Hiatus

I'm busy with summer:

If anyone would like a review copy of The Insurgent for review, interviews or articles in September please email me at noah.cicero@gmail.com.

Put your address in the email. I will probably not email you back.

The Proust Questionnaire

Fawzy Zablah wants me to do this: Here is his book Ciao! Miama which is better than most books that have come out.


1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Being ten years old holding sparklers on a nice summer night.

2. What is your greatest fear?

Currently, trying to have any courage at all.

3. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

coldness

4. What is the trait you most deplore in others?

talking a lot

5. Which living person do you most admire?

living people scare me

6. What is your greatest extravagance?

ice cream

7. What is your current state of mind?

okay

8. What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

ambition

9. On what occasion do you lie?

i don't lie, i remain silent on certain issues

10. What do you most dislike about your appearance?

my forehead

11. Which living person do you most despise?

the person who invented text messaging

12. What is the quality you most like in a man?

quietness

13. What is the quality you most like in a woman?

quietness

14. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

devastating

15. What or who is the greatest love of your life?

fuck i don't know

16. When and where were you happiest?

i don't want to answer that one either, i feel like I would be discriminating against other moments

17. Which talent would you most like to have?

perfect pitch

18. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

that i don't have perfect pitch

19. What do you consider your greatest achievement?

scoring a touchdown in junior high football

20. If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?

women's underwear, preferably a cute pair

21. Where would you most like to live?

i have no clue

22. What is your most treasured possession?

my photo albums

23. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

asking someone for money knowing you'll never pay it back

24. What is your favorite occupation?

kickin' ass and takin' names

25. What is your most marked characteristic?

sarcasm, cruelty to those who deserve it

26. What do you most value in your friends?

quiet

27. Who are your favorite writers?

Jack Kerouac, Richard Wright, and Richard Yates

28. Who is your hero of fiction?

Cross Damon

29. Which historical figure do you most identify with?

Diogenes

30. Who are your heroes in real life?

That's depressing

31. What are your favorite names?

tasha

32. What is it that you most dislike?

a lot of talking and really any kind of loudness

33. What is your greatest regret?

it doesn't matter, does it

34. How would you like to die?

i'm a writer, what do you think

35. What is your motto?

devastating

What Michael Jackson taught white people and Caligula

White people watched Michael Jackson grow up, live as an adult and then die.

Michael Jackson came during the civil rights movement when white people were allowed on a mass scale to really look at black people as individuals.

Before most white people viewed black people as one unified block of blackness. When a white person encountered a black person it was not like they were coming upon a person with a name with a particular set of behaviors that defined them. They were coming upon, an extension of 'black people' or them or that.

But after the civil rights movement a black person could choose to single themselves out and appear as a person with a set of individual behaviors and white people were allowed to see it and even to relate to it.

So Michael Jackson came:

It wasn't his music

his music was shit

Thriller is fucking stupid.

We all know Thriller is fucking stupid.

He showed white people how individual and human black people are

That they are just as fucked up and weird as us.

The white race gave birth to Caligula and Nero, we've known for a long time how fucked up we can get.

But we didn't know that black people could be so weird, fucked up, and human.

I think Bill Cosby and Michael Jackson worked together to make a complete picture.

Bill Cosby showed that black people have the same concerns as white people, taking care of kids, paying bills, keeping the house clean, and putting up with the shit of life, but at the same time, trying to maintain a sense of rationality.

Michael Jackson took on the role of completely fucked human being trying to live in a world that doesn't want fucked up people.

The duality of rationality and letting one's emotions control one's decisions.

Michael Jackson also was decadent as all fucking hell.

Michael Jackson was so "I am number 1" that he thought he could fuck little kids and get away with it, and he did.

Even though a lot of people said that was sick. Jackson's Caligula like behavior goes to the darkest part of humans, their will-to-power. We might not to fuck kids and get away with it, but there is probably something disgusting we want to do and get away with it.

It is like Michael Jackson took on the American Dream full force, or the dream of Western Civilization, because it isn't really purely American. You can be weird as you want to be in most of Europe.

Michael Jackson became as weird and fucked up and unique as a human could be. He took Sartre's call of existence precedes essence and took it to new fucking limits. There was no one like him.

Humanity had not created such a freak and colorful character since Caligula.

We will have to wait two thousand more years for another freak of such magnitude.

I can't stop being depressed

There are like truths

truths are everywhere haunting me currently

they keep scurrying across my brain

i have to grow up in a year

bernice is forcing me to grow up

she has graduated college and wants to move

which means i have to grow up and live and work 40 hours a week

i've never had a checking account

i've lived with bernice six years coming this july

that's a long time

living on this street

with this kitchen

this bathroom

this living room

this closet

the little butterfly pictures in the kitchen

six years

i've just finished a 'real novel'

a 'real novel' that is long enough to be called a 'real novel'

i can't go around saying anymore, "I've never made it as a writer because I've only written short little books"

A truth will be made from Best Behavior

am I a writer or a loopy fuck from Ohio who wrote some worthwhile short stories

I've become such a weak person over the years

two days after I graduated high school i went and lived at the grand canyon, then i lived in san diego

then i went home and drove to south Carolina and saw both oceans in the same summer

the next summer i lived in eugene oregon, came home and drove up through new england and spend the night on by a beautiful lake in Quebec

i traveled back out west like three more times

then time passed

and the traveling and the fun faded

i stopped traveling

stopped having sex

i read a lot

i became comfortable

and let the comfort take over my life

maybe it was because i was out of my parents' house

and didn't see them anymore

and bernice made it so easy to live here, having little rent, only a 100 month in bills

it was easy

all so easy

i could write and live an easy life of comfort

of Youngstown misery

oh

these truths

all making their way to reality

Brandon Scott Gorrell and Catholicism

To understand Brandon Scott Gorrell's during my nervous breakdown i want to have a biographer present a person must understand Catholicism.

This is the logic of Catholicism:

In America we consider to be heaven to have millions of dollars.

Now lets say we grew up in modest circumstances

Not born rich already with connections

but born normal

Well, you would have to work constantly to get millions, you would have to get up early, go to college, show up to your classes, not get drunk at work, maintain good credit, make connections, spend all your waking hours with the goal of making millions of dollars. You would have to leave your family behind and move to a bigger city, kiss your bosses asses, probably take out huge loans to buy businesses, get up early and make sure everything is okay, probably be sadistic and snobbish, sell your soul at least a little, sacrifice fun like getting drunk and high. All kinds of hard work and sacrifice would go into making your millions. It requires a huge effort.

Well, Catholic heaven is better than millions of dollars.

To get to Catholic heaven a person must view their life on planet earth as nothing but suffering. That human life isn't worth living. That the only life worth living is the heavenly one when they will be in the presence of their God.

Brandon Scott Gorrell revealed to me he grew up catholic. I asked him some questions to understand him better and he wrote the word 'catholic' 12 times in a normal sized email. He went to Catholic school all the way into high school and he said the only people he was really around for most of his childhood were catholics.

Brandon Scott Gorrell is an atheist but the world view was firmly placed in his mind

When the poem * I could see it clearly.

The massive listing of small acts

i click on gmail
i click on word document
i click firefox
i click on myspace

Then he writes, "there is nothing in my reality that i fell i want enough to try"

says in terms of Catholicism, "Lord, I understand there is nothing on this planet worth living, only your heaven is worth having."

If the Pope had a poetic spirit he would canonize Brandon for that poem.

There are two other points that must be noticed

his lower case letters signifying that worthlessness, that he is just a small pauper who does not even have the power to write to an upper case letter

And that he wrote 'biographer'

Catholics throughout the middle ages did not believe in writing autobiographers

that autobiographies were too self-important

The middle-ages did not see a biography from Augustine's confessions written in the 400s and then Europe did not have another biographer until the early 1100s with Abelard's Historia Calamitatum (A history of my calamities), both about being miserable.

Brandon could easily have written, "This is my nervous breakdown" or "nervous breakdown" but to include the word 'biographer' is powerful

it says, "I don't view myself as important to write my own autobiography"

The title can also be viewed ironic.

A play off the modern era, how there are books being sold about people and their horrible life experiences.

How people go through horrible things like the holocaust, dying in some wilderness or in war and real people are living through hell, but as soon as the hell is over they go and find a biographer to write down their experience.

Which is saying, "There is no god, if I'm going to suffer, I'm going to find a way to make money for it in this life."

A line by Brandon, "the best moment of my life will be overshadowed by the worst moment of my life"

Total Rejection

I feel like my body is rejecting life

right now

like someone injected something into me

and my body is rejecting it

like i have allergy toward life

even my arms are pissed off

my thigh is screaming in agony

my feet are asleep and won't wake up

my belly wants to be left alone

my anus is tight and sore

and my hair wants to give to up

i feel really terrible

I just watched this movie

it was better than Transformers

Does someone want to buy Best Behavior for 20,000 dollars

I think 20,000 dollars would cheer me up

Might reread Roots to fill better

might take a vicodin to feel better

Paris Hilton and Narcissism

Greg Partch wrote me, "Hi all,

I'm conducting an informal survey, in the hopes of inspiring your best and most inspired thinking, on the subject of non-clinical narcissism. There is Narcissism, as a diagnosable personality disorder, and then there is,say, Paris Hilton, whose narcissism is more of byproduct of the cultural vapidity of contemporary America than it is a pathology. So, here's the question:

What would you make of a person who says, with a straight face: "I'm my #1 priority".

What sort of person would you imagine earnestly thinks likes this? Are they young, old, rich, poor, smart, American?

Any and all thoughts on this subject are welcome."

I've never met anyone who thinks like this in the Youngstown area. I can't imagine any of them thinking they deserved anything but a nice little house and some dogs. A lot of them don't even take vacations.

I lived in Eugene Oregon and been there a bunch of times and no one said or did anything that implied, "I'm my #1 priority".

I've known a lot of republicans and they all think, "White people are the first priority", but that still doesn't imply "I'm my #1 priority".

The only place I've run into "I'm my #1 priority" people is in New York City, they were all rich kids who didn't care about anything because they didn't have to. I was shocked by some of the people, it was like nothing bad had ever happened to them, and they were completely convinced that they should be controlling their reality at all times.

But I don't think America is overall like that, that is some dumb topical shit the media sells to sell more advertisements. Americans like all the general populations of the world are clueless, but they don't assume "I'm my #1 priority".

My roommate (Bernice) gave me this sentence, "Narcissism has become a past time."

Here are two people I know from Youngstown:

MH is the president of the philosophy club, he has twitter, facebook and all such things. He goes to indie rock shows and twitters like five times a day. Which seems narcissistic, but when you meet him in person at a bar or on campus he doesn't announce himself as The President of The Philosophy Department, he doesn't force you to talk about him, he probably does volunteer work.

Another person is GT, she has like 1300 pics of herself getting drunk on her facebook. The site is pretty narcissistic, she has pics of her going to the bathroom with her pants pulled down and pics in her bikini. But when you meet her in person she talks calmly, she listens, she has good responses, and she is trying to graduate college with a teaching degree.

So I think it appears that Americans enjoy playing super star when they are bored and alone at their house on their computers. But when they leave the computer room they act like normal people again.

Transformers Review

I don't know what happened.

My head hurts really bad.

It was really loud.

Shia Labeouf kept running and yelling.

Megan Fox looked really hot, and did not even cut herself or get dirty and her lip gloss did not smudge when she fell off a roof and landed on an awning made of hay and then fell to the dirt. She was also shot into the air like three times because of explosions and she still didn't get dirty or break a bone or get cut. And her make up and hair remained perfect.

There was a robot girl who had a tail, which was hot.

I don't know what happened.

It was like having a few beers and throwing M80s in a lake.

amazon 100 top sellers

Here are the top 100 sellers at amazon

Stare at that list

believe in it

let it break your spirit

3 out of the top 5 are republican nazi books

I've never met a republican that seemed like they ever read a book in their whole life. I don't know who are buying those books. It is disturbing to think that people are publishing books with I assume complete nonsense on every page. But what the fuck, people like nonsense

number 2 is a diet book. Americans are fat and they want to get skinnier even though they took the time to get fat

Number 6 is fiction, it is a story about a woman sending letters to her publisher. I have no fucking clue, of course it takes place around world war 2

NUMBER 9 THE SHACK ""The Shack" is a one of a kind invitation to journey to the very heart of God. Through my tears and cheers, I have been indeed transformed by the tender mercy with which William Paul Young opened the veil that too often separated me from God and from myself. With every page, the complicated do's and don't that distort a relationship into a religion were washed away as I understood Father, Son and Holy Spirit for the first time in my life. --Patrick M. Roddy, ABC News Emmy Award winning producer"

That is total nonsense. So books about republican nonsense, God nonsense, and vampires are what Americans want?

I just stuck my finger in my ass, pulled it out, and smelled it.

18: Olive Kitteridge: "Themes of suicide, depression, bad communication, aging and love, run through these stories, none more vivid or touching than Incoming Tide, where Olive chats with former student Kevin Coulson as they watch waitress Patty Howe by the seashore, all three struggling with their own misgivings about life."

This sounds okay

41 in books: Man Gone Down

has anyone read this, it looks good, somebody tell me the truth on it

618 in books: Those Who Save Us: holocaust novel

58 in books: Sarah's Key: holocaust novel

Fahrenheit 451: why it is there, don't know, pile of shit book.

Neil Gaiman has a book in it, it looks like a kids book. Neil Gaiman has sex with Amanda Palmer which makes him awesome to me.

Glenn Beck appears again at the end: someone wrote in his reviews, "Our democaracy is morally, politically and economically bankrupt." (Did not personally spell democracy wrong, copy and pasted)

What does that even mean?

If any of you say statements like that, or hear people say statements like that, just ask yourself or them, "What does that even mean?"

And you will win the argument.

Don't fight with facts.

Just ask them, "What does that even mean?"

The thing that troubles me about the list is that there is no 'literature', like books for adults, that take place in the present day, like I don't think I even saw a book that took place after 1950. Which makes me wonder about my prospects as a writer and my friends. If no one wants to read about the modern era and especially not about people from the modern era sitting around being depressed.

Hi

Brandon Scott Gorrell

wrote a book

Well, here is the day

It has finally come

Congratulation Brandon

Go buy his book

To PEOPLE

If you are human being

and we are ever making out

do not fucking bite my tongue

do not bite my lip

don't scratch me

*

Bought a 1863 penny today at the flea market

It has an indian head on it

*

While pissing the transportable bathroom

at the flea market

i looked down and saw orange shit

how does one's shit get orange

what do you have to eat for that to happen

*

In Best Behavior I will destroy sex.

Sex will be destroyed.

Total destruction of sex.

No one will be able to have good sex again after reading Best Behavior.