Lazy Sunday

Feeling a little tired today. My husband and I had free tickets to the Loggins and Messina concert last night. We are morning people and we were out past our bedtime. The seats weren't that good--we couldn't see a quarter of the stage--and the accoustics were terrible--the sound kept bouncing back from the higher seats in front of the stage. As a consequence we couldn't hear anything they said and unless we knew the song we couldn't hear the lyrics either. But the tickets were free so I can't complain too much. The audience was decidedly older and didn't loosen up until they'd had a few $7 beers each. But then they started acting like it was a sporting event and there were mass departures for the bathroom and half the arena left before the first encore. My husband and I were sitting on the end of a row and we missed a good portion of the concert because we had to keep getting up to let people by. Very frustrating. We are going to see Cirque du Soleil on Thursday--free tickets--and I hope the audience is better. So today will be a lazy day of reading. And if you're looking for some online reading, here's a few things of interest:

There's a book out about the creators of Curious George. Theirs is an interesting story. They were German Jews and escaped from the Nazis during the war. You can read about it here and here. I loved Curious George when I was a kid. My favorite story was the one where he ate the puzzle piece. I love jigsaw puzzles and when I was growing up puzzles were a family event. There'd be a sale at Toys-R-Us and we'd buy three or four 1,000+ piece puzzles, the harder the better. Then the folding card table would go up in the middle of the living room and we'd all sit down on a side, Mom, Dad, me and Sister. It was great fun. But we always had to be careful because we had a dog and if we dropped a piece on the floor the dog might get a little too curious.

Zadie Smith gets a good review from the NY Times.

And Myla Goldberg's Wickett's Remedy gets a so-so review.

Jay McInerney takes exception to Naipaul's proclamation that the novel is dead:

I write novels. In fact, I just finished one, which is one reason I was alarmed to hear VS Naipaul declaring recently, in an interview with the New York Times, that the novel was dead. Which would make me, I guess, a necrophiliac. Naipaul essentially argues - stop me if you've heard this one before - that non-fiction is better suited than fiction to dealing with the big issues and capturing the way we live now. An accompanying essay, "Truth is Stronger than Fiction", expanded on the theme, and concluded with a lament: "It's safe to say that no novels have yet engaged with the post-September 11 era in any meaningful way." To which we might ask, just for starters, where is the movie, or the big non-fiction tome that has done so.