Towse: views from the hill

August 25, 2010

Bye bye, Firefox. Hello, Chrome.

Filed under: app,internet,life — Towse @ 5:19 pm

Running on Chrome until further notice.

The erratic, unpredictable, unreliable, inconsistent, irregular, changeable, intermittent, uneven, fitful, variable* whims (not to mention the crashes and hiccups and slowdowns and what-nots) of Firefox finally drove me away.

(* Thank you to MSN Encarta online for the synonyms. …)

August 12, 2010

McMurtry memoirs disappoint

Filed under: books,people — Towse @ 11:04 am

I was disappointed in the book the-ladies-who-read chose for this month’s reading: Books: a memoir by Larry McMurtry. Oh, I wasn’t disappointed when we chose it. I was, after all, the person who had come up with the list of about six titles we chose from. I’d even read the first pages that Amazon offers before I added it to the list. Seemed like a readable memoir from a writer I wanted to know more about.

First pages can be misleading.

For someone who writes fiction so well — Pulitzer Prize winning Lonesome Dove, Terms of Endearment, Horseman, Pass By (the book that became the movie Hud), Last Picture Show, and many more — his book seemed a tedious conglom of memories written on 3×5 cards and then reshuffled for coherence. Each card was then expanded a tad to fill a very short (one- or two- pages usually) chapter. The memoir consisted of a rare few noteworthy bits of gleam caught up in a tubload of mud.

Not to be dissuaded (and because I’d picked up the book when I was down at the Mechanics Institute Library to pick up Books), I continued on with the second in his trio of memoirs. The first of the trio covered his book selling/book seeking yen. Yesterday I finished Literary Life: a second memoir, which covered his memories of life as a writer. Although marginally better than BOOKS, the prose was still pedestrian, the stories colorless. Surely this man must tell a good story at a party. Why can’t he translate that into prose?

Hollywood: a third memoir, which covers his days in Hollywood and his life as a screenwriter, came out Wednesday. I’m not going to bother. …

August 7, 2010

Raygun Gothic Rocketship at Pier 14

Filed under: art,photographs — Tags: , , — Towse @ 6:19 pm

Our perambulations yesterday took us to Pier 14 and the party to celebrate the newest “temporary public art” installation, sponsored by Black Rock Arts Foundation. Gavin stopped by. The crowd included Burners in costume, or perhaps that’s the way they always dress.

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