Buddies: Tabitha Mammalian and Jim Gregory Sowders

Acrylic and paint marker on canvas

A review of Melanie Index, the new novel by @ericblix.bsky.social forthcoming from @erratumpress.bsky.social. Would that I could type all this into its own thread but I am far too lazy to reword and reword and whatnot. I dug this book v much and, as evident in review, cannot recommend highly enough.

Hellhound- Vial

Big Country- sosocamo

Strictly 4 The Scythe- The Scythe

Tigray Funk- Sideshow

Play Me- Kim Gordon

Bloodluxe- Slayr

The Apple Tree Under the Sea- Hemlocke Springs

Slather on the Honey- Clothesline from Hell

Some albums I just cannot get enough of rn. Underrated gems, the lot of em.

I know that the author’s a character by way of the Master and I like that he’s infecting and conflicting with the characters, but I’m still not super deeply enamored with how the fourth wall self-reference feels sometimes. It gets a giggle every now and again but idk. Feels detached, a bit avoidant.

Over 650 pages in and it’s still tough to keep a hold of bc of those digressions and parentheticals within parentheticals, but the ease of rhythm has picked up. I’m not that keen on its tacky surface level political jabs but what the narrative is doing re: murder chemicals I think kinda bolsters it.

Check out “Dead Star Love,” new work from @barryoblivion.bsky.social in issue 2 of The New Monuments. www.thenewmonuments.com/barryoblivio...

Check out “Dead Star Love,” new work from @barryoblivion.bsky.social in issue 2 of The New Monuments.

www.thenewmonuments.com/barryoblivio...

dead star love now available via @thenewmonuments.bsky.social

110 pages in, it seems like the five subjects are not the main characters, but are vessels of the main character: the eponymous demiurge that propels them through logorrhea toward profound personal truth as it manifests within a chapter/time-slice. I would like to see this formatted multicolumnarly.

This is not to say it’s not difficult. The first chapter contains an excruciating learning curve akin to To the Lighthouse (maybe that’s a me problem). I only learned of this book because of an article about its difficulty. It’s 120000 words longer than IJ. Often difficulty bears the sweetest fruit.

Maybe it’s because of its setting, cast of oddballs, funniness, and overwhelming wordiness but it reminds me so much of reading Infinite Jest for the first time. I caught this one’s rhythm much faster than I did IJ’s, and for that I’m relived, though Invidicum of course remains a real grade-A doozy.

After pawing for what’s felt like eons at the Invidicum that lived inside my Goodreads account, I have grasped that over-plump apple at last and have begun the month(s?) of eating it. Despite its erudition and digression, though likely because of them, I can’t seem to put it down. Shandean and lush.

The idea that a text can be constructed out of individual voxels like limestone cubes and can still coherently constitute a whole image of some sort is wild. He says autofiction is dead but this doesn’t even feel like autofiction as much as it does a crunchy distorted VHS version of selfportraiture.

Picked up Total Destruction and this dude is on one. “Verisimilitude is a dangerous illusion. Textual representation as a simulacrum of the real is a nonsensical agenda to the poststructuralist” needs to be embedded into my forehead somehow. Maybe as a glyph or QR code. Glad to see he’s still at it.

I have read Paz in Mexico. I have read Del Paso in Mexico. I have read Rulfo in Mexico. I have read Bolaño in Mexico.

I love the form his work takes tho. Its combinatory nature feels like the whole vision’s a multimedia collage, which I can’t get enough of, but I find the actual meat and bones materials of the collage tiring and uninspired. He’s in the same theme>>>execution room in my memory palace as Jia Zhangke.

Maybe this makes me some form of chud, but I’ve read two Kundera books and plainly do not understand the hype to any degree. I haven’t read his holy Musil yet though so maybe that’ll enlighten me to some murky facet of his work I can’t see thru the smudges of my general distaste for his personality.

RIP

Edited version now available. Fixed (hopefully) all the grammatical disagreements and clarified some sentence structures without (hopefully) compromising their freestyled energy. It’s still November so I guess it still counts toward the nanowrimo stipulations. Whatever lmk if there’s glaring errors.

Reading back through this thing and I’m disappointed by the number of typos, regardless of how funny some of them are. Might fix ‘em all and link a v2. I just wanted to complete all the requirements of nanowrimo without flirting with their disgusting AI tolerance. But now is the time for refinement.

PROCEED WITH CAUTION

HELTER SKELTER
53,978 words
14 days

Pleased to say that now that Appalachia has begun to shiver and molt mk.gee season has come back around in full force. Time to once again ruin my year-end Apple Music statistics with an album displaced between the old and the new, the warm and the frigid, lost to everything but me and my car stereo.

Earned through challenge (below) a copy of Erratum’s It’s Tough at the Top and maybe it’s the having worked in retail but I’m enjoying its depiction of middle-manager mediocrity and bureaucratic repetitiveness. It’s drudging up so many memories of empty loafers with its accuracy and it’s very funny.