Unprintable Version

I Know What Happened To The Dinosaurs

They are being kept in a box in Sherburn Elementary School in Sherburn, Minnesota. I judged a speech tournament at Martin County West High for my friend Kootch and the events I judged were held in the nearby elementary school.  This led to all sorts of  great Lilluputian moments.

Web 3.0: The Competence Revolution

In the statistically invalid sample that is my life, the best ad for greyhound adoption isn’t an ad for greyhound adoption. I’ve posted it here. In the world of reality television and user-generated content (such as this blog), the commercial is a striking example of what a team of professionals can do:  this isn’t me pointing a camera at Al and sharing the unedited, accidentally lit results with the world. This is what happens when a creative director guides a writer and an art director.  This is what happens when you work with a good director, a good cinemaphotographer, a good editor, and good voice talent.  Behind the scenes there was a good agency account executive and a good good client contact, both of whom worked for executives who created organizations where such work could be done.

Tentative Notes on Charles Baxter

It is hard to write about former teachers without it seeming like you’re sucking up. I should note that Charles Baxter is a former teacher of mine and that I am immensely grateful to him for many reasons. Most pertinently, he insisted that every piece of fiction is a distinctive solution to a distinctive problem and that the duty to understand the writer’s intentions precedes the right to opine about the writer’s work.

It took me a while to figure out the reason for the metafictional twist in The Soul Thief–a book partly written in a third person with the opacity and instability of first person–but I think I’ve sussed it out: The Soul Thief is about sabotage and the twist is a kind of sabotage. 

(I'm still thinking about his decision to relay the pivotal events of the story in a summarized retrospect.)

Baxter’s acrobatic structures–First Light, my favorite, proceeds backwards–can distract from his other great strength: prose which surprises sentence by sentence.

Almost at random, this description of LAX: 

My fellow passengers trudged out of the plane, blinking like moles exposed to the sunshine. The demon-child I had entertained slept, now, in his mother’s backpack. One woman, clearly, a tourist, pulled her luggage-slop (beach bag, reticule, cosmetics kit) out of the overhead bin and staggered toward the exit. As soon as she reached the gate, she uttered a dissapointed “huh?” at the ceiling.

Then a few sentences later: 

“In every interior nook and cranny, TV sets, hanging like huge spiders from the ceiling, boomed down disinformation from the Airport Channel. You stumble toward your luggage.”

Note the small daring onomatopoeic accuracy of “luggage slop”; the freighted verbs “trudged” and “stumble”; the hint of the narrator’s campus radical past in “disinformation”; the rightness of the spiders metaphor, the weird 180 of the mole metaphor (they are emerging from the sky). 

Enough of the Wonderland already

Jello: It's Like Eating The Future

Because I try to minimize sugar intake, and because I’m not twelve, I no longer have much to do with Jello.  But I spied some 10 calorie, sugar free, primary-colors-in-a-cup jello at the newly remodeled Kowalski’s the other day. It was awesome.  I said to E, what exactly is in this?  She's all like, “I’m just saying, you might notice that the price of that stuff varies with the price of crude oil.”

Happy Saint Patrick's Day

Al is Irish on his father's side. His sire was the Dublin racer Fortress.

Homer Simpson Disowns Ashlee Simpson

1. I’ve never quite recovered from realizing that I’m the same age as Homer Simpson.

2. When I flip on Letterman or Conan, and see the dawn of yet another variant on Green Day, or the debut of yet another Ashley Lavigne April Simpson, I always think, “there is nothing new.” When the much-lauded Vampire Weekend appeared on SNL, E said, “I’m already over the whole David Byrne-meets-Davy Jones thing.”

3. Being older introduces an element of self-consciousness into every decision. When I was in my twenties and didn’t like a band, it was because I didn’t like them. Now, when I don’t like a band, I suspect it is because I am out of touch. 

4. That said, in the first few years of the Current, I have discovered Citizen Cope, the Black Keys, Beth Orton, the Cinematic Orchestra, Spoon, the Wrens, Blackalicious, Common, Calexico, Neko Case, Kill The Vultures, Sia, and Modest Mouse.    

5. John Updike writes about reaching an age in midlife where one is simply satiated with culture. Unlike the omniscient Updike, my thought is not that I have seen too much but that I have missed too much.  That is why I have spent the past months listening to Stan Getz, John Coltrane, Herb Alpert (sorry—I love the guy), Billy Holiday, Leonard Cohen, Roosevelt Sykes, and Dusty Springfield. (Dusty in Memphis is playing now.) And, yes, the New York Dolls and the Dave Clark Five. 

6. I now think:  I am more or less where I am supposed to be. But it is very easy to close one’s ears.

Oddest Sight At A High School Speech Tournament

Walking down the hall, you pass kids, most of them dressed up, talking animatedly to closed lockers.  The kids are from farms, and farm towns, and towns that would cringe if you called them farm towns. Their voices are stentorian or effervescent or Noel Cowardly or pungently southern. They mime tigers pouncing. A girl announces, to herself, “scene!” and draws her hand down her face as of squeegeeing the world away. Her partner—they are in an event called duo–mocks her by pronouncing the word  “theatre” with three syllables so distinct the word might be a sentence: “Thee Ate Her.” He has the good sense to wear a grey suit. Many of the boys here have decided that black shirts and black suits nicely set off their late winter Northern European skin tones. This, of course, reminds me of my own questionable high school fashion choices: the shirt that appeared to feature English village scenes topped off by the checked sportcoat which prompted Kelly Sanden and Anita Johnson to exclaim, “Wow!” They kindly explained to me about checks and patterns. Who knew?      

P.S.  Let’s assume towns can cringe. 

To Winona Area Readers

We Need Your Help.
The Book Shelf looks to move our store in with The Blue Heron in their current location.  But we need your help.

Like many of you, I was devestated several weeks ago when I approached the doors at The Blue Heron Coffeehouse here in Winona to find their doors locked and Larry's note on the door explaining their situation.

We have also had some difficulties, with textbooks not performing as well as we had hoped, our space has become too big for our business to support.

An idea began to circulate after The Blue Heron locked its doors:  What if we combined forces with Larry and Colleen and took half of their space?  This would ensure the continued existence of their coffehouse, and the long-term health of our store.

We are looking to add the cofeehouse experience to your bookbuying experience, and both Larry and I are excited about what a "marriage" of the two businesses would mean for our customers.

There are still some details that would have to be worked out, but I have confidence that we will be able to settle those in the near future.

Here is where you come in.

We need to raise some funds in order to afford the move and other costs associated with relocation.

If all of our customers came down and purchased a few books from our shelves in the next few weeks, we would be able to accomplish our goal.

We believe that joining forces with The Blue Heron will add an energy (and not just caffeine-induced) to your book buying experience, and I am confident it will improve our sales.

I have already worked out a floor plan detailing how we would use the open space in The Blue Heron, and would be excited to share it with any of you who have an interest.  We also have plans to offer classes and seminars on writing through a new venture we are calling the Hawk's Well Literary Center.  I also have my sights on establishing a publishing company, with its first offering to reach bookshelves in 2009.

If you have any questions, or would like to discuss other ways you might help, feel free to contact me at any of the phone numbers listed below.

Sincerely,

Chris Livingston
The Book Shelf

(I received this email and have pasted it here with Chris's permission.)

I spend three minutes around a dog and realize where the word "doggerel" came from

George Washington had at least two greyhounds: Azor, a "huge" dog who was at his side throughout the Revolutionary War and the hilariously named Cornwallis who accompanied him on the tour Washington made of the new states during his first term as President. Unfortunately, George Washington had neither an awesome video camera which his wife gave him for his birthday nor a blog.