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I Caught A Little Cold

I have a little summer cold: sore throat, runny nose, stuffed up sinuses, medicine head, and so on. Unfortunately it came on at the silliest time: classes have just started and we’re moving into the new house this weekend. As I try to sleep each night, I think in my head how my cold is just a small thing in my life, and the pain of my sore throat will go away soon. This helps, I guess.

One book that I always think of when I get a sore throat is Boy by Roald Dahl. In the book, he describes having a doctor and parents trick him into a undergoing a tonsillectomy without anesthesia. Although I cannot remember the exact language of the scene, nor do I remember the details preceding the event, I vividly remember reading and imagining Dahl’s throat filling with blood as the doctor cut away his tonsils. This has stayed with me since I first read Boy as a boy, and, in addition to some other events of my childhood, might explain my fear of doctors, dentists, and other masked individuals.

What other books are out there that have unhealthy characters in them? What stories can I think of to soothe the annoying pain in my ears, nose, and throat?

Random / 24 Comments
August 28th, 2009 / 9:59 pm

Blake Butler

Tao Lin’s ‘Shoplifting From American Apparel’

Really excited about this one, releasing September 15th from Melville House.

shoplifting_taolin

Set mostly in Manhattan—although also featuring Atlantic City, Brooklyn, GMail Chat, and Gainsville, Florida—this autobiographical novella, spanning two years in the life of a young writer with a cultish following, has been described by the author as “A shoplifting book about vague relationships,” “2 parts shoplifting arrest, 5 parts vague relationship issues,” and “An ultimately life-affirming book about how the unidirectional nature of time renders everything beautiful and sad.”

From VIP rooms in “hip” New York City clubs to central booking in Chinatown, from New York University’s Bobst Library to a bus in someone’s backyard in a college-town in Florida, from Bret Easton Ellis to Lorrie Moore, and from Moby to Ghost Mice, it explores class, culture, and the arts in all their American forms through the funny, journalistic, and existentially-minded narrative of someone trying to both “not be a bad person” and “find some kind of happiness or something,” while he is driven by his failures and successes at managing his art, morals, finances, relationships, loneliness, confusion, boredom, future, and depression.

More info here. Preorder here.

Author News / 94 Comments
August 28th, 2009 / 5:59 pm

Matthew Simmons—

The guy who shot those women at a gym had a website. Catherine linked to it a while back. It shared all his weird, angry thoughts about women. The guy who did this? He has/d a blog. It’s really fucked. I will likely spend the weekend reading it.

Blake Butler

What I Read While I Was In Europe

With two 10+ hour days of flying, plus several train days sitting between parts of Paris and Italy (including one where Ken and I went on a loop between the two, continually fucking up our connections), I had a lot of time during the 12 days of traveling in Europe with which to spend with my head stuck in a book. As a result, I plowed through 4 books and the beginning of a fifth, all works in translation, including titles by Jacques Roubaud, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Eric Chevillard, Zoran Živković, and Werner Herzog.

Here are some brief thoughts on each:

roubaud The Great Fire of London by Jacques Roubaud (Dalkey Archive)

Kicked off the trip with this fat badboy from Dalkey, which carried me up to Washington DC and then through several days in Paris. It’s one of the more original premises and executions of a book I’ve seen in a while, and no surprise in that it is from a major Oulipian. Basically, the book is a book about the book itself more than a book of normal concerns. Not quite a writer writing about writing (thank god), but more a writer spooled in the blank space between such, and crushed in his weird onslaught of memory, a dream conceit of trying to compose a novel that never exists, and the crippling brainspace of having lost a wife. Not quite nonfiction, not quite not, a text about text that manages to do a lot of beautiful examinations of life, such as making jelly, and the descriptions of shapes of rooms and light, among which I was surprised at how compelling he was able to keep the compulsion alive across such a massive tome that essentially is all talk of what it is over being what it is, but then extending through that to actually become the blank. Terrifying in the most on-its-face banal of ways, and electric for its method. Felt right to read this one in Paris, which I had not even realized the connection of which (nor, I swear, did I mean to bring all French authors to France, it just happened).

Nah, Blake. It’s Friday. Let’s speed it up.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3vMOdv7pgs

Okay, that Swedish guy kills this.

Also, my head hurts a little. Here is assistance.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQFn3nbO1nE

Fuck Books, It’s Friday, Let’s Slow Out Live, Mane

Thanks to Gene, this whodie-in-the-truck ‘freestyle’ makes me happy to be alive:

Followed by one of my favorite blankpunk songs, live made. Yeah, I just made up blankpunk.

Guest post: Gabriel Blackwell on Ross Macdonald

“The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.”

That’s Kenneth Millar, better known as Ross Macdonald, who wrote eighteen Lew Archer novels over thirty years before Alzheimer’s put an end to his career. Incredibly, as the man got closer and closer to Alzheimer’s, his structures, those surprises, only became more and more complex. The best of his novels, from The Galton Case right on through to The Blue Hammer must have required extraordinary mental effort just to keep the characters straight, which, of course, they never were to begin with.

Macdonald’s characters rarely have fixed identities. Those surprises that he mentions in the quote are less Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes than “General Hospital”: a wife is really her husband’s daughter, a Frenchman is really a Panamanian, but also really a Frenchman, etc. Like I said, complex. Phantasmagoric even. Sometimes illegal. READ MORE >

Author Spotlight / Comments Off
August 27th, 2009 / 4:01 pm