Listening to radiohead's slow piano ballad "videotape" while watching an animated gif titled "dance like a gay spiderman". It works surprisingly well, but maybe that's the cold and flu medication talking.

Denis Johnson's Vietnam war novel "Tree of Smoke" has won the National Book Award for fiction. I bought it on Amazon because it was touted as "mammoth" - and it is. I'm about fifty pages in so far, and the highlight has been a ripping folk tale about the aswang, a vampirish creature that is totally spooky.

Perhaps most significantly, it's one of the few Vietnam War novels I've read, and I've read a few, including The Quiet American by Graham Greene and The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, both of which I loved, but Tree of Smoke is one of the few Vietnam War novels to actually include Asian characters with subjectivity and multifaceted personalities. Nice.