Once upon the edge...

February 28 to March 4, 1976

I didn’t finish much that week!

Picked-Up Pieces, John Updike
My note was: "just a few"
Gorge Eliot, the Emergent Self, Ruby V Redinger
My note was: "appallingly incoherently written, skimmed in self-defense." I did, and do, like George Eliot, but evidently not Redinger.

On Being Funny, Woody Allen and Comedy, Eric Lax
Approaching Oblivion, Harlan Ellison
All the Livelong Day, Barbara Garson

My note on Lax, Ellison and Garson—"never quite finished these, rather depressing." When I looked up Barbara Garson, I see that she wrote MacBird. As a Shakespeare fan and a protester against the Vietnam war, I still remember reading MacBird, including where I sat in the sunlight on the campus at UC Riverside in 1967. The parody of MacBeth was published by Grassy Knoll Press! Garson's MacBird cast Lyndon Johnson as MacBeth. But I don’t remember whether that registered with me when I read (at least some of) All the Livelong Day in 1976.


February 28 to March 4, 2006, I read:

Liquor, Poppy Z. Brite

In her interesting blog, Brite reveals an picture impressive tattoo of St. Joseph that she promised she would get if she could negotiate a change in the focus of her career. That transition (and tattoo) were accomplished. But encountering her earlier work and her more recent work at the same time, my impression is that Brite is a good enough writer that if something interests her, she can take the reader along for the ride.

Liquor is very different from Lost Souls and Drawing Blood. The earlier, horror tales took a homoerotic view of the teenaged heroes, with openly predatory villains, and lots of gore, decay and death-wish-on-the-highway scenes. Liquor is homoerotic soap opera with complicated villains and restaurant kitchen porn. The only decay in Liquor is aged cheese, wine, and maybe the steaks. The blitzkrieg partying of the horror books has narrowed down to a passionately committed gay couple in their 20s, who are both cooks, and trying to make it in the New Orleans restaurant world. They have an opportunity to open a restaurant using their dream idea. But they end up uncertain whether they have essentially sold their souls in order to get the money to open fulfill their dream.

Outsiders : 22 All-New Stories From the Edge, Nancy Holder, Nancy Kilpatrick (ed)

I was interested to see if the Poppy Z. Brite story in this book was a transition between her earlier work and her work in Liquor, but in fact the story was a snippet from the earlier lives of the heroes of the Liquor series—who qualified as Outsiders because of their sexual orientation, I guess.

Most of the rest of the short stories (with a few exceptions) were—as advertised, on the edge. Lordy, I haven’t been near the edge in decades and I ain’t interested in going, thank you very much. Most of these stories were too far over to the “splatter punk” type of atmosphere to be my kind of thing so it would be an exercise in futility to try to judge them.