Can’t take any more coverage of the Memorial Service, and the media’s breakdown of their coverage of the event itself. So, I turn to Jon Stewart for solace. I’m a bit behind, but I found this clip from one of last week’s shows that I thought was particularly refreshing regarding B. Madoff’s newest prison ponzi scheme:

I’m being rocked at about 93% power by Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Rocked enough to write a mid-day, mid-book endorsement: Read it. The voices in this book are crystalline and entertaining enough that breezing through 50, 75, 100 pages at a time is easy and enlightening. Not sure why I put this one off for so long, but I nearly missed my stop on the train on my way back from My Big Day In The Big City last night. MBDITBC was fun…

Things I may need to look into:

1. An iPhone or the like. MBDITBC proved to be a humbling technological experience, as my beaten-up flippity phone (on which I text at a blazing one character per three # hits) felt tiny and inadequate. Still, I’m not sold on whether or not I have it in me to be that guy. The day job seems to demand it. My personality rejects it. The battle rages on.
2. Getting a new bike. The ol’ Death Bike, that got me through ‘97-’00 in The City, and that saved my life on more than a few close encounters with CTA buses and cabs, is on its last, sad wheels. If I were so motivated, I’d fix it up. But it needs a surgeon, and I’m but a mere specialist.
3. Wall shelving. You know those wall-mounted, long shelving units that kind of make your books look like they’re suspended? Sort of mod-looking and whatnot? I’d like those. Only for cheap. Thoughts? Suggestions?
4. Getting outside more. Enough of this list. I grow tiresome of it…

1. I’ll watch NASCAR and drink a glass of red wine while doing so. Further, I will ask you to leave if you are pulling for Kyle Busch…

2. I’ll watch an entire dubbed movie on Telemundo or Univision. Recent favorites include: Predator, Aurora Encounter (this film is bizarre/creepy in any language), Delta Force, and Roll Bounce. I don’t speak Spanish…

3. When I watch Deadliest Catch, I feel as though I can taste the crab legs every time they show those guys chucking them into the tanks. I think about how I could never work on those ships, simply because I would haul in a pot, grab one of the Alaskan Kings and take it into the galley and prepare it in a huge pot with a few Stroh’s…

4. I find Charlie Rose one of the most exciting men in television…

5. I haven’t laughed out loud during a Simpsons episode in years, but must watch it because it’s like a security blanket to me…

6. I was utterly inconsolable when, after having tuned in for all of VH1’s Top 100 Songs of the ’80s, I learned that Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” lost to Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer”. It just couldn’t be so. As a child of the ’80s, I recall vividly being rocked at least 75% harder by every track on Hysteria over Slippery When Wet. Granted, both rocked. But Pour Some Sugar on Me was the moneyshot of moneyshots at all of our junior high dances. It was the rockinest song of the ’80s hands-down. It’s not that Bon Jovi wasn’t up there, because they were, no question. Simply that Pour Some Sugar on Me is the quintessential ’80s rock song, as it’s so obviously about that which was on all of our minds at the time–being drenched with granulated sugar, of course. Living on a Prayer is like a story about people and stuff. Who cares, you know? I don’t know. It just really bothered me that I tuned in, stuck with it for every hour-long installment or whatever they were, only for all of my illusions to be so utterly dissed…

7. I’ve lost interest in this list now…

Yesterday came/went. I honestly wasn’t attuned to the Anniversary until I came home from teaching @ about 10-ish and navigated to MSNBC, which was “minimally edited coverage from 9-11.” This amounted to a real-time replay of “live” coverage from the past. Like a time capsule from hell, we will always have the 24-hour coverage from that day, complete with Matt Lauer’s play-by-play as the buildings come down. It made me feel skeevy, so I turned it off and lay in the dark and thought about that day…

Iowa City, IA –hell and gone from the East Coast. So much so that my freshman students at the time, god love them, still showed up to class and said things like, “Did you see those fuckin’ buildings come down? They were like whoooooosh!” I had to remind myself they were the Columbine generation–relatively unmoved by Events, unless they were of the variety that were Unfolding around them. Otherwise, isn’t there something else on TV? A graduate colleague who wouldn’t cancel class because, she claimed, “You don’t stop academia for mass hysteria.” In Steve Marlowe’s apt., drinking with friends and breaking it down. Earlier that day, I had a seminar with Jim McPherson–one of the most brilliant men in American letters. The room was packed with Workshop people who  wanted to hear his sermon. The focus of the seminar was Humor in Literature (or something to that effect). I remember passing around his cans of smoked almonds and cashews, and listening to him tell us, “Your generation now has a metaphor. We had Kennedy. You have this. I don’t know what to make of it. That’ll be your job.” The torch was passed, and we gathered together over drinks and talked…