It’s not even been an hour since I walked out of the theatre and, as such, it’s far too early to properly judge, but still: Stranger Than Fiction might be my favorite movie I’ve ever watched.

There are movies I love. Movies I admire as incredible achievements, movies that make me laugh uncontrollably, movies that do any number of things very well and that I enthusiastically recommend. But it’s very rare (I suspect this is true for everyone and not only me) that a movie comes along that I find really speaks to me. Transfixes me. Grabs me early on and makes me feel like it’s not simply talking to me but through me. Like it’s expressing a part of me, but in a better, more perfect way than I ever could.

Almost Famous did, but was far from perfect – it was too long and the actual plot wasn’t as great as the feeling of thee movie. Pleasantville was speaking to me – right up until the last third of the movie turned to total shit.

From the very first moment, Stranger Than Fiction seemed to be speaking to me. Naturally this filled me with terror, because I was so sure this movie couldn’t end well, they were bound to screw it up somehow (you can just see the gaping plot holes), and every failed ending is proportionately worse based on how much you enjoy what came before. And then … I was wrong. It’s just this amazingly perfect movie, all the way through. Well, not perfect, there’s at least one thing that doesn’t work, but that’s pretty easy to forgive in a movie that’s otherwise so good. So good and so funny and so dark and so sad and so … I don’t know, so me.

I’m still on a high from it clearly, because wow. Just wow.

I have been having some trouble this year – as I did the year before, and the year before that – getting into the holiday spirit. This didn’t used to be particularly hard for me to do. Though not my favorite holiday (it’s pretty much always been Halloween, even when I was little), I’ve always (or perhaps I should say at least until recently) really loved the holiday. This despite my complete lack of religious belief and general annoyance with the crass commercialization of something that I love for the Rockwell-like ideas of hot apple cider and family and gathering around the tree. My childhood was at times amazingly like that Rockwellian fantasy. My adult life to this point, sadly is not.

When I was younger I had a tradition that I observed every Thanksgiving night that began my happy embrace of the season. Sometime after all the family had gone home and I was as full of apple pie and cranberry sauce as it is possible to be, I would go to my room and listen to a very particular song on a very particular holiday CD. (The actual artist and CD are too embarrassing to reveal here, and that must be truly embarrassing when you consider that just a few posts below this one I gush all over how much I enjoy that “Unwritten” song.) That tradition has in recent years fallen by the wayside. This year it didn’t even occur to me until sometime last week that I hadn’t listened to the song – and even though I’ve finally broken down and put holiday music on my iPod, I still haven’t heard that song.

Part of this, almost certainly, is that I have not yet (and may never truly) adjust to the reality of winter in Phoenix (read: there isn’t such a thing). I all but missed Halloween what with the 100-degree temperatures and on Thanksgiving I was uncomfortably hot sitting outside. Even the recent “cold”-er weather hasn’t really helped. I’m not going to extol the virtues of a white Christmas or anything – snow is only pretty in theory, in reality it is wet and cold and makes traveling a distinct pain in the ass. But it does at least set the right mood.

More of the problem, though, is just that I’ve become an adult and being an adult sucks. Sucks hard. I mean, OK, sex is pretty good and I enjoy my booze every now and then and driving is nice, but besides all that adulthood is pretty much a bust. Work? Sucks. Money? Don’t have enough. Bills? Don’t get me started. And even Christmas. It’s just not fun anymore.

The worst of it is that Christmas reminds me not only of the basic things you lose as you grow from a child into an adult, but it reminds me in particular of a part of me that I’ve lost and that I miss. It might seem hard to believe, those of you who have never known me as anything but the decidedly cynical bastard I am, but as recently as high school I was terribly romantic, hopelessly romantic. Not in the Valentine way (I’m still reasonably good at all that), but in the classical way. I believed in the goodness of the world and the power of love to overcome everything and in beauty and in soulmates and … basically all the shit that I today roll my eyes at and regard as utter bullshit.

But, like most cynics who deride the more wide-eyed among us, I really only do so out of jealousy: I miss being that way. Even as I openly gag and push away any such silly, starry-eyed idealism, part of me still yearns for it, part of me remembers when I believed in it, and that part of me misses being that way. It’s a much more fulfilling way to live.

Take the movie to which I increasingly make an effort to relate every thing in the world to – Love Actually. It’s not just a romantic comedy. It’s like ten. It’s sickeningly bursting with optimism and joy and the belief that amor omnia vincit and “all you need is love” and while it gets to me on all those levels (I’m still not that jaded, apparently) the stories I find myself liking best are the dark ones – the long-time wife who knows her husband is cheating but doesn’t know exactly in what manner, and the new wife who suddenly realizes that her husband’s best friend is in love with her. These plot lines have the ring of dark reality to them, and of course like any realist I’m far more enamored with dark real stories than happy real ones (my happy marriage is not nearly as interesting to write about as a marriage falling apart would be, for example). This is disturbing, and while this is itself a sign of hope, I just know that it wasn’t so long ago when I would have seen myself in Colin Firth’s writer character and hated the two stories that dared to bring darkness into such a bright movie. I still love Firth’s story, and Hugh Grant’s, and etc., but they don’t interest me. This is how I have become a dark and cynical person: I am, at least in my approach to art, more head than heart – I’ve become overly cerebral. And it’s ruining my Christmas.

There’s other adult stuff getting in the way, too, of course. The older you get, the shorter any individual month becomes in terms of the entire life you’ve lived, and the more you begin to realize that whether it’s Christmas or Halloween or some week in June, you still have to go to work and your boss still needs those TPS reports yesterday. But that, ultimately, I secondary. I mourn my lost Christmas spirit, but some of that is inevitable and I can live with that – it’s just ridiculous to bundle up in a parka to do Christmas shopping when you know perfectly well that it’s going to be sunny and 70 outside. It’s bad enough admitting that – it’s even worse being reminded that every year I become a little more like Ebenezer Scrooge and a little less like his nephew.

Just like Jay-Z ...

I’m back. Except, I think I was gone a lot longer than Jigga ever was.

You might notice that my absence corresponds rather well with a typical fall semester of school and there’s a reason for that, of course. But now, while not being completely finished, the bulk of my class work is finished, and here I am again.

I have to admit, it’s not that I was so busy 100% of the time that I couldn’t blog, far from it in fact. But this semester I was enrolled in two literature classes, which turns our to be a hell of a lot of reading, even when you can skim or skip a few books that you’ve read previously. But, again, it wasn’t that I was too busy … I was just unmotivated.

One thing I have learned about myself in recent years is that I’m a writer. That is, I’m not someone who can write, or who writes well, or who uses writing as a particular tool to solve this issue or another. Nor does it mean – God knows – that I actually make any money from writing. I used to think that when I was depressed, if I could force myself to write that it would help to cheer my mood. In fact I had it backwards: it’s not that writing cheers me up necessarily, it’s that not writing makes me depressed. And if there’s one thing that can keep me from writing too much, it’s reading.

This is, I know, kind of a terrible thing to say. A writer has to read, has to really fucking love reading, if he wants to be a good writer. This I believe absolutely. By the time I reached high school I understood – mostly intuitively, though I was able to break it out if needed – a lot of the basic underlying conventions of writing in different genres. It shocked me that so many of my peers – and when I here use the term peers I’m not referring just to other high school students, but to those who were in AP English classes with me and many of whom were way, way smarter than me – flat out didn’t get this stuff. Even some of the good writers didn’t same entirely capable of functioning outside of the convention 5-paragraph essay. I learned all this from reading; not reading anything about how to write, just reading. I read newspapers and saw how that kind of journalistic writing is different from magazine journalism, and how features are different from news, and how and when it’s OK to let opinion slip into writing. Surely I wasn’t born with any of this knowledge, though I may have been born with a brain receptive to it – I just read all the time as a kid. It wasn’t until college that I learned that reading could be a problem, too.

Throughout junior high and high school, I wrote all the time. Awful, trite crap and silly stupid shit, yes, but I just wrote and wrote and wrote. I loved it so much that during my sophomore year of high school it occurred to me that – outside of writing books, which, let’s face it, doesn’t pay the bills – one of the best ways to get paid for being a writer was journalism. I was good at journalism, both writing and editing, because I understood it. The problem was that I kind of hated it (mostly the reporting). So, even though one of the reasons I was interested in UA to begin with was their strong journalism program, when I went to college I enrolled as a creative writing major. And then I promptly stopped writing almost altogether.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I was writing a lot. I had papers to write all the time and all kinds of interesting and not-at-all interesting stuff to read. I didn’t stop reading for pleasure, but I surely cut it back a lot. And as I spent more and more time thinking about academic topics, I spent less and less time allowing the creative side of my grain to make up stories.

I graduated with a creative writing major and barely wrote anything creative in all those four-plus years. Everything that I finished in that time was required of me for a grade. Nothing was longer than 30 pages or so. And most of it was bad. I mean, I was an OK writer then, though four years have made me a better writer now so that I sometimes wince to read some of my old stories, but the stories themselves were just uninspired. You can tell they were forced. There’s nothing behind them, even when they’re (mildly) clever, or (almost) have a plot. Almost all of that fiction (and even some of the “creative non-fiction”) was banged out in the wee hours of the morning mere hours before it was due to be turned in. Every writer runs up against deadlines, but I was pathetic.

The only two stories I’m at all fond of that I wrote in college were both conceived – if not written – while on vacation. One takes place in London, where I went on vacation during my sophomore spring break. The other takes place in an unnamed city but was a re-inspired version of a story I had worked on in high school that came back to me while I was in Hawaii. I wrote something recently (which I will probably post here sooner or later) about the very great extent to which travel and foreign places inspire me. It’s not that I can’t commit to a story and let writing it become a part of my daily life. In high school I was good at that, and over the past 2+ years I have learned the skill again. But when much of my life becomes devoted to some other kind of pursuit – generally school – the creative side of me atrophies. In those times, it seems only travel is particularly effective at breaking my stupor (London and Hawaii in college, a weekend trip to California this fall).

I always want to write. As I said earlier, not writing tends to put me in a bad mood. But there are times when I have much else to do that I find I can’t force it – and that if I were to try, I would be forcing it. At these times, even my recreational writing (what there is of it) gets vaguely academic – see the aforementioned essay about me, travel and writing, and another literary critique of Lemony Snicket that I’ll post here as well.

The good news is that the semester is over, more or less. The bad news is that winter session starts in a week or two. But at least I’m blogging again.

In which I make my triumphant return

(A blog in 5 acts.)

*

I think if I were a pop music producer I would have a backup choir in pretty much every song I produced. Usually coming in toward the end to add that last over-the-top soulful touch. Seriously, I know plenty of songs have this already, but I can’t fathom why every song doesn’t. It’s not like pop music has ever been afraid of doing too much of a good thing. And a choir singing backup and adding little soulful shouting behind the vocals is most definitely a good thing.

This is how I’m justifying my love for this Unwritten song that was (I guess) a pretty big hit this summer. It’s a good bit of bubblegum pop anyway, and goodness knows I’m a sucker for inspirational-seize-the-day type songs anyway, but it’s that choir toward the end that takes me “this song is OK” to “I’m actually embarrassed by how much I like this song.”

Sure, there are other factors. I tend to hear the song in particularly appropriate situations – driving through Beverly Hills on a lovely June day, driving through Mission Hills on one of the most beautiful August days God ever created – and so I associate the song with those happy times. That’s all well and good, but it really comes back to that choir.

It’s basically a verse-chorus-verse-chorus-chorus-chorus song and the end would be really monotonous if it were just Natasha Beddiwhatever (full disclosure: this song is on my iPod so I could look her name up, I’m just too lazy) singing it over and over – though even then she (or, probably, the producer) does a nice job of altering the phrasing anyway. Still again – that choir.

Thing is, it’s probably not actually a choir. There could have been one or two people in the studio doing background vocals and it’s easy enough to make them sound like hundreds of voices. I care not. When those voice kick in I allow myself to see a balcony full of soul-singing women in white robes, giving it their utmost. I can see the lady at the far end of the line who’s not singing the words but instead is skatting and making all kinds of bizarre but soulful noises, complete with wild gyrations and hand movements. I see the choir moving together as one in a side-to-side motion, and yet individually breaking the rhythm of movement with arms thrown into the air or hands extended to assist in reaching a note as appropriate. I see and hear all of this and the song becomes secondary. I am powerless, I turn up the volume, my face breaks into a smile, I sing along. I feel no embarrassment until the song ends.

This is what pop music should be – and would be, if I were producing it.

**

I’m thinking about changing my license plate again, mostly because I want a personalized plate, but also because it offers the side benefit of ridding myself of A6NEW, which I have hated ever since it arrived.

This started mostly in San Diego last month, because I saw a few music-related plates and I envied them. I spent one bored afternoon checking what was and was not currently taken according to the AZMVD web site and determined many interesting DMB-themed plates were available. I tabled the idea at that point, because my registration will need to be renewed at the end of October anyway – I decided to wait until it came due and if it still seemed like a good idea then, I would go ahead. It’s not registration time yet, but it’s been several weeks, and I’m still thinking I might do it. My favorite options are both reasonably easy to interpret, though even once correctly read most people won’t necessarily understand what it refers to. That’s OK with me.

The best of the options I remember were NMBR41 and LVRLYDN, for the songs #41 and Lover Lay Down, respectively. Something like 364041 is also an option – those are the untitled/numbered songs in the DMB catalog. I like all these options, but really wish I could somehow get something relating to the phrase “Don’t burn the day” on there. But I just can’t see how to compress that to seven letters. The lyric comes from the song “Pig,” but I really don’t need a license plate that says “Pig” on it. Suggestions and/or comments are welcome.

***

I know I’ve been reading a lot of old literature (Shakespeare and gothic novels – all for school, of course) because when I above wrote “because I want” I first started to write “I am desirous of” and when I wrote “my face breaks into a smile” I originally had “my countenance becomes full of joy.” No kidding.

****

Every year Neil Young puts on two concerts in San Francisco that are a benefit for the Bridge School, a special program that supports disabled children (gross oversimplification but I don’t really know all the details). The concerts attract big name bands that each night play acoustic sets of about an hour. Usually there are 3-4 big name bands and a few other smaller acts that you may or may not have ever heard of I’ve always thought it would be fun to go, but never been sufficiently motivated to make the trip.

This year’s lineup, however, includes not only my two favorite bands – Dave Matthews Band and Pearl Jam, to the uninitiated – but also Brian Wilson, Foo Fighters, Death Cab for Cutie, and – perhaps most intriguingly given the all-acoustic setting – Trent Reznor. Oh, how I want to go!

I spent Sunday looking up travel deals and flights and hotels and car rentals and all those nasty details. It wouldn’t be ridiculously expensive, but it’s more than I need to be spending. Plus it would require at least one and possibly two days of vacation from work, and those are increasingly hard to come by at this point. On Monday I decided the wise thing would be to not go. I made my peace.

Then yesterday I got a check from NAU for the balance of my student loan for this semester – they’re idiots and not only didn’t process it in a timely manner but also didn’t reduce the amount as I had requested. So it was a sizable check and for a moment there I thought, “Damn it all! I’ll go! I’ll pay for friends to come, as well! It’ll be a grand old time!” Then I came to my senses and reconfirmed my commitment to adult sensibilities – but the peace I had made had been disturbed and I was sad again.

But as of last night a wondrous new possibility has presented itself. It’s not in San Francisco and it’s not a bunch of interesting bands, but it’s within driving distance, it’s on a free weekend, and it’s realistic enough that it might cure my melancholy. On Saturday October 28 and Sunday October 29 Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds will play acoustic shows at the Santa Barbara Bowl! I’m giddy at the thought. Tickets will be hard to come by, but I think I’ll at least have to try. Even if only for Saturday night. And could there be a way to work this into a Disneyland / Knott’s / Six Flags trip? Oh, the enticing possibilities …

*****

People sometimes look at me like I’m crazy when I confess how much I like Elton John, but you have to understand that I’m not talking about Lion King/Aida/80s and early 90s Elton John when I praise him. Most of that stuff wasn’t even good pop music. But in the 70s, he was brilliant, and some of his most recent records have at least teased at that old style and quality. Now he has released a record called The Cowboy and The Kid that claims to be a sequel to one of his best albums of the seventies – Captain Fantastic and The Brown Dirty Cowboy. And not only is this new record great, I think it’s better than Captain Fantastic. Definitely gets a seal of approval.

I also am feeling the need to pimp Amos Lee as much as possible. His first album has been out for some time, but you still probably haven’t heard it. It’s great. He’s got an acoustic songwriting style that’s reminiscent of folk, but he sings like Otis Redding. And his new album, which comes out next month, is amazingly good stuff. (Uh, a little birdie told me so.)

My pseudo-summer vacation

Last night marked the end of my summer session class (ie, month of hell) and as far as I know I passed it, so that means it’s a reason to celebrate. I’ll grant you, it would be easier to celebrate with air conditioning, but I’m trying not to wallow in self-pity. At least it’s somewhat overcast and not 110 today.

But once the A/C gets fixed (and provided that it works for longer than 4 days this time), there’s some fun stuff to look forward to:

• Ben Harper at the Dodge Theatre tomorrow night.
• DMB two weeks from tonight on my birthday. That’s a fun birthday party all by itself, but I do like any excuse to get my friends together. Especially if it’s in honor of me. The problem is I think Brianna and Robert are out of town the weekend before and we’re going to be out of town the weekend after my birthday. And the weekend after that is Labor Day weekend. Anyone with a clever solution to this problem (Thursday night dinner?) is welcome to make a suggestion.
• Going to San Diego for a weekend (August 25-27). Ah, San Diego let me count the things I love about thee: nightlife, beaches, downtown and Gaslamp, little Italy, and weather that’s cooler than the temperature I would set on my thermostat – if , of course, I had a working cooling system.
• I actually have to start school again on the 28th, but I’m almost excited about that, too, since it will be my first exposure to actual literature classes. This could go either way.
• Broncos v. Cardinals pre-season football game on August 31. It’s preseason so I don’t much care about the game, but it should be fun to go have a look at the new stadium.
• The lovely woman here at work who just sold me tickets to Wicked at face value, while I was seriously considering paying a ridiculous markup to get them off Craigslist. No one mourns the wicked, you know. But they do mourn the loss of air conditioning.

no. 12

I have no idea if anyone reads this who doesn't also read Lisa's blog, but I implore you to take three minutes of your life and go watch this film.

http://www.myspace.com/no12movie

It's amazing, and probably the coolest thing I have ever been a part of.

I'm extremely proud of Kane, Tracy, and Trish who really are the ones who make the film what it is. If we were only going to win one award then I'm absolutely glad that this was it. And better yet is that it will be played again at the International Horror & SciFi Film Festival, and hopefully on in a few other places after that.

Go watch this now. Then when my friend Kane becomes famous you can say you remember him from this short.

You've probably all seen this week's cover of People:



But here is an exclusive sneak preview of next week's cover!

Three of my favorite authors all in one room. Cool.



Personally, I'm sort of ambivalent about Harry's potential to die. I don't want him to, I guess, but if he does and she does it right (which I have every faith she would) then I wouldn't really have an argument with that decision.

Big Mouth Lancey Bass

Yeah, because you keeping this "secret" really fooled everyone. We're shocked!

***

Last week I praised Phoenix for having a number of sporting/concert venues that are not named after corporate sponsors. In fact, I think I called it one of the city's few redeeming qualities (there are probably more but they're so hard to think of when it's 118). Then I read the Cardinals are shopping for a sponsor to grant naming rights to for their new stadium. So much for Cardinals Stadium, I guess. Bastards.

Mega Book Post

I’ve had a good run lately with the books I’ve been reading.


It started with a huge novel by an Australian prosecutor named Eliot Perlman called Seven Types Of Ambiguity. It tells the story of a kidnapping and the successive trial from the points of view of seven of the involved parties. It’s got a Dickensian (both a word and a style that I love) quality in its political and social scope, but also gets very po-mo with its different narrators and the way it shows how truth varies from person to person. Simply one of the best novels I’ve ever read, but it’s a serious undertaking.





Also read Joan Didion’s memoir called The Year Of Magical Thinking about the year after her husband’s death during which she was also dealing with her daughter being sick. Brutal and honest stuff. Not something you’d want to read just for fun, but if you’ve ever lost a person this is about as good a memoir on grieving as you’re going to find (C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed is the only other better thing I’ve read).




Then I went for a wonderful satire by Max Barry called Company. Barry also wrote a book satirizing advertising called Jennifer Government that I loved—Company takes on corporate culture. As often happens with satires, the plot just sort of unravels at a certain point, but it’s so worth it for the horrid and painful truths in the first half of the book. If you’ve never worked in a corporate office, it would probably just seem like absurdism, but – tragically – it’s not.




Kevin Brockmeier wrote a book called The Short History Of The Dead that is far from perfect but I’ll always remember because it has one of the best ideas I’ve ever heard for a story. The book takes place (in even numbered chapters) sometimes in the future, as a plague of some sort is killing off virtually all humanity. One of the last people left living is a researcher in Antarctica. The odd-numbered chapters take place in a sort-of Purgatory-like City that’s somewhere after life but not quite like what we think of as death. It’s based on a belief prevalent in many African cultures that there are not two states of existence (alive and dead) like we assume in the Western world, but instead there are three: alive, dead but still remembered by the living, and ancestors (not necessarily people who have been forgotten, but those who are no longer remembered by the living). The odd numbered chapters make the book. The city first fills up drastically, then begins to drastically empty as quickly as it filled (all as a result of the plague). Ultimately, the only inhabitants left are those remembered by the researcher in the even-numbered chapters. It’s a very good book and there are some passages of writing that are excellent, but it’s such a neat idea I’m not sure any writer could have pulled it off.


Then I read Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro (the guy who wrote The Remains Of The Day). This book inexplicably takes place in the twentieth century, but in a different twentieth century than the actual one we just completed. It’s revealed slowly, but the essential idea is that clones were created, raised separately to adulthood, and then essentially used for parts. The book is the journal of one of these clones and it’s about as creepy as anything I’ve ever read. Her story is mostly mundane (schoolyard crush becomes lifelong flame), but the background of who they are and what future faces them is so abhorrent that it just paints every little action that might otherwise be boring or trite as painfully bittersweet. This is a book I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to anyone.


Most recently, with a little urging from Brianna, I moved onto Daniel Handler (the guy who also writes as Lemony Snicket). I read his first novel The Basic Eight and loved it, and just finished his novel/short story collection Adverbs and loved maybe half of it. Handler is one of those writers who is as much or more interested in playing with language as he is in plot. That’s fine and interesting – it’s just not generally my preference. (I’m a plot guy. Tell me a good story and write well and I don’t care if there’s nothing new in the writing at all.) This worked out pretty well in The Basic Eight because he has 400 pages of novel to fill up so he essentially had to give us plot. And, really, there’s not that much plot – just enough. But his writing is entertaining enough to cover a lot of things that might have been flaws in other books. In general, I hate novels told in a series of letters or diary entries, but this “diary” worked. Flannery is entertaining to read. There’s an over-long section at the end that is almost all about circuitous writing and not at all about plot and that’s the only part of the book I didn’t just love. It should really be a movie (except they’d probably ruin it and they aren’t big on school killing movies since Columbine).


Adverbs is billed as a novel on the cover and true enough seems to contain many of the same characters … but it’s still really a collection of stories. As such, some are excellent, others are just semi-interesting exercises in complicated exposition. Still, there are a handful of the through-images that I just love from Adverbs: (1) The stories mostly take place in San Francisco in a time around (before, during, and after) a disaster of some kind. We don’t really know what. Maybe it’s an act of terrorism. Maybe it’s a volcano. Maybe it’s an earthquake (hey, it’s San Francisco). This is brilliant to me. The not knowing is cryptic and frightening, which is of course the point. What better expression of our national consciousness post-9/11? Moreover, it gets to the point of something I have always tried to work into stories about San Francisco, which is that an impending dread hangs over the place and did so even long before 9/11. The city is sitting right on top of probably the world’s most treacherous fault line. The city has been destroyed before, and very well may be again. But no one knows when. That feeling of uncertain but potentially approaching doom pervades many of the stories, and is wonderful. (2) Although the book is taking place in a recognizable place, it’s not really our world. It’s not our San Francisco, or it is but it’s not our world of culture. Characters have passionate discussions about music, naming bands that Handler has completely made up. If you try really hard you can maybe guess that he may or may not be referring to some real world bands (and places, etc). But maybe he’s just making it up. To his characters, though, the bands they talk about are as real as U2 and Shakira. It’s a nice touch and a tempting one to emulate.


Anyway. Having finished the Handler books, I’ve gone back to Perlman for a collection her wrote called The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming. The first story is one of those that just takes your breath away. Mine, anyway. The second story was also very good. I’m excited.

Other stuff I want to read soon, but may or may not get to:
Handler’s other books, the adult Watch Your Mouth and the Lemony Snicket series so that I’m caught up for #13 this fall
Levi’s American Vertigo essays
A memoir called Oh, The Glory Of It All, by Sean Willsey. But maybe I should wait until I’m working on a San Francisco book to pull out all the SF stuff. Also if I ever get around to writing that, I should re-read the best earthquake novels I've ever read, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (Salman Rushdie) and Strong Mation (Jonathan Franzen).
I’m always itching to re-read Bret Easton Ellis stuff. I’m thinking it might be time to revisit Glamorama.
Jose Saramago’s Seeing/Blindness books.
Who knows how much else?