(11.25.02)
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Giving My Body to Science (2) by Rachel Rose (Poetry)
(11.24.02)
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Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh (Fiction)
I hadn't realized that this book was written in dialect. It's quite a gratifying way to write, though it can be a challenge to read. Besides that, the thing that surprised me most about this book was that the movie, which I had seen first, had taken and inverted the passages about wanting a house, a television set, leisure suits, 40 hour weeks -- in the book Renton diparages this life. The implication that he planned on giving up junk and embracing home life is not in the book at all. The book itself was less tidily moralistic, less palatable, more outlaw, unrepentant, flatter of affect, less aroused. As you might expect from a junkie novel.(11.17.02)
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Testaments Betrayed by Milan Kundera (Essays)
(11.16.02)
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Identity by Milan Kundera (Fiction)
(11.08.02)
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Sweet Dreams by Michael Frayn (Fiction)
(11.08.02)
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Who Killed Palomino Molero by Mario Vargas Llosa (Fiction)
(11.05.02)
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A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace (Essays)
If a bit rambling and disorganized, veering between showoffy erudition and regular ol guy vernacularity, these essays are incredibly enjoyable -- the title essay, about Wallace's cruise ship experience, made me laugh to tears. Still haven't finished Infinite Jest. Some day.(11.04.02)
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What the Living Won't Let Go by Lorna Crozier (Poetry)
I hated Lorna Crozier's poetry even before I read it, if only because she is called Canada's Most Beloved Poet. Doesn't that sound hateworthy, Hallmarky? She's also called a 'nature poet', and I tend to like my poets urban. I was so eager to hate poor Lorna Crozier that I even went to the library and checked out her latest book, What the Living Won't Let Go, to confirm my loathing. And there were many lines that I could either love or hate (

) depending on whether I was feeling indisposed or generous at the time. I kept reading, teetering on the fence, liking it, resisting being taken in. But then the poems got less twee, less mist and shimmer, more darkly carnal, bloody, raw and desperate. The book is in two parts, the first about Crozier's own family, and there is too much easy beauty there. But the second half is about another family, a shadow family, caught in struggle and misery, and then the book comes alive, and how:

The joke was on me. Canada's Most Beloved Poet? She's not as Hallmark as it sounds. The moniker must be some CBC humbug. (11.01.02)
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October 2002

The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
by H.R. Trevor-Roper
(Non-Fiction)

Last night I was reading H.R. Trevor-Roper's classic work The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, which I was quite enjoying. In the first chapter, Trevor-Roper was discussing various clerical theories of how the Devil managed to beget offspring after having sex with witches at night in the form of an incubus, that visited female witches or a succubus, that visited male witches. But this was a problem; wasn't the devil neuter? A great deal of theological thinking was expended in the attempt to resolve this matter. Some thought the Devil swiped the testicles off the dead and impregnated the witches with borrowed vital essences, but the church eventually followed the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, the second founder of demonology after St. Augustine. He said the Devil could only discharge as incubus what he had previously absorbed as succubus. Trevor Roper then remarks:

Excellent for other reasons not adumbrated here. (10.28.02)
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Glass, Irony and God
by Anne Carson
(Poetry)
Five Stars.(10.28.02)

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Identity
by Milan Kundera
(Fiction)
A short book -- and love story -- about a relationship that founders when the male half mistakes someone else for his partner, Chantal. Out of this single disorienting event proceed a whole series of misunderstandings and mistaken identities that threaten to undermine what is otherwise a wonderful and fulfilling relationship. As in many books by Kundera, Identity concerns itself with the ways in which a deeply gratifying relationship can be threatened by inventions in the lovers' minds. Loss is the undertow of love.(10.25.02)

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Snatch
by Judy MacInnes, Jr.
(Poetry/Prose)
(10.23.02)

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Giving My Body to Science
by Rachel Rose
(Poetry)
(10.23.02)

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Kingsway
by Michael Turner
(Poetry)
Beauty and rubble along Kingsway, the oldest road in Vancouver, which is not a street, not a road, not an avenue, not a boulevard, but a way. Short poems made up of short lines and no stanzas. Jazzy riffs, lullabies, arguments and obituaries taking place in the land of Wally's Burgers and Metrotown. (10.20.02)

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Plainwater (2)
by Anne Carson
(Poetry)
It's very easy to hate a book and harder to like one. Almost impossible is loving a book, and I love this one. I can explain in forkfulls of words why I hate books by Jack Kerouac or Jay McInerney or Charles Bukowski but I can't say why I love this book as much as I do. Well, maybe I could, if I really tried. But then I'd be writing poetry myself.(10.20.02)

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Pfitz
by Andrew Crumey
(Fiction)
(10.10.02)

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Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts
by Wislawa Szymborska
(Poetry)
(10.04.02)

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September 2002

Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations General Assembly
by Denis Johnson
(Poetry)
Not as good as his prose. (09.30.02)

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Mission Child
by Maureen McHugh
(Science Fiction)
This book appeared to be going somewhere, but never arrived. Teenage Janna was born and raised in an "appropriate technology" mission started by former Earthlings who had seen the destructive effects of wanton technological growth. But a wandering band of thugs kills all but a handful of the mission, and Janna is forced to wander the planet kinless. After her husband dies she travels dressed as a young boy, and intimations are made of a great role s/he is to play, introducing a third gender into the mix. This never really resolves into anything fruitful; more interesting, I thought, was the theme of the reintroduction of advanced technologies into a deliberately luddite culture, and the recolonization of a once abandoned colony. (09.29.02)

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The Visual Culture Reader
by Nicholas Mirzoeff, Editor
(Non-Fiction)
(09.12.02)

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Disobedience
by Alice Notley
(Poetry)
A wonderful new find, and winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize. Alice Notley, once one of the New York School of poetry (Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan) writes a record of a poet in her fifties living in Paris, taking on the persona of Soul and conversing with an alter ego variously named Hardwood, Mitcham and The Detective, dipping into dream, scaring up fragments from her unconscious and resisting every dictum, expectation and dogma she comes across. (09.10.02)

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American Magus: Harry Smith, a Modern Alchemist
by Paula Igliori (Editor)
(Non-Fiction)
A collection of accounts and reminiscences of Harry Smith, an extraordinary collector, film maker, alcoholic, genius, ethnologist, artist, creator of The Anthology of American Folk Music and Shaman in Residence at the Naropa Institute.(09.05.02)

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August 2002

Incorporations
by Zone Books
(Non-Fiction)
(08.19.02)

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Like Life
by Lorrie Moore
(Fiction)
(08.17.02)

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Days of War, Nights of Love: Crimethink for Beginners
by CrimethInc.
(Non-Fiction)
(08.11.02)

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Ubu Roi
by Alfred Jarry
(Drama)
(08.11.02)

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Evasion
by Anonymous
(Memoir)
A fascinating memoir by a vegan straightedge traveler kid who lives entirely by squatting, dumpster diving, shoplifting and receipt scams, hopping trains all over the country, gate-crashing concerts, hitchhiking, living large. It begins:

It's true that our hero supports himself mainly through crime. Above all else he'd like to live outside capitalist consumer culture, and barring that, undermine it however possible. That he ends up a parasite of the consumer culture he is so profoundly against, essentially living off of its excess comes up a couple of times in the book, but I think it is impossible to live in the U.S. without this hypocrisy. It's a true blue On the Road for our generation, with the same "that's not writing, that's typing" style, but it is the voice the disenfranchised anti-consumer travelling kids that want to find something real, to live life and not watch it on TV or buy it at the 7-Eleven, where their peers stand bored and miserable in their Vans sneakers and Kangol caps wondering what to do with their lives. (08.09.02)

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American Psycho
by Bret Easton Ellis
(Fiction)
Once again I feel... unwashed after reading a book. The last time this happened was after reading My Idea of Fun last year. American Psycho is neither the offal some people assert that it is, nor the work of art others have spent many words insisting. It's something in between, a fairly competent dissection of the late 80s yuppie heart beating beneath the Ralph Lauren V-neck sweaters, a completely revolting exploration of woman-hating, materialism, and bloodlust, but by no means the towering work of Dostoevskyesque themes as has been claimed. (08.05.02)

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Compulsion to Kill
by Laura Foreman (Editor)
(Non-Fiction)
A Time-Life book about serial killers? This is the second Time-Life book I've read in the past month, the other one being a volume about the Pacific Front of WWII. Weird. I've always associated Time-Life with Norman Rockwell, not Norman Bates. (08.02.02)

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July 2002

Debbie: an epic
by Lisa Robertson
(Poetry)
(07.31.02)

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The Atrocity Exhibition
by J. G. Ballard
(Fiction)
I read the edition with J. G. Ballard's notes in it -- a UK edition apparently not available in the States. This whole sexualization of car accidents -- what? I can understand how they are irresistibly compelling, that you can't look away from them and that they therefore have powers of attraction as strong as sexual situations, but huh? Penetration of the body by machinery, car crash as orgasm, wound as sexual orifice, it seems like an idea only a man could come up with. So invasive, destructive, repulsive! I have never had any interest in the supposed "dream" the car offers of speed, power and freedom. Prostheses, cyborg culture, Donna Haraway, the widespread use of contact lenses, pacemakers and hearing aids -- even Stelarc -- are more interesting investigations of technology penetrating the body.

That's the only part of it I had a problem with. He has a lot of very prescient parts about celebrity culture, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe and the media cynosure of the Kennedy assassination. All good.

The notes were great. Without the notes in this edition, I don't know if I'd've understood a thing -- without the help of David Cronenberg and Scott Bukatman too. Yeah, it's astonishingly brilliant, but even less engaging than reading Burroughs, another writer whose willful refusal to accommodate the reader has frustrated me in the past, but not stopped me from reading volume after volume of his work. I persist nonetheless, wishing these guys'd toss us a line every now and then, like the notes in this edition. Thank you Mr. Ballard.(07.31.02)

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Survivor
by Chuck Palahniuk
(Fiction)
(07.28.02)

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Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing
by Jill Radford
(Non-Fiction)
(07.25.02)

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The Death and Letters of Alice James
by Alice James with intro by Ruth Bernard Yeazell
(Non-Fiction)
Alice's letters are not exceptionally interesting, but her life as a Victorian hysteric trying to die, is. She was the sister of Henry and William James, the novelist and the philosopher respectively, and the daughter of Henry Sr, the only daughter in a family of intellectuals. She spent most of her life as an invalid, troubled by vague complaints that apparently had no organic cause, a case study of what was called "hysteria" ( from hyster = womb) by Freud and his gang. The possibility of her having any kind of respectable intellectual life seems remote and unattainable to her. She mocks herself when she joins a group of educated women attempting to tutor less educated women in a correspondence school, concluding that "matrimony still seems the only successful occupation that a woman can undertake".

Thus begins the wasted life of a woman who could have been as great a mind as her brothers, trying earnestly to "get herself dead" to rid herself of the body -- the femaleness -- that keeps her down. When she is finally diagnosed with breast cancer when she is in her 40s, she writes rapturously in her diary of the great success she's waited all her life to achieve. (07.24.02)

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The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake
by Breece D'J Pancake
(Fiction)
Didn't do as much for me as it seems to do for other people. All over the place there are people saying Young Hemingway, what a loss, work of genius, but I'm not among them. I read this first when I was fifteen, and it made a strong impression on me. But it didn't stand up to a reread fifteen years later. It's unfortunate he died; he was going some place. It's just that he hadn't gotten there yet. (07.20.02)

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Jesus' Son (5)
by Denis Johnson
(Fiction)
(07.17.02)

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Outer Dark
by Cormac McCarthy
(Fiction)
(07.15.02)

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Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives
by Robert K. Ressler
(Non-Fiction)
(07.13.02)

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I have lived in the Monster
by Robert K. Ressler
(Non-Fiction)
This was a fairly standard serial killer book -- I am getting to be something of an expert on serial killer books -- written by Robert Ressler, who worked for the FBI during the past 30 years and coined the term "serial killers" and consulted on The Silence of the Lambs. I get the sense that he's been coasting on these achievements for a long time now, enjoying a career as a homicide consultant, and milking his fame by writing books such as this one. He occasionally lapses into defensive screeds responding to persons who have apparently attacked him in print and goes on occasionally about the status he has in homicide cases. There are interviews with John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer in here, as well as three Japanese cases -- which I found most interesting -- the killing of a Japanese kid dressed in a Halloween costume by some NRA maniacs in the South, a Japanese doctor who murdered his family, methodically tying them up in different colored ropes, and an analysis of the Aum Shinrikyo Cult. (07.12.02)

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Introducing Cultural Studies
by Ziauddin Sardar and Borin Van Loon
(Non-Fiction)
You know, I love this series. I have the book on Mathematics and the book on Chaos. You can read them in one sitting, they're in comic book format, and they give the basic info you don't seem to get in university. I don't know why that is. Maybe because you spend all your time reading the original texts. And because survey courses, which give you an overview of the field, have died out for various reasons. One of the most illuminating things I ever did was read The Norton Anthology of English Literature in two volumes, including all the essay at the beginning of each period (Renaissance, Jacobean, Victorian, etc.) in preparation for the GRE in English Lit. I retrospectively understood what I'd been taught as an undergraduate but would never have been able to put together on my own. The war on "The Canon" has endangered if not extincted these overview type things, and they're immensely useful. (07.06.02)

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Lightning on the Sun
by Robert Bingham
(Fiction)
Someday I'll have to put all the hilarious malapropisms and punishable-by-law verbicides in here. I think this must've made it to press after Bingham died, before the editor was able to erase all evidence of Bingham's tin ear and SAT study guide vocabulary. One oughtn't be so mean to a dead man though. Lightning on the Sun was a well-plotted novel, but I was undelighted with it. Definitely not Graham Greene, to which it had been compared in the jacket copy. (07.05.02)

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Dogeaters(2)
by Jessica Hagedorn
(Fiction)
(07.04.02)

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June 2002

Return to the Philippines
by Rafael Steinberb
(Non-Fiction)
This is a Time-Life book, but had a great deal more info, interesting anecdote and detail than Victory in the Pacific listed below. Surprisingly (or maybe not so surprisingly, seeing as how this book is likely directed towards Time Magazine and Life Magazine subscribers) there was almost nothing from the Filipino viewpoint -- it was told from the perspective of a gung-ho bellicose American. But I've done hardly any reading in military history until now, so any gung-ho-ness about any war seems peculiar to me. (06.30.02)

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Women Overseas: Memoirs of the Canadian Red Cross Corps
by Frances Martin Day et al.
(Non-Fiction)
(06.30.02)

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Victory in the Pacific
by Michael and Gladys Green
(Non-Fiction)
Essentially a Cliff Notes version of WWII in the Pacific, with photographs, and without embellishment, criticism or analysis. (06.30.02)

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Cruddy
by Lynda Barry
(Fiction)
Sitting uninterrupted in a different world for four hours is a remarkable feeling, particularly a world as gory and creepy as the one in Cruddy. I thought it was excellent, albeit horrible. Ernie Pook's Comeek, Barry's syndicated cartoon, doesn't come close to the darkness in Cruddy, though there are outcast, maltreated teenagers here too. Roberta Rohbeson, age 11 (though she appears to be 8) is on the road with her serial killer dad (whose family ran a slaughterhouse) who doesn't acknowledge that Roberta's a girl (he calls her "Clyde" and "son") and who travels with a set of knives (each of which has a name) in a series of stolen cars, hunting down the people who've deprived him of his rightful inheritance, killing them in gory ways only a meat man is capable of, and stealing suitcases full of cash... Meanwhile, in an intertwined diary, Roberta, age 16, hooks up with a crowd of suicidal, drug-addled losers, a couple of whom have escaped from the Barbara V. Hermann Institute for Adolescent Rest -- a home for teenage psychos -- after stealing copious amounts of pharmeceuticals, which they all continuously take. That should get you started in understanding what Cruddy is like. It's a thing of terrible beauty. (06.28.02)

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Acme Novelty Library #15
by Chris Ware
(Comic Book)
Just when life has lost its sting and sadness, another copy of the Acme Novelty Library comes along and tears me apart with its four-color meditations on life's beauty and desperation all over again. (06.27.02)

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Crime: An Encyclopedia (2)
by Oliver Cyriax
(Non-Fiction)
(06.19.02)

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Gravity's Rainbow (4)
by Thomas Pynchon
(Fiction)
(06.15.02)

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The Black Veil
by Rick Moody
(Fiction)
The Black Veil wasn't very good, alas. I read it almost continuously in one 24 hour period in the midst of The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa and another reading of Gravity's Rainbow. It's interesting how Moody's writing has evolved since The Ice Storm and The Ring of Brightest Angels -- both of which I read and reread and marvelled at until Purple America came out which I liked less, but which had that gorgeous soliloquy at the beginning. The things that started happening in that book -- the lists, the run-on sentences -- were evolved further in Demonology, and then he added those irritating italics, borrowing tricks from Thomas Bernhard (he's said this in interviews) which don't come off, and make the writing annoying, flaccid or worst of all, boring. The Black Veil was shapeless, too much piling on unleavened by much taking out (see how the tendency to italicize is contagious?) a great deal of historical hooha that didn't do much for me. And it's a beautiful thing when lengths of protracted wordage are cut with instances of verbal contraction (c.f. Lester Bangs writing on Van Morrison's Astral Weeks). Sadly, Moody did not gift us with much contraction.

I'm enamored of Moody's writing nonetheless. In spite of the fact that I did not love the last two, maybe even the last three, I'll always buy his books. Once you love a book someone has written, or an album they've made, you can't just drop them. And so Rick Moody book after Van Morrison album, I wait faithfully, hoping they'll be for just one moonlit night the man I fell in love with.(06.11.02)

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The Book of Disquiet
by Fernando Pessoa
(Fiction)
(06.05.02)

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May 2002

The Wrecking Yard
by Pinckney Benedict
(Fiction)
Not bad, not great. Southern tales, similar to Breece D'J Pancake's, some great, some not so good. Laconic, hardbitten and hardscrabble men have trouble with drink, with women, with the people in charge. The title story was a winner, as well as the last one, I think it was the last one, called 'Olen' or something (I got this one out of the library). (05.28.02)

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Seventeen
by Kenzaburo Oe
(Fiction)
(05.27.02)

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Going Down Swinging
by Billie Livingston
(Fiction)
(05.03.02)

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Stupeurs et Tremblements
by Amelie Northomb
(Fiction)
I periodically read things in French to keep from losing my ability to read in that language; problem is, I have to look up so many words I either lose the thread, or continue on with an incomplete data set, which can be disatrous for one's comprehension. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this comedic tale set in a Kafkaesque Japanese Corporation where Amelie, our Belgian protagonist (indistinguishable from Amelie, our Belgian author), begins a year contract and over the course of six months gets demoted incrementally down to toilet attendant by her beautiful and remorseless boss.

Many people, judging by the Amazon.fr reviews, were offended by the portrayal of the Japanese in this book as sadists, bureaucrats and ninnies. Northomb does go on about "The Japanese" and "Japanese Women" as generalities, and when writers trot out generalities of any variety, the self-appointed referees in the stands are thrilled to have the opportunity to throw their red flags into the field. People are always offended by the portrayal of a culture by a person who is not "qualified" to write about that culture,i.e. native, as we have seen with Memoirs of a Geisha or even Shogun. No one would jump all over Kenzaburo Oe for writing this story (but who could jump on him? He's a much much better writer than Northomb).

A thought which brings me around to thinking: life is short. Read Oe if you haven't, rather than this, unless you're practising your French. In fact, I'm going to do that right now.(05.03.02)

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The Negro in the City
by Gerald Leinwand
(Non-Fiction)
Continuing in my researches on the 60s, I somehow got my hands on a 1968 book called The Negro in the City by Gerald Leinwand, a well-intentioned but woefully misguided reader which is part of a series called "Problems of American Society". The Negro in the City has 75 pages of essay about "the problem" and then selections from the writings of Richard Wright, Booker T, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, MLK and others. Mr. Leinwand was clearly trying to do good, but the anxious don't be afraid of black people tone was all over the place, as in this passage, following a list of black people in high places:

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April 2002

Absalom Absalom
by William Faulkner
(Fiction)
(04.30.02)

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Cities In Transition
by 010 Publishers
(Non-Fiction)
(04.30.02)

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Utopian Entrepreneur
by Brenda Laurel
(Non-Fiction)
I found this one lying on the table at a friend's house, and so sat down to read it. Brenda Laurel was the founder of Purple Moon, a game for girls, that was spun out of Interval Research, where I worked briefly just before its demise. It's a portrait of the times, and what the motivations were behind Purple Moon. Laurel is an exponent of doing good while making money, and insists that public good and private gain are not antithetical. I have to admit that my favorite thing about this book was the groovy laminated cover, however. We were also instructed "not to talk about Interval to the press" upon leaving, so the juicy tidbits that might have been in here about Interval weren't in evidence. (04.16.02)

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Angels
by Denis Johnson
(Fiction)
Not what I was expecting. I suppose because I had read Almost Dead, Jesus' Son, which were not like this one. Almost Dead was full of metaphysical musings, large wallops of description and kooky karacters. It was sort of elliptical, wandering. Angels was told more or less straight on, narrative structure 123. Angels is the story of two drifters, one a mother of two little girls, the other a man on his way to jail, who meet on a bus going cross country. The guy gets involved in an ill-fated bank robbery with a couple of amateurs, ends up in jail and on death row. There is a particularly gruesome, vivid and hallucinogenic rape scene in the middle that will stay with me forever.(04.12.02)

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Jesus' Son (4)
by Denis Johnson
(Stories)
Yes, I just keep reading this one over and over and over and over. It's incredible.(04.02.02)

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March 2002

Actual Air (3)
by David Berman
(Poetry)
A friend and I were talking about this book, and decided that it was the Poetry of Our Generation, be we X or Y or some group undefined by marketers. Berman's unlike any voice we'd come across in poetry before, a scrappy college kid in an indie band deploying an ur-hipster vernacular in a sort of offhand manner. It was a poetry bestseller! And we too were enamored of it.(03.31.02)

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A Bend in the River
by V.S. Naipaul
(Fiction)
(03.29.02)

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Seek: Reports from the Edges of America and Beyond
by Denis Johnson
(Non-Fiction)
which starts out with an astonishing story about the civil wars in Liberia, endless gory Grand Guignol slaughter, murderous presidents, starving people tearing open and eating packages of rat poison because they are famished and can't read. Here's a bit that should give you a flavor of what was going on over there (and echoing, astonishingly, the Glanton Gang's activities in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian):

Then came Hippies, a piece on The Rainbow Gathering, and a look at what has become of Johnson's hippie contemporaries still groping towards transcendence in middle age; next a tale about flying in a single prop plane with a pilot with a death wish on their way to dredge for gold in Alaska. Somalia, and Liberia again and Bikers for Jesus. "If you want more books about the American Violent," my friend Eric said, "Pinkney Benedict is your man." (03.25.02)

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Autobiography of Red (3)
by Anne Carson
(Poetry)
Contrary to appearances, I don't read books. I only do preliminary investigations into whether or not a book is worth rereading.

This is my third go-round of Autobiography of Red, A Novel in Verse, which is a work of genius. The story of a modern monster, Geryon, a red boy with wings, and his doomed love for Herakles. (03.17.02)

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Our Lady of the Assassins
by Fernando Vallejo
(Fiction)
Like Jean Genet but...not as good. The first chapter or two are horrifying, but then it all becomes very boring very quickly. Vaguely nauseating, and eventually banal. Our Lady of the Assassins is the story of a 50-something man returning to Medellin, Colombia after a 30 year absence, during which time the city has been transformed into a circus of slaughter under the auspices of a corrupt government and lawless drug lords. He falls in love with a fifteen-year-old boy, Alexis, from the comunas -- the slums surrounding Medellin -- who is an assassin, though his victims are largely random: pregnant women, taxi drivers, waitresses, people that play their stereo too loud. Alexis kills over 100 people during the 7 month period the author is keeping him. He, and the other boys who work as assassins go to church, consecrate their bullets, pray that they shall sucessfully murder their victims. They make offerings to the saints and smoke crack in church. And meanwhile our narrator proclaims: God is a faggot, vermin, the devil, gonorrea. He has a solution for society's ills: kill the poor, machine-gun them down, exterminate the lot. He wants to kill himself, but does not.

The book revolves around a single scene in which the narrator and Alexis save a wounded dog which has limped into a sewer to die. He asks Alexis to shoot it to end its suffering, but Alexis can't do it. So the narrator kills the dog himself, and then turns the gun on himself, cursing God and begging to be taken away. He doesn't kill himself, but the next day Alexis is shot dead.

I don't know if you've ever had the chance/misfortune to read 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade, but it's page after page of sadisitic atrocities (man rapes 8 year old boy while cutting off his head. Next chapter: a dozen priests gang rape 12 year old girl, kill her, and leave her to be nibbled on by rats. Next chapter: Soldier smears shit all over old lady, then.... You get the picture. It's an astonishingly dull book that you have to force yourself to keep reading. The endless murders in the Our Lady of the Assassins felt the same way.

What's the point of all this horror, death, rot and corruption? Part of it comes from this very Catholic idea: no matter what you do, no matter the crime, you will be forgiven, your sins will be erased, you will be redeemed. And transgressions of any of the limits of this world -- its laws against the wholesale slaughter of innocents, for example -- brings you directly in contact with the sublime, beyond earthly categories of good and evil, and face to face with God. (03.10.02)

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Hunger
by Knut Hamsun
(Fiction)
I want to give Knut Hamsun a big kick in the ass, from here to Norway, from here to 1890, from here to there (wherever *there* is, since I encountered him between the covers of a book) and regardless of the fact that Hamsun is dead, because I stayed up all night reading his book Hunger expecting something great, because I am such a rabid fan of The Growth of the Soil and Hunger has been much touted, but I was disappointed, and ultimately more impressed with Henry Miller's starvation, and George Orwell's, and even Lars Eighner's. It's quite possible they got their inspiration for their own romance-of-starvation stories from Hamsun; even so, he's been improved upon.

My personal bias against this book is that I when I was eighteen, I decided that I wanted to be a writer in New York, and not "work" -- that is, work only on my writing. After three or four months of living on cigarettes and diet soda (I find it amusing now that I was drinking diet soda) and pocketing the saltines they gave away in cafeterias to season your soup with, I decided it might be a while before the world recognized my genius and so I decided I had to get a job. Which this idiot Hamsun refuses to do, preferring to spend his time working on his justifications and excuses.

There's this odd northern/eastern European tendency towards unreality that I've noticed in Gombrowicz, and Schulz, and recently Kis, and now in this book by Hamsun. I'm still trying to figure out what it is. It's sort of intransigent flightiness, willful feyness and childishness. And it really bugs me. So much so I'm feeling a completely irrational desire to kick Hamsun's ass. (03.09.02)
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Brighton Rock
by Graham Greene
(Fiction)
I finally found out what all the fuss was about, and I'm ready to do a little fussing myself. The characterizations in this book were just remarkable -- Pinkie, the teenage gangster who cannot keep himself from knocking off one crony after another to save his ass; Ida, the happy sybarite, whose curiosity and sense of justice put her hot on Pinkie's trail. I thought these people are so real, they're right out of Dickens -- Dickens when he isn't being lazy and using repetitions of stock phrases or behaviors, but showing you the world. Also a tense thriller, Brighton Rock just clambers up and up and up to this fabulous cinematic climax, and there was so much meaning there, I felt as if I were watching the last scenes of Chinatown for the first time. (03.08.02)

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The Orchard Keeper
by Cormac McCarthy
(Fiction)
(03.07.02)

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Finite and Infinite Games
by James P. Carse
(Non-Fiction)
A finite game is a game you play to win, but an infinite game is a game you play to continue the play. There is some very brilliant stuff in here, and my little coterie of thinkfolks have all gone nuts over this little volume. It's written by a Christian, so there are some weird parts about sex, but pay no attention to that part. The rest of it is a real Guide For Living, the kind of thing you were looking for in Herman Hesse, Carlos Castaneda, Jack Kerouac when you were young, but still haven't stopped trying to find.(03.02.02)

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February 2002

Zuckerman Unbound
by Philip Roth
(Fiction)
The sequel to The Ghost Writer (see below). (02.18.02)

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The Ghost Writer
by Philip Roth
(Fiction)
This book is largely about the terrible consequences a family will suffer if they have a writer in the family, especially if that writer is Philip Roth (disguised here as Nathan Zuckerman). There is a good article about the Zuckerman series here in Salon(02.16.02)

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The Old Man and the Sea
by Ernest Hemingway
(Fiction)
(02.14.02)

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A Personal Matter
by Kenzaburo Oe
(Fiction)
(02.10.02)

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Suburban Nation
by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zybeck, Jeff Speck
(Non-Fiction)
If you've ever lamented the fact that you can't walk anywhere in your town, that you spend hours in traffic on your 2-hour-a-day commute, if you're wondering why certain towns have universal appeal, while others are utterly without charm, if you never understood why you can't afford a house (and yet can afford a car) -- this is the book for you!(02.09.02)

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Male Fantasies
by Klaus Theweleit
(Non-Fiction)
(02.09.02)

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Crime: An Encyclopedia
by Oliver Cyriax
(Non-Fiction)
English, with a particular emphasis on serial killers. Not pleasant to read, except for that horror-movie frisson, which some consider pleasurable. I had gotten this intending to use it for the construction of villains, but the stupidity of the crimes -- and the criminals -- makes it clear that real criminals are nothing like the souped-up villains in print and on the screen who are far far more complex and interesting. (02.02.02)

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January 2002

The Armageddon Rag
by George R. R. Martin
(Fiction)
There was a discussion of whether this book was "trash" or "pulp" and while I had initially put it in the "trash" category, after some consideration it was promoted to "pulp". I was reading The Armageddon Rag because I was researching what life was like in the 60s, and this book followed a journalist as he chased down members of a Zeppelin/Doorsish band from that era, as well as visiting various friends from his past. The reason I'd initially labeled this one as trash was because of the gratuitous sex scenes, the fact that a sports car played a major role in the story and the fairly cardboard cut-out 60s archetypes that were the supporting cast. But what saved this one was the occult mystery central to the plot: whether or not the revolution that was left unfinished when the sixties turned into the seventies and the seventies turned into the eighties could finally be completed in a great paroxysm of music. It was a good read, for sure, and pulp for all of that, but not bad. (01.29.02)

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Early Sorrows
by Danilo Kis
(Fiction)
These short stories (very short stories) address the horrors of war through the eyes of a dreamy, somewhat detached young boy, in a way that is mildly disconcerting. As you learn more and more, story by story, of what is going on -- our protagonist's father disappears one day never to be heard from again -- the horror, which is elided, becomes eerily present and the sorrow of the boy becomes more plangent. Kis's father died at Auschwitz. (01.26.02)

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Slow Learner
by Thomas Pynchon
(Fiction)
What a relief to read this collection of stories! There's hope for us yet. These five stories are the early works of Thomas Pynchon, spanning the years from 1957-1964. The first three are clearly juvenilia, the fourth significantly more accomplished (and clearly an etude executed in preparation for his novel V. The last story is, as he says, no longer written by an apprentice but by a journeyman, as he had already published a novel at the time of its writing. The most illuminating part of this collection is not the stories, but the preface in which Pynchon analyzes each of the stories and what he now sees as their particular flaws. As such, these stories are excellent for the writer-in-training, and for Pynchon scholars. As for whether or not they're a good read for persons of other persuasions, I'm not sure that they are.(01.25.02)

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Suttree
by Cormac McCarthy
(Fiction)
This is the second McCarthy book that I've read (after Blood Meridian, see the blurb from November 2001) and boy howdy, I love McCarthy! At some point when it gets warmer, I'll write a proper blurb. My computer is in the only unheated room in my apartment and its damned cold today.(01.24.02)

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The Rings of Saturn
by W.G. Sebald
(Fiction)
Will write up a bit on this after I and my tiny book group have finished discussing it. (01.20.02)

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Stardumb
by Dave Hickey
(Fiction)
This comes from the Art Issues imprint, which pairs writers and artists to create unique illustrated books for adults, and this particular volume takes as its theme Astrology. Hickey's short stories (and the visually engaging collage assemblages of John DeFazio) follow the Zodiac sign by sign, offering a story and illustration for each. Hickey is better known as an art critic than short story writer, but you'd never know it from these stories which are brief, incisive sketches of curious individuals directly or tangentially involved in the commercial art world. The stories are incredibly fun and retain their buoyancy even when touching on darker subjects. (01.14.02)

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Wittgenstein's Mistress
by David Markson
(Fiction)
(01.13.02)

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Lord of the Flies
by William Golding
(Fiction)
One of the books I missed reading in high school, it was like other books read in high school in that the "message" seemed a bit ham-fisted when read as a fully grown adult. It's an excellent tale nonetheless, the story of a group of boys that get stranded on a desert island and revert to feral Lord-of-the-Jungle behavior, a bunch of little Kurtzes. I wanted more about Simon, the child-mystic, and more Piggy, of course, but hey, most high school students are grateful it isn't any longer.(01.12.02)

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King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero
by David Remnick
(Non-fiction)
Less about Ali the boxer than about Ali the cultural icon. Remick draws together a very convincing argument that Ali was a new model of black man, that the previous boxing icons, Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson represented the 'big scary black dude' and the 'nice christian black man' respectively, but that Ali defined himself as a black man irrespective of the ideals and prejudices of whites. Ali is huge, and Remnick tries to explain here why. (01.05.02)

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On Boxing
by Joyce Carol Oates
(Non-fiction)
Joyce Carol Oates has an incredible output. She puts out what seems like a book a year, and while I've never read any of them except On Boxing I think I know why: she doesn't edit. Rewriting would have gotten a lot of the redundancy out of this one, and if she were the kind of writer that only wrote when she was not reiterating something she'd already iterated plenty, maybe she wouldn't be clogging the shelves. Now, it could be that I feel this way because this is the second time I've read this one. Anyhow, enough dissing Oates. This book is good. There is a lot of good writing on boxing, and this is perhaps not the best, but it's still astute and literary and personal and written by a true fan.(01.04.02)
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