February 2012
93 posts
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Fucking politics
Read a thing about how people are complaining about some academic speaking at public universities in California because he’s opposed to aspects of Israeli government policy.
It’s ridiculous for several reasons:
They’re accusing him of being an antisemite when he’s Jewish.
They’re accusing him of being anti-Israel when he’s an Israeli citizen.
They’re...
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my other job
literally cataloged a zip-lock baggie of bones and several full of old nails today.
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I know I've posted about this before
but every time I find Écrits in my book closet, I have this shock of surprise when I remember that, Yes, I own a copy of the complete Écrits.
[Followed by lots of questions about Why I own a copy of Écrits.]
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and I quote (English teacher edition):
“I have the misfortune of being an English instructor. I attempt to instill a bunch of bobby-soxers and drug-store Romeos with reverence for Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe!”
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wtf weird California, like, windstorms
you’re making it really difficult to have my coffee and cigarette. Thanks for getting all kinds of little leaf debris in my coffee, and blowing my cigarette almost out of my mouth. Good thing there’s a tiny, 14 inch gap between my apartment and this utility shed that I can squeeze into and take refuge from you, Aeolus.
when you wake up feeling almost hungover
is it a sign that your dependence on caffeine and cigarettes in the A.M. is now complete?
Or does it mean you’ve become such a lightweight that a 32 (oz.) gives you a hangover?
it feels kind of late to be drinking one of those...
considering I’m not planning on going on a massive drunk tonight.
But I almost fell asleep on a stripped mattress at 6:30 and the consequences of too early a sleep would, I think, be much worse than those of staying up.
big pimpin'
discovered that I had actually forgotten to pick up a paycheck in December (I thought I’d been low on funds that month…), so I got a bit of what felt like surprise money today.
The effect of that: I went to the health food store and bought over twenty dollars worth of ahi tuna jerky while thinking about that scene in Scarface where Michelle Pfeiffer says “nothing exceeds like...
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This sensation
Of feeling really clean (primarily just because my hands smell nice) reminds me of being in Orange County for some reason.
I think that in a way this might be a really good commentary on Orange County.
Would I rather
Smoke a cigarette or continue to enjoy the smell of the soap they use in the bathroom at work on my hands?
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and I quote (my italics edition):
”[…] while a couple of the prorectors are feared, none of them is all that much respected, and they’re avoided, and stick together with one another and keep to themselves and seem on the whole sad, with that grad-schoolish sense of arrested adolescence and reality-avoidance about them.”
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and I quote (dance of Ivan Ilyich edition):
“When he danced it was only as if to say, ‘look, I may be part of the reformed system, and I’ve got as far as Grade 5, but if you want to see me on the floor I can show you that even in dancing I can be the best.’”
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invented a song
it consists of repeatedly saying “paying my bills” to the melody of “Metronomic Underground” by Stereolab.
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anyone ever noticed
that the song “Cocaine Blues” (or “Transfusion Blues”) has roughly the same plot as Naked Lunch/William S. Burroughs’ actual flight to Mexico? Right down to the narrator of the song being named “Willy Lee” (Naked Lunch’s narrator is “William Lee”).
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and I quote (freshman sociology edition):
”[…] Derrida. He was so complex, so profound, so deep, that even philosophers who heard him, men who read Sartre like you and I read Doonsbury, had no idea what he was saying. Gifted with a tremendous and insubordinate intellect, Derrida was also unmatched for chutzpah.”
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Escape Into Aesthetics
I think I might switch from Camel 99s (which are somehow cheaper than regular Camels) to Parliament Lights.
I remember that I used to smoke them, and that my roommate smoked them and that I convinced him to switch to Camel Lights years ago. But a coworker gave me 3/4 of a pack the other day, and I kind of liked them much more than I remembered. The chemical aftertaste that I used to hate about...
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ok, how does this work
I want to sell a series of performance pieces to a major art museum.
The pieces (which have already taken place) consisted of me reading works of serious literature at various McDonald’s restaurants.
The physical chronicle/evidence of the piece consists of facebook status updates (which are all archived as part of the facebook archive).
Any leads? Do any of my followers have an in with...
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FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK
I missed A Dangerous Method. I almost went last weekend, and then I was going to go during the week, and now it’s gone and I have nothing to do this weekend. FUCK SHIT CUNT SON OF A BITCH MOTHERFUCKER GOD DAMNIT.
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salescunts
I can’t help but absolutely love the weird shock/disappointment groan when I tell telesalespeople from my ISP (which is also a cable provider) that I don’t watch television.
(It’s not really true - I do watch tv sometimes - but being as I don’t subscribe to cable and don’t know how to work the digital broadcast receiver that may or may not be built into my tv, I feel...
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and I quote (LATFH edition):
“David Foste Wallace - Infinite Jest: A Novel Actually, scratch this one. It’s too damn long. Hipsters just hear that it’s good. If they actually read it they’d see that Wallace is a poseur.”
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OK, I'm commiting. I'm invested.
I am going to read Infinite Jest.
I am almost to page 100.
I have ordered Elegant Complexity (even though it’s probably unnecessary, but buying a $25 guidebook kind of makes you feel like you need to actually, you know, read the book to which it is a guide).
I will read Infinite Jest.
I will finish it, possibly before the summer.
I have no other real heavy reading commitments this...
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buying books I've already read is so much fun
I’ve been buying copies of books that I’ve already read, but which I borrowed from friends or libraries. It’s an incredibly satisfying experience, though, because I get to add them to my “read” shelf (I segregate my read and unread fiction) without having to do any work (I did it already, years ago!).
Just got a copy of Craig Clevenger’s deeply flawed but...
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What the hell is the point of being in California
If it’s fucking raining? The whole point of getting up early is so that I can enjoy cigarettes in the sunshine (that’s kind of the whole point of waking up at all). This is horseshit.
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I love
this soft, burned out, dull metallic taste that’s in the back of my mouth all the time now from smoking all the time. I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s actually a really pleasant feeling (although it’s probably a sign of, like, cancer growing, or dead nerve endings or something).
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and I quote (Valentine's day edition):
“You can’t measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.”
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Valentine's gifts
got a pristine (I mean brand-fucking-new looking) hardcover, second printing copy of my favorite Kurt Vonnegut novel - Slapstick - in the mail today.
And someone at work gave me a pack of Parliament Lights (minus the four she’d smoked over the weekend), which was neat because I haven’t smoked those in years and it turns out they’re not bad at all (although smoking regular length...
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hmm
apparently all of the salient points that I think need to go into my paper on the 776 page Brothers Karamazov can fit on the two sides of one sheet of college-ruled binder paper.
Way to go, Dostoevsky.
"We're all going to die"
is what I found scrawled (in my handwriting) across the back of a handout on John Dryden’s “Mac Flecknoe.”
That must have been a boring meeting.
and in other news:
the Colombian peso took a nosedive at the start of trading on Monday following certain news from this past weekend…
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I get frustrated sometimes
when I realize that John Hawkes had already published The Cannibal and was writing The Beetle Leg when he was my age. I think this is funny, because I feel like if a 24 year old were to come out with those books today he would be laughed.
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Would be really interested to know
To what extent Ed Tom in No Country For Old Men is based on the sheriff in The Beetle Leg. I feel like John Hawkes would have to be right up Cormac McCarthy’s alley. Doesn’t a school in Texas (not UT, though) have his archive?
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In the Fahrenheit 451 universe
I would be so totally screwed.
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My Son My Son What Have Ye Done
Was really good. why did it get mixed reviews?
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redundant statement of the day:
this Maya Deren movie is super art house.
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Netflix algorithm:
why does liking 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blue Velvet cause Netflix to recommend that I watch a documentary about the guy from the Magnetic Fields? I mean, that sounds great, I love the Magnetic Fields, I just don’t understand how you get from A to B in this case.
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my Whitney Houston story (why not):
When I was eighteen, I took LSD in a house that belonged to a friend of a friend. In the kitchen, we found an audio CD of Henry Kissinger speeches and decided that listening to these at some point in the evening would be incredibly funny.
Around 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, we decide it was Kissinger time, so we open the CD case to find that the Kissinger discs had been replaced with albums by...
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baffled
was doing some searching and found a movie called My Winnipeg and it sounded familiar and I went to see if it was on Netflix only to find that it was already in my queue, which I did not remember and which makes me think that there’s no point in searching for new movies to watch, since basically every single art-film on Netflix instant has apparently already been added to my queue.
So far...
why
is every decent $5 DVD at Target either A) a movie I already own, B) on Netflix Instant, or C) something I’ve already seen enough times that buying it is pretty much pointless?
I would’ve bought The Prestige, but it was $10. Same for all the old Westerns.
economics 101:
I went to Target today and bought a steel folding chair for $10 and a cotton sweatshirt for $20.
This seems really baffling and counterintuitive - how can a sweatshirt made out of maybe one pound of woven cotton cost twice as much as a chair made of seven or eight pounds of steel?
Then you consider the labor costs of manufacturing each item: the sweatshirt is maybe a tiny bit more labor...
the point at which I always completely blow it
where I feel like I’m being rejected and so overreact to gain some kind of assurance that this is not the case, and by doing so make it the case.
I’ve been on the brink of this for an hour. I think I’m about to cross over it.
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Becoming a source of private embarrassment:
The fact that I’ve misplaced my original Os Mutantes CDs and have just been listening to their English-language collection (which is overproduced and has cheesy lyrics, although at least you can sing along to it when you’re ignorant, as I am, of the beautiful Portuguese language).
At least nobody ever scrutinizes my CD collection.