Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America:
I hope someday we’ll have enough money to get those pictures developed. Sometimes I get curious about them, wondering if they will turn out all right. They are in suspension now like seeds in a package. I’ll be older when they are developed and easier to please. Look there’s a [...]
Yearly Archives: 2009
Self Defense
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Elsewhere
No Correlation:
Criminal Justice Babe: Your new office sucks.
The Temp: Thank you.
Criminal Justice Babe: Why’d you move in here?
The Temp: Some are born with shitty offices, some achieve shitty offices and some have shitty offices thrust upon ‘em.
Criminal Justice Babe: It’s really small.
The Temp: It has one redeeming feature.
Criminal Justice Babe: And that is?
The Temp: (Points [...]
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Self-reliance
I read the other day, outside a store front, a sign:
NOTHING HAPPENS, AND WE REPAIR IT
and stayed out, certain that this was a terrible way to say things.
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The weather is changing; the subway is strangely crowded and we are in kind. She asks if I am seeing someone and I think what a stupid question, I [...]
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SELF-HELP
-You want kids?
-I like em enough, yeah.
-Enough? To what?
-I had this thought, right, to have a few kids. Three or four. Then from the day they’re born I’ll plant them with heavy objects– in shoes maybe, or clothes. Each child an increased number, like the fourth one’s holding the most weight in the day.
-I don’t [...]
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From the two most violent books I’ve ever read:
Antrim, Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World:
It’s a compromise, it’s not the best of all possible worlds, but neither is the world the best of all possible worlds, is it?
McCarthy, Blood Meridian:
I wonder if there’s other worlds like this, he said. Or if this is the only one.
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Here is Antrim reading Barthelme’s “I Bought a Little [...]
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Some ways to whittle the world down
Maslow, found in de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work*:
It isn’t normal to know what we want.
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Last week I built a yurt, start to finish– one of those novelty-type things that actually realized into wood slats and labor. All this talk of not being able to hammer a nail over the internet or something and [...]
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Fits and starts
I’m worried and all of it is living like snakes in each shoulder blade, things wrapped and strangling to live or make space. Too much to sleep. I find an ad that reads,
Do you find it easy to dismiss worrisome thoughts?
OR
Do you worry all the time?
Are you between 18 and 65?
and I think ‘there is [...]
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Last things
Decca Aitkenhead interviews Clive James:
If he could go back through his life and edit out the bits of which he was least proud, which chapters would go? “Oh, without number. Whenever I was cruel or insensitive.” Has that been a theme? “Yes. Casual, focusing only on my own needs and requirements, yes. Inability to know [...]
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Cuidate, querido
It is unlikely we are taking care of ourselves. So (first) I will have to stop ending emails that way;
Sophie Calle: Agreed. D’accord. Ouais.
(Sophie Calle– “the Marcel Duchamp of emotional dirty laundry”; men-to-projects maker. Oof.)
(second) I am tired, often.
Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: “In no love story I have read is a character ever tired.”
(Roland Barthes– [...]
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