resolved:
no more smokeing or chewing tobacco
no more spending time at (a name, indecipherable)
Barton Fink: How come nobody reminded me this movie was so weird. And I don’t mean weird in the traditional, colloquial sense but more in the “difficulty as barometer of literary worth” school of the narrative arts. Also, the Coen brothers seem to have some kind of infatuation with fat guys screaming “AAH AHH AHH” when in proximity to, or enacting, terrible violence. “I’ll show you the life of the mind” will always bel the #1 thing to yell if you are going to shoot someone with a shotgun, at least to this young man. I saw this movie a long time ago and I forgot a variety of things about it in that long time: One, 90% of this movie is medium shots of a terrified john turturro. The remaining 10%, in some order, is John Goodman sweating, Judy Davis looking at the floor and John Maloney doing a terrible southern accent and then getting murdered off-camera. File under “another movie/book/poem/suicide attempt/painting about how hard it is to produce (previous form of art), especially as relates to commodification and the desires of the audience.” I remember at the time I first saw this that it feels like an unfinished script, the way the entire movie just falls apart over about 15 minutes, then abrupt ends with a few more polished scenes tucked on the back of it. Unclassifiable?
i gave myself a stomachache by eating an entire box of life cereal yesterday. i also gave myself a stomachache while drinking a giant martini while wearing sweatpants and petting a cat distractedly and at that point, i wondered legitimately, when did i turn into a working girl. it happens in half-moments, as i’ve said before. but anyway, yeah, you people leave me to my devices in hyde park and even the vestigial space where my dignity woudl reside if i have any, that space, it has evaporated as well.
Houellebecq is not quite saul bellow, i realize now that i finished Platform if only because saul bellow was able to restrain himself from putting a very graphic sex scene on every other page. it’s obviously a uberjoke — mostly the book seems to be concerned with how western civilization has collapsed down into western sexuality, which has collapsed further into different kinds of perversion. ultimately, this book is worth reading; it’s tempting to completely disregard sex scenes by just skimming until you see “i fell asleep next to her naked ass” or “i woke up and lit a cigarette” and resume the plot, but that undermines things a bit. what i’d call this is sex scenes as a style and not as a narrative element. seems to this country priest that most ‘literary’ practicioners circa 2005 use sex as a narrative event, like it’s something that battens a plot-sauce or intensifies characterization. i think that’s crap. in Platform sex instances become something else entirely — early on the book, sex scenes cease to be titillating, or even important to the plot (which is sort of abstract and slow-moving really… mostly a set-up to a big laugh at the end), and become these bricks bouncing off your head. not clear what to ascribe this to. either A) in france you have to have more sex scenes to sell books B) houellebecq is a serious wizard who broke shit down for me. it’s probably B+. anyway, michel houellebecq: you are a currently acclaimed french novelist, i read a book by you.
i am going to stop pretending that i’ll get around to writing one-sentence takedowns of everything i read and just try to keep the great conversation going here.
hot debuts:
Michel Houellebecq: you *knew* france was going to re-re-figure shit out and drop this guy on you. i am only slightly engaged with Platform thus far but clearly this guy has me and most of my fellow travelers dialed. like he has my tax information on file because he owns me. in the spirit of comparing 16yr old athletes to people 20 years down the road: saul bellow but with a more reliable low-post repertory.
Large-print edition of Jayber Crow that once belonged to the Tacoma Public Library: frere hagen, this for you. (a chaise lounge!). anyway, i will report back on this shit to you all assembled gallants.
I definitely sent myself off to sleep last night by rapturously thumbing through my recently acquired book of candid snapshots of F Scott Fitzgerald and family. that’s not weird. what is weird is that i keep having dreams that are set in the 72nd street 1/9 stop. the one that seems monumental but isn’t. maybe it’s 78th street. i can’t (#@!(&ing be bothred with this snot.
Nomar Garciaparra: You hit .370 once. you are now hee seop choi.
also notionally and/or financially assented to:
:: Dance to the Music of Time, 1st trilogy (you knew this would happen)
:: eating lunch at subway
:: being alone in dingy apartment above the pot & pan company for the entire week. i looked into finding a tuberculosis sanitarium that had a weekly rate but as they say, no dice.
:: using typewriters at work
:: having to go to the bathroom less
:: these gray corduroy jeans. if anyone was wondering, i have been spending time looking at my own ass in the bathroom mirror at work. i can always fob it off as “seeing if i have a stain on my clothes” or “tucking my shirt in” if a guy interrupts my ongoing pageant of the self. that pretty much covers my entire existence, as it turns out, quickly pretending to be doing something else when someone interrupts me from admiring myself.
:: still hackin up bits and pieces of The Year in Books That I Read 2005. i can offer several teasers. for instance, the worst book i read this year was also the first book i read this year congratulations jay mcinerney!) and the last book i have read so far was so far my favorite (john barth). this tells us something about my long- and short-term memory functions, although i’ll tell you, i might be wrong about john barth but i am NOT wrong about jay mcinernery. i have clinical evidence (the book even smells and looks bad, importantly).
:: wouldn’t Boyz N Tha Hood be more affecting if at the end it turned out that Ricky hadn’t even gotten the minimum SAT score to get into USC and play football? Did he even get the minium score? i can’t remember. i was fretting about this while walking home from work today (i have a fever, actually, if that explains a bit). then i immediately decided that i am sick of living in hyde park and i was going to look into houseboat options, then some guy kind of made a face at me as we passed and it turned out he was going into my building too so i had to hide over by the door to subway to wait for him to get done checking his mail (he took a good long time, which made me fairly certain he had small- or large-scale plans to vex me)
books i have finished recently:
A Hero of Our Time, Mikhail Lermontov:
Not clear if this is good because the author intended it to be good or because the author is so weird and mangled by stylistic ethics that the weirdness of it merely acts good to people reading with a different sense of what defines “goodness.” i suppose it could work the other way around just as easily. i vote good. still no dead souls.
O! How the Wheel Becomes It!, by A-Train Powell
if i’m goign to start messing around with shit i don’t understand i figured that i should probably start with the shortier, easier to ignore parts of Anthony Powell’s body of work before i drop scrill on Dance to the Music of Time. what i learned: this appears to be straightahead subtle satiric criticism of vague trends among british literary types circa 1970-1990 which should not resound with me as particularly funny or interesting but i choose to approve heartily of. i need a nap and some kind of food that isn’t cookies because all i have eaten today are cookies and this vodka. as far as this book is concerned — probably not a necessary read, although i found it to be a pleasant enough diversion. good source of mannerisms, if you are in the market for mannerisms.
Jens Rehn, Nothing in Sight:
Um, it’s waiting for godot except estragon has one arm dies in the first 40 pages and instead of being two weird guys, it’s a german submariner and an armless amerikaner guy in a rubber boat in the middle of the ocean. and they’re not waiting for godot, they’re just smoking cigarettes. halting vote for good, mostly because i got it for free but of my own choosing and would like to feel validated in that.
some awful jackass (actually just a polite-looking white lady) is standing in front of the table full of cake at the office christmas party so i can’t get any cake without hipchecking her brutally into the boards. which is chief among the reasons for my retreating to my cubicle. that and i don’t like crowds and i’m not interested in drinking hennessy and soda (who bought this?). i’d rather be outside mincing it up in the snow and drinking by myself (either diet coke or bourbon, not a combination). i have a weird terror that the office christmas party is now ending and people will now start walking psat my cube. oh god i hate this.
in more positive news: there is no more positive news.
i promise that the next post will entirely be about baseball roster moves and not about how i am a racist, if that’s what i am.
