Personal Dictionary

By On · Add Comment · In Internal Dialogues

I got a new phone a while back, leaving me with a completely empty user dictionary. Again. In the time since then, the following lexicon has come to define me in the digital age:

ass, assclown, assclowns, assed, asshole, AWP, badass, ballsy, barfly, bedlam, beets, belay, berets, bitches, blogs, blowjob, blowjobs, bodega, Bogart, boggle, boggled, boner, boners, boning, boobs, bowtie, bozo, BQE, braintrust, bros, bullshit, burping, catchphrases, Classon, Clint, cock, cocks, coddle, coddling, crap, crapsteak, cunt, cunts, cusp, cuter, cutest, dammit, damn, dang, Dekalb, dicking, dicks, Dien, doling, douche, douchebags, Duh, Dumpy, dustpan, dweeb, fart, fawning, finagle, foists, Freddy’s, fuck, fucked, fucker, FUCKERS, fucking, fucks, gah, Gatsby, gawk, gents, girly, gobsmacked, godspeed, goner, goon, Gotham, guh, hah, haha, hahaha, Hamurabi, HBO, hehe, hell, hiccups, hijack, Hipp, Hipps, hipsters, hokey, honks, hoodie, horseshit, horsiest, hula, hungover, interrobang, ipso, irk, jizz, joyeux, Katniss, kitties, levee, LGA, ligament, lightsaber, lofted, Lolita, looker, Loup, medic, meh, MFA, middling, minx, moleskines, Mommom, Motown, Muppets, nah, napped, naps, nerdy, Netflix, nigga, noir, nom, noodge, NYU, OKCupid, omg, ooooo, palatial, PBS, pee, peed, peeing, peeps, pees, Peeta, penis, pff, phew, Phillies, pied, Pogues, Poppop, Po-tee-weet, probs, puke, puked, puking, punchline, puppetry, pussy, Pynchon, pétanque, quai, reals, resend, roofied, Rory, sappy, sexiest, sexytimes, sheesh, shit, shite, shithead, shitheads, shits, shitting, shitty, sing-alongs, slut, smarts, socked, sot, splink, Springsteen, stooge, strep, stripper, sullies, sully, Supermen, suss, sweethearts, taco, TARDIS, tater, Tennant, texted, texting, tine, tits, torrential, totes, transom, transvestites, Treehouse, trumps, Tudor, twat, umpteenth, undead, unfunny, vibe, Vonnegut, weiner, werewolf, wh00t, whinging, whore, whorehouse, Williamsburg, windowsill, winging, worthless, wtf, yah, Yorkers, Yuengling, yup, Zach, Zack, Zelda.

If anyone needs me, I’ll be having a Yuengling at Freddy’s with a couple of transvestite shitheads with middling lighsabers.

Why you should read Eureka Street right now

By On · Add Comment · In Writers

“Like almost everybody else, in a life littered with the undead memory of a hundred first kisses, I still hadn’t got over them. First kisses still made life worth all the boring bits of living—all the going to the toilet, getting headaches and having your hair cut.

“There was a girl I knew from Century Street. She dumped me just after the first time she kissed me. ‘What could be better than that?’ she said. ‘When will we ever improve on that?’ I didn’t like to admit it but she was right.”

Robert McLiam Wilson, where is that follow-up? Eureka Street is sixteen years old!

How To Write A Novel

By On · Add Comment · In Self-Referential, writing

A year or so ago, I got an email from my grandfather telling me to ask my grandmother how to make boiled eggs the next time I called. So I did. She laughed and said, “Put the eggs into a pot and fill it until the eggs are just barely underwater. Turn the heat on medium, then go to the grocery store for three hours. Come home just before the house burns down.” [Continue Reading...]

Three Months

By On · Add Comment · In Internal Dialogues, writing

It’s been three months since I got down to really writing that novel I started in earnest during National Novel Writing Month in 2007. Averaging three pages a day, with about 30,000 words written or rewritten. I have almost no idea how many words the thing is right now, even though I’ve been doing little math experiments on obverse pages to try and figure out how much I’ve written since November. It’s more than the entire novella, I know that. I also know how well I’ve been doing at writing consistently. How? Well:


[Continue Reading...]

Gender Bias Bias

By On · Add Comment · In Familiars, writing

Teddy Wayne has a great editorial on Salon today called “The Agony Of The Male Novelist.” It’s great because it brings attention to the same thing that Kate Bolick’s feature “All The Single Ladies” did in The Atlantic: that fact that the actual battle for equality between men and women has changed faster than our perceptions have. In the piece, Wayne is responding to novelist Jennifer Weiner’s blog post about the disparity between male and female reviewers for the New York Times book reviews. In the post, Weiner does exactly what Vida did last February with the dubious collection of publications-by-gender statistics, which is to say, completely ignored how anyone gets meaningful statistics. We don’t find out what the pool of available reviewers is, gender-wise, whether more or less men or women turned in solicited reviews, much like Vida doesn’t bother providing the information that would make her statistics meaningful: namely, how many men submit to those journals versus women? If the ratio is 5:1 men-to-women published, the only way something can be made out of that is knowing, for example, that the ratio of submissions is 1:1, which means there’s an evident bias in the editorial process, or 5:1, which means the pieces published reflect the pieces submitted, in which case there’s no evident bias. It’s sloppy argumentation, and honestly, it’s Orwellian in its lack of clarity and its clear agenda of distortion. What’s to lose if the submission figures bear out the publication figures? The worst thing that happens is we have proof of a growing equilibrium between male and female writers. Of course, then there’d be nothing to complain about. [Continue Reading...]

NPR

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Me: here’s what fucking annoys me about NPR
Andrea: please, tell me more
Me: they have these musical breaks, there’s probably a reason for them, but I don’t know what it is
Me: and it’s always this instrumental thing
Me: looped
Andrea: it is so you can reflect on your whiteness

Bag of Tricks

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image

This is the bag of a mad man. Picture: While Mortals Sleep by Vonnegut, Slow Learner by Pynchon, Something Happened by Heller, two regular sized Moleskines (the novel), two three-pack Moleskines (short stories), one large lined Moleskine (script).

More Books From People I’ve Seen Drunk

By On · Add Comment · In Familiars

On January 3rd, my arch-enemy (see earlier post about the arch-enemy/nemesis dichotomy) Leigh Stein’s first novel comes out. It’s called The Fallback Plan, and I suspect it’s probably really good. Right now I’m only able to review Gravity’s Rainbow, although if I know Leigh, there are probably plenty of guys in her book who can make V-2 rockets fall from the sky simply by having a boner. That link is probably her Amazon referral thing, so she’ll get money if you buy it that way, besides the money she’ll already get, which I don’t know how publishing works, so maybe it’s a dollar? two dollars? Certainly, it’s American currency, whatever it is. She’s also got a collection of poetry coming out in June, but that is something like a million years away. She has a website, sure, but it’s one of those Blogger affairs because apparently having two books in the offing doesn’t warrant a nice website with a Flash opening that lets you play whack-a-mole with little Leigh Stein heads popping out of holes in the interwebs.

Also: Naturi Thomas’s book, How To Die In Paris, is totally still out, and you should buy that, too. Her website is totally legit to boot. For the ladies keeping track of who’s having an easier time getting published, that’s 3 to 1 (I’m counting Ivy Pochoda’s The Art Of Disappearing as well), with women I know getting published at a rate of four books to every one book by a guy I know.

Criminal Mastermind

By On · Add Comment · In Words & Music

In a bid to replace the demo version of “Criminal Mastermind” on the eventual soundtrack for The Prospects, I stole a friend’s diaphragm microphone, my roommate’s M-Audio MobilePre, opened up Garage Band and recorded this version, which isn’t going to be used, so I might as well post it here. Don’t ask me why I decided it’d be a good idea to throw a little rock organ behind the chorus.

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