I wish there was more close-up footage of a frog’s eye blinking in Earl Sweatshirt’s new video. But there is some of that and it is very good! I think I would like to watch a full 3:10-long video of a frog’s eye blinking to a soundtrack of Earl reciting his intricate tongue-twister rhymes about his life. As emotionally moving and in-depth as they are astounding from a technical perspective. “Mama often was offering peace offerings…” he says, and your jaw drops at how the simple transposition of those two words, “often” and “was,” can open the door for a line so beautiful.

Related: Two Early Poems By Odd Future’s Earl Sweatshirt

“Is the recession really and truly over,” is what we began to ponder, Carrie Bradshaw-style, as the invitations to holiday parties began to overflow our inboxes. “Kind of,” is the answer! Because we were pondering that at the same time as the New York Times was planning to lay people off and Rupert Murdoch was shuttering The Daily. So kind of not.

We also learned that there is no party-planning communication between different media outlets. December 12th? You are a holiday NIGHTMARE. Let’s look!

As you know from previous years, don’t bother trying to crash these parties. They’ve got those open bars locked down tighter than a [mildly lewd holiday metaphor about reindeer goes here].

December 6th

• BBC Holiday Cocktails, at the BBC offices
This is the only party where there’ll be “shenanigans.” (That and the Guardian’s, presumably.) English folks understand the importance of getting wasted and fondling each other in the chilly months between Michaelmas and Christmas. Their invite’s slogan: “Eat Drink and Be Merry.”

December 10th

• The Awl Contributor Holiday Shindig
Some terrible bar
“Good job, good effort”: There’s a rumor this wee holiday party might even have an open bar for a small portion of the evening! Probably not though. If only these losers had VC money to waste on liquor!

December 11th

• Tablet Magazine’s Hanukkah Party
Rockwood Music Hall
Finally, someone made a list of Jews and rounded them all up. Invite slogan: “Celebrate with Candles, Cocktails and Your Friends.”

• Refinery 29
The Parlour.
Junior staff will be forced to wear sale outfits and stand under signs that say “BUY NOW.”

• Riverhead and Granta
These do-gooders are having a holiday party — that’s a BENEFIT. Totally not in keeping with the season. You are welcome to attend!
A Holiday Benefit for PEN
$15! At the Brooklyn Brewery

• “Exclusive Tasting at House of Walker Hosted by Johnny Walker for Friends of Business Insider”
This holiday party was either spam or, more likely, Business Insider sold their list to Johnny Walker. That is a really daring piece of revenue production. They really are going to move to “profit mode” someday!
8:30 PM on Tuesday, December 11, 2012.

December 12th

• Buzzfeed
The Varick Room at Tribeca Cinemas.
This party will feature a parade of deformed animals — tragic cats with broken faces, goats with two-and-a-half legs and tiny, miserable ponies — all desperate for a shovel to the back of the head. Instead of putting them down, Buzzfeed employees will take pictures of them and make slideshows. Invite slogan: “Open bar and passed hors d’oeuvres all night long!”

• The New York Observer
6 to 8 p.m., at No. 8
This two-hour party takes place at “the nightclub formerly known as Bungalow 8.” This is a step up. Last year they had the party at that terrible place where Drake hit Chris Brown with a bottle while evil robot Rihanna laughed.

• The Verge
Tanlines and DJ Trent play at Angel Orensanz Foundation.
This party is notable for actually being one that you really do want to attend.

• New York magazine
At ACME.
The more successful and money-minting that New York magazine has become, the quieter the magazine and its editor Adam Moss have gotten. This discreet affair is family only: no malformed cats, no hip bands, just caviar and diamonds for everyone. In the wee hours, editorial director Jared Hohlt will lay hands on each attendee, and any person found worthy will have a limb turn to gold.

• Felix Salmon’s holiday party
Surly Reuters bon vivante will mix the business, media and art worlds at his home. If you crash, just wear something outlandish and carry a big bottle of liquor, he’ll be unable to turn you away.

December 13th

• Melville House Holiday Party
At their delightful offices.
Melville House, the quiet publisher with the genius business model, will pelt party-goers with out-of-copyright manuscripts. Whichever book you’re left holding at the end of the night, you have 25 minutes to write a press release and attractively reissue it to the market.

December 14th

• Gawker Media Holiday Party
The Bowery Hotel
For employees and their current sex partners only. Will feature a really big Big Board, where editors and writers will have their yearly traffic numbers displayed. At midnight, Nick Denton and Erin Pettigrew will execute the losers. After midnight, a “Boxing Day” stage of the party begins. With boxing. In which deposed former Gawker editors will be brought out to be pummeled by mighty Gawker pugilist Hamilton Nolan. Start doing super squats now, Remy Stern!

• Huffington Post/AOL
Skylight at Moynihan Station
Be there or be TERMINATED. There will be sweaters. (Also! A hot rumor that there will be a private — and therefore better — HuffPo-only party.)

December 18th

• Artforum and Bookforum holiday party
Pravda
Always a winter wonderlanderful mix of advertisers and filthy-haired freelancers, this over-subscribed party is basically a Learning Annex class for how to sexually molest strangers on the subway. But! Pravda promises to be a delicious location. Invite slogan: “with cocktails and hors d’oeuvres.” Oh I’m sure.

Got one to add? Sure you do! Drop us a line or a tweet! Discretion assured.

“Bag-in-box wines are more likely than their bottled counterparts to develop unpleasant flavors, aromas and colors when stored at warm temperatures, a new study has found. Published in ACSʼ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, it emphasizes the importance of storing these popular, economical vintages at cool temperatures.”

Mr. Richard Wayne Penniman, who has as much of a claim to the patrimony of rock and roll as anyone else does, turns 80 today. I could have picked a better song, but you’ve probably heard all of them a million times already.

“When it comes to sperm counts, French men aren’t what they used to be, according to a new study. Researchers found that between 1989 and 2005, the number of sperm in one milliliter of the average 35-year-old Frenchman’s semen fell from about 74 million to about 50 million — a decrease of roughly 32 percent.”
 — Before you dismiss this with a, “Big deal, so there will be fewer men wearing berets and stealing our Oscars for performances in which they do not even bother to speak,” bear in mind that it’s not much better anywhere else.

Michael Cunningham! A.M. Homes! Zadie Smith! David Byrne! Deer Tick! All this and more in the great City of New York today.

We don’t usually tell you that reading a particular “Classic Trash” selection is mandatory, so let’s take it slowly: “youuuuu mussssttttt reaaddddd thissss boookkkkk.” Whew. Okay! Now we can talk about it.

Papillon is my jam. Papillon is the best. Papillon is the most fun. Papillon is the shit. Do you ever do that thing in a new relationship where you assign reading? NO, THE WORST, I KNOW, but you show up with a plastic bag containing four paperbacks and say: “You are not going to understand why I am this horrible, aggravating way unless you do the reading”? Does anyone else do that?

Well, I do that, and Papillon is one of those four books. Probably the least arduous of the four, though none of them is, like, the collected Will and Ariel Durant.

Papillon is the single greatest adventure story ever. It begins: “It was a knockout blow — a punch so overwhelming that I didn’t get back on my feet for fourteen years. And to deliver a blow like that, they went to a lot of trouble.” Right? Right.

Although it’s a memoir, Papillon is not necessarily all that true. (Charrière said it was 75% true, which is probably less true than Wikipedia and more true than the work of JT Leroy.) If you want to say it’s less than 75% true, I can’t hear it. Don’t want to hear it. Don’t much care to hear it. Will mildly resent you for it.

Here’s the deal: there was this guy, Henri Charrière, who was born in France in 1906. We are sure that part is true, because public record. He was kind of a thug. We’re pretty sure that part is true, because no one has been all “oh, my buddy, Henri! We were Eagle Scouts together, and he always stood in the gutter to prevent ladies’ dresses from getting splashed.” Then he killed a pimp. Well, he was convicted of killing a pimp. He said it was a frame-up. But, you know, people do say that, don’t they?

Then he was given a life sentence, plus ten years of hard labor, which was pretty legit hard labor, because French Guiana probably made Shawshank seem like [insert fluffy bunny thing here], and he was there for a long, long time and tried to escape a bunch, and then did, and had crazy mad sex with a bunch of lovely ladies in the jungle (they were his wives and they were sisters, and they were total nymphos), and then left for no good reason and was recaptured and then got sent to Devil’s Island (the French say he did not get sent to Devil’s Island), and then he successfully escaped from Devil’s Island (the French say it’s super-easy to do that when you were never actually there), and then made it to Venezuela and spent the rest of his life smoking and drinking and gambling and screwing around and then wrote Papillon and then died.

(Those things may have happened to this guy instead, but let’s not be nitpicky and childish.)

What will you get out of this book? For starters, a pretty decent grasp of French prison slang from the 1930s (“cavale” is escape! “camelote” is junk! “mec” is buddy! “plan” is a metal cylinder containing money or valuables that you shove up your butt to avoid theft!) It’s also the essence of entertaining. It is diverting! You could totally take it to prison with you, or Cabo, or your family’s house for Christmas.

It may also lead to a lifelong obsession with being ready to get out of Dodge. “Please take a moment to locate the nearest exit”? Bish, please. I’ve already figured out who the toughest guy in the room is and am ready to garrote him with my headphones to establish my dominance. Can you make a raft? Use a compass correctly? Field-dress a deer? Can you or can you not tell if someone is in the dry or wet state of leprosy and interact with them accordingly?

That last part is no longer a much-needed skill and Charriere’s advice not accurate ever in human medical history, for the record.

I’m having a moment now where I’m realizing that my family really read an inappropriate number of gory prison-themed books together. I mean, we were reading Papillon around the campfire when I was six, and then there was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the best parts of The Handmaid’s Tale, Life and Death in Shanghai, and then there was my eighth-grade book report on The Gulag Archipelago (sorry, Mr. Proderick).

Hmm. Meh, if you’re self-aware you probably don’t need that much therapy, right?

Read Papillon.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Wait, has anyone else even read it?

2. I have never watched the Steve McQueen/Dustin Hoffman movie, partly because Dega, Hoffman’s character, is in the book for about five minutes and I resent making this totally-accurate-book into a buddy picture for no good reason.

3. There is no prisoner sex, so if you are thinking about picking it up for some Beecher/Keller-esque romance, do not bother. Some of the guys jerk off a lot, and there’s the aforementioned jungle sex interlude, but this is basically the least homoerotic prison memoir ever written.

4. No, I know, that bummed me out too.

5. Would you insert anything into your “plan” apart from money? Letters from loved ones? Folding umbrellas?

6. What would be your formal or informal assigned reading for a new partner?

7. What should Wills and Kate name their baby?

8. Papillon, right?

And next time, we will be reading The Twilight series — yes, all four books!

Previously in Classic Trash: ‘Atlas Shrugged’: Who Is John Galt’s Chiropractor

Nicole Cliffe is the books editor of The Hairpin and the proprietress of Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews.

★★★★ Moist and moderate, a day misplaced from some other month or latitude. The chill in the air was mild, to be welcomed through an open jacket or an open window. Surely there were extra errands worth running out in it, excuses to take a stroll — but the clock and the daylight had not abandoned their December duties. Just after 3 p.m., out the office window, the sun was already behind the roofline. Forty minutes later, there were still rays stretching across the roof, if you chased up the fire escape after them. Then, already, inevitably, it was the long night again.

“First there was an effort to clean up the red-light district in Amsterdam. Then came new laws regulating who could frequent “coffee shops” in the city and elsewhere in Holland for a joint. Now, the Dutch capital is introducing a plan to punish bad behavior by sending chronic neighborhood bullies and vandals out of the city center for a punitive stay in uncomfortable housing containers.”

A series on the stuff that delighted us on the Internet this year.

Watergate, The Night Stalker, the Church Committee, Rod Serling’s “Night Gallery,” the Pascagoula Abduction and the Jonestown Massacre: this was my 1970s youth. My mom, who recalls taking pro-communist flyers from Lee Harvey Oswald outside the downtown New Orleans building where she worked as a secretary, once lifted a tobacco pipe left behind by Jim Garrison at a cocktail party, and kept it in a place of honor. My dad would occasionally reference the mysterious classified part of his job at NASA in Texas, on the team that prepared the Eagle lunar lander for Apollo 11. Ghost stories and monster hurricane reports got jumbled up in my head with hysterical local news reports on the energy crisis, serial killers, and waves of UFO sightings. Psychics were routinely on network television at night, warning of the world’s impending doom. For several years, in dentist offices and neighbors’ houses, I would find the same 1972 issue of Time Magazine with a terrifying illustration of the Devil on the cover. It is impossible to overstate the weirdness of the 1970s.

The last two television shows I followed were “Twin Peaks” and “The X-Files.” They made perfect sense in the 1990s. (They still make perfect sense.) When the daily newspaper where I worked hired a psychic to find a missing little girl, it seemed right for the times. When the psychic gave warnings by phone of what would happen on a particular day — from the name of the obscure California Indian reservation where the child’s skull was eventually found to a detailed description of the man who would aim a shotgun at my own skull — I listened without prejudice. Life was weird. Is weird.

My comfort stations on the Internet are places of shadow and mystery. I return to them the way religious people return to their Bibles, the way the sex freak returns to the porn underworlds defined by Rule 34.

Conspiracy theory is of no interest to me; I don’t need some slob in a tract home yelling into a webcam about how he figured out there’s an owl statue at Bohemian Grove. It’s the “high weirdness” that appeals, the combination of synchronicity and the sinister that keeps life interesting beyond the daylight pursuits of career, money, mating, family, retirement accounts, death.

From FidoNet and Usenet to Compuserve and GEnie, there was plenty of Paranoid and Paranormal America to be found online in the pre-Web days. And there were many 1990s spooky sites that I’ve loved, from the text-based information dumps of Xenu.net to the text-based information dumps archived mailing-list material like the insane Krill Papers. But it wasn’t until the Age of Blogging that writers and editors emerged with their own cultivated corners of the Internet. It was necessary, too, as spam ruined Usenet and illiterate Web forums took Usenet’s place.

The golden era for this particular Web niche was the Bush Regime, with its stolen election and its dark clouds of millennial depression and intense paranoia created by the competing theologies of terrorism and technology. An economist would note that the widening chasm between rich and poor and the rotting safety net of American life created the atmosphere of distrust and frayed nerves where conspiracies breed, just as the panics and recessions of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s replaced Cold War suspicions with doubt about our own leaders and institutions. Political scientists might note that the Far Right dominates conspiracy theory during Democratic administrations, while the Far Left takes over when the Republicans are in charge. But I am simply fascinated and terrified by everything that seems to be going on below the surface. And in this year of lower-than-average presidential election melodrama, the Weird Web again provided intrigue and mist.

So what would you find in my cabinet of curiosities, which is really just a bookmark list passed on from browser to browser and computer to computer, the many dead URLs like lacuna in a gnostic codex? You might click on Professor Hex, the “Scholar of the Strange and Mysterious.” has been posting a clever assortment weird material since the mid-2000s. You know you’re in good hands from his standing art alone: a gloomy underwater statue opposite a delightful black-and-white portrait of L. Ron Hubbard and Jack Parsons’ “Scarlet Woman,” Marjorie Cameron. Then there’s the Cryptogon, maintained by a southern Californian now living on remote farm in New Zealand, with a selection that occasionally and exactly hits my particular bag of strange. The Daily Grail and Fortean Times offer the mix of esoteric headlines and features you might expect from the alternate universe version of cable news, while both Rigorous Intuition and The Secret Sun excel at the longreads of this underworld. To say anything else would be to shine light on things that are best experienced at night, when you are alone and ready to be possessed. The exorcism of daylight and skepticism can return in the morning, if that’s what it takes to get you out the door.

But there’s no coming back all the way, that’s the final warning about this particular hallway of the Internet. You can dismiss 90% of it and still be haunted by the remainder. Why is your phone making those clicking sounds, anyway? Do mobiles even do that? Who keeps taking your mixed paper before the recycling truck arrives? Did that tense-faced guy in a bland four-door sedan really follow you on three random errands by chance?

Previously in series: The Delights Of ‘Diamond Joe Biden: Vice Presidential Jams’