When: Monday, November 17th at 12:00pm

Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson will be discussing her new book, Leading Ladies: American Trailblazers, at the Barnes & Noble across from North Park Mall.

Barnes & Noble - Lincoln Park
7700 West Northwest Hwy. Ste. 300
Dallas, TX 75225
214-739-1124

About: Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-TX) is the first woman to represent Texas in the United States Senate. In 2000 she received more than 4 million votes for her re-election to second term in the US Senate, the highest number of votes ever received over any other statewide candidate. Hutchinson was named one of “The 30 Most Powerful Woman in America” in 2001 by Ladies Home Journal.

Related articles:
CNN.com - Texas senator may leave before term ends

{From Project X Theater}

Join the Board and Producers of Project X for a casual and intimate evening with acclaimed playwright, poet and fiction writer, Denis Johnson on November 8th at 7:30pm.

Mr. Johnson’s works include Tree of Smoke, which won the National Book Award in 2007 and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and the story collection Jesus’ Son, adapted into a film of the same name in 1999.

On March 6th, Project X and Kitchen Dog Theater will open the southwest premiere of Mr. Johnson’s new play, Psychos Never Dream.

Project X invites you to hear Mr. Johnson read from his works, glimpse a preview of Psychos Never Dream and enjoy a unique opportunity to visit face-to-face with one of the nation’s most critically acclaimed authors. Refreshments will be provided.

Trying to stay consistent with literary authors can be tough, and it can be discouraging to buy a book and find out you’re not into it 30 pages in. Luckily, there’s a website for that. What Should I Read Next? has over 47,000 books in their database. The site is easy to use - submit a title or author and voila! OK, it’s not magic (although sometimes I wish it were). The site goes through other users book lists and selects books you might enjoy too. Enter your email address (optional), and start creating your own book list and increase the websites database. I did register and submitted some of the books I’ve read over the last few months. While the recommendations were great, the site became unfriendly to use (confusing image symbols, an unusable list format). The search function was good enough for me.

Go to the site, pick out a book, and turn off that TV!

Shocking to go from Hemingway to Burroughs. This was evident on page 1 of Burroughs’ novel, Naked Lunch. Circling around junkies and “fezz”, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this new style of writing. Burroughs was all over the place. But it really didn’t matter. Because, either way, I wanted to keep going. The technical term for this is the cut-up technique, where the author rearranges text at random in order to interrupt the linear movement of normal literacy. Fascinating and weird. What is weird are the terms “flowing” on pages. My eyes grew large when I first starting reading, and my head sort of cocked to the right, and a sigh of “whoa” was driven around my mouth. I didn’t have an expectation going into the book, except knowing that Burroughs was one of the influential writers, along with Ginsberg and Kerouac, from the Beat Generation. The book was written in Tangiers, Morroco between 1954 and 1957. In 1959 the book was published in Paris, and by 1962 Naked Lunch was banned in many parts of the US because of the books obscenities. The Massachusetts Supreme Court found the book was of social value, therefore not obscene. The ruling marks one of the last major censorship cases in the US.

Tonight I finished reading The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway. If I ever travel to Spain, this is the book I will want to read on the way over. If I ever see bullfights or drink absinthe, this is the book I will think about while doing it. Hemingway is so eloquent when describing the environment around his characters. It’s so relatable. I had first felt that way when I read A Movable Feast. And now, after reading The Sun Also Rises, I feel even more attached with his writing, because it is so simple yet intelligent. I smile after reading sentences and breath out with admiration because it’s sometimes how I feel, but the words are not as beautiful when I do try and say. Here are only a few quotes I picked out; the entire book is a classic to read. I have a feeling this book will be like the movie I can watch over and over again.

“It was a good morning, there were high white clouds above the mountains. It had rained a little in the night and it was fresh and cool on the plateau, and there was a wonderful view. We all felt good and we felt healthy…. You could not be upset about anything on a day like that.
That was the last day before the fiesta.”

“I drank a bottle of wine for company.”

“Caffeine, we are here. Caffeine puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave.”

“It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, and ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.”

I picked up the book “Animal Farm” by George Orwell after the Borders books clerk had been in disbelief that I hadn’t read it. She had approached me earlier when she saw I had a Vonnegut book in hand. She told me about her first Vonnegut (”Breakfast of Champions“, mine too) and proceeded to tell me some of her favorite books over the last few years. I was flattered that she shared her favorite books with me. She couldn’t have been more than 18, and knows more about lit than when I was her age. I wonder where that came from for her?

For me, I thank my brother for giving me my first novel, one that I truly loved, “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac. That book had traveled with me from Bedford to San Diego to Bedford to Austin and then back to Bedford. It took five years for me to open that book, after returning home for the second time, and when I did I was instantaneously hooked on the writing and philosophy. I’ve read it three times since.

Last month I had the privilege to view the original scroll of “On the Road” at The Harry Ransom Center in Austin, TX. Kerouac’s style of writing, continuous & spontaneous prose, had moved him to cut large pieces of tracing paper and tape them together, cutting out the time it takes to manually insert another piece of paper into the typewriter and avoiding the thought interrupted. The scroll is approximately 120 feet. The exhibit displayed the first 40 ft.

Along with the book Choke, Jon Hall also let me borrow “Hell’s Angel’s” by Hunter S. Thompson. This guy had lived one crazy life and not to mention he also went out with quite a bang (really, I didn’t mean for that to be a pun). Thompson wrote about how the Hell’s Angels went from a California outlaw biker group to becoming a group of rapists and tyrants among the cities of America. It happened Labor Day weekend 1964, the weekend they all meet north of Big Sur to reunite and party with other members throughout the state. What happened that weekend would make them famous for being rumbling savages looking for young woman to gang bang. At least, that’s how the media, the state, and law enforcement made it out to seem. Thompson is going to tell us a different story.

I’m currently reading Slaughterhouse-Five. This is the second Kurt Vonnegut book I’ve read. The first one, “Breakfast of Champions” was brilliant writing, and if you haven’t read it, you must. Towards the end I couldn’t stop smiling and saying out loud “oh, shit” as he creatively places himself in the bar as the “creator” of one of his characters, Kilgore Trout. It was so beautiful. If you ever hear me reference “Goodbye, Blue Monday”, Breakfast of Champions is why. So, on to Slaughterhouse.

Here’s the synopsis via Amazon.com:

Kurt Vonnegut’s absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut’s) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.

I’m at office, catching up on last week’s work. I’m looking forward to going home and making a dent into the Vonnegut novel. Also looking forward to Sunday for some reason.

Excellent Quote from the book:

“That was one of the things about the end of the war: Absolutely anybody who wanted a weapon could have one. They were lying all around.”

So true.

I am currently reading “Choke” by Chuck Palahniuk. Really an awesome book so far.

Here’s the synopsis from Amazon:

“Victor Mancini is a ruthless con artist. Victor Mancini is a med-school dropout who’s taken a job playing an Irish indentured servant in a colonial-era theme park in order to help care for his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother. Victor Mancini is a sex addict. Victor Mancini is a direct descendant of Jesus Christ. All of these statements about the protagonist of Choke are more or less true. Welcome, once again, to the world of Chuck Palahniuk.

“Art never comes from happiness.” So says Mancini’s mother only a few pages into the novel. Given her own dicey and melodramatic style of parenting, you would think that her son’s life would be chock-full of nothing but art. Alas, that’s not the case. In the fine tradition of Oedipus, Stephen Dedalus, and Anthony Soprano, Victor hasn’t quite reconciled his issues with his mother. Instead, he’s trawling sexual-addiction recovery meetings for dates and purposely choking in restaurants for a few moments of attention. Longing for a hug, in other words, he’s settling for the Heimlich.”

This book was recommended and borrowed from my co-worker Hall. “Choke” is novel and was released in 2001.

There’s also a movie coming out in September so I recommend reading the book first. Check out the trailer on Cinematical’s website. The movie will star Sam Rockwall and Angelika Huston.