Recently in Books Category

So there's a book out there called The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism written by a saucy 37 year old Canadian. She teamed up with Alfonso Cuarón who did Children of Men to make this little filmy, directed and edited by Cuaron's son, Jonas.

Follow up article about the Harry Potter knock-offs that have flooded China in recent years.

In addition to my personal favorite, "Harry Potter and the Big Funnel," we also now have:

"Harry Potter and the Waterproof Pearl"

"Harry Potter and Platform Nine and Three-Quarters"

"Harry Potter and the Chinese Overseas Students at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry"

the raw shark texts this book has a viral youtube marketting campaign. it's sort of a borges-cum-calvino with a dash of murakami book, but then he quotes both of them before two different sections, which is lame. there's a bad entity creaure man thing named Mycroft Ward that's into assimilating, and with my thoughts on Microsoft Word and shrinking language, and how strong language is a concrete thingy in the book makes me smiley. Also, the book has ascii art, and an ascii shark flip book section. and they make some sort of brian eno tape loop thing that's like a pent-o-gram of safety like from that Ghoulies movie. Lot's of cute science based on logic and not tech, and a lot of tech based on logic and not science. Enough cultural allusions to be annoying. viral youtube account, featuring lightbulbs and sharks

soon i will be invincible parody of super heroes and villians from alternating chapters from one Dr. Impossible (villian) and a new hero cyborg lady named Fatal ("Fuh. Tell. I should have chosen Cybergirl. It was on the list.") The parody is light, it really reads for the most part like any post modern comic, cept there's not pictures. So, it's still enjoyable and funny at points. The batman, hero with no powers, character is autistic, which I like. They touch on time travel and alien invasions, so it's full blown, which is also nice. There's also a 100 year old retired villian named Baron Ether who lives in New Haven, CT, which is like, right where I grew up. So cool. Author is a videogame consultant.

god jr. Dennis Cooper, the author, I've been told, usually writes about highly horrible gay punk action, with Venice beach runaways being fisted and murdered and then being discussed by a group of men who pick up said Venice beach runaways, who do fuck them, but don't murder them. I haven't read those books. This book is a short with a big font about a man who lost his son in a car accident. he also lost the use of his legs. Kinda. He's building a monument to his son, based on a drawing. Then he plays some GameCube for about 40% of the book, a faux Banjo Kazooie.......

......where his son spent a lot of time. But those last few sentences don't really sum it up at all. Its a tiny book about things beyond gried but still framed in rationale. It made me really sad. It also reminded me of Alpha Dog and why I dislike LA so much. And pot. Nintendo is still ok.

longitude 'popular account' of the guy who made the first chronometer that helped sailors navigate the seas and avoid pirates. some crazy shit, like what scurvy does after all your teath fall out. (your brain explodes.) also, an attempt to solve the longitude problem by wounding dogs and intellictual turf warfare with the clock tinkerers taking on the astronomers. also lots of archaic tech. i think there's a bbc miniseries about this with michael gambon.

then we came to the end this book is the 2nd person plural. its all We this and We that. And not the royal We. Its there for a purpose that accepts that shit crown at the last paragraph, but its still a pretty funny book about an office where everyone is getting laid off slowly, while the only work they have is an impossible pro bono case about making breast cancer funny. Increadibly nether clawings to 9/11 that are so faint, because, if they are there, they stand on quagmire. The one from hound of the baskervilles. the grimpen mire. That thing ate a horse. Great flashback when a co-workers daughter is kidnapped and they make a missing poster for her, and photoshop all the not-so-nice from the kidnappie. not so weird depature chapter in the middle that is revealed in the end. eh.

books by david mitchell
cloud atlas fucking brilliant. let's chase the modern human condition in a boutique of great language accross the horizon of time, and then trace it back. 6 stories, all tied to each other by their own narrative, interrupted in mid clause to pick it up on the end. missionary diaries, bisexual composers letters, movies, holograms, oral communication and collapsed down on itself on the way out. period peices smashed on omega level sci-fi capitalism, and all critqued by the next generation or ten. should have won the man booker thing prize.
black swan green wonder years in england with thatcher and the falklands. eh. gave it to my mom.
number9dreamhis second book. i didn't like it despite being set in tokyo with idiosynchric genre remixs. didn't finish it. rare for me.
ghostwritten his first book. very good. cloudatlas journey but bleak. follow a japanese cultist to a misplaced phonecall to runaway lovers to korea who ask an english man for the time who is embezzeling who in turn.... etc. There's a non corpral body and a radio dj who talks to a satelite. man made.

books not written by david mitchell

the keep i gave this book to sam. I liked it. I hope he read it.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics Good read. Its a mystery novel, but you don't know it, ever. Oh fuck I just said it. I guess its going to be a movie and people think the author is attractive. was listed as a top ten book in NYT book review for 06 and didn't sound boring. Its was ok, I guess.

Against The Day Is Pynchon parodying himself? Probably not. Still pretty great.

I know what you're thinking: "I don't want to read a book about a twee British boy with a rad scar, but I would read that book if it were loaded with kung-fu fights and lessons about civic morality in a sprawling, hyperspastically-developing empire."

Well look no further.

China, purveyor of all things bootlegged, has been pumping out Harry Potter books for years - particularly "final" episodes, because waiting is for losers - and many of the books tack on China-tastic elements like kicking and speaking out of synch with your lips.

Here are just some of the sweet, sweet books about little boys with brooms between their legs that you've not only missed but will continue to miss, since (besides their titles) they've yet to be translated into English:

“Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Relative Prince”
“Harry Potter and the Hiking Dragon”
“Harry Potter and the Chinese Empire”
“Harry Potter and the Young Heroes”
“Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon”
“Harry Potter and the Big Funnel” (this is obviously the winner)
“Harry Potter and the Chinese Porcelain Doll”

BUT THAT'S NOT ALL. One man, eager to please his young, Potter-crazed son, wrote a 250,000-word (wtf) final episode with a no-nonsense title. From the New York Times:

The result was “Harry Potter and the Showdown,” a 250,000-word novel, the final version of which he placed recently on Web sites, followed by a notice saying he was looking for publishers. The book quickly logged 150,000 readers on a popular Chinese site, Baidu.com’s Harry Potter fan Web page.

“This is fantastic,” Gu Guaiguai, an admiring reader, wrote online about “Showdown.” “I wonder if Rowling would bother to continue to write if she had read it.”

Another reader was even more breathless. “You are the pride of our Harry Potter fans,” he wrote, adding, “We expect you to go on and write Harry Potter number eight,” which Mr. Li has in fact already begun.

[Disclaimer: I have not read any of the HP books; I think they're a scam by Hewlett-Packard to sell more non-working Ease-E Break printers. I have seen the movies and enjoyed watching scary demon-things continually punk British kids. I am, however, deeply entrenched in Harry Potter number nine, tentatively entitled "Harry Potter and the Crazy Bamboo Warriors," or perhaps "My Dinner With Harry Potter... and Andre... and Crazy Bamboo Warriors." It's complicated.]

Sure enough. Available where fine .torrent files are DL'ed.

Not sure which one to download? Have your favorite torrent site sort by date uploaded.

The LA Times quotes Lisa Holton, president of trade publishing and book fairs at Scholastic, as saying they plan to

"...take down all this different material, and by taking it down we'll never know whether any of it was real until you read it yourself on Saturday morning."

Brilliant! She's right: just give them a couple minutes, and they'll have all the illicit copies down off the internet. After all, stopping the spread of information on a global computer network is a breeze. Right, MPAA?

Best of luck mashing all that toothpaste back into the tube, Lisa! Let me know how it works out.

Link to NY Times Blurb.

is the saddest thing

by Robert Pinsky

Samurai Song

When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.

When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.

When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had
No mother I embraced order.

When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.

When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.

When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.

Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted my sleep.

***

Robert THE MAN Pinsky arbitrated a metaphor-battle between Sean Penn and Stephen Colbert.

Here's some video...

by Mark Strand

Fire

Sometimes there would be a fire and I would walk into it
and come out unharmed and continue on my way,
and for me it was just another thing to have done.
As for putting out the fire, I left that to others
who would rush into the billowing smoke with brooms
and blankets to smother the flames.When they were through
they would huddle together to talk of what they had seen—
how lucky they were to have witnessed the lusters of heat,
the hushing effect of ashes, but even more to have known the
fragrance
of burning paper, the sound of words breathing their last.

I love Heidi. She's now bi. She also has a transcription of the beloved old crazy man's talky at bennington. Enter the sideways love balloon.

Last night in Manhattan, Crazy Old Man (and author) Kurt Vonnegut died in Manhattan.

I have been reading Vonnegut since high school, when I was required to read Slaughterhouse-Five. He has remained one of my top five favorite authors. He was a prolific writer, as a trip to any bookstore's "V" shelf will attest, and through it all his work was insightful, entertaining, and deeply human.

Except for Timequake, which was a bit of a reprint and rehash of older material. And, you know, plus A Man Without a Country, which was written when he had clearly lost either his marbles or respect for his readers because it consists almost entirely of reprints - verbatim - from the aforementioned Timequake.

Still, he was a fantastic writer and I will miss him.

Thanks, Mr. Vonnegut.

From A Man Without a Country

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC

Times obituary here.

Vonnegut slideshow at nytimes.com.

His largely incoherent and curmudgeon-tastic second-to-last TV appearance (on the daily show) after the jump. Video courtesy onegoodmove.

by Ted Hughes

The Thought-Fox

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

by D. Nurkse:

Separation at Burnt Island

Brothers and sisters, who live after us,
don't be afraid of our loneliness,
our dented wiffle ball, the little kerf
the dog chewed in the orange frisbee.

Don't grieve for our kite; not the frayed string
that clings to your ankle, not the collapsed wing.

We lived on earth, we married, we touched each other
with our hands, with our hair that cannot feel
but that we felt luxuriously, and with promises.

We made these bike tracks in the sand
—don't follow them—and this calcined match head
is the last statue of our King.

We lived between Cygnus and Orion,
resenting the blurriness of the Pleiades,
in a house identical to its neighbors—
stepwise windows, ants never to be repelled,
TV like a window into the mind
that can't stop talking, redwood deck
facing the gulf.

Everything was covered with sand: the seams
of the white lace dress, the child's hinged cup,
the watch (even under the crystal), the legal papers.

We were like you, or tried to be. We divided our treasures
(a marble with no inside, a brooch from Siena),
signed our names with all our strength, and went home
in two directions, while the marriage continued
without us in the whirling voice of gulls.

another edit: saw this in last week's times. don't you associate with these people?

Addendum from Book Review Ron Jeremy has a half blind, hairless rat named Fetus.

Highlights:
The word 'scrotum' is ruining this year's Newburry Award winning novel's sales as grumpy elementary school librarians ban the book. The word scrotum is overheard by the main character about a dog getting his scrotum bit by a rattlesnake. The author says this is a true story. Kids get some awesome books. And now it's new with a bunch of folks.

The navy will be deploying dolphins. Linking to dot mil sites makes me nervous.

Non NYT stuff follows including a J. Mann update.

There will never be enough time.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory originally had a chapter called, "Spotty Powder" and a character called Miranda Piker, who was edited out of the final verson. Now you can read the lost chapter at Times Online. I'm glad she was edited out, Miranda Piker is a square and a smart-ass and I hate her. Although the implied cannibalism wasn't wasted on me. Apparently Miranda's fate was too chilling to be included in the book. I say, bitch got what she deserved.

Spotty Powder

Locus Novus now features one of my prose poems, animated by a Turkish artist/writer who's written a manifesto on graphic design. High-five for manifestos!

Locus Novus is publishing/animating a story/prose poem of mine pretty soon, which is primarily exciting for me and for people who enjoy animated stories/prose poems. I like the site; maybe you will, too.

(Also, my Lord is cooler than yours, so you pretty much have to do what I say, or else I will utter a single word in my native tongue and melt all your pots and pans, and you will be unable to fashion elbow pasta and cheese for yourself when you are very drunk.)

Today we share "Entering Yellow Stream and Hearing an Ape" by Liu Zongyuan, who, was, sadly, "another victim of political intrigues." Sometimes I think I am like the ape, who will probably never get the servant to fetch him his primal-slippers...

The road and stream bend for a thousand li,
Sorrowfully, an ape somewhere calls.
The lonely servant’s tears are now exhausted,
The heartbreaking sound is in vain.

alushinrio

Whilst browsing the Apple website today trying to decide whether or not it was finally time for me to bite the bullet and buy Microsoft's industry-standard turdling Microsoft Office (or, instead, to pay a much more appropriate price) when I did a double-take at the above image.

Hidden on Apple's Microsoft Office page is an obscure reference to Kurt Vonnegut via Bokononism, his made-up religion that features prominently in his bookCat's Cradle.

Worth checking out. Often has some interesting studies up.
http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/

In the latest New Yorker, by Charles Simic. Seems appropriate, considering all the, you know, lunatic disasters going on in the Levant right now.

This next number is a fucked up little song about rain, and summer changing into autumn, and how evil Nature is--like one big, evil clown with a fake knife that's really a real knife... Fuck, that's so fucked up... Anyway, we can thank Paul Laurence Dunbar for:

Because maybe ours is, in fact, a party at which work gets done, I present, I hope legally:

"The Vegetarians," by John Ashbery, from Shadow Train, one of those excellent books you are obliged to purchase if you want to avoid defenestration at the hands of my team of trained howler monkeys, who move through the night like India ink spilled across slick litter (perhaps a magazine; probably Vogue). And you'd better watch out: The monkeys have been lifting tiny, organic weights, and each receives a ration of one Clif Bar per diem, so, they have the strength to beat you up and the endurance to outlast you in a footrace, assuming you don't have a crazy rocket-unicycle (why would you have a crazy rocket-unicycle? are you that afraid of my ink-monkey death-brigade, that you'd purchase or build or force some poor Czech genius to invent a fucking rocket-unicycle?).

Point is... you know, read the fucking poem:

Death

Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest.
They will place my hands like this.
It will look as though I am flying into myself.

[Macro to micro, in descending mirror-onion-flutter of perspectives:] So we have a Poet Laureate, Donald Hall, another New Englandy type, and he's quite all right, though I myself'd've voted more for NaS or even more preferably MF DOOM, but that level of conceding something to populism and relevance will have to wait.

In the meantime (and times do get mean), I'll have to admit: I rather enjoy this idea: What if I were to post, daily or something like daily, though not necessarily, strictly, "every day," a poem of graspable, chewable Value (to me, at least), to share with my friends? Not a harsh conjecture this, and so we begin, at once, with Vasko Popa, who was old at one point and wrote many poems about wolves:

is a great book by John Perkins, former economic hit man (EHM). From the back cover:
EHM's are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex and murder. They play a game as old as Empire but onethat has taken on terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization. I couldn't put this down, the author is a likeable guy doing dispicable things. It has opened my eyes to the evil behind the country I was already ashamed to live in. Especially recommended for people (like myself) who are embarrassingly ignorant of what goes on here in our bad bad country.

Also for your enjoyment:

"Humans"- directed by Three Legged Legs

Woah, was going through an old harddrive and what do I find, but my blog entry from Ruben's semiotics class.... let the good times roll. so, if Thomas Pynchon, semiotics, book covers, or Odin interest you, read on brave reader. I sez so. Special guest comment by Tim Veras!

I don't know if you guys already know about Abebooks, but snap! you should because it's so hella-cheap. It's new and used books, textbooks, out-of-print, and rare books. I just bought a book for $2.00. They've got a gianormous selection. Now you can skip the Strand and be a lazy bum.

Abebooks

Last Sunday I read a review of Counting Heads and semiswiftly ordered it. I got it this Thursday and finished it today, Sunday, on a subway in Los Angeles. (There may be a subcon point of this entry to relay the fact that Los Angeles has these quaint little subways.)

Spoilers?