Who doesn’t like Mac and Cheese? Die-hard pinkos, and people who hate God. That’s who.

Very good tamales are sold in the Mission District in San Francisco by “The Tamale Lady”, who shows up in bars and on the street at just about the time barhopping drunkards are blazingly inebriated and hungry. Vending her precious corn-meal delicacies from a rolling cart, she may appear a little sketchy, but most will tell you her wares are safe for consumption. MOST. I have one acquaintance who swears her tamales are lethal, but then he drinks alot and has tattoos on his knuckles, so I don’t trust anything he says.

I am proud to say that when I was a little child, I partook in the very first “Take the Pepsi Challenge.” I am also proud to say that despite the coaxing of the young man who was running the booth, I FAILED the Pepsi Challenge three times in a row, choosing Coke every time. In this world, you are either a Pepsi drinker, or a Coke drinker. I am the latter. Good night.

Silverman is a great writer, but it blows my mind that he is a Professor of English at NYU, since most of his literary critique in this book reads like a Freshman essay. Seriously; it was so bad I had to stop reading the book, which was a pity, since the rest of the book was so interesting and well put-together.

The book could have been alot more interesting, at least to me, considering the premise (Dante) and the characters (a bevy of Bostonian Brahmins). But it fell short. There was too much emphasis on creating psychological portraits of the major characters, and the “thriller” part of the novel was formulaic and pretty predictable. (That part was kind of like CSI… the one who did it is the one person they interviewed in the first ten minutes of the show that you never heard any more about.)

I did like the snippets of asides and glimpses into the publishing world of the time (like the snide comment about Poe). It was his knowledge of the times and the people concerned that saved the novel from being horrible. Pearl probably could have written a really stimulating nonfiction work instead of wasting everyone’s time with this novel.

I bought this book for my husband, who is from New Orleans, when we were in town for our engagement party in 2004. It’s one of those “look at all the pretty pictures, look how many more cars there are now” type books. I have yet to read any of it.

I stuck with Frank through all of the other DUNE books, but Book Five was where he lost me. Maybe he was drinking too much at the time he wrote it. Maybe I was drinking too much when I was reading it. For whatever reason, I recall it dragged; I put it aside, and being the kind of person who won’t start another book until I finished the one I am reading, I didn’t read anything for about five months.

Shame on Frank, for putting me through that.

A very beautifully written, moving book. It operates on so many levels, and has a very mystical, mythological feel to it.

I would have preferred the album if they had just cut to the chase and started singing directly about their penises.

Well, at least it was new when it first came out. As the precursor to Kathleen’s outings with Le Tigre, Julie Ruin is a much simpler work than any of the Le Tigre albums, but it is also purer in a certain sense. A great album all around.