Ha! I'm NOT alone!

Since about 80% of this article went unread after I downloaded it, I'll point you to the 20% that made me feel better about myself. Really I think half my gripe with podcasts is the word "podcast" itself. Don't fall for the hipstercast bloggercast buzzcast hype, kids! Remember! Not once has television ever a) given you a broad or b) been casted at you by a broad. (And if "b" ever has held true, it was probably a nasty fight, and I'm sorry for bringing up bad memories.)

That said, Edward Champion recently interviewed William T. Vollmann. Kazuo Ishiguro recently appeared on the Guardian Book Club. And David Foster Wallace was recently aurally-spotted on Bookworm. It's a veritable cornucopia of audio of my current Important White Male Writer Obsessions. (I figure Ishiguro is British enough to count, eh?) If someone coughs up a J-Franz interview in which he says he's on my way to my apartment right now to hand me the manuscript of his next book--to discuss a few points with me--I'd probably love you the only way a man can love someone through the Internet without using his credit card. (Links! I mean links to your blog! Sicko.)

Also speaking of Ishiguro there's a couple of other bits of audio I've been digging up recently that I need to figure out how to save for posterity. And by posterity I mean, that day when I'm going to stop jamming to tunes and get down to listening to very important literary audio things.

Speaking of tunes, I still owe Maureen a list of songs that have held my attention recently. It's so amazingly hard to do that, to pick some arbitrarily finite number of songs, especially if I'm going to say something brilliant about them, something that will make you as a reader instantly go give bands money so they'll keep making music for me. (That said I'd like it if someone would give Autolux a billion dollars so they could play in my living room. That would be sweet. Same deal for A Cricket in Times Square. Buy me a second living room. Or just a bigger living room. Also, Laetitia Sadier. I mean, she should be in my living room. I've downshifted back to normal Stereolab listening rates recently but my God whenever Fab Four Suture comes up in the playlist I go into immediate French-rock love spasms. Yeah.)

Also, isn't the current test-name for Maureen's blog genius? Note the impartiality I wear on my sleeve. (On a shirt I'm not actually wearing, but.) Sadly, due to unforeseen (saddening) circumstances, I won't be able to make the reading at Mac's Backs on Thursday (which means no sword-fighting with Austin, so he'll hopefully keep his hands and recap it for Team Blogland). You should go though anyways because I'm certain it will be awesome.

To close out with a couple random things before I disappear for maybe a week (or more) (because sometimes, life calls in the bills): While I intend to read Don Quixote this year, and while the idea of combining the reading with a deathmarch tickles my fancy, the timing on the Don Quixote Deathmarch is sadly not right for me, so I'm going to have to wait a while and go it alone, though I do salute those who partake in this endeavor; Jane Dark has an interesting take on V for Vendetta (which yours truly did like and was sort of surprised by the "subversiveness" of it, but was more surprised by how sad it made me that something as weakly "subversive" as this movie was was somehow surprising); Yay!!!--I mean come on, I'm way more likely to go buy two paperbacks than one hardcover anyday, nevermind whether I might wind up spending more total; and finally, did I say hells yeah to this judgment yet? If not: Hells yeah! No no, I mean it. Hells yeah.

With a name like Darby, I'd have to be cute

Cute like a dog, that is. (Via MetaxuCafe.)

(In any case that photo does sort of symbolically represent how I feel about my own writing lately. It's like, wow, hey, this is nice. I'm actually making writing again. Tangible enough for me to rest my chin on it. But there's not really enough to make a full-blown pillow out of it though, so.)

(Placeholder posts like this to continue until I get some free time. To make real posts. Right.)

(Also by the way, I know you want me to be your friend, right?)

(While I'm at it: yes, the bulk of this entire post is its own asides.)

Old lit bloggers don't die, they just...well, yeah they do, eventually, but they live on in our minds thanks to the paganesque notion of immortality

I'm...I'm not quite dead yet!

I am, maybe, though, a little bit obsessed.

(I recently read When We Were Orphans. Loved it. Missed half of what I should have caught, though. Dur. I'm about to start re-reading Never Let Me Go. Then, I think it's time, the time has come: time to re-tackle The Unconsoled. Oy!)

--

Also, quick shout-outs to those who have left some recent comments:

Denny: Leave all-year warmth? What the HUH? Crazy talk.

L Lee Lowe: I have not read Michel Faber. But, I will! Thanks for the suggestion!

Arethusa: Oo! Yeah, I'd been wondering recently if Ishiguro did things other than novels. I need to check that out, definitely.

Also, some fun recent convo at Working With Words. (I secretly get nervous when I find out someone's actually listening to the things I say, and that people might actually read books I suggest. I feel like I suddenly have credibility, but before I get to figure out what to do with it, it's already on the line. Yikes!)

(Also, speaking of credibility: I recently outed myself in a comment at Jen's site. Yeah, I'm that awesome.)

Buh duh wuh HUH?

Eh? Wha?

Dear Cleveland: here's something you could steal and make way so much more better.

Three things I want you to know; the third sounds a lot weirder than it actually is

1. I'm about 180 pages into Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans, and, yes, it's true: I've developed a tremendously huge crush on Ishiguro's brain. Call it a braincrush.

2. I'm on about Day Nine of being Way Over The Top Obsessed with the band Stereolab, and, yes, it's true: I've developed a tremendously huge crush on lead singer Laetitia Sadier. Call it a Frenchcrush.

3. If Ishiguro and Sadier got together and made a baby, and then sent that baby back in time, so that it was sort of like the baby was actually born in 1978, making that baby about my age? I would marry that baby, today, with all my post-ironic heart.

Two things I want you to know

1. I don't care what certain lesser reviews have to say--I mean seriously, Rolling Stone referring to anybody as "coasting"? Get out. When's the last time they've been relevant? And no, Almost Famous doesn't count--because the truth is this: the new Stereolab CD, Fab Four Suture, is great. Mad great. Mad crazy great, no doubt.

2. I promise blog posts longer than a couple sentences sometime in the next month. I got plans. There's gonna be this faucet, see. And when I turn it, it's gonna flow. Flow with water, and lots of it. With the water being a metaphorical representation of the cool, refreshing, thirst-quenching taste of my ideas and words. The faucet won't be a metaphor, though. It'll just be a faucet. I'm really don't know how it's going to work, but I'm pretty sure it won't involved awful mixed metaphor jokes.

A blogpost only Noah Cicero and Tao Lin could love

Why does Fearless Leader want to make the Baby Jesus cry?

Speaking of David Foster Wallace, David Foster Wallace is Speaking

In conjunction with my previously having linked to an audio interview with author Mary Gaitskill, I mentioned my general state of being not-so-into podcasts. I did eventually listen to the Bookworm interview with Gaitskill. Both which and who I liked, and was made at least momentarily glad for all this technology stuff.

So imagine my surprise when several weeks passed and, after I'd completely forgotten that I'd put the podcast feed into iTunes, I noticed that the Bookworm interview that had most recently been downloaded to my computer was with...David Foster Wallace! And this after the generally accepted belief that one must ritually sacrifice real human babies to DFW's agent to get even a napkin from DFW that had once dried his sweat. Not that I've actually listened to the interview yet, since I've been too busy listening to Stereolab's entire catalog on repeat for the last week straight. It's just sort of pomoically comforting to know that I'm carrying around David Foster Wallace's voice in my pocket when I'm doing the hipster shuffle down mainstreet.

iThere's iSome text interviews out there, iToo, if iYou're iNot into the iWhole iAudio iThing.

Let's hope for less of the same, and more of the rock

Not only does Tod Goldberg root out the fucktards, he also drops the occasional dose of Intriguing Industry Insider Perspective. The moral of the story? Don't know what to expect.

One of those days

Certainly, the greatest music review ever.

An open letter to the Getting Things Done cult

Dear Getting Things Done cult,

Uh, what? Are you kidding me? People, it's called a "notebook". Look it up.

Sincerely,
Someone who thinks you've jumped the shark

TDAOC Reading Tips #1

When in doubt: read some Kazuo Ishiguro.

Uh oh--competition on the high seas of the piratic bloggery. Quick, somebody get me a poop deck

Back in November, Maureen McHugh and Dan Chaon and Kelly Link gave a reading at Mac's Backs on Coventry. But you knew that already, because you're a very loyal, terribly dedicated, hell, some might go so far as to say "freaky stalkerish" TDAOC reader. Or not. Being the sort of blogger I am, my follow-up blog post was really more of a blog sneeze.

As it turns out, I wasn't the only blogger in the room that night. Austin Kleon, whose blog I discovered randomly today, was also there. His write-up totally kicks my write-up's ass. Why? Hand-drawn pictures, that's why. Plus, Austin brings us the night's money quote: "I heard one of the audience members say, 'Oh, God, it's like the royalty of Cleveland writing here tonight...'"

So now Maureen McHugh and Ellen Klages are going to be giving a reading at Mac's on Thursday, March 30, at 7 pm; check the Mac's Backs monthly e-mail, kindly reposted by Jeff Hess at Have Coffee Will Write, for all the details. (Just be warned: Maureen McHugh is very intimidating. "How intimidating," you ask? She has actually intimidated cancer right out of her body. That's intimidating, right there.)

Until then, I've got to concern myself with figuring out how I'm going to one-up Austin's follow-up post. I gots reputation to protect, see. I'm thinking of learning to paint watercolor portraits before the reading. I'm sure I can squeeze an easel in down in the basement of Mac's Backs. Or maybe I'll just take the cop-out option and challenge Austin to a sword fight. Because nothing says fortifying one's Technorati rank like accidentally hacking your own limbs off.

Good news

No no no. Not good news.

Inanely fantastic news.

Cat Blogging Friday

I'm going to join the litblogosphere's own Gwenda Bond and participate in Cat Blogging Friday, cuz it's still Friday somewhere, yo.

Let me introduce you to Simon...



...and Stella...



...who are not my cats. That said, they think I'm okay enough that they let me hang out with them for an afternoon last Sunday as I eased my hungover way into semi-full consciousness. I'll leave it as an exercise for you to determine who's the shy one and who's the little attention whore. Hint: Stella is definitely the little attention whore. In the good way, I mean.

(If you're desperately looking for a book connection in this post, there actually is one; I read the first hundred pages of Blue Angel that afternoon.)

She....wore....blue....oops, wrong story

So last year, I read Francine Prose's A Changed Man, and I wasn't all that crazy about it. Since then, I've read some of her reviews and essays, which I've generally found interesting and stimulating. I've liked them, really. Liked them enough to think maybe my reaction to her novel--I mean, not her one novel, it was actually her fourteenth, give or take?--was just a fluke thing. So, now, I've read her previous novel Blue Angel, because I think I'd heard once or ten times or howevermuch that it was better than A Changed Man and it got stuck in my head and I felt like I needed to give it a shot. So I've given it that shot, and, I guess though I still see some of the elements of her prose style that bothered me so much in A Changed Man in this book, those moments generally bothered me less in Blue Angel. For whatever reason. (Though they still did bother me, now and then. There's a certain earnestness, now and then. Like, a blatantness to the way some things are stated. And I get nervous even saying that because I worry that's where the "satire" in her novels is, and I'm just actually totally missing it. I worry a lot about this. That I'm just not getting the joke.) And overall, I think I'd want to say that I enjoyed the novel, if it weren't for the fact that I spent most of it having strong, very strong, reactions to everything Swenson, the main character, did. Or failed to do. For very long stretches of the book, all I could think was, "My God! Swenson! You fucking asshole!" And then now and then I'd find myself downshifting to think, "Aw, jeez, Swenson. You dumbass." And though there was a bit--maybe a page or two--near the climax of the book where I sort of found myself pitying him, it really didn't last, because, jeez, Swenson...what an asshole. And there you have it, the core of my feeling about this book: Francine Prose did an awesome job of making me hate the hell out of her main character. Like, clenching-my-teeth levels of hate. I'm not sure if this is the reaction she intended for me to have.

Right click, add to bookmarks

Grant Bailie--who is not Maud Newton but who may secretly be James Spader (according to the comments within that page I just linked to there, which said link you should not click if you are not prepared to participate in a frank, honest discussion of that most basic of human needs, by which I mean not James Spader but ESS EEE EKS, wink wink) but who is verifiably the author of the very fine novel Cloud 8--has started up a little thing called a "blog" which has quite possibly the best title ever. Seriously. Oh, you question me, but see if you're not tapping your foot to it in a couple hours when you've got it stuck in your head.

Also, rumor has it--and by rumor I mean me, or rather "I", which means that "has" would actually be a "have" but whatever--that, if you drop by The Erin O'Brien's Owner Manual for Human Beings, and catch Erin with her web cam on, and you click on it, you might just be able to take part in a little something called "chatting" with Erin, possibly Grant, and maybe, if you're having a bad day, a terminally uninteresting me, on such fascinating and far-flung literary topics as cigarettes, pirates, lamps, pants, and Texas. Just sayin'.

Well, that's one way to put it

"It's like eating a whole lot and going to the vomitorium." (Via.)

More Canadian writerly goodness

There will be more Canadian writerly fun tomorrow night at John Carroll University as part of the so-far quite excellent Red, White, and Read program. Nino Ricci will be reading at 8 pm, following up on Tim Taylor's solid reading and interesting discussion from two weeks ago; then you've got Stephen Marche coming to town on March 14th. Click here for a PDF of the Red, White, and Read brochure with the upcoming schedule for March and April. Or just check my blog obsessively until I post about the next reading like half an hour before it happens, because I'm awesome and on top of things. (Get it? Canada? On top? Yeah, I didn't mean for that to happen.)

Howevermany Books Challenge Round-up #1

Last year I did the 50 Book Challenge, and hit like 60 or something. This year I guess I theoretically sort of nominally signed up for the 75 Book Challenge. But now I'm sort of like, whatever. I'll read a lot of books and learn as much as I can from what I read and learn to enjoy literature in new ways and blah blah blah. There's only so many
hours in the day, see, and I have things I'd like to do with my life other than read, like become a rock star and walk on the moon and drink PBR on David Foster Wallace's yacht, and of course string together the occasional hopefully entertaining post about my adventures as a nerd, and plus when I do read, I'm honestly a real slow reader--if I get through as many books as I do it's because I have no life and I spend all my time reading--and as well there's a lot of big books I'd like to tackle this year--I think it's time to re-read The Brothers Karamazov, for instance, since it's been ten years now, and I think it's also time to finally get through The Lord of the Rings maybe, since it's been a while since the movies stopped coming out, and there's You Bright and Risen Angels over there which I want to wade my way through now for real, since I've read the (even longer) Europe Central. And I'm disturbingly serious about wanting to do Bleak House, too, actually. There's any number of other books in the piles right now that are over 500 pages long. Like The Unconsoled, by Kazuo Ishiguro, which I've bitched about previously; I really want to give that another shot. And...okay, the list goes on.

The list goes on, and it's just damned depressing to think of how it's going to just keep going on, long after I die; and how I won't even have the beginnings of a handle on the list as it stands even right now before I head off to the big library in the sky. So, you know: fuck it. I'll read what I read. I could pad the list with quick reads just to boost the numbers for the sake of the boosting and the padding, but, we're talking about books here, not boobs. Not, uh, that this should stop you from talking about boobs in the comments, mind you. See. And...

And okay! Right. It's agreed: if I want to worry about the numbers, I'll go read some math books, but I'd like to focus on the words, and I find the target thing sort of distracting from the main mission, and, right. I'm still going to count, of course, because when I was in college I picked up a Math minor and some habits are just hard to shake. So.

Boobs.

Anyway, here's what I've read so far this year.

1. Ch'Ae Man-Sik, Peace Under Heaven


2. Douglas Coupland, Miss Wyoming
   
   I posted some thoughts on the above two books here.



3. David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster


4. David Foster Wallace, Oblivion
   
   I kind of just kept mentioning DFW a lot in January. I don't know if I ever actually came out and said, like, that the books were really good, duh. I might not have mentioned that Consider the Lobster felt a little dated. Just a little. In a, yes, pre-9/11 sort of way. But that didn't stop me from enjoying the book, nor do I think it's necessarily a flaw.
   
   What is a flaw is that it's been ten years (!) since Infinite Jest was published, and we don't have a new DFW novel yet. That's sad.



5. Kristin Allio, Garner
   
   I never actually said on the blog that I read this, I think. It was the most recent Litblog Co-op Read This! book. It was fine. Fine book. For me, though, it kind of fell into the shadow of what I read next.
   
   Do check out the LBC blog though, it was Garner week this week, and I still need to read through the postings myself, actually. Man, I suck at the Internet.



6. Elizabeth Crane, All This Heavenly Glory
   
   Fantastic opening sentence. Also, is not "chick-lit".



7. Ander Monson, Other Electricities
   
   The upper-cut to Elizabeth Crane's jab. (Or, uh, insert appropriate punching metaphor here.)



8. William T. Vollmann, Europe Central
   
   Refer to this blog's sidebar. Click on the link to the February 2006 archives. Scroll at random. Read.
   
   Or, just make yourself sad, very sad, and you'll kind of be in the same boat as me.



9. Thomas Beller, How To Be a Man
   
   My girlfriend picked this out for me because I could use some instructin'. (Ha ha!) Turned out what she really gave me was the best possible way to follow up Europe Central. Personal essays, nothing overly complex, good humor value. I just liked it. Like a long-held-off-on inhalation.



10. David Sedaris, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
    
    Actually I'm not done yet but I will be soon. Beller put me in the mood for the humorous personal essay sort of thing, and this book's been on the coffee table since Sedaris came to town, sometime in 2005. Sedaris is as funny as ever (I loved Naked and Me Talk Pretty One Day, of course) but I'm wondering if maybe I'm seeing a little more of a dark edge to these stories? That's not saying much though; February and all, I could find the dark edge at the heart of a candle's flame, so.

And also

Lauren Ambrose and I did not spend Tuesday hanging out on David Foster Wallace's yacht.

"Bummed," as a word to describe my feelings regarding this, could easily be classified as being one of those things in this world that do not wholly represent the reality of the situation at hand.

A little bit about Vollmann

Here's an interview with William Vollmann that's been making the blog-linked rounds.

And here's the fact that that original seven volume set of Rising Up and Rising Down that you'd wished you'd bought when it was in print? You really now wish you'd bought it so you'd maybe be able to think about selling it.

(More random bits of Vollmannishness, as they catch my eye, should appear at my del.icio.us "vollmann" page. I'm trying to sort of create del.icio.us tags for authors to collect the relevant web-stuff as it catches my eye. You'll find a couple more half-baked attempts at this down in the tag cloud down near the bottom of this blog's side bar, which area of the side bar is about all the Web 2.0-y goodness you're likely to see around these parts, the tag cloud and the live feed of my "books" links and my Flickr badge I mean, at least until I hit the lottery and get rich and devote my life to trying to develop the form of this blog into something that masks the huge vacuous core that is its recent content. I wouldn't hold your breath. Though really I would love to do this thing up far fancier than I've been able to do to date, sadly, I think right now the extent of my mad-web coding 1337 knowledge is expressed pretty fully in the random header image script with the text floating over it. Which I'm afraid probably just looks like complete crap in anything but IE or FireFox anyways, so. Uhnm. Right. Anyways if things look painfully slow here lately just go check out the books tag feed down there and see what you might see. Chances are I'm seeing plenty, I'm just completely apathetic about actually saying anything about it other than, hey, look, there's a thing. As much as I totally dig, agree with, fully endorse, and send out a major crap-ton class level "Hallelujah" to the sentiment that we should STFU about blogging about blogging and just bloody well blog already, February, I'm afraid, has had other plans for me, and they involve it making me not even feel all that enthusiastic about, like, feeling enthusiastic. So. Like note that the opening sentence of this post actually originally said "inteview" and I almost left it, not as an ironic commentary on my apathy, but because I was actually just apathetic. But then I fixed it because I was too apathetic to leave it at that. I'd say there's a joke here, a meta-joke maybe, but, hopefully you gave up on this parenthetical already, and are surfing links off my vollmann tag page. Which if you get bored with that you can always hit the "this tag by all users" link somewhere over there, wherever, and be treated to god only knows how much crap. Y'know. So.)

Totally

Like I said, for sure.

Data, with conclusion

Data:

1. Today, Maud Newton mentioned a writing contest at Opium Magazine.


2. Grant Bailie--who is both TDAOC-endorsed and girlfriend-of-TDAOC-endorsed--has been published by Opium.

Data:

1. Ig Publishing has recently published Proud To Be Liberal, which includes a contribution by Maud Newton.


2. Ig Publishing published Grant Bailie's novel Cloud 8, which is approved and endorsed by both TDAOC and girlfriend-of-TDAOC.

Conclusion:

1. Maud Newton and Grant Bailie are, stunningly, not actually the same person, though it is clear that inadequate study of the data could lead one to believe the opposite.


2. I am totally hardcore awesome for bringing all this to your attention.

William T. Vollmann's Europe Central kind of defies the hack-blogger to come up with funny blogpost headlines about it

We prefer our personal tragedies, because we're all cowards and bastards.

- Europe Central, p 695

So I finished Europe Central on Monday. I can't say I totally loved it. I also can't say I liked it as little as I was afraid I would after the first hundred pages. Nor can I say that every page was of "the most depressing thing ever"-type caliber. I think it's fair to say that my earlier statement--that the words "annoying" and "brilliant" kind of summed up the book--held true through to the end.

And yet for all that I miss the book, already. And while I still think the book would hold up well, if not feel like a very much better novel, during a re-read (a theory that gains some evidence in my much-improved understanding of the novel's opening section when thumbing through it after I'd finished the book) I'm not going to re-read it any time soon. Even though I sort of do want to.

It's not a comforting head-space to be in, when you're in there, in that book. It's definitely not comfort fiction. You don't want to read this book to be happy. The loose trilogy of chapters sort of in the middle, about Vlasov ("Breakout") and Paulus ("The Last Field-Marshal") and Gerstein ("Clean Hands"), those are just incredible chunks of imaginative historical fiction, technically and aesthetically astonishing, but they're not going to make you happy. You should read them, but you should expect it to hurt. And not just in a "Wow that was great story" way but in a sort of deeply and personally felt moral experience sort of way. ("Moral." This book begs us to discuss that word. This book was published at the wrong time for us to truly, deeply discuss that word, though. It's part of a package of religious-type language that's been sort of co-opted, see. Which makes me sad. But.)

And yet, for this notable lack-of-happy quality it's got going on, the book is sort of addictive. You get in there, you start to get the feel for Vollmann's weird prose style, and what he does with all these seemingly random chunks of story, and...I dunno. There's really nothing else I've ever read quite like this book. Even when it doesn't quite make sense, or even when you feel like you've just missed so many things--which unless you're some kind of freak genius I guarantee you're going to miss things in there--you're still kind of unable to consider reading anything but the book, once you get far enough into it. Does that make sense? Or am I generalizing too much?

I'm generalizing too much. Okay. Let's get personal. Look. What I'm trying to say is this: the book, like February, like long winters, sort of fucked me up for a while. This book for me has sort of been my February this year, actually. And I'm really glad to be done with the book, for that; when February ends, I'll be glad in much the same way. And yet, I miss the weight of this book's pages in my hand, and I miss the density of this book's prose in my brain.

Is this what it means, when they say that a book can read the reader?

Book Porn: The Europe Central edition

Europe Central.

It's a big sun'vu'bitch.

Also, it goes well with pants.

And in other news

It should of course be noted that the best blogging on this blog usually happens by people who aren't me. Case in point: Robert Ellis on Rick Moody & music & writing. Also, Arethusa poses a mind-sploding question.

And while I'm mentioning and replying to comments--an activity I really normally suck at but please don't be offended, whenever you kind people do comment I immediately run outside in my joy and do a sort of arcane dance to thank the blog gods for the kindness of commenters and their comments, which let's just say the dance involves hula-hoops and torches made out of print newspapers and, maybe, just maybe, mystical incantations, and let's leave it at that--let me say that hey Jenny, yeah, I'd totally plan on making the thing with the stuff, but see, I'm kind of double-booked since I have that weekend slated for my annual "Be a huge freaking wuss" thing, see, and, uhm...yeah...ermm...

Europe Central

I'm now halfway through William T. Vollmann's Europe Central, and I've come to a uniquely stunning conclusion: war really fucking sucks.

Random things about writing and reading, with a digression about German techno and sex

All things via the MetaxuCafe headlines page:

• Quote of the moment: "Writing is a habit that is too easily broken." So very damned true.


• Now here's a neat idea. Using a Wiki to track books read. I don't even have a list written up for this year, not that it's that big yet, but this might be something I try, before I completely forget everything I've read. "David Foster who, you say?"


• A post at Kate's Book Blog on the connection between music and writing. She mentions an anecdote about Peter Robinson; I think I heard/read somewhere, the same basic story, but with Rick Moody and...uhm, The Ice Storm, maybe? Interesting, in any case. Judging by the amount of electronica-ish music I've been listening to lately, the "spirit of the time" I'm capturing in my writing is probably one of obscure German pixie-like women tweaking dials that control how people gyrate; as ideal, optimistic (if cynically so) visions of the future go, it's one I could live with. (Seriously, some of the beats on Ellen Allien's Thrills album are designed solely to make the listener want to have sex. It's crazy. Definitely not something to listen to before meeting with the board of directors. "And as you'll see by our profit-loss margin indicated on this slide, unh, the way I'd like to slide you across this conference table, mmhmm...um...next slide, please.") And then there's also my basic inability to get tired of Squarepusher's "Tetra-Sync" off the Ultravisitor album, which track we'll loosely classify as "future-space jazz," for lack of any other current, widely-accepted classification terminology. Determining the "spirit of the time" I capture when I listen to that ten minutes of synthed-out drummed-up freak-funk Arthurian-reverbelot is left as an exercise for the reader.

Yeah, I used to be geographically agnostic, but it turned out it was just a college phase

Cue Jim Eastman with your Wine & Politics--er, Technology & Community--laugh of the day.

(His closing statement, by the way, is why I like to admit that I'm a moron.)

Europe Central

Well, I'll say this: you could do worse with your time than to block out a couple hours to sit down at the bookstore and read "Breakout," the Vlasov chapter from Europe Central. Just...I guess...well, be ready to feel like the air's been sucked out of your brain, by the end of it. I just finished that chapter, and now I'm kind of wondering why we ever bother to get out of bed, ever.

Dickens? In Cleveland? Hating on the mainstream media? What era are we in? ALSO: I'm a big dork and I'm exhausted, too

Been meaning to link to this for a while (actually, been meaning to link to a lot of stuff for a while, but, well, sometimes you got to take your book-bloggin' street-level, get down and nasty with the gluebound-funk, makin' deals in secluded library corners with your lit-posse, if you know what I mean...which if you do, that would make you weird, since I don't have any idea what I mean). John Ettorre has some fun Dickens facts for you, including that there's actually a Cleveland Dickens Fellowship (which I will admit to an intense, almost overpowering, sudden curiosity about), and that Dickens actually once visited Cleveland. That factoid has that real weirdly anachronistic feel to it. Like when you found out recently--when they stopped letting you send them--that telegrams had actually been around for a really long time, and you really thought about it? No, it didn't make sense. How did cavemen invent telegrams? Didn't they need electricity for that? How did they convince cowboys to put down their lassos and hitch up their utility belts to string all that wire? No. It makes no sense at all. And yet, there it is: true. Same for me and Dickens and Cleveland. I mean, the guy, he like, defined England, right? So what was he doing over here? And what kind of boat back then could cross an entire ocean? I don't get it. Truth be told, I don't even actually believe it. Lies! LIES! John Ettorre, in light of certain recent discussions about the nature of online conversations, I'm going to have to take off my gentleman's gloves and put on my fightin'-words gloves, and tell you how I really feel. You spread lies on the Internet! On the Internet! Yeah! Expletive! Expletive! Yee of low moral standing! You're a coward and a cur! Hiyah!

Yeah, wow. I didn't know that paragraph was going to go there. Live television, folks! Note to self: don't blog when tired.

Anyways, Dickens: if you ask me, I'm cool with Dickens. I'm due to read some Dickens, since I haven't in a while. And by in a while, I mean, I think what Dickens I have read, I can't actually count as having read anymore (link via). But I do remember trying to read Great Expectations in high school and thinking that Dickens was a little bit too British for my tastes at the time, but then I gave it another shot sometime after college and I remember thinking that Dickens was actually a little bit too awesome for my tastes. And then there was whichever one book I did manage to find time to read when I audited that Dickens class in college. I'm sure I'm pretty much cementing my reputation here as a completely hopeless dork, but whatever. It's cool. I'm cool with Dickens. Even though I actually literally can't remember which book I read when I took that class. Sorry. Audited that class. So not only am I a dork, but I'm a lame dork. Go me. (It was either David Copperfield or Dombey and Son. Wait. What the hell? Dickens wrote a book called Dombey and Son? A really long book called Dombey and Son? Seriously, what the hell? Was this guy paid by the word, or something? Er, oh...) Oh! And I do remember reading some of his journalism/essays in that class, too, which were actually really fun pieces. Short! Blog-posty in length, if I recall. I remember liking those. And I guess I read A Tale of Two Cities in high school, on my own time, too. Which doesn't make sense, I know. Also, I've checked the shelves, and it seems I have two copies of Great Expectations. What? Who am I?

But yeah, now that you all know I'm a big lame clueless memoryless dork, anyone want to read Bleak House with me? It's the one Dickens book I own that I know for an absolute fact I never read, except for maybe the first hundred pages, which I think I might have tried to read, before realizing I was about to graduate from college, and that reading was for chumps and suckers and that I didn't need to read anything ever again. So I figure maybe I'll try to tackle it this year. Say, maybe, in June, or July, which'll be about when I finish Europe Central, maybe?

In praise of Canada

Okay, so I'm totally kicking myself in the face for having missed this recent Dan Chaon event (as neatly discussed by Maureen McHugh, who I think would be great fun as the focus of a similar type thing). But it's okay, because I'm going to make up for it. I'm committing myself to attending as many of these upcoming Red, White, and Read events as I can make (there's a PDF of a brochure for the event linked off that page).

Red, White, and Read is a program being put on by the English department at John Carroll University (my alma mater). Judging by the kick-off reading, it's going to be a personally painful series, because I've gone into book-buying lock-down mode (when certain books decide they need to be purchased and read immediately, cutting in front of the other 20-30+ books on the coffee table that have been waiting patiently for their turn since way too long ago, never-even-mind the number of books I've been holding off on buying because I'd go broke if I did so, certain drastic corrective measures have to be taken), but I'm going to be strong and go anyway. Even though I'll be leaving empty handed. I'll be strong.

It's a neat idea and a fun theme. I made it to the Ann-Marie MacDonald reading last week. Her reading was captivating and entertaining (I now have an entirely new appreciation for the word "Bullshit!"), and whenever I grant myself use of credit and/or library cards again, I'll be picking up her stuff. This week Timothy Taylor will be reading on Tuesday and Nino Ricci will be appearing at the end of the month. And then there's four more writers after that in March and April. So, come join me, and send a little love up north.

And at the quarter, it's Thumb Drives and Oven Clocks 1, and William T. Vollmann OMG WTF?!?

Warning: scattershot reactions ahead.

So I'm around about a quarter of the way through Europe Central, depending on whether or not you count the end notes. (I, generally, haven't, though in some cases, I have.) My reaction so far can be summed up by the words "annoying" and "brilliant", in varying ratios, depending on the page, paragraph, hell, the sentence I'm reading at the time. It's like, I know that 20th Century military/cultural history is difficult, complex stuff, but at times, I wonder if Mr. Vollmann isn't going out of his way to make things more difficult than they need to be. (His weird rhetorical verbal ticks often just annoy the hell out of me; compare to DFW's "like"s which are mostly just fun. When WTV's narrator(s?) repeatedly says, "you know," I mostly want to grab him [them?] by the throat and say, "No, I don't! Why do you think I'm reading this book! It's your job to make me know!") And then at other times I'm wrapping the gold book in a lemon slice and bashing my brains out with it, when he drops a line or two of seriously Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster levels of genius. So yeah, I dunno.

It's just a big damn difficult muscle-car of a book which is sometimes really rewarding and sometimes just really difficult and I guess there's no way around it.

Maybe it's weird, but I do like the longer chapters better; I think he does better when he tells an actual story and has real narrative flow upon which to drape his observations and ideas and thoughts and whatever. Admit it: you secretly adore shorter chapters in novels, because it makes the book feel snappier and sometimes less like "work". But in Vollmann's case, the shorter (couple page) chapters have kind of made me roll my eyes in advance, because, chances are, if there's going to be places he loses me, it's going to be those chapters. (Like, if DFW tried to write Infinite Jest as a piece of flash fiction...although maybe that's a bad example because DFW's longer chapters in IJ often epitomized the idea of "literature as work", so take that as you will.)

Mostly as ever I feel my shortcomings as a reader; here's a lot of data and info and story and what not and I'm sometimes just not processing it right, I worry. It's a book I'm already wondering if it wouldn't be better digested when re-read. Not that I really intend on re-reading it right away--I've got a lot of other damn large books I'd like to read this year.

Lest this reaction seem too negative: the 80 page chapter "The Palm Tree of Deborah," which I just read yesterday, was pretty much completely ecstatic and lemon-slice-wrapped-gold-brick painful. (Also the longest chapter so far, and looks like second longest in the book, and knowing what I think I know about the way this book is going, I really can't wait for the longest chapter, which is way the hell out there near the end of the book; fab.)

This is what I see when I look over that way, when I'm trying to come up with intelligent things to say for you fine folks

I actually do have lots of things to blog about, but, uh. Erm. Well, y'know.

Further proof that 2006 is the coolest year in the history of coolness; or, if I learn of one more thing I have to look forward to, I'm gonna lose it

I...I just...words, they...the facts...oh, yes, the fact.

Here, let's state the fact: Mark Z. Danielewski has a new book coming out this year.

I'm. I'm like. Oh, oh gosh.

Oh no.

Oh. Hell yeah.

Hell. Yes.

(Syntax of Things has links.)

One thing I can say right away as I work my way into William T. Vollmann's Europe Central...

...is that it's not a book to try to read when you're tired. I imagine you can see cartoon question marks of confusion floating like balloons off the top of my head, right now. Yeah.

*bug-eyed stare*

Random thoughts on a snowy Sunday afternoon, following a breakfast and shower that were in the wrong order, while now waiting for the coffee to brew

Actually, no. I've got nothin'. Mostly I just needed to get that blogpost title out of my head.

But so long as I'm here I'll mention that I started reading William T. Vollmann's Europe Central last night so, aside from my usual random mid-book thoughts, it might be a little while before I come around here raving about something I've read. This will give you the chance to catch up on my most recent new favorites. Unless you are friend Chris, then you need to finish reading the Steve Erickson books from last year. Also, unless you are my girlfriend, in which case, you need to pretty much do whatever you want, because you're more awesome than me.

Also, "ulysslexia" is the best new word of 2006.

And well, also, I know it came out in 2003, but if you never picked up a copy of the Steve Burns album Songs for Dustmites then, hey, no time like the present, right?

Okay. Coffee's done. Go Browns! Woof woof woof!

Aw, geez

Sometimes good literature sticks together in the reading pile. Elizabeth Crane's All This Heavenly Glory blew me out of the water only for me to then a couple days later land in the cold snow of Ander Monson's Other Electricities. Two very different books you really should read.

It's a funny thing, books, that are good or bad; I don't know how much you're like me when you read but I often have my mind made up pretty early on in a book: this is a good book, I'll think, and then it stays good; or this is a dull book, and etc's, with many pages left to go. Elizabeth Crane's book pretty much staked out its ground as a very good book from the get-go: that first sentence/paragraph/story is just awesome. And the rest of the book delivered on the promise of it. But it kept surprising me; it never really fell into the doldrum of being just thoroughly good. It kept catching me off guard. I laughed out loud, a lot. (Seriously, best use of Christina Applegate outside of Donnie Darko ever.) I kept reacting. It kept me there, the whole time.

Ander Monson's Other Electricities, I honestly think maybe I didn't think I was going to like the book much, once I started it. Don't know why. Sort of like I was thinking it was just another book like "that kind of book". It was okay and all but, it was following a tough act. But dammit, the book won me over. Just...damn. Damn. That's some writing right there. (The "Elsie and Henry" story is as life-affirming a piece of story-telling as I think I've read in a long time, and is surely not to be missed.)

So, the next time someone insists literature is dead, send them my way. I'd like to tell them to go to hell. Because, seriously: it's not. So very not.

Not to get topical, but..

..is it just me, or is the bloggers-vs-MSM hate-fest actually just a big huge hate crush? The only thing I can't tell is, which side is Jason Lee, which side is Joey Lauren Adams, and where we're going to find a Ben Affleck to bring them all together in one sweet weekend of love-making. And baby-making.

Er, oh, wait...the movie didn't end that way, did it. Damn. Back to the overcooked metaphor drawing board.

But anyway, what do you think that bastard baby offspring would look like? I know: it'd look like someone who would STFU about it and get the job done.

Yeah. Huh. Crazy.

Bullet point rock: the things/products I'm generally looking forward to consuming edition

• This.


• This.


• This, whatever it turns out to be.


• This (third story from the bottom) (though I probably already basically have it, sort of, in pieces/parts).


• This guy is coming to town. Guess I have to get that album now, huh. Also, just found out about this group of guys. Oh, none of it's the same or could be the same as the Catherine Wheel, but...something, right?


• This. I think, at least. I mean...Jim O'Rourke as producer? You tellin' me you callin' in the O'ROURKE FACTOR? Get the hell out. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm calling it: the Wilco of 2006 is Beth Orton.

Where was this information two months ago?

The funniest thing you'll read this week is at Intersecting Lines:

For decades, the debate has been raging amongst literary scholars: "Which is better? James Joyce, or a train timetable?"

...

A train timetable: "Pro: Can be used as a bookmark, thus making it even more useful."

Ulysses, by James Joyce: "Con: Huge book. Can not be used as a bookmark, ever."

Red brackets

Red brackets
Originally uploaded by thegrue76.

This is the kind of thing I get caught up in, when I'm suposed to be doing things that are marginally more important. It's no wonder I'm not famous yet.

More of that hard-hitting, in-depth TDAOC literature analysis you've grown to love and loathe

If Elizabeth Crane's novel All This Heavenly Glory is "chick lit," then dress me up in Prada and hand me my pitchfork, because, yes, this book rocks like all hell.

(There's convo this week about the book at the Litblog Co-op, along with a podcast I'll have to download. Elizabeth Crane should be blogging there today, too (Wednesday). Bonus!)

Hate mail, bloodshed, and whack-funk exoskeletons, this week on Lost. Er, I mean, here. On my blog

Gay cowboys? Cowboy presidents? Oh, silly America! You know you ain't got nothin' on...

BULLET! *devil horns*

POINT! *power chord*

ROCK! *explosions*

• Tod Goldberg hates you. Er. No. I mean: Tod Goldberg hates mysteries, and you hate Tod Goldberg. At least, if your name is Mike Dorsey. Or if he's ever called you a fucktard.


• You got two links that lead you to this list here of the 100 best opening lines of novels. Ready...set...DEBATE! (The "two" link, by the way, leads to another list-in-development, which you should contribute to, though this week, your suggestion can't be possibly as wicked-awesome [hint, hint, for the astute, dedicated TDAOC reader!] as my own.)


• Want.


• It's gonna be a full-on rumble at the The Morning News 2006 Tournament of Books. Can you dig it? I can. Last year's winner, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, was awesome; this year, I just want to see some hits. A Jonathan Safran Foer/Nicole Krauss spouse-fight! Kazuo Ishiguro bitch-smacking Ian McEwan! Mary Gaitskill's Veronica being in like four places at once, Zadie Smith using a little Beauty to stun her opponents, Garner coming out of like nowhere and The Historian totally eating the turnbuckle! OH YEAH!


• No I mean seriously, want. In the future, all music will be created by animatronic-looking British women robot people. It's going to be awesome.


• Dan Green has lots of things to say about Stephen Dixon which I feel too dumb to even begin to agree or disagree with. Except for the line, "His relative lack of popularity among even readers of serious literary fiction is both surprising and understandable", which I'm pretty much totally in agreement with, though his explanation for that isn't what I'd have said, maybe. What I'll say is this: Stephen Dixon's books hit me in the gut in a way no other books do. And his prose style, which seems really out there, when you read it for the first time, it's funny, but you start to see it other places. David Foster Wallace, for example; moments here and there, you see Dixon's style melded in there, and you understand it better, in a way, for having known some Stephen Dixon along the way. Plus, you know. Dude's my cousin. And us Dixons, we represent. (Well, extremely distant, unrelated cousin, anyway.)

I also hear they want me to learn how to friggin' cook already, but I don't want to push it too much for one day

If there's anything I've learned in my time on this over-caffeinated wet ball of a planet, it's that your cardinal rule of blogging is also your cardinal rule of life: Give the Ladies What the Ladies Want. And right now, what the ladies want is a hot interview with poet/novelist/S4N Books co-founder Tim Miller and a sneak preview of his current epic poem and work-in-progress, To the House of the Sun. Paul M. Jessup's got the hook-up:

I read about a contemporary writer, a guy who won a Pulitzer a few years ago, who said he was actually worried that novels had to compete with television and paint ball. I read another thing where a professor said Eliot's Waste Land was only an "artifact of language." I don't understand either stance. Other people can treat books the same as hamburgers or reality TV, and other people can dissect literature and try to make a science out of it, people can treat these things as something to study rather than experience, but I would hope the writers could continue to see the soul in what they're doing. It's really a sacred and holy thing.

Head this-a-way for more-a-that.

No, I mean, seriously: wicked-awesome

The opening chapter of All This Heavenly Glory by Elizabeth Crane is one of the finest sentences I've read in the last five years. That opening chapter/sentence is ten pages long. It's seriously wicked-awesome.

And then the couple chapters after that are pretty sweet, too.

The book is up for discussion at the Litblog Co-op this week. The book will also be in my hands every free minute I have the next few days until I finish reading it. It's one of those books I've been sort of loosely meaning to read for a while now, and now that I'm into it, I'm wondering what took me so long. Because, seriously.

The only comment about the James Frey ordeal that matters

This just in! My sources tell me that The Smoking Gun is set to investigate Dave Eggers and his best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which faces allegations that--as one industry insider put it--"Toph didn't really talk like that". More on this story as it develops...

It would seem we've achieved the state of having "got nothin"

Well, it's not so much that I've got nothin' as that...well, yeah. It's so much that I've got nothin'. Really. Nothin'. I'm looking through my links and it's all just David Foster Wallace crap, which you're better off just skimming through yourself at my del.icio.us DavidFosterWallace tag, rather than having me just post links to stuff and be like, "Hey, here's some more David Foster Wallace crap, as if you really want to follow me any farther down that dark road".

Beyond that, though, the old concentration circuits are shot right now. Like here it is, once again well past the time I meant to go to bed, and I'm all like, "Hey, maybe I'll rearrange my furniture", except thankfully I get distracted by something else before I start--and subsequently stop mid-stride--anything time-consuming that's likely to leave my apartment more awkwardly disorganized than it already is. I actually put down a book tonight, and I don't think I'm picking it back up, and I feel bad about it because it's really quite a decent book, it's just...every two pages I'm off looking for coins to sort into piles, because for some reason that will just seem more interesting at the time. That or like, something else. None of which "other things" actually happen because I wind up instead clicking around on Flickr which I think I've decided is basically the Platonic ideal form of timesuck; it's like Orkut and Myspace and Friendster and whatever else you kids use, but it's got pretty pictures and for some reason I've decided it's my new life's goal, this week, to become friends with everybody on it. I'm sure I'll forget about that goal soon enough though. I mean earlier tonight I was working on a short story and then the next thing I knew I was Swiffering the damned kitchen floor. There was no transition. It's like my life has become a Fiery Furnaces song or something. Which is weird since I've actually been doing most of this tonight to the sounds of Godspeed You Black Emperor for the last like four hours so you can understand maybe the kind of apocalyptic scatter-brained mind-stance I've been standing in, if you know the band, at least.

Anyway I'm mostly hoping this is a temporary condition, a passing phase, and that pretty soon I'll be back to talking about things that interest me without paying any attention to the fact that, like, the world's on the Internet, now. I mean I saw that AT&T Blogging billboard recently and I nearly drove off the road under the sheer weight of the absurdity of it. If I could go back in time and tell 13 year old me that, like, there would be obscenely large corporations trying to profit off the stuff I was at the time doing with my Commodore 64--namely, communicating with other human beings--I would have...well I would have been really fucking creeped out, because, you know, Future Me? Dude gained weight. And grew his hair out. Future Me is weird, says 13 year old me.

Uhm. Oh, speaking of Commodore 64s, if you were a fan, then this will blow your brain out. Maybe that's where all my problems came from? Maybe I made the joke one too many times and it was bound to actually happen--that eventually my brain would literally get blown out. Weeeeird.

And on that we'll close with a dimly related question. George Nemeth at BrewedFreshDaily wonders what the theme song of your blog would be. Me, I'm totally stumped as to what the theme for TDAOC would be. For a bit today I was thinking it would be "Whatever Happened to Soy Bomb" off the Eels' latest album, but then I realized, no, that's got nothing to do with the blog, that's got everything to do with the fact that I've spent at least an hour a day for the last seven weeks humming the song in my head. Yeah. I've got a bitchin' mental-remix of it and Prefuse 73's "Choking You" going on, that, ah, if only I could plug my brain in to the USB port and let it see the light of day. Ah. Yes.

So let's hear it. What's my theme song? What's your theme song? And, if you've got any ways to, like, fix a brain, let me know about that, too. Do they make Concentration Duct Tape?

Women and girls go walking through the sky

Women and girls go walking through the sky
Originally uploaded by thegrue76.

It would seem that the Internet's ability to "share photos" has come a long way since, uh, 2003.

Some self-referential naval-gazing. Or just updates and comments re: previous posts. The glass half empty/full/drinking itself

So then!

Earlier, I mentioned some movies that are coming out this year. BondGirl kindly pointed this way, and a commenter over that way mentioned that the guy behind Donnie Darko also has a new movie scheduled for this year. Southland Tales. The tagline is listed on IMDB as "Warning: you are entering a domain of chaos." which is nice and all, but check out this cast: Seann William Scott? Sarah Michelle Gellar? Mandy Moore? The Rock!?! Justin fucking Timberlake? Seriously, what the hell? None of that makes any sense at all.

It's going to be awesome.

And then, well, uhm. I don't even know what to make of this:

Writer–director Paul Thomas Anderson is in advanced talks to produce and direct There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a turn-of-the-century Texas oil prospector in the early days of the oil business. The sprawling period piece, which Anderson has spent several years writing, is loosely adapted from Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!

Budgeted at more than $25 million, Blood will be jointly financed and distributed by Paramount’s specialty films division and Miramax Films, according to Paramount specialty division president John Lesher. "It's an ambitious film and a compelling, relevant story about family, greed, religion and oil," Lesher said. "Paul is an incredible talent, exactly the kind of filmmaker the new division wants to be in business with."

Yeah, I know. What the hell. At least I think this one won't be out until not 2006, because what with the Lynch and the Aronofsky and the Donnie Darko guy, yeah. Sorry. The mindsploding plate is full.

Okay, back to books: the Mary Gaitskill interview I recently mentioned is up on the mobile-intarweb-podcast-net you kids are all AJAXed up about and is now also on my computer, waiting for me to completely forget to ever listen to it, though I mean to. Which is awesome.

And then, also, recently, I referred to some newspaper guy as being not too bright. Erin O'Brien (whose blog is consistently entertaining and who will be talking the writing business this weekend at a local library, for those of you who are in the area, interested in the writing business, and who are physically capable of waking up during daylight hours on Saturdays) kindly fact-checked my statement, and the facts are highly amusing, I say.

And when I said that "four more books are on the way this week" at the LBC, did you think I was lying? Did you think I was crazy? Cuz, I wasn't, and I ain't. Shockingly, I've actually heard of three of the titles, which either means they're slacking off, or I'm spending way too much time on the Web anymore. The fact that I've read none of the selected titles pretty much negates all of the above, though, and just makes me want to get to work and get to reading. Oh, literature. Why can't I quit you?

I'm sorry. That was uncalled for.

Okay anyway. Next to last: I finished Oblivion tonight, which means I might stop writing like a bargain-basement DFW 15th generation photocopy sometime in the next few months. I was thinking of immediately re-reading Infinite Jest right now, but I've already broken one of you, and I'm going to say that's a good month's work right there and call it a night. That and I mentally and physically couldn't handle that right now. I have more to say (which I may or may not ever get around to saying, as the case here usually is) but for now I'll just hint that, a), DFW is sometimes really awfully heartbreakingly good and it hurts hurts hurts, and b), that I'm almost certain DFW is a Stephen Dixon fan, at least enough to have picked up and deployed the occasional verbal-linguistic tic; you'd know if you saw it, I think, unless I'm wrong, then, you wouldn't see it at all.

And finally, so long as we're on the hot topic of me, no, that's not a trick of the light in my profile pic. Rather, that gray hair is authentic and real and verifiable by science. Genetics are a funny thing.

Speaking of DFW...

...Edward Champion was there. And, I'm, well, here. Which isn't there. Which is sad. But c'est la vie.

("The Soul is Not a Smithy," which is in Oblivion, by the way, I should just say, jesus. Seriously. It's easy to forget with the text games and the crazy prose and the stunts and the big ideas and what have you that when DFW gets it up in his mind to make it his beeswax to affect you, the reader, emotionally, he really does, and he does so in a way that somehow cuts through, both through the text and through you, almost painfully; at least he does when you're me, I guess. Your mileage may vary. But I hope it doesn't, cuz, god. Chills. Great story.)

(Also the other night I broke through the fourth wall. But you know how that usually entails text looking at the reader or realizing its own status as the text, that when we refer to the fourth wall we mean some "action" taken by the text? No. It was me who broke through the wall; the text received me, even though I'm not sure it was aware of it at the time. But I'm not sure if that's the kind of story you can tell on the Internet without causing people to shift their weight nervously from foot to foot while looking for an excuse to go elsewhere, somewhere away from you. God only knows. It was in a dream, but still.)

But please, feel free to fact check me on this

Bob Hoover is a douchebag:

Ah, the blogosphere, where hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of writers, some of them qualified, scribble their observations, opinions and information, some of it phony, daily.

I've been poking around this virtual neighborhood for some time, confining my gazing to those of literary interest or "lit-blogs." And since there are so many of them, a glance or two is all the time I can devote to reading them.

...WTF?

Unlike the established media, there are doubts about blogs' accountability, dependability and durability.

Also, outside of their mothers, it's hard to figure out whom these bloggers are targeting.

...WTF?

My blog, however, would be run through the Post-Gazette editing grinder intended to force out rumor, mistakes, innuendo, obscenity, gossip and speculation -- the very stuff that blogs are made of -- and keep the truth and correct grammar.

...seriously plutonium-grade WTF? When did Dick Feagler start writing for a Pittsburgh paper?

(Via Conversational Reading.)

200-odd pages? That's like one subnote of one of DFW's footnotes

(Not that re certain blogpost-title figures I'm, uhm, recently re-obsessed w/r/t, mind you.)

It's January 16. Do you know where your Lit Blog Co-Op Winter Read This! selection is? But wait, hold up--in a move that's sure to spark endless controversy, those wacky bastards, they...ah, fuck. No, I think we're pretty much all in universal agreement here at TDAOC Inc. World Headquarters LLC Esq. that the decision to bump the discussion about the book back a few weeks is a net-gain good move. Though I'm sure we'll need to see it in action to reassure the stakeholders, and none of this should be construed as me having you let me stop you from complaining; after all, us book nerds, we loves us some rowdy, hooooooo ha!

If the big winner don't float your boat, four more books are on the way this week. So, eyes open, feet on the ground, credit card at the ready, and get to gettin', kids.

David Lynch. He wears sweaters!

LynchNet has some stills, I guess, from the upcoming (this year? maybe? hopefully?) new David Lynch film, INLAND EMPIRE, which I guess is supposed to be capitalized, all of it, that way. It's hard to tell what you're looking at--there's no real context, though I'll say that image with the title in it sort of really freaks me out for reasons I can't even begin to identify--but these images do serve as a sort of proof of the fact that yes, David Lynch is indeed making a new movie, and that there is actual work done on it, and so we might get to see it, possibly even soon, possibly. The movie, if you know nothing about it, is--according the Lynch himself--"about a woman in trouble", I think, from what I remember when I did some research about it. Which, y'know, isn't saying much. But saying a Lynch movie is about a certain subject, really, is sort of like saying that getting smashed in the face with an axe is about pain. Your garden-variety "about"s go right out the window when you're talking about something that, uhm, you have to just experience.

So with a Darren Aronofsky sci-fi (?) epic (?) (The Fountain) due for release this year (?), and a new David Lynch film on the way, this year is set to be the biggest year for hipster artistic fervor ever. I am, you could say, excited. If David Foster Wallace were to this year release Infinte Jest 2: Smackin' Some Racket, I would pretty much completely lose my shit.

Some Mary Gaitskill links

Mary Gaitskill (whose Veronica I sort of abstractly liked and whose Because They Wanted To I sort of pretty much loved) continues to make the rounds. The Elegant Variation points at a Bookworm radio interview with Gaitskill; the "listen" link just breaks on my computer, and I've added the podcast to iTunes but the interview doesn't seem to have been added to the feed yet. There's some other interesting looking interviews from that show, which I'll probably download and then never actually listen to. (Podcasting has, you could say, not made a dent in the daily routine of my life. Even if the thought of a robotic, automatic Thumb Drives and Oven Clocks text-to-speech podcast has a sort of twisted, maniacal appeal to it. Fitter. Happier. More productive. A pig. In a cage. Making a very obvious joke.)

Uhmmm, asides aside, for the textual purists, there's a text interview at Failbetter with Gaitskill up now. Link via, uhm, someone.

One year? Feels like only eleven months

So, today, January 12, marks the one-year anniversary of the existence of this blog.

Yeah, I don't know. I was going to do a big review or a best-of or just make some kind of big old brouhaha out of the whole thing but, eh, no. It's late and I'm tired. I was also going to do a big contest with presents and prizes and goodies and stuff, boxes of books and cakes and the like, but then I remembered I have virtually no industry insider connections and that I'm too lazy to develop such connections in order to get free stuff to give away, and so for me to give you stuff, I'd have to actually go buy it myself, with my own dollars, and...yeah, no offense, but, no. I got bills this little Internet hobby of mine ain't payin', let's just say.

So, I'm sorry I can't promise you free stuff, or at least the chance of free stuff, and due to the irrational (or quite rational, one would hate to think) fear of the low quality of one's blog's archives (there's got to be a word for that fear because I'm sure it's not unique to me--if no such term exists I'm now coining it as "fearchives" [as in "Thinking about my old blog posts, I got a mad case of the fearchives and stopped blogging for three weeks"], a term I expect to be the main reason for my fame once I'm dead and buried) I've not got the stomach to dig up enough old material to generate a best-of post (and I'd hate to bore you with a retrospective anyway), but what I'll say is this: this blog's been, for me, an interesting experience, and that I hope maybe you've found something interesting here along the way yourself, and that I'm looking forward to more interesting (both in terms of quantity and quality) experiences in the coming months. Or days or years. Who's counting, right?

Which all essentially cynicism-free heart-warming rambling really basically boils down to: thanks for reading. That's pretty cool of you. Maybe someday I'll get to buy you at least a beer or a Coke or something.

And, uh, hey, okay, yeah, now that you mention it, I have been reading David Foster Wallace again recently...why do you ask?

Yeah, football. Right, right, sure

Ok--so you need to read more books written by women; but what to read? You're a modern, discerning, but partially clueless hipster, and the other boys on the football squad will totally kick your ass if they catch you "accidentally" reading chick-lit. Not to mention that you've recently grown re-addicted to Spoon's Gimme Fiction: "bringing about the apocalypse/is not considered/considered cool". Who to turn to for help? How to be lead through the dense halls of all that's being published right now while doing your part to push back the end of all things?

Enter the Grace Book Club, dedicated to recommending "three books a month by amazing women writers, and in our own little way help fend off the literary apocalypse, book by book by book". With a bonus book this month. The club's run by Elizabeth Merrick, whose novel Girly I still want to get my hands on--and, well, my eyes near, I guess being more important--once I dig my way out of a certain previously-mentioned coffee table literary disaster site. Oy.

Actually, no, I'd probably just lay around in bed all day, eating really fabulous, ridiculously expensive lo mein with Julianne Moore

In an alternate universe, I have lots of money. Lots of money. Enough money to afford my own private plane, so I can fly around the world, buying toys like this, whatever the cost. Were buying the host families and their homes necessary, I'd do so. I would have all the time in the world to tinker. I would have an entire private studio filled with such obscure toys, where I would spend long days creating epic post-synth-rock instrumental antiprog masterpieces, the real nasty stuff you're first repelled by but soon need, like a heart. Auraldrugs; your butt shakes, your mind explodes.

But instead I'm in this universe and I'm just telling you what I would do, but could I. C'est la shite.

(Link via.)

In binary, I've already read 10 books this year, and that's before the book in translation bonus. I rule

So after I finished Ulysses I went and re-read Jeff Noon's 2002 novel Falling Out Of Cars. I dig Jeff Noon a lot. Vurt is like prose-coke; one line is never enough. Falling Out Of Cars saw him taking his verbal pyrotechnics down a notch to highlight the darkness that's sort of lurked around the corners and edges of his work to date (that I've read). It's probably his most mature book, and it's really a shame (I think) that he's since then decided to get into screenplays instead of focusing on novels, but hey, whatcha gonna do, eh?

FOOC isn't available on these western shores but I'd say you're better off starting with Vurt anyway. If you dig that then you can do Pollen (which is good but not Vurt-tastic) and Nymphomation (which was very nearly Vurt-tastic, actually). But skip Automated Alice--it was a nice idea, nice concept I guess, but it seemed sort of ephemeral compared to his other stuff. Also I've never felt the urge to track down Cobralingus--remixing text is sort of a nice mental game to play after a couple pints but from what I saw the one time I flipped through the book in the bookstore, it wasn't something I wanted to really spend time reading. And I've only had vague desire to catch Needle in the Groove, which sounded sort of like Cobralingus with a plot. Eh.

-

So after my Jeff Noon kick I finished off 2005 by jumping into the stack my girlfriend gave me for Christmas with Heavy Water and Other Stories by Martin Amis. I'd never read Martin Amis before and I don't know what I thought he did before I read him but now I know at least one thing he does, which is funny, which he does very well. "Career Move" was one of those "wow, I look like an idiot because I keep laughing out loud in the coffee shop" stories, and "The Janitor on Mars" is good funny sci-fi. There's a few less than memorable stories in there, but generally, hey, I know a bit of Martin Amis now, and I like what I now, and I'll be (eventually) raiding my girlfriend's bookshelves to borrow her copy of Money. I mean, assuming she's cool with that.

-

(My girlfriend, I feel the need to interject here, is sort of freakishly well-read, and makes me feel inferior. Just wanted to get that out there.)

-

I kicked off 2006 with a loaner from my girlfriend, a book she'd handed to me sometime earlier in 2005. She'd caught me looking at her bookshelves--which when there's bookshelves in a room I sometimes I just do, I just look at them, regardless of the fact that I have no intention of actually taking books from the shelves, I think it's something about all the bars of color and hypnosis or something, I dunno--and, figuring I was looking for something to read, she went to some other shelves and pulled down Peace Under Heaven, a 1930s era Korean novel by Ch'Ae Man-Sik. (Book in translation--score one extra book point for me! Ka-ching!) It was good; I liked it. I won't pretend to know enough about Korean culture (of the 1930s or not) to be able to speak as anything like an authority about it, but I'll say that the book is lighter than one might suspect a book written in 1930s Korea to be, probably due in no small part to a very readable, fluid translation, while also probably being more informative about the time and place from when it came than I suspect I realized it was when I was reading it (as was suggested by the couple sentences of the introduction that I read after I finished reading the book).

The novel's described as being a satire, or at least as being satirical, but whether due to the fact that we live in an age when The Onion defines what "satire" is--and don't get me wrong, The Onion's hella funny at times, and is now and then dead-to-rights on, but whoever it was who said we live in a golden age for satire was smoking a little bronze-aged crack, if you know what I mean, which if you do, congratulations, now you explain it to me for me--or due to a general lack of knowledge about the culture, I'm sure plenty of the humor was lost on me, though I'm not a complete dunce and I guess I have at least half-formed non-verbal theories about the whole thing. But then, plenty of humor definitely is easy to pick up...I mean, when the main character refers to every other male in the book as a "bastard whose balls he'd have cut off," well, I mean, come on. Comedy goldmine right there. So, you know, funny ha ha, but then you've got the novel's more sinister aspects--females don't seem to exist in a PC world, let's say--and the book muddies matters up a great deal, at least from a modernized western standpoint. I guess I could say in conclusion that the book both enlightened and confused, which, well, I'm cool with.

-

And finally! My second book for 2006 is sort of a new tradition, I guess, which may or may not last past this year; around this time last year I read a Douglas Coupland novel, Hey Nostradamus!, and now here it's a year later and I've just finished (another Christmas gift from my girlfriend, who, in case you're not keeping score, has been sort of the theme-giver of these last three books) Miss Wyoming.

I'm going to go ahead and put this out there: Douglas Coupland doesn't get enough play. If you're like me, you once read Microserfs and were tickled by it and then later you found out Coupland was the guy behind the term "generation x" and then you lost his phone number and changed your own phone number and next thing you know years have passed and you forgot all about him. It was one of those fluke things that I saw Nostradamus in the bookstore one day in 2004 and I stood there in the aisle and read the entire opening section (which when usually in a bookstore I'm lucky if I even finish the opening sentence of a book before I'm putting it back on the shelf) before I figured I should just buy it, already, because my feet hurt and I wanted to go sit down.

A year and two books later and I'll tell ya, Coupland's a good writer. He's interested in some stuff, to varying levels of blatantness: the overbearing parent, how to disappear completely, quietly playing with the structure of the novel to reach strange dramatic effects. He gives good quick read (you know that means something coming from me--if it seems like I read fast, I don't; it's more like I just read for long stretches of time, often to the exclusion of life) that doesn't lack thematic or narrative depth. If you're interested in things like that, which I kind of feel icky for having just typed out, but whatever. Let's put it this way: there's mental meat on the textual skeleton, neither overpowering nor undercutting what's essentially good, off-beat story-telling.

Miss Wyoming is one of those "it all makes sense by the end" books, I guess you could call that little sub-genre; what's remarkable about it is that you (by which I mean me, as I by no means mean to suggest you are as dullardish as I) don't realize it's going to be one of those sorts of books until you're almost there. The book offers surprises; it's not perfect, but it does have one of the finest closing sentences I've read in a while. In short: a most satisfying read.

-

And that's where I'm at. Somewhere in there I did read the opening essay--the one about porn--out of the new David Foster Wallace book of essays. (I'll tell you, reading about porn--and I mean, porn, what-for--in a coffee shop near your Catholic alma-mater in a highly Jewish, family-friendly neighborhood? Sort of confuses your brain.) So that'll probably be the next book I look to finish. Then after that, I'm not sure. The To Be Read stacks, which were under control for a while there, they kind of, ah, grew limbs and began throwing the lamps at the walls. There needs to be some pruning going on up in this joint.

Looking for a short story?

Max at The Millions can suggest a few.

(And yes, speaking of short stories, I still need to finish my Sci Fiction appreciation. See, there were the holidays, and then I got ill this week, and, and...and...and, I'm lame. Real lame. But I haven't forgotten! I swear!)

Bullet Point Rock: The headcold-muffled return

Here's some things.

• Via BFD comes the absurd Starbucks story of the day.


• Those crazy UK folk and their new year's reading resolutions. Seems I'm not the only one with Dickens in mind. Where did that come from, anyway?


• SlushPile comments on an article at CNN.com about the possible next round of competitors for the title of "the next DaVinci Code".


• Good quotes about experiencing art at Chekhov's Mistress.


• And finally, the Literary Saloon points us toward an article on Orhan Pamuk. Interesting stuff:
  

  At first, Pamuk was quiet when he found his books to be the object of controversy. Then a provincial governor ordered the burning of "Snow" last summer. What stains Turkey's history, Pamuk argued in his commentary, is the impossibility to speak freely.
  
  "I believe that in today's Turkey the prohibition against discussing the Ottoman Armenians [is] a prohibition against freedom of expression, and that the two matters [are] inextricably linked," he wrote.
  
  Historical truth is elusive and the best substitute is probably a constant competition of ideas. As long as scholars engage in research and Ottoman records remain accessible, it should be no recipe for media circuses or fatwas. And yet, timed as it is with heated debates about Turkey's EU candidacy, the Pamuk trial is one more in a long list of political scandals.

TDAOC MNS FTG Watch Y2K6: Alert Status Red: Stop the man before he twists again

Oh no.

I did not think it would come to this, but to this it has come: the implementation of emergency alert protocol TDAOC MNS FTG Watch Y2K6, in which we, like pedestrians drawn to watch the imminent and repeated crashing of fast cars into busses full of nuns, are drawn to watch M. Night Shyamalan (henceforth known as "MNS") aim his movies like full-throttle death-bullet VW Bugs directly at the exposed crotch of our dear American culture. Or something. My brain is quaking with rage and fear as I type these words, and my figurative language creation functions are on overload.

You see, here's the thing. In my previous post, I made an off-hand analogical comment regarding the levels of dismay we would all experience were MNS to release a new movie this year. As if to say that the release of a new MNS movie would make us all more stupid by a factor of six. It was meant in jest and humor, my brain telling me that there was no way MNS would release a new piece of dreck this year, the stench and stink of his most recent effort The Village still virtually clinging to our very pores, as it were.

But it turns out, the joke is on me. H. E. Eigler at Phantom Keyboard alerted me, almost immediately, to the IMDB entry for MNS's latest effort, titled Lady in the Water, due for release...on July 21.

My gasp of shock was only slightly muffled by the exclamation of hope that it had not yet come to pass and might not yet come to pass if I were to leap immediately to the Internet to start a petition beseeching the film studio to keep the damned movie to themselves and never unleash it upon the all too suspecting public, but then I realized that path could eventually require me to secure legal representation, and that just isn't happening because the ad dollars this blog reaps are barely enough to cover my weekly hooker-and-cocaine habit, and if you think I'm giving that habit up to save the world, you have obviously underestimated my commitment to depravity.

Now, see, the obvious problem with MNS is the way his movies fetishize the WHOA TWIST! ending. I mean, I'm slow, if not altogether stupid, and even I get it: hey, the world isn't all it appears to be. Or something like that. Whatever the point is, it's mundane and dumb and it gets laughably boring when it's pounded into your head every other summer.

But what really irks me is that the guy's got potential to not suck. He's got technical film-making chops, as it were. Signs was pretty breathtaking until I thought about it and my brain jumped out of my head to drown itself in my oversized Coke. You know I'm all for good mindless entertainment, but don't leave me feeling insulted if my brain accidentally turns on. There was some camera work and such in The Village that was thrilling. That one long shot of the girl walking across the field, the camera dipping down to the ground and pointing up at her and the sky, the sound going out until we reached the destination? The single take nature of the shot? The mad awesome bomb was dropped. Too bad it wasn't dropped into a good movie.

But then, why that's all nice preamble, the real problem is that I feel compelled to see his movies even though I know they'll make me angry. Let's not kid ourselves: MNS isn't a film-maker, but a vacuum technician. He creates not movies but machines, their sole purpose being to suck money out of my wallet.

Now I'm afraid that MNS has finally made a choice: when it comes time to decide between setting aside the bag of tricks to start making solid, visually thrilling, twist-free films, or to fly off the fucking deep end into the terminal territory of the bat-shit insane, the answer will be the number two of Lady in the Water.

Want to know why?

Of course you do.

Let's take a look at the "plot" blurb for this upcoming movie, as reported by IMDB:

Apartment building superintendent Cleveland Heep (Giamatti) rescues what he thinks is a young woman from the pool he maintains. When he discovers that she is actually a character from a bedtime story who is trying to make the journey back to her home, he works with his tenants to protect his new friend from the creatures that are determined to keep her in our world.

By "Giamatti," they mean, of course, Paul Giamatti, who played Harvey Pekar in the movie American Splendor; Pekar (for those of you who aren't from Cleveland and are therefore free of the inclination to applaud a little bit every time Cleveland is mentioned in any national context whatsoever) being a Cleveland hero, of sorts.

Uhm.

So what he have here, is, the actor in a movie about a character from a story becoming "real" is playing a character named after the home city of the guy that actor portrayed in what may be his most well-known role.

Erm.

You can't see it, right now? But I'm totally slamming my face into the fourth wall.

Repeatedly.

I think we know where this is going.

--

Mostly irrelevant full disclosure: one time, after I saw American Splendor, I sat in a west side hipster coffee shop listening to Toby Radloff play Scrabble, which was undoubtedly the single most surreal experience ever. Then a couple weeks after that my girlfriend and I were at the theater to see, I think it was Lost in Translation, and Toby walked into the theater and sat in the seat directly behind mine, making that the undoubtedly second most surreal experience ever.

And if you see the movie without reading the book? You just nullified the next book you read. Hey, it ain't all hilarity & hijinks around here, pal

So last year (the one that just ended) I signed on to the 50 Book Challenge. I eventually stopped keeping track of the books I was reading because I started feeling like a pretentious cluck about it, what with listing everything on my blog's sidebar. Heaven knows, the last thing a blogger wants to come off as is like they're all like "Hey hey hey look at me!" (...) Erm...so I don't know the exact number of books I read in 2005. I know I crossed the 50 book line. I don't believe I hit 60. Of course, some of the books I read were long. Real long. And hard. And named Ulysses. So, I guess you can pardon me for still declaring myself ridiculously awesome.

Now I'm thinking I'll probably resurrect the list and update it as best I can, then get the final number before storing the list somewhere on this site, because I've stopped feeling pretentious about it. Instead I just feel really geeky about it, which is obviously completely okay, if not witheringly charming and deftly attractive on my part. But more importantly, I missed being able to execute my full book-completion ritual: adding the book's title and some random related links to the list on my blog, slapping the book down on the growing finished books pile, bellowing and thumping my fists against my chest and scaring everyone in my apartment building before carrying Naomi Watts to the airy, scenic top of my To Be Read pile to make out for a couple hours before falling back down to my inevitable yet sad death, grabbing my next book out of the stack on my way down to cushion the fall. Without adding the book to the list on the blog, swatting at airplanes just wasn't as much fun.

Naomi Watts, however, remained ridiculously awesome. Every single time.

Anyways, it's 2006 now and that means a new challenge, and Edward Champion is out to pump us up. Or to make us all look bad. I'm not sure. 75 books instead of 50? Well, sure, now, I guess that's possible. As I mention in the comments over there, I think some alternate math will help. Let me update and add to those numbers here:

• Bleak House, I'll say, now that I can see it weighing down the shelf across the room, is totally worth, like, four books, maybe five if back injury is sustained while carrying that brick. Seriously, was that guy paid by the word or something?


• Don Quixote remains worth two books. Mostly because I don't own it so I haven't picked it up in a while. I reserve the right to make it worth more books later, when I do buy it, and I yank my shoulder out of its socket in the process.


• The William T. Vollmann's oeuvre in one month idea was a stupid idea and should be disregarded. Seriously, is that guy paid by the word or something? Do you realize the guy has written more books than you have hours in the day? Hint: many.


• Reading a work in translation? That counts as two, because really, you're reading two books, the book as book and the book as translation.


• I think re-reading a book that you read once long ago should also count twice; the old read carrying through in the form of the new read.


• Literary genre books? Those uppity ghettoized books that dare to use genre conventions toward literary ends? Yup: you can count one book per genre. (I think that makes Dhalgren worth about eight.)


• If you've ever read Infinite Jest, you can double your total at the end of the year. Cuz, of, like, footnotes, or something. (Doubling takes place after the multiple-read factor is taken into account. So, like, this is the perfect time to read Infinite Jest for the tenth time, because that one read? Totally counts for twenty. We're having a fire!!!!!! sale.)


• People who leave multiple comments on my blog will be automatically placed into a raffle; at the end of the year, one lucky commenter will be awarded ten free bonus reads!


• If you read Jeff Noon's three vurt books (Vurt, Pollen, and Nymphomation), and Jeff Noon's Falling Out of Cars, you automatically win. Because I say so.


• Bought the book in hardcover? Bought yourself an extra book point, you awsome person you!

I reserve the right to make up more crappy rules along the way. Like, David Foster Wallace announcing the forthcoming publication of a new novel isn't actually worth anything to your books read total, but you should do a shot of fine vodka (or two shots of the other type of liquor of your choice), as part of the drinking game I just made up, which only has one rule so far, but which I think is the best drinking game rule ever.

Oh and to make things interesting: if M. Night Shyamalan releases a movie this year? Everyone gets docked six books. Because, you know what? Fuck that guy.

While I collect my thoughts, here's a question to consider

Why do you read?

2006: The year in preview

2006: Well...okay, then. Let's do this thing.