Giving Thanks, Past-Style

I have done a lot of things on Thanksgiving, but one time I did stuff with Colleen.

In what must have been 1999, I went to visit her in her first Grown-Up Apartment, in Philadelphia. We made a massive feast together, and photo-documented it for our friend Timmy, who at the time was in Mali, in the Peace Corps, and had only eaten some sort of corn gruel for six months and had probably only gone to the bathroom once in that time.

Here's Colleen putting the finishing touches on our candied yams:

And here's me, in a shirt I had stolen from Timmy back in college, proudly displaying some sort of delicious looking dessert.
God Bless America, and all our Feasts and Friends. I sure am Thankful for these things.

This Here? THIS Is What I Am Thankful For This Year

God Bless us all.

The Wedding List(s)

Hooray! More photos from Dory's wedding are up for browsing and ordering.

I like this one, because you can see The Bride and The Man-Bride and me and Sarah and everyone is very happy. Plus, this was after the official part so they are now no longer living in sin.

This one may be my favorite. I'm not sure what's happening, but this is when I met Dave for the first time.
The mysterious thing? That's almost the same face I made at a DIFFERENT wedding. Here's me with Amber, reacting to my mother dancing to Usher at my sister's nuptials.

I guess Open Mouth Gape Face is my Signature Style at weddings. Congrats again DD!

Picnic, Lightning

Now, the truth of the matter is that while I work in BOOKS, I'm not the biggest reader of fiction. Nonfiction is more my game, with memoirs from and histories of Hollywood's 'Golden Age' being one of my favorite BISAC codes.

Oh, sure, I just finished An American Wife and liked it very much - it was an excellent romance novel set in the White House (and I'm mildly jealous since I took an English Comp class with the author in college), and just yesterday I finally bought a copy of Lush Life, at the soon to be extinct Biography Bookshop a few blocks south of me - Irony Alert! It's NOT a biography!

Speaking of Irony, nobody did it better than Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, who is no doubt my favorite writer. His genius positively staggers me, and I can read and re-read my favorites by him multiple times with new rewards with each flip of the page. One of my most prized possessions is a first edition of Pale Fire, perhaps my favorite book of all time.

(It's worth noting, in the great CRD Venn Diagram, that Miss Shelley Winters starred in a rather Kubrickian (very Kubrickian, I guess) production of his most famous novel).

Anyway, just last week his son took a break from opera singing and race-car driving to publish The Original of Laura, the novel VN was working on when he died. It is unfinished, and was supposed to be burned, and yet now, for the price of almost two Andrew Jacksons, we can flip through the master's note[card]s.

I'll get to that in good time and perhaps will even report back, but today I'm enjoying flipping through this slideshow from the Wall Street Journal. These are re-designed jackets for some of his classics.

Mr. Chip Kidd tackles Ada, something I personally have tackled multiple times in my life (from memory: in 1998 in Austin, TX, 2005 in the Catskills, NY, and 2009 in the Chelsea River Park), never getting much further than page 100, but loving the battle.

Stephen Doyle re-does Pale Fire, which thrilled me both in 1996 in Poughkeepsie, NY and 1997 in Miami Beach.
I can't even remember how many times I've read Pnin - at least a dozen. Carin Goldberg takes this one on, and while I prefer my banged up mass market edition, seeing this makes me want to break my heart all over again with this tale of viscous and sawdust.

Mr. Nabokov, my hat tips to you.

These Old Cats Have TEETH

Is it Genius? Nope. Is it funny enough? Heck yes.

Phew!

From my mom. She loved the card.

Also? Sweet Jesus!

One more animal post for the day.