Last night I climbed into bed with my man Philip Roth and had a literary tryst with his ingenius 'Defender of the Faith'. Then I read the Thomas Pynchon short story 'Entropy' and I tell you I love it for the characterization going on in the opening paragraphs alone. I know people like this. We all know people like this. There were pretentious assclowns in '58 and there are pretentious assclowns, Online Now!, as we speak. Me included!

Listen:

"They all wore hornrimmed sunglasses and rapt expressions, and smoked funny-looking cigarettes which contained not, as you might expect, tobacco, but an adulterated form of cannabis sativa. This group was the Duke di Angelis quartet. They recorded for a local label called Tambu and had to their credit one 10" LP entitled Songs from Outer Space. From time to time one of them would flick the ashes from his cigarette into the speaker cone to watch them dance around. Meatball himself was sleeping over by the window, holding an empty magnum to his chest as if it were a teddy bear. Several government girls, who worked for people like the State Department and NSA, had passed out on couches, chairs and in one case the bathroom sink.

This was early February of '57 and back then there were a lot of American expatriates around Washington D.C., who would talk, every time they met you, about how someday they were going to go over to Europe for real but right now it seemed they were working for the government. Everyone saw a fine irony in this. They would stage, for instance, polyglot parties where the newcomer was sort of ignored if he couldn't carry on simoultaneous conversations in three or four languages. They would hanut Armeninan delicatessens for weeks at a stretch and invite you over for bulghour and lamb in tiny kitchens whose walls were covered with bullfight posters. They would have affiars with sultry girls from Andaluca or the Midi who studied economics at Georgetown. Their Dme was a collegiate Rathskeller out on Wisconsin Avenue called Old Heidelberg and they had to settle for cherry blossoms instead of lime trees when spring came, but in its lethargic way their life provided, as they said, kicks."

For those of you that have read it, with which "Entropy" character do you identify the most?

My answer is - the sailors.

Ok, time for Part II of tonight's entry sponsored by Nerdlinger Inc.

Question: If you were to design a semester's curriculum for a literature course, and your students can buy and read ten books, what do you put on the list, and why? What's your course called?

My answer:

Course title: (All Happy Endings Resemble One Another, Each Unhappy Ending is) Unhappy In Its Own Way.

Reading List:

1. Thom Jones - The Pugilist At Rest
2. Philip Roth - Goodbye Columbus
3. Nikolai Gogol - Diary of a Madman
4. F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
5. Harold Pinter - The Homecoming
6. Tennessee Williams - A Streetcar Named Desire
7. Lynn Crosbie - Miss Pamela's Mercy
8. Fyodor Dostoevsky - Notes From The Underground
9. William Shakespeare - Othello
10. Gabriel Garcia Marquez - the Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother  

Suggested Supplementary Reading:

Michael Ondaatje - Coming Through Slaughter
James Joyce - The Dead
Andrei Sinyavsky - Pkhenz
Vladimir Nabokov - The Return of the Chorb
Margaret Atwood - True Trash

Steven Seagal, man... This guy is my new patron saint.

Case in point: Exit Wounds. Why was this overlooked at Cannes? Why did the Academy turn their back on this masterpiece? (That's right; why do you think I italicized the title?!)

Why I loved Exit Wounds - An Expose :

- It features big meaty gentlemen zapping eachother with police-issue stun guns to prove their manliness.

- Seagal randomly beats people to death in every scene. I paid special attention. He kills someone in every frame.

- The film is quite obviously shot entirely in Toronto, yet the plot insists on cleverly hiding this fact. Example? There is a scene where the CN tower is clearly visible, and I mean *clearly*. Steven Seagal's character: "Yep, it's not much but it's home... I love Detroit."

Also featured? Eaton Center environs as badass ghetto which "needs to be cleaned up!". For the uninitiated, Yonge and Dundas to downtown Toronto is what Times Square is to NYC.

- Lots and lots of low-rent extras who constantly look at the camera, look bored, and in the nightclub scene, wear zebra-printed outfits to denote funky scensters.

- DMX plays a gold-hearted thug who is a heroin dealer AND a small business owner! Yea... he's a ghetto "computer genius" with an dot-com company. The company, naturally, seems to exclusively employ the world's hottest black women as computer programmers. All of whom, I might add, wear impossibly sexy tanktops in primary hues and type away furiously in front of multiple LCD screens. They be troubleshooting those mainframes yo!

- At one point Steven Seagal is attacked by a leather-clad tough wielding a small power tool... a belt sander, I believe.

- It's obvious when Seagal's stuntman takes over because he is 75 lbs. lighter.

- For some reason Canadian star Jill Hennessy stars in this movie as a tough-talkin' police captain. Obligatory "sexy female authority-figure walks into the steamy locker room and confronts untameable stallion cop (Seagal) and one can cut the sexual tension with a knife" cinematic trope included.

- In a scene where Seagal is supposed to come off as sexy, the camera pans to him scarfing down a roast beef sandwich with little bits still hanging out of his mouth.

- Seagal also sports motionless bird-nest hair that betrays follicular relandscaping. Look carefully and you will notice strange auburn highlights (most likely sheared from some long haired breed of dog) peppered in with his natural hair.

- He also repeatedly wears really ill-fitting jeans, and at one point utters the sentence "I never learned how to read".

- The fight sequences include all the requisite classics: chains, abandoned warehouses, the throwing of a 400 lb. beefcake accross the room and through glass, and at one point, Seagal busts a move I can only liken to semi-levitation.

You know, the fantastic thing about Seagal's movies is that not only are they action packed and feature him in a variety of zany, lovable incongruities such as a kneecap-busting enviromentalist or spine-crushing cook, but also that he gets all ethical and political on your ass. Remember those somber enviromental facts that appeared on the end credits for On Deadly Ground? That's gold, man!

Finally... I present to you the many classic character names of Steven Seagal. Note the use of natural elements and ethnic flavoring to the names connoting ardor and firmness.

Nico Toscani

Mason Storm

John Hatcher

Gino Felino

Casey Ryback

Forrest Taft

Austin Travis

Jack Cole

Orin Boyd

Glass

Travis Bidner

Agent Cold

and most recently, Sascha Petrosevitch in the ingeniusly titled Half Past Dead, where he plays, be still my heart, one of my people.

All these factors inescapably lead me to the following conclusion...

Forget Kelly LeBrock and Marry Me, Steven Seagal!