Category: bookish

never at a loss for stuff to read. if I could just shoehorn one more syllable in there, it’d scan pretty cool, I think. what little I know or can take a stab at talking lines. anyway, yesterday afternoon’s library haul (this doesn’t count the ninety-plus I already have checked out, on my shelf, which I call The Annex). was going to type them all in for that Books You’ve Bought But Haven’t Read Yet (or something) thread over at the Velvet, but good gr…

Finished copies exist, are real, are in the mail now. If I had the skills, I’d rework some of those gas-shortage pics from the late seventies, of all the cars lined up, only I’d put a big DEMON THEORY in place of the pump. or maybe pirate one of those Body Axe commercials, re-edit it to showcase DT which, yeah, as you can see, Logan over at the Velvet just rigged up. very cool. rigged this one up too.

reading now: Anne River Siddons’ 1978 THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR.

what it&…

Maybe it’s this way for everybody, I don’t know. Sometimes I’ll stumble across something in a book, anyway, and it’ll just burrow right to the core of me and never leaves. I say sometimes, but, I suppose, I’m only about to list three. And, it’s not that they’re said all that perfect or anything, it’s more like they’re just obviously true. Trick was, I’d just never thought about them:

• ‘Everybody has a ce

• Excited that the Savoj Zizek DVD’s going to be available soon. He’s my PKD, since PKD went on extended hiatus. Click on the poster to get to the place
• Check out the Frank Miller cover for Gravity’s Rainbow. Pretty excellent (thanks to Rob for the heads-up). Click here. (would paste it here, but don’t want to deny them their due clicks [hey, somebody just wrote, saying that link was bad, or giving them problems, all that, so I snagged the cover, stuffed i

was paging through a few-months-old notebook and stumbled on this, which I’d copied down from Antonia Quirke’s bfi book on JAWS. brilliant, brilliant stuff:

There are two types of monsters. The first is our incarnation of fear. King Kong, Dracula, Godzilla. The other, of which the first sharkless hour of Jaws is a supreme example, is the inflection of the whole landscape with fear. Virus horrors, the Maryland woods of the Blair Witch, Hanging Rock. In the first

So, yeah, I’m on a desert island, can only have ten books. A strange, impractical set-up—that the dungeon master here can assume I’d grab a round number of books instead of a two-way radio or a knife—but so be it. I’m there. I can only have ten books. Which is a lot like punishment, but, too, is a lot better than just nine books. Here goes:

1.Don Quixote. Not because it’s a classic and not because it’s on the required reading lists and not because it was the first real no…

Or, really, just all of R.M. Berry’s stuff. It starts with Plane Geometry and Other Affairs of the Heart, ramps up to Leonardo’s Horse, then hits with The Dictionary of Modern Anguish. Each brilliant. His short story “Metempsychosis” has been, along with VALIS and COL49 [The Crying of Lot 49], probably the most influential, for me. In the sense of this is a thing I’m always trying to pull off, each time I sit down to write.

Frank, as Chiasmus Pre…