reviens

hi!

i have the internet back now.

if you like 'the magus' by john fowles, read 'the ebony tower' which is also by him. the first story (it is a small collection of sort-of related work) is a novella about a painter-turned-writer who visits a renowned painter living in hermitude with two young women, also art students. sexual liaisons and other mischief abound.

but overall i'd really just give it a C-, because the writing's good (it's fowles, duh) but the plot and mise-en-scene just remind me of a first, less creepy draft of 'the magus.' which, if you haven't read, you should.

kaylen, as to your thoughts on danielewski's "novel," it does, and will, scar your fiction for life. take it from one who knows and has felt the stinging wrath.

my ex-roommate stole my copy of pessoa's 'the book of disquiet' & i have been rummaging, from mess to mess & room to room, for it when i finally gave up the ghost (as it were) and succumbed to despair. awful, awful, fat beast masquerading as a man. he stole a lot of my shit. mostly books. i hate him. it is good to hear, jonathan, that he has other work out there. surprising that it's not attributed to one of his heteronyms instead.

i haven't been reading a lot. mostly movies; old, classic movies i've never seen but have always wanted to. some revisiting to childhood with animated disney. my book club book last month was 'foucault's pendulum' by umberto eco ('da vinci code' for smart kids) & this month it's 'equus' by peter shaffer. i like the latter, but it's so short - and i've read it already. so it's kind of a let-down.

if you like crazy conspiracy novels with a lot of esoteric stuff (speaking of 'da vinci code') you should check out "flicker" by theodore roethke (i think his name is) ... its ending is one of the most amazing i've encountered recently. i lent this out to my friend and he said he can't stop reading it (between drinking heavily & tearing his hair out over his girlfriend-at-a-distance). that's nice to hear.

i also made my first book sale last week. $25 for a signed, first draft copy of my novel "MS." which is awful and terrible but someone wanted to pay me for it, so i sold her a copy and made nine dollars in profit (after binding it at kinko's.). that was fun. a little unnerving though. she seems to have liked it, and for that i am thankful - though i want to hear what she didn't like.

i actually need to find a new book. something interesting and original. everything i look at lately just seems ripped off from something else, or is boring subject matter. maybe i'm being too critical. i should read some more pynchon, though wading through 'gravity's rainbow' was a battle -

cheerio.

i don't like omelettes, but i like dan times a million

rhianna, before i forget-- your guy-thing has nice poem tastes. weirdly lyrical for poems. though i will never forget laughing him off the stage in my head for the poem he recited, which began "rub-a-dub-dub, our love smells like vapour rub"...well, i give him "props" for taste. who knew? you did, probably.

anyhow. this is "writing". writing about music. how could that not be appropriate...

from saidthegramophone's individual top albums of '06:

3. Destroyer - Destroyer's Rubies
Ever eat an omelette and think, halfway through, "why do I like omelettes?" but then when you're finished, you just feel great? Yeah, me too.
-Dan

that just blows my little palpitating heart (end-of-fall-term-stress palpitating) to smithereens.

{ps- chandler brossard's over the rainbow? hardly just arrived, from Pages. i got the usual phonecall for "tomasina" telling me the good news. good and unexpected, considering i'd ordered it back in october, and forgotten... anyhow, tack that onto my christmas reading list. from what i know they're dirty, fucked-up fairy tales with lots of sex and gruesome bits. the review was pretty captivating. nytimes book review, however long ago...you know me and fairy tales.}

how i am nice

sorry i haven't posted in so long- it's starting to feel like the jon and kaylen show. Most of my books come from kaylen though, and it seems wrong to be giving out sloppy seconds book reviews....

However I do now have Selected Poems by Alden Nowlan. I bought it for a friend online after he complained he could never find it in stores and would like it very much.

But before it passes into his hands I thought I'd post a poem from this old-school, obscure poet:

Canadian Love Song

Your body's a small word with many meanings.
Love. If. Yes. But. Death.
Surely I will love you a little while,
Perhaps as long as I have breath.

December is thirteen months long,
July's one afternoon; therefore,
Lovers must outwit wool,
Learn how to puncture fur.

To my love's bed, to keep her warm,
I'll carry wrapped and heated stones.
That which is comfort to the flesh,
Is sometimes torture to the bones.

i'll be hunchbacked for christmas...

...lugging all these books on my reading list, around.

what i hope to cover over christmas:
the robber by robert walser

coming through slaughter by michael ondaatje

the crying of lot 49 by thomas pynchon

and the object stares back: on the nature of seeing by james elkins

neverwhere neil gaiman

misfortune wesley stace

G john berger


re-read
the dark labyrinthe lawrence durrell

+ lots of little essays etc by blanchot

pirates & if jonathan was pillaged, instead of willfully inclined to lend me books, these would be the "booty"

first off:

is anyone else souring on pirates in general? i feel as though i've been rolling my eyes a lot more the last five years. i don't think i laughed out loud once at the last pirates of the carribean movie...

gideon defoe (author of pirates! in an adventure with [whaling/communists/scientists])is wonderful enough to enjoy, pirates or no pirates. his footnotes are charming, the book with all its nice illustrated covers, witty and tounge-in-cheek-weird etchings on the insides of the covers, and hidden amusements... is a delight. it will be a dark day if gideon ever defers from communists and scientists and pairs the pirates! up with something like ninjas. you'd be surprised how many people haven't caught on that it's no longer a novelty.

still, i would marry him.

second:
met for coffee & conversation with jonathan at higher ground. at a very tensy island table in the middle of the floor, "entirely too small for my knees" (mysterious island mis-quote) and my mammoth, bound, nytimes sunday. jonathan, you are pretty awesome company.

it doesn't hurt he hates frankenstein too and happens to agree on what's the best Poe story, the cask of amatillo. i mean, of course, the poe that doesn't mudwrestle–to my knowedge.

i gave away
days between stations & our ecstatic days by steve erickson

i got
the robber by robert walser
coming through slaughter by michael ondaatje
the crying of lot 49 by thomas pynchon
and the object stares back: on the nature of seeing by james elkins

also, i have wound up with a pay from charles bonjour, la, bonjour by michel tremblay.

more house of leaves narny narny nar.

i'm about halfway through this house of leaves, and it has asserted itself as being rightfully on the Top Novels list.

my only complaintive observation at this half-point is:

i find myself skipping over the guy's novel about himself. everything down to his name (johnny) just smacks of chuck palahniuk. do i have qualms with palahniuk? since lullaby, yes. but previously, no. choke is one of my favourite novels, actually, and i enjoy the style here and there–but when the 'here' is interrupting the story about the hallway? i get prickly. listening to his dark and needy rampages; his spastic encounters with himself and the darkness; even his fantasies of the sexual nature are starting to pitch off into obnoxious. it reads more and more like some kind of "oh my god i'm peeing my pants with darkness!" (sometimes, literaly).

and it is only because the story interrupts the one with contrastingly mature characters who are concerned with the physical and not always going off on how much darkness they have inside themselves. if the hallway says that about them, it's a nice diffusion of angst. if it doesn't, all the better.

i skim over his hallucinations, his freakouts, and insert random, mental "yeah yeah, narnynarnynar"s. not because it isn't good writing. it is. but the character's issues are ones i feel i could get from a number of other sources.

we'll see how i feel at the end of this...

another thing about Danielewski

this guy is crazy. and smart as a whip.

can you think of another writer who has had a reading from his book become a Top 40 hit, however briefly? the video is below (the reading from House of Leaves). it's a bit creepy though, because it's his sister singing and covered in mud (his sister is Poe)

the strangest thing about it all is that the book is such a bizarre, experimental work --- the kind of thing that seems doomed to obscurity on a normal day.

new danielewski, etc

the "just-bought" pile:

Mark Z. Danielewski's new book Only Revolutions
Jorge Luis Borges Selected Non-Fictions
Eirin Moure Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person (translating Fernando Pessoa)

recently i read the massive 1085-page Pynchon novel Against the Day. I won't say anything about it here because I reviewed it for the Calgary Herald last Saturday. Subscribers can read the review online. It was glowing. Pynchon is a god.

(one thing i will say is that the novel concerns the Tunguska Event, which i am shocked more people do not know about)

post-bar bluestockings

some girls get laid or makeout with random people when they're drunk. i? i take people's books. i don't remember if i asked him, but when i opened my bag this morning, looking for my pill box full of glorious pain meds to suppress the hangover... and found a copy of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere...i assumed (read:hoped) .. i asked for it.

mark, if you are reading this, please let me know...

in other news, i am also terrified house of leaves will scar any future attempts at fiction.