Last night, caught in some sort of TV doldrums, Mrs. Millions and I ended up watching “The National Scrabble Championships” on ESPN2. Two pasty guys hunched over a table doesn’t typically qualify as a sport, but we figured we’d allow ESPN2 this digression from its usual content. Or maybe since the poker shows have been such a hit, they’re trying to introduce more “seated around a table” activities to their lineup. Regardless, since we’re known to whip out the Scrabble board, we watched. It was mildly entertaining. One of the commentators was Stefan Fatsis, sportswriter for the Wall Street Journal and author of Word Freak, a look into the odd world of competitive Scrabble. A couple of years ago I gave the book to Mrs. Millions, and let her know that I’d like to read it when she was done. She ripped through it, and started talking about “bingos” and “combos” and other strange things. She read the book so intently that the it literally fell apart – torn binding, pages scattered everywhere – totally unreadable. So, I’ve never read the book. And she’s beaten me at Scrabble ever since.
My Scrabble Curse
Another Good List
Ms. Millions and myself are expecting a number of house guests for Thanksgiving, so there probably won’t be much posting on the old blog for a few days. Luckily for you guys, though, I’ve brewed up a post chock-full of fascinating info for all of you. First off, Time Magazine columnist, Andrew Arnold put together a list of 25 best graphic novels of all time as part 2 of a series commemorating the 25th anniversary of the birth of the graphic novel, which, according to him (and many others), was the publication of Will Eisner’s A Contract With God: And Other Testament Stories. I haven’t read it but it’s supposed to be incredible. At any rate, Arnold has put together a great list that includes a couple of my favorite books of all time. Here are the ones from the list that I have read.From Hell by Alan Moore was lent to me, forced on me really, by a friend of mine who is really into comic books. I was skeptical, but this one turned out to be pretty riveting. The art, especially, is magnificent: noirish fields of black create an ominous mood that permeates the story.Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware: This is one that really transcends the genre. When I read this, it made me wonder why people aren’t making graphic novels out of everything all the time. There are so many stories out there that can be made fascinating by the artists’ pen. Everyone should read this book.Maus Vols. 1 & 2 by Art Spiegelman: It’s hard to put into words how incredible these books are. If anyone requires proof that the graphic novel medium, when wielded expertly, can bring more to the table than the plain old written word, then these books provide it. Reading Maus is an emotional experience, and I think a lot of that emotion comes from reading a tragic story rendered in a format that seems so innocent. Everyone should read these two books, too.Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud: I’ve talked about this book before. There is something about comics, about the format of comics, that makes them enchanting and that makes them peculiarly well-suited for telling stories. I had always just accepted this as fact, but McCloud decided to find out why, and the result is a phenomenal book — itself a comic — that is both illuminating and entertaining. I should also thank Scott for pointing me in the direction of this list via his blog.More Mutis ManiaThis is good. This is really good. I open my email today to find this email from friend and fellow Alvaro Mutis & Maqroll the Gaviero obssesive, Brian:Man, oh, man, do I have some info for you! I was just casually glancing through a copy of Video Store magazine, when you wouldn’t believe what movie I came across…. “Ilona Arrives with the Rain.” Yep, apparently, it’s a Columbian film from 1996 that’s billed as “A dangerous romance full of international intrigue…. Based on the novel by award-winning Columbian author Alvaro Mutis.” Not sure if its really any good, but am still very curious to see it. A DVD is being released by Facets, and Amazon has a release date of December 16. Here’s the link: Ilona Arrives With the RainI’ll definitely be checking that one out.MoreMy friend Edan, who loves cookbooks, wants everyone to know that Home Baking: The Artful Mix of Flour and Tradition Around the World is a great new book by globe-trotting husband and wife team Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. And since we’re talking about cooking, here’s a quote from the book I’m reading right now: “‘Restaurants make lousy hobbies. You have to be obsessed and driven and completely out of your mind to own one.”But you had–”Two, yes. But Alice,’ Pete said almost tenderly, ‘I’ve been totally nuts my entire fucking life.'”
Reflections on Fear, Freedom, and Growing Up
Recently two people who wouldn’t seem to have much in common—my 26-year-old brother and my one-year-old son—have both had me thinking about wonder and fear, and how their experiences of those two things are similar to each other’s, and different from my own.
My brother Ryan is traveling right now, halfway through a backpacking trip that will last through to the early summer. Before he left, he took a Saturday morning bus down to Philadelphia to say goodbye. I waited for him on the front stoop of my apartment building, with my son James perched on my hip. We spotted him when he was still a block away and even at a distance I could tell Ryan was grinning; as the youngest sibling in our family, he had always been the one left behind, but now it was his turn to skip away.
Each morning I wake early to the sound of James crying down the hall. Like my brother abroad, the world is a strange place to him and he’s often scared. I bring him into the bed where he nurses with my wife; then it’s up for breakfast and the official start of the day. I’ve lately become an expert with our toaster; the bread always comes out just right. I eat my cereal while James munches on his diced banana, sometimes smearing the fruit across the table, sometimes putting it into his mouth.
Over the last few weeks James has learned to “cruise,” that is to walk side-shuffle by holding onto the edge of a couch or by pressing himself against a wall. It was while watching him try to bridge the short gap between our bureau and our bed that I first thought about how his days are like my brother’s. The previous evening Ryan had sent an email about a harrowing bus ride he’d just taken into the Himalayan foothills north of Delhi. He said that when he’d looked out his window, there was a sheer thousand foot drop where the road was supposed to have been. I imagine James, if he had the words, would describe his days in much the same way.
In the afternoon James and I take a long walk. When I first moved to Philadelphia four years ago, I was running a lot and I liked the idea of trying never to follow the same route twice. Now James and I trace the same path everyday: 20 blocks east to the river on Pine, 20 blocks back west on Spruce. I like being able to anticipate the topography of the sidewalk, to steer the stroller around the same loose patch of bricks that I avoided yesterday, and to know by the cloud cover whether the children at the nursery school we pass along the way will be playing indoors or out.
Even amid such routine, I still have moments of wanderlust. Every now and again a whiff of burning trash will awaken the physical memory of being alone in La Paz when I was twenty. Or something about the way a woman pokes her head out of a third floor window will remind me of what it felt like to watch the sun go down in Darjeeling. I feel myself drawn towards the airport in such moments, but not in a serious way. There’s James to take care of, and my wife who’d be surprised if I didn’t come home. But more than that, I know that the exhilaration I felt when I woke up in Delhi for the first time isn’t open to me anymore. This is something that I think James, who no longer pays attention to a blue plastic flower he couldn’t get enough of a month ago, understands too.
Of the many misconceptions I had about what it would be like to grow older, two stand out above the rest. The first concerns freedom which I thought about in the same way I thought about candy: I couldn’t imagine how in both cases more was not always better. It would have been impossible to convince myself ten years ago that the small orbit of my current days would feel as satisfying as it does. This I think is the kind of knowledge that is hardest to communicate across generational lines, that in the future you won’t desire the same things you desire right now.
The second misconception is about fear. Watching James, and thinking about how we interact, it’s easy to see why as a child I assumed that the world would becomes less scary as I grew older. He is terrified of being left alone in his crib and I come take him out; a siren sounds outside, and he clings to my leg. His days are filled with at least equal parts wonder and fear, and from that perspective, it must seem as though I command the world.
But I don’t of course. Though my fears are less broadly distributed than they used to be, they are perhaps more deeply felt. I can go days and sometimes even whole weeks without feeling afraid of anything, but then in a moment at night I’ll understand that my wife and I are not promised to fall asleep beside each other forever, and that James, who cruises around the living room each morning, will have to learn the most important things in life on his own.
[Image credit: Abnel Gonzalez]
Public Radio Roundup
I listen to a lot of Public Radio, perhaps too much. And while I probably shouldn’t be scheduling my days around radio shows devoted to cooking or news quizzes, there are some Public Radio personalities that do deserve my devotion (and you probably yours too.) One of these is Ira Glass, host of This American Life. Glass was recently in the news for his vocal protests of FCC crackdowns. In this essay from the New York Times Magazine he takes up for Howard Stern and criticizes the absurdity at the center of the decency battle. And the Houston Chronicle explains that Glass isn’t just a public radio host, he’s also a sex symbol. Often considered one of the funniest voices on radio, David Sedaris is a frequent contributor to This American Life. His fans are already clamoring for his latest book due out this June. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, another of Sedaris’ collections of humorous, autobiographical essays, is previewed here in the Sydney Star Observer. And then there is Terry Gross, master interviewer and host of the long running show Fresh Air. A collection of Gross’ famous interviews will be coming out this fall, titled All I Did Was Ask. Here’s an interview with the queen of interviewers at the Detroit Free Press.
Welcome to the Working Week 2: Emre
[Editor’s note: This week we’ve invited Megan Hustad, author of How to Be Useful: A Beginner’s Guide to Not Hating Work, to dissect our contributors’ first-job follies.]Emre writes:The joyous Sunday nights at college became my biggest tormentors upon joining the ranks of working people in New York. I’d get the blues every Sunday around 9 p.m., and in an effort to stave off Monday would stay up really late – usually drinking and watching TV.One such Sunday, I was so preoccupied with reading Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections that I did not even leave my bed the whole day – except, of course, to hit the toilet, get more coffee, make Bloody Marys and nibble on some cheese. The whole day passed and before I realized it, the book was finished, it was 4:30 a.m. on Monday, and I was thoroughly exhausted and depressed by the outcome. I called my boss, left a semi-drunk, highly strung-out message saying something along the lines of, “Dear Boss, it’s 4:30 in the morning, I cannot sleep and am terribly depressed. If I come to work tomorrow, I might go crazy. I am taking a mental-health day,” and hung up.When I went to work on Tuesday everyone seemed very concerned about my well being. My boss said it was totally OK to take mental-health days as I saw fit. And I thought, “it worked!” Or did it?Megan Hustad responds:I’m going to say yes, it did. Probably. But only because on an average day you were pretty reliable and conscientious. (If you remembered to call in with your regrets at 4:30 a.m., drunk, yes, I’m guessing “conscientious” applies.)You ever notice how some people like to arrive at the office a little late, say, fifteen to thirty minutes late, but every single day? And then there are those who are already stationed, pouring their second cup of coffee, always at 8:55? The first group, often, tends to think they’re getting away with something. (Or that being blasé about hauling ass to work in the morning is akin to joining the Wobblies. Subversive!) But truth is, making a habit of fudging procedure generally backfires. (There are brilliant exceptions, but…takes too long to explain here.) When the boom comes down, it comes down hard, and the chronically late types find themselves nitpicked and chastised for minor infractions. Seemingly more buttoned-down types, however, get to deviate wildly from norm on occasion, take huge allowances, or commit major indiscretions, and — more often than not — get away with it.Oh, and it’s not only that mental-health days are sometimes necessary. Here’s a line from John Wareham’s 1980 Secrets of a Corporate Headhunter: “Sometimes fail to arrive at all: your absence can be the talisman of your presence.” A perfect attendance record won’t get you the corner office, he argued, and if you’re also seen at every last party, you should probably make a point of not showing up once in a while. (In other words, don’t be all Eva Longoria and get dressed for every “hey, there’s a new Treo model, we’re rolling out the red carpet!!!” event to which you’re invited.) I like this advice. Uselessness rating: 2For more information, please see these related posts:Welcome to the Working Week: Megan Hustad Analyzes Our On-the-Job FoiblesWelcome to the Working Week 1: MaxWelcome to the Working Week 3: GarthWelcome to the Working Week 4: Andrew
Rock and Roll Breakfast
You can’t swing your arms around in a general interest bookstore without hitting three or four “theme” cookbooks, which collect recipes related to a certain motif. This trend explains books like The Book Lover’s Cookbook, Dinner Dates: A Cookbook for Couples Cooking Together, and The Sopranos Family Cookbook. These are books you buy as gifts for people you don’t know that well.But as with every rule there is an exception, which brings me to I Like Food, Food Tastes Good: In the Kitchen with Your Favorite Bands, which collects recipes culled from bands like Death Cab for Cutie, They Might Be Giants, and Belle & Sebastian. My old friends The Walkmen are in it too, which is fitting because they used to have recipe section on their web site. That’s where I first learned about their “Foreign Chicken Dinner,” the recipe they’ve contributed to the book. They don’t have the recipe on their site any more, and I can’t remember exactly what was in it, but I seem to recall it involved tomato sauce.
Tina Brown’s New Yorker Lives On
An uncharacteristically thorough post at Gawker goes in depth on the make up of the current staff of the New Yorker, pointing out that the resurgent magazine under editor David Remnick is staffed by a disproportionate number of writers brought on during the tenure of reviled editor Tina Brown. Interesting stuff.