everyone in bar hates bar.

the funniest single page of headlines in a long time.

includes:

obama runs constructive criticism ad against mccain

wealthy teen nearly experiences consequence

members of twisted sister now willing to take it

everything midas ceo touches turns to mufflers

palin brushing up on foreign policy at epcot

and let's all give it up one time for:

Point: Gov. Palin Has No Foreign Policy Experience, Refuses To Acknowledge Global Warming, And Supports The War In Iraq

Counterpoint: Please Keep Your Voice Down, My Poor Retarded Child Is Sleeping

Shhhhhh!

the unhappy face theory.

television tends to level everybody out and make everyone seem kind of blandly good-looking, but at montreal it turns out that a lot of the pros and stars are interesting-or even downright funny-looking. jim courier, former number one but now waning and seeded tenth here, looks like howdy doody in a hat on tv but here turns out to be a very big boy -- the “guide média” lists him at 175 pounds, but he’s way more than that, with big smooth muscles and the gait and expression of a mafia enforcer. michael chang, twenty-three and number five in the world, sort of looks like two different people stitched crudely together: a normal upper body perched atop hugely muscular and totally hairless legs. he has a mushroom-shaped head, inky-black hair, and an expression of deep and intractable unhappiness, as unhappy a face as i’ve seen outside a graduate creative-writing program.*

*emphasis added. this is part of a paragraph from DFW's 1995 esquire essay the string theory about pro tennis. it's a remarkable read, with more than 40 footnotes. (even other parts of this same paragraph have other, unique worth, such as wallace remarking that pete sampras is mostly teeth and eyebrows in person with unbelievably hairy legs and forearms from which he postulates a high likelihood of back hair for sampras, which makes everyone feel better. 

wallace describes agassi's superlative game beautifully and at length before asiding that he hates agassi**, and that watching him dominate his way through a match is beautiful but doesn't make me like him any better; it's more like it chills me, as if i'm watching the devil play.

**buried in the reams of contextually vital footnotes is one about how brooke shields, so beautiful on paper, is entirely nonsexual in person, such that he can readily imagine roughing up the suspect with her picture in hand, but who in the live 3d he deems unfuckable.***

***i'll stop with the spoiling. it's really interesting. if you haven't read it you should.

i love you.

so, again, mcsweeneys.net this week is putting up recollections about david foster wallace. i've been reading one or two at a time, as a) any more than that and my whole body starts to grieve, and returning from your smoke break and sploshing into your chair like a bucket of grief (4 or 5 times each day) is unhelpful and smelly, and b) every single one is so beautiful. here's a clip of the one by sue dickman -

...He was tough in workshop but not mean. He made me look at writers I'd already discovered on my own—like Lorrie Moore—in a new way, and he introduced me to writers I probably never would have discovered on my own, like Lee K. Abbott. He had us read a Stephen King story about a possessed laundry machine ("The Mangler") in conjunction with a prize-winning short story told from the point of view of a dead body ("Poor Boy") to illustrate the differences between literary and genre fiction. There were other tangible things. I used to confuse "further" and "farther," and, apparently, I did it quite often. In one of my stories, I'd confused them yet again, and in the margins, he'd written, simply, "I hate you." I've never confused them since. He once left me a note, postponing a meeting, excusing himself by saying, "I'm so hungry I'm going to fall over." While I was irritated that he wasn't there, I immediately adopted that sentence and have been saying it ever since.

the future of yesterday is right fucking now.

want help making a career change by eod tuesday? well maybe you should go to yahoo.com and read like, roughly, i don't know, the 2nd article from the top of the page. 

yahoo.com's 2nd article from the top of the page is a terrific resource for any job-uncertain persons who can benefit from helpful facts like "for instance, as a pediatric nurse, you’d work with children." 

In today's globally scphinctering economy, politicians stare into the middle distance and insist we're all going through the same thing. we're not; but we all may well want the same thing, which is to read the phrase "continued growth" not less than five times in 600 words. 

"The future," says yahoo.com's 2nd article from the top of the page, looking down at you from its perch waaaay up almost at the tippy-top of the page, "the future holds opportunities." boo-yah. 

i wish you way more than luck.

the commencement address david foster wallace gave in 2005, he opens with a little ditty. here's the opening paragraphs:

(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

the whole thing is here; i've read it several times, and recently, when i've eagerly popped it in my mouth like a lozenge, something to soothe my itchy perspective, and also like a bracing shot of absinthe, to snap my eyes open and remind me i'm awake. from near the end:

The capital-T Truth is about life before death.
It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

FORGET ABOUT THE FUCKING TOE.

some good stuff (and some goldbricking bullshit) got written to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the big lebowski. but this, i just saw today, and it's tasty.

walter sobchak, neocon : the prescient politics of lebowski.

these, turns out, are the particulars of the nobility i aspire to.

-- from james wood's how fiction works --

flaubert loved to read aloud. it took him thirty-two hours to read his overblown lyrical fantasia, the tempatation of saint anthony, to two friends. and when he dined in paris at the goncourts’, he loved to read out examples of bad writing. turgenev said that he knew of “no other writer who scrupled in quite that way.” even henry james, the master stylist, was somewhat appalled by the religious devotion with which flaubert assassinated repetition, unwanted clichés, clumsy sonorities. the scene of his writing has become notorious: the study at croisset, the slow river outside the window, while inside the bearish norman, wrapped in his dressing gown and wreathed in pipe smoke, groaned and complained about how slow his progress was, each sentence laid as slowly and agonizingly as a fuse.*

*though one wonders if a great deal of time was not spent just sleeping and masturbating (flaubert likened sentences to ejaculate). often, the excruciation of the stylist seems to be a front for writer’s block. this was the case with the marvelous american writer jf powers, for instance, of whom sean o’faolain joked, in wildean fashion, that he “spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon wondering whether or not he should replace it with a semicolon.” more usual, i think, is the kind of literary routine ascribed to the minor english writer ac benson—that he did nothing all morning and then spent the afternoon writing up what he’d done in the morning.

heaven is a booze crooze, and so is hell. in each THERE IS COWBELL.