What I'm Reading

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Nebula Award nominee
National Book Award winner
and
Messed. Up. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gatsby

Fitzgerald was the Keats of early twentieth century prose writers: everything he said, he said more beautifully than anyone else could.   A first reading of The Great Gatsby is like a first visit to Europe: you're so anxious to see everything that you rush ahead, missing countless wonders along the way.  Fitzgerald's narrative style is so fluid you're carried along effortlessly, but the way he describes things is relentlessly brilliant.  You do yourself a favor by slowing down and enjoying the ride. Daisy's voice, for instance, "was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again." Tom was "one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterwards savours of anti-climax."  When dinner was announced, Tom took Nick's arm and "compelled" him from the room "as though he were moving a checker to another squar...
Read more

Hiding in Plain Sight

A woman walks into the living room one day to find her husband sitting in his chair wearing only underwear and a top hat.  "Why are you in your underwear?" she asks him.   "Because no one ever comes to see me," "Then why are you wearing a top hat?" "Because," he says, "someone might."     Blogging seems like a useful way to get some thoughts down in a format that is easy to track over time.  It helps me see ideas objectively and connect them to others.  I like that the web provides that big city anonymity of being lost in the crowd.  It seems unlikely that my blog will be stumbled across unless through some quirky search term.  Like if someone now Googles "quirky search term."  But as soon as I start writing, I feel the need to put the top hat on.  I find myself editing and scrapping thoughts and wondering if this or that will sound stupid, when the point is supposed to be throwing my thoughts out of my head so ...
Read more

Work (not) in Progress

For almost as long as I’ve been reading books, I’ve wanted to write them.  I started writing a mystery series when I was 8.  (“Michael’s early period,”  a critic might say, “reflects an unmistakable Scooby-doo influence.”)  I was writing poetry even before that, and later started more ambitious projects, mostly sci-fi monster disasters, like my sadly unfinished Giant Ant Attack, which would have terrified mankind.  Unfinished would aptly describe most every story or essay I’ve started since then.  I mean, I have a hard time finishing a grocery list these days. Here are the two typical life cycles of my writing projects: idea – excitement – first draft – sharing idea – death or idea – excitement – first draft – editing – disgust – death
Read more