He’s the one here on the right, with the glint of triumph in his eyes.

Ok maybe that is arguable about the New Yorker but really they could have more coverage of the jewels. And to be fair, it’s been a year.

Why am I saying any of this? Well, this Saturday, Das Racist uses its powers for good and joins Fred Ho, Tao Lin, Richard Price, Lorraine Adams, Karan Mahajan and Koreanish favorite Nami Mun for the Pageturner Sexy Nerd party at Chambers Fine Arts in New York City, located at 522 West 19th St. Admission is $40, $60 for two and free if you wear your sexy nerd glasses.  Come out and support the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s Pageturner festival**, and have fun at the same time. I of course am, like Victor Hugo was once, with my party clothes locked away until I finish my residency here at Ledig House.***  But you go.  I insist.

I seriously do.

*Also, for publishers looking for a celebrity novel with some underground cred and some very real literary qualities, Victor is an astonishing talent.

**For bonus points, ask Ken Chen about the t-shirt ideas we came up with after Brooklyn Bookfest.

***Yes, Victor Hugo was never at Ledig House. But he did ask his wife to put chains on his party clothes, so he would not go out and instead write.

Sometimes he’s a little needy with me and I can’t work it out (I may have ditched on him at a party somewhere in what I like to call Crown Slope last fall—Victor, you lived! You got home!*) but he is brilliant, and I love his band. So much. Which is to say, I was wrong.**

Because of my nefarious act last fall, I am now exhorting you to go to that previous myspace link, listen to the band and if you like them, follow this link and vote for them at the Deli.

*Sometimes the best thing you can do for a bird is to push it out of the nest. Victor, I say this with a lot of love. Good luck!

**Victor is beginning at the New School’s MFA program in fiction this fall, where Sufjan Stevens also went. Who knows how it will all turn out. Victor could just as easily make singing comicbooks.

Looking through my blog stats tonight, I found a new referrer, a very sweet guy who lives in Toronto and works with Katimavik. In his posts, he does this thing I’m going to take up in this post, by way of welcoming him, using “-ings” to create posts about what he’s up to, over at Katima-what?, his blog.

I should mention, I’ve been missing Toronto desperately of late. The Beguiling, The Drake, Bloor St., Queen St. West, Little India. For my new friend, who’s in Montreal tonight, I hope he has a Boreale Blonde and thinks of me.

Writing

Spent today on the new novel.

I’d slept in after a night of drinking with some friends who are senior faculty here. Sometimes when I go to their houses, I think, Yes, martinis, I could have four, just like you, plus, wine. And then I wake up, remembering I am not like them. Hangovers are good for writing fiction, though, because you’re too weak to resist your best instincts. Though this may be part of why you have the hangover.

Recovering

I went to the gym and did an hour of cardio.

Reading

While I did that, I read Us Weekly and New York Magazine. People are talking about New York a lot in the last year. For a while, it was a bit grudging, but I think people are over that now. I really enjoyed the Heath Ledger article, but even more, the profile of Carine Roitfeld, the editor of Paris Vogue, who’s more or less what you’d want the editor of Paris Vogue to be: completely out there, fearless, skinny, pretty and with a vicious streak that makes it all kind of come together. There’s an amazing moment in the profile, where she mentions that she has a scale in her office.

“A scale. So people always say that I weigh my staff, and it is totally wrong. All my girls are very skinny and very chic and very beautiful. And if they are not beautiful, well, then they are very charming. So people always say that I weigh them, but no. I don’t weigh my girls.”

The profile writer didn’t bring it up, though. She did. So interesting.

Interesting

Not really a gerund. But! An -ing. I’m very interested in the work of Antonio Viego. My friend Jorge just described for me going to hear him speak at NYU, on his idea that identity politics has reduced us all to identity as a function. His book is called Dead Subjects. This is from the book’s description:

Antonio Viego argues that Lacanian theory has the potential to begin rectifying the deeply flawed way that ethnic and racialized subjects have been conceptualized in North America since the mid-twentieth century. Viego contends that the accounts of human subjectivity that dominate the humanities and social sciences and influence U.S. legal thought derive from American ego psychology. Examining ego psychology in the United States during its formative years following World War II, Viego shows how its distinctly American misinterpretation of Freudian theory was driven by a faith in the possibility of rendering the human subject whole, complete, and transparent. Viego traces how this theory of the subject gained traction in the United States, passing into most forms of North American psychology, law, civil rights discourse, ethnic studies, and the broader culture.

So, I’m going to get my Lacan on and read it.

Eating

In my hungover state, I went to McDonald’s and got a Big Mac. I was recently at a McDonald’s where they had no Big Macs, and feared it wouldn’t be there. As I ate it, it felt like I was consuming something endangered. Like in a year, next year’s freshman class won’t know what a Big Mac is.

Listening

Keane’s “A Bad Dream”. Under the Iron Sea is the album. It’s… amazing.

Closing

Hello, Toronto. I miss you very much.

The star of this week’s Google Image-search Custom Header is an anonymous Korean punk rocker found through bROKe In Korea, a message board for Korean punk rockers.

I’m researching Korean speed metal bands for my third novel. If anyone can help or wants to help, leave me a message here or email me at emperor (a) rebeliloveyou dot com.

“I’m definitely a fan of juxtaposition,” he explains. “Using the most beautiful line to say the most horrific thing — I think one of the main things in songwriting is definitely friction between the words and the melody. It’s got to be done very delicately because both elements are somewhat explosive, and all of a sudden the song becomes like a crystal meth lab. You know, you don’t want to blow up your family.”

Rufus Wainwright, explaining his new album (and its apocalyptic vision of America) to Dana Vachon on Salon.