extremely loud and incredibly close - a review'ish

I finally finished Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I was sad to see it go because it's been a good friend these last few months, sitting on my night stand, sometimes on top of other books, sometimes under them, sometimes with a glass of water on it, or a cup of tea. I was only able to digest it in small doses. I put the it down to read other books in the last three months. I read, The Road Less Travelled, Edward Bond's Lear, The Sun Also Rises, Trout Fishing in America, The Dharma Bums, Letters to a Young Poet, The Art of Happyness, The Crying of Lot 49, The British Abroad - The Grand Tour, and 4 Shakespeare Plays. None of which I've felt compelled to blog about. Im not sure why this is, but I wrote the person who recommended this book to me on October 10th and said that "if ever there was a book that was written for the sole purpose of making a grown man cry it would be this on," and I meant it.

The book evokes an emotional response based upon a few basic triggers. There's the dad son relationship thing that always gets me. There's the 9/11 thing that of course is sad. There's the impossible love story. The tortured artist. The scared kid. The grieving wife. The grieving mother. The grieving everybody. The more I write about these things now though, the more I feel tricked. And I guess that's something that I must have picked up on earlier when I wrote that line to a friend - that the book feels somewhat contrived. If I was to make a list of everything that I could think of to get an emotion out of somebody, it would include the things I just listed. This should make me upset. I should feel tricked, and in some ways I do, but Jonathan Safran Foer's greatest accomplishment in my opinion, is that a person can read this book knowing all of these things and not care. Which is to say that it doesn't get in the way.

And it's not all sad, there's mystery, and there's adventure, and discovery, and colorful writing, and incredible witticisms from a clever nine year old. Oskar (the protagonist) is my hero. Maybe it's because, like Oskar I read as far as I could into A Brief History of Time when I was younger, and had to put it down partly because the math was getting too hard, and partly because it was giving me to much anxiety. Maybe its because he's incredibly funny, and I wish I could have come up with the line "Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake." Whatever the reason, I'm not embarrassed to say that I want to be like a nine year old, and though I'm sure it will give you heavy boots to read it, as it did me, i highly recommend it.

cheers,
nate

english / welsh accents

I was at a dinner part at some friends' house a while back tried to catch some accents on video. What I ended up getting was mainly a bunch of people eating, but in between the bites of food I picked up a few accents, and it was nevertheless entertaining.

And even though Im sure they're gonna kill me for putting this on the blog, here it is... (sorry guys!)

quiet in the village

The semesters over! and all's quiet in the student village right now. Most of my American friends have left for good (miss you guys already) and everyone else has gone home - well except for my asian homies (its too far for most of them to make the trip), and one Canadian girl. But thats pretty much it.

So, Im using this time to catch up a bit on the blog. I've been kind of ambivalent about the whole blogging thing in general, but I've gotten comments from a few people on the lack of updates, and by the looks of the counter at the bottom of the page, at least a few people have been checking it out (or accidentally clicking on it, which I guess is entirely possible), so I guess I'll keep at it for a while. I'm planning to put a few postings up here pretty quickly, if not tonight then tomorrow. There's lots to blog about, here's a glimps of what's to come...

- there's the trip to Mallorca, Spain a few weeks ago
- the pictures from the 3 London trips I've taken so far
- the dinner party video that I took to try and capture some of the different accents
- the story about the Londoner and the African that we went clubbing with in Picadilly Circus
- and the picture of my flat mates that I've been meaning to throw up on here, so you can see who I'm living with - actually why don't I just throw that up now...

Here's me with Ben and Stacey (aka my little welsh sister) on the first night we all moved in back in September...