cool things (a continuation)

• baseball games in small towns
• subscriptions to the new yorker
• finally cutting a pair of jeans that were 7-8 inches too long that i’ve had for NINE years but hardly wore due to said overlength and yet held onto for some reason, but now that they’re regular length, i wear them every day! what is the lesson here, not sure
• vanilla coke zero every once in a while
• my new white worishofers, aka my old lady cruise shoes
• clyde sleeping at my feet

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you know what would be fire?

MORE, THE GOODNESS NEVER ENDS:

but i have never thought to myself “you know what would be fire? chopping up that old radicchio wilting at the bottom of the fridge and throwing some radishes and cold green beans on it then squeezing a lemon wedge over the top and letting that be the only thing i eat for the rest of the night.” NO, THANK YOU. as an idea that’s fine or whatever but as a person with a yawning emotional void that can only be filled with snacks i’m gonna need that lettuce to have a cheeseburger on top of it.

the other day i was thinking about my wedding meal and i was like, i would just have all desserts, just desserts, and though desserts are not snacks but aren’t they?

i can’t believe i haven’t posted about samantha irby before

i had an icon thing on my PHONE directly linking me to bitches gotta eat for like, 2 years, but yet somehow i never posted on bookbinder, how can it be? until now when i’m drinking bailey’s irish cream at 6:40pm on a lame day and reading her blog  and she is just so good, this is just the tip of the iceberg:

i drove back to chicago last week to do an interview and goddamn that shit felt weird. not the interview, that was dope, despite the fact that i described my personal style as “fat ninja” and ordered 1/3 of the food i would actually eat in case it’s one of those interviews where the writer goes super in-depth into the mannerisms of the subject. you know what i mean? like when you read a vanity fair piece about emma stone and they describe exactly how much almond milk she puts in her extra-hot coffee, like down to the motherfucking ounce. this is not to compare my hulking, mouthbreathing self to emma stone, mind you, it’s just that i am an excruciatingly self-conscious person who will die upon reading “irby lumbered slowly into the restaurant, eyes darting nervously behind oversized black sunglasses as she surveyed the space for enemies, then squashed her bulk into a booth to order the first sixteen things on the appetizer menu.” LOL FUCK THAT. i can promise you as long as i live that my secret fat shame will stay right where it belongs: hovered over the trash can searching for a food item thrown away in haste that i couldn’t stop thinking about for several hours.

man i hate talking to people in person. first of all: WHAT THE FUCK DO I KNOW. not much! i’m not actually 100% sure about anything! i once did a book talk and this dude i knew i shouldn’t have called on stood up and quoted my own words back to me and i was just standing there flummoxed like “wait did i actually write that.” i made him pull out his copy of MEATY and hand it to me and then played it off on some “lol if i wrote it i guess i meant it” type shit, why o why am i still interacting with human fucking beings!? but this seemed like a good opportunity to end up in the mailboxes of the childhood homes of all of my friends, so i decided to make a trip of it and rent something called a “compact suv” so i wouldn’t risk anyone busting out a window to steal one of the many pairs of crocs i keep in my real car and so i could go 90 on the highway without worrying that the muffler was going to fall off. i haven’t rented a car in a while, but apparently at enterprise now they get in the car with you to make sure that everything is to your liking? so this poor fucking kid trevor and i go out to the car lot and he has to sit there while i squint at and fuck with all the knobs and buttons to connect the bluetooth and raise the steering wheel and at one point i raised the seatback from chaise lounge to high chair and he exclaimed “my mom drives just like that!” and if the insurance they made me buy would have covered it i would have murdered him.

but now that i’m dead

from bitches gotta eat:

i remember being a kid and rolling my eyes when my mom put betty wright on the record player and swaying in the middle of the living room, eyes closed, cigarette burning between her lips. i only wanted to listen to music that was fast and aggressive, shit that mirrored my internal pre-teen torment. but now that i’m dead i like songs that sound like a nap.

well, many facets

many good chuckles from helytimes:

from:

the only book I’ll ever need?!

if I want to learn more about China I can pick up this month’s Westways:

Lol did somebody pitch Westways “how about a story about China?”

WESTWAYS EDITOR: what angle?

PITCHER: Everything from cities to cuisine!  All the facets!

EDITOR: All?!

PITCHER: Well, many facets.

EDITOR: Is there enough there?

PITCHER: I think so.  Did you know it is a 5,000 year old civilization?

EDITOR: Wow!  OK let’s also have a piece on Iceland and car racing for amateurs and I think we’re good!

so: a brochure.

a great story: “a love story” by samantha hunt.

I’ve been thinking about drafting a manual for expecting mothers. An honest guide to a complex time of life for which no one’s ever properly prepared. After I became a mom, I asked an older friend, “How come you never told me I’d lose my identity when I had a kid?”

“ ’Cause it’s temporary. They give you a new one. And I kind of forgot.”

“Really?”

“No.”

When I sit down to begin my manual, I realize how specific my guide is to one demographic. So then, O.K., a mothering guide for middle-class, heterosexual women who went to college and are gainfully employed. But once I’ve arrived there, my pen raised and at the ready, I realize I actually have very little wisdom. So: a brochure. Pen in hand. Until I realize that what I’ve learned about being a middle-class, hetero mother who went to college could actually be boiled down to one or two fortune cookies. I write, “HORMONES ARE LIFE. HORMONES ARE MENTAL ILLNESS.” I write, “EQUALITY BETWEEN THE SEXES DOES NOT EXIST.” And then my job is done.

oh my

Liev Schreiber and Chuck Wepner. Illustration by Tom Bachtell. Courtesy of The New Yorker.

[Chuck] Wepner earned his nickname, the Bayonne Bleeder, in 1969, when his fight against Sonny Liston rained blood on the spectators. Between bites of herbed scallops, the fighter said, “I could feel my nose breaking, hear my cheekbone cracking. The doctor looked at me and he went”—Wepner made a retching sound. “I almost retired after that, but I had the doggedness.” Working variously as a bouncer, an enforcer, and a liquor salesman, Wepner trained part time till he got his shot against Muhammad Ali, in 1975. “I was in such good shape for the Ali fight that I didn’t know whether I wanted to fight him or fuck him. I hope I don’t embarrass you,” he said to Schreiber, who gave a cosmopolitan shrug.

Or Coconuts

House rules at Ernest Hemingway’s casita in Key West. NO coconuts.

(via molly young)

the unbelievable smugness of apologizing to nabokov in your title

from nicole cliffe, via carrie frye’s newsletter:

When I was a shamefully and hopelessly callow Harvard undergraduate, I managed to claw my way into Zadie Smith’s fiction workshop, an opportunity I then squandered by being myself (lazy, self-absorbed, and not that good a writer). Zadie did not like us very much, with good reason. You’ve read “On Beauty”? That’s basically what she was dealing with. Mostly, when I think back on that workshop, I writhe with embarrassment, but I also think fondly of a very kind and generous thing she did for us a few weeks into the semester.

With a slightly grim expression, she walked around our table carefully setting down individual copies of a stapled short story, titled “Picnic, Lightning (with apologies to Nabokov.)” She informed us that this was a bad story that she had written, herself, in one of her own terrible undergraduate fiction seminars. She let us read it, and talked about how everyone writes bad things on the way to writing anything good. She talked about the unbelievable smugness of apologizing to Nabokov in your title. She talked about the necessary apprentice work of trying to sound like a much better writer, one that you love, and how as your own voice develops, you can let those avatars fall away.

i couldn’t talk for two days

from the john waters interview in lenny:

John Waters: …until I saw Pelican 212, a rock group that Trump picked for his inauguration ball. Did you see them? No one but me seems to have seen them.

Kaitlyn Greenidge: No, I haven’t.

JW: Never has there been a more hideously untalented, amateur group, and they were singing covers of James Brown songs. I couldn’t talk for two days. I went to the marches and everybody had great signs, but I found I just wanted to have one that said “I Hate Pelican 212,” but then no one will know what I’m talking about.