One quick mention. My friend and former bandmate Scott and his wife Dawn had a beautiful little girl last week. I have been to visit and held the little girl, who is smaller than Li'l Sphere ever was and cute as the cutest button ever created. Huge congratulations, kids!

I'm in the 2nd week of 4 fun-filled weeks of being a stay-at-home dad. It's been wonderful. Sure, I had some preconceptions about spending my free time catching up on the writing. Although I'm still waiting for this free time to manifest itself, I haven't missed it at all.

Lessee, my reading has been slow. I started Jared Diamond's brilliant Collapse, but only got about 100 pages in before it was due back at the library. I'm currently reading Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated, but I flat-out hate it. Does it get better? Is it all jokes about wacky foreigners and wacky historical Jews? 'Cause right now it seems like an endless 80s-era Mel Brooks skit starring Yakov Smirnoff. If no one comes forward to tell me it'll get better, I might just abandon it.

The baby and I have been listening to lots of great music. We've had Music Brought To Us By The Letter "B" day twice - last Monday and today. Last week, we listened to Pet Sounds, Revolver, disc three of Star Time, and Younger Than Yesterday (that's Beach Boys, Beatles, James Brown, and Byrds, if'n you don't know it). Today, we had Bartok's String Quartet No. 2 (as performed by the Emerson String Quartet), the first half of Black Sabbath's Paranoid, selections from Big Star's #1 Record/Radio City, and a few songs from Bowie's "Heroes". We've had a few aborted attempts at Blues Day (a coupla Howlin' Wolf songs, but no follow up), Elephant Six Day (no go - we had to switch gears before we got through the first Olivia Tremor Control song), Coltrane Day (half of A Love Supreme), and Brought To You By The Letter "O" Day (I had Okkervil River, Os Mutantes, and the Old 97s picked out), but so far, I haven't been able to duplicate the double success of "B" Day. We'll try again this week, though. That's the whole point of repeating "B" Day: a new starting point. Tomorrow, maybe, we could try "Sh," including the Shadows, Shaggs, and Shangri-Las. Or what the heck, I'm always up for Electric Miles Day.

I'll get new pictures up soon. From babyland, over and out.

Book No. 18: Blink by Malcolm Gladwell



Blink reads like a management book. I don’t think I’ve ever read these sorts of chatty anecdotal-evidence books in any other genre, although I’ve never read a self-help book. The central thesis is that experts in a field (or, at least, people knowledgeable about a certain issue) internalize their expertise to the extent that their snap judgments are often more correct than a thorough analysis, even though they may not be consciously aware of the rationale for any particular snap judgment. My impression from some of the reviews I read was that Gladwell was arguing that all first impressions are more accurate than thorough analysis, but that's actually not it. He's clear that he only means this to be true for people with considerable experience in and knowledge of a particular issue.

Hmm. I don’t really have much to say about this book. My life is unchanged. Once you accept his conditions, the thesis seems almost self-evident, in a way that’s both supported by the chatty anecdotal evidence but not necessary demanded by that evidence. Gladwell is an easygoing writer, and I guess it’s a good thing that he’s interested in popularizing facially counterintuitive psychological research, but I don’t really know what to do with this knowledge now. To tell you the truth, I kept thinking of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s advice to Luke from beyond the grave in Star Wars: trust in your feelings, let go, etc. OK. I get it. Next!

A quick word of congratulations to Julie and Dutcher, two of the coolests cats I know, for simultaneously throwing the kickingest party ever kicked in Bertram, TX and getting hitched in a lovely ceremony during a remarkably well-timed thunderstorm. I had been thinking about a toast for y'all for a while, but somehow managed to flub it when Julie's sis-in-law came around with the camera. What I meant to say was: I'm fortunate to know both of y'all. I met y'all via the magic of the Internet and the minutiae of cult-pop culture. I'm thrilled that y'all found happiness with each other and hope that y'all will continue to make each other happy through the rest of your lives. See, obscure obsessions with pop culture really do bring people together. Auguri!

Book #17: The Disappointment Artist by Jonathan Lethem



I feel more kinship with Lethem than I should. It's awkward. I wrote that article about his books for the High Hat with the jokey call-out that in retrospect embarrasses me as much as any statement of unabashed fanboyishness should and will eventually embarrass the progenitor (assuming that we're not talking about Harry Knowles here, of course).

In this collection, which eventually begins to cohere into a memoir of sorts, Lethem talks about his obsessions -- obsessions I tend to share or at least recognize as similar to my own, current or past, (and would I please shut up because this isn't about me) -- as a way of talking about his coming-of-age: The Searchers, the Talking Heads, the subway station near his childhood home, the mentors he adopted after his mother died, his father's art, Star Wars, Cassavetes, Godard, Chuck Berry, Marvel comics, Fripp & Eno's No Pussyfooting album, and other weird little bits of pop culture detritus.

This focus of the self as mediated (in De Zengotita's terms, which I intend to use until a better model comes along) infuriated John Leonard, who wrote about how little he cares for Lethem's obsessions in the NYTRoB several months back. Leonard should know better (although everything I've read by the guy indicates that he clearly doesn't). Lethem isn't merely cataloguing his preferences. He's pushing through the mediation to examine how he became the man he is. What does it mean that he's watched The Searchers twelve times, trying to understand his reactions to it? The Searchers is a complicated, ugly, beautiful, confusing, corny, profound movie: a landmine of contradictions, like history itself. Would Leonard prefer a world where people didn't examine their reactions to movies like The Searchers? From his essay, I suspect he would prefer that people don't think about The Searchers at all, so long as movies he believes more intellectual exist. Or, I don't know, maybe Leonard thinks movies are beneath concern. His point seemed to be that Lethem is wasting his talent thinking about junk pop culture, but it's apparent that Lethem, although he acknowledges that his obsessions are outside of high cultural concerns, finds junk culture infinitely fascinating. As do I. As does anyone born after WWII and the advent of pop culture and the mediated life. The divisions between high, low, and in-between are crumbling.

This is not to say that all aesthetic reactions are relatively equal (just being clear here). I am, however, saying that Leonard's aesthetic revulsion to Lethem's subject matter is nonsense without sufficient support, which Leonard never really musters in his article.

Anyway, the book. I loved it, which I knew I would before even opening the cover. My head is filled with the same pop culture detritus marking my emotional development as Lethem's, and he truly speaks for those like me who think of pop songs or movies when thinking of important events.

Which is good for me (I know, I know, this is everyone's main concern -- but how is the book for you specifically, Hayden?), because I lack the discipline to ever get around to writing any of the fiction rattling around in my head. I long to be a writer, but I hate to actually write, and I never do it. At least, I never do anymore (and are you surprised that this paragraph is about me again? Get used to it, 'cause I appear to have a compulsion to write about me me me on my stupid blog), unlike when I had a writing class forcing me to sit down and craft stories.

OK, the book. Not me, the book, the book. Lethem is still carrying the weight of his adolescence, as I suspect everyone does, although since his emotional maturity is measured by the music, movies, and books he loved, he relives it when he encounters those things. Well, ok, maybe this isn't so new: so did Proust, albeit not with pop culture but things more subtle. Lethem is remembering things past with forceful intensity, partially because he still loves the stimula that drive these memories.

Lethem's prose is as welcoming as always and the book is much shorter than it should be (and why didn't they include Lethem's lovely essay on the unknowability of the Go-Betweens?), which makes it an unfortunately fast read. Not that I enjoyed wallowing in sympathy for Lethem, who had some horrible pain in losing his mother as a teenager, but I do enjoy listening to Lethem yap on about stupid things I love, as much as I love hearing any of my smart friends do so. Maybe more, because unlike when I bullshit with friends, Lethem's pearls of wisdom and understanding are captured in a book and thus not transitory. Shit. I need to acquire the discipline to write if it's permanence I'm so worried about. Don't I?

Book #16: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami



My secondhand knowledge of the world is inescapably linked to pop culture.

For instance, I know modern Japanese life only through pop culture and could only imagine the people and locales of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as Miyazaki anime. Maybe that's not too far out of the question. As in Miyazaki's Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro, Murakami's novel blends a fantasy spirit world seamlessly into a modern life informed by signs and portents. The seemingly hard edges of reality are constantly proving to be more fluid than they seem, as if supernatural mysteries lurk constantly behind the mask of mundanity.

Besides Miyazaki's anime, Murakami's novel reminds me of many Western writers. His obsession with pop culture and fusion of styles recalls Jonathan Lethem. His short, blunt, declaratory sentences and affable-if-a-bit-empty leading man is pure Raymond Chandler. His byzantine labyrinth of interconnecting stories and unpredictable plot development is Pynchonesque. His leap into fantastic situation makes me think of Neil Gaiman (although I should probably reveal that I find Gaiman a disappointing novelist, albeit a great writer of comics). Not being familiar with other modern Japanese novelists, I have no idea if they are all as interested in the West, or if my small sample is skewed by a Western touch (other Japanese artists I like include, for instance, Kurosawa, who loved John Ford's movies, and Miyazaki, who reaches Western audiences more than almost any other anime director). I understand that Murakami wrote this novel while visiting America, but I also understand that it was a bestseller in Japan, where people must certainly have gotten his constant references to Western pop culture.

Anyway, I read the book at the recommendation of Leonard Pierce and found it fascinating, if a bit disappointing at the end (sure, I understand that some storylines were dropped to maintain the point that not all mysteries require explanation, but I also read that the American publisher insisted on a particular word count from the translator, who wrote a more accurate translation that was much longer and presumably had a less abrupt conclusion). The narrator through most of the book is Toru Okada. The plot unfolds in waves and the central mystery isn't reached until a ways into the book, but suffice it to say that Okada is as descriptive and unflappable as the classic Chandler protagonist. First he receives strange phone calls, then goes to a closed-off alley behind his house to look for his cat. He encounters an alluring teenage girl while thinking about a creepy abandoned house at the end of the alley. Then, strange people suddenly begin to appear and disappear from his life. His primary antagonist in the book hardly ever makes an appearance. Some of the most compelling parts of the book are stories told to him by passing acquaintances with whom he feels a strong connection. Some other passages are stories that he will never hear.

All in all, this is a strange and beautiful work with an atmosphere of social horror (founded on the horror of history, specifically the atrocities of WWII) that more than compensates for the somewhat unsatisfactory end. Although it reminds me of several different Western writers, it ultimately speaks with a voice of its own.

Me, me, me, me, me. I should have apologized before writing the last post for being so narcissistic. But what's a blog without the narcissism?

You scored as Postmodernist. Postmodernism is the belief in complete open interpretation. You see the universe as a collection of information with varying ways of putting it together. There is no absolute truth for you; even the most hardened facts are open to interpretation. Meaning relies on context and even the language you use to describe things should be subject to analysis. Postmodernist 100% Materialist 75% Cultural Creative 69% Existentialist 56% Modernist 38% Romanticist 38% Idealist 25% Fundamentalist 25% What is Your World View? (corrected...again) created with QuizFarm.com

I'm 33 today. In four months, I'll be 1/3 of a century old. In three years, statistically speaking, half of my life will be over. I think I'm lucky to have grown up in a time where I can carry so many of my adolescent passions with me into adulthood. None of that "when I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." for me. Well, ok, Paul was talking about ways of understanding, but still. Perhaps the mediated life is less of a centered life than the lives of those who came before. Perhaps I shouldn't care so much about pop culture, which, like some sci-fi drug, not only keeps me young but focuses my brain on unimportant details so as to keep me distracted from more important things, using me up. Perhaps we are all Dorian Grays now.

Still, I feel lucky. A man my age a century ago would be well over halfway through his life, burnt out by constant work and struggle, striving to feed his many children and spouse, rising before dawn and coming to bed late, tired, sore, married to a woman he hardly knew before he married her, friendly with a few other men (and not women) in the vicinity with whom he speaks a couple of times a month, only hearing music in church or if he could afford an instrument around the house and had found the time to learn to play it when he was young, perhaps reading a few books when he could get hold of them but hardly ever having the time or opportunity for entertainment, and farming if he still owned land but most likely losing that farm and having to move to an urban center to find work (n.b. if it's my great-great-granddad we're talking about, he didn't lose the farm, nor did my great-grandfather, grandfather, or father). Relatively speaking, I have it made.

What would he think of me, this man of 1905? Would he want what I have? Would he think I'm wasting it? Would he recoil from the frivolty with which I surround myself? Or would he long for luxury of surrounding yourself with frivolous entertainments?

When I think of him, I think of how fortunate I am to have the great things that I have. I may work in an ethically ambiguous field and I may waste my intellect -- or what little of it I still can access, that is -- on issues that ultimately don't matter to anyone but me, but I have a wife who is smart and beautiful, an infant son who is happy and well-fed, a house, car, pets, guitars, electronic luxuries that the 1905 man could not even imagine, a job where I rarely break a sweat and can usually leave after a mere 8 hours, shelves of CDs, books, and movies to ease and challenge my mind, a college education, an extended family and friends that we can -- wonder of wonders -- contact instantly, though they live half the country away, and the ability to up and travel just about anywhere in the world in just a few hours. Many of these things are material goods or opportunities, but they augment my life.

I know that progress towards a more fair society proceeded quickly in the 20th century until the conservative backlash against economic progress in the 1970s and 80s reversed the expansion of the middle class. The man my age in 1985 would be able to tick off a similar list, although the man my age in 1965 would still be working towards it. Nevertheless, things are better than they used to be, and I hope that the political alignment of the country leans again towards progress in the next election so that we may keep the gains hard-won from the wealthy by our grandparents and great-grandparents.

Anyway, I've always taken measure of myself on my birthday and found myself lacking. This year, I will be strive to be more optimistic: I will view as opportunities the places where I fail my conception of how I should be. Most importantly, I will try to show my wife and son that I deserve them every day. This is my life's work.