Recent Acquisitions

Found at a recent library sale (and late night book shopping)

The Eight Immortals - T.C. Lai

Mantissa - John Fowles

Negative Affirmations - Mole & Appleby

Penelope's Man - John Erskine

The Silence of Colonel Bramble - Andre Maurois

Life of Hadyn
Life of Mozart
Life of Wagner
(All by Louis Nohl)

A Dash of Daring Carmel Snow and Her Life in Fashion, Art, and Letters

By Myself - Lauren Bacall (autobiography)

The Tale of the Incomplete Prince - Tshe Ring Dbang Rgyal

The Letteres of Fenelon

The Gay Genius - Lin Yu Tang

The Complete Writings of Ambrose Bierce

Lou-lan and Other Stories - Yasushi Inoue

The Yachtsman's Week-End Book - John Irving & Douglas Service

The Letters of Rainer Maria Rikke

The Annotated Alice - Lewis Carroll and Martin Gardner

The Words - Jean Paul Sartre (autobiography)

Jill - Phillip Larkin

Erewhon - Samuel Butler

Mulligan Stew - Gilbert Sorrentino

The Complete Poems of Michelangelo

The Executioner's Song - Norman Mailer

Memorabilia & Mathematica - Robert Edouard Moritz

Axel's Castle - Edmund Wilson

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge - Rainer Maria Rilke

The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories - Eudora Welty

Rice Bowl Women, Writings by and About the Women of China and Japan - Dorothy Blair Shimer

Meet My Maker, The Mad Molecule - J.P. Donleavy

The Twenty Seventh City - Jonathan Franzen

Perversity - Francis Carco

Pope Joan - Lawrence Durrell

The Yellow Book

Point of View and Expressive Form in James Joyce's Ulysses - James Joyce

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge - Ambrose Bierce

The Midwich Cuckoos - John Wyndham

The Oxford Book of the Sea

The Decay of the Angel - Yukio Mishima

Made de Sade - Yukio Mishima

Put Out More Flags - Evelyn Waugh

The Sound of the Mountain - Yasunari Kawabata

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F-ck. Why Can't I Write?

ToIn my world, a universe where things that shouldn't happen do, I'm actually doing okay as far as this "Being a Writer" thing is concerned.

I have an agent.

I have a modicum of talent.

I have stories to tell.

But instead of writing, forcing myself to write, and getting it out there on the page I have been:

Playing online Scrabble. My high score is now 482 points with a bingo on the first word for PEGLIKE.

Listening to Tom Jones' "Mama Told Me Not To Come" and trying to pretend it's not a song of incestuous perversion. Cause that ain't a way to have fun.

Doing my makeup like I was a member of ABBA in the 70's.

Eating a lot of toast with crunchy Skippy peanut butter.

Drinking massive quantities of Coca Light.

Updating my Facebook hourly. Madame ama is doing jack shit. Madame Ama is listening to the radio. Madame Ama is updating her Facebook status update.

Painting her toenails and watching Sweet Sixteen, which leads to me saying things like "wow, really? That's so bitching".

Ending this blog post to play more Scrabble and then maybe, write.

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Murakami's "After Dark" Not Light Reading

I got a cold. A semi-badish one. There was a lot of coughing up involved. No more details necessary.

A general sense of discontentment. A week without finishing a single book. Many started, none finished. I am holding out to go cheap book shopping because despite the numerous books on the shelf, I don't want to read any of them at the moment and the ink well has gone dry. I haven't written more than a paragraph in some time. Remember, blogging doesn't count. It's like horseshoes and hand grenades. An exception.

I tried to provide moral support to C. so he'd finish Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude. I don't think it worked. He got confused by all the names and timelines. I however will go to the grave defending the book's brilliance. To the grave.

In lieu of writing, I spent massive amounts of time downloading music I don't need because my iPod is the music player equivalent of an overeater's pants after Thanksgiving dinner. But of course I needed 6 gigs of Kraftwerk. Who doesn't? Plus I now have the entire Madness discography and a new selection of Razormaid remixes to choose from as I nod my head on the metro.

Also, I did find The Monroes "What do all the people know". Which might be one of the greatest Ska songs of all time.

But now to Murakami's "After Dark".

In terms of the way it's written with everything taking place within the course of one night and in the first person plural "we", it's interesting. He managed to get cats into the story (of course he did). There's the usual call girls, chain restaurant references, and characters who are unhappy but not unhappy enough.

In terms of length it's about 200 pages. Why did I get the feeling that Murakami had to push one out for the publisher, which is the writer's equivalent of jerking off before a big date. I simply didn't connect with the book. I kept reading it because I thought at any moment I would. I didn't learn enough about the characters. Or at least not the ones I was the most interested in. I know it's supposed to be a novella (fancy word Italian in origin for a short book the writer obviously didn't give a shit enough about to write properly? Hmmm maybe.), but why introduce a character at all, focus on them intensely, but not tell me anything about them really?

Towards the end there was something resembling an ending. The sun came up. A few things happened. But characters disappeared. It left me with the same feeling I have when I try to find the Rick James skit from the Dave Chapelle show on YouTube and it's some teenage idiots horrible remix of it and not the actual skit.

I still hold a place in my heart for Murakami because of Norweigan Wood, Wind Up Bird, and Hard Boiled, but I can only forgive so much. I did however take notes of some of the effects he achieved which might be helpful to me in my work. But I except and demand more.

Maybe Murakami's ink well is going dry too?

Overall I wouldn't discourage someone from reading it, but if you like it. Please, tell me why.

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