Fort Colleague

I know it’s a stereotypically fun thing to do, “look at me, I am so cute, I’m making sushi at home,” but hey let me tell you making sushi at home is really super fun! Gerhard Richter’s daughters and I biked to the unbelievably awesome Nijiya Market in Japantown and bought all the good stuff, brought it home, threw some John Mayall on the hi-fi, and got cookin’! Highly recommended. Kid-friendly fun. Twelve stars. More top-rated San Francisco picks from the Lord’s own iCal:

• TONIGHT THAT MEANS IN ONLY A FEW HOURS 6:30 p.m. Blake Butler presents some hand-crafted languagey sentences from his mouth to your waxy little ear-mouths, Dog-Eared Books, 900 Valencia St. (@ 20th). Feat. Meg Pokrass & “Raw Kimchee, the Feminist Emcee.”
• TOMORROW Matthew Zapruder et al at the RADAR Reading series, “san francisco public library / main branch / latino reading room / basement level / 6:00pm / always free”
• ALSO TOMORROW HOW CAN YOU CHOOSE EILEEN MYLES 7 pm at CCA,
  SAN FRANCISCO CAMPUS, TIMKEN LECTURE HALL
  1111 EIGHTH STREET (AT 16TH & WISCONSIN)
• ALSO TOMORROW Vivian Girls at Bottom of the Hill
• ALSO TOMORROW “Tom’s band” “La Corde” at the Knockout, with “airfix kits,” “rank xerox” 9:30, free show
• THURSDAY: “Carnivorous Virility, or Becoming-Dog”, 5.15pm, 3335 Dwinelle, UC Berkeley, I am treating this lecture like a psychedelic rock show
• FRIDAY: A lot going on incl. aforementioned Joe Wenderoth thing in Oakland but all is precluded for Van Dyke Parks with Clare and the Reasons and opening act Josh Mease,  7:30 p.m. Swedish American Hall!!!!!!! Discover America!!!!
• Sunday is VALENTINE’S DAY. Remember, ladies, Valentine’s Day is for HIM, TOO, some band called “Lights” is playing at the independent, it’s the most romantic day of the year, it’s like the Superbowl Sunday of Love, not to be missed, Valentines Day, highly recommended

Trash Forest

There’s a T.C. Boyle story in the copy of Harper’s in the office bathroom. Yep: this is one of those blog posts where the author writes about a short story he read serially over the course of a week of visits to the bathroom. It’s a genre on the Internet, you knew that. I haven’t even finished the story yet. It’s called “My Pain Is Worse Than Your Pain.” It’s still in the bathroom, so I don’t  have it in front of me for reference. I should wait to write this blog post until I’ve finished the story. I received two friendly acquaintance comments about this blog, positive ones, which means in this space I have to become angry and toddler-style and poo-poo all over the place in order to set it back to “Freedom of Expression” mode. If I let the happy friendly acquaintance comments make me too happy then I will get stuck permanently writing sentences like these: Gary sipped his fourth cup of coffee as he refreshed the browser window. “Sheila?!?!” he wondered. Then: “Where the Fuck is Kleist?!?!” Just kidding. Mouse over the brickette. Barbecue just kidding. Just kidding. I’ll write those sentences whether you like “me” (to) or not.  The climax of the Boyle story seems to come very close to the beginning. The story could’ve ended after two pages and I would’ve been satisfied. The story while about pain and suffering and humiliation generated a great deal of pleasure for me. There were times when I felt ecstatic reading it. I’m sorry if I’m forcing you to picture me reading Harper’s in my office bathroom. I work in a fun office where you can leave any books you want in the bathroom and no one comes up to your desk later saying, “The books in the bathroom, they make me sick to my stomach. It’s disgusting. Seeing them in there, warped from dirty water damage, forces me to imagine all of you guys individually sitting in there, chuckling over the Readings, shitting and pissing. This is a foul place.” Most of my coworkers have been made to cry at some point during their tenure. Is that true? Probably. We’re all eleven years old, and eleven-year-olds cry when they’re upset. It’s a high-pressure office, but sometimes we drink beers at our desks! I can make as many marijuana jokes as I want and I never get in trouble. A good cry, hey, it’s all part of the rich panoply, pageantry, tapestry, tapenade, papistry, I hate myself. This blog is fiction, all rights reserved, no part may be reproduced without express written permission of the author. © 2010 Goodjobbb. I don’t actually have a job, I’m not an editor of anything, despite what Google or the New York Times Paper Cuts Blogroll tells you, that was a joke, I live in Paris with my boyfriend, I am 23 years old, people often tell me I look like Selma Blair. I was surprised to see that the T.C. Boyle story went on for several more pages after the “climax.” The story is so good that its length becomes a boon. “I ordered a small pad thai to go but they gave me an entire huge lunch special what a BOON!” I read recently about this same phenomenon in Anna Karenina: the big narrative wad gets blown early, and then there are several hundred subsequent and inexplicably still-interesting pages. I read this in the introduction to Elif Batuman’s The Possessed, I think. Of course she put it much better. Nota Bene: after I finish the TC Boyle story I’m not going to come back “here” and “finish” this “blog post.” It’s already done. Writing is not rewriting any more. That ended in 1983, with the publication of Funny Fake Ekphrasis, the legendary collaborative experimental novel written by Thomas Berger and Nora Ephron. After my daughters matriculate at ‘Uni’ I’m not going to “come back here” and post photos of them in their caps and gowns. If you’d like to picture me writing (typing, really, this is hardly writing, Truman Capote on JD Kerouackinger, etc) (what) (nothing) (I hate “you”) (“fly fishing the stream of consciousness”) (MousePad SexDreams) (ScareQuotes Boat Rental, Inc) (I Am Going Blind) (FlyFishing For Cynpathy®) (“I’m Busy At Work, I Don’t Have Time To Be Typing All This™”) (Strunk & White Mix [DFA]), picture a terrified woman wearing a tunic pouring purified water into an large jar of Sun Tea.

Joe Wenderoth reading in Oakland on Feb. 12th at 7 p.m.

Foundering mouse,

Foundering mouse,
Foundering mouse,
You normally sign your emails
with a single capital initial
followed by a period.

Your last apologetic email was so sad
with its lowercased initial.
The letter looked like it’d been drenched with water,
hair all matted down.

What letter was it?
Who are you talking about?

Nothing. No one.
Meet me at Ministry?

No.
Meet me at SaladSpace?

No.
Cream comes out of your tear ducts?

Nein, dog
Ah, so, brows and butts,
my two favorite parts of the friendship

Shat Blad
Bled Blonde

Barf wind

Shit-blog

Pram-Wheelie

Bledsoe

Massachussetts’ Lagers

Cramps

Class war:

Pavement :: Vampire Weekend

Saturday, February 6th 9pm
Sean Hayes,
Sean Smith (Citay),
The Fresh and Onlys
windy-gap

Amnesia 853 Valencia St.
San Francisco, CA
$10 donation, $25 gets you a free beer, $35 and over gets you two free beers

www.standwithhaiti.org

“Beetle Boop”

A classic fave from Michael Kupperman

Lords of Saturday

22-year-old cool-guy rides his bike through a red light. On the next block, a different, uglier 22-year-old cool-guy rides his bike through a red light. The Lord of Saturday takes a sip of water from a half-crushed plastic bottle as he coasts. It’s 10 a.m. This is their element. They are the Lords of Saturday. First guy I’ll call Garrick. Second one was Earl.

Over on the other side of the country, in Brooklyn, three hours earlier, the same thing happened. Their East Coast analogues, the Lords of Saturday East™, rode their bikes quickly and effortlessly through light traffic, cool-guys in excellent grey jackets. San Francisco must have had at least 30 such grey Lords this morning, spread evenly across the city, pedaling their way to—what? Sex with TK, noise pancakes? A shitty weekend job, a mostly empty office? The library, the beach, or Bethany’s? Park, office, mom’s. Hip bakery, weak bakery. Certain death. Record store.

The Most Important Short Story of Your Generation

NPR’s Guy Risdall sipped his fourth cup of coffee. He listened to the first Helmet record on headphones as he responded to emails.

The song played so loud, and Guy felt so high from the caffeine that, even though he could see a clear sky through the window in the corner of his vision, he still hallucinated a gentle rain falling. It battered big elm leaves down into the carhoods.

Clarissa Explains Most of It

Horsey is champing at the bit! He is a professor of Spanglish at Domenicka Girl University of Barbados County, which is a hot little sub-county within Marin, in Northern California. Horsey teaches:

• poetry
• indie-rock criticism
• short story
• table mannahzzzz
• peacock
• shootin’
• jewish studies
• ovary sciences
• a river runs through it (fly fishing)
• ENGL204: “John Fante and the Beats”
• Java
• NATTYSCI003: “VeggieTales from the CryptCyde”
• Gymn
• Gyne
• Avatar Studies
• CRWRI404: Politically Correct, Pseudoexperimental Erotica (practicum)
• tabla (indian classical music)

A student walks up to Horsey on one of the campus’s windy paths. “Hey I’m trying to square Marx Freud and Darwin but it’s hard. These thinkers only really make sense to me when I’m having sex with another person. When I’m in the library or in my dorm room trying to write a paper it doesn’t make sense. But, you know, when I’m having sexual intercourse, during the duration of the intercourse it all makes sense. I feel like I get marx darwin and freud.” Horsey winks. “In that order?” The student frowns. “No.”

HORSEY: Well, come by my office hours, we’ll talk about this problem.

STUDENT: Professors are like therapists in this way, non? [She lights a cigarette]

HORSEY: “Oui.” [He does not speak French]

T.R.A.N.S.M.I.S.S.I.O.N.

I.N.T.E.R.R.U.P.T.E.D.

Link to an Interesting Article About Twitter

SHOUTING INTERNET GUY: I CAN’T WAIT UNTIL EVERYONE LEAVES AND IT’S JUST ME IN THE OFFICE BLASTING STREAMING WEIRD INSTRUMENTAL HIP HOP AND MY TINY BOWL OF HONEY ROASTED CASHEWS RUNNETH OVER, WEARING A CRAZY WIG OF PAD THAI THAT FALLS INTO MY EYES, GCHATTING WITH MC PAUL BARMAN, GCHATTING with self-loathing people in New York who are not sad that JD Salinger is dead, who are not sad that Twitter wrongfully terminated a Jewish woman last night, who are not sad that a robotic cat raped a drawing of a mouse in plein air on 32nd St and Harrison in San Francisco that same night; these fuckers are unmoved by the outrageous story of all the caffeine in an unsteeped Earl Grey teabag deciding to GET HIGH USING A GRAVITY BONG, and then go back into the teabag, and then a toddler, only 3 years of old, ordered the tea from his Russian nanny, demanded tea, NANNY FETCH ME TEA, and so the Russian nanny dutifully steeped it, and served it, and the kid died, 86 years later, of natural causes. Nobody  is concerned that I’m not friends with Harmony Korine? That I have Dutch gentials with the brain of a Dane? That I sometimes dip articles from Harper’s into boiled water and watch them steep and then drink the tea while I read the leaves?

I’m glad Jessica Hopper was outraged by the new Vampire Weekend record. I think she’s a smart and funny writer. Martin Amis is, too, but that doesn’t mean JM Coetzee denies his readers the pleasure principle. I’m not fluent in Italian, French, German, or Swiss French. I’ve never brought a Swiss woman to climax. I’ve never denied the pleasure principle to JM Coetzee. He asks, and I tell. Every time. @moodygroovin is the darkest, dankest 140-character assassin on twitter. Every author who’s ever published a novel as a paperback original with FSG or Picador has at one point in print claimed that one needs to be a coffee-drinker in order to be a successful novelist, and each and every one of them is wrong. My fictional female alter ego, Beth Pails, drinks nothing but hot tea in greens and Grays and wrote a novel that Amis and Coetzee agreed could “only have been produced by the Internet and its attendant depravities.” It sold several, several copies. If I were a woman, I would have the body of a woman. Do you remember that time I paraphrased Steve Martin’s line from L.A. Story about how he would spend all day feeling himself up if he were a woman when we (you, the reader, and me, Bethany) were in seventh grade and Mrs. White was scandalized and I got in “pretty big” trouble?

One more paragraph: “I still like hip hop.” Of all your favorite living novelists under the age of 40, which do you think likes hip hop least? This is among the questions I’ll be asking tonight on a panel I’m moderating at the Garricks’ Library, 800 Valencia St, just kidding, 5:15 p.m. Appearing on the panel will be Cameron Stipené, Shellie Coup, and (I’m just kidding, 800 Valencia is the increasingly gourmet bodega on the corner) Lydia Brousserrie. $5 suggested donation. Enter through Rhea’s Deli.

Speedy Marie

DEB: Don’t waste your youth. Don’t waste this coffee high. Get it down on paper. Grab life by the clear plastic tab and tug gently until you reach orgasm.

VIJAY: What?

DEB: Don’t pretend like you don’t know what I’m talking about, Vijay.

V: I know what you’re talking about.

DEB: Thank you.

[East-coast trees flash by. It's all green. The trees may as well not have trunks. They're just hanging, diagonal foliage. The forest is empty of deer. Insects accumulate on the windshield, but Vijay and Deb, hallucinating, interpret this as an argument against the existence of insects outside the car.]

VIJAY [Driving]: We’re approaching eighty miles an hour.

DEB: [Hallucinating]: Is that the name of a town?

VIJAY: Yes. “Eighty Miles Per Hour.” Population: 60,000. Mayor: Debbie K. Leamme. Public libraries: Yes.

[I should probably get back to work. Big heap trouble focusing. Every day. Forever.]