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7:22 AM Ballpoint
I didn't watch enough of the Hussein/Rather interview to form much of an opinion. There's this much: yes, Hussein might be a loony, and he is a kind of distant, abstract threat, but this war thing is insane. From the interview itself all I gathered is that people who wear perfectly nice suits seem reluctant to appear, on camera, with perfectly nice pens. Both Hussein and Rather took notes with Bics. Or PaperMates. White stem, black cap. Humble and efficient and good enough -- yes. But are these Bic people? Are they? Really? I'm guessing they both own at least one half-decent fountain pen, the kind that doesn't require heavy presssing on the page.
So either Hussein and Rather are reverse writing utensil snobs or I am a fairly straightforward utensil snob. Else I should have been listening to what they were saying, as opposed to worrying about what they were writing with. And of course there's the surreal needs of the medium, which might have required that both Iraqui dictator and television personality appear with matching pens. So somebody had to hide his MontBlanc so as to not to appear as though he was putting on airs.
Sunday, February 16, 2003
10:40 AM Other, More Interesting Voices in Less Cluttered Rooms
Aimee's new site is up. Go visit http://www.poshlost.net/ for all the stripped down goodness. And may you bask in the glory of the Nabokovilian URL? You may.
Also, my friend Godfrey needs someone to adopt Whip-It. Adopt, if you can.
Life over here is good and tranquil -- buckets of fiction and nonfiction writing going on. Some of it is good. Some of it is staying in the bucket.
There will be more in the way of updates later, but for now it's all more of the same, w/ perhaps more homesickness than usual -- tuned out NPR this week (pledge drive) to the Latin radio station for a salsa and merengue fix, and was pleased to hear an Aterciopelados tune amid all the trumpets and tales of romance gone wrong. The homesickness might have something to do w/ working on a piece that might be the beginning of something bigger. It's set in Bogota but cribs liberally from Nerval's Aurelia and from The Wizard of Oz. It needs to be messed with -- as it stands it just stands... It's static, though tight and strange w/o veering into freewheeling surrealism, which I've come to distrust. So it's better than average but still in need of major surgery. (Oh, the nonfiction piece mentioned on 2/2/3 was tremendously well received -- more well received than it deserved.)
I finished the Garcia Marquez memoirs a week ago but have not had a chance to open the next nonrequired book, Jonathan Carroll's Wooden Apples.
Monday, February 10, 2003
2:07 PM Concordance
So not a few hours after posting the link below the girl in question e-mails me for a Buffy marathon the next day. I had a great time -- there is of course no question of a re-hook-up, nor would I be all that keen on one, and besides the boy she's dating right now is an acquaintance and actually a very nice person.
Spent an ungodly amount of hours in the company of good people watching angsty vampires. We ate more bacon than we should have. I drank a pot of coffee.
I'm still, unfortunately, far too inarticulate when we're alone, but at my normal level of inarticulateness when more people are present. This is a problem. Here's someone I'm really just very grateful to, someone who has done more for me than any girl has in years, and it's simply a failure at a social-grace-level -- don't have much of an excuse either, other than this part of it is fairly new too, spotting someone and wishing them all the best in one's head, a desperate wish to see that this person is doing well, is happy. To carry a conversation with the thank-you-hope-you're-happy-thank-you reel running in the background is a little distracting.
Friday, February 07, 2003
7:12 AM On Messing Around While Sober
A short piece for Frederick Barthelme's Public Scrutiny. (Professor Barthelme is the author of several wonderful books, including Bob the Gambler and (with his brother) Double Down.)
Sunday, February 02, 2003
5:34 PM Cheer Up, Emo Kid
I forgot to add that I've also been listening over and over again to ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead's mindblowing Source Tags & Codes. They sound like everything I've ever heard and loved rolled into something noisy and wrong. Yes, some of the lyrics are a little on the emo-ish side, but you can hardly hear them anyway amidst all the guitar buzz.
Just sent four poems to The New Yorker, then read this article on the fiction turnover. I think I performed these actions in the correct sequence.
What else? Got 3.5 hours to go.
2:12 PM "I could have been someone!"
To which the late, great Kirsty MacColl replies, "Well, so could've anyone." I've been listening to her greatest hits while working a full noon-midnight shift at the labs for the first time in months.
So what has been going on? The fiction piece was well received -- great suggestions were made, some nice marginalia was found on the copies that were returned, and the passive voice that is going on right now will be done w/ in a sec, I promise, though why it is here at all I don't know -- the bulk of the suggestions were pretty easy to put in and I've taken my professor's advice and submitted it.
Nonfiction workshop on Monday. No clue on what people will suggest, which is why workshops work. The nonfiction piece up for discussion derailed -- it has a page-long quote by Trollope plus two extended bits on waking up next to implausibly beautiful women in Bogota, plus several parenthetical apologies on the derailment, plus an illustration of a penguin and one of Trollope in his old age, but not nearly enough perhaps on the whole immobility-and-shyness problem when in the company of women. So right now it's a mess -- but it could be a succesful mess. Or it could need radical surgery.
So anyway: MacColl. When she replies like that to Shane McGowan of the Pogues it made me think of Jacques, the bitter old man in "As You Like It," saying that it was good to be sad and say nothing. (A quote I've been carrying around now for so long that it creeps into everything. I put it into the fiction piece as the title of a self-help book: It's Good to be Sad and Say Nothing!) Rosalind's reply? "Well, then, it's good to be a post."
I'm not sure quite what it is I'm trying to say here. Maybe it's just that women are amazing at dispelling gloomy bullshitty spells, and specially women like McColl and Rosalind, who throw their heads back and laugh, and who with that motion make it very clear what life is all about.
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