Biblioklept

I have always loved the month of May. Spring semester is usually over and done by the last week of April and I seem to breathe a little easier. I love May Day and there’s always been a neat little run of interesting dates in the first week, including my wedding anniversary. (My silly ass has taken to including Thomas Pynchon’s birthday as the capstone to the first week of Merry May). I get that May the Fourth is stupid, but it seemed fun when my kids were little, and I get that Cinco de Mayo, even with its roots in the Chicano movement, is probably now just a marketing tool for amateurs to do it up, a la St. Paddy’s Day and NYE. But it’s fun to have a little treat. My best friend died on 5 May 2025 though and I was dreading the date, although the anxiety over it was worse than the actual day. But then I dreamed about him for a few weeks straight. The month seemed incredibly long but at least the terrible drought in Florida broke with heavy heavy rains.

The wife and I make a point to sneak in an anniversary trip in early May. We spent a few nights in the Wynwood neighborhood of Miami and saw Belle & Sebastian perform their 1996 album If You’re Feeling Sinister in full. I felt incredibly old but it was magical. I’ve never been a big fan of Miami, but we had some good meals and enjoyed talking to a few of the artists at the Bakehouse Art Complex. This is the closest I actually got to a bookstore in Miami. Bookleggers is not actually a bookstore, it’s a free library, and it wasn’t open, although there was a loaded library cart full of titles out for offer. I love the idea and if I lived down there I’d pop in to donate at least once a month.

But on to books!

I’ve wormed into William H. Gass’s massive novel The Tunnel again. This is like my fourth or fifth serious attempt. I love Gass’s essays and shorter fiction, but I find that I stall out. My tactic this time has been to read one section a day, or at least to try to. I’m somewhere around page 160 now, and I think I’ve finally gotten into the “story,” or whatever, but it’s all pretty damn windy, and Gass’s penchant for alliteration, which I enjoy in short doses, is, like, too much (there’s a moment where the narrator remarks his wife’s calling him out on all the alliteration; I didn’t dogear it though).

I’ve also stalled a bit on Guillermo Stitch’s The Coast of Everything; I was attempting the same approach as that I’ve taken to The Tunnel — a section a day — but I keep getting distracted by shorter morsels, like Gabriel García Márquez’s In Evil Hour and Chronicle of a Death Foretold (both in translation by Gregory Rabassa, of course). Chronicle was even better than I’d remembered; In Evil Hour was rough, mean, and short.

The pictured stack is not all May reading, although I did read and review Antoine Volodine’s novel The Monroe Girls (tr. Alyson Waters) in early May.  I read and reviewed Thomas Kendall’s How I Killed the Universal Man in April; I then read Joanna Russ’s And Chaos Died and meant to review it and kept moving it up the stack and then eventually lost track. On Bluesky, I tweeted that I was “baffled by the whole thing. Like if Kathy Acker wrote a sci-fi psionic satire. Very weird, I think I loved it, it might not be a ‘good’ novel.” That’s still basically my memory. I picked up a first edition Grove Press copy of WSB’s The Ticket That Exploded and I now have to reshelve all the Burroughs which means I have to reshelve a whole bookcase. So it can hang there for awhile.

I gave up pretty quickly on Stanley Crawford’s Gascoyne — probably too quickly — but I wanted the weirder flavor of his slim 1972 novel Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine. I ended up reading Crawford’s 2005 novel Petroleum Man over two nights and loving every minute of the experience. I highly recommend the novel, as well as Dan Visel’s 2010 review of the novel at his blog With Hidden Noise. I also recommend the blog With Hidden Noise, which was somehow not on my radar fifteen or some such years ago, but which I have very much enjoyed browsing now, which is to say over the past few days. There’s a rich backlog there. I lament too often that There Aren’t Any Good Websites Anymore, but maybe I don’t look enough; maybe I’m guilty of spending too much of my internet time on social media sites. The first book I mentioned here was by William H. Gass; I’ll take my offramp from this cursed blog by suggesting you read a real blog post, this With Hidden Noise post on Gass’s On Being Blue, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, and Thomas Browne.