Books I've read since getting here:

The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
Le Sabotage Amoreux - Amelie Nothomb
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues - Tom Robbins
Fictions - Jorge Borges
portions of Huit Novelles and Caprices des Femmes (collections of French short stories)
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
About a Boy - Nick Hornby
31 Songs - Nick Hornby
Sanctuary - Nora Roberts
Love - Toni Morrison
In the Beginning was the Command Line - Neal Stephenson
Checkpoint - Nicholson Baker
Diary - Chuck Pahlaniuk

It was cool when Kafka wrote Metamorphosis, but now it's old hat. Being in French just makes it more confusing. Le Sabotage Amoreux is delightful, but suffers from a case of being written in French. I re-read the French version of the Robbins, and discovered that the only people who would like the book are Americans who can read French. Borges is one of the greatest writers I've read, in any language. his work is the most consistenly creative stuff I've ever seen. The two collections were uninteresting, hence me only reading portions thereof. A Confederacy of Dunces is one of the best books ever. Nick Hornby writes books like the songs he likes. Watch High Fidelity or About a Boy, and read the books like you were listening to the soundtracks of those movies. Nora Roberts writes books for lonely women, and quite bored twentysomething men are a small minority of her readers. Anything Neal Stephenson touches is gold, but you have to have a secret desire to be a ninja or an engineer, or, even better, both at once!. The Nicholson Baker book is written in a modern style that's good if you read it fast, like every snippet of conversation is extremely witty and quick. Chuck Pahlaniuk writes books that, in your mind, look like Fight Club was filmed. That's because he wrote Fight Club.
Press Return.

You can probably get away with a lot of completely unromantic things if you subscribe to one idea: the idea of true exclusive love. The idea that, off all the 6 billion people in the world, there is one, just one, who's the perfect match for you. Who if you met them, you'd drop anything and everything and spend the rest of your life together and everything would be wonderful and no problems and no arguments (unless that's what you're looking for, in which case plenty of them). Basically, this one person is the solution to every problem you've got, and you're the solution to theirs, and once you get together, like Voltron, you're an unstoppable force.
You've seen them, or at least heard about them. Couples who, at 80, still love each other like they did seven million years ago when they got married, who are still frisky and make out in public and do all of those things that people in love do. And you're convinced that they've found it, the singularity: the true exclusive love.
Well, what if it doesn't exist? I don't mean that in a bad way. What if, out of a random group of 1000 people of the appropriate sex(es), there's probably a person or two with whom you wouldn't mind spending the rest of your life? Somebody with whom you've got enough in common to make a relationship work? Doesn't it seem more likely that this is the case? And wouldn't that be amazing: look at how much better that math works in your favor: one amazing incredible outstanding generally fantastic person, or thousands of people with maybe a couple fewer adjectives in front of their noun. Or maybe not. Hmm...
But, once you've got one, you can't treat that person like they're an interchangeable part, as it were. Nope, you can't do that at all. Everybody wants to think that once you've found love, you've found the one love to end it all, and everybody wants to be treated like that one love. Because we're afraid of the limbo time between people. We're afraid of being alone, being rejected, not having somebody with whom to go to the movies or go on walks with or make out with without having to ask politely or make some slick combination of socially pre-defined moves. We're afraid of what the possibility that there are thousands if not millions of people out there that you could marry and be happy with (if you wanted to) means. We don't like to be a dot in the universe. It's one of the things that makes humans great and one of the most frustrating things in the world to deal with.
I miss eating burritos. There's not a Mexican in sight in this country. South of the border they do speak Spanish (except they call it Castellano), but their idea of a tortilla involves eggs and potatoes down there. It's sad, but we make do. On fait avec...

I have this issue with trying to make another album. In fact, it's always been my problem making music. I'll write a song, and it'll be a song that I like, but it will be totally the wrong genre for the album I'm trying to make. It'll sound more like Johnny Cash than Iron and Wine, more like Frank Zappa than The Postal Service and, well, that's just not what I'm going for sometimes. I'm trying to make music that sounds like it was written in this century. Which is hard. So I'm here accumulating a back catalogue of unrecorded songs at record speed, but the album is moving along slowly. And I'm stuck with the quandary: do I try to bend the songs into the right genre? Do I try to make them something they're not, with some trick of production, some doubled voice or synthesizer noise, some change of tempo or instrumentation? Or do I try to make several albums simultaneously, each of which having its own theme and feel? Or do I forget about it all and pursue a career fixing people's computers and making lots of money and buying lots of shit?
Part of the problem is that I've only got one path for recording. My voice, my acoustic guitar, this one microphone, this laptop. That's it. The question is how much can I do with this setup? Sometimes I feel like everything sounds the same, and other times I'm boggled by the vast array of sounds I can make even given this limited equipment. But it's another question: I could wait until I get back to the States and I've got an amplifier and more microphones and more money and start recording then, but I'd lose some temporal freshness, and my willingness and time available to do the project might be diminished. And do I really need more sounds than I've currently got? I promised myself this album would be better than the last, but does that mean I need to have fancier equipment? Or just spend more time? Or what? Not sure...
And will anybody even listen to it?
By the way, if you want to hear how it's all coming, you can go to seasac.gotdns.com and navigate over to Latif Learned. The current work is all under the section called Demos, but that's for lack of a better title, and also because I've not decided if these recordings are final or works in progress. More are being put up soon.

It's easy enough to fall out of the habit of writing regularly in this blog, or Mass Email That Never Was, or whatever you (or I) want to call it. I had this problem before when I tried to write in a personal journal. I would only write when something went wrong, so reading through it years later makes my life sound morose and mismanaged and other m words.
But then, I've got a daunting amount of information that I could theoretically write here. The problem, as they say, isn't whether or not I can write, but what to write. And I just spent a week in Asia. So, where to start? What to say?
I spent a week in Asia. As the regulars of the other blog will note, I went there to rescue my brother from a hospital. What happened was, he was vacationing in Phukhet, Thailand, which those among you who watch something other than Fox news will note is one of those spots outside of America. Specifically, it's located on the west coast of Thailand, near the gigantic earthquake (something like 8.9 on Mr. Richter's scale) that struck on December 27th. My brother was there, and he narrowly survived that, and managed to get to Bangkok, not only with his life, but with his luggage and passport and money. Miraculous.
Then, in Bangkok, he went into some sort of shock state, and it happened in public, and there was a run-in with the police, who didn't know how to handle it (language barrier, we can assume), so they threw him into a hospital. So I went, and being family, was able to sign him out. Then I went with him to Japan, and then I went back to Bangkok (having two round-trip tickets that centered on that city - one from Paris to Bangkok and back, and one from Bangkok to Fukuoka, Japan, where Gabe works and lives, and back), and then I went back to Paris. Where I discovered that the trains were on strike, and was forced to buy a plane ticket home.
So, that was nine days of my life. What should I say about it? I don't know if I have anything at all to say about it. Or, if I do, it's too jumbled up and current to make any sense right now. Some days, at the end of them you can say, "Today I did X Y and Z." Others take more days to absorb, and you have to let the things that happened in them leak out over the course of even more days. Some days are full of stimulus. Some people live entire lives of those kind of days. Near the end of their lives, they're still leaking wisdom from things that happened to them when they were younger, and they're mistaken for being exceptionally sage and wise. When, reallly, all they did was live their lives the way you're supposed to.
So, as I believe I've said before, I may have to leave this post at that, and let the story leak out anecdotally in future posts. Which is okay. It's good to be guaranteed something to talk about. It beats not writing anything at all. Or always writing sad things, and leading an m-based life.
It's good to be back.

Go to http://donaldandanna.blogspot.com for an update; no time to write the same thing twice.
-Donald

So, sitting here all day, reading old emails in a sort of attempt to start 2005 with a clear idea of just what went on in 2004, I come to a couple of realizations. Which have nothing to do with old emails. Or maybe I just came up with one. I'll keep writing, and we'll see how many come out.
First, I realized at some point that I'm in the habit of not trying at all to understand people when they speak French to me. That's not to say that I don't understand them. I just don't listen very closely. I can't seem to convince myself that it's a good idea to closely listen to somebody speaking French, even if it's to me, and I care about what they are saying.
For example, earlier today, in the street, Anna and I walked by some altercation, wherein one man was yelling at another, loudly enough to hear, and then they exchanged blows, and then one guy pulled out a knife, and then the whole thing was over. I was curious enough to watch them, and wonder what they were arguing about, but I didn't try to comprehend their words, even though I most likely could have if I'd put forth some effort, and it undoubtedly would have shed some light on the situation.
Another example: when our landlord Mr. Palate talks to me (admittedly about complicated subjects like mold and construction) I never comprehend what he's saying, even if he's directly talking to me. I end up asking Anna later what happened.
Maybe that's it: always having somebody around who really can understand French has made me lazy. Or maybe I was already lazy. Or maybe I've just become generally non-commital to people in general. The France effect.
As far as what's happening these days, I'm practing guitar and writing and recording songs, and reading books, and generally trying to enjoy myself and edify my life all on my very own, with Anna as a kind of cohort. Or, according to Robin Rich, just a hort. That's it. The super-interesting things that happen happen either in my head, or in retrospect. I've adopted a certain jaded attitude to shield me from the harsh realities of life that are surely happening to somebody else. If they happen to me, I don't realize it until later. You should all write me letters in the meantime, pending actually talking to me.
I also realized that I have developed a penchant for not making any sense at all. Definitely the France effect.

Two thousand motherfucking five! Woo!
All right, people. I hope y'all's year starting as entertainingly as mine. I personally made sure that from midnight to three o'clock Europe time, everybody on Rue de Fauborg something-or-other had a happy motherfucking New Year. It was a a blast, let me tell you. I like to think that I made the world a better place that night.
I'm trying to put my photos from things up on the web, but I'm out of space (lame!) on the server I was using, so now I have to decide whether I want to delete old photos, or try to find new web space. If anybody's got some, and wants to host my photo site, do tell!
Anyway, I'm really very much not entertaining today, but I feel, as the maintainer of a blog, it's important to put up a holiday message. I'm going to go give myself a holiday head massage.
-D