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Why, yes. I would jump off a bridge just like everybody else.

Kelly; Gatsby; Ellington; cats; Picasso; Yeats; Keaton; O’Connor; To Have and Have Not; de Kooning; The Who; Larkin; dunno from Trollope, so pass; Holliday; can I pass without admitting that I’ve yet to go through a Russian phase; I think I’d prefer Greene, but pass; Graham; vegetarian, but burgers; Letterman, for fuck’s sake; Cat Power; Verdi; Monroe; Cash; I’ll punt the Amis question; Mitchum; Morris; Vermeer; Tchaikovsky; this is like a question between wine and, you know, that light stuff you drink when it’s hot; Coward; Grosse Pointe Blank; pass; and pass again; Turner; also, I’ve never really gone through a ’50s revisionist Western period, so pass; comedy; fall, though we prefer autumn; Sopranos; Gershwin and Gershwin; James; sunrise (one loves more the rarer seen); Porter; Mac, for God’s sake; New York ditto; um, pass; Van Gogh; Elvis Costello; blog; Olivier; which one has “Luck be a Lady”?; Chinatown; Election; minimalism; Daffy; the very question is telling, but hey: post, baby; Batman; Emmylou Harris has really long hair, and I like her voice, but I know little else and nothing at all about Lucinda Williams, so pass; Johnson, because, hey, dictionary; I’m going to, um, pass; Dick Van Dyke; Eames; I love Double Indemnity, but I haven’t seen Out of the Past, and I want to, so pass; Die Zauberflöte, so pass; green; Midsummer’s; opera; theatre (theater is the building, dear boy); one could not possibly decide this one without more context, so pass; Northwest; Sargent; I haven’t even read enough Kundera, so pass; Music Man (another head-scratcher); I’m a vegetarian, I eat sushi, do the math; I’m going to punt this one, Alex; Albee; I haven’t read Dove, so pass; who? what? (pass); Wright; again with the who and the what and the pass; watercolor; subway (when I can get it); Stravinsky; neither, but crunchy, if I must; mumble mumble (pass); Mozart; the ’20s; Moby-Dick; I need to get a grip on Mann, so pass; I’ve heard one, I think, but not the other, or maybe I have, but anyway, pass; Dickinson; Lincoln; Mann; Italian; and I think I’ll be blasphemous and agree: piano; ate them once in Italy and, well, that’s not why I’m a vegetarian, but I’ll have to go with no; long—no, longer—keep going, no, I need some more—a bit more—another epilogue? Sure—oh, a few more pages couldn’t hurt anybody—is that it? Are you done?; swing (which feels like a failing); Judgment, baby. —Which gives me a TCCI of 55%; that, and a buck-fifty, and I can get a 16 oz. coffee tomorrow, with a little room for cream.

  1. Dan Layman-Kennedy    Jul 16, 02:41 am    #
    It may say everything you need to know about me that in most of the categories I really care about, my answer is "A small slice of each, please."

    I mean, come on. A world where I have to choose bewtween acoustic and electric, or Coward and Wilde, is not one I should like much to live in.

    (He delurked to say.)

  2. Bryant    Jul 16, 07:49 am    #
    I'd buy the coffee, if it came to it. This Phair thing -- I still don't quite understand. It's not that I don't like Liz Phair, because I do, but it's my opinion that when I put on the CD and heard the mild-voiced woman from an 80s pop band singing, so casual and blunt and direct, "You fucked it up..."

    Well, I think there was more impact in that. The bitterness and the anger is all the more potent for being clear-eyed. It's the difference between a hangover and cleaning up last night's wreckage with a clear head.

    Plus there's Juliana Hatfield on that album, so.

  3. --k.    Jul 18, 07:41 am    #
    To be fair, Teachout says some if not most of the choices are supposed to be razor-thin, and I'd hope he didn't think they were fixed in be-all, end-all stone: heck, I took the test twice, once on a lark and once a bit later for this, and I flopped on a couple of choices. (My score stayed the same, though.)

    And Liz Phair did one really good album and one pretty good album and then what? (Juliana Hatfield? Didn't she sing in that video with the giant hissing cockroach?)

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