There were many moments in the Vine like that one--where you might think today was yesterdaym, and yesterday was tomorrow, and so on. Because we all believed we were tragic, and we drank. We had that helpless, destined feeling. We would die with handcuffs on. We would be put a stop to, and it wouldn't be our fault. So we imagined. And yet we were always being found innocent for ridiculous reasons. [from Out on Bail, Jesus' Son, by Denis Johnson.]

10:59 p.m. - I got my renewed American Youth Hostels card today! On to Chicago. And why? I'm a librarian and ALA will be there in mid-July. Check out Librarian.net for latest news on the world of librarians.

10:08 p.m. - From Pillow Book: hito ga nakunatta (a man has died) domingo, 11 junio. what happens to you when someone in your path dies? growing up I remember family members passing away - my uncle when I was 4, my grandfather when I was 7, a friends father when I was 10, my babysitter when I was 14. my dad's father when I was 18, my dad's mother when I was 22. at my first post grad-school job, a woman I worked with lost her husband to suicide. people thought at first that he had been killed by a stranger, or perhaps even an enemy (he was formerly a deputy in that small town and put many people in jail once or twice who may or may not have deserved it). we didn't know about the suicide until after the funeral. seems that he was tired, wrote his boss, the sheriff, a note explaining just how tired he was, and then he drove under an overpass along the only major east-west highway and shot himself. how do you react to death? I held my grandmother's hand when she died. I was the only one in the room. I wept and then I went into shock and now I mourn.

12:15 a.m. - Theodore Kaczynski's papers are going to the Labadie Collection after two years of negotiating:

[from CNN]
"It took curator Julie Herrada two years of negotiations with both Kaczynski and his lawyers to convince them to donate the letters to the university's collection of anarchist and social protest literature... Kaczynski's letters in the collection gave the curator a distinct impression of the man... "He's thoughtful, meticulous and has a sense of humor," Herrada said."

[from Michigan Alive]
"A major decision involved whether to allow the public to see who wrote the letters. Although the library's mission is to make information accessible to the public, she was concerned because many of the letters are extremely personal. Herrada consulted her colleagues and ultimately decided to block out the names on the photocopies that are being provided to the public, although the original documents will be available to the public in 2049."

12:35 a.m. - I made chocolate nochip cookies tonight. Actually, one big chewy one and then I put the rest of the dough back in the fridge. Here's the recipe:

CHOCOLATE NOCHIP COOKIES
CREAM:
2 sticks of whatever congealed fat you want (butter, butter, butter)
3/4 C brown sugar
3/4 C white sugar (that you pour in your coffee)
2 eggs (Pete and Gerry's Organic Eggs from New Hampshire)
2 t vanilla
STIR IN:
1 t baking soda
1/2 t salt
2 T unsweetened cocoa (I go buy Ghirardelli - even in Lubbock it was stocked)
2 1/4 cup flour
MIX WELL! and let it cool down in your fridge for a while.

If you want one big chewy cookie, take as much dough as you figure you can handle and press it into some nice, appealing shape (about 3/4 inch thick). Bake at 375 for 11-20 minutes depending upon how think you made it. and enjoy! kinda brownie like the thicker you go with it.

01:35 a.m. - I read my first and last Homes novel this weekend and hated just about every word. When I called my friend S, I told that him that I thought that Music for Torching was the worst book I'd read in years. I don't know why I finished it. We laughed at the hipness Homes thinks she embodies and the mimicry of Bret Easton Ellis at his very worst. I can't believe that I bothered to finish it. But at least I've read it and now know that it's my first and last of her shit.

[salon review - I should have read this first] "Homes peppers "Music for Torching" with "surprising" and "unlikely" plot developments designed to be intriguing; instead, they feel cheap and manipulative, like snippets of Joyce Carol Oates at her worst. A good camera angle or a smart soundtrack could add depth and emotion where Homes has left them out, as when Paul follows a mistress into the seedy part of town and gets his pubic area tattooed, or when Elaine has an affair with a Martha Stewart-ish neighbor. The trouble isn't in the description of these events. Here Homes reveals her true abilities, as when she describes Elaine's first lesbian kiss. "The kiss, unbearably fragile, a spike of sensation, shoulders the frame. Everything Elaine thinks about who she is, what she is, is irrelevant. There are no words, only sensation, smooth sensation. Tender, like the lick of a kitten." But Homes is hiding behind her excellent prose. She's created a series of beautiful, complexly simple descriptions instead of a compelling novel with round, developed characters."

[even better - about The End of Alice] "Too bad we can't put A. M. Homes in prison for writing a book this gratuitous. Or for her mistaken assumption that, by alliterating the prisoner's feverish reveries, she injects an element of poetry into the prisoner's plight. Lines like "piss-stained pages ... the crustation of evaporated excrete -- a conservator's conundrum, not the kind of compilation collectors would kvell over" should land anyone in jail."

01:15 a.m. - in 06.07-12.2000, I mention 'the Knights in Satan's Service'. Through the day (today is Sunday after all) I reminisced about my old Sunday School attending years and just how many lectures I listened to about rock music. I recall one particular sermon on the sexual innuendos not so delicately implied in Robert Palmer's 'Simply Irresistible' video. My youth 'leader' actually told a crowd of nearly 100 early teens how that video made him susceptible to being turned on. Check out 'The Devil's Disciples' from the Index On Censorship.

An excellent article on this whole fundamentalist view, "Christ, Communists, & Rock n Roll," is found at WFMU's LCD site. Also from LCD: "The Five Worst Acoustic Acts My Eyes Have Ever Had the Displeasure of Witnessing"

12:50 a.m. - long live the feminists who made up the world we live with today...Mademoiselle Miller does it again [from salon].

"In a cascading series of ironies, Steinem's classically feminine personal style led her to adopt some of the movement's most radical ideas. Single and childless, she was the quintessential independent "career woman," but with the enviable style and boyfriend options of Jacqueline Onassis. Her "smashing looks" both thrilled and deeply confused the media. Hennessee and others relate a telling anecdote: "In 1972, Kingman Brewster, then president of Yale, told an audience of graduate women that he could accept the part of the movement represented by Gloria -- the part that included men," but not the supposedly man-hating philosophy of Friedan. He had, of course, completely transposed the two women's positions."