I have been sitting here trying to update G-R.com for fifteen minutes, and all I've accomplished is adding two or three tracks to last.fm. It probably did not help that one of those tracks was Iron & Wine's 'Trapeze Swinger,' which is Lani's everything song but my debilitating melancholy song. Trying to speak for another person's life is absurd and even a little sick when you get right down to it—it's the biographical pages that give me such trouble, it's trying to make sense of her crazy, beautiful, artistically profound marriage that makes me feel like I have far overstepped some personal boundaries. I've kept it to facts and quotations and drawn no conclusions, but it still feels wrong to make my subject an actual person, rather than an unconnected celebrity. Well, with some distance from the first flush of obsession, it is perhaps time to become the cold and professional webmaster, and stop being so publicly creepy.

Apart from that, a few short lessons in pretension from my everyday life:
—Use Moleskines exclusively;
—Take out a subscription to The New Yorker;
—Stop wearing denim and build a wardrobe of 1940s-esque pieces;
—Use em dashes liberally;
—Have a cup of coffee in hand at all times, and fair trade as often as possible;
—Use NYC Metrocards as bookmarks (courtesy Lani ;);
—Watch a lot of foreign films;
—Listen to a lot of Joan Baez, Nico &c;
—Abbreviate et cetera as &c;
—&c...

Oh, it's safe to say I'm a fairly consciously constructed person, but it's genuine all the same. So I can put these things in a list and sneer rather pretentiously at myself...