sunday short stack

"Never before had I believed or suspected that I had a soul but just then I knew I had. I knew also that my soul was friendly, was my senior in years and was solely concerned for my own welfare. For convenience I called him Joe." - Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

• I'm looking forward to the release of the Mountain Goats' new album, Get Lonely, on Tuesday and their appearance at Amoeba Hollywood on Wednesday. I heard a preview of the album at their show in LA a couple of months ago and the song "Half Dead" broke my heart. Via Rake's Progress, here's an interview with John Darnielle at the Village Voice.
• The Areas of My Expertise will not teach you how to read, my feral mountain man friend, but you should buy it anyway.
  
• This Fun Movie Quiz is a great way to pass the time (via Ed Champion).
• If Bukowski thought Mickey Rourke was too theatrical (read: pretty) to play him, what would he possibly think about Matt Dillon?
• Pete Doherty's mom cashes in on her son's efforts to embody recidivism (via Perez Hilton).
• I'm terribly sad to be missing Brooklyn's first official Book Fest, featuring Mr. & Mrs. Foer Krauss, Rick Moody, Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead, and Jhumpa Lahiri (via Maud Newton).
• Adam Kirsch uses Walter Benjamin's relationship with hashish as a starting point to look at his literary criticism: "It is characteristic of Benjamin that the first fact he thought it necessary to record was not the time he had taken the drug but the time he started writing about it."
• Panoptocist has a great post on "the Wilhelm scream" and its storied past.
• Apartment Therapy LA points to a nice photo collection of the actual hardware of Los Angeles addresses as well as this great quote from Clive James: "Prejudices are useless. Call Los Angeles any dirty name you like...Six Suburbs in Search of a City, Paradise with a Lobotomy, anything...but the fact remains that you are already living in it before you get there."