Thoughts for Tomorrow:

"As we express our gratitude, we much never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them."

--John F. Kennedy

Tomorrow is World AIDS Day (via 501c3cast)

RIP Mr. Miyaki:

Jeez, Pat Morita died too?

Must be all that rain...

Seattle had been named the most literate city in America. Must be that new library. Or Nancy Pearl. Or all that rain that keeps everyone indoors and reading by the light of the moon.

San Francisco is a measly 5th but that's up 5 notches from last year. I take some comfort in that (via ArtsJournal).

Susan Orlean Blogs Away:

Susan Orlean (look to your right. I'm reading one of her books as we speak) is guest blogging at Powells.com this week. Which is all sorts of cool. She's good at it too.

One Sentence Movie Reviews: "Zoolander"

Zoolander (2001): "Movies that begins life as five minute MTV sketches should probably die there too."

So Hey...

So hey, I'm done with my book tour. Like done done. Bookmark Now and I have parted company. We had a great run but now it's time for both of us to move on. We're going stay friends. We think.

Since I've been working the last 6 months almost nonstop, flying across the country a dozen times and eating way way too many egg mitts in waiting lounges, I'm going to take the month of December off. Any work that happens will be fit in between reading, movie viewings, trips to the gym, long walks and longer baths. It'll be blissful. By January, I may be ready to start the proposal for another book. I promise nothing

However, since I'm a workaholic freak, I need to structure my relaxation time. Which is pathetic. But otherwise,, I'll simply obsess about what I should be doing, even though I shouldn't be doing anything, feel lousy about not doing it, even though "it" is nothing and make myself and everyone around me miserable.

Below is an ambitious, insane list of what I'd like to do before 2006 shows up for checkers and milk. I'll slot each item in where I can, like tomorrow I'm buying a vaccuum.

1. Create personal budget for 2006

2. Record more episodes of Your Ten Minute World, my awesome podcast

3. Buy vaccuum cleaner

4. Try NIA or hip hop dance class at the JCC

5. Spend a day reading 9 inch pile of magazines I neglected this week.

6. Spend a day seeing 3 or more movies.

7. Spend an entire day reading one book.

8. Revisit geocaching

9. Take the giving of holiday gifts seriously this year instead of buying everyone I love a book from Amazon 3 days before Christmas.

10. Visit a place in Northern California I've never been to before

11. Write fan letter to Dailysonic

12. Write thank you notes to everyone who supported me during my book tour

13. Clean car

14. Empty old filing cabinet

15. Sell old computers on Ebay

16. Sell old CDs after buying a few large CD binders

17. Sell out

18. Sleep late (I suck at this)

19. Return 6 months of email buildup

20. Clean computers (files and casings)

21. Be.

What does your December look like?

Done.

So my book tour is over. 15 cities, nearly 50 events, thousands of miles traveled. I have no idea how well the book is selling and frankly, I don't want to. RIght now, I want normalcy, friends, family, loved ones, time with Suzan, my cat and myself. Time in San Francisco, time to wander, time to turn left when I meant right. Time to be.

I'll be taking December off before beginning my next project and to enjoy the holiday season. So you'll be seeing a lot more of me around these parts.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. And thank you for your support. You make it all worthwhile.

One Sentence Movie Reviews: "Jarhead"

Jarhead (2005) "An OK war movie can make excellent gay porn."

Flaggelation is not Cool:

Wake me when American Literature stops its self-hating whining and fatalistic nonsense. At the ceremony for the National Book Awards (rundown of winners here), Toni Morrison, Norman Mailer and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (who I expect better from and should be ashamed of himself) all warned us (set your faces to cringe) that "The serious novel may be in serious decline." Never mind that Norman Mailer hasn't had a contemporary thought since the Johnson administration, or that Morrison has decided to conveniently overlook the explosion of interest in poetry and the written word happening in African-American communities across the country or that Ferlinghetti, a half-century resident of San Francisco, has ignored his adopted home's thriving literary culture. All of which leads me to place the blame at the feet of...

1) The Internet. The biggest evil the arts have known since the Nazis burned books on the Opernplatz.

2) "Desperate Housewives", who has drugged America into watching the idiot box on Sunday nights instead of doing what they were before: Quizzing each other on Proust.

3) Junk Food, which has made everyone so fat and lazy they can no longer lift a book like The Naked and the Dead and thus forced them to deny the First Commandment of Contemporary Literature: Length equals merit.

4) Podcasting, which, er, because I don't know what it is must be one of those new fangled distractions that keeps the kids from buying my books.

5) Arrogance and self-hatred. It serves exactly no one to moan the death of literature and propose no solution to the contrary. It is the height of arrogance to assume the decline happened safely after you had published greatness, collected your awards and been crowned a legend.

Miles Davis was perhaps the greatest musician of the 20th century. Not once did he complain that jazz was in peril, nor did he ever blame contemporary culture from shifting their interest away from him. At the end of his life, he was making music with Big Daddy Kane, Public Enemy and many other hip hop artists his contemporaries were cursing for killing the spirit of jazz.

Morrison, Mailer and Ferlinghetti should learn from his example. Theirs is an unwiliness to accept change, to see how the world could be different than the one you grew up in and to engage in labored denial of history. The novel has been declared dead since the day it was born. And when, in that 300 years, has it happened?

Their scolding is not wanted here, on the battlefields of contemporary literature, where many of still have the audacity of hope. Shame on all three of them for spitting on it.

Slate Reports on Literary Crushes:

An old chestnut that never seems to spoil, Slate asks a bunch of famous people to reveal their first literary crushes. This is a lot like asking someone to discuss their beloved's annnoying habits at their wedding rehearsal dinner. The circumstance precludes an honest answer. So no matter how self-effacing or down-with-peeps a media personality is, they are certainly not going answer something uncool like "Danielle Steel" even if it's the truth.

This is not one of Slate's prouder moments (via Readerville).