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I haven’t had a day off since… I’m not sure, exactly. Today turned out to be one! But only just.
The schedule at the PO didn’t have my name on it, I finished the second of my latest articles last night, and I had no church related obligations today, so I was looking forward to a day to start working on my only resolution.
I was not so deep into a book called Disturbances in the Field when my cell phone rang. It was almost noon and only now was the government calling? I let it go to voice mail. Then the house phone rang and again I let voicemail get it.
Resolving to neglect those messages, I kept on reading until I came to the end of a chapter and needed a bathroom break. I checked the voicemails when I got back to my desk. The supervisor left a message in each mailbox saying only that she wanted me to call back.
“Harrumph!” I said and thought to myself, “I’m not calling back!” as I picked up the phone and called back.
“Nevermind,” she said. Did I mention I was still in my pajamas at this time?
What happened was that the carrier on R5, Jim Regular, called and said he had become sick while on the route. As opposed to me who is just sick of the route. He wanted to know if I could be called in to take over.
The supervisor performed a miraculous healing over the phone. She did this by telling him that if I were to be called in, I would get paid for the full day of work on R5 and that he would lose a sick day.
So I’m still sitting at home, though no longer in my pajamas. And as soon as I finish typing this post, I plan to re-engage the words of Lynne Sharon Schwartz.
I’m listening via the touch to an NPR feature on a book called The Shack, which is the number 12 book on amazon at this moment. It’s distributed via the author’s brother’s garage… no kidding.
I’d never heard of it. The author says it’s a book for everybody, but it’s also a book about God.
I think I’m gonna read this one, for sure.
Iv been thnkng l8ly about composing a novel out of txt msgs. Hwvr, I’m mor than 1 yr 2 l8. C?
that don’t read anymore, it’s middle aged mailmen too.
I started and finished a book, 1 book, on my roadtrip. I also began a second one, this one. I haven’t finished it yet!!!
Makes me sad.
Look,
in your hand…
It’s not a book, but an incredible simulation.
It’s ugly. Uglier than a Honda Element even!
It’s a Zune you can read!
It’s the Kindle from Amazon. And it’s only $400! Everyone is gonna want one!
Except me.
My feelings are more along the lines of those expressed by differentmike in an incisive and witty comment on Newsweek’s fawning cover story,
Buried on page 4 (after which I stopped reading): “due to restrictive antipiracy software, you can’t lend them out or resell them”. Or back them up. Or move them to a different device. Or support an ecosystem of accessibility/utility tools. Or allow fair use rights. Honestly, ebook vendors make the RIAA look like a model of enlightened self-interest by comparison.
Thanks for playing; don’t call us, we won’t call you. Next!
Read the book by Steve Martin but skip the movie.
The movie isn’t bad. It’s beautifully shot. Director Anand Tucker gives us a picture of LA that is equaled only by fellow brit Mick Jackson‘s portrait of the City of Angels in the previous Steve Martin vechicle, LA Story. That earlier film, however, is a much better investment of your entertainment dollars and minutes.
Shopgirl the book is a scream! It made me shoot coffee out my nose in a Fort Worth coffeehouse, while also probing the various types of loneliness in which the major characters live. I expected the movie to be as funny as well as touching, but the screen adaptation, also written by Martin, magnifies all the somber notes of the story (of which there are many) while deemphasizing the hilarity.
It’s too bad. The book is one of my favorites. Steve Martin is an incredibly gifted and multi-talented artist. It’s always fun to see what kind of things he’ll explore next. This time though, it only made me want to revisit his previous work.
Shopgirl the book was published in 2000. The movie came out in 2005 and stars Claire Danes and Jason Schwartzman, as well as Martin.
Read the book. See the movie if you must. Also highly recommended is Martin’s later book, The Pleasure of My Company… which I’m hoping somebody will film.
Perhaps you recall that I was reading Cross Country by Robert Sullivan. It took me over three weeks to get through the book, much longer than it did for Sullivan and family to make the trip he describes. This wasn’t because the book was bad, but because the post office kept interrupting my reading days.
I was going to write a full fledged review but I think I’ll just link to this one by Bruce Barcott, and this one by Finn-Olaf Jones instead. Both reviews come from the New York Times and may require you to set up a free account to read them.
Barcott liked the book, Jones did not. Says the former:
One of the great pleasures of “Cross Country” comes in watching Sullivan go through the various stages of the road trip, from irrational exuberance on Day 1 to face-slapping desperation in the late hours of Day 5. He’s a sweet, old-fashioned father and husband. In an age of OnStar and G.P.S. units, he travels with TripTik maps from AAA. There are no iPods or DVD players for the kids; they make do with the radio and magazines. Sullivan possesses enough self-awareness to make fun of himself when, for instance, he asks, “Hey, who wants to read from the Lewis and Clark journals this time?
But Jones quibbles:
the six-day drive stretches into 372 pages of mind-numbing logistics: a troublesome roof pack is installed, adjusted and readjusted ad nauseam; “enough coffee to drown an elephant” is described cup by cup; a quest for the next Holiday Inn Express seems to take longer than Lewis and Clark’s crossing of the Bitterroot Mountains.
There are moments of brilliance along the way. But the verbose text, like the notes that pioneers deposited along old Western wagon trails, encourages the reader to take shortcuts. Too bad Mr. Sullivan or an editor didn’t take them first.
Me? I think both are right. The book could easily have been shortened by a third and been a better work. But though Cross Country is a long journey, it offers more than its share of rewards, like this passage from the early pages:
“The America that I see, is an America that tells you to keep moving, to move on to something better, to get on the road and keep going, to stop only briefly to refuel your car and yourself but then to keep pushing toward the place that is closer to where you should be, or could be, if only you would keep going. America says move, move on, don’t sit still. . . . In other words, America is the road.”
Which is a thought that kept rattling around in my own head when I made a very nearly cross country road trip last September.
I liked Cross Country enough that I mooched another of Sullivan’s books, which just arrived in the mail today. It is the intriguingly titled, How Not to Get Rich: Or Why Being Bad Off Isn’t So Bad.
I’ll be sure to let you know how this one goes, once I get to it.
A word of caution: If you haven’t read the book, then be most careful reading the articles I’ve linked to in this post. Semi-spoilers abound.
No, not that pirates movie, this one. No Country For Old Men may take place in the deep southwest, miles away from the sea, but it is about pirates alright.
The Coen brothers have made the film with the Palme d’Or buzz this year, based on Cormac McCarthy‘s book. It stars Tommy Lee Jones (looking a bit like McCarthy himself as he stands in front of God’s own distance in clip #4 at this page) as the titular old man, a sheriff who runs here and there just missing the most ruthless, heartless, stone cold killer ever drafted by an American author. His name is Anton Chigurh (sounds like sugar) and you’d better pray he’s not after you. Chigurh is in search of some money that an inadvertent pirate named Llewellyn has taken.
You’ll be rooting for Lew throughout, I’m sure. Just like I was while reading the book.
This movie will not be for you if you’re looking for a non-violent, feel good movie where the guy gets the girl. Well, one of these guys will get a girl but…
The shame is that we’ll have to wait until November* to see it. What do you know, I may just have to go to the movies this year.
*this particular blog entry says “No Country” was not one of McCarthy’s better works. Well, I’ve read all but two of them and this one rocked me to the core. I read it in one day, almost in one sitting. I still think about the three main charaters sometimes, they come unbidden into my mind, like ghosts. And I for one cannot think of a better place for this material to wind up than in the hands of the Coens (though perhaps I should wait to see the film before being too certain).
Charles Bukowski worked for the postal service before he became a novelist. His first novel was called Post Office, and I just finished reading it.
It is one vulgar book, let me tell you. It’s also very good. Bukowski gets the tone of the postal worker exactly right. The book needs to have an edgy (radical understatement right there) tone. If anything, Bukowski moderated some of the coarseness of the language.
I read the book for two reasons. First, a former blogger known only as Beekman recommended it shortly after I started working for the USPS. Secondly, because I’m planning on writing a collection of essays about working at the PO. The stories are just too good. I have been told repeatedly that I need to write some of this stuff down, so I’m going to do that.
If you can stomach the language and the very adult content, I would heartily recommend Post Office. Bukowski achieves moments of dark humor and even pathos, often following close on each others’ heels. It’s quite a piece of work, especially when you consider that it was his first novel.
Don’t bother with the Wikipedia entry for him, it’s convoluted and confusing. If you wish to learn more about Bukowski, check out this site instead, or this page.
By the way, I listed Post Office in my inventory on bookmooch about five minutes after I finished it. I received a request for it (in other words, it got mooched) before I could finish typing the listing!
I’ve been enjoying Bookmooch, which I joined some time ago. Some of you other book geeks really ought to check it out.
I only put a few books up at first but the couple of mooches I’ve engaged in so far seem to have worked okay, so I listed a few more the other night.
Within minutes of my last listing jag, a book that I had just bought and read got mooched. The day after I sent that book, the same user asked if she could mooch another one. I just sent that one today and was intrigued by this user. She has a ton of books (629, at this writing) listed and has done a lot of trades both ways.
I noticed she had a blogspot blog (but we won’t hold that against her, will we?), with a very intriguing title: Mission 101: Read 101 books in 1001 days. The top post at goldiebear’s blog is dated May 11, 2009 and is a list of the books she will have completed by then. I was doubly intrigued that she seems to have preselected the books she wants to read… though I haven’t perused the blog too throroughly yet, so this may not be the case.
Anyway, I’ve blogrolled GB because I want to see what kind of progess she makes. I may even try to keep pace with her, using different books, of course, since apparently all of mine are soon going to be hers 😉
So, fellow reading nerds, I commend both goldiebear and her quest as well as bookmooch to you.
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