I’m usually not a fan of traditional jokes. No sooner have I been told about a priest walking into a bar or about an insect immured in a bowl of borscht than I feel slightly irritable and trapped, as if the designated audience to a fart in a spacesuit.
That said, though, I’m loving the site Old Jews Telling Jokes–particularly when the jokesters in question are the site creator’s own father and mother.
En route to our mutual speaking engagment at the Los Angeles Public Library to discuss the peculiar charms of the elderly, Sandra Tsing Loh ran into some trouble. Namely, her eccentric, 88 year-old father, as you can read/hear here or here.
(Pasadena’s KPCC)
I’m just back from a seven-city bout of bookflogging and tabletop dancing. I’ve shown my ankles to smart and lively book lovers in NYC, Durham, Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Columbus. I am a very, very grateful man.
In the manner of a self-involved awards show honoree, I’d like to place my right hand over my heart to denote earnestness, and bestow the following awards:
MOST UNFOUNDED EXPRESSION OF ANXIETY: My mother, on the eve of our mutual appearance on a community radio show in North Carolina called “Carrboro Book Beat,” asked me, “Is this going to be dressy?”
MOST FLATTERING ASSESSMENT OF MY WHITEBREAD CHARMS: After a banter-driven conversation with interviewer Warren Etheredge in front of a Seattle audience, a friend of Etheredge’s asked me, “So, Henry, are you a New York Jew, too?”
MOST THRILLING ENTRANCE: My sister, with seven of her friends, in a white limo, to my Books, Inc. reading in San Francisco: possibly the first time that “white limo” and “independent bookseller” have appeared in the same sentence.
BEST REACTION TO A NOT-ENTIRELY-POSITIVE BOOK REVIEW: “How To Live” character Sylvia Miles said to me of one slightly dyspeptic book reviewer, “He wouldn’t ‘get’ someone like me. His idea of avant-garde is Arlene Dahl.”
MOST SEMIOTICALLY-CHARGED MOMENT: Given a Sharpie, I was asked to sign James Thurber’s closet at the Thurber House in Columbus.
STRONGEST EVIDENCE THAT MY WORDS ARE NOT FALLING ON DEAF EARS: Immediately after I uttered the statement, “I’m agnostic” at Books and Books in Coral Gables, the bookstore’s lights went off for three seconds.
More reviews: Seattle Weekly, Los Angeles Times, Washington Blade, Denver Post, Hartford Courant.
There’s a terrific piece just published by Laura Miller on Salon.com that compares my new book with a memoir written by 91 year-old British editor Diana Athill.
“Henry,” you are no doubt wondering, “how is your mother handling the fact that, in the review of your new book in the current issue of Oprah magazine, she is described as ‘a role model for the ages’?”
Well, I can tell you, it’s all muu-muu-wearing and elevated diction from Ann from here on in; don’t expect to be granted an audience unless you are bearing a tape recorder or honorarium. If you do happen upon her in the environs of a certain North Carolina retirement community or Costco and are unsure what the appropriate tone to take with her is, consider hushed awe.
There’s an article in this week’s Newsweek about a new $2.7 million program at the University of Chicago that will be dedicated to Defining Wisdom (as the program is called.) The Chicago scholars are looking at some quite unusual sources in their individual searches: data compression, music appreciation, and, yes, ants.
Suddenly I feel much better that my new book about wisdom has a chapter about a cat.
(Bonus: the article refers to me as “the Socrates of dilettantes.”)
Typically, the period just prior to a book’s publication is one marked by a deafening silence–what authors and publishers call “the calm before the calm.”
So it’s been especially lovely for this aficionado of calm to hear some rumbling about my new book. Thank you, thank you Time Out New York, Vanity Fair (not online yet), USA Today, Time.com, and NPR’s “Talk of the Nation.” I am flattered, humbled, and dripping with honey.
Update (1/6): More reviews. From Very Short List, Minneapolis-St Paul Tribune, Pop Matters,Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Durham Herald Sun, and the website of the New Orleans Times-Picayune (I’m not listing bigger papers like the L.A. Times, the Boston Globe, and the Chicago Tribune because, counter-intuitively, they all picked up the same wire review.)
On Tuesday morning, an 88 year-old woman outside of Portland, Oregon was attacked by a naked intruder in her home. Recalling a news story in which a victim survived an attack by grabbing her assailant’s testicles, the Portland woman did exactly that to her unclothed interloper. Whereupon the assailant–whose name, I kid you not, is Michael G. Dick–proceeded to flee.
The woman, who doesn’t want her name used, told Oregon’s KPTV,
“I thought it was somebody I knew, but then seeing him without clothing, you know, it’s nobody I knew.”
(Eartha Kitt, 1927-2008)
“The best thing to do is wear a wig and be more or less sure it’s going to stay.”
