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The Nihilist

Posted by Unknown 7/25/2010

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below this line is the story of my life
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Top 10

On visiting a brilliant bookshop yesterday, The Magic Door IV

Yesterday, I finally had the chance to visit a local independent bookshop, The Magic Door IV , that I had been meaning to for years, but its store hours (2:00-8:00 p.m.)* had always made it impractical for me to drop by when I had a regular 8-5 office job working for somebody else. In May, when out of the blue it occurred to me that I had still not patronized the The Magic Door and its hours were no longer an issue, I dropped by on Memorial Day (May 29th), but the store was closed for the holiday. Undeterred, when Father's Day rolled around three weeks later, I decided I'd go then. Almost out the door, though, I thought maybe I better call first, make sure they're open. Sure enough, they were closed for the Father's Day holiday. They were closed, and yet the owner, Dwain Kaiser, answered the phone anyway and urged me to drop by on Tuesday. He was adamant that I — whom he didn't know from Adam as they say — drop by the store on Tuesday, insisting as one wo

The Royal Family by William T. Vollmann

Rarely has a book evoked in me such deep abiding disgust (and that's a compliment, definitely a laud ) over what I'm witnessing described that I cringe practically every page, close my eyes every other paragraph, almost vomit in my mouth each chapter, feeling simultaneously repelled and yet compelled (how does William T. Vollmann do that?!) to continue reading. Reading The Royal Family's akin to viewing macabre masterpieces like the The Exorcist or Alien , watching with one eye open and one eye closed as the gross images elicit visceral reactions that shock and shock and shock some more, and just when you thought you'd become desensitized or too jaded and couldn't be shocked anymore, Vollman somehow ups the ante and shocks you worse again -- and that's a compliment (not a complaint) to Vollmann's genius documenting what in lesser hands would appear as exploitation or cheap titillation, rather than a gritty, streetwise, all-too-horrifically-real

On Leaving LibraryThing (and why that's a GoodThing)

There's no better book cataloging resource on the planet than LibraryThing. For the rabid aficionado of books; for the pathologically obsessed bibliophile, such as yours truly (and thousands of others, many of them my virtual friends), LibraryThing offers the finest system anywhere online I've ever located. LibraryThing may not be the largest or most popular book cataloging site or community out there, but it's by far the most hardcore . If you've been to Goodreads, LibraryThing's largest competitor, you can see right away that LibraryThing is like walking through the doors of the finest university library in existence, like Columbia say, and Goodreads, well, isn't. That's not to say Goodreads isn't good, it just isn't good like LibraryThing is good, a company too good to be called good . I've decided, nevertheless, that Goodreads is going to be good enough for me. Having been intimately involved with one of the most active and per

Exhuming The Body by William Sansom

Considering William Sansom's short fiction was once widely anthologized in frighteningly titled story collections (e.g., London Tales of Terror , Ghosts in Country Houses , The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories , as well as several installments of The Pan Book of Horror Stories ), with a novel named The Body , readers already acquainted with his better known, more diminutive, phantasmal forebears, could understandably conclude that Sansom's first novel The Body was likewise macabre. Honest mistake, that. And perhaps also disappointing for those mystic connoisseurs of the obscure with a taste for Sansom's peculiar style of understated extravagance -- a style similar to yet not quite as distilled as that of those refined denizens of the fin de siècle , nor as baroque as the later Lovecraft crowds he was often lumped in with (peruse any of the table of contents of one of the dozens of anthologies Sansom contributed to in order to better see my point) -- wh

No Exit -- "The Concentration City" of J.G. Ballard's

"The Concentration City" (1957) is one Hell of a story. That Ballard named his leads Franz and Gregson and set certain bureaucratic procedural crime dramas around them made me think immediately of The Metamorphosis , but I'm not positive Ballard was intentionally riffing off Kafka here. And regarding Concentration City's history there's multiple mentions to a time "before the Foundation" millions of years ago, which seems to be a gracious nod in Isaac Asimov's direction. Hong Kong's concentrated high rises. Photo by Michael Wolf Franz aims to fly in Concentration City (it was a dream he had) but there's really no room to fly in a city that has no open air space -- not even for a single bird. Any available space is already occupied with construction. So he hatches a plan with Gregson not so much to escape Concentration City but to ride the commuter train, a "Supersleeper" that connects the various Sectors and Fe

I'm Still Obsessed with Infinite Jest

If Infinite Jest were a bowling score, it would be 300. Perfect! It's literature's equivalent of facing the minimum twenty-seven batters in a nine inning game of baseball and retiring everybody who steps into the batter's box. Of the four editions pictured above, I own three. Which edition do you think I don't own? When the Ten Year, $10 anniversary edition of IJ came out in 2006 with the rambling (nearly incoherent) introduction by David Eggers, I had to buy it even though the copy I possessed (note I don't own Infinite Jest or have a copy of Infinite Jest , I possess Infinite Jest like I'm Legion) was in great shape, good for another half dozen reads. A couple years back, just six months prior to Wallace's suicide, I possessed a hardcover first edition of Infinite Jest , even though I had only read the Ten Year, $10 anniversary edition of Infinite Jest with the introduction by David Eggers, twice. I saw Infinite Jest sitting in a pile

Getting Attuned to the Surreality of J.G. Ballard's "Prima Belladonna"

I'm proceeding slowly through The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard in 2013, and hope to have at least something to share on each story eventually. There's potential spoilers below. First story up for study is "Prima Belladonna" from 1956, a story originally collected in Vermillion Sands . "Prima Belladonna" is told by an unnamed narrator as a reminiscence. A recollection of a long-ago, idealized time known in his culture's history as " The Recess ," that " world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer ..." that lasted for a decade. People worked only a few hours per day during this era of ennui , assuming our unnamed leading man is any indicator of the cultural norm, spending their hours not in labor but instead on balconies with beer, playing i-Go, a game described as " decelerated chess," as if chess (for the lay person, not a pro) wasn't slow enough already. Ballard's got that wry wit going

Some Thoughts on Night by Elie Wiesel

Night , despite being only 109 pages long, is not a quick, easy read. The book for me, and I think for a lot of people, doesn't end even when you've read the last page. Because the beyond-horrific, indescribably inhumane images of the Holocaust, experienced through the eyes of a child, Elie Wiesel, remain forever. At least they have for me. The innocence and optimism of a childhood perspective in the opening ghetto scenes of Wiesel's hometown, starkly contrasted with the child's inevitable spiritual despair and rejection of God, is some of the most powerful -- and poignant -- prose I've ever read: " Not far from us, flames were leaping up from a ditch, gigantic flames. They were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load--little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it, saw it with my own eyes... those children in the flames. (Is it surprising that I could not sleep after that? Sleep had fled from my eyes.)...."We continued our

As Taught by Paul Frizler; or, Swan and Shadow by John Hollander

I discovered this masterful poem for the eyes and soul back in the autumn of 1989. I was an undergrad at Chapman University, when I took a course that altered my life's course inexorably, "Introduction to Poetry, 101". The poem above was featured in Poems, Fourth Edition: Wadsworth Handbook And Anthology , a textbook I still own and reference regularly. "Swan and Shadow" by John Hollander was used as an introductory illustration of what was then commonly called "concrete poetry," but today is better known as "visual poetry". The class was taught by the most eccentric and engaging genius of a professor I ever had, the late great, Dr. Paul Frizler , B.A. at the ripe old age of nineteen, Ph.D. in English by twenty-six. Frizler personified lightning. He was eclectic and sincerely outrageous. I remember his regaling us of his encounter with Jim Morrison at UCLA. Unlike Morrison , however, Frizler's eccentricity was ne

The Suspect by L. R. Wright

Finished L.R. Wright's first mystery novel The Suspect (her fourth published novel) and I've had the unrelenting suspicion since finishing it that it is a perfect book. At first I wouldn't give it ten out of ten stars, I thought to myself that maybe I'd give it nine, or 9.5, only because I'm not completely convinced that the forensics Wright depicted in the novel were as thoroughly fleshed out and considered as they would have been in so-called real life. But, maybe, in 1984, in a backwoods town on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, reachable only by ferry boat, the crime was investigated as thoroughly as it could have been back then. Maybe Wright got it exactly right. In real life, would there have been enough evidence to convict the suspect, an eighty-year-old, cantankerous widower, George Wilcox? Maybe not. Maybe that's why Karl Alberg, the divorced detective on the case, could never nail him. Maybe L. R. Wright thought up the perfect scen

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