7/22 And I hope that you die... I hope that we both die

I read today: 8 incredibly tedious articles on the state of modern literature, of which 1 was interesting or moderately entertaining. The rest were typified by this gem: "The experimental poetics variously identified with this expanded range allow for reconsideration of oppostional terms like conventional and experimental or expressive and innovative while nonetheless working to foreground and unsettle identity categories, particularly, race, class and gender, and the scaffolding of their linguistic architectures in examining rhetorics of self." (That sentence was actually chosen at random). I also began my first foray into the world of James Joyce, reading the first 50 pages of Ulysses, what most people consider the greatest English novel of all time. Not that 50 pages, in this case, counts for much-- the fucking book is damn near 1,000 pages. Wish me luck on that.

I also wrote a fair amount today, finishing and posting a short piece on prostitution over at Innocent Abroad, and plugging away at a very daunting poem that I began while traveling, and coming up with a (better) lead-in to the end of Phylloxera. Interesting to me that the semester starts tomorrow and is heavily based on writings which are based on what I do in class, but I really, really want to write this story and have it be good. I've got premises written for at least half a dozen more stories that could also be good, but this one has kind of obsessed me, which I think is good-- 'what inspires you should entire you', and I do plan to use that as an epigraph one day. I think it's hilarious to, rather than quote Dante, Homer or Shake-a-spear, quote artists that actually had a big influence on you. In my case that's Bob Dylan, T.S. Eliot, Adam Duritz, Billy Collins, J.R.R. Tolkien, Don Henley, Adrienne Rich, John Irving, Richard Bach, etc.

And if anybody had any doubts that The White Stripes were funny cats after their one-note 'surprise show' in Newfoundland where they played-- get this-- one note, then walked offstage with Jack proclaiming: "We have now officially played every state and province in Canada," here's a cell-phone camera video of another surprise show they did in Winnipeg-- on the god damn city bus. (This video is only part of the show-- in the link above, they also play Hotel Yorba (one of my favorite songs) and some douche proclaims loudly "I'm gonna die, man!")



Drink Count: 7

Class starts up again tomorrow, and then so do the daily pictures and shit, I suppose... catching up on 30 days in 4 really jaded me on this blog, and if this shit is boring for me, it's gotta be unbearable for ya'll...