Alex > Recent Status Updates

Beautiful.

WTV's providing a good excuse to boogie down with some Shostakovich.

Aaaaahhhhh... back in my sprawling/fragmented/pomo comfort zone.

After reading 400 pages in translation from Russian, I'm ready for some substantial English prose.

Told myself to read 100 pages yesterday. Read 30.

I've slowed down quite a bit since returning from Austin. *** Heading to John King very shortly, my salivary glands are drowning themselves.

Enter Crucifer.

Cruisin'

So good. Between Invisible Cities and this, I feel like I absolutely made the right choice in putting Take Five aside.

“If men and women began to live their ephemeral dreams, every phantom would become a person with whom to begin a story of pursuits, pretenses, misunderstandings, clashes, oppressions, and the carousel of fantasies would stop.”

This already has the feeling of a top-ten book. A good one to close out the year and get the fuck out of dodge with.

I really can't take this anymore. Unpopular opinion, unsophisticated critique, but Mano is just trying way too hard.

This is maybe the most overwritten book I've ever read.

Counting down, of course.

The Archimboldi section might be my favorite.

Archimboldi.

Dear Lord. So I bit the bullet and bought one of the expensive copies of Take Five for $60. It just arrived. There's a heartfelt note and signature for Mano to the original owner of the book, along with newspaper clippings (one of which dyed the pages enclosing it), tickets, and postcards from Yale, where they apparently knew each other. I feel like I just stumbled into another life.

I'm shooting for finishing this up during Thanksgiving break. I think that's about the same time I finished Savage Detectives last year.

I'm not sure I've ever needed a user's manual for life as much as I do now.

That copy of Take Five I ordered last month has yet to even ship... I got a bad feeling about this.

The Part About the Crimes.

Fate is in Greektown. Represent.

On to The Part About Fate. The last bit of Amalfitano made me excited to pick up Nazi Literature in the Americas. The interconnectedness of Bolano's makes it seem as though his entire oeuvre is a single sprawling novel.