December 2009
57 posts
Examples of inquiries I will respond to: 1) What letter of the alphabet would you be and why? Example answer: Q, for reasons too sensitive to explain here. 2) What word are you still not 100% sure you are pronouncing correctly, so you sort of mumble through it? Example answer: Contemplative. 3) What percentage of your tights would you say have holes in them? Be honest. Example answer: ...
Dec 31st
2 notes
“That’s the thing about the past. The closest you can get to it is stories, and...”
– Lydia Peele, from Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing (via robbery-of-the-heart) Favorite book of 2009
Dec 31st
7 notes
2 tags
Dec 30th
2 notes
2 tags
“But from time to time. From time to time. What tenderness in these little words,...”
– Samuel Beckett, from Molloy
Dec 29th
9 notes
3 tags
Dec 29th
8 notes
3 tags
In Which I Reveal Some Character Flaws and Why...
Him: i’m about to go to lost weekend right now 500 days of summer Me: oh yeah i hear good things. but zooey whatsherface bugs me on principle. no one should be allowed to be that cute and quirky and a good singer. Him: i really want to marry her Me: she was on top chef and it was like oh holy eating disorder Me: she’s a vegan who doesn’t eat soy or whate weat wheat you are...
Dec 29th
4 notes
3 tags
"I Do Things the Accountants of Truth Would Not...
J.W.: I’ve seen you quoted as saying that you’d rather die than see an analyst. Can you elaborate? Werner Herzog.: I think it’s a mistake of the 20th century. You could not live in a house that was illuminated to every last single corner. And human beings become uninhabitable when they are scrutinized and illuminated into their last little dark abysses. Just leave people as they...
Dec 28th
12 notes
3 tags
I received a head-lamp (with six settings!!!) and two mini lanterns for Christmas; this means: 1) My future camping trips will be wonderfully well-lit 1a) I will no longer have to hold the flashlight in my teeth when doing things that require two hands. 1b) If I wear/hold all of them at the same time I could potentially be confused as a constellation by somebody far away. 2) My coal miner...
Dec 27th
6 notes
1 tag
Dec 27th
3 tags
“Speaking as a botanist and a mad woman, she said, the most extraordinary word in...”
– V. Nabokov, from Ada, or Ardor
Dec 26th
19 notes
Dec 26th
8 notes
“Paris sky, secret weight flesh which in hiccups spits in our faces. Through...”
– “Paris Sky” by Minou Drouet, age 9, 1955
Dec 24th
Breaking Update: Winter Break, Day 3
Bowls of homemade (oh, to be retired) Kit Kat ice cream consumed: 2 Conversation witnessed between my mother and a movie theater vendor: Vendor: That will be  $3.50, ma’am. Mom: But that sign says $2.00 for hot tea. Vendor: Yes, but you have a large cup. Mom: This is the cup you gave me. Vendor: A large is $3.50. Mom: Let me get this straight: you want me to pay over a dollar extra for...
Dec 24th
27 notes
David Simon interview with Vice Magazine →
youmightfindyourself: And what’s different in New Orleans? Because New Orleans has created such unique cultural art in terms of music and dance, and it’s a very idiosyncratic culture, it shows the value of what the American melting pot is capable of. It does it in a way that is visual and musical and demonstrable, and it does it in the fucking street every day. Somehow this city is trying to...
Dec 23rd
34 notes
2 tags
Avonlea is my chicken soup
Anne: Look do you see that poem?
Jane: Where?
Anne: There... down in the brook... that old green, mossy log with the water flowing over it in those smooth ripples that look as if they'd been combed, and that single shaft of sunshine falling right athwart it, far down into the pool. Oh, it's the most beautiful poem I ever saw.
Jane: I should rather call it a picture. A poem is lines and verses.
Anne: Oh dear me, no. The lines and verses are only the outward garments of the poem and are no more really it than your ruffles and flounces are YOU, Jane. The real poem is the soul within them... and that beautiful bit is the soul of an unwritten poem. It is not every day one sees a soul... even of a poem.
via piquant
Dec 23rd
5 notes
Breaking Update: Winter Break Day 2 (Animal...
I heard a screech owl catch a mouse last night. A wild turkey flew into a neighbor’s window and fell into the bathtub. I passed two horses in a pasture today, looking bored. I imagined their conversation went something like this: Horse A: ‘Sup. Horse B: All in the game, yo, All in the game. Horse A: It’s played or get played, out here. Horse B: For real. Books I brought...
Dec 23rd
11 notes
Dec 23rd
6 notes
“We have dreams. It’s like art. Is art useless? Yes and no. The concepts...”
– Fabiola Gianotti, particle physicist in charge of the Large Hadron Collider via
Dec 22nd
26 notes
Dec 22nd
21 notes
Breaking Update: Winter Break Day 1
I cooked curried lentil soup for lunch and farfalle pasta with zucchini and smoked mozzarella for dinner. You guys, I have been existing on caffeine and Doritos dust for the past three weeks, so this is pretty monumental. I have been alternating reading about particle physics and watching a NINETEEN HOUR LIL’ WAYNE MARATHON on the television (sometimes both at the same time!). It’s...
Dec 22nd
“Physicists now say that all the visible matter in the universe—galaxies,...”
– Kurt Andersen, “The Genesis 2.0 Project”
Dec 22nd
31 notes
Dec 22nd
8 notes
Interviewer: Finally, a fundamental question: As a creative writer what do you think is the function of your art? Why a representation of fact, rather than fact itself? Hemingway: Why be puzzled by that? From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a...
Dec 21st
7 notes
Dec 20th
18 notes
Dec 19th
6 notes
Dec 19th
6 notes
Dec 18th
5 notes
“I sort of knew we were kindred spirits 4evz when we were watching “Anne of...”
– My friend Ian
Dec 18th
16 notes
Dec 16th
12 notes
Dec 16th
5 notes
Some of the More Embarrassing Essay Titles I Have...
What’s Love Got to Do With It? Themes of Psychological and Sexual Manipulation in Daniel Defoe’s Roxana You Spin Me Right Round: Yeats’ Gyre Peach, Plum, Puritan: Vivid Monotony in Elinor Wylie’s ‘Wild Peaches’ I’m Not Even Sure What Hurts* *On Notes From Underground. Note to Abby: the eminently turtlenecked J. B-S was not amused!
Dec 15th
11 notes
“I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center...”
– Joan Didion, from Why I Write
Dec 15th
13 notes
Love Diagrams →
The science of storytelling; socks on the floor; fluctuation; dadaism; and the value of time in relationships via
Dec 15th
3 notes
“Yet even so there is but one world and everything that is imaginable is...”
– Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
Dec 13th
5 notes
“I wonder where the dreams I don’t remember go. I talk to my things when...”
– Edouard Leve, Autoportrait
Dec 13th
5 notes
Dec 13th
34 notes
Dec 11th
10 notes
Dec 11th
13 notes
On Language
Some peoples, such as the Wishram Chinook of the Columbia River in what is now the state of Washington, or the Ashantie of Nigeria, have considered infants’ vocalizations to manifest a special language. For the Wishram, this language was interpretable only by men having certain guardian spirits. In such cases, the native language is in native theory a second language to everyone. -Dell...
Dec 11th
58 notes
Dec 11th
6 notes
Dec 10th
12 notes
Dec 9th
8 notes
A Round-Up of My Finest E-Mail Titles of 2009
I Need That Bananaganizer! “Lil’ Wayne, Get Upstairs and Brush Your Diamond Teeth Right Now!” A Secondary Meta-Discourse For Your Primary And Other Secondary Discourses Elephant Shrews are Sooooo 2008 Dancing Plague of 1518 A Spherical Apology Existential Mew I’m Bored (and You Ruined My Pants) Real Things v. Towers Of Fuckwinds and Frimicates I highly recommend...
Dec 9th
6 notes
Dec 8th
12 notes
“And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light In which everything is meant for...”
– Wallace Stevens, from A Rabbit As King of the Ghosts (1923)
Dec 8th
2 notes
Bests
My car got stolen last week, Tumblr. Which, apparently, if you live in San Francisco and drive a mid-nineties Honda Accord, is a rite of passage. Ah, well. I just hope the thug who drove away in it felt just a little self-conscious in a powder blue car with an EXTREMELY RARE Bonnie Prince Billy bumper sticker, an “I love love” gay marriage support sticker, and a “World’s...
Dec 7th
26 notes
An Interview with Alvin Toffler, Education...
Here’s a complaint you often hear: We spend a lot of money on education, so why isn’t all that money having a better result? It’s because we’re doing the same thing over and over again. We’re holding 40 or 50 million kids prisoner for x hours a week. And the teacher is given a set of rules as to what you’re going to say to the students, how you’re going...
Dec 6th
14 notes
“Humans are not made to sit at computer terminals or travel by aeroplane; destiny...”
– Werner Herzog, from Herzog on Herzog, who is all over Tumblr today in the form of shoe-eating and dancing chickens. If you have not previously seen it, please take a moment to admire my life’s masterpiece, a cake I baked inspired by Werner Herzog’s shoe. Recipe included.
Dec 6th
25 notes
“Let the stars Plummet to their dark address, Let the mercuric Atoms that...”
– Sylvia Plath, from Nick and the Candlestick
Dec 6th
12 notes
3 tags
“Funny—I saw that verse in small violet letters before you put it into...”
– V. Nabakov, Ada, or Ardor I love when he gets all synaesthetic on you.
Dec 6th