May 1, 2008
Colbert needs an ass-kicking
I realize it's just a sketch, but Colbert just ripped "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" out of a copy of Salinger's Nine Stories. I flinched like I'd just seen a snuff film.
You do NOT fuck with "Bananafish".
(OK, I'm trying to come out of my hole here, cut me some slack.)
Posted by ray at 12:11 AM | Comments (4)
March 6, 2008
A chat with Chin Music Press
Anthem Magazine has published a short but interesting interview with Bruce Rutledge and Craig Mod of Chin Music Press. They talk about their online projects and some future publishing works, including a second edition of Do You Know What It Means.
(Hey Bruce, does that mean I get another check?)
This is also a heads-up, if you don't know already, to keep tabs on their Voices of New Orleans blog. Edited by Colleen Mondor of Bookslut, it's like the BoingBoing of all things having to do with post-Katrina New Orleans; not just aggregating content at random, but choosing the best and most relevant post-Katrina news of the day from the MSM and blogs and giving it some context along with a link.
Posted by ray at 5:10 PM | Comments (6)
December 4, 2007
Sandrine
I've been having trouble with William Gibson's latest one for weeks, only managing a couple of pages a night before falling asleep and not being able to keep track of all the intertwined plots and the dozen or so key characters. I finally gave up and grabbed the next thing on my pile, one I'd been looking forward to: Dedra Johnson's Sandrine's Letter To Tomorrow.
I could have read this in one sitting. I had to force myself to put it down at 2am the first night because I had work the next morning, but I read it some more at lunch and finished it the next night. It was like a punch in the stomach to me, the first night my heart was racing, and I'm still not completely over it days later. Others might react differently but if you or a loved one have lived through similar circumstances as Sandrine, reading this will be an emotional experience that you won't soon forget. I know for me it picked at some scabs that should have healed long ago.
Sandrine is a bookish light-skinned black girl growing up in New Orleans in the 1970's, being handed off between parents and stepparents with varying degrees of parental involvement. It's moving and it's shocking and it's sweet and it's brave, sometimes all at the same time.
This is brilliant and I want more like it.
Posted by ray at 11:30 PM | Comments (7)
May 29, 2007
Breach of Faith
I just finished reading Jed Horne's Breach of Faith.
This is probably the first overall look at Katrina that I've read, other than maybe Cooper & Bloch's Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security (which was primarily focused on the federal government's response to the disaster so is not really so general).
Breach of Faith is strongest when it relates personal anecdotes, when it really digs into the real-life calculus that goes into deciding whether to evacuate or not, and how the storm and resulting flood affected rich and poor equally, though in different ways.
The book ends in the spring of 2006, so already much of the recovery narrative seems somewhat dated. He talks about the mayoral election but does not discuss the outcome; regardless, Nagin's performance is not given a pass. Horne holds out his harshest criticism for the Feds, obviously, but not in the detail that Cooper and Bloch do. And for some perplexing reason, it seems Horne has a wee crush on Governor Blanco; she comes across as a politically shrewd tower of strength who is merely misunderstood by the media...clearly a year's worth of Road Home headlines would have sucked the wind out of that angle if Horne could have seen into the future a little.
There's also a lot of fawning over Ivor van Heerden and Bob Bea, two characters whose reliability and motives are still open issues, in my view.
It's a worthy read simply for the stories of regular people, though. I was enthralled during those chapters, less so for the later material about floodwall forensics, Bea, Ivor, and the Corps, which regular followers of the issue in the paper and on blogs will find a little redundant and shallow.
(One complaint which others might find minor, but which I found highly distracting: he consistently fails to capitalize things like "coast guard", "army corps", etc., even though he is clearly talking about THE Coast Guard and THE Army Corps of Engineers. Drove me up a wall, it did. Also misspelled a few street names. Arggggg.)
Posted by ray at 10:34 PM | Comments (4)
January 17, 2007
DYK Reading next week
For all you locals, another reading and book signing for Chin Music Press's Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? will take place next Wednesday, January 24, at the Jefferson Parish Library, 4747 W. Napoleon Avenue in Metairie.
I'll be reading from my story, "I Was A Teenage Float Grunt", and other DYK authors David Rutledge, Sarah Inman, and C.W. Cannon will be reading as well. Copies will be available for purchase at the event.
The festivities start at 7 PM.
Posted by ray at 11:10 AM | Comments (3)
November 22, 2006
The boy is a cynic
Watching Goblet of Fire.
Dad: "So every year, the whole school thinks that Harry is a cheat and a liar, and by the end of the year it always turns out that he's telling the truth and is battling Voldemort. Why don't they ever learn?"
Liam: "I don't know. J.K. Rowling can't think of anything else, I guess."
Posted by ray at 9:10 AM | Comments (2)
August 27, 2006
An Afternoon With Authors
If you happen to be watching TV right now, switch over to CSPAN2. They're rebroadcasting this afternoon's Press Club of New Orleans event, "An Afternoon With Authors". Many post-Katrina book authors are on-hand, including some from Chin Music Press's Do You Know What It Means anthology.
Sadly, I had to turn down a panel invitation since I was already commited to the Arabi Wrecking Krewe today, but DYK authors Sarah Inman and David Rutledge are scheduled to speak.
Posted by ray at 10:54 PM | Comments (0)
July 3, 2006
A Scanner Darkly
I just saw a preview for A Scanner Darkly on Comedy Central, and one of the review tags said "Linklater's funniest film in years!"
I beg your pardon?
It's been years since I read the book, and yeah, all of Dick's stories have a sort of wry cynical humor to them, but they're more edgy than hyukster funny. Did Linklater or somebody else with the purse strings need to dumb this down and tart it up for a modern idiot audience? The original work explored complicated ideas about consciousness and awareness and reality vs. perception, and this was supposed to be the film that would finally faithfully represent Dick's vision on the screen. It'll really break my heart if we end up with Total Recall on rotoscope.
My books are packed, but I'm going to have to go buy another copy and reread it before I see the film, just to firmly replant the book in my brain like I did with War of the Worlds.
The book is always better. Always.
Posted by ray at 11:29 PM | Comments (9)
May 22, 2006
DYK Reading in Austin
This weekend BookWoman in Austin will be hosting a reading/signing for Chin Music Press's Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?
I'll be reading from my story, "I Was a Teenage Float Grunt". Austin film geek and New Orleans native Juliette Kernion will read from her reminiscences of New Orleans movie theatres, and David Rutledge will read from his awesome memoir about the days before Katrina, "Corners of the Quarter". Publisher Bruce Rutledge will also be on hand.
The event is Saturday night, May 27, starting at 8:00pm. BookWoman is located at 918 W. 12th St., near Lamar, right next door to The Tavern.
If you're in town, I hope you can make it. It's a great little book, and I'm proud to be associated with it.
Posted by ray at 9:20 PM | Comments (1)
April 10, 2006
New Orleans visit #4
Last weekend got off to a great start when I managed to get a picture of the DYK anthology on display in the airport bookstore. Right below Rising Tide, right next to River Road Recipes, and if you look closely at those blue books on the top shelf, that's A Confederacy of Dunces. Fine, fine company I keep now.
Chin Music's Voices blog has a summary of the book signing at the Barnes & Noble in Baton Rouge, here. (With pictures of myself and Jette.)
And they talk about the Tennessee Williams festival events, here. (More pictures.)
The rest of the weekend, I ran around looking at real estate, only half seriously. And looking at schools, slightly more seriously. And being taken on a tour of every Irish pub in the Quarter, with complete and utter seriousness and focus, by the charming Maitri, who knows every bartender and chef in the neighborhood, and who scored us some amazing cajun curried duck thing at Asian Cajun (goofy name, unbelievably good food) on Decatur Street, and then took us to Dante's Kitchen on Sunday night where I had escargot, and black drum on a bed of truffle grits in a something-something brown butter sauce. I came. Twice, in fact.
Most of my other meals were all of the sandwich variety. You could eat nothing but sandwiches for a month in New Orleans and never get bored. Had a smothered duck po-boy at Crabby Jack's, a muffaletta at Napoleon House, a roast beef & horseradish po-boy and a Barq's at Domilise's. Wuz good, I miss it all.
Spending my entire weekend on the Sliver and in the Quarter, it was almost possible to forget about Katrina. Til Monday, I did some driving around through Broadmoor, Gert Town, and Gentilly. Seven months later, and these once dense and thriving neighborhoods are ghost towns, piled with debris. Broadmoor residents are clearly fighting the good fight, but it looks like it will be years before it will be the kind of neighborhood you want to bring your kids to. Same in Gentilly. It's just overwhelming, still, seven months later. Progress, where it exists, is moving at a crawl.
Posted by ray at 10:42 PM | Comments (7)
March 27, 2006
DYK News and My Next NOLA Visit
Chin Music Press has just about run through their first print run of Do You Know What It Means, and Borders has ordered a thousand copies. And last week, we were the #6 Best Seller in the Greater New Orleans area. #7 was The Da Vinci Code. Most of the rest of the top 10 were all Katrina-related. Go figure.
I'll be in New Orleans this weekend, arriving Friday mid-day and leaving Monday afternoon, so if you want to meet up for a drink or something, shoot me an email. Between thinking hard about real estate and schools, most of my time will be spent prowling po boy joints, so if you see a guy with a Ruby's BBQ shirt on and roast beef gravy running down his arm, that'll be me.
Saturday at 1:00 some of the other DYK authors will be doing a panel at the Tennessee Williams Festival at the Cabildo. (I won't be involved but might be skulking around in the background looking for free food.) And Sunday at 2:00, several of us will be doing a reading/signing at the Barnes & Noble in Baton Rouge.
Outselling The Da Vinci Code is exciting stuff, let me tell you, but just being on the same top 10 list as Chris Rose and Tom Piazza is a bigger honor.
Posted by ray at 9:19 AM | Comments (7)
February 18, 2006
Da thing at da Saturn Bar
The DYK party at the Saturn Bar was a smashing success. Well over a hundred people were there, we sold a bunch of books, raised several hundred dollars for Rebuilding Together just from bar donations, and everybody had a great time. All of the people associated with this project are brilliant and charming and sincere and I feel lucky to be a part of it.
I've got a few pictures over in my Flickr page if you're curious about what these folks look like.
On the way out, I talked to the new owner of the Saturn Bar, the nephew of original owner O'Neil Broyard. He says he won't be open in time for Mardi Gras, unfortunately, due to delays in getting licenses, but definitely will up and running by Jazz Fest. And if the bar takes off and does well, he's thinking of giving up his booming flooring business. Says it's going to be an adventure, for sure.
Lots of people are rethinking what they want to do with their lives since Katrina. And he's right, it's going to be a hell of an adventure for all of us.
Posted by ray at 9:44 AM | Comments (4)
February 14, 2006
DYK news and events
My copy of Do You Know What It Means arrived the other day, and I devoured it almost immediately. It's really an elegant little thing, beautifully designed, and the stories are fantastic.
I've already had to do a private reading for family and friends (they humor me so), and had to autograph a copy for Jen the lovely apartment manager when we live now.
This past Sunday the Times-Picayune ran a review of the book that ran over half a news page, with pictures and quotes and banner headlines and everything. You can read it online. It's all pretty much glowing praise, closing with:
"Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?" not only captures the valued and unique facets of our culture; it provides a kind of emotional prism, ways of looking at this time of love and rage, fear and anger, despair and fierce -- and I mean fierce -- hope. So, as C.W. Cannon writes in his "New Orleans Manifesto," "See you on the streets."
They mentioned my story. They even mentioned my recipe.
That review right there is all I really need. If the locals get it, if they read it and give it their stamp of approval, then that means we did something good. Everything else is just gravy.
This Thursday, February 16, from 6-9PM, we'll be having a launch party at the reborn Saturn Bar, 3067 St. Claude Avenue in the Ninth Ward. There'll be readings and cooking from the recipe chapter. Admission is free. Gambit Weekly plugged it as one of their "Best Bets" in their events listings (with another glowing mini-review). So if you're in town, come on out and say hi.
We'll also be doing a book signing during the AWP Conference in Austin, March 8-11. Not sure the exact time, but when I find out details I'll let you know.
Finally, there is a reading at the Baton Rouge Barnes & Noble on Sunday, April 2. I'm hoping to be able to make that one as well, but certainly most of the other Louisiana-based authors will be there.
So much time, so little to do...
Posted by ray at 9:01 PM | Comments (11)
February 7, 2006
Look Ma, I'm famous!
Before Sunday, the last time my name showed up in the Times-Picayune was in 1982 when they listed all the local National Merit Scholarship winners.
But there it is again this past Sunday.
Hee hee!
Posted by ray at 9:05 AM | Comments (7)
January 25, 2006
DYK Book Launch at the Saturn Bar
The launch party for Do You Know What It Means will be taking place in the Ninth Ward at the legendary Saturn Bar, 3067 St. Claude, on February 16, from 6 to 9 PM.
There will be readings and home cooking based on the recipe chapter in the book. I'll definitely be there...my first published story, how could I not? So if you're in town, come by and say hi.
If you're not familiar with the Saturn Bar, check out this post from Chuck at the Gumbo Pages. The Saturn Bar is a neighborhood institution...sadly, owner O'Neil Broyard passed away during the post-Katrina cleanup, but his family is working hard to re-open it.
You can pre-order the book through the end of January, with all pre-order profits donated to Katrina relief organizations.
Posted by ray at 9:17 AM | Comments (9)
December 23, 2005
Merry Christmas, y'all
I'm still in town but I don't know how much time I'll have for posting until next week, so everybody have a Merry Christmas or whatever else it is you celebrate.
Don't forget that you can still pre-order Do You Know What It Means until January 6, and all pre-order profits will go to Katrina relief.
Don't take your tree down til January 6th. Then put up your Mardi Gras decorations. Tis the season and all.
Finally, I leave you with a new Night Before Christmas, Post-K style, swiped from the legendary Gulfsails blog, who got it from who-knows-where. What it lacks in meter it makes up for in pure heart. Thank you, Unknown Author.
Update: The author is Stephany Lyman of UNO. Thanks Stephany!
Have a merry one, y'all.
'Twas the night before Christmas and in the Faubourg At the edge of the crescent, no creature stirred.Under the shroud-like blue plastic from FEMA
That flapped in the wind in the wake of Katrina,Nothing was hung by the chimneys with care
Since chimneys and roofs were no longer there.The houses, abandoned for trailers or Texas,
Were circled with watermarks, branded with Xs,And in them no sugarplums danced in kids' heads,
For no little children slept snug in their bedsOn this night before Christmas in Faubourg-St John
Where time had stopped dead, while the world carried on.Then, lo, from the depths of what once was my garden
(Now a wild cesspool of strange hydrocarbons)Up drift some voices from out of the dark
To compete with the flapping of my FEMA tarp:"They all axed for you, dawlin'. How did you do?"
"-Nine feet of water, and how about you?""Do ya know what it means to miss New Orleans?"
"-Not enough ersters-or rice and red beans!"I'm certain of whom this can't possibly be:
It's not the adjuster; it's not Entergy;With looters gone elsewhere, this can't be a stick-up;
And who can remember the last garbage pick-up?It's surely not someone from Capitol Hill
To tell me, at last, whether I can rebuild.I lift back what's left of my old cypress shutters
And peek past the tangle of phone lines and gutters,And what to my wondering eyes should appear?
Not Santa Claus and his team of reindeerBut, costumed in rubber attire and gas masks,
A long second-line, waving hankies and flasks.Rather than coconuts, beads and doubloons,
This krewe carries gear (and, just barely, a tune).With wet vacs and power tools, sheetrock and nails,
Brawny and Brillo piled high in their pails,They're Superdome faithful, survivors of attics,
Mardi Gras maniacs, Jazz Fest fanatics,Carnival trackers (from Allah to Zeus),
Believers in Saints (whether St. Jude or Deuce),Joined by a couple of Dutch engineers,
Some out-of-town builders and church volunteers.They pause at the dead Live Oak next to my door
In T-shirts declaring Make Levees Not War.Since ditching my mold-ridden fridge at the curb,
MREs have become the hors d'oeuvres that I serveSo I pass them around with Abita's new ale
When a wrench taps, "Clink! Clink!" on the side of a pail:"To Blanco," they cry, "She got contra-flow down!
To Nagin-he sure told those Feds and Mike Brown!To NOLA dot com, CNN, and the Times
Who cut to the quick of the Superdome crime!To all those who took in our downtrodden folks,
Or ferried them out in their flat-bottom boats!To Tennessee... Texas... Jackson... Atlanta...
Our Baton Rouge brothers ... and Lou-i-si-ana!"I notice no Rudy steps up as their leader,
Yet something unseen guides this flock of believers,A force that transcends rich or poor, black or white,
A light that can steer this brigade through the night.In a twinkle they've finished the last of the ale
And they hoist their equipment, their masks and their pails:"On, Comet! On, Borax! On, on Spic 'n Span!
"Come (Yule) Tide and Cheer! Come, All, let us plan!Up, Mildew! Off, Mold! Out, out, Toxic Waste!
Come, Shout! Away, Wisk! Come, let us make haste!To the top of the water mark! Up, past the stair!
Let the City that Care Forgot know that we care!"Then to Lakeview, Gentilly, Chalmette and the East,
Away they all marched to a Zydeco beat.Ere they rose past the tarps, I heard a voice say
"Merry Christmas-and Laissez les bon temps rouler!"
Posted by ray at 11:40 AM | Comments (7)
December 5, 2005
Pre-order DYK
Looks like the page for pre-ordering Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans? is now up here.
New Orleans is a complex American city that is in dire need of help. Katrina and corporate greed threaten to wash away its nuances, and that is why Chin Music Press decided to gather the voices of the Crescent City in a special volume of essays, art and information. Inside Do You Know, you'll find the rage of a people treated by their own government like an "ugly, unwanted stepchild," as Toni McGee Causey puts it, but you'll also find laughter as boy scouts navigate a Mardi Gras parade or as a rather bookish professor steps onto Bourbon Street for the first time. Do You Know takes the reader back to the New Orleans of yesteryear with 19th century engravings of the city and musings from writers, such as British geologist Charles Lyell's reflections on the 1846 Fat Tuesday: "We saw persons armed with bags of flour, which they showered down copiously on anyone who seemed particularly proud of his attire."
You can support Katrina relief, support a small publishing house, and also support my very first published work, all with one purchase.
Posted by ray at 11:06 AM | Comments (3)
November 3, 2005
Do You Know...the Book
The book in which my New Orleans piece will appear now has a working title: Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?
Craig Mod from Chin Music Press is doing the book design, and is blogging the design process at the Chin Music blog. It's fascinating reading, especially considering how well-received the design of Kuhaku was (which I hope to get a copy of real soon). The Chin Music folks are book geeks, design geeks, music geeks, coffee geeks, Japan geeks, and now, God love 'em, budding young New Orleans geeks.
I've also got a PDF of the DYK press packet, with my bio in it.
My bio. Is that like the dorkiest thing ever, or what?
Posted by ray at 9:39 PM | Comments (5)
September 28, 2005
Gaiman and Whedon
It's National Goth Month, according to this great interview with Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon.
Mirrormask looks awfully cool.
And now that they mention it, I do feel a lot like a dolphin lately.
(Thanks Merrick.)
Posted by ray at 11:47 AM | Comments (4)
September 4, 2005
Anne Rice: Do you know what it means to lose New Orleans?
A history lesson, and a moral lesson. Yeah, the vampire shit drives me nuts sometimes, but Anne Rice loves her city.
But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us "Sin City," and turned your backs. Well, we are a lot more than all that. And though we may seem the most exotic, the most atmospheric and, at times, the most downtrodden part of this land, we are still part of it. We are Americans. We are you.
Posted by ray at 12:44 AM | Comments (10)
August 16, 2005
Prime
"Never been crazy about Mexican food -- I'm a haute cuisine boy from way back." --Frank Firestone
I finished Prime the other night, Poppy Z. Brite's sequel to Liquor. Not as good as the first, but still an enjoyable read, enough so that I'm looking forward to book three in the series, Soul Kitchen.
Prime picks up with Rickey, G-man, and Lenny, two years after the opening of their restaurant, and tells a very complicated tale that manages to intertwine Lenny's shady business practices, the internal political maneuverings in the New Orleans DA's office, and the revamping of a floundering Dallas-based restaurant owned by a rich Texas businessman/yokel named Frank Firestone.
It wouldn't be possible to go into how all these threads are related without doing major spoiler damage. Unlike Liquor, which was basically a suspense/thriller story hiding behind a restaurant tale, Prime is a mystery novel. And that might be where its weakness lies, because all the secrets that drive the plot stayed hidden right up until chapter 25, where they were all just sort of awkardly blorped out onto the page in a big lump, right before the climactic scene. Some people can write these kinds of things and do them justice, and I don't know if that's where Brite's strength lies.
What makes it worth reading, though, are the characters, who are all rich and colorful and fully-formed and wonderful. I wanted to keep reading because I feel like I know these guys, and I want to know what happens to them next.
And of course, when Rickey travels to Dallas, all the New-Orleans-native-in-a-foreign-country scenes just tickled me to death, since once again they are so spot on, so exactly like my experience moving to Houston after growing up on the West Bank. Seeing grown men in cowboy boots, and "rivers" that don't have enough water in them to float a piroque, never mind a freighter. And wondering what the hell things like "last call" and "dry county" mean, and why you can't walk out the front door of a bar with your drink.
Rickey had been completely befuddled when Coop said Oak Cliff was a dry neighborhood. At first Rickey thought he was talking about the climate, and wondered aloud how it could differ from the rest of the city's."No," said Coop, "dry as in no alcohol."
"No alcohol? What the fuck do you mean?" Rickey hadn't meant to be rude, but it was as if Coop had suddenly started speaking another language. "Do they stop you at the border and take it away or something?"
Coop laughed. "Nothing like that. You can have it in your home. But the stores don't sell it, and there aren't any bars here."
"What about the restaurants?"
"I never eat over here," Coop admitted. "I think they can serve alcohol, but the customer's supposed to show a drinking permit. I hear the waiters never ask to see it, though."
"A drinking permit?" Rickey clutched his head. "How can there be a drinking permit? That's the most retarded thing I ever heard."
If you liked Liquor, you'll still like this one. It's still some of the best true-to-New-Orleans lit I've run across.
Posted by ray at 7:42 PM | Comments (0)
August 14, 2005
Mystic Pig
Richard Katrovas's Mystic Pig blew my mind. Thanks Karl.
A wholly different sort of New Orleans book than Poppy Z. Brite's Liquor and Prime. Katrovas is a poet and so his style is ornate and complex, in contrast to Brite's straightforward conversational tone. And while the Liquor series is about the interactions between an array of colorful characters, Mystic Pig is about the internal demons of one man with a mid-life crisis and a bizarre secret life.
It's so very hard to describe this book without giving anything away, and it's a book that you're best served going into without knowing much about the story. Quick summary: Nat is a restaurant owner with three children by two wives, and a secret life that involves a third woman. But the secret life is so much more than what you're thinking.
This book utterly nails the thought processes of the 40-something husband and father who feels like something slipped away over the past couple of decades while he wasn't watching. Like American Beauty or Lost in Translation.
This snippet is Nat talking to his newly discovered birth mother via email:
I'm a father, a dull, phallic signifier (how am I doing with the lingo?) in that odd Hell of unsteady yet enduring patriarchal determinants. But you know what? I'm also a night goblin, rousting about in the shadows while others sleep. I'm a silly monster my kids are not only not frightened of, but regard more in the spirit of a large pet who comes and goes, more or less protecting the hearth, than of a gray wall of intractable laws and their enforcement. Hey, I'm just looking for myself, like everyone else, trying to figure out who I am. Maybe we never stop being sixteen. Isn't that really when it starts? Right about then? Isn't that when suddenly you realize that the child you recently were, so sure of it itself, so sure of who and what it was, is a foreigner trapped inside you? It will always be there, must always be accounted for, even as you have become someone else. And there is no single moment marking the birth of that rattled self, that self wholly aware of how ordinary it is in most respects, but also feeling a uniqueness that would allow it to occupy the entire fucking universe all by itself, allow it to be God.So you're fourteen or fifteen or sixteen and you could be God if the universe would let you, but it won't, so you have to be human and account almost daily for the child you recently had been, a child who will always be there and who will be the only immutable fact of consciousness unto death. But there's something else. An itch. A compulsion maybe? No, I prefer it to be an itch, one that can never be scratched or balmed. A sense that there is something of you, maybe the part that could be God, maybe not, that is knowable and that you should try to know. Why? No fucking reason. No fucking reason at all. There's just that itch. In my secret life, in those brief moments I indulge in that artifice, and yes I admit freely cheerfully unambiguously that it is an indulgence, the itch ceases.
But the revelations of exactly what slipped away and why--in Nat's case--is so shattering, so twisted...well, you have to read the book. I've said as much as I can say.
Posted by ray at 11:20 PM | Comments (0)
August 1, 2005
Go To Hell
I am always on the lookout for good (free) bookmarks. I have a big pile of cool ones from the Roky Erickson Trust. Be nice to me and next time I send you a gift, I'll include a couple.
And the free ones that our mighty indie bookstore Book People gives out always have great quotes on them. My previous favorite was this witticism by Groucho Marx: "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. And inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."
But now I have a new favorite which, with 100% perfect accuracy, describes me and describes how my relationship with books and with the outside world has worked since I was five years old:
Posted by ray at 8:26 PM | Comments (0)
July 26, 2005
Potter Interruptus
The stress of not having read the new Harry Potter yet and trying to dodge all the spoiler landmines in the blogosphere is killing me. I finish Tim Powers tonight, but Gina hasn't finished Potter yet so I'm gonna have to fight her for it.
I was hoping to go into it completely fresh, but I already know that something really huge happens, something dire, and now thanks to an accidental blog entry I know which character it involves. [Update: I've since been informed that I don't know as much as I think I know.]
If I wait a few more days I'm gonna accidently hear the whole damn thing and then I might just say "fuck it" and wait for the movie to come out.
As a group, y'all...shut the fuck up for another week, OK?
Posted by ray at 2:32 PM | Comments (0)
July 17, 2005
Potter Potter Potter...
The events around the release of The Half-Blood Prince have left barely a dent around the house.
Cassidy still hasn't finished Order of the Phoenix after all these years. I think the overwhelming bulk of the thing just depresses her, and she's got a bunch of summer reading assignments to finish before middle school.
Liam kind of skimmed the first book, but he tends to think of Harry Potter as a movie series. The first movie came out when he was around 4. He likes to read, but he'd rather read Spiderman and Lemony Snicket.
Gina just finished Liquor, but she's rarely in a huge hurry to jump on the latest book. Busy, busy, busy, y'know.
And me? I'm still working on Last Call, and I refuse to start another book until I'm done with it. But lately I've been frittering away my valuable reading time playing around with my new PowerBook. And to be honest, I kind of skimmed a lot towards the end of Order of the Phoenix. That big battle scene just seemed like it was written with the camera shots already in mind...it was dull dull dreary and dull. I liked the book, but it could have been even better about 20% shorter. So I am actually torn between starting Potter next, or getting back into the next few volumes of Sandman. But the longer I wait, the more likely I am to run into spoilers in the blogosphere...what, Voldemort is Harry's father? Deja vu!
Bookwise here, it's been the opposite of the Perfect Storm. Just the Perfect Meh.
Posted by ray at 12:29 PM | Comments (0)
June 25, 2005
Liquor: A Novel
Best. Novel. All. Year.
From what I can tell, New Orleans author Poppy Z. Brite originally made a name for herself writing vampire/horror stuff. I haven't read those early books, so I can't really comment on them specifically, but then again I guess it's not a surprise I never read them...if I'd heard about them I would have turned up my nose. I've always resented the way that the Anne Rice books turned New Orleans into some kind of goth mecca, a cartoony fantasy place where the city is so thick with vampires and voodoo and cemeteries and Marie Laveaux it's a wonder anybody gets anything else done.
But Poppy, it seems, has grown up, abandoned the undead, and is now writing about what is truly important in New Orleans, which is food and booze and neighborhood bars and Yats. And she knows the city well. She knows the city like a native.
I don't think it's possible to write convincingly about New Orleans if you're not a native, and I'm still not entirely positive that an outsider could read an accurate book about New Orleans and truly "get it". Even something like A Confederacy of Dunces, which is a brilliant novel...I don't know how somebody who doesn't know New Orleans could really fully grok it. That book was such a huge deal when it came out, when I was in high school. Not only did it finally put New Orleans on the map in terms of 20th century American fiction, but it did it by portraying in beautiful, hilarious, painfully accurate detail the people of New Orleans. It captured a now-dead era in New Orleans...before the huge wave of tourism, before the Cajun food craze, when there were still department stores on Canal Street and the Riverwalk was still a rail yard and Mardi Gras was still a largely local phenomenon.
Well, Poppy writes about New Orleans and its people with the same true, deep, powerful understanding that John Kennedy Toole did.
Liquor follows the adventures of two guys from the Ninth Ward, two guys living the typical hard-drinking drug-abusing bohemian lives of line cook grunts in the upscale eateries of New Orleans. If you've read Kitchen Confidential, you know the guys I'm talking about. Anthony Bourdain's army. I remember late one night being in a dive bar in the French Quarter after restaurant closing time, and a crowd of these guys came in to drink and play pool after getting off work. Still in their grubby, stained chef whites with the Brennan's logo stitched on the breast, they were an imposing bunch of sweaty, loud, long-haired, hard-drinking tattooed badasses. Imagine Mudhoney after guesting on Iron Chef. They were fucking cool.
Anyway, these two guys in the book, Rickey and G-Man, get the idea to open a theme restaurant called "Liquor", where every item on the menu has booze in it. And they get help from an unlikely source in the form of Lenny Duveteaux, a New England-born television chef with black curly hair who owns a touristy chain of New Orleans-themed restaurants (yeah, yeah, so it's kind of obvious who he's supposed to be). Things go from funny to debauched to strange to violent. It's a glorious book.
What I like best about Liquor is how authentic the characters are. I know exactly what these people look like, what they sound like. Everything they do, everything they say is believable to a native. Poppy understands the sound of how people speak, the rhythm of their days, even how they get around town and why. I mean, little things, like in one chapter they're driving back uptown to their shotgun house at Marengo & Tchoupitoulas, and they take Magazine Street. Now, anybody who wasn't from New Orleans would have had them driving up St. Charles past the ancient oaks and stately mansions of the Garden District. Because that would have seemed so "New Orleans-y". And it would have been obvious bullshit to a local, because anybody who drives Uptown knows that you take Magazine Street because it's got fewer lights and less traffic. I love that she knows that.
And the way people talk:
"We're no yats," said Rickey. "You gotta be old to be a yat.""Bullshit," Tanker told him. "Here, take my foolproof yat test." He scrawled five words on a paper napkin -- SURE, ALL RIGHT, ROOM, TULANE -- and pushed it across the table. "Read that out loud."
"Shore. Awright. Rum. TOO-lane," Rickey read.
"You're as yatty as they come."
"What's a yat anyway?" said Lenny. "I know it's somebody who talks like you guys, but I don't know why you call it that."
"Hey, Lenny, where y'at?"
So I've found a new favorite novelist to follow around for a while. There's a sequel to Liquor already out, called Prime. And there's a third one in the works.
And Poppy's blog is over here, in case you're interested. Those of you who keep dancing around the notion of becoming writers, do check it out, since she talks about writing an awful lot.
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If you happen to notice when I add new books to the "Currently Reading" list over there on the left: no, I do not need sex explained to myself. I'm reading this one before handing it off to Cassidy. Her pediatrician strongly impressed upon us that she needs to have a basic handle on topics like oral sex before she starts middle school, because it will come up and better she have learned a little common sense ahead of time before some 8th grade boy decides to teach her his alternate view of reality. So, uh, yeah, heebie jeebies all around.
Posted by ray at 10:59 PM | Comments (9)
June 11, 2005
Friday Night Lights
I finished Friday Night Lights last week, a birthday gift from my friend Sarah. I wasn't really aware of the book until the recent movie version came out, since the book was originally published during my all-too-brief exile in California.
Now I've read a lot of books about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and there are a lot of non-touristy-type places I'd like to visit in Belfast, or in Derry. I'm a WWII history geek, and some day I want to visit Auschwitz. I want to visit Normandy. One of my favorite trips ever was going to Berlin right after the Wall came down, and getting to see it while no-mans-land still existed, and while nobody was really 100% sure yet if somebody wasn't going to change their mind and shoot you for climbing up on top of the Wall. Hell, after reading Guerevitch's book about Rwanda, I even checked out the web site for the Hotel Des Milles Collines to see how much it costs to stay there.
But I tell you...after reading Friday Night Lights, I don't ever ever want to go anywhere near Odessa, Texas. It sounds awful. It sounds dreary. And to me, who once got dragged into an interrogation room for (unfounded) suspicion of drug smuggling by East German border guards, Odessa actually sounds too scary and alien to contemplate.
If you're not familiar with the book, it is the non-fiction account of the 1988 season of the Permian Panthers football team, during the depths of the West Texas oil bust. It's roughly a football equivalent of Hoop Dreams...a high school, a whole town, where football is revered above all else (especially above academics), where players are treated like gods until injury or graduation transforms them back into the "dumb niggers and oil field workers" they were born to be.
I suppose some people can read this and see "traditional American values". All I see is everything that is wrong with America right now. Everything that the educated Urban Archipelago must continually fight against. Conservative America as a religion in its own right. Football as an obsession, as a fetish, raised almost to the status of a sacrament. Reading this book right on the heels of What's the Matter With Kansas made me more depressed than ever about the faux-Christian-values jock contingent, the people who Bruce Sterling once described as the "they don't know nothing about nothing and hate anyone who does" crowd.
It's a brilliant, fascinating read. It's a great book if you want to see right into the heart of where our President calls home. But you might prefer to avert your eyes.
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In happier news, I've started both Sandman and Poppy Z. Brite's Liquor, which are both fantastic and uplifting. I probably won't have much to say about Sandman, since I appear to be the last person on the planet who hasn't read it and people more well-versed than me in the comics thing have already talked it to death. But I'll say more about Liquor as I get farther into it, 'cause there's lots to talk about there. Imagine Kitchen Confidential, in novel form...in New Orleans. Yeah, baby, it's that good.
Posted by ray at 6:56 PM | Comments (4)
May 28, 2005
The Path To Bookslut
I'm skipping across blogs like a frog hopping from lily pad to lily pad. Checked in with Austin Bloggers, which led me to All About E, which made me go all giggly:
Leah: "I went to 7-11 and bought a Slurpee and the cashier-guy checked me out."Me: "Isn’t that what he gets paid to do?"
which led me to Bookslut, which made me go all giggly again:
The Agony Column has an audio interview with Chuck Palahniuk about, among other things, his new book Haunted. The one question I would have liked him to ask: How is it even possible this book is as bad as it is? It seems to violate laws of physics with its badness.
I don't know how I went so long being oblivious to the existence of such a fine website, something that is so much greater than the sum of its parts, "book" and "slut" (each of which individually is dang fine).
Now I have another place where I can read about books instead of, say, reading a book.
Posted by ray at 11:05 PM | Comments (1)
May 26, 2005
Running With Scissors
I finished Burroughs' Running With Scissors yesterday. Finally. Took me a long time since it was my gym book so I only got in snatches of reading on days when I wasn't too lazy to do cardio.
It was good. Not as good as Dry, which I loved, but it was still enjoyable. I think Dry was very easy to relate to for me, since I've been through a lot of the same stuff he has. OK, no gay crackhead lover, but a lot of the other stuff.
Running With Scissors was more alien to me, and for a while in the middle it was starting to bog down...his experiences as a child were SO bizarre, SO twisted, that it started seeming like just a litany of freakishness with no end in sight and no point. But having read these two books out of order, I knew what the end result was. I knew he had to end up as an alcoholic ad executive in Manhattan, because I'd read the second book, and when in the final two chapters the plot suddenly starts racing towards that resolution...it was somewhat glorious. It's like watching American Beauty, and sort of not seeing how all of these tragic and twisted and comical anecdotes have anything to do with each other, and then the ending washes over you and you get it, and it is lovely.
I've got a couple more on my to-be-read stack, and then the following order is incoming from Amazon:
Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls - Rachel Simmons
"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character - Richard P. Feynman
The Price Advantage - Michael V. Marn [I need to read this for work.]
Liquor : A Novel - Poppy Z. Brite
No god but God : The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam - Reza Aslan
The Sandman Vol. 1: Preludes and Nocturnes - Neil Gaiman
Mystic Pig : A Novel of New Orleans - Richard Katrovas
Not sure what order I'll take them in. Probably knock off Sandman in a few hours, then what? Karl will say Mystic Pig. Sarah K. will want me to read Feynman. And I definitely have to read the Rachel Simmons before Cassidy starts middle school in August. Any other votes?
Posted by ray at 2:25 PM | Comments (8)
May 22, 2005
God and Harry Potter
Clint Hagen has been writing a really interesting series of posts in his blog about the book Looking for God in Harry Potter, by John Granger (who I'm not positive is the muggle parent of Hermione, but the thought has crossed my mind).
Fortunately none of the parents where my kids go to school are possessed with the lunacy that the Harry Potter stories are Satanic or anti-Christian or otherwise dangerous for young minds and souls, but such parents do exist. This being Texas, the suburbs and outlying towns around here are probably thick with them.
I haven't read Granger's book yet, but it's high up on my list (that is, if I can get to it before it's my turn to read The Half-Blood Prince. We have four HP fans in our house so we fight over the books when they come out.)
At any rate, Mr. Granger himself is providing some commentary to Clint's musings. Check it out.
Posted by ray at 8:14 PM | Comments (0)
May 21, 2005
Book Tag
Karl has been passing around blog memes like the clap lately.
1) What is the total number of books I've owned?
I've got about 400-500 upstairs right now. About a hundred technical books at work. Not counting books I owned as a kid, I've probably sold/lost/given away about a hundred.
2) What is the last book I bought?
I bought a pile a couple of months ago: To Kill A Mockingbird, Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs, Invisible Monsters by Chuck Pahlaniuk, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow, and We Wish To Inform You... by Paul Gaurevitch. That pile and random gifts from people have been keeping me busy.
3) What is the last book I've read?
Last finished? Digital Fortress. Mostly to annoy Doxy.
The last I've read which I haven't finished, my current bedtime book, is Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger. A birthday gift from the lovely Sarah K.
4) What are the 5 books that have meant a lot to me?
OK, a few more than five.
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
William Gibson, Neuromancer
Los Bros Hernandez Love And Rockets (the various anthologies)
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Charles Bukowski, The Most Beautiful Woman in Town
Walter Miller, A Canticle for Liebowitz
Michael Azzerad, Our Band Could Be Your Life
Tim Pat Coogan, Michael Collins
Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Alcoholics Anonymous. Not because it was a good book, it actually kind of sucks. But because for some unexplainable reason it worked.
Extra credit question, 'What book would you wish to buy next':
Something about New Orleans. Either Mystic Pig by Richard Katrova or Liquor: A Novel, by Poppy Z. Brite.
Tag! You're it!
Melanie
Rachel
Quinn
Brett & Hiromi
Clint
Ya know what's sad? I have trouble thinking of more than 6 or 7 bloggers who read mine. Some of those I'm tagging just to see who's there.
Most of my hits lately are people googling the purple pope. Sigh.
Updated 5-22-05: I can't believe I left the Hofstadter book off.
Posted by ray at 9:49 AM | Comments (5)
May 18, 2005
Digital Fortress
Despite what some people think of them, I really liked Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons. Yeah, it's all fluff, but it was entertaining fluff. I steered clear of Digital Fortress, though. Don't know why, I just had a feeling I wouldn't like it.
Well, my darling daughter bought me Digital Fortress for my birthday. With her own money. Because she knew I liked Dan Brown's other books. So when your daughter buys you a book with her own money, you read it, and you like it. End of story.
So what did I learn from this book? A few things (spoilers, some of them):
1. The EFF is a bunch of naive do-gooders who have no clue what kind of carnage would be wrought if the government couldn't spy on us.
2. The NSA clearly needs to be able to listen in on all of the world's electronic communications any time they want to, for purely noble reasons. They would never abuse this trust.
3. Bits, bytes, alphabetic characters, alphanumeric characters, and ASCII characters are, oh, pretty much all the same thing, right? For instance, this is an 8-bit key: "APQRDX34".
4. The villian is named TANKADO. His shadowy accomplice is called "NORTH DAKOTA". All of the most talented cryptographers at the NSA will fail to recognize the obvious anagram here until the last chapter. Anagrams are hard, I guess.
5. Computers at the NSA have this futuristic feature where with a couple of keystrokes, the user can "lock" their terminal so that nobody can use it unless they enter the user's password. This technology is so mind-bendingly high-tech that it requires a half-page of explanation.
6. Passwords at the NSA are all fixed-length keys of 5 alphanumeric characters, case-insensitive.
7. The NSA is an overwhelmingly male-dominated organization. However, if you are a female who is also the most brilliant code breaker who ever lived, you can work there if the director thinks you're hot.
8. If the power in the NSA Crypto division goes out, the backup power will only be sufficient to keep the main codebreaking computer running. All other power, including doors, door locks, and lights, will be unusable.
9. However, if the power door locks are not functioning, all doors in the most secure facility in the world can be forced open with a little muscle. As a general rule, all men in the NSA are strong enough to open them. The lone woman is not.
10. If the main NSA database loses power, all data contained within it will be lost forever.
11. Given a cryptic phrase written by a scientist including the words "prime" and "difference", a room full of mathematicians and crypographers and scientists will not notice that these are mathematical terms until disaster is less than 10 seconds away.
12. When riding a Vespa scooter across oil-slick pavement at 50 miles an hour, frantically pumping your brakes will allow you to stay upright for dozens of yards and then continue riding once you are through.
13. In Spain, all punk rockers are dumb, illiterate stoners, but they speak flawless English with an American accent.
My girl bought this for me, so I read it, and I thanked her. I'm such a good daddy.
And you know what else? It was still better than Cryptonomicon.
Posted by ray at 11:35 AM | Comments (6)
May 15, 2005
What's the Matter With Kansas?
I finished What's the Matter With Kansas? a few weeks back, and I can't recommend this book highly enough. Thomas Frank explains how Republicans have taken control of the Red states by political swindle, a Jedi mind-trick in which the GOP signs up working-class Red Staters to an anti-elite populist uprising, while at the same time convincing them that 1) rich Ivy League Republicans are not part of that hated elite, and 2) economic issues have no rightful place in any populist uprising.
It's brilliant how this switcheroo has been executed.
I'm going to quote at length here from the final chapter (without permission) not because I want to steal Frank's words, but because I want to convince you to go out and buy this book now.
American conservatism depends for its continued dominance and even for its very existence on people never making certain mental connections about the world, connections that until recently were treated as obvious or self-evident everywhere on the planet. For example, the connection between mass-culture, most of which conservatives hate, and laissez-faire capitalism, which they adore without reservation. Or between the small towns they profess to love and the market forces that are slowly grinding those small towns back into the red-state dust -- which forces they praise in the most exalted terms....
Behold the political alignment that Kansas is pioneering for us all. The corporate world -- for reasons having a great deal to do with its corporateness -- blankets the nation with a cultural style designed to offend and to pretend-subvert: sassy teens in Sketchers flout the Man; bigoted churchgoing moms don't tolerate their daughters' cool liberated friends; hipsters dressed in T-shirts reading "FCUK" snicker at the suits who just don't get it. It's meant to be offensive, and Kansas is duly offended. The state watches impotently as its culture, beamed in from the coasts, becomes coarser and more offensive by the year. Kansas aches for revenge. Kansas gloats when celebrities say stupid things; it cheers when movie stars go to jail. And when two female rock stars exchange a lascivious kiss on national TV, Kansas goes haywire. Kansas screams for the heads of the liberal elite. Kansas comes running to the polling place. And Kansas cuts those rock stars' taxes.
As a social system, the backlash works. The two adversaries feed off each other in a kind of inverted symbiosis: one mocks the other, and the other heaps even more power on the one. This arrangement should be the envy of every ruling class in the world. Not only can it be pushed much, much further, but it is fairly certain that it will be so pushed. All the incentives point that way, as do the never-examined cultural requirements of modern capitalism. Why shouldn't our culture just get worse and worse, if making it worse will only cause the people who worsen it to grow wealthier and wealthier?
Put down the laptop for a couple of nights and read this book, and make your friends read this book.
Posted by ray at 10:33 PM | Comments (1)
April 26, 2005
H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds
Since my rant a few months ago about the Spielbergization of War of the Worlds, I've heard rumblings. Rumblings about how bad the new film really is turning out to be. "Independence Day with tripods"...bleagh.
And rumblings about another movie actually based on the book. Set in Victorian England. The link will take you to some trailers, which show that they have the right goals in mind, at least. They've read the book, and they get it. Whether they can pull it off is another question, but I'm hoping. Really hoping.
Posted by ray at 9:16 PM | Comments (1)
April 15, 2005
Hornby-o-rama
I have been meaning to read a book about cricket for awhile, with the sole intention of annoying you all. I even toyed with the idea of reading only cricket books this entire month, but then I realized that this would make it too easy for you to skip the whole column; this way, you have to wade through the cricket to get to the Chekhov and the Roddy Doyle.
I finished The Polysyllabic Spree the other night. What a great book. Anybody who can write about reading the same way that Hornby wrote about music in High Fidelity is my kind of people. He's got me wanting to read Chekhov and Dickens now, and get caught up on current Roddy Doyle. He's redeemed himself for How To Be Good.
And now I have to figure out what to do about Fever Pitch. I hate seeing a movie before I've read the book, but there are extenuating circumstances here. The new film has been recast as a Red Sox tribute, and sorry Nick, but in the "Shit Ray Cares About" pantheon, you rank way WAY below the Red Sox. The Red Sox are up with my kids and motorcycles and uni and crawfish and the Ramones and dark chocolate. Nick, friend, you are brilliant, but you rank down in the 85-95 percentile range, along with bluebonnets, homemade buttered popcorn, the Astros, and the second Clash album.
And the kids are bugging me to see the movie. And I've got other stuff I want to read before I take on yet another Hornby book...the non-fiction is calling me again.
And lo and behold, there is actually a 1997 film that appears to be really based on the book...it's actually about soccer, at least, and stars English people like Colin Sodding Firth. So maybe I can see the new film, then read the book, then see the old film. Or something.
Posted by ray at 10:17 AM | Comments (0)
March 28, 2005
The Polysyllabic Spree
Hornby gets it:
So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading--about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it's going badly, when books don't stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you'd rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time.
So he can be forgiven for himself having put me through both of these extremes in the last six months. This is a monthly journal where he analyzes what he bought and that subset of which that he actually read. I was hooked by that first paragraph, and then boated and gutted when I got to this bit (about a Robert Lowell biography):
Lowell, it turns out, is the guy you can see just behind Zelig's shoulder: He corresponded with Eliot, hung out with Jackie and Bobby K., and traveled around with Eugene McCarthy in '68. He also beat up his own father, had endless strange, possibly sexless extramarital affairs with innumerable young women, and endured terrible periods of psychosis, frequently accompanied by alarming rants about Hitler. In other words, it's one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of "This is ME!"
...as I did recently to Gina with Dry, but she has little tolerance for me pestering her with choice quotes out of books every twenty minutes or so, which means that when I find something in the Spree that I absolutely must share, you'll stand a good chance of seeing it here. Which may actually happen infrequently, work being the death march that it is this week and next, so don't let me stop you from going out and buying this one yourself, even though I didn't buy mine because Darrell sent me his spare copy. (Thanks, Darrell!)
And in case you were wondering, the title does derive from the glorious Polyphonic Spree, but the setup is too involved to go into here, you'll just have to buy it and read it yourself.
And buy the latest Polyphonic Spree CD as well, while you're at it.
Posted by ray at 7:51 PM | Comments (1)
March 22, 2005
How to be Good
By Nick Hornby.
Summary: sarcastic, bitter, unlikeable doctor is having an affair because her husband, who has been sarcastic and angry his entire life, is for some reason still sarcastic and angry after two kids and years of marriage. Husband goes to an annoying hippy faith healer and suddenly becomes full of love and generosity. This makes wife even more sarcastic and bitter, only now she's compulsively introspective about it.
Hilarity fails to ensue.
I wrapped up my cardio workout with only six pages to go in this book, and I just can't do it. I'm not going back to it. I'm done. I don't care how it ends. It was awful. I hate these people.
I was not surprised that I was disappointed with my last Palahniuk read, since I still viewed him with some suspicion even after liking Choke. How much of Palahniuk is hype, how much is just the modern fetish for the grotesque? Invisible Monsters answered that question for me.
But I love Hornby. High Fidelity and About a Boy were both spectacular. So this latest was a real let-down.
I'm not sure where I'm going next. I'm almost finished with the Rwanda book, so I'll need a nighttime book as well as another fluff book for the gym. I've got a couple of Irish history books by Tim Pat Coogan in the stack. I've got To Kill A Mockingbird, Augusten Burroughs' Running With Scissors, (Dry was fucking fantastic), something by Cory Doctorow, and some Hornby non-fiction that Darrell sent me and highly recommends.
We shall see.
Posted by ray at 11:13 PM | Comments (5)
March 16, 2005
Back
I'm back, but I'm finally sporting the sore throat and runny nose that have been the fashion rage with everybody I know the past month, so any vacation news or pictures will have to wait til I'm feeling better.
I need to rest up, since SXSW starts tonight, and St. Patrick's Day is tomorrow.
The only thing I'd like to leave you with is a brief book review: Chuck Palahniuk's Invisible Monsters is an absolute waste of time. I can't even get traction on the vast and numerous reasons why I dislike this book, it's just a monumentally pointless collection of words.
It took me more than a month to finish it, and between that and the equally tedious Nick Hornby book How to Be Good, which has been keeping me from enjoying my cardio workouts since January, I have officially sworn off novels for a while.
So I'm back on the non-fiction. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda
by Philip Gourevitch has been a fascinating read so far.
More later. I have a date with some Nyquil.
Posted by ray at 5:41 PM | Comments (5)
February 23, 2005
Recent non-fiction, part I
Last month some time we were talking a lot about books, and I promised to run down a bunch of my recent reads in the non-fiction category, since up until recently I'd been reading a lot more non-fiction than fiction. So here ya go.
Dan Savage Skipping Towards Gomorrah
Dan is the weekly sex columnist who writes "Savage Love" but this book isn't sex advice, it's his take on American culture. In each chapter, Dan takes on one of the seven deadly sins and goes out and tries to live that sin in a uniquely American way. So he does Greed in Vegas, Lust at a heterosexual swingers club, Gluttony at a BBW-and-admirers convention, etc. Along the way he manages to skewer the hypocrisy of the moral crusaders of the right like William Bennett at every turn. It's a great read if you're one of those who loves the sin but hates the sinner...er, I mean loves the sin but hates the sin-hater...no, wait...how does it go again?
William L. Shirer The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
The classic reference on the subject of Nazi Germany. Shirer was a reporter in Germany during the rise of Hitler and so witnessed much of the early years of the Nazi party first-hand, but his book is not just a first-hand account, but authoritatively and meticulously researched. If you want to understand how it could happen again, you need to understand how it happened there. The German people were not insane and they were not evil, yet they were possessed by evil and insanity for almost twenty years, with horrific results. Think it couldn't happen here? You're naive.
Dr. A (Isaac Asimov), The Sensuous Dirty Old Man
The lovely and talented Sara bought this for me last summer. Supposedly a satirical instructional guide on how to be a leering, lecherous dirty old man and beat the talentless young studs at attracting cute young things, I have taken it to heart. I know Dr. A only pretended to be kidding, and that this really should be a manual for living. I try to incorporate it into my daily routine.
Dan Shaughnessy The Curse of the Bambino
Originally written in the late 80's but updated recently (before the 2004 Series though), this book has probably done more to propogate the Curse notion than anything. Yes, the Curse was supersitious nonsense, but when fate shits on you year after year after year, you can't help but be superstitious. So now the Sox are becoming like the Yankees...the fashionable hat for non-fans to wear just because it looks cool. It's like when the masses discovered punk rock...the poseurs are out in force, and just because somebody wears a B on their hat doesn't mean you'll be able to commiserate with them and have them understand you. Winning was great, but the legacy of winning is almost a disappointment. Like, "now what?" Still, a fun book. (Yeah, I read it before they won.)
Got a few more I'll write about when I get some time.
Posted by ray at 9:28 PM | Comments (0)
February 21, 2005
Hunter S. Thompson RIP
I was at a benefit tonight with my friend Kristi, and for some reason the subject of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" came up. She had just recently read it for the first time, so we talked a little about Thompson, Kerouac, Ginsberg.
Then later Gina and I saw a late show of Hotel Rwanda, and it's been Rwanda that's been on my mind the past few days anyway. Until now.
Something got me out of bed, I don't know why, and I came down, checked my email, then checked MSNBC.com.
Hunter S. Thompson has taken his own life. With a gun. Naturally.
How very very sad.
Posted by ray at 2:06 AM | Comments (2)
January 27, 2005
War Of The Worlds
I saw a preview for the new War of the Worlds movie, and it made me rush right out and buy a copy of the H.G. Wells book. I loved this book when I was a kid, and I wanted to re-implant it in my brain before Spielberg & Cruise have a chance to pollute my memories.
Wells' book is fabulous. Published in 1898, it predicted flying war machines, automated genocide, and terror bombings of cities long before the carnage of the World Wars ever happened. It's clearly a product of the waning Victorian era; the lackluster "steampunk" movement from 1990's sci-fi tried but failed to recapture these times by projecting modern technology backwards upon 19th century settings, but they never achieved anything close to what Wells could do by imagining future technology and dropping it into his own 19th century world.
I never really watched the old 1953 movie; the bits and pieces I saw just seemed like so much boiler-plate 50's commie-scare sci-fi, and though I love films like "The Day The Earth Stood Still", I didn't like seeing my beloved "War of the Worlds" updated in the same manner.
So now, enter Spielberg and Cruise. Obviously, they'll gut the book. This is modern Hollywood, they have to. They'll rip out every shred of the 19th century and replace it with 2005. They'll sand off the rich backdrop of rural England and paint on some urban Jersey landscape. They'll twist and squeeze and shred the story of a regular citizen watching awesome events unfold and remold it until it becomes yet another Cruise-as-action-hero venture. And to top it off, they'll sprinkle it liberally with backtalking kids and product placements...lots and lots and lots of product placements.
They'll destroy this book for the millions who will foolishly go see the film before reading the book, or (horror!) never bother with the book at all. Only we lucky few, who know the book inside and out and have it imprinted on our brains, will know the true story.
And yeah, I'll go see it. I might even like it. But I wanted to get my bitching in ahead of time.
Posted by ray at 10:13 PM | Comments (1)
January 21, 2005
Books I Just Couldn't Finish
I used to always finish a book, no matter how much I hated it while I was reading it. Then my friend Jeff managed to convince me that life is too short...and he was talking about Gravity's Rainbow(!), which at the time I was assaulting for the third and final time (my high water mark is page 100). Jeff's take is that in the time you spend punishing yourself with a book that you're not enjoying, you could have gone out and read three other equally rewarding classics that you did like.
So I don't flog myself with a book that just isn't doing it for me. And sometimes this might be a mistake; I think I mentioned that I almost abandoned Choke but stuck with it and I'm glad I did. But here are four that I'm not going back to:
Annie Proulx, The Shipping News. I wanted to see the movie when it came out, since my grandparents were Newfies and I'm a big Kevin Spacey fan, but a friend convinced me to read the book first. God, what punishment. Her writing style is fractured and torturous. I felt nothing for the characters. It had fuck all to do with Newfoundland. I hated it from page one, read about a third, and finally chucked it.
Still haven't seen the movie yet either.
Joseph Heller, Closing Time. OK, first let me say that Catch-22 is probably my favorite novel of all time. I have read it at least twenty times. I even organized a prank on Orkut revolving around a character of the book, as a means of easily dividing up the women on Orkut into "worthy" (got the joke) and "unworthy" groups. Worked like a charm.
So this book is ostensibly a "sequel" to the first, following Yossarian, Milo, and the other characters as they reach retirement age. I read about a third of it and dang if I could find a point to it all. It was still satire, but lacking in wit...or a plot. I love those characters, but wanting to see what happened to them next was not enough reason to keep reading. They got boring. They got bitter. Tossed it.
Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man. Hugo Award winner. Psychic crime novel. Not bad, just boring. I might actually go back to it one of these days, but I have very particular fetishes when it comes to sci-fi and this one didn't tickle any of them.
Jim Marrs, Rule By Secrecy. This one and another of his were Christmas gifts from a relative. I love this woman, and often she gets me great gifts, but there are two things she should never buy me: music and books. Marrs is one of those conspiracy theorists who believes that the Trilateral Commission, the Knights of Templar, Skull and Bones, and the Illuminati are all part of a grand conspiracy bent on world domination. I love history books, but I like ones where the author has checked at least one or two primary sources in his lifetime and not just based all of his "research" on what OTHER conspiracy authors has written. Crap crap crap crap crap.
Posted by ray at 8:25 PM | Comments (2)
Nick Hornby
I can't believe the other night I forgot to mention the two best novels I read all year. High Fidelity and About A Boy, both by Nick Hornby.
My tiny reading audience has all probably read both of these and seen the movies (I haven't seen the latter film), so I won't rehash them here. But Hornby speaks to me. The music, the dry sarcastic wit, the complete inability to figure out what the hell is wrong with this woman or that woman...
Weird though that two of the best novels I read this year, by two different authors, centered around a protagonist who went to support groups where he didn't belong just to pick up chicks. I'm thinking I need to stop going to the all-male AA meeting and start branching out a bit.
Anyhoo, I went out and bought Hornby's How To Be Good and started it tonight. It's my cardio book for the gym so it'll take me a few weeks to finish it. I'll let you know how it goes.
Posted by ray at 7:41 PM | Comments (3)
January 19, 2005
Fiction I've read recently
This post by Karl about the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels list got me thinking about what I've been reading lately, what I have yet to read but want to, and what it seems like I've been reading for years (I have kind of a problem with having five or six books in process at any given time).
So anyway, first installment, is stuff I've read (and finished) of the fiction variety in the past year or so:
Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate: An entire novel written in verse, about a group of friends living in the Silicon Valley in the 80's. A friend of mine bought it for me since she knew I lived there in the late 80's as well, and I was hoping for a gripping tale of 72-hour amphetamine-fueled hacking binges and motorcycles and tattoos and punk rock (is there anything else in the Bay Area?) and instead got a sweet tale of heartbreak and loss and forgiveness. Doing the entire 300 pages in rhyming couplets was cute mostly, brilliant sometimes, but often tiring and affected. Still, a nice story.
Roger Zelazny, A Night In The Lonesome October: OK, Doxy is gonna kill me if she finds out, but I was bored to tears reading this. Doxy recommended reading it to your kids, one chapter a night through the month of October, but I started it the last week of September and didn't finish until almost Thanksgiving. I catch all the references to Lovecraft, etc. It just didn't hook me. In the end it was just a light fantasy book.
Chuck Palahniuk, Choke: The first book I've read by him, and I almost put it down after the first chapter because of what I thought was its overwhelming negativity (I don't like negative when it's just a cheap "edginess" tactic) but I'm glad I stuck with it. The story follows a guy who goes to sexaholics anonymous meetings to pick up chicks and who slowly goes insane while his mother lay dying in the hospital. Like books by people like Hubert Selby, it gets pretty raw in the details of how far down in the gutter people can get, how much they can debase themselves because of their own compulsions and mental lapses, but unlike Selby's books, which always just seem like pointless flogging of the soul, this one ends on a note of acceptance and renewal.
Dan Brown, Angels & Demons and The DaVinci Code: Yeah, I know, I know. Pretty much fluff, but I like puzzle-plots and conspiracies and I like stuff about the ancient history of Catholicism, and these were great to read back at the beginning of the year when I was travelling a lot.
Greg Bear, Darwin's Radio: I've been looking for another sci-fi author to get obsessed over since William Gibson isn't prolific enough and Philip K. Dick is dead, and I think I'll keep looking. An OK read, but if you don't have a degree in biochemistry you'll have trouble following a lot of the details, and there's a lot of that Heinlein tactic of having some character engage in a pages long monologue to provide background to the reader that always seems so fake.
So that's it? A whole year's worth of reading?
Well, as it turns out I read a lot more non-fiction than fiction. And this list also doesn't include the stuff that I've reread for the umpteenth time (LOTR, Dubliners, Catch 22,...)
I'll get to the non-fiction later on.
Posted by ray at 5:57 PM | Comments (14)
January 6, 2005
From Karl Elvis:
Directions: copy this list of ten authors, then replace any authors not in your bookcases with authors who are. Replacements in bold.
When you're done, go back via Karl's blog and keep clicking back up the trail, it's fun to see how this list changes.
Here's mine. I threw a non-fiction author in there just so I wouldn't be bored. Yes, I read shitloads of non-fiction. I'm a dork.
1. Philip K. Dick
2. Charles Bukowski
3. J.R.R. Tolkien
4. Hunter S. Thompson
5. Roddy Doyle
6. Tim Pat Coogan
7. Milan Kundera
8. William S. Burroughs
9. Lemony Snicket
10. William Shakespeare
Posted by ray at 8:37 AM | Comments (2)