used // in well-loved condition

The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books
edited by Jeff Martin & C. Max Magee


A new month, a new review. This was an impulse buy off the "employee recommendations" display at my local Barnes & Noble while killing time before seeing "Thor" in 3D. One look at the cover art, and I couldn't very well not buy it. Throw in the fact that I've been kicking around the idea of doing my thesis on reading as tactile experience and the fetishization of print, and it's fairly obvious that this particular book was tailor-made for me.


Happily, it did not disappoint.

this is not a house

Nor is it what Lichtenstein means to me. But that's neither here nor there.

It's strange how we can carry around mental postcards of people we've never known, stranger still how it's impossible to envision them in any other scene. Or fashion. Or skin.

I'm physically incapable of picturing William S. Burroughs as anything other than a withered old raisin of a brilliant junkie who shot his woman dead. Just can't buy the young man pre-William Tell version. Allen Ginsberg exists only as words on a page and a disembodied voice as Jack Kerouac howls drunkenly in the background.

Samuel Beckett is a portrait hung above my favorite table in a pseudo-Irish pub in Berkeley. And the sound of isolating laughter in a darkened London theatre off Picadilly Circus.

David Foster Wallace is his black & white author's photo at the back of Infinite Jest... which I guess is better than the memory of a man whose light was extinguished at the end of a rope.

And Sylvia Plath? Not the broken woman with her head in the oven, not to me. Just quick, clean, cold:

Dirty girl. Thumb stump.

Anyway. Watch "Beat." Good movie.