Motley Kamuka

My edition has a sticker that it won the Man Booker Prize, and is among the best books of the 21st century according to the New York Times, and the claim that it was a #1 NYT best seller. And a quote from Golson Whitehead. And the horizon isn't just lighter, there's an orangish yellow. George Saunders is 67 year old, 9 years after publishing this book, which seems to be his only book that is not short stories. He was born in Amarillo Texas, and grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, Oak Forest. He got an MFA at Syracuse 1988, where he's a professor since 1997. In 1981, he received a B.S. in geophysical engineering from Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. "I really love Russian writers, especially from the 19th and early 20th Century: Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Babel. I love the way they take on the big topics. I'm also inspired by a certain absurdist comic tradition that would include influences like Mark Twain, Daniil Kharms, Groucho Marx, Monty Python, Steve ...

The Husbands by Holly Gramazio is the next book for the book club, that I can't seem to meet with. I've fallen asleep before the meetings the last two times.  It's speculative fiction where a woman comes home to a different husband. It could be horror because she's so scared at this alteration of reality, but it's more like Groundhog Day . Reality changes enough so that it makes sense, and she has a pictures of the surprise husband on her phone lock screen, and in her photos. There are changes, but not enough to be a completely different world. It becomes a mystery, who is my husband? It's a rorschach for who she wants to be. In the 3rd chapter we learn the mechanism, if he goes into the attic, a new guy comes down and the walls and whatnot change. Some are more handsome than others, one is naked, they have different accents. My first thought was of a German movie called  I’m Your Man (2021) (Ich bin dein Mensch). In that movie, a woman is given a companion an...

Why not title it the cruelty instead of unkindness ? It emphasizes the lack of virtue than the vice.  It's Afrofuturism, a plantation in a traveling spaceship. All the various problems are worse in poverty, and neurodivergence is one of them, avoiding gender issues by being a they, though others call Aster a she. Aster is a healer in the slave area of the ship.  Rivers Solomon has a few interesting changes in their looks: Notes: 27 pages a day until we meet for the book club.  I like it that Solomon has Keats' negative capability .  The mean guard imagines they should thank him for being such an asshole. It reminds me of a certain person who gets imaginary peace prizes and starts wars.  The sections have different narrators. I didn't make the book club, and I'm almost done, but I came across the sentence where she used the unkindness idea. My translation is, the unkindness of ghosts is that we're reactive, and have unhelpful traumatic reactions to situations i...

Siri Hustvedt is openly mourning the loss of Paul Auster on Facebook with photos of notes he wrote her, and photos of them when they were young.  In my early 20's friends visited my wife, and he had The New York Trilogy . I read it and loved it. Read his poems. Read almost everything he's published, not quite everything he edited. I saw him read one of his novels at a book reading. Watched movies he was involved in. Listened to his daughter's music. Read some of his wife's books. Read his wife's sister's book on hysteria. Read his last book.  Another one

Can't seem to power my way through Rob Burbea's Seeing That Frees . I like his insistence that sunyata is a vehicle for freedom, helps you to let go of negative fabrications. I'm reading it slowly. I'm still podding my way through Megha Majumdar's A Guardian And A Thief.  One bad thing after another, but it's also about triumph over all those problems, so far. I fear the ending. Mary Oliver's Devotions is something I occasionally pick up. Her neo-transcendentalism and love of nature is really grand. Lama Govinda's Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism.  He explains how it's quite impossible if you go deeper into it, to be Hindu and Buddhist because the worship is different. Sangharakshita also talked about Hindus who believe Buddhism is just an offshoot, not different. I'm not around that, so it seems far off to me, in time and place. The Gujarati women in my neighborhood don't come at me with that. Only a few speak English, they mostly keep to t...

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 ...