Steely Dan

Pretzel Logic is my favorite album of theirs right at this moment. The album featured Jeff Baxter on guitar, but not in the picture.

Curious lasagne, sun and marsupials

It's the twenty first day of the eleventh month at a quarter to two in the afternoon two thousand and ten. I am barely thirty eight.

House party for a couple of november gurls in the english department last night and a november boy and that boy was me. I was hardly celebrated. My sweater was insulted once. Compliments outweighed the insults, still those hurtful sweater comments do linger. I took an Anvil-strength Advil this morning that has seemed to knock the Macallans 12 I imbibed last night out of the park of my headache. I can actually move my mind around a little. The English dept has rather impressive taste in booze and they all love scotch which is wonderful.

I just wrote a letter of complaint to an on-line bookseller who jacked me on a free shipping offer. The complaint is so grammatically neanderthal I'm sure they won't take any notice, but I cant put any mental energy into complaints because I feel my talents are better served elsewhere. You're probably wondering why write the complaint at all and it's a fair point, but I do feel better having done it.

After carrying on at Doug and Cindy's, I came home addicted to peanut butter and honey. This is after the enchiladas at Doug and Cindy's. My tastebuds were kind of on vacation, why else would I think it was curious lasagna with a Szechuan tincture.

I have forty pages to go with Kangaroo.

There's a charming description of a kookaburra. Then there's this recent passage, after RL bites into a custard apple:

“The warm sun, the big, blue harbour with its hidden bays, the palm trees, the ferry streamers sliding flatly, the perky birds, the inevitable shabby-looking, loafing sort of men strolling across the green slopes, past the red poinsetta bush, under the big flame-tree, under the blue, blue sky — Australian Sydney, with magic-like sleep, like sweet, soft sleep — a vast endless, sun-hot afternoon sleep with the world a mirage. He could taste it all in the soft sweet, creamy custard apple. A wonderful sweet place to drift in. But surely, a place that will some day wake terribly from this sleep.
Yet why should it? Why should it not drift marvelously for ever, with its sun and its marsupials?”

It is snowing right now. I feel some inspiration coming on and there it goes, lost in the snow-covered trees.

Wild Zero

Busy couple of days they have been, or have they?

I bludgeoned my thumb spraying the cat. Whenever it gets into something it shouldn't be getting into, it gets a spray from the water bottle. The problem is my technique is one-handed and really eager, when I depress the squirter, I do it aggressively and the trigger pinches the knuckle on my thumb and it causes a lot of bloodshed. The silly thing is I just worked out the source of this injury last night. I have been wearing band-aids for a couple weeks now.
I “performed” a reading Saturday night at an event, I say “performed” because there was some whisky spillage down my sweater prior to oration and many thought it was part of the act. A groove was lacking story-wise, but it did have its moments. Six people fixed stage-front were able to hear me and make noise over the noise of the bar. The school has been screening a lot of movies and I have been attending them. On Tuesday I saw Bergman's Persona. Not my fav of his, but still uncomfortably touched by genius, is it not? His avant-destructiveness is smooth and visceral.
On Thursday I saw Milos Forman's Firemen's Ball, a charming satire about not altogether uncharmless bureaucrats. Friday there was a zombie bonanza featuring Wild Zero, a masterpiece from Japan, starring the rock band Guitar Wolf. See this as soon as you want to. I wrote part of this while someone in class read an essay they had wrote about Julian Barnes, an execrable writer. I'm less than a quarter into reading Kangaroo by DH Lawrence. Does everyone feel the same way I do about this that it is excellent (at least up to where I've got)?