I often have ideas while walking the dog in the morning, and by the time I get home, shower (because New Orleans in the summertime is like living on the surface of a very moist sun), eat breakfast, and then settle in for work, they’re gone. I like turning them over in my head while walking, and if I were more ambitious, I suppose, I would take notes or something like that to refer to them later. I know a few people who are massive note-takers, kanban users, etc. I just can’t. It just ends up being a pile. I have a few aborted entries from this blog I keep around, and I may get to them someday, but largely they get deleted.
One of the reasons I began playing the ukulele after years of messing with electronic music is because I can simply pick it up, strum it, and music comes out. There’s no advance preparation.
But that’s a lie. There’s been a minor fuckton of ‘advance preparation’. When I first started taking lessons, I spent hours strumming one or two chords along to a metronome to develop a sense of rhythm. I spent ages learning about music theory (I only know enough to be dangerous at this point). I practiced playing the same songs repeatedly until I was sick of them. Only after all that did “pick it up, strum it, music comes out” happen, and there’s still a ton I can’t do.
I’ve been seeking inspiration about something to write about here. I’ve been enjoying reading the things I have read as of late, but “pick it up and strum” hasn’t happened. So, I’m gonna offer up a few thoughts about some things I have recently finished (at least the ones that have stuck with me), and go over what I am reading now:
“Einstein’s Beets” This gigantic tome by Alexander Theroux is ostensibly about food aversions, but is really a repetitive polemic about our relationship to food as a whole. It has an amazing final chapter, but the run up to that is a gathering of factoids, opinions, and a seething hatred of Andrew Zimmern. I do not know when Andrew Zimmern pissed in Alexander Theroux’s Wheaties, but he must have. Theroux’s vitriol can be hilarious, and his anecdotes charming, and his opinions thoughtful, but I felt the whole thing needed an editor. Badly.
“Tender is the Flesh” This was pitched to me as sort of a gross out, and I guess it is, but honestly the descriptions of cannibalism within are pretty mild to someone like me who has sat through a ton of extra-gory horror movies (I have had a misspent adulthood). What it does do is capture some of the profound sadness that we can find ourselves in. The sense of sadness and being alone in the world was palpable. It was curious to me as I kept trying to think of ways to improve it, but kept coming up flat; in other words, the flaws I found in it may have had more to do with me than with the novel itself.
There’s perhaps some territory in that space to be mined, and I started and stopped several entries about it, but they kept coming across as unkind to the perceived flaws, and I didn’t think that fair. This is the sort of thing someone will make “prestige television” out of and it will either be excellent or terrible, with no middle ground.
“Our Share of Night” Another one that was pitched to me a certain way, but was something entirely different. I started it thinking it would be a quick horror novel, and it is not that. There are horror elements, there are supernatural elements, but the book is really both (directly and indirectly) about the horrors of the Argentinian coup, during which over 30,000 people were “disappeared”. It is also about the burden parents face in caring for their children, and how hard decisions can affect children who cannot comprehend those choices.
It does this via a very interesting framework involving an occult society. This is the book out of the ones I’m writing about here I can recommend the most, but I would also understand how someone might find it offputting. I myself had trouble with it when I started, as my expectations were different than what I actually got. By the time I was done with it, however, I was left with a novel that kept me thinking long after I read the last sentance.
I think that’s a good way to wrap things up here. So, what am I reading? I’m glad you asked.
“Defiance”– this is book four of “The Spiral Wars”, a sci-fi series recommended to me via Reddit. Thus far, the series has been a solid set of potboilers, with lots of well written action. Knowing “what’s going on” during action scenes is hard to pull off consistently, but Joel Shepherd manages it well every time. It’s just entertaining space navy stuff.
“The Tunnel”– William H. Gass. I’m like 40 pages deep into this, and it’s already captivated me. Gass is a master craftsman, there’s a quotable line nearly every page (“Another day, another dolor”), and I swear I could write an entire entry about it now, but you know, I’ll finish it first.
“Arno Schmidt’s Zettel’s Traum: An Analysis”– Volker Max Lanbehn. One of this blog’s hilarious ambitions. There’s not a lot of Schmidt analysis in general, and even less of it is in English. There’s chunks of untranslated German in here, which interrupts my flow when reading. It’s likely the author expects you to have read a bit more Schmidt than I have, but I’ll take what I can get as I contemplate the great lumpy grey whale sitting on my bookshelf.
Until I pick up and strum again… take care.
The Lithole 
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