new music: bob mould's "i'm sorry, baby, but you can't stand in my light anymore"

another one of my occasional music posts. it's more than necessary, however, to direct your attention to the new single by mr. bob mould, whom all of you should revere.



bob mould - i'm sorry baby, but you can't stand in my light anymore (via captain's dead)

don't moan about the auto-tuned vocals - he started it a few years ago, and it seems we need to arrange ourselves with the fact that he won't stop any time soon. apart from that, a classic mould piece in folk-rock mode. hopefully, the record will live up to what the single promises.

back in the 90s, i - as usual - spent the night over at a friend's, playing c64-games until the early morning. said friend was into hiphop, but also fugazi, and he pointed out that sugar were a pretty good sountrack to jump'n'run games in the vein of mario bros. since their music had such a colourful, bubblegum-like quality to it. looking back, i can only say that the gum certainly hasn't lost its flavour yet.

btw: if you haven't checked out sugar or hüsker dü before, your life has been a waste of time up to this very moment. get started!

passages: "the dead"

yeah, it's the holidays! thus, more time for blogging... currently reading the new david sedaris book, and waiting for my copy of jeff walters' "citizen vince." since i've got no book to review at the moment, i'll introduce a new feature: there'll be regular posts that contain passages from literary works that i find worth your while.

here's the first one:

"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

this is arguably one of the most beautiful passages in literature. it's the closing paragraph of james joyce's short story "the dead" out of dubliners, before he went all stream-of-consciousness. i was never too interested in any other work by joyce (though i did have a go at "portrait of the artist as a young man" once), but this is simply stellar writing. i read it while being stuck at the celebration of my grandfather's 90th birthday at the end of winter, 1999, and the memory never left.

new -ish fiction: matt ruff's "safe negro travel guide"

oh, i forgot that i promised some links to short stories on the web. so here's another one:

matt ruff - safe negro travel guide

it's ctulhu once again! i think it's kind of disappointing that the story stops when it starts, but still... ruff writes that this was supposed to be the exposition to a whole tv series called lovecraft country, and these are basically the leftovers. whatever - enjoy!

zzzzz.... zombies: max brooks' "world war z"

in the unlikely case that anyone is still checking this site - i've been terribly busy lately (new job and all), thus the negligence of the blog. also, i've heard rumours that i need to update my 'google stats,' whatever that means. help is appreciated.

so, just a short entry this time. due to me being a full-time teacher now, i haven't had time to read much. however, there's one book i managed to finish:




max brooks, author of the zombie survial guide and son of mel brooks, delivers a story about - you might have guessed already - a world-wide war against the undead. the interesting thing is that he doesn't stick to convential horror lore - instead, he presents a fictional non-fictional account of the dawn, spread and eventual defeat of a zombie pandemic in the not-too-distant future. the book consists of interviews with veterans of said conflict which detail the economic, military and political impact of the rise of the living dead.

overall, it's a good read. especially brooks' observations concerning the consequences of a global downturn struck me as eerily relevant in the face of the economic crisis we're facing today. also, it's a strange coincidence that his descriptions of the unnamed, heroic us president more than once mirror obama, although there are hints in the text that the vice-president, nick-named 'the whacko' for his radical politics, is an african american, not the president himself. talk about fact outrunning fiction.

however, brooks is not a great writer: especially his characterizations are mostly ham-fisted, clumsy and rely on tried-and-tested stereotypes far too much. which, of course, is a problem for a book that basically evolves around the frequent introduction of new characters who get to voice their point of view. especially the unconvincing narrative voices of the american survivors of world war z are often hard to bear, in some cases insufferable.

but still, the novel manages to entertain. i once read an editorial piece in time out where the author tried hard to come to terms with the fact that he actually enjoyed "the da vinci code'" despite dan brown's abysmal writing - it's not as bad in brooks' case; his text is cleverly constructed, well-paced and full of interesting ideas. which, in turn, makes me realize that he might not be a bad writer after all, since all of the things mentioned above are, of course, essentials of storytelling. it's just that i (as pointed out earlier) like books with fully-realized characters, which is what brooks doesn't pull off.

well, so much for the undead. the entry turned out not to be so short after all. taking a look at the books and stories i reviewed so far, it looks as if i mainly stick to horror/fantasy-tinged ficition with a literary bend. that's quite a surprise to me, since i always liked to think of myself as an aficionado of post-postmodern serious stuff. time to face the facts: i'll have to write something about pynchon or gaddis, otherwise my self-perception will be completely fucked.

now: back to work. get your guns, your machetes, canned food and a huge supply of clean water. and always aim for the head. good night.

new-ish fiction: neil gaiman's "a study in emerald"

a thought came to my mind: because i've always been terribly afraid of jail sentences, i feel hesistant about posting mp3s here. however, since this thing is supposed to be primarily about literature, i have decided to put up links to good short stories every once in a while.

the first story to be thus honored is neil gaiman's "a study in emerald." i don't really know whether it'll make sense to you if you haven't read something by h.p. lovecraft at some point in your life, so here's a primer: this writer (lovecraft, that is) developed an intricate cosmos populated by all sorts of creepy, pseudo-divine alien entities with funny names like cthulhu or nyarlathotep, and there's the constant threat of them being unleashed upon the unwitting human population. aesthetically, lovecraft drives home the feeling of constant, lingering malice by making frequent use of a quite limited set of adjectives (think "blasphemous," "unnameable" etc.) and generally refraining from actually describing the monsters that haunt his protagonists, focusing on the psychological terror of the - mostly doomed - characters instead. if you ever wondered where a good deal of metal bands get their lyrical inspirations from - here's the source. the hellboy comics and movies are also related.

i read lovecraft when i was really young and i'm not sure whether he's a great author (as, among others, borges and houellebecq think) or just another cheap pulp novelist from the first half of the 20th century. luckily, one doesn't have to ponder such questions any longer, because neil gaiman delivers a short story which juxtaposes lovecraft's cthulhu myth with the world of arthur conan doyle, thus adding a healthy dose of irony which makes this sort of thing palatable for grown-ups, not just role-playing, sex-deprived teenage nerds (i hope).

neil gaiman - "a study in emerald"

hope you don't feel like lovecraft in brooklyn after reading this one. now,"ph'nglui mglw'nafh cthulhu r'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn," indeed!

new music: dreamsludge and video gamers gone bad

i've come to notice that there are quite a few artists heavily influenced by endless hours of pushing buttons in front of a computer screen. no, i didn't all of a sudden realize that there is electronic music composed and produced on computers out there, but rather people like dan deacon and max tundra whose main sources of inspiration seem to be soundtracks to old video games. both "which song" and "get older" are beautiful, over-the-top exercises in blissed-out melodic weirdness which perfectly capture the excitement of a night spent in front of, i don't know, giana sisters while entertaining juvenile fantasies about girls. yes, i consider that sort of thing to be exciting. oh, while i'm at it: the depreciation guild has a somewhat similar approach, although they merge purely synthetic sounds with shoegaze rock in the vein of mbv and the likes. their album can be downloaded for free, so count yourself lucky.

in other shoegazing news, i discovered the label crucial blast whose artists seem to be into creating an unlikely yet interesting mixture of pop, sludge metal, noise, and - yes - shoegaze. i say " seem to" because i don't have the resources to actually buy some of their records at the moment, but once the money starts flowing, count me in. how can you not love a label that is responsible for inventing the subgenre "dreamsludge"? see, no one thought of it before, but the world is a happier place now.

a mixed bag of this'n'that

i should have expected this. posting my reading schedule seemed to promise some sort of rigorous literary exercise programme which would force me to read like a professional athlete. circle training: huxley, gaddis, crowley, and then a bit of marquez for cardio. what i failed to consider, however, is that i can only keep up that kind of discipline for a very short time. as so often, money is lost, gym memberships are abandoned, piles of books left unread.

i didn't stop reading though. far from it. the only thing is that i, despite of my impending bankruptcy, bought a huge load of other books. these i even managed to read, so there's an upside. let's have a look at some of them:



there's nothing more frustrating than coming up with a seemingly bright idea and then stumbling across someone who had that very idea way before you and acted on it far more convincingly than you'll ever be able to. case in point: this blog and nick hornby's "the complete polysyllabic spree." essentially a reader's diary he wrote for the US magazine believer, this is hornby at his best. even though i initially had little interest in most of his choices (a lot of british literature and remote american authors) , i still read the book cover to cover in two days. i didn't care for his last few novels, but once he's writing about his cultural obsessions - as he did in "fever pitch" and "high fidelity" - you just can't help being swept along with his enthusiasm. this man could probably even write a book about soccer and i'd still be interested. uh, wait, he actually did.

anyway, now i'll have to add another two books to my reading list: "citizen vince" by jess walter and "what good are the arts" by john carey. hornby's approach to keeping up a reading schedule also made me realize that it would help if i didn't only read novels but the occasional non-fiction book as well, just to spice things up a little. which leads us to another work finished during the christmas holidays:


yes, i know. uninspired and populist, this choice, no? well, i don't really mind because I'm ready to admit that i've been fascinated by the man ever since he decided to run for presidency. this book did little to lend further support to my enthusiam, but it also didn't diminish my view of the president elect. instead, what i got was page after page of deliberate dialectical reasoning which i've come to reckognize as being typical of lawyers. i don't know what it is, but being a succesful practitioner of the law seems to require a mock-regal, slighly dozy tone as well as tirelessly weighing one argument against the other without necessarily arriving at any sort of conclusion.
which, however, makes for a great meditative reading experience. on the one hand ... on the other hand ... still, there's no denying that ... relaxation guaranteed. the literary equivalent to a massage (although i never had a massage. it's actually supposed to be quite painful, isn't it?).

other honorable mentions: max goldt's "qq" (great as always, but since i'm writing about anglophone stuff here, i'll leave it at that). finished "the solitudes" and currently halfway through "love & sleep" (as promised, an entry on john crowley will follow sooner or later), while i've nearly given up on marquez. i wonder whether i should take to heart hornby's advice for people struggling with difficult books they're not really enjoying: "please, please: put it down. you'll never finish it. start something else."