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Books read in 2002
Books read in 2003
Books read in 2001
Books read in 2000
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An attempt to list every book I've ever read, which only goes up til 2001.

A list of books I've been meaning to read that I already own.

And another list of every book I own, or owned. (As distinguished from every book I've read.)
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I buy almost all my books at Powells if I am buying them online. Free shipping, even to Canada and Mexico, with purchases of $50.00 or more.

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Currently Reading:

Books I've read recently:

Wow, it's been a long time since I've updated this. I haven't been keeping good records of what I've been reading either, so I'm just going to guess.

{ June 2006 }

Old Filth by Jane Gardam (Fiction)

{ May 2006 }

{ April 2006 }

Ben and Jerry's, The Inside Scoop by Fred Lager (Business)
It's actually pretty tough to be an ethical company. This account is by the COO, the one below by Ben Cohen, one of the founders. (04.00.05)
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Ben and Jerry's Double Dip by Ben Cohen (Business)
(04.00.05)
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{ June 2005 }

Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (Economics)
A best seller, and an impulse buy. Full of factoids and interesting conclusions. The thing I liked best about it was that it was dependably politically incorrect, and drew whatever conclusions the data indicated, regardless of how those results would be perceived morally, the biggest example being that the reduction of crime starting in the early 90s was a direct result of Roe vs. Wade in 1973. The book was ultimately unsatisfying, however, and could have been written as a lengthy article in the NY Times Magazine or the New Yorker. (06.12.05)
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Marcel Proust by Edmund White (Biography)
A very short biography of the master of memory. I didn't know a thing about him, really, so this was just the ticket. I also have the biography written by the maid that took care of him for the last 15 years of his life. All this just more procrastination on the way to reading beyond Combray. (06.08.05)
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The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (Non-Fiction)
So I'm a couple years behind on this one, so what? You're all reading Blink. I'll get to that in 2007.(06.05.05)
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Rose Mellie Rose by Marie Redonnet (Fiction)
(06.03.05)
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{ May 2005 }

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (Fiction)
(05.08.05)
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{ April 2005 }

Something by Someone (Not Sure)
(03.05.05)
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{ March 2005 }

Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough, John Helyar (Business)
A real potboiler of a business novel, and the inspiration for many subsequent deal books int he business section of your bookstore. Egos, greed, betrayal, and lots and lots of money fly around in this story of the RJR Nabisco LBO. (03.05.05)
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Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis (Business)
(03.03.05)
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Women As Lovers by Elfriede Jelinek (Fiction)
(03.01.05)
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{ February 2005 }

Status Anxiety by Alain de Boton (Essay)
(02.23.05)
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The Best Business Stories of the Year Edited by John Bogle (Business)
(02.22.05)
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Nevermore by Marie Redonnet (Fiction)
(02.21.05)
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Atonement by Marie Redonnet (Fiction)
(02.20.05)
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Forever Valley by Marie Redonnet (Fiction)
(02.13.05)
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{ December 2004 }

Typologien by Bernd and Hilla Becker (Art)
(12.28.04)
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Hand to Earth by Andy Goldsworthy (Art)
(12.26.04)
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The Winner Take All Society by Robert Frank (Non-Fiction)
(12.26.04)
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The Culting of Brands: when Customers become True Believers by Douglas Atkin (Business)
There was a lot of good information, ideas and anecdotes in this book, which was based on the studies of cults, and then applied to companies that have devoted followers such as Harley Davidson and Apple Computer. Don't forget that Christianity was once a minor cult. Good stuff. (12.12.04)
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Oyvind Fahlstrom on the Air: Manipulating the World by Teddy Hultburg (Non-Fiction)
About the wonderful, multidisciplinary artist, Oyvind Fahlstrom, who invented languages, built installations, did drawings and poetry and performances and sound art. (12.12.04)
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{ November 2004 }

Candy Story by Marie Redonnet (Fiction)
(11.13.04)
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Metastases of Enjoyment by Slavoj Zizek (Non-Fiction) I didn't read the entire thing, only the first and last essays. The last essay was about Otto Weinenger's Sex and Character, written in the late 1890s, a classic of chauvinism and anti-Semitism. Zizek manages to convince his readers that this book, one of the founding texts of Nazism, holds within it the key to a radical feminist vision, in the entertaining Zizek style.
(11.12.04)
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Prayer Cushions of the Flesh by Robert Irwin (Fiction)

A strange erotic tale of a man who was put into prison at the age of five, and released after 15 years. He is made Sultan, and, after being humiliated by the women in his harem, condemns them to death. None of the executions are ever carried out, and it seems that he is enslaved by his own lust, and thus becomes a slave of the women. A sexist fantasy.
(11.11.04)
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A Scanner Darkly

"Masterpiece" was written all over the cover, and while it was quite good, I don't know if I'd go that far. Though I guess you could call it a masterpiece of Dick's oeuvre: that wouldn't be going too far. It's about a near-future drug culture (1994! it was written in 1977) in which a mysterious, invisible organization enslaves people by addicting them to Substance D. It's creepy, paranoid, psychedelic and strange, like the rest of Dick's books, and is apparently being made into a movie, which is a good thing. His books have made excellent movies: Blade Runner, for example, and The Minority Report. by Philip K. Dick ( Science Fiction)
(11.05.04)
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{ October 2004 }

Romanian Poems by Paul Celan (Poetry)
(10.31.04)
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Dr. Marbles and Marianne by Nicki Jackowska (Fiction)
I wasn't particularly impressed, though, to be fair, I didn't read it slowly or well. (10.19.04)
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Days and Nights by Alfred Jarry (Fiction)
Utterly pretentious. I haven't read anything by Jarry beyond Pere Ubu, but became interested in some of the Pataphysical poets (Bok, et al.) and so decided to give it a run. Turgid, overwritten and solipsistic.(10.14.04)
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The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki (Non-Fiction)

I enjoyed this book immensely, and it keeps coming up in conversation, like it is this year's Tipping Point. From my blog:

I'm finding that The Wisdom of Crowds is upsetting a lot of presuppositions I've long maintained about, well, the stupidity of crowds. For example, a political scientist at the University of Michigan has done some experiment using computer-simulated problem-solving agents that demonstrated that a group that consists of all smart agents does worse than a group that consists of some smart and some not so smart agents.

The point of Page's experiment is that diversity is, on its own, valuable, so that the simple fact of making a group diverse makes it better at problem solving. That doesn't mean that intelligence is irrelevant -- none of the agents in the experiment were ignorant, and all the successful groups had some high-performing agents in them. But it does mean that, on the group level, intelligence alone is not enough, because intelligence alone cannot guarantee you different perspectives on a problem. In fact, Page speculates, group only smart people together doesn't work that well because the smart people (whatever that means) tend to resemble each other in what they can do. If you think about intelligence as a kind of toolbox of skills, the list of skills that are the "best" is relatively small, so that people who have them tend to be alike. This is normally a good thing, but it means that as a whole the group knows less than it otherwise might. Adding a few people who know less, but have different skills, actually improves the group's performance.

(10.10.04)
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Games of Love and Death by Arthur Schnitzler (Fiction)
(10.05.04)
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{ August 2004 }

Dream Story by Arthur Schnitzler (Fiction)
This is the story that Stanley Kubrick based "Eyes Wide Shut" upon. The film was surprisingly faithful to the story -- I'd thought it had departed much further from its source than it did (from reading a review? Not sure where that idea came from). I don't know if the film got his books back into print in translation in English, but if so, it is a good thing. (08.31.04)
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Vertigo by W. G. Sebald (Fiction)
Much of the sorrow and guilt and suffering of being German after the Second World War is obliquely expressed in Sebald's wonderful, dreamlike, depressive and semi-autobiographical travelogues.(08.31.04)
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The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison by Mike Wilson (Non-Fiction)
The end of the the joke begun in the title is, of course, that God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison. (08.28.04)
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{ July 2004 }

Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore (Business)
If you're launching a technology product, and it has been very successful with the geeks and early adopters, you're in for a rude surprise when you try to take it mainstream, unless, of course, you've read this book. (07.22.04)
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Business as Unusual by Anita Roddick (Non-Fiction)
By the founder of The Body Shop, about her journey in the building of a profitable and ethical company. (07.20.04)
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Millenials Rising by Neil Howe and William Strauss (Non-Fiction)
Demographics about the Generation formerly known as Generation Y or the Echo Boom. Surprisingly conformist, coddled, and, surprisingly, "less violent, vulgar, and sexually charged than the teen culture older people are producing for them." (07.19.04)
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The Clear Cut Future by Various Authors (Non-Fiction)
(07.12.04)
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Fellini's 8 1/2 by Tazio (Non-Fiction)
(07.10.04)
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Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric by Marjorie Perloff (Poetry)
(07.09.04)
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{ June 2004 }

Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire (Poetry)
(06.30.04)
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The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant's New Babylon to Beyond by Catherine deZegher (Editor), Mark Wigley (Art Criticism)
(06.20.04)
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Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon (Fiction)
(06.15.04)
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A Heart So White by Javier Marías (Fiction)
Amazing, again. One of my favorite writers of recent years. (06.15.04)
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{ May 2004 }

Little Nemo in Slumberland, Vol. 2 by Winsor McCay (Art)
(05.23.04)
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Henry Darger: Art and Writings Ed. by Michael Bonesteel (Art)
If you're not familiar with his work, Henry Darger is, with Wolfli, one of the two greatest "Outsider Artists". He was a deeply religious recluse who went to church 3X a day, spoke with virtually no one, but who produced a phenomenal number of paintings and books about an imaginary world populated by little girls who were constantly under attack and defending themselves from wars and monsters. The work is beautiful and was made by tracing pictures from coloring books and magazines onto large horizontal sheets of paper, which were then painted with watercolor. The paintings were not found until after Darger died, alone and friendless, in 1973. (05.22.04)
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Seduction by Jean Baudrillard (Theory)
(05.20.04)
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The Threshold of the Visible World by Kaja Silverman (Art/Film/Theory)
An important book. Feminist Film Critic Silverman starts out with the question, "Does Freud have a theory of love?" and develops her thesis, based on Lacan's Mirror Stage, through idealization and the "productive look" which valorizes that which is ugly or unlovable in the cultural gaze. I'm not doing justice to the book, which I don't have in front of me right now. She brings us through the work of Brecht, a German film that looks fascinating, titled, I think "Ticket of No Return", a video artwork by Harun Farocki, the work of Cindy Sherman, and others, to make her ideas clear. Provided me with much food for thought, and keeps stimulating new ideas. (05.18.04)
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The Cluetrain Manifesto by Weinberger, Searles, Lock, Levin (Business)
(05.06.04)
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The Macintosh Way by Guy Kawasaki (Business)
Some great gossip in here about the founding of the Macintosh Group at Apple in the early to mid 80s. (05.05.04)
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Rules for Revolutionaries by Guy Kawasaki (Business)
This was more or less pulp. Kawasaki didn't go into very much in depth, it was like a big Power Point presentation. There was more substance in "The Macintosh Way". (05.05.04)
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{ April 2004 }

The Believer (April) by Various (Magazine)
(04.16.04)
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Cream 3 by Editors of Phaidon Press (Art)
Every two years another "Cream" comes out: 10 curators curate 10 artists each. It's a yearbook of sorts, and some people hate it (Peter Plagens of Art Forum). But I think it is a useful overview for those of us who live in the far reaches of the art world (i.e. not in New York), and don't read the art magazine religiously. (04.02.04)
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{ March 2004 }

The Believer (March) by Various (Magazine)
(03.30.04)
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Hotel Splendid by Marie Redonnet (Fiction)
Reminded me of Thomas Bernhard's Concrete: a woman lives in remote hotel built on a swamp that her grandmother built. She takes care of the crumbling hotel, as well as her two neurotic and sickly sisters. We live in her mind. Her thoughts are repetitive and claustrophobic. A really original style. Deceptively simple. (03.15.04)
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Reimagine! by Tom Peters (Business)
(03.05.04)
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{ February 2004 }

Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami (Fiction)
(02.09.04)
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Forbidden Colors by Yukio Mishima (Fiction)
(02.09.04)
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The Royal Physician's Visit by Per Olov Enquist (Fiction)
(02.04.04)
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Earth From Above: 365 Days by Yann Arthus-Bertrand (Photography)
This is a beautiful book of photographs that Arthus-Bertrand took from the air. He covers most of the planet, and visits some very remote regions. The pictures are awe-inspiring -- and I don't use that term lightly. I've given this book as a gift to many people, and every one has loved it. The texts accompanying the photograph are mainly about environmentalism and sustainability. Highly recommended.(02.15.04)
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{ January 2004 }

Pictures From an Institution by Randall Jarrell (Fiction)
(01.15.00)
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Cosmopolis by Don Delillo (Fiction)
(01.12.04)
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All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy (Fiction)

Well I finished it and I suppose it wasn't as bad as I had thought it was going to be. Reading it was akin to seeing your cult band sell out, putting out Top 40 when previously they'd written only complex hieroglyphics whose meaning could be teased out only by those willing to climb the mountain and take the vows. Once the mainstream pours in (lucid prose, love story, a plotline that would make Syd Field salivate, the triumph of good over evil...) the true believers are flushed out. You could compare it to the more accessible works that many artists create late in their career. I'm thinking Late Picasso, or Late de Kooning -- critics fall all over themselves to celebrate this stuff that feel distinctly kneejerk and bled to me. The only thing that made me happy about All the Pretty Horses was that John Grady didn't get the girl. Well, on to The Crossing. (01.10.04)
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{ December 2003 }

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Fiction)
(12.27.03)
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Success by Martin Amis (Fiction)
(12.23.03)
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Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (Fiction)
(12.22.03)
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The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson (Poetry)
(12.10.03)
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Emily Dickinson by Cynthia Griffin Wolff (Biography)
(12.08.03)
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Fresh Cream by Various (Art)
The second in a series (there is now a third) wherein 10 curators choose 10 artists at work in the world of contemporary art today. As an art-lorn ex-New Yorker, it depresses me to not be in the midst of what is certainly the centre of the art world and in what is clearly a backwater burg. Reading art magazines and art books such as this one is what I do to compensate. It's not the same, but it supplements the New York visits. (12.07.03)
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Whitney Biennial 2002 by Various (Art)
Ditto on this. (12.07.03)
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Breaking Open the Head by Daniel Pinchbeck (Non-Fiction)
(12.07.03)
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{ November 2003 }

Pharmako/Poeia by Dale Pendell (Non-Fiction)
(11.30.03)
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The Believer by Various (Magazine)
(11.25.03)
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Serious Girls by Maxine Swann (Fiction)
(11.20.03)
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Drawings and Observations by Louise Bourgeois (Business)
One of my favorite books. Bourgeois worked in near-obscurity for decades until she was finally rediscovered in the 80s when she was in her 70s. I love that. She uses sculpture, her main medium, as a means of exorcising her demons. Her drawings are just "a little help". Bourgeois also doesn't think artists should feel entitled to make a living through their art. "The artist is lucky to be able to overcome his demons without hurting anybody. Instead of being grateful, they want to make money. It is ridiculous!," she says. (11.20.03)
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Making Their Mark: Women Artists Move into the Mainstream, 1970-1985 by Rosen, Brower (Art/Non-Fiction)
(11.18.03)
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Over-Sensitivity by Jalal Toufic (Fiction/Non-Fiction)
(11.16.03)
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Full Frontal PR by Richard Laermer (Business)
I was reading this because we were scouting around for a PR agency for GNE, and Richard's firm was recommended to us. This book explains how PR works, and how you can do your own PR. (11.10.03)
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{ October 2003 }

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ape by Michel Butor (Fiction)
(10.23.03)
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Trans 8 by Various (Annual Art Book)
(10.20.03)
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Frisk by Dennis Cooper (Fiction)
I only knew two things about Dennis Cooper: that he is an editor for Artforum and that he is a cult author. He is a cult author because he messes with dangerous ideas. The dangerous idea behind Frisk is that the story outlines the evolution of a sadistic, gay, would-be sex killer. It, alas, didn't have the thing that lifts such a story above pulp sensationalism. (10.10.03)
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Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill (Non-Fiction)
(10.1.03)
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{ September 2003 }

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn (Fiction)
(09.30.03)
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The Fountains of Neptune by Rikki Ducornet (Fiction)
I confess I only read the first half. I'd hated the prologue, in which we are introduced to a character who has been in a coma for 50 years. The second half seemed to return to this premise, which I found an annoying frame to an otherwise engaging story. (09.27.03)
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Moy, Sand and Gravel by Paul Muldoon (Poetry)
(09.15.03)
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The Portable MBA in Entrepreneurship by Various (Non-Fiction)
(09.12.03)
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The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek (Fiction)
Jelinek is Austrian, and it was made into a film, in French, by an Austrian director, Michael Haneke. The story of a piano teacher, a failed concert pianist, who lives with her mother in Vienna, falls in love with one of her students. Powerful characterizations of the three main characters, and a merciless examination of the ferocity of love.(09.06.03)
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The Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf by David Madsen (Fiction)
Entertaining, but overwrought.(09.01.03)
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The Entrepreneur's Guide to Sewn Product Manufacturing by Kathleen Fasanella (Non-Fiction)
An indispensible guide for people who want to start a sewn products company -- clothing, wallets, handbags, whatever. Takes you through the nuts and bolts of how to starts such a business. This book is hard to get your hands on, but worth the effort. (09.01.03)
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{ August 2003 }

Thumbsucker by Walter Kirn (Fiction)
(08.25.03)
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Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me by Javier Marias (Fiction)
(08.22.03)
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The Complete Idiot's Guide to MBA Basics by Tom Gorman (Business)
Once again let me sing the praises of the various "Idiots", "Introducing", Cliff Notes and other intro texts, which have replaced the encyclopedia in quick information access, are freely available from public libraries and are more dependable than online research. I read these things all the time for general overviews of various subjects. These are most helpful for practical subjects such as business, but also good for brief intros to subjects you slept through in college, such as Sociology, Kantian Philosophy, etc. Good for patching up the holes left by your liberal arts education. (08.15.03)
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The Siren's Song: Selected Essays of Maurice Blanchot Edited by Gabriel Josipovici (Essays)
(08.12.03)
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The Blanchot Reader Edited by Michael Holland (Essays)
(08.10.03)
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Jimmy: An Autobiography by Jimmy Pattison (Autobiography)
I am a lit geek and so am unaccustomed to the bluster and bullying of your typical business biography. Having read this autobiography of British Columbia's most successful acquisitions king, I am now curious about the genre as a whole, and am considering writing an essay about it after I check out the biographies of Martha Stewart, Donald Trump, Warren Buffett, Jack Welch, and other captains of industry. They seem to model themselves quite closely on Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey: tales of tender youth, the crisis, the special amulet, talisman, or piece of advice from an elder (Use the force, Luke) the obstacles encountered and overcome, etc. etc. (08.08.03)
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{ July 2003 }

The Believer July 2003 by Various (Periodical)
(07.13.03)
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Death Sentence by Maurice Blanchot (Fiction)
(07.12.03)
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Marketing Your Product by Donald G. Cyr et al. (Non-Fiction)
(07.12.03)
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Market Research Made Easy by Don Doman et al. (Non-Fiction)
(07.10.03)
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Small Business Guide to Legal Issues in Canada by James Miller (Non-Fiction)
(07.08.03)
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Confusion by Stefan Zweig (Fiction)
High-flown emotion prevails, sober consideration withdraws in this ode to the seductions of literature. Told retrospectively by an aging author, we discover our protagnist as a reformed 19-year-old Lothario, who finds himself drawn into a passionate love affair with Elizabethan English by a magnetic professor. Melodrama? Perhaps. Contemporary mores have changed to such an extent that the dramatic "reveal" at the end of the story hasn't much impact. And having anticipated the conclusion by the end of the first chapter, I was impatient with the withheld information. But I'd never read any Zweig before, who fled the Nazis and died in 1942, a double suicide, with his wife, in Brazil. It was an absorbing short read. (07.07.03)
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{ June 2003 }

The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller (Biography/Philosophy)
(06.30.03)
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Cinderalla by Junko Mizuno (Comic Book)
Mizuno is the queen of creepy-cute manga, and Cinderalla, based on the Cinderella fairy tale, tells of a orphaned waitress who falls in love with a zombie. Not permitted to interact with the zombies, being a mere mortal, she is zombified by a sympathetic fairy. Creepy, sexy and adorable all at the same time, in the inimitable Mizuno fashion. We can't wait till all her work is translated into English. (06.21.03)
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Amsterdam by Ian McEwan (Fiction)
A disappointment. It was ruined for me by the implausible conclusion, and its too-neat settling of accounts, the paste-on encounter with the Hillside Strangler, and the posthumous revelation that the symphony sucked. There is no doubt that McEwan deserved the Booker award for something, but not for this. I hear Atonement is great... (06.17.03)
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The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima (Fiction)
(06.16.03)
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Discipline and Punish (3) by Michel Foucault (Non-Fiction)
(06.12.03)
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{ May 2003 }

Blueprint Small by Michelle Kodis (Non-Fiction)
A book of photographs, about small houses, that was also reviewed for Readymade, soon available at a newstand near you. (05.16.03)
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The Ganzfeld by Various Authors (Periodical)
An annual art magazine, that was also reviewed for Readymade, soon available at a newstand near you. (05.16.03)
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Les Enfants Terribles by Jean Cocteau (Fiction)
(05.12.03)
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The Believer by Various Authors (Periodical)
I am writing a review of this magazine for Readymade Magazine, and I will post it to this site as soon as I can. (05.10.03)
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{ April 2003 }

7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey (Self-Help)
It's a generally accepted truth that the answers are fairly easy to find, executing them is the hard part. Self-help books take advantage of the fact that the act of buying a self-help book is itself a step on the road to helping yourself, the only step, I suspect, that many self-help addicts take.

As far as these books go (my knowledge of them is scant) the 7 habits that Mr. Covey recommends we undertake are solid, uncontroversial, and, if fully integrated into one's life, likely will lead to greater fulfillment, success at work and happiness within the family.

Nonetheless, I have a problem with entire genre, which hasn't abated after reading this book. Self-help books tend towards the diminution of life's complexity. So do the 10 Commandments, of course. But nevertheless, they do.

Too tired to explain myself fully. Off to bed.(04.20.03)
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Dandelion by Various Authors (Experimental Poetry Journal)
(04.20.03)
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Fathomsuns/Benighted by Paul Celan (trans. Ian Fairley)(Poetry)
(04.12.03)
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Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan by Paul Celan (trans. John Felstiner)(Poetry)
(04.11.03)
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Undying Love, or Love Dies by Jalal Toufic (Essays)
(04.09.03)
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Nicholodeon by Darren Wershler-Henry (Poetry)
(04.03.03)
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{ March 2003 }

Three Paths to the Lake by Ingeborg Bachmann (Fiction)
(03.31.03)
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Shark 3 Edited by Lytle Shaw and Emilie Clark (Journal)
Included an excellent piece by Peter Middleton about the poetics of time, and an interview of Barrett Watten by Lytle Shaw. Shark is only published once yearly, alas.(03.30.03)
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Anathemas and Admirations by E.M. Cioran (Essays and Aphorisms)
(03.20.03)
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Ground Works: Avant-Garde for Thee Ed. by Christian Bok (Fiction)
A much-needed anthology of Canadian avant-garde prose, including Steve McCaffery, Daphne Marlatt, Chris Scott, George Bowering, bpNichol, Gail Scott, Robert Zend and Audrey Thomas. (03.15.03)
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Poetry Plastique Curated by Jay Sanders, Charles Bernstein, et al. (Non-fiction)
(03.14.03)
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How The Blessed Live by Susannah M. Smith (Fiction)
(03.10.03)
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Alter Sublime by Christopher Dewdney (Poetry)
I wish someone would bring this back into print, it's fantastic. Poetry + Science = Wonderful. More on this later, when I can do it justice.(03.08.03)
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Enduring Love by Ian McEwan (Fiction)
(03.04.03)
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Shark 4 Edited by Lytle Shaw and Emilie Clark (Periodical)
(03.03.03)
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Eunoia by Christian Bok (Poetry)
(03.02.03)
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The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan (Fiction)

I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way. And but for the fact that it coincided with a landmark in my own physical growth, his death seemed insignificant compared to what followed. My sisters and I talked about him the week after he died, and Sue certainly cried when the ambulance men tucked him up in a bright red blanket and carried him away. He was a frail, irascible, obsessive man with yellowish hands and face. I am only including the little story of his death to explain how my sisters and I came to have such a large quantity of cement at our disposal.

Thus begins Ian McEwan's creepy first novel The Cement Garden, written in 1978. The book tells the story of an English family that lives isolated from the rest of the world in a crumbling house that resembles a castle. The neighborhood around it has been razed to make way for a suburban development that never came to pass, though delapidated prefabs list on overgrown lots. In the distance loom modern high-rise towers, and though their father attends work and the children attend school, all their relatives are dead, they have no friends and no one ever comes to visit them.

First the father dies suddenly, and soon after the mother takes to bed, suffering from a mysterious illness, and dies a lingering death. Only the children remain -- Julie, who is 17, Jack, who is 15, and their younger siblings Sue and Tom. Jack, from whose perspective the story is told, is a revolting, sullen, pimply teen who masturbates compulsively. The children struggle to keep their world together, and untoward, nasty things transpire -- things that, in their loveless world, have a perverse logic of their own. An interloper, Julie's 23-year-old boyfriend Derek, a professional snooker player, threatens to expose their horrible secrets.

There was something about The Cement Garden that was similar to another book I'd read recently, The Confusions of Young Torless. In both books there is a group of four children living in isolation from both their parents and from the rest of society, acting out the compulsions of adolescent sexuality and the perversity of children. Torless, Jack and their companions are the last representatives of a failing, impotent aristocracy declining into decadence. The telling of them were quite different -- while Jack is mostly cruel, affectless and unreflective, Torless examines his every action and decision with lapidary minuteness, analyses each and every psychological frisson.

A film was made of The Cement Garden which was apparently pretty good and quite faithful to the text. McEwan has been winning a lot of prizes lately, most recently the National Book Critics Circle Award, and I'd thought to investigate, having never read any of his work before. Now I'm reading Enduring Love.

(03.01.03)
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{ February 2003 }

Crystallography by Christian Bok (Poetry)
(02.28.03)
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Species of Spaces and Other Pieces by Georges Perec (Essays)
(02.26.03)
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Veil: New and Selected Poems by Rae Armantrout (Poetry)
There's nothing quite like the swift snick of Armantrout's poetry blade driving home. Her poems are perfect in their spareness, in their humor with frequent flashes of darknesses suddenly revealed.(02.21.03)
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The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property by Lewis Hyde (Non-Fiction)
(02.20.03)
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Musca Domestica by Christine Hume (Poetry)
(02.15.03)
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The Confusions of Young Törless by Robert Musil (Fiction)

Our protagonist Young Törless, whose first name we never learn -- we learn no one's first name -- is at an Austrian boarding school at the turn-of-the-century, that he attends in the hopes of improving his prospects by associating with his 'betters'. He has made two friends, Beineberg the fascist mystic and Reiting the jovial sadist, who are, quite intentionally, practicing the deployment of power over other human beings. Initially Törless fears and admires them but simultaneously he feels a certain aversion towards them that he can't quite identify. He is in love with his mother, and hates to part from her. He visits a prostitute regularly, who "stinks of the barnyard" and whom he alternately desires and despises, but who he gets mixed up in his mind with his mother. Törless doesn't know what he thinks, what he wants, who he likes -- we're in a bildungsroman here -- but Beineberg and Reiting, with their unerring predator's instinct for the weakest member of a herd, singles out a boy named Basini to humiliate. They may or may not have caught him stealing. Törless, attracted and repelled by their careful plan of degradation and abuse, goes along, and finds himself up in the attic night after night watching and/or participating in the merciless rape, torture and humiliation of fragile Basini. It's a prophetic novel, a flinchless examination of the culture of discipline and masculinity leading up to The Great War, The Freikorps and eventually, The Third Reich.

Grab your Freud, your Kant, your Nietzsche, and your Klaus Theweleit. You'll be needing both Volume One and Volume Two of Male Fantasies for this look into a pretty fearsome place. Theweleit? Who's that? you ask. Theweleit wrote the two volume Male Fantasies which ain't no Best of Penthouse Forum. It's a study of the emotional bases of fascism, examining the cult of masculinity, the hatred of femininity and the discipline-to-destroy evinced by the proto-Third Reich Freikorps. He comes to the conclusion that the Nazis -- we're talking the regular folks, not the individual rulers -- weren't oblivious, in denial, reluctant or otherwise resistant to do what they did; Au contraire. They were doing exactly what they wanted to do, a conclusion that is simultaneously very so tell me something I didn't already know and utterly bone-chilling.

Come to think of it, while you're attempting to wrap your beleaguered brain around the battlecries our own President, you oughta grab your Theweleit and read closely too.

More on Young Törless later. I keep going like this, I'm going to run out of pixels. Read it. It's a fascinating book and Musil's first novel, written when he was 25. It's a stop-gap on my way to reading, you know, that Man Without Qualities thing, which is not yet available in comic book format. (02.07.03)
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The Cell by Lyn Hejinian (Poetry)
(02.06.03)
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Paris Review #161 by Various Authors (Journal)
(02.05.03)
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3rd Bed #7 by Various Authors (Journal)
(02.04.03)
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Fata Morgana Alaska by Christine Hume (Poetry Chapbook)
(02.02.03)
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Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty by Dave Hickey (Art Criticism)
(02.01.03)
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{ January 2003 }

Poems for the Millenium Edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris (Poetry)
A marvellous anthology, proving once again how the process of selection -- curating, editing, sampling -- can itself result in a work of art. Covering everything from Aboriginal chant-songs to William Blake to Federico Garcia-Lorca, and dozens of poets neither you nor I have ever heard of before (D. Burliuk? Gunnar Ekelof? Hagiwara Sakutaro?) -- there is nonetheless a cohesiveness, a flavor to all of these poets and poems that relate them to one another.

There are dozens of poetry anthologies purporting to cover "postmodern" poetry, but I've yet to see one that covers as much ground as this one, including large swaths of non-Western poetry and Black Mountain-y ancestors of Language Poetry. My only complaint about this book is that it is broad not deep. Though I suppose for a more satisfying depth -- I'm talking 10 poems per author rather than the average of 3-5 -- it would probably have to go into 12 volumes. As it stands now, Volume One is already hard enough to hold, well nigh impossible to read in bed. So it looks like I have, in fact, two complaints. But don't let its size scare you! It is excellent. Highly recommended. (01.31.03)
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Overnight to Many Distant Cities by Donald Barthelme (Fiction)
(01.29.03)
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Vineland by Thomas Pynchon (Fiction)
(01.28.03)
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Think of the Self Speaking: Interviews with Harry Smith by Harry Smith et al. (Biography/Interview)
I think Stan Brakhage said it best, albeit with mighty Smithlike convolutions, on the back cover:

Harry Smith created an entirely new form of interview, every one of which is unique inasmuch as his tactic was to assess each interviewer and then proceed to pull his or her leg, like they say, creating a dance of language dedicated to fction in the guise of truth and then ultimately to complicated and all-encompassing truths disguised as biographical fiction, tall tales, myth somesuch. Smith creates forms which demonstrate, in a variety of ways, the shunning of a quest which "question" suggests, the curse embodied in any answer, the impossibility of communication which the concept of "interview" suggests, unless (and here's Harry's particularity of magic)...unless one were enabled only to "read between the lines" of the exchange.

Interestingly, he could also have been speaking about Lyn Hejinian's brand of evasive autobiography below.
(01.27.03)

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My Life by Lyn Hejinian (Poetry)

During that wander up and down Market Street in San Francisco when I found The Letters of Wallace Stevens on a mailbox, I went into Books, Inc. and found on the poetry shelves My Life by Lyn Hejinian. Which I read in its entirety on the plane back to Canada. It went like this:

You spill the sugar when you lift the spoon. My father had filled an old apothecary jar with what he called "sea glass," bits of old bottles rounded and textured by the sea, so abundant on beaches. There is no solitude. It buries itself in veracity. It is as if one splashed in the water lost by one's tears. My mother had climbed into the garbage can in order to stamp down the accumulated trash, but the can was knocked off balance, and when she fell she broke her arm. She could only give a little shrug. The family had little money but plenty of food. At the circus only the elephants were greater than anything I could have imagined. The egg of Columbus, landscape and grammar. She wanted one where the playground was dirt, with grass, shaded by a tree, from which would hang a rubber tire as a swing, and when she found it she sent me.*

These uninflected, seemingly flat and paratactic sentences seemed wonderfully artless to me, a straightforward reporting of "the facts", ideas, observations as a child might speak them (or as I have found myself doing when speaking foreign languages badly). There were few question marks, and no exclamation points. There was a form of punctuation in the sentences heading each sequence, such as As for we who "love to be astonished", which were repeated intermittently in the texts that followed. I was quite rapt. It is a lovely book. (01.27.03)
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Aufgabe #2 by Various Authors (Journal)
(01.25.03)
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Twilight by Gregory Crewdson (Photography)
I wrote a short piece on this book for Readymade magazine, entitled Bed, Bath and Beyond, which I will post here as soon as the issue following the issue in which it appears appears. If you get my drift. (01.22.03)
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The Chick at the Back of the Church by Billie Livingston (Poetry)
(01.13.03)
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Pharmako/Dynamis by Dale Pendrell (Non-Fiction)
The second of a series of books by Pendrell on "the poison path" which started with Pharmako/Poesis, an exploration of psychoactive plants from poetic, chemical, pharmacological and occult sources. Pendrell calls it "dangerous knowledge", the antidote, however, to "even more dangerous ignorance".(01.02.03)
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