This was a blog. It is sleeping now. Some day soon it will be revived in some strange way that nobody will expect or can predict. You’ll hear about it somewhere at random, on the street, on a listserv, linked to a blog you know. You won’t know it is the second life of this blog, as it will be a super secret, untraceable blog created by anonymous wizard-librarians. So keep your eyes - and your mind - peeled.  

No, I haven’t read this new novel about a knife salesman, and no, I don’t think I will, but man, what a terrific cover! We just bought some new knives by the way, so I’m taking great pleasure in mincing garlic and slicing heirloom tomatoes these days. And my favorite absurdist TV has to be the Knife Show - them boys is always good for a few laffs.

I found an Amex gift certificate for a Chicago restaurant at the library today, which started a series of associations that wound up at this favorite poem of mine, by Campbell McGrath, about food, cold, and joy.  Check it out.  

Must I really? Okay Ivan Brunetti, you asked for it. You are a crass disgusting pathetic self-obsessed little creep who dreams up horrible horrible things in the blackened hollow recesses of your wretched, quivering psyche; nobody should ever read another one of your books, ever, ever. They should be buried beneath the degenerate filth of which they are created. There, are you happy now? Are you? (oh, and I really loved your anthology, btw). Now SQUIRM, maggot!

…though ’twere to buy a world of happy days, so full of dismal terror was the time!”  House, by Josh Simmons. Its a nightmare, thats what it is. Man happens upon an endlessly unfolding old house in the woods, where two attractive women await to explore its dimmest recesses and subterranean pools, to tryst, and to disappear and into a swallowing darkness from whose borne no traveler returns.  Perfectly uncanny nightmare logic; one is glad to awake.

Hamilton’s best-known title is Hangover Square, but I think this recently unburied treasure may be a better introduction to his genius to most readers, with its more measured, benevolent view of human folly and its sympathetic heroine - the sober, bewildered Miss Roach. Having fled the bombings, Roach returns from London each night to a boarding house in a quiet suburb where she and her fellow inmates are nightly subjected to the spectacular boorishness of Mr. Thwaites, a devastating literary creation that had me wincing and gasping as I might over the jaw-dropping sallies of Borat, or of Ricky Gervaise in the original British version of The Office. For a moment it seems as though some respite is at hand when a hard-drinking American lootenant brashly courts our Miss with disarming ham-fisted vigor; enter Vickie Kugelman, a German immigrant who threatens her place in the yank’s affections and joins league with the Dickensian Thwaites in waging an insidious war of insinuations and slights upon Roach. Hamilton’s psychological insight is keen, and he clearly relishes tying his characters in knots of their own devising. The moments of discovery, exasperation, and triumph are sublime - I recall dissolving into gales of laughter over a pitch perfect rumination that simply read “Oh…Oh…Oh…” This perceptive comedy of manners is a sheer delight.

A haunting novella - sort of an ethereal counterpart to Wells’ Island of Doctor Moreau, inspired in part by the author’s fascination with Louise Brooks, The Invention of Morel is the curious fable of a man lost on an island where he falls in love with the beautiful Faustine, who seems not to know he exists. It is small comfort that nobody else on the island seems to know he exists either. Is he a ghost? Are they? The answer to this riddle is gradually revealed to be something that resonates mightily with life as we know it, which is to say often not at all. How many of the people who matter most to you actually exist? I don’t have a whole lot of patience for metafictions that lend themselves to some handy symbolic reading about life, but they rarely seem as elegant and inviting as this. A good titles for Borges fans - he writes the prologue in the handsome nyrb edition that I read (I have a mad crush on nyrb classics) - and for fans of folks like Eco, Auster,  Saramago, et al.

…75 Objects with Unexpected Significance, by Joshua Glenn.  This collection of  doodads, dinguses, jiggers, gizmos, widgets, dealie-bobs and whatsits - each imbued with meaning by its owner, saver, collector - is a treasure, and a delightful object in itself, handsomely constructed.  (I enjoyed it more than, say, Paul Auster’s I Thought My Father Was God, which flowed to similar ends in many regards), and the book had me musing on my own uneasy relationship with things.  (Incidentally, I’m a fan of the word ‘thing’ and its irresistable etymology, and love it when it is used traditionally, as in LibraryThing.) On the one hand, I am wary of acquiring or sanctifying objects, disenjoy shopping, and rather than getting excited and typically repulsed at flea markets,  garage sales, and especially estate sales, where the futility of objects is brought home in the resentful glare of piles of stuff that has outlasted its owner - a special kind of momento morii.  On the other hand I’m a serious clutterbug, my desk is a monument to hefty, vertiginous disarray, and do have my toys, typically bought in a fetishistic fury on ebay or someplace.  The siren song of the hominid skull replicas, for instance.  Or the homies, or the crate of Beethoven busts, or interesting Tarot decks.  Statue of the Incredible Hulk Reading an upside-down book. Eminem action figure.  (This is all to say nothing of the books, which is a whole other order of neurosis…) And then the old stuff - the little stuffed koala toy that I had as an infant, and that has since been tossed and tortured and frozen in ice and made to sing Hurdy Gurdy Hurdy Gurdy Hurdy Gurdy, etc. Or the Peace Love 1972 Democratic National Convention License Plate Cover that used to hang in our attic clubhouse, and now sits in the garage, emanating lost hopes. mmm, stuff - makes your fingers tingle, as does this tasty book. 

Things seem to have gotten worse in the sequel? prequel?… quel! to Ohle’s Motorman.  Maybe it is the effect of the last great Forgetting, or perhaps the pernicious aftereffects of the Pisstown Chaos, maybe his childhood experiences raised by the inventor of edible books, or the wayward whimsy of the Ratt’s laws, but Moldenke has gone from being a figure of great pathos to a removed and, yes, even cruel figure. The moral center may be Miss Ophelia Balls, maybe not. The sinister Jellyheads have given way to neutrodynes - a blessing and a curse - and then there’s the problem of stinkers (not to be confused w/ the rotting plesiosaurs). There’s a church that seems loosely based on scraps of Lee Harvey Oswald, and steady tides of maculation, regurgitation, legislation, miscegenation, death and decay, punctuated by broadcasts and asides of a dimly sociopolitical nature. Motorman brought to mind Escher and Beckett; Age of Sinatra recalls Hieronymous Bosch, James Ensor, Odilon Redon, Ralph Steadman, Francis Bacon, the logic of Lewis Carroll, and the inevitability of the Zapruder film. (Delicious green glands washed down w/ mulce; smoking hair; death eggs, flocculi and spew; disfigurative surgery: if some Cronenbergite makes a film of it, I’m not going). Still there is such vitality in the language and protean inventiveness in the world that I was once again blown away by Ohle (rhymes with Holy). 

…and Their UFO Connection, by Jack ‘Kewaunee’ Lapseritis. Just when you were beginning to lose faith in the world, it comes to light that the elusive Sasquatch - misrepresented by the CIA in media and various other fraudulent accounts - are gentle giants of an advanced interdimensional race of telepathic healers who, far from meaning us harm, might just save us all - if only we open our hearts and minds. Where do they come from, and why are they here? Well, nobody really knows for sure, but the best thinking is all writ down here in this book, together with eyewitness accounts (Sasquatch in the Pickle Patch, Teluke the White Sasquatch & Family, etc.), and instructions on how to make contact (hint: leave your gun and your machismo behind). Skeptical? So was I, so I know what you’re probably thinking. Maybe you don’t really believe in the existence of Bigfoot, or you have serious doubts about the extent and significance of psychic phenomona, and you may suspect that whole UFO thing is a lot of hooey at worst, and involves unpleasant probing at best. It is only when all three of these are joined together that the coin drops, the light dawns in the forest primeval, and everything suddenly becomes a clear, elegant, cohesive whole. Also, don’t you just love that feeling of driving on the highway late at night, a.m. radio on as Art Bell’s voice intones wondrous things from somewhere in the darkness beyond? (My interlibrary loan copy had a takeout menu from a combo Mexican Pizza joint somewhere in the Bay Area - mmm, bigfoot munchies! Not ready for the full life-changing revelation?: adventure fans might enjoy Phillip Kerr’s fine Crichtonesque yarn Esau, in which the Yeti play a crucial role). Mitakuye oyasin.