Last night was bloody and sore and violent, like a battlefield before people invented spears and swords. And, in the haze, a sanguine haze coloured by too much alcohol and self-recrimination, something was hatched, an Athena full-born who demanded the splitting of my head. I’m getting carried away. The anger in me seems like my Janus flip side to the lightness that has occupied my self and soul when the shades are drawn.

This afternoon someone sent me a great poem by a poet who I was not at all aware of: Osip Mandel’stam. How delicious he is! Here is for joy’s sake, from my hands:

For joy’s sake, from my hands,
take some honey and some sun,
as Persephone’s bees told us.

Not to be freed, the unmoored boat.
Not to be heard, fur-booted shadows.
Not to be silenced, life’s dark terrors.

Now we only have kisses,
dry and bristling like bees,
that die when they leave the hive.

Rustling in clear glades of night,
in the dense forests of Taygetos,
time feeds them; honeysuckle; mint.

For joy’s sake take my strange gift,
this simple thread of dead, dried bees,
turned honey in the sun.

What a treat to have discovered all this dark turning treacly words that stamp their love with so much authority. And who was the sender? A tall Russian boy with a penchant for playing football badly that I met while on a photo shoot. He was reading Kleist and made fun of my Bill Bryson book, which naturally led to some interesting verbal parrying while waiting for the photographer to tell us how to pose. Models. I was surprised, really, to find out that I wasn’t the only model around with a serious literary bent. I guess, hell, it is Paris.

Finally, in other news, they are carrying the Superbowl on French National TV again this year. I had no idea that the Colts were up against the Bears. I had idea the Bears were back to being good. Anyone remember the Refridgerator? Anyone remember the Chicago Bears Superbowl Shuffle? 

When I first read Thomas Hardy’s "Tess of the D’Urbervilles" I was young, maybe a scant thirteen years old. At that time, product of one very ambitious asian mother dragon, I had been gobbling up as many classics as I could. Reading a classic was seen as good because it belonged to high culture. Luckily for me, and I do think this was a fortunate stroke of luck, I always loved reading and dealt with that demand quite readily. But what could be said of my understanding?

How could I know anything about the pure eternal love of Tess for Angel Clare, or even why Alex was portrayed as so villainous when really he did seem to be the only one I could relate to? (more…)

Standing on the balcony at the Theatre du Chatelet, there is a commanding view of the Seine, the fountain, the overarching justice buildings and the high towers of Notre Dame. It’s a view that is as Parisian as Paris could be, like the view of the Eiffel Tower from the hills of Montmartre, or the view of the Louvre from the Left Bank. It’s a tourist’s wet dream. But it’s not everyday that one can have this view. Though the Theatre is open for several variety shows, access is often forbidden to the top balcony. Still, having the view tonight was the least of all luxuries.

For those who waited around, for those not wasted on acid or other ancillary itchiness, the plush red seats between one and two in the morning was heaven on earth. After midnight, the theatre was evacuated of the techno wastoids while the roadies prepared the stage for Gonzales. The wait for this, the highlight of the Francofffonies soirée, was a good forty-five minutes. But hey, the last time Gonzo played a free concert in Paris for last year’s Nuit Blanche, the wait was a good four hours long.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to write something about the German film adaptation of Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles, Elementarteilchen, but having seen the film, I feel dreadfully compelled to give my two cents. This film has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the ideas in the book. Besides the rewrite of the ending, the glossing over of many key moments in the book, what this film shows is how seriously a shallow reading of The Elementary Particles reduces the story to dross. The film was hailed by both critics and public in Germany. Germans either have a poor translation on their hands, or there exists an alarming willful miscomprehension, in the humanist reading by the people of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, of this ultimate anti-human novel .

I really don’t want to spill too many beans but here are some short points on why this film cannot be linked to the book. *ATTENTION: SPOILERS*
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I have just finished reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay… reading it over a course of a couple of days. I must have started it around four days ago, reading it in fifty page chunks at each setting. Last night, starting on page 145 at around one in the morning, I found myself unable to let it go. Seven hours later, the book was finished. Michael Chabon’s book starts like the Golem that is its central metaphor, huge yet weightless. Yet, in the 650-odd pages is a frighteningly complete universe, a universe fraught with madness, love and sheer life. Given that its subject matter is comic books, the book reads closely like a Stan Lee tale. I couldn’t let go of any of the characters, from Joe Kavaliers tragic escape from Prague, to Sam as the NY Jewish boy ripping together tales of fantastic exoticism as "the impossible solutions to insoluble problems," Rosa Saks as the bohemian love interest, and all sorts of various characters, each equally endearing and maddening in their chutzpah, including a memorable cameo by Salvador Dali and Orson Welles. I unreservedly LOVE this book and will probably write something more coherent when I get some more time after my upcoming week long vacation in Dordogne. All I can say is that it inspired me profoundly… now I need to get some sleep. See y’all in a week.

Michael Chabon on the Golem and writing:

"Since reading "The Idea of the Golem," I have come to see this fear, this sense of my own imperilment by my creations, as not only an inevitable, necessary part of writing fiction but as virtual guarantor, insofar as such a thing is possible, of the power of my work: as a sign that I am on the right track, that I am following the recipe correctly, speaking the proper spells. Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, (more…)

Lunar Park was finished over a course of two mornings, one evening and a subway ride. I think it a fine book. In an interview, Ellis said that he’s tired of being branded as the angry young man that says the world is shit because he would hope we all know the world is shit and saying it is unnecessary. Still, in the book I find the recurring scenes of parental idiocy and child medication to be his new way of saying the world sucks, albeit from an angry middle-aged man. The most wonderful aspect of Lunar Park was how easily it propelled itself forward, how much fun it is to read about battery operated toys that take on a life of their own, the sinful wafts from Stephen King land (references to the Shining, Pet Sematary and IT), and the oddly failed attempt at redemption. There’s something so damn human about beige carpet growing into green shag.

So now I’m reading Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, a novel he wrote when he was 24. 24. 24. Yes, 24. Why is age important? (more…)

I have been trying to read Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel Mason & Dixon for the last month. It didn’t seem worth it to change the image on the top left since I can’t say I’m reading something I can’t seem to get past the fortieth page. Not to say it’s a bad book, but 19th century speak by salty dogs coupled with Pynchon’s usual miasma-like story telling doesn’t make for easy reading.

And easy reading I am in need of. These last two months of debauchery and systematic self-inflicted abuse have left little time for serious forays into a literary land. So, I’ve abandoned ship, jumped overboard, and roared straight into home turf. Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park is exactly the kind of book I can relate to right now. The characters seemed photocopied from my life and I’ve always been a fan of Stephen King.

I like this. I really do. Word up to Sam, who describes the thingee better than I do.

I fed it Frank Zappa and it gave me back the Thirteen Floor Elevators. I fed it Sam Prekop and it kicked in some Sea and Cake… I gave it Slayer. It gave me Death. Sunday I’m in love.