My colleague, on hearing that I’ve made an appointment to get my wisdom teeth out, advised me to ‘bring my iPod’. She said having her iPod on and playing allowed her to distract herself when she got her braces removed.
When I got my braces removed, MP3s weren’t even a format yet. Oh, how old I am!
(I don’t have an iPod, in any case. I still use a trusty teeny tiny Creative Zen Stone that does the job perfectly well.)
And so it begins. The UK general election is set for 6 May.
I’ve been wanting to read A Single Man for a while, but I spotted Goodbye to Berlin in the library catalogue and figured, if I like this one I’ll probably like A Single Man. Plus it’s about Berlin in the days leading up to the Third Reich, and long-time readers and good friends know I’ve got a slight obsession with the history of the Second World War and Hitler.
If F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote super-amazingly about the Jazz Age, Goodbye to Berlin is like the working/middle-class version. This series of stories — not quite a novel, more connected first-person accounts of various people who lived in Berlin before the Nazis came to power — was a quiet read. It doesn’t have great emotion and heartrending scenes of despair in any way and unlike Fitzgerald (again, I have a real bee in my bonnet about how he’s just not that great), Isherwood’s chosen subjects are much more relatable than Daisy and Tom or Dick and Nicole.
(A wee tip for the Darcy fans: read this after watching A Single Man and imagine Colin Firth’s voice reading it aloud. It’s brilliant.)
On to “Photos,” where our iPad user is a woman. She, of course, immediately sits down on the couch and puts her feet up. The photos show good-looking friends, adorable children holding umbrellas in Paris, and the like. Thanks to the iPad, we can have the novel experience of holding our pictures “right in our hands.” Uh, thanks. Haven’t done that before.
Oh, and Best. iPad. Description. Ever:
One melancholy thought occurs as my fingers glide and flow over the surface of this astonishing object: Douglas Adams is not alive to see the closest thing to his Hitchhiker’s Guide that humankind has yet devised.
And Cory Doctorow is my hero:
The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a “consumer,” what William Gibson memorably described as “something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth… no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote.”
The way you improve your iPad isn’t to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps. Buying an iPad for your kids isn’t a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it’s a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.
I’ve also eaten an entire tube of Smarties. Happy easter.
This is a gem. Those who love the Mad Men series will adore this book — it’s written by a real Mad Man from back in the day. He’d worked at small agencies and big agencies, and eventually opened his own and then wrote this memoir of that dog-eat-dog world.
(We just saw the episode where Sal gets fired. Having read this book, I know Roger Sterling wasn’t exactly exhibiting unusual behaviour!)
If you’re interested in the advertising industry or Mad Men, this is a must-read. It’s funny, smart, gossipy, and a brilliant insight of advertising in America in the 50s and 60s.