We're Basically The Same Person

Robbie Basho Had One Good Song

2011-12-14T14:22:00.000-05:00

Charlie on Cats

2011-11-27T13:35:00.000-05:00

[Charlie Day on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia]

Horselover Fat talks to Maurice

2011-11-21T13:32:00.000-05:00

Deer Hoof

2011-11-20T11:08:00.000-05:00

de-hooving

Invisible Cities / Italo Calvino

2011-11-13T17:54:00.000-05:00

or the Heavenly Hash Dialogues:

Kublai Khan: I do not know when you have had time to visit all the countries you describe to me. It seems to me you have never moved from this garden.

Marco Polo: Everything I see and do assumes meaning in a mental space where the same calm reigns as here, the same penumbra, the same silence streaked by the rustling of leaves. At the moment when I concentrate and reflect, I find myself again, always, in this garden, at this hour of the evening, in your august presence, though I continue, without a moment's pause, moving up a river green with crocodiles or counting the barrels of salted fish being lowered into the hold.

Kublai: I, too, am not sure I am here, strolling among the porphyry fountains, listening to the plashing echo, and not riding, caked with sweat and blood, at the head of my army, conquering the lands you will have to describe, or cutting off the fingers of the attackers scaling the walls of a besieged fortress.

Polo: Perhaps this garden exists only in the shadow of our lowered eyelids, and we have never stopped: you, from raising dust on the fields of battle; and I, from bargaining for sacks of pepper in distant bazaars. But each time we half close our eyes, in the midst of the din and the throng, we are allowed to withdraw here, dressed in silk kimonos, to ponder what we are seeing and living, to draw conclusions, to contemplate from the distance.

Your Empty Plate

2011-10-12T00:37:00.002-04:00

Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiari

Shouldn't Soraya have a cult following?

Richard Brautigan on Tuna Fish Sandwiches

2011-10-07T01:57:00.001-04:00

     Why did the American humorist have such a big problem with tuna fish? The answer is quite simple: fear. He was afraid of it. He was thirty-eight years old and afraid of tuna fish. It's that simple. The reason for the fear was mercury.
     When they discovered a few years ago that there was more mercury in tuna fish than normal, he stopped eating it because he was afraid it would accumulate in his brain and affect his thinking which would lead to an effect on his writing.
   He thought his writing would get strange and nobody would buy his books because they had been corrupted by mercury and he would go crazy if he ate tuna fish, so he stopped eating it.
     His decision to give up eating tuna fish sandwiches had been one of the most difficult and traumatic decisions that he had ever made. It still caused him to have bad dreams.

     - from Sombrero Fallout / Richard Brautigan [1976]

Contempt for / Walker Evans

2011-09-09T15:40:00.000-04:00

12 26 37 NYC

men who try to fascinate women with their minds;

gourmets, liberals, cultivated women;

writers;

successful writers who use the left to buttress their standing;

the sex life of America;

limited editions, "atmosphere," Bennington College, politics;

men of my generation who became photographers during the depression;

journalism, new dealers, readers of the New Yorker;

the corner of Madison Avenue. and 56h street;

the public;

Richard Wagner, radio announcers;
hobbies and hobbyists;

the soul of Josef von Sternberg;

the gay seventies, eighties, nineties, or hundreds;

art in America, the artist of America, the art lovers of America, the art patrons of America, the art museums of America, the art directors of America, the wives and mistresses and paramours of the artists of America, the etchings and the christmas cards and the woodcuts and the paintings and the letters and the memoirs and the talk and the beards or the cleanshaven faces of the artists of America;

for college bred intellectual communists with private incomes;

for safe experimentation in living or in expression;

for merrie England;

for critics;

for passing away, passing on, going on, leaving us; instead of dying;

for school spirit, Christmas spirit, gallant spirit, and whatever is meant by The American Spirit

Walker Evans, Self portrait 1930's

Reader's Block / David Markson

2011-08-18T22:39:00.000-04:00

b. 1927 - d. 2010 of unknown causes

When I picked this up, I flicked thru some pages, thinking: what kind of novel is this? Just looks like a series of double spaced sentences. Now that I've read every line of it, I want to read every book this man ever wrote. Amongst the odd facts about artists, writers, and historical figures listed in the book, are a few lines dedicated to our "Protagonist," an old man living alone by a cemetery near the beach. As Markson says, this is memory's intrusion upon imagination. While reading it, I made marks around some of my favorites.

Selections from Reader's Block

Bruno Schulz was carrying home a loaf of bread when he was shot down in the street by the Gestapo.
Only a lunatic would dance when sober, said Cicero.
Baudelaire spent two hours a day getting dressed.
Where was Jesus between the ages of twelve and twenty-nine?
In the decade before his death, Ad Reinhardt painted nothing but black canvases.
Kafka laughed repeatedly when he was reading his own work.
For a certain period in his mid-twenties Vincent Van Gogh could not pass a church without breaking into tears. And went unbathed, which he construed as sanctifying.
Never to have been born is best.
Get out as early as you can, / And don't have any kids yourself.
You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family. Said Charles Darwin's father.
Thomas Mann's definition of a writer. Someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
I guess maybe there are two kinds of writers, writers who write stories and writers who write writing. Said Raymond Chandler.
Four of Freud's five sisters were incinerated by the Germans in 1944. Four.

------------------------------------------------

Year Published: 1996. Pages: 193.

A Feast of Snakes / Harry Crews (Oh my god, bear with me, I have writer's block)

2011-08-02T23:24:00.001-04:00

[b. 1935 - still alive] Teaching UF students while wearing a jean jacket in 1980. [photo source]

"His life had become a not very interesting movie that he seemed condemned to see over and over again."

The first third of this book caused me some serious trouble. I couldn't get used to the writing. It just seemed awful. The type of smelly, polyester shit characteristic of everything that comes from the seventies. And then it grows on you. Like when you first move down South and hate the living shit out of it and then begin to relish in its shabby, stunted ways.

It is most of all a ridiculous book, filled with angry, crazy Southerners of a small town Georgia hell. There is not one normal person in the book. It's kind of sick, too. All the mention of snakes and dog fights sent me into shock. I think I am terrified of Harry Crews.

Sometimes reading books about negative subjects has a strange effect on the reader, sending you into a bad mood, just because you hate some of the people in the book. The effect of this book is pretty powerful that way. As if you're watching something really horrible happen, fascinated and can't look away, you have to keep watching to see the grande finale these hellish scenes are building up to. It's not a very nice feeling.

I'm sure this is a book that a lot of people hate. I would exclusively recommend it to people interested in the South or people tired of reading writers who play around with their words too much and end up saying nothing at all. I think what I liked about the book was that it doesn't try too hard to do things in a new way. It doesn't try to tell a story dependent on form or propped up on gimmick. It just gets told.

--------------------------------------

Year Published: 1976. Pages: 177.

Eat When You Feel Sad / Zachary German

2011-07-28T22:41:00.002-04:00

b. 1988 - still alive

"Robert thinks "If I get Chinese food I'll feel okay for as long as it takes to eat the Chinese food. If I get twice as much Chinese food I'll feel okay for twice as long.""

Robert's cat is mentioned multiple times on 24 pages of this book; that's second only to cigarettes, which are mentioned multiple times on 30 pages of this book. I know this because there's an index and I like looking at indices. I probably enjoyed looking at the index more than actually reading the book, not that I didn't like reading it, I thought it was pretty entertaining, actually it gave me something to point to when justifying some of my habits.

Before I read this I knew it was going to be sparely written. I knew it would be about a depressed person. And I wonder if I hadn't known that, if I hadn't ever heard about and read this type of bare-ass autistic writing, would I have continued in my elitist ways and called it 'typing' instead of 'writing?' Maybe. This is certainly a book that will not age well, already it's dated, but the nice thing is knowing that it wasn't written for posterity. It's a brief communication, in a mumble, that probably you won't hear too well, but you don't need to anyway, because you already know what the words are. You've been saying them forever.

There are a few things I was happy about, which I have put into a list, because I don't want to explain and lists are useful for just stating things:

1.) There are no metaphors.

2.) There is a moment when Robert is putting on a sweater (that he just bought from a thrift store) while walking on the street and he becomes nervous at the possibility of people watching him do it.

3.) Robert calls his cat "baby."

4.) Robert only thinks about exercising, but never actually does it.

5.) There are no unrealistic/deep conversations.

6.) There's nothing oblique about the character(s) or what they're doing.

7.) There's no pretend wisdom or knowledge of ultimate meaning.

8.) There are no questions.

9.) Landscape, physical, and often emotional descriptions are omitted.

10.) Appropriately sentimental ending.

------------------------------------------------

Year published: 2009. Pages: 117. [Melville House Publishing]

Anagrams / Lorrie Moore

2011-07-27T20:44:00.002-04:00

b. 1957 - still alive

"Every time she passes the department sign for "outgoing mail," for instance, she mutters, without fail, "I've had enough of those; I need a wan poet type.""

I love reading Lorrie Moore just because she is hideously uncool and she always makes me feel better no matter what. She makes really bad jokes and in the words of Stephen Malkmus: I'm the only one who laughs at your jokes when they are so bad and your jokes are always bad. He might as well have written that for Lorrie Moore. Now that I'm thinking about it, Pavement makes perfect background music to Lorrie Moore stories. There's that same play on words and clunky 90's atmosphere to both of them.

The characters in Anagrams, especially the central character, or really in any book of Lorrie Moore's, are on the edge of hysteria at all times or maybe only in their social interactions. The main character of this book, Benna, makes up imaginary family members to whom she talks instead of talking just to herself. At one point, I started to think the 'imaginary people' was just a nice way of saying 'people I can't believe I'm connected to' and I thought they were real in the story, but they're not and then I realized Benna ate Thanksgiving dinner alone. If you look at the book and take out the 'imaginary people' and leave just Benna alone, it becomes very sad.

Mostly, I think this book is about failed people, people who didn't make it thru their twenties into a settled-down normality. Success is what they don't have and tho it depresses them, they tell bad jokes and do goofy, childish things despite their depression.

So, yeah, I guess I would say I liked it.

--------------------------------------------

Year published: 1986. Pages: 225.

Varying Degrees of Hopelessness / Lucy Ellmann

2011-07-23T12:40:00.002-04:00

b. 1956 - still alive thank God. [I prefer my toast with peanut butter and chocolate chips sprinkled up top. Photo source.]

"Contrary to popular belief the world is not beautiful, lit by its ceiling light. Its design is flawed. Every living thing creates more mess than it picks up. We're transforming stations: we consume things that originally looked and smelled fairly good, and then turn them into shit. This is our contribution to the universe."

Lucy Ellmann is our new and improved Charlotte Bronte. Here, an interviewer described her: "In person, Lucy Ellmann appears almost pathologically shy. She speaks quietly, sometimes barely rising above a mumble, her big blue-eyed gaze wanders around the room, her hand hovers in front of her mouth as if trying to conceal some orthodontic catastrophe, though I can't see evidence of one. This diffidence is at odds with her prose manner, which is distinctively loud..."

I learned from the same interview that readers are not expected to relate to Ellmann's main characters, because they are somewhat autobiographical and morose. They are Brontean [unlike those mainstreamers Austen wrote about] because they are rare and considered abnormal. Sometimes their abnormalities will make you want to reach into the book and slap them for their self-hatred and apathy, but mostly they'll make you laugh. Hopefully, this is a self-conscious laugh. You know, maybe secretly, that Ellmann's characters are not so wildly different from yourself, that their horrifying lack of social ease is understandable even communicable, like chickenpox. Their own self-conscious battle with themselves makes them hyper-aware of other people's feelings, leaving them deprived of the things they want or making them dress in ugly clothing.

I will tell you that the heroine's inept and delusional take on relationships is awesomely reassuring, but I don't want to tell you about her sexual malaise, because I think I'll make it sound awful. Both the hero and the heroine dawdle in a semi-romantic [awkward] friendship for a couple years and then the inevitable happens, one of them meets a blonde, tan Californian.

Although the characters are sad or are dealing with shit that is sad, the book itself is not sad and is not boring in the way that the depiction of sadness can be is some other books. There is an overall tone of biting self-deprecation that I really enjoyed. Though, sometimes, the language can feel dowdy, like the heroine herself.

I was worried this wasn't going to have a happy ending, I thought with all this repressed emotion, someone is going to have to kill themselves, but it ends with a nice, ten and a half pound baby.

"The Pacific islanders who were exiled to Mauritius, so that their own island could be used for testing the atom bomb, died of ugliness. Mauritius was too ugly to bear. Robert too had seen ugliness, but so far it hadn't killed him. He was working on disgusting himself to death."

Year published: 1991. Pages: 182.

An Invisible Sign of My Own / Aimee Bender

2011-07-21T22:09:00.000-04:00

b. 1969 - still alive

"On my twentieth birthday, I bought myself an ax."

That opening sentence won me over, I read it standing near shelves of books and leaned into them for support as a little wave of euphoria broke over me, then I took the book home and stared at it, afraid that what followed wouldn't feel as good. What followed was the story of a girl obsessed with numbers, she is someone who has to knock, literally, on wood for reassurance throughout her day. This book is like one of those old songs by Belle & Sebastian, the ones that glorify the weird girl. If this were a song written by B&S's Stuart Murdoch, it would be titled 'Mona and Her Amputee Identity Disorder.'

Let me first say that I loved the hell out of this book. Maybe it wasn't written as well as I've heard Bender's other stories are written, (I've never read her before, so I've nothing to compare this with) but I've found that the more personal a book becomes to the reader, the less the actual writing matters e.g. Jean Rhys, early Lorrie Moore. And what is 'good writing' anyway? I think this book is definitely one you have to take personally or else it will fall flat. I like its imperfections and the spots where the story falters, its lack of depth at times. I am glad Aimee Bender wrote this the way it is.

There is a fable in the prologue of this book. The people in it, a family, have to chop off various limbs to get eternal life. Then, because they are hideous, they get kicked out. They made their sacrifice now for nothing, because they will eventually die anyway. The baby of the amputee family was excluded from amputation, but when she's twenty, her leg falls off and she is accepted by the other amputee family members as, in her deformity, one of them. This fable doesn't play out literally in the story, but its general implications are apparent and we find that they don't work out so well in reality. Instead, a better ending is found, one that doesn't include self destructiveness as redemption.

Year published: 2000. Pages: 242.

READINGS

2011-07-19T21:01:00.001-04:00

By chance, I picked up two books written by two different Jewish women. Both were born in the same year, both familiar with each other's writing, one is dead, one is not. They are representatives of a genre, except I don't know which genre, I think it starts with an F. Things are getting strange around here.

1.) American Genius, a Comedy / Lynne Tillman

b.1947 - still alive [photo by Nan Goldin]

"Actually, I want to be surrounded by many cats, hundreds, if I didn't have to take care of them and be responsible for cleaning their litter boxes, because when looking at them, at their sleek coats, their serene indifference, their implacable calm, unless they've gone mad like my cat who stalked and attacked me, the world's horror leaves temporarily."

I like Lynne Tillman's book because she doesn't call people by their real names, instead she uses made-up nicknames based on their personality. Like the 'demanding man' or the 'birdman.' She is naturally weird where other writers try to be weird. This book is s l o w, which is why I liked it so much. Fast paced novels are okay, too, but I like to go back to something like this, it cuts deeper, because its pressure builds up and stays with you for days & days. It's definitely a book you have to focus on and have attention to spare for this style of prose. I would say you have to be completely alone, but I have a short attention span now, which I blame on the internet. The sentences are long and demanding, you have to have a lot of free space in your head to keep the thread of just one sentence sometimes. This woman builds sentences that are as digressionary, pointless, and exciting as one's own thoughts. They raised my blood pressure. There are certain things (occurrences, episodes) that resurface many times throughout the book. If you don't like repetition, I can assure you that you will hate this book, but I liked it, because I think Tillman wanted to remind you of things, how things really are inside your head. People have the same thoughts repeatedly, things they obsess about. They use their memory and their memory gets them further and further away from what 'actually' happened.

You never really know where the woman of the story is staying, I think it's some sort of quiet resort in Massachusetts, where the food is gross. She records her observations, memories, and knowledge. She is the female W.G. Sebald or Marcel Proust. This book is very much focused on the body, mostly the skin, its physical presence and problems are found everywhere. If I had to say what this book is about I would have to say skin and cats. It made me miss my childhood cats so much I had to run and find my current cat to wake up and hold til he bit my arms.

[Year published: 2006. Pages: 292. Soft Skull Press]

2.) Blood and Guts in High School / Kathy Acker

b.1947 - d.1997 breast cancer

"Teachers replace living dangerous creatings with dead ideas and teach these ideas as the history and meaning of the world. Teachers torture kids. Teachers teach you intricate ways of saying one thing and doing something else."

Two people stared at the cover of this book for an inexcusably rude amount of time, in awe of Kathy Acker's unsanctified head. I won't tell you who they were, since you don't know them. I can only be thankful because, as far as I know, they didn't open the covers and look inside at all the drawings of naked people.

This book has an inordinate amount of wildness in it. You'll encounter some crazy bullshit in this book, which will, depending on your personality, make you either laugh or feel uncomfortable. Parts of it are drawings, poems, plays, paragraphs - all of which come together into a story of a girl named Janey. A lot of crap happens to Janey and then she gets cancer and dies. It's a novel of oppression. I don't know why you would read this book if you weren't interested in feminism, maybe you want to make fun of it, in which case I don't like you and please leave now. Reading Kathy Acker is a stepping stone, now you can never unread her. People who read Kathy Acker seem like the kind of people that will bring it up a number of times in their life when discussing any subject at all - this will seem annoying, but it's really just the effect.

I can't say I liked every bit of this book, [who likes translating Persian poetry?] but I liked that it was different and non-boring. It will make you want to re-read The Scarlett Letter with freshened eyes and subvert the patriarchy.

Year originally published: 1978. Pages: 165.

- from Who is Afraid of Kathy Acker?

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy #1 / Douglas Adams

2011-07-16T18:07:00.000-04:00

b. 1952 - d. 2001 of a heart attack

"Life, loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it."

I did not come near to suspecting how much I would like this book. Mostly, it made me laugh like an idiot and feel nerdy, which are both pleasant things. Before, I was too much of a book snob to even think about picking this up, a NYT bestseller about aliens, heh, NO. [However, horrible phases pass you by and you become the subject of other, less demanding phases which open up the field of criticism even wider.] This is not some dumb-ass book. It's very intelligent. It's a good-ass book, written by a good-ass man that drinks tea. I'd like to read the rest in the series, but I have so many other things to read.

It actually starts out so normal, that it kind of lost my attention. It wasn't any fault of the writing, which by the way is nothing to laugh at, since the book reads really well - it's just been awhile since I read a story that followed a traceable linearity. I think this is one of those books that causes the reader to go thru a series of strange facial expressions and sounds, giving other people, the non-readers, a chance to raise their eyebrows at the person and think, "What a weirdo. At least I'm not as socially defective as that person."

Douglas Adams described himself as a 'radical atheist,' which I guess is apparent from reading this book, which has exactly zero references to God. Instead, other life forms are the creators. Aliens. Maybe I should think about why that makes me so uncomfortable. Probably because I have to reconcile the fact that I like this story a lot, but am not a fan of atheism. Or aliens. Altho, I loved the sad robot.

Also, it seems like British musicians are Hitchhiker fans, for instance OK Computer, Paranoid Android? What's going on over there.

"What's up?"

"I don't know," said Marvin, "I've never been there."

Adams playing guitar, the smoking one is Neil Gaiman

Year published: 1979. Pages: 216.

The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western / Richard Brautigan

2011-07-14T21:21:00.001-04:00

[b.1935 - d.1984 Suicide.] Doesn't his hand on the mailbox look deformed? I've stared at it for so long and can't figure it out.

"...the professor took to thinking too long about things that were not important. Once he spent two hours thinking about an iceberg. He had never spent more than a few moments previously in all of his life thinking about icebergs."

This book killed me. And by kill I mean it was like Whoosh! and I was off in Oregon with two professional killers. One who counts things and one who is curious, both of whom I dearly loved. When I had finished the book it was like Plop! and I was back in my disappointingly real life with no happy ending to the story to console myself with. It was fun to read, like something by Vonnegut or Francesca Lia Block, I think, mainly because of the combination of the rock-solid-concrete prose and kooky story material. Brautigan was probably on some heavily-influential 'chemicals' while getting this one out. Considering that, it was probably fun to write this book as well.

I guess from the title you can guess that this book isn't about normal people doing normal things, like washing dishes or blogging. I wish we didn't have to cry Metaphor! at everything that is not based in reality. I want to be able to take this book at face value, but I guess you can't do that after a certain age when you are finally able to buy a bottle of crappy wine from Target. It's a real downer that everything has to have a meaning.

The Hawkline Monster. What?

The Hawkline Monster controls minds. It is a very bad, evil monster. It doesn't kill anything directly, it enslaves people or makes them into something else, like furniture. It also makes people want to climb into each other's beds with alarming rapidity. The Hawkline Monster has a conscience, which is its helplessly weak little shadow.

This sounds like drugs. Drugs are the metaphor, right?

Wrong, bitch! It's clinical depression.

Well, whatever you want the Hawkline Monster to be in reality, it is really just some tricksy pool of light invented by a blonde haired man who shot himself in the head with a .44 Magnum. [That sentence makes me want to cry.] The weird thing with Brautigan is that the Hawkline Monster of this story gets defeated and turned into something 'good,' but which ultimately does not lead to the happiness of its characters. It does not even bring them closer together. What brought them together was the Hawkline Monster, the 'bad.' It's a befittingly strange conclusion to a strange story, one I will be re-reading and calling the library to break to them the sorry news that someone, some thief, has stolen their book from my...car.

Year published: 1974 Pages: 216

The Chronology of Water / Lidia Yuknavitch

2011-07-11T12:57:00.047-04:00

Dressed for a reading.

I'm making myself write about this, because I finished it yesterday and still, I feel like I have no idea what to say about it or where to begin. I went thru a series of stunned expressions, disgusted, hating, sad, and finally disbelief that I had thought about never finishing it, because by the end I'd become completely enamored.

Yuknavitch says, "I want you to hear how it feels to be me inside a sentence. Even if some of the sentences lose their meaning."

You will, they do. Recognize this book is a memoir, so it does not ever leave the confines of the monolith (see above photo) that is Lidia Yuknavitch. At times, this can be claustrophobic. But maybe that was my fault? Since I read it too fast? If I could, I'd gift this book to every female member of my family. But I won't because I'm poor and they wouldn't get thru the rough, raw portions anyway. In other words, it's a book you have to share.

If not completely well written, the book is definitely easy to read. Sometimes it felt like reading someone's blog archives. Don't think I mean that disparagingly, it's just that the language is so unpolished and 'individual.' Maybe it was just easier to think of her has a blog persona than an actual person. There are large portions of this book I can in no way relate to, but why do we have to relate to a piece of literature in order to appreciate it? I no longer do that anymore, I try my best to remove myself from the narrative. There are portions of this book that made me think, oh, yeah this is why Chuck Palahniuk read it 12x, the perv. So, you know what that means.

Befittingly, I read this lying by a pool in between swims.

Year published: 2010 Pages: 293

The Night Visitor and other stories / B. Traven

2011-07-09T17:54:00.000-04:00

[1890 - 1969] Died of unknown causes in Mexico City.

"During my early youth I carried all of my earthly goods in my pants and coat pockets, that is when I had a coat, because I had to be ready to travel at any hour no matter where I happened to be, mostly on account of merciless truant officers. Since then, having become in the meantime well-to-do, I carried all my earthly riches in that shaky cardboard box. It makes you wonderfully independent."

These stories are about Mexico and what I'm thinking is: this sounds boring like all other norte americanos writing about South America. [I'm considering Traven an American since he was born in Chicago, despite all the wild rumors about his identity.] However, Traven tells stories like they should be told, can I say he writes with 'heart' without sounding too blurbish? They're meaty stories, which is just what my skin & bones need from time to time. They're, for the most part, fantastical stories, but without that dry 'magical realism' of other South American lit. [I may be talking about Garcia Marquez. Have I told you I cannot bear Marquez, because I can't.]

I think what I liked about them the most was that they made my headache go away. I've estimated that I have a headache ~70% of the time and to find something that zaps it is ... good.

Reading the stories out loud is possibly the best way of flushing out the the little sleeping ducks nestled into the fields of Traven's story-telling. It's like the way in which children's stories are meant to be read aloud. Except I read these mostly to my dog and whoever was outside my window.

One of these stories has been made into a movie: Macario. I don't understand how they did that. Or why.

"...protect yourself against the evil sprites of the tropical hell."

Year originally published: 1966. Pages: 235.

Naked Lunch / William S. Burroughs

2011-07-07T21:48:00.001-04:00

b.1914 - d.1997 Died of a heart attack.

"Now I, William Seward, will unlock my word horde... My Viking heart fares over the great brown river where motors put put in jungle twilight and whole trees float with large snakes in the branches and sad-eyes lemurs watch the shore, across the Missouri field out along distant train whistles, comes back to me hungry as a street boy don't know to peddle the ass God gave him..."

I wanted to read this because of what Kerouac said about it, I don't really remember what he said, but he made it sound good. I didn't like it that much, no, actually I did like it, but it's complicated - I appreciated it. I'm sitting here in front of my computer and can't really remember anything about what happened in it. It was like a 3 second tornado that picked me up and then sat me down nicely, with a lollipop in compensation for the trouble. A lollipop made, maybe, of candied cocaine.

You'll be much happier if, when you read this, you just skip the first half of the book. Do that for yourself, at least.

At work, there's this old man who talks about whenever the hell he grew up, during the war. I remember him talking about idioms of the language in the fifties. He said people always were going: "you dig it, man?" and "yeah, I dig it." He was right. Maybe he was formerly a drug addict or something, because that is the dialogue of the people [junkies] in Naked Lunch.

If you, like me, do not regularly use drugs, this can be highly educational. Nutmeg! You can get high off of a tablespoon of nutmeg. Good to know. [See also 'yage']. You'll find yourself staring at people, thinking 'psychotropic drugs' as they stare back at you with round, frightened eyes. I'm not really against drugs, I sure seem to read about them a lot. The book's definitely not recommended if you're easily nauseated. Some of the more lurid descriptions in the first half are what your mom would call gross, if she read it. In fact, I can't believe this sits on a library shelf without burning the covers off of the neighboring books. There are too many people getting raped and spreading their yucky diseases.

"Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference. They would like to jump down into their stomachs and digest the food and shovel the shit out."

Year originally published: 1959. Pages: 213.

The Literary Swagger

2011-07-04T20:09:00.000-04:00

W.G. Sebald

walking around, hands-a-pockets.

Julia and the Bazooka / Anna Kavan

2011-07-02T19:16:00.000-04:00

[b.1901 - d.1968] Died of heart failure.

"What I do never affects anyone else. I don't behave in an embarrassing way. And a clean white power is not repulsive; it looks pure, it glitters, the pure white crystals sparkle like snow."

[Except when you think the people standing in the road are hallucinogenic apparitions and getting run over by your car won't hurt them because they're not real.]

A collection of 15 short stories. All of which are worth reading, even the weaker ones, and none of them are happy or will make you feel good. Sometimes they will make you feel awful. I think, actually, all the stories are about feeling awful. They are connected short stories (the ones I like best), with a principal female character who is going thru a lot of shit. She is suicidal, addicted to heroin, lonely, and gets into strange relationships with odd, disappearing men.

Here, Anna Kavan is really just writing about herself and she does it well, if melodramatic at times. But I liked how melodramatic it was. For example:

"I've never enjoyed my life, I've never liked people. I love the mountains because they are the negation of life, indestructible, inhuman, untouchable, indifferent, as I want to be. Human beings are hateful; I loathe their ugly faces and messy emotions. I'd like to destroy them all."

This pessimism and anger is found frequently throughout the book, but something so blatantly misanthropic like that quoted above is actually a little humorous after a while. You get taken thru the horrible existence of this one girl, her hatred and fear of life, and you feel emotionally drained after reading it. You are afraid to admit that you can identify with this character or at least you can understand her and she makes you understand, because Kavan writes with an extreme honesty and bravery.

My Three Favorite Stories:

1.) Fog - I liked this because I often feel psychotic when driving and the weather often matches my state of mind. The story is a waking nightmare, one in which reality is pushed away as the woman comes out of her foggy denial. It's ironic that she uses heroin to maintain a semblance of sanity, but she appears sane only in her inner world, to herself.

2.) World of Heroes - The story that comes nearest to being pleasant. The person who called Kavan a feminist on the cover of this book obviously didn't read this story. Atypical doesn't equal feminist. I liked it because our central character finds herself some outcast friends and drives around the world with them. Sad ending, as usual.

3.) Zebra-Struck - Relationship story. The closest Kavan comes to a love story. The character identifies herself as a mutant. Struck by cosmic rays, she is something inhuman. But in her alienation, she becomes exclusively dependent on a married man much older than her who gets some sort of perverse delight in making her depend on him.

Don't look into her eyes!!!

Year published: 1970. Pages: 155.

Too Loud a Solitude / Bohumil Hrabal

2011-07-01T17:26:00.001-04:00

[1914 - 1997] Fell out of a fifth story window whilst feeding pigeons.

"I drink to make me think better, to go to the heart of what I read, because what I read I read not for the fun of it or to kill time or fall asleep; I ... drink so that what I read will prevent me from falling into everlasting sleep, will give me the d.t.'s..."

It's a little too easy to just breeze thru this book; to drift thru its pages and then return it the library and forget about sad Hanta and his outdated paper press and outdated love of books. It seems like this story is the epitome of a modernized Czechoslovakian folktale, it has just the right amount of sad and funny, absurd and mundane. It's a book against progress and efficiency, its narrator upholds the old philosophers, like Plato and has visions of Jesus and Lao Tzu when he's drunk. The narrator is old and over-educated for manual labor.

There is one part in particular that endeared this book to me. It's when Hanta (the narrator) remembers when he was younger and thought all he needed to look handsome was a pair of purple socks worn with sandals. The first time he wears them, he is on his way to meet a girl and he steps into a giant turd. He takes them off, leaves them in the road, and runs away into a field.

Year originally published:1976. Pages:98. Translator: Michael Henry Heim.

Picture source.

There is No Year / Blake Butler

2011-06-28T21:32:00.001-04:00

1979 - still alive.

"Q: WHAT SHOULD THE FATHER HAVE KEPT IN THE GLOVE BOX THAT HE DID NOT?

A: A gun, a length of wire, a set of rubber gloves, emergency money and some form of rations, Fear of Music by the Talking Heads, fake flowers (the kind that never die), permanent marker (the kind that can never be erased), a photo of his wife from a time he'd like to remember (uh-huh), a photo of his mother."

Should you read this book? Yes, you should. But know that experimental/indie literature requires some patience. And in that patience you will ask yourself, Why am I not reading a concrete story, one with fully threshed characters; one that doesn't contain the sentence: "The words became a new long vein inside his nose."

I don't know why not, because it would be whole lot more simpler and more convenient for the enjoying of my summer downtime.

You read this book, I think, because you like inventions when they involve putting words together to form sentences. This book is a skeleton where other novels are the obese bodies of the gastronomically unsatisfied.

You can call it dumb, pretentious, or the hopeless drivel of those following in David Foster Wallace's footsteps. You will feel this way or you may like it. But I don't think you'll like it. It's too exhausting to 'like.' You may feel, like me, that its the gray space between dream and memory and imagination. A rip in the seam of our ordinary lives; that the bizarre fantasy of the characters is a manifestation of their loneliness and isolation.

It's a strange tale of a family living in a house wreaking personal terrorism on anyone who enters. The telling of it is pressing, but at the same time does not attempt to make any sense of what is happening. I guarantee there will be times when you will have no sense of what the fuck is going on. (Not only in this book, but most likely in your personal life, too.) However weird it gets, the strangeness of the book doesn't distance the reader - actually, it's pretty familiar. It's a little heartbreaking, a little scary, and well worth the frustration of sorting thru its assortment of verbal escapades.

"They went to bed together, all at once, not discussing, and they didn't feel the need to lock their doors. They fell asleep quickly without thinking and their dreams were full of bliss or magic, some kind of wondrous unfamiliar which in the coming days of daylight would itch and itch against their lives."

Year of publication: 2011. Pages: 401.

The Literary Gams

2011-06-27T11:25:00.001-04:00

Julio Cortazar

showing off them legs

The Man in the High Castle / Philip K. Dick

2011-06-26T21:21:00.001-04:00

"For it is a fact that wu is customarily found in the least imposing places as in the Christian aphorism, 'stones rejected by the builder.' One experiences awareness of wu in such trash as an old stick, or a rusty beer can by the side of the road. However, in those cases, the wu is within the viewer. It is a religious experience. Here, an artificer has put wu into the object, rather than merely witnessed the wu inherent in it."

Oh, Philip. You let the I Ching write a book for you and look what happens. It gets called your 'best work' and wins a Hugo?

This book was born the same year as my mother. And I love it twice as much. Sorry, kidding. Even if you don't care what would have happened if the axis had won WWII (and you should because according Dick, it is probably happening in a parallel world) you will, I think, still appreciate the story telling. Sometimes it seemed as if the particular asian-speak of some of the dialogue carried over into Dick's prose. Words like 'the' and 'your' and 'my' are left out in some places. It is something that is very infectious and verbally thrifty. Altho, his book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is better than this. Rachael Rosen of 'DADOES' has a prototype in this book, Juliana. And again we see an underdog type of man who 'succeeds' when he does what others would only laugh at or have doubts about.

There is a part of the book that I liked the most where one of the characters has a nervous breakdown and goes to sit in a park with old men on benches. All the while fondling a tiny, worthless trinket and speaking into it. I got a lot out of that scene.

It seems wrong that this is considered science fiction. I have such a different idea of what science fiction is, mainly something I wouldn't want to read. Labeling a book as science fiction seems dismissive. It puts a piece of writing under a different domain, one outside of 'real literature.' Which is bullshit.

The Science Fiction Book Club needs members. I'm thinking about it.

This is probably why I haven't picked up any of Dick's books until recently. I thought they would be badly written, because on the spine of books at the library there is a UFO sticker which did a pretty good job of warding me off. So, I guess, my prejudice did nothing but deprive me of alternate universes and yarrow sticks.

Civil War recruiting poster for Mr. Tagomi

The Clown / Heinrich Boll

2011-06-21T21:20:00.002-04:00

1917 - 1985 Died of complications arising from diabetes.

"Do you suffer from melancholia?"

"How did you know?"

"I can tell by your voice. You should pray and take a bath."

"I've just had a bath, and I can't pray," I said.

I didn't know professional clowns had relationships. Let alone life altering breakups that leave them taking too many baths and smoking too many cigarettes and taking up the guitar to play songs for people on the streets of Bonn, Germany. For that matter, I can't picture clowns in post-war Germany at all.

Boll makes it work, tho, because this is a pleasure to read.

Hans Schnier: clown, not religious, a bohemian monogamist. Hans Schnier's career has just been ruined. His Catholic girlfriend has left him for a fellow Catholic. When he gets back to his hometown of Bonn, all his old friends have left or don't care about him anymore. His family is unremittingly cold and strange to him. There is one scene with his father that I thought was very good. Boll managed to convey the feeling of all the interactions between semi-estranged parents and their grown children in a few pages. Certain things that happen in the course of a family's individual history take on such a totemic role in this book. Our clown is very susceptible to particular images, especially from his childhood and no, it does not matter if they are real or not. The more I think about this the more I like it.

He is a kind of anti-masculine hero, it's very good. I like Heinrich Boll for being able to write such a character, he's a non-realist in a realist novel. I'm embarrassed to say that the book reminded me of something that Woody Allen would do. It has that obsessive, non-sensible quality that unfortunately isn't very common. I highly recommend this depressed clown.

And it has a nice cover.

Touchingly, his tear drop has a swastika in it. The message is one of German sadness, obviously.

Translator: Leila Vennewitz. Originally published: 1963. Pages: 247.

By Night in Chile / Roberto Bolano

2011-06-19T20:02:00.001-04:00

1953 - 2003 liver failure

"At the end of the day we were all reasonable, we were all Chileans, we were all normal, discreet, logical, balanced, careful, sensible people, we all knew that something had to be done, that certain things were necessary, there's a time for sacrifice and a time for thinking reasonably."

[I wish that at the end of the day I was Chilean.]

This is the first novel I've read by Roberto Bolano and I'll be reading more of him. My only regret is how little I knew of the premise on which this book was written. On the back cover of the book Susan Sontag calls this a 'meditation.' A very good word for what kind of book this is or what it becomes when you read it. It's written in the most natural language and this naturalness almost makes the book too easy to read. Pages flew by. Not that it doesn't command your attention, it does, but in a 'meditative' way. Like a trance that Bolano puts you under so that you suddenly become a Chilean priest traveling around Europe, writing demonic poems, wandering on yellow roads, ranting.

The book is about one priest's criticism on the state of literature. That it tends to suck, because writers aren't reading much classical lit. Altho, he does like some modern lit. He promotes young, unknown Chilean poets. I will warn you that if, like me, you have never read Neruda or Lorca you will feel uncultured and left out. (The reason I have not read Neruda or Lorca is that some poetry in translation seems to be bereft of value. Something so dependent on the vernacular, when translated...it's not the same.)

The priest is a very unorthodox one, it seems as if his priesthood is of secondary or even tertiary importance. He is self-conscious of his cassock. He has a sort of symbolic priesthood; one that thankfully keeps him from falling in love or becoming involved with women, or men. He's devoted to literature and his friends. It's strange what a relief it is to not have to read about sexuality, because its seems totally irrelevant in this book. However unusual, Bolano was smart to leave it out. The priest's not overtly religious as one would expect. I promise you will like this priest, even if you aren't a fan of Catholicism.

The problem is that I don't think you're supposed to like/sympathize with the priest. Bolano would hate that. Our priest retreats into literature while a revolution is overtaking his country and therefore he is a villain. The priest remains silent about political injustice he learned about too late and so he is haunted by a "wizened youth" who derides him for his supposed hypocrisy. I did not read this book within the context it was written. I know very little of Chilean history, and the thing is that if you don't know what it is that the priest chose to ignore, then his actions contain no perceivable shame. The actions that were intended to be failings are not or at least not the kind of failings that matter. He seems apolitical, above the melodrama of protest. And so his escape into literature can seem like an honorary delegation, permissible in intellectuals. If you read it in this way, Bolano actually appears to be understanding rather than condemning. This misinterpretation of human weakness is kind of fascinating. History is a strange beast. It changes everything.

"I could no longer bear the weight, or to be perhaps more precise, the alternatively pendular and circular oscillations of my conscience, and the phosphorescent mist, glowing dimly like a marsh at the vesperal hour, through which my lucidity had to make its way, dragging the rest of me along."

Translated by Chris Andrews. Originally published, 2000. Pages: 129

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men / David Foster Wallace

2011-06-17T20:24:00.000-04:00

1962 - 2008 suicide

"Victory for the Forces of Democratic Freedom!"

I feel really dumb trying to write about DFW's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. I said I wouldn't do it, but here I am. I don't usually like 'innovative writing' when it goes beyond a certain point of the unfamiliar and becomes an absurdity of no interest. For instance, one of the pieces in this (Datum Centurio) is a series of definitions of words in 2096. I admit to skipping over it. And I admit to not liking Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko. I think only the hardcore DFW fans really like those ones. However, one of the weirder ones ('weird' as in if your mom read it, she would have no idea what was going on) was one of my favorites: Church Not Made with Hands.

Top Two Stories in the 22 Story Collection:

1.) B.I. #20 12-96 New Haven, CT: I don't think I can name any other short story that has made me as sad as this one. It's one of the 'Brief Interviews' scattered throughout the book and is one of those story within a story type of thing that usually goes rotten when other writers attempt it. The interviewer is never heard, thankfully, but she's addressed, so it's sort of like a schizophrenic monologue. This format is excellent, because it conveys a realness to the reader with all the interruptions and the side tracking. If the story had been told without the interviewer and the interviewee, I think it would lose some quality that is present only when something is discussed. The quality, I think, is defensiveness. That need to represent something to someone else in such a way that it does not lose its ability to run you over.

2.) On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand, the Acclaimed Young Off-Broadway Playwright's Father Begs a Boon: Family discord, but not in the usual sense. A man grows to hate, not his wife, but his son. On his deathbed, after pretending all his life that everything was perfect and normal, he dies confessing his unending hatred of his son. It sounds awful, but it's really funny.

The Mezzanine / Nicholson Baker

2011-06-12T22:06:00.001-04:00

Nicholson Baker compensates for his baldness with a beard.

" I know that in solo elevator rides I have pretended to walk like a windup toy into the walls; I have pretended to rip a latex disguise off of my face, making cries of agony; I have pointed at an imaginary person and said, "Hey pal, I'll slap that goiter of yours right off, now I said watch it!""

The book smelled like vomit, it had blood and coffee stains on it, and it is shaped like a restaurant menu. Still, that didn't keep me away from it. It had footnotes that when on for paragraphs. Footnotes that bled into the next page before I was done reading the main text on the previous page. This book is about nothing. It's the Seinfeld of books. Not that I am complaining about that, just the opposite. I'm saying there was a lot to excuse me from ever finishing this. I did finish it, I read it slowly wherever possible. And I really liked it. Sometimes I would rush thru the main text to get to the footnote. Baker explains the importance of footnotes, so you'll find out.

The insane amount of detail in The Mezzanine is somehow comforting. Imagine writing about your lunch hour and taking up 135 pages to do it. That is the span of the book, whose center is a man who discovers that both his shoe laces have broken within 24hrs of each other. In my head, the narrator became Special Agent Dale Cooper. They both have that same current of thought that keeps going on and on about things other people don't pay attention to. A rigorous examination of otherwise ordinary things. It's either a better or more annoying way of living. I think better and this is why. The narrator reads his Penguin edition of Aurelius: "Observe, in short, how transient and trivial is all mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spice and ashes." A quote which the narrator describes as "destructive and unhelpful and misguided and completely untrue." (I agree). The transient and trivial part of the quote is especially irritating to our narrator, because the transient and the trivial is what his life is made up of. It's what counts. So, he throws away his philosopher. He sits in the sun and his mind wanders away into trivialities.

I think the whole book was written to counteract that Aurelius quote. It does an excellent job doing so.

"At that age [four] I once stabbed my best friend, Fred, with a pair of pinking shears in the base of the neck, enraged because he had been given the comprehensive sixty-four-crayon Crayola box - including the gold and silver crayons - and would not let me look closely at the box to see how Crayola had stabilized the built-in crayon sharpener under the tiers of crayons."

Diagram of an Escalator

Speedboat / Renata Adler

2011-06-09T21:16:00.001-04:00

Renata Adler [1938 - still alive]

"It may be that we were retarded. We were younger. We were other people, anyway, in another world."

I think this book is about the sixties. Renata Adler was a reporter among other things and this book is a collection of paragraphs about her observations. Observations about herself and other people and language. I liked it. Reading it is similar to listening to some one talk about shit, but only that particular kind of shit you most want to hear. Scraps and short sketches seem to be the only things my brain can handle this particular summer. (Too bad I made a resolution to get thru Infinite Jest). There is no storyline, linearity, or message. There are no conclusions made, no ending or beginning.

Ephemera. Am I allowed to use that word to describe this book? I don't think I am.

I have a feeling this is going to become one of my most favorite books. And thus in 178 pages, Adler finally breaks my reading block that I've had for too long now. Even though I keep forgetting what's in it, I keep skipping back thru the pages and nothing seems familiar, I'm going to count this as one of my major influences. I don't know how, but it's a pretty funny book. A little like Lorrie Moore's short stories. I didn't understand the P. Aaron thing in the telephone book. Does P. Aaron sound dirty? Is this a sixties thing or am I being dumb?

"I love the laconic ... A question is addressed to them. They do not answer. Another question. Silence. It is a position of great power."

It may be that small things that happen affect you more than you think possible. For one, small things happen more often than the big heavies. Personally, I remember seemingly inconsequential things and forget the overall episode all too much. It may be that our brains can accommodate only the pieces of something much larger. I think that is what Renata Adler was pointing to. The mass of inconsequential things that matter a lot more than they should. Like the wind:

""It is the sirocco", someone said, looking pale on the boat deck, passing the aspirin..."Always blame the wind. Depressions." A French man said that, in any case, he had a grand cafard."

Cafard is French for cockroach and is an idiom for depression.

The Eternal Husband / Fyodor Dostoevsky

2011-05-30T21:59:00.000-04:00

Dostoevsky had the eyes and nose of a small dog. [1821-1881] Died of a lung hemorrhage.

"What's the good of remembering the past when I've not the slightest power of escaping myself."

This is about two men of two types. One is the eternal husband and the other is the predatory type.

A middle aged man realizes he is depressed because he keeps seeing a man wearing a hat with a mourning band. The middle aged man does not feel guilty about all the shitty things he used to do, he decides he would make the same mistakes and bad decisions all over again if given the chance. Which is good, because regret is a waste of your resources. But the man reforms eventually! Kind of a disappointment, I know. But notice that he still unmarried, still a predatory type in the end. Really, he didn't change at all. He merely concluded one disturbing episode of his life. In the end, it says that he is happier and free of anxiety. Both are the joyful products of unselfconsciousness.

Why does he retire from douche baggery? Because of a child. Dostoevsky has a fixation with the power children wield over adults. Also, because he was almost murdered, the middle aged man overcomes his hypochondria.
The middle aged man is bothered by his liaison with a provincial married woman ten years past. Of whom he is slightly ashamed of having loved. Of whom he might have gotten pregnant. And by whom he was rejected. The man with the mourning band in his bowler is the husband of the woman and without knowing it, the middle aged man is troubled by this association.

The whole trick of this story is that none of the characters are conscious of their own motives. They are not introspective, which I congratulate them on. They have ignored or blinded themselves to whatever it is they really want. The middle aged man really wanted the provincial lady to have his child, but he couldn't admit it; he was too ashamed. The eternal husband wanted his wives to be continually stolen from him because he has to remain the eternal husband, but he couldn't acknowledge it. I don't think the eternal husband really wanted to kill the middle aged man, he knew revenge was expected of him [as is seen in the manner in which he treated the illegitimate child of his wife] and so he has sought out the middle aged man; the natural outcome of such a meeting is violence. We see the eternal husband make the middle aged man give him a Judas kiss. Does he make the middle aged man admit his betrayal? Or is he saying that the middle aged man is soon to be dead? Or he is a mad homosexual? The eternal husband is attracted to women he knows don't love him and who will eventually cheat on him. He anticipates it and so therefore he does not have to be betrayed without his own knowledge and consent.

The eternal husband makes his fifteen year old bride-to-be hate him and creepily watches as the middle aged man almost charms his way into her petticoat. And we see the eternal husband at the end with another, different wife, who hates him just as the others did and who is equally prowling as the others. Both of the men remain unaffected by the brief understanding they had of their own natures, it did them no good at all.

[Translator: Constance Garnett. Pages: 120]

It's possible I've misinterpreted all of this. Who really understands Dostoevsky?

Lyubov, his daughter. Never married. [1869 - 1926] Died of Anemia.

Cat's Eye / Margaret Atwood

2011-05-26T19:45:00.000-04:00

Canadian [1939 - still alive]

Young women need unfairness, it's one of their few defenses. They need their callousness, they need their ignorance. They walk in the dark, along the edges of high cliffs, humming to themselves, thinking themselves invulnerable.

I don't know exactly what to say about this book, because I liked it. Sometimes it seems written to appeal to masses of people (which it does), sometimes like something more uncommon. It's a question of snobbery: whether or not you can ignore the mainstream success of Atwood and read her unbiased by the acclaim of superfluities such as 'The New York Times Book Review' or 'Cosmo.' Shit, I just looked and there's actually a blurb on the cover from 'Cosmopolitan.' Generally, these books targeted towards women with a proclivity for reading modern classics are puerile nonsense. Remember The Lovely Bones? Remember The Secret Life of Bees? They're books that become book discussion topics and melodramatic movies that old ladies go see and cry during.

Atwood veers into this with her perfectly educated grammar and faultless story line. She mildly rejects the description of feminist for her work, which I understand since it's become such a dirty, but useless word. Any book about a certain kind of woman is immediately branded with Feminist, which discredits the extremo-feminist lit (probably very much more fascinating than their milder form). And I don't want to analyze this as a feminist text. True, the men in this book are portrayed as clueless and often ridiculous; where the women are strong and, let's say, able to control things, like people or is it people like things?

I think this book was intended to portray a middle aged woman, Elaine, by showing her past. An idea that is way over-used. There is possibly something flawed in thinking that the adult is explained by the occurrences of childhood or what's the use of growing up? Either a person is a person because that's the way she was born or the interference of other people has made her as she is. Maybe only believing in the influence of other people affected her, that rumination of memories is self destructive. Think of all the weird shit that has happened to you and in the end, you're still the same person. That's not to say that people can't change the way they live or think, but that they essentially have the same personality as always. There is no such thing as the 'blank slate,' it's too idealistic to believe. Instead of thinking the things that happened to her formed her personality, it could be that her personality is what caused everything to happen as it did. It might be egoistic to think things happen because of who we are, but I think it's better than things blindly happening regardless of us. And it is the group of interacting personalities of the little girls that determined the events as they were. The girls' particular control over Elaine didn't just happen in the natural order of things. There is no universal law stating that women must be bitchy to one another.

Nicolas Cage says to read Siddhartha

2011-05-25T23:51:00.000-04:00

The Girlfriend of Charles Starkweather

2011-05-24T14:57:00.001-04:00

Caril Ann Fugate, the youngest woman to be tried for 1st degree murder in US history.

First Love and Other Sorrows / Harold Brodkey [AKA Aaron Roy Weintraub]

2011-05-16T19:18:00.003-04:00


[1930 - 1996] Died of AIDS. The caption reads - "A portrait is a portrait. There is no forgiveness."

"He was still immersed in the dim, wet wonder of the folded wings that might open if someone loved him; he still hoped, probably, in a butterfly's unthinking way, for spring and warmth. How the wings ache, folded so, waiting; that is they ache until they atrophy."

I didn't like these stories. They're too healthy and educated (Brodkey went to Harvard, which is too bad). They are styled to sound like 'American literature in the fifties' and it kind of disgusts me to read that. Think of a student's imitation of early Philip Roth or Richard Yates.

The stories capture periods of a boy's life from adolescence to his college days, then they move on to scenes of his sister's adulthood. There is a numbing complacency in these stories. They lack emotion and they lack the engaging emotionless quality that in itself provokes emotion, which I suppose can be expected of a writer's first work (he was only 24).

The one story I liked was The Quarrel. It's about two college students bicycling around France for summer vacation. First and most importantly - college students are not interesting, I know because I am one and I don't like to read about us. Freed from college, these two boys are definitely involved in a nice little bromance. "We were free from college and observation; we were molding each other, protecting each other from being ordinary." Each admires the other for their idealized character, but as with most ideal qualities, they are only a posture for the benefit of another person. I found their situation very funny and true, because they went on this epic journey together around France, but ruined the trip by hating each other most of the time for inane little reasons. [Year: 1954. Pages: 223]

Werner Herzog:

2011-05-15T21:44:00.000-04:00

"I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the twentieth century. A major, major mistake. And it's only one of the mistakes of the twentieth century, which makes me think that the twentieth century in its entirety was a mistake."

[source]

Les Liaisons dangereuses / Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

2011-05-14T18:40:00.000-04:00


[1741 - 1803] Died of fever and exhaustion.

In the words of our anti-heroine Marquise de Merteuil: "He'd call me false and faithless and I've always had a weakness for those two words; next to cruel, they're the nicest words for a woman to hear, and not so hard to earn."

The novel is nothing more than a collection of letters exchanged between more than 5 people. How Laclos manages to pitch these letters so perfectly is creepily amazing.

The whole point of the story told thru letters is the rivalry between two aristocrats (a Vicomte and a Marquise) fulfilling their French Rococo duties by out-competing one another in sexual escapades.
It's strangely absorbing to read considering the subject. I guess nosing into people's secrets is always amusing.
The Vicomte and the Marquise are really just playing a game, they want to have as much fun as possible at the expense of ignorance and hypocrisy and sincerity. I don't think they take anything seriously except each other. I hate saying they're in love, because they didn't believe in love. So, let's say they were perfect equals. When the Vicomte attaches himself to The Prude, the Marquise is jealous and seduces Danceny to get even. The poor Marquise. She is supposed to represent a proto-feminist, seeking revenge on the patriarchy by humiliating men with her superior control over herself and her environment. But Laclos deprives her of this (probably because it was more true to life) by letting the Vicomte hold the greater power in the end. The Vicomte decides her ugly future, she is turned into the arch bitch of her little world on the malediction of a man who was her equal in deviousness and trickery. Everything went to hell in the end because the two people controlling things turned against one another. The Vicomte wanted to subvert her power with his own, but the Marquise wouldn't submit to his smug confidence. He was treating her like a whore. Thus, the Vicomte either gets stabbed or allows himself to be stabbed by Danceny. I don't think he allowed himself to be stabbed, he enjoyed being alive too much to want an easy way out.
The Vicomte ends up with almost no condemnation while the Marquise is forced to exile. Yet it is the Vicomte who does the most damage. He rapes a fifteen year old girl, fresh from her blind education in a convent, seduces a religious woman who is left alone far too much by her husband, and turns Danceny into sword-wielding killer. What does the Marquise do? She lures men to her country villa until they're bored of her. She seeks revenge on men, but it was the only power she could exert so who can blame her? Her intrusion into a young couple's affairs is another way for her to manifest the sense of power it seems she so badly needed to express. And I think her handling of it was pretty funny.
All the characters in this book end up fucked by the society they live in. I think Laclos was above all, moralizing on such a society as would tolerate the philandering of it's men and condemn the same thing of it's women.
Marie Antoinette had to secretly order a copy of this book which had no title or author displayed on the cover.

[Translator: Douglas Parmee. Year: 1782. Pages: 372]

Bonjour Tristesse / Françoise Sagan

2011-05-06T16:49:00.004-04:00

Spending her froggy summer at a villa, somewhere near the beach [1955].

I read this book every spring around the time the school semester is ending. Reading it this year means I've read it 4x. The first time I read it I was the same age as the narrator, Cecile, and it was, to me, then a light and dreamy summer book. I read it less as the melodramatic reminiscence written by a teenage French girl that it is and more as a smart novella, with no underlying meaning hidden in its shallow sentences. I liked it for its hard-line emptiness then, because I wholeheartedly agreed with its 50's youth wisdom and got carried away by its plot, but now I like it more because its annoyingly apathetic tone, its plagiarized sadness is something ridiculously familiar and common to all teenagers with literary pretensions - the exception, of course, is that Sagan actually wrote something that someone wanted to publish.

It amuses me to read something so dumb and pretty, that I read years ago and thought was an intelligently written work about a girl on her summer vacation who schemes away her time. I remember liking it because I knew I should like it, since it was a favorite book of a member in some Swedish band. (It was either Peter or Bjorn, or it might have been John...) I still don't know if Sagan intended for it to be as dumb as it is, does she concoct this story to tease us for our pretensions of being 'bad' or 'world-weary' or 'pessimistic?' Is she nodding her head to French people in general - to write a French cliche that she knew Americans would lap up in genuine appraisal of her talents? However, she was 19 when it was published, meaning she was the same age as Cecile in the book when she wrote it and probably just as unwittingly kitschy.

I'd like to think she wrote Cecile's character so that those of us who read it young would have someone to mimic, and that later, when we weren't teenagers anymore, we would have something to laugh at about ourselves. Whatever the intention, I still like to read it, because it's become a sentimental gauge of whatever differences in thinking or experience of the previous year has left me with as I begin each summer vacation. [Year: 1954. Pages: 130]

In Charlie Bat's words

2011-04-20T17:46:00.002-04:00

"Here I am in the LA wasteland. I hate the palm trees. They look like stupid birds. Everyone lies around in the sun like dead fishes. I go back to my little sad bed and feel sorry for myself. Saving all my pennies. Still no work. But I keep hoping."

The Vet's Daughter / Barbara Comyns

2011-04-14T20:55:00.000-04:00

A plot-driven novel! God, I hate plots. Barbara Comyns was a realist in denial. She starts out solidly enough with a horribly disconnected family, then imposes a weird thing on the vet's daughter towards the end that seems completely out of sync with the beginning. The vet's daughter is Alice Rowlands and her father is a drunken veterinarian living in London. The whole point of the story is to show humans being cruel to other humans. How we trample on one another. Animals seem to be the only bright point.

What is the matter with English writers in the early part of the 20th century? They were all bitter, but not brightly so. They wrote these storyish stories that attempted to attain a mythic quality. I see them with super serious looks on their faces when they sat down to write stories in their attics. If I had to characterize it, I would say: Dully realistic with a few eccentricities to try to enliven the deadness of homely words on paper. It takes itself too seriously and this worries us.

[1907 - 1992]
Notice her uncanny resemblance to Winona Ryder?

Tropic of Cancer / Henry Miller

2011-04-08T22:42:00.003-04:00

Henry Miller [1891-1980], smoking a long one.

"I'm a bit retarded; like most Americans."

I'm so tired of reading about death. About people too bored to experience anything like the misery from being alive and making stupid decisions. This is why I like Henry Miller. As lecherous and sexist as he was, at least we can say he was honest about it. At least he kept himself from being bored or becoming a mediocre mensch.
This book is about being poor and hungry and crazy in the 1920's. But being poor in Paris, which is not like being poor at all. It's also very sexually graphic. In almost every review of the book people complain about this incessantly, I feel like hurling the book at them or at their paltry embarrassment.
In fact, while I was reading this in the library, there was a man in his 20's (are they men in their 20's??) complaining very loudly about having to read sex scenes in American slave literature (which is a whole other topic) for school. He was embarrassed and angry, when he should have been understanding. The same thing goes for Miller's novel. All anyone mentions is how gross the sex is. Yeah, he uses words like cunt and fuck among others in that category A LOT. What's so offensive about cunts? People don't like to be confronted with what they do when no one's watching.
What's funny is that Henry Miller's friendships with men make so much better reading material than whatever went on between him and his Parisian women. He actually liked people (except the bourgeois), which seems like such a rare thing. He was extraordinarily dependent on other people. For food, mostly. And cigarettes. He reminds me of Kerouac, but without some of the silly self-indulgence. But unlike Kerouac, Miller lacks identity. Kerouac had a personality that he miracuously translated lovably in his work. Miller kind of floats thru this novel. He fills it with his observations of other people. Not such a bad thing. Did I mention he writes desperately? Like it was the only thing keeping him alive. [Year: 1961. Pages: 318]

Of Dostoevsky: "It is a pity that we should never again have the opportunity to see a man placed at the very core of mystery and, by his flashes, illuminating for us the depth and immensity of the darkness."

Of planetary guidance: "What is this chaff we chew in our sleep if it is not remembrance of fang-whorl and star cluster?"

Vertigo / WG SEBALD

2011-04-02T10:55:00.001-04:00

Sebald was having some sort of nervous breakdown while composing the pages of this book, mostly writing about himself as he travels around Italy and Germany. On foot and by train! He draws bleak comparisons with himself and tragic historical figures in the thick of their lyophilizing depression. He went alone on a trip around Venice and Verona and experienced a trip-ending paranoia of being followed by two strangers. I think it was seven years later that he returned to Italy to wander around again for apparently no other reason than to take a photo of the pizzeria where he went crazy. He returns to his place of birth, a small town in south west Germany, where he goes a little nuts again remembering his childhood in minute detail.
A very slow, thoughtful book with twisting, vertigo-inducing sentences. I recently had a bout of vertigo due to an earache. It was profoundly unsettling to wake up every morning or stand up suddenly and feel the room flop over and over on itself. I kind of thought this book would be like that, but it's a little more relaxed in an anal-retentive, hyper-observational way. Sebald seems able to recall near-insignificant details abut things that happened to him years ago. I envy his ability to remember his childhood so clearly. Unless he's reconstructing his past for the sake of the book, but I like to think everything he writes is for real. That it actually happened the way he tells it. [Year:1990 Pages:263]

This is who makes her appearance in the final pages:

The Winter Queen / Robert Peake

READINGS

2011-03-26T22:23:00.001-04:00

Roland Topor [1967]

1. O Caledonia / ELSPETH BARKER - Opens with the death of the main character, Janet, and you spend the rest of time reading the book knowing she is going to die in such a way that she will be dressed in her mother's clothes at the bottom of a staircase. In a castle. In Scotland. Because that's how 16-year olds die over there. Janet is the epitome of Scottish eccentricity. Of doom and gloom. Of outsider status. Basically, she's a younger version of Enid Coleslaw (in my mind, anyway). And I feel very affectionate towards this book, but I didn't like the way it was written. I couldn't swallow that imitation Gothic-tone without gagging a little. But also, I think it's supposed to make you feel that way. It is, after all, about a little misfit (read: intelligent) girl who is growing up to find that people are nasty and cruel and she wants nothing from the world except to be like her crazy aunt (or was it her cousin?) who collects mushrooms and deformed animals. It's not like a novel, it doesn't read like prose. I feel certain a man could never have written this book. It's more like an adult version of a tween book that you re-read out of languishing, emotionally-charged self-indulgence. Which can be quite pleasant. It's the kind of book that calls a crow a 'jackdaw.' Or maybe that's what all Scottish people call crows, idk. It's also very hard to find, it costs $112 on amazon.com [Year: 1991. Pages: 160]

Roland Topor [1976]

2. The Body Artist / DON DELILLO - I like how much this does with so few pages and so few words. I like how DeLillo keeps the weirdness sane by writing in such a blanched and petrified-wood style. It's not like reading, it's like listening. Another story involving mr. death, actually it opens with a pre-death scene (I love that breakfast. Nothing is better than breakfast food. This is not an opinion, but a fact.) And you are never sure if one of the characters is a consoling hallucination or a retarded man that hides in people's walls, listening to their conversations. What does it matter, really? [Year: 2001. Pages: 124]

Existential family dinners in the middle of the woods, in early spring

2011-03-24T12:53:00.000-04:00

The Family Sayn

Artistin Marcella / Ernst Ludwig Kirchner [1910]

2011-03-22T18:20:00.000-04:00

Check list for a Kirchner portrait:

stripey dress
stripey knee socks
red shoes
cat
MDMA eyes

READINGS

2011-03-21T22:09:00.001-04:00

1.) Sentimental Education / Gustave Flaubert - I love novels about failures, especially this Frederic Moreau character who moves to Paris for school, drops out because he didn't like going to his classes, spends his whole life mooning over an older, married woman, and never fulfills any of his aspirations. He does stupid things willingly, because he does what he feels like doing. I am calling this knowledgeable stupidity. Which is exactly why this book is called L'Education Sentimentale. Flaubert makes sentimentality seem favorable, even if it leads to failure and eventual emptiness, since it was nothing to begin with. Frederic's sentimentality was the best thing about him, but it was his worst quality - depending on how you look at it.
I like how all the women in this novel have multiple lovers. Flaubert. I think I remember reading that Flaubert was a sexual deviant. Obviously, this is the man that wrote Madame Bovary, which has the most glorious failure as protagonist (it turns out not sexy at all, but actually a pretty depressing novel.) The weird thing is that I don't think I liked this a lot, I liked certain things about it, but as a whole - not too much. I loved this in theory, but actually reading it is a chore. I liked the ending. [Year: 1869. Pages: 401. Translated from French by Perdita Burlingame.]

2. The Girls of Slender Means / Muriel Spark - A book about communal-living, poor, mostly cynical girls in post-WWII England. I thought this would be so much better, I mean the title alone is enough to make me love it. It's spareness (intentional or not) is inadequate, I don't think it fits the subject of the book very well. The subject is a chubnik lit chick remembering her attempt to seduce a handsome, bisexual poet, who has just been killed via martyrdom in Haiti. All mixed in with spinsters, the dormitory-lives of young girls, and orgiastic poetry readings. And what happens when old bombs explode near your house.
Yeah, it should have been good. But I think the terse, matter-of-fact, I'm grown-up-voice of the narrator is really sucky. The idea is good, tho.[Year: 1963. Pages: 176]
I freaked over the repeated appearance of the taffeta Elsa Schiaparelli dress. Of course Spark would name-drop the never diminishing greatness of Schiaparelli:

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Philip K. Dick (the K stands for Kindred)

2011-03-14T22:58:00.002-04:00

Philip K. Dick in his pre-bearded days

"The morning air, spilling over with radioactive motes, gray and sun-beclouding, belched about him, haunting his nose; he sniffed involuntarily the taint of death."

A few things I learned from reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?:

1. I know now that my microbiology lab partner is an android. Thank you, Philip K. Dick.

2. If empathy is what separates humans from non-humans, I guess I could also be an android, too.

3. In the future, human quality of life will depend on the number and types of animals a person has, just as it did thousands of years ago when we were all nomadic herders.

4. In 2021, ten years from now, we will be driving hovercars and only chickenheads and other low-lifes will be left on Earth. The rest will be on Mars. The suburbs will be largely abandoned.

5. This is a painting by Edvard Munch which is mentioned in the text. I think because androids don't experience the particular feeling the painting is depicting. (Poor Luba Luft!)

Puberty [1895]

6. 888 is the channel you dial on your mood organ for the desire to watch TV no matter what's on. Do it.

7. Sex with androids is outlawed, but it happens; afterward, when the android is spurned, it seeks revenge. Watch it.

8. It may take me a long time to get over this book. Philip K. Dick is my newest love.

1928 - 1982

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn / Betty Smith (AKA Sophina Elisabeth Wehner)

2011-03-11T21:05:00.002-05:00

1918 - In Brooklyn, wearing some pants.

"A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn't tell it like it was; you told it like you thought it should have been."

No matter what kind of childhood you had, I think this book will always turn you back to it or at least make you think about some of it. Or maybe make you want to write as good a story about your childhood as Smith does about her own childhood in Brooklyn. I don't know how she got away with writing about her childhood in a non-intellectual vein. This is not an analytical/ philosophical/ exploratory book, it is just a story. And I like that it is, because who really remembers their childhood as a series of psychotic Freudian episodes that freak people out. Memory is so much more simpler. You remember if you felt happy or sad when this or that happened or what the people you knew did or the things they said.

I think the story you remember is so much better than any truthful thing your present perspective can put into it. I think Smith's ability to write her childhood out into a book (a very popular one) was based on this. She knew the story was better, even if the story has its bleak moments, bleakness is not 'bad.' It's not even something that burns out your childhood nostalgia. (Even if you were a childhood burnout.) Bleakness is just bleakness and it makes the happy parts of the story more significant. The happy parts in books about childhood are cliched, but not as much as the sad parts. Smith keeps down the poor-girl kitsch, thankfully. The kitschy feeling you get in certain parts of the book is pleasant, anyways. Except! when Smith's poor-girl kitsch veers into pseudo-feminist tirade. Yuck. We do not like this self-loathing.

This is what I really wanted to get to: the pseudo-feminist tirade. The girl in the story is Francie Nolan. She watches a group of Brooklyn women tyrannizing (I love that word) a young mother who got pregnant without getting married (or an abortion). They actually start to stone her. And it's from this that Francie decides to hate women, she says that women "stuck together for only one thing: to trample another woman...whether it was by throwing stones or by mean gossip. It was the only kind of loyalty they seemed to have." This seems like an okay thing to think, since Francie learns not to judge (or hate) the mother who got stoned just because she was a single mother. This is good. But what is not good is that she is perpetuating hatred of women by picking out their faults and saying these are the only qualities women have so therefore I hate them and don't want any women friends. I can imagine some numbnut reading that part and agreeing with her reasoning that women should be hated "for this disloyalty and their cruelty to each other." What's even more horrible is that she points out that the only person that helped the stoned mother was a man and then she goes into praising men for sticking together against "ensnaring" women. She makes it okay for men to hate women, to treat them badly because we treat each other badly. What the fuck, Betty? Deciding to hate other women, solves nothing in fact it contributes to sexism. She is sexist against her own sex, which does not make any sense. "Men are different," she says. Men are not different. They are just as blindly lost in themselves as women are.

2011-03-10T12:18:00.000-05:00

Unknown German Scientist with cat

READINGS

2011-03-05T10:22:00.001-05:00

1.) Lord of Misrule / Jaimy Gordon - I had no idea this was going to be about horse racing, why the fuck did this win the National Book Award? There's nothing really remarkable or new about it. Actually, the meaning behind the title: Lord of Misrule is worth reading about. The only reason I finished the book was to see what would happen to 'the frizzly haired girl,' who's redeeming characteristic was that she was Jewish. (That's why she had frizzly hair.) And anyway, it wasn't really worth it, our country has horrible taste when it comes to bestowing awards.

2.) Black Hole / Charles Burns - I was surprised by how stupid this was. Not even stupidly funny, just stoopid. I heard this was really good, so maybe I'm just picky. Your writing sucks, Charles Burns.

3. Wonderful, Wonderful Times / Elfriede Jelinek - I'm convinced Jelinek must be a weirdo (She wrote The Piano Teacher, too). All Austrians seem really weird, their country doesn't make any sense. But anyway, she wrote this book in what seems like a rush, in cuts and jumps. There are passages I had to read over and over again to seal in my brain. I really liked this after having read about 2/3 of it, before that I was reading blindly without paying attention (bad habit). It's mainly about four kids, half of whom love the other half of the group, but the other half only love each other. For reasons, I guess, only post-war adolescents can understand, they ritually attack people and steal their wallets. The ending is terrible, I didn't like that part. It's hard to say you like this book, since it's so harsh and austrian. But I liked the way she wrote when she wrote about one of the girl characters - Anna. And also the family scenes, when each kid would go back home to their psychotic families. The rest is pretty disturbing.

READINGS

2011-02-23T20:23:00.002-05:00

1. Blood Meridian / Cormac McCarthy - I felt like such a man reading this. It didn't seem like fiction at all, which is saying a lot considering how unbelievable it is. Much of it is gruesome. So gruesome, it will put a little stealthy indian in your manner of walking and dispel the vapidity of your speech. (And when the porcine man in the line behind you pokes your shoulder-blade, you will land a karate chop on his carotid and carry on calmly, secure in your self-defense mechanism.) In other words - it's a toughening book for the limp-wristed reader. I don't know, I was in a drastically altered state while reading it. I love McCarthy.
A short synopsis: The book is about a group of American scalpers in the desert and the Indians who do a number of nauseous things to them in revenge. Everyone dies, except one. It's a little tricky to get into at the beginning of the book. McCarthy's difficult for your brain to comprehend, because your brain is accustomed to too much of the shitty.

2. Goodbye, Columbus / Philip Roth - Another male author, what is wrong with me lately? Roth is such a mannish writer, I have no idea about him or what it is that he is doing, but he's memorable. He's also an asshole, like all men his age. I like Roth's people, (and I don't just mean their Hebraic flaws) because they're so unlikable, because they lose their bearings, because stupid things happen to them and their reactions are often harsh.

Roth, wearing a sweater and McCarthy, cultivating a steely mouth.

I would name him Stieglitz

2011-02-22T17:19:00.003-05:00

illustration of cat.

The Sick Girl / Michael Ancher [1882]

ancient sabealmian proverb:

2011-02-21T20:18:00.000-05:00

"Permit me the leisure of my sadness."

Everyday Genius

2011-02-18T06:03:00.000-05:00

has put Consecration of the House up, written by yours truly.

I read a really long book by Adam Levin and it's called The Instructions

2011-02-14T19:57:00.000-05:00

It's the scripture of Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, [see Judas Maccabeus] the possible messiah of his generation. And unlike the author, my verbosity is in check and all I'll do here is recommend this hulking mass of words. And express my regret for reading in eight days what it took nine years to write. Also, I think this book is responsible for the twitch in my right eye, which I have never before experienced. Additionally, I really want to make a pennygun, but I don't drink soda or own any balloons.

This is a blurry demonstration of how the spine is almost as wide as my face, which is not normal in the least.

My only complaint is that the author didn't make Eliza June Watermark into a likable character, I kind of hoped she would die instead of the character who actually did. The character who actually does die...it is a horrible moment of reading. [there are some more words about the book here.]

Ice / Anna Kavan

2011-01-16T19:22:00.000-05:00

World destruction wrought by a second ice age wherein the usual things happen - girls run away from men and the men chase them by boat, car, plane. I liked this, it was written by a heroin addict. Anna Kavan can be fustrating to read, because she leaves things out, she misses something. I don't know what it is. Maybe I'm just out of the practice of reading descriptive novels, but the whole thing is too conscious of itself. You can hear it writing, adding sentence upon sentence. But I still liked it. I think the story itself was good enough to carry it along despite the narrative. How about if the narrator was the ice itself? I will rewrite this from the ice's point of view, killing everything.
I have a few problems with this passive Jean Rhysian-girl, or not her, rather the man who chases her. He saves her, but I'm pretty sure rescuing a girl doesn't mean you get to rape her because she's ungrateful. Or did he briefly turn into the man he saved her from? When the hero's role is fulfilled he becomes the villain.
If Anna Kavan meant 'ice' to mean 'heroin,' is our future heroin addiction? Maybe the girl herself is the heroin. If I remember correctly, she looks a little like heroin. She's pursued, prostituted, used in secret, and in the end she is never given up.

Anna Kavan [1901-1968]

You will like Frank Lima

2011-01-12T20:38:00.000-05:00

From Scattered Vignettes:

"As I listened
late at night,
I ate salt from my left hand,
while turning the dial
with my right hand.
I was the only human being
alive
on the face of the earth
and I was communicating
with fantastic beings
in the green cathode night."

From 01/01/2000

"I’ll collect
The tickets at the door, wipe the dust off the seats
And make it perfectly clear that writing is as lonely
As a pile of shoes. Heaven is wingless and far away,
And there are no books that mention your name or mine."

READINGS

2011-01-10T18:24:00.000-05:00

1. Ficciones / Jorges Luis Borges - Borges is like a South American Poe, but without all the camp. I wanted a lot of these stories to be true accounts. They are so lovable and different. There seems to be a lot of displaced people, mysterious historical events and impluses, and tragedies. My favorite was The South. I recommend starting with Part Two, because those are the less headache-inducing ones.

2. The Loser / Thomas Bernhard - Basically one big inner monologue of a failed 'piano artist' who is thinking about his two school friends after their death. It's much better than it sounds. Unless you can't appreciate sarcasm and extreme pessimism, in which case Bernhard is not someone you'd like. Plus he confirms my belief that fifty years is enough, is just right.

Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989)

READINGS

2011-01-06T22:50:00.000-05:00

1. The Tunnel / Ernesto Sabato - A painter becomes obsessed with a woman he doesn't know. I thought this would be so good, but it turned out to be really stupid. I thought it would be the South American version of The Stranger. Maybe I just lack the patience for stories about controlling relationships that never seem to end definitively. Or maybe I'm a cold-hearted bitch who doesn't believe in possessive love. Anyway, my attention wandered away to the National Geographic Channel throughout. Yeah, but seriously don't read this, instead, watch Restrepo.

2 . Prozac Nation / Elizabeth Wurtzel - I didn't really like this, but I'm still glad I read it. It can be extraordinarily monotonous, after all it's about depression. I can understand why she wrote such a confessional memoir, but why is it so long? Books about depression shouldn't be so depressing, I think. Footnote: Not to be read after you turn 20.

3 . Polaroids from the Dead / Douglass Coupland - A book of short works along with some photos. I always seem to like Coupland [except for Eleanor Rigby]. There are a few polaroids in this book that I'm restraining myself from tearing out, but I'm sure I won't last long. Plus he draws attention to the fact that Florida is shaped like a handgun, which I agree with wholeheartedly. And the myth of Japanese zigzag bridges.

READINGS

2011-01-02T18:20:00.000-05:00

1. Vacation / Deb Olin Unferth - A normal, heartbroken man with an odd head shape separates from his wife by going on a horrible non-vacation vacation. It's a plotless novel, the kind I've been liking lately since it reflects life so well. What I liked about it was the characters' overlapping bereavement. They are all looking for something, missing something, or losing something that is not what they think it is. Unferth writes characters you feel bad for like how you feel bad for yourself, but in a very uncomplicated way. I feel like I will probably read this again when I am older.

2. Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass / Bruno Schulz - A series of small, interconnecting sketches that rely heavily on description, it reminded me of the work of Miklos Radnoti - very easy to get lost in. Schulz said about them that he wanted to create a history of a family in them, but a history of their being. Their history distilled in memories, images, things like that. I can't say anything else without sounding stupid, so I'll add that the stories are amazing and should be read in the middle of the night when you are drowsy. Note: The first one is not a good one to start out with, I recommend reading the book backwards. [Many of his drawings accompany the book.]

3. Embers / Sándor Márai - I'm not going to lie, the first half is blah, but it's probably badly translated from the Hungarian. The second half is a monologue and monologues are goodies. There seems to be a lot about killing animals in this monologue and sexist things that old men say, but I think it was pretty good. Worth reading for the handful of good paragraphs/ideas Marai covers. Here is a quote: "People communicate their thoughts in sign language, haven't you noticed?...They have no self-knowledge. All they talk about is what they want, thereby exposing themselves unconsciously in all their hopelessness."

READINGS

2010-12-27T11:32:00.004-05:00

1. Spring Snow / Yukio Mishima - Rich people. An 18-year old obsessed with his feelings, falls in love with the slightly older Satoko. Then he's not in love with her, then he is again, then comes the tragic ending. Written very traditionally, considering it was written in the 70's. It can be hard to read because of the language, (the translation may be shitty) but worth reading if you like Mishima.

2. Atmospheric Disturbances / Rivka Galchen - The relationship between a psych doctor and a much younger Argentinian who has been 'replaced' by her doppelganger in a strange plot probably constructed by weather-controlling Meteorologists. I didn't like it a lot when I was reading it, but after I finished I realized how good it was. Seemed like it tried too hard to sound intelligent, which in the end makes it kind of cold. A cold-hearted novel, if that's possible. I think it was really about how people change or how people are idealized or maybe psychosis. On the back cover some person compared it to a Murakami novel, yes, but without the lovable quality in Murakami's novels (I think mostly, because they seem so personal).

3. The Woman in the Dunes / Kobo Abe - An insect-collector who is kind of an asshole (he's a teacher, of course) goes searching for beetles somewhere where there is a lot of sand, he comes to a village where the people do nothing all day but shovel sand to keep their homes from collapsing. Some of the descriptions are really nauseous, I remember. It makes sand seem scary, if you weren't already scared of it. The insect-collector says: "I rather think the world is like sand...You yourself become sand. You see with the eyes of sand. Once you're dead you don't have to worry about dying anymore." On the introductory page is written: Without the threat of punishment there is no joy in flight. That doesn't seem true to me, but it makes sense within the context of the book. It really, I think, is about the pointlessness of life.

Dougal Dixon / Man After Man

2010-12-26T11:15:00.000-05:00

READINGS:

2010-12-19T11:36:00.002-05:00

1. The Rings of Saturn / W.G. Sebald - Is not a story with a plot and is absolutely pointless in a good way. Like hearing someone else's very intelligent rambling. The narrator walks around the English countryside thinking of weird historical things and somehow each relates to the other in very mysterious ways. He says of herring fisherman: "They just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness." And speaking of the story of St. Sebolt: "I wonder now whether inner coldness and desolation may not be the pre-condition for making the world believe, by a kind of fraudulent showmanship, that one's own wretched heart is still aglow." Overall, a very calm novel that would bore most people, but I liked it because the writing is amazingly good.

2. Under the Volcano / Malcolm Lowry - 375 pages spanning one day (the day of the dead) in the life of a depressed, alcoholic man living in post-revolution Mexico. It is also the best book I've read in months. And very funny sometimes. It's autobiographical, I think and it's written like an alcoholic would write. The kind of book you become obsessively attached to while reading it, but then forget most of it when finished. Most of the book is about each characters' experience with heavy disappointment.

3. A Clockwork Orange / Anthony Burgess - A little beast. Burgess invented a whole vernacular derived from like Slavic languages that is used throughout the book and easily understood in context. Amazing only if you like that sort of thing, and I do. Words like 'malchick' and 'devotchka' for boy and girl. Or 'moloko' for milk. Violent, at times, but kind of in a funny way except for the rape. I think mostly it's about free will and how shitty we are.

4. The Land of Green Plums / Herta Muller - Sad, mostly and funny. Four people during Ceausescu's leadership of Communist Romania are afraid most of the time and contemplating suicide. They are from the country and move to the city for school. Muller writes in images, so sometimes you'll have to guess what's going on without being told. Which can be negative, because it puts you at a distance.


Sebald, Lowry (drinking Bols), Burgess (gesticulating), Muller

READINGS

2010-12-09T18:32:00.001-05:00

1. Beloved / Toni Morrison - Creepy ass shit. I'm sure there's some underlying meaning I'm not understanding, had the feeling that I didn't get something that I was supposed to. I liked reading it, tho. It covers infanticide, reincarnation, mothers, daughters, growing up, etc.

2. Middle Passage / Charles Johnson - Yeah, but the Happy Ending is predictable. I kind of wanted the main character to be an eternal asshole rather than develop further. It pokes fun at hyper-masculinity.

3. The Professor / Terry Castle - [Essays] Didn't like it as much as I thought I would. There's one on Susan Sontag that's good. There are too many damn references and the writing is old-fashioned. I've gotten out of practice and patience with wordiness. The main piece is about an age-disparate relationship.

4. Desert Solitaire / Edward Abbey - I tried. [The author is an extremely interesting person, tho. And I agree with many of his arguments/ideas.]

5. Richard Yates / Tao Lin - Difficult to simultaneously read and understand what it's saying. I think its bleakness rubbed off on me. It includes another age-disparate relationship, $$$, and family. Very little of it seems like a lie, which is good I think. Could have easily been written by a mentally ill 12 year old.

Did you ever notice

2010-12-03T00:06:00.000-05:00

UPS men are the Jesuits of the postal world?

Quip

2010-11-11T21:23:00.000-05:00

"I'm not drinking now because I'm a future alcoholic."

Fortuitous

2010-11-09T22:17:00.000-05:00

Like a strategic seat change mid-semester.

READINGS [don't count when assigned]

2010-10-27T00:25:00.000-04:00

First, it feels bad to read books when forced.
Second, reading about one subject in a series of books is dehumanizing.

1. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - nice and short, but not really worth it.

2. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl / Harriet Jacobs - No. She is annoying, I don't care, I don't know what's wrong with me.

3. Dessa Rose / Sherley Ann Williams - Likeable. Uses very different narrators (a good thing) and has a few relate-able characters. Merited interest because it made my prof uncomfortable during the sexy scenes.

4. The Known World / Edward P. Jones - Too many different story-lines, he's much better with short stories. I did like how he incorporated some massive Biblical parallels into a history of America, perhaps it may be out of place? Nice author photo, tho.

5. The Island of Dr. Moreau / HG Wells - Nasty writing, I didn't like reading it. A conglomeration of science experiments on an island and nothing else really happens except people die.

6. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde / Robert Louis Stevenson - Pretty great. The writing is - the story, not so much. Just look at the man, he knows:

7. Mind: Key Concepts in Philosophy / Eric Matthews - Brain Aneurysm. I reallyreally liked the last chapter. (Sometimes tho, Eric Matthews, I feel like a robot. Sometimes I talk like a robot.)

8. Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer - Dangerous to read while under the influence. Had to defend him against the depressive tropes of people in college.

"I don’t want to be remembered for lyrics. I want to be remembered for having a big nose that’s a little crooked. And for being skinny."

2010-10-01T17:46:00.001-04:00

American Electra / Susan Faludi [excerpt]

2010-09-26T17:22:00.000-04:00

"If we could only make a clean break with the past - create a new wave, a new school, a new theory - we could shed the weight of history." But to what end? To create a tabula rasa, where the past is no longer usable and one can become or unbecome anything? Where everything is relative, indeterminate, and a "choice" as valid as any other choice? In other words the weightless, ahistorical realm of the commercial, a realm that promises its inhabitants a perpetual nursery where no one has to grow up. The nineteenth-century feminist dream of the "empire of the mother," which gave way first to the hope that "sisterhood is powerful" and then to the hokum of "girl power," now faces displacement by an even more infantile transgressiveness ("the brave new world of Gaga girliness"?)a cosmetic revolt that has less in common with feminism than with the 1920s flapperism. It posits a world where pseudo-rebellions are mounted but never won nor desired to be won, where "liberation" begins and ends with wordplay and pop-culture pastiche and fishnet stockings, and where all needs can be met by the bountiful commercial breast, the marketplace's simulacrum of the mother.

- via Harper's

Diving

2010-09-23T14:34:00.000-04:00

The day I realized the answer is underwater.

All we do is sweat here, it leaks from our eyes and our eyes are tired of it. Sitting in chairs in public places means sitting in someone else's sweat and you know it because you can hardly breathe from the smell.

Proust was a Neuroscientist / JONAH LEHRER

2010-09-12T11:20:00.000-04:00

This is the triumph of our DNA: it makes us without determining us. The invention of neural plasticity, which is encoded by the genome, lets each of us transcend our genome. We emerge, character-like, from the vague alphabet of our text. Of course, to accept the freedom inherent in the human brain - to know that the individual is not genetically predestined - is also to accept the fact that we have no single solutions. Every day each one of us is given the gift of neurons and plastic cortical cells; only we can decide what our brains will become.
The best metaphor for our DNA is literature. Like all classic literary texts, our genome is defined not by the certainty of its meaning, but by its linguistic instability, its ability to encourage a multiplicity of interpretations.

[This book is one of the most interesting I've ever read. More on Lehrer.]

“I’m German in my mind,” Lagerfeld says, “but from a Germany that doesn't exist anymore."

2010-08-29T20:30:00.001-04:00

The New Yorker: In the Now - Where Karl Lagerfeld lives.

prozac nation / wurtzel

2010-08-29T01:37:00.000-04:00

"Madness is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression…depression is pure dullness, tedium straight up. Depression is, especially these days, an overused term to be sure, but never one associated with anything wild, anything about dancing all night with a lampshade on your head and then going home and killing yourself…The word madness allows its users to celebrate the pain of its sufferers, to forget that underneath all the acting-out and quests for fabulousness and fine poetry, there is a person in huge amounts of dull, ugly agony…Remember that when you’re at the point at which you’re doing something as desperate and violent as sticking your head in an oven, it is only because the life that preceded this act felt even worse. Think about living in depression from moment to moment, and know it is not worth any of the great art that comes as its by-product."

READINGS

2010-08-24T14:30:00.000-04:00

1. Chilly Scenes of Winter / Ann Beattie - Humorous depression. I liked it a lot and want to read it again sometime when I have time.

2. Go / John Clellon Holmes - Unreadable. It's out of date and contrary to what ppl say, it's nothing compared to Kerouac and the other beats.

3. Less Than Zero / Bret Easton Ellis - I read it. Finished it. And read it again immediately. Really liked it.

4. My Antonia / Willa Cather - Dreamy Nebraska. Anti-immigration. Ha, jk. I liked it. I like pioneers. And the country.

2010-08-21T23:51:00.000-04:00

[Falconetti in La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc]

[Stare / Jenny Saville]

[Girl in Bed / Lucian Freud]

READINGS

2010-07-30T10:07:00.000-04:00

1.) the tanners/robert walser - long and boringish. don't recommend if you're not r.w. obsessed.

2.) taking care/joy williams - short stories. find this and read it. it's amazingly readable.

3.) lunar park/bret easton ellis - funny, i think i was 'truly' scared a little bit too. it's an ode to stephen king.

4.) middlesex/jeffrey eugenides - hermaphroditism. you start to wonder if maybe j.e. himself is an hermaphrodite. it's well written and not boring at all.

5.) bright lights, big city/jay mcinerney - oh yes, i recommend. i liked it a lot, i practically ruined the library's copy.

6.) cognitive-behavioral therapy/tao lin - sometimes funny, sometimes gnawingly 'fruitless.' i don't recommend unless you're a t.l. fan.

7.) vox/nicholson baker - graphic and unpleasant at times, but memorable i guess. it's basically two ppl recounting their sex lives within the span of a telephone conversation.

A Pale View of Hills/KAZUO ISHIGURO

2010-07-12T17:57:00.000-04:00

Synopsis: Quietly pointing to things in grey/white light, not to explain them but to show them to our eyes in all their blurriness. Remembrance of deceit. Dualism of the person you once were and the person you are and the discomfort of it. Who you are to other ppl, if that's important. Projection. Confusion of being.

Character Analysis: Keiko/Meriko - estranged father, unhappy, no ties w/ fam, no friends --> suicide.

Etsuko/Sechiko - self-involved, liar, seems to frequently get her feet caught in rope, drowns kittens, traditionalist turned non-traditionalist hiding behind a normal person --> life in the British countryside/security/safety.

The Decay of the Angel/YUKIO MISHIMA

2010-07-11T17:22:00.000-04:00

This is the last book Mishima wrote before his suicide. It's literally the last thing he did on the morning of November 25, 1970. It's the last of a tetralogy, but not having read the earlier books, it's still pretty easy to follow.

Likes: An orphaned 16-yr old boy watches incoming/outgoing ships, he's adopted by some old rich guy b/c of three moles on the boy's underarm. The boy may or may not be human and is expected to die by the time he's 20. He's told by an old lesbian that he was thought to have been the reincarnation of someone the old rich guy knew. He turns out be normal/mediocre. He is defeated by the old lesbian and attempts suicide. It doesn't work, but he goes blind. It's all very depressing and worth reading. The writing [translation] is stunning. It def. influenced Murakami. Or maybe it's just the common nationality. idk.

Dislikes: N/A

Quote: As a matter of fact, the play of light, when he investigated his enigmatic smile in the mirror, sometimes made it seem like that of a young girl. Perhaps a young girl in some distant land, speaking some incomprehensible language, had just such an enigmatic smile as her only route of communication. He did not wish to be understood as saying that the smile was girlish. Yet it was not a man's smile. It had in it a quality of a bird waiting in it's nest at the most delicate moment, free of either coquetry or timidity, between hesitation and resolution, preparing b/c of an adversary for a crisis as of walking a dark path. Between dark and dawn, neither road nor hill could be made out, and each step might mean drowning. It sometimes seemed to Toru that it was a smile he had inherited from neither of his parents, but acquired rather from a young girl, a stranger, he had met in his distant youth.

Varieties of Disturbance (stories)/Lydia Davis

2010-07-06T16:56:00.000-04:00

Likes: They're funny. The short shorts are the funniest. A lot of them showcase neuroses. And animals. Somehow they seem extremely personal and close to the author so that you feel you're reading something written to you by someone you used to know only a little bit. For some reason they waited until a safe distance was established before communicating. I'm thinking of Cape Cod Diary especially.

Dislikes: The longer stories run on too long. I'm not exactly complaining about length, but instead the purpose/content of the length. Self-indulgent maybe. Which is sometimes okay I guess.

Quotes:

1. Idea For a Short Documentary Film - 'Representatives of different food products manufacturers try to open their own packaging.'

2. Index Entry - 'Christian, I'm not a'

3. Almost Over: What's the Word -
'He says,
"When I first met you
I didn't think you would turn out to be so
...strange."'

4. Hand - 'Beyond the hand holding this book that I'm reading, I see another hand lying idle and slightly out of focus - my extra hand.'

foto

WIMBY 1980 vs. 2010

2010-07-04T12:46:00.001-04:00

borg/mcenroe

nadal/berdy

Kitchen/Banana Yoshimoto

2010-07-03T17:59:00.000-04:00

Likes: The people were depressed, orphaned, trannies, strange but not unrelatable, in recovery, and ambition-less yet not direction-less. They may like sleeping on sofas. All things likable about a person. Dying is common, Yoshimoto kills off a lot of people.

Dislikes: Sometimes seemed like imitation Murakami. The translation is not the best, because these stories [there are two novellas] could have been made much much better if the writing was cleaner.

+ I read this sitting on a wall above brackish water & mind-warping humidity with the constant fear that my glasses would fall off into the water leaving me incapable of driving home.

Quote: The place I like best in the world is the kitchen. No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it's a kitchen, if it's a place where they make food, it's fine with me. Ideally it should be well broken in. Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate. White tile catching the light (ting! ting!).

'Their faces shone like buddhas when they smiled.'

Underworld/Don DeLillo

2010-06-25T17:45:00.000-04:00

Likes: Can think of nothing concrete, but just the overall holy presence of DeLillo's wordmanship. [Also, being unexpectedly confronted with pure black pages which were gazed into with a secret drifting need.] I think the section on Klara Sax in the roof-top summer might be the greatest prose I've ever read.

Dislikes: It was really long, the epilogue was too much, the prologue can throw you off b/c it's baseball baseball baseball and who likes reading about it. I admit to feeling a little lost once. Or twice.

In no way is this linear. Which I like. Every chapter is about something different [time, place, person(s)], but with small bits of connexion here and there. Like The Baseball. Like sexual rendezvous. Like priests. Maybe this book made us feel like we should have had a nice Catholic upbringing instead of the lazy Protestant one foisted upon us.

The Long Tall Sally in question:

THE SHLAMAZEL

2010-06-22T18:27:00.000-04:00

We recover from unidentifiable sickness and the car gets a flat. We discover the bench we are sitting on is the home of several thousand red ants.

Norwegian Wood/Murakami

2010-06-21T00:53:00.001-04:00

Naoko dies. She hangs herself in the woods. This is what Forever 21 means. Ha, nah.

Marilynne Robinson has a poodle named Otis

2010-06-18T18:18:00.000-04:00

1. I've never aspired in the way people are supposed to aspire. Which is really an enormous help, if you want to write.

2. There's something in my temperament … I have a problem with explosions in the sense that many very fine books are written about things that do, in fact, explode. But if the explosion is something that's supposed to make the novel interesting as opposed to being something that it's essentially about, I think it's very much to be avoided.

--> the article.

Helga hearts Heinrich

2010-06-14T01:23:00.000-04:00

We don't like it when ppl get older. They grow into and become strangers who we wouldn't have ever wanted to know.

The 4 Major Plays/Chekhov (trans. Curt Columbus)

2010-06-13T02:19:00.000-04:00

Rating: astounding.

Some of the lines in these plays hurt my brain they were so good. Largely b/c of the translator. Chekhov's ppl are fucked up. Like you & me.

Examples:

From Seagull 1.) - '...the most important thing isn't fame, or glory, or anything that I dreamed about, but the ability to survive.'

2.) -'All I can do is obsess over these daydreams, these images. I don't know why I'm doing it or who it's for. I don't know, and I don't have any faith in what I'm doing w/ my life.'

From Uncle Vanya - 1.)'Your former convictions were not wrong, the weakness lies in you. They aren't to blame, you are. You forget that conviction alone is nothing, it is what you do with your convictions that counts.'

2.) -'Why did you get drunk tonite?'
-'B/c it feels just a little like being alive.'

3.) -'I love forests, and that's strange! I don't eat meat - strange! A spontaneous, pure, honest relationship w/ nature and ppl is impossible...'

From Three Sisters -'When I'm w/ just one person it's fine, I'm like everyone else, but around lots of ppl I get depressed and shy and I say all kinds of stupid shit. But I'm still much more honest and refined than most anyone else...'

I liked Uncle Vanya and Seagull best and Cherry Orchard least. Three Sisters was okay, I liked Solyony and Irina in that play. I have to give this back to the library tomorrow. I don't think they deserve it.

Oliver Peoples sunglasses = best ever Salvation Army find in my life.

White Noise/ Don DeLillo

2010-05-29T21:31:00.001-04:00

Germans, chemicals, families, Deja vu, kitchens, pre-computer days. Read it, bitches. (A bottle of San Pelly helps, but is not req'd)
While reading this under the park pavilion I had the distinct impression some weirdo was standing just outside my periphery, watching. I was sure he was wearing a pair of white shorts. Every time I looked tho, there was no one there. So watch it, this is a warning, medium-sized psychosis possible.

Deerest:

Offshoot, Issue 1

2009-08-07T23:20:00.000-04:00

linkage to poem, page 16.

An hour at northwood dental.

2009-07-23T18:29:00.000-04:00

Rub your teeth together. Left and right. Tap, tap.

Gott

2009-04-17T19:37:00.000-04:00

I am here today.

Haus

2009-03-30T12:03:00.001-04:00

*elimae pub pending*

i got in for the April issue.