Mandibles on Sandpaper

Updated links.

Most of my reading slumps hit after I've finished a novel that so in-habited me (Harington allusion) that I can stare at my bookshelves and wander aisles of new and used bookstores and not find anything I want to read. I'm sated but unsatisfied.

Then there's the slump spawned by abundance's too many too juicy choices. I just finished this

last Friday in anticipation of this, released Tuesday:

I picked this off my bookshelf Saturday 

to reread until the new Atwood, but I'm resisting because this

will be on my doorstep soon, but I discovered this yesterday

and I've already determined to appreciate it fully I'll need go back and reread Lightning Bug and The Choiring of the Trees and When Angels Rest and Thirteen Albatrosses and of course Architecture of the Ozarks and With (in which Latha makes a heartbreakingly beautiful appearance).

O, I'm 350 pages into this

Here's a Madison Smart Bell review of Imperial (sub rqrd):

From the start, Vollmann has had the ambition to tell vast tales. His first book of "short" fiction, The Rainbow Stories, is a thunderous retort to the minimalism popular in the 1980s, when Raymond Carver, abetted by the editorial influence of Gordon Lish in using Hemingway's methods for creating stories whose key elements were intentionally left unspoken, had created a vogue for terse, stripped-down, and often rather vacant narratives. Into this climate The Rainbow Stories exuberantly burst, at 560 pages, with many acrobatic authorial intrusions. One 112-page story, "The Blue Yonder," presents a community of homeless denizens of a San Francisco park, along with "The Zombie," a serial killer who stalks the homeless, and Vollmann himself, whose interest in these people is less sinister but no less acute. Like Imperial, most of The Rainbow Stories have a documentary quality, though unlike Imperial they are partially fictionalized, and in these stories Vollmann refined his technique of introducing himself as a character in quasi-fictional narratives...

In Vollmann's portrayals of his writing and behaving self there is always a tension between the dense layers of worldly-wise cynicism he has acquired over time and his persistent impulse to do and be good. That impulse is a part of his nature which he always seeks to protect and preserve and which he admires when he encounters it in others—Steinbeck for example, in his social responsibility and deep regard for truth in describing the characters he wrote about, or the Flaubert who composed "A Simple Heart." More than anything else he has published, Imperial and An Afghanistan Picture Show tend to reveal the origin of these elements in his work.

Also in my backpack is this

and this

I'm starving in plenty. Life is generous and large. I forget sometimes, and when I remember, I'm too paralyzed by all there is to do that I don't do anything. Click Fleabus, yo.

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• Obamapostasy.
• Fred Hiatt's war-boner.
• Surging into Afghanistan, beheadings is Iraq.
• The Business of Occupation.
• UPDATE! MacArthur 2009.
• Images of the dead.
• What is torture for?
• UPDATE! The world outside?
  
• Obamapostasy.
• Believe it when I see it.
• UPDATE! Obamapostasy.
• UPDATE! On the above, Cheney v Obama.
• Our awesome post-racial society.
• Progressives as devious political satirists.
• On progressivism and progress. Another reason I urge you to read Harington: his critique of mistaking technological advancement for human progress, in all the novels but especially through the character of the traveling salesman in Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks.
• UPDATE! Bakhtin! Someone else I need reread.
• Rhetorical question. I was driving home from a United game a couple of weeks ago, and trying to find the postgame radio broadcast I stumbled on Frank Gaffney's radio show, and pwoot, what a pwooter.
• UPDATE! Quality prognostication.
• Fish Fry. My professor friend, The Miltonist, considers Stanley Fish an unchallengeable genius in all things because of Fish's early scholarship on Milton. When my friend enthuses about Fish I nod and smile.
• Easy but funny.
• Easy but funny.
• Obama anal-poisoning Letterman!
• UPDATE! While yes the crime is horrific, what's interesting is that the Post reporter, in a story involving race in Farmville, makes no mention of the history of racial strife in Farmville.
• Go ahead, run Ehrlich. (And fuck Carroll County.)
• Go ahead, run Ehrlich.
• UPDATE! Fredneck pigs scream ACORN!
• Gophershole clownery.
• UPDATE! ICC! Six bucks from Gophershole to Laurel!
• Soccer Tactics 101.
• Manchester Utd is the Juve of England.
• UPDATE! No one asks how I separate my tribes.
• My theory is that it's a fraudulent program (with world's stupidest helmets) led by an assclown of an asshat of an asshole of a fraudulent coach.
• Jack the Bulldog says:

• UPDATE! What a frecking bleghoor.
• Millions is doing something interesting. It's funny, I really liked Mating, I really hated Mortals, though I'm positive it was as much me being elsewhere as it being suck.
• Heh, Nick Cave and dust covers. But, when is Nick Cave's birthday?
• UPDATE! Again, I'm bypassed for a MacArthur genius grant. Heather McHugh wasn't.
• Well, this will tempt me to subscribe, at least electronically. Plus the new Richard Powers' story.
• New Tom Sleigh!
• UPDATE! The reissued Carver is a big deal to a small and devout circle. I don't say this to snark, just to reiterate my bitch with Carver was never Carver but the fracking legends of imitators he spawned and the fracking MFA programs which stole their money.
• Joyceance!
• 57 is a large number in this context, but what fascinates me is, does she remember all her kids - if I asked her a detailed question about Winterthur, could she? And if yes, what? And if no, what?
• UPDATE! Thyraphobia, part nine.
• Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever, video blocked by fucking corporate rat bastards.
• BOATLOAD! of mp3 of new releases.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• UPDATE! The world outside? A very underrated album. It's the Furs album I listen to most often now, that and the first, which has, IMHO, the best first song of a first album ever.
  
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment. Start with Upper East Side. Loud.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• UPDATE! A friend asked that when I post new links on old posts would I please make them more eye-grabbing, so since she said please... She's also the friend that told me my colors were too loud a few months ago....
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.

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LUMP OF SUGAR ON AN ANTHILL

Thomas Lux

The dumb ants hack and gnaw it off grain by grain
and haul it down to the chamber
where they keep such things
to feed their queen and young. The smart ants
dig another entrance, wait for rain.
Which melts the sugar,
and through viaducts they direct it
to their nurseries, the old ants' home, the unantennaed ward,
and so on - the good little engineering ants!
The dumb ants have to eat their sugar dry.
Put your ear to a dumb ant's anthill's hole - mandibles on
sandpaper is what you'll hear.
The dumb ants pray it doesn't rain before
they've done their task,
or else they will drown - in sweetness,
but drown, nonetheless.

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Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs. Yes, again.