July 2004

Wolves, Lower

Suspicion yourself, suspicion yourself, don’t get caught.
Suspicion yourself, suspicion yourself, let us out.
Wilder lower wolves. Here’s a house to put wolves out the door.
In a corner garden, wilder lower wolves.
House in order. House in order. House in order. House in order.
Down there they’re rounding a posse to ride.

(repeat verse)

Suspicion yourself, suspicion yourself, don’t get caught.
Suspicion yourself, suspicion yourself, suspicion us all.
Wilder lower wolves. Here’s a house to put wolves out the door.
In a corner garden, wilder lower wolves.
House in order. House in order. House in order. House in order.
Down there they’re rounding a posse to ride.

1. If there’s truly a decline in literary reading, I blame books like this. (See also Slate’s scathing review.)

2. I don’t know much about Neal Pollack (although I gather that I should), but a graphic novel (final item) about 1840s New York sounds pretty great to me.

Saturday was a great day for an outdoor show; the rains stayed away and the day wasn’t too hot. The bands, though, were like a house afire.

Tigers and Monkeys started the set, with songs inspired by blues and Southern rock. T&M, a project of singer Shonali Bhowmik, is currently touring with Ted Leo, Saturday’s headliner.

Next up, Brooklyn-based Sea Ray, a sort of wispy-rock combo with shades of The Polyphonic Spree, Belle and Sebastian, and Brit-pop bands like Travis. Sea Ray, however, blows the Coldplay types away by not being whiny navel-gazers. Jen loves ‘em for their prog-rock tinkering with chord progressions.

After Sea Ray came The Natural History, a pop-punk trio out of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Ordinarily, I’d suspect Upper East Side “punks” as poseurs, but Natural History has chops.

Finishing the afternoon: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists (or Ted Leo/Rx or Ted Leo and the Pillbox Hats or whatever he’s calling his band these days). Leo and his band played a tight set, of Clash- and Jam-influenced punk-pop.

Leo is a rock hero in New York, playing a legendary South Street Seaport show during the blackout last August. When the power failed, Leo convinced the barrista inside a nearby Starbucks truck to loan Leo his generators. Leo and band plugged in and treated the crowd to a latte-powered jam.

All four bands have MP3s officially available, as all good bands should, so dig ‘em out and have a listen. Jen has pictures from the day, here.

My six-year-old nephew, who spent the weekend in the hospital, has been diagnosed with Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura (ITP), an autoimmune disorder in which the immune system attacks and destroys blood platelets. Idiopathic means the disorder has no known cause.

Jake’s doctor treated him with a IV of gamma globulin, which stimulated new platelet production. He was released yesterday, his platelet count back to normal. According to the NIH, “[a]bout 85 percent of children recover within 1 year and the problem doesn’t return.”

Bar slang

One thing I’ve picked up from indexing education journals is that publications aimed at teachers often provide good backgrounders on complex topics. These backgrounders present complicated information in concise and understandable formats, without oversimplifying the topic.

Understanding Evolution: An Evolution Website for Teachers is such a backgrounder. It provides guides for both learning and teaching evolution, including an explanation of scientific methods, the mechanisms of evolution, evidence to support evolutionary theories, and misconceptions about evolution.

There’s even a section that helps educators overcome roadblocks they face when teaching evolution. This section would also help lay readers understand and counter some of the objections that some have toward evolution.

I hope to read this thoroughly when I have a chance.

In 1862, the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson took a rowboat outing with friends, among whom were three daughters of the dean of Oxford’s Christ Church. Dodgson made up a story to entertain the girls–Alice, Lorina, and Edith Liddell–during the short trip. Alice asked Dodgson to write the story down, which he agreed to do.

The result was an illustrated manuscript, Alice’s Adventures under Ground, which, in revised form, became Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Scans of this manuscript reside online; I’m displaying three of them, but you can read the whole story by following my first link.

Each image links to larger images:

Lockhart’s right: The High Line plans look like a dystopian hellscape. I need to get back up there with my camera before the High Line is twisted beyond recognition.

I’m the president, not a very good novelist!