i was going to present some more adventures in cultural literacy (i still had the adventures nee) but instead i decided i needed to spend three hours listening to incomprehensible tape recordings of me in the back of a limousine with four provincial adjutant rockettes and five other people whose function i remain unclear on. sometimes i do not understand things that i allow to happen to me. i think this is because i have some kind of debiliating pyschological malformity wherein the part of my brain that recalls what activities I am well-suited for only actually works right like four hours a day, and those hours change all the time. if you get me during the blackout period you could talk me into becoming a larouche activist or joining the coast guard. other things of moment: i saw a transexual dance show, consisting of one (1) transexual who did not know the lyrics to either of the song he was dancing to (good dancer though — i won’t hate).
coming soon to the ptb reading and discussion bund:
Anthony Powell
Mikhail Lermontov
Clinton Portis
Peter De Vries: John Updike for humans
the weird eurasian frat guy at the computer next to me who won’t stop farting through his mouth (is there are thing where you can be a hypochondriac about other people’s manners and facial expressions, i have it if it exists)
Also:
neonationalism in my personal autopsy of culture
thoughts on viewing The Blue Planet while sober
dear college girl,
why are you in a computer lab in your underwear at 9:30 at night? were you raised in a whorehouse. also, how do you have a suntan, you look very non-ethnic and the sun hasn’t been out for two months. i suspect you of various sins, including being part of a nationwide decision to crap on revanchist secular mormonism. also, why did you sit so far away from, now i can’t see you
signed,
mr. beatty
dear mr. beatty,
why are you in a computer lab with a scarf on at 9:30 at night? you graduated from college more than 2 years ago and you are already balding. i will cut you
signed,
virgin-whore complex
i never thought i’d spend any part of a sunday afternoon belittling myself because i didn’t have the courage of my convictions to buy 400-thread count queen sized sheets off the back of a pickup truck at an outdoor flea market.
according to the new york times, the lady who wrote the jerky book about how some people are bad at punctuation is now writing a book about how no one has any manners anymore. which is too bad, because it sounds like it’s exactly the book i want to write except not overtly fictional (novels of manners squiggly = novel about manners. this all is all rooted in the fact that, in shared human experience (not just housecleaning) the person with the higher standards always loses (scm’s theory).
joke i did not make up:
guy walks into a forehead store. he says, mind if eyebrows?
things i am no longer interested in:
numerology
beer
michael vick
buttermilk
issues i am confronting in year 24:
poor circulation
random, transient solar-wind-caused lower lumbar pain
current reading projects
Wake Up Sir by Jonathan Ames
funny, softbatch novel about writing (excusable indulgence? ppl need to get better about obscuring how all their art is just about their struggle for personal expression. i mean, if it’s a novel about how hard it is to be a novelist, at least make it about how hard it is to be a travelling jewish salesman in 1906 dublin. wait). stop, back to this book: deeply funny, very light novel about being a drunkard writer which is weirdly, unexpectedly derailed and almost ruined by a 15-page god awful deviant sex scene. there’s nothing wrong with deviant sex, there’s nothing wrong with eroticism in the narrative arts, except i was lying about the first two parts of this sentence. still, good for Jonathan Ames, he wrote a novel and i enjoyed it until he decided he was too good to conform to my developing neocounterreformatory Rules for Not Talking About Certain Things Unless You Do It in a Hard-to-Define-Way. which is where i would finally redeem my several-month old attempt/vow to talk about JM Coetzee. which i’m not here to do. i bought a leather wallet with the san francisco 49ers logo imprinted on it. i chose this over alabama, univ of louisville and mid-90s vintage phoenix suns. next time i might buy a spiderman mask.
vollmann! where can i buy a dvd of the National Book Award ceremony, especially one edited like Three Games to Glory.
current source(s) of belittlement: the men’s room urinal. if i want to be splashed with my own urine, i don’t think i would be in the bathroom at all, now would I, unless i wanted some privacy. i’ve been beaten down pretty badly on this one and i don’t expect to mount an offensive anytime soon. handicapped stall it is. as far as i can tell there are no handicapped people in the building, so i’m not bothering anyone as i relax with periodicals such as “Bookforum” (secretly bad? final judgment pending) and “The London Review of Books” (i read it on the bus to impress blue collar types)
committment, newfound: tacked onto earlier resolutions regarding a new dress code, i’ve more or less decided i should only wear clothing from brooks brothers, especially sneakers from brooks brothers. unfortunately for me, and for brooks brothers, everything they sell costs c $300, except for the sneakers, which thank god for that. i think we need to cobble together our resources, we merry graduates of the soon-to-be dissolved college of the university of chicago (cross your fingers), and look into starting a brooks brothers bootleg emporium. write for details.
i promise to write about literature later today. i only have 20 mins before work to take my digestif and oil myself for office combat.
every time unmarked cop cars drop me off in front of my apartment i worry that people are going to start thinking i’m an informant. i don’t know who those people would be. it was all worth getting robbed if only for sunday, when a detective came upstairs to fetch me and i greeted him at the same time as the guy who is *always* smoking weed on our hall walked outside and audibly almost peed himself when i said “hi detective.” also, i failed to keep stop snitching pretty drastically. in fact i snitched about as much as you can. we got him dirk. it only took me about two seconds to pick dude out. unfortunately if he gets served like the cops predict it will take him in the vicinity of 120 years to get over it. the lesson, as always, is don’t rob me.
forthcoming: we discuss JM Coetzee, racism, business casual dress.
If anyone wants to take the liberty of translating the german in that picture (i think it’s something from wagner) go ahead and go nuts, all i care about is that they used a collie. there was also a picture of a girl, dressed up as captain ahab, except in a bikini, stabbing some guy who was supposed to be moby dick (he was just wrapped in a white sheet) with a sword, everyone knows swords were a popular way to kill ways. maybe weird german bad conceptual art whales can be killed with swords.
i think someone needs to start a hyde park crime tracking and response blog. just so we can go ahead and finish turning into west rogers park while the u of c turns into a bad ivy league school, right down to people getting rolled on campus and kids having weird racist-themed bacchanalia in the halls of academe. i’m about as indifferent to my personal safety as about anyone else, but i don’t like it when other people start adjusting my personal paranoia.
media review, week of 10/31/05
Operation Be Human expanded to my watching house MD for the first time. i figured i could probably run the risk since i had already seen more than an hour worth of commercials for House MD over the last two baseball playoffs, so might as well trade that in for an episode. Shock outcome: House MD is actually kind of funny, although the plots are um, stupid, and i’m guessing repetitive (This week: House refuses to make an easy diagnosis and instead almost kills the guy but then everyone sees he was right almost all along at the end). I give House MD the halting one snap of approval. I approve because i laughed at it, i disapprove because i was probably half in the bag at the time and more concerned about when i would get to play scrabble next. also, i am sh1tty at scrabble.
New rules of living:
1. We tuck our shirt in, every day, unless it is a sport shirt, in which event do not wear it to work
2. Soup as part of at least 9 meals a week
3. No gum chewing
4. Only walk down streets with businesses on them. When not an option always jog.
5. No more paying for storebought haircuts except as a form of therapy
6. introduce yourself to everyone. no exceptions for awkwardness.
7. jacques demers
Things I would do if I got medical coverage soon
1. Eye exam
2. semiprecious gem inserted into front tooth
3. mouth inspection, intermediate intensity
4. divert some funds into purchasing DVD of miller’s crossing, other films
5. lots of unnecessary prescriptions
