an interview with boba fett

..is up on the work blog.

WHAT NARCISSISM MEANS TO ME.

Tony Hoagland’s book has a great title, there’s no doubt. That it’s the title of a poetry collection, rather than a bramble of youthful, quasi-confessional memoir, cements it as such.

Hoagland is exactly my speed of poet, and, given my inconsistent but undying aspiration of writing dialogue that fits within the Jesus paradox--fully human and fully literary--it’s difficult for me to imagine a set of poems coming any closer to clearing its throat and saying ahem, this is for you, hello. Hi. Example One:

COMMERCIAL FOR A SUMMER NIGHT

That one night in the middle of the summer
when people move their chairs outside
and put their tvs on the porch
so the dark is full
of murmuring blue lights.

We were drinking beer with the sound off,
watching the figures on the screen--
the bony blonds, the lean- jawed guys
who decorate the perfume and the cars--

the pretty ones
the merchandise is wearing this year.
Alex said, I wish they made a shooting gallery

using people like that.
Greg said, That woman has a PhD in face.

Then we saw a preview for a movie
about a movie star who
is having a movie made about her,
and Boz said, This country is getting stupider every year.

Then Greg said that things were better in the Sixties
and Rus said that Harold Bloom said that Nietzsche said
Nostalgia
was the blank check issued to a weak mind,

and Greg said,
They didn’t have checks back then, stupid,
and Susan said it’s too bad you guys can’t get
Spellcheck for your brains.

Then Greg left and Margaret arrived,
and a breeze carried honeysuckle fumes across the yard
and Alex finished his quart of beer
and Boz leaned back in his chair

and the beautiful people on the tv screen
moved back and forth and back,
looking very much now like shooting gallery ducks.

And we sat in quiet pleasure on the shore of night
as a tide came in and turned and carried us,
folding chairs and all

far out from the coastline of America

in a perfect commercial for our lives.



That one’s great and I love it. It’s so easy on the ear, yes? Deceptively so, you might say. The stories he paints in his poems are very much scenes, drawn so precisely they seem entirely casual. ..And that’s largely what I have to offer, in terms of insight about Narcissism. I’m not super good at talking about poetry. God, though, this was a nice switch, to just have this slender book to pick up now and again, read a poem, and feel immediately comfortable.

Honestly, that’s my full analysis; and I don’t want to fall into a stumbling praise of his lines and themes and the sounds of his words, because I admire all those, but why would I talk about it when I can just show it here. Maybe the MFA poets can show me some annotations and I can see how it’s done. Until then, let me leave you with Impossible Dream, which I’ve read many times and have yet to hit the summit of adoration for it. (One thing I love, again blatantly relevant to my own tiny world, is the tense-shifting.)

IMPOSSIBLE DREAM

In Delaware a Congressman
accused of sexual misconduct
says clearly at the press conference,
speaking
right into the microphone
that he would like very much
to do it again.

It was on the radio
and Carla laughed
as she painted, Die, You Pig
in red nail polish
on the back of a turtle
she plans to turn loose tomorrow
in Jerry’s back yard.

We lived near the high school that year
and in the afternoons, in autumn,
we could hear the marching band rehearsals
from the stadium,
drums and off-key trumpets, brass
smeared weirdly by the wind;

a ragged Louie Louie
or sometimes, The Impossible Dream.

I was reading a book about pleasure,
how you have to glide through it
without clinging,
like an arrow
passing through a target,
coming out the other side and going on.

Sitting at the picnic table
carved with the initials of the previous tenants;
thin October sunlight
blessing the pale grass--
You would have thought we had it all-

But the turtle in Carla’s hand
churned its odd stiff legs like oars,
as if it wasn’t made for holding still

and the high school band played
worse than ever for a moment
as if getting the song right
were the impossible dream.

Bobby Fischer Goes to War

Imagine you’re a shy, quiet boy growing up in a large quiet place. You have among your biggest heroes men of physical action, both real and not real—Robin Hood and Aragorn; Larry Bird and Dennis Rodman—but you know in your gut from early on that what sets you apart is your mind. You’re content there, can always find things to do in there, where others seem to not. Going into the woods with a long stick, a pen knife and a dog doesn’t cease to pass the time well as early as it might, because you can make the forest a frontier, an escape, a place to lay a trap.

That’s enough empathetic exercise—it’s not a particularly difficult or rare one. My point is that this is the kind of boy I was, and, though I had no tremendous affection for chess, Bobby Fischer became on of the most intriguing heroes I had almost from the moment I first heard his story. Bobby Fischer Goes to War concerns itself with the war that was Bobby Fischer versus Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972. When I heard stories about this ’72 battle, with the variety of big, unblinking demands made by Fischer—his refusal to play, his demands for more money that, coupled with his disallowance of TV or film coverage for the event and the revenue stream that went with along with it, practically bankrupted Iceland—I struggled to make sense of them, to find some noble ethic of resistance that was consistent, and would’ve failed at, but for the fact of his disappearance. He was in hiding.

Hiding, see, was where the best kinds of heroes went—the misunderstood men who had to bide their time and lay low, waiting for their moment of redemption. I knew of these themes even as I loved them—I enjoyed finding the common threads in my heroes, and one thread that ran through all of my most highly held characters was that of being thrown out, excommunicated, on the run.

So Bobby Fischer took a seat in that pantheon of mine, and stayed there for some time, until he unavoidably showed himself to be something not at all like a hero, or a relatively sane person. Now, years later, that hasn’t ended up being a bad thing for my idea and estimation of him — Hunter S Thompson’s body of work and life practically demanded his eventual shotgun suicide, if you know what I mean.

here comes the gravy pipe.

(from patton oswalt's first stand-up album)

..and i like the high end steak houses like lowry's and ruth's chris. but i'll also go to the shitball steakhouses like outback and black angus. i'm there. it's steak. not so much black angus though, 'cause remember how friendly the ads for black angus used to be? they were, c'mon in have a steak! how about a baked potato?

and you're like, fucking how about yeah!? see you tomorrow night. table for two, 7:15.


..we'll start you off with our appetizer platter. featuring five jumbo deep fried gulf shrimp, served on a disc of salted butter with fifteen of our potato bacon bombs, and a big bowl of pork cracklings with our cheese and butter dipping sauce.

um, we're all gonna split that...

oh you'll each get your own! Then, we'll take you to our mile long soup and salad bar featuring bacon and cream soup and our fine iceberg lettuce he-man salad, served in a punch bowl, with 18 pounds of ranch dressing, pork stuffed deep fried croutons and what the hell, a couple of corn dogs.

uhhhh hey man, i tell ya what. i'll just get a mixed green salad.

hey! i'll suck a cock on the golden gate bridge before i'll bring ya a mixed green buddy!!
then we'll wheel out our bottomless trough of fried dough!

what? wait a minute, am i gonna get a steak?

oh you'll get a fucking steak!!! cause then we'll bring out our 55oz. las mesa he-man steak slab, served with a deep fried pumpkin stuffed with buttered scallops and 53 of our potato bacon bombs.

ohhh dude i don't think...

and then bend over abigail mae, 'cos HERE COMES THE GRAVY PIPE!!

what?!

black angus, doors are locked from the outside, faggot!

at black angus your name is peaches.

we'll do it live. FUCK IT! WE'LL DO IT LIVE!

if you ain't seen the lately-uncovered clip of bill o'reilly blistering his own sausage (as they say in the infoporn business) behind the news desk, well, please do.



what can you say; the man knows how to pepper his sauce. FUCKING THING SUCKS.

the point: go here and have a listen to the remixes that one dude has made. my favorites are DO IT LIIIIIVE!!! and Fuck It (Revolucian Mix), which are now on my workout mix. really brilliant stuff.

bitch kneed my nuts.

#4 on the top 5 all-time monologues list.

eel down, repeat, we have an eel down : a eulogy.

[i was asked to write a eulogy to honor the office eel, found this morning on the floor, dead. i did, and co-worker alana pulled together a nice design. snowflake bin laden, i can only hope i've honored the call as your eugoogolizer.]

EXAAAAAAACTLY.

the money quote from the wiki entry for the new sincerity -

"My position is irony is dead (...) but at the same time, just to return to old-fashioned sincerity, and particularly the kind of sentimentality that that draws in with it...we don't need it. So that's why we've created the New Sincerity. A perfect example of the New Sincerity is Evel Knievel. There's no way to take Evel Knievel literally. It's impossible. The man has a leather jumpsuit and he drives a rocket car. The leather jumpsuit has red, white, and blue stars and stripes on it. It's absolutely preposterous. On the other hand, there's no way to appreciate Evel Knievel ironically. He's too awesome. He has--I don't know if we've mentioned this--a leather jumpsuit with the Stars and Stripes on it and a rocket-powered car. That's why we appreciate Evel Knievel with the new sincerity."

marion images

i drink beers and write a letter to espn's bill simmons.

I'm not an emotional man, Bill.

But I’m in Seattle and love the Supersonics, and have spent the last year and a half feeling some unhealthy mixture of anarchistic and resigned. I’m actually looking forward to the lawsuits. I want the city of Seattle and Fay Bennett to really square off. I want Howard Shultz's Flux Capacitor of a lawsuit to really have balls, in the litigational sense.


We've had some of the most shit-talkingly awesome ball ever played up here.

But of late there’s been very little to keep us afloat. Kevin Durant, in spite of PJ Carlesimo's jaw-dropping, poopy-pantsing badness, has been a real lift, man. In his rookie year he gave us the things that make family: humility, shyness; promise, struggle; grace, and, most recently, clutchness. In the home stretch of the season he was a feline force, an utter joy to watch. You like KD, so I bring the quandary to your feet.

I read on Wages of Wins today the breakdown of why Kevin Durant didn't deserve RoY over Al Horford. Okay, I think: Horford was freaking awesome in the Boston series. Let's hear the argument.

The argument is two charts, one for the Hawks and one for the Sonics, listing the WP48 (wins produced per 48 minutes) for each player on the rosters. And there it is: Horford has an '07-'08 WP48 of 0.176; Durant's rookie WP48 comes in at -0.017. Whaaaa-at? Al Horford was just a hair over ELEVEN TIMES BETTER than Durant? In terms of wins, that’s what they’re saying. And they’re saying that wins produced is what matters. Then I look at the charts again, and it registers that Horford was next-to-first on the Hawks this year in terms of WP48, while Durant was next-to-last on the Sonics.

Luke Ridnour was almost two times more valuable to the Sonics than Kevin Durant this year. Wally Szczerbiak. Donyell Marshall, Mouhamed Sene … Kurt Thomas, in his sacrificial time with the Sonics, was more than 16 times as valuable as Kevin Durant.

The sunshine is gone up here. We’re in the candlelight-vigil stages of this thing, and my main-man candle is Kevin Durant.


Hide it under a bushel? No! I’m gonna let it shine.

I know this letter is insanely long; it’s Friday and I’ve had a few beers and I have to study after this. So … anything you might have to say about WP48, how it is that Nick Collison is amost exactly as good as Horford, which makes him more than 10x as valuable as Durant, that’d be great. But were you to give a RoY shoutout to Durant, that’s what I think dudes need to read about. After one season, it’s impossible to remove KD from your thinking about the future of this team. He’s become the center point of pride for anyone here who’s paid any attention.