At Swim Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien
The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien
Collected Short Stories, Isaac Babel
Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges
Other Inquisisitons, Jorge Luis Borges
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez
Correction, Thomas Bernhard (The Line Works)
Nog, Rudy Wurlitzer
Gimpel the Fool, Isaac B. Singer
The Assistant, Bernard Malamud (Collected Stories)
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
Samuel Beckett works
Hunger, Knut Hamson
I’m Not Stiller, Max Frisch (Homo Faber)
Man in the Holocene, Max Frisch
Seven Gothic Tales, Dinesen
Gogol’s Wife, Thomas Landolfi (Words in commotion. The Autumn story)
V, Thomas Pinchon
The Lime Twig, John Hawkes
Blood Oranges, John Hawkes
Little Disturbances of Man, Paley
Enormous Changes as the Last Minute, Paley
I, Etc., Susan Sontag
Tell Me a Riddle, Tillie Olsen
Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell
In the Heart of the Country, William Gass
Fiction and the Figures of Life, William Gass
The World Within the Word, William Gass (Omensetto’s Luck)
Advertisements for Myself, Mailer
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
Journey to the End of the Night, Celine (Death…Installment Plan)
The Box Man, Kobo Abe (Kangaroo Notebook)
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Peter Handke
Kaspar and Other Plays, Peter Handke
Nadja, André Breton
Chimera, John Barth
Lost in the Funhouse, John Barth
The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
Black Tickets, Jayne Anne Phillips
Collected Stories, Peter Taylor (Summons, To Memphis)
The Pure and the Impure, Colette
Will You Please be Quiet, Please, Colette
Collected Stories, John Cheever
I Would Have Saved Them if I Could, Leonard Michaels (Going Places, Men’s Club)
Collected Stories, Eudora Welty
The Changing of America, Max Apple
Collected Stories, Flannery O’Connor
Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
The Death of Artemio Cruz, Carlos Fuentes
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera
The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne C. Booth
Henderson the Rain King, Bellow (Augie March, Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift)
The Coup, John Updike
Rabbit, Run, John Updike
Manifestos of Surrealism, André Breton
Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag
A Homemade World, Hugh Kenner
Letters, Flaubert
Sexual Perversity in Chicago, David Mamet
The Changling, Joy Williams (State of Grace, Taking Care, Breaking and Entering)
Going After Caccieto, Tim O’Brien (Things They Carried)
The Palm Wine Drunkard, Amos Tutola
Searching for Caleb, Ann Tyler
Thank You, Kenneth Koch (Collected Poems)
Collected Poems, Frank O’Hara
Rivers and Mountains, John Ashbery
Tragic Magic, Wesley Brown
Mythologies, Roland Barthes
The Pleasure of Text, Barthes
For a New Novel, Robbe-Grillet
Falling in Place, Ann Beattie

by using it as my summer reading list, I mean I bought several of them started 12, finished 5, and longed for the others.

I also read Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. Do read it, if you have the stamina and brain power.

My Chinese zodiac animal is the horse.

My wife’s is the monkey.

See them all here.

It is difficult for me to comprehend. I have only known a world where advertising is more pervasive and more blatant. Obviously there are a few exceptions i.e. the latest Skittles campaigns… But to imagine a world with less and less outdoor advertising, where you are forced into subtlety (TiVo is already doing this to TV) makes me happy.

I also might be happy because I am listening to Cansei De Ser Sexy. If you speak Portuguese: Yes I am tired of it, but I still am.

This is what it looked like 10 years ago when I lived there:

And now:

CAPITALISM is the opposite of minuscule. A – a.

I think America should resort back to the isolationist strategy that made possible both World Wars. Let us lay back in our easy chairs, sip lemonade on our porches with our trash free streets and let the work be done off shore. Until whoever wants to conquer us rolls in. They will find a nation of highly articulate self-aware people who can’t change an oil filter but maintain wonderful Web sites.

I almost forgot about our unquenchable desire for war and conquest. I would be in my cage and my uniquely American character trait of war lust would fulminate inside me. How could I be so stupid that I couldn’t see reality? I would say to our new communist over lords: “Are we so different? Is your inferior brain any different from mine? The answer is yes, now come here so I can hit it with a mallet. I was just kidding about that. You and Keol have shown me movies about American war lust but why don’t we sit down and I will show you a softer side of America. Then… Blam! That’s not a projector; it’s a spinning blade shooter. Bwaa hahaha. Okay, I guess that wouldn’t work now that you know. But did you ever try to extend me the hand of peace? If you did, I would rip it off and eat it.”

Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown,
Of thee, from the hill-top looking down;
And the heifer, that lows in the upland farm,
Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm;
The sexton tolling the bell at noon,
Dreams not that great Napoleon
Stops his horse, and lists with delight,
Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height;
Nor knowest thou what argument
Thy life to thy neighbor’s creed has lent:
All are needed by each one,
Nothing is fair or good alone.

I thought the sparrow’s note from heaven,
Singing at dawn on the alder bough;
I brought him home in his nest at even;
He sings the song, but it pleases not now;
For I did not bring home the river and sky;
He sang to my ear; they sang to my eye.

The delicate shells lay on the shore;
The bubbles of the latest wave
Fresh pearls to their enamel gave;
And the bellowing of the savage sea
Greeted their safe escape to me;
I wiped away the weeds and foam,
And fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore
With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar.

The lover watched his graceful maid
As ‘mid the virgin train she strayed,
Nor knew her beauty’s best attire
Was woven still by the snow-white quire;
At last she came to his hermitage,
Like the bird from the woodlands to the cage,
The gay enchantment was undone,
A gentle wife, but fairy none.

Then I said, “I covet Truth;
Beauty is unripe childhood’s cheat,
I leave it behind with the games of youth.”
As I spoke, beneath my feet
The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath,
Running over the club-moss burrs;
I inhaled the violet’s breath;
Around me stood the oaks and firs;
Pine cones and acorns lay on the ground;
Above me soared the eternal sky,
Full of light and deity;
Again I saw, again I heard,
The rolling river, the morning bird;
Beauty through my senses stole,
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.

-Ralph Waldo Emmerson

I somehow navigated myself to this: Free to Choose, from this blog. I had to go back through my history to figure out how I arrived there. Once there, I spent several hours watching the Free Market PBS programs produced by the economist Milton Friedman.

Spore–> Spore Video Game–> Panspermia–> Circumstantial Evidence–> Mens Rea–> Tort–> Lawrence Lessig–> The Future of Ideas–> Legal Affairs.com–> Lessig.org–> Just because I’m not working doesn’t mean you can’t–> Lessig Wiki–> and finally Free to Choose

I read the first half of the book “The Future of Ideas” a few years back when working at eBay. I remember it painting a bleak and frightening future. I think the second half of the book probably included Lessig’s optimistic views of how to curb the tide of corporate power. I am usually reading so many books at a time that with my short attention span I only finish about half the books I start.

Your total ignorance of what you profess to teach merits the death penalty. I doubt whether you know that St. Casian of Imola was stabbed to death by his students with their styli. His death, a martyr’s honorable one made him patron saint of teachers.

Pray to him, you deluded fool, you “anyone for tennis?” golf-playing, cocktail-quaffing psuedo-pedant, for you do indeed need a heavenly patron.

Although your days are numbered, you will not die a martyr-for you further no holy cause-but as the total ass which you really are.

…Or was it that he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of language many colored and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?

the troubling odors of long corridors…

…a din of meaningless words drove his reasoned thoughts hither and thither confusedly.

James Joyce

Poetry is no less mysterious than the other elements of the earth. A lucky line here and there should not make us think any higher of ourselves, for such lines are the gift of Chance or of the Spirit; only the mistakes are our own. I hope the reader may find in my pages something that merits being remembered; in this world, beauty is so common.

Jorge Luis Borges