Not Found

  laugh all you want, i know i'm right

tapered jeans are coming back.

fashion swings with the times. backlash is huge, timing is everything.

we had bellbottoms in the 70s, then tapered, even leggings, in the 80s. then came the rise of grunge, kate moss and doc martens.

no one could get their tapered jeans over the boots, so they started slitting the sides of their pants. this turned into bootcut jeans, which stuck.

but you'll notice: grunge got lazy and turned into emo -- and when was the last time you saw someone in docs? and aren't we tired of displaying our underthings every time we sit down? haven't you had enough of low-slung?

and another thing: my father always said, and it's true, that there isn't much you can do to improve gods art. how is the body formed? are our waists below our belly buttons? do our ankles flare OUT? no and no.

don't be afraid. get em now. you'll be ahead of your time.  ¶ 9:21 PM

  we certainly are

"east of eden."

I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. Some you can see, misshapen and horrible, with huge heads or tiny bodies; some are born with no arms, no legs, some are born with three arms, some with tails or mouths in odd places. They are accidents and no one's fault as used to be thought. Once they were considered the visible punishment for concealed sins.

And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born?

As though nature had concealed a trap, Cathy had from the first a face of innocence . . . .

-- steinbeck

in other news, the girl who got me through aristotle finals has nailed down a couple things for us, including the fine distinction between friends-who-have-sex and love.  ¶ 5:10 PM

  cheating on the great books with the beatniks

me: hey, rich, who is DH lawrence? do we like DH lawrence?

rich: um, he's kinda sexual.

me: like freud? or obscene?

rich: obscene, really obscene. there's a poem by one of the lesser beats called "fuck poem" and one line of it is "DH Lawrence DH Lawrence DH Lawrence."

me: oh.

i cheated on my reading list to pick up anais nin's a spy in the house of love: a focused little volume, easily read in a day, which follows a married woman through the village, long island and the upper east side as she slips from lover to lover only to discover in the end that despite her sincerity and compassion, she has no idea how to love.

i recommend it in the offhand way i would recommend everything beat.  ¶ 11:49 AM

  use extreme caution

you know a book is really good when strangers stop you on the street when they see you have it and your roommate steals it from under your nose as you sleep.

I Am Charlotte Simmons is just such a book. in a way, it is a very easy book. wolfe is a master, and his elegant arc of a story reads so smoothly it's almost as if the story is reading itself to you. he makes 676 pages feel like 67.

in another way, it is extremely difficult to read. it almost feels like watching a snuff film. the books slaps the reader across the face with an ugly, hyper-realistic strangling of a young girl's soul. the reality that wolfe shows us through this book is one we are not likely to forget -- or escape.

the whole book is summed up in the first page and a half. wolfe describes an experiment performed on cats in the 80s: a group of brain damaged cats are housed with a group of normal cats; the lobotomized cats are compulsively sexually active; because of the environment, the healthy cats eventually begin engaging in deranged, compulsive sexual activity as well.

from here, wolfe plunges us directly into the environment of the ficticious dupont university, where we meet vance and hoyt, two frat boys completely intoxicated with themselves and trashed to the point of "exquisite toxic poise." wolfe details very well the dizzying illusions they have about wealthy college life: "you know what [our fraternity] is? it's a mastercard for doing whatever you want!"

from gorgeous, forboding scenes of dupont we jump to a tiny mountain village and meet our heroine: charlotte simmons, a girl who is smart as a whip and good as gold. though a little embarrassed by her father's mermaid tattoo, she is her mother's "good, good girl" and intends to remain so. she is excited about her scholarship to dupont; and even more thrilled to leave the mindless redneck party boys and girls of her tiny highschool behind her.

what happens after her arrival at dupont is not as predictable as one might imagine. it is not the story of a sweet little girl lead astray -- not exactly. charlotte is not sweet, and she isn't exactly led. she is the "conscious little rock" that one of her professors describes to her in class: a rock that, once thrown, suddenly develops a mind of its own and on its way down, gives you a perfectly rational argument that it has free will. throughout the book, charlotte is reminded by her loved ones (family, a teacher from home, and a adam, a dorky reporter for the school paper that might as well be a shakespearian jester) that she is Charlotte Simmons, that she has free will. but there are other influences in charlottes life: her anorexic, slutty roommate beverly; dim-witted but well-meaning basketball star jojo johanson; bettina and mimi, fair weather friends who, like charlotte, will do whatever it takes to be popular; and hoyt thorp, the angelically handsome demi-god of st. ray's fraternity. these characters tear away bits of charlotte until she too is wearing low-slung diesel jeans, skipping class and dancing loins-to-loins dupont's "elite." with the last chapter entitled "the ghost in the machine," the reader is left with no doubt that Charlotte Simmons is no more.

although the story of corrupted youth has been told before (generation of swine, the picture of dorian grey, the beautiful and damned) it seems that wolfe is the first to show how bad it has gotten today: unbelievably obscene rap, easy-access pornography, sexual deviance, and what wolfe calls the "fuck patois" are all relatively new and socially accepted faces of rottenness. be warned that wolfe does not shy away from any aspect of the shallow, destructive and wholly disgusting activities of this new generation (us!)

so! anyone wanna party??  ¶ 7:09 PM

  help

the boys are trying to convince me that nina simone's version of I Loves You Porgy is better (unqualified) than billie holiday's.

i'm trying to stick to my guns, but . . . .  ¶ 8:20 PM