I read Cruddy by Lynda Barry last night in a single four hour sitting, waiting for Stewart to get home. Sitting uninterrupted in a different world for four hours is a remarkable feeling, particularly a world as gory and creepy as the one in Cruddy. I thought it was excellent, albeit horrible. Ernie Pook's Comeek, Barry's syndicated cartoon, doesn't come close to the darkness in this one, though there are outcast, maltreated teenagers in this one too. Roberta Rohbeson, age 11 (though she appears to be 8) is on the road with her serial killer dad (whose family ran a slaughterhouse) who doesn't acknowledge that Roberta's a girl (he calls her "Clyde" and "son") and who travels with a set of knives (each of which has a name) in a series of stolen cars, hunting down the people who've deprived him of his rightful inheritance, killing them in gory ways only a meat man is capable of, and stealing suitcases full of cash... Meanwhile, in an intertwined diary, Roberta, age 16, hooks up with a crowd of suicidal, drug-addled losers, a couple of whom have escaped from the Barbara V. Hermann Institute for Adolescent Rest -- a home for teenage psychos -- after stealing copious amounts of pharmeceuticals, which they all continuously take. That should get you started in understanding what Cruddy is like. It's a thing of terrible beauty.
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Now I know all of you have been endlessly designing tattoos for yourself that you never get around to getting tattooed on your bodies. Face it, you'll never get a tattoo. But don't let your talents go to waste! You should compete in the 20 Things Temporary Tattoo Contest!
LINK | 7:55 PM |
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Art Garfunkel updated his Book List again. He hadn't for a long while, so I'm glad to see he's keeping it up. Looks like 2002 has been a pretty slow year so far. The breadth of stuff he reads is pretty amazing. Take this sequence:

Whosoever takes a nap in the afternoon shall feel very guilty and attempt to make up for it by working long into the night again.
LINK | 6:45 PM |
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Whosoever shall stay up all night, shall be very tired in the morning.
LINK | 9:32 AM |
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From Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner:

An interesting take. And then 30 pages later:

There is something brilliant about Faulkner's "faster rules of vice" idea, as I know from my own wrongdoing. If I feel bad about doing something, my head fills up with explanations, rationalizations and ad hoc ethical systems to justify whatever it is I have done, and that last only as long as I am feeling guilty. When choosing rules that will govern behavior and result in "virtue" (a problematic word that derives from the Latin vir- meaning "man" and thus "manliness") I am reluctant to take on any rules I'll have to stick to, and sticking to rules is a lot of what virtue is all about.
LINK | 12:53 PM |
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Some web art: Love Katie and 10.
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Does anyone remember reading about a city in Italy at the bottom of a man-made lake, appearing in an article sometime back in The New Yorker, I think, about 4 years ago? I wish I knew the name of it.

I was just telling Ben and Stewart about the underwater villages perfectly preserved in the sub-zero temperatures at the bottom of Bull Shoals and Norfork Lakes in Arkansas, where I lived one summer. Miles and miles of valleys were flooded during the water projects in the 30s and 40s, and since the water is so cold, nothing has decayed much; the leaves are apparently still on the trees.

Oooooh, look what a search turned up. Wow, I also pulled up an old Omni magazine article.

PS. Don't hire Vera Solovieva to do your translations.
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Inbox: From 3989 to 0 in three hours.
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First this guy Celso Machado, a Brazilian who lives here in Vancouver, played the guitar and this fabulous serious of percussive sounds he made entirely with his own body. It was so much fun! Go see him play at Granville Island on Monday July 1 -- write it in your calendar now! Next, the main act. Charlie Haden and his new band Nocturne played some of the slightest, most ethereal music I'd ever heard. After the concert we floated out onto Granville Street into the Saturday Night and Trying to Get Laid Circus -- the Vogue is right next to The Roxy -- the relentless thump of the music, the women in lycra, the leering men -- it was a shock to our systems after two hours of lolling in hazy wisps. "Cultural toxicity levels are high here," Celia remarked, and we fled home to the West End where we downed some Mondo Gelato gelato. Then around 1:30 we headed to the office where were worked until the sun came up then home to sleep.

Today is yet another perfect day here in Vancouver. And there is more jazz. We're headed down to Gastown.
LINK | 3:29 PM |
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Noted with pleasure: The Hyde Park Review of Books, "a quarterly review of the most promising fiction and serious nonfiction books from small, medium, independent and University presses."
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You wouldn't believe the astonishing weather here. And it's the weekend of the Jazz Festival; there are all kinds of free concerts going on down in Gastown and on Granville Island. We're going to see Charlie Haden and some Latin outfit this evening at the Vogue, but first, work.
LINK | 3:16 PM |
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I recently wrote a rant about the New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani, whose reviews seem to be the rote work of an overtaxed undergraduate, the kind of undergraduate who always gets straight A's in English, but fails to understand the literature on a fundamental level, the level of love. It is because I fall in love with books, with writers, that I read so much and read some books over and over and over and over and work so hard at the one I am writing. And this love is not unlike loving another human being; it is like a very large love, like loving humanity all at once with all its tragic error and comedic pratfalls and exaltation and humiliation and cracked and broken faces and cracked and broken hearts mysteriously compressed and delivered straight to my own heart via black squiggles of ink on white paper.

Today I was overtaken with this large love, this terrible objectless Rilkean longing, stumbling blindly around downtown. It was 7 or 8 and everyone was off work and driving around and looking at each other and wearing skimpy clothes and laughing with friends or walking alone or buying things because they wanted other people to love them. I sat down on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery with my decaf and tried to write it down while Ray the street musician told his goofy jokes and played Don't think twice, it's alright, which just about killed me, it being the golden hour and me so susceptible. It eased up when I finished writing and Ray left and the bagpipe player started and I took the bus home, but 4 hours later it's still here in some form or other, what it is I can't truly tell you, I wish I could.
LINK | 11:29 PM |
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Among other things, Alice, Jason, Stewart, Ben and I ate this absurdity:

At least, that was what we were supposed to have. But the baked apple ginger gelee was replaced with nasturtium gelee, and to be honest, I couldn't really taste the tincture of hibiscus in the pan jus. Tasted like regular ol' pan jus to me.
LINK | 11:26 PM |
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Recently someone said that a meal they'd had at a certain restaurant was so good that the meat was falling off the bone. Ew! There are many disgusting things about meat but people talking about meat falling off the bone is in the top 10.

And I'm a meat eater myself. The doctor says being anemic and having low blood pressure makes me crave salt and meat. I was a vegetarian for two years or so, but one day I found myself sitting at the counter of Jackson Hole on Madison Avenue eating a cheeseburger with no recollection of how I'd gotten there. I'd also find myself standing at the meat counter in the grocery store, leaving handprints in the frost on all the plastic-wrapped steaks. Some kind of vampiric animatronic fugue state most likely brought on by all the carob and nutritional yeast.
LINK | 10:53 PM |
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The Black Veil wasn't very good, alas. I read it almost continuously in one 24 hour period in the midst of The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa and another reading of Gravity's Rainbow. It's interesting how Moody's writing has evolved since The Ice Storm and The Ring of Brightest Angels -- both of which I read and reread and marvelled at until Purple America came out which I liked less, but which had that gorgeous soliloquy at the beginning. The things that started happening in that book -- the lists, the run-on sentences -- were evolved further in Demonology, and then he added those irritating italics, borrowing tricks from Thomas Bernhard (he's said this in interviews) which don't come off, and make the writing annoying, flaccid or worst of all, boring. The Black Veil was shapeless, too much piling on unleavened by much taking out (see how the tendency to italicize is contagious?). It's a beautiful thing when lengths of protracted wordage are cut with verbal contraction (c.f. Lester Bangs writing on Van Morrison's Astral Weeks).

I'm enamored of Moody's writing nonetheless. In spite of the fact that I did not love the last two, maybe even the last three, I'll always buy his books. Once you love a book someone has written, or an album they've made, you can't just drop them. And so Rick Moody book after Van Morrison album, I wait faithfully, hoping they'll be for just one moonlit night the man I fell in love with that hot, sandy, long ago day with the sun in my eyes and the wind off the Cape...
LINK | 1:49 PM |
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Messenger bag found. Novel not.
LINK | 9:31 PM |
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Stewart has put up some wedding photos and a story.
LINK | 10:32 AM |
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Has anyone seen my orange messenger bag? You know, the Manhattan Portage one? I last saw it sometime before the wedding, and it has the only draft of my novel in it...
LINK | 7:40 PM |
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Eric is here for the big charrette this weekend. What's a charrette? A good explanation is here. It is a process used extensively by the building community which is being adapted for all kinds of design projects. We're going to be hunkered down all weekend drawing up plans and working on a brand new as-yet-unmentionable thing.
LINK | 11:19 AM |
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Rog says:

I lick you. Today on the CBC program Ideas a woman said that animals develop social relationships by licking each other, but each animal can only lick 150 other animals before it runs out of licks. She said that some people think that language is the way that humans lick each other. Which means that weblogs are a great new development in lick technology and I am a great, slobbering galoot.
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I think we're finally leaving today for Jasper; we were supposed to leave on Monday, but I was sick and the weather reports for Alberta didn't seem very promising. Things are looking much better today, so I think we'll finally be hitting the road in Ben's convertible, into the Rocky Mountains and the sky sky sky.
LINK | 11:34 AM |
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From the morning's mail:

Question: I see that you are fairly new to Vancouver, but wondered what a writer of your generation/persuasion/ilk thinks of Douglas Coupland and if you've ever met the man?

I don't know very much about Douglas Coupland, having never read any of his books, with the exception of City of Glass, an excellent little book all about the unusual and interesting aspects of Vancouver. I admire the fact that in addition to his writing he designs tables and puts up the occasional installation in the local galleries. They're nifty, breezy, witty, kind of like the bits of his writing I've read. I've never met him; I think he lives somewhere over in North Van.
LINK | 11:28 AM |
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Victoria, British Columbia, June 1, 2002:

Cue Lohengrin.
Brilliant blue sky, cloudless. Bride and groom beam at one another.

Judge Palmer: Mumble mumble.
Caterina: I do.
Stewart: I do.

Kiss. Bald Eagle flies over, fish in beak. One guest gophers out of his seat, his view blocked by a vast beribboned hat. Seven ladies dab at the corners of their eyes with their handkerchiefs. San Francisco Contingent does The Wave.

Caterina's joy is so enormous, she feels as if she might burst into blossom, or smithereens.
LINK | 11:31 PM |
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