LIBRARY DEPT: I love libraries! Recently, in Chelsea, NY, a duck library has materialized! The premise is simple: GIVE A 🦆 TAKE A 🦆 Support your local library!

"…mildly erotic with its curvaceous plaster walls." -Michael Kimmelman on the renovation of The Frick www.nytimes.com/2025/03/15/a...

QUOTES DEPT: "A thousand of my father’s most subtle syllogisms could not have said more for celibacy." -L. Sterne, Shandy

READING DEPT: Elias Canetti In bed with some light reading.

READING AND WRITING DEPT: You have to put in the 10,000 hours. Garner told The Paris Review: “The diaries are how I turned myself into a writer — there’s my 10,000 hours.” -from Helen Garner’s diaries www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/b...

@slotkin.senate.gov: you need to say “SPENDING IS GOOD, AND HERE’S WHY: FREE EDUCATION FOR EVERYBODY, HEALTHCARE, SCIENCE FOR THE FARMERS AND THE REST OF US, WHATEVER!" Own why democrats can govern, goddammit!

Nice to see Leonard Cohen remaining culturally relevant. A character in the red-glasses skit on SNL: "I once went down on Leonard cohen."

MAKE YOUR OWN DAMN EMOJIS DEPT: Type in Emoji Kitchen into the google browser and mix and match emojis. Because it’s things like this that really matter right now.

MY CELEBRITY AUTOBIO DEPT: Chow Yun Fat at a screening of John Woo’s Hard Boiled, Divine on a NYC street. Asked for an autograph and got one. He was divine! Jerome Hellman, ditto autograph. Got a wave back from Tom Hiddleston on a NYC sidewalk.

PARAPHRASE DEPT: Hamlet "There is more philosophy in fiction, dear reader, than are dreamt of in philosophy."

AMERICAN DYSTOPIA DEPT: www.nytimes.com/2025/02/01/u...

This amounts to the most significant data leak in cyber history. Private individuals in the data business now have access to your Social Security information. This violates privacy laws in every state. Hopefully, state AGs will file suit & pursue criminal charges. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/01/u...

READING DEPT: PROUST I have decided to begin reading Proust again this year, and this time finish it. The elegant Penguin Modern Classics paperback editions, from the UK are expected to arrive on February 12. I am intimidated and excited in equal measure. I hope to recapture my focus.

AI SNAFU DEPT: "Journalism" Fail The HAL 9000 is just running the show now, so STFU.

TEXT-SPAM DEPT: "Is there still room for improvement in the proposal we discussed last time?"

Thanksgiving day mood.

WIKIPEDIA LITERARY LIVES: John D. Macdonald, Weight Loss: "Following his 1945 discharge from the army, MacDonald spent four months writing short stories, generating some 800,000 words and losing 20 pounds (9.1 kg) while typing 14 hours a day, seven days a week."

READING & BOOKS DEPT: Sometimes you just have to buy a book because it has this in it: J. G. Ballard and Bob Dylan traveling together to a Richard prince exhibit. My heart is full. I am done. Nothing can top this.

T-SHIRTS I READ TODAY DEPT: I’m too sober for this.

MUST WATCH DEPT: Mr. K • 2024 Dir: Tallulah H. Schwab A little bit of Kafka, a little bit of Walser. Looks like my kind of cinematic recipe.

"…a vase in a window, a blip on the radio, a misplaced brick in a wall." -The New Yorker, page 36, Sept. 16, 2024

READING DEPT: WARHOL, PHILOSOPHY A whole day of life is like a whole day of television. -p. 5 You can do so much more with a chair than you can with a painting. -p. 6

EPIGRAPH DEPT: Janet Malcom’s Reading Chekhov, A Critical Journey "What torture it is to cut the nails on your right hand!" -Chekhov, letter to Olga Knipper, October 30, 1903

DREAM DEPT: I’m in line to check my luggage and get my boarding pass at the airport, with my dog, which in the dream is the wrong breed, when I suddenly realize I left my passport at home.

"There were some things, some anger or passion that was beyond my understanding and had been tamped down for too long." -Diane Williams, from the Oct. 2, 2018 NY Times profile Once you read her your mind will order speech into her cadences. www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/b...

OVERHEARD DEPT: #OverheardInNYC Well, my list of things to do is, I got work at the top and then a chick I gotta work out and then I have to pack my place.

EVERYBODY IN NYC RIGHT NOW: Did you feel the earthquake? ME: I have no feelings.

Photos that look like they’re from a Beckett play. Credit: Ralph Crane/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

My mood, most of the time.

So many song lines I did not know.

Stanley warned us. We’ve seen this movie.

"Tengo que get el fuck out of aqui…" -Best use of Spanglish, ever, anywhere by a not-native Spanish speaker: Thomas Pynchon, 'Against the Day' 2006.

FAVORITE ARTISTS: Nic Nicosia Real Pictures #11, gelatin silver print, 1988, Honolulu Museum of Art

Get all your reading recs from @pabstblueribbon.bsky.social They know whereof they speak, and they like the weird. Keep it weird!

I am not a person with a complicated fate.

ROOMS: "Everyone carries a room about inside him." ― Franz Kafka, 'Blue Octavo Notebooks'

No.

"Odd fog patch in the south." -Foreign weather report

"More and more in my films, I’m trying to suppress what people call plot. Plot is for novelists." -Robert Bresson, on the eve of beginning production on ‘Pickpocket', a film he wanted to be about "hands, objects, and glances."

Righty Tighty, Lefty Loosey!

New York City people.

J’refuse!

weedy little customer ended up back down some hole early in his life #PynchonHaiku #AgainstTheDay #Reading #ThomasPynchon #Haiku