Bus reading

Idiot city

I inherited The Royal Nonesuch: Or, what will I do when I grow up? from my brother. He reads a lot. Sometimes, I'm not sure how, but he does. Sometimes, he reads good books, like the ones I recommend, and sometimes he reads unbelievably technical and unceasingly empowering books on growing your fortune, living the life you want, and playing the stock market just so. Then he reads books magazines tell him to read, like this one...I think. I honestly have very few positive things to say about this book, so I won't. I found it to be vapid and painfully name-droppy, without emotion, and completely unrelatable. It is tiresomely self-involved without being self-aware and pervaded by a false-sense of entitlement born of past success rather than current merit. But it's about L.A. And it's a memoir of a gifted twenty-something who becomes a prozac-swaddled failing thirty-something. So maybe it sucks, but maybe it's just accurate. What undoubtedly is accurate and good in this book is this single phrase describing L.A. from above:

I felt pleasantly adrift up there in the sky, floating with my forehead pressed against the glass over the sunstruck idiot city.

[An added note on entitlement/pretension/douchebaggery, The Royal Nonesuch is apparently an allusion to Huckleberry Finn, something I wouldn't have known without doing a google image search for the cover art, but something that now knowing makes me dislike the book and the author even more.]

On the nod

Momentary freedom from the claims of the aging, cautious, nagging, frightened flesh

Several years ago, probably six or so, I bought William S. Burrough's novel Naked Lunch and failed pretty miserably to get anywhere with it. This Christmas my brother gave me the 50th anniversary edition of his first novel, Junky. I was not optimistic.

Despite my initial hesitation (I read the 30+ pages of introductory material in full just to delay actually having to deal with the text) I found Junky to be much more approachable (a serious understatement) than Naked Lunch. The novel reads for the most part like the twenty-five cent sensationalist paperback that it was, exploiting the public's desire to explore the seedier side of society and to become "hep" to the new underground jargon. It also, however, shows flashes of true narrative beauty and Burroughs' characterizations are some of the best that I have ever come across.

His face was lined with suffering in which his eyes did not participate. It was a suffering of his cells alone. He himself--the conscious ego that looked out of the glazed, alert-calm hoodlum eyes--would have nothing to do with this suffering of his rejected other self, a suffering of the nervous system, of flesh and viscera and cells.

There was something boneless about her, like a deep-sea creature. Her eyes were cold fish eyes that looked at you through a viscous medium she carried about with her. I could see those eyes in a shapeless, protoplasmic mass undulating over the dark sea floor.

He was simply the focal point for a hostile intrusive force. You could feel him walk right into your psyche and look around to see if anything was there he could make use of.

The conversations had a nightmare flatness, talking dice spilled in the tube metal chairs, human aggregates disintegrating in cosmic inanity, random events in a dying universe where everything is exactly what it appears to be, and no other relation that juxtaposition is possible.

Live the dream, Potato

No One Belongs Here More Than You

It's not often that on wine-soaked nights the conversation turns to current avant garde fiction. Though I am certainly a literature nerd, it's unusual that I force that upon others without some sort of accomplice. My roommate's sister Lindsay was in town last week and, as a hopeful doctoral candidate in poetry, she fit the bill. The topic at hand was a book of short stories that my roommate, Anna, had purchased for me while in Paris with Lindsay, No One Belongs Here More Than You. Anna read the book but was taken aback by some of the sexual content, Lindsay read parts of the book and was frustrated by the use of sexual content. I read the book and barely noticed the sexual content. Just call me Jaded.

Despite the possible shock tactics and questionable merit (the author is no Proust...well actually she could be. I've never read Proust. But I highly doubt that she's Proust.) I did come across some interestingly, at times beautifully, phrased ideas and perhaps the best name for a dog ever...Potato.

People tend to stick to their own size group because it's easier on the neck. Unless they are romantically involved, in which case the size difference is sexy. It means: I am willing to go the distance for you.


We wetted each other's blouses and pushed our crying ahead of us like a lantern, searching out new and forgotten sadnesses, ones that had died politely years ago but in fact had not died and came to life with a little water. We had loved people we really shouldn't have loved and then married other people in order to forget our impossible loves, or we had once called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away before anyone could respond.

Always running and always wanting to go back but always being farther and farther away until, finally, it was just a scene in a movie where a girl says hello into the cauldron of the world and you are just a woman watching the movie with her husband on the couch and his legs are across your lap and you have to go to the bathroom.

We needed time to consider ourselves, to come up with a theory about who we were and set it to music.

This made her so angry that she did the dishes. We never did this unless we were trying to be grand and self-destructive.

Then Potato ran by. He was a little brown dog, just like the woman said. He tore past me like he was about to miss a plane. He was gone by the time I even realized it had to be Potato. But he looked joyful, and I thought: Good for him. Live the dream, Potato.

When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder

Everything will be OK perfect.

While in college when revealing to family friends or acquaintances the direction of my study (English Literature, duh!) the endlessly repeating follow-up question was nearly always, "Oh that's great. Who's you're favorite author?" At the time I never had an answer. Never. I've liked a lot of books in my time but I never felt concretely that my appreciation was of the author. There was never an authorial focus centering my pursuit of material. I did love Oscar Wilde, but in a different way. I loved his character and his history and his brazen yet refined personality. I don't particularly love his books.

Now post-college I absolutely have an answer to that plaguing question. Jonathan Safran Foer is maybe the best thing that has happened to me in the last two years. His books are everything that I think books should be. He is the author that you can't help but be frustrated by because you love his work so much that you wish it was yours. And he's only 26 so why couldn't it be yours? It can't be yours because you can't even begin to understand how he does it. The composition seems so difficult but the end product is so seamlessly integrated.

Here's some stuff from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, his second novel:

My first jujitsu class was three and a half months ago. Self-defense was something that I was extremely curious about, for obvious reasons, and Mom thought it would be good for me to have a physical activity besides tambourining, so my first jujitsu class was three and a half months ago. There were fourteen kids in the class, we all had on neat white robes. We practiced bowing, and then we were all sitting down Native American style, and then Sensei Mark asked me to go over to him. “Kick my privates,” he told me. That made me feel self-conscious. “Excusez-moi?” I told him. He spread his legs and told me, “I want you to kick my privates as hard as you can.” He put his hands at his sides, and took a breath in, and closed his eyes, and that’s how I knew that actually he meant business. “Jose,” I told him, and inside I was thinking What the? He told me, “Go on, guy. Destroy my privates.” “Destroy your privates?” With his eyes still closed he cracked up a lot and said, “You couldn’t destroy my privates if you tried. That’s what’s going on here. This is a demonstration of the well-trained body’s ability to absorb a direct blow. Now destroy my privates.” I told him, “I’m a pacifist,” and since most people my age don’t know what that means, I turned around and told the others, “I don’t think it’s right to destroy people’s privates. Ever.” Sensei Mark said, “Can I ask you something?” I turned back around and told him,” “‘Can I ask you something?’ is asking me something.” He said, “Do you have dreams of becoming a jujitsu master?” “No,” I told him even though I don’t have dreams of running the family business anymore. “Do you want to know how a jujitsu student becomes a jujitsu master?” “I want to know everything,” I told him, but that isn’t true anymore either. He told me, “A jujitsu student becomes a jujitsu master by destroying his master’s privates.” I told him, “That’s fascinating.” My last jujitsu class was three and a half months ago.

When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table. I spent my life learning to feel less.

Everything will be OK perfect.
I started to cry.
It was the first time I had ever cried in front of him. It felt like making love.

He squeezed my sides so hard, and pushed so hard like he was trying to push through me to somewhere else.

“Hey, buddy.” “Actually, I’m not your buddy.” “Right. Well. It’s great weather today, don’t you think? If you want, we could go outside and toss a ball.” “Yes to thinking it’s great weather. No to wanting to toss a ball.” “You sure?” “Sports aren’t fascinating.” “What do you find fascinating?” “What kind of answer are you looking for?” “What makes you think I’m looking for something?” “What makes you think I’m a huge moron?” “I don’t think you’re any kind of moron.” “Thanks.” “Why do you think you’re here?” “I’m here, Dr. Fein, because it upsets my mom that I’m having an impossible time with my life.” “Should it upset her?” “Not really. Life is impossible.” “When you say that you’re having an impossible time, what do you mean?” “I’m constantly emotional.” “Are you emotional right now?” “I’m extremely emotional right now.” “What emotions are you feeling?” “All of them.” “Like…” “Right now I’m feeling sadness, happiness, anger, love, guilt, joy, shame, and a little bit of humor, because part of my brain is remembering something hilarious that Toothpaste once did that I can’t talk about.” “Sounds like you’re feeling an awful lot.” “He put Ex-lax in the pain au chocolat we sold at the French Club bakesale." “That is funny.” “I’m feeling everything.” “This emotionalness of yours, does it affect your daily life?” “Well, to answer your question, I don’t think that’s a real word you just used. Emotionalness. But I understand what you were trying to say, and yes. I end up crying a lot, usually in private. It’s extremely hard for me to go to school. I also can’t sleep over at friends’ apartments, because I get panicky about being away from Mom. I’m not very good with people.” “What do you think is going on?” “I feel too much. That’s what’s going on.” “Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?” “My insides don’t match up with my outsides.” “Do anyone’s insides and outsides match up?” “I don’t know. I’m really only me.” “Maybe that’s what a person’s personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.” “But it’s worse for me.” “I wonder if everyone thinks it’s worse for him.” “Probably. But it really is worse for me.”

Shit Happened

Pink Fucken Speed

I have this annoying habit of starting twenty books and only getting through two. I usually get about fifty pages in and then find myself distracted by all the beautiful and shiny and completely unnecessary new books that I just purchased to keep my old books company. In the past I have never been able to return to one of these neglected tomes, tossed aside for the younger, flashier model...until now. Having undertaken a monetarily imposed ban on new books coupled with another fine induced absence from the library, I have been forced to scrape the bottom of the proverbial barrel and revisit the previously abandoned. The first book that I was ever able to successfully finish after a five month hiatus was Vernon God Little. The San Francisco Chronicle described it as a Huckleberry Finn-like story (apt) written a la the creators of South Park (inapt, kinda lame and lazy, i.e. a 17 year-old saying fuck a lot doesn't make him like Cartman). Despite my qualms with SFC I did find some pretty amazing descriptive passages, all the better for their bluntness and the narrator's obsession with panties. In the course of this novel I was forced to confront some of life's more profound questions, particularly, when the plural noun panties is used in the singular is it still "panties" like "pants" or is it "panty?" I'm still open to all theories.

*P.S. the following quote is not for the sexually modest or easily embarrassed.

She tries to close back her legs, wriggles hard, but she's lost, I'm on fire, committed even more now she's shy of her musky damp. I pull aside her weeping panty to face a delta writhing with meats, glistening with sweat carrying spicy coded silts from her ass; olives, cinnamon dust and chili blood. She gives up, beaten, without a secret left in the animal world. Her knees bend up and she takes in my tongue, my finger, my face, she cries and bucks, horny ridges, ruffles, and grits suck me up, suck me home to the stinking wet truth behind panties, money, justice, and slime, burning trails through my brain like acid through butter. Pink Fucken Speed.

Nostalgia is fear smeared with Vaseline

We'll chance anything to destroy ourselves, but we're such chickenshits when it comes to happiness.

My brother makes great Christmas lists. I think for the most part GQ makes the lists and he sends them out, but there are generally, (amongst the over-priced gadgets, over-priced man totes, over-priced man cosmetics) some really great books. Two years ago Home Land by Sam Lipsyte made GQ's list and thus Zach's. I bought the book for Zach but as soon as the wrapping came off, I stole away with it into my room and promised to send it to him when I finished. It was hysterical, bizarre, and poignent, my favorite combination. Also, how can you not love a guy who spells wang with an h? Exaggerated pronunciation of penis words...always fun.

How much whang could a man spank in this world?

My father demurred, begged off, wasted his shot. Yes, those jazzbos spiraled into smack hells of their own devising, but not before slapping down some landmark lite wax.
"Failure of nerve," my father had once said, the words hard, soothing candy in his mouth.
"That's a good phrase for it," I said.
"I didn't make it up."
"No, but it's still good. I usually just tell myself I'm a pussy."
"Me, too," said Daddy Miner.
I knew I was in the vicinity of a serious lesson, if not about how to live life, then at least how to put some poetry into your craven retreat from it.

There are some who consider him an evolutionary cul-de-sac.


It occurs to me, Catamounts, sitting here composing this latest update, that someday, if and when the collected works of Lewis Miner ever see the light of day, some futuristic editor-type might attempt to assemble these dispatches in a certain manner, to, for example, tell a story, or else
effect some kind of thematic arrangement of interwoven leitmotifs: Work, Love, Masturbation, Gary.
This would be a grave mistake.
There are not themes, no leitmotifs. There is no story.

What's all this storytelling stuff, anyway? Stories pour out of us daily, and most of them might not unfairly be lumped under the taxonomic heading: More Boring Than Your Neighbor's Spork Collection.

concentrate on sex

Didn't he know that words carry colors and sounds into the flesh?

Anais Nin wrote what was eventually published as Delta of Venus for $1 a page. The pages were purchased by a wealthy patron never known to Nin. She was repeatedly chastised by the patron for being too poetic and directed to "leave out the poetry and descriptions of anything but sex. Concentrate on sex." These seem fairly simpl requests and some that undoubtedly could be and are met by women writing today. But, for Nin, it was impossible to separate sex from poetry, from emotion, from art. The sex she writes about is at times savage, unequal, and base, but never detached. There is always emotional presence, consciousness, desire, enjoyment, and fulfillment. The perspective is also undeniably female. She creates a uniquely female sexual/sensual voice that is at once at odds with even modern gender sensibilities and extremely comforting. Considering the nature of the project, the merit in these stories lies in Nin's expression, despite her patron's instructions and perhaps against her own attempts at supression, of the emotional and psychological life behind sex and intimacy for women.

She was raised on a pedestal of poetry so that her falling into the final embrace might seem more of a miracle.

You and I exist together in all delirious countries of the sexual world. You draw me into the marvelous. Your smile keeps a mesmeric flow.

She was a magnetic center for the world of women who considered themselves condemned by their vice.

Her cravings were vague, poetic.

Women were not as tolerant as men towards women who made themselves small and weak by calculation, thinking to inspire active love.

dog-eating, crotch-busting fools

I read Hell's Angels by Hunter S. Thompson this summer. So did some of my friends. The general conclusion seems to be that overall we don't really care about the Hell's Angels anymore. The roving menace that they were or were made out to be in the 60s and 70s no longer frightens us. That being said, the book is still worth reading. It's a testament to Thompson's journalistic and literary ability that my friends and I would continue to read and finish reading an entire book on a subject that has become completely irrelevant. His language has a way of shocking you into continuation. Things will be blah, blah, blah, motorcycles, blah, blah, blah, rape and then he throws out a phrase like "tender young blondes with lobotomy eyes," and you keep reading just hoping to find another something like that. lobotomy eyes. wow. He also has an almost prescient understanding of what would in our generation become the media circus. It is so subtle that one can't be sure if he is even aware of it, but it's there and it's interesting. He is much more vocally and satisfyingly political and bitingly if humorously takes on racism, the military, and backward thinking.

...it is a time for sharing the wine jug, pummeling old friends, random fornication and general full-dress madness.

The girls stood quietly in a group, wearing tight slacks, kerchiefs and sleeveless blouses or sweaters, with boots and dark glasses, uplift bras, bright lipstick and the wary expressions of half-bright souls turned mean and nervous from too much bitter wisdom in too few years.

All three major television networks would be seeking them out with cameras and they would be denounced in the US Senate by George Murphy, the former tap dancer.

They would owe most of their success to a curious rape mania that rides on the shoulder of American journalism like some jeering mastubating raven.

Here, sweet Jesus, was an image flat guaranteed to boil the public blood and foam the brain of every man with female flesh for kin.

...they were lodged in the Monterey County Jail in Salinas...out there in Steinbeck country, the hot lettuce valley, owned in the main by smart second-generation hillbillies who got out of Appalachia while the getting was good, and who now pay other, less smart hillbillies to supervise the work of Mexican braceros, whose natural fitness for stoop labor has been explained by the ubiquitous Senator Murphy: "They're built low to the ground," he said, "so it's easier for them to stoop."

They rode with a fine, unwashed arrogance, secure in their reputation as the rottenest motorcycle gang in the whole history of Christendom.

they are better constructed for the mindless rape of any prostrate woman they might come across as they scurry about, from one place to another, with their dorks carried low like water wands.

The reasoning was sound; the beasts were put off in a place where they could whip themselves into any kind of orgiastic frenzy without becoming dangerous to the citizenry--and if things got out of hand, the recruits across the road could be bugled out of bed and issued bayonets.

raison d'etre

writers. good ones. writers who say meaningful things. writers who say beautiful things. writers with more original minds than my own.

words. good ones. words that when paired are more than black marks on white paper. words that when paired are more than words. words that when paired are more than ideas and ideologies. words that are experiences.

In the manner of Hunter S. Thompson's Hemingway and Fitzgerald retyping, hopefully the repetition of all these amazing things will help me to learn what it is about them that makes them great and will cause them to rub off on me, just a bit.

disclaimer: I am particularly, if not overly, fond of figurative and romantic phrasing. I am drawn consistently and egregiously to themes of beauty, love, and sex, and to images of flames, ghosts, gems, and sweets. Know this about me.

Also, I will try to refrain from over-contextualizing and analyzing because as the aesthetic esthetic of Lord Henry Wotton purports:

"Beauty, real beauty ends where intellectual expression begins." - Oscar Wilde

That being said, here's my first post:

"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming."

I have always been a collector of quotes, but not in the Bartlett's sense. I don't collect quotes because they are quotable. The things that stand out to me are not those that fit neatly into categories like "on success" or "on dreams." Oscar Wilde seems to me to exemplify both the exception and the rule. He is endlessly quotable and a master of the bon mot. His quotable quotes, however, are so interesting because they are in a way anti-quotes, anti-proverbs. They are often destructive paradoxes espousing the values of aestheticism. Their self-negation models the idea that art has no use, no morals, and no purpose aside from beauty. In this case, words for words' sake with no meaning or message beyond them. And sometimes he just says beautiul things.

Some of my favorites from The Picture of Dorian Gray:

"...I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible."

"'What you have told me is quite a romance, a romance of art one might call it, and the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic."

"People say sometimes that Beauty is only superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought is. Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances."

"Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts longer."

Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnm, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs.