I like to read memes but I don’t participate very often. But this one was too good to pass up. It’s from Annie.

List 15 books that will always stay with you. And don’t take too long to think about it. It has to be spontaneous.

I reread my list and some of the choices seem pretty pedestrian and obvious, but it is what it is. They don’t call them classics for nothing. I thought of throwing a ringer in like Das Kapital or Ulysses to sound like a big smarty-pants but it would have been a lie. Play along, if you’d like

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit by Charles Bukowski

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Journey to the End of the Night by Céline

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Will You Please Be Quiet Please by Raymond Carver

If I Die in a Combat Zone by Tim O’Brien

Ironweed by William Kennedy

Barrel Fever by David Sedaris

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I thought the long hours at work would abate with the advent of summer but they have not. I just pulled another 13-hour day. I’m full of spit and bile and anger. I work for people stupid enough to do this:

This is how incoming projects are categorized. When I first saw this I laughed out loud and made a joke about how if everything is a panic then nothing is a panic, but the woman who set up this system got a hurt puppy-dog look on her face.

Artiste Florenza and I attended the Jenny Holzer exhibit at the Whitney. It was a series of LED sculptures that are visually fetching but can also be headache-inducing if you stay in the gallery too long.

Holzer works with words, words, words and most of them have a political bent to them. I sometimes grow weary when art tries to beat me over the head with a political agenda.

Stick with this video. The Whitney installation starts about :30 seconds in and it’s worth a look. Here’s the link if you can’t see it below.

Here are a few stills.