i just spent five hours at Borders Bookstore, waiting for laura to get done with training for her job.  it wasn’t bad.  i read a lot, didn’t spend too much. being there made me think about all the art i want to complete–writing, comics, music–…i work out now.  lifting weights.  one of the things i do is situps with two ten pound weights on my chest.  when you work out your muscles tear, then repair themselves, getting larger.  when i do a full round of 60 situps with the weights i’ll often sit on the couch.  my stomach is kind of squinched up when i sit like this.  i imagine my muscles repairing themselves like this, so that i can’t lie flat.  and when i force myself to lie flat my muscles in my tummy all stretch, stretch, stretch, then snap–POP!–, and there’s a huge soft gap in my belly and it turns blood red as i slowly bleed to death internally.  that’s how i feel right now with writing, need to lie flat and write it out, stretch.  maybe it’s not so much like the belly thing.  but it feels like it is. anyway, i’ve been doing a lot of sketching lately after not having drawn very much at all for a year or more.  i’m planning on turning some of my stories into comic strips.  does this have to do with reading McSweeney’s 13?  maybe.  so what? bite me.

i just wrote and posted the father of communication. yeah, it has words and stuff and no pictures or anything, so that might turn some of you viewers away. literature is dead. 

speaking of people killing literature, why do so many people see fit to worship chuck palahniuk right now?  is it because he wrote fight club?  i’ve read two of his books, choke and lullaby.  the premise of choke wasn’t really that great or even strong.  a guy has a scheme where he goes to restaurants and pretends to choke, a stranger saves him, said stranger feels like the saved guy is their son since stranger saved his life, so stranger sends him money each year on his new “birthday.”  he does this at many many restaurants so he gets many many checks.  now, interweaved throughout this story is sexaholics, weird sexual encounters, etc. 

the most obvious questions is why would these strangers send him money?  chuck’s answer is because they feel like he’s their son.  but…they saved HIS life…wouldn’t…er…why would this even be any sort of outcome whatsoever?!?

anyway, plot aside, his writing isn’t really “touched with psychopathic brilliance” as L.A. Weekly said.  but perhaps the most disturbing blurb is from Bret Easton Ellis: “Maybe our generation has found its Don DeLillo.”  OUR GENERATION’S DON DELILLO?!?!

for those of you who are not familiar with DeLillo…well, i’m one of you.  i’ve only read one of his books, Underworld, so i’m not an expert on him.  but i can tell you this:  i’ve never been a big fan of baseball.   i used to play it as a kid, but i don’t really like watching it.  ever.  in the beginning of Underworld there are about 50 pages describing the events in and surrounding a baseball game.  for someone who is not interested in baseball, this could be very very boring.  but i loved it.  i can’t explain it.  i still think baseball is boring to watch, but seeing how Don DeLillo watches it is not only interesting but captivating…but that’s too cliche a term.  it made me want to go out and buy a yankee uniform and one of those big foam hands (that’s baseball right?) and get a hotdog and follow the team around the country.  this, i think, is what measures great literature.

Choke, on the other hand, made me wonder why i had paid 24.95 for this hardback book, that more or less amounted to a poor plot with sick, sleazy sex scenes (isn’t this the definition of a bad porn??  maybe good porn, depending on who you are).

Lullaby was better in the plot field.  a guy memorizes a poem that kills people when they hear it…and then he can just think it to them and it kills them.  i think…it’s been a while and that detail is a little vague.  another guy also learns the poem.  there are plot holes in abundance here,  no doubt (why doesn’t it kill him when he says it?  why, since he feels a threat from the other guy who learned the poem, doesn’t he just think it towards him and kill him?  i don’t know, and i don’t think Chuck does either.)  but the writing was still…eh.  it was average.

i went to see Chuck Palahniuk give a reading in Austin at BookPeople when he came through town.  it was a very enjoyable reading…not a reading at all actually, he decided to just do a Q & A.  the guy has tons of disturbing stories to tell, and they all sounded true (he did say they were true…but you know…everyone lies) and he seems like a really nice guy, like he’d be a great conversationalist, really easy to talk to.  the amount of ideas he has seems to be endless.  if only he could write like he talked to us.

i didn’t mean for this to be a book review.  i mean, who cares about books? literature is dead! burn them!  burn the stinking books!