Daniel Pinkwater, The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror:
“Welcome to Howling Frog — Books of the Weird,” the fat bald guy said. “I am Howling Frog, the owner, general manager, clerk, stock boy, and janitor — and this is my good friend and spiritual guide, the Honorable Lama Lumpo Smythe-Finkel.”
[...]
“Books of the Weird is the bookstore in which you can find those books you never dreamed of finding, books you never knew existed. I have books about unheard-of places, seldom visited and practically unknown. I have books dealing with miraculous events and strange occurrences. I have books on obscure topics, such as knot-worship in fifteenth-century Switzerland, and how to tell a person’s character by the shapes of his ears. And I specialize in scary books about ghosts, vampires, poltergeists, banshees, time travelers, voodooists, cultists, and Republican presidential candidates.”
“Anything about werewolves?” I asked.
“I’ve got the best werewolf section in town,” Howling Frog said.
“I’d like to have a look at it,” I said.
“Too scary for kids,” Howling Frog said. “What do you say, Lama?”
“Maybe not for these kids,” the Honorable Lama Lumpo Smythe-Finkel said.
Attempting to recite early comic Beckett aloud in an Irish accent (not to anyone, just alone in the apartment, crazy-person like, declaiming to various walls while pacing loops around various rooms), partly for laughs, partly in the name of faithfulness to the originating voice, etc. I do a pretty mean Irish accent, if I may say so myself, the razor R’s and prettily bludgeoned vowels and musical broguey inflections, absorbed from (for instance) Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf CD (weirdly mesmerizing on long car trips!), and recent exposures to Colin Farrell’s melodious Oyrish vocal hotness on Jonathan Ross and in the voice-overs of The New World, and other assorted sources that do not come to mind specifically now. The soohn shewne, having nooh altairrnative, on the noohthing nyew. OK maybe not so mean.
Henry David Thoreau, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”:
If there is nothing new on the earth, still the traveller always has a resource in the skies. They are constantly turning a new page to view. The wind sets the types on this blue ground, and the inquiring may always read a new truth there. There are things there written with such fine and subtle tinctures, paler than the juice of limes, that to the diurnal eye they leave no trace, and only the chemistry of night reveals them.
New car! We buy a Toyota Yaris. 2007 model, former rental, 52K km (32K mi) on it, four-door. Kind of a chick car, but this chick does not mind. Highly fuel-efficient, so saith the literature — gets twenty spazillion klicks to the liter and runs on sunshine and flower petals and bottled unicorn laughter. For a two-year-old ride it looks suspiciously brand new, except for the arachnoid explosion of key-scratches on the right side of the steering column, abstract art yielded by past renters’ blind scrabblings and stabbings for the ignition slot. The exterior is a kind of dark deep chameleonic blue, changes with the light, shading toward Grover-navy at times and Rebo-cobalt at others and occasionally a McDowellian azure sky of deepest summer. We’d’ve preferred black or gunmetal or chilly silver or something chromatically noncommittal, but blue will do. It drives nice. How amazing to have shock absorbers again, to have AC again, to have power windows/mirrors/locks again, to be able to leap into mucho accelerando with the merest insinuation of the toe again. Our Yanksgiving road trip to Florida next month may now be somewhat survivable.
This is our first car whose model name is not a real word. In the past I had my Protege, Laura had her Echo. These were words. Silly car names, of course, but you could imagine the metaphorical qualities the automakers’ armies of brand-identity stoats had in mind, maybe. What in the pluperfect Halicarnassian fuck is a yaris? The word has a strangely anemic, biological sound, watery, clinical, vaguely anatomical, a Martian body part no Martian would mention in polite company. And how to pronounce it? I’ve heard it spoken two ways: 1) rhyming with Paris, and 2) beginning with a Jolly-Roger-ish yarrr. The intertubes unreliably inform me that Toyota’s brain trust coined the word by combining an English phonetic spelling of the German ja (“yes”) with the Greek Charis, the singular form of Charites, the three Graces of Greek mythology — what hallucinating suit brainstormed this bullshit? Perhaps yaris is an acronym. Your Automobile Requires Incessant Servicing. Yuppietastic Automatons Roll In Style. Yay, A Ridiculously Insulting Swindle. Yo’ Ass Regrettin’ It, Sucka. Young Americans Resemble, Increasingly, Spheres. Yodeling Antelopes Relish Incinerating Scranton. Yeti Astronauts’ Rocket-Ignited Spatulas. You Aren’t Really Interesting, Scott. Yawning Apathetic Readers Indubitably Stupefied.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars:
We dined at the fort tonight, and the captain-governor displayed his garden to us. He has indeed received from France three crates of genuine earth. It has travelled two and a half thousand miles, and within it three green leaves are growing; we stroke them as if they were jewels. The captain says of them, ‘This is my garden.’ And when the all-desiccating sandstorms blow, the garden is taken down to the cellar.
Postscript to yesterday’s entry: It is only just last evening, while browsing through online galleries of Rembrandts in search of AC/DC resemblances, that I happen across “The Rich Man from the Parable” and am surprised to recognize that a bad replica of this painting was the picture hanging above the mantel in the Pillar and Post’s Olde Library room where Laura and I had our wedding. In fact we conducted our ceremony while standing in front of it. (You can see it on the left side of the above photo, a wide-angle B&W film shot taken by my brother, who appreciates a good ceiling.)
All this time I’d thought that that library painting had just been a kind of amusingly quaint bit of grotesque old-timey portraiture. Some mystical/alchemical sorcererish weirdo, hamfistedly rendered by, say, a plague-ridden medieval monk armed with a hazy concept of perspective and paintbrushes made from rat bristles. It was ugly, but I liked it. Now that I find it’s an attempt at a Rembrandt copy, I’ve gone back and taken a new look at it — zooming in on where it shows up in the background of one of our color wedding pics — and I can now see just how hilariously awful it is.
Left: Detail from the Olde Library’s replica. Right: Detail from the Rembrandt piece.
Click for a closer comparison.
I guess this goes back to the old idea that you can more easily grasp the genius of the great painters if you compare their works with copies, where you can see what went wrong. Our replica-artist here is not really that terrible, but it’s just that they’ve taken Rembrandt’s evocative, moody, startlingly lifelike scene and transmogrified it into a flat, lifeless, misshapen tableau of what appears to be a softening wax dummy of a malnourished Richard Attenborough, posed in mid-parade-wave, with creepy post-lobotomy eyes bent on vacancy, seconds away from being buried beneath a clutch of enormous floating pastries from Cubist hell. (The fact that I’ve been reading a novel involving art forgeries is purely coincidental.) (Need I even add: I can’t paint.)
Robert Levine, profiling AC/DC for the New York Times last week, gets a compelling quote out of guitarist Angus Young:
The band makes no pretense to art, and its lyrics often contain what might be called single entendres … For this, and much else, Angus is unapologetic. “People say it’s juvenile music, but pardon me” — he speaks these last two words with exaggerated politeness — “I thought rock ’n’ roll was supposed to be juvenile. You sing what you know. What am I going to write about — Rembrandt?”
Below: A detail from Rembrandt’s 1627 “The Rich Man from the Parable”; and AC/DC singer Brian Johnson. I don’t know … maybe it’s just the hats.
AAAGH!!!
Twenty-five years later and still in dire need of some serious haircut science.
So today I turn thirty-two and I won’t lie, I am posting the above image in an attempt to make my parents cry like babies. Oh, boo-hoo! Oh cruel time! Whatever happened to our precious little snowflake! (Actually, I’m fairly confident that Mom and Dad are instead just snickering uncontrollably at the sight of their pencil-necked little snowflake’s monkey face and mullet and ridiculous shirt collar like the rest of us are.) Now if you’ll all excuse me, I’ve been looking at these two photos side-by-side for way too long today and now I must be off to cry like a baby. Oh cruel time!
Jumbo eggs, twenty-minute grits, black coffee, brilliant and brainpan-assaulting kitchen-window sunshine, fizzy orange flutes. Wikipedia the Wise on the mimosa: In some places, it is traditional to use leftover, somewhat flat champagne from the night before to construct mimosas. YES! Hair of the dog that bit me, Lloyd …
Theodore Roethke, “The Coming of the Cold”:
The small brook dies within its bed;
The stem that holds the bee is prone;
Old hedgerows keep the leaves; the phlox,
That late autumnal bloom, is dead.
All summer green is now undone:
The hills are grey, the trees are bare,
The mould upon the branch is dry,
The fields are harsh and bare, the rocks
Gleam sharply on the narrow sight.
The land is desolate, the sun
No longer gilds the scene at noon;
Winds gather in the north and blow
Bleak clouds across the heavy sky,
And frost is marrow-cold, and soon
Winds bring a fine and bitter snow.
My overseas absentee ballot has arrived. Showtime! I am commanded to seal my completed ballot inside the enclosed yellow envelope bearing the form on the back that I have to sign and date, which assures the Erie County elections droids that I am a Special Federal Voter. If you say so. I love that the envelope features a notice box with the heading “Important!!!!” — four exclamation points. I must then slip the signed-and-sealed yellow envelope into the other enclosed envelope, this one a deep golden bureaucrat-manila, and mail that. All very occult. The ballot is certainly easy to read but has this severe standardized-test fill-in-the-Scantron-oval thing going on, a little shudder-inducing, a little hackle-raising, summoning up my long-buried impressions of high school SATs (East Coast style) and ACTs (Midwest style). Don’t get to X the Barack box, as previously stated. Rather, I shall fill in the Barack bubble. The Obama oblong. The, uh, Ellipse of Awesome. No. 2 pencil not required …
Paul Simon: “The lyrics of pop songs are so banal that if you show a spark of intelligence they call you a poet. And if you say you’re not a poet then people think you’re putting yourself down. But the people who call you a poet are people who never read poetry. Like poetry was something defined by Bob Dylan. They never read, say, Wallace Stevens. That’s poetry.”
Trent Reznor, on recording Adrian Belew’s guitar parts on NIN’s The Downward Spiral: “So we rolled the tapes and just asked him to play. He’s ‘Do you want rhythm stuff?’ I said, ‘Anything you feel like doing.’ ‘Well, what key is it in?’ ‘Uh, I’m not sure, probably E, see what happens, don’t worry about it.’ … He said something about just doing something with Paul Simon, and we said okay, this is the anti-Paul Simon.”
(These and other buttons available from democraticstuff.com. Via Catherine.)
The way it works for us U.S. citizens living in other countries is, if we want to vote in a presidential election, we must request an overseas absentee ballot (yes, Canada is considered “overseas”, notwithstanding the lack of an actual sea over which to sail), or, if this ballot hasn’t arrived in the mail by two weeks before the election, we can print out a Federal write-in absentee ballot and send that in instead.
Since the Electoral College system requires each citizen’s vote to be counted within their state of residence, and since we expats by definition don’t reside in any American state, our overseas votes are assigned to the state of our last U.S. address. Pretty arbitrary, but I guess it’s the best they can do. Thus my overseas vote would go down as a New York vote, what with those sixteen months I spent in Buffalo before my Canuckization approval came through.
Of course, it’s not much of a stretch to predict that, on the electoral map, New York State is going to go as bright blue as a freshly asphyxiated Smurf, with or without my piece of paper (which likely won’t even be opened and counted until many days after the networks have called the election for the candidate whose party’s goons have pulled off the most swing-state vote-rigging), but, you know, I am apparently assured a nice warm fuzzy engaged-citizen endorphin rush from playing my part in this bit of theatre, so let’s just get it over with, X the Barack box and rummage for a 96¢ stamp and then hope Canada Post and the USPS can summon up the combined snail-mail wherewithal to deliver the damn thing to the Erie County Board of Elections office before we hear the crack of doom on the evening of Nov. 4. I should FedEx.
