February 2012
7 posts
“You never get likes on the posts you don’t publish”
– Zig Ziglar
Author talk
Strange sensation: hear a writer speak in a room full of people who love that writer, though you think the writer is hacky. These people are your friends, so while she talks you think about ways to moderate your criticism, then you think about how to be polite and uncritical, then you tell yourself that you need to chill out and just enjoy that they are enjoying her. Just chill out. Get annoyed at...
Stanley Hauerwas thinking about taking the plunge
The assumption is that there is someone right for us to marry and that if we look closely enough we will find the right person.
This moral assumption overlooks two crucial aspects to marriage. First, it fails to appreciate the fact that we always marry the wrong person. We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or...
Advice from a homeless person on giving money to...
Dude: “I saw this woman I used to smoke crack with, and she asked for $5. I knew she was gonna use it to buy crack, so I gave her $2.50.”
1 tag
Your letters, they all say that you're beside me...
The summer after graduating high school I had intense moments with this girl whom I had liked since 5th grade, and in August, 2001, I bought fancy paper and wrote her a love letter. She was slow to respond; it took her until September. At my freshman dorm I panicked when I received her thick envelope, because, regardless of what the letter said, I knew that reading it was going to be a big...
January 2012
15 posts
Joan Didion thinks your blog sucks
For how many weeks has Ta-Nehisi Coates been writing about Ron Paul, racism, and the Civil War? What a bizarrely narrow time investment. Ron Paul as a figure—separate from whatever movements are coalescing behind him—is a flavor of the month and not significant. Maybe the TNC pieces are great, maybe he exposes all sorts of previously unseen societal structures, maybe they will...
The mundanity of audience reaction
Recent tour diary of Dean Wareham (Galaxie 500, Luna):
From the stage tonight I notice three different people crying as I sing “Blue Thunder,” which is a song about the power-steering action in my old 1975 Dodge Dart and doesn’t quite seem worth crying about, though admittedly it is also a song about being alone behind the wheel, and I wail about driving “so far away,” so...
“‘It is one of my joys, not to be a house-owner,’ wrote Nietzsche as...”
– Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (via hollovv)
WatchAd by Stephen Colbert’s Super PAC that is actually airing across South Carolina this week. Notice that his name does not appear in it. As an act of subversion (re: campaign finance laws, “our broken political system”) it is fairly abstract and artistic but exhilarating, too.
Humbling moment in which you relate to something...
I was having a terribly shitty week, but friends have made me feel better bit by bit, and then today I watched a mid-period episode of The Office and realized that after Andy dated stern, 90-year-old Angela, he met Erin, who is so fun and—to me—almost unfathomably charming, and I thought, This narrative can be my narrative, and now I feel much better and am going to take all the Vic...
12 Delegates At Stake
If you get your parents’ cable account info, you can watch CNN live on the website or app. I don’t care about tonight’s primary but will watch some of the coverage for nostalgic pleasure. The pageantry and inane commentary was thrilling four years ago, like how it must feel to follow your football team as they ascend to the Super Bowl, if the quarterback quoted MLK a lot. I miss...
Watchunbuiltroads:
eric fleischauer deleting girls from his phone while melodramatic music plays
one of my fave pieces ever
Eric Fleischauer, Going Through, 2010
www.isbabyoncebornyet.com →
beyoncesbabycompletesme:
This is good and all but what I really need is an app on my phone that will RING THE ALARM when this baby slides out (and it will slide out, from Beyonce’s womb to a bathtub full of chocolate sauce). Then I can stop everything I’m doing and, I don’t know, put a dagger through my heart because there’s nothing left to live for. Just kidding!!
Loved by a lover of dwarves
Thursday a friend asked if I loved or love-loved her. Sunday I was driving down the street and, in my rearview mirror, saw the friend walking her dog; I recognized that she was with her boyfriend, whom I have never met. Now here is the notable part of the story. Her boyfriend looked tiny, maybe four feet tall. I stopped my car in the middle of the street to get a better look. I was headed...
December 2011
8 posts
Convergence for New Year's Eve
“But we need to forget. And we are enabled to do so. If it were otherwise, we should be in a terrible plight. We should never be able to bear the sight of our whole being in time.”
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2 540
“Everyone’s allowed a past they don’t care to mention”
Bill Callahan, “America!”
1 tag
Dan Fogelberg, “Same Old Lang Syne”
...
CABINET // Caveman: An Interview with Michel... →
groans:
cool man lives underground to learn about what happens when we stop measuring the passage of time
Public grieving
If you figure that you can see the trajectory of a people based on who they revere—or mourn or tell stories about—then Steve Jobs and Christopher Hitchens make me way more depressed than Fox News.
Palace Music, “West Palm Beach”
I...
November 2011
14 posts
Couple thoughts on Melancholia
1. Dogville has one of my favorite endings; after Nicole Kidman is chained to a rock and tortured by the village, James Caan drives into town, casually gets out of his car, and murders all of the villagers with a machine gun. It is cathartic, funny, and final. Somehow it feels like the most logical possible ending to the movie.
In Melancholia, Kirsten Dunst’s problems are small, invisible,...
On her birthday for Joanna, whose graciousness I...
kingdragon:
“You Never Wanted Me” - Julia...
Life chatz
Interview for job in Seattle went well, but do I want to be a lefty labor organizer? Once King Obama crushes all dissent and everyone becomes a conscripted member of the Bipartisan Party, it could be a black mark on my resume. Plus, if I want to work in the South again later, “Labor Organizer” may as well say “Terrorist.”
I just realized that I forgot to ask about money;...
How many times must the piper be paid for his song
—Who is this?
—Mickey Newbury
—Did he kill himself?
—Nope, died naturally
—Did they check? The longer it plays, the more it sounds like he killed himself
Years of Internet work vindicated
—Do you remember the Liz story?
—I’m not sure. Who was that?
—Well she came to New Haven,
—Oh, the one you posted your best tweet about? The Anderson Cooper tweet. I remember it every time I think about Anderson Cooper. “I cleaned around my toilet base just like Anderson Cooper: 360.”
Taunt your children with the task of your burial
On Andre Dubus workshopping one of his final stories:
There was a debate, though, of the sort we often had at Andre’s house over some practical issues in the material. The main character digs a grave and builds a coffin and buries a man over the course of an afternoon, and many of us felt there wasn’t enough time to accomplish all that labor. …
Later, Andre’s two sons...
October 2011
16 posts
1 tag
thinking of becoming a boyfriend
dumbassfils:
gonna pack up and head to dorchester for the boyfriend fair
gonna hire myself out
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
Miroslav Volf on the need to imagine a new order:
The most seminal impact of envy consists … in transforming “the ideas of the dominant” into the “dominant ideas.” Once the link between the privileged position and certain values has been socially constructed, the disprivileged are prompted to seek redress for their humiliation through demanding such values for...
Intimacy and the informateur →
Clever reading of Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse
I am gearing up to write something on social networking, identity, and love relationships—more “Love your neighbor” than luv-love—so lately I read article after article like this. My third eye is glazed over.
So far my favorite is Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together. Let’s book-group it in a Google Hangout...
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