Screen time

I spent this past weekend in Boston with my girlfriend, visiting her family. In the spirit of this quasi-vacation, I took along some light reading: Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, a copy of which I picked up on the cheap at a liquidating Border's.

The book's reputation had me expecting a shocking, polarizing experience. This was not the case. The sex and violence were graphic, but I've watched enough Saw movies and episodes of Dexter (the protagonist of which is reputedly based on American Psycho's Patrick Bateman) that cartoonish depictions of serial killer mayhem don't really faze me. The book's critique of consumerism also isn't anything new. Most people my age had recognized, internalized, and eventually rejected Fight Club's message by the time they were sixteen. All of that being said, the book was often hilarious and a lot of fun to read. Bateman is certainly an unforgettable character, in spite of his self-diagnosed vacancy.

A certain tangential passage from the book's second half caught my eye. Sandwiched between his posh hang-out regime and a line about deoderant:

"There were four major air disasters this summer, the majority of them captured on videotape, almost as if these events had been planned, and repeated on television endlessly. The planes kept crashing in slow motion, followed by countless roaming shots of the wreckage and the same random views of the burned, bloody carnage, weeping rescue workings retrieving body parts."

Achilles heel

I've always been a pretty healthy dude.  Sure, I've experienced a few hiccups here and there (I was a carrier of the streptococcus bacteria for a while as a little kid, for instance), but considering my degenerate lifestyle, my body has proven itself quite durable. I don't remember the last time I went to the doctor for anything other than a check-up or stitches.

That years-long winning streak has come to an end.

GOD FUCKING DAMMIT.

You may remember the post a few months back in which I mentioned that my right foot was bothering me. Well, despite my valiant effort to resolve the problem by publicly humiliating myself on the elliptical five times a week, my foot never healed. I finally got it checked out by a podiatrist, and it turns out that I have the dreaded condition known as PLANTAR FASCIITIS, the physical evidence of which can be seen above.

Us weirdos

An illustration of Faust by Gray, who also illustrated Lanark

It's come up in the past that I've been reading a lot of weird books since I moved to New York. The latest addition to my running series of weird novels was Alasdair Gray's Lanark: A Life in Four Books, which I actually finished a few weeks ago.

Gray's book is divided up into four smaller interior 'books,' as well as a prologue, interlude, and epilogue. The first two books comprise a fairly conventional bildungsroman (or, more accurately, a künstlerroman) about an artistic, emotionally constipated young man growing up in Glasgow during the 50s and 60s. The third and fourth books address an amnesiac who wakes up in an allegorical dystopian version of Glasgow called Unthank. It becomes clear that these two figures are the same man, and that the division between them is the result of a personal cataclysm that occurs at the end of the second book.

As though the divided-plot thing wasn't weird enough ("Perhaps the author believed that one large book would make a bigger splash than two smaller ones," Gray quips), the above segments appear in the following order: Book 3-> Prologue -> Book 1 -> Interlude -> Book 2 -> Book 4 part 1 -> Epilogue -> Book 4 part 2.

Still here

It's been a while since I posted! This is a brief update so I can limber up my blogging muscles.

I just finished an eleven-day vacation, much of which was spent at my parents' house in suburban Philly. I hadn't left New York for a substantial period of time since January, and by July I was starting to feel approximately the way Smeagol feels after finding the Ring.

Now that I've spent some time outside of the city, I've remembered the sound of (non-manicured) trees and the softness of the (garbage-smell-free) wind, and I plan to start updating this here blog on the regular again.

I've also switched from full-time to part-time at my restaurant job. Seeing as how I've been there for over a year and derive absolutely no pleasure from the work, I'll be looking for different employment for the next few months (hopefully it doesn't take more than a few months). I'll likely have more time to update here under these conditions. Look forward to some self-effacing and/or panicked discussion of my job prospects, along with the usual half-baked rumination on books, music, and other people's political blogs.

It's good to be back!

Too many characters, too little focus

One of the reasons I've been posting infrequently as of late is my addiction to George Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. I mentioned several posts ago that I'd read the two books, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings. In the five weeks since, I've blown through A Storm of Swords and most of A Feast for Crows (as well as the unrelated Lanark: A Life in Four Books, which I'll discuss in a different post).

Martin's series increased pretty rapidly in pace and scope during its first three volumes. During the fourth, it's lost a great deal of momentum. Martin constructs his sweeping narrative out of a series of third-person-limited chapters, each of which follows one of a rotating cast of characters. He's killed off plenty of characters who've had their own narrative chapters, but as the series has gone on, the list of active characters has grown considerably. A Feast for Crows focuses mostly on characters who initially played minor or tertiary roles in the plot. The series's center of gravity has shifted, and while the reader gets to see much more of Martin's well-developed world, a number of compelling major characters have been out of pocket for the entire book.

Kafka dream

Well, I just went a whole week without a post. Whoops. No excuse this time--there were just other things that I elected to spend my time on instead. I guess that's what happens when the most pressing reason to write regularly is "because you ought to."

Last night I had a dream that's become recurrent over the past three months or so. I tend to dream pretty frequently, but it's exceedingly rare that I have the same one multiple times. And as with most recurring dreams, this one is easy to read into.

In the dream, I'm working in a dingy neighborhood in some major Northeastern city. It's not clear whether the city is New York or Philly. The job I'm working is some sort of menial desk job--I typically spend the day correcting someone else's spelling and grammatical errors. The office I work in is cluttered, cramped, and without air conditioning, so I sit sweating through my work shirt while fans ineffectually push the air around.