Bringing out the Dead

Now a major motion picture if you hadn't heard. I perfer the book of course, but the movie was entertaining and quoted from the book directly for the most part. Joe Connelly isn't a flowerly writer. His meaning is compressed like Hemmingway somwhat.

"We rushed the dead boy into the emergency room."

The sentence ends a chapter and tells us the outcome without walking us through the scenes, compressing pages into the single adjective "dead." if he was just a boy, the outcome would be uncertain and require more naration. But they rushed the dead boy, that tells us more about them than the boy or the future.

The Coma

"The Pavement, marked with grease and rain and chewing gum. thousands of peices of discarded chewing gum, pressed flat by pedestrians into a constellation. And if I reaches down to touch the paement, I could feel grit beneath my fingers. the grit stuck to the natural oils on my hand. If I lifted my hand and looked at the grit, I could see that like grubby snowflakes each grain was different from the others. Detail. Spectacular. Fractal. "

Alex Garland writes about a dream world experienced by a patient in a coma. the dream-like descriptions are all in first person and even his use of verb tense adds to the surreal feeling of the book. As a whole, the book fails probably for lack of density. It's more of a novella. Nonetheless, certain passages are gripping and totally original.

Bordertown

The book is titled "Bordertown" and regards sympathetically for the way los tejanos have been marginalized in the borderlands. It's an artbook, relying on design, montage and photographs to convey their rhetoric. But as well respected it is visually, there is come clever use of language as well. They set the tone for the rest of the book, not with the opening paragraph, but with a hand written blurb on the second. It clearly declares their book notjust as art, but also as ethos propaganda.

Yo Tengo un pistole

Con manago de marfil

para matar todos los gringos

Qui viennen por ferrocarril!

(I have a pistol

With a marbel handle

With which to kill all the Americans

Who come by railroad)

-Folk tune popular in Chihuahua durring the

Mexican revolution

and the Mexican american war.

HYPNEROTOMACHIA POLIPHILI

Never was there a more dense, multi-faceted tome. Every sentence, capitalization, indentation, and alliteration has secondary and tertiary meanings. The author, still unknown for certain was a cryptomaniac. Even the illustrations contain coded messages.

It was printed in about the year 1500 in a language created by its author using italian grammar with words from latin, tuscan and greek. Translation of the book into english was not even attempted until 1952, but not completed uuntil 1999. Translator Prof. Joscelyn Godwin of Colgate U. did his best to hold the original authors neologisms. The result is gorgeous but also nearly unreadable.

"In this horrid and cuspidinous littoral and most miserable site of the algent and fetorific lake stood daevious Tisiphone, efferal and cruel with her vaparine capillament, her meschine and miserable soul, implacably furibund."

The original pseudo tuscan texts are here:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/HP/hyp000.htm

Béla Tarr's minutes and seconds

"...I despise stories, as they mislead people into believing that something has happened. In fact, nothing really happens as we flee from one condition to another. Because today there are only states of being - all stories have become obsolete and cliched, and have resolved themselves. All that remains is time. This is probably the only thing that's still genuine - time itself: the years, days hours, minutes and seconds." -Béla Tarr

As quoted in Cineville http://mr-lucky.blogspot.com/

details accumulate

Todd Ashley, singer lyrcist, bassist and now blogger.:

"The details accumulate; the information wells up as the city closes in around me. But at first it doesn’t compute; it reads as gibberish, resembles chaos: a maelstrom of dust and smoke, garbage and construction debris, vehicles and animals and people and sewage, music and shouting and confusion."

http://postcards.blogs.com/

Pierre Boulle

Pierre Boulle wrote Bridge over the River Kwai, a book that later became a classic movie. The novel, originally in French was well-translated by Xan Fielding in 1958. It contains two spectacular bricks of language, neither of which made the movie in the inevitable exanguination that has to happen to an epic novel to make it into a 2 hour movie.

The first I print here as it appears in my 1961 time edition .. bowdlerized! The two quotes appear at nearly opposite ends of the book and really show the range of the writer and the story.

"The f---ing bridge still isn't built. the f---ing Emperors f---ing railway still hasn't got across the f---ing river in this f---ing country. The f---ing C.O.; he knows what he's talking about. If you see him, tell him we're all for him. The f---ing baboon hasn't heard the last of the f---ing British army."

"All that remained now was what the Colonel called the trimmings, which would give the construction that finished look in which the practiced eye can at once recognize, in no matter what part of the world, the craftsmanship of the European and the Anglo-Saxon sense of perfection."

Craig D. Lindsey

It's a fine day that I read a record review worth reading.
http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/view.php?id=14350

"...the most shocking slam comes when he [Josh Love] compares Winehouse to our more synthetic Stateside pop stars. “People call Ashlee and Britney artificial all the time,” Love wrote, “but they feel 10 times more genuinely expressive than Winehouse.” Yeah, he’s going to hell for that one—and let’s hope Lester Bangs, Paul Nelson and Ellen Willis are there to take turns sodomizing him with red-hot rhino horns."

All this in defense of a not-so-fair maiden; Amy Winehouse.

In the Devil's Larder

FromVignette 54 from the Devil's Larder, by Jim Crace.

"The Devil wanders with his straw sack at night through the meadows and the woods behind the town. He's there we're told, to plant the mushrooms that he's raised in Hell, where there's no light to green them, so that the gatherers who come at dawn, against the wisdoms of the coutryside, can satisfy their appetites for sickeners or conjurors, or fungi smelling of dead flesh and tasting of nothing when they're cooked. He feeds them dissapointments, nightmares. fevers. indigestion, fear."

Hot damn that's good.

Johannes Bobrowski

"How beautiful a house is, now in the night. The wind drops that little bit of dust by the roadside before it swings around and up onto the roof, bends over to the right, looks down at the bed of onions, and then jumps off the ridge, one hand on the chimney."
-Johannes Bobrowski

Bobrowski was from East Germany but as far as he was concerned he was Prussian. It makes him the last great writer in Prussian literature as he was the last one in Prussia at the time. If you're curious how he could so freely add anthropomorphize the wind, read his works. I reccomend Darkness and a Little Light as a good collection.

From the Crossing

“The man and his burden passed on forever out of that nameless crossroads and the woman stepped once more into the street and the children followed and all continued on to their appointed places which as some believe were chosen long ago even to the beginning of the world.”

-Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

Days of Life and Death and Escape to the Moon

The best book I've ever read, and possibley the best book William Saroyan ever wrote. I haven't read all of his work, but with an estimated 200 unpublished works alone... I dont expect I'll get a comprehensive position on that in this lifetime.

And of course what they [Writers] have managed to say, at their best, has been magnificent, has been incredible, has been beautiful, but it hasn't been coffee, cigarettes, travel, people, beer, whiskey, gambling, fornication, laughter, talk, and pleasure.
-William Saroyan.

you can buy the book for $3 used. Go get it.

Bishop Pero Fernandes

"The locals, impressed with the glorious civilization the bishop represented and eager to absorb it in its totality, prompty ate him."

Well great goddamn. Not only is that a sentence, that's almost a life story, it say everything. it tells the before the after the cause the consequences. It's truly brilliant. Whish I knew who wrote it. I think I cut the clipping from an inflight magazine.

Not only serpents but stones

I hate shakespeare. But this was a great sentence.

"If we live in language at all, it is only after we really live, after we live outside language, as mute as not only oceans but mountains, not only serpents but stones."

One Very Hot Day

A terribly dry book on the Vietnam war. Not the best I've read by far, and not the worst, but in the middle of all the stiff language David Halberstam cuts loose for ONE SENTENCE.

"It had been a day and a night and a day again of terrible and hysterial bitterness and fear and death -of fear being passed among them in the confusion like a great contagious disease, of men groaning and dying and screaming in both languages, of Americans shouting to get those sons of bitches moving, the Vietnamese saying again and again it was not the right time, the must pick the right moment, the Americans saying, no goddamn it now, or we'll all die in this stinking wet hell-hole, and the Vietnamese saying not now, we must wait, take cover, and the Americans shouting, there is no god-damn cover, and always the wailing and the shivering in the background."

...On Howlin' Wolf

http://www.bubblegum-machine.com/week108.html A fairly hip MP3 blog. It's editor, (who shall remain nameless as I assume that is their wish) wrote the following about The one and only Howlin' Wolf.

"His songs came from that place where the soul of a man never dies; where highway 49 meets highway 61 and men barter with the devil while smoking unfiltered cigarettes -he was the backdoor man and the bullcow..."

Hesse

Steppenwolf is superior to Siddartha, but Siddartha for all it's Buddhist trappings became the more classic tome.

"The devil is the spirit and we are his unhappy children; we have fallen our of nature and hang suspended in space."

The Devil and Sonny Liston

It's hard to Overrate Nick Tosches, but some hipsters manage. I quote his bography of Sonny Liston here, when he was at what I expect post-humously will be considered his peak.

"I did not know that it would also reveal the forces of another, unexplored darkness, an underworld unto itself and I did not know, above all , that it would reveal a soul that, even amid the darkness in which it dwealt, eluded all concepts of good and evil, of right and wrong, of light and darkness themselves."

Blood Oranges

It's the same book as Elementary Particles, which is the same book as Winteresse and others I am sure. But this was a great phrase by John Hawkes.

"Our unwanted intruder meant to say: that he had slept in dark caves, that he had burried countless dead ewes, that he also knew what is was like to bury children, that death was forment, only men could work in the service of death, that death was for men."

City paper?

Rarely do I like a record review. J. Edward Keyes actually writes to write sometimes. This one was fine in that regard.
http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2006-01-19/music.shtml


Each note was like the flick of a moist, pink tongue, evincing a kind of assurance and poise and command that—for the first time—made the Power part of Marshall's moniker seem like more than a cruel joke.