DO ANDROIDS HANG VIRTUAL STOCKINGS?
or, A Rick Deckard Christmas Special


I’m making my way through the Blade Runner briefcase set — a gift, literally and in every other way. As you may know, it has five discs which include every version we ever knew existed of the movie, and others most of us didn’t know existed. Plus a four-hour documentary, plus alternate and deleted scenes, plus extras, plus a plastic “Spinner” toy (that’s the exhaust-belching craft piloted by Gaff in the picture), plus a pretty little silver unicorn.

Blade Runner was always a great movie, even when it was non-definitive. But the newly-tweaked, finally-polished, now-and-forever, yes-I-really-mean-it-this-time definitive Ridley Scott cut is great without reservation or apology. Unless someone digs up archival footage of the soon-to-be-deceased Philip K. Dick performing a cameo as the God of Biomechanics, no one will assemble a better Blade Runner. Or, conceivably, a better science-fiction movie: it has the displacement, the sumptuous alienation of another world not so far removed from this, and also the open ends, the ambiguities, the unanswerable questions that move some of us to speechlessness and drive others to hair-pulling irritation, but in any case are bound to rise without contrivance from any great human story taken at its own organic pace, be that the Bible, or Hamlet, or Moby-Dick.

Last night I watched the 1982 U.S. theatrical cut (with Deckard’s painful faux-noir narration and appended happy ending) while wearing headphones. The use of phones to drink in a well-done movie mix remains an underutilized pastime, despite its readiness in the techno age. I was freshly amazed at the density of the film’s layers, the variety of tones, voices, and eerie chatter crowding its tracks. Noted these new wrinkles or previously undetected anomalies, listed in ascending order of interestingness (or descending, if you’re my opposite):

1) In the early scene of Deckard’s first meeting with Rachel, a wall-size visor lowers to filter out the glare of (artificial) sun, and — in a mere confluent uncanniness, not an articulated quotation — a swell of soundtrack music imitates the sighing synthe-vocal prelude to the Bee Gees’ “How Deep is Your Love.” The story is basically, boy loves replicant girl: how deep, indeed? (Thank you, Vangelis.)

2) The woman who delivers, at a few points, an a cappella rendering of extended musical moans in Asiatic tongue sounds quite like Björk.

3) Following his “retirement” of Zorah, Deckard, stunned and emptied by the act, escapes rain and pain at a wayside saloon, a dark hole in the sidewalk wall attended by a testy barmistress with an eyepatch. He drinks. From somewhere within the dark hole of drink originates the most incongruent, and what seems the loveliest imaginable sound — a crooner fronting a small group, singing love lyrics that in this rotten world of life-sucking neon sound as strange as a dead language of antiquity: For our love is such pain / And such pleasure / And I’ll treasure it till I die… Gaff appears, snapping his silver-handled cane, but the song continues to whisper from the hole in the wall, an epiphany deferred, a dream-voice lost: like tears in rain.

The song is “One More Kiss, Dear,” written by Vangelis and Don Percival, sung by Percival. Apparently it was created in imitation of the song that was used in earlier workprint versions of this scene — “If I Didn’t Care,” by the Ink Spots:

If this isn't love then why do I thrill?
And what makes my head go round and round
While my heart stands still?

If I didn't care, would it be the same?

4) Roy Batty crosses the room and the screen to join Pris and J.F. Sebastian, stretching his back as eggs boil and (artificial?) sunlight pours through the curtain. Sebastian is a genetic designer, a 25-year-old prematurely aged, who fills his loneliness by building friendly toys. So the apartment is full of dwarf-bots and cackling gadgets, life-machines great and small; sound of springs, cuckoos, ratchets and bells. And in the quiet morning hum of mechanical movement, there is — I could swear — the voice of a young woman, or a child, whispering a polyglot nonsense, a jumble of languages like Gaff’s Cityspeak, from which my ears could salvage only two hurried, frightened words of English: “Not yet — not yet.”

Did I hear it? It does, of course, speak to the theme of Blade Runner, or at least what is chief among its many themes: time. Time enough, are Batty’s first words; Time to die, his last. Human, and evidently replicant, consciousness opens and closes on those perceptions: as soon as we’re aware of time, we’re aware of time running out.

But still and yet — was there a voice, and did the voice say those words, or did I only fill them in? We are known, when looking at blurred or deformed images, to arrange shadows and light to make faces; do we also arrange sounds to shape words, words that will fit meaning? Of course we do, and I could put paid to the whole question by going back this second and checking. But what if I went back and didn’t hear the words — would that mean they weren’t there the first time? And if it turned out they weren’t there, would that mean they weren’t true? If I didn't care, would it be the same?

On these happy notes and gleeful conundra — Happy New Year. Resolve to listen harder for voices and songs. And join me in a special chorus of “Be My Baby” for Sandra, Ed, and their new crib-lurker, Duncan.

ALREADY HISTORIC

I'm sure I wasn't the only one to Google "Duncan Park"...



Anyone have a silk-screening kit?

Attn: Dizzyheads

The Wizards of Whimsy (S. and E.) welcome to middle earth their newborn dark warrior Duncan (the Warlock of Whimsy? Sorcerer?)!

Here they come now — Nothing believes Korea? — more

I.
Nico singing "Chelsea Girls" at the Chelsea Hotel:



(Via Dizzyhead Sarah)

II. Clover on Rod Smith (in The Nation):

The poetry does not come out to greet you. I am not quite sure what to make, for example, of the poem opening "Nothing believes Korea." I like the sound of that and feel like I might be about to understand something. By the next line, "Nothing turns into it, & leaves your salt there," I am feeling a little lost, and not in a Paddington Station kind of way.

III. Cairns:

British comedy series are an odd lot, often functioning on inertia and raw acting talent rather than anything resembling good material, and yet they inspire tremendous warmth and attachment in the public here. Take the CARRY ON films — arguably three of them are consistently entertaining, out of a total of twenty-nine. Twenty-nine.

IV. Selfdivider on Shaun Tan's The Arrival. And Mike Atkinson doesn't just review film—he reviews beer: "This monster brew is an open, post-Scotch-ale combat between uber-hops and bloodthirsty malt, loud, mean-spirited and stormy, with trumpet blasts of prune, rose, pumpernickel, anchovies, and nose-punches of the past."

V. I've started a tie-in blog for my upcoming novel Personal Days. Let me know if you have any ideas...

VI. Also I'll be taking a break from posting for a bit, but the rest of Team Dizzies will be making an appearance here...ummm...right, TD members? Uh...hello?

Hoop dreams, cont'd

Another day, another ouroboros!



Ditmas Ed gives us a lesson in natural history, or rather Natural History. (Two different stories, the first from 1925, the second from 1940.)

One of the most persistent and widespread snake myths in the United States tells of a large serpent which takes its tail in its mouth and rolls like a hoop. It is further reputed to have a poisonous sting in its tail, which is launched at its enemy from the rolling position....My interest in the story was aroused during a stay in Louisiana, where I could gather eyewitness testimony regarding one of the “hoop snakes” (Abastor erythrogrammus) and the “stingin’ snake” of the genus Faranda. It appears that the supposed habit of rolling like a hoop is an elaboration of the more fundamental belief in a snake with a poison sting in its tail....

Bonus: More primo ouroboric content, as always, at Erasing.

My early career

“The dog ran back to me, the cat hesitated, and I shot (the bobcat). It’s on the back of my sofa there,” Park says, pointing to the handsome pelt on the couch in his Prineville home.

Park thought the incident made for an interesting story, so he handwrote a piece and mailed it to Outdoor Life magazine.

“I still have the rejection slip,” Park says.

—The Bulletin (Bend, OR)

Gossip Girl roundup

New Yorker:

“Gossip Girl,” by its very title, promises both to tell you the secrets of the city and to remind you that you weren’t invited to the party.

New York Observer:

The facts are this [...]: Dan's father's loft—it looks to be at least 3,000 square feet—probably sells for about $600 a square foot now. That's going by the general rule of thumb that Brooklyn condos (and we'll assume it's a condo as no co-op board, even in Brooklyn, would likely let in a rock musician-turned-artist who keeps odd hours) sell for half of what they would in most of Manhattan; and in most of Manhattan, condos sell for over $1,200 a square foot on average, according to research firm Radar Logic.

(Via Chrita)

Jane Dark's Sugarhigh!:

[Gossip Girl is not a character]...It's a blog with Kristin Bell's voice, which posts news, salacious stories, gotcha pix and so forth about the popular students. It is, in short, a gossip site. The show's imagination is that celebrity journalism has made its way to high school.

Pop will eat itself, cont'd

Another day, another ouroboros:


Via Scott

Back in the U.S.S.R.

It's a Dizzyhead Carla double feature: Here she writes about the history of Gawker, and over at the PF, she dusts off a reprint of Eimi, E.E. Cummings's weir;dly,punctuated account of his travels in the Soviet Union. (Archival bonus: The Eimi article links to Marianne Moore's original take on the book.)

Sound advice

From Pinky: "[D]uring the early days of sound, the studios had such trouble with recording that some banned jewelry from their sets (too jangly) and oiled down all the actors’ hair (to prevent static-y crackles)."

Brian Evenson at Moistworks has some mighty Conan musings.

At Office Naps, Smokey Robinson's "I Care About Detroit."

Notes for Thursday

A new Ghost is out...

Elsewhere, another mystery publication is assembling...

And I realized, posting about Bill's Keeler-Kelly extravaganza, that I've written about Trapped in the Closet, too—it's an article called "Guided by Voiceovers," in this month's Modern Painters, which I am pretty sure is on the stands now. (Alas, no updates on the ultraminimal website.) Will post the "lost chapterette" from my article soon...

A tip of the hat to Dizzyhead Michael at TONY! (I didn't realize Charles Bernstein had a blog...)

Some apple cider just waiting for you

Is Jens Lekman's "Friday Night at the Drive-in Bingo" an homage to Jonathan Richman? Here's a video performance; the album version has an It's Time for...–style saxophone instead of whistling.

(Via Dizzyhead Dennis)

The first picture show

Over at Termite Art, Dizzies Team Member Rob points to a Buffalo News article about the Ellicott Building. "If one was looking for a cosmopolitan night on the town, you could enter the Edisonia Phonograph Parlor, head downstairs, and walk into Vitagraph Hall—one of the earliest, and possibly THE earliest, movie theater in the U.S., having opened in October, 1896," Rob writes.

(Here's the original article.)

Predictions from 1900

"Hot and Cold Air from Spigots," no C, X, or Q in our alphabet...and much more.

(Via MUG)

Old Grub street

"If there is any bitterness in this letter, please forgive it. I might have been a good electrical engineer—instead, I find myself on Grub street." —Keeler to his editor John McCrae, 4/6/34 (reprinted in Keeler News No. 65)

Favorite reads of 2007

From Dizzyhead Gautam:

Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
The Reader, Bernhard Schlink

"...and I reread Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell) and still loved it."

Blog post title of the week...

...goes to Ed's "A Thing I Picked Up Off the Street in the East Village in 2002 When 9/11 Was Still Freaking People Out."

Now he's openin' the cabinet...

The latest Keeler News has another great Poundstone piece, in which he looks at the similarities between R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet and HSK's webwork novels. A must-read, with a meditation on so-called "bad art" that I subscribe to (in a nutshell, it's easier for the hoi polloi to think about something like Trapped or The Man With the Magic Eardrums—not that the h.p. ever thinks about TMWTME!—as comically inept failures, rather than deliberately wild works of art in which the creators strived for—and attained!—very specific, peculiar effects).

A fun little chart also points out that Keeler died on January 22, 1967 in Chicago...the same month and city in which R. Kelly was born!

Misheard in New York

"Oedipal treats are the least favorite..."

(Actually: EDIBLE)

The benefits of commuting

This paragraph is packed with goodies:

Mr. Hitchcock read all of the work’s four volumes, 2,600 pages and more than 5,000 articles, at least three times, often while riding the subway between Brooklyn College and his apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. “If I had known then what I know now,” he said in that interview, “I would have put my order in for a new pair of eyes.” —NYT

A near truth

Remember Dizzyhead Rachel's article on the disputed authorship of the poem "Footprints"?
Now two of the claimants have written comments. (One signs off with "Child Prodigy-World Renowned Faith Poet-Author.")

In related news: Who wrote "'Twas the Night Before Christmas"?

Drunken masters

"They wrote the best poetry literally while they were drunk. They are called the drunk immortals of poetry," [Da] Chen said. "They wandered the country, visited one friend and another." The poets would drink and then be challenged to create a perfect line..." —The Beaumont Enterprise

In a nice bit of nomen-omening, the writer of the article is named "Donna Liquori."

UPDATE: I like the name "Enterprise" for a newspaper.

When David met Shimon...

...with INXS.

(Via Dizzyhead Dennis)

Niiiiice

I.
Verlyn Klinkenborg had a double-jointed review in Saturday's Times, reading Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as if they were a chapter in newly minted Nobel laureate Doris Lessing's Shikasta.

II.
Luc Sante's blogging! The profile sez: "Subjectivity is my middle name, a trick memory is my pack mule, and self-contradiction is my trusty old jackknife." Niiiiiice.

III.
Currently watching: Jumong!

Right here, right now

Dizzyhead Bill writes:

As a precocious reader, I long failed to connect the printed word "nowhere" to the spoken word. I read the printed word as "now-here" and understood it to mean "the here and now." I'd read that someone came out of "now-here," or vanished into "now-here," and took that to be a poetic trope in which now-here can mean an omnipresent limbo.

Readers of this blog will now have added insight into Bill's Keeler parody, "The Box From Nowhere!" in the current issue (No. 65) of the Keeler News! Sample line: "Did you know that, under medieval French law, a reptile is considered to be a 'person'?..."

Not quite a joke

NRBQ + NYRB = NYRBQ!

Joining the club

Wasn't going to blog today, but just saw Dave Itzkoff's piece on Cavemen in yesterday's NYT:

"Every year, it seems, one new series is offered up as a sacrificial lamb to the critical gods....In 2007 that show has undeniably been 'Cavemen.'...[T]he 'Cavemen' creators look back and think they were sunk from the start." —"A Sitcom Battles Its Own Prehistory"

The article looks at how hard it was for the Cavemen creators to shed the "this show was spawned from a car insurance commercial" label, but as fellow fan and Dizzyhead Mike e-mailed me, that just means "it's more 'TV' than TV itself!"

As Itzkoff writes: "Some critics shared the opinion of Amy Robinson of The Charleston Gazette, who acknowldged that the bad publicity surrounding 'Cavemen' had influenced her opinion of it." A reviewer for the Daily News gave it zero stars. Looking back: It seems like the writer of this earlier, negative NYT review fell into the same trap—liking Cavemen more than she expected, and unable to justify this feeling, viz., "Let the record reflect: I laughed." OK—well, isn't that a good thing, isn't that what sitcoms are supposed to make you do? Run with it! Don't fight the feeling!

Alas, this post is not the well-shaped argument for Cavemen that I had contemplated writing a few weeks ago. It seems like a lost cause at this point, and there are other things to think about. But to encourage viewership, ABC could do more—they could offer more than just two episodes at a time on their website, for starters. And they could...broadcast new episodes every day of the week. (The article says there are seven episodes yet to be shown.)

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blogging about Gossip Girl.

False etymologies, continued

I was reading Heather McHugh's "Broken, as English" (on Tom Phillips's A Humument and the fragments of Archilocus), in which she breaks down "together" as "to-get-her"...I thought of two other false etymologies:

"Bowdlerize" comes from the British practice of censoring translations of the seedy Baudelaire (mispronounced "bowdler").

And...I forgot the other one.

Heather = heat-her? That wasn't it.

A long time ago I wondered if Adam Ant's name was meant to play off the word adamant.

That wasn't it, either.

List List Revolution

In the ink-and-paper (I think?) L.A. Times, I run down some of the SF/fantasy/slipstreamy things I've enjoyed this year. I've written about most of these in my Astral Weeks column, though there are some extra goodies here, including Cathy Park Hong's Dance Dance Revolution...(You can also listen to CPH on DDR over at the Poetry Foundation.)

(Via Counterbalance)

Weekend rubble

I. From the Parkives, a review of Adam Rapp's The Year of Endless Sorrows, from Bookforum:

The unnamed young protagonist—a fledgling fictioneer with an entry-level job at a Viking-like publisher—fits White’s description of “a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart,” except that he keeps his slowly growing manuscript in the empty freezer of his East Village walkup, and his main wound is the gnarly result of a hoops injury. Limping becomes “a kind of personal theatre,” and he tells anyone who asks that his book-in-progress is about “acute knee pain and the end of the world.” It’s a heartbreaking work of staggering.

II. The return of Ten Words?

III. Fred Astaire as Keith Moon in the Wodehouse adaptation Damsel in Distress (via Mr. Cairns)

Secrets and ries

I.
From John Updike's 12/3 New Yorker review of Ha Jin's A Free Life:
"In China every day I wanted to jump up and fight wiz someone....Zere you have to fight to survive, but here I don't want to fight wiz anyone, as eef I lost my spirit."

II.
"During this trial, I've had to sit there and listen to rie after rie," he said, maintaining the mock Asian accent. —"Accused Triple Murderer Dons Asian Accent During Testimony," New York Post, 12/3/07 (via Hua)

More in today's Times: "Though he was born Stephen Sanders in Queens and has no passport, Mr. Sakai testified in a thick, wavering accent, transposing L’s and R’s."

III.
Back to The New Yorker: "In retrospect, it figures that a serial “ninja burglar” would turn up on Staten Island, a borough whose biggest cultural export, the Wu-Tang Clan, long ago nicknamed the place Shaolin, in honor of kung-fu movies. This particular bandit, who is now thought to have robbed eighteen homes on the island in the past seven months, acquired his honorific in September, when he encountered a Dongan Hills resident named Phil Chiolo while raiding Chiolo’s home. He was dressed all in black, with a black face mask, Chiolo said, and he carried nun-chucks, which he used to club Chiolo in the chest, head, and shins..." —Ben McGrath, "Ninja Hunt," 12/10/07

I wanted an otter

Island burghers and shakes — Saturn's return —

One of my students posted this on our class blog—quite addictive! Establish utilities/technology in the proper order to make your island thrive! Learn Japanese (not)! (Arlo Ogg has been playing it almost nonstop since yesterday.)

From the Parkives: A super-rare review of Born Under Saturn. I say super-rare because even I've never seen a copy of it!

Dizzies Newsfeeds for December 6 — From the Parkives, XXVII

At the Poetry Foundation, Geoff Dyer traces some interesting artistic-novelistic-poetic connections...Selfdivider on Korea and German literature: "But in [my uncle's] private study, which was only a dark, tiny room with a low sit-down table, he had shelves of books with names that seemed almost mythical to me. Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, et al."...Halterius views a rarely seen "disasterpiece," the video-theater version of Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover...Levi argues that the novels of Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake) are about work...leading me to dust off this nugget from the Parkives:

GOD SAVE THE MARK
By Donald E. Westlake
Forge/Otto Penzler Presents, 268 pp., $14.95

Fred Fitch, the gullible narrator of Westlake's 1967 novel, receives 300 grand from an uncle he's never met—and then his problems really begin. Sniped at, seduced, and ceaselessly solicited, Fred wises up just enough to keep his life, not to mention his loot. A neighbor fishes for some Fitch funding to self-publish his neglected masterpiece, Veni Vidi Vici Through Air Power, a book that asks one burning question: What if Julius Caesar had had access to a couple of biplanes? Fred himself recalls—or foreshadows—Charles Portis's Dog of the South übernebbish, Ray Midge, prone as he is to wonderfully absurd digressions that you can't help but read aloud: "I wanted to call him Ralph, I really wanted to call him Ralph. I wanted to start my answer with Ralph and end my answer with Ralph and put Ralphs in here and there in the middle of the answer, and answer only in words which were anagrams of Ralph." E.P.
—June 29, 2004, PTSNBN

Sniffed out

Whatever happened to the prosthetic schnozz Nicole Kidman donned in The Hours? David Cairns tells all.

Shell game

Fifty-one years ago, a traveling circus performed at the new zoo in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province in southern China. For a cash payment, the circus left behind a large female turtle. Zookeepers slipped the turtle into a large pond, where for a half-century it hibernated in winters and poked its pig-like snout above the water’s surface every spring. The walls of the zoo became the equivalent of a time capsule. —"China's Turtles, Emblems of a Crisis," NYT

Are there any novels narrated by turtles?

I was reminded of this.

Trunk call

Ouroboros meets...Snuffleupagus?

(Via Brian at Crude Futures)

False etymologies

At the Poetry Foundation, Samantha Hunt talks to Heather McHugh about Vesalius.

I love this question:

I remember once being tempted to read the etymology of “desire” as “from or of the father.” What are some of your favorite false etymologies?

New Dizzyhead challenge?

From the Parkives, installment XIV

'Saint Ralph'
by Ed Park

Catholic schoolboy Ralph Walker (Adam Butcher) quixotically enters the 1954 Boston Marathon, magically thinking that a big Beantown victory constitutes a miracle—and only a "miracle," according to a doctor, will awaken his comatose mother. The odd mix of arbitrary plot and fastidious details (here is mid-century Hamilton, Ontario!) might lead a viewer to believe that Saint Ralph is the biopic of some awe-inspiring Canuck runner heretofore unknown stateside—Terry Fox pretty much filled up that informational pigeonhole. Discovering that it's all made up renders the experience even more pointless. The race itself is a suspenseful sequence of slo-mo uplift—suspenseful in the binary sports flick sense of either he wins or he loses, uplifting insofar as it's a music video scored to yet another version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," that de rigueur dirge that gives every montage from Shrek to the O.C .'s first-season finale a numinous coating of epiphany. There are points of contact with two other recent Catholic-youth titles: Millions (with its similar saint fixation) and House of D (fatherless boy, ailing mom). The most blatant rip-off is of the Rushmore soundtrack. But Ralph Walker is no Max Fischer, and his monomania gets dull fast. The unintentionally humorous high point comes when Ralph pores over an amazingly thin book entitled Canadian Martyrs, recalling the Airplane! passenger who, craving some light reading, receives the leaflet Famous Jewish Sports Legends.

—August 2nd, 2005, PTSNBN

Bobu-anon

Buy too many books? Place looking like this?



Maybe you need to take a step back and admit you have a problem.

(Via Dizzyhead Thomas)

Now, onlooker — Aphorisms

Here's how David Cairns writes about movies:

Here is the blade of a sword.

Here is the man who holds the hilt.

Here is a straw effigy, his target.

The sword.

The man.

Now, onlookers…

We draw in on the straw figure, remorselessly.

We’re all in a field!

CHOP!

That's his entry on 1968's Samurai Rebellion, explaining how a simple scene can be skillfully amped up "just by being splintered into Ecstatic Fragments." Love this kind of film writing—and I'm already a fan of Cairns's new blog, Shadowplay. Highly recommended.

* * *

If I were to just get one page of the New York Times delivered every day, it might have to be page four, where they have unusual international stories. Yesterday's was great: "Dark One Liners Shine a Light on Mood of Serbs."

The Communists who still ran the country were not amused by...an aphorism that ultimately got [Rastko Zakic] arrested. Roughly paraphrased, it said, “When our Father died, it turned out he abused us and he abused our mother as well.”

In 1984, an unrepentant Mr. Zakic published his aphorisms again in a book called “New Crossed Words” — but with all the aphorisms in the negative form. The new anti-Tito aphorism said: “When our Father died, the court determined that he didn’t abuse us.”

After he was hauled into court, he called mathematicians and philosophers to the stand to argue he could not be tried twice for saying opposite things.

Dizzies Newsfeeds for December 2

"Things happen to me with accents on 'em!": Dizzyhead Hua in the N.Y. Sun on the delightful-sounding All About H. Hatterr...Selfdivider with another great post, this one on Percival Lowell, Theodore Roosevelt, and King Kojong...The Stubblemeister has a great NYTBR piece on the story behind the placement of cigarette ads in paperbacks (from A.E. Van Vogt to The Bluest Eye; oddly, the title bar on my browser says, simply, "Essay about Cigarette Advertisements in Paperback Books"!); as a bonus, he fills his blog with a wealth of related links, and Levi picks up the scent, chasing down the possible meaning behind a pseudonym used by a book reviewer tapped by the industry to write a positive review of Smoking and Society: Toward a More Balanced Assessment, and finally pointing us Luc Sante–ward..now that's what I call Dizzyhead synergy!...Snowing in New York, time for the Psychic Envelopes' "Winter Losses" (what happened to "Indian Summer"?!)...Over at Erasing, the Batman–Proust connection...Finally saw that Gossip Girl episode Hua was blogging about, wow, in some ways the best one yet?...(More Gossip Girl stuff in today's Times: "Not that we’re obsessed or anything”)...Gotta get my hair cut...xoxo...You know you love me....GOSSIP ED....wha....