“I still see music as an act of defiance as much as it is an act of celebration.” Since I live in the Pacific Northwest and was sentient in 1990’s, the so-called Riot Grrrrl scene in Olympia, Washington was everywhere. One of my favortite bands to come out of that scene was Sleater-Kinney and that line, from Carrie Brownstein’s new memoir, really sums up that band for me. Their unusual set-up (they do not have a bass player) and energetic, bordering on manic, delivery really […]
A curious blend of cunning and artlessness
Poor Chief Inspector Maigret! His day had started out so splendidly: “From the moment he lit it, in the doorway of the apartment on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, Maigret savored his pipe with greater enjoyment than on other mornings. The first fog of the year was an unexpected treat, like the first snow to a child, especially as this was no noxious, yellowish winter fog but, rather, a milky haze interspersed with haloes of light. The air was crisp. He felt a tingling in his fingertips and […]
Strange and harrowing must be his story
When I read Tambora The Little (Volcanic) Ice Age a few books back, it got me interested in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Last Man. I couldn’t remember actually reading Frankenstein before and the most lasting memory I have of anything relating to the tale is Peter Boyle and Gene Wilder’s rendition of “Puttin’ in the Ritz”. So yeah, I had some work to do. First of all, the flowery romantic prose took some getting used to since I have been reading a lot of Georges Simenon, […]
a hot private sadness, like tears
Mr. Hire is more than a solitary man. His furtive and vaguely creepy countenance has set his neighbors, in the Villejuif neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris, against him. When a prostitute is found dead in a nearby vacant lot, there aren’t a lot of clues. But it’s not long before that distrust and unease comes to the fore and the concierge in the building where Mr. Hire lives points the finger at him. What we know is that he couldn’t have done it, because […]
“The cogs of existence are oiled by sorrow; the machine produces nothing but despair.”
If you want to get into the Halloween spirit and seriously creep yourself out, then this book is for you. Alectryomancer and Other Weird Tales, is a collection of 13 (naturally) stories that are quite diverse in tone and scope. It’s called “Weird Fiction”, which I learned originated in the late 19th and early 20th century, blending the supernatural, mythical and sometimes scientific as seen in works by H. P. Lovecraft, William Hope Hodgson and Clark Ashton Smith. What I found in these stories lives […]
Some people should never meet
This novel, the third in Tana French’s loosely linked Dublin Murder Squad series, features Frank Mackey, whom we met in the last novel, The Likeness. While he had an entertainingly caustic sense of humor, to me he was still your basic middle-aged divorced dickhead. In this book, the tone has shifted somewhat as Frank has to return to the old neighborhood and the past that haunts him still. When he was nineteen, Frank and his sweetheart Rosie planned to escape their hardscrabble neighborhood and sometimes violent Irish Catholic […]
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