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The Husbands by Holly Gramazio

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...
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The Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

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...

Mourning Paul Auster

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

The pile

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...

Paraclete

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 ...

Megha Majumdar

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...

Greek Mythology

  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