Julia Holter is playing Rock and Roll Hotel September 26. Anyone? I can keep tabs on sales, it can be a game day decision - has to be for me right now. I do want to give you some reads. I saw the headline that Obama is going to nominate exactly whom everyone knew he was going to nominate to head the Fed. We are currently housing - this is true, and more interesting since Serendipity and its sidekick Fine Metaphors Abounding are involved - a recent college graduate, a daughter of a friend of a friend of my late mother-in-law (who died a year ago this week), the daughter of a friend of a friend of my late mother-in-law a Chicago School of Economics graduate who started a job at the Fed a week ago today. Earthgirl can vouch. We trusted her with our cats when we went to Ohio, all seven are accounted for and apparently untraumatized by her shock doctrine and insistence on austerity. What? Summers' withdrew his name? Nonetheless, that's today's clusterfuck summary gag in lieu of clusterfuck links to stretch the clusterfuck linklessness hit streak to
- Linguistic anxiety and and the deconstruction of the self in the realm of the ridiculous.
- Zombie social democracy? I can post theory, I said last Thursday night to L, related to the clusterfuck but not link directly to topical clusterfuckery. You're hedging your bet, she said, so I waited until today since the bet was the weekend and I don't need the grief over the free pints.
- Neurosis and terror as national policy. Silber's latest, if I'm going to break the clusterfuck-free band it might as well be with Silber.
- Send Arthur the coins in your pocket.
- The banality of systemic evil.
- The one and the many.
- Reparative compulsions.
- Commercial art is no longer a crime.
- Maggie's weekend links.
- { feuilleton }'s weekly link.
- The New Inquiry's Sunday links.
- Allegory.
- The secret life of punctuation.
- Three photos from this past weekend's slideshows likely to be canvases of Earthgirl. Yes, that part is gone there too.
- Jonathan Letham - I have not made it past a hundred pages of multiple tries at his novels, they don't sing for me, I assume the fault is mine - sorta lovingly asssnarks the new Pynchon.
- Fooled me for years with wrong pronouns.
- Ashbery's Flow Chart.
- New Leonard Cohen song.
THE JOY OF SOLIPSISM
Nick Twemlow
Bring the oncoming train into focus.
Tell me your theory of the market.
Pupils dilate, trees fall,
I practice transference in my downtime.
Think of my mother watering
plants. Is
everybody really watching?
Blog me. Add to my Wiki entry.
Date me. Reply to my electronic flirt.
My mother told me she’d nominate
me for that award, if she could bear
the proxy. Show me your tits.
I shaved my balls. I took out
a second mortgage. Motherhood
frightens the elms, carves its sorry
initials into the sky’s prolapsed anus.
Each sadness passes through
me like a gallstone. My valve leaks
an amniotic canopy over the
bar I’m fragging. I’m a fragment,
a tender button. I saw my first
beetle in the periphery. Lake Shore
Drive against the ruins, the stain
of lake-effect snow a special effect,
the only weather
exhibiting any real affect.
Wow, you aren't madly in love with Motherless Brooklyn? recalibrate ... recalibrate ... recalibrate
ReplyDeletein the ludlow piece on the banality of systematic evil that you link to, he states
ReplyDelete"Tellingly, a recent Time magazine cover story has pointed out a marked generational difference in how people view these matters: 70 percent of those age 18 to 34 sampled in a poll said they believed that Snowden “did a good thing” in leaking the news of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program.
So has the younger generation lost its moral compass?
No. In my view, just the opposite."
sounds right to me
Lethem: Can be quite good, but wildly uneven -- both from my own experience, and the opinion of some that I trust.
ReplyDeleteThe Fortress of Solitude quite knocked me out, featuring a long of descriptive passages that were among the best I've read in recent memory. (For instance: A game of softball on a Brooklyn sidestreet in the hour before sundown.) Have liked a number of his short stories.
As an essayist he's occasionally quite sharp, tho' prone to flying off on tangents. Case in point: His recent addition to the Continuum 33 & 1/3 series, in which he took on Talking Heads' Fear of Music. Had anticipated it'd be the perfect match, but instead it turned out to be a disappointment -- a pointless read. Banged out in a flush of enthusiasm, he desperately (IMO) needed an editor who'd rein him in, force him to focus less on himself as a listener and more on the item in question.
I intend to try again (and I don't mean to suggest his review of Pynchon makes him an untouchable). I don't remember the particulars of why I failed Letham's novels, it's been a number of years, I've Fortress somewhere on the bookshelves. I've a vague memory that the Brooklyn one had
DeleteHis new novel looks interesting, though almost everyone who likes his stuff says start w/Fortress. On the ever growing never-catchable list....
Lordy, this reminds me that the major thing I miss about typepad was it's edit-your-comments functionality, cause back then I didn't reread before plunging publish neither.
Deleteassnarks — precisely the word i was looking for after reading the review! all that poetizing may be paying off after all!
ReplyDeletejust got back from the mtns. been away. miss me? pics to follow