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‘Adorable is a book which documents life. By this I mean from birth to death. Generally when there are such novels both these two occasions are presented in a sanitized way, everything is restrained and dealt with tastefully. Not Adorable.
‘With this book we readers get the real deal. From the minute you are born you are covered in shit and piss and all that crap will make appearances in different forms throughout your life. Then later on it’s the body juices and fluids that accompany sex and then it’s the rotting flesh of death,
‘The book is divided into 4 parts. The first part consists of a couple becoming a family and all the ups and downs of rearing a child. Like I said, there’s a lot of scenes involving poo. Adorable does go deeper as it focuses on the dynamic of the couple – here called, simply B and Q, with the child being called Æ, .
‘The next 2 sections are about death, one part is a meditation and the other is an essay: how do we approach it, why is it in our minds? how integral is it to our lives?
‘The book ends with B and Q and their relationship, with an emphasis on the more corporeal aspect of their partnership. The book starts with a description of bums and ends with one too, thus, like life, we come to a full circle.
‘Ida Marie Hede’s view on life is an honest one. I agree that it is one filled with bodily functions, skin and liquids and I enjoyed reading her descriptions of them (or they were translated well). In between these sections, there are paragraphs on films, music and art: things that are also a part of life.
‘Adorable is a very organic novel: everything flows smoothly and despite the myriad of references and topics mentioned, it all feels natural on the page, no matter how detailed or graphic, all subjects are pulled off (maybe not the right term) with ease.
‘Despite all the descriptions, Adorable is a beautiful book. We all know that life does have its ugly moments and a lot f them are documented here but it’s what also makes life, oddly special. In its own way Adorable is a celebration of all things human, poo and all.’ — The Bobsphere
Death Is the Mindfuck of Existence: A Conversation with Ida Marie Hede
‘Adorable’ @ goodreads
‘Adorable’ @ The Complete Review
Here the dead are animate.
Buy ‘Adorable’
Ida Marie Hede Adorable
lolli
‘From one of Scandinavia’s most innovative writers, a shimmering journey into the absurd phenomenality of family life – and the human microbiome
Now that Æ exists, B wants to survive the apocalypse everyone is talking about. She wants to grow old and wrinkled and withered and shrunken so she can stay in the world with Æ. She wants to communicate with an adult Æ on the phones of the future. Maybe through some form of telepathy, maybe through small strands of DNA – conversing as mother and daughter will, in the future that might be.
‘Adorable is a haunting, transmundane portrait of a young family told in four parts, in Copenhagen and London. The love between B and Q is tender but worn. When their daughter Æ is born, the everyday lights up in a new way. In its second part, the dead are animated in B’s brain. When B’s father dies, the news is delivered to her by phone and an essayistic, collagist meditation on death and transmission ensues. And then, it’s finally Friday. B and Q descend below the living room floor and wander through a cracked and skittish underworld.
‘In Ida Marie Hede’s porous world, which is our world too, grime, bacteria, and even death are intimately bound up with health and renewal. Fusing the commonplace and the profound, the material and the spiritual, the elegiac and the conceptual, Adorable powerfully insists that it is impossible to tell where death and life begin or end.’ — lolli
Excerpt
B’s BELLY IS FLAT NOW. She really loves its doughy flatness. The punctured white softness that will never be tight again.
Before the flatness her belly is temporarily full, absolutely bulging. A piece of skin around something kicking and living, which is Æ.
Æ is pulled out of B’s womb with forceps that grab her temples. Small red indents on her temples. Æ comes out coated in bacteria from B’s vagina and arse. Bacteria seep into Æ and trigger an immune response: now Æ can live for a thousand years. But it’s almost like Æ doesn’t want to come out — her head won’t turn the last bit of the way in B’s pelvis; a head is actually stuck, pushing on her cervix. Warm, drawn-out spasms of pain, and Æ will have to be taken out by C-section.
If Æ comes out through B’s sliced-open belly, there won’t be enough bacteria. The doctor needs to stick a finger up B’s arsehole, rotate it deftly and then smear a wet finger caked with bacteria across Æ’s shrieking lips.
It doesn’t matter how Æ was born, her lips quickly locate B’s nipples and start sucking. Milk and cracked skin, gums gnawing on breast flesh.
B would like to live for a thousand years too. She holds Æ in her arms, Æ is so new. B can barely figure out how to hold her. As long as she doesn’t drop her: lose hold of her head and break her neck.
Now that Æ exists, B wants to survive the apocalypse everyone is talking about. She wants to grow old and wrinkled and withered and shrunken so she can stay in the world with Æ. She wants to communicate with an adult Æ on the phones of the future. Maybe through some form of telepathy, maybe through small strands of DNA — conversing with each other as mother and daughter will, in the future that might be.
B no longer doubts the future or its new technologies. Æ’s presence moves the lifespan of all things infinitely outwards.
B says she wants to be stronger too, to have bacteria from a body that is not her own. Bacteria is like a life-giving elixir: faecal bacteria from X are transplanted into Y’s digestive tract and changes are observed in Y’s mood and metabolism.
Her belly skin is nowhere near tight again, the lacerations on her uterine walls not even slightly healed. B bleeds into her big mum-nappy, long slimy strands.
Maybe she needs to go home and rest, to lie down with her legs up and with Æ balanced on her belly and a croissant in her hand. Æ’s mouth on her breast and stiff splashes of milk on her baby face.
Or maybe she’s too eager and can’t relax. After Æ is born, she can’t get enough life. She’s taken directly from the delivery room to the gastroenterology ward.
There, a probe is inserted through B’s oesophagus and into her stomach. Down here, the party is already in full swing! There are billions of faecal bacteria in B’s stomach, more than there are humans on Earth, bacteria that have lived for millions of years, which moved into B the day she was born, and which will move on when she dies. In that sense, the word human isn’t very accurate. She’s not mostly human, not at all. Bacteria bounce around, frolicking with half-digested food, as if inside a centrifuge. But it’s not enough, she needs more! Inside the tube, there’s shit from a shit-donor whom B doesn’t know. As the shit descends into her system, B is dangerously close to the brown mass: only the plastic barrier of the probe separates her from the stranger’s shit, sliding through her to become part of her intestinal flora.
She might as well have eaten the poo herself.
B is waiting for a change. Bacteria gives everyone a second chance.
So the skinny person can become a chubby person, the aggressive person can become a calm person, the restless one even-keeled, the depressed and anxious person can become optimistic and impulsive, the optimistic and hopeful person can become deadly serious and thereby increase their sex appeal.
And the person who loves long black lace opera gloves and full polka-dot skirts and big white plastic hairclips will want to wear tracksuits and shrunken woollen vests and sexy black baseball caps that make your eyes really round and blue.
And the person who loves T-shirts with bleach stains and pasty everyday faces and post-humanist theory will want to dance the lindy hop, a dance that makes your cheeks rosy-red.
The person in Buffalo boots puts on an old fisherman’s sweater, the person with acne gets glowing skin, the person with raised eyebrows can have them lowered, the too-pretty person can get a little more asymmetrical.
The person who’s always been missing a crooked and compelling scar on their cheek gets a crooked and compelling scar on their cheek, the person with big boobs gets small boobs, the person with a flowering arm gets a shrivelled arm.
The wildly hairy person loses all their hair, the person who feels too white gets darker skin, the woman who’s had multiple abortions loses her ability to conceive, the person with a belly flat like a pancake gets a swollen belly that’s doughy like sandwich bread.
So that everyone will be able to achieve their desires, so that all of us, the oppressed, can transform ourselves and become the upstanding humans we all secretly dream of being.
So that all of us, the ones in power, can transform ourselves and become the courageous underdogs we all secretly dream of being, and maybe already are.
Who sent the poo? Just as they’re always in the process of producing semen, bodies keep producing shit. If there’s a shortage of shit somewhere in the world, more is likely to turn up soon somewhere else.
More babies, better mood, worse smell.
B doesn’t know who donated her faecal sample, the hospital won’t give her that kind of information. Whether it was a hopeful gift from an old arsehole, sweetheart, I’m giving you the best-cut stuff I’ve got.
B is back home. She watches movies on the couch while she nurses Æ.
In Pasolini’s Salò, a group of teenagers are held captive in a castle. They’re served swollen chunks of shit on porcelain platters and they eat them slowly from porcelain plates, revolted, punctuated by fits of vomiting, down goes the shit.
Æ gurgles, milk spouts out of her and soaks a cloth nappy, a shirt, baby eyelashes, peach fuzz.
Extras
Ida Marie Hede: Vær så modig, som du kan
The Familiar & The Absurd: Literature from Copenhagen
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‘SEARCH FOR INGRID CAVEN’S name in the credits of the first feature film in which she appears, and disappointment will be in store: it is nowhere to be found. Her role in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Love Is Colder Than Death (1969) is too small. A little over 20 minutes into the film, Bruno (Ulli Lommel) is trawling through the inky Munich night, looking for a sex worker named Joanna (Hanna Schygulla) in the hope of then tracking down her pimp (Fassbinder). Caven emerges out of the darkness as if from nowhere. She stands alone in the frame, her exsanguinous face piercing the obscurity. The petty criminal addresses her from offscreen:
— I’m looking for a girl called Joanna.
— Why Joanna? Why not me?
— Because she’s the one I have to find.
— Joanna, Joanna … I saw her just now, in a yellow dress.
‘After this exchange, lasting but some 20 seconds, Caven turns away and vanishes into the void. She is never seen again. The film moves on without her, establishing a pattern that repeats many times throughout the actress’s extraordinary career, whether in works by Fassbinder or others: in appearances as captivating as they are brief, she streaks through films like a meteor in the sky. She is fragile and formidable, worldly and wounded. She is there and then gone, unforgettable.
‘Change a few letters in Caven’s first line in Love Is Colder Than Death and her questions slip out of the fictional universe and into the thorny thicket of offscreen relations: “Why Hanna? Why not me?” It was Schygulla that Fassbinder deemed “the key to everything” in that early film, Schygulla that he went on to make his star, Schygulla that he placed atop his 1981 list of the 10 best actresses of contemporary West German cinema. (Caven is there, too, but in last place.) It is as if Caven’s inaugural appearance in a feature film already confronts the fact that she would rarely perform principal roles.’ — Erika Balsom
Ingrid Caven @ Wikipedia
Ingrid Caven @ IMDb
Meteor, Star, Galaxy, Caven
‘Ingrid Caven: A Novel’, by Jean-Jacques Schuhl
Buy ‘Ingrid Caven: I Am a Fiction’
Ingrid Caven: I Am a Fiction
Fireflies Press
‘From Ingrid Caven’s start in cinema alongside Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the myriad extraordinary roles that followed, to her theatre performances and legendary concerts, the German actress and singer has been a force of inspiration and a vital collaborator for artists across five decades, including Werner Schroeter, Yves Saint Laurent, Jean-Jacques Schuhl, Daniel Schmid, Bertrand Bonello, Albert Serra, Claire Denis, Jean Eustache, Rita Azevedo Gomes, Raúl Ruiz and André Téchiné.
‘The book features a new in-depth interview with Caven by Cyril Neyrat and Tsveta Dobreva, a dossier of photographs and other material from her personal archive, a career-spanning essay by Erika Balsom, a conversation between Jean-Jacques Schuhl and Albert Serra, and creative texts on individual films by Philippe Azoury, Renato Berta, Bertrand Bonello, Luc Chessel, Bruce Hainley, Rachel Kushner, Nathalie Léger and Audrey Wollen.’ — Fireflies Press
Excerpts
Extras
Ingrid Caven 1978 / 2001
Ingrid Caven – Chambre 1050
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Diagnostics
I’ve consumed my own body weight in weight-loss tablets. I tell myself a lifelong flirtation doesn’t constitute marriage, that I can let this shit go. I’ve seen how they send them home once the final diagnosis has been made. I know what an end-of-life package looks like. A man disowns what’s left for the sake of an armchair. His bowel sits inside the cancer it made. The cannibal in the mirror is off his food. Tell them I come from a long line of infecund suicides. Tell them to bury me in a salt mine, and come get me when I’m cured.
Viral
There’s something almost homely about a giant virus in Siberia that’s waited till now to wake up. I think of it like the Capgras syndrome I’ve been trying to cultivate—as if I wouldn’t love the imposters just as much. You see, it’s all nerve agents out there, and my gas mask is fogging up. I was counting the dead bodies amassed in the Grand Canyon, and that had something to do with it. They were everyone that had ever lived. The sight of billions of dead anything is vernacular for the superficiality of giving anyone what they want. Poetry is impossible or it isn’t. Its possibility is a joke. It would be like actually laughing out loud. Like a vacuum with nothing in it.
Coda
How is it your horrors are not mine? And how is it that they are? Trying to exchange suffering for words is like marking your own homework, and still getting it wrong. It’s not true that genetically engineered mice will improve our nightmares. They can’t even sing in a straight line. Not that your expectations were high, but this illegal trade in miserablist anecdotes isn’t as lucrative as you might think. As soon as I’m destitute enough I plan on being happy with all the things I don’t have. Right now I have a terabyte of examples that show how examples are misleading. Right now this something on the edge of my experience is ten times the size of itself. It’s a kind of uncomfortably-dimensioned kind of thing. My incompleteness is about the size of its confusion. Encompassing this uncertainty, as a strain of precision, I repeat myself until the only meaning left is modulation. I get up from my chair. I go in no directions at once. — Gary J. Shipley
Gary J Shipley @ instagram
[DE-CON-STRUC] YOU WITH YOUR MEMORY ARE DEAD
‘Stab Frenzy’ @ goodreads
30 Fake Beheadings
Buy ‘Stab Frenzy’
Gary J Shipley Stab Frenzy
Apocalypse Party
‘Stab Frenzy is about four members (once five) of an art collective bent on destroying their own identities, the complacency of humans, and art itself. It is a book about art and writing as art, and how our destructive impulses can sometimes be manifestations of a begrudging love.
‘Stab Frenzy is a brilliant, brutal satire of the art world, but it’s more than that, too: it’s a work of art in itself, an ingenious and gory paean to the author’s favourite artists—the shut-ins, the suicides, the spree killers, the daydreamers who dream of destroying the day. Art bleeds into bodies and bodies bleed into the book: Gary J. Shipley’s an artist à la the artists he loves, a force for delightful deformation. This book deformed me, and for that I give thanks.’ — Derek McCormack
Excerpt
Extras
The Face Hole by Gary J. Shipley
BRIGHT STUPID CONFETTI by Gary J. SHIPLEY
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Matthew Kinlin: In Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Death states to Max von Sydow as the medieval knight: “Most people think neither of death nor nothingness.” Your new collection of stories, Red Flags (House of Vlad, 2024), offers characters the opportunity to think about their own deaths as experienced, often occurring in gruesome and funny ways. What motivated you to write about this confrontation with death and non-existence?
Charlene Elsby: I was at home when the Facebook group for the neighbourhood started showing up in my notifications, as a woman had been hit and dragged at the intersection outside my apartment. Now I’ve always been a little taken aback at how we’re all able to go about our lives, given that death threatens us nearly constantly. And it reminded me of a pamphlet that I was given at a palliative care house when we were watching my stepmother pass. For a couple of weeks we were there nearly constantly, my father sleeping in a chair next to her bed, and I going home nights and returning in the day to bring food and allow him time to go home to bathe. The pamphlet told us that we should not expect our loved ones to have any new or profound thoughts or insights as they approach the other side–and that while we often expect this of the dying, it is unfair to impose upon them like that. Thus I wrote the first story of the book, and the other seven following the same general theme.
Now it’s interesting that you should bring this up now, as I’ve just awoken in my chair and, in that space between sleep and waking, I saw my stepmother’s head in what turned out to be a scarf bunched around a hanger on the drying rack. A psychic told me three months ago that there was a woman with short, curly hair watching over me, and I believed that it was her. When she passed, I used to have dreams that she was calling me from farther and farther distances away, until one day she appeared in full opacity, to tell me that she was fine. Those dreams completely ended after that final encounter, so it was strange to be thinking of this when you wrote to me.
Does the air seem to have a strange scent where you are?
Charlene Elsby Site
Charlene Elsby @ instagram
Book Review : Charlene Elsby ‘Red Flags’
Charlene Elsby @ goodreads
Buy ‘Red Flags’
Charlene Elsby Red Flags: Stories and Other Disturbances
House of Vlad
‘Red Flags features eight new stories and three out-of-print chapbooks by the “scream queen of wild psycho-philosophical transgressive lit.”’ — House of Vlad
‘One of my favorite contemporary writers—Elsby’s voice winds its way into your head and smashes about like a trapped heron.’ — B.R. YEAGER
‘Elsby’s voice is daring, original, and wholly uncompromising. — PAULA ASHE
‘Depraved, stark, and dripping in blood… Unique prose, dark musings, and an experimental structure blend beautifully with the layers of grief and bodily autonomy.’ — SARA TANTLINGER
Excerpt
from AGYNY
I knew it from that moment and there’s always time to think while fucking not looking around not thinking about the paint or the curtains there isn’t anything about those things to think about but real thinking and real fucking they go together, like drinking and fucking except drinking and fucking it’s one first then the other but thinking and fucking you do those at the same time and I started thinking, fucking, when the hell it would be over and then trying to move around some under him make it all go faster but fuck if he didn’t like that fuck if he didn’t put his hand down on my mouth to hold me still like that and thinking fuck if that didn’t make it for me like hold that there let’s just lie still and let him fuck me let him fuck me to death and let his hand stay there forever as I pulled my lips back so he could feel that I had teeth and I could feel it flesh on bone not that I didn’t want to bite him but I wouldn’t if I didn’t then he might fuck me to death and that would settle it, settle it forever.
It’s not fair when you’re damaged goods that no one wants you anymore but hell, I know what it’s like to put something back on the shelf because someone else has already fucked it up.
—- What they don’t tell you is how when you’re damaged goods you start to think that maybe it’s supposed to be that way and maybe you’re supposed to like it.
—- There’s always a way to be happy and if you’re going to be damaged and happy better happy to be damaged, like the damage, like it, like it, do it again.
—- Thinking of his hand on my mouth like maybe he thinks he got away with something but maybe there’s something I could do to make it happen again let it happen again but more so, grab my hair and pull it back and fuck my face just use it make it cry and scream and stop it can’t much scream like that now can you. Like a pussy that can tell you when it wants it.
—- Damaged goods got off the shelf and wants to fuck.
—- That’s when I knew I was fucked is when it didn’t seem like damage any more at all, not damage, this is all scratches, bruises and blood.
He said, “If I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t do it,” and that meant a lot to me, because it meant it didn’t matter I was all over the sheets and floor and his cock most of all but he could always shower that off no matter but the sheets I felt worse about. He’d choked me with his hands and then his cock and then his hands and his cock and then I felt it all come out and tasted every flavor at once and now that was all that was all over the cock and sheets and floor, but he was very nice and said, “That’s what laundry machines are for,” and still I thought that it might take a couple cycles and some really good soap but I thought that he might know a thing or two about it because if he didn’t, he wouldn’t have done it. Probably.
Extras
Black Telephone TV: Charlene Elsby
Not Worth Living – 001 – Charlene Elsby
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‘With sparse, focused prose emphasizing striking physical details, Williams creates stark portraits of senselessly slaughtered dolphins, razed forests, and overrun holy sites. There is a clear warning here about the cost of damaging our environment. And it is not just a physical toll. As once solemn traditions lose their meaning and places of reverence are turned into tourist traps, it becomes obvious that failing to respect what we find in the world may be costing us a part of our humanity. Amidst this devastation a feeling emerges that it is the soul of the earth itself that is in danger of evaporating completely and that Azrael feels woefully ill-equipped to save it. And the question lingers in his mind if it is even right for him to do so. Is there not a divine plan at work here?
‘God seems frustratingly distant, both in the celestial stories and in the stories of regular people. It is made clear from the very beginning that Azrael is distinct from other angels. Heaven is not his realm. He and Jesus are not well aquatinted, we are told. Just as importantly, Azrael is not Death. Azrael’s purview is the living world and the souls that fill it. In this regard, he is not unlike the Devil. And this results in an oddly touching camaraderie between the two. As they snipe at each other, execute petty revenges, and argue philosophy it becomes clear that they rely on one another’s company to keep back a void of loneliness. It is a need for connection that feels distinctly human.
‘Silence doesn’t just echo from the divine in these stories, it prevails in the mundane world as well. From a father afflicted by laryngitis to a man awed into silence by the sight of two elephants, people struggle to find their voices in these stories. As with most things in this collection, there are two faces to this silence. At times it provides a sense of calm and reflection, while at others it becomes a fearsome, devouring force. It is the silent drip of grains through the hourglass, as the feeling builds from one story to the next that time is running swiftly out—for the world and for the souls trying to find their way back to it.
‘The mixing of the celestial and the mundane in these stories makes the smallest moment feel significant, while the weightier concerns of the Devil and Azrael take on a degree of irreverence. Illustrious figures such as Bach and Dylan Thomas often appear hapless or absurd, while anonymous characters carry themselves with a humble dignity. These stories sometimes feel like bizarre fever dreams, others arrive with startling clarity. The result is a strangely beautiful kaleidoscope, refracting the question of what it means to be human into ninety-nine bejeweled rays.’ — B.B. Garin
Joy Williams’s Beautiful Apocalypse
‘The comfy story has got to change’
Joy Williams has long been obsessed with humanity’s all-destructive existence.
The Angel of Death Has Some Reservations About His Job
Buy ‘Concerning the Future of Souls’
Joy Williams Concerning the Future of Souls
Tin House
‘Balancing the extraordinary and the humble, the bizarre and the beatific, the book presents Azrael as a thoughtful and troubled protagonist as he confronts the holy impossibility of his task, his uneasy relationship with Death and his friendship with the Devil. In this follow-up to Williams’ 99 Stories of God, a collection of connected beings – ranging from ordinary people to great artists such as Kafka, Nietzsche, Bach and Rilke to dogs, birds, horses and butterflies – experience the varying fate of the soul, transient yet everlasting.
‘Profound, sorrowful, witty and ecstatic, Concerning the Future of Souls will leave readers awestruck in their confrontation of life in the face of death.’ — Tin House
Excerpts
1
They lived in New York City in an apartment overlooking a park. It was the park, his parents said. You were always supposed to say the park. His father was sick. He began being sick a year before when he had laryngitis. His father had been interested in the sickness for awhile but now he was not. His mother had never wanted to understand it and did not want to learn anything about the machines his father required. This was not because she didn’t love his father, he was told. People who knew the machines and how to care for them came in every day but they did not spend the night. His father spoke little to his mother but he would talk to him in his strange new voice. He did not like it. He did not like trying to talk to his father about school or soccer or the doorman’s puppy which he had only seen pictures of anyway.
—-Every few weeks they would leave the city and visit his grandmother who lived with her brothers in a large house by the ocean. You could not see the ocean except for a tiny part of it and even that sometimes disappeared. Everyone in the house was old—or elderly was a word he had learned— and there were no children anywhere. Still, he did not mind these visits, he was somewhat hypnotized by them in fact.
—-They didn’t seem to know each other well though they must have known each other better than anyone else. They would make popcorn for him in a pot on the stove and not the microwave. They didn’t have a microwave. His mother had confided in him once that his father’s family were rich oddballs and that their home was full of kitsch.
—-“Kitsch,” his mother had explained, “isn’t in itself beautiful but instead elicits its emotion from the beauty it depicts. Like that black ceramic pan-
ther in the bookcase.”
—-“I love that panther,” he said.
—-“Of course you don’t love it,” his mother said.
—-He did and one of his great uncles had given it to him but he broke it playing with the necklace it wore and he did not cry. They showed him a photograph of his father as a boy. When he was the same age you are, they told him. His father’s eyes were dark, even disbelieving. He wanted to ask what he had been looking at, though he did not, because he didn’t believe it either.
KITSCH
2
What is your name?
Alph.
Ralph?
Alph.
How do you spell that?
A. L. P. H. as in: Alph the sacred river ran through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea.
I don’t think you’re right for this position.
HUMAN RESORCES
3
He had four thousand wings. This was simply a fact. The feathers of each wing— innumerable. As they should be. The wings sheltered the souls so they could not be viewed in transit. This too was correct. He also had a thousand eyes but not, as has been rumored, four heads. Azrael was spectacularly made and looked nothing like Jesus as was so tirelessly depicted though in truth the Nazarene was not at all as rendered either. Jesus and Azrael were not well acquainted. They traveled in different circles. Jesus was surprisingly unfamiliar with death other than his own.
—-The birds of the air were terrified of Azrael.
His murmurs of assurance were incomprehensible to them. Their bones were hollow and filled with air. The sweetest air. Wasn’t that enough?
IN LOVELY BLUE . . .
AROUND WHICH LIES MOST
LOVING BLUE . . .
*Hölderlin
Extras
Live! At the Library: Joy Williams
UA Prose Series: Joy Williams
*
p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! ‘Badlands’ is great. It’s one of the best written films ever too. Zac’s still sick, but I think he’s swinging upwardly. The tarot reading: It was when I was working on ‘I Wished’. A tarot expert friend suggested doing one to try to put me ‘in touch’ with George. But the actual reading, as I mentioned, disturbed him too much to go through with it. He said the cards were saying that trying to communicate with George was very dangerous and that it shouldn’t be done. Naturally, even though I don’t really believe in the spirit world, etc., I’ve wondered about that incident ever since. Squirrels are magicians, I think? Love making this thing we’re attempting to do to free our film and that looks like it’s likely to collapse at the moment not collapse please, G. ** James, 10 am here by my French clock. If you get a small, handheld vacuum cleaner, you can use it to vacuum up mosquitoes. Neat little trick. I like the idea of the blog’s internal organs being bloody, but, practically speaking, nah. Paris somehow looks even better when it’s nippy. Not sure why. I guess a gray light suits it. I’m fine with, like, herbal tea, but tea that’s supposed to be caffeinated and is instead censored is kind an abomination to me. Good, you’re writing. Fuck pre-determining categories. I always think of what a write as a thing until it tells me it’s something in particular, if it ever does. So, Saturday is your second day off in a row. Max it out, and I have no doubt you will. ** _Black_Acrylic, That’s true. I think the only voicemails I get are from utility companies telling me to pay my bills. I’ve never heard of George Grossmith, but that book does sound entertaining. Enjoy. ** Tyler Ookami, Nice: that specified nostalgia. Those are some great answering machine song adds, I must say. Good eye or ear or both, I guess. Melvins are god. I went on a reading tour with Foetus in the 80s. Boy, was he a complete fucking prick back then, and now he’s like the nicest guy. Getting off coke can make such a difference. Good take on Gaga. That ‘she actually can sing?!’ prioritising seemingly brought on by those American Idol, etc. shows is maybe the greatest malady of contemporary music, I think. Mike and I talked about possibilities re: who would write the Goth Rock Opera score — Mike himself plus friends, Lux Interior and Poison Ivy of The Cramps, Patrick Mata (Kommunity FK), a few others — but we never got as far as commissioning the music, unfortunately. Stellar weekend to you. ** jay, The best thing about answering machines was that it was de rigeur to leave messages for people, and people would get quite creative, or leave very drunken embarrassing messages, and you could pull the tape out and keep the best messages stored and on hand, not that you ever ended up doing anything with those tapes, but still. I’ll set my sights on ‘MGS2’. I just met a Big Boss in ‘Luigi’s Mansion 3’ that I don’t seem to be able to beat no matter what I do, so I might have to bail on that game and move on. So your friend hypnotised you? I’m apparently very susceptible to hypnosis, and when I was a teen my friends would hypnotise me if we got really bored and couldn’t think of anything else to do. It’s an interesting state. It was interesting to find out what I was willing to do when it was something I was just shy about doing normally and what I absolutely wouldn’t do even under hypnosis. Was your weekend one of note? ** Kosten Koper, Hello, Kosten! I’m grateful for this rare treat! Nice list of phone messages there. Somewhere in my boxes of shit in storage somewhere is a saved phone message of a very drunk William Burroughs singing happy birthday to me. Thanks for that link. I’ll definitely check it out and will give the folks here the option too. Everyone, the great Kosten Koper passes along an answer machine-related link of total note. In his words: ‘AUTOMATIC CONFESSIONAL VOICEMAIL PROJECT – ANYBODY AND EVERYBODY WELCOME TO PARTICIPATE. Call The Automatic Confessional and leave a one minute message of any words and sounds that you want. I (Hal McGee) will not edit or restrict or censor the messages in any way. I want you to understand the full implications of what this means. I will allow any form of expression, no matter how offensive, objectionable, or tasteless — this includes hate speech, racism, sexism, ageism, etc. This does not mean that I personally condone or approve of or agree with any content of any of the messages.’ Here, Thank you, kind sir. Try not to be such a stranger if the odd mood strikes again. xoxo. ** Steeqhen, Those videos sound so exciting. Seriously up my alley. I am on the hunt starting in … however long it takes me to finish this p.s. Thanks, yum. What’s the magazine you’re editor on, only if you don’t mind saying? I liked ‘Hell House LLC’. In our film, the home haunt is very disappointing and not scary. The family’s aspiration and their failure is kind of what the film’s about. Quiet sounds okay. I’m going to maybe take one last stab at beating this impossible seeming Boss in ‘Luigis Mansion 3’ and then probably give up and download another game. I hate when that happens. ** HaRpEr, Funny, the first thing I thought of when Ferdinand sent me that post was the Replacements song too. Your description of the book makes sense, yes, and I’m serious down for it. Like ‘Time Remaining’, very interesting. Definitely dig in and do that. It sounds pretty crucial. Plots that can only be observed from afar are always the goal. Well, for me, and for 90% of what I read. You sound really jazzed and inspired. That’s so exciting! Kudos, kudos. Did you make good progress during the weekend? ** Uday, You poked through. ‘Quarry’ by Jane White … wow, I feel like I’ve read that, but I’m not absolutely sure. It sounds so familiar. I’ll check and try to make haste through its pages if it’s a stranger. Are you better or at least better-ish now? I hope. I like Kafka, sure. I never fell in love with him, but it might’ve been my mood. Funny books? Mm, I have an odd sense of humor maybe. Let’s see … off the top of my head maybe Ivy Compton-Burnett, especially ‘The Present and the Past’, Derek McCormack, especially ‘Castle Faggot’, Ronald Firbank, especially ‘Valmouth’. I don’t know that they’re laugh out loud funny, but I found them highly amusing. ** Lucas, Hey. Oh, I was sad to wake up and see your message. Shit, I’m so sorry and sad that I don’t get to see you so quickly and sad that you’re missing the concert. I shouldn’t besmirch your mom, but that really sucks of her, I’m sorry. Yeah, you just have to find your way here when the time and opportunity allows. That’s all. Your ideas about the ghost boy story make it seem kind of imperative that you proceed with it and throw yourself into it, etc., because it sounds pretty monumental. I hope you managed to have a weekend that made the weekend you were going to have seem like a small miss. xoxoxo. ** Okay. Up there are five recent or new books that I really liked and really think would be worth your time if you look through them and think you might agree with me. See you on Monday.
Now available in North America 
Wow, that Hede segment is really interestingly written! I’m super jealous of her style of writing, it’s very biological and descriptive without losing any dignity, which I’m super jealous of, whenever I end up writing in a slightly body-forward way, it ends up being a little bit more abject than I want it to be. I’ll definitely check that book out, thank you!
Oh, yeah, that does sound very amusing – I suppose voice notes are a very different beast, or at least a lot easier to widely disseminate. Yeah, I know what you mean, I always try and avoid games with big unbeatable bosses when I can. I’ve been playing this one really fun game called Golden Idol recently, that’s like a modern point and click adventure. You get this very gif-like half second repeating clip of a person’s death, or the theft of an object, or something like that, and you have to figure out what exactly happened by examining the room. It’s been really interesting, it’s incredibly convoluted in terms of the crimes, but in a very fun way. Like, you need to figure out which maid swapped the two drinks, in order to figure out where the poison was, and which person pickpocketed the poison from who, et cetera. It’s more amusing than it sounds.
Huh, it’s interesting to know you’re also susceptible to this kind of hypnosis stuff. Yeah, it’s sort of weird that it actually works, I was pretty shocked. I’m not really capital-i Into it, but I’m totally fascinated by it as a subculture, out of all of the really high-concept fetishes it seems to be one of the nicer communities, from what I’ve heard from my friend. It seems like her particular brand of it is also all about changing of words, too, like shifting thought processes, or removing words from your vocabulary. Her main thing is having parallel conversations, like having a normal conversation on one end, but having a “conversation with my subconscious” by occassionally slipping in words that should affect me. Honestly, incredibly interesting experience, I ended up going home and writing for an hour or two afterwards.
P.S., James. It’s just the combination of Don Quixote and Demian, I think those two are pretty big in that Limbus Company game – although, with anime men as characters. I think it’s sort of a sequel to Ruina / Lobotomy too?
Hi!!
As always, thank you for the excellent recommendations above!
I didn’t know tarot could be used to communicate with the dead. Although I guess it makes sense that it can be used to explore that idea at the very least. I generally have a hard time believing in anything I haven’t experienced myself or seen with my own eyes, but there’s something about tarot that I’ve always been drawn to. Maybe it’s because I’m very interested in projective techniques, and tarot feels like a great and exciting tool for that. That said, I’ve never participated in an “official” reading. So far.
Oh no. I really, really, really, really hope your plan to free “Room Temperature” survives whatever is currently attacking it!!
Love rolling onto his other side and taking the whole blanket with him, Od.
Hiiiyaaa
I don’t know what happened, maybe my server lost connection was lost, hopefully I didn’t do something wrong hahaha, but anyways yesterday I wrote a comment and it didn’t post. The excitement of its contents are partially lost because I can’t remember fully what I said but I’ll try to recap what I can. Firstly, if you r by Saint-Honore you should totally go to Serge Lutens, have you seen his photography? It is extremely beautiful and has this decadent glamour which ceases to exist anymore. If I had the cash I would immediately go buy their purple juice Sarrasins, its a dark jasmine tincture thing, I had a serious obsession with jasmine a few years ago, did you know it naturally produces a chemical compound (Skatole, or 3-methylindol) that’s found in human corpses, feces, and I think blood…. The name I know it by is Indole, and I love this word, it reminds me of adolescence…… and dole whip, maybe incest>? Anyways jasmine has this sickly sweet innocence thing to it, and the main reason I even bring up perfume is cause it has some deep connection with memory, that I don’t think science can even really explain. Anyways, I will try to attach some links of Luten’s photography.. 2) I’m here in this old city to study, but I can’t speak French…. I really love Paris though, it has this feeling of being slightly stuck in the past. Would of course love to meet you, but earnestly I think my heart would flutter to much! 3) Thank you for posting all the music on the Answering Machine post, it really set a happy mood for my Friday, especially the Pulp song. And nice to see Kurt and Courtney’s beautiful faces on the blog too 4) Oh and I didn’t get to see the HK show at Agnes B. because of the snow, I didn’t know it was going to happen and I wore these patent leather Mary Janes out all day, its fine because I’m from a town where it rains a lot, although I always get a little afraid of hypothermia when I test the bodies limits against the weather. 5) I wrote a little something actually about tragedy and the loss of physical media inspired by yesterday’s blog post. So thanks again for that!! Always a pleasure to get access to what your thinking about 6) And on that topic, I will be sure to try and source a copy of that novel on Ingrid Caven, I love the posters of her in ‘Shadows of Angels’ (1975) // I can totally see how you never got into Lady Gaga, although I still will look fondly on her early music videos, and for getting me into Alexander McQueen. // Hope you have a restful weekend! Going to my favorite town in Il-de-france on Sunday, do you get out of the city much or are you truly dedicated to Paris? xx
Heyheyhey Dennis, woke up at 12pm today, 11hrs of sleep, woopwoop. Now half 1, and COLD. Pissing it down out there, too.
My favourites were Elsby, and Williams’ HUMAN RESOURCES was funny. I had a moment reading this post where I remembered that writing is like the coolest fucking thing ever and I smiled a bit at just. How. Much. Can be done with writing. Like you can literally go anywhere. IT’S SO COOL! And how do you keep up to date with all this razor-sharp *new* fiction? I find most of it through obscure blogs and following rabbit holes of links. I own very little of this kind of writing. The newest novel I own is Brainwyrms by Alison Rumfitt which I got from Foyles after seeing Henry IV a while back.
Duly noted that vacuum>mosquito trick, but I’ve never really had to deal with mosquitoes. Only seen very few in stairways or my room in summers. Annoying trying to sleep whilst some tiny buzzing nuisance flings its body against the wall or spooks the shit out of me by flying to my lamp which I’m using to read.
Guts/flesh/computer combo is kind of a ‘thing,’ isn’t it? Like Videodrome (which I haven’t seen). Or the cover of Lisa 2, v1.0 by Nicholas Rombes, which I haven’t read, and nor can I remember how I discovered it, even though it was, like, yesterday. Practically speaking, I’m not super averse to gory stuff. Or just gross things in general, usually I’m the guy who does the gross but necessary shit if I’m in that kind of situation. I know very few bio students (one, and even then we don’t even talk) at college but they get to pick apart a fish head, or something, which sounds kind of fun.
That grey light is one of the things I really like about winter. Sometimes I see a kind of bluish tint over everything, like it just *looks* cold, too. For herbal tea I have red bush. I agree that decaf tea is abominable. Whenever I make a cup I always have this constant expression of spite, wrinkled nose, frown and everything. But then I’ll down it in seconds because I’m not especially discriminating when it comes to tea.
Indeed! Labels are for soup tins. Plus writing that doesn’t fit into any one category/kind is pretty queer in most senses of the word, so, excuse for me to treat my writing like a metaphor for my own queerness, or, something. Aw yeah B]
Yeah, and then I’ll have Sunday, which makes for THREE days off, consecutively, by Jove. I plan on maxing it out by… staying in bed wrapped up warm, and reading Waiting for Godot, because it’s about time I do. Seeya Monday! :]
P.S. jay, huh, who would’ve thought? I’ve got no idea how either of those would link into an anime-y RPG. Anime men are just spreading like a disease these days, man. Like, there’s this anime called Bungou Stray Dogs – haven’t watched – but they’ve taken the names of writers, but, like, made them hot? And it’s just so fucking baffling when I here people my age thirsting over Dostoevsky. Like. What??? I can’t keep up with The Youth of which I am supposedly a member ;-;
Re: ‘literary’ videogames, presumably you’re aware of Disco Elysium? That’s pretty wordy. I’m also pretty into the idea of visual novels.
Hope your weekend’s a good one! :]
Ooh, Alison Rumfitt is great! I thought Brainwyrms was much better than her first novel. Haha, yeah, Bungou Stray Dogs is my nemesis – I’m a huge, huge fan of Osamu Dazai’s writing, but whenever I refer to him, people assume I mean this dog-guy anime twink, which has led to some really amusing misunderstandings. I think Limbus Company is (apparently) very good at it, even if I’m a bit taken aback by seeing Captain Ahab from Moby Dick as an anime woman with a robot hand. I think you play as the protagonist of Camus’ “The Stranger” too, so make of that what you will.
I have played Disco Elysium, and I did really enjoy it, I always love amnesia narratives. I’m a big visual novel fan too, I remember loving Ace Attorney when I played it. I don’t game a ton though, have you been playing anything good recently?
Good to know, I should actually fucking *READ* the damn thing. But I have so many books, which on one hand is T_T but on the other is :D. They will all have their time.
You’ve a brother-in-arms against BSD, it irks me, perhaps irrationally. My copy of No Longer Human has the most gorgeous magenta shade. I swear I’m not superficial!
Whatever would Melville think…
Just skimming the Wikipedia page for Limbus Company, Jesus, what a literary checklist. What market could the animefied canon *possibly* be aiming for?
I played DE for a bit, but my laptop, God bless it, is not the best. The soundtrack is great, I have it to thank for me discovering British Sea Power, who are *great.* The VNs I’ve read are on the trashier edgy porny side of things.
I don’t really game at all, these days. Occasionally I’ll try a run on the Binding of Isaac, which I’m very bad at. But writing + reading + A Levels + wasting time on the internet take up my life most these days.
If this comment has any typos in it, I will be mortified
Yeah, I’ve never actually watched BSD, I’m sure it’s alright, it’s just sometimes a shock to look up Osamu Dazai and see anime guys. Oh yeah, that Dazai series of covers is wonderful! Yes, I have no clue what Limbus Company is going for, but apparently it’s coherent, according to my flatmate.
Yes, terrible laptop gang, haha. I’m pretty much just a retro gamer for my terrible computer, and I use my switch for everything else. Sea Power are amazing, I really go in for all of that really powerful post-rock ish stuff, anything Sigur Ros-like is amazing in my book.
Yeah, my boyfriend is a Binding of Isaac obsessive, to a slightly unhealthy degree. I often read next to him while he plays that game, and it seems to pretty much only inspire irritated exhales, but he says it’s very fun, so who knows. Anyway, happy weekend, see ya!
Have you watched any other anime? :0
I try not to be picky about book covers, but some are just. So. Nice.
Your flatmate is on their own wavelength. Good for them.
Absolutely, I love running games on, like, the lowest graphics setting possible! And even then my fans are working overtime, and my laptop sounds like it’s about to take flight.
Re: post-rock, I’m guessing you’re into Godspeed You Black Emperor (with an exclamation mark, somewhere in there, I’m sure)? Or Mogwai? Or Explosions in the Sky? I still haven’t listened to that one Sigur Ros album everyone has. Agaetis Byrn, or something.
One of my chums has an impossible knowledge of Isaac. He’s like an obsessive scholar out of something by Lovecraft, only instead of hoarding cosmic magicks it’s Binding of Isaac stuff.
Happy weekend back at you. Gonna read some Sarah Kane today :]
Hmmm, I’m really really into Serial Experiments Lain and Utena, how about you? I know what you mean about lovely book covers – my personal favourites are probably Conquest by Nina Allan, and maybe the cover of Marbled Swarm, haha. I have a huge weak spot for Penguin Classics covers too, some of those are beautiful. What are your favourites?
Yeah, I totally know what you mean about low graphics settings. I honestly haven’t played a game with demanding graphics for ages – the last thing I played was Alien: Isolation, and that game is astoundingly good looking for how much power it requires. I am a massive, massive Black Emperor! fan, I’m less into the other two. I think, if you can, try and listen to Agaetis Byrn on good headphones, or vinyl, it’s like this total wall of harmony and noise.
Yeah, I totally know what you mean about Isaac, my boyfriend’s totally the same. It’s totally incomprehensible to watch, like he’s just doing semi-random things and somehow making progress. My equivalent is probably the Hitman games, or Deep Rock Galactic. Do you have an equivalent thing, for games or books? Anyway, enjoy your Sarah Kane, see ya!
Man I’ve got like no idea if I’m replying to you properly. We’ll see!
Lain is one of the few anime I’ve seen in full, Utena I am oblivious to. I’m up to date on Chainsaw Man and finished the JJK manga and am also up to date w/ Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, which is probably my favourite anime/manga. Other anime I’ve finished, uh, Evangelion (even the rebuild movies), and Welcome to the NHK.
Any of the Closer covers are pretty. Racking my brains for covers I like. Jesus I cannot think of any T_T shit. The famous Catcher In The Rye cover is real nice. I’ll have a lil rummage through my bookshelves and get back to you tmrw.
Shall slap Agaetis Byrn on my LISTEN TO THIS FOR GOD’S SAKE list. Been listening to Ben Folds recently, pfft.
Deep Rock Galactic needed a Google. I guess my videogame knowledge is best w/ Pokemon, or Earthbound, or Final Fantasy 7, or Terraria? Books-wise I can talk about Wuthering Heights or Atonement for quite a while. And the 2 Pynchon novels I’ve read. And I guess I’m kind of a wannabe Shakespeare buff. OH and I like Grasshopper Jungle a lot which is this totally stupid YA novel.
I read Blasted by Sarah Kane. Blimey. Not a happy play. Good read, though. Sunday afternoons are always such bummers -_-
Hi Dennis,
Summoning Salt is a great YouTube channel centered around speed running history, a lot of videos on random and interesting games, including one on blindfolded Mario 64 speedruns; he just uploaded a video about ‘Simpsons: Hit and Run’ speedruns, which I loved because I could never finish the final mission and to me it was impossible — crazy to think that people can complete the entire game in about an hour.
The magazine is called ‘Motley’, basically just a standard college magazine, though it has it’s own Wikipedia page which is interesting! I’m the fashion editor this year, although I’m creative director on another magazine in my college (through a society). It’s fun writing articles, and I’ve been feeling pretty accomplished, though I always forget about the magazines and freak out trying to come up with something.
The film sounds fascinating, I’m excited for it. Hopefully everything works out
That boss sounds frustrating. I remember I played through the entirety of Bowser’s Inside Story when I was younger, and could never beat the final boss. I couldn’t mash hard enough. Even tried it like 4 years ago, assuming I was just too young to do it, but nope! Might try it again at some point, but I think I spent altogether about 5 hours of my life trying to beat that boss!!
I’ve been using my Switch again after buying online for a month. I have a few games I need to finish like Mario Wonder, Pikmin 4, even Breath of the Wild. I always just want to buy some game, but most of the Nintendo games never go on sale or go down in price; it’s been 7 years and Mario Odyssey is still the same price… I’m hoping I can come into money or find a cheap copy of some Switch games somewhere, because there’s so many games that I haven’t played but wanted to, just because of the price.
Anyway, I’ve been having a simple weekend so far, a lot of lounging around, although tomorrow is my friend’s monthly poetry night, so I’m probably gonna go to that and maybe read something. If I’m feeling brave!
i’m woozy and doozy from a medication, but i’ll see how this goes.
hi den and others, long time no see. well only two months. i was gonna write in during two months but uh *imagine a series of chaotic and violent gifs depecting anguish, pain, and suffering with the word OCTOBER on it.* and uh *imagine an even more brutal, vicious, and viscious set of gifs with the word NOVEMBER on it*, it was not a fun time.
i’ll try to catch up to the current topics, but these books seem nice. joy williams is well, joy fucking williams. so i got that, and i got the shipley due to being an apoc party fanboy. gonna see if my wallet loves me getting a third book, eying the hede and or elsby. we will see which one, maybe i should not get more then i can read becuse oh god i have not read in these two months. sorry to the book gods.
currently writing uhh something, a story about a ‘mystery’ forum/bbs/chat, kind of just a horrifying sewn on hydra of internet communication. been obsessed for a while on the communities that developed around specific cases. so i’ve been channeling that obsession into a story about a ‘community’ of sorts, or at least a reaction to a mystery. embryo stages, nothing fancy rn.
also before i forget, been playing a car-rpg, a CaRPG, big vrroom rpg. ‘racing lagoon’, a final fantasy spin off of sorts, but instead of travelling the world with magic. you race cars. it’s a fun game, but wow is the writing in this something else.
https://imgur.com/a/2U4K0VK
it has this deeply melancholic, ethereal writing style that really hits a spot for me. like the best version of my depressed fifteen year old writing. in short, it is very good. also something that never came out in the west, so this is all translated by fans n all.
i think that should be all, unless i post something tomorrow, or well. today but later.
The books this weekend all look good, the Joy Williams especially so. Will need to figure out my Xmas spending schedule accordingly.
Here in Leeds and up in Scotland we are being attacked by Storm Bert, which has brought sleet and rain all around us. Think the family is still going out today for brunch which temains the perennial highlight of our time together.
The new episode of my show Play Therapy v2.0 is online here via Tak Tent Radio! Ben ‘Jack Your Body’ Robinson wants you to relax deeply and watch the light. That’s good. Let yourself go down deeper. Listen to your tone and make it go deeper. Deeper, deeper, deeper.
Just in case that link’s not working, this one definitely is.
Hi. Yeah, honestly, I haven’t had a great weekend. I spent most of Saturday with my best friend luckily but now I’m at my dad’s and my mom’s once again threatening to permanently kick me out and leave the country etc. It’s far from the first time she’s done this and the only other option I currently have isn’t really ideal either so I’m hoping to either move in with my cousin or get a place of my own within the next year. I’ll be alright then, I guess. I’ve been working on (mostly thinking about) my new story. It’s very superficially going to be similar to the story I published in SCAB, as in dealing with roughly the same subject matter, although it’s going to be the victim’s rumination on it after his death. I originally wanted to write it in first person but I feel like it would weirdly be emotionally hard for me to do that so I’m not sure. Even though that doesn’t make sense. I started reading some sections from Weil’s ‘Gravity and Grace’ which is incredibly inspiring. Especially the one on decreation and her definition of it as “making something created pass into the uncreated” which more or less might be the crux for all my ideas regarding this story right now. Otherwise, I’m doing okay, just catching up on a lot of sleep, which I’m thankful for since I have a bunch of exams next week. Trying not to let everything going on get to me etc. Sending hugs, hope you’re well
P.S Jay, those are my favorite animes as well!! I even gave myself the same haircut as Lain when I was 13, which is honestly really embarrassing to look back on lol, but just shows how much I love that series
Oh yeah, I’m totally the same, I got a Lain brain at 16, but because Star Wars was huge at that time, people were constantly assuming I was going for a sort of Jedi look. Are there any other anime you recommend – it’s one of my big blindspots, so any guidance would be appreciated!
Anime’s also sort of a blind spot for me tbh, stopped watching them as much about two years ago — although ‘Paranoia Agent’ and ‘Evangelion’ were formative experiences for me so I’d recommend those as well. I started watching ‘Penguindrum’, by the director of Utena Kunihiko Ikuhara, though I dropped it because it became sort of too unintelligible for me. I remember it was good, just a very brainy show in some ways, like Utena. I’ve heard great things about ‘Monogotari’ and ‘Higurashi’ (the original 2007 run) and started them both but they’re just too long for me personally.
Paranoia Agent is an all time favourite, Satoshi Kon is honestly formative in terms of my visual imagination. “Too unintelligible” sounds amazing for me, so I’ll definitely give that a watch. Yeah, I think I also sometimes tend to watch bits of anime and not the whole thing – one of my flatmates has embarked on this 100 episode harem (?) anime about a man dating 5 identical twins, and that’s something I always enjoy watching for 5 minutes or so while I cook. Did you ever watch Beastars? I’ve always felt like that was about as good as modern anime has gotten.
nick drake death anniversary tomorrow Ooh yeah, I really liked Evangelion when I watched it, but I think it probably wouldn’t be as interesting to me as an adult. Chainsawman is another one I’ve heard good things about, but I’ve never really gotten around to reading it. Yeah, that Catcher in the Rye cover is lovely, I agree. Do you mean the new-ish Pink cover of Closer? I’m a bit of a purist, I always slightly lean more towards the original print.
Oh yeah, that’s very fair. I remember being obsessed with Terraria when I was 12 or something, but I haven’t actually thought about it since then, so thanks for that nostalgia trip. Yes, Wuthering Heights and Atonement are a great pair, I think. There aren’t many books that I think I can really “explain” at absurd length, but I think my closest to that would probably be Foucault’s Pendulum, and maybe Marbled Swarm – I have two really, really heavily annotated and sticky-noted copies of those two. Pynchon is amazing too! Anyway, see ya tomorrow.
Oops, sorry, this was meant to be a reply to James. Ignore me!
testing
Strangely, Chrome would not allow me to post here, but I can do it now with Safari.
Gaga could be great when she stuck to dance-pop – THE FAME MONSTER is a blast. But soon afterwards, she started trying to please an audience that doesn’t even respect pop or club music to begin with.
How was your weekend? My parents are doing alright, which is reassuring, but I’m still woozy with stress. This evening, I hope I can focus enough to write a review of THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG.
Did you hear the surprise-drop Kendrick Lamar album?
Have you ever read Kenzaburo Oe’s “Nip the Buds, Kill the Children” ?
Read it a couple of months ago and absolutely adored it – kind of an anti-lord-of-the-flies. Supposedly Mishima fucking hated the guy.
Anyway – hope you’re well lovely ! Sending warm wishes ! Nice to see everyone else still in the chat too 🙂
Oh – also – did a joke interview a bit ago with a friend about his getting off with a Dennis Cooper lookalike in a french gay club – I will try and find and paste in here soon !
Thanks for your support on my project. Yeah, plot really does not interest me. I get really bored and uninspired if I dig myself into a hole if I make a plot by mistake. I like the idea of the initial illusion of plot but then breaking it, kind of like what David Lynch does. Also, Lautreamont does that. I read ‘Maldoror’ recently and it does a thing where it starts focusing on something but then starts doing something else. Those kinds of manipulations are very interesting to me, but plot generally bores me. It’s never been what I’ve read for. There’s obviously stuff I like that does have a plot, but it’s not the driving force and / or the style is doing something interesting enough for me to like it.
Oh, these books look really interesting. I didn’t know Joy Williams had a new book out. That Ingrid Caven book looks delightful. I’ve been snooping around for that Jean-Jacques Schuhl novel about her since you posted about it.
Yeah, I think my weekend was fairly productive. It’s difficult to know how much you’ve actually achieved when you’re juggling multiple things. I’m definitely keeping busy at the moment, but luckily only in ways that I’m finding fulfilling. I don’t think I have as many things going on next week, but words obviously. As many words as I can muster.
In the UK we’ve been having a crazy nationwide storm. ‘Storm Bert’ it’s been called. Rain is fine but intense wind is something I simply cannot abide by. I feel like the captain of a doomed ship every time I need to stand outside. It’s difficult to even put one leg in front of the other.
Anyway, how’s it going with you? Anything interesting on the horizon this week?
I’ve already made my way through Compton-Burnett (at your recommendation) and Firbank. McCormack will have to wait till my stomach is stronger, I think. I went back on the blog and searched for Quarry and it turns out you have read it! Not much progress with Kafka this weekend (only 11 words worth keeping out of 400 or so). The deadline approaches but that’s OK. I did have two consecutive wonderful evenings with friends so that’s nice. Hope your weekend goals have been more attainable for you.