What I'm Reading

First, I wanted to let you know that one of my favorite authors, Neil Gaiman (author of the Sandman graphic novels, Neverwhere, American Gods, Coraline- which was just made into a motion picture, and many other great stories), will be interviewed on The Colbert Report tonight. That should be entertaining.

Here's my latest list of books:

Breakfast at Tiffany's (which includes the three short stories House of Flowers, Diamond Guitar and A Christmas Memory) by Truman Capote. Okay, I've never watched the film, perhaps due to some misguided preconceived notions on what it was about. I still have no desire to watch the film (I am just not a big movie person), but I did love the book. The three short stories were also great. The only Capote book I'd read until now was In Cold Blood which was very well-written, but gruesome.

Pink by Gus Van Sant. Yes, the film director (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho) Gus Van Sant. I saw this book on PaperBackSwap and ordered it out of curiousity. It is strange to say the least, and maybe not for the reasons some may think after simply reading the synopsis. It involves dimensional/ time travel, but the weird part- to me- is that some of the characters seem very familiar.

For example, there is a rock star named Blake that commits suicide and the public blames his wife Blackie, likening her to Yoko Ono for breaking up the great band of the '90s. Blake had a horrible addiction to... buying large farm machinery. Okay, so it seemed a little like Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love if you just change the names and swap "farm machinery" for heroin. Bizarre. The suicide note that the character Blake leaves is practically verbatim to the one Kurt Cobain actually left. Blake suicides by gun, also.

Another familiar character is Felix Arroyo, who is a sensitive, teen "informercial" sensation who dies from an overdose outside a popular gambling club owned by another young star. Sound familiar? Maybe because River Phoenix died outside The Viper Room, which was owned (at least partly) by Johnny Depp if I recall correctly.

While I normally LOVE strange books (I've read nearly all of Kathy Acker's novels) this one seems a little contrived. It doesn't really read like a novel but more like a rough draft for a second-rate screenaply. By the time I was 30 pages in I swear I had alreay had to stop and refer to at least 12 footnotes that Van Sant added to explain who a character was, after making allusions to them out of nowhere. It was very distracting and more than a little annoying.

Also, the story is full of hokey names, such as the narrator Spunky. There is lots of boring information about the making of informercials which is Spunky's line of work. It just seems that Mr. Van Sant, who worked with River Phoenix and later made a film about Kurt Cobain's last days, would have found a more artistic and interesting way to pay homage to these persons he found so captivating. When reading it I felt as though there were lots of cryptic references, "inside jokes," that are put there solely for people he actually knows to "get."

On the back of the book the price was $21.95! (Mine was from PaperBackSwap, so I didn't pay that). My overall sense was that Van Sant had the money and connections to get his book published, so he did. It was almost like a weird posthumous Valentine to River Phoenix. I don't regret reading it, but I do not recommend.

The book I hope to begin today is Darkness Visible by William Golding, also author of Lord of the Flies, which was great.

After that I have The Time Traveller's Wife lined up.

Cellar Door

I'm sure that most of you have heard about this idea (following text borrowed from Wikipedia because I was too lazy to write it out myself):

Cellar door is a combination of words in the English language once characterized by J. R. R. Tolkien to have an especially beautiful sound. In his 1955 essay "English and Welsh", commenting on his affection for the Welsh language, Tolkien wrote:

"Most English-speaking people...will admit that cellar door is 'beautiful', especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent, and moving to the higher dimension, the words in which there is pleasure in the contemplation of the association of form and sense are abundant."

I recently decided that if Cellar Door is the most phonetically pleasing word compound in the English language, then it is my job (part-time, no pay) to find the least mellifluous.

Here are the front-runners so far:

• Snack Cup




• Pizza Bread




• Monosodium Glutamate




• Ann Coulter




• Vulture Bee (I admit, I got that one from a Wiki random article)




• Lactation Consultant




• Tax Preparer

Okay, so maybe, just maybe, I am not truly separating the sound of the words from their meanings (Ann Coulter, Tax Preparer) and have corrupted the whole idea of this project. You get the idea though.

I want to hear some of your ideas on what YOU think is the most phonetically displeasing phrase in English. Lay it on me. I want to know!

Too Exhausted To Write

That sums it up, no? Here's some Violet photos, as I haven't hit my quota this week on that front. I'm going to go lie down and read until she wakes from her nap. (Or until I hear the dryer buzz, signaling my time to trek into he dark basement to swap out laundry.)




Oh yeah, and we finally got the crazy bangs cut. Before:


And after (Yes, that is food on her face.)