I had a bunch of stuff I planned to write about this weekend. I was going to write another piece about Karl Rove and his trash-talking of Hillary Clinton. I was also giong to write an essay / book review of Linda Greenhouse's
Becoming Justice Blackmun and tie it in to the modern abortion and death penalty wars in the United States. Actually, I still might write that one. The problem is that it'll wind up being one of those epic fucking posts that I write, no one reads, and I get bitched out for because it's really long and has no pictures of titties in it.
Since those posts require a lot of work, I've been feeling lazy and I don't much feel like taking your shit, I didn't get around to either project. Basically, I've been staring at my monitor for the last 53 hours waiting for inspiration to hit with no real result. I know what you're thinking and, yes, I do have the life.
So here I am, frustrated, exhausted and generally headachey despite having masturbated to newly downloaded
Lilly Thai videos a half dozen times this morning. What to do, what to do? Oh, I suppose I can swivel my chair around and rub one out to
Kyra Phillips, but I do that every day around this time. Besides, I should put something up before the villagers get restless.
Since I seem to be incapable of throwing together anything original, I'll just ruthlessly steal from the pride of Texas, my beautiful Snowball,
De. The queen of my more depraved and brutal sexual fantasies has a
book meme up this morning. I'll steal that and everyone will once again be happy. Or bored. Whatever.
What are you reading right now?
Before I knocked myself the fuck out this morning with Maria Christina and Nytol, I had closed the covers of the aformentioned Becoming Justice Blackmun for the final time.
Do you have any idea what you’ll read when you’re done with that?
That's tougher to answer than you might expect. As anyone who has read this blog for longer than two or three minutes knows, intellectual discipline isn't exactly my strong suit. What I read is entirely dictated by my mood.
Often times, I'll start between three and five books at a time and see which grabs me. I've frequently been asked if this gets confusing. Frankly, it doesn't. If I'm reading, say, a Henry Miller novel and a book about the Nixon administration, there's little chance that I'll develop a mental picture of Henry Kissinger wiping off his cock with a two franc note and throwing it on a whore's breasts. But I'm willing to bet that you just did. You're welcome.
Or I might get really hoity and read some fiction, which I don't do a lot. The last novel I read was
Memories Of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which was beautifully written but only slightly longer than your average pamphlet.
In recent months, I picked up both
V and
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, which I should read at some point. Then there's
The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which
Dr. Reverend,
Zombie and Oprah won't shut up about. And I was really impressed by McCarthy's
Child of God, so maybe I'll give
The Road a shot.
What magazines do you have in your bathroom right now?
Foreign Affairs, the Atlantic Monthly and Black Tail. I'm so highbrow.
What’s the worst thing you were ever forced to read?
Anything in school. Luckily, I was well-read enough and quick enough on my feet as a kid that I got through high school reading only one assigned book,
Fifth Business by Robertson Davies. I don't do well with things that I'm
forced to read. Furthermore, the education system makes you read such garbage that I'm really not all that surprised that most people are functionally illiterate.
What’s the one book you always recommend to just about everyone?
People never do what I tell them. The world would be a much better place if they did. A sexier place, too. Let's just say that the world's salad would be thoroughly tossed and we would all live in eternal peace.
Since I mostly read political and legal history and biography, my recommendations are pretty much useless to everyone who isn't a sexless geek. I have no idea why it is, but Harry Potter fans are getting laid left, right and fucking center and I'm not. I can recommend books all goddamned day, but my interests don't often converge with other people's.
Having said that, I was once in a relationship that was founded on books almost as much as it was by her love of watching me masturbate. I'd buy her a book, she'd start to fall in love with me, so I'd buy her another book. If you're trying to get into a woman's pants, I can't think of a better strategy than buying her books. Anybody can buy flowers and frilly underthings, but if you buy her a book, it says something about your opinion of her - specifically, that you're pretty sure she can read. Women seem to appreciate this.
Said woman and I share a love for the darkness of the human condition. So among the books I got her were
City of Night by John Rechy,
Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen and
The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq. While I might have been the biggest loser and worst lover of her life, I was fucking fantastic for her library.
Had I have had my wits about me, I'd have given her
The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis De Sade so that she could properly feel my love. Then she would have had no choice but to marry me.
Admit it, the librarians at your library know you on a first name basis, don’t they?
Yes, but not for the reasons that you would expect. Between the ages of twelve and fifteen, I had this nasty habit of borrowing books from the library and not returning them. 1982 - 85 also happened to be my
Nietzsche phase, so if you went to the North York Public Library looking for the works of a syphllitic German philospher, you were shit out of luck. Can you blame me? Just look at that mustache! I want one and it isn't like there's anyone to say that they won't fuck me anymore if I grow one.
You would think that a twelve-year-old with a pile of Nietzsche's works would be a novel and highly erotic visual. Alas, this did not get me laid once. Instead, there were whispers of "What a strange boy." This was further compounded by my close resemblence to
Slash, who did not yet exist.
I fear that the Toronto library system might still have shoot to kill orders for me, should I darken their door. Only the whole, this isn't completely negative as it leaves me with the always entertaining option of "suicide by librarian," which might be the most creative death ever!
In any event, I've always preferred owning books to borrowing them. I'm not really good with deadlines. Accordingly, I currently own several thousand books.
Is there a book you absolutely love, but for some reason, people never think it sounds interesting, or maybe they read it and don’t like it at all?
Actually, there are two. Three if you count Nixon's memoirs, which I've never been able to get anyone to read on account of the fact that it's 1,200 pages long and by Richard Nixon. So I never count RN.
The first is
Platform by
Michel Houellebecq. The only person I got to read that and actually like it was the girlfriend from several paragraphs ago. We bonded over that book. It caused her to love me as she'll never love another and it launched us into what is easily the most dysfunctional relationship of my life. As much as I love it, that fucking book might be
cursed! Simply put,
Platform is a story about love between people who don't know how to feel. You may have read your share of tales of romance, but if you haven't read one involving sociopathic French people involved in the sex tourism business, well, you just haven't lived yet. Houellebecq is
Albert Camus with particularly raunchy fuck scenes, which would have made
L'Etranger an even better book than it already is.
But other than the girlfriend who shared my misanthropy, I couldn't get anyone to read it.
The second book is
The Private Life of Chairman Mao by Dr. Li Zhisui. For reasons that I still can't understand, that book was the first thing I could focus on after my father's death. It may be that I took some comfort in the fact that there were people whose lives were turned even more upside down than mine had been, but I'm not sure.
As Mao's personal physician for 22 years, Li had a ringside seat to the dementia that overtook the world's oldest continous society. Through Li, we learn about the terror that the Cultural Revolution unleashed not only outside Mao's court, but within it as well. We also learn that Mao was a virtual petrie dish of veneral disease who had sex with everyone in sight, believing that it would keep him forever young. Mao, it turns out, was easily the most libidinous dictator since Caligula.
And other than Dr. Reverend, people couldn't be less interested.
Do you read books while you eat? While you bathe? While you watch movies or TV? While you listen to music? While you’re on the computer? While you’re having sex? While you’re driving?
I used to be able to do all of the above, but I can't now. I'm old and I tire easily, I guess. Although, I ususally read whilst eating. That makes me a really popular date.
When you were little, did other children tease you about your reading habits?
To an extent, but not as much as you would think. There was (and continues to be) much better material to work with than the fact that me read good. I was short, stupid and the oddest-looking kid I knew. Now I'm tall, stupid and the oddest looking adult I know. Don't you love a happy ending?
What’s the last thing you stayed up half the night reading because it was so good you couldn’t put it down?
That would be the Mao book described above. Also, a good issue of Swank has been known to keep me up at night.
And that concludes the meme I ripped off from the lovely De. Am I the only one who wonders why I can't write anything that's less than 1,000 words?
Please kill me.
Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Everyday I Write the Book By: Elvis Costello From: Punch the Clock
