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, [...]

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 to you [...]

Thorne Hall

GARY: Instead of working, I’m going to go home, caramelize the crisper’s two floppy carrots in some hot marijuana oil with onions, and take it from there.
BEA: Don’t. You’ll hate yourself on Monday. To say nothing of Sunday. You have a profound amount of work to do.
GARY: I know that, Bea. But but but but [...]

Big

“I’m the one who played Pemulis for him,” confirmed Big’s big brother when contacted by phone. “Girl with Curious Hair” came about, he said matter-of-factly, “because I told him stories in my living room while listening to a Keith Jarrett record.”
Wonderful short DFW-errata-sleuthing essay by Michael Casper (via Quoinstone)

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 in [...]

The Institutionist

(That’s what I kept thinking Nicholson Baker’s new novel was called. The Institutionist. Did you mean: The Institutionalist?!?!??!)
(Still braindead.) Anyway:
Geoff Dyer on Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist (in the Abu Dhabi National):
It’s a bonkers idea, but as we all know, any given sentence can be galvanised by a single surprising word (which is also, as Yeats [...]

Brainstorming Session

SHANNON: Maybe we should have called this a barn-storming session!
[General laughter.]
SHANNON: [Cont] No but really, Jacob, you haven’t been updating the admin site, and we’ve all fallen behind because of your laziness. What’s been going on?
JACOB: Well, I stopped being a vegetarian, and it’s really thrown my digestion for a loop. I also started smoking [...]

St. Ex-Frassissi

I didn’t realize Charles Bernstein and Jon Lovitz had done ads for the Yellow Pages together. (via Lilith-Anne Spoonbreads)
Click here to read my review of I Am Not Sidney Poitier and the Half-Blood Prince, by Percival Everett (with JK Rowling) in the Summer issue of The St. Exfrazzissi Quarterly
When you look in the mirror, what [...]

For the to-be-read (2-bread) file: Jesse Nathan’s giant essay on “an Italian poet named Leonardo Sinisgalli“. Should be good!
Also: Everything sucks
And: Everything is terrible
And while I’m at it: Steamboats are ruining everything

Ezra Buchla of Gowns believes that his band’s brittle harmonies have a similar effect to gospel music. (“If people have souls, that’s the way [...]

private post

I have a degenerative retinal condition that causes severe night blindness
normally it only affects me at night/low-light situations
this week I’ve been having trouble seeing during the day, too
it’s supposedly supposed to  slowly encroach to my “normal” vision but this feels sudden
maybe I just need new glasses — my prescription is a different joint than the [...]