“…a desperado is
better at comedy than an eccentric, you walk out the door, there’s a car
waiting.” Bernadette Mayer
“the car had an open
top that he never looked out of as he drove straight ahead. An iron mushroom.” Clark Coolidge
Throughout this 2015
northern hemisphere summer I had the opportunity, and the time, to read freely.
I hit it hard. The continuum was beautiful, “discovery” (like the two writers
above) or “re-acquaintance” (Zora Neale Hurston or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) two after
two, three after three, and the next leading to the next, and the next, a
profusion, an explosion, exponential growth.
(I think I know what exponential growth is: kind of like my Facebook “People You May
Know” list after Friend requests get confirmed.)
Here’s a mash-up of some
of the authors’ names and/or titles of written works (and maybe a quick comment):
Anne Waldman; Peter
Munro, Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes
Tropiques; John Keats, Poems; Willa Cather:
One of Ours, Death Comes for the Archbishop; Guy
Davenport; Anne Carson; Jenni Rivera;
Vilum Flusser; Alina Bronsky (a pseudonym and I called “her” out on it
in my review); Violet Duke (modern romance writer); Joy Williams; Annie Proulx The Shipping News; Kurt Vonnegut Cat’s Cradle; Evan Rail Why We Fly; Thomas Ligotti; Claude McKay
(1889 – 1948); Michel de Certeau; Maxine Hong Kingston; Rebecca Solnit; Kate
Wilhelm; Yrsa Daley-Ward; Robert Frost; Charles Slater; Gertrude Stein; Sam
Pink; Chelsea Hodson; David Gordon; Arthur W. Goodhart; Terri Jenkins-Brady; Jules
Verne (under the sea and center of the earth, great fun); Herman Melville;
Robert Louis Stevenson; Kafka, The Trial,
The Castle, both long and dull
compared to shorter works such as Metamorphosis
and A Country Doctor, to name two.
(BTW A Country Doctor is a “must read”
IMHO. From Wikipedia: "Psychologists at the University of
California, Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia published a
report in 2009 using A Country Doctor
as the variable in a study testing what impact reading absurdist tales has on
their cognitive skills. The study showed that reading the story improved test
subjects' ability to find patterns. Their findings summarized that when people
have to work to find consistency and meaning in a fragmented story, it
increases “the cognitive mechanisms responsible for implicitly learning
statistical regularities.”)
And finally, a line from
Drop Dead Perfect, a cop and crime
thriller by Rick Murcer, which I
read in one evening after getting home from a long drive in heavy traffic—it
was the perfect escape, and I couldn’t stop until I reached the conclusion.
“He was on top of
the heap when it came to being an asshole sometimes, but he did all the hard
things right.”
Looking forward to autumn!
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