2666: In Revue

Torrential is the right word for 2666. There's a lot of it, most of it of conspicuously high quality. Which is what drew me to it, that and the sustained praise for the book as a whole. But I don't think I can read it again any time soon. First, I mentioned a lot about the obliterating fourth section, the one about detectives in Mexico trying to solve brutal murder rapes and it casts a cloud. It's a frightening, towering cloud, but...I can't go back. I will go back. Almost certainly.

But not now. Bolano's basically written 5 stories, each with a different style and intertwined them. And I don't normally read any of those stories. I mean, okay, I read Greg Rucka's comics and I'm only now starting the first of the three Tara Chase Queen and Country books, but the epic road trip or going insane or love triangle or war story is not something I'm familiar with. Yet, it's compelling. Painfully. What's crazy is that I don't even know the important things I've missed. I'm willing to bet the dreams the characters had all line in one form or another and those will be the portions I focus on intently on the next reading. This reading was just to get through it.

It's weird. I'll go back to records. I'll go back to videogames, but books, for the most part, I read once and tear through whatever's new. Can't slow down. I want to see something new more than I really want to suck everything out of a book, but 2666 is so colossal as to require a second reading, no matter how far in the future it will be and no matter how much of my brainspace it'll take up. Whenever I was asked by my friends what I was reading, 2666 was the book that leapt to my mind. Yes, I was reading other books, but they were books That Were Not 2666.

2666 is described by critics as borrowing elements from many different genres and that may be true, since I'm not a literary critic, but, what seems like a more truthful appraisal of the material to me is that it's five different books, sewn together through shared characters, plot and setting. It's at least five different flavors of novel, some fleshed out into full length books, others, one just long enough to fit in a coat pocket comfortably.

I want to move on something else. Something else being, as mentioned before, the three Tara Chase Queen and Country books. I'm 100 pages into A Gentleman's Game and it feels so much...lighter to read. Certainly, Greg Rucka isn't the same kind of author Bolano is, but A Gentleman's Game hits a genre I recognize the pattern of and hits it almost without trying. (I'm familiar with it and the comfort that comes with the familiarity is welcome.)

I'll almost certainly push my reading boundaries again, since I have two stories by Yuiko Mishima Spring Snow (I think?) and a short essay called Patriotism. I almost wasn't going to buy the book (it's really a pamphlet), but then I remembered: with a title like that, I'll put my money down. As for Bolano, it's not like I'll be hurting for more of his work. Maybe the Savage Detectives next? That is to say, next, but not soon.





I have at least 4 BT records somewhere on my music devices and computer, but the only one I ever listen to is the single for the Force of Gravity, which has two remixes and two other extended mixes of songs. Oddly enough, said single doesn't have the original track, but instead has a radio edit. So: It's a single for a song it doesn't contain.

As for why this is the case, well, I basically look for Somnambulist, and never find it, since it's apparently on the one my friend didn't burn for me (remember those days?) and I happened on the tracks years ago and have kept the Force of Gravity in my queue.

An additional aside: Click the link to Somnabulist. It takes you to the official video for the song, which visually, feels incredibly dated. It makes me smile, because I know I'm acting/dressing at least as stupid now, but in different ways. Look back and laugh.

I Just Don't Want To Feel Like I'm Burning

Burning love.

First, it's not about setting fire to love. Which, since it's me, you could reasonably expect. Burning Love is a band. Burning love is a lyric, with "a hunk of" before it. Burning love is something I've never felt. But I've felt on fire and never had the words for it. It took Matt Fraction (writer of the Immortal Iron Fist, the Invincible Iron Man) to admit that he was an alcoholic and went into rehab before the phrase made any sense. Mr. Fraction, in the back of Casanova, has run interviews and intruiging backmatter and in number four, I think, he had an interview with Mike Doughty (Soul Coughing singer, now independent artist) where Mr. Fraction said Mr. Doughty was his sponsor through Alcoholics Anonymous.

There's three times Mr. Fraction uses the words fire or burning, but there's the one that's relevant: I went into recovery because I didn't want to feel like I was on fire all the time. When I first read that, I knew it was important, even without truly understanding the phrase. It was last night, going out kids for drinking, walking in Piazza Navona, that I finally understood what burning was.

Burning love is a love so powerful, so immediate, so visceral that it's all-consuming and globally encompassing in its personal scope. And immediately, I knew why Chris Colohan (Left For Dead/Cursed/the Swarm vocalist) named his new project Burning Love. It's the manifestation of an obsession, consumptive desire. It has little to do with love and lot more to do with burning.

As for 2666, I think I understand just how committed Bolano is to breaking the reader's face in the murder and rape in Juarez. (Read this article, then try not to cry. Then, watch this report and wait for the last thing the reporter says. In the six hours we spent there, there were seven murders.) I thought I was finally closing in on the end of the chapter and I found out I had another 50 pages left to go. I just want to throw the book to the floor and never look at it again, but it's important to see this fucker through.

There's sly little moment in the book, where there's a character with an announcement to make, in front of a bunch of exasperated journalists who are all thinking the same thing: Stop giving us fucking preamble and give us the name of the killer/rapist. Given that it's been 250 pages of brutal rape and it's not over yet, it's not hard to see this as Bolano's way of saying to the reader, I know how you feel.

Which means: He knows it and he wants to make certain we are as horrified and exhausted by the killings and murder that have become routine in the city and its real life equivalent. No, you don't get to get out because you're tired of it, I see the text saying. I'm not sure if that's brave, stupid or hardheaded. But I can tell: Bolano is enraged and consumed by the senseless and unending murder of the women, violated and humiliated before their death.

He burns about it and writes it the same way. It will hurt you, if you let it. One of the fiercer female characters (who is a forward thinking Mexican congresswoman) is hopelessly homophobic, and hopes, painfully, that her only son will never come back to Mexico, as it's no good for him.

For a person that tries to manage the country: That's just cold.




There's little to nothing to do with the post except that the song is morose. It's a song off the new Kanye West disc. I mean, Kanye's a guy that pretty often talks about girls like they're a renewable resource, but even he comments here, with more than a bit of sorrow: american apparel girl in just tights/ she told the director she just wants to get into school/ the director said/ take them glasses off/and get in the pool.

Oh and the Raekwon verse at the end is a wizened, resourceful look back over the hinted-at guitar solo, keys and thunder in the distance drums.

Cut Short And Used Up.

I wrote elsewhere that the world will kick my teeth in. Coming back from the adventure this weekend, I can testify to the veracity of that statement.

Or in other words: Yes, the world can so easily crush me, without even realizing it. This was reinforced by the last sentence in the first paragraph I read of 2666, after spending a page talking about the police detectives trying to connect the dots on a brutal, vicious rape (a topic as light as a 30 meters of concrete), there's this: The semen samples sent to Hermosillo were lost, whether on the way there or the way back it wasn't clear.

It ends there and it's nearly impossible for me to keep reading. After a weekend of incredible highs and crypt level lows, most occurring in my mind, reading that matter of fact final sentence deflated me. After all the hard work of the detectives and the incredible (but sadly commonplace) pain of the rape, the piece that would help bring the rapist to justice was lost due to carelessness, neglect or not trying. All that effort expended and...it's simply not around any more.

Frustrating describes, but doesn't encapsulate it. There's bits of rage and exhaustion after having read it, that whatever else I do, no, this is what the world is like and no amount of expensive vacations to indulge me is going to change it. The joy, the happiness, the leftover buzz or high from the achievement the adventure was short circuited and burnt out.

Cut short and used up? Yeah. That's how it felt.





Today I was listening to NaNaNaNa by My Chemical Romance, which in the context I heard it this weekend was suitably eardrum rattling and epic but after this, feels like the song is hollow and armored in tin.

Blue Monday

No real good news from 2666. I'm now 574 pages done (with an entire book left to go after this one) and...it's more of the same. It's well written, but...hopefully, now, I'm spinning even closer to the center. One major character is going make an announcement to the press, but that's a process that's taking forever and in the meantime, the female bodies, some mutilated, some not, accumulate.

Still a lot of women dying. The sheer number, unrelentingly, who all, somehow, work at maquiadoras is staggering and it can't be stopped. Police are incapable of finding the killers and even if they could, corruption, laziness or simply just not having enough resources available to do the job abounds, with many of the investigators chauvinist pigs. The women, almost exclusively, are referred to by the police as whores, or even if they're confused and went out with a guy and it ended with their death, they're still tarred by that, somehow.

It's not so bad, one of the characters says, at least in Santa Teresa, more women, than in other parts of Mexico, have jobs.The maquiadoras provide the jobs, and are temples, themselves, as if the young women are constantly scarified on it to keep the town and workplace going. The women pay the price for the Mexican lifestyle, in which the rage, jealousy and loathing of men is paid to their spouses or girlfriends accounts. She was cheating on me, so I killed her. She wanted a little space, so I strangled her. Drugs are often involved.

We see the men on their own without the women in prison, and there's…at least two counts of prison rape which get graphic and makes me physically uncomfortable.

This book feels like it's got a political undercurrent, even though there's…nothing explicitly political here. But, if we're to take Gramsci's ideas at face value, that recognition is the first step to action and has value, then there is a reasonable argument that Bolano, by showing the myriad ways women get killed and how little happens, is making his point about how women are treated today and how casually news of their deaths is received.

Their deaths are oppressive and constant. I can only imagine what it's like, in every meaning of the phrase.




We Are the Pipettes is a song by the Pipettes. It's the first track off their disc of the same name. Light song, hopefully, to counteract the depressing post.

Many Unpleasant Things

I don't see 2666 being beautiful yet. It's devastating, for fucking sure. The repetition of the women getting murdered hasn't lost it's punch. Hell, I just read the sentence "in August 1995, the bodies of seven women were found" and I think immediately, 2666 is going to fucking start now, finally.

On a mundane note, I wish the book was printed on heavier stock, because at the moment it's paper thin and I don't underline or make notes anywhere for fear of tearing the pages. Then again, when you've got 900+ pages (893 of story, a couple of explanation, and the title page, plus errata), my guess is it adds up quickly.Then again, this is a first edition in paperback. I'm late to the game, so this is what I get. More to the point, I choked down the above $10 price at a Borders of all places, so I don't get to talk.

ANYWAY. Back to the story.

For the last seventy some pages, the story's been based around a detective that is slowly, starting to investigate the deaths of the women. And they've been dying on at the clip of one or two a month. But I interpret the finding of seven bodies in August 1995 as the author saying and here we go. For real this time. That said, I either need a longer attention span, because these 3+ page paragraphs are starting to get to me.

It's only dawning on me now that from here on out, the rape and murder part is only going to get more pronounced.This is not one of those good thoughts. At all. I soldier on.

Aaaaaaand we get to the prison rape bit. I was right. Uh. I'm not going through the mechanics, but I imagine there's an Oz episode or two that will educate you, if you desire such a thing. I would usually be happy I'm right, but prison rape isn't really, the kind of thing I'm stoked on.

I explained 2666 as a book that's crazy to a person reading the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. (Original title of Girl With…, by the way: Men Who Hate Women.) I read a bit of errata in the back of the 2666 before I started reading '66 in earnest and it talked about a book that swirled around its center. I think of it like a spiral. Hell, there's three whole stories before I get to the story's center, Santa Teresa.

The story about the critics/professors was the furthest from Santa Teresa. I think they only heard about Santa Teresa, or at least went there and didn't stick around. The story about the widowed philosopher had the philosopher move close to (or in) Santa Teresa, but most of the story was about the wife's hitchhiking to meet up with a man she slept and a book that drove the widow crazy. Part number three, about the black reporter, was the person who spent the most time in the city, covering a boxing match that was over (as it had to be) painfully quickly. He ended up being with the philosopher's daughter after guns were drawn and violence was going down.

And now, we're in the city proper where we see from the perspectives of the detectives, the finding of the dead women. There was vaguely mention of it in the first story, more talking around it in the second story and substantiated discussion in the third. I wouldn't call this a story that unfolds so much as a story that is spiraling, maybe downwardly, towards its horrible and truthful center.




Today's song: Silhouette by Thrice. It would be Under A Killing Moon, but, it seems like the murders of women are going to get worse, so I want to save it for when it gets even more out of hand.

I Hate The Way I Get When I Can't Handle Bad News

I made a passing reference to a person being turned insane in 2666, and I'd like to return to it here, as I think it's a thing worth mentioning. The main character (or at least the reader's POV) is Amalfitano, a philosophy professor who married a crazy woman that left him and their daughter without warning. She returns in the early middle portion of the book, briefly, then leaves again, leaving (we are led to believe) a book by Dieste. Amalfitano is cursed by the book (or his ex-wife's memory attached to it), paralyzed, he can't throw it away or leave it somewhere never to be found, so what he does is he puts the book on the clothesline, as if it needs to dry out.

"For a while, he didn't move, breathing with his mouth open, leaning on the horizontal bar of the clothesline. Then he went into the hut as if he were short of oxygen, and from a plastic bag...he took out three clothespins...and with them he clamped the book and hung it from one of the cords and then he went back into the house, feeling much better."

Bolano notes that the idea is Duchamp's, apparently referring to this piece. Amalfitano's daughter asks why he didn't take it down and he can't give her an answer.

Applying that to me, the private point of Subsidized Sincerity is my own book on the clothesline. I don't think anyone ever visited Eleven Names after Zach and Tom left, but I just kept writing because I thought through sheer force of my will i could keep it going. I was wrong. Looking at Subsidized Sincerity now, though, there's no comments, and I frankly don't have the heart to go looking for pageviews, because I get the feeling it's all me.

Not that comments should be a barometer for worthiness of a project, just for a measure of feedback. So at this point I'm doing it for myself. And why am I doing it? To one up Zach, somehow. Why? Because I'm childish and can't let a good project and idea just die. My barometer for that, hilariously, is number of things written for Eleven Names versus Subsidized Sincerity. We had a blow up fight once, in the middle of Eleven Names about quantity versus quality. I was quantity, he was quality. He said that if we keep putting out quality posts, people will keep coming back. (This is a good point.) I said, well, if we don't stick to a schedule, people won't come back and if that means that an update doesn't get another layer of polish, fine. There's another bite at the apple in seven days and people will know when to come back, as opposed to returning whenever they remember we exist.

That I'm committed or at least believe the endeavor to have worked when I "beat" Eleven Names on quantity, is something. I'm not sure what.

The number for Subsidized Sincerity, including this post is 22. The number for Eleven Names is 266. (Hello theme.) Hell, 266 isn't even a real number. There's at least 10 drafts in there, plus 10ish total posts in the beginning trying to figure out how the software works. Let's say 246. And that's including other people's posts on Eleven Names. My contributions, is maybe 75, maybe 100. I think, just by virtue of all the things I did when Zach and Tom stopped, I've done the bulk of Eleven Names writing.

And madness is going back to these things for the well of inspiration and not expecting it to poison me at 1 a.m. when I'm alone. Madness is going over the same things and expecting things to change. (Madness is also a band. They're quite good. But that kind of defeats the purpose of the post. Shhhh.)

Then I go to my AIM chat logs from a couple years ago (the heyday of Eleven Names, in a cruel twist of fate) and see all the things I saved with the idea that I'd come back to later on to try to improve myself. It hardly ever works like that. It's a folder filled by and large, with my failures and the things people think of me and don't tell me directly.

This is a terrible idea and also madness. It compounds my anger with the interest of more self-loathing. I should delete the entire folder, but I don't. I stew in it for a couple minutes, until I remember Brandi's transcendent sunburst in praise of irrationality or "fire under my ass": Inspiration only lasts a few rounds.

I don't nuke the folder, but I look at the folder of my disappointments and failures and I close it. I chew, with yellowed teeth, over the comment that I'm like a baby bird and I can't live on my own. They're right. Most of my best Eleven Names pieces were written because those were the one of the few things I took control of in my life. The rest, I divested myself of control over. I made terrible mistakes. (Which in theory is what college is for.) I've tried and I've failed. Miserably.

When I put it in those terms, I remembered a Samuel Becket quote, paraphrased. Try. Fail. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. (What it actually is is Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.) Reducing that, I get try.fail.try. And where do I remember that from?

Oh, right.

The founder of Issue Oriented, my friend and editor over there, Ronen Kauffman was in a band called try.fail.try. Even from thousands of miles away, my friends, through their work, somehow, unwittingly, take care of me. I am saved by their backwash, turning off the computer, squeezing out toothpaste from a surprisingly slender tube and going to bed with a smile on my face.




Here. Have the antidote to all the poison I took last night, a silly little video from The Wonder Years, a band I avoided because I heard they were a New Found Glory stand in. Watching this, I remember how much I liked New Found Glory years ago AND why I still love the much maligned pop-punk genre to this day.

The video has some really good spots of intertextuality (the bleeping of the word fuck, while putting the words fuck you on the screen over people's faces, and the "ding" of a smile from the terrible girl when the lyrics say the narrator expects her to be drunk when she calls. (Plus, the gang vocals of "we all say" over the chorus "my friends all say" just makes me smile.) Maybe this is peculiar to me being a guy, but there's an uplifting spirit to the video and the song that obliterates the clouds over my head.

Plus, I'm a sucker for that chorus and the "my friends help me out" vibe of the video. It's a little superficially similar to New Found Glory's video for My Friends Over You, which also took place in a wrestling ring.

(2666) Makes Me Feel Good

Oh, 2666.

Since the last time I wrote about it, I read another 300+ pages. It went quicker now that the world has been introduced and we're getting into the characters. Also: photos are obviously not mine.

The story only starts kicking into high gear when a woman is involved. For the first book, (the author Roberto Bolano, left , now dead, suggested to his family, just before his death that the five parts of 2666 be split up and published as five separate pieces) the woman, called Liz Norton (an critic of a fictitious author called Archimboldi) starts having sex with two (Pelletier and Espinoza) of the three men (Morini) in the group at the same time and then the three of them (minus Morini) head off to Mexico where Archimboldi is rumored to be.

The four are all professors at European universities.

They don't find Archimboldi, but the tenured academics end up having a three way and interacting with the residents (the two men visiting hookers) after the woman chooses neither of them leaves. The distance between the white European professors and the residents is understated, with the tension being between what the residents feel and the professors don't see or recognize.

When they get back to England (where the woman teaches) Bolano is sharp, with one of the two professors beating an angry cabbie to the point of almost-murder and the other professor simply kicking the cabbie when he's on the ground from the beating. Espinoza, the professor doing the beating is terrified to return to the country, while the other professor thought that it simply wasn't sporting to kick the guy when he's down.

The second book is about a philosophy professor (Amalfitano, living in Mexico) being driven insane by his deranged ex-wife who writes him letters from her hitchhiking trip, where she swears she had sex with a gay poet. She casually mentions that the poet's partner, has AIDS, which can't have gone unnoticed by the professor. Their daughter is perpetually in the background, but by the end of the portion (much shorter, 60some pages), it's not the father making lunches for his daughter, it's the other way around, which is a great indication of who is still all there and who will factor into the story later more heavily.

It's here that the book starts going into the really long paragraphs (three ish pages), but at least this time, there's periods, which are tiny, tiny oasis' in the swirling sand that is Bolano's writing. (Related note: I don't know the plural for oasis.)

My favorite quote from the book so far, from page 227:

Now, even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters...they have no interest in real combat when the great masters struggle against something, that something terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

Yes, that is Bolano calling readers posers for choosing the safe works where authors don't make mistakes and are on all the time. They want to see the flawless, pretty youtube instructional video and not the false starts and trip ups that must accompany the brightest shining and proudest moments of the authors. A(nd yes, I chose that picture right there because he looks super nerdy and more accessible to me than the picture up top.)

I wonder if I'm guilty of that myself. I can't say why, since I'm technically sworn to secrecy, but I can assure it's far more pedestrian than I make it sound. I mean, I like Crime In Stereo's The Troubled Stateside perhaps more than the rest of their discography, but that's one of their in-genre (Long Island hardcore, if you were wondering) records, where every song feels like a bomb, but it's something where the lineage is extremely clear and there's immediate parallels (Kill Your Idols, Silent Majority, Millhouse) for the whole enterprise.

Crime In Stereo's final (so far) studio full length, I Was Trying To Describe You To Someone, has a lot of great songs, and songs I like better than The Troubled Stateside, but overall it's shaky and uneven. Queue Moderns leads into Drugwolf, but Exit Halo after that one, goes a little long, say, for the majority of Exit Halo's six minute running time. There is no song like that on Troubled Stateside.

Anyway. 2666. I beginning to slow down on it, now that the perspective has shifted yet again to a detective who lives at the heart of the book, in Santa Teresa, (the Ciudad Juarez analogue), but the detective stuff is currently just a little bit plodding. The women dropping like flies advertised in every review I could find, are dying faster now. Currently, the detective is being assigned to other cases, but the dead women just keep piling up on the periphery of the story. If there's anything I've learned from Bolano's writing, it's that what's on the periphery now will become hugely important later on. A final note: the picture to the immediate left is one when the writer was 23, according to where I found it on the internet. He died at 50.




Here is the first song on the new Iron Chic record, Not Like This. The song is called Cutesy Monster Man and it's...gruff punk rock from the guys who used to be in Latterman (a band I mentioned here before) and Small Arms Dealer (a band who'se first CD I own but never listened to). It's a live take, because I can't find the studio version.

A View of Something Beautiful

There's always a temptation for me to be pessimistic. I'm a glass half empty person, historically and it's taken a concerted effort for me to vocalize and act optimistic. Changing my behavior patterns to ones that favor and foster optimism is hard work. (It's more often Fuck my life and hardly ever Fuck! My life!) So, when my roomate, a ditzy gay kid maybe 4 years my junior, clogs the sink in the room while cutting his own hair and leaves it filled, 80ish percent with water and then is about to leave to go dancing for the night, I immediately feel the years of my age on my back.

(I make him clean it up, which requires he find a cup and literally scoop out the water and pour it into a trash can. That's how much water was in there.)

So that's not good, but on average, this is a fantastic change and something that I have really to thank globalization for. Case: I was listening to the new record from Envy (called Recitation, below), a Japanese screamo band, while reading 2666, by a South American and Spanish author translated into English, in an Italian bistro where I would soon get gelato.

It is hard to argue with the thesis of these months. Sure, I recognized that I am incredibly privileged, five or six times over to go on this trip, but man, this couldn't have happened thirty, twenty or even five years ago. Yes, I am immersing myself in many other cultures and seeing what works out. I am so very cosmopolitan.

Or am I?

2666 is a book nerd's book, Envy's a screamo band that is loved by maybe 10,000 people tops in this world and both of those pieces of media are things that are intimidating to people who want to interact with me. The headphones shut out verbal communication and if there's movement meant for my consumption, I'm too absorbed in the book to see it.

Even as I'm supposed to be absorbing new culture and different ideas, I'm still listening to the same bands I was before and as opposed to changing my behavior, becoming a little less obviously anti-social and interacting only in a way that is prefunctory (Can I buy a coke? Yes, it will be 2 Euro. Okay, thanks.) Yes, I'm not going out to the usual bars for entirely mediated behavior where expats and dudes looking for American girls speak the language.

Am I just contributing to the rise of the American mono-culture around the world? Am I an unknowing agent of the societal chlorine that is Americans abroad? Okay. Societal chlorine might be going a little far and is extremely insulting to the kids going out who are a) trying to have a fun time in a familiar-ish setting, but also b) didn't sign up to be a kind of post-globalization punching bag.

Still, we're all caught up in systems, few of which of are our choice. And now that I think I see the system and the ripples of my behavior, I can't look away, right? I am far more fettered than it is fashionable to admit. But even including fetters, this is an incredible opportunity, one that I'd do well to take advantage of. I'm not entirely sure I am, and even if I were...I'm not sure I know what it means, which sounds like a great subject for another blog.

A friend, however, IMed some sense into me: you're in fucking rome. I'm somewhere beautiful. I have friends in and outside of the screenbox of my laptop and I'm comfortable. Life's good, but I still wonder about what's obscured in the view....



The song comes from the Canadian punk band, the Flatliners, off of their reinvigorating 2010 disc called Cavalcade. Lyrically, the song is about accepting your faults while being in a world that is more fantastical and wider than you can believe. Also, they rep Chicago in it, so there's a little bias on my end. But still: It's a song about being on tour, seeing crazy shit and realizing that it's awesome.

Strike Anywhere At the Spanish Steps

I visited a museum dedicated, oddly enough, to the life of Shelley, Keats and Byron today. It was literally next to the Spanish Steps, on the tiny fourth floor of an old building that looked more like a Tetris piece than something made with stone. But. Shelley is especially interesting to me now because of his association with Strike Anywhere.


I'll explain. Strike Anywhere, as you may remember, is a band I plugged here before. But! I always knew that somehow, their song Blaze (from Exit English, a 2003?4? record) referenced something from Shelley, the Masque of Anarchy, but I was never sure how much. Sure, I didn't recognize the first verse, for frankly, the last six years. It was always something garbled before the second verse and the bridge.

And that's okay. Not all lyrics have equal weight.

But, I was listening to an interview with Thomas on Monday, I want to say and he said off-hand something to the effect of, yeah, the first verse is ripped straight from the Masque of Anarchy. I had time and I found the verse. It is as follows:

We! Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake these chains to earth like dew
You are many, they are few!

First: Unvanquishable. That's...an old word, alright. That explains why I never understood the first verse, I can count how many times I've heard that word before on one hand.

Second: Man, Shelley makes that shit sound so noble and awesome. The truth, of course, is different, as you can count on many, many more hands the number of people that have died in unsuccessful revolts.

But. The song's pretty fantastic even without knowing the first verse. The rest, well, my favorite lines are the switching between "human solution" and "human pollution" in the choruses along with "amplified adrenaline". It might sound super nerdy out of context, but you'll hear it below.

Back to the surprisingly well appointed museum, literally overlooking the Spanish Steps. It was a low-lit oasis of a reading room and a place to catch my breath in a place that was bright, filled with loud tourists all taking pictures of their friends on the Steps. It gave me, for 4 Euro, a spot to recollect myself and exhale.

Strike Anywhere is not a quiet band, nor are they a quiet place to take a breather. They've got a couple songs that allow me to exhale and catch my breath (Instinct, Notes On Pulling the Sky Down, Asleep, First Will and Testament, Till Days Shall Be No More and Postcards From Home) but the majority of their songs are 2-3 minute long bursts of occasionally sung punk that places a premium on speed and heart. They're a cup of Gatorade along the marathon, the extra tank of gas in a cross country trip. Strike Anywhere, for me, is a constant re-dedication to the ideas and beliefs I fell in love with years ago, that bad things, no matter how ubiquitous ought to be noted and worked against.

I also wouldn't be at that museum if it wasn't for Strike Anywhere, obviously, because without them it is significantly less likely I would have cared at all about Shelley, but more so, because Strike Anywhere represents a lot of the emotional and social decisions I've made in the past few years. If I hadn't listened to Strike Anywhere, maybe I'd be happier or less aware, or have taken a right as opposed to a left at certain crossroads. If I didn't listen to Strike Anywhere, I couldn't have walked up those stairs, because I wouldn't have a reason to care.




I'm still on 2666, and by page 100, we're finally starting to get to the plot. There's been enough dream sequences that I'm pretty sure I'm missing something. You know which song this is gonna be, right? It's gonna be Blaze and its intro, We Amplify. Sure, Blaze sounds great on its own, but that extra minute of a buildup is worth it. Trust me.

Announcing A Theory of 2666.

I was talking with a couple kids about snap decisions on the way back from St. Peter's yesterday (a monument that took over 120 years to build) and I ended up dispensing sage advice to the effect of "sometimes, the only way you're going to do something is to say you're doing something gigantic and then start doing it before you can stop and think better of it."

In that vein, I'm announcing A Theory of 2666, publishing every Wednesday. As I mentioned before, I brought Robert Bolano's 2666 with me on the trip, but I also brought the classic of modern philosophy and ubiquitous judicial citation, A Theory of Justice by John Rawls. I got about 90 pages through A Theory of Justice before putting it down for something that would fit more easily into a satchel and I never got back around to picking it up again. I'm intimidated by 2666 (It is supposedly a rejuvenation of the Latin American literary genre and I've read an entire one book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez), as I've mentioned before and used that as an excuse to let it sit on the shelf or on the dresser. No longer.

I'm reading both, starting now. Well, I'm switching between the two, this week it's 2666, next week it's A Theory of Justice.

I'm only 35 pages into 2666, and already, there's a love triangle that must collapse at the worst possible time, a strange and reclusive author with no pictures that inspired four main characters, one of those characters, as a reader, I expect to die. But, what's most surprising to me is a sentence, starting four lines from the top of page 18 that ends near the bottom on page 22. Now, in terms of width and height, 2666 is 8x5, which seems normal to me.

5 pages without a fucking period or, more crucially, a paragraph break. First things first: If you can construct a sentence like that and have it work, as it does in 2666, my hat's off to you. You're unreal at what you do. But as a reader on a bus or between classes, it's a display of virtuosity that is infuriating. Well, aggravating. As a person that plays with words, I'm humbled and immediately aware I am watching a person who has truly mastered the written word. Comparatively, I play with blocks. Legos, if I'm lucky. As a person that has to read it and does so in a world where I have to negotiate other human beings and the bookmark slips, I pray, feverishly, for a paragraph break or period or a chink in the armor of the paragraph to save my place.

There is no such solace. Then again, I'm reading 2666, not some trashy Chandler ripoff. The message I take from 2666 is that I need to up my reading game. If not that, then, at least understand this is the terrain I am getting myself into now. I am getting into books that more is expected of me. Oh! I like 2666. I mean, it's challenging reading, but I enjoy the time I spend with it. How did I not get to that?

I can get to that next week! Two weeks! See you Friday.




Today's song is Far's Mother Mary, as covered by Thursday at Hellfest, with the aid of Far's singer. One of the things I have a weak spot for at shows is male camaraderie and this video is saturated with it, a five minute piece of bro-ing out onstage overflowing with emotion. Yes, this is what I love and hardly often get. The song is about how we're gonna die and the only way we're gonna be remembered is for what we do, in what media we leave behind, which has a thematic simliarity to 2666, as there are four main characters chasing a reclusive author, whom they only know about through media.

I would say I planned it, but I didn't.