Recently:

Watched:

Eastbound & Down Series 1 - 9/10

The Trip Series 1 - 9/10

Daria Seasons 1-5 - 10/10

Trailer Park Boys: Countdown to Liquor Day - 8/10

This Is England directed by Shane Meadows - 10/10

Black Snake Moan directed by Craig Brewer - 7/10

Black Swan directed by Darren Aronofsky - 10/10

Buffalo 66 directed by Vincent Gallo - 10/10

Brown Bunny directed by Vincent Gallo - 8/10

I Am Love directed by Luca Guadagnino - 10/10

Pulp Fiction directed by Quentin Tarantino - 9/10

Read:

Lovesong by Nikki Gemmell - 7/10

The Book of Rapture by Nikki Gemmell - 5/10

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd - 6/10

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley - 8/10

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess - 9/10

Geek Love by Katherine Dunne - 10/10

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky - 6/10

Reheated Cabbage by Irvine Welsh - 9/10

Junior by Macaulay Culkin - 3/10

A Mercy by Toni Morrison - 7/10

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood - 9/10

Listened to:

The King of Limbs by Radiohead - 8/10

Let England Shake by P.J. Harvey - 8/10

Kudos by Surf City - 9/10

Street Chant EP by Street Chant - 8/10

Sinister Militia EP by Telepathe - 8/10

Hardcore Will Never Die...But You Will by Mogwai - 9/10

Currently reading:

"With one burning hand she held his and with the other she kept pushing him away."

- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Words of Advice for Young People by William S. Burroughs.

Meanwhile, life goes on...

I am sometimes asked if I have any words of advice for young people.
Well, here are a few simple admonitions for young and old, man and beast.

Never interfere in a boy and girl fight.

Beware of whores who say they don't want money. The hell they don't.
What they mean is that they want more money; much more, these are the most expensive whores what can be got.

If you're doing business with a religious son of a bitch, get it in writing; his word isn't worth shit, not with the good lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal.

If, after having been exposed to someone's presence, you feel as if you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that presence. You need it like you need pernicious anemia.

We don't like to hear the word "vampire" around here; we're trying to improve our public image. Building a kindly, avuncular, benevolent image; "interdependence" is the keyword -- "enlightened interdependence".

Life in all its rich variety, take a little, leave a little. However, by the inexorable logistics of the vampiric process they always take more than they leave -- and why, indeed, should they take any?

Avoid fuck-ups. Fools, I call them. You all know the type -- no matter how good it sounds, everything they have anything to do with turns into a disaster. Trouble for themselves and everyone connected with them.
A fool is bad news, and it rubs off -- don't let it rub off on you.

Do not proffer sympathy to the mentally ill; it is a bottomless pit. Tell them firmly, "I am not paid to listen to this drivel -- you are a terminal fool!" Otherwise, they make you as crazy as they are.

Above all, avoid confirmed criminals.
They are a special malignant strain of fool.


- William S. Burroughs.

"I’ve wasted a year of my life. Maybe everyone out there is a liar. And maybe the whole world is “stupid” and “ignorant” but I’d rather be in it. I’d rather be fucking in it than down here with you."

- Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

Article on Toni Morrison's 'Beloved'.

One of my all time favourite books. From Slate.com.

Why Is Beloved Beloved?

After all the plaudits, it's time to look at the novel's merits.

By Stephen Metcalf

Posted Thursday, May 18, 2006, at 2:42 PM ET

In 1987, Toni Morrison's Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1992, with Beloved still widely regarded as her masterpiece, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Three legs make a stool: This past month, in a New York Times poll of 200 critics, writers, and editors, Beloved was named "the single best work of American fiction published in the last twenty-five years," beating out novels by such luminaries as Roth, DeLillo, and Updike. I participated in this survey and can attest that, from the moment the solicitously hand-typed letter from the TimesBook Review arrived in the mail, Beloved was the presumptive winner.

Like two other American novels devoted to race, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, Beloved exists wholly beyond its own artistic merits and demerits. These books have become something more than mere literature; they're homework, with an afterlife guaranteed by their place (or in the case of Huck Finn, its embattled absence) on the high-school and college syllabus. ("Only Shakespeare rivals her in the number of senior theses devoted to her work," Harvard English professor Barbara Johnson has said.) Were it simply a matter of social redress, we could all go home now, the Dead White Males having been forced to cocktail with a Living Black Woman. ButBeloved isn't solely a work of protest and advocacy, as Morrison herself has insisted, nor solely a symbol for the progress and virtue of the prestige-granting institutions in American letters. It's a serious novel and a work of art, and it deserves to be accorded the highest respect. It deserves, in other words, to be asked, Yes, but are you any good?

For those who haven't read it, Beloved tells the story of Sethe, an ex-slave who has resettled to the outskirts of Cincinnati with her daughter, Denver. Near the beginning of the book, the two are joined by Paul D, once Sethe's fellow slave on a Kentucky plantation called "Sweet Home." (After years of thankless yearning, Paul D has at last become Sethe's lover.) It's 1873, the Civil War has been fought, and though slavery as a legal institution is over, it has only started its haunting of the African-American psyche. This Morrison dramatizes with the actual haunting of Sethe's house by Sethe's deceased baby daughter. We never learn that baby's given name, but in exchange for sex, Sethe has had a headstone carved for her girl, bearing the single word "Beloved." Paul D exorcises the house of the ghost, but later, upon returning from a carefree day spent at a carnival, Sethe, Denver, and Paul D discover a young woman sleeping near the front door of their house. The young woman goes by the name Beloved, and from all appearances she is a revenant, the embodied spirit of Sethe's dead daughter.

Morrison presents Sethe's turbulent inner life through a process both Morrison and Sethe herself call "rememory," a kind of psychic haunting in which the specifics of a traumatic incident are told and retold, even as the teller tries to block their full emergence into the conscious mind. The central traumatic episode of Beloved, to which the narrative returns again and again, is an infanticide: Twenty years earlier, Sethe beheaded her baby Beloved with a handsaw rather than allow her return to slavery. In Beloved, Morrison perfected a mode of narration, entirely her own but with roots in everything from the African griot to As I Lay Dying, built out of compulsive repetition, in which the onion, as it were, is constantly being both peeled and reconstituted; in which memories are constantly being both exhumed and buried; and in which the mind of the storyteller is both imprisoned and set free in the act of retelling. And so, like the return of Beloved, and the enduring curse of slavery itself, rememory is both a reconciliation and a vexation, both a healing and a wounding.

No wonder Beloved has been such a success: It draws up so elegantly on the blackboard. And in some very real sense, the central deranging tragedy of American life has found its finest expression in the oceanic rhythms of Morrison's prose, with its deft use of synecdoche, anaphora, and incantatory repetition, with its unique combination of seething plaintiveness and iron triumph. At the same time, though, one notices a secondary effect of these rhythms: The traumas depicted in Beloved don't actually feel, to the reader, particularly traumatic. On the contrary, the dominant sentiment of the book is the nobility of sheer endurance, a sentiment that transfers rather too easily to the reader's own self-regard. Would this nobility have transferred so easily had the book portrayed its humiliations more graphically? For a novel that will educate many Americans about racism, the grislier facts of the post-bellum world have been strangely muted—there is a single, somewhat oblique mention of the Klan ("Desperately thirsty for black blood, without which it could not live, the dragon swam the Ohio at will"), and there is almost no sense of hunger or deprivation. ("Feeding her is no trouble," Sethe says of Beloved. "I pick up a little extra from the restaurant is all.") Certainly Beloved contains passages meant to invoke intense horror, but none is immediate or documentary. For vividly portrayed action in the novel's present tense, the following passage is more representative:

Beloved took Denver's hand and placed another on Denver's shoulder. They danced then. Round and round the tiny room and it may have been dizziness, or feeling light and icy at once, that made Denver laugh so hard. A catching laugh that Beloved caught. The two of them, merry as kittens, swung to and fro, to and fro, until exhausted they sat on the floor.

A Land of Cockaigne quality pervades their lives, with meat stews on the stove and pies in the oven, so that when Sethe fetches pillows for her girls "from the keeping room," I had to work not to picture items out of the Cuddledown catalog. Physical humiliation is downgraded in favor of psychic humiliation, which is then dispersed into ambient waves of spiritual uplift. Sethe's mother-in-law was a lay preacher who once worked a spot called simply the Clearing:

Finally she called the women to her. "Cry," she told them. "For the living and the dead. Just cry." And without covering their eyes the women let loose.

It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women, and then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that followed, baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart.

In the universe of Beloved, rational knowledge isn't denigrated so much as absent—a notable regression from Uncle Tom's Cabin, a book written more than a hundred years earlier. In Stowe's novel, an interesting allegorical conflict had been generated between the characters Uncle Tom and George Harris. As a simple man in the image of his lord and savior, Tom is totally exempt from the world of rational calculation, an innocent when it comes to profit and loss. His worth, Stowe lets us know with her signature operatic bluntness, is infinite. Harris, in the meantime, is a black man who is mentally talented. How do you stand between him and his fullest potential, Stowe asks, between him and his fair market value as a wage earner? Knowing full well that religious zeal, and not Jacksonian free enterprise, would carry the cause of abolition furthest, Stowe made Tom, and not Harris, her symbol for the brutality of racial oppression. Uncle Tom's Cabin, according to a bon mot often attributed to Lincoln, started the Civil War. Beloved … well, it has won a black woman the major literary prizes, hasn't it?

Uncle Tom's Cabin, Black Boy, Invisible Man … Beloved? Perhaps the reduced compass of its ideological ambitions is an expression of the book's feminism, in the same way, for example, the Great War has been reduced to a mere parenthetical in To The Lighthouse. And yet, though Virginia Woolf always wrote as a woman, and often as a feminist, nothing she ever wrote feels written for women. A feminist's rage against the facts of a man's world, and especially a recent tendency to mass violence, runs throughout her work. Beloved, meanwhile, is a historical novel that doesn't feel grounded in history. Its historical details, such as they are, feel quickly sketched, and much of its imagery is vague, combining a tendency to faux-folksy countryism with a casual use of modern slang (Paul D is said to have "beat the shit out of" the haunting spirit of the baby Beloved).

What Beloved does feel grounded in, and firmly, is a repudiation of everything that exerts a soft but nonetheless unpleasant authority in a young person's life. In place of the need to master hard knowledge or brute facts, there is folk wisdom; in place of science, animism; in place of the strict father, the self-sufficient matriarchy, first of Baby Suggs', and later Sethe's, house; and finally, in place of a man's world, the hallowed sorority of women, especially women of color—though on this last, Morrison does not insist too heavily. As Sethe, very pregnant fugitive, breaks for the Ohio border, she runs into a young white woman named Amy. At first Sethe is fearful, but Amy is raggedy and a little touched in the head and presents no danger; and eventually she helps Sethe through (a peculiarly uneventful) labor. In a passage Morrison has identified as holding out hope for racial reconciliation, Sethe and Amy swaddle the newborn on the banks of the Ohio. "A pateroller passing would have sniggered to see two throw-away people, two lawless outlaws—a slave and a barefoot whitewoman with unpinned hair—wrapping a ten-minute-old baby in the rags they wore."

If Beloved expends almost no energy mapping its historical reality—the wage system, like parturition, has been oddly gentle to Sethe—it's because Beloved was not designed to conjure with the past as a concrete reality. True, the past, in all its ugliness, breaks into the present, but the landscape of Morrison's present is mostly an interior one. Late in the novel we discover that the painfully withdrawn Denver, like George Harris before her, is clever. "Other people said this child was simple, but Lady Jones [her teacher] never believed it. Having taught her, watched her eat up a page, a rule, a figure, she knew better." But this is a small flourish, another aside. Beloved is not Denver's story, the story of a worldly gift artificially depressed by bigotry. It's Sethe's story, as Sethe stands poised before the possibility of her own therapeutic self-renewal. The word "self" is worth pausing here. If you asked a college student in 1967 what she most believed, she might put a finger in your face, before telling you off about the war; these days, too often she points to her own chest. In a folk ideology, the ardor with which we believe becomes its own truth. Not coincidentally, Morrison has spoken eloquently of "the precious interior, the loved self, whatever that is, whatever vocabulary you ascribe to it, [that] is suppressed or displaced and put someplace else."

The language knocked around in my head for days after I read it. Where had I heard this before? In the late '70s, coincident with the emergence of Toni Morrison as a major novelist, a European psychologist named Alice Miller wrote a best seller called The Drama of the Gifted Child and the Search for the True Self. The opening paragraphs reads as follows:

In order to become whole we must try, in a long process, to discover our own personal truth, a truth that may cause pain before giving us a new sphere of freedom. If we choose instead to content ourselves with intellectual "wisdom," we will remain in the sphere of illusion and self-deception. … The damage done to us during childhood cannot be undone, since we cannot change anything in our past. We can, however, change ourselves. We can repair ourselves and gain lost integrity by choosing to look more closely at the knowledge that is stored inside our bodies and bringing that knowledge closer to our awareness.

Beloved is indeed a work of genius. No other American novel of the past 25 years has so elegantly mapped the psychobiography of its ideal reader.

"I would welcome each new dislocation, unpack my few belongings with alacrity and even joy, then set out to explore the neighbourhood or district or city and learn its ways; but soon enough I'd begin to imagine what I'd become if I stayed in that place forever...shut up in a cage of a house that would not be recognised as a cage until it was too late.

Too late for what? To get out, to move on. Yet at the same time I longed for security. It was a similar story with men. Each one was a possibility that quickly became an impossibility. As soon as there were two toothbrushes - no, as soon as I could even picture two toothbrushes, side by side on the bathroom counter in trapped, stagnant, limp-bristled companionship - I would have to leave."

- Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder

i will remember your small room

the feel of you

the light in the window

your records

your books

our morning coffee

our noons our nights

our bodies spilled together

sleeping

the tiny flowing currents

immediate and forever

your leg my leg

my arm your arm

your smile and the warmth

of you

who made me laugh

again.

- Charles Bukowski

And I also found...

...a cool article on J.D Salinger...

Holden Caulfield's Goddam War

...and Adam Panczuk.

Adam Panczuk was born in 1978. He is a graduate of University of Economics and Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan - Faculty of Multimedia Communication. He travelled through Asia from Middle East to Siam taking photos.

He is now working on a project depicting the transformation of Polish village. His focus is on the relationship between human being and nature and on the essence of humanity in relation to the earth, the seasons, and passing away and birth as inseparable elements.

'Do you know what it came from?' said Luke. 'Mayday?'

'No,' I said. 'It's a strange word to use for that, isn't it?'

'It's French,' he said. 'From M'aidez.'

Help me.

- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“Boy, did he depress me! I don’t mean he was a bad guy- he wasn’t. But you don’t have to be bad guy to depress somebody - you can be a good guy and do it.”

— J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

I decided to do this instead of going out tonight.

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold the books you've read in their entirety, italicise the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

"Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."

"That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write " - you" right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it'll say "Holden Caulfield" on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say " - you". I'm positive, in fact."

- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

“Spending time with her seemed almost too easy, as if we’d skipped all those first steps that couples are supposed to have, as if we had loved each other as kids, gone our separate ways, then returned to each other as adults who were through with games and already knew each other’s secrets.”

—Adam Langer, The Thieves of Manhattan

Oh. This is me all over.

"No one gets the relationship they deserve. For some people this is the cause of unending resentment, for some people it is the source of unending desire. And for some people the most important thing is that they have found something that doesn't end."

- Adam Phillips

Clenched Soul by Pablo Neruda.

We have lost even this twilight.
No one saw us this evening hand in hand
while the blue night dropped on the world.

I have seen from my window
the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.

Sometimes a piece of sun
burned like a coin in my hand.

I remembered you with my soul clenched
in that sadness of mine that you know.

Where were you then?
Who else was there?
Saying what?
Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly
when I am sad and feel you are far away?

The book fell that always closed at twilight
and my blue sweater rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.

Always, always you recede through the evenings
toward the twilight erasing statues.

"Madness is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression…depression is pure dullness, tedium straight up. Depression is, especially these days, an overused term to be sure, but never one associated with anything wild, anything about dancing all night with a lampshade on your head and then going home and killing yourself…The word madness allows its users to celebrate the pain of its sufferers, to forget that underneath all the acting-out and quests for fabulousness and fine poetry, there is a person in huge amounts of dull, ugly agony…Remember that when you’re at the point at which you’re doing something as desperate and violent as sticking your head in an oven, it is only because the life that preceded this act felt even worse. Think about living in depression from moment to moment, and know it is not worth any of the great art that comes as its by-product." - Elizabeth Wurtzel

"I can’t stand “real” men. Masculinity is trash. Go cry in a corner, write in a diary, hug your mom. Please. I’ve felt the painful consequences of this posturing for too long; seen fragile men who never should have been told to be anything else in the first place crack under the weight of our flawed expectations. Let our boys paint. Let them wear skinny jeans and read Ellison. However soft spoken or uncoordinated, leave them be. If you don’t, you and me will have a serious problem." - Joshua Bennett

‎''It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.''