"I'm a book-a-decade kind of motherfucker, yo."

this man. i may be in love with this man.

last night i had the immense pleasure of seeing junot diaz speak. and, let me tell you, the pleasure was IMMENSE. sometimes, when you watch someone closely, you can see their thoughts forming and morphing into what finally spills out of their mouth. with mr. diaz, the closer i watched, the more suprised i became as he listened to the questions posed with such nonchalance that it was hard to believe he was even listening, yet he answered with such intensity and clarity that there was no doubt that has a filing cabinet for a mind.

his love of space - both real and imagined, combined with his firm grasp of both the spanish and english languages leaves one (me) swooning. his ongoing discussion with the crowd and himself of the idea of an artist was inspiring and left me wishing that a certain someone (christian) could have attended.

instead, i will paraphrase for him here the part that most interested me of his advice: a good piece of art is a particular piece of art - its generality is found in its particularity and one is left vacillating (sometimes within the same sentence) between feeling that the book is speaking directly to the reader and as though the reader is eavesdropping on the most private of conversations, yeah?

while fearing redundancy, i must again urge you to pick up this man's literary wonder.

This is what the good guys do.

Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in
their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in
the ground.

this book, oh, this book. last night was one of those nights that had me setting arbitrary restraints: i'll stop reading when i get to page 175. no, when i get to 200... i'll be done at 1:45 a.m.

everything in it is so gruesome and redemptive all at once. mccarthy is an amazing storyteller. all the gore and all the sick in this book boils down to the idea that no matter how bleak life becomes you must live your life as though it has meaning.

a bit sentimental/cheesy? yes. a masterpiece? yes.


also, internet has been elusive lately. look for pictures of the weekend later tonight...

autumnal activities, $2

cranberry scones (rose levy berenbaum is my hero) and mulled cider for breakfast.

my backyard - best backyard ever.

lying with a beautiful girl in between two rows of spartan apples.

what i'm trying to tell you is that it has been a lovely, lovely day. i want several more fall days like this, days that seem longer than twenty-four hours and involve some of the best people that live in this fine city.

if you've not read after the quake by murakami, consider it required reading.

Black Box [Amos Oz]

With all due respect to Tolstoy I'm telling you the opposite is true:
Unhappy people are mainly plunged in conventional suffering, living out in
sterile routine one of five or six threadbare clichés of misery. Whereas
happiness is a rare, fine vessel, a sort of Chinese vase, and the few people who
have reached it have shaped and formed it line by line over the course of years,
each in his own image and likeness, each in his own character, so that no two
happinesses are alike.

not only does mr. oz write astoundingly beautiful gems like the above, but he speaks truths while doing it.

last night was bars and books. i enjoyed myself, but more than anything it has planted the idea of beginning my own book group that is maybe possibly smaller... anyone interested?

What more sci-fi than Santo Domingo?

if you have not yet read this book, i must insist that you do so immediately. christian just described it as "epic and real and small, all at once" and i could not agree more. the swagger and intelligence of his prose delights every part of me (and yes, i may be a sucker for both the spanglish and the footnotes...).