#361

Didn't post yesterday--not an excuse, this spate of posting has nothing to do with a commitment to daily posting and everything to do with how much I feel the need to type, generate, propagate. Working on a novel, begun and shelved in 2019, back on the wire and the lightning's running up and down.

Some quick reports, then, and back to that.

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After finishing Jailbird and reading Mother Night again (fantastic--expect a post about Vonnegut and the concept of uncritical love, which I'd forgotten I read about in that wonderful, sad little book), read Stephen King's freshest and latest, Holly. Reading it reminded me how I highlight and underline albums and bands and songs and books all wrong in this blog, but then again, it is internet. Gotta go with what I think looks correct, instead of what is the actual rules.

Anyhow Holly was a pretty fuckin' great little detective burner and as she has since her miraculous conception, Ms. Gibney fucking rocked out with all her shit just hanging loose basically everywhere, just a hot mess. She is the undisputed queen of the screen and thrice-crowned baller of the reasoning scene.

He also says some very true things in it about poetry, among them some things I've taken for granted about it for a long time but am glad are present, and some that I think of as rather silly, but then, all poets are bound to think of all mere talk of poetry and every other poet as rather silly in one way or another, no matter how privately or delicately. 

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Stevie K's made his way onto the blog rather a lot, as I think back, and there is much excellent reason. If a book about the craft can set a writer on their path, then On Writing is certainly my dinghy downriver. 

That alone is ponderous, but considering that my first unambiguous, uncensored, completely adult presentation of racism, sexual violence, and economic violence as they operate in a microcosmic representation of the United States came at the age of twelve from my very first King novel, Bag of Bones--an (I feel) underdiscussed and currently (perhaps?) unpublishable novel that is nonetheless perhaps one of three or four of the clearest indications of what can only be called King's genius*--he has had a tremendous, definitive impact on my worldview and my reckoning of fictive power right off the starting gun. 

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On a different note, it's nice to be reading old Vonnegut, who will grant us no new books evermore, and fresh new King at the same time. I read them both at the same time as a teenager, and as discussed, he who has found the bright blue tunnel down to the Afterlife definitely had his say in the kind of writer and person I am too. 

Rereading Galápagos now.

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My dad got me some books this Christmas, Holly among them, even though he really shouldn't have despite the incredible holiday savings his membership entitles him to. I get too much stuff from my folks, they're too nice, it gives me the guilts. A very dope problem to have, though. I think maybe they contribute too earnestly to the commodities economy, but that's its own classist bullshit probably and who the fuck am I to judge my parents anyway. Who cares, ultimately. New books give me a tremendous hard-on, as you well know, so that makes me a hypocrite on top of everything. 

Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement, by Ashley Shew

You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything, by Walt Hickey

All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr (a special edition, I guess? It's kinda nice, with good creamy pages and that type of cloth hardcover without a dust jacket that is durable and can display hi-res images and gold emboss. I don't even know if what I'm describing is even extant in my collection, besides this example. Anyhow, I did not choose this, my dad put it in my hand, as is evidently his sovereign right. Maybe it's now a streaming TV show he is watching) 

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Man, I am just full of opinions lately, and all about puttinem on the blog. Opinions cause so many huge problems and are so contradictory to any coherent good sense or logic that I try not to have em but man: I fuckin gottem.

--JL

*It is my held notion that King harbors three or four distinct geniuses, nevermind the wizard and the warlock. We contain multitudes; it is King's abiding, frightening, and electrifying power to manifest--or birth--several clearly defined aspects of his being for us to see the world through simultaneusly, like a prism spiltting light refracted by further prisms. It's a thing he has in common with a few great writers and some shitty ones with vision. Naturally, I aspire to my own brilliant spellwork, and ply my trade in deadly earnest pursuit of that thing called a fucking great book, a fucking genius book, feeling very conscious of his presence and his lessons along the way. 

Some more opinions, why not