NYC in a few links

Best Translated Book Award? Awarded!

Grimaldi's Pizza? Eaten.

MoMA? Most assuredly yes.
And indeed.

The Met? Oh yes.

Arepas? To be sure!

Viennese coffee? I should think so.

A St. Germain cocktail with breakfast? Why not?

A trip to BookCourt? Another to the Strand? A final stop at Book Culture? Yes, please!


Walked across the Brooklyn Bridge.
Walked to the UN, Tudor City, the Financial District. Ate things at places. Came back, grimy and repulsive.

Visiting Julia, etc.

A fine hostess, Julia has just informed me that Shaq uses Twitter. Two unrelated things.

Other notes:
Someday, I want not to be a jerk and to merely be pleasant. I feel unexpectedly terrible about the way I comported myself last night. I also tell some astonishingly small lies. Not so much of a problem.

Cobble Hill is congenial to my temperament. DUMBO? Absurd, but with a perfect palette.

Pictures may or may not follow. It seems like a lot of bother. But I must, if only to show you the sole of that one shoe.

Fathers & Sons

There have been too many fathers in history and too few sons. The founding fathers, the father of Fascism, of the atomic bomb, of this and of that. Let me be a son, then.

The Son of Modern Incredulity.

Wrongissmo, Il Duce.

"First of all, as regards the future development of mankind, and quite apart from all present political considerations. Fascism does not, generally speaking, believe in the possibility or utility of perpetual peace. It therefore discards pacifism as a cloak for cowardly supine renuncia­tion in contradistinction to self-sacrifice. War alone keys up all human energies to their maximum tension and sets the seal of nobility on those peoples who have the courage to face it." —Mussolini

First of all, pacifism is not cowardly. The point is not, I would imagine, to lack defense, but to shun violence. And pacifism is meaningless without the capacity to act violently--which is why pacifists should be trained in lethal arts, without exception and by force if necessary. Violence is ignoble. Tension is undesirable. My impression from the movies is that an aggressive war is, without much exception, contrary to the welfare of the State.

Book Review: Three Novels by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

You'll have to track down a copy of the 5th and final print issue of CALQUE to read my review of three novels by Jean-Philippe Toussaint.

I wrote it.

Living up to the Skype?

I am not cool. I am not even not cool enough to be cool in a different way. And so, I just started using Skype. And so, I'd like to report that Skype is, actually, really neat. Or would be if more people I knew used it. And if I knew people I wanted to call for free on the internet. Or people I wanted to call at all.

Skype.

I apologize for having written this. I also apologize for the headset with microphone that I purchased so as to better use a communication service that no one I know uses.

I look stupid.