After writing the previous entry, I went to bed. And stayed up till all hours reading Andrew Vachss' latest, Only Child. The part I was confused by earlier had no connection at all to the rest of the book, so I'm not too troubled by my failure to comprehend it. Although I'm not sure why it was there at all. Actually, I think it's setting up something for a future book, but the first 50 pages are totally disconnected from the rest, which is a bit jarring. It seems like that would have worked better if it had been an unresolved subplot throughout the book instead of being all in one section that never goes anywhere. Weird.

The actual plot, once I got to it, was fine. It wasn't great, but I certainly enjoyed it. There's less of the day-to-day of Burke's life in this one, and that's kind of a shame, but Burke's changed a lot from the early books. I dunno; it was a little "lighter" in some ways -- not the subject matter, but it felt more James Bondish with the general goofiness of some of the developments. Plus, the fact that women just can't resist Burke. I'm usually able to accept that, simply because Burke hangs out with some screwed-up women, and there's a certain amount of sense in their being attracted to him since he's screwed-up himself. But it seemed more implausible than usual this time.

There were lots of random things I liked: a shout-out to Joe Lansdale; a fun trivia fact about NYC (the location of Main Street). The highlight is probably when Burke is trying to get information from kids by posing as a casting director. (It does almost make sense, really.) Firstly because his impersonation is really funny, and I suspect it's based on Vachss' dealings with people Hollywood, which just makes it funnier. And secondly because the stuff the kids talk about is amusing by itself.

This was my favorite: "Some were very deeply depressed about the new run of Buffy. 'Now even The Slayer sucks!' one cracked." And then a couple of paragraphs below that, he mentions two girls getting into a fight, and one of them yelling, "Bring it, B!" Which might be a coincidence, but it seems odd. There was also some conversation about how people will believe anything on the internet (they post an entry to IMDb to "prove" that their movie exists).

Oh, and I got mentioned! Not really, but the character I took "Strega" from is mentioned, and it's gotten to the point where I've almost forgotten the source so it's weird to see it in print. It's part of a section where Burke reminisces about his relationships, and I liked it for a lot of reasons besides my namesake being referenced. But for the record, the quote is: "Strega would do anything for me. A lot of women say things like that. The way Strega meant it scared me as much as it drew me." Heh. She's much scarier than I am, though. Or scary in different ways, at least.

I remembered a couple of other things while cleaning this afternoon. Not that you need context, but I cleaned the living room and the bathroom and sorted out the hall closet and started on the bedroom, and thank goodness, because over the past few weeks the apartment had become a disaster area, and now I don't feel like I'm living in complete chaos. Which is irrelevant here, but I wanted someone to appreciate all the tidying I did. So anyway:

I picked up Ellis' Global Frequency. Which didn't grab me especially, partly because it seemed very similar to The Filth and I didn't like that much. But I'll give it another couple of issues, since I think this issue was intended as an action-packed premiere and it may not indicate much about what future issues will be like.

And last weekend, when I wasn't quite so harried, I had dinner with my family and we tried out another Cheapass Game: "The Great Brain Robbery." You're a bunch of zombies in the Old West, robbing a train for the precious brains of the passengers. And when the train stops, whoever has the brain with the highest IQ wins. Sadly, since we were playing for the first time, we didn't play very well, and my brother easily raced to victory. Afterwards we all agreed that there should have been more fighting. That's good advice for almost any game, really. Oh, the rules of the game give you lots of excuses to say things like, "You can't do that; you haven't got a brain in your head!" which adds bonus fun. We'll have to give it another try now that we have a better idea of how to play.

I also wanted to mention that Michael Dirda has returned to The Washington Post's Book World from his sabbatical, hooray. And in his piece last weekend he mentioned that he had tried several times over the years to read Don Quixote, and couldn't get through it until he tried a translation by Burton Raffel. So I feel a little better. I'm technically still on my first attempt, right? I think I get a year before I have to start over. Maybe I should try the Raffel edition.

Oh wait, and I got Andrew Vachss' Only Child. I'm only about 70 pages into it, though. So far it's a little confusing, but that could be because I was reading it while half-asleep.

Gosh. I've got over two weeks to catch up on. I've been spending a lot of the time at work, and then complaining about work, and fitting recaps in there somewhere, and then occasionally sleeping. So I'm not sure how much I can remember of what I did when I wasn't working or sleeping. We'll start with reading:

I got two of Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan TPBs: Gouge Away and Spider's Thrash. The fact that there were two new (to me) books confused me, and I spent a long time looking at them and wondering if I already had one. But I bought them both, and it turned out I didn't have either one, so that was nice. The "Nobody Loves Me" story in Gouge Away was hilarious. And vicious. And it's hard not to think of the Warren Ellis Forum at the end, when Spider meets his audience.

Also got Mike Carey's The Furies. Which I shouldn't have bought. Not because it isn't good. I saw it and said, "ooooooh," and picked it up and thought, "Maybe someone will get it for me for Christmas." But then I thought, "Maybe no one will. Or maybe they'll try but it will be sold out by then, and then I'll never ever see it! Until the paperback." And I dithered like that for a while, and eventually greed won out so I bought it. So it's another Sandman spin-off story, and Mike Carey is the guy who writes Lucifer, which I really enjoy. And this has art by John Bolton, and it's just gorgeous. Beautiful paintings. I flipped through just looking at it for a while before I read it, which I hardly ever do. Just lovely. The story follows Lyta Hall as she tries to rebuild her life. And then she winds up in Greece, and one of the Titans has a plan to destroy the Furies. Wackiness ensues. And some violent deaths. The parts about Lyta's new friend Pauline feel a bit extraneous, as if it was inserted so that there could be a more upbeat ending. But that's my only quibble.

I finished rereading First Hubby. I'd forgotten how sweet it is; it is a love story in a lot of ways. And it's very funny. The premise is that it's a book by husband of the first female President of the U.S. You eventually find out who he's writing the book for, since he doesn't plan on publishing it. But it skips around, telling the story of how he met Clementine (the President), and talking about current events, and their family. The funniest parts are the "alternate history," for want of a better term, since Clementine is President when Clinton was. See, in the book, we eventually learn that a feminist third party ticket won the 1990 election after the Democrats nominated Dukakis, and then it was discovered that Marilyn Quayle had seduced Bush in order to keep Dan on the ticket. And then a few other things happened, but it's funnier if you just read it. There's also a Presidential death by fish, which seems like a Robert Anton Wilson joke.

Like all Blount books, there are a lot of very quotable lines: "Not until you have a son of a certain age do you realize why it is that old men start wars and send young men off to fight them." And of panhandlers: "If Donald Trump can behave the way he does, then why shouldn't people go up to strangers in the street, get right up in their face and ask for money?" And this is from Guy's first (short-lived) press secretary:

"From watching a cat, I had worked it out [...] that what separates us from the lower animals is that we are not flexible enough to lick our own genitals. So we seek satisfaction in the arts, the sciences. Money. War. [...] Then, however, I stopped to think. And I realized that cows couldn't either."

Okay, I'll stop quoting now. But it's a funny book. If you like cryptic crosswords, you should look for Blount's Camels Are Easy, Comedy's Hard which has a bunch from when he did the crossword for Spy magazine. I also love Blount because he often mentions The Good Soldier and At Swim-Two-Birds which are two of my favorite semi-obscure books. We're kindred spirits, see?

This week I reread Douglas Adams' Life, the Universe, and Everything. It took me most of the week to get through it because I'd manage about 20 minutes of reading before falling asleep. There's not much I can say about it because surely you've read it a dozen times yourself, right? Although the book did fall apart about three-quarters of the way through. It was an old paperback copy that I think I bought in elementary school, and I've got the nice hardback collection, so it's not especially tragic. Well, it's a little sad. Because I've had that copy for so long, and I can't imagine how many times I read it. But it was well-loved, so it's probably going through some kind of Velveteen Rabbit transmogrification right now.

Moving on to DVDs... I watched Heavenly Creatures a few weeks ago. Which made me want to watch Donnie Darko so I did, and then I wanted to watch Heathers. But I didn't have it handy. I don't know; I just had some kind of "teenagers running amok" theme happening.

And I watched the first Blackadder series. Which is technically The Black Adder, but it changes to one word for the other series. I hadn't seen it before, possibly because I don't think our local PBS station aired it. Or maybe I just didn't hear about it at the time. Anyway. During the first couple of episodes, I thought the premise was quite funny but the execution wasn't so much, and I worried that this was going to be yet another cultish thing that I didn't get. Which is fine up to a point, but I had high hopes for this one. But as it went on I was enjoying the episodes more and more. I think it was because he starts out as very stupid and only slightly evil, and as things go along he gets more evil and less stupid. He's still pretty dumb at the end, but there aren't as many jokes based on that by itself. Which suits me.

The DVD also had little historical extras, explaining some things like the Wars of the Roses, and Morris Dancing, and that actually Archbishops of Canterbury didn't get killed quite that often. Which are helpful if, like me, you're not British and spent maybe a total of a week studying that period in history. Although reading a lot of Shakespeare helps with some of that, obviously. Plus you get more of the jokes in the show that way. I once planned to read all of the history plays in order, figuring that would get me bonus history knowledge (inaccurate, certainly, but at least I'd know the order of the kings) in addition to the literary points. And I got through a few, but then it got too hard to keep track of who was who, and how they were all related.

Oh, and I watched Being John Malkovich earlier today. Such an odd movie. Fun! But odd.

And finally, I got an Entertainment Earth catalogue for some mysterious reason. So now I'm going to mock it. There's a ton of Lord of the Rings crap (though Star Wars has even more, of course). My favorite piece has to be "The One Ring with Light Up Base." Dullest. Toy. Ever. It's a ring! In a jar! And the base has a lightbulb! Whee! And did you know there are Muppet action figures now? It's kind of cool, because I like the Muppets, yet also kind of creepy. And it took me a while to figure out why it was creepy, and then I realized that, because they're action figures, they've all got legs.

There are also figures for Herculoids, Twilight Zone, and Outer Limits characters. Which seems strange to me. Particularly the Outer Limits stuff, because I'm not aware of a huge interest in it among Gen-X types. Who are, I think, the market for all the geek merchandising mania. Maybe I'm just not traveling in the right circles. And even that's not as strange as the "Barbie & Snoopy" Sopwith Camel set. With Barbie wearing a leather jacket and goggles and so on. Is there really a Peanuts/Barbie crossover market? But a few pages later, mixed in with the SWAT Team dolls and the Stonewall Jackson doll, there's a Red Baron doll. See, putting him in with Snoopy would at least make a vague kind of sense. I guess.

And then there's the Jenna Jameson action figure. Just reading the blurb makes me feel creepy.

I'm cheating. I did write this on 11/6, but I didn't post it until today (the 17th). It was part of a much longer bit of rambling, which you could probably recreate by saying, "I'm very tired" a few hundred times. But I did want to save this part, so here it is:

So I woke up early this morning. And then the alarm went off. And I listened to the radio for a while while half-consciously thinking "Donwanna gettup. Bed cozy and warm and it's cold outside and SO TIRED. Donwanna." And the alarm shut itself off after a while, so then I woke up enough to turn on the TV and rationalize loafing around for another half-hour. (There's an "I'm exhausted" motif to all of this which you may have picked up on.)

Right, so I think I had ABC's morning crapola show on. And they were talking about babies and pregnant women and I just wanted to hear about election returns, so the ongoing irritation was starting to wake me up, which I suppose is a good thing. At the end of the segment, the female co-host said something close to, "No matter how cynical you say you are, anyone who looks at one of these newborn babies and claims not to be moved by the miracle of life [blah blah blah more along those lines] has no heart and no soul." And then it was all "Back to you, Bob! Tee hee!" and things went on.

Well, that sure woke me up. Jeez, lady, what did I ever do to you? Granted, I agree with half of her assessment on general philosophical principles, but... I don't go around saying that if you like babies, you're a sentimental clod. I don't even think it quietly to myself, in fact. I try to avoid the whole topic, honestly. I don't mind having the minority opinion on babies; I'm just asking why I deserve to get insulted by some perky irritainment anchor first thing in the morning. Sheesh.