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    some fresh book reviews

    Here's some of the books I've finished in the last two months or so, along with some capsule reviews:

    Justice League America: World War Three, by Grant Morrison & co.
    Grant Morrison closes his run on JLA with a bang, taking us from Atlantis to Heaven to cosmic space in a dogged determination to out-do every previous comic-book end-of-the-world storyline. The result is hyper-kinetic and deliriously crammed: a psychedelic mandala made out of superheroes. There's no room for (much) character development here, but amid the fireworks there are still moments where the story manages to feel surprisingly moving and personal. A blast.

    Kalpa Imperial, by Angelica Gorodischer
    Fabulist allegories investigating the relationship between power, humanity, and storytelling, using Empire as the central metaphor. Often fascinating, although the book has a tendency to skew towards abstraction: this has the feature of making the stories feel more universal (a plus) but also saps them of concrete details that would make them more memorable.

    Oblivion, by David Foster Wallace
    Strong collection from Wallace, with the opening and closing stories ("Mister Squishy" and "The Suffering Channel") being the high-water marks. These two stories are perhaps the strongest pieces of fiction I have ever read about life in corporate America, revealing yet another vast field of human experience that Wallace has seemingly obtained mastery over. Impressive.

    The Garden of the Departed Cats, by Bilge Karasu
    Strange narrative about a traveller who grows embroiled into a conspiracy / human chess game, interspersed periodically with fables, metafictions and allegories. Sounds promising: the combo of "fantastic tales plus framing narrative" recalls Calvino, and the tales themselves are akin to Kafka's parables. But in the end, the book misfires more often than it connects, rendering these comparisons tragically superficial.

    Time Maps, by Eviatar Zerubavel
    Brief, readable book about the ideology of historical narratives and timekeeping systems (i.e., the calendar). I'm no stranger to the ideological dimension of the quotidian, so the revelations on hand here didn't feel especially startling, but having so many examples so accessibly presented kept the book enjoyable.

    All of these reviews are mirrored over at my LibraryThing page, for those of you who are into that sort of thing. Plus they're also on the Raccoon Books page for the year-in-progress.

    Since the year's almost over, some year-in-review posts will appear soon (my anuual one for albums of the year and for books of the year). But I'm still on the road, moving ever further north and not logging a lot of time on the computer, so those posts may not appear until early 2007. Stay tuned.

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    Friday, December 29, 2006
    11:54 AM
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    mix geekery

    I've been working hard this week on working out my students' final grades, so updates to this blog may be sporadic. Er, more so.

    The good news is: I think I've finished my year-end mixes, featuring notable tracks that came out this year. It's a two-disc affair, as usual, with one being "Instrumentals" and one being "Songs."

    I listened to a pretty eclectic mix of things this time around, which leads the song mix down some interesting paths: I'm proud to say that I managed to get from Sunn O))) to Beyonce with only one intervening track (later on the disc I do the same one-degree-of-separation thing with Gnarls Barkley and Joanna Newsom). General observation is that this year's disc is more pop and dance-oriented than in years past: almost the entire disc is upbeat and jubilant, which is kind of a surprise given how much this year actually sucked.

    On the flip side of the coin the Instrumentals disc is mostly slabs of abrasive texture: Myrtu, Jazkammer (in their black metal configuration), Axolotl, etc. That's just the way this year went down.

    If either of these discs sound like something you want, and if you're not sure that you're already on the list of annual recipients, use the comments box below or drop me a line: "projects" at this domain.

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    Tuesday, December 12, 2006
    10:21 AM
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    raccoon audio: let's boogey to the elf dance

    For each of the past five years, Sufjan Stevens has released an EP of Christmas-themed songs, both traditional carols and originals (now collected in the Songs For Christmas box set). I heard a few of these last year around this time, and was struck by the way that they play up Stevens' central strength (his skill at composing unusual arrangments) while completely sidestepping his central weakness (his tendency towards pretention).

    Take, for instance, today's track, "Let's Boogey To The Elf Dance." Its palpable aura of casual goodwill and all-around lightheartedness are so winning that I find myself preferring it to nearly all of the more (self-consciously?) "important" tracks on [Greetings From] Michigan and [Come On Feel the] Illinois[e].

    [Related: I often have a hard time stomaching material by The Decemberists, whose tendency to indulge in twee anachronism is by now so shtick-y that you could essentially make a drinking game out of it (1 shot each time Colin Meloy mentions a European place-name; 1 more each time he mentions an occupation that existed in the 19th century). It is for this reason that my favorite Decemberists song is "Apology Song," about something as modest as a stolen bike.]

    Thanks to Ray and Rich T. (respectively) for gifting me these tracks.

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    Friday, December 08, 2006
    2:12 PM
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    raccoon audio: rag for william s burroughs

    So if you were to ever make a 10-minute film about the life of William S. Burroughs, you could use this Matmos track as your soundtrack. Gunshots, adding machine sounds, Jajoukan pipes: this cut has it all. (If I were to quibble, I'd say they should have faded out into the sound of purring cats in the final minute, but otherwise, spot-on.)

    From Matmos' new(ish) album, The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth of A Beast, which is a suite of ten songs, each dedicated to a different deceased queer.

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    Tuesday, December 05, 2006
    6:32 PM
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