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     |  A star is born, a raw red giant in the constellation of Queens, New York. Matt Burgess has such a great word vault that he seems at war with being a writer who is also such a great noticer. The prose turns a bit purple a times, like Matt is straining, eager to let his imagination loose onto the streets of his beloved Jackson Heights. Continue reading Dogfight by Matt Burgess  Each member of the party is given its moments, and Updike has John describe in only the most glowing fashion a party at a house where the parents have gone out, and somehow returned, and the party goers are not in trouble, and the cops were not called. I especially like how John finds himself thinking about luck, and how men who are lucky enough to get a woman, however you want to think of that process are lucky, but they don’t think of the men who aren’t lucky. When you do have luck, do you ever think of anyone else? Continue reading The Happiest I’ve Been by John Updike – Olinger Stories  Updike swears dangerously close to a meditation on what it means to be young, willfully unknowing, and somehow brave enough to risk what little money there is on a game that is rigged only to take it. It’s the cynic in me that keeps my son away from the boardwalk, as my money will soon be separated from my wallet if we aren’t careful. Ben, the pint-sized hero of this story, is exicted by the fact that something new has arrived, driven in while he looked the other way, and then he turned his head and it had set up, tents, games, ferris wheels, cotton candy, and something that can only be seen at night, anticipation. Continue reading You’ll Never Know, Dear, How Much I Love You by John Updike – Olinger Stories  In this wafer-thin missive, Updike brings us through the working class suburb of Olinger. Johnny shows up at his neighbor’s house with an interesting proposition: he’d like for the Lutz family to go down the street to buy him a bottle of wine. Johnny isn’t any older than sixteen and when he approaches the apartment screen door, he spies the bare leg of Thelma, a girl he knows from around the neighborhood. Continue reading Friends From Philadelphia by John Updike – Olinger Stories  This is a novel, in part, about science. I consider it fiction from the distaff side, from the non-liberal arts side. That’s refreshing. I’ve had two close friends who were scientists, a physicist and an engineer. So I think I know the mind-set and RB has nailed it. Even down to several references to Singing in the Rain. My physicist friend loved talking about Singing in the Rain. Why? Because it’s the musical for geeks. Continue reading You Lost Me There by Rosecrans Baldwin  The book I was trying to power my way through—Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again—was bumming me out, both because of the madly desperate fever dream quality of the prose, written by a man in the throes of fatal illness, and because, in a literal sense, I could barely focus on it. Whenever I would read more than a page or two, my vision would get fuzzy, I would feel unbalanced, I would have to close my eyes or squint before I could try to read another page. Continue reading When We Fell In Love – Adam Langer  I never knew Ken Bruen to be such a great writer, a grab you by the throat kind of guy, and this story is nothing short of asskicking at its finest. Bruen makes no secret for his love of crime fiction, and this novel is an ode to his favorites, he namedrops them through out the book, his main character takes over a flat once occupied by a lover of crime fiction, and has lined his walls with the greats, Elmore Leonard (not great, if you ask me), James Ellroy (he is great), James Sallis, Charles Willeford, John Harvey and sprinkled over the course of this story Bruen references other greats crimes novelists, quotes them, and generally reminds you that the story your reading wouldn’t be possible without the crime forefathers who he’s standing on. Continue reading London Boulevard by Ken Bruen  There was a time in my life when I was on a slow elevator off Spring Street in Soho a great deal. Christ, that elevator took forever. It must have been a hundred years old. But I understand about slow elevators. JS has a great line: as the lift drifts down from floor to floor, it’s like Nico is passing through decades of her life. In my opinion, you have to be in midlife to appreciate a slow elevator. Continue reading Barcelona in James Salter  My favorite part of the show is watching Don Draper try to navigate through all the moral morass. The self-indulgence and consequent emotional wreckage he creates for himself and the people close to him. I think the compulsion to assert individuality against history, family, work is compelling. My least favorite part is that I know that the writers are pulling all the right levers and presenting us with this very attractive package called Don Draper but that he has a rotted core. Continue reading Interview with Natasha Vargas-Cooper  Each section of this book covers something different from the early 60′s, movies, travel, skinny ties, Pete’s college look, and Jackie Kennedy’s interior decorating, just to name a few, and there is an accompanying essay with each picture. I especially like the section about John Cheever and how Draper’s life on the show is very much like a Cheever story. The creator of another AMC show called Rubicon, which is basically a low-fi espionage, referred to Mad Men as John Cheever on television. Continue reading Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960′s America Does the reading public really need a million titles per year? Wouldn’t it be a little easier to sort out the growing demand for a hundred thousand? Don’t get me wrong, I like eclectic, I like many voices, but it seems to me a hundred thousand is a lot of voices. You only published fifty thousand in 1990, and as I recall, the industry was in better shape. Continue reading Dear Publisher  Iris Murdoch, the mid-20th century British novelist, was the true inheritor of the great Victorian tradition of moral psychologists. Her complex stories turn on questions of what’s the right thing. Only in contrast to today’s dogmatic moralists, who are so convinced that they know exactly what you should be doing, IM wrote stories where good and evil are real but meant to be puzzled over. Continue reading Three Guys One Download – Iris Murdoch  He introduced me to storytelling. In my infancy, it was the oral tradition. In the darkness of my room before bedtime, he spun whole worlds for me out of thin air. He was masterful. His characters won my sympathy right off the bat. He understood tension. Pacing. Climax. For the most part, these stories comprised an ongoing serial concerning three orphaned tiger cubs and their adventures in the jungle. I’m guessing my old man liked Kipling. Continue reading When We Fell in Love – Jonathan Evison  Vendela hasn’t made writing this novel easy for herself. She keeps Yvonne, her principal, isolated for a remarkable amount of time. Is this a disastrous mistake? You write “John sat in his room.” or “John made coffee.” because you don’t know what the fuck to do with John. Hawthorne wrote a chapter of “The House of the Seven Gables” that consists of a dead character in a room. I love the chances that great American literature can take. Continue reading The Lovers by Vendela Vida |  | ||
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