Year / 2004

by DrMabuse

White Bread

So listen all, peeps. We got this here Whitbread dope piquing crosst the pond. My boy David Mitchell got jacked, dig, but there other choices instead. Add some shortening to them cookies, biatch, and you get a list so simple that my ditch-dirty cuz could bake youze some mean pumpernickel blinded.

Dwellin’ on da fiction:

So we gots us a clear favorite with Alan Hollingshurst. Wasn’t enough for The Line of Beauty to scarf the Booker, now it needs Whitbread too. Sheet, book’s got bigger appetite than my libid. Leave the boy alone. Bee-effin-seiged by ‘views, he is. Cat can’t stop answering dubyaass questions. So he out, cause we all tired of his Thatcherism-ramblin’ ass.

Kate Atkinson has nice name and tome titled Case Histories. No doubt ever’one’s main forens-fixated folk is pleased by this. Still, the girl’s favorite books are hackneyed as hell, and I ain’t talkin’ taxi. So she out too, cause we like influences spiced, if you know what I’m sayin’.

Annie Levy’s got that Small Island, smart, sassy and cerebral. We like that and nice curves in a hot momma. But more postwar posturin’? We sick of the Gravity’s Rainbow offshoots, dig? Maybe ’cause we drinking 40s and revisiting the mack daddy who started all this — who is a lot clearer than these messy folk. No, Levy’s out, just cuz we be chillin’ through year’s end.

Then there’s this freedom-soundin’ author named Louis de Bernieres with Birds Without Wings. Boy’s humble with the Tolstoy comparisons. Sounds like a right cat. Our horse is on him. Go Louis go! We may be movin’ on up to Paris if that Penn Ave. bad lay push us in da slums.

by DrMabuse

Iowa Yin-Yang

Tonight, at Modern Times, two University of Iowa grads read from two books issued from University of Iowa Press. Both books were remarkably compact (both around 135 pages) and both authors had won several awards. It is here that the similarities end between Marilyn Abildskov and Merrill Feitell. (Although, you see? They also have similar first names!)

Both read for about twenty minutes: Abildskov from The Men in My Country and Feitell from Here Beneath Low Flying Planes. Abildskov’s book is a highly personal memoir set in Japan about her days as an English teacher, while Feitell’s book is a collection of short stories (and winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award).

After their readings were up, the two answered a handful of questions, before Marilyn took the mike and began interviewing Merill and expressed how astonished she was at Merill’s output, before Merill confessed that writing her California-based novel was an uphill battle.

Even so, the two ladies demonstrated that there’s one heck of a demand for Iowa writers here in San Francisco. It was SRO by the time I got there, but I somehow managed to find a strange seat watching the two authors in profile. I felt a bit like Tom Landry, which is a strange sensation to feel at a reading.

Incidentally, I’ve read The Men in My Country and I’ve been trying to talk Marilyn (a friend of mine) into a Segundo interview. I made an impassioned pitch to her that she did indeed have things to say, but we’ll see.

by DrMabuse

Status Report

  1. I am badly in need of a vacation. I have been waiting for Thanksgiving to roll around, but alas even two weeks away is an eternity.
  2. Because of the general fatigue, my reading speed has dropped to an all-time low. A mere 75 pages a day, if that. It’s not the books I fault, but a certain malaise that nags at me. Why does literature matter? It does, don’t get me wrong. But in prioritizing reading and responding above other things, am I not the apolitical parvenu remaining blissfully ignorant in Stalinist Russia?
  3. November’s election: oh, how to fight off the bitter aftertaste! And why is the right so angry? They won this motherfucker!
  4. Writing is pathetic. We’re talking 400 words or so a day and that involves staring at a screen for about two hours, putting a ZoneAlarm Internet Lock on the comp. And even then, none of it matters. Not the poetic descriptions of vagrants fading into urban colors, not the dialogue involving choices. We’re talking earnest questions that nobody wants to answer. Understandable.
  5. I have been trying to avoid all political news. Fallujah, rigged elections, mandates, tax code readjusted for the rich. But this, apparently, is an impossibility. My moral concern about my country has eaten away hours of my time — reading news stories, replies, angry bloggers, the like. Before I know it, it’s 2 AM. The sad thing is I haven’t a clue as to how we can win. A few general ideas, sure. But nothing within my current existential purview. What a waste!
  6. Invariably, people want to talk politics in social clusters. And I’m sick sick sick of it. Somehow, everything else seems trivial. You can’t talk about a winning restaurant or a fantastic feeling someone had last week without coming across like a complete and utter cad. To resist social discourse is to be Donne’s island, but it all leaves me feeling spent and secluded these days. And so I’m reluctant to chatter or socialize, even when I force myself to. Plus, I am now very cognizant of stupid people and I don’t like these elitist impulses.
  7. There are strange people taking away the solitary time I need during my weekday lunches to remain a happy and sane person. And apparently I’m not alone. The strange people in question have sensed the dip in cheeeriness and have brought in their efficiency experts and their positive values programs and their Leo Buscalgia rhetroic (accompanied by milky New Agers who resemble the palette of Cream & Wheat and cherub-cheeked bald guys who haven’t smiled convincingly since 1986), and it all makes everyone feel uncomfortable. And they are rebuked in whispers.
  8. There is a general feeling of defeat in the Financial District. People are overworked, nobody’s hiring. This is the new American way — at least for the next four years. And while one can complain, the general sense is that one should not if she expects to keep her job. It is much like the mentality behind the Great Depression. Guilt for having to settle within a socioeconomic archipelago of overqualification.
  9. There are surely better ways to eke one’s existence than this.
  10. I have no shame about how these points are interpreted.
  11. I’m a cheery soul and I’m fighting every impulse that resembles that moment in Happiness where Ben Gazarra willingly applies the salt to his meal. As long as I exist on this planet, I will not throw in the towel. But I weep at the growing batallion of Gazarras who have seemingly infiltrated every urban hot pocket.
by DrMabuse

Beating a Dead Horse

This morning, several conservative litbloggers weighed in on the Red States vs. Blue States business.

Well, when you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way.

Really, I haven’t seen such vitriolic political nonsense in this nation since the Baltimore Riots of 1812 and 1861. (And if Baltimore is the place that the shit starts stirring, I expect the Hag to offer a Daily Riot Likelihood Report.) Let’s not make that mistake, shall we? The election’s over, the nation’s divided. Depending upon where you sit, the country is either (a) going to hell in a handbasket or (b) moving in the direction the people want it to. How about this: Can we move on now? You have your side, we have ours. You’ll have a cakewalk, we’ll have a fight. Blah blah blah.

But in the end, we’ll kick your asses. We always do.