Unkinny.
I’ve written about that sense of ostranenie which is heimlich; how about the home-like stuff that leaves you feeling all outside yourself? —I do not watch football, not anymore, and even then it was only on in the background while I did other things because the grownups had control of the television. I haven’t been to Alabama in years; the time I’ve spent there is measurable at most in months. But I was born there, and the first dirt I ever walked on was dry and red and smelled like pine sap under the sun, so when Jim White sings “Alabama Chrome” and gets to the bridge—
The heat it is withering, humidity smothering.
Strip of silver tape, a sly lie covering
Dent in the side of a redneck ride.
Going deep for the Crimson Tide. —Yeah!
—I can’t help but pump my fist and sing along. Roll Tide.
(I don’t think you understand. My father went to Auburn. War Eagles! See? I can’t help but get it wrong! And yet I can’t help but get it—)
Gonna bump to the thump of the Selma slammer.
Wanna jump up and down like a wack jackhammer.
Sing a little “Sweet Home Alabama”—
Jimmy gimme wink like a big flimflammer.
Boatswain!
I’ve been watching an inordinate amount of Prospero’s Books lately, because it is an ideal entertainment for an infant who’s sitting in your lap while you’re trying to get some work done in a window on the other monitor over there—glorious music, a charismatic man doing all sorts of silly voices, every second there’s something new and rich and strange and beautiful to look at.
—Also, I now remember why it was I’d thought of giving Perdix all those memory-dancers, but that’s neither here nor there. Nor would you be interested to learn that I want my office to look like this:
At least I’ve got the papers-and-books-everywhere æsthetic down.
—While we’re on the subject of movies playing repeatedly in a corner of the screen, remind me to tell you at some point (and I’m not even kidding here) why Speed Racer was maybe 2008’s best movie. Fuck The Dark Knight—those fucking Wachowskis filmed a sequence in the goddamn subjunctive!
The crying of lot 48½.
Once you see the arrow in the FedEx logo, you can never unsee it.
Mad, mad world.
“Mad”ness comes from the lazy epoch.
The aunt is mad at me.
The uncle comes home late.
The children are mad.
The dog is mad.
The housewife is mad at you—
the door is barred.
The ship is sunk, the crew
is mad.
—Ernst Herbeck [via; via]
I don’t know—
2009 looked bigger on the TV.
In Tsaija, five kilometers out from Sovetskaya Gavan.
I have no idea what I’m going to do with this just yet—
—so into the commonplace book it goes.
It’s what you do, not who (you say) you know.
Apparently, I’ve been web 3.0 for a couple years now. Who knew? (—Web 4.0, then: we all leave our websites to languish, gathering dust and rust and rotting links.)
Taran plus five weeks and counting.
I did mention the whole kid thing, right?
—Oh, sure, over at LiveJournal and Twitter. —But here? On my own dam’ blog blog? Bupkes for weeks on end. Where did the time go?
Further bulletins when I can find the words. (I know I left them around here somewhere.)
It’s the little things, isn’t it. It’s always been the little things.
“Lately, we all need to eat dinner together. Different groups, but always groups. Long tables, long meals. Lots of dishes and drinking glasses and laughing. This is not, at all, a complaint. It’s just happening on all sides now, often, and I wonder why and, also, I love it.” —Jen Snow
Vanity thy name is.
- Take a picture of yourself right now.
- Don’t change your clothes.
- Don’t fix your hair
- Just take a picture.
- Post that picture with no editing. (Except maybe to get the image size down to something reasonable. Don’t go posting an eight megapixel image.)
- Include these instructions.
Oh, wait. That’s actually the picture what Bill gave my for my birthday. (Which was spectacular, by the way.)
—The meme’s over here, if you must know.
Why I currently like Facebook to an arguably excessive degree.
“Kip joined the groups What Would William Tanner Vollmann Do?, Scott Pilgrim is my hero and DAR: A Super Girly Top Secret Comic Diary. 10:06pm Comment”
27½ weeks out and counting.
Quisquiliæ.
Regrets: I regret leaving out Sara’s point from that “Comics Are Not Literature” panel about prose making you forget the black marks on the white paper, and Douglas’s complement that comics make you all too aware of these specific marks made by this specific person, and what that says about rough and smooth; I can’t believe I didn’t tie up the dangling loose end of “pretty much is good enough”; I wish I’d gone ahead and attacked the name of “graphic novel,” which is one of the main reasons why we’re all so het up about literature and not so much worried about art. (Aht?) There’s some nice comments over at the Valve, and I hope I wasn’t the last one in the pool. —Mostly I wish I hadn’t utterly missed the obvious joke of Canon and Continuity.
Silk; linen; pearls.
It was actually twelve years ago today. (Depending on how you look at it.)
Swan, swan, hummingbird hurrah.
Apparently it was not quite 22 years ago that I walked into a Sam Goody or whatever it was in the mall a longish bike ride from our house in Barrington Hills and saw to one side a towering stack of Lifes Rich Pageant (Bill Berry peering quizzically over those bison) and, to the other, a great record-store poster of The Queen is Dead, Alain Delon lying back over all those casette tapes. —I’d say something about how wistfully I wonder what might have happened had I franklied Mr. Shankly instead—but I already have, four years before. (That’s the thing about blogging, after a while; you don’t have to say anything more. You can just look back and point.)
20 weeks out and counting.
Ladies, gentlemen, plain people of the internets, it pleases us more than we can say to present our daughter, Taran Jack Manley.
If her name is anything to go by, she’ll be a tricksy goat come roaring down from the rocky fields of Heaven (somewhere leeward of the Isle of Man, it seems) with a white rose in her teeth and mischief in her eyes; she may, in fact, be here to save us all.
—Though not quite yet. (She is, as it were, in beta.)
