Jessica read and liked brian's review of The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories:

"you meet someone and they tell you that The Beatles are their favorite band and you kinda hate 'em, yeah? The Beatles are the most popular pop/rock band of all time, wildly innovative, and wrote, probably, more great songs than any other band... but ...more you meet someone and they tell you that The Beatles are their favorite band and you kinda hate 'em, yeah? The Beatles are the most popular pop/rock band of all time, wildly innovative, and wrote, probably, more great songs than any other band... but to be your all-time favorite band? kinda dull. i think i'd take someone who champions Rush or The Eagl- (no, not the Eagles. any other band but The Eagles, Steve Miller, or Aerosmith) over The Beatles just because it's more interesting.


this is why i'm so so hesitant to call out tolstoy as my favorite writer. same kinda shit, y'know? but he just might be. at the very least he's sitting at the (head of the?) table with genet borges orwell and the other usual suspects. yes. and i know it because when i popped into the book store and saw this gorgeous new hardback of tolstoy short stories by badass russian translators Peavar & Volokhonsky, well... i felt it move. took all i had not to rub against this book in the store -- waited till i got in the car and dry-humped the shit outta this beautiful bitch.


so listen: this book is a must buy. great writer. great translators. great looking edition (during masturbation i find my eye wandering away from my television freeze-framed on a naked rosario dawson or marisa tomei and to the tolstoy section of my bookshelf where - next to all my penguin softback tolstoy short story collections - my hardback P & V translated editions of war & peace, anna karenina, & ivan ilyich and other stories sit. of course, in order to prolong the experience i've gotta think back to when kowalski exposed himself in my car -- the visual equivalent of a cold shower). and a great selection of stories.


A GREAT selection of stories. i hate when they release a newly translated collection of a great writer's stories and they leave out the greatest hits. well, they're all here, kids: ivan ilyich (love me do) is terrific if slightly overrated. the kreutzer sonata (happiness is a warm gun)? fucking great! master and man (blackbird)? i cry. the devil (i'm a loser)? amazing! hadji murat (a day in the life)? fucking genius! they're ALL great.

trust me, booknerds.(less) "

Jessica read and liked brian's review of Under the Dome: A Novel:

"in the 2008 film max payne, there's a point in which the gloomy hero is, of course, offered casual sex by this ridiculously beautiful woman:



aware that payne is mourning the murder of his wife she says something to the effect t...more in the 2008 film max payne, there's a point in which the gloomy hero is, of course, offered casual sex by this ridiculously beautiful woman:



aware that payne is mourning the murder of his wife she says something to the effect that if he'd like he can call out his wife's name as he fucks her. ok. this is kinda interesting. if i was the director i'd hard cut to payne banging away and, yes, squealing his dead wife's name. play it straight. sad and tragic but also kinda funny and very human. and it offers up a complexity and darkness mainstream movies tend to shy away from.


of course, payne tosses this preposterously impossibly wildly beautiful woman out, offended at the very idea: in movies like this you can't have your hero banging strange woman and being sexually deviant in any way. too much complexity.


well, there's a whole lot of that shit going on in under the dome, in which the good guys are good and the bad guys are bad (i mean reeeeaaaaal bad. like gang-rape bad, kill-your-own-son bad, mass-murderer bad). and it's a shame b/c there's much to love about this 1072 pg. novel.


but it's not just the 'max payne' moments, it's the whole picture. check it: the novel is populated with tons of characters and just about all of 'em are all-american common-folksy types. kinda folks sarah palin'd be happy to have over for a moose and buffalo dinner. they all have backstories and personal tics and behavioral distinctions, but essentially king's view of human beings and human behavior is kinda conservative and uninteresting. strange from a guy with such a fertile imagination for the fantastic.


but here's what's most frustrating: if you're dealing with common folk, it's fun to throw 'em in extreme situations and watch 'em crack. we've seen it all over Apocalit*: lord of the flies, blindness, the road, etc… but this is the part i don't get: king chooses the less interesting of both worlds. 1) most of his characters are simplified and bland and 2) those that crack when the dome comes down ARE ALREADY ASSHOLES! it's bizarre. what's fun about this shit is watching the slow burn of a decent or sane character as they descend into evil or lunacy. it's kinda obvious what's gonna happen when henry kissinger or dick cheney is tossed into No Exit, ain't it? king's bad guys were bad before the dome and once the shit comes down they kill and gang-rape with no fore or afterthought. how the shit is this interesting? has king been too long in the horror genre that he's come to see murder and rape as something akin to jogging around the block or swatting a fly? what's great about murder in serious works of art (and make no mistake: this novel means to be a serious work of art) is not the murder itself but all which surrounds it.


i happen to believe that human existence is kaleidoscopically demented and deranged and far weirder than it appears on the surface. the most 'normal' of us are revealed to be sucking cock in airport bathrooms, believe in talking snakes or burning bushes or interplanetary beneficiaries, and like to be spanked flogged or abused, etc… in short, i appreciate people like david lynch or david cronenberg not in that they offer an alternative to the humdrum of daily existence but in that they throw to the forefront what is actually happening behind closed doors. i reject king's view of the world in that it lacks moral complexity, it lacks the true stink of human existence. blue velvet is heightened for sure, but it reveals what small town americana feels like. it is edward hopper to stephen king's norman rockwell.


and really. what's with all the banter? king has nearly every single character speak as if they were a precocious 13 year old. people actually say shit like "i'd tell you but then i'd have to kill you' or 'that's why they pay me the big bucks' as if this was the height of cleverness. and when a man and woman dialogue? ugh! king's lucky he's a megarich megafamous megastoryteller b/c my man has NO GAME. i mean… you wanna read the narrator's description of when our hero finally gets laid? keep in mind that we're dealing with a 1072 pg. book in which everyfuckingthing is described. this scene is both obscenely underwritten and obscenely icky:


"Want to?" he asked.
"Yes. Do you?"
He took her hand and put it on his jeans, where how much he wanted to was immediately evident.
A minute later he was poised above her, resting on his elbows. She took him in hand to guide him in. "Take it easy on me, Colonel Barbara. I've kind of forgotten how this thing goes."
"It's like riding a bicycle," Barbie said.
Turned out he was right.


anyway...

the good? lots of it. what king might lack in his basic presentation of human behavior he almost makes up for in his evocation of a kind of horrible and ineffable beauty. amidst this mash-up of sci-fi & political allegory there are scenes of true beauty and a kind of gritty poetry... so the book is about an impenetrable dome that descends over a town and the descent into some kinda Hobbesian nightmare -- as pollutants and dust and pollen collect on the roof of the dome, the townspeoples' view of the sky is skewed. they can't see the dome, so the sky itself appears... different. sunsets seem as when a volcano explodes: a deep rich burning red. and the night sky? a meteor shower is transformed into a natural fireworks show with streams of pink and red slashing the sky to bits. the latter is punctuated by the town's total silence save the quiet sobbing of its inhabitants as they view what they believe to be god's masterwork. and minus the 'leatherhead' parts, the final 'fireball and survivor' sequence haunted the shit outta me. some seriously horrifying stuff. as great as any bleak and despairing scene from any other example of apocalit.

so, yeah. my first foray into stephen king. badass bestseller horror iconic motherfucker and inspiration behind this terrific terrific terrific song:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6GzVCYqo...


i read 1072 pages in just under a week and that's no small feat. i'd like to share a beer, mr. king, get to know you. do i wanna tear through your oeuvre? we'll see...


*that's 'apocalyptic literature', thank you very much(less) "

Jessica read and liked Books Ring My Bell's review of Eating Animals:

"Well done, Jonathan Safran Foer, well done.
(your book, not steak)

Look, I love meat. I really do. I hate myself for that, but I love meat. I also deplore seeing living creatures suffer. (I'm the jerk that lets spiders out of the h...more Well done, Jonathan Safran Foer, well done.
(your book, not steak)

Look, I love meat. I really do. I hate myself for that, but I love meat. I also deplore seeing living creatures suffer. (I'm the jerk that lets spiders out of the house instead of squishing them.) I also know that if I had to kill the animal myself, I'd be a veggie for sure. I'm a total sucker for animals, but not enough of a sucker, I guess.

In junior high, I became a "crazy animal rights/environmentalist tree worshiping bunny hugger". This required me to not eat meat. I don't remember what started it, but it only lasted a few weeks.

A few years later I read, The Jungle and that put me back on the veggie wagon for a month or two.

In college, my anatomy and physiology lab completely cured me of eating beef roasts. (the human muscle in the lab was WAAAAAY to similar to the hunks of cow flesh wrapped under the cellophane.) That lasted a few months.

When driving, if the livestock truck passes me on the highway, I go veggie. (for a day if the truck is empty, maybe for a week if it's full)

This book may have changed me for good. Now, I'm not 100% vegetarian all of a sudden or attempting to go vegan, but I'm starting. When I go out for dinner, I will not choose meat. I will cook here at home with less meat. (This may drive my carnivore husband to divorce court. I'll send you the bill, Jonathan Safran Foer!)

Some veggies and vegans may say Foer was not "forceful" enough, but I am hopeful that at the very least, people like me will cut back on meat, which may lead to quitting meat altogether. Maybe enough people will see the horrid conditions of factory farms and demand fair treatment for animals.

Maybe I'm just living in a fantasy world... I mean, really, the most dedicated carnivore has to admit that factory farms are beyond awful. Exception to the rule: those who think the Lawd JEE-ZUS put the animals here for us to shoot -perhaps from helicopters- and eat. Those folks won't care that factory workers stick electric prods up animals' orifices (orifii?) and put cigarettes out on the animals' flesh. (Yep, sure makes ME believe we are higher, more civilized beings!)

Anyway... some people will NOT be moved by that at all. (NUTJOBS!)

Maybe the heartless population could be enticed to cut back on meat consumption with a little common sense? I am a sucker for common sense, and this book clearly points out that eating meat does not make a hell of a lot of sense.

Consider the impact of meat lust on the environment; the nasty pollution from factory farms, the decimation of wildlife (think overfishing). Think about how many calories of food go into making one little calorie of meat... No sir, makes no sense.

So, if the sad brown eyes of Bessie the cow are not enough to sway you off meat, and, like Rush Limbaugh, you could give a shit about the environment, maybe the fact that meat is not exactly the best thing for your health will get you to lay off the dead animal flesh. Increased meat consumption has been linked to colon and breast cancer. Anyone else noticed the increase of neurological and autoimmune diseases? You don't think that factory farms, which pump the animals full of antibiotics and hormones may play a part, do you?

Perhaps?

Maybe the surge of MRSA, H1N1 and H5N1 are revenge from the animals. Karma for all the suffering. Maybe when a pandemic of H1N1 wipes out a massive chunk of the population, the animals will go to slaughter with a little smile on their faces.

Okay. Maybe not.

I think this is one of the most thought provoking books I have read in ages. Should be required reading for those who put meat in their mouths.
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Jessica read and liked Ceridwen's review of Ulysses:

"I “finished” “reading” this about two weeks ago and have been grappling with the following question for the last fortnight: am I the kind of asshole who gives Ulysses two stars? It turns out that yes, yes I am. From the very beginning, I stru...more I “finished” “reading” this about two weeks ago and have been grappling with the following question for the last fortnight: am I the kind of asshole who gives Ulysses two stars? It turns out that yes, yes I am. From the very beginning, I struggled with the idea of meaning in Ulysses - due in part because of stupid blurbs like Anthony Burgess's on the back on my copy: “Everybody knows now that Ulysses is the greatest novel of the century.” Of course, this blurb is about as douche-baggy as it comes. “We” all “know” that this is the “greatest” novel, do we, “Anthony”? (Yes, I am aware that sarcasm is the refuge of the weak.) It may be stupid, but this quote does gesture to the common knowledge of this novel's cult/occult status as one of the gnarliest books ever, the holy grail of really hard reads, the kind of thing to notch on your bedpost after its conquest. You won't take me, Ulysses, I''ll take you.

There's an implicit challenge in all of this critical jizz blown over Ulysses, one that I was willing to take on when my sister proposed we read this. We'll all go in together! It'll be fun! Nothing can stop us now! So I start reading, and I immediately start having a problem with the idea of meaning, but – this is the almost funny part – I had no idea how deep my trouble with meaning went. I hack my way through roughly 200 pages, and then decide its time to bust out my reader's guide, knowing full well that I'm so awesome that I don't really need it, and it'll just tell me that I'm awesome and then I can go back to reading. Alas, what it told me was that not only did I not get the billions of Classical references, something I was more or less prepared for, but that I didn't even get the simple, concrete meaning of the action. For example, I thought, when Stevie D was out walking on the quay, that there actually was a whale that some people were cutting up. Nope, this is some imagining into the past, a glimpse of ancient Ireland. Arg!

Not long after this confrontation with the edges of my entirely not-Classical education, one of my fellow readers send me this link. (Thanks Gary!) If you're not interested in popping out and watching this right now, I'll describe it: it's a Marx Brothers skit, in which Groucho is at the races, trying to determine which horse on which he should bet. Harpo comes up, purportedly selling ice cream, but then he offers to sell Groucho a track guide. He does, but then it turns out he needs another book to read the first book, and then another to read that, on and on until he's given Harpo most of his money, and then bets on the wrong horse anyway. Ha, funny right? I would have to read an entire mountain of books to get what is up in Ulysses, and then, like the joke I just explained, I wonder if I would just be murdering to dissect, killing the punch line cold.

This is the thing: I'm not sure that this is what Joyce would want, not that I've ever given much credit to a writer's intent. Despite all the hand wringing I've been doing about Meaning, worrying about not “getting” the joke and all that, Ulysses itself is entirely, aggressively anti-Meaning, in the Classical, epic, heroic sense of the term. Nothing – and I mean nothing – is too base and low to not warrant his attention, not Bloom taking a leisurely morning crap while reading the paper, not having a shave, not bickering in a coach on the way to a funeral. It's the great anti-Epic. It may claim to be a novel, but the language has the luminous fracture of Modernist poetry, skimming along just outside of form in an almost self-conscious parody of itself. I suspect if I had a six thousand hour audiobook of this novel, I would have enjoyed it more, letting the words wash in their ebb and flow, and quit trying to catch fish out of the river. (Also, if Joyce had read it himself – he had a lovely voice.) The Epic creates heroes out of sociopaths – I'm looking at you Achilles. (Or the Devil in “Paradise Lost”, although I think probably poor Milton is rolling in his grave about what the Romantics did with his depiction of Old Scratch.) Ulysses doesn't just turn this upside down and create sociopaths out of heroes, but something weirder and more sly: he makes the banal unheroic. Which is what it was to begin with. Which kinds of makes my head hurt.

This is just a bit a personal weirdness, but while I was reading, I kept thinking of this oddball story I was told once. Tom is a colleague of mine, and once, he was in the process of moving all of his stuff from one apartment to another. Everything he owned was all heaped in the back of his truck, held in by gravity and magic. He's on the freeway, and feels it shift, and watches in horror as his stuff slides off the back of the truck one piece at a time, spilling out onto the open road. As each item hits the pavement, it breaks into pieces, and those pieces roll and become smaller pieces, until almost everything he owns is strewn over a quarter mile of highway. He exits and doubles back around, and stands fishing out the few things that haven't been utterly destroyed by their recent bout with gravity and its consequences. He does this quickly, as he's pretty sure he's going to get some massive fine for being a litterbug if a State Trooper happens by. Reading Ulysses was for me like watching the English language fall off the back of the truck and break into a billion pieces. I could fish out the odd lamp, but the rest was debris. It's funny when this happens to someone else – poor Tom – but it sure wasn't funny when it happened to me.
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