Isles Beat Rangers, 2-1!

I quote Herman Blume from Rushmore: "...take dead aim on the rich ones. Get them in the crosshairs ...and take them down."

Sleepless Days

It's hard to find any information about Jurek Becker's Sleepless Days. Usually, a Google through the interwebs on any book of choice will yield a good deal of information, some good, some...not so good. But this is not the case when I was looking to get some background on Sleepless Days.

This story chronicles a crisis in the life of an East German schoolteacher. An unidentifiable health episode descends Karl Simlock into a kind of life-upending transformation. He quits his job, his family and everything that anchors his daily routine: "I have led my whole life so far as if the genuinely important things were still to come. I have been waiting for the door to be opened behind which the action is taking place. I never asked myself whose hand is supposed to turn the doorknob."

Becker's Simlock is experiencing a crisis anyone in middle age can relate to. Yet, because Simlock's episode is partly caused by the restrictive world of East Germany, I found it difficult to pinpoint Becker's motives behind Sleepless Days. Was Becker trying to portray the existential trauma of one man (any man) or was the screaming desperation laid out by Simlock, a metaphor for the frustrations all East Germans felt living in the GDR's crushing banality and marginalized anonymity?

Either way, this is a beautiful book and I am shocked that it flies so far below the radar.

My Second Favorite Brendan

I.


Today, while visiting the city of Philadelphia before his team, the New York Islanders, were to take on the Philadelphia Flyers, Islanders defender Brendan Witt was hit by a truck. After this transgression occurred, Witt got up, dusted himself off and headed back to the arena to get ready for the game.

Of course, as I write this post the Islanders are losing 6-2 to the Flyers, so perhaps Witt should have sought medical assistance. Still, that's a man who's got a pair of stones, my friends.


II.

In other sporting news, it would appear that the United States' first game in the 2010 World Cup will be against Her Majesty's Collection of Dysfunctional Overpaid Footballers. Here's the bracket for Group C:


Of course, the British press is salivating over the prospects that their nation's team is a shoe-in to advance to the second round, lumping a victory over us as trying a task as defeating Algeria and Slovenia. Keep talking chaps...keep talking. Their boisterous posturing at the expense of my home nation's dignity has really gotten my Irish up. As you faithful of Slimbo's Shelf know, I am not one to submit to moronic American jingoism, but until our beloved Screaming Eagles lay the three lionesses to rest in South Africa, I am considering a boycott of all things English (and you Shelf readers ALSO know that I am an unrepentant Anglophile).

Boycott list includes:

1. Tea
2. Bass Ale
3. Kingsley Amis and Nick Hornby
4. Beatles, Stones and the Kinks
5. Rachel Weisz (and this one hurts!)
6. English Premier League (will only watch Tim Howard, Everton Keeper, only the greatest on the planet!)
7. Monty Python
8. Granta Literary Magazine
9. Nigella Lawson (see lament re: Rachel Weisz above)
10. BBC World News at 9am
11. When Saturday Comes (footie magazine)
12. Being polite and ironic

III.

Lastly, the Giants beat the monkey out of the Dallas Cowboys last Sunday....ah, that felt good.

The List Master

Summer is the season most aligned with book reading. I, on the other hand, get no time in the summer to read, for good reasons as our family is usually hoping about in the sun chasing some fun activity or another.

So Winter is my time to buckle down and hit the books. This time of year, I excitedly form my list of books I plan on tackling as the days grow short and the wind whips through the barren branches:

1. The Polysyllabic Spree, Nick Hornby - The list master himself. I'm into this one right now - it's a series of Hornby's contributed columns from Believer. Hornby breaks down a year in his life and tells you about the books he's bought and read. But this work is more about his love of books and the act of book buying and book obsessing.

Upcoming reads:

2. The Black Book, Ian Rankin. It's Edinburgh, it's dark, damp and cranky. Not a book for sunny beaches and rum drinks with those little umbrellas in them.
3. Sleepless Days, Jurek Becker. An East German schoolteacher is confronted with his own mortality - am I in heaven or what?
4. The Black Prince, Iris Murdoch. For my birthday, I bought myself a used 1973 first-edition hardcover in great condition. I plan on wearing white cotton gloves as I read this.
5. Chekhov - Selected Stories. It's winter so oh, yes...there will be Chekhov. The greatest writer that ever lived IMHO - a fine doctor too. I have at least three different Chekhov short story anthologies. They're like paper towels - if I see them, I buy them because I can't live without them.
6. Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth. I know, I know - I've never read it. I'm only human.
7. Airframe, Michael Crighton. A good friend gave me this to read because I work with airplanes. Too bad the late Crighton aligned himself with the crazies toward the end.
8. The Finest Stories of Padraic O'Conaire, Again...it's the whole damp cold thing.

Today

Today's my birthday and I'll leave it to you to figure out how old I've become. This is the year. Yup. This is the one I do all the bullshit - write the book, run the (half) marathon.

Love to all - you who check in from time to time. I appreciate the traffic and hope you get a kick, an insight or at least a diversion when you visit.

Sorry my posts have become a bit thin (or dare I say 'slim') lately. Truth is I am working on a n_vel (I won't let myself actually say the word). And this n_vel project is sucking the gravitational force away from blogging. But fear not. I'll still be here - to pester, annoy and kvetch as only I know how.

With love,

Slimbo

Healthiest US States

Check this out: Forbes Magazine published an article listing the healthiest US States. Rankings were based on things like obesity, smoking, cancer deaths, etc. Slimbo's Shelf is here to help you break down the results:

The healthiest (top 5):
1. Vermont - Now I'm actually kind of surprised here. I once spent a week in Vermont in the dead of July. It never got above 50 degrees and the sun came up at 9:30am and promptly set at 4:00pm. How do you stay healthy while freezing in a log cabin drinking syrup eleven months out of the year?
2. Utah - This isn't fair. They have Mormons. Those people don't drink, they don't smoke. Not fair....just not fair.
3. Massachusetts - I'm sorry. I really don't get this one. Between the years 1990 and 2000, I visited Boston about twenty times. And during each visit, every inhabitant I encountered was binge drinking. All of them.
4. Hawaii - I'm surprised Hawaii wasn't #1. My in-laws live on the island of Oahu and I get there about once a year. Every. Day. The. Weather. Is. Beautiful. The air is fresh and the ocean awaits. If I lived there, I'd be a bronzed surfing god...really I would.
5. New Hampshire - You've seen the license plates. "Live Healthy or Die". 'Bout sums it all up, doesn't it.

And now...the bottom five:
46. South Carolina - "YOU LIE!!" No, Addison Wilson III, we don't lie. Maybe fighting health care reform that might enhance preventative medicine isn't such a bad idea, huh?
47. Louisiana - now this isn't fair. They have Bourbon Street. That'll throw off the curve, won't it? And think of everything they had to go through Post-Katrina. Give these folks a break, I say.
48. Alabama - ever been to a Skynard concert? Me neither.
49. Oklahoma - kind of surprised here. I always think of Oklahoma as the diet-Texas. Texas Lite.
50. Mississippi - Fun to spell, lousy to visit. I should like to point out that from a civic legislation standpoint, two of the bottom five are best known for exerting inordinate amounts of energy keeping the confederate flag as their state flag. Just sayin'.

My home state? New York - #25. Middle of the curve.

Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather

When I was growing up, my family moved a few times. The town I live in now just happens to be where I lived between the time I was six and thirteen. I didn't specifically seek to reclaim this place. My wife and I were expecting our second child and our apartment just wasn't going to work. I made it my quest that I would buy the first house I could afford and it just happened to be here.


- - The town has changed a great deal. It was once composed of almost exclusively working-class Irish and Italian families. Now though, due to its close proximity to New York, it's become somewhat gentrified with young, professional yuppie families, I guess, like my own. The small homey movie theatre where I saw E.T., is now a film arts center and the corner newsstand where my brother and I bought baseball cards and comics has become a fashion optical store. The ancient timber box church we'd once attended has been bulldozed and rebuilt.

- - But amid this makeover, I may find some artifact, a sign that's been left unchanged, a store that's been utterly unchanged through three decades. And in these small pockets I feel a transformative rush and a dizzying sensation of being neither in the present nor in the past.

In the title story of Gao Xing Jian's Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather, the narrator is reminiscing about his youth as he makes his way through the town where he grew up. He has bought his grandfather a new fishing rod, a sort of prolonged replacement for one he broke as a child. But as he walks, this man is disoriented by the lack of familiar landmarks. Amid all that is unfamiliar, he is devastated by the absence of a vast lake he once knew: "...I never imagined that the fish would all die, that the sparkling lake would turn into a foul pond, that the foul pond would be filled in, and that I would not be able to find the way to my old home."

- - If I've learned anything, it's that your old home is gone. Unlike this narrator, I can easily find my old house. It still stands, renovated and expanded. But it's gone. I can stand on its front lawn for hours. But it will never come back and that time, like all time, is gone forever. The danger of nostalgia, and the danger of my living here, is that all around me lurks the narcotic possibility of losing my foothold in reality and becoming lost in something that exists only in ether. If I find myself heading down that path as I drive to work, stop into the dry cleaners, or walk my children to school, I have to keep this refrain: 'open your eyes'.

- - The rest of the stories in this book are sparse, delicately paced and filled with people lost in a world of their emotions. The spector of the Cultural Revolution hangs over all these characters. Everyone deals with their emotional lives with great trepidation, perhaps remembering the time when emotional lives were effectively bulldozed and forbidden, or like the aforementioned lake, filled in and unrecognizable.

The Jazz Loft - Revisited

Some time ago here on Slimbo's Shelf, I'd expressed my frustration that The Jazz Loft, a treasure trove of tapes compiled by Eugene Smith, had been unfairly squirreled away by some ambiguous academic powers that be.

My ire is derived by my love of jazz and my obsession with artifacts. Here appeared to be a veritable treasure trove of recordings capturing not just some music which spontaneously erupted from this oasis of creativity, but a time capsule snaring the sights, sounds and textures of 1950's and 60's New York.

Well, apparently WNYC will be presenting incremental pieces from Smith's tapes. Hallelujah.

On Parade

Now, don't get me wrong.

I'm all for hyperbolic displays of patriotism.

But why is the eagle-as-Patton flag displayed behind Mariano Rivera? I mean, this is an image normally seen as perhaps a translucent decor on the back window of a redneck's pickup truck. Why is it on the Yankees' parade float? Don't get me wrong - not complaining...just saying it's a bit out of context.

Yankees Win!

To all my Yankee-loving Shelf readers, I offer you sincere congratulations on your 27th Championship.

Your highest payroll roster in its democracy-crushing new stadium did a hell of a lot better than my team did, with its second highest payroll roster playing in its own democracy-crushing stadium.

Pitchers and catchers report in....about 92 days.