Category: Odds and Ends

You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Yes, yes, I know. It’s a cliche to discuss the search strings that show up in your user stats as people search for random things online. But everything’s a cliche these day. Calling things a cliche is sort of a cliche. So here we are.

“graveyard dirt sat on a roast while menstruating”
Two people this month thus far have landed on this site with this search string. Is it really that odd, that a woman sat naked on a roast? Maybe it is. I mean, I haven’t done it and feel no urge but I think this would be odder if she had sat on a dog while naked and menstruating, or on your grandpa, or a stranger’s fully loaded Toyota Camry. But alas, while I have discussed Ms Graveyarddirt over here, I cannot help you get to the pictures of her most notorious act.

“8 yod girls want sex”
So… Anyone have any idea what this is about?  Is this motherfucker asking if 8 year old girls want sex?  What the hell? Fuck you, no they don’t.  Thanks for coming to me so we could clear that up together.

“adderall addiction paranoid boyfriend. heating”
I sort of sense that period followed by an H is a mistype and the searcher likely meant “beating.” Oh this world…

“better word for collection of short stories”
Anthology. Glad I could help.

“do they have book about cannibals”
Indeed, they do.  They have lots of them.

“half shirts fucking movies”
No idea what this could mean. None whatsoever.

“if you spend every day chopping up meat on a slab and selling it”
You will likely be called a butcher? I don’t know. I am mostly appalled that I immediately knew which entry I wrote caused this lost soul to come to IROB – Leopold Stein’s frightening treatise on the female patients who terrified him because women with mental illness are ABSOLUTE EXAMPLES OF HUMAN EVIL, Loathsome Women.

“ireadoddbooks adam parfrey”
“ireadoddbooks jim goad”
“ireadoddbooks parfrey”
“ireadoddbooks tethers”
Holy crap, this means people specifically searched for books on this site. Like there was a pre-existing awareness that IROB is here. Like maybe they read my discussions and felt the need to search for them again. Oh my ego!

“is it legal to read fiction bestiality”
God, I hope so or we’re all gonna do time.

“list of zoophilia fiction”
“sexy write-ups on bestiality(horse)”
James Steele, are you reading this? Your touching novella of a horse dildo is why search strings like this happen. You man. It’s all you.  And yet I still somehow feel it’s all my fault.

“science fiction book where the main character gets an anal probe”
You’re gonna have to narrow it down.

“what was the bird-serpent war in history”
I don’t know but I do know it happened around the time the poles shifted.  If you find out, come back and tell me.

“the evil gringo blogger”
Evil Gringo, what the fuck have you been doing? You have a blog? Why did I not know of this?

“what happens if you shoplift from american apparel”
You end up with a book deal and slavering fans who continue to this day to dog the hell out of people who found your prose lacking. That’s what happens if you shoplift from American Apparel.  Also your dick falls off.

“lesley ann downey photos”
“lesley ann downey ian brady photos”
“lesley ann downey ian brady audiotape”
These particular strings come up a lot. Guys, you’re not gonna find her autopsy photos, or any of the photos and audio recordings Myra and Ian took of this child here on the public Internet. If they are out there you are gonna have to search the deep web and you may want to think about it before you take that step to find images of a tortured, murdered child and the sounds she made when begging for her mother.  Not moralizing here.  I’ve searched for terrible things.  But I’ve also found some stuff online that, once I found it, left a stain my soul that can never wash away.  Just throwing it out there that maybe you don’t want to see or hear these things if you know it may haunt you forever.

“rubbed a pregnant belly (horror fiction)”
From your keyboard comes much truth, anonymous web surfer.

These are the highlights from May and June. For all those who landed here hoping to find horse porn and tapes of murdered children, sorry to have misled you. Alas, I feel this is my curse for refusing to take SEO seriously.

Goodbye, Mr Bradbury

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

It seems fitting that a once-in-a-lifetime author would die on the day of a once-in-a-lifetime astrological event. Whatever called you home, be it the Venus transit or just reaching the end of your body’s usefulness, your life was spent creating words paralleled by none, worlds more fantastic and horrifying than we left here can create, and you deserve a nice, long rest. Godspeed, sir.

This Is Not an Odd Book Discussion: Three Interesting Broads

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Thematically, all I have to tie this post together are X-chromosomes, so, you know, don’t look for much in the way of commonalities. But at the same time, this site is often a sausage festival in terms of discussion. Most of the books I read are by men, most of my commenters are men, most of the people who send me amusing, annoying and frightening e-mails are men, and I feel I need to diversify a bit. So here are three women whose websites I love and whose approach to their craft or lives I find deeply interesting.

Let me begin with Bonnie Strange. Bonnie is a stunningly beautiful and completely insane German model and fashionista. Since fashion for me entails making sure to match my shoes, I did not discover Bonnie because of her fashion contributions. I found her looking for vegetarian recipes. I landed on her recipe for Jesus Fries. The perfect remedy for hangovers, it involves onions, sriracha sauce, bagged fries and so much American cheese I got acid reflux just looking at the picture. But her lunatic sense of humor and hilarious photography sucked me in.

I found especially amusing her entries about her visit to Greece, her disgusting recipe for Caesar Salad (as her “cat” Peter says, “Oh fuck!”), and her short treatise on going out (“DRUNK HUMANS EASILY GET AGRESSIVE”) clad in what appears to be panty hose, granny panties, a half-shirt declaring “SEX” and a blonde side ponytail.

Bonnie is that elusive perfect package – lovely, whimsical, interesting and intelligent while being completely insane. She is so awesome that I imagined my long-time commenter Ted from Romania marrying her, having icy-blue-eyed, completely deranged offspring with her. But alas she has a boyfriend. She also has a FUCKYEAH Tumblr.

The next interesting broad’s, whose name I do not know, is a witch living in Scotland. She refers to herself on her sites as Ms Graveyarddirt so that is what I will call her. I found her because people on a Christian watchdog site I frequent from time to time were bitching about her sitting naked on a roast (I’m too tired to find the picture but if you want I’m sure you can find it). I am unsure how she lost control of her main site, but she did and it hasn’t been updated in months. It gives one of those “this site may be compromised” blurbs when you search for it but I read the entirety of it and I’m fine, but bear that in mind.

While, like most Americans, I am squeamish about menstrual blood and semen in general, let alone when they are used in food, if the people consuming it don’t care, it’s no skin off my back. But that’s where so much of the negative reaction to Ms. Graveyarddirt comes from – a disgust borne from her lack of disgust. She uses her menstrual blood in food, mostly offerings to the gods she worships, especially one she calls Papa. (I don’t begin to understand because, heathen that I am, I have a serious block where such things are concerned, but I can appreciate sincerity when I see it, and this woman is quite sincere.) Ms. Graveyarddirt has a relationship with her body and the natural world that makes tidy Westerners nervous (she is an an American of Ukrainian descent living in Scotland so it’s not like she wasn’t conditioned with the rest of us – she just chose to transcend it). She eats fresh roadkill, she gathers mountains of fresh mushrooms, and she is teaching herself taxidermy, using the less fresh roadkill she finds. She casts spells. She makes elaborate shrines. She works harder than anyone I think I have encountered in cyberspace and it’s a little inspiring to me because though I lack any sort of religious or spiritual conviction beyond a sort of primitive “the universe responds directly and in kind to the way we behave” sense of the world, her genuine endeavor to forge a unique path is in and of itself unique.

She is not a Llewellyn Books kind of witch. She lives her life instinctively, doing what feels right to her, respecting the earth and her beliefs in a way that eschews the dogma that accompanies even witchcraft. She sneers at ideas like the Law of Threes, that what you put out there comes back to you threefold, because her experiences don’t prove it and how can a spiritual tenet come from a dogmatic belief repeated over and over. Christ, Mary and other elements of more “traditional” religion make their way into her belief system. It really is hard to describe, which is why I spent two months reading her main blog. For those worried about her site, she also has a LiveJournal, a Tumblr and a Facebook fan page.

I find her a refreshing change of pace from so many blogs I read. Genuinely interesting people are few and far between. And she’s an accomplished cook and baker – pictures of her bread are genuine food porn (phallic loaves for the win). She may not be everyone’s cup of tea but I really dig her approach to life, her work ethic, and her intellectual honesty. You don’t have to like her or to agree with her to find her work ethic admirable and her mind unique. I hope to buy one of her taxidermy projects one day. She doesn’t have anything up on her ETSY store at the moment but when she does, I will be all over it, I assure you.

The last amazing broad I would like to refer you to today is Sarah Proud and Tall. A humorous writer with a delightful yet trenchant outlook on the political world (and decidedly liberal, so all my con and Libertarian readers may wanna give her a miss if they think a writer posing as a 92-year-old woman in a nursing home for the violently senile will provoke them too much), Sarah came to my attention via Mr. Oddbooks. He sent me a link to her now famous article, “In which the vengeance of God is justly meted out on earth,” which was so funny it gave me a really bad case of the hiccups, I was laughing so hard. The story Sarah tells is of her and a young Gloria Vanderbilt besting Ayn Rand at a Christmas party hosted by Bitsy Trump. Here’s a small sample:

She was never content with just the Pool Room or just the Grill Room, so she always booked the whole place. Whenever she did, she’d pay the staff extra to leave the doors open, and then when people came in to ask for a table they had to say, “Yes, we are open, but there is no table for you. Off you fuck.” It did wonders for that place’s reputation. Two weeks after Bitsy’s first Christmas party, the Four Seasons was shooing the punters off with sticks, and there was a two week waiting list just to be sneered at by the maître d’.

“There is no table for you. Off you fuck!” is what people now see when they are banned from this site. Well, the one person banned saw it and he’s now unbanned so no one sees it but act up and there it’ll be, I promise you.

I would be remiss in not letting you know Sarah also writes for Balloon Juice. There you can read her discussion of viewing the movie based on Ayn Rand’s book, Atlas Shrugged, entitled “By the incompetent at the expense of the stupid.” Again, one of the funniest things ever on the Internet:

Making a movie from the rancid scribblings of that vile and termagant shrew – a woman who never met a circumlocution she didn’t like and whose idea of character development was to have someone rape someone else – was never going to be a great idea.

And then there’s this:

Ayn Rand may have been an evil old ferret with a heart of frozen poison and the morals of a tapeworm – in person, she may have made your palms itch with the urge to strike her and keep on striking her until she fell down – but at least she wasn’t boring.

This movie, on the other hand, is the only experience I have ever had which is more tedious than actually reading Atlas Shrugged. I haven’t been that bored since Andy Warhol asked Joe Dellasandro to hock up a loogie on the ground, filmed it for three hours and then made all of us at the Factory watch it in slow motion.

I’ve been to funerals that had a better script, livelier action and a happier ending.

But don’t think my beloved Sarah is a one-note writer. She spends her days mocking others too. I loved her evisceration of that pantload, Jonah Goldberg. Bonus English usage lesson in that article as well – never say Sarah doesn’t have your back. Sarah is such a deft writer that she managed to lampoon Michele Bachmann and the Catholic Church in one entry.

I adore Sarah. She really is a good old broad.

This Is Not An Odd Book Discussion: Apology and some incredibly absorbing links

This post originally appeared on 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!

This Is Not an Odd Book Discussion: A handy guide

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

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.

This Is Not An Odd Book Discussion: Looking at my comments

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

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.

Continue Reading “This Is Not An Odd Book Discussion: Looking at my comments”

This Is Not an Odd Book Discussion – Horking and enormous time sucks

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Dear readers, I came down with what can only be described as the plague. Mr Oddbooks brought home some conference crud and I watched a neighbor kid, and as we all know, kids are crawling with germs.   The neighbor kid’s germs morphed with the conference crud to create a supercrud.  My house may or may not be under a CDC tent.  So I haven’t been doing much but occasionally showing my ass in political communities and staring, stunned, at how much I really need to vacuum. I hope to have the “insane” and outsider literature discussion up on Friday, but given how things have been, it could be Friday, it could be three weeks from now.

Also, lots of people have been sending me books to read and I appreciate it. However, I am behind because of many reasons that have nothing to do with the plague but have everything to do with personal organization. So if you sent me a book and I said I would read it and discuss it, it will happen, in the fullness of time. The only exception would be if I began reading it and decided that even a crushingly horrible review would not be in your best interest. But that’s only happened once so I don’t see that happening.

In the mean time, let me share some links.

Here is the website of Gabriella Chana, a writer who thinks that she is genetically half Catherine the Great and half King David, who has a soul bond, or some such thing, to Brent Spiner, the dude who played Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Jesuits are keeping them apart, and she has a list of hot, Hollywood stars who want to marry her but all she can do is have mind sex with them. Gerard Butler, Matthew McConaughey, Hugh Jackman and Brent Spiner all long for her, evidently, but cannot marry her due to the Jesuits, though they somehow manage to leave awkward comments on her message board. Plan to devote hours to reading and reviewing Chana’s (aka Gail Chord) YouTube videos. I don’t know why George Clooney has yet to want to marry Chana, but I think it has something to do with the fact that he dates so much the Jesuits cannot keep him in cloned women that have babies to force him to marry them. Thanks to Ted the Romanian for this enormous time suck. Truly lunatic, so lunatic that I feel like it has to be a hoax but it probably isn’t.

Less involved but equally demented (though definitely not a hoax) is this site devoted to the theory that Stephen King killed John Lennon. There’s a book about it and you can be sure that I will be reading this book. Well, it’s actually a booklet, but it seems worth a read. I can only imagine that the reason that Stephen King has not sued the man behind this site is because the theory is so devoid of anything approaching reality that there was really no reason to shut him down. But I found it pretty interesting so you may, too.

Hopefully, this trend of being sick constantly is coming to an end and I can get stuff moving here. Clearly I am not a stoic who can work through such things. I’m pretty sure I would have been one of those people who died very young before antibiotics, vaccines and a modern infrastructure that supports the weak. Bear with me, please.

El Gato Muy Malo, 1992(ish) – 2010

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

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.

Happy Fatty
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.
Pegleg

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.

Oddbooks Media Dump

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Increasingly I find myself wanting to share the non-oddbook media I consume or become obsessed with. Some of it is left of center, some if it isn’t, but if it appears that others like posts like this, maybe I’ll do this more often.

I think in addition to simply wanting to share these things that often accompany my odd book journeys (because it is a strange, circuitous route at times that gets me to the bizarre books I read), I hope others share whatever their most recent media obsession is. Nothing like sharing the love.

This week I have been listening to two songs a lot online. One is Nouvelle Vague’s cover of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division:

I love listening to the singer’s voice, hearing touches of her French accent as she turns this song about the frail rage of love into something that seems far sweeter than it ever seemed possible.

Then there’s this song that’s been all over the radio lately:

The song is a little quirky and such, but I like this song mostly because I want to watch him sing. I literally just watch his mouth. I hadn’t realized how common perfectly spaced, uniformly-shaped, completely even, blindingly white teeth had become and how uninteresting they are to look at. The absence of perfect teeth in his mouth is almost sexy. I really like his cuspids. They give his mouth an interesting sort of sneer. If this guy becomes quite famous, I hope he never lets himself become another boring-mouthed Everyman.

And then there’s this. Yep, an analysis of bestiality and pedophilia in The Simpson’s Movie. Yeah, 90% of it borders on being unhinged. But at the same time, when Mr Oddbooks watched the movie I turned to him at one point and asked, “Is Homer gonna fuck that pig? What the hell?” So the author is sort of on to something. And the lunatic deconstruction of the film is, even when it is completely wrong, not entirely unlike some of the writing I have engaged in (:cough:breivik:cough:) so I appreciate the attention to detail. I just have to say that he lost me at Ned Flanders. No one should impugn Ned. Ned is the man. Ned rules. Never bad-mouth Ned.

Generally, when exploring the underbelly of the Internet, I find far more disturbing things than an unsane look at the Simpsons but give me time. I’ve only just started sharing what I find on my phone at 4:00 am when insomnia is ruling my sorry ass. Perhaps next week will be better. But for now I come with pretty French covers, amazing eyeteeth and Masonic hysteria in cartoons.

So, tell me anything you consumed this week that impressed/appalled/fascinated you.

Odd and creepy stuff that is not book-related

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

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.