etc.

I was somewhat confused by this book. I liked Martin, for the most part, I enjoyed Millhauser’s descriptions, and I appreciated his ability to paint a not too nostalgic picture of turn-of-the-century Manhattan, and I would recommend that anyone who has a remote interest in that city read this book. Perhaps I should explain a little before exploring my particular confusion. Martin is the son of shop-owner Otto Dressler, a cigar man who owns a modest cigar shop where Martin works up until he is in his mid-teens. Martin knows his tobacco and enjoys the work but right from the get-go you can tell that he aspires to something more, something grander that he doesn’t yet fully comprehend himself. He falls into the hospitality world where he works as a bellhop for a few years, all the while hoarding his money until he eventually buys a lunchroom, then a second, and a third (he is perhaps the quintessential American franchise man), but still vaguely unfulfilled, he begins building hotels, each successive hotel grander than the last.

While I was reading this book I came to a more intimate understanding of the nature of the American dream because Martin seems to epitomise everything it can be, both good and bad. And here’s where things got a little fuzzy for me: in the last ten pages of the book, Martin’s third hotel opens and is pretty much a failure. Is it hubris? Is it one of the pitfalls of dreaming the American dream? Has Martin lost touch with reality? It’s probably all of the above, but Millhauser’s narrative stops at least 50 pages short. I needed for him to work through the failure part more thoroughly. By the last page I was left feeling a little stupid, like there were some essential connections there that I should have made much earlier in the book (well I did see impending doom pretty early on, how couldn’t you?), like I might have missed something. It felt like a rushed ending and I felt a little cheated by the fact that it all wrapped up just as we were getting to the really interesting bits, the bits about what would make a person (a magnate, really) continue to push the boundaries of physical space and all that good stuff.

I’m not a crossword type, but once in a while after I’ve made my way through the paper and the funnies, I reach the puzzles at the end and think to myself “I can do this.” The thing that gets me is one wrong answer and it’s game over. So imagine my predicament when the first clue I saw in the crossword today was: “6 letter slang for ‘drunk’. Christ.

bombed
boozed
buzzed
canned
guzzed
jugged
juiced
pissed
potted
ripped
sauced
soused
stewed
sussed
tanked
triped
wasted

Which got me thinking, how many other synonyms/euphemisms can I come up with?
bent
blitzed
crocked
flushed
grogged
hammered
hosed
inebriated
intoxicated
laced
liquored
oiled
pickled
plastered
sloshed
sozzled
tipsy
toasted
totaled
wined

Missed any?

• I bought a new PDA last week. Nothing fancy, I won’t be doing any wireless surfing or checking of email on it, it’s mostly just to keep me organised, with my contacts at my fingertips. I had one of these for years, and then last year I went back to paper just for the hell of it. And recently I’ve been overcome with the need for technological organisation once again so, having pulled out the old clunker and realised that it is now a juiceless hunk of plastic worthy of landfill, I bought the Zire and spent most of the weekend alternating between data entry and fond cradling.

• With the closing of The House just two and a half weeks away, Michael and I have been talking about what we need, by way of furniture. We need a lot. So over the past couple of weekends we’ve been to a few estate and consignment auctions and have had a moderate amount of success. It’s tough to resist the impulse to buy everything we need right away, especially at auction prices, but we figure we should probably live in the place before we buy anything more. So auction attendance is on hold for now and will resume shortly after June 12th. Perhaps on June 14th.

• Our agent dropped off the boxes she promised (part of the company’s good customer service is that we get free boxes for using one of their Buyer Consultants). She arrived on Friday night with thirty clean, strong, brown boxes. That should be just about enough for my books.

• It turns out that Feature Price (current e-j.com host, grrr) was purchased by Atlantic.net. It’s good to know what’s going on, but despite that knowledge, I am still powerless in my attempts to have my DNS changed. You see, when Feature Price registered my domain name for me last year, they listed themselves as the owner of the domain, the bastards. After a whole lot of back and forth and an email message to FP that bounced back ten days after sending it, I have finally learned who the registrant of my domain is and they have been wonderful to deal with (support emails that have been answered within the hour! What a novelty!). It sounds like Atlantic.net is trying to do the right thing by working with DotRegister to transfer domain ownership from Feature Price to the actual client. Still, I’ve learned my lesson with big, cheap hosting companies. Blake, from LISHost, has been tireless in helping me try to wrestle this thing to the ground so I’m more than happy to give him my money.

This is a long, meandering narrative about the life of an hermaphrodite called Calliope, and I enjoyed every word of it. Eugenides certainly does have an eye for the wacky and that coupled with his ability to describe the bizarre comically and compassionately makes for great storytelling. We sort of caught a glimpse of this with The Virgin Suicides, but in Middlesex, he takes his time and puts together a family history and personal memoir that has you sympathising with this completely marginal character very early in the narrative. The big surprise was me not getting impatient with his many plot detours. Given the practically negligible amount of time I have for pleasure reading off late, my patience level for unnecessary deviations has reached alarming heights, so much so that I find myself craving the short phrases and crisp rhythms of Hemingway (extra points for those who pick up the pop culture reference, circa 1982). But Eugenides makes his circumnavigations work, and for that I was gratefully delighted (not to mention delightedly grateful).

Pictures from the Windsor trip.

Windsor, Ontario was a bit more depressing than I thought it would be. Since my former impression was based solely on two particular neon signs (one over the Ambassador Bridge to Detroit and the other on the tallest building at the University of Windsor), I didn’t expect to be any more disappointed than I already was. It’s a dreary little bordertown, with a very depressed downtown area in which we discovered a grand total of three decent eating/drinking establishments, only one of which was somewhat interesting and edgy.

The actual conference was great. I like conferences that are targetted to a smaller subgroup of librarianship (this one is for information literacy/instruction libararians) because it really allows the speakers to get into the nitty-gritty of their own programs and not have to generalise for a wider audience, which makes for fruitful discussion even outside the seminar room. I met some great people from all over, solidifying my belief that librarians are some of the most interesting and percipient people around. I can now claim friends in Kingston, Ottawa, Montreal and upstate New York, a few of whom I’m looking forward to seeing again at CLA/ALA.

And in housekeeping news, etches-johnson.com is migrating to LISHost over the next few days, so things might get a little funky around here for a bit. This probably means irregular posts and unanswered email. I’ve been planning this move for a while so I’ve been largely ignoring the dubious news about my current, oft-bemoaned host for the simple reason that I just don’t care anymore dammit.

My email message to the bandwidth bandit bounced back yesterday, so in an effort to get my point across, I pulled the old switcheroo. Now, where Mr. Z would expect to see the fruit of his offending actions, he will instead see this. I wish no ill will upon him, most often this sort of bandwidth theft is merely the result of ignorance. Let’s just call this a learning lesson, shall we? And a tip of the hat to Jessamyn for the switch idea.

If I checked my referrer logs more frequently I’d know that this person has been recurrently stealing bandwidth from me over the past few months. I’m not mad yet but suffice it to say that a polite yet stern email message has recently been dispatched.

If I checked my referrer logs more frequently I’d know that Beck (yes, that Beck) has linked to these pages in the past.

If I checked my referrer logs more frequently I would have found out months ago that some friends have been keeping secret blogs (you know who you are), and to them I say: you can’t hide on the Internet, kids.

If I checked my referrer logs more frequently I would have known to pull the plug at the end of March 2003, my best month yet (must have had something to do with Beck). It’s been downhill since so I’ve obviously missed my chance to go out on a high note.

If I checked my referrer logs more frequently I would have apologised months ago for regularly disappointing 5% of my readers.

And so, issue 8 of what they’re searching for:

• creampie sluts
• 3 doors down in london pictures 2003
• actually shortage librarians
• articulate or pathetic or bakal or peste or expansive
• centering or ibsen or shrilling or downright or circular
• films and self-mutilation
• funny public discourses
• how is the five things of geography affecting life today in south america
• naked pics of david gallagher
• plastic bibs wholesale
• spiderman[2002] is waste of time
• the best of cherpictures
• what is the difference between the keyboard of a typewriter and a coputer

Backstory: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

I first read this book last fall and I picked it up again because it is my book club’s selection this month. I think I liked it even more the second time around. As I’ve noted elsewhere, there is a richness to this book that offers up something new every time you read it, which is certainly my definition of a good book, if not The definition of a Good Book. The first time I reviewed it, I started out by saying that no one writes the ordinary like Shields does (or something like that). And while that is certainly true, I realised after rereading it that it is this sort of lukewarm praise that the novel’s narrator, Reta Winters, and perhaps even Shields herself, is reacting so vehemently to.

In the novel, Winters first book, My Thyme is Up, receives a particular literary prize (one that values a novel’s beginning, middle and end, nothing postmodern, therefore nothing that has any staying power) that is doomed to seal her fate as a mediocre writer, a writer of “her own time”. And in her attempt to grapple with her daughter’s decision to abandon her studies in search of “Goodness”, she comes to project her own powerlessness as a woman on to her daughter’s decision to live on the street. She decides that Norah has given up fighting a losing battle, the battle against a society that marginalises women, that makes excuses for them, that refuses to acknowledge their accomplishments. We ultimately learn that Norah’s street life was in fact a direct result of having witnessed a traumatic event (self-immolation by a Muslim woman on a street-corner in Toronto), so all the conjecture about her not being able to accept her place in a world that has no place for her becomes self-reflexive. Reta herself is the woman who is fighting the good fight.

It is in fact possible to be blown away by the same book twice and this book is the perfect illustration of that.

Some books you can read over and over again and get a little something different from every time. In fact, that should be the universal, undisputed definition of a Good Book. The Good Book I am currently rereading is Carol Shields’s Unless, a book that is so chockful of artful language, incisive words, and deft turns of phrase that it could offer up a little something new with each successive reread. I read Unless for the first time last fall when I was trying the Booker sprint to the finish line. And I’m reading it again now because it is my book club’s current selection, and I’m a happy little clam for it because not only do I have arguably the best reread excuse going, but I also get to talk about it with a bunch of smart, interesting, and insightful people over a warm beverage in a couple of weeks. Bless.