A. Promise him a romantic home-cooked meal.
B. Make it all vegetarian.

You can broil and stuff an avocado with polenta and chestnuts. You can hand-shape a rustic tart with homemade crust and vegetables from your garden. You can put all this on a plate with a fancy double-gold-medal-winning chardonnay and perfectly cooked green beans (also from the garden).

He will eat it. He will appreciate it. He will agree that vegetables are important and acknowledge your concern that neither of you get enough of them. He will reiterate that he likes vegetables okay. He will thank you for your trouble and tell you that you are wonderful for making him such a nice meal.

But through the whole thing, he will still be looking around for the main course.

I recently got around to reading The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. I had put it off for several reasons. For one thing, the whole Oprah controversy turned me off. For another, Jonathan Franzen seemed pretentious and arrogant in the interviews I read with him. And he listed among his favorite writers the very same ones I dislike for their macho grandstanding and general lack of emotion and humor.

So I was thrilled to find that I enjoyed The Corrections. This was no macho, humorless man book! This was an interesting, complex book of familial relationships with fascinating characters and an oddly optimistic ending. I was delighted. I decided to reexamine Franzen. I dug out some old interviews with him I had read back when The Corrections came out and … he still rubbed me the wrong way.

Well, apparently my initial impression was not that far off. At least, according to the New York Times review of Franzen’s new memoir The Discomfort Zone, which they call “an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass: petulant, pompous, obsessive, selfish and overwhelmingly self-absorbed.”

[Franzen] tells us that he felt put upon by public entreaties to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina. (”Why should I pony up for this particular disaster?”) … He describes how he once “dropped a frog into a campfire and watched it shrivel and roll down the flat side of a log.” He describes reasoning that “not having kids freed me altogether” from having to worry about things like global warming: “Not having kids was my last, best line of defense against the likes of Al Gore.” And he describes the judgmental outlook that he and his wife shared for many years: “Deploring other people — their lack of perfection — had always been our sport.”

Yikes! I suppose it’s lucky for Franzen that he is a talented writer. But, after reading this, I don’t think I would ever want to hang out with him.

UPDATE: Now that I’ve listened to Terry Gross’s interview with Franzen about his memoir, I find Franzen endearingly fumbling and more relatable. Confusing.

It is birthday month around here. I know six people who are celebrating their birthdays this month, including Kyle, my mother-in-law, and my dad. And, last night, we learned that Kyle’s cousin Tonya (maid-of-honor at my wedding) gave birth to a healthy baby girl, Emma Lynn. August birthday number seven!

On Friday, we had a pizza party to celebrate both Kyle and our friend Chris’s birthday. Around 15 of our friends showed up at Old Chicago Pizza in Petaluma.

(Leona, me, my giant arm, and Krista at the pizza parlor)

Afterwards, we saw Snakes on a Plane, which was awesome. Justin squealed and kicked his legs every time something happened on screen, making him my new favorite person to see scary movies with.

Afterwards, Leona made Kyle a Snakes-on-a-Cake cake. And, with a nod to Kyle’s love of Linux, Troy wrapped Kyle’s present in Snakes-on-a-Penguin wrapping paper that Troy designed himself.

(Gummy Worms and Army Men battle it out on the cake)

(The caption says “Nobody Fux with Tux”)

On Sunday, we went to my parent’s house and had another joint birthday party, this time celebrating Kyle and my dad’s birthday. My grandfather, who recently passed away, upholstered chairs for a living, so my mom had all these vintage fabrics from the 1930s-1980s to give me. Many of them were hand-painted in England and France, often with intricate bird and nature scenes.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with them yet. Right now I just like looking at them.

This weekend, Kyle and I drove to Portland to see Sleater-Kinney’s last concert. The band, which is one of my favorites, is breaking up. It’s a bummer for a lot of reasons, among them:

1. They just released their best album ever
2. They are one of the few bands today creating music that is politically relevant, but still interesting and fun
3. They appeal to both men and woman, a rarity for an all-women band
4. They rock

We drove up on Friday, spent Saturday in the city, and drove back on Sunday. Since it’s a nine-hour drive to Portland, Kyle and I spent a lot of time in the car. But it was worth it. The concert was excellent and I got to go to Powell’s, where I bought several books, including a biography on Eugene O’Neill, the play Medea, and maps of Rome and Florence for our upcoming trip to Italy. I also discovered that I still get mad at Oregon drivers and that smoked trout goes really well with eggs.

(Corin Tucker, Janet Weiss, Carrie Brownstein)

Even though I’ve listened to Sleater-Kinney since college, I’ve only seen them three times in concert, twice in San Francisco and once in Portland. It took seeing them live to really understand how good the band is. If I hadn’t, it probably wouldn’t have sunk in that Janet Weiss is one of the best drummers, ever. She is flat-out phenomenal. She is also possibly one of the most unphotogenic people in the world. In all the pictures I’ve seen of her, she looks 45 and tired. In real life, she has a child-like, wide-eyed face that I guess the camera hates. Beyond all that, she is juggling so many balls as a drummer that I find her mesmerizing.

Before the band went on, Eddie Vedder came out on stage and played a folk song about the war and then sang “You Belong To Me” with Janet. He summed up the evening by saying that he had always wished he could have seen The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Keith Moon, etc’s last shows, but he was grateful to be there to see Sleater-Kinney’s.

The band absolutely rocked throughout the show and two encores, going out with a definite bang. At the end, they played a choked-up version of “One More Hour” with lyrics like, “in one more hour / I will be gone / in one more hour / I’ll leave this room.” I left at 12:30 a.m., sweaty and tired, and feeling it was one of the best shows I’ve ever been to.

I’m very curious why the band broke up. It probably has to do with Corin having two small kids and their being together for 11 years and besides, bands don’t do well when they stay together forever. But to go out at the top of your game is also a little sad.

I still hold out hope that they may reunite after awhile. Or go on to make something even better.

Listen to Sleater-Kinney here.

For an audio book, I’m listening to William S. Burroughs read Junkie, his autobiographical novel about heroin addiction during World War II. I’m interested in the subject of heroin abuse and have read other books on the subject, but Junkie is old-fashioned and the narrator’s emotions are oddly detached from his subject. So for the most part, the book is Burroughs rambling about junkies he knew back in the day. And, I don’t know, maybe it’s his old-man voice or his out-of-date slang, but throughout the whole thing, all I can think of is one of Grandpa Simpson’s rants:

…like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ‘em. “Give me five bees for a quarter,” you’d say…

It may be too late to mention this, but I have two articles out this week that you can probably still pick up. One is a restaurant review in the North Bay Bohemian of Romeo’s Pizza in Petaluma. I gave an overall positive review.

Secondly, I wrote an article on National Forgiveness Day for the Pacific Sun. I interviewed Michael Berg, whose son Nick was beheaded by Muslim radicals in Iraq. Michael is working hard on forgiving not only the people who killed his son, but the Bush Administration for using his son’s name to promote a war that Michael is against. It was very interesting listening to his thoughts on forgiveness. Check the article out if you get a chance.