my cats only love me because i feed them

Have you guys read Fugue State yet? I just returned it to the library. I guarantee that I will only remember the bleeding eyes when it comes time to meet again. And playing ponies. Except maybe that I'm not sure if that was the same book. But that's okay, right? I'll just be like the surly undergrad in the insane clown posse tee. You will appreciate me for my commitment to character. Maybe I'll check it out again.

I wish there were some way to see who else/how many other people had checked out books before you now that the little stampy pages are gone. I wish that the internet actually let us spy on people more. Maybe we should all mount webcams around our houses. We can be the girls of Venom Literati. Gross.

Weather Enticement

I would like to announce, for Literati who may be considering moving eastward, that tomorrow it will be 48 degrees here and sunny. Weather is important to mental health. This is a public service announcement, brought to you by Venom Literati - Cincinnati Branch.

let's state our allegiance.

Okay, you got me. I like plot.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about how I read, which means I am a 'uge nerd. More particularly, I have been thinking about how I read vs. how I watch TV or movies. When I watch TV, I am willing to subject myself to the lowest, most banal, most repugnant things, and what's more, I enjoy it. I am not ashamed to admit I like the Bad Girls Club, for example, and all they do is shout nonsense at each other in a repetitive way. I can pretend to think intellectual things about it, but really it just fascinate me because of what it is. And then afterwards I feel sort of gross and overexposed. So why am I such a snob about reading, or more accurately, closeted about occasionally reading things that are not also, like, art?

Confession part two: I really like plot.

I read both "Fugue State" by Brian Evenson and "The Dolphin People" by Torsten Krol over the weekend. I liked both of them immensely. "Fugue State" seems like literary horror, which is one of my favorite things, and reading "The Dolphin People" was very much like watching an adventure movie in my brain. I hope I am not discouraging you from reading "Fugue State," Kathy. The words in it are really very good, too. It's not a plot-only book.

The moral of this post is that I'm going to watch less TV and read more like I watch TV. More widely and less ashamedly. I am going to reject things that don't interest me partway through, like flipping the channel, and sometimes I'll read things that verge on chick lit. As long as they're funny. And well-written enough. I'll still read poetry. I'll still read lots of stuff from small presses. It's unlikely that I'll start reading celebrity autobiographies to substitute for the E! network, but I'm probably going to read some other terrible things. And tell you all about them. So there.

So...what's our next book?

I watched a Dr. Phil episode sometime during the last week, and it turns out that teens are having sex. America is outraged. Dr. Phil cannot believe it either.

I am reading something called "Fugue State" and something else called "The Dolphin People." I am not sure either of those is appropriate for us.

Kathy wants us to read Robert Lopez. I have not discussed this with her. I can just sense it.

Wait, I just started looking things up and discovered everyone loves "Fugue State." I've barely begun it. I've only read "Fugue." Maybe that should be our book. What do you think? Here it is:http://brianevenson.com/fugue.html. It's hallucinatory and darkly comic. That sounds like us.