Which, I’m finding, aren’t at all the same as my five favorite books. Ridiculous, yes? Wish I had some fix for that, or at least an explanation, or suspicion. I mean, it’s kind of presupposing some major disconnect between intensity and . . . I don’t know: appreciation? Revisitability? Not some Pirsig-ish ‘quality,’ I don’t […]
Man, turns out Only Revolutions, at 360 pages, was an easy read, yeah? I mean, as compared to three million pages. But it is Richard Grossman, so maybe three million pages is just the right amount [ see below ]. As some of y’all know, I’m always pushing that seventy-page sentence fragment from his The
[ the title and the whole piece here may not make much sense–it may not anyway–without cueing into TheValve.org, which, it looks like, may have the original Marcus article in PDF ] Just what is experimental fiction, then? The easiest definition for experimental or innovative or non-conventional fiction is fiction that, both at armslength and
I first read Pynchon when I was twenty-two, I think, between a B.A. and an M.A. The only reason I read him, too, was because I’d hit up a professor I trusted for a list of books I’d need to have read if I didn’t want to get laughed out of grad school. She of
Looks like, in pre-celebration for TURISTAS1, Demon Theory pulled two reviews this week: & [ click em to hit the rvws ] Cool places each, though the reviews are kind of opposites of each other. Anyway, it’s none other than Mike Bracken on the Toxic Universe one. Which, I mean — for my first novel,
and his freezer’s now spilling over with elk. which is to say dancing days are here again, all that. and, because all this can’t seem to organize itself any other way, a list: That 32 Poems (Fall/Winter 4.2) with my story “Lunch” is out and about now. Just had “The Sadness of Two People Meeting
Bleak. Unremitting. Is to the road trip book what THE HILLS HAVE EYES was to the family vacation movie. And as far as post-apocalyptic stuff goes, Cormac McCarthy’s THE ROAD makes you see what a happy fantasy A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ was, how tame DR. BLOODMONEY was. That that road in THE PARABLE OF THE
everyone dreams the dream but we are it It’s like a word problem: If two ribbons, one gold one green, approach each other at a rate of eight pages at a time in a three hundred and sixty page book, will they ever meet? Because of course one-eighty isn’t a multiple of eight — you’re
Just thinking about what I said in that last post, about how I don’t do reviews because I’m pretty sure I’d set my standards impossibly high, just so I could shoot down every book in my path. That may be a little too broad a statement, though — I don’t mean to suggest that all
Well, I mean, yeah, because he’s got titles like THE LUST LIZARD OF MELANCHOLY COVE and PRACTICAL DEMONKEEPING. These are what originally got me peeling his books up from the shelves back whenever ago. Years already, I guess. Too, though, I’ve yet to read a CMoore book that hasn’t made me smile, and then impressed
Just finished Charles McCarry’s OLD BOYS, which, like the rest of the Paul Christopher series, just absolutely blew me away. The guy’s not just a good storyteller, he hammers his prose, too. Usually you get one or the other. A sample line: She had the wary unwavering eyes of a woman who knew how attractive
never at a loss for stuff to read. if I could just shoehorn one more syllable in there, it’d scan pretty cool, I think. what little I know or can take a stab at talking lines. anyway, yesterday afternoon’s library haul (this doesn’t count the ninety-plus I already have checked out, on my shelf, which
Finished copies exist, are real, are in the mail now. If I had the skills, I’d rework some of those gas-shortage pics from the late seventies, of all the cars lined up, only I’d put a big DEMON THEORY in place of the pump. or maybe pirate one of those Body Axe commercials, re-edit it
Maybe it’s this way for everybody, I don’t know. Sometimes I’ll stumble across something in a book, anyway, and it’ll just burrow right to the core of me and never leaves. I say sometimes, but, I suppose, I’m only about to list three. And, it’s not that they’re said all that perfect or anything, it’s
Excited that the Savoj Zizek DVD’s going to be available soon. He’s my PKD, since PKD went on extended hiatus. Click on the poster to get to the place Check out the Frank Miller cover for Gravity’s Rainbow. Pretty excellent (thanks to Rob for the heads-up). Click here. (would paste it here, but don’t want
was paging through a few-months-old notebook and stumbled on this, which I’d copied down from Antonia Quirke’s bfi book on JAWS. brilliant, brilliant stuff: There are two types of monsters. The first is our incarnation of fear. King Kong, Dracula, Godzilla. The other, of which the first sharkless hour of Jaws is a supreme example,
So, yeah, I’m on a desert island, can only have ten books. A strange, impractical set-up—that the dungeon master here can assume I’d grab a round number of books instead of a two-way radio or a knife—but so be it. I’m there. I can only have ten books. Which is a lot like punishment, but,
Or, really, just all of R.M. Berry’s stuff. It starts with Plane Geometry and Other Affairs of the Heart, ramps up to Leonardo’s Horse, then hits with The Dictionary of Modern Anguish. Each brilliant. His short story “Metempsychosis” has been, along with VALIS and COL49 [The Crying of Lot 49], probably the most influential, for
