Aug 28, 2007 

How to terrorize your children

6:36 PM | | | links to this post

 

Lobstah, as promised




6:31 PM | | | links to this post

Aug 24, 2007 

North Toward...Crustaceans


My family leaves for a week of vacation in Maine tomorrow. We're staying in a cottage on an island with Laura's mom and uncle. By the way, did you know Maine is pretty much next to Nova freakin' Scotia?! Crazy. At any rate, I hope to spend most of my time and energy gorging myself on acres of lobster while submerged in giant vats of melted butter.

Awesome. (Updates forthcoming...)

2:40 PM | | | links to this post

Aug 17, 2007 

Want to live longer? Move to NYC.

New York is the safest large city in the United States. Now it is also one of the healthiest. No wonder its denizens live longer than the rest of the country. Can't believe it? Read Why New Yorkers Last Longer. The article asks: "This city, once known as a capital of vice and self-destruction, is now a capital of longevity. What happened?"

In the course of seeking an answer to this question, the author raises some other very interesting questions about the particular shape of a community's life and habits, public policy, use of shared space, etc., and their inevitable effects on a city's residents. The author also brings the statistics into the suburban vs. urban debate. Worth a read. For my part, I'll simply say that I lost 10 to 12 pounds in the first 6 months I moved here without any changes to my diet; I simply walked more. So I'm slightly less rotund now, even if it remains to be seen whether or not I'll live longer than the rest of the country.

11:35 AM | | | links to this post

Aug 16, 2007 

Brooklyn Authors

Surely Brooklyn has a claim as one of the most literary locales in the West. Need convincing? See the following list. I started the Brooklyn Authors Book Club here in Park Slope last year. So far we've read Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn (soon to be an Ed Norton movie---yeah!), and Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev. My only criteria for book choice is that the authors have at some point resided and written extensively in Brooklyn or, in a few select cases, have set the chosen novel in Brooklyn and accurately captured one of the sub-cultures here. Oh, and we're doing only fiction at this point.

Based on my fallible internet research, I've learned that I can keep this book club going for a very long time! Here's my working list now. Do I have any wrong? And who have I missed?

Brooklyn Authors (in no particular order)

Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Lethem, Chaim Potok, Bernard Malamud, Nicole Krauss, Rick Moody, Jhumpa Lahiri, Colson Whitehead, Emily Barton, Paul Auster, Betty Smith, Hubert Selby, Jr., Pete Hamill, Walt Whitman, Richard Wright, Arthur Miller, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Paule Marshall, Phillip Lopate, Dara Horn, Lisa Dierbeck, Kate Christensen, Francine Prose, Jonathan Ames, Jonathan Baumbach, Joshua Ferris.

1:49 PM | | | links to this post

Aug 15, 2007 

Merton on Mercy

I'm currently reading Thomas Merton's autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain. At the same time I am reading through an interesting and ambitious biography--given to me by a friend--of Merton, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Doris Day: The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, by Paul Elie. (You may recall that Percy and O'Connor along with Dostoevsky make up my holy triumvirate of novelists.) In this biography Elie interweaves the lives and themes of these four great Post-War Catholic writers. It's also been fun to see how each of these four spent formative time in New York City. At any rate, I may have more to say about each of these books in the near future. For now I thought I'd share this quote from Merton concerning wars (World War II in particular) and belief in God.

"People seem to think that it is in some way a proof that no merciful God exists, if we have so many wars. On the contrary, consider how in spite of centuries of sin and greed and lust and cruelty and hatred and avarice and oppression and injustice, spawned and bred by the free wills of men, the human race can still recover, each time, and can still produce men and women who overcome evil with good, hatred with love, greed with charity, lust and cruelty with sanctity. How could all this be possible without the merciful love of God, pouring out His grace upon us? Can there be any doubt where wars come from and where peace comes from, when the children of this world, excluding God from their peace conferences, only manage to bring about greater and greater wars the more they talk about peace?

We have only to open our eyes and look about us to see what our sins are doing to the world, and have done. But we cannot see. We are the ones to whom it is said by the prophets of God: 'Hearing hear, and understand not; and see the vision and know it not.'

There is not a flower that opens, not a seed that falls into the ground, and not an ear of wheat that nods on the end of its stalk in the wind that does not preach and proclaim the greatness and the mercy of God to the whole world.

There is not an act of kindness or generosity, not an act of sacrifice done, or a word of peace and gentleness spoken, not a child's prayer uttered, that does not sing hymns to God before His throne, and in the eyes of men, before their faces.

How does it happen that in the thousands of generations of murderers since Cain, our dark bloodthirsty ancestor, that some of us can still be saints? The quietness and hiddenness and placidity of the truly good people in the world all proclaim the glory of God.

All these things, all creatures, every graceful movement, every ordered act of the human will, all are sent to us as prophets from God. But because of our stubbornness they come to us only to blind us further.

'Blind the heart of this people and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes, lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and be converted, and I heal them.'

We refuse to hear the million different voices through which God speaks to us, and every refusal hardens us more and more against His grace--and yet he coninues to speak to us: and we say He is without mercy!"



12:46 PM | | | links to this post

Aug 10, 2007 

Letters at Midnight

In keeping with the unpolished spirit of the species of communication known as blogging, I've decided to start posting rough recordings of song fragments and other such creations of mine here on shookfoil. The first is this verse and chorus from a song currently titled Letters at Midnight. Listen to it here. (You MUST use headphones! Your computer speakers will not be sufficient.) I have no aspirations of ever recording any of my songs at a more professional level, so my hope is simply that in sharing song sketches here I might have enough fun to stimulate myself to sit down and put some work into my many other song ideas.

Now for some explanation and caveats concerning Letters at Midnight. This particular song fragment is old; I doubt I'd write something in a similar vein today. Many years ago my brother Jesse wrote the bass line and I sat down to crank out lyrics and the rest of the music. This particular recording was my first experiment with my mac's garage band. I had no guitar slide so I used a flat-edged bottle-opener; I had no piano so I used the 'ASDFGHJKL' keys on my computer for the electronic piano sounds; I had no microphone so I used the built-in one on the mac; I also seem to have forgotten some of the lyrics. And I've not yet figured out how to properly add drum tracks to songs. Maybe on the next one. Any questions? (No, in spite of popular demand F.O.M. is not making a come-back...)

2:16 PM | | | links to this post

 

Tech Help! -- another shook site in the meantime

I have been trying for a long while now to teach myself how to upload an mpeg file to blogger. All to no avail. I've tried free web hosting searches and such, but I still can not figure it out. Does anyone out there care to lend me a metaphorical hand?! What has worked for you? Specifically, I would like to be able to upload garage band creations and such to my blog here, using a trustworthy and free web host. I've used geocities for text files in the past, but my other media don't seem to work there. Let me know...

In the light of my ignorance on this count I've caved and signed up for my trial iWeb account that came with my mac. It's good for two months and I don't expect that I'll shell out the the money to sign-up when the trial runs out. Though maybe I'll love it enough to do so--we'll see. For now, I'm using it to share media that I create on my mac until I have another solution. You can check out the other, if not new-and-improved, shookfoil at this link. And I doubt you'll need to add a bookmark. Most likely if I post anything there I'll link it here.

2:04 PM | | | links to this post

Aug 9, 2007 

Brooklyn Tornado

The Galt family is perfectly fine. Just thought I'd let all of you know since we had so many phone calls from around the nation last night and this morning. Thanks to all of you for your love and concern. We were flying back from New Orleans yesterday at the end of a vacation when the storm hit so all we experienced was a delayed flight to JFK. I'm checking today with church members who live in Sunset Park and Bay Ridge to see if everyone is okay. So far no seriously bad news.

1:20 PM | | | links to this post