It feels like a down sort of afternoon, so I thought I’d try to counteract that by talking about some things I like right now. The list is very incomplete, but it’s a start:
- Tim Wakefield took a no-hitter into the 8th inning tonight. This wouldn’t matter much to me — I tend to think no-hitters, while cool, are pretty flukey — but Wakes is 42 years old. Think about that for a second. I did, and it put me in mind of one of my favorite books from last year, The Brothers K, by David James Duncan. The Brothers K is about the Chance family, and its patriarch, who makes a dramatic baseball comeback late in life. I know, I know, it sounds like a cornball book, but it’s so good, even if you’re not a baseball fan.
- The tenor saxophone on The Stooges’ “Fun House.” I’d embed the song here, but it isn’t available on Lala yet. Just go buy the CD and listen to it. It’s, dare I say, raunchy.
- My friend Kiki Petrosino’s post at The Millions. I can’t do it justice, so, here: Sometimes, when I am writing poetry, I find myself wishing for the fluorescent orange belt I once possessed in my youth, when I was a “safety” at the crosswalk, ushering the smallest kids past the hot front grills of cars and school buses. I want other people to notice me and know that I’m a poet. Frank O’Hara says: “if/I ever get to be a construction worker/I’d like to have a silver hat please.” Totally!” Kiki has written a book of poems about Robert Redford called Fort Red Border. She’s brilliant and so is this post. Go read it.
- The weather today. “Clear, cool and windy” is an underrated type of weather.
- The first 120 pages of Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. I’m a tenth of the way through this book (it’s a bahoemith) but I’m already at that point where I can’t wait to find time to read it. How can you not love paragraphs like this: Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stepndous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo–which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn’t a stupendous badass was dead.
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Fun House is filthy, transcendent and so undeniably wonderful. Iggy sounds like he’s getting socked in the stomach—and enjoying it—in just about every song, and the repeating lyric “I feel all right” always sounds so NOT right. One of my absolute favorite things. And yes, we had great weather today.
Well, the Vroman’s blog was on my Like List until I found out I wasn’t on theirs.
Gillian, you’re on our “love list.”
I love The Brothers K. A colleague found out I had written a baseball book of my own and said he’d be sending me a book he knew I’d like–it was TBK. I read the sprawling novel in one w/e and for me, captured the confluence of family, baseball, and the craziness of religion (another area of interest of mine).