January 2012
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Walt Whitman’s brain is in a jar in Philadelphia. I want to go visit it.
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In 2010 Mark Baumer walked across the entire United States (from Georgia to California) which he documented on his tumblr, The Baumer. This year he’s writing 50 novels. On Sunday he asked Tom Hanks for $50,000 dollars to cover costs for that project. Tom Hanks declined. So now he’s asking the rest of us for $50,000 on Kickstarter. He sent me this exclusive excerpt from his novel I Only...
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I just opened a piece of gum and put it in my mouth while thinking, “I’ve been chewing a lot of gum lately.” Then I discovered when I started to chew that I was already, in fact, chewing another piece of gum from less than an hour ago.
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“The perfect man is pure spirit. He does not feel the heat of the burning deserts nor the cold of the vast waters. He is not frightened by the lightning which can split open mountains, nor by the storms that can whip upon the seas. Such a person rides the clouds and mounts upon the sun and moon, and wanders across and beyond the four seas. Neither death nor life concern him, nor is he...
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The best part about 2011 was that I didn’t do anything incredibly stupid, like I did in 2010.
December 2011
13 posts
vwswrite asked: So you have an MFA in writing? I was thinking of going on to do that but I'm not sure if it's worth it. What do you think? Did it help you in any way in your pursuits??
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My year in books
I found quite a few books to be earthshakingly good this year, many more so than usual. I don’t know if this means it was the books that were better or if it was I who had become a better reader. I am of the perhaps mistaken notion that it is the reader that creates the book through reading, so I would be inclined to say that I had evolved in the past year, and that after one-third of a...
All the various valuations that are put on [life] by the social game are illusory, basically. Because it’s only in play that we say this is good, this is bad, this is advantageous, this is disadvantageous. We would go on to say after this, “I cannot imagine anything more difficult than overcoming this hypnosis. I am so enchanted by this system that the idea of treating it as not very...
Does the present create the past?
My throat is sore, but I have no brandy to douse it.
Here is the last thing I typed on my typewriter:
“We measure ourselves against others: Am I sane or insane? Am I smart or am I the stupid one here? How can I reach those shores of the norm where is which so many of us would like to dwell.”
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Brother's Friend Maggie: Laugh like a Bellatrix. You'll feel better.
Monkfish Jowls: What's a Bellatrix?
Brother's Friend Maggie: Really?
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November 2011
7 posts
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“So long as a writer is working below the power of her powers, she is depriving...”
– Marilynne Robinson (from the forthcoming When I was a Child I Read Books)
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One of the best passages I’ve read in a while, about fecundity:
Lacewings are those fragile green insects with large, rounded transparent wings. The larvae eat enormous numbers of aphids; the adults mate in a fluttering rush of instinct, lay eggs, and die by the millions in the first cold snap of fall. Sometimes, when a female lays her fertile eggs on a green leaf atop a slender stalked...
MFJ: I have 3000 tumblr followers now. What should I do with them?
XA: Hahahahah... send them on a treasure hunt to my blog.
MFJ: ok
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VKN said: “You disappeared off your blog for awhile.”
Okay! Here’s an email I was writing (but didn’t finish or send [but which I’m finishing now to you, dear blog reader]) to my friend Kevin yesterday about American novels:
I.
Have you read anything good from the US lately? I’m despairing. Yesterday I read the first two pages of the new Dennis...
October 2011
12 posts
VKN: How are you keeping warm at my mother's house?
MFJ: I am keeping warm by keeping sheep in two of the three bedrooms. At night, when the temperature falls, I remove some of the sheep from their rooms and take them into bed with me. I keep spare sheep because some sheep have escaped and some have died; I want to be sure to always have one or two on hand. I have once been in bed with a sheep that has died, and it is just as chilly as having no sheep at all.
“As smoking give us something to do with our hands when we aren’t using...”
– Dwight Macdonald
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“You remember that time when I suggested that we go to the local ice cream place down the street to buy a few scoops of vanilla and then go to the grocery store across the street to buy whisky and then combine the two in ice cream whisky drinks? We still haven’t done that.”
“A single person in nature is not an individual but an animal.”
– Dwight Macdonald, Masscult and Midcult
My time in Singapore (November 2009-June 2010) was a lot like an adult version of the teenage years, I just realized. I’m writing this thought down here so that I can remember it in the future.
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Is there such a thing as social momentum in this world? Almost a year ago a good friend of mine from Singapore asked me if I wanted to be a part of his new literary journal that was going to focus on international literature and translation. (Okay, he didn’t ask me so much as tell me that I was, out of the blue, the Special Feature editor.) It’s called Asymptote and the fourth issue of...
September 2011
16 posts
We wrote two plays tonight. One about Amorefest and the lack of chocolate strawberries in Ghana. The other about a parasite convention. (Or was it a convention of parasites?)
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Spent most of today writing a review of The Truth About Marie by Jean-Philippe Toussaint for Asymptote.
Here’s what I said to the editor when I emailed it to him:
“Attaching my review or an attempt at a review or some words on the book or some words on the book and some gestures towards other books or a bunch of words that don’t really go together but somehow found themselves...
