You Are Not A Stranger Here

So my friend Cornelius Blackpool suggested a collection of short stories to me. "It's called 'You Are Not A Stranger Here' by Adam Haslett," he said. "It's fucking awesome."

Blackpool has always seemed a damn smart guy, having majored in Literature and went on to work in the Hedge Fund world.

Anyhow, Elle bought me the book from the Strand last week. I finished the book i three days of subway rides. Besides the ones where Elle and I meet on the back of the train on our ways home from work, they were the best subway rides of my life.

Haslett graduated from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and from Yale Law School. It's the only thing he has ever published, and it was a finalist for the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. And for good reason, too. His stories are definitely MFA fiction, but the best kind. Critics have called the stories Checkhovian. I guess that's fair.

Here is the first story from the collection:

"Notes For My Biographer"

Two things to get straight from the beginning: I hate doctors and have never joined a support group in my life. At seventy-three, I'm not about to change. The mental-health establishment can go screw itself on a barren hilltop in the rain before I touch their snake oil or listen to the visionless chatter of men half my age. I have shot Germans in the fields of Normandy, filed twenty-six patents, married three women, survived them all, and am currently the subject of an investigation by the IRS, which has about as much chance of collecting from me as Shylock did of getting his pound of flesh. Bureaucracies have trouble thinking clearly. I, on the other hand, am perfectly lucid.

You can read the rest here:

www.all-story.com/issues.cgi?action=show_story&story_id=46

I never posted a picture of my head:

5 staples and 4 interior stitches. I've been getting headaches lately, but was told it's fine on Thursday at the ER. I have Post-Concussion Disorder. They said the headaches would go away eventually.

So, we've been surfing a lot lately. Jon, Dale, Lucas, Pete and I have been on a bender. Elle has been coming and bodysurfing with us, too. Summer is amazing when you are young, in love, and have good friends around you.

These are Lucas' pictures of the Schwinn Paramount I purchased off him. I will take pictures of the frame built with my stuff soon:






I bought it of Lucas for a great deal and then built it up with Ezra. He helped me lace up some Phil Wood HF track hubs to Open Pro's and got me some Sugino 75's and a Nitto 65 post. I have nt gotten a chance to load the pictures I took of it yet. It hauls ass, and will probably be a contributor to my ultimate demise.

I got a new bike, a new log, a new spot for the summer, and nothing to show for it on this blog. I'm working on it. Stay chuuunneed.

Mark Greif is one of the smartest men I have ever met. He has been my teacher and life-coach at the New School for the last year. In that short time he has introduced new ideas, confirmed old ones, and dismantled and obliterated others. He is the editor or a personal favorite magazine of mine, n+1, and a writer who consistently weaves philosophy, literary criticism, pop-references, and sociology throughout his work, and in his daily lectures/discussions. He recently published an essay titled "What You"ve Done To My World" in an anthology titled Heavy Rotation. the Anthology consists of writers articulating something about a particular album that changed their life. Mark chose Fugazi.

Last fall we came to class to find that Mark had cued up the projector and had several YouTube videos of Fugazi, Bikini Kill, etc. ready for us to watch. We sat and intellectualized Punk for the rest of class, mark becoming flush when he found himself "falling into the 'nostalgia trap'" when discussing his younger years.

"What You've Done To My World"
By Mark Greif
Minor Threat didn't last long as a band. It was, though, as the music writers say, "influential." Meanwhile, its young singer, Ian MacKaye, moved through several short-lived bands until he formed another stable group, which added a second, lesser known but highly emotional young singer, Guy Picciotto, from the even shorter-lived (but "influential") band Rites of Spring. This was, as it turned out, a piling together of two geniuses on the Lennon/McCartney model—with a new rhythm section of comparable genius. They called their band Fugazi.

It chagrins me to be writing about Fugazi, since no one is less qualified than I am to do it. I wasn't there in D.C. when they started, I didn't see them on their first tour or their second, and I always had the profound and pleasurable sense that their music at least partly excluded me, because it was so tightly bound up with the post-hardcore and straight-edge world, a subculture I had nothing to do with. They were not commercial, they didn't offer themselves to the world through radio or TV, they didn't connect to anything else I knew or that felt natural to me. In fact, in addition to being a band, Fugazi was a kind of phenomenon known to many people who didn't care for them musically: an anticommercial, ultramoral, somewhat puritanical outfit that toured constantly, often playing in such unconventional places as church basements and college rec halls; that insisted on an all-ages admissions to shows so that fans under eighteen or twenty-one could attend; that held down ticket charges as low as five dollars, rather than raking in the money.

read the rest here:

http://nplusonemag.com/what-youve-done-my-world