Get read for a killer set list this new years! DJ Bowie, Bookworm, Jamwerks, Ill Cosby, KRRs24 (watch your eyes), and Fast Nasty. All this for a 5 buck cover? Wow. Love Nooga.

$5 – 21+
$10 – 18+
with valid ID

Doors @ 8pm. Music @ 9pm
Drinks til 3am. Party til…

RSVP on Facebook

“The holiday season is a time for cheer and happiness for many, but it’s also a crazy time to be venturing out into the wintry bustle of last-minute shopping madness. Thankfully, there are a lot of affordable, excellent downloadable games to be had without ever leaving the warmth of your roaring hearth fire and the company of your loved ones. Grab a steaming cup of hot cocoa and settle in for this month’s download picks. We’ve got a great mix for you: musical black holes, intrepid subterranean explorers, a bookish worm, and restless alien monsters – a little something for everybody.”

Check out the full article here at What They Play.

Yes, this was a real cover: September 10-16, 1994

Ever wonder what your favorite magazine says about you?  Come on, make something up!  It’s what the women at Jezebel did, and their comment thread came up with a few cute ones.

The Economist
Libertarians.

Well, I’m pegged. I probably AM a libertarian, sort of. Is progressive lite with a libertarian streak an actual political leaning?  I like how the Economist gives me my global economic news in humorous soundbites, sometimes with very bad language. Yes, Virginia, economists DO say “Fuck.” A LOT. Especially these days.

The sentiment is real, but the magazine cover is not

I am a bookworm, though not really a certified one, but indeed, I love to read books! I may even say that my memory of how I went with reading when I was very young is still here in my busy-thinking brain. I was five when I first learned how to read. I grew up in my mom’s province, that is, in Quezon, and she enrolled me in Kindergarten in Nabangka Elementary School. My mom found it a bit hard to teach me how to write, and ever since, she just let me go on with my learning in due time. She almost gave up on me. I learned how to draw first before learning how to write letters, ü. It took a long while before I find myself writing my name on that blue-and-red-lined paper. It was I who nagged my mother to teach me na how to write my name. And then in school, I had a friend whose mom is a teacher. Her name is Mabel, and after class hours, she used to take me to their nearby house and we read lots of books there. We even learned how to read English words and phrases there on our own, of course, following the Filipino way of reading syllables. So we might mispronounced reading words like mom with [mom], as in the Tagalog pronunciation. But that daily exercise served as our little foundation in reading. That exercise involved the reading with the mouth, with speech, mostly and partly with comprehension.

Perhaps, a bad memory of my learning how to read experience was when my ninong gave me the microphone and had me sing ‘My Way’. I was too young that the way I sang the song was [may way], Yes, the Tagalog way. Just imagine me singing.T.T

When I was six, my family moved to Laguna. My mother took me in another elementary school in the place. The teacher asked each of us to read so as to determine the readiness of the incoming students. That way, they are also able to know where or in which class section to put the child. Luckily for me, I was able to read clearly and answer the questions nicely that they are to put me in the first section. BUT I was too afraid with the teacher, whose wearing eyeglasses and always holding a stick that I begged my mom to take me home. The teacher told my mom to wait, that perhaps, I wasn’t too ready to be seated in a class. My mother spanked me at home because of that. But she took heed of the teacher’s advice. I stopped for a year. The next year, I was determined to go to school on one condition, that I am to be put in the second section in which the teacher looked more warm and kind. The school personnels agreed, but during the second quarter, they transferred me to the first section again. I cried, yeah right, but the teacher promised to hide her stick. And so I stopped crying.

Since then, I became a book fanatic and I read before going to bed. It’s just lately that I begin to be choosy of the kind of material to read, such that I had an eye defect and can’t stand prolonged reading. But still, I read all kinds of reading texts. I usually take down notes while I read when it comes to the class reading lists because I doubt I will remember well what I’ve read. In my younger years way back in elementary and high school, I read the text once and then I already know the contents. I can easily absorb the thoughts or the knowledge or information the author/s is/are trying to convey to the readers. It’s just at the moment that I’m having difficulty retaining the knowledge I get from reading books. Anyway, that won’t get in the way.  : )

Journey to that moment in the middle of the night.

Moments were fleeting

but I still remember them

i made them

a bigger deal.

Shooting stars, waves, the fog

“where did you come from?”

hand in mine, i waited for you to sleep.

you felt my beating heart…

just ask for me back

my heart will be there in a second,

for at least.

near the waves

under the trees

watching the stars.

i was yours to push away,

you were mine to question.

your little tape recorder

“I get to see you tonight!”

“I get to see you tonight!”

“I get to see you tonight!”

your smiling face.

—————————— Inspired by a broken heart 2008 (not mine, though link.)

Bookworm Adventures: Astounding Planet (28 MB download)
Help Lex the Bookworm save the world in this time-traveling, vocabularious adventure! Build words and battle nearly 50 alien mutants and robot foes to save the Great Library from certain doom! But this time you’ll be joined by new fighting friends, Skeletrox and H.G. Wells! Boost your word power with all-new Rainbow Tiles and earn 8 new treasures along the way. And remember – the better the word, the badder the damage!

I’m not sure why my idea of life s rather vague-maybe because i have a restless mind & a tortured soul?

AFTER DARK by HARUKI MURAKAMI tells me bout INTELLECTUAL CURIOSITY & the price i have to pay for it, how everyone’s caught up in his/her own tentacles, & how to race my own shadow. I read this novel in1 sitting last night (i know,am an addict) & i guess tonight will be another sleepless night for i have another Murakami book sitting on my stairs.

So basically right now I’m just procrastinating from writing this article … which will be my last article for my internship!  Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to write.

During my Web-browsing, I came across some humourous things which will provide you with some distraction.  Enjoy!

First of all, this list of stereotyping people by their favourite author.  What does your favourite author say about you?  According to this list, I’m a girl who made out with other girls in college when I was going through a “phase” (Jane Austen), and a female high-school French teacher with a master’s degree (Virginia Woolf).  I wonder what loving the Brontë sisters says about me (they’re not on the list)?  That I’m an obsessive romantic with a dark side (quite accurate)?  

Take a look at the list.  Is your favourite author(s) on there?  What does that say about you?  Are you a youth group leader who picked your nose in fourth grade (C.S. Lewis)?  Or a woman whose favourite colour is hunter green (Margaret Atwood)?  

From the same blogger is this website of pure comedic gold: http://www.momsmsgs.com.  

From the website’s About section:

We decided to start this site when we realized that because of technology and social networks, parents can be annoying more often and in a more public way. The texts messages are embarrassing enough – you only have to provide us with your first name and your relation to the offender.

And remember Mom and Dad, we only poke fun because we love you.

Anyone who has received a ridiculously misspelled text message, e-mail, or awkward facebook status comment from their parents will truly appreciate the humour of this website which had me laughing hysterically at work (co-workers think I’m nuts)! 

Here are some of my favourites:

Becky: OMG Gossip Girl was so good!

Becky’s Mom: What does OMG mean? It sounds like you’re choking.  (Facebook status comment)

Janna’s Mom: Why can’t we all get along?

Janna: What happened now

Janna’s Mom: Aunt Nancy said that she wasn’t coming to Christmas because Dad told you guys about how she went to Twilight by herself (text messages)

James: We won the ultimate frisbee tourney!

James’ Mom: You’re my favorite little mathlete. I remember you when! (Facebook status comment)

Ryan’s Mom: Is that bar really a cougar place? I’m scared they’ll take my hubby away!

Ryan: Dad’s 61. You have nothing to worry about.  (text messages) 

Remind me to start saving my mom’s text messages, okay?

Let the Great World Spin

10:

Let the Great World Spin (2009)

Colum McCann

I’ve become quite impatient with the symbiosis of art and war. Iraq and Afghanistan war themed movies got shoved down everyone’s throats and for the most part, they all floundered. It’s not that I’m not deeply moved or distressed by the events going on in the East – I just haven’t been able to connect with anyone’s vision of the impact that 9/11 or the two aforementioned wars have had on the American public. September 11^th, 2001 was a day that no one will ever forget and everyone has that story of where they were when they first heard the news of the attack on the towers. 9/11 and the consequent two wars have become fodder for major artistic crap and I don’t think it was until I read Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin that I was finally able to emotionally connect with another’s vision on the subject. The novel revolves around a group of characters that are all connected by the fateful August day in 1974 when Philip Petit walked eight times across the World Trade Center on a tightrope. Philip Petit is never named in the novel and that’s because he is not more important than any of the other characters in this book. The New Yorkers a quarter of a mile below his tightrope are also walking a tightrope of their own, in the time while the Bronx is burning, while the first emails are being sent out, while America is still trying to recover from the evils of the Vietnam War. The novel is a masterpiece, but even its smaller parts, like a chapter called “Miro, Miro on the wall” could stand apart as one of the best short stories I’ve ever read. Reading it I felt like I was reading the Wandering Rocks of New York City. The book definitely has a Ulysses effect, which I’m obviously going to get all ridiculous about. How typical that an Irishman ended up penning the defining 9/11 novel.

The Road

9:

The Road (2006)

Cormac McCarthy

The cover for The Road pretty much tells you what you’re going to see on this journey through Apocalyptic America: pure blackness, gray ash falling from the sky, and red blood blood blood. I don’t know that an author has really slapped me in the face with the darkness in the soul of man as forcefully as Cormac McCarthy has. His crowning achievement, Blood Meridian, is constantly hailed as the bloodiest book in American literature and let me tell you, they’re not lying. McCarthy has to be an alien from outer space or something. You read McCarthy and you’re awakened to the possibilities and the miracles that can be performed with the language you thought you knew so well. We’re so used to reading the great masters of the form like Joyce and Faulkner and you wonder what has happened to the world – why don’t people write like that anymore? When I read Cormac McCarthy I revel in the fact that there is a living, breathing master still amongst us. Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy will be the two authors that in a hundred years time will be regarded as the masters of the American novel. The Road is McCarthy’s easiest book, to read that is. It’s his most accessible, being nowhere near as hard to follow as say, Suttree. The Road contains some of the most beautiful language you’ll ever read in your life; it’s also one the most harrowing and deeply distressing pieces of fiction you’ll ever come across. The America that ‘The Man’ and ‘The Child’ walk through is beyond anything I’ve ever thought could be possible. This is not some Roland Emmerich extravaganza, where Noah’s Ark lays perched on the tip of the Empire State Building after a giant tidal wave or anything like that. This is a world where the toxins of years before have finally managed to cloud the sun from the Earth, leaving it in total darkness – the only light being the white you can see from the ash falling from the sky. McCarthy presents an incredible display of man’s degeneration, and as compelling and visceral an experience as it is, I pray that the closest I ever get to a world like this is solely through McCarthy’s artistry, but seeing how things are going, that’s probably not going to happen.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics

8:

Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2006)

Marisha Pessl

Special Topics in Calamity Physics gave me the great pleasure I once had, especially when I was in high school, of picking up a brick of a book and tear it to pieces in a day or two. My roommate at the time would come home and find me on the couch laughing my brains off, when she caught me crying my eyes out was when I had finished it.  It presents a murder mystery in the coolest, freshest, most original manner (each chapter titled after a great work of fiction [Othello or Howl for example]) and concludes with a whimsical conceit of a Final Exam. It felt like a hodgepodge of Mean Girls, Six Feet Under, American Beauty and The Da Vinci Code. It’s a book that is as fun as it is intelligent and funny. It didn’t get as much praised as I had originally expected it to receive, but nonetheless, I think it was the most fun I think I had in reading a book this decade. Its conceits tickled me in such a great way and I really never ever had any clue where it was going to go. I feel bad for Marisha Pessl. This was her debut novel and I can only imagine that coming up with something to follow this must be stomach-turning for an author. But whatever, that’s her job. So churn it out good woman! I need more Pessl!

The Year of Magical Thinking

7:

The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)

Joan Didion

I didn’t know a thing about Joan Didion when I picked up this small memoir. I’ve never been one to gravitate towards a memoir for that matter. It just didn’t seem like my cup of tea. But, seeing how heavily praised a work it was, I obviously picked it up. I saw that National Book Award stamp and I called it a day. I didn’t know what I was in for. Ms. Didion’s recollections of her life with her husband, the writer and poet John Gregory Dunne and their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael and of her husband’s subsequent death has now beome a classic of what could be called “mourning literature”.  The way she mourns her husband, all the while trying to keep strong for her dying daughter, who will eventually die just short of the novel’s publication, is absolutely heartbreaking. I was a real mess when I read this book. Ms. Didion lets us see her without any of the glamour. We see her at her very worst, when she just wants everything to just crash and burn. She bears her soul in these pages in the most uncompromising way. It’s terribly sad what happened to Ms. Didion and it’s not hard to feel for her, but it’s presented in the most stunningly beautiful language. It’s not the kind of book you can finish and then just move on to the next one. You mind and your emotions need time to repose once you’re done reading this memoir. It’s one hell of a cathartic experience.

Middlesex

6:

Middlesex (2002)

Jeffrey Eugenides

Middlesex has a narrative arc that I just go gaga for. It’s the same exact paradigm used by Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: Three parts, titled chapters, a family saga that starts with the grandparents of the particular third generation member in question, who typically has a magical power or is just a band apart from the rest in its own unique way. I knew when I read The Virgin Suicides that Jeffrey Eugenides was someone to follow; someone whose works I should know and register. Middlesex is the story of Cal and his Greek immigrant family. Cal is an “intersexed” person who only learned of his undescending testicles at the age of fourteen, when he was still Calliope Stephanides. Middlesex starts in Greece, ships us across the Atlantic, to Detroit, Michigan and all the way to San Francisco. I really appreciate and connect to Eugenides’ sensibilities. His stories are romantic and very dark and his writing is always very calculated and powerful. Middlesex is taboo in the way One Hundred Years of Solitude is taboo about incest and the apprehensions behind making a life, about reproduction. In ways Middlesex is an amalgam of many great stories (the correlations in narrative between Middlesex and Midnight’s Children or One Hundred Years of Solitude are hard to dismiss) but Eugenides still managed to give us a gorgeously inspired piece of work. The second read was even more powerful too.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

5:

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2006)

Junot Diaz

So when I was living with my ex-roommate, she had a galley copy The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. She thought it was brilliant, shoved it down my throat, but I told her I was busy with who knows what at that moment. So she shoved it down our other roommate’s throat and he ended up thinking it was brilliant as well. Still, for some reason, it wasn’t grabbing me. I had to wait, once again, for it to win the Pulitzer for me to do the obligatory Scooby-Doo “urf!?” to finally read this book. It’s one of those brilliant books that everyone loves. I see someone reading this book on the subway all the time and it always makes me smile. I want to scoot people off their seats just so I can sit with the person reading the book so we can talk about it and how I love that part, and has she read that scene?” I can be intolerable and this book made me really intolerable. Its nods to science-fiction, its geekiness, its use of Spanglish and its inherent beauty just floored me and made me jealous that Diaz had written something like this first. I’d be proud of myself if I were Junot Diaz. This is a book to covet, it’s so good. I hadn’t loved a character and been so honestly frustrated by one and felt so connected to a fictitious character in so long that when I finally came to the end I didn’t know what to do with myself. I couldn’t read anything else for a little while. I was so wrapped up in my feelings about Oscar Wao. As someone who likes to write fiction on the side, this book immediately made me look inward and made me pick up and a pen and start writing a little bit again. It’s a very passionate book and surely destined to become one of the great works of American literature, not just of this decade, but of the entire canon.

The Savage Detectives

4)

The Savage Detectives (2007)

Roberto Bolaño

Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer

The Savage Detectives is unlike any book that has ever been written. It presents a style and form that has a writer’s stamp all over it. Once cracked, you’re immediately in the Bolaño world. You’re immediately introduced to The Visceral Realists, a gang of poets that include Chilean poet Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, both founders of the resurgence of this poetic movement which was first started by “the mother of visceral realism” Cesarea Tinajero. The first part of the book is narrated by Luis Sebastian Rosado, a seventeen year old who is introduced to the poets and is eventually taken along on the quest to find Cesarea Tinajero, who had disappeared from world long ago. The second part, “The Savage Detectives” is 400 pages of vignettes, consisting of the dozens of voices of people that Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano meet in the consequent 20 years after their trip into the Sonora Desert to find Cesarea Tinajero. I couldn’t believe how original this book is. This guy juggles what feels like a hundred voices in these four hundred pages and he keeps everything he’s working with in the air. One thing about Bolaño that I really loved and respected was how well he wrote gay men. The relationship between Luis Sebastian Rosado and Luscious Skin is just as truthful and erotic and funny and adventurous as any of the fiery sexual explorations that pepper this novel. It’s a very erotically charged, but it’s very sexy. And I’ll NEVER forget Barbara Patterson, the American hippie chick with the mouth of a sailor, or Amadeo Salvatierra, who keeps trying to shove mescal down your throat every time you come back to his story. How can someone map 20 years in the lives of these two people so precisely and with such gusto? It’s a head-spinning book that really wrapped its fine web all around me till I felt like I belonged in its pages. I lived and breathed this book and it was so sweet to discover it all on my own. It was there at The Strand and I took a chance on it, especially considering that I got it hardcover and that I really never do. Well, it was the discovery of the decade for me. I can’t think of a single contemporary writer that I’ve read this whole decade that has impacted me more than Bolaño.

House of Leaves

3:

House of Leaves: (2000)

Mark Z. Danielewski

The first thing that grabs you about House of Leaves is its size. It feels and looks like a fat movie script. The cover says “A Novel” but once I flipped through its pages, I didn’t see your typical everyday novel. Boxed-in words that you can read only when projected onto a mirror, sentences in the shape of snapped ropes, appendixes, photographs, letters, film reels – pretty much a typographical labyrinth of mad genius that even with its hyper-intelligence, manages to also be highly accessible. I never felt as if the book were leaving me behind, sucking up its dust. There are so many secrets, puzzles, anagrams, acronyms, references that entire websites have been created – discussion boards, blog commentaries and conspiracy theories all of them trying to put the pieces of this puzzle together. At the start we meet Johnny Truant, a young L.A. scenester who moves into the first floor apartment of a blind man named Zampano who has just died. Inside the blind man’s mausoleum of an apartment he finds a pile of manuscripts, pictures, film reels that pertain to a certain project called The Navidson Record. This report is supposedly some Blair Witch kind of underground movie spectacle – a real life family home movie of shot by the Navidson family as they try to fight off…their own house. Slowly, but surely, we start thinking just like Johnny, getting so sucked in to this story that we start believing it’s real. The house on One Ash Tree Lane, as the Navidson family soon learns, bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, well – actually it grows on the inside. Eventually, their children get lost in the house and what ensues is one of the scariest and most thrilling reading experiences I’ve ever had. We hear about theories on sound and echos, parallax, we walk down a 5 ½ minute hallway, and we’re taken down Yeat’s winding gyre – Dante’s ever-turning path down to the bottom of Hell. As terrifying as the experience is, at its true core, House of Leaves is a love story. It’s about fear, definitely, but more specifically, the fear of losing your family to forces that seem out of your control, whether its madness or from random chaos. Bret Easton Ellis’s review on the back cover of my copy asks himself ‘Will I ever recover?’ In my case – any day now.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

2)

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2001)

Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a book I’ll never forget. I keep wanting to reread it for a third time, pretty much all the time. There are so many books I want to read, but all I want to do is read this again. So many images from this book stay with me, that just come in flashes every once in a while. The entire premise is so exciting. It’s more than 600 pages and you never feel encumbered. Joe Kavalier was a character I truly fell in love with. Just like I fell in love with Aladdin when I was a wee homo, Kavalier was the fake man of my dreams. I wanted to be around him all the time. I can relate to Sammy Clay in so many ways and there are few love stories that move me the way Sammy Clay and Tracy Bacon’s relationship affects me. The scene at the airport at night and their walk through the abandoned World’s Fair site are some of my favorite scenes in any book I’ve read. It’s a book that contains multitudes too. It’s an immigrant story, a love story, a gay love story, about the birth of comic books, a post-World War II novel and it succeeds on every level.

2666

1)

2666 (2008)

Roberto Bolaño

Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer

I discovered Roberto Bolaño at the perfect hour. I had picked up The Savage Detectives and was instantaneously addicted to his polyphonic style. I was hungry for more and I started shopping around for some Bolaño, when I heard, who knows where, that 2666 was coming out and that it was a near thousand-page monster. I immediately Googled this said monster and found the cover art and synopsis on Amazon. First off…the cover designs by Charlotte Strick and Jonathan D. Lippincott is without a doubt the best I’ve ever seen. I love book design and it honestly is a big factor in which book I chose to read next. I crumble for a good cover, or overall book design, like Danielewski’s books, as well as Chabon’s on some occasions, Kavalier & Clay to be precise. So, when I saw Gustave Moreau’s “Jupiter and Semele” behind that red demonic typography I knew there would be a real and true universe contained behind that cover. Like a psychopomp, it showed me the way to hell. It also showed me that hell is palpable and that we’re all living in it.

Reading a book like The Savage Detectives can be exhausting, and I sure as hell was weak from retaining so many lives in such a supersonic speed at such an incessant rapidity. I figured it was the incredible and inspired triumph of a writer that just wrote his masterpiece. Surely if I was exhausted, the guy that conceived of what was probably hundreds of characters must still be gasping for air years later. But no, it was just like a regular Tuesday afternoon of jotting stuff down for him. He seemed to inhabit a Shakespearian madness of filling the transparencies of others and the way it reads, so fluid and naturally propelled, it only feels as if it is spilling out of him as he’s writing it – consulting no books, no manic marginalia, no tape-recorder. His prose feels like immemorial knowledge, like the scrolls of a parallel universe. The entire book, in one way or the other, centers around the factory town Santa Teresa, based on the Mexican town of Juarez, where hundreds upon hundreds of women’s murdered bodies have been recovered from the streets and in the deserts on the outskirts of the city.  Although a technically uncompleted novel, 2666 is comprised of five parts: “The Part about the Critics”, “The Part about Amalfitano”, “The Part about Fate”, “The Part about the Crimes” and “The Part about Archimboldi”. It is 893 pages of some of the craziest prose I’ve ever read. “The Part about the Crimes” itself is 280 of carnage, nihilism, rape, shooting, strangulations, murder. We meet all of Santa Teresa’s victims as well as some of their respective families. We learn their daily regimens, the friends they’ve made in their lives, and most shocking, or startling of all – we meet some of the men that killed them, men they knew, and even some they loved.

It was an epidemic; it wasn’t a slasher roaming the streets for a span of more than a decade, but an entire city that seemed borne out of some plasmatic violence. I’m talking about both Santa Teresa (the fictional) and Juarez (the real), for they are separate entities. Bolaño had heard about the murders from an article in a newspaper and wanted to conduct a further investigation, but as luck and the cosmos would have it, he never got much or real information to work with. The lives of all the women in “The Part about the Crimes” are pure Bolaño fancy. But when we read it, it’s as real as knowing your own name. And that’s just one of five parts (but lucky for us, a sixth part has surfaced amongst Bolaño’s papers in Spain).

In 2666, Bolaño takes us through North America, Mexico, and all across Europe in one rhetorically maniacal fell swoop. The worlds created here are so fully-fleshed, so seamlessly drawn from every angle that it’s hard to not accept that Florita Almada, the psychic force of the novel, doesn’t really make those television appearances, or that Archimboldi is a real person that lives or had lived in a universe that wasn’t automatically legitimized by Bolaño’s word. We learn so much from reading 2666, and it doesn’t matter whether any of it is true or not in the physical world. We learn about the various species of seaweeds and sponges, about post World War II science-fiction, that a starfish won’t survive in a normal fish tank and what it might feel like to know you’re crying underwater. If you’ll allow me, this is what we have to learn about ‘stars’ according to 2666:

STARS – (Seaman) said that people knew many different kinds of stars or thought they knew many different kinds of stars. He talked about the stars you see at night, say when you’re driving from Des Moines to Lincoln on Route 80 and the car breaks down, the way they do, maybe it’s the oil or the radiator, maybe it’s a flat tire, and you get out and get the jack and the spare tire out of the trunk and change the tire, maybe half an hour, at most, and when you’re done you look up and see the sky full of stars. The Milky Way. He talked about star athletes. That’s a different kind of star, he said, and he compared them to movie stars, though as he said, the life of an athlete is generally much shorter. A star athlete might last fifteen years at best, whereas a movie star could go on for forty or fifty years if he or she started young. Meanwhile, any star you could see from the side of Route 80, on the way from Des Moines to Lincoln, would live for probably millions of years. Either that or it might have been dead for millions of years, and the traveler who gazed up at it would never know. It might be a live star or it might be a dead star. Sometimes, depending on your point of view, he said, it doesn’t matter, since the stars you see at night exist in the realm of semblance. They are semblances, the same way dreams are semblances. So the traveler on Route 80 with a flat tire doesn’t know whether what he’s staring up at in the vast night are stars or whether they’re dreams. In a way, he said, the traveler is also part of a dream, a dream that breaks away from another dream like one drop of water breaking away from a bigger drop of water that we call a wave…Really, when you talk about stars you’re speaking figuratively. That’s metaphor. Call someone a movie star. You’ve used a metaphor. Say: the sky is full of stars. More metaphors. If somebody takes a hard right to the chin and goes down, you say he’s seeing stars. Another metaphor. Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming. In that sense a metaphor is like a life jacket. And remember, there are life jackets that float and others that sink to the bottom like lead. Best not to forget it. But really, there’s just one star and that star isn’t semblance, it isn’t metaphor, it doesn’t come from any dream or any nightmare. We have it right outside. It’s the sun. The sun, I am sorry to say, is our only star.

For someone so consumed with the lives of writers and poets, it’s interesting that Bolaño fails to mention the span of the literary star, who unlike the movie star and the athlete, can live for hundreds or thousands of years in the minds and the hearts of his devoted followers, of his or her readers. Bolaño for one, I expect, will be read and remembered for a very, very long time. We know that Bolaño is gone, but his light keeps reaching us, and I’m grateful to have looked upon semblances of his making such as that of 2666.

Bookworm Adventures: Astounding Planet (28 MB download)
Help Lex the Bookworm save the world in this time-traveling, vocabularious adventure! Build words and battle nearly 50 alien mutants and robot foes to save the Great Library from certain doom! But this time you’ll be joined by new fighting friends, Skeletrox and H.G. Wells! Boost your word power with all-new Rainbow Tiles and earn 8 new treasures along the way. And remember – the better the word, the badder the damage!

Mr. McCann answering audience questions

TRUSTING THE DISTANCE

A Q&A with Colum McCann following a reading from his new National Book Award winning novel, Let the Great World Spin at 192 Books on December 9^th, here in NYC.

CM: Does anyone have any comments or questions?

Audience: I was wondering if you’ve ever met Philip Petit.

CM: I have a message on my answering machine (in a French accent) “hello this is Philip Petit. I am looking for Colum McCann…” but no I’ve never met him. I sent him the book. I talked about what I wanted to do, but I haven’t heard from him, so I don’t know whether he likes it or not. But, in a way, well I would love for him to like it, but in a way I don’t really care because it’s not so much about him as about so many others. But I think what he did was beautiful and I think he handled it that moment when he was up in the air with the most beautiful grace. It’s…it’s an impossible thing. What Philip Petit did was impossible – it was beyond possible. And what happened to the towers was impossible, beyond possible, and how they match together – this act of creation and this act of destruction and it becomes its own strange double ground (sic). I don’t think there’s any one way to write about 9/11. Don DeLillo did a beautiful job. So did Jonathan Safran Foer and Claire Messud did it beautifully. But the thing is there’s all sorts of stories to tell and I wanted to tell it from the allegorical point of view and allow people to experience it maybe in a different way. Really, the whole novel, what I tried to achieve is two little black kids are coming out of the projects in New York and they get rescued. Take it from the very high to the supposedly low. The lowest part of Manhattan, late midnight when the kids are taken away by Social Services. I’m sure Petit would recognize that.

Audience: I wanted to ask about your process of research versus writing. You put a lot of research obviously into this book and into Zoli. Do you separate the two very distinctly? Do you set yourself a period of time in which you do research? When do you know when to begin to write? Do they kind of feed off each other? How does the process work?

CM: I wish I had an absolute answer to that question. You research it and then you walk away from it and try to forget it. I fill up notebooks first off and then I never consult the notebook again. It’s very strange. This one wasn’t so hard. Zoli was a much harder book to research and not as successful a book in many ways. Even Dancer was a harder book for me to research. But this is a New York novel and I’ve been here for the best part of 20 years, so it was an easier thing to do. Like Tillie, for example, what I did was, I got in touch with Richard Price, who I love, one of America’s great writers, and I knew that he knew the cops in the city and I said, “Hey Richard can I borrow your cops?” And I went out on what you call a ride-along with them. And I did a ride-along in the Bronx and I did walk-alongs with Housing cops in the projects and things like that. And then they gave me access to files from 1974 of all the prostitutes and all the nicknames and all the lingo that were in the rap-sheets and reports. And then I went to the New York Public Library, greatest library on Earth, and looked at all the photographs and any films that I could get. And then I went and spent six months trying to capture her voice and essentially failed right until the end when, that line that I read to you tonight, “the skinniest dog I’ve ever seen is on the side of a Greyhound bus,” that was the line that allowed me access to her voice. It was late one night and I was about to go to bed and I tell my wife “I’ll come to bed in five minutes” and she tapped me on the shoulder and it was the next morning. You know, it was one of those things – you get into her voice. And then you forget the research and just hope that it comes out. But I kind of don’t write about what I really know about. I say this to my students at Hunter College – essentially I have a very boring life. I live on the Upper East Side. Sorry. I have to apologize for my address all the time. No, but I have a very normal life, but I write towards what I want to know. That’s where the research is.

Mr. McCann signing books after the reading and the Q&A

Audience: Tillie for me was a difficult character of all the characters. It’s hard to get into her. It’s hard to get attached to her and then when she’s in prison there’s such enormous despair. You sort of brought this vital woman to our lives and I was thinking about this today before coming up here and it’s like…she tried to save her daughter, she tried to take the rap and her daughter ends up dying anyway. And there she was with no one to really talk to about it, about how she was in a system that she despised. And she’s been successful at avoiding it, except for short stays in prison. How did you create that despair for Tillie? It made me feel very sad.

CM: Sometimes these characters just take over and we don’t know where they’re going to go. One of the big secrets about writing and I think most writers will tell you this, is that we really don’t have a clue what we’re doing and we just hope it’s going to work out. One of my favorite quotes is from Doctorow where he says that writing is like driving in a fog at night with your headlights on, and you can only see a certain distance down the road and you trust that distance, and eventually it’s going to get you somewhere. I’d say with Tillie, I didn’t know what she was going to do. I didn’t know what she was going to do to herself in prison. I didn’t even know that her granddaughters would get rescued. It was just the process of writing the book. Later on you make sense of it. I realized like 3/4 of the way through the book that I kill off the two major characters in the first chapter, Corrigan the Irish Monk and Jazzlyn the prostitute. They’re actually the two pillars of the novel. So, these two pillars, or maybe we can call them towers, fall in the first chapter and then you spend the rest of the book reconstituting. That was a real revelation for me. But I didn’t know that! I’m not being disingenuous when I say that I’m not as clever as my readers, but I’m emotionally clever and I can feel things. And if you can walk into that and you can trust it, then hopefully it’s going to work out. Honestly, I really believe, that a book is never finished until it is read and completed and examined and pulled apart and maybe it should haunt you afterwards. That’s what good books do to you; that’s what they do to me. Like Michael Ondaatje. He haunts me! Like when I think of In the Skin of a Lion or when I think of Divisadero – that book haunts me so much. I think that’s the purpose of good writing.

Audience: In Man on Wire, where he’s talking about living your life like you’re a man on wire – when you set out to write this book, did you set out to break some rules? Did you feel like you were a man on a wire?

CM: I’ll tell ya, the honest to God’s truth is – I had this idea shortly after 9/11 and I became a citizen. I was down there protesting and I was like, what if I get arrested? – they can deport me and whatever. I thought I was going to write a book only about the man on the wire and what I was going to do was mix some history and I was going to make him fall because he was way too slow. And that was it, you know. And that was going to be that big sort of image. And then it seemed to me that that was almost too easy because people were perverting justice and I wanted to pervert the idea of history. Again, as a writer, all these people that were gathered down below became much more interesting to me, and I realized that they were the ones walking a tight rope. But they’re more like six inches off the ground, but the thing is if they fall, they fall just as hard as anyone else. I wanted to talk about the grace of the man up above, but I really wanted to talk about the grace of the woman on Park Avenue who has lost a son, or of the Irish monk who believes that someday the meek might inherit the earth. That was the sort of tight rope. As for me personally, I never felt I was walking a tight rope. I know the image of the writer that walks the tight rope, but I never felt that. I swear I couldn’t even stand on this table without collapsing. I have terrible, terrible vertigo.

Audience: When you talk about being haunted by books you’ve read, I was wondering if you could talk more specifically or at length about what, if anything, you hope that your work accomplishes in the lives of other people that read it.

CM: Wow, that’s an enormous question. I don’t know that books can do a lot, and I believe in literature; it’s the only thing that sustains me, as well as my family. I think books can shift things sideways just a little bit. I don’t think books cure things or anything like that, but I think if you find things in say, The Skin of a Lion or Coming Through Slaughter, or Peter Carey’s work, or whoever it happens to be, that we can be changed slightly and our relationship to the world has sort of a domino effect. I sometime think about things that happened to me when I was young, but one very significant thing happened to me when I was very young. My father took me to see my grandfather in London, and my grandfather was dying, and afterwards, because my father thought I was freaked out, he took me to the Hard Rock Café and I remember I had a burger – I didn’t even know what a hamburger was. Is anyone here from Ireland? No? Well, there’s no hamburgers. But we were in London and we had gone to see my grandfather and this Irish waitress was there and she leaned over and she heard that I had just met my grandfather and she touched my face – just  touched my face and she bought me an ice-cream sundae. I swear that she probably forgot that the next week; no big deal for her. She just did a kind thing. But every time I go to London I think of that woman, and who she is and what she did. The enormity of the small moments build up in our lives in the same way that the enormity of the small moments in literature can build up and have an impact on culture or on ideas. When I think about a book like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and how powerful it was for me, how it shifted my relationship – to a community, a whole community, or even in the way to tell a story. Is it enough? Yes, it’s enough. Is it small? Yes, it’s small. Does it have a larger impact? Yes, I think also has a larger impact.

Audience: Could you talk about why you felt that this particular event was something to not only write about, but to create a common thread amongst all these characters in particular?

CM: Simply because it was so beautiful and to write toward it seemed so other-worldly. It had profound influence because when you write “World Trade Center” on a page – we know what it means to us now. I was very aware that if I had written this novel in 2000 it would’ve been completely different than having written it now. It was these things that holds the whole – let’s go back to your question – the tightrope is the thing that holds the whole novel together. I just thought…I don’t know…it was extraordinary.

Audience: Does this book exist in its current form without the events of 9/11?

CM: No. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. I knew that from the beginning. I said something like that, except I think I said “anti 9/11” novel and I don’t know what that means now, except that I wanted it to be different from other 9/11 novels. I didn’t want it to be full of “oh woe is us,” because I think the most important thing that we have is the ability to be empathetic and become alive in another skin – certainly in another body. I wrote about this earlier this year, because I was in the hospital for a couple of weeks and I reread Ulysses, and that was the greatest experience. I was on morphine and Percocet; listen it helped. But listen, my dead grandfather walked into the room – because he had been alive on June 16, 1904 and my dead grandfather sat on the bed and read that book for me, really, he was there, and that seems to me the great thing about books. And if you want to know about say, June 16, 1904, you want to know about the early part of the century go to Ulysses. It’s an encyclopedia of human knowledge, and moreso than any history book.

Bookworm Adventures: Astounding Planet (28 MB download)
Help Lex the Bookworm save the world in this time-traveling, vocabularious adventure! Build words and battle nearly 50 alien mutants and robot foes to save the Great Library from certain doom! But this time you’ll be joined by new fighting friends, Skeletrox and H.G. Wells! Boost your word power with all-new Rainbow Tiles and earn 8 new treasures along the way. And remember – the better the word, the badder the damage!

As a bookworm myself, I always appreciate thoughtful gifts that I will use. And, yeah, I can appreciate a good bookstore gift card now and then, but there are so many other creative gifts out there that are way better. Unless you are a book worm yourself, it’s hard to get a gift that this nerdy friend of yours will actually like and use! So, let me help you.

Here is your bookworm gift guide to the rescue; for bookworms, by one.

A Reading Light
Book lovers are notorious for staying up way past their bedtime, losing themselves in a book. Unfortunately sometimes their partner/roommate isn’t so down for this adventure and turns the lights out too early. With a clip-on reading light, everyone is happy. These are also great for reading on planes, trains, car-rides, etc. This version by LightWedge is super cheap (under $10!) and comes in a billion colors and patterns. I chose the star pattern; it reminded me of Harry Potter, one of my favorite series!

A Personalized Copy
There are several companies out there who are able to produce copies of books with an extra page in them that you personalize! How cool is that? Inscribe It! was the best company I stumbled upon, with over 200 classic and loved titles available for personalization. You can even upload pictures to include on your page! Yes, hand-written messages are thoughtful, but if I received a book from Inscribe It! I would be beyond impressed. If you know your bookworm is missing a necessary classic from their library (in this case, I would recommend everyone have a copy of “The Alchemist“!), you can not only fill that hole, you can also personalize it for just a wee bit more!

KNOCK KNOCK Personal Library Kit
Every bookworm knows that pain of losing a treasured book to a forgetful friend of acquaintance. Either you constantly forget to ask for these books back or your silly friend manages to lose your all-time fave. Most (polite) people will buy you a new copy, but it won’t have the same smell or wear as your original. I myself bought a stamp with my name on it to try and reduce this absent-minded thieving, however I would much prefer a personal library kit, especially this one from KNOCK KNOCK. The kit comes with cards for you to give to your borrowing friends with your name on it so they know who to return the book to, a log for you to keep track of your lending and a date stamp and pad to round it off. This is so retro and fun and, most importantly, functional!

Bookish Souvenirs
My favorite book is “A Clockwork Orange,” so when my friend presented me with a t-shirt featuring the opening paragraph of “A Clockwork Orange” last year, I freaked out. Most of the memorabilia involves the movie and, trust me, I know that they searched high and low for that shirt. Because of the rarity of book souvenirs, a bookworm appreciates when a friend puts in the extreme effort to find them one! Websites like Etsy allow independent designers to showcase their goods, which are sometimes based on the designer’s own personal interests. Therefore, it is a haven for book souvenirs. My favorite bookish item I found on my hunt has to be this True Blood mug. Now, everyone knows that True Blood is based on a book series, so it counts! Plus the designer is willing to use the “Vampire Mug” template and make gear for other series (anyone know a TWIHARD?). Perfect for your bookworm to curl up with a cup of tea and their favorite novel.

Toby Stephens and Ruth Wilson in BBC's adaptation of Jane Eyre

After reading this article, about how new adaptations of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre are being made to appeal to Twihards, I have just two questions:

1. Can’t everyone just leave the Brontë sisters alone?
2. Must this Twilight insanity phenomenon influence every aspect of culture, leaving nothing sucked dry (see what I did there?)?

Apparently, Emily’s gothic tale of dangerous, obsessive love has been experiencing an increase in sales due to its mention in the Twilight series and a revamped cover with a sticker that reads: Bella & Edward’s favourite book!   Don’t get me wrong — I’m glad kids are reading (even if they are reading low culture), and that it’s making them turn to the Brontë sisters.  My issue is with how they’re getting there — from a vampire’s recommendation.  I suppose my problem is that I suffer from true Old Lady Syndrome, which is why I haven’t touched the Twilight series, the Harry Potter series, and snobbishly disdain anything with that kind of collective hysteria.  Pop culture phenomena always makes me bristle and embrace the eclectic, the bizarre, the underrated.  When those things become unearthed and re-marketed for mass consumption, I feel as though I’ve been betrayed.  

I forget how I came to read Jane Eyre, but I was probably in grade 8.  As a somewhat pretentious adolescent, I was hungry for a good old-fashioned classic after the joys of reading Pride and Prejudice.  I remember the precise scene where I decided I had found my new favourite book: when Mr. Rochester dresses up as an old gypsy come to read the fortunes of his high society house guests, and Jane’s, and then his identity is revealed.  I remember my heart actually thumping loudly in excitement and fantasizing about Mr. Rochester, even more than I fantasized about the stuffy Mr. Darcy and his wet shirt clinging to his body (our teacher showed us BBC’s Pride and Prejudice as a graduation treat!)

 I have read Jane Eyre countless times since then and it is by far my most favourite book in the entire world.  Each time I read it, something new strikes me, a new dimension is added.  The last time I read it, in third-year Victorian Lit. class, I was shocked by the pre-feminist implications of the novel’s conclusion and the fact that Jane only returns to Rochester when he is blind and physically handicapped. Rereading it now, I’m finding all sorts of comments on the class system and Jane’s peculiar position outside the margins of society.

So strong is my loyalty to the story that I’m automatically nervous whenever a new adaptation is made to a novel I treasure.  Since I’m not a big fan of Wuthering Heights in the first place, I’m not overly concerned that the role of Heathcliff is being played by Ed Westwick of Gossip Girl fame in the newest adaptation.  The 1992 version, starring Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes, was pretty terrible and didn’t make me like the book any more.

However, since she is Charlotte’s sister, I cannot help but feel protective over Emily’s work and its latest bastardization to cater to Twihards and their disposable incomes.

Ladies, drool over your new Heathcliff!

The best adaptation of Jane Eyre I’ve ever seen is the BBC’s, starring an appropriately plain Ruth Wilson as Jane and an unconventionally sexy Toby Stephens as Rochester. If anyone has the rights to classic British literature, it’s the British, and they usually get it right, as is evident in their long, yet mostly accurate, adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.  The new Jane Eyre will star very pretty, very young (and very un-Jane Eyre-like) Mia Wasikowska and a ridiculously handsome Michael Fassbender whom I haven’t seen in anything else.

Will he live up to Toby Stephens' Rochester?

Too pretty to be plain Jane Eyre?

Needless to say, I’m very nervous about this adaptation, as I am with the untitled Dominic Murphy film project about the “imaginative worlds invented by the Brontës as adolescents.” According to Murphy’s producer Mike Downey:

“There is a whole younger audience out there that is ripe to enjoy these darker versions of what is generally served up, and the response from funders has been very upbeat, especially in the light of the recent success of Twilight”

I’m throwing up my hands, Stephenie Meyer.  If your terribly written, yet extremely successful series is going to lead sheep teens to my beloved classics, so be it.  If anything, it will give them their first taste of literature so good that it has stood the test of time.

Bookworm Adventures: Astounding Planet (28 MB download)
Help Lex the Bookworm save the world in this time-traveling, vocabularious adventure! Build words and battle nearly 50 alien mutants and robot foes to save the Great Library from certain doom! But this time you’ll be joined by new fighting friends, Skeletrox and H.G. Wells! Boost your word power with all-new Rainbow Tiles and earn 8 new treasures along the way. And remember – the better the word, the badder the damage!