Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch to be published in October

I know it's been a long time since I posted something. Took me more than a year to get back to this blog. In blogging terms compared to the real world that would be like, let me think... EXACTLY 11 years! Which is precisely the amount of time that will have passed by since Donna Tartt's second novel The Little Friend came out when finally her third, The Goldfinch, will be published on October 22. If you travelled along my pages here, you might have taken note that her third novel has always been on top of my eagerly awaited list of things to come. This is now how Amazon describes it:

A young boy in New York City, Theo Decker, miraculously survives an explosion that takes the life of his mother. Alone and determined to avoid being taken in by the city as an orphan, Theo scrambles between nights in friends’ apartments and on the city streets. He becomes entranced by the one thing that reminds him of his mother: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that soon draws Theo into the art underworld.

Composed with the skills of a master, The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America. It is a story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the enormous power of art.

The 2008 press release from Little, Brown described it as

a story of loss and obsession about a young man, guilt-stricken and damaged after the death of his mother, and the growing power that a stolen piece of art exercises over him, drawing him into an underworld of theft and corruption where nothing is as it seems .

Someone noted that the remaining 8 months will feel way longer than the past 10 years. To make it easier for all of us, why not reread The Secret History or The Little Friend or listen to Donna's brilliant voice on the audiobook versions of them. Those, especially The Secret History (The Little Friend comes only in a heavily abridged version with her reading it herself) and her reading of True Grit are the epitome of storytelling. She is, after all, a master storyteller in every respect.

I wrote something about one and a half years back on her. Just scroll down or click these links: Donna Tartt takes her time and Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling...

Breathing House of Leaves Tattoos

Everybody knows how much I love Six Feet Under and, after five incredible seasons, its finale and last sequence with Claire driving cross-country and time passing on relentlessly. And I love the song that plays over it and have listened to it so many times but I just came around to see the actual music video of it for the first time: Sia - Breathe Me

Why does it remind me of House of Leaves so much? Along with the video, I think, the song reverberates much much more with the book than Poe's Haunted or Angry Johnny.

Talking about House of Leaves, I came across this book cover art by Bas Alberts, which made 3rd place in the 50 Watts' polish book cover contest:

Since I liked it so much, I altered it and put it on a shirt. It's under a creative commons license and I only have to give the designer's name, which I did above and will tell everybody who asks me about the shirt.

Note: The blue leaves are actually navy-blue and the square next to the word House is exactly 5/16 of an inch big + the whole thing and therefore the words are mirrored. Then I made something up for the back, too.

I still need some suggestions for a House of Leaves inspired tattoo. Shouldn't be as big as these:

Or maybe something Bret Easton Ellis?

or David Foster Wallace?

Why couldn't I find a pic of a thumper tattoo barely an inch from a shaved pussy? This is the internet! Has nobody got such a tattoo? I can hardly believe that.

david foster wallace was depressed by karen green

This is just incredible. You know what I do most on this blog? Besides blogging, which I don't do too often anymore, I am checking the stats to see how many and which and where and what led them here, people (is this a legit sentence anymore?) find their way to my site.

In the very first weeks, there was always some guy from Denmark on my site, actually checking daily what I wrote and what not. He ceased (maybe he deceased) doing that. The post that was read most often on my site, is this one about DFW, Karen Green and MZD and guess how people come to surf on it.
Someone actually googled: david foster wallace was depressed by karen green. And take a look at the links google gives for this search. There's not only "David was a big sweater" but also, and, well, you can check it out, a guy that tries to convince you that "Roger Federer killed David Foster Wallace."
He's somehow paralleling Federer's not so good performance of 2008 to DFWs equally not so good performance of 2008, which led to his suicide on September 14th, and well, somehow, Federer is a lousy saviour after all, and won the US Open on September 13th 2008. The argument goes something like this: In his piece about Federer, Wallace idealized Federer as the saviour, yes, Jesus Christ or GOD himself (does the idea of GOD contain a self, anyway?). Although Federer sucked bad, the whole year, he finally nailed the US Open and let's see, what our little friend on the other side of the internet has to say about it:

Federer would win the US Open on September 13th, but it was likely too late for redemption. God's immanence on Earth had been retracted, the age of miracles was over. DFW was found hung the next day.

 I would like to add the opinion that Federer's win was actually thought of  by DFW as the second coming of christ and so he subsequently hanged himself the next day to see if he was already dead. Jesus!

an octopus?

Yes it is the biggest fucking octopus Slothrop has ever seen outside of the movies, Jackson.

Talkin bout animal paranoia:

All my life, I have waited for this moment...

More. Later.
www.bushofficial.com

October 2011 Wind-up

I have so many excuses for this. Unfortunately they are all not very convincing. Not a single one, actually. I haven't read on in Gravity's Rainbow for over a month now. Yes. I know. Shame on me. And shame, indeed, I feel. It also took me over 6 months to finish Infinite Jest, which holds a very special place among all of my other reading experiences now. And the last episode that I read of GR was really really good. Slothrop on his British-candy binge. Hilarious. Something terrible must have happened at that point in my life that prevented me from reading on. Is something good about to happen to get me started again? I will let you know.

Stuff that I bought in October:

• Books:
• Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted
• Tama Janowitz, The Male Cross-Dresser Support Group
• Zadie Smith (ed.), The Book of Other People
• Gabriel García Márquez; Leben, um davon zu erzählen (Living to Tell the Tale)
• Roland Barthes, Mythen des Alltags (Mythologies)
• Tickets for performances:
• Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
• Elfriede Jelinek, Das Werk/Im Bus/Ein Sturz
• Giuseppe Verdi, La Traviata
• Giacomo Puccini, Tosca
• Tonights Anti-Halloween Show at the Sonic Ballroom with Cologne HC-Punkband My Defense
• Movie theater tickets:
• Lars Von Trier, Melancholia
• Steven Soderbergh, Contagion

Stuff that I read, watched, listened to, saw, attended, whatever, this month:

• Bush (everything)
• Jonathan Coe, The House of Sleep (to be contd.)
• The Believer Book of Writers Talking To Writers (contd.)
• Some (very, very few) of Immanuel Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgement)
• Jefferson Airplane, The Best Of
• Lars Von Trier, Melancholia
• Steven Soderbergh, Contagion
• Giuseppe Verdi, La Traviata
• Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
• Duncan Jones, Source Code
• Dexter, season 6
• Bored To Death, season 3
• How To Make It In America, season 1
• Some live-tennis, especially China Open and Istanbul Masters

I'm not ready to say something of value about Melancholia, so I will say something that is probably equally not of value about Jonathan Coe's The House of Sleep. To have bought this novel on a flea market a few months ago was a very unlikely move for me. I neither knew the author nor the book title and judged solely from its front jacket, which depicts a bed of nails, and its back jacket, which tells me about narcoleptics and film afficionados drawn together in a gothic manor, that it would make for a nice little read. And it does, kind of. Nothing more to be said about this one.

I don't have much time, so everything in telegram style from now on: Like new season of Dexter. Not so much as masterpiece first season. Bored to Death don't like George this season. His role too dumb now. Like women's tennis dresses. Source Code evil military propaganda. Death not enough for soldier to serve country. Wonderful afterlife awaits after death in military. Contagion real nice epidemic movie. Question Soderbergh leaves (intentionally?) open: What about highly aggressive mutated virus in Durban cluster? We (western civilization) just don't give shit and let poor people in South Africa die? Like Jefferson Airplane. La Traviata dumb opera. Opera's contemporary place only in other fiction as nice backdrop. Like Batman. Jelinek's Ein Sturz best play in long time. Get chance to c My Defense live? Go do it. Don't like hardcore but their gigs rock like fuck.

can I get my cheese in cornflower blue?

 

I just had to buy it!

By the way: I bought Palahniuk's Haunted but didn't read it yet. One of the more powerful arguments for this decision - the buying, not the not-reading, was the rumor that about 5 dozen people fainted at readings of the included short-story Guts. As Wikipedia puts it:

While on his 2003 tour to promote his novel Diary, Palahniuk read "Guts" to his audiences. It was reported that over 35 people fainted while listening to the readings. On his tour to promote Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories in the summer of 2004, he read the story to audiences again, bringing the total amount of fainters up to 53, and later up to 60, while on tour to promote the softcover edition of Diary. The last fainting occurred on May 28, 2007, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, where five people fainted, one of which occurred when a man was trying to leave the auditorium, which resulting in him falling and hitting his head on the door.

Does anyone believe this? I mean, come on, 60 people? Is there video footage of it on the internet? Are there interviews w/ the people who actually fainted available? Plain PR? Anybody know more about this, please comment here.