Monday, June 06, 2005

Settling into Summer

I'm making the reservations now for the Yale hotel. It's just around the corner (the tournament, not the hotel). I would love to let one year rest before beginning the next year. But we're also hacking around the MHLs, I've begun instilling some discipline on myself on the team webpage update, and I hope to have the Bump site up before 9/1 for a change. This is ridiculous.

I also wonder if I'm cut out for video games. I am stuck on God of War after putting in about 11 minutes of game time. I know what to do; I just can't do it. I keep pushing this block toward the archers, and they keep shooting the block. #&^%^$% archers! When this begins to get me down, I say to myself, Yo, let's watch a movie. Everyone recommends Napolean Dynamite, so what the hell. Pop it into the old DVD player. Hmmm. Good credits, but that was about it. Here was a movie that, if you ask me, definitely could have used some archers. Why is everyone recommending this to me, not just teenagers but adults (all right, stunted adults to be sure, but adults nonetheless)? It is, I grant, unique, but would it have killed them to actually be funny? Nothing worse than staring stone-eyed at the TV for an hour and a half just wondering about the state of mind of those people who liked this thing. When the most amusing thing in a film is 'Tater Tots, you know you're in trouble.

Jeesh.

The answer to the question, by the way, is City of Glass by Paul Auster. The book, not the graphic novel (no cheating!). I mentioned this earlier as the perfect postmodern novel, but never actually named it. It distills all the themes of narrator/narration/language that I'm working on in Caveman. I'll analyze it there, but if you're curious now, check it out. Don't expect to actually enjoy it, in that boring conservative pre-modernist sense of a good read. It's not a reading experience the way, say, The Hobbit is a reading experience. But you may find it fascinating.

Finding time for Caveman is getting difficult. We're on summer hours here, which means a longer day and golf on Friday afternoons. I keep thinking there's a joke somewhere in the concept of Sumer hours, but I can't really figure one out (as in Sumerian, not icumen in). I'll leave it to you. (I know, if I were smarter, I'd be funnier. Yeah, yeah, yeah.) Still, if I can give just one night a week to Caveman I might have it finished before the summer is over (Sumer is already over).

I need to concentrate. Settle down a little. It's summer. Enjoy it. Debate is over. Ahhhhhh...

No comments: