Apocryphal butt enlargement stories

Hello internet, I just read two more books and bought approximately 100000 records of varying quality and stomped around in the snow and ice in my makeshift snow suit. I ate shit on Lake Street but survived to ride my bike around on ice like an idiot once more. Fun and exhilarating and sweaty and scary.

First of all I read In the Freud Archives (1984) by Janet Malcolm. I suspect I will read all of her books and not have much to say about them beyond relating anecdotes and being a bit wowed by her smarts. This book was also wonderful, rich with incisive and telling details and hilarious in its generational spats. Malcolm gets a lot of shit for being icy and mean, and I definitely see it and find it a bit off-putting at times, particularly when out of nowhere she slips herself into her writing. I feel totally blindsided in those moments, like "there's a real person behind this?" She's great though, and I will read more soon.

I read The Flamethrowers (2013) by Rachel Kushner too. Much has been written about her ear for dialogue and how incredible her writing is, and it is. Reno, the book's protagonist, is constantly on the receiving end of blather from her friends in the art world, long-winded men of various stripes from misogynist to neurotic (and undoubtedly the two intersect). She also suffers this fate at the hands of her boyfriend's mother, a cruel Italian plutocrat who relates the following anecdote:

A cousin who went to sub-Saharan Africa and was bitten by a tsetse fly and got elephantitis in his buttocks. He'd had to purchase special-order trousers with a gigantic seat, Sandro's mother said, and he slept with a platform extension at the side of the bed, to support his ass. (226)

This is a complete aside from the plot (though it is very much a part of what makes this book so wonderful, these details!), but it is up there in butt elephantitis stories with the one about the inaccuracy of the painting of Washington crossing the Delaware (due to thyroid issues, he had a gigantic butt and would have fallen out of the boat or sunken it entirely). Favorite historical apocrypha genre.

Anyway, Reno (we never learn her real name) comes to New York from Reno and falls in with the downtown art scene, and begins to date a wealthy son of privilege whose family owns a motorcycle and rubber empire. Reno had been a motorcycle racer and artist before, but now in New York she falls under the specter of the much older Sandro, whose connections in those worlds subsume her prior engagement with them. Kushner describes Sandro as elegant, yet all he seems to do is skirt away from his family's past and have sex with Reno in public. Reno is a great protagonist and narrator though, witty and observant and capable, and Kushner plops her down in the middle of these great times of upheaval and she completely holds her own. I found her eminently relatable and cool. A wonderful entertaining book about badass girls getting theirs.

Currently reading Wanderlust (2000) by Rebecca Solnit, more to come on that... I'm a huge fan of Solnit so I'm hoping it will become more focused as I read more, cuz right now it's a bit all over the place.

Can't stop jamming these songs below... It's funny the stuff you come around to.

 

 

 

Why do I feel gross after eating cookies and watching Trailer Park Boys all day? Ugh.