Category Archives: Postscript
Yuck
I sat patiently up to the sixtieth page, growing more and more bored by the second—how many ways can you insist that two people love each other even if (gasp!) they’re in their forties, and that this magical sex-strike just ruined everything? how many lackluster, unworthy-of-book-space characters (armed with their sex-lives-that-were) are you going to introduce us to? And then I realized I was being a complete idiot and just skimmed to the end. Where, lo and behold, the townspeople arrive at epiphanies and voice them publicly, on stage!—and the spell lifts and people can start bonking each other again! (It’s not Disney, goddammit!) And don’t forget the mysterious nomad who’s been—wink to the reader!—doing this for years. Hurray for magical Greek plays! Goddamnitall. [Continue reading.]
“I never thought this labyrinth would be a pleasant thing to return to.” — My own quest for answers within House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, and some remaining questions
That up there are some of my notes on House of Leaves, the novel-creature by Mark Z. Danielewski. I skipped Little Red Moley with this one, and used Giant Fat Red Moley Journal — and even then I used at least five different kinds of Post-its, haha. I could not scribble on the margins of […]
“Two truths” from Paul Chowder
Poems do seem to want to announce, over and over, that life’s warm zephyrs are blowing past and the gravestones are just beyond the next rise. Little groupings of gravestones, all leaning and cracked, with a rusty black Victorian fence around them. They’re just over that rise. Poets never want to forget that. And actually […]
Sasha might be enjoying reading the “About the Author” pages a smidge too much –
[This is all obviously off the top of my head. Hello, lazy weekend.] [And thanks to The Boyfriend for letting me borrow his Robert Lowell poetry books for yet another fuzzy book pictorial.] You know the whole la-dee-dah about letting the text speak for itself, the author being dead and all that jazz, the Not […]
“It is still there, now a thick fog, and again only a light mist.” — Henry Dean’s Heavy Boots
When certain words touch you, because they’re just so right, as approximately right as anyone can be about things like these. More from The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick, more from my favorite story of the collection, “The Oak and the Axe,” more from Henry Dean, more on that thing we have many names […]
postscript || The Imagined Previous Life of What I Loved, Which is Stained by Something I Don’t Bother Identifying
So, like a lot of my books, I found this one in a BookSale. In fact, Hustvedt has become one of those authors that I have to rely on bargain bins for. Either overstocks or previously-owned, these books have gone through lives of their own before they came to me. Which brings us to this […]
