Brace yourself, dear readers.

I didn’t buy any books (gasp! shock! horror!) so I have nothing to report on the rabid book-buyer front this week. Instead, seeing it feels as though it has been a while between reviews, I’ll quickly chat about what I have been reading. I’m working my way through Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar, which, despite it’s heavy use of a Scottish accented prose and slang and a generally downbeat demeanour, is keeping my attention. That is, when that attention isn’t being distracted by Hunter S. Thompson with Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 72. H.S.T. is managing to captivate me and get me involved in the American politics of 37 years ago with his outlandish wit and fierce mockery of the system. I’ve still got some Chuck Palahniuk books to read, but I think maybe the Palahniuk wave has crashed and I might be a bit over it? I’ll see how I feel when I finish these two books.

I started watching the first season of Mad Men this week, and the incredibly handsome Jon Hamm has me really wanting to read/reread some Jack Kerouac. Anyone else think Hamm would make a great Kerouac if someone had the lack of decency to make a film version of his life? Speaking of Mad Men, here’s me and Don Draper at an after-work rendezvous via the way too much fun on a boring Sunday afternoon at work Mad Men Yourself:

So, Don, what have you been reading?

Ahem. Cartoon vanity and daydreams of meeting some dashing Don Draper look-a-like over a cocktail or two aside, here are some bookish articles that I found interesting this week. Douglas Coupland writing for the Guardian on his personal circumstances while he wrote Generation X:

“And so I started to write the book. I remember spending my days almost dizzy with loneliness and feeling like I’d sold the family cow for three beans. I suppose it was this crippling loneliness that gave Gen X its bite. I was trying to imagine a life for myself on paper that certainly wasn’t happening in reality. In the book there was the idea that people marooned in life could unmaroon themselves by telling stories to each other. That still seems to me to be a valid way of seeing the world. There was also the notion that telling stories was a way of coping with information overload – hence the book’s subtitle, Tales for an Accelerated Culture. In 1989, information overload meant 50 TV stations instead of 10, as well as push-button phones instead of rotary dial phones – quaint now, but back then it felt real. What was really going on with the writing of X was, I suspect, the use of storytelling as a form of creative pattern recognition from which clues to psychic survival might erupt. That’s possibly what storytelling is in a large sense, and it’s what I do for a living, the most recent evidence of which is Generation A, a follow-up to X where the cultural acceleration experienced by the characters is palpable rather than theoretical.”

Heather Dent over at PopMatters writes a reflective eulogy for Hunter S. Thompson:

“For generation after generation, Thompson rocked/rocks/will rock the dominant paradigm, describes our national character; corruption, inequality, mediocrity, freedom and fun, Fear and Loathing. His words, all the more relevant today, continue to delight and rattle us.”

Over at the New York Times, Arthur Krystal contemplates writers who appear to be terrible conversationalists.

And, finally, in my constant search for news, articles and basically anything of interest regarding Carson McCullers, Google News search turned up a review of a bar in Portland, The Press Club, which has a selection of crêpes named after authors. It appears that the owners have some good taste in literature as one of the crêpes is named after McCullers and I’m curious about how they decided that this particular combination of ingredients – “mozzarella, mushrooms, red peppers, and spinach” – represented Carson McCullers? In lieu of a ticket to Portland, I’m tempted to try and create my own version of crêpe à la Carson and report back on my findings.