Overheard

"Where are you calling from? I keep hearing Chinese in the background."

"Chinatown."

New Poem: The Man in the Hat

The man in the bowler hat
Looked at the painting and said What is that?
That is no painting and I have no hat.

Autocompose

To my secret crush,

Your hair is softer than a thousand bunnies. You move with the elegance of a soft summer cloud. You are simply luminous; a god among men. You shine bright like a diamond.

Butterfly kisses,
Nathan

Made with love by Yahoo Mail Autocompose.

I asked for water

Howling Wolf:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUA9FUTieKA#t=59

Memorial

http://vod.worshipchannels.com/WestminsterArchivedServices

Pynchon sentence: detective version

Maxine drops for a minute into one of Shawn's visualizing exercises in which her Beretta, within easy reach, has been transformed to a colorful California butterfly dedicated, like Mithra, to purposes of peace.

People / Art

Fog

The keys to the Kingdom are locked inside the Kingdom -- Josh Ritter

2013 Reading

Books read in 2013, reverse chronological order:


The History of the Snowman -- Bob Eckstein

Raw -- Mark Haskell Smith

Why Are You So Sad? -- Jason Porter

Total Chaos -- Jean-Claude Izzo

The Flamethrowers -- Rachel Kushner

Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine -- Simon Critchley & Jameson Webster

Little Failure -- Gary Shteyngart

My Mistake -- Daniel Menaker

USA Noir -- Johnny Temple, ed.

The Rage -- Gene Kerrigan

My Notorious Life -- Kate Manning

Acharnians -- Aristophanes (Henderson, tr.)

Medea -- Euripides (Warner, tr.)

The Reason I Jump - Naoki Higashida

Antigone -- Sophocles (Fitts and Fitzgerald, tr.)

Tree of Smoke -- Denis Johnson

Hit by Pitch: Ray Chapman, Carl Mays and the Fatal Fastball -- Molly Lawless

Works and Days -- Hesiod

Theogony -- Hesiod

The Pioneer Detectives -- Konstantin Kakaes

My Struggle:Book 1 -- Karl Ove Knausgaard

Twin Cities Noir: The Expanded Edition -- Julie Schaper & Steven Horwitz, eds.

Pitching in a Pinch -- Christy Matthewson

The Signal -- Ron Carlson

Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in the Seventies -- James Wolcott

The People's Act of Love -- James Meek

The Last Word -- Lisa Lutz

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal -- Mary Roach

Where'd You Go, Bernadette -- Maria Semple

My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles -- Peter Biskind (ed.)

The Teleportation Accident -- Ned Beauman

Voltaire in Love -- Nancy Mitford

Fatale -- Jean-Patrick Manchette

Erasure -- Percival Everett

The Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley

The Dinner -- Herman Koch

Bring Up The Bodies -- Hilary Mantel

How to Be a Woman -- Caitlin Moran

Building Stories -- Chris Ware

Whose Body? -- Dorothy L. Sayers

Secrets of the Wholly Grill-- Lawrence G. Townsend

Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever -- Mark O'Connell

HHhH -- Laurent Binet

Jesus' Son -- Denis Johnson

Reveille in Washington: 1860-1865 -- Margaret Leech

Labyrinth -- David L. Ulin

Red Lights -- George Simenon

Fifth Business -- Robertson Davies

From NYRB

"Like most people in New York, I daily expect to find myself walking the West Side Highway with nothing but a shopping cart stacked with bottled water, a flashlight, and a dead loved one on my back . . . ." -- Zadie Smith

Last night's dream: "We're okay."

Overheard at the Bar

They told me that I was not in danger of killing myself and could leave the hospital. So I left, and then walked back in and said I was suicidal and they re-admitted me. I did this five days in a row.

Link to "lost" concert films, including Robert Franks: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/10/lost-and-found-classic-rock-shows-on-youtube.html

But

"He smelled like one of them restaurants they got, but he was all right." -- George Pelicanos

Bar Talk

"So he knocks on the door and I say 'Don't come in' and he opens the door anyway and I'm 'What are you doing in here?' And he opens the shower curtain and reaches in and takes the loofa."