My new job could be a lot worse. I get to work in Santa Monica, my commute is pretty short – ten or twelve minutes – I’ve got free parking, I only work five hours a day, I’ve got an hour and a half for lunch, and I don’t take my work home with me. Too bad it only pays three bucks an hour. Since I can’t talk about anything else about what I do all day, I’ll be talking about what I’m doing on my breaks, frequent and unusually generous as they are.



In celebration of the fact that my (nearly) entire Tintin collection has now made the trip from my old bedroom in Anchorage to its own shelf in our new house, I’ve decided to reread all of the books from The Land of the Soviets to the unfinished Alpha-Art. I’m on jury duty until the 24th, and I’ve got 24 books to read, and since I’ve made a lot of headway on the Infinite Jest project in the last week or so, I should be able to get through them all.

I can’t remember the last time I read the first Tintin book; I didn’t get ahold of it until the mid-’90s, I don’t think, and it’s frankly only interesting as a historical document. Unlike the other books, I’ve probably only read it once before. The book has a consistent emphasis on miraculous and/or narrow escapes; in fact, it gets to be a somewhat tiresome string of unbelievable escapes, the likes of which will feature in later books but never in such quantity or ridiculousness. Snowy has his somewhat world-weary nature already, but is also truly grateful anytime disaster is averted. Tintin’s celebratory jig is there, and Hergé’s interest in beautifully rendered and accurate vehicles is in place as well. Some of the bad guy faces are proto-Bordurian, and a few other interesting tidbits can be found, but overall, it’s a bit of a one-note debut.