![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/Nissley-author-photo_BLOG.jpg\" "\\"Tom")
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I am, in theory, living the dream: I made a lot of money on a game show and quit my job to write. In December<\/span>, I won eight times on Jeopardy!<\/em> and suddenly found myself the third-leading money winner in the history of the show (aside from tournaments and John Henry\u2013style man-versus-machine battles<\/a>). I left my job (as an editor on the Amazon.com Books store<\/a>) in March, and ever since I\u2019ve been trying to sort out how to get all the things done for which there still aren\u2019t enough hours in the day: reading, working on a novel every day instead of once a week, blogging<\/a>, umpiring Little League, writing another book that the world might want more than a weird novel about silent movies, saying hi to my wife more than I used to, and, crucially, preparing for the next Jeopardy!<\/em> Tournament of Champions, which hasn\u2019t been announced yet and which I haven\u2019t yet been invited to, though it seems like a safe bet. For better or worse (better!), being a game-show contestant is now one of my jobs.<\/p>\n 1:26 P.M.<\/strong> A track by the late, great comic Mitch Hedberg<\/a> on earphone shuffle: \u201cI just said \u2018snake eyes.\u2019 It\u2019s a gambling term. Oh, it\u2019s an animal term too.\u201d<\/p>\n 1:28 P.M.<\/strong> Next on shuffle: \u201cThe Gift,\u201d off the Velvet Underground\u2019s White Light\/White Heat<\/em>. I am unfailingly charmed by John Cale\u2019s deadpan Welsh reading of the banal American chatter of Lou Reed\u2019s story, which seems straight out of Lolita<\/em>: \u201c\u2018I\u2019m supposed to be taking these salt pills but\u2019\u2014she wrinkled her nose\u2014\u2018they make me feel like throwing up.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n 10:25 A.M.<\/strong> Back to Tess<\/em>. She\u2019s a maiden no more.<\/p>\n 11:40 A.M.<\/strong> This second section of Tess<\/em> is melancholy and thrilling (two words that are more or less synonyms in my mind), in a way that makes the first section seem just some mechanical business to get us to this point of truth.<\/p>\n 7:55 P.M.<\/strong> Catching up with the Jeopardy!<\/em> teachers\u2019 semis from yesterday and today: I\u2019m still doing better than usual, with Coryats of 41,800 and 37,400. Immediate payoff for my new study regimen: a day after taking notes on the Baroque composers, there\u2019s a \u201cGoing for Baroque\u201d category. I get all five right, although I\u2019m not sure any are from the studying. Meanwhile, I feel terrible for John, who lost yesterday\u2019s game because he left off a \u201c1\u201d and bet $7,001 instead of $17,001. He looks mortified.<\/p>\n 11:25 P.M.<\/strong> I fall into a classic Net rabbit hole: via a Facebook link from a writer friend, I dive into the video recordings<\/a> of two cops interrogating a fellow LAPD detective about a cold-case murder of the wife of an old boyfriend of hers. I follow up with Mike McGough\u2019s Atlantic<\/em> piece<\/a> about the case.\u00a0 The article\u2019s interesting, but the videos are can\u2019t-miss stuff, if only for the experience of watching someone (allegedly\u2014the case hasn\u2019t come to trial yet) comprehend\u2014and deny\u2014that the jig is up after twenty-three years. Meanwhile, back on Facebook, in the comments another writer (who\u2019s also a cop) argues that taping interrogations like this has knocked down homicide resolution in Chicago to all-time lows. Hmm: bad for law enforcement, good for defendants and voyeurs of human nature?<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/tessdurbervilles.jpg\")
12:26 P.M.<\/strong> At a nearby caf\u00e9 I open up Tess of the d\u2019Urbervilles<\/em>. I have a house full of books I\u2019ve been dying to get to, and if I don\u2019t now, when will I? Nevertheless, sitting down in the middle of the day and opening a Thomas Hardy<\/span> novel seems a perverse flouting of modern productivity.\u00a0But in this age of fictional implication and indirection, I\u2019ve developed a taste for imperious, know-it-all narrators: there is a real pleasure in being told<\/em> something once in a while\u2014even, or especially, by someone who may not know everything they think they do.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/jep-teachers-tourney-cast-150x150.jpg\")
10:55 P.M.<\/strong> Tonight\u2019s Jeopardy!<\/em> (on TiVo, after watching lovable ex-Terp<\/span> Greivis Vasquez play key triple-overtime minutes in the NBA playoffs) is the first semifinal in the inaugural Teacher\u2019s Tournament. The J!<\/em> discussion-board opinion<\/a> is that the questions have been dumbed down a bit for the teachers (like they do for teens and celebrities), and it\u2019s true that I\u2019ve done a little better playing along than usual the past week. Today my Coryat score<\/a> is 36,000, a little above my average. But I knew the Final Jeopardy category, \u201cThe Titanic,\u201d would be a disaster (ha!) for me: \u201cWhen the ship sank in 1912, among its cargo was 7 million pieces of this, in over 3,400 sacks.\u201d All I can think of is \u201csilver,\u201d but I know it\u2019s wrong<\/span>.<\/p>\nDAY TWO<\/h3>\n
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12:15 P.M.<\/strong> All I\u2019ve done so far to prepare for a return to Jeopardy!<\/em> is play along with the show every night and keep track of how I do. At some point I know I will get more systematic about figuring out my weak spots, but some are so glaring I don\u2019t need a statistical analysis to reveal them. Today I open up The Great Composers<\/em>, one of a stack of references (on chemistry, Latin roots, art history, etc.) I picked up last week, and start filling a spreadsheet with names, dates, and notable facts. Can I confess what an unalloyed pleasure this is? It\u2019s a completely superficial exercise, but it hints at, and gives a structure to, a complex cultural history I\u2019d love to immerse myself in.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/billcunningham.jpg\")
9:40 P.M.<\/strong> My friend Josh and I go around the corner from his apartment to catch up with Bill Cunningham New York<\/em> before it leaves town, and it\u2019s at least as wonderful as everyone says<\/a>. It\u2019s pretty much impossible not to come out of it with your pretensions deflated and your desire to do good and personal work enlivened. The cot squeezed between his filing cabinets, the three dollar sandwiches, the monkish devotion to his craft: those are all voluptuously appealing (to me). What would fill me with despair is all the small talk he has to make at the society parties he shoots.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/Dodge-at-Dicks-150x150.jpg\")
11:55 P.M.<\/strong> I stop at Dick\u2019s<\/a> for a shake on my way home, and feel like I\u2019m still under the spell of the movie. The other customers are three young guys who have, with pride, parked a tricked-out custom Dodge that Cunningham, if he gave a damn about cars, would appreciate: purple paint job, bright yellow rims, and butterfly doors. I do my best to stay true to the film\u00a0by taking a (poorly lit) snap with my phone.<\/p>\nDAY THREE<\/h3>\n
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9:05 A.M.<\/strong> Every morning when we walk past this extremely shallow pile of dirt on our block labeled, generously, \u201cFREE,\u201d I am happily reminded of the scene in Kicking and Screaming<\/em> (the Noah Baumbach post-college movie, not the Will Ferrell soccer-dad one) when the great Chris Eigeman puts a homemade BROKEN GLASS<\/small> sign on his floor rather than actually cleaning his broken glass up. And then I\u2019m further reminded of Eigeman\u2019s story from the commentary track about a fan who came up to him at a restaurant and silently placed a BROKEN GLASS<\/small> sign at his feet, which ever since has been my Platonic ideal for fan-celeb interaction.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/richardbrodyphoto-300x300-150x150.jpg\")
2:10 P.M.<\/strong> Only one previous Culture Diary (Richard Brody, Part II<\/a>) has the \u201cWerner Heisenberg<\/a>\u201d tag, but in the time leading up to my diary week I kept thinking of the uncertainty principle. Brody used it to describe the way that his daily habits were being warped<\/span> by the necessity of recording them for the diary, but I wondered about a similar distortion: Would I do things just so I could write about them in the diary? I even devised a notation system: I would mark such staged events with an (H)<\/em> for Heisenberg<\/em>. In practice, though, I\u2019ve ended up mostly doing what I probably would have done anyway, at least until now, when instead of reading a magazine with my lunch I put in The Spirit of the Beehive<\/em> to finish a viewing I started on a plane trip a few weeks ago (H)<\/span>. The movie, which I\u2019d been wanting to see for years, feels like a benign Iberian cousin of The Shining<\/em>\u2014and then suddenly maybe not so benign. Meanwhile, after saying on day one how much I enjoyed Hardy\u2019s pushy telling, here I relish how very little telling there is at all.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/cabiria-150x150.jpg\")
4:35 P.M.<\/strong> I\u2019m pretty good about not going on the Web when I\u2019m writing, but I\u2019m stuck in a scene for my silent-movie novel about the staging of a battle, and I idly go online to see where I can find a copy of Cabiria<\/em>, the 1914 Italian picture that is probably the closest real film to the pretend one in my story, though I\u2019ve never seen it. I expect I\u2019ll be lucky to find it at Scarecrow<\/a>, my miraculously encyclopedic local video store, but\u2014crazy world<\/span>\u2014Netflix has it available for streaming and a minute later I\u2019m watching it.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/sherlock-holmes-thomas-watson-150x150.jpg\")
8:50 P.M.<\/strong> A quick dose of bedtime reading with Peter, my eleven-year-old: We\u2019re working our way through the complete Sherlock Holmes. (It\u2019s the only Kindle reading I do, aside from thumbing through Stieg Larsson on my phone.) I love that, along the way, he\u2019s acquired a working knowledge of the transportation options of late Victorian London, from dogcarts to hansoms.<\/p>\n