"Never Forgottonia"

The butterfly butterflew the coop!

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
District 9
Starship Troopers
Nurse With Wound, Alice the Goon
Vincent Gallo, When
Tom McCarthy, C
Michael J. Trinklein, Lost States: True Stories of Texlahoma, Transylvania, and Other States That Never Made it

You wanna know what's long? Anna Karenina is long. I'm reading the free Project Gutenberg version of it on my phone as a whelp-I'm-on-the-couch/bus/central lockup-I-might-as-well-read-something book and the way they do it there is that it downloads in chunks, like as you go. It keeps a running percentage (I'm at 8%, where a train backs over a station porter, severing the poor bastard in twain, just as Anna arrives in Moscow. Women have a way of doing that in this book.) but there is no heft of pages that lets me really know how I'm doing.

I'd totally forgotten how much I love Vincent Gallo's When album. That Vincent Gallo. He has trip-hop cred (should such a thing be possible), having performed in SAMO with Jean-Michel Basquiat at the Mudd Club back when everything was converging, and really, @vincent_gallo is my favorite celebrity. He acts so scintillatingly outrageous and weird that he comes around to charm from the other end.


"My Beautiful White Dog" and "Honey Bunny"

Nurse With Wound defies context.


"(I Don't Want To Have) Easy Listening Nightmares"

We made a pass at the bookstore after dining in the same Five Guys franchise as was Peter Berg, former Chicago Hope doctor and director of Friday Night Lights. He's here making a movie based on the game Battleship (sorta) featuring Liam Neeson and Rhianna. They are set to film part of it in the blues bar down the street. I know none of that makes sense, but it's true. Joe Jonas was recently spied canoodling with his ladyfriend, who has a bit part in the thing, at a terrible old-lady restaurant chain. We get minor sightings like this all the time; our town looks movie-generic and there are awesome tax incentives at play.

So anyway, let me wipe the stars from my eyes to tell you I tried to read a part of Tom McCarthy's C and I felt like its prose was a logic puzzle; the kind that takes one longer to figure out than it is fun to figure out, but Lost States was a light wonder. It's about long forgotten and abandoned subdivisions of our nation. Its prose is airport magazine breezy, full of cheap jokes and somewhat unsound in it's purview; the West Florida Republic was included and that was not a temporary state or a secession but it's own country for 90 days.




BUT, it spoke of Forgottonia, a mildly successful secession gesture in the western potbelly of Illinois in the 70's born of a lack of highways in the region. It's not the most glorious cause for revolution but I lived there right at the navel of that potbelly while it was going on and I've never heard a peep of this before. C'mon! I'm ready to get a "Never Forgottonia" tattoo: a fist gripping a torn strip of I-72, the proposed Chicago-Kansas City conduit that only cuts throughout corn between Hannibal and Champaign, A million squealy teens can watch my tax dollars (or something) bring a Jonas Brother to my adopted home's worst sandwich place forever henceforth on the Internet and yet Forgottonia is forgotten-onia? There is a Facebook group at least.




I'm annoyed that I've never heard of Forgottonia, it being a so-so tale notwithstanding, mostly because it kills me when there are good stories right there on the ground. I've always enjoyed a good dungeon master who gets me through the maze and now want to be that dungeon master for others. I believe this is the OG classic D&D starter module I started with. The one with the keep; if memory serves, the fancy sword in the keep master's closet is cursed. I told Maya about the different kind of dice in D&D: 4-sided, 6-sided, 8, 10, 12, and 20-sided and she thought that sounded cool, and today she declared herself to be into sci-fi and fantasy, so ok. I could draw parallels among metamorphosis and science fiction and mythology and directors and Battleship and being cut in twain but I've led us both far enough astray by now. (Rolls d6) OK. To your south a cave opening leads to two tunnels about 10 meters in, one leading east, one west. Which do you choose?