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My friend Annie (at SuperFastReader) is giving away a copy of the book Auralia’s Colors, by Jeffrey Overstreet! I haven’t read the book yet (it’s in my pile) but it’s been getting rave reviews as a tightly-written, gripping fantasy book. She’ll also be posting an interview with Overstreet in October. I’ve been reading his blog (which is mostly film and music reviews/news/musings) for a long time now and I’m excited for the book. So go check it out! (Who doesn’t love free books?)
Tonight we’re going to the IAM Open House at their new space in Chelsea! It’s so exciting that they finally have a “home”. Can’t wait to see it. :)
We are heading out of town this weekend to visit my brother at Messiah. It’s family weekend. Should be fun, and much cooler than when we moved him in a month ago. We’ll be gone till Sunday night. I can barely believe that October is almost here. Soon it will be Christmas time. Yikes! And yay!
Oh, I forgot to mention. I finished book #50 on Tuesday night; no small feat, considering that said book was Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing, second book in his Border Trilogy, and it was very long and full of Spanish. My Spanish reading comprehension has gone through the roof.
Anyhow, all that to say, it’s good to reach my one and only 2007 goal!
I’m now reading The Maytrees, Annie Dillard’s latest, and I’m loving it. It’s like reading long-form poetry that has a distinct and interesting story.
The Poetry Society of America is going through some rough times, stemming from an award given to a poet who has previously made comments that some of the Poetry Society’s board members found racially-charged.
Other board members said they felt that such comments were not characteristic of Mr. Hollander’s views or had been misinterpreted. Mr. Louis-Dreyfus said that even if the comments were representative, they were irrelevant criteria for judging the Frost Medal, just as he would argue that Ezra Pound’s anti-Semitism should not detract from the literary appreciation of his work.In some ways the questions about Mr. Hollander’s remarks reflect a broader debate over whether the evaluation of artistic merit should be affected by the sometimes unsavory opinions or actions of the artist. Last year, for example, Germany was stunned when Günter Grass, the Nobel Prize winner, confessed that he had joined the Waffen SS, the military branch of the Nazis, when he was 17. At the time, some people argued that he should renounce his Nobel.
I go back and forth on this very issue. On the one hand, rewarding people of questionable morals seems morally repugnant; on the other hand, everyone has their own skeletons in the closet, and I really tend to think that art (and all work) should be judged on its own merits and not the lifestyle of its maker.
What do you think?
It was good! I think I might try WAY less salt and slightly less pepper next time, though. Still, tasty. Crusty bread is a must-have accompaniment. Tom picked up a stellar chianti as well. I think I might also try throwing some potatoes in for the last hour. Mmmm.
We watched The Lookout (Joseph Gordon-Levitt!) while we were eating, and enjoyed that, too. Finished it and we were talking about something, and for some reason, we decided to watch The Matrix, which we ended up pausing for future watching about halfway through because it was late. We love our little parties.
I made something interesting for dinner tonight; can’t wait to go home and try it. It’s been in the oven all day.
I found the recipe loosely described in the Tuscan butcher apprenticeship section of Heat. This is it, sort of:
1. Buy a good-sized beef shank.
2. Pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees.
3. Put the beef in a pot (I used our Le Creuset 2-quart French oven, which was a wedding present from Angela and makes me happy every time I look at it, though I want the whole set now and that’s not too good).
4. Pour in a bottle of chianti to cover the shank. I didn’t have chianti, and my pot was just a tiny bit too narrow at the bottom for the beef, so I fudged it with a bottle and a bit more of Cabernet Sauvignon from Trader Joe’s - cheap and tasty.
5. Add three tablespoons of salt and one of black pepper.
6. Peel a head of garlic and add the whole cloves to the pot.
7. Reduce the oven heat to 200 degrees; cover the pot and put it in the oven.
8. Cook for twelveish hours.
You can see it’s a lot of guesswork; in the book, he says to serve it with hearty white bread and the wine that you cooked it in.
So anyhow - we’ll let you know how it went!
This guy has so many bees in his bonnet that it’s a bit hard to read the article; apparently, Brooklyn is at fault for what he considers maudlin “wonder-filled” prose.
This is the central idea in his essay:
Unfortunately, it’s false to all human experience to find “growth” in tragedy. In fact, the dull truth is that pain is tautological. The only thing suffering teaches us is that we are capable of suffering.
I haven’t lived a full life yet, but I’ve experience my fair share of suffering and pain; I believe that stories have the potential to help people live through their pain and come out on the other side. People do it. It’s not crazy, and it’s not immature or pie-in-the-sky to believe that we can grow through pain, become closer to our fellow man, and see the loveliness.
Now, I realize that lots of people don’t like the books he cites in the article (Jonathan Safran Foer, Michael Chabon, whose latest he clearly has not read, Dave Eggers, even A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - although weirdly, he finds Jonathan Lethem to be an exception). Fine. Some of these books are not to people’s taste, have stories that are too spun out or meandering, or in Eggers’ case, are wildly self-congratulatory.
But in reading the article, you begin to see that his real issue is with beauty in fiction; beauty that transcends tragedy, that dares to dream a little. Call me naive, but I don’t think a sense of wonder excludes the truth.
And the whole Brooklyn thing is just so weird. (I love how he says that “Brooklyn’s always been the overlooked sibling among the boroughs.” Really? Not Staten Island? Have you ever actually left Manhattan, sir?)
The Guardian has a list of the rooms where various well-known writers work. Of special interest to me was Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), because he apparently writes in a branch of the Brooklyn Public Library near my own home. Seamus Heaney, on the other hand, writes in a nook-like room overlooking the harbor in Dublin.
And NaNoWriMo (NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth) is coming soon, in November, and I’m once again toying with the idea of joining the crowd. I don’t know. I can’t decide.
Lastly, this article about a Jane Jacobs exhibit at the Municipal Art Society is making me think I should finally buckle down and finish her book (which I’ve been reading slowly) and go see the exhibit. She’s really a fascinating woman who famously “saved Greenwich Village” from Robert Moses’ highway bisection plan, and I have in my head this David-and-Goliath struggle between them that probably is a bit idealized but still kind of fun.
Pygmalion was quite good, and I can heartily recommend it for anyone in New York . . . if you can get tickets. Claire Danes is going to lose her voice from it, but she and the rest of the cast are delightful, and Jefferson Mays is as far from Rex Harrison’s Henry Higgins as you can really get (and more believable because of it).
Saw Eastern Promises on Saturday. It’s graphically brutal and bloody in a few choice spots (I closed my eyes). However, not only is David Cronenberg a confirmed genius (storytelling, the look of it, everything is just so interesting), but Viggo Mortensen has finally reached the upper echelon of my personal list of great living actors, playing a member of the Russian mafia in London with completely convincingly and without any hints of Aragorn. Not for the faint of heart, though.
We met with friends who are in from Scotland for their first trip to the US. (NYC is a very weird place to go on a first trip to the US, too.) We brought them out to Brooklyn, and after they got lost and then found again, we had dinner at Miracle Grill (southwestern American), then dessert at the Cocoa Bar. They were intrigued by the discovery of blue corn, which, we informed them, does indeed grow in the US and does not involve food coloring. Who knew?
On Sunday, the Village Church had our annual outdoor service in Washington Square Park:
It was actually the first one I’d gone to, and it was a lot of fun. Perfect weather, plenty of people dropping by to listen in, and some really good discussion during the question & answer time. It’s so good to hear people asking civil questions and giving civil answers in a public forum, you know?
Afterwards Tom and I went to see Across the Universe, which was a giant disappointment and probably not worth your ticket money unless you’re really, really into Julie Taymor or the Beatles. The acting was ok, and the music was totally re-imagined and therefore fun to listen to, but the story and script were so bad that it was dead in the water. I think she was trying to make an extended music video, but . . . it wasn’t. It’s quite lovely to look at, but wait and rent it. (And most of the people walking out of the theater were saying that as well.)
Tomorrow night we’re seeing Flight of the Red Balloon in press screenings at the New York Film Festival. We’ve only just seen another of Hsiao-hsien Hou’s earlier films (the lovely and meditative Cafe Lumiere) and saw Three Times last year when it was in theaters; this one is actually in French and stars Juliette Binoche.
On a non-movie note, we had some standing credit at the local Community Bookstore (they have the best fiction section EVER), and Tom went by the other day and brought home Annie Dillard’s new book The Maytrees and an older Lorrie Moore book, Anagrams. Can’t wait to tackle them.
Lastly, we were introduced to this last night while having dinner with our friends Victoria and Sam. Enjoy.
We’re heading out in an hour to see Pygmalion, starring Claire Danes, uptown. Very excited as this is a favorite play for both of us. I think I bought a copy in junior high and read it many times over, before I realized how significant this George Bernard Shaw fellow really was.
Our church has its annual outdoor service in Washington Square Park this weekend. We basically just pull all our chairs outside and have the service in the Park. It’s the best weather for it, and it’s apparently a lot of fun and nice to be out in our community. So if you’re in the WSP area at 11am . . . stop by. :)
Looks like we were ahead of the Times. (Haha). (via Angela)
The new Radiant magazine website is up! And I’m a contributing blogger to “The Pulse”, Radiant’s blog about TV, music, movies, books, and art. First post is here!
Living in Brooklyn and working in Manhattan, I see a lot of strange things and people. So many, in fact, that I’ve stopped noticing except for in extreme cases. But today, as I walked back from a lunchtime errand to Trader Joe’s for some three-buck chuck, I saw:
- An grizzled old man, apparently an actual or aspiring sea captain, with a mottled white beard, captain’s hat and striped shirt smoking a pipe and lugging a basket full of . . . who knows?
- A girl, probably no older than 18, channeling Marilyn Manson to a T with white pancake makeup, lots of black eyeliner, and blood-red lipstick.
- A man briskly riding a Segue in the bike lane, very GOB-like.
- Two tall identical dark-skinned men in hot pink T-shirts with giant unruly Afros, each with an identical model-slim bobbed-haired blonde on his arm, all wearing giant sunglasses.
It goes without saying that all these people lacked any irony.
On Friday night, we had some lovely friends over who we hadn’t seen in a while. Tom made scallops and linguine in a white wine reduction (woo woo) and we talked books and other Friday night topics. I can’t distinctly remember but I’m pretty sure that we watched more of The Office after they left. We’ve been doing that a lot. :)
I headed out early on Saturday to meet up with my friend Jeri, who I hadn’t seen since she was in my wedding last year. She lives and works in Connecticut now, and had come to the city on a bus trip with other co-workers. It was great to see her - if too short. I headed home and we watched Yi yi, the first Taiwanese film I’ve ever watched and liked right on the spot. It was rather long, but warm and funny and touching. Then we headed to the Zoae series at the Brecht Forum, featuring some really excellent artists (actress and playwright Danai Gurira, poet Joe Haferbecker, and the always wonderful singer-songwriter Susan Enan). Late night. And I think more Office when we got home.
Sunday began with a stop in at Blue Sky Bakery for muffins (I’m not sure what Tom had, I had a most delectable raspberry-mango muffin), then church, then home briefly before heading to a birthday party on a rooftop in our neighborhood, followed by a wrap party for one of Tom’s recent films in Soho. But the rooftop view was amazing.
The New York Times Book Review reflects on the twenty years since Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, and the trials of choosing a literary canon. Totally fascinating if you’re a student or professor.
But many young professors aren’t interested in teaching outside their narrow specialties, nor are they generally prepared to do so. And colleges are loath to reinstate the core curriculums they abandoned in the ’60s. “Because we lack cultural self-confidence, we’ve lacked the ability to say, ‘This is a good book and should be taught, this isn’t and shouldn’t,’ ” said Judt, who was dean of the humanities at N.Y.U. in the early ’90s.
People, I was going through blog archives recently and reading old entries. I used to be much funnier. Why are you still reading?
In that spirit (and I have permission for this) -
We often lounge around at night telling stories about our day, sometimes eating. A couple nights ago I was finishing up what I’m sure was a very riveting story about something involving choking, or perhaps I was choking. The important point here is that something triggered that very interesting non sequitur switch in Tom’s brain.
“Oh,” he said. “That reminds me. I was eating cucumbers in the shower yesterday . . . ”
I think he suddenly heard himself talking. I have rarely seen him laugh so hard; thought he’d turn blue and pass out, and I wasn’t much better.
Of course, that was a little better than Tuesday night. We go to the Village Church small group in Jersey City on Tuesdays, and since I’m coming from Manhattan and he’s coming from Brooklyn, we don’t arrive together. This week, he made it there before I did, and apparently walked in the door and announced, “I beat my wife!”
Perfect fall weather today; crisp but not cold, and sunny. I am wearing corduroys, a T-shirt, and a scarf and drinking a nice hot cup of coffee and feel just about right.
Tom picked up extra shifts at the co-op last night, and I busily brought our humble abode into some semblance of order and made a chicken in white wine vinegar sauce from the Silver Spoon, which made the place smell very vinegar-y (not pleasant). I brought some for lunch today, and I’m hoping it tastes ok.
Also, we received a set of lovely knives from Tom’s parents for our anniversary! We’ve been using a hand-me-down set of knives from my former roommate that were rather dull. I cracked open the box last night and started using them. It’s a complete revelation to cut bread and not have it crumble everywhere, and to chop onions and have them stay on the cutting board instead of flying about and falling into cracks between counters and appliances where they will stay and go bad. Oh, the joy. I feel like a real grown-up now.
Speaking of food: this week’s New York has an article by a guy who lives in the outer reaches of Brooklyn and turned his tiny backyard (”Green 1/55th of an Acre”, the cover proclaims) into a self-sufficient garden. It’s harrowing but fun to read, having grown up in a world where we actually did grow a lot of our food ourselves and had rabbits and chickens. It makes me wonder what my own children will be like, since they’ll probably grow up in Manhattan or Brooklyn. I really hope I can garden on a rooftop or in a community garden so they don’t join the growing ranks of those who don’t know the joy of eating peas in their pods or who aren’t aware that carrots grow underground.
Speaking of food; I shopped for ingredients at the co-op last night and left full of joy that I can now do things like buy gloriously fresh apples for eighteen cents, or four free-range chicken breasts for four dollars. We’ve always seemed to spend most of our money on food, because frankly, we love to cook and entertain and we love good food. It’s such a blessing to be able to buy it at a reasonable price and to feel good about what we’re eating, ethically and nutritionally.
All this food talk is probably springing from Heat, which I’m using to cut my Cormac McCarthy consumption and enjoying greatly. If you like food, you’ll love this book (and it’s not fiction!). Highly recommended.
I’m not sure how I feel about James Frey getting a book deal. On the one hand, the guy is high on my “creep” list for fabricating parts of his own memoir, and I feel like he shouldn’t get rich because of it. On the other hand . . . the next book is fiction, and apparently, he’s good at fiction. I haven’t read his memoir and I have no idea if he’s actually a good writer or not. I suppose it comes down to the fact that the book industry, as with most industries, rewards talent, not character.
We got an Amazon credit card a while ago because we needed a card that wasn’t an American Express. Every time you spend a certain amount of money on the card, Amazon sends a $25 gift certificate in the mail. Luckily for us, Tom ordered a number of things for work that were reimbursed, so we quickly hit that amount and got a gift certificate in the mail last week. Our books arrived yesterday and today:
- Heat - Bill Buford (subtitled “An Amateur’s Adventures as a Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany”). I heard a podcast where he read from the book and had to go for it.
- Nobody’s Perfect - Anthony Lane. A whole book full of profiles and film & book reviews by my favorite New Yorker reviewer.
- The Discomfort Zone - Jonathan Franzen. Well, you know that I loved The Corrections. This apparently is his memoirs, published in 2006, and for some reason Amazon was selling it new, in hardcover, for $4.40. Score. (I think it’s the end of the run.)
Yay, books.
Very rainy here today, but somehow still warm. Strange. Also, other New Yorkers, has the trash on the sidewalks smelled especially awful to you this week? It’s made me gag far too many times the last few days.
Last night we went to the Co-op to finally join, which we did, enticed by the proximity to our own home and the impressively inexpensive food; the produce is not too much cheaper but much fresher than surrounding grocery stores, but it is local and organic, and everything else there (meat, cheese, snacks, drinks, bulk grains, the list goes on) is so much more cost-effective than anywhere else in the vicinity. I can finally get Clif Bars (an integral part of my daily diet) for $1 apiece.
The co-op here works differently than the one to which my family belonged in Albany, which allowed non-members to shop at higher prices. At the Park Slope co-op, only members can shop, and each adult member of the household has to work one 2 3/4 hour shift every four weeks, which comes out to 13 shifts per year. So, between the two of us, we need to work 26 shifts per year. And my husband, who is amazing, is working something like six shifts this week and next to get us ahead. He worked one today already and is going back to work another this afternoon.
In other news, our New Yorker hard drive came at some point this week and the guy who runs the photo studio below us had received the package, so he caught us on our way out the door last night and handed it over. It’s great. I’m so excited that all the original cartoons and ads are preserved. If you like the New Yorker, or just like good writing, I think it’s well worth the cost.
Fall sparks creativity, I think. Tom and I have suddenly both started new writing projects. Here’s to hoping it lasts.
We had a pleasant weekend. On Friday night we ate Thai food and then went to see 3:10 to Yuma, which was alright. The screenplay was mostly a bore, but the acting totally saved it, though a lesser man than Christian Bale would have run it into the ground. Production design was great, the music was fun, and some of the wide shots were lovely - though, the randomly unfocused frames started to seriously get on my nerves. All in all, we settled on a B-. If you like westerns, it’s probably worth watching.
Tom made some delicious tomato and avocado grilled cheese sandwiches on Saturday for brunch/lunch and we watched two movies in the course of the day - Avenue Montaigne (so-so) and Snatch (I love it, Tom had never seen it). He also made some kind of shrimp and corn and pepper salad for dinner, and after dinner, we went to Starbucks to work and read. Quiet day.
Sunday was busy; after church, I had a meeting for the church website that lasted until about 4pm, and then we went out to Jersey City to watch The Office season 3 with Kevin & Laura. They’d seen it, but we hadn’t, and originally we’d planned to watch their TiVo’d episodes but Tom ended up buying the DVD set for me! So we watched about 10 episodes over popcorn and homemade French bread pizza. I’m so excited to own the whole season on DVD. I can get months of enjoyment out of it.
We have a busy week coming up. We’re planning to finally go join the Park Slope Food Co-op tonight (very excited, as I grew up shopping at co-ops and this one is half a block from home). We have dinners and visitors and small groups this week. And I’m trying to keep running, though my just-over-three-mile jaunt this morning almost killed me - I couldn’t even run a third of it. Bleh. I wonder what I’m doing wrong?
I love the New York Times’ book review podcast.
I’ve been a little obsessed with the story in this week’s double issue of the New Yorker about high-flying wine counterfeiters since I read it last weekend. I think it’s a great story. (A great movie?)
Anyhow, if you’re not a subscriber, you can now read it here.
Starting in 1980, Rodenstock began holding lavish annual wine tastings, weekend-long affairs attended by wine critics, retailers, and various German dignitaries and celebrities. He opened scores of old and rare wines, all provided at his own expense, and served in custom-made “Rodenstock” glasses that were supplied by his friend the glassmaker Georg Riedel. Impeccably dressed, wearing stylish Rodenstock eyeglasses and shirts with stiff white collars, he bantered with guests, exclaiming, over an especially fine bottle, “Ja, unglaublich! One hundred points!” He was punctilious about being on time, barring latecomers, and when serving older wines he banned spitting, which prompted some guests, alarmed at the number of bottles they would be sampling, to hide spittoons in their laps. “You don’t spit away history,” Rodenstock admonished them. “You drink it.”
Rodenstock made no secret of having discovered the Jefferson bottles; on the contrary, the record sale to Forbes had made him a celebrity in the wine world. In the spring of 1985, he would later explain, he received a phone call about an interesting discovery in Paris, where someone had stumbled upon some dusty old bottles, each inscribed with the letters “Th.J.” Rodenstock refused to reveal who had sold him the bottles, but apparently the seller did not realize the significance of the initials. “It was like the lottery,” Rodenstock said of the experience. “It was simply good luck.” He would not say how many bottles there were—in some accounts, it was “a dozen or so,” in others, as many as thirty. Nor would he disclose the address in Paris where they were discovered.
NYTimes Books: No Thanks, Mr. Nabokov.
Today, as publishers eschew the finished manuscript and spit out contracts based on a sketchy outline or even less, the scripting of rejection letters has become something of a lost art. It’s hard to imagine a current publisher dictating the sort of response that Alfred Knopf sent to a prominent Columbia University historian in the 1950s. “This time there’s no point in trying to be kind,” it said. “Your manuscript is utterly hopeless as a candidate for our list. I never thought the subject worth a damn to begin with and I don’t think it’s worth a damn now. Lay off, MacDuff.”
Now, that’s a rejection letter.
I’ve long maintained that famous people die in threes. This time, it seems especially sad; first D. James Kennedy, then Luciano Pavarotti, and now Madeline L’Engle.
Last night I made a salad of tomatoes, cucumbers, kalamata olives, and mozzarella cheese dressed in a chive and red wine vinaigrette, loosely based on a recipe from an outstanding salad recipe book
Our weekend is fairly open. I think we’re hoping to see 3:10 to Yuma and possibly Shoot ‘Em Up (who can resist Paul Giametti as a crazy bad guy?), and on Sunday after church and a meeting, we’re planning to marathon a handful of The Office Season 3 episodes so we’re caught up. Not that we’ll be watching Season 4 in “real time”, since we lack network TV, but at least we’ll know where it left off.
The weather is gorgeous. I love fall.
We celebrated our first wedding anniversary yesterday! I had to work, of course, but we had the evening free. We exchanged gifts before dinner; I got Tom a small checkers/backgammon/chess set in a nice leather-bound box, designed for traveling, so we can take it to coffee shops and other places where one might enjoy chess. He, being awesome, got me the Complete New Yorker hard drive, with every issue of the New Yorker in digital form from 1925 to 2006, with extra space for upcoming years. I’m excited about reading profiles on basically anyone who matters, on demand, and as Tom put it, “We can read the review of Citizen Kane - from when it was released!” Too fun. I’m totally geeked out.
We dressed up went down to Applewood, which we crowned “the best meal we’ve had in Brooklyn, and possibly in New York City”. We had intriguing cocktails (a tarragon Tom Collins for me and some kind of cucumber-infused thing called “Slopeside” for Tom) and a shrimp risotto to start. I ordered a duck breast over wild rice salad and Tom had a hake, and it was all very excellent. Small, succulent portions.
We dropped by Cocoa Bar to pick up truffles and then came home and had truffles and chardonnay over a game of chess. Lovely evening, lovely anniversary.
On an only vaguely related note, the Times book section ran an article today about e-books that’s really interesting, detailing the new e-book readers coming out this fall. I really don’t think anyone’s going to easily convince me to give up my paper books, and Tom, who likes to write in books, will never be convinced, but it’s interesting all the same. As the article points out, they’ve been trying to work on this for years. I just like books as physical objects - especially, as I’ve lately discovered, books published by Picador, which not only tend to be excellent but are exactly designed to attract people with my exact aesthetic.
And that’s that.
Apparently there’s a taxi strike on. I must be too proletarian to notice.
Friday night was my first time home since Wednesday morning. We had plans, but they got cancelled. We watched The World, a slightly strange but still coherent Chinese film about workers at a low-budget Epcot-style place in Beijing, interspersed with random thirty-second cartoon bits underscored with Asian pop. I have a really difficult time liking Asian cinema in general, but this one was okay.
Saturday we slept in and cooked breakfast, then went to a small screening of the film Tom worked on in February (just us, the directors and their wives, and the writer). So much fun. It’s great to see something that you were deeply involved with coming together.
We came home and watched Fracture (Anthony Hopkins, Ryan Gosling), followed immediately by Primal Fear (Richard Gere and a mind-blowing Edward Norton) - in doing so, we inadvertently were marathoning movies by the same director. Despite its melodramaticly stupid name, Primal Fear is probably the better movie - but Fracture is worth renting.
On Sunday after church we went shopping, then cooking, and then had a few people over for dinner. I made dijon-dressed new potato salad and hamburgers, and Tom cooked the hamburgers on our new indoor electric grill. They were pronounced by two present as “the best hamburger I’ve ever had”. So, a success for us. We make them with beer and Worcestershire sauce and onions and jalapeno peppers, and I think it makes a difference. Stayed up late discussing life.
We’d originally planned to go to the beach on Monday, but we just didn’t feel like making the long train trip and decided to go out to brunch (Los Pollitos II on 5th Ave in Brooklyn - cheap and yummy) and then went to Prospect Park for a few hours to read books and watch people flying the biggest kites I’ve ever seen in my life, with 8-foot wingspans. I finished Lolita - what a crazy book, but I bow at the feet of Nabokov. Came home and turned the leftover meat into tacos and watched The Wind Will Carry Us, an Iranian film that was surprisingly lively and funny. I was expecting something much more akin to other films I’ve seen from roughly that part of the world - slow, quiet, focus on the cinematography - but this was much funnier, with great dialogue.
I guess this is the start of the school year, which is the start of fall, which means everything starts in earnest again. I got up and took the long route running this morning, managing to cover over 3 miles, mostly running - a record for me, as I have a lot of trouble breathing and I’m trying to push through it. I think I’ve come to understand the concept of pushing through a “wall” better, though. Once you get past it, you start to feel like you could run forever.
Also, we’re returning to small group for the first time in a year, since we got married. We’re trekking out to Jersey City tonight. It’s sort of our old small group (though almost none of the same people), so we have grand hopes. It’s not a long way for me from work, but it’s a little longer for Tom, from Brooklyn; still, it takes a little over an hour, and we spend that much time getting to places in Manhattan.
Tomorrow we’re hoping to go back to IAM’s weekly Wednesday morning breakfast-and-discussion-group, from which we sort of took a break when I couldn’t go any more because of my job and Tom was working more consistently. But we’ll hopefully be back.
Tomorrow is also our first anniversary. :)
We made a CD for favors at our wedding a year ago, but we didn’t have the big wedding after all because of my Dad’s passing. So we’ve dispersed the CDs in our wedding thank-yous, which people have been receiving. But in the effort to get the thank-yous out, I forgot to include a track list, which I’m now printing below.
The CD is also now registered with Gracenote, so iTunes and various other music players should recognize the tracks.
Song of Songs
1. Pierce Pettis - Song of Songs
2. Coldplay - Til Kingdom Come
3. Andrew Peterson - Canaan Bound
4. Iron & Wine and Calexico - He Lays in the Reigns
5. Caedmon’s Call - Table for Two
6. Sixpence None the Richer - Melody of You
7. Glen Phillips - True
8. Blessid Union of Souls - The Rest of My Life
9. Jars of Clay - These Ordinary Days
10. Eastmountainsouth - Hard Times Come Again No More
11. Eisley - Just Like We Do
12. Dan Haseltine - For All the Saints
13. Over the Rhine - I Want You to Be My Love