scooters, vacation, fall

1. Currently reading…
David Hume's Treatise on Human Nature. No, not really. I'm actually reading nothing but magazines right now. The first "Reading" in this month's Harper's is good, and the one about the contractor working in Afghanistan. Also, there's a Bolaño poem…

I'd like to be reading a novel.

2. Favorite Line(s):

An aristocrat was riding down the street in his carriage. He ran over my father.
·
After the ceremony I walked back to the city. I was trying to think of the reason my father had died. Then I remembered: he was run over by a carriage.

- VIEWS OF MY FATHER WEEPING, Donald Barthelme

"The roads are empty and I am driving fast. I think of my father, imagine him long ago at night casually parting my mother's legs with the mechanical indifference of someone opening a cupboard. And I say to myself: I will leave every cold man, every man for whom music is some private physics and love some unsteppable dance. I will try to make them regret. To make them sad. I am driving back to my tiny kitchen table and I will write this: forgiveness lives alone and far off down the road, but bitterness and art are close, gossipy neighbors, sharing the same clothesline, hanging out their things, getting their laundry confused.

'That's how much it costs, Miss,' says the attendant at the gas station where I stop, looking rather numbly at the price on the pump.

'Oh,' I say and fumble for my wallet. The oil cans stacked against an old truck tire are wordless and collusive. But the triangular plastic flags strung at one end of the island flutter and ripple in the wind, flapping to get my attention, my compassion, like things that seem to want to sing but can't, things that almost tear themselves in trying to fly, like rainbow-colored birds, hung by string and their own feet."

-What is Seized, Lorrie Moore

3. You should read Sandra's book. It's good. I personally felt very depressed throughout, but I'm easily depressed. Which is not say the book is sentimental—it is not. I should quote something again I think:

1.1 Three postcards arrived the following week:
1.2 Dear Mom, Got here without dying. This is just to let you know I decided to use my middle name from now on cause I suddenly realized, Eddie = Oedipus, which just freaks me out. Like, I can't believe I was so lucky to get away, now I see what's really happening. Anyway, this is the last time I'm writing, so if you want to think I'm dead, it's not my problem. –JACK
1.3 Chrysa, Here is London which SUCKS. They all look like fucking walruses, I totally get that Beatles song. So I've got this Finnish chick now, Martina, she's like seventeen. She's like, she left her hometown because 'the people were not sincere,' so basically dumb chick. But that's why I'm not writing after this cause I can only write when I'm lonely, sorry. Tell Mom I'm trying to be cool but I can't deal with her right now.—JACK
1.4 Chrysa, Getting the fuck out of Europe to Africa, I can't take it here. It's like everything's neutered with so-called 'civilization.' Like Martina ran off with some other Finnish asshole named Casper (honest to shit real name) cause he sleeps with both men and women because he's comfortable with his masculinity or some shit, which I don't have to leave California to hear this shit. Like friendly ghost jokes or what. So I'll write from Egypt if I don't suddenly have a fit and die. – JACK
1.5 That was the last we heard.

THE ONLY GOOD THING ANYONE HAS EVER DONE, Sandra Newman

-- Abbi Dion