I'll come up with something

My secret agent name is "Stan Smith"

Charlotte Gainsbourg, IRM
Tom Franklin, Smonk
Steve Reich, Double Sextet/2x5

He struck a match with his thumbnail and lit another cigar.

Nobody cares, but I feel a clarification is nonetheless due: this on page two of Smonk is not where I got my similar comment about Mark Richard the other day, though reading Richard's Charity and then an excerpt of Smonk made me want to read Smonk, like immediately.

The match-thumbnail thing came from an incident in a friend's apartment in Thibodaux probably 20 years ago, when some small time Cajun drug dealer sat at my friend's table and was talking about how if Ian Curtis had lived, he'd be Jim Morrison today to which I though, OK, maybe, he kinda is anyway right? and then the guy opened a box of kitchen matches, the thick wooden ones and kept lighting them with his cocaine nail, over and over, smooth, letting them pile up like Abe Lincoln tossing together a log cabin in the ashtray. It was like I'd never seen a match before.

I tried to learn how to do it myself but gave up and let that be his. Which is what reading all these books lately is. Not that reading needs justification, but it does in a way. It takes up a lot of time, whittling away options, and I'm a little bummed that Tom Franklin already did the match on the thumbnail because I really wanted to use it in something I'm working on but that's OK. I'll come up with something.

I'm thinking about how Paul Harvey moved from topic to topic on his radio show. He'd just squawk "page TWO" and go there, gulping a fresh throat of air before diving into another story about a young Boy Scout that did a good deed and grew up to become a U.S. Senator or a Marx Brother or something. If Tom Franklin mentions Paul Harvey in this book, I'ma stop reading. But I probably won't.


Shatner does Cee-Lo's "Fuck You" on Lopez Tonight. Note they swap out the n-word for Shatner and bleep out the F-word, making a big show of his transgressive behavior while still observing some boundaries.

The A/C in my office was disconnected as a part of it being fixed so I open my windows and then wedge justbarelyopen the door with an old Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine I found in the hall. A story about a dognapper adorns the front cover and an ad for subscribing to the Stephen King library the back. It slides in perfectly tight in the gap under my door. I usually open it and then latch the deadbolt to keep it from swinging closed but now with natural air in the mix, the door likes to slam continually with each fluctuation of pressure. I just flipped through its, expecting to see Tom Franklin or Paul Harvey or Cee-Lo or someone else from this train ride through synchronicity and thought this format would make a great lit journal; cheap newsprint, quick stories that stay with you for a bus ride and then become doorstops until the pressure rips them to tatters and they are gone. Ready for new words telling the same stories.