January 2010
28 posts
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The Fan Club
When I talk about the Secret Pillars of the universe this is almost what I mean. Jon Rafman’s Google Street Views. From his essay on the project:
These collections seek to convey contemporary experience as represented by Google Street View. We are bombarded by fragmentary impressions and overwhelmed with data, but we often see too much and register nothing. In the past, religion and...
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Excerpt
Excerpt from a work in progress:
The Mexican with the mower took his hand off the deadman’s switch and the motor stopped. He bent and lifted the sprayguard and unlatched the bag and scooped the runoff back inside. Bright green grass furrows showed alongside the tire treads where he’d made full passes. He carried the bag to the parking lot and shook the mulch into a trash barrel. He leaned the...
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Sharing
Excerpts from the First United Methodist’s Preschool Show & Tell 6B class:
Jonah: It’s a book. A crocodile book and a tiger and a piggy. And it’s a peacock. My papa gave it.
Natalie: I have a butterfly. She’s Allie. Oops her shoe fell off. I got her from home. And she has a skirt and she has sparkles on her legs.
Isabel: Cinderella because her dress is blue....
Health Concerns
From a video where a man named Gordon Griggs discusses the advantages of intimacy with real dolls over human prostitutes. An excerpt:
A lot of people want to know why I have Real Dolls instead of getting a prostitute. Mainly where I live prostitution is illegal, which means it’s against the law. And not only is it against the law, they’ll confiscate your vehicle and you won’t...
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The King
My uncle Barry and my father James at Leavenworth Penitentiary in 1983. Though not in this shot, I was at there too, not yet a year old. Barry was a career bank robber. He died in a Winnipeg prison some years ago. During his last years he wrote an account of his adventures and handed it off to my father. I have the manuscript on my dresser. Nine hundred pages of his awkward, cursive prose. Each...
Momma I’m So Sorry. Clipse. From Hell Hath...
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The Creative Writing section of the Tumblr directory is pathetic. Surely there has to be a better representation of writers using Tumblr.
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Pusher Trilogy (Nights Out)
You are on a particular journey that separates you from other human beings. You go out of your house and this is true. A life lived outside of rooms.
You have a face that shows who you are. It is a face others see and interpret but can never truly know. It is a face that acts a certain way now and then, at a bus stop, in the proximity of corpses.
If you understand exactly the way you look...
The Greatest Lyric of the Decade Gone Past (and...
The greatest lyric of the past decade was very simple to decide. The combination of the words and backing music bring it to greatness in about 4 seconds.
It is a lyric that makes me phenomenally proud and glad to be alive every time I hear it. It is from a song I sang word for word with utter glee and abandon, drenched with rain and caked in mud, at All Points West last summer. It is a lyric that...
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Cowboys in Alaska
Walking yesterday on Park Place in Brooklyn I found the ESL primer Cowboys in Alaska.
According to the publisher, Collier-Macmillan, the book “is for students of English as a second language. The book contains seven original stories written within a controlled vocabulary and with a restricted choice of sentence patterns, but designed to maintain the interest of adult readers.”
I...
A Thousand Miles from Nowhere. Dwight Yoakam.
...
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Ten Best Films of the Decade Gone Past
In alphabetical order my decision is:
Adaptation (2002)
American Psycho (2000)
Children of Men (2006)
Kill Bill Vol 1 & 2 (2003-04)
Mulholland Drive (2001)
No Country for Old Men (2007)
Sexy Beast (2000)
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
The New World (2005)
There Will Be Blood (2007)
And these eight mentions which are honorable:
4 Months, 3 Weeks...
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“I’ll know most of what there is to know about being dead, but I’ll...”
– Marilynne Robinson. Gilead.
Jeff Bridges. Brand New Angel. from Crazy Heart...
White Sky. Vampire Weekend. From Contra.
This...
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Topanga
Eventually we passed the Indian ranger riding the bulldozer. He had come up behind us at the bottom of the trail from off some construction site and matched our pace exactly for the last half hour. We stopped trying to talk. The diesel roar was absolute. Now he was idling and I could hear the hiccup in the engine from a long ways out. By the time we’d come through the sun and past the...
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“Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft that burns....”
– Ernest Hemingway. Interview in The Paris Review. Issue 18. 1958.
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Brothers
I’ve stopped drinking. I only watch war movies and read war books. Generation Kill, Jarhead, Platoon, Brothers.
I feel alert. My dreams are passageways. I have long phone conversations with my girlfriend as I pass from room to room.
I go on walks with the dogs. Dusty lots. Mexicans holding court in driveways full of power tools, landscaping equipment.
I hiked a mountain in the...
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Transit
Out of New York the pilot was Australian. He said we’d be stopping to refuel in Denver on account of the headwinds and then continuing on to Las Vegas.
Sitting on the ground in Denver the boy behind me told his father he thought the airplane pilots reversed thrusters on landings to help the plane slow down. He asked his father if he didn’t think that was right. His father said it...
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