Exhibit 6.27

Nebraska Election Showdown

Thursday - Barack Obama at Omaha Civic Auditorium
Friday - Chelsea Clinton at UNL and The Coffee House (?)
Friday - Michelle Obama at undetermined location
Saturday - Mike Gravel at The Touchdown Club in North Platte

Okay, one of those is probably fake.

Exhibit 6.26

Election Thoughts

*Clearly enough people aren't talking about this.

*Sort of seems like people are understating how big of a win this was for Obama. 10 days ago he would have won half the states he won and gotten beat much worse in others. I know they more or less split the delegates, but isn't that a win for the non-presumpitive nominee?

*You've got to think that Romney is smart enough to see that he can't win a three person race and that Huckabee has nowhere else to go. It's not like Huckabee is going to wake up tomorrow and start yearning for the days when he wasn't hanging around Chuck Norris and was best known as the funniest unemployed guy in the church men's group.

*Worst case scenario for the Democrats: Super delegates end up deciding the race for Clinton who then has to face McCain. The base would (rightfully) feel cheated and McCain will have spent months drumming up support. Clinton v. McCain = scary if all of this recent Democratic enthusiasm disappears without Obama.

*Worst case scenario for the Republicans: Pretty much what has happened. Honestly, they can only go up from here. As much as your average moderate or independent might respect McCain, Republicans can't forgive him for speaking his mind on immigration and taxes.

*Can you imagine being Romney's kids and watching him pump another $10 million into the race? I mean, that's enough money for an invisible car or to have Prince play your 25th birthday party. Maybe they don't care. I guess it's not like I resent that when my dad buys a pair of shoes the money could have bought me space shoes in the future.

*The big winner last night: That's right, the Drake University men's basketball team. 21-1 and winners of 20 straight. Congratulations, boys.

*From here: Looks like Obama is pretty much going to clean up for the rest of February but it won't matter. This will never end. Expect to see a lot more Tucker Carlson than usual.

Exhibit 6.25

Went to see Chris Bachelder read at Nebraska Wesleyan last night. He was fantastic, reading a gripping section of his book U.S.! which is apparently about the repeated assassination and resurrection of Upton Sinclair. Hard to beat that.

He also has an e-book available from McSweeney's here. Go take a look.

Exhibit 6.24

On the Super Bowl

*I'd like to take back everything bad I said about Eli Manning during the fantasy football season. Seriously, Eli, we can make this work. Give me another chance.

*I would have been sad to live in a world without smug commentary from the '72 Dolphins.

*Troy Aikman and Joe Buck are horrible. At one point Joe Buck seemed not to understand the concept of a false start and immediately after Brady badly missed Moss in the end zone, Aikman talked about how dialed in he was. Not a good showing.

*We are going to be allowed to talk about how Brady was yelling at his receivers--including Wes Welker on a badly-thrown ball that landed somewhere in Flagstaff--now, right? I mean, he spent all game pouting as if he just found out Leonardo DiCaprio was sitting with Gisele upstairs.

*From Petty I was hoping for "Wild Flowers," "Change of Heart," "Walls (Circus)," and a guest spot from Dylan and Jeff Lynne on a surprise version of "End of the Line." I'm half serious.

*Petty did play three tracks off of Full Moon Fever, and thankfully one of them wasn't "Zombie Zoo." So that's good. I love Petty. He seemed really relaxed out there. In other words, he was the exact opposite of Tom Brady.

*Mike Campbell doesn't get nearly enough respect.

*I know they are out of the running for the greatest team of all time now--and I hate them--but I doubt we'll ever see a team as good as that Patriots team. They are dirty, dirty cheaters, of course, but for more than half the season they dominated a league designed for parity in a way that no other team ever has. For the other half of the season, they were merely incredible.

*On the other hand, this videotaping scandal is about to get really ugly. I'd say the odds of Belichick coaching the Patriots next seasons are about 50/50. This isn't going to be good for anyone.

*One of the commercials featured Donkey Lips from Salute Your Shorts. In other words, watch out Blake Sennett. You may have Rilo Kiley and The Elected, but your reign as most successful former Salute Your Shorts cast member could be short lived.

Exhibit 6.23

Remainder

I don't remember what I expected when I picked up Tom McCarthy's book, but it wasn't exactly what I ended up getting. The premise of the book synopsizes really well: something falls from the sky and nearly kills our narrator at which point, armed with a large settlement, he begins to experience distinct visions which he then tries to painstakingly recreate. What I didn't see coming is that the key phrase in the synopsis is 'painstakingly recreate.'

In most books, the room around the plot is filled with side characters or subplots. You might be reading a spy novel but the spy might be in love, etc. McCarthy's book is adamant in sticking to its main plot and the stubbornness is admirable if not always thrilling. The narrator hires actors, architects, and set designers to reenact a moment that may or may not have actually happened to him, and once he becomes bored with that reenactment, he begins another. What's really fascinating is that though the premise is odd, the sheer exactness and mundane nature of the initial reenactments--finding the right smell of liver, scattering the ground with cigarette butts--can make it a bit of a chore in places though that's undoubtedly the point.

I almost loved this book, but in the end I think I admired it more. McCarthy is a great writer though his prose isn't particularly poetic or showy. His great gift is finding a way to get inside the scenes we see again and again and make it compelling each time. For a writer, it's a bit of a high wire act of a novel. With no other plot and only one other major character--the "facilitator" hired to oversee the reenactments--there isn't anywhere to hide in a novel like this. There is one character with one inexplicable purpose.

I imagine most readers will have either accepted the premise or put the book down at a certain point, and it's frustrating when late in the book a possible explanation is offered for why the character is demanding these reenactments. At that point, I'd already decided I didn't want an explanation and it comes off as a little heavy-handed, the one explanation in a book where even the narrator's accident doesn't get one. We get early on that he's not the most reliable of narrators, but the beauty of the book is that the only thing to hold on to are his responses to the scenes he plays again and again. We're at his mercy to tell us what's real yet he doesn't. Only he can tell us why he's doing what he's doing and though we are so closely in his head in every way, he never does. Each tiny bit of zen happiness he gets when the scene is done exactly right is what propels him, and the book, forward. We may not understand why he chooses the scenes he does or why he chooses at all, but we understand how it makes him feel. No explanations are necessary.

I suppose something should be said about the end. It comes quickly and the actual mechanisms of it are telegraphed pretty obviously. As the reenactments take the narrator closer and closer to danger, the mundane is no longer enough and the book's ending seems appropriately inevitable.

Ultimately, I'm not sure quite how to feel about the book. I didn't always enjoy reading it due to its exactness and straightforward prose, but those are also the things that brought about its best moments. At one point I was certain the book should have been a novella, but as it went on I realized it would have been pointless if the description had been condensed. There were times when I wanted someone to tell the narrator that what he was doing was crazy and times when I wanted him to do crazier things. It's that kind of book. Until the ending, the book seems purposefully designed not to force the reader into new meanings. Its steadfast single-mindedness makes the reader enact all of the twists him or herself. The book keeps doing what it's doing while our perceptions of it shift because, like life, it just keeps going through the same motions. Perhaps the narrator is just better than the rest of us at picking the moments that matter.

Exhibit 6.22

I realize I'm throwing off my not at all thought out numbering system here, but I wanted to add to the above thoughts that Rhian Ellis and J. Robert Lennon both read and gave some thoughts about the book over at Ward Six. You can find hers here and his here.

I discovered their blog through Dusty and was surprised to find out they had both read the book (which I had just started). I've purposefully avoided reading what they had to say about it but am on my way there now. We can even race.

Go.

Exhibit 6.21

For Nebraskans

Apparently the Nebraska Democratic Caucus allows absentee ballots which strikes me as strange for a caucus. There's no chance to realign yourself to any other candidate should your guy or gal not get 15%, but at this late in the game that's pretty much impossible unless you're holding on to that Mike Gravel dream. In any case, I'm all for it.

You can go here and click on the link for the Absentee Preference Card to get started. Just be sure to get it in by February 6th. They list four options for missing the primary: Homebound, Out-of-State Student, Out-of-State Military, and Infirmed. Since they don't list an option for missing the caucus to go see Cloverfield, I'm not really sure what to do.

I mean, I could be infirmed or enrolled in a horseshoeing college in Wyoming by then. Better not chance it.

Exhibit 6.20

One word movie reviews with words taken from the book Marketing to Women

Little Murders: Relational
Shoot 'Em Up: Segmentation
Juno: Progesterone
Eastern Promises: Spiral
I'm Not There: Swaggering

Exhibit 6.19

Quiz

Which of the following DOESN'T happen in the first three minutes of Shoot 'Em Up?

A. Clive Owen shoots an umbilical cord to separate the baby he just delivered from the mother.

B. Clive Owen shoots a car's oil pan and then slides across the oil for about twenty feet while shooting bad guys.

C. Clive Owen shoots a neon sign until only the letters "FUK U" remain. He then says, "Fuck you" to shoot home his point.

D. Clive Owen shoots his grandmother then watches his sister's muddy drawers as she crawls up a pear tree to view the wake. He then shoots her, too.

Exhibit 6.18

The new La Petite Zine is available.

I have two My Untimely Deaths in it, and you should read them if you're curious to see what they are all about. If you are interested and want to order the little book, information can be found in this post right here.

There's some really great stuff in LPZ including this from Stefi Weisburd:

Scenes from a Little God Childhood

•
A little god, wrapped in popsicle sticks, feathers
and tape, is dropped from a second story
castle turret along with a dozen
eggs bundled, by little hands,
in bubble wrap, springs and letters of love.

That's just an excerpt from the beginning, but now you understand why you should read it.

Exhibit 6.17

You should be sure to check out Carlin's new football blog The Realness Hurts.

This blog originally had a different name, but I'm so excited about the possibility of writing an NFL Draft Preview that I can hardly remember what it was.

Here's an NFL Draft Preview Preview: Tweener.

Exhibit 6.16

On Editing a Novel #3

DESCRIBING YOUR PROTAGONIST. Your first draft probably described your main character with a series of adjectives once in the first sentence of the novel and never mentioned what he or she looked like ever again. So how do you turn "Tom was tall, kind of orangish, teary-eyed, a sno cone lover, short, smelled like Tab soda, awesome, haptic, a good tipper, a SWMDDF in his personal ad, sort-of medium-heighted, salty, and not entirely sure who killed his father." into a novel's worth of powerful description?

All you have to do is search for every time the character's name get used an insert one of your adjectives in front of it. Just watch:

I never though I would step foot in this Arby's again, awesome Tom thought.

Watching the woman carefully, Tom smelled like Tab soda.

Professional writers might even work the adjectives into speech to make your descriptions come more naturally:

"I'm starting to think no one killed Tom's father," she said. "But Tom is a good tipper."

If you run out of adjectives, look around the room and take them from items around you (e.g. a cup of coffee on your desk could add some "steam" to your character's personality or some "Colombian Dark Roast" coloring to his eyes!)!

Exhibit 6.15

Last night we went to go see the Number 22/23 ranked Drake Bulldogs take on the unranked Creighton Bluejays at the Qwest Center. It really is a pretty fantastic venue for basketball and, say what you will about it, but Omaha really comes out to support the Bluejays. This game is also notable for featuring two out of three Korver brothers and all three were in the building. Guess which is which!

Drake (17-1, 16 game winning streak) won in overtime which made me very happy and the children in front of us very sad. I probably didn't need to taunt them by telling them this means Keno Davis gets to choose the next pope.

In my defense, at the time I thought it was true.

Exhibit 6.14

I'm not sure when The New Yorker got all smutty, but in addition to the topless photograph of Lee Miller in the most current issue, there have also been quite a few Playboy-esque comics featuring topless line drawings and some joke about sex recently. Also, a year or so ago, there was an entirely gratuitous nude picture of a show girl. You may think that have these moments catalogued a little too well, but it's really just the shock of seeing a drawing that looks like a topless Mrs. Keane from Family Circus wedged into an article about Rudy Giuliani that makes me remember.

I mean, my grandmother subscribes to this magazine for god's sake. If John Updike were alive, this would never be happening (or, actually, it would be happening a lot more often with much more depressing results).

We're about six months away from David Remnick launching New Yorker Forum. I'm going to start submitting letters now just in case. I'll just go ahead and address them to David Denby for now.

Exhibit 6.13

So I've been playing around with Goodreads for the last two days and have decided that I'm unwilling to give star ratings. Thankfully, the website has a lot more to offer so I still plan on using it as it's a cool way to find work. It's sort of like going to Dusty's blog only a bunch of people are on it and it actually gets updated.

I came to the realization like this: After giving away some 5 star rankings to books I love yesterday, I found myself tormented on how to dole out stars for books I "only" really liked, or, even worse, didn't like for very specific and often very subjective reasons. I didn't feel like I would have the time or the mental acuity to always explain why a book got three stars instead of four, and, more importantly, I'm not really interested in creating a hierarchy of books in the first place.

I suppose I think book criticism should be more than a rating system--or a quid pro quo arrangement--but even then I think I could live with a rating system if I was capable of using it more responsibly than I probably am. Even then, I really don't know what the stars intend to measure or if I could use them consistently from book to book. The stars go from "didn't like it" to "it was amazing" and maybe I'm crazy, but I feel like some books are capable of making me feel both ways simultaneously. Sometimes those are the best books, but there's no room for that in the ranking system so I suppose if I feel that way I'll just have to write it out. I'm fine with that.

I'd prefer that whoever looks at my list of books sees books that I decided, for whatever reason and with whatever outcome, to spend my time with. There are so many out there, that I guess I see that as endorsement enough. Unlike with movies or albums, I rarely regret my choices when it comes to books because even when I hate something I don't feel like it was a waste of time or money. It's hard to let someone know that a book you gave two stars is deeply flawed but still an important or even beautiful book.

So apologies to Haruki Murakami and anyone else I gave 5 stars to yesterday only to cruelly remove them today. It's not you, Haruki, it's me.