#30 Fugitives and Refugees

My first Chuck Palahniuk book, and it is about his town of Portland Oregon.  It is more of a travelogue for the slightly demented and bizarre.  Because nowhere does he describe the main sites like Powell's Books, Nike Town, Portlandia, or the touristy parts of downtown.  This is a book about Portland from someone who lives in Portland and tells you about the places that he likes to go.  And between each chapter there is a short story from his life in Portland, which I guess is autobiographical.

I will be in Portland next week, hopefully I can try and hit one of the places he talks about.  I haven't been to OMSI in a while...

(This is not my Palahniuk book for book club, I will be reading Pygmy.)

Tom Strong and his adventures in bad physics

I have been reading this Alan Moore comic series for the last month now (36 issues) and have read about Tom Strong, genius, travel between dimensions, time, and reality.  All of his adventures defy physics in some way or another, but still enjoyable reads.  I don't think the 'science' was meant to be taken seriously, but with such amazing theories out there like superstring theory, it could easily have been amazing and within the realm of possibility.  maybe I am missing the point.

I was hoping that Alan Moore would have written all of the issues, but about halfway through he stopped and various other writers picked up, though he did finish off the series by writing the last issues.  Which in a way tackles the scientific inaccuracies by ending the world and exposing Tom to reality.  I was kind of clever.  Next up is Gaimen's Sandman.

#28 The Filth

I have been waiting several days now to post this latest entry in "Weird books i have read", and frankly I am without understanding of Grant Morrison's post-modern graphic novel entitled: The Filth.  It is really hard to make sense of something that is mutli-dimensional and by dimension I mean it travels freely between the 'real world' and scripted comic book pages.  The main character is confused the whole book, as well is the reader, which I guess Morrison intended.

Strange things in the book I cannot make sense of:
-A talking communist chimpanzee that is an assassin.  I appended a picture of this primate so I wouldn't be disbelieved.
-A superhero ripped from the pages of a comic called Super Original that is now real and wants to destroy this real world for taking him from his comic pages.
-Mutant sperm that is enlarged and kills all the women in Los Angeles by violently flying through their wombs.
-A dimension that is organic and living everywhere, and feels like something ripped from a Cronenberg movie, or from Lynch.
-A pleasure cruiser that is its own country and goes around destroying everything it comes near.
-Small beings that live in your body and destroy cancer and other ailments, but they use photosynthesis to live, so if the body is deprived from sunlight, these beings eat the body.

I think I can keep going on for a while.  I cannot connect these strange symbols together to make any sense of the graphic novel, which was a fairly long read.  I guess I will have to reread The Filth to make better sense of it.  It was well written, and the drawings wee very dense and required one to look carefully at every frame to "understand" what was going on.

Ubik

At the beginning of the year I told myself I wouldn't read more than 7 science fiction books.  I am ready right now to say that limit was too low.  I think this is already number 4 or 5.  Also, I read this one probably 6 years ago and could not for the life of me remember what it was about, just vague impressions, but nothing substantial.

Glad I reread this little gem of a book.  I quite enjoyed that the book took place in half-life, or from cryogenically frozen minds.  It also had some good tension and horror as the characters were mysteriously dying throughout the book.  This is the closest PKD has come to horror.

There is something nice about completely forgetting a book and then getting to enjoy as though it was completely new the second time you read it.

One a side note.  Only two more weeks at Yellowstone, so I need to get as much reading done now as I know I will not get any done when in Korea.

Naked lady covered in blood is my new title for...

I read this mainly because somewhere I heard that Kill Bill was partially based off of this, and also that Kazuo Koike is supposed to be the manga god in Japan.  Yes, there are a lot of similarities between this and Kill Bill, but some stuff I wasn't expecting.  For example: Many of the episodes in the four volumes of this 800+ page manga end with the heroine naked and covered in blood.  Actually many of the episodes eventually result in the heroine naked at some point.  I can't forget lesbian sex either.  This was all really surprising from a graphic novel made in 1973-74.  But then I did a little research, meaning I went to WIKI, and read that this was published in the Japanese Playboy, so go figure.

Despite writing to his audience there is much in the way of story that I enjoyed, such as the revenge aspect, and that this was a historical piece taking place in the late 1800s Japan.

#25 Tis Pity She's a Whore

With a title like Tis Pity She's a Whore who wouldn't read this play by John Ford?  As with many Jacobean plays I find it difficult to tell if it is a tragedy or a comedy in the first act.  It starts with a brother confessing to a friar his more than filial love to for his sister, and then arguing with that friar.  Kind of comedic, I thought?  I was looking forward to a light hearted romp about incest, because anything seems possible for the Jacobeans.  So this brother tells his sister about his burning passion and she says, "ME TOO!"  Well, moving to the next act she gets pregnant and people start to die.  So much for the light hearted romp.  Then the sister marries someone else and the brother gets jealous and kills her.  So like any sane person he advertises his crime by walking around with her heart on the end of his sword telling all of his crimes of incest and murder.  He then kills her husband and tries to have a go at anyone else at the party (Her wedding ceremony).

There are some side stories as well, one concerning a character of such dimwitedness that he was pure comedy.  He would always go on about a horse with two heads for show in the circus, quite funny...but he was accidentally killed in a terrible assassination plot.  But the best line came from him describing his mortal wound,

"I am sure I cannot piss forward and backward, and yet I am wet before and behind."

By that point I knew it was definitely a tragedy.

Edward II

This is the third Marlowe play I have read this winter, and he has distracted me from Middleton now for about 3 weeks.  I will be back in the thick of Middleton next week, but for now I have Marlowe.

Edward II is a new play to me, and I realized my only exposure to this obscure king is from Braveheart.  In the movie he was Edward Longshanks queer son.  Remember the scene when Longshanks tosses the princes lover out the window?  That Prince!

This play focuses a lot on Edward and his "lover" Gaveston.  The whole first part of the play is how Edward loves Gaveston and everyone else in the kingdom hates Gaveston.  It is kind of comical how the king is constantly doting on his lover, even as his nobles are raising arms against him.  No matter the situation the king asks about his Gaveston.

Eventually the king is defeated and taken to some dungeon where he is tortured with rotten food, drainage water, and foul smells.  The way the characters described it I couldn't help but laugh, especially as Edward was a very proud person.  I think Marlowe has a dark sense of humor, that if playedd right on stage could cause the audience to laugh at a monarch humiliated.