I've been reading A Dance with Dragons since the fall. It's been slow going--only a couple pages every couple days. It's hard to find interest when nearly all the action is in the east. Whenever I hit one of Jon's chapters I get through it quickly though. I don't know exactly what initiated my entry into this series so long ago. I guess in some moment of boredom I picked up A Game of Thrones (of which I had a physical copy) and found something in those first few chapters. In the first, deserters from the night's watch encounter wights; in the second, Ned Stark beheads the lone surviving deserter. I wonder why this is so popular. Ostensibly this is due to the plot twists, but even getting to those requires the reader to push through great lengths of Martin's granular descriptions of everyday encounterings. I wouldn't say this is even fantasy (though that genre is hardly my territory, to be fair), so I still wonder whether that genre is worth exploring. Like Harry Potter and other YA stuff is the extent of my exploration. Gregor the Overlander, Percy the Lightning Thief, Artemis Fowl, etc... I wonder if I should start this series again once I finish this. Sadly I discarded my spine-busted copy of the first some time ago, but lately I've been reading epubs anyway. It's not implausible to imagine a some future date of residence in an old-people home, with my only respite from terrorizings by a Ben Stiller-type being found in A Song of Ice and Fire. 2 or 3 years ago in Colorado (a place of noted separation some would classify as foreign) I purchased an e-copy of Cesar Aira's book of stories The Musical Brain. It's been a troubling activity for quite awhile; the work is classifiable as minor and eccentric, thus we duly note its consequent layers of mystique. I read about a fifth then started again from the beginning last year. Now I am well past the parched syllables of God's Tea Party known to have stranded many a reader. Not all can re-orient into a mentality fluid enough to change a page's frame of reference when an opportunity demands itself. The reader re-images the narrative producing sufficient ignorance to blur the surfaces of raw brainstorming and create new footholds and leech points on any objects suited for projection; the reader is free to view the renderings, no longer trapped inside the musings of the man himself. The spirit of anthology coincides with the fantasies of youth. It is sometimes a rough chew because the flat sentimentality leaves only its desert of balded theoretical constructs. Thus the exercise is more perverse than the reading of any old novel. I had read several of Aira's books within the year of two the preceded the anthology, but this one became a real stone wall. I am still in the survey stage as a reader. Sure, I read one or two things over the years, but since the successive and well-applauded entries of the TV, Netflix, and Twitter I have tumbled from the steeple-top I once regularly glanced down from. Now I'm picking up things others read long ago, with no ability to discern the broad from the wide. I resolved to finish nearly all I start, leaving me pushing through fair bits of work. Interest in movies is staling, too (finally jumped to Drive My Car though). This all may be a symptom of the greater dominance of boredom emerging out my now booze-dried flesh. Boredom is physical irritating, but rationality pushes for its embrace (as any who's jacked-in is familiar). Do I need a book club? I recall in the lone lit course I took some moments that teased the promises of such table-topped or round-of-chairs encounters. The necessary question relates to the participants' ability to take the false discourse in stride and start a new stems as quickly as each one dies. The goings-on of a book club only mature into real processing if each reader has renderings of their own. All that's required is a single passage worthy of repetition. The detectives out there may still be granted their fantasy allowances as well, assuming they submit to the terms we've laid out. No more are we trapped by the social turbulence of the penners. I do willingly admit impressions from discourse led to the opening of Serotonin. Sometimes I read it aloud; the French places are nice to roll through. Roth's Letting Go has been coming into focus in the last week or so. There are long stretches to trudge though, but when the long alienating arguments terminate we can breathe again during the table-setting for the next. I wonder where Roth's argument-conversation structure evolves to as he ages. So far I've just read Farber's reviews from '42 and '43. I'm hopeful that his reviews of non-narrative cinema will reveal some balance in his discoveries to treat upon. The Cain book was sufficiently scandalous and pulpy, but those attributes still refuse me any leavings so it hardly matters. At the beginning of The Black Dahlia I felt unclean about its pleasures. It was the nearest I'd been to a page-turner in awhile, but its pleasures' aftertaste resembled the overcooked candy of junior-high. Over time my senses adjusted into over-familiarity and boredom. I feel a steady cloud of vacancy over the book as I near its end. I just piece together recollections of the film and play the narrative guessing game. Blinding contours of construction now. Will I wilt into The Big Sleep before I close this exploration for good (excluding the separate pleasures of Crumley)? I'm trying to adjust into my Stephen King approach of consider the words themselves overclose, staring until unfamiliarity emerges. It seems obvious now that books have become easier to discuss than movies--probably due to the greater interval over which the experience traverses. I wonder where I'll read next. I can sense some desperation or frustration now. One or the other, probably both.
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