Language Bom

Dear future grandchildren,
I’m writing this blog for you. Someday all blogs will be engraved on the bottoms of wide flat stones and you’ll slide your finger across a surfaceless touchpad and the stone will turn and you’ll read these words and think about the life of the man who begot you.
Hi!
I put on my semi-rumpled [...]

Lingua Citadel

I work for a small nonprofit theater company; a theater festival in the Hague (Den Haag), Netherlands, inexplicably invited members of our company to a festival they are putting on but all the senior members of my small theater company got lockjaw syndrome and painful-butt disease so by the luck of the draw I got [...]

Middle initials omitted.

Officers from Beijing’s Industry and Commerce Administration stopped the sale of “ObaMao” merchandise showing Obama dressed as Mao Zedong. The Republican National Committee said that its health-insurance plan would no longer pay for abortions. The Cheesecake Factory agreed to pay $345,000 to six male employees who were sexually harassed by other male employees, the number [...]

David Crosby fan fiction

—Why was the American Office filmed in Berlin?
—It wasn’t.
—I read it was.
—Where?
—In Sergio Aragones’s autobiography, Plato Fails
—You are constantly joking around, it makes it fun to be around you
—Ya, thanks for saying so
—Except I heard you made a rape joke yesterday.
—I did. I regret it. I already apologized to Tom.
—Why’d you do it?
—I was drunk. [...]

In my deepening commitment to sound completely stoned at all times even though I am not stoned:
Seeing Animal Collective (as Avey Tare & Panda Bear) in a waterlogged basement in Oberlin, Ohio, in 2000 or 2001, one of the best shows I’ve ever seen, and then watching them get bigger over [...]

Pummelmilk

ODIN: Will you strike a man’s tooth?
DESIREE: No sir! I will not. [She resumes typing.]
ODIN: How will you know the shine of the quivering swine?? Right????
DESIREE: [Takes out her earbuds] What? Oh… the shivering swine? Hey, can we talk after work? I’m super super busy right now. [Smiles sweetly]
ODIN: Will a gank-rag rise into a [...]

lo-carb cheez-cake

I think you should be a LITTLE MORE FAMOUS before you eat that.
ok
now?
I don’t think you’re QUITE famous enough to eat that.
ok.
…
can i eat it now
no. you’re LESS famous than you were when we STARTED this conversation!
oh. shoot! I don’t know what to do!!
go on tv, start a newspaper column, I dunno, don’t ask ME!
it [...]

Cy Preclops

—I haven’t had a drink since Saturday.
—It’s Wednesday.
—I know
—You sound like an alcoholic.
—I know. It still feels good not to drink. I’m going to keep going with it.
—Good! That’s good.
—Every time I make a proclamation like this I immediately undermine myself, but I sort of want to become totally straight-edge: no booze, no drugs, no [...]

personal pan pizza

—Quit drinking coffee, day 4, still feel a little moony, a little spacey, but pretty much out of the woods
—Blog, internet, writing, friends, harmful, peaceful occlusions. Dog just realized “Mystery Science Theater 3000″ is a brilliant name for a (brilliant) TV show. Couldn’t get enough of the photographs accompanying this NYT article about The Onion, [...]

Violent and original dreams

Will Self on JG Ballard in Granta 107:
Ballard, the most outlandish of fictional imaginers, had always dug out his wellspring by the hearth, and remained the perfect exemplar of Magritte’s dictum: a bourgeois in his life, a revolutionary in his dreams.
Another maxim, expressing a similar sentiment, is attributed to Flaubert. From his entry on [...]