December 2008
27 posts
“My first morning in Washington, I realized I’d forgotten to buy a shower...”
– Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope, in a passage that makes me feel better about my own domestic incompetence
“…(he denies, of course, having anything in common with his beatnik...”
– from Time’s original review of Naked Lunch in the ’60s
TIME 100 Movies →
Reading this list reinforces the notion I need to see more substantial movies. Anyone with me?
Daily Routines →
This cool site chronicles “how writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their day.” Apparently being a writer entails also being a morning person…
“The University of Santa Teresa was like a cemetery that suddenly begins to...”
– Roberto Bolaño, 2666
You think this is easy? Realism!
Events of note:
I’m wondering…: were they his OWN shoes?
At Lakota on Friday, a man with a samurai sword entered the coffee establishment. He charged into the center of the building, shouting to all patrons, “Let me inform you of this! One thing…” and proceeded to to tell everyone that the artist who apparently made the art on the walls (Graham Bailey is what the...
“Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted...”
– Herman Melville, Moby Dick
The Books—“Tokyo”
Why would anyone ever choose to write a thesis?? I mean…really?
You’ve got your table of contents, your intro, your lit review, methods…etc. and on and on for dozens and then over a hundred pages! It’s like a force.
Hmm.
The first of the classes in my second to last real...
“Half the people in America are faking it.”
– Robert Mitchum
Speaking of crazy...
I just discovered that Philip Roth (as well as several other awesome people such as Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, and Tom Stoppard) were the patrons for a quarterly publication, Index on Censorship, that I worked for in the UK a year or so ago.
Check this out for proof! My name’s there, too. God, I miss that experience—easily one of the best times I’ve ever had.
Eastside Tavern's Dan Friesen comedy?
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Is this real? This is amusing and pretty awesome, particularly the fact that there’s an article about it
This song feels appropriate for my apartment in...
Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization →
Hmmm…..
“if you’re on MySpace now, you’re a [expletive] cretin. And you’re not only a...”
– Michael Wolff
Publishers Announce Staff Cuts →
The world is falling apart and I’ll never have a real job anywhere ever.
Reasons to be hopeful
“…Obama the reader blossomed as an undergraduate at Occidental College in California and, especially, during the two monkish years he spent finishing up his degree at Columbia University in New York. “I had tons of books,” he told his biographer, David Mendell (“Obama: From Promise to Power”), about this time in his life. “I read everything. I think that...
“This was the Midwest, my friend. Not New York”
– St. Louis native Jon Hamm, the actor portraying Don Draper on Mad Men, on why nobody offered him therapy when one of his parents died before he grew up, GQ
My Ipod broke a couple weeks ago, which I got...
Sleepless and thinking
How, after only receiving four hours of sleep last night, am I still awake past 3 a.m. tonight? My intentions, all the best, involved me passing out at 11 p.m., which I tried to do. I’m tempted to stay up and up and just read all night. I’m supposed to be at work at 8 a.m.
Tonight on the a phone a source in Texas referred to her 15-year-old and 19-year-old sons and asked me if I had...
Caring for Your Introvert (The Atlantic, March... →