My Mug

..is the biggest mug.

"..but in the great demoralisation of the land he kept up his appearance."

[A Continuous Lean]

In a nutshell

It was a Tuesday

Epic Scottish wind and wetness. Literally, I can't even crack the window to smoke a cigarette. It's like the entire city is flying down a highway at 85 mph. So the apartment smells like cigarettes, and the wind is pounding and whipping against the window, not giving a fuck, and I'm sitting here at the kitchen table watching the great landscape withstand it; the Crags: a beacon of endurance through the shittiest of weather. A magnitude of indifference. Joseph Conrad, Kevin Barnes, Thomas Hobbes, Julia Driver--I'd like to thank her for being so good at understanding ethical theory that I don't have to. Game theory, fish and chips, stupid essays from the '70s being really hypersensitive about race. Really wonderful pieces in the New Yorker etc etc life is alright, propelling through it all with the steady iv of black coffee, all day, yesterday, today, tomorrow, the next. Am literally stuffing my brain with information. I'm not going to remember a lot of it, but it seems to mean something now, the culmination of all of it, seems like the right thing to do. I'm not even thinking about what I'm going to get out of it, Immanuel Kant. Oh and the other day I got drunk at 2. I don't remember what happened.

Also, if you speak Italian, get at me. I need a translator for a minute.

Sunday Reading

"There is in these scenes rage, revenge and some garden-variety sexism, but they are — in their force, in their gale winds, in their intelligence — charismatic, a celebration of the virility of their bookish, yet oddly irresistible, protagonists. As the best scenes spool forward, they are maddening, beautiful, eloquent and repugnant all at once. One does not have to like Roth, or Zuckerman, or Portnoy, to admire the intensely narrated spectacle of their sexual adventures. Part of the suspense of a Roth passage, the tautness, the brilliance, the bravado in the sentences themselves, the high-wire performance of his prose, is how infuriating and ugly and vain he can be without losing his readers." Katie Roiphe, "The Naked and the Conflicted," NYT Book Review, Dec. 31 2009

Clean up: the past two months

"Never go with a hippie to a second location."

Words cannot properly express the mindfuck that was the party in the flat across the hall last night. I'm serious. The apocalypse quite possibly could have gone down in our building. Pynchon would have blown his load. The only monuments we managed to acquire to remember it by are a bright yellow cowboy hat and a strikingly innocent looking stuffed lamb, which seems strangely biblical. Of course we have three flights of stairs filled with crackden waste to remind us of this night of all nights, lest we become indifferent to the stench of urine and start to forget. Apparently some girl OD'd in the stairwell. Who wants to go syringe collecting? Shit was straight weird when it was happening, but God, the aftermath is just so damn sordid. Like the house in Fight Club, or that part in Apocalypse Now when they find all those playmates living in helicopters and going the fuck out of their minds at that abandoned army base. I'm serious though, these anonymous Europeans, they treat the entire world like it's Ibiza in the '90s. They don't even use toilet paper! I like their funky hats though.

I am the white sky high over Tripoli

Friday again. And little has changed since last week beside the facts that it's sunny, the Olympics are coming to town, I understand the difference between Qualitative and Quantitative Hedonism, and smell like a cross between a fine leather saddlery and a coal mine, thanks to this traditional British soap I've been using.

"A day off is something real special, but, so is a good neighbor."

In case you were wondering what cowboys looked like in the 1980s. Someone should sample the shit out of these.

I want to have sex with these sneakers

[High Snobiety]

End of Week Beastmode

[And just because it's Sunday Funday]

Today's thing that's better than writing an English paper

Sledding in Medfield, USA from JOE MACLEOD on Vimeo.

Things I have had enough of:
fedoras/any hat resembling a fedora, unless donned by Dr. Rajorshi Chakraborti, who can do what he wants.
the "soul"cd in our kitchen
ethical theory
J. D. Salinger remembrances

Things I have not had enough of:
riding my awesome new (old) bike!
cherry pie
courgette cake
green velvet blazers with suede elbow patches
Satanic Panic In the Attic
The comment sections of J. D. Salinger remembrances

"So all the females know that the exercises are compatible to them."

"I'm just playin, I don't really wanna take yo' ass nowhere."

February third, two thousand and ten: Royce da 5'9", Tekken 2, Jude the Obscure, Charlie Rose, High Modernism, etc. Also, come this May, I'll be dancing my beer-soaked behind off in sunny Barcelona to the likes of Pavement, Panda Bear, and Lee "Scratch" Perry. Stoked.

Picture this:

“I started writing and making up characters in the first place because nothing or not much away from the typewriter was reaching my heart at all.”-J. D. Salinger

[Lillian Ross, The New Yorker]