Bleeding Fiction

This isn't really news, per se, but you can get things at Amazon.com that you cannot find in other places. Through some process that is secret from me, they have access to books that other bookstores, of the type you might enter physically and find book-covered shelves in, will not acknowledge the existence of even if blackmailed. And, to be clear, when I say blackmailed I mean that the pictures will show both the ardvark and the sewing machine.

Today, I received a package from Amazon.com. The rarity of the box's contents made me feel as if it had been lifted from the afternoon stage and carried to me by colorful horsemen in black hats who may have been firing pistols into the air at the time. I felt like a very lazy western outlaw.

You may ask what I number amongst my ill-gotten gains, and I'm not so miserly as to keep the knowledge from you. First, I got the album Nice, by Puffy Ami Yumi. I'm not, generally speaking, into the JPop scene. I mostly don't like American pop music. I expect much less to enjoy pop music from another country, in another language, altogether. So, leaving aside the more orchestral anime soundtracks, I'm usually glad to give Japanese music a pass. Given their influences (which include The Beatles, The Who and The Clash), Puffy Ami Yumi is an exception.

The Garden State DVD was second. If you've seen the movie, I do not need to explain to you the sheer awesomeness of it. If you haven't seen the movie, come to my place, from no matter how far a distance, and we will watch it. As soon as you get here.

Next was the Gilmore Girls Second Season DVD set. Gilmore Girls is in its fourth season now and, unlike some other shows I could mention, it still maintains its high level of awesomeness. The Second Season DVD set illustrates this nicely with its inclusion of a Gilmore Girl Phrasebook, which explains all of the (sometimes obscure) references the lead characters make in the second season.

Fourth was a book that I've mentioned before, The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture. As I said then, this is a book I've wanted for a while without even knowing that it existed. Occultism and Soviet kitsch? Yeah, I'm all over that. It's got a chapter called "Technology as Esoteric Cosmology in Early Soviet Literature." That's just cool. And, like most things I buy these days, fuel for a possible story I've been kicking around since the summer.

And finally the first volume of The Deer and the Cauldron, written by Louis Cha. I bought the book based entirely on hearsay and speculation. I had, for example, heard that Louis Cha is basically the founder of and most important figure in the twentieth century Chinese wuxia literature movement. Leaving aside the classics like the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the Outlaws of the Marsh Louis Cha made what may well be the first attempt at a written prose heroic literature for China (as opposed to oral histories and operas). Everything that comes after, including Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero, is in a lot of ways due to Louis Cha's influence. Because of some of my own writing interests (slow as they are in the coming...) I wanted to check this out and see what I could draw from it. A blurb on the dust-jacket has it that the book's "Martial Arts meets Monty Python." Should be interesting!