Rogue Reporter

A few minutes ago, I decided Steve Malkmus should just be called "The Malk."
Then I googled it. I dunno what happened. It was like my fingers were typing it but nothing was actually happening inside my brain. It was google autopilot.

By the way. Nice blazer, professor.

I've continually warned people against the dangers of Wikipedia. But this week, I must say, Wikipedia has given me many gratifying giggles.
First my trained monkey and now this:

List of neologisms on The Simpsons

I think "malk" might even end up being my favorite but who can really say...

OHMIGOD! If you have not yet seen this young lady's video blog YOU MUST WATCH IT.
For a little while I couldn't tell if emo kids really were just annoying, whiny bitches or if I was just getting old and jaded.
ummm....yeah...
I feel bad for EmoGirl. I do. It's rough being a kid but this is just...

I remember when re-reading Robert Cormier books, journaling, and maybe whipping the bed with a belt was the best a girl could do in the way of expressing "pain" on the average night.
Maybe those days weren't so bad after all. At least there was no webcam document of it.

EmoGirl has some shit to tell Meghan. And the pain, people. Soooo much, like, pain.
THANKS TO KATIE FOR MAKING MY DAY.

In the past few days I've been trying to write out a piece of something I've been meaning to work on for years now. I'm reading Sunday at a nonfiction storytelling series, Telegraph Stories, and I wanted to bring something new. Figured a deadline might make me finish a small piece of it. Test some things out.
Instead I've been staring at the screen, letting memories take me as far they wish to go until they're done with me. It's taking me back to my undergrad days when I made some shady trips into memoir territory. I had a professor who was convinced I should write the definitive Portuguese-American memoir. Irish was hot then. Cuban and Puerto Rican was on its way in. I could be the next Esmeralda Santiago or Frank McCourt!
The idea made me sick then and it still does today.
But there were two parts of my mind duking it out in those days and I still haven't been able to get over how I've managed to keep these two forms of writing--that overlap so nicely--so divided when all I've ever seemed to want to do is combine them.

At the time I was obsessed with autobiographical fiction. Jamaica Kincaid, Marguarite Duras and Jean Rhys were a triumverate I'd fashioned out of sparse lines and dreamy surrealism buried under a fog of booze and/or anger. Mine and theirs.
I even dreamed of a seminar I'd teach about postmodernism and postcolonialism that revolved around their work.
Jean Rhys especially killed me. She was, at once, morbid and exuberant. Horrified more by herself (everything she was incapable or cabable of) than the people surrounding her.


In the other direction, Tim Crouse's The Boys on the Bus--a document of his time on the 1972 presidential campaign trail and, essentially, the beginnings of pack journalism--had me convinced that the world would fall at the hands of shitty political coverage. I wasn't entirely wrong. I understood then that it was worthwhile to be a political reporter outside the mainstream media.
But it could come with an uncomfortable set of responsibilities.


But more than anything, Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel made me want to be a first rate storyteller. One so good that he didn't even have to make it up. Writing about New York's unsung eccentrics from the '30s through the '60s, Mitchell's voice lived and breathed inside his stories, but he hardly, if ever, used the "I."


This is all a long, boring way of saying that studying writing for so long was a help in a lot of ways, but sometimes I just feel like a trained monkey who'll never find its own way to communicate.

This is some inappropriate blogging but...
I think I made out with this guy once. I'm pretty sure. On the lawn in front of a dorm.
He was a good kisser. I think I somehow managed to say something self-deprecating in the middle of it. He put his hand up my shirt. And my shirt was tucked in. He worked for it. I respect that.
And now he's reading at the bookstore where I work. Clear across the country. A million years later. Weird.
I won't be there because it'll make me think about things that are irrelevant to my life, like if my hair looks as good as it did 8 years ago or how much weight I've gained since college or about shirts I loved and lost that I shoplifted back then.

But YOU should go. Because it'll be fun for YOU.
Good stuff.

Noah Eli Gordon and Sara Veglahn
Pegasus Books
Wednesday 7:30pm

YES..........................MORE, PLEASE.......THANK YOU........I LOOK FORWARD TO IT...
(savvy surfers click photos for links)

For a few days I was working on some stoner-style conspiracy theories about where the non-label Destroyer website had gone.
Turns out I'd just forgotten the URL, which I actually had in the archives of my own blog.
Yes, I can be very stupid at times.




In any case, it was all in the name of directing you to this play that marks the home of the non-label Destroyer website.
I love this play. I've read through it twice and something about it is deliciously pretentious and very European New Wave.
1960s not 1980s, that is.

Also...rainy day at the bookstore + Silver Jews American Water = playing endless noodle-y air guitar solos in my head. Well into the night.
Berman & Malkmus Forever, people. Berman & Malkmus Forever.

Be there or else I'm not going to sleep with you ever again. Not any of you. Not any more.
I'll be working so cookie/cupcake-like treats, monitary donations, and mix cds will be greatly appreciated.