I
Read Odd Books

As my readers may know by now, when a bout of cyclical depression hits me I am very quiet.  People often have the idea that my lack of online presence during these times is because I am shuffling through my days like a middle-aged Sylvia Plath, tearing at my hair, or politely planning my suicide, stuffing my pockets with rocks as I walk dramatically into Lake Travis.

It’s far less cinematic than that.  Far less interesting, too.  When I am hit with a bout of my depression, which is sort of akin to a brain fog, I move slower, can’t sleep, and am down, to be sure, but the key symptom is a lack of attention.  I cannot hold a thread in a conversation.  I forget words for common objects.  I cannot really read anything longer than a blog entry, and I certainly cannot write well.  They last anywhere from a few days to a couple of months, but generally I get off lightly as they seldom last longer than a few weeks.

That is what it is, and I came out my my most recent bout in time to post that pile of words about Knut Hamsun.  Then I almost lost one cat, Miss Baby.  While we were worrying about her, a completely unrelated and seemingly healthy cat of ours, Wooster, dropped over dead.  Wooster was a strange, furtive, but lovely cat and his death was a blow to the house beyond anything we could have anticipated.

So I’ve been far more useless than I would like.  I have some interesting discussions in the works: an odd books zine from a writer in Australia, an Alasdair Gray collection, A New Bizarro Authors Week, and more.   I’m looking forward to the latter – it’s been a while since I had a giveaway.

But until then, let me share two of the amazing conspiracy theory sites I found when wandering the web late at night in the throes of insomnia.

The first is the site September Clues Research Forum.   This site is dedicated to the idea that 9-11 did not happen, that the attack itself was staged with media complicity, that no planes crashed into anything that day, and that not a single person died.  I found this site because I had a copy of Don Delillo’s The Falling Man and found myself Googling “falling man,”  the iconic photograph of a man who jumped from the World Trade center.  It was through that Google that I found this site.

It’s a small board, with a max of around 1000 members, far fewer active.  It’s beyond the Loose Change crowd (and the key players on this site declare that Truthers are part of the conspiracy, a smoke-screen so that no one focuses on the “real” truth).  It is some of the most hardcore conspiracy theory I have encountered in recent memory.  Convoluted, intricate and detailed, these particular True Believers have created an alternative reality wherein all the victim photographs are really photoshops or were created from one main photograph using photo manipulation.   The families of the dead are all actors or lying for some reason, the Ground Zero pictures were all staged, and everything we saw that terrible day was an elaborate theater used to trick us into war in the Middle East.  None of it happened.  Famous victims like Barbara Olson didn’t die on the planes – in Olson’s case, they posit that she got a ton of plastic surgery and came back to remarry her husband Ted Olson in a new identity.  Their proof for this is… both hilarious and the result of lots and lots of work.  If there is a means by which I can link to individual comments on posts, I cannot find one, but I also think this is for the best.  Little bits and pieces of this are almost worthless – one has to experience the whole of this by reading posts and threads as they come.

I seriously cannot list the amount of intellectual endeavor on this site, but a word of warning:  the makers of this site and the people who are key in this theory aren’t anything like the Loose Changers.  They are not engaging in a coy, “what if/I’m only asking hard questions” stance that the Truthers use to shelter themselves from the hard criticism that comes from asking “hard” questions.  The main players on September Clues Research Forum believe they have proven their case for this extraordinary conspiracy beyond any reasonable doubt and don’t like people challenging them because they brook no dissent.  So if you decide you want to interact with these folks, bear that in mind.

The second site appears to have been abandoned, more’s the pity, because, while not as outlandish as September Clues Research Forum, this blog contains some excellent conspiracy theory analysis. The site analyzes the use of Monarch Program, Illuminati and Masonic, and MK-Ultra imagery as found in movies, music videos, and photoshoots.   Pseudo-Occult Media is a site after my own heart – verbose, given to extreme analysis of media and completely whacked.  The author, one Benjamin Singleton, does not appear to be writing anywhere else, but if anyone knows where he is or if he is writing again, I would love to know what he is up to these days.

I found this site after landing on the Daily Mail, of all places, reading an article about how happy John Mellencamp is these days after divorcing his supermodel wife, Elaine Irwin.  I wondered how some of the other supermodels from the 90s had ended up and began Googling “Tatiana,”  “Linda Evangelista” and “Karen Mulder.”  It was the search on Karen Mulder that led me to the site, to this article in particular, wherein Mulder’s images and erratic behaviors are discussed with the assumption that she was a Monarch Program victim.  Singleton analyzed dozens of pictures to show the links between Mulder and the Monarch Program and Illuminati sex slave programs.  This is one of those rare sites wherein I don’t want to contact James Randi and see how to debunk it effectively because unlike many True Believers, Singleton showed his work.  While I can look at the work and simply say, “Images of kittens and leopards and butterflies are just common in photography,” Singleton makes an interesting case for how these images are used to tell specific stories and the stories often end up being very similar.  One does not have to believe any of it to just marvel at the work that went into the analyses.

I am not even close to finished reading the site, but I already have some favorite articles.  Singleton’s analysis of the imagery associated with Lana Clarkson, the woman Phil Spector shot to death, was fascinating.   Equally interesting was the use of Monarch imagery and the use of Alice in Wonderland as it applies to programming victims and the images of Peaches Geldof and others.  Whether Singleton is a lunatic or the Sanest Person You Know, after reading his blog, you will never look at black and white stripes, red shoes, butterflies, kittens, wild cat prints and Alice costumes the same way again.  Or maybe it’s more accurate to say you will be surprised at how common and overused they are in media, fashion and film.  You don’t have to fear the New World Order to find this worth a read and Singleton has a ton of content on the now defunct site.

So that’s what I was doing over the past couple of weeks as I waited for my brain fog to lift.  Hopefully y’all will find it interesting to some degree and I’ll have some book content up here soon.  Hopefully the Alasdair Gray discussion will be up Friday or Monday.  If any of you have some odd website, message board or blog recommendations for me to read when the next fog rolls into my head, share them please!

Dear readers,

Some of you are aspiring writers. Some of you are published writers. All of you are heavy readers.  And almost universally, my readers are people who love small presses. I myself am a fan of small presses. But sometimes small presses are run by ignorant pricks.

Here’s a handy guide that will help you determine if the editor of a small press is an ignorant prick:

– Did he change the title of your story so that it now contains a misspelling?
– Did he fail to tell you he changed the title of your story before the story went to print in an anthology?
– Did he make you sign a contract allowing the press to edit your work but then confused editing with rewriting?
– In those rewrites, did he change the gender of a character, create a name for another character and include implied rape in a story where there had not been rape prior to the “edit?”
– Did he call you unstable and mock you when you contacted him about these appalling breaches in editorial conduct?
– Did he impugn his own press as he scrambled to call you such a bad writer that no professional press would touch your work?
– Is his name Anthony Giangregorio and does he run Undead Press?

If you answered yes to some of these questions, then chances are your editor is ignorant or a prick. If you answered yes to all, then the ignorant prickiness goes down to the molecular level and you should use your stories as cat litter before you submit them to such a press.

Sadly, Mandy DeGeit did not have this handy list for reference and was fucked over by Undead Press. But through her suffering we’ve all learned a important lesson today, I think.

Much love!
Anita at IROB

PS:  Increasingly, I think that perhaps old Tony is really an evil, ignorant prick.

PPS:  There is now no question about it.  Tony really is an evil, ignorant prick.  He very recently made a veiled threat against writer Alyn Day, mentioned in the link above.  Yes, I can hear the neckbeards explaining, ever so patiently, that old Tony isn’t threatening Alyn.  Why wouldn’t an editor who has been shamed for his dreadful treatment of writers decide to stop by the homes of one of the writers who outed him as a cretinous jerk?  Don’t we always stop by the homes of people who have exposed our shoddy business practices?  Couldn’t possibly be that Tony wants to intimidate Ms Day by implying he plans to come to her home “for a talk.”  So let’s all add whistle-blower intimidation to the long list of things wrong with this choad.

Tony

So, as we all know, or should know, I am often sucktastic about replying to comments. It’s a part of my avoidant personality, I’m told. Sometimes I can deal with digital evidence of human interactions and sometimes I can’t. So a lot of comments here may go unanswered because I am a notorious flake.

This comment, however, went unanswered because I simply did not know what to say. It’s stayed with me for a while because… well, I’ll show you the comment, left to my entry about John Coleman’s book about conspiracy theory and disease:

Im really nobody special. No special degree nothing fancy..just experience. All I can really say is dr. Coleman is gutsy. He taked a big risk. For that I commend him. I will never see another Dr for as long as I live. Its too bad …im only 22 and really wanted a family one day. Dont think I can do that now…its ashame fear runs through me knowing what theyll do to that new born baby. dr. c if you ever read this…I rrally think youd be interested in hearing what my father has come to find. I think you got it but theres more…much more. Maybe you know though, maybefor your own safety you stay quiet on the other things…probably smart however I hopeone day we meet face to face… I feel lonely in this. Its too bad my family wasnt part of the elite, born into it. Four families in this world striving for world domination. Can you guess who they are ? My dad figuredit out. Somehow someway I hope you get tomeet him.

This comment bothers me because it challenges my attitude wherein I enjoy conspiracy and wallow in its lunacy. I do challenge it here from time to time, but I also take an attitude wherein I just revel in the panoply of bizarre belief. But this comment makes it clear that there is a price to be paid with bad belief. Here is a young woman (or so she says – this could be anyone) who thinks that she cannot have a family because something bad will happen to her newborn child. Something so bad it makes her ashamed to think of it. There are other problems with this comment, but that is the one that stood out to me the most – the loss of potential family because of some bizarre, unspecified fear.

Bad belief is so bad because it discourages independent thinking. Bad belief is almost always black and white thinking, an either/or proposition that leaves no room for any middle ground. The middle ground is important because it is a place of no pressure wherein people can find the answers they need. But when you think God/god/Allah/whatever dictates a belief from which there can be no deviation, when you believe that there is a conspiracy of elites set to destroy the world and control your children, it’s hard, if not impossible, to find a middle ground. And without a middle ground that encourages critical thinking, you end up with a 22-year-old who is so scared of the world that she cannot even think of having a baby. She is so certain of external control over her life that she cannot even research alternatives to hospital births, like home births or birthing centers. Half the women I know give birth at home and selectively vaccinate their children. Some question the need for constant well-baby exams. Whether or not I agree with these decisions, there are alternatives to simply refusing to have a child because Doctors Are Evil. But bad belief makes it impossible to see any alternative.

Here’s another comment that alarmed the hell out of me. It alarmed me so much that after a basic Google, I determined that the person possibly existed and I took the editorial decision to X-out all of her identifying information. Rather than reproduce the entire comment, here are some quotes:

I spent the last year worried sick about my daughter(4)-I had never heard of ritualistic abuse in my life, but was researching other types of abuse to see if I could find out what was going on with her. I came across one line about creatures in hooded robes-and ended up on the floor screaming uncontrolably (Ive never been affected like this before, but have always had a deep fear of the occult). I asked my mom about it (a pastor) and she informed me that when the ritualistic abuse scare was taking place in Xxxxxx in the early 90′s that my father was called in as a specialist (he was the chaplain at XX).

So she was worried about her daughter and researched abuse to find an answer. Okay, I guess that is not too unusual, but then she goes on to say she has always been terrified about the occult and that her father was a specialist in ritual abuse and yet she had never, ever heard of such a thing. That raises red flags for me because when you have been taught the world is flat, you live in fear you will fall over the edge. If she was raised with a father who was a specialist in ritual abuse cases, every scab is going to be evidence of torture, every toddler tall tale is going to be direct evidence of actual events because children never lie. It seems impossible that she could have been raised with a father who specializes in such things and never have heard of them.

The next day, when my children came back from their dads (weve been separated for about a year), I prayed for them. Neither of them had heard a word about any of this. When I told them that Jesus gives us power over the scary things, and that they dont have power over us, my children went insane. They started tearing through the house-they talked about sleeping in coffins, rape, spiders, my daughter put her fingers down her throat and told me there was a bad baby inside her and that she was going to have a new mom and a new dad…

If you have read anything about the bad approaches used by therapists and pastors to elicit testimony from children in Satanic and Ritual Abuse cases, you can already see bad things at work here. How does she know the children did not know she prayed? How does she know they are not acutely aware of her searching endlessly for what she thinks is wrong with them? She was raised by a “ritual abuse specialist” and she is so worked up she left a comment on an entry about a book discussing the CIA’s involvement with rock musicians – she’s not really being as discreet as she thinks. And the kids’ reactions? One has no idea what she has left out of the story but again, once you start planting ideas that Jesus protects us from scary things, don’t be surprised if your kids begin to speak of scary things. And don’t be surprised if they continue to overreact and spin stories about coffins, rape and impossible toddler pregnancies. And if they do, don’t assume the toddler pregnancy is real, or that the coffins are real because once you begin to go down that road, you are victimizing your child without meaning to. But the really unfortunate part is this:

I told CPS, and they sent me to a psychiatrist/psychologist thinking that Im insane. My tests all came back normal. I know my children-they couldnt have made that up

So, CPS investigated and determined the problem is the mother. I’m not sure what psychiatrist would tell her she is insane when all her “tests” were normal. I have no idea what test she could be talking about. But instead of gain some perspective and engage in reasonable fact finding and determine reality from fantasy (does my daughter show signs of rape, how could a toddler be pregnant, have I ever seen a coffin at my husband’s place and if not, is there a place he could reasonably hide one from my view, have I been tainted by my father’s odd beliefs, etc.), she digs in further, insisting that a four-year-old could never come up with outrageous stories, even with a frantic, religious woman with a history of questionable belief questioning her. Because even though she says she only talked about Jesus, I wonder what a hidden camera of her examination of her children would reveal. Regardless, I think of this woman from time to time and wonder what the hell is happening to her children. I really hope this was someone yanking my chain. I really hope there is no woman raised by a dogpatch Ted Gunderson mentally torturing her kids.

And just to end this discussion of my comments (and be glad I don’t reproduce the e-mails I receive – be very glad), here’s one that’s creepy in a way that at least does not leave me worried for two possibly fictional children or an undereducated woman whose fear prevents her from having a child. This gem was left in the comments for Part Two of my discussion of 2083. The link takes you to this video:

Oh dear lord, that voice. This is evidently a piece of writing from a person called Mox Mäkelä and the video links to a site where you can experience more creepy, odd videos. Hurrah for things that won’t make James Randi depressed or Penn Jillette shit blood.

I used to be a fan of black metal, and I guess I still am, but now it’s more appropriate to say I’m a fan of specific black metal bands. It always helps to be specific, I think.

So in the spirit of specificity, let me tell you I rather like Ulver. I think even more specifically, it’s safe to say I like Garm, the former singer for Ulver. I love his voice, and I like the idea that if Mr Oddbooks were to start lifting weights again and decided to get some ink, he and Garm could pass for brothers. Maybe cousins.

At any rate, Ulver’s 2000 release, Perdition City, is in my top ten albums of all time. And the best song on that album is “Porn Piece or the Scars of Cold Kisses.” At 4:00 one morning, I wanted to listen to it in bed, but iTunes was having “issues.” I was forced to go to YouTube, which was not as an appalling a choice as you might think because it just so happens that there is a fan video for “Porn Piece or the Scars of Cold Kisses” that is my favorite fan video ever. Yeah, the video is stretched and skewed but ultimately, the video is very, very good. I don’t think I could ever have thought of “Porn Piece” and Lost Highway as two media elements that went together, but that’s the beauty of this kind of thing, I suspect. Also, I tend to think that imposing one’s will on popular culture is all that’s left to us people who can’t sleep and yet can’t concentrate on anything productive.

So beautiful. “On the stairs, before I left, one of the girls had surprisingly given me a kiss. Stung in the cold long after.”

But it was Youtube at 4:00 in the morning. It couldn’t end in a great mashup of an achingly beautiful song. It never does.

It never does.

You know how Youtube has all the related videos over to the right in one endless and godless lineup?

I looked at those related videos. I learned something. I learned that David Lynch released an album late in 2011. It is called Crazy Clown Time.

I’ll let that soak in for minute.

Crazy.

Clown.

Time.

And it sounds exactly like you think it would and you should not listen to this before the sun comes up. You should not listen to this as your Garm-like husband sleeps with his hands closed across his chest, an elderly cat at his feet, your house quiet, your neighborhood dead. You should not listen to this song even now, but you probably will because the curiosity will force you.

Here it is. The thing that currently haunts me.

I…

I just don’t know. Words fail me. That was horrible. I kind of want to cry.

But because he is David Lynch, in the midst of the grotesque, there is also something truly beautiful. “Pinky’s Dream” is slightly jittery and mildly horrible, but still has lovely moments

But like much of Lynch’s body of work, you have to make a conscious choice: do you focus on the lovely or the grotesque? Do you focus on Isabella’s lips and her accent or Dennis Hopper and his fucking nitrous mask?

You focus on Dennis and the mask.

Fuck.

I think my off-topic entries I had previously called “Media Dump” will now be called “This Is Not An Odd Book Discussion.” My media dumps were really just media trickles. Better call them what they are: “This Is Not an Odd Book Discussion.”

With that out of the way, let’s talk about a mild but still unsettling musical experience I had recently. I was listening to “Diane” by Hüsker Dü and though I have known of and played this song since I was 16, there was something new to it. I could hear something in it I had not heard before. I am not a person who has a wide musical vocabulary so bear with me if what I am saying sounds amateurish and if you have a better explanation for what I am trying to say, please speak up.

The weird feeling of hearing something new focused around Bob Mould’s guitar work. The clearest example of the part that started niggling the back of my head happened around 0:22 – 0:33. His guitar work is sort of shrill and desperate. You hear those chords throughout the song.

Because I have a touch of OCD in my genetic makeup, once that feeling that I was remembering something hit me, I had to listen to the song over and over until Mr Oddbooks begged me to give it a rest because some people have to get up in the morning, dammit.

And I was lucky he was so desperate for sleep because putting it aside for a day or so enabled my brain to clear and it became apparent what I was thinking of when I was listening to “Diane.” It was a song I have already and recently discussed, “We Are Water” by Health.

I do not know what the instrument is that makes the upsurge of noise that occurs at 0:41-0:46 and again at 2:06-2:13. And the tempo is not even similar to Mould’s guitar work in “Diane.” But there is something about that shrill noise from both songs that caused me to link the songs in my brain.

But then the obviousness of it settled in. I said in my last discussion of “We Are Water” that the surge of noise I delineated above reminds me of screams after seeing the video. Mould’s guitar work is shrill, a sort of on-edge sound that I now also associate with screams because “Diane” was written about a woman, Diane Edwards, who was killed in 1980. She was a waitress in St. Paul, MN, and she was 19 when a man named Joseph Ture abducted, raped and murdered her.

Having heard that jangling noise in “We Are Water” and associating it with screaming after seeing the video of the young woman or man being chased down by a demented killer, I think I had that association of discordant noise as a female scream implanted in my head. And now all of Bob Mould’s guitar work in “Diane” sounds like screams, too.

I wanted this to be a synchronous event. I wanted there there be more coincidence to it than there was. Eric Wareheim (yes, that Eric Wareheim) directed the video for “We Are Water” and was once in a sort of punk band himself. I looked him up, certain he was born in Minnesota and had grown up on Hüsker Dü. Perhaps he felt the same sense of being screamed at as he listened to both songs and had “Diane” in his mind when he created the video.

No luck. He’s from Pennsylvania. It’s all just in my brain. As usual. I bet people reading this and listening to the songs at the appropriate places will not hear a damn thing I did. And that’s cool. I often go through these weird musings wherein I see connections that a normal person does not hear. I’m used to it. And really, given that “Diane” is about a murder victim, had I any sensitivity, I should have heard the screams before. Regardless, I can’t listen to these songs again for a while because now I hear a real woman screaming at me and I have enough really horrible stuff going through my head at the moment.

So, dear readers, are there any songs that began to fuck you up in ways you didn’t expect when you first heard the song? What’s your version of suddenly hearing a woman screaming in a guitar part in a song you had heard for years?

Today marks the second anniversary of the date when I lost the most remarkable animal I have ever known. Note that I did not say the best cat ever, or that he was a good boy, or anything praising his virtue. Adolph was a terrible cat at times, so bad we called him El Gato Muy Malo, among other things. But goddamn he was remarkable. He was our nasty roommate who refused to learn English and get a job. I am not one to anthropomorphize my animals. But Adolph was different.

I cannot describe him well anymore. I fear so much time has passed since I spent time with him that I would not be able to find the words to tell you how intelligent, friendly, disgusting, valiant, nasty and wonderful Adolph was. Even if he had been a perfectly ordinary cat, he looked like Hitler and lost a leg. That alone is worth remembering.

But even though I no longer really know what to say, I needed to commemorate this day. I posted his eulogy on this site, but I also wrote about him in a cat community. I was surprised at how many people felt similarly about him in just the informal post I made right after he died. I gave him a lengthy eulogy that he likely felt was the least I could do, and it was. Last year I also remembered his passing. Perhaps next year the day that he died will pass without me immediately realizing the significance of the date. I tend to doubt it, but I also used to doubt that a single day would pass without me thinking of him, and that has happened.

Until then, I’m just remembering the most epic cat who ever lived.

Feel free to tell me about the epic animals you have known and I’ll return to odd books on Monday or Tuesday, I swear.

I’ve been a bit busy lately. I know, that sounds weird to read because it is well known that I am the least busy person on the planet. If I run an errand, I need a nap and a diet soda upon waking. But since about December I’ve had a lot of energy. Lots of hobbies, errands, cooking, interacting with Mr. Oddbooks, and absolutely neurotic levels of cleaning have been going on. This burst of energy means my backlog of books to discuss is about to become not so backed or logged.

And it means I want to write here more, even when I don’t have book-related content. I will have book content Monday – a discussion of Wrath James White’s Population Zero – but until I post it, I want to discuss the music/noises I have been obsessed with lately. I’ve been resurrecting old writing of mine, looking at it and seeing if it is worth salvaging. Some of it is and one of the pieces I want to work on is deeply disturbing. When I work on disturbing stories, I cannot listen to my usual music. I find myself listening the most discordant, horrible sounds because my usual tastes may cause me to think of old friends, old activities and I end up reminiscing more than working. I need things that jangle my brain in an anonymous way.

Nothing I share below is new, though some of it is new to me. I’m sharing it anyway because I feel like sharing, dammit. And it’s not like this site is devoted to the latest in media anyway.

I’ve always been very interested in numbers stations. There’s just something very creepy and intense knowing that you may be listening to a coded order for a spy to kill an enemy agent or to take the cyanide pill. Yeah, none of that probably happened, but it’s still unnerving to listen to a form of communication and know you cannot now and will never know what was being communicated. So I’ve been listening to numbers stations recordings.

When that gets tiring, I listen to the Siberian Sounds of Hell. Anyone who has ever listened to Art Bell knows of them. Utter bunk, but distressing noise is distressing noise. I most often listen to a 20 minute loop of this I have on my computer, but this little video gives the “origin story” of these sounds.

And if you were an Art Bell junkie for any length of time, you probably already know of the call Art Bell got from a supposed frantic man who claimed to have worked at Area 51. Tool turned the call into a song called “Faaip De Oiad.” There’s something about this one that sort of messes with me if I listen to it long enough. I have absolutely no idea why.

Then there is this little gem. I found this one several pages back on a Google search for “horrible noise.” I’m not really into noise rock so that may explain why this has been out for two years and I never heard of it until recently. I play this one in a loop for hours as I think. And again, for whatever reason, there is something about this noise that is troubling to me. Much of the this song is distressing, especially the line, “Our bones won’t grow in the dirt.” That was enough on its own to be unsettling, but then I looked up the band and found this video. Now I associate all of the noise surges with screaming and the line about bones has a more sinister meaning. And then there’s the whole story in the video. Is the victim a girl or a boy? How long was he or she held in captivity, because the smeared make-up and dirty socks convey the idea of a lengthy abduction. The madman is in his underwear. Did the victim thwart a sexual attack and flee? Is the camera pan comparing the legs of the running victim and the madman telling us something? How about the manner in which the victim knew the exact place to hit the femoral artery? What does that tell us? Anything? Nothing? In a way this video encapsulates all that is amazing in story-telling – giving enough information to draw us in and leaving out enough so that we are forced to think. This one is gory as hell so if you are easily freaked out by such things, don’t watch.

I never really liked Aphex Twin but this was part of my background noise when writing long before I saw the video.

And then there is the always horrifying “Frankie Teardrop” by Suicide. The screaming, oh the screaming. The relentless drum machine. This is madness in the form of a song.

There’s more but six videos for one entry is more than enough, I think. Please share with me the music that helps you work, the music that terrifies you or the music that fills you with nauseated dread.

Because I am at times an indiscriminate consumer of books, it’s not unusual for me to purchase duplicate copies. Actually, this happens a lot more than I likely know because you don’t even want to know how many books I have yet to catalog. But anyway, I have the following duplicates and my lovely readers here can have them if they want them.

If anything sounds good to you, leave a comment claiming the book(s). Then send me an e-mail at anita at ireadoddbooks dot com with your address. For the love of all that is sane, do not leave your address in the comments. Just claim the book and send me the e-mail and it’s yours.

Here are the books I want to unload on y’all:

Chew On This: Everything You Don’t Want to Know About Fast Food by Eric Schlosser CLAIMED

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto by Chuck Klosterman CLAIMED

Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays by David Sedaris CLAIMED

The Almost Moon: A Novel by Alice Sebold CLAIMED

13 Steps Down by Ruth Rendell CLAIMED

All are either new or so close to new that it sort of doesn’t matter.

I’d like to say this will not happen again but we all know it will. Thanks for taking them off my hands.

I had planned to have Part Three from 2083, wherein I begin to discuss Anders Behring Breivik, online on Tuesday but it just isn’t going to happen. I will definitely have it finished and online on Wednesday, with Part Four likely to come on Monday. Sorry about that. You’d think discussing a mentally aberrant mass murderer drenched in conspiracy theory and narcissism would come very easily to me. Life is strange…

Until then, if you have ever wondered what one of my extremely long discussions would look like translated into Norwegian, it’s your lucky day.

Check back with me Wednesday and until then, I appreciate all the comments, positive and not-so-positive. I am flattered and humbled that my opinions on this manifesto resonate and have meaning for others.

The last two weeks totally didn’t happen, right? My days have melted into a sort of gelatinous yet dusty place where time has been rendered meaningless.

But I swear I have two discussions that will be online soon, with more to come. I want to do some more themed weeks but until I am able to adapt to this here Earth time, I don’t think I should try.

I did loot a used book store that is closing (and let us not speak of Borders lest I begin to cry and write another eulogy to the stupid corporate chain that stole and then broke my heart). I should write up the list of the books I purchased. Some were so old and so “collectible” they triggered my mold allergy. Good times.

Anyway, I am alive but useless in ways that words fail to convey to the non-useless. But book discussions are a-comin’ and they will be fun. God gets eaten by dogs, followed by junkie vampire teenagers in the Pacific Northwest who may not be vampires but I don’t know because I had to stop reading the book. Yes, I am going to review a book I couldn’t finish yet was so striking it demands a discussion. Strange days, indeed.

So tune in or check your blog readers from time to time because I totally swear I will be productive soon.