Unremitting Failure reminds me of that Wordsworth poem, and that reminds me that there’s something that has always bugged me about the Romantics, and it’s similar to what bugs me about all this indigo children crap. It’s this faith in children, this faith in the benevolence of nature. Children are mean little shits. Nature can kill a hundred thousand people in a matter of minutes.

Of course, the only people worse than people that worship nature are those who believe that you need to fight it. I’m not so mean spirited to think that you should fight nature, and certainly not so hubristic to think that you can win. But you can pick your battles.

Due to work deadlines, the posts you are missing are

• How much I, like Terri, am loving the new Camera Obscura record
• My visit to the 3rd Annual Printing Arts Fair at the Museum of Printing in North Andover.
• The beach be one of the best things we got
• A book report of Ghostwritten by David Mitchell.
• A book report of The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
• A book report of Scoop by Evelyn Waugh

Mentioning them here is my way of guilting myself into actually writing them.

…like John McCain and Arlen Specter, a constitutional amendement against gay marriage won’t be as big an issue in the mid-term elections this fall.

So, I’m glad I wasn’t the only one petty enough to notice the tacky frame that the photo of one dead Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was displayed in.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is reporting that the Mysteries of Pittsburgh movie will probably be shot it the ‘burgh, contrary to earlier reports.

This is probably the most junk-food book I read in a while. I got it when we went to the AAUW book sale in State College. I actually goofed and meant to get the copy of MASH.

The main thing I wanted to point out was, as someone who grew up watching the preachy 70’s TV show, it was surprising to see how the book version of Hawkeye is pretty racist and sexist. He clings to his small-town Maine outlook, and he doesn’t seem to have much moral agenda beyond being a good doctor and having a good time.

Some parts are pretty good, but overall it was a little forced and it was never really well written. I read it in about 3 hours, and it was fairly entertaining, but I still felt like I could feel some brain cells dying.

So, I actually read I Am Alive and You Are Dead last fall, and I wanted to see what I wrote about it, and I wrote nothing about it, so I’m writing the report now. Did I really write nothing about it? Guess not.

I wanted a biography of Philip K. Dick, because I was curious how much of some of the details of his last three books were biographical. The answer to that question is both more and less than I thought, which is about what I expected. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer is really almost not science fiction at all, it’s really more a portrait of Berkeley and the wacky spiritual quests of its overeducated denizens, which are often painfully transparently motivated by their inability to deal with their personal relationships. I was especially curious to see if the Episcopal bishop (who sort of reminded me of someone who would have been in my sister’s ex-boyfriend’s crowd) was based on a real person, and he was, sort of.

Anyway, it confirmed a lot of what I had guessed. Dick was a dick, especially to his wives. He was really crazy, though at times it seems almost willfully so. Reading it kind of got me over him, which I was also sort of hoping to do. I still want to get around to reading The Man In The High Castle, but it might be a while.

The author only frothed into raving fandom intermittently, but did seem to write the book as an excuse to write little expositions on his favorite novels. I guess that’s not uncommon in biography, but still, I think it was a little annoying.

Near the mobbed bars on Caroline Street, at roughly 11pm.  
Guy 1: I was talking to this, just, gorgeous woman. And then it turns out, she’s a Red Sox fan!

Guy 2: Awwww….

Guy, walking down the street near the Stata Center:

She grew up on, like, some kind of commune. There were all kinds of random people on it. She had all these brothers, but they weren’t really her brothers. She had this father, but he wasn’t really her father.

My parents taught me to believe in a father and a mother and respect for women. Not just sticking your dick into whatever you feel like, whenever you feel like it, like she does.

Still. She’s such a… dynamic person!