Text Testimonials

Today's Text Testimonial is..."Super Sad True Love Story" by Gary Shteyngart. Yes, I believe that today is the  appropriate day to share this novel. 

This book is a great way to diffuse those proud nationalistic emotions you may be feeling from over eating beef, soaking up those harsh rays, and inhaling debris from fireworks.

Read anything good lately??? Please Share!

Text Testimonials, Need a Book to Read?

In the Skin of a Lion, by Michael Ondaattje

"The first sentence of every novel should be: 

'Trust me, this will take time but there is order here,

very faint, very human.'"

Michael Ondaattje's In the Skin of a Lion unfolds the story, a story that is very similar for most countries, the development of a nation envisioned by the rich yet built with the hands

of the marginalized, the hands of immigrants. Ah! Keep reading, I know this trope is in full swing of repetition..yadda yadda Egyptians using Jews to build pyramids, oh wait you thought aliens did that? Ok so this book takes Giglamesh to the next level! From the beginning of epic tales to the reversal storyline of the Swamp Thing, In the Skin of the Lion is one of the first narratives of many narratives to examine the human condition of the superman mentality set in Canada! Cool right?   

Yes Ondaattje focuses on those national narratives who are not represented, yes he investigates the thought of never returning home and constructing a new identity, yes he examines the move from the wilderness into the industrial city, yes he questions whether tradition is a jail cell where one is stuck with their family for eternity! As well as the search of construction, reconstruction, replaceability, the plague of curiosity, and removability. 

Okay I need to back up, I am little excited about this book because it really reminds me of Tom Robbins Still Life With Woodpecker, oh yeah its got explosives too! And it may be even better. It is about CANADA, the country that everyone seems to always tell shut up, well it has one of the best national narratives. Fuck yeah. Ondaattje's style does change book by book, but this one is filled with this most brilliant prose. And if you are at all thinking that this style of writing may cause aesthetic to trump ethics, don't get your panties in a bunch.

A really scary thought came into my head, after sharing a bunch of childhood stories concerning hilarious moments with bugs, I wondered if the kids who are born in today's world would ever share stories such as these. No, because kids today have forgotten nature, perhaps it may be bold to say, but their concept of the wilderness is of a city, and not of the wild. A professor of mine once asked what color are the trunks of trees. The consensus, brown. Wrong he claimed! Gray. When we were painting with those awesome watercolors in preschool, our teachers told us to paint them brown. But if we really bothered to stand in front of a tree and open our own damn eyes, we would realize the color gray. Patrick, Ondaattje's protagonist, grows up during the 1920's, Canada was just beginning to use technology's first methods of constructing a nation. 

"Patrick gazes on these things which have 

navigated the warm air 

 above the surface of the earth 

and attached themselves to the mesh with a muted thunk...

There will suddenly be order and shape to these nights." 

Patrick is not god, he is just a boy, but it has always been man's dream to be god, and well the only possible way for this to exist, even though yes there is a chance god doesn't exist but then what would that make us? Oh crazy people who write superhero comics, oh wait...

Patrick in a sense is in the making of the superhero mentality, he examines nature to understand himself, but 

"the trouble with ideology, 

Alice, is that it hates the private. 

You must make it human."

So the superhero mentality appears plenty of times through daredevils working on water ducts and a major bridge, catching a nun plummeting to her death midair, and searching for a runaway millionaire, the chaos is interrupted constantly with lines that remind us of the dangers of the superhero mentality... 

"people step in out of sunlight 

and must move slow in darkness". 

The concept of time is creepily illustrated, Patrick is plagued as a boy as to why he must rest at night and work during the day, juxtaposing the workers on major construction sites who work only at night. 


"Night removed the limitations of detail"


Just as all superheroes' avenge villains in the night, the most important question is illuminated. 


Who really is a hero and who is a villain?

There are detectives, aliens, "child murderers" and shadows incapable of separating themselves from humans!

"You must remove her shadow from you".

Just read it. I would love to talk to someone about this book!




**Have you read anything great recently?? Please Share!

Text Testimonials

I have been doing this for a few entries, but I want to start addressing, other than poetry, a newish addition to this blog is the text testimonials. I enjoy reading and hope that you do too, and if you are in need of a book recommendation view the label- Text Testimonials. For now its safe to say a genre of the books are contemporary irish fiction and please please share any good books you have been reading!

Fishing The Sloe-Black Rover- Colum McCann

Sisters

“My promiscuity was my autograph. I was hourglassy, had turf-coloured hair and eyes green as wine bottles. Someone once bought me an ice cream in Achill Island, then we chipped some amethyst out of the rockbanks, and climbed the radio tower, then woke up, later, at the edge of a cliff, with the waves lashing in from the Atlantic. The next day my father, at the dinner table, told us that John F. Kennedy had landed a man on the moon. It was a shame, he said, looking at me, that it had turned out to be a heap of ash…He told me once that he had overhead a man at his printing shop call me ‘a wee whore’ and I heard him weeping as I tuned in Radio Luxembourg in my room."

            "My older sister, Bridgid, succeeded with a spectacular anorexia. After classes she would sidle off into the bog, to a large rock where nobody could see her, her school sandwiches in her pocket, her Bible in her hand. There she would perch like a raked robin, and bit by bit she would tear up the bread, like a sacrament, and throw it all around her… I sometimes watched her from a distance. She was a house of bones, my sister, throwing her bread away. Once, out on the rock, I saw her take my father’s pliers to her fingers and slowly pluck out the nail from her middle finger of her left hand. She did it because she had heard that it was what the Cromwellians had done to the harpists in the seventeenth century, so they could no longer plug the cat-gut to make music. She wanted to know how it felt. Her finger bled for days. She told our father that she had caught her hand in a school door. He stayed unaware of Briged’s condition, still caught in the oblivion caused, many years before, by the death of our mother—lifted from a cliff by a light wind while out strolling. Since that day Brigid had lived a strange sort of martyrdom. People loved her frail whiteness, but never really knew what was going on under all those sweaters. I envied her that unused body that needed so little, yet I also loved her with a bitterness that only sisters can have. "

This is how the book begins, if its enough to catch you for the second page pick it up!  The book is chaptered by different short stories, all fabulous. If you have an text testimonials, please share!!!






on a secret insight to one of my deep desires- sometimes I wish my contemporary irish fiction professor would read to me in St. Stephan's Green- he has such an wonderful voice makes any text have a simple elegant rhythm- but for now I just have my horrible attempt of an irish accent to listen to (only in my bedroom)!! 

Jesus Died For Somebody's Sins But Not Mine

Watched the Clouds Pass

What I didn't say

was that I

didn't want to walk away

each step, quick-cement

sucking the soles 

deep into the gray

drowned somewhere

 in that lonely bay

arms empty

yet the weight

of disregarding

carpe diem

what a foolish girl

choosing to 

walk away

and all events

remain

non-create-able

I will only see your face

in a year,

so long to your soul. 

-No point in writing a review, or some sort of commentary disclosure about this book, go to your bookstore and pick up a copy of Just Kids by Patti Smith. 

My Dreams Have Changed Now

"' I used to believe that Tuskar was a man and the Blackwater Lightship was a woman and they were both sending signals to each other and to other lighthouses, like mating calls. He was forceful and strong and she was weaker but more constant, and sometimes she began to shine her light before darkness had really fallen. And I thought they were calling to each other; it was very satisfying, him being strong and her being faithful...You know, I thought your father would live forever.' " 

The Blackwater Lightship, Colm Tóibín

OTG: Openly Titular Gesture. One True God.

Do yourself a favor and read this book.

The Non-Fictitious Comic Book Invisibly Illustrated

Maybe we all 

have the same narrative

switch the names

the nouns

Ha!

now you are 

reading yourself.

If we are so universal

maybe its time to

stop shooting

the pedestrians

the civilians

the other-siders

the wrong-doers

the right siders

the leftist

the crazies

the young

the old.

How far are we

removed from trauma?

Cinematic Cyber-Space Kabooms!

We can only believe

we are all

living on this god-damn planet

and it is time

to start re-writing

the narrative

cause Hitler

and Superman

sure have a lot in common.

He's A Ride

"We'd been dancing together in a circle, our jackets and jumpers and bags on the floor in front of us, and I was sweating a bit. And I felt the sweat when I saw Charlo. This wasn't a crush, this wasn't David Cassidy or David Essex over there, it was sex. I wanted to go over there and bite him.

He took the fag from his mouth, I could feel the lip coming part of the way before letting go, and blew a gorgeous jet of smoke up into the light. It pushed the old smoke out of its way and charged into the ceiling.

He was coming over. The cigarette went onto the floor; he flicked it away, didn't look where it was going. He was coming straight at me but he wasn't looking. I was shiteing; he was going to walk past me."

Unfortunately, this is not a love story. And it is pretty much Badlands- only the Irish version. The hardest part to get through this book is reading the thoughts of this battered woman. How she defends her husband till the end, only because she loves him, and how she powerfully manipulates her own thoughts. This book constantly switches between past and present, and crying in St. Stephan's Green was a tad embarrassing but this book is pretty "brutal" and Doyle uses only the best Irish slang! 

And You Thought I Couldn't Mind-Read

We live in-between

two doors of our psychosis 

which do you believe?

Do Yourself A Favor

"He turned on his bedside lamp to look at the faded roses of the wallpaper, then turned it off again. In the darkness he got up and stretched out on the sofa beneath the windows, which he sometimes did when he couldn't sleep. He might tiptoe across the landing, as once or twice he had, to gaze down at the soft fair hair spread on the pillow, eyes gently closed. But tonight he didn't.

He dozed, quite easily in the end, and then in some Italian church the woman sacristan read the evening lesson. In the shaded corner of the piazza men played cards. 'Love is greedy when it is starved,' Heloise reminded him when they walked across the difficult paving. 'Don't you remember, Everard? Love is beyond all reason when it is starved.'"

-The Story of Lucy Gault

Memory

I did not want to see him after the year had passed what I feared most was losing the memory of him the second I saw the real him and that memory would be erased, forever gone, lost and re-catalogued with his new face, new hair, new mannerisms I knew that this newly catalogued man would not be the memory of the man I loved. 

Set The Hearts Of Youth On Fire

I think I spend too much time in Chapters. But in the used section upstairs every day one of my favorite books is propped up on a shelf. I'd like to think its the guy at the information desk, kindly placing these books out for me since we hang out pretty much everyday, of course while he is on the clock and I am looking for some book for a class. I always wonder what his life is like outside of the bookstore, and when does he actually have time to read since he is always in there. But god damn he pretty much knows all existing books, and gives me recommendations every day. I would like to call him my best friend. 

"Yes, but you know I haven't any children. Besides I am a foreigner. I have no intention of dying here."

"Mr. Barlow, you are afraid of death."

"No, I assure you."

"It is a natural instinct, Mr. Barlow, to shrink from the unknown. But if discussed openly and frankly you remove morbid reflections. That is one of the things the psycho-analysts have taught us. Bring your dark fears into the light of the common day of the common man, Mr. Barlow. Realize that death is not a private tragedy of your own but the general lot of man." 

Adorn the Imperious

ris & EwingHarris & EwingHarris & EwingHarris & Ewing

Photography: Alfred Eisenstaed


"I cannot deny," I said, "that nothing will attract a man more than the picture of a beautiful, passionate, cruel, and despotic woman who wantonly changes her favorites without scruple in accordance with her whim--"

"And in addition wears furs," exclaimed the divinity.

"What do you mean by that?"

"I know your predilection."

              - Venus In Furs, Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch





Speak So Slightly

childlike, extends her limbs
flips page and takes two deep drags
lets one knee-high fall down