“ I learned that money can be a lot of things. It can be something that is hoarded, fought over, protected, stolen and withheld. Or it can be like an energy, fueled by the desire, will, creative interest, need to laugh, of large groups of people. And it can be shuffled and pushed around and pooled together to fuel a common interest, jokes about garbage, penises and parenthood.
Louis C.K. sold over 100k copies of his special, making more than $500k.
Life is hard. Here is someone.
I live in Brooklyn and work at Kickstarter.
or here I am on Twitter.
Stuff on Tumblr I like/d.
“ When I’m at work on a story, I never compose paragraphically. I write stand-alone sentences. I might fixate on three or four sentences a day. I’ll enlarge them to at least twenty-six-point type on the screen. I’ll futz around in their vitals, recontour their casings, and work a kind of reverse cosmetology on them to bring out any defining defects or birthmarks or swoonworthy uglinesses and whatnot. Only much later will one such sentence overcome its aloofness or diffidence and begin to make overtures to another sentence, which might be pages and pages away in the draft. The sentences eventually band together into paragraphs. The paragraphs, to me, are nervous little cliques or sororities of like-natured outcasts who put up with each other despite the friction. There’s a lot of rubbing the wrong way and very little mating of a peaceable kind. Getting something that might pass itself off as a story out of these uneasy alliances is in fact a pretty maddening and brutal ordeal. Among my deficiencies is a freaky neurological setup that keeps me from seeing wholes. So all I can see are parts, pieces, flickery fragments. I will never be up to writing a novel. It’s all I can do to even read one.
oh, Gary Lutz. I love him, or his sentences, and his sad sad recurring themes, so much. But I also want to shake him. Stop putting your sentences in 26-point font, Gary. You deserve to be happy.
“ People have to understand that their short-term decision to save a couple bucks undermines their long-term interest in their community and vital, real-life literary culture.
Tom Perrota re: Amazon.
Nuclear Football
During their presidencies, both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan preferred to keep the launch codes in their jacket pocket. On one occasion, Jimmy Carter left nuclear launch codes in his suit when it was sent in for dry cleaning.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Let’s Move To The Country - Smog
Let’s start a
Let’s have a
This song has been in my head all day. We went to buy a Christmas tree, we ended up with a real one, and by that I mean not what I envisioned, which was one you put on a little table or a stool or something. It was $55 dollars. We both stood there wavering. Of course we want a Christmas tree but we know there are better things to spend you’re money on. This is silly. I won’t even be here on Christmas. But we split it, dividing our cash up and standing there for a while, too long, watching everyone else, not talking to anyone or asking to be helped. “Is this how much Christmas trees are normally?” “In New York, yes.” “Yeah, but—” “No, in the rest of the world you go out into the woods and chop one down — ” “And it’s like 20 bucks right?” “Not even.”
This is our myth we’re already building about what life would be like outside of here. That we’d go out into the woods and cut down a tree for $5 instead of stand here in what is usually, I think, a barren fountain or a dog park, in the middle of a big intersection, surrounded by $60 trees, our view a highway overpass, a diner, a gas station, and a few bars. We felt foolish. Or young. Or new. Which was nice, too, granted.
A couple with a little baby took pictures of each other in front of some of these trees and two friends buying a table tree asked the tree guy to take their picture. “Everyone’s trying to have a moment here, on this street corner. It’s sad.” I stood up on the edge of the dried up fountain, where I could reach to kiss his temple. “Are you trying to have a moment?” “No.” I jumped down. Someone took the tree we wanted. We’d been standing there 10 minutes, watching these weird swarms of bugs fly around and wondering how they got there, if they lived in the trees. I wondered if they were what in Louisiana they called “no see ‘ems.” This wasn’t a word used in my family but a word I’d hear my friends say, so that I never wholly got a grip on what no see ‘ems were, yet appreciated the sentiment, and have spent the rest of my life turning the phrase over in my head and wondering if what I’m seeing are no see ‘ems (as you can imagine, a bit of a conundrum).
We got our $55 tree and walked proudly home, across the street from the couple with the little red-haired baby (“a ginger baby!” “I knew you were gonna say that. I knew.”) who did not, as it turns out, buy a $55 Christmas tree. They just went over there with their stroller and took some pictures.
This has been reissued and it is so great. I bought it tonight, among other things that it turns out i hate and want to throw away (I’m terrible at music. TERRIBLE.) While I was in line a man hovering near me bumped into me while I wasn’t looking and then patted my arm and apologized very intensely. Then he asked me what records I was getting. WHAT. I guess this is how it works. I mean, I’ve seen movies but some guy asking you what records you’re getting is a thing you always imagine is about to happen but never does and really, never should, if you ask me. I mean what am I supposed to do? Hug the records to my chest and say, “no I’m not going to show you.” god. I just kind of half heartedly flipped through them and even skipped the last one because I wanted to what, show him who was boss? I don’t know. Anyway he said he bought this Charlie brown thing too. ALLEGEDLY. I dunno what I said. But he will never know what my last record was. (it was a smog record that it turns out is “early” smog and not warbly enough for me. I am so filled with regret. I hate everything).
I’m probably projecting.
“ That’s the whole secret, is if you hire great people and you don’t mess them up with a lot of analysis and conversation and speculation and nonsense—if you just get out of their way and shut up, they give you the performance that has made them the great performer that they are.
Woody Allen on directing actors, from Woody Allen: A Documentary, which yes, of course you should watch (via lonelysandwich)
Sunday night I found myself kind of half-crying into my leftover pumpkin pie about the meaninglessness of existence and the fact that I was too short to reach most of the records at the record store I had just gone to for the first time (fuck that place). So in an effort to cheer me up, we camped out in bed and watched this Woody Allen documentary for four hours straight. I soon forgot about all of that stuff — the records, the pie, and the fact that we’re all going to die — and instead just worried about how many Woody Allen movies I still haven’t seen. TOO MANY.
“ Changing the subject is one of the most difficult arts to master, the key to almost all the others.
Cesar Aira, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter.
I was at a reading recently where someone cited this. I quickly pulled out my phone when I heard it and typed it into the bottom of my “Thxgiving to do list”. If only I had meditated on that very difficult art a little more before the big day, maybe we wouldn’t have spent so much time discussing the variety of school teachers in my hometown who have been busted for sleeping with students. Perhaps my mother would have never had the opportunity to say, “What goes around comes around,” not really an appropriate aphorism with regard to the subject matter. Anyhow, I want to delete this to-do list now, my little victory, so here you go.
