Listen Here, You Goddamn Jackals.

Read My Balls Off '09 carried on uninterrupted, I just stopped posting about it, so enough already with the molotov cocktails. The past five months have been busy, to say the least. In no particular order, my brain ate the following in the intervening span:

• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay- Michael Chabon (realistically depressing, whimsically cheerful)
• The Naked and the Dead- Norman Mailer (Mother Fuggin' Good.)
• The Name of the Rose- Humberto Eco (I couldn't get Sean Connery's voice out of my head.)
• Crying of Lot 49- Thomas Pynchon (My favorite Pynchon novel so far.)
• Invisible Cities- Italo Calvino (Read this guy, all of you. NOW!)
• Hey Rube- Hunter S. Thompson (I like Thompson when he writes with a purpose, way less masturbatory than Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Makes me want to pick up On the Campaign Trail.)
• Mulliner Nights- P.G. Wodehouse (Hilarious once you get the cadence down.)
• Childhood’s End- Arthur C. Clarke (I'm going to have to finally read 2001, this was really terrific.)
• Venus Plus X- Theodore Sturgeon (Apparently this is Sturgeon's "worst" novel. I need to read his other stuff, this was both good and structurally mind blowing.)
• Kiss Me, Judas- William Christopher Baer (I liked it a lot, but I don't quite see what the fuss is about.)
• The Lady of the Lake- Raymond Chandler (How do you not like more Phillip Marlowe?)
• The Maltese Falcone- Dashiell Hammett (I had a dream that Hammett and Chandler wrestled for my affection.)
• Texas: Volume 1- James A. Michener (Modern travel literature! Fantastic!)
• The Plague- Albert Camus (I prefer this to The Stranger, I won't lie.)
• The Time Machine Did It- John Swartzwelder (Eeeeeh I might read more. It was a bit much at times.)
• The Road- Cormac McCarthy (I found a copy that doesn't have Viggo Mortensen's mug on it, reason enough to finally give it a read. Not bad at all, not as genre destroying as Blood Meridian though.)
• Blood Meridian- Cormac McCarthy (The Judge is the most terrifying character ever written.)
• The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce- Ambrose Bierce (Bitter Bierce is my man.)
• City of Glass- Paul Auster (This is what Kiss Me, Judas wanted to be, I think.)
• The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ubik (Library of America Collected Edition)- Philip K Dick (I am unsurprised that Dick went completely nuts.)
• Beowulf- (Seamus Heaney Translation) (This was so easy to read it felt like cheating, despite the fact that this is the preeminent [if not definitive] academic translation.)
• Collected Short Stories of O. Henry- O. Henry (I keep trying to posit that "O. Henry" sounds like "irony" on purpose.)
• Escape from Hell- Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle (Still chewing on this. It's a sequel to a book I like a lot, trying to decide if they should have written it or not.)
• The Adventure of Don Quixote- Miguel De Cervantes (I had to finally read it after working on the musical years ago.)
• The Complete Chronicles of Conan- Robert E. Howard ("What is best in life?")
• Necronomicon: The Best Wicked Tales of H.P. Lovecraft- H.P. Lovecraft ("AAAAAAAAAAAH!")

And then whatever I had to read for class. (Most of Shakespeare's plays, two collections of short stories for Women Writers, a major chunk of a Norton Anthology of American Lit, some Anglo Saxon poetry, Piers Plowman, I, Robot, Martian Chronicles, a bunch of Darko Suvin lit theory, and on, and on, and on.)

Jesus Christ! No wonder I went a little crazy and felt over worked. That's a shit load of pages. I'm taking this week off and there's nothing any of you can do about it. I'm not sure when I'll post again, but I figured I'd let you all know I'm still making good on Read My Balls Off '09, the first New Years' resolution I've ever attempted.

Other news to friends I haven't talked to in awhile: I'm down about fifty pounds, I'm up to 2.5 miles in the pool three nights a week, twenty to twenty-five miles on my bike three nights a week, and forty-five minutes of fairly intense weight training on pool days. The novella's on track, I should hit the 220-250 page range right in time for the fall school workload to crank up. Most of you will get to read it if you ask nicely and promise to actually follow through and, you know, fucking read it. (Jgib I'm looking in your direction.)

When the hell did I turn into a person who actually gets stuff accomplished? Someone, please, let me know.

Holy Fucking Moses.

We're back.

Sorry about that, midterms slammed into finals, and then I was distracted by an issue that took a hammer to all my natural defenses (bitterness, cynicism, fatalism, etc.)

Anyway, that's done now, so everyone can relax. I'll be back to laughing at sick children, throwing rocks at idealists, and gripping irrevocable bachelorhood as a higher calling in no time.

First: in the interim, I finally read Low Life, which could have easily been the inspiration for Gangs of New York, if it weren't for the eponymous book on which the movie was actually based.

The subject matter is similar, to a point. It paints a picture of Manhattan as a whole. That's about all I'll say because I want you all to read it.

Bastards.

My busy schedule kept me so deep in reading and writing that I was on the biweekly plan (mentioned a month or two back) so that's all I read for Read My Balls Off '09 in the down time.

Up next, a downright irrepressible friend named Molly gave me a copy of John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor.

Because it was a gift (and she's super cool), it immediately climbed to the top of the pile and took precedent. I'll be back in a few days to say I'm going to review it, go off on a tangent, not really talk about the book much at all, and then announce what I'm going to read next week.

Or as I like to call it: "The Usual."

He Still Do That Voodoo That He Do So Well

This past Friday I was walking through a bookstore and noticed, to my surprise, that Orson Scott Card slipped another Ender book past me. Not only did this book's release sneak in under my radar, it was, in many ways, the book I desperately wanted when I was thirteen and had just chewed through the original book in about two days. It's a direct sequel to Ender's Game. It was a wish fulfilled, an oddly symmetrical thirteen years later.

Ender in Exile, still in hardcover, was started Friday evening and finished about two hours ago. My brain is still processing it, so I'm holding off on any specific comments, but if you're a fan of the series, by all means, pick it up. It's worth a read.

Except that I will say this: my intense desire for more when I finished Ender's Game may have left a hunger gnawing at me for the past thirteen years, but I'm glad that hunger wasn't satiated until now. Since I turned about eighteen, anyone I've encountered that hadn't read Ender's Game was urged to do so as quickly as possible. While I'm sure the book was enjoyable for all ages, I've always felt its ability to profoundly affect the reader was greater the younger they were when they read it. Whether or not there's any truth to that, I can never be certain, but I have noticed an encouraging inverse correlation as it relates to age.

As I think about it more and more (bearing in mind I'm still mere hours beyond completion) I find myself very glad that so much time passed for me. Despite the fact that Ender rounds out the book about ten years younger than my robust twenty-six years, my own immaturity and his advanced intelligence seem to put us in a similar headspace; he speaks as if he's thoroughly entrenched in a sense of responsibility I've only awakened to in the past couple years. While what made his character so intriguing to me at age thirteen may be gone, that with which it has been replaced seemed to hit even closer to home. I'm very grateful for this book.

A brief aside on Card:
He is, without a doubt, one of the biggest influences on me as both a reader and as a wide-eyed, hopeful writer. A couple of you have expressed a particular interest in, or enjoyment of, the characters I try to write. If that's true, one thing needs to be made emphatically clear: It's all thanks to Orson Scott Card.

From the Earthborn series, to the Ender/Bean books, to his short fiction, it has always felt as if his guiding principle has always been honesty. A specific, and dedicated sense of honesty that seems to inform this man in anything he does, at least as far as what's evident in both his fiction and non-fiction, but is especially evident in the characters he creates.

He seems to be a tenacious, lifelong workhorse of a scholar and, in many ways, has set the standard to which I try to hold myself in any and all writing endeavors.

I am the reader, the writer, the lifelong student, and hard work-emphasizing curmudgeon because of Card; because a man named Al Biemond, a man who, it seemed at the time, could only barely tolerate me and my adolescent laziness one day accidentally discovered my enthusiasm for science fiction and immediately steered me towards Ender's Game. Thanks to both of them, I can barely move for all the damn books cluttering up the place.

This book helped me get a week ahead on Read My Balls Off '09.

I think I might take the next few days off to digest the nine books I've finished, so far.

I'll see you all again next Friday.

Thanks for the continued support in the only New Year's resolution I've ever made.

Edit: In the interest of proper history, something should be clarified.

After the discovery of a shared interest was made, Al and I, whenever we were scheduled together, would rush (prudently) to complete the sometimes unpleasant work of preparing a country club swimming pool for it's irritating clientele to give us a chance to sit down and talk about books, movies, TV shows. He even stopped calling me "porterhouse." That was a pretty big win.

Behold the social unifying power of popular culture!

-AJM 3/02/09

Send help. (also pants.)

Experiencing a ROFA. Randomly Occurring Fit of Anxiety. It's a sort of strange restlessness that hits me out of no where and fills me with an unexplainable sense of dread. In the past, these were medicated into oblivion by cookies, buying DVDs, or some other act of indulgence.

For reasons I can't explain, probably a one-time-only synaptic misfire, something moved me to go for a run and burn through forty minutes of weight training.

As far as synaptic misfires go, this is the only one, I add with complete confidence, that I've ever had that moved me to a positive action and not, say, a random bout of black belt level pants-shittery at a Wendy's or similar establishment.

So, I'm either growing up, or my limbic system has thrown up its hands in frustration and taken my consciousness by the shirt-front, head butt it into a weeping, mewling prostration, and is now in the driver's seat in a desperate biological coup de'tat.

I'm voting it's the second one.

Look out, cookies! The new junta don't want none of your goddamn diabetes!

You hear me?! Not one diabete!

Big shout out to Cabin Con (Kabin Khan?).

I'd say I wish I was there but honestly, I'm really glad I'm not.

Big love for all of you, but I'll be damned if I didn't think a weekend of board games in an isolated cabin in the southwestern Michigan woodlands wouldn't drive me to stab, hang, drain, flay, and wear you all.

Miss ya'll.

"I foresee that very soon I shall be overwhelmed by the pressure forced upon me and be forced to take extreme measures which will lead to war. "

That's an excerpt from something called the Willy-Nicky Correspondence.

It's from a series of telegrams back and forth between Kaiser Wilhelm and Czar Nicholas in an attempt to avoid kicking off World War I.

Go history!

I'm running late and don't have time for much of a post, so I thought I'd write it like a really bad telegram. I really wanted to end everything with "stop!" but "stop!" was pretty much just a period, and I couldn't justify writing "stop!" at the end of everything without it being dialogue, so I'll keep it short. Probably shorter than this explanaition.

V's done.
Still mulling.
Up next The Terror.
After that, probably The Endurance.
Reading lots of stuff about cold places.
Scripting a comic about a cold place for a friend.
Friend is the artist.
Hard part (finding a fucking artist) done.
Happy thoughts.
More soon.
Disgusto and Aack issue 10 3/4 done.
Surprise, bitches.

Criminy!

Been too busy to post lately. I wrapped up V. last weekend and tackled the measurably more pleasurable P.G. Wodehouse's Mulliner Nights.

I'd like to say I'll be back to talk about it later, but these days, who knows. If I've learned one thing from this, it's that I really do hate blogs as much as I did before I ever felt obligated to try it out.

In other news, one of my professors last week won the award for "greatest show stopper ever" when he told a student he was trying to "choke an idea to life, but unfortunately, the more [he] squeezed, the more he killed it."

The student in question was reaching really hard to find a political connection in Cambyses, which has a special honor of its own.

It's the worst play ever written.

It's only significant because it's the missing link between middle ages morality plays and early renaissance drama.

Next week: Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, Luc Sante's Low Life, or Dan Simons' Drood.

Question for anyone reading:

If you had a bunch of scrap metal the size and shape of tiny golf flags, what would you build out of them?

Out of his mind.

Christian Bale is out of his mind.

NSFW.