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September 1st, 2008
 | 02:42 am - Further evidence
HOW LONG WILL OUR GOVERNMENT DENY THE EXISTENCE OF SALADCATS?
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August 28th, 2008
 | 02:09 am - Goddammit Walter
As always, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) substitute has been abetting my obsessions:
eyeteeth: I'm doing well I think, I haven't mentioned Freeman in several days.
substitute: That's because he's not behind you right now.
substitute: He's on your sofa drinking cherry Coke
eyeteeth: goddammit Walter get your shoes offa there
substitute: If you're just going to sit around, stop playing with the icepick and go to the store. Get some eggs and a bottle of Chianti.
eyeteeth: And if I find any more goatee hairs in the sink I'm going to shove your OTHER four kids into the river.
eyeteeth: Haha, some eggs and a bottle of Chianti, why is that funny?
( Bonus picture of Attica )
eyeteeth: The first lobotomies were performed on dogs, Moniz did that.
substitute: The rest were performed BY dogs, but not many people know this.
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August 17th, 2008
 | 11:22 pm - I'm not even in an office this week
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August 5th, 2008
| 01:28 am - Thrilling true tales
That last guy is my Mammon coworker Mike and in fairness I should mention that I do not wish to make time with him. That panel is included merely to represent the kind of geekiness I bring to the table. By the way, if you find an old copy of Henry Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage -- mine is from 1926 -- by all means look up the article "Preposition at End." Ideally it should be read aloud to the accompaniment of a military band:
...The fact is that the remarkable freedom enjoyed by English in putting its prepositions late & omitting its relatives is an important element in the flexibility of the language. The power of saying A state of dejection such as they are absolute strangers to (Cowper) instead of A state of dejection to which they are absolute strangers, or People worth talking to instead of People with whom it is worth while to talk, is not one to be lightly surrendered.... That depends on what they are cut with is not improved by conversion into That depends on with which they are cut; & too often the lust of sophistication, once blooded, becomes uncontrollable, & ends with, That depends on the answer to the question as to with what they are cut. Those who lay down the universal principle that final prepositions are "inelegant" are unconsciously trying to deprive the English language of a valuable idiomatic resource, which has been used freely by all our greatest writers except those whose instinct for English idiom has been overpowered by notions of correctness derived from Latin standards....
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July 25th, 2008
 | 12:19 am - Rock and roll
"Rock" is Kid Rock, and "roll" is what Warren Zevon is doing in his grave right now:
Seriously why. What does "Werewolves of London" have to do with your shitty paint-by-numbers song about boning some jailbait in Michigan? Also, the word "bottle" does not rhyme with the word "tomorrow." Also, this video is crap. If I wanted to watch endless footage of some dude in a boat I'd watch Catalina Caper and if I wanted to see ugly people making out shamelessly in public I'd just get on the A train.
The funny thing is that if Kid Rock weren't a dumbass he might know that Warren himself wrote his own song referencing "Sweet Home Alabama," and he could have sampled that, which would have been kind of clever even if (as seems likely) it didn't make "All Summer Long" or its accompanying visuals any less shitty. Warren's song is called "Play it All Night Long," and the version I like best is the one from his live album Learning to Flinch, recorded after he got sober. Here he is performing it in 1982, when he was, you know, not:
"There ain't much to country livin'/Sweat, piss, jizz, and blood." You know, I bet Warren liked Flannery O'Connor. But the point is, to recap, Warren Zevon was awesome, Kid Rock can take a flying leap. Incidentally, this is the song that inspired David Letterman to remark, "I'm no linguist, but I believe Warren Zevon may be the only man in the history of human communication to use the word brucellosis in a song."
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July 23rd, 2008
 | 08:06 pm - The violent bore me to death
There are authors I like and authors I don't like. Fortunately for me the first list is quite long (Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, Sinclair Lewis, etc.) and the second is pretty short (Kurt Vonnegut, Cormac McCarthy, etc.). But there is a third list that is even shorter, and that is authors I just don't get. I'm glad there are only a handful of names in this category, because it confuses and upsets me when I can't figure out why someone wrote something or what that something is trying to say or, most baffling, why other people seem to understand when I come up blank.
This latter list, off the top of my head, is as follows:
Joseph Conrad
Ernest Hemingway
Henry James
D. H. Lawrence
Doris Lessing
Flannery O'Connor
There are mitigating factors for all of these. Of Joseph Conrad I have read very little, and am determined to read more, if only because substitute likes him and was sad the last time I said I didn't. I also told him I would try reading A Movable Feast because I have mostly only read Hemingway's Nick Adams stories and as far as I can tell they're about nothing happening in a lot of choppy sentences. Henry James wrote a few things I like and possibly even understand, such as "The Beast in the Jungle" and What Maisie Knew, so I say I don't get him mostly because of The Portrait of a Lady, which seems to send so many people into raptures. I only wondered, from the first page to the last, why everyone in the book was so crazy about Isobel Archer. She struck me as insipid, except when compared with Pansy Osmond, whose insipidity is perhaps literally unsurpassed in Western fiction. Most of the other characters, meanwhile, were merely loathsome. I started reading D. H. Lawrence because I got a snippet of Women in Love as part of the body of a spam e-mail, and in snippets I can enjoy him, but I don't understand the way his characters talk or behave or attempt to kill each other and then act like nothing happened, and perhaps I would need to be British to understand his obsession with class differences and in particular his obsession with the way uneducated working-class people annoy the sensitive rich with their rough manners. As for Doris Lessing, I don't have much to say about her except that I read The Golden Notebook many years ago and should probably try it again. But more recent attempts at other Lessing novels have been no more successful, so maybe I just lack a gene.
That brings us to Flannery O'Connor. I am trying again, as I have tried more than once in the past, to understand her. Several things impede me. Flannery was a devout Catholic from the deep South of fifty years ago and I am a half-assed half-Jew from modern New York and we simply do not see eye to eye: when a guy drinks unpasteurized milk and gets Bang's disease she sees some kind of religious judgment, whereas I just see an idiot who should know better if he's going to live on a farm. When she writes about poor blacks who speak phonetically and live in shacks and hunt possums I have to take her word for them, never having known people who fit that description. And it's not that I don't trust her about stuff like that, or about poor whites living in medium-sized Southern towns and going to whores -- it's not that I'm not perfectly willing to take her word, it's just that having taken it there I am in the shack or on the bus and why? Why am I here, Flannery?
Writers all have their obsessions. William Faulkner got the notion of a little girl's muddy underwear just visible as she climbs a pear tree, and around that image he wrote The Sound and the Fury. Even a thing as small as that will stick in your mind, and then you have to write about it, in order to stick it in other people's minds. Flannery's obsessions are sickening familial unpleasantness, contemptuous men who live with their mothers, stupid white bigots (often the mothers), book-smart white people who think they're better than the bigots (often the grown sons), the clash between dour Christians and angry non-Christians, and shocking violence suddenly inflicted on the complacent. You'd think I'd like the violence, but it brings no catharsis. Even murder and suicide seem part and parcel of the general dull horror of the Flanneryscape -- a world where human interaction is a constant torment and, as the Misfit says, "It's no real pleasure in life."
Flannery is obviously a vastly talented writer, and many smart people have called her very flattering things, comparing her to Sophocles and I don't know what all. So what am I missing? Is it just that I don't know my Christian theologies very well? I can't figure it out -- with one exception, which is the reason I haven't yet given up: the story called "Parker's Back." In this story tattooed womanizer O. E. Parker finds himself married to one of those dour Christians, and somehow unable either to abandon her or to please her, until he hits upon the bright idea of getting an image of Christ tattooed on his back. It is a very funny but also very sad idea and I see Flannery's genius in every line. But I do not see it in endless descriptions of halfwit Enoch Emery annoying the hell out of people, say, or sick fathers annoying the hell out of their daughters, or racist mothers annoying the hell out of their sons.
Ultimately, and this is a theory I'll have to test on some more stories of hers, I think the key to understanding Flannery may be to read all that unpleasantness as the opportunity for grace. The worse the thing is that happens to you, the better the chance that you'll straighten up and find Christ. According to this logic, if a serial killer comes along and murders your whole family, it's your lucky day. This theology probably worked great for Flannery, who had an agonizing autoimmune disease of which she died young, but to me it's just brutal and perverse. Of course any theology must account for brutality and perversity, but it seems as if that's all Flannery does, over and over. No one in her world is ever happy or good, yet the suicide of a child is supposed to elicit -- gratitude? Because it provides an opportunity for his father to be saved and go to Heaven? No, that's just fucked up, Flannery. I'm trying, but I keep coming back to that conclusion.
So we're wrestling, Flannery and I, to use a biblical image of which she might approve. Don't worry, I can take her. She had lupus!
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July 9th, 2008
| 02:48 am - The Zeppo
Yes, Buffy fans, the the Zeppo, Herbert Manfred Marx, youngest by far of the five Marx brothers, youngest by even more if you only count the four who made movies. The next youngest of those was Groucho, Zeppo's elder by eleven years. In 1914 the three elder Marxes got their nicknames in the course of a poker game with a friend and went on to give their younger brothers nicknames to match. Groucho would claim thirteen-year-old Zeppo was named after the Zeppelin because it was invented the year he was born, but Groucho is an unreliable narrator and his dates do not check out. What seems more likely is Harpo's explanation that they named their kid brother after Mr. Zippo, a trained chimp on the vaudeville circuit. Like the chimp, Herbie was athletic, and anyway how could you not tease a brother that much younger than you? Chico, the eldest, was twice his age.
( Click! There are pictures! )
But maybe you're not convinced. Maybe you need a less subtle argument.
( The less subtle argument )
Now that's hard to refute.
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June 29th, 2008
 | 02:33 am - Teethmas
Today is my birthday! It's time for a poll.
Poll #1213057 He thinks I look alike
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: AllHow do you pronounce the eldest Marx Brother's name?
It's also time for Chapter Two of this novel I'm writing. Remember that thing? This part took me a damn long time because of all the research. I hope you will read and enjoy it.
( Stuffy the Vampire Slayer )
Happy Teethmas to everyone!
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May 29th, 2008
| 12:59 am - It's too bad I can't actually draw
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May 26th, 2008
| 05:18 pm - Free stuff
Folks if you are in New York and want to cart it away, come take my stuff! Currently on offer are the following:
1) A GREAT BIG LOFT BED. It's had several owners but it's nice and sturdy, and cats love it. Eighty-two inches high in total, though the mattress itself sits several inches lower than that; 59" wide, 80" long, ladder included of course. Come on over and I'll help you take it apart.
2) A GREAT BIG DRESSER, made of dark wood with brass drawer-pulls, that I've had since I was a kid. This damn thing is indestructible. Four big drawers, two little drawers: measures 46" high by 30.5" wide by 19" deep.
3) A SMALL FILE CABINET, five drawers, just like this one: http://www.samflaxny.com/browse.cfm/4,1683.html.
4) THIS ELLIPTICAL MACHINE: http://products.howstuffworks.com/fitness-quest-eclipse-1100-hr-a-elliptical-machine-review.htm. It's very nice, I just don't use it much.
5) A NICE LOW TABLE WITH SCROLLED METAL LEGS that is probably supposed to be a planter.
Also there's an armchair I found on the sidewalk several years ago, but probably no one wants that though it is in good condition. Spread the word!
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May 15th, 2008
 | 03:50 am - Hands up
Who wants to be on the filter to read my stories? I just finished another one.
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April 25th, 2008
 | 02:41 am - Spring turns me into Pants from Jerkcity
There really is a Bulgarian boy though I don't believe he is a goth. I met him at a party a while ago and we geeked out about Bulgaria all night. Probably he doesn't meet many Americans who will do that with him. Despite this he has not responded to my latest e-mail, possibly because he thinks I am only using him for his nationality. There are other ways I would like to use him!
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April 22nd, 2008
 | 02:01 am - Slaying of the firstborn
I used to write about serial killers an ungodly lot and now I don't do it that much anymore, which I think is good. This first paragraph kind of fell out of the sky onto me while I was visiting my sister and brother-in-law and nephew for Passover, and then I wrote some stuff to go with it.
I had loved him and so when he turned up with his throat slit, like I do, though all over his kitchen floor which is unlike, I was 150% pissed and went to talk to Danny and Declan and Balboa and Tancred-and-Tiffy and Gas Station and Nervous Necro, who hates that name but is stuck with it. We are none of us joiners except Tancred-and-Tiffy with each other but someone usually owes someone a favor so I thought one of them might know something. To find him like that, I said, was like someone pissing in my face. Which one of you pissed in my face?
"Fuck, just get another one," said Gas Station. Of the eight of us, or seven if you count Tancred-and-Tiffy as one, he is the least methodical. Declan and Nervous Necro are the most and the rest of us are somewhere in between but I had been saving this one. How many times had I imagined it and then to have it come out like this?
"Are you sure you didn’t do it yourself?" asked Tiffy. I would have said a certain thing in response except that Tancred scares the piss out of any rational person. He is about seven feet tall and I have seen what he can do. It is worse than anything I have ever done. Depending on your sensibilities I would say either Danny or Nervous Necro is the absolute worst, but Tancred-and-Tiffy come close. I started to cry because I had loved him and he was spoiled and Tiffy said she was sorry and Nervous Necro called me a fag. I punched him in the throat because he is about five and a half feet tall and though I have also seen what he can do it is impossible to be afraid of a face like his. He uses this to his advantage.
Confidential to my sister: I will have some stuff to say about your beautiful son soon, probably in the form of stick figures.
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April 11th, 2008
| 02:23 am - Just like everybody else does
Where the hell do you go to meet people in this city? Twenty minutes on Time Out New York's website and I already feel like a fucking Smiths song. And is there no acknowledged middle ground between "gunning for matrimony" and "gunning for an anonymous rum-soaked three-way that I'll record and post on my MySpace page"? Because while I like sex as much as anyone, I would prefer that it not be with someone abhorrent, and there simply is no way to weed out abhorrent people without some kind of minimum waiting period like for handguns. Am I the only person who has realized this? The other people who have realized it, where do I go to meet them?
I just want to enjoy a man's company and have a few drinks with him and flirt a little and maybe touch hands. This is a universal need. And it has been years.
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April 8th, 2008
| 02:08 am - Heresy funnies
It is with great pride that I present to you the longest single stick-figure comic I have ever created, sixteen straight panels of me acting like an unmedicated schizophrenic. The subject matter is sufficiently weird that I anticipate either a flood of responses or none at all. Which will it be?
( Bogomilism! )
Needless to say I glossed over a lot. Not everyone in Bulgaria was particularly keen on converting to Christianity, for example. Boris ended up executing a lot of people and having his own son blinded, but it worked, Bulgaria is Christian to this day. Furthermore, Boris is a saint. Considering the kind of things he did to people who disagreed with him, I would have canonized him too, just to keep from pissing him off.
That thing on my head in panel thirteen, incidentally, is not a fez but a traditional Bulgarian lambskin hat called a kalpak. Drawing myself in a kalpak was fun. I think it suits me, don't you?
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March 31st, 2008
 | 09:44 pm - Oyez
I want you people to know that I got nine out of ten questions right on this absurdly difficult quiz. How do you like me now?
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| 01:40 pm - Yes.
How Copy Editors Blow Off Steam
Metrosexual guy: If I was some fish...
Girl, not looking up from her bus schedule: Grammar just cried.
Metrosexual guy: I don't follow you.
Girl: Good, because if you did, I would have to have you arrested.
Metrosexual guy: I am so confused.
Girl: Do the words 'you are an idiot' confuse you?
Metrosexual guy: I hate you.
--28th & 5th
via Overheard in New York, Mar 29, 2008
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March 28th, 2008
| 05:21 pm - Pop
Just now I had a tasty sandwich, and returned to the Mammon offices thinking, as I have many times before, that when one speaks of smacking one's lips the lips are not actually what is being referred to, it is the tongue smacking against the palate. And this reminded me of something that happened two years ago.
One night I was sitting at the computer when I heard a strange popping noise as of the bursting of many small bubbles in sequence. I looked around, but could not discover where it was coming from. When it stopped, I went back to the computer. Then it happened again. After a few iterations of this I finally pinpointed the source of the weird noise: it was Attica, whom I had recently acquired, and who was sleeping on the sofa with her paws in the air. Cautiously I approached until I was close enough to discern why my cat was popping: her tongue was moving as she slept, repeatedly forming and breaking a vacuum seal against the roof of her mouth.
That was the first time I witnessed Attica dream-nursing, as she was to do often for the rest of her life. When she was awake she would try to get milk out of me, out of my clothing, and out of the blankets on my bed, by kneading with her front paws and rooting around with her muzzle, all the time wearing a look of intense concentration. (For kneading she preferred my gut, but she was not particular, and would attempt to extract milk from my arm or my eye or my cheekbone if it was closer to her paws.) When she was asleep her lips twitched and her tongue flicked in and out as she dreamed, I hope, milky dreams. I never heard her pop again, though.
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March 20th, 2008
| 02:59 pm - Attila the Bun
Bulgaria and environs have been coming up in my conversations a lot recently. substitute has been encouraging me. As a result, things like this happen on IRC. (Tildes represent laughter.)
eyeteeth: I'm a Slav 4 U
substitute: Slav 2 the Rhythm
eyeteeth: Balkan to the Oldies
substitute: Do do do do the Hussar
substitute: Moscow Moscow man, I wanna be a Moscow man
eyeteeth: Oh dude, you are way too good at this.
substitute: the golden thread that connects eastern europe and disco forever
eyeteeth: You hold the Kiev my heart.
substitute: At first I was afraid, I was Petrograd
eyeteeth: ~~~
eyeteeth: That's just fucked up.
substitute: why is this so easy?
eyeteeth: I DON'T KNOW
substitute: Oo oo oo oo Stalingrad, Stalingrad. Stalingraaaaaaaaaaad
substitute: C C C P, so much fun in the C C C P
eyeteeth: You can hang out with all the Boyars!
eyeteeth: Hun is the loneliest number that you'll ever do.
substitute: hahahaha
substitute: Hallelujah, it's raining Pnin
eyeteeth: ~~~
eyeteeth: I saw a werewolf drinking a tumbler of arrack at Trader Marko's.
substitute: And his hair was Magyar. VERY Magyar.
Poll #1157635 Everyone likes polls!
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: AllWhich of us should feel the most shame?
Despite the temperature, which has been forty-five degrees all day every day for what seems like years, I can tell spring is coming by certain unequivocal signs. A few brave pigeon cocks can be seen doing their weird dance for a few indifferent hens; the starlings' beaks have turned from black to bright yellow; and there are hot cross buns for sale in Therapy Park. Mm, buttercream icing.
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March 11th, 2008
| 04:27 am - Far Beyond Ruthven
You learn the funniest things reading about vampires. For example, did you know that John Polidori, the father of vampire fiction as we know it, named his vampire "Lord Ruthven" as a dig at his pal Byron? See, Byron's crazy ex-lover, Caroline Lamb, wrote a novel about their affair, and that was the name she gave his character. (I think I am justified in calling Caroline Lamb "crazy" because in attempting to win Byron back she had herself served to him at a restaurant -- naked, on a platter, covered with mint sauce. Mint sauce for lamb, get it? When I got it I didn't know whether I felt prouder of myself or more ashamed, posthumously, of her.) Two years after the story was published Polidori killed himself with hydrogen cyanide -- the stuff the Nazis later called Zyklon B -- but that's a footnote. The important thing is, after that it became quite a trend to write about heartless aristocratic vampires named Lord Ruthven. (That's pronounced to rhyme with given.) I don't know if this was especially because of the name's association with Byron, though his public image, that of a cruel and fashionable bastard who is somehow sensitive and vulnerable at the same time, still echoes in vampire literature. In any case there were dozens of these Ruthvens, in fiction and on the stage, most of them happily preying on virgins, until Dracula came along in 1897. He is the reason most people have not heard of them.
Count Dracula is an aristocratic vampire in the Ruthven mold, sexually both attractive and menacing, Byronic in his Weltschmerz and his unholy appetites, and I don't know why he knocked all those other vampires out, precisely because he did knock them out so comprehensively that I've never read any Polidori, or Heinrich August Marschner, or Viktor Rydberg, or Alexandre Dumas (senior). I have read Dracula, more than once, and I don't want anyone thinking I'm dissing Dracula, because I would never do such a thing -- if for no other reason than because of Professor Abraham Van Helsing, whom you will note Bram Stoker liked enough to give his own first name, and who is still one of my favorite characters in fiction. He is avuncular as all get out, but he will kick your ass.
When we came into Lucy's room I could see that Van Helsing had, with his usual forethought, been putting matters straight and making everything look as pleasing as possible. He had even brushed Lucy's hair, so that it lay on the pillow in its usual sunny ripples. When we came into the room she opened her eyes, and seeing him, whispered softly, "Arthur! Oh, my love, I am so glad you have come!"
…And then insensibly there came the strange change which I had noticed in the night. Her breathing grew stertorous, the mouth opened, and the pale gums, drawn back, made the teeth look longer and sharper than ever. In a sort of sleep-waking, vague, unconscious way she opened her eyes, which were now dull and hard at once, and said in a soft, voluptuous voice, such as I had never heard from her lips, "Arthur! Oh, my love, I am so glad you have come! Kiss me!"
Arthur bent eagerly over to kiss her, but at that instant Van Helsing, who, like me, had been startled by her voice, swooped upon him, and catching him by the neck with both hands, dragged him back with a fury of strength which I never thought he could have possessed, and actually hurled him almost across the room.
"Not on your life!" he said, "not for your living soul and hers!" And he stood between them like a lion at bay.
What is my point? My point is that sometimes, even when a convention exists, someone or something comes along that so thoroughly takes hold of that convention as to gain possession of it. Bram Stoker did it with vampire fiction at a time when his literary world was choked with vampire fiction. I want to do it too. Just to own the genre, that's all. To be the one who does it right.
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