beyond the push/pull of hedonism, ascetism

Find the melancholy dialectic of concrete and prairie on a campus
full of 20 somethings in sweatpants and inner-directed compasses.

OR


Find the line in the book of poems that states: [Proposition regarding
the existence of fun] / when we weren't sure our lives were worth
surviving.














OR

Find sibilance on reruns of Imus episodes from the eighties, back
when shock jock meant something more: much more, much less.
Do it on a radio with a dial that actually turns.









Beg for conjunction

AND


Get "you dipshit" cute with the typesetting.


AND

Find a story involving characters whose lives are an
obscure reggae song and spread it like syphilis in the
house of De Sade.


AND

Run 12 miles today, tomorrow, the day after that, and the next
day too. Regret smoking for so long. Regret not having that
regret sooner.

Onward, Frazzled Soldiers

1.


as per expectations, the New Yorker's election coverage
has been quite good. I particularly recommend Remnick's
the Joshua Generation, which begins:

Barack Obama could not run his campaign for the Presidency based on political accomplishment or on the heroic service of his youth. His record was too slight. His Democratic and Republican opponents were right: he ran largely on language, on the expression of a country’s potential and the self-expression of a complicated man who could reflect and lead that country. And a powerful thematic undercurrent of his oratory and prose was race. Not race as invoked by his predecessors in electoral politics or in the civil-rights movement, not race as an insistence on tribe or on redress; rather, Obama made his biracial ancestry a metaphor for his ambition to create a broad coalition of support, to rally Americans behind a narrative of moral and political progress. He was not its hero, but he just might be its culmination.

if you were not aware that the new yorker is a magazine
that can be found at newyorker.com, now you are.








2.

Succumbed, not succombed.

Zadi Smith has a piece in the New York Review of Books.
It seems to be about two trajectories that the novel
is on (it seems weird to put it that way, but . .), one
of which seems to originate with white dudes enamored
with the idea of the avant-garde.

Having spent the last year and a half in libraries downing
Mt Dew and wading through texts that have little to do
with the avant-garde or even novels, I do not feel qualified
to comment. I am reading the Sawtelle dog book from that
woman Oprah and her club, as grist for the conversational
mill with the parents. And Yates Revolutionary Road is
designated hitter re: Christmas break. I need to flesh
out the lineup, and would enjoy any suggestions that
lean away from the traditional/lyrical Realism and
countenance something a bit more fucked up.

If you have such suggestions, please do share.

WHOA

POSNER, Circuit Judge. John Veysey appeals from his conviction, after a jury trial, and sentence of 110 years in prison for mail and wire fraud, arson, and the related offense of felony by fire. The facts are amazing, but we shall resist the temptation to recount them at length. In 1991 Veysey set fire to his house and inflated the claim that he then filed with his insurer. The insurer paid, and the house was rebuilt. The following year Veysey married a woman named Kemp, increased the insurance on the house, removed the valuable contents of the house, along with himself and his wife, and then cut the natural-gas line inside the house, causing the house to fill up with gas and explode spectacularly, utterly destroying it. He grossly exaggerated the value of the property allegedly lost in the explosion--some did not exist and some he had removed before the explosion. The insurance company (a different one) paid, and he used part of the proceeds to buy another house. The next year he tried to kill his wife by driving his van with her in it into a river. When that failed he killed her by poisoning her, and collected $ 200,000 in the proceeds of insurance policies on her life. He placed personal ads in newspapers, seeking to meet women. He became engaged to one of the women he met through his ads, named Donner, but broke his engagement after failing to procure a $ 1 million policy on her life. He then took up with a Ms. Beetle. This was in 1996 and the same year he burned down his house, again submitting an inflated estimate of the loss and receiving substantial proceeds from the insurance company (a different one, again). He then married Beetle, and they moved into a rented house. She insured her life for $ 500,000 with him as beneficiary. One night in 1998, after drugging her, he set fire to the house, hoping to kill both her and their infant son, on whom he had also taken out a life insurance policy and who was in the house with her. They were rescued, and soon afterwards Veysey and Beetle divorced. The house was rebuilt and Veysey persuaded a woman named Hilkin to move in with him after she had accumulated some $ 700,000 in life insurance and named him as the primary beneficiary. He apparently intended to murder her, but he was arrested before his plans matured. There is more, but these are the highlights.