after a number of/ revolutions you’ll// feel something catch.
Ah, back in New York. Chicago and Iowa City were absurdly fun, at least as much as I could make it. Iowa City was so much more fuckin’ awesome than I could have thought a town in the midwest could possibly be. I have an apartment now, and I plan to move in around August 9th.
pictures of iowa city, the flood, miscellaneous debauchery:
grilled cheese vendor!!!! :
me enjoying the grilled cheese thoroughly:
On the plane ride back into La Guardia Airport I finished a novella by Andrew Dubus called Adultery, which, because of its blatantly middle-age concerns, bored the piss out of me. The hardest part of getting through Adultery is that I couldn’t divorce Dubus from the book: I feel like all the stories he ever writes concern middle-aged affairs, adultery, a writer character (like John Irving), dissatisfied wives, malcontent husbands… bla bla bla. But by the end of the second section (Adultery is divided in four sections), I was able to see how touching Dubus’ prose really is, and by the end of the novella I was almost in tears. Luckily, and old lady sitting next to me reading The Power of Faith or some other book with a similar title, well, she wasn’t crying, and if her god-book wasn’t making her cry, then I could sure as hell suck it up for a book that only hours earlier bored me to the point of head-slamming. Definitely the kind of literary fiction I could recommend to my mother.
Also, at the Prairie Lights bookstore in Iowa City I bought:
More to come.
July 1, 2008 at 10:55 pm
Ah, New Addresses–the first Koch book I read in its entirety. It was a good place to start.
I bought Harvey’s book just recently, with a note from the author inside. (My feelings are somewhat mixed on the work so far, though I’ve definitely liked it enough to keep reading.)
July 1, 2008 at 11:09 pm
yeah i’m excited for koch.
as for harvey, i’ve read about half & think she comes up with a lot of neat words and lines but i can almost never figure out how they cohere. it gives her poems a very surfacey feeling, like the girl in class who is a really unique kind of pretty but also incapable of feeling. it might be unfair to make premature judgments though.
-ally