#243

Reading through the archive on a whim, and saw that on the first day of 2019 I made a list of stuff to be thankful for, and one of those things was "a present lack of catastrophic plagues." And so I thank God and all the saints within time and all those beyond it that indeed, we didn't have a plague then, and I had managed to be openly thankful for this before we, of course--of course!--would.

This is why we are thankful. Because living is enduring just long enough to lose it all; one or two things at a time till there's only one last thing to let go of, or all in one fell swoop. 

Sorry, guys. But I also mentioned total war in that post, and things don't look great. I mentioned catastrophic plagues in 2019 because, well, things didn't look great. People really weren't washing their fucking hands or taking anything about the concept seriously, y'know? So, I dunno. As I am wont to say: strap in. I think our current governments may well be in the grip of the paroxysm. 

The process is slow, though. We might have ten, twelve, fifteen years yet before the gunpowder's ready for the spark. And the paradigm might well shift, the momentum drain. Always we must hope.

*

Also, reading your own work is always cringe, but reading your own public diary is actual pain, a pain hard to describe. You know me, though: I'm about to try.

*

Whatever. What a piece of work is man, indeed. Indeed.

*

Still reading Tristram Shandy, thank God. I was starting to scare myself. Maybe it's just that I read more on the computer in the mornings the last couple of days and watching more than one movie a night a few nights in a row. Watched like thirty movies in the last two months or so. Every live Batman movie ever made, for one. I can't believe, in this whole blog, how little I have discussed superheroes. Especially Batman and Spiderman. I have so much to say about them both. 

Anyhow, Tristram Shandy is so, so good, so so funny--oh, how I have lol'd! I'll finish it soon, but I don't want to. Been doing other stuff too. Loss has given me the resolve to aim for a healthier and more responsible social life. As we move "past" this pandemic, opportunities are thicker on the ground than they have been, and I have been trying to make use of them.

Other people may be hell, but heaven is a place on earth--a place you share with people. So it goes and thank God. 

*

Also, I talk so little about The Legend of Zelda, even though it's one of the most important parts of my life! No mention of Skyrim all blog, or Mario! I don't mention Mario?!? Thank God I babbled enough about Pokémon to sort of illustrate how much that means to me.

When I was two years old, not long after I had learned to read confidently without help, I played my first video game. It was new, the edge of gaming--Super Mario World, on my cousin's Super Nintendo system. I have played video games my entire life since, and my blood runs Nintendo red. I got a Nintendo Switch in 2020, on which you can play Super Mario World, and Skyrim, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (which is the greatest game ever made and one of the greatest works of art produced in the history of producing art on this planet), and so much else that it boggles the mind. I'm playing a little Skyrim again, along with a couple of games by the same publisher of oddities(nakana): Journey of the Broken Circle, by Lovable Hat Cult (they are Danish) and Infini, by a pack of mad Canucks known as Barnaque. They are good. 

All things are good. 

I have to take a piss.

Have a good day.

--JL

#242

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that this is the two hundred and forty second post, post two four two. The fun in the math of this number is huge. But something about it, I dunno. To be honest, not one of my favorite numbers. It's maybe too perfect, too even, too balanced. I prefer 2424242. The same, but better. Better, too, than 24242424. 2424 is kinda funny.

*

m,    ≥÷

*

That was the cat. One of the cats, the older cat. The deaf one. Ezra got her for free almost four years ago from a family out in the sticks. The other one, blind, Ezra and I fetched together from the shelter the day after we met her there, once we were somewhat settled in the current apartment. 

Certainly this is not the first case of sharing what a cat did to something an artist was in the middle of working on, or beginning, but it is the first time an animal besides myself has entered anything into this blog's text field, and that seems momentous. Especially as Chubbs is something of an artist herself. Love the way she knocks stuff down and covers stuff up. A clear and unafraid talent, sometimes poignant.

*

Finished Jayber Crow. Dang. I wasn't ready for some of that, how hard and beautiful it would be. Wonderful, gorgeous, hilarious, bitterly sad, profound as fuck. Gotta get my hands on this dude's poems. The book was every-page good.

Reading The Lowland now, by Jhumpa Lahiri. Just about halfway, page one hundred and sixty two. Amazing so far. Beautiful and sad, remote and intimate at the same time. It's that dealio wherein no quotation marks are used to delineate dialogue, which seems to lend books and stories that special distance from the reader and that particular insideness and way of being folded into their own reality to the characters--more intimate for them, further away from you. Less performance, more innerness. More like a dream, a dream in some ways more detailed and clear than waking life ever is.

*

Completed The Lowland. Tremendous. Started The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne. I started this in high school because I loved the movie they pretended to make about it back in the day. Tristram Shandy: a Cock and Bull Story. I looked it up. Never did complete it, but I did buy a handsome green Everyman's Library copy. Now seems to be the time. 

*

About halfway through that book, now. I'm gonna hit publish on this thing after I go ahead and acknowledge to you, dear, dear reader that yes: yes. Yes, I am grief-reading in a quiet frenzy. We all cope differently. 

Be good to your people and try to be your best for them and yourself, dear reader. It is a brief and precious time we have, to show that the sharing of it means a little something to us.

--JL

#241

Read The Hakawati, by Rabih Alameddine. Loved it so much. Classic shit. Then I reread the Digger omnibus. Unflagging quality. So fucking good and really took me back to what passes for some of the good old days on the wide world web. Now I have picked up Here I Am, by Jonathan Safran Foer. I think the rule for awhile will be thick books, content and provenance secondary but at least every other book should be new to me. Want long trawls. Will definitely read War and Peace again sometime in the next couple years, I think. Completing that book may mark a milestone in my life, on par with The Silmarillion and reading Nietzsche. 

*

Saw a red-shouldered hawk in flight above the car on a drive just now. 'Twas Ezra who spotted it. Its tail band was wonderfully stark, bright flashing cream arc across dark chocolate fan. 

*

Left the post at that for the day and ended up finishing Here I Am the next. Now it is the day after that, and I have read the first few pages of Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry. Maybe I'd better publish this before I have to amend it again. Maybe I really should just shut up about what I'm reading for the rest of my life and amortize that time into reading more. It is not outside of reason to say that everyone should do the same with many, if not all the things they talk about and do. 

*

Here I Am was excellent (it's laughable. I could never stop myself, so I why do I bother to think of it?). I want to read it again. I want to read everything again. Why can't I get a Guggenheim or something for that? Be good to cut, say, a nickel a word, keep writing for free. In this economy, you say? I can make it work, I reply. Life takes so much goddamn time and energy to live, setting aside how much life it costs to get money to sustain life (almost always most of it). Give me the money to live--just to live--without the sacrifice of this time, and I would read not twice as much, not four or five times as much, but ten at least. How ten? Out of one hundred and twenty-six waking hours in a week, roughly, at least forty are spent literally on the clock, but at least twenty more are spent around the clock, like traveling to and from, and thinking about it, and getting ready, and so on. It's fucking tedious just to consider it. Then, the cleaning, the care of cats and men, the cooking, the eating, the shitting and showering, the going out to get stuff or see people, the consumption of other media in other mediums, the creation of art, the listening, the seeing, and so on ad scholastica. By which I hope to evoke the pedantic listing of everything I do and perform.

Anyway as it stands I barely get to read ten hours a week, broken up and scattered. That's nothing, and pathetic. If I were able to read books the way I work shifts--eight-hour blocks where nothing else is expected at me, and slacking frowned upon--you would not see me fucking around with my paltry however-many books a year. I would not have just ten bookshelves and be pruning them when able. I would live at a library, and I would read its entire ever-expanding contents every five years or so. Fuck you if you think I'm lying. I'll read your stupid tits off. I'll read your stupid dick back into your body.

--JL

#240

Hello. I have completed War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy. More on that someday.

*

One of my oldest and most precious friends, an individual that stood out in my life like a torch in the darkness of the cave, is dead. Got the news a few days ago, no details, and have been reflecting on how I do not prize my friends enough. Involved deeply in our own relatively solitary lives, we had not spoken in over a year. I missed them, I thought of them, and now missing them and thinking of them is all I have. So it goes.

A former coworker is also dead; a sweet and caring person. Also no details. Neither of these people was past the age of thirty, not that it matters. I know some people, like my little sister, that lived for only a few seconds, or ten years, or twenty. We cannot understand these relative measures of time and value; we cannot inscribe worth on a hundred years over a day, but we tend to, it is our reflex, and we cannot help it. 

Really, there is no point, no saving grace at all, in details. My hunger for a narrative, for some sense, is an animal thing, unhelpful and blind. There is no sense to be described, mined, discovered, or applied. Just the main fact, which is the only sense there is.

God rest them both. What more can be said? What more could be asked for? We grieve, we pray our tears a blessing, a washing, a remembrance, and we live. We do not want to outlive our family or our friends. We do anyway.

So we live. 

--JL

#239

Very well. Why shouldn't I? Be it from autism or some twisted vanity (in myself, I often have trouble with this distinction, as do external perceivers. Indeed, know that I often seem to be an asshole without having any concept of why what I am saying is ridiculous--I'm just saying what I'm thinking--and at the root of it all is a fundamental arrogance, which I believe I may have been born with) I shall attempt to list every book I have read while the blog was on hiatus. Two particular books have taken up a disproportionate amount of that time, but this will still take some time and effort.

*

Ain't got the critical give a fuck to write them all down, regrettably, but, as some may recall, I was reading a bunch of Stephen King, and I read a bunch more. However, not going to go into the archives to find out exactly what I posted and didn't post. Stephen King has published sixty-two novels, and in 2019 I read about forty-six of them, all exempting the Dark Tower series and a few other odd ones out I didn't find or get around to rereading, like Dolores Claiborne and some Bachman book or another. Thinner. I didn't reread Thinner. And so on. He has published eleven collections of short fiction, and in 2019 I read ten of them, including his newest, If It Bleeds, exempting only Full Dark, No Stars, which I last read in 2011 or so while visiting my father and brother while they were living in Dubai. It was a library book, and not supposed to leave the country. Back in 2011, I gave a fuck about very little. That trip marks the one and only time me and my dad got loaded at a bar. More exactly, a pub, frequented by the many British expats doing business in that place at that time. I smoked Dunhills while staying in that miserable hellhole of a city.

Anyhow. Sorry in advance for formatting laziness, and mistakes wherever they should occur. Except for the first and last, they are in no order of any particularity or intent whatever. The books of 2020 (a couple are from this year but only like two):

The Body Has a Head, by Gustav Eckstein (this book so constantly blew my fucking mind that I had to take a lot of breaks, and it therefore took a lot of time. Also, coronavirus considerations, questions of love and friendship, and work were very hectic and time-consuming throughout the period.)

A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole

The Animorphs Series, by K.A. Applegate, et al. (reread)

The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson

The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie

The Once and Future King, by T.H. White (reread)

Bleach, by Tite Kubo (reread)

Templar, AZ (books I-IV), by Iron Spike (reread, first time in print form)

The Harrowing of Hell, by Evan Dahm

The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, The Red Pony, Tortilla Flat, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, The Moon is Down, Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck (reread) (reread most of The Pearl, but did not reread the end for some reason. It was excellent, perfect, right up to moment I stopped. Just had to move on to the next thing. This happens sometimes, very rarely)

Heroes of the Frontier, Your Fathers, Who Are They? And The Prophets, Do They Live Forever?, What Is The What?, by Dave Eggers (WITW unfinished near the end)

Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness, by Kenzaburo Oe, transl. by John Nathan

If Cats Disappeared From The World, by Kawamura Genki, transl. by Eric Selland

The Neon Wilderness, by Nelson Algren

Watership Down, by Richard Adams

Fifty Short Stories, by Anton Chekhov, transl. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

Selected Short Stories, by Rabindranath Tagore, transl. by William Radice

Halo: The Forerunner Trilogy, by Greg Bear

Halo: The Kilo-Five Trilogy, by Karen Traviss (reread)

Halo: The Fall of Reach, Halo: First Strike, Halo: Ghosts of Onyx, by Eric Nylund (reread)

Halo: Contact Harvest, by Joseph Staten (reread)

Halo: The Cole Protocol, by Tobias S. Buckell (reread)

Halo: The Flood, by William C. Dietz

Halo: Evolutions, by various authors (reread)

A Song of Ice and Fire, Books 1-5, Fire & Blood, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Tuf Voyaging, by George R.R. Martin (reread)

The World of Ice & Fire, by George R.R. Martin, Elio M. García Jr., and Linda Antonsson (reread)

Lord Brocktree, Martin the Warrior, Mossflower, The Legend of Luke, Outcast of Redwall, Mariel of Redwall, The Bellmaker, Salamandastron, Pearls of Lutra, The Long Patrol, Marlfox, Taggerung, Triss, Rakkety Tamm, Eulalia!, The Sable Quean, by Brian Jacques (reread)

The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes, The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat, It's a Magical World, Attack of the Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons, by Bill Watterson (reread)

Play Ball, Snoopy!, Peanuts Treasury, It's a Dog's Life, Snoopy, by Charles M. Schultz (reread)

Positively Pogo, by Walt Kelly

Shutter vol. 1: Wanderlost, by Keatinge, Del Duca, Greni, Brisson

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers vol. 1, by Higgins, Prasetya, Orlando, Howell

Multiple Warheads, by Brandon Graham

The People Look Like Flowers At Last, by Charles Bukowski (reread)

Hate That Cat, by Sophie Creech

The Song of Roland, transl. by Frederick Bliss Luquiens

The Waste Land & Other Poems, by T.S. Eliot

Beyond Self: 108 Korean Zen Poems, by Ko Un, transl. by Young-Moo Kim and Brother Anthony, introduced by Thich Nhat Hanh and Allen Ginsberg

One Hundred Poems from the Japanese, edited and transl. by Kenneth Rexroth

The Postmodern Taxidermist From Outer Space and Other Love Stories, by Matt Ernst (reread)

Silence in the Snowy Fields, by Robert Bly

And I'm Not Jenny, by Tara Rebele

Dissecting Hate, by Sam Majchrowski (my husband wrote this book)

The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and transl. by Stephen Mitchell, bilingual edition, introduced by Robert Hass (left at about halfway through, bookmark in for a return)

The Andromeda Strain, by Michael Crichton

The View From Saturday, by E.L. Konigsburg

The Nakano Thrift Shop, by Kawakami Hiromi, transl. by Allison Markin Powell

Kissers, by James Kochalka

One Punch Man vol. 14, vol. 15, by One and Murata Yusuke

You and a Bike and a Road, by Eleanor Davis

They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, by Hanif Abdurraqib

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Killing Commendatore, by Murakami Hiruki

The Last Temptation of Christ, by Nikos Kazantzakis

Rain: A Natural and Cultural History, by Cynthia Barnett

The Lie and How We Told It, by Tommi Parrish

Crawlspace, by Jesse Jacobs

Harry Potter 1-7, by J.K. Rowling (reread)

Silverwing, Sunwing, Firewing, by Kenneth Oppel (reread)

The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis (reread)

The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster (reread for me, read aloud to my husband for the first time at bedtimes)

1984, Animal Farm, by George Orwell (reread)

Winnie the Pooh, by A.A. Milne and Ernest J. Shepard (reread)

The Fall of Gondolin, by J.R.R. Tolkien and Christopher Tolkien

and finally, the books currently in process:

Palladium, by Alice Fulton

The Republic of Poetry, by Martín Espada

War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, transl. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

*

Doubtlessly I have missed a few here or there. It was a long gap. But here we are, all caught up. I'll let you know once I'm done with War and Peace, which I have been chipping away at since shortly after the new year. I'm really rolling along with it now; one hundred pages past the halfway mark, so only about five hundred to go. One thing slowing me down is I don't like to carry such a big book around with me all the time. Another thing is that this book is literally two miles long.

It is extremely good.

--JL

#238

What news, I ask myself, is worth recording? I ask purely in a sense of what would be fun for me, then try to winnow down into what might be entertaining for others. Then I have to play with the cat, for she, too, cries for entertainment. Just as in humans, this ludic need seems to be both fickle and bottomless.

Do I have any bright ideas, I ask, if I don't feel like news or the delights of minutiae. 

April did not prove itself a month of bright ideas. The cat played a lot, though. Both cats. Each cat unit.

*

Every avenue of thought is made up of more traps and pitfalls for the thinker than any kind of clear passage. There exists no thought so pure that the vanity and arrogance of the thinker cannot mar, no thought so sensitive or fine that a callous or brutal personality could not fashion into a weapon for itself, no healing that a tortured person cannot turn to pain. If truth exists, and is absolute, then it is a good and fine thing, but not utile for the "thinking" ape. We will not be able to agree upon it, no matter how it manifests, and it would be boring if we did. Truly, it would signal the perhaps irretrievable end of something vital, something human. At any rate, the truth will continue to be, without needing anyone to acknowledge it anyway.   

I was thinking that, and just now I thought abut how personality has no gender; it is affected by gender and gender as experienced in embodiment, but the personality itself is referred to as the personality itself, while we think of a person as a them, not an it. But since the personality can be said to be the person, and indeed the most personable part of any person, should it not be thought of as the primary part of the person? Well, it is, and it is an it: the it that thinks that it is he, or she, they, me, or you. And who knows how much other nonsense, this thing, this it, believes and thinks! Hilarious.

In the end, we can only gather to ourselves our notions which approach what we believe may be the truth, and serve them best we may. 

*

The man is all vaxxed up and fully incubated, folks, and how very brave new world it all is. Our advance into the delightful blend of the Orwell, P.K. Dick, and Huxley futures marches apace! The other Huxley future, the more sublimely Nietzschean vision of a spiritually reborn and wholly revalued world, still has its chance, I believe. I also believe that a lot of the people saying so in so many ways are trading with false coin, but that does not worry me unduly anymore. 

When I was a kid I wanted the world and its climate and ecosystems fixed, the truth discovered, enshrined, and set as the highest possible good, and all the human choir to sing with one voice the body electric and the universal tone. This is still my dream, but I have come to understand that this dream is not for me. I live in a world whose systems are in violent transition--all its systems. The truth is further away from us than I could ever have known as a child, when I held it in my mind, obvious and perfect. Our riot, our chaotic disharmony, which hurts and strains the ear so, has its perfection and its tone is as universal as every tone. Each life is small to the life of this small world, each as essential to it as it to each of us. 

Let the process go. River's gonna flow. 

--JL