friday july 27
In the category of winsome, anthropomorphic nature fiction, Timothy, or, Notes of an Abject Reptile by Verlyn Klinkenborg was last year's unexpected and delightful prize. This little study, translated from the German, is narrated by a tortoise named Timothy, who lived, in fact, in a garden belonging Gilbert White, an 18th century British curate and naturalist. White wrote The Natural History of Selborne, an enduringly popular work of scholarship, and recorded his observations of Timothy in his journals.
Verlyn Klinkenborg slyly turns Timothy, the object of scientific inquiry, into a watchful chronicler of the Selborne environs and a commentator on the strange ways of its human population. The action, if a turtle’s meander can be so characterized, occurs during a week of freedom that Timothy spends beyond the garden gate. I recommended Timothy, or, Notes of an Abject Reptile as an irresistible little gem in 2006.
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I need to be vague so a Major Corporation won't slap me with a SLAPP suit, but I used to be a contractor in the library there. The library was right across from the large auditorium, and one day I noticed everyone from the [censored] wing of the building going in, which was not unusual. But this time, it turned out that 300 [censored] were being told they would no longer have jobs with the Corporation in [censored] months, and that a certain kind of research would no longer take place there.
Everyone took the news pretty well except for one guy who must have found out beforehand what was going on and refused to enter the auditorium. He sat in one of the nice chairs by the library yelling things like, "It's a lot cheaper to hire a PR person than to invent a product that will keep someone's [censored] in their [censored] for their whole life!"
That's the man I want to marry, unless he already is married.
One of my points here is that it's a good thing the companies involved with researching sulfa drugs and the even better antibiotics didn't drop out because the research involved was expensive.
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wednesday july 25
Mark Merlis’s 2003 novel,
Man about Town,
is a low-key but wonderfully resonant story of midlife crisis.
Joe Lingeman is a mid-level advisor on legislative matters to Congress. It’s an interesting job, but not exactly earth-shaking.
He has been in a relationship with his lover, Sam, for fifteen years. Again, comfortable, but the earth doesn’t really move.
Then Sam leaves him. And on the job, he’s suddenly in bed (legislatively speaking) with a homophobic senator who wants to ban Medicare payments to gay AIDS patients. Joe is forced to face the fact that he doesn’t have any of the things he wanted to have by midlife.
And what were those things? He remembers the glimpse of infinite possibilities he got at fourteen, when he came across the photo of a beautiful youth in a swimsuit ad at the back of a suave men’s magazine. It seemed like a window into another world to the naïve, repressed boy he was.
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tuesday july 24
About 25 years ago, my mates and I were drinking 9-cents-a-bottle wine (probably now about 78-cents-a-bottle wine) in the Avignon train station, waiting for the 3 a.m. billet bige train to Italy. A man with a bleeding hand approached us. He spoke no French nor any other recognizable language; just "Tch, tch, tch," as he pointed first to our individual bottles of wine and then to his dripping hand. My classmates scattered, but I caught on and poured a few cups of the cheap wine on his hand. He said, "Tch, tch, tch," and went to a different part of the station.
The paragraph above provides one piece of useful advice, which is that alcohol is a good thing to pour on a wound, or on a potential wound. Rubbing alcohol is best, but you can't count on everyone you meet in a train station at 1 a.m. having rubbing alcohol.
It's hard to write a whole book about poison ivy, because there are basically just two rules about how to treat it in its initial stages, but Outwitting Poison Ivy, by Susan Carol Hauser, who also wrote Outwitting Ticks, makes the subject as lively as possible.
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In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War is the sequel to This Boy’s Life, Tobias Wolff’s classic coming-of-age memoir about growing up with an abusive stepfather in the 1950s.
A National Book Award finalist, In Pharaoh’s Army chronicles Wolff’s decision to join the Army and ultimately, the Vietnam War. Wolff’s voice is painfully honest, rendering the horrors of war and its casualties (including his good friend Hugh Pierce) with both sensitivity and shattered illusions. He is equally hard on himself, examining his own close calls and survival amidst the loss of so many others.
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monday july 23
A few days ago I heard a NPR story about a woman who decided to forego buying things from China for a year. It reminded me of the book I'm currently reading by an author who decided to opt out of the consumer market by not buying anything for one year. As I listened to the news piece and connected the books I thought how nice it must be to make the decision to not buy anything as opposed to not having the money to purchase, which is the way it is for some Americans.
As John Edwards continues his poverty tour during his bid for the '08 democratic nomination, we are again reminded of the lines drawn between the haves and the have-nots in this country. The poor's approach to consumerism is completely different than those of financial means because they don't have the wherewithal to spend. There's no statement they can make on mass consumption by withholding their dollars because more than likely they don’t spend frivolously enough to be missed
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sunday july 22
There is one corpse in the body count and the novel isn't open yet. Richard Bachman, pseudonym for Stephen King, died of cancer of the pseudonym back in 1985. This novel, Blaze, was unearthed by Stephen King and published just this year. It's about a dead guy and written by a different dead guy yet the codex exists right here in my hot little hands in all it's jacketed black and orange glory.
Clayton Blaisdell Jr. is one of the most unfortunate characters of the lot of Stephen King's books. His mother dies and Clayton is left with his alcoholic and abusive father who throws him down the apartment stairs one time too many.
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