You will take my complaints on the chin and think, "It's only Amnon."

I recently read The Genizah at the House of Shepher by Tamar Yellin, another free book sent to me as an early reviewer at Library Thing. It was the second book in two months to employ the expression "chalk and cheese" which I had hitherto never heard. But that's not why I'm mentioning it here. I'm mentioning it here because of this paragraph, from page 32. Aside from the bit about reading at speed, I have to say... well, ouch.

He had his books spread ostentatiously on the table when his guest arrived, to create the impression of a great scholar, though in fact he was nothing of the kind. Raphaelovitch had read a great many books in his time, but was hampered by his inability to remember any of them. All he could recall were the titles, of which he kept a careful list tucked inside his sleeve for emergencies. He read at speed, believing that the mind could retain more that way. Apart from the standard texts he never went over a book twice, since anything of importance must have been stored in his brain the way sedimentary rocks are laid down by time. On the other hand, any book, once read, became his possession, and he could not bear to part with it.

Weltschmerz

I've just read The Discomfort Zone, a memoir by Jonathan Franzen (previously mentioned on my blog here) that I believed, until page 30 or so, to be a novel. Once the realization hit that it was actually non-fiction, I felt a deep disappointment, though if I had been enjoying the read, and I had, what did it matter? It mattered because I had been expecting all the bits of life I'd been ingesting to ultimately Lead To Something, the way they invariably will in a good piece of genre fiction, narrative fiction. A good Tolstoy, where all those different lives would ultimately been seen to be inextricably intertwined, a good Dickens in which the handsome stranger in part two is later proven to be the son of the widow of the powerful landowner sent to jail in part one, a good John Irving in which the beating begins in the first paragraph and doesn't ease up the slightest bit for the next 250 pages. I'd already read The Corrections, after all; I knew what to expect.
No, it's a memoir, and I still enjoyed it and read it to its finish, but without the expectations of It All Coming Together, and of course, it didn't. It wasn't fiction, it was Life. And the realization that accompanied all of this, that Life is actually life and that my own too, will be a memoir and not a novel, well, out of this hole I have not yet climbed.

Just wondering.

If it is true, as it sometimes seems to me to be, that I identify to a ridiculous degree with whatever novel or memoir I am currently reading, that I become so truly lost in a good book that the real emotions of my real life are felt less keenly than those absorbed through the fingertips, if indeed I am what I read, for the duration of the reading it, then why, well why, for what possible reason, do I read so many lonely and depressing books?

What could be better than getting paid to dance?

Getting paid to read, of course.

Well, so far I don't get paid to read, but I do get some free books. I am a proud Library Thing Early Reviewer.

Yay, me! So far I've gotten advance copies of two books to read, The Break-Up Diet by Annette Fix and Imagine Me and You by Billy Mernit. Neither was spectacular, but they were both just the sort of book I would read. Hooray for free books!

Let's go to the movies, Annie.

I want to see Then She Found Me because I read the book by Elinor Lipman, who I also met and loved, and because I also love Helen Hunt. But I haven't met her.

Wango?

Minutes of the Life

A quickie, because I want to get to bed reasonably early tonight (and as I just told a friend moments ago, early ends now, seeing as how it's midnight).

I had a really lovely weekend. For one thing, I got a really odd sunburn on one side of one leg only, and who could argue with the wonderfulness of that?

Also this weekend, I got a lot of sleep AND I got a lot stuff done[0] AND I spent a lot of time outside AND I read a great book[1] AND I spent a lot of time with my boyfriend AND I went to yoga[2] .

[0] Like, my taxes. WHY DO I OWE LIKE $5000 AGAIN??? TAXES SUCK. Also, I choreographed three dances yesterday. In the park. How great are iPods?

[1] Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Of course, since everyone else loves this book, there's a part of me that wanted not to love it, but there is no denying it: it is fabulous. Of course, I am a little cranky that people have begun to think the name of my blog is derivative of this book, as though they have any connection at all, as though I'd ever heard of the book when starting this blog, or even two years earlier when I first used "ReadDanceBliss" as my username on some networking site somewhere. But there is a huge parallel there too; check it out.
Read/Eat? I LOOOOOOVE to do these at the same time, love to lose myself in both. Reading and eating - this is my favorite hedonism.
Dance/Pray? Her "pray" is actually largely yoga, which is not so different from dance. Plus, the particular kind of dance I teach is meant to be a religious practice of sorts, and I am often called up to teach a "Prayer Through Dance" workshop.
Bliss/Love? Clear.
I can't deny it; I loved this book. I read the "Eat" section on Friday, a day I spent largely in bed or at an outdoor cafe. I read the "Pray" section on Saturday, the day I went to yoga and choreographed three dances. I read the "Love" section today (Sunday), the day I spent in lazy comfortable bliss at my boyfriend's place. Ahhhhhhhhhh.

[2] First time with my fabulous new birthday-present yoga mat - thank you D&A!!! It was woooooonderful (except since it's new, it was really slippery and I had to work extra hard to hold on and now I'm extra sore! But I am unbelievably happy to be this sore :)

In other news that you probably already know, I really want to buy a house, like, soon. Like, in 2008. Got advice? Books to recommend? Brokers, agents, lenders, managers, renters to introduce? Hook me up! Tell me what you know or what you wish you had known! HELP!! I am so terrified.

Goodnight!

lynx

[0] Ok, so I've been sent over to Stuff White People Like a few times in the past and it never quite did it for me until today - the latest entries are goddamn funny.

[1] I know, I know, you've already read this article on irrationally holding on to options because you saw it on reddit or whatever, but *I* just read it (thanks jjd!) so ppppbthhhhht to you.

[2] OMG!! Speaking of a few of my favorite things, check out Librarian Dress-Up. We're not just talking librarians here, we're talking librarians dressed as Wonder Woman. Be still my heart.




CWID: Image from this crazy bookmark site.

Because "nothing says 'reading is fun' like guns and booty-shaking, right?"

I know there's all this controversy about the song: is it satire? Is it a failed attempt at a positive message? Is it stereotype-reinforcing or boundary-shattering? Ya-dah ya-dah - it's a goddamn funny song with a goddamn funny video. See it here: video and read some of the more interesting commentary on it - I particularly like the comments on quillandquire.
Now, can someone point me to the LA Times article, because I can't find it. Kthanks.


OKFINE it's not JUST a goddamn funny song. YES it's a parody, which, like all good parodies, brings into focus a little bit of the ridiculousness of its subject. YES it's a public service announcement, because even if it's got curses in it, it's also got damn good messages in it (just like this blog, donchaknow). YES it's stereotype-reinforcing AND boundary-breaking. It's smart AND funny. And catchy, no? I especially like the R.E.A.D.A.B.O.O.K. refrain :)

"Let me know, bubele."

Wait, Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer are married? To each other?? Why didn't anybody tell me? (Image and commentary on this from my favorite snarkers here.)

Bookslut, November edition... belated.

How did I fail to post this? I just found it in my drafts... oops. Well, December and the eagerly-awaited year-end round-up coming soon.

An easy (for you) month: I only finished five books in November, and I've already blogged about two of them separately. We had:

• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. More non-fiction that reads like fiction, my favorite kind. Another one for my Metaphors That Don't Suck^TM File: "He had merely fallen face down across the bed, as though sleep were a weapon that had struck him from behind."


• Burning Bright by John Steinbeck. I love theme-and-variations kinds of stories. This structure of the "Play in Story Form" was an interesting idea but hard to believe in as a new genre. This is a tiny book and yet it gets in deep and quickly, and still manages to keep being surprising. I really liked it.


• The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley. About this book I've said too much already.


• Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk.


• A Year in Van Nuys by Sandra Tsing Loh, also already blogged here.

Judaism: from the folks that brought you the weekend.

Fabulous quotation of the day, from 52portions.com:

"Judaism is the world's most obsessive-complusive book club. Every week, religous Jews read a portion or 'parsha' of the Hebrew Bible, so that at the end of a year we've read the whole thing. Then we start all over again."

The Haunted Bookshop

Before we do the big November Bookslut Breakdown^TM, let's spend a few moments with a chance encounter. I love to browse used bookstores, of course, and I usually end up buying 60 million things I hadn't exactly planned on buying... but there are many books floating about in my mind as things I intend someday to read, so if I find a used copy for some silly price, of course I'm gonna get it... I own many many books that I have not yet read, but that means that whenever I finish a book, I wander out into my living room/office/library and get to shop my own shelves for what to read next.


Anyway, I recently discovered the fabulous Iliad Bookstore and wandered in there and indeed bought 60 million books that I was delighted to find. Most of them were books I'd heard of, and things, like I said, that I already intended someday to read. But I did pick up one book that I'd never heard of, and which I took sort of on a whim. It was The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley.

Now, I'd heard of Christopher Morley only by having seen a quotation of his in some other book I read long ago; I'd never actually read a book of his. But I liked the quotation an awful lot, and it was very near to Halloween when this chance encounter took place, in a newly discovered dusty and wonderful bookshop, and by god the name of the book is The Haunted Bookshop! I had no choice.

"For paradise in the world to come is uncertain, but there is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven which we inhabit when we read a good book." he says on page 26. Clearly, I was in love.

Now, may I quote at you until you cry?

Let me tell you that the book business is different from other trades. People don't know they want books. I can just see by looking at you that your mind is ill for lack of books but you are blissfully unaware of it! People don't go to a bookseller until some serious mental accident or disease makes them aware of their danger. Then they come here. ... People need books, but they don't know they need them. Generally they are not aware that the books they need are in existence... I am not a dealer in merchandise but a specialist in adjusting the book to the human need. Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a 'good' book. A book is 'good' only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error. A book that is good for me would very likely be punk for you. My pleasure is to prescribe books for such patients as drop in here and are willing to tell me their symptoms. Some people have let their reading faculties decay so that all I can do is hold a post mortem on them. But most are still open to treatment. There is no one so grateful as the man to whom you have given just the book his soul needed and he never knew it. ... The world has been printing books for 450 years, and yet gunpowder still has a wider circulation. Never mind! Printer's ink is still the greater explosive; it will win.
--pp16-18

"Her cheeks were cool and ruddy from the keen air, her face lit with the tranquil satisfaction of those who have sojourned in the comfortable city of Boston." --p38

Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries... When you read that book you can feel it blowing up your mind. It leaves you gasping, ill, nauseated--oh, it's not pleasant to feel some really pure intellect filtered into one's brain! It hurts! --p115

Check this one out and note that this book was published 90 years ago. 90!
"We had to beat [Country], yes, but the absurdity lies in the fact that we had to beat ourselves in doing it. The first thing you'll find, when the [X] gets to work, will be that we shall have to help [Country] onto her feet again so that she can be punished in an orderly way. We shall have to feed her and admit her to commerce so that she can pay her indemnities--we shall have to police her cities to prevent revolution from burning her up--and the upshot of it all will be that men will have fought the most terrible war in history, and endured nameless horrors, for the privilege of nursing their enemy back to health. If that isn't an absurdity, what is?" --p114

"All right," said the bookseller amiably. "Miss Chapman, you take the book up with you and read it in bed if you want to. Are you a librocubicularist?"
Titania looked a little scandalized.
"It's all right, my dear," said Helen. "He only means are you fond of reading in bed. I've been waiting to hear him work that word into the conversation. He made it up, and he's immensely proud of it."
"Reading in bed?" said Titania. "What a quaint idea! Does any one do it? It never occurred to me. I'm sure when I go to bed I'm far too sleepy to think of such a thing." --pg170

"But we are what we are, and Roger was even more so." --p172

On Not Writing

What English-language poet has not at times rebelled against a language in which the suffix -s makes a noun plural and a verb singular? ---W H Auden

So, as I've mentioned before, people around me seem to think I'm meant to be a Writer. I myself haven't really believed this since around about the 6th grade, but at least a few of my friends are convinced I will someday write novels and lots of other people are always asking, "Do you write?" with an unmistakable tone of "You idiot, why aren't you Writing?"

Also as I've mentioned before, I recently went to see Ann Patchett, author of the fantastic memoir Truth & Beauty and the lovely novel Bel Canto, read from her new book Run. The reading part was great, but the Q&A that followed was even better, and one of the best bits was the story about this extremely humbling conversation she had with her stepson on the day she had completed both writing her latest novel and reading one by Henry James. "Oh, you finished the new book, that's cool," the son remarked. Then, "Wow!! You finished the James? That's great! Congratulations! What did you think?!" and on in this breathless excitement.

Why did the former accomplishment garner such lukewarm praise, such a muted response in comparison to the latter? "Consider how many people have read all of Wings of the Dove compared to how many have written a book," he told her. She had to admit he was right; in a way, it was a larger accomplishment to have been the consumer than the producer. In this instance, the consumers, the readers, were a far more elite group.

Smiling ruefully over this anecdote later that night is when I first happened on the snarky and wonderful 101 Reasons To Stop Writing. Messages from the universe, gentle reader?

Well, but then I post a nothing post about *not* posting in response to someone messaging me "why don't you write in your blog anymore" and I immediately get five comments urging me to keep writing. Mixed messages from the universe, then, my five gentle readers.

Close to home, so to speak.

Sitting in my cafe (admit it it's a bagel place) (but I don't eat bagels) (it's called "NY Bagel & Cafe". It's a cafe! They serve coffee!) (but I don't drink coffee) on Van Nuys Blvd, reading A Year in Van Nuys by Sandra Tsing Loh. I can't get my bluetooth keyboard (hand-me-down) to connect to my fancy Treo (hand-me-down), so I take out my notebook to write in, as usual. I read the following line (p198):

"I am not even packing a (crutch of the literati/crack cocaine of the chronically self-involved) Writing Journal."

Wow. Ouch. Wow.
And this:

"How about your friend Jolene?" Ben shoots back. "The Blocked Novelist/actress/lyricist/playwright/whatever. Maybe she should move to New York."
"Actually," I say, "Jolene originally came from New York--or perhaps the word is fled."
"And now she lives in Santa Monica. Practically rent-free."
"Exactly. A musical based on Los Angeles bohemian life would be called not Rent but Rent Control."

Wait a minute. I originally came from New York. My apartment is under rent control. Wow. Ouch.

Oh God, now this. Page 215. I actually clasp my hand over my mouth when I read this, here in the cafe bagel place on Van Nuys. She rants on and on about the life of a writer and how it is drudgery and not romantic and absolutely soul-sucking and ends with:

"Do you guys hear me? I've had purer 'highs' off paying my bills with Quicken!"
"'Quicken!' they murmur. Apparently they like Quicken too."

WOW. OUCH. RDB, this is your life. A quick look at statistics from the past six months or so of my journal, in which I write nightly (see "chronically self-involved", above) -

Number of instances of the word sex: 2

Number of instances of the word Quicken: 19

Bookslut, October edition.

So, in case it wasn't already clear, I like to read. And I keep a sort of bookblog elsewhere on the web, but I've really been wanting to record my progress and post my small commentaries here as well. I just can't quite figure out how to work that into the stream of this blog... for now, I've decided to post just this one post about the six books I finished in the month of October.

A note about the hyperlinks to book titles - I do that "Amazon Associates" thing, which means that if you click on one of my links to get to Amazon.com and then buy anything, not necessarily the book I linked to, I get a small kick-back from the money you spend. It's a FABULOUS way to let me know you're out there reading - please click-through from one of my links whenever you want to buy something from Amazon!

• I'm Not the New Me by Wendy Mcclure
  This is written by the girl who writes Pound and who found and annotated those hilarious Weight Watchers cards. SO damn funny. The book was great, especially if you happen to be all obsessed with a) blogging b) weight loss and c) dating. Hello, my life.
  
  
• A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr
  I can't believe how fantastically wonderful this book is. And it's non-fiction. I'm nuts for non-fiction that reads so much like fiction. And it's pretty fantastic to almost know someone in it; I can't remember actually meeting "Billion-Dollar" Charlie Nesson, but I know his daughter and I have fantastic memories of his house - I've referred to it as my dream house for years - and they mention the house itself in the book... twice! Ah, our little brushes with greatness. No, seriously, read this book.
  
  
• Run by Ann Patchett
  I went to see Ann Patchett read from this book and it was loooooovely! First of all, Ann herself was absolutely lovely, self-assured and comfortable and sweet and funny and quick and incredibly likeable. She walked into the reading room a few minutes before she was scheduled to start and announced that she might as well sign some books right then, so the wait wouldn't be as long afterward. People immediately start to grab their books and get up from their chairs to go to the table, but she quickly waved her hands: "No, that's ok, I'll come to you." And she spent the next five minutes or so walking around the room, perching on empty chairs and signing books, until it was time to begin.
  
  I was pretty amazed at how many stories she told. First she just talked, and her little anecdotes were very nicely contained short stories, and then later when people asked questions, her answers were also nicely-packaged little gifts. [More on this to come]
  
  
  
• Exile and The Kingdom by Albert Camus
  I love Camus and I really love this from McSweeneys. And I love how Camus can write about nothing and make you love it, this beautiful, beautiful nothing. Sometimes Italo Calvino strikes me the same way.
  In this collection is "The Artist at Work" in which is the fabulous line: "'History shows,' he would say, 'that the less people read, the more books they buy.'" With these ever-bigger Barnes and Nobleses and other big-box-book-stores and yet the seemingly ever-diminishing numbers of actual readers, this seems sadly, absurdly true, no?
  
  
• Wild At Heart by Barry Gifford
  A book club called "Nobody Reads In LA"? FABULOUS. First rule of book club: don't talk about book club. See you next month, Chuck.
  
  
• Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
  Here's the lesson: correct economics depends on a wide view, not a narrow one. One must look at all the far-ranging effects of a policy on all groups in a system, not just on the immediate or local effects. One must trace the consequences on all groups. That's it. He says it many times, many different ways, and using lots of different concrete examples of the fallacies that are strongly believed due to the failure to apply this rule of wide perspective. Pretty damn readable and comprehensible for an economics book, for a non-economicsy girl like myself. What's cute about this book is that it was first written in 1946 and my edition was revised for 1979 and the author talks about having hope that we may still learn from our mistakes and may still save ourselves from economic ruin in various ways (social security policy, rent control, etc)... but just as he must have been dismayed to see that not so much had changed for the better from '46 to '79, I'm willing to bet things wouldn't look much different to him today either, nearly 30 more years later. But the hope is just so cute: "There is a real promise that public policy may be reversed before the damage from existing measures and trends has become irreparable." Hee hee!
  More serious cuteness is the way this guy waxes poetic... while discussing economics. On page 171 he writes:

  Yet the ardor for inflation never dies. It would almost seem as if no country is capable of profiting from the experience of another and no generation of learning from the sufferings of its forebears. Each generation and country follows the same mirage. Each grasps for the same Dead Sea fruit that turns to dust and ashes in its mouth. For it is the nature of inflation to give birth to a thousand illusions.

  He later calls inflation "the opium of the people." Who knew economics could be so cute?
  
  I also recently read this article and like how they summarize a piece of what the book is saying very nicely here: "The make-work bias is best illustrated by a story, perhaps apocryphal, of an economist who visits China under Mao Zedong. He sees hundreds of workers building a dam with shovels. He asks: 'Why don't they use a mechanical digger?' 'That would put people out of work,' replies the foreman. 'Oh,' says the economist, 'I thought you were making a dam. If it's jobs you want, take away their shovels and give them spoons.'
  

"The world is perverse, but it could be worse." [0]

My friend Cotton recently (by which I mean, nearly a year ago), blogged about a non-glowing (that's an RDB-style understatement, in case you aren't yet familiar) review he was surprised to find in the first few pages of a book he was reading by Iain Banks. He asks the questions you'd ask: did someone with a conscience feel the need to warn the unsuspecting reader? Was the idea that potential readers would be so intrigued by the bad reviews that they'd be more likely to read the book? Equal time? Truth in advertising? etc.

One option that I considered that Cotton didn't mention was that it was actually an accident that those reviews were included in final printing, after maybe being in drafts as a spoof or a joke or whatever, and accidentally not having been removed.

I'm telling you this fascinating story because I just had reason to ask these questions myself. I read the fabulous Harper's Magazine and this month's issue includes an ad for the new book by Jonathan Franzen, The Discomfort Zone. Is the text in the image too small to read? The second review says, "[A] total lack of humor... perverse" and the fourth says, "Odious... incredibly annoying."

So, what's the deal? Is it a gimmick to catch my attention (it did)? Is it an inside joke style review, given the title and subject of the book? My theory of the mistaken inclusion is ruled out by the fact of this being one small clear ad, not pages of filler reviews that no one reads. Why'd they do it? Was it Franzen's idea? More importantly, have you bought me this book yet? I loved The Corrections.

[0] From the poem "Sonnet for Minimalists" by Mona Van Duyn.

I. Want. This.

Wow. A bookcave. A bookcase with a little nook for you to climb into and read. How is it that no one else thought of this before? How is that I don't have one of these? Wow.

But can my books all be blue, instead of pink? I kind of hate pink.

(By the way, I found this by way of moonrat who calls herself a "bookwench". You probably know by now that I call myself a "bookslut", so the question is, What is the difference between us? What are the philosophical and social implications of choosing one label over the other? Why does she get paid to read books and I don't? Why or why not? If so, as what?
Yeah - both her blogs are cool, so check them out if you're a bookwhore too.)

"If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

I have just (and I mean just) read A Man Without A Country by Kurt Vonnegut. I found it accidentally today in a used book store (which bookstore I also found accidentally today) and brought it home and then sat down and read it. And loved it. And having just finished it and closed it and glanced at the back (I almost never do this before reading a book, only afterward) I see now that the New York Times Book Review says that reading it is "like sitting down on the couch for a long chat with an old friend."

I'd have to agree.

I'm not even the biggest Vonnegut-head; it's not that I liked it because I am crazy about every book he ever wrote, though I know there are many people out there that do feel that way. It's actually been quite a long while since I read one of his novels.

Anyway, it's a very quick easy read, in the sense that it doesn't have a lot of pages and the printing is very big, plus there are illustrations and Vonnegut doesn't use a lot of long words. But it's good, and I guess what "good" means to me in this context is that it gave me a lot of things to think about and caused me to jump up out of my chair once or twice, and I sure love that feeling.

It's the Eve of Yom Kippur, often said to be the holiest day of the year in Judaism. (I may even go to temple tonight, on my own, for services, something that hasn't happened in... oh, ever.)
Therefore, the quotation I'll give you tonight from KV is religious in nature, sort of:

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

"Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers" in the Pentagon? Give me a break! (p98)

Hapworth 3, 2007

I've never really been a newspaper reader, a fact that has brought me varying levels of embarrassment over the years. Now that I listen to NPR for hours every day, I have no problem with my non-newspaper habits. I also have never subscribed to the New Yorker, although I spent many years living with various people who did, so I got to read it a lot. Now I subscribe to Harper's Magazine, and that's enough for me, thank you; it's monthly and it's dense, and if I attempted to read a weekly or a daily or probably even an additional monthly, I'd never read anything else. I much prefer to continue my book habit as it currently stands.

Anyway, so since I've never read any newspaper regularly, I've of course never read The New York Times regularly, though I've also lived with subscribers to that on and off for many years. For a while, I was very into the Sunday New York Times Magazine, and a lazy Sunday morning spent reading it. I used to joke that I didn't have to read the whole thing; the game was to find the inevitable reference to J D Salinger and then I could stop. Honestly, it was *always* there. Always. Once it was on the very last page, in the crossword puzzle, but it was there.

So, a friend of mine has read New York magazine for years, and every time I look at that one, I sort of sigh and wish that I read it (and that I still lived in New York). It seems to be just my flavor of humor and pseudo-intellectualness and snarkiness and artsiness and well, perhaps if I did live in NY, I'd subscribe. This friend visited me here in LA recently and left behind a few issues for me to read. I was just now finishing up one of them, having enjoyed it but still feeling relieved that I didn't have to do it every week. I felt a sense of total freedom to page very quickly through and past all the "this week in NY" listings, since a) it's from about two months ago and b) I'm not in NY... and then there it was: a call-out box entitled "A Perfect Day for Bananafish". Do *all* publications with NY in their names have to contain a Salinger reference?? Does this really happen every week in this one too? Do I get to play the game again with the other three issues she left me? Oh, the joy :)

The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, waistoids, dweebies, dickheads...

a) I know, I've been falling behind on the posting. Ten days to go until I'm outta camp, yeah!! Deep thoughts to come.

b) I know, you've already read this, because I'm the one out of the loop. But in case you haven't, this article about class distinctions as mirrored by Myspace and Facebook is pretty interesting.

c) I played "trading lessons" again on Tuesday; I taught the Lion a dance and he gave me an army-style workout... so now I can't move and everything hurts. Ouch! Also got into the batting cage again and hit some slightly faster balls. Love it!! Really want to spend more time in there and see how fast I can hit. Doubly inspired after reading Shoeless Joe last weekend on the plane ride to and from New York.