100 words

I like buying old, cheesy-looking paperback versions of books. It’s sort of exactly why I am morally or emotionally comfortable with the notion of an e-reader: I collect real paper books because they’re cool-looking, but I don’t feel any particular need to “collect,” say, Bossypants, or whatever. Anyway – I tend to read these books into oblivion, though. I like dog-earring pages to mark the good words and lines and ideas, and I carry books in my purse or my pocket, and I hold them with one hand on the subway. They get bent and torn and manhandled and rough housed and the covers fall off and chunks of pages fall out. I mostly don’t mind this. I feel small pangs of guilt, maybe, but it’s also bragging, too: “I read this book.” That kind of thing.

So. This book was flipping awesome!

I got it at the Strand for 48 cents!! I only half-assumed I’d ever read it, but I started it on the way home or whatever and got fantastically, magically hooked. The author is…god, crazy? or amazing, at least. He keeps writing these lines that are sort of awkwardly inserted unsupported opinion? Or, personal experience in weird, revealing ways? Like, “Lovecraft probably wasn’t actually suicidal; most authors go through periods of the blues following strings of rejection,” or, “Lovecraft himself thought that Poe was a better poet than he was, but Lovecraft was obviously the far superior writer.” Also he keeps very awkwardly acknowledging and then apologising for Lovecraft’s massive racism: “Srsly, guyz, lots of totally intelligent people felt the way he did (or, like, at least they did like 20 years earlier).” He goes off on weird historical tangents, where he gives us the histories of other writers or Rhode Islanders or astronomers, or of the amateur journalism movement, or of Aryanism, or of the history of academic research into the sorting and categorising of race (yeah…there’s…lots of race stuff in there). He sort of subtly snipes at the keepers of Lovecraft’s letters and other primary sources for not giving him enough access. He also claims that Lovecraft wasn’t allergic to poison ivy, was born with inherited syphilis, and probably totally wasn’t gay, so quit asking about it already, okay?!

Anyway, it’s brilliant. Look how much I dog-eared it!

I also got these, because, embarrassingly enough, Stephen King says they’re good?

That title! So motherfucking brilliant. I will never write a title that good. And, I couldn’t help it:

Now that I’m on public transportation again (An hour and a half commute each way! 3 hours a day! 15 hours a week! 60 hours a month! 720 hours a year! That’s THREE MONTHS’ worth of days of extra work a year!) maybe I should re-start my long-ago-abandoned ABIAT feature “100 Words or Fewer While On the Clock?”

Room, by Emma Donoghue, in 100 words or fewer, while not on the clock:
I was kind of embarrassed to be caught reading this book on the subway. It’s sort of airport-y? Like, mothers of teenage girls buy this book in airport bookstores and then don’t finish it ever? And it seemed insanely exploitative and super dirty and kind of just mean. (And screw you to all the reviews and reviewers that call this “original,” because, gross.) But…I basically enjoyed reading it. There was an exciting part. It was interesting. I kept wanting to see what happened next. That’s a decent handful of the number of checkmarks you need for a “good” book, I guess.

AND OKAY HOOOOOOLD ON, a Note From the Editor:

I wrote all that like four days ago, and I just the other day now got a nook as a gift! Whaaaaa! So, yeah, neat. 100 Words or Fewer While On the Clock is totally back on!

And okay but SECOND NOTE:

I just noticed that back the first time I used to write “100 Words or Fewer While On the Clocks,” I didn’t capitalise the word “on,” but now I do. Thoughts, gentlemen?

I haven’t done a Review in 100 Words or Fewer While on the Clock in ages. So I probably don’t even remember what I’ve been reading. Here are a few random ones anyway:

We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates in 100 Words or Fewer While on the Clock:
JCO reminds me of Tori Amos in an I-got-raped-once-and-I’m-not-about-to-let-you-forget-it way, though far, far less annoyingly so. Anyway, Mulvaneys: meh, decent. Totally an Oprah Book Club book, though, and you can tell.

Haunted by JCO in 100 Words or Fewer While on the Clock:
A far better book. Still lots of rape. Here’s a JCO Mad Lib: Susan is a [poweful profession]. She is [doing something enviable]. She meets [man or men or boy]. [man or men or boy] [does something wildly unexpected to violate her]. Susan [does something wheren she breaks down very visibly]. [She gets revenge] or [someone else does for her] or [she simply becomes broken, making for a very akward feminist moral].

That was probably more than 100 words.

JCO, I kid because I love. You’re still my dog.

Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk in 100 Words or Fewer While on the Clock:
Man, you know I love you. You KNOW I loved that first story. That story was freakin’ suh-weet. My only thing is that I wish you had saved that one for last, because I kept waiting for something to top it, and nothing did. On the other hand, though, it was a brilliant opener. Reality-TV-moral: unnecessary. But maybe I just misunderstood the moral. Maybe it was more of a human-nature thing. Still unnecessary, though. MAN, I loved that first story.

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James in 100 Words or Fewer While on the Clock:
That’s right, bitch. I read Henry James. What-what? Every once in a while I get randomly into this sort of gothic-romantic-victorian crap. Mostly, though, it’s super boring. Anyway, this one was one of the non-boring ones. Sexy in that repressed way. JCO has a short story based on it in Haunted. So that’s nice.

Ash Wednesday by Etan Hawk in 100 Words or Fewer While on the Clock:
AAAAAAH ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. …What? That wasn’t a joke? Oh. Ahem. I mean, no, no, it was good. It was real good. Also, good idea cheating on Uma Thurman. Both of these things: good ideas.

Magical Thinking by Augustin Burroughs (though that might be misspelled) in 100 Words or Fewer While on the Clock:
Ugggggggggggggggggggg. You are SO not David Sedaris. I don’t know who told you you were, but…uggggg. Like, here’s the thing: pretty much most people don’t need more than one memoir. Like, Nabokov? He could have written more than one (though I suppose his was an autobiography, not a memoir, the difference being that autobiographies aren’t for fags). Augustin Burroughs? No. You only get one, and I’m being awfully generous at that.

Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis in 100 Words or Fewer While on the Clock:
Most likely fantastic. We’ll know this Wednesday. Yay!

Oh, hey – so you know how in Starbucks they’re selling CDs now? One of the CDs they have is of Sly and the Family Stone. Turns out the dude in the awesome hat on that CD looks EXACTLY like Giesel! There are two pictures specifically where they look alike: the one in the awesome white hat and also one where his tongue is sort of sticking out over his teeth. Back me up on this one, eh? Totally.

Ian’s in California. I miss him. I bought him a mango-seed-remover. Which…is necessary. He’ll…aprreciate it. Don’t tell him, though. It’s a surprise.

I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe, in 100 Words or Fewer, While On the Clock:

Well, first of all, you’re not. What you are is Bonfire of the Vanities, except with creepier sex scenes and more jarring slang and dialogue and a far less sensible racial tension. But you know what? I didn’t hate it. I don’t suppose I’ll be writing quotes from it on my notebooks and on the insides of middle school toilet stalls like I did with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Something-Or-Other when I was thirteen and easily impressed by shit like that. But I totally will probably attempt to read the last third of it at some point, maybe.

Blonde, by Joyce Carol Oates (historical fiction about Marilyn Monroe), in 100 words or fewer, on the clock.

Okay, okay, she’s sad, I get it. No one really understood her, right.

Plus, for the entire 50-page segment where she’s pregnant and happy, you’re just sitting there thinking, “Right, but when is the miscarriage?” And Oates keeps teasing you: “Gosh, Marilyn’s not here. I wonder where she is?” asks Arthur Miller. “Marilyn? Marilyn? Oh…here you are, reading a book in the kitchen.” And: “I guess I’ll just run quickly down these stairs in high heels now and – oops! – I fell! Don’t worry, I’m fine, though.” And: “Marilyn, what’s that horrible red stain all over your white shorts?” “Raspberries, silly.”

And then she has a miscarriage.