5 things. 60% literature-related and 80% illustrated, with links.

1. When I bring Maya to gymnastics, I really look forward to walking the track listening to something trancey and montonous (but never actual trance music, in the techno vernacular) - walking the track is perhaps my sole stab at cardio-vascular health, and it was cardoned off for repainting. more dissapointed than myself was a 5-year old dying to go play on the track, but was admonished by his shockingly tanned and hair-did dad, holding this very copy of Atlas Shrugged, with a reptilian look of authority declaring, because I said so. Of course I've played that card, but I know the flimsiness of that declaration. I've never read any Ayn Rand because the people who have and and will tell you about it annoy me and look a lot like this dad - overcoiffed and desperately trying to be more everything than they are, and hold because I say so aloft like a heraldic banner. 45 minutes later I saw him slouched in a corner, asleep with the book loose in his grasp, and I thought about stealing it and throwing it into the toilet of the men's room. I got your rational self-interest righcheer, dad.
   
   
2. Julian Cope's Japrocksampler has hit some theoretical bookshelves. As his Krautrocksampler is rumored (I have never found a copy of this available) to be the most poetic statement possible about repetitive future/Neaderthal music from Germany in the 70's, so does this promise to be for the wild untold landscape of Japanese psychedlia of the same era. Julian Cope is the greatest corny stereotype of Englishness alive - equal parts Ozzy Osbourne and Henry Higgins, and drivel from his cultured baritone sounds like it was delivered by Lord Byron in a rainstorm. If you loved me at all, you would buy this for me.
   
   
   
3. Maya and I were killing time at the CD Store as Nick Drake's Bryter Later was booming on the stereo, and it filled me with strange holiday cheer. Christmas in Louisiana is autumnal in palette, and the string sections on this record, swelling to the point of bursting with honeysuckle melancholy is the finest. I want to listen to this album not on an iPod, but booming from loudspeakers hanging from trees, hidden in the rustling redyelloworange leaves along the Natchez Trace Parkway as I lazily rollerblade its length. I have all these songs already, so no need to buy me the boxed set. Maybe a set of rollerblades and a portable tree-hanging iPod ready PA instead.
   
   
   
4. One of the people in my class today spent the entire day picking his nose. Not in an absent gotta-get-that-outta-there way, but in a lazy hair-twirling ambiance to his thinking. Like up to the first knuckle. Really. I have a six-year-old and exposure to her even more disgusting six-year-old friends and yet I have never seen that much concerted booger picking in one sitting.
   
   
5. Ben Greenman's new collection of stories A Circle is a Balloon and a Compass Both was sitting on the shelf at the library and while it is not Superbad (not the movie, but Greenman's first book that is as weird and funny as David Sedaris' Naked) it is totally ridiculous, funny and bone dry. It makes me miss Mark Leyner, who consumed my entire literary focus for a year or so a decade or so ago. Where has he gone? Wikipedia says television and IMDB says he just penned a John Cusack film about a Lucille Ball grade assassination plot. Whatevs, movies suck. I would like to have a wiser, sharper Et Tu, Babe in my life, please. No one will remember this John Cusack movie, but I will praise you forever for a new book.