I’ve been tagged by Pete Anderson for a meme that involves listing the first sentence from the first post from each month of the previous year. So here goes:
January: “In case you were wondering, my New Year’s Eve was just a tad more wilder than this.”
February: “I am operating on a prepossessing paucity of sleep and still have many things to do today. ”
March: “Robert Birnbaum talks with Martin Amis for the fifth time.”
April: “Richard Grayson alerts me to the Coney Island Reporter, a blog chronicling Coney Island’s unfortunate corporatization.”
May: “Condition of Mr. Segundo: Rattled by interlopers.”
June: “The crooked bastards at Javits want $29.95/day for wi-fi.”
July: “David Ulin raises a provocative point about Harvey Pekar’s recent prolificity, contemplating whether Pekar is authoring too many books for his own good, while likewise pondering whether Pekar’s concentration upon other personalities comes at the expense of Pekar skillfully depicting his own personal experiences.”
August: “At the the Litblog Co-Op, they’re cha-cha-chatting about the next round’s lineup.”
September: “Sunday Times: ‘The Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.’”
October: “To my great surprise, there are scant YouTube links to Lois Maxwell’s fourteen Bond film appearances as Miss Moneypenny.”
November: “Recovering from many martinis.”
December: “Now this is a very interesting move, and I hope that Mr. Pierce will be granted some major technical flexibility to dramatically reconfiguring all of the blogs.”
I’m not sure what this exercise says exactly, except that the guy who keeps up this place is a relentlessly curious and cantankerous bastard who drinks too many martinis, doesn’t sleep enough, and has some political empathy. Which is probably pretty close to the mark.
For far more interesting people than this cranky rube, I tag the lovely Tayari Jones (who can now be found at the top of the revamped Bat Segundo site), Levi Asher, the collective contributors to the eNotes Book Blog, This Recording, and Sarah Weinman.
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
roger that.
My my, what an impressive person you are!