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.

2005: The Year in Review

2005: Well, then.

Writing this post made me want to eat salsa. Mmmmmmm....salsa

Another day, another literary fiction vs. Science fiction debate-slash-discussion. Return of the Reluctant starts here (in response to an article over here) and is replied to in turn by Paul M. Jessup here (with some other responses at Metaxu Cafe).

Maybe I'm under-thinking things here, and feel free to yell at me if you think I am, but the fact that literary people might not read science fiction and the fact that science fiction people might not read literary fiction doesn't surprise me in the least, for much the same reason that people who enjoy Mexican food might not like sushi while people who like Japanese food might not care for spicy salsa-laden burritos: because when it comes to literature and food and much anything else, people have tastes, and, when it comes time to partake in a given cultural or culinary experience, people will typically reach for what is known, what is comfortable, or what is understood already to be enjoyable. Yes, there are those of us who will happily read both sci-fi and lit, and I think we number in greater quantities than we're given credit for, but is it any surprise that there are many other people who will not fit into our cross-genre mold? I don't think so.

There's also a certain matter of stereotyping going on on either side of the divide that impedes introduction of more people into the cross-genre ranks. When literary fiction people are perceived as being snooty, nose-raised, pinkie-extended, smug freaks, and sci-fi people are perceived as being laser-gun-toting, oversized pimply adolescents, you're not going to get a lot of cross-pollination. I'd say the literary people need to let out their inner dorks and that the sci-fi people need to be seen holding more glasses of fancy wine but I think we know that's not going to help matters much.

What's going to help matters is people who are willing to recommend books from as broad a spectrum of literature (read as: "all fiction") as possible. You can debate about the divide until you're blue in the face, or you can read more books and recommend them to people who trust you; it's about finding authors, like Kazuo Ishiguro, who are willing to just write books, not "sci fi" books or "literary" books. It's about creating a new sort of taste in story.

--

Edit: When using spell-check, note that if you're not careful, you'll accidentally replace "Metaxu" with "meat's". The fact that Blogger's spell check has the possessive form of "meat" in its dictionary is, well, something you probably didn't know already. But now you do. And that might be worth more than any half-baked rant of mine.

--

Edit #2: Sweet corn on the cob, was I freakin' drunk when I wrote this post? I think I've nailed all the weird typos...wordos...sentenceos...whatever you want to call them. Please forgive me if you haven't already. I gave my proofreader the holiday off. Last I heard he might be back just in time for February. We'll see.

I almost brought back Advanced Footnote Technology for this post but then I remembered I'm lazy

A cousin of mine recently finished her long battle with David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. So maybe that's why I feel the sudden need to pick his books back up, since I doubt Uncle Earl's next in line for this family duty. Or maybe it's that I've finally recovered from my own affair with DFW's books, which happened a couple years back, and now I'm ready to dive back in. Or maybe it's that last year's short fiction collection Oblivion just came out in paperback and I've been hearing a lot of buzz about the newly released essay collection Consider the Lobster, and I haven't read either and I suddenly feel behind; like it's not nice of me to be ignoring what he does offer us in my rush to hold out for another novel, oh me of high expectations. Or maybe it's that whole "I just finished Ulysses and now I want to eat DFW's canon in under a week" factor. Or...who knows.

Whatever it is, DFW's back on my radar, and there's holiday book store gift cards burning a hole in my pocket, and I think we know what that means: trouble. (Never mind the 20 percent off sale going on at Half Price Books this week, a discount that could and probably will easily lead to some serious wallet-targeted damage in the next day or two.) Profiles like this (via) don't exactly hurt matters, either. Nothing ground-shattering in there, but still an interesting read.

And hey never-you-even-mind the recent birthday discovery. Just sayin': I'd happily sign a special birthday copy of my blog for DFW if he'd reciprocate with, oh, I don't know, something small. Some small token of the shared specialness of this one particular day of the year. Something like...oh...I don't know...the secret lost director's cut of Infinite Jest maybe. That would do nicely. Very nicely indeed.

Yup

This is pretty fantastic. Public poetry readings, anyone?

This just in!

This just in, indeed: this here blog is the number two hit on google for lakewood ohio hipster. But you already knew I was #2 in your book, so.

And, well, as long as I'm here: I finished Ulysses the day before Christmas, and I don't even know what the hell to say about all that yet. I'm not sure I'll ever know what to say about all that. So now I'm re-reading Jeff Noon's Falling Out of Cars which, jesus yes, it's as good as I remember it being, and you need to read it, right after you read Vurt and Pollen and Nymphomation, or at least Vurt. Falling Out of Cars is both perfect right now and wrong right now, what with noise being a key theme of the book, and what with life having gotten noisy on me this last week. (All I'll say is this: Decent car insurance? Yeah. Glad I got that.)

Anyway, hang tight, check out some of the rest of the Web if things are slow 'round here, cuz I'm too bloody distracted right now to think straight, and don't let the left-over holiday whiskey go to waste, kids, cuz I sure as hell ain't drinkin' it.

2006 is gonna be sweet.

"For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives/In the valley of its making where executives/Would never want to tamper"

This post (via BFD) sounds related to the literary aesthetics discussion, some of which happens here (via Conversational Reading).

Or I can just summarize my thoughts thusly: a couple years back I had the good fortune to see Kurt Vonnegut give a talk at Severance Hall. And by give a talk I mean, he just talked. There was no theme or whatever, no topic. Just talking. He was hilarious.

During his time on stage, he told a wonderful story about mailing something, I think it was a story, it might have been a letter, it doesn't matter. He talked about walking down the street while doing a little dance, being in love with the woman who worked the counter at the post office, the feel of the envelope he bought from the corner store. There was no point to the story. It was a wonderful story.

When his hour was up he closed his talk with a piece of advice. It went something like: "We are put on this planet to fart around, and don't let anybody else tell you otherwise."

That's a philosophy I can get behind.

Did I mention my Finnegans Wake in three days plan? I did? Well, consider it re-mentioned; just sayin'

From So Many Books:

So what did I do? What any self-respecting reader would who is in the middle of three books--started a new one! I chose Maureen Corrigan's Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading. Books about books and/or reading are like comfort food for my soul. They are what I turn to when I feel stressed and need to just let go. And Corrigan's book is doing a marvelous job. I never thought about the idea of comfort reading before, but I see a pattern of it throughout my reading life. Do you engage in comfort reading? And if so, what do you generally choose as a comfort book?

I'll tell you what: after reading Ulysses, pretty much anything will feel like comfort reading. ("Whoa. Whoa, I, like. Understood that sentence. And the one before it. Oh man, screw this, I'm gonna go play Tetris.") I've got some ideas for what's going to come next. I'll tell you for sure once I get there, but I think I can safely say that, as much as I might right now think I would love to make January 2006 the month I finally completely read Anna Karenina, re-read The Brothers Karamazov, grok Gravity's Rainbow, polish off Don Quixote, fight fire with fire with You Bright and Risen Angels, and shine a little light on Bleak House, I'll probably steer clear of doorstops for a while.

Though...there really is something comfortable about long novels, isn't there? Or is that one of those "dork" things dorks like me say? Yeah. If you need me, I'm gonna go build up some upper body strength...now, where did I put my copy of Infinite Jest, anyway...

Holy crap! February doesn't totally suck!

So I just read this article about David Foster Wallace (pointed out by the Rake)--about which I may say more later--and I was provoked to do some random Googling, and I landed on the DFW Wikipedia page, and now I must turn to you, dear Internet, to ask a question of critical importance: is it possible that the intro of that entry is accurate, and that DFW and I actually share the same birthday? Give or take a bunch of years, natch. Stunning, is what this is, absocrapsolutely stunning. I haven't felt this jazzed about having a birthday in the bloody middle of the bloody worst chunk of winter since I learned that Claire from Six Feet Under, Lauren Ambrose, was actually born literally the day before I was. You know this means she and I are meant to be together and that we're destined to spend our Februaries eating brownies with DFW. On his yacht. Please don't hate me when I become that ridiculously awesome.

Happy birthday to me, kids, happy birthday to me.

"Crash sites keep me up at night"

Interesting profile in the current Bookforum on Thomas McMahon, "a former biophysics professor at Harvard University and the author of four strikingly original novels...in addition to two books of nonfiction and numerous scientific articles and papers". The article discusses the seeming divide between the sciences and the literary world, and the ways author-scientists like McMahon bridged that divide. Spoiler: no, science and literature don't turn out to be the same thing.

A few quotes, first one from McMahon himself:

In McMahon's posthumous novel, Ira Foxglove, which reads as an unassuming, literary-scientific manifesto, a middle-aged inventor says:

As far as I can tell, ideas always show up like that, absolutely free. And very often in a nearly final form. . . . What you do have to do is test them, with your education or with your experience, to see whether they're any good. You can go to school or grow old learning how to test ideas. That takes hard work. But no one can teach you how to get them. They come for nothing.

...which, I mean, yeah. He's talking about science, sure, but that more than applies to writing. Substitute "draft" for "test" and you've got the idea of it. Which pretty much feeds right into the other quote from the article that caught my eye:

McMahon had a particular gift for finding the mathematical kernel of a complex phenomenon. Some of his work was done within traditional laboratory settings, but his most interesting results seem to have emerged from creative, even idiosyncratic, experimentation. While working on the Harvard track project, for instance, he photographed students running on enormous pillows (a model of an exaggeratedly pliant surface). When studying the mechanical properties of trees, he and his wife went out into the woods with a stopwatch, shook tree trunks, and measured the resulting oscillations. As Howe told me recently, McMahon "wasn't afraid to do goofy experiments if they led to good science." In fact, his career serves as a reminder of the sometimes-fine line between brilliance and childlike indulgence.

...which, again, basically: yeah. All told, I'm looking forward to reading some of McMahon's novels; I think I'd like to start with Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry--seems most in line with my long-held and randomly-held fascination with the atom bomb.

Cue the closing personal parenthetical: (See, it's interesting stuff, at least to me. I grew up a math and science nerd who also happened to read a lot of books, rather than a literary dork with a side interest in geek stuff, though I guess it was only barely tipped in the one direction. Up until college I was planning on going into engineering, not writing. But somewhere along the line I flipped out, melted down, cracked, and made the switch; I escaped with naught but a minor in math, downgraded from a planned dual english/math major once I realized the hot girls generally signed up for "Intro to Writing Beret-ridden Poetry 301", not "Pound You in the Face Symbolic Logic 301". Still, I'm plenty interested in the sciences; The Making of the Atomic Bomb has been on the TBR pile for too long, and my long-dusty yet-unpublished first novel features as a main character a scientist who references movies like Heat to demonstrate basic principles of game theory. Yeah, sure, sometimes I look back on the life I could be leading today, but I don't miss it much. Okay, I miss the huge stacks of cash I'd be lining my apartment with, sure. But I wouldn't have written all those crappy poems during college. It balances out. Right?)

On reading Ulysses, a very "Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeah, Boyeee!" novel, in one month: Day Nineteen

To quote a scholar no less scholartastic than myself:

I guess maybe eventually it had to get a little tiring, a little bit like a little too much. I kind of stopped reading Ulysses this week, which really has been the perfect book to be reading this month, in some ways, in the way the book just embraces noise, and goes about making some noise of its own. Maybe Joyce did it better in that other book, the one I'm pretty damned sure nobody, nobody reads, and so I feel no pressure to tackle, but still, with Ulysses, Joyce still steps up to the mic and rocks it, world-ending last-shot style.

A day later, I see that The End Of The World gets a minor speaking role in the book.

Yup.

Also: penis fireworks. (In the book.)

Mmhmm.

Remember the brains on drugs commercials? The frying egg? Right.

Picture that commercial soundtracked to Joanna Newsom's song "Peach, Plum, Pear" (rock the harpsichord like a vandal!) and you've got my brain on Ulysses.

On reading Ulysses, a very ... wait, what was I doing again? Who are you? How do you know my language?: Day Eighteen

Long year.

Slow week.

...

Long year.

Mitch at Anteroom raised a good point: December is a stupid time to try to read something as dense and as demanding-of-your-undivided-attention as Ulysses is. (Mitch was kind enough to put that all in much more diplomatic terms.)

Of course, nobody's ever accused me of being wildly intelligent.

Well, okay. I have been accused of being wildly intelligent. See, sometimes I hide my stupidity pretty well, well enough that people might mistake me for someone with some smarts in my head. Why, then, instead of rolling with that, would I let my innate dumbness all hang out, by trying to do something as silly as read Ulysses during a single December?

Mostly it was just a thing to do. Ulysses always seemed like one of those books that everybody talks about but nobody actually ever reads. It didn't seem like a book you were actually supposed to read. Like, reading Ulysses, that's just not something that's meant to happen. Except, it does happen, and I wanted to have some reason, some excuse to get over that hump, to get to the place where it does happen, for whatever profit or loss that might bring. Let the pages fall where they may.

So, why December, then? Fine to read it in a month--a first reading, you're barely hoping to survey the book at best, get a feel for the landscape, you're not actually going to understand any of it--but why the big end of the year month, when you're all run down and jacked up, when there's more distractions than there are at any other time of the year? Why, God, why indeed?

For me, this year, this blog, it's been largely about rediscovering literature. Way back at the beginning of the year I signed up for one of those fifty book plans--read fifty books, blog a lot, make some noise, pat self on back for being an awesome middle class literate guy with spare cash and leisure time, say wahoo and go nuts. Because, it's not that I ever forgot how awesome books are, but along the line, I got distracted, by everything else in life. There was that year I spent addicted to Netflix, those hours spent playing video games, the countless times I chose to try to write my own stories, the forever and ever and amen. I wouldn't go back and trade any of that in. (I mean, watching all those seasons of Buffy in half a year? Yeah, that was some pretty sweet action right there. God bless catching the ep where SMG's mom died, while I was stoned on Vicodin. That was rad.) But, see, somewhere, somehow, my knowledge that I still loved books and reading and literature and the struggle to create meaning out of chaos, the life-long knowledge that something I'm here to do is take part in the good fight, that was all still there, but. Something fell off track. It seems I forgot to actually read books. And that wasn't cool. So it was time to get back to my roots. Time to keep it real. Time to remember how this gangsta rolls. So, Netflix got cancelled, the Playstation started to collect dust, and the laptop found itself with long stretches of time off. But damn it, a lot of books got read. And it was dubbed totally sweet.

Which was fine and all until somewhere along the line I decided it would be good motivation to make Ulysses the fiftieth book, to do it all in one month--to be forced to read the book in this given time frame or else fail in the year's quest, whatever. Combine this with the desire mentioned above, about making Ulysses less an insurmountable abstraction and more a real thing, and you've got whatever you've got, with all of this: you've got a random Internet guy reading a really hard book in one hard month, and making some noise about it.

...

Slow week.

It's funny. This year, it's been about reconnecting, and all that. That was the theory at least. And it's worked out that way, a lot. But then in reality it's also been about opening my arms wide and taking in as much of the noise out there as I could stand. It's been about reading, and reading, and reading, and then reading all this stuff people post on the internet about reading, and reading about reading about reading, and then everything else out there with the blogs and the bloggers and the media and the noise and the stuff. It's an awful lot to be interested in.

I guess maybe eventually it had to get a little tiring, a little bit like a little too much. I kind of stopped reading Ulysses this week, which really has been the perfect book to be reading this month, in some ways, in the way the book just embraces noise, and goes about making some noise of its own. Maybe Joyce did it better in that other book, the one I'm pretty damned sure nobody, nobody reads, and so I feel no pressure to tackle, but still, with Ulysses, Joyce still steps up to the mic and rocks it, world-ending last-shot style.

Noise. Noise noise noise. In other ways it's been the wrong book to read this month, because, y'know. It's one thing to know there's culture jamming going on out there in society somewhere that isn't where you are. It's another thing to invite the culture jammers into your house, set them up with their own coffee table and couch, so they can throw spitballs at your brain. Sometimes, like life, it's just too much to take in.

But either way, it's right, isn't it? Ulysses, that is: this life, it's complicated. There's more noise in heaven and earth than in your philosophy, eh?

Anyways, yeah, I got a little tired, and it was a slow week. Didn't get much reading done. Insert a dash of boring trite cliche twenty-something white guy identity crisis in there, resulting in a slow blogging week (not that I have nothing to say but that I've got too bloody damned much to say), and you get the picture. That's okay. There's still time to finish reading Ulysses by six the evening of December 31st, which is when I begin drinking copiously, and the blog's not going anywhere and I guess there's still room on the internet for boring trite cliche twenty-something white guy identity crisis blog posts, so I guess it's all cool. For a while I thought I'd be done with Ulysses way early, but I think I knew going into it there'd be some time off thrown in there. It's cool. Fuck knows what I'd do for an encore if I finished early, after all. Finnegans Wake in three days, like what.

...

Also! I'd just like to say: I've really enjoyed the comments and such that have filtered my way, regarding this little project, and/or regarding Ulysses in general. I'd love to hear more reactions to the book. More stances, if you will. Love it? Hate it? Never heard of it? Keep 'em comin'.

And depressing math it is

Don't think of it as me not updating the blog for four days. Think of it as me spending a week doing the math of mortality. Nevermind the number one comes up with; mind the feeling that everybody else is up to more than you, is accomplishing more in a day than you are in a week, and you'll begin to understand how dire the whole situation might feel, when one accidentally focuses on it to the temporary exclusion of reality.

On reading Ulysses, a very lutulent novel, in one month: Day Twelve

Fact check this, Dick Feagler: Ulysses makes my brain hurt.

No Darby is an Island: Some Ulysses links

Part of the conceit of my little reading exercise this month is that I'm attacking Ulysses as just the text itself, not as the text that has inspired hundreds of thousands of pages of commentary, criticism, and exegetical textual analysis. That's all for the next reading, which I've tentatively slated for 2037.

That said, I'd be a total prick if I implied that I'm "getting" as much of the book as I am (which isn't very much) without any help. To that, I should mention that I've found this page pretty helpful, just in terms of making sure I have some clue as to what to look for in each chapter, and to make sure I didn't completely miss extremely elemental plot points in previous chapters. (Stephen actually masturbated in the third chapter? Yeah, I missed that. Wow, I suck.) That's an old page, dead links, confusing set-up, etc, but there's good information none-the-less. (Where's the Ulysses wiki? Or is there one, and I've just missed it? Maybe I'll start one. Uhm, the next time I read the book.)

Being an occasional video-games addict means I like the OO OO OO SHINY!!! things. To that, there's this, which, really, what else do you need, right?

And I'd really be a dick if I didn't mention Richard Lewis, who, like me, is reading Ulysses for the first time. He's spending a year on the book, which means he's way more hardcore than me. He's also got pretty brilliant photos.

On reading Ulysses, a very drunk novel, in one month: Day Nine

Step One

Screw reading, for one day

Step Two

Get drunk on beer, something vaguely Irish

Step Three

Wonder where you were going with this

On reading Ulysses, a very wikki-wikki-wikki! novel, in one month: Day Eight

Bands I suspect James Joyce would listen to while writing Ulysses were he writing the book in 2005 (a non-comprehensive list):

• Four Tet (because sometimes you just gotta kick out the jams and sleep, eat some food, and have some visions)


• The Orb ("Little Fluffy Dublin, doo doo doo, Little Fluffy Dublin, doo doo doo")


• Prefuse 73 ("Female Demands", indeed)


• LCD Soundsystem (only the singles disc; and maybe that Daft Punk song, 'cuz that was pretty bad-ass)


• Aphex Twin on one stereo and Sonic Youth on the other stereo, simultaneously. Because, that makes sense


• Do Make Say Think (ending each night's writing with the last track of Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymn, "Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!")


• The Radio Dept. ("Lost & Found", indeed)


• Nelly Furtado (because who the hell's gonna tell James Frickin Joyce he can't have some pop with his coffee?)

Another year end list, sort of; and then some other stuff

Better late than never, I guess?

Also while I'm here: I've seen this story mentioned several places but Slushpile gets the award for snarkiest headline.

And while I'm at it, my reading is stunted. Also, I didn't put any money in the Salvation Army bowl outside the grocery store, today. I'm a bad fucking person and I'm going to hell.

And for bonus fun, an interesting discussion about style in literature. (I, of course, as usual, have fascinating things to say, but I'm too busy being stunted to do so. Oh? What, me, bitter? No.)

On reading Ulysses, a very long novel, in one month: Day Seven

Pattern:

1. Read many pages. Miss a lot.

2. Think, "Huh?"

3. Sleep, some.

4. Wake up next day, sort of exhausted, with stream of conscious internal monologue running through head for several hours after waking up. Realize it's pitch-perfect internalization of Joycean literary voice. Be too tired to do anything with that knowledge.

5. Think, "Huh?"

6. Wonder what form TDAOC Fan Fiction would take; shudder with fear.

7. Repeat from 1.

It is what it is--so long as "it" is "totally kicking major ass"

As you may have heard, Maureen McHugh has been named one of three finalists for the second annual Story Prize for her book Mothers & Other Monsters. I think it's safe to say she's already locked in the "What a way to cap off one hell of a year" award.

I'm ashamed to admit I just searched the blog archives to find a post I could point at so I could say "I'd told you so," but I can't find one--seems maybe I just thought about telling you so, a lot, without ever actually doing so. So now I'm telling you so: awesome book, awesome title, awesome cover, awesome stories. You should read it. There. One less thing to worry about not having done this year. Woo!

Lists of lists of lists of copies of a copy of a copy of a list of a copy of a list of a list of copies of a copy of a list of a list of a copy

Hey! It's almost the end of the year. So raineth down upon us the Year End Lists. For book lists, Return of the Reluctant has listed a bunch of lists here. That should be more than enough to keep you busy for a while. Unless that's not enough hot list action, then check out The Millions, which solicited some lists which are being posted; find them here and here and here and here and here, so far. And then keep an eye on Tod Goldberg's blog where reader lists and Tod's lists are due to be posted shortly (with a teaser list from Tod here). And then there's the New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year list (of which fiction titles, yours truly has read four, attempted but threw out one, and has several others mentally queued) and the NYT Top 10 of the Year (read one, quit one, quit two previous by one author, read earlier book by one this year).

But honestly you could care less what all these high-falutin' thinkers think. You've spent the last month scouring the TDAOC archives, putting together the pieces, doing the detective work, examining the dust and sweeping up the evidence, all in pursuit of the answer to the question that's plagued you like a disease: What Would Darby Read? And I'll be happy to tell you, once I figure that out, myself. I'm sure I've got oodles of year end blog activities planned. Maybe I'll work a list in there, somewhere. No promises, though. I'm a busy man, see. All those...naps, and all.

UPDATE: This just in! From the About Flippin' Time department: Gwenda Bond points out the first list I've seen to include Steve Erickson's Our Ecstatic Days, a book which didn't get nearly enough play this year. So maybe I just gave it away there, but, yeah, Our Ecstatic Days is right up at the top of my own theoretical list. And you should read it.

Yeah, but will there be snacks?

MetaxuCafe: Literary cool-kid hang out? Time sink you didn't know you needed? Best idea ever? Yes, yes, and no, unless you disqualify sandwiches, in which case, yes.

On reading Ulysses, a very famous novel, in one month: Day One

More than once, today, I checked the contents of my hipster man-satchel, a sideslung messenger bag meant for boys two-thirds my age, half my weight, and twice my coolness quotient. I was making sure it was there. Not my coolness quotient, but the book. It was there, of course. I put it there, last night, after midnight, after the month began. Ulysses, a very famous novel. A novel I will be carrying with me for the next month. So that I can read it.

I did not read it today, nor do I expect to read it tomorrow, nor even on Saturday, which automatically demotes this month from a December to a February, and not even a leap-year February, at that. But I did have the book with me today, and that means the month has begun, the clock is ticking, etc, etc, and etc. Sunday I may open the book. I may feel the opening pages with my winter-chapped fingers, I may flip through the pages, feeling the breeze fanning off their edges. I may, then, elect to take a nap. It has been a very long year, and I'm short what feels like a couple hundred hours of sleep.

I'm beginning to suspect I did not think this plan through very well, not very well at all.

(More as more becomes available.)

Riffing on Rick Moody's Purple America

Just finished reading Rick Moody's Purple America. Yeah, so I'm a few years late in submitting my application to join the lustrous club of Those Who Have Read Rick Moody. (I hear there's a lot of women in this club. I'll try not to seem too boorish. Or falsely graduate-studentish sensitively deep-thinkingish.)

This book was simultaneously compelling and ugly. We'll start with the bad: Moody's style, at least in this book, it's all about the rampant overuse of italics. You're either going to dig 'em, or your going to think he's a windbaggy blowhard. Just my hunch. I'll admit: I've been known to slant some prose now and then, right here on this blog. I hope they add a conversational effect or suggest vocal tones I'm too lazy to imply otherwise. Moody, though, goes poop-all crazy with 'em. Now and then, they worked; the italics were there for a genuine reason, they added stress that clarified and enhanced both meaning and tone. Then other times it's like the cat jumped on Ctrl-I while humping the computer's mouse. Often I couldn't find logical reasons for certain phrases or words to be stressed. After a while, the italics became like white noise, dropped from conscious perception.

(White Noise, by Don Delillo--coincidentally--being a book that Purple America reminded me of. Probably mostly for the family drama meets big toxic event background plot parallels; there may be more to it but it's been four years since I read Delillo's book, and I just gave my copy of White Noise to my girlfriend, along with her copy of the Moody book, plus I'm booked reading-wise for the next month, so no comparative analyses from this guy anytime soon.)

So there's the italics--which were ugly--and there's the wickedly twisted syntactical strategies--the long sentences that hop around like bunnies on trampolines, the rushing prose lending to everything a sense of (potentially unwarranted) importance--which I was okay with. The voice, it's sort of charmingly addictive, and definitely distinct. Though sometimes I'd find myself reaching the ends of climactic pages without having a clue what I'd just read. I think the textual gambits didn't connect with me as well as, say, Infinite Jest's stylistic slap-shots. Generally Purple America's style doesn't settle for subtlety when blunt hammer-to-the-face techniques can be used instead, even when the hammers sometimes miss.

So let's be blunt: the voice should not have worked. It didn't work for me, the first time I tried to read the book, a year or two back; I threw it down in disgust after about twenty pages, convinced that this was not a book I wanted to devote time to, that those people who spoke of Moody fondly were clearly insane. Why I decided to spend these last few days on it is as much the result of a randomly renewed curiosity about this guy I've heard so much about (due in part to the recent publication of Moody's latest novel The Diviners; see also the intro of this interview), as it was the result of the horrible sense of guilt I've had every time I've looked at this copy of Purple America that I borrowed from my girlfriend a year or so ago, who I know for a fact is not insane. Whose taste in books I've generally meshed with. Having had a few days that needed to be filled with one book, it seemed like the right time to right some wrongs about myself and my relationship to the contemporary cultural canon and my desire to continue having my girlfriend like me and not think I'm a total dunce.

None of that has anything to do with why I liked the book. I didn't expect to like it: I thought, still, that it was going to be a total chore, one of those "taking medicine" novels. Why I liked the book had everything to do with the fact that in spite of its stylistic flaws (which it should now be argued aren't so much flaws as they are attempts to get to something otherwise out of reach) this book boasted an amazingly compelling story, deeply fucked up characters with fascinating motivations, strange relationships that beg to be probed for explanation and understanding, and the potential for major nuclear disaster, which, a, is my personal kryptonite as far as willingness to not read a given piece of literature, and, b, is something I had no idea was coming, having not gotten that far the first time I tried to read the book. (Had I known then what I know now I might have gotten this book back to my girlfriend a lot sooner.) How much of all of this plot-level detail actually depended on the alternatingly loathsome and awesome style--because, yes, there are moments, wonderful moments, when everything stylistic fell into place, and bluntness gave way to the subtle, and it would be like page-magic--is not a question I'm awake enough to answer. But I'm tempted to say this teeter-totter of everything balances on a fulcrum of the word conflict.

And in the end the thing is this: I've read this book, and now I'd like to read more of his stuff.