Taking the message from the streets

You're Mrs. Dalloway!

by Virginia Woolf

Your life seems utterly bland and normal to the casual observer, but inside you are churning with a million tensions and worries. The company you surround yourself with may be shallow, but their effects upon your reality are tremendously deep.
To stay above water, you must try to act like nothing's wrong, but you know that the truth is catching up with you. You're not crazy, you're just a little unwell. But no doctor can help you now.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

I took Amsterdame's book quiz. I was positively Dallofied by the results. I also have just put my LJ library card into hard and fast use. Recent withdrawals include: "Joseph Andrews" by Henry Fielding (hilarious, contrived and thought-provoking, like any nascent artform should be), "Dreamcatcher" by Stephen King (the first 250 pages were fun, as were the Bush criticisms, but at 700 pages total, it was blah), "The Red Badge of Courage and other writings" by Stephen Crane ("The Blue Hotel" and "The Open Boat" are some of the finest writing available). I'll migrate over to "Dead Babies" by Martin Amis once I "teach myself Eastern philosophy." All this to say it's nice to have access to English that goes beyond "My friend and I are going to the seaside this weekend." Also, for a town of under 400,000, their libe has an really credible CD collection. The Pretty Things, Kruder and Dorfmeister, The Fall, Jackie McLean, Willard Grant Conspiracy and Godspeed You Black Emperor have all performed on my Walkman. The public library has to be one of the most ingenious inventions of all time. It beats the balls off the Internet. Thanks, Ben Franklin. My days lately have consisted of extravagant email exchanges with New York and elsewhere pals. Homesickness has gone into remission. Fortunately, that will get an innoculation in October when I return for a wedding. Weddings are funny things. They're like private art openings...for the guests, that is. Everyone stands around in a sort of chit-chatty awe, then they get drunk. Last night, there was an art opening at Škuc, a gallery in Stara Ljubljana. There was an old guy there who had 12 plastic cups stacked one on top of the other with a fresh one at the summit. My friend remarked "That's probably so he can know how drunk he is." I thought to myself "That's probably the number it takes for free Teran to taste good." Apparently, this old guy is also an artist's model. I truly love that artists can give employment to the elderly just for be fractured, decaying artifacts of their former selves. It's the same with obese people. Folds upon folds of flesh somehow seem less unhealthy when rendered in gouache. The exhibit itself was nothing of supreme interest to me. I named one part of the exhibit "the wall of shaving cream vaginas." They were actually made of terracotta painted in white acrylic. Abstract art is funny in that it can be simultaneously blase and captivating. It's a meditation on material, but it rarely goes further than that. The "idea" of it is slightly galling to my pragmatic mind, since a hardware store is also a meditation on material. Of the most phenomenological important is my newfound laziness toward my appearance: yawning baldness and Guevaraesque facial Brillo, a cycle of three clothing items every week, wearing busted year-old shoes even though I have new ones. Dirty cleans, as good old Jimmy Joyce said. And so while not at my most delightful, I am at least sanitary. In the sana mens column, I'm teaching myself Slovene by doing crossword puzzles for children which means that my vocabulary makes daily strides while my grammar sits on the bench and eats Twinkies. In the sana corpus, I, like Jesus, walk everywhere.