forty-two: december 2004

12.31.2004 friday
 The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac Why is it so everlasting entertaining to follow "Ray" (Jack) and "Japhy" (Gary Snyder) around through their lightly seriously poignant playground of wine, meditation, mountainclimbing, and the lust / celibacy dilemma? Is it that peculiar Kerouackian dialogue? Ersatz Zen lessons? Bottoms up, anyway.
-Erika
 12.30.2004 thursday
 Angels and Demons by Dan Brown Before The DaVinci Code, Brown wrote about CERN and Vatican City. One plot governs both books. Excessive, unconvincing plot twists cannot distract from descriptions of Muslim lust for pale flesh. Only imbeciles are entertained by, only bigots are tolerant of this book.
-Marc
 12.29.2004 wednesday
 Toast by Nigel Slater A clever conceit: Slater, now a chef, tells of his boyhood through the prism of the (generally awful) meals he ate. While it never quite transcends its structural limitations, it remains a rather sweet, if awkward, take on memory and childhood longing.
-Timothy
 12.27.2004 monday
 Cosmo Doogood’s Urban Almanac Imitating the style of the better-known almanacs, Cosmo Doogood’s Urban Almanac brings a greater awareness of “nature” to the city, but it also marks the anniversaries and celebrations of the neo-natural, urban landscape. Inspires me as reader to mark my own time.
-Jen
 12.26.2004 sunday
 Hunger by Elise Blackwell This book may be very good. J.M. Coetzee endorses it, and he’s not one to throw words around. I haven’t read any books this week. Not entire books. Just two issues of The Nation and one of the Times Literary Supplement. Feh.
-Diana
 12.22.2004 wednesday
 Greenvoe by George Mackay Brown Brown's first novel examines the difficulty of using prose to infiltrate individual consciousness. He here uses many of the tropes of overlapping consciousness and intertwined history and myth which he later developed more fully; while not always fully realised, still quite lovely.
-Timothy
 12.21.2004 tuesday
 Mine: The One That Enters the Stories by Clark Coolidge But I haven't finished it yet. In the relative legibility of black-and-white, an account of the process of account. "Mine" is "my own" or "everything-goes-in". Product is permeable to the reader's divided attention. Time is always running out.
-Erika
 12.20.2004 monday
 Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography by Roger Shattuck A collection of essays on the ethics and morals of humanity as they butt heads with expanding limitations on knowledge, this book I read in nonsequential chapters, mostly for aesthetic reasons. My favorite chapter discussed abstinence and sublimation as crucibles for pleasure.
-Eve
 12.19.2004 sunday
 Carrington by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina “The life that inspired the major motion picture,” blares the book-jacket. The book’s more forgiving than the film, less moralizing. It’s about how the postal system nourished the institution of romantic friendship. How a group-marriage was built on benign, or sublime, dissensus.
-Diana
 12.18.2004 saturday
 Stiff by Mary Roach Don’t know what to do with your body after death? This book offers dozens of viable options, presented with biting, laugh-out-loud humor. I want to be composted and help trees to grow. Beats being a practice head in a plastic surgery lab.
-Becky
 12.17.2004 friday
 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon The transparent plot twists keep this from being a mystery story. It is, however, an interesting look at a deteriorating marriage, as seen through the eyes of the couple’s autistic teenaged son. Marketed to adults, but belongs on schools’ reading lists everywhere.
-Becky
 12.15.2004 wednesday
 Poetry, Language, Thought by Martin Heidegger The fourfold of earth, sky, gods and mortals, the way language speaks and bridges create their banks, the need to dwell poetically, the worlding of the world itself: Heidegger turns to Rilke and Holderlin and creates a lovely sort of mystical word-play.
-Timothy
 12.14.2004 tuesday
 Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography by Jimmy McDonough Apotheosis makes people crazy. Young handled rock stardom better than many. He kept personal and artistic integrity by always being willing to walk away -- no matter the cost to others.
Plus lurid tales of idiocy and excess -- and model trains!
-Brian
 12.13.2004 monday
 Proof of Silhouettes by Sheila E Murphy A voice’s place in a choir is shifting, time is and is not an agent of change, all these languages make it necessary. Sheila E. Murphy’s intelligent, sensitive movements between voices, places, vocabularies are not different positions but different degrees of presence.
-Jen
 12.12.2004 sunday
 The Great Bagarozy by Helmut Krausser Satan (or is he?) seeks therapy, recounts struggle for Maria Callas’s soul. This Satan does rather little damage. I guess that Krausser’s postmodern point (what’s a devil to do after the death of God?), but I longed for Bulgakov’s lively, havoc-wreaking Satan.
-Diana
 12.11.2004 saturday
 no bird on yr arm by Donna Kuhn http://www.tmpoetry.com Even if you're annoyed by Prince / Pound shortenings of "the little words," if yr a sucker 4 a bird poem or u like "tawdry" lyricism on occasion, check Donna Kuhn for surprising and beautiful lines set among Supercuts and chicken cutlets.
-Catherine
 12.10.2004 friday
 Season of Oak Galls by Amy Trussell http://www.tmpoetry.com/ Jazz and voodoo-inflected lyrics risk the mawkish and vague, but sometimes flash and dance to life. "Angel Floor Water" ends the book with an ars poetica. A tumble of words, "place parts with broom dove grass down moon / offering roots feast...."
-Catherine
 12.9.2004 thursday
 Small Weathers by Merrill Gilfillan Gilfillan is no language poet; yet, through sheer compression, his diction at times approaches nonsense, or an alternate sense, within which the delighted reader adheres to soundplay and fingers startling gems from forgotten chests of language--yet is firmly and literally grounded.
-Erika
 12.8.2004 wednesday
 Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson Hyper-poetic, extraordinarily sad, this is a novel where plot is subservient to landscaped moods. Has a great deal to say about how we are shaped by family and community, often in phrases so beautiful that you can't help but linger over them.
-Timothy
 12.7.2004 tuesday
 India’s Bandit Queen: The True Story of Phoolan Devi By Mala Sen The Goddess of Flowers born by the River of Revenge. The story of the most famous of female dacoits, a hero and a terror through Uttar Pradesh in the 1980s. Those who are beneath the law may end by going beyond it.
-Brian
 12.6.2004 monday
 The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler At the insistence of a mousy girl from Manhattan, Kansas, private dick Philip Marlowe dusts off his cynicism to investigate the dual identities of toupee’d flophouse residents, icy actresses, a mobster with a solid alibi, and a corn-fed, bible-reading prodigal son.
-Miriam
 12.5.2004 sunday
 Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee "Novels cannot think," writes a narrator of Elizabeth Costello. This novel thinks; it struggles against what a novel must include (scenes, incidents, characters). Its novelist-protagonist struggles against literature's being asked to do what it cannot, must not: profess. Oscillates between refusal, surrender.
-Diana
 12.4.2004 saturday
 The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown Regarding both the book and the mystery: an exciting premise fraught with glaring errors, imperceptible to the uninitiated. Spy novel format precludes illustrations. Anagrams abound. Clever readers may stay one step ahead of characters. Illuminati are cleverer than this. Really, we are.
-Marc
 12.3.2004 friday
 Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino Dreamy, but a bit repetitive, the brief stories woven for ancient emperor Kubla Khan by youngster Marco Polo paint an empire of fantastic, endless cities that appear thematic: desire, time, symbol. The emperor deduces rightly that they are all the same city.
-Eve
Polyverse by Lee Ann Brown She puts on costumes: collaborator, "Dickinson", soundwitch, Steinian derivative filtered through a latter location. Watch Lee Ann play dress-up (and she is girly!) Yet here she is, too: lover, Southerner, mentee, a person who writes. Brown (University)'s GCB makes an appearance.
-Erika
 12.2.2004 thursday
 We Are All Around Us by Amy King http://www.blazevox.org/weareall.pdf These lyrics torque like "new sentences" but remain personal poems using noun-heavy imagery to capture emotional states that narrative relationship lyrics always capture: "... let me / stroke her stomach for the internal events, / ... a peach softly opens into pear...."
-Catherine
 12.1.2004 wednesday
 O Pioneers! by Willa Cather Begins and ends in sentiment, but in the middle there is something strange and familiar about love and the impossibility of tragedy in America, but only sadness. Not the moral tale it appears to be, nor entirely cohesive, but sometimes quite beautiful.
-Timothy




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