watching plisetskaya's anna karenina & while it is boring on occasion & the music isn't much good, it is much better done, as a filmed ballet, than the only other ballets on film I know well (the two great nutcrackers) & it really works with the fundamental ugliness of the art form (ballet not film)

what is an animal looks like a rat, has a tail like unto a rat's, but bigger & rounder & lives around back of my building what is it called and also, if you know, what is its name I would like to know so I can give it a civil & neighborly greeting next time I see it

a yawn in four parts someday I really must make a full flipbook of one of her sneezes. they are exceptional

lovecraft having a bad time at the holiday party

really wild news out of dc tonight this is an exclusive you are not going to believe who is sitting on me right now

how embarrassing to have your grandfather’s ghost go rummaging through your personal private pantries & iceboxes & all and condemn you as a “one-chicken man” people always want to say it’s mothers-in-law are the tyrannical judges of inadequate holiday housekeeping but mainly it’s ghosts

so excited to have become the most annoying kind of person there is (rile everybody up while we're waiting for the tenants' union guy to show, urge everyone to form the association, second all the motions, & fade back into the crowd as soon as volunteers are needed for positions of responsibility)

invented some kind of walnut meringue situation it's not very good but what is both good & important is I discovered or rediscovered how easy it is to whisk egg whites to whatever stage. why did I misremember it as being more laborious than whipping heavy cream when it's much easier

really testing the limits of the psychic torments my beautiful cat can endure

engaging in my favorite post-midnight early winter activity (scouring youtube for old unseen gelsey kirkland clips & losing my entire tiny mind at the couple of irredeemable unlovable godforsaken cretins in the comments who pretend to find fault when fault there is none)

can you find the cat hidden in this picture

on the next-to-last of the slough house spy books (they are skillfully done but aggravating. whimsical at the worst of times & alternating between broad & repetitious humor & mournful reminders that everyone dies & spying is a totally pointless as well as a dirty business. yeah, well, I know)

je suis venu te dire que je m’en vais

well what the fuck, antarctica how do you think that makes me feel

is there anything worse than not becoming a wolf right when all your good plans for the evening kind of hinge on becoming a wolf at that particular time

thanksgiving is a fake idea & an imaginary holiday and so on but I do rely on it to keep myself oriented vis-a-vis the calendar and where I am in time's relentless forced march into the future. wasn't it supposed to be today?? I mean I know it isn't today, I am aware. but shouldn't it be

sleepy

a) really goes to show...something...how many would-be defenders of decency still fully believe that grotesque mediocrity coupled with youth is "hot" by definition, a sexual temptation it takes a strong good man to resist, & aren't bright enough to be deeply ashamed of revealing this

the first month I was in dc, in two thousand NINE if you can believe such a year ever existed, sleeping on the couch of kindly relatives by night & wandering around by day, who did I nearly walk right into on connecticut ave but one dipshit name of ryan lizza now I know what you are thinking--

when I see certain names on the epstein email lists I start to get the feeling I had back when I made up a personal private work rule for myself that I wasn't going to catalogue work by more than two authors per day who had tried to murder their wives. what are the odds I'll be asked to, I thought

they didn't seriously start to adapt the running man & get too scared to just let the guy fly a plane into a tower that's so pathetic just for that I am going back in time to ten minutes ago when I still couldn't remember which one was the long walk & which one was the marathon man. or whatever

the new orphan black, which nobody told me about (somebody did tell me about it but I forgot) is really charming in the way it does 25-yrs-in-the-future it's all the same but pointless touchscreens on everything, human-sized giant cellphones (for posting), & the worst trouser shapes you ever saw

please PLEASE will you creeps (affectionate) find another five urgent news stories to get in a frenzy about that aren't all just as fuckin disgusting as these two there might be more than two, today. if there is a third, I do not know it, I will not meet it. I close my mind to it

it’s rose season that’s the time of the year when I bring home red roses to my beautiful cat but she is the fairest flower in the garden

I'm so pleased about the sandwich acquittal, not just because the ice guys deserved it & not just because the guy seems so nice, but because I had to endure so many horrible catered lunches when I worked in downtown dc. not from subway, from corner bakery, but it's all the same shit

I'M READY TO MOVE TO NY WHERE DO I APPLY FOR MY FREE APARTMENT I got such a bad haircut today I thought nothing could make me happy again. but I was wrong

I am rereading (have reread most of) the vampire lestat for the first time since I was 13, out of the great love I bear my fellow man, & I can't believe I forgot the canonical solemnity & ceremony with which the newly turned & risen vampire carries out his Last Ever Trip to the Bathroom

remember the terrific little tanith lee story about the girl who was raised in seclusion & strict ignorance of life's general progression toward death, all servants always replaced before they grew grey or wrinkled, so she never grew physically old herself because it did not occur to her to do so

enjoying a bach cantata (her, not me. I have taste)

reading the second spooky book I have read in recent years that is built all around the philip experiment. I didn't go looking out for it in either case, the books came to me. I am so angry leave my favorite spirit nonsense ALONE it is mine it belongs to me it has my name on it, can't you READ

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