December 2010
50 posts
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What I Am Still Reading, Part 1
I don’t finish every book that I begin. Or, I mean, I won’t. I rarely give up on books. But some I will lose, some I will forget about, some will never claw their way back up into my interest. But it is not so very desperate, their situation. When I say I am still reading these books, I mean it. I might pick them off my shelf and take any of them for a ride on the train on any given...
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Aira/Rand
In Caracas, squatters have built a community in twenty or so floors of a high rise tower on which construction has been abandoned. Also, it is nearly New Year’s Eve. Isn’t it time you reread Cesar Aira’s incredible short novel Ghosts? It is a reworking of Wilde (big gay ghosts feature prominently). It is about a family of Chileans living in an unfinished apartment tower in...
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“This too is a type of epic retardation in Goethe’s and Schiller’s...”
– One of these days I am going to take a job as an instructor somewhere. I will teach a class called Literary Criticism for Giggling Twelve-Year Olds. This will be one of the main texts. Auerbach on Roland in Mimesis.
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A Continuing List of Proper Nouns Previously...
Thor
Jughead
Hoth
Yes, Thor. That means she’s oblivious to Marvel comics, Metal, and even Norse mythology. Every time I run aground against one of these words it makes me imagine what fertile grove of actual useful knowledge about actual useful life she’s cultivated in its stead, and how much I might be missing. Like, instead of “Mjöllnir”, she knows a word for a...
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What else would you like to say?
Eight taps for good. Then a long silence.
“If you’re through now, Miss James, I’ll be speaking to you again.”
Three taps for yes.
“You’re through?”
Two taps.
“What else would you like to say?”
She taps for several minutes straight. Hundreds of taps, maybe thousands. I don’t know what she’s saying. A so-so here, a great, yes,...
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“Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts but their arrest as well. Where...”
– Benjamin’s “These on the Philosophy of History” is really the greatest essay ever written about how Science Fiction operates, not least because of his theological adulteration.
Also? “Messianic cessation of happening” is my current favorite phrase.
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He May Have Had a Ponytail.
I was doored today.
I was riding down Dekalb, by Alibi. My landmarks are dive bars. A big truck was parked in the bike lane, of course. Trucks park in bike lanes. Everyone parks in bike lanes. I cut to the left, between it and other cars on the side of the road, an alley the width of myself, my bike, and with two or three inches to spare on either side between the winter-grimed plastic and false...
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“Indie Bookstore Clerk Wonders If He Should Put On Sufjan Stevens’ Christmas...”
– Sam said this to me something like five hours before he actually twat it (yes ‘tweet’ is a strong verb; deal with it). I laughed out loud. So loud.
@mcnallyjackson The other only acceptable choice would be Bob Dylan. (via michellelegro)
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What I Read, Part 2
These are more of the books I read this year.
Aquarius Rising by Ben Fama (Ugly Duckling Presse)
This is just a chapbook, so it might not count. But Ben Fama is a new icon of the Brooklyn poetry scene. He’s churning out gorgeous, smart and bitingly aware poetry (in a tiny write-up for the store I applauded him for using the word .gif in a poem in this book), hosting readings, and editing...
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“Computing machines are of little use when it comes to calculating the properties...”
– The ghost of Viktor Shklovsky hates the Google Books Ngram widget. From his Energy of Delusion, 1981 in Russian, published in 2007 in the states by Dalkey.
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“I don’t understand a word you are saying and I completely disagree.”
– My new mantra, from Fatale by J.P. Manchette.
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“(She familiarized herself with the nunchaku, a weapon hitherto unknown to her.)”
– Best parenthetical in French literature, probably. From J. P. Manchette’s Fatale, out in May from NYRB
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What I Read Part 1
These are the books I read in 2010. I tried to draw a complete list, but I’ve forgotten more than a few, particularly in the early months of the year.
Aurorarama by Jean-Christophe Valtat (Melville House)
So very good. One of my favorites of the year. Also just a beautiful book. It’s a drug-and-dead-pirate-fueled polar adventure, written in English by my new favorite frenchman. You...
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Things to be worn in cold weather, particularly in Antarctic waters, according to Herman Melville:
gregoes
pea-jackets
monkey-jackets
reefing-jackets
storm-jackets
oil-jackets
paint-jackets
round jackets
short jackets
long jackets
all manner of jackets
oil-skin suits
dread-naughts
tarred trowsers and overalls
sea boots
comforters
mittens
woolen socks
Guernsey frocks
Havre...
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Every Book I've Read This Year, According to...
that melville house book that had dark green trim, about the guy?
aliss at the fire?
the seagulls w arms book
the old melville book
the green leopard book
that old scifi paperback book you found on housing works with the weird tank top on it
um that poetry book that had both languages next to each other? some vaguely arabic thing?
all those UDP books
that old woman who we went to see at...
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Gentlemen Wear Fluorescents
Yesterday [Is that right? It’s been a long weekend and I haven’t been getting much sleep.] I bought a copy of the new edition of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne, one of the strangest and greatest novels in the English language. This latest was put together by the folks at Visual Editions. They’re the ones who let JSF tell them where to cut...
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Those very souls which had suffered
Lotze as critic of the concept of progress: “It is not … clear how we are to imagine one course of education as applying to successive generations of men, allowing the later of these to partake of the fruits produced by the unrewarded efforts and often by the misery of those who went before. To hold that the claims of particular times and individual men may be scorned and all their...
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I can't decide between these names for my...
Gracchus Babeuf
Gracchus Babeuf
Gracchus Babeuf
The problem is that they’re all so awesome.
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Versions of Joanna by VersionsofJoanna
Mostly these make me want to listen to Joanna Newsom herself. Apparently if you buy them it benefits Oxfam.
Anonymous asked: are you as pathetic as you seem?
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An Incomplete List of Proper Nouns Which My...
Galaga
Peter Nadas
Galactus
Voldemort
I am incredibly sorry about how representative of my brain this is.
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In the story I just reread this morning, Walter Jon Williams’ Nebula-winning “The Green Leopard Plague”, caloric deficit over time is used as a measure of labor in a new post-scarcity global economy, made possible/inevitable by a virus that expresses itself in humans as chlorophyll in the skin, crashing the value of food as a commodity and in turn the worth of currency as a...
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“[T]he hatred for Shelley and Keats and those poets was monumental until a way...”
– Michael Palmer is still the best, in case you were wondering.
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If I had to read two books a week I might have a... →
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How to Read
Ron Silliman recently wrote a great post, which I read by way of Matt Cheney, about his method of reading. Silliman reads dozens of books at a time, as do I, and is comfortable skipping between them or indeed reading them in either direction. Matt reads more aurally, which is somewhat alien to me, but points to Sam Delany’s description of his own powerfully visual and ineluctably sequential...
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“It had worked well enough on Mars.”
– From John Varley’s first novel, 1977’s The Ophiuchi Hotline
Nearly every sentence of a science fiction novel indicates that it is a sentence in a science fiction novel.
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Band of Thebes lists the hundred best LGBT books... →
I like this list. Good to see Martin, Myles and Taylor get some attention. The best part, though is David Leavitt, who picks Peter Nadas’ A Book of Memories. Because he’s right. Fuck the ninety-nine other books on the list and every other book published this year, all very good I’m sure. Instead, we should all be (re)reading A Book of Memories. It might be the greatest novel you...
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“However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with...”
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Frank O’Hara (might as well be my patron saint at this point)
I love this quote but, speaking as a person who has committed some few perverted acts in pastures (not always as soft as they look; usually quite scratchy, in fact), let me say that Frank was missing out—on the acts, sure, but...