read read read read read

by chad kultgen

I judged a book by its cover yesterday and bought it at the big sale at Daedalus. It had a giant sticker on the front about a sexual content warning, but I had already assumed as much, judging by the title. I really liked the black and white design of the cover but did NOT like the blurbs on the back by apparent screennames?! Yet another blurb boasted it was “the book that sparked a youtube frenzy.” But the design was good, the first line-glance was good so I gulped and did it.

I read it all last night, not because it was good but because it was a quick, very very quick read. I can see women being more offended by this novel than anything Bukowski could ever do (and I often get reamed for having every Buk novel on my shelf when gals peruse my library), but I like to take things in stride. Men are really like this, yes, they generally think about and want sex every second of every day. Not all of them, of course, but the average. When they’re not playing video games, but even sometimes when they’re playing video games. I did have a slight issue with how he portrayed gay men in the novel, but there was also some truth to it.

Basic plot. Unnamed narrator (I bet the author really liked Fight Club!) is with girlfriend of one year Casey until someone better comes along, feeling nothing and actually somewhat disliking her as he fantasizes about sexing up literally every woman that comes across his path. On a flight back to LA after visiting parents for xmas, something better does: she’s a smaller-assed, pertier-breasted and younger woman named Alyna. After a rushed phone call setting up a date with this other woman, Casey tricks narrator into getting engaged (seriously) and then she resorts to more trickery to stay that way. Eventually, things become a mess and poor little unemotional fratastic narrator has to Deal With It. I enjoyed the commentary on how most men really think and reluctantly agree with his assessment of how most women are—even the ones you fall for because “they’re not like everyone else” turn out to be just like the others in the end. You both end up bored, disinterested, making excuses….

“It will never be like it was. It will never be better than this.”

What fun, what a mirror—both good and bad.
Brooding teen boy obsesses (in a writerly way) over girl named Rachel while studying for entrance to university. Pet recommends!

Bonus! I have netflixed the film based on the book and your Jolly James Spader is in it! Perfection.

Quotes: (and, admittedly some of them are meaningless, I just like how he strings words together)

London is where people go in order to come back from it sadder and wiser.

I am in my own appearance if anything rather oppressively Caucasian.

To my right, dentures clicking like castanets, an old man chopped through a hot-dog at insect speed.

I felt mournful, squelchy.

I wanted to ask my host if there were perhaps any broom-cupboards or disused lavatories he wouldn’t mind me locking myself into until the party was over.

Like most people, I feel ambiguous guilt for my inferiors, ambiguous envy for my superiors, and mandatory low-spirits about the whole system itself.

Thus I maintained a tripartite sexual application in the contrapuntal patterns.

One of the troubles with being over-articulate, with having a vocabulary more refined than your emotions, is that every turn in the conversation, every switch of posture, opens up an estate of verbal avenues with a myriad side-turnings and cul-de-sacs—and there are no signposts but your own sincerity and good taste, and I’ve never had much of either.

Martin Amis

The third Novel of Amis that I have cracked, and the only one I’ve finished. It was crafty and clever—masterfully done. I seem to enjoy novels which make me cringe the whole way through. This cringe-fest was brought on by the splicing of two completely divergent lives in a tiny apartment built for one. Terry v. Gregory in a sinister battle of the sister. There can only be one winner…

effluria
chasuble
appurtenances
cynosure
virilia
furore
vestigal
telegenic
reticule
axiomatic
petallic
verdured
quiescent
perfidiously
catamile
eyrie
coevals

Douglas Coupland

Aimless community college students live in the middle of nowhere, get caught between GenX Crunch and Reagan Excess and use way, way, way, way too many similes (ridiculous ones at that). So incredibly indulgently indubitably awful, yet it propelled itself along like a sleek and modern snail, sliming its way across the pages. It was ok. I bought it because of how ridiculous the cover is. There’s also the GenX table of elements which was…innaresting.

“I like Anna-Louise. We feel natural around each other, and I hope this is enough. I get exhausted thinking there must be more.”

“entertainment totem”

“I think of how people can betray me simply by not caring enough to hide the fact of how little they care.”

“Your own ability to rationalize your bad deeds makes you believe the entire universe is as amoral as yourself.”

words!
quackettes
antipode
desultorily
pitchblende

J.P. Donleavy.

My last new one of his for awhile. I have two fiction left and all his non. I kind of want to not read the last two so that I can always have that in my life. It makes me sad. I hope he publishes his third in the NYC trilogy—feminist backlash be damned.

Anyhow, Low is the follow-up to Schultz. Now, Franny’s got 99 problems including a whole string of bitches. Schultz-boy prays a lot to his titular ancestor because, really, he has no one else. It was a fun ride and I really liked the ending.

Onto!

“That is simply not cricket.” (I think cricket here means the same thing as cromulent.)

“Lesson thirteen in my life. Never pull a zipper in anger.”

“Kindness
Is the worst
Cruelty
When it breaks
Your heart
And
Holy Jesus
And I might even
Have to be
Nice right back”

“I speak seven languages. And I can fuck in eleven.”

“Sigmund the tricks women will play to land a man no fisherman in history could ever invent.”

words are back here:
emolument
klaxon
contretemps
vitreous
aspic
sozzled (yet another synonym for drunk—Donleavy supplies me with a lot of these)
shilkker
fluthered
vicissitudes
banjaxed
proscenium
abreacting
drugget
pillorying
cruet
pogroms
borax
chuffed
frisson

J.P. Donleavy

A Playboy notable book of the year, the tattered 1981 paperback Dell I have boasts. The misogynistic and self-loathing upper-lower-middle class Jewish Rhode Islander Franz Sigmund “Isadorable” Schultz alights on London to take the West End by storm. Along the way, his dick leads him from one mess to the next and he befriends his production partners, the foppish and charming aristocrat Lord Nectarine and his sidekick Binky Sunningdale. Schultz grows to idealize their lifestyles of leisure and lusts for his own riches. He becomes so determined to make his production Kiss It, Don’t Hold It, It’s Too Hot a success that he will do, say and fuck anything to make it happen. The journey is hilarious, disturbing, offensive, poignant and every inch Donleavy.

“But Schultz, I must remind you this is England. You can’t go around punching people.”

”’I guess with guys like you with everything you got already, that the things you end up wanting are beyond the emotions of ordinary men.’
‘Ah Schultz, I’m afraid that one just does not know what’s in any man’s heart.’
‘Fucking greed is in mine, even as much as I love the theatre. but holy shit, your Lordship, you know what I’m thinking. That religion does not teach the only important truth there is, that man saves his soul by money alone and to be rich is right and true and from that derives all beauty and justice.’
‘By god Schultz, although you are indeed stretching your imagination tonight
You
Have also
Said
It all”

“I never know what’s going to happen next
And nothing
Sacred or
Profane
Would surprise
Me”

“I’ve got a hardon. Which fucking human nature uses to pole vault me out of old disasters into newer bigger ones”

“Dear me, the incredible cheek of gatecrashers these days. It does make on yearn. Doesn’t it. For previous and more decent times.”

“These days, you don’t know which people’s personal ethics are on holiday.”

“Real democracy must include the right to throw a fuck into somebody and to be seen doing it… The way she uses her magical ass she must sense there are already enough people on the globe that you’ve got to find something else beautiful to do with your libido than produce babies.”

“To hell with the mediocre.”

“When
In my last
Emotional crisis
I was a
Burning symbol
Happy and free”

“The state of unhappiness can become so familiar that you don’t dare embrace any moments of delight.”

“But always in bliss, something happens. You get cheated, short changed and reminded again of the world. Once love is over it conveniently turns to hate.”

“And when you find a friend who is good and true fuck him before he fucks you.”

“Maybe I just don’t know when people hate me and when people love me.”

“His Lordship said I should be more English about my remonstrations. Don’t say I could kill you. The proper expression is Schultz, sir I assure you I shall shatter your stumps and make mugwump of what remains.”

“Good morning folks, welcome to Horrorsville, you have just left Happytown Junction three thousand miles behind.”

“There are two kinds of women before they all become the same. One who sells herself many times over and regrets it. And one who sells themselves once and regrets it.”

“Guys exist to screw women and women exist to make them pay for it.”

“Loneliness is a step towards death.”

“Life at best is just a Jewish joke.”

...words forthcoming…

nota bene: this book had more typos in it than any I have ever read.

Oi! A lot of ‘em hit you in the gut and made you want more. And the clear, precise details just where you need ‘em. My gosh, Dick was a god with a pen in his hand or a sheaf in his typewriter. Need to acquire more more more.

“He knew, sensibly, that there would be nothing easy about the day-to-day deception. It would call for the constant vigilance and cunning of an outlaw. But wasn’t it the very difficulty of the plan that made it worthwhile?”

“People never understand a man who wants something more outa life than just money.”

“There’s no more why to not loving than there is to loving.”

Favorites of the lot:
“Jody Rolled the Bones”
“No Pain Whatsoever”
“A Glutton for Punishment”
“A Wrestler with Sharks”
“Builders”
“Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired”
“Trying Out for the Race”
“Liars in Love”
“Saying Goodbye to Sally”

stay tuned for words

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald

“there are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired”

Lost track of how many times I’ve read this, but the markings, highlighting and notes on the pages are getting pretty heavy. After over a year straight of forcing myself to read new books, it was lovely and wonderful to burrow inside one so familiar. And I hit some new levels, ones I hadn’t hit before because it’s been several years and now I am broke and dancing towards oblivion so the poignancy goes deeper than ever before.

Jay McInerney

“Partying is such sweet sorrow.” -Jeff

“Sunday is the day of restlessness, dedicated to stale news, guilt and culture.”

“The misery as well as the vitality of the metropolis seeped into her psyche.”

“Basically, men talk to women so they can sleep with them and women sleep with men so they can talk to them.”

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I… I didn’t even notice until just now… Then two more roads diverging, and two more, and suddenly here you are in the middle of… somewhere pretending you know where you are going.”

“I visited the midwest once. There was nothing to see and nothing to keep you from seeing it.”

“Sleeping alone was like death.” (Corrine without Russell)

“The devil’s in the Hamptons.” -Jeff

“Just because something could be done didn’t require that you do it.”

“When she asked, he said he was fine, not quite so punctured as to leak.”

people reduced to mottos/slogans: “eat the rich” (donna) “save me from what i want” (jeff) “the scarlet N” (washington)

interlocutor
dactyl
polemicist
frangible
Sibyl
sibilant
peignor
ken
excoriating
detritus
insouciant
lissome
riposters
samizdat
mendicant
tautologically
moribund
keening (widow)
apogee
chesterfield
salver
purview
quotidian (overused)
putative
wanderjahr
imprimatur
gadfly
demimonde
bibulously
lugubrious (overused)
sybaritic
sumptuary
evinced
sotto vocce
parvenu
autodidact
amuletic
palimpsest
ingot
perfidy
solipsism
ziggurat

By Frank O’Hara

I’d like to let it speak for itself.

Favorite poem: (43T ruins the spacing.)

For Grace, After a Party

You do not always know what I am feeling.
Last night in the warm spring air while I was
blazing my tirade against someone who doesn’t
interest
me, it was love for you that set me
afire,
and isn’t it odd? for in rooms full of
strangers my most tender feelings
writhe and
bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand,
isn’t there
an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside
the bed? And someone you love enters the room
and says wouldn’t
you like the eggs a little
different today?
And when they arrive they are
just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
is holding.