Revisting Concerning the Jews by Mark Twain

"I have no special regard for Satan; but I can at least claim that I have no prejudice against him. It may even be that I lean a little his way, on account of his not having a fair show. All religions issue bibles against him, and say the most injurious things about him, but we never hear his side. We have none but evidence for the prosecution and yet we have rendered the verdict. To my mind, this is irregular. It is un-English. It is un-American; it is French. Without this precedent Dreyfus could not have been condemned."

Also, I am really enjoying Nick Drake. Smoking Too Long has been added to my sidebar.

Thank you, Squeo, but not for anything in particular.

Also, I spoke too early regarding Serena Ryder. I still don't care for the majority of her music, but the song Melancholy Blue is absolutely amazing.

Fuck Rothko.

I spent two hours today at work becoming oriented. Everyone is exceptionally nice and they all appear to find every minute of their workday utterly boring. Many of them intimated to me that they had considered suicide. Others gazed at me with eyes of infinite sorrow and whimpered softly. They told me about their respective theories of subjective time. Apparently, time never passes more slowly than when you are guarding art you don't like. One of the guards said, "It's all shit to me; I don't care who touches it, so long as they don't leave any marks during my shift."

The Museum has a Rubens, a Gainsborough, and a Rothko; their Winslow Homer is on loan to another museum. I think that we're supposed to like Rubens and Gainsborough. It's probably still ok to think Rothko sucks.

I don't care for Winslow Homer either and I don't care who knows it.

The only painting at the museum that I really like is a pretty average Yves Tanguy. It was kind of misty and atmospheric and nice and just like every single one of his other paintings. Nothing special, but it would look real nice in my apartment next year.

The guards said that the most exciting event in recent memory was when two little boys knocked the Rothko off the wall. It fell to the ground with all of the force of a canvas covered in splotches of red paint. Then, a museum worker picked it up, brushed it off, and rehung it.

It is going to be quite an exciting summer.

Bad Fortune

We had Chinese tonight. It was delicious, but my fortune made me gag:
"Efficiency is doing better what is already being done."

The Chinese are absolutely right, but do you know who was really efficient?

Nazis.
The Nazis were real efficient motherfuckers.
Jews still got killed, as we always have and as we always will.
The Nazis just did it better.

Fuck the Nazis.

The Best

I almost love Champaign-Urbana.
I know that I definitely prefer it to the suburbs.
There is something delightfully rundown and personable about the place and I love the restaurants, at least those that have not been transplanted directly from the strip malls to which I am accustomed. Green St. is home to a host of mediocre restaurants grafted from the Northwest suburbs. They are unpleasant reminders of home and they make me angry. I do not want to be on a single street with a Chipotle, a Noodles & Co., AND a Potbelly's. I love the local restaurants, how small they are and how unlike the carbon-copy franchises that I grew up with. Siam Terrace, my favorite Thai restaurant in Urbana is not the finest food in the world; it is far inferior to I Am Siam in Wheeling. Still, it is superior to every other strip mall Thai joint in the 'burbs. The pizza is not the best I have ever eaten either, but it is good enough that I miss it when I am at my parents' house. The grocery stores here are far inferior to those at home, but what they lack in decent deli and produce, they make up for with ungroomed and mindless hicks who cannot control their carts. The movie theatre is more expensive, but worth every penny. It is clean, has superior sound, and only one screen. It may take longer for movies to make it down here, but there are better movies playing at Boardman's than there are at Kerasotes.

I'm not sure that I ever want to leave. I still feel a pressing urge to travel-- to Europe, I suppose--, but I would want to come back here.
I cannot think of a town where I have felt more comfortable.


I have added a list of my favorite establishments in Champaign-Urbana to my sidebar.

Why God Made Cows

Today, I went to Farren's. It was the defining meal of my life. I ate the most delicious hamburger that I have ever eaten; it was a deeply moving and spiritual experience. I have eaten hamburgers all across this great nation, from Hawaii to Boston, and I have never eaten a burger as delicious as this. It was as if there was a communing of souls, the cow that gave that meat willingly abandoned its idyllic existence atop some lush green hillside to provide me with the most exquisite pleasure I have ever known.

Or something.

While not, perhaps, the most exquisite pleasure I have ever known, it was a damn fine burger. I ordered the Double Russell, two half-pound patties of succulent beef, topped with bacon, sauteed mushrooms, and a homemade bleu cheese dressing. The Russell ordinarily comes with a jalapeno cheese slice, but always faithful to my dearest loves, I substituted a slice of delicious Wisconsin cheddar.

My own personal Kosher law dictates that bacon is only acceptable on a Club Sandwich. For the Russell, I cast aside my customs; I have found a new religion. In Epicurian splendor, I will lie forever atop a heather-soft pile of the hand-cut French fries that I tasted this evening.

Or something.

Farren himself is rumored to be a retired professor. I don’t doubt it for a moment. Such culinary craftsmanship and pride of work bespeaks a wisdom that a man could only gather by a lifetime of scholarship. He was a real Hugh Akston, the fictional philosopher-turned-cook, from Atlas Shrugged. Farren is a genius and a poet.

Or something.

Bottom-line: Damn fine burger.
Jessica, Amy, and Honey Lou, the Bard of Beanwater all agree.

In fact, the burger was so good that I am going to apply for graduate school down here so I can stay near Farren’s: the home of my sweetest dreams.

Or something.

And it is really something.

I have a confession to make...

I know. I'm sorry. I was curious. I know that it's no excuse.
I know and I'm sorry.

Did I like it?
No.

I know that that doesn't make it better.
If it's any comfort, I'm disgusted with myself.

I'm so ashamed.

From Mark Twain's Letters (by way of The Singular Mark Twain by Fred Kaplan)

I was born with an incurable disease, so was everybody—the same one that every machine has—& the knowledge of the fact frightens nobody, damages nobody; but the moment a name is given the disease, the whole thing is changed: fright ensues, & horrible depression, & the life that has learned its sentence is not worth living.

On an unrelated note, Mary O. McCarthy probably did the right thing.

On an equally unrelated note, Jack Handey has been funny in the past and will probably be funny in the future.

Don't Ya Dare Hold Nothin' Back...

So there's this thing and it's a promotional video for Virgin Digital music. It's a pretty cool little video that has references to a ton of popular songs from the last 50 years or so. I know that there are allusions that I am missing and they are pissing me off. I have noted about 25-odd different songs and some are questionable. I need your help. There are maybe 7 images that I can tell are allusions and cannot identify.

My list:
1. I Shot the Sheriff – Bob Marley or Eric Clapton
2. Tears In Heaven – Eric Clapton
3. Purple Rain - Prince
4. Message In a Bottle – The Police
5. Sitting On the Dock of the Bay-Otis Redding?
6. Sloop John B- The Beach Boys?
7. Free Bird- Lynard Skynard?
8. Magic Carpet Ride- Steppenwolf
9. Scarlet Begonias-The Grateful Dead?
10. Another Brick In the Wall – Pink Floyd
11. Seven Nation Army – The White Stripes
12. Dancing Queen - ABBA
13. Like a Rolling Stone – Bob Dylan
14. God Save The Queen-The Sex Pistols
15. Hotel California – The Eagles
16. White Rabbit-Jefferson Airplane
17. Smoke Two Joints-Bob Marley
18. Tiny Dancer- Elton John
19. Piano Man-Billy Joel
20. Blue Suede Shoes-Elvis Presley
21. I am the Walrus – The Beatles
22. Fat-Bottomed Girls-Queen/American Woman-The Guess Who?
23. Atomic Dog-George Clinton
24. Video Killed the Radio Star – The Buggles

The soundtrack to this adverstisement is performed by Serena Ryder, a fairly unremarkable young musician who probably won't amount to anything. I am pretty unimpressed by the majority of her music, but the song on this video, "Sing Sing", is pretty damn good. It's also only about 40 seconds long and I am saddened that such a good song is so short. Still, it is good enough that it made it onto the sidebar of this blog.

Back to my Mark Twain paper...

Heterochromia

I desperately want heterochromatic children. Kate Bosworth, whether she knows it now or not, can maybe make that happen.

Kate, if you're reading this, I want you to know that I want you to be the mother of my children. I don't care how it happens, but I am not averse to the old fashioned way. I'm just a charming, intelligent, and pleasant guy who wants your freaky freaky eyes.

The ball is in your court, Kate.

Professor Bruce Michelson: A Short Rant

Maybe what we’re doing in the sadism of the spring semester on an American university campus is forcing you to develop a biological resistance to the existential crisis. We dish out Eliot, Sartre, Beckett, Camus. We seem to have a whole series of courses that we require you to take before we give you your baccalaureate degree and all of them are designed to bum you out. In this one small liberal arts college, they had a course on the films of Ingmar Bergman. In January. In Vermont. Naturally, all the students thought, “hey, a movie course,” and everybody tried to sign up for it. They watched 20 Bergman films in 25 days and, 5 days into it, 700 students at a school of 2000 were depressed as hell. The face of God as a spider, there are Swedes screaming at each other, and a guy is playing chess with Death. The school should have aerosoled the prozac and gassed the students like they did in at Berkeley in the sixties.

Twins are Creepy (So I Wrote a Poem)

When twins walk by I always shudder
At the fact that one looks like the other.
Which is one and which his brother?
Satan’s sons by sinful mother.

This is in no way an attack on women, mothers, or Satan. Some of my favorite people are women, mothers, and Satan. Actually twins are ok too unless they're in the same room.

Today, Jessica and I did everything.

I mean it. We did everything. Not only did we go to some classes, but I made an appointment to see the Dean of Student Organizations so I can restart the literary magazine. Not only that, but I got a job as a security guard at the art museum. Not only that, but we bought two papasans and an ottoman. Jessica went to Cingular to see if she could con them into replacing her phone. Also, I paid my sewer bill, made an appointment to meet with an old man who wants me to be a handyman, had a root beer float, and vaccuumed all the cat hair off of my new cushions.

I also had two matzo balls in Chinese chicken broth, some Spicy Princess Chicken, a mango mochi, 20 mysterious lemon candies that contain 550% of my daily value of Vitamin C, and 12.18 fl. ounces of Mr. Brown Iced Coffee in a can.

It's GREAT...if you're looking for a coffee-flavored laxative.

Jesus-fucking-Christ...

Now, I am going to move my bowels and read How It Is by Samuel Beckett.

It is a real busy day.

I wish I owned this building.

Often I find that it will not do to own a possession only in part; when I see something that I like-be it a piece of pizza, a book, a sock, or a hundred and four year old architectural masterpiece-when I see something that I like, I want to own it.
Wholly and unequivocally.

Today, I want to sit down with my book, put on my sock, and take a bite of my pizza inside the big wedge-shaped building that I own.

Why I Should Not Update This Blog For Awhile

April 24th- Paper Three for ENGL 248 (3-4 pages)
April 27th – Major Paper for ENGL 455 (Twain) (8 pages)
May 1st – Paper Three for CINE 262 (4-5 pages)
May 3rd – Final Paper for ENGL 455 (Nabokov) (8-10 pages)
May 5th –ENGL 455 (Twain) Final Exam 7-10pm
May 6th – CINE 262 Final Exam 1.30-4.30pmm
May 9th- ENGL 248 Final Exam 8-11am

also why I almost certainly will update even more often

Fibonacci Poetry

I
just
cannot
go on with
these constant dark days
of grotesquely perfect weather.
Every day is yet another beautiful day
and I find the bare sun to be an awful blight on once sweetly gray and empty skies.

I took this idea a few steps further to the 21 syllable range. Soon I will be trying my hand at a 34, a 55, and maybe even 89 syllable line poem.

Maybe.

Turning the Page...

Jessica has informed that I quote too much and too often. Instead, this entry will be about the things that are wrong today.

It is sunny and I am tired. These two problems compound each other because just when my tolerance for bright light is at its lowest, nature double crosses me and turns on the high beams. Some people may attribute their depression to Seasonal Affective Disorder, but mine is pure Jeff and the sunlight only exacerbates my already foul mood.

Also related to being tired, I have given up coffee. A morning double shot of espresso had become an unpleasant and welcome part of my routine for a while. I have given it up in protest of the departure of the barista at Bar Giuliani. She will never know quite how much her espresso meant to me. I went there twice after she quit and both times I was treated to shots of the most putrid muddy espresso imaginable. Imagine THAT!

I have hiccoughs and I refuse to spell them phonetically. These are violent hiccoughs that are more akin to epileptic spasms than to the shortlived childhood malady that can be cured with a spoonful of sugar. My hiccoughs send me reeling into walls and my eyes rolling into my head as a repulsive burping groan forces its way past an aching throat. These awful hiccoughs are nearly always the unwanted result of the characteristic fits of unexpectedly high-pitched girlish laughter that peal forth from my person at times of great mirth. I often hiccup when I laugh at funny times, but I don't like it. My hiccoughs seems to have subsided temporarily, but my chest cavity still aches with their violence and I know that it will continue to do so for the rest of this horrendously sun-dappled and mockingly beautiful spring afternoon.

From Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

"He was inept with his hands to a rare degree; but because he could manufacture in a twinkle a one-note mouth organ out of a pea pod, make a flat pebble skip ten times on the surface of a pond, shadowgraph with his knuckles a rabbit (complete with blinking eye), and perform a number of other tame tricks that Russians have up their sleeves, he believed himself endowed with considerable manual and mechanical skill. On gadgets he doted with a kind of dazed, superstitious delight. Electric devices enchanted him. Plastics swept him off his feet. He had a deep admiration for the zipper. But the devoutly plugged-in clock would make nonsense of his mornings after a storm in the middle of the night had paralyzed the local power station. The frame of his spectacles would snap in mid-bridge, leaving him with two identical pieces, which he would vaguely attempt to unite, in the hope, perhaps, of some organic marvel of restoration coming to the rescue."

From Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent...only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth...The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine, nothing must be permitted to occur on it save by my dispensation...The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself to the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by the such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

From Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

"You know what kind of man I think you are? You're the kind of man who would stand there and smile at his torturers while they were tearing out his guts--if only he could find faith or a god."

Hey! We Should Go To:

Not I: A Samuel Beckett Centenary Celebration
January 13 – April 23, 2006

This artists’ book exhibition celebrates the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Irish writer Samuel Beckett, and complements the performance of No Danger of the Spiritual Thing: Short Works by Samuel Beckett, a series of short one-act plays performed at the MCA on January 13-15, 2006. This exhibition highlights the fundamental questions that Beckett and other artists have explored concerning human identity, communication of thought, and the question of subjectivity. While the exhibition does include a Beckett work, it draws primarily from the MCA artists’ book collection and from the work of Bruce Nauman, who was heavily influenced by Beckett. The central work of the exhibition is the 15-minute play by Beckett, Not I, which is to be presented as a film to be seen rather than read. The exhibit also includes Nauman’s drawings for Studies for Elliot’s Stones and his film Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk) (1968) which directly draws from Beckett’s novel Watt, depicting an individual moving only at 90 degree angles. Featured artists from the MCA’s artists’ book collection include Marcel Duchamp, John Baldessari, and John Cage. This exhibition is curated by Tricia Van Eck, Curatorial Coordinator and Curator of Artists’ Books.

...at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.