pedestrian saga

In fits and starts I’ve been getting a real kick out of LibraryThing (the brilliant book-cataloging-tool-cum-social-network), categorizing the books I own, borrow from the library, work on, want to read… In an outburst of Web 2.0 love, and as an early birthday present for myself (”precious”), I even shelled out 25 clams for unlimited cataloging as a lifetime member.

Allow me to direct your attention momentarily to the right sidebar, where you’ll see the books I’ve been reading lately. That’s a LibraryThing widget! On my blog like magic!

So I’ve been going through a self-help phase (I’ll spare you the details), and then for fun—war comics! I came across Palestine on a “graphic novels aren’t just for kids and hardcore comic shop nerds anymore” list (around the time I was reading Marjane Satrapi’s books) and added it to my own 1.0 reading list. I returned for it when it was time to grab some, you know, light summer reading for my recent vacation.

Palestine collects Joe Sacco’s reports on life in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank during the First Intifada (early ’90s), and his follow-up, Safe Area Gorazde, takes us into a besieged Muslim enclave during the Bosnian war (1992-1995). And that sentence right there demonstrates how much I’ve learned from them! It’s like suddenly I can navigate the language, geography, history, and politics of these terrible wars that raged right under my nose and so over my head. (more…)

So for many years (I’ve lost track of when I started) I’ve been working my way through AFI’s Top 100 Greatest American Movies of All Time. My checklist has been pinned to several different refrigerators in at least two states, and by now I’ve ticked off about 80 of the 100. I’ll earnestly watch a trio of westerns or Hitchcock flicks, then lose interest in mainstream Hollywood and wander off into a Bollywood marathon or a documentary spree (or maybe even see a slew of new movies), only to return to the project months later for another round. By no means do I dig all of these movies, but I sure love checklists!

Let’s see. It happened one night recently that I finally got around to watching It Happened One Night. Solid Frank Capra entry. Good show! Check!

Bringing Up Baby, on the other hand, didn’t happen one night. No, it took me the past three evenings to get through this assault of a screwball comedy. The sensation of watching it was vaguely reminiscent of trying to chase away (catch?) little Jeremy Martin, the fastest runner in my fourth-grade class, as he took schoolyard name-calling to an interesting new level by mercilessly taunting me: “Katherine Hepburn! Katherine Hepburn! Katherine Hepburn!”

The best thing about the Bringing Up Baby DVD (another generous loan from The Best Library) was the gallery of trailers for other Howard Hawks films. This trailer for Rio Bravo is kind of a giddy thrill, especially when the rockin’ baby-faced Ricky Nelson breaks into song and then breaks character to address the movie-going masses. (”There’ll never be another like the ragged woman-wrecked castoff called Dude.” Those folks obviously never predicted the coming of The Big Lebowski.)

Even more enduring a thrill is the reference interview fantasy that introduces The Big Sleep. Check it out!

Tonight I stayed on campus after work to hear Leslie Marmon Silko speak to a class on Native American philosophies that is open to the community. I remembered enjoying her stories in the English class I took that one summer at IU and hunching over a word processor in my boyfriend’s basement apartment to type an essay on the color imagery or something. So last week I borrowed a copy of her acclaimed novel Ceremony from my generous public librarian acquaintances and have been reading it in anticipation of tonight’s lecture. Refreshing, this novel-reading abandon, my first in what seems like a long while. (more…)

On Friday I barfed three times, at ever-shrinking intervals, for no good reason. My appetite disappeared entirely, and I shrank into a pathetic heap on the sofa and in bed (alternatively, in between trips to the bathroom). I passed the day and the night seeking to remain as still as possible, slipping into a vampiric stupor, a vestige of my true self (me! the one obsessed with rich food—ice cream and fruit pies, nachos and fettuccine all’Alfredo, Chianti and Fat Tire, curried peas and precious roasted garlic!) I missed the apparently awesome vault by my favorite OSU gymnast, Mandi Rodriguez, at the last home meet of the season.

Scott came to the rescue with a bottle of nuclear pink pepperminty slime-dicine, and yesterday I managed to choke down (and keep down) a few glasses of Cran-Raspberry, a small bowl of granola, and six stale water crackers. Still bereft of all epicurean desires, I pulled Twentieth Century Eightball off my bookshelf and burrowed into the sofa to enjoy the misanthropic pornography of Daniel Clowes. Late in the afternoon, I got the crazy notion to do something useful and decided to cut the grass. So when Scott wasn’t looking, I hauled our new old reel mower out of the shed and set to work. Maddy ran wide circles around me as I staggered across the back lawn, stopping to catch my breath and steady myself after each pass. Not the bliss of before.

The good news is that I ate a full plate of peas and pasta for supper (though sadly recoiled at Scott’s objectively wonderful garlic sauté) and Inland Empire is playing at 3:00 and 6:40 today. Depending on how lunch goes, I may just be ready to take it on.

So I’ve been volunteering at the public library. This week, when I was looking up a long list of graphic novels in the catalog for one of the librarians, I stumbled upon Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical Persepolis series. (In the library reviews, it was compared favorably to Art Spiegelman’s Maus books, which I received as a lovely birthday gift a couple of years back, but which, alas, I have yet to read. They sit with the Primo Levi volumes on my shelves, quietly gathering dust. I find it challenging to get in the mood for Holocaust stories, you know? Had The Pianist from Netflix during its big Oscar year, and it just sat atop the television for weeks, waiting for me to get in the mood, before I finally sent it back unwatched.) Left the library that day with the first Persepolis, as well as Embroideries, the fabulous story of a multigenerational group of Iranian women swapping bawdy tales by the samovar. (more…)

Tonight Scott held my hand as I made my first edit in that ubiquitous behemoth of a wiki, correcting a misspelling in the entry for The Name of the Rose. (Much, much more on TNOTR soon.) How thrilling and satisfying! And yet the potential for dangerous copyediction…

Day Two of pacing around the house, tense and seemingly incapable of focusing long enough to accomplish anything productive. Meanwhile, the shining sun beckoned, and so I took the dogs out to the OSU farm for a very long walk. Maddy is such a scaredy-dog! Passing by the mellow cattle and the curious alpacas, she stood frozen and wide-eyed and held her fluff-tail low. The sheep were grazing too far from our path to test her shepherd cred. A magnificent raptor hovered above the grass between us, strutting its acrobatics before swooping down for a field snack. A hawk, maybe, with a striking white brow like an owl’s. I didn’t find a picture of the species, but the attendant distractions of the search led me to the happy discovery that this big book is online. I really enjoyed seeing the “double-elephant folio edition” at the Huntington Library.

Did I mention I’m not concentrating well these days?

Back home, I gathered the post and added another job rejection letter to my growing collection. But it’ll be okay, because it turns out Saint Matthew’s Churches out of Tulsa, OK, are poised to pray for me and my job search. In fact, they say in their letter they “FEEL THAT SOMETHING VERY WONDERFUL IS TRYING TO COME TO [ME].” Apparently, the next 24 hours are crucial, because “timing is important to God.” Bad news for a procrastinator like me! As I consider their list of prayer needs, I wonder if I’m supposed to check all that apply. I certainly wouldn’t want them to pray for “confusion in my home”! The Brat Pack can manage that on our own, thank you. They offer to pray for “a money blessing” and even provide a space for me to specify an amount. No blank to indicate the exact make and model of “new car” I might want, however, and could I substitute a bicycle anyway? As for the mystical paper prayer rug I’m to mail back with my needs checklist and my seed gift, I’m with this guy: I’m keepin’ it. Unless maybe Paul Turner would be interested in hanging it with his velvet Jesus at the Darkside.

Ghost Dog found a Way in Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai; I find wisdom in the iBook G4 User’s Guide (on page 63).

When you experience a problem, there is usually a simple and quick solution. Be aware of the conditions that led up to the problem. Making a note of things you did before the problem occurred will help you narrow down possible causes and then find the answers you need.

Last night, I hugged my dogs tight, attempting to shake myself out of a treacherous rut of low energy. We needed to play. So I cranked Ted Leo + Pharmacists and let the moshing begin! In one magical moment, I observed Gordon and Maddy’s intricate, um, furry tango twist and pause right in time with the opening of “Little Dawn”– just at that sweet spot after the bass joins in and TL’s guitar dives down to meet his rhythm boys. Shiver!

Here you’ll find a video of Ted Leo + Pharmacists performing “Little Dawn” live in a Unitarian church. I highly recommend going to the trouble of downloading it.

Eventually I decided to stop dancing with the dogs and sit down to the soup. I was skimming the table of contents of America: the Book, my new kitchen table read (several months coming from the public library), searching for an appropriate point of entry (”Hmm, I already checked out the nude Supreme Court at the airport bookstore…”) when “Shake the Sheets” led me straight to Chapter 6.

The TL+Rx site doesn’t offer audio of that one, but the others I find just as fabulous and inspiring (and maybe a little easier to access technically than the Unitarian gig).

Once you’ve converted, be sure to thank Caption Jockey. The motherscratcher is a music guru.

HST suicide for real? Can’t even form a complete sentence about it, it’s got me so flabbergasted! After all the self-inflicted madness he actually did survive?

Funneled naive anger at 16 into his worldly tales of fear and loathing. Copied Steadman drawings in red and black and blue ink and called myself Jann Weiner. Bought hilarious HST biography for a buck in downtown Chicago and felt like I’d robbed the store. Curled up with Better Than Sex atop my coarse hostel blanket with the windows open on Bologna and laughed and laughed at politics I didn’t understand. Vivid.

HST RIP? Couldn’t be!