Tartt, not tart.

[mccutcheon]

Anything but a sweet tart. Has anyone seen the photo of Donna Tartt on the dust jacket of the hardbound copy of her new book The Little Friend? The woman looks like she has Victorian ice her veins. What else could she be but a serious novelist? Maybe that mother in The Ring who raised horses and threw her daughter down a well. I’ve only just bought The Little Friend (I’m sure it’s not a reference to a girl’s period- but we’ll see.) Her first book The Secret History was very well done and is translated into twenty-four languages- including American, British, Canadian and Pape. And also both Portuguese and Brazilian. She has the writing down. Now let’s loosen that blouse, baby. Time to get On The Bus with Pax Acidus. Donna Tartt is a novelist, essayist and critic. But can she write poems like this?

Losing it in style (the anti-depressant daymare)
By McCutcheon

I wake up fat and hungry
My life is one bloated fantasy
I think I need to go on a diet
As I eat two dozen doughnuts
I plan to have some exercise
As soon as I take a nap
My girlfriend never had jet lag
She isn’t going anywhere
That didn’t stop her though
From walking out the door
I got fired from my job
For being too polite
I made the customers uneasy
With my insane smile
I have no pets or plants
My goldfish swam away
With my hamster
I look out the window
It could be dusk or dawn
Either way it’s time for pizza
I wipe my face on my underwear
And then I start to snore

[mccutcheon]

So far as I can tell, I am about 50 pages in, The Little Friend isn’t about a girl’s period. Then it wouldn’t be, would it? I mean Donna Tartt isn’t Judy Blume. No, no, no this is a big black ominous totem. Donna, Lilith Stern’s (ex-wife of Frazier) little sister, really had a go at it. In the prologue we have a little nine-year-old boy who ends up dead, hanged around the neck from a tree branch in the family’s backyard on Mother’s Day. Of course, the mother doesn’t like this present and she is into the terror you never come back from. And how does a nine-year-old hang himself? There must have been foul play. But wait. The prologue has a prologue. Today every writer is starting a book with a quote, or rather a few quotes. This one starts out with a quote from Harry Houdini.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am now locked up in a handcuff that has taken a British mechanic five years to make. I do not know whether I am going to get out of it or not, but I can assure you I am going to do my best. –H.H., London Hippodrome, Saint Patrick’s Day 1904.

There is another quote from Saint Thomas Aquinas. But you know, it’s theological.

For Burnt Roof of Mouth I think I’m going to use a quote from Sloth.

I love Pizza. -The Sloth, everyday.

Before I started reading The Little Friend, I’d been trying to read Joyce Carroll Oats, Don DeLillo and John Updike, long-standing sturdy members of American letters, and I couldn’t get into them. I thought reading them would help me become a better writer, and it has. I now know I don’t want to write boring crap such as that. Even when they tackle sex or writing I’m left cold. The best thing I come away with is their sentence structure. They all write beautiful sentences, something I dream of doing one day. J.C.O is presently teaching a course on self-editing at Princeton. How does one get into her class? I wonder if I have to be like Donna Tartt. Where does a Pax Acidus writer go to improve? I think I’ve come as far as I can go on Guinness alone. On Saint Patrick’s day I drink pints of Guinness instead of tying my self up and submerging my self into tanks of water and other nonsense.

[mccutcheon]

Okay now for the puns. (Intended?) I know the suspense is killing you. You are thinking McCutcheon is such a fool. He spent $26 (with a 30% off- maybe it isn’t going to be translated into 24 languages) on a big black book and is going to be hauling this thing down to the pool in the Evil Heat while all the girl in Bikini’s are reading Cosmo. Hint- when reading books down by the pool surrounded by girls in bikinis its better to read little paperback so you can bend them around and sneak peaks over the tops at the girls in bikinis. With big black hardbound ominous totems they take up too much size to craftily sneak peaks without looking like a pervert. Besides all the girls in bikinis look at me like I’m a nerd reading such a huge paperweight. One girl came up to me and asked what in the hell was I reading. I said it’s the newest version of the bible and I’m studying to be a priest. At first she didn’t believe me and then I showed her the quote from St. Tommy. Then she believed me, and asked what kind of car did I drive. She was from LA. I said a red one. Anyway, so you are all thinking I’m stupid because I’m lugging this thing around when there really is no mystery- the kid hung himself by mistake, he slipped up, acting like a little Harry. But no, that’s not it. The hero of the story is a little girl, the kids’ younger sister, who wants to solve the murder. And she likes Harry. So maybe that’s it. And I think she’ll do it too, because like me she loves Sherlock Holmes. This also takes place in the SOUTH and there are references to 'Nigger' all over the place. Not for shock value the way Tarintino used in Pulp Fiction, I believe, but because I think Donna wishes her last name was Faulkner or at least Twain.

[mccutcheon]

So now the little Miss Nancy Drew is on the case, and she is going after the town ruffians, who are into meth distribution and inhalation. But isn’t that the obvious choice? I’m hoping there is a catch, a plot twist, a little trickery that gives me tingles.

Down by the pool reading the big black ominous totem the girl from LA came up to me again.

She said, “You still reading that Bible thingy?”

“Yup. They added a New Testament and it’s a bitch but I gotta learn it.”

“Oh?”

“So what kind of red car do you drive?”

“A red hot sports car, just like in that song by Christian electro group Squarepusher. All the aspiring theologians are driving them these days. We are going for a new image after all that nasty fiddle diddle stuff.”

“Oh?”

“Oh yeah!”

[Maverick]

It's a good story, but I don't believe a word of it. Ok, well, maybe the part about the LA girl asking what kind of car you drive...

[mccutcheon]

If you don't believe the story that's Donna's fault not mine. Donna the serious novelist, essayist and critic. Not girlie band The Donna's.

[mccutcheon]

Roses are red, and a variety of other colors. But they've never been blue — an omission legions of rose breeders have sought for centuries to remedy. "It would be a beautiful thing to see," said James Armstrong, an award-winning flower show exhibitor and consultant with the San Francisco Rose Society. Breakthroughs in biotechnology may finally resolve the quest for the elusive blue rose, which, alas, does not exist because roses lack the corresponding pigment genes.

I know this bar called the Blue Rose.

[mccutcheon]

our newest member has a cool website. check it out.

Now i'm reading two books at the same time, Tartt and Bangs, is it a good thing? I don't know. Hopefully I'll be up to the task. But it has to be done because it is best boook of the moment, written years ago. yes, it's Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung by Lester bangs. Rock and Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock and Roll.