"Ballard Locks", or, Here I Go Maudlin.

Here, please enjoy nostalgic and fiercely maudlin documentary record in pictures of my once-favorite tiny piece of anonymous art: a pair of padlocks with hearts on them. Perhaps the spontaneous expression of a couple's desire to express a permanence of love that, like the MasterLock, could allow each participant in that love to withstand the bullets of fate; perhaps the expression of the recently dumped of their desire for such permanence; perhaps just something very cute bolted onto a derelict building during another tedious, drug-fueled evening among once-and-future strangers to each other--who knows?

I was obsessed by these during the few months here recorded (March through September 2006)--not coincidentally a very emotional time in my life. This series of photographs is now, as then, a perfect excuse to wax pretentious and just enjoy myself.

"Ballard Locks" - a photo essay

The site of these "Ballard Locks" is now a newly developed complex called the "Ballard Blocks", with Trader Joe's and various other things that once again show the triumph of progress and modernity over love.

The Show That Smells, by Derek McCormack

This book is a delicious, delicious treat, full of surprises. 

I picked up The Show That Smells after reading the plot summary on Dennis Cooper’s blog (the book is published by Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery series). I expected a delightful, quirky and enjoyably subversive summer read. I was completely unprepared for what this little book really is: startling, funny, full of unexpected twists and morsels of horrific glee. It is almost a novel in verse, and reading it is like watching an unusually wonderful contemporary silent film in novel form. It smells like Edward Gorey, Kathy Acker, Ed Wood, Guy Maddin, and Jean Genet all at once, but somehow doesn't feel derivative at all.

This is a singular, unique work full of punning vampire queens, sexual slapstick, Lon Chaney and righteous queer carnie power. I can’t wait to read it again.

Backwards-ness, and a Beautiful Poem

A little late--I want to call your attention to a wonderful poem:
"Last Post" by Carol Ann Duffy, which appeared on the BBC online on August 6, 2009.

My graduate thesis was about the "narratological implications of reversed time" in Time's Arrow by Martin Amis. By which I meant: how backwards is an important and effective way to tell stories about war and genocide, in that book and other places (like a memorable piece of Slaughterhouse-5).

Skip my ponderous thesis, please, and read Duffy's poem instead: it's the second one on this page.

Best of 2009: James Magruder's Sugarless

James Magruder's Sugarless is my favorite book of 2009. In the book, Rick--the narrator--looks back on a formative period in his life with astonishing insight and nostalgia, feeling again, through the telling of them, all of the thrills and anguish of becoming an adult. It offers the reader the vicarious pleasure of watching Rick negotiate his initiation into the sexual world, and then complicates that pleasure with honest depictions of the failure, loss, and grief which constitute mature self-awareness and social existence.

Along the way, we experience surprisingly clear yet complex descriptions of Rick's self-discovery: puzzling out the tangles of sexual desire, family, and social relationships, and of the ways that people talk around and about both the important and trivial things of life. As confusion resolves into certainty, Rick, his world, and the important people in it hurtle with all of the intensity of adolescence to a crisis as unexpected as it seems inevitable. Rick's conflicts and strength and emotional landscape shine through the prose with amazing clarity. The last chapter, in which an older Rick looks back on his life, expresses the losses of youth with a beautifully understated profundity.

I wholeheartedly agree with Tony Kushner's applause: "The texture of Rick's world and the details of his experience ring true and important, with emotional depths that warrant and reward repeated re-readings" (from the back of the book).

You should take a look at the website for the novel--it has a great trailer (when did books start having trailers, anyway?) and lots of interesting tidbits about the author and his work:

http://www.jamesmagruder.com/

The beginning of a blog

What, I'm blogging?

Anyway... this will be a place where I post reviews of books: delicious, repulsive, mediocre, dull, exciting, trashy, or not covered by these categories. As with other blogs, I'm sure I will end up talking about other things, like films, or home repairs, or important union issues. Who knows?

So here we go. It is worth mentioning that our library is on LibraryThing, at http://www.librarything.com/profile/the_darling_copilots.