City of Coughs

I'm sick with... something. It feels like an annoying hybrid of cold and flu. Fluld, if you will. I tried to go in to work this morning, but after flulding it up for an hour and a half - and spelling "scholarship" as "scholar schip" in my germ-addled haze - I went home to rest.

I've been indoors since on a steady tea and lentil diet, alternating between watching the Hustler, knitting, reading and Facebook stalking my friends who have the good sense and strong immune system not to get sick. It's all left me feeling a little gamey.


The reading material hasn't helped much either. It's The New York Trilogy, by Paul Auster. The prose moves quickly, it has some kind of plot, but in the end I'm left feeling hungry for something meatier. Between the linguistic games and painfully postmodern flourishes, it made me want a real detective story like nothing else. Like a lot of pomo fiction, it doesn't have the courage of its own genre convictions. Things start out well, and then plots deflate upon themselves, the characters veer between sounding like NYU professors and private dicks, then - wham- it's done. Still, when it's good, it's very good, so I'll put on my pile of "Books I Would Enjoy More If I Was A New Yorker," beside Motherless Brooklyn.

I do find that Penguin Classics cover by Art Spiegelman to be charming though. And maybe I would have liked it better if I hadn't been flulding my way through part of it.