skootsheeting

i'm pleased beyond compare that this blog can provide a destination for those googling the following:

dog worm identification
i love you but rick ross made me choose darkness
little people rodeo
donald barthelme horndog
waxed hip waders
beckett vectors
The impact of OP pesticides on the Eyes
photo torment unit [weird....]

a bit ago Brian McFarland wrote about some tweets he liked, including one of mine, here.




i don't think i mentioned it on here but i'm editing anonymous reviews at HTMLGIANT, which is exciting. you should write one and submit it. there are a couple wild ones promised to come down the pipe but no one has reviewed a kitchen appliance yet. review a review of a painting or ESPECIALLY your favorite indie literature. a review of Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer has received a Critical Hit Award from Electric Literature, linked here.

january is rejection month. i received three rejections today and i liked every one. i even like form rejections. i don't know what it is. just the act of getting an email (or especially a paper letter) from a magazine is enjoyable for some reason. maybe because it is evidence that someone read the story or, if they didn't read it, then at least they are acknowledging that they received it. i have been trying not to check the calendars of certain schools to see when their semesters start.

i want this post to be the number one resource on the internet for skootsheeting

i'm currently reading Steve Erickson's Tours of the Black Clock, which is unhyperbolically amazing. the language, the pov shifts, and basically the audacity of the whole book so far has me thinking i waited too long to pick it up. as a very small example, Hitler is a character, though he is never named. the book is also quite humorous.

i've started typing first drafts instead of writing them by hand, and i wish i had made this transition sooner. i think it was partly superstition/laziness/something but 90% of the time i would write by hand, thus forcing myself to revise as i typed it up. but TYPING IS FASTER. i am looking at a DeLillo interview right now: "I like the tactile quality of the typewriter and the sense of hammers striking the page and fingers hitting the keys, and the shapes of letters themselves, yes." in late December i spent more than three whole days JUST typing up the contents of some steno notebooks, which was a pain. i also think writing longhand was a kind of protection against the internet, and a pad of paper and pen being more portable than a laptop etc. now i just don't go anywhere and try to control myself.

the rapper Cage should never have made music after 2005ish or maybe he should have never "cleaned up his act." it's weird when someone's first single is the best thing they'll ever make (below). i do still enjoy that dust album he did with Tame One, however.

text block

brevity's the soul of wit but you're still talking

i'm [was] in a hotel room in Philadelphia. my flight was supposed to go BOS->PHL->ATL but it went BOS->PHL. the airline put me here and tomorrow i go PHL->IAD->ATL. i'm standing in the dark looking at the parking lot and silent interstate. i'm eating pepperoni combos because they weighed the most out of all the items in the snack shack (7.2 ounces/198.5 grams). i'm drinking the water that says "free" on it and i think the other waters that don't say "free" cost money. i think autistic style is a style like crane style and tiger style. i like bacon; i like Bacon and his focus on the mouth.

you should read this interview of Mike Young by Peter Jurmu for Redivider's contributor spotlight.

you should also just look at this Coover cover. [http://www.granta.com/dyn/1319199371770.jpeg]

i remember one time this guy told me he knew a LOT about music and was never stumped so i asked him if he'd heard of Beta Satan partially because the name has always been funny to me so he asked me how many listeners they had on last.fm. that was a sad conversation. if future employers were illiterate i would say many additional things in public forums i think. should i delete the previous sentence because it is in itself _____.

a workspace that was supernice/very productive for me recently:

so ___ to read/watch/listen to/look at

i'm going to sleep for 3ish hours.

MIT replicates the brain

MIT replicates the brain (via @diddioz)

hi

___ just ___ in ___ sleeve

it's probably more enjoyable to write about DFW than read about him. people are proprietary. other than interviews i don't really seek things about him that contain other people's opinions. though i will read the full-length bio when it comes out. it seems very fun to explain one's "personal" relation to DFW, and i will do that then be quiet.

at some point in high school i learned that the toilet scene in Trainspotting was inspired by another in a book called Gravity's Rainbow, and I became excited about the idea of that book.

at some point in college i saw The Crying of Lot 49 on the reading list for a course so I signed up to take it, which ended up blowing my mind (because of the class itself and the professor's enthusiasm). i overslept on the last day of class and only made it on time because the landlord was banging on our front door for some reason; i had been dreaming about Trystero and thought upon waking that the organization had infiltrated my sleeping mind and was trying to make me miss class. vitamins.

my last semester in college i took a course because it had Gravity's Rainbow on the syllabus. it also had people i had never heard of before like Barth, Gass, Gaddis, and Toni Morrison (jk I had heard of Toni Morrison before). I need to email Jim Hans to thank him. He had read Gravity's Rainbow 7 times. He made wonderful daily digressions and was mad knowledgeable about pretty much everything if I remember correctly. He assigned Gravity's Rainbow over spring break. I read half of it then finished the rest after graduating. "what?" -richard nixon

i think i became conscious of the term "postmodern" at this public school summer thing for english and science nerds. this was 2001, Chris Bachelder was one of the teachers there and i remember Bear v. Shark was just about to come out. my basic understanding was that postmodern things were non-linear like Fight Club.

i looked at the wikipedia entry for "postmodernism" a lot, learned about David Foster Wallace and Donald Barthelme at the same time, and would get them confused before I read anything by them. one time i saw Noah Cicero's name in the wiki for "postmodernism" but I think it got edited out. DFW and DB's names were the same to me, except I associated Barthelme's with a kind of purple. Wallace's name (before reading him) reminded me of crystal.

when i was coming home for christmas from living in Germany I went to Dussman's (large chain bookstore) the night before my flight and bought DFW's Oblivion because of the cover, the "heir-apparent to Pynchon" thing, the Zadie Smith "he's so modern" thing and because of his general reputation. "Mr. Squishy" changed me, as did "Another Pioneer" (airplane frame) and every other story in there really.

after Oblivion I copied and pasted every DFW interview I could find on the internet into a word document and read it over and over. I also watched the Charlie Rose interview(s) (the one w/ Franzen and Leyner less so) more than would seem rational. I read Girl... and Brief Interviews and reread Brief Interviews. the nonfiction, of course, was great but it seemed like something my non-existent aunt had been recommending. I was "saving" Infinite Jest for some reason.

I started an MFA program at Emerson College in 2008 and David Foster Wallace killed himself during what happened to be my first week of classes. I had classes Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights. Wallace killed himself on Friday. I found out over the weekend. it's all very selfish and everyone has expressed almost every permutation of grief and postmortem handjob possible, but Wallace's suicide was the only death of someone I never met that made me very sad.

the next Monday I think I blurted something about how DFW had hung himself and the professor said "hanged himself." so that stuck with me. wednesday I had workshop with DeWitt Henry who said it was a real tragedy, and that he had hired Wallace to teach at Emerson back in '91. he said Wallace was really shy, and that he (DeWitt Henry) had posted some flyers about Wallace's novel Broom of the System, but that Wallace had taken all of them down.

I finished Infinite Jest around the time I finished the program, and I wanted to reread it immediately thereafter. that book is 15 years old: damn.

for people who care it seems obvious that ringo dying last would mess everything up. as far as grief maximization is concerned.

future death