Wow, National “Unmarried and Single Americans Week” is already almost behind us.  Again!  I didn’t get any of my cards sent out.  Happy week all my single friends!

Here, some pictures.

[List Austin still thinks I'm dead.  I'm still not.]

Maxwell Perkins, editor extraordinaire (1884-1947).

M. and D. have an ambassador, now, in their ranks. I’m fit to be tied. Blue with envy. How come none of my friends are ambassadors, for crying out loud! What are you all doing every day? I wonder if I hadn’t ditched Lisa Austin for coffee if she’d be an ambassador right now. Our actions have consequences.

Anyway, M. is funny and he said “we have an ambassador, you have an Envoy” or something like that, and I didn’t get it until I read my last email to him with the fascinating news that we bought an Envoy. Jeez, I’m dull. Ruined it for the Christmas letter.

He went on to note that Ambassador used to be a car (or, I guess still is a car, or not. My fact-checker’s run off with the cook). And that Mitt Romney’s father (or ex-gay lover!) was tied up in it somehow. Heh, heh. Do your own visual work there. (Btw, I think I’ve linked to two entirely different cars called “Ambassador”. The first is from India, and not what M. was referring to, but I don’t care I think it’s cute and I want one in Grotto Blue. I’ll put it on my list.)

The point of all that is nothing. But there are piles of great books out right now. It’s disturbing, distracting, I’m trying to work not read. Yesterday, I mentioned this one. Here’s another.

P.S. For my birthday this year I want a small licorice-flavored pill that gives me the positive mental and physical rewards from an invigorating workout, without the wasted time, heavy breathing and sweat. Thanks.

The New York Times Book Review has a blog Dwight Garner writes called Paper Cuts.  I like the vintage book ads he pulls from the files, and I like when writers send in their songlists.  There, I said it. 

Send your playlist here!

There’s a bee in the house.  They haven’t disappeared, they’re all in my backyard!  Their creepy little carcasses adorn my window sills!

• I’m having Lipton’s Cream of Chicken Cup-a-Soup for lunch.
• Halfway, a tiny little town that anyone who grew up in my neck of the woods knows, has it’s 15-minutes-of-fame city Welcome sign up for sale.  [Read the story behind the story here.]
• I’m reading some of this, and think it’s fantastic.
• I discovered “Miss Gretchen’s” web site (thank you Miss Gretchen!) and think she’s brilliant!  It makes one think, instantly — don’t take this wrong, Miss Gretchen — of Dare Wright, who authored a series of children’s books accompanied by exquisite photos of dolls in various settings.  And, of course, Jean Nathan’s book The Lonely Doll, which is the title of the book Dare Wright was most famous for.  (Dare Wright was crazy.  Miss Gretchen appears quite lucid, with razor-sharp wit.) 
• It’s a beautiful day, go outside.
• I can’t, I’m working.
• I can’t get stupid WordPress skip a line between bullets, it’s ignoring HTML. 
• Elizabeth Bishop has a lovely poem on Writer’s Almanac today.
• Alan Greenspan’s a liar? 

This is very funny. Samantha Bee from The Daily Show. Completely unrelated to Lisa Austin.

Arts and Letters Daily is my favorite web site, ever, in the whole world, times infinty. 

It’s the first place I go for inspiration when I get stuck, and it never lets me down.  Funded by The Chronicle of Higher Education, it is, as described by editor and founder Denis Dutton, a web portal for “the kinds of people who subscribe to the New York Review of Books, who read Slate and Salon and The New Republic — people interested in ideas.” 

Okay, that makes it sound boring, I can’t get through more than two pages of The New Republic lately.  (Also, Dutton’s being modest, Slate and Salon are hardly in the same league.  They’re what “people interested in ideas” read when they’re desperately, desperately bored.  Like I was Sunday.  And even then I didn’t read them.) 

Arts and Letters Daily, under Dutton and co-editor Tran Huu Dung’s nimble touch, has humor, variety, brain candy – all relaxed and unforced.  A lemonade stand, as Dutton puts it, yes; but truly the most intellectually attractive lemonade stand in the universe.

That said, below is a lede in the New Books links column today:

“Call it sperm, semen, baby gravy, jizz, cum, number 3, donut glaze, pearl jam, love juice, man cream, whatever.  It generates it’s own poetry.”  [Link to article]

Heh, heh.  Who said academics don’t have fun?

It sounds like someone’s crying outside.  Hmm.  Maybe it’s me, crying about A.’s new tattoo.  (For those of you not keeping count, the 4th one happened Friday.  Coinciding with this, Oprah is running a special show today about Wives Who Really Seriously Dislike Their Husbands’ Tattoos and the Husbands Who Keep Getting Them.)

Sonny Rollins is playing in Portland Friday. 

Claire Zulkey is clever. 

That’s all I have.

H.L. Mencken said this (from Writer’s Almanac):  “The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animals.  Some of their most esteemed inventions have no other apparent purpose, for example, the dinner party of more than two, the epic poem and the science of metaphysics.”

I can’t say much for metaphysics, but I am hopelessly smitten with the Dinner Party, in all its boring and glorious forms, and re-reading The Wasteland right this minute to prove Mencken wrong.

Whatever.

Not really reading The Wasteland.  Actually reading an all-employees doc A. is sending this afternoon.  Some blah-blah about loyalty and blah-net-net success.  Jeesh.  Companies.

And then finishing books, finishing books.  Life, for now, is elsewhere, and finishing books.