I’m trying, kids.
I’m trying really hard to like this book. Because I want to finish it. Because I want to see the movie. Because I heard both are really good.
But so far, the book isn’t.
It just isn’t.
I was intrigued at first. The characters seemed solid enough, but then both sides of the story just fell apart.
On his side of things, it got all Book of Genesis on me.
We get it. It’s a big family. There are a lot of characters. There are a lot of names. There is a lot of absolutely not at all moving forward plot. Oh, now he’s found another love interest in exile. And it’s boring.
On her side, we get multiple stories about how up this girl is fucked.
We get it. She’s had a very troubled pas—oh here’s another story about when she was a kid in school and didn’t answer questions. My god.
This all could have been much, much shorter. And her character especially could have been much more believable. He seems to be making her up as he goes along. But hey, she’s a loose cannon and a bouncing football. You don’t know what she’s going to do. Right? That’s all fine. When she’s doing something.
As of today, it looks like the story is going to maybe start to maybe do something.
I’ll keep you posted.
You have to get through the first 75 -100 pages (I gave up several times too.) Then it gets REALLY good.
I made it through 150 pages and gave up, and I watched the Swedish movie version on Netflix.
Stieg Larsson had an interesting plot idea that he weighed down with pointless detail, unbelievable subplots and middle-aged man/journalist wish fulfillment.
Another in a string of busy days, but bow ties make things better. (Taken with instagram)
So it seems there’s another ghost in the machine. But yeah, Missing-e is definitely the thing Tumblr should be most worried about. Not making sure the basic fucking functionality of their site is working.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandmother lately. Part of that is probably because each year for Groundhog Day she would use a butter knife to draw a groundhog in the peanut butter of our sandwiches for school. Part of it is the fact I just realized she died 15 years ago, on Dec. 4, 1996. And part of it is that today is 10 years since the house she lived in when I was growing up burnt down.
After she fell, broke her hip, and came to live with us in 1990, one of my uncles moved into the house. The house I grew up in is the last in a row of four houses, and my uncles and aunts lived in the other three.
I was living at home when the fire happened, and I was home from work early. I had grand designs on writing all about the fire for today, but it would have taken weeks, and a narrative of a fire and its aftermath doesn’t really capture what happened.
It’s hard to watch the house where some of your earliest memories happened burn. To see the huge plate window where your grandmother taught you to identify birds blackened with soot. To have the linoleum floor that supported the kitchen table where you learned to love to drink coffee heat up, sag and collapse. To watch the ivy that had been growing along the front of the house since long before you were born burn off and never return.
The weeks after the fire were spent cleaning out debris, burying the dozen stray cats my aunt had taken in, rolling out the project cars my uncle kept in the garage, even though everyone knew he was never going to work on them, putting the things that escaped the flames but were saturated with the woody, sharp smell of smoke into plastic bins so they could be cleaned.
It’s a brick house, so it’s still standing. It took most of two years, but my uncle and aunt moved back in. Now it’s their house. And though I’ve been inside dozens of times since the fire, I can’t tell you what the inside of the house looks like. I can’t shake the memories of the hardwood floors, the white metal beds my brother and I slept in, the big console TV and bigger console record player. When I visit, I half expect to sit at a table that’s been stopped from wobbling only by a piece of cardboard folded up and wedged under a leg, and sitting on high-backed green vinyl chairs that your legs would stick to in the summer. I think I might catch a glimpse of elementary-school-aged me sitting at that table, watching “Reading Rainbow” on a television sitting atop an old foot-powered Singer sewing machine, or my grandmother, still on her own in her 80s, using the yellow push-powered vacuum to clean the area rug in the dining room. Maybe I hope to see the blue glass vase that sat on top of the perpetually out-of-tune piano—the vase that my mother told me dated back to before the Civil War when a pillow fight with my brother nearly knocked it to the floor.
But though I’m welcome whenever I want to come over, the house where my grandmother lived is gone now, just as she is.
Saul Alinsky
So, Rules For Radicals is changing up my game in a big way. If you haven’t read it and you’re interested in social activism (shouldn’t we all be?), I encourage you to pick it up.
First, the rules:
1. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you
have
2. Never go outside the experience of your people
3. Wherever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy
4. Ridicule is a person’s most potent weapon
5. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy
6. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag
7. Keep the pressure on with different tactics
8. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself
9. Maintain constant pressure on enemy
10. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it
Mid-afternoon snow, even a light dusting, guarantees people will be driving like idiots on the way home this evening. (Taken with instagram)
“My Favorite Museum Exhibit”: Arab Courier Attacked by Lions - Boing Boing
This is my favorite museum exhibit, as well, and every time I go to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, I have to go see it.
So here it is: My thing for January.
I covered Warren Zevon’s “My Ride’s Here.” I was going for a more rock feel than either the album version or Bruce Springsteen’s (perhaps better known) live cover, so I upped the speed. Zevon was a studio musician at heart and a hell of a producer, so the original has the slick sound you’d expect from him, and the Springsteen cover is clearly a live piece. I wanted to take a middle way. I thought just playing the guitar and singing would be too simple for this project, so I added the keys and drums. I hope the ghost of Warren Zevon doesn’t haunt me for ruining one of his songs.
The Good: My vocals are pretty much in tune, and I created everything except the drum track myself. I used a loop for that because 1) I don’t have a drum set and 2) I can’t play the drums, hence my not owning a drum set.
The Less Good: My vocal tone/timbre and guitar playing are pretty weak these days. Lack of use will kill proficiency. I can still make the chord shapes and everything, but I’m 10 years removed from daily practice and that makes a difference. The key/synth sounds are a bit cheesier than I’d like. That’s mostly because I don’t have a keyboard, so I had to enter the notes by hand into a sequencer, which made them less expressive than I was hoping for.
I want to write up a few of the things I learned this month, and then it’s on to the next thing!
So here we are. My first thing is finished. Onward!
Reblogging this for the evening/night crowd who might not have seen it. That’s the last of my shameless self-promotion for a while, I promise.
Fabulous!
These all remind me of the apartment building I lived in until this summer. I loved my apartment. It was perfect. It was me. The only downside was the other people that also lived in the building and were disgusting and inconsiderate.
I’m considering nailing something akin to the 95 theses on the door of the upstairs neighbor who I’ve never seen but can only assume, from all the noise coming from there, is a 450-pound tap dancer.
