The world is a funny place, maybe the funniest.

So, I posted a link yesterday to that interview with Gary Shteyngart and I didn't consider myself to have ever have heard of him or anything. (That was quite the sentence, but stick with me.) Today I unfolded a note on my desk at work which was books I wanted to track down to take on my holidays (in other words, a note I made more than a week ago) (oh, and it's written in pink pen because I roll like a 14-year-old girl) that said:

Comeau - One Bloody Thing
Shteyngart - Absurdistan
B Lee O'Malley - Scott Pilgrim
Wendell Berry - Bringing It To The Table

That's so weird. That's weird, right? For an organ that supposedly loves patterns, my brain is sometimes super-bad at finding them.

I now remember going to the SHTEs in the stacks, pulling that book off the shelf, and thinking, I'm probably not going to have time to read this.

3 interviews, 1 incredible house, 1 link

I shall follow the structure described above.

i. Bill Murray @ GQ.

Okay. Well, how about Garfield? Can you explain that to me? Did you just do it for the dough?
No! I didn't make that for the dough! Well, not completely. I thought it would be kind of fun, because doing a voice is challenging, and I'd never done that. Plus, I looked at the script, and it said, "So-and-so and Joel Coen." And I thought: Christ, well, I love those Coens! They're funny. So I sorta read a few pages of it and thought, Yeah, I'd like to do that. I had these agents at the time, and I said, "What do they give you to do one of these things?" And they said, "Oh, they give you $50,000." So I said, "Okay, well, I don't even leave the fuckin' driveway for that kind of money."

And it's not like you're helping out an indie director by playing Garfield.
Exactly. He's in 3,000 newspapers every day; he's not hurtin'. Then this studio guy calls me up out of nowhere, and I had a nice conversation with him. No bullshit, no schmooze, none of that stuff. We just talked for a long time about the movie. And my agents called on Monday and said, "Well, they came back with another offer, and it was nowhere near $50,000." And I said, "That's more befitting of the work I expect to do!" So they went off and shot the movie, and I forgot all about it. Finally, I went out to L.A. to record my lines. And usually when you're looping a movie, if it takes two days, that's a lot. I don't know if I should even tell this story, because it's kind of mean. [beat] What the hell? It's interesting. So I worked all day and kept going, "That's the line? Well, I can't say that." And you sit there and go, What can I say that will make this funny? And make it make sense? And I worked. I was exhausted, soaked with sweat, and the lines got worse and worse. And I said, "Okay, you better show me the whole rest of the movie, so we can see what we're dealing with." So I sat down and watched the whole thing, and I kept saying, "Who the hell cut this thing? Who did this? What the fuck was Coen thinking?" And then they explained it to me: It wasn't written by that Joel Coen. 

ii. This is an oldie: director Nicole Holofcener @ truthdig. I just watched her film Please Give a few weeks ago and really liked it. She also directed Friends With Money which is one of my favourite movies.

Would you see these films as feminist or political?

Gosh, to me it just seems like I'm really self-involved. I write about what I go through, what my friends go through, what I find interesting, what movies I go see—isn't that sort of narcissistic?

Can you really be narcissistic and political at the same time?

iii. Novelist Gary Shteyngart @ the NY Times. Ok, I have never read any of this guy's books, but the trailer for the new one was funny enough to make me put it on hold at my library.

You were educated at Oberlin College.
I majored in myself, in Gary Studies. You’re allowed to do that.

On Freshome I loved this Fab Lab House:

It creates three times the energy it uses. It has incredible, fort-like interior spaces. Plus this particular picture made me grin like a dummy:

It has a plant-stoop!

Finally, 1 link: Know Your Meme. I read about this impromptu science fair to teach science to Insane Clown Posse fans on boingboing. And I didn't understand why that was funny. Know Your Meme to the rescue with F*cking Magnets, How Do They Work? This website can also explain to you about I Dunno LOL ¯\(°_o)/¯, You Have Died of Dysentery, and every other thing a digital immigrant (or n00b) might encounter in a forum.

I really want to develop a series of training sessions on memes for my staff meetings at work. It seems like as a "virtual services librarian" this is within my area of responsibility. It would be like, OK, adult services. Here's the deal with, like, that OK Go video where they're on treadmills. Here's what it means if someone painstakingly writes out "ROFLCOPTER" in ASCII text. And what is rickrolling? Hey, you hired me to explain the Internet! <3.

bus haiku

all these billboards for
american apparel
fill me with despair

3 more books, 1 more haiku

I'm on holidays. My book-reading project continues.

Monday - Overqualified by Joey Comeau. Comeau is the co-author of the webcomic A Softer World. And (as we Canadians love to write) he's Canadian! I was actually looking for his new book, One Bloody Thing After Another, but the Chapters website lied when it said it was in stock. But it's for the best, because I learned that One Bloody Thing is about zombies (or something?!?), which I am tired of; whereas Overqualified is about grief and ridiculous letters, which I NEVER grow tired of. This is a really funny book, and it's a bit sad in places, and it's nice and short. And he's Canadian.

Tuesday - Shoplifting From American Apparel by Tao Lin. This review from Bookslut sums up my feelings about this book pretty succinctly. Especially this part: "Even in this short and spare work, it is fatiguing to read the commoditized so-called underground undeservedly claiming elevation over mainstream consumer and work choices." This puts it more articulately than I ever could. It's short too, but if you're only going to read one of these two short, at-times-uncomfortable books, make it the first one. All the yuppy vegan food and meaninglessness in this one are exhausting.

Wednesday - Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr. I don't know why this book has taken me so long to finish (All Consuming says: 14 weeks. Thanks, online chronicle of my failure!). It's not that it's not good, otherwise I would have given up on it long ago; it's something else. It's just not the book for me. I think I've grown weary of beautiful, sparkling, supernatural boys. Their sparkliness gives me migraines.

sure i've read these books
but i've watched some tv too
like jurassic park

So, I'm on holidays this week, and I'm trying to finish a book a day. I don't expect to achieve this goal, because this is not one of those blogs where I make some kind of outrageous commitment to do something for a set period of time, then actually FOLLOW THROUGH, and blog about it in a consistently amusing yet thought-provoking way. This is the kind of blog where I write dumb haikus. [Not every day, though. I mean, I have other stuff to do.]

So anyway, here is what I've read so far:

Friday: Allegra Goodman's The Other Side of the Island. I liked this book-- it was spooky. It was suspenseful enough that while I was reading it I just wanted to find out what was going to happen, but now that it's done, I kind of wish I had savoured it more. Sometimes if you finish a book too fast you get that feeling -- like when you try to keep walking down a set of stairs that ends one step earlier than you expected, and there's something kind of jarring about it, the too-hard step onto the floor. This is as close as I can come to expressing how I feel about this book ending. This is Goodman's first YA novel, but she has written books for adults, and my library has them (which is good, because I can't afford to go on holidays every week, obviously).

Saturday: Maureen Johnson's The Key To The Golden Firebird. I love Maureen Johnson's books more than a 27-year-old should, really. I was crying at the end, and not just because I was tired from finishing a book in one day. This sad to say, though: I kind of like her twitter more.

Today: Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim Vol 1: Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life. It's awesome! It's as awesome as my comic-loving friends told me it would be! The only problem with this is that now I want to (a) read all the others and (b) go see the movie, but not before reading the other books, not all of which are out yet. Yeah. Problem! Oh yeah, I also kind of want to (c) be a really cool cartoon girl with a messenger bag and awesome hair.

I'm also reading bits and pieces of Wendell Berry's Bringing It To The Table, because it's long and I know I don't have a hope of actually finishing it all in one day. So he'll get a longer letter later, when I finish it. This is not cheating. This is being forward-thinking.

a book every day?
that seems pretty plausible
for a giant nerd

Sooo, what am I doing, both the empty Twitter and Facebook boxes are asking me?

a. Getting ready to go on holidays! This means, not that I am actually GOING anywhere, but that I am not going to work for at least six (6) consecutive days. And I am trying to pick out books to read. And some of these books are not in my library, so I am having to buy them from Chapters. I don't want to buy them. But I have to. Because of  holidays, you see?

b. Going to my garden. Except that it has been raining, like Noah-level raining, for days and days here so actually going outside is not fun, and when I tried it on Tuesday, I fell down my front stairs in my slippery flip-flops and ended up with these bright purple bumpy bruises on various parts of my body. It's like Edmonton was reminding me, Stay inside, or something even worse will happen. (This sounds funny, but actually it was terrible, because of the pain; and also, I'm well aware that limping around after claiming to have fallen down some stairs is basically a covert way to beg your co-workers to call social services. The fact that one of the bruises is the exact size of my porch railing is good evidence for the truth, though.) So instead I have been working my way through The Alberta Native Plants Council's Native Plants Source List and compiling my own garden wishlist and figuring out where I can get the plants on that list and where I should plant them. Surprisingly, my husband does not want to drive to Black Diamond, Alberta this weekend to pick up plants for me. I have no idea why. I thought he loved me.

c. Reading this essay from the New Yorker, Advanced Placement, about the Gossip Girl books, and it is kind of making me want to read them again, which is weird. I read the first six or seven books in the series and then grew kind of disgusted with myself and there were even a couple paperbacks I had bought (because I was not willing to wait for them to be returned to the library, shame on me) and I even donated those TO the library because I kind of didn't want the evidence of my compulsion to exist anymore. But now it seems like perhaps I was missing whole layers.

d. Thinking about fonts, because in addition to the Comic Sans shout-out I posted from McSweeney's a couple weeks ago, I recently encountered The Helvetica Killer, about Aktiv Grotesk, which (its designer hopes) could be the font to bring Helvetica down. (I know that on the Internet, this is equivalent to posting that you hate the iPhone or orphans or cute puppies, but I've never understood what all the fuss was about, Helvetica-wise.) And Papyrus Watch, which reports on Papyrus spottings in the wild. I used Papyrus once for some shirts I screenprinted (they read "I'll be in my bunk") and ever since then I see it EVERYWHERE. The hierarchy of fonts is complex, Internet. You never know who you might offend with your typeface. At this point, 30% of my original readers have jumped ship due to the verdana overload.

Man, seeing this blog entry you would think I was a total nerd, and you wouldn't know I'm actually, as Veronica Mars would say, 30% danger-loving girl-touching rock star.

However this does NOT count as my cake vs pie vote

Jocelyn: This pie is delicious.
James: I KNOW. It's the first rhubarb thing I've ever liked.
Jocelyn: Maybe we should learn to make pie.
James: I don't know, this pie was only $4. Maybe we should just buy a million of them and eat them for breakfast.

We find the Google search predictions sad and hilarious.

James: Oh, man. He acts like... a jerk. He acts like a child. He acts like a girl.
Jocelyn: Men are the worst.

Internet, futility of the

If we could somehow design the perfect iphone charging station and be done with it, the total volume of new content being developed for the Internet on a daily basis could be reduced by 30%.

Just a suggestion.

i can be a shark

I am really enjoying the photostream of flickr user Balokov. The shark image at right caught my eye today, but really they're all good. Legos! Living in the world!

I do love the Guardian's Digested Read.

Bret Easton Ellis' Imperial Bedrooms, digested:

"You're looking very thin Clay. I guess it didn't work out with Meghan," Blair says. I've no intention of ever explaining anything so I shrug in a cool sort of way and hope the critics will love the empty unreliability of my narration.

A TV Note

So, I (along with the rest of the world, it would seem) have been swept up by GLEE. The episode a few weeks ago with Neil Patrick Harris, and guest-directed by Joss Whedon, was amazing. Meanwhile, James and I borrowed the first season of Deadwood from some friends. I watched the first few episodes and I could not bring myself to keep watching. Like every HBO show, let's see, ever, it has good writing and amazing production values and real actors who are good at acting. But it's so bleak, and after a few episodes I felt like I had already absorbed all the crude language and women getting beaten up and men getting beaten up that I needed to see, and now James watches it alone.

And this article from NPR explains exactly why: More Misery! More Death! More Cruelty! I felt like I was sort of vindicated in my desire to watch some photogenic, stereotypical people dancing rather than, I don't know, children becoming orphans or people dying of STDs. This is the Glee/Deadwood paradox. You can only watch one or the other. I have chosen Glee, and James has chosen Deadwood. Within a year, we'll probably be divorced. And I will still kind of feel like I need to apologize for liking something so cheery.

Art and correspondence

I loved this letter from William Steig about his fear of public speaking. The entry on Letters of Note also includes the text of the speech he ended up delivering when he won the Caldecott.

I love this in particular:

Art, including juvenile literature, has the power to make any spot on earth the living center of the universe, and unlike science, which often gives us the illusion of understanding things we really do not understand, it helps us to know life in a way that still keeps before us the mystery of things. It enhances the sense of wonder. And wonder is respect for life. Art also stimulates the adventurousness and the playfulness that keep us moving in a lively way and that lead us to useful discovery.

Is it true that you support the escalation of formality in everyday life?

Absolutely.

So is the trend toward casualness an unfortunate event?

Yes, I would say. It makes me unhappy. To some extent, it's on purpose, so I don't know if I would call it unfortunate in the sense of unlucky. There's a casual agenda, and I think it's winning. The pros of formality are forethought put into word and action, spiffier clothing and fetishization of everyday occurrences.

-Daniel Handler (author of the Lemony Snicket books), in The Sunday Conversation interview

I just want to make out with the Internet, or at least take it out for coffee.

Couch Cushion Architecture: A Critical Analysis on the Build blog.

Benefiting from the life work of structural engineer Heinz Isler, this lightweight roof shell structure creates a graceful span while fully sheltering the interiors. Massive counter-weights keep the structure taught while an entire façade remains open to the exterior. 

From McSweeney's: I'm Comic Sans, Asshole.

You think I'm pedestrian and tacky? Guess the fuck what, Picasso. We don't all have seventy-three weights of stick-up-my-ass Helvetica sitting on our seventeen-inch MacBook Pros. Sorry the entire world can't all be done in stark Eurotrash Swiss type. Sorry some people like to have fun. Sorry I'm standing in the way of your minimalist Bauhaus-esque fascist snoozefest. Maybe sometime you should take off your black turtleneck, stop compulsively adjusting your Tumblr theme, and lighten the fuck up for once. 

From The Atlantic: Rent a White Guy. Totally surreal.

An interesting project: an eighteeen-year-old high school student tries to live according to Seventeen magazine at The Seventeen Magazine Project. Again, totally surreal.

And one more new blog, more of the crafty/DIY variety: The Art of Doing Stuff. This woman, seemingly, can do anything good.

In Jocelyn-world, I finally updated Dispatches from Zone 3a after only one month's absence. I mean, I can garden or I can blog about gardening. It's pretty easy to figure out which I am going to do.

LINKS FROM THE INTERNET

I dip in and out of rss feeds all day at work, most of them (well, ok, some of them) related -- at least tangentially -- to my job. Today I did a Bloglines audit and added some new ones, including these five: 

1000 awesome things
the hypothetical library
information is beautiful
daily interesting photos
letters of note

in a new folder called "good for my brain." I'm not sure how you determine whether something is good for your brain. I'm looking for the answer. I feel like my neurons are not as sparkly as they once were. DO YOU THINK THE INTERNET CAN HELP?

I like adding new blogs I discover to my rss reader and trying them out for a few weeks. The best test of whether I am ACTUALLY interested in a blog's content is whether I stop to read it when it publishes a few items among hundreds. I'm prioritizing without intending to, which is kind of the point. For example, I subscribe to both MeFi and Slashdot but I very rarely read them. (However, they survived this audit, maybe because I don't want to compromise my nerd cred.) Other new additions on this round:

The Bygone Bureau
Lapham's Quarterly
Cheap Healthy Good
Tiger Beatdown (proving that a pithy title will get you at least one feed subscriber)
Toothpaste for Dinner

I declare June to be "rss audit month." Also "Eating the weird leftover food in your freezer month." Party ever-harder.

See, I have done your work for you.

5 academic papers someone should write about the Muppets

"Animal" instincts: the politics of implied rape
The disapproving patriot: Sam Eagle as patriarch
Meta/text Puppet/eer: Cinema, body and narrative through the postmodern lens
Diva or chicken: the Muppets and the troubled state of female agency
"Working's for another day": Fraggle Rock in the shadows of the American Dream

May I suggest you buy this?

Sexy Librarian Glasses Showcase

Recently I decided I wanted a necklace with a pair of librarian glasses on it. That might seem like a fairly specific thing to want, but the assortment of such necklaces on Etsy suggests that I am not the only one.

l to r:
Mini Maude Necklace | $26 from Isette
Sexy Nerdy Pink Glasses Necklace | $6 from Michelle's Charm World
Studious Slate Necklace | $32 from How Fetching
I Heart Glasses Kitschy Necklace | $24 from SparklePeach
Flirty Nerdy Glasses | $12 from Saritas Jewelry Box

I bought the pink one, partly because it was pink and partly because it was only $6 and partly because the same shop had an awesome lego octopus necklace for sale which I also happened to be looking for. But they're all lovely, and so literary.

PS.

I feel guilty.

Two recent additions to the lexicon

Here are two things that I have recently begun saying.

I. "Oh, come on, Bible!" On 30 Rock, Liz Lemon is delivering a reading (the standard one from Corinthians) at Floyd's wedding. She has been forced to "stall" by Jack so she starts leafing through the Bible randomly looking for passages to read, and she keeps encountering ones about spilling seed on the ground, and things like that. She gets all annoyed and is like, "Oh, come on, Bible! Help a lady out!" "Oh, come on, Bible!" has become a standard indication of irritation for me, perfect for when nothing seems to be going right.

II. "I can do anything good." Embedded below is my favourite Internet video, maybe of all time. I quote a lot of things from it, including making disjointed but enthusiastic lists of things I like (which vary from one moment to the next but usually include, "I like my husband. I like my dog. I like my garden. I like my Glee DVDs. I like my coffee.") But "I can do anything good" is my favourite. I think this little girl probably means "I can do anything well," ie., I can do a good job of anything; but I prefer the actual meaning, which is that there are good things around, and I can do all of them. I also like going, "yeah. yeah. yeah. yeah" while doing a jumpy little dance. Oh man, I need to watch it again right now.