#458

When it comes to play, the only analog game that really thrills and grips me is chess. Even pinball, which is basically a video game, merely diverts me for the most part. Besides that, by and large, I find manipulating board games, pencil-and-paper games, dice and card games and the like to be more of a hassle than anything else. I dunno. I just don't feel the spark, the galvanized, intent feeling that is so free and instantaneous when I've got a controller in my hands. 

Used to play around with kind of a specially carved wooden chess set and board that my dad had as a children's toy--the pieces were quite big and blocky--and the old man started teaching me around the same time I was learning to read, so like, two and three years old. Chess is one of the first and only tabletop games I ever learned, and I only started getting really serious about learning it when, predictably, my dad found the right book for me to learn out of, allowing me to make studying it and defeating (killing) him a project I could work on in my own time and through my own imagination.

Though I technically learned to play Super Mario World first, and video games are therefore my first love, as I beame older and more capable, chess took over my ideation and sense of the world in a way that few video games--indeed, few worldly phenomena or cultural apertures--ever have. 

That's the crazy thing about chess. So powerful that it is all games, all puzzles, all contests. It is even all stories. 

*

Around when I started becoming proficient at chess, so, seven and eight years old, my dad had me start reading Plato and Aristotle, and a text intended to enrich and supplement called Ética Para Amador, by Fernando Savater, a Spanish philosopher who wished to create a philosophical primer for his collegues to use with new students, an intimate instruction in ethics for his son, and a modernized, slimmed-down work in the tradition of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, also a text that has been of great importance in my life. Though I did not complete any of these books cover to cover until I was about ten, they put quite a lot of grist into my little mill right away, more than enough to grind on.

Why bring this up? You know me, dear reader--simply reflecting on my childhood. One of my passions, eh? Plus my chess set is near me.

*

Also I blame my inability to perform in the modern academy and indeed modernity itself on this early instruction. Once again, like Oskar Matzerath, I had everything I needed early on, and it stunted me profoundly.

*

Guess I'll probably read The Tin Drum again sometime soon. It was a really big deal to me when I read it as a teenager. One of the deeper oceans of those years, like East of Eden and One Hundred Years of Solitude and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. 

One crazy thing I did book-wise was taking my second-ever recreational Adderalls and staying up all night to read  Alan Fletcher's The Art of Looking Sideways from cover to cover. Doing this changed my brain permanently. That would have been in college, at age nineteen, which feels at this advanced age like relating some Shakespearean apocrypha; like nineteen-year-old William Blake was in the next dorm room lying on his bed, staring at his ceiling in the dark and weeping silently. 

Another crazy book thing I did was read The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings and Unfinished Tales and The Hobbit every single year. Now its's every few years. Funny how the landscapes change. 

A final crazy book thing is how if I'm having anxiety I might just read like eight thousand pages of George R.R. Martin's words. It is a  warm comfort to me, you see, how very many of them there are. The pleasure of their arrangements and their construction is soothing on top of that, and of course, we circle back to chess--very comforting, the chess of his writing, his books, his mind.

With soothing anxiety, a different remedy is listening to Patton Oswalt routines. Something about that voice of his--he just makes me feel calmer, even when he's agitated.

*

Good bet a lot of this post is repeating myself. Well, one is bound to, on occasion. That, too, can be comforting to an anxious turn of mind.

--JL

#314

Got a bunch of books. Also have been reading a bunch of books, though, not as many as I would like. Finished rereading all my Tolkien, then reread Laurence Yep's excellent Dragon of the Lost Sea cycle, which I had not done since I was a wee sprat--used to check 'em out of my local library branch over and over. Think I've mentioned that. Then I read Prince Ombra, another book I had not read since in a long time. I read this one once, when I was eleven, maybe twelve, at my best friend's insistence. Didn't remember all of it with my customary clarity, but a few scenes have stuck with me through the many years, and the work as a whole was more formative and influential than I would ever have guessed. An amazing book. I mean seriously, that book is truly something. Read After the Quake and Kafka on the Shore, and am currently almost done with James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, borrowed from my mom at her insistence. Apparently Mr. Stephen Dedalus reminded her of her own firstborn (yours truly). I cannot deny certain affinities--even echoes. After that, the plan is to read a bunch more Murakami, reread Ulysses and perhaps more Joyce--probably just Dubliners, dunno if I want to get into Finnegan's Wake till next year, and at least a bit of Le Guin before I hit the nonfiction again.

There's really a lot of nonfiction I've been meaning to get to: a book about diamonds, a book about the Wars of the Roses, a book about metahistory, a book about Jerusalem, a book about math; books about a whole bunch of fuckin shit. Too many books, not enough time or money. Why, why won't the government pay to me to read like a madman every day? Can they not grasp my potential value as an intelligence asset? Fools! Squanderers!!! Just fucking make me a spot, feds!

Uh, speaking of books, I've grabbed too many this month and should have tabulated them, but didn't. Because of these factors, the following list may not be exhaustive, and I shouldn't--damn it, won't!--get more new books at the very least till well into next year. 

We'll see how that goes.

*

The Very Eric Carle Treasury, Eric Carle

Tono Monogatari, Shigeru Mizuki

The Cricket in Times Square, George Seldon

The Rescuers, Margery Sharp

Black Zodiac, Charles Wright

What Have I Ever Lost by Dying?, Robert Bly

Memoirs, Dreams, Reflections, C.G. Jung

Love That Dog, Sophie Creech

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Kafka on the Shore, First Person Singular, Haruki Murakami

The Trumpet of the Swan, E.B. White

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain (not strictly necessary, since I own a complete collected works of his, but whatever. Maybe a gift someday after read it, or before, who cares)

Early Christian Lives, a bunch of people (Penguin Classics, publishers)

The Universe Within: The Deep History of the Human Body, Neil Shubin

Life in Ancient Egypt, Adolf Erman, transl. H.M. Tirad, introduction by Jon Manchip White

After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre

The Templars and the Grail: Knights of the Quest, Karen Ralls

The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar: Solving the Oak Island Mystery, Steven Sora

Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic, Ingrid D. Rowland (Really extremely excited to read this)

The Long Valley, John Steinbeck

Squire, Sarah Alfageeh and Nadia Shammas

DEAS...and Other Imaginings: Ten Spiritual Folktales for Children, Valerie Tarico

The World According to Garp, John Irving

Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, Elvis Costello

The Abolitionist's Handbook, Patrice Cullors

Birds, Tim Flach (this was a wedding anniversary present from Ezra and it is supremely magnificent)

Fairy Tale, Stephen King

Principles of Isotope Geology, second edition, Gunter Faure 

The Complete Practical Guide to Pet and Aviary Birds, David Alderton

Nobody Knows My Name, James Baldwin

The House at Pooh Corner, A.A. Milne

*

Cool ok that's all I got time for MAY NOVEMBER BE A VERITABLE BLITZ OF PRODUCTION PRASE GOD

--JL

#300

Man! Dude! Dear, dear reader! The time do slip away from a man, and there can be little doubt about that, generally, I bet. Definitely for me, the only time I really felt time moved too slow, as opposed to galloping away, was during high school. High school, such torrid microwaved bull shit that nothing in my life, no matter how difficult or tragic, has ever seemed really as bad. Have worse traumas inflicted themselves upon me, before and since? Yes. Would I rather experience them again three times each than go through high school again even once? Yes. With hesitation, but yes, yes, firmly yes. 

Finished rereading Animorphs, naturally, crying by the end. Now reading The Shield of Achilles, by Philip Bobbitt. 

And that, beloved friends, is all I have time for today! More...TOMORROW!!!

Peace and war and war and peace, beautiful strangers, soldier on in the name of love.

--JL 

#245

Native Son is so fucking good, Richard Wright is such a fucking genius. My mind is fucking blown. I had a lot of questions concerning Richard Wright's interpretation of American life when I first read Black Boy and Native Son, but living in America this whole time since then has made me understand: this dude knew the psychology of it all cold, and he fucking told it straight, simple, and true. Genius. James Baldwin style. Oh! That's it. I read James Baldwin, and now I understand Richard Wright better. But could I have understood James Baldwin, felt him and reveled in his brilliance as I did, if I had not first read, and been troubled by, Richard Wright? Who knows! All I know is I am damn glad I have both their books around. The most basic fact and most important takeaway is that they are two of the most talented craftsmen in their field, ever, period. Those mothers knew how to fucking write. 

*

If you have read Crime and Punishment and not Native Son, I challenge you in no uncertain terms: you oughta catch up.

*

I think--almost sure--that I will read Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain now. Could go a different way but that is what is currently in my mind.

*

People who pretend to read, people who pretend to watch--see--and people who pretend to think, are capable of believing themselves brilliant, astute, correct, qualified, any number of fine adjectives that suit their vanity and ease their consciences. 

In truth, these nonentities merely serve as nodes on a memetic string they dance upon and propagate but do not comprehend. 

There is no stopping a meme--their power is too great, the willing nodes too numerous--but you don't have to believe them. You, personally, the brain that thinks. How memes might force you to respond to them is another matter, but your mind is always free to understand more deeply than a meme, to think and doubt and believe more freely than you are free to act--if you are able to muster the courage, the humility, and the faith in your own selfhood that this freedom requires.

*

SMOKE WEED EVERY DAAAAAAAAY

--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

#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

#231

Conclusions drawn by living people about what history has "led up to" inform their opinions and actions. This produces more history. We all help fill in the blanks no matter what we do or where we are or what is going on. Our ignorance of history, our acceptance of sound bites, slogans, and short, one-sided versions of long and densely complex stories in lieu of long and inconvenient journeys into the thickets of facts, secrets, lies, and exaggerations in pursuit of a truth that we will never truly know keeps us slaves to repetition and futility, but it is understandable. Society cannot develop itself on the unactionable murk of scholarly doubt. It needs grist for its multiplying hydra of devouring mills, the healthsome whole grains of infallible sciences, convenient truths, and interchangeable political realities to bake into bread. The people need their bread to get through the day. This is a truth you can't avoid.

*

I would straight-up let an AI plug me into a virtual world. Perhaps I already have. Who gives a fuck?

*

Slowly reading War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, broken up by quickly-read books of poetry. Perhaps I should track the reading in a separate blog, or just an updating text file posted somewhere. Or never mention it again. Time will tell, won't it?

*

ok peace

--JL

#213

Boy oh boy, people of Earth. It is such a time to be alive. 

Often as I walk to and fro I am reminded, because of my propensity for inhaling smoke on purpose (really? Think about it. Really? What a stupid fucking monkey is a man) how amazing it is that the air is still breathable at all. Dirty enough, though. I can tell shit is worse because cities smell like shit. Cities always have, but man, my sense of smell has only gotten worse and less sensitive as I have aged, and I think every city, every town, smells way way worse than in 1995. Man, I went to New York a few years ago, and I never in my life want to go back. Talk about a location that is its own brand of ordure with every step you take. New Yorkers are a proud people, and rightfully so; it is possible that no other city in the world presents such a complex assault on each and every sense the human body possesses, and to be a part of the tradition that has brought about such a state of affairs is surely the province of a powerful culture. God love the place and all, but I wanted to sink down to its bedrock and die there, where there is nothing to smell at all. 

Anyhow, we'll get the turtles, and the crocodiles, some other shit that made it since practically the start of the game, but the algaes and the jellies and the sightless worms that feed on heat in the places where only human beings have ever brought visible light are all going to be fine. This planet has way many life cycles left in it, way many, and we do not matter. Try to live your best life. Fight! Be brave, because courage is more significant than life; or, courage is what makes life significant. The symbol is more than the paper and the ink. We've gone down into the impossible crushing dark and fucked the moon up with our dirty feet; what more could you ask for?

Oh, you want to spread, like a dang virus. Ok, we who live in the Philip K. Dick present will determine how bad the Ridley Scott future can be. Let's play the game. Let us... extrapolate.

*

Almost finished with The Running Man. After I complete it--after its clock runs down, so to speak--I'll probably eat chocolate and watch a movie. Those are the decisions I make in the face of the sixth extinction, as democracy dies in the darkness or some other thundering bullshit an asshole sells.

*

Today I looked at the news and found myself unable to parse the headline. It meant less than nothing to me; it was composed of words I knew, each of them I knew, but together, in the order that they made, they became less than themselves, the reflection inside of a box made of mirrors. Pictures of Donald Trump's face in close-up--really only that, for about a fucking minute, as the headline blared the void itself. I have no idea what the voice-over was saying. It was all extremely grotesque, like licking green furry mold off a log of watery cheese. Sometimes bad tastes can actually cause your tongue to feel like it has withered, withered like a dead flower. Ever experienced that? Think of my brain as a tongue. Think of your own brain as tongue, and watch what you put in your mouth. 

My mom tried to explain it to me. I consider myself a decent presence of mind, on a good day if I'm paying close attention, and all I got was that Donald Trump talked on the phone, and what he said might have been illegal. I almost died of a surprise-induced coronary, I did. Look: if that dude made a promise to somebody, that person is getting fleeced. Bouncing memos about what a criminal says to other criminals--be real; these potentates are each and every last one all washed head to toe with blood, from the meanest to the most exalted, and they all lie to each other and to their lying coworkers and to their real bosses and especially to us--and calling it something to pay attention to? Someone marked the memo urgent. Well holy fucking shit.

Man, I'm glad we can get an economy to run around this kind of bullshit. I'm glad someone's getting paid to run the worst rigged game show, contemptuously scribbled by the most cynical writers on the planet. 

I paid extremely close attention to all sorts of news for a few years there. If you're on that tip, have fun while you can, before you pay close enough attention to see the seams.

*

Before I forget, today I bought volumes 14 and 15 of One Punch Man. Also The Legend of Zelda: Encyclopedia, companion volume to The Legend of Zelda: Hyrule Historia, which has been a jewel in my collection since it hit the shelves. They look so fucking handsome together that I want to take my last shit and drop dead. I'm serious. The latter deepest, richest green, green of the fathers of all firs, the former a blue whose royalty humbles Royal. The heft of them, their smooth, velvety covers, the astonishing image quality, the wild, rich, somehow fleshly scent of their pages, deep in their centers...

Man, I love making pornography of conspicuous consumption. I love being an American. And I fucking love having sexy books. Used books are also exceedingly sexy, but sometimes ripping the plastic off a coffee table book you actually want and being the first living thing to smell it is like having a new woman. Bam. I fucking said that, and I mean it.

Have a beautiful evening. Yes books are yonic and yes the brain is phallic and yes that interpenetration is the perfect balancing of sexual energy because reading is fucking and being fucked, like all good things, especially fucking, and writing*.


--JL

*I discussed this quite recently. I should give in and read more of Peter Sloterdijk's books. I have mentioned this also, I think. If you allow it to be, Peter Sloterdijk's name is both phallic and yonic, but if you've gone that far, it's phallic twice.

#210

Well! How about a list of all the books I have gotten through since last I mentioned such data? Some people will think I am lying about this list, but those people don't know me or live my life. I am not to be fucked with.

Since August 26th, after realizing that I actually only had two pages of Philosophical Fragments before the end and completing it, I read, in this order:

Duma Key, The Stand, Desperation, It, Hearts In Atlantis, The Tommyknockers, Mr. Mercedes, Sleeping Beauties, Stranger Things: Darkness at the Edge of Town, 'Salem's Lot, and Pet Sematary.

Those books are all by Stephen King except the one under the umbrella of a licensed property, and Sleeping Beauties, which is a collaborations with Owen King. They are also, by and large, quite long. Perhaps not long long, or long in the way that a book like Moby Dick is long (yeah I've read that bad motherfucker), but long. Without thinking about it too hard I can say that I've read more than four thousand pages in the last month and a half or so.

How do I accomplish this and also work so many hours at my job? Friends, the answer is simple: I truly care about little else.


--JL

#207

Read this little sumthin or other this beautiful morning and man, my entire body is racked with pleasure. Coming from a dude who does not drink wine anymore and if he can hold the line, never will again, it was like drinking a glass of Ideal Wine, the wine you drink wine in pursuit of.

That piece of text is fucking good. If you like my prose and want a harder taste, the industrial-grade shit what needs diluting to one part in ten, this is a good thing to read. I didn't even know about this website till today! If even part of the stuff on there is to that level, it is internet treasure. Some days clicking around pays off.

*

Criticisms often leveled at pieces like the one that I have linked to today run along the lines of impenetrability, which is incredible; a painting is also technically impenetrable. You don't need to be familiar with the chemical composition of each pigment to look a the fucking picture, though, and writing like this is something that you can just read. You read it like you're being fucked by it, you let it happen to you and comprehend it later if at all. Stuff like this stays in you and occasionally pertinent revelations illuminate it further; sleeper wisdom, planted connections and reverberations. 

In this case, something like twenty wikipedia articles are conveniently embedded to increase accessibility (commendable and cool), but having all the background in the world won't protect you from how the piece is written and what it actually does, which is violent, fantastic, gorgeous, triumphant, disgusting, and super funny. Above all it is penetrative, as I mentioned; to yourself attempt to penetrate it, to conquer it, to lord over it in your ponderous bigbrain, is to miss the point, and especially, the fun.

*

Ahem-hem. I of course, understood it completely because here I am writing about it and what better proof. 

hahaha no I mean I'm not lost in a sea with a torn sail or anything, like I don't need most of the appended articles (though I have them all tabbed on my browser for later because I'm inspired to refresh myself and take it for another spin) and I knew almost all of the words, but I'll have to get houndy on some shit I have no idea about before I really feel like I have a handle on it, whereupon I might like it even more, but it won't be able to bring me the same pleasure it brought me today. A different set of pleasures will bloom, to be sure, but it's never quite what it was the first time, is it?

Anyway, anyway. Thank you, Elytron Frass, for making my morning good today. I hope you, too, had an engaging start to your day.

*

Tomorrow I will try to write about something other than what I read online before I opened up the text editor. Criminy, I used to try to mix it up around here. 

Sitting with a box of nicotine gum at my left elbow. I guess this fucking shit costs seventy-five dollars? On the basis of this expenditure, cigarettes that come near my mouth after I have consumed the gum ought to spontaneously transmogrify into one of those joints that grace the cover of glossy magazines concerned with the flagrantly conspicuous consumption of world-class cannabis products.

It should have that little horticultural arrangement of tips on the lighting end, so that it looks like it's wearing a little wig if you stand it on its filter. It should definitely stand perfectly, without coaxing, on its filter. Its paper was dipped in hash oil and smeared lightly with pressed resin. I smoke it in one long pull; preparing for the drag takes about eight seconds. I have one more for the morning, two for the afternoon, and two more for at night. Occasionally, however, I might enjoy six in a row.

*

Y'all, I hope they never build a prison for DOOFUSES

-____- 

  

:____:

*___*

:____:

*___*

:____:

-____-

0      0

(-------)

0      0

(''''''''')

 ||||

 ||||

 ||||

 ||||

 ||||

 ||||

 ||||

(        )

 \      /

   \  /

    *

    *

    *

  farts!

--JL

#173

Real quick before I go on with Album Week 2019, I'll letcha in on how reading has been happening. You like that, you like when I talk about the books I'm reading. 

Well, I like writing about them, baby. What we have here is a case of synergy. Let's hunker down.

*

Just about halfway through the pages of Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments, which is to say I have read the original translator's introduction and the introduction by the commentator which took ninety-seven pages and am about fifty-two pages into the text itself. I have only about fifty-eight more before I am done with the book and then there are the roughly hundred and seventeen pages of commentary. I'm not sure if I'm going to read them this time around. I liked his intro enough to do it, but come on. Not a big "coulda been done with this already" guy, but the math on this is damning and Kierkegaard writes accessibly by my lights, really seems like excess.

Due to misunderstanding about a copy of Coyote Blue by Christopher Moore, I read it in its entirety so I could return it to a coworker only to be told that it was mine to keep. It was a pretty dang good book--and as an added bonus, my typing those words marks the end of a whole teenaged-to-adult life with a prejudice against Christopher Moore on the basis that his books look stupid and annoying and he seems stupid and annoying and the very first page of one made me hate him when I was a teen so I have never read one of his books till now, to show my coworker that I have an open mind. The book as an aesthetic object still drives me crazy, it looks bad and stupid and they made it ugly and hateful and painful to the eye and mind, but he is a real, real smart dude and a skilled and funny writer and the book's content skips and kills and frolics like its titular creature/totem (never does trick you, though). Great stuff, I'll read more in future.

Read Distance Mover and Don't Come In Here by Patrick Kyle. That's everything I could get my hands on, everything collected and bound I'm pretty sure (I mentioned reading Roaming Foliage I'm pretty sure, I know I mentioned Black Mass and it all started with Everywhere Disappeared) and it checks out: genius-level ouvre, can't wait for Death of the Master to drop, raise no monuments to the living and all but Patrick Kyle is a living king.

Also read the first couple pages of Death World by Harry Harrison. I'll get back to that soon.

*

Okay! Album Week. Album Week 2019. What fucking day is it? How many of these have I done? 

*

It is raining outside. A beautiful rain. Silver light, thick heavy drops coming down even. Further south this business was a fucking shitstorm, floods everywhere, railroad tracks high in the air, the gravel beds they rested upon washed away completely in deluges that tore people's homes from where they sat and washed them away down the street, windblown chunks of roof coming to rest in what branches remain to the trees. 

Few were injured. Truly incredible. Yesterday there were tornadoes all over the place; not many people hurt then either. Miracles happen, they demonstrate video evidence of miracles, and we just keep on going like nothing is real. That's part of the overarching miracle, I suppose.

*

My dad's recording of Handel's Water Music got lost somewhere I think, so I can't determine the details of my formative recording of the composition. I can't even think of it right now, in my mind. I forget how it goes. Sad.

*

Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" is a great song. I've never heard the studio recording, only outtakes. That's how I like Dylan, by and large. Some of his studio stuff is okay, but I like The Gaslight Tapes and stuff from No Direction Home and old live recordings and stuff like that. I read Chronicle vol. I, appropos of nothing. Talk about a book that changed nothing in my life. Unlike "A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall". Unlike "Moonshiner".  So forth.

*

Rain's slacking off already, after an hour. I stared out at it and watched it fill floodplains over the asphalt and burst crystal fireworks on the corner of the roof the garage building.

You know what's a good album? Having everything be totally quiet and listening to the rain fall on the world.  

*

Precipitation's done for now. Got the window open to let in the breeze.

--JL

#166

Yo, as of now, this ole blogomatic has 77 posts for this year, 88 posts for last year, and the tworter account has tweeted 222 tweets. This delicate and incredible situation will cease to be as soon as I smash the "publish" button on this, the one hundred and sixty-sixth post.

Life is so fucking rad. Why are numbers so cool? People say fuck math, I have said it myself, but like, I wanna fuck math.

*

You know. Do it.

*

One plus one equals two. This is the third-most basic framework for reproduction and also pornography, preceded by one plus one equals (x) ones, itself preceded by one divided by half. 

Yup, 1(0.5)=2 and that right there is where fucking begins. The math that supports that moment in possibility is more complicated and murky, but still hot, probably.

Bet it feels disgustingly good to engage mitosis, ugh. Just...splitting. Mm.

*

Haha okay I'm done being gross for today.   

*

Well, on paper, anyway.

*

Let's see. Read Fear and Trembling by SK and got most of the way through The Sickness Unto Death (both translated by Walter Lowrie), then decided to break it up a little with Roaming Foliage by Patrick Kyle and I should finish up Tezuka Osamu's Ayako before I go into work. Then back to Kierkegaard. Planning on reading his Philosophical Fragments (translated by David Swenson including commentary by Niels Thulstrup, translation revised and commentary translated by Howard V. Hong) and after that I'm thinking of rereading Being and Time by Martin Heidegger, but I've also been eyeing King Kong Theory by Virgine Depenthes, No Disrespect by Sister Souljah, The Death of Truth* by Michiko Kakutani, and frankly, I don't even know why I'm bothering to plan because I'm also feeling the pull of Hannah Arendt, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Stephen King, Ursula K. Le Guin, Manning Marable, Carl Jung, and William Shakespeare, plus a couple anthologies. Just to name a few.

Literally anything could happen, including none of the above. Chaos reigns!

*

Point is, I'm done with this, gonna go read.


--JL

*I complain about people saying shit like this, titling their books and articles with shit like this, but y'know, I always feel compelled to investigate the claim. I sneer at "the death of this and the death of that" but I'm always like "oh, whatup, you said what died? Tell me allll about what you mean by that." Probably I'm just chasing the dragon of how I felt when I read that God is dead. Nothing ever measures up even in the remotest sense. 

#157

These Derrida essays are fucking savory. They're the sort of thing I would have unhinged my jaw and swallowed in a single sitting when I was younger, comprehending but not fully understanding, before grabbing the next thing off the shelf. Devouring and devouring, never sleeping. I chew a little more now. Once I was a python that had eaten an elephant. Don't know what I am now, but the way I am receiving these essays make me feel like I might have digested something.

This makes me outrageously suspicious of myself. It is essential to never, never relax into feeling like you have anything figured out.

*

On a related note, I wished to clarify that my last statement in yesterday's post was not meant to be a a condemnation of existence. Not a moaning or a groaning. Simply a noting.

My feelings about the vortex are complicated, but overall, I would rather be here than not. Ecstasy > Agony, even at my most agonized and bereft. My feelings about the center are that it is a gift. The essays have been validating these feelings with every word and also the title of the collection*, which is why I picked it up in the first place. 

--JL

*The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida (Secrets of European Responsibility; Beyond:Giving for the Taking, Teaching and Learning to Give, Death; Whom to Give to (Knowing Not to Know); Tout autre est tout autre)

#148

Just reread One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey. One of my favorite books of all time; used to collect different printings and editions of this book. Stole two copies of the same edition from my high school, had one with a weird movie cover, one with a cover by some French artist that I bequeathed to my younger brother, one or two others. Got rid of them over the years and stuck with my Penguin Classics Deluxe edition containing the introduction by Robert Faggin and the foreword by Chuck Palahniuk with the Joe Sacco cover, full of the author's evocative sketches. I like the cover okay and absolutely love Kesey's artwork right in with the text, but the foreword and intro are unbearable, albeit intelligent and useful. I mean they are fine but a part of me is cringing the entire time I read them.

Still one of the best bangers ever fucking written. I need to not go another year of my life without rereading this book. It has been a mistake to slack off. 

Now I am going to read Witches Abroad, by Terry Pratchett, because my buddy just keeps slinging his books at me, because I told them to throw him at me whenever, because Discworld books are simply incredible every time. Dude is smart as all hopping hades and an unbelievable condenser. An implication of his swings more dick than three whole regular books.

Finished A History of Europe, quite a ride. Really phenomenal work. During the process of absorption I leavened it with Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, and Small Gods, by that selfsame Terry Pratchett we were discussing. Both of these books thoroughly rocked me. I now understand why people are surprised that I haven't read Snow Crash, and bug me so much about it when they find out I haven't. Well, now I have, and I get it, and am simply living a better life now that it's happened. Everybody wins.

Also read a lot of comics every day, per dietary standards. 

Peace, flickering candles. Stay lit.


--JL

#142

"Dude, I heard you been reading in the office. You gotta cut that out. Can't have you doing that."

"Joe, man, if ___ comes to me again with a book of yours he found under the damn counter, this is gonna stop being funny to me, dude. I'm serious."

"You cannot read behind the counter, Joseph. What if customer come in? Plus you sitting down, people look inside, people not know we open. They not come in. You cannot do that."

"That is not a classroom text, mister Lidd. Put it away. I am tired of having to tell you."

"Is that a book? I am teaching. Give that to me immediately and see me after class."

"No reading in class. See me after."

"No, Joseph, you cannot stay in the classroom and read during recess. That is outside time, okay? Don't you want to play with your friends?"

*

Very, very boring stuff.

*

Could type for hours, quoting the ways I have been yelled at or criticized for reading at the table. 

Some stuff you just absolutely cannot for the life of you be obedient about, not even for your own mother. I would forget. After having had my ear off about it for the ten hundredth time. Literally forget. And when she said not to, it's like, I could hear her, remember that this was something I had been told a thousand times ten times over, and understand that it was serious, but I just cannot process that command. It is not a real part of the physical universe as far as my brain is concerned, so it was a war I was bound to win in attrition, since obeying a compulsion does not register as effort and defiance is immutable when protecting basal functions. Never did I say to myself "hell with mom and her feelings, I'm gonna bring this book to the table just to rub it right in her face". Rarely would I even think of anything at all. I would bring the book I was reading to the table because I was reading the book. I would grab a book to read at the table because I want to read while at table, a drive wholly undiluted by experience and untouched by any consideration or premeditation. Barely a conscious process. Nine meals out of ten, I have a book at the table. That's just how it is. She gave it up with reasonably good grace, after more than fourteen years of campaigning.

*

I read books in restaurants (though the ratio is three meals out of five), in lines, on buses and planes. Alleyways behind the restaurants where I have worked are a favorite, as is while standing up smoking a cigarette. I read The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis on a walk home, years ago. When I went to bars, I read books there. At sporting events, weddings, graduations, assemblies; on camping trips and other vacations; figured out places to hide during recess; and there is a list longer than I am tall of random places I have had to wait and happened to have a book or two on my person, plus another longer than my arm of planned waits I was ready for and places I have had to wait at on a regular basis and was thus usually equipped, such as bus stops, or stairways, or creaky old bleachers at the edge of a scrubby, cleat-torn field.

*

Life is fucking hilarious. What a dweeb. Also I have been a real jerk to my mother in this lifetime. Very poor form. 

--JL

#93

Man, it was a beautiful day today. A lot of beautiful light fell out of a beautiful blue sky, and that light lit up a lot of beautiful things a lot of different and beautiful ways. 

*

Forgot to mention! The first book I read this year, on New Year's Day, was Being There, by Jerzy Kosinski. It was hella dang good. It barely took an hour to read, too. Wanted to start the year with some concision.

*

Time for rest, people of the blog-reading community. Be kind to one another out there. Also, if you have a little extra money, buy my books! First plug of the new year! May this year render that link swollen with many more purchasing options.


--JL

#86

Read a book by Terry Pratchett! It had been a very long time. I read a few at a formative age, but I guess Kurt Vonnegut sort of took over that conceptual reading space. If I had to pick a culprit. The truth is I read one I didn't much care for, thought I'd have a break, and never thought to return. But this one, Hogfather, was both excellent--truly, magnificent and pretty much genius--and seasonally appropriate. 

Before that, I had quite abandoned Susan Sontag, carried away as has been my wont since age eight by Madeleine L'Engle's incredible powers. We all have a literary mother. My Mother brought me the Time Quartet after a trip back to the U.S., and put them in my hands, saying she had a feeling I would like them. It really was a feeling, too. She knew nothing whatsoever about them, had never heard of them, saw them on the shelf while looking for a gift for me and felt those would be good, not only good, but Good. Moms, man. I thanked her, privately feeling that she was almost ridiculously and perhaps even mockingly mistaken; the books looked weird, and also soft in some way beyond the pastel palettes and gentle linework of the covers. They were shelved and went unread for some months, but I read at such a pace in those days that they were all I had uncracked, and thus I deigned to read the first sentence of Wrinkle, which, (famously) of all the possible sentences in the wide, wide world of sports, went "It was a dark and stormy night." 

That second sentence, though. Immediately assuages any sense of betrayal. From there, relentlessly, it's nothing but one of the finest artistic achievements ever, straight-up one of the best books of all time. All of them are. I weep to read them. Nakedly, messily, ecstatically, sorrow breaking me open and joy tearing me apart.

*

You know what? That opening line still kills and I'm never really mad to see it. Charles Schultz used it all the time and it was always good. Just, when I was a little kid, I was for real considerably snobbier than I am now. Pretty embarrassing. Reading a lot is my main thing and and on that turf, I could be unkind. Have been unkind. Could still be unkind, if cornered. Tigers, leopards, spots and stripes, scorpions and their stingers, you know.

For example: don't ever try to have an argument with me about a book you haven't read, or bring a book you haven't read into a argument. I'll find you out quick--I make it a point to admit outright if I have not read a book, since anyone who tries to make you feel bad for not reading a book is straight-up bullying you and I don't give a fuck what bullies think of me--I will call you out on the spot, and I won't let you walk away feeling good about yourself. I don't care about what you haven't read at all, I don't care if you don't read stop signs, but pulling that shit is the stuff of cravens, jackasses, and again, bullies.

It can never be said enough: all that a bully is good for is being defeated. It is up to everyone else to grow strong enough to defeat bullies, and if necessary, strong enough to protect, help, and support those who for some reason or another are particularly vulnerable to bullies. In addition, bullies come in all shapes and forms, and everyone has it in them to protect someone from some bully in a way best conferred to their own suite of talents and abilities--some bullies are even thus engaged, for life is rarely as simple, cut, and dried as we like to declaim. Support systems and coping mechanisms; complex, layered. 

However, bullies are always welcome to get their miserable lives right, and until then, all they deserve is defeat, frustration, and the obdurate, mute hatred of the universe.

What they generally get is something else. 

I've always had a strong personal sense that everything shakes out in the end, though; even, in unseen ways, minute by minute and hour and by hour. Imbalance is part of a larger balance and all that. Inborn subjective comforts are a lucky thing, existence-wise. Bolstered, if you are lucky, by exceptional books.

Good night!


--JL

#79

I don't feel too much like putting one of these out, and didn't yesterday, because I'm working very hard on other projects and they feel vital and working on them is like taking in a very special drug through the typing fingers.

Never did get around to finishing that play, did I? But it's so close! It's like when the program stops loading at ninety-eight percent and the process just hangs there for three months.

Anyway, that'll come when it comes. I'm working on other stuff, so expect this blog to be a return to a very short form for a while.

So many things yet to read, so many things left to write! 

The main perk of this vocation is that childhood feeling, unalloyed. 


--JL

#70

After I finished Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which is very excellent, and by Philip K. Dick, I read And Then, by Natsume Soseki. It was tremendously fantastic. And today I finished The Sheltering Sky, by John Bowles. It was okay. Better as you go along.

Might go back and append the authors to all the books I mention, and also underline the titles. It's been weighing on me, frankly. Something feels immoral about how loose I've been playing it. The accumulation is beginning to grate. It's the first time I'd go back through the archive to make such an extensive edit. That feels wrong too, despite the fact that it's a perfectly professional, unobjectionable, objective, even arguably necessary edit. 

Dunno why I'm even discussing it. Whatever I do, I won't do it tonight.

What am I reading now, you ask? Iron John, by Robert Bly. It's kinda weird, but I dig it. It was a gift from an older dude. Let me tell you: this book reads like a gift from an older dude. I like it a lot and feel impelled to laugh at it, at its accoutrement and affect, but refrain from a kind of pity; it's a lot like how I felt about the man who gave it to me. It's not a mean laughter at all, though, and the pity fades as I age, replaced by more warmth, and I think, understanding, Young dudes can be harder than they realize and it's suboptimal. I honor this gift and I honor the spirit this book is written in, which is very honest and heartfelt. I honor that dude, and I hope I see him around.

Anyway, who cares? I get along too well with old dudes, frankly. But I grew up with dudes with severe emotional disturbances and I'm no picnic either. Been itching for chess matches with strangers, though, and there's no chops like old chops. 

Not sure what I'll read next. A few women in a row, I think; that was a three-dude streak. I try and juggle things a bit, keep the mind alive.


--JL