james agee wrote Meanwhile I am thirty and have missed irretrievably all the trains I should have caught. well im nearly 10 years further down the road and i didnt go to harvard nor did i write for no national magazines; only freight trains filled with wandering priests passed me by. i shouldve read more, i shouldve traveled more, i shouldve borrowed money and jumped into some fucking war. mostly i shouldve spit and sneered when it was suggested a life of literature is for sissies. i realize now im a fucking sissy, always been a fucking sissy. i should be a professor of How We Express This Fucking Thing. i should be in that Perfect Room which occupies my mind 20 hours of the fucking day, surrounded by books and smiling upon dancing sunbeam motes as i excitedly arrange words. in the meantime i will make certain to never discourage my son & daughter from their whatever suchlikes.

If you wanted to be heavy-handed — and oh, I do — you could even say that the book functions like an album: it’s possible to enjoy each song as its own independent creation, but if you listen to the whole album, the artist’s intention is made clear. And Egan’s intention seems to be to shoot her characters’ lives through with lyrical beauty.

on one heavy hand: the writings brilliant. on the other: many of the songs flirt with autotone, leaving me oddly aware of the insane talent but not the art.

Where this is differing from the pilots of Lost or The Sopranos for me is that those pilots were more nuanced — the pilot for Lost managed to combine serious action with some shadowy mystery and time-jumping thrown in. The Sopranos pilot punctuates its atmosphere of suburban claustrophobia with moments of acute aggression. Thrones so far is just hitting the same tone over and over, and that tone is “Impending Doom.” It’s so much doom! Everyone’s on edge, and it seems like everyone’s working some kind of angle — except for Peter Dinklage’s Tyrion, who’s probably the best character because he’s the only one who seems to be having any fun. Between the beheadings, the rape, the incest, and the generalized sense of anxiety that seems to engulf all members of the Stark family, Tyrion is a welcome bright spot of relief.

agreed. too fucking wooden. as if the cartography of the credits signaled that scenes like the discovery of the direwolves are simply points to be quickly checked off.

 [3 tupelos]

i said the name jon lee conjures a roughneck running shotgun with pancho villa or any other motherfucker who pays in gold. i say well donde esta that motherfucker right now.

[answer: libya]

Let me put it to you this way. You’re talking to a recent immigrant at jury duty. He is telling you how determined he is to be a good citizen and civic role model for his kid. a) “So I’ve been trying to read Tocqueville in the evenings after work.” b) “So I try to attend an occasional City Council meeting.” c) “So I’ve been volunteering as a precinct captain during elections.” d) “So I keep up with the Supreme Court by reading the most significant opinions each session. e) “So I keep up with what Congress is doing by reading The New York Times.” f) “So I read the blogs of a few political scientists each day.” e) “So I watch Keith Olbermann every night.”

flummoxed by zeitgeist. dude was no glen beck and this aint no cultural throat-punch. besides which i dont watch cable news to hear my opinion smugly repeated.

True Grit is not as sharp as recent films by the Coens—Burn After Reading, No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man—but it will suffice for those ready for an off-beat Western that talks not like the real life of 1880, but like a book. Whether in the forlorn dryness of the chat between security men in Burn After Reading or the ruminative lamentations of Tommy Lee Jones in No Country for Old Men, the Coens are our film-makers most in love with words. Don’t worry—the wintry landscapes are pristine and heroic (thanks to cinematographer Roger Deakins), and the few action scenes are sipped with fervor, like men in the desert finding a puddle of water. It is a movie. But you may want to do no more than listen. With your eyes closed, is it easier to hear everything being said?

that the desperate, final scene (not the dopey epilogue), one of my favorites in recent memory, is nearly wordless is todays notable irony.

(snotty like) hasil adkins in a tennis sweater.

also:
crazy for you, best coast
the ding-dongs
the big to-do, drive-by truckers
i will be, dum dum girls
frankie rose and the outs
reform school girl, nick curran
strychnine dandelion, parting gifts
tomorrow is alright, sonny & the sunsets
whitey morgan and the 78s

cotton jones, free energy, futurebirds, gil scott-heron, girls, hacienda, harlan bobo, sharon jones, she & him, jon langford, tender trap, titus andronicus, ty segall.

She showered first, in order to get ready for school, while he went to the kitchen to get more coffee, fetch the paper from the front door, and boil himself an egg, thinking over the ruffling water that his life was only a history of such mornings, an ever-growing pile of eggs, the shells by now filling up the kitchen, spilling out into other rooms.

also from page 81 (the bad):

And yet it still could be, the sheer R. Crumb fullness of her, the cloud-soft breasts large as throw pillows, their size and perfection demanding attention, there to press an ear against, the heart beating beneath, if he listened closely, as a amazing as surf in a shell.

are frequent flashes enough to overcome the semantically stalled garbage truck, the dead deer, the lightning-loosed tree limb? does the depth of observation, the ability to evoke feeling, the startling novelty of an idea provide enough juice to otherwise plow through? hell fucking no. life is often messy, awkward, all knees & elbows, but Great Books never are, Great Books slow, but they never idle.

…her box of cereal (MY CEREAL) next to the measuring cup, its pictured athlete — receiver, hurdler, basketball player — frozen in leaps or bounds.

never understood this sort of thing; its a box of fucking wheaties.

the ding-dongs.

a tubful of Saturday Night.

[slice: knock me down]

If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he’s made of sugar.

1. frankie rose and the outs
2. best coast
3. dum dum girls
4. tender trap

id take lonesome dove over any cormac western. hell id take lonesome dove over pretty much anything.

religion is found fucking money which you could use for some after-school activity for the kid or toward the mortgage or so that you dont have to put groceries on your red-hot credit card but whatever god buzzing around the backyard blackness of your brain tells you that this money aint no reward for your manifest goodness you lazy sumbitch; get up off your motherfuckin ass and make the kind of money youre capable of making. so you give the money away and you feel good about that but othertimes in other things you take take take and that god of yours just stares silently from out beyond a cyclone fence.

i imagine a dishonest life is measured in something like dog years; i was young then but now im old enough to believe i once ran from charlemagne.

THE EXILES chronicles one night in the lives of young Native American men and women living in the Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles. Based entirely on interviews with the participants and their friends, the film follows a group of exiles — transplants from Southwest reservations — as they flirt, drink, party, fight, and dance.

ill say it slower: no sympathy for better hair, better music, cheaper motherfucking beer. do i want to step outside? sure ill step outside.

 [4.5 tupelos]

i blew a .347 once which meant the drunk tank for two and then general population for ten. i had actually tied another for drunkest but he was stopped while driving and had warrants out. he threw up all over the place and was probably my age now.

Phil’s hands go up like he is lifting a slaughtered lamb up on top of an ice box.

dumb is an ugly word but dumdum is the lollipop you eat after youve been vaccinated for diphtheria.

 [slice: jail la la]

“May I come in?” It was Yoko. “Komako asked me to bring this.”

She thrust her hand out like a postman. Then, remembering her manners, she knelt down awkwardly before him. Shimamura opened the knotted bit of paper, and Yoko was gone. He had not time to speak to her.

“Having a fine, noisy time. And drinking.” That was the whole of the message, written in a drunken hand on a paper napkin.

Not ten minutes later Komako staggered in.

“Did she bring something to you?”

“She did.”

“Oh?” Komako cocked an eye at him in wonderfully high spirits. “I do feel good. I said I’d go order more sake, and I ran away. The porter caught me. But sake is wonderful. I don’t care a bit if the floor creaks. I don’t care if they scold me. As soon as I came here I start feeling drunk, though. Damn. Well, back to work.”

“You’re rosy down to the tips of your fingers.”

“Business is waiting. Business, business. Did she say anything. Terribly jealous. Do you know how jealous?”

“Who?”

“Someone will be murdered one of these days.”

“She’s working here?”

“She brings sake, then stands there staring in at us, with her eyes flashing. I suppose you like her sort of eyes.”

“She probably thinks you’re a disgrace.”

“That’s why I gave her a note to bring to you. I want water. Give me water. Who’s a disgrace? Try seducing her too before you answer my question. Am I drunk?” She peered into the mirror, bracing both hands against the stand. A moment later, kicking aside the long skirts, she swept from the room.

Attentive as ever, Kuno took it for granted that he was to teach me to ski. I should have much preferred to mess about alone, but my attempts at polite dissuasion were in vain. He regarded it as his duty; there was no more to be said. So we spent two perspiring hours on the beginner’s slope; I slithering and stumbling, Kuno admonishing and supporting. “No, excuse me, this is again not quite correct … you hold yourself in too stiff a manner, you see?” His patience seemed inexhaustible. I longed for lunch.

the fireside chat that will never come because there is no fireside and there are no motherfucking chats.

 [slice: getting used to uselessness]

Grant is straight out Marvel Comics — alcoholic, son of a tanner, manumiter of slaves, warrior-poet in the most literal uncartoonish sense, scourge of the Klan, (and thus the original prosecutor of the War on Terror) and so [on] and so [on]. More specifically, he’s right out of our concept of the Hero. I haven’t read enough Joseph Campbell. But I recognize something ancient in the story. The dude’s name is Ulysses and U.S.

It’s hard to imagine that with something as written about as the Civil War, there’s still poetry untouched. And there’s this touch of the bluesy anti-hero. I read about Grant and Lincoln and think of Marvin Gaye — “I come up hard, but that’s OK\Cause trouble man, don’t get in my way.” I mean think about both of these guys, at varying points mocked by men who were smarter but not wiser, rising up from the laboring classes to become saviors of their country. How American is that?

sub monument valley for marvel. mike cooley for marvin. etc. etc.