I’d promised something else for today: a look at rockstars who write. And although I’ve collected some information, several of the books I ordered from Amazon haven’t come in yet. Frankly, I don’t want to write the article until I’ve read James Earl Jones’ book of short stories.
So instead, we’re going to shake things up a little bit this week, and by shake things up what I mean is we’re going to do this willy-nilly. There’s no particular theme here: I’m just going to tell you what books I’ve read since last week.
Friday
Friday was kind of a wash for me. I remember something about going to the Red & Black on Thursday night and having a few whiskeys. After that it’s a blur. I recall someone asking me whether I’d prefer to be a WWF wrestling star or a pro golfer, and after some careful consideration I chose pro golfer. Then some cute 20-year-old told me that I was a bougie sell-out. So I smacked her in the face, to show her how un-bougie I am. That didn’t happen. What actually happened is that through the dynamite powers of my intellect, I got her to admit that she’d rather be a Real Housewife of Orange Country than a pro golfer and then I acted smug, which was great except that she didn’t notice because she was really, really drunk. I didn’t read anything on Friday.
Saturday
Then Again
Elyse Friedman
An editor friend of mine recommended this book to me. He said, “Sarah, I think you would like this book. You remind me of her. ”
“Then Again” is a twisted novel about an anxious, agoraphobic, obsessive misanthrope who is summoned by her richer-than-god L.A. screenwriter brother to their old house in Toronto. Once there, she discovers that the brother has gone to great lengths to make the house appear exactly as it did fifteen years ago, before their mother died of cancer and their father blew himself up. The screenwriter brother even goes to the trouble of hiring fake look-alike parents. The obsessive, misanthropic sister spends most of her time popping Klonapin and washing it down with hard liquor, which led me to wonder what the hell my editor “friend” meant when he said “you remind me of her.” Because I am not agoraphobic, I just don’t like leaving my apartment.
Sunday
In Persuasion Nation
George Saunders
I imagine you’re all way ahead of me on this one, but man, is this guy a genius or what? I gobbled this baby up cover to cover on Sunday and I will probably read it again next week.
My favorite story in the collection is probably Jon. It’s about a group of kids trapped in an everlasting focus group; their experiences are limited to the trying-out of new products and the watching of new commercials. There is something totally hilarious and also tragic about the way they talk. It’s a peculiar kind of pidgin made of advertisement-speak and English:
“…And though I had many times seen L1 34321 for Honey Grahams, where the stream of milk and the stream of honey enjoin to make that river of sweet-tasting goodness, I did not know that, upon making love, one person may become like the milk and the other like the honey, and soon they cannot even remember who started out the milk and who the honey they just become one fluid, this like honey/milk combo.”
I would like to have saved Saunders for a Funniest Authors to Namedrop article, but as we all know, I dont have much wiggle room this week.
Monday and Tuesday
Unnamed Book
Unnamed Author
I’m not at liberty to say what manuscript I slogged through on Monday and Tuesday because I’m reviewing it for something else and I think there’s something in my contract about not revealing names, etc and dude, I need to get paid. I’ll tell you this, though: they were the galleys of a sloppy first novel about a couple of teenage girls in Newfoundland who want to get out of their small town. That, in itself, is just fine. But I’ll leave it at this: I’m sick of authors who - in earnest and without the least bit of self-awareness or irony - have their physically unattractive characters DIE at the end. I swear, the whole book was like a long boring exemplum for the axiom, “life isn’t fair.”
Duh. If it were, my ex-boyfriend who dumped me to spend more time with his band wouldn’t be opening up for MIKA at the Bell Center. God, I hate Facebook.
Wednesday and Thursday
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union
Michael Chabon
It’s like after you eat something bad you feel like you deserve to eat something good? So I set out on my first Chabon book yesterday, and I’m about 100 pages in so far.
Who’s read this? Holy Trout! Is it just me or could the writers from “The Family Guy” mess with him? Can’t you imagine a scene where a cartoon Chabon - looking like the undead - blindly throws darts at a series of peoples, places, and things? Thwack. Alaska! Thwack! Yids! Thwack! Detectives!
That said, I get the feeling that this is Literature with a capital L - dense, difficult reading. The kind of stuff you namedrop at dinner parties. So give me another couple of weeks to finish it and then someone, please, invite me to a dinner party.
NEXT TIME: ROCKSTARS STAB (at) LITERATURE NAMEDROP STABS (at) THEM
I enjoy reading Sarah’s weed waking of literature. I like words but I don’t like reading them unless there funny. This is funny…I hope she keeps reading.
February 8, 2008 at 3:34 pm“If it were my ex-boyfriend who dumped me to spend more time with his band wouldn’t be opening up for MIKA at the Bell Center. God, I hate Facebook.”
That doesn’t make any sense to me. What does it mean?
February 8, 2008 at 4:33 pmUmmm…Svetlana, did you mean to post this on the Fort Reno page? You’re on the book page now. :)
And you don’t look like a hippie, but I’m going to be more suspicious around you now… Fort Reno lover. Hmph.
;)
Okay, that’s mean, Svetlana. Delete your mislocated comment and leave mine sitting there like I’m schizophrenic or something…seeing posts that don’t actually exist!
February 8, 2008 at 4:47 pmDid no one notice that I wrote “…JAMES EARL JONES’ book of short stories?”
I meant Steve Earle. So embarrassed.
February 8, 2008 at 6:25 pmTaylor,
The thing about the ex and opening for MIKA at the bell center was a bad joke meant to convey my petty bitterness. If life were fair (or if life were anything like movies-of-the-week) the boyfriend who dumps you to “spend more time with the band” (ie. sleep around) wouldn’t make it.
February 9, 2008 at 7:31 pmJohn Paul Jones wrote a book about nautical battle strategy, is that what you were thinking of?
February 9, 2008 at 7:41 pm
I would love it if you wrote a column on rockstars that wrote books that they didn’t know they “wrote.” My favorite is when interviewers quote passages from biographies and the rockers deny that being the true tale. I suppose they should interview the ghostwriter instead. Anthony Kiedis is the best at this when talking about his experiences with Cher as a young kid.
February 8, 2008 at 3:06 pm