At the risk of sounding like a philistine, I thought it was about 100 pages too long—I got really bogged down in the middle. But Ullman’s a really gre...moreAt the risk of sounding like a philistine, I thought it was about 100 pages too long—I got really bogged down in the middle. But Ullman’s a really great writer — I highly recommend Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents.(less)
I love this book — I first read it in the 1999 paperback edition put out by Sasquatch Books, but now Drawn and Quarterly has re-issued it in hardcover...moreI love this book — I first read it in the 1999 paperback edition put out by Sasquatch Books, but now Drawn and Quarterly has re-issued it in hardcover with new artwork, a new afterword by Lynda, and about 50 extra strips. More here: http://tumblr.austinkleon.com/post/45...(less)
Re-read this the other night. Still nightmarish and hilarious. Every author who has a book in the self-help section should have to read this. West ori...moreRe-read this the other night. Still nightmarish and hilarious. Every author who has a book in the self-help section should have to read this. West originally conceived it as “a novel in the form of a comic strip”:
The chapters to be squares in which many things happen through one action. The speeches contained in the conventional balloons. I abandoned this idea, but retained some of the comic strip technique: Each chapter instead of going forward in time, also goes backward, forward, up and down in space like a picture. Violent images are used to illustrate commonplace events. Violent acts are left almost bald.
I love Westerns. I love a good story. I love 300-page books with super-short chapters. I love funny dialogue. I love narrators who digress.
I loved thi...moreI love Westerns. I love a good story. I love 300-page books with super-short chapters. I love funny dialogue. I love narrators who digress.
I loved this book.
My wife got it for me for Valentine’s Day. I’d never heard of it. 100 pages in, I started reading it really slowly because I didn’t want it to end.
After I finished, I read some interviews with DeWitt, and found out that the novel was sort of an accident.
After his first novel, he’d been thrown off the scent of story, and was more concerned with “voice,” but he got really bored with his reading habits, and started re-reading some older favorites of his, rediscovering story as a kind of constraint. (He says now of his reading habits, “The moment it begins to feel like homework, I head for something more welcoming.”)
Then one day he scribbled “sensitive cowboys” on a piece of paper. He started thinking about how the neurotic is rarely featured in Westerns, instead, the hero is usually a “near mute man in black who kicks the devil in the dick before breakfast.”
So he wrote “a testy exchange between two men riding side-by-side on horseback. One of them was self-doubting and vulnerable, while the other was confident to a fault.” He didn’t know what to do with it, so he set it aside. Later, he found a book about the Gold Rush at a yard sale, and he remembered the two men. He wrote about forty pages before he discovered they were brothers. He says writing the dialogue “at times I felt I was eavesdropping.”
In the book, the brothers head out to kill a man named “Hermann Kermit Warm.” This character came about after DeWitt cut a photo of a prospector out of the yard sale book and tacked it up on his wall. The name however,
“I didn’t make it up. I stole it. I was watching Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and a Hermann Warm was credited as the art director. He’s got a Wikipedia page and everything. I added the Kermit, because I like the musicality of the added syllables, but really, I just lifted it.”
Another fun tidbit: at some point he realized he was spending too much time on the internet, and that he’d actually never gotten a good idea from there, so he had his wife change the wifi password.
Anyways, this is the best book I’ve read so far this year. Highly recommended.
This is what I call a "toilet book," which, believe it or not, is a huge compliment. It's one of those books that demands that you buy it and put it o...moreThis is what I call a "toilet book," which, believe it or not, is a huge compliment. It's one of those books that demands that you buy it and put it on the back of the toilet, so you can read bits and pieces of it whenever it suits you. (I consider ULYSSES a toilet book.) Too dense to read in one pass, but jammed full of little nuggets of goodness. Codrescu is so much fun to read. Essential if you have any interest at all in dada. (less)
This book will NOT teach you how to diagram sentences. It does, however, tell you the history of the practice (mixed with lots of personal memoir) and...moreThis book will NOT teach you how to diagram sentences. It does, however, tell you the history of the practice (mixed with lots of personal memoir) and show what sentences from many famous authors look like diagrammed. It's witty and brief. (At many points Florey uses a hand-drawn sentence diagram as a punchline to the text -- in that way, it reminds me of Vonnegut's BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS.) Would make a good gift for a writing geek like me.(less)
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