Sunday, June 17, 2007
Gallowmere: Vice City
Yes, the name is a blatant reference to the game Grand Theft Auto:Vice City which is itself a blatant reference to the 80s action serial (given a movie treatment as once predicted by Joey Goebel) Miami Vice. I'm not at all a fan of the game, or the series or the movie, but I'm a whore for wordplay... I also seem to enjoy splicing the words 'gallow', 'mere', and 'Gallowmere' around as liberally as a nudist hippie enjoys displaying his nether-regions. Reason: just because I can. "But what does the word 'Vice' have to do with Gallowmere?" You may be asking. You may not have, but let's just say you did to humour me, OK? Let's say you did so we can get to the point, already, because we all want this thing to end right?
I mentioned in an earlier entry that my greatest vice is buying, reading, writing, sniffing, tasting, groping books. I'm a big time bibliophile. At [Pages] bookstore, my paycheques actually show negative balances due to the enormous book debt they've entrapped me in. Now I'll be forced to work there until I'm about 199 years old to work off all the debt, and yes, I've already factored in presumed royalty cheques I'd get from my own books, lottery winnings, legal settlements, swindled taxes, and income from other jobs I'll be taking. And along with this book debt, I have the enormous burden of a queue of books to read. Novel upon novel, non-fiction book upon non-fiction book, it's endless.I anticipated reading until my eyes rotted this summer, but I haven't been so successful in that venture yet, my Sensei [Master Splinter] is a real ball buster, and the Japanese class I have takes up a lot more time and energy than I anticipated, along with that, I still have my own projects that I've been finding time for (time like now, I've been up since 4 AM). But, I'll better manage my time, and find time to do it. I'll get anything in regards to book tending and Gallowsizing (I made up a word there! It's an eponym too! I am so funny and clever!) done in the eeeearly morning, do my tedious studying in the afternoons, and then read my way to sleep at night, so I can dream up ways of legally plagiarizing the writers I adore, then say they're just paying homages like Quentin Tarantino.
Boy did that sentence ever run on. Speaking of which, I haven't gone running in ages. I guess my spirit had frozen over when I tried running in the winter and my legs froze in the middle of running. They found my legless body in a puddle of frozen blood 5 weeks later, and my legs weren't found until spring. Luckily they were able to sew them back on and they work like nothing ever happened.
So on that note, I'm going to embark on my summer reading, starting tonight. And because I feel like it, I'll list my planned summer reading here:
Reading Like a Writer - Francine Prose
After Dark - Haruki Murakami
The Curious Incident of the dog in the Night time - Mark Haddon
Metamorphosis -Franz Kafka
The Jesus Puzzle - Earl Doherty
A Dirty Job - Christopher Moore
The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man - Robert M. Price
Kitchen - Banana Yoshimoto
The Origin of Species - Charles Darwin
God is NOT Great - Christpher Hitchens
The Famished Road - Ben Okri
Lolita - Vladamir Nabokov
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski
The books vary in theme, subject matter, density, size, and taste, and you can also expect such variety in the thoughts of them I'll be expressing on here. They will range from brief blurbs, to long winded, book length raves/rants/ambivalences. It'll be interesting nonetheless, at least for me.
