Virtual Margin

Oscar Snubs of 2011

2012-02-23T00:17:00.002-05:00

It's my blog and I can talk about movies if I want to.

The Oscars are only a few days away. Normally I would be incredibly excited; the Academy Awards are my Super Bowl, after all.

But this go around, the excitement isn't there. I was severely disappointed with the nominations this year. It wasn't a particularly spectacular, mind-blowing year for film, but there were still plenty of gems. The Academy apparently didn't dig deep enough to find them. Or more likely, they were found, tossed aside, and the loudest, most obvious pieces of fool's gold were chosen instead.

The Best Picture catgory this year is full of feel-good, cliche-ridden, emotional wank fests. War Horse? Really? It was like Spielberg was trying to parody himself. Oh look it's the horse that brings opposing soldiers together and it saves the farm and it's going to save this blind kid and oh here's a dying child. Whenever I watch "horse films" I always imagine the horses being like "fuck this shit" while the humans paw all over them. What I'd really like to watch is a horse movie where the horse is just like a complete asshole. He's completely uninspiring and every person he comes in contact with has a worse life because of him. Call it something like "My Mortal Enemy Flicka."

[EDIT: I'd like to add as a disclaimer that I haven't yet seen Hugo, so please don't take this as an outright complaint against all the nominees. I'm not saying they're all horrible films. I just feel like they're all safe picks, with the exception of Tree of Life.]

There were some Oscar snubs this year of fairly popular films like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 and Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Both of which I thought were good films, but not necessarily Oscar-worthy. And there are lesser-known films (which I haven't seen yet) that the Academy has been criticized for excluding, like Melancholia, Shame, and We Need to Talk About Kevin.

But this is a list of films I HAVE seen this year that I felt were unjustly denied nominations.

Martha Marcy May Marlene

Talk about an incredible performance by Elizabeth Olsen. Olsen playes Martha, an escapee from a dangerous cult who seeks refuge at her sister's house. While refusing to discuss her experience, the tension between the siblings steadily grows. Meanwhile, Martha has difficulty separating reality from her dreams, and by the end, so is the audience. I love films that play with the audience's perception of time and reality, and this one turned out the be a mind-bender, though it wasn't advertised as such. Disturbing and a bit creepy, it was nonetheless fantastic.

Nominations it should have received:

Elizabeth Olsen for Best Actress

Nominations it actually received: zero.

Hanna

I love it when a smart, unique action film comes along. Hanna doesn't sport a particularly original storyline -- telling the story of a child hidden and raised in the wilderness to become a warrior -- the film makes up for it in great characterization in the protagonist, played by Saoirse Ronan (Atonement, The Lovely Bones). Hanna is a fierce fighter, confronted by new experiences, new acquaintances, and a world harsher than the frozen tundra where she was raised. If you're tired of action films filled with CGI, constant slow-motion kung fu, and female action stars in leather, you should check this one out. And if you like it, you should also get your hands on a copy of Chocolate, a Thai film directed by Prachya Pinkaew, featuring an autistic girl as the ass-kicking heroine. The fighting scenes in both of these films are phenomenal, and are shot in longer takes, such as in Oldboy. No epilepsy-inducing strobe editing here.

Nominations it should have received:

Best Score. Hanna has an excellent score written by the Chemical Brothers (sample). Most scores aren't noticeable, but this definitely was. Another film's score that should have been nominated is The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, arranged by Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor (sample). I thought it would be a shoe-in, after the Fincher/Ross/Reznor success last year with The Social Network. Instead, The Artist (sample) and War Horse (sample) are nominated in this category. Fun fact: both scores made me want to run out of the theater screaming. I love John Williams, but this wasn't his shining moment. And he's nominated twice this year, also for The Adventures of Tintin. He's like the Meryl Streep of film scoring.

Then again, I've never trusted the Academy on the film score category, since Clint Mansell has never been nominated in it. That...is unacceptable. Have you heard the soundtracks to Moon or The Fountain? Requiem for a Dream or Black Swan? Just, the best. And do you know how long it took to retrieve all the links in the last two paragraphs? Like 15 minutes. You're welcome.

Nominations it actually received: zero.

50/50

I went into the theater not wearing eye makeup, knowing I would bawl my eyes out. And I did. Loosely based on the real life experience of screenwriter Will Reiser and friend Seth Rogen, it portrays a young man's struggle with cancer, and how he and his family deal with the situation. The way the film deals with death felt incredibly real. Death isn't falling on your knees and yelling into the sky "NOOOOO!!!" (cue montage). It's on a hospital bed, saying goodbye to your loved ones, knowing it may be the last time you see them -- a 50/50 shot that you'll never be in this world again (cue me and my friend blubbering in the theater).

Nominations it should have received:

Best Original Screenplay by Will Reiser. It packs just the right amount of humor and empathy, without it becoming an exercise in emotional masturbation (cough warhorse cough).

Best Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt. An all-around great performance. The fact that he isn't nominated makes me want to kick George Clooney in his handsome face.

Nominations it actually received: zero. I actually went back and checked this like three times to be sure. That's how surprised I am that it wasn't nominated for anything.

Drive

I wasn't as blown away by this film as I hoped I would be, given the rave reviews and recommendations from its fans. But I was still impressed. It had a unique style and pacing, and the soundtrack was wonderful. The protagonist reminded me a lot of Leon from Luc Besson's The Professional, since both are silent, moralistic men working in immoral professions. And I'll have you know it only took me ~45 minutes into it to realize the title was a double entendre. I are a college graduate.

Nominations it should have received:

Most supporters of the film are upset that Ryan Gosling didn't get a Best Actor nomination. But I don't think there was quite enough to his role to warrant one. He was even better in Lars and the Real Girl. I would go more along the lines of Best Editing. The scene when the Driver kisses Carey Mulligan in the elevator in slow motion? Perfect.

Nominations it actually received: Best Sound Editing. If you say so. Wouldn't call myself an expert on this category.

Young Adult

If you asked me to name my favorite film of all time I would laugh in your face. But ask by year and chances are I could answer. And my favorite film of 2011 was Young Adult. I felt like it was criminally underrated, and hasn't been coming up at all in the "best of" conversations. This is a shame.

Directed by Jason Reitman and written by Diablo Cody, the same team behind Juno, it's a character and dialogue-driven film that lives up to their previous collaboration. Marketed as a comedy, it turns out to be a pretty dark film; it's anything but quirky.

Following her divorce, YA fiction writer Mavis Gary returns to her small hometown to steal back her married high school flame. Stuck in a perpetual fantasy land, Mavis is delusional and refuses to accept reality: that she is no longer the prom queen, and that "true love" doesn't always conquer all. Or possibly even exist. It's pretty dark and a bit depressing, without a feel-good ending, which is probably why audiences didn't flock to it like they would, say, Slumdog Millionaire.

Nominations it should have received:

Best Original Screenplay, Diablo Cody. I thought Cody's writing was marvelous. The characters, the dialogue -- let's all just forget Jennifer's Body and focus on the two brilliant pieces she has put forward.

Best Actress, Charlize Theron. It can't be easy playing such a despicable and pathetic character, and still manage to make the audience identify and eventually feel sorry for her.

Possibly a Best Supporting Actor for Patton Oswalt. I admit I'm a bit biased here since I love Patton. But he showed off his serious acting chops in his role as "hate crime" Matt, the loser in high school (and afterwards) who becomes the voice of reason for Mavis.

I can't wait to see this film again when it's released on DVD mid-March. It was the little things that all together made it spectacular. The fact that in high school she was given the "Best Hair" award, and now she wears a wig. The manicure scenes that show the development of her character, and her change of tactics (black when she's on the offense, clear when she's ready to come clean, etc). The KenTacoHut (the combination KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut). Matt's sister yelling from the kitchen about ranch dressing... it is a comedy too.

My beef with the Academy

A report came out a few days ago that revealed the members who vote on the Oscars are overwhelmingly white and male. Specifically, the group is 94% white, and 77% are men. That is nowhere near an accurate representation of the audiences who watch movies -- or even the people who make them. So is it any surprise that of the nine Best Picture nominees, only ONE features a female lead character? The Help. It's also the only film featuring a lead who is a person of color. Not just lead, come to think of it -- persons of color are almost entirely absent from the scripts of the other eight nominees; unless you count the "savages" in The Artist, and I don't think you want to do that. The Help has come under a lot of scrutiny itself for its portrayal of black women and racism in the 1960s (I won't be jumping into that), so its nomination probably feels bittersweet to many. Such as when Driving Miss Daisy won Best Picture in 1989, while Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing wasn't even nominated. Guess which one you will actually watch in a respectable film class. Regardless of what you think about The Help (I liked it, and I feel like I've been apologizing for liking it ever since), you have to agree that Viola Davis' performance was spell bounding, and I will be crossing my fingers for her Sunday night.

So why do the nominations this year feel so old and stale? Probably because old, stale people are voting for them. With the exception of Tree of Life, the Best Picture noms are exercises in old-fashioned filmmaking. In the case of The Artist, very old-fashioned. I have such a love/hate relationship with the Oscars. On one hand I love to see great films get recognition, where otherwise only those making $100 million plus get any notice. On the other hand films like Crash, Braveheart, and Shakespeare in Love (and nearly The Blindside one year, god help us all) end up winning the top prize. Ten-year-old me loved Braveheart. But the Academy's voter pool shouldn't be made up of ten-year-old me's.

I'll still be watching Sunday night, probably cursing up a storm and throwing things at the tv. I'll be cheering for Emmanuel Lubezki to win Best Cinematography for Tree of Life, Jean Dujardin for Best Actor in The Artist, and Midnight in Paris for pretty much anything. I'll look for Jack Nicholson in the front row wearing sunglasses, and will be sad when he isn't there. I'll probably be laughing at whatever Billy Crystal is saying, and praying he comes back next year.

Then I'll pick up a book, read it in its entirety, and share what I thought about it on this blog. HAHHAHHAAAAHHAHA. Sure.

Ann Patchett and Colbert on bookstores

2012-02-21T09:29:00.000-05:00

The Colbert Report

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I love the end. Don't think I've ever seen Colbert speechless before.

I've always wanted to visit Patchett's bookstore in Nashville. But an 8 hour drive could take me so many other places...I'd rather go in another direction than towards Tennessee.

Psssshttt...like I even have the option anyway. There's $7.24 in my checking account. Here's to possibly affording a ham sandwich for lunch!

one more thing

2012-02-11T20:44:00.002-05:00

In defense of print books

2012-02-11T11:25:00.001-05:00

I defended ebooks. Now I'll defend what probably doesn't need much defending...yet. Regardless, I'm going to whip out my list of complaints and rant like Andy Rooney calling IT support.

1. Value

When you buy a print book, you buy a thing that actually exists. It has value. Without electricity, it is still there. In the motion picture 2012 starring John Cusack, when the world ended there was apparently only one book left or something, and it was a print book. And it was written by John Cusack.

Print books are covered by the right of first sale. Once you buy it, you can do anything you want with it (other than copy it and distribute those copies). You can give it away. You can sell it for $1. You can sell it for $1,000,000. You can wear it as a hat. You can tear out its pages and line a litter box. You can buy it for a public library and an unlimited number of people can check it out and read it. Unless they read it with cheeto fingers, and then you have to buy a replacement copy. But you can buy that copy used, thanks to the right of first sale.

That giant book you see above is a copy of Audubon's Birds of America, and it's one of the most expensive books in the world. In 2000 it sold for $11.5 million.

2. Bookstores

There's no crying in baseball, and there are no ebooks in bookstores.

Once upon a time there existed places where you could browse for real life things, and then buy them in real life. CUH-RAZY I know. Sure the clerks were a bit snooty; particularly when you bought anything where the author's name was in larger font than the title. But then you climbed up one of those rolling ladders, glided along like Belle (holding back the urge to burst into song), and found a rare hardback copy of The Mouse and His Child that you loved as a kid, and you squeal a little bit (and not because it's about mice).

My favorite bookstore, Ram's Head Books, is closing. After 48 years. Now there are zero independent bookstores selling new books within 50 miles of Roanoke. They had an incredible collection, and I never, not once, went inside without buying something. Sorry if I'm a bit sore over it.

A few ideas on how this can stop happening:

Indie bookstores can survive. But they'll have to change tactics. Practically every book that has ever been printed is available for purchase online. And chances are it's cheap. If you try to stock every title imaginable, you will fail. If you stock only bestsellers, you will fail. If a reader knows what they want, they can (and will) buy it online, or at Barnes and Noble. Instead, stock what they didn't know they wanted. Make walking into your store an experience of awe and surprise. Only stock the good stuff. Stock good authors -- people you've read. You know that "other customers bought" thing on Amazon? Emulate that. Also, it couldn't hurt to just make sure your store is attractive. Take some pointers from the 20 most beautiful bookstores in the world.

Bookstores aren't libraries and they shouldn't try to be. Book spines aren't interesting -- book covers are everything. Your customers are there to buy a physical object; so give them one! Buy gorgeous books: hardcovers with thick paper and slipcases. Autographed rare prints that weigh 20lbs. Coffee table books about coffee tables.

Take my most recent print book purchase, Matt Kish's Moby-Dick in Pictures. It's absolutely gorgeous. A book to own, no doubt. 552 original illustrations for all 552 pages of Moby Dick. You could buy it as an ebook. But I'm not sure why you would. Seems kind of greedy. This is a book you want to share with people. You want people to come in to your apartment, see it, and exclaim "wow, that is such a cool idea!" and then spend the next 45 minutes leafing through it. Then you're both late to go see The Descendants, but that's okay, because it turned out to be overrated anyway.

3. vintage is a thing right

analog is totally making a comeback. we can be hipster together and listen to some LPs while reading kerouac in paperback. i'll take some polaroids and we can pay for things at urban outfitters with pennies. this was purposely written in helvetica.

4. Turn on a dime

Now I'm going to pretend like I know what the hell I'm talking about.

Lets talk about ebook publishers and distributors. When they sell you an ebook, is it really yours? How easy would it be for them to take it back? Or decide not to sell it to you in the first place?

Back in 2008, Amazon ruffled some feathers when they deleted copies of Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from customers' Kindles. Of all the books to delete. The copies were illegal because they were sold from an unauthorized publisher. So it wasn't some sort of Orwellian censorship of....Orwell. But what bothered people was the realization that Amazon could (and would) take away things you thought you owned. And they didn't have to break into your house to do it.

In Fahrenheit 451, teams of firemen had to locate, invade, and incinerate entire houses filled with illegal books. In the age of ebooks, it takes one button. Imagine George Jetson sitting at his job, pushing one button over and over. His finger slips, he hits the wrong button. Poof, the entire canon of Western literature is erased. George Jetson shrugs and goes for a jog on his outdoor treadmill.

And the money? Publishing is a business after all. The dime is the bottom line. And what's a better way of making money than selling someone a book they don't have to pay to print, the customer has to buy an expensive device in order to read (which constantly outdates itself and has to be replaced, and oh looka there, is manufactured by the same distributor who sold the book), isn't covered by first sale, can't be shared, sold, or transferred, and after all that, still charge the same price for it as a print book?

That's not a dime. That's a billion dollars.

But a billion isn't nearly enough, says Penguin, who recently withdrew their titles from Overdrive, a popular ebook platform for public libraries. Why? Because they're afraid it would ultimately affect their sales. Access to ebooks, they claim, is too easy for patrons. They're actually reading the literature we publish! For free! The horror! What is this, a publicly sponsored program to promote literacy, education, and information regardless of an individual's background or income? Sounds like socialism to me. We'll take our ebooks over here, thank you very much.

Funny thing about print books -- you can't pick and choose who you sell them to.Or suddenly change your mind and take them back.

My issue with ebooks is entirely over the ownership thing. You won't find me over in the corner stroking paperbacks and mumbling conspiracy theories about the FBI on the internet or anything. What I'm saying is when you buy an ebook you end up paying for the experience of reading it. Which is totally fine and wonderful and I do it too. But that experience, and not the ownership, should determine the pricing.

When I pay for the experience of seeing a movie in the theater, my $10 is paying every single person listed in the credits. Take, for example, The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. 1,895 people listed in the credits. That's a half penny per person when I get my ticket. Really it's less since part of it goes to the theater. A fraction of a penny! Those greedy bastards. Next time I hear someone complain about expensive movie tickets I'm going to punch them in the wiener. Then when the movie is released on DVD, the price is higher. Because you're paying to permanently own that movie. On a thing that exists.

When you're paying for an experience, and not an item, the price should be reflected accordingly. Support the publisher and the asshole who wrote the book. But we shouldn't be paying for a printing press, shipping costs, and a bookstore front, when there aren't any. As of now, the prices haven't evened out, and publishers are making a killing off of selling thin air.

This has been a fairly grumpy defense, and I apologize. I promise I'm not a mad mountain woman living next to a Walden-esque pond, yelling at trees and debating with squirrels. I'll end on a light-hearted point.

If print books disappear, how will we make animated videos of books coming alive at night?

Internet Lovelies

2012-02-09T00:20:00.000-05:00

There's a librarian themed Ryan Gosling tumblr.

Through the long span of reading it and not reading it, just looking at it, or carrying it around, I kept thinking about art. It’s power, its lack of power, what it does to the hypercultured; I’d call most readers of this blog hypercultured. Does it blunt us to the real trauma around us? To the relationships and forms that are actually unavoidable? I wouldn’t be surprised. I do know that art really can “humanize” someone, in that it can make them really aware of other minds and ways of life, painfully & acutely aware, for the first time. It’s becoming harder to fight off the idea that art is best as a benign storehouse for excess energy, for ideas or behaviors that would normally be considered weird or offensive, and that, at its best and most beautiful, is contagious and hooks people into its practice and community, in order to grow itself as a form of human activity; but why fight this? In other words, art as/is the least harmful cultural node.

Ken Baumann on reading 2666, Link

Least harmful? Possibly. But there is this Flavorwire list of the most dangerous novels of all time.

The deep foundation of the US – so went my thinking – was not the comparatively recent 18th-century Enlightenment structures of the republic, with their talk of equality and their separation of church and state, but the heavy-handed theocracy of 17th-century Puritan New England, with its marked bias against women, which would need only the opportunity of a period of social chaos to reassert itself.
...

I made a rule for myself: I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist. I did not wish to be accused of dark, twisted inventions, or of misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behaviour. The group-activated hangings, the tearing apart of human beings, the clothing specific to castes and classes, the forced childbearing and the appropriation of the results, the children stolen by regimes and placed for upbringing with high-ranking officials, the forbidding of literacy, the denial of property rights: all had precedents, and many were to be found not in other cultures and religions, but within western society, and within the "Christian" tradition, itself.

Margaret Atwood on A Handmaid's Tale, Link

One day I'm going to spell "quince" in Scrabble. Until then I'll stick to the tried and true "qi".

MC Lars "Annabel Lee R.I.P." animated by "internet friend" John Sasser

Go to BetterWorldBook's Shop From Work sale and click the "Boss Button".

Graphic novelist Nate Powell answers the ShelfAwareness "Book Brahmin" questionnaire in an interesting way. I love his answers. A reader after my own heart.

Other updates:

- My laptop died so I bought a MacBook Pro. I'm scared of it and I feel like I'm supporting something evil. Like "the Empire" or something. And not the record store Empire.
- Driving home the other night I became momentarily convinced that I should drop everything and go back to school to become a screenwriter. I've never attempted to write a screenplay before. If I won the lottery I think I would try to write a screenplay and force someone to film it. How much would Tarantino cost.
- I've been reading nothing but trashy paperbacks and it's why I haven't had any quotes to share lately. Unless you want me to share passages with too many pronouns and descriptions of outfits in them. Sometimes I need to read bad things.
- My hair smells really good right now.
- Last weekend I went to a Tool concert. They're one of my favorite groups. I wrote my senior thesis while looping the album 10,000 Days. Someone commented that I didn't look like a Tool fan. Earlier in the week a patron refused to believe I wasn't a student. I still get carded at R movies. When in Best Buy, I'm typically followed by a trail of dudes in blue shirts who are convinced I don't know what I'm doing. One actually tried to talk me out of getting my DSLR last year. "Yeah this is a pretty advanced camera....here we got some pink ones over heeeeere...." I get called "sweetie" a lot. My appearance seems to be a constant source of disappointment to others. This isn't an emo moment. I just think it's funny that my baby face and gender will never allow me to be taken seriously outside of things to do with Miley Cyrus, sprinkles and rainbows.

Or it could be this cupcake shirt I'm wearing.

World Book Night 2012

2012-02-06T11:55:00.000-05:00

You may or may not have seen the ad over here on the right ------->
I put up advertising World Book Night in the US.

It's a program where on April 23, 2012, thousands of book givers will hand out free copies of books to non- and light readers in their community. Each giver is given 20 copies of a particular book, which have been specially printed just for this occasion, free from the publisher. I just received a letter saying I've been approved as a giver, and I'll be handing out copies of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in April.

If you'd like to be a giver...there's still time! You have until midnight tonight (EST), February 6th, to fill out an application! They've extended the deadline, so I'm guessing they haven't had enough people apply. The application isn't hard, and you'll be doing a great service.

Plus, the list of books you can choose from to hand out are really great. The other 5 in the list I've read beside Immortal are I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Kindred, The Hunger Games, The Poisonwood Bible, The Namesake, and The Lovely Bones. Maybe one day I'll get into how Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible changed my life. Let's just say it's what made me decide to major in English and renounce 18 years of religious upbringing.

So,

Oscar Wilde and Rorschach

2012-01-31T14:11:00.000-05:00

January was a long one. I can't believe it's been 31 days since I drank too much champagne and passed out on my bed fully-clothed and...well, you don't want to hear about that.

All that time and I still haven't written those reviews for books I read in December. It might be because I lost all the notes I took when reading them. Or it might be because someone gave me a copy of Dead Rising and I spent a hilarious amount of time getting the 'zombie genocider' achievement. Hooray! 20 imaginary points have been added to my imaginary videogame success tally. Let's all live in the internet.

I need to get on with my life so here's the world's laziest reviews of some really great books.

All of that Oscar Wilde stuff
(A House of Pomegranates, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories, The Happy Prince and Other Tales, and The Picture of Dorian Gray)

All but the last were collections of fairy tales written by Wilde. Most of the stories were incredibly sad. Remember the first time you read The Giving Tree? Well it's three books of that. But so good! The Brothers Grimm can suck it for writing such patronizing, moralistic stories to keep girls scared witless and locked inside bedrooms.

Okay, does that look like Matt Damon and Heath Ledger to you.

The Picture of Dorian Gray was Wilde's only novel. I wish he had written more. The basic plot of the novel revolves around a beautiful youth who is granted eternal youth, and in turn a magical portrait of himself ages instead. Dorian's sins and follies cause the portrait to age rapidly, giving him a visual representation of his own soul. It's an exploration of mortality and morality, and how each affects the other. In a way it reminded me of Drew Magary's Postmortal, where the introduction of immortality causes humanity to collapse into death, destruction and depravity. And after all that, the "immortals" don't get to live any longer than they would have normally as mortals.

Another thought: I've always been fascinated that stories always marry immortality with prosperity and hedonism. I guess, after all, if you were poor and lacked a lounge chair and a servant feeding you grapes, you might not want to live forever. But just once I want to see a hobo vampire. Instead they're all filthy rich and rolling around in velvet for no reason. Who's paying you!? Why is blood sucking a lucrative pursuit!?

Back on track...the preface to the novel, written by Wilde, is a wonderful meditation on art and meaning. Here it is:

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

You can now count Wilde as one of my favorite authors (there's a list somewhere).

Watchmen

Everything you've ever heard an enthusiastic nerd say about Alan Moore's masterpiece is absolutely true. Watchmen definitely lived up to the hype. And fun fact: I thought this would be a relatively breezy read, and could knock it out in just one bathtub session. It took me about a month to work through. It's not an all-night read. When you finish a chapter you have to sit back and think about it. Several days if needed. The structure is genius, weaving in journal entries, chapters from an imagined autobiography, snippets from a completely different comic (a comic within a comic! Inception!), among other things, right alongside the basic paneling and plot. There's nothing about this graphic novel that I would change. Being in the graphic novel format is the only way the story would succeed. I give credit to the filmmakers who attempted that adaptation a few years ago -- they did the best they possibly could have. But there's no way you could successfully translate between mediums here without missing the entire purpose.

On an imaginary list of the best novels I have ever read, this would be on it. Somewhere between Lolita and Wuthering Heights.

But don't take my word for it.

thinking about the ocean

2012-01-19T19:31:00.000-05:00

After reading Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and watching both film adaptations, I've moved on to reading the next in the series: The Girl Who Played With Fire. Except that after getting through around a hundred pages I put it down, not wanting to move forward. Right now Lisbeth Salander is on Grenada, reading math textbooks on the beach, drinking rum and cokes, preventing murders, hooking up. I know she'll return to Sweden soon -- that cold and rapey land -- but I don't want to leave the sand yet.

I keep running across mentions of beaches and oceans today. Part of a poem I was reading mentioned a stone beach, just two words, and I had to stop and day dream about the ocean for ten minutes. There's something about the open water that fascinates me. All the time spent between infrequent vacations to the Atlantic feels claustrophobic, like life is a box with holes punched in it, just enough to keep one breathing. Everyday you open your eyes, there's always something there, blocking the line of vision. I look now and there's a wall. I look out the window and there's a twenty-story bank. I stare into the sky and people begin staring at me. As long as you're looking at something, the somethings of the world will always be on your mind.

Standing at the ocean, you can stare off into the horizon and see nothing. It's flat and expansive and appears unending. It's the closest most of us will ever get to being in space. It marks a delineation between here and everywhere else. The beach is synonymous with vacation, because maybe you can't go everywhere else, but you're sick and tired of here. It's why no one sets their beach chairs facing the hotels and pools. People don't come just for the bikinis and Mai Thais. Except Carmen Electra, probably.

I've flown over the Pacific, but never sailed across it. I can't even imagine what that it felt like for the first sailors to float unknowlingly into open water. Curiosity is so much stronger than fear, though. Sometimes I'm tempted, standing on the shore, to dive in and swim straight forward, unstopping. Just to see if I eventually hit a painted wall. Then Ed Harris will announce over the intercom that my entire life has been scripted. "What a boring show," I would mumble, swimming back to shore.

Last week I found a tour company that offers trips to Antarctica. You might say Antarctica is my Fiji. I squealed audibly when I found it. It's $8000, so it's pointless enthusiasm. But just knowing it's possible gives hope. Antarctica is not sandy or warm. But it does offer the ability to look at nothing. Or as close to nothing as we can get on Earth. And by looking at nothing I can stop thinking about myself, about everyone else, and just think about the world. The universe. Existence. Penguins. The fact that everything and everyone on Earth is made up of the same matter, the same elements, as what goes into the stars. We are star matter.

The best way to look at the picture of the Pale Blue Dot is to regard the mote of dust, acknowledge it, note its insignificance. Then turn the camera around and let's explore.

In Defense of E-books

2012-01-19T00:35:00.000-05:00

E-BOOK WARS

It's Darth Kindle vs. Luddite Skywalker!
Watch as young Amazon Skywalker turns to the glowing side!
'Read books on paper, you must,' Yoda mumbles.

How are these Star Wars / publishing industry analogies working for you? I need to go outside more often.

I never bought into the whole "ebooks are evil" scene. The emergence of ebooks has presented a load of controversial issues regarding permissions, pricing, distribution, access, ownership, censorship, piracy, monopolization, etc. And these all need to be discussed. Extensively.

But please stop talking about smelling books because you're creeping everyone out.

So what's defensible in the world of electronic booking?

1. There's the fact that I just bought the Collected Novels of José Saramago, all 13 novels and 3864 pages, as an ebook for $33. Buying them individually as paperbacks would have cost nearly $200.

This is how ebooks SHOULD be priced (or close to it -- this was pretty dirt cheap actually and I felt bad buying it). And a lot of the slightly older, less bestseller-y titles are. But buying a new release as an ebook? Forgettaboudit. Charging hardcover prices for something that is neither hard nor covered is something publishers need to get over.

2. James Joyce and Virginia Woolf! They entered into the public domain on January 1, 2012. Also known as Public Domain Day to us pale, bookshelf-dwelling shut-ins. I feel like right now I should be slowly taking my glasses off and cleaning them with the bottom of my sweater vest for knowing about Public Domain Day. All I need now are glasses and a sweater vest.

Project Gutenberg is grand, and makes me glad the internet exists. Cat videos and whatever this is are great too, but finding a book on Antarctic penguins that was published in 1914 and instantly downloading it for free is where it's all at.

Just look at these adorable penguins and tell me there's evil in the world.

3. Who knows how many Shakespeares, sisters of Shakespeare, Stephen Kings, or J.K. Rowlings died in obscurity before the internet because their writing was refused the light of day by stuffy publishers? Probably a lot. But now thanks to Al Gore and magic, writers can use the World Wide Web (or whatever you kids call it these days) as a one-stop shop to gain a following, market their writing, and publish their work without great cost to themselves. An important factor to consider when even online literary journals are beginning to charge reading fees for submitted work.

Take The Raven and the Writing Desk, a blog I follow, which just released a Best of collection of really excellent short stories and poetry as an ebook. And it's free until this Saturday! So check it out. Unless free is too expensive for you, you crazy person.

4. There's more than one way to skin a cat (eww) and there's more than one way to buy an ebook.

There's Powells, BooksOnBoard, and this gigantic list of like two hundred indie bookstores that sell ebooks. So if you're into the whole supporting local businesses thing, there you go. And don't forget to support your local starving writers while you're at it.

Look for an 'In Defense of Print Books' post in the near future, once I'm able to get my hands on particular print book I want to talk about and possibly cuddle with.

But NOT a 'Defense of Marriage' post, because I don't feel like wearing a sweater vest THAT much.

You are a bad person, Rick Santorum, and you should feel bad.

Sick, sick, sick

2012-01-10T13:38:00.000-05:00

Unclear Vicissitudes, by Matt Kish

And no, I'm not referring to the QOTSA song.

Don't you just hate January and February? Every December I can see them looming on the horizon, cold and brown and depressing. No color, no warmth -- at least November has the decency to have rustling leaves and good smells.

If one compares the seasons to a person's life, January and February are the death throes. Give me the 20-somethings of May and June, but please don't let me live past December 31st.

It doesn't help when your Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD :( ) is accompanied by some kind of mystery disease. For the past 8 weeks I have been coughing like a dying orphan in a Dickens novel. At first I thought it was pneumonia. But after I stopped coughing up green stuff and blood (!) I realized I was either over it or never had it in the first place. Although WebMD had me somewhat concerned I was going to die in a matter of hours. And possibly rise from the grave as the undead.

But it's still here, minus the hacking of blood, and I don't know what it is. COPD? Bronchitis? Super Asthma? Shriveling lungs? Whatever Gwyneth Paltrow gave to everybody? Of course I should go to the doctor, having healthcare and all that. But I have a terrifying phobia of doctors that I can't explain. Although it possibly started when I was 10 years old and my dentist called me an "idiot" to my face for refusing braces. I am many things, but an idiot I was not when I refused to make my parents spend $6000 on vanity. And look, 26 years old and my teeth haven't exploded or anything.

Regardless, the majority of my days as of late have been spent under a duvet, neglecting chores and friends, without the brain or willpower to pick up a book. Buying Nyquil has become a sunday night tradition. I actually googled "Ricola overdose" yesterday. I've been killing a lot of zombies in video games lately. It makes me feel better somehow. Although not better about myself.

Two artists whose blogs I follow have recently been sharing work they have created under the influence of sickness. Matt Kish, illustrator of the book Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page (which I intend to buy and review some day. some day.) created a series under the title "Radians" which can be in its entirety here.

On the other end of the spectrum is Gabby Schulz (aka Ken Dahl) who has created an ongoing comic series titled "Sick", which as of now includes 15 installments.

Simultaneously funny and depressing, the entire series thus far can be read here.

77 ain't bad

2011-12-31T23:59:00.001-05:00

Books owned that were read

Or is it?

That's the final number of books read this year. It's not 100, but I'm happy. I'm behind on the reviews -- those stopped at number 70. I'll finish the rest in the next week or two.

So here's the list:

1. The Awakening, Kate Chopin
2. Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Jules Verne
3. Dealing with Dragons, Patricia C. Wrede
4. Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, Patton Oswalt
5. Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller Jr.
6. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Patrick Suskind
7. Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton
8. I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, Young-Ha Kim
9. Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk
10. Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut
11. Eeeee Eee Eeee, Tao Lin
12. The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
13. Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins
14. Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins
15. Take the Cannoli, Sarah Vowell
16. No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
17. High Fidelity, Nick Hornby
18. Unfamiliar Fishes, Sarah Vowell
19. Shoplifting from American Apparel, Tao Lin
20. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
21. Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes, Neil Gaiman
22. Vox, Nicholson Baker
23. V for Vendetta, Alan Moore
24. Very Far Away from Anywhere Else, Ursula Le Guin
25. Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, Tao Lin
26. You Are a Little Bit Happier Than I Am, Tao Lin
27. The Stranger, Albert Camus
28. A Listener's Diary, Sarah Vowell
29. Contact, Carl Sagan
30. A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
31. Drinking at the Movies, Julia Wertz
32. Skim, Mariko Tamaki
33. The Lifted Veil, George Eliot
34. Mathilda, Mary Shelley
35. Lady Susan, Jane Austen
36. The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle
37. The Help, Kathryn Stockett
38. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Lisa See
39. First Love, Ivan Turgenev
40. One Day, David Nicholls
41. Parnassus on Wheels, Christopher Morley
42. During My Nervous Breakdown I Want My Biographer Present, Brandon Scott Gorrell
43. No One Belongs Here More Than You, Miranda July
44. The Gospel of Anarchy, Justin Taylor
45. Everything is Going to Be Great, Rachel Shukert
46. The Postmortal, Drew Magary
47. The Shit My Dad Says, Justin Halpern
48. Ready Player One, Ernest Cline
49. Sloth, Gilbert Hernandez
50. Love and Rockets: New Stories Vol. 1, Gilbert Hernandez
51. Ayiti, Roxane Gay
52. The Farthest Shore, Ursula Le Guin
53. Tehanu, Ursula Le Guin
54. Tales from Earthsea, Ursula Le Guin
55. The Other Wind, Ursula Le Guin
56. Bed, Tao Lin
57. Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs, Ellen Kennedy
58. Wilson, Daniel Clowes
59. Ghost World, Daniel Clowes
60. American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
61. When She Woke, Hillary Jordan
62. Camera, Jean-Phillippe Toussaint
63. Selected Unpublished Blog Posts of a Mexican Panda Express Employee, Megan Boyle
64. Break it Down, Lydia Davis
65. Vathek, William Beckford
66. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
67. The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde
68. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
69. A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf
70. Us, Michael Kimball
71. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
72. The Happy Prince, Oscar Wilde
73. A House of Pomegranates, Oscar Wilde
74. Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories, Oscar Wilde
75. The Clouds Should Know Me By Now: Buddhist Poet Monks of China
76. Willow, Wine, Mirror, Moon: Women's Poems from Tang China, Jeanne Larsen
77. Watchmen, Alan Moore

And I wanted to see what my unconscious reading habits looked like statistically:

40% were by female authors
60% by male authors

Only 16% by authors of color

60% novels
12% graphic novels
10% short stories
9% poetry
6% non-fiction
3% other

12% translated from another language

So it was the year of the English white male novel. No surprise there. Next year I will strive for more diversity.

But I did manage to knock 21 off The Guardian's 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read list. If I keep going at that rate I'll finish off all 1000 when I'm... 70 years old! But by then they'll change up the list and we'll all be too preoccupied wearing anti-gravity boots and dancing on the ceiling to care about books. If we even make it to the year 2013.

Countdown to the zombie apocalypse 2012!

3...2...1...

Us, 70/100

2011-12-19T11:08:00.001-05:00

I feel a little bit like a dick for giving Us by Michael Kimball only two stars on goodreads.

Here's why: Kimball wrote the story about his dying grandparents. Most of it is from the perspective of the grandfather, who takes care of his wife after she has a seizure and goes into a coma. Very little is from the perspective of the grandmother. There's also a portion from the point-of-view of Kimball as a boy going to his first funeral.

At first it is heartbreaking. But by the end I felt like the biggest Ebenezer Scrooge (McDuck) in the world, at one point doing the jerk-off motion with my hand while reading it. So heartless! I know. But the entire thing seemed like an exercise in emotional masturbation.

It also felt like something meant for people who maybe haven't gone through the type of emotional trauma experienced by this family (although it's something we all eventually go through). I'm not one of these people. The problem with having a large family is that you become very familiar with sickness, death, and funerals. I've been visiting hospitals and attending funerals all my life. It hasn't gotten any easier. There's nothing more profoundly disturbing to me than going to an open-casket viewing or putting flowers on a grave. I did the latter just this weekend.

I understand why Kimball wrote this book. It was a way to process what he experienced, and what his grandfather must have gone through watching his wife die. All the same, I can't give it a good review based entirely on the subject matter and the fact that it made me weep like an Oprah audience member. You can't write a book that consists entirely of the last third of Nicholas Sparks novel.

The idea would work wonderfully as a writing exercise, or a creative writing class work-in-progress. A personal reflection or meditation. The most disturbing meditation ever I presume.

However it blows my mind that anyone could have actually enjoyed reading this. Or got anything out of it. Or, for the love of god, would recommend it to another person. This book would make the worst Christmas present ever.

"Merry Christmas! When considering what to get you I thought, 'I bet this person would just LOVE reading about old people slowly and painfully dying!' Can you pass the eggnog?"

Bah humbug.

A Room of One's Own, 69/100

2011-12-15T17:00:00.002-05:00

It feels like I've read the first chapter of Woolf's book-length essay a thousand times; where the fictional narrator is chastised for (literally) walking off the path at Cambridge's campus, barred from the library, and complains about being served prunes for dinner. The prune discussion, although funny, always led me astray from the book's purpose and caused me to put it down. But picking up from that point and moving on I was finally able to finish it this time; and I'm so glad I did.

Apologies up front for all the very long quotes I am about to post. I had more marked but decided to take mercy upon the internet. Besides, you can always read the entire thing for free right here.

Woolf's published essay is a lengthened version of a series of lectures she presented to two women's colleges at Cambridge in 1928. I would give anything to have been in the lecture halls when Woolf recited her views, just to see the women's reactions. Presented with the broad subject of "women and fiction", Woolf narrows it to a discussion of why women have been unable to produce the volume and quality of work that men have been able to over the ages. The answer is fairly simple: women haven't had the advantages that men have. It's hard to write the complete works of Wm. Shakespeare when one is forced into marriage, take care of children, and refused the right to own property. Instead, she argues, any woman with the genius of Shakespeare during his era would have been driven mad and committed suicide; an eerie precursor to Woolf's own fate.

My only criticism of A Room of One's Own, as others have pointed out, is that Woolf doesn't discuss the conditions of women of color. It certainly would have made it a longer essay, but its glaring omission leaves holes in her argument. There should be a disclaimer at the beginning of book stating that what she means by "women and fiction" is really "middle-class white women and fiction."

Regardless, it's a must-read for anyone interested in the history of English literature, and even for writers, for there are plenty of observations on what it takes and what's needed to be a successful writer. Or at least a self-respecting one.

Now here are some lengthy passages I couldn't edit down without their losing meaning and soul:

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size....That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is? ... They start the day confident, braced, believing themselves desired at Miss Smith's tea party; they say to themselves as they go into the room, I am the superior of half the people here, and it is thus that they speak with that self-confidence, that self-assurance, which have had such profound consequences in public life and lead to such curious notes in the margin of the private mind.

What genius, what integrity it must have required in face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking. Only Jane Austen did it and Emily Bronte. It is another feather, perhaps the finest, in their caps. They wrote as women write, not as men write. Of all the thousand women who wrote novels then, they alone entirely ignored the perpetual admonitions of the eternal pedagogue--write this, think that. They alone were deaf to that persistent voice, now grumbling, now patronising, now domineering, now grieved, now shocked, now angry, now avuncular, that voice which cannot let women alone, but must be at them, like some too conscientious governess, adjuring them...to be refined...admonishing them, if they would be good and win, as I suppose, some shiny prize, to keep within certain limits which the gentleman in questions thinks suitable...It would have needed a very stalwart young woman in 1828 to disregard all those snubs and chidings and promises of prizes. One must have been something of a firebrand to say to oneself, Oh, but they can't buy literature too. Literature is open to everybody. I refuse to allow you, Beadle though you are, to turn me off the grass. Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

...where books are concerned, it is notoriously difficult to fix labels of merit in such a way that they do not come off. Are not reviews of current literature a perpetual illustration of the difficulty of judgment? "This great book," "this worthless book," the same books is called by both names. Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the degrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes. So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery...

...fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

A Clockwork Orange, 68/100

2011-12-15T08:00:00.002-05:00

What could I possibly say about Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange that hasn't been said before? Beats me. But I have to write something.

It's considered one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. It inspired one of the most critically-acclaimed films of all time. Plus plenty of halloween outfits. I'm guessing one out of every five college freshmen has the notorious movie poster in their dorm (next to "crazy stairs" and Munch's The Scream). It created an entirely new form of slang, nadsat, which is going to make me ask for "eggiweg" for breakfast for several weeks I'm sure.

And its own author hated it.

From Burgess' book Flame Into Being : The Life and Work of D.H. Lawrence:

The book I am best known for, or only known for, is a novel I am prepared to repudiate: written a quarter of a century ago, a jeu d’esprit knocked off for money in three weeks, it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die.

The misunderstanding was that by depicting "ultra-violence," the novel was glorifying it. It was released in 1962 after all.

Did Kubrick's film adaptation glorify sex and violence? First off, are we combining sex and violence into one thing? -- as in "violent sex"? If not, then I'm not sure why sex is in that sentence. Because sex does not need to be glorified. Most people find it pretty glorious already. Secondly, at no point in the film did I feel violence was being glorified. Try watching the scene where Alex rapes a woman while belting out "Singing in the Rain" and not be traumatized for life. I feel a bit traumatized just typing it out.

The moral of novel (and film) is extremely clear. Anyone who can make it all the way through either should have the intellectual capacity to understand its message: it's better to have free-will and be evil than none and be forced into kindness. It's a big idea with a lot of social and religious implications. One could argue for days on it. I won't be doing so because I have a stack of books on my nightstand I need to attend to. But one thing it's NOT doing is saying "violence is sweet."

*Warning, possible SPOILERS below. If you care about that sort of thing.*

But I have another bone to pick with Burgess. In the original UK version there are 21 chapters. In the first US edition they cut the last chapter, and that is what Kubrick based his film on. After reading the full 21 chapter version I have to agree with Kubrick and say the last chapter felt unnecessary. It changes the tone of the novel drastically, and quite honestly, makes no damn sense. I get what he was going for -- a sort of No Country for Old Men type of old vs. youth battle. Alex grows one year older and, poof!, wants to be responsible, stop the raping, killing, and pillaging, and (good god) have a kid of his own. If Burgess had fast-forwarded 5-10 years in the future, this may have worked. Although from a stylistic point of view it's still horrible. The previous chapter ending in flying colors, and the last being a great pile of mush.

What if instead of Brian De Palma ending Carrie with her grabbing that girl's arm, it continued 5 minutes more with them sitting down together and discussing the weather? No! Bad storylining. Bad bad.

But THAT'S IT! I swear that is the last novel with rape in it I will read this year (what's left of it). I'm all raped out.

The Importance of Being Earnest, 67/100

2011-12-14T08:00:00.003-05:00

Aubrey Beardsley cover art <3

The first play I've read all year! And probably since college. Seems crazy that I haven't read The Importance of Being Earnest before. I think I saw part of a movie adaptation once. I knew it had something to do with the fact that a bunch of guys pretend to have the name Ernest.

Did Jim Varney's Ernest character every do a parody of this? Something like "Ernest Goes to 19th Century England"? Or "Ernest Scared Witless?" No? He should have.

This was one of the funniest things I've read all year. It so fun to read something that is just outright hilarious. A nice break from all the depressing and murder obsessed literature that's been populating my "have read" list. Wilde's play manages to make the trivial serious, and the serious trivial. Cucumber sandwiches and muffins are more consequential than marriage. Or death. Thus the play's subtitle: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People.

Here are some passages:

...it is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

...I know perfectly well whom she will place me next to, tonight. She will place me next Mary Farquhar, who always flirts with her own husband across the dinner-table. That is not very pleasant. Indeed, it is not even decent...and that sort of thing is enormously on the increase. The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public.

Algernon: Do you really keep a diary? I'd give anything to look at it. May I?

Cecily: Oh no. [Puts her hand over it.] You see, it is simply a very young girl's record of her own thoughts and impressions and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy.

Jack: How can you sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can't make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.

Algernon: Well I can't eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins calmly. It is the only way to eat them.

Lady Bracknell: Dead! When did Mr. Bunbury die? His death must have been extremely sudden.

Algernon: [Airily.] Oh! I killed Bunbury this afternoon. I mean poor Bunbury died this afternoon.

Lady Bracknell: What did he die of?

Algernon: Bunbury? Oh, was was quite exploded.

Lady Bracknell: Exploded! Was he the victim of a revolutionary outrage? I was not aware that Mr. Bunbury was interested in social legislation. If so, he is well punished for his morbidity.

Algernon: My dear Aunt August, I mean he was found out! The doctors found out that Bunbury could not live, that is what I mean--so Bunbury died.

Vathek, 65/100

2011-12-13T17:00:00.004-05:00

William Beckford's Vathek had been on my reading list a long time. It's always paired with other classics of 18th-19th century gothic literature, like Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Castle of Otranto--faves of mine--so it's been on my radar awhile.

Rather than taking place in Europe like most gothic lit of the period--amongst medieval ruins, wind-swept plains and sublime mountains--we're transported somewhere in the Orient. It's very vague. Beckford was no doubt taking advantage of the then current (1782) popularity of "Orientalism," since stories like The Arabian Nights had just found their way to Europe.

All the tropes of gothic lit are here: ghosts and demons, extreme emotions, towers, subterranean passages, and religion vs. enlightenment (science). In this case the religion being explored is Islam rather than Catholicism.

I wasn't familiar with a lot of the terminology and mythology of Islam, so of course I had google up and ready. I think I spent more time wikipedia surfing than actually reading the book.

If you feel like wasting a few hours, here are some pages to check out:

jinn
azazel
Iblis
besom
ifrit

Wait, Ifrit! I know that one. Thanks Final Fantasy! (don't let anyone tell you can't learn from video games)

In the story the Caliph Vathek is a rich, spoiled, pleasure and knowledge-seeking ruler. He is given the opportunity to attain all the power and knowledge of a god, if he renounces Mohammed and performs heinous deeds to prove it. Heinous as in feeding 50 children to a demon. Goaded on by his evil mother, Vathek works his way into hell and discovers just what his reward will be for his efforts.

It's a twisted fairy tale with a heavily didactic moral in the end. Which is beyond being just "don't kill children." Beckford's fight is against the enlightenment movement. The moral is "don't seek knowledge you're not meant for." An Adam and Eve story for an Arabian prince.

And don't make deals with the devil. At least not for "ultimate knowledge." Don't settle for less than new car. Or a Mad Men DVD box set.

*struck by lightning*

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, 66/100

2011-12-13T17:00:00.003-05:00

Featured cover is a minimalist interpretation made by an artist at this blog. It uses the original Swedish title "Men Who Hate Women." Which is really a much more appropriate title.

Lisbeth Salander, the "girl with the dragon tattoo," is one of the protagonists. She shares equal page time with the other protagonist, Mikael Blomkvist. But the American publishers didn't call it "The Guy With a Grudge Against Corrupt Business Moguls." I understand it's not as flashy.

But all the focus on Salander's character in marketing the books, and the subsequent film adaptations, has been a bit disheartening. I've been trying to pin-point why I feel that way, but can't. Would the novels have been as popular without Lisbeth Salander's character? No, probably not. She's a fascinating character. So it makes sense that she would be the one publishers and producers push forward as the image for this series.

But maybe that's it. She's the "image." I have a knee-jerk reaction to seeing women used as images to advertise things.

I really enjoyed reading Stieg Larsson's first novel in the series. I plan on reading the other two in January. I was warned about disturbing scenes of sexual violence, but my god, after American Psycho they seemed fluffy in comparison. I don't think I can truly be disturbed ever again. I decided to finally jump on the bandwagon and read it after finding out David Fincher was directing the American film adaptation. You know Fincher, right?: The Social Network, Se7en, Fight Club? Yeah, I'm definitely going to see it. Of course Fincher has had his own share of criticism, particularly for his portrayal (and lack thereof) of women in The Social Network. Let's see how he handles a film with GIRL in the title.

For the 3-4 people out there who haven't read the first in the Millennium series (I used to be one of them!), here's the basic rundown: Mikael Blomkvist is a disgraced investigative journalist who's been hired by an eccentric millionaire to solve the case of his missing niece, who disappeared almost 40 years ago. When Blomkvist suspects the disappearance may have something to do with a string of violent murders, he recruits PI researcher Lisbeth Salander -- an extremely talented, asocial young woman with a history of sexual abuse in her past. She holds a personal vendetta against men who abuse women, and takes up the case for almost no money. What follows is what you'll read nearly 700 pages to find out: what exactly happened to Harriet Vanger 40 years ago?

My very first guess turned out to be the right one. Might I mention that my college roommate was obsessed with Law & Order so I was forced to watch it multiple times every day for about a year. I had ~90% accuracy guessing the killers. Stories are stories. They have to be set up a certain way for them to work. Unfortunately in real life crime solving I would probably be horrible.

*walks over to dead body, kneels down and runs a gloved finger over the sidewalk next to the victim, tastes the residue. "The nun did it," I say with absolute certainty.*

Break it Down, 64/100

2011-12-12T10:02:00.001-05:00

I mentioned the other day about blogspot farting and causing me to lose my whole post on Lydia Davis. I'm not rewriting the entire thing because that would require rereading all of Break it Down to find all the passages I marked. Maybe another time.

So why aren't the passages still marked? Well, dear imaginary reader, it's because I removed all the post-its when I went to have my book signed by Lydia Davis. It just so happened that she was having a reading at my alma mater. I found out after I had already mooched a few of her books on a recommendation.

Her reading was good, and mostly from new unpublished material. She shared one piece that she had rough-written that morning. I admit it was difficult to pay full attention to her, since there was a student in front of me practicing her cross stitching for the entire duration.

I should mention that my alma mater is a women's college. Of which, every year, a portion of the student population has an "embrace the textile arts" movement; a way of empowering an art consistently overlooked because of its association with women. But really it's an excuse to knit ugly fucking scarves during class and pretend you're doing something profound. I fail to see how it's empowering to ignore the visit of a highly successful, internationally recognized female author, just so you can cross stitch the Little Mermaid on a fucking pillow.

Despite the seething beams of hatred I directed towards this young woman for upwards of 90 minutes, I remained calm enough to wait around for Davis to sign books afterward. Where surprisingly (stupidly) there wasn't a line. Kids these days! (shakes fist, yells at cloud)

Our short exchange was appropriately awkward -- Davis often writes awkward, almost autistic characters, probably why I like her so much -- and I left with a signed book and a very sad soul. On the way home I stopped by Krogers and bought "sad soul" food, i.e. barbecue potato chips and soda.

Blogspot decided to erase all the passages I had already copied over from Break it Down, so I'm just going to share with you one of her short stories, my favorite from this collection.

From "The Fish":

She stands over a fish, thinking about certain irrevocable mistakes she has made today. Now the fish has been cooked, and she is alone with it. The fish is for her--there is no one else in the house. But she has had a troubling day. How can she eat this fish, cooling on a slab of marble? And yet the fish, too, motionless as it is, and dismantled from its bones, and fleeced of its silver skin, has never been so completely alone as it is now: violated in a final manner and regarded with a weary eye by this woman who has made the latest mistake of her day and done this to it.

Love every word of that. Wonderful.

Writing a short story now called "The Barbecue Potato Chip."

Internet Lovelies

2011-12-09T09:50:00.000-05:00

Daniel Clowes' cover for the New Yorker

"Where are the books?"
"Um, they're over here on the bottom shelf. But wouldn't you rather have a Simpsons themed Monopoly board? Or perhaps you'd like to browse our 32 different varieties of moleskine notebooks?"

So many bookstores (and online book retailers) have become like pharmacies; barely even carrying the things they were created to sell. My local CVS (aka Snuggie Outlet) doesn't carry Tylenol. The biggest pharmacy in town doesn't have Tylenol. TYLENOL. My god but they have waffle irons.

A book — a real book — is one choice, taken from a pile, opened and entered as its own singular, separate world. Once chosen, you are not holding the constant opportunity to alter or improve your choice, or simply change it just for the sake of restless change. You are there, now, without the relentless pressure of the fact that you could always be, and maybe you should be, maybe you’d be happier or more productive or different, doing something else.

KJ Dellatonia, Link

Imagine the least funny joke you can imagine and then imagine having to see that joke repeated for a hundred minutes while someone punches you in the face with the sharpest knife in the world while also pouring gasoline into the cuts and occasionally burning you with white hot fire. That’s a moderate approximation of the experience of watching this movie.

Roxane Gay on watching Jack and Jill, Link

It's also the experience of watching Carlos Mencia try to perform comedy. OHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. Snap.

Nothing will trickle down to you unless you shake the clouds. Time to make it rain updwards.

Jim Behrle on occupying American poetry, Link

I think mostly what this is about, is whether you’re the type of person who writes something on the Internet and feels secure/smug/confident or the type who is immediately racked with regret and self-doubt and self-loathing...

But there is that compulsion to say something. (Dare I say?) to say anything.

Elizabeth Ellen, Link

I'm that second type of person. Whenever I get a comment, facebook like, retweet, etc., evidence that whatever bullshit I've been spewing forth has actually been read, I become a nervous wreck. Whenever I comment on message boards or other people's blogs, I immediately close out of the window and log out of email, terrified of any response back. Or no response at all. It's complicated.

Hi! I have social anxiety disorder. Even on the internet! (fun!)

There's a list of the 56 Best/Worst Similes in this blog post from House of Figs. Whether they're the best or worst is up to you. But they're all hilarious. Here's a sample:

5. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

16. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

17. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

43. The knife was as sharp as the tone used by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) in her first several points of parliamentary procedure made to Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) in the House Judiciary Committee hearings on the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton.

And my all time fave:

51. It came down the stairs looking very much like something no one had ever seen before.

That sentence is so intriguing! What is "it," and what could it possibly look like? My mind goes immediately to Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, but I've seen it before, so it obviously cannot look like that. The mystery!

I feel like I've used too many exclamation points today.

:(

Whatever. I'm just gonna watch this 50 times over and then play some Simpsons Monopoly.

why blogspot is a gigantic fart

2011-12-05T17:05:00.002-05:00

I was almost finished with this nice, longish post on Lydia Davis and one of her short story collections, but I tried to undo posting a picture I realized was stupid, and somehow everything was deleted when I clicked the undo button, and clicking redo did nothing, and then blogspot autosaved like an ass, I lost everything, and now I feel like Jo March and Amy has burned my manuscript.

Dear blogspot: if you fall through the ice I'm not going to come save you.

Selected Unpublished Blog Posts of a Mexican Panda Express Employee, 63/100

2011-11-21T08:00:00.001-05:00

Read Muumuu House's most recent publication, Selected Unpublished Blog Posts of a Mexican Panda Express Employee, a poetry collection by Megan Boyle. I was really excited to read it, being a fan of her blog (tomhankssuperfan.blogspot.com/), twitter, and ThoughtCatalog articles (including the classic Top Ten Things to Imagine Happening to Nicolas Cage as He's on His Way to a Dentist Appointment he has Postponed for Three Years).

The first word that comes to mind in regard to this collection is "funny." The second is "honest." The third is possibly "relatable" and/or "internet."

Boyle's collection is an amalgamation of chronological blog posts and poems, describing her daily actions, thoughts -- pre-meditated and stream of consciousness -- confessions, memories, and self-reflection. It brought to mind that Jean-Philippe Toussaint quote I posted yesterday:

literature focused on the insignificant, on the banal, on the mundane, the "not interesting," the "not edifying," on lulls in time, on marginal events, which are usually excluded from literature and are not dealt with in books

and from the same interview

The problem with the idea of the "minimalist novel" is that it's very simplistic. The term "minimalist" calls to mind the infinitely small, whereas "infinitesimal" evokes the infinitely large as much as the infinitely small: it contains the two extremes that should always be found...

Boyle's collection contains the infinitely large and the infinitely small. Large ideas like the difficulty of human connection, small actions like eating noodles and "surfing the web."

But can I stop waxing literary and say that I really really really really really enjoyed reading this book?

Here are some passages:

i could never be a sports writer, unless my assignment was to write 'sports sports sports sports sports' for three pages

i want to delete everything from someone's computer except a giant microsoft paint picture of a dick that takes forever to load

am i consciously trying to think interesting thoughts because i think i'm going to write this down later? am i actually interesting or do i just want to construct a view myself as 'interesting' so i can feel like i shouldn't die? 'interesting' seems mostly dependent on other people's perceptions, less on mine, maybe. or more like my idea of what will 'interest' others. if other people didn't exist i wouldn't worry if i was interesting or not

i keep thinking about updating my blog, twitter, and facebook with 'AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH,' then leaving the internet indefinitely

it feels like i could die in 50 years or tomorrow and the world would be relatively the same place

there would still be trees and people loving each other and killing each other

i feel insane and maybe on the verge of some kind of breakdown right now, like i'm not even sure what the internet is right now, i feel like i've taken a lot of pills but i've just had hummus, pita bread, an apple, some oreos, coffee, water, and birth control

i would like to matter to every person in the world

i would like every person in the world to matter to me

neither of those things will ever happen

i strongly feel that everything is and always will be okay while walking from subway to my apartment, holding a sandwich and a diet coke, usually around 9PM, seeing maybe two other people on the street and very few cars

when i close my apartment door and turn on the lights something changes in my stomach and i think 'shouldn't there be something else, something is missing'

Camera, 62/100

2011-11-20T08:00:00.001-05:00

Finished the slim but worthwhile Camera by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, translated from the French by Matthew Smith. The novel follows the thoughts and actions of a Parisian man as he pursues a relationship with a driver's ed instructor. The style of writing, what you might call minimalist or matter-of-fact, combined with the narrator's actions, had me convinced in the beginning that the man was possibly a psycho or murderer. I was prepared for something dark and grisly. This is what happens when you pick up a book and start reading without looking at the back cover or any reviews or descriptions. That, and you've been reading American Psycho for ten months.

But here's why my mind was set on him being a psychopath. The man is presumed to be older and doesn't have a driver's license. He goes to sign up for driver's ed classes, doesn't have all the application materials necessary, and keeps returning every day to the driver's ed office without them just so he can hang out with one of the employees. And by hang out I don't mean have conversations with, but just to be in the office with her. I found it terribly creepy, although the back of the book describes it as a "love story."

Perhaps I'm sensitive to this particular brand of creepy, since I once had a workplace stalker. A library patron who would play solitaire on our computers, waiting for me to get off work so he could follow me out and try to start one-sided conversations. Possibly wouldn't be so creepy if I hadn't lied and told him I was engaged, and wasn't interested. Several times. Creepers please stop with the creeping.

The story in Camera turns out not to be creepy or murdery at all. Instead it is an account of an uneventful period of time in the self-obsessed narrator's life, not special for any particular reason, but given importance through description of his activities and his thoughts.

Take the very first line:

It was about the same time in my life, a calm life in which ordinarily nothing happened, that two events coincided, events that, taken separately, were of hardly any interest, and that, considered together, were unfortunately not connected in any way.

The novel is split into two focuses (foci?): the first half dealing with "the struggle of living," and the second half with the "despair of being," both lines used by the narrator.

In the "struggle of living," most of the narration is centered on his actions -- step-by-step the things he physically does during the day. Often sprinkled with extreme detail. Think of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" when he spends nearly ten pages describing the house and its surroundings, except with this guy eating an olive. In an interview with the author he refers to this mode of writing:

Underlying my novel is, although it isn't expressed theoretically, an idea of literature focused on the insignificant, on the banal, on the mundane, the "not interesting," the "not edifying," on lulls in time, on marginal events, which are usually excluded from literature and are not dealt with in books.

In the "despair of being" the narrator slips into philosophical thought, with his self-obsession turning from "what I am doing" to "what am I doing here?" Self reflection not of the body but of the mind.

It was night now in my mind, I was alone in the semi-darkness of the booth and I was thinking, protected from outer torments. The most favorable conditions for thinking, the moments when thought can let itself naturally follow its course, are precisely moments when, having temporarily given up fighting a seemingly inexhaustible reality, the tension begins to loosen little by little, all the tension accumulated in protecting yourself against the threat of injury...and that, alone in an enclosed space, alone and following the course of your thoughts in a state of growing relief, you move progressively from the struggle of living to the despair of being.

The novel never becomes grisly, but it does turn a bit dark.

A nice read, and I'll be looking into Toussanit's other work in the future.

When She Woke, 61/100

2011-11-19T08:00:00.003-05:00

The premise behind Hillary Jordan's When She Woke is what made me grab it. In a near-dystopian future (when will I tire of dystopian fiction?), Hannah Payne awakens in jail with her skin dyed bright red -- her punishment for having an abortion.

When She Woke is a re-imagining of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, but it is also heavily influenced by Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. In Jordan's dystopian future, a sterility epidemic has caused an under-population crisis. In some countries women are subjected to forced insemination. In the U.S., Roe v. Wade has been overturned, and the government has devolved into a dictatorial theocracy.

A feature of this new society is a process called "chroming" -- a form of punishment alternative to prison, in which citizens are punished for their crimes by being dyed a color relative to their offense. These "chromes" are then shunned, discriminated against, abused, and in some cases hunted once released back into society. Hannah Payne (think Hester Prynne) is guilty of murder in the eyes of the people: she had an illegal abortion to save the reputation of the already married father.

Not everything about chroming or the logistics of this dystopian world really sticks together or remains believable from beginning to end. But it's not meant to be. It's more of a plot-device to explore the concepts of guilt, faith, and dogma.

Some might consider the novel having an anti-Christian slant, and it definitely focuses on questioning the standard practices and doctrine of evangelical religion. However, I wouldn't consider it anti-god or anti-faith. The protagonist is a deeply religious young woman who, through her chroming experience, comes to question and ultimately rebel against the theocracy governing her. Her faith in god is explored, but never completely denounced.

Similarly the novel takes a pro-choice stance, but acknowledges the complexity of the issue. Hannah retains a feeling of personal guilt and responsibility for her action which she explores, while simultaneously refusing the guilt placed upon her by the puritanical society she lives in.

Jordan provides the best answer for the abortion argument: "It's personal."

...the procedure. Hannah remembered how the term, along with the other equally clinical and dispassionate words he'd used, had calmed her. She saw in retrospect that they had in fact enabled her to go through with it. You didn't temporize, much less agonize, over a procedure, you proceeded with it. A procedure didn't induce regret or require expiation. But how different the scenario became when you substituted words like "murder" and "abomination." The truth of it, Hannah thought now, lay somewhere in between. She'd ended her pregnancy out of love and fear and necessity. It hadn't been simply a procedure, but neither had it been an atrocity.

I would consider When She Woke to be YA fiction, despite it not being classified as such. I'm sure the publishers decided not to market it this way to avoid controversy with parents over it's subject matter. But everything about the way it's written and the way the subjects are approached point directly to YA. How disappointing that a book which could help young adults work through issues of faith and sexuality won't find it's way into their hands. I'm sure if the book was about actual murder, full-fledged and gruesome, it would be sitting right there on the school library shelf next to Twilight.

American Psycho, 60/100

2011-11-18T10:55:00.002-05:00

The very first substantial piece of creative fiction I remember writing, as a junior in high school, was a short story about a well-dressed business man who attempts to murder a woman he approaches on the street. From what I remember it was horribly-written, tied up with a great big moral at the end, along the lines of "don't trust appearances!" or the like. Little did I know this premise had already been used 10 years previously by Bret Easton Ellis.

I've been reading American Psycho since February, which has kept me in a constant state of paranoia and anxiety nearly the entire year. If you're not familiar with the novel or film adaptation, let me fill you in:

The story is told in the first-person by the protagonist Patrick Bateman; an extremely wealthy, young, good-looking Wall Street investment banker in the late 1980s. By day at least. On his own time he's a psychotic serial killer, torturer, and rapist.

Bateman narrates his day-to-day activities, which for the most part revolve around materialism and participation in Manhattanite and yuppie culture. There are pages and pages of him and his colleagues going to nightclubs, doing drugs, talking about fashion, and discussing proper etiquette and popular culture. It's a life obsessed and saturated with consumerism. There are endless descriptions of designer clothing and products, name-brands thrown into every sentence. I'm guessing at least 100 pages are dedicated entirely to describing what people wear.

Let's put it to the test. I just did a search in the ebook format, and the word "wearing" is used 208 times. 208 times in 438 pages.

But all of this is Bateman's surface persona. The guise he's undertaken to appear human. He's studied what he believes human behavior to be, through movies, TV, and catalogs, so he knows how to act. A mask of sanity.

This is my reality. Everything outside of this is like some movie I once saw.

Surface, surface, surface was all anyone found meaning in...this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged...

There's a lot going on this novel, and I can see how people could go different directions with the meaning. It could act as an indictment against yuppie culture and the Wall Street elite, who are greatly satirized (spending gross amounts of money on meaningless things, cruel and heartless towards the poor, compare business cards to see whose is better, etc.) An exposure of unfair capitalism and separation between classes. Bateman's attitude toward the poor and needy -- almost all of his victims are dependent: beggars, prostitutes, animals, children -- is that of total disgust. Like Ayn Rand if she were a psychotic murderer. How apt that I finished reading this at the height of the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Or the novel could work as an indictment against human consumerist behavior in general, elite or not. 1% or 99%. Patrick Bateman isn't human. Being a materialistic pop culture obsessed asshole is his human disguise -- what he considers to be the norm.

Everything failed to subdue me. Soon everything seemed dull: another sunrise, the lives of heroes, falling in love, war, the discoveries people made about each other... There wasn't a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly, total disgust. I had all the characteristics of a human being--flesh, blood, skin, hair--but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that the normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning.

On the other hand it could be a study of how a psychotic mind works.

When his mask of sanity slips, he indulges his dark impulses by viciously torturing and killing people. He progressively becomes worse throughout the novel, with relatively little violence happening the first third of the book, to WOW, I DIDN'T KNOW THAT WAS PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE by the end.

The chapter titles give you a good heads up:

Ch. 2: Morning
Ch. 7: Health Club
Ch. 13: Video Store then D'Agostino's
Ch. 18: Lunch
Ch. 22: Killing Dog
Ch. 38: Killing Child at Zoo
Ch. 44: Tries to Cook and Eat Girl
Ch. 45: Taking an Uzi to the Gym

The novel's very graphic and extreme depictions of violence, primarily towards women, has made it controversial. In many countries it cannot be sold to minors, and stays shrink-wrapped until sold. I haven't seen the 2000 film adaptation, but it was only given an R rating, so I can guarantee you it's fluffy in comparison.

I wanted to hate this book, but I couldn't, being so well-written. It's one of the best books I've read this year. If there was a way to read it again, skipping all the extreme violence and endless descriptions of ties and dress socks, I would do so right now. But it could never be a favorite book. In fact I don't think I could be friends with someone who listed American Psycho as their favorite book. And definitely wouldn't spend any time alone with them.

So was there a point or need for all the graphic violence in the novel? Could Ellis have gotten his point across without that scene with the girl, burning acid, a starving rat, brie cheese, and one of those play mouse tunnels? (whatever you're thinking, yeah, that's what he did).

Here's Ursula Le Guin's take on violence in literature:

Can fiction still really flabbergast its readers, shock, shake, amaze, dumbfound, disturb, frighten them? Or can it merely continue meeting the expectations of those whose literary diet consists of revelations of infamy, perverted sexuality, violent injustice, monstrous brutalism, physical deformity, deliberate cruelty, and the mutual infliction of misery on one another by the members of dysfunctional suburban families?

These are revelations?

Is it news to most readers over five that people can be really, really mean to each other?

Or do they just like to read about it?

They do. I do. I sit open-jawed, horrified, enchanted to watch Atreus’s or Hamlet’s dysfunctional families destroy everybody who comes in contact with them in the process of destroying themselves. I am fascinated by Heathcliff’s cruelty and Ahab’s wicked madness and Lennie’s innocent murderousness.

But I don’t think Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Bronte, Melville, or Steinbeck were writing to horrify, to shock or frighten or sicken, to sear eyeballs or to wrench guts. They were aware of audience, oh yes indeed, but their intentions were not violent. They were not in assault mode. A writer whose intention is to frighten and distress the reader has a very aggressive program and a very limited goal. Serious writers want to do something beyond asserting power over their audience, beyond self-satisfaction, beyond personal gain — even though they may want all those things very much.

I'm not sure I can answer whether Ellis was going for pure shock value, without intention, or if the extremity of Bateman's actions was meant to illicit something more from the reader. Possibly it's a way of undermining the "moral voice" that's so prevalent in literature (as it was in my high school story). This time the reader gets to be the moral conscience.

Some moral conscience I am though, being unable to stop laughing out loud after reading the following line:

In the kitchen I try to make meatloaf out of the girl but it becomes too frustrating a task and instead I spend the afternoon smearing her meat all over the walls, chewing on strips of skins I ripped from her body, then I rest by watching a tape of last week's new CBS sitcom, Murphy Brown.

I am a horrible, horrible human being.

Wilson, Ghost World, 58-59/100

2011-11-08T09:22:00.000-05:00

Here's a short post, basically just updating the numbers on what I've read.

Finished Wilson by graphic novelist Daniel Clowes a few weeks ago. It's about the unlikeable Wilson, a middle-aged guy who's honest to a fault. The kind of guy who will start up a one-sided conversation with you in Starbucks, and turn it into a rant against society. You know that guy. But because he's honest, he's still relatable. He says what we're all thinking.

Here's two panels I liked:

I used to fantasize about being is prison and having time to read/think. What a privileged, surburban thing to fantasize over. Even though I've never lived in a suburb.

The panels are done in newspaper style, with the art style on each page being different, and every page being a new "chapter." I loved the alternating art work. But the setup got a little old by the end. Since every page has to be self-contained, they followed the same pattern: Wilson talking or doing something brash, awkward silence, one-liner by Wilson. Repeat. It was okay, but no one wants to read an entire book of Garfield, even if Garfield ranted against consumerism or went to prison (presumably for killing Nermal).

It was fun, but I think the biggest thing I'll remember about this book was that Wilson bears a striking resemblance to Drew from Toothpaste for Dinner.

When writing this "review" I tried to find my review of Ghost World, the other Daniel Clowes book I've read, but realized I never actually did a post on it. Whoops! Really thought I did. I could swear I remember scanning pages from it. I think I just mentioned it one day and made a Steve Buscemi joke.

Rather than do a full review, which would require a reread and some scanning, I'm just going to leave you with the fact that it's really good and you should consider reading it. Lisa Simpson concurs.

Also

STEVE BUSCEMI.

Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs, 57/100

2011-11-07T16:23:00.001-05:00

Read Ellen Kennedy's book of poetry, Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs, the second book I've read from publisher Muumuu House. Started by Tao Lin in 2008, Muumuu House will be releasing its third (fourth?) book, SELECTED UNPUBLISHED BLOG POSTS OF A MEXICAN PANDA EXPRESS EMPLOYEE by Megan Boyle next week, the title of which I had to copy/paste to ensure accuracy. Why are there so many links in this paragraph.

Like this more articulate and thought-out review on goodreads notes, Kennedy's writing seems a bit too derivative of Tao Lin's style, and it comes off more as a parody than original. The poems that are more sincere and (seem) to reflect her own voice are the strongest. That being said, I still laughed at the Woody Allen/Ned Vizzini one.

Here are the two poems I liked best:

"Orange"

I wish my life consisted only of
riding my bike with you
down a giant hill that never stopped
while listening to music
with no one else around
in the middle of nothing,
except a few shiny and relaxing lights above in the sky
like stars but a little brighter
and more orange

"Poem"

I'm violently stuffing
the void in my life
with cute toys
from fifty-cent machines

and they aren't helping
but they might give the one
who performs my autopsy
something to bring home
to the kids

Bed, 56/100

2011-11-03T20:22:00.001-04:00

Advance apologies for all quotes below.

Sometimes I have a lot to say about a particular book, and sometimes I don't. I've never been very good at coming up with abstract reviews for things like poetry, short stories, conceptual novels -- anything without a big ol' plot. I can write about plot. But I can't write a review with phrases like "impressively smart" or "highly entertaining." Because that wouldn't tell you anything. I may just as well say "I liked it. It was good."

So trying to tell you why I liked Tao Lin's Bed would be like me trying to tell you why I like Seinfeld.

Seinfeld is a show about nothing.

Bed is a short story collection about:

College students, recent graduates, and their parents work at Denny's, volunteer at a public library in suburban Florida, attend satanic ska/punk concerts, eat Chinese food with the homeless of New York City, and got to the same Japanese restaurant in Manhattan three times in two sleepless days, all while yearning constantly for love, a better kind of love, or something better than love, things which--much like the Loch Ness Monster--they know probably do no exist, but are rumored to exist and therefore "good enough." [From the back cover]

And I liked it. It was good.

Bed has to be my favorite of Tao Lin's books. And it's probably the most accessible. Start with this one rather than Eeeee Eee Eeee. Work up to that one.

Here are some of my favorite passages:

Outside, crossing Fifth Avenue, he looked up at the buildings and felt a kind of rapture, something of apology and thanks and intelligence--though maybe just a thing of coffee and wakefulness--forming, like a good idea (the world thinking hard, finally), here, in the little wind, the slightly infrared space between the buildings, the wet, shucked gemstars of the traffic lights, and all the glassy windows above, bright and comprehending as eyes, watchful as a world that wanted, truly, to know--and to love--all its lost and bewildered people.

"And what's gravity? No one knows. No one cares. Why is there gravity? That's so weird. That's like, why are there things? That's so depressing, that that question even exists. But sincere, I think."

[Aaron] began writing sort of science-fiction conceits for workshop; crude, uncritiqueable things that did not fuck around, but got straigt to the point, which was always bafflement. In one, an alien civilization discovers that gravity is the cause of worry, love, and fear, the underlying desire of all things to occupy the same space (to correct the big bang, go against God's, or whoever's, big impulse move, that shady decision of somethingness) to again become one final, gravityless, unchangeable thing--and is baffled.

He thought it might make a good children's book one day, a collection of them "Fairy Tales for the Young Disillusionist", or something. "Handbook for Doomed and/or Disenchanted Children: a Pop-Up Collection".

As one had to expect very little--almost nothing--from life,...one had to be grateful, not always trying to seize the days, not like some maniac of living, but to give oneself up, be seized by the days, the months and years, be taken up in a froth of sun and moon, some pale and smoothie'd river-cloud of life, a long drawn-out and gray sort of enlightenment, so that when it was time to die, one did not scream swear words and knock things down, did not make a scene, but went easily, with understanding and tact, and quietly in a lightly pummeled way, having been consoled--having allowed to be consoled--by the soft and generous worthlessness of it all, having allowed to be massaged by the daily beating of life, instead of just beaten.

"Depressed people...are so depressed and harmless. Bin Laden and everyone, Bush--they're always grinning on TV. What the fuck is that. No on ever thinks about this shit, really."

First week of February you began to suspect that, for the rest of your life, nothing might happen. This was one of those years. You mail-ordered a special mattress, and napped too much. In restaurants, people ordered the ice-cream cake, shoved their hands under their thighs, and talked loudly about death. On TV, politicians began to snack from Ziploc bags, like a provocation. Almonds, raisins. Sour Patch Kids.

Things, you felt, had changed.

There was a new foreboding to the room in which you slept. There was the fear, now, that all your anxieties and disconsolations might keep on escalating and never stop. There was the theoretical chance that if you threw a banana at a wall the banana might go through the wall.

You were one person alive and your brain was encased inside a skull. There were other people out there. It took an effort to be connected. Some people were better at this than others. Some people were bad at it. Some people were so bad at it that they gave up.

2011-10-27T12:04:00.000-04:00

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before; for though one of the instincts of youth is imitation, another equally imperious, is that of fiercely guarding against it.

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.

Edith Wharton in The Writing of Fiction

Nim Chimpsky: Live at the German Bordello

2011-10-27T01:46:00.000-04:00

Read Elizabeth Taddonio and Daniel Bailey's chapbook Nim Chimpsky: Live at the German Bordello while standing next to my stove waiting for some pasta to cook. Read it again while dying my hair and listening to Death From Above 1979.

It's really good.

Here are some lines from it I liked.

i want to write a hot club song called "twitpic yr dickpics"

i hope i die from rabies 10 seconds before i would've died from natural causes

From 'Public Knowledge'

Gif request - Mark Wahlberg punching himself in the chest repeatedly in the movie Fear

my google chrome download bar shows that today I downloaded a gif called 'friday afternoon' & 2 pictures of mario batali

From 'WHAT IT'S LIKE'

i googled who is my mom and it turned out my mom is the same person I always thought she was

i think i'm gonna pitch "totally chill men" to amc, a show about dudes from the 90's who watch tv commercials and then chill with the products

how different human history would be if humans could jump as high as cats

From 'Memoir Titles'

Off-brand graham crackers
Cocktail hour with the mammoths
Dognapping

TL;DR NB4R LYMI
Not now, I'm wired in
Old Lady Swag - Socks

Artifical light and watching Roseanne alone after work
A bookcase made of ottomans
Cat Dress

From DREAMS & WISHES

movie where viggo mortenson runs around a forest with purpose for 2 hours. we never find out his purpose. viggo's boot gets messed up and that is the main crisis of the movie.

i want to be a rapper where my name is every letter except j and z

i want to live two lives simultaneously. one as myself and one as "pump up the jam" by technotronic

i wish i had an ethnicity to write about

i want to smoke a shitload of salvia and then walk around a mall and wherever i am when the salvia wears off is where i build my castle

Buy your own copy for $2.

Fictional maps, forever and ever

2011-10-25T16:37:00.000-04:00

Was going to add this to my Earthsea review, but decided it needs its own post.

Lindy West in a review of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire:

Basically—here is the dark, mewling shame-baby that's been calcifying for years in my brain-womb (medical term)—I will read anything with a fucking fictional map in the front.

Ohhhhhh, how I crave a fictional map! Oz, Middle Earth, Narnia, Neverland, Fantastica, Tortall, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, the one with the talking war-bears where everyone gets to have a magic otter that is their best friend... uhhh... Dinotopia... ummmmm... you know, all the other ones. All the main ones. I love that shit. So imagine my delight upon discovering that not only does each volume in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series have a fictional map in the front, IT HAS A FUCKING FICTIONAL MAP IN THE BACK, TOO. That's two fictional maps. Two. (Plus sometimes a third supplementary fictional map that I really can't get into right now because I need both hands for typing, if you know what I mean [MASTURBATION JOKE].)

All hail fictional maps.

And check this out as well: fuckyeahfictionalmaps.tumblr.com

Earthsea Series, 52-55/100

2011-10-25T09:32:00.000-04:00

I kind of love this cover art for the first book. It reminds me of Fuseli's The Nightmare. Only one problem: the main character isn't white! Oh, book publishers. Forever whitewashing the world.

When I first started reading Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series about a year ago, I decided to wait and do a blog post when I finished all the books. Now I wish I hadn't, not realizing quite how many there were. I"ll be stretching my brain trying to remember everything.

These are the books in the series:

A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)
The Tombs of Atuan (1971)
The Farthest Shore (1972)
Tehnau (1990)
Tales from Earthsea (2001)
The Other Wind (2001)

Only the last four were read this calendar year.

The Earthsea series is fantasy aimed towards young adults. It molds itself after Tolkien and preludes Rowling. At the beginning of each book is a lovely, sprawling map of the fictional world of Earthsea, drawn by Le Guin herself.

Don't hurt your eyes. Click the pic to make it much, much larger.

Don't you love big maps like that? I could look at them all day. Earthsea is an archipelago of islands that necessitates all travel be made by boat; or flight if you happen to be a dragon. Oh yes! There are dragons. You can't go wrong with wizards and dragons.

Most of the stories revolve around the wizard Ged, who as a young boy travels to a wizarding school to learn magic. His school adventures don't span 7 books, however, and by the third book Ged is middle-aged. It's nice to come across a YA book that isn't so obsessed with youth. I think more literary fiction should feature young adults and vice-versa.

One of my favorite aspects of Earthsea is how the magic system works. Le Guin explains fully how the magic works in this world, instead of just claiming some things to be magic and some not. Here magic is performed by learning and using the "one true language": the language that existed before men created their own. Every rock, tree, person and animal has its own "true name" that allows any wizard or witch who knows it to have complete control over it.

But there is a downside to this system. It's knowledge based. Wizards learn the true words through memorization, which means that the knowledge can be withheld from anyone who isn't deemed worthy.

In the first 3 books, written between 1968-1972 (The Farthest Shore was originally subtitled "The Last Book of Earthsea"), Le Guin was criticized for making this wizarding world almost exclusively male. There are village witches, but they are considered lowly, working mostly as mid-wives and healers. "Weak as women's magic, wicked as women's magic."

Tehanu, written 18 years later, was her response to the outcries of sexism from critics and concerned fans. The novel focuses on the gender discrimination and segregation within Earthsea. She reveals that both sexes hold the talent to perform magic, but only one is privileged enough to be taught how.

Le Guin has apologized before for the supposed sexism in the earlier novels:

What happened in the 17 years between Farthest Shore and Tehanu was that feminism was reborn, and I became 17 years older, and learned a good deal. One of the things I learned was how to write as a woman, not as an honorary, or imitation, man.

From a woman's point of view, Earthsea looked quite different than it did from a man's point of view. All I had to do was describe it from the point of view of the powerless, the disempowered - women, children, a wizard who has spent his gift and must live as an "ordinary" man.

But reading the first three, I kind of "got it." I understood the sexism at play; that it was the work of the characters, not the author. Tehanu addresses the issue nicely, although perhaps a bit too thoroughly, sacrificing story for preachiness. And it's a bit sad that the big "feminist" book in the collection is basically 300 pages of two women trying to fend off a rapist until a prince comes and saves them. An over simplification, but that's what it boils down to.

From Tehanu:

She felt as she had felt in Havnor as a girl; a barbarian, uncouth among their smoothnesses. But because she was not a girl now, she was not awed, but only wondered at how men ordered their world into this dance of masks, and how easily a woman might learn to dance it.

You've probably noticed some similarities between this series and Harry Potter. Both feature schools for young wizards. The prejudice against women resembles the discrimination against mudbloods (the founders of the school on Roke debated over accepting women, declined, and kicked out the founders who WERE women. At Hogwarts it goes the other way, with the anti-mudblood Salazaar Slytherin renouncing his position).

Another aspect both series share is their focus on immortality vs. death. In Harry Potter, the entire story springs from an evil wizard's desire to be immortal. The Philosopher's Stone, horcruxes, the Deathly Hallows--all attempts to cheat death. Dumbledore, ever the voice of reason, reminds us that death should not be feared, but looked to as "the next great adventure." In Earthsea the moral is much the same: cheating death, destroying the balance, will have dire consequences.

From The Farthest Shore:

You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose....That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself? Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the light of sunrise and sunset, to buy safety for yourself—safety forever?

In the first book, Ged summons a dead spirit, unleashing a shadow into the world that seeks to destroy him. In The Farthest Shore, Ged must travel into the afterlife to defeat an evil wizard who, in his quest for immortality, has taken magic from the world. We return to the afterlife in The Other Wind, when it's discovered that a decision made thousands of years ago to create life after death has sentenced generations of people to purgatory.

Moral of the stories: You're gonna die. Just deal with it.

From The Other Wind:

"I think...that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me that life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed."

I've always loved how works of fantasy draw on each other, and can take tropes of the genre and will them into a new creation. No work exists that wasn't inspired or adapted from something else. Earthsea is very much tied to Middle-earth. And Rowling's creation was undeniably influenced by the works of several fantasy authors. I don't think she has ever tried to hide the fact. But I've read a few interviews with Le Guin where she expresses a bit of animosity towards Rowling that I find deeply unfortunate. There's nothing grosser than rivalries between authors.

Example: The 50 Best Author Put Down of All Time. It's kind of funny, but it's also really sad and pathetic. Like some kind of nerd rap battle. You don't have any microphone to drop, Mark Twain, so just stop. Leave the insulting to the critics and your fans.

Thinking every piece of fiction that comes along is going to be sublimely original is ridiculous. It's all about what you do with your inspiration. Just take a look at Lev Grossman's The Magicians. It very actively and openly drew from the world of Harry Potter, Narnia, and Middle-earth. But no one's complaining, because he ran with the idea of merging these worlds, creating something new that celebrates the entire fantasy genre. I love it.

So get over it, jealous fantasy authors. You're not the first person who's ever written about a dragon.

Ayiti, 51/100

2011-10-24T10:03:00.001-04:00

Was really happy to receive Roxane Gay's debut collection Ayiti a few days ago in the mail, after pre-ordering it months ago. And can I mention just how much I love getting books in the mail? I spend a good portion of my work day opening interlibrary loan packages, and then come home and open some more that are just for me. Anything that comes directly from the publisher are always the best, packed with goodies and bookmarks. Bookmooch packages are great too, especially when they include little personal notes and books with marginalia. I should probably go outside sometime.

Gay's book is a collection of short fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, all representing experiences of the Haitian diaspora. Most readers coming to this book won't know much about Haiti or its people, besides the fact that it is a devastatingly poor country. "We are defined by what we are not and what we do not have." The stories are presented honestly--not sugar-coating the poverty and hardships of its characters--but also avoiding using gimmicky sob stories (although I did sob in at least one of the stories).

One of my favorite shorts, "There is No 'E' in Zombi Which Means There Can Be No You Or We," is a zombi(e) "love story." Or could it be classified as zombie erotica? Either way, it's not whatever you're picturing. As Gay emphasizes in the beginning under the headline [Things Americans do not know about zombis:], "They are not dead. They are near death." No necrophilia here.

My other favorite, "In the Manner of Water or Light," is devastating and beautiful. Narrated by a second generation immigrant, it tells the story of how her mother was conceived during the 1937 massacre of Haitian people by the Dominican Republic. The mystery and romance surrounding her grandfather, encouraged by the grandmother, shows the lengths we go to to protect ourselves from tragedy and the truth. Even when it means crossing an ocean.

From "All Things Being Relative"

My parents were born in Haiti, the first free black nation in the world.

It is an island of contradictions.

The sand is always warm. The water is so clear blue bright that is sometimes painful to behold. The art and music are rich, textured, revelatory, ecstatic. The sugar cane is raw and sweet.

And yet. What most people know is this--Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Her people eat mud cakes. There is no infrastructure--no sewer system, no reliable roads, erratic electricity. Women are not safe. Disease cannot be cured. Violence cannot be quelled. The land is eroding. The sky is falling.

Freedom, it seems, has a price. We are defined by what we are not and what we do not have.

You should also check out Roxane Gay's blog I Have Become Accustomed to Rejection, where she writes some of the funniest movie reviews on the internet.

She also contributes to Bookslut and HTMLGiant; two of my favorite favorites.

Love and Rockets: New Stories, Vol. 1, 50/100

2011-10-20T21:46:00.001-04:00

Be prepared for some venting, ranting and/or raving, and tons of geekdom.

In my review of Sloth I mentioned I wasn't familiar with the comic series Love and Rockets by the Hernandez brothers. I happened to see this first volume for New Stories at the local comic shop and grabbed it. The cover alone (once again) would've been enough for me to buy it.

Just like in Sloth, something felt "off" about the entire volume. Even starting at a point in the series where I was missing some back story, it was still pretty easy to pick up on what was going on. But all the dialogue felt like it was translated from another language, badly, even though it was written originally in English. Almost every written word just felt unnatural and odd.

However I couldn't make myself hate it. The artwork is wonderful, the characters fascinating, and the stories are definitely never boring. The backbone story in this volume follows a group of female super heroes known as the Ti-Girls, who are....I don't know, trying to stop an enemy from destroying earth after she loses her tiny bean-sized baby in space, or something. Like I said, it's odd.

But here is what makes the Ti-Girls unique:

A middle-aged Spanish speaking maid turned super hero? That makes me very happy.

I'm sure this grouping looks odd. Like something from Kick-Ass or Mystery Men -- super heroes that break the Superman/Wonder Woman mold. But it's more than just breaking outside a race or age barrier. Let's get gender specific (yes, let's).

Unless you've been living under a rock (or you're just not a complete dork like I am), you've probably heard about the controversy over the representation of female characters in DC's "new 52" series, which is a complete reboot of their line of super hero comics. The representation of women in comics is not a new controversy, but this recent release has really brought the issue into the spotlight.

The two characters readers had the biggest problem with was the new Catwoman and Starfire. And just to give you an idea of what we're dealing with here:

And no, this didn't come from DeviantArt (where any person, animal, and inanimate object probably has fetishized fanart dedicated to it). That's in a real live comic book.

Catwoman's portrayal is (arguably) milder in comparison, and honestly, she's CATWOMAN. As in CAT. She's allowed to be sexy and have awkward clothed sex with Batman if she wants. I shall allow it.

But this has been a long-time problem in comics. Women characters, even as the good guys, are represented as Playboy Bunnies. Eye candy with no personality. Or if they DO have personality, it's gotta be a sessy one. If she has goals or motives, chances are she's a villain. It goes beyond anatomy into their actions and attitude. Cookie cutter women different in hairstyles and costumes only.

If you want to see a list of grievances (and possible solutions), read this lovely set of interviews with comic creators at ComicsAlliance. Everyone has a different opinion on the problem, but at least they all agree that there IS a problem. Also, check out this great article by FilmCritHulk on the unfortunate sexism in the new Arkham City game -- the problems in comics and videogames tend to overlap.

So I agree with the cause. I'm all for transforming the way women are represented in comics. At the same time, even in the most well-intentioned arguments I see an unfortunate double standard.

Super heroes aren't a 20th century phenomenon. They've been around since the creation of stories. The gods/goddesses of Greek/Roman/Norse mythology, the Titans, Achilles, Perseus, Hercules, Beowulf, Paul Bunyan...we've been obsessed with super people for a long time. These heroes were also incredibly idealized. And not as much in their personalities or morals as they were physically idealized. Think of the ancient Olympic games. Think of Sparta. The perfect athletic body was revered; almost worshiped.

And in 2011 we still worship in the cult of the "perfect body" (or whatever a particular society as a collective deems to be ideal). It only follows that our super heroes continue the trend of being oiled-up body builders. I don't personally agree with it, but there it is all the same. Comic book super heroes are the new gods. And in some cases ARE gods (THOR!).

So why is it different when it comes to female super heroes? Yes, they have impossible chest sizes, perfect faces, and wear outfits that could easily be mistaken for underwear. But so does Superman. (how is his chest possible? HOW?)

"But the representation of male super heroes isn't sexualized like it is for women."

Isn't it? Just because comics and their TV spin offs starring male supers are marketed mainly towards boys doesn't mean it's not sexualized. They market an idealized sexual identity. "If you want to date Lois Lane, be this."

After all, I've read several outcries against shows like Sailor Moon (a spin off from the wildly popular manga series), claiming indecent sexuality in its all-female cast, despite it being marketed entirely to girls.

So let me get this straight.

This is ok for boys 9-12.

But this is not ok for girls 9-12.

"If you want to date Tuxedo Mask, be this."

And here's what I'm getting at here. There's this horrible, repressing notion floating around out there that the mere existence of a female body is automatically sexual. It doesn't even have to be Pamela Anderson shaped. If it's just there, being female, it's automatically sexual. (quick! cover it in a burka!)

Well I have news for the entire human race. If you have a body, congratulations: you are sexual.

Sorry, that's just how it works. So let's stop pretending only half the human population is about sex, and the other half is only about technology and Dr. Pepper 10.

I want comics where even the super heroes are believable. Realistic characters with flaws doing unrealistic things. Let's bring variety to the genre by creating heroes we can identify with, instead of idolize.

But as long as we still have Adonis super dudes, with muscles in places muscles shouldn't exist, and chins that could cut through adamantium, please don't throw such a shit fit over super ladies having super boobs.

DO get angry when they have no personality. When they make stupid poses or say stupid things. When the only aspect of their identity is sex, sex, and more sex (although it certainly works for James Bond).

Let's use this controversy to create something entirely new. Instead of relaunching the same characters (now with even more muscles/boobs/chin dimples!), come up with something unique. Original. I want to see an entire comic series starring a middle aged Spanish-speaking maid fighting crime. Make it happen.

Check out Kate Beaton's "Strong Female Characters" comic here.

Sloth, 49/100

2011-10-08T13:31:00.000-04:00

I picked up the graphic novel Sloth while browsing the library, based on the title and cover art alone. It's kind of an inside joke that if I was an animal in my past life, it would've been a sloth. Attractive, right? No...you can't tell me sloths aren't cute.

Sloth was written and drawn my Gilbert Hernandez, one of the creators of the Love and Rockets series, which unfortunately I'm not very familiar with. This title turned out to be very surreal, almost David Lynch-ian, with characters switching identities, an unreliable timeline, and a giant goat monster in a lemon orchard. The three central characters are able to will themselves in and out of a coma, apparently to escape the doldrums of teenage suburban living.

However, this boring suburb also has a quite a few suburban-legends: murders, bodies buried in the lemon orchard, and a goat that switches identities with intruders. And supposedly that's what happens in the middle of the story. Suddenly the reader is taken into something approaching an alternate universe, where the characters are the same, but their circumstances have changed. Drastically. Question is, is one of them now the goat? Is the goat whoever is wearing the sock cap? How did things change so drastically? What's the meaning behind that psychotic teacher? Why did they yell at that lemon farmer for no reason?

So many questions that, even re-reading most of it again, I still couldn't answer. The story was a puzzle that I don't think would ever form a whole picture. Perhaps the reader is supposed to make the picture on their own. Almost like Inception: entire internet boards could be filled with possible interpretations. But in this case, the vague, open-ended storyline just wasn't as successful or interesting. Even if I could figure out who was switching with who, I'm not sure I would care. There doesn't seem to be a point or focus behind any of it.

But there was one funny scene:

Run away fast. That's a Hannibal Lecter look right there.

Ready Player One, 48/100

2011-10-03T17:00:00.001-04:00

This was probably the geekiest book I've ever read. And I've read a lot of geeky things.

Ernest Cline's Ready Player One is a science fiction novel that unabashedly celebrates it's own genre. I dare you to find another book with as many references to classic video games, comic books, sci-fi/fantasy novels, and film, as this one. Though I'm sure Patton Oswalt's Zombie Spaceship Wasteland is a close second.
Cline's novel also revels in pure 1980s nostalgia: the arcades and pizza parlors, John Hughes films, shag carpeting and wood paneling...so um, pretty much my childhood. Sure, I was more a child of the 90s. But growing up in rural Virginia, we were pretty much 10 years behind the rest of the world anyway. I spent a significant portion of my childhood swinging Pitfall Harry over crocodiles, shooting asteroids, and jumping barrels on the lovely Atari 2600. And don't even get me started on the NES.

Ready Player One is set in an uncomfortably near dystopian future, where humanity escapes the crushing poverty and desolation of their reality by living vicariously in a free world-wide MMPORPG called OASIS. From home they can put on virtual reality equipment, login to OASIS, and live their lives in a virtual world. Think Second Life x1,000,000.

When the designer of OASIS dies, he decides to leave his entire fortune (hundreds of billions) and control over the OASIS to whoever can unlock an easter egg he's hidden inside the game. But it's not going to be easy; unless you're a whiz at 80's pop-culture trivia, can make the highest score possible in Pacman, and know every single line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It's like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, except in this version Mike Teavee would be the winner.

From the publisher's blurb: "part quest novel, part love story, and part virtual space opera set in a universe where spell-slinging mages battle giant Japanese robots, entire planets are inspired by Blade Runner, and flying DeLoreans achieve light speed." Yeah, there you go.

If every book was this fun and addictive, you would never be able to pry me away from my couch. Few books come along that I want to recommend so badly that I can barely contain myself from throwing copies of it at people in the street. So if you're a child of the 80s, the 90s, or at heart, do yourself a favor and pick up this book.

Here are some passages:

I started to figure out the ugly truth as soon as I began to explore the free OASIS libraries. The facts were right there waiting for me, hidden in old books written by people who weren't afraid to be honest. Artists and scientists and philosophers and poets, many of them long dead. As I read the words they'd left behind, I finally began to get a grip on the situation. My situation. Our situation. What most people referred to as "the human condition."

It was not good news.

What would happen if I somehow became rich:

Halliday bought and restored one of the original Deloreans used in Back to the Future films, continued to spend nearly all of his time welded to a computer keyboard, and used his newfound wealth to amass what would eventually become the world's largest private collection of action figures, vintage lunch boxes, and comic books.

Fun facts about Ernest Cline:

He also wrote the screenplay for Fanboys, and is currently working on the screenplay for the film adaptation of Ready Player One. He has a wonderfully geeky website at http://ernestcline.com/. He also does poetry performances, and I would recommend you listen to "Nerd Porn Auteur" (although not at work).

Complete the cycle and play the Ready Player One 8-bit game:

/nerdgasm

Why I love Ursula Le Guin

2011-09-24T13:20:00.000-04:00

From her forward to Tales from Earthsea:

In the years since I began to write about Earthsea I've changed, of course, and so have the people who read the books. All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.

It's unsettling. For all our delight in the impermanent, the entrancing flicker of electronics, we also long for the unalterable. We cherish the old stories for their changelessness. Arthur dreams eternally in Avalon. Bilbo can go "there and back again," and "there" is always the beloved familiar Shire. Don Quixote sets out forever to kill a windmill...So people turn to the realms of fantasy for stability, ancient truths, immutable simplicities.

And the mills of capitalism provide them. Supply meets demand. Fantasy becomes a commodity, an industry.

Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivialises. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. Heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great story-tellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.

What the commodifiers of fantasy count on and exploit is the insuperable imagination of the reader, child or adult, which gives even these dead things life--of a sort, for a while.

Imagination like all living things lives now, and it lives with, from, on true change. Like all we do and have, it can be co-opted and degraded; but it survives commercial and didactic exploitation. The land outlasts the empires. The conquerors may leave desert where there was forest and meadow, but the rain will fall, the rivers will run to the sea. The unstable, mutable, untruthful realms of Once-upon-a-time are as much a part of human history and thought as the nations in our kaleidoscopic atlases, and some are more enduring.

The Postmortal, 46/100

2011-09-23T07:29:00.001-04:00

Was tired of being bombarded with recommendations for Drew Magary's novel The Postmortal through the Shelf Awareness newsletter, and decided to check it out for myself.

The Postmortal is pure speculative fiction. "So," it asks, "what would happen if there was a cure for aging?"

Wow. Let's see. Well it would probably end in nuclear war, right?

Don't it always? (You maniacs! You blew it up! *damns Statue of Liberty to hell*)

Magary takes the idea and runs with it, crafting the story of a man living in the near future who, along with millions of others, receives the "the Cure"; halting permanently the aging process. The author covers nearly every consequence that could present itself in this situation, although successfully keeping it from becoming a "masturbatory idea dump" (a term Magary uses in the epilogue that I loved) through good plotting.

So what are some of the consequences? Overpopulation, overcrowding, resource depletion, class warfare, terrorism, autocracy, slavery, sex trafficking, Kevorkian-style assisted suicide, mass genocide...just all kinds of sunshiney things!

But of course it's going to end up bad. If you consider the idea for more than 5 minutes you can see how horrible it would be. The novel makes you think about what really defines a life (hint: it's death). But the scariest part of the book is that all of the consequences I listed above are not dependent or unique to the idea of human immortality. Overpopulation is here already, even without a "cure." And the aftermath represented by the author is, frankly, terrifying.

This generation hasn't had to sacrifice one bit, and its reward for such callousness is now eternal life. It's the classic American scenario of people wanting everything right now without caring a lick about the long-term. You could excuse it by saying, "Well, that's just the way we are." Well, the way we are is going to cost us everything.

"I think a lot of people mistakenly hoped the cure would end not only death but also the anguish of processing death, of processing finality. I think people thought they would be able to escape that, and the opposite has proven true. They have to spend much longer dealing with their grief.

Oh, but it's not all horrible. There's this too:

The producers of the Saved by the Bell reboot petitioned the governor of California to allow them to administer the cure to the show's teenage stars, so that their characters wouldn't have to graduate in the show. The governor denied the request.

A world where Screech stays young and lovable forever? Where he never turns into a egotistic, perverted asshole? Where the domain dustindiamondisadick.com isn't already taken? Maybe all that apocalypse would be worth it.

Here's a trailer for The Postmortal:

And you know what? Seeing the little blurb from Justin Halpern in that trailer just made me realize something. I read his book Shit My Dad Says several months ago and completely forgot to write anything about it. I gave it as a birthday gift to a friend (sneakily reading it before wrapping it up), so I can't go back and pull quotes from it. But damnit, I'm counting it in the 100 books countdown.

So.

Shit My Dad Says, 47/100

If you want an idea of what it's like, just check out the twitter feed that started it all, @shitmydadsays.

It's pretty much like that, but with context and back story and sans William Shatner.

Everything is Going to be Great, 45/100

2011-09-13T18:07:00.001-04:00

These people. These people with their European tours. Backpacking through Asia. "Finding themselves" by traveling abroad.

How exactly are they affording it?

I somehow managed to travel to Japan for 2 measly weeks after graduation, and it took me 2 years to pay for those 2 weeks. I'd like to make my way to Europe, but damn y'all, I'm rationing toilet paper at this point.

Rachel Shukert's 2nd memoir (she's in her mid-twenties and already has two memoirs, so yeah, she's had some adventures), Everything is Going to be Great: an Underfunded and Overexposed Grand European Tour was an absolutely hilarious read. Filled with sometimes nearly unbelievable tales of sexual escapades (sexcapades), affairs, cultural misunderstanding and uncanny coincidence, you might wonder if this is truly a memoir. Or more like very creative non-fiction. I suppose my life and experience are just so removed from hers, that I can't imagine so many things happening to a person so young. As she says at some point in the book, she feels like she's lived her entire life before the age of 24.

Well, as long as my life stays sheltered here behind my apartment door, buried under a duvet and covered in Cheeto dust, I may as well live vicariously through Shukert's.

And oh, the adventures she has! She travels with a theatre troupe through Zurich and Vienna, ends up in Amsterdam living with two gay roommates (and somehow not having to pay rent), and meets a whole cast of colorful friends, including two vampires and several potheads. Dental emergencies lead to orgies and near-prostitution, stolen bicycles bring about karmic retribution, and yelling "who wants to go to a comedy show?!" outside the Anne Frank house is revealed to be a bad idea.

But you have to admire just how honest Shukert is in regard to revealing her own mistakes and personal faults. There are a million instances reading the book when I wanted to yell "What in the hell are you doing!? Don't go in there! Don't have sex with that person! Run away!" If this were a moralistic Victorian novel, she would have been killed off or forced into prostitution by the second chapter. But it's nice to read something from a female author where she didn't feel the need to censor herself.

In a Wall Street Journal blog post, Shukert talks about this censorship and how it relates to Eat, Pray, Love: a novel which her own is often compared (falsely, in my opinion). She notes:

Women are constantly judged, so we reflexively judge each other. We’re too fat or too thin; too sexy or not sexy enough; too uptight or too lazy, too feminist or not feminist enough. But in our hypercritical judgment, we miss the entire point of feminism, which was not to transform us all into high-achieving super-beings (or sympathetic victims), but about the universal recognition of the fact that women are as fully human as men.

This means accepting, each other, and ourselves, for what we are warts and all.

We are none of us perfect. And that’s what makes us great.

Here here.

Anyway, I have about 5 million passages I want to share with you. You, the internet. Hope you can handle it.

Shukert, attempting to discuss feminism in French with a local whilst inebriated:

"But I have more to be talking. Simone de Beauvoir, she is talking very beautiful about the feminism. But in the true life? She is washing the underpants of Sartre and then she is making of the tears when he is doing the sex with the others of the women... A woman who is true feminist, she is not doing of this. Hear me Benoit! Me, I do not care if you are erotic...but I am not doing the washing of the shit from the underpants of a man!"

I finished the rest of the wine and smashed the empty bottle against the cobblestones, for punctuation. The shattered glass sprayed my legs, leaving a spatter of tiny red spots of blood against my bare skin.

"I am not even washing the underpants of me!"

I know what's wrong with me." I said to the student psychiatrist the university had provided for my care. "Don't think I don't know. My gargantuan sense of entitlement is matched only by my formidable laziness. I have no self-discipline. My eyesight is bad and I hate my boobs. I habitually shoplift small and valueless objects such as non-dairy creamer and pre-made California rolls. I am paranoid, insecure, and pathologically jealous of what other people have--for example, parents who are rich and powerful. I yearn for the approval of others, even though I don't think I like other people very much, apart from the uninterested men with whom I periodically become obsessed. I am addicted to Diet Coke, which I'm told will give me neurological problems and bladder cancer. I'm a terrible hoarder. The only thing I seem able to get rid of is alcohol, which goes down my throat.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman who spends a lot of time alone is going to find herself on the receiving end of all sorts of attention from strange, often sinister, men.

Talking with one of the Dutch vampires:

"Sebastiao and I are not bound by sexual jealousies in the way of mortals. But this girl, I have known her before, in school, and she is listening to the music of Nelly Furtado. I do not believe she is a true Child of Hell."

A backyard is nothing but a little patch of dirt and rocks and sky. And the world is a vast, terrifying and wonderful place, filled with things we don't yet know we need. Nothing comes to us until we leave our little patch of dirt and go find them.

Great, except to leave a patch of dirt for another patch of dirt one needs a patch of money.

The bad things that happen

2011-09-11T23:38:00.000-04:00

You can live with what happens.

There's billions of terror plots! We've pissed off an awful lot of people! We're Americans, that's what we do. If you want to live free and not die, maybe move to Canada. But someone has got to pay for the trouble we've caused all over the world. And after all the press conferences and overmayoring is done, what we'll have left is the old tragedy and response two-step. We'll grieve our own while giving others 100 times more grief. Until we get that the cycle of violence must be broken, terror attacks are just the price of business in America. They can put a camera on every person's head in this great land and still bad things will happen to kind but complicit people. Here's hoping it's me and not you that pays with arms and legs. The only thing we have to fear is the luxury of feeling scared. Commemorate that.

Jim Behrle, Link

But more importantly, you can just LIVE.

Spending your youthful energy on combative, kinetic apathy is a waste. Stuff is AWESOME, GUYS. Something about everything is awesome. Because I live in LA, CA, USA and not other places in the world, I get to write things like “fuck fuck FUCK fuck fuck FUCK” on the Internet (the title of my next blog post). I can condemn Burkas while comfortably wearing a Snuggie (a gateway Burka). I can do an interpretative dance as Hitler for 322 people (suck it, Hitler). I can do whatever I want (sort of) and I can eat whatever I want (not carbs) and be the opposite of dead.

The people who, ten years ago today, flew those planes into the sides of two of the tallest buildings in America had minds that were even smaller than mine (and possibly yours, if you’re wearing a shirt from Threadless Tees). Their worldview was so closed to interpretation that they thought the only answer was a large-scale terrorist attack. I’m not saying Hipsters are Terrorists (though that is a very funny sentiment that I never thought I’d get the chance to write). I am saying that closing your mind to sincerity and praise and appreciation might be the first step in squandering the fucking awesome human condition you possess. Please do not close your mind to the not-small epiphany that epic joy exists.

Megan Amram, Link

Today is a day for remembering. Not just the actual event that happened. Nor the heroic response. And definitely not the all-consuming blind patriotism that followed, resulting in multiple wars and the additional loss of life. But the cause. The people who initiated the terrorist attack 10 years ago, and every terrorist attack in every country before and after, are and were extremely unhappy and closed-minded. They had reason to be unhappy. And there was a reason they were closed-minded.

The thing to remember about today is that you should try your best to live your life with joy, acceptance, tolerance, and understanding. Be the opposite of a terrorist. Understand why bad people do bad things. Understand that your place in the world may have something to do with it. Understand that your actions and attitude have a far-reaching influence.

Yeah, you're free. You have freedom. Don't just defend it. Do something good with it.

The Gospel of Anarchy, 44/100

2011-09-09T16:45:00.001-04:00

Another one off my gigantic currently reading list. Finished Justin Taylor's The Gospel of Anarchy, which up until a few days ago was on sale as a 99 cent ebook from HarperCollins. Apologies! Thought I would finish it before the sale ended so I could tell you about it.

Taylor's novel is about a group of anarchists (punks, hippies, etc.) who become anarChristians -- defiers of authority who somehow end up following the biggest authority of all. The idea itself is really interesting. Even the title brings together two contradictory elements, and many reviewers have admitted they bought the book on title alone.

I had a really difficult time judging just how serious this novel was. The descriptions, thoughts, and actions of the anarchists seemed so much like caricature that I spent the majority of the book thinking it was a parody. Looking back I suppose it was in earnest. And if not a parody, then all the long-winded discussions over philosophy, the bad poetry, the railings over people who actually buy food, the existential conversations with no one...are no longer funny, but just incredibly boring. Like sticking your head into a room of high first-year philosophy majors and being forced to listen to their ramblings. All I'm really hearing is "blah blah the man blah blah bourgeoisie blah blah oh man you should hear them live they're so much better live."

And then the plot. Or the lack thereof. Not that there has to be a plot, but when the door is wide open for a really great one, it's so disappointing when it never emerges. With a group of anarchists forming their own religion, I thought sure it would turn into a story bent on exposing the fallacy behind creating faith. The human faults would shine through and the anarchists themselves would become the rulers, the -archists if you will. Kind of like a religious Animal Farm. But no..

Instead the novel takes itself way too seriously, and the plot becomes seriously muddled when Taylor throws in some supernatural events -- visions, pre-cognition,...spontaneous combustion -- affirming the religion and making the reader go "huh whaa now?"

That isn't to say the novel was a waste of time. Taylor's writing is masterful and his style unique. He flows in and out of tense and POV mid-paragraph, and he makes it work. It's a style I've never really encountered and I like it a lot. I have a feeling I'll be checking out his short story collection, Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, soon.

And I really liked one of the final revelations he provides: one of the characters decides to vote in the presidential election, going against her anarchist roots, and the fact that "voting is more than a waste of time, it's irresponsible." Turns out it's the 2000 election. And she votes for Nader. And she's in Gainsville, Florida. D'OH. I'm certain this fact is meant to expose the real theme behind the book. But I'll have to think over it.

What I DO know is ever since reading the first chapter I've been inexplicably craving a dumpster-dived vegan falafel pita sandwich. Despite how unappetizing the description of it was. I'm no stranger to dumpster finds -- they make up half of my apartment furnishings -- but I draw the line at food. Craving denied.

Finally, here's a passage I liked:

Thomas's plate is blue. He passes through the kitchen, grabs three beers from the case in the fridge--all with his left hand, the bottlenecks between his fingers--and takes his spoils back to his room, hip-bumping the cracked door wide, then nudging it closed behind himself with a foot. He puts everything down except for one beer, twists the cap off, and lets the little puckered button fall. He turns his stereo on, punches PLAY on the tape deck, and sort of half sits half drops to his own floor while the speakers hiss. He leans his back against his bed, reaches up behind his head and feels around for the plate. Maybe-Cindy didn't give him a fork. Ah fuck it. Poison Idea is singing "Death Wish Kids" at stun-gun volume and Thomas is eating liberated cake with his bare hands.

Image by Kevin Thomas from The Rumpus.

No one belongs here more than you, 43/100

2011-09-08T19:51:00.001-04:00

Finished Miranda July's short story collection, No one belongs here more than you. Isn't the cover nice? I got the yellow and black version from the library and the circ desk clerk asked if it had something to do with the Watchmen.

Miranda July is a filmmaker and performance artist in addition to a writer, which I didn't know anything about until...well until now. I youtube'd her last night and watched some clips from her film Me and You and Everyone We Know. One clip was called "poop back and forth forever." Search for it if you dare.

Here are some excerpts I liked:

From "The Shared Patio"

Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person's face as you pass on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It's okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise.

From "The Boy from Lam Kien"

I shut my door and listened to the sucking sound. It was the sound of Earth hurtling away from the apartment at a speed too fast to imagine. And as all of creation pulled away in this tornado-like vortex, it laughed--the sarcastic laugh of something that has never had to try.

But my favorite story, and maybe one of my favorite things I've read yet this year, was "This Person." Wish I could share the entire thing. But even though I can't, apparently Amazon can. If the following passage tickles your fancy (or anything else of yours for that matter), click hyeah and go into the preview. Page 53, MFers.

From "This Person"

Someone is getting excited. Somebody somewhere is shaking with excitement because something tremendous is about to happen to this person. This person has dressed for the occasion. This person has hoped and dreamed and now it is really happening and this person can hardly believe it. But believing is not an issue here, the time for faith and fantasy is over, it is really really happening. It involves stepping forward and bowing. Possibly there is some kneeling, such as when one is knighted. One is almost never knighted. But this person may kneel and receive a tap on each shoulder with a sword. Or, more likely, this person will be in a car or a store or under a vinyl canopy when it happens. Or online or on the phone. It could be an e-mail re: your knighthood. Or a long, laughing , rambling phone message in which every person this person has ever known is talking on a speakerphone and they are all saying, You have passed the test, it was all just a test, we were only kidding, real life is so much better than that. This person is laughing out loud with relief and playing the message back to get the address of the place where every person this person has ever known is waiting to hug this person and bring her into the fold of life. It is really exciting, and it's not just a dream, it's real.

Pics via http://noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com

Internet Lovelies

2011-09-07T03:08:00.000-04:00

Isn’t it funny that this is what happens to us? That even if you love books, if you start to dedicate your life to them, a light goes out, somehow. You come to know them with your brain rather than your soul. Maybe it’s just one more sad example of how you’ve grown up... But it isn’t the least bit of hyperbole for me to say that as an adult who is a voracious reader, I know that I am going to spend the rest of my life not quite managing to love a book the way I loved Anne [of Green Gables], to read it the way I did the first, second, thirty-fifth time. I know that the rest of my reading life is just a thinly-disguised effort to forge a path back to that, but I’ll never get there.

Michelle Dean, Link

using an exclamation point means never having to spell things right.

Adam Robinson, Link

Novellas are like little yummy store samples of the great cheeses of fiction.

Lisa @ BaffledBooks, Link

Fiction will not hasten the decline and fall of the American Empire. A Congressional inquiry into the president's reading habits isn't necessary. Novels are neither a sedative nor a terrorist plot. They are stories about how we have lived, live now and may live in the future, offering perspectives a few more politicians and pundits might consider exploring.

Robert Gray, Link

So it's on my mind this week not only how much I owe to other writers, but also how much I owe it to myself to be selective in what I read, especially as I age and have less time to indulge in books. I used to read everything that came my way, start to finish, but lately I look at the stack of over 50 to-be-read books in my home, and don't feel motivated to open most of them. I am craving a new conversation, or a different one than the ones I have been having in the last few years, and I think it is the writer in me more than the reader that is craving inspiration. While I do read for escape, these days escape-reading bores me, and instead I want to be astounded by the creativity in what I read.

Jessica Goodfellow, Link

Things and stuff:

I'm behind on the 100 books thing, but it's not like I'm not reading anything. Actually, it's more like I'm reading too much. At least that's what I'll tell myself. Here are the books I'm currently in the middle of reading:

The Gospel of Anarchy, Justin Taylor
Bed, Tao Lin
American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
No One Belongs Here More Than You, Miranda July
The Other Wind, Ursula Le Guin
The Magician King, Lev Grossman
Mr. Peanut, Adam Ross

These are all the things I'm reading ALL AT ONE TIME. Not to mention the things I gave up on reading just last week. Snuff by Palahniuk and Freya of the Seven Isles by Joseph Conrad. One was all "porn, boobies, blah blah," and the other was all "sailors, damsels, yar yar." No time for blah or yar.

Other stuff:

Adam Ross, mentioned above, will be reading at my alma mater this month! Pretty cool. I'll be going, granted I can drive from work to Hollins in 15 minutes. Who'd of thunk working in a library could be such a literary cock block.

Lydia Davis will also be reading there in December! Just when I start wishing I lived in NYC or Portland just for all the literary goings on, things start happening in Roanoke.

But no, I still want to move to Portland.

during my nervous breakdown i want to have a biographer present, 42/100

2011-08-31T15:53:00.000-04:00

Lines I enjoyed from Brandon Scott Gorrell's book of poetry, during my nervous breakdown i want to have a biographer present:

from 'giant destructive moth':

i said i want to move into the internet
you said let's do that
i said where do you go in
i said does it have sun chips

from 'face annihilation':

today i wil go to work
i'll hardly ever move my body
then it will be time to leave
sometime tonight i'll try not to get drunk
sometime tonight i'll walk to the store, buy alcohol, and think 'what about the homeless people
sometime tonight i'll get drunk

from 'today i empathized with the top of a tower':

this is what happens
when you seclude yourself and become alienated
you sit on your bed
and receive validation from words on a computer screen
you feel extremely excited and jump off your bed

If you want to read more of Brandon Scott Gorrell's writing, check out his contributions to Thought Catalog, where he is also an editor. And really, you should be checking out Thought Catalog anyway. Because it's incredible. It's the only website I really take pleasure in visiting anymore.

And here's the back cover to DMNBIWTHABP, which is the best ever.

Favorite Summer Read

2011-08-26T11:59:00.000-04:00

Friend and co-worker (and author!) Cherie Reich is holding a Favorite Summer Reads Blogfest over at her blog Surrounded by Books Reviews. I've certainly read enough this summer -- more than I ever have. Despite not taking any vacations. NONE. It failed to be a summer of beach-going, sandal-wearing, or skinny dipping (everyone rejoices), instead turning into a summer of me sitting in my air conditioned apartment killing zombies in video games. (note: the sheer amount of violence I have vicariously inflicted upon the grim CGI bodies of the undead should be enough to put me on some kind of FBI watchlist by now. Chainsaws, guys. CHAINSAWS.)

So none of what I have read in the past 3 months really strikes me as something I'll remember years from now having read in the summer. At least that's my definition of a summer read (or any season read for that matter): a book that for whatever reason ties itself to the period of time you're reading it. Example: Anne Rice books are late winter books. I read the vampire chronicle books during the most depressing part of the year, kickstarting a spiral of depression that culminated in me dreaming I was trying to bury myself alive. JOY!

There are other books I specifically remember reading in the summers of past: there's The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society that I read last year, Alex Garland's The Beach, which I read at the...beach, Harry Potter rereads before the July films, and rereads of Jane Eyre and The Hobbit in high school.

But the one that sticks out the most in my mind is reading Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness one summer at the beach. It's a fairly odd choice, being a science fiction novel set on a planet called WINTER. Let's just say the descriptions of chilly landscapes and Antarctic weather were as good as AC in that horrible beachy heat.

This was the book that got me back into reading science fiction. Telling the story of an envoy to the planet Winter, we follow his interactions with its race of androgynes, their government, religion, and civilization. The entire novel is a study of gender, society, power, and human relationships; even when those relationships aren't between humans. Everything that happens on the fictional planet of Winter is a finger pointing directly back at Earth. The goal of all good speculative fiction.

I'll have to do a reread of this fantastic novel so I can list some passages. But don't wait for that. Go read it now. I think it's the only book I could recommend to positively everyone. No "well if you fancy aliens you might like this," or "stay away if you hate Star Trek." If you like printed words on pages, then you should probably read this book.

And now I'm going to bury you under an AVALANCHE (pun) of awesome book covers!

I have to admit I don't remember there being a guy on fire waving a lightning bolt. Guess I really should reread it.

Parnassus on Wheels, 41/100

2011-08-24T13:50:00.001-04:00

And here enters what could possibly be the cutest book ever written.

Not only is Christopher Morley's novella Parnassus on Wheels a book about books, it's a book about bookselling. A romantic comedy about bookselling! And there's a dog! All kinds of cuteness.

The story recounts the tale of a middle-aged woman, who, tired of taking care of her brother, the farm, and the house for so many years, decides to go on her own adventure. She buys a traveling caravan used as a bookstore on wheels (think bookmobile), and sets off to sell books to the farm families and country folk along the road.

It's supremely funny and cute, and made me long to just throw my collection in the back of a covered wagon and hit the road. Turns out the novella is a prequel to Morley's longer work, The Haunted Bookshop, which has now been added to my wishlist.

Anthony over at the blog Time's Flow Stemmed suggests that if the story was turned into film it should star Hattie Jacques and Robin Cook. Which is spot on. But for some reason I kept picturing Helen Mirren and Jim Broadbent. Horribly wrong casting based on the characters' descriptions, of course. But once I'm set on a visualization of a character, it sticks. And here's the thought process that went behind it:

Description of man w/ red beard manning a caravan named Parnassus --> Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus --> circus --> Zidler from Moulin Rouge wore that ring leader outfit --> has a red beard --> Jim Broadbent is now and forever this character.

Description of overweight 40-ish farm woman --> I like Helen Mirren --> the character is Helen Mirren.

I will never be hired as a casting director.

Of course being a book about books, there are plenty of quotes about books. Which I'm sure all the book bloggers of the world have posted. Book book bookish bookity book.

When you sell a man a book you don't sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue--you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night--there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean.

It's all right for college presidents to draw up their five-foot shelves of great literature, and for the publishers to advertise sets of their Linoleum Classics, but what the people need is the good, homely, honest stuff--something that'll stick to their ribs--make them laugh and tremble and feel sick to think of the littleness of this popcorn ball spinning in space without ever even getting a hot-box!

Any clue to what a hot-box is? Hesitant to google it. At least while at work.

You can buy the novella from Melville House, or read it for free at Project Gutenberg.

One Day, 40/100

2011-08-22T16:22:00.001-04:00

You guys. I really liked this book.

I've been getting pretty annoyed with reader reviews lately. The more popular a book is (or more specifically, best-selling), the more annoying the reviews are. Reading the reviews for The Help made me practically sick to my stomach -- the positive and the negative. Even my own review for it! I wouldn't have written one except I vowed to write something for everything I read this year. AND be honest about it, which will probably cost me some "cool" points in the long run. If I had any to begin with at all.

I started reading online reviews for David Nicholls' One Day and got the same feeling. People giving it one star reviews, while admitting they hadn't even finished it. People giving it five stars and saying "OMG it's sooooo ROMANTIC!!1!" Just...GUH. So I stopped. From now on I'm only reading reviews of vague novels or things published pre-1923.

Anyway. One Day was super funny. That's the first thing that comes to mind. To me it isn't a romance novel, the same way I've never considered Wuthering Heights to be a romance novel (at least not with a lowercase 'r'). It's a story about a very strong bond between two people, and how it, and they, change over time.

Revisiting the two characters on the same day every year for 20 years, we see the ups and downs of their lives, how their personalities change, how their relationship changes, etc etc. Most importantly it's realistic. There's no fluff. No fantasy. My only annoyance was with the end, which was predictable and felt like a cop-out for the writer. Again, don't read the reviews unless you want to a big batch of spoilers.

Then again, we all know what it means when we say "I didn't like the ending." Or "watch out for spoilers." You know what it means. Now you know the ending of the story. I don't have to say anything except "something happens," and you know exactly what that something is.* That's why it's so ANNOYING when novels end this way! Take heed, writers!

So anyway, that should be my last book clubbish read for this month. I'll be seeing the film sometime this week. Here are some great passages from the book that will give you a much better idea of what it is actually like, a lot more than what a review could accomplish:

...Gary Nutkin, our director, wants me to devise a show for infant schools about Apartheid. With PUPPETS for fuck's sake. Six months in a Transit on the M6 with a Desmond Tutu marionette on my lap. I might give that one a miss. Besides, I've written this two-woman play about Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson called 'Two Lives' (either that or 'Two Depressed Lesbians'). Maybe I'll put that on in a pub-theatre somewhere. Once I'd explained to Candy who Virginia Woolf was, she said that she really, really wanted to play her, but only if she can take her top off, so that's the casting sorted. I'll be Emily Dickinson, and keep my top on. I'll reserve you tickets.

'Fat girl,' she thought, 'stupid fat girl' this being one of the slogans currently playing in her head, along with 'A Third of Your Life is Gone' and 'What's the Point of Anything?'

Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believe to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationary.

Isn't she meant to have a close circle of kooky friends to help her get through all this? Shouldn't she be sitting on a low baggy sofa with six or seven attractive zany metropolitans, isn't that what city life is meant to be like? But either they live two hours away or they're with families or boyfriends, and thankfully in the absence of kooky pals, there is the off-licence called, confusingly, depressingly, Booze'R'Us.

* Other novels where "something happens."

Mockingjay
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
Harry Potter, books 4-7
Bridge to Terabithia
Where the Red Fern Grows
Pretty much everything Nicholas Sparks has ever written

Why can't that "something" just be like a pizza party or an orgy or something. Come on guys, surprise me.

First Love, 39/100

2011-08-18T22:31:00.000-04:00

The novella First Love was my introduction to Ivan Turgenev, having never read much from the Russian Greats.

As the title suggests, the story is about love. First love! And all the heartbreak, silliness, and tragedy that comes with it. The protagonist, 16-year old Vladimir Petrovich, falls in love with his slightly older neighbor, who in true 19th century fashion is being courted by like ten other guys. Like all teenagers frustrated and in love, he becomes jealous and angsty, even to the point where he hides in a garden at midnight, planning to stab a mystery rival. Which sounds serious, but was actually pretty hilarious. When he finds out who has stolen the heart of sweet Zinaida, it's a huge surprise (well, for him -- the reader can figure it out fairly easily a few pages in).

This is the first novella I've read that I really wish was a full-length novel. As a 124 page read it works, but it seems like so much is missing. A lot of questions left unanswered and perspectives unexplored. What was the point of having Zinaida be from a "disgraced" royal lineage? Why/how did she fall in the love with...the person she fell in love with? And he with her? This wasn't like Mathilda, which I can't even fathom as a full-length tome (can you imagine how many more times we'd have to read the word despair? Alas!). Even though I now know the story, if First Love was lengthened into a 300+ novel I would absolutely read it.

You can buy the novella from Melville House, or read it for free here.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, 38/100

2011-08-18T08:00:00.002-04:00

Not overly creative with the book covers, were they?

So after the success that was reading The Help, I decided to read the other book club fav that hit the screens over the weekend. But I should have trusted my initial instinct and never read Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan.

The premise of the book, or at least what I thought was the premise prior to reading, is interesting enough. Two women, separated under an oppressive patriarchal and Confucian society, bend the rules by writing to each other in a secret language, concealing their forbidden friendship. Then you read the book and find out the men can actually read the "secret" language, they just don't give a fuck. And the two women live like a mile apart. And they don't really write very much to each other. And their friendship isn't forbidden, but encouraged. In fact it was arranged for them, like an arranged wedding. UM, WHY WOULD I WANT TO READ THIS.

Guilty of Mary Shelley's crime in Mathilda, See throws tragic event after tragic event at the reader, without ever making us actually feel for the characters. As if by throwing as much plot at us as possible, we would just HAVE to emote for these women. There are two plot twists in the story, and I could see them from a million miles away. It also had a strange generational thing going on in the plot, paralleling the structure of Wuthering Heights.

I don't know, guys. I just wasted a lot of time reading it.

If there's one good thing I have to say about it, it's that the novel was better than the film. The film managed to take out all of the parts I actually liked, leaving behind an empty shell of WTF. Just 120 minutes of Bingbing Li making sad faces.

Why are they in modern Shanghai? Nothing makes sense. And Hugh Jackman is somehow in it. I don't understand anything anymore.

The Help, 37/100

2011-08-17T12:01:00.000-04:00

So normally I try to stay away from book club books. Anything that seems like Oprah would recommend it. But what I've found is, whenever I read a book clubbish book...I usually end up liking it.

And what makes up a book club book? They're consistently grounded in reality, historical or present fiction (although usually historical), and have a political, didactic, or inspirational message to convey. The writing is never too experimental, guaranteeing a large audience. The historical ones are well-researched, but still fluff the details for the sake of the plot. And are always, ALWAYS, about people and how they relate to each other. Is that so bad?

The heart and purpose behind every book club pick isn't the plot, but an attempt to enter and understand the lives of the characters; regardless of how removed our own experiences are from theirs. This seems good to me.

I don't presume to think that I know what it really felt like to be a black woman in Mississippi, especially in the 1960s. I don't think it is something any white woman on the other end of a black woman's paycheck could ever truly understand. But trying to understand is vital to our humanity.

Kathryn Stockett

I read Kathryn Stockett's The Help, after months of avoiding it, because the film adaptation was opening soon. And if there's one thing I can't resist, it's a book-to-film adaptation. I'm endlessly fascinated by the transformation that takes place from page to screen. Sometimes appalled by the results, or elated, but always fascinated.

Stockett's novel is a book club darling. It follows all the rules. It has its flaws. It tries to root itself so deeply in the early 1960s, with all of the allusions to historical events and pop-culture references, that it becomes too wide of a focus. It becomes a book trying to account for the entire civil rights movement of that period, when it should have narrowed its focus. And the characters, however hilarious they are, boil down to stereotypes. They are caricatures of the people they represent. Every single one of them, black and white.

It was a great idea for a novel, and it could have been better. But I laughed and cried with the characters, was compelled by the story, gave the book 4 stars on goodreads, and paid to see the movie opening night. So who's the sucker. At the end of the day those 5 million people who bought the book have read and learned about racial prejudice and the civil rights movement in the US.

Like Jessa Crispin noted in this essay defending Elizabeth Gilbert:

Like a lot of people who care about books and writing and sentence structure, I was initially horrified at the success at Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Then I realized what it meant: 80 million people read a book about the removal of femininity from the Catholic Church, about how Jesus liked women and prostitutes and screw-ups and freaks, about how the Bible was edited by men in power, about how Jesus' divinity was not universally accepted. They read the book, and now it's in their brains, like a vaccination against patriarchal monotheism, even if they don't do anything with the information.

Oh, and how I love Dan Brown books. Every badly-written, historically inaccurate sentence. Don't judge me.

Not many quoteables, but here's a snippet I loved:

When you're not making mimeographs or fixing your boss's coffee, look around, investigate, and write. Don't waste your time on the obvious things. Write about what disturbs you, particularly if it bothers no one else.

The Hound of the Baskervilles, 36/100

2011-08-12T11:02:00.000-04:00

My first Sherlock Holmes story!

No, I have never read any Arthur Conan Doyle until now. Or, gasp, even knew the plot of what's considered his greatest work, The Hound of the Baskervilles. I have been trapped under a rock for 25 years. I apologize.

So not knowing the story, I had an enjoyable time trying to piece together the mystery. Would I have still enjoyed it had I known the outcome? Yes, because Doyle's characters are interesting and hilarious. The banter between Holmes and Watson made me laugh out on more than one occasion.

"And the dog?"

"Has been in the habit of carrying this stick behind his master. Being a heavy stick the dog has held it tightly by the middle, and the marks of his teeth are very plainly visible. The dog's jaw, as shown in the space between these marks, is too broad in my opinion for a terrier and not broad enough for a mastiff. It may have been—yes, by Jove, it is a curly-haired spaniel."

He had risen and paced the room as he spoke. Now he halted in the recess of the window. There was such a ring of conviction in his voice that I glanced up in surprise.

"My dear fellow, how can you possibly be so sure of that?"

"For the very simple reason that I see the dog himself on our very door-step.

Having finally read a Sherlock Holmes adventure, it makes me remember a graduate student I knew back in school. He was OBSESSED with Arthur Conan Doyle. He wore tweed suits to class, with with a bow tie, and carried a brief case. If he had ever walked in wearing a flap hat or smoking a pipe I would've lost it. Regardless, it made me feel particularly juvenile/frumpy in my jeans and Tool tee-shirt. Everyday I resisted the urge to just walk up and casually ask him what mystery he was working on, or if he suspected the butler.

So if you want to check out CSI: Creepy Wind-Swept Moors edition, I suggest buying the book from Melville House, or reading it for free at Project Gutenberg.

Lady Susan, 35/100

2011-08-04T14:54:00.000-04:00

Scandal! Drama! Hilarity!

I needed something fun after reading two novellas in a row narrated by sad, dying people.

Jane Austen's Lady Susan covers themes familiar to those who've read her novels: marriage, class, social mores and manners. But this time the heroine is an anti-heroine. A wicked woman and master of words who uses her charm to get what she wants. And what she wants is to find a husband for herself and for her daughter -- by any means necessary.

This was a really fun read. Austen is a master of language, and forms the personalities of the characters perfectly just by what they say and write. The novella is done is an epistolary format, which is perfect for this story. The reader sees how the voice of a character changes depending on who they're addressing. The entire time we get to see the true, horrid personality of Lady Susan through her letters to a friend, while the other characters can only guess. A deception that will echo itself in the character of Wickham later on.

The novella was written in Austen's late teens, making it one of her earliest attempts at writing. However, it wasn't published until 1871, around 50 years after her death. The novella format gets no respect, no respect at all.

You can buy Lady Susan from Melville House, or read it for free at Project Gutenberg.

Mathilda, 34/100

2011-08-03T17:00:00.001-04:00

Finished Mary Shelley's novella Mathilda, #2 for the Art of the Novella Challenge. This may be one of the most Romantic books I've ever read. Romantic with a big R, not a little one. It's so packed full of feelings, melodramatic dialogues, and rainy moors, you'll be convinced Lord Byron is standing directly behind you.

In Mathilda, the title character narrates from her deathbed the tragic story of her life. Having lost her mother at birth, her father leaves her in the care of a cold aunt and disappears for 16 years. He returns, only to eventually confess his incestuous love for her, and ashamedly commit suicide.

Orphans and incest and suicide, oh my!

It's no wonder that Shelley's publisher, her father, refused to publish it and never returned the manuscript. It wasn't found and published until 1959.

I love a good depressing book, but it has to actually BE depressing. If the author is simply trying to convince us to be depressed and it isn't working, that isn't a good sign.

From a review of Mathilda on LibraryThing

The reason I quoted from the above review is that, despite how the plot summary sounds, it's actually a pretty droll story. Not once did I really feel sad for the characters. Possibly because the entire time they were trying to tell me in excruciating detail exactly how sad THEY were.

I did a word count, and here is how often the following words were used in the story:

Alas -- 24
Agony -- 11
Sorrow -- 28
Misery -- 26
Grief -- 48
Bitter -- 30
Tears -- 50
Despair -- 52

And last but not least, the words death (59), die (64), or dead (23) were used for a combined total of 146 times! The book is only 144 pages long. Alas!

Not to mention some of the most exorbitantly flowery descriptions of depression you'll ever come across. My favorite line: "Medusa head of Misery." That's Misery with a capital M, people.

Perhaps I'm being too insensitive. After all, Mathilda, who is "fed by tears, and nourished under the dew of grief," was supposed to represent Shelley herself. In fact the only thing I really found interesting about the story were its autobiographical elements. No, there wasn't an incestuous relationship between her and her father (that we know of), but some of the details and character elements match her life and her family story. Also, the novella was written almost immediately after the deaths of her two very young children. I'd probably write something pretty emo too.

Even though I didn't care for it much, I'm still glad I read it. I'm interested in all things Shelley. And it was a bit of a change-up to read something with so much description of feeling and emotion, when nowadays all 144 pages would've been reduced to an emoticon in a text message.

:*(

You can buy the novella from Melville House, or read it for free at Project Gutenberg.

Skim, 32/100

2011-08-01T22:37:00.002-04:00

Why do I keep reading things set in the early 90s?

I swear I'm not consciously doing it.

Finished Mariko and Jillian Tamaki's graphic novel Skim, which was my bookstore find I mentioned the other day. A gorgeous gorgeous book.

Here's what it's about, in bullet point format, because it's too hot for complete sentences today:

A bi-racial girl
Cliques
Suicide
Homosexuality
Wicca
Friendship
Cool English teachers
Stuff
Things

I don't know. It's just good, okay? Read it already.

Maybe book blogging isn't the right path for me. Can't I just live-tweet while I'm reading? I would have absolutely no followers but it'd be fun as hell.

Here's one part that made me laugh. And also makes me think of Daria.

The Lifted Veil, 33/100

2011-08-01T18:00:00.002-04:00

So George Eliot wrote a gothic-horror/science fiction piece? I can tell I'm going to like this novella challenge.

The Lifted Veil is quite a departure from Eliot's other work. Written only a few months after Adam Bede, it was at first rejected by her publisher. However it now seems to be getting the critical attention it deserves.

The story follows Latimer, a self-described sensitive poet who also happens to be clairvoyant -- he can see visions of the future, as well as into the minds of others. He becomes enamored with the only woman whose mind he cannot penetrate, a plot device that's been thrown around lately. Twilight and that Nicholas Cage movie comes to mind.

The interesting part is that he sees a vision which reveals her true malevolent nature, and the unhappiness their marriage will bring them both, but he does nothing to keep the events from unfolding:

It is an old story, that men sell themselves to the tempter, and sign a bond with their blood, because it is only to take effect at a distant day; then rush on to snatch the cup their souls thirst after with an impulse not the less savage because there is a dark shadow beside them for evermore. There is no short cut, no patent tram-road, to wisdom: after all the centuries of invention, the soul’s path lies through the thorny wilderness which must be still trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time.

The gothic-horror and suspense comes in bits and pieces, including a reanimation scene that brings to mind Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker.

Here are some other passages I marked:

I read Plutarch, and Shakespeare, and Don Quixote by the sly, and supplied myself in that way with wandering thoughts, while my tutor was assuring me that “an improved man, as distinguished from an ignorant one, was a man who knew the reason why water ran downhill.” I had no desire to be this improved man; I was glad of the running water; I could watch it and listen to it gurgling among the pebbles, and bathing the bright green water-plants, by the hour together. I did not want to know why it ran; I had perfect confidence that there were good reasons for what was so very beautiful.

We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.

Buy a copy from Melville House here, or read it for free at Project Gutenberg.

2011-08-01T08:00:00.005-04:00

Melville House Publishing is running a novella reading challenge for August. I'm pretty far behind in my goal of reading 100 books this year, so I plan on joining in.

All the books are part of their Art of the Novella series, which includes 42 classic works. The authors are renowned, but you may not recognize the titles. Lady Susan by Jane Austen?

There are a few different levels of participation:

Curious – Read 1 novella
Fascinated — Read 3 novellas
Captivated – Read 6 novellas
Passionate — Read 9 novellas
Mesmerized – Read 15 novellas
Obsessed – Read 21 novellas
Fanatical – Read 27 novellas
Unstoppable — Read 33 novellas
Bibliomaniac — Read all 42 novellas

I'm looking to do the "Obsessed" level. I figure 21 is doable. So wish me luck! You may be seeing a review by this afternoon...

Drinking at the Movies, 31/100

2011-07-26T22:06:00.000-04:00

Finished Julia Wertz's terrific graphic memoir Drinking at the Movies, which I found by surprise at the library. I always populate my amazon wishlist with books I think I'll never come across in real life. What a surprise when you just so happen to walk up on one, sitting there with it's real cover in all its glossy splendor, which you've only seen in pixels for so long. It's happened to me twice this week. First I found Drinking, then I came across the graphic novel Skim, which has been in my wishlist since 2009, in a local bookstore. See! Libraries and bookstores aren't dead! You just...you just might have to wait two or more years to get what you want. No biggie.

I can relate to the main character in Drinking at the Movies more than I care to admit. So I don't live in Brooklyn. But compared to where I grew up, my current digs make me feel like I am. This comic is self deprecation at its finest, and I identified with every instance of laziness, booziness, frumpiness and introversion. Overall it was super funny and cute (cute in a profanity-laden, poop joke sorta way). And yet touching when it needed to be.

The sad thing is she officially has more food in her fridge than I do. But I have more pajama pants! (wait, shouldn't be proud of that)

The last time I drunk netflix'd I ordered Big Man Japan. When it arrived I decided to watch it drunk, and what proceeded was one of the most profoundly surreal and confusing experiences of my life.

You can check out more of Julia Wertz's comics at, where else, JuliaWertz.com.

A Visit from the Goon Squad, 30/100

2011-07-25T23:05:00.001-04:00

Is it a novel? Is it a short story collection? No one knows. But Jennifer Egan's book A Visit from the Goon Squad IS the 2011 Pulitzer Prize winner.

I've been see-sawing on this book. Gorgeously written. But maybe a bit too "gotcha." I found myself saying out loud "this is completely unbelievable," and my usual reading material covers the adventures of wizards and dragons.

Egan's book is a collection of shorts, each with recurring characters, which blurs the line between novel and story collection. Where the genius comes in is in the structure. Each chapter takes us to a different POV, focusing on a different character, and to what appears to be a random point in the ultimate timeline. The chapters aren't chronological, which some reviewers have found a bit confusing and jarring, but which I found made the stories infinitely more interesting. (If you're reading it and are having some trouble piecing the timeline together, check out this rundown in questionland).

My beef came with how Egan ended many of the chapters. In several of them, she would insert a one-two punch to wrap it up -- making some revelation about a character's future that takes us away from the current time and POV into an almost omniscient POV -- which IS jarring, and made me want to stop reading altogether.

Ex: That nice chapter you just read about the boy and his father? Well, guess what, the boy kills himself when he gets older. KA-CHOW. The end. Next chapter!

Nevermind that a later chapter covers this (and much better, by the way).

But besides the unnecessary jumpiness inside the individual shorts, the structure was genius. In A Visit from the Goon Squad the goon is time. And with every page we're shown how we change over the years. How we're not the same person we were in 1992, or in chapter 3, or on page 59. When you see the change gradually, chronologically, the impact isn't as noticeable. But if there was a book of your life, and you read chapter 7 first, then chapter 2, then the backcover blurb...just how different would it look.

I didn't mark any passages. However there was one chapter that stood out in particular, "Great Rock and Roll Pauses," -- being made up entirely of PowerPoint slides. If you have a soft spot for music nerdom, charts and graphs, or Microsoft Office products, here's a video of the entire chapter:

Potterage

2011-07-14T14:55:00.000-04:00

"Harry Potter via Che Guevara" by Tao Lin, Link

It's the end of an era!

Unless, of course, Harry Potter goes the way of Star Wars and continues making squintillions of dollars through toys, prequels, etc. I mean, it has it's on theme park already.

I'll be at the midnight showing tonight. It's going to be an all out nerd partay!

So here are some Potterish things on the internet to help celebrate.

There's a Kate Beaton comic, showing the adventures of Tiny Hermione.

For anyone who's all like "what's a Harry Potter?", there's a comic chronicling the entire series.

Then there's what the film series would like if included in the Criterion collection. Fancy!

And here's an excellent video that I couldn't recommend more. It will make any fan squeal just a little bit.

Be sure to check out genrocks' other videos as well. She has a mash-up of Fight Club and the Britney Spears song "Circus", and it WORKS.

Internet Lovelies

2011-07-06T16:55:00.010-04:00

Hope everyone had a great 4th of July. And for all the Canadians, hope you had a great Canada Day. There's a Kate Beaton comic for you as well. I spent America's birthday on my couch sick with food poisoning, watching 1776 on TV. Seeing Mr. Feeny run about in tights and sing of American independence is jarring but enjoyable. I also started David McCullough's bestselling biography of John Adams. But now may not be the best time to start a 750 page biography of a colonial icon. Although it's really absorbing so far.

Here are some internet quotes for all you independent people out there.

Minimalism as a productive style can be very affective, alarming and satisfying, but I don’t think there ever was a pure strain of it. For a time, it was just a kettle into which many a strange fish were flung. Now with America’s miniaturization if not irrelevance in the world, it might return to the short story in grim and freshened renewal. Certainly the days of the giddy blowhard are over. I hope.

Joy Williams, Link

Maybe life is one giant disorganized flash mob, a cute point that is still being made. A 6.77 billion people fucked up flash mob without a clear recipient. Some people go to the movies, some girls go to Japan, some OD on heroin, some steal their mom’s BMW, and some guys walk to Walgreen’s for shampoo (I had hair then) at 7:42 pm on a Friday night, the night this apparently really good movie was opening, and decide to walk 3 miles to the Boardwalk, somewhat masochistically in flip flops, entering the ocean, until the coldness bites his shins, and he hears the effortless grasp of waves recoiling back into the ocean, the hiss of its waters seeping into the sand, and the chalky cosmic zit of the moon saying I have let you see this. I think I kept going back because I needed an edge of this world. Night will make the water black, cola. There’s no point in truth because we are only eyes.

Jimmy Chen, Link

wish i had a crowd of spectators like that bro on Man vs Food in here with me rooting while i refresh Facebook and lay on the floor

@blakebutler

Every time I get on Facebook.

Status Update: I may not be living The American Dream like you, but I do have a degree from a private liberal arts university, and that is where I learned that while the possibilities granted by freedom may not always lead to a Successful Life, they do often result in a satisfying sense of superiority. Unlike nearly everyone I graduated high school with, I remain unencumbered by children, a spouse, or the e-moans of e-animal-husbandry on Farmville. Therefore, feelings of superiority arise from knowledge of the following freedoms: I am not forced to explain to anyone why looking at politician/ celebrity dick pics online is not the same as cheating; I can travel to developing countries plagued with women’s rights/ human trafficking problems without worrying that my inevitable kidnapping will devastate anyone and/ or become the basis for a sappy Lifetime movie; etc.

CJ Hallman, Link

On writing with internet access:

that kind of feed of the surrounding world can be rejuvenating, even while it eats your time. I don’t know, I like to have the onslaught of things coming at my head, and then write in streams of focus and click back out, have somewhere to go and not slog through writing endlessly. It’s like a perpetual reset button, though it can get the better of you if you let it, I imagine. If I didn’t have that set up at this point, like I was writing in a log cabin, I would feel claustrophobic and antsy and weird, whereas the internet lets me feel like I’m in a much bigger room, even if the room is idiotic.

Blake Butler, Link

like my best friend geoff, we see each other mayyyyyyybe once a month despite living close, usually less, but we’ve had this intense email chain going since 2002, have probably exchanged about 1000+ printed pages a year, and that’s a really satisfying interaction for me because those conversations have zero filler. but again, the fact that i have a mostly email relationship with my nearest and dearest friend probably says something about how much i’m failing at being a socially integrated person.

Andrea Seigel, Link

My mom has a Buddhist shrine-type thing to which she prays whenever she wants something bad, a new love for me, an old heart for my dad, or just that new Burberry spring coat. I tell her that Buddhism is essentially self-death, but so masochistic you can’t even kill yourself. Of course, I don’t say it in those words. “Ma, it’s about letting go, not holding on,” I say, with condescending italics. She looks at me calmly and lovingly as her child, the invoice of a liberal education branded on my forehead. We don’t understand each other, which is where food comes in. “Let’s go call Junior” (Carl’s Jr. in my mom talk), she says, a sad hunger in her eyes. We make the five minute drive through suburban streets named after states, a microcosm of America in more than one way. She struggles through the intercom, eagerly leaning out the window with a Chinese accent. I see her long lamented muffin-tops around her waist, the near-perfect blue sky of what should be happy, and want to cry. Death is not the and, I say, &. &. Who knew the ampersand could promise so much. On the drive home, me holding the warm bag of Carl’s son, she reaches in for a french fry or two, fingers finding fingers.

Jimmy Chen, Link

Contact, 29/100

2011-07-01T15:52:00.000-04:00

At age twelve, I was completely obsessed with the 1997 film adaptation of Carl Sagan's novel Contact. It may have been what inspired my fanciful notions of growing up to be an astronaut. Then again, most films with interesting female leads at that time sent me into dreams of impossible vocations. After Twister I was absolutely going to be a storm chaser. Jurassic Park? Paleontologist. Tomb Raider? Well, a tomb raider I guess. But what do you major in in college to become a tornado chasing, tomb raiding, tyrannosaurus-rex tamer? It took me a long time to realize that what I loved was READING (and watching) about those things.

Then came the agony over deciding between a BA in English or Film. But that's another story.

THIS story is about a woman who is the first on Earth to contact intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy. I'm willing to guess most people have seen the movie, so I won't spoil anything. I will say that the book is infinitely better than the film (no Forrest Gump-esque score or Matthew McConaughey, for one).

Carl Sagan was blessed with ridiculous talent. He had the super-intelligence to be a renowned astronomer, and the rare ability to translate that knowledge into accessible writing. Creative and non. And beyond that he was a promoter of peace and humanism. What I'm trying to say here is we should start The United Church of Carl Sagan.

Like all good science fiction, the plot may be out-of-this-world, but it's pointing directly back at the world. The story is about communicating with alien life, however it's more concerned with how humans communicate amongst themselves. The ultimate message is that we're not ready to talk to the gods until we're able to converse with each other on our own planet successfully. Peacefully.

Not many quotables, but I did like this observation:

Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe. I mean the real universe. All those light-years. All those worlds. I think of the scope of your universe, the opportunities it affords that Creator, and it takes my breath away. It's much better than bottling Him up in one small world. I never liked the idea of Earth as God's green footstool. It was too reassuring, like a children's story...like a tranquilizer. But your universe has room enough, and time enough, for the kind of God I believe in.

Radio On: A Listener's Diary, 28/100

2011-06-29T16:15:00.001-04:00

Finally finished Sarah Vowell's Radio On: A Listener's Diary after starting, jeez, 3 months ago? I'd definitely consider it the weakest of her books. But it was her first, and was good enough to cement her writing career. So.

The idea of doing something obsessively for a year and writing about the experience isn't new (ahem). In Radio On the challenge is, you guessed it, listening to the radio, a lot, for a year. And the year is 1996. One of my favorite years! Sure, I was eleven. But I remember it crystal clear. A year dominated by the movies Clueless and The Craft, hair scrunchies, mini-backpacks and Beavis and Butthead. I'm sure some boring political things happened too. But OMG JONATHAN TAYLOR THOMAS.

Even though my brain was stuck in eleven-year-old-girl mode, there were still some "oh yeah I remember when that happened" moments in the book. Kurt Cobain's suicide. The O.J. Simpson trial. Bob Dole being Bob Dole, etc.

Even back then, radio was considered a forgotten medium. It still is -- at least in its original state. I never listen to THE radio anymore. My alarm clock used to wake me each morning with the sounds of annoying morning DJs and auto-tuned millionaires, but I put a stop to even that, now using my cell's more reliable alarm feature. And god knows I got enough of traditional radio working a summer job. For 4 summers, 2003-2006, I had a job in a factory where the work was very repetitive and solitary. The only thing to keep us sane was being able to have a radio and earphones (no tape/CDs). This was before MP3 players practically came free in boxes of Lucky Charms.

So, 8rs a day, 5 days a week, for 14 weeks I would listen to the only 2 decent radio stations I could pick up in our concrete bunker. One was a station that plays nothing but the current top hits, which would be great if you like what's popular with the kids these days. With their hippin' and their hoppin'. The other was the local NPR carrier. Which for a few minutes a day is actually interesting and bearable. Until they break out the free form jazz and I feel like Bill Cosby is behind me holding jello pudding.

Patton Oswalt sums up NPR quite well:

Update: Oh, and look, embedding the video was disabled. So here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Re-OdWBCRs

But fast forward to the future and now it's all about pay radio. Or online radio. Pandora, last.fm. And I shell out $25 every month for two SiriusXM subscriptions (one's for my dad, who listens to entirely way too much doo-wop). They have a channel dedicated to film scores! Be still my heart.

I suppose you could still do the same project today: listen to satellite radio for a year. They have music, talk radio, Howard Stern, etc. But the difference would be how you document it.

What plants Vowell's book firmly in the 90s is the fact that it's an actual book, not a blog. And that's what it feels like you're reading: a printed blog. Which is why it took so long to slosh through. Imagine reading 365 days worth of archived blog postings, even from your most favorite site, in one sitting. Yeah.

So. Spread out over 3 months, I can say I really liked this book. If you're a Nirvana fan, definitely check it out. If you hate Rush Limbaugh, check it out.

Here are some snippets:

Faced with a choice of boring and dumb or boring and highbrow, which would you pick? Baywatch is the most popular television program on the same planet that turns away a million Wagner groupies per year clamoring for Bayreuth Festival tickets. "Here we are now, entertain us."

Something Rush Limbaugh said the other day has been eating at me. He was bragging about being invited to "The Big Smoke," a cigar smokers' protest in Lafayette Park across from the White House. He waxed thus:
We in our society, ladies and gentlemen, have an ever increasing bunch of ninnies who are dead set against anybody enjoying themselves. If you have a good time, somebody's going to be upset. If you have a good time doing something somebody doesn't think you should be doing, then they're going to be angry and they are going to use whatever clout, political or otherwise, they can get you do to stop it... Do you know why people smoke cigars? They like 'em!
Do you know why some men have sex with other men, Rush, you homophobic reactionary? They like to!

There's talk of a return to civility in public discourse. The nice-girl part of me says fine, but sometimes, civility's overrated. After all, wasn't Chamberlain just being civil at Munich when he should have screamed, at the top of his lungs, that he couldn't even stand to sit in the same room as that incarnation of Satan? But no, he politely signed the death certificate for a goodly portion of the Western Hemisphere. And no teacups were broken and no tablecloths were stained. Only the world paid his tab later in madness and ashes, and was an ill-mannered, uncivil, impolite mess now, wasn't it?

I say fight fire with fire. Which is not to say fight stupidity with greater stupidity.

The Stranger, 27/100

2011-06-17T16:00:00.001-04:00

Seeing as how Albert Camus' The Stranger is supposed to be one of the most widely read novels of the 20th century, I figured I should probably get around to reading it already. It's a short novel filled with so many -isms -- existentialism, nihilism, absurdism -- that it's like taking Philosophy 101 (which I haven't taken). But as with most widely read novels, it has also been widely commented upon. So I won't add much of my own commentary. Be grateful because I would have NO idea what I was talking about (Nietzsche? That's the guy with the awesome mustache, right?).

What I will say is that every single word of the novel stuck with me. There's not a superfluous sentence in the whole book. And the courtroom and imprisonment scenes had my palms sweating, even though I already knew the story and what would happen. I would like to read it over again right now, but I need to move on.

So here are some passages I marked:

Yes, this was the evening hour when--how long ago it seemed!--I always felt so well content with life. Then, what awaited me was a night of easy, dreamless sleep. This was the same hour, but with a difference; I was returning to a cell, and what awaited me was a night haunted by forebodings of the coming day. And so I learned that familiar paths traced in the dusk of summer evenings may lead as well to prisons as to innocent, untroubled sleep.

...on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten--since, in either case, other men and women will continue living, the world will go on as before. Also, whether I died now or fort years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably. Still, somehow this line of thought wasn't as consoling as it should have been; the idea of all those years of life in hand was a galling reminder!

That was unthinkable, he said; all men believe in God, even those who reject Him. Of this he was absolutely sure; if ever he came to doubt it, his life would lose all meaning. "Do you wish," he asked indignantly, "my life to have no meaning?" Really I couldn't see how my wishes came into it, and I told him as much.

I picked up and old newspaper that was lying on the floor and read it. There was an advertisement of Kruschen Salts and I cut it out and pasted in into an album where I keep things that amuse me in the papers.

A mid-20th century tumblr!

Very Far Away from Anywhere Else, 24/100

2011-06-15T12:19:00.000-04:00

So how are you liking these late 1970s-ish book covers? They doing anything for ya? That guy's sweater needs to be burned.

And whoops! Looks like a skipped #24 is my count to 100. So here it is.

Very Far Away from Anywhere Else is one of the few non-SciFi titles from Ursula LeGuin. I read her novel Malafrena a few years back not knowing it was entirely historical fiction (albeit an imaginary history), and kept expecting wizards or aliens to pop-up at some point.

This short novella is about a teenage boy trying to cope with being an outsider and what his parents/society expect of him. You know, that age-old tale. He meets a girl who's dealing with the same issues and they become friends. They have deep, personal, and philosophical conversations... and yeah you know exactly where this is going before I even finish. Because it's a guy. And a girl. And they're teenagers. The big "can guys and girls be JUST friends?" problem comes up and their friendship suffers under it.

It's a short book but it packs quite a bit in. The story becomes a conversation over what "love" actually is, what it means to be alone vs. part of a group, and the responsibility we have towards others as well as to ourselves. LeGuin captures the teenage experience honestly and realistically. Anyone who has ever been seventeen knows this story.

I think what you mostly do when you find you really are alone is to panic. You rush to the opposite extreme and pack yourself into groups--clubs, teams, societies, types. You suddenly start dressing exactly like the others. It's a way of being invisible. The way you sew the patches on the holes in your blue jeans becomes incredibly important. If you do it wrong you're not with it. You have to be with it. That's a peculiar phrase, you know? With it. With what? With them. With the others. All together. Safety in numbers. I'm not me. I'm a basketball letter. I'm a popular kid. I'm my friend's friend. I'm a black leather growth on a Honda. I'm a member. I'm a teenager. You can't see me, all you can see it us. We're safe.

And if We see You standing alone by yourself, if you're lucky we'll ignore you. If you're not lucky, we might throw rocks. Because we don't like people standing there with the wrong kind of patches on their blue jeans reminding us that we're each alone and none of us is safe.

I guess I tend to think that important events should be solemn, and very grand, with muted violins playing in the background. It's hard to realize that the really important things are just normal little happenings and decisions, and when they turn on the background music and the spotlights and the uniforms, nothing important is going to happen at all.

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, and You Are a Little Bit Happier than I Am, 25-26/100

2011-06-08T18:07:00.000-04:00

Link to image source

Here are some lines I enjoyed from Tao Lin's book of poetry, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, in order of pagination:

from "eleven page poem, page nine":

my unit of communication is the 200-page novel
always remember that i am better than you, according to me
small feelings of permanence later get wrapped and sold on amazon

from the untitled hamster poem on page 63:

'They found a slug in a tree and like 50 ants climbed on top of the slug to try to kill it but the slug jumped out of the tree to try to kill itself but it didn't die by falling and they attacked it more but the slug oozed this sticky mucus and the ants got caught in it and the small ants went and got soil and put it all over the slug and it soaked up the mucus and then sawed the slug's body apart with their pinchers and brought it back to the babies,' the hamster friend says.

The hamster tells its hamster friend that what it just typed is the name of their new press if they just add the word books at the end.

from "fourteen of twenty-four":

innate in all taco bell patrons is the possibility
of phenomenal poetry--something to look forward to

from "eighteen of twenty-four":

...to instill an awareness of death
directly into the reader's facial expression
is still one of the most powerful literary devices available
to distill the essence of any argument or rhetorical situation
pretend you are speaking from an enormous distance
and the audience doesn't exist
and you are not the person who is speaking

from "twenty-one of twenty-four":

one can claim ownership only of what exists within one's skin
and then maybe only what the brain can directly move the atoms of
from one's own perspective the brain seems to own itself
we observe the brain from an abstract distance
we observe each other from a physical distance
the brain observes nothing from no distance
therefore everything is going to be OK

Here are some lines I enjoyed from Tao Lin's book of poetry, You Are a Little Bit Happier Than I Am, in order of pagination:

from "spring break":

i lie on my bed and i wait for your phone call
the only person in the world that i like
my favorite person
not god but a person

and i know you can't save me, you didn't create the universe in seven days
you're just another person who isn't in love with me
but maybe you can do something, still, i guess ...

from "Appreciate Me For Everything Good I Have Done in the Past":

My demeanor in social situations
can be described as 'low-level panic attack.'

from "At That Leftover Crack Concert Two Years Before I Met You":

I think I would panic and drive into a building if I was in Manhattan and a fire truck had its sirens on. In Florida when I'm driving I always use ambulances as an excuse to make illegal U-turns and to drive over medians and do other fun and provocative things with my car. One time an ambulance was coming and I made a U-turn and saw a tree and calmly drove there and knocked it down then saw a shrub and went to that and ran it over like a lawn mower. I felt patriotic because I was trying harder than everyone else to get out of the way of the ambulance.

V for Vendetta, 23/100

2011-05-27T10:47:00.000-04:00

Finished Alan Moore’s and David Lloyd’s masterpiece comic, V for Vendetta. I read the collected paperback edition, which is 296 pages of wonderful.

V for Vendetta takes place in a near future dystopia (which, since the comic was started in 1981, means 1998), where a fascist government has taken charge of Britain after a worldwide nuclear war. Under this new regime surveillance is constant, control is absolute, and anyone who is not anglo-saxon or heterosexual is put into a concentration camp, experimented on, deported or killed.

Enter “V,” the mysterious anarchist, who wears a Guy Fawkes mask and commits acts of terrorism against Britain’s fascist overlords. He’s carrying out a personal vendetta, but also setting up the framework for a revolution by the people.

The whole thing feels like 1984 meets Nazi Germany, mixed with elements of Fahrenheit 451 and Robin Hood (I hope you click that last link). It’s a world built upon propaganda posters.

It really is a masterwork by Moore and Lloyd, and has the honor of being the second comic that has ever made me cry (although honestly it doesn’t take much). I couldn’t recommend it more – whether you care for comics or not.

Plus, you learn all kind of new “V” words to use next time you play Scrabble.

I vivaciously vie to view “V” as a vitriolic, vapid…umm…something something vampire vitamin. #alliterationfail

Vox, 22/100

2011-05-24T00:03:00.001-04:00

Vox is a 1992 novella by Nicholson Baker. The 1992 is important, since it's about 2 people chatting over an adult hotline. The entire book is a transcript of their conversation. I love how the book seems like such a relic of its publication date. A phone conversation? HA...how 1992.

FUN FACT: Monica Lewinsky gave a copy of this book to Bill Clinton as a gift. How 1998!

But at the same time it reminded me of the internet. Or, at least the internet circa 1996-2004 or so. Back when it was somewhat anonymous. Back in the days of AOL chat rooms, message boards, and that poorly animated dancing baby. I miss the internet from the movie You've Got Mail. Yes, the Nora Ephron cheeser. It's embarassing how much I love that movie. Don't judge me.

In Vox the two characters, protected by anonymity, allow themselves to be completely open with one another. Sharing their biggest secrets, most embarrassing and painful experiences, their sincerest wants and fantasies.

And yes, they're on an adult hotline, so the focus of most of the conversation is...adult. It's pegged as an erotic novel, although I don't really consider it as such. But to-may-to, to-mah-to.

Short novel without many quotables, but here's a paragraph I thought was beautiful.

That was my year of heavy stereo use. Unlike you I didn't have a big crush on anyone at the time. I think it was more that I had a crush on the tuner itself, frankly. I used to imagine that the megahertz markings were the skyline of a city at night. The FM markings were all the buildings, and the AM markings were their reflection in water...And the little moving indicator on our stereo was lit with a yellow light, and I knew where all the stations were on the dial, and I'd spin the knob and the yellow indicator would glide up and down the radio cityscape like a cab up and down some big central boulevard and each station was an intersection, in a neighborhood with a different ethnic mix, and if the red sign came on saying STEREO I might idle there for a while, or the cabbie might run the light, passing the whole thing by as it exploded and disappeared behind me. And sometimes I'd thumb the dial very slowly, sort of like I was palming a steering wheel, and move up, move up, in the silence of the muted stretches, and then suddenly I'd pierce the rind of a station and there would be this crackling hopped-up luridly colored version of a song that sounded for a second much better than I knew the song really was, like that moment in solar eclipses when the whole corona is visible, and then you slide down into the fertile valley of the station itself, and it spreads out beneath you, in stereo, with a whole range of middle and misty distances.

Until you read it a second time and you go OH, OH WAIT THERE'S SOME INNUENDO THERE.

Still beautiful though.

Internet Lovelies

2011-05-19T23:59:00.000-04:00

it is one thing to like eating at the Olive Garden from time to time, but it is another thing entirely to go onto a website for chefs and foodies and post "Hey, who else is psyched about the new O.G. Tuscan Trio?" It is one thing to enjoy Rihanna on your iPod, it is another thing to go onto a hardcore punk message board and post "who else is jamming to Umbrella right now?"

Nathan Huffstutter, Link

it is beyond jerk—jerk is an offset of a nuanced initiative, sometimes even provocative (Brando was habitually a jerk—so what? Etc.)—and asshole is understandable, as we all can relate. We are all assholes sometimes in the same way we occasionally get embarrassingly drunk, and it’s OK to say, “God, I was such an asshole…” But douche bag? That’s a pariah. I will drink beer with 99% of humanity, but not a confirmed douche bag. Never. Ever. If someone’s a douche bag, they are a douche bag, done. A douche bag is loathsome, a contemptible phony. It implies a past wrong, a meanness, a paucity, Bad Faith and bad intent. Like a serial liar or a poor tipper who then steals tips off tables when no one is looking. A turd on a wedding cake (whose simile did I just steal, I forget). A douche bag is a douche bag. Fuck them all. A D-bag. A douche. A douche bag. It is a good term, I like it, I like saying it and hearing it said, and it does provide one clear goal in an oft diabolical life of puzzling. To not be one.

Sean Lovelace, Link

I just want someone to point a finger at me and say, “YOU are FUCKING GREAT.” Like an Uncle Sam poster, but instead of Uncle Sam, it’s Jon Hamm.

Apocalypstick, Link

Assembling a distinguished private place for your books is largely the milieu of private people collecting data they've already inputted, in case they should wish for that input to happen again.

Somebody from This Recording, Link

Simply ignore the fact that up close swans are spiteful, nasty creatures, and that too much cake can induce vomiting.

Jessa Crispin, Link

Kubrick once said: "One of the conclusions of the film is that there are limits to which society should go in maintaining law and order. Society should not do the wrong thing for the right reason, even though it frequently does the right thing for the wrong reason."

Link

When I think of all the people who once meant everything to me and now mean nothing, I get a little sick to my stomach. I wonder how it could’ve happened and why things couldn’t have stayed the same. And then I remember that just like the dissolution of a relationship, friendships are casualties of time. I mean, time is the silent killer of everything. It chips away at things that were once thriving. Tick tock, chip chip. And it will continue to do so. You just have to understand that time will preserve the special relationships. It won’t kill anyone off who’s not meant to be killed off. It’s hard to come to terms with that realization though when you’re in the thick of all the relationship death and all you would like to do is call up your old best friend again and tell them about your day.

Ryan O'Connell, Link

On the internet of the 90s:

You were an internet nobody if you didn’t have a Geocities or Angelfire site. How would anyone know that you love Counting Crows and glittery horses if you didn’t build your own page? You’d make sure all of your cyber guests felt welcome by placing a sparkling 3D “Welcome to my page!” .gif front and center – the one that rotates 360 degrees on loop. Don’t forget two glitzy shamrocks – screw it, you’re not Irish, but every homepage needs shamrocks. Don’t ask me why, I don’t make the rules.

Stephanie Georgopulos, Link

I stopped reading. I give myself permission. Because written words were doing their thing long before I was born and will be doing it long after I’m dead. I only have so many books I can read in my lifetime. I now stop a book when I’ve read enough to feel I need to stop. And then pick up another.

Sean Lovelace, Link

The only thing about starting books and then dropping them halfway through is that when you're trying to fulfill a quota (say 100 in a year), it's gonna look like you're not reading anything.

Are you watching? Because I'm failing to read 100 books this year. SPECTACULARLY.

The Sandman : Preludes and Nocturnes, 21/100

2011-05-19T18:02:00.000-04:00

So.

Every now and then NPR holds an online I-will-if-you-will book club. A handful of NPR bloggers pick and read a book that people might be reluctant to read and lead discussions on twitter, through comments posts, live chats, etc. I missed the past two times they did it, when they picked the first Twilight book (didn't care to read it) and Moby Dick (didn't care to read it). Back in November they took votes to see what they should read next. We voted. And waited. And waited. They never chose. I gave up and stopped checking in on it. Then last week I read somewhere on a blog that they finally decided to read The Sandman comics by Neil Gaiman. Hoorah! I'd like to read those! Oh, but wait. They've already started and are almost finished. Of course.

So.

I still decide to try and participate, even in the late stages, and pick up the first volume, Preludes and Nocturnes while at the comic store (shout out to D and B comics!). OH. But wait again! Turns out they're reading VOL 3 for some reason. And only volume 3. They're starting--and finishing--in the middle of the series. Because that makes sense. And it's only one volume. They're allotting readers 5 whole weeks to read a 160 page comic book.

So.

I still read the first volume I bought. It's good. Not "I'm-gonna-go-buy-the-rest-of-the-series-now!" good, but still good. The stories follow The Sandman (or Dream) who is...well, he's the Sandman. He brings you your dreams. Except here dreams are something more. They're really stories. The basis of all stories.

The whole volume was an interesting exploration of stories and their creators. Especially in the chapter '24 Hours,' which I think will haunt me for a while to come.

The artwork was incredible throughout. Not particularly my style, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate it. I think my favorite things was that the storyline is also inhabited by characters from the DC Universe. So there were mentions of the Justice League, Batman, Arkham Asylum, John Constantine...pretty cool.

Plus...did I just find the origins of the raisins face meme?

See it? SEE IT?

Marginalia

2011-05-18T16:57:00.001-04:00

David Foster Wallace's marginalia in a Delillo novel

There's a really interesting article on the New York Times website regarding marginalia in books. In it Sam Anderson argues that you can never truly "own" a book until you've written in it.

Underlining, notes in the margin, circling keywords, reactive exclamation points and question marks, doodling snails in the corners (okay, maybe that's just me)... For Anderson, he considers marking in books to be meditative:

Books have become my journals, my critical notebooks, my creative outlets. Writing in them is the closest I come to regular meditation;

I know the feeling. I didn't really start marking up my books until college. Prior to that I would just keep a notebook handy (preferably with something gaudy on the front, like a Lisa Frank unicorn), writing down favorite passages and reactions to the text. It made me feel like Harriet the Spy. Except instead of spying on real people, I was spying on the characters in stories. How ironic that while reading Harriet the Spy, I was actually spying on Harriet, the spy.

My first year in college, one of my English professors retired and let students take as many books from her office as they wanted. From all the books I grabbed, the thing I noticed were how marked up they were. So much underlining, comments in the margin...I still have her lovely marked-up copy of The Death of the Heart. Going through those books I learned how to become a quintessential English major book destroyer. (Thanks Dr. Keyser!)

After college I stopped my marginalia craze. Possibly because I'm a librarian deep at heart. Or, no, more like a bookseller. With every pen mark, dog-eared page, tear and crease, I'm calculating the price-reduction in the back of my mind.

And that's really why I started this blog. I didn't really intend, or still intend, to do book reviews. Not exactly. I just thought, how can I still collect my favorite passages, personal reactions, reflections, references, and notes so I can access them anywhere? Even without a Lisa Frank notebook? Even if I no longer own the book itself? Because, sure, I'm gonna have my heavily-marked up copy of Fahrenheit 451 forever. But the latest Nick Hornby novel? Probably not.

Also, doing this whole virtual marginalia thing has become even more handy since I've started getting e-books.

in a world in which we’ll no longer own books as discrete physical objects, the only really meaningful thing we’ll own will be the reading experience itself.

In the article Anderson suggests e-book providers consider getting on board with the marginalia revival and offer a means for readers to not only make notes in the e-text, but also have the capability to share those notes.

Marginalia — with its social thrill of shared immersion — is what the culture is moving toward, not away from. We are living increasingly in a culture of response. Twitter is basically electronic marginalia on everything in the world: jokes, sports, revolutions.

Could this include not just friends, but also...authors? Past and present? I know I would pay a great deal to see, say...Chuck Palahniuk's notes in a Nicholas Sparks novel. It'd be like a literary Mystery Science Theatre 3000!

I am so tempted to start up a literary MST3K blog now, you have no idea. MSB3K.

So although there are plenty of doors that seem to be closing with the move to e-books, there are even more opening up.

I’ve long been frustrated with the “distance” between criticism and reading itself. Most critical energy is expended in big-picture work — situating texts in history, talking about broad themes — all of which is useful but hardly touches the excitement of actual reading, a process of discovery that happens in time, moment by moment, line by line. What I really want is someone rolling around in the text. I want noticing. I want, in short, marginalia, everywhere, all the time. Suddenly that seems deliriously possible.

There's another article on the NY Times website that discusses some pretty interesting examples of historical marginalia. Like, did you know Mark Twain was a cynical old grump who liked to argue with authors within the pages of their own novels? Well, yeah, I guess that's no surprise. Somehow I've always pictured Mark Twain as being the Gary Busey of authors.

But until celebrity e-marginalia is possible, you'll have to stick with buying marked-up books the old fashioned way (over the internet? is that old fashioned?)

Powells.com has had a special From the Library of Anne Rice feature that's been going on for awhile. All the books are from her library, although only some have her notations in them. So being the gulla-bull that I am, I bought her copy of Frankenstein a few months ago. I figured, it's in her genre, it's the reason her genre exists, and I could always use another copy.

I was a bit disappointed, seeing as how her markings end after the first chapter. But I do love this one line she bracketed in the preface:

A perfect description of everything her writing, and the entire science fiction/horror genre, is derived from. Lovely. Worth what I paid just to see this marked by her.

SO. Don't be afraid to mark your books! Unless...unless you plan on one day donating said books to a library. Please spare this library worker. My black magic marker runneth dry from de-personalizing many a book. No, seriously. Please don't write your name in the front (and the back, and the spine, and on each exposed side) of a book unless you plan on having it buried with you.

Guys Lit Wire Book Fair

2011-05-11T17:06:00.000-04:00

Every year the Guys Lit Wire blog holds a book fair, rallying the online literary community to donate books to a deserving library. I've participated the past 3 years, sending books to an LA County Detention Center, a day school on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico, and this year, to a deserving high school in Washington, D.C.

Honestly, the library I work in has about the same number of books...but that's a different story. For a high school library it's pretty meager. The school I went to had fewer students, but more books than this.

SO! If you're interested in helping out, check out this link right here for all the details. Donations will be purchased from Powells (I would fly all the way to Portland just to visit this bookstore, seriously), and mailed directly to the library. Personal donations could possibly be accepted, but you will need to contact the librarian directly.

But check out the wishlist! A really great selection to pick from. I went with Kindred by Octavia Butler, The Bell Jar, and Jane Eyre (big surprise).

Kindred is the only book I haven't talked about on here. It was the first novel I read by Octavia Butler, and it's really something else. Perfect YA read. Not quite science fiction, but more like speculative fiction. Like an episode of the Twilight Zone. Basically if you've ever sat around and thought "I wonder what would happen if I were thrust back into a place/time where my particular race/sex/sexuality/religion/what-have-you would cause me to be discriminated against/enslaved/killed/yada-yada?", then this book would be right up your alley. I chose it for the book fair since it has a strong female lead, discusses complicated race issues intelligently, and overall is just an incredibly interesting book.

Here's Octavia Butler, being all awesome.

Give generously! The children are our future! Etc!

Free Comic Book Day!

2011-05-07T13:33:00.000-04:00

WOOKIEES BUY COMICS AND SO SHOULD YOU

Today is Free Comic Book Day! Unfortunately I won't be able to participate, seeing as how I have to work, and this evening will need to start moving into a new apartment (buying all those books seemed like such a great idea at the time...didn't account for having to move them someday).

BUT. But. Might as well make a blog post recommending some comics, so you guys can take advantage of the FREENESS.

I've only recently started reading comics, so I feel weird giving recommendations. Like I'm that guy in the Dos Equis commercials: "I don't always read comics, but when I do I prefer..." (note: I am NOT the most interesting woman in the world).

But here goes:

What I've been reading most recently are the Buffy Season 8 comics. Taking place after season 7 of the canceled show, the comic goes all the places the limited budget of the show couldn't take us previously. So...giant goddesses, centaurs, flying cars, flying people. Good stuff. The art is decent, and the writing is hilarious. This is Joss Whedon at his most Joss Whedon-iest. Season 8 has ended, but word has it that Season 9 is underway. So, woo!

And then there's always the Scott Pilgrim series. This series gave rise to a film, a video game, an incredible sound track...(all of which I own. Sad little nerd.) And yet whenever I mention anything about it, I usually get blank stares. Weird. But if you're into 90s pop culture references and Canadian humor, by all means check it out.

SORRY, I KNOW YOU CAN'T READ THE TINY TYPE.

It's probably along the lines of "something something I'm gonna kick you in the face."

Making a complete 180 into the serious realm of LGBT superheroes (um), there's Batwoman: Elegy. Even if you don't care about Batman/girl/woman/people, or superheroes, or comics in general, take a look at this one for the GORGEOUS artwork by J.H. Williams. Elegy is a hardcover collection of issues #854-860 of Detective Comics, and the artwork is as dark and gorgeous as the storyline. In this arc Batwoman has been dismissed from the military due to the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy (thank god this now makes it outdated). It even contains a prologue by Rachael Maddow, and a cameo by Lieutenant Dan Choi. So check it out, unless your a homophobe. Or a bataphobe.

Ghost World! Also known as the comic that makes me think think about Steve Buscemi's face all day. It's a story about two smartass friends who slowly become unfriends after graduating high school. Probably the most relatable thing I've ever read. Frowny face emoticon.

And I shouldn't be recommending The Walking Dead comics, since I haven't actually read them yet. I have the first book by my bed. I will get to it! But I just know it will be awesome, seeing as how the show on AMC was amazing. I could be wrong, but probably not. I will take full responsibility if this turns out to be false, by calling a press conference and officially retracting my statement. Then I will print out a copy of this blog post and set it on fire.

Words Blogger Didn''t Think I Should Use in this Blog Post

wookiees
freeness
bataphobe
smartass
unfriends
relatable
frowny

I assert my independence from you and your little red squiggly lines, Blogger.

Why read...

2011-04-30T00:44:00.000-04:00

When I could just play this game all day and warp my fragile little mind.

I'm not sure what female sensibilities are. I don't think I've ever had them.

Btw, MK9 has some of the worst dialogue ever written. I think Tommy Wiseau wrote the script. "You're tearing me apart, Sheeva! Literally!

Jane Eyre 2011, and Wide Sargasso Sea 20/100

2011-04-28T20:03:00.000-04:00

picture via xsignalfirex

Finally got to see the latest Jane Eyre adaptation. Period pieces are kinda my thing, and when it just happens to be based on my favorite novel, well, it's a special occasion. But is it ever possible to be completely satisfied with an adaptation? Probably not. Unless you're the one directing it.

The only other adaptations I've seen are the 1996 Franco Zeffirelli one, the 2006 BBC one, and half of the 1983 Timothy Dalton one. I own the Orson Welles one, and I honestly don't have a good excuse for not watching it. Besides the fact that it's Orson Welles in the role of Rochester, which is just weird and creepy. ORSON WELLES.

I've read a lot of reviews of Fukunaga's version, and I pretty much agree with everything they've said, so I won't bother being long-winded about it. Basically, gorgeous cinematography and costumes, Fassbender and Wasikowska are excellent in their roles, as is the always wonderful Judi Dench, unfortunately no chemistry at all between Jane and Rochester, the flashback format was confusing and not really needed, the Lowood School scenes were cut too short, as was the revelation/explanation of the madwoman in the attic (more on this later).

Also, there were several..."awkward" moments. As someone who is herself very awkward, I have a keen eye and ear when it comes to such. And it's never more painful than when it happens on screen.

Times when I noticed it:

- The extra long scene of Adele singing in French for no apparent reason. Except perhaps for comedic effect, which never came. I smiled at Judi Dench's following line, but that's because it was Judi Dench.

- When Jane returns from visiting Mrs. Reed and meets Rochester on the bridge. He makes some funny, flirty comment. She smiles, passes him, then says still smiling "Thank you Mr. Rochester, for your kindness," or something similar and entirely too formal. Just...just a weird thing to say after the flirty informality that just occurred. Especially since she was flirty and informal previously. It was either a dialogue issue or a delivery issue. Am I insane or did anyone else notice it?

- Rochester's floaty voice when Jane is with Rivers. Destined to be awkward in any film adaptation. Floaty, whispery voices don't do well in film since it's more of a third person, omniscient medium. Works better when you're directly in the mind of the character hearing it, as in the novel. Or if it's a horror film and scary Asian cat boy is behind you whispering stuff, or something.

Despite my griping, I was happy with the outcome. A little drearier than most period dramas, and I'm glad for it. Not just a pretty film of frilly dresses and incessant British giggling (but I love those too), and no final happy wedding (or double wedding) to end it. Which is one of my favorite features of the story -- that it doesn't end with a wedding. Or begin with one. The wedding (although incomplete) is in the middle. When the novel ends, it's the future, post-marriage ("reader, I married him"). The film ends without showing even this. Just a shot of Jane and Rochester, equals as they are. (And bearded). Oh how refreshing. A grown up love story.

But back to my complaint of the short madwoman revelation. She's the most distinctive feature of the novel. The most unique, the most scandalous. Dare we forget how daring and provocative the book was when first published. The madwoman had a lot to do with that. The feminist and humanist themes, race issues, post-colonialism, class debates...they all come back to her. Yet she is usually treated as an obstacle, a metaphor -- Jane's doppelganger, a representation of her passion and anger that was locked inside while at Lowood, the desire and scourge of Rochester. But we're only given a dirty, messy-haired glimpse of her before she's thrust back into the attic. Who is/was she? Who would she be as a character in her own right?

In 1966 novelist Jean Rhys set out to answer that question, writing the Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel to the events in Jane Eyre. I read this a few weeks back, and I've been waiting to write on it, formulating my thoughts. Really, I feel I need to read it again. It's a gorgeously-written book. There are so many themes going on, so many allusions, that even though it's a short read, it's and intense one.

In Rhys' novel, the explanation for Antoinette (Bertha) Cosway's madness is her loss of power. Marrying Rochester deprives her of her property, and the fortune she inherited. She loses her name (loses Antoinette and Cosway, gains Bertha, Mason, and Rochester) and her identity. She becomes metaphorically, and eventually literally, imprisoned in her marriage.

There are so many themes and issues -- colonialism, sexual politics, race, "otherness", allusions to the original novel -- that it would take much more than a blog post to cover it. It's amazing what she packed into such a tiny book.

So check it out, since I'm apparently speechless over here.

I will manage to include a passage though. Not completely useless today.

Everything was brightness, or dark. The walls, the blazing colours of the flowers in the garden, the nuns' habits were bright, but their veils, the Crucifix hanging from their waists, the shadow of the trees, were black. That was how it was, light and dark, sun and shadow, Heaven and Hell, for one of the nuns knew all about Hell and who does not? But another one knew about Heaven and the attributes of the blessed, of which the least is transcendent beauty. The very least. I could hardly wait for all this ecstasy and once I prayed for a long time to be dead. Then remembered that this was a sin. It's presumption or despair, I forget which, but a mortal sin. So I prayed for a long time about that too, but the thought came, so many things are sins, why? Another sin, to think that. However, happily, Sister Marie Augustine says thoughts are not sins, if they are driven away at once. You say Lord save me, I perish. I find it very comforting to know exactly what must be done. All the same, I did not pray so often after that and soon, hardly at all. I felt bolder, happier, more free. But not so safe.

Time Enough at Last

2011-04-19T17:00:00.004-04:00

Linda Holmes over at NPR has a really great article on what it means to be "well-read" in the information age. Basically, those words don't mean the same as they did 100 years ago. Or even 10 years ago. It's not until you have easy, if not instant, access to any piece of literature ever written (or film, song, artwork, etc.), that you realize the impossibility of experiencing it all within a human lifespan.

well-read is not a destination; there is nowhere to get to, and if you assume there is somewhere to get to, you'd have to live a thousand years to even think about getting there, and by the time you got there, there would be a thousand years to catch up on.

I used to marvel at how well-read the privileged seemed to be in the 19th century. But looking back, what did they have to read but just what came before them? Which is an enormous amount, to be sure. But that amount has surely doubled since that point. And accessing a piece of literature now doesn't require writing letters of inquiry, ordering said book from the bookseller, who orders it from the publisher, where said book bounces along in a horse-drawn carriage for 100 miles, and is brought to your doorstep by some English guy named Pip wearing a chimney sweep outfit (this is my fantasy don't ruin it). In 2011 my biggest complaint is that if I purchase something from Google's ebook store, I have to pay with Visa instead of PayPal.

What I've observed in recent years is that many people, in cultural conversations, are far more interested in culling than in surrender. And they want to cull as aggressively as they can. After all, you can eliminate a lot of discernment you'd otherwise have to apply to your choices of books if you say, "All genre fiction is trash." You have just massively reduced your effective surrender load, because you've thrown out so much at once.

The same goes for throwing out foreign films, documentaries, classical music, fantasy novels, soap operas, humor, or westerns. I see people culling by category, broadly and aggressively: television is not important, popular fiction is not important, blockbuster movies are not important. Don't talk about rap; it's not important. Don't talk about anyone famous; it isn't important. And by the way, don't tell me it is important, because that would mean I'm ignoring something important, and that's ... uncomfortable. That's surrender.

I try to be as open-minded as possible when it comes to books/films/music, etc. But you have to cut corners somewhere. It doesn't bother me as much when someone dismisses a certain genre as it does when someone sticks only to ONE genre and ignores all the rest. I've tried so far to make my 100 books list somewhat diverse, weaving in-and-out of genres at will. And yes, I'm obscenely behind schedule. Next year I'm doing a 100 films challenge or something. 100 sudoku puzzles. 100 times I will actually make up my bed.

So since we aren't immortal, yes, we will miss out on some stuff. But it's okay.

It's sad, but it's also ... great, really. Imagine if you'd seen everything good, or if you knew about everything good. Imagine if you really got to all the recordings and books and movies you're "supposed to see." Imagine you got through everybody's list, until everything you hadn't read didn't really need reading. That would imply that all the cultural value the world has managed to produce since a glob of primordial ooze first picked up a violin is so tiny and insignificant that a single human being can gobble all of it in one lifetime. That would make us failures, I think.

If you haven't read it, don't worry, someone else has. Call me a socialist Muslim Kenyan, but I've always seen humanity as a collective being, not just a group made up of individuals. Haven't seen the Grand Canyon, or sky dived, read Henry James, or experienced life as an Tibetan monk? Well, someone else has. Is. Will. So you don't have to. It isn't really the literature/art/music itself that will endure into the ages (or at least until 2012), it's the effect it has on those who experience it. What new perceptions on life it has given them, how it changes them for better or worse, and how they pass that on to everyone they come in contact with.

The entire fabric of society could be upheld by some unwritten poem recited 10,000 years ago that no one's even heard of.

Even Snooki's book will impact someone, somewhere. God help us all.

So don't try to become a vampire, or wait to be the last person on Earth so you have all the time you need to read everything in existence. Because then you'll just drop your glasses, and where will you be.

Internet Lovelies

2011-04-12T12:00:00.002-04:00

On the future of books:

2040: Authors Will
Become Like Tamagotchi.

Having determined that what readers want is a "sense of connection," publishers will organize adopt-an-author promotions, repackaging writers along the lines of Webkinz and other imaginary pets. "Feeding" your favorite authors by buying their books will make their online avatars grow less pale and grouchy. If they starve to death on your watch you will lose social networking points. Book clubs will cultivate with their favorite writers the warm, fuzzy, organic bond a trainer develops with his or her Pokémon, a process that will culminate in staged fights-to-the-death between your author and the author sponsored by another book club. These fights will occur offline, since there will be one or two bookstores left and something has to happen there.

James Warner, Link

There are only about 10 American poets most anyone has ever heard of, and they're kinda so-so. I mean, Robert Frost? Having white hair doesn't make you a poet.

That we must either be supportive cheerleaders of the yeah yeah community kind (I find this to be the falsest. The Children of the Corn Glazed Look that comes over the faces of people who live in this place or that place when talking about the place, as if the good poems just come right up through your legs for merely walking in an American place that isn't the Grand Canyon or among the Sequoias.

Jim Behrle, Link

She claims to have no tale of woe when asked what hardships she has had to suffer through and her determination to carry on despite everything she’s known is certainly commendable. However, as strong a woman as she is, she cannot escape unscathed, forcing her to learn that love for one’s self is a challenge that is always ongoing. As for allowing one’s self to be loved by another, that takes a strength we may not even know we have and this is what JANE EYRE embodies.

Black Sheep, Link

when I walked into the venue, all I saw were people in little clumps, talking amongst themselves. I did not know how to join one of those little clumps so I sat to the side, alone, looking like the biggest freak in the universe. I wanted to die or disappear or both. I brought my iPad as a social crutch to pretend I was deeply involved with very important work. I sent an e-mail to a friend. Then I just stared at the screen and tried to figure out what to do, like if I should stay in my freak corner until it was time for my panel while everyone else was in a group or if I should awkwardly try to join a clump of people and then have to endure feeling like no one wants to talk to me and that I’m intruding. It was stressful. I almost left but there was no invisible way to manage that. This is what it’s like in my head, all the time. People think I’m aloof but no I’m literally just spending all my mental energy trying to figure out the least embarrassing way to be around other humans.

Roxane Gay, Link

In general, if a pastime is not classy, those who love it are “addicted.” Opera and poetry buffs are “passionate.”

Virtually all non-work activities have, at one time or another, been represented as craven and diseased...

Novels themselves, now the signature pursuit of the sound and literate mind, have also been considered toxic, as in the 1797 analysis, “Novel Reading, a Cause of Female Depravity.” The 18th-century worry about female literacy is not unlike the contemporary anxiety that Web use above all makes girls vulnerable to “predators”: “Without this poison instilled, as it were, into the blood, females in ordinary life would never have been so much the slaves of vice.” Taken together, these warnings against the very stuff that makes life worth living often seem either like veiled boasts (“I’m addicted to the symphony!”) or just absurd.

Virginia Heffernan, Link

I’ve always thought of the internet, then, as this other universe where fantasy is possible. And it’s true, as the old people say, that its fantasies are not like living. Better. They make it possible to live. How you feel about things that are not really happening to you on the internet is no less real than how you feel about things that are not really happening to you in Gus van Sant movies, or Band of Horses songs, or Raymond Carver stories, or Carmen, the opera, or Carmen, the ballet.

And so the feelings of internet children are less believed-in, but no less true than the feelings of everyone who preferred art and fantasy to reality in every time before.

Sarah Nicole Prickett, Link

I start to imagine, what if a writer could see, experience, feel, at the moment of writing, the lives of every single person he would ever influence with his work? What if she could know the twisted path the work would take? It's the afterlife that makes work dangerous, like a golem or a poltergeist, like the creatures a nymph turns into after she can't be a nymph anymore.

Elizabeth Bachner, Link

On watching Toy Story 3:

How do the toys deal with immortality? Does it cause them to think about time differently? After all, the only possible end to their lives would be profound mutilation like in a garbage compactor or a fire or by an abusive owner. Presumably the toys will see the last moments of our bloated red sun before it goes supernova. If they somehow get aboard an evacuating interstellar spaceship full of humans, they could be around for the heat-death of the universe. In that case, they’ll be the last living beings, floating through a cold empty void, thoughts disintegrating slowly over the millennia into utter madness.

Brad Pike, Link

Comment in response to above essay:

...We thought we were safe but we weren't. Bonnie's mother, spurred on by trendy narratives of material simplicity took it upon herself to just chuck us all in the trash. The effect upon the little girl is unknown. Still, we found ourselves back in the dump again, this time buried inescapably. Separated, unable even to converse, there was nothing we could do to retain our sanity. Buzz probably had it easiest; his finite battery life was his saving grace. I on the other hand, powered by pullstring, have no such easy way to escape consciousness.
Under the refuse of generations, I have been doomed to smolder.

I have no batteries, and I must scr-THERE'S A SNAKE IN MY BOOT

Craig Messner, Link

When I watched Toy Story 3, I kept thinking about immortality and the end of A.I. Artifical Intelligence, with little robot Haley Joel Osment and the teddy bear "living" for eternity.

Also that short story by Ray Bradbury, "There Will Come Soft Rains", with the robots doing things after a nuclear holocaust.

I like when magazines end their articles with some sign, so you know it's over, and the cat still isn't fed, or that cancer is like grossing inside a stranger as we speak, and ignorance/beer is our only mercy.

Jimmy Chen, Link

Shoplifting from American Apparel, 19/100

2011-04-12T10:40:00.004-04:00

If someone came up to me and asked, "What author do you feel best represents the generation of people* born between 1983 and 1988?", I would answer, "Tao Lin."

*also suburban and/or middle class

Shoplifting from American Apparel has a loose plot, although it's not really important. Instead, the novella focuses on themes of alienation, boredom, and ineffective communication -- whether it's face-to-face or through g-mail chat.

Oh yes, the g-mail chats. Lin's work wouldn't be the same without them. In fact, his writing is saturated with social technology. Beyond just name-dropping Facebook, Myspace (this novella was published in 2009, but just this reference has already dated it), and Flickr, it's also feels electronic in other ways -- the short, Twitter-like descriptions, or showing emotion through "facial expressions", like emoticons.

But for the most part it's just funny. Hilarious. The kind of humor that anyone who has ever laughed watching "Two-and-a-Half Men" probably wouldn't find humorous. Which if you have, that's fine. To each his/her own. Just don't buy this book.

"You know those people that get up every day, and do things," said Luis.
"I'm going to eat cereal even though I'm not hungry," said Sam.
"And are real proactive," said Luis. "And like getting things done, and never quit their jobs. Those people suck."

"My face is going to float away from my skull," said Sam. "To emo music."

"Luis, what are we."
"Fucked," said Luis. "Was that like a cheer. What are we! Fucked. Our shit can be studied by an anthropologist 1,000 years from now to know what we ate."
"Indian food," said Sam.
"They will say 'Sam had a vegan diet of good food and wine and Indian food. Luis ingested Waffle House.'"

He lay on his mattress and thought about writing a novel about working hard and becoming rich and living alone in a giant house in Florida. Loneliness and depression would be defeated with a king-size bed, an expensive stereo system, a drum set, a bike, an unlimited supply of organic produce and coconuts, maybe calmly playing an online role-playing game. Each day the person in the novel would lay in sunlight on the living room carpet listening to music in "surround-sound" while drinking iced-coffee. At night the person would ride a bike around the neighborhood or drink smoothies while taking very long baths.

Someone on the street messed up a trick on their skateboard.
"You can't skate," should Audrey.
"What," said the person skating away.
Audrey shouted "Obama" at the person.
"That was good," said Sam. "You dominated him a lot."

Also, it turns out SFAA is being adapted into a film!

Brad Warner will be playing the part of Sam. I've read two of Warner's books: Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality, and Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate: A Trip Through Death, Sex, Divorce, and Spiritual Celebrity in Search of the True Dharma (thank you, CTRL+C, CTRL+V). If those sound interesting, you should check out his blog: http://hardcorezen.blogspot.com/