Knowing my ABCs

For awhile my job was subjecting me to near-functional illiteracy- I'm so busy I stagger home like a zombie, cook dinner, chat, and fall asleep after watching whatever episode of South Park the F-word downloaded. One good thing about the hours and hours of travelling from that last trip to Canada was being able to wallow through books like a pig in tasty, tasty shit.

1. City of Glass, Paul Auster. I want to like Paul Auster because Smoke and Blue in the Face were such great movies and because he was recommended by Dale, whose blog I can read until I'm blue in the face, but I just don't, at least on the basis of The Brooklyn Follies and this book.

One thing City of Glass has in common with Brooklyn Follies is that they both have really great titles. Somehow that just makes it worse for me that the novels themselves aren't better. The ideas he plays with are fun but his characters are so wooden, so stock, so unbelievable as creatures - I wish he'd just write essays. City of Glass was extra annoying because he introduced himself as a non-omniscient character in it, and I hate when people do that. Makes me think of Martin Amis and then I'm in a bad mood.

2. The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, A.S. Byatt. This was a re-read - I had to re-read it when I leant it to a friend, who then wanted to talk about it, and I couldn't because I didn't remember a damn thing. That's great. I hope I forget it again so I can read it afresh again. Marketed as fairy tales for grownups, but actually about the same level of sex and violence you'd find in the source material for Disney, besides the eponymous novella in the collection which has slightly more sex perhaps, and with a genie no less, which is hot.

The shorter stories are charmingly told without Margaret Atwood-style heavy-handedness, and the novella has that yummy A.S. Byatt charm of playing with delightful, abstract or difficult ideas within an engaging, beautiful narrative structure that was so evident in Morpho Eugenia, the novella that got turned into the vastly inferior Angels and Insects . . . Paul Auster, take note . . .

3. After Dark, Haruki Murakami. Japanese deliciousness. It goes somewhere inside the reader without going anywhere at all, really. Short, seemingly slight, and yet each secondary character is so well delineated they don't seem like secondary characters . . . each coincidence so well written there doesn't seem to be a coincidence . . . Paul Auster, take more notes. I have to write an extended review of this one to keep getting free books, so I'll give the hollas a rest for now, but it's great.

4. Suite Francaise, Irene Nemirovsky. So fucking good. I'd read David Golder before and not really liked it, besides the great scene at the end, so I was thinking this would be more free-book-getting-duty-reading, but no. No no. Rough draft of two parts of a planned four or five part epic, that reads better than most books that get all the time they need. If someone handed it to me without telling me that, I wouldn't have been able to tell, I don't think. Doesn't feel like it ends up lickety-split. Charlotte Bronte-ish in how the descriptive passages surpass the dialogue, though the dialogue is good, and yet so very Russian in its scope, and so very harsh on the decline of the French.

It sounds trite to say it's a tragedy she wasn't able to finish it, when the death of the dimmest dimbulb in the Holocaust was a greater tragedy than a mere book getting abandoned. But I will say I hate the French a little more than I did before for allowing this woman's death before the epic was finished. She was writing at the height of her powers and it would have been a classic, a staggering classic, and it probably already is.

Pop! goes my ears

Two plane rides. Four movies. Hours of pain.

1. Night at the Museum. Masculine fantasy about being a slacker loser and still being a good father because the waxworks come to life at the place where you're a security guard. Especially the cute 'waxworks' of the cute animals who were cutely shot and stuffed. Lousier than it sounds, thanks to efforts at emotional interaction between the horrid Ben Stiller and a bunch of off-set semi-famous types doing cameos as midgets. Whole lines that mean nothing. Rubbish. Pain. Ugh.

2. The Pursuit of Happyness. The story of becoming a stockbroker and rescuing yourself and your son from penury. The premenstrual part of my brain thought it was another masculine fantasy, but the brain brain part enjoyed its message of fortune favouring the brave. It was fine.

3. Wild Hogs. Pain. Pain pain pain. I understand this movie didn't tank and disappear immediately upon release, which is only explicable if the masculine fantasy put forth here - geeky, henpecked half-men can find themselves and earn the world's and their families' respect by driving across the country having unfunny pratfalls - is one that struck some sort of popular chord. Vomit excrement Harley Davidson commercial shit. This movie airs in hell.

4. Music and Lyrics. After all that masculine fantasy I was quite looking forward to some feminine fantasy, figuring a change must be as good as a rest. I was wrong. Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore acting in two different movies, spliced together, both of them really shitty and the result more shitty than the sum of its parts. The chemistry between them was so bad I was confused when they started making out. Opening and closing 80's music video sequences featuring Hugh Grant as a A-Ha-type got plugged by my boss, who liked the film, as a 'redeeming' feature. I just saw an insult to A-Ha.

Home again, home again

Jiggedy jog. Funny how soon this place got to feel like home. Maybe it was because in Canada I didn't go anywhere that could have been home - Luke Duke's place on the very night he bought another house, a (half) night at Giulietta's, a night at the smashing place Sugar had found for her wedding, and one surreal-y awful sleepless night on the plane that I spent wondering how my cat was doing in the hold. Yes. Lexie is here with us now. We braved the douanes and her too-fresh rabies vaccination and her cuteness won us through.

In fact it was quite striking how people didn't crash into my luggage cart and how they smiled constantly and obligingly in my direction when there was a cat carrier perched on top of my heavy, heavy stuff. I imagine it's something like carrying around a cute baby. Nonetheless I am very, very happy the trip is over, and I'm sure my darling is too. She looks perfectly content but I won't be sure she is until it's evident she's figured out this complicated new European kitty litter.

The wedding was incredible, incidentally, the most emotionally and spiritually honest and true ceremony I'd ever attended, and the most evidently happy bride and groom. They did lots of things outside of the tradition that was established over the last hundred and fifty years or so - you know, in the time where the wedding industry took over so getting married became more than getting a bunch of townsfolk to stand on the church steps while the priest shouted "these people are allowed to fuck now" and everybody got liquored up. Despite this I'm sure it appealed to all the traditionalists in the crowd and it was certainly very touching for me. The events and location of the wedding were also incredible - forest vermin and my five horrid mosquito bites notwithstanding it was a great idea to have the events in a place that was like a playground for grownups, where we could run around barefoot and relax.

So, so good to see everyone too - so good - even better than I'd thought. Their spawn, too. Little Bitch's little baby is stunning, and Spencer Tracy is awesomer every time I see him. How scattered we all are. . . representing all over the world, besides Africa and South America. Something should be done about that. I do think it would be a good idea for semi-annual group vacations. See how we change, see how our attachments change, all over the world. Very pretty idea.