Almost as sTrAnGe as Fiction Friday

I'm not sure I'll be able to fit these books into my reading schedule during this lifetime:

Knitting with Dog Hair, Crolius and Montegomery

How to Defend Yourself Against Alien Abduction, Druffel

Nuclear War, What's in it for You, Diller

Scott M. Peck, dead at 69

Scott Peck died, author of The Road Less Traveled, 6 million copies, 258 appearances on the NY Times bestseller list -- the book not the author. Don't worry all you recovering addicts and alkies, the books are still readily available in used bookstores for 50 cents. Personally I found the thing unreadable.

I was reading The First Garden by Anne Hebert --such swaths of exposure. Example: "A thousand days had passed, and a thousand nights, and there was forrest, another thousand days and thousand nights, and there was still the forrest, great sweeps of poine and oak hurtling down the headland to the river, and the mountain was behind, low and squat, one of the oldest on the globe, and it was covered with trees as well."

The play's the thing, Unless it's the book

Last night I read Rabe's Sticks and Bones, a play I hadn't seen since working at the New York Shakespeare Festival. When it was first presented audiences were vomiting and fainting during the cutting scene -- Ozzie and Harriet help their home-from-the-war son to slit his wrists. Immediately after that I began Williams' Baby Doll. Rabe moves but Williams is magic. In the library I also came across a book that lists every book Hemingway read between 1910 and 1940. 814 books. It's on the net. Wow!

Open and Closed

Working my way through Lisa Moore's Open. The first story -- rocking, rollicking, rowdy fun. Still slogging through Irving, last night was a long funereal section where basically the main character meets every single person he already met. Like Stephen King, Irving loves, loves, loves repeating phrases linked to particular characters. Example: Wendy Fists-of-Stone Holton. But is she the Wendy Horton who appears on the next page? v. pages 460 and 461. I wish I were kidding.

And The Banned Played On

It's banned book week.

I'll tell you what I think, that content should never be banned or censored. In fact, the people who ban books ****** [CONTENT REMOVED BY WEBMASTER AND DEEMED INAPPROPRIATE FOR GENERAL READING]******

Almost as Strange as Fiction Friday

File this in the "Whatever floats your boat" folder I guess.

Feel like reading a book about how the dinosaurs attacked Noah's ark? According to the author, "It is a verifiable scientific FACT!" For the weak of imagination illustrations are provided.

But wait a minute, an unnamed columnist who purports to uphold the "authority of the Bible from the very first verse" says dinosaurs were ON Noah's ark. Considering space restrictions, he suspects the largest dinosaurs on the Ark were most likely "teenagers or young adults."

Self-induced illusion

I nearly jumped from my seat today, I read in New York Press, a weekly newspaper in New York City. I couldn't believe she or anyone would 1. write on him and 2. win an award for it. Whew. She writes, "I’ve never in my life, my odd life, had a stronger feeling of the actual presence of the character—like a self-induced delusion, you know, ..." Uh, actually I don't know and I'm not sure I want to know. Thanks.

Don't judge an author by his cover...

Evidently Tom Wolfe's new book I am Charlotte Simmons will be released without a title, just the author's name. Isn't this just setting up reviews that say "forgettable"? May I also suggest a reworking of earlier titles: From Bauhaus to Guess Where, The Painted SomethingorRather.

A boy and his mother...

Last night marks the half way point of John Irving's Until I find You. I think my thoughts are pretty much in line with picture of the front page of the New York Times announcing Hemingway's death.

Addictions

The tag line on a magazine that considers short stories is "writers should turn off the television."
Author

So now I have about ten books going at once, (reading addict??) and that distresses me, among them, Hemingway's Garden of Eden, a critical work on Hemingway, two John Irving books, Lisa Moore short stories, an Ondaatje edited collection of short stories, English Patient, IOS short stories, and 50 Facts that Should Change the World. Here's an interesting

link about how US people (probably all North Americans) are addicted to email, spending over an hour each day reading, sending, replying.

No NO NO, not that type of reading addict.

Almost as strange as fiction

My design is to have Fridays be a weird news day. I'll post a wacky link afterwards. However I discover University of Wisconsin's Alexander Dolinin is positing a theory that the 1948 abduction of Florence Sally Homer was Nabokov's inspiration for Lolita. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1774602,00.html Dolinin doesn't appear to address the question as to why, if true, Nabokov never mentioned it. In fact Nabokov discusses his inspirations, developing an earlier story that haunted him and finding inspiration from an ape who when taught to draw, sketched the bars of his cage. http://www.observer.com/culture_books-5.asp For a terrific 1964 Playboy interview with Nabokov go here: http://www.kulichki.com/moshkow/NABOKOW/Inter03.txt. In it Nabokov says, Lolita was his most difficult book to write because he didn't know America. He says he had to invent both America and Lolita, and to learn local content in order to inject an average reality into his works. As I say, always trust the artist, not the critic. And if you want to debate who is least truthful, professors, critics, or writers, well we can do that over a beer.

Ok if the above wasn't werid enough try this. Do you really want to win those carney games? Are cheap stuffed animals your end-all? Do you care? If so, here are some tips. First in line, carry a pocket stone to sharpen the dart that you then launch so it angles down vertically popping a slew of balloons. http://www.retrocrush.com/archive2003/fair/

"I had but hugged the shore..."

Says Hemingway referring to his early writing experimentations. I'm skipping through Carlos Baker's "Hemingway: The Writer as Artist." The theme of nada, nothingness as a contrast, figures strongly in his analysis of Hemingways first 45 stories. [Current project in addition to my next novel is a bevy of short stories.]
On another note I'm always fascinated by explanations of process. In this article from 1940 Hemingway answers the question as to how many words he writes each day: "Hemingway looked at him, not sure whether or not he was being ribbed." The author continues.

Christopher Willard

No more Fun

Rolling Stone has published Hunter S. Thompson's suicide note to his wife, titled "Football Season Is Over." In it he says, "...No More Games....No More Fun...."