#AMREADING MEGHAN TIFFT, THE LONG FIRE. FUNNY, BIZARRE, AND EMOTIONALLY RESONANT.

That’s what the blurb says, and yes it would be funny if it weren’t so sad, and maybe eating the pages of a book is a bizarre way of digesting content, but otherwise it sounded pretty realistic (that is, familiar) to me:

• Silence. I had the feeling he wanted to say something more, and I raised my eyebrows for him to go ahead. I waited, watching the muscle in his jaw poke out as he clamped the words down, and for another few seconds we stood there, trapped inside the rising pressure of his silence.
• All kinds of crazy. A long line of crazies and quacks, people with circuits loose and chips on their should, people living in the moral and mental gray, twisted but functional, not committable, delinquent and duplicitous, shameless and shifty.
• The news. The original horror story, the one that leaves us stuck in the murky landscape of fear and uncertainty…Every night we return for the latest installment, eager for new twists, different angles, fresh hints and allegation – the facts dubious, the rumours tempting, the silences damning…the newscasters, those clean and attractive mannequins sitting complicit and exempt at once, a placid skyline behind them.

#AMREADING OSCAR WILDE, THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

Well, re-reading it, but this is one of the most quotable novels ever  -- disgustingly glib, but undeniably witty.

• The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid.
• The ugly and stupid live s we all should live, undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet.
• Passion is a useful thing to get your book published. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.
• Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly.
• What they call loyalty, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.
• Is insincerity such a terrible thing? Not at all. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

#AMREADING CESAR AIRA, DINNER. PIVOTING BETWEEN THE REAL AND THE FANTASTIC.

A novella of the absurd and yet familiar.

My parents used to pass evenings reminiscing about the early years of their marriage. Their talk consisted of a string of names loosely connected by events – like this:

The daughter of…what was her name? Miganne, who lived in front of Cabanillas’ office…the Cabanillas who married Artola’s daughter. And my mother continued in this vein. Each name was a knot of meaning into which many other chains of names converged.

My parents had no use for antiques or objets d’art – they were just second-hand stuff.

Mother found them inexplicable, useless, and therefore unwholesome.

The narrator is a failure in his own eyes:

Unemployment, the anachronistic relationship between a sixty-year-old man living with his mother, my long-since confirmed bachelorhood, all of it had enveloped me in the typical melancholy of dead days.

But his mother blames it on the environment:

If anything bad had happened to me, the fault lay in those degenerate and evil others who surrounded us. But she also didn’t admit that anything bad had happened to me: I was just fine where I was, things in my life had turned out well and would get even better in the future. In short, a complete denial of reality was in play.

He intends to ask a friend to finance his next venture, but it would do no good to explain his hopeless situation. It was better to let him experience it. There are things that are impossible not to understand if you experience them, or at least if you inhale their atmosphere, because then, even if you don’t grasp them with your understanding, you grasp them with your being and you register them deeply.

But this is an absurd story, and so there can be no understanding.

#AMREADING Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers.

This novel is a treasury of new word creations:

• Techsperanto
• Assisterati
• Taste arbiteur & approviste
• Agglutinated fatness of American pro football
• Cosmic latte (= beige)

Cohen’s innovative language extends to his descriptions as well, for example, of this book launch.

The location: A purposefully unreconstructed but rebranded wreckage harbored on the Hudson – the interior resembled a ruin, a rusted halfgutted rectilinear ‘spanse. Hangaresque, manufacturingesque. Previously a drydock, formerly a ropery. Had it just been built, it would’ve been a marvel – the type of modern design that architects and engineers torment themselves over, the natural course of things achieved by falling apart: foundation issues, an irresolvable roof, problem with the electric and plumbing.

ENJOY BOREDOM ALREADY.

But before you settle in, read Rosencranx Baldwin’s article in the L.A. Times:

http://www.pressreader.com/usa/los-angeles-times/20160207/281822872839874/TextView

Here are a few choice phrases from the article:

• Earbuds are like underwear…almost everyone’s got a pair on them.
• They expose you to a constant stream of stimulation, a cranium full of sound.
• Get rid of them. With your ear canal stoppered white, you can’t hear the world around you. You could be doing some high quality eaves-dropping!