You know

Sukie in Clarke's headlights.

Swamp People 
Lambchop, The Decline and Fall of Counrty and Western Civilization: The Woodwind Years
M. Ward, Transfiguration of Vincent
Tao Lin, Richard Yates 


You know, Swamp People - basically Deadliest Catch with the parameters being readjusted and the budget drastically reduced on  retooled to portray Louisiana alligator hunters - isn't all that bad a show. Too bad they couldn't have had Waylon Jennings narrate it like the real Dukes of Hazzard, though. You already know how good Mad Men is. I'm waiting for some brave incalcitrant soul to pop up with "God, I hate Mad Men!' like a friend of mine did once about James Brown. There are plenty of compelling reasons to hate anything, but c'mon... I stood slack-jawed at how anyone could hate James Brown, but I admired his steadfastness on the subject.

You know, I really like Lambchop, but listening to a whole album of theirs is like eating all your vegetables. No matter how much you like vegetables, some of them get cold and soggy at the end. M. Ward, on the other hand - each little song is like finding one more french fry in the bottom of the bag. I love the way he says "killa whale, please!" in "Sad, Sad Song," and how he says everything in this song.


He only sings when he's sad, and he's sad all the time.

You know, putting my lunch down in the communal fridge down the hall shames me out of compulsively eating it 30 minutes early in a fit of rash Gotta Do Something For My Happiness Now, which will likely benefit me in the long run. If there was only a fridge in the library (10 min walk away) where it could be kept.

You know, Hurricane Katrina formed in the gulf five years ago. I was, have been and will be perpetually aware of when it went down, but it seems like longer to me, a slow, bumpy normalization, and I didn't even live in New Orleans. I wrote a story for Oxford American a couple years ago about Katrina's effect on Baton Rouge, but then and now I feel a little weird telling that story when this was happening just down the road. The OA is hosting a block party in the Ninth Ward this weekend. Y'all should go. I'm going.


Thanks, Offbeat.

You know, my lunch plan sorta failed. I just kept looking at this post instead of getting on with the business of the day while ignoring my lunch down the hall and M. Ward is breaking my heart in two with his version of "Let's Dance" and I dredged all the hummus out of the little hummus container with my finger and now I'm going to make that walk to the library and let old Tao Lin bum me out a little more with his characters' (I think it's just his characters') steadfast refusal to enjoy or celebrate anything but I think my mood will jump in the balance and lift me up and I will, for the experience, thrive. I ate all my vegetables. The new students are fully aswarm today with their little folders and notebooks and awkward steps. If things get dicey, I'll just imagine Waylon Jennings narrating my progress.

The state that I am in

The driveway at the farm.

Belle and Sebastian, Tigermilk and The BBC Sessions

The state I am in: a little sunburnt, exhausted/refreshed, full from the gnawing on  life's juicy marrow.




In order:1) The weekend commenced with that which made Milwaukee famous. 2) Later at Teddy's, Clarke ordered the setup and 3) I the tamales. Top) We headed out Saturday for a weekend in the perfectly named Felicianas. 4) RIP Sportsman's Deli, where I usually get the bait and boudin for these weekends. Thanks for 27 years of service!  5) At the lake they have posted a "No Diving" sign at the lake. 6) We did anyway. There was birthday cake, endless trays of snacks, squealing sleepover country hijinks, fireworks!, beer and the subsequent shit talking among the best people and a number of rides back and forth to the lake in 7) the mule. 8) Maya proved herself to be the most capable fisherwoman, baiting her own hook and 9) catching here the first of like 16 fish she caught that afternoon. The secret is using the Whole Foods chicken sausage that the ants got into.

I agree with the girl in Muriel's Wedding that one should want life to be as perfect as "Dancing Queen" but that might be hoping too much. I am lucky that my gig is occasionally as full and sweetly detailed as a Belle & Sebastian song.


"The State that I Am In."

Sufjan Stevens! Philip Glass! Streaming! Freedom!

I love going through this archway. I go through it every time I walk to the library from my office and doing so feels like I'm going somewhere!

Sufjan Stevens, All Delighted People
Daan Vanderwalle, Alvin Curran: Inner Cities

A new Sufjan Stevens album is upon us! Streaming freely like the acceptance of huddled masses does from the copper lips of the Statue of Liberty! Streaming like the last Dodgers banner in Brooklyn! Streaming like, well, a stream! It's gorgeous and I just started listening to it, so I think its only going to get more gorgeous!




Also there's finally this!


Philip Glass listening to and commenting on his "Openings" being played on marimba by Brian Bell at an LSU School of Music master class, April 13, 2010. It has somehow taken forever for me to upload this. I love how he has Brian explain the remarkably simple architecture that comprise this piece, and gives his insights on playing it toward the end of the video. On not notating tempo:  "A good musician will know what to do and a bad musician will never get it right, so why bother?"

Ed. to add:


As if on cue, I was confronted with this streaming video of Jonathan Franzen, author of Freedom, talking about why he doesn't like streaming videos, or making them or something. I mean... !

hold its own

It is interesting that so quiet a music as this

Daan Vanderwalle, Alvin Curran: Inner Cities


can hold its own against a woodchipper.

RIP Jimmy Pitts and the guy from the Call.


Jimmy Pitts, "Clover"


The Call, "Everywhere I Go" live 1986

He could have stopped there

Avo is a post-modern master of signage/assemblage.

César Aira, How I Became a Nun
Tao Lin, Richard Yates

I started and finished Nun in the course of waiting for, catching, and being carried home on the bus yesterday afternoon. It is one of those magic novellas whose beguiling strangeness is akin to watching a match flare up, burn out, and smolder. I missed the part about the nun if it is actually in there, and found the floating gender identity of the narrator a little confusing, but its opening chapter about the promise of ice cream resulting in a murder and a lifetime of bewilderment is as good as anything ever. He could have stopped there, but thankfully he didn't and saw this snake of a story through until it finished off its tail.

I'm wondering how much of the success of this prose might be due to translator Chris Andrews, who also translated the bulk of the Bolaño novels I read, and they held a similar riveting distance between the reader and the prose. Bolaño was a fan and vice-versa so that might be it too. It's almost like there is a cop holding us eager readers back lest we destroy the thing we love. I only wonder if it's Andrews because I didn't find that same distance in Bolaño's 2666, translated by Natasha Wimmer. 2666 had its own particular gravitational pull, generating a greater sympathy for the characters, and was easier to read than The Savage Detectives despite being nearly twice its length.

Ed. to add: Dig this anecdote from the publisher's website:

A few days after his fiftieth birthday, CÉSAR AIRA (b. 1949, Argentina) noticed the thin rim of the moon, visible despite the rising sun. When his wife explained the phenomenon to him he was shocked that for fifty years he had known nothing about "something so obvious, so visible." This epiphany led him to write How I Became a Nun.

I like this guy.

Nun was the perfect perverse aperitif to prepare me for the cold, bitter meal of Ourselves served up by Richard Yates. I flipped though Lin's Shoplifting from American Apparel while browsing the Urban Outfitters at Perkins Rowe - maybe the finest marriage of reading material and setting in which to read it; unfortunately my shoplifting days are long behind me otherwise I'd have completed the circuit - and thought he was onto something, but 20-something pages into the blunt instrument ennui of 20-somethings indicates that he's caught it.

Ed. to further add: More great signage about knowing when to stop: I was listening to a friend's 90's flashback e-mixtape as I typed this and ducked out just as the dog barked in "Been Caught Stealin'."

I don't want to escape from reality; I want reality to escape from me

Watch your step.

Big Star, "September Gurls"
Pearls Before Swine, These Things Too

Media announcement: My review of Josh Cohen's daunting mega-novel Witz is up at outsideleft. He "vivisects the contemporary neutering of the mystical by letting its details pour out on the ground like a roadkill’s guts."

On the way back from walking Maya to school on the little greenbelt path next to the house that isn't a Frank Lloyd Wright house after all, I was singing "September Gurls" to myself, except imagining it slow and cataclysmic, lonely echoes in a mountain castle with an overdriven amp and crackly, spotty generator power style. Then I heard and immediately saw a demure woman pass me from behind silently on a bike and felt self-conscious about singing. I tried to re-establish my synergy with the Universe's crackling electricity by snapping the above picture of magnolia pods and while doing so, stepped in some fire ants, getting my shock.

If it will load, you should look at these pictures of what happens when you put a glass jar over the hole in a beehive (via Boing Boing) and you'll see what I'm after today. Like in the song below, I don't want to escape from reality; I want reality to escape from me.


Pearls Before Swine, "Sail Away"

pass the biscuits, please

These subjects beg for large format: 1) The menu at George's. 2) The ceiling at George's. 3) The shrimp po-boy at George's. 4) Has anyone ever recommended to you the smoked catfish po-boy at Jay's BBQ? To me either. I will never stop recommending it now. 5) An oak in the rain on campus. 6) Further under that oak. 7) Under another.

Rick Moody talking about writerly desperation and digital media
Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, Together
Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Cow Fingers & Mosquito Pie  
Andre Williams, Rib Tips and Greasy Chicken

Media Announcement: My take on the roller derby and an early-bird notice about country legend Guy Clark practically playing a living room show here in Baton Rouge in October appears in this week's installment of The Record Crate blog for 225.

I was talking with someone the other day about our respective writings and he mentioned a story I'd written of which I was particularly proud and then suddenly neither of us could remember the name of who it was about, and only just now remembered it was Andre Williams. I even met the guy in person while writing the story. How do you forget Andre Williams?


Andre Williams, "Pass the Biscuits, Please"