While I'm not here

This is what I've been doing with my time:

Kate Beaton: I love love love. I just keep coming back.

Asterios Polyp. Just read it, if you like comics.

While I was in Laos and Cambodia, I was digging Never Let Me Go. Also excellent.

The world is just full of stuff that's good. How are you supposed to find the time to do your own things?

Fuck it, I'm going to blog more

Anyone watching Mad Men (obsessively like me)? I'm even feeding the habit peripherally through re-watching movies such as North by Northwest, The Apartment, and reading this book:


It tries to show how much things were changing in the mid-late sixties via an in-depth study of the development and production of the five movies nominated for best picture Academy Awards in 1967. It's a really good read. Super-well researched. Anyhoo, I digress.

There's an episode where Kinsey has this great idea (supposedly; I'm sceptical) but he's drunk and doesn't write it down and thereafter continually regrets the loss of the (supposedly) best idea he's ever had. The 'moral' being, write it down. That's the moral I'm choosing to take in this moment, given that there was something I needed to write down, which triggered the memory of that episode, so I've retrospectively assigned that moral to the story. I can't even remember how it was needed for the narrative. Oh yeah, I think it was to show how good Peggy is relative to her peers at coming up with ideas.

My old friend Rommel said something once about not writing all those ideas down, and getting stuck in yesterday's stale ideas and re-churning them. Put them away (or something), he says. Go fly a kite.

The Crimson Petal and the White

Right now I'm reading this:


It took a while; initially I felt it was too cold or something, but I'm about a third of the way in and it's completely pwning me. It's a page-turner, to be sure.

The best part, now that I'm in there, is that I have some 500 pages to go.

Procrastinatin'

I was cataloguing books on Goodreads, a task I allowed myself as a reward for finishing Dreams From My Father. A chance encounter with Spike Milligan on said site reminded me of how much I loved his war memoirs when I discovered them as a young 'un (teen). I mean to read them again, now. Soon praps. (Or not - I have to read according to the rules first). Anyway. I added a new category to account for his description of shellshock in the fourth of the trilogy (and his bi-polarness in general), which I called mental illness. Then I needed to go through all my 'read' books (I know, I know) and mark up the other books with that tag. This proved a problem; is (for example) The Virgin Suicides about mental illness? They all killed themselves - something must have been going wrong in their brains, right? Or what about American Psycho? Does he have an illness? Is sublimation an illness? Or nihilism? What constitutes a mental illness anyway? How about Louis Riel? Is going a bit nuts not a rational response to oppression? And maybe his vision was true, truly from god - who am I to say?

Anyway, the anti-climax here is that I changed the label to the more inclusive and unreconstructed 'madness_mental illness', which allowed me to tag tales involving things like depression and OCD.

This labelling thing is a lark, innit. In the words of Sandra Bernhard, "don't label me: I'm a people person".

Last word for the day

I'm finally really stuck into this book.


It's totally doing it for me now. I'm about a third of the way through.

I can hear the Fleet Foxes in the other room, so I'm going to read some more.

Aussi, parce qu'il pleut.

More of the same, really

What kind of review do you call this, Goodreads reader?

"I know I read this, but I really don't remember anything about it, so I don't think it would be fair for me to give it a rating. "

Come to think of it, I feel that way about some books. Read 'em today, gone from your memory tomorrow.

I've used up all my BookMooch points so now I'm wasting time on Goodreads. Some people who claim to like books so much might spend their spare time reading, but noooo, I have to get all meta on books' asses.

Things are looking up

- Feel less rutty (ie no longer in rut)
- Room tidied
- Breaking back of art projects
- Spring arrived!
- More work obtained (poverty fended off again)
- Haircut
- Quazillions of books mooched waiting for me to read!
- internet addiction subsiding (enabling life to be addressed)

In other news, it has been so long since I blogged that blogger has changed its interface in the interim. (Blog, blog; inter, inter).

What a swell party

Topics of conversation tonight included:

*Which Jane Austen character are you most like?
*Does reading Archie comics as a child give you unrealistic ideas about what teenagerhood will be like?
*The emphasis on scatology in French culture
*Cost/benefit analyses in everyday life and 'Freakonomics'
*Hill End
*Sideways [film]
*The woman who gave birth to rabbits (fake!)
*The possible formation of a photographic lighting ownership cooperative

I can't remember any more. There was a lot of wine and food and goodness.

That is all.

Live and Learn

I was given this book for my birthday (among other thoughtful presents):


I haven't started reading it yet, but I'm looking forward to it. I'd like to be like Joan Didion. She seems so collected, so smart. I feel that I will be smarter, happier, more focused and engaged when I am reading this book. Those qualities will transfer themselves to me.

American Psycho has won

I finally feel sick and dirty. Previously I was just compulsively reading, fascinated and even relating. I suppose I could be glad that morally appropriate emotions have returned, but instead I just feel dark and empty now.

I killed a tiny cupboard moth and felt guilt and dismay, an experience I've never had before.

I just need Bateman to get caught now. I fear he won't. But at least it will end. Not much longer ... I am going to finish it, so I'm clearly not that disgusted.

I have begun skimming over some of the more disturbing passages, very long conversations about types of mineral water carbonation, for example.

I am reading

This:

It's really, really good.

This sentence is a link to a short but good Self interview that's characteristically cut-to-the-chase-y

I didn't know

I didn't know Spalding Gray had killed himself! I didn't even know he had been dead for the last three years. I'm glad I didn't find out until I finished reading Swimming to Cambodia. I was wondering what he was up to these days while I read it. I guess you could tell he was kind of troubled, in a perky, functional, engaged sort of way. Still, though. It's disappointing.

While reading I want to be a writer

The reason I said that loving a writer’s work can be lonely is that in order to read (or be read to) you give yourself up/over while the words are being read. You can connect those words to yourself and feel alive while reading, but when you put the book down, it’s like you don’t live in that world any more. You can still take pleasure from the memory of it (especially when there’s still more of that world to experience, ie you haven’t finished the book), and enjoy that sort of secret knowledge that you carry with you while the feeling lasts, but it’s ultimately not the same world that everyone around you inhabits. It's too private. Even when you share the experience of reading, like discussing a favourite writer with someone else, there’s something cold about it; it’s so different to that experience of reading, of living in that other world. Because it’s happening inside your head, and we all know the bitter truth about how accessible our heads are to other people (not very).

It’s a little weird, I suppose, to find loneliness in something pleasurable and life-affirming, simply because the experience can’t be sustained. Glass half empty etc.

becarse yr a luddie

For the worst Scottish accents ever recorded on film, see 'Brigadoon' with Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse. But don't go watching it for any other kind of entertainment value. There's not enough dancing to make it bearable. It doesn't even have one great memorable song or dance or scene.

You'll thank me.

Spend that time reading The Slave by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Or Middlesex, that's even better. And less depressing! I am going to read Swann's Way next.

No, really. I am. I'm staring on the bus tomorrow. I figure it will make the time pass more slowly, thus delaying my arrival at the office.

Call me [insert square here] if you want.

(...is my square magic working?)