Tag Archives: floating library

TFL #50

Books

For the 50th installment of The Floating Library, I take a look at a Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. An excerpt:

A friend of mine went into a bookstore in Los Angeles and asked the man behind the counter if they had a copy of Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon. My friend had heard the buzz surrounding the film adaptation by Paul Thomas Anderson, and he wanted to read the novel first. A reasonable request, but the bookseller wasn’t accommodating.

“You don’t want to read that,” he said.

Read the rest of the column here. Thanks for taking this voyage into books with me — here’s to the next 50! 

There’s been a ton of great writing about True Detective and its influenes in the weeks leading up to it finale on Sunday night. Here’s a closer look at the ur text of True Detective source material, Robert Chambers’s The King in Yellow. 

An element of the supernatural hangs over the stories like black stars over Carcosa. These elements do a marvelous job of distracting the reader from the fact that none of the narrators can be believed. It matters less that their sanity has been compromised than the fact that their accounting of events is highly suspect. If you’ve been paying attention to True Detective, you know that the detectives’ unreliability is crucial to the how the story-within-the-story unfolds. 

Addicted to… Cats?

Books, , , ,

In celebration of Bill Burroughs’ birthday month I wrote a pair of reviews about the drug-loving author of Naked Lunch. First I tackled Barry Miles’ new biography, Call Me Burroughs, a fascinating examination of all phases of the author’s life. 

“Call Me Burroughs” is riddled with weird anecdotes laced with gallows humor, bizarre coincidences and profane punch lines. It’s a massive undertaking made complicated by Burroughs’ peripatetic lifestyle and rampant drug use.

Then I took a look at a book that El Hombre Invisible wrote late in life called The Cat Inside. 

I’m not sure what’s stranger—that Bill Burroughs, the godfather of punk, lifetime dope addict and firearms fetishist, wrote a book about his cats or that, in it, you’ll find lines like this:

“… [A] scarlet orange and green cat with reptile skin, a long sinewy neck and poison fangs—the venom is related to the blue-ringed octopus: two steps you fall on your face, an hour later you’re dead…”

That’s classic Burroughs at his hardboiled finest. But cats? Seriously?

Seriously.