God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about. I’m pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I’m not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I…

It’s a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you are ready. I have this feeling that actually no-one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now.

PUKKA – Did You Know?

Pukka tends to evoke the height of 18th- and 19th-century British imperialism in India, and, indeed, it was first used in English at the 1775 trial of Maha Rajah Nundocomar, who was accused of forgery and tried by a British court in Bengal. The word is borrowed from Hindi and Urdu “pakkā,” which means “solid.” The English speakers who borrowed it applied the “sound and reliable” sense of “solid” and thus the word came to mean “genuine.” As the British Raj waned, “pukka” was occasionally appended to “sahib” (an Anglo-Indian word for a European of some social or official status). That expression is sometimes used as a compliment for an elegant and refined gentleman, but it can also imply that someone is overbearing and pretentious. These days, “pukka” is also used as a British slang word meaning “excellent” or “cool.”

It reads like papers often do when they are written in LaTeX. Reject.

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

You’re asking me about the relationship between art and life? It’s like the relationship between the eight hundred or so hours that it took to be psychoanalyzed, and the eight or so hours that it would take to read ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ aloud. Life is long and art is shorter.

Always falling into a hole, then saying “ok, this is not your grave, get out of this hole,” getting out of the hole which is not the grave, falling into a hole again, saying “ok, this is also not your grave, get out of this hole,” getting out of that hole, falling into another one; sometimes falling into a hole within a hole, or many holes within holes, getting out of them one after the other, then falling again, saying “this is not your grave, get out of the hole”; sometimes being pushed, saying “you can not push me into this hole, it is not my grave,” and getting out defiantly, then falling into a hole again without any pushing; sometimes falling into a set of holes whose structures are predictable, ideological, and long dug, often falling into this set of structural and impersonal holes; sometimes falling into holes with other people, with other people, saying “this is not our mass grave, get out of this hole,” all together getting out of the hole together, hands and legs and arms and human ladders of each other to get out of the hole that is not the mass grave but that will only be gotten out of together; sometimes the willful-falling into a hole which is not the grave because it is easier than not falling into a hole really, but then once in it, realizing it is not the grave, getting out of the hole eventually; sometimes falling into a hole and languishing there for days, weeks, months, years, because while not the grave very difficult, still, to climb out of and you know after this hole there’s just another and another; sometimes surveying the landscape of holes and wishing for a high quality final hole; sometimes thinking of who has fallen into holes which are not graves but might be better if they were; sometimes too ardently contemplating the final hole while trying to avoid the provisional ones; sometimes dutifully falling and getting out, with perfect fortitude, saying “look at the skill and spirit with which I rise from that which resembles the grave but isn’t!”

Ante up! Openers! Openers? Get y'r ass off the table, Mitch. Nothing belongs on a poker table but cards, chips, and whiskey.

University of Toronto professor David Gilmour has, not shockingly, stirred up controversy by stating in an interview that he is “not interested in teaching books by women.” And, “I don’t love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall.” And, just in case that wasn’t clear, “What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys … F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys.”

I was leaving my business manager’s office. The elevator arrived right away and I got on to find there was another passenger. She was black, she had a beautiful smile, her headphones blended with her hair, and she was listening to some pop love song on her Walkman. It was loud, but I couldn’t make it out. Maybe I’d never heard it before, but it was a love song. I smiled, slipped on my super-cool candy-red headphones, and turned the Clash’s London Calling way up.

We had ridden together for several floors when we were joined by one of those bicycle delivery guys. He had a little hat, the tight black bicycle pants with the reinforced crotch; he was Hispanic and had the little tiny headphones that fit right in the ear so you can only see a couple little spots of blue and some wires coming out of the ears. He looked at us, wrote something on a manila envelope, put it in his backpack, and turned up his music. I have no way of knowing what he was listening to, because “Revolution Rock" was filling my head. But whatever it was he was enjoying it. We swayed our heads together in different rhythms.

The three of us rode a few more floors, then were joined by a businesswoman type. She had on one of those female biz suits, and her hair and makeup were soft and natural. I think she ran every morning or at least took a dance class. Through the light tint of her glasses, I saw her look at each one of us and roll her eyes up. Then she started shaking her head like we weren’t going to notice. My fellow passengers didn’t notice, but I slipped my headphones down around my neck and said, “It must sound like Charles Ives out here, huh? Is it too loud for you?“

She gave me this little condescending smile through her tastefully lipsticked mouth and said, “You people just cut yourselves off from everybody, don’t you? I mean, it’s really bad enough that no one even makes eye contact anymore, but you people just walk around in your own little worlds. We’re a culture of very lonely people. It’s sad. It’s really very sad.”

Since the other two people in the elevator were still in their own respective little worlds, I appointed myself spokesperson for us three lonely people. “You were really dying for human contact here, weren’t you? Huh? You walked on this elevator and said to yourself, ‘Oh, Jiminy Cricket! I really wanted to talk to this delivery boy, this receptionist, and this big ugly son of a bitch with a square head. But alas, they’ve cut themselves off from my personal contact. I guess I can’t have any meaningful dialogue with them. Darn.’ You don’t give a yuppie-tweed-fuck about the three of us! You just need something sensitive and humanitarian to talk about over your fuckin’ power lunch…. I’ll make a deal with you - we’ll take our headphones off and we’ll listen to you, but you better have something to say. And when you ask him what kind of bike he has and he tells you, you better really care. And you better keep us entertained… do a little fuckin’ dance if you have to! When each of us walked onto the elevator we smiled at one another and you just rolled your fuckin’ eyes. So, you want personal contact? Shoot!“

So, this was another elevator ride in the big city during which I didn’t fall in love, make a friend, or even set myself up to get laid. But I do enjoy the Clash.

The joy of writing never changes, however many books you have published. It is not always a joy. It is only a joy for a fraction of the time, but it is worth it, just for that fraction. And much of that joy comes from being that misfit kid grown up, leading readers and yourself to the wildest parts of your imagination.

But Catfish isn’t a cautionary tale about normal people being victimized by weirdos they meet on the Internet. By lowering the stakes from death or financial ruin to heartbreak, Catfish can blame the victim as well as the perpetrator. The hoaxes are so stupidly obvious from the beginning that it’s impossible to feel empathy for targets like Sunny. Who’s really “worse” in this situation: The lonely woman who pretends, poorly, to be a male model on the Internet, or the one who plows time and energy into such an obvious fraud? Catfish indicts the entire practice of online friendship as a depressing massively multiplayer online game in which the deranged entertain the deluded. Catfish is Jerry Springer for the social media age. Like the sad, bickering subjects of Springer’s show, Sunny and Jamison deserve each other.

Men and women succeed because they take pains to succeed. Industry and patience are almost genius; and successful people are often more distinguished for resolution and perseverance than for unusual gifts. They make determination and unity of purpose supply the place of ability.

Has Made Too Free With John Barleycorn: also A date with John Barleycorn; Loaded with John Barleycorn: Barleycorn is the long-established personification of beer, whiskey, and other intoxicating drinkds made from Malted barley. Dating to at least 1620, it owes its popularity to Robert Burns, who used the expression freely throughout the body of his poetry. In the poem “John Barleycorn,” Burns uses the processing of the grain to produce whiskey as a symbol of man’s life, death, and rebirth. The personified “john barleycorn” is reaped, ground, roasted, and distilled; his life’s blood is drunk by the men of Scotland bringing them happiness and boldness; finally:

But the cheerful spring came kindly on
And show'rs began to fall;

John Barleycorn got up again,

And sore surprised them all.


Excerpted from Drunk : The Definitive Drinker's Dictionary by Paul Dickson

Fap: From Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, ‘The gentleman had drunk himself out of his five sentences…And being fap, sir, was as they say, cashiered’ (1598). The term appears in Noah Webster’s 1806 Dictionary but is listed with the notation of obs.

As you enter the door of the club, some girl, dressed, probably, as Martha Washington, will run up and kiss you. This is not because she thinks you are George Washington; it is because she drank that eighth Bronx cocktail at dinner.

Three sheets to the wind: This nautical expression is not based on sheets meaning sails but rather on the meaning of sheet as a rope attached to the lower corners of a sail that controls the angle at which it is set, according to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable and other sources. The expression famously appears in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son: ‘Captain Cuttle looking, candle in hand, at Bunsby more attentively, perceived that he was three sheets in the wind, or, in plain words, drunk.’

He makes a Virginia fence: Found in Benjamin Franklin’s “The Drinker’s Dictionary” (1737). And explained in “A 19th Century Slang Dictionary” by Craig Hadley as, “A staggering drunk was said to make this (a zigzagging fence) when he walked. Anyone or anything that meanders. Any fence constructed in this manner.”

My 4-year-old nephew’s take on gender-role stereotyping:

Nephew: “Mom, this episode is about a girl who wears a tiara.” Mom: “Why do only girls wear tiaras?” Nephew: “Because girls are pretty and tiaras are pretty.” Mom: “So what are boys?” Nephew: “Very handsome.” Mom: “And what do they wear on their heads?” Nephew: “I’m afraid nothing.”

Burns with a low blue flame: This almost certainly has some relationship to the ancient assertion that if one drank enough rum or brandy and was bled, the blood would burn blue until totally consumed. As early as 1836 this belief was satirized, which probably helped the idea to remain current. “The doctrine of the spontaneous combustion of drunkards has just been exemplified in New York, in the case of a man who had drunk two gallons of rum in five days; he was afterwards bled, and on the application of a match, the blood took light, and burnt blue until it was consumed. Spirit-drinkers should be warned by this, that they may, by possibility ‘flare up’ without bargaining for such a luxury,” read a dispatch published in The Satirist, and the Censor of the Time, March 6, 1836.

Circling Over Shannon: In Ireland, ‘Circling Over Shannon’ is a euphemism for being drunk, coined after Boris Yeltsin’s infamous 1994 trip to Ireland where he was reportedly too drunk to get off the plane, so they circled the Shannon airport six times before landing to sober him up.

Poem: Changing Diapers by Gary Snyder from No Nature (Pantheon).

How intelligent he looks! on his back both feet caught in my one hand his glance set sideways, on a giant poster of Geronimo with a Sharp’s repeating rifle by his knee.

I open, wipe, he doesn’t even notice nor do I.

Baby legs and knees toes like little peas little wrinkles, good-to-eat, eyes bright, shiny ears, chest swelling drawing air,

No trouble, friend, you and me and Geronimo are men.