what is rbk doing using popeye's personal philosophy to sell its silly puffed-up shoes? is there no decency left in this world? i guess when you're too cool for vowels you're also too cool for SUCH A THING AS SHAME

freudian blip

a kind of reconfiguration is in progress. bits of wires, their ends bitten and exposed, are being sucked apart from old nodes and applied to new ones. this way the next time energy flows, it will strike at the right circuit, in the right measure. so i'll absorb less, and reflect more. sigh less and blink more. most tinfoil loyalties can be blown away with a blink.

you ain't never caught no rabbit and you ain't no fren' oh mine

recently had a dark-as-a-ditch dream about having gotten a lobotomy. in the dream, the skull was carved open neatly and the operation - to cure depression - was carried out successfully with the insertion of a coin-sized electricity-discharge thingie, within the folds of the brain. the only hitch being, after the operation, the head was to be kept vertical at all times, or the top would roll off.

you know how you're playing the And What Does This Mean game even in your dreams?

the immediate association was, emily dickinson. If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

but nothing in the current reading material fits this descrip. the five senses haven't reported anything fantastic either, lately. if to be inspired is to be alive, then i'm being jiggled out of an urn, bored to bits.

if it isn't poetry, it must be lack of. like remembering the meter and forgetting the rhyme. the rise and fall, the dip and drawl, the whisper and squall, but not the goddamn words

gorgeousness and gorgeosity

thanks to nothing working out the way i planned it today, i found myself with aching feet and a heavy heart at an old books' exhibition at the ymca. and there i found:
south of the border, west of the sun, murakami
and a most lovely hardback copy of the corrections, franzen

now, not only do i have two beautiful books to read and reread, respectively, but i also have them in exactly the condition i love. they're not hot off the press, with pages that crackle and sharp corners. they've aged, gone soft, and the wait upon the shelf has sweetened them. they have a more satisfying weight now. bricks of my fortress, i love them so.

why i love garrison keillor

because he's funny in a way i can't understand.

with most writers you see where the humour comes from. in some horrible cases, you note the impending punchline for so long, it makes your stomach hurt and your bones groan. but even with the genius, out-of-the-blue variety of nailing the funny, you can see the tracks. eventually.

but keillor i cannot figure out. he writes peices about falling and being tall falling. about his mother's sneezes. about porches and the first time your son comes home with mud from a foreign land on his shoes. all reported in the same, unhurried tone. seeing, telling, seeing, telling.

he reminds me of ishiguro, in how completely he can transport you to a world where you question nothing, believe everything. a dreamworld where images are all. you are a child, led along by the hand, looking around curiously, but content to keep moving. you don't know where you're going and you don't care. you trust.

it's a world that notes the steel in the smile, the appetite in the glance, the composure in the crumpled. all without doubt, without cynicism. the eyes observe with the patience of a tree. people, incidents being observed are uncoloured by the author's presence. insight without intrusion. and there's never just one insight. and they're not all comfortable. but you accept.

and the funniness. unlaboured. funny people work at it, they all, without exception, do. which is why they are all, without exception, insecure. laughter is a cruel thing to be addicted to. keillor tries too. but his efforts are directed elsewhere. prior to a glimpse of the insanely hilarious, there's no tightening of grip, no quickening of breath, no pause for effect. he just lets the joke happen whenever it's ready. and it happens all over the place.

the village voice says this about gk. his "writing has the silvery slip of running water, so graceful and easy it’s hard to believe it can carry so much that is jagged and unresolved. His integrity lies in his not smoothing away those rough edges in the swift current of his prose; they’re bruisingly, sometimes cuttingly there."

reading him is like listening to the radio. it's a delicious giving up of control. and a delicious giving in to the voice.