So this is the house — please don't misunderstand me — this is the house I've continued to live in. I mean mentally. I ranged all through these rooms from childhood on. Until they reflected who I was, as a mirror would. I don't mean merely that its furnishings displayed our family's personality, our tastes. I don't mean that. It was as if the walls, the stairs, the rooms, the dimensions, the layout were as much me as I was. Is this coherent? Wherever I looked, I saw me. I saw me in some way measured out. Do you experience that?

–E.L. Doctorow, "Edgemont Drive"

Tonight I joined in Arcade Fire's The Wilderness Downtown site, and "joined in" started this sentence because "watched" would have been too passive and "experienced" would have been too futuristic and too embracing for comfort just yet. But I wondered on Facebook what kind of award we should give the site. It was that good. The band worked with Google and others to bring We Used to Wait, from the new album, alive in Chrome. I wouldn't want to spoil more if you haven't clicked.

But I would say I like the window effect. The song has gotten decent play on my desk at home, and the song excels at creating anticipation while letting a host of sounds spin up, curving from nothing into light.

Each flash inflects for attention and disappears on a palette that acts busy but ultimately renders invisible. The browser, meanwhile, is the window. This browser has done a better job than any before of acting as a frame and nothing more, save occasional smudges and half-hours of angled sunlight. The narrative in The Wilderness Downtown is your look outside and all it inspired, and that view is now a challenging one.

With this digital vision, what I like just as much about the narrative is the democracy. An album called and themed The Suburbs connects with some, and for me it only connects about halfway. For others, the album can't possibly reach them. But this song, glimpsing life out the window, is more micro, more likely to live in a personal, American modularity. In possibility and its frustrations, we trust and mistrust and trust again. Short of a deed, rarely has an address field proved more liberating.

The Chicago attitude is straightforward and unpretentious, smart and direct, opinionated and funny. We're tough, but we've got heart. Approachable to strangers. Even the prettiest girls in Chicago eat hotdogs and drink beer. What more could you want in a town?

GloNo ("Rock and Roll Can Save Your Life") chief Jake Brown moves.

Twinkle, twinkle, little bat, how I wonder where you're at, up above the…

"Some of the city's best hot dogs," Tasting Table said. It was enough to go. I got the Lewis Carroll dog, with coleslaw on top and a side of mac and cheese, and friend Melissa got the Wonderland dog, topped with mac and cheese. I liked mine, but hers was a true winner. Next time in there, I need to try the Psychedelic Dog, topped with crushed potato chips, pineapple and cheese. Yes, you get tea before eating.

As two photos capture little of a Mad Hatter meal, what with the tea and hotdogs and all, here's basically video footage, via Katie Rogers.

A blink of lightning, then
a rumor, a grumble of white rain
growing in volume, rustling over the ground,
drenching the gravel in a wash of sound.
Drops tap like timpani or shine
like quavers on a line.

It rings on exposed tin,
a suite for water, wind and bin,
plinky Poulenc or strongly groaning Brahms’
rain-strings, a whole string section that describes
the very shapes of thought in warm
self-referential vibes

and spreading ripples. Soon
the whispering roar is a recital.
Jostling rain-crowds, clamorous and vital,
struggle in runnels through the afternoon.

More from Derek Mahon's "The Thunder Shower" here.

If you write "LEFT HAND" on anything, I may buy it. If you write "LEFT HAND" on beer, I'm bound to buy and drink the beer with my left hand. Laura, Amy, Shakti, and I tried the beer garden at Arlington's Westover Market yesterday afternoon, and we had a good but confused time.

We had lunch, had a round and left with many questions. For instance, was there a keg somewhere? Some people had plastic cups. T. Table seemed to indicate as much. But, after wandering, looking for signage and trying to determine who worked there and who did not, we were referred to a wall of single bottles in the grocery store, at the opposite end from the beer garden. We then bought the bottles at the registers and then took them outside. Shakti had her bottle opener, fortunately.

The beers were tasty, but the process felt like a lot of work. Maybe, in our process-related jobs, we were biased toward confusion. Or maybe the garden was staffed differently at night when bigger crowds came.

Don't get me wrong. I'd go back for more. I'd never visited the market before, but it was friendly, bigger than I expected and had a good mix of the ordinary and the unexpected. The food we got the deli counter was tasty, and the butcher was a nice guy. While the garden itself was just off Washington Boulevard, adjoined a post office and backed up to a parking lot, the space worked. Some trees, some tents, some fans that were inactive in yesterday's beautiful weather, some comfortable chairs. I love sitting down in a chair that looks metal and finding it has strong plastic with some give and sway to it. Just a chair, yes, but still.

Previous beer garden visits:
-August 2009. Pix: America wants to see Salzburg rap.
-August 2009. Pix: Prague, part three places for no respectable man.

For months now, intended for blogging, I've had two links about prayer in my browser bookmarks bar. The first, "Sermon, God Give us Grace," an analysis, is now gone from the Web. The other is a Yahoo! Answers where a reader asks the name of the prayer "that starts with lord give me the strength and ends with the wisdom to know the difference."

That blog post hasn't happened — one of many that have sat in draft for weeks or months amid life busyness — but thankfully, Yale has now solved this problem. In the Yale Alumni Magazine, not surprisingly more high-falutin' than the Northwestern alum magazine, a Yale law librarian looks at the Serenity Prayer. That prayer, of course, is what our Yahoo! Answers pal sought and was the topic of the other bookmark as well.

The prayer interests me because of differences between the popular version and the original. Yale's piece interests me because it takes up exactly that issue. Whatever your faith, hang around for the textual.

The first verse of the popularized version:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

The first verse of the original version:

God, give us grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.

The prayer's writer was theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. The Yale article quotes his daughter's book about the differences. She dislikes how the popular "omits the spiritually correct but difficult idea" of praying for grace, and she doesn't like changing "Courage to change the things which should be changed" to "courage to change the things I can."

She frames the debate vs. Alcoholics Anonymous' use of the popular version. At the bottom of the Yale page, a letter-writer questions that approach, noting the good AA has done with that version. I find the "should be changed" to be a stunning, provocative textual difference — that's what made me bookmark those old links in the first place — but the popular is fine too. AA has done great work with its words.

To put one word in front of another, in the direction of the world, is a challenge no matter the topic or vocabulary. I guess I've been thinking of the two versions of the prayer as stages. First, finding some words, we go after what we see. Then, finding what we see is true, we chase what we believe. Daily, we hope for the peace to accept or enunciate.

And maybe that's your line. Maybe that's how the two versions of this prayer both work. One's to recover, internal. The other is what's next.

Big close-to-home events make the best bloggers rise of the occasion. I give you Casey's work for his brother's wedding this summer. Maybe you don't know Casey. I don't care. His lessons from serving as DJ for the wedding are a must-read for anyone who's ever been a DJ, gotten married, attended a wedding, or danced. I'm the latter two. A lesson:

Pander. I hate “Party in the USA.” You hate “Party in the USA.” You know what song pulled people onto the dance floor like a powerful tornado of suck sent by the devil himself? Party in the motherfucking USA. Weep for America later; any song that appeals simultaneously to the three G’s — grandma, grandkids and the gays — deserves a spot on your playlist.

The wedding was a ways back, so what prompts my post today is the YouTube arrival of his toast. Again, don't know him? Doesn't matter.

Unrelated to his brother's vows, I'd like to thank Casey for introducing me this summer to Robyn's Dancing on My Own and the Scissor Sisters' Running Out. Both have lent beats for propulsion-needed mornings, a type of morning occurring more this summer than in a good long time.

Along with "What would I look like with a beard?" (where your search finds a post from a year and a half before the Cooper beard arrival), an odder source of regular traffic to this blog is from searches on "Tell the bartender I think I'm falling in love." Searchers find my little post about the Ted Leo song Bottled in Cork, which has that lyric in the chorus.

So, here's one more for the Googlers. Via Nerve (more than just naked people), we get the song's video, sending up Green Day's Broadway version of American Idiot. (Which friend Annie tells me is worth seeing.)

On Tony Bourdain's new list in Men's Health (via The Morning News), I'm glad to see I once went to two of the list's restaurants in the same weekend, Russ & Daughters and Katz's Deli. Granted, they're two of the cheapest spots on the list, and both are down the street from my brother's apartment. But still, that counts, right? Just wait til I go to Per Se and elBulli in the same weekend. Then you'll be impressed.

Russ & Daughters started as a pushcart nearly a century ago, and it now serves some of the last traditional Eastern European Jewish-style herring and smoked belly lox, sable, and sturgeon. And since you're close, walk down a few doors to Katz's to remind yourself how pastrami is done right. This is what New Yorkers do better than anybody else. And here's where they do it.

What became interesting about it was trying to understand the structure of the fictional moment and then represent that structure. Of course, if you are just using PowerPoint slide templates, the kinds of structures that you can convey are limited. They are divided into categories—relationship structures, process structures, hierarchies—

That's Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, which, as you know, Elizabeth wants me to read, talking to The Morning News about how she outlined her book in PowerPoint. Seriously. The entire thing. With complex slides and all. It's absolutely fascinating to hear in the interview and to see in action, on her site and embedded below.

Looking back, I do wonder why I was determined to write in PowerPoint. It’s hard for me to even fully recapture the urgency of that goal. But I think, really, in the end, the answer was thematic. The book was so much about pauses, and it’s so constructed around pauses—as you say, there are gaps and leaps. This is all different ways of saying there are things that are missing in the book—and in a way PowerPoint is a program that’s built around giving us little snapshots without the connective tissue. It’s all pauses.