My College Radio Application

Dear mom and dad, I went to college from 1999-2003, where I lived, ate, breathed, and smoked college radio (WOBC-FM) all day every day. Then, with a year left, I dropped out to move to CA to work for a magazine. I worked there for the next eight years. Then I fell in love with [...]

Fatty

Hey Cutie! Well, if I’m not blogging, I don’t know who is… Best anagram for great is always Greta. I had to write this thing so I took care of other fake-important business and finally barnstormed my way out the house by maybe 1:15. Stopped at cafe number one, where my internet doesn’t work. Drank [...]

“With a beard, St. Joseph; without, the Virgin Mary”

I began writing a comment on this post by Ed Park, where he politely disagreed with Jenny Davidson’s negative response to the style of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time – but after two Stella Artois and some Ryvita crackers, I’ve decided to host my thoughts here, in my own air-conditioned corner of [...]

Let This Hangover Be Not Wasted

I’m in a book club with a whole bunch of pseudonyms: Jeremiah’d, Paulie Groundphones, Li’l Broheim, Shampoosie, et al. Maybe their pseudonyms should be taken from the book we’re reading, instead of from the jovial thin air above, since the book is already populated by hundreds of perfectly named minor characters. But I’d want an [...]

The Sleepiness of the Text

I found this passage from The Pleasure of the Text gratifying: And yet, it is the very rhythm of what is read and what is not read that creates the pleasure of the great narratives: has anyone ever read Proust, Balzac, War and Peace, word for word? (Proust’s good fortune: from one reading to the [...]

personal webdiary

Just bought a $1 used copy of Rogue Male on the Internet based on a one-sentence zero-argument recommendation from a respected reader-colleague-friend (“Read Rogue Male!”). Found out after I placed the order (shipping from Texas cost three times as much as the book) that it was reissued in 2007 by NYRB Classics. I have had [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Eyeball Soup

There is a bowl of chili here. Steam rises from its beans and meatflecks. It billows politely around a dollop of cold sour cream. As you gaze into the stew, my face—the face of a young, obese Steven Spielberg, “replete” with undirty baseball cap and full Jewish hair fanning out from beneath the cap’s circumference—appears [...]

The Passion According to B.M.

Benjamin Moser on “Why You Should Know Clarice Lispector” Colm Tóibín, at a wedding in Italy, rushed up to me to proclaim his love for her, and said he would do “anything anything!” to get more people to read her. Orhan Pamuk, who had read “The Passion According to G.H.” in Turkish, confessed at breakfast [...]