T-Shirts

Miguel mentioning T-shirts made me think of my favorite, given to me by my nephew:
"I Don't Think Much So I Might Not Be" Unfortunately I've gotten a number of "Huh? What's that mean?" and to be honest, that's all the Descartes I've read or cared to read. Bumper sticker Descartes. Sound byte Descartes.

William Stafford fest at Village Books tonight (Wednesday, at 7)

Books read:

Jean Rhys Quartet. A tragic but terrifically etched, and wryly funny novel about a woman adrift in Paris in the 20's. While the theme of this book is ultimately alienation, particularly of women, the prose avoids despair, largely due to her razor-sharp writing. She is one of the more remarkable stylists I've read lately. Her prose turns on wit, self-deprecation, reversals, pure descriptive narrative, and irony.

Djuna Barnes Smoke. Interesting to read Douglas Messerli's intro to this book, the fact that Barnes wrote copiously for several newspapers (which were a far different beast in the 19teens, collaging stories, essays, memoirs, rants, polemics, and news), and how stylistically this was a formative time for Barnes. As Messerli notes "Readers today may find it difficult to imagine how the mass audience of a newspaper (New York Morning Telegraph) that in its later years marketed itself as New York's "racing sheet," would or even could respond to fictions so peculiar as these." 'Paprika had a moribund mother under the counterpane, a chaperon who never spoke or moved, since she was paralyzed, but who was a pretty good one at that, being a white exclamation point this side of error.'


Movies seen:

The Jazz Singer -- Wildly funny, tragically sad, with incredibly disturbing elements (the blackface role in the Broadway play). Al Jolson is an absolute marveling maniac.

Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro) -- At times this film seems a backdrop for Carnival and surrounding activities, but there are some fine moments, and some of them are the Carnival and surrounding activities, which is rendered with immediacy and vitality. The myth is loosely but effectively interpreted. Orpheus isn't much of a guitar player (his synching is pretty off), but he convinces the two boys he raises the sun every morning, and one of the most touching scenes is the ending, and a little girl in a white dress dancing. Great music, by Jobim, and terrific acting, particularly Lourdes de Oliveira who plays Mira. She would chew you up and not even spit out the bones.

Never Break a New Year's Resolution

It's simple. Don't make any. A quick and easy way to reduce stress.

What I learned at the Reference Desk yesterday:

w00t - Webster's 2007 word of the year, an expression of joy and triumph. W00t supposedly evolved from "Whoomp, there it is" by 95 South, but I have my doubts... Woot, though not w00t, appears in Chaucer's The Wife of Bath's Tale. For wel I woot they patience is gon. And any married man will agree.

Backronym - A phrase constructed after the fact from a pre-existing word (such as Why Order Rich Desserts?)

Neologism - what w00t and backronym are, newly constructed words. The number of neologisms is growing exponentially. My favorite of late is Huckabounce. When I typed Huckabounce into Google it asked me if I didn't mean Huckabone, the 83572nd most popular surname in the United States. Many more neologisms appear instantly at Urban Dictionary.

&

DailyLit - read books in installments by e-mail or RSS feed. Over 400 public domain titles free, and many more for a cost. (via my main man miguel, frenzied scavenger of the web) (what eats Bob?)

Last Picks and Kicks...

Courtney Fortune Band at the (petit) Mount Baker Theatre, January 11, 8 pm

The future of writing - Dasher

Borges Mirror Man

Charles Mingus: Triumph of the Underdog (Shanachie films) This is simply an astounding movie!

Judith Viorst - Necessary Losses (what we leave behind is who we are)

Burroughs Cut-up tapes (y mas)

Be safe tonight.

Amateur Woodworking

Ray McInnis, a friend and old Scot has an amazing project going on his website to trace the history of the Amateur Woodworking Project. Give it a look.

Wonderful Evening

spent re-reading some Borges stories (The South, The Book of Sand) and a wonderful collection of stories, Tales of the Night, by the Danish Writer Peter Hoeg, author of the much acclaimed Smilla's Sense of Snow. That and a little wine was enough.

Forty Days of Rain or the Tale of Two Murakamis

Ryu Murakami's new book, Piercing, is a wonderful touching love story. The two lovers are a man who has a desperate Freudian desire to stab a woman with an ice pick, and a woman who likes to stab her own thigh with a Swiss army knife, and dissolve Halcion into her lover's food/drink and do strange things to them while they sleep. A match made in, well, hell. This is the dark vein of Japanese culture, and brings to mind the films of Takashi Miike, who perhaps voices the implosion of the horror that was nuclear half a century ago, and is now something quite else.

Another Murakami, far better known, & equally strange at times, and particularly in time, Haruki, has put out his tightest novel since South of the Border, West of the Sun. After Dark is is a wonderful book, full of youth at the border of life, and jazz, and love hotels, and Denney's restaurants, and a woman who moves between realms. The entire action takes place in the course of one night, that endlessly mysterious terrain.

Forty days of rain. Build me an ark of books.

Where are books going?

These people have ideas:
Institute for the Future of the Book if:book

if, book call me
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