hopped up on carrot juice and ready to go

1) Here's a question for you. What is the best thing ever in the whole world?

A)Pirates
B)Rock operas
C)Puppets
D)Accordians
E)ALL OF THE ABOVE

If you answered D and you live in New York, please go see Jolly Ship the Whizbang at Ars Nova because it is 100% awesome.

Not as good as the pirate band that played at my wedding, but pretty good. Better than the puppet Hamlet, even, due to the rock music and hilarity. Why do puppets WORK? Why is it so pleasing to see something in miniature, the inanimate animated, carved little faces singing fucking pirate rock songs? These are questions for the ages.

2) Oh and it seems a long time ago but over the weekend we went to the Whitney Biennial, which, as usual, was, you know, spotty. But I loved Javier Téllez's film, "Blind, for the Use of Those Who See," about blind people touching an elephant and talking about how it feels. It's strangely moving, and understated, and thought-provoking, and beautiful. Beautiful! So much of what was there was not. I wonder. Why is so much of contemporary art, or that which ends up being represented in the biennial anyway, so aggressively ugly? What's with that arte povera-type shoddiness that seems so in vogue? It's like the art is daring you to enjoy it. I realize that sounds unsophisticated, but there it is.

3) Finally, the book of the week: I, Robot. Would you believe I have never Asimov? Well, I have not. But I picked up this slender little paperback with an awesomely 70s cover from a box of stoop-sale-afterbirth somewhere and it makes for perfect train reading. Very X Minus 1, these clever little stories. The robots go haywire. The wisecracking scientists fix them. Repeat. Also, Asimov's writing is sometimes completely hilarious. As in:

"At the end of two hours, Powell was copiously besweated. Donovan had enjoyed a none-too-nutritious diet of fingernail and the robot said, "How does it look, boss?"

Copiously besweated! Diet of fingernail! These two are the best, Powell and Donovan. They're always getting into jams and then saying things to each other like, "All right, and skip the sarcasm. We'll save it for Earth, and preserve in jars for future long, cold winters." A comeback I plan to have at my disposal from now on.

Clearly I am on a real nerd-power kick. The talking dolls in bizarre Hell, the werewolves of the wonderful Sharp Teeth. The pirates of last night's play. Basically...I am a six year old boy I think. Next thing you know I'll be really into trucks.

4) Oh and things are afoot. Book things. Website things. Just wait!

howl

It was a very Sharp Teeth weekend here in the Ambulette! Not only did I go see Toby Barlow give a charming reading at BookCourt in Brooklyn on Friday, but then I spent most of Sunday reading, yes, the whole freaking book. Couldn't stop. It is one of those books that lulls you into its world completely, and what a world it is: violent and gnashing and sexy and scary and wolfy. Though it's in free verse, I'd say its language and rhythms have a sight more to do with hard-boiled detective fiction and film noir than with most poetry -- the lines are compact and clipped. And, as with any good novel, the form is undivorceable from the the function -- the form is a strange hybrid, in its own category rhythmically and otherwise, just as the characters are strange hybrids, wolves and women, dogs and men. There's a fascinating plot in there too, satisfying twists and all. An intensely fun read, this book. Often books I love make me want to run off and write, write, write, but this book had the strange effect of making me want to run off and charge through the mountains and howl at the moon and whatnots.

little dog came from you

I did start Sharp Teeth and it is great.

As in (as the dogcatcher remembers his childhood pet):

"But in all these tales the dog is the innocent shooting star
we all wish upon
until it burns up, aging fast and disappearing
behind our jagged horizons.
Each dog marks a section of our lives, and
in the end, we feed them to the dark,
burying them there while we carry on."

Ack! Let us all hug our animals.

werewolves of l.a

The next book I am super excited to, oh god forgive me, sink my teeth into is theter Sharp Teeth. No, not a White Teeth sequel, nor the memoir of an erstwhile dentist, but a novel in verse (yes!) about werewolves (double yes!). Just listened to a great Bat Segundo interview with the author, Toby Barlow, and loved some things that were said. As in: a discussion of so-called "innovators of the new weird," wherein Barlow gives props to one of my favorite books of all times, Anne Carson's (novel in verse, about a monster-boy) Autobiography of Red. He calls her Rachel Carson but it's okay, we totally know what you mean, TB. He also talks about the desert as weirdly fertile place, and idea which obviously (obviously, if you've read my book, which you haven't, because it's not out yet) speaks to me. And then about how the theme of the book (of any book, I'd say) is: "This has all already happened before; this is all completely new." Also, yes. Also, he explains his decision to not have his lycanthropes moon-based by saying he can't imagine a creature being taken over by animal forces once a month. To that I say HA HA HA. Clearly, you are male. But, again, I forgive him. Because I am so excited that a novel in verse has been published, first of all -- by a major publishing house, no less! Everytime that happens I think we should all have a pizza party, even if the book is terrible. And also: werewolves. Transformations. L.A. The desert. Homer. Burritos. So here I go, I'm going to start it tonight.

hell yes

“Something is wrong in the house.”

Finished reading Katherine Davis's mystifying, gorgeous, creepy and inexplicable Hell on a bizarrely crowded train this evening, though somehow I feel like I still haven’t even started it yet. It’s a strange book, deliciously strange, and it concerns itself with three distinct storylines which connect (like the impersonators and the nuns in Mister Lonely!) only obliquely – parallel layers more than braided strands. There are three households in the book: a home in 1950s Philadelphia, a dollhouse within this home, and the cottage of a nineteenth-century domestic management expert. Yes, one of the storylines is about a dollhouse, and it’s amazing. I love that Davis can do things that sound so crazy -- setting part of a novel in a dollhouse, or including a talking mouse -- and make them work so completely. (Again, I'm reminded of Mister Lonely! Watch it and then tell me that the wistfully singing painted eggs don't make you well up a little.)

“Sooner or later the house will get the best of you. It will defy your attempts at narrative because it’s opposed to content; it only honors form.”

I also love the way Davis plays with the same themes and images and ideas in each different setting, the way certain things accumulate throughout the book. In each story there is a sickly daughter, a cold mother, a distant father, a charismatic outsider – there is a an interest in food, including a dread of burning and a hallucinatory, transcendent Molly Bloom-ish stream of consciousness rant about blancmange that is truly amazing. In some ways it feels like some of the pieces of Labrador and The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, gone completely wild, unfettered by anything so pedestrian as, say, plot. Anyway, it’s an odd book but a beautiful one. And it leaves me with three Kathryn Davis books left to read, which is exciting.

“Better far to be a ghost outside a house looking in, especially at night when the lights are on and you catch glimpses of the people you loved when you were alive going about their business.”

Which to read next? Or should I make myself wait. Hm.

don't stop till you get enough

This weekend we saw Mister Lonely, a movie so sweet and strange and sad that we can't stop talking about it (or singing "Mister Lonely"). It's Harmony Korine's newest movie (I realize I've never any of his other movies! Somehow I thought I had but no, no I had not. I gather this is quite a departure) and he was there to answer questions afterwards. Let me first say that this movie was beautiful, just gorgeous frame by frame, and deeply, awesomely weird and funny. It's about a Michael Jackson impersonator who goes to live at a kind of impersonators commune in the Scottish Highlands. (I know, it sounds like it could have gone very, very wrong, and it could have, but it didn't. ) What an ongoing and hilarious joy to see a wistful Marilyn Monroe, an antic Buckwheat, a foul-mouthed Abraham Lincoln, and others, tromping around in yellow Wellies and doing their farm chores. Part of what's so wonderful is that they do very little performing as impersonators -- they just live as impersonators. And then there is a seemingly disconnected subplot involving flying nuns. I know.

If I were going to flatten out the delicious mystery of it and try to put the thing into words, I would say it's about taking a leap of faith to discover who you are. But that makes it sound corny and simplistic, and I would never do something like that. Anyway, afterwards people asked some very good questions and some very silly questions which Mr. Korine answered with a sly, nervous grin. Someone asked about the connection between the two story lines, which of course was what everyone wanted to know but also utterly unanswerable. Satisfyingly enough, the response was a shrug and something like, "Well, you know, I've always wanted to write the great American novel but with, like, pages missing... kind of like that."

too many have lived

Yesterday was a day with two curious incidences. First of all, I think I shrunk. This is distressing if true. But I'm not exaggerating at all when I say that I was wearing shoes I wear all the time and that have always fit just fine; then, halfway through the day, they became too big. They would barely stay on my feet! So after work I was clomping through the Diamond District, towards the Mercantile Library, feeling like a kid playing dress-up in her mother's pumps. What in the world? Therefore, I suppose I must be shrinking?

Anyway. Next up was the reason why I had to clomp over there at all: a live recording of a Dashiell Hammet story "Too Many Have Lived" for the (new?) "audio magazine" The Black Mask. Carrie Tryharder met me there, so she can confirm that yes, if you listen to the program (it doesn't appear to be online yet), that horrible thud you hear towards the start would be me dropping my bag onto the floor. But hey, it's hard to get used to my new smaller self! Anyway. The story was complete with sound effects and a musical number, and made me want to read Hammet which I really have never done. There should be more opportunities to see (and possibly ruin) live radio recordings, I think. It's fun.