At a holiday party Saturday night, friend Greg struggled with naming a literary term, and I blanked on the word completely as well. If only The New Yorker could let James Wood do a glossary of rock explanations for such terms. This November passage of his has drawn praise from many corners, but I'd be remiss if I didn't say it stopped me in my tracks too.

On "Won't Get Fooled Again," the drumming is both staggeringly vital, with Moon at once rhythmically right and massively spontaneous. On both that song and "Behind Blue Eyes," you can hear him do something that was instinctive, probably, but which is hardly ever done in normal rock drumming: breaking for a fill, Moon fails to stop at the obvious end of the musical phrase and continues with his rolling break, over the line and into the start of the next phrase. In poetry, this failure to stop at the end of the line, this challenge to metrical closure, this desire to get more in, is called enjambment. Moon is the drummer of enjambment.

I like enjambment. I love cross-pollinated rock enjambment.

Recently in The New Yorker about procrastination: "Victor Hugo would write naked and tell his valet to hide his clothes so that he'd be unable to go outside when he was supposed to be writing." Last spring, I fell three months behind on my New Yorker reading. If only I'd had a valet.

I'm still not sure how it happened. While I take my subscription more seriously than most — every issue, cover to cover, listings included, for the last seven years — a kind of regular mental exercise — I had never fallen so far behind before. The issue stack rose to half a foot high on my coffee table. March, April, May, until I climbed back on the wagon.

I thought about declaring bankruptcy. But I hadn't made my payments for seven years just to give up. I'd fallen behind before, and I'd worked my way through. So, I set out to do the same. I read on planes, at the beach, on the couch to get tired at night, and on every subway ride to and from the new job. When a colleague borrowed one copy on a flight and lost it, I printed my remaining 40 pages in the issue from the Web.

About a week ago, I finished the last issue in the house, but I was too close to the next issue's arrival to declare New Yorker Zero. As a two- time veteran of Inbox Zero, I believe declaring zero on content means the next piece can't be on its way. There needs to be some clearance room. So, I decided to go for Conde Zero. In my Remnickian quest, I'd fallen three issues behind on Wired, another good cover-to-cover read.

I finished the last Wired yesterday and the most recent New Yorker this evening, with a Skins game as incentive. Another quote from the valet story felt perfect: "Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing… Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all."

Tonight, I'm happy about my answer to that question. I'm glad I didn't give up. I'm relieved to be done. And I'm ready for the next issue. For you, here are some of the passages that made the reading worth it.

1. From the listings:

For those who are unmoved by Gormley’s patented pathos of the human figure in industrial materials, he provides a winningly abstract tour de force: a walk-in skeletal architecture of slim metal bars in nested rectilinear forms — sort of LeWittian, only too complex to be grasped at a glance — painted phosphorescent white, aglow in a pitch-dark room. Every ten minutes, fifteen thousand watts’ worth of floodlights clang on, briefly, to recharge the luminescence and, incidentally, to rattle the hell out of you.

2. Covering fashion-mashing site Polyvore, with a Yahoo Pipes past:

Sadri, who is thirty-five and projects an air of serenity that belies all the frenetic data-crunching around him, was born in Iran. “I grew up playing Legos,” he said. “I think that was an important factor in shaping the person that I am.” When you put on clothes, he said, “you are making that sort of assembly from pieces that you have—this is the Lego analogy—and it’s highly integrated with your identity.”

3. A Saul Bellow letter, about holding back in a piece of writing:

But there is a certain diffidence about me, not very obvious socially, to my own mind, that prevents me from going all out, as you call it. I assemble the dynamite but I am not ready to touch off the fuse. Why? Because I am working toward something and have not yet arrived. I once mentioned to you, I think, that one of the things that made life difficult for me was that I wanted to write before I had sufficient maturity to write as “high” as I wished and so I had a very arduous and painful apprenticeship and still am undergoing it. This journeyman idea has its drawbacks as well as its advantages. It makes me a craftsman – and few writers now are that – but it gives me a refuge from the peril of final accomplishment. “Lord, pardon me, I’m still preparing, not fully a man as yet.” I’m like the young man in the Gospels, or have been till lately. “Give all thou hast and follow me,” says Christ. The young man goes away to think it over and so is lost. There’s a limit to thinking it over…

4. Conductor William Christie on early-music playing:

“Students have been taught to play exactly what they see in front of them… You rigorously follow all the instructions communicated by the composer.” In early music, he went on, the attitude is quite different: “Don’t play what’s on the page, or the score will be dead, deader than a doorknob. You’ve got to become a specialist. Do something to the score, help it along, nurture it, give it substance. Understand that it is a partial document—a document that wants to be completed.”

5. On the possibility the Odyssey wasn't what it seemed:

At the heart of its narrative Russian dolls and suggestive punning is a profound, ongoing exploration of identity: what does it mean, after all, if your cleverness, the trick that at once defines you and which you need to stay alive, reduces you to being “no one”? At the end of the Odyssey, you get the answers to questions that start forming in the first line, the first word of which is andra, “man”: to be a man, a human being, wildly inventive and creative but inevitably subject to dreadful forces beyond our control — which is to say, death — is to be something wonderful and, at the same time, “nothing.” The clever games that the Odyssey plays are, in the end, games worth playing.

6. From an April issue, poet Kay Ryan's "That Will to Divest."

Do they fire you on your first day? Do you have to keep trying it 'til you get it right? Do they help you? Are there instructions? The New Yorker:

The Dyson administrative headquarters are on the upper floor of the research center, in a large open space divided by low partitions. Executive offices and meeting rooms are placed around sides and have glass walls. The youthful staff members dress informally. Dyson forbids the wearing of suits and ties, as well as the writing of memos; works must talk to each other about their ideas. (He also requires all new employees to take apart and reassemble a Dyson vacuum cleaner their first day on the job."

Via Romenesko, an interview with Farley Katz, who graduated from college and helped run the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest:

TCB: Did you ever come across any Caption Contest entries that were not just not funny, but also really disturbing?

FK: There was a guy on the West Coast who would submit really gross sexual stuff every week. After a while, he just stopped. This made me sad.

We never got any top-quality abuse for such a duration at USA TODAY — we were quick in handing out suspensions, even for the excellent "F_Patrick_Cooper" — but it would've entertained the moderators. If you're going to be abusive on digital news sites, go big or go home.

#untoldlessonsfromtheonlinecommunitycookbook

Having not seen The Switch with Jennifer Aniston and Jason Bateman, but having just read the inspiration — Jeffrey Eugenides' 1996 Baster:

1. The abortions.
2. Dan Rather.
3. Mirabella.
4. Letters delivered through the mail.
5. Norman Schwarzkopf.

Also
Was it a thing with Tina Brown's New Yorker to make the cartoons and poems thematic with the articles? One of each in the short story's first few pages matched the your-youth-is-running-out-now-ness. Not that reading the first few pages was easy. Distracting in the digital edition:

Raspy-voiced Selma on Night Court grew up selling her cartoons and humor essays to The New Yorker. Like it was nothing! On Google News, with some work, you can find a description of one of the cartoons. Two little girls attend another girl's party, and one says to the other, "She never discusses her age, but I know she has her second teeth." Ha!

Bonus links: Parts one, two and three from the pilot episode of Night Court, in which Selma gets two lines, both excellent. Also, the movie I half-watched recently that led to this posting. Plot: A drunk, old Peter O'Toole meets Larry from Perfect Strangers. Selma has a small role.

(Best line from the Night Court pilot? Harry: "I own every record Mel Torme ever made. I'm gonna marry the girl that's impressed by that.")

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 saw me smiling on the train Wednesday morning, I was reading the start of Karen Russell's "The Dredgeman's Relevation." If you saw me linger on the platform that evening, I was reading the story's end.

Her fiction in a July New Yorker is the story I'd most anticipated of the magazine's "20 under 40" series. Russell is a random acquaintance of this blog, and I've been a fan of her writing since first reading it. In her stories — usually somewhere between the magical and the grotesque, often equally joyful and gothic — she makes investment. You get the feeling she has to reach a personal, sustained suspension of disbelief for each sentence. At least I get that feeling. The voices beat reality.

Her relative absence from publishing as she's worked on her first book has been no easy time for a Karen Russell fan. Which, granted, is likely much easier than being Russell, as she actually has to write the book.

So, if you do one good thing for yourself today (and you should), read "The Dredgeman's Relevation." Print the pages, take them on the train with you and smile until you're engrossed. Here are five lines from the story — the first sentence and four non-spoiler others. Now go places.

"The dredgeman had a name, Louis Thanksgiving Auschenbliss, but lately he preferred to think of himself as a profession."

"Lightning sent down its white spider legs outside the boxcar doors and crawled up the pine trunks, trailing fires."

"Outside, rising from the ground like the earth's own exhalation, came the odor of peat, a great seawall of it, nothing so subtle or evanescent as a fragrance — no, this was stuff with a true stink."

"The insects had been a chronic irritation on the C.C.C. barge, but out here on the marshy open prairie they were pestilential, their sawing sound filling the air like a cruel ventriloquy of the men's own thirst."

"He did not have any headaches that day, or dark presentiments."

Did you ever consider not becoming a writer?

Do you mean did I ever consider becoming something else? Yes. As a boy, I wanted to be the Peruvian Diego Maradona. Sadly, Peru hasn't made the World Cup since 1982, so I guess I did well to choose something different. But, more to the point, not becoming a writer is something I consider every single day, if only for a moment. What if today I didn't write? What would I do?

It's cool, Daniel. You can still blog. And hear the words in your head. Beautifully beyond you but near you, around you. Ready for purpose.

Part of my latest New Yorker catch-up attempt, in the June 28 issue — neurologist Oliver Sacks examines the case of a writer who suffered a stroke and lost his ability to recognize all written words. As the writer struggles to practice his craft again, Sacks covers how reading works.

We are all faced with a world of sights and sounds and other stimuli, and our survival depends on making a rapid and accurate appraisal of these. Making sense of the world around us must be based on some sort of system, some swift and sure way of parsing the environment. Although seeing objects, defining them visually, seems to be instantaneous and innate, it represents a great perceptual achievement, one that requires a whole hierarchy of functions. We do not see objects as such; we see shapes, surfaces, contours, and boundaries, presenting themselves in different illumination or contexts, changing perspective from their movement or ours. From this complex, shifting visual chaos, we have to extract invariants that allow us to infer our hypothesize objecthood. It would be uneconomical to suppose that there are individual representations, on engrams, for each of the billions of objects around us. The power of combination must be called on; one needs a finite set or vocabulary of shapes that can be combined in an infinite number of ways, much as the twenty-six letters of the alphabet can be assembled (within certain rules and constraints) into as many words or sentences as a language ever needs.