Life imitates ducks.

In the department of bits of my favorite movies following me around places, my coffee mug at Food for Thought last week bore the image of the 1999 U.S. Federal Duck Stamp, painted on acrylic by Jim Hautman, a friend of the Coen Brothers who allowed his art and name to be used in Fargo. The back of the cup contains blurbs on both Hautman (as of that year he was the fourth artist to win that stamp-design competition three times; I wonder if he's exceeded that record now) and his chosen species of duck (the Greater Scaup, a fan of aquatic invertebrates and Arctic breeding grounds). The fictional Hautman, an off-screen character, won a contest to have his art printed on twenty-nine-cent postage stamps; the real Hautman's fifteen-dollar duck stamps are now worth $195. They're rather pretty ducks, too.

A belated welcome.

It occurs to me that I've written several posts on this blog without ever properly introducing myself. So:

 I am Mitchell. Welcome to my internet home. This is an intermittently updated blog about popular culture, notably books. My current ambition is to make it a regular reading log in which I check in at least twice a week about what I've been reading and what I plan to read in the near future.

In the physical world, I live with my wife, Jamie, and our two cats in an apartment in Northeast Portland. I currently play with flour and sugar for a living; my future career goals include freelance writing and copy editing.

  

The title of my blog comes from a passage in P. G. Wodehouse's novel Right Ho, Jeeves, in which a timid, hapless gentlemen accidentally gets very drunk on whiskey and goes on about how great it feels: "'I would be the last to deny that it tunes up the system. I could bite a tiger.... Did I say I could bite a tiger?... Make it two tigers. I could chew holes in a steel door.'"  That's roughly the tone of ridiculous bravado that I like to keep in the front of my mind when I write.

Instead of hibernation

Here’s some of the pop culture that’s helping me get through the midwinter chill: 

The “Fuck fuck fuck” scene from The Wire. Jamie and I finally started watching the show this week after years of planning to get around to it, and man is it worth it. We’re five episodes in, and I’m already wishing it would never end. My favorite scene so far is a bit in the fourth episode where two detectives investigate a crime scene and find vital evidence while saying nothing but the occasional variation on “fuck” or “motherfucker.” The words change meaning every time they say them, of course, as in “Fuck, I pinched my thumb in my tape measure” or “Motherfuck, we’ve been examining this scene from entirely the wrong angle.” The detectives are old partners, and there’s a friendly, almost casual vibe to the scene that somehow fits right in with the grimness of the murder they’re investigating. When the scene was over (it’s less than five minutes long), Jamie and I looked at each other and immediately rewound the DVD to the beginning of the scene so we could watch it again. I now try to make sure to watch it once a week.

Johnny Cash’s cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” (and video). I’m not much into Nine Inch Nails, judging by the small amount of their stuff I’ve heard, but I do like Cash, especially the stuff he did in his late years with American Records: he was  one of those fortunate singers whose voice just seemed to get better as he got older. His elegiac version of this song is, I think, one of the best things he ever did, especially in the context of its remarkable music video, which juxtaposes film of a seventy-year-old Cash with archival footage of his much younger, healthier self. As the song goes on, the older images come thicker and faster, until in the final chorus they’re constantly shifting, as if Cash’s life is flashing before his eyes (indeed, he died the year after the song and video were released). It’s heartbreaking, but it’s also impossible to stop watching the older Cash’s face, which looks simultaneously exhausted and... not bright-eyed, exactly, but alert and clear. He seems ready for the close of his life.

George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (currently in the middle of volume two, A Clash of Kings). Soon enough, too soon, I will be one of the many, many readers—tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?—impatiently waiting for Martin’s fifth Ice and Fire book, but right now I’m still innocently enjoying the early going of his epic. So far it’s a mix of one part high fantasy to one part intricate royal intrigue—think along the lines of an Arthurian romance combined with I, Claudius or The Lion in Winter—and it moves along at a generally bullet train-like pace. It has a huge and ever-increasing cast of characters, including some satisfyingly complicated villains, and Martin is still in the midst of teasing out the answers to the mysteries that catalyzed a lot of the action in the first book. There are roughly eight easily distinguishable story threads at the moment, alternating nicely between violent adventure stuff and crafty political machinations. I’m a bit too short on sleep to conjure up more specific examples of the awesomeness, but the series is every bit as good as I was given to expect.