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.")