Bunnies and Bullets

When I was five years old, my parents left my brothers and me with a babysitter and went to a church auction. They returned–fantastically, inexplicably, unprecedentedly–with a secondhand ColecoVision and a box of games, and I hopped from foot to foot as my dad delicately connected the console’s wires to the back of the TV in my parents’ bedroom. The controllers had a joystick at the top and a numbered pad below, like a phone, and the buttons needed to be pushed hard.

I had never played a video game before. And I didn’t play them much now, choosing instead to lie on my parents’ bed and watch Dad beat Looping, Fury, and Carnival. Mom was good at Venture, which featured a skull-like character that made an undulating moaning sound when it attacked. My brothers and I called it the Wah-Wah Monster. I couldn’t believe that my parents–adults!–liked playing the games as much as I liked watching them play. They were 28.

Eventually, my brother Nick became a better gamer than my dad. We moved to a bigger house. We got a Nintendo. My parents divorced. My mom bought Nick a Super NES. We sold the ColecoVision in a garage sale somewhere along the way.

Great Ape

For most of my adult life, I’ve been afraid of apes, the result of an effective—too effective—intro-level anthropology class that outlined the ways in which humans and primates are just a few DNA twists away from being identical. Kate, in her post last week, asked, “Who wants to hate a chimp?” Me. I did. Chimps refuted my vain and delusional nature—they were proof that everything is accidental and there is no God and, given a couple weeks in the jungle, I’d act just like a monkey. Ape. Whatever.

You know where this is going, of course: I loved “Bruno.” And Bruno. Macy discussed the pleasure of Hale’s writing and his adoration of language, and undoubtedly, it was the moments of pitch-perfect humor—because “Bruno” is, at least initially, a very funny book—that allowed me to ease into this chimp’s narrative. Read more at newyorker.com…

Q&A: Nuns Gone Wild!

In 1986, Craig A. Monson—now a professor of music at Washington University in St. Louis—took a few days off from his research in Italy, and visited a little-known museum in Florence. There he found a Renaissance music manuscript that he traced to a Bolognese convent—surprising, given the raunchy lyrics of its secular selections: “One day Guillot was with Barbeau and showed her his devilish great thingummy. She, too, unveiled her nether charms, more ruby red than rosy….”

As Monson continued his research, he discovered much about nuns that had little to do with piety. “Nuns Behaving Badly: Tales of Music, Magic, Art, and Arson in the Convents of Italy” is a collection of the more outrageous stories, perpetrated mostly by well-born women with little inclination toward religious life. Recently, Monson took the time to answer questions from the Book Bench. Read more at newyorker.com…

Shy Shoes

This week, it’s “The Intimates,” by Ralph Sassone, that’s getting added to my list:

Sassone has a keen understanding of the professional indignities and romantic frustrations of the young and well educated, but the novel feels like the prologue to a story that hasn’t been written yet.

Jazz Hands

What are the one hundred quintessential jazz songs? Listeners of NPR Music and Jazz24, a radio station with offices in Seattle and Tacoma, have voted for their all-time favorites, and the results—which lead with songs by Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and John Coltrane—are now available for live streaming on NPR.org. Read more at newyorker.com…

En Fuego!

January was cold this year, so cold that I contemplated lighting myself on fire on more than one occasion. February hasn’t been much better. So hooray for this warm sexy explosion of a video, which my husband sent me today. I watched at my desk, over and over, as outside people struggled vainly against the icy winds of Times Square, falling to their knees and crying out for the mercy of a vengeful God.

You’ll want to paint your naked body gold and dance with sparklers. I will join you.

 

Power Up the Mr. Fusion

When YouTube Time Machine débuted last fall, it was as a beta site that its creators, Justin Johnson and Delbert Shoopman III, conceived after a few rounds of beers and Johnson’s recollection of a recent night in which he’d spent hours captivated by videos from 1996—Michael Jordan highlight reels, Primal Rage videos—until other related content interfered with his time warp. What if there were a site, the guys wondered, that instantly transported the user to a designated era via video? Read more at newyorker.com…

My People

My grandmother’s family came from, as she put it, “hearty German peasant stock,” a phrase invoked whenever my mom or her siblings complained about chores or homework. It was Grandma’s way of saying, “Suck it up, kid.” She was clever that way.

Grandpa’s family was from Poznań, Poland, and as far as my childhood self could tell, this gave my family only the legacy of our noses, which look sort of like ski slopes with a mogul about halfway down. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve learned more about Poznań. It’s mentioned in writings from as far back as 1012; it’s home to Poland’s first cathedral; it was the site of a 1945 World War II battle (my family was long gone by then, having established itself in Milwaukee decades before). None of these facts are particularly remarkable in Europe, I guess, but knowing a little about where I come from–being able to point to a specific city, a starting point, a destination–makes me proud.

In that spirit, I hope to read “Stone Upon Stone,” by Wiesaw Myśliwski, one of this week’s Brieflier Noted books:

Szymek Pietruszka, with winning candor, narrates his life story in a stream of meandering and sometimes overlapping anecdotes that chronicle the modernization of rural Poland and celebrate the persistence of desire.