Saturday, March 31, 2007

pump up the volume

I couldn't be more in favor of this embedded sharing movement. Like I hear a song on the radio, I do a quick jaunt 'round the net, and the next thing you know, bam!



Pitchfork hooks me up. Check out the lyrics to this Art Brut song that has made me realize that there are two kinds of people in this world: those who would break from your kiss to turn up a pop song and those who wouldn't. I don't know what's a larger number: the times I have committed this act or the guys I have dated who would do it with some frequency. It doesn't have anything to do with the quality of the kiss, and everything to do with the quality of the song.

Friday, March 30, 2007

oprah & cormac on the road

I was baffled and delighted yesterday when I heard the news that Oprah's latest Book Club selection is Cormac McCarthy's The Road. I discovered the news when The Road appeared as an Amazon recommendation with that ubiquitous Oprah sticker in its corner. After convincing myself I was not hallucinating, I went looking for confirmation, and there it was.

Right now, as I write, women across the U.S. are purchasing The Road, and thinking, "Well, the cover's not that inviting, but I'm sure it'll be a good read. Oprah said so." Then they're settling down on their overstuffed couches and starting to read the most horrifying, gut-wrenching tale of apocalyptic devastation to come out in a long time. Too much has been made of this, but we're talking about roasting babies on spits here. I wonder how Oprah really feels about her audience. If I got a little chuckle out of the above scenario, she must have, too.

Yet Oprah has always been about the spirit, and one of the reasons I loved The Road to the extent that I did is that there is spirit and love oozing from the pages of that book. In this way, her choice makes perfect sense. McCarthy obviously felt so; he's granted his first television interview ever. (I'm amused by the Franzen pity and impressed by Oprah's continued willingness to jump into the literary fray - pun intended.) My emotional connection to The Road inevitably extends to the man who created it, and the idea that he will never want for anything material for the rest of his life - thus is the power of Oprah's magic sticker - moves me almost as much as the novel did. It is a well-deserved gift, and I think McCarthy has the gravitas to accept it without even the slightest shadow of selling out.

Thursday, March 29, 2007

so bad it's good

3quarksdaily points to Tony Mora's blog devoted to LA's carniceria store paintings.

a part of her that remains

Camille Paglia on the connections between Hillary Clinton and Hedda Gabler:

Like Nora Helmer in Ibsen's earlier play, A Doll's House, Hedda is trapped in a bourgeois marriage, but she lacks Nora's maternal instinct and spirit of fun. The play is significantly called Hedda Gabler rather than Hedda Tesman, her married name. Like Hillary Rodham, whose initial refusal to take her husband's last name may have cost governor Bill Clinton voter support in his first re-election campaign in conservative Arkansas, Hedda identifies with her military father, General Gabler. There is a part of her that remains, like the warrior goddess Athena, ever-virgin.

Similarly, Hillary's hard-edged militancy (disguised by cheery smiles and pastel hues) certainly comes from her father, a U.S. Navy drill instructor during the Second World War who was punitively harsh on his two sons. The first-born Hillary, with her vaulting ambition, became his true son.

The symbol of Hedda Gabler's yearning for masculine power is her favourite possession, a set of fine pistols inherited from her late father. One of the funniest and most unnerving moments in the play is when, standing in the French doors, she takes target practice in the garden and nearly wings a strolling judge.

But without latitude for authority in the world, Hedda's intelligence and energy turn destructive. Unable to love, she is disconnected from ordinary satisfactions. She plays with others' lives, a malicious manipulation that brings disaster.

there are many sparkleful guys out there

Overheard in New York is branching out - to the world at large and to the astute quips that emerge from the mouths of celebrities, such as:

R. Kelly: All of a sudden you're like the bin Laden of America. Osama bin Laden is the only one who knows exactly what I'm going through.

things you can do

TV on the Radio is doing double duty as a) my plans for Saturday night and b) Ameoba Records' first live EP. They must be exhausted.

Saturday, March 24, 2007

gone fishing

Posting will be light for a few days as I show a visitor the wonders of Los Angeles. Enjoy the weekend!

Friday, March 23, 2007

what are we waiting for?

Even though it's almost a week later, I'm still enjoying this Chris Rock take on the upcoming presidential race from SNL:

hurt

Someone please check in on Isaac Brock. I really don't think this is about drunken Iggy Pop imitation.

Thursday, March 22, 2007

a stage with lots of hallways on it

Now that Aaron Sorkin's no longer busy with Studio 60, he's set his sights on a musical stage version of the Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. Yes, that's what I said.

a lone man jogging

The Economist eulogizes Jean Baudrillard:

Pourquoi pas? When a simulacrum is also a French philosophe, perhaps the most popular of recent decades, he needs a bottle of Merlot from time to time. And since he spent his days considering the seductive power of images and objects, it was fun to observe that he himself had such a power over the woman in the butcher's who wrapped up his foie de veau, just because she had seen him on television.

Via 3qd

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

work in progress

Belatedly via Ed and Gwenda and Callie:

Turn to page 123 in your work-in-progress. (If you haven’t gotten to page 123 yet, then turn to page 23. If you haven’t gotten there yet, then get busy and write page 23.) Count down four sentences and then instead of just the fifth sentence, give us the whole paragraph.

Here's mine (punchline included):

As soon as she hears the door shut and the sound of footsteps receding, Felicia turns to the empty chair that is swiveled at a diagonal towards her. The chair’s upholstery is covered in magenta roses sprouting moss green leaves. She smoothes her housedress and leans forward. Perhaps the chair brings back a time when people cared, when what she had to say was important. Perhaps she sees a figure from her memory, a shadowy disciple with her mouth slightly open in awe. Perhaps she imagines the assertive female voice on the radio news burst into form in her sitting room. When she is alone, the words come, all the words stingily stored up.

“I’m sorry. Pesky congregants. No matter how long it’s been, they still seek me out. True believers always believe. Now where were we?”

yes, I know I'm always banging on about him

I'm glad to see I'm not the only person David Mitchell reduces to well-meaning idiocy. At least Ian Hocking emerged triumphant with an impressive interview under his belt.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

down by the riverside

A friend just sent this to me with the note: If this don't move you, you may be dead!

Monday, March 19, 2007

the 45s were young and fresh

David Bowie reminisces about his high fidelity days.

A record shop was just about the coolest place one could hang out in back then — perhaps not quite as cool as a coffee bar or the burger-selling innovation known as the Wimpy Bar, but it ran a very close second. People who were “aware” were attracted to record shops.

New releases were the high-light of the week and they usually came out on a Friday. This was not always convenient for me as I wanted to be the first to discover the good stuff. Saturday morning was sometimes too late, but often it wasn’t.

There really was no bigger thrill than telling somebody who needed impressing, “You really have to hear this”, as I pulled out the latest by Nervous Norvis. I quickly realised that to recommend was an intoxicating power and it’s something that gives me a true buzz to this day.

shame shame

Dave Eggers Desperate to Welsh on Bad Bet

Saturday, March 17, 2007

better than questions, a questionnaire

I'm looking forward to Jonathan Lethem's upcoming visit to Los Angeles next month - he'll be at LAPL and Skylight. In the meantime, he talks to NPR about giving away the film rights for You Don't Love Me Yet, and he also has a story in this week's New Yorker.

The ritual was made official the first time he invited me out for a glass of red after the movie, as though that were the real point of the afternoon. We’d sit at some Madison or Second Avenue wine bar in the dimming hours, invariably alongside those waiting for their dinner dates, those who made even me feel old. Whether Blondy ever felt old I couldn’t guess. His grandiosity, his U-turn anecdotes, his contempt for the obvious statement didn’t invite such guesses, only the tribute of gratified awe. I gave it. Blondy was like a skater up his own river, a frozen ribbon the rest of us might have glimpsed through trees, from within a rink where we circled to tinny music. I told him I had quit acting the first time we left a movie theatre together, before even finishing a glass. Blondy’s intimate smile seemed to say, not unsympathetically, that it was all for the best.

Friday, March 16, 2007

the grit and the details of being and feeling

Slate has Stanley Crouch on the cynics, sluts, heists, and murder most foul of film noir.

Noir's popularity was inevitable. How could American audiences resist the combative stance of an unimpressed hero whose ethos could be reduced to: "Is that so?" How could they fail to be lured by all of the actresses cast as Venus' flytraps? Everything in film noir takes place at the bottom, in the sewers of sensibility. It holds that the force of the world is not only indifferent to, but obviously bigger than, the individual, which is why personal satisfaction, whether illegal or immoral, is the solution to the obligatory ride through an unavoidably brittle universe.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

we all started somewhere

And you thought Ryan Gosling was just an Oscar nominee...

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

married to the sea

Sometimes I don't quite understand the comics at Married to the Sea (from the creator of Toothpaste for Dinner), but lately we've been on the same hilarious page. Check it:

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

give some direction to the taste

Tom Lutz checks out the "new throng of authors" who want to save us from English departments and our reading selves.

What the writers always insisted was that people are better off reading Tolstoy than some yahoo from the University of Akron deconstructing Tolstoy, and who would disagree with that? Whoever it is, they seem to need a lot of convincing, because scads of authors have published books advising them to beware the snobs and schoolmarms in academia and look at "the text itself." The "how-to-read" genre is venerable, already well under way when Noah Porter published "Books and Reading, or What Books Shall I Read and How Should I Read Them?" in 1871. There is something odd, though, about the latest slough of anti-academic books offering to teach us "how to read." Perhaps it is the fact that they are written by academics like professor Prose of Bard College. But perhaps it is because most of these books are only masquerading as guides to reading. What each really offers is a series of explications of famous passages, much like, well, academic criticism.

cue rimshot

Jossip on the new Claire Danes/Patrick Wilson Gap commercial for the "Boyfriend Trouser":

Actress Claire Danes is as good at stealing "boyfriend trousers" as she is at stealing boyfriends.

neko case in 2022!

Future Rock Hall looks at the artists who will be eligible for future Hall of Fame inductions. The Beastie Boys, Madonna, and Metallica come up next year, but we'll have to wait until 2016 for Pearl Jam, PJ Harvey, and Ricky Martin.

Saturday, March 10, 2007

show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy

I can't say I exactly aced this World Book Day quiz (via Bookslut), but I got the questions right that will allow me to sleep at night.

Friday, March 09, 2007

we are never far from damp stains and cracked ceilings

Alison Lurie gives Alain de Botton the NYTBR treatment.

One difference between de Botton and most contemporary authors who write informally about serious topics (though seldom with so much originality and charm) is that he is not concerned with telling us how to make money, become famous, improve our health or appearance, or attract desirable mates. Nor does he wish to challenge or reinforce our social and political views. Instead, he hopes to make our lives happier and more interesting. This goal may be particularly relevant today: recently, according to The New York Times, there has been so much general discouragement and gloom, especially among the young, that several colleges and universities have introduced psychology courses whose avowed intent is to teach undergraduates to feel better about themselves and the world. De Botton's new book, The Architecture of Happiness, would be a natural for the syllabi of these courses, since its basic aim is to show how buildings can affect and improve our lives.

De Botton's attribution to architecture of not only cause but, by implication, conscious intent has interesting parallels. For young children, almost everything may seem alive and conscious: not only their own toys, but trees, trucks, tables, and TVs. The idea of objects having agency was also once common among adults: in the Middle Ages there are records of a court case in which a three-legged stool was tried and executed (appropriately, with an axe) for causing several people to trip over it and injure themselves. Even now we express similar ideas: you will hear someone say that his new Volvo is a real sweetie and never lets him down, or that her mean old computer is acting up again. If questioned, they would probably claim these statements are mere metaphors; but they are clearly the residue of a primitive, childlike way of thinking.

single and 28 million years old

This Wonder Woman pilot from the creators of Batman reveals that even being a superhero doesn't protect a single woman from parental harassment.


I think we can see why this show didn't quite make it. It's not half as good as the (previously posted) pilot of Batgirl from the same production company.

Thursday, March 08, 2007

don't try these stunts at home

9 Laws of Physics That Don't Apply in Hollywood:

3. Everything is Illuminated: The Myth of Radioactivity

Film would have you believe that radioactivity is contagious and makes you glow in the dark. Where did this idea come from? The Simpsons? Perhaps, but the truth is that the most common forms of radioactivity will make you radioactive only if the radioactive particles stick on you. Radioactivity is not contagious. If a person is exposed to the radioactive neutrons from a nuclear reactor, then he can become slightly radioactive, but he certainly won’t glow. And because radioactive things emit light only when they run into phosphor – like the coating on the inner surface of a TV tube – you don’t really need to worry.

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

jean baudrillard (1929 - 2007)

I am saddened by the death of Jean Baudrillard, a vastly important thinker and a personal inspiration as I struggled to get out of grad school, the ultimate deterrence machine. The following is an excerpt from Simulacra and Simulation (1981).

Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. To begin with it is a play of illusions and phantasms: pirates, the frontier, future world, etc. This imaginary world is supposed to be what makes the operation successful. But, what draws the crowds is undoubtedly much more the social microcosm, the miniaturized and religious revelling in real America, in its delights and drawbacks. You park outside, queue up inside, and are totally abandoned at the exit. In this imaginary world the only phantasmagoria is in the inherent warmth and affection of the crowd, and in that aufficiently excessive number of gadgets used there to specifically maintain the multitudinous affect. The contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lot - a veritable concentration camp - is total. Or rather: inside, a whole range of gadgets magnetize the crowd into direct flows; outside, solitude is directed onto a single gadget: the automobile. By an extraordinary coincidence (one that undoubtedly belongs to the peculiar enchantment of this universe), this deep-frozen infantile world happens to have been conceived and realized by a man who is himself now cryogenized; Walt Disney, who awaits his resurrection at minus 180 degrees centigrade.

The objective profile of the United States, then, may be traced throughout Disneyland, even down to the morphology of individuals and the crowd. All its values are exalted here, in miniature and comic-strip form. Embalmed and pactfied. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin does it well in Utopies, jeux d'espaces): digest of the American way of life, panegyric to American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. To be sure. But this conceals something else, and that "ideological" blanket exactly serves to cover over a third-order simulation: Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.

The Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of this imaginary. It's meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusions of their real childishness.

Moreover, Disneyland is not the only one. Enchanted Village, Magic Mountain, Marine World: Los Angeles is encircled by these "imaginary stations" which feed reality, reality-energy, to a town whose mystery is precisely that it is nothing more than a network of endless, unreal circulation: a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions. As much as electrical and nuclear power stations, as much as film studios, this town, which is nothing more than an immense script and a perpetual motion picture, needs this old imaginary made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms for its sympathetic nervous system.

running the numbers

Chris Jordan's latest project - Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait - "looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics."

Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics tend to feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or $12.5 million spent every hour on the Iraq war. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.

"Plastic Bags" (full-size and detail zoom above) depicts 60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the US every five seconds. Clicking through for many more provocative compositions strongly encouraged.

giant hobo bags on the conference table

Gawker asks an architect how realistic the new Banana Republic ads are.

Gawker: So what is it like being surrounded by nubile 23 year olds in khaki coordinates at all times?

Frankie:
I am not really sure, to be honest with you. I think I may be involved in some different types of architecture than these people.

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

urban cows & strawberry shortcake hoodies

John Dicker just got back from India and has posted over at Newspeak! about the stuff he saw.

  • Street smart dogs: The traffic is so completely nuts in and around Delhi that the many feral dogs walk on sidewalks and appear to look both ways before crossing the street. Sometimes they were just hanging out in the median of a busy road looking at oncoming traffic with an expression like, “I’m not getting my mangy paws near any of that shit. Think I’ll just go to sleep…”
  • Two monkeys: on a bike - one wearing a charming pink pinafore.
  • Lots of toilets, not so much toilet paper.
  • Trucks brightly festooned and painted but lack tail lights.
  • Three people and their goat in an auto rickshaw.
  • Camels pulling the equivalent of a Tough Shed.
  • Feral dogs with bulging teats.
  • Road construction crews consisting of three barefoot men sharing a blowtorch.

Monday, March 05, 2007

langhorne slim!

I don't think there's anyone I've been dying to hear live more than Langhorne Slim. (Many thanks to songs:illinois for the original tip back in '05.) I have some live recordings of a show he did on a boat in Brooklyn (?) that just blow me away. At one point, he threatens to "bring it" and I won't reveal what happens next. OK, he f*ckin' brings it. I often look sadly at his MySpace page and wonder why he won't come to LA. Well, someone's looking out for me because - thank you so much, Spaceland spam - I just found out he's playing tonight for FREE. He goes on at 9:00 and I'll be there with bells on. So should you.

fun with sunday reviews

Two reviews of note in this weekend's newspapers...

Ed Champion on William Vollmann:

The prolific writer William T. Vollmann once traveled to the Arctic, nearly freezing to death, to know what it was like to feel cold and hungry. He smoked crack cocaine with prostitutes to hear their true-blue tales. He survived a mine explosion in a Balkan war zone, with a close friend and another man dying in the Jeep he was sitting in. He authored a 3,300-page treatise, "Rising Up and Rising Down," which examined various forms of violence, applying them to a moral compass.

These rugged credentials suggest the right author for a book on poverty. But "Poor People," which has the comparatively well-off Vollmann compiling his conversations with the downtrodden, is fragmentary and often contradictory in tone, much like poverty itself. In his book's "dictionary" section, Vollmann defines being "poor" as "lacking and desirous of what I have; unhappy in his or her own normality." But Vollmann, traveling to Thailand, the Philippines, Russia and several other nations, never quite pinpoints a norm. He styles his own "phenomena" of poverty as an alternative to the United Nations' "dimensions of poverty." But if Vollmann wishes to take the U.N. to task, a book composed largely of anecdotes and meditative banter may not be the best way to do so.

Russell Banks on Milan Kundera:

Not surprisingly, then, reading “The Curtain” is like spending a long desultory afternoon into the evening sitting over coffee and cigarettes in a pleasant cafe listening to Milan Kundera hold forth on history, literature, music, politics, large countries versus small, East versus West, the lyric versus the novelistic, Paris versus Prague and so on into the night. One has the impression that Kundera, at least on the page, is a fabulous talker and not an especially good listener. But he is 78 now, and he has lived through the military occupation and liberation of his country twice and has endured more than three decades of exile; he has written at least three of the most admired novels of our time, “The Joke,” “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” plus another half-dozen books of fiction. Kundera’s opinions, reflections, memories and desires are well worth listening to.

Besides, he is one of the most erudite novelists on the planet. Not since Henry James, perhaps, has a fiction writer examined the process of writing with such insight, authority and range of reference and allusion. For instance, while analyzing Tolstoy’s description of Anna Karenina’s suicide, he notes in a tossed-off, parenthetical aside: “Stendhal likes to cut off the sound in the middle of a scene; we stop hearing dialogue and start to follow a character’s secret thinking,” which leads him to speak of Anna’s last thoughts: “Here Tolstoy is anticipating what Joyce will do 50 years later, far more systematically, in ‘Ulysses’ — what will be called ‘interior monologue’ or ‘stream of consciousness.’ ” Which in turn leads him to observe that “with his interior monologue, Tolstoy examines not, as Joyce will do later, an ordinary, banal day, but instead the decisive moments of his heroine’s life. And that is much harder, for the more dramatic, unusual, grave a situation is, the more the person describing it tends to minimize its concrete qualities. ... Tolstoy’s examination of the prose of a suicide is therefore a great achievement, a ‘discovery’ that has no parallel in the history of the novel and never will have.” End of parenthesis.

Sunday, March 04, 2007

sunday short stack


"People are like birds: on the wing, all beautiful; up close, all beady little eyes." - Mignon McLaughlin


Saturday, March 03, 2007

save the stand-alone section

Over at LAist, Callie Miller has a rundown of the LA Times Book Award Finalists. It pretty much goes without saying who I want in the fiction category. Now if the LA Times could just get it together when it comes to their book coverage.

Friday, March 02, 2007

his brainchild now consorts with the bad guys

I've been wanting to post a link for awhile now to the incredibly enjoyable series going on over at Slate: Clive's Lives, a selection of essays on twentieth-century thinkers, movers, and shakers from Clive James's new book Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts. It was this week's entry that finally got me off my cyberduff: Alexandra Kollontai and the flaws of Soviet feminism.

A famous figure among the Old Bolsheviks, Kollontai was a sad case, and sadder still because it is so hard to weep for her. Her career is a harsh reminder that feminism is, or should be, a demand for justice, not an ideology. It should not consider itself an ideology and it should be very slow to ally itself with any other ideology, no matter how progressive that other ideology might claim to be. Kollontai was an acute and lastingly valuable analyst of the restrictions and frustrations imposed on women by the conventional morality of bourgeois society. Fifty years later, Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer did not say much that Kollontai had not said first, even if they said it better—as they were bound to do, because they were proposing feasible modifications to a society already developed, whereas she was trying to make herself heard over the roar of chaos.

Previous entries in Clive's Lives include Anna Akhmatova, Dick Cavett, Duke Ellington, and Terry Gilliam. I can't mention Clive James without citing one of my favorite poems, "The Book of Enemy Has Been Remaindered":

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy's much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life's vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one's enemy's book --
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seeminly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys
The sinker, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of moveable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.

Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the blare of the brightly jacketed Hitler's War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyart with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretense,
Is there with Pertwee's Promenades and Pierrots--
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor's Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
"My boobs will give everyone hours of fun."

Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error--
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.

Thursday, March 01, 2007

march comes in like a baby tiger

This is the sort of headline that just slays me:
Tiger, Orangutan Babies Playmates at Indonesian Zoo

Lord help me, there's a slideshow.