How David Rees and John Hodgman Saved My Life: A TRUE STORY

I went to see David Rees and John Hodgman last night at Second City ETC, but got a late start getting out of the house (right before I was going to leave, my 19-month-old fell out of a chair and bit his lip so hard (on both sides!), we were debating whether he needed to go to the emergency room; but also: I am poky) and by the time I got there, they were already over capacity, and I had to get back in my car, pay the parking fee ($10(!)) and drive back home.

TOO BAD: These are some of my favorite Brooklynites.

I have been a fan of JH since the apparently on permanent hiatus Little Gray Book Lectures days* and I am surely the only non-David-Rees-relative to have actually ordered a hard copy of My New Filing Technique Is Unstoppable In: “Horse Races” (horse racing as retroactive metaphor for Credit Default Swaps? SIGNS POINT TO MAYBE).

BUT: let’s look at what could have happened had I made it there in time.

PROS
(1) I would have enjoyed something life has to offer

CONS
(1) I probably would have spent money on books (spending money on books is not in the budget at present)

(2) I would have enjoyed myself so much that I would have gone downstairs to the Starbucks in the Piper’s Alley lobby and had a latte and reflect upon the events of the evening (also not in the budget, both the coffee and the reflecting)

(3) Having enjoyed that latte and the concurrent reflection period, I might have hidden behind a sofa when it was time to close the Starbucks (note that getting to spend the night alone in a coffee shop has recently edged out getting to spend the night alone in a bookstore in my brain-hierarchy of fantasies for lonely people) (also note that this Starbucks is 24 hours, but my fantasy life is stronger than my real life).

(4) Being in that Starbucks after hours I likely would have been HIT BY THIS CAB

What have we learned from this?

(1) If you are falling out of a chair, do not bite your lip.

(1b) Not specific to this, but related in my mind: If you are punching someone, do not tuck your thumb inside your fingers; I learned on, I’m almost positive, Laverne and Shirley (although why (1) a character on that show had to punch someone and (2) a writer for the show thought this was useful information to include, w/r/t punching, I have no idea) that you will break your thumb if you do this.

(2) When you see a sign at a Starbucks that says “Drive Through Window”, before you take action, you should ask yourself: “Is that meant to be imperative or declarative?”

(3) Either John Hodgman or David Rees (or both) were Pavlovianly conditioned by Dr. Laszlo Jamf to host book readings immediately prior to taxi accidents.

(4) Disappointment in Chicago will run you ten dollars.

N.B. Their books, which I have not read due to budgetary restraints, are available here and here.


* Witness this Screenshot of Evidence (tip of the hat to Outlook pst files):


By the way, for what it's worth you can still type in the URL that this email was originally about (I cropped it out by accident, but trust me) and listen to mp3s of Selections of Little Gray Book Lectures, though they're not accessible from the main page.

Note also the reference in this email to a mispost of an mp3 file, a precursor to the current misposting of embedded video, for all you fans of leitmotif.

You’re out there, right? Fans of Leitmotif?
If so, welcome.

Save Ferris

From the comments, moonlight ambulette intones...

listen, this has nothing to do with your post, really, but i've been thinking that you should read Then We Came to the End because it is about people in offices and you work in an office and so do i and i think this book is really really funny and maybe you will too? also...do you still live in new york?

..And my response to that was getting too long, so here it is here:

[spoilers?]

I do still live in New York for something like two more weeks, and when I move, that book will be boxed among my other items because verily: I totally read that book and I liked it a lot.

In particular:

I LIKED:

• How funny it was;
• The first-person-plural voice;
• The guy who quotes Emerson;
• The Catch-22ishness (though it wasn't slavishly Catch-22esque, which you might initially think);
• The very last line, which maybe could be considered gimmicky, but worked for me and which I read with what I guess I would call a satisfyingly pleasant shock (that almost never happens to me in a novel -- the last time it came close was Dave Eggers' You Shall Know Our Velocity, where the last line suddenly made me remember the first line of the book (conveniently printed on the cover) and I went back to the first line to make sure I understood the implication of the last line, and I had, and wow, that got me, but then the rest of the book wasn't so consistently great, and so I'm not going to count that one);
• The fun promotional website, which I wisely did not look at until after I read the book, not that it gives anything away, but because we all know what happens when you look at a debut novelist's fun promotional website and then read her stupid, sucky book. (A clever thing about the website is that only the characters that would have myspace pages do have myspace pages.)

HOWEVER, I LIKED LESS SO, MAYBE, ALTHOUGH THESE WEREN'T THAT BIG A DEAL, I JUST CAN'T ENJOY ANYTHING WITHOUT QUALIFICATION ANYMORE, THE FACT THAT:

• It seems utterly implausible to me that a large percentage of a group of people in a cubefarm would (a) know and (b) embrace a Tom Waits song;
• The "end" the title references, which I take to mean "the end of August and first few weeks of September" thing toward the close of the book, which I read with unpleasant shock (it seemed like a calculatedly throwaway line, and I'm not ready for that to be a throw away line yet; maybe you have a different opinion -- I felt the same way about DFW's "The Suffering Chanel", and I pretty much love DFW);
• I kind of lost track of some of the characters, although I'm happy to blame myself for this
• The resolution to the central maguffin conceit ("Design a funny cancer awareness campaign") wasn't that great, but maybe the point was it couldn't be; but I was looking for it to be like The Cheese Monkeys, where the students get a design challenge and you get a chance to figure out what you would do and then you find out what the students did and you're all like, "Chip Kidd, you madman!"

IN CONCLUSION HERE ARE TWO ANECDOTES

• The book is set in and spends a lot of time dealing with the great city of Chicago and specifically an ad agency in Chicago, and a week or so ago I spent a whole day in Austin with someone who works in an ad agency in Chicago (!) (we were both there for a wedding), and I asked if he had read this book which I had assumed everyone in the world knew about, and if it had taken the Chicago ad agency community by storm and whatnot, and he said he had never heard of it.
• From reading the book, you would think "this remarkable debut novelist must live in Chicago!" and when you finish the book and read the author description it says something like, "Ferris currently lives in Brooklyn" and I think that's probably the darkest joke in the whole book.

It is totally weird to me..

..to see my name show up on someone else's blog when I'm not expecting it (and especially to see "Sugar Land, TX" right next to it (even though this is a line from an email I sent Maud, and she asked me if I would mind if she posted it, and I said, sure, but then I kind of forgot about it)).

Aside:
The last time I saw my name via Internettical means when I wasn't expecting it was when an email I sent to Harpers Weekly last year was included in the subsequent week. It was in response to a line in the 2/28 edition:

Sudanese villagers forced a man to marry a goat after he was found having sex with it; the man also was required to pay the goat's owner 15,000 Sudanese dinars as dowry.

I shot off a note, and when the next week's edition came out, I was scrolling down and saw:

TO: Harper's Weekly
FROM: Patrick Mortensen
I hope the Sudanese man and the goat stay together for the kids.
Thank you! Good night!

(See?)

End Aside.

However:
In the above-linked post, Maud refers to me as a "fellow Brooklyn transplant", and this will soon be an inaccuracy, as we have these two kids now who demand/deserve more space than our apartment can give them, and we can't afford the Next Size Up in Park Slope, and we can't find exactly what we're looking for anywhere else around here, so we've put our place on the market, and assuming it sells, we're moving to Chicago, my previous town of residence, and where my wife grew up.
This is both exciting and cool and also totally destroys me every time I think about it (how can I leave Brooklyn? all of my favorite bloggers are here*).

Anyway, anyway:
in the email I sent Maud, I referenced "pretty faces"; a while ago, I did a "memory map" (a fun, flawed game where you annotate a Google Map screenshot of your hometown on Flickr) for Sugar Land, which I had forgotten about until recently. I was just reminded of it again, because I mention the pulchritude in there, too.

Clearly:
you can't go home again.

But:
maybe you can go to Chicago again.

Thank you! Good night!


* seriously, though, do I have to stop reading Maud and start reading Bookslut? I don't want to fucking read Bookslut. Please do not make me read Bookslut.