Book Reports! "Mythos" and "Let Me Think" (Patreon)

From Penn's Private Book Blog:

Let Me Think: Stories by J. Robert Lennon – 210724 – It was pointed out to me that many of my book reports start with “This is not the kind of book I read,” in one form or another. It’s very clear to me that I do most things I do from a sense of duty and not on impulse. I have lists of books I “should” read, and I push. I do that with practice, and study, and writing, and most everything. But this is the kind of book I read. Really rich, deep, short stories with great turns of phrase and real wisdom. It’s like the McCracken stuff. Modern writers that really think and feel and can really write. This is the kind of book I read. The novel of his that I read was too magical realism for me, I don’t really relate to that, but this is just so good. There aren’t many quotations that I pulled because the stories are short and in many cases the quotation I would like would be the whole story, so I would just be cutting and pasting the book, and then, well, there’s the book. I really liked this. I like the way he writes and the way he feels the world.

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But the boys—the boys are enraptured by their own corporeality. They are horribly alive.

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A couple of burly guys saw it happen and took off after the kid. I asked the old man if he was all right, but I didn’t really care. I was jealous. Of the kid, I mean. I wanted the cane. I wanted to be able to steal a thing with such grace, to be young and an asshole again.

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You, she says. You always take everything. Even the blame.

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If dust is plural, how many dust are there? A lot. You don’t want to think too hard about how many tiny things there are, that you have to pick up. You just clean until things are clean, and not a second longer.

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None of them looked at their phones. I did, because I was by myself, and because I lived most of my life at a distance from the things and people I loved.

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Death (After) I believe in the afterlife in the same way I believe in the afterparty: it may exist, but I’m not invited, and so will never find out.

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Imagine living out here, surrounded by the things. Human-sized rats with fucking coat racks on their heads.

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you will find my Doc Martens ankle-deep in your hemorrhoid-encrusted assholes so fast you’ll wonder if you just time-traveled back to freshman year at fisting school.

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I want all pain to be erased from my memory, and I want to spend the next fifty years in a state of effortless euphoria until I die peacefully in my sleep and ascend to a heaven of puffy clouds, cute interspecies animal friendships, and incessant orgasms at the nimble hands of the men’s Olympic diving team.

Mythos, The Greek Myths Reimagined by Stephen Fry (Audible) – 210804 – I just love Stephen Fry. And Teller mentions the Greek myths all the time in conversation, and I’m always left out. I don’t really care for these kinds of fantasy stories no matter how old and classic they are. I read The Iliad and the Odyssey, and they never really landed with me, but it did help me get more allusions in everyday speech and our culture. But Stephen Fry is so wonderful. He’s able to do what a skilled comedian can do with a subject, and that’s to not make too many jokes. He never does that situation comedy writing that is great for situation comedies, but when it bleeds into other parts of life drives me crazy. He tells these stories and only does a joke, when it’s natural, comfortable, and he really wants to. No desperation.  I mean, it might be 20 minutes (it’s an audio book) between jokes and that’s just right for this kind of subject. Everyone knows (even I knew) so much of our language and culture comes from these myths, but even knowing that, it’s shocking. And it’s so nice to hear the stories that so many of our stories are built on.  There’s none of the Joseph Campbell bullshit (wow, I hated his book), about how they’re put together (Campbell does it at such a high level of abstraction, it means nothing), Stephen just tells the stories.  And there’s no analysis, it doesn’t need it, he just tells the story. And he really does tell what he loves about them. There’s no attempt to be complete, it’s stories that Stephen likes. I listened to this just driving to work and back and it was so wonderful.  He had me looking forward to my commute ever time.

And now maybe I’ll have a little better idea what Teller is talking about and I’ll live a little more in our culture.