the worth of my birth is a billion

Bon Vendredi.

"Sometimes I feel like everyone's eating this thing called scrambled eggs (What are those, I wonder. They look good.), while I'm enjoying a delicious chantarelle and pecorino frittata." -Edan Lepucki goes book spotting, and is charming.

This is the way, step inside

The equivalent of dancing around to Joy Division with a parking cone on your head.

"What are you, joining a minstrel show?"

I bought some black soap today.

She lifted up her wings..

Get yourselves through the week.

Standards

Cat Lady

Comin' down on a sunny day

On Saturday it rained so hard that Brigid's car filled with water. That, upon coming home from the liquor store, we were so hesitant to get out and run inside that we just stayed in the car and drank in the driveway. That the pool almost overflowed. On Sunday we drove a long time to get to the beach, and then, shortly after we watched the lifeguards drag in their stands from the shoreline, it rained again, and we left, watching gaps in the sand fill with water to form tiny, tin-colored lagoons. So it was what it was, the weekend it rained. Last night we went to Wendy's well after closing, 1/3 of us barefoot and 3/3rds drunk, and we walked through the drive-thru, and I ordered a fruit punch with my cheeseburger because they didn't have orange soda, and when we got back home I spiked it with vodka, and this morning, Brigid found all the rain in her car.

a cathouse in El Paso

"I shook as I handed over my father's knife. Such shame. The governor's daughter, who cared so little for this object, would get to keep it. She was from the people who kept everything. I was from the people who rented some of everything for brief amounts of time. I knew I deserved no pity, would get none from the people who kept everything. They only pitied the people with nothing at all. I also knew that because I was leaving without the knife, I did not deserve the knife. A part of me did not want to deserve it." -Sam Lipsyte, "The People Who Kept Everything"--an enjoyably dispiriting excerpt from his upcoming novel, The Ask.

The writing in Harper's really is a fucking treat. I adore Pynchon, and I revere him entirely, but I spent about three hours with Inherent Vice last night, and the two fiction pieces (granted one was Coetzee, but still) I read in this magazine today were far more intriguing.

I have about 75 pages to go in the novel, and my motivation to do so has really dwindled in comparison to what it was when I so eagerly and proudly went out to buy it. I don't know why I was so excited; I guess after finishing the untouchable V. last winter and dabbling in some of his Other Work earlier this summer, I spoiled myself a bit, and set my expectations, despite every review more or less deeming it mediocre, unreasonably high, refusing to consider Pynchon in any setting other than the pedestal on which I'd placed him. But fuck. Let's just get this shit over with. Waiting in the queue for when this is all behind me: Erlend Loe's Naive. Super, and, just to shake it up a bit, Leslie A. Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel. Which I am (cautiously) looking forward to--learning a thing or two.

PS. Can someone just tell Maria Sharapova to shut the fuck up?

PPS. Inglourious Basterds was awesome! And I expected to fucking dislike it! A lot!

When's the last time you mailed a letter?

"C'mon, close that laptop, let's have, like, a General Foods International Coffee Moment, only without drinking that shit because its basically like the coffee version of TANG, the shit they made the Astronbauts drink before they discovered Nutrition." -Joe MacLeod, a.k.a Mr. Wrong, on talking in the coffee shop. (His rants/rambles at over at The Awl are, to quote the great Rod Kimble, "number one.")

There will be snacks

Going through photos, there are a couple gems from the soon to be toast suh mur oh nine that deserve to be shared. These are from Lisa's makeshift twenty-first birthday party at my house, which consisted, humbly, of her, myself, my mother, a case of Magic Hat, and these come-to-life-in-water sponge animals, which my mother seemed to have no remorse over hogging whilst we slaved away over the slicing of vegetables and shredding of cheeses. The bottom picture is of the remnants of our extremely successful foray into pizza making. More to come.

the smell of boiling rice

Bored, ripped off by my dealer, sifting my way through my massive Netflix queue. Watched Seijun Suzuki's Branded to Kill (1967) last night. It was pretty great--a nice combination of clever technique and humorous slapsticity. Plus, the last 15-20 minutes take a really interesting turn, that, for me, kind of made the entire film; the end was fucking dope.

"Please remember, you are dealing with a human form."

Reminiscent of the opening of Bergman's Persona (1966), but with more Lynchian whimsy and less stark, piercing, Scandinavian creepiness.

I'm just an animal looking for a home, share the same space for a minute or two

What a weekend. Couple days in Nueva York, staying with Lisa and Chris and drinking cheap beer and sitting across from James Salter on the train, ate a psychedelic breakfast and drifted through the city, counting big, courtyard-prowling cats and Eastern European prostitutes and signs of possible evidence of some grand, Pynchonian conspiracy through the Francis Bacon exhibit at the Met, American Landscapes, the Frank Lloyd Wright Room, all the velvet curtains and embellished sofas and small doorways of the American Wing, the bemused expressions of the subjects of all the medieval art of which only mine eyes seemed capable of perceiving, the cloisters, the golden chalices, and, my god, did I mention that Francis Bacon. Munched on salads in the courtyard of the New School, strolled through a New York so perfect it'd put W. Allen's own embittered sentimentality to shame, sat in Prospect Park, perspiring and cynical, for hours waiting for Animal Collective amongst a collection of Brooklyn's most passionate fedora enthusiasts, eating cornbread, ice cream sandwiches, barbecued chicken, corn on the cob, blisters forming and formed, the show was alright, then back to Lisa's roof much later than expected for portobello burgers and corn and shrimp kabobs and herbal refreshments and a bunch of ridiculous dudes with their heads in the clouds and more Milwaukee's Best well into the night. Couple days in New Jersey, a late-afternoon trip to the beach with quite the dramatic ending, but which was, for the most part, an extremely lovely evening of sand-dwelling and swell-wading and people-watching, gull-gazing and Creedence-belting, ground-clutching, conscience-challenging. By the time the sun set I tasted, inside and out, like sea-salt and the faint hints of vinegar, and I was very wet and disheveled, and so was Brigid, and so I drove us home, in my bathing suit, my hair straw-like and damp, my skin sticky with soggy sand, up the six-laned Parkway to a candle-lit, ivy-infested porch and a couple beers, a bottle of Xanax and some quality peer-on-peer analysis, just too girls who've read far too much Freud. More drifting around the tri-state, trespassing upon Waterloo Village with my friend Bailey Miller, a bag full of Pynchon and a bottle of $3 wine, talks about god and the correct way to raise a child and ambitions too grandiose to quite process completely, peering in the windows of abandoned old Victorians with seatless rocking chairs on the shambled whitewashed porches, peeing in the woods, driving home tipsy. I drank a cherry float at the Magic Fountain and we played "Marry, Boff, Kill" for quite awhile, and then today, Brigid picked the olives off of my sandwich for me. Add one nervous breakdown in the middle of the night, a tense visit to my ex-boyfriend's house during which I was forced to watch old episodes of The Wire instead of the Mad Men premiere, the delight of snuggling with Becky's cats all night, and about 200 mosquito bites, and you get the picture. Summer is almost over. Thank Allah.

A jaunt out east..

drink my liquor from an old fruit jar

A local radio station around these parts is giving away tickets to this. I don't even really know what a "Blue Suede Cruise" entails.. I just know I sort of want to be on it, sporting a bouffant.

everything dim, lurid and biblical

It was Johnny Hopkins and Sloane Kettering, and they were blazin' that shit up everyday.

Current interests include: oil pastel sketches of common bathroom items, the whistling sound in the background of "Good Vibrations," rose-salted baths, silk nightgowns, vegetarian mayonnaise, sitting on the pier chomping on Swedish Fish with the surprisingly sharp-witted Joshua, not biting my nails, Ponds face cream, picking wildflowers, anxiously awaiting the return of Mad Men, turning my ex-boyfriend's boxers into art, that topless picture of Putin, and this song:

the same dull indifference

"Yalta was barely visible through the morning mist, white clouds stood motionless on the mountaintops. The leaves of the trees did not stir, cicadas called, and the monotonous, dull noise of the sea, coming from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep that awaits us. So it had sounded below when neither Yalta nor Oreanda were there, so it sounded now and would go on sounding with the same dull indifference when we are no longer here. And in this constancy, in this utter indifference to the life and death of each of us, there perhaps lies hidden the pledge of our eternal salvation, the unceasing movement of life on earth, of unceasing perfection." -Chekhov, "The Lady With the Little Dog"

Brown paper packages tied up with string

The time has come, the walrus said

Well, my short-lived, lazy journey has come to its fateful end. From here it's champagne and oyster brunch at the Four Seasons, then rolling myself onto the plane for twenty-four hours of agonizing travel. And hopefully HMB3 will be waiting for me, in New Jersey, with a lumberjack breakfast all laid out, and a fat joint.