Yup, it's true. I've become even dweebier than before. I love quilting. I love the new quilt I'm making.
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I don't have a lot of domestic skills. I'm pretty bad at cleaning, baking and following recipes. I made a really ugly pie once, maybe even twice. I tried knitting a sweater years ago, without much success but I've yet to try sewing, so I'm willing to give it a try. I've become obsessed with quilting, yes, the sport of little old ladies, and I think I'm going to make one. I'm on my way out to the Salvation Army to collect some more size 16 silk dresses. Some of my favorites that I've come across are these by Carol Taylor as well as Nancy Crow's work. I've been listening to the French national radio online to improve my French, and am in need of something to do while listening other than Bejeweled.
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More from the 1994 looseleaf diary. I apparently had a mania for bulleted lists back then. Still do, I suppose. I like how the relationship entry is just another bullet item.

• What is Green Goddess dressing? or is it Green Grasshopper dressing?
• "passion" and "patience" both had primary definitions of "suffering" during Elizabethan times.
• Aphrodisiac: liquid lothario
• theomachy - fight or battle between the gods
• I am beginning to realize that I have been doing all the adapting and changing for the sake of this relationship and he hasn't done any. "That's the way I am," he shrugs, and makes no effort to be anything else, forcing me to adapt to him. Throughout the summer I had to make huge compromises to adapt, had to give up so many things, writing my book, being near my friends, good books, good films, and good conversation. Wrong. It is wrong. [4 days later there is a brief entry "Broke up with X".]
• Woman here named "Felix Box" [see list below. I am interested in women with "men's" names. My name was to have been Andy, spelled like that, but then I would have been A. Fake. My sister's name, Corey, used to be mostly a boy's name, but that has changed. I met a woman named Timothy once, a good name too.]
• Research: Jim Jones, other cult leaders. The power of charisma: Hitler, Jesse Jackson, politicians, televangelists. Charisma is seduction. It is power over other people by not the forcing of another's will or making them act against their will, it is persuading their wills to come into alignment with your own. Repeat after me. Persuasive speech. People who are seeking the bosom of home. Arenas for eloquence, and with it always comes power.

I love Jouke's drawings. Please, send me some more drawing sites!
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From the 1994 looseleaf diary, another list of seemingly unrelated items (there are a lot of these):

• pressed together like skin grafts
• The only cure for xxxxx is reincarnation
• The nine-banded armadillo bears identical quadruplets routinely and are the only mammals known to do so. All are the same sex and have identical genes. The period of gestation can be as long as 20 months, which is almost as long as the elephant's, the longest period among mammals.
• Live 10 years, susceptible to few human diseases
• Get leprosy; were used for leprosy research
• From the Gallery of Infamy: DIEGO DE LANDA, burner of many sacred books of the Maya. Filthy scum.
• Armadillos eat tarantulas, scorpions, snakes, toads, insects.
• Mexico City, Carlos Fuentes: "great flat-snouted and suffocating city, the city forever spreading like a creeping blot"
• On the summit of a hill called the Cerro de la Estrella the Aztecs performed the New Fire Ceremony. Throughout the empire every old cooking pot was smashed and all the fires extinguished. Not until a new fire was started on the chest of a human sacrificial victim could the world be renewed.
• AMPHISBAENAE

I still regret not buying everything that afternoon Geoffrey and I happened upon Marty Balin's garage sale in Mill Valley last year. The shiny turquoise dining room set, the record collection unlike anything I've seen before or since, the 20 ft long abstract print of something-or-other. I got the Victorian photo album with distortions of the Mona Lisa glued to each page, but I gave it to Shana for Chanukah that year. His entire kitchen was collaged with pictures of rock stars cut out of magazines from the 60s and 70s, including everyone, BB King and Leon Russell and David Bowie and Suzie Quattro and Keith Richards. I could've spent hours there. Unfortunately, Marty wasn't at home.
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Another bit from the 1994 looseleaf diary:

Girl trying to avoid her present focuses all her attention on the past. But the present assaults her from all sides, in mirrors and reflections. Crystal balls. Mirror mirror on the wall. Hubcaps. Rear view mirrors. Mica. Cigarette foil. CDs. Polished furniture. Braces, Motorcycles. Fish. Knives. Watches. Police officer's badge. Metal buttons. Christmas tree balls, grade school stars, suits of armor (Philadelphia Art Museum, the dazzle room) ice skate blades, metallic fingernail polish, chrome bumpers, space blankets, suntan reflectors, space ships, Coors, tinsel, bells, belt buckles, scissors, silverware, ice, Philadelphia cream cheese wrappers, guns, door knockers.

Mnemosyne and Zeus spent 9 nights together and created the 9 Muses. Sex with a God.

Breath of life: holding mirror under nose to see if it fogs. Vanity/Conceit.
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Afghan sport called Buzkashi. "It is a thunderous version of polo in which whip-wielding horseback-riders gallop for kilometers across muddy fields, trying to grab the carcass of a dead goat away from each other. There are no teams in this sport, and virtually no rules. By the time the players leave the field, the goat is reduced to a bloody pulp, and the horsemen aren't in much better shape." [More here]
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I've kept diaries since I was five, but except for scanning in the pictures once in 1996, I haven't gone back to read them. Every time I did, I was appalled -- by how dumb they were, how naked, how boring, how pretentious, how self-obsessed. Which is why, perhaps, weblogs are less cringesome: with people watching, you can't be so me, me, me all the time, and think twice about being boring or dumb. Anyhow, I just found a folder containing a looseleaf diary I must've been keeping around 1994, when I first moved to San Francisco. It's full of great stuff, which I'll post over the next few days, such as this poem copied from the empty journals that are kept on the shelf at Farley's, a cafe on Potrero Hill, and which are filled with drawings and anecdotes by the visitors there. I had one of these mugs when coffee-drinking was my last remaining vice. [Crap, I'm told this particular work of brilliance is by the late great band Sublime. I'd thought it was the found scribblings of a secret genius. I think I even *have* this album.]

Which reminds me. My very first day in San Francisco when I was visiting my sister circa 1990, I walked down to the bay and was sitting down by Fisherman's Wharf and a guy asked me for a quarter, and I gave him one, then bought a sandwich, and was eating it when he came back and asked me for another quarter, and I said I'd spent it on the sandwich, then he asked me for my sandwich, and I said no, it was my lunch, then he started screaming "RACIST!! RACIST!!" at me at the top of his lungs -- it was a really crowded area and all the people were looking at me in horror, and I didn't know what to do, and no one was doing anything to help me, just looking at me like I was some kind of racist, so I ran, and ran up the hill as fast as I could and he followed me screaming "RACIST!! RACIST!!" and I ran into a cafe, and fortunately he didn't follow and I ordered a coffee and sat down when this long haired hippie guy came up to me and said:

Which further freaked out my already freaked out self, and so I took myself homeward, where I stayed for a few days, until I felt calm enough to venture out again. It turned out to be a poem by Robert Creeley.
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LIST (just found, undated, probably circa 1994, since the other papers in the pile were from that era):

• Egg and dart frieze (moulding)
• Eldritch - strange and unearthly
• John Birch Society -- ultraconservative anticommunist organization
• Job's Comforter - One who discourages or saddens while seemingly offering sympathy or comfort
• Jongleur - Wandering minstrel and storyteller in medieval England and France
• veronica - a maneuver in bullfighting in which the matador stands immobile and passes the cape slowly before the charging bull
• wisenheimer - an offensively self-assured person (yiddish?)
• Gooseflesh, thorny, emblazoned, bedazzled, spate, plectrum, pique, gore, billow, plummet, cocoon, cloak, fulcrum
• name of God: Elohim
• Undiminished

Name list (on verso), from employee directory at Deloitte and Touche (here referred to as "Toilet and Douche") where I worked as a temp the summer of 1994, and remember suffering from such acute boredom that I was forced to entertain myself by reading the company phone book. Being named "Fake" predisposes one toward an interest in names:

• Cherish La Fleur
• Felix Box
• Uzair Dada
• Tarik Dudum
• Tony Goon
• Manish Jain
• John Jex
• Priti Pandit
• Knute Ream
• Jill Silliphant
• Algernon Locke
• Barbara Dahl (Barbie Dahl)
• Bud McAdoo
• Berry Kwock
• Poe Timmons

It's Buy Nothing Day!

Don't buy anything, OK? It's 3:00 AM, and I'm proud to say I haven't bought a single thing. It's 3:00 AM. Do you know where your wallet is?
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Happy Thanksgiving all you American folks! We celebrated it, oh, about a month ago. So us Canadians (am I allowed to say that?) are way ahead of you on that score.
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Eric writes a little bit about Munchausen Syndrome on his site:

I heard a radio show on one of those San Francisco radio stations a couple years ago about Munchausen syndrome, and on the show they interviewed a Scottish woman who had this particular problem, except that her particular way of garnering attention was by getting *amputations*. They had amputated several fingers and a toe, and eventually part of her leg. How twisted is *that*? I imagine that the only way a person could become that way would be to suffer from some kind of Satanic Ritual Abuse, but that's a whole 'nother topic.

He also mentions the "Secret Free Hippie Hot Tub In This Guy's Backyard In Berkeley Where You Can Go Any Time You Like And Need to Be Totally Silent But We Didn't Know About The Silence Bit, and were soundly booted out of there by a naked man holding a flashlight who waved it [the flashlight] at us in solemn indignation" -- a legendary hot tub, which, like car art and the occasional public appearance of Wavy Gravy, extend Berkeley's diminishing grooviness into the 21st century.
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The great thing about the internet is, as Emer Inube-Mann says (whoever that is) “The Internet has made each man’s private obsession a public nuisance” as quoted by this particular obsessive maniac who has compiled a list of triple homonyms. Nutty. [via Stewart]

My other favorite recently-discovered odd site is Fusion Anomaly, which, if you can get past the inscrutable sci-fi interface (turn off your sound if you don't want your boss to know you're engaging in internet frivolity), contains all kinds of weird categorizations, and information culled from disparate sources. The subject matter is along the Mayan Calendar/Knights Templar/Transhumanist continuum, but there are some fabulous pages. For example, check out the pages on Essence or Creatures. The credo of the site is on the front page:

Do you want to be a Secret Santa? (Love the Santa Robot!)
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Who knew satellite dishes could look so nice? They're like pinwheels. Yoohoo, Land of Plenty folks. Reduce, reuse, recycle.
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Where Osama bin Laden lived in the Zazi mountains of the Bakhtiar province. Looks fairly modest. I'm not sure how long ago it was blown up. [via metascene]

I backwards navigated on that site and found the Watan Afghanistan site, which has information about Afghan books, music and poetry.
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Mario Vargas Llosa on Why a Dictator Isn't Necessarily a Fanatic "A dictator is someone who wants to have power and to become very rich. But if you are a fanatic, you believe that everything that you do is godly inspired and permitted and legitimized and that you are the owner of absolute truth, so that you can do anything, even the worst deeds." I noticed his new book The Feast of the Goat has been translated (this is a story about Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic for 30 years) as well as an interesting looking book by Mexican writer David Toscana Our Lady of the Circus (and also another "Our Lady" book, Our Lady of the Assassins by Fernando Vallejo.)

I wish I had two lives, one in which to live, and one in which to read. I've got someone doing some R&D on this.
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I started a new story today, it's called The Quitter. So far, I love it.
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We were just across the Lion's Gate bridge when foul-smelling smoke started gushing from the engine, so we pulled to the side of the road and called a tow truck and then got out our blankets and hats and gloves and Dos Pesos and hot mulled wine and coffee cake and watched the stars fall from the sky lying flat the median for an hour while we waited. When the tow truck guy arrived, he hitched up the car and then drove us all the way up Cypress Mountain which was not the peaceful quiet meteor-watching spot we'd anticipated, but a big traffic jam as thousands of meteor-watchers created millions of gigawatts of ground light. Then the tow-truck guy drove us all home.

"It couldn't have worked out better," Marni said, and she was right. Except maybe the car. But it had been corrupted by the mechanics when they last "fixed" it, so hopefully they can put it right again, with no further charges.
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Don't forget that the Leonid meteor showers are tonight at roughly 2am (west coast). We'll be up on Cypress mountain.
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From Daegan, the horny remover which she didn't need for her weekend, but might be useful for yours.
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Buy Nothing Day is coming up on November 23! Bring your lunch to work! If the urge to bust out your wallet becomes too strong, recite the following mantra:

Use it up
Wear it out
Make it do
Or do without.

It's for the war effort. But wait, isn't Bush encouraging us to spend?

This site also has the famous Norman Rockwell posters that were initially rejected by the government but printed in the Saturday Evening Post, which makes me wonder: is there a propaganda campaign out there that I'm missing not having a TV? Interesting how the poster form of persuasion has vanished, except to advertise record releases and local art shows.
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Image from the De Natura Rerum by Thomas of Cantimpré, translated by Jacob van Maerlant. [ via Jessamyn]

I'd probably like this Typographic Calendar, except there are no boxes in which to write "Dentist's appointment" and "Dry cleaning".

Speaking of bad design, the front door of this building is really atrocious. It is clear glass, with a handle bolted into it, like you would find in a department store, and modern, unlike the rest of the building. Hideous. Aesthetic considerations aside, you have to instruct people how to use it. To unlock it, you put the key into this little silver box on the wall perpendicular to it, juggle your packages and your Dos Pesos around to open it, hold it open with your foot, pull your key out of the wall, and then enter. Then to get out again you have to tell people to look for a red button on the wall next to the door, which looks like the nuclear button in all those cold war movies, which you have to push, and then wait a moment, and then open the door because some invisible magnet is holding it shut. It's truly abominable. I mean, did anyone ever have to tell you how to operate a door? Doors are intuitive! Insert key, unlock, turn knob, push. To exit, turn knob, push. If this were a swearing type weblog, I'd swear here.
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From my new book Architecture Without Architects by Bernard Rudofsky (this is the 1964 edition):

Then there are pictures of people carrying straw and woven roofs from place to place. This reminds me of how a real estate agent told me that the Chinese always want to buy a new apartment, and how Ewan said his Asian neighbors frowned disapprovingly when he said he was going to fix up an old house, which reminds me in turn of a character in one of the stories in Pangs of Love by David Wong Louie in which he tells his Chinese mother that he is marrying a woman who has a young son and she says, "Why would you want to marry a used family like that?"

Which then made me think (I love this concatenation of ideas) of DeLillo's question in Mao II, "How does something new come into the world?"
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Just back from Waking Life. I have thoughts about it too. Back/neck/head hurts though; going to lie down on my heating pad with my tiger balm and dawgie. I haven't complained here about my chronic pain condition lately. Let me rectify that immediately! Whine.
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I've lost track of the word count on the novel since I've been writing everything out by hand, and have mostly been working on another draft of The Love Fixer, the short story. Going to write at Melriches in about an hour.
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The Art of Aftermath, Distilled in Memory

Thus, today, I am again moved, leafing through the Portraits of Grief on the NY Times site. (Right column)
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QUIZ: Are you my ex-boyfriend?

1. Are you housetrained?
   (a) Yes (b) No
2. Do complete strangers ask to touch you even when you are not wearing suede pants?
   (a) Yes (b) No
3. Are you a non-Scandinavian man who wears clogs?
   (a) Yes (b) No
4. Were you once a competitive speed walker?
   (a) Yes (b) No
5. When, in a restaurant, you leaned across the table , took my hands, looked into my eyes and said, “I have just three words to say to you” did you then say, “Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato”?
   (a) Yes (b) No
6. Did you insist, even though it was completely untrue, that I kissed that guy Andy Dunlop, whose last name I don’t even remember anymore, and never kissed, except maybe once?
   (a) Yes (b) No
7. Did you throw all my clothes out the window and tell me to leave, and then when I started to leave did you run out and gather all my clothes off the sidewalk and barricade the door so I couldn’t leave?
   (a) Yes (b) No
8. Did you date Monica Lewinsky?
   (a) Yes (b) No
9. Did you once appear in a Calvin Klein underwear ad?
   (a) Yes (b) No
10. Are you really good-looking, but not very bright?
    (a) Yes (b) No
11. Did you call me incessantly after I broke up with you, until I had to turn off my phone, then rang my doorbell incessantly until I disconnected it, and then waited outside my apartment at 8 AM every morning for a week when you knew I had to leave to work, and followed me to the A train even though I didn't look at you or say a word to you, did you follow me into my office building, and leave me only after I got into the elevator?
    (a) Don't run for public office, hotshot. I have all your letters.
12. Did I break up with you in four, possibly five European cities during a two week trip?
    (a) Yes (b) No
13. Do you still owe me $200?
    (a) Yes (b) No
14. Were you more in love with me than I was in love with you?
    (a) Yes (b) Yes
15. Was I more in love with you than you were in love with me?
    (a) Maybe
16. Are you gay?
    (a) Yes (b) No

Tomorrow is Moby Dick's 150th birthday, which ranks as my third favorite book of all time (and Cormac McCarthy's first.) I'm still working on the first two positions.
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For the past two days I've been riveted to Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, an astounding book and a book of genius. It is set in 1849-50 and follows the Glanton Gang on their orgy of slaughter along the Texas-Mexico border. It is without a doubt the most violent and bloody book I've ever read, an unflinching study of evil and the lust for war.

We meet a character identified only as "The Kid" when he is fourteen years old and running away from his home in Tennessee. Through various misadventures he ends up in jail, from which he is sprung by The Glanton Gang, a group of bloodthirsty men bent on killing and scalping as many Apaches as possible for the bounty paid by the Mexican state of Chihuahua. The spiritual leader of the Glanton Gang is Judge Holden, who we first meet on page 6, a 7 foot tall albino "bald as a stone" with no beard or brow or lashes, small hands and feet. He speaks all languages and knows all things. He dresses in finery and often appears naked. He rapes and kills little boys and little girls, spurs the gang on to further butchery, dances and fiddles and never sleeps and swears that he will never die. After speaking of how a game of cards on which the wager is death is the only real game, he says:

We have page after page of rape, murder and bloodshed, battle after battle, more blood, more carnage, pitiless, relentless, endless. There is a magnificent story of how the gang was out of gunpowder with the Apaches mere minutes away and Holden, wizard-like, conjures gunpowder out of dirt, ashes and piss. At the end of the book (don't read this if you want the ending kept for the end) there is a final confrontation between The Kid, now forty-five, and Judge Holden, untouched by time. It is the most chilling scene that I have ever read. I have already reread the whole chapter five times. They meet by chance in a saloon, and watch a dancing bear being killed and Holden lectures the kid, now called "the man" that all dancers that are not warriors -- murderers -- are false dancers, since dancing is the warrior's right, and his only. The Kid offers his laconic replies. You aint nothin he says, and Holden says, You speak truer than you know. Holden murders the Kid in an outhouse outside the saloon. Of all the murders in the books, hundreds of which are recounted in graphic detail, this one is a cipher, a void. Moments later we find Holden inside:

This morning I awoke to the story of the exultant soldiers of the Northern Alliance looting and shooting a wounded man at point-blank range and I thought to myself: So it is. He will never die.
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Synthetic Zero has a great idea of how to get more out of life, simply and manageably. Instead of doing one less thing than is on your To Do list, do one more thing. N + 1 instead of N - 1. ( Here's an example of the To-Do list of someone who gets everything done. I, like Eric like to leave evidence of what it is I've accomplished.)

This is similar in terms of simplicity to my realization during my junior year of college that the likelihood of my attaining a 4.0 G.P.A. were greatly increased if I a) went to class and b) handed in my papers on time. Seems obvious, no? However, it came one day like a revelation to me.
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Camping Party. Last night was Julie's 30th birthday and we were instructed to bring things for camping to their loft on the East side of town. They had a "campfire" (red xmas lights under cedar logs with a video projection of a fire over it) and "nature" (photos of trees and grass projected on the walls). We roasted marshmallows on a coleman stove, and sat around the fire. People brought their dogs (Dos Pesos was particularly popular with the ladies) and when it got late we pitched our tents and watched The Blair Witch Project projected onto the walls through the doors of our tents, like a drive in movie for urban campers. Then we all slept over. So much fun.
LINK | 12:19 PM |
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I was so excited about finishing my story The Love Fixer and sending out Genius without a Penis again (having decided two months is long enough to wait for a response) that I stayed up all night reading a short book by John Cheever What a Paradise It Seems which was, from what I can gather, his last.

There's a whole essay to be written here about the elegiac tone of this book, about the things trampled by the inexorable march of progress, about the vestiges of the ancient and the prior in fast food, nomadism, psychotherapy and supermarkets, about the genius of Cheever's use of the first person narrator, omniscient and sad, of how the book seems to wander off into irrelevant asides which turn out to be pertinent, and not only pertinent, but deeply meaningful, more so for their obliquity, and how the title of the book Oh What a Paradise It Seems is repeated on the last page in the (exclamatory) past tense: "What a paradise it seemed!" and why all of this is so wonderful -- but today I cannot do it. I'm too tired from having stayed up all night reading it, and am grumpy from having to sit around the house waiting for a delivery all day. However, let it be noted: I am touting this book, all of Cheever's works, and staying up all night reading in general.

Now, back to my grumping.
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I've only got 175 words down for today, but they were very satisfying. The Love Fixer is done! One more draft and polish and it's in the mail. But who knows? I 've got another two hours to go which is more than enough time for another 3000. Let's go!
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Wednesday was a banner day: 3,075 words. This was not on the novel, but the short story I'm working on The Love Fixer.
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A quote found at [ interludio.net * A Cortina ]

You know how boring people are when they're happy? If you ask someone who's come back from a trip where everything was delightful, whose planes and luggage arrived on time, who had good weather, how boring it is to talk to them about it. Oh! The Riviera? We stayed in this beautiful hotel and ate in fabulous restaurants! It was so good! We went shopping and I found the cutest little handbag, let me show you.... Boring.

Whereas trouble is interesting. When we first got to Mexico, our rental chopshop VW bug broke down somewhere in the Sonoran desert, and we had to walk 20 miles to the nearest town, toppling seguaro cactuses on the way and sucking them dry to fight off our encroaching dehydration. In the dusty one mule town we found only a cinderblock cantina where we were forced by gunslinging bandidos to participate in a chile-eating contest with a guy whose hat was so tight it moved up and down when he chewed, and which contest we naturally lost and which gave us three weeks of gastrointestinal disorders, and at night we were too broke to rent a hammock at the cantina's hamica hut and it was so hot -- like 120 degrees -- we begged a truck driver to let us sleep on the top of his truck full of frozen chickens, and when a couple days later we returned to the car with a mechanic in tow, we discovered it had been completely stripped and was surrounded by five fanged tarantulas and one small scorpion and the mechanic turned toward us and, sharpening his knife, started singing a dirge... -- what I'm trying to say here is: I've become boring. My life has been going so well, and I have been so happy, that I am dull, dull, dull.

*Yawn.* Go read some other weblog.
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Díme algo que no has dicho a nadie. (Tell me something you've never told anyone.) (It sounded more secret in Spanish.)
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• Today's favorite sentence: It was a way of eluding the devil and death. (Which of course has since been edited since I posted it. It now reads, in context: Nonetheless she admired the American way of always working, always trying, always striving. It was also the Chinese way, and the way of certain São Paulo Brazilians. The rituals of work were rituals of purification, means of making oneself cleaner for the final F2F with God, the New York Stock Exchange the sweat lodge of the soul. If you never stopped working you could not die, or wander off the true path into darkness. It was a way of evading death and the devil. ....and this passage will inevitably change again. )
• Yesterday's favorite sentence: She knew (she did not know how she knew) it was impossible to talk about these things.
• Sunday's favorite sentence: Cigarettes were not fast enough.
• Friday's favorite sentences: May had fantasies. There was one involving money. And there was one involving honey.

Rogerio said he needs to lie more often, which made me recall something that David said this weekend which is that when you lie you're describing a reality that doesn't correspond with your own perception of reality, and that when you tell the truth, you're ensuring that other people will see things your way.

Recently Stewart jokingly said, "Fiction? Who wants to read fiction? It's all lies anyway" and the other day I posted a Vargas-Llosa quote about fiction and falsity, and was thinking about how writer and reader are complicit in creating a separate not-strictly-factual reality, a kind of consensual delusion, and how that Famous Writer once said Don't let the Facts stand in the way of the Truth and I've been thinking also of that Pynchon quote from Mason & Dixon, posted elsewhere here, but always worth posting again:

Yesterday I wrote another 500+ words, but I edited them all out again, seeing immediately that they were crap. So I'm even down from Sunday, with a total of 1995 words. However, I'm not worried about keeping up with the Joneses because there are days when I'm able to toss 5000 words on the table.

All this editing before the end of the first draft may be indicative of some mild perfectionist tendencies, hm? But I think the most important thing I learned about writing was to let myself write tons of crap, and be able to throw it away sans regret or mercy. And I mean bucketsful of crap, sifting out the gems -- sometimes only one sentence in five pages. This seems to run counter to the Nanowrimo word count goal, but if I could produce 50,000 good words this month I would be so happy!
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Sunday: 540 words (2005 total, after edits) I thought I was doing OK, but then had a look at the competition. David is already over 10,000 words. 50,000 words in one month? I have to do a lot less editing, as Heather suggests.
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813 words. (1530 total).
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Juliet (who got to see Anne Carson yesterday!) has an interesting thing about twins on her weblog today:

368 words. 717 words.
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I am so annoyed.

Yesterday (when we were leaving in our Venetian masks and formalwear to see the symphony playing with (the silent version of) Nosferatu) Stewart noticed that someone had stolen our license plates, and replaced them with another set. Today the police came and confiscated the plates, which were from a stolen car, and said we had to get new plates. Fine, fine. I could do it tomorrow. So just now, as I was leaving to go see Anne Carson at UBC, which I was so excited about, I remembered that I couldn't drive anywhere without plates. And thus

I am so annoyed.
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Rumsfeld Says the U.S. Is Ready to Send in More Ground Troops in The New York Times. When this whole conflict began, I had thought that there would be more action on the ground, spies and snipers and assassins and infantry, and that the Taliban Mullahs, Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda operatives would be hunted down individually and brought out into the light. Not all the bombing. I am also hoping that the civilian casualties are fewer than the Taliban have been reporting.
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Yes, I'm writing a novel this November too. What do you have planned? Today's the starting date. David Chess is writing one too, and he's even posted his draft online. How bold! And he's written over 2000 words just this morning. He's on fire!

I should confess that the novel I'm writing is the novel I've been writing anyway. Ahem. And I didn't actually register. But it's OK to write a novel in November anyhow, yes?
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