February 2010
29 posts
Overcome By Sensations
A most lurid passage from my evening pages:
“Even as the young man sat twaddling at the dinner table looking at his phone (no rings), at his vegetable soup (oil rings), at the computer screen and a nebulous array of Vampire Weekend promotional material (mostly gay-related), our young man could not dispel a certain heat—a humidity, maybe, that had settled in him earlier that morning...
As Harry Was Meeting Sally
A couple that regularly takes advantage of my limber wrists at the cafe (they drink decaf, sometimes herbal tea) was talking to me about this film from the 90s or late 80s that features a young Meg Ryan acting just outlandish in diners and restaurants. I got the DVD from my public library and am now almost three-quarters of the way through the movie, having paused it during the New Year’s...
“Seidel’s women, on the other hand, feel less like people than like forces...”
– Good Poems About Ugly Things
Is Frederick Seidel an exquisite misogynist?
BY MOLLY YOUNG
Distinctions
1) The snow falling tonight is heavy enough to sound as it lands. Wet wet wet, like breath in your ear. The flakes cast shadows. I don’t think Cody believed me when I told him this on the phone.
2) Reading about pirates fumbling about the Caribbean has made the cold colder, the snow louder. Length and breadth all winter long.
unfortunately, as I read the story
all characters and locations are imbued with Darger magic. Perhaps if I’d consulted the movie posters, first, the playing out in my head of the novel’s scenes would be more swashbuckling, harried, sun-drenched. but now they’re just darkly neon, alley-way-esque, with the weather blowing in warm watercolors (plums and golds) and fine dark lines. Francine Prose’s introduction...
132,000
deer harvested this season in Indiana
I am an uncle.
Fair skin like his mother with dark hair like his father.
continued
I didn’t know when you answer questions they appear as posts. I was thinking they just replied to the sender. I thought, Oh, this is going to be a new discreet frontier in crushing. But tumblr, in its “likes” and “reblogs,” maintains a public space; PDAs—that’s what tumblr is all about.
I’m hearing on the news about an education-at-sea boat...
firmuhment asked: sorry! i wish i had, like, any technical know how that could help you out with that.
on firmuhment
When I want to view his posts, my computer decides the image files are too large and so I get the tops of each. Then I get angry at no one. Now I’m going to read a magazine, where whole pages load seamlessly.
*Ed. notice: ffffffffffffff.
**Ed. notice: the cardinal is Indiana’s state bird!
WatchA notice on the power of photography; briefly its distortions of reality, power, and its conscription of the truth.
apologia pro vita, denemos
Having returned from what I am now comfortable calling “The Nashville Valentine’s Weekend” (pending shorter title), I’ve laid about and read some more Adorno (cf. to duckbeat), Muriel Spark, Edmund White, John Hawkes, and worked a shift at the cafe, and trudged through snowdrifts to feed my cats. Earlier this afternoon I visited Lowes, Menard’s, and Hobby Lobby for...
Follow the Reader →
The most gifted essayists are often just brilliant storytellers. Such is the case with Elif Batuman in her debut collection, The Possessed. A teacher at Stanford University, she has published some of this work in the New Yorker, n+1, and Harper’s. Rather boldly for a tyro essayist, Batuman employs a first-person style, enriched with dialogue, characters, superb pacing, and sizzling rhetoric....
Description of a homosexual
It was true that Ernst had good taste. He went to auctions and enjoyed the putting of a money value on every work of art. He knew it was the wrong attitude, but he couldn’t get out of the habit. He was a Catholic. When he visited the Pope, even then, he couldn’t help calculating the Pope’s worldly riches (life-proprietor of the Sistine Chapel, landlord of the Vatican and...
To do in Nashville, TN
Go to book stores, find used records, hit up a film noir, go to a bar, eat Japanese food, watch highlights from the opening ceremony on YouTube. Try to figure out what happened in the middle stretches, with the tap-dancing Nordic punks and maple leaves. (We watched the program in the Japanese restaurant but the sound was off. How did it mean?)
Our hotel-room treat food: San Pellegrino (obvs.),...
Description of a homosexual
fairest:
Pammy shared a partitioned area with Ethan Segal, who was responsible for coordinating the activities of the regional offices. Because of his longish hair, his repertoire of ruined flourishes, his extravagantly shabby clothing, a somewhat ironic overrefinement of style, Pammy thought of his as semi-Edwardian. Even the signs he showed of middle age were tinged with a kind of blithe...
sunday times book review
Did you find yourself crying a lot while reading the book? Was it from the book or were you just sad? Liar.
Despite its persuasive emotional toll, this is a remarkably long bathroom book. One sobs and sobs for about as long as it takes to sit and finish ones business, and wash ones hands and then get back to ones dinner. This book is probably only read by people who make their own meals.
I...
“Over 45 years ago Susan Sontag wrote that redundancy—an experience of...”
– Hard Feelings: The Novels of Michel Houellebecq, Ben Jeffery
saturday night dangling book review
In “——,” a handsomely bound collection of ——‘s short-shorts, the young author brings her journalistic pith and scrutiny to bare on the urbane enigmas of everyday city life. Complemented by ——‘s witty, mysterious collage-illustrations, the small book rarely seems slight, building as it does a page by page philosophical trajectory, its...
book review
Lithe, tart and bright—her writing is, Lord, what to compare it to? Orange-flavored gingham? The perfectly warmed dildo? A product of this New New York writing, promulgated by the fashionable 22-28-year-old Ivy League set (or graduates of the New School, or, Lord above, Brooklyn CUNY), the sentences sparkle blindingly. When they don’t, they frequently embarrassed this reader with other...
dancing in their the cerements
On the 30th of March other souls began to reveal themselves. Maybe they were coming up from the ground, which was no longer frozen deep from the long winter.
The souls rose up and assumed an air of dignity, shot through in places by the confusion anyone feels when dressed for a grand event, though the event remains mysterious. Like dignitaries before a modern symphony, staring deeply into the...
