the gambler, not The Gambler

I want to go back to Vegas, and soon. I haven't been there in years. There's something about the city I find so alluring. I enjoy gambling, but if that were all I'd spend more time in the Indian casinos around here. No, it's the spectacle, I think. I've always said that if America were to ever go green, Vegas should be allowed to remain as-is, as a relic and a bastion of 20th-century extravagance. There's something very relaxing, too, after working in libraries and bookstores, about the idea of a place that's supposed to be loud as fucking hell. Yet it still has its own internal logic, its own rules, its own patterns and regulations and traditions, all quietly humming along right underneath the saturnalia.

I'm disappointed that The Brothers Karamazov took so much inspiration from other works. The Father Zosima, especially, seemed to have been lifted as a type directly from the work of an earlier poet.

playing at the blues

In the home stretch of A Writer in His Time. Frank has employed thousands of words for the sake of analyzing A Raw Youth and I cannot even begin to describe all the shits I am hoarding.* Get to Karamazov already.

Listened to The Black Keys for the first time in a while, Catch and Release. It's pleasing enough, but there's just something so precious about affluent white men playing (at) the blues. (Aware of the irony? Yes.)

*This isn't strictly true. It is interesting to read about how Dostoevsky managed to create such a deeply flawed work in between the masterpieces of Demons and The Brothers Karamazov.

hyperdimensional sadcube

It is extraordinarily difficult to motivate other people when you can't even convince yourself that getting out of the house today is a good idea.

A matrix consisting of anger, low self-esteem, depression and anxiety, filled out on a day-to-day basis, would best describe me: a kind of hyperdimensional sadcube.

A/LSE/D/A for 4/25/10: 6/7/7/2

I saw some local Norman bands over the weekend at their music festival. I was interested to hear more of a few of them, but can only remember the name of Shitty/Awesome, whom I suspect are at their best live. The keyboardist grabbed the mic on the last song, then dove headfirst into a trash can full of empties (I can't remember this was before or after he'd mounted and humped the keyboard mid-solo). After he'd cleared the area, a dozen people scrambled forward to refill the fallen container. A crowd conscientious enough to tidy up even in the midst of a climaxing set: the hardcorest thing?

Man Without Plan still rules.

Several hundred pages into Frank's Dostoevsky biography, I'm ready to start a new book. But if I quit this one midstream, I'll never finish it.

dostoevsky + mcewan + dirty projectors + man without plan

I'm halfway through Joseph Frank's biography of Dostoevsky, A Writer's Life. It's excellent, although Frank sometimes repeats his assertions, even ones which don't necessarily require firm assertion, within the space of a few pages.

Ian McEwan's Solar was a pleasurable read. It's always interesting to read an author work against an ideology in which they believe, and the way McEwan has gone about it -- putting the means to save humanity from climate change in the hands of a gluttonous, vainglorious lecher -- is painfully believable.

Norman Music Festival is this weekend. I'm attending, and look forward to seeing some new bands, in addition to the Dirty Projectors.

Man Without Plan, a band I discovered on Band Camp, owns pretty hard.