What books are on your night stand?
Night stand is a euphemism for bathroom. I don’t keep books on my night stand. But I do read in the bathroom. I subscribe to Consumer Reports and Esquire. Those are generally around. The book I am reading is about making pasta from scratch. Wifey got me that and a pasta rolling machine for Christmas. I am becoming a pasta master. Its fun and easy. I am brewing home brew again, so I tend to have those books around as well. Am in primary fermentation right now on an ale. Will prolly do another couple weeks of secondary fermentation just for clarity. It won’t be bottled, I gave up on bottling home decade ago. Too much work. I have a kegerator in the garage, so there. then I have unlimited free yummy homebrew on tap at all times.
Btw , its not one of these kegerators. Those are for yuppies. Mine is a good old fashioned repurposed used (free) refrigerator. Yeah, y’all talk a good game about recycling stuff… but I am the real hero putting fridges back to work. Maybe it was a fridge with a bad childhood. Maybe it was a fridge who got in with the wrong crowd and made some dumb decisions. Who are you to judge that fridge? Out here in Parker, Colorado… we are about second chances. I think this just turned into a dog food commercial?
Got it free, and the freezer is still original so we keep stores of local beef in that. Hold on, how did a mention of a book on making pasta turn into a homebrew rant? My apologies, reader. It’s pretty fucking apparent there is no editor here. There is a friend who provides the questions. All of this stuff could really be tightened up. I just want to apologize, and remind you this content is free to use and abuse. Just like your sister.
What’s the last great book you read?
I go through a lot of books, so I am going to cheat. Going to look at my list of books. Ooh, ‘Rolling Nowhere’ by Ted Conover. It was my second book by Ted. Not sure how I got to it, because I really didn’t care for the first one I read (Cheap Land Colorado). But Rolling Nowhere is about the Hobo life, and its fantastic!
What’s the worst sitcom and why?
Mama’s Family. I know, it hasn’t been on for about 25 years. But it was so fucking bad, I get angry when I think of it. I mean, it was SO bad… what was really going on? Did it have a great lead in? Did Vicki Lawrence have something on Les Moonves? It wasn’t just ‘not good’, it was actively bad. It was lazy and patronizing, too. Am pretty sure they had a script department just to make sure each episode as dumb and pointless as can be.
You could find footage of a hobo farting into a tv, thinking the people on tv could smell it… and that would be a more compelling storyline. In fact, imma gonna do that right now! Gonna pull up Mama’s Family on youtube and blow ass into that screen until it melts.
I challenge you to find a worse show. EVER.
Are there any classic novels that you only recently read for the first time?
None I can think of. There are many I know I should read. Moby Dick, or 100 Years of Solitude… these great big epics. I just don’t have the time or attention span. I must have started ‘Great Gatsby’ 6 different times over the last 30 years. It starts great, and then hits a major stall… not unlike a pork roast at hour 4. Soon up will be a re-reading of Midnight’s Children. It’s about India the day before the British granted their independence (which was 1950). I read it back in college and recall it being really compelling. But its also super dense and wordy. I mean, do I have 100 pages or patience just to establish? This is why the first scene in any action movie is an action sequence. Its’ out of context, and we don’t know what is happening… but the music and the cut shots tell is major shit is going down.
Then, once they hook us, they can bore us with their backstory. Someone please tell Rushdie that the intro to Midnight’s Children drags a bit.
Can a great book be badly written? What other criteria can overcome bad prose?
I can’t think of one. The writing, or ‘prose’ as our elitist editor calls it- stands tall above everything else. Think of Henry Miller, or Hunter Thompson, or Bukowski.. or Dylan…. Who cares what they are saying? It’s all nonsense. How they say it, though, that is the value to me.
I am Correct 
