The Story of O by "Pauline Réage" (08/10)

Underworld by Don DeLillo (08/10)

DeLillo is a cold writer.

Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille (07/10)

A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley (06/10)

Like all good books, A Fan's Notes is several works, and one of the more minor ones is an eloquent, mostly unwitting condemnation of mid-twentieth century American sexual mores. This, gentle reader, is why traditional values are shit. My least favorite parts of the book feature young, virile Exley-the-misogynist. I far prefer Exley the extravagant failure, Exley the sardonic commentator on America and all its petty deficits.

Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie (05/10)

A very Moorian work. Moore and Melinda Gebbie teamed up to create a gorgeous graphic novel in which the young female protagonists of Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and Peter Pan meet as adults in a resort hotel on the eve of World War I. The images are beautiful, and Moore's ideas are intriguing, but the work fails as pornography, its stated aim.

The sex is erotica in that it is implausible and stylized and touches on the multifaceted, often contradictory impulses that, ah-hem, "make us human." It is not quite pornography in that the sex is fraught and painful and, one feels, scarcely the point. You know how most mass-produced porn of the San Fernando Valley reduces people to their junk? This does the opposite. In real life, sex is often not worth having. Lost Girls acknowledges that fact a little too readily. It’s good for looking at and thinking about, perhaps deploying strategically in conversation, but not much else.

Here are a few panels.

Wilde parody:

"So odd were Gray's surrounds that mauve delirium descended, tinged by feverish urgency. He struggled through an undergrowth of kisses, floundered in a dank Sargasso of embrace where time became unfixed and all events were without sequence.

"Knelt in ardent demonstration by his passion-of-the-moment he heard Wooton's sly, ophidian whisper at his ear. 'Dear boy, try not to let events so overwhelm you. Bear in mind that though the Road of Excess may lead us to Wisdom's Palace, like all roads it runs in both directions'" (Book 2, chapter 13, pg. 7).

"'As I ventured whilst you posed for Hallward, we must relish experiences before they accumulate to mere decrepitude. Youth is the time to sin, for vice is quickly past its prime, while virtue never has one.'

"Wooton gestured to the Salon's other clients, nestled with their favorites. 'What a distressing rack of threadbare skulls, too meek to satisfy desire 'til it has all but fled, like wretched poets who deliberate for years before they lift their pens to find the inkwell long since dry'" (Book 2, chapter 13, pg. 4).

Home Land by Sam Lipsyte (04/10)

Sam Lipsyte hates conjunctions, convention. Likes startling juxtapositions, mordant observations. Is clever, facile. Isn't really very funny.

Labyrinthes by Jorge Luis Borges (04/10)

"Abulcasim's memory was a mirror of intimate cowardices...the moon of Bengal is not the same as the moon of Yemen, but it may be described in the same words" (151).

"Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that no single book is. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships" (213-4).

"Can an author create characters superior to himself? I would say no and in that negation include both the intellectual and the moral" (215).

Minotaur symmetries.