Who’s ready for Pacific State? Not me!
The advance review copies are out, the book blog tours are booked, and the world is waiting with baited breath to see if the people’s climate fiction champion, Grant Price, can follow up on the non-smash-hit Reality Testing with a deeper, more complex, more mature and more acerbic textual examination of the climate-ravaged corporatocracy. The only way to find out is to BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY. Fell those trees for my books! Fork over your cash to Amazon! Perpetuate the cycle!
A new low this month in Novel Heaven, Short Story Hell: a short story I submitted in April 2022 was returned to me with the note: “Thank you so much for trusting us with your work! As we are revamping our magazine as a poetry chapbook publisher, we have decided to return all submissions to their owners”. I think I paid a $10 fee for that. Strange business, literature.
Book of the month: Shuggie Bain. Heartbreaking, bittersweet and beautiful. Like a Ken Loach film written by Betty Smith, I devoured this novel (way after everyone else jumped on it beacuse of the Booker thing). The writing is deceptively simple, the characters reassuringly complex, and more than once I wanted to reach into the world created by Douglas Stuart and lift poor Shuggie out of it. This is a book that mums and high-falutin’ dudes alike can love in the same and different ways. It also reminded me of one of the best comedy sketches of all time.
Album of the month: If I divide it evenly between The Beggar by Swans and The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess by Chappell Roan, will I be accused of being so pretentious that I could give Paul Auster a run for his money? I don’t care. I like them both. Swans because it’s maybe Gira’s greatest accomplishment, Roan because why would I ever say no to saccharine-laced-with-fuck-you synthpop.
Film of the month: So I watched The Faculty for the first time since I was 14. What a weird film. Salma Hayek shows up for like two scenes. Robert Patrick plays the T1000. Usher is a shit-talking football star. Josh Hartnett is a 28-year-old high school student with weird hair. There’s a whole ten-minute-long scene that’s an ‘homage’ (rip-off) to The Thing. It doesn’t feel like a Robert Rodriguez movie, not beyond a few superficial flashes of style (sure, why not introduce the main characters with a freeze frame and their names written in graffitti like it’s The Warriors?). It’s still fascinating, though. And short. Just as I was properly settling into it, there was the final boss trying to murder Mr Frodo in the school’s own Olympic-sized swimming pool. Definitely worth watching again.
Profuse music:
1 Jun Fukamachi - Urban Square
2 Tangerine Dream - Rain in the Third House
4 Ana Roxanne - It’s a Rainy Day on the Cosmic Shore
5 Japan - The Experience of Swimming
6 Steve Hillage - Garden of Paradise
