While cleaning my family’s place in Chula Vista, my brother stumbled upon a few writing assignments from when I was in first and second grade.
_____
Rain
The rain is raining all around,
It falls on feild and tree,
It rains on the umbrellas hear,
And on ships at sea.
[January 30, 1981. Second grade. A literal drawing of the poem is [...]
Interesting fact: The last words attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (the prominent German man of letters) are often said to be “More light!” This is usually taken to be a spiritual proclamation… but, alas, it’s ripped from the real context. According to J. A. Froude, this statement was not only made [...]
I.
“The Universe has expanded so enormously,” he [Kilgore Trout] said, “with the exception of the minor glitch it put us through, that light is no longer fast enough to make any trips worth taking in even the most unreasonable lengths of time. Once the fastest thing possible, they say, light now belongs in the graveyard [...]
I.
____________________
II.
Kafka-related links from McSweeney’s:
Adjectives Rejected in Favor of “Kafkaesque”
Kafka at Camp: The Lost Diaries
Iris’s Metamorphosis
Gregor Samsa, Coach
Social Security Denies Gregor Samsa’s Disability Claim
____________________
III.
“Prague’s Franz Kafka International Named ‘World’s Most Alienating Airport’” (yeah, the embedded video breaks my layout, but this is a post about Kafka after all so fuck it):
The whole point of this post is to make people cry. (I’m pretty sure Casey will do so first.)
The Giving Tree (1973), animated short based on Shel Silverstein’s 1964 children’s story and narrated by the author:
This was the first book I ever read, at age 4 or so, thus giving me an unassailable excuse for [...]
Fuck the Academy Awards; it’s bad enough that I have to talk to industry people with some frequency just because I live where the movies come from. I updated my LibraryThing account instead, and I share it with you out of narcissism love. Here it is.
More of these can be found here. Via KC/DC, in comments.
I have an EPIC blog post coming up this Saturday or so, about some dude scamming me out of 3,000 bucks and me basically going after him like a pirate*** (with help from my landlord) and getting every red cent back, despite being kind of [...]
“Everything can be as interesting as every other thing. My subject is the American Protestant small town middle class. I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules. ”
-John Updike (1932-2009), interview with Life magazine, 1966
If you like Updike, here’s the interview from which the above sentiment (one oft-quoted [...]