One thing I’ve just discovered about our new pier-and-beam foundation home: if you strike the floor in the living room, it sets the supporting beams a-quiver. Depending upon the temperature, the beams produce a wonderful, low B natural or B flat that can be felt as much as heard in the living room. Neato.

YAAAAAAA-hoooo! Our Denton house is finally on the market! 4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, 2 living areas, office, fenced yard, corner lot, new carpet, great trees, nice neighborhood. I’ll provide a link to the MLS listing once it’s on-line.

This week I had Accordion Crimes, by E. Annie Proux, in the player. It’s an interesting book, because it abandons the Aristotelian dramatic conventions — exposition, conflict, climax, demoument — and instead follows an accordion from its creation, through a series of owners, each with his own interesting (and usually tragic) story, and finally to its end. Unfortunately, there’s a reason than traditional drama is as successful as it is, and I completely failed to be drawn into the story. The individual episodes were moderately interesting, but without an overarching theme or goal holding the story together, breaking the novel into separate short stories would have been an improvement.

Seth brought it to my attention today that I hadn’t provided any updates on the house situation recently. We have just a bit of base molding to get in at the old house, and then it’s ready for Realtors, MLS, visitors, and a For Sale sign. There hasn’t been any significant change in the new house situation — we’re still in it, and still hope that it will be freed from the shackles of bankruptcy proceedings around the same time our old house sells. Interestingly, the assistant pastor of the new church and his wife have chosen a house only 3 blocks from ours, so we have that much more reason to want to stay.

I’ve posted the latest family update, which includes one brother visiting from Georgia, and another getting married. For you visual learners, photos are at the bottom.

I finished Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club over the weekend. (I haven’t gotten to the movie version yet.) It’s a gritty, funny, saddening, interesting piece of work that makes very vivid the nihilistic angst that characterizes so many of my generation. But instead of despairing or abandoning themselves to hedonism, the characters instead reach for an existentialist validation of their own existence and worth in hand-to-hand fights. The writing is excellent, and the book a worthwhile read. I’ll be anxious to see how the film version stacks up.

The latest chapters in the ongoing discussion of rational Christianity with my atheist friend Mark Morgan are going on over at his website. It starts with Mark’s response to a letter to the editor on religion and homosexuality. My latest rant is here for your perusal.

One of the more interesting tapes I’ve happened across at the library recently was a collection of James Thurber stories, interspersed with commentary from other authors and critics. The only encounters I’d previously enjoyed with the author was The 13 Clocks, which my roommate at the time had brought home from the library and which I subsequently foisted upon my family during a long car trip, and the mandatory reading of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty in High School. It was delightful not only to get to hear more of his work, but also to find out about his artistic talents and his life.

My friend and table-tennis arch-nemesis Jason Harmon just tipped me off to the fact that Netflix now has a Marquee program that allows you to rent all the DVD movies you want for $20/month, delivered and returned to your mailbox. I’m sorely tempted, considering how many times Kathy and I have had the 10:45pm “Do you want to take the movie back to Hastings, or should I do it?” discussion.

Kathy and I watched Being John Malkovich the other night. This wonderful film features John Cusak as a bedraggled puppeteer who finds a little door in his little office that leads into John Malkovich’s head for 15 minutes at a time. The film’s delightfully outre sense of humor had me shaking my head and laughing out loud every couple of minutes. Make a point of seeing this one.