magical.

andrew bird's music is simply enchanting!

yes, we've had posts about him already, but i'd just like to reiterate how great he is (in light of the fact that em recently gave me some more of his music to enjoy, AND in light of the fact that my brother's been knocking it, so i feel the need to defend!)!

when i listen to his music, i feel like i'm inside of a cartoon Disney movie--a *good* one--and that there should be singing clocks dancing around my head! and to me, that = good music. ;)

that being said, you dudes should *always* take music recommendations from one miss emily faye to heart! (see previous post) it's just wisdom. pure wisdom.

seriously, you guys need to check out page france. incredible. realy laid back and so wonderful. they deserve to have more than ten people at their shows.

Last night I finished Man Walks into a Room by Nicole Krauss (Either Jonathan Safran Foer is lucky or she is, I can't decide (I think the latter)). This is the story of Samson Greene who is recovering from a juvenile pilocytic astrocytoma. In other words, he has amnesia and cannot remember anything past the age of 12 or before the age of 34. One day, while sitting in his office located in the English Department of, I think, Columbia University, he closed a book and forgot everything. The tumor had been growing unnoticed in his brain for sometime, but only affected him when he closed that book. He was found in the Nevada desert, taken to a hospital, the tumor was removed and he was given a new life. But his old life was there in the form of a wife he could not remember, friends whose faces meant nothing, a mother whose death was a shock, etc. I keep thinking that this all probably sounds like a made for lifetime type movie. But it didn't feel like that. Krauss has a good style, nothing exuberant, just smooth and succint. I liked the way she laid out her story, especially the choice of the opener and closer. This is her first book, you should read it, and then join me for her second, The History of Love, which I have on hold at the library.

Two days ago I finished A Feast of Snakes by Crews. I want to recommend it but it's very depressing. Here's some of the depressing hi-lights: Main character Joe Lon Mackey, who was once a Pro-Football hopeful, runs his father's liquor store; his wife, Elfie, who is the sweetest woman I've ever read, who Joe Lon beats and inexplicably hates; Joe Lon's friends lead Elfie outside while Joe Lon fucks (there's no other word for what he does) his highschool sweetheart on their bed; Joe Lon's sister Beeder, who has been in her room ever since she saw her dead mother on a chair with a bag on her head, rope tight around her neck and a note on her lap; if that isn't sad enough, Beeder likes to take her own shit and rub it into her hair. Have I made you want to die yet? There is also the brutal training of pitbulls to fight to their death, although Joe Lon's father is the one who kicks Tuffy to death.
Why did I keep reading, why do I still consider this book amazing? The answer is in that sentence actually: it was amazing. There's something to be said for a book that genuinely affects you, good or bad. It is not an easy feat. I could read of any old book trying to be depressing and it might not affect me at all if the characters are not interesting or well displayed. Somehow I understood and empathized with Joe Lon, even though he was an incredible bastard and not the kind of guy I typically want to feel sorry for. The ending of the book is powerful, maybe the most powerful I've ever read. Give Crews a chance, maybe not this one if you aren't up for feeling sad. But he's got like 15 novels.

This is the sort of book review that I hate to write; the kind that could never be in any kind of literary magazine. Oh well.

first movie/discussion night a success!

we watched this tonight and had a great discussion afterwards! if you couldn't make it don't worry because i'm sure we are going to make movie night a regular fixture around these parts.

Naked in Garden Hills

Harry Crews' Naked in the Garden Hills is a novel that deals with, I want to say, power and failure. I'll go with that. The novel takes place in probably the 60s and its handful of characters live on a deserted Phosphate mine called Phosphate Mountain. The town is waiting for it's founder, Jack O'Boylan, to return and resurrect the plant and it's inhabitant's spirits - not to mention give them their old jobs back. But Jack's not coming, and what they don't know is that the title and deed are in Fat Man's name. I know, Fat Man, I almost stopped reading it right there. But I let it slide because of the writing. It wasn't Nabakov or anything, but then again Nabakov didn't tell a good story so there's that problem too. Crews is telling a good story. And it involves a lot of tourists, girls dancing in a cage, a 4 foot jockey, and a 620 pound man dealing with the loss of a myth. I was surprised to like it so much but it kept me interested to the very end.

my favorite wife

this movie was alright. i enjoy watching most anything that cary grant is in. the premise for this film sounded decent: on the day cary grant, a supposed widower is remarried, his first wife returns from the island she was stranded on for the last seven years. i think it should have made for an interesting enough film but halfway through i became pretty bored and had several gripes with the film. first of all, no one really seemed to very suprised by the first wife's return, which was odd and unbelievable. now i do agree with jay about people getting all huffy about movies not being realistic enough, but your spouse/daughter/mother you presumed was dead returning would be somewhat emotional i think, even if the movie is a comedy. secondly, the majority of the movie was about manipulating people, which i'm never realy into, even if it is for comedy's sake. i just don't find it very funny, in real life or in movies. but it was watchable, even if it doesn't rank with my favorite cary grant films.

it's sad times when a movie featuring sarah jessica parker is more bearable than a movie with zooey danschel.


sad sad times.

and it is also depressing that of all the people in hollywood, i have to be slightly related to sjp.




i guess it could be worse.

nah.

let's all talk about the pirates of the caribbean.

More like:

Do-Not-Watch-This

"I saw the movie Click this weekend. Did you see Click? The whole universal message of the movie is that you have to live in the moment"
"I saw cars?"
- found review of the movie Click at lunch the other day.

it seems silly to call a classic film 'great'. so i'll just say i really liked 12 Angry Men; which i watched for the first time this evening. the humor, acting, and cinematography are truly top notch.

the river why

i finished the river why today. i read the last twenty or so pages in the garden at phipps. it was lovely. such a fantastic writer. the book is about fly fishing, but like the brothers k and baseball, it's actually about so much more. i know teresa is on the middle of reading it and some of you may someday want to read it so i won't go into any of the plot, but i will say this: david james duncan makes me yearn to be a more spiritual person. there are so many fantastic ideas about god and amazing examples of spiritual living (i hate how that sounds but i don't know how else to phrase it) and loving others. but he never really nails anything down so his writing doesn't come across preachy or religious. the ending of the river why made me terribly sad that i have cut out much of my "spiritual life" and caused me to long for a time when i do feel that connection to my inner self and to something greater than me. i don't know how to go about that at the moment, but i am inspired to start to try. i wish i could better phrase what he makes me feel and what i gain from reading his books without sounding so trite and flakey. i guess the best way i could sum it up is to say that his books are about life and he makes me want to live it.

I finished reading Chris Bachelder's U.S.! this morning. The book is half about Upton Sinclair, the muckraking journalist turned socialist novelist, who is continuously assassinated by right wing anti-socialists only to be exhumed (repeatedly) by leftist optimists. The other half is about America (the title is a pun!). Funny story about me checking this book out of the library: I read that P.T. Anderson's next movie is based on Sinclair's Oil!, though it will not be called that. I was curious so I planned to check it out, but saw Bachelder's book. The exclamation point got me, and the design. I read the back and find that it's about Sinclair. I got both, plus a number of others, as usual (No, I never read them all). I couldn't get into Oil!, though I'm sure I will love the movie.
Funny story, huh? Back to the book. I thought it was entertaining, but not anything exciting. It's sort of a driving book. Like certain music is good to drive to. Only I cannot read in the car. The first half is written in the same vein as Dos Passos' USA trilogy (one chapter is called "The Camera Eye"). Bachelder also improvises on other American writer's like Raymond Carver ("What We Talk About When We Talk About Liberal Arts"), and if I knew more I'd tell you about it.
Bachelder is definitely commenting on 50s era America and McCarthyism. He's created a world where resurrection is accepted, assassins are exonerated and socialism is still an abomination.
It sounds interesting, and it is, but it didn't say anything on a personal level and I didn't really feel for any of the characters. Which, after all, is the only reason I enjoy reading. Well, it's a big reason anyway.
All of that said, give it a shot. It is pretty funny.

arlis & ivy-a short story by john dufresne

When my sister died, I moved the Amana freezer in from the porch and set it in a corner of the kitchen where it belonged. And when I did, the face of Jesus disappeared right off it. I taped up a handy shopping reminder from Saterfiel's Sack N Save on the freezer door-you just put a peg beside bread or milk or Little Debbies or whatever you need. Elvie and I had been together all sixty-six years of my life, all of it in this, our daddy's house. When people die, you begin to notice the space they had taken up with their bodies and voices, with their scent, with the air they displaced with their motion. I'm not proud of what I done, but I could not tolerate solitude, and so I went to the True Vine Powerhouse Church of the Saved but Struggling, not to find Jesus-He has a way of finding me-but to find a widow with the same itch. We married, Ivy and me. I did not impose myself on Ivy in a husbandly way. I started out shy. I ain't much to look on. But I seen worse. Neither of us was very comfortable at first, but we were curious enough and sad enough to get on with it. Ivy felt out of place here, and I told her she ought to make the place hers and she did-moved the freezer out to the porch, and didn't Jesus come back. Looked like he'd aged a bit, but not so much as me. He seemed happy to be back, Ivy said. I got to tell the world. I said, I wish you wouldn't. She said, Arlis, it's a miracle. I said there's miracles everywhere we look, in the bark of trees, in the linoleum, in the bees at their hive. It's a miracle how you run your hand up my arm.

-from Johnny Too Bad

Mixing With Nick

6:58 kills me. And the ending.

At Last!!

Today was the day I finally broke through with this one! After a couple failed start-up attempts over the past few months, I am pleased to say this book has finally "hooked" (yes, awful fly-fishing pun intended) me in!

Here are some things that won me over...

from pg. 22 Gus' description of his somewhat "unknowable" brother Bill Bob which ends with "...he likes baseball...rockets, TV, firetrucks....bow ties, M&M's, Bibles, True cigarettes...and reading the want ads when he doesn't want anything--which is everyday." <--- haha

all of ch. 5b "The Great Izaak Walton Controversy: My Own Rendition"

from pg. 40 These humorous entries in his "God-notebook"
-"Great-Gawd-Almighty"
-"Fathern Heaven"
-"Parsonal Lord N. Savior"
-"R. Lord"

One line in particular was very intriguing to me...only because, as most of you have probably heard me say before, though I have no idea what to do with the whole "Christian" thing I was raised on anymore, I have always taken it forgranted that God can be found/sensed/whatever in nature...at least that's how it's always been for me. But on page 38, the main character expresses something that was very foreign to my own experience and so I found it very interesting. In short, he states, "..I'd fished as intently as perhaps any boy had ever done, and I not only failed to encounter Walton's God, I failed to see the least evidence of His existence." Wow. So, yeah, right there I was hooked.

Though it's a bit premature for me to make a full-on "recommendation", I will say this...I absolutely *loved* "The Brother's K" and therefore was excited to read this book, but the flyfishing details early on left me kinda "eh"...but now that I've gotten thru (and really, it was only the first 20 to 25 pgs. I struggled with), I'm very glad that I stuck it out...well worth it!