We went out for Chinese with some friends last night, and this is the fortune that came in Mrs. Millions’ fortune cookie. Auspicious, no?
A Fortune
Radio Bookman
I took a peek at the Amazon page for The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis and was surprised to find that the book has vaulted to #533 in their sales rankings (the book previously sported a ranking in the hundred thousands.) Now, I know that Amazon rankings are next to meaningless, but still, it’s pretty cool to know that my appearance on Weekend Edition Sunday sent readers looking to pick up the book. I don’t think they’ll be disappointed.
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The View from My Window is a Constant Reminder
I love repetition. I love doing the same thing at the same time and in the same place, day in and day out. I love it because something happens in repetition: Sooner or later, the heap of sameness, accumulated through all the identical days, starts to glide. That’s when the writing begins.
The view from my window is a constant reminder of this slow and invisible process. Every day I see the same lawn, the same apple tree, the same willow. It’s winter, the colors are bleak, there are no leaves, and then it’s spring, the garden is bursting with green. Even though I see it every day, I’m not able to notice the changes, as if they take place in a different time frame, beyond the range of my eye, in the same way high-frequency sounds are out of reach of the ear. Then the slow explosion of flowers, fruits, heat, birds, and insane growth we call summer is here, then there’s a storm, and the apples lie in a circle under the tree. The snowflakes melt the instant they touch the ground, the leaves are brown and leathery, the branches naked, the birds all gone; it’s winter again.
In my youth, I considered Cicero’s claim, that all a man needs to be happy is a garden and a library, utterly bourgeois, to be a truth for the boring and middle-aged, as far as possible from who I wanted to be. Perhaps because my own father was somewhat obsessed with his garden and his stamp collection. Now, being boring and middle-aged myself, I have resigned. Not only do I see the connection between literature and gardens, those small areas of cultivating the undefined and borderless, I nurture it. I read a biography on Werner Heisenberg, and it’s all there, in the garden, the atoms, the quantum leaps, the uncertainty principle. I read a book about genes and DNA, it’s all there. I read the Bible, and there’s the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. I love that phrase, “in the cool of the day,” it awakens something in me, a feeling of depth on sunny summer days that hold a kind of eternal quality, and then the winds from the sea come rushing in the afternoon, shadows grow as the sun sinks slowly on the sky, and somewhere children are laughing. All this in the cool of the day, in the midst of life, and when it’s over, when I’m no longer here, this view will still be. This is also what I see when I look out my window, and there’s a strange comfort in that, taking notice of the world as we pass through it, the world taking no notice of us.
Glemmingebro, Sweden
Excerpted from Windows on the World by Matteo Pericoli. Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © Matteo Pericoli, 2014.
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My very first entry
This is my very first entry on my very first blog. I want to use this as a place to put my writing “out there” into the world. I’ll be writing about music, sports, art, politics, and my unremarkable (but deeply fascinating to me) daily life.
To begin: It is a strange time right now. After months of banter and argument we attacked Iraq. In the long period that led up to this most folks quickly formed an opinion one way or the other and then as the barage of information and insights and new developments came to light, they adjusted their views many times. Some stayed at the extremes while others, like myself, wavered uncomfortably in the middle. I want to believe that we are doing the right thing, and so far I’m pretty sure that I’m not deluding myself. Here in Los Angeles, most folks are either uninformed and uninterested or are badly misinformed and delight in disseminating incorrect information and adding their own personal, implausible spin to things. A good example of this was the anti-CNN rally that took place at Sunset and Cahuenga today. I find it amusing and more than a little bit frightening that so many folks derive so much satisfaction from from deriding something like CNN. To claim that CNN spouts propaganda and is a puppet of the government betrays a fundamental disconnect about the very country in which these people live. If they believe that the current government is the bad guy, then, thanks to the protections of the Constitution, the competition between the multitudes of news sources out there, and the ability of every citizen to seek out news from whatever source he or she please, CNN is one of the good guys. In fact, they have no choice but to be the good guy. The Constitution grants them the freedom to report what they please, and even if the government tried to stifle a major news story, CNN would have too mcuh to gain by being the first to break the story. They would do their best to report accurately because it pays off for them in increased viewership. And in the end, they have the force of law behind them anyway. All that this protest in LA really accomplished was the closing down for the day of many retail establishments along Sunset, which I’m guessing resulted in lost wages for the people working in the Staples, Jack in the Box, and Bank of America among others. Not to mention the traffic that they backed up. Does this accomplish anything aside from negatively affecting the lives of your fellow citizens. I don’t think so. I just hope that this is all over soon, and that we are doing the right thing.
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The Wake of What I Love: A Commencement Address
I spend a significant amount of time being the crazy dude who came to someone else’s classroom to talk about how poetry is amazing. Right now, I’m the commencement speaker. I promise, in three hours, I’ll be the guy who looks uncomfortable in a tie on the downtown 4 train.
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News Roundup
Now the much-vaunted “Oprah effect” has hit Britain, where a brief mention of Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea on a popular daytime show caused sales to go through the roof. Stunned by the response, the hosts claim that they will once again press their producers to allow them to start a book club. It’s amazing to me that the TV book club phenomenon did not actually originate in England, where the world of books is far more integrated into popular culture. In fact, last summer’s “Big Read,” a sort of all time greatest books countdown show on the BBC, was wildly popular and apparently bumped book sales in England noticeably. Meanwhile, Star of the Sea, a book that received decidedly mixed reviews gets a boost that points to the power of the television in the world of books. Here’s the original “Oprah effect” story.To anyone who has read Dan Brown’s mega-blockbuster The Da Vinci Code, here’s an interesting article from the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel that tries to separate the facts from the fiction.The Pulitzer Prizes will be announced in a couple of months and I’ve been thinking about who might win. I’ve lately been favoring Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc in the General Non-Fiction category. I’ll probably muse over who I favor for the next several weeks, and stay tuned for the First Annual Millions Pulitzer Pool (complete with prizes!). Details to come.
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Fourth-Grade Summer Reading: Portnoy’s Complaint
Portnoy complained about EVERYTHING. I probably should’ve picked Diary of A Wimpy Kid.
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Appearing Elsewhere
Over at More Intelligent Life, you’ll find my reflections on the Joseph Mitchell centenary. Mitchell is, for my money, the greatest reporter-stylist of his era; the essay points to a few reasons why. In related news, The New York Times today reports on a blog version of the diaries of that other great reporter-stylist, George Orwell.
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Happy Bloomsday
Dubliners and James Joyce fans are celebrating Bloomsday in the town that Leopold Bloom wandered through on that epic day exactly 100 years ago. Revelers, among other things, ate “Gorgonzola sandwiches and sipped Burgundy wine in the sunshine in honour of the lunch enjoyed by the novel’s hero Leopold Bloom, midway through his momentous day.” The novel of course is Ulysses. and you can read more about this remarkable literary festival here.Ray Charles died last weekend. He made such soulful and happy music. Driving from New York to DC, we encountered several radio stations playing his music, some of them continuously, side after side of classic records. Now the tributes are over, and the radio stations are back to their regular rotations, so I was annoyed when I realized that I left my fantastic 5 cd set in storage in LA.Spencer Reece and his book The Clerk’s Tale got a sizeable write up on the front page of the Washington Post Sunday Style section. Not bad for poetry.BookspottingHow powerful is Oprah? I spotted Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina mixed in with a couple of romance novels in the rest stops along the New Jersey Turnpike. Also spotted: On the Washington DC subway: The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman, Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz, and The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom; and in the back seat of my little brother’s car: Our Posthuman Future by Francis FukuyamaFinally, check out the trilogy of Alice Munroe stories in the New Yorker fiction issue. It’s worth a look if only to read the stories that the New Yorker deemed worthy of such prominent placement. You’ll have to pick up the magazine to read all three. Only the first story is online.
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Found your blog laugh out loud funny Max, if you want another laugh check out NASA's Press Kit entitled: "Living on the Moon"- the photos are particularly scintillating…who writes this stuff:http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/exploration/news/presskits/living_on_the_moon.html
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/exploration/news/presskits/living_on_the_moon.html
The full web link was cut off here it is.
I hope that cookie wasn't eight years old.