Comments on: Humble Pie

By: Marc

Marc — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 22:09:19 +0000

Don’t quit the booze just yet, Avery. You might need it.

By: alli

alli — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 01:07:41 +0000

I live in New Orleans and even I couldn’t get through Confederacy of Dunces. Ignatius made me want to claw out my eyeballs. After IJ, though, I’m going to give it another shot.

By: Carolyn M

Carolyn M — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 17:09:19 +0000

In New York in the 1980″s police locks were common in lofts and apartments in high-crime areas, which was just about anywhere artists and musicians and other poor folk lived. A police lock is a metal bar that forms the hypotenuse of a right-angle triangle (somewhere between an isosceles triangle and a 30-60-90 triangle), the other two sides being the door and the floor. Once it’s in place, someone can pick your lock but they’ll be pretty hard pressed to open your door.

By: joe tyron

joe tyron — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 00:17:25 +0000

Oh no! Smells like peer pressure.

By: The Darkness

The Darkness — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 21:53:11 +0000

Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for coming back.

Glad to have you along for the ride, Avery.

Your frustration was something we all can empathize and relate to. I’m duly impressed at how you stuck with it and caught up. No easy task.

Pleasant readings, Mr. Stice

By: Joel Bass

Joel Bass — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 21:10:14 +0000

So glad you’re enjoying it, Avery, and I wonder if this new discipline you’re working on will help make other mammoth tomes more enjoyable as well.

I do hafta say that I don’t think all books are for everybody. My old standard favorite book I used to push on everyone was “The Confederacy of Dunces,” which I still think contains some of the funniest writing I’ve ever read. But I gradually learned that, while some seemed to love it as much as I did, for a lot of people it was just okay, or they couldn’t stick with it. And I’ve started to realize that that’s not so bad.

All of us have very different brains. And a book is sort of a recipe for rewiring a brain in an entertaining way. Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn’t. If your favorite book works for someone else, it probably only means that your brains were already surprisingly similar.

By: brian warden

brian warden — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 20:18:16 +0000

re police locks, I was able to find this:

http://ep.yimg.com/ca/I/853111_2064_1675934

and

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/nyregion/thecity/27lock.html

By: Dan Summers

Dan Summers — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 18:34:35 +0000

Golly, I don’t remember “Phantom Menace” being polarizing at all. I remember it being pretty universally, deservedly and unapologetically panned.

By: Doubtful Geste

Doubtful Geste — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 18:06:53 +0000

comparing IJ to Phantom Menace? Low blow, indeed. Though my memory differs from yours: huge number of people identified PM as crap at first viewing, and I never met anyone who backed off on that assessment, which, now that a decade has passed, has grown and grown — can’t remember the last time I heard a reference to that movie that was anything other than (accurately) scathing.

By: Katz

Katz — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:21:37 +0000

The question of the police lock has been bothering me, too, so I took a minute to consult The Oracle. From http://infinitesummer.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=216 "The police lock makes Mario into a tripod. Imagine if you had a bat/golf club/hockey stick/broom in front of you and you leaned into it so the point was poking you in the gut. That's how I see it anyway. Police locks (that I've seen anyway) have brackets that get bolted into the door frame and a bar is extended across the door into these brackets, sort of like the ye olde times scenes in movies where a big timber is put across the door OR a bracket is bolted to the floor and the bar is wedged between the bracket and the center (like door knob level center) of the door. So Mario has something like that with a bracket installed in his vest get up." And from http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/MA%20Thesis%20Kevin%20McMorrow.pdf "Mario requires a police lock—a kind of vest from which a steel pole extends to the ground at a 40° angle—just to stand up."