Matthew > Recent Status Updates

Fascinating, entirely new revelations about Apollinaire's life alongside one of his stories and two of his long poems reprinted in full-- I'm being spoiled.

I think I've successfully navigated out of the "look how much sex I had" part of the memoir.

Something that frustrates me about these art-world memoirs is how unsatisfactorily they explain the beginning crests of these long careers. How exactly, in the space of a couple months, did Momus go from a virgin living with his parents to opening for The Cure? Talent and luck is part of it, sure, but take it from Momus and it's because the demo he handed over to Josef K's Malcolm Ross was just that good. Sigh.

Chugging along. Met Margarita. Nice Azazello scene.

Since it was the excellent Russian video game Pathologic that inspired me to read more Russian literature, I was pleased to find that the chapter "Nikanor Ivanovich's Dream" is highly redolent of Pathologic.

And now it's getting REALLY good.

Slow start, but it's ramping up.

Well, suffice it to say, that chapter about the car thefts will go down as one of the best things I read all year.

Found in a junk room at my parents' house. This is seriously good.

Dragging on a bit. I think at this point I have to read something short and come back to this.

The first section is done. It overstayed its welcome just a bit, but I can't put too fine a point on that. It was full of good language and strange situations.

Impressive. Takes a hellish travelogue that Cormac McCarthy might've written and infuses it with a liberal verbal fecundity.

This kind of grammar formalism showboating ("aarggh the passive voice makes me tear my hair out!! noooo stop using adverbs you shitgibbon!!!!") has never been convincing to me, and what's more-- it always just seems like performative frippery. Who the fuck cares this much about adverbs?

Despite his own advice (via Strunk & White's advice), King uses plenty of unnecessary words-- "canine" for dog, "lap" for lick. That aside, this is amusing.

Guy Maddin or Michel Hazanavicius or somebody needs to make a movie of this.

It's been almost 10 years since I last read this, and I'm amazed by how much of myself I find in it.

Not sure if I can make it through "WORD," which seems scatological and prurient to me. Quit enjoyed the preceding though.

I picked this up at Mercer Books for a dollar, and what at first seemed a hodgepodge of random pieces assembled by an opportunistic editor (the WSB catalogue has plenty of those) has revealed itself a surprisingly cohesive amoeba of writings about the expatriate experience in Tangier's "Interzone." Moreover, it depicts a relatively young and vulnerable WSB-- prefame, addicted to drugs, on the run. This is good shit.

I'm sorry if I just absolutely bombed everyone's feed with Childhood's End updates. I misclicked and did some more clicking around to correct the original misclick. Of course, Goodreads doesn't have anything so simple as an "undo" button. I never claimed that this website was well-programmed.

Remarkable selections from the second third listed below.

Some remarkable selections from the first third [1/?]:
"He liked a grassy place, but his wife had told him that a bank is not always safe-- ants or snakes might be hiding, to sting a good man." (p. 17)
"Her laughter was everywhere, and at night her eyes shone in the sky. The air he breathed was Susie; whatever he touched was her too." (p.58)
"She was the darkness and light of his desire." (p. 59)

I can hardly believe my good luck in finding this luminous gem. It's part Under Milkwood, part Wind in the Willows, and even incorporates elements of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, at the extremities of their rustic Englishness. What's more, it's ceaselessly funny; on every page you'll find a paragraph you'll want to read out loud to a friend.