5 books I read recently & loved: Lucy K Shaw Woman With Hat, Martin Riker The Guest Lecture, Jinnwoo Polo, Eileen Myles a “Working Life”, Scott McCulloch Basin

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‘This book made me feel better about life after a frustrating day at work trying to puzzle out some 1970s DIY electrical wiring. so I guess it’s like a little balm against complicated irritants. Among other things (with hat)

‘I said it about Lucy K Shaw’s last book and I’ll say it about this one, too: I think she is writing really clearly about what it’s like to live in these chaotic pandemic years. At least what it’s like for a wise, funny, tender, and thankful kind of person to live during these years. I haven’t been exactly inclined to seek out, you know like “covid writing” as this has all been playing out over 3 years, and I would hate to have anyone read this review and think that’s all this book contains, because it contains a lot of hilarious and heartwarming interrelated items (Aleksandr Petrovsky testimonies, hungover interviews, lots of good running scenes) but i think most people inclined to document have been documenting the pandemic to some degree or another.

‘I discovered Lucy K Shaw’s writing during a sort of uneven emotional period in my life, and reading something that can calm you down and walk with you is just about all you can ask from a book. It’s also always great to read something you think you might need at a given moment and then actually read it and still be able to say, “oh shit, I didn’t know I needed that.” So cheers to the gifts of this book. It has many.’ — Colin

 

Shabby Doll House
Podcast: Low Fi Lit – Lucy K Shaw W/ Hat!
Lucy K Shaw @ goodreads
Lucy K Shaw’s Favorite Books
Buy ‘Woman With Hat’

 

Lucy K Shaw Woman With Hat
Shabby Doll House

‘Intended to be read on public transport or, even better, in bed. A writing and publishing experiment. A low-key manifesto. WOMAN WITH HAT explores what we talk about once we’re reunited.

‘For people of all genders, with or without headwear.’ — SDH

‘As someone who has read all of Lucy K Shaw’s books, this one feels like the most Lucy K Shaw one yet. It feels like Lucy truly writing as Lucy, and not really caring what anyone else thinks beyond the people she wishes to connect with. That enthusiasm and freedom extends to the reader. There were so many conversations in here that made me want to have a conversation with myself about the same topic, or write about it. I also felt inspired to make work that was more free, exciting, closer to the heart of who I truly am, and it made question why I would chase what traditional publishing wants. That all sounds quite serious, so I should add this is a quite funny book as well. Many times throughout I found myself grinning to myself and loling. Yes, Woman with Hat, she is a book that can do it all. The serious, the moving, the ridiculous and funny. Like life, I suppose.’ — Kristen Felicetti

Excerpts

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Lucy K Shaw reads from, “Woman With Hat”

SHABBY DOLL HOUSE (virtual) WORLD TOUR, THE MOVIE

 

 

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‘It’s difficult to talk with Martin Riker and not feel hopeful. Not so much about the world; both of us are likely too old to presume to know what might come of society, the planet, human beings. But talking with him, and reading his new book, “The Guest Lecture,” lit me up in thrilling ways about all the possibilities still alive — at least for books.

‘Then again, books and life, ideas and the concrete, the imaginative and the practical, are not opposites for Riker or for his protagonist, Abby. “There’s a William Carlos Williams quote,” says Riker, speaking from his home in St. Louis, where he teaches writing at Washington University. “Something to the effect of, ‘Only the imagination can save us’. … As a young man, I wanted to tattoo it on my arm. But I decided that it needs to mean something practical. It can’t mean something just idealistic.”

‘Riker has been walking that line for some time; few projects combine the imaginative and the practical as well as Dorothy, the micro-publishing house he runs with his wife, novelist Danielle Dutton. His first novel, “Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return,” had a narrator whose consciousness moved helplessly among bodies as he searched for his lost son — imagine an existentialist “Quantum Leap.” But it’s in “The Guest Lecture,” his second novel, that the dialectic between fantasy and figures, consciousness and bodies, takes its most affecting form.

‘Abby is an economist, because in college a boy made fun of her for not being practical. But she is also an academic, because her affinity for the practical went only so far. Also a wife and mother (practical or idealistic?), she’s recently been denied tenure. And she has been invited to an unnamed institution to give a lecture on John Maynard Keynes. “He embodies someone who has huge ideas,” says Riker. “Really strange ideas, and actually was incredibly doggedly focused on making them practical.”’ — Lynn Steger Strong

 

Martin Riker Site
A Young Academic Ponders Her Failures in an Insomniatic Haze
Cultivating the Arts of Life in “The Guest Lecture”
The Life of the Mind
Buy ‘The Guest Lecture’

 

Martin Riker The Guest Lecture
Grove Atlantic

‘In a hotel room in the middle of the night, Abby, a young feminist economist, lies awake next to her sleeping husband and daughter. Anxious that she is grossly underprepared for a talk she is presenting tomorrow on optimism and John Maynard Keynes, she has resolved to practice by using an ancient rhetorical method of assigning parts of her speech to different rooms in her house and has brought along a comforting albeit imaginary companion to keep her on track—Keynes himself.

‘Yet as she wanders with increasing alarm through the rooms of her own consciousness, Abby finds herself straying from her prepared remarks on economic history, utopia, and Keynes’s pragmatic optimism. A lapsed optimist herself, she has been struggling under the burden of supporting a family in an increasingly hostile America after being denied tenure at the university where she teaches. Confronting her own future at a time of global darkness, Abby undertakes a quest through her memories to ideas hidden in the corners of her mind—a piecemeal intellectual history from Cicero to Lewis Carroll to Queen Latifah—as she asks what a better world would look like if we told our stories with more honest and more hopeful imaginations.

‘With warm intellect, playful curiosity, and an infectious voice, Martin Riker acutely animates the novel of ideas with a beating heart and turns one woman’s midnight crisis into the performance of a lifetime.’ — Grove Atlantic

Excerpt
from LitHub

Evelyn is at a drum kit and I’m behind a marimba holding the mallets in a throat-choking grip that I know, from having seen actual marimba players, isn’t even close. She’s laying down a rhythm that feels rock-steady at first, like a rhymed couplet, like a stanza of Dr. Seuss, but that occasionally breaks time entirely, as if too much rhythm was accidentally poured into that one particular measure and a few beats of it spilled out on the ground. We’re playing. It feels loose. Chaotic, but in control. And we’re talking, too, not while we’re playing, but whenever we stop.

It’s men who write music history, she’s saying, and history is just whatever gets written, which is why history always misses so much of what’s going on.

*

Pamela Z sings and records her voice and loops and changes it in real time, recording her voice to immediately accompany herself still singing.

Ellen Fullman plays on strings that stretch across a room, strings so long that if you pluck them the sound is lower than the human ear can hear. She puts on sneakers and walks up and down, running her fingers along their length to make the strings resonate. Walking music. We saw her do it live. No doubt she’s out in the world doing it somewhere still.

Laurie Anderson’s computerized voice: funny and serious and perplexing and approachable and very ’80s sounding.

Charlotte Moorman playing cello in a bra made out of little TV sets.

Cathy Berberian.

Diamanda Galás.

Music as performance art.

In the arty “performance art” sense of performance art.

Obviously, music is a performance art.

John Cage’s essays and lectures were exciting to read, while his compositions were half the time hauntingly beautiful and the other half just sort of meh.
Björk I’d listened to in high school. Björk I already loved. Pauline Oliveros is probably the most famous twentieth-century avant-garde woman composer, though I personally preferred listening to that French woman whose name I’m not remembering, but whose music sounded, to me anyway, very similar, but a little bit better.

Evelyn explaining Oliveros’s concept of “deep listening,” which she was reading about at the time.

Me wondering out loud whether the reason Oliveros was more famous than the French composer I liked so much was because Oliveros coined this term, “deep listening,” and the most famous person in any situation is whoever coins a term.
Evelyn taking this question to mean that I wasn’t that interested in Oliveros or “deep listening,” which wasn’t at all what I was saying. Either she’d misread my whimsy, or else I’d struck a nerve. That happened sometimes. For all her generosity of spirit, she also had nerves, and I was occasionally surprised by what struck them.

Women in labs composing on tape reels.

Daphne Oram.

Laurie Spiegel.

Ambient, minimalist, electronic.

Delia Derbyshire at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. She wrote the theme to Doctor Who, as well as a lot of other electronic music just about as creepy sounding as the theme to Doctor Who.

Mary Jane Leach.

Annea Lockwood.

Once I get started, it all flows out.

Alice Coltrane, especially those recordings that are just bass and harp. The incredible variety of musical experiences that can be created with just a bass and a harp.

And Christina Kubisch, who composed a piece that sounds like what a cat hears when it dreams.

Susie Ibarra.

Evelyn’s hero Yoshimi P-We.

Harry Partch and his cloud bells, his giant marimbas like something out of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

Meredith Monk and the idea that music and dance have always been spiritual. That music can make spirituality a contemporary experience in a way that religion often fails to.

How a friendship can persist, in memory, as little more than a list of musicians and titles, because a list of music is a record of experience, of the sound-experience of a place and time.

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Martin Riker – The Guest Lecture

The Guest Lecture by Martin Riker w/ CJ Reads

 

 

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MM) This is your second book and your second book to incorporate dolls in a creative way. Your debut, Little Hollywood, entirely paper doll sketches and scripts to be performed, an incomparable format–like POLO–thoughtfully explores quite sad and profound situations. Do you think of dolls as somewhat central to your work? In a sense, all characters in a book are pliant like dolls, to be wrestled and massaged by the author into position, so I’m thinking on a meta-level it makes sense. Does it? How do dolls influence you? Could you elaborate for the uninitiated what POLO means?

JW) POLO stands for ‘Pants Off Legs Open’ – it’s a term from my childhood in rural Leicestershire. Polos are the name of a well-known breath-mint in the UK. So you could ask people if they wanted to have sex discreetly – “Do you want a polo?”. The combination of the highly sexualised suggestion, with the childlike slang-term or secret code, represents the experience of the children in the novella.

In regard to the use of dolls in both Little Hollywood and POLO – I never actually thought about it as a theme in my work until you asked. I guess on reflection, dolls are our first avatars. And both Little Hollywood and POLO look at ideas of identity and role playing. But yes, maybe something about control and compliance, too. Characters in a book, actors in a film, children in an adult setting – all have to comply and are all formed by something greater than themselves. The dolls are a vessel to be filled by their controller. There is a scene in which the protagonist takes his Barbie doll to the graveyard and talks about her hollow head getting possessed by the spirits of the dead. This is a metaphor for what the older boys are doing to the protagonist.

 

Jinnwoo @ Instagram
Jinnwoo @ Twitter
Interview w/ Jinnwoo
Jinnwoo @ goodreads
Buy ‘Polo’

 

Jinnwoo POLO
Expat Press

‘We’re all dolls that crack. Very rarely is a book so unabashed about obsession and growing pains. The boundaries of the prurient are dysregulated. Jinnwoo’s POLO is a stark, spartan narrative of extracorporeal longing, of alienation from the self. It taps into something intimate and molten that boils you alive. A courageous, droll confrontation of sexual adventure and abuse, unafraid of idiosyncrasy or obscenity. It is tender and punchy, featuring an unforgettable, commanding voice teeming with violent rage curling into wisdom. There are no easy categories, no premeditated salves, just reality in all its unforgiving clarity and ambivalence. An unbridled joy, a small book as silver bullet forged to penetrate and detonate. There is so much space to grow from these savage and sobering lines. Its wit and brevity belies a warm depth and astute x-ray of its subjects. POLO explores a codependent relationship like no other novella has, implicating you astride their twin-like interplay like a hard habit. Its impression is not easily shook off. Its meditation on deviance is profoundly once-in-a-lifetime.’ — Expat

Excerpts

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POLO trailer

You Should Be Feeling This Elliott

 

 

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‘Among the things I like about Thoreau is that he was born in 1817 and died in 1862 at the same age my father did, one hundred years later. So Thoreau’s lifespan is familiar to me. I grew up ten minutes from Walden Pond—we all called it Lake Walden. My family had gone swimming there even before I was born. Walden had a great dock that went way out into the water you could dive and cannonball off of and make a big mess. We were well aware of “the Cambridge people” with their funny hats trotting quietly on the trail on the right to where the hermit had been. There was nothing there now I was told. I went to college later in Boston and reading Walden was the occasion for me of beginning to swim in another pond. The guy who had lived in the woods was engaged in deep measurement. He described the pond as an eye that reflected everything there was. He told you how deep it was and he told in exacting terms what he ate and how much. His practice segued nicely with the world I was living in, a world of Catholicism (a.k.a. counting) and control. Thoreau liked Catholicism, well what he liked was Catholic churches and their intention of creating awe. What he didn’t like was God. He was a bit of a Buddhist: “To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogin,” he explained. He was a performance artist as well. Everyone knows Thoreau now, more than his teacher, Emerson and people love to chuckle knowingly that he went home for lunch and brought his laundry etc. He lived a mile away, so why not. And though Thoreau practiced what screams to me as a gay man’s plan to live deliberately and “alone” he was an entertaining and genial man, and many people stopped by, he and his little house were a bit of a local spectacle and David Henry became Henry David because he liked the sound and sometimes it was crickets and birds and sometimes it was humans talking in his hut, in the vicinity of the pond. And that train. The passenger train to Boston ran right by his hut so he witnessed the beginning of the Anthropocene firsthand. He refused to pay his taxes to support America’s war on Mexico and its commitment right before the Civil War to keeping the status quo of being a slaveholding nation. He had met with and knew John Brown before Harpers Ferry and he mourned his death by throwing his own life in a multitude of ways against the weightiness of that crime.

‘Around the time of the millennium I lived on Cape Cod in Provincetown, in my girlfriend’s house, and I was glad to be back in my native state after twenty years in New York. Provincetown was the part of uptight Massachusetts I could bear because of the art and the landscape and the queerness. I began to devour everything I could about this new place that was also old in my life. I read that Thoreau had taken this walk from Eastham which is roughly the elbow of the cape, to the wrist which is Truro, and finally to the fist or the hand which is Provincetown, the pointing finger, where I lived. I began assailing everyone I wrote for at the time which was mainly Art in America and the Voice to let me write a piece about this walk, but no dice. It was the corny kind of piece that Cape Cod magazines ran from time to time or the Times in their leisure section—it was something nice. Thoreau was not nice and I went ahead and did the walk anyhow.’ — Eileen Myles

 

Eileen Myles Site
For Poet Eileen Myles, the Best Writers Retreat Is the Laundromat
Eileen Myles on Discovering the Poetic Core of Everyday Life
Eileen Myles @ Instagram
Buy ‘a “Working Life”‘

 

Eileen Myles a ‘Working Life’
Grove Atlantic

‘The first new collection since Evolution from the prolific poet, activist, and writer Eileen Myles, a “Working Life” unerringly captures the measure of life. Whether alone or in relationship, on city sidewalks or in the country, their lyrics always engage with permanence and mortality, danger and safety, fear and wonder.

‘a “Working Life” is a book transfixed by the everyday: the “sweet accumulation” of birds outside a window, a cup of coffee and a slice of pizza, a lover’s foot on the bed. These poems arise in the close quarters of air travel, the flashing of a landscape through a train window, or simply in a truck tooling around town, or on foot with a dog in all the places that held us during the pandemic lockdowns. Myles’s lines unabashedly sing the happy contradictions of love and sex, spill over with warnings about the not-so future world threatened by climate change and capitalism, and also find transcendent wonder in the landscapes and animals around us, and in the solitary and collective act of caring for one another and our world.

‘With intelligence, heart, and singular vision, a “Working Life” shows Eileen Myles working at a thrilling new pitch of their poetic and philosophical powers.’ — Grove Atlantic

Excerpt

Put My House

Put my house
inside the
boat

Can we do
that

put my dog
inside
of your
dog

put these birds
inside of
yours

put my ocean

put your ocean
all over
my mountains

put my mountains
in there

put my dog
in yours

my dog walk
is safe
inside your
dog walk

let me
eat inside
you. Let

me eat
your food

let me eat
your house

put your house
inside my
dog

put your dog
on my
boat

naturalize

put my heart
in yours

put my mouth
on your
mouth

put my hair
in yours

let me breathe
inside you

let me smell

your guts

put your boat
in my eye

let me eat
your friends

put these hours
inside your
hours

eat this bird
cheep

eat my
dog’s
foot

eat that ocean

run to him
o’er the
o-o-cean

run to them
hear these
birds cheap

fly to me
eat my foot

put my house
inside yours
in your
mind think
me fly

this fly
me home
love me
now

forget your phone
eat my heart

run to him
o’er the o-o-cean

tweet tweet
tweet

dog growl

cluck

click

put my house

right in

there. Yeah

that’s me
lookin out

the window

look at

me

bark bark
bark

put your heart
inside

that bark

More

Eileen Myles | a “Working Life”

An Evening with Eileen Myles (a “Working Life”) hosted by Heather Milne

 

 

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‘Basin begins with a drowning. Figure, the narrator, is rescued from the water by an unhinged paramilitary named Aslan. From near death, he is heaved back into the shattered and bleak world of Scott McCulloch’s debut novel. It is Figure’s subsequent journey along the coast—through villages, outposts, and barren steppe—that forms the story’s action. War forces him from one flooded settlement to another. The survivors he meets share what little they have: their food, their liquor, their opioids, their soiled mattresses, their bodies.

‘The war is based on the historical conflicts suffered by countries around the Black Sea basin but McCulloch avoids details that would explicitly situate the story. Little clues (in the flora and vernacular) could as easily place it in a far-future Australia, with the continent having been split by an inland sea. More important than the setting is the feeling of doom that pervades this world: a sense of futility that has most characters succumbing to narcotic lassitude or nihilistic euphoria, embracing destruction like vandals in a condemned building.

‘In the face of apocalypse, language fails us. We can bear witness to the event, but we cannot clothe it in poetry. At one point, Figure is ‘struck by how long it is since I’ve canalised thoughts into anything other than the act taking place, into what’s already happening.’ This failure of language is the Beckettian fascination at the heart of Basin (there’s a reference to Molloy’s stone-sucking scene at one point). Figure hears conversations in foreign tongues, unrecognised words, song lyrics he cannot understand. Soldiers and drug dealers rhapsodise to him half-intelligibly. War creates exiles whose shared language is horror.

‘Basin is an uncompromising vision of war and death. As such, brief flights of lyricality, glimmers of hope, have enormous significance. The book’s most jubilant scene is the birth of a donkey foal when, amidst the mucus and placenta, we see the young creature’s ‘black pupils emerge and shine.’ But moments like this one are fugitives too, and the poetry of Basin drowns in its darkness.’ — Bryant Apolonio

 

‘Basin’ @ goodreads
‘Letter from Tehran’
‘And now we are no longer slaves’: notes on Eden Eden Eden at fifty, by Scott McCulloch.
Audio: Scott McCulloch [Selectors Block] [29.04.2020]
Buy ‘Basin’

 

Scott McCulloch Basin: A Novel
Black Inc.

‘A nomad swallows poison and drowns himself. Resuscitated by a paramilitary bandit named Aslan, Figure is nursed back into a world of violence, sexuality and dementia. Together, Figure and Aslan traverse a coastline erupting in conflict. When the nearest city is ethnically cleansed, Figure escapes on the last ship evacuating to the other isle of the sea. Crossing village to village largely on foot, a slew of outcasts and ghosts guide him as he navigates states of cultural and metaphysical crisis.

‘Scott McCulloch’s debut novel, Basin, explores the axis of landscape and consciousness. Echoing the modernist tradition, and written in an incendiary yet elliptical prose style, Basin maps the phenomenon of a civilisation being reborn – a hallucinatory elegy to the inter-zones of self and place.’ — Black Inc.

Excerpt

Rain. Faint ringing in the ears. Aslan takes a glug of fruit vodka, sticks his head out the window and spits the spirit onto the windshield and turns on the wipers. Jagged slopes of clay pass in the van window. Turnips are piled up in a vacant lot that looks as though it was excavated for no reason. Perhaps meant to be a block of apartments, or a car park, perhaps even a hole to inhume a thousand hasty pogroms. As I cross this state of conflict I am torn between poetry and reality. Such thoughts and ideations are reified in the terrain itself – it’s as if the land is condemned to destabilisation, to amnesia – all the more embellished when trawling through such a landscape with a wayward seer such as Aslan, moving forward with the pulse of sheer libido, the muscle of mindless sex, dementia.

We stop at a public fountain for water. A woman wearing a white skullcap bobbypinned to her thick black hair sits by the tap with soft drinks and watermelons in the cold trough. On a wooden table draped with a floral plastic covering, she cuts out pieces of the melon with a hunting knife and hands it to us. Aslan downs a few slices, then runs the wet rind up and down his tanned arms. I bite into the melon and watch a beetle crawl in the dirt; its brown casing turning green in the light.

The woman whistles to a younger man, presumably her son or relative, sitting in the shade of a gum tree. He wears a pair of runners with bits of metal glued to the tips of the toes. He motions over to a rusted sheet of metal by the hut, the scrap of an old car bonnet, and proceeds to tap-dance with his heels clicking and the tips of his shoes hitting the metal, tapping and scraping, in triplets and shuffles, clapping his hands to the rhythm of the shoes, inviting us to clap-along, and to the pulse of the tapping shoes and the claps he starts a yodel: a high shrill holler at first then shifting up and down, from castrato to a voice down within his bowels, back and forth, hitting the tin with gusto, oscillating between yelps and groans from deep inside his body electric. The fever of the dance meets the steam in the air. Aslan barely takes notice, squats by the tap and douses his handkerchief in the cold water and wipes his neck and scalp. The whole encounter seems to irritate him for some reason. Perhaps I’ve overstayed my welcome. How long have I been here for now?

We get back into the van. Aslan keeps driving, paying more attention to the cornfields and coastline outside rather than the road. Rambling, he huffs from one point to the next, half-struggling to spit the words out :

—– this terrain is a drawn-out fit, a seizure of nightmare and purchase. The tropics already make your head swell as is, and now the jungle has outgrown the city. I always thought it’d be the other way around. Downtown’s filled with them fags and pigs and I see the haunted spirits, I see the Ugly all around them

—– just a busker after some extra money, no?

I interject, but Aslan carries on, barely opening his mouth, appearing as a ventriloquist for an instant :

—– even the statues sweat in this silver hell. You can see their stone hearts oxidising on their lapels and down their trenchcoats. I used to own time here! The outside outside of time. Sexual offal held up in a net and dangling from the heavens and the grace of God insh’Allah the only way out is to die. Too late! I’m too late sticking around here pretending to already be born. Pretending to move in a room. Despite everything. My feet don’t fit my shoes. I had to use my heel flap to surgeon my cheeks. Old Cossack technique. My hollow absent cheeks … Good tidings good sir! See! See all absent faces. Absent faces in a market or park or in battle. Speaking the nothing beneath my heel. Except for the worms and larvae and eggs all energy-drinked up to the arse and outliving all of us. Good tidings! Static face absent of earthworm. Gold snatch in my cups. Give it to me. Give me snatch in a cup on a revolving table. Annexation. Cunts. Roulette! National Roulette! Global Roulette! O Straitjacket-suit jacket; sky-the-limit guarantee. O Booze, the only weapon to animate the mental State. This green and silver expanse. Annexed. Swollen fingers grappling for a pair of swaying hips in the Great Prostitution. How sincere these night cretins and hustlers – how real this slice of the human race – these merchants of the body purchase. See. Look! Look at them, that one buzzed to a 3, walking lopsided like an accordion on legs, ready to get stretched up and fingered. And there, that other one, pancake tits and a fucked-out head. If only I could wipe my debts with time in sex. I can smell it off the trees. Such a soft hair, such a lovely soft hair. Like a child’s. When I was a child my sister would cut my hair and put it in a beaver’s hole. I smell it off the trees on a coast of retarded white slaves dredging the sand for snatch. People are simply too stupid for freedom. It makes them sterile. They simply don’t want it. Same goes with you flashboy. You’re deaf. You’re not even here. I yanked you out of the sea and nursed and bathed and clothed you and still no consequence, no conviction. Holy Mother of God and Babha deliver us from Evil, insh’Allah. The System’s all fucked polluted. Fallout, people keep using the word fallout, as if this is all something new. The world we know is a product of hatred, but its extinction shall be the work of love…

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*

p.s. Hey. ** A, Hi. I’ll try the 1975, but I’m kind of more into noise these days. No, Courtney Love didn’t request me, I was assigned. In fact when I showed up in Seattle she told she’d read ‘Frisk’ to check me out, and she was really shocked by it. I don’t know Summer/Heat. Wait you mean the season. I thought that was a bad, ha ha. No, I hate summer and heat like the plague. I’ve been in the Pacific Northwest, sure. Paris didn’t used to get very hot in the summers, but thanks to climate change it roasts for a week or three every year now. ** Jack Skelley, Nice: rain. It’s raining here too, but that’s pretty de rigour. Yay and no surprise about Eileen’s greatness, and, hey, look up, .. coincidence. Oh, great, I’ll stalk my mailbox for ‘FoKA’. Slurp, etc. If there’s any radness in me, I’ll embrace it. Access yours too. ** analrapist, Hi. Yes, I like baseball. I haven’t followed it hardly at all since I moved over here, but yes. They don’t call it ‘the poet’s sport’ for nothing. Do you? ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yes, I think that’s who I meant. I don’t know what Momomon looks like, oops. Oh, this was the banana chewing gum. I forgot it was sour too. I guess it doesn’t exist anymore since people are selling packs on eBay for $45. There does seem to be a few banana chewing gum types still around. Most of them seem to be imports from the Middle East. I’ll see if love can get me into the local electronics store today. Love pretending it’s ennui, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Good, I’ll score it. The Surgeon. Thanks. Glad to hear he’s still chasing it. The ineffable. Thanks, Ben. ** Cody Goodnight, Hi. I’m alright, thank you. Cap and gown and the whole classic shebang, cool. Do you walk up onstage and get a rolled up certificate and all of that? Will you throw your cap up in the air? Do people actually do that? I haven’t seen ‘Zigeunerweisen’, but I just wrote it down and I will. I love Assayas’ ‘Irma Vep’. It’s the only film of his I really like. And, yes, amazing ending. And best ever use of Sonic Youth’s music in a film. Nice. I’ll max out my day. Did yours pay off? ** supermario, Hello, Mario. Say hi to Paper Mario for me if you’re not already him. ** Sypha, Honestly, the only Ladytron thing I love is ‘Destroy Everything You Touch’, so I’m probably not a good judge. I think either you or someone commenting on something you wrote on FB said something like ‘at least Skinny Puppy is better than Front 242’, and I agree with that. I think I love all the Zelda games, or like at least. My favorites are probably ‘Windwaker’ and ‘Ocarina’ maybe. ** Misanthrope, CDG still has smoking areas, but they’re only in the international terminals. And they, yeah, stink to high heaven. But hey. Actually LAX has a smoking area in their international terminal, strangely enough. If you come, and I’m here, and if it’s Roland Garros time, it’s a date! ** Steve Erickson, Hi. You can’t get Criterion Channel here unless you have VPN, and, even if you do, it streams so extremely slowly that it’s not worth it. Happy you got a paragraph down. Keep going, duh. Second (technically) new Surgeon LP prop. Okay, I’ll get it maybe even today. I’ll have an audio peek at Jessie Ware. You never know. ** Dom Lyne, Hi. That makes sense: the parallel with music making/mixing. I’m very, very happy with what we filmed. I think it even exceeded my expectations. Good questions about the evolution during editing. It’s so hard to tell until you’re in that trench. My guess is it’ll stay structured as we intended. It’s really just about which shots/angles we use and the scene lengths and things like that. But who knows. I feel very optimistic about it. I’ve never been a family guy, I guess obviously. I kind of removed myself emotionally from them when things were hellish when I was young, and I’ve never been sorry I did. Lovely remembrance of your friend. And delicious too in theory. Love back. ** politekid, Hi, O. It’s just my (lack of) luck that the new Zelda comes out just as I’m about to be swamped full time with editing the film, so I suspect I won’t get to it until it’s already old news. I hope the bookshop was giving away Virilio books for noble reasons. Okay, I would say that was a pretty swell day you had. Better than mine. I tried to write, couldn’t really. I had film related meetings and talks about the messy part (money) that were no fun but were productive at least. I did phoners with friends. I watched a documentary about Tiny Tim that was interesting informationally but nothing much as a film. I went to a store to buy the new issue of The Wire but they didn’t have it yet. Stuff like that. Just stuff, nothing with a crescendo. I’ve heard of Lankum, but I haven’t heard them. Pogues/ Swans hybrid? Weird. Maybe good weird. I’ll hunt. Big up! ** Travis (fka Cal), Hi. Too many creative projects at once doesn’t elicit a ton of sympathy, ha ha. More like congrats. Guitar skills upping. Nice, electric or acoustic? Enjoy Eileen. They’re always great. As is their new book (see: up above). Take care. ** anon01, I think what I always think when I read things like what you wrote, which is basically ‘huh’. ** Right. I managed to read five books I loved over the course of my recent ultra-busy month(s), and there they are for you to check out and consider. I hope you do. See you tomorrow.