Good morning and please listen to me: Denis Johnson is a true American artist, and “Tree of Smoke” is a tremendous book, a strange entertainment, very long but very fast, a great whirly ride that starts out sad and gets sadder and sadder, loops unpredictably out and around, and then lurches down so suddenly at the very end that it will make your stomach flop.

See also coverage in the LA Times, where David Ulin is less effusive, though still impressed:

He's not bad at heart, not exactly; perhaps a more accurate way of putting it is that standard considerations of good and evil do not apply.

This is writing that takes us right up to the edge and, indeed, beyond it, that casts us past the boundaries of ourselves.

The Revelator

Bad monkeys are no joke!

“Bad Monkeys” is something of a science-fiction “Catcher in the Rye.” Along with the Salingeresque details, author Matt Ruff has animated “Bad Monkeys” with the spirit of Philip K. Dick, and he’s borrowed a little seasoning from Jim Thompson and Thomas Pynchon. The real debt is to Dick, in the way Ruff expertly plays with notions of what is real and what is illusion.

From the first chapter:

"We don't fight crime, we fight evil. There's a difference. And Bad Monkeys is the name of my division. The organization as a whole doesn't have a name, at least not that I ever heard. It's just 'the organization.'"

"And what does 'Bad Monkeys' mean?"

"It's a nickname," she says. "All the divisions have them. The official names are too long and complicated to use on anything but letterhead, so people come up with shorthand versions. Like the administrative branch, officially they're 'The Department for Optimal Utilization of Resources and Personnel,' but everyone just calls them Cost-Benefits. And the intel-gathering group, that's 'The Department of Ubiquitous Intermittent Surveillance,' but in conversation they're just Panopticon. And then there's my division, 'The Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons ...'"

"Irredeemable persons." The doctor smiles. "Bad monkeys."

Death Angel: Bad Monkeys | NYT

Recommended by Ira Glass.

The Moth, a not-for-profit storytelling organization, was founded in New York in 1997 by poet and novelist George Dawes Green, who wanted to recreate in New York the feeling of sultry summer evenings on his native St. Simon's Island, Georgia, where he and a small circle of friends would gather to spin spellbinding tales on his friend Wanda's porch. After moving to New York, George missed the sense of connection he had felt sharing stories with his friends back home, and he decided to invite a few friends over to his New York apartment to tell and hear stories. Thus the first "Moth" evening took place in his living room. Word of these captivating story nights quickly spread, and The Moth moved to bigger venues in New York. Today, The Moth conducts six ongoing programs and has brought more than 2,000 live stories to over 60,000 audience members.

For a sample, consider Joe Lockhart. You have to listen to it, because the transcript leaves out important details. See Act Three of The Spokesman, episode 338 of TAL.

The Moth - Live Storytelling Performances

Locative art, a melding of global positioning technology to virtual reality, is the new wrinkle in Gibson's matrix.

It's locative art that leads spooks and counterspooks directly to the cash.

...

Gibson: I don't think "Neuromancer" was prescient. It's more like trend-spotting. ... The level I work at is at the juxtaposition, say, of Prada and Santeria. But it's not about Prada or Santeria. It's not about having ideas about either. It's about seeing what happens when the two are put together.

Q&A with William Gibson - The Boston Globe

It is generally agreed but never specifically discussed that there is a thing called the “summer jam.” I suppose it bears some genetic resemblance to the “summer read.” But the “summer jam” is both a more fleeting and a more dominating sort of beast. There is typically only one summer jam per season and there is no such thing as a repeat. You can only be the summer jam once.

The summer jam is an unpretentious thing. It goes directly to the very essence of pop music, which is to create a sound that is unique enough to catch your attention and almost impossible to ignore. But the summer jam must capture the mind immediately and more forcefully and purely than the pop music hit of another season. This probably has something to do with summer itself. Summer is the season of immediacy, of quick glances and shimmering surfaces. Summer has needs, and more than other seasons those needs have a desperate quality to them. I don’t know whether it really matters if summer jams are even “good” or “bad.” Summer jams are beyond good and bad. They are best described as phenomena, events, things that occur.

The Summer Jam

Amy Bloom knows the urgency of love. As a practicing psychotherapist, she must have heard that urgency in her patients' stories, and in 1993 when she broke onto the literary scene with Come To Me, we heard it in hers. She has never strayed from that theme. Four years later, she published Love Invents Us and followed that with another collection in 2000, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You. A finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Bloom writes with extraordinary care about people caught in emotional and physical crosswinds: desires they can't satisfy, illnesses they can't survive, and -- always -- love that exceeds the boundaries of this world.

It's the kind of humid, overwrought territory where you'd expect to find pathos and melodrama growing like mold, but none of that can survive the blazing light of her wisdom and humor.

... Indeed, nobody wastes any time in this novel, particularly the author. The whole saga hurtles along, a rush of horrible, remarkable ordeals: One minute Lillian is jumping into a deadly ménage à trois, the next she's beating a porcupine to death with her shoe and eating it. Not every woman could pull that off. Each chapter reads like a compressed novel, a form that works only because Bloom can establish new characters and grab our sympathies so quickly.

Immigrant Blues

Fans of Oliver Sacks, take note.

“You know, dear,” I said to him one day, about two months after the stroke, when he was feeling mighty low, “maybe you want to write the first aphasic memoir.” He smiled broadly, said, “Good idea! Mem, mem, mem.” And so he began dictating, sometimes with mountain-moving effort, and at others sailing along at a good clip, an account of what he’d just gone through, what the mental world of aphasia felt and looked like. Writing the book was the best speech therapy anyone could have prescribed. For three exhausting hours each day, he forced his brain to recruit cells, build new connections, find the right sounds to go with words, and piece together whole sentences. Going over the text the next day helped refine his thoughts and showed him some of aphasia’s fingerprints in the prose.

Now, three years later, he has just finished writing his first novel since the stroke, one with Westian characters and themes. During a three-hour window of heightened fluency in the middle of the day, he can write in longhand, make phone calls, lunch with friends. He has reloomed vibrant carpets of vocabulary, and happily, despite the left hemisphere stroke, he seems happier than before, and I think his life feels richer in a score of ways.

What follows is an excerpt from The Shadow Factory, the aphasic memoir Paul dictated with such struggle and resolve, “forcing language back on itself.” In it, he recalls life in the hospital’s rehab unit, what he felt and thought, and explores some of the all-too-real tricks the mind plays to save itself from the tomb of lost words.

'Mem, Mem, Mem' - By Paul West

There are many books with unreliable narrators under the control of sane authors; this is the only one I know where a sane, reliable narrator (on the book’s own terms) is under the control of a clearly crazy author.

The hysteria suited him. He seems to have been a man of intellectual passion and compulsive appetite (he was married five times), the kind of guy who can’t drink one cup of coffee without drinking six, and then stays up all night to tell you what Schopenhauer really said and how it affects your understanding of Hitchcock and what that had to do with Christopher Marlowe.

...

The vision of an unending struggle between a humanity longing for a fuller love it always senses but can’t quite see, and a deranged cult of violence eternally presenting itself as necessary and real—this thought today does not seem exactly crazy. The empire never ends.

Blows Against the Empire

This ought to be useful.

The meanings and origins of over 1,200 English sayings, phrases and idioms.

Whether you want to resolve a friendly argument over how a saying or phrase originated or whether you just enjoy words, you'll probably find something here to interest you.

Meanings and origins of sayings and phrases

With song writer and vocalist extraordinaire Quincy Coleman, think Elvis Presley's power, Edith Piaf's emotion and the spirit of Django Reinhardt breaking Challah on a Hawaiian island while shooting a scene for a David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, Fellini collaboration.

Quincy describes the style of her latest album as "Israeli, surf punk, gypsy swing."

How could you not like that?

Quincy Coleman: Come Closer