]]> http://www.cwbuecheler.com/2009/09/29/the-blood-that-bonds-is-live/feed/ 16 http://www.cwbuecheler.com/2009/05/24/books-hubert-selby-jrs-requiem-for-a-dream/ http://www.cwbuecheler.com/2009/05/24/books-hubert-selby-jrs-requiem-for-a-dream/#comments Sun, 24 May 2009 17:06:08 +0000 chris http://www.cwbuecheler.com/?p=1291 Continue reading →]]> Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby Jr.

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Hubert Selbey Jr.’s Requiem for a Dream is a hard book to read … not due so much to its sensitive subject matter, which is frankly riveting, as to Selby’s unconventional, stream-of-consciousness prose. The guy barely believes in basic punctuation marks, let alone quotes, paragraph breaks, or dialog attribution. It takes a while to get into it.

Once you do, however, you’re rewarded with one of the more honest (and bleak) looks at addiction and the downward spiral it causes in people’s lives. This is not simply a book about junkies, or about people who have no options in life and thus turn to drugs. Selby’s characters are young, enterprising … some are well-educated, cultured, experienced. By no means do they all fit into the stereotypical expectations one might have of a heavy drug user. Yet all of them find themselves inevitably pulled into similar situations.

I’d seen the movie version before reading the novel, which certainly reduces the suspense while reading the book. However, my main complaint with the film was that I didn’t feel like it spent enough time letting us get to know and like the characters, which in turn made the downward spiral less powerful than it could’ve been. This is much less a problem with the book — Selby spends a good deal of time on characterization, and it helps keep the novel interesting and compelling throughout.

I strongly recommend Requiem for a Dream. It may be disturbing to some, but you’re not going to find a better depiction of dangers of substance abuse and addiction.

View all my reviews.

In the meantime, please enjoy this picture of the Empire State Building. It’s not even retouched — this is what it actually looked like. I have to admit: it’s stuff like this that really makes me love living and working in New York. You don’t exactly get to see views like this too often, in too many places.

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
If you live in New York City, which I do, the subway is probably a substantial part of your life. Even if you don’t, it’s a pretty fascinating place to visit, in person or in print. Randy Kennedy’s collection of articles, Subwayland, covers a variety of topics within the tiny world running underneath the city.

Interesting and easy to read, the book touches on a range of subjects. Some are sentimental, others amusing, others mildly baffling (such as the guy who insists he’s not that much of a subway buff, and yet has built a complete replica of a conductor’s station … in his one-bedroom apartment). The end of the book does choose to group several September 11th pieces together, and I found this a bit questionable, as it seems overly maudlin and like an overt attempt at manipulating the reader’s emotions. Still, it didn’t dissuade me from finishing the book quickly.

Perhaps what I enjoyed most about Subwayland is that it is nearly the perfect book to read while riding the subway. The articles are short and easy to read, meaning you can get through two or three of them during the duration of a typical subway ride (or more, depending on your commute).

All in all, an enjoyable glimpse into a world beneath a world.

View all my reviews.

Next week I’m going to try to post a new web design tutorial. See you all soon. Happy New Year!

On that exciting, autobiographical note, here now are the links for the first half of Voices – Chapter 8, beginning with Page 75. It’s available in the Writing section, as always.

If you’re celebrating New Years Eve tonight, I recommend partying responsibly … by which I mean drinking like a fish, but not getting behind the wheel of a car. That’s our plan, along with consuming massive quantities of delicious, Caribbean-themed snacks. It may be cold and gross out in Brooklyn, but in our apartment, we’re all going to be Barbados Slim for the night!

Half of Chapter 8 coming tomorrow, the other half on Thursday, and the final five pages (Chapter 9) coming on Friday. Hooray!

We start by finishing up Chapter 5, and then I’m going to try like hell to finish the entire thing this week, so that I can get on to posting new things, whether it’s fiction, non-fiction, web design tutorials, or just general musing on life in Brooklyn and my continued obsession with the real estate market here.

So. Voices, Chapter 5, pages 47 through 52. Here you go, in the Writing section as always. Enjoy, and I’ll talk to you tomorrow!

The latest version of WordPress has a new admin interface, and it makes posting pages a bit easier, so that’s a good thing. Should make it easier to finish this thing up. There’s still a lot of pages to go!

Anyway, the latest pages can be found in the Writing Section, as always.

More soon!

Yep, that’s the stuff. The sweet, sweet taste of the New York Yankees sucking. See, I live in New York, but I spent my formative years in Massachusetts, and those are the years in which sports allegiances are formed (with the exception of college allegiances, but I only pay attention to college sports of any kind when SU men’s basketball is actually doing well in the tournament). As a result, my sports allegiances lie mostly with the New England region of the country, which has made it a pretty amazing decade thus far. Three championships and a fourth SuperBowl appearance for the Patriots, a championship for the Celtics, and two championships for the Red Sox (after an 86 year draught and a curse and blah blah blah, no less).

Now, granted, the Celtics essentially bought their championship, and the Red Sox have the second-highest payroll in baseball so it’s not like they were exactly a team full of scrappy underdogs … but it’s not like that’s uncommon in sports, either. Spending a crapload of money and assembling a power team for a couple of years is actually much more common than putting a team together through a combination of smart drafting, key free-agent signings, and an equal focus on stars and roleplayers, though that’s exactly how the Patriots did it. Also they cheated, but I don’t really care about that, since every team in every sport is doing all kinds of unethical crap in order to win. The Pats got caught, paid the price, and moved on (probably right back to videotaping signals).

I’m not one of those arrogant Boston fan jackasses who thinks we’re entitled to win things. I was actually quite happy to see the Colts win a SuperBowl, and I would love to see Phoenix get over the hump and win an NBA championship. I am aware that I root for “the bad guys” whenever I root for the Patriots, just as most Yankees fans are aware that their team is pretty much uniformly despised by everyone who is not, in fact, a Yankee fan. Winning does that to teams. No one hated the Patriots until they were good. No one cared. The Yankees have been the best overall team in sports for the past 100 years, and that’s why everyone hates them.

Anyway, the point of all this is that as a Boston fan, I take enormous pleasure in seeing the Yankees perform poorly. In fact, largely the only reason I pay any attention whatsoever to baseball during the regular season is to see whether or not the two teams are going to end up in the playoffs or not, and whether the Sox will have to go through them to get to the World Series. This year, it is very much looking like the Yankees will not get in at all, which makes me happy. In some ways, it makes me happier than the fact that the Red Sox probably will make the playoffs, which is a bit odd, but it’s true nonetheless.

Then again … perhaps it’s not a bit odd after all, because if there weren’t a lot of people who take malicious joy in the misfortunates of others then hey, I guess the term schadenfreude wouldn’t exist in the first place.