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Showing posts from December, 2006

for illustration friday ... {help}

Because she always does help, everytime I reach for her sad, gun-metal storm of a voice.

Rejection City looks a lot like Poopville

Not one but two rejections the last two days, one from the Sun (for a little story called I Am Here Now ) and one from the 'Lists' department at McSweeney's . Merry Christmas! Anyway, I offer up the second rejection (below) in the spirit of the season. OTHER 'IF I DID IT' BOOK PROJECTS THAT OJ MAY WANT TO CONSIDER by Darryl Berger If I Did It: Jing Ke's attempted assassination of Qin Shi Huang (first emperor of unified China, 221 BC – 210 BC) OJ notes – See, an NFL running back knows how to handle pressure. So I would never have fucked that up. If I Did It: The Assassination of Gaius Julius Caesar, 44 BC OJ notes – This is a gang thing. Not a Columbian drug-gang thing, but still: good team effort. If I Did It: The Assassination of Henry III of France, 1589 OJ notes – This Jacques Clément? He was some kind of demented religious dude, got up close to the king by pretending to have a secret message. Me, I'd just fake left and go right. Shoot and scoot, mother

ship of fools, island of clowns

Watching Survivor: Cook Islands last night gave me a sudden ken for William Golding's Lord of the Flies : there he was, a real-life incarnation of Piggy, being abused by a whole gang of Jacks. And while Jonathan didn't receive the heavy-rock-to-the-skull treatment, the ritualized social equivalent was intended as no less hurtful when he was unanimously repudiated and cast out by his 'Aitutonga' tribe. What a spectacle it was, this tribe so glutted with vitriol and self-righteousness. And this in a game where everyone (save two of them) gets it in the end, usually by way of betrayal, usually square in the back. Yet even from this kind of Machiavellian environment there still has to be a 'villain'. Jonathan was a villain because he was told so, over and over again, by the players he had 'betrayed' when he flipped to the better-positioned faction. While there were a couple of adult-sounding but clichéd metaphor devices in use ('cancer' and 'rat

for illustration friday ... {might}

A certain someone advised me that using a king for the concept of 'might' would be a cliché ... of course, that same certain-someone once believed me when I told her about an episode of Grey's Anatomy (she had missed it) which saw the gruesome death of three of the main characters in a boiler-room explosion ... yeah, the major networks are always taking risks like that. And: oh yeah, I'm totally believable. Just check my record!

it's a red dog

A dog from way back, that I've used for a variety of things, and now he's red.