Drinking up the eau de cologne

Rob Sheffield on Elvis Costello's Trust: "He was still singing about girl trouble, but for the first time, the girls in his songs weren’t faceless villains or metaphors for fascism."


Bonus: video of E.C. on Tom Snyder's show, 1981, singing "Watch Your Step."

From The Memoirs of Parkus Grammaticus: Last year I wrote two stories with titles nicked from/mood inspired by songs: "Bring on the Dancing Horses," which I wrote for the "Impossible Geometries" event at 177 Livingston (and now in the latest issue of Open City); and "Watch Your Step," which I wrote for a Housing Works/Bookforum reading, and as yet unpublished, but possibly the cornerstone of a novel, though not the one I'm working on now.

On a related note: the February/March Bookforum is out; I haven't seen it yet, but it has my review of Jonathan Coe's latest novel, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim. (The piece is not available online.) Thanks again to Michael Miller for the inspired assignment!

The two kinds of people

There are two kinds of people, he thought. Those that smear peanut butter on one cracker at a time, eating one and then preparing another, in an exhausting and laborious fashion; and those who industriously and patiently smear peanut butter on a whole row of crackers at once, then savor the uninterrupted eating of the row. Which kind was he? The former.

—The Notebooks of Parkus Grammaticus