Ben’s Comments (group member since Mar 02, 2009)

Ben’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

definitely for chaos

Patty I have to read this anthology

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories

before my class starts on Sept 27.

I can't actually start it until Sept 1, though... But we could talk about some of those if you like? I think they're mostly pretty standard modern stuff...

I am looking forward to reading the rest.

I started reading his collection Men Without Bones the other day (available on kindle for $1.99!). It's a "highly recommended" book in Stephen King's Danse Macabre (which is a survey of mid-century horror). So far, it's okay... the writing is excellent (sort of like John Collier) but it's not actually horror; it's more like witty, amusing, well-crafted stories of the fantastic. I can see these being in the New Yorker or something. They feel very light-hearted and 50s.

i actually have a pretty big reading goal for this year! usually my goal (though i don't always make it) is to read 100 books. but this year i'm giving myself a MAXIMUM of 52 for the year. which i'm hoping will make me read some of those longer long long books i always put off because they make it less likely that i'll get to 100. so, for instance, i'm reading the decameron right now. and am aiming for les miserables and the war at the end of the world and some other stuff like that. rabelais. herodotus. i'm kind of excited about it! we shall see...

i should be able to do it! i still feel bad about missing last year.

oh, me me! don't forget me! i'm there!

yes yes yes!

i'm all in for whenever and wherever, as long as it's after july 16. i don't personally care where we stay as long as there's a bed and a door for me to close but it's true that people seem to like having the great outdoors around. looking forward to it as always! :)

they give it out every twenty minutes now

i imagine if your name is weiner you probably get a little touchy about certain kinds of things.

oh yes! like a yorkshire pudding! i like those. i am officially a yorkshire pudding.

hi everybody! i'm drinking coke zero. i just ate a lot of sushi. i slept all day, it was like 180 degrees, i am now officially a burnt pudding. wait... do you put pudding in the oven? i don't know much about pudding.

don't know why i put "based on" in quotes.

there's also Ed McBain! although i think technically the city in his 87th precinct books is just "based on" new york.

i was going to say Richard Stark but i can't remember if his Parker novels take place in new york or chicago. but apparently the novels he wrote under his real name (Donald E. Westlake) all took place in new york. i never read any of them, though.

i'm leaving the 29th!

wow, that was pretty heavy. don't know that i was prepared for that. but hey, i've been reading "pacific radio fire" a lot these days, so here it is if anyone wants to read it:


Pacific Radio Fire
by Richard Brautigan

The largest ocean in the world starts or ends at Monterey, California. It depends on what language you are speaking. My friend’s wife had just left him. She walked right out the door and didn’t even say good-bye. We went and got two fifths of port and headed for the Pacific.

It’s an old song that’s been played on all the jukeboxes in America. The song has been around so long that it’s been recorded on the very dust of America and it has settled on everything and changed chairs and cars and toys and lamps and windows into billions of phonographs to play that song back into the ear of our broken heart.

We sat down on a small corner-like beach surrounded by big granite rocks and the hugeness of the Pacific Ocean with all its vocabularies.

We were listening to rock and roll on his transistor radio and somberly drinking port. We were both in despair. I didn’t know what he was going to do with the rest of his life either.

I took another sip of port. The Beach Boys were singing a song about California girls on the radio. They liked them.

His eyes were wet wounded rugs.

Like some kind of strange vacuum cleaner I tried to console him. I recited the same old litanies that you say to people when you try to help their broken hearts, but words can’t help at all.

It’s just the sound of another human voice that makes the only difference. There’s nothing you’re ever going to say that’s going to make anybody happy when they’re feeling shitty about losing somebody that they love.

Finally he set fire to the radio. He piled some paper around it. He struck a match to the paper. We sat there watching it. I had never seen anybody set fire to a radio before.

As the radio gently burned away, the flames began to affect the songs that we were listening to. A record that was #1 on the Top-40 suddenly dropped to #13 inside of itself. A song that was #9 became #27 in the middle of a chorus about loving somebody. They tumbled in popularity like broken birds. Then it was too late for all of them.

female

GOOD LORD DON'T DO THAT!! makes my heart palpitate just thinking about it