boy I wish a director who seems so nice & intelligent & loves literature & hates robots and has so many good opinions and verifiably reads books and knows what he's talking about could make a good movie. maybe one day but I don't expect it

for halloween I will be orson welles in the director's cut of malpertuis this is a complicated costume in that it requires two assistants to attend me, one to speak my lines for me in flemish & the other to hold up subtitles in french. while I lie in bed & mutter soundlessly in my own language

every time I get a new winter coat I get excited for the whole new personality I'm sure will come along with it. but I think the vintage ralph lauren purple-satin-lined floor-length double-breasted midnight velvet one I am just now welcoming into my home is really going to come through

I no longer know what is going on (context: life; this world) but there's no john cale album so good that tattooing half the name of it on your body excuses the rest of your horrible life (sorry to john cale whom I like very very much) or if it's about the dos passos book, that can't be good either

a) much like a burning cross or a white hood, a nazi symbol worn on the person or reverently displayed on one's property is a direct death threat. against me, it so happens. also others. the urgency depends on who's doing it, when, and in what company. but it always means that

still thinking about the giant priest who scared me at the supermarket yesterday large & resplendent in his long black dress, shouting at a person in a parka, in an unknown language. I mean a language I do not know. perhaps he knows it himself. that is possible it is even likely

call me paranoid but I can't help believing the reason I never got any of the art thief catching jobs they advertised on the art theft mailing list I used to be on, even though I always wrote exquisite cover letters, was because I had said so many times in public that I think art theft is terrific

did you know that the haunting of julia & juliette of the spirits are two different films!!!! no wonder I could never remember the name of it

remember in SHIRLEY when charlotte bronte says Sometimes you ask for an egg and life gives you a scorpion & then she has this little fugue about how when this happens you got to squeeze hell out of that scorpion & keep smiling as it stings you through & through, just as if it were the egg you wanted

read the worst book ever published on god's green earth, it is or was on several lists of best horror novels because in a dying art all must win & all must have prizes the author hedged it round with a both a fumbling foreword & smarmy afterword to justify his choice of subject matter. excessive

death is so crotchety & susceptible to reverse psychology, it's a wonder anybody ever does die

on a sunny october afternoon I love to receive a $15.39 settlement payment from a class action lawsuit I didn't know I was in I forgot how to post without sounding like I am rolling my eyes but I assure you I really do love it

in my utopian future, everyone who reacts to a terrible thought experiment by trotting out their memories & recitations of the only other such story they ever read, which is always the same bit of lesser le guin, will be brought to me for judgment

predictable but still deeply off-putting how many people's habitual reaction to a good interview with a political monster is to giggle 'I would just go hide in the woods if mister chotiner wanted to talk to ME.' tee hee, et cetera. can't say it's cute. or funny. he has not got special powers

tylenol is the jimmy kimmel of otc painkillers like it won't give you organ failure if you don't consume too much of it at once. and it is important to stand up and say that and say it about tylenol, too obviously I will defend it. it's fine in fact. but it isn't any good & nobody likes it

don’t want to make alice james feel bad but saying Damn is really nothing special for those of us at liberty to say Fuck whether to the duvet, to the cushions, or in other circumstances

I am not a lawyer, a judge, or even a Floridian, but I know what it is to unlace civilization's punishing stays & let your lust for unlimited parentheses, bracketed corrections, and "exact" "quotations" run horribly free in all its dark majesty merryday is his name and a merry day he has had

watching ALIENS for the first time in forever & I know people like to put it down for allegedly not being a horror movie, as if paul reiser's lapels & suit collar aren't extremely horrible, but it does have the most emotionally moving scene in any alien out of all the alienses

I make a special study of which blurbs compare which gothic novels to which respectable influences. you might say What’s the point, it‘s all REBECCA all the time, isn’t it? & mostly (but not always) it is. and I never said there was a point

oops it actually is bad in the sense of being the worst show ever made. sorry for the error

think of being conrad aiken & one day you hear that a famous doctor wants to psychoanalyze you bc he read your books and your brain is so…you know. YOU know. well he never did see one like it & so you have to spend the rest of your life avoiding sigmund Freud & any country he is in or party he is at

oh mr aiken I think you’ll find that I shall

"I’m sorry for making you into my higher power. That was wrong of me, and dehumanizing.” She didn’t interrupt or challenge me, so I went on." collective knee-jerk antipathy to eliz gilbert made you all miss out on a funny story about lecturing a woman who had clearly been dead for a couple of days

really sad to see such an advanced case of houseface they have to start issuing serious warnings for the young people, like with cigarettes everyone always thinks Oh, my houseface will be different, when I’m old I’ll enjoy not leaving the upper attics & I certainly won’t be dead yeah well. we’ll see

back at the place (you know, the place. with the people?) I had one last upswing of good feeling which in retrospect was just the maniacal false remission of bad feelings that hospice pamphlets tell you is the sign the patient is days from death—

donald westlake’s Call me a cab is the most mythical beast I ever stalked without hope of catching, a good romance novel. one of perhaps five in the world. AND by a man I am a little dizzy about it it is set in 1980 or thereabouts & I don’t know when it was written. maybe later, maybe much later

thinking about setting up a one-woman truth & reconciliation committee for myself & using this wonderful fresh swathe of free time to answer every unanswered text, personal email, and paper letter I either didn't see when it came in or saw but forgot about or didn't forget but just never answered

joyce carol oates wrote the introduction for a colin wilson re-issue! not THE MIND PARASITES, a different one. this one might not have any space vampires in it. still though

if somebody handed me a bag of cash thoughtfully wrapped in a bag of potato chips I would simply say thank you and buy myself something nice but I guess I was just brought up properly a gentleman is tender to the bashful & merciful to the bribe-giver. as john henry newman says

if you ever wanted to steal me away from my Situation, like hiring rapunzel out of her tower to research nonsense for you, you should have done it back when you thought of it because it is too late now, I am an unstealable free agent & a rapunzel with no tower is just a girl needs a haircut

THEY DON’T HAVE NIXON TO KICK AROUND ANYMORE

I have a computer again after like a year of wondering why don't I just ship a pot of coffee to lenovo headquarters so they can pour it directly onto the keyboards at the source, really cut out the middleman that was a good idea & a bold cost-cutting measure I will be sorry for not taking

can you imagine starting a whole new magazine just because the atlantic isn't stupid & destructive enough for your tastes sorry for the affected rhetorical pose and all but I am trying to imagine it! actively! to little success oh the sea isn't wet enough, try mine, I call it sea 2: the argument

if it was 10 years ago, and how I wish it was, I would do a wonderful article documenting experiments in the reacher way of living. which is take a bus to nowhere & when you get there, sit around largely until a criminal conspiracy finds you taking notes would be unlike reacher but can't be helped

got trapped into watching a number of short videos on "how crime works" such as they get a reformed bank robber to explain that what you do is you case the joint to determine that banks really are where the money is, then you go in there & get it, & then you run away delightful

don’t know who it was got kicked off for saying it but not only do I wish ill, all manner of ill, you never saw any ills like em, on that dumb rich creep, I wish ill on everyone who wishes her well. for good measure

I don't expect sex workers to take moneymaking tips from me seeing as I go out of my way to do low-paying work that gives no pleasure to nobody, especially not to me, but even more especially not to anybody else but if I were them,

not the first time I have been rudely awakened from a touching dream about a cat with an tragic backstory of labor exploitation & unpaid financial compensation by my own cat who is in desperate need of nothing but her breakfast this is why nobody dreams about YOU, I tell her but then I apologize

lately awoke from a dream that former president barack obama was involved with a charity for heroin-addicted kitty cats & in the dream I was a private investigator hired to find out was this a scam. it was not

anybody got a reliable contact or connection at the

eating a book today to teach the other books a lesson

speaking of apocalypses I still abstain from twitter while I wait for EM to die so I can I bless them with my Posts again. but time and time I look in on them, the way they run sightseeing trips from the higher to the lower levels of hell so the mildly damned see there’s worse sins than being boring

the last of the several apocalypse books I tried to enjoy was a three-novel expansion of the tweet about What would a caveman think of an iphone, with an added subplot about What if you gave an orphaned medieval peasant a talking tank that was both dead dad replacement & faithful dog

only now after all this time reading the diary of “flaccid virgin” alice james, her “receptacle for feeble ejaculations” w/apologies to flannery o’connor, she (alice james) would’ve been a better woman if it had been someone there to shout Phrasing! at her every minute of her life

I can’t stop laughing at this listing it’s so rare to see any speck of creativity in real estate agents but this one gets to me & I think I will steal his technique for my own cataloguing If I Were You I’d Buy This Book It’s Really Pretty Good (You Can Trust Me)

amy lowell I would NEVER blame keats for wasting a lot of years not securing an income & I am insulted you feel the need to explain. what must you think of me “he knew himself well enough to realize that [assisting somebody else] would never work” yeah tell me about it

I went to all this trouble & expense of replacing the ratty old green chair with a ratty new green loveseat exactly like it but slightly wider, somehow both too big & too small for the space, ruining my beautiful aesthetic all for the chance my cat would let me sit next to her sometimes

true & one of the reasons it is broadly understood is that women are considered, as a group and by that group, tough enough to take the truth and undeserving of permanent escape from it. nobody of note is softhearted & -headed enough to get in a sweaty panic over how that makes us feel

happy birthday to me check this out one rabbit (scritching) one rabbit (on the move) one one one…TWO rabbits!! every rabbit is really two rabbits if you have patience & faith & hold still. that’s why god gave you two eyeballs. so you could keep an eye on two rabbits

did you know when oliver sacks sent in the full draft of Awakenings the publisher wrote back to say Dear mr sacks there are too many footnotes nowadays, please eliminate all but twelve, p.s. I am not a crackpot sincerely abraham simpson or gerald duckworth or whatever AND HE DID boy I wouldn’t have