August 2011
32 posts
July 2011
21 posts
Thank you for all the well-wishes over the past day. I would have felt a lot more alone if I hadn’t heard from some of you and if my mom hadn’t amazingly shown up right when the car was being towed away. If I believed in God—well, I’d probably think he was punishing me. Catholic guilt, go figure.
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I’m afraid I’ll have that thing where after trauma you seem normal, but then you go to sleep and never wake up again. Like what happens to the boy in Raymond Carver’s story A Small Good Thing (or maybe that’s just in the filmic adaptation of it in Short Cuts). So if I never blog again, that’s why.
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Late Night Confession #87
Earlier tonight I read through the facts again of the Johnny Gosch kidnapping case from the early 1980s. Gosch was a 12-year-old Iowa boy (who was the 2nd person to be featured on the backs of milk cartons) who was kidnapped and possibly enslaved.
The case was never solved but Gosch’s mother said that Johnny showed up on her doorstep one night in 1997. He told her...
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“The world’s urban population is poised to nearly double by 2050, adding...”
– John Kasdara and Greg Lindsay, Aerotropolis: How We’ll Live Next
“See the job. Do the job. Stay out of the misery.”
– David Lynch
Late Night Confession #18
In 2006 I thought about writing a novel that took place in a mental institution/psych ward/convalescent home for the troubled that was built on a mountain, with nothing nearby for miles. The story was going to revolve around a series of a dozen ping pong matches that a patient and his doctor/counselor were having. Each chapter would feature another match and, most...
On What to Do:
My friend Kevin and I looked into joining the French Foreign Legion after both we learned that they were still operating and accepting Americans. That is the branch of the French military open to foreigners who would like to be commanded by French officers.
That probably won’t happen!
On the other extreme, here’s a good article on the slackening of materialism and...
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Coping Mechanism #73
I wrote in an email last night that maybe I (and others!—especially single people) need to anthropomorphize my credit card bills to help give my life meaning and purpose. Surely other people have found motivation to get good jobs and earn money because they had toddlers that would whine if they weren’t fed or didn’t have Dora the Explorer bedsheets.
So I guess...
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The Books of My Youth
Over the weekend I posted about a few of the books I’ve read lately. Since then I’ve been thinking about what I used to read and thought I’d make a list of books that I thought were great that I read between the ages of 0 and 15.
1. Shel Silverstein: Where the Sidewalk Ends / A Light in the Attic / Lafcadio: The Lion Who Shot Back — Lafcadio may have been...
There are a few links I’ve been meaning to share with you:
My friend Vi Khi Nao recently did an interview with the lit blog HTMLGiant about experimental literature. She says some pretty funny things. You might remember that she did her first interview a few weeks back with Monkfish Jowls.
Poet and translator (and also a former teacher of mine) Michael Hofmann has a great little essay in...
In the current New Yorker there is a profile of Jaron Lanier, a virtual reality pioneer and technology writer, which contains this passage about social-networking sites:
Teen-agers, Lanier writes, may vigilantly maintain their online reputations, but they do so “driven more by fear than by love.” In our conversation about Facebook’s face-recognition software, he added,...
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The Paris Review: Is there anything else you can say to beginning writers?
Georges Simenon: I think that everyone who does not need to be a writer, who thinks he can do something else, ought to do something else. Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don’t think an artist can ever be happy.
The Paris Review: Why?
Georges Simenon: Because, first, I think that if a man has the urge to be an artist, it is because he needs to find himself. Every writer tries to find himself through his characters, through all his writing.
From the Art of Fiction #9, Georges Simenon
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What I’ve learned from men’s magazines:
Men are autonomous individuals.
It is essential to know how to administer a close shave. It is essential to know how to cook a steak medium rare. It is essential to know how to make a martini or, at the very least, the delicate art of pouring a bourbon on the rocks.
Vice should be regularly indulged, as long as one exercises discipline. If...
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I’m making ads today. Do you like any of these?