Human Smoke
Human Smoke is by the novelist Nicholson Baker, who has written some very touching and outrageously silly books which I’ve enjoyed tremendously. But Human Smoke is not a novel, it’s a sort of experiment in collage, cobbling together diary entries, letters, news reports, and speeches from dozens of sources leading up to and during World…
JR by William Gaddis
JR is the third Gaddis novel I’ve read, following The Recognitions (which I recently re-read with great delight) and Carpenter’s Gothic. It took me nearly 4 months to read JR, but this was largely by design. I read multiple books at a time and decided back in the summer to limit myself to 10 pages…
Dreamwork
This morning I had a vivid work anxiety dream about a profession I left nearly four years ago. In the dream I was a high school teacher working at a new school in a complicated building–it’s a dream setting I’ve been in several times and in which I’ve had similar experiences over the years. Despite…
Tai Chi: The Internal Tradition
I was quite pleased when we moved to rural France to discover a quality Tai Chi course offered locally and at an astonishingly reasonable price. For the past three years I’ve been working with our instructor on the Yang style long form, and have learned almost the entirety, up to near the end of part…
The Devil by Name
It was just over a year ago that I read Rosson’s Fever House. I really enjoyed that novel and the way it reformatted the familiar zombie apocalypse trope. I’m sad to report however that volume 2 of the duology is less satisfying. The Devil by Name mostly moves characters around in order to get them…
Im Lauf der Zeit (“Kings of the Road”)
I saw Wings of Desire way back when Netflix used to mail DVDs in envelopes. Later I saw Paris, Texas. These are the Wenders films I heard about back when I was first exploring the renowned auteurs of cinema, and I’ve seen them both a few times. Recently I also saw The American Friend. Kings…
Halloween approaches
It’s autumn and a young man’s fancy turns to…well I’m too old to remember what young men fancy at any time of year. But I fancy reading horror and ghost stories as Halloween looms. The Elementals is surprisingly well-crafted for an early ’80s mass market horror novel. It’s got a Southern Gothic flair, and without…
The Other
I’d thought as a long-time fan of horror that I was at least aware of all the classics of the genre. Until a few months ago I’d never heard of Thomas Tryon’s The Other, and what I read about it intrigued me sufficiently that when I was able to score a digital version for under…
Playground
Richard Powers’ latest is another complex and tightly structured novel spanning nearly a century. There are two primary narrative strands woven together like a double helix, one first-person stream relayed by Todd Keane, an early social media and AI innovator from Chicago, and the other a third-person tale focused on Evelyn Beaulieu, a French Canadian…
Cities of the Red Night
I’ve read a handful of Burroughs novels and also Casey Rae’s entertaining and informative William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ‘n Roll. I think this is easily my favorite novel by the Beat icon. It is ridiculous, absurd, wholly pointless, unrepentently filthy, and a great deal of fun. In Casey Rae’s examination of…
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Mysterium Coniunctionis 