You know the Esquire Big Black Book for Fall 2009 has fallen into hands it shouldn’t have fallen into if they’re choice of the “The Most Important Meal of the Day” is breakfast, and the breakfast James Bond supposedly has is “Scrambled eggs with chopped chives, served on hot buttered toast with pink champagne.” That sounds more like what James Bond’s mom might have for breakfast. Or James Bond when he’s cross-dressing. Or what he might order for the Bond girl before he leaves her at the hotel, where she then dies all coated in gold paint. James Bond has Scotch for breakfast. (Or is that just me?) Or at least a strong espresso.
Although I did like their list of books to help you sleep: Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, and Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. The last one was also a finalist for the National Book Award’s Best of All Times Category, which tells you something about the people there (i.e. they don’t read like I do much). That and that they all seem to have voted for Flannery O’Connor, who is nice in that grandmotherly sort of way, and that’s why I’ve always tried to like her, but is she really the BEST? I guess most readers must be grandmothers. That would make sense. I voted for Faulkner.
I also agree with quite a few of their “Nineteen Things a Man Should Never Say.” With the obvious exceptions – “Teens,” “cool,” and “bye-bye” get a pass from me. Instead I’d add “bro/bra,” “word,” and “totally.”
The next book I’m going to read while I’m pretending to get writing done is David Finkel’s Good Soldiers. I’m looking forward to it. It’s time to replace Vietnam as the dominant American war story in fiction and near-fiction, and these sort of well-written book-length exposés might do it.
And finally, in case I haven’t mentioned it, I’m not the most creatively gifted of my siblings. My younger sister is. She’s a photographer. She took the picture up in my blog header. Apart from author portraits, she also does photo shoots that turn average brides into models, average grooms into sujets d’arte, and, most recently, my nephews into advertisements for the fact that my family makes endearing children…
Jonah
Abner
