White Summer?

I was very tempted by the Infinite Summer project that tons of my friends on all ends of the country are doing right now -- I attempted the book a few years back when my roommate had a copy and insisted it was his Favorite Book Ever. But I'm pretty sure I didn't get even 50 pages in before I stopped and I'm certain I'll never get through it without a good reason (peer pressure). In the end I opted out, but as a result ended up downloading White Noise on my Kindle. I've been on a bit of a crusade to get through the 100 Greatest Novels of All Time, or, more honestly, using the list to find my personal Great books that I never got around to reading, since, not being graded for the assignment, I'm not going to force myself to choke down everything just to say I did it (**cough**Lord of the Rings**cough**).

I can't lie, I've never even heard of an uncomfortable number of these books. One evening I browsed through every summary and started making lists of stories that struck a chord. My friend Katy had just loaned me Watchmen (the movie had just come out), so that was a good place to start, followed by Neuromancer, a book I'd never heard of, and loved. The founder of the "cyberpunk" genre, it's essentially the grandfather of the Matrix movies; half the vocabulary is invented and the story is so involved ... it's like one of those posters you stare at to find the 3d image when you're finally able to focus correctly on the never before defined dimension.

So anyway, I started White Noise a couple weeks ago, and barely 30 pages into it I knew it was going to be one of my top five favorite books. I also find myself wishing I'd read it in a college course, where we discussed it and were forced to sit and write papers on its themes. The dialogue and laugh-out-loud humor are enough to make it great, but as I'm reading it on the Metro (laughing embarrassingly to myself), or just speed-reading in bed because it's so good I need to keep going, I most assuredly feel that I am, well, not getting it the way I need to be. There are themes and innuendo up the wazoo, and I'm sure if I sat down and wrote a 10 page essay on it (or was involved in a nationwide sit-and-read), it would all come together, but as it is, I just want to keep plowing through to read more of his amazing/hysterical prose. Although it's on my Kindle, I suspect I may end up buying a hardcopy of this to re-read and dog-ear (I've been using the highlight feature on the Kindle copiously). I'll also be voraciously hunting down essays and cliffnotes on it when I'm finished.

I'd also like to just point out that I've been watching (and talking about) a ton of TV the past six months, but I've been *reading* just as steadily, thankyouverymuch.

Anyone feel like going through the 100 with me, or as many as you can? Here's the list, and don't worry, I don't have a very good head start. Feel free to recommend books you loved that I should move to my short list.

The Adventures of Augie March
All the King's Men
American Pastoral
An American Tragedy
Animal Farm
Appointment in Samarra
Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret
The Assistant
At Swim-Two-Birds
Atonement
Beloved
The Berlin Stories
The Big Sleep
The Blind Assassin ** short list; I've read The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake and loved them both **
Blood Meridian
Brideshead Revisited
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Call It Sleep
Catch-22 ** tried and failed a few years ago **
The Catcher in the Rye
A Clockwork Orange
The Confessions of Nat Turner
The Corrections
The Crying of Lot 49
A Dance to the Music of Time
The Day of the Locust
Death Comes for the Archbishop
A Death in the Family
The Death of the Heart
Deliverance
Dog Soldiers
Falconer
The French Lieutenant's Woman
The Golden Notebook
Go Tell it on the Mountain
Gone with the Wind
The Grapes of Wrath
Gravity's Rainbow **on my ambitious short list **
The Great Gatsby
A Handful of Dust
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
The Heart of the Matter
Herzog
Housekeeping
A House for Mr. Biswas
I, Cladius
Infinite Jest ** sigh **
Invisible Man
Light in August
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe ** heck yeah, the whole series! **
Lolita
Lord of the Flies
The Lord of the Rings ** no thank you **
Loving
Lucky Jim ** thumbs down, give me his son anyday **
The Man Who Loved Children
Midnight's Children ** almost bought this the other day, but ended up buying Satantic Verses instead; close enough! **
Money ** LOVE Martin Amis (hello I named my cat after him, sort of), but this was actually not my favorite novel of his **
The Moviegoer
Mrs. Dalloway
Naked Lunch
Native Son
Neuromancer ** big thumbs up! **
Never Let Me Go
1984
On the Road ** short list **
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest ** hated the movie, this will be toward the end of my list **
The Painted Bird
Pale Fire
A Passage to India
Play it as it Lays
Portnoy's Complaint
Possession
The Power and the Glory
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Rabbit, Run
Ragtime
The Recognitions
Red Harvest
Revolutionary Road
The Sheltering Sky
Slaughterhouse-Five
Snow Crash ** moved to short list on recommendation **
The Sot-Weed Factor
The Sound and the Fury ** good lord, talk about needing cliffnotes **
The Sportswriter
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
The Sun Also Rises
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Things Fall Apart
To Kill a Mockingbird
To the Lighthouse
Tropic of Cancer
Ubik
Under the Net
Under the Volcano
Watchmen
White Noise ** almost done! **
White Teeth
Wide Sargasso Sea

Art spaces

This morning I attended a business roundtable discussion hosted by Flashpoint, at Conner Contemporary (which is an incredible art space -- go visit if you haven't yet). I missed the first 20 minutes, since I decided to run a real time scenario on how much taking public transportation to H Street NE sucks red hot ass, but I managed to catch a lot of interesting discussion.

Philippa Hughes, Jayme McLellan and Karyn Miller led the talk, and it would probably be easiest for me to say that I usually agree with everything the three of these very smart ladies say. When discussing temporary art spaces and how to approach developers and managers, Philippa brought up the excellent point that it's important to talk in their language and focus on how hosting a show might benefit them. We can talk about the intangible benefits of art to a community and even how, long-term, artists change neighborhoods, but that's not going to convince a storefront owner with a $6000/month rent going unpaid to host your sculptures for free because one day, far from now, it might make him feel good. It's not a business person's job to "better the community," it's their job to make money, and it's the art community's job to succeed in the former by focusing on the latter. If anything, the intangible and long-term benefits of art is the ace up our sleeve. The attention and $$ we can bring businesses this weekend are our cards on the table.

There was a lot of interesting talk about how this common ground might be found, and some developers and BID members were there to bring some good points to the table about consolidating efforts through initiatives like "condominium-izing" gallery spaces, particularly when many galleries feel the rug being pulled out from under them over and over as rents rise and landlords seek tenants with deeper pockets. We also talked about forums to pair available spaces with art groups, like one the Cultural Development Corporation houses.

The obvious dysfunction is that these talks go on and then nothing tangible happens. What will it take to get arts orgs in town working together, focusing on the right priorities, and doing it in a way that's palatable to people with a bigger bottom line to worry about?

Resurrection

Time to give TTtC its yearly dose of CPR. So many random, strange, awesome things have happened the past year, I'm feeling a little constrained by the 140 character updates, so I thought we'd give the blog another whirl. I feel reinvigorated by my recent dip back into the space pool and excited by all the goings on with Ten Miles Square, but I don't write nearly enough anymore (unless you count my temporary editorship at DCist in May, which is a whole other kind of panic-fear-writing-for-your-life).

Today I swung a press seat to the grossly sold out lecture at the Air and Space Museum featuring the Apollo 11 astronauts and Chris Kraft, founder of Mission Control. The lecture is next month, but I'd like some place to talk about it afterwards that doesn't consist of Twitter "OMG"s. So off we go. One more time!

Grandma joins the internet

Oh ho, just kidding, it's only me. After signing up for Twitter eight months ago and promptly abandoning it, something strange came over me last night and I decided to give it a go. Maybe my love affair with Flickr was waning and I needed a new digital high, or maybe I was in agony knowing that there were people out there who wouldn't know instantly about the giant bug I just saw in my kitchen. Why wouldn't you want to know, right?

So you can now follow me where ever I may go, reading every observation I make, as I, um, tweet my way along under heathermg. Enjoy!

Today on the radio

You can listen in today to hear me and Lenny Campello from Daily Campello Art News on the Kojo Nnamdi Show on WAMU, 88.5 FM. We'll be talking about what's going on these days in the art world and good shows you should check out. We should be on around 1 or 1:30 pm.

Call or email in with questions for us: (800) 433-8850 or kojo@wamu.org.

Turn Me On (All Week Long)

Well hey. After abandoning the dredges of humanity in Vegas, I seem to be on an upswing. Tomorrow I'm scheduled to host a live chat with the fine people at Washingtonian.com, in lieu of my renovation column this week. Tune in tomorrow to watch me answer readers' burning questions about construction loans, kitchen cabinets, and managing my own little superbowl team of contractors. You're just gonna be sitting there eating lunch anyway, right?

The good Prince at PoP mentioned it on his site today -- and of course, he's the one who started all this craziness when he interviewed me last winter. A commenter joked that I've turned myself into renovator of the year, which, yeah. Judging by how much HGTV I used to watch, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that people find the renovation work interesting, but, whatever, I'm still totally surprised that people think my little ol' project is fascinating. I even have a small handful of new email friends, who've contacted me from PoP or Washingtonian asking for advice, and now we all regularly trade tips. What a strange little world this is.

Oh, which reminds me, if all goes well (and it will, right?), my kitchen will be done at the end of Friday. What's that? Yeah, I said DONE. DONE DONE DONE. Finito. Nada mas. Zip. (Okay, except for the painting.) Contractors are coming Wednesday to prep for the counters, the counter guys come Thursday, and the contractors come back Friday to install the sink/dishwasher/garbage disposal. WAAAAAHOOOOO.

One more very important thing: Today I got an email from a producer at the Kojo Nnamdi Show. Yeah, that one! Lenny, a frequent guest, threw my name out when they were looking to fill guest spots for their next local arts discussion. Check it out Thursday, either at noon or 1 (they haven't picked yet), at 88.5 FM.

Vegas Fin: Liveblogging from DCA baggage claim #12

So let's just say this about me and Vegas:

Not once did I get to cash out when I left a table. Roulette, slots, blackjack, you name it. My mom, who last month won five grand during her slot tournament, was 500 down this time. After she walked me to the taxi stand last night as I headed to the airport to leave sin city, she stopped by the slots to pull a few on the way back to her room. She won 800 dollars on the third pull.

So if you were wondering if you should rub my head for anything, I'd just advise against it.