"Clay Lies Still" does not want to get finished. I am now convinced that the stars are aligned against it.

I spent a goodly portion of Sunday morning getting the background looping samples ready. They're not perfect, but they're about as close as I'm going to get unless I want to spend a month trading emails with Scott Nydegger (and even then, the chances he'd actually give me the primary source are variable at best). As it always goes with this sort of thing, as the samples themselves took shape, mutations started working in my head for how things were going to go. So I played around with calibrating the samples. Needless to say, I can't remember the exact settings, but I do remember one was set to loop at 5.82 beats. (You can see why I can't just keep a list of settings in my head. I was an English major, I have enough trouble with integers.) Then I started filtering, effecting, looping, doing all the stuff that takes a mishmash of sounds and makes them into something coherent. Eight tracks of chaotic, layered madness, all coming together perfectly. (I can even see backing video in my head, assuming I can overcome my fumble-fingers enough to edit video; intercut Wegener [Der Golem, natch] and Farrokhzad [The House Is Black].) Seven of the eight were completed. I was trying to get that perfect filter on the eighth.

That's when the system crashed.

Job interview tomorrow, and it's right in the middle of the day, which will kill the entire thing, pretty much; I'll need 4-5 hours at least uninterrupted to get it all back together. I'll try again Wednesday. Maybe it'll actually get done.

On the other hand, my movie-watching today, which mostly consisted of short TV music docos and the like, got the idea into my head that I really, really need to do a live set here. It's only a few hours away, all I have to do is somehow convince my favorite soundman that he has to dismantle two stacks of Marshalls and a mixing board crate it all to Indianapolis for music that, until release, only he and I would hear. And all the permits and stuff we'd need to get, and all that sort of thing. But by god, the acoustics in that place are awesome.

We didn't write iPhone apps that made us rich enough to retire at the age of nine.

We don't make five grand a month writing articles. (And you can't tell me that guy does, either.)

We didn't even come up with the idea of a talk show dedicated to zombies.

And we, as Americans, have grown fat and lazy enough to have allowed to government to fuck us out of the founding principle of this nation.

Me, to them:

Can someone please explain this to me?

I worked most of the year in Independence, and my wife works in
Brecksville. We live in Lakewood. I paid $888.35 in taxes to
Independence, of which Lakewood "credits" me 222.07. Similarly, my
wife paid 329.20 to Brecksville, of which Lakewood "credits" her
82.30.

We obviously do not live in Independence or Brecksville, and should
therefore not be paying any local taxes to those municipalities at all
(seeing as we don't vote there). How do I go about getting those full
amounts transferred to Lakewood? If that is not possible, how do I go
about getting those full amounts refunded so I can pay what I
supposedly "owe" Lakewood, despite having paid far more in local tax
in 2008 already than my Lakewood tax burden?

I will not, under any circumstances, pay local tax twice.

Them, in response:

The local taxes for workplace cities are, effectively, workplace local taxes and the local tax for the resident city is, effectively, a residence local tax. This issue has gone before the Supreme Court. Taxation in both the workplace city and resident city has been ruled as constitutional for the reason that municipal services (police, fire, trash collection, etc.) for a particular locality are utilized in both instances. As such, there is no reciprocity between cities, as workplace cities and resident cities both use their respective tax money to fund municipal services in both capacities.

Taxation without representation. Pure and simple. Two hundred years ago, it was considered odious enough for us to go to war. Today, we sit around and take it.

as horrified by Jockeys as I am?

1. The music is horrible. All of it. Every last note. HATE HATE HATE.
2. Way, way too much focus on breakdowns, accidents, etc. For a show that's supposed to bring the sport publicity, it looks like it's bound and determined to drive people away.
3. Anyone else find the "creative" editing of Trevor's race calls (and I have to admit I've never been a big fan of Denman's race calling skills) annoying? It's like they don't believe the average viewer will have enough intelligence to match a given horse with a given jockey.
4. Ummmmmmmm... forgive my stupidity if I'm wrong about this, but, uh, since when has the Cal Cup Distaff been run on the downhill turf course? Isn't it 9f on the dirt?
5., and yeah, I know this is minor, but if you're gonna let me watch California Flag's Morvich, which was my favorite race in all of 2008, I wanna see the whole thing! Come on, it only took 1:10.1 or something like that, for pete's sake...

(and I know this is my regionalism, but hey, Court? We in the midwest would love to have you back. srsly. WE <3 YOU!)

But first...

March 23, 2009
Doubting Thomas Gallery
Audio Visual Baptism 3

featuring
the long-awaited return of
QUELL
one of America's true powerelectronics gods returns to live performance after eight years

also appearing:
SL Makita
Murderous Vision
XTerminal
and much more...

trust me. If you've never had the chance to see Quell live before, you really, really want to go to this.

* * *

this week's "duh" statement that has everyone's panties in a knot: Lulu president says his press has published the largest collection of bad poetry in existence. Is there anyone who actually reads vanity pus who doesn't know this? But teh real funneh is this particular comment:

"The quote from the NYT piece that chaps my ass is from Lulu CEO Robert Young: 'We have easily published the largest collection of bad poetry in the history of mankind,' Young said. Yeah, what about all those micro-presses who use Lulu to publish some of the best poetry in the country? I suggest Young take an extra helping of STFU. Those 'bad' poets are paying his salary."

I love the complete lack of backup to this statement. Methinks me smells some sour grapes there. If you're going to call selected Lulu authors "some of the best [poets] in the country", bub, you need to provide examples. I've read, what, three dozen vanity-press poetry collections in the last couple of years? Send me some that will rank above two stars, plzkthxbi.

* * *

You know your local Sheraton? Yeah, the hotel? It sure as hell doesn't look like this. I think some refurbishing is in order on some of the stateside Sheratons...

* * *

If I can't live in Orkney, can this be choice #2? I didn't know there was a place even more remote, yet still habitable... and it's got broadband!

* * *

Sign of the apocalypse, only applicable to those local to me: Rocky River floods, Westlake threatened. How soon before some moronic preacher starts saying this is god's way of punishing Westlake for the recent scandal?

* * *

Frozen creek. Dead horses. Foul play involved. I hate this.

* * *

On the other hand, first case of Marburg confirmed in America. Yes, folks, the apocalypse is coming. Praise be to Yersinia.

* * *

Why narrative poetry is so damn hard to write.

The essence of narrative poetry is such that you have a story to tell, but the way in which you wish to tell the story is not traditional. In other words, the poem becomes a story without becoming fiction.

Yes, that.

* * *

Crafty types: Sew a book jacket. Pretty nifty. Now if I could just figure out how to make a straight line...

* * *

A slow-running computer and the role drivers may play in it. First off, check out the completely irrelevant Amazon review excerpt at the top of the page. WTF? But really, what I want to know is: does such a thing as a "driver scanner" exist? My google searches turned up nothing that looked right, and I do like the idea quite a bit. I wants one, precious.

* * *

...and now I'm down to 20 open tabs, which is better than it's been in weeks...

Be excited, damn you.

* * *

Could this be the best book ever? Oh, yes. I believe it could.

* * *

Amazon's doing the first book thing again, but it looks like only Vine members will be doing the reviews (for all sorts of cash) this time around. Dammit.

* * *

More about why copyright sucks, and more commenters who just don't get it.

* * *

ROADTRIP ALERT! April 25th, Chicago, Throbbing Gristle. Tickets for the New York show are $35, I can't imagine they'll be more expensive for Chicago. Who's coming along?

* * *

Do you read multiple books at a time? The guy acts like it's something weird.

* * *

Tiffany-- yes, pop queen turned Playboy model Tiffany-- will be starring in a horror flick soon. No word on whether she gets naked.

* * *

Do you really need to see the rest of the headline when the first three worlds are Schoolgirl divorcee, 10,...?

* * *

Library Vixen is my new favorite blog ever. This is not safe for work. at all. you have been warned.

* * *

How do you stop the hooligans from loitering outside your store? Hit 'em with a little Bach. Oh, Alex, how I miss you.

* * *

And from the "pot/kettle" department, Stephen King says Stephenie Meyer can't write. He's absolutely correct, of course... though I have to say I'm not at all sure what he sees in J. K. Rowling, who couldn't write her way out of a paper bag (unless she's gotten MUCH, MUCH better since the first horrible book).

* * *

Yeah, big surprise, someone else banned Bless Me, Ultima, ho hum. Why does everyone complain about the (really kind of boring) profanity and not just say "we want it banned because the book sucks"?

You never know what you're going to find.

* * *

"Trying to read a book by Rae Armantrout in a single sitting is like trying to drink a bowl of diamonds."

Damn you, Silliman, for coming up with what may be the best simile EVAR.

* * *

Random thought: though I was only first exposed to it a few months ago, I am already very, very sick of the term "e-chap".

* * *

Kaye Gibbons, addict. When I originally picked that up, it really still was a delay. (For the linkophobic, the court rescheduled her date for January 26th, which tells you how long it takes me to get around to doing these sometimes.)

* * *

Anyone ordered this? Is it worth seven bucks?

* * *

Sometimes I find out new things about albums I have owned for years. (Given that I have over 2,700 hours of music to listen to, according to MediaMonkey, it's not surprising I don't hear some things for months on end). A song came on today and I thought, "hey, that voice sounds familiar". So I looked it up, and yes, it's the voice of one of my favorite actresses combined with the music of one of my favorite bands. I have no idea how I never realized this before.

* * *

For those who don't mind those grey areas, here ar some places to download an absolute wealth of photography-related stuff and really obscure metal. I stumbled upon that second one today while looking up Akitsa lyrics and immediately started drooling. There's stuff there I've never even heard of, and a few albums I've lost in hard drive crashes and/or had stolen out of the car (can't wait to fill in the gaps in my Abruptum collection, which has fallen victim to both of the above in the past four years)...

* * *

Did I ever mention Apps for America? If one of you geeks has more time than I do...

* * *

You've seen most or all of these before, but they're still really, really sexy. I'm especially fond of the first one. Now if I can manage to get stable somewhere long enough to actually build shelves...

* * *

Best news story of the week: Birmingham bans apostrophes. I'm of two minds about it. Obviously, there are places where apostrophes are perfectly appropriate. That said, it will eliminate shit like this, which cannot by any standard be considered bad.

* * *

Why is it that reviews on the backs of novels by black authors discuss “the greatest African-American writers” rather than “the greatest writers”?

Thank you, Ms. Provine, for making an argument I've been making for decades far more eloquently than I have ever managed to make it.

* * *

Gang Chen makes $14K a month in royalties from his two Outskirts Press titles. Note well that (a) this press release was quite obviously written by Gang Chen and should thus be taken with as much salt as necessary, and/but (b) Chen fits the exact profile of the guy who does turn a profit vanity publishing (he writes niche-market nonfiction and does extensive self-marketing). In other words, the fact that one guy is raking in more than 99% of authors published by major publishing houses does not in any way mean that vanity pubs are not still a financial sinkhole for those looking to get rich quick.

(On the other hand, a number of authors, some of whom I know personally, are at least making extra cash through alternative methods of publication, e.g. monthly web subscriptions a la yuki_onna and greygirlbeast. It's a bloody fantastic way to show your direct support for your favorite writer(s). I urge you lot to go find a favorite writer who's doing it and subscribe. Or, if you're a writer, start doing it. Some of you know damn well I want to give you money.)

* * *

Speaking of money-- so I had an interview at a small liberal arts college in Louisville, KY, at the end of last week. And, yes, once again, the weather was, shall we say, uncooperative. For those of you who haven't been following along:

(a) I had an interview set up in Dayton a few weeks ago on a Thursday. That Wednesday was the day of the "winter assault". I made it from Cleveland to Mansfield in four hours and gave up; we did a phone interview later. I didn't get the job (as I'm still living in Cleveland, this should be obvious).

(b) Last Tuesday, Louisville was hit with the worst ice storm in recent memory. 350K homes were without power. Most of them were still that way when we rolled into town Thursday evening. So were a lot of businesses, including the hotel where we had a reservation. (Nice of them to call us and tell us in the two days between the power outage and my arrival.) We found, by sheer luck, what we believed to be the last room within sixty miles of Louisville Thursday night. We were told that most of the people who were actually staying in hotels were Louisville residents with no power. Great. I won't describe the condition of the room we got, but suffice to say it's possible they'd rented it before to someone who took one look at it and walked out. In any case, the college was closed, but since most of the staff were going to be there, and I'd driven down, the guy I was supposed to start my interview with told me to come in anyway. I did, and spent a rather enjoyable six hours talking to various people there. I should hear mid-February. Unfortunately, while the main roads were crystal clear, the side roads were covered with 6" sheets of ice, leading to us not actually being able to look at any of the houses we'd seen on various websites, so if I do get a job offer (I should hear in a couple of weeks), I don't actually know where we'll be living yet. (We did actually rule out three of the nine by driving through the neighborhoods and having Allison say "there's no way in hell", which leaves us with six other places, one of which is, as far as I'm concerned, the best house ever.)

Does Louisville have a noise scene?

* * *

How the hell do you use VST instruments? There's no input to wire anything to. I is confused.

* * *

So now that the latest version of VLC is buggy as hell and requires far more processor power than I have, and I'd rather shove millipedes in my ears than ever use Media Player, what is the next big thing in free video players for XP? (Or Windows 7, which I was told Friday kicks as much ass as Vista sucks, and supposedly there's a free public beta I haven't gone and looked for yet.) My only real requirements are that, well, it handle all the formats (and external subtitles-- specifically, .idx/.sub files, which DivX player can't) that VLC can handle. Except in a way that works.

* * *

Hey zombie kids, Dance of the Dead is pretty damn funny.

Witness my new facebook photo.



Also, go see Lockout. RIGHT FUCKING NOW. Ignore everything you read ont he Internet about this movie. Ignore all the marketing for this movie. Ignore the fact that everyone who talks about it talks about it as if it were a horror movie. It is not. It is a Jon Jost movie made by a Uruguayan transplant to Chicago, and when you look at it, that way, it all makes perfect sense, and it is the most brilliant movie I have seen this month.

and testing whether the facebook link actually works...

* * *

First off, really, I can say nothing about this but:
WHAT. THE. FUCK.
Yup. Magical new world.

* * *

Authors: Beware of Copyright.
You are done for. You sold your soul and you can't get it back. Not within your lifetime. Your creation, which copyright is designed to protect, is now the possession of someone else. This follows the trajectory as laid out in Michele Boldrin and David Levine's smashing new book Against Intellectual Monopoly.
Hopefully this will eventually be the "The Problem with Music" of the book industry.

* * *

Best movie line I have encountered this month:
"You haven't seen Titanic? You know, at the end, Rose was on Jack's neck. Shutter copied that scene..."

* * *

I have mentioned that I collect Nazi Zombie movies, yeah? Which makes this, in my estimation, the coolest thing to come down the pike in years. Anyone want to bet it doesn't open within fifty miles of me, if it ever shows up in America?

* * *

Woman embarrassed, angry over library book arrest
Now here's the question: is she really, or is she one of those batshit-crazy morons who simply wouldn't return the book so no one else could check it out? Sucks that you even have to ask such a question, but since the book in question has been so contentious for the past decade...

* * *

Offended letters. I have no idea what this is, but the first one is hysterical (though probably only if you can identify the alleged writer, so I'm poking inlaterdays).

* * *

Why do I love Michiko Kakutani?
"Recent DVD collections of early "Sesame Street" episodes were called "Old School" and came with a peculiar warning: "These early 'Sesame Street' episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today's preschool child."

That warning is a measure of how the series has changed in the nearly four decades since its debut in 1969.

The old episodes not only have a handmade, anarchic charm that underscores the show's debts to "Laugh-In," the Marx Brothers and vaudeville, but they also are blessedly free of the uptight, sunnily upbeat, politically correct tone that has crept into more recent incarnations.

Back in the day, Oscar the Grouch was really grouchy (never mind that anger isn't considered constructive), Cookie Monster really gobbled down cookies (never mind that empty calories aren't healthy), and Big Bird's invisible friend Snuffleupagus was really invisible to everyone but Big Bird (never mind suggestions that the giant yellow bird might have been hallucinating)."
YES.

* * *

Happiness is a warm Graywolf. And yet despite their recent success, try finding most of their release at Worldcat...

* * *

Turn a bar cart into a book cart. Awesome. Anyone have a bar cart I can borrow?

* * *

A new take on "for the children" censorship. God, I hate these people.

* * *

There is a town in Indiana called Floyds Knobs. THIS IS AWESOME.

* * *

Is it me, or is Julian Barnes' picture on the cover of Nothing to be Frightened Of vaguely, well, frightening?

* * *

Merzbow reviewed by a jazz publication.
While the idea that noise can be beautiful may be difficult to grasp-—and there are parts of Keio Line that are undeniably jagged, angular and challenging to the ear-—it's still quite extraordinary just how appealing it is.

* * *

I have a huge slab of beef in the crockpot. It's been there for five and a half hours. I want to eat it NOW. You have no idea how good it smells in here.
(I made you a pot roast. But I eated it.)

It wasn't until I was finished recording the ten-minute track that I realized that odd little audio artifact I was hearing in one sample was actually... the sample itself.

Note: when loading sample into loop player, make sure entire sample is not being played in one beat (at 180bpm).

I know these got used as coasters as much as AOL CDs ever did, but I'm going to ask anyway.

Those of you who were involved with (or fans of) mp3.com when it was still a viable option-- did any of you get the The 103 Best Songs You Never Heard disc in the mail? (I'm talking the very first one from 1999, since it seems there were at least three.)

If so, can you post me a track list?

The worst part of trying to clear up the damage that itunes did to my system is that none of the tracks on that disc were properly tagged, and the comp itself doesn't show up on discogs. So while I'm about 90% sure on about half the songs from it, I have no clue about the other half (and I still have about 3,000 untagged songs whose sources I'm trying to place).

Getting a tracklist for this disc would be an extreme help. Thanks.

my boy (see above) is back in training. This year he shows them what a real Thoroughbred looks like.

On the other hand, goodbye to one of the greats. It's been one hell of a run.

* * *

Win copies of Tom Tancin's back catalogue by helping him choose which book will be next in his series. I know some of you are mystery/thriller fans (elbowing Al), so check it out.

* * *

Dumbfuck thinks To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, and Huck Finn are somehow more offensive now that we have a black president, and should thus be censored.

“Obama would be horrified if he knew this censorship was done in his name,” wrote Trudy J. Sundberg, a retired teacher of American literature from Oak Harbor, Wash. Her response to Foley’s column was just one in a barrage of letters and e-mails that the newspaper received.

Indeed.

* * *

Aspiring doctors: I'm sure this is highly illegal, but I'm also sure it will save you thousand of dollars. Hop to.

* * *

This is, by far, the best headline of the week:

Concerned puppy owner smoked marijuana inside Target, shoplifted, then attacked officer, police say

IT'S ALL ABOUT THE PUPPIES.

* * *

Jack Higgins will mark his fiftieth(!) year as a published author in 2009. But he almost isn't. He suffered writers' block thanks to a rare, nasty disease until a 2001 head injury started him writing again. Which is about the coolest goddamn thing I have ever seen. (And makes me wonder if falling might help me write poetry again...)

* * *

And no one ever listens to me when I spout shit like this, maybe they'll listen to a doctor.

They never applied Occam’s razor and considered the simpler, more obvious explanation: that cholesterol is a flawed risk factor and doesn’t predict who will go on to have a heart attack! Even the headline writers seemed to get that “cholesterol levels may not measure cardiac risk.”

(Hasn't this been a "duh" thing for, like, thirty years to everyone but the medical community?)

...while listening to the outpouring of ecstasy that even if (when) not a single campaign promise gets realized, as they surely won't-- the Democratic Party, just like the Republican Party, wouldn't nominate anyone who stood for real change, or I'd have been right there with you watching Mike Gravel or Dennis Kucinich getting sworn in-- that those who are all starry-eyed about Thing 2 getting elected over Thing 1 will find a way to blame those campaign promises not getting fulfilled on Bush. Because it occurs to me that most of you are just too hard-headed to get disillusioned.

I've stopped alternately pitying and laughing at you and started being truly horrified.

Yep, here we finally are, folks. The one book I read this year that if I could, I would sit you all down and force you to read, because I read a whole lot of really strong books this year, and while the race was pretty close between the top three, nothing topped:



The review is being published here for the first time, because it's going out with the batch later tonight.

Donald Hall, Without (Houghton Mifflin, 1998)

Donald Hall is one of America's most accomplished men of letters, and never has he been more so than in Without. Published on the third anniversary of the death of his wife, the late poet Jane Kenyon, Without is split into two sections. The first details the months leading up to her death, and as expected, the poems in this section are fraught, fast-moving, tense, full of alternating hope and fear, as well as the quotidian agony of chemotherapy and imminent death:

“He woke at five, brewed
coffee, swallowed pills, injected insulin,
shaved, ate breakfast, packed
the tote with Jane's sweats he washed
at night, filled the thermos,
and left the apartment on Spring Street
to walk a block and a half
to the hospital's bone marrow floor.”
(“Her Long Illness”)

The second half consists of the epistolary poems Hall wrote in the year and a half afterward. In contrast to the first section, the fear has turned to despair, and the poems are slower, languid, at times almost suicidal:

“I wanted this assaulting winter
to end before January ended.
But I want everything to end.
I lean forward from emptiness
eager for more emptiness:
the next thing! the next thing!”
(“Midwinter Letter”)

Hall is one of those poets who is capable of taking natural language and elevating it not by changing the vocabulary he uses, but by imposing rhythm and phrasing to simply make ordinary conversation (albeit one-sided, mostly, in this case) sound as good as it possibly can. This is absolutely stunning work, and with just eight days left in the year as I write this, I feel quite safe in calling Without the best book I read in 2008. I can't recommend it highly enough. *****

Yes, folks, only two more to go...

Here's #2:



...and the review, from just a few weeks ago:

Catherynne M. Valente, A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects (Norilana, 2008)

Few things are as worth waiting for as a new book by Catherynne Valente. As these things usually go, few things fill me with imaptientce at the waiting for them as a new book by Catherynne Valente. My current monetary situation (and the book's current, as I write this, availability situation where libraries are concerned--a most grievous oversight indeed) had me waiting far too long to pick up A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects, Valente's first book of poetry since 2005's Apocrypha. It was, however, entirely worth the wait.

I'm not sure I believed that Valente was capable of improving on the already-stellar work in Apocrypha, but there are pieces here that do so. While there's nothing in the book that falls short of the standard Valente set for herself in that last book, there are a handful of pieces that transcend even that:

"Hades is a place I know in Ohio,
at the bottom of a long, black stair
winding down I-76 from Pennsylvania,
winding down the weeds
through the September damp
and that old tangled root system
of asphalt and asphodel,
to the ash-fields,
clotted with fallen acorns
like rain puddled in fibrous pools."
("The Descent of the Corn-Queen of the Midwest")

Anyone can make a person who's already seen something see it again in his mind. The point of poetry is to make someone who hasn't already seen it have a similar experience (similar because, as we all know, no two perceptions of a given even are identical, depending on the baggage, the mood, perhaps even the amount of caffeine extant in the system each reader brings to the table). That's how it's supposed to work in a really good book of poetry.

The title of the book implies retellings of old folktales, perhaps, in the vein one would find in the work of Angela Carter, Wendy Walker, or a number of other (and somewhat less accomplished than those twin doyennes of the modern form) retellers who have emerged in the past few years. And to be sure, there are fragments of tales here that you might recognize. But Valente knows, somewhere deep in her bones, that all tales are in some way folk tales; it's just that for most tales, the folk haven't appeared yet. And thus it is that personal history can be woven into folk tales (and if it's not personal history in some of these pieces, then I'm even more impressed):

"When they came to visit us last Christmas,
he grumbled about the capitalist dogma
of our spangled ornaments,
our 9 pound turkey glistening like a gold-skinned baby,
our soft mezzo-soprano two-part harmony.
He spat after her when she went to Mass.

I stayed behind
to wash the big turkey plate,
and he leaned against the black kitchen counter,
leering at me like an overseer.
He put his hands over mine in the soapy water,
and they were cold as storms.
He whispered in my ear,
his breath full of low clouds.
("Gringa")

It's not just the confessional poetry that's been in vogue since the fifties, it's something more, something with that slight tang of legend. It says "This is a tale to tell around a campfire after all the children have gone to bed, scared of men with hooks for hands and creeping vines." At this point, I had also planned to quote from the quietly devastating "The Eight Legs of Grandmother Spider", the book's most personal piece, but there's no way to give you the full effect of the piece without giving you the whole thing, which is too long for a review. The same could be said, of course, with the two poems referenced above, but I could use pieces to point things out. You won't get the full effect of those until you read them for yourself, and that is something you should do as soon as possible. Valente is a true talent, right up there with America's best working authors--Walker, Koja, Taaffe, a handful of others--and the sooner your discover her gifts, the less you'll have to go back and experience when you inevitably decide to gobble up everything she's already written. *****

We're almost to the beginning of another year, and almost to the end of the countdown. Only three books left...

Here's #3:



...and the review, from March:

Grant Morrison, We3 (Vertigo, 2005)

I can't remember the last time a graphic novel made me cry. We3 had me bawling like a schoolgirl finding out the Backstreet Boys had broken up. Morrison's tale of three altered animals (a dog, a cat, and a rabbit) trying to figure out what to do (and how to avoid the forces hunting them) after being freed from their armed forces research facility on the verge of their being decommissioned is heart-rending, and Frank Quitely's artwork is, if anything, stronger than the story itself; the emotions the characters show belie their rudimentary speaking abilities. Morrison and Quitely have packed an incredible amount of emotion into a very short story. Easily one of the best books I've read this year, and perhaps the best so far. *****

And yes, folks... We3: the movie is possibly nearing production. I can't wait.

Here's #4:



And the review, from October:

Martin McDonagh, The Pillowman (Dramatist's Play Service, 2003)

The first scene of The Pillowman plays out about like you'd expect; a writer somewhere in an unnamed totalitarian state (given the names, it's set somewhere in Eastern Europe) is being interrogated by a couple of policemen. A series of child killings is occurring that are quite reminiscent of those in the writer's unpublished stories. (If it sounds like a mix of Closetland and The Mystery of Rampo, you're thinking along the right lines.) He keeps protesting his innocence. One of the policemen threatens to torture the writer's mentally challenged brother, then heads off into another room, and after a while we hear screams. It's all relatively disturbing, but nothing entirely unexpected given the subject matter.

Then comes scene 2, and all the sudden The Pillowman is something entirely different than we think it is. (You know that bit in Se7en where Morgan Freeman does a complete about-face during the climax? Yeah. Except even farther off the track.) Different, and even more interesting than it already was. Gripping, even. I read through the first scene last night somewhat leisurely, then went to sleep. When I started reading scene 2, I was hooked, and didn't put the book down until I'd finished it.

All the film comparisons are because, of all the plays I've read over the last couple of years, this is the one I can see being most powerful if ever translated to a film (a la Bug). While it's still got that theatrical sensibility about it-- when one is dealing with a stage play, one does a lot more telling than showing-- it's plotted much more like a film script. Twists abound. Characters do subtle things that presage monumental changes later on. Most of the telling that goes on when you don't have many ways to show things is happening between the lines. And it all works. Most of the time it works brilliantly. (There's one character whose outlook at the end, and his process of getting there, seemed a bit cliché. But that's a minor point.) Few, if any, words are wasted here, and most of them seem measured for their punch. This is lean, muscular stuff in the vein of someone like James Dickey. It almost sings, though the song coming from it sounds more like a dirge.

It's fabulous all the way around. I can't recommend it highly enough, and it's a shoo-in for my ten best reads of the year list. *****

Here's a question: is it morally repugnant to lie to survey people who cold-call you?

Today's goals:
- post #5 in the 25-best series
- get Erasmus to the point where I can enter stuff
- enter stuff
- record two tracks for Norilana
- get to almost-finished with Toll the Hounds
- get half the reviews I'm behind written

Nice to see I'll manage to accomplish one.

Here's #5:



...and the review, from May:

Shaun Tan, The Arrival (Arthur A. Levine, 2007)

There's a single panel, towards the end of Chapter 2 of Shaun Tan's remarkable graphic novel The Arrival, that sums up a great deal of what you need to know about the book. Previously, a man has left his wife and daughter behind to emigrate to a new land, where everything is unfamiliar to him. When, despite the cultural and language barriers he faces, he manages to find lodging, he pulls out his suitcase and opens it. Instead of the things he packed, what we see is his wife and daughter, sitting and eating a meal alone in the house he used to share with them. Everything about the scene is rendered in exquisite detail, and it's a perfect synecdoche for Tan's approach to his material here; the fabulist attitude laced with a hefty dollop of surrealism, the feel of how it is to be a stranger in a strange land, and Tan's sure hand with his illustrations, right down to the way he gives us the kind of cracking you see on old photographs.

As our nameless protagonist journeys through the city, he meets other immigrants, and he assimilates culturally by listening to their own stories of what it was like to emigrate from their homelands to this wonderful city where all of them have ended up. Tan tells a universal-- clichéd, perhaps-- story in such a unique way that I would think it impossible not to be charmed. This is fine, fine work indeed, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. You need to read this book. *****

Here' #6:



...and the review, from May:

Catherynne M. Valente, The Labyrinth (Prime, 2003)

I'm not sure there's anything I can say about Catherynne M. Valente's writing that I haven't already said. Which gives the irony of Valente's first novel being my fifth review of her work a little extra added piquancy. Here's a fresh, new voice in fiction, and I've already told you all about how great that fresh new voice is in my reviews of Yume No Hon: The Book of Dreams (her second novel) and The Grass-Cutting Sword (her third). Yeah, I didn't get round to reading this one till later, more fool me.

This one gives us a nameless narrator (often compared to Alice in Wonderland, though by my estimation it's the Alice of American McGee's videogame or Svankmajer's brilliant film, not the one originally concocted by Carroll) trapped in a labyrinth-- of her own devising? One can never tell-- and the oddments she meets as she traverses it. It's a quest narrative, but a quest narrative turned quite on its head, where the hero doesn't have any inkling of the goal, the collected detritus of the meetings with helpful entities seems to have no value whatsoever, and no good deed goes unpunished. It's a tough life.

The plot, though, is not the reason to read this, as it never is with a Valente novel; you read Valente for the richness of the writing, the startling images that somehow never stretch the bounds of believability no matter how outrageous they get, the tempering and tweaking of old stories and mythic types that have been begging for such for centuries, if only we could hear it. Valente is one of those who can, and should be revered for same. *****

You knew one was going to show up here sooner or later.

Here's #7:



...and the review, from January:

Gosho Aoyama, Case Closed, vol. 3 (ViZ, 1994)

I've come across a lot of really, really good manga in the past few years-- a Bleach book even hit my Best Reads of 2007 list-- but volume 3 of Case Closed may be the best manga I've yet read. Vol. 3 follows the same rhythm as the rest of the series, with two stories. The first has Conan and the gang solving a mystery on a cruise ship, and it's your basic Case Closed; good, solid stuff, a lot of fun, but nothing special. It's the second story that really got me-- a doctor who has been getting a million yen a month, accompanied by toys for his child. Unable to figure out who's sending him these gifts, he turns to Conan and co. to help him figure it out. This story shows Aoyama's ability to inject real depth of character into the folks in the stories, and it works very well. Excellent stuff, this. *****

(It's too bad the series went so far downhill; I gave up at vol. 19. But those first books are awesome.)

This is the last day of two-a-day. Maybe next year I'll be smart enough to start on December 7th, so I can do one a day all month...

Here's #8:



...and the review, from September:

Trevor Paglen and A. C. Thompson, Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights (Melville House, 2006)

I can't remember the last time I read a general nonfiction book in the space of twenty-four hours; I'm not sure it's ever happened before. But I did it with this one (while at the same time blazing through a novel that was almost as good). And it's not because I know (if tangentially) one of the authors; it doesn't matter if you're my mom, if your book's unreadable, I'm not going to be able to read it. It's because Torture Taxi is a fast-paced, exceptionally well-written book.

I'm something of an egalitarian when it comes to reading; I can read about subjects that I know nothing or care nothing about-- or even actively dislike (cf. review of Richard Bak's Yankees Baseball, a sport I loathe)-- as long as the information is presented in an interesting way. I knew Paglen was capable of this long before he put pen to paper, as I was a big fan of his musical project Noisegate back in the day. One often wonders whether artists are capable of crossing media. In this case, it worked like a charm.

Torture Taxi, as the subtitle tells you, is a book about the CIA's Extraordinary Rendition program, a previously-secret initiative that was brought out into the open by regular folks around the globe who started wondering about the odd flight patterns of a certain group of planes. Using these, they tracked down ghost corporations, secret prisons, survivors of the program, and a host of scary, scary documents. This book, to be blunt, is a conspiracy theorist's wet dream. I've never been a conspiracy theorist, but I've got to say that Paglen and his co-author, investigative journalist A. C. Thompson, make a very compelling-- and damning-- case that Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib are only the tip of this polluted iceberg. They interview the survivors. They visit the sites. They quote, and sometimes show pictures of, the documents. The picture that emerges is not pretty.

This is a book that seems to have gotten very little notice. (Noisegate's music didn't, either, and that's equally criminal.) I guess I shouldn't be surprised at this, but I'm now going to attempt to change that, Torture Taxi is going to be one of the books I start recommending to everyone within earshot. Will likely find its way onto my ten best reads of the year list. **** ½

(Note: eight reviews of this on Amazon and none below four stars. For a political book, I find that extremely surprising...)

And one more for tonight...

Here's #9:



...and the review, from May (I can't believe it took me that long to getting around to reading an Aimee Nezhukumatathil book!):

Aimee Nezhukumatathil, At the Drive-in Volcano (Tupelo Press, 2007)

Anyone who's read Aimee Nez' two previous books, Miracle Fruit and Fishbone, certainly knows what to expect from one of America's fastest-rising poetic stars-- another volume of witty, insightful, incredibly observant poems. (Reading her blog the last few years, I think I've found the source of the "observant" bit-- Nez is also an excellent photographer.) And, of course, the author does not disappoint:

"You are the father of my father and I am the mosquito of the rain barrel.
I give to you three ripples of night water, one single white petal

of a frangipani tree. I give to you four limes to crush
into a spicy pickle sauce. A clasp of coconut gives me back

a day when you were alive, when you showed me the monkeyface
of the shell, the gallop in each clap...."
("What the Mosquito Gives")

Miracle Fruit got itself a very high place on the Beast Reads list the year I first read it; I imagine At the Drive-in Volcano will do the same this year. I've been reading a decent amount of poetry so far in 2008, and Nezhukumatathil is, in my estimation, certainly capable of hanging with the big dogs; this is great stuff, as usual. If you haven't yet discovered her wonderful poetry, this is as good a starting point as any of her books, and I cannot recommend her work highly enough. She's right up there with Richard Siken and Timothy Donnelly as one of the next generation's classics-in-waiting. **** ½

And here we are in the [font = "annoying singers"] tooooooop teeeeeeeen!

Here's #10:


...and the review, from January:

Jane Hirshfield, Given Sugar, Given Salt (Harper Collins, 2001)

It's absurd to start talking about the best books I read in 2008 two days into the year (yes, I'm writing this review on January second), but that's the only way I can really approach Given Sugar, Given Salt, Jane Hirshfield's incredible little book of poems. When I'm reviewing a poetry book, I'll usually jot down notes, then spend fifteen to twenty minutes coming up with a quote that's both good (or awful, depending on the review) and that shows in some way the overall quality of the book; there is, however, the rare exception where I can simply open the book to a random page and start copying, fully confident that whatever passage I choose, it will be both wonderful and indicative. This is one of those books; I'm opening to a random page.

"There are times I feel myself a cow stripped of her leather.

The hide going on without me,
flensed, vat-dipped, beaten to pliable smoothness.

What remains-- awkward, vaguely aware
that something is missing, but what?-- continues
its looking outward, evenly breathes.

Sunlight, wind, the black, inquiring noises of others:
sharp now as the knife.

Muscled unjacketed egg.
Impossible butcher's diagram walking, Beginning to graze.
("Leather")

The first sentence sets you up for a letdown: it's a sentence that screams "I am a message poem. Take me seriously." And yet, when we jump over the strophe break and hit those next two lines, we get nothing of the sort. There's a surprising image couched in erudite language that is entirely inappropriate for its subject matter, and that inappropriateness makes the surprise all the more fun. The poem continues on with its gentle, if deeply sick, humor, until we get back to the "I am a message poem" stuff right before the last strophe, and then, once again, Hirshfield turns away from it, leaving the reader to figure out what the hell "muscled, unjacketed egg" has to do with anything, and making us laugh, uncomfortably, once again with "Impossible butcher's diagram walking." That's great stuff, right there.

The book's sole problem rises from this willingness Hirshfield displays time and again to walk that line between the vapid self-importance of message poetry and the brilliant, subtle lands she usually inhabits; as is to be expected, I guess, every once in a while she crosses over that line into the land of vapid message poetry. Those incursions, however, are rare, far more so than one would expect given how close Hirshfield always is to that edge.

This is amazing work, and it deserves to be read. Pick it up at your earliest opportunity. **** ½

And now for a word from our sponsor.

Here's #11:



...and the review, from August:

Gary Fincke, The Almanac for Desire (BkMk Press, 2000)

Ah, Gary Fincke, how I do love your poetry. And of the books of Fincke's poetry I've read over the last couple of years, The Almanac for Desire is probably the strongest of them. Introspective, filled with a gentle, self-deprecating humor, poetic without being academic (in the sense of "erudite beyond the vocabularies of normal readers"), Fincke's poetry has the kind of straightforward beauty one might expect from a more sensitive James Dickey or a less nature-obsessed Hayden Carruth.

"Here, this morning, I'm shown the sealed drawers
of the monument where a part
of my family lies hidden an inch
from the sun, avoiding the grave
and the slab of the mausoleum.

A dozen names, not ours, fill three sides
of the squared base, all of them etched
like the memories of those who record
everything the know on floppy discs for
the repository of transcribed souls.
("The Repository of Transcribed Souls")

Fantastic book that's flirting with inclusion in my Best Reads of the Year list. If you're not familiar with Fincke, this is a great place to start (or, if you're poetry-phobic, pick up his "musical memoir" Amp'd: A Father's Backstage Pass). **** ½

We're just one day away from the top ten!

Here's #12...



...and the review, from November:

Osamu Tezuka, Ode to Kirihito (Vertical, 2006)

Every once in a while I come across a graphic novel that just makes my jaw drop--Bone, Black Hole, and now Ode to Kirihito. This monstrous (832 pp.) graphic novel is not only absorbing enough that you won't want to put it down, but has as much character development, plot, and action as any print novel, and a great deal more than most. Ode to Kirihito may be Tezuka's magnum opus--and given that Tezuka is considered the godfather of manga in Japan, that's saying something.

Osanai Kirihito is a young doctor who has more scruples than his boss. This makes him a liability, so when the boss finds a way to both study a new disease and get Kirihito out of the way, he jumps at the chance, sending Kirihito to the village where the disease seems to have originated, thus almost guaranteeing he'll contract it. The disease essentially turns humans into animals. Soon enough, of course, Kirihito starts looking like a dog, and thus his travails begin. Meanwhile, Kirihito's old colleague, always more tractable, discovers that the boss' hypothesis on the disease, which Kirihito was supposed to reinforce, may not be entirely accurate, and so he heads off to Africa to gather more evidence. This throws him into a quandary; should he keep kowtowing to the boss in order to advance, or do what Kirihito would have done, and stand up to him?

This is just the tip of the iceberg. There's a great deal going on here, with many subplots, a raft of well-developed characters, and actions and reactions that feel completely realistic. Tezuka has created a wonderfully detailed world here, and the truly amazing thing about Ode to Kirihito is that, like all truly well-crafted graphic novels, it feels like we just don't spend enough time in that world. Eight hundred pages? Just a drop in the bucket. We could have followed Kirihito for thousands more.

Will definitely be on my ten best reads of the year list. An amazing book. **** ½

Interestingly, doing it this way has caused me to shift a few things around, as I spend more time thinking about rankings within rankings (i.e. and/or e.g., not all four and a half star books are equal, which is kind of obvious if you think about it). And thus one which you weren't actually going to see till tomorrow, but the book that was originally here went way,way up the list.

Here's #13...



...and the review, from May.

Wendy Walker, Stories Out of Omarie (Sun and Moon, 1995)

I have said it in my reviews of her other two books, and I will say it again: Wendy Walker is, if not America's greatest living writer, in the top three or four. The only thing I can say against her is that she's released so few books; I realize it takes a great deal of time to craft such meticulous (and spectacular) prose-- word on the street has it Walker revised The Secret Service for two decades prior to publication-- but that doesn't mean I'm not champing at the bit for more. Accordingly, I have spaced my reading of Walker's three extant books, one novel and two books of short stories, over seven years, hoping that there might be a fourth waiting for me at the end of the road. Alas, there is not, so I will wait, as patiently as possible, for book number four.

Stories Out of Omarie, as the title suggests, is one of the books of short stories (the other is The Sea-Rabbit, or, The Artist of Life, and it is just as exquisite as this one). The book is comprised of adaptations and rewritings of tales to be found in the Lais of Marie de France, which are also well worth reading if you can find a decent translation (of you're fluent in medieval French, in which case I'd like to hire you as a tutor). As the title also suggests, one finds many knights involved in various derring-do, maidens who are perhaps not as maidenly as one might suspect at first glance, a number of mythical and/or magical creatures, both of human lineage and no, and some morality play. All of which is quite typical for what is, in essence, a book of fairy tales; what it is that sets Walker apart, as it does with the more current group of writers coming to be known as the mythpunks, is the style, the attention to detail not just in the story but in the language in which it was constructed. It's no surprise that I constantly compare the mythpunk writers to Walker in almost every review; I was long convinced she was the doyenne of the group, though I have since found out, to equal measures of delight and chagrin, that none of them had ever heard of the woman. Which allowed me one of my favorite pastimes-- turning people on to the sheer, unadulterated joy that is the writing of Wendy Walker. Allow me to do the same for you, if I haven't already gotten to you; each of Wendy Walker's other books has been at the top of my Best Reads of the Year list in the years I read them, and it's entirely possible that Stories Out of Omarie will follow suit. It takes some doing these days, since Walker's writing is criminally neglected and all of it is now out of print, but do whatever you must to hunt her books down, and then take them in small doses, like fine cognac. They go down just as smooth and leave the same warm feeling in the belly. Wendy Walker is a national treasure, and should be treated as such. **** ½

[ed. note: the Wendy Walker who wrote the current midlist popular novel Four Wives is an entirely different beast altogether; I remain unsure if this is the same Wendy Walker, who's an art critic when she's not writing, who wrote the introductory material for Deborah Paauwe: Beautiful Games, which I have not yet been able to afford.)

We're back and counting down the hits!

Here's #14:



...and the review, from August:

China Mieville, Un Lun Dun (Ballantine, 2007)

I have written many times (more than I can count, certainly) about the dangers of message fiction. Chief among them is that the author gets so wrapped up in the message that he forgets he's first and foremost supposed to tell a story. When I realized that Un Lun Dun, China Mieville's first childrens' book, was of the “message fiction” stripe, I quailed in despair, thinking I might have encountered my first Mieville book (and I've read 'em all) I wasn't going to like. I should have known better.

Message-fiction writers, listen up: the vast majority of you have a lot to learn from China Mieville. This is how you tell a story. Not just a message story, but any story. (Which is the point, really.) Perfectly-created characters that are rich and deep, a strong plot in which to set them (with no end of surprises-- Mieville is also poking some fun at the traditional fantasy-novel setup here), a setting that manages to both be original and wear Mieville's debt to Clive Barker on its sleeve, and a message that, yes, still manages to poke its head through! Believe it or not, you can have all these things in one book! Don't believe me? Read this one.

Un Lun Dun is the story of Zanna, the Shwazzy (I'd explain that, but catching the many puns in this book before Mieville reveals them is a lot of the fun-- and he still nailed me with Klinneract), and her friend Deeba. The two of them live in a block of apartments in London. Strange things start happening to them-- animals trying to communicate with them in sign language, odd-shaped clouds, being followed by a broken umbrella. Then Zanna goes into a basement, turns a wheel, and everything changes. I wish I could tell you more. I want to tell you more. But I don't want to spoil anything, anything at all, about this book. You deserve all the surprises, and all the delights, awaiting you when you read it for yourself.

If you've encountered China Mieville before, you should know what to expect, except on a more YA level than you're used to. If you haven't experienced China Mieville before, hie thee to the library or the bookstore yesterday, if not before, and pick yourself up a copy of Perdido Street Station, one of the best books that's been published in the past decade, in order to get acquainted. Though actually, I have to say, Un Lun Dun is the first book of his I've thought would also make an excellent entry point into Mieville's alternate universes (while most of his books are set in the invented world of Bas-Lag, his first novel King Rat and many of his shorter works are set in an alternate London somewhat similar to the one he uses here). One way or the other, though, I will not stop in my quest to get everyone I come into contact with to read China Mieville's stuff until, well, everyone has. And that includes you, so hop to it. **** ½

Only selected excerpts from the reviews. And because this is what my photographer-friends calla "picture-heavy post", I'm even going to use a cut to keep your friends pages from exploding. Be thankful. If I were nachtritter, you'd be scrolling past this post for half an hour. Maybe more.

All images stolen from Amazon, because they're so much smaller.

( Avoid at all costs. )

And for #15...



The review, from March.

Li-Young Lee, Rose (Boa Editions, 1986)

I am a longtime fan of Li-Young Lee's work, but I somehow never got round to reading Rose, his first book, until now. Sometimes going back and reading the first published work of an author is interesting in that you can see how s/he developed over the years (this is reviewer-code for "man, this book is not nearly as good as I was expecting"); such is not at all the case with Lee, whose first pieces are just as polished, professional, and deeply absorbing as his most recent work:

"From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach."
("From Blossoms")

Li-Young Lee is a fabulous poet, and if you haven't yet discovered his work, I can't recommend strongly enough that you seek him out as soon as possible. A true poetic treasure. **** ½

(Next up: a real treat!)

One more for today in order to kind of catch up...

Here's #16.



...and the review, from June:

Claudia Emerson, Late Wife (Louisiana State University Press, 2005)

I've had very little patience with review-writing for the past six weeks or so, and thus I let this review go unconscionably long (I finished the book on April 30th and am writing this on June 10th). Thus, I've forgotten most of the phrases I was turning over in my mind. I do know, however, they all involved heaping a great deal of praise on Late Wife, Claudia Emerson's most recent book and the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. I often find myself wondering what the judges were thinking giving the prize to book X instead of book Y; not in this case. The details may be a little fuzzy in my head this far after the fact, but the book itself is pure gold, that much I remember. Emerson has a wonderful eye for detail and that all-too-rare quality in a poet of not letting the story get in the way of the description:

"I'd run that course/so many times I imagined myself/a goat encircling an invisible stake//of the baseball diamond's off-season/desolation, scoreboard blank before/the lightening sky." ("The Practice Cage")

That, right there, is some language, folks. This is a book you want to read. Likely to be on my ten best reads of the year list. **** ½

At one point this year, I believed this books was going to be at the top of the list, or at least in the top five. Amazing how things change...

Here's #17:



...and the review, from May:

Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (University of Minnesota Press, 2002)

I have read, over the years, a handful of books that I consider to be truly important, books that look at a particular aspect of our society, how it has damaged us (perhaps irreparably), and how we might change facets of our culture to stop further damage, and maybe heal some of the damage that's already been done-- Stanton Peele's The Diseasing of America, Gina Kolata's Rethinking Thin, Philip K. Howard's The Death of Common Sense, and a few others. It's a very short list, mostly because these are books that do not fit in with the prevailing norms in the least. These are books that are unafraid to take a stand against the stupidity of our current culture. They are unpopular, and it's very hard to get them published. That, of course, makes them all the more important. And of them, perhaps, Judith Levine's Harmful to Minors is the most important. While all of them address very important topics, this one attacks the most wide-reaching subject I've found in one of these books: how America's puritanical attitude towards sex has resulted in generations of increasingly oversheltered, and dangerously uninformed, children, and how that oversheltering and lack of information have pushed America to the brink of disaster and allowed a number of social ills (of which AIDS is only the most visible) to fester unchecked.

When I started thinking about how to write this review, the obvious place to start, it seemed, would be with an extended quote from the book. Problem is, I couldn't come up with just one quote; so much of this book needs to be quoted, so much of what Levine has to say needs said, that singling out one or two paragraphs from the book seemed to be doing the rest of it a disservice. With one short exception (we'll get to that later), the entire book is quotable. Obviously, reprinting a 270-page book does not make for a good review, and yet if I could have done so here, I'd have done it in a heartbeat; this is a book that every American parent, or anyone who was raised in the increasingly oppressive anti-child culture that began to foment in the 1950s, desperately needs to read. Some will find validation in these pages that their embarrassing, socially unacceptable, or "morally repugnant" thoughts are universal. Some will come to understand that their beliefs about how they should be parenting their children are shared by many others. The majority, I think, will find that they are not alone, or nearly as rare as they had believed. It's the people whose voices have caused all these insane "protect the children" laws to be enacted who are in the minority; they just scream louder and know what buttons to press. When Levine traces the raft of onerous laws involving day-care workers (especially male day-care workers) not being allowed to show affection to children to the long-discredited McMartin case, the obvious reaction is, "well, since none of that actually happened, why do we still have the laws?" Indeed. And yet, somehow, we do.

I was prepared to stick this book far atop my list of best reads of the year for 2008, despite us being less than five months into the year, before I hit the epilogue. Levine stumbles a bit at the very end of the book; where she spent the majority of the book completely on-point, in the epilogue she suddenly starts lashing out at things that seem to have nothing to do with her thesis, drawing the most tenuous of connections at best. But this is in no way to say that the rest of the book is not well worth your time; in fact, were I drawing up a curriculum of must-read books for every American, this would most certainly be on it.

Children, especially those who are suffering between the onset of puberty and the so-called "magic age" at which we are all supposed to gain maturity overnight, are the last subclass of people it is considered socially acceptable to repress in America. Judith Levine is outraged by this, as we all should be, and Harmful to Minors is the result. The trouble she had getting the book published, which she recounts in the prologue, should set off major warning bells to everyone reading it. This is a deeply, deeply important book, and I strongly suggest you read it as soon as you possibly can. For in the six years since its release, not surprisingly, things have only gotten worse. The arm is already lopped off; the more of us who read this book, understand the consequences of our culture's actions, and speak up about them, the better a chance we have to stanch the bleeding. For if we don't, the patient may not survive the operation. **** ½

Fell asleep before I could post these last night. I'm no longer sure two a day is going to work...

Here's #18:



and the review, from New Year's Day:

Paul Fleischman, Seedfolks (Harper Collins, 1997)

I've read a lot of books in the past few weeks, as I often do right around the new year for some reason. The best of them this year was Seedfolks, a kids' book about a community garden in Cleveland and how it came to be. (For the record, yahoo's map doesn't locate a Gibb Street anywhere in Cleveland; if this is based on a true story, Fleischman has masked the location of the garden in question.)

The story begins with Kim, a Vietnamese girl living in a Cleveland slum. In order to connect with a father she never knew, she plants a few lima beans in a junk-filled lot across the street from her tenement building. From this small act grows a community garden, complete with activist residents getting the city to come clean up the vacant lot, social workers using a plot to teach their charges about life, and, of course, a teacher who takes it upon herself to educate the entire surrounding community.

Sometimes, however, what makes a book great is not its overarching message, but how much latitude the author gives his characters in subverting that message. While the subject of the book is a good one, and it is presented in a novel way, where this book passes from the good to the great is when one of the gardeners notices the way the plots in the garden are panning out, and how everyone self-segregates. When fences start to go up around plots, he notes sadly that what was once Paradise is turning into Cleveland again. It's a passage that stands in direct contrast to the message of the rest of the book; Fleischman, who's been feeding us a steady stream of "wow, this garden has changed my life" stories, pulls the rug out from under us by subverting his own utopia. He doesn't do it again at any time in the book, though from this point on, we do get tougher stories about the various gardeners; still, that one moment of disillusionment colors the entire book, and makes it far deeper and more thought-provoking than it otherwise would be.

A wonderful, wonderful book. **** ½

I don't know if most people count re-reads in their 25 best lists, but I do.

Here's #19:



I haven't been able to dig up my original review (from 1986!) yet, and I haven't written the new one yet. Maybe I'll come back and put the new review here once I write it (my goal again this year is to be completely caught up with reviews by 12-31).

And get ready, kiddies-- our next commercial break will have the 25 WORST books of the year! (Behind a cut, because that's a lotta images for one post.)

We're in the top twenty. Time for a long distance dedication!

Here's #20:


(yes, I grabbed the Canadian cover. Why? Because it's cooler.)

...and the review, from June:

Steven Erikson, Reaper's Gale (Tor, 2007)

Erikson finally ties the Malazan and Letherii storylines together in Reaper's Gale, the seventh entry in his Malazan Book of the Fallen series. Reaper's Gale takes place a year or so after the end of The Bonehunters, when the Letherii have grown somewhat complacent under Edur rule, and the Bonehunters have sailed for Letheras in order to avenge the wiping out of an entire Malazan island's population (the why of this is explained at one point in the book). As well, some of the rogue elements get tied back in; it seems everything's happening on Letheras these days.

As always, to read an Erikson book is to gradually get lost in the story, so totally immersed that one forgets to do things like sleep and eat. Still, this isn't Erikson's strongest work, as has been pointed out by many others; to me, however, that doesn't make it any less worth reading. Erikson has created an incredible world here, and he knows how to lay out the pieces to come up with a wonderful story. If you're already invested in the series, this one's an obvious must; if you haven't yet discovered the brilliance of Erikson, the first book in the series is Gardens of the Moon, and you should start there. ****

And so it goes. We're almost in the top twenty! This is the point where, if I were Casey Kasem, your eyes would be slightly dilated and you'd be wondering which overproduced nugget of pop sameness would be at #1. Not here, kiddies.

Here's #21:



...and the review, from February:

Emily Gravett, Meerkat Mail (Simon and Schuster, 2006)

Emily Gravett can do no wrong in my book; Wolves and Orange Pear Apple Bear are destined to become classics of kidlit, not just because the kiddies enjoy them, but because adults are wowed as well. Meerkat Mail, Gravett's third book, doesn't quite come up to the standard she's set for herself, but this should be another one that will have your kids clamoring for you to read it to them over and over again.

Sunny is a meerkat who starts feeling claustrophobic in the family den, so he sets out to see the world and visit all his cousins (all of whom are other members of the mongoose family), and the story is told in postcards that he writes home to his family. Gravett is interested in showing the variations possible in a single species, and she does it well, with the kinds of understated drawings that have made her so popular. While it lacks the over-the-top humor of her previous books, it's still interesting, fun, and a worthy addition to the Emily Gravett bookshelf you should be building for your kids (or the kids you borrow if you feel guilty about reading kidlit as an adult). ****

I was only going to do one today, but what the heck.

Here's #22...



...and the review, from March:

Judy Jordan, Carolina Ghost Woods (Louisiana State University Press, 2000)

Judy Jordan writes dense, exquisite poems that both shock and satisfy, while making you feel vaguely like taking a shower afterwards.

“...it informs the toads,
crouches them in crooked caves of alder roots,
pulses the pale skin under their slack mouths,
keeps them in the pond's tight waves clutching anything:
a pine's resinous knot, a fist of chair foam,
even a drowned and legless female.”
(“Long Drop to Black Water”)

I loved this book; very easy to see why it won the National Book Critics' Circle Award, though I have to admit I'm somewhat surprised that they received such heavy subject matter with such aplomb. This one's definitely a keeper. ****

(On the other hand, my confusing this Jordan with June, who landed on the Worst Reads of the Year list, definitely caused this one to slip a few notches...)

oops. I was out a large part of the day, and the rest of it I've been reading up on autocompleting data-bound combo boxes in C#, which is absolutely fascinating material, I can tell you [sigh].

Anyway, #23...



...and the review, from February:

Gemma Files, Words Written Backwards (Burning Effigy Press, 2007)

That Gemma Files is not yet recognized as one of Canada's premier storytellers can only be explained, as I see it, by the fact that she's just not prolific enough yet; certainly most who have read her two collections of short stories have sung her praises pretty much uniformly. So where's the love from the New York Times and the Guardian and Booklist and Publisher's Weekly and Bookslut? No idea. But “Words Written Backwards” should be dangled in front of them to show them how wrong they are in continuing to ignore such a talent.

This is a one-story chapbook published by Burning Effigy, a very small press whose editors seem to have very good taste, judging by the stable of names one can find on their webpage. The story itself is more, how shall I say, “mainstream” than the stuff you can find in Files' two wonderful books of short stories (Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart, which every one of you should read if you haven't already), though that's not what I mean, and you know it. It's less icky. When you read a Gemma Files story, all the character depth and emotional resonance is there, it's usually just got some interesting (and disgusting) viscous fluids it's coated in. Not so much here, to the point where one might call this “dark fantasy” in the Tanith Lee vein, but without Lee's oh-my-goth patina; it's substituted with the hard, cold realism of a Brad Smith (why this story reminded me continually of All Hat I will probably never understand) or a Giles Blunt (on the other hand, the parallels to the neverending snowstorm of Forty Words for Sorrow are pretty obvious).

The story: an Indian mystic has been sent to attempt to cleanse an abandoned, and seemingly haunted, mine of evil spirits. The night before he's about to get started, however, a young woman from Toronto stumbles into his camp, only slightly frostbitten despite being dressed for the mall instead of a snowstorm. Once they start talking, the mystic starts suspecting her presence here may be more than coincidence.

It's tough to pin down what it is about Gemma Files' stories that makes them so good, and maybe that's part of the attraction; all the authorial trickery washes into the background, leaving you satisfied without knowing exactly why. There's no place where the author pops up and says “look here! Characterization!” or the like. The great Billy Wilder once said that the best director is the one you don't see; it holds true for writers, as well.

What can I do to convince you to read Gemma Files? Tell me. I'll do it. ****

(For the record, I get no kickbacks from handful_ofdust; I was in the publishing biz long enough to know how much you actually get paid on chapbook sales, anyway.)

On an entirely different note, I'm absolutely disgusted that I'm now hooked on two of the least RP of RPGs, Dragon Wars and Vampire Wars over on Facebook, which I'd never actually used until last week. So if you're over there, come find me, friend me, and join my clan. 'cause I'm getting my ass kicked in PvP, and there's no way to opt out. So I might as well become king of the goddamn blood bank.

Two-per on some days, since I didn't start this on December 6th. Which is a good thing, because the list changed pretty drastically in December.

Here's #24:



...and its accompanying review, from July.

Charles Simic, That Little Something (Harcourt, 2008)

Charles Simic is stepping down from the post of Poet Laureate a year early because, he says, being Poet Laureate keeps him away from doing what he loves best-- writing poetry. And honestly, as much as I like seeing Simic, unarguably one of America's best living poets, in such a position, anything that gets him to be more prolific is perfectly fine with me.

I have to say that Simic's distraction is noticeable in some of these poems, but really, when Simic brings his A game to the table, he's still matchless:

"The two of us just barely visible,
Ghostlike looking from high up
At the wet cobblestones,
The one pigeon who appeared hurt,
Who wanted to be somewhere else
And did his best to get there,
Limping badly and stopping to rest."
("One Wing of the Museum")

It's getting kind of boring saying "another winner from Charles Simic," but I'll put up with the boredom as long as Simic keeps turning out my favorite books of any given year. Wonderful, as usual. ****

So since everyone else is posting their favorite books of the year, and because I like to annoy Bonnie, I'm going to do it too. One book per post, with lots of bells and whistles and crap like that.

Here's #25:



Here's my original review, from August:

Richard Lee Byers, Undead (Wizards of the Coast, 2008)

(warning: this review contains spoilers for Unclean. If you haven't read that one yet, don't read this review.)

Byers continues with his Haunted Lands trilogy, and the second book is a worthy successor to the first. Undead picks up ten years after Unclean left off, with that book's main characters scattered around doing the things they normally do. Szass Tam, however, has spent the last decade quietly researching a few tricks that could, if everything goes right, give him unimaginable power and allow him to win the war for control of Thay at last. All that stands in his way are a number of squabbling ex-heroes, a turncoat vampire, and a dream.

Since we already know the characters, Byers dispenses with most of the setup and throws us right into the action. If it's been a while since you read Unclean, this may prove a minor drawback, as there is such a thing as too little reminder of what came before. You'll be back up to speed quickly enough, however, and Byers never lets the pace flag here. Like a number of other reviewers, I think this one is a bit better than Unclean, in part because of the hike in average pace, but also because we get to know some of these characters a lot better than we did in the previous book. Byers manages to fit in small bits of character development that really do add up to something, and in genre writing, that can be pretty impressive. I like this series a great deal, and can't wait for book three. ****

Other thoughts:

One of the few books I read this year that actually came out in 2008, which starts this list off on a right note for once.

This is for folks dropping by from helpvera. Liner notes for the four CD-Rs that are up for auction.

XTerminal = noise/powerelectronics/ambient, depending on the mood, the recording, etc. If you're not at all familiar with noise/powerelectronics/ambient, and/or my interpretations of same, there's all sorts of juicy XTerminal-listenin' goodness to be found at my myspace (six tracks from 1999-2002) and my last.fm page (the entire unreleased Live 103005 disc).

And now, what you're here for.

( liner notes )

For the record, for the rest of you, a VERY FEW copies of each are still available. To reiterate:

one 2008 disc (specify which): $10
two 2008 discs (specify which): $17.50
all three 2008 discs: $25, and I'll toss in a copy of Outro as long as they last
Outro without a 2008 set: $5 (same price as it was in 2000!)

email me at xterminal @+ gmail d0+ com to reserve. First come, first served. (And I've got some reservations that have not paid yet... [pokes people])

...but the limited editions are still available. So I tell you.

The Remorse of the Chattel
blood-red CDR
edition of 10
all samples taken from the last recorded conversations from Jonestown, Guyana
3 tracks, 78 min.

Sampler 2008
(imaginative title, wot)
lightscribe CD-R
edition of 9
8 tracks, 64 min.
Just various stuff I've been working on over the past month and a half, no set destination for any of it except the first two tracks from I Hurt You/You Hurt Me Back

River of Steel
CD-R
edition of 10
6 tracks, 63 min.
most samples taken from the process of steelmaking

one disc: $10
two discs: $17.50
all three: $25, plus if you don't have a copy of it, I'll throw in one of the copies of Outro I have left.
If you don't want all three, specify, obviously.

Or if you just want to pick that one up:

Outro
CD-R
edition of 30 (7 remain)
6 tracks, can't remember how long it is
released September 2000

yours for a fiver.

first come, first served. Email to xterminal 4t gm4il d0+ co/\/\. (You know how to translate that into English, ja?) paypal goes to the same address.

The floor is open.

TONIGHT!
Doubting Thomas Gallery (on Jefferson St. in Tremont)
8PM
FREE SHOW
(so you can afford it)

AARON DILLOWAY (ex-Wolf Eyes)
ROBERT TURMAN (ex-NON)
SL MAKITA (ex-Lockweld)
CONTAMINATION DIET (ex-Season of Discontent)
XTERMINAL (ex-D.I.N.)
AMBIVALENT RESONANCE ORGANIZATION (ex-Edicius)
FELLAHEAN (er... I got nothin')
JESUS KILLS
and possibly even more noisy goodness

I have no idea about the BYO status, but I'm picking up comestibles to be on the safe side.

There will be three new (and one old) XTerminal CDs for sale in VERY LIMITED editions (10, 10, 9, 6). Yes, it took me twenty hours over the last two days (and I'm not quite done with the covers for River of Steel), but everything's finished and ready to go. All proceeds go to the "help XTerminal find a fucking job so he can get out of debt again" fund. YOU CAN FEED STARVING CHILDREN IN LAKEWOOD BITCHES.

And if I don't get this goddamn Huey Lewis and the News song out of my head, my set will feature me stabbing myself in the face.

I know this is the longshot of all longshots, but I will still ask.

Do any of you have a copy of Brian Straw's Backfeed Pools? It was a seriously, seriously limited release that, as far as I know, Brian never actually sold, he just gave out to folks who used to see him live back during the Speak in Tongues days. My copy is really scratched up.

(And for those of you who are unaware of Brian Straw, these days he plays really low-fi blues, and that's all well and good, but Backfeed Pools is seriously ugly guitar-based powerelectronics, and I'm quite fond of it.

Can I borrow yours, or get a rip? (If you're Brian, I can always post a photo of me with the disc and a newspaper or something to show you that you really did give me one back in the day...)

Thanks.

Everyone else is doing it, so why can't we? Ten desert island discs. These would, of course, change, as some bands put out new albums or what have you...

Merzbow, Agni Hotra

Prurient, And Still, Wanting

Breaking Benjamin, Phobia

The Cure, The Top

Death in June, DISCriminate

Lockweld, Metal Pieces

Sol Invictus, Let Us Prey

Joe Frank, The Dictator

Fire * Ice, Gilded by the Sun

Quell, Shaded Pole Motor

Congratulations, Ohio. You actually did (marginally) better than I expected on not flushing yourself completely down the toilet.

First off, Cuyahoga County (with the exception of Lakewood, where I live) got to vote on Issue 127, which increases tax millage for the Cuyahoga County Public Library. It passed by almost 2 to 1. Maybe "the library with ten times the space and one tenth the selection of the Cleveland Public Library" will work to rectify the latter half of that problem.

Second, kudos to the Ohio voters for ratifying Issues 3 and 5. Issue 5 was pretty hotly debated, and as a former Libertarian I really should be against it, but let's face it, I'm one of the people who has been squawking about the seeming death of usury laws in this country. And while Issue 5, which sets a 28% interest cap on predatory lenders, is still way too liberal for my tastes, it's a start, and will at least keep those psychotic bastards who charge 500% (read: payday loan centers) from operating under their current terms. It may even drive them out of Ohio altogether, and that would not be a bad thing.

Issue 3 is another one that the local Libertarians were against, and I have to say that surprises me a great deal, since Issue 3 is all about guaranteeing ground water property rights. As property rights are one of the cornerstones of what the Libertarians used to stand for before they were overtaken by the Christian-wingnut contingent, it once again just shows that the Libertarians are no longer a party that has any clue what its own ideals are. Property rights are sacrosanct in Libertarianism, and any guarantee of them in the law should be welcomed.

Now for the one that kind of confuses me, Ohio. You see, right above the oval bit that you filled in to ratify Issue 3 was the oval bit that you also filled in to ratify Issue 2, which was, in some ways, the opposite. While you stood up and asserted private property rights to groundwater, which is obviously an environmental issue, you also greenlighted the already wasteful state to borrow another $400 million for environmental causes. Now, I'm assuming you're smart enough to understand that the government will not be spending the entire $400M themselves, but will use a good chunk of it to pay environmental groups to do the work for them. When environmentalists are concerned, for "groups" you can usually substitute "activists". As in, the people who are most likely to violate the law you enacted down there in Issue 3. In yet other words, at least some of that chunk of money that you will be paying (because you do realize that they're going to pay back that loan out of your taxes, right?) will be expressly funneled to people who are going to break that law. So not only will your tax dollars be funding them, but your tax dollars will also be spent housing them in jail, paying their court costs when they're too poor to do so themselves, etc. Now, Ohio, I'm not mad at you for this, though of course my tax dollars will do the same thing. I'm just amused.

Now for the parts where I'm just angry at you. Oh, I know they're probably not your fault, because you didn't know any better, and you're impressionable. You people are the reason why some districts in Ohio actually had to pass a law to keep campaigners away from voting sites. (And that this law HAS been passed, and that I walked unmolested into the voting booth on Tuesday, is the single one thing I'm proudest of you for doing since 2006, Ohio-- in any aspect of your existence.) You're simply too stupid to think through the consequences of your actions. Failing that, you're too apathetic to do your own research and are willing to fill in whichever oval the TV, or your church, tells you too. (You're also stupid enough to actually need a church. Shame on you.) Why am I saying these things to you, Ohio? Because you passed Issue 1-- if I remember correctly, Issue 1 actually had the largest margin of any of them-- and you overturned Issue 6. I have written extensively on both of these issues in the past week, so I'll just tell you what you did when you did these two things.

First off, when you overturned Issue 6, by my projections, you cost Ohio roughly forty thousand existing jobs. I'm not the kind of analyst who complains that you cost the state $224 billion in construction revenue and ten thousand jobs that would have shown up when the Casino opened, because we have no idea how much it would cost to build or how many jobs it would create. That's all vaporware. But by not legalizing some form of casino gambling in Ohio, you have created the last state in the Mid-Atlantic region save Kentucky that doesn't have it (Maryland, whose Thoroughbred tracks were also only alive pending gambling, passed slots legislation Tuesday). I may have been over-hasty in some of my projections last week. Beulah will run quarter horse dates in 2009, and have applied for two days of Thoroughbred racing. Two days. Beulah, traditionally, runs in the vicinity of one hundred thirty-five days of racing per year. Two days of racing, assuming eight races a day (Beulah's part of Ohio seven-and-seven) with entirely full fields in every race, means that Beulah will be able to accommodate, at most, one hundred ninety-four Thoroughbreds in 2009. How many do they normally stable? Thousands. What's going to happen to all those horses, considering Beulah's already the bottom of the barrel? They've got nowhere left to go. But to keep this on-topic, what's going to happen to the owner-trainers, the grooms, and the humans who otherwise are tied to specific horses? Public trainers and jockeys can go somewhere else and ply their trades. Most grooms and other stable personnel can't afford to move to another track without hitching a ride from a trainer. And the two next-closest tracks? Well, I expect River Downs is going to close in the next two months. They haven't applied for dates for 2009 yet, and given the eleventh-hour status here, I'm assuming they never will. And Thistledown's running an abbreviated meet. They may actually make it past 2009; if River is gone and Beulah is on its last legs, Thistledown is the only game in the state, and the horses will converge. Thistledown will take over Beulah's place at the bottom of the barrel, and they may be able to squeeze out another year or two of life running races at lower purse structures than they ever have before; if they do go past 2009, in 2010 I'd expect to see the same kinds of races you find at Anthony Downs, Les Bois, or the similarly-doomed Columbus. $750 claimers running for $1,000 purses. Because that's all we'll be able to afford. In any case, by the time a casino initiative can come up on the ballot again, there will be, in my view, no reason for it, because there will be nothing left to save. Thoroughbred racing will be gone from Ohio by 2012. With it will go the thousands of jobs attached to the sport, most of which are jobs you, Ohio, would, I'm sure, consider beneath you, and probably never think about. You know what size a maintenance staff needs to be to take care of a plant the size of Thistledown? We're talking hundreds of people. Then there are the tellers, the judges, the secretaries, the small army of bean counters who work in the armored room. All those folks are now out of jobs. As I said before, Issue 6 wasn't about one guy paying taxes. It was about 40,000 people in Ohio having the chance to pay taxes. You denied them that chance on Tuesday.

And then there's Issue 1. You remember what I wrote Tuesday night about real, honest-to-pete change? Because everyone was all cheering and screaming and crying about how Barack Hussein Obama is going to bring change to this country. And I asked you to think about what you're going to do in four years when he hasn't.

Here's the outcome of Issue 1, Ohio: you will never again have a chance to vote for real change in the government. Closing the door on the time voter initiatives have to get on the ballot all but stops any party but the Republicans the Democrats from ever getting any candidates on the ballot, be they for president or dogcatcher. It also stops the people from getting initiatives on the ballot that they want, not that the politicians want. We didn't have a casino initiative in 2004 because some politician thought it was a good idea. We had it because people-- people like you and me, except they actually gave enough of a shit-- got out there and pounded pavement and collected signatures. Which is the same way politicians from political parties who actually want to do something get on the ballot. I should know, I've signed petitions for every Libertarian, Green, Constitution, New Age, etc. candidate in whatever state I was living in since I was old enough to vote. But now, all that has to happen is that when those signatures are turned in, someone has to reject a specific number of those signatures. There's not going to be time to get out there and collect more anymore. SO the next time you see something completely outrageous and think "there oughta be a law", remember that it was you who made certain that if your Congressmen don't agree with you, there won't be.

In some ways, I envy you. You really, honestly think that because you put someone from the other half of the One Big Party in power that things are actually, substantively going to change. I envy your ability to hope.

In some ways, however, I don't. Because four years from now, when nothing has changed, will you have learned from your mistakes? Will you understand that "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" isn't just a Roger Daltrey quote, and that in order to effect real, honest to pete CHANGE, you're going to need to look outside the established order?

No. You're not. If you were ever going to learn that lesson, you'd have learned it four years ago, when probably a quarter of everyone who went to the polls voted for Kerry not because they actually thought Kerry would make a good president, but because they took "anyone but Bush" to mean they had a single choice.

I have said it dozens, if not hundreds, of times, and though I know it will never take, I will say it hundreds, if not thousands, more. There is no substantive difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties. There has been no substantive difference between the "two" parties since 1932. And there never will be again. That's the reason the two of them are so buddy-buddy whenever it comes to any legislation that makes sure none of the upstarts will unseat them. We had an issue like that on the ballot in Ohio yesterday. I haven't heard the results yet. I will be pleasantly surprised if it got shot down, but I'm not holding my breath. How many people understood the ramifications of Issue 1, which mandates (by Constitutional amendment, no less) an earlier deadline for election-related petitions? It was instituted for one reason and one reason only: to keep third-party candidates off ballots. Despite the insane number of uncontested elections I voted on today (50% of the positions-- if not more-- had only one oval to black in), there were more Independents, Libertarians, and Greens on the ballot I filled out today than I have ever seen on a ballot. In order for those candidates to get on those ballots, unlike the Republicans and Democrats, every one of those candidates had to collect petition signatures throughout the state of Ohio. They have to do this in every state, in fact, which is why the number of Presidential (and other) candidates you see on the ballot varies from state to state. Issue 1 in Ohio was designed expressly to give third-party candidates less time to collect those signatures. And when you turn in all the signatures you have painstakingly collected, some stuffed shirt (who's already been elected, mind you) will go over them and reject a certain percentage for whatever excuse sounds most like "hanging chad" that year, sending you out for another round of signature collections. It's a long and arduous task, and Issue 1 was designed to make it far more arduous, because the time you will have to complete it will be far, far shorter. It's Ohio's version of the arbitrary, and nauseating, rules that surround Presidential debates.

I'm sure some of you know this, but maybe some of you-- those who even know other candidates exist before getting to the polls-- have wondered why you don't see Greens, Libertarians, Constitution Party candidates, Communist Party candidates, etc. (America has over one hundred fifty recognized political parties) in Presidential debates. Simple: Republicans and Democrats have rigged the eligibility requirements for Presidential debates to benefit... guess who?... the Republicans and the Democrats. Needless to say, the other parties have debates as well, but do they get free air time on all the major networks? Hell, no. And, of course, the Republican and Democratic candidates would never deign to show up at a debate that's not controlled by their own parties. Someone might ask a question they haven't been coached how to answer. (Those who watched the Dem primary debates got to watch Mike Gravel, who's about as close to a third-party candidate as you'll ever see in a debate in this post-Perot age-- a select few of you will get to hear some great quotes from his primary speeches towards the end of this month...) And you may be asking yourself, given this wild conspiracy theory I'm spinning, well then, smartass, how did Ross Perot get into those debates, huh? Well, two things. The first: the rules are getting progressively stricter (and more arbitrary). I'm sure Gravel's participation this year will get some more rules changed. Second-- like everything else that happened in his campaign, Perot got in the good old-fashioned political way. He bought his way in. Most political mavericks (you know, real political mavericks, not Republicans in wolf's clothing who pick MILFs to be running mates) don't have that kind of scratch. When those debates do get televised, though, give them a look (they usually show up on public or public-access TV). There were some great debates in '04 that no one actually watched except Allison (even I spent most of them listening from the other room whilst blogging about them). But, you know, it's great when you get the pressing questions about issues that actually matter, and get candidates from the Libertarian, Green, New Alliance, and Constitution Parties answering them... but no one ever asks those questions to the Ree-pubs or the Dems. No one ever will. Those candidates write their own damned questions. You know that, right? You have to.

But I digress. You elected this candidate who promises change. Out of one side of his mouth, anyway. But what do we actually know about Barack Obama? What do I know about this guy? I certainly know that he went toe to toe with McCain when it came to negative attack ads, and never failed to stoop one level lower. I know that while I was getting 10-12 recorded calls about the elections daily, I only ever got one that actively attempted to misrepresent the origin of the call-- and that came from Camp Obama. I know that Obama has out-and-out lied about his voting record more than once, thanks to a friend of mine who pointed me to Obama's voting record a couple of weeks ago. I know that Obama has, yes, said that he will pull some troops out of Iraq-- in order to send them to Afghanistan. I know that his healthcare plan, like those advanced by every Democrat who was aiming for the nomination save Mike Gravel, is terrifying in so many ways I don't know where to begin (but, continuing my argument that there is no substantive difference between the two parties, McCain's "solution" to the healthcare problem was just as stunningly ill-thought-out). I know that every issue where Obama stands in direct opposition to Bush's ideas, no matter how sexy those issues may sound, is not a substantive difference. Let's face it, folks, the Republicans have been in power for all but twelve years since the passage of Roe. And exactly how much progress have the Republicans made in overturning Roe? I'll take "zero" for a thousand, Alex.

And, to go off on another tangent, why is it that so many Republicans (and Libertarians) from the psychotic-religionist camp believe that "let the states decide", when it comes to abortion, is politicospeak for "abortion will be banned overnight"? Because the reason I'm so fond of that very same idea is that I think states will immediately drop such moronic ideas as the partial-birth abortion ban, parental notification, and Bob Barr's absolutely ludicrous idea of a handgun-like waiting period to get an abortion. And let's face it, if some backwards shitheads like Mississippi actually do ban abortion, hey, there's a state line pretty close to you, no matter where you are (save the middle of Texas, or Barrow AK).

But once again I digress. At least please tell me that Obama does recognize that one thing that Bush did correctly (refusing to ratify the Kyoto Protocols) and is planning on progressing down the same path. I can hope, anyway.

But I will say it yet again, and maybe in four years when you've seen nothing change, you will start to understand: the only way to effect substantive change in American policy is to vote in someone who is not part of the status quo. And in America, the status quo encompasses both the Republicans and the Democrats. Assuming you really do want change, as long as you keep throwing your vote away by picking someone in the "two-party" system, you're doing nothing more productive than trying to get the bear trap off your ankle by shooting yourself in the foot.

So yeah, folks, party it up. But don't be surprised when the redistribution of wealth doesn't happen. The system, as usual, worked the way it should. No one who would have actually worked to change anything got anywhere near the ballot with enough support to actually win.

I just checked Makita's myspace. The Nov. 29th show is now being headlined by

AARON DILLOWAY (former member of Wolf Eyes)
and
ROBERT TURMAN (former member of NON)

also added to the bill is Fellahean. And knowing Mr. Makita, there shall be more. Hopefully I'll have a flyer to post soon.

The first track for the lim-eds is in progress, it's called "Gravel Underfoot". I'm trying to decide whether to use excerpts from the two tracks for the next album (tentatively called I Hurt You/You Hurt Me Back, which I'm going to send Hospital Productions' way once I'm through recording it), "The Crushed Envelope" and "Stained Glass Bedsheets". Also possible: a couple of tracks from the very, very long-planned three-disc sets Pornaudiphy and Wound (which I'm finally getting started on as well). Yeah, this is all coming together now.

You know that "I support Bob Barr" banner from a few days ago? Scratch that. There is no way in hell I'd ever consider voting for someone whose position on abortion is so loathsome. (I didn't realize how awful it was until I checked votesmart.) I may not be a one-issue voter for a candidate, but I'm sure a one-issue voter against. Barr's abortion plank is nauseating. Obama's healthcare plan is moronic. McCain... well, I'm not sure I can pick just one. Does anyone know anything about Cynthia McKinney? For someone running for President, she sure has managed to keep her ideas on the issues as far away form the press as possible. Nader, well, he's been a lying sack of shit for forty-four years.

Tomorrow, I'm writing in Mike Gravel. There's been no one else in this race for the past two years I've felt even remotely good about. I'd urge you to do the same, if I thought there was half a chance enough people would read this that someone would actually notice.

Given the last three candidates they've fielded, I'm also thinking about distancing myself from the Libertarians-- they're really shaping themselves into the States' Rights wing of the Constitution Party. (It doesn't help that the most vociferous Libertarian in the state, a batshit nutcase named David Macko, is farther out in the Christian-fundie wastleland than any of these three "committed Christians" whose campaigns we've had to suffer through since 2000. It got to the point during the '04 campaign where I had to filter his email address because I was so sick of reading shit about how wonderful it was that Michael Badnarik was such a "committed Christian", which, if you've never been part of the cult, is fundie-speak for "total fucking whackjob".)

Is there a party out there-- and I don't care how "fringe" they may be-- that caters to the Libertarian ideals without having all the religious idiots running around? Because that's the party I want.

I don't know if people actually consider the position of each candidate on the ballot (given some of the voting methods I've heard, it wouldn't entirely surprise me). If they do, there's gonna be a surprise in Lakewood this year:



I am currently transferring a doco called The Truth About Gay Animals. I MUST WRITE AN EXPOSE.

Copy of the comment I just entered at http://www.noissue6.com :

"It's funny how no one who opposes issue 6 ever mentions that not passing it could mean the loss of 30-40,000 jobs over the next year or two as Ohio's three Thoroughbred racetracks shut down. I wonder why you don't mention that in your ads?

Oh, yeah, because that might actually cause people to see that voting down issue 6 is a really, really bad idea in a state where the economy's already gone to hell.

Thanks for doing your part to continue Ohio's becoming the worst state in America to live in."

If anyone else feels like dropping over there and writing something to the same effect, by all means, please feel free. Or pass it on, if you happen to have a lot of Ohioans on your flist.

Since I didn't include it in the comment for fear of going on for far, far too long, if you don't see the cause-effect relationship, let me give you a very quick history of the last fifteen years of horse racing in the mid-Atlantic.

( cut for those who already know )

Issue 6 is not about whether one guy is going to be paying taxes. Issue 6 is about whether thirty or forty thousand Ohioans will have the chance to pay taxes.

The state's economy is already circling the drain. Vote yes on Issue 6 and you'll stop special-interest groups-- allegedly bankrolled by the owners of out-of-state casinos who don't want to stop the money flowing from Ohio into their states-- from flushing.

remember it. it's a flyer. If you live in Cleveland, you will hopefully be seeing a lot of it over the next few months. note the date. you will be doing something that night if you live even remotely within driving distance of cleveland.

too bad you missed the show sunday night-- which all but three of you who might possibly be reading this did. Makita, who has played more live shows than all the rest of us combined-- including shows with some BIG BIG names in both American and international noise-- called it one of the best shows he's ever been involved with. ever.

however, we are not without mercy. and therefore, we are giving you a second chance. saturday, november 29th. somewhere in tremont (an art gallery. i'll have more details and a flyer later this week).

confirmed: sl makita, xterminal, contamination diet, ambivalent resonance organization. given the way we all reacted to him, i'm relatively sure makita is going to be chasing down jesus kills to see if he'll play the show as well. that bastard was loud.

(and for those of you who were there, i'll tell you exactly what i told makita earlier today-- what you saw was the quieter, gentler xterminal. wait'll you see what i've got planned for that show, baby.)

i have not updated anything regular in weeks. that will stop tomorrow, for tomorrow i start getting back to doing regular things.