circular breathing

King of the Badgers by Philip Hensher

2012-02-08T10:40:00.002-05:00

A novel about privacy, society, obsession and civility. A young girl in a small town in western England is abducted. First everyone is suspected, and then, as the media horde loses interest, Hensher's lens moves in on the private lives of the town's citizen. Aint nobody squeaky clean

I enjoyed Hensher's The Northern Clemencies but that did not prepare me for this. The swerve from a creepy-Church-of-Dead-Girls-suspense novel to full boxer-bunching gay orgies was unnerving. But I stuck with it!

A Village Life by Louise Gluck and Chronic by D.A. Powell

2012-02-04T09:18:00.004-05:00

First Snow
by Louise Gluck

Like a child, the earth's going to sleep,
or so the story goes.

But I'm not tired, it says.
And the mother says, You may not be tired but I'm tired-

You can see it in her face, everyone can.
So the snow has to fall, sleep has to come.
Because the mother's sick to death of her life
and needs silence.

This poem (for Gluck's very quiet, extraordinarily graceful volume of poems) had resonance for me. I've been struggling for some time over a poem for my very sick mother:

The Subjunctive Blues

by Sean Enright

If should could be finale of would…

We hiked on that sudden warming February day:
girls shrieking in the woods suddenly full of people,
dog splashdowns into the icy low creek,
plastic trash caught in fallen branches,
golden pools of thick scum-bubbles,
everything still dead, still completely gone, dull brown.

Ame spotted the severed foreleg of a deer
draped across a low branch,
we all circled back to look,
the white bone at the haunch showing,
the hoof and lower leg still covered with fur,
and I kept looking for other remnants as we walked back;

winter day that was the last moment of that death
before life was to begin again,
and I thought of the opposite,
the last moment of life, and you were in my mind
as you always have been this past year
who would never walk these woods again,
will essentially never walk anywhere again,

except little steps you watch from above
without any connection to your feet
this is ridiculous 1 2 3 4
and we put it to music take a little one step
two step three step come a little closer please
learning forward until something primitive in your mind
catches and your hips startle, knees quiver

and feet inch forward
always with your forehead down, searching for those steps
that got away, giving you an attitude of shame,
so cowed by your ordeal, don’t want to be seen,
and still it has not broken you; little pitfalls

of snowdrops seen here and there
through the transparent woods,
their faint sick antiseptic smell, but still,
born again, never again to die, until the next time,
free to live late winter long
like a crown on a corpse.

My poem first came after the hike with my family, and recalling this poem by Wordsworth:

To A Snowdrop
by William Wordsworth

LONE Flower, hemmed in with snows and white as they
But hardier far, once more I see thee bend
Thy forehead, as if fearful to offend,
Like an unbidden guest. Though day by day,
Storms, sallying from the mountain-tops, waylay
The rising sun, and on the plains descend;
Yet art thou welcome, welcome as a friend
Whose zeal outruns his promise! Blue-eyed May
Shall soon behold this border thickly set
With bright jonquils, their odours lavishing
On the soft west-wind and his frolic peers;
Nor will I then thy modest grace forget,
Chaste Snowdrop, venturous harbinger of Spring,
And pensive monitor of fleeting years!

Chronic, poems by D. A. Powell, is more inscrutable to me, but I'm drawn to the poems, and titles, particularly the title "meditating upon the meaning of the line 'clams on the halfshell and rollerskates' in the song good times by chic."

A Kind of Loving by Stan Barstow

2012-01-25T10:16:00.003-05:00

Beautiful 1960 British novel, about a working class young man who falls in love and suffers the usual dire consequences. There is a truthfulness and a familiarity about Barstow's narrator voice (the young man's voice) that is refreshing and seems unusual for that particular moment in pre-sexual-revolution Britain.

Astounding use of northern England slang, too, dozens of words and phrases I'd never seen before, like "take a butcher's" (to look at).

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

2012-01-04T11:05:00.002-05:00

The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson

2012-01-04T11:05:00.001-05:00

This is Not Your City: Stories by Caitlin Horrocks

2012-01-04T11:00:00.002-05:00

Very beautiful stories. The first one a strange, second-person singular narration. The second about a rural girl caring for her 40ish mother crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, and the lonely girl befriends a philosophical Amish young woman: story is in the form of a make-up term paper to earn her high school equivalency.

Orientation and Other Stories by Daniel Orozco

2012-01-04T10:59:00.000-05:00

We the Animals by Justin Torres

2011-12-22T08:55:00.000-05:00

Quarantine by Jim Crace

2011-12-17T21:27:00.001-05:00

Inscrutable.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

2011-12-17T21:26:00.001-05:00

Too scrutable. I remember 1982 and English majors and college, if only through my cave paintings from the time. These undergraduates are wholly too adult and perfectly-formed neurotics to be realistic.

Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin

2011-11-29T10:37:00.003-05:00

A little bloodless so far. I loved Tomalin's Mrs. Jordan's Profession, but this seems much more subdued.

Pym by Mat Johnson

2011-11-29T10:37:00.001-05:00

Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta

2011-11-29T10:35:00.001-05:00

I threw it across the room halfway through. Probably better than that, but I have no patience for novels about rock music. This one seems particularly false to it.

Turn of Mind by Alice LePlante

2011-11-20T11:25:00.003-05:00

The initial conceit of the novel -- that a distinguished, brilliant orthopedic surgeon specializing in hand surgery now suffers from alzheimers and assorted dementia and can no longer remember clearly whether or not she did or did not kill her best friend (who was found with four fingers severed from her hand) who lives three houses down -- is great. But it suffers in execution, as credulity is strained in accepting an effecting, detailed first-person narration spanning 60 years by someone with memory problems. However, the whodunit plot begins to fade in importance as the narrator's world becomes increasingly facetted and simultaneously dim. As a portrait of a mind giving its own eulogy, the books is alive and ferocious.

Zone One by Colson Whitehead

2011-11-16T14:18:00.003-05:00

A vision of an apocalyptic plague-infested New York City, as narrated by Whitehead's extremely intelligent narrative voice, as peopled by "Mark Spitz," a mediocre man try to live in a world with no future. Employed as a civilian "sweeper" to rid lower Manhattan of plague-infected humans-turned-cannibal, Spit mediates on his own very average pre-plague existence and longs for a return to its normalcy. Or does he? He also seems to hate his past, a little: as a young man, he was waiting for the future to be better. Spooky, mesmerizing, stunning book. First one of his books I've finished.

Extrememly Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

2011-11-16T14:17:00.000-05:00

Couldn't get traction, even after 100 pages. Liked the pages with one word or one sentence, or pictures. They went by fast.

A Confederacy of Dunces

2011-11-13T12:32:00.004-05:00

I used a recent trip to New Orleans as occasion to re-read one of my favorite books of all time, A Confederacy of dunces by John Kennedy Toole, written in the late 1960s and then abandoned after a large New York publishing house sat on the manuscript after several revisions, and Toole then committed suicide in 1969. His mother lugged the manuscript to Walker Percy at Loyola University in New Orleans, who had published quickly after reading it, and the novel won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

A formative book for me, having read it (in all its surrounding mystique and legend and romance) shortly after it was published. I'd never re-read it, though: it was one of those books that affected me so strongly I shrugged off any impulse to try to re-create that first wondrous reading.

Since then, a cottage industry has developed around the book, its author, its origins. There is a memoir (Ken and Thelma by Joel Fletcher), a biography (Ignatius Rising by Rene Nevils), a theatrical piece, statues in New Orleans, blogs dedicated to the New Orleans streets and alleys and buildings where the book takes place, even a movie made of Neon Bible, a slim novel written by Toole as a teenager. Must search out of all of it.

For re-reading the book, mostly in New Orleans, was a delight. It is a satire of the best sort -- no one escapes the sword. Swiftian in its outrage, Rabeleisian in its low comedy, Confederacy sends up communism, urban development, the Renaissance, the 20th century, poor Southern whites, poor Southern Black, homosexuals, college campuses. There is an amazing sub-plot where Ignatius enlists the help of a gay man from the French Quarter, hoping to infiltrate the US military (and thereafter, armed forces around the world) with homosexuals, and have them take over and spend all the time and effort currently spend on war, on celebrations and fashion. The Peace Movement! Sort of an inversion of Dont Ask Don't Tell.

In some ways too, the book is almost tragic, as Ignatius' mother plots to have him committed to a mental institution at the end of the story, only to have Ignatius barely escape when his old college girlfriend Myrna Minkoff (herself a genius satirical caricature of feminism, free love, radical politics, and Jewishness) shows up and spirits him away in her car back to New York City.

There is Jones, the black janitor/doorman at the Night of Joy bar in the French Quarter. He is the closest thing to a hero in the novel.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

2011-11-01T13:02:00.004-04:00

A terribly sad book about stoicism and impossible romance. Very different this time around, reading it: a difference of over 30 years, and my empathies with the book seemed to have enjoyed polar reversals. Now it does matter to me, Jake's great unnamed malady that sidelines him in his life.. Jake's stoicism and refusal to dwell on his own feelings is striking. Brett seems clownish and a little sluttish.

"It's an honest face. It's a face any woman would be safe with."
"She'd never seen it."
"She should have. All women should see it. It's a face that ought to be thrown on every screen in the country. Every woman ought to be given a copy of this face as she leaves the altar. Mothers should tell their daughters about this face. My son" - he pointed the razor at me-"go west with this face and grow up with the country."
He ducked down to the bowl, rinsed his face with cold water, put on some alcohol, and then looked himself carefully in the glass, pulling down his long upper lip.
"My God!" he said, "isn't it an awful face?"

Caffeine puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave.

It was like certain dinners I remember from the way. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.

Then Everything Changed by Jeff Greenfield

2011-11-01T12:48:00.000-04:00

Walking to Hollywood by Will Self

2011-10-14T15:17:00.005-04:00

Wondrous to me at first, as I had paid no attention to it when it came into, and so read it as fiction. Which it is apparently not. Then wondrously incomprehensible. And then just incomprehensible. Had read the New Yorker interview when Will Self had talked about walking from Kennedy Airpot into Manhattan. Having recently begun taking hour-long walks in the afternoon, it's a subject of interest to me. But Self's prose is so playful and erudite and self-reflecting that I threw down the book in disgust not even halfway through.

Last Orders by Graham Swift

2011-10-14T15:16:00.001-04:00

Marvelous Pinter-esque, multiple-POV novel from the author of Waterland.

Jesus, My Father, The CIA, and Me by Ian Morgan Cron

2011-10-14T15:12:00.001-04:00

Was so looking forward to this. Couldn't get through fifteen pages. Weak, sappy, cliched prose.

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

2011-10-06T16:31:00.003-04:00

Andromeda Strain meets The Passage meets Lord of the Flies meets Heart of Darkness meets Apocalypse Now.

Skylark by Dezso Kosztolanyi

2011-10-03T14:11:00.000-04:00

The Third Reich by Robert Bolano

2011-09-30T09:24:00.009-04:00

An 1989 manuscript by Robert Bolano, discovered after his death, and scheduled for release in December 2011. (The Paris Review serially published the novel beginning early in 2011.) Sort of a Borges-meets-Raymond Chandler story set on the Costa Brava in Spain. Noted war-game champion Udo Berger vacations with his girlfriend Ingeborg at a small beachside resort where he spend childhood summers. They meet another couple, Charly and Hanna, and several locals: the Wolf, the Lamb, and most crucially, El Quemado (in Spanish, "burned" or "burned out" or simply "tanned"), a burn victim who runs a pedal-boat service on the beach.

There is much drunkenness, idleness and nighttime clubbing. Berger spends much of his time in the hotel room, staring at his favorite war-game, The Third Reich, which he is supposed to be writing an article on for a big industry publication. He begins pursuing Elsa, the owner of the hotel, a woman he remembers from his childhood, who is later revealed to be caring for her terminally-ill husband in another room in the hotel.

Charly, a bit of a wild man, disappears out at sea while wind-surfing. Berger begins an intense session of The Third Reich with El Quemado, a pathetic figure with severe burn scars, a pedal-boat vendor who lives beneath the "fortress" of pedal-boats he builds each night when the day's work is done. Ingeborg and Hanna return to Stuggart, but Berger stays on, obsessed with his war-game, waiting for Charly's body to be found, and half-enmeshed in a never-consummated romance with Elsa.

It's a Borgesian novel in that it circles obsessively from Berger's single point of view: one thinks variously that Berger is paranoid, paranormal, crippled by nostalgia and trapped by childhood, a violent man, a Nazi-glorifier, in that the story about a game soon becomes actually playing the game and ends up possibly not a game at all, as Berger slowly loses position and strength in the game he is playing with El Quemado (Berger is Germany, El Quemado is the Allies) and ends up on the verge of losing and worrying that El Quemado will demands Berger's own life as a reward. Berger has long, vivid dreams that blur into his waking: was it all imagined, or was some of it real?

It's Chandler in its seedy coastal town mystery of Who Killed Charly? and Where's the Body? Everyone is suspected, nothing is proved.

It's certainly a moody little book: dark and creepy. Berger is not the most reliable narrator, one wonders if he is up to something besides his crippling obsessions and passiveness. The hotel and the local beaches and bars are creepy, filled with lively, chattering passionate drifters. Certainly Bolano is discovering some of the motifs and styles he will later use to much stronger effect.

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

2011-09-27T10:28:00.000-04:00

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

2011-09-27T10:23:00.002-04:00

Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies—my only talent—smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall—on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.

Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian fields like a mistral.

For another thing, it is not open to me even to be edifying, since the time is later than his, much too late to edify or do much of anything except plant a foot in the right place as the opportunity presents itself -- if indeed asskicking is properly distinquished from edification.

God on the Rocks by Jane Gardham

2011-09-15T10:47:00.001-04:00

Not her best, but still pretty good. The way exposition is handled -- by delay, third-peson reporting, and surprise -- is always deft.

Compass Rose by John Casey

2011-08-18T11:25:00.001-04:00

Interesting "sequel" to Spartina.

The Life You Save May Be Your Own by Paul Elie

2011-08-18T11:24:00.005-04:00

So far the Thomas Merton material is the most interesting to me.

As a child, Flannery O'Connor wrote books which she saw "as too old for children and too young for grown-ups."

In 1949, when gravediggers in Queens went on strike for higher wages, Cardinal Spellman "ordered seminarians to dig the graves in their stead and refused to negotiate, calling the workers Communists in the press."

O'Connor on Catholic readers: "You can't shut them up before a thing comes out but you can look forward to a long mortified silence afterwards."

Merton: "There is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question."

What, then, was the Catholic Worker? "We are a group of people living together under one roof," she [Day] declared.

Whereas poverty in the Depression had brought people together in a great convergence of need and will, poverty in postwar America divided them from one another.

WP on JFK: The reason he was a great man was that his derisiveness kept pace with his brilliance and his beauty and his love of country. He is the only public man I have ever believed. This is because no man now is believable unless he is derisive.

WP on writer's block: "I am in low estate," Percy told Foote... "But it won't go, I am hung up, alas oh hopelessly hung up, sitting in front of my paper at 9:05 AM and growing sleepier by the minute. Fresh out of malice, piss, the love of God, hatred of things as they are, or whatever it takes, which I don't have."

Merton: "He answers again with his own experience, which is that God is a being to be known, not a problem to be solved, "and we who live the contemplative life have learned by experience that one cannot know God as long as one seeks to solve 'the problem of God.' To seek to solve the problem of God is to seek to see one's own eyes."

The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O'Connor

2011-08-18T11:22:00.001-04:00

You can't get any poorer than dead.

Interesting as her second, and last novel. But not nearly as interesting as Wise Blood, her first, or the mature stories. The characters are familiar: Francis Marion Tarwater, the orphan raised in the woods by his grandfather, Francis's city-bred uncle Rayber and his brain-damaged son. Orphan makes for city after grandfather drops dead, orphan is torn between uncle's atheism and his grandfather's rabid evangelism, is tormented by a "shadow self" taunting him that he must go and finish his grandfather's work, by baptizing his cousin.

O'Connor's familiar metaphors and allegories are extended, repeated and embellished almost to the point of exhaustion. The plot is simple and not exciting. Worst of all, the characters in almost all instances lack the black comic power of her earlier creations.

You Are Not A Stranger Here by Adam Haslett

2011-08-15T09:10:00.000-04:00

Guests of the Nation by Frank O'Connor

2011-08-10T17:49:00.001-04:00

In the Skinf of a Lion by Michael Ojdaatje

2011-08-10T17:47:00.001-04:00

Not so much. Characters go from being speechless backwoods Canadians to heavy-breathing poetic wunderkinds in the space of a chapter.

Howard's End by E. M. Forster

2011-08-04T09:44:00.005-04:00

Well, it is odd and sad that our minds should be such seed-beds, and we without power to choose the seed. But man is an odd, sad creature as yet, intent on pilfering the earth, and heedless of the growths within himself. He cannot be bored about psychology. he leaves it to the specialist, which is as if she should leave his dinner to be eaten by a steam-engine. He cannot be bothered to digest his own soul.

Still a beautiful, favorite novel, but it seemed a bit doughy this time around, thick with social commentary, narrator asides and the anthropomorphisms of the endless English countryside. Still the plot in the last quarter of the book unwinds with a relentless psychological urgency, as one of the Schlegels' favorite maxims becomes real: Places are more important than people.

"Because a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong for ever," she [Margaret] said. "This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilization that won't be a movement, because it will rest on the earth. All the signs are against it now, but I can't help hoping, and very early in the morning in the garden I feel that our house is the future as well as the past."

Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje

2011-08-04T09:41:00.003-04:00

I strugged with this novel. The fractured narrative of The English Patient here seems artificial, the plot-line unlikely.

I did like the description of the Ceylonese "eye-painter" whom the forensic team enlists to help them identify their Sailor corpse. And I liked the Van Morrison shout out. But that hardly seems enough.

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

2011-07-18T22:26:00.001-04:00

Emily Alone, Stewart O'Nan

2011-07-18T22:25:00.000-04:00

Washington Rules by Andrew Bacevich

2011-07-18T22:24:00.000-04:00

The House of Tomorrow

2011-07-12T20:35:00.000-04:00

Eh.

The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier

2011-06-27T09:30:00.004-04:00

Wacky book. Little "Blindness" by Jose Saramango, little "Cloud Atlas" by David Mitchell, a little sprinking of sci fi. Not sure I get it, but I read it avidly, wonderingly. What I worried was just going to be a runaway case of "magic realism" turned out to be a beautifully-observed, taut series of highly-detailed character sketches.

About the passage of a couple's "love journal" among several disparate people, at a time when the Earth has experienced a strange occurence, "The Illumnination" as it comes to be called, when all human physical pain is accompanied by a bright light shining from the pain's source.

Certainly the novel is about the meaning of pain, the sources of pain, the solution to pain, the differences between private and public pain, and it extends these philosophical questions by erasing the distinction between private and public pain.

A woman keeps a journal where she writes down daily the love notes her husband unfailingly leaves for her. When the wife dies in the hospital after a car accident where her husband also injured, the journal is taken home by the woman in the next hospital bed, who has cut her hand opening a nasty package from her ex-husband containing her alimony check.

The only real "plot" in the novel is the movement of the journal from one character to the next, its effect on each character.

The husband survives his injures, and traces the journals disappearance. He appears at the woman's doorway and demands the journal back. The man, a photojournalist, begins taking pictures of the strange light shows every human's body now makes, shining at the edge of any pain they feel. He photographs a group of high school "cutters," who slice themselves with knives.

Then a little boy, a neighbor of the man's, who suffers from a strange psychological "silence," steals the book, after peeking through the man's window and seeing that for him, an almost-autistic presence who much prefers things to people, the journal itself glows with all the pain of the man's memory of his wife.

The boy passes the journal on to a man who comes to his door to distribute Christian evangelical material. The man carries the journal around the country, and the world, as his mission continues. The novel veers forty years into the future to the man's death. He does observe over that generous span of time that "The Illumination" has done nothing to save or even improve the world: "Still they [children) grew into their destructiveness," he thinks, "and still they learned whose hurt to assuage and whose to disregard, and still there were soldiers enough for all the armies of the world."

Next the journal goes to successful fiction writer, suffering during a speaking tour from an assortment of cancer sores and inner mouth injuries that won't heal. Her son back at home trades for the journal from a street-person bookseller.

She begins communicating with her dead fiancee by leaving notes in cracks in the ground, and eventually tearing pages out of the journal and sticking them in the ground. The fiance replies. In the final chapter, via flashback, the story of how the indigent bookseller got the journal takes place.

Galore by Michael Crummey

2011-06-27T09:29:00.001-04:00

There was a man who did Esther wrong. a horny, social-climbing tenor with busy hands who swore his undying love to her. He practiced his scales with his face between her legs, those muffled notes rising through her bones to strike in her head like pleasure's hammer. His father was German, his mother Italian, and he had confused the arts of love and war in his upbringing. He left her for a Frenchwoman with the breasts of a ten-year-old and a five-octave range.

The Canadian One Hundred Years of Solitude, Galore follows two Newfoundland fishing families over 2oo years of their intertwined, combative history, the family of Patick Devine and his wife, "Devine's Widow," and their antagonists, King-Me Sellers and his wife Selina.

The chart of the family tree at the beginning of the book gets as heavily-referenced as the one in Marquez's masterpiece. There is Judah on the Devine side, who is hacked out of a beached whale by Devine's Widow, whom King-Me Sellers believes to be a witch. The novel ends with Judah's great-grandson Abel returning to the inside of a whale.

The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction

2011-06-27T09:28:00.001-04:00

What happened to science fiction writing? It got lost when everything turned out to be true.

Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

2011-06-27T09:14:00.005-04:00

In which Philip Marlowe gets locked up in a "cure house," strapped to a bed, pumped full of truth serum, and liberates himself by conking his guard on the head with a mattress spring. Among other things.

"You're so marvelous," she said. "So brave, so detemined and you work for so little money. Everybody bats you over the head and chokes you and smacks your jaw and fills you with morphine, but you just keep right on hitting between tackled and end until they're all worn out. What makes you so wonderful?"
"Go on," I growled. "Spill it."
Ann Riordan said thoughtfully, "I'd like to be kissed, damn you!"

There's a giant thug named Moose Malloy. There's a massive Hollywood Indian named Second Planting. There's a naive Bay City detective Marlowe renames "Hemingway" --"it's because you keep saying the same thing over and over." There's another giant, this time a gentle good guy, named Red Norgaard who takes Marlowe out to a gambling ship in the harbor.

From The Big Sleep: Marlowe's office suite contains "five green filing cases, three of them full of California climate."

The King is Alive

2011-06-19T11:04:00.003-04:00

Fascinating "version" of Shakespeare, suggested to me by a friend when I trumpeted that Throne of Blood by Kurosawa was the best non-Shakespeare Shakespeare play I'd ever seen. A group of tourists on a safari bus in Africa decide to stage a version of King Lear as they wait for rescue. Relationships break down, adultery and violence rages, all against a bleak Saharan backdrop and "narrated" by an elderly African man who watches the tourists disintegrate and comments on them. Jennifer Jason Leigh appears, among others.

Part of the Dogme 95 avant-garde filmmaking movement, whose rules known as the Vow of of Chastity are:

Filming must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in. If a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found.
The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. Music must not be used unless it occurs within the scene being filmed, i.e., diegetic.
The camera must be a hand-held camera. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted. The film must not take place where the camera is standing; filming must take place where the action takes place.
The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable (if there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera).
Optical work and filters are forbidden.
The film must not contain superficial action (murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)
Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden (that is to say that the film takes place here and now).
Genre movies are not acceptable.
The film format must be Academy 35 mm.
The director must not be credited.

Trailer is here.

The thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell

2011-06-19T11:00:00.000-04:00

You Think That's Bad stories by Jim Shepard

2011-06-07T11:43:00.001-04:00

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

2011-06-04T11:43:00.005-04:00

His unfinished final novel. Sad, depressing, brilliant. Endlessly self-conscious (even about self-consciousness), one feels Wallace creating an unfinishable tapestry that he's not able to complete. "I'm not putting this very well" is one narrator's ("Irrelevant" Chris Fagle) repeated motif.

The afterword and Notes sections give more plot information than one gets in the entire novel, so he was not very far along, 500+ pages notwithstanding. In the Notes, one finds out Wallace's plan for a Pynchon Gravity's Rainbow-like twist, where the IRS plans to gather a group of unusual workers -- some with psychic powers, some with bloodless staggering logical and intellectual abilities -- in order to maximize revenue.

It's sad because it's clearly unfinished. The organization of the material was largely done by the editor, and it's raggedy in places and too thick in others.

The several extended pieces all point to different hefts the novel might have fulfilled had Wallace finished it: the chapter that appeared in The New Yorker as the story "Backbone," about a boy training himself to lick his entire body, the 100 page high school/college memoir by "Irrelevant" Chris Fagle," the brutal 60-page late chapter IRS staff Happy Hour conversation between emotionless and uber-logical Drinian and foxy former-cutter Rand, where she opens up to him about falling in love with her husband.

Along the way, there's detailed history of the IRS, a lush, brand-named 1970s setting that sets the decade in stone, another paen to Pynchon in a capsule history of 1960s drug use, and several mesmerizing IRS worker characters who are brilliantly sketched but who never quite assume their rightful place in the narrative thrust: Steyck, the manger who as a boy is so nice and kind and fairminded he literally drives those around him to violence, Cusk, who in high school develops an unusually heavy sweating problem, Sylvanshire, a "fact psychic" who infers facts out of thin air about the history and background of people he meets, a lonely mistreated girl with psychotic tendences who has been brought up by her mother in a series of trailer parks, the author/narrator "David Foster Wallace" who is constantly arriving for his first day at the IRS Examining Center in Peoria, IL.

"The Pale King" is mentioned briefly as one of the IRS examiners' "desk names," where they have the option of a nameplate for their desks that is not their real name.

"It is the key to modern life: If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish."

"Enduring tedium over real time in a confined place is what real courage is."

"Squeezing my shoes."

The Art of Recklessness by Dean Young

2011-06-04T11:41:00.003-04:00

A manifesto on poetry and art by one of my favorite recent poets.

The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power by Robert A. Caro

2011-06-03T20:48:00.004-04:00

The caption for the photo to the left (third in a series) is: Johnson at the depot to return to Washington as a Congressman. A poignant scene, given the father-son relationship. He walked alongside his mother, ahead of his father, who could not keep up, and was aboard before his father arrived. Sam started to climb up, Lyndon bent down: father and son kissed.

The Empty Family by Colm Toibin

2011-06-03T20:47:00.000-04:00

God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens

2011-05-19T21:59:00.001-04:00

Driving on the Rim by Thomas McGuane

2011-05-19T21:56:00.002-04:00

Little too wooly for me. Starts out well, and lots of funny stuff along the way, but halfway through he starts saying too much, which is just not like McGuane at his best.

Look at Me by Jennifer Egan

2011-05-04T14:20:00.000-04:00

Just Kids by Patti Smith

2011-04-27T20:00:00.002-04:00

Such charm at the start of this rich memoir of Patti Smith's great friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, form when they were nobodies at all to when they were the avant of the avant garde of New York City, but it weakens haflway through as Patti Smith's pretentions take over.

She knew (and to believe her, almost created) Mapplethorpe, Sam Shepard, Janis Joplin, and a host of other key 1960s counterculture heroes.

Yet who is she? Where are the poems? Her references to herself are jump-cut, as if she learned everything the moment someone else eventually famous affirmed it for her.

His Illegal Self by Peter Carey

2011-04-24T12:08:00.002-04:00

Not worth the effort. The prose is elusive, allusive, complex, but the story of an abandoned child of famous 1960s radicals, and the hippy woman who pretends she is his mother, does not fit with the prose. I threw it aside. I didn't have time to struggle with it anymore. Why does one give up one book in particular, and yet put up with the others that might be lesser literary achievements?

Penelope by Enda Walsh

2011-04-16T15:29:00.001-04:00

Wow, what a thing this play is! A 90 minute crucible of poetry, vaudeville, little magic and mime, Herb Alber tunes, 9000 jokes and four men in speedos wooing Odysseus' wife. No intermission. Couldn't breathe until I got home.

Just finished reading it, a whole different, lesser experience. Still extraordinary though.

The Keep by Jennifer Egan

2011-04-16T15:24:00.001-04:00

Gothic thriller? Prison memoir? Coming of age memori? Revenge fable? Dunno.

Old Times by Harold Pinter

2011-04-06T12:23:00.000-04:00

Music for Torching by A. M. Homes

2011-04-06T12:21:00.003-04:00

Is this what passed for shocking in late 90s suburban fiction? Lame. Sort of a swingers book, married couple grown bored with each other, husband experiments (lightly) with cross dressing, s&m, continues his numerous affairs, wife experiments with lesbianism. both drink alot and ignore their children. No biggie. Very boring.

Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want by Maile Meloy

2011-04-06T12:20:00.000-04:00

The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris

2011-04-03T09:32:00.002-04:00

Very moved by this book. Ashamed that I never finished his Then We Came to the End, will now go back and read it.

This is the story of a partner in a Manhattan law firm who is stricken with a mysterious "wandering" syndrome, where he must pick up and walk and keep walking. Countless mental and physical health experts are confounded by it, swamis can do nothing. It is also the story of his marriage and how it persists somehow through the days, months and years of his condition.

In the second half of the book, where he is literally on the road for years, he receives messages and emails and see his daughter marry, have children, his wife see another man, go to the South of France with him on vacation. But time by this point is moving as if off screen.

The point is He walks. Also a second voice for the man crops up in the second half, the weaker "physical" self that demands food and sleep. The stronger "spirit" half controls him though, and the man walks into extreme physical duress, loses fingers and toes to frostbite, develops a host of serious physical illnesses and keeps walk.

Very beautfiul prose throughout.

I respected you more when you were indifferent to God. You were beset by matters of urgency in your life that took precedence over the lofty speculation of divinity students and men in pews on Sundays. You didn't have the time. You didn't make it a priority. You formed your notions on the fly, in flashes of grim insight, in brief feelings of certainty that consumed you entirely and then quickly faded into the background. When you die, you thought, you die. Why linger on that unpalatable truth? And the alternative, the alternative was a sham. You hated the institutions and the corruptions and the hypocrisies and the evils. You thought it was all a racket designed by the mighty to fleece the weak and keep them in check.... You stood outside of the wind and the rain. Your insights and arguments came to you in prosperity. Death was far off. You could afford to be leisurely. A drink was better than a thought. A meal was better than a conviction. Your family and your work was more meaningful to you than the ministrations of a hundred gods. That is, until you caved.

To be lost in the writing was to be absorbed, and to be absorbed was to lose awareness of everything - the shitty view and the third-class furniture, but also, and here was the paradox, the contentment. To be lost in the writing was to be happy, but it reguired giving up any awareness of that happiness, of any awareness whatsoever, and so he was blissfully unaware...

Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross

2011-03-29T15:31:00.002-04:00

Very interesting, at times sublime, novel. Three novels in one, at least. The first, framing story is about the down-turn of the marriage of a very successful video game designer and a counselor for disturbed children, a woman who has lost over 150 pounds finally after years of dieting. Her husband, though, over the 13 years of their marriage, has found himself fantasizing often about her death. And that's how the novel opens, with the husband accused of killing her by forcing two fistfuls of peanuts down her throat, which she is highly allergic to, and which he knows will kill her. The husband is also writing a novel, which may or may not be the book we are reading. He's also been in touch with a private eye/hired killer named Mobius, who may or may not have decided to murder the wife on his own

Enter novels number two and three, about the two detectives who question the husband. The first detective is suffering marital woes of his own: his wife has refused to leave her bedroom for five months. The second detective is none other than Sam Shepard, the midwest doctor accused of murdering his wife, who was exonerated and released from prison after serving ten years, a case widely believed to be the basis of the TV series The Fugitive.

The lengthy novella about Sam Shepard's marriage and affairs might be the best thing about the book, although all three stories have their power.

It's a bit of a puzzle piece, sorting out what is real, what is imagined, what is the first husband's imagination, what's his novel, and what's the real narrative we're reading.

In the end, it's a dark, compulsive, often beautiful examination of marriage almost exclusively through several husbands' eyes. Men don't come out smelling too nice by the end. Women aren't much better.

Solar by Ian McEwan

2011-03-25T08:56:00.002-04:00

A nice corrective to Franzen's Freedom, in the category of "climate-change fiction." McEwan, skillful as always, has no trouble at all navigating the worlds of post-quantum physics, 21st climatology, dance apparel shops in contemporary London, Arctic Circle snowmobile tours. His anti-hero, corpulent, adulterous, selfish physicist Michael Beard, is a Nobel-prize-winning comic figure who steals ideas, cheats on dozens of women (including five wives), rigs murder scenes and nearly freezes his penis off on said snowmobile tour.

Recommended!

The Ask by Sam Lipsyte

2011-03-22T10:59:00.003-04:00

The first-person narrator has just been fired, and rehired, by a university development office, where he had worked as a fund raised. "The Ask" is what they call their pitches to rich potential donors. Narrator gets reassigned to try to touch his old college buddy Purdy, who is incredibly rich. Meanwhile, narrator's marriage is crumbling. Narrator gets tasked by his rich college friend to shush college friend's illegitimate son, now a returned military veteran with two metal legs. The novel is all voice and no narrative. Sort of an American Martin Amis, but more of an obvious one-lining jokester.

All that said, what a voice:

Child care was like everything else. You got what you paid for, and your child paid for what you could not pay for.

You really had to hustle to recruit the right people to prop up your delusions, but the moment somebody broke ranks, or just broke for a protein shake, the whole deal teetered.

We were like the Frank family in their Dutch attic, but with email.

Why was I such a diseased fuck? It had to be society's fault. I loved people, all people, except for the ones with money and free time.

I dozed off worried I had truly unhooked myself from the apparatus of okay.

Never let them see you sweat, countless bastards tell us, just to see us sweat.

Sayuri's family moved back to Japan soon after, but from then on, whenever I inserted my penis in her hard little hand, I always made sure to insert the gray pixelated dot over it, like they did in Japanese porn. Honor is important to every culture.

"Hell, honey," said Claudia. "I murdered your father when you needed him most. I can take a few impotent barbs from my only son."

The man's hands looked ruined, though, rheumatoid, nicked and pinched by gruesome machinery. I'd done many odd jobs in my life, but hardly any heavy lifting. I stared at my own hands, soft, expressive things, gifted, even, like specially bred, lovingly shaved gerbils.

"But don't get me wrong. I'm all for capital punishment. I'm a huge death penalty guy. I like everything about it. And don't tell me how it's more expensive to the taxpayer than life sentences. Because if you ask me, we should pony up a little more. We should feel the cost of our ritual, revel in it. It was probably a drain on the Aztec economy to capture and drug all those people and carve out their living hearts, but are you going to tell me it wasn't worth it? Yes, sir, the death penalty is where it's at. Is there a chance innocent people die? I should fuckin hope so! Innocent people die constantly in this world. Why should things be better for those scumbags in lockdown?"

(on being an artist) "So, like I always say, it all comes down to how much you need to inflict yourself on the world. You're good enough. If you kiss the right ass, you could certainly make a career.

Devotion by Howard Norman

2011-03-16T15:04:00.000-04:00

Norman clobbers the reader with his swans metaphor. Not much else happens.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

2011-03-09T15:14:00.001-05:00

It’s thick and richly painted as far as it goes – but the sameness of each character’s “interior-ity” (is that a word?) deadened it for me, on the whole. Everything happened to everyone, and every thought occurred to every character, all the time. In the end, I was repelled (and truth be told, compelled) by how Franzen unspools this vast web of interconnected, richly detailed and remembered neuroses, and lets each character be driven by that, by neuroses and self-obsession. He’s so intelligent and wants to show it all over a wide canvas socially and politically – but I felt barely a ripple of narrative tension. A hundred pages from the end, I felt I could not care less about what was going to happen to the major players. Weirdly, I was most drawn to the characters of Joey and Connie. I hated Walter, though I believed him. Richard I didn’t believe, he seemed another side of Walter. Patty was hard for me to believe — Walter and Richard I could buy as having such verbose and self-scrutinizing inner lives – but not the alleged college jock. Also liked Patty's female college stalker, until she got addicted to heroin and sort of dribbled off into cliche. A way different sort of ménage a trois than To The End of the Land, in any event. Also, of course, energetically envious of the discipline and imagination required to get such a monster down on paper. Even if I seem to critically dislike it.

By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham

2011-02-25T08:39:00.004-05:00

Awfully well-written AWFUL new novel (at least it was a quickie) by Michael Cunningham. The main character, Peter, a mildly successful Soho art dealer, has an inner voice that dominates the narration and is the kind of inner voice that one would like to punch in the face. His excruciating self-absorption and self-analysis drain all the life out of the book early. I guess people like Peter exist: I just don't want to know about them.

Enjoyed the observations on NYC and contemporary art, and even on aesthetics generally – but it failed on a flesh and blood level for me. Felt like it wanted to be a much longer book about Rebecca’s family: instead, much of her family got anecdotized (word?).

Peter and his wife Rebecca play host to Rebecca's much younger brother Mizzie (real name Ethan, but called The Mistake by Rebecca's family, since he's about 17 years younger than Rebecca), an aimless drifting twenty-something who has been messed up in drugs and now "wants to do something in the arts." The plot, what there is of it, revolves around Peter's obsession with Mizzie and failed attempt to seduce him.

Cunningham writes gorgeously about New York City, about the contemporary art scene, but fails, it seems to me, to write about Peter's previously heterosexual life with much conviction.
And for me it was just so gay from the get-go, I didn’t buy Peter as formerly straight, even partially straight. He was loathsome, I had not a spark of sympathy. There is an echo of Murdoch – certainly it shares her serious intentions – but it lacks her mordancy, her black-eyed morality, her treacherous plotting, and so some of her humor.

Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

2011-02-18T09:42:00.001-05:00

Little Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenidies, little Edwin Mullhouse by Steven Millhauser.

The Passage by Jusin Cronin

2011-02-12T09:30:00.002-05:00

Februrary 12, 2010 b.v (from "The Book of Sean")
Have just finished The Passage by Jusin Cronin. No smokes are left in my life, no slims, no virals hang beneath bridges waiting to tear me asunder and drink my blood. I am at peace. Relieved even. My forearm swell with the effort of holding such a heavy book for so many long nights waiting for the lights to come back on. It was not the Book of Dave, oh no, not at all. Futuristic, every post-apocalyptic cliche and device possible.

Tinkers by Paul Harding

2011-01-18T20:18:00.001-05:00

Mixed up narrative, the son dying present tense, crosscut with the father's tinker trip though the woods a half-century earlier. Long, blowing, circularly-breathed sentences, a la William Faulkner, via Cormac McCarthy.

Maggot poems by Paul Muldoon

2011-01-16T15:52:00.005-05:00

from the "Let's Hope He's Talking About Himself" Department...

One of the terrible facts about writing poetry is that actually one almost certainly disimproves as one continues…Most people who write poetry get worse. There are various other callings, one thinks, for example, of math. Most people involved with math, from what I understand, peak if they peak at all, earlier in their careers. And poetry, for whatever reason, it’s hard to write decent poetry in the first place and it’s very hard to continue to write it.

Here's an old one by Muldoon, which I must admit I like much better than anything in MAGGOT. It's long, but if that's its worst flaw I can forgive him.

The Old Country by Paul Muldoon

I
Where every town was a tidy town
and every garden a hanging garden.
A half could be had for half a crown.
Every major artery would harden

since every meal was a square meal.
Every clothesline showed a line of undies
yet no house was in dishabille.
Every Sunday took a month of Sundays

till everyone got it off by heart
every start was a bad start
since all conclusions were foregone.

Every wood had its twist of woodbine.
Every cliff its herd of fatalistic swine.
Every runnel was a Rubicon.

II
Every runnel was a Rubicon
and every annual a hardy annual
applying itself like linen to a lawn.
Every glove compartment held a manual

and a map of the roads, major and minor.
Every major road had major road works.
Every wishy-washy water diviner
had stood like a bulwark

against something worth standing against.
The smell of incense left us incensed
at the firing of the fort.

Every heron was a presager
of some disaster after which, we’d wager,
every resort was a last resort.
III

Every resort was a last resort
with a harbor that harbored an old grudge.
Every sale was a selling short.
There were those who simply wouldn’t budge

from the Dandy to the Rover.
That shouting was the shouting
but for which it was all over –
the weekend, I mean, we set off on an outing

with the weekday train timetable.
Every tower was a tower of Babel
that graced each corner of a bawn

where every lookout was a poor lookout.
Every rill had its unflashy trout.
Every runnel was a Rubicon.

IV

Every runnel was a Rubicon
where every ditch was a last ditch.
Every man was “a grand wee mon”
whose every pitch was another sales pitch

now every boat was a burned boat.
Every cap was a cap in hand.
Every coat a trailed coat.
Every band was a gallant band

across the broken bridge
and broken ridge after broken ridge
where you couldn’t beat a stick with a big stick.
.
Every straight road was a straight up speed trap.
Every decision was a snap.
Every cut was a cut to the quick.
V

Every cut was a cut to the quick
when the weasel’s twist met the weasel’s tooth
and Christ was somewhat impolitic
in branding as “weasels fighting in a hole”, forsooth,

the petrol-smugglers back on the old sod
when a vendor of red diesel
for whom every rod was a green rod
reminded one and all that the weasel

was nowhere to be found in that same quarter.
No mere mortar could withstand a ten-inch mortar.
Every hope was a forlorn hope.

So it was that the defenders
were taken in by their own blood-splendour.
Every slope was a slippery slope.

VI

Every slope was a slippery slope
where every shave was a very close shave
and money was money for old rope
where every grave was a watery grave

now every boat was, again, a burned boat.
Every dime-a-dozen rat a dime-a-dozen drowned rat
except for the whitrack, or stoat,
which the very Norsemen had down pat

as a weasel-word
though we know their speech was rather slurred.
Every time was time in the nick

just as every nick was a nick in time.
Every unsheathed sword was somehow sheathed in rime.
Every cut was a cut to the quick.
VII

Every cut was a cut to the quick
what with every feather a feather to ruffle.
Every whitrack was a whitterick.
Everyone was in a right kerfuffle

when from his hob some hobbledehoy
would venture the whitterick was a curlew.
Every wall was a wall of Troy
and every hunt a hunt in the purlieu

of a demesne so out of bounds
every hound might have been a hell-hound.
At every lane-end stood a milk-churn

whose every dent was a sign of indenture
to some pig-wormer or cattle-drencher.
Every point was a point of no return.

VIII

Every point was a point of no return
for those who had signed the Covenant in blood.
Every fern was a maidenhair fern
that gave every eye an eyeful of mud

ere it was plucked out and cast into the flame.
Every rowan was a mountain-ash.
Every swath-swathed mower made of his graft a game
and the hay-sash

went to the kemper best fit to kemp.
Every secretary was a temp
who could shift shape

like the river goddesses Banna and Boann.
Every two-a-penny maze was, at its heart, Minoan.
Every escape was a narrow escape.
IX

Every escape was a narrow escape
where every stroke was a broad stroke
of an ax on a pig-nape.
Every pig was a pig in a poke

though it scooted once through the Diamond
so unfalt… so unfalteringly.
The threshold of pain was outlimened
by the bar raised at high tea

now every scone was a drop scone.
Every ass had an ass’s jawbone
that might itself drop from grin to girn.

Every malt was a single malt.
Every pillar was a pillar of salt.
Every point was a point of no return.

X

Every point was a point of no return
where to make a mark was to overstep the mark.
Every brae had its own braw burn.
Every meadow had its meadowlark

that stood in for the laverock.
Those Norse had tried fjord after fjord
to find a tight wee place to dock.
When he made a scourge of small whin-cords,

Christ drove out the money-lenders
and all the other bitter-enders
when the thing to have done was take up the slack.

Whin was to furze as furze was to gorse.
Every hobbledehoy had his hobbledyhobbyhorse.
Every track was an inside track.
XI

Every track was an inside track
where every horse had the horse-sense
to know it was only a glorified hack.
Every graineen of gratitude was immense

and every platitude a familiar platitude.
Every kemple of hay was a kemple tossed in the air
by a haymaker in a hay-feud.
Every chair at the barn-dance a musical chair

given how every paltry poltroon
and his paltry dog could carry a tune
yet no one would carry the can

any more than Samson would carry the temple.
Every spinal column was a collapsing stemple.
Every flash was a flash in the pan.

XII

Every flash was a flash in the pan
and every border a herbaceous border
unless it happened to be an
herbaceous border as observed by the Recorder

or recorded by the Observer.
Every widdie stemmed from a willow-bole.
Every fervor was a religious fervor
by which we’d fly the godforsaken hole

into which we’d been flung by it.
Every pit was a bottomless pit
out of which every pig needed a piggyback.

Every cow had subsided in its subsidy.
Biddy winked at Paddy and Paddy winked at Biddy.
Every track was an inside track.

XIII

Every track was an inside track
and every job an inside job.
Every whitterick had been a whitrack
until, from his hobbledehob,

that hobbledehobbledehoy
had insisted the whitterick was a curlew.
But every boy was still “one of the boys”
and every girl “ye girl ye”

for whom every dance was a last dance
and every chance a last chance
and every let-down a terrible let-down

from the days when every list was a laundry list
in that old country where, we reminisced,
every town was a tidy town.

"Good-looking is the new well-read."

2011-01-16T15:47:00.000-05:00

To The end of the Land by David Grossman

2011-01-01T10:49:00.003-05:00

Working up a review (download the .pdf!) of this novel for Tikkun, but need to mark it in time here. So far so good, two-thirds through it, a bit of a slog and not as earth-shattering as his 1989 work, See Under: Love, but Grossman builds and builds and builds in his novels, so I'm very interested in what happens at the end. Something better happen, that's for sure. Just sayin'.

Certainly reading Keith Richards' Life at the same time isn't helping me finish this. Imagine two more dissimilar books.

Life by Keith Richards

2011-01-01T10:46:00.005-05:00

Don't know if he actually wrote a word of it, but the stories ring true, and the voice is the half-annoying, ribald, arrogant Keith Richards voice. A lot of the background social history for the fifties and sixties doesn't sound like him, and there's a lot of "it was my idea first, then Mick's" language around individual song compositions.

Here's a typical infuriating passage about his friendship with American saxophonist Bobby Keys:

'You have to ask Bobby Keys how big Texas is. It took me thirty years to convince him that Texas was actually just a huge landgrab by Sam Houston and Stephen Austin. "No fucking way. How dare you!" He's red in the face. So I laid a few books on him about what actually happened between Texas and Mexico, and six months later he says, "Your case seems to have some substance." I know the feeling, Bob. I used to believe that Scotland Yard was lily-white.'

Just not really believable, any of it. And the voice is ridiculous. Or this passage, allegedly from a notebook of song ideas and sketches that Richards kept during the mid-1960s:

JUKE JOINT... ALABAMA? GEORGIA?
Finally I'm in my element! An incredible band is wailing on a stage decorated with phosphorescent paint, the dance floor is moving as one, so does the sweat and the ribs cooking out back. The only thing that makes me stand out is that I'm white! Wonderfully, no one notices this aberration. I am accepted, I'm made to feel so warm. I am in heaven!

Still, a delish thing to read, impossible to put down.

Titus Andronicus, "The Monitor"

2011-01-01T10:46:00.001-05:00

Versailles by Kathryn Davis

2010-12-13T07:27:00.003-05:00

Liberty is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses.

A wondous slender book about Marie Antoinette's career as the Queen of France and the scourge of the French Revolution.

Davis style -- of a compressed descriptive narrative in Marie Antoinette's voice, an omnisciene "brochure voice" describing the structural achievement of the palace, and the natural spectacle of the gardens, as well as little dramatic "playlets" featuring other characters from the period before and during the Revolution -- has an awesome cumulative effect, that took me by emotional surprise at the end of the novel. I cared for Marie Antoinette, cared for her one little voice piping up from the crush of a humanity in revolt.

Cock and Bull by Will Self

2010-12-07T10:08:00.004-05:00

Carol had a good head for alcohol - in fact, she had a spy's head for alcohol; for as she drank, her washed blue eyes grew flatter and beadier, giving an accurate, if tarnished reflection of some pebbledashed saturnalia. That's what one felt, watching her: that as she drank, she was somehow accumulating evidence against those who got drunk.

A little devil sat on Alan's left shoulder, a little angel on his right. On the right-hand shoulder of the little devil sat a littler angel; and on the left-hand shoulder a littler devil. It was the same for the first angel, and so on, and so on. This was the reductio ad infinitum of Alan's moral sense: a great Renaissance canvas depicting diminishing tiers of cherubim and seraphim, imps, satyrs and familiars. All towering up into an impossible void.

In this world where all are mad and none are bad, we all know that the finger points backwards.

Lauren Bacall singing "Sob Sister" in The Big Sleep

2010-12-01T13:18:00.004-05:00

Click here to watch the clip on YouTube.

What a film! Wonderfully sharp writing (Faulkner kicked in on the screenplay), Bogart and Bacall hitting all the high notes. Interesting commentary with dvd on how the film was held a year and a half for the war to end so the studio could rush all its war pictures out before it ended. Also, some of Bacall's scenes were reshot, and extra ones with her added, on the advice of her agent, who was trying to help her recover from her bad reviews in The Confidential Agent, her previous film. And they took her veil off her, which is aesthetically pleasing!

See Under: Love by David Grossman

2010-11-22T17:33:00.009-05:00

A nuanced, high-octane-language experiment in memory, imagination, language and longing, wise and cruel and intelligent and relentless. Long and grueling, too, imitative of the ordeal of the Holocaust experience itself, which at least ended temporally, and the eternal struggle for Jews and others to try to understand the unimaginable.

The first section, Momik, is from a young boy's point of view, who will later go on in life to try to write about the Holocaust. Living in a small town in Israel, with his parents, addled Holocaust survivors whose fears are endless, Momik creates a collection of animals in his basement in order to lure into the open "The Nazi Beast" which his parents and family constantly and ominously refer to, and which he thinks is a monstrous animal. At one point he leads a collection of the town most pitiful and lost souls, also Holocaust survivors, down into the cellar to use them to bait the Nazi Beast:

... Show it, show it, go on, be Jews and show it, and he crouched down with his hands on his knees as if he were coaching the players on the soccer field and inwardly shouted, Now, now, go on, be wizards and prophets and witches and let's give it one more battle, one last fight, be so Jewish it won't know what to do with itself, and even if the Beast was never here before, now it's got to come out...

The second section, Bruno, is from an adult Momik's viewpoint as he researches the writings of Bruno Schulz, a Jewish writer shot by an SS man during WWII.

The sea smiles. It slides a wave Bruno's way, an experienced croupier dealing out a lucky card to a regular customer.

Now I write with a steady pen: Bruno Schulz. Ingenious architect of a singular linguistic experience, the magic of which lies in fertility, a plethora almost rotting with verbal juices. Bruno who knows how to say everything in ten different ways, each as accurate as the compass needle. A Don Juan of language, conquering with a mad, almost immoral passion, audacious explorer of linguistic geography ... Could it be that you, Bruno, reached the limits of this world, and ran around like a madman on the beach when you couldn't find a suitable verbal vessel to sail you into the misty horizon?

The third section, Wasserman, concerns Momik's grandfather and his odd relationship with the commandant of his concentration camp, Neigel. Wasserman suffers a curious ironic condition in the camp: he cannot be killed. And when Neigel learns that Wasserman is author of a series of childhood stories, The Children of the Heart, which Neigel loved, he makes Wasserman live in his attic and begin a new series of adventures for The Children, picking up fifty years later in their lives. He calls Wasserman Scheherezade, and gives him the obverse fate: after each nightly story Wasserman tells him, Neigel will attempt to murder Wasserman again, which is all Wasserman wants, having seen his wife perish in the camp, and his daughter shot to death by Neigel right after they got off the transport train.

The fourth section, The Complete Encyclopedia of Kazik's Life, is an alphabetical concordance of Hebrew terms, in which is related the autobiography of Kazik, a mystical child engendered by the reunited Children of the Heart. Kazik is born, lives and dies within a single day, a la Max Tivoli, the Fitzgerald story, and the Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

In his essay on literature, "Books That Have Read Me," Grossman remembers reading books as a child in a poetic and archaic Hebrew that was very far from the everyday language he knew, and it was a pleasure for him, the unknown words, the gaps, "inferring one thing from another." He transfers that sensation to us in this novel, which is laced with Hebrew words (some defined in a glossary at the end of the book, but many more not).

Room by Emma Donoghue

2010-11-15T10:15:00.003-05:00

Shortlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize, Room has a glorious initial premise: it's a first-person narration by a five-year-old boy (Jack) who's held hostage in a tiny backyard shed by a brutal man (Old Nick) who kidnapped Jack's mother (Ma) when she was nineteen and raped her repeatedly. Jack has spent his entire life in the shed, with only a skylight window. And the novel opens on Jack's fifth birthday, where his mother has decided Jack's finally just barely old enough to help her in a desperate attempt to escape.

Whew. Writes itself, right? Jack's voice is marvelous throughout. It reminded me of Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha ha. And for some reason a little of Flowers for Algernon.

The book is in two parts: Inside and Outside. Though the voice of Jack, and the character of his Ma are consistently strong and engaging, the plot suffers once they get Out. We miss Old Nick's malevolent presence just off screen. Of course, Jack must learn the entire world, which is what makes the second half interesting. He knew of only two other people in existence. He had never been outside, seen sky, walk up a step.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

2010-11-06T10:55:00.003-04:00

Not really about music, although ostensibly about a handful of people who first meet in 1980 during the rise of the punk (well, post-punk, really) era. First Egan novel I've read, and I'm impressed. A book about survivorship and bad choices and persistence and emotional pain, among other things. Egan effortlessly describes the lower East Side of Manhattan, Naples, the African veldt, suburban New York suburbs. It reminded me (in a way) of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, in that the chapters move radically in voice and time and emphasis one to the next, in the manner of wonderful, sadistic meal, where you are left longing for the last taste in your mouth, even as a new and even better taste replaces it. I suffered from chapter-nostalgia constantly.

Memento Mori by Muriel Spark

2010-10-29T12:19:00.001-04:00

Muriel Spark's "old people" novel from 1959 has dozens of major characters, and we jump in and out of every one of their consciousnesses, at one point or another.

Most of the charcters are elderly, living in retirement homes or in their homes, but in their seventies and eighties. Spark's touch with them is gentle: it is not the first thing you find out about them, that they are aged. Instead, you got an insight from their perspective, a perception that does not seem to come from a feeble or senile mind.

The central plot element of the novel is an anoymous caller who telephones each of the old people at one point or another to tell them, "Remember that you must die." The police are called in, and various theories about the identity of the caller are propounded. But his voice, accent, age and inflection differ for each person; he seems to know where each person has recently been, and so the wise (and elderly) former detective on the case, by novel's end, is forced to surmise that the caller is Death himself.

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea by Yukio Mishima

2010-10-20T10:06:00.006-04:00

A powerful, beautiful, brutal book. As if reading it for the first time, I was stunned by it. (I went through, or thought I went through, an intense Mishima obsession as an undergraduate back during the Grover Cleveland administration, but can't be sure of anything from that period, it seems.) The point of view shifts throughout the book between the three main characters, the sailor Ryuji, the widow Fusako and her 13 year old son Noboru, but the reins are held by a cool and fatalistic omniscient narrator. The sailor and the widow fall in love during the sailor's leave, one summer, and the son watches their lovemaking from inside his dresser cabiner in his room, through a crevice in a wallboard.

Mishimi's language is at once strikingly metaphorical and disturbingly concrete. The sailor's memories of the sea, transmiited to Noboru, take on a deadly chant-like rhythm, as the sailor realizes he will put the sea behind him and marry the widow, giving up the highs and lows of the dramatic, and sometimes monotonous, ocean, for the peace and living-death of a comfortable marriage. (He was dealing here with no ocean squall but the gentle breeze that blows ceaselessly over the land.)

For the boy, this is ultimately a betrayal of the canon of his gang of friends, led by the psychotic "Chief," who instructs the rest of the gang in a grisly system of nihilism and existenialism that renounces almost everything in the world as worthless. "Except for the ocean, and a couple other things," the chief says at one point. "Ships," Noboru adds hopefully. "Maybe ships," the chief replies. The widow moves between the two men, tending to her clothing store, hoping to replace her dead husband and thus further "care" for her son, overjoyed to end her five year loneliness as a widow.

You Remind Me of Me by Dan Chaon

2010-10-15T15:37:00.002-04:00

By the author of Await Your Reply. This is his first book and a very good one, if a bit long. It's an examination of two young men, separated at birth: the older brother given up for adoption by the troubled mother, who then has the second child and vows to keep him and make up for her first grievous loss by hanging on to him. In many ways, it's an inversion of the standard view that the child given up for adoption is the loser, for in this case, though the adopted son has struggles of his own, he is a joyful case compared with the son who is kept, who watches his mother disintegrate via substance abuse and severe depression, and eventually takes her own life. The younger son strikes out to find his older brother, a small-time marijuana dealer who has done time, but who marries (if badly) and has a son whom he worships.

If... (1968, Lindsey Anderson, director)

2010-09-25T17:26:00.006-04:00

A strange 1968 film starring Malcolm McDowell as a junior at a deeply traditional English public school. A grower, for sure, starts out sleepily, moves through a three-act, dramatic construction that grows more surreal and violent.

McDowell is exceptionally cast.

An Evening of Long Goodbyes by Paul Murray, The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

2010-09-21T09:06:00.006-04:00

"No, no..." I hastened to set her at ease. "I've heard far worse stories. For instance, this one chap I know, Pongo McGurks, his family had a butler, name of Sanderson - had him for years, used to swear by him, best butler they'd ever hard, et cetera. Then they come back early from a weekend away to find him in Pongo's mother's wedding dress, about to have the toaster marry him to the cuckoo clock."

"Oh." She seemed not quite to know what to make of this. "And this happens often?"

"No, I suppose it's pretty rare," I conceded. "I mean, it's rare that you have a butler who's a perfect size ten." This wasn't coming out right at all.

What a long slog of a heavily-favored book by a young Irish writer whose new novel, Skippy Dies, was what I was actually looking for. But it's too new, the library didn't have it, so I got this one, and hope I didn't poison my own well-spring of enthusiasm for this guy, because THE EVENING just didn't cut it, took forever, not in the good way of the Stieg Larsson series, for instance, or the recent The Lonely Polygamist, which I still haven't gotten around to talking about. Just forever like, this is boring, it does sound just enough like P.G. Wodehouse at times then I guess I'm going to hang around and finish it but when will it GET GOOD?

Putting these two books together out of sheer impishness, a shared phrase in the titles. Two more different books could probably not exist.

Money. Those are the first five letters of his alphabet.

Unposed, Photographs by Craig Semetko

2010-09-04T22:51:00.010-04:00

PRE-ORDER IT MOFO

Song of a Camera
a poem by Thom Gunn
for Robert Mapplethorpe
I cut the sentence
out of a life
out of the story
with my little knife

Each bit I cut
shows one alone
dressed or undressed
young full-grown

Look at the bits
He eats he cries
Look at the way
he stands he dies

so that another
seeing the bits
and seeing how
none of them fits

wants to add
adverbs to verbs
A bit on his own
simply disturbs

Wants to say
as well as see
wants to say
valiantly

interpreting
some look in the eyes
a triumph mixed up
with surprise

I cut this sentence
look again
for cowardice
boredom pain

Find what you seek
find what you fear
and be assured
nothing is here

I am the eye
that cut the life
you stand you lie
I am the knife

Molloy/Malone Dies/The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett

2010-08-31T09:35:00.004-04:00

Molloy

It's so nice to know where you're going, in the early stages. It almost rids you of the wish to go there.

I was out of sorts. They are deep, my sorts, a deep ditch, and I am not often out of them.

Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition.

And in winter, under my greatcoat, I wrapped myself in swathes of newspaper, and did not shed them until the earth awoke, for good, in April. The Times Literary Supplement was admirably adapted to this purpose, of a neverfailing toughness and impermeability. Even farts made no impression on it. I can't help it, gas escapes from my fundament on the least pretext, it's hard not to mention it now and then, however great my distaste. One day I counted them. Three hundred and fifteen farts in nineteen hours, or an average of over sixteen farts an hour. After all it's not excessive. Four farts every fifteen minutes. It's nothing. Not even one fart every four minutes. It's unbelievable. Damn it, I hardly fart at all, I should never have mentioned it.

There I am then back in the saddle, in my numbed heart a prick of misgiving, like one dying of cancer obliged to consult his dentist.

All roads were right for me, a wrong road was an event, for me.

Precautions are like resolutions, to be taken with precaution.

For I always say either too much or too little, which is a terrible thing for a man with a passion for truth like mine.

The Bachelors by Muriel Spark

2010-08-27T15:39:00.006-04:00

"I got a young woman into trouble at the age of eighteen," Walter said. "Daughter of one of our footmen. He was an Irish fellow. The butler caught him reading Nietzsche in the pantry. To the detriment of the silver. Of course there was no question of my marrying his daughter. The family made a settlement, and I went abroad to paint. My hair turned white at the age of nineteen."

He resolved to go to confession, less to rid himself of the past night's thoughts - since his priest made a distinction between sins of thought and these convulsive dances and dialogues of the mind - than to receive, in absolution, a friendly gesture of recognition from the maker of heaven and earth, vigilant manipulator of the falling sickness.

It is all demonology and to do with creatures of the air, and there are others beside ourselves, he thought, who lie in their beds like happy countries that have no history.

The Quickening Maze by Alan Foulds

2010-08-24T08:51:00.007-04:00

This unusual novel imagines the confluence of two great 19th century poets, John Clare and Alfred Tennyson, after Tennyson's brother Septimus is confined to the same mental asylum that Clare has been committed to. They barely meet, but their associates and friends intermingle, and the associations lend a mystical atmosphere to what is already a heady environment for poetry. Clare, an extreme alcoholic, escapes several times from the ground to take up with a colony of gypsies staying in the surrounding forest, exiled as they had been from English common land by draconian property laws, the infamous "enclosure" enforcement that reduced the circumstances of the poor working class even more.

The asylum director falls into a friendship with Tennyson and borrows money from him to fund an invention, a device for mass producing craft wood furniture, which fails utterly. The director's daughter falls in love with Tennyson.

The Fear Of Flowers

The nodding oxeye bends before the wind,
The woodbine quakes lest boys their flowers should find,
And prickly dogrose spite of its array
Can't dare the blossom-seeking hand away,
While thistles wear their heavy knobs of bloom
Proud as a warhorse wears its haughty plume,
And by the roadside danger's self defy;
On commons where pined sheep and oxen lie
In ruddy pomp and ever thronging mood
It stands and spreads like danger in a wood,
And in the village street where meanest weeds
Can't stand untouched to fill their husks with seeds,
The haughty thistle oer all danger towers,
In every place the very wasp of flowers.

John Clare

The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

2010-08-18T08:30:00.001-04:00

www.sarahblakebooks.com

Model Home by Eric Puchner

2010-08-10T17:16:00.003-04:00

Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me by Richard Farina

2010-08-04T22:22:00.019-04:00

Let me tell you, man, you can't move in this country without catching your heel in a hangup. Mousetails in your root beer, grubs in your Hershey bar, always some kind of worm in the image, muching away.

A dazzling, fizzling, appalling, and tragic book. Farina, a classmate and sometimes-pal of Thomas Pynchon's (Gravity's Rainbow is dedicated to Farina) at Cornell, also enjoyed a career as a folk-rocker, married to Joan Baez's sister Mimi, and recorded several seminal folk-rock albums with her, including the stunning Celebrations for a Grey Day. (In David Hajdu's provocative cultural memoir Positively 4th Street, Farina even gets credited with creating the knowing, enigmatic, American artiste-as-provocateur persona that no less than Bob Dylan steals and makes his own.)

In 1966, he slipped out of a publication party for Been Down So Long to ride with a friend on his new motorcycle, and died off a hairpin turn in the Carmel hills.

Haven't read it in years, but remember parts so clearly. The prose is heavily written and re-written, there is a cannabis smell to it, too worked over, an emphasis on sensation and re-representation, rather than versimilitude. Too many words. Too many descriptions. Many bad trips and sensations of bad things coming. But there is marvelous stuff, too: Gnossos dancing on the ice packs covering the local river at the beginning of the spring thaw, urging Spring on, some incredible character thumbnails, his red-gummed Indian neighbors forever drunk on grenadine and gin, slipping prophecies under his door, the lists, the lists! Wish I had the nerve (or the typing skill) to recreate them here.

It received bad reviews when it appeared, but critical opinion over the years has changed as the novel's place in the canon of 60s literature has grown more assured.

The plot is ridiculous and campus-bound, but enhanced by intercut scenes of what Gnossos was doing before returning to campus, when he roamed the West and witnessed a nucelar test detonation in the desert, stoned on mescaline, marijuana (his beloved "panegyric") and drunk on boozed (his beloved "lush.").

The problem is motivation: why is Gnossos so quest- and darkness-obsessed? I hate to sound like a wrtng instrctr, but... back story?

The lists are dense and telling: American plastic culture at its best and most dizzying. I tell you, I think it's a better book than Pynchon's initial sally The Crying of Lot 49.

It's pre-hippie, pre Summer of Love. The only music is some jazz (Brubeck is dissed, Miles is adored), some Mose Allison, some soul references, some Indian raga music.

The president is Eisenhower. The year is 1958. The setting is a college campus in upstate New York positively pulled with Greek-sounded streets and buildings. The narrator, Gnossos Papadopoulis, is clearly Greek. The scene on campus is seething: the administration is cracking down on sex, and the students are rising up against curfew hours and restrictions.

There is (without doubt) an immaturity to the book, a misogyny: Gnossoes is self-conscious to the point of paralysis, Hamletian. But Farina was all of 29 when he finished it. If anything, what doomed it at the time is that it was a 1969 book published in 1966, way ahead of its time.

Farina had an Irish father and a Cuban mother, allegedly fought in Cuba with Castro.

Death, "For the Whole World to See"

2010-07-30T19:56:00.004-04:00

Sheesh. Great lost Detroit black punk band, who recorded seven singles in and around 1974 with the help of Funkadelic producer Don Davis, who must not have done much but turn the recorder on and let it bleed. Certainly some MC5 ringing in their ears, little Stooges, not much metal in the fast stuff but some in the bluesy slower stuff: the tremendous thing about these songs is not who they sound LIKE, but who FOLLOWED them and sounded like them. Particularly the Bad Brains, who either listened to this in their sleep or are these guys children. The stuttering drums, the crushing guitar riffs, the simple-as-brain-damage refrains, the dum-dum-bullet-stupid bass: I'm such a troglodyte at heart! "Keep on Knocking" is the standout, but "Rock n Roll Victim" is the Bad Brains-ish one for sure. Love the songs, love the narrative (brought to me, pathetically enough, by a New Yorker article about them this week. But it made me crank some Bad Brains for the wife, and we thought we were hearing some lost Kiss or some neanderthal Van Halen for sure. For thor's sake buy it (not that I did) and give the guys some money after all these years.

The Suspect, L. R. Wright

2010-07-29T16:06:00.003-04:00

A quietly satisfying mystery novel, remniscent of Simenon: one finds out WhoDunIt in the first pages, but the book unfolds as as WhyDunIt, a masterful character study set in a small town in British Columbia featuring a Royal Mountie detective, a librarian, and two old men, principally, but other characters are quickly and deftly sketched.

There is very little violence, except implied, or recalled: the murder of one very old man by another very old man. The reason for the crime comes out slowly, through flashbacks. The tremendous natural landscape of BC plays a role too, as a destructive force each character struggles against, as a creative force each character struggles to find a nourishing spot within.

Sleep while I Sing takes place after The Suspect: the detective and the librarian are repeating characters, and their relationship, romantic, emotional and intellectual, is important in both books.

Palladio by Jonathan Dee

2010-07-24T06:23:00.000-04:00

I read Palladio with excitement and curiosity, a novel about the advertising business (and other things). My good friend and fiction reviewer without peer Donna Rifkind had recommended Dee's new novel, The Privileges, but I had to wait for my hold at the public library, and snapped up Palladio in the meantime. Dee is a morbidly interesting writer -- that is, I had no idea I was so interested in the world of advertising, the contemporary world of advertising, as well as a thumbnail history of advertising in America in the past fifty years, until Dee began telling me a story about a young man and an older man in that business. Oh yeah, there's a woman too, but it's mostly about advertising. Dee will be compared (by others certainly, and now by me) to Tom Wolfe, since there is a "masters of the universe" sort of a feel to his protagonists (even more so The Privileges) and if I had ever been able to finish a single Wolf novel, I might even make the comparison ring true. But I haven't. Still recommend this book, though: Dee has a marvelous gift.

So I get the new one finally and I'm in a tizzy of anticipation, glancing at it on my nightstand, dutifully (and happily, if in a hard-working sort of way) finishing David Mitchell's stunning Cloud Atlas before I dig in. And The Privileges is a good read, compelling, and Dee once again makes several uber-rich lives somewhat transparent to me and interesting, but on the whole the new one was a disappointment, second half of the book never really delivers on the thesis grandly contstructed in the first half -- that is, a successful couple, I mean so successful that in the second half of the novels pedestrian details like actual numbers of dollars and how many millions have vanished completely , a successful couple (and their couple of somewhat less successful, if gorgeous, children) will have to eventually pay the piper in some fashion for all their success. They don't pay. The wife's father dies, the husband blows out his knee during one of his fanatical workouts, they must stand by their daughter after she is in a bad car wreck where some people apparently die, after partying for several days and nights with her at one of her family's many luxury homes, and the son is held hostage by an "outsider artist" he is considering promoting. (I'm not making that outsider artist bit up, though it sounds like I am.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

2010-07-12T07:57:00.002-04:00

Cloud Atlas is a tour de force. A lengthy "novel" consisting of six novellas that move chronologically from the early 19th century to the distant post-apocalyptic future in the first half of the book, then reverse and run backwards in time in the second half (from p.a. future to 19th century, so we end where we began), and which six novellas are linked with what at first seem to be casual coincidences (the diary chronicling a sea voyage in the first novella becomes a tattered rare book that a young composer in the 1930s finds and reads in the second novella, a piece by the young composer is heard in the third novella), it as ambitious and experimental and daring as it is compellingly and closely written in each of the six wildly-different narratives.

The Hidden Fortress, Akira Kurosawa

2010-07-12T07:56:00.001-04:00

My son and I saw THE HIDDEN FORTRESS at AFI Silver yesterday afternoon, what a masterpiece! The 21-year old Misa Uehara as the Princess was particuarly astounding, more than holding her own next to the redoubtable Toshiro Mifune as the General, and Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara as the two peasants reluctantly accompanying the Princess across ... See Moreenemy territory. They are equal parts Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, the grave-diggers from Hamlet, and reputedly George Lucas's models for C3PO and R2D2 in Star Wars. A stunner.

Love in the Ruins, Walker Percy (1971)

2010-07-03T08:55:00.003-04:00

Forty-five. It is strange how little one changes. The psychologists are all wrong about puberty. Puberty changes nothing. This morning I woke with exactly the same cosmic-sexual-religious longing I woke up with when I was ten years old. Nothing changes but accidentals: your toes rotate, showing more skin. Every molecule in your body has been replaced but you are exactly the same... The scientists are wrong: man is not his own juices but a vortex, a traveling suck in his juices.