You’re scaring yourself, child.
Needful Things
King, Stephen
Hodder and Stoughton, 1991
ISBN: 0 450 57458 X
Hey cublings – after quite the hiatus, I’m back to the blogging, and badderer than ever. Suffice to say, I thought I’d start gentle and then work my way up (or down, as the case may be) to the other stuff that I’ve been reading over the past… oooh. That long, huh?
Needful Things is a weird one. It’s part of Steven King’s Castle Rock oevre, that famously infamous township in Maine which is an amalgam of Rockwellian imagery, Orwellian politicing, and Lovecraftian beasties lurking just below the surface. In true King style, most of the beasties are lurking in human form, but Needful Things has a few notable exceptions to this rule.
Being part of the Castle Rock group there are certain recurrances that pop up – actually that’s not even just true of the Castle Rock novels, but of King’s work in general. I’d like to think that I’ve read enough of his stuff by now (a fact that this blog will attest to) to see the seams on the monster suit. Alan Pangbourne is referenced in other places, and also references in his turn, events in Cujo and in The Dark Half as well. Alan Pangborne is such a godamn likeable character, its always one of those moments which makes the teeny writer inside of me shrivel up and die a little bit inside, just marvelling at the creation. But I digress – it’s not just Alan who is showing up like a bad penny; Leland Gaunt has more than a passing resemblance to that bad-guy-to-beat-all-bad-guys Randall Flagg from The Stand and Eyes of the Dragon, and ol’ Buster Keaton also resembles “Big” Jim Rennie from Under the Dome. Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head, as well – there have got to be more out there.
Brian Rusk is the first character who sets foot in the new store in town, Needful Things (“Funny name for a store” one of the characters remarks – suspicious name for a store, says I); he’s a young lad with a slight speech impediment, a little-kid crush on his speech therapy teacher, and an avid collector of baseball cards. Baseball is one of those things that keeps cropping up in King’s work, much like the little towns in Maine. He’s written a whole book on baseball – I haven’t read it, given that I have little understanding and less interest in the sport, but I hear it’s pretty good.
Booksluts Reading Challenge #3.2: Cancer Ward
Cancer Ward
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr
Bodley Head, London
ISBN: 0370006569
Jeez Louise, there’s impenetrable Russian literature, and then there’s this book.
What was I thinking? My brain is fried enough as it is these days without trying to wade through this kind of thing. It seems to be the problem that I constantly have with literary fiction, right? That I just can’t seem to do it, to enjoy it, to not wallow in the fact that what I’m reading is supposed to be hard, to feel martyred (and secretly pleased with myself) because of this wodgey fortress of a book. To give you an idea, the edition that I got out of the library was the first time that Cancer Ward had been published as a single volume. A single volume, that’s right cublings – it used to be two books! It weighs nearly two kilograms! Okay, so I made that up, but it gave me wrist cramp just getting through the first chapter, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.
This was meant to count towards the Full-Frontal Challenge, because Solzhenitsyn was a Nobel laureate, but damnit, I didn’t read enough of it to even fake having read it. I did learn some interesting stuff about Solhenitsyn (though, not how to say his name quickly) in the course of researching my next read for the Booksluts Award-Winning Challenge. But really, I’d just be padding out the post, and it’s nothing that you couldn’t find out for yourselves on Wikipedia. And I love you cublings too much to fry your brains, so I’ll just content myself to steering dinner party conversations onto gulag’d Russian authors of the 2oth Century to show off my retention skills.
I might start off a bit slower next time and read The Gulag Archipelago instead.
Of Godzilla, saline and other perversions
Crooked Little Vein
Ellis, Warren
Harper Perennial
ISBN 978 0 06 125205 1
This book is just kind of beautiful. Don’t get me wrong, it’s no classic of literature or anything, it’s not even really culty enough to be a cult classic. But that’s almost part of the charm. I mean, I only had an inkling that it might be good because of Ellis’ comic writing, and the fact that I read his blog and he had been banging on about his second novel, Gun Machine, for a while there. Now, I know that being asked back to do another one is no guarantee of quality when it comes to writing… sometimes just the opposite. But after reading this one, I can see why they asked him back.
It’s pretty compelling. Okay, yes, I know, I have a weakness for the gross out, and there are bits in this book which are terminal gross out. Weirdly, it’s been compared to the Chuck Palahniuk story Guts, but I can’t really see it. I mean, Guts is almost medical-porn in its level of detail, and while there is a little of that in here, the whole motivation feels entirely different. It’s almost like, Ellis is faking a world-weariness through the character of Michael McGill that is just a thin veneer over something romantically, comically unpleasant. Read the rest of this entry
Booksluts Challenge Read #3: Baby No-Eyes
Baby No-eyes
Grace, Patricia
University of Hawai’i Press
ISBN: 978-0824821616
This is another of the Bookslut’s Full Frontal challenge reads, and a kind of personal challenge to myself. I have been guilty for a long time of a bit of a hating of New Zealand fiction – we have this thing called the cultural cringe, where New Zealanders (generally, anyway) used to be horribly embarrassed of anything that came out of here. Things have improved in a major way since I was little (in a far off, distant time known as “the Eighties”) but I guess as a nation, we’re still a little screwed up about it. I liken it to middle child syndrome – not that I know what I’m talking about in the slightest, of course, being an eldest child.
Anyway, enough pop psychology. Grace is a New Zealander, and is so local, that if I drive up the coast about an hour, I could probably go visit her if that wouldn’t be weird or creepy. Which it would. So I won’t be doing that any time soon. The story isn’t really regionally grounded, but is definitely a story based in New Zealand. It’s incredibly good; human, interesting, seemingly personal but not too horribly (i.e, obviously) autobiographical. However, I do wonder how much someone who isn’t very familiar with the politics of race in New Zealand would get from it. I mean, obviously, it’s not that hard to fathom out – I mean, this book did win the Neustadt International prize in 2008. Read the rest of this entry
Versus Battle!: McIver v. Mullen
Weighing in at 305 pages, in the pink and green trunks with the corset,
Whores: an oral biography of Perry Farrell and Jane’s Addiction
Mullen, Brendan (2005, Da Capo Press)
…aaand in the red and black trunks, weighing in at 171 pages,
No One Knows: the Queens of the Stone Age Story
McIver, Joel (2005, Omnibus Press)
Introduction:
These two fighters are around the same age, though one has the distinct disadvantage of being noticably shorter on reach than the other. This could be due to the fact that McIver’s subjects are well known for being far more reticent in interviews than Mullen’s, even to the point of refusing to talk about their equipment (Joshua Homme finally broke his silence on that, but it was a long time coming). Both of these stories are told in a chronological vein, with both of them going back to the early days of their frontmen’s careers (Psi Com for Perry Farrell and Kyuss for Joshua Homme).
Ding! Ding! Read the rest of this entry
Enter Confusion
The Atrocity Exhibition
Ballard, J. G.
Publisher: Harper Perennial
MNnnerrrgggh. This book made my brain hurt.
I actually do think I may have sustained long-term damage to my brain cells. Let me paint you a picture; I was aware of having an out of body experience while I read this tiny volume because I clearly remember watching my body sitting on the sofa smacking the open book against my head until the Lad asked me to stop. Maybe that’s why my brain hurts, but I’m pretty much blaming it all on The Atrocity Exhibition. Please don’t get me wrong though, the writing is genius, but it’s a little bit like the book version of that movie Mulholland Drive. You get little snippets, literally, wee snips of story in no particular order that you have to wade through and even then you don’t know if you get the story, but you’re too scared that people will think you’re a moron if you say you didn’t like it.
Well, no more! I’m standing up for morons everywhere. I didn’t get it. Which is not to say I didn’t like it, because by some miracle I did. But I had to try and make sense of it by looking it up on the Internet, and you know that it’s a bad sign when you do stuff like that. This book, according to the Internet, is a classic of underground literature. It’s style is reminicent of William Burroughs, though that’s from the Internet too, because it’s been so long since I read any Burroughs that I couldn’t trust my memory of what his stuff is like. He wrote the preface which is contained in this edition, so that was nice to read.
In retrospect, I should have started with something simplier. We’ve had Ballard’s Empire of the Sun sitting in the bookshelf for a million years, but I read an interview recently with William Gibson where he talks about Ballard being a big influence on him. And you know what a sucker I am for anything gruesome sounding. And while parts of it are unnerving, and disturbing, and you end up searching for meaning which you’re not really sure is there, it is totally worth every second. Read the rest of this entry
Where’s My Cheesecake?
Carlito’s Way
Torres, Edwin (directed by Brian de Palma)
1975, Futura (1993, Universal Pictures)
ISBN 0708817068
Oh man, I love this movie. I’ve seen it loads of times now, but I could never get sick of it. There is almost nothing bad about it. It’s got violence, boobs, disco, drugs… and a story line. A tragic storyline, no less. Like I said, nothing bad about it. It’s one of those movies that I watch any chance I get, but it wasn’t until I rewatched it recently that I felt compelled to read the book that originated the whole thing. It was actually a happy coincidence (the kind of coincidence which is sadly lacking from Carlito Brigante’s life) that I managed to pick it up at a local book fair for only a few dollars.
Carlito’s Way is not a taxing read. I have the Futura edition which stands at 147 pages, which is not a big read at all. The language is… almost quaint, which sounds mental for a true-crime style book, but it’s full of seventies gangsterisms and street talk like “You right, man, you right!” and “Right on!” Heh. Right on, man. That’s not so prevalent in the movie, which is a good thing, but it may have been because the movie was made almost twenty years after the book came out – so, like I say, there’s disco, but not the ‘jive turkey’ back chat to go with it. It’s almost stream of consiousness style, which can make it quite interesting to follow sometimes, but I love the intermingling of Spanish (the fact that there’s a glossary at the back which doesn’t skimp on the swear words also helps).
Seriously, I find it hard to believe that there are people in this world who haven’t yet seen Carlito’s Way, but if any of those people are reading this and think that they might like to, please go watch it before you read this, ’cause after the jump, there are spoilers.
A Regular Robert Deadford
Christine
King, Stephen
Hodder and Staughton, 1983
ISBN: 0450 056740
Welcome to 2012, cublings! Hopefully you are all recovered from any time spent with relations over Christmas and New Year (or any other holiday you might have had forced upon you), and your new years resolutions are listed on your fridge getting frantically ignored. I thought that I’d kick off the book club this year by writing about one of my old favourites, Christine, by Stephen King.
I know that my taste runs to the schlocky end of the spectrum. I’ve embraced that. So, it stands to reason that I should like this book. I mean, you can tell from the first lines on the blurby bit on the back of this book that it’s going to be a treat for the low brow, it goes something like ‘Christine was burrowing into his brain, his subconcience…’ Brilliant, right? I mean, it sounds like the by-line to a Hammer horror or something about brain-parasites or body snatchers. Maybe it’s somehow significant that it is dedicated to George Romero, the director of many brilliant (and Godawful) horror films, not the least the movie Creepshow. Before you ask, no, I’ve never seen the film version of Christine, I’m a bit loathe to, but as usual, willing to take a well placed hint if anyone out there thinks it’s a bit special (or a bit septic, I’m open to either option – having watched The Pillow Book recently, I need something that will blot some of the amount of times I have now seen Ewan McGregor’s…er…zones… out of my head.)
Welcome to the Dark Ages
It would seem that the Golden Age of the Internet is over.
Well, not over, at least, not yet. I was gettin’ my drama on a little bit there. But I figured if a blackout was good enough for Wikipedia, then it’s good enough for me.
There are lots of reasons to rail against the SOPA (Stop Internet Piracy Act) and PIPA (PROTECT IP Act – the PROTECT bit stands for ‘preventing real online threats to economic creativity and thefts’ – it’s the ‘economic creativity’ bit that makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit). Don’t get me wrong – I think that piracy on a major scale is not only dumb, but robs artists, writers and other creative and innovative types of some material reward for their endevours. I understand people need to make money. I really do. It’s always nice to be able to feed ones family, keep the house warm, all that good shit. But in my view, the current way of doing things has come to the end of its cycle, and we need to develop a new paradigm. I know I’m a bit of a starry eyed idealist, and to be honest, I think that there is a point to be made about better regulation of the internet. But not at the expense of freedom of information, at the expense of community supported enterprises like Wikipedia. What I’m really quite worried about is the way that governments (not just the US government – it seems like the raison du jour for a lot of Westernised governments at the moment) are weighing in to protect the interests of privately owned companies, and by doing so undermining freedom of information.
If you are a US citizen, you can protest SOPA/PIPA; or hell, you can at least find out more about it. Here in New Zealand, we have the TPPA (Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement), which I would urge not only all New Zealanders, but also Australians, and everyone from Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. Japan, Canada and Mexico to find out more about too. There are lots of ways that freedom of information is under threat, and it’s up to us as citizens of the new age to find out about it, get informed and decide what side we want to be on.
Citizens of the new age? I think a hippy just invaded my brain. But this shit is really important, so go find out more, go talk to people, and let’s get the knowledge before it’s too late!
