Free Book!

Hey kids! Want a book? For free? How about the best book ever written in English? I'm speaking, of course, about Moby Dick.

Naysayers, cease your naying!

snark

i give to you, bits of the snarkiest review that the nytimes sunday book review has published in a long, long while:

Neither Here Nor There
Dead Man's Float by Nicholas Maes
Espianade, 438 pages, $22.95
Reviewed by the deliciously astute & bitey Thomas S. Woods

Third, and most important, Dead Man's Float ultimately sinks under the weight of artless writing. Few passages produce an "Alice Munro moment," that elusive aesthetic response that is immediate and visceral. Rather, the writing is strung from one end to the other with a daisy chain of cliches. Nathan refers repeatedly to himself as, "yours truly"; characters are "blind as bats"; they make a "beeline" here, then a "beeline" there, and have "delusions of grandeur."

...writing content that is derrivative, unsubtle and excessively laden with moral precepts that are not actually engaged by his narrative.

daisy chain! oh, mister thomas... that lemon you squeeze in your supple palms is my heart.

berger + music blog

i am having issues reading, lately. the most i get done, is standing in the kitchen, reading through the paper while coffee finishes up its delicious business inside the maker. i just haven't been paying attention- is it still 'percolating'? or is that a thing of the past. emulsifying? do coffee grounds really count as a liquid?

i am distracted, and staying out far too late. my roommate also happens to come home and, if i'm lucky, he gives me a handfull of minutes where he puts a meal together. as soon as he sits down, he turns on the tv. even if i'm using the tv to route my i-tunes through the speakers, etc. obnoxious? yeah, you bet it is. and distracting. if the tv is on, i'm not necessarily entertained, but i certainly don't get much work done. i usually just bury my face behind my laptop and squint for hours on end...

in light of eye-wrinkle concerns/graduation concerns/concerns about looking like an ass with my instructors... i dedicated my headachey morning to clearing out the studio and setting books on the corner of my desk so i can actually grab at them between silent bits... hide out in there to avoid the ongoing stream of crappy tv shows as is his preference.

anyhow.

so sometimes i just have warm little moments where reading something amazing suddenly springs up and runs extra mileage. two bits of information collide to form a happy well-faceted moment for me. as in the case of music review + john berger.

i browsed through this music blog amidst the usuals and stumbled on an entry which listed a song called Sodade

8. "Sodade" Cesario Evora
This is another heartbreaker written in a language I don't know. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to translate this one. It makes me feel an intense, but beautiful sadness. Though all the elements of the song obviously work together and depend on one another, my two favorite parts are the very soft sounding shakers present throughout the song, and (of course) Cesario Evora's voice. For some reason, this is a song I enjoy very much in summer.

... immediately i jump to one of my favourite excerpts from john berger's Here is Where We Meet.

Lisboetas often talk of a feeling, a mood, which they call saudade, usually translated as nostalgia, which is incorrect. Nostalgia implies a comfort, even an indolence such as Lisboa has never enjoyed. Vienna is the capital of nostalgia. This city is still, and has always been, buffeted by too many winds to be nostalgic.

Saudade, I decided as I drank my second coffee and watched a drunk's hands carefully arranging the accurate story he was telling as if it were a pile of envelopes, saudade was the feeling of fury at having to hear the words too late pronounced too calmly.

what to say, other than it's a rare and lovely experience when music and favourite books compliment each other so "directly". especially when it's berger... you know how i am about that man.

Chandler Brossard’s Over the Rainbow? Hardly (collected short seizues)

Recommended: nytimes sunday book review - many moon ago
Contains short story collections: the chimney sweep comes clean ; dirty books for little folks; raging joys, sublime violations; postcards: don’t you just wish you were here! ; closing the gap ; traditionally a place of banishment; shifty sacred songs

Chandler Brossard (1922-)

Consider me shocked and astounded to find another beat writer, only this time, a beat writer who’s still kicking. Kicking and not at all American. I have read neither of his “earliest beat novels” Who Walk in Darkness & The Bold Saboteurs but I would recommend them to you any day with very little hesitation.

You could accuse me of being biased to his writing, because a few of the stories were read under the unusual circumstance of being read a) out loud, b) by a boy with big eyes and really adorable side-cheek wrinkles that crop up when he grins, and c) being read in my favourite place in the universe: Bed. Snuggled up to my nose in blankets.

Don't get ideas... They aren’t romantic stories; they aren’t touching stories; they are on the contrary, sordid, frisky little minxes of tales with gutter-mouth elaborations, side-comments thrown smarmily into parenthetical asides, and raging inappropriateness busting out of every plot. Also busting out of every plot? Lines that I want to use everywhere, but probably won’t have any opportunity…

I think I’ll give you kids a sampling and if you don’t want to borrow this one from me, I am putting our friendship, as it is, on probation. Just so’s you know.

The Chimney Sweep Comes Clean:

(Summon up, if you dare, the fetid insolence of steaming sprouts.)

[that was the ending. Aren’t I a vicious spoiler…yes, well, here is the beginning…]

“The bird in the bed-sit next door blows her nose all the time. Is it a flooding, virus-victimized nose she is dealing with? A nose that should be delivered up to hydraulic engineers? Does she have a secret and unresolved thing with it? (A love of one’s nose, in other words.) Or is she trying to communicate with me through our shared walls and doors?

I lean toward the final suggestion, if you will permit me. I have examined her nose, at a thwarted distance, of course, and I can assure that: 1) it is dry as a bone; and 2) there is not a single sign of vice or corruption to it. Oh, it’s had its moments, I’m sure, as what nose hasn’t? But as for programmatic license, absolutely not.

Dear lord! There she goes again. She’s going to deviate her septum at this rate. And do you know what time it is? Two-thirty in the morning. She knows that I’m in bed, with not a stitch on. And I can tell you where she is: standing with her head against the wall that separates us. What exactly is she telling me? Is she waiting for me to make some delicate physical sounds in response? Shall I cough? Sneeze? Scratch on the wall like a starving mouse eating through eternity?”

The “peeker under perfectly decent scabs” that he is, he breaks down the door and engages in odd sexual congress with her on the floor, and simultaneously form an “appreciation” of Yorkshire pudding and brussel sprouts.

“Brussel sprouts and Yorkshire pudding can be loads of fun, it turns out, but only if you’re getting laid while eating them. Which is what happened, give or take a false notion or two.”

And possibly my favouite quote of the entire book:

“All I know is this: blowing one’s nose is one thing, but having it blown is something else again.”


Stories in Chimney Sweep tend to range from the obscene to the curious (but I can only speak for myself) to the familiar. Such as the brief bit about having his food stolen by his roommates.

“'vermin! Secret agents from another stomch! Assassins of gluttony! Stop stealing my bloody food. '

I pasted this perfectly understandable statememnt onto the door of the white refrigerator. Then I ate three pork chops I’d been saving for two future meals. For reasons thata are basically self-explanatory (if they are anything at all)"


“I stand weeping amidst the flagrant crumbs of their toast orgy.”

[Yes, well, I think we’ve all been there…]

Dirty Books for Little Folks:

Hansel ad Gretel: why should sleeping dogs be permitted to go on lying?
[...to let you know how silly/disturbing this gets...]

They had been into sibling incest fot a long time, ever since they had learned that their little friend Oedipus , who lived down the block and who knew a good thing when he saw it, was plowing his mother. “

…Hansel and Gretel were celebrating their little victory with a big joint of Lebanese red.
“Let’s play rape tonight” said Gretel, who was really getting turned on by the hash.
“OK,” said Hansel, letting out a little smoke. “I’ll be Nigger Jim and you can be Tricia Nixon."

[And in all the obscenity and spunk, a few more sensitive examples of craftsmanship…]

Postcards...:
[extremely brief descriptions of “towns”]

Vanishing Point, Florida:
Distance means nothing here. It is a nostalgic artifact.
“We know a lot more about density here than we’re going to let on,” the town mayor has said on more than one occasion.
Children race around the streets as though carrying secrets far beyond their years.
Lots of old-timers while away the daylight hours standing on the bluff staring off into infinity. That’s what it looks like anyway. They’re not fooling anybody. Actually, they’re trying to dope the past.
There is no unemployment problem here. “That’s our business,” folks will answer when questioned.

Lying Low, Virginia
1.Here in Lying Low the apples torture Newton by falling diagonally.
2.Children play cricket with crickets.
3.Boys say to girls, “I want to take your cherry and jump into a pit.” (Hence the town passion is cherry pit jam)
4.The traffic cop is a reformed skydiver and is called Our Boy Bunky the Muffler Diver.

Shifty Sacred Songs:
[a collection of breakdowns of word-entities like “silence” “sadness” “grief”…]

“Sadness:
One thing you’ve got to say for sadness. You don’t have to dress for it. Never.“

The New Kid

Ah yes, the awkward greeting of the new guy. More awkward still, the new guy is rather green to this world of "blogging." Nevertheless, dear reader, our gentle correspondent has been known to read a book or two in his day, and perhaps may have some interesting comments to add to your discussion about the book learnin'.

Firstly, please don't think me a gate-crashing blogger: I was asked to join by Rhianna. So if my posts are boring or stupid, you can blame her.

Perhaps the best introduction would be a quick run-down of the books I have been holding in front of my face recently:

Grief Lessons by Anne Carson: translations of four plays by Euripides. If you like your classical Greek tragedies on the slightly more obscure side, especially those that lack any kind of closure or catharsis, this is a must-read. I quite like Carson's poetry, and she can be a good introduction to other poets like Sappho. If you're like me, and you prefer the Hercules that kills his family in a god-induced madness, rather than the conflict-free Hercules of Saturday morning cartoons and Disney movies, then you'll find the first play in the book, "Herakles", to be especially interesting. (I guess that should be a spoiler-alert)

Diamond Grill by Fred Wah: this is the tenth anniversary of Wah's collection of short fragments about his father and the cafe he owned. To be honest, a lot of Wah's poetry to me feels rather self-indulgent at times, but I really enjoyed this book, his most accessible collection by far. Wah describes this book as a biotext, a different way of thinking about the memoir that isn't bogged down in the expectations of life-writing and autobiography. Not exactly short stories, these prose fragments (or prose poems, if you prefer) add up to a very unified narrative, even though Wah is obviously not writing a traditional linear story. The afterword, added for the new edition, is an essay by Wah about the idea of biotexts, and, despite being quite interesting with ideas similar to those in his Faking It book, it felt like it was tacked on by Wah as a way of holding up his academic street cred. I think he has some reservations about writing in a more accessible way (compared to his poetry, in general). Anyway, small quibble. On a non-literary note, my grandparents knew Fred Wah's uncle, who ran a cafe in Swift Current, Saskatchewan. And if that doesn't make you want to read this book, nothing will.

The Mother Tongue: English and how it got that way by Bill Bryson: this is an old one by Bryson, and I must point out that the first time I was introduced to his work (a friend promised me I would "love" his writing), I couldn't stand him. I did enjoy this book, however, a collection of the interesting and quirky facts about English and language in general. The only strange part of this book is reading all of Bryson's stats: seventeen-year-old population numbers and references to the Soviet Union. Out-of-date facts aside, this book succeeds in making me rethink my hatred of Bill Bryson.

The Englishman's Boy by Guy Vanderhaeghe: I avoided reading this book for many years, mostly because it was so popular. I'm not sure why I did this, because it's a great book. My general attitude is to steer clear of what other people seem to really like, but perhaps I should rethink this.

Other books on the go:
The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgeman (Not only does this book have the funniest cover in the history of publishing, it is quite amusing on the inside as well. My favourite part so far: the list of seven hundred hobo names)
Moy Sand and Gravel by Paul Muldoon
The Last Crossing by Guy Vanderhaeghe
Earth after Rain by Sherri Benning
The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
Metamorphoses by Ovid (trans. by Allen Mandelbaum)

Well, that's all I will say for now. You may proceed in making fun of the new guy.

hark! a resolution

Just in case you want to know, my New Year's resolution has been to buy and read Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace.

In case you don't know what it is, here is a blurb from when it was first published.

"IF YOU BELIEVE the hype, David Foster Wallace is about to be crowned the
next heavyweight of American fiction. And the accolade is probably deserved.
At the very least, "Infinite Jest," his new, 1,079-page novel (including 90
pages devoted to esoteric endnotes), gives a whole new twist to the word
"infinite." This huge volume will prop open even a castle's gates.
Of course, it's exhausting to read such a mega-book. This is the age of the
sound bite. But diving into the riches of "Infinite Jest" is also an
exhilarating, breathtaking experience. This book teems with so much life and
death, so much hilarity and pain, so much gusto in the face of despair that
one cheers for the future of our literature. "

Having only read short stories of his in the past ("The Girl with Curious Hair" being a lovely collection) I've been a little intimidated by the length and esoterica. But I shall triumph!

After all, who better to tackle the biggest and fattest of novels?

I will also read House of Leaves.