The Return Of What This Was Before

I feel like I've been on a week-long blogging vacation, even though there's been more new content on here than there's been in a while. I hope the stuff I've been posting has provided some value, and that people have found it interesting to read. Someone e-mailed some other questions I may pose at some point -- and feel free to do that too, or tell me if this was dull, or if it was great, or... whatever... tell me how I can use the fact that a fair number of people read this every day to help you, personally.

I'm listening to a CD right now by songwriter Hugh Prestwood called "The Fate of Fireflies." It's really awesome, if you like country-tinged singer-songwriter stuff. It's in whatever genre you'd put James Taylor in, I guess. Go to the website and listen to some samples. He's a quality songwriter. A lot of music is pretty uninspiring, but this isn't. Along those same lines, I'll do another plug for "Wearing Someone Else's Clothes by Jason Robert Brown, who writes musicals. This is an album of him singing his own songs. "Someone to Fall Back On" is a terrific song. Ben Folds' latest, Songs for Silverman is also pretty awesome. And there's a song called "Doubting Thomas" on a new album by a bluegrass-folk-pop group called Nickel Creek that's stuck in my head and a really cool song. I'll finish this paragraph with a plug for Dog Years, a comedy CD by Mike Birbiglia. These picks are influenced by nothing except my own taste. I paid for everything on this list. :)

I read Joe College by Tom Perrotta this week, which was OK but not as good as Perrotta's Little Children, which was really good. I'm reading Perrotta's The Wishbones at some point soon (just got it from the library), to complete my survey of Tom Perrotta books and I'll let you know where it ranks. I also read a biography of Billy Joel that was OK. I also read Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell this week, and thought it was OK as well. Vowell writes about the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. I liked the Garfield chapter best, but that's perhaps because I wrote a chapter of my own about Garfield's assassination that never got where it was supposed to go, but was still cool to research and learn about.

And in case this got buried in the week's worth of posts from people who aren't me, go see the movie Proof because it's really good. Roger Ebert agrees with me, and gives it 4 stars. He writes,

John Madden's "Proof" is an extraordinary thriller about matters of scholarship and the heart, about the true authorship of a mathematical proof and the passions that coil around it. It is a rare movie that gets the tone of a university campus exactly right, and at the same time communicates so easily that you don't need to know the slightest thing about math to understand it. Take it from me.

The West Wing season premiere is in a half hour. I didn't watch The West Wing last season much at all, but back in its Sorkin days, I was pretty addicted. I'm going to watch tonight and see if it sticks. I watched the premiere of Everybody Hates Chris and liked it.

And that's a quick tour through what I've been consuming lately. More substance coming soon.