I’m returned home only very slightly closer to reading this new and exciting thing you voted on. (Looks like it will be Autobiography of Red. Also, Iris Murdoch is universally rejected despite my suspicion that she’s awesome.) Instead, I caught up on my New Yorker subscription. I scanned maybe four issues, not including the most recent one-at-the-time,-two-now. I don’t think I’ve ever looked at one the week it came out, which leads me to read about a third of each when I’m traveling to justify having them in the first place. Maybe this year when the renewal notice comes, I will resist the urge to write a check. But until then, this is everything I gathered, as recorded by my brain in no particular order and with no reference to anything else:
I’d like Joe Biden to be my friend.
Conservatives have babies at earlier ages than liberals and frequently conceive premaritally, but are possibly okay with that. (I definitely already knew that. The article seemed strangely boilerplate, Bristol Palin notwithstanding.)
Roseanna Warren wrote some sonnet-shaped poem about food and God that shifted focus niftily a few times.
Gary Snyder is a Buddhist to the extent that it should’ve already been evident to me, if I retained any knowledge of who he is in between reading his stuff.
Norman Mailer ran for mayor of New York.
Norman Mailer identified as a leftist conservative or something else seemingly paradoxical.
Norman Mailer wrote a letter to Don DeLillo congratulating him on Libra, with thoughtful feeling and seemingly no previous acquaintance.
There was a movie that I possibly wanted to see that I possibly don’t want to see anymore by a director I recognize as having an oeuvre. (That one’s going to kill me.)
I’m a fan of short stories being really short.
You can’t burn down rocks, and this makes the cartoon with the cowboys crouching behind rocks laughing at their unseen opponents for setting their arrows on fire less funny.
Wow, and that is it! I do vaguely recall a couple other poems, the plot of the short story in question, and the R. Crumb comic I read yesterday, but still. Someone feel free and chime in with the fact that it’s not actually Norman Mailer at all; I wouldn’t be surprised.
And I’m back to my book. Voting is open until I pick up the winner, so if you want to recruit your friends to stack the race in the meantime (or give Iris Murdoch some love), feel free.
Tell Me What To Read 
Instant fact checking:
There’s no “e” in Rosanna Warren’s first name.
Norman Mailer told Playboy’s editor he could call him “even a left conservative” as long as he didn’t call him a liberal.
Synecdoche, New York is by first-time director Charlie Kaufman, who wrote Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Heh. I am sick. We are talking on AIM anyway, but because you chastise me for not having an RSS feed thingy and because I now work for a blogging site and because I am woefully behind the times, so much so I was not aware until late last week of movieoke… I will post.
First: Voting is open until you pick up the winner… doesn’t that mean you can just leave voting open indefinitely until the book you want wins or for all time, reading nothing but fragments of The New Yorker in the interim? That does not give me assurance that we get to pick what you read.
Second: Can I really vote twice? Cause if nothing stops me from this or tells you who voted for what, I am highly tempted to vote over and over for the much cooler Japanese book which all these Autobiography of the Red fans seem to have overlooked… or for Iris Murdoch cause that was my first choice and, as they say, first thought: best thought… though I did not follow my own advice at the time because I wanted to win and I assumed more cool people would be into cool things like Japanese vampire books.
Third: Speaking of first thought: best thought… this was the little mantra they drilled into our head as we went into our SAT and SAT II testing rounds. As I mentioned to you in AIM, Gary Snyder was on the SAT II. He had a rather long poem about Summer and plums and pies and it was all sort of sexual and over-ripe. I want to find this poem and I tried to online but I cannot turn it up. I think you should help me because I am ailing.
Finally: I want to go see a movie. I will check out Synecdoche and see if I cannot sway you to see it despite whatever it was you read.
Love,
Me
First: Voting is open until you pick up the winner… doesn’t that mean you can just leave voting open indefinitely until the book you want wins or for all time, reading nothing but fragments of The New Yorker in the interim? That does not give me assurance that we get to pick what you read.
Well, since I don’t see a poll-closing function, technically voting is open forever, but I will post some sort of stamp with the votes at picking-up-book-time for posterity. You’re picking the very next book I read. I can’t live on magazines and newspapers and the internet alone. Clearly.
Second: Can I really vote twice?
I’m sure you can if you’re determined, but that would be cheating.
I want to find this poem and I tried to online but I cannot turn it up. I think you should help me because I am ailing.
On it.