2006-08-21, 7:34 p.m.: I forgot to add that the best thing about having surgery and hangin' with medicos and such was the fact that my doctor was, like, straight out of Hollywood doctordom! Like he should be starring in his own ortho-themed TV show. He was that cute and that stereotypically young-doctorly. Though maybe not that charismatic. The great thing about the hospital in general is that it is replete with villains and heroes of all stripes. The valorous and the dolorous, the hellions and rapscallions and the hos. They all gravitate towards medicine, seemingly. The Kaiser organization seems especially polarized in this degree. What's with that? Is the HMO a new kind of fascism or the bad socialism, the place they are manufacturing "the new mankind"? Or is it just me. I have little patience today. I really need to get out and see a movie. A good frosty alcoholic drink might all do the trick. Something frivolous and cruise-shippy. What the people in the forums at Cruisecritics.com would call "foo-foo." That always cracks me up: foo-foo. Vive la langue fran�aise, people. 0 comments
2006-08-21, 6:10 p.m.: I love the word bleak. I want to use it just to use it. I want to be bleak for bleak's sake. 0 comments
2006-08-17, 7:25 p.m.: I lost the Mandolin Quick Chord reference book and now I can't for the life of me figure out E-maj or A-maj. Got F down, though. To play the Hokey-Pokey you only need two chords, G and C. I am doing a translation about this, the Teasmade, arguably the best thing to come out of England since ... well, since then there has also been The Smiths so I don't know what my point it. Point is: I WANT a Teasmade. What could be more Brazil-esque?
I mean, is that really Laurence Fishburne on Pee-Wee's Playhouse? Who has been keeping this hush-hush all this time? Sudden rain but blue mottled sky and no shortage of light. It's almost my birthday. It will be the most unremarkable age ever. And unrebarkable, which is what I first typed. Nothing smells better than a freshly shampooed three-year-old, I tell you. I know because he's sitting right next to me. I just want to wrap myself up in a giant cableknit cashmere blanket, the softest thing ever. I dreamt about one last night, an artist's sort of a shawl if artists made shawls instead of books, crowded with appliques (though, alas, I think some of them were of hearts). A very beautiful blue-and-red thing. Then it turned into a sort of Survivor dream. We have had a lot of those around here; and Amazing Race dreams, which are really anxiety/travel/greed dreams. I want to sleep for eighteen hours and wake up to chocolate mousse. 0 comments
2006-08-17, 6:05 p.m.: I forgot 21. Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person, which I have also not read yet. But soon. Yesterday I made yoghurt for the very first time, using the yoghurt maker Gini gave me for Xmas. This is actually a record, Xmas gifts notoriously going unused for at least one year (or two, in the case of the special high-tech razor Pedro gave me in time immemorial). The average - or the median - or the mean (I am not a scientific person) for books is seven years. 0 comments
2006-08-16, 4:12 p.m.: Books received (this summer, since I broke my leg): 1. Blood Meridian 2. Independence Day 3. The Satanic Verses 4. Fury 5. A Room with a View 6. Howard's End 7. The New Encyclopedia of the Horse 8. Horses for Dummies 9. Quick Mandolin Chord Reference 10. J.S. Bach for Mandolin 11. The Bluegrass Fake Book 12. Spring Comes to Chicago 13. The Whole Horse Catalogue 14. Dressing the Galaxy 15. The Three Pillars of Zen 16. Joan of Arc 17. Because We Are Men 18. Water Witches 19. The Mistress of Spices 20. Winter Constellations 21. something else I forget ... Books read: Howard's End, A Room with a View, House of Sand and Fog, Spring Comes to Chicago. And lots of Star Wars magazines, and lots of Grantas, and lots of Entertainment Weeklys, and lots of New Yorkers, and lots of NYT Sunday editions, and lots of One Storys, and some Wireds, and somebody who shall remain nameless as I don't know his name nor his identity got me a year's subscription to Surf magazine. WTF? I say. 0 comments
2006-08-16, 10:23 a.m.: �What would it say about me, my students, and the hours we�ve spent in the classroom if I said that any attempt to teach the writing of fiction is a complete waste of time?� (from The Atlantic, thanks to Backwards City as so often)
Of course writing can be taught. You teach it to yourself, with the help of others.
(Francine Prose, quoted above, also points out that 'the gift of storytelling' cannot be learned. Probably true. I know I haven't yet succeeded in learning it. If I had, goddammit, I would be a fiction writer by now.) 0 comments
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