they bother you up, your mum and dad. and if they don't get you...

...writing a book regarded as wildly brilliant in one's late twenties or early thirties surely will. Case in point: Douglas Hofstadter, whose I Am A Strange Loop I started reading last night. I remember reading Hofstadter's 1979 Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid when I was a senior in college and thinking this was the most miraculously clever book I had ever read in my life. Hofstadter says readers mostly missed the real point of GEB--regarding consciousness--and that he is going to take a second try at the heart of the matter at IAASL. He also says "I would characterize I Am A Strange Loop as being my own best shot at describing what 'the human condition' is." A hundred pages in, the human condition is apparently wildly disorganized and as much about indulging the self-admiration of Douglas Hofstadter as anything else. I remember there being a current of that in GEB, but now it has gone from current to a scorching thermonucleoelectro wave.

At least I think this is what's happened. I was a lot younger when I read GEB, and so I'm wondering if I would be less enamored of it if I read it now. This is when you know an Established Brilliant Person has really bothered up a book, when you not only want to discard the book at hand, but it makes you question the work that led you to conclude they were brilliant in the first place.

Update: OK, now I just went back and started looking at my copy of GEB and, particularly, my mark-ups in the margins. The new hypothesis is that I am misremembering GEB--specifically, I recalled the good parts of the book and forgot how many problems I had with the character of many of his arguments, even back them. Plus, the cleverness of Godel, Cantor, Turing, etc., rubbed off onto my assessment of him much more then than now, perhaps. It bothers you up, aging does.

with lyrics like these, who would have ever thought the halcyon era of boy bands would come to a crashing end?

So, a friend was effervescing to me on the phone about this show "Mission: Man Band", where they take some guys from 90's boy bands who didn't go onto any solo glory and put them together to give them one more shot at glory. Kind of like when I was a kid and the cars that were the losers in the preliminary rounds of the demolition derby would have a special round and the winner would go on to the finals, as if a car that had already lost in one demolition derby and participated in a second was really going to be a good contender in the finals.

I wasn't hooked on my friend's excited recap until I realized one of the guys was the lead singer of the group who did the song "Summer Girls," which my friend didn't even remember. "You know, the Abercrombie and Fitch song." "What Abercrombie and Fitch commercial was it in?" "No, it's the song where they say 'Abercrombie and Fitch' so many times you think it has to be a commercial."



The lead singer is the recruit into Mission: Man Band. Apparently his life had gone down a negative spiral as it was after their one song in the sun, but then he also now has leukemia. It makes the video poignant, as it was only eight years ago and the guy looks like he presumes he's got bigger days in front of him, as opposed to this video being the apex of his career.

What's especially notable about "Summer Girls" is it has some of the best rhymes in the history of half-hearted-hip-hop. My three favorites:

3. Fell deep in love / but now we ain't speaking
Michael J Fox was Alex P Keaton

2. (as part of the chorus)
New Kids On The block / had a bunch of hits
Chinese food makes me sick.

1. (perhaps the best rhyme in the history of boy band music)
When you take a sip / you buzz like a hornet
Billy Shakespeare wrote a whole bunch of sonnets

in my inbox

From a friend:

Your sudden obsession with the Wu-Tang Clan is only the very tiniest bit 
disturbing, and yet still I hope it lasts only for today.

A longer story beginning with "Wu-Tang Clan Aint Nuthin to [expletive deleted] With" coming up on the shuffle of my iPod while jogging. It's not even a song I like, especially as it is so clearly a ripoff of Freaktoastt J's "Freaktoast J is Not a Toy (Don't Give Freaktoast J to Children Under Five)."

I'm at the office today wearing an Australian cricket jersey, which looks sort of like this. Everyone who has come into the office today--and we are having an informal thing, so people are actually here today--has said something like "I like your shirt." None of them actually like it, but people are too polite to say, "Wow, what a strange and brightly-colored wardrobe choice for someone over thirty-five."

dispatch from crowded bar in cambridge, ma

At Architecture in Helsinki show near Central Square. I am the oldest
person here. They were supposed to be twee. The bass is turned up so
loud I might pass a stone or something. To quote a band after my time
and yet now well past theirs, "What the hell am I doing here? I don't
belong here."

I was expecting them to do more Australian stuff. Like I thought the
lead singer would be hurling wombat blood at the audience. Instead,
not even a reference to how 'tater tots' in Australia are called
'potato gems.'

i will be very disappointed if there does turn out to be a ninth circle of hell and people who buy the 'suffering seniors' mailing list are not in it

If you are worried that you are having too good of a day today and feeling too upbeat about the world, be sure to read this story in the NYT about the mass-marketing of phone lists of vulnerable seniors.

Judging by the mail laying around when I go back to the farm, my father is totally on the "Gullible Senior Adults" lists. My father has also been nearly deaf for the last twenty-five or so years as a result of all the noise in the meatpacking plant where he worked, a situation that has been modestly (but still miraculously) improved in recent years by cochlear implants. I can be become very sad very quickly if I think about all that my father has missed out on by not being able to hear. So now I'm sitting here feeling horrible because my first thought as I was reading this story was that maybe it's not all bad that my father cannot use the phone.

maybe that day the homunculus who lives inside my head forgot to press "record"

This blog will not be taken over by my anxieties regarding aging. But: another social science blogger recently posted a rousing review of a certain book that I've owned for maybe three years. I thought, "You know, I really should read that." So I pulled it off my shelf today along with a couple of other books so I could move them to my nightstand where they would, like most books on my nightstand, remain unread but still be in a kind of well-intentioned queue. Then I opened the book and saw it had all kinds of underlines and notes in the margin in my writing. I've done this before. But here, even as a flipped through it again and looked at my margin notes, it jogged absolutely no recollection of ever having read the book before. Nothing, even sentences that warranted circling with three asterisks and an exclamation point in the margin, rang any bells. None. Zero. If not for the irrefutable evidence of my own markings inside the book, I would testify under oath that I had never read it.

This just increases my conviction that I need to start moving my brain into Microsoft OneNote 2007 as much as possible. Not that I think it's that great a program, but I need to put my brain somewhere and I don't know of any better software alternative.

So, do I read the book again, since I wanted to read it and it's like I've never read it? Or do I assume because I don't remember reading it that it can't be that useful?