Sometimes a classic is a classic for a reason. I remember picking up Moby-Dick sometime in elementary or maybe middle school and bouncing off of it instantly. Hardly surprising. I doubt I thought about the book at all between then and a few months ago, reading that Cormac McCarthy drew some inspiration for Blood Meridian from Melville’s work, and apparently this was McCarthy’s favorite novel. Not difficult to see why, or to see the parallels. ...
I read this for our July Small Press Book Club, pairing it with Math for the Self-Crippling, with this book being suggested by Math’s author, Ursula Villarreal-Moura. I often feel unqualified to evaluate poetry, and that feeling persists. Though, the visual layout decisions and the sense these give appeal to me. Perhaps more to me than to the others in my club. Poem Cardinals, A Novena enters to bracketed segments, weaving across the page before eventually resolving outside of those brackets. My favorite of the layout experiments is on page 34, which features a blank page tailed by a footnote that can only be explained as a typographic panic attack. ...
I’ve read Tom Sawyer several times over the years, physically and audibly. This is my second time listening to the audiobook as read by Nick Offerman, who seems born to read Twain. While I think years ago I’d have given this five stars, I find it is not my favorite Twain by a long shot. It is fun, and funny, but nothing to me compared to Connecticut Yankee. Anyway, I listened to this while falling asleep at night and it was perfect for that. I cannot recommend more strongly Offerman’s readings of Twain. ...
My one comic per year, this time Hickman’s Secret Wars. By complete chance, the same guy who wrote my one-comic last year, House of X/Powers of X. I enjoyed this quite a bit. Read to prepare for Avengers: Doomsday which I probably will not see til it comes out on streaming; I’m not excited for the film. Lots of characters I’ve never heard of. I enjoyed the art and the story. I have very little knowledge of Dr. Doom, but what little I had apparently comes from this comic. God Emperor Doom. Lots of fun. ...
Disclaimer: If you read this book, I suggest not paying for it. OSC’s views should not be rewarded. Visit your local library. I remember checking this book out from the library, probably I was in 7th or 8th grade. I’d just finished Ender’s Game and enjoyed that. I was probably unprepared for how different Speaker for the Dead is, and yet it was immediately preferable to me. I love the immense empathy and search for understanding within, and the warmth that is so often there. ...
Another Guibert. I expected this one to speak a little more to me, as it is the intersection of photography and writing. Little parts of it, especially the brief entry “Contact Sheet” (see note for p75 below) did, and others were worth reading, but maybe had quieter voices. The premise of using words as a method of constituting photographs (the ghost images) in the reader’s mind is interesting; it is what all fiction writing at the least is, of a sort. Stephen King calls writing telepathy. Sometimes the writer strings words together that are outlandish and have nothing to do with anything else, purely because the stringing of them evokes a certain emotion or sensory experience. Other times it is visual description to the nth degree, forcing the image the writer beholds into the reader’s mind (willingly or not). Guibert falls somewhere in the middle. Some of the photographs and paintings referenced speak more to me in Guibert’s words than they do on a computer screen, and some of his words I badly wish I could see printed as a photo. At some point soon I will mindfully go through his photobook The Only Face and I’m curious if I will discover any of these spoken photos in those pages. ...
This is a tiny little book which I bought after seeing it mentioned a few times in Guibert’s The Mausoleum of Lovers. There, Guibert states that he spent the last 50 pages reading through tears. I did not have the same emotional reaction, maybe because the story is not quite what I was expecting. However, it is still affecting. Difficult not to consider analogues between the childhood phase of the book and the current condition of the United States. ...
Rather difficult to “review” journals. What’s the reader to evaluate, the prose? How interesting the trivia? I don’t typically read Goodreads reviews before I write my thoughts, but I felt pretty sure that mine wouldn’t change much. I read a few lamentations, Oh, Hervé needed an editor. I do not want journals to be heavily edited. I think that ruins them. Sure, maybe a few typo corrections or whatever, but to have entries removed by someone else veers into making judgement about what is important and what is not. Two people are empowered to make that decision, the journalist and the reader, especially with a posthumous publication. Especially with a writer so known for being ‘merciless’ and so willing to be pornographic in his work. I would like the thing warts and all. ...
I love Anthony Bourdain. When I moved to Chicago the first time, in 2013, I’d put on Parts Unknown late at night in my dorm and I’d fall asleep watching that show. I’ve turned it, and other Bourdain shows, on as comfort watches many times in the 13 years between then and now. I appreciate and respect his worldview and what seemed like his mission in those shows, which felt like intentional breaking down of barriers and celebration of diversity and how diversity can be a great unifying thing. ...
One of two Ernaux texts that a friend from work brought me back from Shakespeare & Co. in Paris. Like just about every Ernaux, I love it. It’s a short text, only 76 pages. Ernaux’s clinical style and cold near-analysis of memory, recounting her father and the course of his life, make for lovely reading. I’m not sure why, but something about this way of writing makes everything so tangible. I could practically smell the place. Ernaux is one of those writers that I can’t read too much of, lest my writing just turn into an imitation of hers. ...