what_are_you_reading raze (continued from reading_now) miss lonelyhearts (nathanael west) even for a novella, this is short. and i think that's a good thing. as a study of toxic masculinity and the private hell inhabited by some people who are intelligent enough to appreciate art and virtue but incapable of creating or embodying what they admire in others, it's both timeless and a product of its time. it's also sometimes very funny in a bleak, bitter way. but man, all that soulless misogyny is hard to take (which is maybe the point). 210911 ... unhinged just finished 'i'm black when i'm singing, i'm blue when i ain't and other plays' by sonia sanchez and an out of date mycology textbook from the last century 'beginner's guide to the fungi' by c.l. duddington 210911 ... raze the collected works of billy the kid (michael ondaatje) early, pre-"english patient" ondaatje was a very different beast, and i like the cut of his coat. this mixture of poetry and prose serves as the impressionistic autobiography william bonney didn't live long enough to write, using history as a springboard for fiction that pokes at the ribs of mythology until it starts coughing up all kinds of strange and wonderful sounds. this paints such a vivid scene: "the barn i stayed in for a week then was at the edge of a farm and had been deserted it seemed for several years, though built of stone and good wood. the cold dark grey of the place made my eyes become used to soft light and i burned out my fever there. it was twenty yards long, about ten yards wide. above me was another similar sized room but the floors were unsafe for me to walk on. however i heard birds and the odd animal scrape their feet, the rotten wood magnifying the sound so they entered my dreams and nightmares. but it was the colour and light of the place that made me stay there, not my fever. it became a calm week. it was the colour and the light. the colour a grey with remnants of brown — for instance those rust brown pipes and metal objects that before had held bridles or pails, that slid to machine uses; the thirty or so grey cans in one corner of the room, their ellipses, from where i sat, setting up patterns in the dark. when i had arrived i opened two windows and a door and the sun poured blocks and angles in, lighting up the floor's skin of feathers and dust and old grain. the windows looked out onto fields and plants grew at the door, me killing them gradually with my urine. wind came in wet and brought in birds who flew to the other end of the room to get their aim to fly out again. an old tap hung from the roof, the same colour as the walls, so once i knocked myself out on it. for that week then i made a bed of the table there and lay out my fever, whatever it was. i began to block my mind of all thought. just sensed the room and learnt what my body could do, what it could survive, what colours it liked best, what songs i sang best. there were animals who did not move out and accepted me as a larger breed. i ate the old grain with them, drank from a constant puddle about twenty yards away from the barn. i saw no human and heard no human voice, learned to squat the best way when shitting, used leaves for wiping, never ate flesh or touched another animal's flesh, never entered his boundary. we were all aware and allowed each other. the fly who sat on my arm, after his inquiry, just went away, ate his disease and kept it in him. when i walked i avoided the cobwebs who had places to grow to, who had stories to finish. the flies caught in those acrobat nets were the only murder i saw." 210917 ... tender square (oooh, i have that book but haven't read it yet; thanks for reminding me about it. have you read "coming through slaughter"? i think it'd be up your alley.) 210917 ... raze i have *that* book but haven't read it yet. ha! i'll get to it one of these days, though. the spirit of buddy bolden compels me. 210917 ... raze my dirty dumb eyes (lisa hanawalt) this is a re-read, but i think i'm getting more out of it now than i did when i read it for the first time a little over seven years ago — and i liked it a lot then. lisa is insane. in the best way. she likes to draw anthropomorphic animals (you might have seen her work in "bojack horseman" and "tuca & bertie"). her characters are overflowing with so much detail and idiosyncratic life, it almost feels like they're about to jump off the page and start moving around in front of me. it's been a while since i read something that made me laugh so much. there's a (very ineffective) pancake therapist, there are animals modelling bizarre and expansive hats, and there's the cutest splash page showing superman and wolverine holding hands. her illustrated movie reviews are the only reviews i trust. here's a bit from her review of "drive": "bryan cranston is as craggy as albert brooks is puffy. this is like watching an english muffin talk to a marshmallow. 'cranston & brooks' sounds like a brand of marmalade i would spread on an english muffin. they should do a marketing campaign for thomas english muffins and talk about their 'brooks & crannies'." (she gives the film five out of five goslings, in case you were wondering.) the vignette in which hank williams marries the whippoorwill that inspired "i'm so lonesome i could cry" almost killed me with the turn it took in the last panel. and this very_punny snippet of dialogue from "the abusive piano teacher" made me think of e_o_i: "go bach and trykovsky it again! i'll chopin yer lil' fingers off if ya keep mishandeling those notes!" throughout the book, there are some comic strips that illustrate a few days in the life of a moose who's struggling with depression and her identity as an artist. all the silliness goes away there, and the artwork and writing create the effect of eavesdropping on a few painful and meaningful moments in the life of someone who just happens to be a member of the new world deer subfamily. rejected titles for this book include "save a horse, ride a hanawalt", "a supposedly fun thing that is actually pretty fun", "dick lizards and boob dogs: a memoir", and "what we draw about when we draw about sex bugs" (dig the raymond_carver reference there). 210922 ... raze where you'll find me (ann beattie) i made sure to snag a first edition hardcover copy of this book — the one with the front cover that's a painting of an angel in the night sky. that angel is the daughter of the main characters in the first story, as imagined by her mother. i think it took all of three pages for that story to make me tear up. if you can do that to me right at the beginning of your book, i think we're going to be friends. this is from "snow": "this is a story, told the way you say stories should be told: somebody grew up, fell in love, and spent a winter with her lover in the country. this, of course, is the barest outline, and futile to discuss. it's as pointless as throwing birdseed on the ground while snow still falls fast. who expects small things to survive when even the largest get lost? people forget years and remember moments. seconds and symbols are left to sum things up: the black shroud over the pool. love, in its shortest form, becomes a word. what i remember about all that time is one winter. the snow. even now, saying "snow", my lips move so that they kiss air. no mention has been made of the snowplow that seemed always to be there, scraping snow off our narrow road — an artery cleared, though neither of us could have said where the heart was." that's stunning stuff. or, as i said out loud when i finished reading those two paragraphs for the first time: "fucking hell." 210924 ... raze (those quotation marks around "snow" shoulda been apostrophes. but anyway.) 210924 ... raze the first two chapters of "carol winter writes an essay", the novel e_o_i is writing. first she punched me in the heart with "croissant", which is one of the most powerful short_stories i've read all year (and i've been gobbling up short fiction like it's couscous). now she's making me laugh until it hurts with the wit and audacity coursing through this story and her narrator's voice. you_know, "coursing couscous" should really be a band name. or an adult film star's name. or the name a self-indulgent celebrity gives their child next spring. but anyway. kirsten's imagination and her ability to harness it and funnel it into brilliant writing like this amazes me. this is so good, you guys. so good. it's a coming of age story that's been blown apart from the inside, with all the jagged broken bits glued back together in a whole new configuration. i can't wait to read the whole thing. 211005 ... e_o_i Thank you so much!! I would've replied earlier, but I didn't see this until now. It's encouraging to hear when things have a (good) impact. I'm also intrigued by the quote from "Snow" - I have many to-read things, but this sounds so deft and magical. 211007 ... raze i liked some of the stories in "where you'll find me" more than others, and it never really got me again the way it did in those first few moments, but i'd still recommend it. there's a story in there called "janus" that's seven pages of brilliance about a real estate agent who uses a bowl as a prop when she's trying to sell a house and comes to view that bowl as the source of all her success and the most important thing in her life. she always sticks the landings, too. some of her closing paragraphs made me stare at the book and say, "how did you *do* that?" (the book just shrugged its shoulders at me.) as for what i'm reading right now: the essential calvin and hobbes (bill watterson) i've loved calvin and hobbes from the time i first learned to read. something about that six-year-old adventurer and his tiger just spoke to me. i don't have the whole run of comics in collected form. i've only got this trade paperback and "revenge of the babysat". but revisiting these old friends is kind of like stepping back into all the best parts of my childhood with the brain i have now. so much went over my head back then. i know there's no way i had any idea what "defenestration" meant when i was calvin's age. for all the humour, there's a lot of depth here. i think i missed some of that the first time around too. and there's always this: https://i.imgur.com/RBHlJ.jpeg 211011 ... tender_square (ooof, that imgur link got me in the major feels. and i'm not joking, i have three calvin and hobbes books that i absolutely cherish: "it's a magical world," "yukon ho!" and "lazy sunday book.") 211011 ... tender_square maggie nelson – bluets (2009) wave books i’ve read this hybrid poetry work three times in the past six years, which is incredibly rare for me as i do not return to books i’ve read—there’s too many others to read! i first found it at an area bookstore; one of the booksellers had written a review of what it meant to them and i was just getting into writing poetry again so i took a chance on it. the contents and the writing were so surprising, i had no idea a book could be like this. nelson uses numbered sections to work through meditations on heartache, desire, obsession, art, philosophy, and depression and explores how all are related to her affinity for the color blue. it’s raw and real and beautifully realized. (i’ve also read nelson’s book “the argonauts” but i did not like it nearly as much as this one; in fact, “argonauts” felt like she was trying to replicate the success of what works so well in “bluets.”) i read this book a second time during my mfa when it was assigned in one of my workshop classes, but i didn’t get to savor it as much as i did my first time through; i only skimmed it to refresh my memory. i picked it up again a week or so ago after recommending it to j, and nelson’s text moved me just as deeply as the first time i encountered it: “79. for just because one loves blue does not mean that one wants to spend one’s life in a world made of it. ‘life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus,’ wrote emerson. to find oneself trapped in any one bead, no matter what its hue, can be deadly. … 81. what i know: when i met you, a blue rush began. i want you to know, i no longer hold you responsible.” 211012 ... raze (note_to_self: read "bluets") 211012 ... tender_square epitome_of_incomprehensibility “songs of irrelevance” (2008) the imaginative descriptions, inspired sound work, and breadth of subject matter (not to mention the accompanying illustrations!) really drew me to this chapbook, i had so many favorite moments: “slicking my lashes to swords / slashing the sky” to describe the feeling of snowflakes making contact with eyelashes, just wow (“westwood hill in winter”). also “clouds sunburned white” was a surprising association i loved. the germanic words in “night plane” give the language in this poem such punch; this is pure assonance and consonance working in tandem to delight the mouth as it forms each phrase. in “spring cleaning” the barriers between what is inside and outside are blurred by beautiful lines like “my sweater hangs / on a silver birch tree” and “shelving my books in a hill-cleft.” “a lake from various sources” was the best quasi-cento i’ve ever read; it is so difficult to pull off a poem using lines from other writers and what’s here is fresh and exciting and new. the execution was seamless, i salute you. in “aloe,” the plant’s thick spikes are described as both “fat and effusive” and filled with “mucilaginous gel.” there is a clear appreciation for language throughout this chapbook. i read this poem wondering, “is the speaker in conversation with self about their capacity to wonder about plants and their power?” “apples and oranges” is playful and witty: “you are the apple of my macintosh, though not quite named as such— / you are the apple of my orange crush.” i loved the drawing of a face staring out from a pair of glasses, each a lens of an apple and an orange and the visual harmony and dissonance of the “fantasia” portion of the poem gave an added layer to the relationship of these fruit images. “the comet romance” stole my heart, even though it’s about the end of the world: “he bows, and fiddles with his glove, / the ice caps melt in puddled love / while oceans flood the cities’ hum; / he stumbles, stammers, overcome.” my god, even you work with meter and rhyme delights. in “ode to the internet” she pens, “as links relinquish relevance, begin / to open windows, weaving threads of light / that sparkle in the dark of cyberspace,” bringing our attention to the wonderful constellations we create each new foray into the depths of blather and beyond. i’m a sucker for a villanelle and i enjoyed “memory gap’s” exploration of lost youth. the inclusion of a snow globe “made with rice for snow” was an especially poignant detail about childhood’s ability to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. “car trip” is a trip in and of itself with its regal language and description of relationships and the people in them. your characteristic humor is on full display in poems like “the hitchhiker’s guide to counterpoint.” my favorite line? “only a depressed robot can groan.” in “whitehorse, yukon,” the pastoral treatment of the scene is gorgeous; trucks “rattle over jean-blue pebbles” and a “jacket of hot pink fur, / not of a local animal” rests on a balcony. closing with “the treatment” got me thinking about bibliotherapy and how we can use reading to heal ourselves through the empathy we provide to the characters we are drawn to. 211020 ... raze that chapbook sounds so good. current brain candy: the negative reader (pedro barateiro) this book was a gift from a friend seven years ago. it's taken me this long to read it, and i'm only getting around to it now because my dad grabbed it off a bookshelf downstairs a few days ago without knowing what it was, read it, liked it, and thought i might like it too. "it's brainy," he said, "but it's interesting." he was right. this is an unusual, thought-provoking collection of words about art broken up with lots and lots of black_and_white photographs. as pedro himself writes, the book "is a text but should be treated as a painting. it should be used as a mirror or as an x-ray machine, like those used to see what's underneath a painting." one long chapter is made up of a series of pictures and untitled poems. or maybe it's one extended poem presented in pieces. the title of the chapter is: "i've always thought i was alone but now i realize that's not a lie. you've always thought you were an object and now you realize that's not a lie." really. that's what it's called. within the chapter, the title becomes an unstable header that's broken in half, with the first sentence appearing on every verso page and the second sentence on every recto page. both headers keep changing in subtle ways. solitude becomes an object, ands become buts, you become me, i become you, and meaning and identity are blurred beyond distinction. this is a poem or a piece of a poem: "could you please stop asking questions? be affirmative. say something wise or at least something that looks wise. i'd rather not i'd rather i'd i i'd rather not keep all these objects from their own tragedy. can you cross the street without being hit by a violent sentence? are you comfortable in that chair? no, but i'd rather be uncomfortable." there's also a chapter called "photographs of prop doors from unreleased films (presented in parallel with) the bursting dam — a walk outside the book". it's exactly what the title promises. one of my favourite things about buying used books is finding unexpected treasures hidden inside, left there by the previous owner. i didn't buy this book, and it came to me brand new, but it had a surprise of its own for me. on the fifty-ninth page there's a tiny dried-out leaf that's been sitting there acting as an invisible bookmark for almost a decade. i have no idea if my friend put it there or if it slipped in by mistake somehow. all i know is the words it was saving for me were so prescient, reading them was a little spooky. 211021 ... raze choke gasp! (the best of 75 years of ec comics) i started reading this on halloween. it had to be done. i wrote a little about my history with ec comics in the "trailer" blathe. i had four of the russ cochran 64-page reissues that came out in the early 1990s, combining select issues of "tales from the crypt", "the haunt of fear", "the vault of horror", "weird science", "weird fantasy", and "crime suspenstories". i read them so much, i'm a little surprised they didn't disintegrate. i say "had" because they've vanished on me. seven or eight years ago i dug them out of the basement for a bit of nostalgic fun. i have no idea where i put them after i finished reading them. i've looked all over the place. it's as if they never existed. i think maybe a crafty mouse with a thing for horror comics snuck into the house and stole them when i wasn't looking. these days there are dozens of handsome hardcover "ec archives" editions that collect every non-"mad"-related comic ec ever published. alas, owning them all probably isn't in the cards for me. at best, it's going to take me a long time and a whole lotta money to piece them all together. i do hope to at least get my hands on the entire collected "shock suspenstories" run someday, because those comics are home to some of the best and most diverse stories of the lot. as for "choke gasp!", it's the closest thing there's ever going to be to an ec comics omnibus. it's sort of a selective greatest hits collection. like most compilations, it isn't perfect. it's organized in a strange way. you'd think it would be broken up thematically or in chronological order. nope. the stories are presented in artist-specific blocks. i'm not sure i understand the logic there. the digital recolouring has also been pretty controversial. i think it's fine. it wasn't necessary (marie severin's original colouring work was peerless), and i'll always have fond memories of the grittiness of the comics i read when i was a kid, but seeing everything with this amount of clarity is sort of like watching a painstaking high-definition restoration of a film you've only ever seen in a beat-up old print. who knew what you thought was a deer antler was really a windshield wiper all along? not all of my favourite stories are here. but some of them are. and there's a ton of material that's brand new to me. now, to take a look at what's boiling in the old witch's cauldron... 211101 ... unhinged of women and salt - gabriela garcia not a nation of immigrants - roxanne dunbar-ortiz 211101 ... kerry i have a stack of to-be-reads. this morning i opened and read the first few pages of Euphoria by Lily King. but there are two magda szabo novels on the shelf also calling my name... 211101 ... tender_square demian: the story of youth — hermann hesse (martino, 2011) only twenty pages in so far but the story of emil sinclair, a young boy living in two worlds—one of purity and one of sin—is resonating off the page nearly a century after its first publication. i picked this one up because of its in-depth look at exploring one’s shadow side: “i could not go upstairs. my life was ruined. i wondered if i should run away and never come back, or go and drown myself. but these thoughts were not clearly formulated. i sat crouched in the dark on the bottom step and i surrendered myself to my misfortune. there lina found me in tears as she came down with a basket to get wood. i begged her to say nothing on her return and i went up. my father’s hat and my mother’s sunshade hung on the rack near the glass door. all these things reminded me of home and tenderness, my heart went out to them imploringly and, grateful for their existence, i felt like the prodigal son when he looked into his old homely room and sensed it’s familiar atmosphere. all this, the bright father-and-mother world, was mine no longer, and i was buried deeply and guiltily in the strange flood, ensnared in sinful adventures, beset by enemies and dangers, menaced by shame and terror. the hat and sunshade, the good old sandstone floor, the big picture over the hall cupboard, and the voice of my elder sister in the living-room, all this was dearer and more precious to me than ever, but it was no longer consolation and secure possession. all of it was now a reproach. all this belonged to me no more, i could share no more in its cheerfulness and peace. i carried mud on my shoes that i could not wipe off on the mat, i brought shadows in with me, of which the home-world had no knowledge. how many secrets i already had, how many cares—but that was play, a mere nothing compared to what i was bringing in with me that day.” (pgs. 16–17) 211102 ... e_o_i tender_square: Aw, thanks! Also, quasi-cento!! I didn't know there was a name for that. Memories of writings past are both delightful and embarrassing, but it's nice to remember how some of "Songs of Irrelevance" came from prompts given in class, e.g. write about a city you've never been to (Whitehorse, but my mother had visited) and write about one thing using the vocabulary of another, with topics chosen randomly using picture cards (I drew a car and a crown). Also, I love love love Hesse's Glass Bead Game! The satire of academia, the mash-up of different faith traditions; humour with a straight face, sci-fi with a philosophical face... I also have his shorter Siddhartha but haven't read it yet (surprise, surprise). 211104 ... e_o_i But speaking of poetic form, it's your turn! Il miglior fabbro, and pretend I know the feminine declension. Declension? I dunno what anything's called. ANYWAY! I highly recommend Mayflies. The title poem, lines short, fills the page with image and sound. A remembered kiss experienced on a summer-job break and then the down-to-earth duty of hosing dead mayfly bodies off a brick surface. (I remember them gathering in the corners of swimming pool showers.) But here it's dry, and stepping on them makes crackling sounds, which is brought back in the last couplet "crush / of summer" where "crush" is indented and reverberates over words like "crackling", perhaps a suggested "crunch", and the crush who inspired the fluttery feelings. I like how the mayflies aren't butterflies, how the piece gestures at symbols but particularizes them, gritty in the sense of granular, a microscope showing the ordinary from unfamiliar angles. And, as people might know, I'm a sucker for puns that aren't just there to be funny, but also to open new paths of meaning. From "In Tandem": "...So we paint our ruins red instead - germinating seediness..." "Germinating seediness" is friggin' genius. Plus, it resonates with the poem before, "Mount Francis" that talks about city workers on strike and people taking advantage of overgrown city grass to plant wildflowers. Both of them sketch a picture of defiance, of growth in uncooperative surroundings, but "In Tandem" also shows those surroundings polluting people's hopes, as generative-tending risks are traded for destructive ones, though still with a flourish of humour: when the kids are drinking and biking, the lines weave like the cyclists. There's a trick with enjambment I like: when am idea could end on a line, but the next line expands it, refracts it. "Thirteen" is like that with "...we drank from the Big Dipper until high beams grazed us..." You could be high, but you could be under the influence of your surroundings - some of which are, indeed, high up. Highs and lows are explored as animal motifs combine with the joy and fear in teenage years. And there's more - that's just a bit of it. Ah! One last thing. "The summer is killing us" and "Friday I'm in Love" both make great use of repeating lines or ends of lines. Like villanelles or very short sestinas. Is there a name for these particular forms? Anyway, the rhythms created fit well with each poem's themes: feeling trapped (reminding me of the fly in Josef Škvorecký's The Bass Saxophone and also how easily I get sick of hot weather); feeling a lyrical pull to a DJ who doesn't return the attraction. I wanted to talk about the other poetry book too, but I'm plum tuckered out, meaning a plum has been tucked inside my brain and is lulling it to sleep - more sleep, I hope, than last night. Do not go gentle into that good night! Or do, but with plums. 211104 ... tender_square (kirstin, you read my poems with such careful attention and depth, i don’t even know how to begin to thank you. you are, la mia partita nel mestiere, my ideal reader. “germinating seediness” is one of my most fave lines i’ve ever invented, so i’m endlessly pleased that it resonated with you too. “the summer is killing us” is a pantoum and “friday i’m in love” is a villanelle, two forms that emphasize the power of echo and repetition that i believe are some of the most versatile and fun to work with. sending some powerful sleep vibes your way!) 211105 ... raze my favorite apocalypse (catie rosemurgy) catie rosemurgy is one of my favourite poets. her 2010 collection "the stranger manual" sits on the list of "best books of poetry i've ever read" along with carolyn forché's "the country between us", erin carlyle's "magnolia canopy otherworld", and "mayflies" by our own tender_square. someone smarter than me could probably tell you all about how catie deconstructs gender, identity, setting, and poetry itself through the indescribable character of miss peach, who's seen through other characters but also gets her own say. in a 2018 interview, catie described miss peach as being "continually remade by her desire to belong — in her town, as a woman — and her desire to escape the constraints of belonging". "my favorite apocalypse" is her first book of poetry. any fear i had of it not being as good as "the stranger manual" disintegrated about five seconds in. the epigraph quotes yeats and the rolling stones. and that's it, man. that's catie. she's lyricism and startling, unexpected imagery. she's also rock and roll. *real* fucking rock and roll. the way it used to be, back when it was dangerous. i'm only a quarter of the way through, and there are already so many moments i want to quote. here are just two. from "cranberry_juice": "whenever i feel a bit bruised around the temple, his mouth is always there, scooping up some smile for me to taste." and from "twelve and listening to the stones": "if i had a best friend, i might not tell her that once you find your insides and can tighten them, you can bring the ground up to your face, bring the earth you're standing on up through your body, until you can breathe the grass as it comes through the dirt." "the angel and the river water" is so powerful i had to read it twice in a row to take it all in. it begins: "i picture libby undressed, thirteen, floating dead in the river. leaves cling to her like burnt-out stars looking for a way to get at her light. she wants to give it to them, but she can't move it through her skin. the pressing only makes her bigger, softer, brighter." there's an arc to "the stranger manual" that makes it feel like no other book of poetry i can think of. it moves in a such a strange, wonderful way. this book doesn't feel like it's got quite the same thematic heft, but that doesn't make it any less brilliant. in every poem she finds a brand new way to say something or an angle to attack it from that no one's thought of before. and no one writes about love the way she does. there's a great through-line of recurring poems written from the perspective of lovers grace and billy, with his voice always answering hers. they keep showing up to sing to each other at unexpected moments. catie's titles are always wonderful, too. there's a poem in here called "what i wanted to say instead of 'yes' when a guy at a bar asked me if i grew up near lake michigan". a pull quote from rodney jones on the back cover says, "the reader who is not hers after twenty pages needs a blood transfusion." i like that. but i'd change twenty to two. 211118 ... tender_square only the second oliver collection i’ve ever cracked and to say it’s incredible is an understatement. written in the wake of her partner’s death, a love of forty-plus years shared, oliver explores faith and the ever-changing aspects of grief through pastoral poems detailing all of nature’s gifts. oliver’s gaze leaves no small moment unnoticed and her writing is without pretension, sending a direct line to the heart. a favorite, which overflows with her characteristic wisdom and ease, set in a single sentence: praying it doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak. 211119 ... tender_square ah, shit. forgot the title when i was cutting and pasting! the book is thirst by mary oliver (beacon press, 2006) 211119 ... raze mallory whitten (god box) discovering good writing through plagiarism is a really awkward feeling. you're happy to have found something you like, but the way you found it makes you feel dirty, even though you didn't do anything wrong. you ever read someone's writing and think, "this person would make a great blatherskite," or, "i bet this person would love blather"? it's happened to me a few times over the years. sometimes there's just something about a writer that tells me they would get a lot out of this place if they ever found their way here. mallory is one of those people. a lot of her poems and stories read like blathes. she even writes in all lowercase letters like some of us do. the thing is, she's *already* here. at least a little bit. because someone once thought it would be a good idea to take some of her words and present them as if they wrote them. i still don't like the way i discovered her writing. but after buying her books and affirming who the words belong to, i feel at least a little better about it. mallory's writing is billed as fiction. that's hilarious to me. this is the least fictional fiction ever written. she dives headfirst into her struggles with addiction, mental illness, and an abusive childhood. she writes almost everything in the first person. she uses her own name. scott_mcclanahan blends his own personal history with magical realism and plays fast and loose with the facts to get at a deeper emotional truth. some people call that sort of thing "autofiction". mallory just tells you what happened. i love reading and writing things that are clipped and minimal, but i love lyricism too. in mallory's first book, "collected poems & stories", lyricism is in short supply. the writing is so austere, sometimes it feels a little flat and dispassionate. but when it works, it's something else. "why you shouldn't be a high_school algebra one teacher" is a devastating look at what some teachers go through when they aren't able to win the respect of their students. "various dreams that occurred within one night that remind me of how i do not miss binge drinking and having to wake up multiple times a night to pee to avoid peeing on myself" is a poem before it even starts. and "anxiety attack" might be the most honest thing i've ever read about being a recovering alcoholic. it's almost physically painful to see someone going through that kind of emotional pain, but it's impossible to look away. there's humour, too. it's pretty dark and twisted, but it's there. where "collected poems & stories" left me a little cold sometimes, "god box" feels more refined and even *more* honest, if that's possible. the opening two-part story is written in the third person, but it's pretty clear it's a jagged piece of autobiography. the way mallory writes about depersonalization, anxiety, and feeling like a "broken person" is heartbreaking and startling in its clarity and insight. you also get a series of tiny poems like "untitled", which reads: "feel so confused as to how people can love me and love (my) emotional abusers at the same time." that's it. that's the whole thing. and to add another word to it would be a sin. an incredible thing happens about halfway through this book. after recounting some horrifying experiences in the service industry and trying to find a medication that doesn't make her feel like she's losing her mind or having a heart attack, mallory starts to inch toward getting better and being more patient with herself. it isn't some cloying march toward forced, unrealistic enlightenment. it's the beginning of an organic healing process as she grows into the person she wants to be. in "10.5.15" she writes this about drinking a beer for the first time in three years: "in my body i feel all the things that don't serve me anymore in particles that start to tingle & i feel the desire to evolve as far away from them as i can while still honoring how far i've already moved" she starts to appreciate goofy, wonderful little things, like her dog noticing words being typed on a computer screen and trying to bite them as they appear. in "the thing about spirituality", she writes about "being confident enough to believe in something instead of too self-conscious to be sincere about anything". she realizes the qualities she loves in her friends are the same things that exist in her. this is the entirety of "angels speaking through a human i just met": "you think a lot don't you? you don't have to save the world you just have to be here and you're doing a wonderful job" in the end, "god box" reveals itself to be the most personal, literal self-help book ever written. it's a thing of bald, shimmering beauty. 211209 ... kerry "behind the locked door"- excellent biography of george harrison by graeme thomson (hence beatles and harrison song_of_the_day nearly every day) 211216 ... Soma Immune: A Journey into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive (Philipp Dettmer) Reading is very difficult for me, even on ADHD medication. It didn't used to be, when I was a kid, and all I had to focus on for fun was escaping chores and problems by reading in the car. Back then "What are you reading?" was a fun question to tease at how I'd been reading for hours, instead of an inquiry that leaves me feeling like I'm missing out. The author wrote it after getting cancer, because he wanted to understand how his body worked to make all the medical stuff a little less terrifying. It's a really nice read with a lot of little analogies and varies in how dense the data is so you can process it. I've been chipping away at it though. It's made me feel a little better about COVID and cancer. A little light against the darkness of the unknown, I suppose. 211216 ... raze you are no longer in trouble (nicole stellon o'donnell) nicole stellon o'donnell teaches language arts to high_school students in fairbanks, alaska. she describes her writing as "poems and small bricks of prose". i love that. "you are no longer in trouble" documents her experiences as a teacher, a student, a mother, the daughter of a principal, and as a human being with a sharp mind and a good heart, trapped inside a system that's often heartless and braindead. she describes the "fourth person" as "the only one watching the green-aproned cashier slide the groceries over the scanner. all that cashier wants: a break, a basket unpacked, just one customer who might look at her face instead of the flashing numbers on the screen. but even the cashier can't see past the third person. the fourth person, tired of waiting, leaves in search of a shorter line." in the brilliant, biting "dear john hughes", she writes: "you left out the pain. where i grew up, no one mentioned that a boy and girl killed themselves on a farm road outside town on a saturday night. a shotgun pact. his mother worked at a hallmark shop that night. she restocked cards while he shot his girlfriend and then himself. she never came back to work." the best thing here might be "excuses for the principal", a long poem that runs through the whole book and digs into nicole's difficult relationship with her father. it's written as a list of twenty-six excuses, broken into thirteen groups of two. excuse number fourteen: "i never told you i was angry you were unable to talk about your coming death. we had time, but no language. one night my mother called in a panic to put you on the phone. hysterical after waking from a dream that something had happened to me, you wouldn't believe that i was okay until you heard my voice. i answered even though i was driving, stuck at a red light, with my sick daughter in the back seat on our way home from the doctor. i answered because by then any call from your number could be an emergency. i had a sick child, but i had to soothe you. no, fine, everything's fine. we're fine. your terror, dulled by the miles of static between our phones, was the closest we would ever get to saying goodbye." "four poems my incarcerated students assigned me" is jarring. you forget about that side of teaching sometimes. you forget about the students who have no homes to go to. in "landscape with playground equipment, pigtails, and hypodermic syringes", she paints the image of needles on the playground, "fallen in rune-like patterns in the gravel, a script none of them could read". "drills" tackles school shootings from an unexpected angle, revealing what teachers and students are trained to do in the event of an "incident", examining the absurdity of trying to ready yourself for the unthinkable. and "at least name it what it is" is a gut-punch of a prose poem about witnessing a death on an airplane. in "on a field trip to view the tourists at the museum", she remembers "the perfect pelts, the wolverine's black-white v, the afternoon sun, and our shadows dragging along the sidewalk between the museum and the dorm. and myself, so young, watching how history tangles itself around children's ankles and pulls them under. myself, the teacher, another tangle. another tourist, deciding what to take back and what to leave behind. still writing about kids that aren't mine and never were in a land that isn't mine and never was." 211227 ... nr "the silence of the lambs" by thomas harris. i read "red dragon" mostly when i was lying on_the_beach in florida, and enjoyed the juxtaposition. 220522 ... kerry olivia manning's "balkan trilogy." it was recommended to me because of my fascination with the balkans, because rachel cusk wrote the introduction to the new edition, and because it is just generally excellent. only 300 or so pages into about 1000. her narration is so vivid and precise but there's very little direct acknowledgment of harriet's (the protagonist) internal world. you can just see it in the depiction of other characters, how she interacts with them, and the conversations they have. it is very external and makes me realize how internal my own writing is, and i'm not sure how i feel about that. 220523 ... e_o_i Historical fiction-ish: finished The Joyce Girl by Annabel Abbs in May and March by Geraldine Brooks this morning. I mentioned the second in "fanfiction." Yes, "literary" books can be fanfiction (Wide Sargasso Sea, anyone?) and this blends that with historical detail, weaving in the Underground Railroad and the writers Emerson and Thoreau (a little). The main character is Mr. March - I don't think we ever get his first name - the father of the kids in Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. The story picks up with him as a chaplain in the American Civil War, and has some flashbacks to when he was young. A section near the end from the perspective of his wife, Margaret/Marmee, provides an alternate interpretation of some of his past. He tries to live with integrity, and contemporary readers will (hopefully) agree with him that slavery and racism are evil, but the realism in his character is both excellent and frustrating. For instance, he has some unexamined prejudice against Irish immigrants, mentioned in passing, and the way he counsels his wife to get the better of her temper outbursts reads as I Am a Man, I Know Better. It's a complex situation, because she knows that she needs to control her anger better, but she resents his attitude. (This jives with what I know of Alcott: she stressed good morals in Little Women, but she was also something of a feminist and gave a more progressive vision of ethics than many moralistic stories would at the time.) Here, Marmee's character is more complex, too, though we don't get a lot of her compared to him. That's one thing that might have been explored more, but the book as a whole seemed an excellent length, an excellent structure. I keep saying "excellent" and it's one of those vague praise words, so how about it absorbed me so that I stayed up late and then spent (what was left of) the morning finishing it? The descriptions swept me along even though the situations were often brutal. The internal and external conflicts complemented each other rather than jostling each other out. And I preferred this to The Joyce Girl, but maybe that's because I felt I was more familiar with the Joyce family, so I felt the author characterized Lucia's mother unfairly. I don't really know the Joyces, of course. But because I know 19th-century U.S.A. even less, I could't nitpick March that well even if I wanted to. The Joyce Girl has some great passages describing Lucia's dancing. And it deals with ideas of art and women's aspirations in a time when those were opening up into a rosier future (slower for many than they hoped). From a psychological perspective, I think it's inaccurate to depict mental illness as the result of one particular trauma, but it's not clear if that's only the view of (fictional) Dr. Jung or of the novel itself. Lucia in the book (James Joyce's daughter, by the way) shows a personality inclined to violent shifts. Plus she's suffering from the effects of repression, neglect, and multiple break-ups in the span of a few years, so maybe it's not fair to say that the book itself pins ALL of her mental suffering on one thing. But the reveal of what's considered to be the core thing isn't handled that well, in my opinion. Anyway, The Joyce Girl is worth reading too, even if I had misgivings. I mean, *you* (any "you" reading this) doesn't have to pick it up, but I'm glad I did because it prompted new thoughts and feelings. 220808 ... e_o_i correction: *most* mental illness isn't the result of one particular trauma. PTSD can be, but complex trauma is probably more common. caveat: I am not a psychologist. 220808 ... tender_square finally getting around to emily henry’s latest, “book lovers,” which follows nora, a literary agent reading her star client’s latest manuscript. page 296 got me good: “in my favourite books, it’s never quite the ending i want. there’s always a price to be paid. mom and libby liked the love stories where everything turned out perfectly, wrapped in a bow, and i’ve always wondered why i gravitate towards something else. i used to think it was because people like me don’t get *those* endings. and asking for it, hoping for it, is a way to lose something you’ve never even had. the ones that speak to me are those who final pages admit there is no going back. that every good thing must end. that every bad thing does too, that *everything* does. that’s what i’m looking for every time i flip to the back of a book, compulsively checking for proof that in a life where so many things have gone wrong, there can be beauty too. there is always hope, no matter what. after losing mom, those were the endings i found solace in. the ones that said *yes, you have lost something, but maybe, someday, you’ll find something too.* for a decade, i’ve known i will never again have everything, and so all i’ve wanted is to believe that, someday, again, i’ll have enough. the ache won’t always be so bad. people like me aren’t broken beyond repair. no ice ever freezes too thick to thaw and no thorns ever grow too dense to be cut away. this book has crushed me with its weight and dazzled me with its tiny bright spots. some books you don’t *read* so much as *live,* and finishing one of those always makes me think of ascending from a scuba dive. like if i surface too fast i might get the bends.” 220828 ... tender_square “out of esau” by debut novelist michelle webster hein, a story about a woman, susan, who is struggling to remain in her marriage to her husband, randy. after a failed date night to rekindle their relationship, the following passage occurs, where susan tries to accept where her life is in that moment (p. 95): “at the drive-thru, randy ordered the same thing they always ordered—the five roast beef sandwiches for five dollars and an extra-large order of curly fries. down the road, they pulled into the driveway of a propane lot, and they ate in silence with the van running. the exhaust smell seeped inside and mixed with the smell of the meat. the bites were dense and chewy and savory and a little sweet with the arby’s sauce, and for a moment, it was everything that susan wanted—the food itself, yes, but also the two of them sitting beside each other in silence doing the same shameful thing. "whoever wrote this article about the importance of new experiences didn’t understand that it was the ordinary things that kept you where you were—the places you landed together in relief, after the jags you traveled over to get there. what mattered were the things you couldn’t imagine doing with anyone else, the things you no longer had to do alone—like eating to fill a void, like eating in a propane lot in your van with the engine running because it was cold and you were starving for something and there was no else you could bear to bear witness. the new was too difficult precisely because it was exciting, and how many people wanted exciting, really? everyone thought they wanted it, but it occurred to susan, sitting on the warm seat with her stomach stuffed full, that what they really wanted was for the ordinary to be okay and to revel in the moments when it was.” 221013 ... Soma Nona the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir) "You told me, "Sleep, I'll wake you in the morning." I asked, "What is morning?" and you said, "When everyone who fucked with me is dead. When everyone we loved has gone or fled, That's morning. Empty's just another word for clean. Let's put this first-draft dream of mine to bed. In the appointed hour I'll pull up your sheets. I'll kill the light, Lie down beside you; die; and sleep the night. This time will be the time we get it right: Forgiveness not so hard, nor anger long; Our graves will be less deep, our lies less true." You held aloft the sword. I still love y 221013 ... tender_square george saunders' new short story collection, "liberation day." the title story, which is the size of a novella, has stuck with me days after reading. the way saunders describes historical events and blends it into the future is astonishing. 221102 ... tender_square edit: it's too bad nearly all the rest of the stories in "liberation day" are middling. saunders should have released a novella and left it at that. 221111 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Breakfast_at_Tiffany's 230108 ... tender_square safekeeping: some true stories from a life (abigail thomas) i found out about this book from a blog post on fragmented narratives that i bookmarked years ago, before i began writing here. i rediscovered the recommendation, and bought the book several months ago, but only started reading it a few days ago. the stories unfold in a series of short vignettes, most the length of a page, some longer ones spanning into two or three, all around domesticity and love and life and loss and disappointment. thomas's writing is uncluttered and direct. she uses conversations with her sister as a way to steer the work or probe what the point of these explorations are, encouraging the narrator to delve deeper into why these moments are the ones remembered. as a reader the experience is part soul revelation and recognition for me, and part blueprint for how to make sense of my own blathes and what shape they could take as a potential collection. i have to keep putting the book down because i don't want it to end; the stories are addictive and because of their brevity, it's easy to read many in one sitting. 230113 ... e_o_i "Safekeeping" sounds intriguing! I like page-length pieces that go together in a whole, not that I've read a lot of books like this, but a few I remember... Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen (poems) Madeleine is Sleeping by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum (more a novel with short chapters) Other Electricities by Ander Monson (Finally interconnected short stories, but maybe the stories aren't so short and I'm just remembering it wrong. Some pages had electric-circuit-like illustrations, as if to show connections between people in the book. I read it so long ago, it's more of an impression at this point. An impressive impression, though.) Pah. I need to stop blabbing and sleep. I really just wanted to say that I finished A_Woman_in_Berlin, and it was worth it. Gute Nacht, tout le monde! 230122 ... tender_square run towards the danger (sarah polley) i'm stunned by the way polley interrogates memory from the past and from the present, overlapping and weaving a narrative of understanding that is still in flux. i'm moved by her honesty and personal understanding, and envy her ability to examine circumstances from multiple angles of self. 230416 ... raze rough house (tina ontiveros) i read almost a hundred books in 2021. i still kind of can't believe i did that. i'd never read anywhere near that much in the space of a year. in the last two years combined, i can probably count the number of books i've read on one hand. a lot has changed. i don't have the energy or the emotional bandwidth to dig into thick things made of paper like i used to. i miss it. but i've had to accept where i'm at and what i'm able to do. over the last little while, i've tried to gently nudge book-reading back into my life in at least some capacity. i started small, with penny guisinger's "postcards from here" — a tiny but powerful collection of single-page vignettes. then i graduated to a book of poetry. now i'm reading this. my days of blowing through a whole book in a day are gone. i figure if i try to read one chapter each night, i can give myself a realistic goal and something to look forward to. four chapters in, this is already one of the best memoirs i've ever read. tina writes about a difficult, broken childhood with a staggering amount of empathy and clarity. she doesn't sugarcoat anything. she doesn't demonize anyone either. she creates a panoramic emotional view of the landscape of her life, finding the beauty between deep pockets of pain. and she somehow slips lyricism into plainspoken prose without it ever feeling forced. past a certain point, it becomes less like reading and more like hearing her voice in some place beyond the realm of the senses. this isn't my story. but it feels like meeting an old soul who's saying, "i see your scars. now let me show you mine." here she is talking about childhood memory: "i don't remember being a baby. i have no flashes of my mother gazing down into my cradle or my father lifting me up over his head to let me feel the power of flight before i could even walk, though i'm sure those things did happen. it's difficult to report on imperfect memory, but what i do know from those years comes from a different sort of memory. we all have intrinsic memory, a fusion of the stories we've heard and physical immersion in our family atmosphere. our early environment documents the past in our bodies like rings in an old-growth cedar. a salmon knows her river of birth by some mysterious recall, soaked into her during the very formation of her body. that's the way i know our years of migration, through osmosis." just like when i was reading "sleepovers" by ashleigh_bryant_phillips, i really don't want this book to end. so i'm glad it's going to take me a while to get through it. 231024 ... raze patterns of orbit (chloe n. clark) one of the most maddening things i read in "the year of devouring every book in sight" was chloe's first collection of short_stories, "collective gravities". i've never come across a published book with so many typos in it. i'm talking about "excepting" in place of "expecting", characters that change gender when that isn't part of the narrative, and unintentional momentary tense shifts. even the table of contents has a typo in it. a whole story is missing. i wondered for a while if i somehow ended up with an uncorrected proof. when i learned that wasn't the case, i found myself wishing i could step back in time and offer to proofread the book for free. all those errors started to take me out of the reading experience after a while. they were everywhere. and i thought the stories deserved better. so many of them wormed their way into my head and my heart. i'm happy to say this book is (mostly) typo-free. it's a relief to be able to dig in without holding my breath every time my eyes cross the street to a fresh sentence. there's more of that thing chloe does where she creates characters who feel real even when they're doing things that seem impossible. this is my favourite kind of science fiction, where the science is just a pretty scarf around the neck of a story with a strong pulse. though to lump it into any category doesn't really do her writing justice. she incorporates elements of horror and speculative fiction into a stew that's all her own. you've got computers with the souls of poets, cities where the dead live again but never speak, fruit that tastes like memory, and the burden of carrying the painful memories of others. some of the titles are tales before they're even told: "the waves hear every promise you make." "even the night sky can learn to be a fist." "there is the world within this window." a recurring theme in chloe's work is space travel. she captures the vast, lonely otherness of worlds most of us can only wonder about. i think this sentence does a neat job of encapsulating what drives all of her writing: "there are so many things we've never been able to map completely: the bottom of the ocean, the brain while it dreams, other planets." she draws those maps with her words. 231119 ... raze a new york times article about sandra bem's decision to end her own life. i read this once before, about a decade ago, but forgot almost every detail in the intervening years. it took the wayback_machine to break the paywall this time around. it was worth the effort. a powerful piece of writing. 231201 ... raze f*ckface (leah hampton) i guess this would be more like "what are you *not* reading". because i've been actively avoiding finishing this book. it joins larry brown's "facing the music", betsy trumpener's "the butcher of penetang", and "sleepovers" by ashleigh_bryant_phillips on the list of the best collections of short_stories i've read. i think one of the greatest compliments i can give any writer of fiction is that they make me wish i could buy their characters a cup of coffee and just listen to them talk about their lives for a while. leah does that. i also want to punch a few of her characters in the face, but hey. that's a skill too. when a book's got people in it you come to care about after only knowing them a short while, you know it's a good one. dig this: "a lot of people when they die turn their feet inward, just like a baby does when he's napping deep. over the years, after what i've found, i believe we all get warm before we go. we sink down into some warm place like we did in our cribs when we were little." that's from "parkway", about a park ranger worn down by the dead bodies she keeps finding on the job. this is the kind of horror story i love best, where there are no jump scares and the only monsters are us. you can only fear for the safety of someone who doesn't exist if you love them at least a little bit. that's the way it is for me, anyway. "wireless" begins with the image of a finger buried in someone's ass and ends on a quietly_devastating note. "mingo" has an incredible payoff that comes out of nowhere but feels completely earned. moments of unexpected humour rise up out of crushing sadness. it works the other way around too. leah understands that sometimes you laugh to keep yourself from crying, and sometimes the tears come when you're sure the well is dry. someone complained in an online review about these stories ending abruptly and unresolved. i guess one reader's source of frustration is another reader's deep sigh of relief. a snapshot never gives up the whole scene. and a life can't be contained or summarized in twenty pages, or two hundred. the only easy answers come when you're cheating. there's none of that here. 240207 ... e_o_i Less by Andrew Sean Greer A delightful novel I finished not too long ago. Okay, so a moderately successful but not super famous writer gets an invitation to his ex's wedding. He decides it'd be upsetting to show up but also embarrassing to decline without a reason, so he says he'll be out of the country. He proceeds to be out of the country in six different countries - for an awards ceremony, a short teaching stint, a vacation in the desert with friends of friends... The book does a cool thing with narration: protagonist Arthur Less isn't the narrator, so it looks third-persony at first, but it turns out someone else is talking about him. The unnamed narrator is finally revealed near the end (but you'll probably figure it out before I did). Oh, and the whole thing was really well written, but I was surprised it won a Pulitzer. Why? Simply because it's funny. I had this stereotype that Pulitzer-Prize-winning books have to be all stately and serious. Anyway! Some notable bits: -Recurrent phrases such as "magniloquent spoony" (it makes sense in context, perhaps) -A drunk fellow writer telling Arthur he's a "bad gay" (Arthur thinks, I could be a bad writer, but a bad gay?! and the mix of seriousnesses and goofiness in his attendant thoughts about this is well put together) -A more friendly friend saying just because a relationship doesn't last, that doesn't mean it's a failure -Speaking of which, Arthur's two main relationships: first with an older poet and the next with a teacher, the guy who's getting married - these are mostly told through flashbacks but you feel how important they are to who he is and what he does -A midnight book reading at a club in Berlin where the theme is Cold War spies...plus that whole chapter about his six-week teaching post in Germany (his awkward German - I can relate - is rendered in literal English) 240327 ... raze digging up mother: a love story (doug stanhope) like doug's standup, this memoir is twisted, depraved, and unafraid to offend. you've got assisted suicide, unintentional self-immolation, questionable pet parenting, and childhood penis envy. and that's just in the first twenty pages. it's also shot through with a surprising amount of heart. what becomes clear early on is just how much this man's mother shaped not only his sense of humour, but his entire personality, largely by allowing and encouraging him to be himself. they might have been the only two people in the world who really understood and appreciated each other for who they were, flaws and all. it isn't an accident that the book is billed as a love story. 240423 ... e_o_i A Survey of the Derivational Postbases of Labrador Inuttut - Lawrence R. Smith Hey, I actually read a surprising number of the "derivational postbases"! ...But I wasn't supposed to. I was supposed to focus on the phonology section relevant to my school project, but then I spent half an hour looking through the dictionary section and scribbling down words. They filled up a margin and spilled onto the bottom of the page. The reason? I have a half-formed idea of writing a fantasy/alternate-history novel where the main character's first language is a mix of Inuktitut and something Sanskrit-derived. (Haven't even finished my first novel, pah.) Anyway, Inuttut is the variety of Inuktitut spoken in the north part of Labrador, a blob of land shared with Quebec but that belongs to Newfoundland because the borders of lands are even more arbitrary than the borders between languages. Incidentally, the Inuit languages only have a few words for snow; it's just that these languages are polysynthetic (read: Lego-like), so you can get a "snow" word as a base with a shitload (snowload?) of endings. Some non-snow Inuttut suffixes - -atuk/-atsuk to indicate lovability: panik - daughter paniatsuk - dear, loveable daughter -agulak to make things cuter: qimmik - dog qimmiagulak - (nice little) puppy (The ending consonant deletes in these examples, which isn't directly the phonology thing I'm dealing with, but anyway.) 240429 ... raze daytripper (fábio moon and gabriel bá) i was due to dig into another graphic novel. and this one packs a serious emotional punch. fábio moon and gabriel bá are twin brothers who still live where they were born, in são paulo, brazil. this is from the little "about the authors" section in the back of the book: "they like their coffee black, with no sugar, so that the taste is strong and memorable. they believe stories should taste equally strong and be just as memorable. they work with a fresh pot that's always handy to make sure they never forget that." the story they spin here, shaded with magical realism and the imagery of dreams, follows brás de oliva domingos. the son of a famous author, he dreams of becoming a writer himself while spending his days penning obituaries for a local newspaper. it isn't a spoiler to tell you he dies at the end of each chapter. what we're dealing with here is nothing less than life and its inevitable end, and how the small scenes we sometimes overlook are what really give our lives meaning. reading this is kind of like holding a great foreign film in your hands, with the subtitles beamed straight into your brain. i like art that makes me feel, and think, and examine the nature of my own existence. needless to say, this is right up my alley. 240605 ... raze life's work (david_milch) i've been putting off reading this memoir for two years now. david milch is a writer of rare gifts, and a fascinating mess of a human being. he did groundbreaking work at yale while snorting heroin and shooting out traffic lights, went on to helm some of the most influential and critically revered tv shows ever made, and lost tens of millions of dollars at the track. now he's losing himself to alzheimer's. he writes about that in the prologue: "i'm losing my faculties. things seem a continuous taking away. wake, don't know if it's night or day, or whether to trust the processes of your own body to function. you're not sure where you are, obsessively rehearse what you think might be your obligations, to be certain you're remembering what you need to do or know. you act like you know what someone is talking about when you have no fucking idea. you're just impersonating who you used to be. my brain has amyloid plaque, they can number how much. the plaques compound. palliatives slow the spread but nothing arrests it. i get up at three in the morning, defiantly night. even the dogs have different personalities. it's a growing solitude. i wonder, and not infrequently, 'is it gone for good?' my mind. and the only answer you get is an answer in that moment. it doesn't hold on. but that's the whole human contract. seen so, all of this is gone already. somebody's dealing and you have no choice but to play. so to take on at this juncture, under these circumstances, the challenge of trying to see things as clearly as possible, identify certain recurring patterns and joys and tragedies, is a blessing. it increasingly seems that life is something that happens to you and art the opportunity to understand what's transpired. you need only to be brave." i think i felt i wasn't ready to take on all a book like this entails, emotionally and intellectually. i knew it was going to be dense. this is a man who talks the way he writes. there's always a lot at play. after deciding i'd waited long enough, and realizing i was never really going to be ready, i dove in anyway. some of the most beautiful and bittersweet stuff here has to do with the making of "deadwood". that's as perfect a tv series as i've seen. it ended too soon. milch is the reason why. he's honest about that, too. few writers have been so generous in letting the reader into their creative process and making clear the ways in which art and lived experience are braided together even when it doesn't seem so. "there cohabit in each of us elements of resiliency and elements of woundedness and imprisonment," he writes. "what you don't do is try to hide from the complexity of your own feelings. you work with your eyes, and you try not to blink, and you listen, and you try not to turn away. you let yourself feel all of the contradictions, and if you are able to render a world in sufficient complexity, then it all gets told." 240613 ... raze an article about rescue rats: https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2024/06/13/g-s1-4277/rats-africa-heroes-search-and-rescue-mines-tb 240616 ... raze late migrations (margaret renkl) one of the most beautiful books i've ever read, right down to the vivid visual art that plays off of the words (contributed by margaret's brother billy). i struggle to even describe what this book is. memoir? nature writing? a collection of lyrical, deeply personal micro-essays? it's all of those things and more. memory, oral history, lived experience, and a reverence for the natural world are woven into a gorgeous tapestry that ends up reading like a generous helping of the author's soul put on paper. you probably couldn't build a book more suited to my current sensibilities if you tried. i_mean, there are even a few squirrel sightings in here. from "redbird, sundown": "the earth has faded, but the sky will not give up its right to color, doubling down in the west with reds and oranges and yellows. the light catches in the bare branches of the maple and clothes it in a fleeting dream of autumn, all pink and auburn and gold. the cardinal perched near the top of the tree bursts into radiance, into flame, and for that moment nothing matters at all — not the still soil nor the clattering branches, nor the way this redbird will fall to the ground in time, a cold stone, and i too will grow cold, and all my line. never mind. mind only this tree in winter and this redbird, this tiny god, all fiery light leading to him and gathered in him, this lord of the sunset, this greeter of the coming dark." 240619 ... raze pedro paramo (juan rulfo) a uniquely disorienting nonlinear novel, and a ghost story like none i've read before. in her foreword, susan sontag characterizes the narrative as a "multivoiced sojourn in hell". rulfo himself described it as having "a structure made of silences, of hanging threads, of cut scenes, where everything occurs in a simultaneous time which is a no-time." the most compelling character might be comala, a town that's shown both as the vibrant community it once was and the haunted husk it became. 240625 ... e_o_i Recently, two poetry books: More to Keep Us Warm by Jacob Scheier and Abandon by Oana Avasilichioaei. I wrote about them for at least three hours earlier; my goal is to finally start that book-reviewing blog I said I would years ago...but I'm getting ahead of myself. Short-form, Kirsten. SHORT. Basically, both books are interesting because they do unexpected things with poetry: Scheier constructing comedic and/or melancholy mini-essays with his longer poems, esp. "Stuff": "I'm not a Buddhist I just hate stuff" (especially things that match unnecessarily, like dish sets) but also returning again and again to how places and people become ghosts, whether alive or dead and for the other, Avasilichioaei foregrounding character development while not forgetting image, description, or flow. Narrative poetry is one of my favourite types and this focuses on her trip to Romania. At least, the middle section does. There are three different ones, each of which outlines a different character: -the dragon who's probably also Nicolae Ceaușescu -the author-narrator's aunt Tatiana -the maybe-mythical illegitimate daughter of a Renaissance-era king, Stephen the Great 240626 ... e_o_i Also see poem_of_the_summer, maybe, for how the thoughts prompted by "I'm looking for a man in finance" are sort of like Scheier's poem about an ex who lived in a large lonely house. 240626 ... e_o_i I think I like the book Abandon better, though. I don't know. It's not a competition. 240626 ... nr zoe_whittall's new short story collection. this one is easier to read more slowly, which is a good thing. more time to absorb the tiny yet packed-with-zoe-magic worlds. 240626 ... raze catalog of unabashed gratitude (ross gay) this was a gift from someone who thought we might read it together. that didn't happen. since our humble little book club isn't ever going to lurch to life now that we're no longer on speaking terms, i thought i might as well read it on my own. i struggled at first to adapt to the rhythm of ross gay's poetry. he eschews punctuation a lot of the time, and he uses line breaks in an unusual way. sometimes it's hard to know where one thought ends and another begins. but i think my eyes and the machinery behind them have latched onto the music now. he'll do this thing where a poem starts out seeming to be about one thing only to end up being about something completely different. it always feels like an earned, organic shift. i've been especially struck by "spoon" (dedicated to don nelson) and "to the mulberry tree", which begins as a meditation on the luck-licked indignity of being crapped on by a bird and somehow becomes one of the most moving poems i've read in my life. this is "feet" in its entirety (i would quote from it, but some lines are so long they'd just turn into a mess if i tried to honour the original formatting here): https://tejanx.tumblr.com/post/159457180756/friends-mine-are-ugly-feet-the-bodys-common 240627 ... raze a manual for cleaning women (lucia_berlin) when it comes to short fiction, "selected stories" collections aren't really my thing, for the same reason compilation albums don't do it for me. i either want everything in one place so i can appreciate the totality of someone's work, or i want to read an author's books and experience their chosen shape on an individual basis. there's no all-encompassing lucia berlin omnibus. and buying her long-out-of-print books in their original form would probably run me more than a thousand bucks, assuming i could find them all. between this and "evening in paradise", all but eleven of the seventy-six stories she's known to have written are gathered in two convenient and reasonably priced tomes. so i saved myself a bit of time and money, and i let logic override desire for once. you wonder how someone this gifted could have slipped through the cracks so completely in her lifetime. maybe it was because she was too far ahead of the curve. she was writing what everyone now calls "autofiction" long before it had a name, blurring the lines between autobiography and invention with a voice that was vivid but brave enough to be broken. there are more than forty stories in this book. i've read five of them so far, and lucia has already become one of my favourite writers. 240701 ... Soma I’ve 40 or so pages left in “Down Among the Sticks and Bones” after having read “Every Heart a Doorway” just yesterday. Lately I just ache and I have wanted for the warmth this series has lent me. 240701 ... raze fragments (marilyn_monroe) i have a complicated relationship with posthumously published work. i wouldn't want to be without "from_a_basement_on_the_hill" or "ariel", but it's impossible to make the argument that elliott_smith and sylvia plath would have released that album and that book in those forms if they'd lived long enough to see them through. don't get me started on how ted hughes handled (or mishandled) his wife's artistic legacy. i'm liable to hit something. it gets even dicier when you're dealing with private notes and poems that weren't meant for any eyes but the author's. which is what we have here. but i think in this case the reveal helps to expand our understanding of someone who was seen as little more than a one-dimensional sex symbol for far too long. the ridiculous and reductive "dumb blonde" myth that's dogged marilyn even in death is obliterated by her writing, which lays bare the intelligent, wounded, introspective person she really was. she was also more forward-thinking than she probably realized. in the way she crossed out words mid-thought and allowed the ghosts of old ideas to survive behind the new, she essentially invented her own form of erasure poetry more than a decade before doris cross popularized the concept with her "dictionary columns". staring at her own reflection, reckoning with the damage dealt by time, she writes: "there is a dark line between the lips in the outline of several brave waves in a turbulent storm — it says don't kiss me, don't fool me, i'm a dancer who cannot dance." her words rarely hew to any kind of linear path on the page. arrows and curved lines connect seemingly unrelated passages, mapping the movement of her mind. while following some of these rivers of faded ink and their junctions, i was struck by a thought i never expected to have: marilyn_monroe would have loved blather. 240708 ... raze squirrel seeks chipmunk (david sedaris) this book is fucking insane. 240711 ... e_o_i Lately, as in just now, other people's impressively creative blathes: -the condensed, unexpected story of video_game_private_messages -the pun and then the poetic narrative in sunborn -the Adam and Eve myth mixed with tiny, everyday garden moments in eyes_cast_down (and you know who loves a good garden? Me, Satan, dandelions...) 240730 ... e_o_i -oh yes, and the pared-down scene and dialogue of good_adventure 240730 ... raze that conversation really happened, too! talk about your unexpected park exchanges. and all because someone asked me to take their picture with their phone when i haven't held a cell phone in my hands for the better part of twenty years. iphones are like alien life forms to me. as for me, i had to go and reread a_very_short_vacation, because i think it's a beautiful little (well, not so little compared to some of my blathes, but you know what i mean) slice of life. and i too was struck by what soma did with sunborn, and the unexpected gut-punch of video_game_private_messages. it's always a gift to read the words y'all weave. 240730 ... raze my own alphabet (bobbie_louise_hawkins) i have this depressing habit of discovering some of my favourite artists not long after they've died. so it is again with bobbie here. i wish i'd found her when she was still alive so i could have told her how brilliant she was. it makes sense that she and lucia_berlin were friends. they were both fiercely loved by the few who knew their work but nowhere near as known as they should have been in their lifetimes. they were both teachers who had a profound impact on their students. they both flipped the concept of fiction on its head, flooding the page with details from their own lives. bobbie was every bit lucia's equal as a weaver of words and a teller of sometimes uncomfortable truths. that she hasn't yet achieved even a fraction of the posthumous recognition lucia has been granted is a bit of mystery to me. lucia's books have more than five thousand reviews on goodreads. bobbie's have eight. and one of those is for a book where her first name is misspelled. bobbie was many things in her eighty-seven years: a writer, a visual artist, an actress, a musician, a radio dj, a monologist, a mother, a daughter, and a human being with an uncommonly incisive mind. she was also a mesmerizing reader of her own work, effortlessly slipping into different voices and executing intricate tonal shifts on the fly. she lived with the poet robert creeley for eighteen years. if they'd stayed together, she might never have published a single sentence. he told her she was "too married, too old, and too late" to be a writer. "when bob and i were first together," she said in an interview with barbara henning, "he had three things he would say. one of them was, 'i'll never live in a house with a woman who writes.' one of them was, 'everybody wants to be a writer.' and one of them was, 'if you had been going to be a writer, you would have been one by now.' when he would go off to do readings and was going to be gone for three or four days or something, i'd bring my cardboard box out of the closet and set it up on the table and go to work. if i had things to do and if he was at home and he was teaching, when he would leave where we lived, after half an hour he had gone too far to come back. so i'd wait half an hour and i'd bring it out, and i'd start some work. he'd be gone for the time the class took plus an hour's drive each way. i'd have everything put away by the time he came home. if he suspected that i was writing, he would sit down with a glass of whiskey and start drinking and then we'd have three days and nights of furniture smashing and all the radios in the house turned up full volume and the kids trying to sleep. it would just be three days of hell. i think part of what attracted bob to me was competences i had within myself, but it was as if once i was within his purview, those competences were only to be used for his needs, in the space where we lived, and not as though they were my own." she was forty-three when her first book saw the light of day. she wasn't too old or too late. she was just getting started. "my own alphabet" must be the most blather-like book i've ever read. the letters that make up our language are used as a series of springboards for "stories, essays, and memoirs". some entries are several pages long. others are only a paragraph. all of them are essential. every letter gets its due. a is for "abortion", "absolutes", and "adieu". d is for "dogs that bark and will not stop". s is for "silver shoes" and "spouses of writers". here is "heart" in its entirety: "you know the kind of tourist who speaks the language badly but does it fast and loud? anyone who doesn't know the language thinks the spill and fury is the language being spoken properly. until the look on the puzzled faces of the natives makes it clear they're only confused, can't understand what is being said to them: we're being conned by a tourist. the heart has language and place; the heart has tourists who pass by pretending to mean something." that's a blathe if i've ever read one. 240812 ... raze what_we_talk_about_when_we_talk_about_love (raymond_carver) here's the trouble with raymond carver: what we talk about when we talk about his work, even if we aren't fully aware of it, is his editor gordon lish. because the voice in this book and "will you please be quiet, please?" isn't really carver's. it's carver as surgically altered by lish. it's difficult to make the argument that lish didn't improve many of these stories when he took his scalpel to them. but the way he edited them raises some serious questions about what an editor's role should be. when you're deleting three quarters of the original text, changing titles and the names of characters, removing plot points and dialogue, and rewriting at will, i think you've stopped editing and become a heavy-handed and unasked for coauthor. as the writer whose name is on the spine, how must it feel to know the work a large part of your reputation rests on doesn't reflect your sensibilities and isn't what you intended the world to see? based on the recorded evidence, it almost gave carver a nervous breakdown. it's possible that he would have been little more than a literary footnote if lish didn't warp his prose into what he wanted it to be (which is what lish himself believes to be true). maybe he would have died a relative unknown with a small but devoted following and a few books published with small presses. i'd be willing to bet he would have also been at least a little bit happier, and the conversation about his legacy would be a lot less complicated without the intervention of a man who has admitted he saw carver as more of an opportunity than a human being. i don't mean to demonize gordon lish. i think he did some great work as an editor, and he had an impressive two-decade run at knopf, championing a number of gifted writers without much concern for commerce. i agree with some of what i've read of his teaching philosophies — specifically the bit about writing being the act of putting your heart on the page. at the same time, i have some serious problems with the way he belittled his students in an effort to bully them into being better artists. i come down more on the side of bobbie_louise_hawkins here, who once said: "i find that one of the big dilemmas in a university context is that people take criticism as if it's a value to the work, and in fact more often than not it's preclusive. if you pay too much attention to what might be critically applied, you can freeze yourself into a space where nothing occurs." said another way: "tough love" can go fuck itself. anyway. there was a time when i thought all writing should be like this, with every bit of fat boiled from the bone. and hell, if i'd gone ahead and read "where i'm calling from" like i planned to over a decade ago, maybe it would have rocked my world. but that's not what's happening with this book. not now. this is probably going to sound like sacrilege, but i don't find much of this stuff compelling or resonant at all. i'm pretty sure i would feel that way even if i didn't know a thing about lish's role in shaping what's on the page. it's not even a minimalism thing. as much as i love my lyricism, i do still like the stripped-down stuff too. the older i get, the more i realize what i want most from any kind of art is to be moved. most of these stories just aren't doing that for me. some of the punch i was expecting is there in "so much water so close to home" and "the third thing that killed my father off". "viewfinder" has an undercurrent of dark humour i wasn't expecting. but i'd be lying if i said i wasn't underwhelmed. the heart is what's missing for me. i get more out of a one-page story from amy hempel (a lish disciple, as it turns out) than i'm getting from any of this. 240821 ... raze charlotte's_web (e.b. white) and here's the heart i was looking for. i don't remember reading this when i was a child. i know i saw the animated film adaptation, but my only enduring memory of it is the breaking of an unhatched goose egg. like rebecca stead's "when_you_reach_me" and margery williams' "the velveteen rabbit", i think this goes beyond being a simple children's story. it should be required reading for anyone with a soul. 240827 ... raze wild life (kathy fish) there are two versions of this book. what i'm reading_now is the revised and expanded edition that drops some of the original material, adds other things that are new and old and previously unpublished, and remakes itself as a compendium covering fifteen years of writing. there's a reason kathy fish is one of the most celebrated practitioners of what we call flash fiction. "one purple finch", "cancer arm", "repair man", "grip", "river", and "sway" are gorgeous miniatures that offer more meaning and feeling in a page or two than most writers manage to squeeze out of a few hundred. i don't know how you write a story about a man singing a stevie wonder song while standing naked on his neighbour's front porch and find a way to make it both funny and heartbreaking, but "wake_up" somehow manages to pull off that magic trick. these are stories that stick, whether they're about giant babies eating ashes or women who wave down the moon. 240909 ... raze none_of_the_roads_were_paved (robert h. hahn) a history lesson, a coming-of-age tale set during the great depression, and a musical travelogue all rolled into one. bob's father harvey was some kind of guy. he built coffins for casualties of the 1918 flu epidemic in eatonia. he took a two-week course in embalming and became the town's undertaker after converting his mobile t into a hearse. he was the delegated fire chief, the local mechanic and pontiac dealer, a tinsmith, a cobbler, and a bootlegger. when he decided his family's musical talent was their ticket to the big time, he built the trailer that would become their new home and thought up one brilliant scheme after another. he seems to have been capable of doing just about anything outside of telling his kids he loved them. in a lot of ways, he's the tragic engine that drives this story. i'd say the book would make one hell of a movie, but i'm not sure any filmmaker could do it justice. 240921 ... raze the great fires (jack gilbert) i have a thing for ordering cheap used books online from thriftbooks. it's one of the few vices i allow myself these_days. i know this is what libraries are for, but i like being able to keep the books i love best. and i enjoy things that are lived-in and well-loved. the occasional bit of book_ephemera is just another perk of not buying new. this is the first book i've bought in a while that has notes in the margins. the person who owned it before me didn't have much of substance to say. comments range from "wha?" to "who is orpheus and eurydice?" to "what is this thing?" their final assessment: "most of these poems were pretty interesting, but gilbert's style throws me off. a lot of it seems jumbled and almost random at times." if i were to die tomorrow and someone who didn't know my handwriting ended up with all my books, they would think those thoughts were mine. and that bothers me. in an interview conducted shortly after this book was published, gilbert said: "i really think poetry is urgently important. not as an entertainment. not because it's beautiful and it uses rhymes well. but it's almost ... it's one of the very few things we have to make what's important visible." this is a man who pushed fame away in favour of an almost monastic existence so he could build a life that was meaningful to him. his poetry grapples with love, grief, memory, and solitude without ever lapsing into sentimentality. to read him is to allow him to draw you a map of his heart. this is "trying to have something left over": "there was a great tenderness to the sadness when i would go there. she knew how much i loved my wife and that we had no future. we were like casualties helping each other as we waited for the end. now i wonder if we understood how happy those danish afternoons were. most of the time we did not talk. often i took care of the baby while she did housework. changing him and making him laugh. i would say pittsburgh softly each time before throwing him up. whisper pittsburgh with my mouth against the tiny ear and throw him higher. pittsburgh and happiness high up. the only way to leave even the smallest trace. so that all his life her son would feel gladness unaccountably when anyone spoke of the ruined city of steel in america. each time almost remembering something maybe important that got lost." "jumbled and almost random" my pale ass. 240929 ... raze in the year of long division (dawn raffel) i don't know what's happening, or why, or who it's happening to in half these stories. they kind of read like dreams with all the useful contextual information removed. that isn't a bad thing by any means. it just makes for a different kind of reading experience. if anything, it forces me to slow down and focus more on the language, which is gorgeously wrought. take this, from "something is missing of yours": "nothing is out in the yard except for what rightly, by nature, belongs there. the usual stirrings — flappings, flickering things. a slight shudder of brier. a rumor of frost. tall grasses and weedy things. garden and yard tools dirtied with earth. there are scootings and squirrelings. whiffings. hoots. cool acorns, pine cones, thistle and fluff. things that drift down slowly, softly. scratchings. markings. tender signs — if one is looking to see them." 241027 ... raze everything never comes your way (nicole stellon o'donnell) this hasn't hit me as hard as "you are no longer in trouble" did a few years ago, but it's still pretty powerful stuff. the book is split into three sections. "leave out the hours" is a selective memoir in sixteen fragments. "for the sake of argument" is a dialogue with the words on the page and the act of placing them there. "they all came before you" concerns itself with the natural world and the poetry of john haines, which the author finds problematic: "my painter friend, kes, told me, you have a problem with nature writing. and yes, i do. writing that posits the single self in the wilderness as the key to enlightenment irritates me. we aren't trapped into solitary pursuit of the 'older consciousness'. there must be other passages between 'the lines between human and animal' that don't depend on transplanting oneself onto a faux-empty land. there are other doors. even some we contain." 241202 ... e_o_i A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow Zinnia from our world has an incurable disease stemming from industrial pollution. No one with it has lived past 21. For years, she's been obsessed with the Sleeping Beauty story, even doing a degree in folklore. She's just graduated and is turning the fateful 21, so her best friend/on-and-off crush throws her a Sleeping Beauty-themed party...and then she disappears into a fairy-tale world. The novella (it's quite short) is something my brother recommended, with a bit of ambivalence. "I disagree with the author," he said. I looked at the book. "Isn't it a novel? How can you disagree with a novel?" "I mean, I disagree with the author's interpretation of Sleeping Beauty, that it's inherently anti-feminist... Although some versions, I would say, are..." and he goes on for several spoken paragraphs. Then, "But read this and see what you think of it." It was about 11 PM, but I started reading. And kept on. The book has momentum. It's tightly paced, probably owing to the editing as well as the writing. The downside to this is that I don't feel like I know the narrator that well: she can be snarky and often funny, she can be sentimental, but I'm not sure I grasp what makes her *her*. On the other hand, the fairy-world figures Primrose and Zellandine get a surprising amount of character development. So, I don't know. I didn't agree with my brother's assessment of the novel when he asked me about it again, before he went to bed: I don't think the writer hates or even disapproves of the fairy tale. Does she want to do something different with it? Yes, and why not?? But maybe it could be MORE different. The parts linking the "real world" Zinnia to Sleeping Beauty were eye-rollingly obvious sometimes, like the name of her disease having "rose" in its name, re: Briar Rose... And what about a charming character named Charm? Cheesy, right? Even as a joke. Even if you make it gay (but the unexpected part was who the girl Charm had a romance with). Now, I did polish it off in less than three hours, staying up late to see it to the end (part of that was secondhand_stress; my group-class students have their English test for teachers today). 241205 what's it to you? who go blather from