The backbone of colonial America and where-house sales
- November 1st, 2008
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Chuck Palahniuk is of that rare strain of writer.
He violates us with the most extreme characters, but they’re so utterly believable, that we’d just lie down and gratefully push a few hundred in their pockets afterward.
5g33k and I watched Choke last night.
A sex addict support group, a potential half-clone of Jesus Christ, an ingenious restaurant choking scam, a fucked-up childhood, a mad mother who meant well and a doctor willing to get herself impregnated in the hospital chapel in order to carry out a radical stem cell procedure. And there’s more.
All of it plausible.
I haven’t read the book this was based on, and therefore can’t make any judgements on the medium migration, but I could see Palahniuk in almost all the pixels.
I may be writing out of my ass here, but what I got out of it was a portrait of damaged people, searching and failing.
I like that about Palahniuk; that as much as the people he creates are so tremendous and weird, there are little filaments running through them that seal the connection with the reader/watcher.
You may not be a chronic masturbator, but when you see Denny draw the stripper as a perfect female form, you’re taken right back to those moments where you felt total acceptance of a beloved.
The journey you take with the protagonist Victor Mancini, is one you may still be on, even though you might never find yourself naked in an unlocked airplane bathroom.
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Exclusive Books sent out a mass email informing Fanatics cardholders of their warehouse sale. They spelt ‘members’ as ‘memebers’ in their email subject line. I think that most of us bloggers are meme-bers.
Back to the ware/wherehouse sale. The dulcet tones of the GPS dominatrix lead me to Strijdom park where I expected to find a huge structure bursting its zinc with covetable titles.
I was disappointed to find a selection that took me all of 20 minutes to browse through.
I came home with two facepainting kits and fairy stories for the brats, three photobooks with accompanying soundtracks (the American Cars and Cuban beats for my uncle, the Sax! and Moods of La Habana for myself), Terry Pratchett’s Thud!, Alduous Huxley’s Those Barren Leaves, a Marie Claire Breakfast recipe book and The Bollywood Cookbook for my mum (ta for the heads up Kaye).
More to add to the pile of the unread. Whereas I used to eat up entire days reading, now I tend to digest books in spurts, little bites before bed or huge gastronomies on rare Sunday mornings. I’m currently gnawing on Lita Epstein’s If you can’t say anything nice, say it in Yiddish. To the recent vermin carrying the blogosphere plague, “Zolst es shtupin in toches arayn.”
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NaNoWriMo 2008. It’s the first hour of Day 2 and my word count is bleak. Forget bleak, try non-existent. It’s November’s fault. Months that start on the weekend have no real ooomph about them. I’ll start writing on Monday.
Did I convince you?
