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Dhalgren
This review discusses racial and sexual violence. A lot. And make a reference to gross stuff with poop. “Some people need sun, clear nights, cool breezes, warm days—” I said. “They can’t live in Bellona,” Tak went on. “In Helmsford, I knew people who never walked further than from the front door to the car.…
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geek fascism
To my mind, there is no better place on the internet where highbrow and lowbrow mingle freely and in various novel mixtures than the Los Angeles Review of Books. Their contributors feel young and fresh compared to other “serious” book review outlets, their interests range from narrow academic topics to popular culture and any given…
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gr(eat)
I never get tired of the highbrow/lowbrow debate. There’s a long article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on (according to the writer, Michael Clune) a reluctance for humanities scholars to engage in critical evaluation (as opposed to interpretation). This eschewal of hierarchy appears eminently progressive. Who am I to say that one book is…
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lost in the cosmos pt.2
Yesterday I finished with Lost in the Cosmos, by Walker Percy. Finished with, not finished. It was so easy to nod along with his argument. I get this way with particularly nerdy hard sci-fi—particularly Neal Stephenson books—, I am not so good at knowing when the science ends and the fiction begins and it can be so disappointing to…
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cover her face
If you dream like I dream you know that dreams are heavy, and they make you sensitive to other people’s dreams. It’s like walking around with a bellyful of strong magnets, and getting close to other’s success and failures pulls at you like an electromagnetic field. I want to be a person that has the…
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prufrock
whether i am “objectively” special or unusual or fringe or whatever is almost beside the point, it really bothers me that i have so lost touch with the part of me that does not qualify or hedge, that believes unshakably in my own godhood, that i can’t even hear it in my own head, where…
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Slaughterhouse-Five
I finished Slaughterhouse-Five last night. The first time I remember coming across the name Kurt Vonnegut was on Keith’s bookshelves. Keith was my music teacher’s husband, and while my sister was having music lessons, I would go upstairs and keep Keith company, watching him work on music projects or work in the yard,…
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Mirrors: Eduardo Galeano
Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone. Eduardo Galeano, translated from Spanish by Mark Fried. 400p, Nation Books, 2010. (Powell’s) It all began at Christmas two years ago, when my daughter was four-years-old. And it was the first time that she’d ever asked about what did this holiday mean? And so I explained to her that this…
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This Reader's Digest, July 2013
Big reading month for me. Here’s the good, the bad, and the ugly, with some commentary. I get apathetic about rewriting what is easily Googleable, so no plot summaries. Unreservèd recommendations are marked with a star. *The Little Way of Ruthie Leming Rod Dreher A truly unique project. Dreher’s book rarely strays beyond the borders of…
