Sunday 02.07.2010 | 4:23 AM UTC

Blogging: That’s not writing. That’s typing.

If we work on the assumption that Truman Capote’s charming reduction of Kerouak’s amphetamine-driven drivel is accurate, then blogging is certainly an easy target for comparable derision. It’s not writing. It’s typing. And as such we shall consider it here…Henry Miller for the Seinfeld set. Calvin & Hobbs garbed as Salinger & Murakami. You know. For kids.

I jump on this crowded train with trepidation and sheepish enthusiasm. This whole “blog ” thing can be, in the parlance of our times, quite douchy. Maunet may look like a blog. It may dress like a blog and even dance like a blog. More than likely it will, save the occasional purple prose and parenthetical distraction, even read like a blog. But let’s just agree not to call it such. Stop saying blog. Who said blog? Blog. Oh wait, that’s me again, sorry.

Here’s to jumping someone else’s train. Now read on, Macduff…

Sunday 12.20.2009 | 4:23 AM UTC

Best of the Decade: Books

Ok, so this is not a list of the best books published in the past decade… simply those I happened to read and enjoy most between 2000-2009.

Not too many big surprises here for many of you, but a few are buried or ignored little gems. Some already have their own posts here, others will follow suit.

Now, to the list:

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Friday 11.27.2009 | 4:23 AM UTC

Delicious Demon: American Psycho

Every time I walked past American Psycho in a book store, I was mesmerized by the cover: a vaguely victorian photograph of a sinister, steely-eyed yuppie. I knew it was a grisly book about a psycho serial killer. I didn’t read these kinds of books.

Now, I don’t mind movie violence. It doesn’t get inside me and linger. (One notable exception includes Larry Clark’s Kids). But reading mainlines a subject right to the brain, and that particular drug wasn’t my bag, baby. So I saw the movie instead.

Director Mary Harron’s take on Patrick Bateman’s mad shenanigans is pretty gruesome, but it relies more on the suggestion of violence than on graphic torture-porn. She made a wise decision by focusing on the book’s biting satire and black humor that pervades even it’s most horrifying passages. The art direction for the 80′s period piece is pitch perfect, and Christian Bale’s deliberately affected performance is spooky and hilarious. The fact that my girlfriend Chloe Sevigny is in it don’t hurt none either. (Ok, you know she’s not my girlfriend right? I mean in my mind.)

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Saturday 11.21.2009 | 4:23 AM UTC

Why Don’t You Finish What You Start!

As a fairly dutiful reader, I tend to follow one rule: Give the book a 50-page chance at grabbing your attention. If it does, commit. Finish the damn thing, even if the deciding early pages prove to be sneaky little posers.

For the past year, I’ve broken that rule time and again.

The culprits: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, John Steinbecks’s East of Eden and Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

I haven’t finished a book since.

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Friday 11.20.2009 | 4:23 AM UTC

Not a Cheap Date: Don DeLillo’s Underworld

I wasn’t all that impressed with DeLillo when I started pecking away at his ouvre with Mao II. Kinda boring, didn’t finish it. Then it was Great Jones Street, promising to feed my obsession with all things Dylan. Kinda boring, didn’t finish it. DL’s aloof stance and flattened affect made me wonder why I should give a shit about his characters when the author himself seems content floating miles above them as they wilt under the grey, drizzly monotony of his prose.

But I was determined. I’d give him one last chance with Underworld. The cover sure was pretty, the binding and print quality of the paperback edition seductive. So what if it ran 827 pages. It felt good in my hand.

In the course of 16 months, I wrestled with this two and a half pound brute not once, not twice, but three times a lady. The efforts’ prize was like finally deciding to stop buying “affordable” disposable furniture and invest generously in the last couch you’ll ever need to buy. The back cover review reads: “Masterpieces teach you how to read them, and this book is no exception…it may be the only book you’ll ever need.” It sounds high-falutin’, but it’s sure as hell true.

Underworld’s cinematic, elliptical prose plays like a  be-bop score for the French New Wave. The narrative jump-cuts across 50 years of an American history concerned with baseball, feminism, crime, art, J. Edgar Hoover, the Bronx, Jesuits, serial killers, the Cold War, grafitti, paranoia, Jackie Gleason, consumer culture, race riots, Frank Sinatra, nuclear annihilation, Brugel, fatherhood, Lenny Bruce, Judeism, AIDS, Abraham Zapruder, Manhattan roof-top parties, and better living through chemistry. With so many plates in the air, it’s some seriously pro juggling.

After the first go-round, I still hadn’t decided if I’d liked the book, but I found myself thinking about it for months. The book leaves you on similar footing as a film that reveals it’s true impact only long after you’ve left the theater. Or how on first listen, certain songs don’t quite reach you, the tunes wedged uncomfortably in your ear like ill-fitting earbuds. It can be a challenge to fully digest Delillo’s off-tempo cadences without recalling Missing Person’s “Words”:

It’s like the feeling at the end of the page when you realize you don’t know what you just read

Ah, pop music. It covers pretty much everything, doesn’t it. But anyway…

The book plays some serious hard-to-get with your advances. The first reading was a blind date, but by the second we were shacking up. The third time around I’d proposed. It was indeed the only book I’d ever need.

Ain’t it always the elusive ones we end up chasing most doggedly?
Oui, Oui, plus surement, Monsieur Le Pew.

Monday 11.16.2009 | 4:23 AM UTC

A Matter of Consequence: Le Petit Prince

I first read this charming little book in my native Spanish when I was about 6 years old, before I moved the States. I reread it in English a few years later, then again in French in high school. It’s likely the first and last book I’ll ever read in three languages

I read The Little Prince every few years to remind me that now and again, you gotta let your child-like wonder out of it’s post-modern prison and get you straight on a few things: Boas can in fact swallow elephants. Beauty is sad and and a matter of consequence. And flared overcoats with epaulets will always be cool. This book, along with Franny and Zooey, The Beatles, bourbon and cigarettes are the periodic salves I turn to when I feel compelled to throw myself out of a window.

Sunday 11.15.2009 | 4:23 AM UTC

Paul Auster’s Brainy Noir
for Lonely New Yorkers

PAUL AUSTER
:
New York Trilogy | Moon Palace | Hand to Mouth | Leviathan | The Music of Chance
Pretty soon after we (the Royal we, you know, the editorial) had moved to New York and secured suitable living quarters on Clinton Street (not the Leonard Cohen version, you know, the Brooklyn one), friend Ben Niles suggested I read New York Trilogy. Boy Benny, you sure know how to welcome a friend to a dark and lonely place. In a good way.

I’d loved Auster’s own screen adaptation of The Music of Chance, a fantastic little gambling film that plays like the best of David Mamet’s clipped paranoid rants. Auster deals in themes of coincidence, serendipity, loneliness, loss and the search for the self. How very existentialist. Indeed, his noir tales read like Camus dashing out pulp detective fiction. Great fodder for rainy winter days when your sense of self has slipped out of your pocket, lost between the couch cushions.

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Saturday 11.14.2009 | 4:23 AM UTC

Lepers + Priests:
Graham Greene’s A Burnt Out Case

Despite (or perhaps due to) being a long-lapsed Catholic, I’d always been curious about Graham Greene. Rumor has it those Brits sure can write. This book concerns a spiritually depleted, world-famous architect who’s lost the ability to experience pleasure. Dude, that sucks. He leaves his life in New York City behind to live in a leper colony in the Congo where he gradually regains his interest in life. I guess living amongst a bunch of priests and lepers is only slightly less spiritually appealing than sharing the sidewalk with the street pee-ers on the Bowery.