Nate D > Recent Status Updates

That people kill themselves because of my books won't stop me from writing. If people turn into reactionaries, political assholes after reading me, yes, that would stop me from writing, but not if they killed themselves.

Following up on gems from the Just Another Asshole early-80s NYC no wave anthology, and title story here confirms Barbara Barg as totally essential.

Could I ask for a more timely book to be reading right now than this one of arbitrary but harshly enforced borders?

The suburban house is still controversial. You don't touch it; you cannot go there without raising some eyebrows. It remains anathema in architectural discourse and education.
--Beatriz Colomina

Delicious, delicious word salad.

bonus points for arbitrarily inserting the titles of all of Ishmael Reed's novels into a list of obscure sexual maneuvers.

"Buying and having things seemed like a way of knowing who one was. One was an aggregate of interests and desires. People received energy and solace from wanting things and getting them."

I actually worry that the exhaustiveness of this collection may work against it a bit, at least since I foolishly got it out from the library and have to work through Ocampo's entire lifetime of output in three weeks. I'd rather like to get to focus on just the stories in the The Fury as a set, for instance, then take a few weeks before proceeding to her follow-up in The Guests.

This might be just way too on the nose to not be a totally annoying reading experience, but lots of 5-star reviews say I'm wrong. Stay tuned.

I posit a theory: the privileged being which we call a human is distinguished from other animals only by certain double-edged manifestations which in charity we can only call 'inhuman'.
Oh why could I not have been the machine of whales or dolphins or elephants or intelligent bears!

Entirely a shot in the dark, but I'm looking for new job options for February, so if anyone has book or reading or even photography-related work in New York this winter or spring, let me know.

So I probably should have put this link up days ago, but I spent three days along the hard-hit south brooklyn / queens coast in the wake of the storm and will continue to put pictures onto tumblr and flickr.

I ask little of you besides an endless supply of book recommendations, which you always deliver, but if you'd like to help see that a maze gets built: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1...

All stories are true.

All of this is amazing, but "The Branch Line" is where revelatory perfection really sets in, at least in terms of inescapable intrigue and beauty and strangeness.

Actually, I'm not sure how much more of this I can take. Occasionally fantastic, but altogether too goofy and gag-based to really get into.

This really starts to get its hooks in once the novella-length stories start. Shostakovich is totally compelling.

The nose job scene would have been more convincing if I hadn't just read a far more excruciatingly detailed one in V

I can see how this set the standard.

and unsurprised to find that Pynchon writes a great horrifying, funny, informative Rhinoplasty scene

It should come as no surprise that Pynchon writes a better horrifying, funny, informative plastic surgery scene than Palaniuk.