damn, danm

The Moleskin's getting ragged in my back pocket, so let's call this my new commonplace book.

permalink Marion Peck, “Fuck You” WANT.

Marion Peck, “Fuck You”

WANT.

Posted | 4 notes
permalink

Bon Iver — “For Emma” a capella in a Parisian hallway.

I’ve been up all night writing to meet a deadline. The audio track from this has been on repeat for the last three hours or so. It’s like someone rubbing your soul on the back of its neck. Or something. I’m done with metaphors for the night. Because the sun is up, cleverly reminding me it is no longer night.

Posted | 2 notes
permalink
[The sun] sank into the stand of beech trees beyond the back lot, lighting their tops, so that their bare arterial branches turned to a netting of black vessels around brains made of light. The brains murmured among themselves. They kept counsel and possessed a wintry wisdom—cold scarlet and opaline minds, brief and burnished, flaring in the metallic blue of dusk. And then they were gone. The light drained from the sky and the trees and funneled to a point on the western horizon, where it seemed to be swallowed by the earth. The branches of the trees were darknesses over the lesser dark of dusk. Kathleen thought, That is like Howard’s brain—lit and used up and then dark. Lit too brightly. How much light does the mind need? Have use for? Like a room full of lamps. Like a brain full of light.
—

Tinkers, Paul Harding (p. 99)

It’s basically like this for 200 pages. I loved it. This honestly surprised me. I’m not sure why.

(Well, there’s this: these lines come from near the middle of a paragraph that crosses three pages—one of a few that long in the book. Yet somehow he makes it work. Baffling.)

Posted
permalink

Kristen Wiig reads selections from Touch Me: The Poems of Suzanne Somers.

Really.

(via)

Posted
permalink
She stopped before her favorite, a picture of a sand castle competition that must have been held at the turn of the last century. There were very few children visible—one little girl in the foreground, wearing a knee-length dress and a sun hat that might have been made out of newspaper—and the competition seemed to have drawn a crowd of thousands. […] But Annie’s eye was always drawn to a woman over to the right, kneeling on the ground, working on a church steeple, in what looked like a full-length overcoat and a peasant sun hat that made her seem as sad and as destitute as an old peasant in the Vietnam War. You’re dead now, Annie always thought when she saw her. Do you wish you hadn’t wasted your time doing that? Do you wish you’d thought, Fuck the lot of them, and taken your coat off so you could have felt the sun on your back? We’re here for such a short amount of time. Why do we spend any of it building sand castles? She would waste the next two hours, because she had to, and then she would never waste another second of however much time she had left to her. Unless somehow she ended up living with Duncan again, or doing this job for the rest of her working life, or watching EastEnders on a wet Sunday, or reading anything that wasn’t King Lear, or painting her toenails, or taking more than a minute to choose something from a restaurant menu, or…It was hopeless, life, really. It was set up all wrong.
—

Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked (pg 144-145)

I once got into an argument with someone during MFA-school about Nick Hornby. I was pro, she was con. The argument lasted several rounds of Maker’s Manhattans, a cigarette break, and the inevitable move to Knob Creek. I don’t remember how the conversation ended. Pretty sure if I could have pulled this passage out then, I’d have won before the cigarette.

Posted in (yes: MFA-school) Nick Hornby | 1 note
permalink From yesterday’s Providence Journal: Homework at crime scene leads to arrest at high schoolby Amanda Milkovits WOONSOCKET, R.I. — They cut class at Woonsocket High School to break into a house — but it’s the homework that tripped them up. Two 15-year-old boys skipped out of their parenting class early Monday afternoon and broke into a house a half-mile away from the school, said Lt. Eugene Jalette. After stealing some game systems, Jalette said, the boys grabbed their backpacks and headed back to school — but one of them dropped his homework. When Officers Joshua Smith and Brien Godin responded to 52 Hillsdale Ave. for the break-in, the officers noticed the homework near the basement window where the youths had broken in, Jalette said. The homework didn’t belong to the homeowner — or anyone he knew — but the boy’s name on the paperwork was familiar to the officers, Jalette said. By the end of the school day, the officers were at the principal’s office, where they arrested the two boys and also recovered the stolen items, Jalette said. The boys were charged with breaking and entering and released to the custody of their parents. Jalette said the officers are investigating whether the boys were involved in more than a dozen break-ins in that area that have occurred since September.

From yesterday’s Providence Journal:

Homework at crime scene leads to arrest at high school
by Amanda Milkovits

WOONSOCKET, R.I. — They cut class at Woonsocket High School to break into a house — but it’s the homework that tripped them up.

Two 15-year-old boys skipped out of their parenting class early Monday afternoon and broke into a house a half-mile away from the school, said Lt. Eugene Jalette. After stealing some game systems, Jalette said, the boys grabbed their backpacks and headed back to school — but one of them dropped his homework.

When Officers Joshua Smith and Brien Godin responded to 52 Hillsdale Ave. for the break-in, the officers noticed the homework near the basement window where the youths had broken in, Jalette said.

The homework didn’t belong to the homeowner — or anyone he knew — but the boy’s name on the paperwork was familiar to the officers, Jalette said.

By the end of the school day, the officers were at the principal’s office, where they arrested the two boys and also recovered the stolen items, Jalette said.

The boys were charged with breaking and entering and released to the custody of their parents. Jalette said the officers are investigating whether the boys were involved in more than a dozen break-ins in that area that have occurred since September.

Posted in this is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass | 8 notes
permalink

bradc:

chriscantwell:

Rejected Football Promo (Featuring John Mellancamp, America)

Today, Cracked.com is running an exclusive release of the newest Summer of Tears short, which also features Good Neighbor and Invisible Engine (which includes me). All three groups went to USC together, and nearly all of us are alumni of Commedus Interruptus, SC’s 20-year-old improv and sketch group.

This short represents the first time the three generations of us have gotten together to do something. A huge thanks to the Summer of Tears guys for including us on this one, and letting us be a part of this… challenging shoot. Regardless, it was a ton of fun, and I hope we all get to do something again soon.

May I present you this masterpiece and the most indicting short I’ve ever been a part of, starring Will Greenberg, Rob Kerkovich, Nick Massouh, Kirsten Eggers, Beck Bennett, Nick Rutherford, Sean Bury, Matt Wyatt, Babar Peerzada, and Sara Nixon-Kirschner.

NOW LET’S PLAY SOME FUCKIN’ FOOTBALL!!

The dark undercurrents in this short singed the hair off my face.

Posted | 10 notes
permalink [Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

The Slackers, “Wanted Dead or Alive”

Because one ska cover of a late-80s classic is just not enough.

Posted in slackers cover songs
permalink 68-year-old Washington Post features editor punches colleague over 'charticle'
Posted in awesome well kinda | 1 note
permalink

Realism
Take this test. When you read “These dishes have been sitting in the sink for days,” do you think (a) This is an indicator of my inner weather, or (b) Why don’t they do the dishes? Does the phrase “I’m going as far away from here as my broken transmission will get me, and then I’ll take it from there” make you think (a) Somebody understands me, or (b) Why don’t they stay and talk it out? What is more visually appealing, (a) a Pall Mall butt floating in a coffee mug, or (b) those new Pop Art place mats in the Crate & Barrel catalog? If you answered (a), do we have a genre for you.

Recommended for: The rumpled, drinky.

— Colson Whitehead helps you write your next novel, from Sunday’s NYT Book Review.
Posted | 4 notes