What I'm reading right now is Richard Bachman's The Regulators, which I had been meaning to read since gulping down Desperation in 97.

The New Yorkers were as good as always, and Murakami's short stories get shorter and stranger, and Zadie Smith's professional-wrestling-and-impending-mortality story from the week before was wonderful. John Berger's dead mother story from that same issue was beautiful, but I'm pretty sure he did another dead mother story in the exact same mold a year or two before.

Also read Love's Labour Lost. The Shakespeare project continues! Very funny, with a beautiful melancholy turn at the end, and with some endearingly superficial and duplicitous folks -- fun to watch them on-screen, not so fun to have them watch over your kids, or your log cabin, or to have them involved in your life at all. Much like the "Seinfeld" characters.

Again, without the Ambrose video to complement the reading I would have missed out on a lot. Because I can be dense.

Regulator words & people: limpet (p 36), adenoids (p 90), Eric Andersen (p 125)

Nabokovilia in The Regulators (p 225):

Good agent that he was, he had managed to maintain a neutral, if slightly glazed, smile on the ride from the airport, but the smile began to slip when they entered the suburb of Wentworth (which a sign proclaimed to be OHIO'S "GOOD CHEER COMMUNITY!), and it gave way entirely when his client, who had once been spoken of int he same breath with John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, and (after Delight) Vladimir Nabokov, pulled into the driveway of the small and perfectly anonymous suburban house on the corner of Poplar and Bear.

(I knew there'd be a Nabokov bit in the book after stumbling onto this page.)

What I'm reading right now is this week's and last week's New Yorker.

Finished Richard III. Chalk it to temperament (my own) or circumstances (the sheer volume of versions and adaptations) or a combination of the two (the quality of the play, or the delight I take in great villains, or the delight I take in their self-delight, or the delight Shakespeare takes in showing how delighted great villains are with their own bad selves). Anyway. Will be watching the Ambrose adaptation later this afternoon.

Just finished The Moviegoer. Wry. Wrier than wry. Wonderful. Written with a scalpel and a smile. (There are tons of words, movies, and people from this novel that I've hunted down, looked up, or otherwise noted to look for. They're in a physical notebook, and there they'll stay.)

Also read The Taming of the Shrew, which was funny, and funnier still after watching John Cleese as Petruchio in the Ambrose DVD adaptation. It kind of has to be read in a different light than it was originally written. Or it one has to at least make that plea. But one can get past it, and one should, because it's just too damn good.

On to Richard III.

Movie bits: Samuel Hinds (p 37)

What I'm reading right now is Walker Percy's The Moviegoer.

Finished The Wooden Sea, a solidly written meditation on our various selves, on death and dying, and on the random and not-so-random nature of the universe. Plus it's really funny. And the book manages to progress from whimsy to melancholy without betraying its characters or its smartass tone. Carroll is a hell of a writer.

Read Titus Andronicus yesterday. I'd seen this interpretation a while back, and while I thought Hopkins wonderful, I was left queasy and pissed off at the play itself the last time. Enjoyed it quite a bit more this time around. The villains are superbly over the top. The good guys, Titus in particular, are far from good. The unabashed brutality seems well thought out, down to the multiple cases of parents unsuccessfully pleading for the lives of their children. Buckets of bloody fun. Broad but fun.

By the by, after reading each play I've been popping the relevant Ambrose DVD into the player, as a kind of second reading, and also because I miss many of the verbal cues indicating some kind of action going on. I'm also watching them because they're fun. Roger Daltrey played the Dromios in the Comedy of Errors.

Wooden notes: a white-gold IWC Da Vinci (p 85).

What I'm reading right now is Jonathan Carroll's The Wooden Sea.

Wooden notes: "To Ifah2 at Augarten heaven" (dedication... this Augarten? (author lives in Vienna)) Alex Comfort (p 20), weimaraner (not entirely irrelevant) (p.24), coatimundi (p 29), Creed's "Orange Spice" cologne (p 32), Mount Analogue (p 35), The Dixie Cups (more girl group songs), Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, Mulligatawny Soup (p 44), "...'How can you hide from what never goes away.'..." (maybe) (p 48), coluber de rusi snakes (?) (p 49)