Ordinary and dazzling

The book "Stoner" by John Williams opens with these two audicious paragraphs:


William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same university, where he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his course. When he died his colleagues made a memorial contribution of a medieval manuscript to the University Library. This transcript may still be found in the Rare Books Collection, bearing the inscription: "Presented to the Library of the University of Missouri, in memory of William Stoner, Department of English. By his colleagues."

An occasional student who comes by the inscription may wonder idly who William Stoner was, but he seldom pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question. Stoner's colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones, it is merely a sound that evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.


And from there launches into the story of Stoner's life, beginning with the next sentence:

He was born on a small farm in central Missouri near the town of Booneville, some forty miles from Columbia, the home of the University.


I'm not sure why I find this opening so thrilling, other than the implied boast by the novelist: "I will make this ordinary unspecial life of interest to you." Which he does.

Woof

from NYT article about Highsmith-related locations in Greenwich Village:

"Morton Street was where Highsmith “started her lifelong career of aggressive seduction,” Ms. Schenkar explained. It is also where Kenneth Rowajinski, the psychopathic dog killer, is murdered in her 1972 novel “A Dog’s Ransom.” (The unlucky poodle, Tina, bears the name of a dog owned by one of her amours.) “She kills so many dogs,” Ms. Schenkar said of Highsmith. “She hated dogs. She couldn’t bear sharing attention.”"

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/books/11highsmith.html

Roger Angell reappears

His New Yorker baseball articles are fewer and shorter, but still full of grace notes of felicitious phrase and precise observation:

"It wound up 6-1, Phillies -- an outcome that was almost visible when Lee fanned Jeter and Teixeira in the first inning and the holiday crowd at the Stadium went all murmurous."

"Utley, who has slicked-back, Jake Gittes hair, possesses a quick bat and a very short home-run stroke; he looks like a man in an A.T.M. reaching for his cash."

from the Nov 30, 2009 issue,

as is this amusing casual by Mike Sacks:
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2009/11/30/091130sh_shouts_sacks

Wittgenstein helps with the war effort

by taking a menial job as a hospital orderly:

"Wittgenstein's job as a porter was to delivery medicines from the dispensary to the wards, where, according to john Ryles' wife, Miriam, he advised the patients not to take them."

from Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius p. 432.

My New Philosopher Joke

Philosopher Fred: Oy!

Jim: What's wrong, Fred? You seem a little down.

Philosopher Fred: I'm so discouraged. It just doesn't seem like I'll live long enough to find out what happens after death.

Overheard at the Bar

I want to write a column for the L.A. Weekly: "This Day In L.A." It would cover what happened in L.A. the preceding week.

Moose and Squirrel Hit 50

Our namesake turns 50. Every appreciation insufficient. Here's a dim view of the statue in West Hollywood. But then even in the best of light, he's a little dim.

Also, he remembers everthing he ever has eaten.

http://kenlevine.blogspot.com/2009/11/happy-birthday-rocky-bullwinkle.html

Bookstore story

Tobias Wolff, in The Morning News:

Robert Olen Butler told me a really funny story about going to a Borders out in Berkeley—Berkeley of all places. You know, he likes to travel around, goes to lots of bookstores and signs stock for them because it helps them sell and he likes to help them sell his book. So he goes into this Borders—it might have been a Barnes and Noble [there has never been a Borders in Berkeley—ed.], I can’t remember which and I don’t want to badmouth one if I’m wrong—she had never heard of him to begin with, the woman that was waiting on him. Then he said, Well I just had this book come out, and he had a nice big review of it and showed her. And he said, I’d like to sign these books. And she said, Well let me see if I can find them. She did find them; they had about 20 copies of his book. Brought ‘em over, he signed ‘em all. And she said, Well do you want to pay for these with credit card or cash?

http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/birnbaum_v/tobias_wolff.php

Song of the day

Can you please crawl out your window?
Use your arms and legs it won't ruin you
(How can you say he will haunt you?
You can go back to him any time you want to.)

The Way They Write Now

"Put your left hand on the table. Put your right hand in the air. If you stay that way long enough, you'll get a plot," Margaret Atwood says when asked where her ideas come from. When questioned about whether she's ever used that approach, she adds, "No, I don't have to."

Others on the way they write: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703740004574513463106012106.html

The Five Most Ridiculous Sex-help Books

http://www.cracked.com/blog/how-to-f-like-a-librarian/

funnier than the premise

Poem, recommended by The Anthologist

"A Small Hotel"

Selima Hill

My nipples tick

like little bombs of blood.

Someone is walking

in the yard outside.

I don’t know why

Our Lord was crucified.

A really good fuck

makes me feel like custard.

http://everseradio.com/a-small-hotel-by-selima-hill/

Extra Points for Auden, for internal rhymes.

quoted in a review of the work of Edward Lear, by Brad Leithauser in NYRB


There was a Young Lady of Norway,
Who casually sat in a doorway;
When the door squeezed her flat,
She exclaimed, "What of that?"
This courageous Young Lady of Norway.

Edward Lear


There was an Archdeacon who said:
"May I take off my gaiters in bed?"
But the Bishop said "No,
Wherever you go
You must wear them until you are dead."

Anonymous


The Bishop elect of Hong Kong
Had a dong that was twelve inches long.
He thought the spectators
Were admiring his gaiters
When he went to the gents. He was wrong.

W.H. Auden

Dream

On the sidewalk I ran into, literally, my old friend the now notorious felon. He was running along and crossed the street and we saw each other and he ran up to me, and I ended up catching the back of my heels on the curb as he came up to embrace me, and I fell back on the ground. He was carrying a large water gun, as part of whatever it was he was doing that required him to be running around the streets of the city.

Soupy Sales

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/2009/10/22/2009-10-22_soupy_sales_famed_comedian_from_the_golden_age_of_television_dead_at_83.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdUD4giJPOk&feature=player_embedded#

Be true to your teeth, and they’ll never be false to you.

Stuff from Alasdair Gray

Gray:

It has to do with what money you have and what freedom you have to, you know, get on. My first wife was Danish. She comes through very badly in Rodge’s biography because my friends think she behaved very badly to me, and she did, she tended to have affairs with my friends, though not with my closest friends. Her basic attitude was that she didn’t enjoy sex with me and she had to do it with somebody. And I’m afraid I couldn’t take the line of, you will have sex with nobody but me! I thought, well, it’s not your fault. Just don’t tell me who it’s with, I don’t want to meet them socially.

And

Rumpus: Did you get to know the renters?

Gray:

Oh, yes. Most of them became friends. Taught you a lot about life. Somebody once introduced me to a young artist or a young writer, I forget which, it didn’t matter which, and asked if I had advise to give. I said, try and get a house with more rooms than you need and then sublet. It will be a small income, and you’ll find that a lot of people who you trust most don’t pay you, and many people who you don’t find to be particularly trustworthy pay you quite regularly. Of course, they thought I was making fun of them, but it was the only piece of advice I could give to anybody. If someone tries to show you their writing and says, do you think I should stick to this, do you think I could become a real writer? Say to them, If you have to ask that question, no, you can’t.

from The Rumpus: http://therumpus.net/2009/10/the-rumpus-interview-with-alasdair-gray/

See also Gray on the biography written by his secretary: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/20/biography1

Song of the day

Somewhere on my body if you look real close,
you'll find you.

You

I'm calling you

--- from the song of the day, "You" by X.

How a guy named Marshall will eventually become Prez

"I too fear that Obama is the last President we’ll see for a generation. Like others before him, Obama will use some national crisis, manufactured or otherwise, to declare the the country is in dire straits and, to save the country, he has no choice but to suspend the Constitution, institute Marshall Law, and make him President-For-Life… like his many personal heroes around the globe have done before him. And we know that the crisis will never be officially over so there’ll be no need to hold elections."

from Wallace Stevens

Tell X that speech is not dirty silence
Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.



from "The Creations of Sound" by Wallace Stevens (cited by Denis Donahue in a review in Harper's)

On the streets of Portland, OR, 1947.

He was legally a fugitive from the orphanage, and in that sense "wanted." He did not feel "wanted" -- he felt very unwanted. He had desires, and nobody was going to drop out of the sky to satisfy them. He tried to milk a little self-pity out of this thought, but it did not work: he had to recognize that he preferred his singularity, his freedom. All right. He knew what he wanted. He wanted some money. He wanted a piece of ass. He wanted a big dinner, with all the trimmings. He wanted a bottle of whiskey. He wanted a car, in which he could drive a hundred miles an hour (he had only recently learned how to drive, and he loved the feelings of speed and control, the sharpness of the danger). He wanted some new clothes and thirty-dollar shoes. He wanted a .45 automatic. He wanted a record player in the big hotel room he wanted, so he could lie in bed with the whiskey and the piece of ass and listen to "How High the Moon" and "Artistry Jumps." That was what he wanted. So it was up to him to get these things. Already he felt better, just making a list of his desires. . . .
He was in a really good humor when he got to the poolhall . . . .

from Hard Rain Falling, by Don Carpenter

Overheard at the baseball game

The woman behind me, talking with her two friends:

"At first it's scary and it hurts, but after that it is so amazing."

[Not said ironically or with a wink, and not, I think, about sex. Never figured out what it referred to.]

1. Already dancing; 2. Hexagonal; 3. Not compendium but playground

Corrections and Clarifications from The Guardian Oct 3, 2009 http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2009/oct/03/corrections-clarifications


• In a collection of photographs, an extended caption accompanied a 1956 picture of Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire. It said that Hepburn took ballet lessons to be able to dance with Astaire in Funny Face. In fact she had trained as a ballet dancer in Amsterdam and London before changing tack into acting (Willy Rizzo's best shots, 1 October, page 22, G2).

• Archeological excavations were described at the ancient artificial harbour of Portus, near Rome. The harbour is not octagonal as we said, but a hexagon. We meant to compare the capacity of an amphitheatre that once stood on the site with capacity at the Pantheon, not the Colosseum (When near Rome, 2 October, page 12, G2).

• Writing from memory in a piece defending his work against critics – Why my book is not sexist, 21 September, page 21, G2 – Stephen Bayley said that he had been accused by the presenter of BBC Woman's Hour of producing a "coffee-table compendium of filth for perverts". Jenni Murray has objected that she would never use the word compendium (the same goes for filth). The correct wording of the question she posed in the 9 September programme was: "Has he reclaimed images of the female body or produced a coffee-table playground for perverts?"

Bay City

Nathaniel Rich interviewed James Ellroy for The Paris Review. In the introduction Rich described some of Ellroy's activities during the week Rich spent in Los Angeles for the interview. The behavior included:

He talked to women -- on the phone, in restaurants, in his apartment. Late one night he drove to the house of his girlfriend. The lights were on: the woman, her husband, and their children were inside. Ellroy opened the window of his car and proceeded to bay like a dog. He drove around the block and howled again. The he did it a third time. The girlfriend called him the next day, laughing. Apparently he bayed at her several times a month. They had a unique arrangement.

"Living on black coffee and breakfast cereal"

Six months ago he had thought his ghostly place . . . would be . . . between a yearning to prolong the summer of the passionate body and a reluctant recall from the long sleep of oblivion. But he was wrong. It is not the erotic that is calling to him after all, nor the elegiac, but the comic.

from Disgrace.

Benjamin Franklin on Man

Men I find to be a Sort of Beings very badly constructed, as they are generally more easily provok’d than reconcil’d, more dispos’d to do Mischief to each other than to make Reparation, much more easily deceiv’d than undeceiv’d, and having more Pride & even Pleasure in killing than in begetting one another, for without a Blush they assemble in great Armies at Noon Day to destroy, and when they have kill’d as many as they can, they exaggerate the Number to augment the fancied Glory; but they creep into Corners or cover themselves with the Darkness of Night, when they mean to beget, as being asham’d of a virtuous Action.

from a letter written in Passy, 1782 (quoted by Steven Johnson, "The Invention of Air")

Ode To a Hummingbird

Ode to a Hummingbird

hmm mm hmm mm hmmmm mmm mmm

hmm mm hmm hm hm other birds

hmm mm hmmm hmm mm mm hm

hmm hmm mm mm can't recall the words

Air

Sylvie believed in stern solvents, and most of all in air. It was for the sake of air that she opened the doors and windows, though it was probably through forgetfulness that she left them open. It was for the sake of air that on one early splendid day she wrestled my grandmother's plum-colored davenport into the front yard, where it remained until it weathered pink.

from Housekeeping.

The Magic Word

"Perhaps the most frequently invoked [of the automatic grounds for ejection in a baseball game is the use] of profane language directed at [an umpire or his partner.]

'People always want to know if there's a magic word,' the umpire Gary Cederstrom would tell me later. 'Is it 'cocksucker'? Is it 'asshole'? No. The magic word is 'you.'"

from As They See 'Em . . . .

"I Happen To Have Marshall McLuhan Right Here"

http://nerdworld.blogs.time.com/2009/09/08/true-tales-of-conversational-vengeance/

Because the proper way to study Pynchon is to be ignorant of popular culture.

News From The Daily Breeze

A Harbor College geography professor, who for two years barraged TV weatherman Fritz Coleman with e-mails contending his forecasts are inaccurate, has been convicted of violating a judge's order to stop harassing him.

Melanie Patton Renfrew, 54, who has taught at the Harbor College Wilmington campus since 1997, pleaded no contest Aug. 7 in Burbank court to violating a restraining order [KNBC weatherman Fritz] Coleman had obtained to keep her from stalking him.

In an interview at her El Camino Village home, in an e-mail and in an entry on her own blog, Renfrew denied she is a stalker, saying she was trying to get the KNBC weatherman to change the terminology he uses to describe onshore and offshore winds to better inform the public.
She contends it is a science and health issue.

"I did what I felt God was calling me to do," she said in an interview. "I don't feel obsessive."

http://www.dailybreeze.com/ci_13257678?source=rv


AND

A doctor driving a Mercedes Benz struck and killed another doctor running across a street at the entrance of Los Angeles International Airport, police said Thursday.

Richard Burrus, 59, was crossing Sepulveda outside of a crosswalk when he was hit in the No. 3 lane.

Scott, the driver, wearing green scrubs, ran to Burrus' side to help him as police and paramedics arrived. Burrus died at a local hospital.


http://www.dailybreeze.com/news/ci_13265121?source=email


[both from http://www.laobserved.com/]

Sun in smoke

The sun setting through the smoke-strewn skies in Los Angeles. In person, the sun glowed red.

Southern Oregon Endzone Scoreboard

Southern Oregon Ducks

Southern Oregon Deer and Flowers

Barack Obama's summer vacation reading list:

"The Way Home" by George Pelecanos
"Hot, Flat, and Crowded" by Thomas Friedman
"Lush Life" by Richard Price
"Plainsong" by Kent Haruf
"John Adams" by David McCullough

Two teenagers talking

Girl: You should take up knitting.

Girl 2: No, crocheting is way cooler. Crocheting is the new knitting. You obviously don't speak to any old people.

A little personal analysis

Among the LibraryThing Unsuggester unsuggests for me (on the basis of the books I read, and reverse statistical correlations, the Unsuggester tells me what I shouldn't read) are pretty much any book by Sophie Kinsella (about Shopaholics) and

The Good Marriage: How and Why Love Lasts by Judith Wallerstein.

This is based not on a knowledge of me, but because I have read: a Henning Mankel book (whatever), an early Joseph Conrad novel (?), a biography of Shelley (well, no one who reads a biography of Shelley will ever get married, at least not to Shelley or anyone he knew), the Vintage Book of Amnesia (hard to stay married if you don't remember that you are, or where you live) and, clearly most importantly, The Magic Pudding.

It was The Magic Pudding that gave me away.

Best use of the word "basically"

A typical sentence from "Inherent Vice," typlifying the pleasures of that book:

Next morning -- ocean smell, fresh coffee, a cool edge -- Doc was in Wavos, going through the Sunday Times to see if there was anything new about the Wolfmann case, which there wasn't -- though of course with twenty or thirty different sections you never knew what might be hiding among the real estate ads -- and was about to dig in to a specialty of the house known as Shoot The Pier, basically avocados, sprouts, jalapenos, pickled artichoke hearts, Monterey jack cheese, and Green Goddess dressing on a sourdough loaf that had first been sliced lengthwise, spread with garlic butter, and toasted, seventy-nine cents and a bargain at half the price, when who should stroll in, who else, but Shasta Fay.

Nice work By AP Writer

By WAYNE PARRY, Associated Press Writer Wayne Parry, Associated Press Writer – 2 hrs 1 min ago

Rock legend Bob Dylan was treated like a complete unknown by police in a New Jersey shore community when a resident called to report someone wandering around the neighborhood.

Dylan was in Long Branch, about a two-hour drive south of New York City, on July 23 as part of a tour with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp that was to play at a baseball stadium.

A 24-year-old police officer apparently was unaware of who Dylan is and asked him for identification, Long Branch business administrator Howard Woolley said Friday.

"I don't think she was familiar with his entire body of work," Woolley said.

The incident began at 5 p.m. (2100 GMT) when a resident said a man was wandering around a low-income, predominantly minority neighborhood several blocks from the oceanfront looking at houses.

The police officer drove up to Dylan, who was wearing a blue jacket, and asked him his name.

According to Woolley, the following exchange ensued:

"What is your name, sir?" the officer asked.
"Bob Dylan," Dylan said.
"OK, what are you doing here?" the officer asked.
"I'm on tour," the singer replied.

A second officer, also in his 20s, responded to assist the first officer. He, too, apparently was unfamiliar with Dylan, Woolley said.

The officers asked Dylan for identification. The singer of such classics as "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Blowin' in the Wind" said that he didn't have any ID with him, that he was just walking around looking at houses to pass some time before that night's show.

The officers asked Dylan, 68, to accompany them back to the Ocean Place Resort and Spa, where the performers were staying. Once there, tour staff vouched for Dylan.

The officers thanked him for his cooperation.

"He couldn't have been any nicer to them," Woolley added.

How did it feel? A Dylan publicist did not immediately return a telephone call seeking comment Friday.

Inherent Vice

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjWKPdDk0_U

I like the trailer -- narrated by the unseen author.

Party talk

Friend, to me: I'm so glad you came.

Me: I'm glad I'm here.

Friend: I would have been lonely otherwise. If you hadn't come, everyone here would have been civilized.

We are such stuff as hot dogs are made of

"Now, of course, we're all mustard."

-- Dr. Seuss, "Happy Birthday To You."

from Lolita, the movie

Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters):

You touch me and I go limp as a noodle. It drives me crazy.

Humbert Humbert (James Mason):

I know what you mean.

If your birthday is some other day

You become more loving this year. With the help of a mentor or healer, you clear away old resentments, make a plan for living life your way and stay on track. The next seven weeks bring new friends and influences into your world. You'll make money with a creative endeavor and you'll make people happy, too. Libra and Virgo adore you. Your lucky numbers are 30, 25, 39, 15 and 2.

New friends, whoo hoo! And only ten more zodiac signs left to convince to adore me!

Cleveland -- If not for . . .

I'd heard it said that if not for the city of New Orleans, with its chicory-roasted coffee, plates of sausage, and beignets, and also for San Francisco, with its hot croissants, organic fruit jam, and fresh-ground coffee, and possibly New York, with its hot bialys and bowls of steamed prunes, Cleveland would have been considered the "City of Breakfasts." Accordingly, I was not disappointed by the Muffin Pit, by my two eggs, over easy with a side of bacon, or by my couple of pieces of wheat toast and two of those puffy donuts on the side, all prepared by a balding, unshaven, foreign-looking, yet somehow curiously at home counterman in a grease-spattered apron. Our orders were delivered, along with a handsome square container of grape preserves, two glasses of orange juice, and two cups of coffee, by a grandmotherly waitress wearing a yellowed doily crown atop her stringy gray hair. I had been keyed up for the meeeting, but, needless to say, I suddenly found my appetite.

from Erased by Jim Krusoe

The short version

[edit] Crime and Punishment (1866)


Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.

Accept suffering and achieve atonement through it — that is what you must do.

Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel.

Talking nonsense is man's only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms.

"You're a gentleman," they used to say to him. "You shouldn't have gone murdering people with a hatchet; that's no occupation for a gentleman."

Do a man dirt, yourself you hurt.

Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.

Accept suffering and achieve atonement through it — that is what you must do.

If not reason, then the devil.


from Wikiquote: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dostoevsky

In Jeff In Venice, Death in Varanasi, Geoff Dyer speculates that what Dostoevsky had in mind when he defined man as a creature that gets used to everything, was the price of fine glass in Venice.

Selections from "Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi"

When he came to a half-decent canal, he sat beside it and didn't weep.


{ to a goat who has asked the narrator the difference between human and goat consciousness:}

"Well, you see, that is probably the difference. The ability to articulate things. Language. Self-examination. . . . " I didn't know what else to say. It seemed I was lacking in exactly the qualities I claimed distinguished me from my interlocutor. The more I tried to articulate the difference between myself and the goat, the more we had in common.

"I am in mourning for myself," I said, reprising the old Chekhov joke. "My old self refuses to die. The new is struggling to be reborn. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."

"It may seem extreme that . . . "

I suppose this story will be everywhere, but for now it is worth repeating in full:

"A man plotted to kill his adoptive parents with the help of a friend he met on the internet, a court has heard.

Christopher Monks, 24, wanted Shaun Skarnes to murder his parents Christopher and Elizabeth Monks while they slept and then perform an extreme sex act on him, Preston Crown Court was told.

The bisexual pair are alleged to have hatched the plot after meeting on an internet site about "Furries" – people who pretend to be animal characters and share sexual role-playing fantasies.

Skarnes, 19, visited Monks' family home in Preston Road, Clayton-le-Woods, near Chorley, in February after weeks of chatting to him online.

The two played computer games before Skarnes left, telling Mr and Mrs Monks he was getting the train home to Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, and thanking them for having him round.

Monks then watched a DVD with his parents while Skarnes waited for hours in a playpark nearby until he received a text from his friend, telling him the couple were asleep in the four-bedroom house they shared with their son.

Mr Monks woke in the early hours of the morning to find Skarnes beside his bed, clutching a kitchen knife.

He grappled with the intruder and yelled for help from his wife, who was sleeping downstairs.

Dad-of-three Mr Monks told the court: "I thought he was trying to kill me. My wife tried to hit him with a stick but it broke."

She then began to talk to him in a calming way. At that point, his manner changed completely."

The couple went downstairs to find a police officer on the doorstep, who had responded to Mrs Monks' 999 call.

Mr Monks was left with bruised arms, a cut palm and bite marks.

Monks, who was downstairs during the attack, was initially treated as a witness but then later arrested.

Prosecutor Dennis Watson QC told the court that while Skarnes carried out the attack, ex-Runshaw College student Monks stayed downstairs, deleting "incriminating" text messages.

Mr Watson said Monks had talked about his sexual desire for his penis to be bitten off in online chatroom discussions.

He told the jury: "It may seem extreme that he wanted his penis bitten off, but there is ample evidence from websites he visited and conversations with Shaun Skarnes that this was a deeply held interest and one he found sexually stimulating."

It seems that Skarnes was to receive no money for killing Mr and Mrs Monks but the prospect of biting off Monks' penis. This was the climactic act of the conspiracy.

"Elizabeth Monks told the court that her adopted son was a quiet boy who never lost his temper and did well at his temping job at an educational training centre, where she also works.

Her husband added: "We have no doubt that (Christopher) did not intend to go to this extreme.

There is no-one in our closest circle of friends who is not shocked at what has happened."

Skarnes, of Sutton Way, Ellesmere Port, and Monks both deny conspiracy to murder Mr and Mrs Monks."

http://www.lep.co.uk/news/Son-39in-plot-to-kill.5477291.jp

via: http://www.sarahweinman.com/confessions/

From "The Scarab" by James Tate

For my birthday, Donna gave me a scarab from
Egypt, which she said was thousands of years old, and
said to have special powers. Its a beetle carved from
stone. "What kind of powers?" I asked her. "It'll keep
you from being eaten by the hippopotamus god. It'll stop
you from bumping into pyramids. And it will make you
the sexual prince of the universe," she said. "Those are the
three things I wanted most in life. What a great present.
Thanks sweetheart," I said. "Of course that last part
just works with me as your lover," she added. "Believe me,
I fully understood that, " I said. "To tell you the truth,
Peter, I have no idea what kind of special powers it's
supposed to have. . . . "

. . . I was distracted, agitated. I
kept looking around the office for something. At first, I
didn't know what I was looking for. The, slowly, it dawned
on me. The hippopotamus god was coming for me. I reached
in my pocket and clutched the scarab. It was coming, and I
was ready.

Ironic Comfort

The tongue in cheek apotheosis of the song in which the listener is to take comfort from the support and wisdom of the band, a la, say, Hey Jude or Everybody Hurts:

Are you under the impression
This isn't your life?
Do you dabble in depression?
Is someone twisting a knife in your back?
Are you being attacked?
Oh, this is a fact
That you need to know

Oh, oh, oh, oh

Wilco, Wilco,
Wilco will love you, baby

from Wilco (The Song)

I'll like this a lot, some time, some other hour.

The General

Clarity and Incomprehensibility from random blog wanderings

I would like to say that I am truly sorry ;(
I am a bad girlfriend. I should have not said such things about him in the previous post(which i have deleted). Kan people? Such a bad girl, I was. I am so sorry baby. Thanks to Diyana and Kak techic for the help, and thanks cz suruh Echa text emman and mengalah. If not, mesti tk dpt jmpe emman for dinner td ;P Thanks guys. Not to forget my baby boo, Juliet too for the advice, tp i dah okay dengan emman dh sayang. ;;) Thanks friends!! Glad everything's over. We have made a new vow. Secret stuff, haha.

from: http://aisyahhsonceuponatime.blogspot.com/2009/07/i-would-like-to-say-that-i-am-truly.html


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from: http://sp-revenge.jugem.jp/?eid=229

Joke

One snowman to the other: "You're right. I do smell a carrot."

At a party, the fourteen years old girls, not related to the fifty year old man, asked him to tell them Tom Swifties. He did what he could. "My car broke down and this is the only way I have to get to town," explained Tom hoarsely. And an old one of mine: "I love camping, " said Tom intensely. They appreciated and admired the man.

You always fear what will happen when you run out of jokes, though.

Illustration of the principle from Buster Keaton's "The Cameraman" -- throughout the movie when Keaton left the newsreel office, he managed to break the window in the office door. But when he is banished from the office and the presence of the girl, the window doesn't break. It isn't so much that the joke wouldn't fit the mood, it is that the absence of the joke to be expected given the pattern creates the sadness, it is the sadness.

So you don't want to run out of jokes for 14 year old girls.

A wish comes true

"I wish you well" she said, and thereupon I fell in a narrow dark hole filled with water, never to emerge.


from "Brief Stories of Terror"

Makes me want to regain lost weight, and everything else

C.D. was jolly and obscene. With C.D. I felt happy, amused, outraged. C.D. made me feel that I'd been violated and survived. C.D. went over the hill with a huge yelp of delight and then, every trace of greed and lust and all those appetites that kept him constantly on the boil finally withdrawn, he fell into an unrousable slumber. And I felt like laughing. And I felt good and I felt tough.

Compared with the slim hard-bodied men his figure was a joke -- round, tubby, pillow-paunchy, it had the consistency of foam rubber; rolling around with him was like rolling around with some big beach toy.



from The Old Man and Me

from James Tate's poem "Waylon's Woman"

Waylon, it should be said, is a rooster. Loretta is not a hen.

. . . At closing time, we say our good-byes,
and I kiss Loretta, just a little peck, because
I know she is married to a chicken, and I respect
that. Waylon has made her happy in ways I never
could. The starry sky, the police hiding in the
bushes, God, it’s good to be alive, I think, and
pee behind my car in the darkness of my own private
darkness.

The entire poem can be found here: http://www.takethehandle.com/interactive/?p=790

Doug Glanville on the anxiety of the baseball player: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/14/opinion/14glanville-anxiety.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

from the story "Blue Light" by John Updike:

At the beach, when she and Fleischer were still married to other people . . . Tracy's long-toed bare feet beside Fleischer's groggy face had bronzed insteps and pale soles and cherry-red nails, and he wanted to lick them, every square inch, but for the scandal this would have caused, and the sand grains that would have adhered to his tongue.

Optimism and a helpless dependence on being loved, he saw with the reluctant wisdom of age, are the meager survival weapons we bring with us into the world. Fleischer still wanted to be loved, how ever little he deserved it.

Father Daughter Conversation On The Way To See A Mamet Play

Daughter: This is an older play, right?

Father: Yes. It's a revival. [pause] So there'll be lots of gospel music.

[At least five minutes of silence.]

*

All Water Is Holy

from the story "My Father's Tears" by John Updike. Better in context.


We are surrounded by holy water; all water, our chemical mother, is holy. Flying from Boston to New York, my habit is to take a seat on the right-hand side of the plane, but the other day I sat on the left, and was rewarded, at that hour of midmorning, by the sun’s reflections on the waters of Connecticut—not just the rivers and the Sound but little ponds and pools and glittering threads of water that for a few seconds hurled silver light skyward into my eyes. My father’s tears for a moment had caught the light; that is how I saw them. When he was dead, Deb and I divorced. Why? It’s hard to say. We boil at different degrees, Emerson said, and a woman came along who had my boiling point. The snapshots I took of Deb naked, interestingly, she claimed as part of her just settlement. It seemed to me they were mine—I’d taken them. But she said her body was hers.

After our divorce, my mother told me, of my father, “He worried about you two from the first time you brought her home. He didn’t think she was feminine enough for you.”

“He was big on femininity,” I said, not knowing whether to believe her or not. The dead are so easy to misquote.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/02/27/060227fi_fiction?currentPage=1

Sacred Blue!

A leading French business newspaper is launching a multi-lingual version of its website using automatic translation, dispensing with journalists but producing often comic results.

"Ryanair loan to make travel of the passengers upright," read a typically bizarre headline on La Tribune's site this week above a story in equally mangled English on the low-cost airline's plans to make people fly standing up.

"The Chinese car in ambush," "Internet Explorer: mistrust!" and "Assets of the continental right in management of the crisis" were some other mysterious headlines the same day on the site, which is still in an experimental phase.

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/afp/20090710/tc_afp/francemediaindustrylanguageinternet

Sigh

Pogonophilia — The fixation on bearded men

Once, interviewing a woman with this fetish, I showed her four pictures of naked men: a well-endowed eighteen-year-old model, an extremely thin bearded man in his early thirties, a heavily muscled former professional athlete in his late forties, and Peter North, the porn star. Asked to choose the most "virile and masculine" of the group, she selected the bearded man instantly.


from: http://www.nerve.com/personalessays/Saknussemm/my-ten-favorite-fetishes-a-lifelong-sex-researcher-on-his-most-unusual-discoveries/index.asp?page=1

While it would be nice if all I knew partook of the fetish above, in my case, could most profitably be combined with:

Catoptrophilia — Unusual titillation in the presence of mirrors

Poem From My Dream Last Night, Including Both Titles

Instructions For Staying Alive

Inhale

Exhale

Repeat

(alternate title: Instructions For Smoking Pot)

*

Amusement at another's expense

Amusing critical view of Michael Chabon's young adult book about baseball Summerland:

Everything that makes a bad baseball book bad is here–lyricism laid on with a trowel, the “mythology” of baseball and its deep meaning, aching fancy in place of hard exactness. Supposedly a Young Adult novel. Give it to your son only if you want him to hate the sport forever. “A baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day,” Chabon writes. No, it isn’t, any more than cream cheese is a ready smooth device for measuring the contours of a bagel.

from a consideration of best and worst baseball novels: http://www.hardballcooperative.com/?p=1044

[for my future reference - from 1962, re ending a marriage]

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/62jul/johnson.htm

Even I Not So Sure

from a British show about Elton John:

"Though he had been married before, he had always been a confirmed bachelor."

This amuses me

Though I don't mean to make fun of the [facebook] friend of a [facebook friend] who posted it:

"Leslie.....you are right, there are no coinsidences, thank you."

Breakfast

"I was so darned sorry for poor old Cindy that I hadn't the heart to touch my breakfast. I told Jeeves to drink it himself."

-- from My Man Jeeves.

Trouble

*

A tough question

Question overheard in the men's room of a Georgetown bar which makes one hope that the young professional posing the question, in a manner which took seriously the assumptins of the question if being joking in that young professional male way, is not the future mover and shaker he thinks himself to be:

"Would you fuck a Russian girl even though she hated America?"


[Compare and contrast a recently read passage from Henry Miller:


" . . . They would find a job for me as long as I was earnest and sincere. i tried to look earnest, but I only succeeded in looking pathetic. They don't want to see sad faces in Russia, they want you to be cheerful, enthusiastic, light-hearted, optimistic. It sounded very much like America to me. I wasn't born with this kind of enthusiasm."]

Favorite part of a recent wedding ceremony

In all seriousness, in an all serious wedding ceremony, the cantor performing the ceremony said, with appropriate Yiddish inflections:

Your marriage has gotten off to a magnificent beginning, starting with the barbeque on Friday which unfortunately I was unable to attend as I had other obligations.

New phrase of the week

Encountered in the past couple of days in two unrelated circumstances: Silkwood shower.

FMI: Initial Kindle Purchases

Tropic of Cancer -- Henry Miller
The Ax -- Donald Westlake
Jeeves Omnibus: My Man Jeeves and Right Ho, Jeeves -- P.G. Wodehouse
The City and The City -- China Mieville

* * *

Possibly next in the queue:

Something less fictional
The Southpaw -- Mark Harris

Two Leafy Sea Dragons

Three Cheeses

You know,

Marilyn Monroe, describing first meeting Arthur Miller:

"For Monroe, meeting him “was like running into a tree!” she recalled. “You know, like a cool drink when you’ve got a fever.”"

NYT June 2, 2009 review of biography of Miller by Christopher Bigby: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/books/03garn.html?_r=1&hpw

The best way to gain an understanding of something in Serbian

http://translate.google.com/?hl=en#

I took ...

Nice funny sentences, at least in context, from Howard Jacobsen's "The Act of Love":

From his brief how-do-you-dos I took Miles to be an Irish millionaire. A horse breeder, probably.

Strike Through The Mask

Beckett's description, translated from a letter written in German in 1937, of the proper goal for a writer:

"It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. Grammar and style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask. It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used where it is most efficiently abused. Since we cannot dismiss it all at once, at least we do not want to leave anything undone that may contribute to its disrepute. To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through--I cannot imagine a higher goal for today's writer."

Joyce's practice, in contrast, is said to be "the apotheosis of the word."

Mary Roach: 10 things you didn't know about orgasm

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/lang/eng/mary_roach_10_things_you_didn_t_know_about_orgasm.html

[Reportedly contains adult content -- it is a lecture about orgasm]

Samuel Johnson's ideal pasttime, had he no obligations or ambition

"If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman but she should be one who could understand me, and would add something to the conversation."

"Life of Johnson" Boswell -- 19 Sept. 1777.

Samuel Beckett took this as a sign of impotence, but signed on to the idea himself. Letter of 26 Apr. 1937.

New Poem

An Unusual Duck


It's a duck.
But
it doesn't look like a duck
it doesn't walk like a duck
or quack like a duck.
WTF!!??

Mud Pie or Face

Dream:

a game show, entitled "Mud Pie Or Face"

in which contestants wuold end up either with a mud pie in their face, or an untouched face, in which case they woul also win prizes.

sometimes. in honor of National Comma Week, there were three options: mud in the face, pie to eat, or a clean face and prizes.

Final Renard Selections

As a man, Christ was admirable. As God, one could say of him: "What? Was that all He could do?"

Let us not forget that the world makes no sense.

I have a remarkable memory: I forget everything! It is wonderfully convenient. It is as though the world were constantly renewing itself for me.

The theatre. To think that God, who sees everything, must see that!

Writing for someone is like writing to someone: you immediately feel obliged to lie.

Between me brain and me there is always a layer I cannot penetrate.

More from Jules Renard

1897

My father had a heart, but his heart was not a home.

1898

I am a man continually astonished, each instant just fallen from the moon.

I like solitude, even when I am alone.

1902

Style: When"amethyst" comes along, "topaz" is not far behind.

1903

Irony is an element of happiness.

The sudden naturalness of an actor when, during a rehearsal, he interrupts himself to speak to the prompter.

The beauties of literature. I lose a cow. I write about her death, and this brings enough to buy another cow.

1904

One day I believe in human progress, I call for it with all my might; the remaining six days, I rest.

1905

I shall never get used to that woman, I shall never get accustomed to my mother.

Work is a treasure; I know it by counter-proof.

Blues Poem

My baby
makes me nervous.
Makes me wonder
what rhymes with nervous.
Makes me worried
What rhymes with worried?
My baby
makes me crazy.
Makes me think
Makes me think everything must rhyme.

Album of the Day

"Midnight At The Movies" -- Justin Townes Earle.

For one thing, there's a version of The Replacement's "Can't Hardly Wait" but also the low key but jaunty honky tonk song "Poor Fool" ("Now the heart's a tricky thing / But yours more the most / You spend your whole life wandering / With a look on your face like you seen a ghost") [lyrics approximate] and the melancholy "Someday I'll Be Forgiven For This" and many more.

{Album of the season: "Together Through Life" -- Bob Dylan.}

More from the Journal of Jules Reynard

1891

When he looked at himself in a mirror, he was always tempted to wipe the glass.

1893

To spend one's life judging oneself is very entertaining; and, on the whole, not very difficult.

If you thought highly of your family, you would want to please them; and if you tried to please them, that would be the end of you.

1894

I love you as I love that phrase I made up in a dream and which I am unable to remember.

Man is an animal who lifts his head to the sky and does not see the spiders on his ceiling.

1895

The truly free man is the one who will turn down an invitation to dinner without an excuse.

"It is enough to throw you into despair: to read everything, and remember nothing! Because you do remember nothing. You may strain as much as you like: everything escapes. Here and there a few tatters remain, fragile as those puffs of smoke left over after a train has passed."

from the Journal of Jules Renard, August 1889 (tr. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget.)

Short story

A man, who used to be a bookstore worker, walked into a bookstore. In the bookstore, another younger customer kneeled, inspecting a copy of Pop 1280 by Jim Thompson. "That's a good book," said the older man. "Really?" asked the younger man, who told the older that he was just getting into noir, and had read Hammett and Chandler and Ross MacDonald and someone else, and was looking for the next author to immerse himself in. "You'll like Thompson, then. He's pulpier than those writers -- "

"I like that. What's his best book?"

"I like The Killer Inside Me the best, but Pop 1280 is good too."

When the older man left, he was pleased to have made the sale. A young man on his knees is looking to get picked up, one way or another.

Song of the morning

"I Will Never Love You More" by Soko

Nice sentence

"He laughed, a balloon losing air."

Nice image, swiftly etched.

from The Genius by Jesse Kellerman.

Overheard Talk By The Devil -- down the street from the agent

"I removed the old soul. It was worn."

Overheard Talk By An Agent

"You can only wear that if you are sitting at Lake Como, in a deck chair, sipping a glass of Pinot Greej."

Current favorite song lyrics to a song I haven't heard

Artist: Art Brut
Song: Mysterious Bruises

I've had one Zirtec, two Advil
With the drink that made me feel invincible

I don't know how I managed to do this
But I woke up this morning covered in bruises

I only dance to songs I like
So I was sat down most the night

I don't know how I managed to do this
I woke up this morning covered in bruises
Hahahaha

I found a bruise on my arm, one on my knee
I can feel some more in a place I can't see

Is this a new bruise, or has it been there forever?
When did I do it, I can't remember

Can't remember anything I've done
I fought the floor and the floor won
I can't remember anything I've done
I fought the floor and the floor won
I can't remember anything I've done
I fought the floor and the floor won
I can't remember anything I've done
I fought the floor and the floor won

I don't know how I managed to do this
But I woke up this morning covered in bruises

I'd finally decided to tell you how I felt
I mistakenly thought that the drink would help

I don't know what happened
The planets weren't aligned

I kept giving you a wink
You kept missing the sign

I can't remember anything I've done
I fought the floor and the floor won
I can't remember anything I've done
I fought the floor and the floor won
I can't remember anything I've done
I fought the floor and the floor won
I can't remember anything I've done
I fought the floor and the floor won

I finally managed to unravel the plot
It's not a happy ending, but it's the best that I've got

I woke up this morning covered in bruises
One Zirtec, two Advil are gonna get me through this

I finally managed to unravel the plot
It's not the happiest of endings, but it's the best that I've got

I finally managed to unravel the plot
It's not a happy ending, but it's the best that I've got

I had one Zirtec, two Advil
With the drink that made me feel invincible

I had one Zirtec, two Advil
Then I bounced around, just like a pinball

I had one Zirtec, two Advil
With the drink that made me feel invincible

I had one Zirtec, two Advil
Then I bounced around, just like a pinball

Alan Ayckbourn describes symptoms of his stroke

“A very nice doctor came in and said, ‘Are you aware that when you say yes, you’re saying no?’ ” Mr. Ayckbourn recalled, speaking by telephone from the house he shares with his wife in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. “I said, ‘No.’ And he said, ‘I don’t think this conversation can continue.’ ”

from the NY Times 4/22/09

J.G. Ballard has died.

http://www.tomorrowmuseum.com/2009/04/19/jg-ballard-our-greatest-living-novelist-is-no-longer/

The song of the day has changed to no song.

Song of the Day

"Sparkle and Shine" -- Steve Earle

Last night's dream

I was in a very dark place, large and open like a warehouse. Although it also seemed it could have been my house, as at times I thought my cat and son could be there among the many people. It was pitch dark. I couldn't see anything. One, then maybe more, animals attached my feet, latched on to my and bit me, with sharp teeth. Rats? A cat or opposum? I couldn't tell, but it and/or they were fierce and kept at it and it hurt. I was panicking as the attack(s) increased, and was trying to call out "Help" and "Ow!" but my voice was for some reason only a very low whisper. I couldn't see the animals, couldn't kick them off, couldn't knock them off with my hands, though I was afraid to try to use my hands, afraid that the attack would escalate to my hands and the rest of me if I exposed my hands to the animals.

Stout Hearted Man

Samuel Beckett on the type of encouragement offered by his family, and why he might not have "bother[ed] his arse to move" to Paris even if he had the money:

"Here at home they encourage my endeavours to build myself up on stout, and I feel that for stout my world is better lost than for Lib., Egal., and Frat., and quarts de Vittal. They don't say anyhting about my getting a job and I begin to be impervious to their inquietude."

from a letter to Thomas McGreevy, May 13, 1933.

Tristan takes the measure of Big Dap

". . . Tristan took the opportunity to give him a good once-over; Big Dap not so big in private, a little taller than him, a lot heavier, but his body was peanut-shaped, pear-shaped, some kind of food-shaped, and he was ugly, stubble-haired with slit eyes under a heavy brow and a sour mouth like a small MacDonald's arch."

from Lush Life, by Richard Price.

From the Song of the Day

"There is a crack, a crack in everything.
It's how the light gets in."

from "Anthem" by Leonard Cohen

Unfortunate Choice of Words By A Professional

Radio reporter Annie Murphy, reporting on the hunger strike being staged by President Evo Morales of Bolivia:

"It's his way of showing how fed up he is."


On the PRI radio show "The World" April 10, 2009

Every novel's story

"Yet I had felt from childhood that I -- that I was different -- I mean that I was not like other children my age . . . . I was like something rounded, made of rubber: you throw it in the water and it doesn't get wet, you throw it on the ground and it bounces back."

Season of Migration To The North -- Tayeb Salih (tr. Denys Johnson-Davies).

Disorder

The moral, aside from the obvious one about hubris, that de Segur draws from Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign: "Disorder, the most contagious of all diseases, spread among them, for it would seem that order is an exertion against nature."

Nicely modulated sympathy and judgment

from a book with many nice long sentences:

He remembered the familiar landscape better than the conversation. He remembered that Liza Hatter had begun to talk, and that he had begun not to listen, because to listen, to really pay attention, would have to become that other self, the one that smiled and nodded, the one that seemed to be on loan to someone else, the one that completed his four years of college education, the one that for years to please his parents and succeeded very well in doing so, the one that had made him popular, admired, and envied by virtually everyone he'd been around every day for the last half-dozen years, so that he felt a huge chunk of his life had been used up by this other self on loan to these other people, answering their demands, giving pleasantry for pleasantry, joke for joke, sage advice for the asking, while the self he wanted to be and felt most comfortable with, the self that thought and acted boldly, erratically, somewhat dangerously on certain occasions, was a private self that had not got all it asked for, ever, and could seldom go about its business unhindered, and it was that self, there in the car, that tried to shake loose from Liza Hatter's conversation, sought escape through the windows into the woods and the wheat fields, the fireworks stands and the casinos on the reservations, the dusty streets and violent taverns of the reservation towns themselves, and then later, after it had turned dark, into a little game that this self liked to play, and in which Liza Hatter had joined to the best of Tristan's recollection, a game that involved leaving the brights in and drinking from a whiskey bottle, kept always under the seat for this purpose, each time another driver on the lonely highway flashed them, which was often enough that Tristan felt fairly dizzy by the time they pulled off the highway and onto the road to the lake house.

from The Dart League King, by Keith Lee Morris

A man's man, but not at six a.m.

This is how to begin a novel. Note particularly how expressive the protagonist's growls and grunts are.

The jangling of the phone was an angry intrusion. Jack Galleon sat up in bed, looked at the electric clock on his night table. Six o'clock in the morning.

"What the hell!" he grunted. The phone kept up its persistent jangling.

"He jerked the receiver off the rest bar. " "Hello!" he growled into the mouthpiece.

"Mr. Jack Galleon?" A woman's voice, low and throaty.

"At any other time I'd be interested," Galleon said. "But it's six o'clock. In the morning. Call me in the afternoon, sweetheart."

"I'm not your sweetheart, Mr. Galleon, " she said, her voice higher. "I need help."

from the book by Arnold Marmor, entitled either "Case of the Eager Nymphs" or "Trollop Trail" (1963). My copy uses both titles.

The Next Poem

Bruises
can also be
clueses.

(from the "Murder of Ogden Nash: A Mystery In Rhyme." This is a work that no one has written.)

Poem

Memo To Psychologists And Significant Others

A new
tattoo
is often
a clue.

Where the professional judgment of the bartender and private eye coincides

"Two days later, Ernie dropped by in the afternoon. I served him club soda with a splash of whiskey. He's not an afternoon drinker, he informed me, as if I would consider that a credit to his character. "

from Revenge of the Spellmans.

Returning to Moscow after the fire

"The terrain [Napoleon] had to cross to reach Moscow presented a strange appearance. Enormous fires had been lit in the middle of the fields, in thick, cold mud, and were being fed with mahogany furniture and gilded windows and doors. Around these fires, on litters of damp straw, ill-protected by a few boards, soldiers and their officers, mud-strained and smoke-blackened, were seated in splendid armchairs or lying on silk sofas. At their feet were heaped or spread out cashmere shawls, the rarest of Siberian furs, cloth of gold from Persia, and silver dishes in which they were eating coarse black bread, baked in the ashes, and half-cooked, bloody horseflesh -- strange combination of abundance and famine, wealth and filth, luxury and poverty!"

Phillipe-Paul de Segur

The Fatal News

Phillippe-Paul de Segur's description of Napoleon's night in Moscow, before it burned:

"That was a gloomy night, with sinister reports following one another. Some Frenchmen living in that country, and even a Russian police officer, came to warn us of a conflagration, giving all the particulars of the preparations for it. The Emperor, distressed, tried in vain to get a little rest. Every few minutes he called out and had the fatal news repeated to him. Still he persisted in his incredulity, till at about two in the morning he learned that the fire had broken out."

More Roman Jokes

versions by Mary Beard (second one slightly adapted):

A man says to his sex-crazed wife, "What shall we do tonight -- have dinner or have sex?". "Whichever you like," she replied, "but there's no bread."


Three men -- a professor, a barber and a baldman -- were going on a long journey and had to camp out at night. To guard against theft, they took turns keeping watch. They drew straws to determine the order. The barber took the first shift, but got bored. So to pass the time, he shaved the head of the professor -- then woke him up to take his turn. The professor got up, rubbed his head and found that he had no hair. "What an idiot that barber is," he said, "he's woken up baldy instead of me."

http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2009/03/the-laughter-lo.html#more

On a related note, last Friday, the 13th, was Red Nose Day. Had I but known.

Nice sentence

Isabel, a bartender/erstwhile private investigator, meets a man in a bar who extends his hand to her:

"I shook it, because that's what you do, and then picked up a dishrag and began drying some glasses, because that's what bartenders do."

from Revenge of the Spellmans, by Lisa Lutz.

[I'm breaking some rules of this blog here, but a little explication: I like this because 1) It's funny; 2) It's funny, but in another context it could as easily be said by Sam Spade or Lew Archer -- imagine it in Bogart's voice; 3) I like the way the humor derives in part from recognizing that the social dilemma people face is mirrored by the dilemma the writer faces: "How do I make [myself / my character] look like a bartender, and look like a person?"; 4) It feels like a line I could have written, and I greatly admire my own humor.

The jokes I like best are 1) those I never would have thought of, and 2) those I could have thought of.]

Noir in a nutshell

As translated from Japanese:

She met his violent entry with equal force, sinking her nails into his back under his shirt, her groan a fusion of pain and delight.

"You fool, you damned fool!" she cried out as she approached her climax, and he didn't know whether she meant him or herself.

from The Informer, by Akimitsu Takagi (tr. Sadako Mizuguchi)

"Reading is, . . . from its first moments, an inevitable process of forgetting. Even as I read, I start to forget what I have read, and this process is unavoidable. It extends to the point where it's as though I haven't read the book at all, so that in effect I find myself rejoining the ranks of non-readers, where I should no doubt have remained in the first place. "

"At this point, saying we have read a book becomes essentially a process of metonymy. When it comes to books, we never read more than a portion of greater or lesser length, and that portion is, in the longer or shorter term, condemned to disappear."

from How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read, by Pierre Bayard (tr. Jeffrey Mehlman), from the chapter "Books You Have Forgotten"

Amusing Yahoo Headline

Obama reassures Canada on trade /Maple cookies for daughters

Poem

http://www.slate.com/id/2101150/sidebar/2101284/ent/2101283/

"All of the Words on a Bottle of Rolling Rock Beer in a Different Order"
by Demetri Martin

Boating

- Flaubert's advice to Guy de Maupassant, when Maupassant was studying with Flaubert, learning to write:

You must -- do you hear me, young man? -- you must work harder. Too many whores! Too much boating! Too much exercise! Yes, that's right: a civilized man does not require as much locomotion as doctors would have us believe.

from review of "Afloat" written by Graham Robb in the NY Review of Books, Feb. 26, 2009.

Zadie Smith on equivocal, multivocal lives, with special reference to herself and Obama:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22334

Harvey's Pastrami

Harvey's Pastrami, for years known for "World's Largest Pastrami," has a nice sign in the window:

"Enjoy Our Spicy Galore!"

Somehow changes my picture of Harvey.

Norman Mailer's Review of "The Old Man and The Sea"

"I thought it was good, and would have been better if it hadn't been so full of shit."


-- from a letter to Lillian Ross, Sept. 2, 1952, published in The New York Review of Books, Feb. 12, 2009.

Useful, little known facts about the world, though perhaps fictional:

"Dogs see ghosts. They see disease floating down the street like fog. They hear and smell the unimaginable. Yet dogs are indifferent to such things because they are simply part of their perceived world. . . .

Life and death do not mix. They could never dance together because both of them would insist on leading."

from "the Ghost In Love," which later explains why, for the dog in question, the absolute worst thing he can encounter is to hear harmonica playing, particularly if it is the recording of the harmonica part of Neil Young's "Heart of Gold."

By the way, he likes the version

Greil Marcus, on Neco Case singing Hank Williams' "Alone and Forsaken:"

"None of [her work on previous albums] suggested that she could look a song like "Alone and Forsaken" in the face. She isn't up to Williams; unlike him, she doesn't sing as if she's already dead."

from Oxford American, Issue 63.

Whoa Wild Will Wire WIth Wrap You Young Your

How do you recapture afresh the impact of an overly-familiar work of art?

Here are the lyrics of a great, overly-familiar song, arranged in alphabetical order, with each word in the song only listed once:

9 a all american amusement an and are at baby back be beach beyond bold
bones born boulevard boys break broken but cages can ’cause chrome-wheeled comb come could ’cross day death die don’t down dream dreams drive drones drop
engines everlasting everybody’s feels four friend from fuel-injected get girl
girls glory go gonna gotta guard hair hands hard hemi-powered heroes hide
highway highway’s how huddled i i’ll i’m if in is it it’s jammed just kids kiss
know last-chance left legs let like line live lonely look love machines madness
mansions me mirrors mist my n never night no of oh on one ooh out over palace
park place power rap real really rearview ride rider rims rips rises road ’round
run runaway sadness scared scream so someday soul sprung stark steppin’ strap
streets suicide sun sweat that the their then there’s these this three through
till to together tonight town tramps trap try two us velvet visions walk wanna
we we’ll we’re wendy were when where while whoa wild will wire with wrap you
young your

From a very nice quiz, asking you to identify songs which have undergone the same treatment: http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/diversions/and_great_lyrics_quiz_rock_roll_the.php

John Updike, R.I.P.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/01/27/books/AP-Obit-Updike.html?hp

Sorry to see the news of Updike's death. I was a great fan. I liked him best the smaller the unit of consideration. He wrote some very good novels, but better short stories, and unsurpassed sentences. Unlike many great writers of sentences, his were grounded in the circumstances of the greater writing, and the greater world, whether natural or social, internal or external.

Epigraph from 2666

""In those days all I cared about was baseball and ethics, " said Campbell."

from 2666

"On her fifth morning with them, when the medicine she had brought with her from France was about to run out, Lola told them she had to leave. Benoit is little and he needs me, she said. Actually, he doesn't need me, but that doesn't mean he isn't little, she said. I don't know who needs who, she said at last, but the fact is I have to go see how he is. ... "

Sales pitch

Latest undoubtedly false but linguistically intriguing promise from my spam:

Beyond question, any woman will be 100 shocked with your mega.

Baseball Parks In Winter

http://homerderby.com/archives/3176

Coffee House Brawl

My latest dream:

Having drinks at what seems to be a coffee house with a friend from out of town, and someone else. Though a coffee house, whatever I'm drinking is getting me drunk. After two drinks we go downstairs and out to the street. My friend suggests that he and I head to The Dragon, a nearby bar.

Next thing I know, I am back in the coffee house by myself, drinking again. I wonder where my friend is and figure he must be at The Dragon. But then a guy from a group at the next table, slaps and scratches at my face, saying things I don't understand. I bite his finger, though not too hard. I come to realize that he and his friends are acting, and in the midst of putting on a play for the coffee house audience. But the manner in which the actor keeps involving me -- attacking my face -- makes me wish they'd respect the fourth wall a bit more.

My nose hurts from the attack, and I go downstairs to a mammoth bathroom. Mammoth, deserted, like an old basement. Furnished with brown leather couches. I look in the mirror, and learn that the actor had been smearing red paint on me, and my hair and neck are covered in red paint. I wash it off, but it is a difficult task. The paint smears, and I am thoroughly scrubbed and drenched, like a soaking dog, before the paint comes off. I also realize that under the paint I had been given a slight bloody nose.

I leave the restroom and learn from someone entering it that I had been in the women's room. I tell the woman entering that it didn't matter, as I was just washing my face.

Walking up the stairs away from the bathroom, a man recognizes me, and accuses me of treating the actors badly. For one thing, I bit that guy's finger. He starts pushing me and we get into a coffee house brawl.

If I had to wrestle with myself I'd win

pretty amusing:

Ken Blackwell [probable incoming chair of the Republican party]: No. What I said is that, in that regard, you can choose, people choose to be who they are, as they choose to break civil law and God's law...I think you can choose not to be homosexual...

Michaelangelo Signorile [interviewer]: Did you choose to be heterosexual? Did you wake up one day and say I want to be heterosexual?

KB: The answer is that I've never had to make the choice because I've never had the urge to be other than a heterosexual, but if in fact I had the urge to be something else I could have in fact suppressed that urge.


from: http://www.signorile.com/2009/01/rnc-chair-candidate-homosexuality-is.html

Breaking My Rules

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2009/01/12/090112crmu_music_frerejones

Nice to see the appreciation by Sasha Frere-Jones of the sometimes underappreciated Bon Iver.

Dream Fragment

Last night, in my dream, talking to others I pointed to a mountain in the distance and said, "My dream is to someday reach that mountain top."

It was a joke, the point of which, on awakening, I no longer know.

Dream

Last night's dream:

I was at the Academy Awards, or the rehearsal. They were held at a large house, which was a funeral home, and the spacious grounds, which no doubt were a cemetary. I saw Simon Cowell, judge from American Idol, in what appeared to be blackface. I went up to him to chat, and suggest it wasn't in the best American taste, but when I got there I saw he was wearing make-up in a sort of stripe to suggest the mask of the Phantom of the Opera. I told him what I had thought, adding that I figured it was chocolate frosting spread over his face to make an Othello costume.

Later in the dream I was trying to make my way through the house as the show was starting, alternately in empty rooms and then rooms full of performers (as in chorus line performers) trying to get to their spots. I was just trying to find where I could get a drink.

Happy Birthday Sherlock Holmes

http://www.madison.com/communities/canary/pages/jan6.php?php_page_set=0

Is this his birthday? The article is convincing.

Wisdom from Spongebob and Patrick

Spongebob has filled his house with night lights, because he has become terrified of the dark and the "creepy crawlers of the dark."

Spongebob: What if Squidward is right? What if the monsters are just
figments of our imagination?

Patrick: Then we need more lights!

Songs Bruce Springsteen Might Play At The Super Bowl Halftime Show

Born To Run
Born To Run Play Action
Born To Play Free Safety
Born To Blitz
Born To Get Rid Of The Ball Before Taking A Sack
Rosalita

2008 Jambalaya Award Winners

most interesting books read and finished for the first time in 2008:

The Deadly Percheron -- John Franklin Bardin

Cutter and Bone -- Newton Thornberg

Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of The Hound Of The Baskervilles -- Pierre Bayard

The Lost Dog -- Michelle de Kretser

Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States -- George R. Stewart

Elective Affinities -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Man In The High Castle -- Philip Dick

Out Stealing Horses -- Per Petterson

Cakes and Ale -- W. Somerset Maugham

The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox -- Stephen Budiansky

The Curse of The Spellmans -- Lisa Lutz

All About H. Hatterr -- G.V. Desani

The Savage Detectives -- Roberto Bolano

Diary of A Bad Year -- J.M. Coetzee

in reverse order of reading

Final largely complete 2008 Reading List

The Deadly Percheron -- John Franklin Bardin
The Big Lebowski (BFI Film Classics) -- J.M. Tyree & Ben Walters
Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America -- Brian Francis Slattery
Always A Body To Trade -- K.C. Constantine
Cutter and Bone -- Newton Thornberg
Best American Comics 2008
Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of The Hound Of The Baskervilles -- Pierre Bayard
Agnes's Final Afternoon: An Essay on the Work of Milan Kundera -- Francois Ricard
52 McGs -- Robert McG. Thomas, Jr
Batman: Year 100 -- Paul Pope
The Big Sleep -- Raymond Chandler
In The Woods -- Tana French
Memoir of the Hawk: Poems -- James Tate
The Lost Dog -- Michelle de Kretser
Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph -- Edgar Johnson
Rhubarb - H. Allen Smith
How Fiction Works -- James Wood
Let Me Finish -- Roger Angell
Blonde Faith -- Walter Mosley
The Heckler -- Ed McBain
Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States -- George R. Stewart
Netherland: A Novel -- Joseph O'Neill
Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes -- Jim Holt
The Summer Book -- Tove Jansson
Elective Affinities -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Cop Hater -- Ed McBain
Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex -- Ellen Sussman (ed.)
The Commodore -- Patrick O'Brian
Almayer's Folly -- Joseph Conrad
Nazi Literature in the Americas -- Roberto Bolano
The Widow -- Georges Simenon
Blood And Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West -- Hampton Sides
Darker Than Amber -- John D. MacDonald
The Man In The High Castle -- Philip Dick
Girl Factory -- Jim Krusoe
Bonk -- Mary Roach
Updike in Cincinnati -- James Schiff (ed.)
Out Stealing Horses -- Per Petterson
The Poetry of War -- James Anderson Winn
Cakes and Ale -- W. Somerset Maugham
Into The Canyon: Seven Years In Navaho Country -- Lucy Moore
The Invention of Morel -- Adolfo Bioy Casares
What The Dead Know -- Laura Lippman
The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox -- Stephen Budiansky
The Curse of The Spellmans -- Lisa Lutz
The Big Clock -- Kenneth Fearing
Clark Gifford's Body -- Kenneth Fearing
The Counterlife -- Philip Roth
The Man Who Smiled -- Henning Mankell
All About H. Hatterr -- G.V. Desani
I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This -- Bob Newhart
Christine Falls -- Benjamin Black
Born Standing Up -- Steve Martin
The Savage Detectives -- Roberto Bolano
The Barbarous Coast -- Ross Macdonald
Diary of A Bad Year -- J.M.Coetzee
The Long Suit - Philip Davison
Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates
Best American Comics 2007

Amusing answer by a pair of 13 year old girls to the question How Does Gran Torino Compare To Other Clint Eastwood Movies?

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=ApFofJgf8P9QepfuEr081_sjzKIX;_ylv=3?qid=20090101020246AA9NZGw