Roll Away the Dew: May 5 - 11

Some travel for work this week meant I had more time to read and listen than I usually do. I went in hard on genre fiction and Grateful Dead shows, which tells me that I'm nearing a point of burnout.

Books

• Pronto by Elmore Leonard (finished): This was really not what I expected, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. As I noted last week, I was ready for the Raylan of Justified, but this version of him was far less perfect and secure. He screws up a key assignment and then steps up and takes matters into his own hands. He's a man with a code in a morally bankrupt town (Miami, in this case, and then Rapallo, Italy) and he plays true to the Western genre's demands right down the Stetson, but there are just enough flaws to keep him interesting. I'll read more of these, but I'll read pretty much anything by Leonard so I'm not sure that's a strong enough endorsement. I really enjoyed this, even if it felt a bit slight at times.
• Rage by Richard Bachman, née Stephen King (started): No link because it's out of print, and I can see why. I've only gotten through the first couple of chapters, but if this is headed where I think it is, then I already kind of don't want to read it. (Spoiler alert: it looks like it's going to be full of violence in a school...) There's some easy overlap with Carrie due to its location and apparent content, but to my mind it's more immediate and off-putting than King's debut effort ever was. It's genuinely uncomfortable.
• Sandstorm: A Sigma Force Novel by James Rollins (started): This was pitched to me as special forces stories meets Dan Brown, and that was enough for me to try out Rollins' Sigma Force series. I don't love Dan Brown, but I love puzzles and overblown cults with ties to historical events and/or myths. I expect this to go down easy.
• Muse of Fire: World War I as Seen Through the Lives of the Poets by Michael Korda (started): At the start of high school, my English classes were essentially stressful games of Guess What This Means where the only correct answer was what the teacher (which often merely meant the textbook editor) thought that thing meant. I had always been a reader, but suddenly I was filled with anxiety and panic set in each time I had to do a Dreaded Assignment. The worst of it was the time I had to answer a question about what the hunting hat symbolized in The Catcher in the Rye: looking back, I think my answer about protection and looking for meaning makes good sense, but the correct answer was that Holden was "hunting for the truth" whenever he wore it. I knew as I wrote the short-answer essay response that I would either be right or wrong, and I was outraged by the injustice of it. Who the hell knew what the author wanted it to mean anyway?
  
  When I transferred to a new school and discovered that meaning could be discussed and negotiated even, my life was changed forever. It happened in a class on MacBeth and poetry, and the poet who really caught my attention was A.E. Housman, whose A Shropshire Lad was carried into the Great Way by thousands of Tommies in small editions that could be read in the trenches or, hopefully, while on leave. It was also the beginning of my interest in the soldier poets of that war, and now Michael Korda has written a pretty good book that combines short biographies of the biggest names with a look at their poetry and their more important experiences during the way. Korda loves Rupert Brooke in a way that goes well beyond what charm his poetry holds for me, and he occasionally lets slip his own casual misogyny (for example, when he remarks that few poets in modern times find fame and then offers a footnote that reads: "Sylvia Plath is an exception, but it is as much her failed marriage, depression, and suicide that makes her famous as her poetry, except perhaps for "Daddy," or when he throws in an offhanded description of Brooke's love interest's weight problems) but by and large the lives and works of the poets themselves carry the day. Sassoon, Graves, and Owen are all here, but so is Alan Seeger and Isaac Rosenberg, with whom I was less familiar.

Music

• Grateful Dead 5/5/77, 5/7/77, 5/8/77, 5/9/77: I spent a good chunk of time on the anniversaries of the Dead's consensus-best shows listening to them and absorbing them and deciding that the first set of Buffalo on 5/9/77 is maybe my favorite set of theirs. The surprise for me this time through was how good Phil sounds in New Haven on 5/5. He's forward in the mix and relatively restrained with a few good Phil-bombs thrown in for good measure.

Articles and Episodes

• "Cooking on the Edge," Top Chef S22:E09: The cooking has been incredibly strong this season, and after last week's Restaurant Wars and the death of Tristan's father, there was bound to be something of a let down in this episode. They tried to raise the stakes by introducing a heavy-handed Mission: Impossible stunt tie in, but it only came off as absurd and in the way.
• "An Invisible Jump Rope," Taskmaster S19:E02: Another great episode with Stevie Martin stealing the show this time around. I'm not familiar with her comedy at all, but her inability to successfully complete the tasks and her willingness to laugh at her efforts are quickly winning me over.
• "Justin Timberlake Was Supposed To Be Here," Erasable E:225: I don't know exactly what it is about this podcast that I find so comforting, but I truly feel like I know the hosts by now and that I'd be friends with at least one of them if I knew them in real life.
• "How Soderberg Elevates a (Minor) Scene" by Nerdwriter: It's amazing how much quality film analysis you can get this days. This is the kind of thing I used to spend hours on in college. Also, Black Bag was great.