HMMM…PUT A FORK IN SALON. I’m a little slow on the uptake, I guess, but as of last week, one of my former fave internet-only reads looks doomed. (I stopped reading last month, when it started charging for all content.) Too bad. Salon was my Monday stop for the fresh Tom Tomorrow cartoon, and had good articles from Cintra Wilson, Joe Conason, Arianna Huffington, and many others. R.I.P.
I READ A LOT. That fact gets both the credit and the blame for who I am, why I am what I am, the whole vegan burrito. And last year, 2002, the year of a spectacular breakup with Ms. X and a more spectacular reunion with old flame Trina, I read everything. Novels (lots and lots), the Times, the New Yorker, Adbusters, graphic novels, Slate, Salon, books of essays–whoo! And remember, as a lawyer, I push words around for a living. My whole world is ink and paper. [quick clarification: toner counts as ink. –mww]
I’ve been telling myself that I owe it to my blog constituency (both of you) to give some recommendations, a personal top-10 list, or something. But then I realized that impulse was just a rationalization that would let me tell the world about the best book I read last year: Where Rivers Change Directions, by Mark Spragg. This set of autobiographical essays, mostly about Spragg’s cowboy boyhood in Wyoming, is one of the best pieces of writing I have ever read. Period. That may not be much of a recommendation in this day and age, but I’m fairly well-read considering the general Philistinism of my generation. Then this month I read Spragg’s first novel, The Fruit of Stone, and the story broke my heart. I finished it near midnight, and lay in dim light listening to my lover’s quiet breathing and wondered if I would have the spirit to wake up the next morning. Am I communicating here? These books left me wanting to walk up to people on the street and shake them, not just to tell them to read these books, but to tell them to read these books to know what it is to be living.
I CROSSED THE STREET IN FRONT OF A HUMMER H2 yesterday. I peered up and over the hood at the Pilates-toned yupster driving it, dressed for opera, and I found myself in a morbid daydream of spitting on its windshield, kicking dents into its fenders, jumping up and down on its thick steel hood.
The EPA’s annual vehicle ratings are out. They speak for themselves. It should surprise no one that the highest-rated SUV is Honda’s Romanian-looking Element, and that there is a big knot at the bottom of SUVs tied for the lowest rating.
Item: Nissan plans to introduce a full-size SUV called the Titan.
Item: Toyota plans to introduce a full-size SUV called the Armada.