Book Report.

Hi there. I hope you're good.

These days I've been communing with lonely souls in literature.

Just finished Catcher in the Rye. I think I mentioned in a previous entry that I had started this book before and couldn't finish, because Holden Caufield made me angry. I forgot my anger the second time around, and was able to feel so much sympathy this boy. For all the emotions he didn't have words for. For all the times he attempted to reach out to people who let him down, spiraling out of control, through surprising moments of honest and self-knowledge. The book left me speechless.

Perfume's Jean-Baptiste Grenouille's impulses got perverted due to a complete absence of love and care in his life. Even Ignatius J. Reilly (A Confederacy of Dunces), who covers his insecurity in overblown language and food, makes hilarious, sad sense to me.

I also read the Griffin and Sabine box set. This is a beautiful work. It's a series of letters between people who live on the opposite sides of the world. Actual letters and postcards. It's gorgeous.

But.

I found myself more than a little frustrated with the characters, specifically with the way they run from what they claim they want the most. My anger at their wasted opportunity forced me back into my own life, to my own focus on what I want the most.

And all the ways in which I run from it myself.

Next up: Jeanette Winterson's The Passion.

Bizarreness on the recording front: My drummer/producer broke his finger. Ack! He's recovering well though, and all should be on track for the mid February record date. This is getting surreal.

I am going to do February Album Writing Month, if only to counteract the surreality.

http://www.fawm.org

jules

A Good Read.

I'm bushed at the end of a long, long workweek. There's a car coming to pick me up and take me home in ten minutes.

I finished A Confederacy of Dunces today. What a great book.

I'm surprised, actually, that the story was as touching to me as it was.

There's an interesting story behind the book, as well - the author committed suicide at age 32 - 11 years before the book was published. His mother forced her way into the office of a Loyola University professor, and browbeat the man into reading the book, which led to its publication and winning of the Pulitzer Prize.

There have been plans to make it a movie forever, but the potential leads kept dying - John Belushi, John Candy, Chris Farley.

Catcher in the Rye is next, novel-wise. I started reading it before, actually, but got so annoyed at Holden Caufield that I put it down. I'll get through it this time.

Time to run...home. Bed. It's the end of the week, baybee!

jules

A Late Afternoon Monday Post.

Woah, I'm still tired.

It's late afternoon Monday. Sunday was *nuts* at work (I was there again on my own), and I reached home at 11pm last night *incredibly* wiped out. Slept until an embarrasing 11am.

Today I've had my mind squarely on Christmas. My immediate family will get gifts, mostly bought online. I'll tell you all about my journey into Operation Santa tomorrow. I plan on shopping for Operation Santa tomorrow, and sending all of Christmas off through the post early Wednesday. A bit of coordination and planning is required, but that's no problem. I'm a list-making machine.

It will be nice to have the gift-sending out of the way.

I'm feeling schizophrenic these days, having too many things I could focus on at any one time. If I'm knitting, I'd rather be reading. If I'm reading, I'd rather be playing music. My head is darting from one thing to another. Add caffeine to that and I'm a little brown jumping bean. There are about three weeks of emails to answer.

It has been good to read more lately. The Information was sharply written, but the ending left me scratching my head. And a little angry, to be honest. I'm all for stream-of-conscious expression. But The Information suddenly drops its carefully crafted plot and descends into dropped hints and gobbledygook. It's just not clear what *happened*. I'm a little disappointed.

Sexing the Cherry was good, a little fairy-tale-ish. I wonder if Jeanette Winterson means her writing to be an obvious comment on the sexes. Lots of good, surprisingly good, quotes that left me clutching my chest on the subway.

"A man or woman sunk in dreams that cannot be spoken, about a life they do not possess, comes suddenly to a door in the wall. They open it. Beyond the door is that life and a man or a woman to whom it is already natural. It may not be possessions they want, it may very well be the lack of them, but the secret life is suddenly revealed. This is their true home and this is their beloved.

I may be cynical when I say that very rarely is the beloved more than a shaping spirit for the lover's dreams. And perhaps such a thing is enough. To be a muse may be enough. The pain is when the dreams change, as they do, as they must. Suddenly the enchanted city fades and you are left alone again in the windy desert. As for your beloved, she didn't understand you. The truth is, you never understood yourself."

I can't lie, this pinged on the relationship I ditched in September.

Jeanette curiously echoes many of my own thoughts through her characters. Like this one:

"The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger...easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help. We are alone in this quest...I have met a great many pilgrims on their way towards God and I wonder why they have chosen to look for him rather than themselves.

Perhaps I'm missing the point - perhaps whilst looking for someone else you might come across yourself unexpectedly, in a garden somewhere or on a moutain watching the rain. But they don't seem to care about who they are. Some of them have told me that the very point of searching for God is to forget about oneself, to lose oneself for ever. But it is not difficult to lose onself, or is it the ego they are talking about, the hollow, screaming cadaver that has no spirit within it?

I think that cadaver is only the ideal self run mad, and if the other life, the secret life, could be found and brought home, then a person might live in peace and have no need for God. After all, He has no need for us, being complete."

I started Stephen King's Gerald's Game (unable to find Winston Ochse's Scarecrow Gods anywhere) on the way home. It's been great to get exposed to all these different writing styles, and try to figure out how I fit in between them. If at all.

Food now. Can I tell you a secret? I *love* brussel sprouts. I like them a little bit crunchy even, steamed and then fried a little.

Going to go make some.

yum,

jules

Up From The Underground.

Howdy, Folks, out there in the ether.

Sorry to be away for so long. My album sessions started Monday. I was sucked into the album vortex until 10pm tonight, when I came home, made myself a turkey burger, and finally felt like I could exhale for the first time in days.

It has not been an easy week.

Sitting in front of a microphone with a guitar in my hand has brought up *all* my stuff, my yucky psychological stuff. At once. I'm working through it, though. We are recording in a space that's actually in a (sometimes noisy) rehearsal studio, so there have been a few things to negotiate. But, we've gotten down buildable versions of seven songs, as of this writing. I get a week and a half off, and then we try to get the other half of the basic tracks for the record down in two days.

I am exhausted.

I love my producers.

They are polar opposites of each other, almost. They are good friends, but have very different ways of working on music, and it has been such a growth exercise to watch them working it all out, and to work it out with them. They are talented, conscientious men, my fellow soldiers in a difficult task. I am lucky to have them.

Did I mention that I *love* my producers?

*big smile*

I have also been whittling away at my 101 in the few spare hours I've had. I finished The Information and started Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry. My next book will be Weston Ochse's Scarecrow Gods, since he was kind enough to leave a comment on the blog (thank you, Weston!).

And, I'll have something to show you tomorrow, and another thing to cross off the list....

:)

jules

Succumbing To Symmetry.

Okay, so, I did it.

I succumbed to symmetry and added three more books to my books list. So that's 75 books to read (and 75 movies). I am a sucker for symmetry. And maybe now you know a *leetle* too much about my personality.

The three books I added are all Bram Stoker Award Winners for First Novels (the Bram Stoker Awards are given for horror/supernatural writing, as per wikipedia, "fiction in any medium intended to scare, unsettle or horrify the reader"). The novel I'm writing is probably psychological horror, so I thought it'd be good research to look at what other first novelists in the genre are doing.

It's twenty minutes to six and I'm getting a little depressed. There's something that makes me a little depressed when I spend all day in the house, like I've wasted a day of my life. Even though I fully intended to lay here all day. I had a barely coherent conversation with Producer #1 (remind me never to call someone on the phone before I'm fully awake) and we're meeting to start work on my album a day early. I.e., tomorrow.

jules

Under The Duvet. On A Sunday.

I'm home from work today and deep into The Information. This guy sends me running to the dictionary every page. I just had to share this sentence with you:

On the table, untouched, there stood a basket of sauce-glued nachos, and heavily cooling tortilla, as inert as an organ on a medical tray.

I stared at this sentence for several minutes before I could move on.

It's cold, and will be hard to extricate myself from the blankets today. I've got snacks by my bedside and a good book in hand, no one will hear from me before mid-day tomorrow. I *should* go to the street and get a New York Times, having said I would search its pages once a month for an event to get me out into the world.

The temperature easily freezes away my guilt, however. I have no problem pulling the covers up to my chin and happily allowing Martin Amis to slice me up with his metaphors until the sun goes down.

Every day AshWalker's blog counfounds me a little more. The Twang of the Void snakes to the most curious corners of pop/internet/New York culture. How does he find this stuff?

KMP's sig on the NaNo Singles forum contains this quote:

"One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name." --William Travis

Isn't that lovely? One crowded hour of glorious life. It's like music.

jules

What A Great Book.

I've started Martin Amis's The Information.

This guy's writing is amazing. Smart. I really get the "show, don't tell" thing with what he's doing. Snappy, snide, pulling from the ether. The book is about a down-and-out writer's jealousy towards another, a friend who he deems to be less talented. Amis really takes me down there. There's a gem sentence on every page.

And I'm on chapter 2.

I can't help thinking about the thing I just wrote that is striving to be a novel.

*sigh*

Anyhow, more later. With the book done, I feel my mind freeing up so I can concentrate more on 101.

But, what to get Mom for Christmas?

j.

101 — List of 75 Books.

I've spent all day compiling this list, instead of working on my charts.

Hee hee.

1. RABBIT IS RICH by John Updike
2. A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by James Joyce
3. LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov
4. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee
5. GRAVITY'S RAINBOW by Thomas Pynchon
6. THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner
7. THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by J.D. Salinger
8. NATIVE SON by Richard Wright
9. INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison
10. THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy
11. THE END OF THE AFFAIR by Graham Greene
12. LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding
13. THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck
14. CATCH-22 by Joseph Heller
15. TROPIC OF CANCER by Henry Miller
16. WATERSHIP DOWN by Richard Adams
17. THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE by James M. Cain
18. GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN by James Baldwin
19. THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson McCullers
20. THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLES by John Cheever
21. HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad
22. THE INFORMATION by Martin Amis (12/14/06)
23. THE TIME TRAVELERS WIFE by Audrey Niffenegger
24. BELOVED by Toni Morrison
25. OF HUMAN BONDAGE by W. Somerset Maugham
26. NAKED LUNCH by William S. Burroughs
27. THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway
28. THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD by Zora Neale Hurston
29. DELIVERANCE by James Dickey
30. THE BIG SLEEP by Raymond Chandler
31. A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY by John Irving
32. THE STAND by Stephen King
33. MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN by Salman Rushdie
34. DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by Willa Cather
35. THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER by Tom Clancy
36. NORWEGIAN WOOD by Haruki Murakami
37. LIGHT IN AUGUST by William Faulkner
38. SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES by Ray Bradbury
39. GRIFFIN AND SABINE by Nick Bantock (1/20/07)
40. HUMBOLDT'S GIFT by Saul Bellow
41. A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES by John Kennedy Toole (1/23/07)
42. THE BELL JAR by Sylvia Plath
43. GERALD’S GAME by Stephen King (12/22/06)
44. UBIK by Philip K. Dick
45. SPARES by Michael Marshall Smith
46. TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf
47. THE DOOR INTO SUMMER by Robert Heinlein
48. PERFUME by Patrick Suskind (1/18/07)
49. THE DAY OF THE LOCUST by Nathanael West
50. GODBODY by Theodore Sturgeon
51. SEXING THE CHERRY by Jeanette Winterson (12/16/06)
52. THE PASSION by Jeanette Winterson (2/3/07)
53. A PERFECT CRIME by Peter Abrahams
54. A WALK IN THE WOODS by Bill Bryson
55. THE POISONWOOD BIBLE by Barbara Kingsolver
56. THE LIAR’S CLUB by Mary Karr
57. THE FIRM by John Grisham
58. THE GOLD COAST by Nelson DeMille
59. THE WOMAN WHO WALKED INTO DOORS by Roddy Doyle
60. WHITE NOISE by Don DeLillo
61. JONATHAN STRANGE & MR. NORRELL by Susanna Clarke
62. ... AND CALL ME CONRAD (AKA THIS IMMORTAL) by Roger Zelazny
63. AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RED by Anne Carson
64. NEUROMANCER by William Gibson
65. THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS (REMEMBERING TOMORROW) by Ursula K. Le Guin
66. WHITE TEETH: A NOVEL by Zadie Smith
67. THE HARMONY SILK FACTORY by Tash Aw
68. COME TO GRIEF by Dick Francis
69. BONES by Jan Burke
70. PURPLE HIBISCUS: A NOVEL by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi
71. THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald
72. ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac
73. THE LOVELY BONES by Alice Sebold
74. THE RISING by Brian Keene
75. PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT by Philip Roth