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Aug. 18th, 2008 09:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lapsedmodernistIf everything goes according to plan, we should hopefully be getting the keys to our new abode some time tomorrow afternoon.
In the meantime I continue to be a person lacking in bios, as my present itinerant state prevents me from being subject-ified and interpollated into the national and municipal registries. Hopefully this whole lease-having thing will effect the necessary transformation of my vagabond self into the sequence of numbers necessary to procure a bank account and such.
In the meantime, I am finally reading "The Plot Against America," and it is GOOD. I have read a pretty eclectic selection of books over the course of the last two weeks, as these things tend to happen in transit, and with haphazard access to other people's bookshelves, and here is my brief summation: "Sleep With Me"--slightly-less-low-brow "adult contemporary" psychosexual pulp fiction, with SAT words, but it's the sort of psychosexual pulp fiction I like, with creepy ersatz Victorian novel-within-novel, characters wrecking their lives over sexual obsessions, Crying-Game-type plot twists, etc. Nick Hornby's "Long Way Down" was totally terrible and I could not finish it, it was so bad, and it also created this weird retcon alternate-universe feeling that Nick Hornby had authored a terrible novel which was the basis for the movie "Love, Actually" which, unlike most of you, I also thought was totally terrible. Then I read Nick Hornby's "How to be Good" which wasn't terrible, but he is really no good at writing from a woman's POV (and it's not that I don't think that male writers can't be good at it--in fact, my favorite novel with a female first-person narrator was penned by a man, it's just Nick Hornby is not good at it). I totally have a like-hate relationship with Nick Hornby, by the way, because I thought "High Fidelity" was a really enjoyable book, but it bothers me, because, in the symbolic universe of the generation of Pick-Up Artists, Mystery, "The Game" etc., it is kind of a mirror (of introspective bullshit) to "Unbearable Lightness of Being." If you diagrammed it, you'd have, like
HF is to ULoB as the Anya/Xander relationship of season 4 on BtVS is to the Buffy/Angel angst of seasons 2 & 3 (and, I guess, 4 during the crossover episodes).
And finally and unrelatedly, here is a list of places I would like to visit in the next 12 months, taking advantage of the location of my new launching lilypad:
Norway (don't know where, but I want to see the Fjords!)
London (because it has been too long!)
Berlin (because it is the urbex Mecca of Western Europe--also for a couple of academic happenings)
Spain (because Ryan Air flies there for cheap from our neighboring airport)
Vienna (to see a friend I am looking forward to reconnecting with, whom I haven't seen since we bunked together in the Amazon some years ago, and also because there are ten pretty women there, and a lobby with nine hundred windows).
In the meantime I continue to be a person lacking in bios, as my present itinerant state prevents me from being subject-ified and interpollated into the national and municipal registries. Hopefully this whole lease-having thing will effect the necessary transformation of my vagabond self into the sequence of numbers necessary to procure a bank account and such.
In the meantime, I am finally reading "The Plot Against America," and it is GOOD. I have read a pretty eclectic selection of books over the course of the last two weeks, as these things tend to happen in transit, and with haphazard access to other people's bookshelves, and here is my brief summation: "Sleep With Me"--slightly-less-low-brow "adult contemporary" psychosexual pulp fiction, with SAT words, but it's the sort of psychosexual pulp fiction I like, with creepy ersatz Victorian novel-within-novel, characters wrecking their lives over sexual obsessions, Crying-Game-type plot twists, etc. Nick Hornby's "Long Way Down" was totally terrible and I could not finish it, it was so bad, and it also created this weird retcon alternate-universe feeling that Nick Hornby had authored a terrible novel which was the basis for the movie "Love, Actually" which, unlike most of you, I also thought was totally terrible. Then I read Nick Hornby's "How to be Good" which wasn't terrible, but he is really no good at writing from a woman's POV (and it's not that I don't think that male writers can't be good at it--in fact, my favorite novel with a female first-person narrator was penned by a man, it's just Nick Hornby is not good at it). I totally have a like-hate relationship with Nick Hornby, by the way, because I thought "High Fidelity" was a really enjoyable book, but it bothers me, because, in the symbolic universe of the generation of Pick-Up Artists, Mystery, "The Game" etc., it is kind of a mirror (of introspective bullshit) to "Unbearable Lightness of Being." If you diagrammed it, you'd have, like
HF is to ULoB as the Anya/Xander relationship of season 4 on BtVS is to the Buffy/Angel angst of seasons 2 & 3 (and, I guess, 4 during the crossover episodes).
And finally and unrelatedly, here is a list of places I would like to visit in the next 12 months, taking advantage of the location of my new launching lilypad:
Norway (don't know where, but I want to see the Fjords!)
London (because it has been too long!)
Berlin (because it is the urbex Mecca of Western Europe--also for a couple of academic happenings)
Spain (because Ryan Air flies there for cheap from our neighboring airport)
Vienna (to see a friend I am looking forward to reconnecting with, whom I haven't seen since we bunked together in the Amazon some years ago, and also because there are ten pretty women there, and a lobby with nine hundred windows).
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no subject
Date: 2008-08-18 09:33 pm (UTC)It awaits you rubbing its hands in anticipation. Lots of cool old derelict warehouses round here to check out...
no subject
Date: 2008-08-19 06:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-18 10:42 pm (UTC)I want to know what your favorite novel with a female first-person narrator is!
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Date: 2008-08-19 03:47 am (UTC)Also, I thought of you the other day when NYC shut down Park Ave to cars so people could bike peacefully along it for a few hours to see if it would, like, cause Armageddon or anything. It made me think of your quote about how in your new city, even people who look like they should not be on bicycles ride bicycles everywhere.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-19 06:30 am (UTC)Awwww, I miss NYC! That's the only thing they really don't have here in Europe. But, I am consoling myself by thinking that I traded intermittent access to NYC for Europe, rather than residency in it. That might have been harder.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-19 06:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-19 08:32 pm (UTC)