September 2011
40 posts
“What the really great artists do is they’re entirely themselves. They’re...”
– David Foster Wallace
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WatchThe benefit of passion projects, from the folks who brought us Good Fucking Design Advice.
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Tom Waits on Tom Waits
New book review up on: The Rumpus. Definitely required reading for any Tom Waits fan.
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What I'm reading
Imogene is tiny, all-white. Spun-sugar hair, pale forehead, chalky arms. Imogene the Ice Queen. Imogene the Milk Princess. A black spider web is tattooed on her left biceps. She is a resource allocation manager for Cyclops Engineering, in Laramie Wyoming.
Herb is medium sized, bald, and of no special courage. His smile is a clumsy mosaic of teeth. Veins trail like root formations down his...
Saturday in the park
I’ve been thinking about something Vonnegut said about writing his stories in one sitting. Get it all down at once, THEN tinker with it. Of all the writing advice I’ve ever received, this resonates with me the most. I’ve been messing around for two months with two stories that are going absolutely nowhere. I can’t seem to get the momentum to crank em out in one day, and...
“No. I’m against schedules. Write when you feel excited by the prospect....”
– Rick Moody
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What I'm Reading
My father’s method was easy and brutal—hit the road at five in the morning so that we were the only living souls on the Long Island Expressway, making a break for it in the haunted dark. Every so often my mother said, “There’s no traffic,” as if it were a miracle. Well, it wasn’t really dark, June sunrises are up and at ‘em, but I always remember those...
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What I'm reading
The cartographer wanders the city streets, crosses the invisible boundaries that lie between neighborhoods. He takes notes, studies the geography of streets and sewers, of subway lines and telephone wires. His bag holds nothing of value beyond the tools of his trade: his pens and papers, his sextant, his rules and stencils, plus his dozens of compasses, some worth a month’s rent and others...
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This Empty Northern Hemisphere
Today, I walked to the Palace of Fine Arts, where I lay under a shade tree and listened to This Empty Northern Hemisphere while staring up at a blank blue sky. After a while I sat up and watched the tourists take photos of themselves. Tourists taking pictures of themselves is a strange phenomenon. The way they smile, and pose, and position themselves in front of beautiful things. The obligation...
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What I'm reading
We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the sounds of angry men. We wanted more music on the radio; we wanted beats; we wanted rock. We wanted muscles on our skinny arms. We had bird bones, hollow and light, and we...
Pantone 377 C
Pantone swatch displayed in a design firm in Potrero Hill.
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What I'm reading
Tom Waits, even with his barnyard growl and urban hipster yawp (there are dozens of such descriptions of his voice in these pages—dozens!), may just be what the Daily Telegraph claims him to be: “the greatest entertainer on Planet Earth.” He mystifies, startles, and tames his rowdy audiences with his wit. Waits is a practitioner of the fine art of conversation, spinning yarns...
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South Africa Postcards
Awesome postcards from Radio. Six more provinces to go!
Shelf Life
Looking forward to seeing this: “Shelf Life takes viewers on a whirlwind trip through Powell’s City of Books, the world’s largest bookstore. It seeks out customers and staff, book buyers and sellers, writers and readers, to discover what this exceptional place means to them, and why reading is important. Writers Chuck Palahniuk and Ursula K. Le Guin, among others, weigh in on...
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What I'm reading
70. Am I trying, with these “propositions” to build some kind of bower? —But surely this would be a mistake. For starters, words do not look like the things they designate. (Maurice Merleau-Ponty)
71. I have been trying for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do.
72. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one’s solitude....
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Naysayers, So Many Naysayers
I’m a hobby person. There’s no other way to put it. I like making things with my hands. I like having handmade things in my house. I always have. My mom is a quilter (seriously, like a professional-grade quilter) and my dad is a fix-it-yourself kinda guy. This is probably why I feel compelled to make as many things as possible. These are some things I’ve made in the past week:...
Fragments
I took a long walk this morning, which turned into one of those three-hour roam the city with no purpose whatsoever kind of walks, which I do pretty often. I’m working on a story called Laundrette, which is about a laundrette that becomes the site of an archeological dig. This is what was thinking about as I walked.
I headed towards Cole Valley, and up into the hills, where I finally...
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Pear Preserves
Had a few red pears on hand, so I threw together some preserves tonight. I abandoned the recipe since I only had 3 pears. Mathematical conversions based on a recipe for 3lbs of pears was a nice reminder of my total inability to do math, so I just made up my own recipe. You can’t go wrong if you toss in various amounts of all of these things:
pears sugar cinnamon nutmeg ginger cloves lemon...
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DFW + Gen X + Irony + Earnestness
I finished The Broom of the System last night, which I would consider a near-perfect novel, and one of my favorite things David Foster Wallace ever wrote. And I started thinking about that essay Maud Newton wrote in the Times last week about DFW, which I had a lot of issues with. I love Maud’s blogging, and on first read I enjoyed the article, and kind of agreed with it. But then I thought...
Ten Years Later
I was joking about Wet Hot American Summer with a friend today, and (serendipitously) just saw this on David Wain’s blog. I love this poster and what I thought when I saw it was: that movie is TEN years old?! How can that be? I had the exact same experience last week at a Be Good Tanyas show. They were celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Blue Horse. Again, I thought: TEN years?!...
The First Post
Wow. There’s way too much pressure in the first post. Do I go funny? Friendly? Short. It should probably be short, right? How about I just tell you why I’m starting a blog. Why, when there are a million other blogs, many of which are more entertaining than this one, would I want to toss my voice into the digital milieu? Well, I suppose it has something to do with being a writer and...
