The Devil's Dictionary

Matt Schutt has written a sequel to The Devil's Dictionary called Encyclopedia Satanica. I was going to post a bit from it, but I can't find anything good. So, instead I'll post from Ambrose Bierce's original work:

CRITIC
n. A person who boasts himself hard to please because nobody tries to please him.

TRUTHFUL
adj. Dumb and illiterate.

Random Site of the Day.

Belly Dancing For Big Beautiful Women! because, yes, i'm evil

Excerpt:

M'shisha likes the way this costume looks on her because its black color creates a slimmer visual effect. She chose to wear a flesh-colored body stocking because she's long-waisted and felt the contrast with the black top and pants would emphasize the length, creating a narrower illusion. The draped ends of the hip wrap add another vertical line to the overall look.

Another Cup.

The new Cup of Chicha still isn't much to look it, but it's fully functional: you can add comments, do in-site searches, and browse archives by category or date. If you have comments or recommendations, I'd love to hear them.

"It takes an aroused man to make a chicken affectionate." And other translation efforts.

•Translate pages into Redneck, Jive, Cockney, Elmer Fudd, Swedish Chef, Moron, Pig Latin, or Hacker.
•Advertising's Translation Errors
•"In 1855 two Portuguese translators, José da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino, produced an English phrasebook so unbelievably bad that it was reprinted for half a century as a masterpiece of hilarity, under the title English as She is Spoke." But can English as She is Spoke compare to Babelfish's translations?
•David Sedaris tries to translate the nativity story into French.

Barbar Wouldn't Like That.

For those of you looking for pictures of Kelly Osbourne nude or pics of a man's head up an elephant butt, I don't have them.
But here's something that might please both of you.

Repeat Post, for Gabe.

My Genie

In one of my favorite daydreams, a genie comes to me and grants 5 wishes. Every year my answers change, and remind me I'm getting older.
This year, I wish
•to not die from cigarette smoking
•to grow 3 inches so I can toss out my platforms
•to be a (published) novelist
•to stay young until 40 (according to the mirror, I'm 22 going on 35)
•to regain childhood fluency in French. So I can write respectable fan letters to my favorite philosophers.

back-up wishes:
•to be neat.
•to be less depressed, as long as the studies linking depression to genius aren't true.
•to be happy.
•to wake up with energy, and know what to do with it.
•to have a special camera that tape-records my nightmares, and then to use the tapes to become an avant-garde horror film director.

What would your wishes be? Post in the comments section.

I borrowed this suit from the emperor.

Speaking to German magazine YAM, Aguilera insisted she would not pose naked for magazine photos, adding: 'There is neither a moral or a visual reason for that. At the end of the day I am a musician, an artist and not a model.'

Elephant 6 is over

Elephant 6, a music collective started in the early 90s, included Apples in Stereo, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Olivia Tremor Control. So, in one day, three of my favorite bands have disbanded. I'm not sad, I'm still in shock.

Switch.

PSA for my friends using Blogger: Blogger has been hacked. Click the link to learn what to do.

Why Can't We All Just Get Along?

Stereotypes is an interactive art site that lets you combine Eric Myer's portraits to make new, sometimes frightening, sometimes familiar, faces.


If those combinations aren't exciting enough, try Daniel Lee's Manimal site, which combines humans and animals.

I sniff hope. From The New York Observer—

The bond between the Cambridge-educated Ms. Smith and Eminem, the high-school dropout from Michigan, is a case in point. It’s more than just the kind of cutesy-intellectual high-low alliance that gave birth to a thousand Brown semiotics majors’ term papers. Writers like Ms. Smith don’t feel they have to give up on a mass audience in order to say serious things. We’re reaching the end of an era in which obscurity plays as intelligence; date its demise from the publication of Jonathan Franzen’s takedown of super-convoluted postmodern novelist William Gaddis last month in The New Yorker. And yet it’s not that the new literary stars are rejecting the ethos of high-toned literary deconstruction they learned in their college English classes—they’ve already assimilated it, along with their MTV and their hip-hop, and along with an easy acceptance of fame and money as marks of their literary prowess. As Geoff Shandler, an editor at Little, Brown, put it, young authors today "all went through, in one form or another, the postmodernist academic wringer, so they were used to peeking under the surfaces of things as well as fostering collisions and (sometimes too obviously) pumping irony."[more>]

More Birthday Wishlist Items.

On Repeat

If someone ever needed to make a film about an old woman dying in her apartment and no one finding her for weeks, they could use my apartment. It's perfect: ripped packing boxes in every doorway; a trail of papers that runs from room to room like a stream, culminating in the ocean of my office; thirty or forty empty packs of Marlboro reds (the old lady was about 40); and a horde of fruit flies in the kitchen, hoping someone else will come in and die.
I'm not sure antidepressants improve my daily routine. I think they just make it a lot harder to realize my life is a friggin mess (I want to swear, but this site looks so clean.) It's not "normal" to sit in front of my computer all day, rewriting the same first paragraph of my novel for six weeks. It's not "normal" to listen to six Morrissey songs on repeat for 12 hours. It's not "normal" to smoke 2 packs a day and think I'll live to see paragraph no. 2. Oh. Argh. I don't know how to pull myself out of this mess.

Forget Yesterday

Claire Zulkey over at The Morning News makes a strong case for why Ringo should be our new favorite Beatle. Paul, younger than Ringo, "seems determined never to grow old. His hair never quite goes totally gray (strangely enough, a feat of reverse aging in the last several years has caused it to go less gray). . . [And] at his concerts he reminds us with a twenty-five-minute montage of Beatles footage that, yes, he was in the Fab Four, and that, hey, maybe he still could be!" Zulkey continues, "you can just tell that, like a cockroach, he’ll outlast everybody else. Not only will it be Paul McCartney Dying, when he does, it’ll be The Last Beatle Dying. It’s going to be an international mania. . . And he’s going to love it, you can tell, even from beyond the grave." Instead of letting him get his way, Zulkey suggests we join her recently founded Ringo Starr Preservation Society.

SFW ISO SMW

Is hell another writer? Martin Arnold interviews literary couples—among them, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion, and Alice Sebold and Glen David Gold—and answers no. The couples are especially pleased with the free editing service built into their marriages.

Four Notes on Wrong

I think I have some kind of brain illness that prevents good writing. And attempts at good writing speed up the illness's progress.
Tonight I started the eighth version of the first chapter of my novel. This version I titled "Four Notes on Self," and it discusses such things as audience theory, self-reflexive symbolism, and Sartre. It has lots of little diagrams and charts. I'm not sure whether it's too basic or too complicated. I fear it hasn't found the middle ground.
But it is still fiction. Fiction in the tradition of W.G. Sebald (whom my friend Matt Miller recently introduced to me), Milan Kundera (hail my hero), or the anti-christ Alain de Botton, who clumsily tramps on all of my favorite subjects.

Bloody Hell.

Lego Death.

Early Birthday

What to listen to:
Ohmygod!!! I want to die!! 5 new songs by Morrissey:
I Like You
The First of the Gang to Die
The World is Full of Crashing Bores
Irish Blood, English Heart
Mexico

Read the lyrics at Viva Hate, where I also got the mp3 links. Also, watch Moz sing, see him on the Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn on Monday, October 21, read interviews and articles here and here, and download some classic Smiths MP3s.

The UFOS live inside our stereos. . .

I browsed through Amazon and BestBuy's selection of minisystems last night. They don't look like I remember them. An evolution has taken place:

Life is Horrible.

"The noise from nearby airports impairs children's reading ability and long-term memory, a new study has revealed."

Never Play By the Rules

The Rules of Attraction
The teen dramedy is both the most clichéd and most inventive of the Hollywood genres. Both qualities, though, serve the same purpose: the clichés remove substance, and the inventiveness emphasizes style. Just look at the recent evolution of the teen flick--from Can't Hardly Wait to Get Over It to The Rules of Attraction (link goes to trailer). The style is, very often, the substance.

Every film has a style, but by style I mean something specific: blurred images, time-lapse photography, film run backwards, style with a capital S. Style makes the manipulation of images conspicuous.

Rules succeeds when it is Stylish, and fails when it tries to interest us in characters. Its characters just aren't interesting—except maybe for Lauren, who seems like a real person, but the wrong person for the role—and none of them are as believable as the film wants them to be. (Is it possible that every girl on campus looks like this:

?)

But the film's Style distracts us from the characters (it's interesting that Man With a Movie Camera gets a mention) and invests us in things like a leaf, an expression, a tub of blood. If we still need characters as an excuse for these good things, then I guess Rules is a forgiveable enterprise. Long live teens!

Need to get high.

I just watched the clip, linked to below, and it's incomprehensibly bad. No, comprehensibly and comprehensively bad. Yes.

Push Play

Derrida: The Man, The Movie

Watch a clip here.

More on Derrida:
—Derrida and Nonsense Theology, by Jay Michaelson. "…I will take up the challenge and provide a non- ontotheology that looks like nothing, that is not negative theology but rather a theology of nonsense and incommensurability."
—An Introduction to Poststructuralism and Derrida.
—A great on-line collection of Derrida excerpts, interviews, and articles.
—Sexy Pics 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
—the movie poster:

—And a Derrida quote:

"Monsters cannot be announced.
One cannot say: 'here are our monsters',
without immediately turning the monsters into pets."

Derrida, like my father, is a French Sephardic Jew from Algeria. All the formative men in my life.

My first Friday Five.

1. How many TVs do you have in your home?
One, and I should have spent the money on a stereo.

2. On average, how much TV do you watch in a week?
I stare at my computer screen for eight hours a day; why would I want to sit down in front of another screen?

3. Do you feel that television is bad for young children?
Absolutely. Each Saturday morning cartoon is a tab of acid. Imagine the cumulative effects on a 5-year old's brain. I'm still having flashbacks.

4. What TV shows do you absolutely HAVE to watch, and if you miss them, you're heartbroken?
I like Buffy. Two episodes ago, a monster was eating Willow alive. He was peeling off strips of her skin and sucking on them. She was paralyzed and there was a look of horror in her eyes. I'm glad I didn't miss that.

5. If you had the power to create your own television network, what would your line-up look like?
It would be a network that broadcast my brain's electrmagnetic activity, and when I slept, recorded my nightmares.

Moz 4.0

Thirty seconds of Moz singing static. He looks like a goof. But I love him. [from the null device]

Nothing is ever free

"Wegner argues that 'the feeling of will is our mind's way of estimating what it thinks it did.'" [from the null device]

A new contraceptive is banned.

Romanian authorities impound panties imprinted with Virgin Mary.

Britney is slutty, but Christina

is raunchy.

Fall asleep before midnight.

For Daddy's little princess. [found on scrubbles]

the National Book Award

read the nominations here

What European Tribes Think About One Another

some excerpts:
France on Germany: bloodthirsty and fat
Spain on Holland: offensively tall
Holland on Spain: make good servants
Czech on everyone: monkeys

Somebody Had a Bad Time in High School.

"Nerve activity in the teenaged brain is so intense that they find it hard to process basic information, researchers say, rendering the teenagers emotionally and socially inept."

Some bodies do spontaneously combust.

sort of.

Family vs. family pets.

Des Moines, October 16, 2002 - A 2-month-old child is recovering after it was attacked and bitten by a raccoon. The family was keeping the animal as a family pet. Two-month-old Elijha Evans is in critical condition at Blank Children's Hospital. The infant had to undergo hours of reconstructive surgery as a result of the raccoon biting off the boy's nose and lips. [more>]

My impulse, in talking to others, is always towards self-censorship. This is pop psychology at its cheesiest, but I am completely terrified of rejection. I guess what I'm saying is: if I'm mean to you, it means I trust you. That's not an explanation masquerading as an apology; it's a compliment masquerading as an explanation.

what a great phrase: "crackpot"

I'm full of crackpot theories, and I'm always hoping to come across respectable texts that confirm my theories. So, I'm putting out a request. If you know of any theoretical work that deals with these topics, please write me.
—memory as a supplement in the Derridean sense (in particular, I'm interested in traumatic memory: PTSD flashbacks)
—semiotic analyses of the occult/occult symbology
—depersonalization, dissociation, as possible experiences of being "other" to language (ha ha; indulge me)
--->later note: an experience of being "other," not being "outside" language.

Another birthday wishlist item:

Joni is usually a poet.

"I just think it's a cesspool," [Joni Mitchell] said in the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine. "I hope it all goes down the crapper."

New Yorker fiction editor Bill Buford steps down

Are you a survivor?

"Your Life Will Literally hang in the Balance."

You board an elevator at the top of the platform and prepare for the ride of your life. After only a few minutes in the pressurized compartment, you leave Earth's atmosphere behind and the planet appears as a brilliant, ever-shrinking ball of blue. With Earth exerting less and less of a tug, you feel noticeably lighter. The sky gradually blackens and the heavens are aglow with more stars than you've ever seen before. While you marvel at the crystal-clear view of the Milky Way, you try not to think about a harsher reality: For the next 7 days, your life will literally hang in the balance. All that will keep you aloft is a slender ribbon that stretches from the top of that mid-ocean platform to your destination 100,000 kilometers into space. [more >]

Geoff, an interview with Elvira,

Geoff, an interview with Elvira, aka Cassandra Peterson. On her childhood: "I even got dressed up on normal days," she says, "so I was kind of weird."

And you thought worms in tequila were gross.

Motion sickness

Andrew Motion, the British Poet Laureate, "has admitted to using chemical stimulation to help him write poetry - a daily cup of cold remedy Lemsip." Lemsip, which he takes daily, gives him the sensation of having a mild illness, and brings him into "that sort of slightly introverted self-pitying mood that a mild illness can give." "It is absolutely conducive to poems," he added. A Lemsip spokesman reassured users: "It is fair to say that it doesn't cause poetry in most people."

Das Not Guten

Das Experiment is supposedly based on the Stanford Prison Experiment, a barbaric reenactment of prison life by a psychologist in the Stanford area. Off Metafilter, there's also a link to the Milgram experiment, "a lesson in depravity, peer pressure, and the power of authority."

Stop-motion family album

I've been looking at this, scrolling up and down and up, for half an hour.

Limited Narrations

"Novelists for hire -- their company is called Narration Ltd. -- they propose to write fiction for organizations and institutions that want their message communicated."

I didn't mean to buy anything, but, after having an Italian soda in the bookstore cafÈ, I got light-headed and found myself on the street with these:

Under the influence of soda, I only had one criterion for the fiction I was buying: it had to contain pictures or lists or diagrams. The McSweeney's, though, was a predetermined choice; my friend Kerrie Kvashay-Boyle has her first published story in it. (Awesome.)

The best of the Daypop Top 40:

• i used to believe is a collection of ideas that adults thought were true when they were children. Here's a couple that have nothing to do with childhood innocence: "My Mom told me as a young adult, when one doesn't have life insurence, they put a bone up your ass and let the dogs drag you away." "My mother told me that the reason she woke up naked some mornings was because the clothes monster came at night and took all her clothes. Being a shrewd child, I figured that it accounted for the strange noises at night in their bedroom. I finally got it when I was about 10."
  
• Enter a sentence or phrase and watch it get lost in translation. This site runs your phrase through five languages, and then back to English. The only phrase that I could come with that was translation-proof was "They are ugly." Try it.
  
• Generate random product ideas with the prior-o-matic. Design #499202907: It's a blender that speaks with the voice of James Earl Jones! Design #320266475: It's a video recorder that talks, flashes at intervals and believes itself to be self-aware. Design #32725225: It's like a normal necklace, but it traps small animals. Design #1021771650: It's a stapler that will drive you insane, doesn't always work and chirps and whistles. Design #1563720759: It's a contraceptive device! It makes reassuring noises!
  Posted by nchicha at October 14, 2002, 12:24 PM | Comments (0)

Keeping up with Ted's facial hair.
Thanks, Judy.

If the photo isn't showing up, go here. It's photo #2.

Another item on the birthday wish list

Another item on the birthday wish list: as much Andrian Tomine as possible. The comic that's reprinted in The Best American Non-Required Reading is so much better than any of the fiction I've been reading recently.
Earlier today, I started drawing a comic to accompany a mixed tape I'm making, but I'm incapable of catching visual nuance the way Tomine can. Still, I'll finish it; I'm taking a break from writing fiction this week.

When it's genius, it's the Smiths.

"The dense and deeply touching "Talk to Her" makes one think [Pedro AlmodÛvar] has been listening to a lot of songs by the Smiths, those former post-punk potentates, particularly the band's classic, 'Girlfriend in a Coma.'"

"We want our books to smell like poopy."

"We want our books to be used. That's our philosophy," said Georges Hemmerstoffer, head of the Klo-Verlag which publishes the toilet paper literature. About half of all people liked to read on the toilet, he said.

When Narcissists Marry.

"Our 2002 His and Her gifts transform you from a mild-mannered couple into the evil-vanquishing duo of your dreams, with your very own custom action figures."

I can't get the internet to work on my desktop, though it works fine on my laptop. My laptop is running Mac OS 10.2; my desktop runs on OS 9. So I thought I'd upgrade to OS X on my desktop and just copy the system preferences: ha.
First, OS 10.2 won't install. So I upgraded to 10.0.1, thinking I could then upgrade to 10.2. No. But upgrading to 10.0.1 deleted all of my iTunes files (mixed tapes I've been working on all week). Now I just want to go back to sleep.

The bottom line

"The bottom line is I don't trust this president and his advisors."

SCIENTIST LOOKS TO RADIO WAVES FOR SPACE CONSTRUCTION: AOL news

AN American scientist is working on an ambitious plan to build in space using radio waves.

Georgia Institute of Technology aeronautical engineer Narayanan Komerath believes the technique could make space colonisation feasible.

His vision is based on a process called acoustic shaping, which shows its possible to use sound to move solid objects in weightless environments.

He aims to test the technique in space using solar-powered radio transmitters to manipulate fragments of asteroid debris. He told New Scientist that he is yet to calculate precisely how much power would be needed, but points out the solar cells could be kilometres across.

He is due to discuss the idea with Nasa's Institute of Advanced Concepts at a conference in Atlanta later this year.
[clipped from die puny humans]

Wish List

My birthday's in 3 weeks. What I want, in no particular order:
-a stereo, goddamnit. My computer speakers make electronic guitars sound like fiddles.
-a DVD player
-an iPod
-books (particularly fiction by male authors that's not in the realist mode)
-love
-a couch for the living room
-a winter coat
-anything that sounds like Depeche Mode or Belle and Sebastian or the Smiths or Morrissey or le Tigre or Blonde Redhead or Ladytron or Broadcast or the Buzzcocks or Future Bible Heroes/Gothic Archies/Magnetic Fields/the 6ths
-8 1/2 on DVD
-The Royal Tenenbaums on DVD
-candy
-crumpled bills
-www.chicha.org
-a digital camera
-a filing cabinet
-pictures of yourself, framed. I'm serious.
-a visit. Anyone? My life is sad.

La Petite Mort.

There's a really interesting article up at Slate right now. Some highlights:
-"For the first billion years after life appeared on Earth, death was a contingent thing. . . . Only when sex entered the picture did death become inescapable. "
-"One of the three scientists who shared yesterday's Nobel Prize was honored for identifying a death gene that may control cellular suicide in humans. What if this gene could somehow be switched off? Mightn't that be a first step toward bodily immortality? "
-"The cells from Henrietta Lacksólabeled HeLaówere astonishing. Unlike other human cell lines, which would grow for a while and then peter out, HeLa proliferated nonstop and consumed food voraciously."
-"In the mid-'60s, it was discovered, to the horror of medical researchers, that hundreds of published scientific papers supposedly describing how certain heart cells or liver cells behaved were actually about HeLa."

True, true.

Asked the difference between a good poem and a great poem, Charles Wright says, "Great poems tend to begin with 'In,' 'Of' and 'And.' Good poems usually start with 'The.'" [stolen from moby lives]

Every night this past month I've been attending wizardry school in my dreams. I'm making fast progress; I'm the only student in the class who can levitate, and I can now levitate for about forty seconds at a time. I'll keep you updated.

You can read excerpts from Kertesz's works here.

Kertesz Wins Nobel

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- Imre Kertesz, a Hungarian who survived Auschwitz as a teenager, won the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for writing that ``upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.''
(<--- This picture of Kertesz winning makes me very happy.)

Everyonewhosanyone

Everyonewhosanyone.com "lists 1,247 agents and editors in the United States, Canada and Britain, along with their eñmail addresses . . . in order of relative significance." The lit. world is supposedly talking of nothing but.

Nobel Thoughts

The Nobel Prize for literature will be revealed today. If Milan Kundera gets it, I'll buy myself pricey champagne. If John Ashbery gets it, the Iowa poets are going to be insufferable for weeks. If Joyce Carol Oates gets it, I'll break my computer.
Most likely, though, the Nobel won't go to an American; "Von LovenbergÖstressed her personal viewÖthat it would not be an American because of political implications."

What obscure band are you?

Who are you?

Boggle? Scrabble? Text Twist? Bookworm.

Arts & Letters Daily is no longer, but their goodbye kindly directs us to Philosophy & Literature, a smaller look-alike.

American Idyll

from the NY Times—

"All of our victims have been innocent, have been defenseless, but now they're stepping over the line, because our children don't deserve this," declared Chief Charles Moose of the Montgomery County police, teary-eyed and angry after five days of fruitless searching for the sniper who has chosen victims seemingly at random and executed them from afar with single-shot accuracy.

The rhetoric of childhood has become increasingly unsettling. If children are "undeserving," the obvious implication is that adults are not undeserving. In America, adulthood operates in a post-Edenic space, and children are innocents before the fall. Adults may be "innocent" but they are also less innocent.

The article continues:

"We are angry and we are outraged," Mr. Duncan boomed at a news conference in describing "a new low" in the sniper's depredations.

An important thing is happening to our definition of innocence: Innocence is being conflated with potentiality. We have begun to measure innocence through potential; so when potential lessens, so does innocence.
Why would our culture choose this definition of innocence? My guess, probably lame and under-educated, is that weíve suppressed the impossibility of the American Dream by projecting the qualities we associate with the American Dream onto children.
This affects both our understanding of adulthood and childhood inóI would argueónegative ways.
We want children to be stable (passive) vessels of the qualities we project onto them. Since the qualities we best associate with the American Dream are ìpotentialityî or ìagency,î children become passive vessels of agency. The contradiction becomes clear when we flush out what potentiality actually is. To have potential is to not yet have made choices that would narrow that potential (potential as a kind of innocence). But, if we value children for their potential, we devalue the choices that allow for the existence of potential. The existence of choices is privileged over "making choices."
In a sense, we are devaluing agency when we value childhood, and, by valuing childhood in this way, we are constructing children as undifferentiated non-agents.

Can I sleep with them?

Rent an Alan Alda, Prince Williams, Roseanne, Kramer, Pierce Brosnan or Sophia Loren look-alike. But don't expect your money's worth from the Audrey Hepburn, Julia Roberts, Jackie O., or George Clooney impersonators.

Guess what this is diagramming.

My Writing

Attempt no. 4:
Beach towels had turned the park grass into a sprawling patchwork. Teens sat on the towels and watched the fireworks in silence, using their hands to direct the traffic of bottles, cigarettes, and joints. Occasionally a girl crawled off a boyís lap and he left to get her a sweater from his car.
As he walked, the fireworks were behind him. Figures in the dark tried to light cigarettes, but the lighters coughed up sparks and the flames were kicked loose by the wind. He climbed the small hill to the parking lot and, in the dark, his hands and feet could pretend the hill was a challenge. The night had cast a spell; everything seemed greater than itself. At the top of the hill, where the grass turned into pavement, he turned and watched a seed of light jump from the ground. The seed blossomed into a dandelion and night blew out its hundred bristles. The bristles became seeds, returning to the ground.

There is a kind of writer's life

"There is a kind of writer's life where nothing at all happens until he or she sits down at the desk, with the earlier life an essentially eventless waiting-to-be-a-writer. Fleming's life was not like that."

Kundera

The NY Times reviews the new Milan Kundera. (If I could write the perfect novel, it would be 1/4 Milan Kundera, 1/4 Virginia Woolf, 1/4 Lorrie Moore, 1/8 Susan Minot, and 1/8 Roland Barthes.)

Fever

Saturday nights, people are most likely to fall into cliches. Me: in my pajamas, suffering writer's block, drinking by myself, smoking too much, fucking depressed, listening to Depeche Mode, Broadcast, Stereolab, Morrissey, and the 6ths. It isn't 10 yet. I could get dressed and go to a bar, but I think I'm too drunk to walk that far. I could read, and try to learn what a good sentence sounds like. I could watch a movie (I subscribe to Netflix). I could dance with my favorite partner, the mirror, and drink some more and then sit in the bathroom, nauseous and listening to the bathroom fan. I could decide my life is lonely and think about love, relationships, why they're always so painful. I could get out my video camera and do something self-indulgent-slash-experimental-slash-boring. I could go back to sleep, though I woke at 5 pm. I could try to write, and see if drinking has loosened any talent. I could write e-mails that I don't send. I could just sit here and wait for somebody to call. I could pretend to be a cat and bat around some string. I could think of all the things I could do, and keep writing my blog until midnight. I could consult a spellbook and accidentally let candles burn down my apartment building. I could put on techno and watch the iTunes visuals while drinking some more. Okay, that seems to be what's happening.

My Writing.

I can't write. Damn me, I can't write. I've been working on one paragraph for days.
Below, the three versions, each flawed in a unique way:

1. July 4, 1996
Seeds of light jumped from the ground and, with the quickness of stop-motion, blossomed into dandelions. Night blew out the bristles and seeds landed, waiting to jump up again. The crowd applauded, and, in the backseat of a car, colors lit each physiological step forwardó excitement, plateau, orgasm. Occasionally, groups wandered by the carólike ghosts, Alex thought, or Alex dreamed a theory: We will never have many vivid memories, because each eventís assigned one keeper. This night picks her: yellow on her loverís forehead, purple on his chest. Green on his lips before they kiss. Good sex can feel like dreaming.

2. July 4, 1996
Seeds of light jumped from the ground and, with the quickness of stop-motion, blossomed into dandelions. Night blew out the bristles and seeds landed, waiting to jump up again.
Teenagers sat on beach towels thrown over the park grass like a sprawling quilt. They watched the fireworks in silence, using their hands to direct the traffic of bottles, cigarettes, and joints. Now and then, a boy quietly stood up and climbed the small hill to the parking lot to get a sweater or extra pack of cigarettes . He returned looking the same, feeling the same, but in the parking lot momentarily became a ghost.
(Continues on from there.)

3. July 4, 1996
They sat on towels thrown over the grass like patchwork; and bottles, cigarettes, and joints crossed and re-crossed towels like many stitching needles. The crowd, mainly teenagers and college kids, was silent. Their bodies, leaning back, waited for the pause between the rocketís whistle and the thunder of explosion. That dash of calm before dandelions bloomed in the sky and night blew out their bristlesóthat was the caviar of silence. And everyone could have it.

Ugh. Err. Blech. Bahhhh.

short history of what it means to be an Intellectual in America

Maybe This Only Happens in Spain.

MADRID, Spain (Reuters) - A Spanish scientist says global warming may be to blame for giant blocks of ice which fall from clear skies and rip gaping holes in cars and houses.

Wild Paper Chase.

a round-table discussion on translating Murakami

I had my first workshop crit Tuesday. It was as humbling as it was helpful, and it was very helpful.

Sure you've quit, but are you cheating on the web?

What if tongues swelled like bananafish?
I've been shaking tonight, and tried to smoke a cigarette--thinking I was going through withdrawal. The taste was wretched, so I stopped. It's more of a trembling than a shaking--like I have a heart made out of red jello, and the side of a fork is tapping, ringing, the jello bell.
I always secretly wanted people to read my diary, because nothing has meaning without people. But I'm suspicious that there's something gross about writing to a web journal. Do you want to be a voyeur against your will?