August 2, August 2

Yesterday I went to the library and borrowed Raymond Carver's Where I'm Calling From. I wanted to reread "Cathedral." I started "Feathers" instead, stopped a few pages from the end. I just finished it now—it's been a while since I've read Carver. There was a great part about the friend's immense, ugly baby; that was pretty funny, but I laughed out loud at the part where the narrator's wife "chucked the baby under one of his chins." One of his chins!

I was about to start "Cathedral" when my eye fell on the About the Author page. It was only then that I remembered: Raymond Carver died twenty years ago today, on the day I turned 18.

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for February 3

I. Great post over at Driftwood Singers Present (plus some Nada Surf):

Anyway, it gets real Raymond Carver, he needed to get to the UPS place, which was right where we were, but he insisted he didn't want to call the police or get an ambulance or go to the hospital or anything...

II. Over at Moistworks, Ben Greenman reminisces about the Black Album and elections and the store we think was called Rhymes Records...

III. Your weekend Ouroboros, courtesy Erasing—an Escher triple-ourobori/Moebius strip:



IV. Two kind of brilliant things in one sentence (emphasis added):

Every day a few hundred people dialed that mainframe for an alien signal — the then-unfamiliar squeal and crash of information transmission — and fit their receivers into acoustic couplers, like people in kayaks. —Virginia Heffernan, NYT Magazine

V. Devin's baffling Beatles trivia over at Hey Dullblog.

VI. Levi's double-jointed review: Wodehouse and Highsmith. (I highly approve of Lord Emsworth and Others, a completely satisfying grab-bag...)

VI. Weekend wisdom: Do not rent the movie Hot Rod.