Motley Kamuka

I'm reading Mobius Book by Catherine Lacey, and I came across this word in the title, paraclete , and it means (in Christian theology) the Holy Spirit as advocate or counselor (John 14:16, 26). Wow, a new word.  Most of the time I read difficult stuff, but I can really flow over the words here without knowing I'm not skimming. I haven't enjoyed reading a book so much in quite a while.  I have a struggle with the second part where she's in the relationship with a dominating and controlling man, but actually it's not very long and she's back in her intimate loss mode, writing about loss in the age of Covid.  My one question is, if you break up with someone, does that entitle you to paint them negatively for a whole novel? Why not leave him sooner? Actually he left her, she didn't even leave him, so horrible, she spends a whole novel painting him as a subtle monster. Maybe she's just talking about the dynamic of growing up with an angry father, who mostly ...

Reading Megha Majumdar's A Guardian And A Thief  for a book club.  Why am I just noticing Calcutta is now spelled Kolkata? It was changed in 2001! I need like spelling updates on Bluesky, except Bluesky has only really existed for me November 2023.  My experience reading this book is one of horrified anxiety. What terrible thing is going to happen next? I hope to connect to my hope, that they will surmount these trials, but I'm not so sure. In a way it's perfectly set up to tug at my heartstrings. The father is off working in another land. The mother cares for a little girl and an elderly father in a starving Kolkata, where all ethics is out of the window as people steal food. There's a fragile preciousness as lots of things almost happen and the horrors build.  I don't like the title, it makes you focus on who the thief is, but that is the point of the book. Beautiful cover art. The first apocalypse novel I read was  Lucifer's Hammer . I remember thin...

  Taking another run at ancient Greek mythology. One person leads to another. Semele to Selenos to Ampelos to Ikarios to Ariadne. It's like Gravity's Rainbow with a new character introduce every page. Reading Athena now by O'Connor, like these graphic novels. Thinking about Athena by The Who, which isn't about Athena, it's about Theresa Russell. One of my foundational mythologies is The Razor's Edge (1994), not the book, the movie. My father says The Eternals (2021) isn't a good movie but Angelina Jolie is Athena, called Thena.  Links: TED ED on Prometheus by Iseult Gillespie.  Understanding Mythology with Joseph Campbell YouTube Books read: George O'Connor Dionysos

Instinctual subjective list: Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut New York Trilogy by Paul Auster Emma by Jane Austen Moby Dick by Herman Melville The Sellout by Paul Beatty Malloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett The Hobbit by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway Franny & Zooey by Jerome David Salinger One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Haruki Murakami Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte Middlemarch by George Eliot Parable of Talents by Octavia Butler Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosiński Mobius Book by Catherine Lacey

I'm listening to Mark Chernow's book about Twain . Clemens is idealistic and doesn't like racism until he goes to New York, and then he becomes an out of town rube from Hannibal Missouri, and racist. He rejects a religious life because they support slavery. He's a prankster, joker, comedian, story teller. He works as a printer, but he's fairly internerant. His brother found a slave on an island, and that is the basis for Jim in Huck Finn, the point of listening to this book is to give some background to understand a rereading that book.  Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in 1835. Samuel refused to go to school. His mother was the story teller and held the family's emotion. The family's fortunes would go up and down and at one point his mother had to cook for a family so the family could have housing. The father was a humorless judge, among other things. Clemens remembers one joke in his life with his father. His father got sick and died young. Should we see...

Introduction: Thomas Pynchon 's probable last novel drops October 7th, he's 88 for goodness sakes, and I've been trying to force myself to finish Gravity's Rainbow . I'm in the 500's of a 760 page novel for the longest times as I join 3 books clubs, and don't really follow through with most of the book. It's October now and there's not much time before the book comes out.  I'm on page 505 of Gravity's Rainbow on October 1st and I've got to read 43 pages a day, which sounds easy, but not with Pynchon when you're looking up everything. I've posted a lot about looking things up, but I can't do that down the home stretch. I can't write about what an ax bell is, a new discovery of something in the world I didn't know existed. That's what I like about Pynchon, he's always teaching me things. I will update this post as I get the book and read it.  There are just too many amazing quotations (p. 509 GR): "Tempor...