Free

I just put up two old records of mine on Bandcamp, one, The Long March through the Clubs, Colleges and Cafes, which actually got released and the other, Purim!, which I had intended as a 7″ vinyl EP in 1998, which didn’t at the time. The Long March through the Clubs, Colleges, and Cafes Purim! EP Not much to say about The Long March, other than that it is a collection of live recordings I put out…

Michael Moorcock, The Land Leviathan

Of course I’ve read a moderate amount of Michael Moorcock, but I haven’t for some time and, as I finished the Jack Vance book and went to the library for the next volume I looked for a change of pace to take along with the Vance. Moorcock had been on my mind for a while now, because he, as much as anyone I can think of–save Octavia Butler–is the great example of an intellectually-rigorous,…

J.R.R. Tolkein, The Return of the King

I just finished Tolkein, for crying out loud. Enjoyed it, no doubt, but I got to a point after reading the first two that I ran out of steam for a while. Returning to Moorcock’s famous “Epic Pooh” essay, this description of Tolkein’s prose bears quoting:

sentimental, slightly distanced, often wistful, a trifle retrospective; it contains little wit and much whimsy.

More than anything, I found that…

Sheng Yen, Shattering the Great Doubt

I have been practicing Chan Buddhismfor over a decade, but diligently only in the last few years. I’d say rather that for a long time I had periods of diligence that over time grew shorter and shorter, until at one point I stopped practicing. It soon enough became clear to me that I needed the practice in my life, I started up again, and while I’m still far from a perfect practitioner I am…

Louis L’Amour, The Californios

A very good friend and I, about a year ago, were hiking Torrey Pines Park and we were talking about good pulp writers, and not only that but how good pulp writing was really good writing. I consider myself a highbrow lowbrow man all the way. I have read and continue to read “serious” literature, though when I do it tends toward the satirical, but I like to read high-caliber crap. Crap in the best…

Every now and again I do a straight random pull off the stacks in the library and give a book a go that nothing in my experience would have led me to intentionally seek. To some extent, I fool myself, because it’s not entirely random. I tend to do this when I find myself in some section that I intended to go to and maybe I end up getting the book I came for and maybe I don’t. In this case, I had…

Blutopia is not the first of Graham Lock’s books I’ve read. I’d gone to the library, having started a Sun Ra kick (transformed, over the read, to an Ellington kick, to Braxton), and found this on the shelf in the section, which unfortunately doesn’t actually have a straight biography on Ra. This worked.

Put briefly, the book relates–out of chronological order, significantly–the work of Sun Ra, Du…

I haven’t actually read the entirety of Love and Rockets, start to finish, but I have read the bulk of Los Bros Hernandez‘ work. I began my relationship with their work–and at some level I think the work becomes richer when I see Love and Rockets as a collaboration among individuals rather than the work of separate people who happen to be brothers–with a collection of Gilbert’s Palomarstories. My…

Harvey Pekar, The Quitter

Briefly, a procedural note. No more Amazon linking. I’m done with them. Go to a comic book store. Or if you want your books cheap–I mean really cheap–go to the Library.

The Library. Use it.

So, that’s what I did when I got “The Quitter.” I’ve long loved Harvey Pekar‘s work, though I will say that indeed I was first exposed to it through the film. I feel like I was sort of late to the party with…

The Zen Teachings of Huang Po, trans. John Blofeld

I recently did a short retreat, and the immediate result of it was that I want to go on a long retreat. That to me seems a great thing.

I have in the past approached Buddhist texts–in this case the word scripture is appropriate–as I approached other books, or at least other expository texts. I read them to understand some thing, or even more basically to know what some thing is. Huang Po, the text

Haruki Murakami, After Dark

Six or seven years ago a good friend, also a reader, gave me two Murakami books for my birthday: Norwegian Wood and After the Quake. I read the latter first and absolutely loved it. The former I started but didn’t finish. I have a long-standing policy of not finishing books I don’t actually want to read. I think the habit must have started in elementary school, as soon as teachers started…

J.R.R. Tolkein, The Two Towers

As I write this I’m already a bit into The Return of the King. Despite what seems to be its reputation as the relatively boring middle bit, I thoroughly enjoyed The Two Towers. These books pass the most important test I give to books at this point in my life: I enjoy reading them.

Having said this, and feeling like the whole point of this blog is to say something, I’ll say that there are all…

Tom Piazza, Devil Sent the Rain

I think I have previously reported my habit of wandering the stacks in the library and randomly…