Better late than never at all....still not in that great a mood, and the death of Jason Molina was fucking shattering (organ failure from alcoholism at thirty-nine), but I don't want to get completely out of the habit. Baby steps. Baby steps on the bus.
What did you just finish reading?
Uhh, some truly awful trashy true crime books, both nonfiction and novels. A little more seriously, Constance: The Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde, which was very sluggish at first and all about Constance and Oscar's external doings to a maddening extent (she appeared dressed like this! he went off on a lecture tour dressed like that!), but then picked up the terrible tragic weight that the downhill slope of Oscar's story always does. (You have to wonder if Oscar's apparent suicidality in bringing the original libel case, and then later going back to Bosie and abandoning Constance after prison, didn't derive from a deep wish for his life to seem a perfect Greek tragedy.) We don't really get a better picture of Constance -- that might be impossible now -- but at least she doesn't come off as a simpering ignorant stereotypical Victorian female dupe. (Interestingly, she might have written or at least collaborated on the fairy tale "The Selfish Giant," which was used as a framing device in the visually lush but psychologically unconvincing 1997 Wilde -- that presented the very odd spectacle of Jude Law and Stephen Fry being perfectly cast with pretty much nothing to act.)
What are you reading now?
Salt Sugar Fat, which is threatening to do for processed "food" what Fast Food Nation did for Mickey D's. The real evil of a lot of corporate executives, and the bizarre moral neutrality of a lot of "food science" researchers (who are just like the tobacco industry researchers -- the book makes the point, over and over again, that the giant tobacco companies own the giant food companies, and often use the same advertising tactics) is horrifying. You can read along with my bogglement here. The really unsettling thing is how deeply corruption, greed and exploitation is woven into corporate culture: they're the butchers, and we're the cattle. Like most people I first heard of this book after reading the author's New York Times article, which is a pretty good summary, but lacks the building horror that comes from his piling detail upon detail, page after page.
What do you expect to read next?
A dear friend just showered me with a lot of NYRB books, so I'm utterly spoiled for choice here. Fermor! Zweig! Bernhard! Blackwood! I'm having fun just looking through the titles. It cheered me up quite a bit.
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