it's so very maxfield parrish out right now

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For all my griping and moaning, it is exceptionally beautiful here.

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How about a dumb old Western to take yer mind off it all?

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love, 99
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i wish max would lay off joking about the edge

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He can bash the snot out of Bono and Geldoff. They, like, soooo deserve it, but unless I'm gravely mistaken, all The Edge has ever done is play fantastic guitar.

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I think I'm going to die of not finding the nineteen-minute version of With Or Without You that's mostly The Edge. Bono actually shuts up for most of that. I'm beginning to think 86 looped the guitar on that tape he made for me or something. I never find it. I think it would be best if Bono just hummed softly and let The Edge do it.

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love, 99
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looting antiquities

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I know Toucans are not from Egypt, but there is a connection between ancient Egypt and ancient America and I want to contemplate that instead of all this creepy stuff I'm also attending.

Former Egyptian museum director Wafaa el-Saddik said the National Museum in Cairo was looted by its own security guards and that the Memphis Museum, south of Cairo, was "completely emptied" by looters.

"I alerted an army general but it was too late," he said.

Looters also emptied an entire warehouse at the Qantara Museum, near the city of Ismailia, that contained 3000 objects from the Roman and Byzantine periods, a tourism police source said.

Egyptian museum official Mohamed Megahed said there had been "immense damage" to the ancient burial grounds of Abusir and Saqqara.

"Only the Imhotep Museum and adjacent central areas were protected by the military. In Abusir, all tombs were opened with gangs digging day and night," he said.

It seems the looting has been quite more extensive than I've seen so far, and I'm bummed about this, and:

This lies in the background of President Mubarak’s appointment of Egypt’s antiquities Tsar, Zahi Hawass, to a cabinet level post. Given Hawass’ own background and connections to the western elites, this is not a surprising move, but it is one that subtly implies that elite’s interest in Egyptian antiquities.

So I, along with the irascible Phil, am not feeling comforted by this elevation of the prime headache for Egyptologists... often seemingly completely at whim.

Anyway, It's 11am in Cairo, and hour before Friday prayers, and Tahrir Square is already full. In addition, there are people blocking ingress to State TV and various government offices and no word of the contingent that lit out for Mubarak's palace last night, but more on the way.

The army brass have been meeting this morning—without Mubarak or Suleiman—and have promised a statement before prayers. So I will try to stay awake for it... but I'm fading fast....

The people seem to hotly desire that the military take over the interim government. They want them to take out the regime. This is a very, very popular opinion, with also quite a few who feel Mubarak has been tamed and they can wait a few more months. Some of those will be wishing that out of gratitude for what they think Mubarak did for them in the past, some out of weariness and fear, and some because their businesses are tanking beyond help if this goes on much longer.

They are expecting 20 million demonstrators across the nation today.

I'm hoping the military will just announce to everyone before any violence kicks up that they have escorted Mubarak out of the palace and will be running things and facilitating the writing of the new "connestetution" is being written... but you know me. Fairy dust hippie and all....

This post, as with yesterday's, will likely be updating all day, so the people on the feed might want to know that.

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love, 99
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another fascination, not sick

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I can't get over this guy. On the one hand, he represents everything I do devotedly despise about people, but on the other, he is such a work of deeply humane art, himself, and so much of what emanates from him, that I feel I could forgive him for residing amid the despicable.

By the Lagoon

There is a bridge in Prospect Park that is
now condemned.
But I walk over it anyway
and I go beyond the collapsed fence that
wards you off from its edges
and I peer over the bannister at the
beautiful lagoon below
with its shallow yet mysterious water
which is a world unto itself —

a world of sky and turtles —

for water and sky are one —

and turtles and birds within them.
And I remember a long time ago —
when I first looked down into this
lagoon and saw it leading away
and I was young and ready to follow roads —

as I still do.
But I used to go there and become almost

mad with being lost by the lagoon

mad with the woods —
mad with the day and its gold and my

solitude among it.

Mad with my own young murderable beauty —

like some crazy screaming bird —

yet silent – exultant —

pale and screaming with solitude beside

the water —

the silent song of solitude surrounding me —

with its splashes and flutters of wind

and strange shrieks of birds.

And then through the leaves black boys
on bicycles came crashing —

shrieking with laughter —
and I stood still, frozen with terror —

thinking
“They are going to kill me” —

feeling myself so murderable there among
the woods —
on the black side of the park —
so murderable by teenaged black boys

on bicycles —

how could they resist murdering me —

a boy trying to be a tree among trees —

but a tree who has not stopped being a boy —

a young man in love with himself as he was

at seventeen —

when he first set out on his wanderings.
This was where his wanderings had led him —

to this abandoned place.
I imagined living there by the lagoon —

that I was that boy I once was,
still living there among the trees.
When night fell, though, terror overcame me

and I left the park and went home.
But that boy stayed there among the trees.

I imagined his life —

that I had been alone all these years.
I was a man of twenty-seven who lived in a

strange rooming house with his sister

and drank and went to night clubs.

But I was that boy I once was.

I lived by the lagoon.
I had not spoken in years.

I had drifted away from humanity.
I peered out from among the leaves.
I look out of my eyes.

I am alone.

This all took place long ago —

in the summer of a book I began to write,

but a real summer as well —

the summer I first found that abandoned place.

That was years ago.

The book is written.
The book is long since finished.

The boy lives in the book.
But I think he is still there by the lagoon.
I think I must have thought that I could

be that boy again.

I still do.
If I spent one night by the lagoon

at dawn I would be gone
and that boy would be there, watching
from the leaves.
But in all the years since I first found that
place I have never dared spend one night

there.
I have always been too frightened.

—Edgar Oliver

The kind of honesty here is not worn like a designer shirt, something crafted to show off, and so not honest at all, as is the immortal wont of "artists". I don't think the man could be more different from me, and yet I recognize in my cells so much of what he shares. This is true to such a degree that I feel a sort of rejoicing in listening to him speak in his utterly unique mode—something so universally creepy being to me like an heirloom, a little treasure from people who were old when I was a toddler, echoes from the other side of my own galaxy, nestled in a little tresure box on my desk.

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love, 99
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fast fiction

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For those too busy to read a novel....

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love, 99
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a story

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An all-American story.

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love, 99
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i'm outta spray-on pkd

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I should have retained my PKD books in my huge book dump years ago. I kept Hammett and Chandler and Garcia-Marquez, but too many people never returned the PKDs. So now I have none. Maybe I oughta try to fix that, because I've spent the last couple hours trying just to think about his work... and it's just not the same.

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love, 99
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carver's excuse

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Drunks think like this. Losing the view is a righteous excuse to mangle their lovers' lives.

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love, 99
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moon men

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Proof...

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love, 99
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they've finished restoring the bedroom

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I feel some trepidation.

I think they may have taken too much Vincent out of it.

Don't forget his letters.




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this stuff is damn amazing

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I have seen some of his pieces before, but turns out there's quite a lot to look at. It's all got a certain terrible beauty to it, and you know that's... well... that's pretty much up my alley....

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omg

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OMG

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andy goldsworthy

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Here. Put yer heart back together. Or tear it down.

[It'll probably look better if you download it onto your computer and watch it in a smaller player.]
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i remember reading this story in the magazine

[click image, audio, 47 minutes — either I was too tired when I posted this and my eyes weren't working right, or I uploaded a middle version of the image I'd worked on to post instead of the end version... so if the image looks different to you now, well, that's because it is. Yet another thing that chuffs me about the feeds readers! I do so much work making the images go with this page. I'm never going to turn into a bastard Picasso on you, but, pfeh, you'll pardon me, I'm sure, if I continue to question the esthetic of your environment and what it does to your vitality and empathy, or lack thereof. Plus, the only way you will be getting this update and improvement is if you've come late to this post on your reader. I shudder to think of the partially-finished posts you have witnessed, never seeing the links added later and updates. I'm NOT going to sacrifice my spontaneity for posting the perfectly-polished every time. Maybe I will create a drafts blog and do more work before the posts hit this page, so you will get better out there, but STILL, pfeh, yuck. Those readers are UGLY. So I'm going to go right ahead and say the rest I had to say about this story, because you are, most probably, unable to know there's been any change.]

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And I remember thinking how glad I was to have finished it, it being past tense, and then thinking how odd it was to have that thought, felt funny. I read short stories in that magazine every week, and rarely remember a one of them, and wouldn't have remembered this one, but for having had that funny, faintly luminous feeling at the very end of it over nothing I could discern at that moment. I thought the whole thing was a man who really adored his wife and wanted somehow to erase her regret and grief, didn't want her to think less of herself, wanted to be protective but not paternal, afraid her bitterness and obsession with unpredictability might yank her out of his life. So listening to these women discussing it, and going through the story again, I still say the gender-based agenda is just ugly, from either side. I mean, from the very start he didn't like her oldest friend precisely because she was not a good friend to her, competed with her, a boring snob and he was right. That seems to have escaped these two. I won't say more, in case you want to listen and express your own thoughts on the matter, but I feel these two professionals twisted this short story to suit some dim notion of feminism and missed the real depth of the piece.
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Deborah Treisman and Monica Ali read Joshua Ferris’s “The Dinner Party” and discuss it at the image link... sort of like we did in school, expressing what we took away from the works and what we thought the author meant to convey and talking about the characters as though they were real people out there, out there in one of the billions of little worlds that make up the cosmos in which we walk around, pretending usually is just this life, just this little cell in the corner of our own minds and what it has let in as existent.

The protagonist here is just this guy, this unpretentious guy, who clearly just wants his life and friends and love and no pressures to be politically correct or politically astute. There's some famous or high socialite beauty at the party into which he stumbles later in the story, and he has no clue who she is, nor obviously does he particularly care. If you haven't gotten the picture that he's not interested in this sort of thing, but his wife IS, by this time in the story, the ending is going to lead you to prattle about marriages in trouble and postulate that he's a drunk, because he's had too much to drink this night.

He was drinking liberally because he was facing the specter of an evening with his wife's oldest friend and her husband. He does not like the friend because she competes with his wife instead of being her friend. This is extra hard for him because his wife is bitter about being barren and her snob friend is pregnant, and he's NOT looking forward to having this couple over to the impeccably-prepared gourmet dinner his wife is slaving to produce to impress her friend. He's drunkenly making up all this outrageous stuff to help release his wife from the pressure of the competition and the pain of her sense of loss and insufficiency from being unable to have children. He's expressing his solidarity with her, using that mode of tasteless statements he so enjoys about her... going probably overboard because he is increasingly sloshed.

Twice she points out he's no help. Once it is about his inability to make her pregnant, which both know is because she can't conceive. The next time it is about his refusal to enter into the game she calls her friendship, her social life, her desire to be different, superior, unpredictable, chic. Her friend is continually beating her out in these pursuits and it's always a while before she can calm down about it and revert to the friendly feeling again. And, this character flaw of hers keeps him frightened that she will just up and disappear on him one day.

This is revealed, or confirmed, when the protagonist is outside the snob friend's apartment being told off by her. She's a raving bitch, doesn't give a shit about her oldest friend and tries to blame him for that. He's just him. We are seeing throughout the story a guy who completely loves his wife of many years, whose sense of the marriage has not changed from the realization that they can't have kids, who wants his wife not to be so traumatized by it, so embittered by it, so whipped in the self-esteem department by it, wants to help her with that, show his solidarity with her, and she can't see it, is not comforted, does not connect, because she's been thrown into this role as defective and pitiable in a whole circle full of winners and her husband's complete lack of interest in that circle is no help to her sense of self-worth... because her sense of worthiness is based on superficial crap with superficial people... and he's outright incapable of going there, even for her sake... well because it wouldn't ACTUALLY be for her sake, now would it?

Deborah and Monica go on as though he is an alcoholic schlub who is a weight on his wife. It is clear in this story that he is drinking a lot this evening to be able to endure the visit with his wife's awful friends. It is clear that his wife is pissed off at him for getting so drunk when she's trying to pull off this perfect dinner party, and it's made the worse for her because she knows he's doing it to ward off the difficulty of a difficulty that is a difficulty for her in a different sense. It is also clear that the husband of his wife's friend is the alcoholic. Basically, his wife's friendship of so many years is at least equal parts competition and affection for her, while probably completely competition for the bitch who is late to her exquisite dinner. Our protagonist's wife would not have married a loser. She would have married someone her snob friends would be impressed by. So even though we never hear what he does, or who he is in the world, it's pretty obvious he's someone who's made a name for himself in art or letters or something snobs revere. The disappointment is that he isn't playing their game. Doesn't give a shit what celebrities they know, doesn't even follow who's a celebrity, and is abashed by his friend's apparent interest in this stuff.

These two seem to think that the couple times late in the story where he loses his focus, his sense of the here and now, mean he really is a drunk schlub, but it's the opposite. He's drunk that night and the difficulty with focus, the short trips into disorientation, are meant to show he isn't any good at drinking or at the society page. If this were about his alcoholism, he would have grabbed a drink at the bitch's apartment first thing instead of thinking later that it would have made him fit in better if he had grabbed a drink first thing, and he'd have resumed drinking when he got back home, or passed out, definitely not kept trying to deal with his wife's pain and anger and bitterness.

Deborah and Monica think he's the one who's bitter! OMG!

Sheesh. What planet are these people on?
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Maybe they know perfectly well this is what the story is saying, but can't discuss it because dissing high society, in certain circles, in New York is simply not done. The actuality of this story being printed by The New Yorker is in fact far hipper than the celebrities whose attention ups one's social standing.
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She's lonely in her marriage to him because she can't get him devolve back into that age-old keeping-up-with-the-Joneses thing, that life of posturing compensating for meaning.
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Maybe you would prefer to read it...?

And another. No doubt about it, the guy's a good writer.
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masterpiece

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Masterpiece.
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i too cry when people do this stuff

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Because they also do this stuff. Sure, sure, you don't get the intensity of joy without knowing the intensity of pain, but sublimity really can be maintained WITHOUT all this jerking from extreme to extreme, the poles of relative reality, and THAT is what we should devoutly wish for all sentient beings, dedicate ourselves to reinstate into the collective consciousness.
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lewis lapham

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Local boy makes good. I miss him at Harper's. I used to not be able to get the thing out of my mailbox and all the way into the house before I started reading his stuff.
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a way to get to the museums

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i might never emerge

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sleep is my excuse

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I have been doing outrageous amounts of sleeping, to ridiculous hours of the day and adding naps and falling out earlier than usual, whatever we want to pretend is usual, and so I'm just not keeping up with all my multifarious chores and pursuits. Sorry. But I found a recent Peter Coyote lecture for Bippy, who has expressed interest in his state of play recently. Now I'm going to go off and try to put a few simple things together in town and will be back here later, trying to bring you bits and pieces of things that might speak to you....