something like abandon

note to self: please stop eating honey roasted peanuts. more later. i am going to reread the magic mountain in its entirety today. or this week.

i like my nose, i like breathing through it

recent reading:
Robert Musil: if you read The Magic Mountain and thought it was too linear and straightforward, please to see The Man Without Qualities. here’s hoping that pages 400-600 of this book are not an argument between two cardboard cutout characters representing liberal democracy and totalitarianism.

Baudelaire: the finger. try complaining less. esp vid the poem where he complains that dogs prefer the smell of excrement to that of perfume. OK, great, i’ll remember that there’s no accounting for taste, that’s a new one.

greil marcus: take a deep breath and calm down. his appeal and fundamental flaw are one and the same, which is to say, he takes rock music a bit too seriously at inopportune moments in the thought process. also, not clear how much instructive vale there is to be had in dissecting dada/situationists. sort of the cultural studies equivalent of civil war reenactment. one sees how it’s clearly an enjoyable activity, but there is a major failure of the will implied. also, it’s hard to consider sid vicious a topic for scholarly inquiry. that said, greil marcus, at least in lipstick traces, wins, because he talks about medieval heresies, which is the #1 permanent way to my heart.

richard hofstadter, anti-intellectualism in american life: excellent history, if written in a gnarled and slow style. at the same time, there are gripes with the subject matter. hard to critique its relevance, especially now with intelligent design roaming the countyside. i’m just waiting for an article in the chronicle of education wherein a group of two-PhD households announce they’re moving to a compound in the woods. or that a bio professor somewhere in the deep south was arrested for alchemy or trying to breed unicorns or something. halting recommendation, halting only because it isn’t that fun to read.

American Tabloid, James Ellroy. 1 million x yes. Is The Cold Six Thousand this good? I read this book in something like 12 hours. revisionist pottymouthed secret histories of the JFK path to glory + weird undiscussed narrative about the nature of male friendship + special condoms made out of other people’s conspiracy theories = the best book.

“We’re just boyhood friends. You were still a child, Clarisse, when the two of us were already showing the unmistakable signs of a fading schoolboy friendship. Countless years ago we admired each other, and now we mistrust each other with intimate understanding. Each of us would like to shake off the painful sense of having once mistaken himself for the other, so now we perform the mutual service of a pitilessly honest distorting mirror.”

If there’s something you’d like to try

for the record, I finished A Dance to the Music of Time two weeks ago. I’ve been working on something else to do with myself since then. also, i have been going to the woodlawn tap and ordering shirley temples. They make me smarter, I expect. Drinking is for shitheads, let me say that (you know what goes here)

to come soon:
Thoughts on Jewish boxers and non-fiction emotional porn.

I am ordinately excited about the fact that my employer(s) have committed in writing to hiring a second person to do the same thing as me, which means i have to do 50% less work than i was doing before while still being paid as much and keeping my own chair and computer and the internet and chris shelton.

also, i need to buy a new indians hat.

also, if anyone knows of a person who is in need of employment, has interest in recondite science publishing and lives in the chicagoland area (and isn’t specifically anathema to me), feel free to get in touch, as i might be (am) able to put in a word for you. yes, it would be awkward.

and lastly, everyone say a prayer for old friend Wiry Cat. she went on some kind of IRA hunger strike and is apparently down to the kind of weight that got her the name “Wiry Cat.” i predict that the vet will diagnose wiry cat with “being a crazy asshole.”

-johannes silentio

Close cover before strike

Reading Lipstick Traces while making photocopies at 7:45 a.m. : capital idea. I probably should have read this attentively earlier in life but, well, there are your politics of boredom right there.

Heroes of 2006 and beyond:
Sidney Crosby
Me (i’m a survivor! i won the NCAA pool!)
CC Sabathia’s tailor
Me again (i’m a dead survivor)