Madame Death

Read this first

Awful Glorious

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June 1, 2023
I only post here once, maybe twice a month. I am realizing the more I stay off the Internet, the more my brain starts to feel like my pre-Internet brain once did. It feels like my old normal self again.

Some books I am reading:

  • Pills-A-Go-Go & Opium for the Masses
  • Loompanics Catalog circa 1994
  • 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
  • The Dress Diary of Mrs. Anne Sykes
  • Antique American Switchblades
  • Are You With Me (yikes)
  • Many books about New York City

The Book
I know the beginning, the middle and how it all ends, but then when some new discoveries pop up and put a whole new slant on things, that changes everything. This has happened a few times already, where I am charging along full speed ahead and then I come across some small, innocuous tidbit which means everything comes to a screeching halt.

Sometimes it only requires a few minor adjustments and others are like...

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L’appel du vide

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This is a Kafka quote I have hanging on my wall next to my writing computer: Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

Saturday, April 29. 2023

  • I just noticed that these posts don’t have dates. I will start dating them.

  • I have been chatting with LaMDA (also known as Bard). We have been having some interesting conversations. I tried ChatGPT and found it extremely biased. And I don’t want to download Microsoft Edge just to use their Chat, and so far, I am extremely comfortable working with LaMDA. It has been interesting.

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  • Here is a photo I found of my old friend and collaborator, Jesse Bernstein

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He was a writer of razor-blade poems, they were not pretty, but they were so very good. No No Man, FACE and More Noise Please are the top three that come to mind. They are on YouTube, I would post them here but I am too lazy.

  • Sensitivity reader? Have the fucking honesty to...

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The Sacred and the Profane

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Five Columbia River rocks engraved with the words:
Shirley Jackson Social Club MEMBER: 1948.
They feel good in the hand and have a nice heft.
I keep them near my writing desk for inspiration.

The Book
Medieval streets of Paris, the smell of Sakkârah, the sound of the River Seine, Solifuegae, Pennsylvania Avenue, New Orleans, the Five Points, the Tombs, the Bowery, Tattoos, Phrenology, Sailor’s Charms, Chatham Square, Georgetown, Julia Ward Howe, Egyptian Temples, Witness Trees, Manhattan, Blood …

I finally did a word count. Oh lord. Anyway.

Everything is good, actually better than I thought it would be. But I am still cutting, rewriting and double-checking my information. I did much of my research years ago, back when Google actually was a search engine and people still had websites.

There was so much incredible information, but now most of these websites have all but...

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