Watch out!

Overheard in line for coffee at the county courthouse:

The two participants in this conversation could have come from central casting, cast as contrasting friends. The woman telling the story was tall, blond, had her hair tied back, wore white and light colors, including her boots. The friend was short, with short-cropped dark hair, and she wore dark clothes. The woman was emotional, and given to large gestures; the friend carried herself with a more professional air, and was quieter.

The woman: . . . but then he . . . .

The friend: [some quiet words]

The woman: The thing is, even if we got past this, then at some point I would need to get even with him. I would really really really really really really need to get even.

The friend: Really.

Unexpected poetry of loss from third base coach

A nice eulogy:

Dave Smith, a former All-Star closer who holds the Houston Astros record for games pitched, died Wednesday. He was 53.

Former big leaguer Tim Flannery said Smith apparently died of a heart attack, but the official cause of death wasn't known.

"He's gone. My tears are the rain," Flannery, the San Francisco Giants third base coach, told The Associated Press.


[from Baseball Musings: http://www.baseballmusings.com/archives/030454.php]

Or, in CA: History of the Rainman

Very amusing account of selling what may be an amusing book, "The History of the Snowman:"http://open.salon.com/content.php?cid=64473

Latest dream

Latest dream:

Driving down a wide boulevard, the sidewalks made of white concrete, rather like Century City but the whole dream has a bit of the feel of an Italian movie. I hear a faint voice from behind me, calling my name. I look and see in the distance that it is S. [a friend I haven't seen recently]. She is wearing a purple dress. I drive up on a plaza, where cars are not supposed to be, and dive slowly alongside S., and ask if she wants to get in I'll give her a ride. She refuses. She is now wearing a white dress. In the dream I wonder but do not say, "Well if you don't want to get in the car and talk to me, why did you call out to me?" Also I am a bit curious as to how she managed to change dresses.

The content of award No. 1 below reminds me of a favorite line from the Firesign Theater, part of a longer description of the evolution of the planet. It's the first line of the second paragraph below, with more, for context and further enjoyment:

Well, we were covered with the molten scum of rocks, bobbing on the surface like rats. Later when there was less heat, these giant rock groups settled down among the land masses. During this extinct time, our earth was like a steamroom, and no one, not even man, could get in. However, the oceans and the sewers were simmering with a rich protein stew, and the mountains moved in to surround and protect them. They didn’t know then that living as we know it, was already taken over.

Animals without backbones hid from each other or fell down. Clamasaurs and oysterettes appeared as appetizers. Then came the sponges, which sucked up about ten percent of all life. Hundreds of years later, in the Late Devouring period, fish became obnoxious. Trilobites, chiggerbites and mosquitoes collided aimlessly in the dense gas. Finally, edible plants sprang up in rows, giving birth to generations of insecticides and other small, dying creatures.

from "I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus"

More titles

http://www.cracked.com/article_16818_13-most-baffling-book-titles.html

(hattip: Bookforum: http://www.bookforum.com/)

Jambalaya 2008 Literary Award #1

Best Juxtaposition of Titles on the Jambalaya 2008 Reading List:

Born Standing Up, Christine Falls.

From "Liberation" (Slattery)

After the financial apocalypse, a NY lawyer looks at the NY Public Library from afar:

She walks down to the brass telescope mounted on a table, angles it and gazes down the row of derelict office buildings on Madison Avenue, fastens onto the corner of the public library, the outside of which is being cleaned by volunteers. The building and all of its books are still intact, she knows; the employees of the library made a spontaneous pact to defend it as soon as the police force stopped working, and now they just live in the building. They hauled beds into offices and corners of the huge reading rooms, put plaid couches against the marble walls. An army of cats patrols the halls, has litters on the stairs. She imagines that some of the librarians are fulfilling a long-cherished fantasy. Its just them and the books now, the stamped serifs, the margins smudged with fingerprints. You can still go to the library, to the yards of windows casting long stripes of light across the stone floor, the long tables, the wood paneling, the paintings on the walls. You can still go and read the books. Except for the large firearms that the librarians carry, it is like nothing happened, as if every noon, businessmen are still eating their lunches under the lions.

Recommendation

Remarkable piece of autobiography, in McSweeney's 29: "My Crush on Hilary Duff." By Blaze Ginsberg, from a forthcoming book, "Episodes." Ginsberg has been diagnosed with high-functioning autism (among, apparently other floating diagnoses) and he describes his life in the form a a tv guide to a series of tv shows.

Useful Advice

Inject considerable spicery to your aliveness!


[Culled from, if I remember correctly, a piece of spam offering to enlarge my penis. But the advice is applicable to so much more.
-- Found by reading through old e-mails, in this case e-mails I sent to myself.]

Gender Play #3

More than 130,000 inflatable breasts have been lost at sea en route to Australia. Men's magazine Ralph was planning to include the boobs as a free gift with its January issue.

The cargo is worth about $200,000, which is another blow for publisher ACP's parent company PBL, which is already in $4.3 billion of debt.

A spokeswoman for Ralph said the container left docks in Beijing two weeks ago but turned up empty in Sydney this week.

The magazine has put out an alert to shipping authorities to see if they have the container, but if they don't turn up in the next 48 hours it will be too late for the next issue, she said.
Ralph editor Santi Pintado urged anyone who has any information to contact the magazine.

"Unless Somali pirates have stolen them its difficult to explain where they are,'' Pintado said. "If anyone finds any washed up on a beach, please let us know.''

http://www.watoday.com.au/national/storm-in-a-ccup--130000-boobs-lost-at-sea-20081202-6pa5.html

Gender Play #2

This site http://regender.com/index.html switches the gender in a given piece of text or website. Here is this website, regendered: http://regender.com/swap/http://wipsmart23.blogspot.com/ (It works on earlier pages too.)

The list of books and authors to the left is nice, regendered. But what is nicest is once you are on a regendered page, each link you click on leads to a regendered version of the linked site. With enough clicking, the whole world will switch genders. Awesome. I think there must be someway to combine this with a web translation service to turn myself into, say, a French woman.

Gender Play #1

According to the site GenderAnalyzer, there is a 64% chance that the author of this website is a female. Or perhaps it asserts that the author is 64% female. Not sure how that 64% works.

http://www.genderanalyzer.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwipsmart23.blogspot.com%2F

Song of the Day

"Drank all that I can swallow
Now the moon's going to follow me home."

Moon Song: written by Patty Griffin, but in my head sung by Emmylou Harris.

Just want to add: Emmylou, if you google yourself and are reading this, I'd be happy to be you a drink next time you are in L.A.

Cutter and Bone

From "Cutter and Bone," an early passage which helps introduce us to Bone and, in passing, a theme of the book.

"As he crossed the street and entered the parking lot, he could almost feel the woman's eyes on his back, their cloying outrage following him every step of the way. He halfway expected her to call out his name again, but gratefully all he heard was the surf breaking lightly on the beach, that and a kind of chant rising from a group of hippies sitting in lotus position around a driftwood fire. Why couldn't they be singing? he wondered. Why couldn't it be laughter and hot dogs instead of prayer beads and theological posturing, weird amalgams of fire worship and Zen? Christ, he hated California, or at least this coastal strip of it, this crowded stage where America kept trying out the future and promptly closing it, never letting it open for long on Main Street. And yet Bone could not bring himself to leave. It was like loving the meanest, gaudiest whore in the house. You got what you deserved."

The passage illustrates somewhat less subtly than usual the social judgments at work in the book, and the compromised position from which the judgments are made. It also states the subject of the story: just desserts.

A Father's Advice On How His Children Can Distinguish Themselves From Terrorists

Good children take showers. Terrorists shake towers.

Hollywood

Sunset in Beverly Hills

Third dream in a row

I was driving down a major street when I saw someone I hadn't seen in years waiting at a bus stop. Sam. I called out to him and he recognized me. I quickly pulled over and jumped out of the car and ran over to talk with him.

He looked good. He was wearing scrubs under a coat, but that was only slightly strange. I asked him how he had, what he had been doing. He said "I've made a lot of good choices lately." He wouldn't get anymore specific than that.

I told him he didn't need to get on the bus, that I'd give him a ride. But I looked down the street and couldn't see my car. I looked up and down both sides, checked my pocket -- I had my keys so I hadn't left them in the ignition for someone to take. There was no obvious empty space for the acar to have been taken from, but I couldn't see the car anyway, even as I went a bit up and down the street.

Sam seemed like he really wanted to get on the bus.

The Next Night's Dream

At a large house at which I was staying, but in which I did not normally live. Situation vague. But the house was in a normal American urban/suburban setting.

As I was looking around the backyard, a young tiger came prowling through the yard and started stalking me. As I inched away, unsure of how to handle the situation she attacked me. I got bloodied up a bit.

Then -- it was later -- driving back to the house down sort of an alleyway to the garage, there were maybe 20 tigers, about 7 or so of them adult tigers, some very young ones (cubs) and some adolescent tigers, like the one that attacked me. Back in the house looking out the large second story window, we could see the tigers walking around the back yard as well as beyond. People remarked that it was an unusual feature of the house.

Later in the backyard there was a gigantic sea turtle in the swimming pool, maybe 12 feet long. It suddenly surged up and leapt out of the pool and landed with a thud in the yard, casting a shadow over the yard and almost landing on me, which would have been fatal. Apparently though this was standard behavior and not dangerous to the turtle.

That was the end of the dream.

Yes. NO. [ ]

My dream just before waking this morning:

I had a number of e-mails in my in-box. Actually, three e-mails in the inbox of one account, and maybe a couple more in the inbox of a different account. But in the dream I didn't get to the point of looking at the e-mails in the second account.

All of these e-mails were in response to e-mails I had sent the night before, all from the same person. This was a dream that lingered as I awoke, and I was confused as to what was real. I believed that I had in real life sent e-mails the night before. Both in the dream and then into the real morning I felt the dread of having made a terrible mistake, and that the person to whom I'd sent the emails would be angry or offended, with unhappy consequences for the future.

I couldn't remember what I'd said in the emails. I tried.

I could see a part of the text of each of the three e-mails without opening the full e-mail. None of the emails had a subject heading.

The first said: Yes.

The second said: NO.

The third was blank.

PIcture of Two Pictures in a bathroom

Another View of Disney Hall

Bar Talk

22 year old female bartender on why seeing her ex-boyfriend when back in Pittsburgh is creepy:

"He's super chill. Which is cool. But beyond chill. He comes across as gay.

What was I thinking?"


Male Hollywood agent of indeterminate age describing the phenomenon of waking up with someone asleep on your arm, about whom you think "What was I thinking?":

"They call it coyote ugly. You just want to chew your own arm off so you can sneak out without waking her."


Different bar:

Woman of about 40 who has just that minute finished taking her optician exam:

I know a joke. Do you want a Hertz donut?

She is met with silence. She punches the guy next to her.

Woman [to guy]: Hertz, donut?

Me: Ow.

Woman: I got that from Family Guy.

The War of Northern Aggression

The two halves of Beverly Park, the exclusive gated community tucked between Beverly Hills and Mulholland Drive, have gone to court against each other over blocked access and unpaid fees. The tensions escalated last year when residents of North Beverly Park — the part that includes Sumner Redstone and Haim Saban — stopped allowing the nannies, gardeners and other visitors to South BP — the side where Magic Johnson and Richard Zanuck live — from entering off Mulholland.


(From L.A. Observed)
http://www.laobserved.com/

Facebook is scary.

2008 Bulwer-Lytton Contest Winners

http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/scott.rice/blfc2008.htm

The Occupational Hazard of the Fictional P.I.

"[Holmes does not even consider that a death narrated in The Hound of the Baskervilles could be an accident] because [that theory] does not jibe with his vision of the world and his desire to find murderers. It is just too commonplace for a man who dreams of grandiose crimes committed on deep, dark night under tragic circumstances."

-- from the chapter "Murder By Literature" in Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong.

Song of the Day

Hank Williams, singing a surprising, serious version of "On Top Of Old Smoky" in, he says, the way his grandmother used to.

Heroic Fact Checking

John Hodgman, about his books of made-up facts, answering the question about fact-checking his book:

In book publishing, we have no fact checkers, so this rarely comes into play. They are happy to let the author lie and withstand the consequences. But the proofreader can be tricky. On my first book, my poor proofreader had no idea that my book was all made up, and she heroically attempted to correct the record on, say, U.S. Presidents who had hooks for hands, until about page 100, when she got it. By the second book, she had become an invaluable resource and aid in helping me fabricate a world. Her name is Rachelle Mandik, and I am grateful.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2008/11/the-exchange-jo.html#entry-more

Pogo

http://www.pogopossum.com/index.htm

Current chapter: http://www.pogopossum.com/gofizzicklepogo/go15.htm

"A novelist is always born atop the demolished homestead of his own lyricism." -- Milan Kundera, cited in "Agnes's Final Afternoon," as a way into the contrast Ricard finds in Kundera's work between the young man's lyricism and that way of life of the libertine.

Impressive 13 year old

Scene: middle school debate. Summation has just been delivered by the daughter of a man in the stands. Daughter gives a mighty impressive summation in favor of the proposition Resolved: That John McCain Is The Best Choice For Commander In Chief. Man overhears a(n adult) man behind him.

Man in back row: Glad I'm not married to her.

Favorite photo of gay rights protestor's sign

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_4hfeiYr3Zq4/SRaVZbI1rhI/AAAAAAAAEWg/xontu_v4pgg/s1600-h/g.jpg

John Leonard

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Obit-Leonard.html?hp

http://www.slate.com/id/2204095/

http://www.edrants.com/john-leonard-dead/

California Election Report

There goes my plan to move to San Francisco and legally marry a male prostitute.

Black voter

A black male voter, interviewed on NPR:

"My friends and I used to say, 'A black man in American can be anything he wants except a white man or President.' But Michael Jackson has proved the first one wrong and now it seems Obama is about to disprove the second one too."

Anecdote

Story told me:

An older Jewish lawyer, walking to temple on Yom Kippur, falls in conversation with an even older Jew, walking to a different, orthodox temple. The conversation turns to the election:


Orthodox Man:

I'm voting for McCain.

Lawyer:

Ehh. Ok. Why are you for McCain?

Orthodox Man:

I couldn't vote for that Obama. He's Muslim, and I couldn't support a Muslim.

Lawyer:

That's ridiculous. He's not a Muslim. He was raised by his white Christian mother and by his white Christian grandmother.

Orthodox Man:

His father was a Muslim.

Lawyer:

He didn't meet his father until he was 20. What's so whacky about this is that Obama is getting all this heat because of what his pastor said, at the church he's been a member of for 20 years.

Orthodox Man (triumphant):

That too!

Ongoing series choosing representative books for each of the United States (the number to be chosen for each state to equal number of electoral votes the state has):


http://www.omnivoracious.com/books_of_the_states/index.html

Sometimes you hear a xylophone
deep in the forest and you know
that things are just not right.

The opening lines to the poem You Don't Know Me, by James Tate.
Later in the poem the narrator gets into a colloquy with a song, which ends this way:

There's a hole in my head, I said,
I was hoping you would help me fill.
What do you take me for, skillet biscuits?
Perhaps. But you are also the forest song
which is long and deep and clear.
I exist but I have no purpose, the song said,
but I'll pour some cool water over you
that you will not soon forget.

Songs of the Day

On the digital turntable:

Bob Dylan, esp. Tell Tale Signs:

Samantha Brown lived in my house for about four or five months
Samantha Brown lived in my house for about four or five months
Don't know how it looked to other people
I never slept with her even once

Lonesome Day Blues

and his version of Jimmie Rodgers' Miss The Mississippi:

Roaming the wide world over
Always alone and so blue
I am sad and weary, longing to go home
Miss the Mississippi and you

Michelle de Kretser, in The Lost Dog:

describing a character:

A glass-fronted cabinet held a harlequin, a corsair, a ballerina, a drummer boy, a Bo Peep with a crook wreathed in flowers and a lilac dress bunched up over a sprigged underskirt. Once a week Audrey murmured of love to small porcelain people while holding them facedown in soapy water.

describing a failed separation:

To the ache of raw solitude he applied his usual balm of work: marking essays, reading, typing words onto a screen late into the night. The dog would leave his basket to settle on a rug in the study, first turning around thrice, an apprentice sorcerer. Later he would go out into the yard. When he returned, his fur carried the mineral scent of earth into the room.

Tom went to the cinema; out to dinner with colleagues. Then, at the end of a blunt winter's day, in the act of transferring a packet of buckwheat noodles from a shelf to a supermarket cart, he froze. Pride, which had seemed insurmountable, lay in ruins: toppled, like that, and the view a sparkling clarity.

The Sun Sets On The Dodgers

What happened to Laura?

Baseball fans on an escalator:


Fan A: You know, you've probably turned down better tail than that.

Fan O: I've had tail.

A: Oh I know, I'm saying you've turned down better tail than that.

O: Oh, oh yeah.

A: Yeah.

O: Laura -- Laura was juicy.

A: Ah.

O: Laura was juicy. Laura was way juicier than that chick. She was juicy -- she was messed up, but juicy. She wasn't functional, but.

A: Okay.

O: Laura got fat.

A: No kidding. She got real fat.

O: Why do chicks always get fat after I fuck them?

Father picking up Daughter from party at house of Sarah Foster:

F: What do her parents do? The Fosters.

D: I don't know.

F: Though I suppose they may not be her real parents. [pause] They may be foster parents.

D [with more than a hint of sarcasm]: Didn't see that one coming.

Dream Quiz

Question from a quiz given in my dream:

Which President of Croatia played Hamlet twice?


My dream grades:

C+

A/A-

though as posted it was not stated for which courses I got these grades, nor for how many of my courses I received the former, and how many the latter.

Just because she's Rosanne Cash

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081027/cash

Dickens, replying to a request for a humorous piece or two:

"I really can't promise to be comic. As to two comic articles, or two of any sort of articles out of me, that's the intensest extreme of nogoism."

Rejected Titles for Bleak House

Tom-Alone's: The Ruined House
Bleak House Academy
The East Wind
Tom-all-Alone's: The Solitary House where the Grass Grew
Tom-all-Alone's: The Solitary House that was Always Shut Up and Never Lighted
Tom-all-Alone's: The Solitary House where the Wind howled
Tom-all-Alone's: The Ruined House that Got into Chancery and Never Got Out
Bleak House and the East Wind: How They Both Got into Chancery and Never Got Out

Not Up To Phil Rizzuto's Standards

But close . . .

Poetry of Sarah Palin

"You Can't Blink"

You can't blink.
You have to be wired
In a way of being
So committed to the mission,

The mission that we're on,
Reform of this country,
And victory in the war,
You can't blink.

So I didn't blink.

(To C. Gibson, ABC News, Sept. 11, 2008)

"Befoulers of the Verbiage"


It was an unfair attack on the verbiage
That Senator McCain chose to use,
Because the fundamentals,
As he was having to explain afterwards,
He means our workforce.
He means the ingenuity of the American.
And of course that is strong,
And that is the foundation of our economy.
So that was an unfair attack there,
Again based on verbiage.

(To S. Hannity, Fox News, Sept. 18, 2008)


"Outside"

I am a Washington outsider.
I mean,
Look at where you are.
I'm a Washington outsider.

I do not have those allegiances
To the power brokers,
To the lobbyists.
We need someone like that.

(To C. Gibson, ABC News, Sept. 11, 2008)

From Slate: http://www.slate.com/id/2201342

Making small, heartwarming connections with strangers

1. At the bagel store, an annoying little kid running around, banging into people bangs into me and generally stands in my way. His mother calls him, and he has the same name as me. "Hi," I say calling him by his name. "that's my name too."

He glares at me.

2. Outside the bagel store in the parking lot a car pulls quickly into the spot next to me as I unlock my door. A little close. The woman driving wears an Arizona State sweatshirt and her window is down.

"A Sun Devil," I say.

She pauses just a moment. "I had no idea what you were talking about," she says.

"I grew up in Tempe," I say as I get in the car.

"I hate it there" she says, and goes into the store.

Samuel Beckett anecdote

A whiff of the apocryphal about this one:

After a rehearsal in England, Beckett, his director Alan Schnieder and a friend are walking across a field on a rare beautiful sunny day in London.

Schneider: It's a beautiful day.

Beckett: Yes, it is.

Friend: Glorious.

Schneider: The kind of day that makes you glad to be alive.

Beckett: Well, I wouldn't go that far.

Pelecanos' 5 Crime Novels

Books: George Pelecanos

NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Sep 29, 2008

A master of the urban crime novel, Pelecanos was also an Emmy nominee for HBO ' s " The Wire. " His latest novel is " The Turnaround. " His picks for the best of his genre:

My Five Most Important Crime Novels

1. " The Long Goodbye " by Raymond Chandler. A melancholic ode to loss and the passage of time.

2. " The Burglar " by David Goodis. Hypnotic prose and a shocking ending. Call it pulp if you have the need to. It's disturbing art.

3. "The Last Good Kiss" by James Crumley. The post-Vietnam stunner that reinvigorated the genre and jacked up a generation of future crime novelists.

4. "Swag" by Elmore Leonard. Down-and-dirty, this one smokes front to back, and the voice is one of a kind.

5. "Clockers" by Richard Price. My generation's "Grapes of Wrath."

A CLASSIC YOU'VE REVISITED WITH DISAPPOINTMENT: "The Godfather" by Mario Puzo. Except for the page that features Sonny and the bridesmaid. That page never disappoints.

A BOOK YOU HOPE PARENTS READ TO THIER KIDS: "True Grit" by Charles Portis. A great adult novel with a strong, teenage female protagonist.








http://www.newsweek.com/id/160097

"What it takes to make it through this troubled and troubling world is obviously different for a man and for a mouse."

Daniel Robinson, from his lecture series "Consciousness and its Implications."

Dream fragment

At some sort of vacation spot, my friend from my old workplace H. was there too. I had given her something for her kid, a toy or piece of cake, and she came to my door appreciative and friendly thanks to the gesture, and saying, that one more thing would really make the kid happy (or perhaps because she had a second kid). That kid wanted a jar of mayonnaise.

Later in the dream, in a cave a mass traditional baptism was being conducted, and the preacher was close to convincing me to be baptised.

At the drugstore:

Cashier #1: Moses, how much is this?

Customer: It's 99 cents.

Cashier #2 [Moses]: It's 99 cents.

Cashier #1: So I'll ring it in as a dollar.

Cashier #2" How about 99 cents?

"And he couldn't do it. He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here."

- Philip Roth, Sabbath's Theater

( from The Elegant Variation http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2008/09/nota-bene-sabba.html )

Newly Discovered Great Movie Moment

The moment when, in Rat Phink A Boo Boo, about 45 minutes in, when the movie suddenly shifts gears and earns its name. ("This is a job for "You Know" and "Who."") The shifting of gears. It's great.

Dream

Returned home (nothing like my actual home) at lunchtime, to do some dishes. But the major event was that the neighbor's pets came through a hole in their fence, into my front yard, and then in and out of my house. The first was a warthog. After that were a number of dogs, of different species, and it was hard to determine how many. Two? Or was it one? Then maybe Five?

It didn't seem a big deal, but nobody seemed to know what to do. The dogs were more at issue than the warthog, which went uncommented upon.

Men's nipples, without the nipples

http://www.fleshmap.com/look/a.html

On Identity and Jewish Identity

“What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself, and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.”


Kafka -- quoted in “The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay” by Lewis Begley, as itself quoted in the NY Times.

Foul line

Reforestation

Many Hidden Birds

Cape Cod: Morning

Geese at the liquor store

Outside Provincetown

Overheard

" . . . when I sober up I'm going to be really mad at her."

Man, to friend, in the beer line at the Hollywood Bowl.

Follow Steve McQueen in Bullitt:

http://www.seero.com/video/Steve_McQueen_3

Deep Blue

Also --

More 4th

4th of July Parade -- Ashland OR

Nature Haiku

Known as Blackberries
They should be called Mosquitoes --
They buzz in my ear.

Song of the Day

"You Ain't Goin' Nowhere"
-- Bob Dylan

Buy me some rings and a gun that sings
A flute that toots and a bee that stings
A sky that cries and a bird that flies
A fish that walks and a dog that talks

Random

Man, woman and daughter leaving California Pizza Kitchen:

Woman (loud and hectoring): It was a random act of kindness.

Man: Wait. I'm the man. Say I'm with my wife, and another woman comes up and gives my daughter money, it makes me feel that I'm a loser.

Woman: Oh, that's just --

Moby Dick / Wordle

http://www.steamthing.com/2008/06/jellyfish.html

Thomas M. Disch (science fiction writer) / Tom Disch (poet)

Entropic Villanelle

Things break down in different ways.
The odds say croupiers will win.
We can't, for that, omit their praise.

I have had heartburn several days,
And it's ten years since I've been thin.
Things break down in different ways.

Green is the lea and smooth as baize
Where witless sheep crop jessamine
(We can't, for that, omit their praise),

And meanwhile melanomas graze
Upon the meadows of the skin.
(Things break down in different ways.)

Though apples spoil, and meat decays,
And teeth erode like aspirin,
We can't, for that, omit their praise.

The odds still favor croupiers,
But give the wheel another spin.
Things break down in different ways:
We can't, for that, omit their praise.

-- Tom Disch.

[A week ago I bookmarked his blog, having discovered that it existed. And then three days later he killed himself. ]

Nice Opening

We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody dropped the girl off the bridge.

-- opening sentence of Darker Than Amber

Now Playing

Bach Keyboard Concertos Nos. 1, 2 & 4, Murray Perahia and Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. By now you'd think they could afford a barn. [that last simply pro forma]

Also from "Blood and Thunder:"

Early US traveller through present-day Arizona:

"Invalids may live here when they might die in any other part of the world [because of the dry air and pure atmosphere], but really the country is so forbidding that no one would scarcely be willing to secure a long life at the cost of living in it."

Yea, I Know Seems

Western wisdom: Describing the Mexican governor of New Mexico at the time the US invaded, Don Manuel Armijo:

Armijo was, above all, a survivor, and while he put on a bold face, he could be an impressive coward when cornered. "It is smarter to appear brave," he liked to say, "than to be so."

From "Blood and Thunder" by Hampton Sides.

Lilacs

Now that lilacs are in bloom
She has a bowl of lilacs in her room

T.S. Eliot "Portrait of a Lady"

Seems a perfect couplet to me.

The Customer Is Always . . .

Favorite new strategy employed by spam e-mailers in their subject line, in order to pique my interest:

"You look really stupid bullwinkle"

Currently playing

Album of the moment (as of 20 minutes ago):

"All I Intended To Be" -- Emmylou Harris

Talking in America

From the story "Dance in America" by Lorrie Moore (and quite nicely read and discussed by Louise Erdrich on a podcast from The New Yorker.)

The narrator is having dinner with an old friend Cal, and his wife Simone, who she (the narrator) has not met before.

Simone has prepared Peking Duck, which is ropy and sweet. Cal keeps passing around the basket of bread, anxiously, talking about how modern man has only been around for forty-five thousand years and bread probably hasn't changed much in all that time.

"Forty-five thousand years?" says Simone. "That's all? That can't be. [. . . ]"

There are people who talk with their hands. There are people who talk with their arms. Then, there are people who talk with their arms over their head. Those are the ones I like best. Simone is one of those.

This made me laugh: "Then, there are people who talk with their arms over their head."

Then, this pleased me: "Those are the ones I like best."

That kind of look . . .

from Girl Factory (the extended, overly-specific simile a recurrent comic device in this novel):

Immediately to my right as I entered was a lone flamingo, its pink plumage darkened to crimson by the colored lights. The shadowed hatchet of its bill, combined with its beady eyes, gave it a criminal look, the kind you might see on a guy caught while stealing car stereos, leaning up against the side of a squad car in his sweatpants and athletic shoes, waiting to be taken down to the station, booked, and then let out on bail. I wasn't sure whether this was a bad sign or a good one.

Cri de coeur

Found on the internet, searching for something else entirely:

I have apologized for the cat issue and have explained how I can understand how you would feel and how it would make me feel if it happened to Donny and I told you how absolutely WRONG I was for that to happen. I told you that my PREVIOUS behavior was totally unacceptable. I realized that.

So, WHY IS THAT AN ISSUE STILL?

I explained that I am not used to a kid bouncing all over the place. Corwyn doesn't He's an introvert. He's the only other ten year old I know, so he's the only one I can base things on. I never, ever said or implied that there was something WRONG with Nathan. I never said or implied I didnt want to be AROUND Nathan, I never said or implied that my children were BETTER than Nathan.You did all of that, without once asking what I thought, or to elaborate when I had first said anything. AND, I apologized for that entire scenario and told you I knew although Nathan would take some getting used to, and that I was willing to do whatever it took.

As far as Kenny goes, I have never, ever said or done a single thing to him in any way, shape or form. The guy is loud. That's all I have said.

http://rontalks.blogspot.com/

(Good news -- the guy has met a new woman named Charlotte)

Bad Concert Behavior

At a concert, setting a bad example for my children:

On the bench in front of me, two sisters and a boyfriend.

During the first act: they chatter constantly, making jokes about how the first act is not the second act, who they came to see.

During the second act: they jump up on the bench and dance and scream the whole set, literally the only people dancing among thousands in the venue. The whole long bench on which they dance shakes vigorously, and the poor guy next to them (wearing earplugs) is whiplashed around as he struggles to eat a slice of pizza. The three are the cause of mostly good-humored eye-rolling and bonding all around them.

In the break there is some hope that they won't be back for the last act.

During the third act, they are up and down and in and out of their seats, switching places, alternately dancing, singing, and conducting loud conversation. Finally, during a very pretty rendition of a quiet song, I break:

Guy: I got the last beer. The place was closed. I got them to give me this. This beer cost me twenty dollars. [repeat, loudly, three times]

Me, after banging my head on the bench in front of me, even more loudly: Shut the fuck up. Nobody cares about your beer.

They: stunned silence.

A couple of songs later.

Guy: Sorry. I didn't realize I was so loud. I didn't know the song.

John Updike, on his long body of work:

"It is true that everything you do turns out to be by John Updike, and that's a little disconcerting."

"It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you shall speak so that they shall understand you." Thoreau, from "Walden"

About Harry Stephen Keeler:

http://home.williampoundstone.net/Keeler/Home.html

Bob and Ray: "The Komodo Dragon"

To listen to it, click here. (from Slate.)

Early Replacements:

Otto

Everybody gotta go Otto, Otto
Everybody gotta go Otto-to
Everybody wants to know Otto, Otto
Everybody wants to know Otto-to

Tried to come over here
Thought I might give her, give her a call
Tried to phone my baby, give her a call
But Otto, he went crazy
He ripped the phone right off the wall

from Dissatisfied

Look me in the eye
And tell me that I'm satisfied
Were you satisfied?

Look me in the eye
Then, tell me I'm satisfied
And now are you satisfied?

Everything goes
Well, anything goes all of the time
Everything you dream of
Is right in front of you
And everything is a lie

Look me in the eye
And tell me that I'm satisfied
Look me in the eye
Unsatisfied
I'm so, I'm so unsatisfied
I'm so dissatisfied
I'm so, I'm so unsatisfied
I'm so unsatisfied
Well, I'm-a
I'm so, I'm so unsatisfied
I'm so dissatis,dissattis...
I'm so

Lame Llama Alarm

Dream: I was talking to a writer of comedy sketches, an acquaintance, pitching an idea: about a guy who is an Islamist, which alarms everyone, but it turns out what he is, is someone who likes to identify llamas: an "is llama"-ist. The comedy writer was disappointed in the idea, and I, cutting losses, said "Maybe it would be a line in a sketch, not a whole sketch." He wasn't convinced.

[Despite appearances, an anxiety dream.]

Cakes and Ale

From "Cakes and Ale"

describing Alroy Kear:

"Most of us when we do a caddish thing harbour resentment against the person we have done it to, but Roy's heart, always in the right place, never permitted him such pettiness. He could use a man very shabbily without afterward bearing him the slightest ill-will."

on the use of "ready-made phrases" in spoken language:

"The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried this device to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment's reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication."

on the pure artist:

"I saw that Roy was not inclined to be amused. I was not annoyed, for I was quite used to people not being amused at my jokes. I often think that the purest type of the artist is the humorist who laughs alone at his own jests."

Obituary from The Telegraph:

Elaine Dundy, the American writer who has died aged 86, shot to the top of
the best-seller lists in 1958 with The Dud Avocado, a novel which she wrote in
an attempt to save her marriage to the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan; but her
literary success became an added source of friction in a relationship that was
already fraught owing to Tynan's fondness for the lash.

. . . A few years into their marriage, he told his wife he was
getting bored with their lovemaking and presented her with two books on
sadomasochistic sex. Discovering that she was "up against a revered British
institution", she agreed to try – but it was not a success. Their first session
ended with her grabbing the schoolmaster's cane and breaking it.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1933071/Elaine-Dundy.html

An obituary which perhaps could have been more generous regarding her work.

These sleepless nights

will break my heart in two.

-- from the biggest gun there is: Pieces of the Sky

Driving my daughter and her friend R to a party:

As I sit in traffic --

R.: There's a better way you could have gone.

Me: Thanks, R. You are just like my daughter, you don't mention things until after I've done something else. OK -- what's the other way.

R.: I don't know the street name. Do you know where Fred Segal is?

Me: No, R. I don't know where Fred Segal is.

As, later, we pass Fred Segal --

Me: R, that's the street you live on. You should know the name of that street.

R. : Sorry. I only know landmarks.

Overheard at the book festival:

Man and woman at a booth, extolling the virtues of a book they are selling:

Man: . . . and he falls in love with a woman who eats fish.

Woman: It's a dark satirical work.

Song from my dream:

I have one glass eye
and sometimes I can't see at all
but other times I see
that the world's just a giant crystal ball

Sorority girl and fraternity boy at the baseball game. (With another couple, late arrivers and early leavers.)

First there is some complaint on his part about the inadequacy of her costume last Halloween.

He: You said you'd have a good costume, and all you do is dress like a Slim Jim. I thought you'd have something sexy, and you can't do anything better than a Slim Jim.

She: I liked it. Even my brother said it was cute.

The conversation is prompted by a need for costumes for an upcoming day at school, where you show up in costume and start drinking at 6 a.m. Perhaps they should go as Cameron Diaz and Ben Stiller from There's Something About Mary. She has the hair for it.

Or --

He: I think you should dress up dominatrix style, with leather, and a collar, and boots, and I could lead you around on a leash.

She: I'd be the one leading you on the leash.

He: What?

She: That would make sense. Me leading you.

He: What?

. . . . after some discussion, she teases him

She: I wear the pants in this relationship.

He: [his big comeback] The retard pants.

Been meaning to post this exchange for awhile, and there seems to be a window of opportunity.


Author at reading, in response to a question, straightens out some details of her heroine's love life. This is followed by a question.

Questioner: So is this autobiographical?
Author: Mom!

Grandmother: My mother used to ask her grandchildren what they thought the world would be like in the future. So now I am going to ask 13-year old N. what she thinks she'll be doing when she is 35.



Granddaughter N.: Probably drawing an unemployment check. [pause.] If all goes according to plan.

"You know, a lot of people say they like rock music, but myself, I prefer roll music."

-- a daughter who learns from her father

And then I jumped in the river, but the doggone river was dry --

"Long Gone Lonesome Blues" Hank Williams

From Street of No Return, a nice passage:

He was halfway up the steps when the mouse came running down.

Or rather, it came falling down, it must have been blind or sick, or maybe one of them lunatic mice that can't do things in a sensible way. Its tiny furry shape hit him full in the face and instinctively it fought for a hold with its legs. He locked his lips to hold back the startled yell and heard the mouse giving its own outcry of shock. It squeaked as loud as it could, decided this was not the place for it to be, and leaped off.

Whitey shook his head slowly and thought: That almost did it.

He rested there a few moments, trying to forget the feeling of the mouse dancing on his face. He said to himself: Let's disregard these minor issues, you got more stairs to climb, keep climbing.

George Bush to troops in Afghanistan:

I must say, I'm a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed.
It must be exciting for you ... in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You're really making history, and thanks

George Bush:

"And so, General, I want to thank you for your service. And I appreciate the fact that you really snatched defeat out of the jaws of those who are trying to defeat us in Iraq."—meeting with Army Gen. Ray Odierno, Washington, D.C., March 3, 2008

from Jacob Weisman's Bushisms, on Slate, and other sources.

In Australia, or anywhere I suppose, watch out for a guy named Nabulwinjbulwinj -- a dangerous spirit who eats females after striking them with a yam.

Song of the moment:

"Speed of Light" -- Joseph Arthur

Selections from Chapter III of "All About H. Hatterr"

"My father used to say, " I droned to Always-Happy, from the corner of my mouth, "ye never assail an enemy asleep, undressed, unprepared, undefendant, or showing signs of fear and dread."
"Correctly spoken, rector," whispered the feller in agreement, contradicting me -- still dancing for his daddy! -- "but my heaven-gone father used to say, "If ye have no cows, ye milk the bulls instead."
Damme, to this day, I cannot make out how the hell that young feller justified the bulls analogy as analogous to the circumstance!

*

Then Always-Happy gives the signal cry: affirming the battle's on!

"Maro maro maro! May they have sexy and swollen lizards for their sisters, maro!"

*

The world's greatest Churches have approved of such men [those who castrate themselves], because, to them, excuse me, life is no vaudeville.

*

" ... Einstein said it first! Damme, all watches, and chronometers are giving wrong time! . . ."

"May I ask if the same Prof. Einstein did not send naughty post cards by postal delivery to the author Mr. Upton Sinclair?"

"Man, that was a fellow called Eisenstein! ...."

Misheard lyric:

Without clowns, there is no rain.

Lessons from sports talk radio, admonitions dept.:

"You who are without sin, remember what the big guy upstairs said: Cast the first stone!"

H. Hatterr meets Mrs. Smythe, who works at her husband's circus:

Damme, I couldn't take me eyes off of Mrs Smythe!

I fell for her, formidable! and fell in an extremely libido way! Maybe, it had something to do with her buxom hoddy-doddy anatomy: maybe, her tight breeches: perhaps, the red boots she was wearing: her whip: maybe, it was the sheer lack of femininity, her 'I may not by easy on the eye, but I'm no lady' personality, a To hell with Agnus Castus! attitude, which made me feel free of all decorum inhibitories. Maybe . . .

I couldn't say.

She sensed my civil attitude towards her and asked me to call again.

* * *

Later, more aphoristically:

This is Life, or what do you think?

You seek a`woman in a medical libido way. She denies. But she promises, though post-dated, to give all, provided you accept her lion!

The joys of G.V. Desani's All About H. Hatterr, in the current NYRB edition anyway, begin with the blurbs on the back:

"In all my experience, I have not met with anything quite like it." -- T.S. Eliot

"I didn't read many books while writing Augie. One I did read and love was All About H. Hatterr. . . . So, what about All About? I hate to be siding with T.S. Eliot . . . but what can you do?" -- Saul Bellow

from the book, which could simply be quoted in full:

"If two tired elephants should decide to sit upon one, what is the worth of one's feelings about it? It is one of Life's little panto-comedies, against which there lies no appeal."

"The earth was blotto with the growth of willow, peach, mango-blossom and flower. Every ugly thing, and smell, was in incognito, as freshness and fragrance: radiant, dewy!
Being prone, this typical spring-time dash andvivacity played an exulting phantasmagoria note on the inner-man. Medically speaking, the happy circumstances vibrated mt ductless glands and fused into me a wibble-wobble Whoa, Jamieson! fillip-and-flair to live, live!
. . .
Then, all in a huff, I suffered an overpowering Hereford and Angus bull-power impulse, Now or never!
Yet, I could not quite make up my mind."

Eagle, carved of a single piece of wood with a chainsaw. The stripes are shadows cast by the blinds.

Poem of my daughter's rediscovered cleaning my desk:

I saw her at the county fair
and I kicked her
and I told her
that jazz was for creeps
and she said "I don't
believe in God"
and then I got so mad
I just up and left
without even getting validated.

From a New Yorker review (a really interesting and smart review) of The Savage Detectives, on the background of the author:

He [Roberto Bolaño] returned to Mexico City in 1974. At a café on Calle Bucareli—Mexico City’s Left Bank—Bolaño met Mario Santiago, a defiant, acidly intelligent poet of Indian extraction. The two men, along with a dozen or so friends, formed a band of literary guerrillas, whom Bolaño christened the infrarealistas. The group’s aesthetic, Bolaño later said, was French Surrealism fused with “Dadaism, Mexican style.” They published iconoclastic magazines and engaged in myriad forms of provocation, such as shouting out their own poems at readings given by their “enemies” in Latin America’s cultural establishment—in particular, Octavio Paz, the poet who eventually became Mexico’s first Nobel Laureate. Another prominent Mexican writer, Carmen Boullosa, has spoken of her “fear,” before approaching a lectern, that infrarealistas might be lurking in the audience: “They were the terror of the literary world.”

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/03/26/070326crat_atlarge_zalewski

This should stand as a warning to those about to give any readings, esp. if they've been warned to be careful.

More short passages from The Savage Detectives (don't ask me why these):


And at a certain moment the atmosphere became so fraught, every thing on pins and needles, that I thought to myself these assholes must know something I don’t, something strange is going on here, it isn’t normal for the fucking bus to be circling the city like a ghost, it isn’t normal that no one’s getting on it, it isn’t normal for me to start hallucinating for no reason. But I got a hold on myself, the way I always do, and in the end nothing happened.


And then I said: how can you call yourself a Marxist, Jacinto, how can you call yourself a poet, when you can say things like that? Do you plan to make a revolution with clichés? And Jacinto answered that frankly there was no way he was planning to make revolutions anymore, but that if some night he happened to be in the mood, then making it with clichés and the lyrics of sappy love songs . . . .

And after screwing, mi general liked to go out into the courtyard to smoke a cigarette and think about postcoital sadness, that vexing sadness of the flesh, and about all the books he hadn’t read.

The fourth cup brings madness, said Apuleius . . . .

And then Norman said: it has nothing to do with visceral realists, asshole, you haven’t understood a thing. And I said: well, what does it have to do with, then? And Norman, to my relief, stopped looking at me and concentrated on the road for a few minutes, and then he said: it has to do with life, with what we lose without knowing it, and what we can regain. So what can we regain? I said. What we’ve lost, said Norman, we can get it back intact. It would have been easy to argue, but instead I opened the window and let the warm air ruffle my hair. The trees were passing by at an incredible speed.

I'll be yr bird -- M. Ward

I'll be your bird
I'm not the tiger, he never had,
I'm not the first hit when you got it bad.
I'm not your second, I’m not your third,
I'll be your bird.

I'm not your Chesnutt,
I'm not your Mould,
I'm not your DJ on late night radio,
I'll be the first one to ask where you were,
I'll be your bird.

Then when there's no one to care
I could protect like I’ve always been there,
I'll become your bear.

I'll sing statistics, & hide the truth,
I'll tell your dad anything you want me to,
I'll hide your locket under the dirt,
I'll be your bird.


just seemed a good song today.

Latest candidate for best urban legend circulating on the internet:

It seems that the Make-A-Wish is bankrupt, or close to it, because some time ago, they signed on a sick child, and told him he could have a wish. He chose as his wish the right to have unlimited wishes. So Make-A-Wish, bound by its promise and its mission, has run itself into the ground granting this child several trips to Disney World and various other costly luxuries, including daily hot dog lunches with Yankee star Johnny Damon.

[Further investigation reveals this as an Onion story taken for true by the credulous or the logical.]

Fattening Frogs For Snakes

It took me a long time, to find out my mistakes
Took me a long time, to find out my mistakes
(it sho' did man)
But I bet you my bottom dollar,
I'm not fattenin' no more frogs for snakes

I found out my downfall, back in nineteen and thirty
(I started checkin')
I found out my downfall, from nineteen and thirty
I'm tellin' all of my friends,
I'm not fattenin' no more frogs for snakes

All right now... (solo)

Yeh it is nineteen and fifty-seven, I've got to correct all of my mistakes
Whoa man, nineteen and fifty-seven, I've got to correct all of my mistakes
I'm tellin' my friends includin' my wife and everybody else,
not fattenin' no more frogs for snakes


Sonny Boy Williamson (lyrics courtesy of the website The Online Blues)

A couple from The Savage Detectives:

"You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold on to her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement."

"And afterward, after the laugh, we`seemed about to sink back into silence, one of those embarrassing silences between people`who've just met, or between a publisher and a zombie . . . ."

from a review of My Unwritten Books by George Steiner (review by Christpher Hart in the Tines of London: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article3130055.ece )

The one real surprise is a rapturous chapter entitled The Tongues of Eros, which is presumably intended as a serious, inquiring, lyrical and tender outline of a sexual autobiography, but induced uncontrollable fits of laughter in this reader. Steiner’s central argument is that making love “in German” is very different to making love “in Italian”, and that as a polyglot himself (a tetraglot, to be precise), he has had ample scope to confirm this personally.

Ch. “when nearing climax . . . would cry out, though in a muted register, the name ‘Sankt Nepomuk the Lesser.’ ” Another used the euphemism “taking the streetcar to Grinzing” to signify “a gentle, somewhat respectful anal access”.

In bed, in Angers, a French conquest used the rare subjunctive pluperfect, as perfected by Proust, “which arrested me, in, as it were, mid-flow” – something worth remembering if trapped in a lift with the professor. Another rebuked him for taking an unspeakable liberty: “ ‘How dare you address me as tu?’ panted V even as I parted her comely legs.”

He recalls “a glorious ebony partner” in Tulsa, Oklahoma, an intriguingly “unmentionable caress” called “our flowering cactus”, and another’s “lobelias gently watered with saliva”. A woman whose initial he cannot remember, a one-off in a hotel bedroom, observed as they undressed, “Am I myself? Are you you?” “The question,” Steiner muses, “seemed to stem directly out of Fichte’s meditations on the cancellation of the self.” Well, maybe. Or maybe she was just drunk.

Suitable for a housewarming party -- the "brownie" recipe from Alice B. Toklas' Cookbook (courtesy of The Straight Dope):

"Take 1 teaspoon black peppercorns, 1 whole nutmeg, 4 average sticks of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon coriander. These should all be pulverized in a mortar. About a handful each of stone dates, dried figs, shelled almonds and peanuts: chop these and mix them together. A bunch of canibus sativa can be pulverized. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts, kneaded together. About a cup of sugar dissolved in a big pat of butter. Rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient. Obtaining the canibus may present certain difficulties.... It should be picked and dried as soon as it has gone to seed and while the plant is still green."

Cannibis aside, what kind of brownie recipe is this?

Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I'd rather not talk about it, because I didn't understand it.

-- from The Savage Detectives

Some useful and interesting collections of photographs, and one picture blog from Luc Sante:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/

http://unitproj.library.ucla.edu/dlib/lat/

http://ekotodi.blogspot.com/

Ok - knowing nothing more about it than the name, I am puzzled by the Yahoo group: Dommes forced to whore in slavery. In what sense are these people Dommes? It's like being interested in very short giraffes.

Early in "The Savage Detectives" -- some nice sex writing in the book. E.g., too long to quote in full:

Her fingers ran over my face, from my chin to my eyes, closing my eyes as if inviting me to sleep, her hand, a bony hand, unzipped my pants and felt for my cock. Why I don't know, maybe because I was so nervous, but I said I wasn't sleepy. I know, said Maria, me either. Then everything turned into a succession of concrete acts and proper nouns and verbs, or pages from an anatomy manual scattered like flower petals, chaotically linked. I explored Maria's naked body, Maria's glorious naked body, in a contained silence, although I could have shouted, rejoicing in each corner, each smooth and interminable space I discovered. Maria was less reserved. Soon she began to moan, and her maneuvers, at first timid or restrained, became more open (I can't think of another word for it just now), as she guided my hand to places it hadn't reached, whether out of ignorance or negligence. So that was how I learned, in fewer than ten minutes, where a woman's clitoris is and how to massage or fondle or press it, always within the bounds of gentleness, of course, bounds that Maria, on the other hand, was constantly transgressing, since my cock, treated well in the first forays, soon began to suffer torments in her hands, hands that in the dark and the tangle of sheets sometimes seemed to me like the talons of a falcon or a falconess, tugging on me so hard that I was afraid they were trying to pull me right off, and at other times like Chinese dwarfs (her fingers were the fucking dwarfs!) investigating and measuring the spaces and ducts that connected my testicles to my cock and each other. Then (but first I pushed my pants down to my knees) I got on top of her and entered her.

"Don't come inside of me," said Maria.

"I'll try not to, " I said.

"What do you mean you'll try, you jerk? Don't come inside!"

In hard-boiled detective fiction, there are wrong crowds to fall in with, and wrong crowds to fall in with:

Toronto has its own Village. It's very much like the original in New York -- on a smaller scale, of course. Hester got in with a gang of ballet buffs. She went overboard for dancing lessons . . . . She had her hair clipped short, and her ears were pierced for earrings. She took to wearing white silk shirts and matador pants around the flat. She was always doing entrechats or whatever you call 'em.

"The Barbarous Coast" -- Ross MacDonald

On to a new book, because I'm reading too much: begins really well:

November 2

I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way.

November 3

I'm not really sure what visceral realism is. . . .

The Savage Detectives -- Roberto Bolano.

Behind every paragraph the reader ought to be able to hear the music of present joy and future grief. Insh'Allah.
Diary of a Bad Year.

Two from Grinderman, that cheer me right up. Turn the black sky grey.


I changed the sheets on my bed,
I combed the hairs across my head,
I sucked in my gut and still she said
That she just didn't want to.

I read her Eliot, read her Yeats,
I tried my best to stay up late,
I fixed the hinges on her gate,
But still she just never wanted to.

. . . I sent her every type of flower,
I played her guitar by the hour,
I patted her revolting little chihuahua,
But still she just didn't want to.

. . . thought I'd try another tack,
I drank a litre of cognac,
I threw her down upon her back,
But she just laughed and said that she just didn't want to.

"No Pussy Blues" [sung brilliantly -- great glottal catch in the recurrent "she didn't want to" line. And manages to make flower, hour and chihuahua rhyme]

I've got to get up to get down and start all over again
Head on down to the basement and shout:
"Kick those white mice and black dogs out!
Kick those white mice and baboons out!
Kick those baboons and other motherfuckers out! And...

Get it on
Get it on

"Get It On"


"Man on the Moon" is less cheerful:

My daddy was an astronaut
That’s what I was often taught
My daddy went away too soon
Now he’s living on the moon

Latest amusement:

on a site called LibraryThing (one of those sites where you can list books you've read, see who else has read them, etc.) the site offers "unrecommendations." You can look up any book and see what people who list the book are NOT reading. For instance, given the number of people listing "History of My Life" by Casanova, you'd expect 25.3 to have read "The Drawing of the Three" by Stephen King, and also 25.3 to have read "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" -- and yet, no one who has listed Casanova's book has listed either. I guess we are talking about a different type of effectiveness.

A column on the side says: if you liked "Screw The Roses, Send Me The Thorns," you won't like "Little Women." Seems reasonable.

For future reference:

Athletes all over the world have absorbed the American model of self and body, presumably because of the influence of American sports psychology (which "gives results"). Athletes speak openly of themselves as machines of a biological variety that have to be fed certain nutrients in certain quantities at certain times of the day, and "worked" in various ways by their taskmasters to be brought to optimum performance level.

One imagines the lovemaking of such athletes: vigorous activity, followed by a burst of orgasm, rationalized as a kind of reward to the physical mechanism, followed by a brief winding-down period during which the ghostly supervisor confirms the performance has been up to standard.

and, by way of contrast of a sort:

Romantic music seeks to recover a lost state of raptness (which is not the same as rapture), a state of exaltation in which the human shell will be shed and one will become pure being or pure spirit.

from the "Strong Opinions" section (Sect. 27 -- On Music) of Diary of A Bad Year -- J.M. Coetzee.

* * *

Less didactically:

Alan squirms like a little boy, but his embarassment doesn't run deep. I know what sort of childhood he had . . . . Now he is bursting to share his new secret.

Learned from "Diary of a Bad Year" -- in Australia apparently, talk radio is known as talk-back radio. [This fact makes a reappearence later on.]

Early response -- a more entertaining book than expected. I had expected it to be interesting, but not quite so amusing and entertaining.

Donald Barthelme's Fine Soups

My fine homemade soups are interesting, economical and tasty. To make them, one proceeds in the following way:

FINE HOMEMADE LEEK SOUP
Take one package Knorr Leek Soupmix. Prepare as directed. Take two live leeks. Chop leeks into quarter-inch rounds. Throw into Soupmix. Throw in 1/2 cup Tribuno Dry Vermouth. Throw in chopped parsley. Throw in some amount of salt and a heavy bit of freshly ground pepper. Eat with good-quality French bread, dipped repeatedly in soup.

FINE HOMEMADE MUSHROOM SOUP
Take one package knorr Mushroom Soupmix. Prepare as directed. Take four large mushrooms. Slice. Throw into Soupmix. Throw in 1/2 cup Tribuno Dry Vermouth, parsley, salt, pepper. Stick bread as above into soup at intervals. Buttering bread enhances taste of the whole.

FINE HOMEMADE CHICKEN SOUP
Take Knorr Chicken Soupmix, prepare as directed, throw in leftover chicken, duck or goose as available. Add enhancements as above.

Taken from The Teachings of Don B. (as quoted on the website Overnight To Many Distant Cities)

My daughter at Hebrew/Sunday school:

Librarian to class: We have all these wonderful books for you to take out and read.

Other student: My uncle wrote this book [called something obviously Jewish]. Do you have that?

Librarian: No , but that's great we'll have to get that right away.

My daughter [being a smartass]: My grandfather wrote a book called American Indian Law. Do you have that?

Librarian: OH that's wonderful. Is it Jewish?

My daughter: No.

Librarian: Oh then we don't have it.