Today it’s raining off an on, but the best part is/was … thunder. I’m glad I shut my windows last night before I went to bed.
Music: More Pearl Jam. You know, I’m really only familiar with their overplayed, super-famous songs from Ten. The B-sides, the other albums? Mostly it’s good stuff, but this is a talented band, so it’s worth listening to the rest. Thereafter I’ll have the Pet Shop Boys and a little Peter Gabriel.
Sports: As I write this Ohio State is playing Georgetown on channel 3 … Final Four basketball. The West Virginia men won the NIT tournament, but their championship shirts/jerseys contained a typo: West Virgina. With the wrong accent it just sounds … really wrong.
Books: Last night, after returning from La Hacienda and then the hookah-slash-karaoke bar with Kris and Bre (we left Claire, Jack, Lynn, and Giddeon behind) I crawled in bed but decided to read more of The Secret History, and in the end I just read it to the end. The result was that I didn’t wake up until noon or later today, but it was worth it. I guess I’ve read my share of novels so far this year … that makes me happy, though perhaps my dissertation work has suffered in the process. This particular novel was good, but not as gripping as I’d hoped, perhaps, as my friend Amy said, because we dislike the characters so much. I’m used to liking dislikable characters in novels, and I despises “reviews” that bash books because the “reviewer” could not identify with a character (especially the narrator and/or protagonist), but here my complain about Richard is that he remained a stupid f**k. The novel is “told” about 8 years, it seems, after the events narrated, and in that time, in Richard’s narrative, that is, there is no sign or growth. He started shallow and remained that way. There are hints at something more along the way, realizing when he is drunk, for example, that his not-so-elitist colleagues who aren’t part of the his group of friends aren’t really that bad after all, and he ends up in a long-term relationship with one such “normal” person. But in the end they break it off, or rather she does, which is important, for Richard still sees her (Sophie) as a great friend, but what we realize is that Richard, like Henry, is a borderline sociopath. They manipulate but they do not empathize or truly feel.
The novel is masterfully told, and if you have not read it but would like a well-told not-too-genre-fiction oriented novel about events with/about a bunch of rich pricks at a private college in Vermont, I highly recommend it. I picked it up because I’d read somewhere, by a naively superficial reviewer it seems, that there were similarities between this and the amazingly entertaining Special Topics in Calamity Physics, and it stands well enough on its own, but it’s a different type of book entirely.
TV: Battlestar Galactica and Stargate Atlantis (for me) are finished for the season / year … but I still have SG1 to look forward to. Evidently it’s already aired over on Sky or a similar British channel, so I’m slowly getting hold of the episodes. I also have Dexter. I watched the first episode the other night — over the holidays I saw one episode with Mike and Sherie, mid-season — and I can imagine getting hooked on it. It’s well-acted and well-written, and it presents an interesting, self-reflecting sociopath as a protagonist.
Last Night: La Hacienda and burritos and margaritas followed by a hookah lounge and karaoke bar next to a trailer park overlooking the Beltline between Park and John Nolan … it was a bit country, a bit swank, a bit working class. Either it’s not part of Madison proper or it somehow has a cigar-bar exemption of some sort, for in addition to the hookahs there was plenty of regular cigarette smoke to be had in the air. The pomegranate martini? Yum.
