Wreadings

Startin' off the year with beaucoup de hot wreadings, yessiree bob. Loving THUD! I've been carrying that lil paperback around with me everywhere. It's Terry Pratchett! It's mind-bogglingly hilarious! Trolls & Dwarfs! Holy heck it's a hoot ...

Also just finished Pullman's The Golden Compass. I got the trilogy, should start The Subtle Knife next week. Gotta get to all that physics freshness what with the LIVING particles and Dark Matter, the space between the light, the space between the notes, like music, a living alternative to dogma. God in self, as self, so glacierly small we are. Pullman's wrockin' some old fashioned tale telling, this is thoughtful stuff. Dig! Happy to see it's classed PZ7 in the LC schedule. That's children/teen fiction. Yessiree bob ...


This afternoon in Rebel I wread a whole graphic novel, Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow by James Sturm and Rich Tommaso. It's GORGEOUS! Part of a series from something called the Center For Cartoon Studies. They also have a Harry Houdini one I wanna find. There'll prolly bee beaucoup d'others on this history tip. Love it! Still wreading three Pynchons. Dip in every now and then, of course taking last November off to write the first draft of "Boogity" which should be wready 4 final draft by the end of january.


Also just started a new Marvel Essential. Power Man & Iron Fist! Hell yesssss! These boys together is serious ACTION. Luke Cage and Martial Artist Iron Fist? r u kidding? KPOW!!! +++ Wanna wread Faulkner's Land of the Pharaohs. Wanna wread some Chuck Palahniuk and Henry Miller soon. I've not tried either. Also, gotta finish The Idiot and crack a few paperback Vonneguts, starting with Dead Eye Dick, an old small favorite.

The Shock Doctrine

NAOMI KLEIN's new book looks AMAZING!!
Did you see her on Bill Maher?

She's assembled the model of what's actually been happening between the corporations and our government, how they work together, what keeps the whole thing running, strategy,
hurtful worldview ... how we are screwed ...
SHOCK DOCTRINE
Knowing this is gonna help.

more descriptions and comments from some friends @ amazon:

Naomi is doing it!! I've been thinking about this stuff so much it's been making me crazy, now I hear her say it so clearly. omg HELL YES, girl!
you gotta clock the short film by Alfonso Cuarón:

Small Gods month

So at The Book Festival I saw and heard Terry Pratchett and Harry Turtledove. They were brilliant and charming and stirring and fun. I'm 100 pages into SMALL GODS right now and it's a holy hoot. The hilarious truth in this man's scenes are killer. Hahahahahaahhahaahhahahaha! He has been slaying me right from the beginning. Course, this is the 13th title in the Discworld Series, but I felt I could jump wright in. And I did and here I am and it stands alone mightily and I shall wread many more. I want to wrecommend him to everyone. It wreally is like a bitta Douglas Adams and a fista Vonnegut. It's wrelentless!

I finished The Odyssey a coupla weeks ago. It was so super awesome grande mega good I can't wait to wread the Lattimore translation, apparently closer to the Greek. I also want that BEOWULF with the Old English on the facing page. I've been in and out of Edmund Spenser's Fairie Queene, glorious and firm in its gaze and tale! Gotta pick some Harry Turtledove alternative history titles to try. Some sound amazing ... And of course, just generally flipping through hundreds of books a week at work on the 5th floor of the James Madison Building on Independence Avenue. Muscle cars, The Beatles, Johann Gutenberg, Puerto Rican slang, Rommel's attack strategies, The Harlem Hellfighters, Mary Tudor/Henry VIII fiction, piles and piles of vampire fiction, lotsa lotsa so much stuff, I should take notes ...

Odyssey Me

Just finished Book 6: The Princess and the Stranger. YES! Moving swiftly in those trim ships I am. Adventure abounds! I did the first 4 spread out in the front seat of Rebel, afternoon sunshine'n'shade, cicadas and chirpy birdies all around = Excellent Wreads! +++++ Also over the weekend I clocked James Patterson's 1st Alex Cross novel, Along Came a Spider. Loved it. Love our hero, love the pacing, love all the DC stuff. Just checked out the 2nd one, Kiss the Girls. I think they made movies out of both of these, but I'll cruise through the first few before I check da Hollywood takes. I like me some Morgan Freeman [Easy Reader Lives!!] but I did not picture him @ all as Doctor Detective Cross from SE. +++++ Been steady dipping into The God Delusion again as well.

Jack Adam Richard Daniel

Hot diggity dog diggity totally finished that Kerouac scroll in just a few days. YES! What fun! I got that fresh edition of Dharma Bums next up in Jackland. Prolly after I finish The Money Game (this thing is Truthcity!) by Adam Smith (the Modern). The first sentence is: The world is not what they tell you it is. And he gets on into it. A hotass economics book from 1967, totally applicable to today and beyond. A hoot of a wread, wright on! I did it on the airplane to and from Chicago. I should finish this weekend. I am learning from this mother. Also digging THE GOD DELUSION by the mighty Richard Dawkins. The triumph of wreason in my lap! This morning I was into Daniel C. Dennett, chapter 9 of his BREAKING THE SPELL book: "Toward a Buyer's Guide to Religions" ++ I adore this guy! Can't get enuff of his spirited analyzing of religion as natural (not supernatural) phenomenon.

!:::Kerouac:::Attack:::!

I had been digging a Penguin paperback edition of "On the Road" for 6 days when I saw the NYTimes booksection Kerouac cover story under my cat, on the floor of my apartment. How's about this! The original manuscript has been published! Straight on through, babydolls! 8 full rolls of tracing paper [he later taped into a 120-foot scroll!] Now done up in super-handsome paragraphs-are-for-pussies all-out as-was proper printing. I've jumped over to finishing the book like this, as Jack typed those 3 weeks in April 1951. THIS F'ING ROXX! I'm wreading it with all the original names [Neal Cassady! Grand American Champion of Life! Bill Burroughs, Allen etc] and all that scorching-hot pre-edit pummeling prose, just go man, go! Yass! Yass! As of this morning [getting low, surfing on metrorail] the boys are in Mexico. Just hadda whooping time with maryjane & senoritas, thnx 2 the great Gregor, now they're in the jungles ... south ... dark, headlights out for a spell: And now we shot in inky darkness through the scream of insects and the great rank almost rotten smell descended and we remembered and realized that the map indicated just after Victoria the beginning of the tropic of Cancer. "We're in a new tropic! Nowonder the smell! Smell it!" I stuck my head out the window; bugs smashed at my face; a great screech rose the moment I cocked my ear to the wind. Suddenly our lights were working again and they poked ahead illuminating the lonely road that ran between solid walls of great drooping snaky trees as high as a hundred feet. "Son-of-a-BITCH!" yelled Frank in the back. "Hot-DAMN!" He was still high. I am tearing through this thing! Whatta ball! Hoo-ee! Here's some video of unrolling the scroll. There's a travelling exhibit, yass. Plus this supercool, upclose hi-res shot of the glorious thing.

Chief Bromden told me a tale

Heck Yes I finished Cuckoo's Nest. Superb all over the place! I didn't think it was going to be that literate. Hugely entertaining and sad and triumphant. Our narrator gives it all to us, all senses relayed and analyzed, including drug dreams and mental blockages. Everybody's hero is of course Randle McMurphy -- whatta HUGELY American character! ++++ Now I'm back in Russialand with The Idiot, wright in the middle. Prince Myshkin roxx! Is this the Ruskies' Arthur tale, more than the Christ tale? Hmmmm ... I'm also back into Against the Day. Wrockin' thru Salonica with Cyprian and Danilo, just this morning in a bar: "At the Mavri Gata there was enough hasheesh smoke to confound an elephant. At the end of the room, as if behind an iconostasis of song, oud, baglamas, and a kind of hammered dulcimer called a santouri were being played without a break. The music was feral, Eastern in scale, flatted seconds and sixths, and a kind of fretless portamento between, instantly familiar though the words were in some slurred jailhouse Greek that Danilo confessed to picking up only about one word in ten of. In these nocturnal modalities, "roads," as the musicians called them, Cyprian heard anthems not of defined homelands but of release into lifelong exile. Roads awaiting the worn sole, the ironbound wheel, and promises of misery on a scale the military staff colleges were only beginning to contemplate."