Book of Numbers / J. Cohen

Trying to work up the will to take a look at this novel, which reviewers seem to be taking seriously, but can't seem to manage it; though I haven't heard from this New York doorstop producer in some while, so where's the harm? He didn't care for my email to him on the turgid piece of sludge he wrote some years ago about that pianist/composer, can't recall the title, a novel that was wacky and goofy but not funny.  I got as far as the scene, an apex of scatology, where the central character, about halfway through the book, climbs up on a piano, drops his trousers, and makes a deposit.

God save us from graphomaniacs who appear never to have been within ten feet of a Shakespeare bookcase.

Cf. N.O. Ting: "If you don't have something nice to say, by all means say it!"

Josh, why drop a little known author like a hot brick just for being, respectfully, honest? Honesty is not worthless. If you're one of these writers sensitive as a scrambled egg, toughen up old son! To conflate a respectful and honest assessment of one's work with a malice-driven vendetta is to do oneself a disservice. And what goes around . . . .

For a comic novel that will have you snickering and laughing out loud, take a look at Steve Toltz' A Fraction of the Whole, though I tend to regard him as a loser for not responding to my complimentary three-page single-spaced letter mailed c/o his publisher.

Bitter thumb-biting envy and Hibernian love of a good fight mingling in a true witches' brew, on this morning after a predominantly white night that has left one too tired to do what one should be doing. Okay, let's go out and make some enemies, the world is sixty-percent fictitious anyway--and permanently insusceptible to a satisfactory analytic. The world in its essence is unknowable! Try and stop me from saying it.

One of the major fictions being that the U.S. is a democracy. It's not a democracy, it's a rich guy's plaything.

As to climate change, the prudent and necessary steps to mitigate or stabilize it are not being taken and will not be taken because of the dehumanized and self-destructive nature of global capitalism and the stranglehold it has on governments worldwide. What's coming for civilization is a crumbling, gradual or otherwise, of the global economy and devolution back to the Dark Ages, or Semi-Dark Ages. Count on it.

But cf. Proust: "Political passions are like all the others--they flare up, they burn out."