Ennealogic 2012: Week 16

“Listen: I don’t have anything against autobiographies so long as the writer has a penis that’s twelve inches long when erect. So long as the writer is a woman who was once a whore and is moderately wealthy in her old age. So long as the author of the tome in question has lived a remarkable life.” – Roberto Bolano, The Secret of Evil.

Which leads into Item #1:

1. The Secret of Evil, by Roberto Bolano. It’s out now, and you gotta read it, man.

2. Arsenio Hall meets Jason Voorhees. Publicity scam schmublicity scam. This is the real deal.

3. Speaking of evil and death, psychedelic drugs are making a resurgence. “As her fears intensified, Sakuda learned of a study being conducted by Charles Grob, a psychiatrist and researcher at Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center who was administering psilocybin — an active component of magic mushrooms — to end-stage cancer patients to see if it could reduce their fear of death. Twenty-two months before she died, Sakuda became one of Grob’s 12 subjects. When the research was completed in 2008 — (and published in the Archives of General Psychiatry last year) — the results showed that administering psilocybin to terminally ill subjects could be done safely while reducing the subjects’ anxiety and depression about their impending deaths.”

4. New album from Chicago’s Hums + Haws. It’s fuckin’ free, so what have you got to lose?

5. A book about a film about a journal to a room. Something we’re excited to read, because Tarkovsky is something like an erudite prophet.

6. Lars von Trier is talking about a new movie. So he’s a part-time Nazi. So he’s got FUCK tattooed on his knuckles like some kind rich man’s G.G. Allin. But his movies are rough, if not transgressive, and he’s always interesting to watch. Nyphomaniac is next up on the list, and sounds like it’s going to be more of that high-art porn he pulled off in The Antichrist.

7. Subject Brooke Greenberg. “Brooke Greenberg (born January 8, 1993), is an American from Reisterstown, Maryland, who has remained physically and cognitively similar to a toddler, despite her increasing age. She is about 30 inches (76 cm) tall, weighs about 16 pounds (7.3 kg), and has an estimated mental age of nine months to one year. Brooke’s doctors have termed her condition Syndrome X.”

8. 500 years of western female portraiture. Interesting to see what happens in the 20th century, fer sure.