Okay, so I was only right on three of my four picks last night. Let's try for four tonight:
Kentucky over Indiana
Baylor over Xavier
North Carolina over Ohio
Kansas over North Carolina State
Julia and I are thinking about tramping down to St. Simons Island Sunday for our first trip to Georgia's Golden Isles. (We've been to Brunswick before and liked it.) Anything to get out of boring-ass Statesboro and get Julia's mind off Montevallo.
Book Review:
Okay, this is a tough one. The plot: During the golden age of American invention and building, Martin Dressler, the son of a cigar-store owner, shows initiative and dream-like wonder even at a young age. His first job is working as a bellboy in a faded hotel down the street. Through the years, he advances to desk clerk and then personal assistant to the manager. He breaks off his own and creates not one popular lunch-time restaurant, but two, then three, then four... Unable to connect with his equally caught-in-a-dream, strange wife, he focuses his energies on building a hotel - a grand, loony monstrosity. But he can't stop at just one. The book culminates in the unveiling (and failure) of Dressler's third (and possibly final) creation: a hotel that contains about every type of pleasure on earth.
First off: This is not a book for everyone. If you like books with a fair share of dialogue, look elsewhere. You could accumulate all the dialogue and it would take up maybe 25 of the novel's 293 pages. The book is filled with long, fanciful paragraphs, endless, minute descriptions of New York City. It's not a fun book and it tends to be boring.
Millhauser has an imaginative mind and he lets his powers of imagination run wild. The novel's pages tend to spill out like the ideas in Dressler's head.
We get what Millhauser's doing. The novel seemingly weaves in and out of Millhauser's mind - we're not always sure what is real. And while Millhauser's imagination is startlingly fertile, the characters here aren't particularly ingratiating; they're kind of flat, unreachable. And yet, Millhauser thrusts us right into the interior landscape of a visionary. We get a great sense of what the men who built this country might have been like, how they might have thought. There is no such thing as 'overboard' or 'too much.' The novel becomes a portrait of obsession, of tunnelvision. It's not always a pleasure to read but it is distinct. Winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize. (*** out of 5)
Missing, the new ABC show with Ashely Judd, is a fun romp through Europe with Judd playing a protective, resolute former CIA agent yanked out of suburban housewife-hood when her son is kidnapped. (Could the alleged death of her husband, played by Sean Bean, ten years earlier play a part in all this Hmmm?) It's Taken meets Alias meets the Jason Bourne movies meets anything else that comes to mind. Judd (an appealing actress) is playing a character a bit one-note (so far, anyway) but it's fun to see her kick the crap out of everyone in sight. It seems like there will be just enough to sustain the ten-episode season. The scenery is nice and the whole enterprise is played straight, humor-free.
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