If you’re wondering why I haven’t posted for ages then you haven’t been following my tumblog. Anyway, I’ve just broken a several-months-long spell of reader’s block. Not sure what it was. It probably started when I picked up “The Brothers Karamazov.” I wanted to read something hard. So I picked a doozie. As the page turning slowly decelerated over the course of a couple of months, I soon began to grow disillusioned. I’d told myself I wouldn’t go back to reading multiple books at a time. (I’d at one point had about a dozen books with dog-eared pages and could barely remember any of them.) But I also didn’t want to give up on the ol’ Brothers K. So fast-forward many moons and I hadn’t read much at all.
So I hid TBK under the bed and pulled out something a bit more colorful. “Filth” is the story of a man descending into disrepair of the soul and madness. It contains what must be the most vile and despicable antihero in all literature. The main character is a racist, misogynist, foul-mouthed cocaine addict, as well as a corrupt police officer with loose morals who’ll fuck anything that happens by and then berate them afterward. He betrays and sets up for disaster those he would feign friendship with, and then puts them down and says they deserve it. On top of it all, he abandons personal hygiene, has a nasty crotch rash, and carries a tapeworm around in his gut. But the tapeworm is more than just a parasite. It starts speaking to him, giving him instructions and even acting as his conscience when he does things particularly cruel.
“Filth” is the kind of book that when you reach the halfway point you realize that there’s no way this character can redeem himself to bring about a happy ending. Likewise, there’s no ending that could make the story feel more sordid than it already is.
I simultaneously was annoyed by and enjoyed the eccentric spelling and grammar meant to reproduce a heavy Scottish accent. At times I couldn’t even translate, and some cultural references went right over my sheltered American head.
In any case, this blue book with a $4.95 price tag on the front hopefully has restarted my regular reading schedule. I’ll try to get through some more quickly.
I’ve spent the last few weeks helping put together a year-end music compilation that The Bulletin is giving away. It’s one disc of Central Oregon bands and one disc of national acts. Of course, whether you choose to actually make discs is up to you. But I put some effort into the included printable sleeves! (Oh, and if you want the jewel insert version, e-mail me. I can probably hook you up.)
Visit www.bendbulletin.com/nearfar to download The Bulletin’s free two-disc compilation Near/Far, containing 30 MP3s from Central Oregon and national acts. No subscription required. Includes songs from The Shins, Arcade Fire, Aesop Rock, Band of Horses, plus Person People, The Roe, The Mostest, Coyo and more.
p.s. I apologize if your download is slow. It’s not my fault.
Just uploaded another shot from New Zealand. I’ve had this folder full of pictures I’ve been meaning to stitch into a panorama for a while. Follow the link to the Flickr page for the full image.
Does it seem strange that I’ve been using Google Reader for more than a year and it just now lets me search me feeds?
A Google product. Lacked search for a year.
Anyway, I’m glad as hell to have it. I can’t tell you how many times I could have used this feature in the last year.
I’ve known about Google Docs since way back when Writely was first acquired. Up until now I’ve never really thought it was that useful. But over the past few days I’ve been finding myself working on some word processing documents both at work and at home, so I decided to give Docs a try. So far, I’m impressed. It’s feature-rich, and pretty stable. Hell, it seems to work faster than Word ever has on my Powerbook. Browser-based applications have the unfortunate characteristic of having their most powerful feature also being their greatest weakness; Because Google Docs is online and accessed through a Web browser, I can get to my stuff from anywhere without have to copy any files from one place to another. But the downside is, I have to be connected to the Web in order to use it.Not that that’s a huge problem. Let’s face it, a modern computer not connected to the Internet is crippled. And what with the growing ubiquity of Wi-Fi, there are very few places I would want to take my Powerbook that wouldn’t have Web access.
So, for the moment, Google Docs is finding it’s way into my everyday work and personal writing. As a matter of fact, I’m writing this entry from Google Docs.
Some features I love:
- The ability to E-mail the currently open document both as the body of the email or as an attachment in a variety of formats.
- Collaborating on documents. (Although I haven’t actually gotten to use this yet.)
- Being able to check all past revisions of the document.
- The ability to export in practically any format.
Some features I’d love to see:
- Easier insertion of special characters. (You know all those Adobe character shortcuts? Those are great…)
- Ability to upload PDF documents just like I upload Word and OpenOffice documents.
- “Preview” mode that shows page margins and accurate line breaks.
- Ability to Save As an external document format, work on that document in an external application (let’s say while offline in the woods or something), and then upload the document so it “re-joins” the original document as the next revision.
- Better find and replace.
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