Recent Harper’s “Reading”:

SARTRE: Yeah, after I took mescaline, I started seeing crabs around me all the time. They followed me in the streets, into class. I got used to them. I would wake up in the morning and say, “Good morning, my little ones, how did you sleep?” I would talk to them all the time. I would say, “Okay, guys, we’re going into class now, so we have to be still and quiet,” and they would be there, around my desk, absolutely still, until the bell rang.

GERASSI: A lot of them?

SARTRE: Actually, no, just three or four.

Reminded me of this anecdote about Nabokov’s The Original of Laura, the existing fragments of which are being published this week:

In October 1976, asked to nominate three books he had recently been reading, Nabokov chose a new translation of Dante’s Inferno, an illustrated guide to North American butterflies and a book of his own, “the not-quite-finished manuscript of a novel”. He had recently been ill, and, in his delirium, kept reading the novel aloud to a small dream audience consisting of “peacocks, pigeons, my long dead parents, two cypresses, several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to be almost invisible”.

LOLZ.

Also, I love this aside near the end of the Sartre interview excerpt:

GERASSI: From the end of the war until de Gaulle’s coup d’état in 1958, you were haunted by neither crabs nor depression?

SARTRE: We keep calling them crabs because of my play The Condemned of Altona, but they were really lobsters.

P.P.S. From The Wall Street Journal, referring to The Original of Laura:

For decades, Dmitri Nabokov kept the manuscript locked in a Swiss bank vault, allowing only a select group of Nabokov scholars to read it, and occasionally suggesting in interviews that he would destroy the novel. In 2008, more than 30 years after his father’s death, he announced to a German magazine his decision to publish the work, saying that his father had appeared to him in a vision and told him to “go ahead and publish.”

Orange Juice – Rip It Up

Oh my, yes!

Update 2/25/09 2:25 p.m.:

WTF?!: Just heard this song playing in Barnes ‘n’ Noble, at which store one normally does not hear “Rip it Up” by Orange Juice. I believe that I called this bold new reality into being with my blog post.

]]> http://doomspirals.wordpress.com/2009/09/25/fave-trax-rip-it-up/feed/ 1 doomspirals ripituporangejuice http://doomspirals.wordpress.com/2009/08/30/machiavellihank-williams-sr/ http://doomspirals.wordpress.com/2009/08/30/machiavellihank-williams-sr/#comments Sun, 30 Aug 2009 20:17:41 +0000 doomspirals http://doomspirals.wordpress.com/?p=666 ]]>

Snippet from The Washington Independent:

On Aug. 20, thousands of people — 1,700 have already committed — are being encouraged to donate to the younger Paul’s campaign in a “moneybomb” modeled after the single-day events that raised $5 million and $6 million for his father during the 2008 campaign.

Ladies and gentlemen, Sasha Frere-Jones:

An unadorned style has served Cohen’s albums best, the voice clean and clearly audible. In 1977, for the album “Death of a Ladies’ Man,” Cohen’s uneasy collaboration with the producer Phil Spector—who excluded him from the final mixing sessions—resulted in a dreadful mix of pop, country, and some weird variant of disco. (Cohen later called it “grotesque.”)

I can only assume that “weird variant of disco” refers to this song. A turd for the argument.

Remember when everyone got mad at me for asking why meat-eaters could be so upset about the Michael Vick dog-fighting mess? Well, two professional writers have the same stupid debate in today’s newspaper; not very interesting, except for this value judgment:

At the same time, though, I’m a [sic] unapologetic species-ist: I reject Peter Singer and all his works, I think that the value of animal lives is contingent and the value of human lives absolute, and I would leave a thousand pigs to die in conditions of absolute misery to save a single human infant.

What a bold hypothetical! One thousand pigs? Are you sure? I would say that a single human infant is only worth 100 tortured pigs.