Pseu Braun

One of my favorite shows on WFMU is Pseu’s Thing with a Hook. Last year’s marathon I pledged and got her premium CD, brit fedex’d your playlist – pseu’s thing with a hook – sharp hooks vol 2, which was fantastic. Jim Noir — Key of C — stuck in my head since I heard [...]

A Failure of Concern

Finally finished “A Failure of Concern,” Ben Marcus’s story in the January issue of Harper’s. I need to reread it. It’s funny, disturbing, baffling. There is a strange paragraph–amid the rest of the strange paragraphs–near the end: The detective remains folded over himself, coughing weakly, and I might be inclined to wonder if my syntax [...]

Reverberating Forth from the Antipodes

Brian Boyd, Ron Rosenbaum, and Leland de la Durantaye appeared on Australian national radio yesterday to discuss the fate of V. Nabokov’s final unpublished novel. The host had the hots for Rosenbaum and didn’t use Boyd well. Boyd is the only panelist to have read The Original of Laura. He says it’s riddled with lacunae, [...]

Unchastened Drums

“Good taste” — an idea that means quite a lot in this category of the Grammys — can be telegraphed quickly by reducing the role of the drums. In last night’s dream I quoted the above line from Ben Ratliff’s article on why Herbie Hancock’s lamest record won a Grammy for Best Record. I then [...]

Sordid Boons

I ate a tuna melt and waited an hour then ran 12 miles. The thing happened again where I assume an hour is enough to digest a tuna melt but even 4 miles in it’s still with me. The line from Wordsworth often gets stuck in my head when this happens: The world is too [...]

victory lap dances

bad pun, bad morning, bad hugz big pun, big morning, big hugz bug juice, bug harmony, bug rugs