Soundtrack of My Mind: [02.09.10]

So Damien Rice is gonna write you a lyric like "I love your depression and your double chin" which makes him cool automatically. Plus also he's Irish. And there's some evidence that he may, in fact, be an asshole, which I'm okay with. Some of my favorite people are assholes. (Not really, but that sounds cool to say, so I'll just leave it.) But what's so awesome about this song -- and unfortunately you really only get a little bit of it in this YouTube version -- is the weird, distorted, slowed-down-45 kind of singing that sounds like a ghost or some Voice from the Other Side of Something. (Kicks in just after the two-minute mark. The original track has the benefit of some wacky machinery that makes him sound kinda-sorta like Beelzebub. Here it's merely the level of freaky he can muster with his own vocal chords. But, you know, either way...) It's just. You know. Weird. Which is almost always pretty cool.

The Art of Connection

It is a Monday night in February. Cloudy. 47° Fahrenheit. Today I worked a fun job I'm lucky to have. And then I came home and exercised and ate some good, wholesome food. I corresponded with a dear, old friend. Told her about my life. The ways that it is the same. The ways that it is not the same. Now: I'm listening to The Frames in concert at the 9:30 Club in DC, c. 2007, thanks to NPR's All Songs Considered. Some blueberries and vanilla yogurt await.

So life is pretty close to perfect, right?

I mean. Yes. Yes. Emphatically yes. These are things that engender a deep and unshakable (unshakable, really?) happiness in one Humble Beitelblogger.

The thing that I want to express, however, has something to do with -- well -- wanting to express something. Because, you see, when a Humble Beitelblogger is deeply and unshakably happy, it sparks a creative impulse. Where he wants to put something down on "paper" that somehow captures, reflects, or otherwise articulates that feeling. Here. World. Look at me. Look at this. Just...look at it. And sometimes that's possible. But sometimes it's not. Tonight I really want to put into words the sense of both peace and delight I feel, all on my own, right here, right now. This perfect, cloudy Monday in February. But there aren't really any words for it.

One of the things I say a lot in fulfilling the duties of my aforementioned day job is this: writing is an act of connection. And I believe that. It's an act of connection. And so is dancing. Or caring for an aging parent. Or celebrating the birth of a child with your dear friends in Michigan. Or eating a handful of blueberries. Or curling up next to the small, warm body of the dog with whom you've shared a life for the last twelve years and drifting together into a deep, wordless sleep.

Sunday Link: Ben Dunlap, Wise Man and Raconteur

Um. Well. You know. This is pretty awesome. Just watch it. Can't do it justice with a stylized blurb. Hungarians. The Holocaust. Integrating the textile industry in the American South. Bartok. Harry Potter. The secret to saying YES to the Universe. And the quintessential Renaissance man weaving it all together seamlessly, mellifluously, passionately in the grand tradition of the raconteur indigenous to the American South. Huzzah...

Sunday Link: You Too Can Be a Skateboarding Icon!

Because who doesn't love a plodding "as-told-to" profile that encourages everybody to be skateboarding superstars? Imagine it: a world full of people who are all the time flying through the air, doing their triple salchows and double lindys (or whatever it is these kids call their mad gyrations). This would be a world full of helmets and elbow pads and knee pads. Folks would crash and stumble and cheer. And we'd all have four companies and video games named after us and we wouldn't have to go to college and also there would be no bosses. I mean, you know, sign me up, right? (Also: did you know that Benicio Del Toro was Tony Hawk's favorite movie star? It's true!) Except for can we have at least a couple people who can write sentences that are more than simply utilitarian? Ones that express an actual, idiosyncratically human voice or whatever? Thanks!

Sunday Link: What's So New About the New Evangelicals?

This week, Pastor Jim talks about the so-called New Evangelicals -- the young Bible-thumpin' folks who skew liberal (sorry: Progressive) and aren't quite as dug in on the far right side of social issues as are their predecessors. He focuses on this Newsweek article about a fella named Richard Cizik, who was ousted from his position as a lobbyist with the National Association of Evangelicals after he said publicly that he favored civil unions for gay folks. Now it seems Cizik's got him a new outfit -- the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good -- and he's goin' all Prodigal Son on the conventional (i.e., Conservative) evangelical world. Gotta admit I've got a moth-to-flame fascination with folks like Cizik -- the whole Donald Miller/Sojourners crew. I find them equal parts bizarre/annoying (in a super go-getter, do-gooder Key Club from HS sorta way) and breath-of-fresh-air (in a super go-getter, do-gooder Key Club from HS sorta way). And I can't say as I completely trust 'em. But: I do think the Erstwhile Nazarene was, first and foremost, a Progressive (also a rabble rouser) so at least they kinda-sorta got that part right. And if Pastor Jim says they're alright, well, then, you know: I guess they got that going for them too.

Soundtrack of My Mind [02.04.10]

In a brand new feature here on Beitel-blog, you'll get you a taste of the musical mantras that on occasion root themselves deep in your humble Beitelblogger's brain, and then he just "sings" them -- out loud and/or not -- incessantly throughout the day. Today it was Ingrid Michaelson. All. Day. Long. Which was fine because I like Ingrid Michaelson and this is a dadgum good song. (This acoustic version's cool and all, but the original is a little more electric and so it growls more. Which I like a little better. Still.) "Something tastes different / Maybe it's my tongue / Something tastes different / Suddenly I'm not so young." Indeed. So. You know. Must've been a good day, then, right?

30 Things I Love Right Now [02.03.10]

1. A cell phone resurrected from the cold, watery depths of a commode... 2. The water-extracting properties of uncooked rice... 3. A made bed... 4. The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom -- a pull quote: "With the virtual absence of visitors and opportunities to mix outside their immediate family, Paul and Felix [Dirac] probably did not appreciate they were being brought up in a singularly unusual environment, a hothouse of private education overseen by a father who would speak to them only in French and a mother who would talk only in English. According to one witness, the young Paul Dirac believed that men and women spoke different languages." Wait...they don't?... 5. Mystics... 6. Atoms... 7. Cool old art fo-toes... 8. Kramer vs. Kramer... 9. St. Bartholomew, patron saint of, uh, tanners -- because everybody needs a patron saint, right? -- but that's not why I love him right now; it's because I like that painting in the BMA... 10. Sunrise... 11. Hot and Hot Fish Club... 12. The Great Kaiser... 13. Hydration... 14. Ingrid Michaelson... 15. That time when I was four and followed a line of ants into the woods even though my mom was late for work and was none too pleased to have to come looking for me... 16. My on-again-off-again relationship with coffee [currently: on-again!]... 17. A regular investment in the collective store of human experiences (?)... 18. Saying yes with conviction and purpose... 19. Raw carrots... 20. Cooked carrots, for that matter... 21. Almonds... 22. Brand-new toilet seats... 23. The Sundance Screenwriters Lab... 24. Johnny Cash... 25. Yes, for sure: blogging [which is to say: an internalized commitment to the yin-yang balance between short-form projects and long-form projects in my life, how the two feed each other, how they are actually kinda-sorta the same thing, etc.]... 26. Words and images. Together... 27. Entree -- that it's at least two things: 1) a tasty meal, often in a cool bistro and 2) a kind of passport into a new place, be it in the tangible world and/or in the region of experience... 28. Contemplative arts... 29. A grilled chicken and slaw pita at Zoe's... 30. Moxy. The word. The trait...

Sunday Link: The Difficulties of Today and Tomorrow

February = Black History Month. Hence The Speech, in its entirety. YouTube -- what with its weird brand of necromancy -- makes almost everything the present moment, don't it? Monday is Sunday. January is February. And 2010 is (in a weird, parallel universe sort of way) always and forever 1963. ["What the hell's he talking about?" "Forget it, he's on a roll..."]

Or 2009, for that matter.

To wit: here's a bit of last summer's travelogue re: the SCLC's Poor People's Campaign -- the march on Jackson Missippy (under the unrelenting June sun) that was intended to help us Progressive types refocus on King's unrealized vision of adding issues of socioeconomic class to the larger Civil Rights portfolio. Your Humble Beitelblogger was there, of course, and he wrote about it and took pitchers and everything. Now that is a party. Amen. Etc.

Sunday Link: When Up Is Down

And when Sunday is Monday. Because, you know, Sunday Links happen on Sunday most of the time. But there are times and places when they happen on days that aren't even Sunday at all. Monday, say. This is one of those times and places, and this shiny-eyed/-headed, bouncy little fellow tells you why. Sort of.

Sunday Link: What Would Buster Do?

This week, Pastor Jim eschews the headlines to reminisce about his own calling to the cloth. Seems his granddaddy -- a man who was illiterate and wholly unchurched -- thought there weren't too many worse ways to spend a life than as a preacher. Even pleaded with his grandson to reconsider his decision to pursue his vocation in the church. To no avail, obviously. Sayeth Pastor Jim:

I tried to explain to him about a sense of the presence of God. I talked to him about having a calling and a desire to help people. But I could tell he was unconvinced. Finally, after it was clear I would not change my mind, Grandpa said, "Well, if you are determined to be a preacher, try to be like Buster." I don't know if that was his given name or a nickname picked up from childhood. In fact, I never even knew his last name. Buster was a bootleg preacher who didn't have a regular church. He preached wherever he had opportunity. He would hold forth on front porches, or from the back of pickups, and in one bizarre incident, in the produce section at the grocery store. His message was always the same, "No matter what you have done, or how bad you have been, God loves you anyway."

Gotta say: I'm obviously simpatico with Pastor Jim's politics and I like it when he gets after the hypocrites and moneychangers, et al, but I think it's my favorite when he's just a damn good open-hearted preacher man who relentlessly pushes the Erstwhile Nazarene's simple, two-word, and o-so-ecumenical theological underpinnings: Be nice.

Anyhoo, click here to read the rest...

J.D. Salinger: Wait. Wasn't He Already Dead?

Word out of Cornish, New Hampshire, is that America's richest, famousest virtuoso-recluse -- one Jerome David Salinger ("Jerry" to his friends and disgruntled former lovers) -- shuffled off of this mortal coil yesterday. He was 91 years young.

I been noodlin' about how to recognize the momentous moment. Because, you know, I'm a white male writerly-type of privilege born in the second half of the 20th century; therefore: Catcher in the Rye is a sacred text. Or whatever. (If you really want to hear about it. God, I wish you could've been there. If you want to know the truth. Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.)

At first I thought, "Well, there's that whole big-fat footnote in that wacky memoir you wrote about yourself (even though, you know, you're not famous or anything [yet!]) -- all about how The Catcher in the Rye is a sacred text and all, but you hesitated to acknowledge it exactly because that felt like a cliche to you. Or something." (I was talking to myself, see, hence the second person. And the quote marks.)

But then I thought: you want somebody to actually pay you to publish that and put it in Barnes & Noble and it'll make you famous and a household name and maybe Tobey McGuire will play you in the movie, etc, so maybe it's not a good idea to, you know, just put it on the blog. For free or whatever. This is, after all, America or whatever. Maybe if it was Communist Russia or something. But it's not. Plus maybe that would jinx it or something. I don't know. Who can ever really say about such things?

_____

So that's where the ground lamb and frozen peas -- pictured above -- come in.

Because, you see, when you're a recluse -- no matter how virtuosic you are (or maybe even especially when you're a virtuoso)-- and you finally die, folks dig up all the weird shit you did when you were alive, just to prove and/or reiterate that you were one crazy mofo.

In Salinger's case, he was a famously unyielding secular ascetic who -- case in point -- had some really odd ideas about what he put into his belly. Frozen peas everyday for breakfast. For din-din, it was rare ground lamb cooked at very, very low temperatures. Every night. Because, uh, well, I don't really know why. It was just the way he knew it had to be.

On the one hand, the guy lived for 91 years. He was thin as a rail. Plus also totally rich. And famous. And he wrote a perfect -- no joke -- perfect novel. And you can count on one hand the number of people who've done that in the last century or so. So he was doing something right -- right?

I mean. Uh. Well? I guess so.

_____

So me and my Anonymous Sister got into a heated debate a few weeks ago. It was a debate about asceticism. My argument: there have been truly exceptional people throughout the course of history who have divorced themselves from the messy tumble of the workaday world of Real Life Human Beings. All manner of monastics, of course: Merton, Thich Nhat Hanh, Thoreau. Mother Teresa. Sister Wendy. Etc. And they've done great things. Advanced insight into the human experience. Etc. While these folks are certainly outliers and a society can't function if everybody tunes out to tune in, they do play an important role in the advancement of the human race.

Her argument was, you know, basically that they're all a bunch of effing weirdos.

_____

Fast forward. It's January 28, 2010. The day J.D. Salinger, notorious American recluse, has died. I am in the parking lot of an extremely mediocre Mexican restaurant. It's chilly. I'm shivering a little. I'm with a very pretty woman. She's also smart. Bold. Maybe even brash. This is someone I do not know particularly well. She is showing me pictures of her rambunctious puppies on her iPhone. It's cold. I really want to kiss her. I'm shivering a little. Stuff of the world.

Salinger once told a lover -- an innocent much younger than him -- "The trouble with you, Joyce, is you love the world."

Let the record show:

On January 28, 2010, the day J.D. Salinger -- the weirdo ascetic, the talented man who made such a conspicuous show of divorcing himself from the world -- finally and irrevocably did divorce himself from the world, I did kiss the pretty, bold woman with the puppies and the iPhone.

Because the trouble with me is I love the world.

FYI/411: The Soundtrack of Tectonic Catastrophe

The Communist Radio (aka, NPR) had this to offer up into the world this evening: all about a radio station in Port-au-Prince that has morphed from just a regular old, mind-numbingly inconsequential radio station to an actual civic bellwether. Giving vital news, literally saving people's lives. Great story. That said, I do need to observe -- simply because the Communist Radio people seem not to (nor do the Haitians, for that matter, but who can blame them?) -- the irony embedded in this unbelievable, uh, thing.

A pull quote from the piece:

When the quake struck at 4:53 p.m. on Jan. 12, Signal FM was playing "Hotel California." The Earth groaned and the building shuddered, but just before the DJ ran out, he had the presence of mind to hit the "repeat" button. So for the first 30 minutes of Port-au-Prince's descent into hell, the only thing you could hear on the radio was the Eagles' standard — over and over and over.

Are. You. Effing. Serious.

Serious?!

I mean, you could call that presence of mind. But I've gotta say that true presence of mind would be to say, You know, do my countrymen really want to listen to this particular song at this particular moment? Incessantly?

"You can check out any time you like / but you can never leave" ?

"We are all just prisoners here, of our own device"?

Prolly, you know, not. Maybe in this particular cataclysmic situation, total and complete silence is a little more appropriate. Not that I blame the dude for going on DJ autopilot or whatever. But still. Man. Why couldn't it be, I don't know, something a little less hellish and surrealistic?

Sunday Link: He (Still?) Got Game

What's an aging jumpshooter to do when he's just endured his toughest week on the most difficult job he's ever had? Why, he takes some time out on a Sunday morning to hoist up a few threes, of course. (And, you know, bring a trusted advisor back into the fold to help with message discipline. All hands on deck, etc.)

Sunday Link: Compassionate Storytelling in Images

Ryan Lobo, photographer, travels to the most dangerous places in the world to take pictures that tell stories. Pictures that hold the secrets of suffering, the promise of redemption, and that ask open-ended questions about the nature of justice. Which would seem to make him like any hard-core photojournalist. But to him, there's something different. A pull quote:

I won't go into details of what led to a decision I made. But let's just say it involved alcohol, cigarettes, other substances, and a woman. I basically decided that it was I -- not the camera or the network or anything that lay outside myself -- that was the only instrument in storytelling truly worth tuning. In my life when I tried to achieve things like success or recognition, they eluded me. Paradoxically, when I let go of these objectives and worked from a place of compassion and purpose, looking for excellence rather than the results of it, everything arrived on its own. Including fulfillment.

Which is to say -- if I might take the liberty of a paraphrase -- such a transformation (towards excellence, fulfillment) requires not substances and an Other (I've a sneaking suspicion these are actually quite often obstacles to such transformation) but instead a certain and significant measure of surrender.

Sunday Link: Where In the World Is Cornel West?

Everywhere, or so it seems. Here's a wacky and totally fascinating little Q&A with the very smart, very quirky Professor West. Ostensibly it's about what he does with his Sundays. My favorite moment?

IN THE COMPANY OF GREATS I’ve been married three times. I’m married to my calling, but I’m not married to a particular woman. I have no pets. My apartment is full of books and records, the light of Toni Morrison and John Coltrane. And Chekhov, everywhere.

What does any of that even mean?! That's what makes it -- and, probably, the man-the-myth himself -- so very awesome. Sort of you get it/him. Sort of you don't. Which is just so very much like life in general.

Sunday Link: Pastor Jim re: Pat Robertson, Part II

So last week Pastor Jim went after Pat Robertson's Haiti-made-a-pact-with-the-Devil diatribe. This week, he supplies some of the philosophical and/or theological underpinning for it. I.e., the nature of suffering and what the Erstwhile Nazarene would suggest as a just and sane and, well, yes, holy response to said suffering. Click here to check it out... [As an extra-special added bonus: here's the mock letter from the Devil to ol' Pat that the Minneapolis Star-Tribune published earlier this week and that's now making the rounds.]

30 Things I Love Right Now [01.22.10]

1. Yes, definitely Modest Mouse and Band of Horses... 2. Pinto beans... 3. The Grand Idea of Interpersonal Commerce (and, no, I have no idea what that means either...)... 4. This: that there are four (4) things -- four (4) actual, viable, real things -- that may very well end up representing my early ouevre. And I really effing mean that. For the first time ever. I've wanted to mean that. But haven't (really) until now... 5. Yes, Iron & Wine (and yet somehow I resist that for absolutely no good reason. I have this strange and utterly unsubstantiated idea that it's cliche for me, a random thirtysomething so-called "Progressive" white guy to like/love Iron & Wine. WTF?)... 6. But I draw the line at Death Cab for Cutie. On principle alone... 7. 44 is so totally struggling right now. Like. Maybe he's the New Millenium Jimmy Carter. But. A) what's wrong with that? and B) dude has so totally been in dire need of some legitimate battle scars, i.e., that which does not kill him, etc... 8. Yeah, I mean. Modest Mouse. Seriously... 9. A 25-lb. barbell that kinda-sorta hurts my shoulder but what the hell... 10. Saying no. With purpose and conviction... 11. That maybe I'll climb a mountain someday... 12. The Shins! Don't forget The Shins!! Because I'm an utterly predictable bearded white guy!!! 13. Telethons! Awesome!! I mean, who really wants to actually watch one, but this is an important piece of cultural capital that an entire generation (or, uh, three?) hasn't really had any reason to encounter. Now, thanks to George Clooney, Generation Next knows what a telethon is! Wait -- does that mean someday George Clooney's gonna go on the TeeVee all swollen and tuxedoed and scary (a la Jerry Lewis) and traumatize everybody?... 14. Very, very serious people... 15. Mildly reckless people (that is in the context of 21st Century America, which is to say, you know, inconsequentially but charmingly reckless)... 16. Sculpture... 17. Freckles... 18. Possibility... 19. Dressing like Jackson Pollock... 20. Talking with the barber on a gray Friday late afternoon... 21. Thomas Merton... 22. Shunryu Suzuki... 23. Henry (Endree!) Miller... 24. Simple sentences... 25. I mean, okay, humans in general and, you know, just how they do... 26. A Saturday morning tee time... 27. Okay, whatever: Radiohead... 28. Links on the internet, which totally changes everything. Just everything... 29. Reinvention... 30. The moment when you say: Oh. I get it. Nobody gets it...

FYI/411: Man, Meet Hour

Okay. The folks down in Marketing have long held that a great proportion of the Beitel-blog faithful are ambivalent (at best) about American sport. However. First of all, it's such a huge part of the culture, right? Can you really ignore it? And then there's this: if you splice out the jargon and the jingoism, what you get is just flat-out human interest stuff.

Case in point: the goings on in Knoxville, Tennessee, these last few days.

Let me set the scene for those of you who don't follow the college football. That is to say, in generic terms of human resources:

So, say you're an employer. And you take a fairly big risk on hiring somebody who may or may not be the right person for the job and you commit an awful lot of resources to helping her/him be successful. And then say, right off the bat, he/she says some stuff and does some stuff that embarrasses you and your organization. Just sort of makes an ass of him/herself. Makes things way more difficult than they need to be. And then say she/he isn't really all that successful in completing the tasks of the job. Just kind of, you know, mediocre and uneven. And then -- here's the kicker -- say he/she then, a little more than a year after you hired him/her, at the worst possible time of year for your business, tells you, "Uh, hey, you know thanks for everything, but my dream job just opened up and they've offered it to me. So, uh, see you later and, you know, good luck or whatever."

[PS: I kinda-sorta did this one time, so he who throws stones, etc...]

So that would sort of suck, right?

Okay. So now imagine you're the person said employer interviews to replace said dead-beat. And because the timing's so bad, you're one of a limited group of people in your profession who are both qualified for the job and willing/able to take it. You've got a pretty good resume but things aren't going great at your current job. You've recently been promoted but the jury's still out about whether you can cut the mustard with the new responsibilities. That's a tough interview/probationary period, right? Everybody's suspicious, betrayed, put upon. Plus there's the fact that you've got to hit the ground running because you're making a transition when you really need to be focused on making sure this crucial time of year goes well. Oh and then, PS, a good portion of the process will be documented on YouTube.

Kind of a nightmare, right?

So that's where Derek Dooley and the University of Tennessee football program come in.

I appreciate when people rise to difficult occasions. Yes, Derek Dooley is a football coach. Yes, he can be plastic and annoying in the way that football coaches can be plastic and annoying. (And, of course, he's now the football coach at Tennessee, a program whose fans can be pretty damn annoying just by their very nature.) And maybe he'll fail miserably. But. He nailed the interview. He got everything right. On the fly. Under very difficult circumstances. Even gave shout-outs to his mom (for influencing him as much as his famous football-coach dad) and his wife (for making sacrifices in her own career as a physician to help him achieve his vocational goals). And that deserves to be commended. Even if you hate football in general. Even if you hate Tennessee football in particular.

Sunday Link: DIY Pep Talk

I think I keep slapping up links, etc. here re: DIY (which is to say Do It Yourself) in the arts because I'm trying to rev myself up to actually, well, DI[Myself]. At any rate, here's an article in the NYT about the ways in which DIY is manifesting itself in the film industry:

In the Old World of distribution, filmmakers hand over all the rights to their work, ceding control to companies that might soon lose interest in their new purchase for various reasons, including a weak opening weekend. (“After the first show,” Mr. Broderick said, repeating an Old World maxim, “we know.”) In the New World, filmmakers maintain full control over their work from beginning to end: they hold on to their rights and, as important, find people who are interested in their projects and can become patrons, even mentors.

Hey. Damn straight: I'll take a patron. That'd be pretty awesome. Will you be my Peggy Guggenheim? (FYI [not to be confused with DIY]: That's ol' Peg up there on the gondola. And if that ain't a plug for patronship -- you get to wear crazy sunglasses and ride around in a gondola with your little fru-fru dogs -- then I don't know what is!)

Sunday Link: How to Live to Be 100+

Nine simple things anybody can do to live longer and better. PS: Ol' Dan up there is actually 114 years old!! (Not really. But wouldn't it be crazy if he was?)

Sunday Link: Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

When it comes to old Pat Robertson, let's just say Pastor Jim's, uh, not a fan:

Pat Robertson, television evangelist and founder of the 700 Club, holds a prayer retreat at the end of each year. During these annual prayer meetings, Robertson meets with God and God tells Pat what is going to happen in the coming year. Of course, someone does not have a very good batting average on these predictions...

And it pretty much gets more and more scathing from there. My favorite part is the part where he talks about how/why so-called "contemporary worship services" suck so bad. That doesn't have anything to do with Pat Robertson, really, but a sprawling rant never hurt nobody, 'specially when it's all so dadgum true. ("Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?" -- "Germans?" -- "Forget it. He's on a roll...") Auburn First Baptist, man. Now that's a church I could go to.

Click here to read the full op-ed in the Anniston Star...

Sunday Link: Zadie Smith Is (Still) Smart

Seems the lovely and talented Zadie Smith has a new book of essays out, Changing My Mind, and the NYT's got a review of it. Reviewer Pankaj Mishra dismounts thusly:

Smith’s intellectual ambitions are remarkably consistent with those of the postcolonial writers and academics who have settled into the abstractions of a posh postmodernism. “Changing My Mind” displays many of its virtues: a cosmopolitan suavity and wit that often relieves intellectual ponderousness. Smith’s native intelligence, however, seems so formidable that you can’t help hoping she’ll change her mind yet again.

And that's reassuring because that's pretty much how I feel about every Zadie Smith book. There are parts with which a body might quibble -- and sometimes they're substantial quibbles -- but mostly she's just so damn clever, so damn smart, and very often funny to boot, that I end up just saying, "Ah, you know, whatever," and looking forward to what she's going to do next.

Potential is a funny thing. Football coaches like to say it'll get you beat faster than anything (that is, relying on a player's potential as opposed to what he's shown you on the field in practice). But show enough of it -- as Zadie Smith has since day one, with White Teeth -- and you get an endless string of opportunities to fulfill it. Maybe that doesn't work on the football field, but it sure works on the bestseller lists. And, besides, a writer's "failure" is almost inevitable when it comes to any book project; the successful ones are those whose failures are the most interesting.

30 Things I Love Right Now [01.16.10]

1. Cilantro... 2. Matt, the IT guy at work who helped me figure out that my video and audio drivers on my laptop were all jacked up -- now they're all fixed and it's a brave new cyber world!... 3. When your neuro-opthalmologist calls you on Saturday afternoon (Saturday afternoon!) and tells you your MRI/MRA is all clear (you know, except for that little hole in the right frontal lobe that's, uh, probably been there since you were a baby, which totally explains everything)... 4. Nirvana... 5. Drive By Truckers... 6. Long weekends... 7. Snapped cold snaps... 8. The Half-Known World by Robert Boswell... 9. Rear Window... 10. The prospect of seeing actual pictures of my actual brain... 11. New hubcaps... 12. Plain yogurt... 13. Chapbook #2 comes out later this year and the folks at Black Lawrence Press seem pretty proactive about all that... 14. Band of Horses... 15. Proper alignment at address... 16. A dream journal... 17. Cobwebs... 18. This Emerson quote (by way of my copy of Tropic of Cancer, which I'm finding is every bit as whacked as it's supposed to be, btw): "These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies -- captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly"... 19. Learning to fly (but I ain't got wings)... 20. Sonnets... 21. My day job... 22. "Maybe I'm Amazed"... 23. Blue Pilot V-7 pens... 24. The little button that lets you switch between windows on the laptop and it puts all the windows at a 3-D skew... 25. Oatmeal... 26. Cherries... 27. Did I say I love that I don't have a tumor that needs digging out of Ye Olde Gray Matter?... 28. The little curlicue-whorls of fur on my dog's elbows (I mean, I guess they're her elbows)... 29. The Egg Man... 30. The Walrus (goo goo g'joob)

Update Update: This Is Your Brain

Actually, it's not. Or maybe it is. Only thing I know for sure is it's not mine. But. I, earlier today, had me my very first magnetic resonance image snapped of Ye Olde Noggin'. Because Science wants to study what it is that makes me so damn smart. Or something. Funny thing about it is it's a lot like a Deep Space Heavy Metal Rock-and-Roll show in there. Not in my brain, I mean. (Though sort of it is there too.) But, no, I mean in the little tube they put you in to snap your pictures. All loud but also vaguely ethereal. (As opposed to very specifically ethereal, which is I think sort of impossible.) Just like I imagine outer space to be. If Jimmy Paige was in charge of outer space. (And who's to say he's not, really?) Anyway. That's what I did today. Also listened to my favorite Drive By Truckers song. How about you?

FYI/411: Poetry Must Rely Upon Shameless Self-Promotion

The fine folks at Copper Nickel were nice enough to publish this really long, odd poem I wrote. It's called "In Order to Form a More Perfect Union" and it's about...uh, America? Love? Other things? Plus! It's in thirteen sections. And! Each line has thirteen syllables! It's a veritable OCD cry for help! So. Yeah. Buy a copy of Copper Nickel 13. It's got me plus all these other cool people in it, like such as...

Poetry by: Dan Albergotti (I've met him!!), Jeff Baker, Scott Beck, Mary Biddinger, Jericho Brown, Stacey Lynn Brown, Jessica Cuello, Leia Darwish Clark, Chad Davidson, Kelly Davio, Anna Carson DeWitt, Tyler Dorholt, Michael Dumanis, Kerry James Evans, Noah Falck, Farrah Field, Noah Eli Gordon, Michael J. Henry, Bob Hicok, John James, Jessica Jewell, Marc W. Laughton, Patricia Lockwood, J. Michael Martinez, Adrian Matejka, Karyna McGlynn, James Thomas Miller, Joseph Radke, Adam Theron-Lee Rensch, Brian Ripley, Joshua Robbins, Bret Shepard, R. T. Smith, Alison Stine, Nicole Walker, A. E. Watkins, Karen Weyant, Allison Benis White, David Daniel Williams, Brennen Wysong.

Prose by: Dinah Cox, Charley Henley (I helped commandeer a boat with him!!), Holly Goddard Jones, Laleh Khadivi, Baker Lawley (I played flag football with him!!), Jef Otte, Antonio Salinas.

& visual art by: Krista Franklin.