One unanticipated advantage to the new, booze-free regime: a significant decrease in the amount of recycling we’re producing. This was last week: Whereas this week:
Dependency.
About a year ago my doctor suggested that I give up coffee. Uh-huh, I replied anxiously. Good patient that I am, I went home and did exactly that. Two days later the caffeine withdrawal headaches were so bad that I couldn’t see properly. Christina, quietly shaking her head at my inability to do anything in moderation, patiently suggested that it …
Modern Jazz for Beginners
There’s been much chatter in the jazz blogosphere of late about why young people (apparently) don’t go to see live jazz any more. One of the more interesting consequences of all the hand-wringing is an interesting project by Patrick Jarenwattananon, who is the editor of NPR’s jazz blog, A Blog Supreme. He has asked all sorts of hip young cats …
Save the Date – Reading at Orr Street Studios
I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be giving a reading from the new book at Orr Street Studios on Tuesday, November 10, as part of the new “Hearing Voices” season. I did this a couple of years ago and it was a great experience – engaged audience, warm atmosphere, and cool space. Mark your calendars – it would be great …
This is what the Internet is For.
None of yer self-indulgent blogs, thank you very much. This is mesmerizing, and strangely beautiful. And it could only be shared thanks to the web and YouTube. I’m still trying to work out how they did some of it, and I would love to know how long it took. A friend of mine posted this on Facebook and I wanted …
This Just In: Americans in Bad Beer Shock
A small, but sweet, moment of vindication over the weekend. I am often mocked by my friends for liking warm, flat beer. Of course, I consider it my duty as an Englishman to mock them right back. With the honorable exception of some excellent micro-breweries, American beer is utterly without character. I’m talking here of the Budweisers, Coors, and Millers …
Yo. Innit.
I am not a real hip-hop fan. A cursory review of my CD collection reveals precisely six rap/hip-hop albums – and probably six of the most well-known in the genre, at that. It would be like owning a copy of Kind of Blue and calling yourself a jazz enthusiast. My first cautious foray into rap was inauspicious, to say the …
How to Sell a Million Books. In a Day.
So Dan Brown’s latest sold over a million copies on its first day of release. Good luck to him. I read The da Vinci Code some years ago and enjoyed it immensely, apart from the fatuous caricature of an English academic, which suggests that Brown has never actually met an Englishman. He seems to think that we speak as if …
Good Question
Catherine, our four year-old, to her mother: “How come we always never go to Disneyworld?”
Reading Pynchon. Or not.
I idly remarked in this post that I didn’t seem to be reading much fiction these days. Part of the reason for this is that reading other people’s fiction can mess with my head a little while I’m writing… but I’m not writing much (except for this blog) at the moment. But my struggles with Thomas Pynchon’s latest, Inherent Vice, …