Everyday I'm Watching You Die

Hey, check this out. I was skimming the blog and realized that I had read all the books I said I would read and post about. Boom, here it is.


Lemme just say something about the Bard here before I start. Until very recently I hated the shit out of his 16th century ass, all his stupid anachronisms and puns and perceived asshattery. I loathed his lace collar wearing, quill in ink dipping, sonnet composing and unrhymed iambic pentameter spouting ass. I raged, literally, every time I saw the texts of his plays in the bookstore. Seriously, who the fuck reads plays? Anyway, the reason for this is my high school freshman English teacher. The bitch, probably dead now, was this giant asshole that, if I recall correctly, had the nickname Big Bird. She was an ass and had a huge fucking gapey wet snatch for ol' Bill Shakespeare and she rammed Romeo and Juliet down our throats and abode no type of criticism. She'd heard it before from innumerable generations of uncouth louts, hayseed hick motherfuckers who asked, "What for we gotta read this for?" So, I hated her, which meant also that I hated W.S. and I refused to read him.

Recently, I had a change of heart and, realizing his influence on shit, decided to give him another try. I picked up Julius Caesar and read it in like two days and it was good. Chock full of good quotables, a keen eye for the details of mob behavior, and brimming with the crazy wine fueled rash decisions where people kill themselves. I liked it, but I wondered that, in 500 years, will the shit that still gets read and heralded as groundbreaking and timeless be the best-sellers of today or will it be the things that are truly "literary" (whatever that may be)? Like, when we're zipping around the solar system, near extra-solar planets and colonizing the fuck out of local space, will humanity be reading Dean Koontz and John Grisham or Thomas Pynchon? What texts will future English graduate students discuss as canonical and everlasting and which ones will be regarded as mere blips on the history screen of literature? What the fuck are they going to make of Nicholas Sparks?

Fuck you future graduate students, you asses aren't even going to exist. World's ending next year.



I liked how Updike managed to write in the present tense because I really think it takes balls and is hard as fuck to do. That aside, this book was fucking awful. Just fucking terrible. And do you know what makes it terrible? The main character is a goddamn douchey fuck. Like this, "Aww, poor me, I peaked in high school and I couldn't be assed to broaden my horizons past basketball and now I'm so pissed that life happened around me and I wasn't man enough to make shit happen on my own so it's everyone else's fault that I can't make my present/future what it should have been." What a fag, seriously.


This, however, was fucking awesomely brilliant. Just go read it. I can't say anything that would add to this work.


I know, everyone raves about Joyce except Gertrude Stein, but I'm just not feeling his flow. He's good sure, but I just ain't feelin' the mothafucka. I don't know, maybe I don't understand the zeitgeist (there I fucking said it) during which he wrote, or I can't comprehend all the other deeper shit that's supposed to be happening with Joyce's work. Anyway, I read it and felt neither strongly for or against A Portrait. The internet proclaims that Ulysses is golden, though, so we might see about that.


If all you have to do to win the Nobel is write a story with a bunch of bumble fuck asshole villagers doing stupid shit, then put my name down for one and I'll shit out a story. This was another seemingly great novel that I felt should have earned the author a punishing fist to the balls. I hate characters that are fucking stupid and do foolish things and never learn from them. Discussing the circular nature of history and family dynamics aside, and forgoing a look at Marquez's magical realism horseshit...

I forgot where I was going with that because I had to yell at the children. Anyway, I didn't care for this novel. It fell flat and none of the characters were worthwhile, they were all assholes doing stupid things that I couldn't be bothered caring about. Fuck those villagers. I don't give a goddamn about them.

There you have it. Next up, I'm working on a bunch of Plato's dialogues, Homer's The Illiad, Infinite Jest by DFW, and I'm going to try to get my hands on a copy of Moby Dick and give that another try.

I Know My Truth

I'm just gonna rattle off a bunch of shit here so feel free to just skip this shit.

1. I was reading Jon Franzen's book of essays and it is an exercise in terrible, hand-wringing, white-guy, emo-shit, so much so that I want to punch him in the goddamn dick. I would pay, and I mean far out the ass, to watch him battle to the death against other authors for my amusement. I don't think I can adequately express the rage that creeps up behind my face when I read his petulant shit. "America is childish" "Being Middle Class is hard" "No one takes me seriously, but I am a serious thinker" "Oprah liked my book but I'm too edgy for Oprah so I complained about it" "Novelist are the only true mirror for society and all other mediums for reflection are cheap, trite, and disingenuous"

ATTENTION FRANZEN: YOU ARE A RICH-ISH WHITE GUY WHO MAKES A LIVING BY WRITING DOWN WHAT YOU THINK IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING IN THE WORLD. YOU ARE NOT IMPORTANT.

2. I am so mad about number one.

3. The bird and the bee still rule.

4. I can't decide what the best Bjork album of all-time is. My top three are Homogenic, Vespertine, and Debut. It is driving me to drink more than usual.

5. I was reading the Tom Robbins book, Another Roadside Attraction, and I had to stop because I hate hippies so goddamn much. Also,

ATTENTION ROBBINS: YOU ARE NOT FUNNY. STOP TRYING TO BE FUNNY. IT COMES ACROSS AS GRATING AND INSULTING TO THE READER AND NO ONE THINKS, DESPITE WHAT THE L. A. TIMES SAYS, THAT YOU ARE REMINISCENT OF MARK TWAIN.

6. I need some new music and I often wonder what happened to people I used to know and think often of their influences on me. Also, am I the only one who feels buoyed when I see old people after I haven't seen them for a while and I think, "Hey, they haven't died yet. Good for them."

7. You know, I have a lot of, now stowed and itemized, baggage from my first marriage but I'll give my first wife this: she introduced me to Marvin Gaye and so she gets a plus one for that.

8. I used to listen to Pearl Jam when I was a foolish teen and think that they were good. I wish I could go back in time and punch teen-me in the stomach and tell him to stop being such a douche all the time.

9. One time, I was at this bar in Texas, and I mean it was the epitome of shit hole and there was chili and tortilla chips and cheese in these crockpots and if you were there you could eat it for free. We had showed up at this place, the name was Wolf something, as an afterthought before we crawled back to base and the emptiness of our beds. I found the crockpots and started eating all the chili and then I went to the bar and had a tequila sunrise because I was with a friend who really felt the Eagles and I drank down the terrible juicy tequila. I remember running to the fetid bathroom but not making it and I threw up a little on the carpet in front of the bar before hitting the bathroom and filling an urinal with chunky chili. We left and I passed out alone under my sheets.

10. You know who doesn't get enough recognition? Duran Fucking Duran. Those motherfuckers have spoken the truthiest of truths for a long time now and no one holds them up as the beacons of prophesy or self-reflection, but those motherfuckers should. Pop Trash totally encapsulated the feel of the 2000s but you don't hear a goddamn single critic tell you that shit. Also, Ordinary World is the best and most true song that an adolescent can ever hear.

11. I like making lists.

12. You know what else is fun? If you just sit and listen to people, they will run out the yarn of their entire goddamn lives without reservation and then you can know all that more about them and their actions and beliefs and all their internal shit that they don't show to any of the superficial people they see on a daily basis. Freud was kind of right with his ideas of therapy because people will talk out their closest demons to an un-speaking ear.

13. Bakers Dozen: The Cardigans are the best thing to come out of Scandinavia since Vikings and mead.

There it is.