etc.

“The last word from the latest post is up for grabs“.

There’s something vaguely disingenuous to me about an independently wealthy person experimenting in living the hardscrabble life all for the purpose of journalistic integrity. The gist of it is that during a conversation with Lewis Lapham, her sometimes editor, Ehrenreich recalls the days when writers used to do real, old-fashioned journalist-type stuff. When they wanted a story on America’s working class, they would roll up their sleeves and step into the role themselves, do a little first-person investigation. So this is what she does.

I actually consider Ehrenreich to be a writer with some integrity; even in this book, she makes valid points that are carefully footnoted and sourced throughout. But apart from pissing of people who refuse to buy that she’s doing any sort of real socio/anthropological work, Ehrenreich also misses the boat in not going far enough with her little experiment. It’s not enough to write a book whose only real statement is that capitalism thrives on the back of an underprivileged working class. We already know that. What she should have done is personalised this statement a bit more, taken advantage of being amongst real frontline unskilled workers who don’t have the luxury of setting rules for themselves (like no shared accommodation) and made it about how they cope, instead of how she manages to do a bang-up job on cleaning houses faster than her co-workers.

So long, Bob.

I have been bone tired all week. Tired as in in bed at 7.30pm on Monday night. Tired as in that heavy-lidded feeling on my drive home from work at 3.45pm on Tuesday. Tired as in not even 190 channels or an encore presentation of The Cable Guy can keep me up at 8.45pm on Wednesday. Tired as in exhaustedly ecstatic when I see my co-worker walk in this morning with an electric kettle because it means I don’t have to walk to the coffee shop with dry teabag and travel mug in hand, I can lean over my desk and make a whole cup of tea with deft fingertips.

I have no valid explanation for this protracted state of languor, maybe it’s because I have been super productive at work, crossing stuff off my to-do list, vanquishing niggling tasks that have been haunting me for months. Or maybe it’s because if I’m not at work, or if I’m not driving, I have my nose buried in a book, I’ve devoured three already this week, it’s like I’ve been in a literary vacuum for months and all of a sudden anything remotely interesting on the printed page has my rapt attention, and my brain is just tired, so tired, after being in a state complete dormancy. Thanks, Harry Potter.

Just 4 hours into having the place wired and I’m already experiencing a goodly amount of media overload. I could be watching BookTV or IFC or BBC World or Animal Planet, or I could be downloading music at iTunes for 99¢ a shot, or I could be interacting with my television set like never before. The options seem, quite literally, endless. Add to that the really engrossing book I started reading today and you have an overstimulating mélange of media that seems altogether unreal, in a very real way.

This is the flea market find my husband has been looking for his whole flea-market-scouring-life.

If I had read Hogwart’s School of Double Entendre before I read the book, I might have enjoyed it more. [bookslut]

Toilet roll game à la Dean Allen.

This book is a collection of articles from Jay McInerney’s wine column in House and Garden magazine, all of them no longer than 4 pages and most concluding with his personal recommendations. Jay McInerney is a novelist with a serious wine jones. And this is what makes this book so great. He’s not a formal wine critic in any sense so, lacking the often abstruse (and usually high hat for most of us) vocabulary that is conventionally used to talk wine, McInerney makes his comparisons with literature, art, music and pop culture iconography instead. This is a great read for oenophiles and neophytes alike, but particularly for anyone who couldn’t taste the salad bar in their glass of Napa Valley Cabernet if it leapt out of the glass and smacked them in the nose.

I have mixed feelings about this book, verging more on the negative than the positive. On the positive, I finished it. That alone is a feat of sorts because I have recently become the kind of person who gives up on books when they just aren’t doing it for me anymore. I have way too many other things I could be doing/books I could be reading to waste my time on one that I am not enjoying. So, having said that, finishing this book alone means I didn’t hate it.

But not only is it too long, it got on my nerves a bit. Or, I should probably say, Harry got on my nerves a bit. Even for a teenager, he is whiney and skittish and uninteresting. Is it the magic or is it the hormones? And who cares anyway? By the end of it I felt thoroughly cheated because it reads so much like a bridger, the kind that exists only to build the backstory for the next volume. Which is the sort of thing you might expect from most series, but not what I expected from this one.