Yes, I wrote this on Tonya Harding's website.

Her website is fucking creepy.

Some really cool acting from Leo, Kate and Michael Shannon.

What I've Read, What I've Known, Turn the Pages Turn to Stone, etc...

This is what I read this year. Some of this was for school, some pleasure...but you probably couldn't guess which was which (hint: crime thrillers and graphic novels tend not to be included on college syllabi, but then neither does classic literature)

FICTION

Samuel Beckett - Molloy (a hundred pages that felt like a thousand, but brilliant)

Aphra Behn - Oroonoko (at least it was short)

Michael Chabon - The Final Solution (awesome)

Henry Chang - Chinatown Beat (big disappointment)

Michael Connelly - The Black Echo (kind of a letdown)

Don DeLillo - Libra (Interesting, but not as fun as White Noise)

Charles Dickens - Christmas Carol (An emotional rapist, though halfway through you'll start to like it, like the rape scene in Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter)

Roddy Doyle - The Commitments - I dug it.

James Ellroy - Blood's a Rover (best book of the year hands down)

William Faulkner - Sound and the Fury (he's most poetic when he's most misogynistic and racist, which is kind of disturbing)

Nathaniel Hawthorne - "Ethan Brand" (An amazing story about a man searching for the unpardonable sin)

Nick Hornby - High Fidelity (helped me understand my brother)

Henry James - Turn of the Screw (William writes better, but a cool ghost story nonetheless)

James Joyce - Ulysses (1000 pages that reads like 5000; brilliant gibberish)

Ibi Kaslik - Angel Riots (Awful and Canadian--coincidence?)

Dennis Lehane - Mystic River, A Drink Before the War, Darkness Take My Hand, Shutter Island (Probably the master of the crime story at millenium's end. Ellroy is more literary and more disturbed, but Lehane is more controlled, and his stories move. An amazing writer.)

Henning Mankell - The Dogs of Riga, The Man Who Smiled (Ingmar Bergman's son-in-law who writes socially conscious detective stories. Great, but kind of depressing.)

Herman Melville - Moby Dick; Or, the Whale (A classic that's actually kind of fun to read)

Grant Morrison - Batman Arkham Asylum, Batman and Son (Well-painted and interesting)

Robert B Parker - Back Story (A good page-turner if a bit cheezy)

George Pelecanos - Soul Circus (Supposed to be better than Lehane; a big disappointment; warm-over Elmore Leonard)

Neil Pollack - Never Mind the Pollacks (worth the read, Josh!)

Ian Rankin - The Complaints, Knots and Crosses (more of a traditional mystery writer than Lehane, but his equal in character and plotting. and the television Rebus episodes are so fucking good).

J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Wrapped up the series nicely; fun)

Richard Stark - The Hunter (Badass caper novel)

Robert Louis Stevenson--Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (terrific and short)

Josephine Tey - Daughter of Time (A crime novel that uncovered the historical truth about Richard III)

Michael Turner - Hard Core Logo (snorrrrrrrrrrre)

Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions, God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian, A Man Without a Country, Slaughter-House Five, Like Shaking Hands With God (Breakfast was amazing; the rest were fun to read, and occaionally brilliant, but diminishing returns)

Joseph Wambaugh - The Choir Boys (Police procedurals by a real cop. A cop who can fucking write).

Richard Yates - Revolutionary Road - (Astonishingly Brilliantly Funnily Poignantly Amazing)

NONFICTION

Pat Capponi - Bound by Duty (A former nuthouse patient critiques the police)

Stanley Cavell - The Senses of Walden (A cool philosophical examination of Thoreau)

Frederick Douglass - Narrative of the Life... (Best slave narrative I'd read...out of two)

Sigmund Freud - Overview of Psychoanalysis, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Wolfman (His case studies are the best thing he wrote; beware of Lacan)

Margaret Fuller - Woman in the 19th Century (really spoke to me)

Werner Herzog - Herzog on Herzog, Walking on Ice (the greatest filmmaker is a decent but not brilliant writer)

William James - Varieties of Religious Experience, Pragmatism (Game-changers both)

Soren Kierkegaard - The Sickness Unto Death (Impenetrable but worth the attempt)

Jon Krakauer - Into the Wild (Pretty cool)

Roy Porter - Disease Medicine and Society in England 1550-1800 (yes I read every goddamn page of this. Seriously.)

Henry Thoreau - Walden and Civil Disobedience (Terrific inspiration)

Nick Tosches - Hellfire (Great biography of Jerry Lee Lewis)

Joseph Wambaugh - The Onion Field (The best Wambaugh, and the movie's good too)

Slavoj Zizek - Understanding Lacan (I don't, so it couldn't've been that good a book, could it?)

DRAMA

Sophocles - Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone - (Entertaining, though I doubt they'll stand the test of time--wakka wakka, they're old, get it?)

Johann Goethe - Faust Part One and Two (The German Shakespeare's no Shakespeare, but not bad)

Shakespeare - Merry Wives of Windsor, Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, Coriolanus - (It's fucking Shakespeare, okay? Everything he put a pen to is worth reading)

Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (More Beckett than Shakespeare)

INTERVIEWER

You mentioned economic freedom. Does the writer need it?

FAULKNER

No. The writer doesn’t need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper. I’ve never known anything good in writing to come from having accepted any free gift of money. The good writer never applies to a foundation. He’s too busy writing something. If he isn’t first rate he fools himself by saying he hasn’t got time or economic freedom. Good art can come out of thieves, bootleggers, or horse swipes. People really are afraid to find out just how much hardship and poverty they can stand. They are afraid to find out how tough they are. Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don’t have time to bother with success or getting rich. Success is feminine and like a woman; if you cringe before her, she will override you. So the way to treat her is to show her the back of your hand. Then maybe she will do the crawling.

Interview with William Faulkner, Paris Review.

I haven't found a really funny site in a while, but funnyexamanswers.com did it.

Shutter Island...!

Other than Sherlock Holmes, Shutter Island is the next big film I'm looking forward to. Scorsese directing an adaptation of Dennis Lehane's novel, with DiCaprio, Von Sydow and Kingsley starring? Hell yes.

I started reading the book yesterday and already I'm 200 pages through, which is great considering how little time I have. Lehane is such a gifted writer, one who effortlessly combines evocative writing, interesting characters and deep moral dilemmas. See Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone for evidence of this.

Just the way he puts sentences together is arresting:

When they'd cleared the trees, they reached a paved road that crossed their path like a grin, and Teddy could see a house off to both his right and his left. The one to the left was the simpler of the two, a maroon mansarded Victorian with black trim, small windows that gave the appearance of sentinels. The one to the right was a Tudor that commanded its small rise like a castle.

That's a guy who cares about writing for its own sake, not just in furthering the plot. Michael Chabon is my favourite writer's writer for descriptions and evocative turns of phrase, but Lehane would make the short list.

You can get a copy of Shutter Island for four bucks at Black Bond. I suggest you do so.

Sinatra exacts revenge on punk for Sid Vicious's "My Way"

I've listened to this now more times than I've ever listened to the Clash.

Let's rehash the war one more time

I'm not saying I always agree with the guy, but Christopher Hitchens is the only person on the pro-war side of things who makes a lick of sense. If you can't acknowledge the positive aspects of those you disagree with, then you are a poop. I think John Stuart Mill said that.

I'd done a gig recently, and I was complaining about a bruised rib or some other kind of injury that one incurs on stage. And Henry says, "Yeah, I've got quite a few aches and pains, too." He rolls up his trousers and his legs are covered in cigarette burns where people have been stubbing their cigarettes out on his shins. I thought: Fair enough, you win this time. But I'll be back.

Nick Cave on how he met Henry Rollins.