February 2012
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January 2012
15 posts
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Halo of Gold - Beck
Saturday afternoon, Beck...
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book ideas
- a phonebook that, based on conversations overheard in public places, just guesses people’s cell phone numbers
- The Bee Reader, an e-reader that emits an extremely loud, bee-like buzzing whenever it is in use, to alert other people that you have a lot of thoughts going on in your head because you’re really concentrating on your Bee Reader, just like a good little drone
- all the...
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Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood - Nina...
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"country noir"
I watched Winter’s Bone last night. The film’s takeaway is that there is nothing—spoiler alert—quite like holding out the arms of your father’s watery corpse so someone else can chainsaw his hands off in order to provide you with evidence that he is actually dead, allowing you to get the police off your back and save your home from confiscation. It’s not quite...
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Angel in the Snow - Elliott Smith
Sometimes...
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title sequence
I’ve been taking a break from all the forms of writing that usually preoccupy me. It’s been a superb holiday so far. But I’ve been writing songs instead, and I haven’t done that in years. This all started because I’ve been playing guitar obsessively with one of my friends over the past few months, and then he and I did a show. I wrote two songs for the show, and the...
December 2011
7 posts
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moleskine archaeology
I want to assume that other people went through a phase like this, but there was a time when I actively sought out Moleskine notebooks. One of them I filled with titles. Just titles of stuff like “How to Remove a Grown Man from a Tree” and other relatively meaningless phrases. This was several years ago, and I gave it up, because I didn’t like the earning-a-merit-badge feeling of...
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the week's deeds
- talk to Aaron
- ignore Aaron
- Christmas party in office
- meeting with advisor
- I can’t hear Aaron
- read
- What did you say, Aaron?
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This Side of the Blue - Joanna Newsom
November 2011
15 posts
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a poem i like
NO MATTER HOW BIG YOU MAKE A TOY, a child will find a way to put it in his mouth. There is scarcely a piece of playground equipment that has not been inside a child’s mouth. However, the object responsible for the greatest number of choking deaths, for adults as well as children, is the red balloon. Last year alone, every American choked to death on a red balloon.
Ben Lerner - Angle of...
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Song to Woody - Bob Dylan
On the inside of an old...
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It's a light week
-It snowed two days ago, a foretaste of the long Minnesota plunge into February’s dead-of-winter blues.
-People are leaving Minneapolis for a week due to Thanksgiving. I stay in town, because plane seats are $$$. I will make sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving with friends at a friend’s house for friend times. As always, she will play one of the badass soul mixes that she has in...
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Gangsters & Pranksters - Pavement
Some days,...
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Bulldog Skin - Guided By Voices
Sunday work song.
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I have an important question about the history of...
Did the word zoinks (used as an expression of abject terror) exist before Shaggy on Scooby-Doo?
Also: as a result of the Google searching I just did, I know now that it is zoinks, not zoiks, which is what I thought it was my entire life. Frankly, I don’t feel like I really learned anything just now.
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Last night, I met a smart, well-regarded scholar who writes about ________ and _______, and he dispensed some advice—apologizing, as advice-givers usually do, for slipping into advice mode (is giving advice always something you have to be in a “mode” for, like you’re that away of your programming and it’s the same as everyone else’s? yes?)—to the graduate...
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the ending of a poem I like
I like that poem by David Berman that ends with a goofy bit of dialogue:
All: O Dougs, where are you?
Dougs: In the wild hotels of the sea.
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thenotes:
Driving in the rain, I see a crumpled brown thing ahead in the middle of the road. I think it is an animal. I feel sadness for it and for all the animals I have been seeing in the road and by the edge of the road. When I come closer, I find that it is not an animal but a paper bag. Then there is a moment when my sadness from before is still there along with the paper bag, so that I...
October 2011
5 posts
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The Enigma of Amigara Fault →
andrewfm:
Appropriately enough for the season, it’s hosted on a page entitled ‘spooky halloween of doom.’ This is a good short horror story for some Halloween reading, by Junji Ito.
I first read this a few years ago, and now I seek it out as often as I remember that it exists. Which isn’t as often as it should be. Because why? No, just because.
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Invisible - Grouper
HEY I HAVE PERMISSION TO LET...
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What Are You Doing?
-Combining sangfroid and elan
-Making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich
-Getting some writing done
-Not pitching editors on ideas
-Explaining a very short Lydia Davis story to my students
-Living in a kingdom of laughing skulls
-Trying to pronounce the new word I made out of “sangfroid” and “elan”
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Not to get all “I’m holding out my pinky while daintily slurping my fucking Earl Grey” on you, but last night I was reading the new issue of the Paris Review—specifically, Lydia Davis’s essay on translating Madame Bovary [this is definitely the most ridiculous sentence I have ever written]—and came across this awesome Korean proverb:
“If it’s your...
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the world is my oyster?
Being a relatively new iPhone owner, I have only recently become accustomed to the inadvertent comedy of its autocorrect. It’s boring territory! Nobody ever liked autocorrect jokes and wait a minute everybody LOVED autocorrect jokes i can remember i was there. Uh. But sometimes autocorrect does NOT intervene.
For example, my father texts me frequently, often solicitous about my general...
September 2011
6 posts
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Today's end result of random internet browsing
If you are looking for a 39% discount on Swastika Armbands for theatrical purposes, then Amazon has the deal for you. Amazon customer reviews are weird and lead you to weird things.
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Note to Self
All men are enemies. All animals are comrades.
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Friday Night Lights
The light in my room
The light in the bathroom
The light in the hallway
The light in my office
The light on the street
The sunlight
The moonlight
The light at the concert
The light in my car
The light from my phone
The light from my car
The light in the hallway
The light in the bathroom
The light in my room
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I wrote a long, kind of personal thing for The...
9 Ways of Looking at a Single Paragraph
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guided missile
yesterday it was 90 degrees and today the high is 72 and tomorrow the high is 58 you aren’t supposed to put cold water in a hot glass too quickly it could break is this what’s going to happen to the air or the sky no probably not but big rifts don’t open up in the earth often enough actually wait yes they really do
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Polar Opposites - Modest Mouse
MESSAGE RECEIVED.
August 2011
13 posts
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Sound effect
This morning, my new roommate was dropping coins into a barely filled tin jar where he keeps loose change, and I really really really for a moment genuinely thought That is most the horrid, awful, jangling-in-the-throat cough that I have ever heard. It was so distressing that even after a second when I realized it was coins dropped in a metal jar and not a human cough, I couldn’t shake the...