An Open Love Letter to Aleksandar Hemon

Dear Mr. Hemon,

I've gone to bed with you every night for months (first there was The Lazarus Project, then The Question of Bruno, now Nowhere Man) and subsequently, I suffer from the delusion, shared by people in love, that I will never find anyone else who makes me feel the way that you do -- no one whose prose satisfies me the way that your prose satisfies me. I have felt this way before, and when it ends, as it must, there are always a few unsuccessful liaisons (very nice books, but) before I find some new author to be faithful to, for at least as long as their novels last. I am sure that you will make other readers very happy, and I am only jealous of their ignorance of you, the pleasure of opening you for the first time.

At least, there is comfort in the knowledge that I can return to you, in a few years, when I am older and perhaps wiser. Rereading your body of work with my new hypothetical wisdom, I may grow to feel that my previous affection was merely childish infatuation compared to the depth of feeling that suffuses me in this hypothetical future. Still, in the midst of a passionate one-sided literary affair, I find it hard to imagine it ending. To clumsily paraphrase you, you are like everybody else because there is no one like you.

Yours,

Emily

New Year's Book Resolutions: Sam

This year I will finish "In Search of Lost Time."

New Year's Book Resolutions: Tim

"Heaven grant that the reader, at this moment as brave and ferocious as the words now being read, may, without being disoriented, find a savagely dangerous path that leads through the desolate swamps of these sullen, poison-soaked pages. For unless a rigorous logic and a concentration of the mind equal to defiance is brought to this reading, the deadly emanations of this book will dissolve the soul as water does sugar. It is not right that everyone read the pages that follow; very few will be able to taste this bitter fruit without danger. Consequently, timid soul, before penetrating any further into such uncharted regions, stop, turn around, go no further. Listen to what I say: stop, turn around, go no further . . . "

He says this stuff at the beginning about making sure you're ready to read his book. I reckon he's probably serious, and I haven't really felt up to it before. In any case, it keeps falling off my shelf.

New Year's Book Resolutions: Paige

I am knitting this whole year!

New Year's Book Resolutions: David

Started it. Didn't finish it. It's really long. But it's good.

New Year's Book Resolutions: Rebekah

ONLY REEDING PIKTURE BOOKS! AND MEBBE SUM BARTHES?

"Everything is an Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson" by Kevin Avery

Paul Nelson's life narrative  is too good and too tragic.  A man who didn't compromise, and paid the price for his stance in the world - nor could he really take care of himself as well. in other words the dark noirish side of being a professional rock n' roll critic.

Nelson was one of the first important figures in Bob Dylan's professional life and eventually signed the New York Dolls to Mercury Records, where he worked as an A&R man.  A job for sure that wouldn't last forever.  The great aspect of Nelson's work as a critic and even as a human being is his ability to see through the artist's work and really define it on a very personal level.  That I think is a critic's job, and Nelson nails it to the written page.

The painful thing about reading this book beautifully written and edited by Kevin Avery is a lot of people are going to identify with Nelson's love for culture and what it means to him/us/them.   Any person who loved Jackson Browne as well as the New York Dolls is able to see beyond the veil of pop machinery and just focus on the work on hand.  The fact that he went all out to get the Dolls signed is an amazing narrative.  No one in the music biz liked the Dolls except for a handful of critics - and Nelson was the one who really stopped at nothing to get them signed and that alone we can be really grateful for Paul Nelson.

But here is a man who didn't drink alcohol, but consistently had two cans or bottles of coke with his daily hamburger (he is sort of a Popeye Wimpy figure) and led a life devoted to his interests and nothing else.  Also the fact that he ended up working at a video store is both tragic and great at the same time.

The tunnel vision that made him unique is also what killed him in the end.  And again, that is the scary part of someone who is so devoted to comment on music, film (a huge film fanatic as well as music) and living on the side of noir despair.  A very sad book.  But the interviews with his fellow critics and friends (most love him to bits) is quite moving and a tribute to those who write to expose how 'their' feelings are attached to the shine or the mirror-like image of pop culture.

New Year's Book Resolutions: Daniel

I wrote a paper on Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano in college, but I didn't quite have the time to read it. Now that it's 2012, I've decided this is the year I'll pop open a mezcal and make good on that essay.

New Year's Book Resolutions: Michael

If you do not want to read this book after reading these first few lines, you might want to check your pulse:

"Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and the scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants, and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, "whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches," by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, "Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men," and he would have meant the same thing."

I have never read a Steinbeck novel, so I am not a complete person yet; in other words, I have never understood certain truths and attitudes about people and places and this weary earth, things that only Steinbeck can teach me.

New Year's Book Resolutions: Ruth

No ships passing in the night . . .