summer plans

We had a good Neanderthal meeting on Monday night to discuss Caputo's The Voyage. Following Lumpkin's last-minute suggestion for a location change, we met at the new Fado and sat upstairs on the new roof deck on a lovely late-spring evening. The usual suspects were Lumpkin, Parker, Mullen, and me, and we were joined for the first time by my friend and colleague Andy Delfino. He gets high marks for a) having actually read the book, and b) convincingly lecturing on Post-Modernism (Mullen gets high marks for pretending to be interested when what he really wanted to talk about was Lost).

Anyway, we've decided to make Fado our new meeting location. After all, unlike Fox and Hounds, they closed for renovations and you can actually tell they did something. Plus, it's evidently more convenient for the hinterland-dwelling Mullen. And the scenery is better. The view of the neighborhood from up there is nice, too.

In the interest of time, we went ahead and set a date and picked a book for June, bypassing the usual intermediate step of pretending to care what those who didn't attend might want. Our next book will be White Noise, by Don Delillo, and our next meeting date is Monday, June 23rd. We also decided that the Neanderthals would take a summer break over July and August and would kick off our eighth season in September with a weekend in the mountains (details TBA) to discuss Charles Frazier's Thirteen Moons. We'll iron out logistics about that one later . . . for now, though, White Noise, June 23rd at Fado.

EDIT: Hey, wonder if I'm related to this guy?

next meeting, May 19th

We've set Monday, May 19th, for the next mustering of the Neanderthal horde. We'll invade the new-and-imperceptibly-improved Fox and Hounds at our usual 7:00 time. The book this time around, by popular vote (or is it more like a caucus?), is Philip Caputo's cleverly named The Voyage. Happy reading! (Though I'm guessing you probably won't be as "happy" as you were while reading A Sport and a Pastime.)

new book choices

I'll leave it to Lumpy to report on last week's meeting, as I had to coach a soccer match and thus arrived late (but early enough to take part in the speculation on why his girlfriend read A Sport and a Pastime). Here, however, are the book choices for next month: The Voyage, by Philip Caputo; The Nonexistent Knight, by Italo Calvino; Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer; and Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut. The poll is open for a week . . . feel free to add your comments here and lobby for your preferred choice. We'll set a meeting date shortly for sometime in May.

what's on deck for the Neanderthals?

Let me first say that I'm sorry for the delay in posting after our last meeting--I've been inundated with the day-to-day of getting a new Varsity soccer season up and running. At any rate, we had a good meeting at the end of last month--Lumpkin, Enloe, Parker and me gathering to discuss All the King's Men. Unexpectedly, and rather inexplicably, Fox and Hounds was closed for cleaning and renovations ("who ever heard of a bar's closing for cleaning" mused Chip), so we all sauntered next door to The Big Easy, which was, in retrospect, a far more appropriate locale for discussing this particular novel.

I'll leave it for others to comment further about the book, except to offer this: while I luxuriated in the poetry of Robert Penn Warren's descriptions (a consensus opinion among us), I had trouble at times reconciling this voice as coming from a 1st person narrator--if I take a step back and think about it a little, I just can't see Jack Burden speaking or writing this way.

Anyway, what's next for us? In keeping with the roughly bimonthly schedule we've adopted since reconstituting, looks like we should plan our next meeting for late March or thereabouts--we'll work out a date soon to suit the schedules of our regulars. The book choices we agreed upon putting up to a vote are as follows: On the Road, by Jack Kerouac; A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess; A Sport and a Pastime, by James Salter; Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays, by Albert Camus; and White Noise, by Don DeLillo. I should mention that all of these works are nice and short . . . probably a welcome change after Crime and Punishment and All The King's Men. Weigh in by the end of this week!