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27.2.04InventionsProfessor Butts eats a sandwich and digests these ideas for new inventions:
-Public lighters: flame-dispensing fountains for smokers -ArachNet: a stocking-like sleeping mask to prevent the unfortunate swallowing of spiders 26.2.04Quiz, Of Anecdotal OriginFor four years in college, I played quizbowl with wonks, herbs, and hunchbacks. Pettiness & pettifogging. One pub quiz at the bar was enough to restore my faith in things trivial. My team won half the rounds & reached glory in a culminating chug-off which I won to a hoot of 'Do it for Scotland!' For ultimate victory, we took home a pub quiz flyer with the scrawled legend 'Pub Quiz Champeens,' and decorated with a graffito of two very victorious penises. Also beer. Aha! Now I see what happened this morning: 8% alc./vol. What!?
Unrelated: this merciless sendup of bad web style is a chuckle unless you have a shit website yourself. 22.2.04Money, No MoneyI saw actual classic hobos today, huddled in a close circle, wearing tattered woolies & ragpicked hats, cooking over a flaming barrel on some disused rail. Amazing.
Last night in Atlantic City, Amy somehow managed to win $120 at roulette betting on numbers associated with our anniversary and my birthday, while during the same period of time in New Brunswick I was able to piss away something like $60 on unhappier numerological whims involving '33' & such. Thank God Pat bought me a drink for his birthday. I'd forgotten about this third-rate university quiz. 20.2.04Starving SeabirdsYou think it's funny, too.
19.2.04Family's goal: To kill book using epithetThe word nigger appears in To Kill a Mockingbird. And even the dimmest herb can tell you that the book champions inner goodness, tolerance, etc. Thus it must be bowdlerized or banned.
Kneejerk activist Mum Garvey flaunts her intellect: 'I was like, this is 2004, and this is still being read in schools? [My son] started pointing out the words in the book. It's inappropriate.' Because literature and nigger-baiting are the same, of course. She didn't read the book. Sometimes I think I write poems for everyone. Then I realize, Oh, not Mum Garvey. 18.2.04GaffeI've shampooed my face & soaped my hair.
16.2.04AWOL (Alcohol Without Liquid)Where's the fun in this? Yet, possibly it's very, very fun.
PhoneAmy dropped her phone in the toilet on Friday night. It was obviously destroyed, which means that she is now the proud & embarrassed owner of a snappy, new LG, whilst I must wait until July to upgrade. Oddly enough, her phone has drowned before. A few years back she was yachting (or something) off Atlantic City and was hit in the face by a wave or something awful, and her phone was done. Good thing these aren't hairdryers we're talking about.
13.2.04867.5309LibidoThis Harvard sex magazine business is a bit tame to me. The (girl) editors declare, It's not smut, it's artistic expression! We've seen this (done well) before.
Related: I'll give you one guess to name the last school in the country that will have a sex magazine. 12.2.04Beyond Pleasure::If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons (becomes inorganic once again) then we shall be compelled to say that 'the aim of all life is death.'
Don't read Beyond the Pleasure Principle in bed. You will not get up. It's not your fault. Good night. 9.2.04De TrainNo one on the train ever gets past p. 15 of what he's reading. Fellow-next-to-me-reading-an-Anna-Patchett-novel, you're not fooling anyone.
AutomataIn the last four or so days, I've bought three new books of poems. Only a fool buys his books precisely when his class reading begins.
Ivor Gurney's war poems; Sad Little Breathing Machine, Matthea Harvey; The Cosmos Trilogy, Frederick Seidel. I usually go into book-buying and reading with the hope that the poems I've got will somehow be the ones I've been looking for, which is unfair. Adam Kirsch didn't find what he needed in the latest Seidel. He wanted him to rub another pair of fictive political titties in his face. To use the applicable phraseology. I could read Matthea Harvey's poems at 8.30 in the morning, somehow, which is a review. It's a book of machines, and systems, and strangenesses. And an extraordinary title. And I haven't finished it, but I have hopes that it might be coquettish, too. What do I do with a book that has great moments, for a moment? One poem has a few lines about a sunfish and a duck lunging for a crumb & accidentally kissing (ah, yes, in 'Toe the Line with Me'), and how this is a great, awkward connecting moment, and a functional description of Othering. It's sort of stunning at first, and then kitschy, and then maybe just irritating. This is the process, and it seems automatically repetitive, once the switch has been thrown. Harvey sounds like what most poets would sound like if they had imaginations. She lives in Brooklyn. Why is it that 87% of young poets live in Brooklyn? 7.2.04A NoteA note to City Lobster: even though your 'scoth' selection was reasonable, I was somehow put off.
4.2.04Rhyme'Rice is nice. Ricicles are twicicles as nicicles.' Testicles are besticles.
Which reminds me of a John Berryman anecdote. He was at some hole-in-the-northern-Great-Plains stay-in rehab program & watching a wholesome film. The song 'What Do the Simple Folks Do?' came on & his booming refrain was (for the hearing of a bunch of sad, old, sauced Minnesotan ladies), 'they screw! they screw!' Oh, John. I'll be cuddlier next time. 3.2.04Hot, Stoned, SploogedI'd seen much of this before, but Ashkan Sahihi still needs attention. The drug series made him famous as some sort of scabrous messiah, and this "Cum Shots" business is too good to miss. Just too good.
And to show that I can and will read art autobiographically with ease & a clear conscience: 'I've never been concerned about where it lands.' 1.2.04IbuprofenBottles of ibuprofen carry a cautionary notice for those who 'consume 3 or more alcoholic drinks every day.' (Ask your doctor.) If you're hung over (say), and your drinking patterns match those in the warning (say), and you have only Advil (say), you are beyond medical help (certainly). Also, all three drink machines that you can walk to will be broken. One of them will steal your money.
Note the Wrens. Not that I've heard all of their new record (which sounds at least partly terrific), but their last record was called Secaucus, before even the NJ TRANSIT junction of slick, perpendicular, cruciform slabs was there. Secaucus (the station) is absolutely brilliant, & I've spent far too much time there. In honor of the Super Bowl: the beginning of the Formula 1 season in Australia is only a month away. Note the disclaimer at the bottom of the page: 'motorsport is dangerous and accidents can happen.' In case you're killed, of course. |
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