The above is a photo of me pawing through my piece on The Awl about the meat markets.
This piece started as a failed conversation my friends and I had about truffle oil.
We were drunk at a loud bar. Rather the bar was loud because we were drunk in it. Two of my friends were talking about ham-fisting or fisted hams. It was a pork dish of some kind. I was angry at my phone because twitter wouldn’t update. I was angry at myself for never having read The Magic Mountain.
One of my friends turned to me and said:
“What do you think about truffle oil?”
“What?” I said. I thought he said something like muffled foil. Not that perfectly off but close.
“Truffle oil. What do you think about?”
“I think there’s a silence walled up in the violent structure of the founding act.”
Which must be a typical thing for me to say. We started talking about The Girlfriend Experience, never to return to truffle oil or muffled foil.
We left the bar and didn’t get into the next two bars and ended up somewhere we shouldn’t have been.
The above is a photo of me drumming up my review of the Coetzee/Auster letters, which I was thrilled to have published on HTMLGIANT earlier today. This part:
“In the hands of these two high-spirited masters the word exercise sounds as antiquated as the word fax, as antiquated as the word ATM machine, the word digital sounds ancient, cellular sounds older than Babylon. Even Brooklyn suggests nothing has happened there since the Dodgers left town.”
Footnote: This is an Eric Packer riff, the Eric Packer who mistrusts the word ATM MACHINE in his book Cosmopolis.
I remember what position I was sitting in in 2003 (I got an advance copy somehow) when this passage just killed me.
I would never look at an ATM the same way again.
I lost that advance copy of Cosmopolis (probably worth something on ebay) and that’s unfortunate for many reasons, but for my purposes in this footnote it sucks because it was in that copy where I certainly made sure to underline the ATM passage, very tastefully, in that pacifistic Nicholson Baker not-underlining underlining style of 2001.
Now I don’t really know where Packer says it.
Somewhere earlier on, but I don’t know where.
Even though I only bought it like a month ago, I haven’t been able to locate my brand new Robert Pattinson cover Cosmopolis.
Which I didn’t crack open.
A part of me believes it’s not even here in the apartment.
A part of me believes I didn’t even buy it.
I’ve found my four copies of Sister Carrie (marked up in the explosive style of 2007) but not my one copy of Cosmopolis.
Related: the word bitcoin sounds like it lost meaning in 1372.
This is me giving birth to my Spring Breakers piece on The Awl. It’s the 46th most interesting SB piece in the world. Big ups to hellodeer for being so pantonerific.
