OF A GOLDEN AGE

My dear friend and I discuss work holidays.

tycho: all my coworkers are being all butch and showmany and like “i’m not taking holidays”
tycho: “holidays are for wussies”
tycho: and I’m like, I’ll see you on tuesday
tycho: cheers!
me: Hahahaha
me: “holidays are for wussies”

And in the holiday spirit, the Frugal Vegan has a list of suggestions in lieu of money to give to homeless people, including easy-open nonperishable foods and hygiene items. It’s a lovely idea, especially as the weather grows bitterly cold here in Chicago.

The New York Times reported that Kim Peek died of a heart attack a week before Christmas. Peek was a savant of nigh unprecedented abilities and the inspiration for Raymond Babbitt in the movie Rain Man:

Mr. Peek had memorized so many Shakespearean plays and musical compositions and was such a stickler for accuracy, his father said, that they had to stop attending performances because he would stand up and correct the actors or the musicians.

“He’d stand up and say: ‘Wait a minute! The trombone is two notes off,’ ” Fran Peek said.

(This is, I think, how my friends imagine I feel when I see typos or grammar errors. They’re wrong, by the way.)

The article is a lovely tribute, and the contrasts in Peek’s mental state — brilliant in some ways, completely incapable in others — create moments of dark humor:

When Kim was 6, another doctor recommended a lobotomy. By then, however, Kim had read and memorized the first eight volumes of a set of family encyclopedias, his father said.

Rain Man is one of my family’s favorite movies, something from which we quote incessantly. Raymond — the character inspired by Peek — communicates almost entirely through nonverbals, and Tom Cruise’s character must learn to read between lines that aren’t present. He undergoes a now-classic Cruise transformation from crass to humbled, from uncaring to involved.

When the economy flounders and so many talented people find themselves out of work or underemployed, I think it can be tempting to lament that we aren’t all a certain way or haven’t followed a certain path. I love Kim Peek’s story because he spent most of his adult life giving presentations and making public appearances, helping to shore up the self-perceptions and confidence of other adults who faced challenging mental circumstances.

With great brain power comes great responsibility, usually at the sacrifice of some other part of one’s life or personality: our most beloved artists, scientists, and any of those who make important waves for humankind have discovered this firsthand.

Mindy Kaling, who executive produces, writes for, and Kelly Kapoor in The Office, has a sweet holiday feature in the New York Times. In it, she tells a stranger that she’ll be spending the holidays with a family she doesn’t have, a fictitious husband and children. Instead, she’ll be with her parents and her older brother:

Do I want to be the child in my current family, or the parent/wife/grown-up of some other one? The first seems real and comfortable. The second seemed like a silly bit of mischief, a game of pretend, even though I have a sense it might be just around the corner.

I hope my future family always feels like this. Like I got away with a little lie, but with accomplices. “Oh, this is just the cute boy I married and the crazy kids I have, can you believe it? I can’t.”

In my nerdy travels I’ve never read Jane Austen, although her books seep into our consciousness from nearly every angle, the most obvious being repeated and high-quality movie versions. My very favorite of these is Ang Lee’s adaptation of Sense and Sensibility starring Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet. Because wow. Unfortunately I hold a serious grudge against the Brontes that accidentally overflowed into Austen, and someday hope to get over it like a grownup and read at least one of her books.

The Jane Austen Book Club is a lovely book, classy and smart, full of interesting female characters. Author Karen Joy Fowler opens with a short description of the version of Austen each person in the book club hopes to read (a romantic? an independent spirit? a means by which to make sense?), and she peppers their conversations in the book with legitimate literary opinions. The most wonderful and largely unsung quality of this book is that its characters choose to read challenging literature in their spare time. They have jobs and other interests and decide that it is worthwhile to read Austen for fun.

Their reading group has six members, five women and one man, and the man is considered, not mocked, as an outsider both in a group of women and in the world of Austen. An unseen collective narrator makes asides about the man’s copy of Austen’s “collected novels,” and how it is, sniff, pedestrian. For anyone who’s ever known or been a book snob (FULL DISCLOSURE: GUILTY OF BOTH), this should be mildly embarrassing to see in print. And I imagine that’s the point. There is also a section in which the club attends a charity event where they’re seated with a contemporary writer, and the way Fowler contrasts the mystery writer with each club member’s attitude toward Austen, and books in general, really sings.

I wished the book was longer, which is a good sign. I also bent over the corners of half a dozen pages, another good sign.

One of the women, Sylvia, is recently divorced and has a 30-year-old daughter, Allegra. Her thoughts make up my favorite moment in the book:

Sylvia thought how all parents wanted an impossible life for their children — happy beginning, happy middle, happy ending. No plot of any kind. What uninteresting people would result if parents got their way. Allegra had always been plenty interesting enough. Time for her to be happy.

The other night, Nathan and I talked about the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, and why it succeeds — the characters are allowed to have unhappy beginnings, middles, or endings, and their stories breathe and flex. Fowler’s characters do the same, simultaneously having unhealthy relationships and judging other people’s, making poor decisions and commenting on those around them. I identified with their attitudes and warmed when those attitudes were challenged and reformed.

For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

Sometimes before work I get my act together early and decamp to Starbucks for a little bit of reading.

One day very recently I sat, reading Sue Grafton, admiring that morning’s musical choices in the shop. Some semifolky classical knockoff came on and I longed for Clair de Lune, one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written, lovely, at once plaintive and powerful, understated, filled with enormous life. It makes me think of winter, and light glinting off of water, and my grandfather, who always tuned the radio in his Mercury to the classical station. The abused old baby grand piano I made my parents keep when they moved to their new house, because how can you get rid of a piano?

I stood and put on my coat, and what piece came next? Clair de Lune, as I live and breathe. “Hokey smoke,” I said. People turned but I left, and strains of the piece rang in my head as I walked to work. As I turned the corner I looked up and saw a flock of geese passing overhead, standing still in the strong winter wind.

Isn’t a pilgrimage a beautiful concept? These geese make one every year and its significance is on par with any religion: They live because of it. We grouse about the weather, the inconvenience, our dead car batteries or freezing groceries. But what we can fix with extra layers and patience, the geese must fly thousands of miles to find.

Five finds in our work fridge when I cleaned it out today:
1. 9 expired yogurts, 2 cream cheeses, 1 cottage cheese
2. 1 very black banana
3. 5 kinds of mustard
4. 5 kinds of salad dressing
5. 6 sodas, each a different kind, five of them Pepsi products

Five synonyms for cool, from a sixth grader:
1. Okay
2. Frigid
3. Good
4. Cold
5. Fine

Sue Grafton makes me happy. She writes consistently readable mystery novels with an independent, believable heroine and an interesting cast of supporting characters, kind of a Murder She Wrote for the slightly younger set.

For the uninitiated (and, with millions of copies of each book sold, I guess there aren’t many), the star of Grafton’s series is Kinsey Millhone, a thirtysomething private investigator hitting the prime of her career in the mid to late 1980s. She’s low maintenance, low drama, and high energy, with few friends and a great deal of skepticism toward her fellow human. In each book, you learn a little more about Kinsey: her estranged family, occasional relationships, and reliable patterns of behavior.

In fact, Kinsey seems kind of clueless in the abstract: few attachments, no family commitments, and a solitary life as a P.I. She looks like Veronica Mars in twenty years, someone whose disappointment in other people is constantly reinforced by her duties investigating people whose most mild offense is adultery. But Kinsey isn’t this way, besides some garden-variety cynicism. She is intelligent and suspicious, but genuinely enjoys the company of many people she meets in her investigations and her few close friends.

So anyway.

Q is for Quarry begins with a cold case, a twenty-year-old murder of a teenage girl who was never identified. The Jane Doe case is real, and Grafton uses it as the jumping-off point for an elaborate series of connections between small-town families and past scandals. Many of the people she meets are townie ne’er-do-wells who pose no real threat, and Kinsey develops soft spots for certain individuals. She puts in dozens of hours of back and forth with people whose stories don’t add up, keeps meticulous notes as always, and tries to see everything from every angle.

The real highlight of this book isn’t Kinsey, nor the murder investigation. It’s Kinsey’s two colleagues, one a retired detective and the other an active lieutenant, who draw her into the cold case from the getgo. In many ways, Kinsey acts like an ornery old man, so when Grafton seals her up with them in a small town for a week, Kinsey has to step back and observe the differences. No, she is not all that ornery. And yes, she does miss having reliable male companionship in her life.

The two cops are also great characters: one a cancer patient selling off his possessions and planning for the worst; the other a drinking, chainsmoking junk-food addict with a history of heart problems. Kinsey hassles both for their terrible attitudes and behavior, and it’s clear she enjoys the opportunity to help as much as to lovingly needle.

Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

Obama heavyweight and hometown hero David Axelrod made a funny as a guest on George Stephanopoulos’s first episode of Good Morning America:

[Stephanopoulos] questioned Mr. Axelrod about the health care bill; the president’s plans to badger “fat cat” bankers about bonuses; and the economy. Mr. Axelrod presented him with an alarm clock permanently set to 3:30 a.m., a gift from, as he put it, “your friends in the White House.”

And apparently something’s rotten in the state of cohost rapport between Stephanopoulos and Robin Roberts:

After noting that surveys suggest that women view Mr. Woods less favorably than men do, the new anchor said dryly, “Well that’s a shocker, huh?”

Ms. Roberts, using a “Romper Room” tone that suggested that she didn’t realize he was kidding, replied, “We’re learning something new every day.”

With a name like Robin Roberts, I can see why this person may lack a sense of humor.

Five games I didn’t love at first:
1. Mario RPG
2. Street Fighter
3. Super Smash Melee
4. Sonic the Hedgehog
5. Chrono Trigger

After several hours of too-slow plot play and several months of bored hiatus, I returned to Chrono Trigger and it finally won my sustained attention. I still don’t love that there’s no separate battle screen (stupid Final Fantasy games, ruining me for everything else) but I do love the music, the graphics, and the entire conceit of the game.

This weekend I watched a sixth grader play this insane-looking game Nazi Zombies (no, really) and the graphics were so real it kind of made me sick — I don’t want to see some real character’s head get blown off, or some real character without legs dragging around on his elbows. It reinforced that I am an eight-bit girl when it comes to my favorite games, and I will play Super Nintendo games indefinitely. Nathan thinks it has the best games of any console to date, and I agree.

Five games I ended up not loving:
1. Super Smash Brawl
2. Final Fantasy VIII
3. Super Mario Galaxy
4. Final Fantasy X
5. Super Mario Bros 2

Five games I loved immediately:
1. Final Fantasy VI, VII, IX
2. Paper Mario 1, 2, 3
3. Super Mario Bros 1, 3, and World
4. Mario Kart Double Dash
5. Katamari Damacy

Reading Cary Tennis’s column Since You Asked makes me happy, always. He is fighting cancer right now and this lends additional pathos to his writing, but he is always provocative and thoughtful. A few years ago a reader asked for any advice Cary might have on dealing with a death in the close family and Cary began:

You know, considering all that our poets have said about death, I do not feel all that eloquent either. What small observations I might add are like little scraps of paper on a heap of gold.

I have long believed in little scraps of paper!