Let's Not Forget About This, Because This is The Best

Chiara, Insult Comic

Chiara: Did you ever have a falling out with a friend?

Me: Not since eighth grade.

Chiara: What happened in eighth grade?

Me: I stopped being friends with this kid because I thought he was too nerdy. I wanted to be more popular.

Chiara: That's terrible!

Me: No, it totally worked. He went on to become one of those kids who wears all black and a trenchcoat. He used to play dungeons and dragons at lunch while I had girls for friends. My plan was a great success.

Chiara: Girls for friends? That's no success.

Dæmonomania

Finished Dæmonomania the other day and it floored me.

Languorous and layered, humane and hermetic, erudite and often page-kissingly lovely, Dæmonomania is the third part (of four) of Ægypt, John Crowley's cycle about the secret history of the world and the perhaps even more closely guarded secrets of the human heart.
 
In it, the seeds of the things that were planted in its immediate predecessor, Love & Sleep, flower and ripen and everything manages to go right and then wrong. The pages are crammed full of esoterica and writerly paragraphs and passages, but the focus is so close and so delicately are the characters handled (despite the sometimes crushing turns they are subjected to), that it never feels dry or forced or artificial.

What's more, Crowley has managed to refigure and recontextualize many of the ideas and characters and plotlines from the previous two books in ways that seem organic and real and yet completely change the meaning of what has come before. And, of course, that's sort of the theme of the book within the book (and of the books themselves). When it works (as it nearly always does) it is like witnessing a perfectly crafted magic trick or, perhaps, like alchemy; you have to lay the open book against your breast and give your head (heart?) time to stop spinning.

There is a lot going on.

But I dunno. It is the sort of novel you have a hard time describing because so much and so little happens. Or, anyway, it is the sort of novel you have a hard time describing without pretentiousness.

Certainly, I've already failed.

I can't gain much ground by rambling on and on. Suffice it to say that I have loved no books more than I've loved these four comprising the Ægypt cycle and I've loved few as much.

Go and pick up the first one, The Solitudes.

It is the book you should be reading as we roll into Spring.

The Art of Memory

Small Black - "Photojournalist"

Still the Best Thing Produced by 2010

El Guincho - "Bombay"

We Are the Guy Fieri We've Been Waiting For

Me: Why is there so much Guy Fieri?

Tim: Every generation gets the Guy Fieri they deserve, Jeff.

Me: But the bleached blond blowout and the bowling shirts. He is the sort of person who has a mancave - and calls it that.

Tim: Don't forget about his Ritz cracker cheesesteak sliders.

Me: Is that a real thing?

Tim:

Me: Jeeeeeeeeeeeesus.

Tim: You're going to eat those and watch old Superbowls in your mancave, Jeff

Me: Have you seen the thing he does with his sunglasses?

Tim: You mean where they are on the back of his head?

Me: Yeah. They should put him on Mount RushBro.

I Approve of This Wholeheartedly

The Wilhelm Scream is the Right Song for Headphones at Night in a Hotel

Through the Gates of Horn

I've never had a useful dream before.
Or, anyway, I've never had a practical dream.
Robert Louis Stevenson dreamed the entire plot of The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. Elias Howe dreamt the invention of the mechanical sewing machine. Prince woke up and was able to write out the entirety of "Little Red Corvette". Samuel Taylor Coleridge dreamed the poem Kubla Khan and, when he was transcribing it, was disturbed by a knock at the door which caused him to forget the rest of it.
Paul McCartney and "Yesterday," Dmitri Mendeleyev and the Periodic Table of Elements, Salvador Dali's Persistence of Memory.
Me? "Don't forget your dongle!"
I had a pile of things prepared to take in to work today but I had neglected to put my USB flashdrive onto that pile and will absolutely need it. I woke with a start at four in the morning having just had an insistent nightmare in which I was made to feel like an idiot for forgetting a USB flashdrive. When I woke with a start, I got up and put the damned thing on the pile of stuff I need for work today.
You ask me, Morpheus is phoning it in. Where's my THIS?

Candlemas 2011

So today (or tomorrow?) is Candlemas. Or Brighid. or St. Brigit's Day. Or Imbolc. Or Groundhog Day.
Whatever. Same Diff.

This is the midpoint between the Winter Solstice and The Vernal Equinox.

In my phony-balogna Secular Paganism this is one of the holidays. Because our main belief is that holidays should be evenly distributed and have good party decorations.

You celebrate the lengthening of the days, the first buds on the trees, the baby animals conceived but not yet born. You celebrate the winter for its wintryness. (because, at Christmas, you celebrate all the things winter is not, really).

I meant to have a big party this year. My WINTERLUDE party. Was gonna have tons of lights and candles and lanterns and was gonna serve gins and tonic and listen to brittle electro-funk music.

Alas, the New Year's thing we had sorta threw us, money wise. Next year.

Anyway, Happy Candlemas! Happy Winterlude! light some candles. make one of these things, whatever the fuck they are:

See you dumbasses for Easter.

Self Portrait of Jorge Luis Borges, After He Went Blind

Howlin' Wolf is the Prime Mover

I've said it a hundred times:

The stars would stop turning, the sun would fizzle out like a wet match, and the moon would crumble to chalk in the sky if not for Howlin' Wolf.

Top Ten of Aught Ten

1. Janelle Monae The Archandroid

Janelle Monae "Tightrope" (from Letterman)

2. Arcade Fire The Suburbs

Arcade Fire "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)"

3. Kanye West My Beautiful Dark twisted Fantasy

Kanye West "Power"

4. Beach House Teen Dream

Beach House "Walk in the Park" (from Pitchfork)

5. The National High Violet

The National "England" (from the Brooklyn Academy of Music)

6. Vampire Weekend Contra

Vampire Weekend "Giving Up the Gun"

7. Joanna Newsom Have One On Me

Joanna Newsom "Soft as Chalk" (on Fallon)

8. Wild Nothing Gemini

Wild Nothing "Chinatown"

9. Sleigh Bells Treats

Sleigh Bells "Rill Rill"

10. Twin Shadow Forget

Twin Shadow "Slow" (from 4AD)

And, Honorable Mention (because I am bad at editing or counting or both):

The Black Keys Brothers

The Black Keys "Tighten Up" (from Letterman)

Here Is Some Trivia About An Animal That Unfortunately For My Trivia Became An Internet Meme And Now Probably Only Gets Read By People Looking For That Meme (Sigh)

1. Honey Badgers are not really badgers (they are more closely related to weasels and skunks)
2. They got that name because they go around tearing into beehives, but they don't even really want the honey as much as THEY WANT TO EAT THE BEES (or anyway, the larvae). They get stung hundreds or thousands of times and they do not give a shit.
"FUCK BEES" -- a Honey Badger
3. They routinely fight off much larger animals in order to defend their territory or their kills. They have been documented fighting with lions and winning - because the Honey Badger likes to get underneath the lions and RIP THEIR BALLS OFF. I'm serious.
4. Honey Badgers eat pretty much everything. They have one of the most diverse diets in nature and are true omnivores. They will eat all parts of an animal they kill, including the bones.
5. They eat cobras. They get bitten by the cobras when they try to eat the cobras. Cobra venom can kill a human in under half an hour. The venom nearly kills the Honey Badger, too. They get bitten and then fall over, paralyzed, their bodily functions shutting down. To all the world, it looks as though the Honey Badger has been killed. Then, after a little while, the Honey Badger sort of shakes it off, comes back to life, and goes right back to killing everything in the world and just generally being BOSS.
6. They eat tortoises. Because their jaws can crush the shells.
7. They have been known to dig up corpses to eat those, too.
8. Their skin is extraordinarily thick and loose on their body so, even if you manage to pin one or something, it can turn around enough inside of its own skin to bite and claw you to death.
9. An army of Honey Badgers could take over the world. Luckily, they don't give a fuck about politics. They just want to murder and eat everything they can get their teeth or claws into.
Here is a charming little video about Honey Badgers doing all those things (and more!)

My Favorite Albums of 2009

1. Grizzly Bear Veckatimest

Grizzly Bear "Ready, Able" (from Letterman)

2. Animal Collective Merriweather Post Pavilion

Animal Collective "My Girls"

3. Phoenix Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

Phoenix "1901"

4. The XX xx

The XX "VCR"

5. Dirty Projectors Bitte Orca

Dirty Projectors "Stillness is the Move"

6. Neon Indian Psychic Chasms

Neon Indian "6669 (I Don't Know If You Know)" (unofficial video)

7. Washed Out Life of Leisure

Washed Out "Feel it All Around" (unofficial video)

8. Yeah Yeah Yeahs It's Blitz!

Yeah Yeah Yeahs "Zero" (from Letterman)

9. jj No. 2

jj "From Africa to Malaga" (no video available)

10. Neko Case Middle Cyclone

Neko Case "People Got a Lotta Nerve"

And, because I always have one I feel guilty for leaving off, my 2009 alternate:

Yo La Tengo Popular Songs

Yo La Tengo "Sugarcube" and "Periodically Double or Triple" (from La Blogotheque)

I Help the Half-Crab/Half-Woman

On my way home from a concert the other night, I decided to walk up K Street instead of I street. K Street has fewer street lamps and fewer cars. I wanted to enjoy the crickets and the soft churr of sprinklers as I wandered home in the midnight heat.

As I strolled past a smallish apartment building, harshly lit with halogen bulbs, I came upon a strange, contorted form on the grassy parkstrip. It was a woman, more or less. She was calling softy, in a plaintive croak, for her cat, which I could see across the street, rubbing itself on the trunk of a cherry tree. The woman shot a pop-eyed glance at me and I offered to help.

I went across the street expecting to have to chase the cat, but it was perfectly happy to be scooped up into my arms and I returned, triumphantly, to the other side of the street and the strange little woman. She scuttled toward me using only her arms, holding them akimbo and pushing from one side and then the other while her legs, bent at odd angles, merely twitched out of time with her stuttering locomotion. She moved side to side and chattered for her cat. I offered to place it directly into her apartment, the door of which was open behind her.

The apartment was filthy and smelled like a parakeet's cage. The TV was on, tuned to only static. There were bottles and fast food wrappers strewn everywhere. I set the cat down and I swear it let out a sigh.

The lady asked me, as I was leaving, in a voice like someone was choking on a kazoo, to tell those people to leave and I said which people and she said that couple by the car and I looked around and saw that there was no couple anywhere nearby and I wanted to leave very much very soon.

I put the cat in her apartment and pulled the door to. I made sure she didn't want any help and I left, walking up the street as I had been before. I had walked maybe two blocks before I heard again the wailing, plaintive spasms calling for a missing cat. I stopped and waited for a long moment before turning around and going back to help again.

The Chiara Heresies II

On Easter, Chiara and I eschewed the traditional family brunch and went for a walk around the Avenues - the neighborhood where we live.

The weather was fine for walking as long as you stayed in the sun, but turned bitter cold as soon as you went beneath the branches of a tree or the shadow of a house. We had intended to make a picnic outing of it: stop at the neighborhood market, buy some provisions, sit in the park and get our mind off of things, but it was just too cold in the wind and the ground was still too damp from the previous day's rain.

We walked back to our house through the cemetery. It is, or so I'm told, the largest city-operated cemetery in the United States, so it is gigantic. It is filled with tombstones worn down to illegibility by the years, pitched at odd angles as they slowly sink into the earth. Here and there something really tragic, like the stone from 1870 that listed a woman and three unnamed children - a death in childbirth we guessed. Mostly we tried to spot the masonic symbols and the most old-timey names:

(Jedidiah, Zebedee, Tharquad).

At the edge of the cemetery sits a church. Parishioners were filing out of the doors in their cheap suits and floral dresses, heading home from Easter Sunday services. We tried to guess their denomination based on their hairstyles and clothing. A group of teenagers were sitting in a circle on the grass, be-suited and be-floraldressed, reading from the bible and talking.

I had to stop Chiara from shouting at them "Aren't you tired of believing in imaginary people?!" by admonishing her that it was Easter.

She reminded me that I was the one who was always on about the pagan origins of Easter - its Anglo-Saxon roots as a holiday for Eostre, Goddess of the Dawn and of Spring, celebrated as a fertility festival with colored eggs, rabbits, and baby birds.

All true enough, but still . . .

As it was, she pointed at them and barked out, in Nelson the Bully's telltale singsong, "Haa-Haa!" as we passed.

I don't know if they looked over at us or not. I looked firmly at the wet ground and the misshapen headstones and quickened my pace. Chiara chuckled evilly.

"Aren't you glad we can sleep as late as we like on Sundays and then go for a walk or do whatever we want?" she asked me with a smirk.

I said that I was glad of those things. And that we didn't have to sing unmelodic and droning songs in the company of our neighbors every week. And that there were at least two days of the week we didn't have to leap out of bed at some (un)godly hour. Still, I didn't want to taunt those poor dopes - look at their haircuts!

Then we went home and made waffles.  We picnicked at the kitchen table and watched the Daily Show on TiVo.

"Happy Easter," said Chiara to me.

"Happy Easter," said me to Chiara.

If I Had Read This During the Election

I would have been insufferable.

So I just finished Barack Obama's 1994 memoir Dreams from my Father. There is plenty to say about it, but I think I'll start with this:

It is, literally, the only book ever published by a President before that President entered politics (or even, seemingly, thought of entering politics).

This grants Dreams from My Father a particular resonance. Indeed, with all the fatuous cries during the campaign of "who is Barack Obama?" those shouting such vaguely hysteric attacks failed to recognize that Barack Obama, moreso than any Presidential candidate before him, provided the answers to that very question long before he was a national figure and long before he had anything to gain from concealing or spinning his own past.

To be sure, it is an autobiography, and few literary genres are so untrustworthy as autobiographies. Obama himself tells the reader in the book's introduction that characters have been combined from real people in his life and that events have been compressed or extended for narrative, and I feel certain that, here and there, self aggrandizement has crept into the story.

But, at the same time, it is a remarkably humane book. Obama pulls no punches with himself, often casting himself as the flawed character in his own story. There is real wisdom in his telling and it doesn't for a moment feel forced or false. Even without his later achievements, this book would have stood a good chance of leaving Barack Obama remembered as an extraordinary man.

So, first things first: Obama was asked to write the book just after he was named the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review. It was supposed to be a personal story of race in America, but it became something more than that over the couple of years it took for him to write it. It became a paean to an outsider's world, a lonely guy story. It is a revealing and lyrical exploration of living between two worlds, of and other than both.

By now everyone knows the outlines of the tale. Obama is born in Hawaii to a White mother from Kansas and a Black father from Kenya. Before Barack is even a couple of years old, his father leaves and returns to Kenya. He will only see him once more during his life - when he is ten years old, and only for a week or so. Obama spends most of his life trying to carve an identity for himself, both as a man and as an African-American, and he is forced, eventually to come to some new synthesis when his father's life and his father's failures are finally revealed to him when he travels to Kenya to, for the first time, meet his relatives after his father's death in a car accident.

It's a compelling story, but it is an even more compelling book. Obama has what so few politicians have - he has the gift of actual literary talent. He is an extraordinarily good writer, both in terms of his ability to describe and set a scene or a character and in terms of his keen understanding of narrative structure. In fact, though a memoir, the book is consciously novelesque and reads quickly and engrossingly like the best bildungsroman.

I say that had I read this book during his campaign I would have been insufferable. That is perhaps because, as an English major, I am stunned and honored to have a President capable of a book of this quality. Perhaps no President since Lincoln has had so firm a grasp on the written word, and America cannot suffer for its leaders knowing how to wield their language well. As hard as I fought and cared and hoped that he would become the 44th President of the United States, I find myself anxious for the end of his tenure as President so that he can get back to writing. I would love to read a novel by the author of Dreams from My Father.

Unclean! Unclean!

Those are Mina Harker's words when she comes out of her stupor at the hands of Count Dracula who has just been found in her bedchamber forcing her to suck on his tit where he has cut himself and is bleeding.

It is pretty much the best scene in the whole book and is positively messy with sex. The scene is described in such a way as to bring to mind - to our 21st century minds anyway - a forced fellatio. There is this description of the act where one of the men who bursts in upon the scene says it looks like nothing so much as a man forcing the nose of a kitten into a saucer of milk.

Fantastic.

One wonders, of course, how much Bram Stoker could have had such a thing in mind (or, indeed, even been aware of such a thing) in those pre-Freudian days, but throughout the novel the vampires are blatantly associated with sexual activity. The Brides of Dracula, who come to seduce Jonathan Harker during his stay in Castle Dracula, are practically soft core porn characters, both in their behavior and description. The thrusting of a stake into a female vampire and her subsequent baring of teeth and thrashing of extremities taking on a decidedly carnal - if gruesome - cast, with the hero plunging his stake into the creature again and again while she moans and screams. It seems impossible Stoker was not aware of himself.

Even before Dracula, of course, vampires had begun to take on the lascivious characteristics that were always under the thin veneer of Victoriana. Camilla, the most popular vampire novel prior to Dracula, was, after all, about a lesbian vampire seducing a young girl. But this very excitement which is evident in Stoker's book (the reader can sense his scribbling hand rapidly increasing the pace with which words are laid onto paper whenever the undead get a scene) is, in a way, part of the problem with Dracula.

Thing is - the book is really terribly conventional for its day. There must be twelve chapters in which the protagonists hold hands and pray together and resolve to love one another always. The men are, to a one, flat as the paper they are written out upon and Mina, clearly the most dynamic and interesting character, is constantly passing up action to moon over the men. One senses that Stoker either didn't know what he had in Mina Harker or was conflicted about a "new woman" protagonist and couldn't bear to let her loose upon the plot where she could have torn through literature for real.

Still worse, Dracula is hardly in the damned book. He gets several short chapters in the very beginning and then disappears almost entirely until the aforementioned "rape" of Mina Harker. Hell, he doesn't even get a final scene. The protagonists spend the last third of the book rushing all over eastern Europe to catch Dracula before he can return to his castle and regain his strength while Dracula outwits them in a hundred different (and boring) ways, but when they finally reach Castle Dracula, just before the sunset, the are successful in killing the fiend in his coffin before he can rise for the fight.

Its the most stunning anticlimax I have come across in ages.

Save for Sherlock Holmes, no character in fiction has been adapted for the screen as many times as Count Dracula. If one was to add all of the other media - books, comics, art, music, video games, toys and games - I would lay money that no character PERIOD has even been treated with so much as Count Dracula. And though, naturally, Stoker could not have known this would come to pass, to give such a creation no final speech, no fight to the death, no death scene, even? Criminal.

Look, I had always heard/read/been told that Dracula was boring and not worth the time it would take to read. I can say definitively that this was not the case. It isn't by any means a perfect novel and it is nearly buried on occasion underneath tedium and Victorian bloviating, but it reads faster than I would have expected it to and it is so impossibly classic that it feels perhaps more rewarding than it really is.

Other People's Dreams of Teeth

Everyone loathes to hear another person's dreams related to them.

So I'll make it brief.

Dreamt last night that two of my teeth fell out. they had two small metal prongs by which they were meant to attach to my gums via insertion of these prongs into very small holes. I spent the whole dream frantically trying to simultaneously direct the prongs into their apertures and still hold on to the tooth. No matter how hard I tried I could not replace the teeth in my head. It seemed terribly important and caused me horrible stress that i could not put everything aright.

I've read somewhere that to dream of one's teeth falling out is common, but I've never before experienced it. Supposedly, if you're the sort who believes in the unconscious mind and the interpretation of dreams, such a dream reflects a feeling of not having control in one's life.

It certainly seems plausible in my case. When I awoke, I didn't feel any relief to discover that all of my teeth were in place. Instead I just replaced one nightmarish fear-stress continuum with another.