When I'm loitering around on the Web all bored, it's nice to know there are huge archives at exile.ru. This morning I read a Mark Ames review of an underground club in Moscow that contained an accurate description of what it felt like after seeing the Butthole Surfers in what I assume was 1988. I remember walking down an empty street in Pontiac, Michigan, in a haze after seeing them for the first time, in euphoria, feeling like I had seen something no one ever had before. (This also was the first time I had seen a g-string on a live woman, and actually, come to think of it, probably the last time.) Or seeing an exhibit of Joseph Beuys at the museum in Darmstadt, Germany. All the American kids were talking about this weird part of the museum with felt and lard and dishes of bees. I remember wandering through the galleries, room after room, knowing nothing about the artist, and all the labels were in German, and being so intensely, mystically moved. I really couldn't tell you why. The more I read about Beuys later on, the happier I am that the first time I saw his work I had no clue what it was about, because evidently I felt what he'd intended his viewers to feel. Usually when I'm given hints on what to feel about art I go ahead and feel it. As long as I like the art, I'll go along with what's asked of me. But I'd have had a hard time going along with an order to feel the oneness or whatever I felt at this show.

That said, we saw "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" yesterday. All the actors in it were charming, like heart-eyes charming if you know your old Monkees shows. I didn't walk out of the theater feeling like a new person; I felt like I had spent the exact amount of time in the theater as I actually had.

Dispatch 3 from Hell Is Other People's Opinions: Went to a book club last week. We discussed "The Kite Runner," which I thought was not very good. Completely and instantly clear when I walked in that everyone else loved it. LOVED it. One girl said it was her favorite book ever. We went around the room and said our favorite books, so I know these are not dumb or unread women. I just can't figure out what about that book has made such an impression on readers. I found it amateurish in writing and plot. Implausibilities involving topics I do know about (life in publishing) made me doubt the facts relating to topics I don't know about (the Taliban). I guess it's another Da Vinci Code. Oh lord, though. I said my favorite book was "Howard's End." Why not.

Here are some words I have banned in copy at my office:
decorative
special
various
-type as a suffix

I am crazy about the BBC show "Look Around You" but it's on at the worst time in the world: 10:40 on Thursday night. I really did try to stay up for it yesterday but fell dead asleep on the couch. I woke up at 1 am, which is right in the middle of the unfocused worry portion of my night. Usually I am up at about 3 having unfocused worries in a semiconscious state. But last night I had to get up from the couch, clear my dinner dishes, set up the coffemaker, go up three flights of stairs, and get ready for bed, all while in this state of unfocused worry. Everything I did seemed to have horrible consequences I could not begin to comprehend. Then I couldn't get to sleep so I played computer solitaire on N's old iPaq. Which was the exact worst thing to do, as it allowed my mind to race freely. I spent a little time working on the graduation address I will someday deliver to the students of my old high school, wherein I will share all the carefully worked-out theories that enabled me to get the hell out of Toledo. I was working through the definition of "adulthood" ("There's no principal of adults!") when my rational mind told me it was time to read a fucking book. I am reading "Low Life" by Luc Sante, which is more or less a rehashing of some other, older books such as Asbury's book about the gangs of New York, as well as "The Big Con," the greatest book ever written. In "Low Life" you get the feeling the writer is working a lot with secondary sources and simply presenting all the facts out of those sources. It's actually a lot like an article out of "Murder Can Be Fun." One of his other books is called "The Factory of Facts" and the phrase rings in my head as I read this book. It's fact after fact. I know the facts all came from places but I don't know whether I trust those places -- there are a few fun asides presented as fact that I believe are urban myth. But a book like this does fill the mind wonderfully.

From Will Christopher Baer's "Penny Dreadful":


...they were patiently waiting for me to stop freaking out and get my shit together and flow.


This line occurs to me a lot.

Guy Davenport died this week. I think I lent his book "The Geography of the Imagination" to some of my friends. I know I have lent or given "7 Greeks." I go back to his essays when I am feeling too tired to read anything new, or feeling stupid or complacent. Yesterday morning I saw his publisher's announcement of his death in the New York Times and felt a shock. His name has held a totemic significance for me ever since I was a teenager and read an essay of his on the photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard. This was in an Aperture monograph of Meatyard's work that I must have read to pieces. Then I lent it to someone whose photography reminded me of Meatyard's but who had never heard of him. Next thing I knew the book was lost in the Oakland fire, along with whatever other great treasures. But there was an essay about Meatyard by his friend Davenport that moved me. It's the source of a thought I apply to many of the people I love -- Davenport, who was extremely educated, was remarking that Meatyard had never read the Odyssey or the Iliad or something. But, Davenport said, when Meatyard does get around to reading it, what a reading it will have. I may be getting the attributions messed up but that's the idea. Most of his nonfiction writing involved making connections among writers and books and ideas, about half of which I've read. And every time I go back to reading his essays, I've read a few more books he mentions. I'm excited to go back now having finally read Howard's End. He jumps around among topics and ideas in a way that gets me excited to pick something new up. It is as exciting to me as my freshman-year honors conference, when there was a similar interplay of ideas. It was just assumed you wouldn't make cheap pop-culture references that would end the discussion. I don't know if kids can even have this kind of discussion now. Some smartass would jump in with a sitcom refernce and shut down the higher brain function of the class. If I was a professor I would ban references to any kind of modern work produced for profit. "Madonna Studies" can blow me.



One thing I remember doing on search engines in, like, 1996 was searching for the terms "Guy Davenport" and "Ralph Eugene Meatyard." I'd come up with nothing. The two groups, early Web users and modernists, were absolutely separate. It was akin to Fran Lebowitz translating the letters of Alfred Lord Douglas into CB slang. (There was no CB term for "pearl gray.") Is it declassé to know the works of Fran Lebowitz almost by heart? Guy Davenport knew lots of Greek lyrics and stuff.

"I know what to think. I know what to do and I know what to think." Elliott Gould as Phillip Marlowe in "The Long Goodbye."

To read this weekend:



St. Clair McKelway's "Annals of Crime and Rascality"

Geoffrey Household, a new book I found at a mystery bookshop called Whodunit

A bunch of NYTimes Magazines that I saved up, now that I only have time to read the Style section.



In every other house on our block, it's Thanksgiving. I hear someone next door moving heavy stuff and it might be a turkey roaster pan. Of course, it's almost too late to start one, isn't it? Thanksgiving is a day I feel a bit sorry for myself because our little household has no gravitational pull on the holidays. No one really takes seriously the idea of hauling kids and minivans down to see us. We go to them. We also like to travel, so everything adds up to us going away and calling the lovely Angie to come feed the cat. This weekend we'll decide where to take a trip next year. That $200 Expedia coupon offer is burning a hole in my pocket. We could buy tickets to visit another relative but I really want to go back to Europe. N has floated the idea of Jamaica. I wonder who he thinks he's married to. Neither of us tan. I want to go back to Turin, for some reason (the witchy attraction), or to Barcelona. When I have to think of a place I haven't been yet, I draw a blank. I mean, I can name places. But should I take a chance on finding a new place (Prague) depressing when I know I love Paris?