By request, special SueAndNotU Edition...
“We girls are such bitches, eh? I've been meaning to ask you, Matty, what collections of your favorite essayists you recommend. I know how you dig Baldwin and White, but do you have specific collections you turn to?"
---Susan Smith, September 14, 2004, 9.15 a.m.

"Now that I've updated, I feel fully justified in taking you to task for your paltry blog offerings of late. What's the news in Temple? Read any good books lately? Did you see Hero? Are any women ruining your life?"
---Susan Smith, September 10, 2004, 9.10 a.m.

Good lord, woman, as if I haven't been verbose enough lately, you throw down this gauntlet?


I'm too old for this shit

I couldn't tell if those girls were being bitches or just goofy. I haven't hung around sorority girls too much, but their sense of humor seems to always be treading the line between the two. And I will affirm what you said about you girls being such bitches by proving it's correlate — that we men are total assholes — by saying: The two ugly ones were bitches, but I thought the cute one was just having some fun. She smiled at me.


Now for something I actually know about

Ah, as for the essays, I'll try to keep this short, because I could talk for a long, long time. Riveting, I know. Hold on to your seats.

Starting with the obvious...

— The Essays of E. B. White is without a doubt my desert island book. I absolutely love it. I've read some of the essays in there more than half a dozen times each. BUY THIS BOOK.

Another interesting collection by White is One Man's Meat. This was a monthly column he wrote for, I believe, Harper's for about two to three years toward the end of WWII. All of the columns are there, arranged chronologically, which is the best part about the book: you get to see the essayist as he struggles with the times. As you track his thought process, you feel his passions flare, his logic falter, and his melancholy act up — then when he collects himself and gets it together, there are some real gems. Some of the absolute best are also included in Essays, though. Interestingly, some of these monthly columns were nothing more than mini-collections of short thoughts, not always on related topics — in other words, it was like a month worth of blog entries. Very cool.

(I'm not doing well with that brevity thing.)

— Baldwin's first two collections are where it's at: Notes of a Native Son (incredible) and Nobody Knows My Name (very, very good). I recommend, however, getting the Library of America edition of his collected essays. It includes all six or seven of his essay collections and some others pieces published later in his career. It's probably Baldwin overload at 900 pages (even the prof who introduced me to Baldwin hadn't read the entire thing), but this way you're sure to get everything. The volume is very handsome, as well.

Baldwin is, for some reason, most well known for his long essay, "The Fire Next Time." This I will never understand, as it is mostly built on rhetorical flourishes instead of the rugged, substantive prose he wrote early in his career. For instance, the title essay "Notes of a Native Son" is among the very best essays I've ever read. I can't recommend those first two collections enough.

— There are too many Orwell collections to list. The first essays I read were in a slim volume I borrowed from Reid, the name of which eludes me. I say, fuck it, go all in with Orwell, too: Orwell: Essays, put out by the Everyman's Library, is massively comprehensive (1200+ pages) and only about $25 new in hardback.

Highlights: "Politics and the English Language," "Shooting an Elephant," "A Hanging," "England Your England," "Such, Such Were the Joys," and many more I'm forgetting. The most impressive thing about Orwell is his quality across topics and across time in the "minor" essays. Just lucid to the point of ridiculousness on things, like, how much tea Britons drink.

Included are Orwell's series of weekly newspaper columns, "As I Please." Also reminiscent of blog entries. Pretty neat.

(Phew. Still with me?)

— Kriston would probably plug Montaigne here. I guess you can't go wrong with the man who created and named the genre. He's not really my style, although considering he wrote in French in the 15th Century before anyone else thought to write in a like manner, he's definitely worth picking up, especially if you find a nice old copy at an antique store, like I did. He only wrote two volumes in his life, and they're almost always published together.

— A Mencken Chrestomathy. Some of the pieces are a little too short for my blood, but you gotta have this crank and his 25,000-word vocabulary around. Makes Dennis Miller look like Sean Hannity.

— This summer I stumbled across an interesting Mark Twain collection: Mark Twain and the Damned Human Race. I've only read a few essays so far, but "Corn-pone Opinions" was worth the price alone. C'mon, it's Twain. It's hilarious and totally scathing. Beautiful.

— You know about Amis. (The War Against Cliche for the rest of you.) The Hillary Clinton piece might be the funniest book review I've ever read, challenge only by that woman's review of a Martha Stewart tell-all in The Atlantic.

— I would love to find a good, all-purpose Virginia Woolf collection. Her essays run to five or six volumes, but what I've read is excellent. (Duh.) "Death of a Moth" is really pretty amazing, and her essay on Montaigne, cleverly titled "Montaigne," is very good as well. She's also famous for the essay "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," which helped usher in the age of modernism and contributed to the downfall of Victorian lit with the phrase (so loved by scholars needing a book title): "On or about December 1910 human character changed." I wrote an essay on Virginia Woolf's essays that I'm quite proud of, for what it's worth, which is not much.

(Yes, I'm still going.)

— Man, I almost forgot: A Train of Powder by Rebecca West. Six long essays, three interlinked ones on the Neuremburg Trials, three on other matters relating to the justice system — fucking bad ass. Like journalism, narrated. Exquisitely crafted writing, very thought provoking. She's still alive and writing, although I hear her recent stuff is pretty not good. Too bad.

— If you like poetry, To Begin Where I Am by the Czech poet Czeslaw Milosz.

— For you New Yorker readers, Brendan Gill's memoirs Here at The New Yorker is light and fun and just as well written as you'd expect.

— As for general collections, I like The Oxford Book of Essays, edited by John Gross, and Esquire: The Best of Forty Years is surprisingly good.

I'd shy away from the annual collections, most notably The Best American Essays, as they are exceptionally hit or miss. I have one year that is very good, one year that is pretty good, and then there is the most recent edition which included that fucking terrible, terrible essay from Harper's about Sacajawea. I thought it was a typo when I saw that in the contents. Depends on that year's editor, I guess.

— (And you thought it was over, mwa ha ha!) If I may step a wee bit out of bounds, Borges' Collected Fictions read like essays in many cases. Amazing book.

— And, finally, I'm really looking forward to Mark Bowden's collected magazine writings, due out this fall, Road Work. His journalistic essays in The Atlantic over the past two years have been outstanding. The poorly titled "The Kabul-ki Dance" was the first to grab my attention. It's funny and beautiful and about manly stuff like fighter jets. It also has profanity — yea!

That's more info than you'll ever need. Sorry I was too lazy to get hyperlinks, but them's the breaks. Hopefully there's something for everyone in there.

(Keep it short. Ha! I lied!)


The news in Temple

The school board approved a tax rate of $1.6318 for every $100 of property value. Also, the guy who used to run the biggest laminate company in the world, WilsonArt, housed in Temple, gives a lot of money to children's charities in town.


The only book as of late

If you didn't have to in high school, just go read O'Brien's The Things They Carried. You can thank me later. Otherwise, see above.


Hero...

...wasn't as good the second time. Danny rented it months ago, and I think I enjoyed watching it in the privacy of the Red House much more than in a crowded theatre while I munched on nachos. Not sure why. Also, now I can't decide if it was nationalist propaganda or subversive social commentary cloaked as nationalist propaganda or just confused. Still beautiful, though.


The vehicle for this final story is my car

Women may not be ruining my life, but one did ruin my evening about a week ago. And it wasn't because she was a bitch. No, not at all. In fact, quite the opposite. It was because she's perfect.

As I talked about in the previous post, me and some friends did take a cruise down Enfield Road, a.k.a. Lame Memory Lane. I really didn't think much of being carried by both Christa's and Nicole's houses, although I reflexively notice it every time. I invested a lot of hope in those girls. I'm not sure why.

Anyways, we went out that night with Adam and had a good ol' time, eventually meeting up with Lilly and Amanda. Lilly wanted to go to a bar that she'd never been to before, and as it was getting late, we opted for one nearby, The Dog and Duck.

Now the Dog and Duck is pretty much known as a place you go when you specifically don't want to pick up chicks. You go there with the fellas or with some friends that you want to be able to actually conversate with. And Saturday night the place was perfect for that: practically empty and there was bad ass, low-key Irish folk music on the jukebox. There were so few people inside that the bartender polled all of the customers for their approval before breaking Austin's indoor smoking ban.

All was going jolly well when, lo, an actual attractive woman walked in from the patio on the way to the bathroom. I glanced up at her. And then I stared at her the entire time as she walked by.

It couldn't be.

"Ha ha, I knew you were gonna stare," Lilly laughed from beside me.

"No, but—" I protested

"When I saw her come in, I looked over at you and you wouldn't stop looking at her," Lilly kept rubbing it in.

"But I know that girl, I think." I turned and looked at Lilly. I didn't want it to be true. "I think that was Married Girl," I whimpered. "But she's supposed to be in Indonesia!" We debated the plausibility of this while we waited, but she never came back our direction, using the other door to exit.

A few minutes later, around last call, we decided to head out. I walked outside onto the patio, only to run in to Kingore, on his way to meet up with us. We said hey, and I sat down on a picnic table while everyone else made their way out.

Then from the out of the shadows at the table across from me a girl stood up and started walking my direction. I gritted my teeth, knowing what came next: I was about to be middle-schooled.

Shannon stepped out into the light, smiled a bit, and said, "Matt?"

To sum it up: since I had last ran into her at Lovejoy's more than a year ago, she was still one of the most beautiful girls I'd ever met, still married to the scraggly-looking guy behind her, and she had enjoyed Thailand.

When she told me she was applying to public policy grad school, I thought, "Damn. Hot."

And when she asked me, "Oh, cool, for whom do you write?" I thought, "Don't say that."

And when smiled to say good-bye, she had something black in her teeth, and I thought, "I don't care."

And when Justin, watching from the sidelines, whispered to Lilly, "This is ruining Matt's night" he was right.

It was only as we drove to Mojo's for the after-party, my spirits down but resigned, because they couldn't be anything else, that I thought about riding along Enfield. Foreshadowing's a son of a bitch, but I could only shrug: What can I do?

I tried to shake it all off as I parked in the dreaded Magic Wok lot. What I was thinking, who knows. I was distracted. And when, half an hour later, we watched the tow truck pull my car right past us on the patio, I just gritted my teeth and watched it go until it was out of sight.

That night I had a dream about her. It was boring. We just talked. I was nervous. I woke up, shook my head and frowned. Okay, I thought.

I drove home the next evening, glad to be getting back to the present. As I was mercifully counting down the last few exit numbers until mine, flashing lights appeared in my rear-view. I looked at them for a second, studied them, and turned on my blinker to exit.

What next? I wondered, before I gave the cop my best, honest to God, I thought I was going 70, just following the car behind me, which actually wasn't a lie. He took my license and walked back to his car. I leaned my head on the windowsill and looked out at the gas station parking lot. I watched little black cricket silhouettes crawling along the ground, periodically getting flattened by the tires of an 18-wheeler.

And when the officer came back and said "Okay, I'm going to issue you a warning..." I was so surprised I didn't even hear what he said next.

"You need to watch your speeding out there," he was wrapping up.

I stumbled over my many thank yous and he told me to have a nice evening.

I put the car in gear, feeling that there was maybe a little balance left in the universe. What good fortune, and I hadn't done a thing to deserve it.

UPDATE: Danny writes in with a small correction: "She did come back our way, remember? Everyone was looking for a wedding ring. I thought it was funny for the whole group to be staring at this girl on her way back to the pool table area."

He's right. I was pretty tired by the time I got to writing that part, and I just misremembered it. It was funny though. I remember all these eyes at our table moving without heads turning, people pretending to sip their beers, looking all the while. She went around the corner and the table began discussing it all at once: "I saw a ring." "Yeah, me too." "Definitely a ring." But she had changed her haircut, so I still wasn't sure until the patio conversation.

And now you know ... the rest of the story.