Two reasons I am excited to be reading the new Lorrie Moore book

'Walking home, I passed a squirrel that had been hit by a car. Its soft scarlet guts spilled out of its mouth, as if in a dialogue balloon, and the wind gently blew the fur of its tail, as if it were still alive.'

'The piece was like an elegant interrogation made of tangled yarn, a query from a well dressed man in a casket, not yet dead. It proceeded slowly, like a careful equation, and then not: if x = y, if major = minor, if death equals part of life and life part of death, then what is the sum of the infinite notes of this one phrase? It asked, answered, reasked, its moody asking a refinement of reluctance or dislike. I had never heard a melody quite like it.'


[[[[[ Also the Sleater-Kinney reference on page 27, I was not expecting - Moore is not a popcult namedropper and not hip I didn't think but when do I dislike a Sleater-Kinney reference. As often as I dislike questions with no question mark and blogs coded into incoherence.

The word randomness is used once, and oddly innocuous. I wonder if it is such a mis- and over-used cliche in the US, and I suppose not. I can't understand it outside teenage context. ]]]]]]

wait a million years

I hate when a song is in my head for a whole holiday and not on my iPod

Brad Pitt's chin = irrelevant

Bradshaw is wrong, Inglourious Basterds is the best Tarantino. Or maybe the Tarantino for people who don't care much for him past the initial nervethrills. The bad reviews seem pissed it's not empty pastiche. They also don't give QT credit for knowing what he is doing, complaining about the narrative loose-ends as if they are an accident. IB's meta-flourishes are not cool and flat, they have a point. One murder scene is I think a brilliantly conflicted use of/apology for cinematic misogyny so subtle as to be potentially nothing more than me projecting feminism onto everything because I'm too bored of sexism to acknowledge its existence any more. But reception theory is ok I think.

I guess it is some sort of betrayal to his fans, but I feel like QT is a little closer to my side. My side being the good side. Plus he is friends with Margaret Cho:

Ursula Meier has the right idea

After being asked about naturalism/surrealism in 'Home': 'if you put a camera right next to a highway, it's surreal.'

9% abstraction, 5% figuration, 86% misc

Twice on Saturday I had cause to rant about the way art exhibitions cling to the abstraction/figuration binary as if they decided in a mass meeting it's the only way to get the peepl thinking about how painting works. It was all over the National Gallery and also Per Kirkeby, which I liked but also knew what James meant when he said PK seems like someone who reads 200 books before starting every painting and hasn't laughed since 1968. Clearly I don't object on the grounds of my superior artistic sensibility; it's the opposite maybe - I object as somebody who doesn't necessarily know enough to resist the insidious whispers of the "accompanying materials" at exhibitions, but resents that creeping sense that one has finished looking at a painting when one has pronounced "13% abstraction, 87% figuration" and nodded sagely. just gimme the date, title, whatevs, shutup.

from a conversation overheard in line for the toilet after watching Zabriskie Point

"i thought it was gash. maybe back then it was all like "ooh anti-capitalism" but it's all a bit obvious now isn't it."

reason number 37896 why I hate queuing every time I use a public toilet

how to write a master's dissertation

#1 Ashtanga yoga to Glenn Branca's Lesson No. 1

#2 Typing goes faster with Matmos's Rag for William S. Burroughs

#3 Just listening to music now actually

 today's achievement: i just figured out how to do the hash symbol on Macbook.