i’ve always preferred the idea of jandek more than his music. not that i don’t dig his monotonic klang. i do. but i love the the outsider mythos that grew up around him that much more. obviously barry esson put an end to this by dragging his mysterious ass onto a stage in glasgow five [...]
http://berglondon.com/blog/2009/11/26/another-science-fiction/ *It’s tremendous stuff from BERG. It’s like Thomas Pynchon, Taos-style. Imagine having your entire home done over in Taos-Los Alamos Rocketry Atomchic. And you’re in there reading, say, “The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista” (1956) from the “Vermilion Sands” series by J G Ballard. You might just implode...
(Sorry, UK friends, but take a day off in solidarity if you like!) I'm bringing the following books to my parents': -Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon -Path of Daggers, Robert Jordan -Ash, Melinda Lo -The Lottery, Shirley Jackson (this isn't to say I'll finish all or any, but I'm sure I'll read at least part of some!) How about you? Leave me comments!
An amnesiac action hero who battles a mystifying web of enemies, Jason Bourne has outlived his author. David Samuels considers the enduring appeal of the kicking, punching, paranoiac babe in the woods. David Samuels in The National: The news that...
Hey, it's the Tiny Tim song Thomas Pynchon was talking about! This insane song appears on Tim's 1968 album "God Bless Tiny Tim," so all that ice caps melting business has nothing to do with our present-day angst over polar bears and obeisance to the Great God Gore . Unless Tim started it all. Who are those kids anyway? And why did adults subject the youngsters to this trippy apocalyptic weirdness?...
Tiny Tim at the peak of his talents. One of the strangest performances you’ll ever see. Via Boing Boing , where they inform us that this song is referenced by Thomas Pynchon in his new book, Inherent Vice . [Video]
Two new books on Raymond Carver—a biography and a collection of stories—bring a "welcome and necessary corrective" to what we know of the short story master, writes Stephen King. Carol Sklenicka's A Writer's Life cuts Carver too much slack for his personal life—he was a "sometimes dangerous"...
Ok, so this isn’t much of a post, but I thought I’d put up the list of books I’ve read since coming to Japan and those I was in the midst of reading. Recently, I’ve reached a point where I read a novel or two about every week or two. So, by next [...]
Gary says: I’m reading the latest Thomas Pynchon book, Inherent Vice, and he makes reference to this song. It’s like Tiny Tim is tripping on acid, entertaining children, and predicting global warming — all at once....
Some say Thomas Pynchon got nabbed of the 1974 Pulitzer for Gravity’s Rainbow due to a majority of the presiding panel’s distaste for his scene where our hero eats feces out of the ass of a prostitute (not to mention a very particular description of what sort of whose anatomy the protruding waste reminds our [...]
The National Book Award winners were announced November 18 during a ceremony in New York City. These are probably the major US awards after the Pulitzer Prize, and there are several categories. The prize for fiction went to Irish author Colum McCann for Let the Great World Spin , which is based on life in New York City in the 1970s. The piece was described as an "indelibly hallucinatory portrait...
A few years ago, Jonathan Lethem published an essay in The Village Voice, ‘Close Encounters: The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction’, in which he decried the close-mindedness of the genre and sketched an alternate history in which Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow won the Nebula instead of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama in 1973, leading to a reconciliation...
The National Book Award for Fiction went to Colum McCann for his novel "Let the Great World Spin," a story of New York in 1974 that doubles as an allegory of 9/11. It was the final award at the black-tie...
No surprise here: The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor won the Best of the National Book Awards Fiction tonight, in a public vote that received more than 10,000 responses in the final stretch. Find my NBA review of the book here, and the nascence of the mild (and, it seems, totally unnecessary) campaign for its win here. O'Connor's book was chosen by readers over the other finalists: Invisible...