Fortress of Solitude

TBOGG writes about Jonathan Lethem:

I had the opportunity to start reading Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude (graciously purchased for me from my Amazon wish list..thank yew) and it's really good. Beauifully written. I read his Gun, With Occasional Music (which was okay) several years ago, and I never would have thought he was capable of this. In fact, I passed on Motherless Brooklyn because of Gun.

Gun, With Occasional Music was the first Lethem book I read (on reading a little 1/4 page review in the back of a Time magazine when it came out in the early 90's). I loved it, and I've read everything he's written since then. Most of it has been worth reading, and some has been very good indeed. But, Fortress of Solitude almost ended up in the Started But Never Finished pile because it really bored me. I only finished it because the book was a gift from my darling wife. I thought the writing was far too clever and the story too slow and pointless. Maybe that's because I was expecting something else?

All of Lethem's other books are all fairly small, with clearly-defined plots and there's often a sprinkle or more of sci-fi thrown in to keep the ol' imagination working. But this one was a long flashback of his own childhood (not exactly an autobiography, just inspired by his childhood in the 70's, according to an NPR interview i read). And while there were interesting topics like, the music of the time, the tagging and drug cultures, the troubles of a white kid in a black neighborhood, etc., there just wasn't a whole lot of plot to grab onto. About halfway through I started thinking, "OK, where is he going with all this? He's introduced a half-dozen different things that could be a plot if he pushed one of them a little, but none are grabbing me, and he's not making any one of them really stand out." Instead, he just wanders through 10 years or so of his childhood and describes all the stuff that happens to him and the people around him. All the people around him fall apart, or worse, and he ends up basically the same person he always was - alone. Was that the point?

Request

If we ever work together, you and I, and you are sick, stay the fuck home!!! Really, don't come to work!!! Your contributions are not so valuable that you need to risk infecting everyone else.

PBR

Pabst Blue Ribbon is making a comeback. This article at CNN says that PBR is popular again with kids of all ages:

"It's really popular with not only the college students but also the working class guy and the Social Security crowd," said Lilias Barisich, whose family has operated the bar since 1954.

The arch-cool kids like it for its obvious anti-pop-culture appeal:

"There's a theory that there's a niche out here for a consumer that's anti-marketing," said Eric Shepard, executive editor of Beer Marketer's Insights.

Betty's owner Lessner said, "People are really sick of the Budweiser-type marketing with naked girls and cars. Pabst is kinda hokey and nostalgic and people like it."

And of course, the price; you can get one for $1.50.

Yet they don't mention the best reason: Dennis Hopper, as Frank Booth in Blue Velvet recommended it heartily: "Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!!!"

Still, I'll likely never buy a six pack of PBR for home. If cheap beer is what I need, then I'm always a sucker for extra-pale Rolling Rock, or that other cheap Pennsylvania beer: Yuengling; now that they've put some marketing behind their beer, I can find Yuengling way down south in NC. There's plenty of cheap or nearly-cheap beer with far more character than PBR.

Of course there's a time and a place for ultra-cheap beer with no character: college. In my college days, all we drank was Golden Anniversary, cause you could get it for $8 for 24, or $2.50 for a six. At that price, everything else was a luxury - even The Beast or PBR's cousin, Old Milwaukee. You'd save yourself the price of two packages of ramen noodles - perfect for tamping down that sweetish, churning, warm G.A., at 2AM.

Scam the scammers

CNN reports:

A former Harvard University instructor of medicine who was arrested on Tuesday for conning friends, colleagues and Internet acquaintances out of $600,000 was himself duped when he trusted other swindlers with the money, police said.

Weidong Xu, 38, quickly lost his ill-gotten loot by investing it in a dubious Nigerian business offer he received by e-mail. The spam message promised gains of $50 million, police said.

There's nothing on the page that says if this is an April Fools joke or not.