Against The Day

Slogging my way through “Against the Day” by Thomas Pynchon. It’s a mighty leap that shouldn’t be taken lightly. A thousand pages of dense entanglements, characters of such a magnitude notes should be taken, calamities and landscapes that float into the picture to be swished away like a flash tween after a single frame, and time – time that is invariably a very fixed commodity and can’t be given short shift by the rapid filing away of words by grazing. 30 pages a day and i have just recently met the 400th page, still not sure where Mr. Pynchon is taking me. While reading this tome I have seen other postings out on the blogsphere about this book, some are reading it, some are critical, others are writing running dialogs about what they are encountering during the read, myself I am finding myself questioning the relationship of reader and writer. The investment. The book is hefty. $40 dollars with a discount at Barnes and Noble, still it wasn’t the $1.95 I paid for my first copy of Dhalgren or the similar price I paid for Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow paperback in 1975, both of which I picked up in a grocery store in Idaho Falls, ID, neither book would be found in a grocery store today, let alone a bookstore rarely carries Dhalgren and the copy of a paperback of Gravity’s Rainbow today goes for about $18.00 with a discount at amazon.com. The simple matter is that I did not give thought then, and do not now give much thought to the cost of the book – dollar wise, instead it is the time spent with the writer’s words, the investment of my time. It seems when I was younger I could give large draughts of time to reading, but today that time seems very precious and the writing should be damned good or I will toss the thing away immediately. I thought perhaps after reading the early reviews that the bulk of the book would be an easier read than “V” and “Gravity’s Rainbow“, sadly these reports were not true. The text is dense, the lists paragraphs entangling, some of the descriptive narrative breathtaking and some numbing, all combining into a work that must be read slowly to savour a wordsmith’s work. The most surprising aspect of this book for me has been the similarity of science dialog that coincides with other books i have read recently this year or am reading at the same time. Mr. D and I bought Phillip Ball’s Critical Mass a couple months ago and I have been reading through it slowly on days when I don’t want to be involved in a novel’s drama, and during these forays into Ball’s book I am reminded of the history of science novelistically portrayed in Neil Stephenson’s The Confusion I was reading back in February this year. A nice way to tie up the end of the year, as I was devastated by my readings of four books by Michel Hollenbeque. Atomized, Platform, Whatever and The Possiblity of An Island. Devastated. Well I read them, swallowed them actually, couldn’t help myself. They are not difficult to read, simply written, compelling, and yet the bitter candor of the writer and the what seems to be utter disregard of humanism is repellant and enticing at the same time. I have gone back over and over the pages – rifling through passages to find those moments that conspired to pull me into the clutches of this compelling writer’s take on the condition human. There are moments that are ponderously infantile in their male erotica, trite in their portrait of the sixites-sevenities cult religions, and overbearing in their masculinity, yet there is a positiveness that shines through even through the abrupt death of central characters, and a shining sanitized world at the end of Atomized and a overtly thought out end of the world scenerio for the end of The Possibility of An Island. Would I read more Hollenbeque, yes – they were torturous in their world view, akin to racist in some parts, mysoginistic in others, but there was thought provoked, and a dialog was created between the writer and myself, and between my inner self and my outer world. Unlike Murikami you are not left with a questioning void at the end – you are left instead devoid of feeling anything but the wish to go out and walk in the fresh air and hope that there aren’t many people with such a gray miopic view of the world out there. As to Mr. Pynchon’s Against the Day – I have put it aside as of late. I have found it difficult to read his book let alone write on these fleeting testiments. Last year in February my parents called to let me know that my mother after many many years of smoking had contracted lung cancer. They were undecided at the time what route they were going to take, hadn’t talked to the doctor as to the course of treatment they were going to follow. Soon they began a bout with chemo, where my mother lost her hair and energy due to the radiation, and her platelet count dropped drastically, but she was stubborn and struggled forward. I went to visit her in August after Mr. A and I got back from Paris. I had a great time with her even though she wasn’t up to doing much but talk and be with me. I knew though that when I kissed her goodbye this time – it was going to be more difficult than usual – I always have said goodbye to my parents with the knowledge that this could be the last time, but this time it was more real, more solid. The future didn’t bode well even if we were all trying to put a good face on it. After my visit, my brother visited my parents, then my dad’s sister and then my sister and her kids got a visit from my Mom and Dad who went over for a short visit, my mom really wanted to go visit. At Thanksgiving time my sister and kids went over to stay with my parents and ended up spending two weeks because of the snow storms in the mountains between Seattle and Eastern Washington and then my parents were quiet for a couple weeks. About three weeks before Christmas, a week after my sister’s visit, they called to break the news that the doctor had taken my mom off her therapy and said there was nothing to be done. It was very unsettling to my mother to have to tell us this news right before the Christmas holiday. It has been very difficult to think or to move beyond this state of waiting since then, her health slowly has deteriorated, the hospice workers started coming over and the week between Christmas and New Years they moved the hospital bed into the living room, where my Mom has watched TV in her easy chair for many years. Dad has been sleeping in the living room with her on the couch. It is now three weeks since she last ate, she sips water occasionally, the hospice workers come over, Dad wakes up each morning wondering if she has left him in the night. This all weighs heavily on each of our thoughts and hearts. Her strong will has no end it seems. Why do I write about this – this personal emotion. As I have contemplated my life these past few months, awaiting the day my Dad says that my Mom is gone, I have found myself thinking about the writing relationship I have had with her. I must say I have been frightened by the thought of her leaving would leave my writing barren, so much has writing been apart of my relationship with my Mom. My Mom was never a great writer, she wrote simple letters of relating what was happening in her and my Dad’s life. I have many memories of watching her during my childhood rewriting letters she had started to my Dad, my Uncle Boyd, my Grandmother (her mother), Aunt Lois, making sure that the spelling was correct, that a sentence was correctly structured, she was worried that her lack of education would show through her writing. She always had a letter going and when I left home I began to receive her letters. 35 years later, I am going to miss her letters. Over the past couple of years the paper letters filled with her handwriting have changed to emails filled with colorful backgrounds, and emoticons. Writing is tied to her. I haven’t finished the Pynchon book yet. My mind has seemed to wander down all sorts of different paths as I await my mother’s passing, but right now I am thrilled that words haven’t left me, and the pleasure of reading and writing has not been lost because I am losing her.

Murakami Wins Franz Kafka Award

From: ceskenoviny Czech Happenings – Congratulations Haruki Murakami – incredible book – Why were you shocked?

Japanese writer Murakami arrives in Prague Prague- Japanese author Haruki Murakami, which will be awarded the Franz Kafka Prize at the Old Town Hall on Monday, arrived in Prague today. The renowned writer, one of the candidates for the Nobel Prize for Literature this year, only rarely travels. He came to Prague because he highly esteemed the prize bearing the name of his favourite author. Murakami said that he greatly esteemed Franz Kafka and having been awarded the literary prize named after him. This attracted him to Prague, he added. Murakami said that he had never been to the country in which Kafka had lived. He said that it was intriguing for him to be here. Murakami said that he had started reading Kafka’s work at the age of 15 and was deeply touched by it. He said that he had read almost all of his books and that Kafka was one of his most favourite writers he had come across during his life. Kafka’s work has been translated into Japan in its entirety. Murakami said that the popularity of the German-writing author from Prague from the early 20th century was not unusual in Japan. Kafka is respected and liked by many in Japan, he added. The protagonist of Murakami’s latest novel Kafka on the Shore is called Kafka Tamura. Murakami said that there was a connection between the 15-year-old main hero and him when he read Kafka for the first time at this age. He escapes the home and his parents in order to be independent and gets into a very unusual world, Murakami said. It is symbolical that his name is Kafka, Murakami said, adding that he remembered Kafka’s world all the time he had written the novel. Murakami said that when he had learnt that he received the Franz Kafka Prize, he was absolutely shocked. Haruki Murakami, 57, is one of the outstanding contemporary Japanese writers. He gained popularity inside and outside Japan with his novel Norwegian Wood. Author: ÄŒTK.

Shakespeare and Company, Houellebecq, Murakami(again) and my summer of leisure July 2006 part 2

Shakespeare and Company for many sparks a sense of literary history, for others memories of Before Sunset with Ethan Hawke – the movie made the little cavern of books seem grandly large, when in fact it is a cramped, jam packed nest of books in disorder. Walking through the entrance one is easily transported back into an earlier incarnation of City Lights in San Francisco, Lawrence Ferlinghetti most assuredly spent time here, before opening his store on Columbus Ave. And yet it was different, tighter, compact, steamy, of course it was mid-June and we had finally found the place. Hunting for Shakespeare and Company seemed to take on gargantuan proportions, maps were studied, web addresses were checked out, and walking down streets for two afternoons led us to believe it was an aberration of literary myth.

We did in the meantime during these wonderings find a small vegetarian restaurant – it was packed outside – inside though it was dark and sweaty – it being a very hot day – and we found Gilbert Juene – a mecca we continued to go back to once found – they have the most exciting array of maps of all of France – it would be incredible to find something of this type here in the US, bicycle path maps, road maps, broken down by county/states, we bought tons of maps – a special group of maps of the southern French area where we are planning another bicycle outing in the near future. When we did finally find the bookstore we were a bit surprised at the location, how many times had we passed by this area, the name of the store above the entrance, poem by the owner on one of the open shutters


It was here I was looking for a new book to read after finishing Murakami’s “Hard-Boiled Wonderland”, and of course in English, my last attempt to buy a book in French – Henry Miller’s “Rosy Crucifixion” panned out – still haven’t found the time to translate one of my all time favorite pieces of writing, so it had to be English and I was sure I would find something to read at Shakespeare and Company, – actually I was looking for more Murikami – obsessive compulsion I guess. There was none to be found except Kafka on the Shore which I already had, so I picked up a copy of Luis Cernuda’s Poems “written in WATER”, translated into English, one of my favorite poets. We have a copy of his homoerotic poem books from when we first met and Palm Springs still had a decent bookstore on the main street, which of course was along time ago before the Modernist Nazis and the no growth morons moved into the town. Book in hand I went to the front of the store, hoping to purchase this book without too much difficulty English wise, but still didn’t feel I had found the book I wanted to read. Nobody was at the cash register, so I stood back and looked at the books in front of the buying station, English translations of French Novels, there were all the Balzac’s, and Genet’s Dave A purchased Quereelle even though I had a copy at home, and I picked out a book, Atomised by Michel Houellebecq, the cover of course wasn’t very appealing, some emaciated blond chic, bikini clad, black and white photo, and some notes from critics saying it was a fabulous story. Ignoring the quotes, marketing is a fucking bother when it comes to choosing a book, I kept tossing it about in my head, I knew I had read somewhere about the writer but couldn’t remember where, I liked the heft of the book. I liked the first few sentences on the first page. I liked the size of the type. I was looking for something light to read. I figured since the cover had such a sexual look to it, that it might be just the right type of vacation novel to tackle, light, easy read. Wrong. This is some powerful, dark writing. More later on the writing, as I have just finished four of Monsieur Houellebecq’s novels, and I can unqualifiedly say he is one great writer, even though he is sexist, racist and a bit of a misogynist. Politics and fiction have their discomforts. I finally decided to buy Atomised and “written in WATER”_. The girl who sold me the book opened the books and stamped them with the Shakespeare and Company logo, kind of a nice souvenir, plus she slid in between the pages this handy bookmark reminding me where I had purchased the books.


We were damned hungry after trying to find the bookstore and it was the night when France was going for the second slot of the World Cup and the streets and restaurants were filled with people, many places had video screens of the game on and people were congregating outside of these restaurants 10 and 20 people deep while the game played on – luckily the place next to Shakespeare and Company was not completely full and we were able to get a table, Le Petite Chateau.

Where we had this absolutely incredible meal, the air was perfect, the sounds of the city was lively, the escargot was delivered in a puff pastry bowl, the wine was magnificent, the company was delightful, we just had a grand time. I think it was one of our favorite nights actually.

Afterwards we walked across to Notre Dame while the cars raced by us with flag waving, horn honking Parisians chanted about their success in the World Cup, there was such an exuberance in the crowds of people. We ended up on the plaza in front of the Hotel De Ville where they were showing on an inflatable movie screen our number one favorite animation film “The Triplets of Belleville”, families, couples, tourists all gathered in the warm evening air, were chuckling at the antics of the three triplets, the grandmother, the dog and the gangsters. What a great way for us to get ready for our trip to Strasbourg and the opening of the Tour de France – another story of course.

Balthus, Murakami, Houellebecq and my summer of leisure July 2006

Every time I approach Haruki Murakami’s writings I am reminded of the paintings of Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, better known as Balthus, not especially his erotica, but the world and visual appeal of his young maidens — who have always struck me as very mature women hidden within the folds of their girlish innocence. Why? Well every one of Murakami’s novels that I have read is inhabited by one of these female waif, precocious, wickedly innocent and I always have the feeling that just outside of their written world is a Cheshire cat smiling away. And invariably I feel like smiling as if the Cheshire Cat myself during my meandering through this world of words. I purchased “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” a couple of years ago and began reading it, but because of reasons that now allude me, I put it aside, maybe I wasn’t ready for the off-kilter world of his chief protagonist, or I wasn’t in the mood for reading, but set it aside I did; then I purchased his newest release “Kafka on the Beach” and raced through the pages, swilling in draughts, chapters, sections, pages in a race to get to the end of this finely crafted tale of intrigue, mystical old men, cats and forests. I found it totally entertaining. Just enough wildness, just enough beautiful sentences interspersed throughout to keep the pages turning, wanting more. I was exhausted by the end and yet jumped headlong back into the Murikami world with the “Wind-Up Chronicle”, and this time I was hooked, eating up words I had digested before, gulping down his bizarre world of sisters, husband and wife on the brink of destruction, cats, wells, mediums, and a young woman to round out the story. So while getting ready to go to Paris this year, I packed in my backpack the next book I had decided to read by Murikami, “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World”, a tale of wonder, mystery and totally whacked out adventure, a place inside of a place, a land inside a mind, Kafkaesque, reminding me of José Saramago’s “All The Names”, a world unto itself, and yet a world that slowly crosses into your consciousness and has you realizing that you might be caught up in some of the same episodes, I felt incredibly close to a sense of déja vu during the read, and I couldn’t stop turning the pages. One of the most troubling things for me when reading his books, is most of his character’s have no name, it’s not that he doesn’t have dimensionality to his characters — in fact they are very real, touchingly close to the mark, but he refuses to put a moniker to these painted creatures, these ghosts of your gray matter. Enjoyable and relaxing — I read this book avidly in Paris. The day after the Robbie Williams concert at the Parc de Prince, 68,000 enthusiastic Robbie fans singing along with every song Mr. Williams sang was a day that found both Dave and I in need of respite. We were exhausted. So we spent the next day down at the River Seine, along the cobblestone walkway thoroughfare, with books, sandwiches and sodas, reading books, people watching, waiting for the parade of Bateaux-Mouches tourists clicking focused cameras along the quay, and enjoying the late afternoon, early evening northern sunlight and clouds. Perfect. Speaking of Robbie Williams. Well the concert was everything we thought it would be and more. I mean 68,000 people all who barely spoke English, singing in unison, “Angels”, brought tears to every one of our eyes, and voices. Take a look at the link below from DailyMotion.com — it was a day bright with emotion and damn it was hot. Sweltering. And it amazes us how long we lasted without hydration. We started the day riding the metro from Les Marias to the southern point of Le Bois de Boulogne. An hour-long ride of metro transfers, it beat walking. We ended up with 2,000 others who were early, we had a few protein bars and some water and the supply lasted from 12 noon to 5 when they finally let us in to the stadium. Our tickets were for General Admission so we raced to the point where we would be closest to the stage — had a great view and we were dying in the open sun.

The opening act sucked royally. Jamaican rap jazz, the two female singers were good and their costumes were great but the trans sexual male singer and the gansta rap boy were just shit. We couldn’t wait for their set to end and Robbie to come out. Well he did and it was a stupendous performance. Huge production. His stage extended out into the crowd, there was a circus metal contraption that housed the huge plasma screens, his band and the sound system. When it was time for his entrance there were fireworks, and huge cannons of fire that burst all along the walkway to the center stage in the middle of the crowd, bursting then into huge vents of steam and up jumps Robbie singing and dancing for the next two hours. He did old, he did new and he was kinetic and funny and held notes that you would think were studio produced only. The crowd was calm although they did push and shove like all crowds when he first came on stage, but soon a relative space opened around each of us and we were all able to enjoy. One thing about concerts in Paris, they smoke. They smoke everywhere — you get used to it. If you don’t you are in for a sorry time I think. We took a long walk back to our Paris apartment, along the Seine, past the Tour Eiffel, past the carousel at Les Jardins du Trocadero, where families were enjoying ices, and the cooling hot evening air, we ordered water and then walked up to the last metro of the night and made it just in time. Ending up at the Republick station and having to walk down the winding ways to our apartment. We were hot, sticky and tired and completely satiated with Robbie “good time feelings”. When you see a performer cry after audience participation it’s hard not to feel like a part of a bigger body.

Let’s get back to the reading materials. One of my favorite books is “Querelle” by Jean Genet. And one of my favorite movies is a movie hated by most the Fassbender rendering of the novel, Brad Davis and Jeanne Moreau. Boat on the dock and reading brings this to mind. Reading Murikami reminds me of how consumed I was with Henry Miller when I first discovered him and the same with my readings of Genet after I read Saint Genet by Satre. Side note we stood in front of Satre grave in Cimetière du Montparnasse, along with Becket, Cortazar and Ionesco. Remind me to tell you about you searches for the dead and the famous. So sitting on the quay seeped in the magic of literature, David was reading Kafka on the Shore — talked him to reading it — he loved it, and me reading “Hard Boiled Wonderland”, across the river they were giving salsa dance lessons on a huge platform in the sculpture park, and the launch before us has a stately looking yacht and crew waiting for guests. Soon guests began arriving, big burly men in suits too tight for summer, strong mustaches, women dressed in slinky black dresses, long flowing hair neatly coiffed, attendants dressed the part of cruise ship stewards, hailing new arrivals, giving the helping hand to the unsteady, all seeming to be out to enjoy a ride along the Seine on this beautiful summers eve. Soon a chauffer driven limo pulled up next to us. Chauffer jumps out, lady in waiting jumps out the other side of the car, a stately large English woman in a white dress covered in a gaudy floral pattern and her partner a petite elderly East Indian matron struggled along the cobblestones towards the launch, clutching at each other’s elbow, chatting and pointing at the sky and the river. We quietly were speculating as to who was in the limo’s backseat. Of course this is speculation, and of course we were tired, but after watching the person who was finally lifted out of the back seat by the chauffer and the lady in waiting we surmised that the woman was non other than Jeanne Moreau — it fits perfectly into our dream life in Paris, her perfectly gorgeous tan black dress, the unsteady stride across the cobblestones, unlike her racing footsteps across the hallways of the Louvre, but that beak, those penetrating eyes, we are going to go to our deaths saying we saw her that day on the Quay in Paris. Living in Palm Springs we have rubbed elbows with celebrities, David used to do a lot of work with George Montgomery, and when we waited tables Mary Martin always sat in my section, and of course I will never forget my second day in Palm Springs and behind me, right beside me in the line at the Post Office was one of my all time movie heroes Joseph Cotton, whom I later waited on all of the time. But seeing Jeanne Moreau or supposedly spotting her had us both excited. It made the day. Later on I finished “Hard-Boiled Wonderland” and then started my trek into Michel Houellebecq’s “Atomised”, but I was hooked on Murikami and still am, back from Paris I picked up “Dance, Dance, Dance” and just finished it this week. Incredible is all I can say. Same characters, different embodiments, but still a thrill, the twists the turns and the emotional connections are rich and exciting. I am soon to begin the next book I have bought of his, “South of the Border, West of the Sun” but it will have to wait until I finish with my newest Houellebecq – “Whatever”. More on Paris and More on my summer leisure later. d

Stacks

Have decided to once again tackle Auto de Fe written by Elais Canetti. It has been a while, possibly 15 years. My copy is dog-eared, stained from coffee. Boise. The cover of the book is lavender, very straight forward titling, with a photo of the author taking up one third of the cover. I find myself surprised by the text – when I read the novel I thought I had given care to remembering the nuances of the writing, carefully trying to hold the writing in my mind instead of being a reader racing through the text, not enjoying the texture of the words, but only living through the story. And yet that is what I was. This is a new book, a new story. The first chapter of the first book – A Head Without A World – opens with Professor Peter Kein talking to a small boy in front of a book store, Mr. Canetti’s language translated into English is choppy but fitting to the character. After leaving the child with a promise to look at one of his books, he encounters a stranger on the street, well encounters is the incorrect phrase, he ignores a passerby who is asking him a question, who doesn’t realize he is on the street he is asking directions to, Kein is beaten by this passerby as he grows angry to Kein’s indifference and Kein in turn writes in his notebook of Stupidities, that he failed to realize the seriousness of his indifference. The chapter ends with Kein sitting down to his writing desk after talking to his housekeeper, who will play a big part in the rest of the story. Professor Kein is the owner of the largest collection of books in the city. He is a sinologist (a student of Chinese history and language and culture) and absolutely dissolved from the world of man. The pages of books are more valuable than interpersonal relationships, intellectual meanderings better than discussing the weather, and the matters of daily of life are the mere dust balls that catch upon the flooring of his carpeted library. Frugal, stoic, under the spell of words, under the spell of ideas, under the spell of higher education and snobbery Professor Kein exists. This is the entrance into his lonely world. Mr. Canetti won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981, his “The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit” is short and vivid, his autobiographical “The Memoirs of Elias Canetti: The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in My Ear, The Play of the Eyes” recounts early life in Vienna and Europe, it was here I learned about Robert Musel, Isaac Babel, Karl Kraus, and his book “Crowds and Power”. I remember reading this book slowly as I said above, listening to Charles Mingus’ “Mingus Au Um” especially the tracks entitled: “Self-Portrait In Three Colors” and “Fables Of Faubus”. I remember it was a journey of not only words, but a journey of notes. It seems to me today that music has turned into a different partner, my reading habits are different and listening to music is a background environment instead of a center of influence. We are listening to “Dear Heather” by Leonard Cohen this morning – we have had it since it’s release, but neither one of us has really listened to it fully, it is sweet and soft. An excerpt from Auto De Fé “But no mind ever grew fat on a diet of novels. The pleasure which they occasionally offer is far to heavily paid for: they undermine the finest characters. They teach us to think ourselves into other men’s places. Thus we acquire a taste for change. The personality becomes dissolved in pleasing figments of imagination. The reader learns to understand every point of view. Willing he yields himself to the pursuit of other people’s goals and loses sight of his own. Novels are so many wedges which the novelist, an actor with his pen, inserts into the closed personality of the reader. The better he calculates the size of the wedge and the strength of the resistance; so much the more completely does he crack open the personality of his victim. Novels should be prohibited by the State.” Elias Canetti Auto de Fé

Stacks

All The Names – José Saramago – author of Balthazar and Blimunda. Slow meandering Kafka Kastle walk, meandering through labyrinths of lists, stacks of paper and emotionally cold, one slowly finds the way into the deep alley of the lead character Senior José, low-grade clerk of the Central Registry – where computers do not exist, neither do ciphering machines, telephones or humanity. This is a Tower of Babel circular city, stretching out to the ends of the earth with it’s non-existent boundaries between civil duty and life. Caught up in a search for the subtle, Senior José slowly walks out of the labyrinth, to become a thief and lady’s man only to find himself languidly captured within the web of the Chief Register, a web surrounds this small insect of a man, who thinks that his small meanderings beyond the normal are not detected. The hand that plays each string is not only licking it’s chops over the discovery of this bit of life, it enjoys watching his escapades and takes pleasure in the notebooks the Senior meticulously notates his explorations of the bigger world. It is a dusty habitation, card stacks of the living, divorced, married, born and buried. Lines of like-minded souls inhabit the world of the Senior, fascists all – the lowly clerk has is jury of peers, his guilt is his motivation. The one moment of wakefulness he experiences, the luxuriousness of resting in the belly of an olive trees shadow in a cemetery is interrupted by the chance meeting of the world of chance embodied in the figure of the Shepard who is purposefully changing, names and markers in the cemetery of the suicide. A mad idea this – the philosophy of the absurd in a world of order. I found myself slowly trapped within the pages of this short novelette which became a one page read a night – savoring the slow unraveling and remembering how other writers had slowly weaved their web around me – ensnaring me to read further. I am reminded of Klien in Cannetti’s Auto de Fe, Pollo in Terra Nostra by Fuentes, the man in Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamson, Morvagine by Blaise Cendrars, Dahlgren by Samuel R. Delaney, The Queen of the Whores by William Vollman, Berlin AlexanderPlatz by Doblin, the letters of Rilke to his friend Lou Andreas-Salome, letters to Felice from Kafka, Karl and Rosa by Doblin, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Rosy Crucifixion by Miller, Cities of Interior by Nin slowly everyone of them moved within my soul, wriggled, reminding me of where I touched them first, read them, who was around me, what tastes, what sounds, music, cigarettes, coffee, friends, times, a jumbled cachaphony.