Wednesday 25 January
BlogWeek, Day Three: Cabana Soaps

Filed under Endorsements

One shame in being sick is the way you let yourself go in terms of showering. I showered Sunday for the first time since Thursday morning. Is it gross? I was glad for the cinnamon sweet orange soap we had in the bathroom. Really? I’m going to blog about soap? I’m going to blog about soap. Cabana Soaps bills itself as a sensory experience, and this is accurate. It’s saying little of a soap that you get to smell it while you wash with it. Every soap smells. Cabana Soaps smell better than most soaps, but they feel good. I feel like I can feel how good glad my skin feels when I use them. Also: Zac when he makes soap uses nothing artificial. It’s to other farmers’ market soaps what other farmers’ market soaps are to Dial or something. He’ll ship some to your house!

3 comments  ::  Discuss  ::  2012-01-25  ::  dave

Tuesday 24 January
BlogWeek, Day Two: Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84

Filed under Books

From the end of the fall term until last week, I read 1Q84 (pronounced, right?, /kyoo-teen/ eighty-four?), and I regret the time spent on it. It’s 925 pages. By the end I felt I’d wasted a lot of good hours on a book that should have been 325 pages. Is it a problem with late-career writers, nobody editing them back to decent lengths? I couldn’t finish the last Stephen King book I picked up—Lacey’s Story, was it? Lisey’s?—because after a couple hundred pages I wasn’t halfway through.

Look: I like long novels. I liked Infinite Jest, Bleak House, Middlemarch, Portrait of a Lady. I’d like to read Moby Dick. I’d like to read Proust. I’d never argue these novels need to be shorter than they were (because of course history would immediately prove me wrong, as who knows maybe it will with the Murakami). I’m trying to find a solid way to show that the above novels justify their lengths (a tricky task given what we know of Dickens and pay-rates) in ways that 1Q84 does not, and I’m coming up empty.

Or maybe it’s this: if your novel is about one familyless man and one familyless woman and how they come to fall in love, and if you don’t move around in time or space much, and if your secondary characters could all fit comfortably in a Ford Excursion, you don’t have a 900-page novel in front of you. I don’t care how many air chrysalises are being built. I don’t care how swiftly your publisher hires Chip Kidd to turn your overwrought story into a design experience. No debut writer would ever be allowed to get away with this, and why isn’t that more of a problem?

 ::  Discuss  ::  2012-01-24  ::  dave

Monday 23 January
BlogWeek Day One: The Appurtenances of Sickness

Filed under Endorsements

I’ve been sick this weekend with a throat thing and a chills/body-aches thing. Prescribed Chloraseptic throat spray has been mostly unhelpful, but 1000mg acetaminophen every four hours did fine work on the fever/chills/aches.

Before hearing from the on-call doctor that acetaminophen (which, like “Chloroseptic” I’d prefer to spell with another “o”) was best for body aches, I’d been taking ibuprofen. Of the Big Three in Pain Relief, I take naproxen sodium when I know I’ll be eating regularly, as it lasts longer but will upset an empty stomach. When I can’t eat anything (when, say, hungover) I take ibuprofen. I take acetaminophen never. Is it because I have this notion that it’s older? Or old-fashioned? I’m curious about what the rest of you take. I wish the doctors of the world would agree on some kind of heuristical method. I’d listen. Placebo effects are so strong with me that a doctor could say to get a haircut and dip my toes in bleach and I’d sleep happy and well each night.

Also, the folks over at Gatorade graped up the color of its Fierce Grape variety from what used to be a wrong-but-unscary deep blue, but somehow this has resulted in in a marked grapelessness to the flavor. I’d been a (sorry) fierce admirer, but no longer. Sorry, Gatorade. You’ll need to find another all-star athlete for your endorsements.

2 comments  ::  Discuss  ::  2012-01-23  ::  dave

Sunday 22 January
Catching Up

Filed under Announcements

I still have a blog. I’ve got recent news and things to go over, and I’ll do them once a day this week, like vitamins we’ll all take to resurrect our blogging health. Stay tuned, friends. Thoughts are forthcoming on sickness, cleanliness, books, The Legend of Zelda, and Post-its.

 ::  Discuss  ::  2012-01-22  ::  dave

Tuesday 17 January
Raymond E. Myers: WWII vet, truck driver, active church member

Filed under Uncategorized

(From the Washington [Pa.] Observer-Reporter.)

Raymond E. Myers, 93, of Coal Center, Clover Hill, died Saturday, January 14, 2012, in Consulate Health Care of North Strabane, Canonsburg.

He was born June 5, 1918, in Claysville, son of the late H. Edwin and Gladys Fonner Myers.

Mr. Myers retired as a truck driver for Peoples Natural Gas.

He was a veteran of the U.S. Army, having served during World War II as an ambulance driver in the 4th Division (Ivy), and participated in several major campaigns in the ETO.

He was an active member of First Baptist Church in Bentleyville and member of West Pike Run Grange.

On March 28, 1942, he married Dorotha Morris, who died December 31, 2003.

Surviving are a daughter, Pamela Madden and husband Ted of Williamsburg, Va.; three grandchildren, Shani Madden of Alexandria, Va., Jenny Ward (Adam) of Fairfax, Va., and Dr. David Madden of Tuscaloosa, Ala.; a sister, Aldene Cox of Washington; and several nieces and nephews.

Deceased are four brothers, Harold, who was killed in action in World War II, Randolph, Roland and Kenneth Myers, and an infant sister, Corina Louise.

Friends are welcome from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Monday in Thompson-Marodi Funeral Home Inc., 809 Main Street, Bentleyville, 724-239-2255, where services will be held at 10 a.m. Tuesday, January 17, with Pastor Shirley Edgar officiating. Interment will follow in Maple Creek Cemetery, Fallowfield Township.

In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to First Baptist Church, c/o Janet Ladisic, 113 Washington Street, Cokeburg, PA 15324. Visit www.thompson-marodi.com to leave a condolence message, order flowers and share photos.

 ::  Discuss  ::  2012-01-17  ::  dave

Friday 6 January
Very Good Paragraphs

Filed under Very Good Paragraphs

From Elif Batuman’s piece in the 19/26 Dec 2011 New Yorker on Göbekli Tepe, the oldest man-made thing in the world:

After my last afternoon at Göbekli Tepe, I decided to devote the rest of the day to the other Urfa pilgrimage—the Abraham one [Urfa claims to house a cave where Abraham was born]. I walked along teeming sidewalks, among street vendors selling pomegranates, lottery tickets, novelty Koreans, fresh pistachio nuts, sherbet, bitter coffee, photocopies. One man was literally selling snake oil—a thing I had never seen before—in addition to ant-egg oil, hair tonic, and unscented soap for pilgrims. Handbills advertised a conference called “Understanding the Prophet Abraham in the 21st Century.” A psychiatrist with a storefront office specialized in “ailments of the nerves and soul.” Most restaurants had signs that said “WE HAVE A FAMILY ROOM!”—meaning that the main dining room was for men only. About eighty-five per cent of the pedestrians were men. Nearly all the women were wearing head scarves, or even burkas. I saw one woman so pious that her burka didn’t even have an opening for her eyes. She was leaving a cell-phone store, accompanied by a teen-age boy wearing a T-shirt that said “RELAX MAN,” over a picture of an ice-cream cone playing an electric guitar. You wouldn’t thin an ice-cream cone could play an electric guitar, or would want to. I was reminded of Schmidt’s hypothesis that hybrid creatures and monsters, unknown to Neolithic man, are particular to highly developed cultures—cultures which have achieved distance from and fear of nature. If archaeologists of the future found this T-shirt, they would know ours had been a civilization of great refinement.

 ::  Discuss  ::  2012-01-06  ::  dave

Monday 19 December
I Agree with Destiny Burton.

Filed under queers

The comments following some random blogger’s list of gay people in Hollywood gets heated:

 ::  Discuss  ::  2011-12-19  ::  dave

Tuesday 13 December
Avenues for Irritants

Filed under Comedy

Recent Facebook and Twitter (respectively) complaints about holiday car “antlers” from a friend and then a standup comic (click to enlarge as needed).

Maybe comedy evolved as a way to get people to listen to one’s complaints. Or no wait, that’s what Facebook was invented for. My point here is not anything about quality of cultural critique (friend’s update garnered 10 likes and 21 comments, whereas Delaney’s tweet garnered 28 retweets but only 8 replies), but more about where the comic’s default mode intersects with the poet’s. No ideas but in things. This tweet and all it has to say about those antlers fails completely without that Andie MacDowell sweatshirt.

 ::  Discuss  ::  2011-12-13  ::  dave

Monday 12 December
New Music, Old Book, Local Businesses

Filed under Announcements + Endorsements

One of my resolutions for the new year is to buy one new record a month, at a store here in Tuscaloosa. And not Best Buy or Barnes & Noble, but Oz Music, which has these bumper stickers I’ve been seeing on the more sticker-laden cars around town that say “Support Local Music” or some such.

At any rate, I read somewhere that like most things worth doing, resolutions take practice, and that one should give them a shot in December to see how implementing them for reals is gonna go in January. Today I went in and had fun being a music-store clerk’s dream:

Hi, I’m trying to buy more new music. I have some things I like and things I don’t like. Can you help me find something?

One guy kept pushing Say Anything on me, which sounded from his previews like Blink 182 meets The Bloodhound Gang and I was: Not Interested. I almost grabbed the new Wilco record, but that felt like cheating. Instead I got this:

Fitz and the Tantrums: Pickin' Up the Pieces

And this:

Childish Gambino: Camp

…which latter record was only half a cheat as I knew all about it but had only heard one or two tracks. Then I put both CDs in my car’s 10-disc changer which resides in my car’s trunk, and now I get to actually listen to them rather than get them on iTunes and hope to remember to listen to them.

I haven’t bought a new CD since, oh, maybe The Arcade Fire’s Funeral?
(more…)

 ::  Discuss  ::  2011-12-12  ::  dave

Saturday 10 December
College Applications Asking “Quirky” Questions

Filed under Endorsements

(UPDATE: College applicants: Googling “i felt like i truly belonged when brown” is not going to help you get into Brown. Or maybe you’ve got rich folks…what do I know?)

Here’s a thing I’ve never done, I don’t think: comment on news articles! From Aiming for Brevity: Quirky Application Prompts, found somewhere on the New York Times‘s Web site:

College applications are increasingly testing students’ brevity, as The Chicago Tribune pointed out on Friday.

[...]

Brown University, for instance, has asked its applicants this year to write—in addition to the newly restrictive 500-word personal essay required by the Common Application—25 or fewer words in response to one of the following, rather ambitious prompts: “I felt like I truly belonged when …” or “If I could do something with no risk of failing, I would …”

I am on board. I’ve written here before about how writers should see things like Twitter and Web-page text boxes as fecund challenges the ways poets do certain strict forms. Ditto for college applicants: Everyone can text thoughtlessly, and everyone can write thoughtless essays in five clunky paragraphs. Brevity takes scrutiny, care, and time. Blaise Pascal: “I have only made this [letter] longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”

Ditto² for college applicants’ parents:

Susan Van Horn, a mother of two high school seniors in Illinois, told The Tribune that colleges’ application questions this year were “markedly different” from four years ago, when her son applied to school. She also expressed frustration at the 25-word quotas some applications imposed, telling The Tribune, “You find yourself counting characters and editing ‘do not’ down to ‘don’t.’ It gets that silly.”

You are wrong, Susan Van Horn. “Do not” is not unsilly, it’s needlessly formal. You may think a college application is a formal occasion, but these schools are arguing otherwise.

 ::  Discuss  ::  2011-12-10  ::  dave