A very happy eighth birthday to Speedy Snail. Rory Ewins has been maintaining a grand arsenal of academic writing, cartoons, computer advice columns (Dr. Komputor) — in short, a variegated life preserved in web form reflecting the great possibilities of the personal web. I met Rory once — a good seven years ago at Fray Day 4. I was then posting a good deal of sophomoric personal material to the Web. But to my great shock, Rory recognized me and introduced himself. Not being among the cool kids, Rory and I both performed our material late in the night in front of a crowd. I recall capacious plumes of marijuana smoke drifting over the heads of disinterested twentysomethings sitting on the front couches at Cellspace. It was an audience that grew distressingly less interested with the fine folks who dared to share their stories. Thankfully, a German friend and I were there, sober, laughing hysterically at Rory’s grand delivery of a Madagascar tale. (You can find the audio here. Oddly enough, my own performance, which chronicled the history of a love seat, appears to have been dropped and unreferenced by those who have deemed me not part of history.)
Incidentally, Speedy Snail’s birthday reminds me that edrants celebrated seven years on the Web back in May.
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
Thanks, Ed, I’m honoured. Fray Day 4 seems a long time ago, doesn’t it?
(I think that RealAudio stream is broken, actually – I contacted Derek a year ago and he sent me a copy of my bit of the audio, now parked in a forgotten corner of said arsenal…)