bad thing inventory

This past month has been stressful.

Time for bullet points.

• I was really sick, almost delirious.
• Galleys stuff is happening, slowly. This is exciting.
  
• I stopped seeing someone I was seeing for a long time.
• Revising the other novel is making tears of blood come from my eyes. But I like it.
  
• I got angry at someone in line for a movie and grabbed his neck and someone pulled me off.
• A chubby person took all the furniture from our living room. How bad is it that when I'm angry at a fat person for something unrelated to their fatness, I repeatedly point out their fatness?
  
• She wouldn't even be pretty if she were thin.
• I bought so many books and they're sitting beside the bed, looking at me, like dogs, expecting me to read them.
• It's hard not to grab people by the neck when they're pushy.
• I stare at the ceiling a lot and feel full of rage.
• I received an amount of money that seemed to me tremendous, and already it is gone and I have less money than I did before.
• I went to an event where there were some people I really needed to talk to about something, and for some reason I didn't talk to them, and they left, and now I have to wait two weeks to get it over with. Fuck.
  
• Somebody I trust keeps telling me I'm a horrible person. It's true.
• Fires isn't going to be in many bookstores. People will have to already know it exists to buy it.
  
• My roommate got hit in the head and her scalp was stapled and she seemed to be in a lot of pain.
• It's cold.
• I want to strangle almost everything I see, including intangible things, like good judgment. I'm going to lure good judgment into a back room with friendly talk, then strangle it slow.
  

A pretty remarkable election season

Article subhed: "GOP frontrunner: I have never had sex with a man"

web-based TV show

Despite the questionable name (and my innate suspicion of all things Yale-related), this is funny, especially the first episode.

I wonder if they actually acquired the rights to that Queen song.

dead prostitute

A friend I haven't spoken to for a long time emailed me yesterday saying this:

Nick,
I had a dream the other night that someone found a dead prostitute in your room, and I was trying to convince everyone that you were really a great guy and that you'd probably befriended her and were in no way involved with her death. What do you suppose that means?

Probably nothing, don't worry about it.

October 2006, the Martian Canal

I'm rereading The Martian Chronicles yet again. The chapters are all dated, as the book takes place over a period in the future as Bradbury envisioned it. The last chapter is...October 2006.

This actually lends a certain additional poignancy to the book, which is pretty haunting anyway.

***

I had lunch yesterday with my friend Alex, who I haven't seen in a long time, maybe a year. Dinner with another Alex. Wandered a bookstore. Saw Todd Solondz.

Except for that lunch and dinner, I didn't leave my apartment this weekend.

***

My roommate went to The Knitting Factory last night and one of the performers threw a bottle into the crowd. It hit my roommate and she had to get her scalp stapled. She came home covered in blood.

bread + art = necromangia

The work of a true culinary artist, as pointed out by Rachel Khong.

Galleys: exist

I like my publishers. They sent camera-phone pictures to my cell phone when the galleys arrived from the printer.

I said I would write about Tao Lin's poetry book soon, but I haven't finished reading it yet. However, the "giant poem" he just posted on his site has some wonderful passages:

i once let a reviewer into my home
i led him down
into my basement
by holding both his hands and walking backwards down the steps
while facing him with a wide smile and an otherwise neutral facial expression
what happened next was shocking
you won’t believe what happened

and this:

my rhetoric is supported by first-person anecdotes
your rhetoric is supported by rudy guiliani
my rudy guiliani enjoys smiling widely at homeless people
with an otherwise neutral facial expression
your rudy guiliani hears clicking noises in his head
then makes clicking noises with his lips
even after repeatedly being advised and agreeing
not to do that anymore

bathtubs are also good

The Terry Caeser article mentioned here and published here makes an argument with which I completely agree. It's not even an argument, really. Everyone knows it and considers it self-evident or nearly so, but it's still worth saying out loud: there's no place to read now.

People can get to you everywhere. Your phone is like a little limb. Emails come every five minutes. Everywhere, there's stuff to draw your antennae.

The best time/place to read, for me, is also the best time/place to write: between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m., with the phone and all lights except a single one turned off. Music is bad while reading (but not while writing; why is that?) Food is bad while writing (but not while reading; odd). All drugs except nicotine and on rare occasions ritalin are disastrous. Warmth and big black shadows are good no matter what.

Galleys: delayed

They will exist next week.

I got Tao's book of poetry, you are a little bit happier than i am, this weekend, and have read a good deal of it. I will write more about it later.

It's too rainy outside to go hunt for the mysterious sushi place today. I'll go home and read a book.

Revisions to the manuscript that is not Fires or the half-finished Midnight Picnic are going quite well. A few more weeks, perhaps a month and half, and it should be finished, and ready to be sold for very little money, if any.

I saw The Departed again last night. My only significant problem with the movie is that the first mention of a mole inside the police department comes from Damon's character, who of course is the mole. The film seems to be unintentionally giving the impression that he's trying to blow the whistle on himself. (Incidentally, the second time around, I noticed that Scorsese seems to be repeatedly hinting that Damon's character is gay. Odd.) I love the freeze-frames during the gun battle near the end. I love that most of the dialogue is fairly unnecessary, nonsensical, and totally involving. It's a crazy, patchwork movie: why the narration only in the first minute? Why start the film, Menace II Society style, with dirty archival footage of riots that suggests what's coming is gritty social realism and end it with a visual joke that would fit right into a Blake Edwards Pink Panther movie? Who cares? It works beautifully.

Speaking of mafia films: Now here's a fellow who, if he were a character and I wrote him, would quickly wind up in a bathtub full of acid minus feet, head, and hands.

On a friend's advice I am slowly reading The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub. The prose is quite terrible. The story is fairly entertaining.

I've spent most of the last few days slouching on things. Chairs, beds, sofas, floors. I'm still really tired from being sick. Eating tremendous amounts of high-energy food (peanut butter, apples [not high energy but good], eggs, pasta, raw fish) to regain my strength.