Bar la Grassa/Laura’s birthday
*Premiered in 2011
Ranked meticulously and pseudo-scientifically after much listening and re-listening over the course of the last week.
530 books catalogued and alphabetized, from Acker to Žižek.
Yesterday, I took 20-30 to Book House in Dinkytown. They took about half of them, giving me $28 in store credit, with which I purchased the following:
The total actually came to $30, but the guy working there said it was close enough. I left the rejected books (mostly outdated textbooks and old paperbacks in poor condition) on the corner of 15th St. and 4th Ave., not sure that anyone had any use for them.
While making an inventory of all of my books in preparation for an alphabetization marathon (I’m up to 465 so far, with about 20-30 that I plan to get rid of), I stumbled upon this, written in an old, barely used notebook. If anyone can identify the writer I was most sophomorically and transparently attempting to emulate here, I’ll buy you a falafel.
Upon gathering his various notebooks and loose papers into his messenger bag and expressing his condolences and salutations to Mrs. Shauermeyer regarding her favorite cat’s euthanasia and her niece’s newly discovered pregnancy, respectively, Lior Walsh left the office of the Shauermeyer Literary Agency, descended to the street level by means of the elevator, and stepped outside into a terribly pleasant April evening. Though every idiosyncrasy of Lior’s manner while in his agent’s office suggested that he was in the utmost of hurries—his toe tapping, his fast talking, his neglect to even shake his agent’s hand—he in fact had no pressing appointments, and in all reality, nothing to do. So instead of hailing a cab, or even retreating to the confines of a subway car, he decided to walk home, all the way from Times Square to his room in the Upper Eighties. He quickened his pace at first, of course, in case the old lady happened to peer out her seventeenth floor window and spot the young man who did not offer his hand slovenly shuffling his feet up the street. That would be dreadful. “It is imperative that we stay on the best of terms,” he thought. So he continued along at a near run until he was almost out of breath, but certain that she would not see him.
When he reached the halfway point between 67th and 68th streets, Lior reached into his pocket and produced a cigarette, which seemed to stop him cold in the middle of the sidewalk. He placed the cigarette in between two very thin lips and lit it. Lior made it a practice to never smoke while walking. “That’s precisely what leads to addiction,” he could habitually be heard saying.
SANTA IS REAL
The end of Goodfellas or the middle of Almost Famous?
Yesterday morning at 7:43, my girlfriend’s brother’s fiancée arrived at mine & my girlfriend’s apartment to drive the two of us the roughly hour and a half drive (depending on traffic) from Minneapolis to my girlfriend’s brother’s apartment in Rochester (the Northern part, I’m told). At 7:39, when my girlfriend received a text message from her brother’s fiancée (which read “I am here!!”), I made the always-last-minute decision of which books to bring along. Quickly, I selected Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (shockingly, my first Vonnegut), which I was about 100 pages shy of finishing, and Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, which a number of friend-colleagues and I had decided to get together and talk about in January, not least of which so that we could all honestly claim to have read Being and Time while simultaneously having established a quorum to prove it. Anyway, I normally take at least three or four books with me on any trip, regardless of the length. And yet, choosing only a novel I had nearly finished and a book I most decidedly did not actually want to read in any literal eyes-looking-at-the-page sense did not seem in the least bit strange to me. Perhaps I was just more tired than usual. It was early, after all. We were to stay in Chatfield until Thursday.
By the time we arrived at the parking lot of my girlfriend’s brother’s apartment complex in the Northern part of Rochester, I had read all but twenty pages of Cat’s Cradle. My girlfriend’s brother wasn’t there—he was at the gym?—but my girlfriend’s mother was, waiting in her car (“I just got here,” she said). We transferred our belongings into my girlfriend’s mother’s car. We stopped at the mall on our way to Chatfield. I bought a coffee inside of a Barnes & Nobel—and yet, for some reason, it did not occur to me to buy another book, to even look at books.
I finished Cat’s Cradle last night a little after 10 under the covers of a child-size bed, using my iPhone as a flashlight. It was good. Great, even. But here I am now: with one book, alone in a house of e-reader readers. My unconscious is clearly out of line. Merry Heideggermas.
donkey brains
"Christmastime is here."—Vince Guaraldi
This song makes me want to wear eye make-up regularly for the first time since 2004.
Brian Wilson, Radiant Radish Health Food Store, West Hollywood, 1969-70.On the story behind L.A. Smog (spoken word), plus a great 1976 interview with Mike Douglas.
(via aquariumdrunkard)
…mmmm…
Der Winter ist da.
Watch the just-cute-enough new video for Jessie Ware’s “Sweet Talk”, starring a mini Jessie Ware.
“What a cramp on philosophy was the castration complex with its insistence that the bottom of all buried fear in man was his fear that the penis would be lost; no, the PW had often been tempted to write in parallel to Millett that fear of losing the penis was not the root of other fears so much as it was the final product of social fears, that one would, for example—let us enjoy the example—not be afraid of a maniacal Amazon in a dark alley so much because one had harbored the terror from the age of three that the penis could be lost at a clip, as from fear that the huge murderess upon one was so dangerous, so voracious, that nothing, not even one’s buried prick, was safe; to the contrary, the PW had often thought that the castration complex was more likely to be a trauma which had struck Freud personally, struck him on the instant of his circumcision. No mean trauma. That the first searing, sense-shattering pain after birth should explode on the sense from there, there! in that region of the body, would be cause enough for later fear of castration. Freud never cared to question the rite of circumcision but we can suspect how his unconscious must have worried the possibility that circumcision was the fastest way to relocate libido from the genitals to the brain and the mouth.”
Fuck theatre.
"Tech"
“I think the only people who should have [Twitter accounts] are comedians. Because it’s all about one-liners. I would love it if Conan O’Brien or Reggie Watts or Stephen Colbert were to walk into a room and tell me one joke and leave. But you don’t want Gore Vidal telling you ‘I’m doing my dishes right now.’”
