"I forget where Virginia Woolf says this, but it's the best explanation, something that I agree with 100 percent. She says something to the effect that the g...
In my nightmare, I am in my bedroom. It is the same bedroom that I sleep in, in the same house that I live in. A group of four Quebecois come in to the room, talking about my air conditioner. They are friendly, and they have nice things to say about the air conditioning in my house. I wake up whimpering.
Yes, we are stacking once again. Read since the last stack: Moving On (McMurtry) - very good except the ending felt like someone telling you a story at a party and then instead of finishing the story they walk away, leave the building, never return Gardens of the moon (Erikson) - fun and silly fantasy stuff The Garden of Seven Twilights (de Palol) - ponderous post-modernism :( Lime Pit (Valin) -…
In the lush expanse of nature, car doors beep and car alarms blare as people laugh and a generator hum mixes with the noise of mosquitoes. My constipated son takes me to the outhouse to discuss snowmobiles and adventure motorcycles with a strained face. "There are 300 toilets here," he tells me. "They'd have to level this whole forest for an outhouse that big," I tell him. On the beach, a family…
"Yeah you know, we don't know what to feed him. It would be a lot easier if he'd just eat a sandwich," I said. "For a long time I would give away half of my sandwich to my friend. He was unlucky. His mother was an alcoholic and his father wasn't around. And he never had a lunch - my friend was always hungry. So for many years I would give him half of my sandwich. Later on of course he would share…
It's wonderful that for a couple of weeks every summer the sun is an orange-red eye in a sky choked with smoke because, for now, it's just a couple of weeks. This will be a time my child remembers fondly, because at least for part of the summer the air was breathable. I wonder how many of these crystalline summers my next son will remember? Machine robot skeletons stomping out human skulls in a…
"We should check the basement." "Oh no." 'LISTED - NON-SALVAGEABLE' - The tags placed on plastic bags of every item in our basement touched by the 9 inches of storm drain overflow that flooded the space. Two storage cubes worth of books, memories, baby supplies, children's toys, exercise equipment. "(Your claims adjustor) is not currently available. Please leave a message." "Oh it's okay if you…
I recommend this heartbreaking long-form profile of the American writer William Vollmann: https://bigreaderbadgrades.substack.com/p/we-always-leave-things-unfinished Vollmann writes exhaustively about North American history, sex workers, death, the environment, and the downtrodden. He is unsentimental, adventurous, and radically empathetic. His writing can be beautiful, upsetting, challenging,…
I'll confess: I've been a sucker for comic books since the convenience store spinner rack days. It's a versatile medium - it can be both a pure expression of a lonely sicko with a pen (most of yr indie comics), or, these days, it can be the ineffable by-product of a production line grind that makes no sense - a writer, penciller, inker, letter & colourist on a monthly grind to ship 20 or so pages…
THE POWER BROKER IS A ROBERT CARO BOOK ABOUT ROBERT MOSES. A PULITZER PRIZE WINNING ACCOUNT OF ROBERT-ON-ROBERT CRIME. ITS THE SIZE OF AN OLD PHONE BOOK, THE PAGES ARE GLOSSY LIKE A UNIVERSITY TEXT BOOK FOR SOME REASON, AND IT IS A DENSELY WRITTEN ACCOUNT OF NEW YORK STATE LEGISLATURE AND PUBLIC WORKS PROJECTS. IT FUCKING RULES. (I WAS ACTUALLY BEING DECEITFUL ABOUT THE CONTENTS OF THE BOOK - IT…
I delight in a stack of books, and can fool myself into thinking I know what I'll want to read next. In this stack: Moving On - Larry McMurtry - A shambling rodeo and grad school soap opera about a young woman navigating marriage, relationships, and young adulthood in the 1960s. I'm almost done reading this - at its best, it captures a Linklater-y hangout feeling with wonderful characters (and it…