Category: bookish

and his freezer’s now spilling over with elk. which is to say dancing days are here again, all that.

and, because all this can’t seem to organize itself any other way, a list:

• That 32 Poems (Fall/Winter 4.2) with my story “Lunch” is out and about now.
• Just had “The Sadness of Two People Meeting in a Bar” accepted at Red Rock Review.
• That end of November reading I was doing at Texas Tech has now been moved, tentatively, to March 1, 2007.
• WORLD W

Bleak. Unremitting. Is to the road trip book what THE HILLS HAVE EYES was to the family vacation movie. And as far as post-apocalyptic stuff goes, Cormac McCarthy’s THE ROAD makes you see what a happy fantasy A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ was, how tame DR. BLOODMONEY was. That that road in THE PARABLE OF THE SOWER was gold brick.

Anyway, though this is a non-review like all the others, still, some steering if you’ll take it: read THE ROAD in five hours or less, all in one sit…

everyone dreams the dream
                  but we are it

It’s like a word problem: If two ribbons, one gold one green, approach each other at a rate of eight pages at a time in a three hundred and sixty page book, will they ever meet? Because of course one-eighty isn’t a multiple of eight — you’re either four short or four over. Which kind of make…

Just thinking about what I said in that last post, about how I don’t do reviews because I’m pretty sure I’d set my standards impossibly high, just so I could shoot down every book in my path. That may be a little too broad a statement, though — I don’t mean to suggest that all reviews that burn a book are similarly motivated. Granted, some reviewers just have bad attitudes (Tobias Wolff, of course, in “Bullet to the Brain,” shoots one of them …

Well, I mean, yeah, because he’s got titles like THE LUST LIZARD OF MELANCHOLY COVE and PRACTICAL DEMONKEEPING. These are what originally got me peeling his books up from the shelves back whenever ago. Years already, I guess. Too, though, I’ve yet to read a CMoore book that hasn’t made me smile, and then impressed me too, somehow. Like this, from A DIRTY JOB, which I just finished ten minutes ago:

• “Oh, goddamn,” said Minty Fresh (damn on the dow

Just finished Charles McCarry’s OLD BOYS, which, like the rest of the Paul Christopher series, just absolutely blew me away. The guy’s not just a good storyteller, he hammers his prose, too. Usually you get one or the other.

A sample line:

She had the wary unwavering eyes of a woman who knew how attractive she was but wanted no sign from me that I might have noticed this too.

I’m not sure or even suspicious that it gets any better than that. After reading it, too&…

never at a loss for stuff to read. if I could just shoehorn one more syllable in there, it’d scan pretty cool, I think. what little I know or can take a stab at talking lines. anyway, yesterday afternoon’s library haul (this doesn’t count the ninety-plus I already have checked out, on my shelf, which I call The Annex). was going to type them all in for that Books You’ve Bought But Haven’t Read Yet (or something) thread over at the Velvet, but good gr…

Finished copies exist, are real, are in the mail now. If I had the skills, I’d rework some of those gas-shortage pics from the late seventies, of all the cars lined up, only I’d put a big DEMON THEORY in place of the pump. or maybe pirate one of those Body Axe commercials, re-edit it to showcase DT which, yeah, as you can see, Logan over at the Velvet just rigged up. very cool. rigged this one up too.

reading now: Anne River Siddons’ 1978 THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR.

what it&…

Maybe it’s this way for everybody, I don’t know. Sometimes I’ll stumble across something in a book, anyway, and it’ll just burrow right to the core of me and never leaves. I say sometimes, but, I suppose, I’m only about to list three. And, it’s not that they’re said all that perfect or anything, it’s more like they’re just obviously true. Trick was, I’d just never thought about them:

• ‘Everybody has a ce

• Excited that the Savoj Zizek DVD’s going to be available soon. He’s my PKD, since PKD went on extended hiatus. Click on the poster to get to the place
• Check out the Frank Miller cover for Gravity’s Rainbow. Pretty excellent (thanks to Rob for the heads-up). Click here. (would paste it here, but don’t want to deny them their due clicks [hey, somebody just wrote, saying that link was bad, or giving them problems, all that, so I snagged the cover, stuffed i