W E R E A L C O O L

We Real Cool

by Gwendolyn Brooks

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Strike straight. We

Lurk late. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon.

T H E F I N E S T

Those Joseph Szabo photographs remind me of Lolita. They're creepily voyeuristic and perverse but strangely alluring, kind of like Humbert Humbert. 

"It will be marked that I substitute time terms for spatial ones. In fact, I would have the reader see "nine" and "fourteen" as the boundaries - the mirrory beaches and rosy rocks - of an enchanted island haunted by those nymphets of mine and surrounded by a vast, misty sea. Between those age limits, are all girl-children nymphets? Of course not. Otherwise, we who are in the know, we lone voyagers, we nympholepts, would have long gone insane. Neither are good looks any criterion; and vulgarity, or at least what a given community terms so, does not necessarily impair certain mysterious characteristics, the fey grace, the elusive, the shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm that separates the nymphet from such coevals of hers as are incomparably more dependent on the spatial world of synchronous phenomena than on that intangible island of entranced time where Lolita plays with her likes."

Lolita - Vladamir Nabokov

I M M E R S E Y O U R S E L F

"Fuck the Taser," I said. "It's no good beyond 15 feet. We'll need the M-79, with CS grenades, then drag him down with a jeep."

(The Great Shark Hunt by Hunter S. Thompson)

Currently reading Gonzo, the Hunter S. Thompson biog

Recently acquired: The Great Shark Hunt, Hells Angels and Kingdom of Fear. Which one to read next?