{"id":29566,"date":"2010-07-26T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-07-26T03:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/WP-IMPORT\/2010\/08\/26\/homework\/"},"modified":"2010-07-26T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-07-26T03:00:00","slug":"homework","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/homework\/","title":{"rendered":"Homework"},"content":{"rendered":"<table width=\"750\" border=\"0\" align=\"center\" cellpadding=\"0\" cellspacing=\"0\">\n<tr>\n<td align=\"left\" valign=\"top\" class=\"style1\" scope=\"col\">\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/localhost\/WP-IMPORT\/wp-content\/uploads\/old-imgs\/7-26-10-homework.jpg\" width=\"580\" height=\"433\"\/><br \/> (The disaster in progress. Photo Socotra)<br \/> \u00a0<br \/> I could not help myself. I overslept and could not even get to the Times with all the crazy summer stuff going on. My fingers twitched on the keypad and &#8230;<br \/> \u00a0<br \/> Dammit, I did it again. I curse this addiction to the written word. There are other stories to tell, but I am clutched by the words of others.<br \/> \u00a0<br \/> &#8220;From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor: Front-Line Dispatches from the Advertising War,\u201d by Jerry Della Femina, re-issued this year since Mad Men, in its fourth season, is modeled on it&#8217;s real characters.<br \/> \u00a0<br \/> I heard an NPR interview with Della Femina, the legendary ad man from the 1960s. Hysterical interview about drink and sex and smoking on the job. I recall Dad being relieved when he got to be a boss that he could stop going to lunch. <br \/> \u00a0<br \/> My sister found him on the floor in the kitchen yesterday morning, with Mom trying to get him to his feet.<br \/> \u00a0<br \/> I can\u2019t bear to think about that, so I thought of the NPR review of &#8220;Never Tell Our Business to Strangers: A Memoir,\u201d by Jennifer Mascia. Her old man was a drug dealer and murderer. Fascinating interview. <br \/> \u00a0<br \/> I can put away Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross, since he won me back at the end of the book. I need to go back and unravel the secret but probably won\u2019t. Worth a read, though.<br \/> \u00a0<br \/> \u00a0On the stack: Blood Oath, Blood River, Island Under the Sea, the last of which has made it to the tote bag to travel to the pool to hear Allende\u2019s take on Haiti, where I spent <em>just<\/em> enough time, while the former of the Blood books recount a real trip up the Congo River by Tim Butcher into the newest Heart of Darkness, while the latter blood is Chris Farnsworth\u2019s adventures of the President\u2019s vampire.<br \/> \u00a0<br \/> Five or six Philip Kerr books about Bernie Gunther, the hard-boiled German private dick whose adventures in Nazi Germany are like potato chips, can\u2019t read just one.<br \/> \u00a0<br \/> I am working with Mac on an alcohol-fueled oral history project, so related tomes have been bought or pulled out of deep storage: \u201cWhirlwind,\u201d Barrett Tillman\u2019s exhaustive history of B-29 operations in the Pacific, \u201cAnd I Was There\u201d by Eddie Layton, Mac&#8217;s Boss. \u201cDouble Edged Secrets: US Naval Intelligence Operations in the Pacific During World War II,\u201d by Wilfred J. Holmes. &#8220;Jasper&#8221; Holmes is the guy who saved Mac&#8217;s life by refusing to let him go on the USS Wahoo&#8217;s last cruise. <br \/> \u00a0<br \/> Related professional reading: \u201cEye in the Sky\u201d for book review in the Quarterly; trash fun with Martin Amis in \u201cThe Pregnant Widow\u201d and Kingley Amis, his Dad, with \u201cLucky Jim\u201d are both on the shelf, one step up, along with \u201cA Visit from the Goon Squad. Everything needs to get put up since the maids are coming tomorrow and it always winds up resorting the stack like a bad poker hand. <br \/> \u00a0<br \/> Outside, I am on chapter four of Kraaken by China Mieville on the water-proof iPod in the pool, which took an hour and a half of paddling, a personal record, and which I hope to continue later this afternoon. <br \/> \u00a0<br \/> From the other stack by the bed, \u201cCity of Thieves,\u201d David Benioff, on the siege of Leningrad told by an elderly couple in Florida; Sebastian Junger\u2019s \u201cWar,\u201d on real Afghanistan, wily old spook Alan Furst and his latest outing with \u201cSpies of the Balkans.\u201d<br \/> \u00a0<br \/> I am not going to get to most of them. But what the hell. I love summer and idle optimism.<br \/> \u00a0<br \/> Wait till I get back to the graveyard of unread books at Daedalus Books &amp; Music. It is an online store like Amazon that sells thousands of quality bargain books, CDs, and DVDs for the independent reader and listener. Their brick-and mortar warehouse is over in Columbia, MD, and is air conditioned.<br \/> \u00a0<br \/> They say that print is dead, and it is all going digital, but I say screw it.<br \/> \u00a0<br \/> You can spend the day there, but you might want to take a wheelbarrow to get to checkout. It is the homework I enjoy. <\/p>\n<p> Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra<br \/> www.vicsocotra.com <br \/> <em><a href=\"http:\/\/vicsocotra.com\/rss2.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Subscribe to the RSS feed!<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(The disaster in progress. Photo Socotra) \u00a0 I could not help myself. I overslept and could not even get to the Times with all the crazy summer stuff going on. My fingers twitched on the keypad and &#8230; \u00a0 Dammit, I did it again. I curse this addiction to the written word. There are other [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-socotra"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29566"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29566\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}