M. Sarki's Blog: Mewl House, page 5
May 11, 2012
John Jeremiah Sullivan
Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son by John Jeremiah SullivanMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
A most amazing and brilliant work. I was totally surprised. The first half of Pulpheads prepared me for the reading of this masterpiece. Thank goodness my stubborn refusal to have a try at it did not prevail and a brighter mind prevailed. My total review is here:
http://mewlhouse.hubpages.com/t/302646
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May 7, 2012
Vanishing Point
Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir by Ander MonsonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Not that anyone would give a hoot but I finally did get a correctly described copy of this book from a seller on amazon.com, and for that fact alone I am extremely happy. It is easy to discount the troubles, and even the successes of others, but you won't find any of that here coming from my lips, or even sparks off the blazing speed of my typewriter. I, too, like Ander, could type 55 words per minute in Mr. Sventko's typing class, and I probably could have done even better had he not been the feared football coach he was. My stupid spelling mistakes were what bothered me and made me have to slow down. His daughter Marcia consistently kicked my ass in typing and it gave her a superiority over me she probably needed in order to get through her routinely boring days. The recreational drugs that others of us engaged in made for a high school education a little bit more adventurous than the typical high school cheerleader like Marcia. Try taking mescaline and attending a Paul Butterfield trigonometry class. Or be a student teacher working under the tutelage of the school's golf coach in a special education classroom. Once I even dropped a hit of blotter acid too late in the day and had to play a qualifying round for placement seed in our following day's school-sponsored golf match. There was no possible way to keep track of where my new golf balls were flying off to after striking them so hard with the intensity of a rapidly blooming acid trip. Thank goodness I was playing with a young square geek who would go on after college to become the county's prosecuting attorney. Back then he had a proficiency for cheating on the golf course, so me offering him the freedom to blatantly adjust his own score if he would allow my reentry, without penalty, of a new golf ball in place of the lost one still flying around somewhere out there in the cosmos seemed like a very good deal for both of us. Neither one of us ever spoke of that day together on the golf course again, and we were both lucky not to have been found cheating on our scorecards. I am sort of a heal for bringing this subject up now but I wanted to make the point of how a born cheater can naturally years later slip into the county prosecutor's seat and seem to do a pretty good job of keeping accurate the public score against its own criminals.
Ander Monson wrote some pretty good pieces collected here in Vanishing Point. Were they perfect and without blemish? I think not. But nowhere as poor a showing as some critics here on goodreads.com have made them out to be. There were fits of brilliance to be found here and there, and as I said in another piece I wrote regarding this book, the first essay titled Voir Dire was fantastic. He also wrote of the Gerald R. Ford memorial funeral service and procession held in Grand Rapids as well as a lengthy, and quite interesting piece on the money brand of snack chips, Doritos. I did not much like the Dungeons & Dragons essay, but I am not born of that time period and have never played a Play Station type Game Boy slash computer game in my life. And for the record, I will state that Ander Monson is not David Foster Wallace, and in addition he is no Hunter S. Thompson. But I will vigorously say he is loads better than Jonathan Franzen and the other wannabes out there writing essays today. To have him compared to an inconsequential writer the likes of Tao Lin I do find more than a bit disconcerting. There is a whole lot of upside to Ander Monson and I think, almost snidely and certainly happily, that already Tao Lin has had his fifteen minutes of fame, and for what I clearly am not sure of. Another fairly new writer I am currently involved in reading goes by the name of John Jeremiah Sullivan and he is not too shabby, and his best work is surely ahead of him too. Look also for a fellow by the name of Lee Klein. His star is definitely rising. But I certainly do recommend this book to anyone wanting a new experience in the form of an essay. Monson is fresh, and like myself, was fortunate to be born in northern Michigan, and in his case, the Upper Peninsula in a cold and lonely town called Houghton.
For further word and more detail over what I think about Ander Monson click on the following link:
http://mewlhouse.hubpages.com/t/2fc892
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May 1, 2012
Blue Guide to Indiana
Blue Guide to Indiana by Michael MartoneMy rating: 1 of 5 stars
Based on my present reading lately of the first three essays in Martone's "The Flatness And Other Landscapes", slipping this "Blue Guide" into my "currently reading" list was a mistake. This book should have been deep-six'd and allowed to never ever see the light of day. Come on here, Martone is no Bob Dylan who can play with his audience anyway he sees fit and still come out on top as big-time Creator. At best a juvenile retreat into indifference and unimportance, "Blue Guide" sucks dirt in every way possible. I found nothing even remotely interesting for me, and most everything I looked at was a complete waste of my time, of which, really, I have none left to spare. It is hard enough for me to even have an open mind when it comes to a thing called a "Hoosier", but I came to the reading of this book as Jesus would, my tolerance at the forefront of my label, and still I could find nothing to make parable or exact my talents on to make this putrid water into a drinkable wine. But in the meantime, after getting this nasty taste out of my mouth, I will happily continue on with Martone and my intensely serious reading of his "The Flatness And Other Landscapes" and be glad, I am certain of it, that I did, and do not hold as a grudge this awful joke of a book against him.
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April 30, 2012
April 28, 2012
April 26, 2012
Profanations
Profanations by Giorgio AgambenMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Verb1.adulterate - corrupt, debase, or make impure by adding a foreign or inferior substance; often by replacing valuable ingredients with inferior ones; "adulterate liquor".
Synonyms: adulterate, debase, doctor, load.
These verbs mean to make impure or inferior by adding foreign substances to something: adulterate coffee with ground acorns; silver debased with copper; doctored the wine with water; rag paper loaded with wood fiber.
A photo from some time ago that I wish I would have kept, where my wife's face was simply angelic, she sitting backwards in a ladder-back chair, nude, her legs spread wide and her genitals on display. Of course, my wife and I don't do porn so we rejected the photograph, but in retrospect, my wife was so damn beautiful in that photograph, totally unaware she was showing too much of her genitalia, and because of it, innocent to the consequences possible, even, for example, if her aging dad, who was still living at the time, ever found out. Because of my wife's innocence the problem now existed where our art did not interface with pornography in the sense described in the opening quote because the model had no feelings of conflict and contradiction during the shoot, but would have had afterward when she saw the results and thought of her father finding out if she went ahead and approved of the picture's publication. I, as photographer, was guilty from the beginning simply because I wanted the shot completed as composed in order to see what we could see, but never did I have any idea of publishing it and I went radically extreme like a dummy so far as removing it from my files.
Nathalie Boët (also known as Chloë des Lysses), has some fantastic photos taken of her where she is famously indifferent to being fucked hard and in many settings and positions. That is the extent of my pornography "likes" pertaining to photography. And truth be known this is the type of photo I would love to capture my wife in. The indifference. But that will never happen. She is not even close to the type of person who could make art like that. I am not sure she is even the type of person who would allow herself to be fucked like that, the way the pros do it and with all that heavy machinery involved. (We are both recovering puritans.) But I have never thought I had to resort to bondage or tricks to get a powerful image. Practice and a good eye helps.
One of my favorite series of what I consider "pornographic art photographs" ever done has been tainted for me with the knowledge that Boët's husband at the time was simply using her and she has gained no profit from her work since they have divorced. What I have learned from the web, and of course some of this may not be true, is Dahmane, Boët's ex-husband, has a long reputation of degrading all his models on the set, not paying them, publishing the photographs in magazines without the models being informed of this, or getting their cut, and on. Dahmane has published at least two books of photos using Chloë as his model as well as selling expensive prints of their work together. Chloë, I understand, was pretty much broke after she split with him and has yet to receive any payment for her nude and pornographic efforts in front of his camera. I believe she even was ordered by a French judge to pay back taxes owed on profits from her work, profits that she never even received. Seems the judge considered her a whore. The famous philosopher Giorgio Agamben writes about her unique work in front of the camera in his very interesting book titled, Profanations.
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April 18, 2012
April 17, 2012
April 4, 2012
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