Vulgarmonkey

Only if you want a ton of traffic

2005-01-16T04:38:00.000-08:00

Blogclicker, really does work, I've been getting a ton of vistors out of this thing, and it's growing rapidly, I suggest you do it before it gets worthless like blogexplosion.

Racism

2005-01-16T03:56:00.000-08:00

(CBS) Taye Diggs, the stage, film and TV star, has been coping with some very real drama.

He and his wife, Tony-winner Idina Menzel, have gotten hate mail spurred by their interracial marriage.

2005-01-13T17:11:00.000-08:00

(CNN) -- Britain's Prince Harry "deserves a break" after his apology for wearing a Nazi uniform to a costume party, his aunt, the Duchess of York, has told CNN.

Harry, third in line for the British throne, was pictured on the front page of Thursday editions of Britain's The Sun newspaper wearing a swastika on his sleeve at the party. The 20-year-old was also holding a drink and smoking a cigarette. The rest here.

The royals lost me on this one. I was all in favor of retaining them (not that I have a say), but this one got me. The inbreeding has obviously dimmed the intellect of the current crop, the need for someone to usurp the throne of England is evident...who's with me???? I need plane fare.

On a serious note, there are actually people who defend this snotty little fucker who is probably too dumb to recognize what his uniform meant. At least I hope that's what it is. Of course, these people can't see anything really bad about Auschwitz, hell some of them don't even know what Auschwitz was.

Read These:

2005-01-13T03:55:00.000-08:00

Billy Bathgate by E.L. Doctorow

Welcome to Hard Times by E.L. Doctorow

Chicago Loop by Paul Theroux

Black Sunday by Thomas Harris

Bluebeard By Kurt Vonnegut

Time's Arrow by Martin Amis

A House for Mister Biswas by V.S. Naipaul

Cotton Comes to Harlem by Chester Himes

2005-01-11T02:28:00.000-08:00

A Blog portal

2005-01-10T22:33:00.000-08:00

A Blog portal

Thus

2005-01-10T15:54:00.000-08:00

Thus it was.

A Blog On Matchmaking/Personals Sites

2005-01-10T02:30:00.000-08:00

A Blog on Matchmaking/Personals Sites

BAD FICTION SEX

2005-01-08T15:27:00.000-08:00

I was reading this article on Tom Wolfe winning the prize for bad sex in literature. It occurs to me, how do you write good sex? It's like trying to find a new way to describe somebody eating, short of a character inserting food via their nostrils, it's hard to say anything new. Even the internal mechanics are pretty often the same, or said in the same way, anyway. By internal mechanics I mean emotional/intellectual. I know it can be done though, just not very easily, and requiring a great deal of insight inot what a character is thinking/feeling. It will probably wind up being autobiographical too. It's one of those things that force you to call on memory rather than experience.

2005-01-08T02:52:00.000-08:00

Stuff for the content-challenged Blogger, add-ons and such.

2005-01-07T04:40:00.000-08:00

ALL THE JOYS OF BLOODY VENGEANCE
By
WR BULL (Part 1)

He was scarred in all kinds of new ways, new souvenirs, deeper and uglier than the ones he went in with, missing a tooth, smoking more than he had before, but he came out, came back home unraped, unbeaten, and less afraid than ever. He got a job with his uncle, working as a clerk in the mornings answering the phone and working the cash register. He got a room in Delford, a rough-drawn haphazard little town, no straight roads anywhere. He bought weed and sat by his window in the evenings and smoked and planned.

Oh, how he hated the world. He wanted to kill and kill and never stop killing. He wanted to walk into restaurants and dump a bucket of gasoline on somebody and set them on fire. He wanted to get a gun and fire tight groupings into walking bodies. He wanted to strangle, to decapitate. Thing was, now he could do it. Prison had given him the key to the hole where the animals were kept. Now all he wanted was for somebody to set him off.

There she was sitting on the veranda swing, the Great White Goddess in all her glory. She would see him standing behind the tree and imagine he still cared, still the little loser who loved her and couldn't find anybody else who wanted him. He was the one she had wanted when she still thought he was stronger and blacker than he turned out to be. Yeah man, she got herself a real nigger now, big and black, and this one has money. After prison in Tennessee Neill found that the voices in his head are almost always African American. She was there on the swing looking happy like he had never been in her life and he wanted so much to kill her. Not slowly though, fast and bloody and hard. What did that say?
(END OF PART 1)

RUM PUNCH By Elmore Leonard

2005-01-06T14:00:00.000-08:00

Andrea Yates' conviction thrown out

You Will Die

Microsoft Releases Antivirus Apps (finally).

Waiter Accused of Billion Dollar Art Robberies

2005-01-06T01:56:00.000-08:00

Mystery By Peter Straub

2005-01-05T19:56:00.000-08:00

Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island has something of a dramatic plot twist about two thirds of the way through, if you don't already know. I would be lying if I claimed to not have enjoyed this book. I liked the thrill of that moment when the gimmickery didn't feel like gimmickery, when I was genuinely surprised. That's rare for me, not that I'm smart or anything, just cynical about literary devices and tricky writer shit.

The story itself is about a pair of federal marshals arriving at an institution for the criminally insane to investigate the disappearance of an inmate, Rachel Solando, who is there for having drowned her children. This prison/mental hospital is on an island. It follows a line of interesting, if not particularly alarming, twists till about 3/4 of the way in we hit up against the stonewall of the big surprise. I won't spoil it for you. There are links to Amazon here. Don't be a hater.

I have two points to make about this book:

1. It strikes me that pretty much anybody (especially if they have a quirky personality) could be committed by their family should the family so desire. Think of any of the people you know over age 25 and let us say that you heard that they had been sent to a mental hosptital. Would it be that hard for you to come up with a reason? Something that you could think back to and say, ah, yes, I should have seen it coming? Look at those ugly pictures he has on his blog! What normal person would enjoy such things! I knew he was fucking nuts!

2. The surprise is not the kind where the writer has been thinking of this all along.If you've ever written a short story or a novel and tried to be cute with your endings, you know that surprise endings are fucking hard to pull off. The way it happens most easily, is for the ending to surprise you. You're writing along happily and then it hits you: what if I did this? Or this? I suspect that that is what happened here. You can see the narrative building the suspense in one direction, and then you can see where the lightbulb goes on.

2005-01-03T05:49:00.000-08:00

There is no way to like violent pulp and not like Stephen Hunter's books. These are guys' books if there ever was such a genre. Unlike Tom Clancy, the king of the guys' book, Hunter does not shy away from extremes. His heroes are a little deeper than Clancy's chise-jawed stalwart. The Swaggers et al are very matter-of fact about killing and Hunter is in no way ashamed. Much like Dennis Lehane (whose SHUTTER ISLAND I will look at shortly) he writes his protagonists as tortured with guilt and old sufferings. It is an easy way to get the reader on the side of the man who is going to kill more than a few bad guys before the novel ends.

Hot Springs is neither Hunter's best or worst book, it is simply typical. His hero is Earl Swagger, the father of the hero of a couple of his other books, Bobby Lee Swagger. He is war-hero still haunted by his abusive childhood and his younger brother's suicide. He is requested to join the war against Owney Maddox (based on a real-life gangster who did, in fact, run Hot Springs, Arkansas after WWII, it's a name similar to "Owney Madden"). Needless, to say, the pages of the book start to smell like gunsmoke and sound like the tinkling of spent shell before you're halfway through. Swagger manages to have a fistfight with Bugsy Siegel, drink countless bottles of bourbon, and kill countless hillbillies as well as father Bobby Lee.

This book is not what I would call "quality fiction", it's sort a cross between Dirty Harry and Forrest Gump, now that I think of it. It is raw, violent, male-bravado pulp with no other merit than to keep you turning the pages, but it does its job very well.

2005-01-02T00:44:00.000-08:00

Jebnit
IFYOUMESSWITHMEIWILLKILLYOU
broken
DeadBolt-Bulletin
vulgarmonkey
Avast30

2005-01-01T21:40:00.000-08:00

You read a novel and it changes you. Readers are different from the rest of the world, readers of fiction in particular. The love of stories is the sign of an internal life, an ability to relate to concepts and to empathize, it shows a personal layer beyond the apparent. The enjoyment of words on paper separates you from the rest of the world for whom reading is a tiresome necessity, a chore to be done in order to pass tests or to find out what is in this can.

The vast majority of human beings concern themselves only with what is practical, what is likely, what exists, they do this and are content. They are unable to see beyond necessity and desire. In this respect they are not unlike dogs. Their aesthetic is basic, this matches that, they like paintings that are like photographs, they like the smell of English Leather. This girl is pretty because she has big eyes and long hair. They like TV because you can understand the stories that are on TV, the soap operas are like gossip, the actors spit emotion at you and you don’t have think to get anything. For TV you don’t need imagination. Imagination distracts you. You sit and suck at Hollywood’s teat and numb your mind.

The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry

Egan Hated Nurses Pt. 2

2004-12-30T02:58:00.000-08:00

Last of the Breed By Louis L'amour

THE BOY
Eighteen months before when his father had been in his bed on his back, dying, the boy would come to the window and talk to him. At the time Egan hadn't liked it, the old man wasted his strength trying to hide his fear and swallow groans so he could smile and talk nonsense. Egan wanted, at times desperately wanted, to tell the boy to f*ck off and leave his father alone. Of course, then the old man would have cried. He cried at every little disappointment then, after years of it never even entering Egan's mind that his father so much as had tear ducts. He saw his father cry over a spilt cup of yogurt, apologize to tears to Egan for having shat himself. In the night Egan would hear sobbing and lie awake thinking about mentholated tobacco and how as soon as the old man was out of the house he would smoke until his throat closed with phlegm. He would drink every night for the rest of his life.
The boy talked to himself. Seven or eight years old and nobody to talk to over there but his grandmother he would spend his holidays playing by the fence, having loud conversations with himself in the hope that Egan's father would hear and respond. He always did it when he wasn't busy. Always sorry for somebody.

Last of the Breed By Louis L'amour

He left in the dark with her in the mornings. She waited with him at the bus-stop, staring back at the people who stared at them while pretending not to. Stared at the ones who did it frankly, mostly women. Sometimes she would kiss him as the bus appeared at the corner and then step back to avoid the crush. After that she would walk back to the house. It worried him that she would get raped one morning.

Last of the Breed By Louis L'amour

The boy loved her and she loved him. Those first days in January, he stared over the fence at her as if he had ever seen a white woman before, his jaw slack with simple astonishment, as if he were ready the fling himself over the fence to her.

Last of the Breed By Louis L'amour

"They broke into you house looking for him. About two hours after I left to go to work."
The television set that they had removed, and brought back for some reason sat on the armchair, the antenna wire hanging down the floor like the arm of a sleeper.
"He's dead." She was crying, but her mind was the oiled gun that it always was. "Three hours."
They had only one "he" in common. Three hours for what, he wanted to know. He didn't ask, though. He had the idea that it was surgery or resuscitation. He stood looking at his returned TV that he would have to hook up again and let the shock cut into him.

Last of the Breed By Louis L'amour

Egan Hated Nurses Pt.1

2004-12-29T10:24:00.000-08:00

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Egan hated nurses. They were working class sociopaths, little barmaid sadists. Nurses had made the last days of people he had loved miserable, full of shame. His father had been afraid to call someone for his bedpan. He thought about it all as he sat looking at the white pantyhose draped over the back of the sofa. Was this one different or were the memories fading enough for him to betray them? With that not answered he got to thinking the next thing: if she left the pantyhose there, he would want to take them up and press them to his face. I am a sick and twisted little man, he thought.
Different Seasons

Then she came out the bathroom and sat down on the sofa, across from him. She took the cigarettes from the pocket of her uniform, never once moving her eyes from his face. It was a stare that demanded, albeit very calmly, very logically, he tell her something or take her into the bedroom so that they could have sex on his bed. The eyes, big and green made it clear, that the sex, if they were to have it, would be very good.
Egan decided that they should talk instead.

Different Seasons

Jimson Pt. 1

2004-12-29T09:34:00.000-08:00

THE MALTESE FALCON

I once overheard an American woman reveal to a stranger that her husband was "a little weakling". This was at the Molloy Inn where I was headwaiter for three years. She was sitting with the other "guests" waiting to be seated, telling this to strangers. Back then I wondered about the years of disappointment and venom that allowed her to think that let alone say it out loud within earshot of me, not American, not white. The changes that years of shared confinement can cause in a couple are a mystery to me, I have never been married, nor have I ever lived alone with a woman. I think that the coldness and betrayal I saw that night, ten years ago killed any I lingering hope I might have of trusting a woman.

THE MALTESE FALCON

I have long resigned myself to the fact of my own weak will, my cowardice. I drink and I smoke and when I can afford it I sleep with whores. I cannot stop. I am the plaything of my lusts. I could see the resignation to that on the face of my uncle Ferdie as he sat looking at my face over the overflowing ashtray and empty Gold Label rum bottles that occupied the table-space between us. He had begun by looking pointedly at them and back at me, and then had given up. Now his look said only that he could see, finally, what a waste I had made of my life.

2004-12-29T05:42:00.000-08:00

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Without its blooms, delicate white funnels, the Angel's Trumpet or Jimson Weed (datura stramonium) is as drab a plant as it is potent and potentially lethal. It lacks the cosmetic flair of its popular, ubiquitous mind altering fellows, Cannabis and the poppy whose leaves and/or fruit seem to scream their weirdness. A staple in shaman's preparations, particularly wysoccon, (used in Algonquin rituals), it goes by other names as well, ones that reveal it's raw chemical power, devil weed, mad apple, zombie's cucumber.

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For years American emergency rooms have dealt with hordes of youngsters tripping on Angels' Trumpet tea, made from the mature seeds of the plant. The symptoms of ingestion include dry mouth, sometimes fatal rapid heartbeat, fever, constipation, and, of course, the vivid, often ugly hallucinations.

THE TRIPS
The hallucinogens are atropine and scopolamine. The effects of the tea may last as long as forty-eight hours.

Users of Angel's Trumpet report hallucinations involving conversations with nonexistent people, inanimate objects that seem to be alive, plants that are seemingly possessed of intelligence, not recognizing their own reflection in a mirror, among many other things.
Another effect of Angel's Trumpet is amnesia. The user finds himself or herself in a city with no idea how to get home or even where home is.

THE BENEFITS
It is thought to be useful in treating whooping coughs and asthma, and as a muscle relaxant.

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THE END

http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/2607075/detail.html
http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/golden_guide/g141-150.shtml
http://www.genesishealth.com/micromedex/altmedgen/ame0244.aspx
http://www.greenmantrees.demon.co.uk/power.html