Good Thing I'm Literate.

Pleasingly (although not pleasing for my room's cleanliness, and my mom's happiness with me), I've been reading a lot lately. At my job, which happens to be at a ridiculously modern Aspen-esque cabin with rows of bookshelves filled with intellectual finds I will probably never understand (I don't "get" Kafka)(my job is babysitting for a scholarly couple--their baby sleeps a lot so I have time to notice these things without endangering the longevity of my career there), I came across The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx. I know my mom liked the book a lot, and I vaugely knew it was made into a crappy movie with Kevin Spacey. But now that I've started reading it, I've been really pulled into it. It's about a middle aged semi-loser widower named Quoyle with two kids that moves to his native Newfoundland, basically. But the book profiles the geology of Newfoundland and its inhabitants with such stark lyricism (without being ostentacious-a word I learned today!) that it opens up a new style of writing for me. Also, Proulx describes Newfoundland very vividly and it seems a lot like Rockport, Massachusetts--the place where my mom grew up and I vacation often. Except people in Rockport don't club seals during the winter. So anyway, I reccomend it.


Oh, and it won the Pulitzer Prize.


I also picked up Killing Yourself to Live by Chuck Klosterman, one of my favorite music journalists. He wrote the hillarious and poingant (as poingant as any memoir about hair metal can be) Fargo Rock City, which I've read more times than I can count. This book is about a road trip he took while writing for the uber-hipster magazine Spin, visiting the famous landmarks where rock stars died all over the country. But that's the bare bones, really; more of the book is about the death of parts of his own life; more specifically, his relationships with women. This book is far more poetic than Fargo Rock City, but still is filled with side-splitting one-liners and observations. For example (in this part of the book he's talking about Sid Vicious's supposed murder of Nancy Spungen):

"Vicious purposefully OD'd on smack before the case ever went to trial, so I suppoose we'll never really know what happened in that room, though he did tell the police, "'I did it because I'm a dirty dog.' This is not a very convincing alibi. He may as well have said, 'I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain't one.'"

-Chuck Klosterman, Killing Yourself to Live

And that's only page 7.

It's probably the most relavant reference to Jay-Z I've heard in a long while, except for Barack Obama telling journalists that he's been listening to a lot of Jay-Z lately. Apparently he loves "the art of hip-hop."

He also bowled a 37 in Pennsylvania recently.

A 37!

Barack Obama: I got 99 problems, and my bowling score is definitely one of them.

This blows my mind, kind of. My boyfriend and I recently started going bowling once a week, and while we're still horrible, at least we don't get failing test scores (or even D's!). But then again, he's just a skinny politician. And I'm a floppy klutz that reads instead of cleaning her room. So there you have it.