I was preparing to leave when I spotted an album with a wonderful title: "More Songs About Buildings and Food." You will probably already know who it was by--I didn't. The Talking Heads. As I stopped to admire it, I was gripped by melancholy, similar perhaps to the feeling a certain kind of man gets while sitting with his wife on a train platform as a beautiful girl--different in all aspects from his wife--walks by. There goes my other life. Is it too late to get into the Talking Heads? Do I have the time? What kind of person would I be if I knew this album at all, or well?

--Zadie Smith, My Epiphany About Joni Mitchell

BEFORE AND AFTER SCIENCE

“Living in the past may seem like a disadvantage, but it’s a cost that the brain is willing to pay,” Eagleman said. “It’s trying to put together the best possible story about what’s going on in the world, and that takes time.” Touch is the slowest of the senses, since the signal has to travel up the spinal cord from as far away as the big toe. That could mean that the over-all delay is a function of body size: elephants may live a little farther in the past than hummingbirds, with humans somewhere in between. The smaller you are, the more you live in the moment....“I once mentioned this in an NPR interview and I got flooded by e-mails from short people,” Eagleman said. “They were so pleased. For about a day, I was the hero of the short people.”

--Burkhard Bilger, The Possibilian

Things I like about this article: Eagleman, neuroscience, time, Brian Eno, short people.

LIKE IT MEANS SOMETHING

You hang onto your pain like it means something, like it's worth something. Well, let me tell 'ya, it's not worth shit. Let it go. Infinite possibilities, and all he can do is whine.

--Nathaniel, Six Feet Under (via Ruth Boglebizer)


Six Feet Under is a good show, and the first show that I watched from beginning to end. During the finale, I wept and wept, and now it makes me think of Justin and Martin--no complaints there.

“La Vita Nuova” explained how to become a great poet. The secret was to fall in love with a perfect girl but never speak to her. You should weep instead. You should pretend that you love someone else. You should write sonnets in three parts. Your perfect girl should die.

--Allegra Goodman, La Vita Nuova

BEING BETTER BROS

One particular book, I said, broke me out of a phase where I couldn’t finish a novel.

My friend is precious and hopeful and took it to mean that I finished writing a novel. Actually the phase was one in which I couldn’t finish reading a novel, because reading is hard to do for sustained periods, because I would rather Tweet reviews of frozen pizza.

But she is excited to read this novel that I’ve written, and I am excited to be thought of as someone who wrote a novel, so I’ll wait a while before responding.

--Eddie

Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to do? How can you be sure about something like that? Isn't it all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex? How do you know whether something is really what you want to do or just some kind of nerve impulse in the brain? Some minor little activity takes place somewhere in this unimportant place in one of the brain hemispheres and suddenly I want to go to Montana or I don't want to go to Montana.

--Don DeLillio, White Noise

EXISTENTIAL DREAD ON THE PLAYGROUND

Elliot: Living. It is so hard.
My mom: What do you think would be easier? Non-living?
Elliot: Oh, I don't know. Maybe being a turtle. Or a bug.
Mom: Yes, that might be easier. but then you would miss your family and friends. Would you like to take your shoes off now?
Elliot: [sighing deeply] I've forgotten how to bend.

--Conversation between my mom and Elliot (b. 2005)

SO WHAT IF THE INTERNET HAS TURNED EACH DAY INTO A PANIC-RIDDEN INFORMATIONAL HOT-DOG-EATING CONTEST?

And I do, I spend enormous, unjustifiable amounts of time simply gorging on information. The worst of it is that I seem to need more and more, but the equipment I am using is too slow, it’s positively lumbering. No way can my head handle the rate at which I am trying to shove stuff in; the evidence of that is conclusive. I can never remember how to spell Aung San Suu Kyi. A Canadian friend ribs me for knowing so little about the Harper government. I still haven’t read today’s newsletters from Salon, japantoday.com, or The New Yorker. The books in this house are evidently multiplying on their own. It takes me forever to read even a newspaper article in Spanish, let alone Roberto Bolaño like I’m supposed to be doing.

--Maria Bustillos, In Praise of High-Speed Overload

YEP YOU GOT IT

Sunil knew nothing of the movie [Slumdog Millionaire] that ends with an airport-slum boy finding money, love, and fame. However, he might have recognized one of that movie's conceits: that deprivation may give a child a certain intelligence. The other conceit--that a child's specific miserable experiences might be the things to spring him from his deprivation--was the lie. It was the movie version of the electrified fence. The women who had been manicured and exfoliated and blown out would linger at the premiere past 1 A.M., then head to the after party at the JW Marriott. They could relax, not just because the film about the slum boy had a happy ending but because the boy's suffering had been part of the solution.

--Katherine Boo, Opening Night

The Wire was not about Jimmy McNulty. Or Avon Barksdale. Or Marlo Stanfield, or Tommy Carcetti or Gus Haynes. It was not about crime. Or punishment. Or the drug war. Or politics. Or race. Or education, labour relations or journalism. It was about The City. It is how we in the West live at the millennium, an urbanised species compacted together, sharing a common love, awe, and fear of what we have rendered. The Wire depicts a world in which capital has triumphed completely. A world in which the rules and values of the free market and maximised profit have been mistaken for a social framework, a world where institutions themselves are paramount and every day, human beings matter less.

--David Simon, Quality Trumps Ad Nauseam



Hey, Timothy, remember how much David Simon sucked IRL? That's really too bad. Hey, Dan, remember how much we suck when it comes to City and Culture but it's actually a really cool class so we shouldn't suck so much? Yeah.

The fact is that we're all lonely, of course. Everyone knows this, it's almost a cliche. So yet another layer of my essential fraudulence is that I pretended to myself that my loneliness was special, that it was uniquely my fault because I was somehow especially fraudulent and hollow. It's not special at all, we've all got it. In spades.

--David Foster Wallace, Good Old Neon

The Germans must have a term for it. Doppel­gedanken, perhaps: the sensation, when reading, that your own mind is giving birth to the words as they appear on the page. Such is the ego that in these rare instances you wonder, “How could the author have known what I was thinking?”

--Leah Hager Cohen, Alice Munro's Object Lessons

NO MATTER HOW FANCY YOU THINK YOU ARE

Monica Maristain: Have you shed one tear about the widespread criticism you’ve drawn from your enemies?

Roberto Bolaño: Lots and lots. Every time I read that someone has spoken badly of me I begin to cry, I drag myself across the floor, I scratch myself, I stop writing indefinitely, I lose my appetite, I smoke less, I engage in sport, I go for walks on the edge of the sea, which by the way is less than 30 meters from my house and I ask the seagulls, whose ancestors ate the fish who ate Ulysses: Why me? Why? I’ve done you no harm.

--Blake Wilson, Stray Questions for: Roberto Bolaño?! [via Boyland]

A BIG BIG BIG HEARTBEAT

Yeah, I don't really know anything about anything but that is pretty okay because I don't think I've ever really known anything about anything, and everything has worked out pretty well so far. I worry that my parents don't know how crazy I am about them, so if I die and they are sad someone please show them this. I worry about trash islands twice the size of Texas and men standing on hills in Kazakhstan, smoking cigarettes. I worry that you find me boring.

Why don't you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don't you take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooon?

--Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick

I felt a little good after reading this book because I am pretty sure that when I am almost fifty I will also not understand anything in my life, it's good to know that I am not alone in this.

--Tao Lin, The Easter Parade by Richard Yates

APPEARANCE POKER

Lonely people tend rather to be lonely because they decline to bear the emotional costs associated with being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly. Let's call the average U.S. lonely person Joe Briefcase. Joe Briefcase just loathes the strain of the self-consciousness which so oddly seems to appear only when other real human beings are around, staring, their human sense-antennae abristle. Joe B. fears how he might appear to watchers. He sits out the stressful U.S. game of appearance poker.

--David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction

There's this TV show that you might have heard of called Friday Night Lights. You might have heard that it's about about a high school football team from this tiny town in Texas that is made up of people who are really into football and God. Which sounds absolutely terrible, right? Except that it's sfg. And I mean seriously, seriously, sfg. With many hours to kill at the Philadelphia airport I made the happy mistake of watching the first episode and haven't been able to stop. I am enamored with most of the characters (except you, Lyla), everything about it reminds me of Alliance, and even football can seem epic when it's played against a backdrop of Explosions in the Sky.

One of my favorite things about this show is that it captures so well how absolutely crushing life in high school can feel. A large difference between the way I handled trying situations then and the way I do now is that I am always very aware now that things get better. It seems simple enough, but I remember feeling many times during high school (what with moving, breakups, deaths, and parental issues) that improvement was nearly impossible. So I guess that's maturity?

Anyway, the first season is the bomb dot com, and although the second season isn't nearly as good it does boast Tim Riggins buying flowers while Devendra Banhart croons (swoon swoon swoon). It's funny and sweet and poignant and perfectly summery.

I feel old.

--Bodie, The Wire