The Chameleon
This article in this week’s New Yorker is simply fascinating; the stuff of which movies are made. Don’t want to ruing the plot for you, but be prepared for several twists and turns.
The most fascinating thing about the whole plot to me is how persistent the guy has been, even after serving time in an American prison, he returned to the same behavior when he got back to France. His insistence that he was always looking for love and a family is supported by his troublesome relationship with his blood family.
There are times when I am depressed that I will look upon children jealously, seeing a simplicity to their lives (that may be an illusion) that do not feel in my adult existence. I don’t think I am alone in this feeling: it’s been written about time and time again. How many books are filled with longings for childhood, to be like a child?
Bourdin’s inhibitions just were not great enough to stop him from taking the next step that at least I know I have pondered before: time machines, magic potions, Tom Hanks in Big.
I can’t really put my fingers completely on why the story touched me so much. There are plenty of reasons not to desire a return to chidlhood, or to being a child, I guess that’s what keeps me sane, but if the genie granted me one wish…
Blog
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Daily reading
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New roommate
Looking at photos tonight with my new roommate. There’s discussion of the things we have in common. I am just looking at all of this history, mostly blurry just like my experience of it is now, lots of you. You don’t look like his soon-to-be ex-wife, but it rings a bell. He says you look happy. Like you and me and we were happy once. It reminds him of what he fell in love with with his wife; something now that has become just a dream; she’s changed so much.
I try to tell him that I think it is different with me and you, that you really haven’t changed that much from what I fell for, and that what I fell for was really you. I feel foolish. As if I know?
He says you’re beautiful in those old photographs.
I say that I know. -
Daily reading
10 Things to Scratch From Your Worry List
Throughout my life, I have been surrounded by one form of worry wart or another. It’s very entertaining most of the time, but when it boils down to being told what vessels to drink my water out of, and where I should carry my iPhone, it is going too far. I have planned many times to do hours of scientific research to debunk the worries of my wartish friends, but like so many things (like taking out the trash and washing all of my dirty clothes) I just can’t find the time or energy.
Lo! Today I see this article on NYTimes.com. A lot of my legwork has been done for me, and in a very few, short paragraphs too. Now I don’t have to worry about compiling this list anymore.
My favorite quote (and this one is for my old boss):
Nalgene has already announced that it will take BPA out of its wonderfully sturdy water bottles. Given the publicity, the company probably had no choice. But my old blue-capped Nalgene bottle, the one with BPA that survived glaciers, jungles and deserts, is still sitting right next to me, filled with drinking water. If they ever try recalling it, they’ll have to pry it from my cold dead fingers.
Now I need to go refill my bottle that I keep on my desk, that I will never take camping. -
Daily reading
One last pitch for Tim Drew
I heard this piece on NPR this morning and sought it out when I got to work. It made me shed a manly tear that nearly caused me to blow through a traffic light. This page has an audio link to Frank Deford’s audio story as well as a transcript of the same story. -
Daily reading
For a little over a week now, at JT’s encouragement, I have been reading this blog that is ostensibly a critique of how the press covers baseball. It being a critique of baseball journalism, I didn’t think of posting it here as I imagined it would be of little interest to the average BPC reader, but, lo!, today I spy a piece that we can all get a chuckle out of. It’s a pretty funny sideswipe at ESPN commentators doing their best Siskel & Ebert on the new Batman movie.
Enjoy! -
No country for old men
My uncle Willy died last Friday. He was 78. While alive, he was the wiry, hairy-chested type of old man of which the world does not make any more these days. He’s the first of my dad’s siblings to die and I believe that it has affected my dad in ways that even his mother’s death over ten years ago has not. When I got the message I was sitting in a park listening to indie rock music in Chicago. I couldn’t help from imagining how strange Willy would have thought the whole scene to be, and in imagining that I thought of how far I have come from my family: that thing I grew up with, and as, that I spent much of my adolescence trying to outdistance, and have spent much of late 20s and 30s trying to figure out how to get back to.
What I knew of Willy is that he farmed a bit: sweet potatoes and the like. He worked for several years at the Nu-Tread tire company, just behind the outfield wall of the old Durham Athletic Park; the same park where the Durham Bulls play and where the movie Bull Durham was shot. He also bought cords of wood in the fall the at he would cut, split, and deliver to houses nearby for winter heat. On the property that he owned there are two ponds that my brother and I frequented on weekends for fishing. Bass and bream could be caught in such aplenty, with bobbers and worms or crickets or grasshoppers, that one would think that Willy stocked the pond, but that was just not him. It’s almost as if the fish were there because a man like Willy could only have a pond with such plentiful fish.
In the fall, my brother and I (and sometimes father and mother) would help harvest the sweet potatoes. It seems that I even remember gathering bailed hay at some point as well. When a tire went flat on one of the cars we would go to the used tire and repair shop that Willy and a friend had established in a building on his property.
He had a wife named Nelly and a daughter named Patricia, my cousin, who lived across the street with her husband. I would not know Patricia if she were to walk right up to me. Probably wouldn’t recognize Nelly anymore, maybe not even Willy in his last few years. -
Summer in the City: 15 July 2008
Beware the ides of July, the day before you leave for Chicago and the day where every minute will be twice as long as they were yesterday. And the day after… before the airport, every minute thrice as long as even today. Logarhythmic expansion.
And at work there’s too much to be done. Self-imposed deadlines the I am trying to shirk. Trying to just cruise into it all, to not have an all-nighter like I seem to always have when getting ready to depart for a few days. -
Oh, please…: New Yorker Obama cover
The upcoming New Yorker cover and its consequent fallout is a shame. I would totally expect the reaction that the Obama campaign is having from a conservative candidate in his shoes. After all, they have done all that they can to discredit the “liberal media” (i.e. media not controlled by conservative owners and organizations) over the last decade or so, so much so that people are not sure what is real information and what is purely myth, as attested to by the purely-myth, conservative mass email that was forwarded to me today about all of the ways the Democratic party has screwed the American people over Social Security over the last few years.
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Daily Reading
Hollywood’s Hero Deficit — The American, A Magazine of Ideas
The article’s basic gist is that “true” heroes have disappeared from American cinema in the last few decades, or when they do exist, they are relegated to “a world far, far way”:e.g. Star Wars, Superman etc. It downplays what it calls “victim heroes,” which it says characterizes all of the heroes from films in recent years: e.g. Erin Brockovich, Michael Clayton… The author states that Hollywood fails to give us such “true” heroes, even though audience obviously want such heroes, although the author fails to provide a source for this matter of fact.
If you cannnot tell from tone here, I think this is a load of horseshit. So, tipped by the add for a Newt Gingrich book on the same page as the article, and remembering my college conservative news rag’s (The Duke Review) proclivity for printing photos of John Wayne, I decided to do a little research. -
Daily reading
What is poetry? And does it pay?
This story in Harper’s may call into question all of the most recent statements I made about poetry and its importance. The writer goes to an annual meeting of the “Famous Poets Society.” One which happens at the Gold Nugget in Reno, of all places. Top prize: $25,000. I laughed out loud several times while marveling at the author’s ability not to completely come unglued at certain of the goings on.