that just me? 

Ladies and gentlemen, start your opinions: New York Times names best American work of fiction of the past 25 years

The winner was Toni Morrison's Beloved, which I remembering liking a lot but not quite as much as some of her earlier novels. 

The runners-up included Underworld by Dom DeLillo, which had a brilliant, precisely evoked and fluid first chapter about the Bobby Thomson homerun game in 1951 and then descended so quickly into significance whoring that I couldn't get much past page 100. 

And then there was all the stuff I haven't read, including all recent Philip Roth. He's always struck me as a jerk who writes homeric epics to his penis, but since people who are as discerning and as different as Greil Marcus and Trish Hampl have raved about his books, maybe it's time for me to lighten up a little. 

If my experience is like yours, you'll bring to this your personal catalog of the half-remembered,  the partially read, the vaguely rejected, and the impossible-to-compare.  But I suppose that's half the fun. 

My annoying nomination:   Martin Amis's Money: A Suicide Note. It was written by a Brit, but it's a portrait of New York and Los Angeles whose prose has soaked up a sense of the malevolent/charismatic city; it's tremendously funny, often obscene, and ultimately sad.  Or that's what I thought ten years ago, when I last looked at it. 

MoMA.org | Contemporary Voices: Works from The UBS Art Collection

Link: MoMA.org | Contemporary Voices: Works from The UBS Art Collection. When I heard the original designers of Wired speak years ago at the Walker, they said that web design was more like museum design than anything else. Yet most museums don't do much with their web sites or they do and I've missed it. But this is cool.

Coolest Fact, Among Many Cool Facts, in Animals In Translation

Packs of wild dogs in Mexico City cross the street in the intersection, with the light.

Runners-up: Prairie dogs use adjectives. Parrots can ask–and not merely parrot–questions.