Meta-coverage

Omnivoracious reviews the remix of the notes on A Monster's Notes, after first reviewing the original review.

Nice!

We're not done yet.

OR ARE WE.

(Stitching in this side note: Tom tantalizingly suggests the upcoming Vollmann, Imperial, is the contemporary Anatomy of Melancholy.)

Wet, unpredictable

Stelarc is commented on in Sheck's A Monster's Notes.

A remix of my remix of my AMN review would include this recent Telegraph story:

Writing on his website, Stelarc explains part of the reason for the ear is a potentially extended Bluetooth system, where the receiver and speaker are position inside his mouth.

Jenny wrote about a book on Stelarc in her "field guide to genetic engineering and bodily enhancement" a while back:

A demonstration of his prosthetic Extended Arm brings tears to one essayist's eyes, reminding her of the persistence and pathos of bodily attachments. Whether it's pierced and suspended from cables, scaffolded in metal prostheses, or penetrated by a miniature camera that broadcasts from inside his intestinal tract, Stelarc's body remains "wet, unpredictable, emotively disorderly, itself a technological marvel."

Notes on Notes on "Notes" (for Jacket Copy's "PoMo Month")

Last week, columnist Ed Park reviewed "A Monster's Notes" by Laurie Sheck.

This is his remixed, expanded, deconstructed/reconstructed remake of that review.

—Jacket Copy (L.A. Times)



A SAMPLE:

Page 271, in its entirety: ". . . The monks in their patchwork rags . . . and I a patchwork . . . the workings of each mind a patchwork, each self roughly stitched as you stitched me."

“Winter darkness pulls over like a monk’s cowl, enclosing us in worlds where strange things take place, where anything can happen, where the mind goes where it’s never gone before, and stays.” -- Gretel Ehrlich, "The Future of Ice"

Fungibility of the notebook mode. Juxtaposition is easy, at times even arbitrary; effects perhaps no less revelatory or pungent.

On Amazon’s Omnivoracious blog, Tom writes: “Ed Park's notes on 'A Monster's Notes' by Laurie Sheck: ‘I started this review before finishing the book, in the form of notes. I didn't know I was writing the review yet. I have another file just as long. Fungibility of the notebook mode. Juxtaposition is easy, at times even arbitrary; effects perhaps no less revelatory or pungent.’ [His notes weren't really revelatory for me -- what do you think?]”

I think you’re wrong.

And we’re not done yet.

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Photo: Director James Whale, left, with actor Boris Karloff on break from the 1931 filming of "Frankenstein." Credit: Los Angeles Times

The armor of the venetian blinds

New Astral Weeks, on Laurie Sheck's A Monster's Notes:

R. e-mails me that our friend J. has to take blood pressure medication because she drinks too much coffee, which makes me laugh. But also that J. "had this horrifying story about recently running into a crime scene near her house where a man had been cut into little pieces in a box." Which makes me think I will never get to sleep. I do, but in the middle of the night a storm centers itself overhead. I am not dreaming and now I understand the term "rolling thunder," the noise caroming like a ball in a roulette wheel, a ball the size of 20 baseball stadiums, a wheel with a diameter the length of Manhattan. Car alarms go off. I silently count the seconds before, or is it after, lightning penetrates the armor of the venetian blinds, to scrape my eyes and shock the bedsheets silver.