Book roundup:
1. The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz: B-
2. Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson: B+
3. Spook Country by William Gibson: B
4. Empathy by Sarah Schulman: B+
5. Jokes and the Unconscious by Daphne Gottlieb and Diane DiMassa: A
6. Gommorah by Robert Saviano: C

Stuff I’ve acquire recently that I hope turns out to be better reading material than this last crop:
1. Kingdom Come
2. Gravity’s Rainbow
3. The Hikiteia
4. Blood Meridian
5. The Mere Future
6. The Library at Night

Spoilers in the reviews ahead.

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

This book was… disappointing. When I was in New York last year, everyone was reading this book on the train, and I mean everyone. I figured, hey, ten million New Yorkers can’t be wrong, right? So I dutifully picked up a copy at the Strand. I was very much looking forward to it. A blurb telling the tale of a nerdy, outcast boy growing up in Jersey, the Dominican Tolkien? Check. Pulitzer Prize? Check. Interesting writing style? Check. What could go wrong?

The positives first. I liked the integration of Dominican slang and nerd language with the English prose. It had a conversational feel. I liked the inclusion of the footnotes spotlighting oft-ignored Dominican history, and the setting of the story in the period of Trujillo’s dictatorship, which North American tend to forget entirely in favor of Castro. I liked the idea of setting the plot in motion with the fuku, a terrifying and endless Caribbean curse. And finally, I liked that the story didn’t solely focus on Oscar, but explored the lives of his sister and his mother.

And now, the negative. WHY MUST EVERY FUCKING STORY BE ABOUT A BOY WHO CAN’T GET LAID? I was hoping Oscar would be more like Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces, but no. There wasn’t anything particularly compelling or personable about Oscar and there wasn’t anything particularly wondrous about his brief life. Oscar spends most of the book sexually harassing or stalking women, a tendency that Mr. Díaz describes as “love.” The whole story hinges on Oscar’s pathetic virginity and how very tragic it is that no woman will take pity on him and fuck his sorry ass. BOO HOO. I am so sick of these story lines. There are many things in the world more tragic than a man who can’t get his dick sucked. Especially a totally delusional pervert like Oscar, who seems to think that women exist to suck his cock. Well, Oscar, maybe that’s your problem!

In conclusion, I thought the book was pretentious and aspired to way more than it actually achieved. It was full of half-fleshed out ideas and cliched, half-realized magical realism that, to me, was a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing. I would be very open to an awesome book about the Dominican diaspora, and I guess this did fill some sort of literary hole so maybe that’s why everyone was all over it, but to me, it was just yet another story about some loser guy obsessed with love stalking women he can sexually harass until they have pity sex with him.

Written on the Body

So I took this book with me on our romantic getaway to Ottawa under the misapprehension that it was Stark’s favorite and it was tres romantic. Well, I quickly learned that Stark actually wasn’t the biggest fan and also that it is not at all romantic. Why does everyone think this book is so great? I feel like every lesbian in the world loves it and gets tattoos of passages on their ribs and quotes it all the time… Am I wrong? It’s not that the book is bad, it’s just about a shitty philanderer who screws up her life and the life of everyone around her. It actually captures that quite well, so go Jeanette. I also enjoyed her trademark funny bits inserted amongst all the drama. There were some quirky little stories about exes, none of which I can remember now, but they made me laugh. Generally though, it’s a book about a very unlikeable character, and as such, it wasn’t something I can say I enjoyed a great deal. Well written though, and it only took, like, two days to get through it, so I can’t complain.

Spook Country

I was really looking forward to this book, as Pattern Recognition was probably my favorite Gibson book and also one of my favorite novels ever. I found the character of Case Pollard so thoroughly cool and thought Gibson really managed to escape the future for the present in quite an interesting way, where everything still seemed sort of cyberpunk while still being grounded in our own world. Spook Country was just a sad echo of everything that made Pattern Recognition awesome.

For the first time, I really felt like Gibson was out of touch with future tech. I mean, virtual reality googles and holograms, William? Really? That’s soooo 1985. The book was sort of like a sequel to Pattern Recognition in one of those vaguely connected ways that Gibson favors, taking place in a different corner of the same universe with a few overlapping characters and themes, which I think made it seem all the worse by comparison. I’m not sure why Gibson didn’t just reprise the character of Case Pollard, definitely one of his stronger creations. Instead, he created a “new” character that was basically Case Pollard, but with a different back story. Unfortunately, there were too many subplots going on to really get a chance to know this new character and I found her story shortchanged.

I also expected more of the spook country angle. Intriguing spy story, this is not. The central mystery had such a lame conclusion, I couldn’t believe it was the best that Gibson could come up with, which is basically how I felt about all the plot lines of the book. A lot of buildup and then no satisfaction. Too many storylines that ended up going nowhere. And a sense that Gibson has finally fallen out of touch with the zeitgeist.

Empathy

This book was okay. I think I did myself a disservice by reading Schulman’s best novel, Rat Bohemia first. Everything else seems to pale by comparison. But generally, this was a good story. I am a sucker for her portrait of the decay of New York in the Eighties, which is always why I end up unable to say no to one of her novels. The central plot twist was basically an intellectual feminist version of Fight Club. I would rag on Chuck for ripping her off, but really, this major reveal was so underdeveloped that I don’t mind it getting a more strongly realized reprise in Fight Club. A really interesting concept, though.

Jokes and the Unconscious

This book was good, but really, really depressing. It’s really the only reading material that I’ve felt worth my time in awhile though. I’ve been having bad luck with books. But this novel was good, and the scratch, violent, hallucinatory illustrations by Diane DiMassa were perfectly suited to the material. Out of the above list, this was the best. Plus, lesbians.

Gommorah

I’m only halfway through this book right now and I think I’m going to give up on it. I never though I’d say this, but I wish it was written by David Simon. I picked it up because the back promised an insider look at the Camorra crime organization, a work of journalism so revealing that the author had to be placed under police protection. So, y’know, I was expecting Donnie Brasco or The Corner. I was expecting the guy to go undercover, befriend the criminals, really get an in depth picture of their lives. But no. Robert Saviano’s “insider” view of the community seems to consist mostly of him riding around Campania on his Vespa, checking out crime scenes and overhearing conversations at coffee shops. Big fucking deal. The rest of the story consists or recounting trial transcripts and news reports. It’s basically just a timeline that could have been recreated by anyone willing to listen to the police band on the radio and read the newspapers a lot. I expected him to, y’know, talk to someone or do a more in depth portrait of one particular corner of the community. Like how David Simon captured the crack epidemic in inner city America by writing an portrait of one family, really talking to them, following them around, following their lives for a year. NOT RIDING AROUND ON A FUCKING VESPA TO SEE DEAD BODIES AFTER THE FACT. Now, I understand that getting people to talk in a community infested with a secretive criminal organization isn’t exactly easy, but really, you couldn’t find one person to talk to about their experiences? Or maybe focused on one family or the effects of one crime, instead of giving such a broad overview of events that nothing is actually understood?

Also, I don’t know what is going on with books coming out of Italy, but I always find their translations seemed rushed and poorly done. Maybe this Saviano guy is a really great writer, but you wouldn’t know it from this translation. I also thought the North American edition could have used some front matter, introducing topics that may not be familiar to readers whose knowledge of Italian organized crime is limited to The Sopranos. I read half the book before I came to one solitary translator’s note, explaining an acronym. So yeah, boring and confusing. And, well, there’s just something about Saviano that rubs me the wrong way. Like he’s just a teensy bit racist and sexist and is probably one of those uber macho assholes who catcalls women on the street.

2008

1. Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin: B-
2. The Blue Place by Nicola Griffith: A-
3. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning by John Mahler: B
4. Persepolis I and II by Marjane Satrapi: A+
5. After Dark by Haruki Murakami: B-
6. Cover Me by Mariko Tamaki: B
7. The Devil’s Cup by Asshole McAsshole: F
8. Two Ends of Sleep by Lizard Jones: A
9. The Glass Cell by Patricia Highsmith: B
10. After Dolores by Sarah Schulman: A
11. Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil, Gillian McCain: A+++
12. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami: B
13. Slow River by Nicola Griffith: A
14. Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood: A+
15. Godspeed by Lynn Breedlove: B (But the first ten pages are, like, A. Too bad she couldn’t sustain the style.
16. The Corner by David Simon: A- (It had issues and some sketchy decision making, but it was too engaging to blow off.)
17. The Chelsea Whistle by Michelle Tea: B+
18. People in Trouble by Sarah Schulman: B
19. Beebo Brinker by Ann Bannon: B (Clearly this is the section of the year where I was raiding Stark’s lesbian fiction collection)
20. Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters: A-
21. Tea by Stacey D’Erasmo: B-
22. Deja Dead by Kathy Reichs: D- (This book was so profoundly disappointing. Ugh.)
23. The Code Book by Simon Singh: A
24. Every Contact Leaves A Trace by Connie Fletcher: A

2009

1. Gangs of New York by Herbert Asbury: Unfinished.
2. From the Velvets to the Voidoids by Clinton Heylin: Unfinished, but let’s give it an F for pretension.
3. The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel: A+
4. Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino: B
5. Master & Commander by Patrick O’Brien: A-
6. World War Z by Max Brooks: A
7. Homicide by David Simon: B (Having read The Corner first, it’s impressive to see how much Simon’s writing has improved. It’s amazing how many stories appeared almost exactly in Homicide.)
8. 2666 by Robert Bolano: Oh dear…. where to begin with this?

Has anyone else read 2666? Because I would love to discuss it with someone. Someone who is not a pretentious lit critic, who are really only interested in sucking Bolano’s deceased cock. I read this book because my friend D, whose opinion I respect greatly, is a fan of the author, and also, because it came in this beautiful three part boxed set, and I am a sucker for good book design.

This book was intense. I should probably say “these five books were intense,” because it actually was intended to be five individual novels. I was enraptured by the first part, confused by the second, baffled by the third, sickened by the fourth, and then re-enraptured by the fifth. What is it about? Um… everything. Violence, love, death, hate, racism, sexism, genocide, globalization, exploitation, intellectualism, literature, war, immortality and the futility of trying to control your own posterity, all in just under a thousand pages. Like pretty much every book I read by Serious Male Authors recently, it also includes the requisite giant cock vignette. But, giant cocks aside, this book actually is one of the most honest depictions of worldwide misogyny that I have ever read. It doesn’t try to put the blame on one man, or a group of men, in order to forgive all the other guys who “really aren’t like that, we swear.” It doesn’t try to shift the blame onto the women, blaming their violent end on the fact that they were whores or teases or walked down a dark alley in a short skirt. It bluntly depicts the world as it really is – a place where terrible violence against women can be committed over and over with impunity for the simple reason that a woman’s life is worth nothing.

Let me tell you, the month I spent reading this book was a pleasant one.

So anyway, I won’t go into more than that because I don’t want to spoil anyone on the story, in case I’ve just sold you on the idea of reading the book with that heartwarming description. But, if anyone has read the book, I would really appreciate some incite into The Part About Amalfitano and The Part About Fate. It makes me feel better to know that even the translator remains confused about certain aspects of this book. I feel like I just sat down and read it over again, it would really make complete and total sense. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time or the energy to reread a book about the mass murder of women. So I am going to read a Nicola Griffith novel instead… Oh, Aud….

Gangs of New York was okay, if a little (a lot) xenophobic, but it just generally wasn’t interesting enough to read all at once. Although when I caught the movie on TV a few months later, it was interesting to see what the set designers and script writers had taken from the book to create their vision of the Five Points. Lots of interesting details in the background that I recognized from the book.

From the Velvets to the Voidoids is another unfinished book. I desperately wanted it to be as awesome as Please Kill Me, which I should have known would be impossible, being that Please Kill Me is one of the most amazing books I’ve ever read. Sadly, Velvets wasn’t even a pale shadow of Please Kill Me. It was full of pretentious music analysis and out of touch hipster crap. Instead of an honest vision of the actions of real people, it was just a load of the same old bullshit about the otherworldly genius of Lou Reed and how Nico was just a starfucking attention whore with no actual talent and how Patti Smith’s songs only existed because of the men she was sleeping with at the time. GIVE ME A BREAK! Also, half the text was just detailed (boring) discographies and bragging comments about how one cannot truly understand the Stooges unless you’ve heard some obscure b-side to a six inch. Blurgh. Maybe I’ll pick it up again when I’m feeling more charitable…?

Let’s see… then I went through the entirety of The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For in a hot minute and was sad when it was over.

After that came Master & Commander, which was pretty excellent, despite the fact that I needed to buy a dictionary to explain all the words and I still wasn’t sure what was going on half the time. But the picture of life spent on a ship in Nelson’s Navy coupled with the incredibly gay relationship of Maturin and Aubrey made it worthwhile. I would love to read the next books in the series. I have no real complaint about it besides the portrayal of women. While I accept that men of the time would have thought a certain way of women, I felt that the book itself was often equally insulting. But then most of the book was spent away from women and full of gay subtext so…

Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino was very aptly named. It was the story of two Japanese women who had attended a prestigious private school, but ended up as cheap street whores. The first half of the book was narrated by the sister of one of the girls, a woman best described as grotesque. The book was an interesting commentary on the treatment of women in Japan, but it was a bit trying to read about them from the perspective of such a terrible person. I heard it had an alternate ending in Japan but couldn’t find anyone to confirm it for me.

Yesterday, as I was off on an 11.5 mile jog, I was thinking about the Murakami book, as well another book I’ve read recently, “Slow River,” by Nicola Griffith, the TV show Heroes, and the Kowloon Walled City, which I’ve become obsessed with as of late.

First, the Murakami book. I honestly didn’t expect a huge amount from this book. I always expect a MAGICAL AND MINDBENDING transformative experience from Murakami’s fiction, which is why I find it so disappointing when a novel fails to live up to this expectation. But I flipped through this book while at the bookstore, and it seemed like it would be pretty fluffy, which ended up an accurate guess. The book is part memoir, part something most closely resembling an advice column or inspirational self-help book. The memoir-focused chapters are the strongest. My three favorite sections of the book were Murakami’s descriptions of his experiences running from Athens to Marathon in the mid-summer heat, running a grueling 62-mile ultra marathon, and the first time he decided to write a novel. Two of these sections were taken from previously published essays, which might explain their deviation in style. The descriptions of these runs were fantastic and really resonated with my experiences as a runner. The rest of the book was hit-or-miss.

One thing Murakami did many, many times in this book was make a incredibly specific statement about his own feelings, but write it in a way that made it sound like a general philosophy that he was applying to everyone. Then, right after concluding the thought, he would say “But please don’t misunderstand me, I don’t mean that everyone feels this way, just me” or some such thing. I found this maddening. One of the reasons I love Murakami is because he is able to write about something very specific, like the inner thoughts of a disaffected 30-year-old married salaryman protagonist, living in Tokyo, with an earlobe fetish and a penchant for Miles Davis, and still have his story resonate with millions of different people from all over the world. And he was still able to do that when he was writing about his very specific experience running from Athens to Marathon. Even though I have never done any such thing, he still managed to convey a set of thoughts that I could understand and identify with. But when he would go off on these weird general philosophical tangents about “how one writes” or “why people run,” he would end up sounding trite and even kind of cheesy.

In one of the chapters of this book he gave his answer to the question “What do you think about when you are running?” He described a kind of void in which he was thinking about nothing at all. For me personally, when I’m running long distances my mind starts to wander all sorts of places. Sometimes I’ll be listening to a podcast about a topic I find interesting and my mind will still wander off to some distant land of future photography projects or what I would sing to piss off Simon Cowell in the unlikely event that I found myself on American Idol (answer: “You Love It” by Peaches). I got the same kind of feeling while reading this book. I would go through a couple of pages and then realize that I had been thinking the entire time about what I wanted for lunch the next day and had absorbed almost nothing of what I had read.

One thing Murakami and I have in common is that we’re both more well-suited to long-distance running than any other athletic discipline. Team sport require other people, and running short distances generally require speed and acceleration. Long-distance running, on the other hand, is a solitary pursuit that allows a person a generous amount of time to really get into a groove. Another reason I love it is because it allows you a lot of time to think. Running short distances taxes your heart and your lungs. When I’m out of breath and my heart is beating out of my chest, I can’t think of anything other than pulling in air. During long distance runs, however, I’m often breathing just fine, but my muscles are screaming in pain to stop. And that’s when I generally decide to let my mind wander. For instance, yesterday, instead of thinking about the pain running up and down my exhausted thighs, I worked myself up into a lather over the show Heroes. Stark and I have been watching the first season on DVD and it has quickly gone from mildly entertaining, to unbelievably stupid, to infuriating.

The writers of this show are clearly the laziest bastards in Hollywood. What first drove me crazy about this show was the lack of continuity in the plot or the characters, the blatantly inaccurate science, and the scary eugenics-laced voice overs. I am all for suspending disbelief and for comic book-style adventures, but if you’re going to make up a universe different from ours, keep it consistent within itself. And if you’re going to use our universe, do a decent job of researching it. I’m sure the entire show has Darwin rolling in his grave. Poor misused and maligned Darwin. If you’re going to mention Darwin, at least bother to read his books. And if you’re going to base your entire show on the Human Genome Project, at least read a few Wikipedia entries on genetics. IT’S NOT THAT DIFFICULT. If you don’t feel like following the laws of science, then make up your own. Don’t mangle real science! I dropped out of bio in college and I’m far from an expert, so if even I can spot the gaping holes in your understanding of genes and find that nothing you’ve said has made ANY SENSE, then… well, your show is basically crap.

This complete lack of understanding of genetics pales in comparison to the blatant plagiarism by the writers of this show. Basically the entire plot is cobbled together from plot elements of The Watchmen and The X-Men, but with none of the power or the meaning. As an unpopular queer nerd growing up, X-Men was really important to me. The oppressed and persecuted mutants were symbols of any and every group of Others, and when the comic tackled AIDS and how conservative politics and fear can lead even the most well-meaning society down a very dark road to genocide, it was powerful. It had meaning. It was saying something. Heroes, on the other hand, has no political stance, has no higher meaning, and says nothing. It exploits the imagery of the Holocaust and of 9/11 to go for sensationalism and ratings. It makes evil trivial and human tragedy just a neat plot twist. There was more emotional resonance in an old episode of the Saturday morning X-Men cartoon than in an entire season of this inane show. Ugh. I would love to hear from the people who like this show. It seems so popular these days and I have no idea why.

Another thing I was thinking about while my legs were setting themselves on fire was the book Slow River, by Nicola Griffith. I loved this book – it hit all my kinks and is definitely now up there in my list of favorite books of all time. As I was running, I was thinking about this book in comparison to another of my favorite books, Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood. They don’t have a lot in common in terms of plot, but in the way they depict the future, I think that Oryx is sort of like the pessimistic side of the same coin. Which is not to say that Slow River is a completely optimistic vision of the future, but I guess anything is optimistic when compared to Oryx & Crake, which is one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read.

Both visions of the future are continuations of the world we live in now – with ineffectual governments controlled by corporate interests, an exploding population fast outstripping available resources, a rapidly decaying ecosystem, and a technology and entertainment obsessed society unwilling to deal with the problems ahead. Margaret Atwood concludes that this track leads to complete and utter destruction by way of Chicky-Nobs. Oh boy, thanks a lot for the nightmares, Margaret. Nicola Griffith creates a world in which, once business interests realize there’s money to be made in saving the planet, society survives, albeit mired in even more debt to greedy corporations. Although the prospect of total devastation and destruction is a wee bit more terrifying than living in a world that is just a slightly more dilapidated version of the one we live in now, I find the world of Slow River to be an equally meaningful rebuke of the way wealthy countries are currently behaving. “Keep watching American Idol on your iPod while corporate lobbying groups continue to burrow their way into the government,” this books seems to warn, “and you’ll have no one to blame but yourself when hospitals and schools and even wars are run by contractors and you have to pay Monsanto for the privilege of not dying from eating a salad.”

Slow River, written in 1995, is eerily prescient. While many of the more popular contemporary sci-fi and cyberpunk authors were so excited by the rapid advance of computers that their books read now like quaint mash notes to virtual reality and jacking-in, this book has become only more relevant with age.

Movies
- Roadhouse
- Magnum Force
- Friends With Money
- Batman

Books

After Dolores: A

If I were to place this book in a list of the Sarah Schulman books I’ve read so far, in order of my favorite to my least favorite, it would go as follows: Rat Bohemia, After Dolores, People in Trouble. I Rat Bohemia so much that I started reading it again as soon as I finished it. People in Trouble disappointed me. Maybe because Stark told me it had been nefariously plagiarized by Johnathan Larson when he wrote Rent and then… it really wasn’t the same thing at all. So there was that expectation, but still I wasn’t a big fan. I found the characters quite irritating. But After Dolores was fantastic and a very close second to Rat Bohemia.

The book follows the narrator, a depressed, chain smoking, hard drinking coffee shop waitress around New York. She’s been dumped by Dolores, a terrible person, and yet she can’t get over her. Dolores rarely makes an appearance. Instead, the book deals with the narrator’s interactions with a series of characters, from a woman with a gun pretending to be Priscilla Presley, to a young Punkette having an affair with an experimental actor. It manages to shift between funny and sad and scary and angry without even one misstep. It also hits several of my kinks:

1. Lesbians
2. Greasy coffee shops and dive bars
3. Being poor in New York in the Eighties
4. Lesbians

Please Kill Me: A+

After so many years of reading glorified vanity pieces masquerading as the unbiased history of the punk movement in the Seventies, this book was a bit of fresh air. Structured as an oral history, with decades worth of interviews from everyone from artists, to writers, to record label staff, to musicians, to groupies, this book tells the amazing warts-and-all story of the rise of New York punk. There is no kiss-assery or attempts to forgive bad behavior on account of genius, it is just all there. Iggy sleeping with 14 year old girls, Johnny Thunders beating his girlfriends, Dee Dee Ramone turning tricks on the street, years and years worth of drugs and violence and egos. Not to be read by anyone wanting to preserve their hero-worship of any punk star except for Debbie Harry, who comes off smelling like roses.

Movies

Road House: A+++

Hahahahaha. Why have I never seen this movie before?? Oh my god, what an incredible entry into the “Everything and the Kitchen Sink” school of movie making. This movie is like every awesome movie of the Eighties rolled into one and starring Patrick Swayze. Patrick Swayze with a mullet. Patrick Swayze with a mullet playing a renegade philosopher/academic/Tai Chi master/glorified bouncer/lover of the century. I love how this movie basically invents the idea of a “cooler” that would be so famous as a BOUNCER that everyone across the entire country would know him by sight. This movie hits so many of my kinks:

1. Patrick Swayze. Shirtless constantly. In leather. With a mullet.
2. Sam Elliott
3. Patrick Swayze and Sam Elliott being so clearly IN LOVE WITH EACH OTHER, I was tempted to write fanfic before the movie was even over.
4. The myth of small town America
5. Roadhouse bar full of rough and tumble, yet lovable characters.
6. Evil corporate villain that improbably controls everything, is in love with the hero’s girl, and thinks he can never be defeated! Plus, he has homoerotic henchmen. And a cool pad full of weird Eighties crap. And angsty memories of WAR. Hahaha. Endless fun.
7. A taxidermied bear.
8. Semi-decent Eighties music.

Magnum Force: B

We spent the big bucks on fancy-ass cable (okay, we got a deal where we would only be spending 10 more dollars a month) and scored AMC. The very first day the cable took effect, what should be on but day two of a Dirty Harry marathon. I was very excited. Magnum Force proved to be worth my two hours for sure. First of all, there was the awesomeness of San Francisco in the Seventies – decrepit, corrupt, full of dealers and pimps and dirty cops, and with the added bonus of muscle cars. The plot was completely and totally predictable, but whatever, what matters is the journey. Dirty Harry going home and being randomly propositioned by the Hot Young Thing who lives upstairs. Dirty Harry getting propositioned by his ex-partner’s naughty ex. Dirty Harry getting checked out by the gay guy from upstairs while defusing a bomb. Dirty Harry brandishing his big, phallic gun. Dirty Harry taking down an entire ring of vigilante cops and just wandering off into the sunset. Sadly, we missed the rest of the entries in the series, but knowing AMC, they’ll be on again next month.

Friends With Money: B+