Some Words

Every day I ride through a graveyard twice. The most surprising thing to come of this was the speed with which I stopped noticing. It was not that I stopped thinking about the dead people buried just a few feet away from where I was riding. I stopped even noticing the gravestones. In fact, after the second week of this commute, I only really noted the mortuary nature of the path I rode when the funeral home on the edge of the cemetery cremated some bodies. I found myself, panting heavily from the ride, rolling slowly through the cloud of ash that their chimney set off. The funeral home is built into the hill and the smokestack is only a few feet above the path.

The closest I came to thinking about death after that was when I saw a four point buck grazing near the flat stones of a large plot. That seemed like and appropriately cyclic image, and one I would not have expected in Portland, which is hardly rural, but where people still warn you about letting your cat out, for fear of coyotes.

This left me unprepared to crash. It was raining and I gripped the front brake harder than the rear on a tight turn. Guided by the mass of the books in my panniers, the rear tire popped out and I slid along the cement for several yards. I should note that the cemetery hill has some severe drop offs and for several yards I thought I was going to slide off the edge of the road and into the void. Instead I stopped two feet from a solid and impressive granite tombstone. The slope was quite gentle. I was left with the impression that the cemetery is occasionally capable of manufacturing its own business.

Two weeks later, as I struggled up the steepest part of the hill I looked to the left and saw a steep drop, and to the right a gravestone. “Oh yeah,” I thought, “there are gravestones here.”

I’ll never be on KEXP, so who am I to talk, but “Mind Idea” has to be about the dumbest song title/opening lyric I’ve ever heard in the entirety of my life. I mean, I’ve listened to, and liked, some crap over the years. But I was unable to keep from laughing when The Current Song of the Day served up this track. He’s a little more mellow in the youtube video. If you hear the studio version it sounds like he’s thinking “I am the Sartre of indie rock” as he belts out “Mind IDEA!” The rest of his stuff stuff seems, you know, okay. But that opening lyric is like starting a first date by opening the door and earnestly telling a girl: “I’m a very deep guy. I don’t mean that ironically. I’m just really like, deep and existential n’shit.” Once you’ve gone there, it’s just not going to happen.

Darcy O’Neil is looking into vodkas that may use glycerine. I would not be surprised if all of those brands did. I with one or two notable exceptions, everyone I know who’s made claims about the delicate flavors of vodka has come off looking like they’re trying too hard. If it’s in there, it’s beyond me, and people tend to step up like they’re using it to prove other people have no taste. I suspect I know that act too well because I fall into that trap myself.

When I hear the studio version of this I hear echos of Bowie, when Pitchfork listens, they hear Motown.

I can’t say that I’m with them on that.

Please let it be a monolith.

“Leigh was willing to perform oral sex with Vincent Gallo in the 2004 film The Brown Bunny, but said ‘it just didn’t work out.’ Eventually, Chloë Sevigny got the role.”

Floating through the mass of Wikipedia, you sometimes find sentences that just can’t really be written in that neutral Wikipedia tone they seek. This is from the article on Jennifer Jason Leigh

Through Bookslut, I stumbled onto this plea for better Hugo shortlists.

It was interesting and inspiring, but I think it may miss the point of why many people read science fiction. Genre readers are often very similar. Mystery readers are an excellent example, some of them churning through the books in the field at a pace that astonishes and may scare people a little. Looking around the advice on the tubes, you find that mystery novelists especially, and genre writers in general, general are editing one book, working on writing the next, and promoting the one that just got published. The industry has to keep pace with the most voracious readers with low sales and high volume, which doesn’t serve the authors very well, and doesn’t let the books achieve anything beyond a workmanlike mediocrity most of the time. Those sorts of readers are looking for escapism more than erudition, and if there are a large number of voters who are that kind of voracious reader, for better or worse, it will show up as mediocrity in the listed books.

Also of note from that post was that the new Le Guin was good if flawed. This is heartening news. I had given up on her after I felt she phoned in several novels upon closing up the Earthsea cycle.

A few of my friends have kindles, and I’m sure they’ve all read 1984 and have paper copies, so it won’t have effected them much that the title was removed in an act of pure irony by Amazon, ostensibly at the request of Orwell’s estate. This is yet another lesson (many of them provided by the estate of James Joyce) in poor management of your own intellectual capital.

In other, personal, book news, rereading The Diamond Age is a good thing, it holds up very well when you know what is going to happen already. This is a feat that surprisingly few books manage.

This video reminds me not so much of my teenage years, but what I thought would make me awesome back then, if only I could do it.

I find myself wondering what a Dinosaur Jr. show looks like now, is there anyone under 25 there? Or is the early 90s a resurgent retro meme at this point? Didn’t we have to wait a few more years?

I saw today’s Three Panel Soul (Titled “On Monster Manuals,” I couldn’t quickly find a permanent link) and got nostalgic for a hobby that I simultaneously must stay the hell away from. No time right now, but it does remind me pleasantly of my wasted, and maybe not as wayward as it could have been, youth.

It was with some sense of pride that I got to see Franken win. It wasn’t that I loved Franken as a candidate, I wanted one of his primary opponents to win, but he was there to unseat Coleman and he did it. Last week there was a nice little article on Minnesota politics that managed to not be condescending, much to my surprise, given that this was the NY Times.

A while ago I changed my email notification settings with the New York Times. One of the things I signed up for, after having dropped several of their digest notices of articles, was breaking news. Now, I expected this would be the really big stuff and I’d get one ever few days, tops. Instead I get them all the damn time, usually about celebrity deaths. Okay… well then, at least I heard it first? No. In yet another sign of the decay of the newspaper industry. I usually get the notice about 8-12 hours after I saw it everywhere else, including the NYTimes front page.