reading_now raze i used to be a voracious reader. at some point i stopped reading books with any regularity. it was probably a combination of things...being mercilessly needled by my mother and stepfather for "always having [my] nose in a book" (as it was some grave sin to enjoy reading). less time. less room in the brain. more time spent on the computer. more of my own words wanting to be written. less milk in my diet. i have piles of books i've been accumulating and meaning to read for years now. they just sit there attracting dust. i think it's time i started wiping some of the dust away and giving some of these books their due. so i've decided a goal for this year, a third of the way through, is to read as many books as i can, to make up for lost time. hey, 335_songs got started late... the book i started reading this morning: "the_road" (cormac mccarthy) i'm normally a pretty fast reader, but there's a density to mccarthy's language that forces me to read some passages over a number of times before moving on. not because the writing is "difficult", but because some moments are so striking i want to revel in them for a while. i'm only on the thirty second page, and already i think this may be one of the best things i've read in a very long time. an early excerpt: "in dreams his pale bride came to him out of a green and leafy canopy. her nipples pipeclayed and her rib bones painted white. she wore a dress of gauze and her dark hair was carried up in combs of ivory, combs of shell. her smile, her downturned eyes. in the morning it was snowing again. beads of small gray ice strung along the lightwires overhead. he mistrusted all of that. he said the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and of death. he slept little and he slept poorly. he dreamt of walking in a flowering wood where birds flew before them he and the child and the sky was aching blue but he was learning how to wake himself from just such siren worlds. lying there in the dark with the uncanny taste of a peach from some phantom orchard fading in his mouth. he thought if he lived long enough the world at last would all be lost. like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory. from daydreams on the road there was no waking. he plodded on. he could remember everything of her save her scent. seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. she held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. freeze this frame. now call down your dark and your cold and be damned." i wish i had someone to read this book to. the words come alive in a whole new way when you say them out loud. but i also like the way they dance around inside my skull. so that'll do just fine for now. 130417 ... z i love this book. mcarthy writes extremely intimate prose about whole people. his power of description is better than cinematic; it's atmospheric. in this book, the uncaring malevolence of the landscape is extraordinary. i love this book. also, the film was very faithful to the book. it's worth seeing. 130417 ... unhinged a tomb for boris davidovich - danilo kis harry potter and the goblet of fire - jk rowling 130417 ... raze god, what a book this is. i'm halfway through now. you describe it well, zeke. initially the lack of quotation marks to denote dialogue is a little jarring, but it didn't take long to adjust. i'd like to see the film, but i fear some of the best bits of the story (thoughts, dreams, descriptions) are all but unfilmable. maybe that's part of the unique power books wield; they allow us to create the films they conjure for us in our own minds, limited only by imagination. 130417 ... raze "the old man and the sea" (ernest hemingway) i read this book once, so long ago i might as well have never read it at all. i think i was still in grade school at the time. what strikes me now (and what was probably lost on me then) is the stark gravity of hemingway's writing. it's rarely expansive, but the words accumulate great power by explaining only what needs to be explained, and no more. "just before it was dark, as they passed a great island of sargasso weed that heaved and swung in the light sea as though the ocean were making love with something under a yellow blanket, his small line was taken by a dolphin. he saw it first when it jumped in the air, true gold in the last of the sun and bending and flapping wildly in the air. it jumped again and again in the acrobatics of its fear and he worked his way back to the stern and crouching and holding the big line with his right hand and arm, he pulled the dolphin in with his left hand, stepping on the gained line each time with his bare left foot. when the fish was at the stem, plunging and cutting from side to side in desperation, the old man leaned over the stern and lifted the burnished gold fish with its purple spots over the stem. its jaws were working convulsively in quick bites against the hook and it pounded the bottom of the skiff with its long flat body, its tail and its head until he clubbed it across the shining golden head until it shivered and was still." 130428 ... raze ("stem" is supposed to be "stern". that's what i get for copying that passage off of the internet from someone who doesn't know how to fucking read, instead of transcribing it myself. won't be doing that again.) 130428 ... raze there's humour here too. i'd forgotten all about that. "'you did not do so badly for something worthless,' he said to his left hand. 'but there was a moment when i could not find you.'" 130428 ... raze you know, now that i think about it, an r and an n next to one another could easily be confused for an m in passing. i apologize, random person who added that particular hemingway passage to some educational website and whose transcription i then copied here. it's not like i've never misread things... just last night, a friend wrote that they would pop a confetti cannon in my honour and i first read it as them saying they would *poop* a confetti cannon for me. i almost died. then i realized my brain had added an extra o, and i survived. 130428 ... no reason "how to get along with women" it's not a how-to guide, but in a way, i could see that it could be. the lead characters, all women, are understatedly provocative and haunted. respected by the writer. this book appeals to the feminist in me and makes me wish i knew more women like these ones. maybe i wish i was one. 130428 ... nr from a review: "Many of the characters in Elisabeth de Mariaffi’s debut collection have identity issues and confidence problems, but their author is incredibly self-assured. De Mariaffi focuses on female relationships – both romantic and between friends – and the power struggles that accompany them. Centring on women fighting to come to terms with their own identity or trying to grasp the full force of their sexuality, de Mariaffi explores her subjects with a detail-oriented eye, deftly inserting the reader into key moments in her characters’ lives." yes. this. 130428 ... raze "cruddy" (an illustrated novel by lynda barry) this book was given to me a few years ago, a gift from a friend, and i'm only reading it now for the first time. it's the tale of a 16-year-old girl named roberta, whose father calls her clyde (because he wanted a son), who has a knife named "little debbie", who exists in a sort of living hell, with her parents acting as two opposing satanic forces. the narrative is rendered in the first person. it's alternately horrifying and hilarious. often it's both of those things at once. her father (referred to only as "the father") emerges as one of the most compelling characters, monstrous as he is. two stories that take place five years apart are woven together seamlessly. on every page there's a phrase or passage worth quoting, and barry's drawings (rendered in charcoal, i think) are crude but reveal themselves to be a perfect visual accent. an excerpt: "sylvester the nude mummified man at ye olde curiosity shoppe was not the first dead person i had seen, but he was my most influential one. he had a piece of ancient cloth over his privates but otherwise he was completely exposed. the sign that explained him said he had been found in the desert. it was the heat and the sun that dried him out before he had a chance to rot. you need moisture to rot correctly. bacteria and certain insects that help the process have to have moisture. but if you croak in the middle of the desert during a hot time of year, all of your moisture can go very quickly and your skin can shrink fast onto your bones and if the blowing sand rolls gently over you it can make you smooth and shiny. sylvester was smooth and shiny. his eyes were collapsed, understandably, but his mustache was there. his lips were very shrunken but there was no mistaking the reality of his teeth. very yellow, the front teeth slightly overlapping. his arms were crossed over his stomach and his toes were pointed and the sign said to look for the bullet hole and it was there, easy to see in his chest. the one thing that kept bothering me was that they displayed him standing up. if it was me doing the display i would have had him laying down. i would have had sand in the case. i would have made it look as realistic as possible and most of all, i would not have covered his vulnerables. i would have wanted everything displayed. in the interest of science. to show what happens to a dead man's pecker in the sun. i thought it even before what happened, happened. but i wouldn't count that as ESP." the blurb on the back cover describes the book as "part 'easy rider' and part bipolar 'wizard of oz'." that's not a half-bad miniature capsule review. 130509 ... unhinged "paranoia" (victor martinovich) an excerpt: 'I didn't know where I was headed or why I was headed there, but for some reason I felt sad. The sadness I had wanted to transfer to the little man in the sun-drenched classroom remained with me, bottled up, unmitigated, without release. But no big deal, ol' man, no big deal. It's May, after all. I reached the end of the corridor of the little street leading from my apartment to Independence Avenue, our country's principal artery, which through some glaring oversight to this day does not yet bear his name. I found myself among well-dressed, apathetic passersby, who made me acutely aware of what I was searching for, what had driven me out of my apartment. I was looking for a pair of eyes, of course! I needed human eyes that would look at me, even if with indifference, but look at me, not at my clothes, at my despondent raincoat, at my haircut ("FREAKING GENIUS"), and not a the excessively mechanical - I preferred not to think about it - way I walked. No, at me. At this creature walking down the street, among other creatures, ready to love them and to look at them, really look at them, in the biblical sense, to notice them. Yes, I know, I know. I am asking for too much. This soon will pass.' 130511 ... raze "the underwater welder" (jeff lemire) i loved strange, unsettling stories when i was a kid. "the twilight zone", "the outer limits", "tales from the darkside", "the hitchhiker", "alfred hitchcock presents"...all that stuff. i ate it up. i was into comic books back then too, before i knew what graphic novels were, or that they even existed. i had a special fondness for the "tales from the crypt" / "vault of fear" / "haunt of horror" trifecta. colour reprints of some of the classic issues kept me company up at my mother and stepfather's trailer more than once. why anyone would want to spend a week or two in a glorified pop can, where you have to walk to the bathrooms, the showers don't have hot water, and there isn't much for anyone to do aside from sitting around ruminating on how much they despise one another, i'll never know. but that's where we spent a good chunk of our time every summer. you never saw a van full of kids so happy to get home when our "vacation" was over. my comic books have been boxed up in the basement for years. but lately i've been piecing together a list of graphic novels i'm interested in. things like art spiegelman's "maus", adrian tomine's "sleepwalk and other stories", chris ware's "building stories", and paul hornschemeier's "mother, come home". couldn't find any of those at the bookstore i visited on the weekend, but "the underwater welder" caught my eye, and a quote on the back cover describing it as the equivalent of a great unproduced "twilight zone" episode convinced me to buy it. the thing felt really nice in my hands, too, which didn't hurt any. lemire's artwork is "sketchy", rendered in black and white. the somewhat rough-around-the-edges look works well here. the story is a little like a feature-length, grown-up version of some of the more ground-level science fiction-y tales that slipped into "tales from the crypt" once in a while, with the spooky business taking a back seat to character development, making it that much more effective (because the possibility of something nasty happening to a character is a lot more frightening when you care about them on some level). this story has some pretty meaningful things to say about memory, commitment, and the way we treat the people who love us. "i've always been good at putting two things back together. it's easy. you just take two pieces of metal...pipe or rigging, and apply a tungsten electrode and a shielding gas, and like magic, they stick together. you need to ignore the fact that you're deep under water...under all that pressure...just zero in on the weld itself...let everything else fade into the background. it's all about control. you just need a steady hand. that's how i feel right now, like two broken pieces that need to be put back together. so why is it so hard to do? i guess there aren't any instructions for that." i don't make a lot of impulse buys, but i seem to have a weirdly good track record when i do. the trend continues. 130513 ... epitome of incomprehensibility When I was waiting for people yesterday in Value Village (50% sale; this was exciting, you see) I flipped through a 4-part comic. Written by Alan Grant, it was both creepy and funny. Two universes collide and people start changing: women who have babies grow pouches in their necks, and people make a clicking sound - written with a * - instead of the letter O - and the narrator is left wondering what the hell's going on. And the whole thing seems like a karmic take-that for his earlier contempt of the poor. I forget the title. Besides the contemporary French book that I'm reading from the library, I also picked up, somewhat randomly, A House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (1905). It's one of those social dramedy things. It reminds me a bit of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (why are so many of these books named after houses or other places?) except here the churchy types are just as shallow as the partiers, just in a different way. It makes me glad I don't have gobs of money to lose. 130514 ... raze bookworms_unite! 130515 ... raze "it was on fire when i lay down on it" (robert fulghum) my dad bought this book not long after it was first published, in 1989. so i would have been about seven years old when i first read it. what can i tell you? i was a weird kid, never really into kids books. it's in pretty good shape for a twenty-four-year-old paperback book. the main thing separating it from its youth is the way the pages have yellowed with age and taken on a vague, musty-sweet aroma. you have to almost press your nose against the paper to notice it. fulghum writes short essays that are more like extra-small short stories, or mini think pieces. he's a unitarian universalist minister, a musician, a painter, a sculptor, and at one point or another he's been a ditch-digger, a newspaper carrier, a ranch hand, a teacher, a bartender, an IBM salesman, and a singing cowboy. his work gets swept into the self-help/inspirational genre. i'm not sure that tag quite fits, though it can get close to pop psychology at times. he's definitely a glass-half-full kind of guy, with a disposition much sunnier than mine. but there are things in his writing that resonate much more now than they did when i was a young'un. "all i really need to know i learned in kindergarten" is probably his best-known book. i think this one is better, and goes deeper. it isn't all warm and fuzzy, either. i was an avid reader of fulghum's books until "from beginning to end". he lost me with that one. it didn't do much for the thirteen-year-old me, and i stopped keeping up with him after that. that one's in a box downstairs somewhere. i'm not sure if i'd feel differently about it now. but on a whim, i pulled this one out for a re-read. it's been so many years since i last read it, i've forgotten almost everything that's in here. there are meditations on a hilariously botched wedding, the tranquility of tree-climbing, the mysteries of the human brain, some pretty unpopular opinions about dogs, and a lot more. the one story i remembered — the one that's stayed with me through the years — is about fatherhood. as a young girl, fulghum's daughter packs everyone's lunches. one day she gives him a second paper bag, filled with her private treasures. stones and seashells and things. he takes it to work, investigates the contents, and then throws them in the trash, not thinking they're anything important. later, he realizes the terrible mistake he's made, and digs through the garbage with the janitor after-hours, trying to find the love he threw away. my dad told me about that story all those years ago. it's what made me want to read the book, and what made me want to return to it now. i'd transcribe a little excerpt, but i think it's a story that needs to be read in full. so here's a different bit i like, from the very beginning: "a tabloid newspaper carried the story, stating simply that a small-town emergency squad was summoned to a house where smoke was pouring from an upstairs window. the crew broke in and found a man in a smoldering bed. after the man was rescued and the mattress doused, the obvious question was asked: 'how did this happen?' 'i don't know. it was on fire when i lay down on it.' the story stuck like a burr to my mental socks. and reminded me of a phrase copied into my journal from the dedication of some book: "quid rides? mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur.' latin. from the writings of horace. translated: 'why do you laugh? change the name, and the story is told of you.' it was on fire when i lay down on it. a lot of us could settle for that on our tombstones. a life-story in a sentence. out of the frying pan and into the hot water. i was looking for trouble and got into it as soon as i found it. the devil made me do it the first time, and after that i did it on my own. or to point at this truth at a less intense level, i report a conversation with a colleague who was complaining that he had the same damn stuff in his lunch sack day after day. 'so who makes your lunch?' i asked. 'i do,' says he." 130528 ... e_o_i I read that book! I may not have read all of it, but I definitely read some of it. I likewise found the optimism too optimisty sometimes, but the incongruous humour made his stories realistic, not cheesy, and added to the whimsical wisdom. 130528 ... raze the incongruous humour and whimsical wisdom! yes! that's exactly what i'm liking about it now, a little older and more whiskered than i was my first time through. 130528 ... raze "lost cat: a true story of love, desperation, and GPS technology" (caroline paul, with drawings by wendy macnaughton) if you're a cat person at all, you should read this book. it's not a difficult or terribly lengthy read, but there's more depth to this quirky little selective memoir than there might appear to be on the surface. it'll make you laugh. it'll probably make you cry too. the only reason it didn't do that second thing to me is because i lost the ability to cry proper-like sixteen years ago, and it hasn't returned to me yet. i'll admit i had some mysterious painful invisible dust blown into my eyes by a few specific pages of this book, and it took some work to keep them from overflowing with this strange liquid. funny thing, that. this is a love story and a mystery wrapped up into one. caroline paul is in an accident that leaves her injured, housebound, and depressed. she takes solace in her two cats — the gregarious fibby (short for fibula) and her brother, the skittish, neurotic tibby (short for tibia). one day tibby disappears. when he returns several weeks later, he is no longer anxious or shy, but "a swashbuckling adventurer". caroline (who does the writing) sets out to unravel the mystery of where tibby went and why, with the help of her partner wendy (who provides the drawings). what happens along the way is frequently hilarious and occasionally heartbreaking, with the images always acting in perfect counterpoint to the words. one of my favourite bits comes when caroline decides to try and learn how to "speak cat", to find out from tibby himself what the deal is. "you would think that only a few people would show up to an animal communications class. you would think four or five, ten at the most. you would be wrong. in the large college classroom in marin county, california, fifty people waited eagerly for the lecture to begin. the room was alive with the sounds of saliva, shifting bodies, and the jingle of metal. that was because thirty attendees had brought their real, live dogs. mixed in with these sounds was the crinkle of paper; those of us who were dogless clutched flimsy photos of our animals. on my lap lay a two-dimensional tibby, his large, wet extraterrestrial eyes staring from a partially crumpled head. next to me, a lumbering black newfoundland snuffled, looked at me sadly, and then lay down. i know, i tried to communicate. stupid humans. today i had brought two sides of myself to the class: my skeptical side counted the people in the room and added up the money the teacher was making. my earnest side stared at tibby's photo and told him, 'tonight we're going to have a little chat.' the teacher was a scientist. she said that she approached speaking to animals scientifically. scientifically, she had come to the conclusion that animal-human communication was well within everyone's grasp. she said, 'talking to an animal requires only a loving intent, followed by thoughts.' she said, 'the thoughts are most powerful if they're in pictures.' she said, 'receiving communication requires an uninhibited mind. your job is not to filter; it is to recognize and record.' she said, 'the first thing that pops into your head is probably from the animal.' she said, 'in order to do this, you have to put aside the fact that you think i'm crazy.' then she asked us if there were any questions. ('are you crazy?' skeptical mouthed to earnest, and laughed meanly.) yes, there were questions, actually. a young woman raised her hand. her cat, she said, had passed away recently. how could she speak to him? 'put all your questions in the past tense,' the teacher said, nodding with sympathy. someone else asked about talking to coyotes. another, whether her dog and cat could talk to each other. the teacher then hovered over a nearby beagle, swooped him off the floor, and cradled him in her arms. he had droopy eyes, a graying muzzle, and a look of resignation. this was her beagle, and we were going to talk with him, she told us, and we all leaned forward so that not a single thought-picture would be missed. here's what happened next: the teacher sent the beagle feelings of love. she requested his permission to ask him questions. she asked him to tell us about himself. or at least that's what was supposed to be happening. from where i sat, she was just staring at him. she may have been secretly looking for fleas. we were to receive the information the beagle transmitted and write it down. 'free your mind,' the teacher reminded us as we waited for word from our canine friend. 'remember,' she said, 'the first thing that pops in is probably from him.' i wrote: 'droopy-eyed, old, carpet, asparagus, brussels sprouts, red jacket.'" i have my friend alice to thank for telling me about this book; she sent me a link to the review that convinced me to go out and buy it. she hasn't read it yet. i'm mailing her a copy on monday. i hope she enjoys it as much as i have. 130622 ... unhinged suite francaise - irene nemirovsky it would have been her masterpiece; it was conceptualized as a five part work, like an orchestral suite. she finished the first two parts before she was deported to auschwitz. it is one of the most real novels i've ever read about war. i'm not sure why it seems more real to me than 'all's quiet on the western front' maybe cause i've never been a soldier *shrugs* maybe it seems more real because she was a casualty of the very war she was writing about. maybe it seems more real because after 70 years there really isn't much different in the world. there have been more genocides, more economic collapses, even more division by class and race. and yet we all think the same things. what will happen to me? to the people i love? to the places i love? and 70 years later, greed still wins. it makes all the death, effort seem pointless. 130623 ... e_o_i A couple of months ago I read a book by Irene Nemirovsky - a short book, with two novellas/long stories. The first one was Le Bal/The Ball, where a teenage girl tries to ruin the party her newly rich parents are planning because she's not allowed to go. There's some humour, lots of great character details, and a nicely ambiguous sentence at the end. The second is called Snow in Autumn, originally Flies in Autumn, and it's more explicitly historical: it follows the perspective of an elderly woman, Tatiana, who's a servant in an aristocratic family when the Russian Revolution happens. She stays alone in their mansion for a while, then finds them again in Paris. And it does a good job of showing how memory influences the more outward aspects of someone's environment. (Besides the fact that I need practice summarizing, I think unhinged would like these stories. And I admit to owning Suite Francaise, but I never finished it the first time I read it because it was too long. This shows what a dedicated person I am, does it not?) 130625 ... e_o_i And the one I'm reading right now is called Nothing Could Be Further by Tim Conley. The book is yellowish and rectangular, but not a standard book-sized rectangle: 5 by 6.5 inches, or about 12.5 by 16.5 cm. On the front, under the title, it reads "thirty stories" and on the back: obsessive ambiguous fiction cha-cha-cha which gives an idea of its (at least attempted) unconventionality. The stories themselves are surreal, but not strictly in a magical-realism way: the focus is not so much on what happens (although weird things frequently happen), but what the narrative considers important, which may not be what the reader expects. For instance, in the story "Deluge," an uncle comes to live with his nephew while there is a terrible flood outside, and the nephew obsesses over his uncle's annoying habits instead of, say, survival. The story "The Weakest Link" takes place at a bar where members of a women's hockey team, post-game, are complaining about their bad goalie. Oh, and one of them is possessed by demons. It is very funny and makes up for any overt watch-me-I-am-being-weird moments elsewhere. Right now I'm reading "Potatoes" which starts out with a quote from Wittgenstein. (Perhaps I'll copy it into Google Translate when I'm done, since I don't know German and the result is likely to be amusing.) The main character, Laura, a kid of around ten, uses the same kind of associative "logic" that I still do for fun: "If you don't finish all of your potatoes, said Mother, you won't have nice dreams. (...) Her mother had never lied, ever - or not that Laura knew about - and potatoes and lies were different things. And nobody, she thought, would lie about vegetables, or disgusting things that come from the dirt, like potatoes. Potatoes were not important, and you only lied about things that were really important." It goes on to describe Laura's dream - which is about potatoes and perhaps isn't nice - and to prove Douglas Coupland wrong when he said describing dreams is boring. Although who knows at any given time whether Douglas Coupland is serious or not? Anyway, I think I like this book. 130625 ... raze "detroit: an american autopsy" (charlie leduff) living right across the river from detroit for most of my life, i've always wondered how it all went so wrong over there. this book doesn't answer all of my questions, but it isn't supposed to. it's probably best described by leduff himself when he writes: "this is not a book about geopolitics or macroeconomics or global finance. and it is not a feel-good story with a happy ending. it is a book of reportage. a memoir of a reporter returning home — only he cannot find the home he once knew. this is a book about living people getting on with the business of surviving in a place that has little use for anyone anymore except those left here. it is about waking up one morning and being told you are obsolete and not wanting to believe it but knowing it's true. it is a book about a rough town and a tough people during arguably some of the most historic and cataclysmic days in the american experience. it is a book about family and cops and criminals and factory workers. it is about corrupt politicians and a collapsing newspaper. it is about angry people fighting and crying and snatching hold of one another trying to stay alive." one or two clumsy turns of phrase aside (how the editor's scalpel missed "occasionally interrupted by the occasional tick tick of an editor's key strokes" is beyond me), this is vivid, unsentimental, you-are-there writing about a city that's been dying a slow death for a long time, and the people who go on living in its husk. the passages about the broken-down fire department and charlie's doomed sister are especially powerful — sometimes hard to read, but just as hard to turn away from. and the political stuff is both horrifying and hilarious. on a random note, "lipstick and laxatives" is going on my list of favourite chapter titles. a woman working the cash at the bookstore a month or two ago recommended this to me when she saw i was buying harper lee's "to kill a mockingbird". if i see her in there again, i'll be sure to thank her. it's a good read. 130802 ... raze i have read not one book that is equal parts horrifying and hilarious, but two! look at me go! 130802 ... unhinged glamorama - bret easton ellis sometimes a biting satire is all that will do it for me 130803 ... raze "essex county" (jeff lemire) i just spent more than four hours tearing through this 500-plus-page book of words and images. it was time well spent. the more of jeff lemire's work i read, the more i appreciate his unique artwork. it's raw and scratchy. it's not often "pretty" in the conventional sense. but there's a stark beauty to it that's perfect for the kind of stories he tells. i love how he draws his characters in a way that makes them look like real people...not through hyper-realism, but by failing to idealize them — by allowing them to have flaws. big or crooked noses. lines from age and hard living. receding hairlines. out-of-shape bodies. tired eyes. and the flaws aren't just physical. people screw up. they make mistakes. this has a way of keeping things grounded even when surreal elements come into play. and there are a number of perfect little grace notes that would probably be impossible outside of this medium. for example, one character literally walks through his memories while slipping in and out of senility, and at one point his face becomes the moon in the sky as he watches himself do something he's spent years wishing he could take back. the old man is witness to the sins of his youth as a weeping satellite. think for a second about how brilliant that is. this is a collection of what were originally three separate graphic novels, but they belong together, and ultimately they tell one large story. when it's finally made clear how everything is connected, it feels organic, and not like the cheap deus ex machina that kind of thing can sometimes devolve into when left in the wrong hands. two incidental but very cool things: [1] some of the musical references are surprising, to say the least. in a photograph taken in the 1950s (well, a drawing of a fictional photograph), a character is holding a duke ellington vinyl LP. in a "deleted scene" included in the bonus material, a different character is listening to a john cale album. for this alone, lemire earns six thousand cool points. [2] i live less than a half hour from essex county. there are even a few references to my city in here. 130821 ... raze "slaughterhouse-five" (kurt_vonnegut) i read the short story "harrison bergeron" in grade twelve english class. as thought-provoking as it was brief, it should have inspired me to read more vonnegut. it probably would have, if not for an english teacher who found a way to grind any and all writing down to nothing, picking it apart until no mystery or beauty remained. it took a while before i was able to scrape enough of the residue of that literary emasculation off of my brain to enjoy reading anything "serious" again. i've owned a copy of "slaughterhouse-five" for something like eight years, but always forgot i had it. during a recent cleaning / organizing adventure, i found it again and stuck it on a bookshelf in my bedroom. i kept meaning to read it, until i stopped meaning to and just started. this book is a song about death, time, war, and alien abduction, with a mantric three-word refrain: "so it goes". there isn't a single semicolon. vonnegut famously hated the things, calling them "transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing". for the first ninety-odd pages, i liked the song a lot without loving it. the membrane between like and love was thin, but very much there. it takes a special sort of magic to make me fall in love with a book. then came a scene in which the main character, billy pilgrim, who has come "unstuck in time" and drops in on different parts of his life at random, with no control over the when or where of it all, experiences a concentrated time blip that enables him to watch a war film in reverse. i won't transcribe it here, because i don't want to ruin the moment for anyone who hasn't read the book. but there was the magic. i laughed the kind of unintentional sound you make when you're delighted by the unexpected brilliance of something. now i get to read the rest with love in my eyes. a friend once told me he thought my writing was vonnegutian. i'm not sure i'm worthy of that compliment. it's a great compliment all the same. 130830 ... unhinged brilliant moon - the autobiography of diglo khyentse the heart of prajna paramita sutra - translation and commentaries by the venerable master hsuan hua the secret book of sacred things - torsten krol 130831 ... raze "winesburg, ohio" (sherwood anderson) spiritual forefather to cheever, carver, ford, faulkner, and hemingway, among others, sherwood anderson published this book almost a century ago. he died in 1941 of peritonitis brought on by the accidental swallowing of a toothpick, a fate straight out of one of his own stories. this has been branded a "short story cycle", but all the stories flow into one another, characters recur, and it operates as a self-contained novel when read in a single sitting (which is the way i've treated it). the sense of place and anderson's ability to make real his characters' inner lives is startling. more than once, i've found myself disliking a character only for my feelings to soften five pages later after gaining an understanding of how they got to be the way they are. there's a lot to absorb here for such a short book. this is one that i think needs to be read more than once and will offer more to the reader each time it's revisited. there are too many perfect moments to touch on more than a few. here are two. two men sharing a moment of connection while husking corn: "ray pearson arose and stood staring. he was almost a foot shorter than hal, and when the younger man came and put his two hands on the older man's shoulders they made a picture. there they stood in the big empty field with the quiet corn shocks standing in rows behind them and the red and yellow hills in the distance, and from being just two indifferent workmen they had become all alive to each other. hal sensed it and because that was his way he laughed." a man and woman sitting together on a hill: "in that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly and waited. in the mind of each was the same thought. 'i have come to this lonely place and here is this other,' was the substance of the thing felt." DO NOT read john updike's introduction. it should have been an afterword. he gives away far too many plot points, and quotes the final line of the book. i was lucky enough to get wise to the spoilerific nature of the piece within the first paragraph or two, and left it for later, but i'll never understand why so many writers of forewords thoughtlessly spoil things better left for the reader to stumble into. i don't want to know how a novel ends before i've read the first page. 130917 ... past anathema 130917 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Just finished beautiful_losers by Leonard Cohen 130917 ... raze "three shadows" (cyril pedrosa; translated by edward gauvin) a young boy lives an idyllic existence on a remote farm with his mother and father. one night, he sees three shadowy figures on a hill looking in on him through his bedroom window. the ominous figures grow closer and more frightening. they never explain themselves, but gradually it's made clear that they're harbingers of death meant to take the child from his parents. while the mother does her best to prepare for the inevitable and make the most of what time remains, father and son set out on a perilous journey in an effort to literally outrun death. if i were a parent, i think this graphic novel would have destroyed me. i'm not a parent. i don't ever plan to be. but i don't think the absence of children mutes any of the book's power. it just pummels you in a different way. this is a haunting tale of love, sacrifice, loss, and the painful tug of mortality. cyril pedrosa's black_and_white artwork, drawn with pencil, pen, and charcoal, is some of the most expressive i've seen — never more so than during the nighttime scenes. his use of light and dark is masterful, and he enriches his profound fable with wonderfully unique character design and no end of great little details tucked away in the background. one of my favourite visual jokes: in an early panel, the father smokes a pipe while the mother reads a book called "the art of stew", a look of complete bewilderment on her face. and it's all doom and gloom. there's humour and happiness here too, and at least half a dozen characters you end up wishing you could hug, along with a few you want to strangle. to date, this is the only work by frenchman pedrosa to be translated into english. if the rest of what he's done is half as good as "three shadows", that needs to change. 130919 ... raze i meant to say "it's NOT all doom and gloom". why, missing word? why? 130919 ... e_o_i Drinking Water: A History by James Salzman Sixty years ago, tap water was the cool new thing and bottled water was out. Stupid Coke and Pepsi, etc., for bottling and selling tap water. Stupid us for buying it. (The book itself is a bit more nuanced.) 130920 ... raze "we have always lived in the castle" (shirley jackson) what a deliciously unsettling little book this is, right from the brilliant opening paragraph: "my name is mary katherine blackwood. i am eighteen years old, and i live with my sister constance. i have often thought that with any luck at all i could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but i have had to be content with what i had. i dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. i like my sister constance, and richard plantagenet, and amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. everyone else in my family is dead." 130923 ... raze "sleepwalk and other stories" (adrian tomine) the comic equivalent of a collection of short fiction, this brings together the first four issues of adrian tomine's "optic nerve" series. there's something a little bit raymond_carver -ish about these tales. they have the sense of small pockets of life being lived in all their messy, mostly-low-key glory. some of the characters are not very lik(e)able at all, and some of the stories have brutal endings that range from "painfully real" to "deeply unsettling". out of sixteen stories, i've counted two that end on a somewhat hopeful note, and one of those is debatable. i can handle that kind of grimness...though "pink frosting" is disturbing stuff, capturing the horror, senselessness, and awful stupidity of random violence in just two pages. "lunch break" is devastating in a different, quieter way. likewise with "supermarket", in which a friendly blind man is helped by the same young woman every time he visits the grocery store. she acts like a friend, only to stop speaking whenever she sees him walking somewhere outside of the store, so he won't recognize her and she won't have to talk to him when she isn't obligated to. the one minor quibble i have is with the heavy use of textual narration. while it works well for the most part, in a few places it might have been a little more powerful to show without telling. then again, there are stories in this book that do just that, with no narrative text at all and good use of silent panels. damn you, adrian tomine, for punching me in the gut so many times. i'm glad i let you do it, but now i think i need to go watch a youtube video of a kitten doing something cute to cleanse my mental palate. 130925 ... raze standing on a sword isn't so difficult. balancing on the blade isn't the hard part; it's the dismount that's tricky. 130926 ... raze (that bit was meant for more_things_learned_from_dreams, but thanks to blather being slower that george w. bush's brain in a thinking contest once again and having to refresh the captcha, it ended up here instead. joy.) 130926 ... raze THAN. not "that". i give up. 130926 ... raze "the sound and the fury" (william faulkner) i wasn't sure where to start with faulkner. i've read that "light in august" is an example of his writing at the peak of its powers, married to a relatively straightforward story that doesn't require a lot of mental heavy lifting. i've read that "as i lay dying" is a good way to get your feet wet in deeper water without drowning, though you might fall in and soak your clothes. and i've rarely read anything about "the sound and the fury" where the word "difficult" doesn't crop up. some people think it's a masterpiece. some people hate it. some people don't know what to feel about it or what it means. faulkner himself called it "a real son-of-a-bitch". i've read a lot of things, about a lot of the books he wrote, and none of it's done much to help me make a decision. for no particular reason, i chose to start with "the sound and the fury". and i think if i'd read this book when i was in high school it would have exploded my brain. two chapters and 180 pages in, it's becoming less impenetrable. but only just. for every question that gets an answer, there are three new questions that rise up in its place, like serpent's teeth. even cheating a bit and using a trick to help keep track of the way the chronology of the first chapter jumps all over the place without explanation didn't make much difference. i think with a book like this, all you can do is let it wash over you and try to orient yourself as well as you can from moment to moment. the experimentation wouldn't amount to much if the writing wasn't any good. but man, is it good. on one page, there'll be something like this: "he stood there beside the gaunt rabbit of a mule, the two of them shabby and motionless and unimpatient. the train swung around the curve, the engine puffing with short, heavy blasts, and they passed smoothly from sight that way, with that quality about them of shabby and timeless patience, of static serenity: that blending of childlike and ready incompetence and paradoxical reliability that tends and protects them it loves out of all reason and robs them steadily and evades responsibility and obligations by means too barefaced to be called subterfuge even and is taken in theft or evasion with only that frank and spontaneous admiration for the victor which a gentleman feels for anyone who beats him in a fair contest, and withal a fond and unflagging tolerance for whitefolks' vagaries like that of a grandparent for unpredictable and troublesome children, which i had forgotten." then two pages later you'll get: "the displacement of water is equal to the something of something." and then there are wild stream-of-consciousness passages with no punctuation, action and dialogue and thought all bleeding and blurring into one another in a seemingly heedless onslaught of words, when this is where the answers to some of the many questions are hidden. i've read that this is all part of faulkner's design, and eventually everything snaps into place. we shall see. 130927 ... raze it snapped into place alright. and faulkner was right to call it a son of a bitch. talk about a soul-crushing book. it'll be interesting to read again without the disorientation that was there the first time through, knowing better what's what and who's who and the why of the when. 130928 ... raze yeah...it's amazing how much easier that first long chapter is to read, and how much more sense it makes, revisiting it after having read the whole thing. 130929 ... past i've taken a hazard and am letting an international network of my peers decide what i read next. so far the competition is neck to neck with all of my initial suggestions. 130929 ... raze "still_life_with_woodpecker" (tom robbins) i almost dove straight into more faulkner, but then decided i might be better off opting for something a little lighter after "the sound and the fury" had its way with me. it took a while to decide what that lighter reading should be. i have too many books to choose from. it's a great problem to have, but a dangerous one for someone as indecisive as i am. a wonderful, caustic, fiery substitute teacher introduced me to tom robbins in the twelfth grade (see innerviews_raze for details). i bought the book he recommended, but for some silly reason didn't read it at the time. it sat around feeling unloved even longer than "slaughterhouse-five" did. i can see why some people find tom robbins maddening. if my brain were wired just a little differently, the interjections about the author's typewriter, the insane similes, and the weird ralph nader deification would probably be more irritating than amusing. but this is a fun read, at least for me, if not quite the revelation it might have been had i read it as a teenager. the girl i wrote slightly_rehearsed about used to ask me every so often, without any segue, "how do you make love stay?" now i wonder if she was reading this book, and fancied herself an outlaw or a princess, and this was her way of checking to see if i was reading the same book as her. a nudge that blew past whatever shoulder of mine her mouth was closest to without being felt or understood. whatever the case, if we still communicated, and if she were to ask me the same question today, i would quote from "still_life_with_woodpecker": "who knows how to make love stay? 1. tell love you are going to junior's deli on flatbush avenue in brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if love stays, it can have half. it will stay. 2. tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. face southwest. talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a moustache on your face. find love. tell it you are someone new. it will stay. 3. wake love up in the middle of the night. tell it the world is on fire. dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. fall asleep. love will be there in the morning." 131006 ... raze "in the garden of the north american martyrs" (tobias wolff) in addition to writing the famous memoir "this boy's life", tobias wolff has published several works of short fiction. this was the first. i found it at the used book store i visited today — the one with the accidental inspirational section for elves (see "what_made_you_snicker_today"). it wasn't a book i was looking for, but i was glad to find it. two stories in, i can already tell this is good stuff. this wolff fella knows how to paint a moment. 131012 ... raze heck (zander cannon) i had this plan to alternate prose and graphic novels. it kind of fell by the wayside. but here is a graphic novel! and i am reading it! this one originated as a serialized web comic. you'd never guess. it works well in physical book form as one larger unbroken thing. hector "heck" hammarskjöld, a former high school quarterback, inherits his estranged sorcerer father's house when the old man dies. he always felt there was something not quite right about the place, and after moving back in as an adult he learns where the bad vibes were coming from: there's a portal to hell in the basement. so he does what any sensible person would do, and opens up a business as an inheritance consultant, specializing in "posthumous closure". got a loved one you think might be in hell? he'll go down there and bring them a message for you, or bring one back from them. one day an old flame knocks on his door and hires him to find her husband, so she can get some closure, and heck and his tiny mummy sidekick go to hell to take care of business. this sounds like a fun, silly little pulpy comic. and it kind of starts out that way. then it gets dark and deep in a hurry. there's a story behind the mummy sidekick that isn't funny at all. hell is not a nice place. you don't want to know what happens to thieves and traitors. and just because you're only a visitor there to do a job, it doesn't mean you won't have to wrestle with demons of your own — literally and figuratively. a relatively quick read, but a good one. 131014 ... raze winter's bone (daniel woodrell) as with "the road", i knew this was a movie before i knew it was a book. in both cases i've yet to see the movie. but i know who the actors are. when i was reading "the road", the faces i formed for the man and the boy weren't any i'd ever seen before. here some of jennifer lawrence's features have slipped into my mind's rendering of ree. that's not a bad thing. sixteen-year-old ree dolly is caretaker to her two younger brothers and their near-catatonic mother. her absentee father cooks meth and has put the house up as part of his bond. he's skipped bail, and if he doesn't make his next court date, the house will be sold from under what's left of the family, leaving them "dogs in the fields". it's left to ree to find her father, dead or alive. two words keep coming to mind here: bleak, and beautiful. a man pissing against the wall of a shed becomes poetry. how do you even do that? how do you write about something like that and make it compelling? i don't know, but daniel woodrell does. this is one of my favourite bits so far: "she took to pausing more often to study on things that weren't usually of interest. she sniffed the air like it might somehow have changed flavors and looked closely at the stone fencerow, touched the stones and hefted a few, held them to her face, saw a rabbit that didn't try to run until she laughed at it, smelled victoria on her sleeves and hunkered atop a stump to think. she spread her skirt taut across her knees and tucked the extra under her legs. those stones had probably been piled by direct ancestors and for a long while she tried to conjure their pioneer lives and think if she saw parts of their lives showing in her own. with her eyes closed she could call them near, see those olden dolly kin who had so many bones that broke, broke and mended, broke and mended wrong, so they limped through life on the bad-mend bones for year upon year until falling dead in a single evening from something that sounded wet in the lungs. the men came to mind as mostly idle between nights of running wild or time in the pen, cooking moon and gathering around the spout, with ears chewed, fingers chopped, arms shot away, and no apologies grunted ever. the women came to mind bigger, closer, with their lonely eyes and homely yellow teeth, mouths clamped against smiles, working in the hot fields from can to can't, hands tattered rough as dry cobs, lips cracked all winter, a white dress for marrying, a black dress for burying, and ree nodded yup. yup." 131019 ... raze urban tails: inside the hidden world of alley cats (photography by knox; text by sara neeley) as a cat lover, it can be difficult to read about the plight of feral cats. but the pictures in this book are pretty incredible. 131021 ... past embassytown by china meiville because why read something light after reading heavy stuff all day? 131021 ... e_o_i For the purposes of one writing project, Penguin dictionaries of Literary Terms and Critical Theory; Wikipedia for the other. Transparent Things by Vladimir Nabokov. So far it's not very transparent. It starts out sounding like Milan Kundera, a bit abstract, but not uninteresting. 131022 ... raze ariel (sylvia plath) this is the book that immortalized sylvia plath. often we look to the last work an artist created before taking their own lives for answers and insights. an album or a book can be interpreted as an extended suicide note, when the artist might not have meant for it to be taken that way. the poems here are almost impossible to separate from their author's self-determined end, the same way elliott_smith's album "from a basement on a hill" is difficult to separate from his. taken on their own terms, they're taut, finely-honed clusters of words that hum with an almost violent energy. the first line of the first poem is, "love set you going like a fat gold watch." that has to be one of the most interesting and complex (and, it has to be said, poetic) things i've read about the conception of a child. it's just one line, but there's a lot in it. there was a lot in her. 131024 ... raze (singular / plural fail. underscore fail. phooey. although...it's said that cats have nine lives, and i'm sure there are cats out there who fancy themselves artists, so...) 131024 ... raze the arrival (shaun tan) anyone who thinks comics and graphic_novels aren't art needs to sit down and absorb this thing. it's the story of a man who immigrates to a new land in the hope of building a better life for his family, leaving them behind in a dreary city where long shadowy spiked tails snake through the streets like oppressive ghosts. if a graphic novel can be thought of as a film you hold in your hands, this would be a silent movie. there's no dialogue or narrative text; the tale is told entirely through images. the artwork defies easy description, ranging from astonishing realism (some panels resemble dusty old photographs) to alien landscapes as beautiful as they are bizarre. one of the quotes on the back cover is from art spiegelman, who describes the book as "a documentary magically told by way of surrealism". i think that pretty much nails it. the new city / country / place in which the nameless protagonist tries to find his way is full of architecture, objects, and animals that have the strange logic of dreams. this allows the reader to experience something of the wonder and fear of being a stranger in a strange land, with nothing quite as it was where we came from, making the language and cultural barriers palpable. but the man does encounter people who become something like friends, as fleeting as their moments of connection are, and they find ways of being understood to each other. some of these people are fellow immigrants, and their own stories play out in haunting silent flashbacks. one scene that i think is a perfect example of the way shaun tan arrives at a kind of heightened emotional realism through surrealism: the man finds an apartment in the new place he's trying to acclimate to. all of the appliances are unusual and confusing. inside a ceramic container he finds an animal that resembles a cross between a dog and a benevolent lizard. he places his suitcase on his bed. when he opens it, for a moment he sees his wife and child inside, eating breakfast without him, the viscera of the luggage having become the kitchen of his home. then it's just clothes inside. clothes and a picture of him with them. he hammers a nail into the wall of his new bedroom with his shoe, hangs the picture where he can see it, and sits and stares, a world away from the people he loves, while his new animal friend sits on the window sill watching him. this is one of the deepest, most beautiful books i've ever read, and there isn't one word in it. 131027 ... raze the stories of breece d'j pancake (breece d'j pancake) breece pancake was born and grew up in west virginia, looked something like will oldham the man when will oldham was still a boy, taught english at virginia military schools, studied creative writing, and blew his head off with a shotgun in 1979, when he was 26 years old. at the time of his death he had published six short stories. this book collects those six, and six more. there's something in this spare-but-evocative kind of writing that speaks to me in places i didn't know needed speaking-to. it's there in "winesburg, ohio". it's there in raymond_carver. it's there in cormac mccarthy, if a bit more knotted and thick. and it's here too. but it's different each time. each voice speaks in its own way. the language is similar, the vocabulary never the same. breece pared his stories down until there wasn't a wasted word. each sentence reads like it was carved from something true, into something more than true. about half of the stories are written in the first-person present tense, which isn't something i've seen much of anywhere else. it works. it all works. it's a shame he was gone so soon. but in reading alan mcpherson's perceptive foreword, i think i understand why he made the choice he did. it's possible to die of inarticulate loneliness. breece was free in the dark mist of his stories, but outside of them he was one of his characters, torn between where he came from and where he wanted to be, trying to escape from and return to the first place while not sure what the other was. the beginning of "fox hunters" makes me wish he'd written an entire novel from the perspective of an animal: "the passing of an autumn night left no mark on the patchwork blacktop of the secondary road that led to parkins. a gray ooze of light began to crest the eastern hills above the hollow and sift a blue haze through the black bowels of linking oak branches. a small wind shivered, and sycamore leaves chattered across the pavement but were stopped by the fighting-green orchard grass on the berm. the opossum lay quietly by the roadside. she had found no dead farm animals in which to build her winter den; not even a fine empty hole. she packed her young across the road and into the leaves where the leathery carcass of another opossum lay. she did not pause for sniffing or sentiment. metalclick. she stopped. fire. she hunkered in tight fear against the ground, her young clutching closer to her fur. soft, rhythmless clumpings excited her blood, and she sank lower. with day and danger advancing, fear was blushing in her as she backed cautiously into higher brush. from her hiding, she watched a giant enemy scuffling on the blacktop, and a red glow bouncing brightly in the remnant of her night." 131030 ... raze (james alan mcpherson's foreword, that should have been. i don't know how i missed a whole third of a name.) 131030 ... e_o_i I'm a little curious: are you finished The Sound and the Fury, and do you read books one after the other? If so, you read quickly. I tend to be reading several at once. Shaun Tan's The Arrival sounds like something I'd like. I'll look for it in the bibliotek but it's probably not there. Perhaps in Drawn and Quarterly - as the name suggests, they have a lot of comics as well as poetry. Ariel is brilliant, and her novel The Bell Jar is also very good. I feel that if in some alternate reality I met Sylvia Plath, she'd strike me as a snob and I'd dislike her. But this cold front would hide a delightfully sharp sense of humour. In real life, depression overcame that, which was monstrously unfair of it. 131030 ... raze i do read one book at a time, one after the other. i've always been a little bit in awe of people who can read several books at once. i couldn't do it. but then i've never been very good at multitasking. i can't even have more than one online conversation going at a time without my brain saying, "what are you trying to do to me?! i will not be split!" i guess i do read on the fast-ish side. what slows me down is the choosing-what-to-read-next part. i've spent days trying and failing to make a decision before finally forcing myself to grab something, leading to thoughts of, "why didn't i just grab this six days ago and save myself the waffling?" i burned through "the sound and the fury" in two days, then doubled back and read the first section again, and will probably re-read it all the way through sometime before the end of the year. there's a ton i could say about that book and what it made me think / feel. i can see why some people don't like it or just find it to be too much, but it got me good, and i love how mutable it is...how it will become a whole new book the next time i read it. i've got another few things by faulkner to read, but indecision is chipping away at me again there. i mean, do i go a little off the beaten trail and read something like "the wild palms", or do i just read "as i lay dying" and try to forget the dozens of paperbacks i saw at the bookstore with james franco's face on the cover? decisions... "the arrival" comes highly recommended by me. and i found it at indigo books! whoever thought to stock it there deserves a handshake and the sandwich of their choice. i think part of my being moved by it could have to do with the history of immigration in my own family. i first typed "my only family" by mistake. i suppose that's true too. my great grandfather left czechoslovakia with his wife during the second world war when their son, my grandfather, was a child, to avoid being exterminated by the germans. great grandpa rudy was a business tycoon. he owned a dozen stores. he had a villa. i have an old black_and_white picture of it somewhere. it's surreal. he was a rich man, and he left his home with nothing. he brought his family to canada, changed their (our) last name, and had to start over in a place where everything was new to him. so reading that book kind of let me get some feeling, however hazy, of what it might have been like for him, and it made me realize for maybe the first time how not-very-far-removed from it i am in terms of the bloodline, and how i wouldn't exist if not for rudy's escape during the nazi annexation of the sudetenland. and putting that all aside, i just think it's a really beautifully-drawn and moving story. this is one of my favourite images: http://euphonymag.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/0.jpg 131031 ... e_o_i Cool - I like the mix of realism and symbolism. And you can see Canada geese flying in the background. I wrote something that was sort of a response to this, and it grew wings and migrated to birdlike_ancestors_in_flight. I'll give my report on Transparent Things soon. It's more interesting than I gave it credit for. 131101 ... raze king city (brandon graham) this is the story of joe (a lovelorn thief and "cat master" capable of doing just about anything with his genius feline partner earthling j.j. catingsworth the third), pete (a mob courier with a heart of gold), max (a veteran of the hellish zombie war, addicted to a drug that slowly turns the user INTO the drug itself), and other inhabitants of king city. it's a sort-of cyberpunk noir set in a world where soda comes in flavours like "victory" (sweet) and "divorce" (bitter), there's a hotel specifically for criminals to lay low at when they need to get back on their feet between jobs, and in the right part of town a man will sell you a drug knife you can have sex with. there are elements of manga and graffiti art merging to create something really interesting on the eyes, and the amount of detail packed into some of the panels is nuts. even the inside flaps of the dust jacket are fun to get lost in for a while. and it's funny. there are little visual jokes all over the place, like when joe says "fuck a shit sandwich!" in a moment of frustration, and a thought bubble shows earthling the cat trying to imagine what a shit sandwich would look like. in one of my favourite bits so far, joe steals a woman's brains (all four of them) and stores them in earthling's stomach. earthling takes to watching soap operas and weeping while eating junk food, until he barfs up the brains and reverts to his former personality. i like cerebral and high-brow humour as much as the next person, but this stuff that some would call juvenile still makes me laugh my ass off. as graphic_novels go, this one might not quite be high art, but i'm enjoying it. (and i meant to say, i like the migratory thing you wrote, e_o_i) 131107 ... raze something burned along the southern border; campfire radio rhapsody (robert earl stewart) bob is a friend of mine. there's even a poem in one of his books dedicated to me, about a strange character we've had fleeting mutual contact with, who i had a few memorable encounters with at the family campground in lambton shores where chunks of several summers were spent in the trailer of strangeness. but i ain't biased. the dude can write. and i mean really, really write. of his two books of poetry, i think the second, "campfire radio rhapsody", has the slight edge for me. but only just. each book is punctuated by a lengthy, stunning centerpiece. in "southern border", it's "flicker rate", a suite of poems that deal unflinchingly with the loss of a parent. in "campfire radio rhapsody", it's "the county reporter", a long multi-part poem that touches on, among other things, the sad death of a former mayor-turned-blackjack dealer. these are both re-reads. i think i'm enjoying them even more the second time through. and i'd quote something, but there so many great moments and turns of phrase, i wouldn't know where to start. 131111 ... raze as i lay dying (william_faulkner) so far i don't think this packs quite the same punch for me as "the sound and the fury" did. it's still good, though. and just when i'm thinking it's "only" good, faulkner goes and writes a line like, "i feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth," and i shake my head and read it another ten times. 131114 ... e_o_i transparent_things 131126 ... raze the faraway nearby (rebecca solnit) this book begins as something of a memoir but soon fans out in other directions and becomes a book about impermanence, about leprosy and the strange arc of che guevara's life, about fairytales, about fruit preserves, about stories and what feeds them, how we tell them, what they feed to those who are there for the telling. it's written mise en abyme, chapters arranged as mirrors of themselves, with an additional chapter running through the entire book at the bottom of each page, the textual equivalent of a news ticker. it also contains a "review" of mary shelley's "frankenstein" that is one of the most insightful reviews of anything i've ever read, anywhere. 131128 ... past the city & the city 131129 ... raze stitches: a memoir (david small) the autobiographical graphic novel is one of my new favourite things, and this is a good one. david's is something of a real life horror story, made all the more poignant because the monsters are regular people who, in a twisted way, think they're doing the right thing. it's remarkably free of easy sentimentality, too. there's real anger here. as there should be. 131220 ... Piso Mojado zeitgeist, bruce sterling 131220 ... e_o_i Not "reading now," but there are two memoir-ish graphic novels you (and y'all) might be interested in: Epileptic by David B. and Pyongyang by Guy Delisle. Both are originally in French, but both have English translations. 131221 ... raze thanks for the tip! investigate i shall. (blathe like yoda i will.) 131221 ... raze 45 mercy street (anne sexton) most of these poems read like nightmares, even when they aren't dream-related. dark, dark, dark. but i dig it. the "bestiary U.S.A." section, with poems named after animals and insects, is vicious. "i look at the strangeness in them," she writes in a brief introduction, "and the naturalness they cannot help, in order to find some virtue in the beast in me." 140106 ... e_o_i Hmm. I'll write that down. I've definitely read something of hers in an anthology somewhere, but anthologies are like quotes pulled out of context and (sometimes) dissected dully. In the poetricity world aussi, Black by George Elliott Clarke (excerpts and superficial commentary on "black," in the red.) 140107 ... raze my dirty dumb eyes (lisa hanawalt) i can't remember the last time a book made me snicker this much. a lot of the artwork is beautiful (lisa draws dogs better than anyone i've ever seen), a lot of the humour is crude, and it makes for a fun combination. her illustrated movie reviews and lists of things like "what dogs want", "how we can tell martha stewart's drunk", and "tips for living with a significant other" are especially funny. sample bit: "i give 'the vow' two out of five kisses. on the way home from the theatre i saw a rat who found a churro and it was more romantic than anything in the entire movie." then she draws a rat saying something really romantic to a churro, which is a spanish donut / doughnut that kind of looks like an ear of corn that's been shaved bald. 140211 ... raze the velveteen rabbit (margery williams; drawings by william nicholson) i don't think i ever read this one when i was a kid. maybe it's better to read it when you're old enough to recognize that it's a children's book, but it's more than that. "'real isn't how you are made,' said the skin horse. 'it's a thing that happens to you. when a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become real.' 'does it hurt?' asked the rabbit. 'sometimes,' said the skin horse, for he was always truthful. 'when you are real you don't mind being hurt.' 'does it happen all at once, like being wound up,' he asked, 'or bit by bit?' 'it doesn't happen all at once,' said the skin horse. 'you become. it takes a long time. that's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. generally, by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. but these things don't matter at all, because once you are real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.” 140219 ... e_o_i That brings back fond memories. I liked how he was "real" before being real - the reality of imagination - when I read it I was old enough to read but maybe not old enough to think thoughts like I'm thinking now. 140221 ... e_o_i The_Cry_of_the_Dove by Fadia Faqir 140611 ... raze i need to pick this up again. i got a pretty good rhythm going last year, managed to read more books in the space of about eight months than i'd read in the last several years combined, and i thought i'd carry the momentum into this year. that didn't happen. at least i have a good excuse. it's more difficult to set aside time for reading when you're busy making things and assisting other people in making things. still, the teeth that live in the brain always feel sharper when they've got good books to make their meals. i ran into a friend today and we made a deal to borrow-swap graphic_novels at the week's end. he's going to give me "beautiful darkness" and i'm going to give him "asterios polyp", which i haven't actually read yet. maybe knowing i've only got until the weekend before i kiss it goodbye for a while will get me to do something about that. 141229 ... raze asterios polyp (david mazzucchelli) as expected, this is good. there's a lot going on here — art, duality, aristophanes, orpheus and eurydice, the improbability and enduring power of love, the miraculous usefulness of the penis as a subject of cocktail party conversation, and more. the artwork on its own is almost bewildering in the way it shifts to match the narrative. take one small moment of an argument between the titular character and his wife. they share the same panel, but she's all scratchy red lines, and he's all clean blue geometric shapes. she's messy, but she's real. he's nice to look at, but he's empty inside, and his back is turned to her. he's somewhere she can't reach, not listening, not caring enough to listen. there are some neat tricks, too, and though this is a story that doesn't rely on trickery to say what it wants to say, having the main character's stillborn twin brother act as narrator feels like a nice touch. i think jeff's gonna like it. 150103 ... e_o_i Work-related, but interesting - The Great and Holy War: How World War 1 Changed Religion For Ever by Philip Jenkins (published by an Oxford imprint in 2014 - I think it's also with HarperCollins with a different subtitle). Basically, his thesis is that every country that fought in the war presented themselves and their allies as fighting for God, and their enemies as the devil, and a lot of people took this fairly literally. Ironically, most of them used quite similar religious imagery and rhetoric; all the nations except the Muslim Ottoman Empire were either officially Christian or officially secular and majority Christian. Speaking of Christians and Muslims, this I thought was an interesting point: "In modern times, radical Muslim clergy and activists have often cited religious justifications for violence, to the extent that many Jews and Christians even doubt that Islam is a religion, rather than a militaristic doomsday cult. Yet Christian leaders in 1914 or 1917 likewise gave an absolute religious underpinning to warfare conducted by states that were seen as executing the will of God, and they used well-known religious terms to contextualize acts of violence" (p. 14). ...This'll sound silly, but most of what I still remember about World War 1 comes from the last Anne of Green Gables book, where the main character is Anne's daughter "Rilla of Ingleside" (everyone has to be Someone of Someplace in Lucy-Maud-Montgomery world!) I read it first when I was around twelve and a few times since; I enjoyed the humour, the adventure and romance plots, and frankly (this'll make me sound bad, perhaps) the "excitingness" of war. But I remembered scratching my head about the local pacifist being portrayed as loony, or at the least misguided, and constantly the butt of jokes - not that pacifists can't be goofy, sure, but it seemed he was goofy because Montgomery was trying to paint pacifism as inherently irrational. To be fair, she also satirized the locals who were against him - they couldn't understand him at all and suspected he was in league with the "Huns" (i.e., the Germans). I also remember that, in the book, people used words like "Armageddon" and general end-of-the-world imagery to talk about the war. There were even prophetic dreams (L. M. Montgomery dabbled in mysticism, but she didn't always include it in her books - when she did, sometimes it was to make fun of mystic types). Here the prophetic dreamer is taken seriously - she's a 20-something woman with a tragic romance but a rather unromantic name (Gertrude or something?) and her dream that she's standing in a field full of blood was fairly scary to my younger self. Hell, I should read THAT again too. It was published in 1921, just three years after the end of the war. Dear old Wikipedia says, admittedly a bit vaguely, "Rilla of Ingleside is the only Canadian novel written from a woman's perspective about the First World War by a contemporary." ...I'm just not sure Prof. K wants to quote Anne of Green Gables spawn in a book on Swiss theologian Karl Barth's 1914 sermons. Seriously, that book was how I remembered the names of WW1 battles. And they say "chick lit," especially books for kid types of chicks, is all gossip-boys-fame-makeup stuff (or whatever the 1910s equivalent was). 150303 ... raze so sad today (melissa broder) when the first few pages of an interconnected series of personal essays make you cackle for a few different reasons, you know you've probably got a good one. one chapter in this book is called "under the anxiety is sadness but who would go under there". another is called "love like you are trying to fill an insatiable spiritual hole with another person who will suffocate in there". this book was hiding in the self-help section. that's messed up. this isn't a self-help book. it's a "this is who i am and probably a little bit who you are too" book. 160509 ... e_o_i That sounds a bit like the Cheryl Strayed book my friend gave me. Not her memoir Wild, but a compilation of her "Dear Sugar" columns. Right now, poetry - the current issue of Vallum, which I'm trying not to call either Vellum or Valium. A lot of the poems so far seem kind of distant to me - too nose-in-the-air, abstract, or formally traditional - but there are a few that grabbed me. One about a coral reef, another about imagining an impossibly high bike jump. Magic bike jumps: I approve. I love children's poetry, especially the funny stuff. Confession: I just reread Toes in My Nose by Sheree Fitch. Nostalgia aside, it's really good stuff! Also see Dennis Lee, Shel Silverstein, "Dr. Seuss," etc. 160512 ... raze between (avalon moore) every wednesday and friday avalon moore posts a new page from her self-published graphic novel "between". it's a coming-of-age story with a poignant twist up its sleeve that, once revealed, adds another layer of unexpected depth to an already rich reading experience and somehow feels less like a trick than an inevitability. it's probably pretty clear from skimming this blathe that i'm a fan of graphic novels. one thing i've found, though — sometimes the words are somewhat two-dimensional. they're there to provide some rhythm, some narrative propulsion, some dialogue, but in some cases they take a back seat to the art. that's not the case this time. avalon's words are more than strong enough to stand on their own. you can read "between" here: https://thestorybetween.com/page-1/ her "born on a tuesday scribbles" are also well worth checking out (self-described as a "bizarre little scrap heap of all kinds of flotsam and jetsam from out of [her] brain"). there's a little bit of everything there. 170704 ... amy anthropology i don't think it would be wise to share what i'm reading -- the reasons i'm reading are too multiple and farflung, and simple minds might make something out of nothing, and the wrong thing out of everything else -- but mostly i'm struck by the lack of safety in sharing because the books i'm reading don't reach the bar of populism for our times. whole categories of reading wiped out. it's sad what you can't discuss. RIP college? RIP safety in culture, let's pray to Jesus not. safety in numbers forever. publishers. editors. best sellers. existentialism. rock the vote, sure, why not? 170705 ... unhinged love love - sung j woo totalitarian temptations in free societies - ryszard legutko 170706 ... raze the disaster artist (greg sestero, with tom bissell) being sick stinks. the downtime afforded by being sick has a mucus-caked silver lining stuck to its forehead, though, and the faded ink on the ribbon of the thing says, "if you've been slacking off on reading books, now would be a good time to fix that." greg sestero was one of the lead actors in "the room", which was written, produced, directed, and bankrolled by the unsolvable enigma that is tommy wiseau. objectively speaking, "the room" is one of the worst movies ever made. it's been called "the 'citizen kane' of bad movies". the premise is simple, but the way the film is constructed is almost impossible to describe. nothing that happens in it makes any sense. the dialogue is bizarre. the acting choices are all wrong. characters appear with no introduction and disappear with no explanation. entire plot threads are introduced and abandoned at will. and the star of the show is maybe the weirdest leading man any movie has ever had, a guy who looks like he belongs in a jean-claude van damme film playing "random henchman who gets kicked in the face #3", with an accent one critic described as sounding "like borat doing an impression of christopher walken as a mental patient". "the room" made $1,800 against a $6,000,000 budget (that's not a typo) and a was a stunning box office flop. and then a funny thing happened. people started to appreciate the film as an unintentional comedy, and it grew into a cult sensation. hollywood shithead james franco just made a movie based on greg's book and is getting some of the best press of his life because of it (of course he gave himself the starring role). the book is about the belief-defying birth of one of the strangest movies ever made, and the behind-the-scenes intel is often hilarious. but it's also the story of an odd, sometimes troubling codependent friendship between two struggling actors. tommy has never admitted to anyone how old he is or where he's from. he's been saying for years he's a new orleans native (you only need to hear him speak for five seconds to know that's a lie). when asked how on earth he managed to raise six million bucks to make a movie on his own steam when the industry wouldn't have anything to do with him, he said he imported some leather jackets from korea. "the disaster artist" probably contains about as much truth as we'll ever know about tommy. he grew up in poland and spent some time in france, where he was treated horribly. movies fascinated him. eventually he ended up in america with a dream of becoming an actor. somehow he worked his way from selling imported european toys on the docks to owning several prime pieces of san francisco real estate, running a store that sold irregular denim products at discount prices, although how he even made money doing that remains a mystery. there's been speculation that he was involved in drugs or the mob and "the room" was an elaborate money laundering scheme, but that's tough to swallow given how clueless tommy seems to be about a lot of things. this is a guy who couldn't even remember his own lines from the script he wrote himself when they were shooting the movie. (there's also this: he was in two car accidents, one of which almost killed him, so there may be some amount of cognitive impairment or PTSD involved.) tommy does some pretty dishonest, manipulative, and downright cruel things to people, especially when he's "directing" his movie. he's also capable of acts of great kindness. it's difficult not to feel some amount of affection or sympathy for him. this is a guy who was judged and rejected his whole life, who could never get a single *audition* for an acting job matter what he did, who finally found a friend in greg who seemed to accept him for who he was but was largely in it for the financial perks, and who poured everything he thought and felt into a movie he wrote and bankrolled himself, only to hear the world laugh at his ineptitude. he may run with the idea that "the room" was meant to be a dark comedy all along, but it's pretty clear he was trying to make a serious drama about love and betrayal. it just ... didn't come out like any serious drama anyone had ever seen before. don't take my word for it, though. check that movie out. preferably with a group of people. i promise you it'll be an experience to remember. 180113 ... raze (there's an extra "a" and a missing "no" in there, but i guess i was overdue to make some boneheaded typos) 180113 ... e_o_i Ah yes! Serendipity. I'd just seen a clip from that. I suppose Tommy Wiseau is the long-haired mumbling one who laughs at odd times? The book makes me curious about the book. I know someone who's a good visual artist but writes bad poetry (and can't really see that he's better at A than B, though he should - after all, he likes painting more). This seems to be at a whole other level. 180113 ... e_o_i "The book makes me curious about the book": I meant that your WRITING makes me curious about the book. Gah. I think I need sleep. Also, I'm sorry you're not feeling well. Hope you get some rest too, and feel better soon. 180113 ... raze fortunately it was only one of those industrial-strength colds that seem to be going around right now, only this one came with free bonus chills and random aches. at this point it's gone, but for this frustrating residual cough that's taking its time going away. go away, residual cough! i refuse to pay you residuals! the television pilot you were involved in as an executive producer was never picked up by the network, and it's not the sort of thing that's going to turn into a cult curiosity years from now! but anyway. i thank thee for the well-wishes. :) 180120 ... e_o_i That's rotten. Glad you're feeling better. Actually, I think I meant "the movie clip made me interested in the book." I don't know what I mean. Reading now: Crystallography -Christian Bok How Do I Look - Sennah Yee Rabbit Punch - Greg Santos Parable of the Sower - Octavia Butler Three parts poetry, one part dystopian-survivalist sci-fi. 180125 ... unhinged the hate u give - angie Thomas had me full on crying on the bus twice today. stories make tears well up all the time but i have had a lifetime of practice containing my tears this story might be extra powerful because i hear echoes of my life_partner , my friends at macys in this story. strong reverberating echoes that tug on my heartstrings hard enough to make tears fall on the bus 180125 ... raze the serial killer's apprentice (james renner) i don't know what it is about unsolved crimes and unexplained disappearances that have always intrigued me. maybe it's the feeling that if you just found one missing puzzle piece you could put it all together. but nothing ever quite adds up. for every rare case like the mystery of lori_ruff, where eventually there's some small amount of closure, there are insoluble enigmas like the disappearances of jean spangler, louis le prince, the entire crew of the MV joyita, ray gricar, the sodder children, zebb quinn, and the bizarre case of tamam shud. subtitled "and twelve other true stories of cleveland's most intriguing unsolved crimes", this book scratches that would-be armchair detective itch and then some. there are a few typos that really should have been caught ("grizzly murders" is a real howler ... there are no stories about bears here), but other than that it makes for a good, compelling, sometimes creepy read. 180125 ... raze trouble boys: the true story of the replacements (bob mehr) my introduction to the replacements came through cameron crowe's film "say anything". in a small scene near the end, lloyd dobler turns up his sister's stereo as it plays "within your reach" just before leaving home, as if to say, "remember me by this." paul westerberg's flanger-drenched guitar riff caught my ear and made me want to check out more of his band's music. i was an angry teenager at the time, so the timing couldn't have been better. there was something broken and desperate in songs like "unsatisfied" and "hold my life" that got to me on a gut level not a lot of music seemed capable of reaching at the time. i don't know how many times i listened to "answering_machine" on repeat when i was depressed about a stagnating long-distance relationship. a little later, i dug into paul's post-replacements solo work and came to appreciate his maturing voice as a songwriter. all the while, i wondered: how is it that these guys didn't become household names, when lesser bands like the goo goo dolls got rich and famous by shamelessly aping a watered-down version of their sound? the replacements had great songs that were universal enough to work as anthems but personal enough to mean something to a listener searching for more than just a catchy tune. they didn't make the same album over and over again, either. they managed to grow and expand their musical range without ever losing the raw, could-fall-apart-at-any-moment quality that made them exciting in the first place. and for at least the back half of their existence, they had major label support. it seemed like they had everything going for them. so why weren't they huge? bob mehr's book has all the answers. and they aren't pretty. this is the kind of book that's a double-edged sword if you're a serious fan of the band. it's thorough, meticulously-researched, very well-written, and a clear labour of love. it's the kind of deep-diving rock biography you hope for but so rarely get. there's also no effort made to sugarcoat anything. you get the unvarnished truth. and it's often ugly, if not disturbing. the replacements had opportunities most bands would kill for. they went out of their way to sabotage every one of them in the most grotesque ways possible. i lost count of how many times someone in a position of power tried to help the band or championed their music, only for paul and co. to make a point of humiliating and alienating them. some of the stories are so absurd they're funny, but after a while you want to step in and say, "jesus, guys ... enough." the replacements made snatching defeat from the jaws of victory their life's work. the insane amount of alcohol and drug consumption going on had more than a little to do with it, but it's clear the warped psychology went deeper than that. mehr does an admirable job of untangling the difficult childhoods of all the major players, suggesting that if the deck wasn't stacked against them from the start, the cards were at least seriously bent out of shape. original lead guitarist bob stinson emerges as a tragic, heartbreaking character who just couldn't find a way to process the horrors of his early life and never managed to get it together or feel like a whole human being. his younger brother tommy was roped into the band when he was all of eleven years old. while putting the bass in his hands saved him from an almost certain life of crime, any chance he had at a somewhat normal adolescence disappeared right there. so it's easy to feel sympathy for him too. paul westerberg is another story. i used to kind of admire paul. i thought here was a guy who did it his way, "playing the game" be damned. i felt there was something noble in his fiercely independent stance. in the book he comes off more like an unrepentant asshole who got off on spitting in the faces and stomping on the hearts of everyone who ever believed in or cared about him and his music. as one reviewer on goodreads put it: "if paul westerberg isn't the least sympathetic figure in rock history, he's in the team photo." a great, engrossing read. i learned more about the band and what made them tick than i ever thought possible. but now i kind of feel like i need to take a cold shower. 180416 ... unhinged (some pat gesture of empty ceremonious recognition, march was women's history month...maybe. if my voracious historical search to salvage the civil rights of the violated (to protect those that suffer), for so many years most of my thoughts and my writing consumed by history and politics, my hunger for encouragement and to know what wins, i find my reading list being dominated with girl power. the state i was born in is trying to pass a state law that gives women the death penalty for abortion...in 2018. i keep searching for any small scrap that can calm my screaming heart. my hair is on fire. there is so much to scream about i can't breathe.) i wake up every morning around 530 and i read. most recently: girls and sex by peggy orenstein (so my personal observation that men seem to be treating all of us women like porn stars in bed, learning about sex from porn isn't unfounded...) doing harm: the truth about how bad medicine and lazy science leave women dismissed, misdiagnosed, and sick by maya dusenbery (oh olga...during the conclusion of this book the way you died and the fact that it wasn't just because of bad health insurance but also systemic bias against women in western medicine. i started crying so hard the tears blurred the pages. my mother's doctors always blaming her health problems on her weight, my aunt's doctors telling her all her pain was just in her head. there are no words here...) 180417 ... raze fun home: a family tragicomic (alison bechdel) been meaning to pick this one up for a good few years now. it's received accolade upon accolade and been hailed as a pioneering work in the graphic novel world. "illustrated memoir" feels like a more apt description for what alison bechdel does here as she attempts to untangle her difficult relationship with her father. i don't think there's one panel that doesn't have expository text of some kind. it works, though. if i have a nit to pick, it's this: there's something distant in bechdel's writing that keeps me from making a complete emotional investment. maybe that's the right choice, given the atmosphere she grew up in. it just leaves me a little cold. 180923 ... raze the country between us (carolyn forché) this is some of the best poetry i've read in a long while. vivid, powerful, sometimes disturbing, sometimes shot through with a stark eroticism as desperate, tenuous connections are forged in the face of grave danger. many of these poems draw from carolyn's work in el salvador in the late 1970s as a journalist and human rights activist. she finds a way to braid the personal and the political together so tightly, the line separating one from the other disappears. her descriptions are so evocative you can almost touch them. from "the memory of elena": "in buenos aires only three years ago, it was the last time his hand slipped into her dress, with pearls cooling her throat and bells like these, chipping at the night" "the colonel", less a poem than a memory of hell, deserves to be shared in full: "what you have heard is true. i was in his house. his wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. his daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. there were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. the moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. on the television was a cop show. it was in english. broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. on the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. we had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. the maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. i was asked how i enjoyed the country. there was a brief commercial in spanish. his wife took everything away. there was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. the parrot said hello on the terrace. the colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. my friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. the colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. he spilled many human ears on the table. they were like dried peach halves. there is no other way to say this. he took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. it came alive there. i am tired of fooling around he said. as for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. he swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. something for your poetry, no? he said. some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground." here she talks about the poetry of witness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsbMHshf1a8 180924 ... raze me write book (graham roumieu) this is memoir "written" by bigfoot that acts as a sequel to "in me own words: the autobiography of bigfoot". it's great fun. there's a foreword from the loch ness monster, who talks about keeping a low profile and enjoying the later work of brian wilson. as for bigfoot himself, he examines his life and psyche, and the results are hilarious. an excerpt: "one time poacher try to get bigfoot organs. he expert safari hunter and spend weeks stalking me and learning bigfoot ways. he see my love for count chocula and hide in fridge disguise as giant milk carton. day before he want poach bigfoot decide go on low carb diet so no chocula. man freeze to death in fridge. bigfoot also have cirrhosis at time so it convenient for me use him for liver transplant donor. bigfoot enjoy irony." 190117 ... raze (i was going to kick myself for missing an "a" in the first sentence, but it kind of works as a nice tribute to the writing style of bigfoot.) 190117 ... raze the polish boxer (eduardo halfon) this is billed as either a novel or a collection of short stories, depending on where you get your information. i don't think it's either one of those things. it reads more like a selective memoir, with each chapter connected to the one that came before it. eduardo loses some points with me because of the frustrating habit he has of objectifying women, painting them more as objects of desire than three-dimensional human beings. but he can come up with some pretty poetic and evocative stuff when he feels like it. the best story might be the one hiding on the "about the author" page, where a paragraph mentions the five translators who worked on this book and ends with: "rather than compete with one another to introduce eduardo halfon's work to an english-speaking readership, they decided to work closely together to produce this collaborative translation of 'the polish boxer'." 200502 ... raze what you need (andrew forbes) andrew forbes is from peterborough, ontario. he writes short fiction. he also writes about baseball. that makes sense, because reading his short fiction is sort of like getting the wind knocked out of you by a fastball thrown with bad intentions. it hurts like hell, but sometimes you can't stop yourself from laughing through the pain. i think a line at the end of one of his stories sums it up: "all the broken things. all the missing parts." that's what he writes about. i thought i knew where some of these stories were going. i was wrong almost every time. it didn't feel like eating the dust at the bottom of a writer's box of tricks. it felt like the unpredictable, maddening stuff of life intervening and saying, "i'll take it from here." from "dorothy": "people's days are full of special circumstances, of peculiar details. what takes place within the walls of our home is unique, as is what happens in yours. we have a familial understanding, a list of tics, things relayed almost telepathically. with a narrowed eye my wife can communicate to me what it would take you several paragraphs to make me understand. her shoulders — the set of them, the tension held there — tell me everything i need to know about her mood, though it took me several years to learn to read them. 'what's wrong?' i'll say. 'how'd you know?' 'your shoulders.' likewise, with our children, we invent normalcy, craft anew the small stuff of daily life. this is what we've done with dorothy: designed, or fallen into, our own kind of normal, though it may not resemble even remotely what happens around your kitchen table. maybe your kid can recite the names of the prime ministers. maybe you're expected to prompt him at every meal ('and after borden?'). maybe you cut the crusts off her toast without being asked. you know your children. my daughter is articulate, musical, curious, and has somehow found the ability to defy gravity. we, as a family, have adapted and accommodated, and we'll continue to do so. some days, i'll admit, i just can't unearth the patience to humour her adventurousness. we'll all have breakfast, then marie will leave for work, and i'll turn to my daughter and say, 'please, dottie, no walking up the wall today, okay?' and she, brandishing the unblinking logic of a two-year-old, will say, 'no, daddy, i can walk on the wall because i can walk on the wall.' how do you argue with that? i should hasten to note that she is not universally amazing. she can't dress herself. the tantrums have become more severe lately, and she is brought out of them with ever greater difficulty. she can be rough with the cat. when she tires of a meal or a snack she's likely to just drop the remaining food on the floor. and, maybe most frustratingly of all, she's among the last of her friends to resist potty training. in a shameful turn we have resorted to bribery. if she uses, or even attempts to use, the potty, she gets one sticker in her notebook. we bought sheet after sheet of cows, horses, fairies, stars, moons, at the dollar store, anticipating buy-in on her part. so far, though, the sticker sheets are almost wholly intact. the notebook is mostly empty. we are, i believe, conscientious parents. we read books and magazines about child-rearing. we go to the public library every week and we check out books about how to shepherd a toddler from diapers, through training pants, and on into the promised land of underwear worn confidently and without mishap. all of the literature — and there is a lot of literature — says that accidents are to be expected, steps backward, regressions, setbacks, and that we are not to make a big deal out of them. but none of the books we have consulted mention how best to react if your child is standing on the bathroom ceiling, her ultra-fine blonde hair hanging down and brushing your face as you peer up at her, you imploring her to come down and try the potty just one more time, while she holds her training pants in her hand, waves them like a pennant, and then pees all over herself, and you, and the floor, while grinning." 210129 ... e_o_i "i thought i knew where some of these stories were going. i was wrong almost every time." I felt that myself. I came to the end of the excerpt and thought, "What? How is the kid standing on the ceiling?" So I read it again. See, it felt so much like the style of insightful realistic fiction that I skimmed over the "gravity" line, taking it metaphorically. I wuz had. :) Also reminded me vaguely of Nothing Could Be Further by Tim Conley: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/13540361-nothing-could-be-further 210129 ... e_o_i Just reread most of this page: I already talked about Nothing Could Be Further back in 2013. I haven't finished a reading novel in a while. All of a sudden I have ambitions: writing a novel, learning German and Spanish, doing another degree in linguistics... but my novel-reading capacity hasn't been great lately. Getting into some poetry though. 210129 ... e_o_i corrects *reading a novel 210129 ... raze i remember you mentioning that book to me! knowing that was back in 2013 is scaring the pants off of me right now. it's a good thing i dressed myself in two pairs of pants this morning. and i've been way out of reading shape myself for far too long. i'm determined to read more things made of paper this year. it's one of the few new_year's_reservations i bothered to make for 2021. 210203 ... raze train dreams (denis johnson) this little novella snuck up on me. for the first thirty or so pages i was thinking, "lyrical descriptions of the work of a day labourer in the early 1900s are nice and all, denis, but i'm going to need something a little deeper than this if you want me to make an emotional investment." then there came a long chapter in which things got deep and sad and beautiful all at once, and that was it. i was in. this is one of those used books with notes made in pencil by the previous owner. they underlined a few things they liked. they did such a sloppy job of underlining one of my favourite passages, they almost crossed it right out. "it was only when you left it alone that a tree might treat you as a friend. after the blade bit in, you had yourself a war." the notes in the margins and square brackets and stars and wobbly lines of emphasis are pretty constant until the twenty-first page. then they stop. i guess whoever had the book before me didn't finish it. either that or they got so engrossed in the story they forgot to make any more notes and just surrendered to the music of the prose. 210203 ... raze sleepovers: stories (ashleigh bryant phillips) this book. my heart. jesus christ. 210211 ... raze bats or swallows (teri vlassopoulos) i'm having a hard time not judging every collection of short fiction i read right now against "sleepovers". that book's subtle but daring experimentation with form and point of view, the authenticity of the characters' voices, the stark but lyrical beauty of the prose ... all of those things make it one the best things i've read. ever. it sets a pretty high bar. this book doesn't scrape those same heights, but it's good, and each story seems to be better than the one that came before. some reviewers have complained about the narrators of these stories having voices that sound young or naive. i think that's a pretty stupid criticism. some people ARE young and naive. and what some mistake for naivety is really a state of being open to things others are closed off to. whatever. you're aces in my book, teri. i'll even forgive you for failing to use serial commas. you get bonus points for mentioning windsor in one of your stories. 210303 ... e_o_i Your entry for Sleepovers beats my ten_word_literary_criticism (title and author not included) 210304 ... raze i probably should have waited a day or two so i could have said something of actual substance about that book. ha! but at the time i was kind of overwhelmed. the end of the second story almost made me cry, and then the first sentence of the next story made me laugh so hard i thought i was going to fall out of bed with moist eyes. i don't think that's ever happened before with anything i've read. 210305 ... raze this keeps happening (h.b. hogan) so far, i think almost every single character in each of these short stories has been a horrible person. but they're all convinced of their righteousness, no matter how wrongheaded they might be about everything. it's kind of fascinating to read something this well-written that doesn't give you anyone to root for, where every laugh (and there have been a fair few of those) has to force itself through the emotional equivalent of gritted teeth. 210402 ... nr alternating between a YA novel from an east coast author i know (and just finished another YA book by her) and Gone Girl. i'm alternating between reading it and listening to the audiobook, which is a new experience. 210402 ... nr alternating between a YA novel from an east coast author i know (and just finished another YA book by her) and Gone Girl. i'm alternating between reading it and listening to the audiobook, which is a new experience. 210402 ... nr i blame the double post on blather telling me multiple times the cave was crumbling around me. and i somewhat blame that on the red wine. 210402 ... raze (as i get deeper into it, i'm noticing just about everyone in this book swears "under [their] breath". and the editor missed a bewildering number of obvious typos. it's the little things.) 210404 ... nr The Push by Ashley Audrain. it amazes me that she was initially a freelancer (i think), then a book publicist, then signed a seven-figure deal for this, her debut novel, which is lovely and insightful and heartbreaking. i'd like to know her secret. 210408 ... raze magnolia canopy otherworld (erin carlyle) the front cover of this book is flat-out gorgeous. erin's poetry is pretty gorgeous too. she folds her fascination with true crime and the dangers of womanhood into memories of her harrowing childhood in such a way that the surreal starts to seem commonplace. i like how she bites into the ugliness instead of trying to distance herself from it. the poems in which she refers to herself as "the animal" are especially powerful. her use of "creature" as an intransitive verb is one of those unexpected moments that makes me rethink what language can do. the poem "true crime" reminds me of neko case's "deep red bells" in the way it presses its ear to the throats of the dead and strains to hear their gone voices whisper from where they're buried. "sunken" does a similar thing in a different way, with prose broken into small parts, one paragraph on each page, cut into pieces like the dismembered subject of the poem. not wholesome fun for the whole family, then. but i've always been drawn to the dark stuff. "this is not a baptism, but a call back to your life after you crawled out of the cave of your mother, that old danger." 210421 ... raze hold still (nina lacour) i was looking at random things on goodreads a year or two ago when i came across this book. i really liked the idea of a writer incorporating a fictional character's diary entries as actual visual art, but i didn't think a YA book about a teenager dealing with her best friend's suicide was for me. i thought the premise had "bad afterschool special" written all over it. a few weeks ago i was browsing around on bookoutlet.ca when i got the idea to look up "hold still" just for something to do. it was in stock, and it was dirt cheap. for the book's ten-year anniversary it got a complete facelift, with brand new cover art by adams carvalho. i kind of fell in love with the image he created. it made me feel things. and i just happened to have a $5-off gift voucher sitting around. if i used it, i could get the book for free minus the cost of shipping. so i bought the book because i loved the way it looked. i'm shallow like that sometimes. i have a goodreads shelf designated for books that "got me in the gut". these are things that made me tear up at some point or really hit me in the place where feelings are felt. it's not something that happens often. if a book can punch me in the heart once before i'm finished with it, i consider it something pretty special. i'm less than a quarter of the way through this book and it's already punched me in the heart half a dozen times. i mean ... that just doesn't happen to me. ever. i've never been a teenage girl (though sometimes i feel closer to being one now than i did in my teenagerhood). so i'm about as far away from this book's supposed target audience as you can get. but i was a teenager once. i wrestled with depression and suicidal ideation. i had friends who struggled too, and not all of them made it out alive. i don't know if i've ever read a book that does a better job of nailing what it's like to be that age, to feel like you're somewhere so dark no light can reach you, to lose someone you care about, and to feel like a ghost haunting your own life. it's fiction that feels so true it hurts. it ain't like the YA books i was reading when i was a youngster, that's for sure. the cover isn't just pretty to look at, either. it's got serious emotional teeth once you get deep enough into the book to understand what you're looking at. score one for gift voucher-induced impulse buys. 210425 ... raze i can't even. i can't. this book is going to kill me. i can't remember the last time i got so emotionally invested in something i was reading. it's at the point now where i'm thinking about these fictional characters as if they're real people. normally i'd be saying, "i hope the writer doesn't toss in some stupid conflict that strains believability just to ratchet up the drama." instead it's more like, "don't mess up this tenuous new friendship! i want good things for the two of you! you both need this! open your mouths and say what you feel, damnit!" and then they did. and i lost my shit. shit gone. go'd away. bye-bye shit. see you tomorrow. i love it, but god, the anxiety. my captcha says "ooqoks". this is the sound my heart would make right now if it could sing. thank you, wise captcha, for giving a name to the mess of raw feelings that is now me. i don't know if i can read any more heavy YA books after i finish this one. i'll just walk around weeping all the time, leaking sad glad inarticulate soul confetti. tell your cynical CIA torturers and your angry romantic renegades: johnny's achilles heel has been discovered. 210426 ... raze black wings has my angel (elliott chaze) written in 1953 and damned to relative obscurity for more than sixty years, this reads like the best voiceover narration ever written for a fatalistic film noir, with the caveat that you have to supply your own visual information. it's better that way. there's enough atmosphere here to choke on. too often the femme fatale character in this kind of story is a fetishized afterthought. not here. she's smarter, more unpredictable, and more dangerous than the main character. also: tim sunblade has to be one of the noirest names anyone has ever come up with, even if it's just a pseudonym invented by an escaped prisoner looking to put together the score to end all scores. 210615 ... raze mouthful of birds (samanta schweblin) this collection of short stories doesn't quite have the same narrative heft or emotional urgency of "fever dream" (one of the best books i've read this year so far), but it's got more of the dreamlike strangeness i like about samanta's writing. "olingiris" builds something fascinating and affecting, somehow, out of a shadowy institute where women are paid to pluck all the hair from the legs of another woman, who's paid for her hair, which is stored in bags that are transported by yet another woman, who's paid to leave them in a room where they're retrieved by someone she never sees. "santa claus sleeps at our house" proves she can slip into the authentic-sounding voice of a child narrator and tell a more down-to-earth story anytime she feels like it, and she can do it brilliantly. and "toward happy civilization" dares to question the nature of apparent purgatory, wondering if it isn't an improvement over the conventional idea of happiness. there are also dogs: "he has the notion that the dogs of the world are the result of men who have failed in their attempted journeys. men nourished and retained with nothing but steaming broth, men whose hair grows long and whose ears droop and whose tails lengthen, a feeling of terror and cold inciting them to stay silent, curled up under some train station bench, contemplating the failures of the newcomer who is just like them only still has hope, staunchly awaiting the opportunity of a voyage." 210629 ... raze the butcher of penetang (betsy trumpener) sometimes you buy a cheap used book and you discover it's been signed by the author, and you realize the person selling the book didn't bother to mention that because the author only ever published this one thing in book form and it kind of sank without a trace, so they don't think the signature was worth anything. this is one of those times. and sometimes you start reading a book of short fiction that has forty stories in it, and within the first three you know you're in for something special. this is one of those times. the first paragraph in the very first story does more for me than most entire books manage to do. even the epigraph, written by the author, is a small story in twenty-three words: "the winter you licked the frosty fence post to see how cold it tasted, you lost days of things you had to say." betsy is a news reporter and writer for the CBC, and a radio documentary producer. her fiction seems to have a strong undercurrent of autobiography running through it. most of these stories qualify as flash fiction. few of them are more than two or three pages long, but they're perfect snapshots. not a wasted word anywhere. every great writer has an angle that's theirs alone, a piece of their voice that can sound notes no one else can, that don't live on any measurable scale. this is hers. "when a diver drowns trapped in the drain at the bottom of the pulp mill pond, you take your car. if a house burns in winter on the steep side of the canyon, you bring your mittens and a pencil that still writes in the cold. you watch the firemen's boots slide downhill all night on the ice their hoses made. you wash the ashes from your hair. when it's autumn, you cover the garden sculptures and the knapweed display and the vegetable competition at the fall fair. you praise the place that takes time to honour the longest green bean in town." 210709 ... raze that first "don't" should be a "didn't". bleg. 210709 ... raze shadowchild (p.f. thomése) this book was a gift to the lake geneva public library from the chapin foundation. or at least the copy i own was, before it became mine. last night, i spent more time than most people would want to admit scraping off what i could of the library catalogue number sticker affixed to the spine, yellowed with age and made more stubborn and less willing to let go by its decrepitude. it makes for an interesting companion piece to william kotzwinkle's "swimmer in the secret sea". both are novella-length books that deal with parents grieving the loss of a young child. if "swimmer in the secret sea" reads like truth walking around in fiction's clothes, "shadowchild" is truth that reads like poetry. and that's part of my problem with it. william kotzwinkle allowed himself flights of lyricism and dream imagery, but there was an elemental pulse driving the story. it was easy to connect with the characters. this is different. there's some beautiful writing here, but it feels like there's a thick layer of gauze separating the words from the feelings driving them. as a reader, it has a distancing effect. maybe that's intentional. everyone deals with loss in their own way. i guess i'm just moved more by a less analytical approach to soul-shattering life experiences. this is pretty great stuff, though (even with a few comma splices where i would have placed periods instead): "one must always be ready to welcome the dead, that's a known fact. for a long time, for example, my father continued to pay absolutely no attention to his own death. after his funeral, he just kept coming home. he had a place set for him at the table, he received his mail at the old address. he had parked the car (as the only one in the family who could drive) in its regular place. his raincoat hung on the hook by the door, his hat lay on the rack. his footsteps were heard regularly on the stairs, on the parquet, on the gravel in front of the house; he shut doors — upstairs, outside — behind him all the time. and when you got up to see what was taking him so long, you could still smell his tobacco in the hall: as if he'd just gone out the door and would come back in a bit. sometimes i had to pull out the obituary just to convince myself that he was dead. since then other people have moved into our old home, so there's no one waiting for him there anymore. we all moved to new houses, started new lives, leaving my father behind in the former, the dated, the past. suddenly, one day the table stopped being set for him, his mail stopped arriving, his hats and coats disappeared from the rack, his footsteps were no longer heard, and everyone stopped getting up to see what was taking him so long. apparently he was dead then, without anyone being able to say exactly when it happened. time reconciles, they say. but that should be time reviews. it's a review exercise. you keep on hashing things over and over, until you forget what it was like at first. that's why orpheus wasn't allowed to look back. by seeing her anew, he reviewed her. and so obliterated her." 210712 ... raze magnetic field(s) (ron loewinsohn) i have a hit-and-miss relationship with metafiction and experimental fiction. sometimes it bites into me. other times it comes off like someone who has nothing to say is showing off about how big their brain is. i don't mind putting in some work if it's going to pay off, but "close reading" has never really been my thing. most of the time i don't want to analyze why something works the way it does. i just want to enjoy the music. this book lives in a category of its own, beyond metafiction, beyond experimental literature, beyond summarizing. it bit into me, tore a chunk out of me, and now it's in the process of spitting that chunk back out after chewing on it for a while. a few months ago i started keeping a reading journal. i've always felt funny about underlining things or making notes in my books. this way i can get down my thoughts and highlight some of my favourite passages without defiling what i'm reading with my own words, and i get to put some of these composition books i've collected over the years to good use. how many pages a book gets in the reading journal is a pretty good indication of how much i like it and how much i'm able to get out of it. nina lacour's "hold still" and rick bass's "the sky, the stars, the wilderness" each got nine pages. that's a lot. "magnetic field(s)"? thirty-six pages. i had to start a second reading journal halfway through. there weren't enough pages left in the first one to get down everything i wanted to say. what starts out looking like it's going to be a thoughtful, unusual crime novel soon unspools in all kinds of unanticipated directions. it begins with a thief who only steals valuable items from the homes he breaks into so his transgressions will have a plausible explanation to the outside world, when what he's really doing is trying to invade the lives of people he'll never know, inhabiting the spaces they inhabit while imagining who they are. from there it becomes a story about environments: the environments created by houses and apartments, by social gatherings, by relationships, by music, by sound itself, by weather, by nature, by words, by clothing, by emotional states. it's about emotional voyeurism. it's about the rooms and homes in people's lives we'll never be able to enter, no matter how much we wish we could. it's about the way we impose our own lives onto physical structures that existed long before we did, and the other lives that have existed and will exist inside those structures, and the inner lives of the structures themselves. it raises questions about what constitutes theft and art, and what qualifies as a violation of someone's personal space. it forces the reader to question what's true and what's imagined, and where the lines between truth and fiction intersect. it grapples with the hidden lives of objects, and how something that's worthless to one person can mean everything to another. it's a novel organized in three movements, with motifs that are repeated, that deepen and take on new meanings and dimensions with each repetition. what one character thinks about mozart's "piano sonata no. 4 in e-flat" is true of the book itself. it has "a melodic basis, a solidity of understructure". it creates the written equivalent of the droste effect. in a neat little microcosmic example of what the whole story is doing, a man stands staring at an intricate model town in a hidden room of the house he's renting, and in it he finds a miniature version of the very house he's standing in, inside of which he sees a smaller version of this hidden room, complete with a tiny model of the model town he's looking at. even the story of the model town and how it came to exist has layers tucked into other layers. this all might sound like a cold intellectual exercise. it isn't. there are real, powerful emotions at stake. there's also a page-and-a-half riff on the imagined history of a penis-shaped ceramic pipe that's so brilliant it made me laugh and shake my head at the same time. it's a short book that's taken me a long time to get through, but not because of the density of the language. it's written in a very clear and accessible way. it's because there's so much here to unpack. part of the thrill is seeing all the connections that are formed, and working out how intricate they are and how deep they go. this is one of the most fascinating books i've ever read. it's made me think about the rooms and houses, both physical and emotional, that have been a part of my own life. in dreams i keep returning to many of the same places. the stories are always different, but the settings are often familiar. houses i've lived in. houses i spent a lot of time in when i was growing up, though they weren't mine. my grade school. my high school. certain bars and coffee shops i used to frequent. sometimes these places blur together or take on elements of one other. it isn't an accident that i keep returning to them. the places that hold parts of our lives become a part of us as much as we become a part of them. in this way, "magnetic field(s)" has also made me think about blather like no other book i've read. how we all are and have been a part of something much larger than ourselves, something that wouldn't exist without us but existed before we were here and will probably be here long after we're gone, that's both changed us and been changed by us, that will always hold us inside of itself. the way each blathe on blue and red is a room that leads to countless other rooms. an environment within a larger interconnected environment. each word a world within a world containing other worlds. the way each blathe creates its own music, and anyone who's listened to it has existed inside of it and become a part of its character, whether they've left a mark of their own or not. the way you're walking through this room right now, your footprints becoming a part of its emotional and physical history, its past and its present. 210725 ... raze the watch (rick bass) rick bass slows me down. cormac_mccarthy does that too, but with cormac (i hope he doesn't mind if i call him cormac) it's about the density of the language and wanting to drink it all in. with rick it's more about the way he makes moments come alive. i don't want to rush those moments. i want to let them breathe. my introduction to his writing was "the sky, the stars, the wilderness". what he does with the three stunning novellas collected in that book is sort of the inverse of magic realism, shining a light on the strange, magnificent beauty of the natural world and the people who inhabit it. he takes the time to show you things you might not think to look at. and the way he writes animals is incredible. the guy could write a book told entirely from the perspective of a bird or a bear, and i would eat it right up. "the watch" is the first book he ever published. if these short stories don't quite carry the same sense of wonder with them as "the sky, the stars, the wilderness", there's still plenty here to admire. the title story has a whole paragraph that's just about the wind. you can almost feel it come off the page and blow your hair back. it made me stop reading and say, "how the hell do you DO that?" in another story, he writes this about one of his characters: "he moved with an awkward power: as if perhaps once he had had this very great strength that had somehow been taken away: an injury inside, to some set of nerves, which still retained the strength, but did not allow him to use it. like a loaded pistol, or a car parked on the hill without an emergency break." i read that and i'm right there, watching that man move. 210807 ... raze (note to self: next time you want to write, "the density of the language," use other words. "the elasticity of the undercarriage," maybe.) 210807 ... unhinged poetry i did my old childhood maneuver of going to the poetry section and selecting whatever spines caught my eye alberto rios sonia sanchez eileen myles 210807 ... tender square i really like the idea of a book journal, and i'm stealing it for later use, raze. not reading as much as i should these days, but i can't stop thinking about these two pieces since i read them a few weeks ago: ranging by will mcmillan (cnf): https://intothevoidmagazine.com/article/ranging/ levels by alec hutchinson (fiction): https://intothevoidmagazine.com/article/levels/ also need to shout-out my fave books of the past few years that have stayed with me long after finishing: george saunders - lincoln in the bardo brandon taylor - real life raven leilani - luster carmen maria machedo - in the dream house elif batuman - the idiot ottessa moshfegh - my year of rest and relaxation 210808 ... raze steal it! please do! i hope you have as much fun with it as i've been having. it's become such an integral part of reading a book for me, i wish i'd thought to start doing it a lot sooner. i don't always think to write about the things i'm reading here, so it's nice to have a record of all these things_i_wish_i_could_catch_in_a_bottle. 210808 ... kerry several things at once: tove jansson: fair play thomas wolfe: look homeward, angel summer 2021 issue of jacobin 210808 ... raze problems and other solutions (allie brosh) allie brosh doesn't consider herself a comic artist. she says she makes "picture stories". there's an intentional crudeness to her art, but its simplicity is deceptive. the range of emotions she's capable of conveying through facial expressions alone is insane. i don't know how she does it with so many self-imposed limitations. and she draws the best dogs. i can't even explain why. she just does. some of her stories are funny to the point of causing physical pain from excessive laughter. some of them are honest to the point of self-immolation. her writing about depression is some of the most perceptive i've ever read. from her first book, "hyperbole and a half": "trying to use willpower to overcome the apathetic sort of sadness that accompanies depression is like a person with no arms trying to punch themselves until their hands grow back. a fundamental component of the plan is missing and it isn't going to work." there are more hilariously expressive dogs in this book. there are also horses, hypothetical films like "arch-nemesis 4: einstein returns" and "ryan is sorry (starring ryan)", and a kangaroo pig. there's helpful information like this: "how to turn the word 'dandelions' into a noise like 'bargadons' - be two years old - be scared of dandelions - try to scream the word dandelions while you are running and crying, and before your face and tongue are fully developed" in the chapter that deals with the death of allie's sister, there's a twelve-page spread of silent panels made up of childhood memories. it's more devastating than any exposition could have been in its place. i didn't think a bunch of drawings of two kids playing and fighting and just being kids could mess me up like that. something about seeing what was taken away without any words — because no words could capture the totality of that loss — makes it that much more visceral. there are no cameos from the alot or spaghatta nadle, but hey, you can't have it all. 210816 ... unhinged my body is a book of rules - elissa washuta this book keeps punching me from so many different angles. sorespots pressed into new bruises. i wanted to finish it this morning but i can really only stand to read it in small chunks like a disaster gawker forced to avert their eyes. or more like someone who spent their 20s in a similar fog of mental illness, trying to erase their own assaults with whiskey and pills; i read this book and feel parts of myself which in my middle age just makes me so damn sad. that i'm not alone should be comforting but really it's just heartbreaking. (maybe it wasn't just his drug habit that chased me to seattle. maybe we were more codependent than i ever let him know) 210822 ... kerry my body is a book of rules is a great book. i am currently dipping into a collection of shirley jackson stories. 210822 ... unhinged i read her newer book 'white magic' first and liked it well enough to want to read everything else she's ever written my body IS great but...intense for me in a way white magic wasn't 210822 ... e_o_i The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead I told J. it had many levels to it. She grinned, putting her hand up higher every time I mentioned another level. 1. It's the 60s (maybe) in New York City and Lila Mae Watson is the first black woman working in her company. A struggle, but she's tough... 2. The book is set in an alternate universe where elevators are very important, and she's an elevator inspector... 3. Problem: an elevator she's just inspected breaks and falls, which leads to a mystery she has to solve involving sabotage, corruption, and the two main schools of thought on elevator inspection: the Empiricists and the Intuitionists. The thing J. did with her hands made me laugh, because the visual metaphor was much better than me trying to be punnish. And the book is strange and absorbing; it IS funny in many places, but it also plants you firmly in its world, so you don't question things like a textbook called Theoretical Elevators. 210823 ... unhinged homewaters: a human and natural history of puget sound by david b williams cascadia revealed: a guide to the plants, animals and geology of the pacific northwest mountains by daniel mathews 210824 ... raze tomato red (daniel woodrell) i loved "winter's bone" enough to swear off ever seeing the movie, and i'm someone who likes john hawkes an awful lot. i've never objected to jennifer lawrence showing up as a protagonist in my dreams either (hey, it's happened once or twice, and i'll have you know it was perfectly wholesome). no film adaptation is ever going to capture the language in that book. it just can't be done. and the language is part of the magic. this is a different kind of story, but there's the same sort of lyricism and desperation running through it, and a bit of welcome humour too. the voice of narrator sammy barlach is all kinds of wonderful. these are the first three *sentences* on the very first page: "you're no angel, you know how this stuff comes to happen: friday is payday and it's been a gray day sogged by a slow ugly rain and you seek company in your gloom, and since you're fresh to west table, mo., and a new hand at the dog-food factory, your choices for company are narrow but you find some finally in a trailer court on east main, and the coed circle of bums gathered there spot you a beer, then a jug of tequila starts to rotate and the rain keeps comin' down with a miserable bluesy beat and there's two girls millin' about that probably can be had but they seem to like certain things and crank is one of those certain things, and a fistful of party straws tumble from a woven handbag somebody brung, the crank gets cut into lines, and the next time you notice the time it's three or four sunday mornin' and you ain't slept since thursday night and one of the girl voices, the one you want most and ain't had yet though her teeth are the size of shoe-peg corn and look like maybe they'd taste sort of sour, suggests something to do, 'cause with crank you want something, anything, to do, and this cajoling voice suggests we all rob this certain house on this certain street in that rich area where folks can afford to wallow in their vices and likely have a bunch of recreational dope stashed around the mansion and goin' to waste since an article in the scroll said the rich people whisked off to france or some such on a noteworthy vacation. that's how it happens. can't none of this be new to you." oh yes. 210826 ... unhinged crying in h mart - michelle zauner this book broke the dam in my heart this morning especially the part where her mom's hair falls out from chemo. my dad died with his full beard just the way i loved it because by the time he let a doctor find his cancer it was too late for chemo. 210829 ... raze like the singing coming off the drums (sonia sanchez) i have unhinged to thank for recommending this one to me. "you need her," she said. she meant to say, "you need her book," but i think she nailed_it the first time. i did need her. i do. this book is subtitled "love poems". these are like no love poems i've read before. some of them are blues songs. some are tankas. even her haikus have so much inside them. "now i move in the blood of women who polish pores a cappella." 210901 ... e_o_i I-Language by Daniela Isac and Charles Reiss This book answers something I was thinking about but hadn't quite formulated: if linguistics as social science relates to anthropology, what does linguistics as science connect to? And it's right there in the subtitle: linguistics as cognitive science. The difficult part is that neuroscience is still pretty young, so it's hard to know exactly what parts of the brain encode which parts of language, but we can use tools from related fields to determine how best to define language rules in ways that represent how the human brain works. An example from Chapter 4 is languages that have specific stress patterns for syllables. Some have the stress on odd syllables, others on even syllables. Now, the authors say that the stress systems are encoded in the brain as pairs, since grouping is a more basic cognitive function than counting. So it's better to represent the rule as a set of pairs than any other way. As for the writing itself, the examples are clear and the illustrations funny at times, but I feel the authors' attempt to make the language accessible (i.e. understandable to newbies) is a hit-and-miss venture, as it often is: for me, some things were too dumbed down, others not explained enough. But I'm just one reader, and the idea is to have a broad appeal, not to somehow intuit everyone's previous knowledge. Some of the material I'd learned in previous classes, but the *approach* is fairly new to me. "I-Language" basically stands for language that is internal to brains, and the authors draw on Chomsky as well as Roy Jackendoff. (David got me a book by the latter and then remarked that his surname sounded like an archaic past tense for jacked off. In his I-language!) Anyway, this is for one of the courses I'm starting on Wednesday; I'm trying to read it ahead of time to be more prepared - not JUST because I'm a nerd but also because I want to offset some of my ADHD-related slowness. 210906 ... unhinged sovereign self - acharya shunya so powerful i had to set it aside for months because it was intensely poking some sorespot s i wasn't ready to poke. i cried again this morning while reading it. it's like she can see all my wounds while giving me a hug at the same time. 210906 ... kerry slowly nearing the end of The Door by magda szabo. it’s pretty brutal and i find myself saying things like oh god, oh no, no way but i don’t want to finish it; i don’t want to say goodbye to the characters. i already know i’ll miss them. 210906 ... raze biography of a grizzly (ernest thompson seton) a fun garage find. my printing is called "king of the grizzlies". i know i read this when i was a kid, but i don't remember anything about it. reading it now, what's startling to me is how *dark* it is. a bear named wahb watches a hunter kill his mother and siblings while he's still a cub, and he has to learn the ways of bearhood on his own. for something that was written in 1900, it's pretty bold stuff. wahb isn't a fuzzy ball of good feelings. he grows to hate people and animals alike after being robbed of everything he loves. it's sort of like "john wick" for bears. and mort künstler's illustrations are remarkable. 210907 ... raze after eight years of pretty steady additions, this blathe is getting pretty long in the tooth and slow_to_arrive, so let's_talk_about_books some more over yonder: what_are_you_reading? 210911 ... unhinged seek you: a journey through american loneliness by kristen radtke highly_recommended to every skite american or not 211009 ... nr a crime thriller called Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter. (that's her real last name. she definitely couldn't have become a children's author!) 211214 ... unhinged lame deer, seeker of visions - lame deer and richard erdoes one of the most compelling indigenous histories ive ever read 211215 ... kerry excellent biography of george harrison by graeme thomson (hence the constant song_of_the_day beatles/harrison) 211216 ... kerry excellent biography of george harrison by graeme thomson (hence the constant song_of_the_day beatles/harrison): "behind the locked door" 211216 ... kerry excellent biography of george harrison by graeme thomson (hence the constant song_of_the_day beatles/harrison): "behind the locked door" 211216 ... tender_square kerry, may i suggest pattie boyd's "wonderful tonight"? it covers her marriage to harrison (and clapton). 211216 ... kerry whoa, triple blathe! never done that before. sorry, all. thanks for the recommendation, tender_square. i'm adding it to my list! 211216 ... nr i just finished "red dragon" by thomas harris. it was unlike anything i'd ever read. 220510 ... nr "daisy jones & the six" by taylor jenkins reid. it's her best book so far. "she had written something that felt like i could have written it, except i knew i couldn't have. i wouldn't have come up with something like that. which is what we all want from art, isn't it? when someone pins down something that feels like it lives inside us?" "it seemed like there wasn't anything about me, any truth i could tell him, that he wouldn't accept. acceptance is a powerful drug. and i should know because i've done them all." i had hurt ____. god knows i had. but loving somebody isn't perfection and good times and laughing and making love. love is forgiveness and patience and faith and every once in awhile, it's a gut punch. when you love somebody who doesn't deserve it... i have no tolerance for people that waste other people's faith in them. none at all." this book is the gut punch i needed. 220707 ... e_o_i I love the first quote, nr! Thanks for writing that down. 220708 ... nr my pleasure! there were a lot of quotes from that book that really struck me. 220709 ... kerry have been working my way through japanese novels (translated obviously), all written by women. it is interesting to see the differences and (mostly) similarities in how they write about work, relationships, children, and sex. "goodbye tsugumi" by banana yokomoto (lovely) "breasts and eggs" by mieko kawakami (overrated) "convenience store woman" by sayaka murata (delightfully strange) "strange weather in tokyo" by hiromi kawakami (unexpectedly romantic, lots of food and beer) currently: "there is no such thing as an easy job" by kikuko tsumura 220711 what's it to you? who go blather from