i'm having pringles for breakfast ~ ugh ~

[lookingland]

for the 50bookchallenge:

no. 12 ~ The Autobiography of a Quack (and "The Case of George Dedlow") by silas weir mitchell. mitchell's stuff is so interesting. his preoccupation with the underside of the medical profession reveals the ways in which the culture of his generation had their own peculiar neuroses. not much to the story here. a young dissipated man takes up doctoring but doesn't actually want to do the work part of it, so falls into all sort of creepy schemes and winds up a homeopathic spiritualist who just dispenses pills and communes with the dead. of course he gets what's coming to him. my favorite phrase in the whole book is "the melancholy spectacle of my failure" (gee, i wonder why that is?). i already discussed George Dedlow before. while describing the story to someone this weekend, they pointed my nose toward Johnny Got His Gun. Honestly, sometimes i'm sure i have been living under a rock. now i have to read that before i can proceed.

anyway, having read his short stories and two novellas, i guess it's time to tackle a novel by mitchell and see if he can sustain over an even longer work.

no. 13 ~ Without Blood by alessandro baricco. a wee book by the author of Silk, which made my top ten of all time last year. i'm less enamored of this one, though its a powerful story, well told. unfortunately i sorta feel like it's a redux of The Night Porter, but watered down as a result of its non-specificity (in terms of time and place). i think baricco tries to give it a new twist by putting the character of Nina in control of the situation (control being a relative term here, since he defines revenge, by nature, as being a destructive force). i got impatient with the story, though it ended well (if not enigmatically). but The Night Porter is a much more powerful take on the victim/abuser complex.

wee warning to my flist peeps who read my film reviews and sometimes add things from my list to their queues: The Night Porter is an extremely difficult film (i couldn't even find a picture from it that i thought would be appropriate to post here). it's incredibly disturbing and i don't recommend it for the squeamish or the sensitive. it's been controversial forever, but i tend to think it's an important film (though have no desire to ever watch it again).

finished my contract, went to have pie with a friend.

i did a ton of reading this weekend. otherwise i didn't get any writing done, which is a shame. but i did turn over a dozen possible entry points in my head. i'm having a hard time placing the first scene. clearly i need to just start writing and see where it goes from there. i'm having a struggle getting my head out of 1862 and into 1874/75. it's just such a different world.

didn't read lj most of the weekend, alas. got a lot of catching up to do!

happy monday all!

: D