My Mistake

I make many. A coworker often wears a Not A Fan shirt. Rather than inquire, I simply assumed it was some athletic purity movement, like No Logo but about corporate distortion in sports. Apparently it isn't. It is crazy talk and i am relieved that i didn't inquire. I don't think he will read this.

Wishing Hope Solo Was Ill

Manuel Neuer demonstrated poise today. The pair of second ties in the Champions League semifinals were ecstatic evidence that football is an amazing game and nothing else compares. I could offer an analogy with Steve Erickson's Zeroville which moved me immensely. I wrote elsewhere that during my entire adult reading span, this is the book I wish that I would have penned.  I then read his The Sun Came In At Midnight and the pose motif  of lost children and amniotic insanity wore thin.

A few days later I read Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. What a waste that proved. Really cool bug people attack the Earth and in response, the humans declare that bright kids are culled into training centers and then we have Mitt Romney in Sparta. Trust me, it becomes much worse after that.

Scott Parker, I Feel Your Pain

The torque of the cosmos was apparent this afternoon, leaning on my tender soul with overtones of message and meaning. I was listening to the Bryan Ferry dong Alphaville and the book at my feet was Zeroville. The uncanny was at hand. I froze. Time resumed and I reflected.I finished two books last week Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff and Pump Six by Paolo Bacigalupi. The first one conspired to destroy my hope in literature. It failed. it also failed as literature. The second was a collection of stories by the author of The Wind-Up Girl. I liked those, well, most of them.

I also read Study in Emerald by Neil Gaiman, a story where he imagines the possibilities of Sherlock Holmes encountering the monsters of Lovecraft. Consider me unimpressed. I found it juvenile and flat. Michael Chabon was much more successful in his The Final Solution.

Then I encountered Zeroville.

The Sweet Purview of Bobby Zamora

Lists remain attractive. Likewise schedules create a few trembles here and there. Despite my predilection for ranking and rating, I have little success with adhering to plans for reading. My interests enkindle and crash to the earth as something crosses the radar and alters everything. Paolo Bacigalupi is just such an aberration.

Just Think

The author Paolo Bacigalupi was unkown to me until about 26 hours ago.

The gasp of bad taste

The waves of the zeitgeist continue to undulate, often at my expense. My reading continues rampant as my desire to write sulks and atrophies: go figure? During our recent trip to Miami I visited the city's Holocaust memorial. I was moved. Despite having issues with the explicative essay chiseled into its marble wall; exclamation points don't contribute to exposition and who really believes the Wehrmacht to be as effective in 1944 as they were in 1940? Aside from that, the spatial sense of the memorial is haunting. Since that trip I have read The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman and The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn. I was prepared to not appreciate both of these texts. I was in fact deeply moved despite these predispositions.