Obligatory Halloween Post

Pet Costumes!

Author/Title Combo of the Month

The Coming League and the Roman Dream
by
Harry Rimmer

Subtitle of the Month

from Smoldering Women by Burton St John, all caps preserved for added breathlessness:

THE BIZARRE PLOT OF A DEPRAVED WOMAN WHO PAID A MAN TO VIOLATE HER OWN DAUGHTERS


special bonus award!

Most Transparent Pseudonym of All Time:

Yvonne, or The Adventures and Intrigues of a French Governess with her Pupils
by
Mary Suckit

attn BURL

I think you might like this artist.

sign of the times

The Christian Science Monitor is going internet only.

Welcome to the future!

also, how does such a nutty religion publish such a good newspaper?

flickr update

get it while it's hot!

WOW

I picked up a couple of Stephenie Meyer hardcovers at the library sale, not expecting much.

She's part of the current post-Rice vampire renaissance and sells like hotcakes so I grabbed them for the store.

This book graphically demonstrates why you should look up everything you buy, however obvious it seems.

That makes it the most expensive fiction book I've ever had for sale.

For comparison, we sold a pretty nice 1st edition of the seminal Heinlein novel Stranger in a Strange Land a couple of years ago for $600. And that's a cornerstone title for anyone interested in SF.

A complete shock.
I'm betting it'll move fast at $500, making it the single most valuable book I've sold online.

homebody

I'm almost done painting.
Sage Sweater in the entryway is more pastel than I wanted, but looks OK.

It's a nice match for the Goldfinch in the living room, the entryway is a weird shape with a pain the ass super high ceiling over the stairway and the wife absolutely loves it, so it stays.

The kitchen is nailed down. The living room is still more loading dock than anything, but it's serviceable. I've got the office nook set up, but minus broadband it's a girlfriend in a coma. The bedroom is still a disaster. The new bed is great, but the old one is leaned up against the wall waiting for the new floor downstairs and most of our clothes are still bagged up against one wall.
Maybe tonight I'll take a stab at it.

The garage is still stuffed full.
All of the unpacking we've done so far hasn't done much but pry a couple of bricks from the wall.

finds

We took Eamonn to his first library sale this morning.
He seemed to enjoy it, riding front pack with mama in his Winnie the Pooh hoodie, complete with ears.

We picked up four boxes of stock and a couple of grocery bags of pocket books for the store for 80 bucks.
One book of historic photos from the Imperial Valley priced out at 90, so that took care of that.

The most interesting part was taking a spin through the hardcover fiction.
I don't usually have time, since most sales start at 9am on work days. But today I gave it a once over, and found some really interesting books paddling furiously in the scrum, trying not to drown in the the Dan Browns, Nora Roberts and Danielle Steels.

A pretty nice 1st edition of The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin, a book I've never seen in hardcover. Should move briskly at 100. An amazingly fucking clean 1st edition of Black Robe by Brian Moore (a book I believe Bobo teaches). Not super valuable, but it's rare to see a book you can honestly describe as Fine/Fine in the wild, unless it came out last week.

And one for the personal library, an abnormally nice copy of The Ice Schooner by Michael Moorcock.
Old-ish SF and Fantasy is scarce in hardcover period, clean copies are a rare treat.

These are the little sparks that keep dealers pawing through mountains of dreck for years on end.


/edit
Curiosity inspires me to look up Black Robe.
There are 78 1st edition hardcovers in dust jackets, let's see how far up the price ladder I have to climb to find one that's Fine/Fine....

Winner:
#33, at an eminently reasonable $15.00.
I wouldn't personally buy this copy because of a line in the description:
We offer a LIFETIME GUARANTEE.
Never trust book dealers who traffic in the language of the department store.

AT&T sucks a fat one

Called the clown farm Wednesday, having not heard back from them r/e my problematic lines.

I took matters up with a fellow who seemingly had no knowledge of this previous arrangement and walked me through all the troubleshooting steps that had already failed. Eventually he arrived at the positively Hitchcockian conclusion that my lines needed inspecting.

Taking it a step farther than the previous tech drone, he actually scheduled a visit.

So at least I'll know if they're blowing me off without having to call and confirm.

I've dealt with a lot of these folk in the past few weeks and they are all so desperate to be pleasant and amenable it's downright eerie.

Which makes business sense.
The service is shit, but fixing that would be really expensive.
Fine-tuning the script your customer service drones run to placate your irate, sun-maddened subscribers is cheap, so it looks good in a report.

It probably works.
Most Americans don't seem to mind piss raining down from an upper floor provided whoever's emptying their bladder accompanies the shower with a flattering, upbeat monologue.

offline

going offline again until AT&T un-fucks their lines or my next shift, whichever comes first.

And to prove I'm going all out for you, my readers, I stuck one of those wireless thingies on my comp yesterday and sniffed around for unsecured networks in my neighborhood- not a one!

Curse my new rural life in McPalin's REAL AMERICA(tm)!

In the decadent big city I could appropriate some bandwidth neighboring networks in my hour of need. That's one thing the ocean of students was good for. That, and projectile vomiting contests.

I'll try and take some pichurs for a make-up post when I return.

punching the clock

One mid-sized boulder in the avalanche of change that's buried my old life is the daily commute.

I didn't think it would be that big a deal.
I've traveled between town and the coast my whole life. When I was a kid, the coast wasn't much more than a cluster of houses with one gas station & attendant mini mart, a tiny pier overlooking the mud flats, a bakery and a grocery store the size of an average supermarket produce aisle. If you wanted anything or wanted to do anything you drove to town.

The last few years we've been driving out to the coast several times a week, visiting the sizable expatriate community driven off by the financial tyranny of a university town with perfect weather.

But there's a difference between a voluntary, free form schedule and needing to open the store by 10am. It's not a long drive and I enjoy my job, and so lacks the hair splitting blade of existential despair I imagine hovering over many of my fellow travelers.

Still, it puts me in a strange space, one I'm not sure how to utilize.

It occurred, watching the telephone poles go by this morning. that driving to work is the only time most people are alone with their thoughts.
Maybe this explains the attraction cell phones have for drivers.
The unexamined life may not be worth living, but that doesn't divert the national stampede toward ever more cunningly packaged diversions.

screaming fit

Babies are like the mafia...just when you think you're out of some awful, mind-jarring stage of development they SUCK YOU BACK IN.

The Fusser has been happily amenable to reason the last few weeks.
He'll cry, but stops when you pick him up, or change his diaper, or feed him, or satisfy the opaque desire he is so inelegantly expressing.

Then last night, apropos of nothing, mayhem.

The living room turned expressionistically lurid, a suitably Wagnerian backdrop for the aria of destruction pouring from the scarlet cave of his throat.

We tried this, we tried that, expecting nothing, killing time in the trench waiting for the bombardment to end.

It's the only aspect of childrearing I can't take, that sort of hopelessly inconsolable shrieking. One more thing for the 'back in therapy' laundry list....

Birthday Alert: Little Timmy

He's throwing a little thing we like to call PARTY at Chez Farrell this Friday, October 24th.

He promises war crimes and various shades of assing about.


We should start a Withnail & I pool, whoever gets closest to the actual start time is the winner. Tiebreaker is how soon after starting the movie he passes out on the couch.

I say he throws it on at 1:23 am, and passes out right as they leave Uncle Monty's apartment.

Inagural homowning disaster

Call from The Wife a few hours back.

The tenant came to pick up the last of his junk and discovered that the septic tank had spent the days since his last visit disgorging into the downstairs unit, turning it into a makeshift house diaper, if you will.

Not cottoning to the idea of squeegeeing raw sewage around with an infant on her hip she cast about for aid and was referred to Central Coast Casualty Restoration.
(company motto: When Disaster S T R I K E S!)

They're hard at work as I type, having been given permission to deploy ANTIMICROBIAL MATERIALS,which sounds impressively industrial and sort of futuristic, conjuring images of a buzzing squadron of dragonfly-sized robots deploying sterile white foam over a North Sea studded with bobbing turds.

The septic tank guys are en route.

I'm happy this wasn't discovered on a sunday.

big fat flickr update

click click.

No internet at home.
It's like a phantom limb, I can still feel it even though it isn't there.

I have several updates worth of stuff trapped on the deaf-mute computer in the living room.

In the meantime this'll have to do.

Country Life

Ah, the idle existence of the rural squire!

Having successfully trundled our worldly possessions to the new country estate via donkey cart and native porter, we reversed polarity and began extracting the juice from the mass of boxes in the garage.

Gather your life up and compress it into the smallest possible volume, then shoot forward, expanding outward at the next leg of the journey like an octopus darting between reefs.

That's moving.

The new bed arrived this morning, annoyingly.
We moved our old bed and wrestled it upstairs despite looming obsolescence.
I'd have happily slept on the floor for a few days, but babies impose their perspective on events.

We've been welcomed to the neighborhood by a new cast of bird friends.
An owl landed outside the bedroom window on our first full night, and the trees framing the back yard showcase several competing flocks. The idea of seeding the expanse of the backyard with bird and bee friendly foliage is remarkably pleasant.

We've adopted the habit of a daily walk to the bay around sunset.
The little nature preserve at the end of the block clones the milieu of my youth, before houses conquered all.
It's an eerie feeling, persistent deja vu.

When I was seven or eight I ran through an identical landscape on a much grander scale with my dog.
Mom worked full time and the single channel on the teevee was no match for the sprawl of nature (although I always found time for Match Game & Joker's Wild).

I started finding pointed stakes with cool colored ribbons tied to them stuck in the ground, spoor left by surveyors parceling out the fields.
They were great spears for rabbit hunting.
I made a game of collecting as many as I could carry, dragging bundles to my hideout in a sprawling stand of dwarf oaks surrounded by a moat of poison oak.

By the end of the day they were stacked head-high in the main 'room' of my little cathedral.

I'm sure that drove someone crazy.

In the movie of my life we can frame this scene like the natives first glimpse of British ships through the trees in The New World, innocent in the face of absolute transformation.

Author Name of the Month

I give you the learned scholar behind New Theaters for Old,

Mordecai Gorelik

How to avoid hipster baby names

Click Here.

I strongly agree with rule 5:
NO NAMES YOU MIGHT USE FOR A DOG.

Spare your child the stigma of being told to FETCH on the playground!

Treasure Hunt

As of tonight, after I clean the last stray dust bunnies out of the old place, we'll be officially moved.

It was a big mess, surprise surprise.
None of the trucks we arranged for panned out and the wife had to round up a mammoth U-Haul at the last minute. Helpers descended from on high on wings of fire and we stuffed it like a Foie Gras goose.

Note to prospective movers:
Familiarize yourself with any new vehicle before dark, to avoid inadvertent slapstick comedy during the exodus. We couldn't figure out the dome light and my first stab at disengaging the parking brake caused the hood to fly open.

Unloading went much faster than loading.

Absent strict military discipline these things develop their own momentum, and in the cascade of furniture and goods certain essentials went AWOL, blending in anonymously with the massed cardboard cubes of life stacked to the rafters in the garage.

This morning I rooted through lawn and leaf bags piled like civil war cannonballs on the bedroom floor for the day's wardrobe.
The discovery of a pair of boxer shorts exited me all out of proportion, like grasping a small, longed for treasure in your stocking on Christmas day.
The box with bathroom essentials was wilier quarry and we ended up sharing a towel and postponed brushing our furry teeth.

I dropped off the truck at U Haul before work.
Some alchemical combination the unaccustomed vehicle size, its litany of strange road noises and the unusual view afforded of familiar landscapes cast me into a reverie.

I felt like I had always been driving the truck and was going to keep driving the truck forever. As long as I kept the little Fuel Efficiency dial in the green I would never have to stop, I could drive the empty box across the country, slowing as I passed warehouses bursting with potential, teasing them before accelerating back onto the highway with a coquettish laugh.

Fortunately I was following the wife or I'd have ended up stranded in wilds of Arizona, gas tank empty and dreams scattered across the muted sands.

I parked the truck and picked up toothbrushes on the way to the store, then we shared a pleasant breakfast at the counter.

and in other milestones...

'complaining about other people's lists' pt 426

This time Vanity Fair draws my ire.

There are a lot of really excellent films on that list- but you could pick names from a hat and get a bunch of great documentaries. Docs have more greatness per volume than other kinds of film.

Problem one:
WTF with no Errol Morris?
A 'best doc' list lacking Morris is like a H2 without the O- it's something, just not what they claim.

Problem two:
Two Michael Moore films, neither of them his best?
If he makes this list at all, it's for the very genuine Roger and Me. His other films can't hold a candle to it.

Problem three:
Leni Riefenstahl was a propagandist, which is the opposite of a documentarian.
She would make my list not as a filmmaker but as the subject of the excellent doc The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl.

Problem four:
The Maysles brothers are represented, but no Salesman?
Pah, be serious.


And a quibble- the Robert Evans doc The Kid Stays in the Picture is interesting, but far too accommodating of its subject to be great. There is a great documentary in his life, but this one is more interested in buffing its subject's tan to a bronzed gleam than exploring those fresh mounds of dirt in his basement.

IMHO the must-see docs on their list are:

- Brother's Keeper
- Sorrow and the Pity
- Crumb
- Sherman's March
- When We Were Kings
- Hoop Dreams

attn SALLY

DFW interview.

with a Nabokov hook for my butterfly-loving regulars!

LM: I’ve always felt that the best of the metafictionalists—Coover, for example, Nabokov, Borges, even Barth—were criticized too much for being only interested in narcissistic, self-reflexive games, whereas these devices had very real political and historical applications.

DFW: But when you talk about Nabokov and Coover, you’re talking about real geniuses, the writers who weathered real shock and invented this stuff in contemporary fiction. But after the pioneers always come the crank turners, the little gray people who take the machines others have built and just turn the crank, and little pellets of metafiction come out the other end. The crank-turners capitalize for a while on sheer fashion, and they get their plaudits and grants and buy their IRAs and retire to the Hamptons well out of range of the eventual blast radius. There are some interesting parallels between postmodern crank-turners and what’s happened since post-structural theory took off here in the U.S., why there’s such a big backlash against post-structuralism going on now. It’s the crank-turners fault. I think the crank-turners replaced the critic as the real angel of death as far as literary movements are concerned, now. You get some bona fide artists who come along and really divide by zero and weather some serious shit-storms of shock and ridicule in order to promulgate some really important ideas. Once they triumph, though, and their ideas become legitimate and accepted, the crank-turners and wannabes come running to the machine, and out pour the gray pellets and now the whole thing’s become a hollow form, just another institution of fashion. Take a look at some of the critical-theory Ph.D. dissertations being written now. They’re like de Man and Foucault in the mouth of a dull child. Academia and commercial culture have somehow become these gigantic mechanisms of commodification that drain the weight and color out of even the most radical new advances. It’s a surreal inversion of the death-by-neglect that used to kill off prescient art. Now prescient art suffers death-by acceptance. We love things to death, now. Then we retire to the Hamptons.

Full list of author interviews.

archeology of moving

I found a box of letters in my closet that go back 20-odd years.
The persistence of the printed word is an underrated asset in this golden age of binary wonders.

While the lazy slob in me deeply appreciates keeping tabs on people with Facebook, sharing pictures via Flickr, chatting with my friends on Ventrilo and dropping notes via gmail, I won't be stumbling across any of it in a shoebox when I'm an old man.

The wife has kept journals since she was little, ready for moving they take up two good sized boxes. They're a practical solution. With letters you need to intuit things based on replies, which matches nicely my somewhat oblique approach to self inspection.

I like that I once I knew all my friends addresses by heart.
Now, I just start typing and the machine reads my mind.

Retro Video: Cult of Personality

embedding disabled by freedom haters.

attack of the meme

via Burl and Devritsko.

TOP 5 THINGS UNDER $5 I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT

1. coffee
2. tacos
3. toothpaste
4. canned whole tomatoes
5. Cook's Illustrated

TOP 5 FAVORITE MOVIES

1. The New World
2. Vernon, Florida
3. Dead Man
4. Bladerunner
5. Beau Travail

TOP 5 BABY NAMES I LOVE (Besides my own Children’s)

1. Beatrice
2. Violet
3. May
4. Dagmar
5. Marcel

TOP 5 SONGS I COULD LISTEN TO OVER AND OVER AGAIN

all I've been listening too the last few months is Elliot Smith, so this is his list:

1. New Monkey
2. Needle in the Hay
3. Clementine
4. Satellite
5. Talking to Mary

TOP 5 BOOKS I LOVE

1. Ghosts of Manila by Mark Kram
2. Room with a View by EM Forster
3. Neuromancer by William Gibson
4. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
5. War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges

TOP 5 THINGS THAT ARE ALWAYS IN MY PURSE

That's no purse, it's a MAN BAG!

TOP 5 EXPERIENCES THAT CHANGED MY LIFE FOREVER

1. therapy
2. marriage
3. baby
4. being the fiend's uncle
5. washing up at the bookstore

TOP 5 CURRENT OBSESSIONS

1. baby
2. moving
3. baby
4. baby
5. painting the house

TOP 5 PLACES I’D LIKE TO GO

1. Italy
2. Ireland
3. England
4. south of France
5. a real Democracy

TOP 5 APPLIANCES/KITCHEN TOOLS I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT

1. non-sick skillet
2. microwave
3. Kitchenaid stand mixer
4. food processor
5. microplane grater

TOP 5 FAVORITE TV SHOWS

1. Deadwood
2. The Wire
3. Project Runway
4. Whatever Anthony Bourdain is doing right now
5. Curb Your Enthusiasm

TOP 5 PEOPLE WHO’S TOP 5 LISTS I’D LOVE TO SEE

I'll answer these things but I won't promote 'em.

live update

Taking a break from packing up the kitchen.

All the paperwork is done- now we have to move or we'll be living in the dark with no running water behind a redoubt of accumulated garbage.

Bought more paint. A sage-ish green for the entryway, staircase and kitchen and some replacement paint for the bathroom, since I fucked up by getting matte the first time around.

Got coverage for tomorrow afternoon- the down side to a tiny business is not many warm bodies to pick up shifts. I'm taking off at noon to pack and haul.

The fusser is being relatively angelic. He generally stops howling if you pick him up, he's been sleeping mostly at night and mostly for a couple of hours at a stretch, and the puking and screaming after meals have died down.

Awesome!

Bobo, I promise to take pix tomorrow.
Anyone looking to lend a hand, roll by the house any time after noon. The more the merrier!
And thanks to DEVRA for fuss wrangling tonight and hanging around to watch Flight of the Conchords with us.
Be sure to head over to her blog for HOT BOOB CAKE VIDEO AK-SHOWN.
She started updating again- who knew?

The Weed of Conservatism Bears Bitter Fruit

first cold

the Fuss had a headcold last night.

Not much we could do for him since he can't blow his nose yet.
We tried one of those bulb thingies where you're supposed to suck the grue out of their nostrils, but the cure was worse than the disease.
His resulting shrieks channeled the 4th tone and threatened to gash through a portal to some tortured alternate dimension populated by bat-winged mass murderers and closeted evangelical Republicans.

Even asleep he sounded like a small outboard motor.

Not a restful night.

Happily, by the time I left for work his nose had cleared up and he was smiling and chatting away, seemingly unaffected by his ordeal.

happy birthday

to the wife!



I can't top last year's gift, which is currently screaming his head off every evening around sundown.

Maybe some barf-resistant evening wear?
And we still need to take Devra out for a birthday feast...they're starting to pile up!


Other October 6th noteables:

Le Corbusier, inventor of the humongous glass box!

Britt Ekland, erstwhile Bond hottie!

Thor Heyerdahl, raft builder!

Gerry Adams, aka Gearóid Mac Ádhaimh, Irish Troubles-maker!

standards and practices

In the hierarchy of friends the ones who'll help paint your house lounge atop the mountain in Olympian luxury, sipping mead from spiraling golden horns while satyrs hand-feed them dainty morsels from chased silver platters of distilled culinary delight.

Thanks to Meggsey, Simey and Devritsko for plying their brushes like divine lightning bolts in our service.

We finished off the giant bedroom in a light, slateish blue, turning the strangely proportioned space (ten feet across, running the width of the house) into a restful grotto.

I wanted something warm and happy for the living room to counteract the fog that is the traditional atmosphere of our new coastal redoubt. We settled on a warm, buttery gold, bright and cheery without being clownish.

Devra described the original mucus-y yellowish semi gloss as "white, after 25 years of heavy smoking".

I remember the color from childhood. It was the cheapest paint she could find and always looked damp, like a cellar wall in the low country.

The fancy shmancy Ralph Lauren I picked for the living room was thirty bucks. The blue for the bedroom was fifteen.
What would Brand X Off White run?
The house I grew up in, you could do the whole interior with one gallon.
Sure we were dirt poor, but she could've covered the difference with cigarette money.

Mom had a two pack a day habit.
She smoked Bel Airs because they came with coupons, one per pack and a bonus sheaf for buying a carton, like Green Stamps.
She kept them in a little wicker suitcase under the television, rubber banded bales of 100 packed in tight layers, prop drug money from a children's play.

She traded them all in one day, mailed off for a vacuum cleaner and some trinkets.
The cancer was unimpressed by this shell game.

I like painting the place the way I liked helping my grandpa drain the garden pond. Once its done you can see the fish again.

Retro Video: You Dropped A Bomb On Me

Gap Band Goodness.

Embedding disabled by freedom haters.

milestones

The Fusser slept through the night for the first time.

11:30 to around 6:30.

Whoohoooo!

fusser time

It's been a while....

Here are some fresh pix.

moving

we're in chute now so posting will be light.

I have a bunch of links and videos queued up so y'all don't get bored and wander off.

Retro Video: Just Like Honey