I've been reading A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. It's fucking good literature, and after having to force myself through reading David Eggars, it's nice to know that there are other voices sprouting. Literature seems to be a game for people who've attained a certain level of experience. You just don't see many people under 25 who are published and good. Though there are plenty of sub-25ers who can certainly write, there aren't many -- it seems -- who can write whole books. Some of this probably has to do with market forces, but I digress.

Anyway, I like James Frey's book and I didn't like Eggars's. I just finished You Shall Know Our Velocity and it bothers me that anyone would like that book. I contains little wisdom in my estimation, and the fact that anyone has ever compared it to On the Road is deeply and personally offensive. I've heard that Eggars had to battle with publishers, cut hundreds of pages, and that the "real" book is much better. Maybe that's true; maybe it's PR. I don't really care. It's not the author who I find disturbing; Eggars seems at worst to be a well-intentioned egomaniac with an undeniable gift for language, at best a struggling young author with some sense of social responsibility. In either case, he's fine. What I find disturbing is that there are people who read the same book that I did, and who really enjoyed it.

It disturbs me because I disliked 90% of the book. I disliked the characters, failed to empathize. Were I to meet these people in real life I wouldn't think so much of them. It distrubs me to think that either A) skilled rhetorical flourishes (which Eggars provides in quantity) are all that people notice about literature, or that B) other people really felt for these characters. It disturbs me and leads me to question my own grasp of the America Cultural Moment.

I find emotional immaturity and postmodern self-awareness to be generally annoying and generally my two least favorite personality facits of my supposed peer group. I have a spiritual kind of hatred for the kind of peevish inhibition which Eggars's characters wallow in. I also have little patience for reflexive emotional skirt-holding; for people who can't buck the fuck up and live. There are great moments and good sentences in that book, but there's nothing I would call substance. There might be a real attempt to grapple with Everything, but if there is -- and it's not just a bunch of intellectual razzle-dazzle -- it's a failure. And so it worries me that people might think the book is wise, or even entertaining.

James Frey, on the other hand, is my kind of person. I would like to shake his hand and talk about philosophy and the human condition over many cups of coffee. His writing is stylistically adventurous (no quotation marks), but that's fucking irrellivant. What's relevant is that he knows how to write in a way that grips your mind and heart. What's relevant is that he has a vision for comedy and tragedy and understands something about the soul and what makes people tick; reminds me of Irvine Welsh at his best. His character -- himself at 23, no doubt in some ways filtered through hindsight -- is a character I can not only empathize with, but strongly admire to boot. The other people in the book, even the incidental ones, are all rendered full and lifelike. The situations, though far outside me realm of experience, are engaging and the story (the story!) carries me along as a reader the way a story aught to. It engaged my imagination and intelect and emotional vocabulary and made me really want to know what happens next. It is a book which I stayed up too late reading more than a couple times. I am sad that it is over. I strongly recommend it.

I want to write private notes. Great letters to old friends which express all the things I'm for one reason or another still shy about writing right here. I've always been skittish talking about girls in the thick of it. After the fact, in the lens of history, I'll go over things. But I don't often dive in to the workings of my heart (or my hips) in public without the comfortable distance and respectibility which introspection brings. I find the kiss and tell to be generally cheap.

So I want to write private notes to girls. Old girls and new girls; curiosities and rememerences and flirtations on the sly. I also want to pitch woo, to use an old outdated phrase, and I that's something which needs cover. Romance implies a certain kind of seclusion, an enticing element of closeness and privacy. You need curtains and candles and music and time; or at the very least you need some good sheets to hide under, though those always get tangled. It's better when you have the whole set of freedoms; no restrictions and ample energy. But I digress.

I want to write private notes. I've been thinking about myself as a writer, how I feel stagnant a lot of the time, and wondering if maybe become an electronic man of letters wouldn't be a way to keep my creative fires high. I could perhaps delve more deeply into fanciful writing, letting a bit more of my pent up internal fuel into the stream. But I want to start out with something a little more covert. Maybe I'll make my own email list that people can opt-in on, something which can carry juicy bits and wild renderings. My own foray down the the Rageboy path. Maybe there will be a secret website -- someplace where the full life of my mind can live. Maybe that someplace could be out here in the same old spot, with some kind of password or permission...

But I want to write private notes, and I think there's a reason for that. And I think that's where I will start.

The image seems broken, but it's kinda monty-python-esque.

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!


If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!


How grammatically sound are you?

For anyone who's heard me rant, I've been wanting a Luxury Hybrid on the market for years now. Lexus is doing it. The market is so fucking obvious. This will, I think, do a lot to get the ball rolling. According to my man Frank, it'll have equivalent 270 hp, a sub 8 second 0-60 and the fuel efficiency of a 4-banger. About f'ing time, sez I.

I feel like dancing, and ain't gonna spend any of my hard-earned hours wondering how people I don't know think it looks. This is a calculated decision, because you look cooler when you don't care. The ultimate is if you can spend hours and hours caring and rehearsing and disciplining your body, then let it all go in the moment. Yeah; that's how you make good art, good love, good work, good memories.

I'm still wound pretty tight; like a sping-loaded toy when you've fully cocked the works. More key-twisting just makes that broken clicking sound. Caffeine-loaded and this feedback thing is starting to spiral. Knots grow in my back on their own accord. But in spite of this and Everything I'm feeling good, like I can still hang loose, like I know what I'm about. I feel tall, serpintine, like a lanky asskicking rainmaker. I feel fearless, if still slightly overwhelmed.

She trapeses by, comments, and I tingle. This is how we all feel from time to time if we're lucky; and there's no point in hiding it.

I'm lonesome. The other weekend this really great woman sort of just brushed through my life; a highschool crush, and still quite something. Then just this past weekend I was hoping to see her again -- she lives far from here, was on her way to and from a Spring vacation -- but no such luck. I shouldda called her. And, yet there's been an effect, old musty parts of my mind and body are alive and tingling.

And I remember this feeling. As all my senses come online it feels like senior year of college, like that last frenzied compressed three semesters. Very busy and on my own. I'd broken up with Yael, was solidifying my identity, directing my friends in a play, taking a full courseload -- classical theater, musical singing, hitting the weights, trying my little gambits with the women. Everything was full of movement, and yet I cut through it more or less in my own bubble.

Once again my days are full, the stress is high, the great singing uknown calls out, but this time I think my sense of isolation is more pronounced. My social world, while growing, is much smaller than it was when I was in college. With work taking so much of my time and being so far removed from the rest of my life, conditions have been unfavorable; the network is thin. And so the night just a mite bit colder.

Stoller and Sterling over at BOPnews know how to have fun. I've decided once and for all that Tommy Friedman is a tool, mustache or no. That is all for now.

Went to Vegan pot-luck last night; good times debating various things with anarchists who know their shit... The rest of this is posted on my MfA Blog.

Has the world become more radical or is just my change in senery? The bay area harbors more fringe elements than the five boros; it's more sheltering in that way. On a good day I like to call it spaceship San Francisco. On a bad day I feel scared that so many are so bloody-minded. On most days I feel restricted by my square-world occupation; electoral politics. It's not like I have to wear a suit to work, but my activities of late have led to a great deal of self-censorship, and often I find myself feeling a little illegitimate.

But it's a long story, my struggle with trying to meet the rest of the world halfway.

I've been involved in way-out circles most of my life. I know from hippies and anarchists and would-be revolution. There's something different, sometimes sadly sour in the air out here. Maybe I just didn't move in the right circles back east, but it seems like every other person I meet out here is talking about making plans for the collapse of the system, for the "inevitable imposition of martial law," for revolution of the decidedly non-velvet type.

Sometimes it's frightenlingly attractive. Frank and I were at a Reclaim the Streets party a few months ago, ate a couple pot cookies some nice hippie girl sold us -- two for five dollars -- and after lazily circling the laconic SFPD on our bikes ended up at the Anarchist protest, where the legions of red and black were displaying solidarity with striking grocery workers. It was allright as protests go; no great shakes, but there's some good energy. I've more or less had my fill of these kinds of things, I'm thinking, when a real livewire organizer takes the megaphone, a young black man stalking the line in cammo, solid deliver, crisp diction, chants the crowd knows and loves. He's got the touch.

And sitting on the outskirts with my bike -- a spectator if there ever was one -- I'm just about buying it. "There are more of them then there are of us." You're damn right. But then so what? What are we here to do? Dismember the police, tie up the managers and burn down the store? It feels like a possibility, but I don't think it serves anyone's purpose. Obviously it's not what was going on, but in that moment I was ready to do something drastic. Potential for mob action? distressingly high.

Every now and then it cuts the other way. Every now and then maybe I pull someone back towards the sunny-minded way. I know my optimism is infectous. I know that it's no fun believing the world is fucked and that billions must perish before a balance is struck. That's a really depressing way to look at things. That people carry the notion with a measure of grave pride seems to be distinctly American. There's tough times ahead, but it's gonna be them what falls to the flames. They deserved it, ho ho, right.

Dig, yo. The Ice Age doesn't discriminate, and you may not believe in voting, but unless you're stockpiling guns in the woods -- and even if you are -- the idea of resisting the powers that be with violence is a fool's errand.

I'll tell you what we need. We need some damn information revolutionaries. People who machine-gun the truth of agency into the population. We've got a way to do whatever we can get people to agree to do; democracy is a good idea and we aught to take it more seriously. People get hung up on money, myself included, but the real action is in what people can do to one another. Relationships outvalue dollars by orders of magnitude, and the tragedy of the modern era isn't that there's such a great disparity between the rich a poor, it's that people have so few meaningful flesh and blood realtionships and put so much stock in flickering images, ghosts and simulations.

I remain optimistic about the chances of people, if not the state. I tend to think that lacking any pressing animal need and given good information, people tend to do right. People don't naturally attack one another unless there's scarcity, and as a world we've got plenty. The tricky part is realizing this, because it threatens everyone's line of business. Personally, I look forward to the time when we know, and everyone can relax.

It'll soon be illegal to get your ya-ya pierced in Georgia. This law would apply only to the ladies:

Genital piercings for women were banned by the Georgia House Wednesday as lawmakers considered a bill outlining punishments for female genital mutilation.

...

Amendment sponsor Rep. Bill Heath, R-Bremen, was slack-jawed when told after the vote that some adults seek the piercings.

Bill. Buddy. You've got to get out and see the world more. I mean, I've only gotten up close a couple of times, but my limited experience has left me decidedly pro on this issue. Outlawing non-consensual mutilation is a no-brainer (wouldn't that be assault, or child abuse or something?), but you should see what sticking a little strategic metal somewhere can accomplish. It's really quite something.