Here.
Here, in no particular order, are some tidbits that I deem important enough to write about:
I just finished Michael Chabon's book of short stories--A Model World. They were pretty evenly good. The book was divided into two parts, and the second part, in many ways, wasn't a collection of sort stories, but a novella, broken up into vignettes. It featured the same characters, themes, and had a definite arc to it. It was also the best part of the book. You just got to love those 'growing up nerdy and Jewish' stories.
I also just finished Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, which, I think, was his first Philip Marlowe novel. It was good. One of the small pleasures I have when reading older fiction is reading blatant misogyny and homophobia, realizing it, then trying to suppress my reaction to it then wondering if I should supress my reaction to it... it's a delightful little cycle. Nevertheless, you have to love this kind of passage:
I leaned against her and pressed her against the wall with my body. I pushed my mouth against her face. I talked to her that way.
"There's no hurry. All this was arranged in advance, rehearsed to the last detail, timed to the split second. Just like a radio program. No hurry at all. Kiss me, Silver-Wig."
Her face under my mouth was like ice. She put her hands up and took hold of my head and kissed me hard on the lips. Her lips were like ice, too.
I went out through the door and it closed behind me, without sound, and the rain blew in under the porch, not as cold as her lips.
While on the topic of The Big Sleep, Warren Ellis's Desolation Jones obviously owes the noir genre a great debt. But the first six issues--the first story arc--of Jones owes a particular debt to The Big Sleep. Jones is like an updated, Ellised-out, more cynical (if you can imagine) version of The Big Sleep. Well, "There is no new thing upon the earth... all novelty is but oblivion."
I quote without comment from Dispatches from the Culture Wars:
This is so absurd that words escape me. Elizabeth Dole has proposed an amendment to rename a bill that would help fund AIDS research and outreach around the world after Jesse Helms. The man who opposed any and all funding for AIDS research. Words fail me.
Due, I think, to the massive storm that hit Boston today, I didn't have power in my apartment for most of the day. It is striking how attached I am to electricity. Even more striking as to how much more reading I was able to do when I couldn't wander the labyrinthine internets, and blankly watch episodes of whatever television show I'm obsessed with today. Here's to more power outages in the near future.
This post is the 200th post to appear here at Ich Bin Ein Oberliner. Big day.
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