Happy New Year’s Eve!

Nattering / By /

This seems an inauspicious post to make as the first of a new year, but ha! I’ve decided that TODAY is our New Year’s Eve, since I felt entirely too crappy yesterday to celebrate. So that means it’s technically not the first post of aught-six, now doesn’t it?

Yes, I finally gave in and went to the doctor — not girl or boy, fish or fowl, martian death cold or the beginnings of bird flu but SINUS INFECTION, it turns out. At least I got antibiotics and loopy-making pills that seem to be helping. Of course, on the not so pleasant side effect tip is that Christopher’s picking up the original cold that started all this. It’s a vicious, as they say, cyclotron. But. We’re getting dressed up in our pajamas for a New Year’s party here in a bit (where we will be the only hangover-free people, likely, natch — this postponement celebration thing has many benefits), where we will eat, drink and be merry.

And my head WILL clear enough to get some writing done, because it has to. There’s always tomorrow. Which will be the first official day of the new year according to the Shaken & Stirred calendar. Got it?

In like a lion.

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Friday Hangovers

1 Comment / Hangovers / By /

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Thursday Hangovers

3 Comments / Hangovers / By /

Otherwise known as the ritual cleansing of the bookmarks…

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Siesta

Excuses, Excuses / By /

Since the thing to do seems to be to stay very, very quiet, don’t expect much here until next week. Yesterday, I crashed and burned after the 700-mile neverending odyssey that was Christmas (thanks for the Magnum), managing only to accomplish lunch with a friend and the pending tweaks to GG (word to the wise: make sure you haven’t inadvertently skipped a chapter, like say eighteen, in numbering). Today the Magnum goes back to its Rental Home and I get my car back, and hopefully a new stereo installed. I have a terrible cold again, or perhaps it’s just exhaustion.

My to-do list is just the right length for a long holiday weekend: getting a massage (a present even!), mailing some stuff, finishing up interviews for and writing a freelance piece, writing up my notes on a friend’s most excellent novel, revisiting my Roanoke research and revising a short story. Oh, and somewhere in there drink champagne and resolve stuff. And see Syriana.

I may break in with an RIP for the Magnum and a list of things that made me happy this year. Then again, I may not. Either way, I wish you an enjoyable last few days of the year and a better next one.

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Mockbee, I Love Thee

Science Project / By /

Fred Bernstein visits Alabama to look at some amazing buildings:

Music Man’s house, with colorful glass embedded in concrete floors and shelves that move on skateboard wheels, is one of about 40 buildings conceived and built by the Rural Studio, an ever-changing troupe of architecture students who bring their tools, tenacity and talent to impoverished western Alabama. The 13-year-old program, under the auspices of Auburn University, is sometimes called the "redneck Taliesin."

Like Frank Lloyd Wright, the master of Taliesin, Samuel Mockbee, the Rural Studio’s founder, was a larger-than-life figure. Born in Mississippi, Mr. Mockbee established the Rural Studio in dirt-poor Hale County, Ala., a place where trailers teetering on cinderblocks and disintegrating barns were two of the most common building types.

I highly recommend the amazing photo chronicle of some of the project’s best work, Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency.

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Found in Translation

1 Comment / Books / By /

Grossman vs Montero in the WaPo:

Grossman : That’s true. It’s like music. You can tell who the composer is after a bar or two because of particular stylistic characteristics. I read a paragraph or two of a writer, and I know exactly who I’m reading. Just as you would never hear Miles Davis and think he was Dizzy Gillespie, or that Mozart was Ives, it would be hard to mistake your writing for, say, Mario Vargas Llosa’s.

Montero : You know that musicians as well as authors are always looking for their own language. But it’s more than the language. It’s something to do with ethics and aesthetics.

Amazing conversation between these two. Do read the whole thing.

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Monday Hangovers

Hangovers / By /

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Hannibal Goes Bad

Books / By /

The WaPo has a story about the rising crime rate in Mark Twain’s home town:

Apart from some murder and grave-robbing in "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," Mark Twain immortalized his home town of Hannibal as a sleepy place where life rolls by as slowly as a barge going down the Mississippi. But that’s pure fiction nowadays.

Drugs and a lack of jobs have brought a boom in armed robbery and theft to this community of 18,000 that calls itself "America’s Hometown."

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Flatline

Excuses, Excuses / By /

Yes, we’ve been sucked into the holiday vortex. It looks as if it’s a 72-hour journey to the other side this year, so see you late Monday. Much must be eaten to avoid getting trapped forever. (And the holiday bitchiness continues to grow at an alarming rate…)

Anyway, those at the right are less lame than me, so check them out in the meanwhile. Also, Jeff VanderMeer has put up a "kind of" holiday tale from the Secret Life, for your reading pleasure.

Last but not least, drop Mr. Rowe a holiday line or comment on his practically nonexistent birthday (aka TODAY), at CVROWEATGMAILDOTCOM or on any random entry over here. Sadly, he’s still computerless so he may not respond right away, but he’s sharing mine and frequenting the library so it won’t be too long. And how lame is it that he gets no real birthday? Very, very.

And hey, hope you got some loot. You deserve it.

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