"Performing 'Ulysses' on Bloomsday at Symphony Space is the only way I'll ever finish the damn book." Stephen Colbert

[NYT]

[BloomsdayNYC]

Tell me about it, Norris Church

"The sex was always great. That was the glue that held all this mess together, or the honey.”[Norris Church Mailer, on life with Norman]

[The New York Times Magazine]

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

Next year all our troubles will be miles away..

"We’re moving pretty fast now. When you slide by it all, so fast, you think you won’t ever have to get bogged down in it again — the traffic, the neighborhoods, the stores, waiting in lines. We’re really speeding now. The ride is smooth. Pretty quiet. Just a little squeaking from some metal part in the car that’s jiggling. We’re all jiggling a little."

I can't think of a better way to celebrate this annually strangely bitter sweet morning than with a story by Lydia Davis, the contemporary of the strangely bitter sweet.

Merry Christmas, you beautiful old Building & Loan!

"When I was a kid, we used to suck on pennies, and it was a delight."

So there's like, four feet of snow out there. It's been coming down since around this time last night, and it got so bad today that my mother and I actually had to stop our car in the middle of route 50 and wait for the road to reemerge from the thick white out by which we suddenly found ourselves enveloped. I think this is all so wonderful.

In any case, I spent my evening eating chicken pot pie and sipping bourbon in front of a roaring fire. I also watched the SNL Christmas special (thanks to my mother's, who, as it turns out, is surprisingly savvy with the DVR), and was delighted to find myself reacquainted with this gem of a skit:


Also, did you know that Fred Armisen and Peggy from Mad Men are engaged? Because I did not, until today.

"Credulity--do you all know what that means?"

crinoline of smoky burgundy softer than the rain

Isn't that Heath Ledger's baby?

Maria Kalman's delightful, animated documentation of her trip to Thomas Jefferson's crib is almost as awesome as American Apparel's new staple crop:



That is all.

"more complex than a sequel"

Today I woke up at nine, ate some smelly cheese and coffee, found a job, bought a tuna sandwich at a gas station, went to the Post Office, went to Baltimore, watched Suzanna's cable television, ate a burrito, bought some weed, swam with my dogs in the pool, did my laundry, watched the season finale of The Real Housewives of New Jersey, assembled a terrifying shelf tower for my parents' (alphabetized, great going) entire cd collection for $12 an hour, and tomorrow morning I start work at 7.

Also, sounds like J.D. Salinger's in great shape.

Also, if you're really that miserably bored, here's a pretty interesting essay/review, if you're into that sort of thing. I honestly haven't come across Salinger in a long long time, but I feel pretty good about dedicating so much of this post to him; it's refreshing to read a critique of his writing, which is, as I now recall, fairly refreshing itself, in style and essence. Hm. Anyway.

Rabbit at Rest

'He was an old-fashioned realist, with an unswerving belief in the power of words to faithfully record experience and to enhance it. If other writers, younger ones especially, couldn’t quite subscribe to that belief, still it was reassuring to know that there was someone who did.' -The New York Times