It’s Not Happening

Obscure joke? Identity theft? Troubling misunderstanding? I received my first issue of Cookie magazine today, with Liv Tyler gaping vapidly at me from the cover while “her” “kid” “plays” with one of those wooden German puzzle-piece train sets so popular with our people. Wait, our people? Shit.

I also got the first issue from my new McSweeney’s subscription, and I hope and wish and want to believe it’s all a work by those mad geniuses – but if it is, it’s absolutely perfect down to the ads and tip-ins. So it’s not.

So now is the time to explain who did this to me and why. It is also the time to take this off my hands. If you think you can stand a magazine that offers both “LIV TYLER on the simple pleasures of family time” and “54 WAYS TO BE THE PERFECT DAD,” I won’t judge you. Not judging is a new thing I’m trying.

It’s time for the next round of cold fusion! A Japanese gent named Yoshiaki Arata, emeritus professor of physics at Osaka University, claimed to demonstrate it just a few days ago. I have no horse in this race – though I do think that people are spooked by the words “cold fusion” because of the previous failure, and there doesn’t seem to be any good reason to dismiss it this time, or any time, really, unless it can be shown to be impossible like perpetual motion. The comments are well worth reading if you are patient and seeking amusement. Skim when it’s time to skim, but wow, nerds can be awesome. Okay, here’s my favorite:

khurshid ahmed May 25, 2008 7:32 PM

In the name Allah the most gracious and ever merciful.

I have deep faith in cold fusion.

Joke? Bizarre misunderstanding of faith? Freakishly ineffective hate crime? Who knows?

I went to see the man Saturday night with Junior and her dude and we went to Tinkle Camp in our pants. I’ve tried and largely failed to describe him before, but America’s Husband offered this concise appraisal: “He’s the hip-hop Soderbergh.” Good, brief, but a little incomplete. Still, better than I can do.

He told us a story about cough syrup, in the second person I believe, and rapped about words (and the objectification of women, and the objectification of object, and, well, lots of stuff, really). His loop machines offered brilliant accompaniment, and while there was no super-hot, mind-blowing dancer to pull on-stage this time, he still tore the plance down. Always see Reggie Watts.

So some effete snob decides to devise and share a list of 1001 books we must all read before dying, which suggests that s/he thinks most Americans will live for more than 1,000 years. Still, this is the sort of exercise that pleases my inner librarian, so in the interests of full disclosure, I’ll post those I have read:

• Pastoralia – George Saunders
• Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
• Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
• Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
• The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
• Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
• The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
• Perfume – Patrick Süskind
• White Noise – Don DeLillo
• Queer – William Burroughs
• Neuromancer – William Gibson
• Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
• The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
• Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
• High Rise – J.G. Ballard
• Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
• Crash – J.G. Ballard
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
• The Wild Boys – William Burroughs
• The Atrocity Exhibition – J.G. Ballard
• Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
• The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles
• The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe
• The Third Policeman – Flann O’Brien
• The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
• God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – Kurt Vonnegut
• Sometimes a Great Notion – Ken Kesey
• Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
• The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
• A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
• The Drowned World – J.G. Ballard
• Labyrinths – Jorge Luis Borges
• Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
• Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
• Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
• Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
• On the Road – Jack Kerouac
• The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
• Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
• Lord of the Flies – William Golding
• Junkie – William Burroughs
• Casino Royale – Ian Fleming
• Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
• The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
• The Killer Inside Me – Jim Thompson
• The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
• I, Robot – Isaac Asimov
• Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
• The Plague – Albert Camus
• Animal Farm – George Orwell
• Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
• Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
• For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
• The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
• Nausea – Jean-Paul Sartre
• Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
• The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
• At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft
• Miss Lonelyhearts – Nathanael West
• Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Céline
• Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
• A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
• Story of the Eye – Georges Bataille
• Steppenwolf – Herman Hesse
• The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
• The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Enormous Room – E.E. Cummings
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
• Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
• The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
• The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
• The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
• Dracula – Bram Stoker
• The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
• The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
• Against the Grain – Joris-Karl Huysmans
• Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
• Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
• Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
• Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Silas Marner – George Eliot
• A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
• The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
• Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
• The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
• The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
• A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
• The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
• The Nose – Nikolay Gogol
• Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
• Candide – Voltaire
• Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
• Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe

So…more than I would have thought (nearly 100), but almost all easily categorized as Forced to Read in School, I Was One of Those Guys in College, or Given to Me by a Girlfriend. If this list seems shockingly illiterate or weird, that’s only because I am – the list itself is mostly what you’d expect, though I was surprised that Ballard had several books on while, say, Twain had only one. But it’s all subjective, who cares, etc., etc.

My phone is temporarily out of my hands, maybe until Tuesday. Email me if you need something.