]]> http://www.cerebraldebris.com/2009/09/29/the-blood-that-bonds-is-live/feed/ 0 http://www.cerebraldebris.com/2009/07/30/books-hubert-selby-jr-s-last-exit-to-brooklyn/ http://www.cerebraldebris.com/2009/07/30/books-hubert-selby-jr-s-last-exit-to-brooklyn/#comments Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:44:32 +0000 chris http://www.cerebraldebris.com/?p=1371 Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really didn’t expect that it’d be so easy to find a book that’s even more depressing, startling, and at times outright uncomfortable than Requiem for a Dream, but all one really has to do is look to Selby’s earlier work, Last Exit to Brooklyn. Selby’s novel – itself more a series of novellas featuring related characters – is populated with drug-addled drag queens, prostitutes, thugs, and a particular union organizer who is an awful man in nearly every respect. That you end up feeling sympathy for nearly all of these characters, even said union organizer, is a testament to Selby’s remarkable ability to invest his characters with realism and humanity. These are deeply flawed people, all, but they’re still people, each with their own set of wants, needs, and dreams.

As in Requiem for a Dream, Selby’s writing style is light on punctuation and grammar, near stream-of-consciousness, and at times extremely difficult to read (the scenes near the end of one drag queen’s night out with “the girls” are borderline incoherent … an intentional effect). This makes it a bit tough to get into the book at first, but once your brain adapts, reading becomes pretty easy.

It’s easy to understand why this book caused so much controversy when it was released in the sixties. It contains enough sex, drugs, and profanity to ruffle many feathers today. That said, it never felt to me like Selby was trying to be exploitative. Rather, he was trying to paint an accurate picture of the kind of underworld that forms in cities, and was particularly prevalent in New York through much of the second half of the twentieth century. He brings you into these peoples lives and, without sentiment or sensationalism, shows you the world that they live in.

In all, I found the book engrossing and at times moving. These are not people you want to spend time with, and often not people you can identify with, but they are nonetheless human, each with their own tragedies, big and small. Like no other author I’ve ever read, Selby is able to express this without ever stating it outright, and for that his work demands respect and attention, no matter how vile its subject matter sometimes becomes.

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My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Hubert Selbey Jr.’s Requiem for a Dream is a hard book to read … not due so much to its sensitive subject matter, which is frankly riveting, as to Selby’s unconventional, stream-of-consciousness prose. The guy barely believes in basic punctuation marks, let alone quotes, paragraph breaks, or dialog attribution. It takes a while to get into it.

Once you do, however, you’re rewarded with one of the more honest (and bleak) looks at addiction and the downward spiral it causes in people’s lives. This is not simply a book about junkies, or about people who have no options in life and thus turn to drugs. Selby’s characters are young, enterprising … some are well-educated, cultured, experienced. By no means do they all fit into the stereotypical expectations one might have of a heavy drug user. Yet all of them find themselves inevitably pulled into similar situations.

I’d seen the movie version before reading the novel, which certainly reduces the suspense while reading the book. However, my main complaint with the film was that I didn’t feel like it spent enough time letting us get to know and like the characters, which in turn made the downward spiral less powerful than it could’ve been. This is much less a problem with the book — Selby spends a good deal of time on characterization, and it helps keep the novel interesting and compelling throughout.

I strongly recommend Requiem for a Dream. It may be disturbing to some, but you’re not going to find a better depiction of dangers of substance abuse and addiction.

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My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’ve seen Eugene do stand-up several times, and he’s pretty funny, though not my favorite comic of all time. His style of humor is relaxed, sometimes self-deprecating, often ironic and … confused? It’s not uncommon for him to say something and then immediately ask “wait, what?” — the book pretty much follows the same template, combining amusing observations with off-the-wall statements that may not even make sense to the author, let alone the reader. It suffers slightly from the inability to display video, which is a big part of Mirman’s live act, but some of the illustrations and timelines are pretty great.

It’s an up-and-down book. There are sections that I thought were kind of lacking, but also multiple points during each chapter that made me laugh out loud. While I never had any trouble putting the book down, I never had any trouble picking it back up, either. It’s fun and funny, easily accessible, and a very quick read that will probably make you laugh a few times per chapter. It won’t go down as history’s greatest comedic work, but if you’re into comedy books or in particular if you’re a fan of Mirman’s work, it’s worth picking up.

View all my reviews.

So now I’ve learned that setting the camera to aperture-priority mode and then adjusting the aperture way up will, assuming your lighting is decent, provide that type of effect. This is not exactly rocket science; anyone who’s ever taken a basic photo class in high school is currently going “well DUH!” … but I never took a basic photography class! So it’s new and valuable information for me as I continue my quest to become a better photographer.

Here, now, is a picture of a cactus!

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Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

1. I strongly dislike ketchup, even on burgers.

2. In relation to #1, I adore mustard, particularly the really powerful French kind, with which I will not only load up my burger to the point that it scares even my French wife, but in which I will then also dip my french fries. Yum!

3. I not only have ambitions of someday owning a bar, I know what it will be named, what it will look like, and have a pretty good idea of where it will be located. I am hoping to make my fortune in other industries first so that I only need the bar to break even, not provide a profit, thus maximizing the amount of cool things I can do with it, rather than having to make sure I’ve got Bud Light on tap and ten screens for football.

4. I change my mind about what I want to do for a living roughly every ten minutes, but only between a select group of careers: Owner/Principle Front-End Developer for a web startup, Fiction Author, Bar Owner (heh), Freelance Writer, Musician, and Real Estate Investor/Landlord.

5. Related: I come up with new ideas for web businesses at the rate of about one per day. This makes it difficult to stick with one.

6. Related 2: I sway violently between wanting to live in Brooklyn for the rest of my life, and never wanting to live in one city for more than five years at a time.

7. I feel like I should be closer to my family – particularly my extended family – than I am, and I feel bad about this quite frequently. But I never do much to fix it.

8. I am absolutely obsessed with Brooklyn real estate, and have Trulia.com open in a browser about 80% of the time I’m online.

9. I used to weigh 296 pounds. Now I don’t. I wish I could sell my diet and make a fortune, but I don’t think the “Have lots of stomach problems and essentially starve yourself until everyone thinks you have cancer” diet is going to sell a lot of copies.

10. Incidentally, I don’t have cancer and I’ve since returned to much more normal eating habits.

11. I do not want kids, and have never wanted kids, for as far back as I can remember. Also for as far back as I can remember, people have told me that this will change. I’m still waiting …

12. If my relatives knew how much I spend per month on coffee, they would slap me so hard that most of my teeth would fall out.

13. I once fell “up” a friend’s stairs (ie: tripped and fell forward as I headed up them) with two 32oz diet cokes from Wendy’s in my hands, and rather than spill them on my friend’s carpet, I opted to faceplant into the stairs.

14. Speaking of faceplants, when I was about ten, I got a bag stuck in the front wheel of a ten-speed bike and flew over the handlebars. I tore up half of my face, but managed to come away with it bearing only a tiny scar just underneath one nostril. The scabs peeled for months, though.

15. I dropped out of art school and failed out of a liberal arts college (essentially – put on one-year probation and never went back) before discovering this thing that normal people know as “a work ethic.”

16. If you put a box of peanut butter cups in front of me, no matter the type, I’m probably going to eat them until either they are gone, or I make myself feel queasy. I can’t help it.

17. After 31 years of telling people I don’t like onions, I’m inexplicably kinda starting to like onions. I don’t know what happened. Maybe it’ll happen with ketchup too, someday. But I doubt it.

18. I wrote a 409-page (manuscript format) novel between the ages of 11 and 15. Ten years later, the characters from that novel would be reused in the novella Voices, which you can find in the writing section. The plot’s almost entirely different, though.

19. I get so flustered when trying to speak French around my in-laws that I can inevitably only remember about six words, and I feel like a gigantic retard.

20. My two least-favorite chores are hand-washing dishes and mowing lawns. Fortunately I only have to deal with one of those, in Brooklyn, and that only occasionally.

21. I can’t decide whether the 16 year old me would be thrilled with how my life has turned out, or horrified by how much I’ve sold out to the man. The smart, funny, and beautiful French wife can’t hurt, though.

22. I’m inherently a pretty selfish person, I think. I need a lot of time to do “me” things, I have to have a lot of projects happening at once, and I need time to adapt when people spring ideas on me that differ from how I had expected something to go.

23. The only game company on the planet that I would take a job with, at this point in my life, is Valve Software.

24. I don’t really want to work 40+ hours a week for the rest of my life. At least, not 40 scheduled hours. My goal is to reach a point where I need to work less in order to cover my cost of living, while having more time for projects and traveling.

25. I am terrified of being in open water (lake, river or ocean) at a depth over my head … yet I’m completely fascinated by submarines and would absolutely buy one if I somehow got mega-rich. I’m going on my first submarine tour in Hawaii next month. I expect it will either be awesome, or signal the end of that obsession.

I’m pretty excited. I’ve never owned a digital SLR before, and the D60 is capable of taking some beautiful pictures. I bought a package which includes an 18-55 AF lens, a 55-200 AF lens, telephoto and wide-angle converters and a bunch of other crazy stuff that you can see if you click that image on the right.

This means I’ll be putting the Flickr widget back up, since it’ll actually have content again. It also means I’ll probably be making occasional blog posts on photography, and on stuff in Brooklyn (and other places) that I’ve photographed. I’m looking forward to it!

Yes, I’m addicted to HGTV.

“MY GOD!” I scream at my wife. “Do you know how much that would COST in Brooklyn?”

“Yes,” She answers. “Yes I do.”

“Why don’t we live in Decatur?!?”

“Because Georgia isn’t Brooklyn?”

“Oh … yeah.”

And when it’s not “House Hunters” or “Property Virgins” or “That guy in the black turtleneck who isn’t actually a part of the show except he shows up at the beginning and looks smug,” then it’s the do-it-yourself shows, which are even more compelling. I mean, some of them are asinine, like the one where they paint stuff — hey, newsflash, if you paint your friggin house it looks better than leaving all the walls white!

But “Income Property,” for example? Holy crap. I’m now convinced that my wife and I should buy a 17-floor mansion … and live in a tiny room in the basement. Just think about how much money we’d be saving on our mortgage by renting out the rest!

It’s terrible. It’s terrifying. It’s … some “T” word that means “insane!”

I’d go on … but “House Hunters International” is on, and I need to see which house the Spanish lady with the annoying voice chose!

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
If you live in New York City, which I do, the subway is probably a substantial part of your life. Even if you don’t, it’s a pretty fascinating place to visit, in person or in print. Randy Kennedy’s collection of articles, Subwayland, covers a variety of topics within the tiny world running underneath the city.

Interesting and easy to read, the book touches on a range of subjects. Some are sentimental, others amusing, others mildly baffling (such as the guy who insists he’s not that much of a subway buff, and yet has built a complete replica of a conductor’s station … in his one-bedroom apartment). The end of the book does choose to group several September 11th pieces together, and I found this a bit questionable, as it seems overly maudlin and like an overt attempt at manipulating the reader’s emotions. Still, it didn’t dissuade me from finishing the book quickly.

Perhaps what I enjoyed most about Subwayland is that it is nearly the perfect book to read while riding the subway. The articles are short and easy to read, meaning you can get through two or three of them during the duration of a typical subway ride (or more, depending on your commute).

All in all, an enjoyable glimpse into a world beneath a world.

View all my reviews.

The problem with living in Brooklyn, or anywhere in New York City that’s not a combat zone, is escaping the soul-crushing spector of spending the rest of your life throwing money down the toilet on rental accommodations. It’s not that owning a home is inherently a good thing — ask all the people who got screwed by the sub-prime crisis — but it’s something that can be very valuable for a variety of reasons. For a long time, I liked renting. It was easy, it was simple, and it didn’t require me to tie myself to an area … if I needed to get out, the worst I was sacrificing was a few months in lost rent, or whatever. Owning a home, that’s a big-time commitment not only financially, but a commitment saying “I love this city/town/etc and want to stay here for a really long period of time.” That really wasn’t something that interested me until Charlotte and I moved in together.

Of course, that event occurred in New York, where we remain still, and buying in New York is a really difficult prospect. It typically either requires you to be filthy rich, or willing to compromise heavily on location (like: live in a rat-infested shit-hole, or live an hour outside of the city, or both). Charlotte and I make good livings by American standards, but are at best middle-class by New York standards, and certainly nowhere near filthy rich. This means that while we can afford to rent in a nice neighborhood, buying in that neighborhood seems to be basically an impossibility.

Take, for instance, this noteworthy building. It’s two blocks up the street from us, it has a gorgeous exterior, it has brand-new, gut-remodeled interiors, and as a plus it used to be a brothel! Good times for all, but the smallest two-bedroom they offer is set at an asking price of nine hundred thousand dollars. I mean, even if you assume it’s 10% overpriced and maybe go crazy and believe you could haggle that to 15%, you’re still talking $765,000 plus closing costs. That will buy you a damn mansion in most of the country. Here, it buys you two bedrooms in a remodeled whorehouse. A really pretty one, I’ll admit, and the location is utterly killer … perfect balance between being close to the subway and being removed from the noise of Flatbush Ave. If I had $900k to spend on a condo, I’d look real hard at this place.

But I don’t. So instead I’m confined to drooling over it from afar … and posting rambling blog entries about it!