books
Language is a virus from outer space — Burroughs
Demon Copperhead
An epic, emotional blast reimagining of David Copperfield in rural Appalachia during the early days of the opioid crisis. The brilliant rich characters will stay with you for life. This book made me so overwhelmingly thankful for the love and care of my upbringing.
"Everybody warns about bad influences, but it's these things already inside you that are going to take you down. The restlessness in your gut, like tomcats gone stupid with their blood feuds, prowling around in the moon-dead dark. The hopeless wishes that won't quit stalking you: some perfect words you think you could say to somebody to make them see you, and love you, and stay. Or could say to your mirror, same reason."
"With anybody else it might have been a downer, driving out there on lonely roads, walking through dead weeds, no sound except some crows in a bald tree griping about the weather. Dori though. She'd get so excited for any small thing, it made you happy to be alive."
Just Kids
A beautifully written account of Patti Smith's early life and her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. It makes you wish you were sitting in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel when it was the centre of the universe, submerged in poetry and alcohol. Put on Phantasmagoria in Two and sink in.
"It was like being at an Arabian hoedown with a band of psychedelic hillbillies. I fixed on the drummer, who seemed as if he was on the lam and had slid behind the drums while the cops looked elsewhere. Toward the end of their set he sang a song called 'Blind Rage,' and as he slammed the drums, I thought, This guy truly embodies the heart and soul of rock and roll. He had beauty, energy, animal magnetism."
"Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply. I got over the loss of his desk and chair, but never the desire to produce a string of words more precious than the emeralds of Cortés."
Stoner
Stoner is a quiet novel written with devastating precision. The prose is exact, not a word is wasted. It reminds me of train dreams — a book about one life that might appear small from the outside but contains immense inner weight and turmoil. From farm to the hallowed halls of university, it traces the life of one man who endures. It is a book to be experienced rather than unpacked. I really enjoyed it.
"The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly."
"In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another."