Book Reviews

"'One day we lose the person we love. Anyone who is unable to sustain that loss fails as a human being and does not deserve our sympathy.'"

After over forty years of silence, two former best friends meet and confront the past. Not much more to say without spoiling. Very simple book, but quite well executed, some excellent musings on the nature of friendship, trust, and survival.

"'We have to learn that our desires do not find any real echo in the world. We have to accept that the people we love do not love us, or not in the way we hope. We have to accept betrayal and disloyalty, and, hardest of all, that someone is finer than we are in character or intelligence.'"

"Any sense we had of existence was merely a reminder of the incomprehensible futility of existence, a futility that would repeat itself ad infinitum..."

The first half of this double novella relates a failed academic's drunken retelling of his sponsored trip to Extremadura, Spain. Tasked with writing a piece to increase tourism within the region, he becomes intrigued with the history of wolves in the area. Having lost all confidence in his ability to create anything meaningful, the narrator follows the threads of the wolves' extinction in place of learning Extremadura's selling points. Typical Krasznahorkai bleakness, pontification on the futility of existence in a world based on scorn.

As a follow-up, two short stories follow. Both focus on a game warden that soon turns his attention towards humanity. Burdened with the guilt of senseless killing, he begins laying out traps for humans.

This work fits well inside that greater Krasznahorkai mission statement of futility. K tells us that life becomes meaningless when we castrate ourselves from the natural world. When all mystery is rationalized out of life, things become dull; when we define all that exists, existence ceases to matter.

"Affection can’t always be expressed in calm, orderly, articulate ways; and . . . one cannot prescribe the form it should take for anyone else."

Character-driven semi-autobiographical feel-bad fiction about two women whose dependence on one another outweighs their incompatibility and general unlikability. A petulant writer and a stubborn, mentally ill housekeeper form an unlikely bond. In the beginning, their relationship is often mediated through each woman's connection with Viola, a dog rescued by the writer.

I think this book is probably really good for fans of character studies and Oprah Book Club type reads. I found it pretty drab, the prose is devoid of any sort of flair, I feel like I could have just watched a movie.

"How irrational, how unpredictable is the attraction between people, how fatal its current. And yet I was well versed in Greek literature, which portrayed nothing but the passions: death and love and friendship, their hands joined together round a glittering axe."

Krasznahorkai's oeuvre has a particular focus on futility, that the good times are behind us, that the future is nonexistent. Yet, there is spiritual resistance to this futility through art. Art exists wholly outside the sphere of our otherwise banal existence. Like in , the protagonist claims that listening to Bach is the solution to the apocalypse as his music reveals, through transcendental beauty, that there is more to existence than what we can be tangibly experienced. In War & War, prose is the salvation to the human condition.

In War & War, Korin discovers a revelatory text at his job as a records keeper in rural Hungary. Already disillusioned with this life, he determines that his calling is publishing this work online before killing himself in the center of everything. So, he sells off all his belongings and travels to New York City.

The content of the text is revealed in metafictional recollections to various acquaintances Korin comes across; Four travelers, pursued by war, search for peace. The narrative shifts seamlessly between time and place, from Gibraltar to Babel, the quartet is repeatedly met with destruction. A crystalline expression of reality is captured in the pages of the manuscript that drive Korin to ensure its preservation for eternity.

The travelers meditate on love and peace along their journey, concluding that God exists within and art is the expression of that inner holiness. However, logicians and warmongers betray God. In illuminating the secrets of the universe, in killing mysticism, they are killing the part of the interior that reaches out to a higher cause. When all exists, nothing exists, and from there good mornings and bad mornings simply become mornings.

Troubles never come singly.

An oafish neo-Nazi henchman portends apocalypse at the molecular level, setting off a chain of unrelated events, all of which spell doom. A wolf attack, a bombing, a pandemic, every day is doomsday to someone. Really, collapse is inevitable, if it isn't the disease or the political violence or the complete collapse of matter, our own minds will eventually shatter us.

The first half of Herscht 07769 builds up to some great conclusion that never happens. All the original threads we follow from the start become frayed, the false vacuum decay apocalypse, the wolf attacks, the bombings, they are not resolved, what seems important never comes to fruition, instead are ended plainly, pointless death. It isn't one thing, its always the other. Every precaution taken is rendered futile by some stray catastrophe.

I find it somewhat strange that this is the book Krasznahorkai chose to write in one single sentence. Some of his novels benefit from the long-drawn meandering prose, but this one seems like a strange choice given the story's accessibility. Though, I did feel this lent the book a symphonic quality; As I read, the singular stream of events, with their highs and lows, did have similar qualities to the music of Bach, which, glancing through some other reviews, I see Krasznahorkai has actually asserted himself:

"Bach's music is also very complex, but we listen to it without stopping it at the bar limits, just because it gives us the time to rethink where we are actually."

The most inspired and interesting idea in this book is never wrapped up, annoyingly enough, though, that is the point. The protagonist Florian writes incessantly to Angela Merkel to voice his concern on the end of the world. And, well, Merkel does write back at the end, but the letter lays unopened. Florian's physics teacher Kohler, he plants the idea in Florian's head about the disaster, and, well, he disappears for a year, comes back changed, is mute, is working on something in strange coding languages on his computer, and, his eventual funeral is attended by a scientist who publicly commends his work in the field. One of those things that drives you crazy to not know but is probably better off unsaid.

Stories of those who live in the impassioned shadow of great things.

Krasznahorkai's Nobel Prize win was a little puzzling to me after reading and , his work seems unapproachable. But I get it after Seiobo There Below, if you can get past the 10 page long sentences, this feels like Oprah Book Club bait. Not in a bad way. Just maybe a bit thematically maudlin.

There is an astounding breadth of subject matter traversed between the pages of this book, Krasznahorkai's diligence in research is impressive. There is a particular depth of understanding of Japanese art and culture on display here. Like, in chapter 987 (the chapters are numbered by the Fibonacci sequence), my favorite section of the book, the factual content regarding the Ise shrine is incredible, but also his empathetic apprehension of Kawamoto, his embarrassment with his guest's inability to read the air. A lot can be learned about art history here, and the curious reader is given innumerable threads to follow for further research with Krasznahorkai's references and allusions.

At it's core, Seiobo There Below is about the relationship with humans and the divine conducted through the medium of art. Explorations of how art is actually physically created via natural materials, how the artist functions in society, and how the art impacts the viewer. Writing this, I recall the section about a Louvre security guard's obsession with the Venus De Milo and his thesis that the singular statue channels all previous iterations of that sculpting tradition. At times I didn't enjoy the reading, but now, with the book behind me, my appreciation grows by the minute.

I think the subject matter is arbitrary. "Write what you know," Krasznahorkai is a European with an affinity for Japan, but it is just all Europe and Japan. So much diversity of content within those two regions, yet we never stray further than Granada. Krasznahorkai's created sphere of art and importance is reductive towards the message, with an obvious demonstration of relentlessness and duty to the message of the work, I think it would have been stronger if it wasn't so Euro/Japan centric. Even if it was just European or just Japanese, but with both, it has this inconsistent feeling, like this is just what Krasznahorkai likes to write about. The argument on aesthetics almost undermines itself by being parochial. Maybe this is a tactless woke gripe but it took me out of it a tad.

There is a reaper, Death yclept, by Almighty God employed. Soon he will cut.

Freshly free off a quadrennial confinement, Franz vows to walk the straight and narrow. No more funny business from here on out. The whole Ida business leading to his arrest was a fluke, see, he is no villain, this time Franz is going things legitimate. But, there is a reaper...

1920's Berlin's criminal underbelly, they're building a station on Alex, you know, Franz selling papers on the duckboards, only thing is, tuppence a copy, five pfennigs an hour, something like that, a man can't live. Jeremiah said we would heal Babylon, but Babylon would not be healed. Crime pays.

Cinematic, no, operatic, replete with choral refrain. Döblin holds us at arms' lengths, wonder what in the world Franz is getting at half the time. Christlike innocence until he's pimping his new woman, until he is beating her half to death. There is a conflict of interest, his ego and his impulse. And what with society on the brink and all...

1,399 cattle, 2,700 calves, 4,654 sheep, 18,864 pigs. There is a reaper, Death yclept.

As interesting to me as a friend describing a dream. Surrealism doesn't do a ton for me unless backed by stellar prose or some greater evocation of mystique. The prose here is stellar at times, but just didn't leave me spellbound like I suspect I was meant to be. Some really rich scenes, but the in-betweens didn't keep me captivated. Interesting reconjurations of the textures of childhood. I would have felt better about this if I hadn't read it at work, if I hadn't read Calvino before, if I had a stiff drink to go with it, if I hadn't trudged through some lesser Cartarescu at the start of the week. Luckily it's short enough to try again.

In just barely 300 pages, Krasznahorkai achieves in blistering concision what most are unable to achieve at all. The Melancholy of Resistance is, at its core, a book about entropy as an absolute condition. A traveling circus catalyzes the death throes of an East Hungarian town in decay. An enigmatic relationship between a reclusive musician and the starry-eyed village idiot illuminates the futility of purity.

Eszter alienates himself from society through his pursuit of perfection. Equal temperament is, to him, an unholy adulteration of just intonation. Yet, finding discordance exists even in true harmony, he becomes immobilized by the illusion of spotlessness and his own self-referential questioning. Thus, he withdraws from the world, remaining only loosely tethered to reality by a bond with the emotionally stunted Valuska—Valuska, a childlike "angel" with a hyperfixation on the cosmos, not as they are, but as he believes them to be.

Eszter's estranged wife, a social striver intent on seizing control of the city council in order to mold the city into her own vision of purity, impels the arrival of the circus and the famed dead whale it keeps in tow. Mrs. Eszter, anticipating turmoil in the whale's wake, orchestrates a quiet coup capitalizing on the riots.

The novel ends with a literal microcosm of teleological futility in the form of the whale's icy decomposition. Krasznahorkai guides us through the rot, personifies blood cells and bacteria, paints the process as an epic conflict, yet, we know what happens, the whale is dead...

Serious, SERIOUS contender for favorite book...

"MAYBE, in the heart of this book, there is nothing other than howling, yellow, blinding, apocalyptic howling …"

Standard Cărtărescian dream fare, heavy meditation on memory, motherhood, symmetry. I think Nostalgia did it better before, Solenoid does it better afterwards. A lot in Blinding was reappropriated in Solenoid, actually, the cult (the Ones Who Know/the picketists), the narrator dressed and treated as a girl in early childhood, the bio-mech Tetsuo style body horror. Solenoid feels like a more polished, better distilled work on similar subjects.

There are some moments of brilliance here. The cutaway gag of the Badislavs triggering an undead nightmare through opium addiction is genius. Other clever bits are less memorable, huge slogs of less interesting poetic waxing about hard-ons and and butterflies between.

Overall disappointed but also I don't think I was in the proper mood for it and it is hard for Solenoid to be topped.

5 stars for 4:48 Psychosis. The other works range from pretty alright to good. Her earlier works are violent and depraved, ruminations on personal and societal violence, love in the face of despair, deterioration of the interior, fame/royalty. Graduating into straight Beckettian minimalism in later works, Crave and 4:48 Psychosis are almost reminiscent of . The latter really toes the line of overly edgy, but the beauty and sincerity of the work make it something really special.

"'Washington’s crap, Becker.' 'And women? Marriage? Children?' 'Crap.' 'Yeah? Well, what do you want?' 'To hide.'”'

Misanthropic ambulations through an adolescence defined by isolation and physical/social disfigurement. Bukowski's semi-autobiographical Chinaski is ugly and miserable with few redeeming qualities but his ability to take abuse. Bacchanal beginnings of a career drunk. Stylistically bereft. Or staunchly realist, sometimes these feel the same to me. Need a shower after reading. And a drink.

Picked up at Second Story on P Street because I liked the shade of yellow on the cover.

My brain is wired for fiction, but sometimes I feel reading it is no better than watching TV. Which is why I love historical fiction, there is actually learning to be done while following the yarn of the story. The Public Burning kinda teed me off because it requires a fair amount of prior knowledge of the subject or some secondary sources to fill in that knowledge gap. Mostly stuff I maybe should've known. But I appreciate a work that can be enjoyed as a standalone. Nixon's Checkers speech was over 70 years ago now.

Nixon as a narrator for these atom spy satire was ingenious, his paranoid thirst for acceptance and power exemplifies the condition in which the US found itself during the Cold War. The personification of America as superheroic Uncle Sam was fun at times, as was his communist archenemy, the Phantom.

My main issue is that around 1/3rd of the book is just this sustained hysterical scene-setting of Times Square as the locale for the Rosenberg execution. After every couple chapters we return to the Times Tower for more inane bullshit. Okay, William Faulkner is there, haha, Hank Williams is there, haha, Betty Crocker! Betty Crocker is there! Coover is Disneyfying the electrocution, yes, understood, the commercialization of the execution, the propaganda, the media, whatever, it just doesn't require 150+ pages.

It is really smart. Nixon showing his ass to America/America showing its ass to the world, Nixon being... overcome.. with the spirit of Uncle Sam. Just way too long.

My 4th of Vollmann's dreams, I have yet to read . I think Argall is by far the weakest of the dreams, at least from a literary standpoint. Fathers and Crows was laden with symbolism and style, truly a work in it's own league. 's reimagination of Norse history blended with mythology was spectacular. And , though incredibly flawed, is essentially a travelogue cum contemporary story of a toxic relationship told through the lens of a historic tragedy, inventive and incredible. Argall is pretty straightforward. The John Smith and Pocahontas story is a tough one to tell due to the unreliability of the sources, Vollmann acknowledges the possibility of Smith's embellishments without refuting them, which might seem a bit disingenuous but I think is necessary for telling the story as a fiction. What Vollmann does with historical fiction is insane and he truly is the most important living author.

"And so : 'The mummers, quacks, jugglers, prestidigitators, bawds, cut-purses, and swashbucklers divided the world among them; - the sheep stretched out their muttonheads and let themselves be shorn; - while the fools gamboled and somersaulted. And the clever ones, if they could, went forth and became hermits : the history of the world in nuce, in usum Delphini.'"

Syntactically not quite like anything I have read, Schmidt arranges his narrative in relatively short bursts of ideas and action. Freedom of pure poetic expression feels more closely realized in this format, chaotic and feverish. The prose, especially in the first novella, , is enchanting, makes one really regret not knowing German to read the original text.

Story-wise, nothing too spectacular, post-war struggle, post-war sentiments. The latter two novellas are almost love stories set to the backdrop of post WWII and post WWIII, respectively. Schmidt's protagonists constantly pontificate on the nature of man, specifically that most everyone is too stupid to create or correctly consume culture, frothing at the mouth in misanthropic throes. Maybe it felt tired, but nothing grating. To me, the story was just a necessary vessel for the writing.

I did start writing down descriptions of the moon while reading this, Schmidt was borderline obsessed with moon descriptions... also cloud descriptions. The list goes as follows:

THE DEATH MASK OF THE MOON WEDGED CHITINOUS A FIERY BRUNETTE OF A MOON WITH CLOUD RUCHING LACONIC A PALE WHITE FISH BELLY (MOONFISH) BULL’S-EYE MIDDLING DARKLING THE SHARP HIPPOCRATIC FACE OF THE MOON LAY TIPPED ON HIGH BUXOM RUSTIC MOON JAGGED SBIRRO-FACED INSECTILE THE PICKAX OF THE MOON WAS TOILING IN THE INERT CLOUD GRAVEL THE SHINY CURVE OF THE MOON’S PLOWSHARE SOLID SAUCY CURT ACHILLEAN FELLOW, THE MOON : DRAGGED A STIFF CLOUD CORPSE BEHIND HIM AROUND OUR EARTHENWARE TROY (BLUSTERY). THE MOON’S BALD MONGOL SKULL MOON : AS A SILENT STONE HUMP IN THE BLEAK MOOR OF CLOUDS

I kept falling in and out of this book. McElroy's prose makes me think of what is would be like to paint a stucco wall, multiple passes over the same area multiple times, each pass filling in a little more... Like, I feel like we have the same events retold multiple times over but each time a little more comes to light. So many retroactive details feel almost hidden in the poetically garbled narrative, one must be especially attuned to the reading ritual to catch everything. Sometimes, I just wasn't able to stay still for it to wash over me. Some of the symbolism ended up feeling more gauche than evocative, like the Umo/Lazarus comparison and the reverse dive at the end. I did like the recurring motif of blindness because reading McElroy feels like stumbling blindly.

Failed to get off the ground with this one a few months ago but picked it back up this week and burned right through it. After such a long reading hiatus, Pynchon feels like a hug from an old friend, I am truly bummed that with Bleeding Edge I have now read all of his works. I liked this a lot more than Vineland, surprisingly. Post dot com bubble era New York tech bro fraud investigatory hijinks. Pynchon's fiction is too explosive for monomyth, the hero can never return, would be like taping a spent grenade back together, something I noticed in his books, endings tend to be jarring, next to nothing is wrapped up nice, one of the few realisms in the Pynchon canon. Bleeding Edge is forward thinking and increasingly relevant. 3.5 stars

This novella is mostly about Prince Genji's grandson's quest to find a secret garden in modern day Kyoto. But it is also about the expedition of central Chinese hinoki tree seeds across East China Sea, and it's also about the survival of moss spores and it's about the embrace of theoretical infinity while simultaneously rejecting infinite reality and it is about builders and gardeners and architects and rabid foxes and beaten dogs. In essence, this is a meditation on the finite past and the infinite present, rife with page-long winding sentences that draw out beauty in the mundane. Excellent book to read right before bed but ultimately banal.

"So blue, the word and the condition, the color and the act, contrive to contain one another, as if the bottle of the genii were its belly, the lamp's breath the smoke of the wraith... What sinks us to a deeper melancholy: sexual incompleteness or its spastic conclusion? What seems to line our life with satin? what brings rouge to both our cheeks? Loneliness, emptiness, worthlessness, grief... each is an absence in us... Being without Being is blue."

Vigil is Saunders' attempt at a contemporary lampoon of . A dying oil tycoon is visited by bardo-dwellers, some trying to comfort him in his final moments, some trying to make him repent. Saunders shifts blame from climate terrorists to the system, his protagonist deciding that killers, billionaires, cheaters and the like are simply "inevitable occurrences," impossible to pass judgement on. This book seems clear individuals of any responsibility for their faults or misdeeds. The ruthless, selfish oil tycoon was a ruthless, selfish oil tycoon, but we still drove and flew and powered our homes, we cannot blame him, right? Overall, feels out-of-touch and overly-sentimental. A crock of shit, really.

I met Mathias at a poetry reading and we had a brief conversation about used books with heavy marginalia that suddenly stops around page 40.

As a first work of fiction, this is great. Some stories are much stronger than others. Mathias’ background as a poet really shines through the prose. Hearts and I Bought a Sword are the standouts for me.

Good book, but just okay for Pynchon.

The Milwaukee half of the book was pretty great but I felt the scope got too blurry after the liner to Europe. A lot of Pynchonian goofery but toned down compared to most of his other works. I wish I was fresh off a reread of Against the Day, seems like there are quite a few tie-ins. Prose was not as captivating as previous works, but there were some really strong parts. This stood out to me:

"For days now Hicks had been noticing, even in the daylight and out on the street, the return, from somewhere back in deeper Prohibition times, all across his body and over his face, light as delusional bugs, the ghostly crawl of professional finger-eye coordination, somewhere above and in the distance, tightening in on whatever is centered in its crosshairs, which at the moment happens to be Hicks's head."

Probably would've enjoyed this more if I read it in a week rather than 2 months, however reading has lost its luster to me lately.

Neat little collection of post-war tales a la . The first and final story are both pretty awful, but there are a handful of great ones between. Jody Rolled the Bones and A Really Good Jazz Piano were standouts. Yates is no king of short fiction, but if you have a Raymond Carver shaped hole in your heart, I would give it a go.

Perfect.

"We ascended the overpass and gazed north and south along the tracks all the way to Everywhere. In the end we knew as much as we had before."

When Vollmann freight hops, the destination is not so much physical as it is mental. The goal comes from the act of catching out on a boxcar to some unknown terminus. Waiting along the tracks through cold rainy nights or blistering afternoons for a chance to latch onto a northbound grainer. The deafening clatter of the tracks, parched throat, desperate to sleep yet desperate to stay awake. None of it sounds very appealing.

"When I steal a ride on a freight train, I honestly don’t care where it goes. What could be more ridiculous than that? Isn’t going anywhere the same as going nowhere?—What does one usually see from an open box? —Well, a long flat vista of fences, boggy fields, mountains in the distance . . . —In which case, why not stay in bed for the rest of my life?"

Vollmann compares his quest for this vagrant's high to Hanshan's Cold Mountain:

"Where’s the trail to Cold Mountain? Cold Mountain? There’s no clear way. Ice, in summer, is still frozen. Bright sun shines through thick fog. You won’t get there following me. Your heart and mine are not the same. If your heart was like mine, You’d have made it, and be there!"

Really incredible memoir, I wish I had more to say but my brain is struggling to function properly after the 2 hour park nap I just had. Highly recommend this, the text is quite short and there are some really neat pictures at the end.

"I tried to persuade myself that this was what I had come for, to see and be scorched by what I had seen."

"What is it about the polar heavens that fixes a transient thing for eternity?"

I adore Vollmann, I love historical fiction, Vollmann's historical fiction scratches a special itch for me. That being said, I think the source material for the Ice-Shirt is just too difficult to make interesting in a contemporary western setting. Without further fictionalization, you are stuck with a cast of character with names like Thorbjorg, Thorbjorn, Thorgil, Thorkel, Thorstein, Thorvald etc... A man can only take so much flipping back and forth for clarification. Maybe this book is too short, there isn't enough time for the world to be built, for all the Thors to differentiate themselves. Or maybe I should've done some precursory reading on the topic, learned a bit more about the sagas first.

The ice shirt, as an object, as an idea, is Norse hegemony over the natives in Iceland, Greenland, and Vinland. As Eirik the Red's clan expands trading routes throughout the North Atlantic, they, unsurprisingly, mistreat the natives, deceiving and dehumanizing them for personal gain. Vinland wasn't icy then like it is today, the sagas took place during the Medieval Warming Period, so the Norse brought to these relative paradises a cruel frost.

Long, sightless drives over shimmering desert highways and the flat monotony of days and months and years of pointless life posed against Didion's stark prose and rapid-fire short-chapter pacing make Play It As It Lays an interesting read. The form fights against the fill. Or, arguably, highlight how meaningless the time between the "action" of life is, how the day-to-day isn't even worth mentioning.

Sharp prose but I really can't bring myself to enjoy reading of the hedonistic lifestyles of 1960's L.A. Babitz has a certain level of self-awareness with which she tries to justify her position in the Hollywood landscape to herself and her readers. As though ironizing will separate her from the culture that she pokes fun at. Which feels out of touch to me. I could not find much beauty in her shallow relationships with superficial people. Her descriptions of California can be really beautiful though, I love the way she talks about places.

“It occurred to me that all I had to do was turn around and that would be the end of it. But the whole beach, throbbing in the sun, was pressing on my back.”

Overdue read for me. Very sobering one, at that. Carefully made plans float away uncaringly. The same preoccupations that torture us through the bad times follow us into the good times. Whether we find meaning or not means nothing. We still find ways to die in the silliest of ways.

I wish I had read this earlier in life, I feel like it would’ve resonated more.

"irreconcilable anxiety petrified in the dense darkness of a reduced inconsolable existence..."

Ceaseless rain falls on the Great Hungarian Plain. Following the disintegration of the collective farm system, villagers of an unnamed town lead shallow, idle lives. Hope does not exist in this muddy hole save celestial bells heard on the horizon... The feeling of futility towards this meager existence is visceral. Residents succumb to their basest impulses. Miserable, lightless book, but, like, in an awesome way.

Brief, nonlinear account of the most important events and ideas out of Europe in the 20th century. Akin to a glorified wikipedia page. Though I really liked the section on neuroses and coercive freedom. See:

"And later, when almost everything was permitted, they started to be depressed because they did not know what they would like to have done, and they were transformed into new pathological subjects and psychiatrists said that the pathological subject had been totally transformed during that period. And sociologists said that depression was a compensation for a world in which individual freedom no longer represented an ideal that we must painfully struggle toward, but a barrier that we must painfully surmount ... And some people wanted to find some meaning in everything and suffered existential frustration. And psychologists said that looking for meaning in life was the result of a need to drive emptiness and death out of it and that it allowed one to live more intensely."

Seven stories centered on the perversion of truth and the farcical facades of fascists during the Great Purge. The strained relationship one juggles with their ego when met with strife. The titular story, a struggle between a ruthless inquisitor dedicated to higher justice and a legacy-obsessed revolutionary is perfectly juxtaposed with the subsequent tale of forced apostasy and religious conversion under duress. Okay, or, the story of botched gulag card game stakes leading to a 15 year game of cat-and-mouse to shed the nickname "bitch." Thematically consistent and consistently entertaining.

I cannot stop thinking about the imprint of the shoe salesman's clenched fist, temporally branded in the middle of the parlor, suspended there...

I regret to log that this was not quite my thing.

I rank this alongside as glorified YA fiction poised as high brow postmodern fiction. The entire concept of the A.F.R. felt silly to me, the gratuitously gross scenes of misery porn w/r/t [the] Ennett House's residents read like breadcrumbs to wade through all the stuff that just wasn't super interested.

Though, Infinite Jest's reputation so far precedes the work that maybe I have bias. Also, a lot of stuff in here is insanely poignant today and Wallace's forethought is genuinely incredible. Like, the entire part about video calls and people buying masks and the pseudo-luddite rejection of video calls and everyone just going back to regular calls... that played out in real life so close to how Wallace described.

A lot of the depression stuff with Kate Gompert really resonated, I feel like there were some really really accurate descriptions about how depression feels.

Very happy to have this one behind me. Have not been able to read outside in the sun for 3 weeks because I unfortunately care about my public perception and this book has quite the reputation.

Interesting, but, like.. as a Wikipedia page.

Crazy that the story was made into a bestselling book, a miniseries starring Amanda Seyfried, and almost a movie starring Jennifer Lawrence.

The Richard Fuisz Medcom stuff was by far the most interesting part.

Life in a chair...

Nazi historian William Kohler wallows in a pit of disappointment, nearing the winter of a wasted life. Embittered by failure, he embraces the fascism of the heart, the base wantonness at the core of the soul, the pursuit of self-interest at the expense of others, at the expense of one's own self... hatred as a mask to entomb shame and fear. Kohler vindicates himself of his misogyny, his bigotry, his hatred is spoken out as courageous truth, he hides behind history, for which he gave up poetry in his youth. Hatred exists within us all, morality fails just around every bend in the corridor of history, the Third Reich could not exist without those willing to carry out orders. And Kohler points out we are fools to believe that there may have been any sort of moral growth to ever occur in humanity.

The prose is beautiful and disgusting, a thin-film interference rainbow on a pile of vomit, every page has equal share of sentences that provide literary euphoria and sentences that make ya wanna take a shower. Misanthropy is the main refrain, the Tunnel is a hellish slog that leaves you feeling dirty for having read it. The 600 odd pages took me nearly 4 months, there is only so much grime a person can wade through in one sitting. However, I probably copied down more sentences from this book into my notes app than any other book.

I did like Kohler's reconciliation with poetry. History is poetry. History is not remembered by dates and events, history is experienced through feeling, through the pants we wore that day or the trinket we bought at the store. Poetry allows us to actually experience history.. otherwise it is just a story that happened to someone else.

I know I will need to reread this next year when the new Dalkey prints finally ship. I am looking forward to it almost as much as I am dreading it.

Danielle Book Club Book #3

Study of the relationships between women and patriarchal structures through the guise of interpersonal relationships and dreams. Psychologically reliant on men/authoritarian structures, socially conditioned to accept the role. Taxing read, this one filtered a majority of the book club. Not particularly enjoyable, but still got a lot out of it. Cool nautical imagery.. the ocean, nature, innocence and simplicity, boats being the means through which we traverse the sea, and we find ourselves at mercy of the captain. Water on every side, 360 portal to what life could be, stuck on this stupid boat captained by this stupid man. The only way to change course is to sink the boat, by the way...

We shall cease to think and suffer, it shall be the Redemption.

My second of Vollmann's dreams. While the tome-like maintains relative succinctness across its 800+ pages, the Rifles meanders constantly throughout it's 300 or so pages. The introduction was so strong... Vollmann explored the idea of firearms as a means of suppression. You provide guns to a group of people, alter their way of life, make it so they can no longer function without the guns, and then you throttle the ammo supply to maintain hegemony. This was Canada's main method of enslavement with the Inuits shipped off to far-flung Resolute and Arctic Bay.

The rest of the novel consists of a history of John Franklin's lost expedition to discover the Northwest Passage interpolated with Vollmann's personal experiences in the arctic. Bill's tenuous relationship with an Inuit woman informs the blanks left in the history, which he fills in with yearning. Really, you can feel his loneliness splayed out, belly-up across the pages. If you are familiar with Vollmann, you know he has an affinity for prostitutes. Perhaps the lack of sex workers operating out of the arctic circle had a strain on him. I just never imagined an arctic expedition to be so horny. Some really incredible (in an ironic Vollmannesque way) illustrations, some very pretty parts, but this dream achieves only a fraction of what I expected from my previous foray into his recreation of the American landscape.

Read the Fagles translation.

The excerpts of the Odyssey that I read out of textbooks in my youth came to life in a way that they cannot in my adulthood. So I went in with high hopes for the epic I had built up in memory for twenty years. It was fine.

*Content Warning*

In Brownmiller's treatise on rape, she defines the act as an expression of power and dominance. Rape is not a result of the lonely male overcome by lust—rape is political, a tool of degradation and dominance over women, rape is "The perpetuation of male domination over women by force." The sexual violence men impose on women is a "Historic mission," a reinforcement of androcentric hegemony. Rape functions as an instrument of subjugation, "A sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation." Within a patriarchal society that places value on masculinity and sexual prowess, women's bodies become currency. Rampant misogyny as a rule among men diminishes the idea of a women's bodily and sexual integrity to a simple object. "A woman is perceived by the rapist both as hated person and desired property. Hostility against her and possession of her may be simultaneous motivations, and the hatred for her is expressed in the same act that is the attempt to 'take' her against her will. In one violent crime, rape is an act against person and property."

The first section of this book presents research on the history of rape throughout history. There is a large focus on the sexual violence executed on women in times of war and political unrest. From ancient tribal skirmishes up until the modern day, men have ravaged the women of their enemies. Women become a token of combat, a prize for the victor, and a humiliation of the adversary. "The very maleness of the military—the brute power of weaponry exclusive to their hands, the spiritual bonding of men at arms, the manly discipline of orders given and orders obeyed, the simple logic of the hierarchical command—confirms for men what they long suspect, that women are peripheral, irrelevant to the world that counts, passive spectators to the action in the center ring." For the military-minded man, women are chattel, and, in many cases, rape is one of the privileges of being at war. Beyond the rape of innocent women, military conquest is almost always accompanied by prostitution. Sex, for men, is viewed as a God-given right. "Man should be trained for war and woman FOR THE recreation of the warrior."

There is an interesting section on the psychology behind the rape fantasy. Brownmiller speaks about the media she was exposed to as a child and the thought patterns and dreams cultivated by it. Chauvinism is the defining factor—the male fantasy is ever-present in film, news, children's books, etc. Snow White, the beautiful but comatose girl brought to life by a stolen kiss... Little Red Riding Hood's encounter with the Big Bad Wolf... Sexual violence towards women is threaded throughout so much of the content we ingest. This informs adolescent sexuality, introducing the idea that women should be submissive to a dominating man. "Our female sexual fantasies have been handed to us on a brass platter by those very same men who have labored so lovingly to promote their own fantasies. Because of this deliberate cultural imbalance, most women, I think, have an unsatisfactory fantasy life when it comes to sex. Having no real choice, women have either succumbed to the male notion of appropriate female sexual fantasy or we have found ourselves largely unable to fantasize at all. — when women do fantasize about sex, the fantasies are usually the product of male conditioning and cannot be otherwise."

Since biblical times, litigation in terms of rape has been controversial. The difficult nature of providing proof of rape, alongside the innate male tendency to devalue the words of women, creates a legal dilemma. In dealing with rape allegations, the promiscuity of the women is almost always brought into question. Did she have a history of libertine behavior? Did she lead the man on? Brownmiller points out that it is unfair to bring these questions into the matter. "Tacit 'consent,' is patently unfair, since such standards are not applied in court to the behavior of victims in other kinds of violent crime." There is a huge discrepancy between the number of reported rapes and rape convictions due to the idea that women might lie for personal gain. In order to change this injustice, Brownmiller suggests "a gender-free, non-activity-specific law governing all manner of sexual assaults would be but the first step toward legal reform." Another flaw in the way society deals with rape litigation is the subconscious belief that some rapes matter more than others. There is this idea of the "less dead," people like drifters and prostitutes who get thrown on the backburner by law enforcement and do not receive the same quality of justice in trial. When touching upon rape-murder, Brownmiller pointed out that "The murder of a beautiful young woman is no more regrettable, no greater tragedy, than the murder of a plain one, except in a culture that values beauty in women above other qualities. By putting great store in the murder of a beauty, beauty acquires the seeds of its own destruction."

To eradicate rape, there must be a complete upheaval of a male-dominated society in which women are viewed as objects. "All prior traditions have worked against the cause of women and no set of values, including that of tolerant liberals, is above review or challenge." Brownmiller views sex work as a massive obstruction in the way of women's rights. When a women sells her body for monetary compensation, how is a young man supposed to take that? "[Prostitution] institutionalizes the concept that it is man's monetary right, if not his divine right, to gain access to the female body, and that sex is a female service that should not be denied the civilized male. Perpetuation of the concept that the "powerful male impulse" must be satisfied with immediacy by a cooperative class of women, set aside and expressly licensed for this purpose, is part and parcel of the mass psychology of rape." Brownmiller views pornography as crux of anit-female propaganda:

"Hard-core pornography is not a celebration of sexual freedom; it is a cynical exploitation of female sexual activity through the device of making all such activity, and consequently all females, 'dirty.'"

"We and our bodies are being stripped, exposed and contorted for the purpose of ridicule to bolster that "masculine esteem" which gets its kick and sense of power from viewing females as anonymous, panting playthings, adult toys, dehumanized objects to be used, abused, broken and discarded."

This is an increasingly topical take as sex work becomes more normalized through online interfaces like Onlyfans. Many sex-forward women defend the right to sex work, claiming that they have the right to use their body as they'd like, be it transactional or not. In response, Brownmiller doubles down on the belief that sex work harms all women and says "Liberal consciousness [that] remains fiercely obdurate, refusing to be budged, for the sin of appearing square or prissy in the age of the so-called sexual revolution has become the worst offense of all."

A personal anecdote: I was recently in Montreal with a woman. There is a famous porn theatre right on one of the main roads through the city. Besides offering tickets to viewings of porn movies, they also sell merchandise in the lobby. The merchandise is tacky and kitschy and would make for, in my mind, a fun souvenir. However my companion was pretty uncomfortable with the idea of stopping by, even if to just buy a quick tee shirt. It's just porn... but today I have a better understanding of the discomfort she might have experienced. Porn, proven as the antithesis of anti-feminist propaganda, changes the way one might think about patronizing a theatre in any way.

It is a travesty that "[A] woman who claims to value her sexual integrity cannot expect the same amount of freedom and independence that men routinely enjoy." Though Brownmiller's work may me a bit outdated now, 50 years after being first published, there is a lot of valuable insight into the psychology of rape and possible recourse for it. My only qualm is that there is a pretty gratuitous amount of violence in the first person accounts used to back up the data. I don't have to read 20 graphic rape descriptions of girls in the Vietnam war to believe the statistics.

We don the crow shirt and make the exercises, ascending the stream of time through the forests of Quebec. Fathers and crows is a sprawling and relentlessly humanist history on the founding of French Canada. At the forefront, the Jesuits, tasked with converting the lost souls that populate the land. The relationship between the French and the natives is harrowing and ugly and Vollmann's sympathetic hand and uncompromising vision brings justice to the topic.

Iron takes such a prominent role in the early chronicles of the New World. The relationship between the Natives and the French was built on the trade of iron for beaver pelts; As dependency on the material grew, so did the control the French were able to exert over the Natives. Iron became the media of enslavement.

A good portion of this novel is focused on Kateri Tekakwitha, the first canonized Native American saint. It is very telling of the Catholic mindset that her first miracle was becoming whitewashed. "This face, so marked and swarthy, suddenly changed about a quarter of an hour after her death and became in a moment so beautiful and so white that I observed it immediately." Upon her death, her skin turned white and her smallpox scars disappeared. She became a saint by becoming more conventionally beautiful upon death.

"'Are you happy here Mrs. Leatherby?' This was a difficult question to answer as I had ceased thinking in terms of happiness for some time."

I had hoped that this book would be a testament to the endurance of human imagination, a sort of appeal to the value of elders and a criticism on elder care. It certainly started off in that direction. However, the second half becomes so indulgently whimsical and surreal that it loses a lot of meaning. I like the idea of senile old women discovering freedom in the winter of their lives, but I just grew did not care for the whole occult aspect of the plot, I found myself skimming a lot.

"'Although freedom has come to us somewhat late in life, we have no intention of throwing it away again. Many of us have passed our lives with domineering and peevish husbands. When we were finally delivered of these we were chivvied around by our sons and daughters who not only no longer loved us, but considered us a burden and objects of ridicule and shame. Do you imagine in your wildest dreams that now we have tasted freedom we are going to let ourselves be pushed around once more by you and your leering mate?'"

I can see the appeal in the way that I understand is beloved by so many but I just didn't get it. This book has an incredibly similar feel to me, so though I understand that it has appeal, the appeal is mostly lost on me.

Unexciting prose and an unexciting plot culminating in a corny Disney-movie ending.

I have been trying to get my hands on more Fante after reading Ask the Dust two years ago… severely disappointed.

A war between insects and electricity… Vollmann’s time as a war correspondent during the Soviet-Afghan war (somehow) served as a foundation for his first novel. The conflict is framed within an autobiographical meta narrative in which the author details the history of the bug conflict from his work computer, having remained in the office after hours. Frenetic with schizo-asides and transtemporal detours, You Bright and Risen Angels is the definition of making a long story longer. Nothing is linear. The timeline is completely swallowed up by all of the random addendums and side plots Actually, the denouement of the war occurs in a fictitious second volume, we receive closure through random flash-forward snippets littered all throughout the book.

If you learned anything in that 100-level creative writing course you took to fulfill the last couple credit hours of the humanities requirement for your major, you might remember hearing that you shouldn’t really use coincidence to get your characters out of trouble. Vollmann, however, relies entirely on coincidence in this book. Well, really, he just alters the laws of the universe to fit his story. Like, when you would play superheroes with the neighbor boy and he would fire a fatal laser directly at your chest, but, oh, wait, you had just developed laser immunity, actually, you developed a laser shield that returns the laser directly to sender. The world of You Bright and Risen Angels is melty and gooey, subject to fantastical adjustments at any moment.

All I can do is applaud the imagination, writing inane bullshit of this caliber requires generational talent. My write-up might seem negative, but I loved this. There is no doubt in my mind that Vollmann is the greatest living writer.

Sidenote: In the unstoppable camera of my mind’s eye, a meeting room full of G-Men in early 1996. After finishing an 18-hour marathon session of popcorn reading You Bright and Risen Angels they all begin cheering and shouting, “we got em!”, because the Author’s Note at the end of the book would convince anybody that Vollmann was, in fact, the unabomber.

Danielle Book Club #1

Classic immortality parable that philosophizes about the meaning of power, time, and progress. After taking a potion of immortality, Raymond Fosca spends 600 years alternating between hope and defeatism. The horror of life eternal is realized when Fosca experiences the futility of life and love with no stakes, witnessing the erasure of progress and outliving everyone he crosses paths with.

A bit bloated, there were parts that were an absolute slough to get through. Weird anachronous character allusions (Pierre Carlier = Jacques Cartier, except the timeline is so inaccurate) kinda took me out of it. However, the epilogue was jaw-dropping and made the slow parts worth the time.

I know you guys all love Bolaño but I just… don’t! He’s a master at evocation but never follows through. So many really dark, interested ideas that don’t feel fully fleshed out. This collection, to me, was much better of a read than 2666, but I feel like I struggled through most stories. Bolaño just might not be for me in the same way Borges and Barthelme are not for me.

I think books about music are inherently flawed. Music is larger than life and reading the domestic circumstances surrounding a certain recording or musician can kind of strip the magic from the music. I don't often feel like I gained much from reading a book about music. But I did really like this, probably because I believe Modest Mouse to be the greatest band to ever do it.

I think the story surrounding the recording of the Moon & Antarctica is pretty interesting, but I value this book for deepening my understanding of the album's meaning and some of the overall themes of Modest Mouse. Brock often talks about the inevitability of death and how, given the fact that life ends, we must not take everything so seriously. Songs like Gravity Rides Everything and Float On feel like a reassuring pat on the back. It sucks, but it won't suck forever... we are all headed in the same direction. However, before reading Zachary Petit's book, I hadn't really picked up on the significance of the album's closer. "And the one thing you taught me 'bout human beings was this - They ain't made of nothin' but water and shit. Alright." There is a departure from the nurturing consolation Brock gives on other tracks. He tells it to you straight, he thinks you need to hear it. I think it makes the less harsh tracks more beautiful, Brock is firm when he feels he must be.

Ohhh and Paper Thin Walls feels like an entirely different song after reading the deep dive on it. The Moon & Antarctica was and remains the 4th best Modest Mouse album, but I do have a newfound respect for it.

I might've guessed the ending too early to really enjoy this. Despite the short length, I felt this dragging. Plot kinda reminds me of the Stone Tape theory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Tape_theory

Read this in a single sitting, blitzed off my ass, which is how I think this needs to be read. Feels like this was written entirely in the shower. Or someone filled out a Mad Lib with the best one-liners in their iPhone notes app.

Essentially plotless and also a little dumb, but I kinda had a blast with this one. Lots of silly little anecdotes. I prefer Callahan as a songwriter, though.

“Isn't there something hateful about going out on dates. The last date I went on, the girl (a ballerina!) picked me up in a huge truck with wheels that set it four feet off the ground.

She wouldn't stop saying how sorry she was that she insisted on picking me up, but she couldn't trust anyone's driving, afraid of having her legs crushed. I told her I didn't mind, but she kept talking about it. So I remain the feller in the restaurant who reads waitress name tags as if they were actress credits in a movie.”

On the surface, this is a really gauche satire of the American legal system. A circus of nonsensical litigation. Like, a dog gets stuck in a public statue and the sculptor is granted preliminary injunction against the volunteer firefighters tasked with freeing him? And the Episcopal Church is suing the Pepsi Cola Corporation? Everyone is suing everyone else. But the law commentary only sets the scene for Gaddis to dig into his usual themes of art, entropy, and the degradation of American culture.

The worst Gaddis by a pretty significant margin... but, like, c'mon, its still Gaddis.

Rilke remains hopeful in a decidedly meaningless world. “How charged with illusion is all we do here.” The pursuit of happiness is never complete, the goalpost is ever-moving. There is a primordial incompatibility between lovers that renders love unfulfilling. “But when you have known that first encounter, desire … are you unchanged? Each to the other’s lips uplifted — touching wine to wine: O then how strangely the drinker eludes his role.” Man searches for a perfect moment in which all is complete and correct, and it never comes. Yet we continue on, for nobody truly believes they will die until it happens. Death is for others, not I. For Rilke, life is just a search for something that does not exist.

Yet, we live. And what is the alternative? We are already here. Rilke tells us that the true meaning of life is creation. We name things and give them meaning so that others may enjoy them. So that we can create some sense of fulfillment and joy in this barren void. “Not because happiness is true, that unearned profit of certain loss. Not from curiosity, or to temper the heart that still could live in the laurel…. But simply because to live is important, and we are needed by all this here and now, these ephemera that oddly concern us.”

To live is important.

A Daedalian display of linguistic mastery and literary ascendancy. Nabokov builds a puzzle box of infinite pieces in the misshapen frame of a novel constructed using only poem annotations. There is an entire college course worth of material to explore here, but also an easy-reader for those who do not have the time. Nabokov’s mind is a library, not a debating hall. You get what you put into Pale Fire, but it is immensely rewarding even at the surface.

Okay, first, put this track on.

Thanks!

Acetone isn’t an easy band to understand. Their drowsy, floating take on psych-country is a ready made reverie, inspiring the most inattentive passive listening experience this side of Baby Sleep White Noise 8 Hours. Infinitely accessible, but demanding in terms of truly listening to, rather than just hearing. A band you can spend hours with and not be able to recall a single song. But at some point it clicks, and it clicks hard.

The Acetone sound is so characteristically Californian. Mark Lightcap’s guitar work fills even the most amateur synesthesiac’s nose with that sweet, gentle fragrance of the desert at night. Richie Lee’s subdued delivery feels like a private confession of the drug-addled lifestyle of the burnt out artist in Los Angeles. There is a visceral sense of malaise and aimlessness behind Acetone’s easy-listening facade. “Some heard California. Some heard heroin. Some heard both without distinction.”

Sweet’s attention to detail to the history of Acetone is admirable. The band’s story is faithfully contextualized every step of the way with references to the scene they were in at the time and pop culture at large. Sweet’s wealth of information on the band’s influences gives insight to what exactly shaped the sound of Acetone.

As a society, we tend to have a sick curiosity when it comes to suicide, especially when it comes to artists. Clearly there are negative implications to glorifying it, but I would be lying if I said it didn’t make me more interested in the art. Guys like Mark Linkous, Elliott Smith, and Cobain all saw huge posthumous success. It’s like the act gives credence to the art. The feelings encapsulated in the music become more genuine when the hurt surmounts to something visible. There is a moral cancer in society that draws us to these tragic figures, the same way traffic slows on the side of the highway opposite a fatal crash. We crane our necks to get a glimpse at things we try not to think about. That being said, I think Sweet was realistic in his approach to Richie Lee’s suicide. Lee was a flawed person and portrayed as such. His actions had consequences to those around him, and Sweet made sure to write about them.

I think that, as far as music history goes, this book is pretty good. But it is just a music history on a rock band from the 90’s. If you’re into the band, it’s worth reading. If you aren’t, there probably isn’t much here for you.

You may try and try again Not to be unsatisfied Just squeezing by one more time But how long do you go on Believing things are gonna be alright?

In the atlas it said DRAINAGE BASINS and UNPRODUCTIVE AREAS and LOST LOVES and FOREVER LOST LOVES.

A majority of Vollmann's works can be separated into two categories. These categories are, broadly, his meticulous and uncompromising passion projects... and then the trauma-porn hack-journalism that finances them. The Atlas is an exception in that it exists as a consequence of the latter. Burdened with a wealth of unshared experiences and blessed with self importance, the traveler has just got to tell you about this one time when they were abroad. In an overly-ambitious attempt to breach the boundary between travel-novel trash and writing of a higher order, Vollmann stitches together vignettes from his life as a war correspondent and globe-trotter to create this deeply flawed collection of stories.

The Atlas implements this recursive structure of serializing stories, grouping the first and last stories, the second and second to last, etc., which just does not really work at all. Even the most diligent reader will forget the first of the matched stories by the time they get to the far side of the 60 page titular climax. Personally, I see this style choice as a kind of cop out, an assertion that there is a theme and a greater importance to these mostly random narratives.

Random is the keyword here. Some of these stories are likely non-fiction, others clearly fictional, some impressionistic smatterings best classified as ramblings. It's frustrating to not know what is real and what isn't in a work like this. By the time one gets acclimated to the style and setting, they are dragged to the next country, to a brand new brothel or flophouse. Worst of all, after a demoralizing slough through the seediest rooms across several nations, you're met with the most heartbreakingly beautiful prose of all time, if only for a moment. So you read on.

Was put onto Larry Brown by an interview with MJ Lenderman, the greatest living rock and roll artist. His songs paint grim portraits of failed lives and laughable masculinity to the tune of (mostly) upbeat Americana. Lenderman took to reading in order to improve his songwriting and mentioned Brown, so had to read some of him.

Right up my alley, hypothetically. Gritty, bleak countrified short stories, vignettes of sad people in the American South. Compare closely to and , both outstanding examples of the enduring southern gothic tradition in the modern age. But Larry Brown's literary debut fell far short for me.

First, let me say, the titular story in this collection is actually amazing. Alcoholic husband turns to drink to cope with loss of attraction to his wife (it is heavily hinted that she underwent a mastectomy.) While his wife dolls herself up at the vanity, he is laying in bed thinking of an unfaithful tryst he recently had and how he yearns for novel love. Also boobs. Randy Brown loves boobs. All these stories talk about boobs, this guy was perhaps the biggest boob guy of all time.

I was pretty psyched for the rest of the collection after that first story, but was let down repeatedly. Weird choices of experimental story telling. Weird, unrealistic stories. One story reads like Benjy Compson's inner monologue from except way less interesting. It does not feel purposeful or indicative of the narrator's character attributions, it just seems like Brown wrote the story and then scrambled all the sentences into different positions. Then there is a story written in very short and simple sentences about a kid who enacts revenge on a driver for hitting his dog by throwing a brick at his head, causing him to crash and his car to explode. High school creative writing class material .

Speaking of high school creative writing class, here is an actual excerpt from the final story in the collection :

"I knew it was coming. We’d had a bad afternoon out at the lake. Her old boyfriend had been out there, and he’d tried to put the make on her. I and seven of my friends had ripped his swim trunks off of him, lashed him to the front of her car, and driven him around blindfolded but with his name written on a large piece of beer carton taped to his chest for thirty-seven minutes, in front of domestic couples, moms and dads, family reunions, and church groups. She hadn’t thought it was funny. We, we laughed our asses off."

I think he has a decent writing style, though it does come off like he is trying way too hard. Which is understandable in one's first foray into writing. But his unpracticed voice combined with the goofy stories did not do it for me. I have on my to-read list but I am by no means excited to read it after Facing the Music.

[a:Jamie Stewart|18858062|Jamie Stewart|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1703277217p2/18858062.jpg] has gone on record citing Mishima as an influence in their songwriting in several interviews. Jamie Stewart, who put me on to , , and [a:V.S. Naipaul|3989|V.S. Naipaul|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1497418880p2/3989.jpg]. Both on grounds of my compatibility with Jamie Stewart's taste in media and using novels they've read as a tool to better understand the music they write, I thought I'd better read some Mishima.

I was unsure of where to start so I checked in with the biggest and brightest minds of our generation over on reddit.com. Some pitiful career commenter said Confessions of a Mask might help one get a good idea of Mishima's overall calculus, better equipping the reader to fully comprehend and appreciate some of his other works. Unable to make a single decision in life on my own without anonymous validation, there is where I started.

Confessions of a Mask is only semi autobiographic, there are surely parts that are true to Mishima but also probably other parts that are fully fictional. Unsure of where Mishima stands, we resort to say, safely, the narrator is a freak. The introduction is reminiscent of the story of prolific Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo. Getting off on blood and death, believing your poor constitution is a result of lack of blood, fetishizing dying young, these troubling thoughts drove Chikatilo to murder. Definitely disturbing, Mishima's concept of beauty is heavily tied into what others might call horrific and gruesome. Mishima writes about the narrator coming to some strange erotic awakening when seeing a man carrying buckets of waste down the street.

"What I mean is that toward his occupation I felt something like a yearning for a piercing sorrow, a body-wrenching sorrow. His occupation gave me the feeling of "tragedy" in the most sensuous meaning of the word. A certain feeling as it were of "self-renunciation," a certain feeling of indifference, a certain feeling of intimacy with danger, a feeling like a remarkable mixture of nothingness and vital power—all these feelings swarmed forth from his calling, bore down upon me, and took me captive, at the age of four. Probably I had a misconception of the work of a night-soil man. Probably I had been told of some different occupation and, misled by his costume, was forcibly fitting his job into the pattern of what I had heard. I cannot otherwise explain it."

The narrator feels a sort of crippling nostalgia towards the poor and unfortunate, the lives he cannot live and is in no way a part of. Here, we get an idea of the way tragedy and beauty are intertwined in Mishima's mind. This first section of the novel is compelling and disturbing.

The rest of the book is frankly boring. The narrator tries to fall in love with a woman but cannot; not for lack of trying, he is unable to feel romantic or sexual attraction to women. Was not a fan, but I am looking forward to reading more by Mishima.

Shortly after the suicide of author and controversial figure Dom (or was it Don?), circumlocutory Cy slips into the unsecure widowed apartment. There, he writes his life story in the form of random, tenuously connected vignettes that he circles back on again and again. Mostly, he expounds on his two closest childhood friends, Al and Bob, who he has kept separate into adulthood for reasons much deliberated upon but not wholly clear to any rational reader. Cy's writings to his deceased idol become a sort of prayer in which he finds someone to tell his story to, because what is God if not "someone you can tell your side of the story to?"

Ancient History is in typical McElroy stream-of-conscious style. I found it more enjoyable to read that Lookout Cartridge, but the plot is obscured by the prose in a similar way. It took me over two weeks to work through this novel. Granted, I'm not really reading much these days, but it seems excessive for such a short book. Really makes me worried to tackle Women and Men, McElroy's writing is not something that can be worked through easily.

The most evocative part of the story is the narrator's belief in a unique organ that he, among other only-children, possess in their brain called the vectoral muscle. Using this, he is able to detect the field-state of others and examine the parabolic locus of the past and present in the American terrain.

"'Only reason to believe in God is it’s someone you can tell your side of the story to.' An only child doesn’t only protect his parents. They lose their lives in his, so he must take care not to lose his life. Even including the action theater of your suicide, or my omenoid reflections on history and religion, or the physical witchcrafts of childhood and the kitsch biophysics of your (and my) Americanolysis, is my trick here tonight only the unchidden privateering of an only child?"

Overall, McElroy is one of the most interesting authors to read but also the most annoying.

In youthful rebellion we unjustly label required readings as unnecessary and unproductive. There is probably at least a little truth to this. Certain works of fiction are so ingrained into the collective cultures of the world that the source material becomes less potent than the adaptations. We doubtlessly absorb little tidbits straight out of Shakespeare from modern works and media through osmosis. You can be familiar with the themes of Hamlet before even knowing the title of the play. That being said, I do think that this is a pretty fun read. I can't say it is very moving or groundbreaking, but the language is enrapturing. Iambic pentameter! Why did he do that? Its fascinating. Anyways, nothing new to say about something like Hamlet but I'm gonna put some of my favorite sections down below.

"But virtue, as it never will be moved, Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven, So lust, though to a radiant angel linked, Will sate itself in a celestial bed, And prey on garbage."

"Many wearing rapiers Are afraid of goose-quills"

"For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despisèd love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of th’unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin"

Wino Jimmy haunts San Francisco's Tenderloin district, attempting to recreate lost love by way of pay-by-the-hour trysts with drug addled prostitutes. Whores for Gloria gives a glimpse into the lives of addicts, psychologically ruined Vietnam veterans, and streetwalkers. Vollmann extends a sympathetic hand to these misunderstood and misused people, painting a real and humanistic portrait of them. Poetic at times, disgusting at others, there is no shying away from the filth of the alleyways and trick pads, yet there are still moments of beauty to be found. Personally, not my favorite book.

“The revenge of popular culture on those who take it too seriously.”

Both wildly overrated and massively over-hated. DeLillo combines hyper-descriptive, easy-to-read, pulpy prose with Pynchonian mystique, which makes for a really strong foundation. I just think DeLillo fails to deliver anything meaningful. A shame, especially since the first chapter of this book is so strong. You get this idea in your head about what this story is gonna be, there this pennant game winning baseball, and then this guy who buys that grailed memorabilia to satiate his obsession with failure, there is so much going on at the start. And then DeLillo drops everything interesting and you have to read about random shit you don’t really care about for 600 pages. The timeline ricochets back and forth through time, frenetic vacillations that don't really offer enough intrigue for you to figure out the who, the when, or the where.

Underworld bites off way more than it can chew, attempting to commentate on the Cuban Missile Crisis, pop culture, race relations, the nuclear family... there is just too much going on and DeLillo takes a Pollock approach of resolution. Just haphazard, nonlinear spraying of dead end plots.

Some really weird stuff, not, like, cool weird, but just kinda bizarre. Like his one guy, he is traveling Europe with his new wife and realizes that the deeper he goes into the continent, the worse his poop smells. And he’s bugging out about it, he doesn’t want his wife to smell how stinky the bathroom is after he poops. Then, the ending... I cannot believe how stupid the ending to this book was. Spoiler here: this nun dies and then the afterlife is inside the computer. It's embarrassing. Preteen level depth. "Some people have a personal god, okay. I’m looking to get a personal computer. What's the difference, right?"

I am harshly critical of this work because Libra absolutely blew me away. This would be fine for edgy YA fiction maybe. Just reading this through the lens of expectation, seeing people hail this as a postmodern masterpiece, I have to air my grievances.

"Unguentine, suicide, the business card, the barge, alcoholic’s leap into the sea, bottle, grey lips, boughs dragging in sea currents. So goes the sequence..."

A gardened barge hosts a failing marriage as it sails through a barren nautical wasteland. Wife fails to understand the husband's work, fails to appreciate his contributions to their self-sufficient maritime habitat; husband fails to emotionally and socially stimulate wife. Unguentine is either doting, abusive, or both, we feel unable to trust the narrator based on her varying descriptions of her silent husband. They fail to relate and connect nearly exclusively through creating contraptions a la Swiss Family Robinson.

Crawford strips away the typical 1970's cookie cutter suburban setting from the relationship drama, gives the couple an arguably idyllic floating paradise for the marriage to decompose on. It's definitely a morbid worldview. Then, after the death of Mr. Unguentine, Crawford scrutinizes solipsism: "I saw how foolish I had been and realized that the time had come to simplify my life. I had no need of museums, collections, mementoes." What purpose does anything serve in the absence of society?

This is only around eighty pages and the prose is neat and concise, there is no reason to not read this book, but also it's something I could have done without.

Maybe I lack poetic literacy. I've often felt that I just don't really get poetry. I mean, some things are certainly nicer to read than others. But I think that, on the whole, the medium doesn't quite do it for me. It's probably this progression-based mindset I've worked myself into when it comes to reading. My compulsion to devour as many books as possible has to be quantified. If I am to make reading a part of me, I need numbers, if only to prove my worth to myself. I'm not averse to spending the required time with a difficult work, but I am prone to flying through a book of poems without giving it proper attention. I am still teaching myself to properly read poetry. But a lot is lost on me. So regard my review as such.

So obviously a poetry book written by the man who brought us the greatest opening line to an album of all time ("In 1984, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection") is gonna be pretty good. I'm generally wary of anything written by a celebrity/pseudo-celebrity, but Silver Jews listeners know Berman to be a real poet and a true artist. He has this talent for evoking nostalgia within the present. Displaying a poignant but also kinda casual grief for the passing moment. And, then, this book is chock full of late 90's artefacts of Americana that have begun to feel alien 25 years after Actual Air's publishing. There is a heavy atmosphere of longing and regret. Berman seems to recollects childhood almost indifferently, then turns to pounds his chest in anguish at the loss of yesterday afternoon. "The world is 66% Then and 33% Now." We pass into domesticity. Carpools, soft ball leagues, celebrity deaths, grocery stores. Margarine commercials mistaken for memories.

As someone currently living in that same Virginia that Berman spent adolescence, some of geographical and cultural observations are especially virulent. In the way that Raymond Carver's poetry is imbued with the feeling of the great Pacific Northwest, Berman's writing bleeds Virginia-- Virginia, Texas, Tennessesee, the American Southeast.

Gonna paste in a couple of stanzas that stood out to me especially:

"Do you remember the way the girls would call out "love you!" conveniently leaving out the "I" as if they didn't want to commit to their own declaration."

"He wasn't sure how the bathroom mirror worked but he decided it must be powered by the razor blades and asprin he found in the engine compartment."

"Their keen eyes and ears twitch. The other couples look beautiful tonight. They stroll around listening to the brilliant conversation. The passionate speeches.

Clouds drift across the silverware. There is red larkspur, blue gum, and ivy. A boy kneels before his date.

And the moon, I forgot to mention the moon."

I guess my overall opinion on this collection is that it rocks. Without knowing if I even really like poetry, I can say that I loved the poems in this book. My only complaint is that it costs several hundred dollars to get a physical copy. This is the type of book you take everywhere you go.

Things have not been the same since we lost David Berman.

"To the days beyond this one which are still perfect."

I recall Gass talking about the difficulty of writing. For him, in particular. How writing never came easy , that there was a flagellant nature to his creative process. His self-declaration of misanthropy. That his writing is fueled by hate. The bleak and palpably freezing story "The Pedersen Kid" from his In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. So there is an expectation. This won't be warm and fuzzy.

Framed by the titular Omensetter's legendary stint in Gilead, Ohio, Omensetter's Luck revolves around the characters drawn into his auspicious tenure in town. Well, it's a miracle he'd make it into town in the first place, what with all the rain. Someone must be looking over him, how the flood spared the house he'd rented. And how was he so sure his wife was carrying a son? Omensetter was touched.

Yet he goes about unwashed. There is a christ-like innocence in his simple ways, yet something darksided in his accordance with fate— An episode in which he refuses to kill a fox trapped in a well comes to mind. There is something alluring and off-putting about this strange out-of-towner.

Enter Reverend Jethro Furber, perverted pastor and overall sick and twisted individual— Furber's downward spiral into insanity is the essence of this novel. Mental soundness already tenuous at best, Omensetter's luck drives him over the edge. His stream-of-consciousness rambling a la Quentin Compson encompasses the largest section of the novel. But persevere! There is a fine pay off and quite a few silly little songs and rhymes scattered on the path along the way.

Furber's possibly real but likely imaginary sermon on life's futility is probably the highlight of the book.

"I ask you now to ask yourselves one simple foolish question—to say: was I born for this?—and I ask you please to face it honestly and answer yea if you can or nay if you must. For this? You rise in the morning, you stretch, you scratch your chest. For this?" "Eat, sleep, love, dress—of course you were born for something better than this."

Though Gass does not resonate me, personally, quite as much as some of the other great voices in postmodern fiction, his stark and morbid portrayal of the human psyche is remarkable and I look forward to reading The Tunnel whenever the Dalkey Archive Press reprint hits the shelves.

"I want to rise so high that when I shit I won't miss anybody."

Europe Central finds Vollmann compressing and then stretching the titanic, media-saturated Eastern Front of the Second World War into brief vignettes, expressing the urgency and loss of life experienced during wartime with themes of aesthetic, dignity, and love. This is a fascinating and sweeping work of historical fiction. Yes, fiction, but take a look at the sources really quickly. What is it, around 50 pages? The impressive amount of research conducted in the writing of this book is reflected in the subject matter; Oftentimes it can feel like an objective history. The liberties taken are valuable. Elena Konstantinovskaya never lived in the capacity Vollmann imagines, but a book like this could not exist without her place in the Shostakovich-Karmen love triangle. How do we actualize an event we learn from between the scribbled-in pages of somniferous social studies textbooks? Western propaganda shows us the American bride waving her kerchief from the navy docks, western propaganda shows us the lovers’ embrace at the end of the war. Western propaganda shows us the mechanical march of Hitlerites and the dangers of soviet communism. How do we color in scenes captured before household technicolor? What is the driving force of anything? Vollmann tells us to think about this conflict less in terms of groups and armies and more in terms of humans with human motives.

Europe Central’s coda takes form through Shostakovich’s composition of his Opus 110 in Dresden. “What’s that sound? The very first moment that Shostakovich arrived in Dresden, music flooded his skull in a hideous scream; he clutched at his chest and the world whirled, but nothing else did.” Unyielding in frenetic angst, Vollmann, or, Shostakovich, synthesizes the most grotesque and excruciating facets of human existence into a single stream of ugly beauty. “So in Opus 110 he self-loathingly quotes himself: the opening motif of the First Cello Concerto, the ‘Jewish theme’ from the Second Piano trio: Well, Elena, you see how lucky it is that you didn’t marry me.” There is an urgency to convey something that cannot be communicated, there is a desperation to reach out. The words of Vollmann’s “Opus 110,” the notes of the 4th movement of Shostakovich’s Opus 110, they feel as though they could almost leave tangible marks on the skin of the receiving party, there is violence in the anguish and despair with which the opus takes form. “And whenever there’s any beauty at all in Opus 110, it’s dismembered; it drips with death like shitty guts hanging out of a woman’s marble-white torso.” Post-war life fails to make sense of the images of children dragging fallen peers on makeshift sleds, the tiny blue hands tugging on the fraying length of cord by which the living carry the dead. “And death oozes out of the silences between notes, too, the silences of secret Nazi documents, the eight-beat rest which hung between himself and [his son] when the boy confessed to having denounced him at school.” The screams of the violins in b-flat echoing the screams of the dying (was that Elena?) are mirrored nearly wholly by Vollmann’s accompanying written word. “Of course I’ve failed to describe Opus 110 just as I’ve failed to describe death; music remains ultimately indescribable unless Khrennikov and the other artillerymen of Soviet culture compose it for us in pre-measured clips of glittering copper-jacketed mediocrity.” Harmony, compounded, is relayed from an unknown source; we strain to capture it. “That flash of prettiness near the end, perfumed by Elena Konstantinovskaya, affords the listener scant relief; rather, it reminds us the D. D. Shostakovich is dying with his eyes open. He knows what happiness is. He knows that he’ll never possess it.” The lead-up only sweetens the payout, a 700 page overture that crescendos into one of the most important passages in 21st century literature. “Every place leads here. Hence Opus 110’s horror as intimate as the throat-slime of music, the strings dripping with bitterness and hate.” And the piece ends. The wheel has spun. There is brief illumination that lasts only as long as it takes the paraffin to burn off before the match head ceases to exist but only as a fading imprint on the retina before we are once again endeavored with the Sisyphean task of tripping in the dark.

I almost gave up on this book several times. Probably every 50 pages I had to put it down and look at favorable reviews to convince myself that it was worth reading. At around page 400 I resorted to some really heavy skimming, and, honestly, I don't think I missed out on much. The plot revolves around an awful and unlikable middle schooler who thinks he is the messiah and incites a riot in his school. It's kinda mean-spirited, his Israelite followers stage a coup at a pep rally that wounds a bunch of kids and kills their coach. Protagonist Gurion is resolute in his righteousness as he steps all over his parents, principal, and peers.

Levin tries to be funny but its all very holds-up-spork humor befitting the age group he is writing about. "'What if I itch on the wang?' On the wang? 'The wang,' said Fox. Try scratching with your thighs. 'That never works.' I— 'I’m just kidding, Gurion. I can handle a wang-itch. The secret is to picture a nice blue stream full of fishes who are friendly except when there’s heat, which makes them grow fangs and try to eat the hot thing.' Okay, I said. 'Really,' he said. 'Because an itch is heat, so you cool the itch down so the fishes don’t tear off your itchy-hot penis.' That works? 'Always works.'" I often felt like I was reading a YA novel.

There are some gratifying bildungsroman parts that are interesting to read, but every single part that involves the motel owner Flowers, Gurion's parents, any scanned emails, meetings with Principal Brodsky, anything other than kids fucking around is just so incredibly dull. My one compliment I will pay to this book is that the very ending is pretty interesting, the anticlimax is pretty evocative. However I don't think it was worth 1000 pages to get to.

My heart says 2 stars but I will give it 3 since I somehow managed to stick with it through it's entirety.

"Those are my instructions for all you wicked sons. What you write matters little, your scholarship is nothing, it will die as soon as you."

I may have more to say after my wrap-up discussion with my reading buddy for this book. I feel like I don't have a whole lot to say about the Iliad, it is a work that doesn't really need my reckless scrutinizing after a single read-through.

Something I liked was how, knowing the fate of Troy and the victory of the Achaeans, we are still made to feel uncertain about the outcome of the Trojan war due to the role of the gods in this story. Zeus, the most powerful of all the gods, actively opposes the Achaeans and interferes to their detriment. Readers are given the feeling that it will be impossible to gain victory over and army that has Zeus on their side. I think a story can only be considered great if it is interesting to read when you already know exactly how it will end. It is impossible to spoil a great story.

Something I did not like was the repetition of certain plot points, specifically the mano e mano showdowns that end with one of the fighters being spirited away by a god. I can't remember if this happened twice or three times, but it feels like three. Even twice is too much. It just felt silly, it felt like a copout.

I have only read this version, the Lattimore translation, so I can't compare it to others but it was nice to read. The language was archaic but still simple which feels authentic to a story out of oral tradition from the time period. The translation did not feel forced to yield to my understanding.

I haven't been reading or writing much this month, I really don't feel like I am in the right headspace to write about such a colossal, historic work so I will end this write-up here.

“Who did the president, who killed Kennedy, fuck man! It's a mystery! It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma! The fuckin' shooters don't even know!”

A near-perfect example of historical fiction. Perhaps the biggest flaw is that DeLillo is too convincing. Confident in areas of concoction and well-researched everywhere else, Libra is awfully easy to read as a history of the JFK assassination. Looking towards other great works of historical fiction (Mason & Dixon, The Sot-Weed Factor), the lines between fantasy and reality aren’t as blurry, it is typically pretty clear when the author is being imaginative. The research for this novel is so thorough, some characters don’t even have wikipedia pages but can be found listed on government webpages, making it pretty difficult to determine who is entirely fictional and who is not.

This aside, Libra is so unbelievably good. A slow burner, I picked it up back in September and put it down at page 40. I finished it on my second attempt, but it took 200 pages over 2 weeks to get invested. Not entirely sure what preventing me from being completely enraptured from the start, the prose is incredible. DeLillo has a unique way of turning several concise, simple sentences with no flashy vocabulary into a paragraph teeming with significance. The shifting-of-perspectives are great, too, Libra is near blissful to read.

I think that the main reason that this book feels so authentic and real is because DeLillo never lets you leave your position as reader, you are firmly placed in an omnipotent position and there isn’t even a chance to place yourself in the shoes of characters. Scenes change quickly with no notice, emotions are described matter-of-factly, you are not seeing the situation as the character sees the situation. This makes for a really interesting read, given the themes of paranoia and control. Back to Pynchon, the biggest dealer in literary paranoia–he puts you right into the conspiracy, you begin to question your own role in the narrative, you get your own dose of delusion. Libra is different, the paranoia is not smothering or oppressive, it is something you look down at from above, not something you must look through to see anything. Despite this sensation of being apart from the plot, DeLillo occasionally gives really candid glimpses into the effects of paranoia on the main players of the JFK assassination conspiracy. "It means the end of loyalty. The more complex the systems, the less conviction in people. Conviction will be drained out of us. Devices will drain us, make us vague and pliant.”

Really, Libra is remarkable for keeping the incredible intrigue of America’s greatest conspiracy relevant going into the next century. Personally, I was never interested in the JFK assassination, I never cared about this particular history, the way that I have heard it spoken about in my life did not pique my interest in any way. However, even after finishing Libra, I find myself jumping from wikipedia page to wikipedia page on people involved in the assassination. I cannot recommend this book enough.

“If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.

But Maybe not.”

Published posthumously as the capstone of Gaddis' oeuvre, Agapē Agape is a single ninety-six page paragraph in which he addresses the themes of entropy, art, and the destructive forces of capitalism that he spent his career exploring. Examining the relationship between art and it's own demise, a timeline is created, starting from the joyful participation in creating music on to the commodification of it through the invention of the piano roll, which gave Babbage the foundation for the concept of the computer, a machine further utilized in the sterile reproduction of art. "Authentic art had its base in ritual, and mass reproduction freed it from this parasitical dependence." The artist becomes the performer, the art becomes cartoon.

When the narrator speaks about the way in which the unwashed masses consume art, he speaks from within the herd. Gaddis doesn't assume a holier-than-thou stance, but, rather, acknowledges his position as a cog anchored in the capitalist machine. He, too, possesses an "insatiable thirst for trivial recreation and crude sensationalism."

Usually not a fan of the Beckettian, Bernhard-esque style of monologuing in a plotless void, however I really really loved this. Gaddis is just a pleasure to read, and this particular work really synthesized ideas presented in his previous works. The length really helped, less than one hundred pages and the typeface was pretty large in my copy, easy enough to read in a single sitting.

Brian Evenson is a jack of all trades but a master of none. All of these stories seem super contrived, Evenson wears his influences on his sleeve. None of these stories are bad, but none of them are particularly good in my opinion. "Moran's Mexico" reads like Borges, "The Progenitor" like Barthelme, "The Prophets" is like a bootleg Flannery O'Connor, "Barcode Jesus" is like the rough draft first story of Ron Rash mixed with George Saunders. There just isn't a whole lot of original, clear voice here. Also I found Evenson often was forcing disturbing and macabre, which just came off as goofy. I felt like there was nothing to be gained from reading this.

The first couple letters offered some actual wisdom but Rilke's advice slowly devolved into bland and unfounded talking out of his ass. Rilke has solid ideas about artistry but his thoughts on love and solitude are trite and not worth sharing.

"A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity - assume this fate and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking after the rewards that may come from outside." -- I like this, I think it is a good rule of thumb to make sure you are creating art out of the internal desire to create and not for potential gains from outside. Attention and money are not reasons to create, or, you cannot expect to create meaningful art if you are only creating to impress.

"Read as little as possible in the way of aesthetics and criticism – it will either be partisan views, fossilized and made meaningless in its lifeless rigidity, or it will be neat wordplay, where one opinion will triumph one day and the opposite the next. Works of art are infinitely solitary and nothing is less likely to reach them than criticism." -- Nicely worded anti-critic assertion. Everybody knows that those that cannot create critique, I don't think this was profound but it was said in a nice way.

"You well know you are in a period of transition and want nothing more than to be transformed. If there is something ailing in the way you go about things, then remember that sickness is the means by which an organism rids itself of something foreign to it. All one has to do is help it to be ill, to have its whole illness and let it break out, for that is how it mends itself." -- Actually stupid, just because something hurts does not mean that it is making you stronger. In fact, often it is the opposite. Approaching internal strife with a no-pain-no-gain attitude is a really good way to end up spiraling.

"Perhaps the great renewal of the world will consist of this, that man and woman, freed of all confused feelings and desires, shall no longer seek each other as opposites, but simply as members of a family and neighbors, and will unite as human beings, in order to simply, earnestly, patiently, and jointly bear the heavy responsibility of sexuality that has been entrusted to them." -- Rilke's feminist view point that humans will only be able to truly love once women gain an equal footing with men is kinda nice but unfounded and silly. I think that the power dynamics existing between the sexes, though ever-shifting, are irremovable and irrelevant from the ability to truly love. There is still divorce within the gay community.

Then there was his whole thing on the necessity of solitude that I simply do not abide by. "What is needed is only this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going within and meeting no one else for hours — that is what one must learn to attain." Ok...why? What for? Solitude is not a prerequisite for introspection.

Consider Jackson Pollock: do you regard his paintings as works of deliberate genius or acts of random charlatanism? As a recovering philistine, I am somewhere between. Well, between feelings about McElroy, not Pollock, I haven't made the connection yet. McElroy writes like he is flicking globs of paint at a canvas. His prose consists of scattered, interrupted thoughts, distractions that become distracted, nearly incomprehensible at times. However, McElroy does not write this way with the intention of confusing the reader. I'm missing the quote, but to paraphrase, he writes the way he writes and although he does not intend for his books to be so difficult, he appreciates the reader that is up for the challenge.

So, I'm somewhere between admiring McElroy and despising him. I find myself getting really annoyed with how esoteric he has to be. Additionally, the stories themselves are pretty, well.. um.. I don't want to say boring, but they're very domestic, for the most part, usually, kind of like vignettes out of normal lives (I am not counting "The Last Disarmament but One", obviously). Returning to the Pollock comparison, it really is not about the subject matter with McElroy, it is all about the composition. Like, a man tries to translate the babblings of his 9 month old baby into intelligible speech. Not really all that interesting of a plot, right? But McElroy manages to create something really incredible with his idea simply through his use of language (This is the finally, titular story, which is the only reason I'm rating this a 4 instead of a 3). Basically, McElroy probably isn't someone you go to for story time, the story is the least important part, what is truly valuable is the wraparound and convoluted way he tells it.

From what I've read (60 pages of Women & Men, Lookout Cartridge, A Smuggler's Bible), McElroy's principal idea in his writing is a essentialized version of the heart mantra. Like, not exactly that a thing is defined by every other thing, but, specifically, a thing is defined by what it is not. I first noted this in Women & Men when he was describing a man's attraction to a woman, to her sex, which is, in a way, a void, an absence of a thing. "And she was in that gap there in the middle which was still an empty gap no matter how much of her was in it, she was what was in that gap in the middle, but she was there just for a moment, and it was the thought looking either way that she and no one else caused him to get that hard-on, she was what had done it, but then also that, well,..." And, like, A Smuggler's Bible, from the title you can infer what I'm getting to, that the bible in this scenario is defined by what it is or is not smuggling, by empty chamber inside. And Lookout Cartridge, I recall him speaking of the pointlessness of the cartridge without the receiver, that the mortise is defined by the tenon. “The force that modifies the thing becomes the thing itself," and "By thinking it unthinkable, we thought it." This concept of emptiness is form is something really important to McElroy as it appears in many of his works; it's fascinating, the way he draws on this idea.

Some of these stories made me think I could learn to love McElroy ("Canoe Repair," the boomerang one, "The Last Disarmament but One," "Night Soul," "Character") but some of them really made me question why I keep trying so hard to understand him ("Mister X" in particular, I genuinely hated nearly every second of reading that one).

“'It’s just feedback,' I said, using the popular, inaccurate sense of the term."

Significantly less polished than Solenoid (I believe there was around 25 years between the two), but very similar in theme and ambition. I think I actually prefer Nostalgia, I think that the short story format works well with Cartarescu's surreal storytelling, he is able to start afresh in each new segment and paint a brand new strange world, whereas Solenoid felt a little bloated with absurdity. "The narrower the action’s or the play’s or thought’s space, the larger the rest of the world, that is, the World. And it is always worth it to constrain yourself, even reducing yourself to nonexistence, in order to increase the wonder of the world."

The connections between the five stories in Nostalgia are tenuous at best, so I definitely would consider it to be a story collection rather than a novel. The first story is a grim Dostoyevskian tale of a career Russian roulette player. Mentardy is the account an epileptic boy that comes to be the unspoken leader of a gang of ragamuffin children in a Bucharest slum. In the Twins, a turbulent relationship marked by unrequited love and manipulation ends in a Freaky Friday-esque tragedy. REM is a nesting doll of reminiscences shared between two lovers culminating in the woman's recounting of a bizarre week spent at her aunt's house as a child. And, the Architect is about a man who modifies his car to have an organ inside and subsequently never leaves the vehicle again. I found all five of these stories to be of a similarly high caliber, there wasn't a single stinker in here.

Cartarescu is an expert at conjuring the feelings of wonder and confusion experienced in youth. The anger and repulsion the narrator of Mentardy feels when witnessing the titular character having a sexual encounter with a neighborhood girl really captures the discomfiture that comes with growing up. The games the girls play in REM takes you back to when the scenarios you would fabricate as a child felt, no, were real. MC has a gift for excavating forgotten feelings.

I think that Cartarescu, in Solenoid and Nostalgia, is mainly concerned with the solipsistic nature of dreams and ontology. Like Joyce's Stephen Daedalus, MC alludes to the desire to impossibly create an objective masterpiece, to write something meaningful wherein the meaning can be drawn equally by all, to access "the All." "most writers – will never reach The All. They will never even become geniuses. They will never become anything. I … I am one of them. But at least I know this and try to express this powerlessness through everything I write. I know that nothing can be said, that no one expects you to say anything, but that you must say it. I know you must somehow go against the injustice of being human and being unable to reach The All." Becoming a great writer is not enough, could not be enough. The degrees of difference between a pulpy adventure novel and the next great book are too few. "Fundamentally, they’re all books, nothing else. Reading them will give you a somewhat more intense aesthetic pleasure. Like coffee with a little more sugar. You will abandon them after thirty pages to make a sandwich or go to the bathroom. You will read them concurrently with some detective novel." MC yearns to do the impossible, to make something that actually matters in a meaningless world.

Aptly dubbed Pynchon's most accessible book by countless reviews, Inherent Vice is probably the only work of his that doesn't require the average reader to take at least a little glance at a reading guide. I'm personally not upset by Pynchon opening himself up to a wider audience like some of the more pretentious dick lit fanboys are, but Pynchon himself might be... Like, do you think, in writing IV, he could've been taking it out on you for having to dumb down his enyclopedic style of quips and allusions and thesauric prose? I'm not convinced he wasn't.

Some of Pynchon's worst writing at times. Like actually just dumb. Like: "'—Denis, you said you took driver ed in high school.' 'No, no, Doc, you said did they have Driver Ed, and I said yes ’cause they did, this dude Eddie Ochoa, that there wasn’t a cop south of Salinas could get near him, and that’s what everybody called him—'" Get this guy in the Disney Channel writers' room. Protagonist Doc was written so strangely, like he's supposed to be this horny doper hippie? But he packs a piece? And has the reflexes of an action movie star? Haven't seem the film yet, but PTA casting him as Joaquin Phoenix kinda messed with my idea of him as well, I straight up cannot see Doc as Phoenix.

When I was a bit younger I really loved Murakami, I thought everything he wrote was incredible. But as I worked into the second half of his bibliography, I found it harder to ignore that he just kept writing the same thing over and over again. I'm wondering if I'm reaching that stage with Pynchon. Every Pynchon novel is just guy (or Oedipa), mysterious organization, funny song, unsatisfying conclusion. The Golden Fang is Tristero is the Jesuits is V. is them, the secret society intrigue grows tired eight books in. "Mostly in these cases, the answer was, 'You’re being paranoid.' But in the business, paranoia was a tool of the trade."

I went in actively wanting to like it since so many annoying Pynchon bros seems to hate on his shorter works, but I have to agree that IV is pretty, like, not bad, but.. okay at best. 2.5/5.

With only Bleeding Edge left to read, here is my Pynchon rating near-master list: Mason & Dixon Gravity's Rainbow V. Crying of Lot 49 Slow Learner Vineland Inherent Vice

A woman at the end of the world who no longer reads books or listens to music talks about books and music. Escapism in the form of repetitive yapping about random art trivia interspersed with lonely vignettes of life as the last living creature.

Pietro Torrigiano broke Michelangelo’s nose while he was in a state of enragement. That would be Torrigiano in the state of rage, not Michelangelo, naturally. And 500 years later, in the self-same city, a man by the name Laszlo broke the nose off of Michelangelo’s Pieta in a state of insanity. That would be Laszlo having a psychotic episode, not Michelangelo’s Pieta, naturally. Laszlo was never criminally charged. He and the Pieta had remained equidistant from one another throughout the encounter. Laszlo having descended from Laszlo Solom. Or was he a descendant of Philip de Laszlo. Actually I don’t believe that he would be related to either of them. There is a piece by Philip de Laszlo in the National Portrait Gallery, a portrait of Flinders Petrie. I know this for having wheeled by it countless times. Pietro Torrigiano has six works in the National Portrait Gallery. Michelangelo, in the creation of his Pieta, did not consider whether Mary may have been menstruating. Jesus, in Michelangelo’s Pieta, was not descended from anybody, naturally. This is scarcely to suggest Mary was not the mother of Jesus. Giotto similarly depicts Jesus and Mary in Lamentation of the Death of Christ. Mourners and angels alike are illuminated by an aura of light around their heads. The auras are round but they are not perfect circles. When a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle. If Giotto were to trek through the woods would his trail take the form of a perfect circle? If he moved tangentially to this circle would he continue making perfect circles? Beckett’s Molloy states that circles in the forest will make straight lines just as the straight lines have made circles. David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress reads similarly to Beckett. One can imagine Markson painting gold coins onto Beckett’s floor. One can imagine Beckett painting gold coins onto Joyce’s floor. Rembrandt’s cat was, in fact, looking at the pointing finger, not the painted coins pointed at. God, the things men used to do. Perhaps I have not mentioned that Samuel Beckett had a pet seagull at Trinity College that came to his window to be fed. Perhaps I have not mentioned that I am menstruating.

Markson attempts to demonstrate Wittgenstein’s ideas on logical atomism and analytic philosophy by creating a story out of hundreds of short statements spoken in a void. Language is the attraction here, there is no actual story to be discerned. Not a great read for guys like me with below-average levels of media literacy.

I believe that the urgency with which I read, fueled by guilt and shame for not reading for so many years of my life, is not compatible with really subtle works of experimental fiction like this, I just cannot slow myself down enough to fully enjoy the prose and end up missing a lot of the charm. I think I understand what Markson is going for but I don’t think that I, as a reader, have quite enough patience for it. Personally not the biggest fan of the experimental plotless Beckettian stream-of-consciousness style novel. WM has its moments, there are some memorable quotes, the narrator Kate has a distinct and fun way of thinking about things, however I probably wouldn’t read this again or recommend this to anybody

One of those very special first novels in an authors career when they just come out absolutely swinging. When the stars align, when focus and craft mesh perfectly with the amateurish impulse to put every ounce of their soul into a single work. Lots of comparisons to Gaddis’ the Recognitions floating around reviews for A Bended Circuity and it’s easy to see why that comparison is made, few authors come right out of the gate so strongly.

A Bended Circuity is an ironic ode to casuistry, duplicity, and bigotry. A satirical celebration of the captains of industry, the gubernatorial nepotists, the Uppers of the south. The south is spurred to rise again following a slight by an unseen adversary. Those long descended from the antebellum apex of southern living act on the desire for a complete return to days they were in no way a part.

This book easily has the highest density of words-I-need-to-look-up per page out of probably any other book I’ve ever read. Stickley’s prose requires a thesaurus on hand. However it is done elegantly, I don’t feel the insane lexicon to be pretentious or aggravating, it feels right. Maybe a little silly that every single character talks with a Mensa level vocabulary, but it’s charming.

I feel like I have more to say but the final sprint to finish this book has worn me out. I think this book is incredible but it’s absolutely exhausting.

“In this War between the states, I think that every politician or man of renown must have a public stance and a private stance. That much has been covenanted in the Southern Tradition. You cannot go round saying what you believe, I’ve learnt you will pay the price for it…”

Solenoid is an attempt at reconciliation between the human condition and all the horrors that come with it. Comprised of musings of a meaningless life in a city designed with desolation in mind, the narrator chronicles bleak and surreal episodes of daily life in socialist Soviet satellite Romania's capital city. Recording these episodes into his manuscript, the failed writer-cum-schoolteacher attempts to untangle the mysteries of cognizance and knowing. "I don’t have a coherent story, the facts of my life are vague flashes over the banal surface of the most banal of lives, little fissures, small discrepancies. These unshaped shapes, allusions and insinuations, topographical irregularities are sometimes insignificant by themselves, but taken together they become strange and haunting, they need a new and unusual form in which their story is to be told."

Replete with extradimensional meanderings and paranoid interpretations of the Voynich-Boone-Everest clan, Solenoid is firmly grounded in a world of sharp math that can be a little difficult to follow at times. Reality is divaricated between a numerical world and one filled with monsters suspended in tubes of bubbling nile green formalin and gravity-manipulating machines buried beneath the city. The fake and the real interchange at a dizzying rate. An intersection between body horror and cosmic horror. You are lost.

I found myself, at around the 100 page mark, worried about how a book like this one could go on for another 500-something pages. Not much happens at first. Not much happens at all. But somehow Solenoid is captivating all the way through. It really has that grim eastern/central European feel that you get from Kafka, Gombrowicz, and Dostoevsky.

Bleak, and I mean really bleak. Thought provoking, but you might not necessarily want those thoughts provoked. Found myself having a lot more existential crises and late night panic attacks during the last few weeks I've been reading this. But I still give this book the highest of recommendations, an incredible work.

"Aren’t we going mad, packed like hams into our soft sacks of gristle and bones? Don’t we endure, day by day and hour by hour, the thought that we are getting older, that our teeth are falling out, that we are going to contract awful diseases and nightmarish infirmities, that we were going to suffer and then disappear and never give the world shape and meaning? Do we need another tyrant? Or imbeciles who preach from the desk without believing one iota of what they say, the same way they don’t believe in classical poetry or mathematical theorems, or the laws of physics, or in atoms, or in gods, or in class struggle, who would preach about anything in the same tone, just as long as they got their afternoon nap, their only god and friend?"

Do you remember, as a child, how you would lay in bed at night and come of with fantastic scenarios? Coping with juvenile heartache or spurred by desire for filial retribution after seemingly undeserved punishment, you would create a dream scheme in which you would make everyone sorry for the way you were treated? And this simple but impossible plan would spiral into an eventual turnabout of heroic action that would make everybody revere you? This story is basically like that but without all the doubling back with post script reinsertions that the wandering mind is wont to do.

A 12 year old gets pissed off at his family so he starts living in the forest around his house. Literally in the forest, like, the canopy of the forest--he vows to never set foot on solid earth again. This is a promise that he keeps. His arboreal/empyreal life is full of storybook adventures, like foiling the plans of pirates, becoming a war hero, falling in love with a beautiful women and being betrayed by her, having a little wiener dog named Ottimo Massimo.

Really cozy fun read. Definitely the finest entry in Calvino's Our Ancestors trilogy.

Calvino had one of the most imaginative and creative voices in 20th century western literature. For me, he is better than Borges and better than Barthelme, something about Calvino positively resonates with me. His playfulness cannot be contained within the bounds of reality.

Invisible Cities isn't really a short story collection or a novella but something in between. There is a common thread that contains the meat of Invisible Cities, but that meat takes the form of 55 descriptions of cities. Fun cities, silly cities, sad cities. Treehouse cities and underground cities and cities that don't really actually exist. These vignettes are recounted by explorer Marco Polo as he revealed the smuggled "moods, states of grace, and elegies," to Kublai Khan.

Great for a regular read-through, but also a great toilet book. The appeal of up and selecting a city at random for a quick toilet read gives Invisible Cities true re-readability.

The first time I read this was around my junior year of high school during my Russian Literature phase, during which I read dutifully and not joyously or intentionally. So, my reread, spurred by finding this at the back of my closet, was like reading it for the first time. I remembered there was a duel, I remembered it took place amongst those convalescing in a town built on a spring, stuff like that. But I really did not absorb or retain any of the magic in this book.

Firstly, the structure is great. Essentially, this is an I-know-a-guy-who-knows-this-guy story, but it works wonderfully. Pechorin is introduced indirectly through a story told orally to the narrator. Then, by chance, Pechorin is briefly met. Finally, the narrator receives the writings of Pechorin. In these, the meat of the story. And nearly 60 pages into this 169 page book!

Pechorin is a disinterested man of twenty some years who staves off ennui by toying with people. The only relief to his malaise is great feelings, either adoration or hatred. Not a very nice guy. So, his notes tell the story of him torturing those around him in order to evoke those feelings. Pechorin has no great love for life, yet has not had a good reason to stop yet. "Some will say 'he was a good fellow,' others will say I was a swine. Both one and the other would be wrong. Given this, does it seem worth the effort to live? And yet, you live, out of curiosity, always wanting something new... Amusing and vexing!"

The title of the story is quite contradictory, yet, not... Clearly Pechorin is an asshole. Yet he is brave and charismatic. He knows exactly how to get what he wants and has the guts to do it. He's sympathetic. Lermontov writes him as a badass. Perhaps he is attempting to reflect how vice is oftentimes met with reward. Ego is something we tend to despise but confidence is magnetic. Deceit is bad but everyone loves hearing exactly what they want to hear. Pechorin is someone we know we should hate but cannot help but admire.

Underrated. I think Pynchon's introduction denouncing the works in this collection set readers into a disparaging mindset from the get go, but, like, this is still Pynchon, it's still pretty good. Okay, well, the first two stories could be thrown away if you are reading this for their contents. However they are pretty valuable in terms of framing Pynchon's career and evolution of style. Under the Rose is pretty cool for those who have or will read V., getting this alternative cut of the Porpentine in Egypt chapter is really neat. Entropy is decently interesting. But the Secret Integration steals the show here, this story rocks. Here, you really start seeing Pynchon insert his trademark wackadoodle slapstick comedic tropes into his work, although they are not so seamlessly integrated as they will become in his novels to come. Inherently interesting (kids pranking adults, that is fun, c'mon), heartful, and with a crazy twist (the children imagined their token black friend), this one is well worth reading. I think a proper reading of Slow Learner does necessitate having precursory Pynchon proficiency, but having met that preliminary, this is pretty good.

You know the Shaggy Dog? The remake with Tim Allen, of course. Where he puts his job before his family and ends up learning the importance of fatherhood only after being transformed into a, well, shaggy dog? Yea, this book is a lot like that. Or like that movie Brother Bear. But also a lot like Kafka’s the Trial; the court proceedings leading up to the forced animorphism are wacky and nonsensical.

The human transformed into something else to learn a lesson trope is a little overdone, but what if there is no lesson to be learned? What if it reflects the North American penal system? What if rehabilitation was never actually the point? Thompson manages to do something new with it that kept me engaged.

Very funny at times. My favorite part: “Judging from his use of grammar, I read, his long sentences and tendency to jump from tense to tense, we are clearly dealing with a psychopath. We even have evidence of poetic leanings and rumours of juvenilia, an unfinished science fiction romance written in his virgin years. This is worrisome, as it’s an indication of excessive masturbation, which is prove to addle the mind.”

The low rating is perhaps partially my fault. This was my ebook for the last few weeks, meaning I read it on my phone between sets at the gym or on my computer at work between calls. I don’t think this book is meant to be read that way. This book demands your full attention every step of the way, otherwise you’re going to get lost and keep getting more and more lost. To me, this book felt like an exercise in creating a story using the most convoluted and tenuous language possible. The plot jumps around like crazy, you will have like bread crumbs from different events in different countries in different decades all sprinkled in the same paragraph. If you feel overwhelmed, McElroy did his job.

At it’s foundation, this novel is about some guy who makes an artistic (plotless) film; the film gets partially destroyed and a labyrinthian search for the perpetrator ensues. In addition to the film, the narrator has kept a diary that is seemingly just as important to the saboteurs as the film itself. Through this, McElroy through Cartwright plays with the idea of photographic (videographic) media vs written media. An image can show every single detail except the subtextual story. A written page can detail everything shown in an image but cannot convey the little details, can not bring a reader to truly see.

Cartwright sees himself as a cartridge of sorts, something that is inserted into a space and makes things happen. This book is full of cartridges, mediums that define, mediums that are the message—liquid crystals, the cast on Jane’s arm, the television sets, the reels of film. The cartridge, Cartwright, is between the mortise and the tenon. “I am on my lookout site keeping watch for those who have gone into the building’s shadowy forms and are to be warned by me if the other forces come from the street outside, so I’m important but I’m struck stationary between the two motions of those inside and those outside but I do not know enough about the two sides, can’t look at both at once.”

I just found this to be convoluted for convolutions sake. I enjoy maximalism and experimental writing but this felt excessive. Maybe, like I said, I would’ve enjoyed it if I could read it as a physical book somewhere I could focus. Oh but physical book? The hardcore costs $2000. Anyways. And have I lulled you who have me?

Surreal, nonsensical plot with no real arc. The stakes are so high, like, mass extinction high, but wait we have to lure the (friendly) antagonist out of his house to politely steal his doomsday substance, but wait! I heard Joyce is still alive and hanging out up north of the city, that’s kinda really important, put the rest on the back burner.

I don’t think this novel should work but it kinda really does. O’Brien demonstrates a real joy in language, you can feel the playfulness through the pages. A lot of things seemingly happen just to insert fun little anecdotes. Like the whole thing about men becoming bikes and vice versa. This book is way too short to be delving into random tangents like that, but it does and you have to love it. O’Brien just wants to envelop you in an entropic embrace. “Is there to be recalled in this magnificence a certain philosopher’s pattern of man’s lot on earth — thesis, antithesis, synthesis, chaos? Hardly.”

“What had happened, after all? Nothing much.”

I don't know a thing about theatre so my review is based on story and writing alone, staging has no relevance to me.

After working my way through Cormac McCarthy's bibliography, I had been hesitant into getting into his screenplays and other works thinking that they wouldn't bear the same significance has his novels. This thought was reinforced after reading the Sunset Limited which, in my opinion, was pretty lackluster. But I read his lost screenplay Whales and Men yesterday and was pretty blown away so on I move to the Stonemason. And I liked this one, too.

A family in Louisville, Kentucky with typical family problems. Money, infidelity, drugs, pretty straightforward. The magic in this play lies in the narrator, Ben, and his Papaw's attitude towards work. Specifically, masonry. "And if it is true that laying stone can teach you reverence of God and tolerance of your neighbor and love for your family it is also true that this knowledge is instilled in you through the work and not through any contemplation of the work." Work is not a means to live for these gentleman but work is life itself. Nothing is godlier than working hard.

Some really beautiful passages about the stonemason trade. "They were designed by the men who built them and their design rose out of necessity. The beauty of those structures would appear to be just a sort of a by—product, something fortuitous, but of course it is not. The aim of the mason was to make the wall stand up and that was his purpose in its entirety. The beauty of the stonework is simply a reflection of the purity of the mason's intention."

The biggest issue in this work is character development. The women in this book barely exist. Maven is just a brick wall for Ben to bounce his ideas against. Mama literally just cooks and cries. It is difficult to create realistic characters in shorter form content, however the women in the Stonemason really just don't mean a thing. Soldier's disappearance and subsequent death is seen through the eyes and the mind of his uncle, rather than his grieving mother. She cries and secludes herself. That's all we see. Would've liked to see more there.

I was shocked to find out this was written in the 80's because a lot of the themes in Whales and Men seemed to become a big focus in McCarthy's (much) later works. I'm talking about the Kekulé Problem (pause here and go read that. I'm incredibly serious, stop this review now, go read the Kekulé Problem, come back), the Passenger, and Stella Maris. The theme I'm referring to being language, it's evolution, and the impact of language on human epistemology and perception. Like, the 2022 duology's assertion that mental disorders (schizophrenia, in this case) do not exist in the animal kingdom because language does not exist in the animal kingdom.

Here, in Whales and Men, evil is a human condition that has arisen from the convention of naming, of speaking, assigning symbols, confusing the symbol for the real thing. "A thing named becomes the named thing." Whales have a pretty sophisticated system of communications but exist outside the parameters assigned, in this hypothesis, to humans, this being a result of the massive distance whales can communicate over, a vacuum chamber the size of the pacific ocean in which words (noises) evolve simultaneously, communication is one to one, symbols have a universally definite meaning.

The human condition is a series of wires twisted and meanings mislaid. "... civil wars are the bloodiest and that most murder victims are killed by members of their own household. But it isn't pure proximity that triggers rage. It's Betrayal. It's not communication but the shattered illusion of it that sets us at each others throats. What we are driven mad by is our own lies. We long for communion but we have no real belief in it."

Whales and Men gives a lot to think over but its also just a really moving piece of writing. The rising action is crafted perfectly to make the climax hit like a freight train. 133 pages, this is a one-sitter, do read. Just make sure to read the Kekulé Problem either right before or directly after,

Americans need to stop going to Europe.

This is, in theory, the coolest book to ever exist. The greatest living writer of short fiction teaching you how to write a good story? Yea, that rocks. But there is no easily replicable formula to writing a great story, the questions that literature aims to explore don't actually answer them. Saunders knows this and he isn't out to sell us snake oil. The bottom line, Saunders tells us, is that, to create a great piece of fiction, you need to WORK.

Through the stories included in this book, Saunders gives us tips and helps us identify what is great about a great story. But, as Saunders states himself, knowing what makes a story great isn't knowing how to make a story great. One must work and work and work. The most important part of the writing process is starting, getting something out there, and then letting our interior literary voices make decisions to refine our initial process. According to him, a story is made up of an infinite number of small directional choices that we must make.

I haven't really written any fiction ever, so I have no idea what problems I might face or how the tools provided to me through this book may help me to hone in that craft. But, even without experience or intention to write, I still found this to be a worthwhile read. I love anything Saunders writes and getting nuggets of historical context to these stories as well as notes on the translations was really neat. I enjoyed it.

Vulgus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur.

At some point the Recognitions ceases to be just a story and becomes real life. Brilliant beyond comprehension. Completely soaked with that angry, magical feeling of a great artist’s debut work. Heart makes up for sophomorics. The type of book you start dutifully but end regretfully. I mean, Chrahst, I could live in this book.

Late 1940’s, early 1950’s Greenwich Village, teeming with decadence and depravity and pretension. An ideal setting to explore the value of criticism and the merit of art. Is aesthetic value enhanced by ownership? A reproduction of the Mona Lisa on a cigarette advertisement—increases or decreases the importance of the piece?

Gaddis is seen to begin developing his trademark style of unattributed dialogue and obscure allusions, however in a digestible way (as compared to the labyrinthian J R). Although he has not hit his stride with masterful dialogue writing incorporated in later works, the Recognitions still blows any other book out of the water. Every voice is real and unique.

Beyond the surface-level theme of counterfeiting, there are huge religious undertones that I’m not even prepared to start mentally working my way through yet.

I’m gonna return to this review at some point, I’m mentally exhausted after that ending. Stanley’s character arc… perhaps the most perfect ending a book could have. Thank god there was gold to be forged!

“There is always an immense congregation of people unable to create anything themselves, who look for comfort to the critics to disparage, belittle, and explain away those who do.”

6/5

How is the worth of life measured? Experiences? Or physical belongings? In the case of the latter, what do you have to show for yourself? Can you fit everything you own in a mid-size sedan? What about a single suitcase?

The Suitcase is a satirical memoir of life in the Soviet Union. Dovlatov goes over the meager effects inside his sole piece of baggage brought to America from the homeland. Each item bears a story that gives glimpses of his existence before emigrating. From a belt he acquired after being beaten in the head with it's buckle to a pair of driving gloves leftover from a failed acting career, every object contains tragedy and comedy.

Of Soviet writers, Dovlatov is the funniest and the most inventive. This one rocked.

I really wish I liked this one more than I do, I love the idea of reading Pynchon and not feeling like I’m missing out on something. Accessible, subtext kept to a minimal, Vineland is pretty reasonably followable. But, well, not a whole lot happens. The story is flashback after flashback, the main action comprising less than a quarter of the book. Great ideas felt underdeveloped to me. I just had trouble getting immersed in this one and was racing to be done with it.

Here, Pynchon takes on the shifting of culture America undergoes between the 60’s and the 80’s. Replete with the typical Pynchonian paranoia, serious concerns about the rise of fascism are implied. “…soon they’re gonna be coming after everything, not just drugs, but beer, cigarettes, sugar, salt, fat, you name it, anything that could remotely please any of your senses, because they need to control all that. And they will.”

The previous entry in TP’s 20th century California chronicles, TCOL49, is absolutely dripping with style, an absolute pleasure to read even if half the time I hadn’t a clue what was going on. But Vineland really lacked that charm I was hoping for. Especially given the presence of wacky characters like metal artist Billy Barf and a ninjette DL, not to mention an actual ghost town, no, town of ghosts, I would’ve liked more, um, silliness.

The mental instability check annual window jump is so genius though.

“To hell with freedom! I want peace.”

Dovlatov places us amongst the Russian émigré community living on 108th St in New York. We meet an assortment of characters like Karavayev, a human rights activist that fights for the freedom of rapists, and Zaretsky, a journalist who gathers data for his new work Sex Under Totalitarianism by begging women to sleep with him.

After a series of failed relationships, protagonist Marusya decided to leave Russia for New York with her young son. After a year of jobs that don’t stick and a tumultuous relationship with Latin American lover Rafael, she decides she’s ready to return to Russia, willing to be imprisoned if just to be back.

Pet parrot Lolo parallels Marusya, constantly breaking out of his cage and eventually escaping. Freedom not being all too great, Lolo willingly returns. Through the hunt for Lolo, Marusya comes to terms with her new life and decides to make the best of things, marrying Rafael and staying in New York.

Dovlatov is incredibly witty, there are some really funny bits scattered all through this short novel. The story itself isn’t all that interesting but Dovlatov writes in a way that keeps you glued to the pages. At around 100 pages, there’s little reason not to read this little satirical novella.

App crashed in the middle of my big long write-up so just doing an abridged review

- hated the deleted scenes, I don’t like when experimental fiction messes with typefaces and page format and stuff

- plot setup was pretty cool, I liked Chance and Delta’s intros, but novel nosedived once it got into the H̶u̶m̶a̶n̶ I̶n̶s̶t̶r̶u̶m̶e̶n̶t̶a̶l̶i̶t̶y̶ P̶r̶o̶j̶e̶c̶t̶ I mean project sunflower and A̶k̶i̶r̶a̶ oh I been Bubs stuff. Forced convolution but was kinda surface level, like Gresham wanted to build intrigue but everything was pretty clear the whole time

- strange reading an author who is clearly terminally online. Elon Musk, spacex, memes, it felt weird

- attempts at Pynchonian naming were hamfisted. Islamophobic character names Houellebecq? Yea okay. Lucius Beezelb? Sigh

- climax was bizarre, like, the 690 lb anvil? Chekhov’s big honking “plot device here” sign, I guess. And the fourth wall breaking? Cmon

Overall felt like a b action movie in novel form that’s kinda bad but not so bad it’s good. But that’s also what I think Gresham was going for, it was supposed to feel like a silly movie. Um what else.

This was Gresham’s first novel, right? There is a lot here, he’s a talented writer, I just think Sunflower was a bit over ambitious. Strange mix of really unique inspired voice and triteness.

I’d give it a 3.5. Recommend because it’s fun to read new stuff. But this isn’t groundbreaking.

A genre-defying anti-western survival story. The nature of this book doesn’t reveal itself until the last act. When does the shit hit the fan, when does the stir-craziness set in, when does the cannibalism start? Well, it doesn’t. The winter snowed in in the Rocky Mountains passes pretty uneventfully. Williams sets a familiar scene and subverts the expectations set by Donner party and Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571.

The real kicker happens right up at the (partially) triumphant return of our hunters to the eponymous Butcher’s Crossing. The skins will not sell. The railroad will not come. All was for naught. Fancies have shifted and the tide of time has left the buffalo-hunting industry behind. Horrific, really, this pristine, idyllic valley chock freaking full of buffalo.. completely ravaged for nothing.

In part, a story about searching for meaning. Leaving behind convention in search of substance. My favorite genre, a well-off white boy throwing it all away to run wild (see All the Pretty Horses, Into the Wild). And, of course, getting more than they bargained for. As McDonald puts it, “Young People… You always think there’s something to find out.”

Williams writing is concise, laconic, even. This book is super skimmable, close reading doesn’t grant much more clarity than a quick gloss-over, honestly. A few pretty parts but mostly just straight plot.

“That world came to him fitfully and unclearly, as if hidden in a dream. He had been here in the high valley for all of that part of his life that mattered.”

I was reading Whitman’s collected works, but I’m shelving it right at the end of Calamus, I’m really just not interesting in continuing, at least not right now. Had the collection sitting on my bedside table far too long and I’m just never gonna pick it up again.

Leaves of Grass was alright, I just don’t think it’s for me. O, this, O, that! Whatever, yea, I don’t see much substance is describing a million different things and saying they rock, I find Whitman really unconvincing in his telling of how beautiful America is. A couple really great sections in Song of Myself, but so bloated and repetitive. I’ll try again, I’ve heard Whitman makes more sense as you grow older. To me, right now, it’s just a chore to read.

Yea this rocks. Short and sweet, disgusting at times and beautiful at others. Wasn’t expecting a whole lot from this little pamphlet sized book, but some of these pieces feel huge. Will definitely be revisiting this.

The literary equivalent of being the monkey in the middle of a game of keep-away. Pynchon is smarter than you and he knows it; at this point in his career, he has absolutely no reason to make things reasonably comprehensible to the average reader. Pynchon has always been convoluted and esoteric, but, like, cmon… how am I supposed to factor quaternions and Pythagorean teachings into my understanding of the plot? And, then, almost like a grand joke, we delve into Balkan politics…

Maybe a 3 for Pynchon, less driven and transformative than GR, less charming than CoL49, less entrancing than M&D. However, maybe one of his more heartful works, there is some real characterization in this book that the others lack. Cyprian, Kit, Lew Basnight.. especially Cyprian! The cast of AtD feels quite alive. Also some of my favorite passages in any Pynchon I’ve read are in this book.

There is a basic, easy-to-follow plot and a complementary abstract one, there are real characters and imaginary ones, it’s easy to get lost in this book and caught on all the information Pynchon unloads page after page. Which leaves a lot to think about, but it makes the going slow. At 1085 pages, this book is an absolute slog, characters disappear and reappear hundreds of pages later, often long periods of time passes without much mention, it takes a pretty sizable amount of dedication to make it through Against the Day. Again, not Pynchon’s best, but still a remarkable book.

He awakens still half-dreaming, something about business and corporeality. Erection reaching upwards in a sunrise salutation, something about corporations and corpulence..

Smut for the dick lit fan, or, maybe, postmodernism for the lonely housewife. A naughty housemaid/punishing housemaster story. Each day the same but different, slight alterations between vignettes. Every morning the master struggles to arise as if being born all over again, mulling over his dreams that manifest in the form of puns. It’s repetitive but it’s short enough to not get bothersome. Strange this has been published as a standalone book, the ebook I read was 40 pages.

Broadly applies to systems of oppression. The maid dutifully cleans up after the master’s debauchery, he dutifully punishes her for minor infractions. It hurts him worse than it hurts her, his refrain echoes across pages. Why? It’s all out of the manual, there is protocol, his master spanked him the same. The job is performed well but the maid serves penance for lint on her uniform. The job is a result of the master carelessly making a mess. Sounds familiar, right? Maybe a little ham-fisted for a metaphor, this model serves within the model it criticizes. But it’s pretty entertaining, I like the way Coover writes and I’m looking forward to reading more of him.

Five stories about home—home in terms of the house but also in terms of family, community, the body itself as a home. Abuse, estrangement, mental instability pervade. The homes are broken.

The first story rocks. Bleak, mean-spirited, the type of story that requires a shower after reading. The narrator’s descent into hypothermia-induced mania is horrific. Gass’ depiction of a boy undergoing a traumatic event feels real. The flashbacks to nudie mags and spring days to mentally escape. Feels real.

The other stories are unique but, really, a chore. Gass knows how to write a sentence but not a story. Great ideas with poor execution. The type of story where your brain feels like it’s on fire because you are trying so hard to stay focused and get the fucking thing over with.

My favorite part is in the title story. Gass on farmers: “Tell me: do they live in harmony with the alternating seasons? It’s a lie of old poetry. The modern husband man uses chemicals from cylinders and sacks, spike-ball-and-claw machines, metal sheds, and cost accounting. Nature in the old sense does not matter. It does not exist.”

Not a favorite of mine but still looking forward to reading more Gass, this is an early entry in his catalog, hoping it’s all up from here.

I really wanted to like Barthelme, I felt like I was supposed to like Barthelme. During the early stages of my time with this book I was thinking about what I might say in the write-up and kept thinking along the lines of, “Well, just because something is objectively good doesn’t mean it is pleasant to read.” And this got me thinking a lot about objectivity and what it means for a piece of media to be “objectively good”. And I think maybe objective goodness is a nonexistent quality, the only reason I came to that conclusion was because I was told that Barthelme was good. In a vacuum I would not have found much genius in Sixty Stories.

There were some really amazing stories but those are numbered in the single digits. And, believe it or not, this collection has sixty flipping stories. So honestly not a good ratio, huh? I feel like a large majority of the stories here are just dialogues between two unnamed characters about random bullshit. Some good one-liner witticisms result out of this, but it mostly makes for a disappointing reading experience.

Barthelme’s writing, for me, took a sharp nosedive after the 60’s. Most of the stories I liked came before 1970’s City Life. Kept hoping he would return to the earlier form I enjoyed, but it didn’t happen except for the School. The School is the shining masterpiece of Sixty Stories, one of my favorite things I’ve ever read, but I had to sift through a lot of.. um.. stuff I just didn’t enjoy whatsoever to get to it.

Barthelme is important for his inspiration to other writers, he’s a writer’s writer, right? But I don’t like David Foster Wallace much either. Just conflicted about this guy, but I am interested in reading more by him and see what else he has to offer.

Edit: oh okay so, I’m the story the Glass Mountain. Definitely got a lot out of that story, particularly one line about demystifying symbols. Let me find it…: “Does one climb a glass mountain, at considerable personal discomfort, simply to disenchant symbols?” Man, I love this line. Sometimes you do shit you don’t even care about doing just to have done it. To, hmm, remove the power of something. Like, spending money on a trip to a renowned monument to see the bus stop and tourist slobs always positioned behind the camera in photographs. Desexing something near universally alluring? Disenchanting symbols. I like it a ton!!

Beautifully written.. perhaps too poetic for its own good.

Hawkes is a master at synesthesia. Absurdist sensory descriptions mark the style of this novella. Nonsensical, yet viscerally palpable: “In Syb’s voice he heard laughter, motor cars and lovely moonlit trees, beds and silk stockings in the middle of the floor.” “He could feel the wet light rising round all the broken doors, the slatted crevices, rising round the fens, the dripping petrol pump, up the calves and thighs of the public and deserted visions of the naked man…” “Her long white head of hair was shrieking in the wind as if the inboard engine was sucking the strands of it.”

The prologue is stunning, young boy and mother’s English transience, life in boardinghouses, mother killed during the air raids. Hawkes promises a sweeping and emotional narrative in the first section. And, then, fails to deliver. The entire narrative shifts to a gangster story. And, then, the boy from the prologue dies in the first chapter, taking with him all of the gorgeous framework previously established. Tonally, nothing changes, there is a really interesting dichotomy between the low-brow plot and the dense prose. Interesting, yea, but really difficult to follow at times.

The titular lime twig represents the promise of freedom from a life on criminal entrapment. The lime twig is the promise of a new life for the gang boss once the heist is successfully pulled off. At least I think? There’s like two sentences on that. Character motivations are sprinkled in so lightly and infrequently, it’s really difficult to understand why anything is happening. One of the major characters is killed in a bathhouse by other gang members and I still don’t really know why.

The book is really short which leaves a lot to be desired. At the same time, it’s kind of nice that it can be read in an afternoon, the stakes are low which makes it easy to wholly enjoy the prose without sweating the plot too much. Apparently the newspaper article chapter headings were forced by the editor to make the plot easier to understand, however it really doesn’t do much of anything for me, I thought it was kinda silly.

Quite a bit to dislike here but also a really fantastic and interesting reading experience.

I refuse to give a less than a five star rating to a book by an author I’d like to see reach a wider audience. So this review comes without a rating, but this collection of stories exists somewhere between three and four stars for me.

Gresham is clearly an incredibly talented writer, but I find him to be careless at times. Inconsistent? There are occasional hiccups that take me out of the story. For instance, in one of the stories the narrator phrases a situation as something occurring habitually, but follows it with dialogue that would only take place if it were a first time for said situation. Stuff like this—I felt the flow being disrupted fairly often. That being said, Gresham has a really strong literary voice that is perfect for his unique brand of pulpy gross-out fiction. Lots of nice little witticisms and insights scattered throughout as well that make this worth reading beyond the plain entertainment value.

I’d say maybe a quarter of the stories really did something for me. Some of them were a little overly silly or a bit aimless. All of them are interesting, but maybe print isn’t the most ideal medium for them. For example, In the Rough would be really great as an oral story but it doesn’t resolve very well which made it strange to read. The titular story, Violent Candy, was too rooted in coincidence to make a meaningful reading experience, but I could see it working great in visual media.

The few stories I did enjoy knocked it out of the park. Lovebird comes to mind. Man, what a story. Saunders level insane-o goofiness but with tons of heart. Footage of the Aftermath was amazing, however I found the whole Ritalin rage thing a little pointless.

Oh oh okay so in the story Inside Joke, the kid shatters the other kid’s mom’s dildo, but then somehow is able to show the dildo to the sex store clerk? Another example of carelessness that took me out of it.

What else? Hurt People Hurt People was great, at 4 pages long this is the story I would show people to get them to check Gresham out.

I was really blown away by Iris, the introductory story, so much so that I immediately went and ordered Sunflower by Gresham after reading it.

Hm yea that’s about it. Entertaining and promising but not everything I’d hoped it would be, but still worth reading. Tex Gresham shows tons of promise.

Don’t quite know where to start with this one. Perhaps with manuscript V protagonist Harry Tindall’s favorite word? So: a prolegomenon.

Highly biased review. Eager and anxious to start McElroy’s magnum opus Women & Men, new edition fresh off the print, no longer $300 on eBay but, what, $35? from publisher Dzanc, false start followed by several months off the shelf on the bedside table, there being no soft and sensible section to dig your fingernails into, at least, not within the first 40 pages. So I thought to begin in the same place as McElroy, his first book. I’d rather learn to read the guy when the stakes are lower, 1200 pages is a gamble if you can’t decipher the first sentence. So, A Smuggler’s Bible. This book is out of print, has been out of print for a while. Long enough to run upwards of $200 a copy. Jumped on a $84 copy and I’ll be damned if I don’t 5 star a book I spent that much money on. McElroy’s signature smuggled on the title page, by the way, neat surprise. So maybe I had to force myself to fall in love to circumambulate the pit in my stomach that come’s with spending money. Well! The write-up now.

Chapters alternate between present-day David Brooke (or, technically, an unnamed inhabitant of DB’s brain, in him, behind him, but apart from him) and eight manuscripts he is writing and editing on a transatlantic cruise. Each manuscript is a story involving David Brooke but not centered on him. Colleagues, housemates, family members, slices of their lives in which David is just a side character. David is smuggling himself, his essence, in his manuscripts.

Smuggling is a major major major theme here, if you can even believe that. Most important boundary is time. Okay, hold on, first, on time: we are meant to be seeing time as three dimensional in terms of this novel. Time isn’t a line we progress down, McElroy is asserting we are static, we do not move, we go nowhere. So I’m thinking of time as a plane slowly expanding outward center-of-the-universe style from the solipsistic self. Things get harder to see as they are pushed further away, hey? Simply: we forget. So David wants to smuggle himself, take the past with him, take it through time’s infinite checkpoints. Or something like that! David intends to smuggle the entire, the epistemological whole, a concise replica of himself, done so by a multitude of narrators whose varying perceptions can be synthesized into a single David.

David Brooke recognizes death as a dead end, it just stops there, we do not go anywhere. Christ, Brooke suggests, is the great smuggler, the only to ever transcend it, the only to ever go anywhere. So maybe the manuscripts are an attempt at a loophole, to preserve his memory (or to preserve him) after he dies.

McElroy tosses around a whole mess of dichotomous juxtapositions. Like, remember, the different perspectives? “…Be drugged by the world’s fair of verbal ambiguities in which we live, yet at the same time being aware, aware, aware, and intensifying your victimization by the age you live in and, more, by the nation you live in, this can you, as Spinoza says, preserve yourselves, be conscious of the trap you can never skip and the part you can never doff…”. This coming from academic fraud Duke (Manuscript IV), Duke sees personhood, particularly American personhood, as the embrace of paradox. We drive our cars to work and we hate every second! And DB himself on perspective—“Do we not use each other to slip across the frontiers of self-scrutiny as something other than lonely people? Once I thought of killing myself—to get out. But instead I chose another way of leaving myself—projecting into the lives, the consciousness of others.”

McElroy uses dichotomy and recurring symbols in ways I don’t understand. Man, isn’t literary comprehension difficult without sparknotes? Like, McElroy mentions this screwdriver DB stole several times, then, later, his father (or David writing from his father’s perspective) reflects on the Manhattan Project’s Louis Slotin, the slip of a screw driver and subsequent prompt-critical that resulted in Slotin’s death. And, okay, what about the church in Norway vs the church on Oake’s land? Aaaand the smuggler’s Bible from the cruise ship smuggler vs the one from St. John? Ellen repeats, mantra-like, this beach could be anywhere, Corfu, Cornwall, Casco Bay. Yes, I think McElroy has intentions with this, but it’s beyond me.

A lot of it is beyond me and probably beyond the scope of reasonable understanding. This being because this is McElroy’s first book! And it has that special quality we find in many masters’ first artistic endeavors where they seem to be fighting for their fucking lives to get something out that has GOT to get out, like, absolutely swinging for the fences, come along or don’t, there is real heart and soul, real meaning, whether it can be made sense of or not. And that is my main basis for the 5 star rating. I feel desperation in this book, despite the domesticity of subject matter and the awfully steady (beautiful at times, but basically emotionless) prose, there is real desperation somewhere and I just adore being able to feel that in a work.

Edit: I forgot I wanted to talk about Sartre a bit. Recurring fragment of a Sartre quote comes up several times, “devoid of secret fragments,” coming from “I have never before had such a strong feeling that I was devoid of secret dimensions, confined within the limits of my body, from which airy thoughts float up like bubbles. I build memories with my present self. I am cast out, forsaken in the present: I vainly try to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.” Really works into McElroy’s ideas on the psyche as something static. Alienation from the past, desire to carry it with. And, working Sartre into the perspective angle: Sartre says hell is other people, well, right near the end of the novel we get “GOD is other people.” Salvation in this idea of the self only existing as a kaleidoscope of viewpoints!

A bizarre metafictional nesting doll, half the book consists of little snippets of fictional works that play into the main narrative. That main narrative being pretty jumbled and, at times, hard to follow. Calvino essentially wrote a book about books, he’s concerned here with how readers read.

Some of the vignettes were really good, Italo Calvino is a master of short stories. However, the main story didn’t entice me all too much. I’m a bit disappointed, I’m such a huge fan of his stories. But maybe he’s novels aren’t for me, I didn’t really like the Cloven Viscount or the Nonexistent Knight much either.

“V.‘s is a country of coincidence, ruled by a ministry of myth.”

A big complaint I’ve seen with Pynchon is that he sacrifices heart for irony and jokes. He begins what could be a really beautiful anecdote and then ends it with a poop fart peepee joke. But, for me, V. has heart, V. feels like when an artist puts a desperate ferocity into their first body of work, absolutely swinging for the fences. Unbelievable that the guy was 26 when he published it.

Where Gravity’s Rainbow is sort of a calculated and directed work, V. Is pretty sinuous, plot and ideas apparently coming to a head and then just as quickly falling away. Which works, a major theme in this work is sinuosity, above and below, etc. Which is the main theme of GR. Lots of character crossover between the two books. GR can be considered a sequel to V. Especially considering that GR is all about the V2 rocket. V., V2.

Fausto’s writings to Paola from Malta and also the chapter about the young ballerina are some of the most incredible bits of writing I’ve read. The conclusion of that Malta chapter is actually insane, really grotesque and wonderful. And, well, same can be said about the ballerina segment.

The Whole Sick Crew chapters provide a lot of relief for the really heavy, dense Stencilized chapters, they tie into the story but they’re also really fun. Profane, the, I guess, main character, has this important-feeling plot arc regarding inanimacy that I’m still working into my general understanding of the book, but it’s entertaining to read about his schlehmihl-ness.

I marked this one passage about mothers faking preparedness for motherhood, being secretly terrified of what grows inside them, not understanding it at all. In that bit: “They are possessed. Or: the same forces which dictate the bomb’s trajectory, the deaths of stars, the wind and the waterspout have focussed somewhere inside the pelvic frontiers without their consent, to generate one more mighty accident.” Highlight in bold red. The book ends, spoiler, with Sidney Stencil’s boat being lifted by a waterspout. And, well, isn’t GR all about that parabolic trajectory of the bomb?

And, as always, the Pynchonian element of mystique, the clandestine “them”. Which, in this book, is V. Parallels to the jesuits in M&D, W.A.S.T.E. In tCoL49, them in GR. Pynchon can build entire worlds around paranoia and not knowing.

Another one to tag for a reread, there’s no way to understand everything here on first read, but the reading itself was pure gravy and I’m looking forward to returning at some point.

Zadie Smith’s debut novel, a post-colonial, postmodern loo—wait, postmodern? Yea, well, that’s the qualifier that sold me on it. But.. is it? Well, no. At least, not for me. But it is for this guy online, he says that “the blurring of the difference between so-called high and popular cloture and blurring of social identities” make White Teeth postmodern. But it really doesn’t read like postmodern, it’s pretty damn straightforward. But a good compromise between the gratuitously traumatic immigrant stories that frequent the book club circuit and the pretentious dick lit titles thrown around on r/literature.

Really ambitious for a debut novel but falls short of greatness. Dialogue is strange. Things happen often seem to happen in order to give the reader background information rather than because it should be happening. Or, like, characters will have a really unnatural conversation about something from the past for the benefit of the reader. Smith was 21 when she wrote this, though, I think this is a crazy book for a 21 year old to write. But it’s pretty lackluster in the grand scheme of things.

First Salinger was, of course, , it was summer reading in middle school or something. And then, last October, I spent the day with a woman I met in Portland, Maine, she worked in publishing, very bookish. We browsed a bookstore together and ended up picking a book out for one another. I chose a collection by [a:Raymond Carver|7363|Raymond Carver|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1613953222p2/7363.jpg] and she chose . I read Franny and Zooey 2 days later taking the train in and out of New York City from where I parked my car out in New Rochelle. Felt like an almost ideal scenario to read those two stories to me. But I didn't like either at all, like, not a bit. So I was a bit worried going into Nine Stories, seeing as my only adult experience with Salinger was less than positive.

But, yea, actually really enjoyed this collection. There are a couple stinkers, like Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut and De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period, but some of the stories are phenomenal. For Esme is the highlight for me, followed by the Laughing Man.

Salinger excels at creating an image of the social alienation following World War II. Despite the universal involvement in the conflict, most people seemed eager to forget it as quickly as possible. Veterans were misunderstood, there experiences were disregarded, nobody actually wanted to hear about any of that bleak shit anymore. Emphasis on the huge emotional gap between men coming home from war and the wives they return to, there is no way the war trauma of war could be shared between lovers and also nobody actually desired to take that trauma on themselves.

I liked it, pretty short, really good length of stories for quick reads to fit into random gaps in your schedule.

Sort of bland, run-of-the-mill Americana/frontier novella focusing on man's relationship with nature and the supernatural in the ever-shrinking wilderness of the American Northwest. Prose is pretty nice but there isn't that much to this book. The climax sees the protagonist take care of a wounded feral girl that he believes to be his daughter, purportedly raised amongst a wolf pack. Calls back to a conversation he had with his wife about the intelligence of animals vs. humans, how dogs are smarter because they have the instinct to survive directly after weaning, whereas people only become smarter once they learn to communicate. Style and setting reminiscent of Steinbeck for me.

I remember really really enjoying when I read it last spring. This novella has none of the charm I remember his story collection having. I was honestly bored with this one fairly early and was very thankful it was so short.

I really really disliked most of this. Like, maybe maximalism isn't for me, but this felt like actual torture to read. I just don't really feel like the excruciating and brutal attention to detail really did anything for me. That being said, I can recognize some talent in the writing, it just felt like sloughing through all the bullshit kinda ruined it.

I actually liked Mr. Squishy a lot. Incredibly boring, but it was thick and convoluted in a way that felt like a puzzle, unraveling the details. I didn't even pick up on the narrator's plot until I looked at some discussion boards and had to go back and look at it. That story was nice. And, of course, the 2 page story about the child getting scalded was great. But everything else really did nothing for me.

Wallace really focuses on art and the importance of artists in a lot of these stories. The Soul is Not a Smithy references Joyce's attempt and recognition of the futility to create a true work of art, the impossibility to fully get any message across to a reader. Good Old Neon describes one's struggles with imposter syndrome and fraudulency, which mirrors this insecurity Wallace bears when it comes to creativity. And the novella, a story about making art out of literal shit, and, well, is it still just shit? I really liked that stories discussion on determining the point in which the human body becomes repugnant. Nothing wrong with a little skin on skin. But a piece of disembodied skin... fucking foul. Why? Still kinda thinking about this in terms of art and creating.

I personally don't have much of anything to say about any of the other stories. The "It was all a dream," copout ending of the title story is obviously pretty lame but it manages to do it in a kinda thought provoking way? I don't know I just didn't really like this collection.

Sa-a-ay, I thought this was a book about the war? Forged out of the stinking miasma of the Zone, here is the real war, Jackson, forget your blitz, forget your air raid sirens, this is a war of distraction, it’s you and it’s Them and it’s us and it’s—Us? the preterite and our Parabolic path of flight. Or was it a mandala? Brennschluss is in Act II, friend, if you weren’t counting, and now you’re not even running on fumes, no, you’re completely cut off and it’s just the gentle betrayal of gravity against smooth slide through space, condensation collecting on red, well, purple in this light, warhead, lubricating the passage like, heh heh, cock in cunt before the slow leveling out as incline of rocket body, tail to head, drops, nearly undefined passing through the whole range of negatives, depending which way you’re looking, before a quickening descent..

I’m writing this review right after finishing my first read.. well, actually, I still have 20 pages left but I’m already putting some thoughts down. And it’s a great disservice to this book and anybody who reads this review to say, like, anything about it on first read, especially without ample reflections time. Like Nabokov said, reading is nothing, it’s all in the reread.

At face value, this book is really fun, great bits and puns and musical numbers, even if you can’t break through into what Pynchon is really trying to say, the book is enjoyable as hell. But if you are aiming to understand what Pynchon is trying to say… well, good luck, I guess.

The strangest part of this book is the complete lack of any talk of nuclear war. But I think that’s a huge part of the point, if the idea of the preterite, that the true and the real is just out of reach of the arc, or, inversely, that it is passed over by the same arc. There is a singular reference to Hiroshima in the form of a faded newspaper reading “OMB DRO ROSHI” or something like that. But isn’t the nuke what all this is about? The V2 serves as the basis of the ICBM. And Gottfreid.. well, again, I don’t have a fucking clue. “It’s just too remote.”

I think I liked Mason & Dixon better, being a whackadoodle romp, just straight fun. But Gravity’s Rainbow is a clear masterpiece of postmodern fiction, like, even if you aren’t fully grasping it, you KNOW there is so much there and I’m really excited for a second reading so I can start piecing together some of my remaining questions, like.. the Argentinians? What’s up with that? And the dodo birds? Maybe I missed something. My reading comprehension isn’t the best.

Huge ups to the Library Guy and Michael Davitt Bell for their reading guides, the Reddit scholars for the think pieces, and all the freaks that contribute annotations at the Pynchon wiki.

Required listening - Hellfire by Black MIDI

“Sometimes you insist on getting a VIN just because you know it’ll end the call…”

The makes of a really great toilet book for your uncle that works at a dealership. Except toilet books don’t really exist anymore because of smart phones.. what could they possibly print on paper that would be more important or entertaining than what’s currently on my screen?? So anyways, you gift this to your uncle for Christmas and he gives a hearty belly laugh and pats you on the back real hard, thanks you through residual chuckles. And then it sits on the top of the toilet tank in the guess bathroom. Spine never wearing, pages in perfect order, not opened since that Christmas.

Or, you’re like me, a parts department employee and your boss gets the book to sit in the department, also gathering dust. But I actually sat down on my last Saturday at this particular dealership and read through.

First, complaints.. chao teeing the book is entirely arbitrary, especially when the chapter titles don’t actually denote the contents of the chapter in any way. But you also don’t want to group the types of dealership interactions together because they are so redundant and if you read 20 stories in a row about customers having difficulty providing VIN numbers it wouldn’t be very entertaining so you need the repeated cases of customers not knowing their tire sizes to break it up.

I don’t think this book is really for anybody outside of the industry. It requires a baseline level of dealership parts department knowledge. But it could be mirrored to any service industry position. Like, people are assholes, people are stupid, and you wanna feel less alone amongst the masses of the preterite so you read or write a book about it. I applaud the author on keeping things light, I know I can’t talk about my job without getting mean-spirited.

It’s just really surprising, ya know, when you start really understanding how many people out there know so little. In my case, working for Alfa Romeo, how are you gonna pronounce it Alfa Romero? You don’t know the brand of car you drive? And having a body shop that works primarily on teslas… Tesla drivers and a different breed of… I don’t wanna say stupid, but like, god…

Anyways, not gonna leave a rating and fuck up this guys overall rating because I’m a hater and wish I could cash in on my boring experiences nobody really actually cares about. But if I did it would maybe be like a 3/5.

And, like that, I’m all caught up.

Maybe it was a big mistake, racing through all of Saunders’ story collections in, what, two, two and a half weeks? Actually, I know it to be a mistake. Saunders is special and I indulged so quickly and now I’m all out. At least the guy is still kicking. There’ll be more.

A lot of these stories feel like rehashes. Like, the title story is a mix of Semplica Girls and My Chivalrous Fiasco. Ghoul is another themed entertainment park story, except this one doesn’t have any guests. Well, Pastoralia didn’t really have any guests either. A Thing at Work is pretty Reminiscent of Downtrodden Mary. Elliott Spencer and Jon… I mean, all the stories are good, but they get less good as you go and kinda tend to get mixed up when you look back. Maybe if I started with Liberation Day, these stories would be my favorite, maybe they’re technically better than the stories leading up to, but it’s hard to really tell, having read it last. But, actually, I’m pretty convinced that they aren’t anywhere near as funny. This is the least funny of Saunders works, easily.

My ranking of his collections would go: Civilwarland in Bad Decline Pastoralia Tenth of December Liberation Day In Persuasion Nation

Which is nearly in order of their release dates.

One things about Liberation Day is that the closing story is incredible, really really beautiful, easily the best in this collection at only around 10 pages. Doesn’t follow the typical Saunders formally, this is one of his realistic stories. Which honestly sometimes hit. Like, you don’t come to Saunders for Realism, but some of his best don’t reside in his wheelhouse. Tenth of December, Victory Lap, Winky, the End of FIRPO. Like, these are actually among my favorites and skip all the dystopia stuff.

Which is, I guess, to say, that I think the theme park setup and the memory wiped characters and stuff is a little played at this point and I really appreciate when he steps outside of that.

Miss Lonelyhearts

The first of the two novellas is close to 5 stars. Basically little vignettes of newspaper advice columnist Miss Lonelyhearts drowning in Despair in 1930’s New York. His advice is commodified. It is disingenuous and forced, he is tortured by the sad saps who write in. Struggles with hedonism, shame, spirituality in a world bereft of any real point. Less than 60 pages but impactful.

The Day of the Locust

This one clocks in closer to 2 stars. A certified entry in the incel canon. Intensely condemning of the vacuous culture surrounding American entertainment. But, like, super super mean-spirited. The singular female character is two dimensional, scratch that, one dimensional, just a punching bag for West’s ideas, her motives are unimportant, she is nothing. Maybe an allegory for the allure of the glamours of Hollywood and how it chews up and spits out those that try to make it, but still, centering this on the one woman character is kind of a depressing worldview.

West’s Los Angeles is composed of those that come to California for the sole reason of dying. They come to fail. The promise of fame and prosperity is a lie, turning the once hopeful into people with nothing to lose, violence bubbling under the surface, able to erupt at any time.

“Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they've been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can't titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.”

Edit: Bonatica de Los Angeles by Xiu Xiu is absolutely required listening for Day of the Locust

The most over the top entry of Saunders' that I've read thus far. But also the most focused. The stories here are much more tightly linked, swinging into full force dystopian capitalist hellscape. Of course Saunders deals a lot with this in his other works, but not as relentlessly as in In Persuasion Nation.

I worry that I am only giving this one 3 stars because its, like, my 5th Saunders book I've read in the past week. I don't wanna burn myself out on such an amazing writer, but at the same time I am compelled to read as much by this freak as possible, he really is great.

But, honestly, I didn't particularly love any of the stories in this collection. I really enjoyed Brad Carrigan, American and also Christmas was pretty good. But the title story was actually kinda annoying for me and a lot of the other ones fell a little flat.

I enjoyed the insights on gender and sexuality and stuff.

But I didn’t really get the story. The back of the book says is a darkly comedic story, but there isn’t really anything funny about it. It’s kinda just annoying. I have no idea if I’m supposed to like the protagonist, but I really don’t, she is so obsessed with what is punk and what isn’t. She’s also just a terrible person, which is probably the point, but I can’t really tell if the author wants me to think that. I guess she does, but then that leaves me wondering how I’m to resonate or empathize with her feelings or anything.

I also feel like the author spent a lot of time trying to flex her literary knowledge with references to esteemed works, but immediately shits on them because “the patriarchy”. Was weird to me.

This was recommended to me by a friend and I’m glad to have read it, but it was also very annoying to read.

For me, this one was quite a bit weaker than and . I felt that every story in those two collections was absolutely incredible, I was amazed at Saunders' inability to miss. But actually I think most of the stories in this collection are misses.

That being said, the hitters are HITTERS. I think my favorite story of his that I've read so far is "My Chivalric Fiasco". It really kinda essentializes everything I like about his writing into a perfect story. The title story was also really really good, as well as the opening story. All some of his best work. The rest was kinda forgettable, I actually actively disliked the Semplica Girl story and the one about Al Roosten.

The conversation with Saunders at the end was really valuable, it was neat to get into such a creative person's head for a couple pages.

"Anyway, what I really think good writing does: It enlivens that part of us that actually believes we are in this world, right now, and that being here somehow matters."

Entirely whatever to me. Written nicely but story was, well, whatever. I didn't anticipate liking it, anyhow, I just felt I needed to read it before .

Experimental, inventive, ingenious, and… and, well, actually sort of just bad.

Tens of narrators, probably upwards of one hundred. Which is a cool idea, but was annoying here because usually each narrative contribution was one line of dialogue so you had to check who was saying it. But then you just stop checking who says what. Because 95% of the time it doesn’t matter. Anybody could be saying anything, it doesn’t make a difference. Besides, on the rare occasion a character has more than one line of dialogue to say and their segment spans to the next page, you don’t know who is saying it until you flip to that page. Or you could flip ahead preemptively. Not sure what Saunder’s intention was, whether he wanted you to not know the contributor until you get to the citation or to look ahead or what. It feels sorta messy.

The citations of books and letters is especially silly because it’s like 20 different sources just saying the same thing. Or contradicted one another on something totally arbitrary, like Abraham Lincoln’s hair color.

The civil war setting kept almost serving a purpose, but then not serving a purpose at all. The war casualties and race relations were mentioned a few times and each time it felt like they were building towards something. But yea, no. Again, totally arbitrary. This story could’ve taken place in any time period with any characters. Abraham Lincoln did not have to be in this book, it could’ve just been a guy. It’s not like there is any historical accuracy anyways.

Not sure what the dead character attributions are even supposed to be, I guess thoughts? But Saunders modifies dialogue to have character quirks by, like, misspelling or shortening words. But random words. It doesn’t work in a way to signify any sort of accent or speech impediment. Like, honestly pointless.

Even when a character spells funny, they are still eloquent as hell. Everyone in this book is well-spoken, even children. The two main characters have zero discerning differences in their thoughts, like, either of them could be saying the others dialogue at any given time and it wouldn’t have mattered. Unless it was specifically about their background. Speaking of, one of the main characters just has a huge massive erection the entire book? Like comically large boner that he has to bear.

There are redeeming qualities, most of them being the context to all the characters’ deaths. Like, their backstories. Really great character building, typical of Saunders.

It’s a shame this book is Saunders’ most popular, because it is really weird, really experimental in a way that is probably off-putting to many. I think many readers will miss out on the best living short story writer because this novel is so wacky.

Loved Pastoralia, love this one, too. Saunders is really preoccupied with the role that entertainment plays in late stage capitalist America. Pastoralia, Bountyland, Civilwarland… corporate theme parks catered towards the wealthy that exploit the working class. The harsh working conditions and strict company policies involved with a non necessity like themed entertainment reads as ridiculous satire, but also rings truer every day.

“To allow the deserving to experience an historical epoch unlike our own in terms of personal comfort.”

Themes of disfigurement, loneliness and loss are pretty strong in this one. Exaggerated loss of community experienced in the post-industrial West. Selling out of neighbors/colleagues for pittances.

Really really funny though. Peak dialogue. Astoundingly inventive. Ethical raccoon removal service company that beats raccoons to death en masse with a tire iron before dumping them in a mass grave is just one highlight.

“In these times, strange times that they are… seeing someone do something that’s not patently selfish and fucked-up is like a breath of fresh air”

Everyone is ugly and miserable.

“Boy oh boy, could life be a torture. Could life ever force a fellow into a strange, dark place from which he found himself doing graceless, unforgivable things like casting aspersions on his beloved firstborn”

Really bleak but also hilarious, like, when have I ever laughed out loud at a book before? Saunders exaggerates normal aspects of life under late stage capitalism to such a degree that you can’t help but chuckle. Outlandish, yet entirely believable.

Incredible dialogue writing, reminds me of Gaddis, which is a compliment of the highest order. Actually so excited to read the 3 other Saunders books I picked up along with this one. This is the type of book that makes you fall in love with reading again, that gets you out a reading rut, that restores your faith in the medium. God.

“It's the freaking American way—you start out in a dangerous craphole and work hard so you can someday move up to a somewhat less dangerous craphole. And finally maybe you get a mansion.”

Profanely beautiful. Like a work of haruspication, Herr rifles through the guts and grime of the Vietnam War to divine something grotesquely alluring. The urge to willingly subject oneself to the horrors of war is impossible to explain, but there is an attempt here. Vietnam is simply a backdrop to an exploration of the human psyche, voyeurism, and trauma.

I found this book a little hard to start, the jargon is pretty thick and a foundational understanding of the Vietnam War is a prerequisite. But once you get in the groove, this book is really hard to put down. It really shines for me in the ~20 page section titled Illumination Rounds, consisting of scattered vignettes of random encounters and occurrences.

As the war journalist struggles to understand the draw to the battlefield, the reader struggles with understanding why they picked the book up in the first place. There is a morbid curiosity that can only be satisfied through exposure to the most foul and horrifying facets of humanity. Herr does not justify his presence in Vietnam, but instead investigates his role as a journalist in the war.

Came here from Anthony Lloyd; got there by Jamie Stewart.

There isn't really a good place to start in reviewing this. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is sprawling. While this novel is best defined as a travel memoir, it is mostly made up of a retelling of the story of the Balkans. As West traverses 1930's Yugoslavia, she gives a historical recounting of each destination she visits, thus placing her experiences in the context of the region's troubled past.

Occurring in 1937, there is a very unsettling feeling while reading through West's trip knowing the fate that Yugoslavia would suffer in the coming years. Every person met on the journey would soon be gravely impacted by the coming war. Many would be killed. It is a liminal feeling, being sandwiched in a brief moment of respite between hundreds of years of strife and the catastrophes to come.

West's main argument of the novel is that the pacifist desires to be martyred. The Grey Falcon represents the pacifism of the Balkan states in the face of Turkish invasion. The black lamb is the pointless sacrifice made in hopes of salvation. West's Yugoslavia is able to find redemption in the epilogue by resisting fascism despite inevitable destruction.

There is so much more to be said about this book that I am not ready to say. Really really great.

Beautifully written. Lord Henry’s witticisms are simultaneously the highlights and the most annoying parts of the book. I remember actually feeling viscerally disturbed when Sibyl killed herself despite fully anticipating it to happen. Beyond that, I don’t think that the story is all that intriguing, nor the message revelatory. But Wilde could be writing about anything and it would still be a pleasure to read.

I really dragged my feet on reading this for very childish reasons. I felt protective over Michelle Zauner’s music, being a Little Big League fan since 2014, and also protective over Korean food; I didn’t want these things reaching wider audiences, I wanted these things as much to myself as they could me. Really dumb and childish but these things kept me from reading this book right away nonetheless.

The book did live up to the hype though, there isn’t a lot I can say about it, it really does speak for itself. Zauner’s writing is clear and direct, which suits the subject matter/genre perfectly. Like, not as lyrical as her music, for obvious reasons, but not much crossover between her evocative songwriting and her prose. Not a bad thing in this case.

By all means, this is a 4/5 star book

HOWEVER

Michelle Zauner committed what is, as far as I’m concerned, the biggest sin in the world of westerners eating Asian cuisine. Page 213, she called fried pork “tonkotsu”. First off, tonkotsu is a style of ramen, tonkatsu is fried pork. This bothers me because I love tonkatsu, but whenever I try to find tonkatsu near me via google, the results are plagued by google reviews saying “the tonkatsu ramen was so delicious,” and the likes. This makes finding one of my favorite foods so difficult. Also, it should be donkatsu if she’s learning it from maangchi. Really silly thing to care about but it bothered me enough that I’m dropping my rating an entire star. Like, I’m actually that dumb and obnoxious.

Equal parts obnoxious and brilliant, every one of these stories is packed with charm and invention. Although, at times, infuriating to read, I spent a majority of my time with this book with a grin on my face. Calvino's pseudoscientific explanations for the universe are unbelievably creative and whimsical.

My favorite story is easily the last one. In it, Calvino explains that, through evolution, eyesight evolved as a means to see the designs mollusks developed on their shells as a courtship display. The second chapter is a really really beautiful impression of the evolution of human sexuality from cephalopods that I really liked.

Italo Calvino is a master at short form fiction.

SCI-FI JULY #12

Astounding amount of depth squeezed into such a short book. I read that the translation doesn’t do justice to the original text, but I quite liked the writing.

Red was actually a really likable protagonist despite the victim complex. His ends justify the means of providing for the bloodsucking alien tech farmers, but he refuses to acknowledge his place in that system. As he grandfathers new stalkers into the profession, he is arguable as exploitative as the buyers. But I still like the guy.

The core idea of the book is kinda forced into a single dialogue as the laureate (forget his name) goes on a lengthy tangent about the possible relationship between the earthlings and the invaders. Wish there was a bit more to this, but it is kinda nice to leave things open ended and brief, allow for readers to come up with their own conclusions.

HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND MAY NO ONE BE LEFT BEHIND!

SCI-FI JULY #11

It’s difficult to put any of my thoughts on this book into words, like, holy…

Really really similar to Ubik, you get feuding corporations, god in the form of drugs, precogs, extraterrestrial colonization. But wayyyy better than Ubik, for me. Dick starts threading religious undertones into the plot fairly early on, whereas Ubik seemed to dump it all into the final chapter.

As typical with Dick, the story is largely impressionistic, a lot of questions and ideas are posed but never realized. Which works so well with this novel. I need to think a lot about this one before I can write any sort of meaningful analysis. Really really incredible.

SCI-FI JULY #10

You should only use coincidence to get your characters into conflict, not to resolve conflict. Ghanima crafting a working blowgun from only what she had on her person was beyond ridiculous. Like.. just nonsensical, like MacGyveresque plot advancement. That alone took me so out of the book it drops from a 3 to a 2.

Every character has their own shit going on, like, everyone has different ends in mind and it’s kind of a big jumble. Leto follows his golden path through the dark, he is driven by unseen and unspoken forces in a way that’s really unnatural. And then he gets superpowers? It’s kinda fun but really corny.

As quickly as Herbert introduces facedancers, he pretends they never exist, only bringing up tleilaxu when he must talk about Idaho. Makes it feel like Dune Messiah was completely off-canon, like it was written by a different author.

The writing is as good or better than Dune Messiah. About as entertaining as both Dune and Dune Messiah. But yea, to cap the trilogy off, I think they were all okay but nothing I would recommend.

SCI-FI JULY #9

As typical with PKD, really really strong ideas and themes that are tenuously strung together by plot points that are dubious at best. For example, how does Jory know about Pat's power? And that ending... Well, I think the ending was a purposeful dead-end twist to allow the reader to come to their own conclusions, I don't think any sense can be made of it.

With those complaints out of the way, I gotta say that this is the strongest Sci-Fi July entry so far, way better than for me. The final chapter-heading advertisement grants Ubik godhead, which ties the other advertisements together, an assertion that God is everything; The likening of God to various products, to a monopoly, is very fitting in the late-stage-capitalist pay-per-use world in the novel. Good book.

SCI-FI JULY #8

I was told before starting this that it was originally intended to be including in the initial Dune novel but Herbert’s editors made him split it into separate books. This is not true, not even gonna google it, but there is no way. Dune Messiah introduces so many new elements to the universe that weren’t present in the first of the series. Obviously Dune is not rooted in reality, but the universe was believable. Dune Messiah sees the high strangeness factor cranked up a few notches with gholas and face dancers and sight without eyes. In that way, it kinda felt tacked onto the series. Like, a completely different vibe, sorta like a fanfic. That being said, I think this one might be more well written than Dune. Dune was an action book, very straightforward prose, very skimmable. The language in Dune Messiah was much more interesting to read.

Sci-do July was a terrible idea, I’m getting so burnt out on it.

SCI-FI JULY #7

Boring and bleak. The first 100 pages are mildly interesting, it’s gratifying to align biblical events with the Canopean history of Shikasta. Then it just gets dull. Leading’s portrayal of humans is really grim. Very whatever book for me. I skimmed through quite a bit because so much of the book is devoted to restating general world history through the scope of Canopus, which I found to be pretty pointless and bland.

SCI-FI JULY #6

I really just didn't like this at all. The writing sucks, but also the ideas are not even interesting to me. Using math to predict the future is silly and corny. I don't care if it was written in the 1950's, that has nothing to do with me, this was unpleasant to read, each subsequent part was worse than the last, there was nothing for me in this one.

SCI-FI JULY #5

In a world where the axis powers win World War II, the Pacific Northwest becomes a Japanese territory. The Japanese inhabitants LOOOVE American culture, collecting bygone American trinkets. The novel’s end reveals that the truth is the axis powers lost. So, I’m a way, I think P. K. Dick predicted weeaboo culture back in the 1960’s. Instead of antique Mickey Mouse watches, though, Japanese culture fanatics collect big titty anime girl figurines.

It was alright.

“A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope. Falling into an interminable ennui.”

SCI-FI JULY #4

I liked it okay, but was very underwhelmed. At first I thought maybe Herbert didn’t really know what he wanted it to be, but that’s not true; I think the book just isn’t what I wanted it to be. I expected a sweeping epic, but I found the scope pretty narrow. Also anticipated a bildungsroman, but Paul doesn’t really undergo much of a transformation, his character is heroic and almost omniscient from the very beginning.

The beginning was actually pretty awesome, the dinner party in particular was neat, reminded me of scene from a drawing room in Russian literature. But the final 2/3rds of the story were really tropey and.. well, underwhelming!

Still going to read the trilogy but I wasn’t super impressed, literary equivalent of an action movie.

SCI-FI JULY #3

I started sci-fi July fully intending to not really like anything I'd read, I just never thought sci-fi would interest me. But Neuromancer is pretty great.

Neuromancer is completely saturated with style, Gibson has created a really fascinating world here. However, he does not meet the reader halfway in understanding this world. The story progresses with a blatant disregard as to whether the reader is following along or not, it seemed to me. Which I found really great, actually, there was work involved. Not even the protagonist really knows what is going on, exclaiming during the climax of the novel "I got no idea at all what'll happen if Wintermute wins, but it'll change something!'. His motivation is self-preservation, the entire reason the heist is planned in the first place isn't fully realized until the very end of the book. Even then, at least for me, the understanding is tenuous at best.

I liked it.

SCI-FI JULY #2

This one isn’t really even science fiction, but I was recommended it for sci-fi July.

It’s hard to give this one a good review since modern media is saturated with the post-apocalyptic rebuild-society story. I’m sure it was really great in 1959, being “one of the first apocalyptic novels of the nuclear age”. But yea it’s really played, I can’t read this without bias.

It starts off pretty neat, we get some information on the global politics leading up to the war. But it all drops off once the bombs fall. Which makes sense but it just becomes a cutesy Swiss Family Robinson living off the land scenario. There isn’t really a clear climax or arc or anything between the bombs dropping and the end, it’s basically episodic. Randy’s realization of his role as leader is really bland, none of the other characters even matter. Peyton’s discovery of the secret room at the end full of everything they could possibly want is so ridiculous. Like, how am I to believe they didn’t throughly explore every inch of the property when they were going hungry at one point?

Just not really for me.

SCI-FI JULY #1

Before reading any P. K. Dick, I was told that he was really great at coming up with ideas but did a poor job at fleshing them out. And that’s my main complaint with this book. The framework is laid for something really incredibly, but he just doesn’t spend any time fleshing things out. The fake SFPD building, Rick’s Mercer fusion in chapter 21, life outside of the city… I’m really curious about all these things, but Dick only presents us with a really vague impression.

The exploration of the humanity/sentience of robots/androids is sooo played, this wasn’t even a novel concept for 1968. But Dick does do it well, i wasn’t bored or anything.

“You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is a basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity”

Exceedingly bloated and gratuitously morbid. Literary equivalent of a ASPCA commercial with a 12 hour runtime. Trauma porn, through and through. I can’t think of a singular appeal to this one besides a voyeuristic look into Jude’s horribly grim life.

The most annoying part about this book for me was the constant flashbacks time skips without a solid timeline to relate to. It’s just a chronological mess. Luckily that’s okay because there aren’t actually many important events happening. Speaking of time, it’s like this book was stuck in 2018 for the entire 50 year time span. No historical events are mentioned, no changes, nothing. The cell phones and open attitudes about sex and gender and overall feel leads one to believe they are in their 20s during the present day. But then they’re 40 and it still feels like present day. Feels lifeless, the way it’s stuck in time.

I think I was meant to be sad and cry, but I just didn’t find myself caring that much about the characters. I wasn’t convinced by their interactions or their lives, it felt so contrived and staged to illicit a reaction from the reader but it just ended up being kinda goofy to me. I wanted to laugh when Willem was killed, it was just so silly.

Yanagihara’s narration is strictly plot, no further exploration of themes, no points made. Prose is pulpy and very readable but not pretty in any way, no nice lines stand out.

I don’t wanna be so negative on this one but 800 pages??? For what? I don’t know. 2 stars because I hated it but somehow read the whole thing.

Wow. Wow wow wow.

I read both of O’Connor’s novels before touching any of her short stories and I thought I was missing something. To me, they were just okay and I didn’t really understand why she is so esteemed.

But! Her short stories blew me away. Every single one is good. Not a single miss. Heaters only. Southern gothic excellence.

O’Connor is particularly gifted at bringing her stories to a close. She spends ~19 pages creating an intricate world full of complex characters and then takes 1 page to unravel the entire thing, demolishing all of it. I feel like probably at least half the stories end in death.

A recurring theme I’m really fascinated in O’Connor’s work is the idea of disfigurement. A lot of her characters are physically disabled—club footed, one legged, deaf, irredeemably ugly, etc. Paired with heavy religious overtones, I think she may have had trouble reconciling the existence of physical deformity, given that man is created in God’s likeness. O’Connors disfigured characters do not bear their lot graciously. Actually, they are, for the most part, bitter and full of impotent rage. O’Connor suffered from Lupus starting at a young age and I think that her struggle with illness is reflected in these characters.

My favorite story was probably the Enduring Chill. Death is usually the worst possible outcome, but the horror-story ending in this one is survival. A failed artist finding solace in his own slow decay, knowing full well he will never amount to anything, glad that death will save him from embarrassment. Only to recover. Yea that one is really good.

Really, really beautifully written. The section detailing the cottage as it lay empty was so incredibly stunning. There is virtually no plot, which might not matter in a book like this, but the cast of characters is to large to get to know in just over 200 pages. I think a reread is necessary, go into it knowing who is who and what is what so that you can really focus on the thoughts of the characters. I want to like it a lot more than I actually did.

DeLillo creates such a detailed impression of late-capitalistic liminality. Industrial fluorescent lighting, megamall HVAC set unseasonally too hot or too cold, running errands at 7 pm on a weeknight, leaving work early for a doctor’s appointment. American grocery store aesthetic. Sterile in a way that feels unclean.

Very pulpy, but in a good way, little attention is lost as we are swept from scene to scene, vignettes of suburban life. We know something bigger is going on—Dylar, Nyodene D, SIMUVAC.. clandestine elements Pynchonian in their mystique (Tristero from TCOL49, jesuits from M&D). It’s frustrating to, as the reader, be kept in the dark, but we aren’t meant to know, it’s really not important.

Important is DeLillo’s statement on escapism, displacement activities, consumerism, voyeurism. Important is California, where we can watch death and disaster from the comfort of our living rooms. Better them than us. Important are the simpletons, their innocence through which we can vicariously live in a world without tragedy. And important are the religiously devout, who believe so we don’t have to.

I was prepared to give this one a 3, I think that DeLillo hints at something really REALLY big but fails deliver. Which I kinda do still think, but there is a lot here that makes White Noise a little better than good. Also the little pocket witticisms are really lovely. “Everything was on television last night.”

The child runs deep in everything!

Exploration of the synthesis vs the analysis, or formation vs deformation of the individual by means of culture and class. What do we even know about the narrator outside of what is imposed upon his pupa by others? “A human being does not express himself forthrightly and in keeping with his nature but always in some well-defined form, and this form, this style, this manner of being is not of our making but is thrust upon us from the outside”. Also very silly, the face-pulling duel rocked.

Recommended to me by a very modern girl with very modern calves and calves of legs, calves, calves, calves

“It would not be well in your particular case to believe in God… Religion will only make you despondent. But until we work out something for you it will be useful to subscribe to some philosophy. Why don’t you read Sartre and become an existentialist? It will keep you moving until we find something more suitable for you?”

Big John Barth fan, but these were a bit of a struggle to get through. Both stories kinda just explore the question of why—why move, why die, why do anything. Why write this book? Feels mostly uninspired and the stories aren’t even charming. A lot of things happen for no reason. A lot of things don’t happen at all. Impotence is the refrain. Whatever.

“One of the great sins of the sixties was introducing drugs to the good-ole-boy element of Southern society.”

Yea I like this one a lot. Rash is a contemporary torchbearer in the southern gothic tradition. Although he does come off as a watered down William Gay, who is a watered down Cormac McCarthy, I think this collection picks up where our boys left off in the ongoing story of the fall of the south. The prose is mostly plain, but that’s not really a bad thing. I think the stories are a little inconsistent, there are some heaters and some that I won’t ever think about again.

But yea, I did like it a lot.

Reading Gaddis feels like having several different conversations with several different people at the same time. Entropy remains the main theme in Carpenter’s Gothic. The Booth’s house takes the place of J R’s 96th street apartment, endless envelopes and phone calls.

Carpenter’s Gothic offers much more narration than J R, which is great because Gaddis has a really evocative and impressionistic way of describing things. However, like it’s predecessor, there is little to no exposition through narration, the entire plot occurs through unattributed dialogue. Things get messy, but that’s the entire point.

My second title in Gaddis’ catalog has cemented him as one of my favorite authors and I’m excited to tackle the Recognitions here in a few months.

Took me a bit to figure out what was even happening in this book. Every character is really awful and all their actions seem to lack motivation. Meredith interviewing Roche in the sweltering studio possibly set the groundwork for the Eric Andre show ha. The premise of sexual violence alongside a political uprising on a Caribbean island is enticing, but it just doesn’t do anything for me here.

Was put onto this book from an interview with Xiu Xiu frontmen who has notably quoted Faulkner and Fante in songs and also written about My War Gone By, I Miss It So. Given his track record of great recommendations, I’m a little disappointed and I hope this doesn’t keep me from checking out some of V.S. Naipauls other works in the future

Faulkner has a very unique voice. Every novel of his that I have read up until this point has distinctly Faulknerian. His stories have been a treat for me because he branches out of his normal southern gothic style and gives a bit of variety. Some of the war stories in the second half, like “Turnabout,” read almost like Hemingway. There are elements of Dostoyevsky in the final section of stories. “Death Drag” could be an episode of Trailer Park Boys.

That being said, Southern Gothic is Faulkner’s wheelhouse and the stories out of Yoknapatawpha County are the highlights of this collection. Really good collection of stories :P

“Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you…”

Fante’s LA is haunted by impermanence. Arturo Bandini is a stranger amid strangers amongst the transplants of the city. The boomtown becomes a desolate wasteland as Bandini prognosticates its return to the Mojave. Already, the buildings crumble to dust at the behest of the earth itself. All is transient in the desert.

A voyeuristic trek through famed war voyeur Anthony Lloyd’s stints on the front lines as a journalist. Trauma porn is the main appeal here, but still pretty informative and thoughtful. Found the drug addled italicized segments a bit disjointed.. the relationship between Lloyd’s addiction to opioids and the adrenaline of the battlefield is important here, but the intermittent spurts of anachronous benders smushed between sequential episodes of wartime hijinks felt off to me. Really good though!

Wow. Hm. Okay!

I really want to give this 5 stars. I was absolutely blown away at times while reading this. A lot of these stories are incredibly smart and funny. Conscience, The Lost Regiment, the Man Who Shouted Teresa, and the Petrol Pump really stood out to me. But a lot of these stories also just aren’t very good, particularly the dialogues. The first half of this book had me clinging to every page, the second half was a slog to get through. None of these stories are more than twenty pages, but some of them felt like they took an eternity to read. It’s hard to give a singular rating to a collection spanning 4 decades, Calvino’s style evolved (dulled?) throughout his career, his later stories are u recognizable from his early entries. Anyways. Conscience is one of the greatest short stories I’ve read and I highly recommend at least reading this one online if you can’t commit to the whole collection!

I saw Xiu Xiu perform in Washington, D.C. shortly after this book was released. I had finished it several days prior and brought it with me in my bag and I ended up getting it signed by Jamie Stewart. Which is kinda weird, given the contents of the novel. It was like looking him in the eye and telling him I knew all about the fucked up stuff he did. The hellos and nice to meet yous felt sorta like “I know about the house party poop incident” and “I’m really sorry about what happened to your asshole”. At least for me. It’s hard to read something so deeply personal and vulnerable about someone and look them in the eyes without that kinda just sitting there like a big slimy lump in the back of your head. Not that I feel any sort of way about Jamie Stewart, I was just kinda embarrassed to get it signed, like I was calling him out for the sickening sexcapades detailed in the novel. Anyways. I had him sign on the acknowledgments page that says something along the lines of “if you a member of my family, please, for the love of god, do not read this.” Kinda funny.

Grotesque and rancid. Really. Like, do not read if you’re squeamish. Really reminded me of my favorite book as a child, My Life in Dog Years by Gary Paulson, which is an autobiography told via the various dogs Paulson had in his life. This was like that, but with sexual partners. Like, sex is the main idea, but Stewart does get into where he’s at and what’s going on in his life surrounding these encounters and relationships.

This was really hard to put down and not exactly for the right reasons. This isn’t a book I could recommend to anyone or read again, probably. But Stewart actually writes pretty beautifully, I remember there being some really pretty passages and neat prose here and there. Which is no surprise, I know he is a big reader. Like, he quotes Absalom, Absalom! in Dear God, I Hate Myself. Real bookworm shit.

Speaking of, Jamie Stewart has put me on to a lot of books that I really enjoy. Hot Karl by XITSJ references My War Gone By by Anthony Lloyd, which I loved. Secret Motel quotes Ask the Dust by John Fante. Read both of these because of those songs. In interviews and offhand online posts he has also led me to Guerrillas by V. S. Naipaul, Shikasta by Doris Lessing, the Russian Prison Tattoo Encyclopedia, I’m probably missing a few. But was cool to read his writing after he’s introduced me to so much neat stuff.

Jamie Stewart is among my favorite lyricists. Maybe my very favorite? So reading his prose was a treat. Regardless of how I felt about the book, I loved it just because I got to get more into the headspace of a huge influence of mine. So yea it’s a bizarre read but it’s still an important entry into my own personal literary canon because of the importance of the author to me.

I guess I feel like I can judge this book now. Reading this was close to torture, but I’ve been thinking about it a ton for the last 3 months. It’s impressive and astounding that Beckett was able to write so much about so little. Not as bleak as the reviews I read made me believe it would be, also nowhere near as profound or worthwhile as other reviews prepared me for. Maybe I don’t get it. I probably don’t, I skimmed the last 150 pages. Like, reading this began causing me actual mental anguish near the end. The part about the guy walking for months in his front yard and his family beckoning him and them dying from eating spoiled ham or whatever by the time he got there.. that’s what I think about when I think about this book, it’s so ridiculous and silly but maybe brilliant because of how much I come back to think about it. I was prepared to give this 1 star as soon as I finished, but I think sorta fondly back on it. I think I need a reread. But not anytime soon.

Print out a family tree and tack it to the wall before you start. Finish in as few sessions as possible. This book contains magic that loses potency every time it is closed. Things don’t stop happening. You tell yourself that this Jose Arcadio will be the last Jose Arcadio—he’s not. Enjoyed this a lot but every time I picked it up I had to spend 10 minutes relearning all the characters and events. Although the themes are pretty melancholy, there is enough whimsicality to keep things from getting very heavy.

Feels like an AI generated Murakami book. Everything in this book has been done before in his previous works. Recently divorced/separated middle-aged artist. Convoluted, bloated plot with esoteric WWII metaphors. Namedropping music and movies that bear no significance. Weird sexualization of young girls. Weird sexualization of perfect white ears. A simple meal. Another simple meal. And another.

I love to hate Murakami, his prose is addictive and the stories are evocative, but mostly just a lot of nothing. The Marvel of modern fiction. Not worth reading.