2013 DISINHIBITIONS: JOHN THORPE

2013 for me, no particular order. Not all of is new this year, but new to me. I'm mapping contours, right?

Solaris, Stanislaw Lem. Killed me. Just started reading SF last month and this has been a cut above the rest. Two cuts.

Found a six dollar facsimile of The Wood Beyond the World, William Morris at Kelmscott, 1894. Beautiful and it's terrible. Instructional and it's terrible. 

David Brazil's The Ordinary, and esp. CJ Martin's reviews. Never thought for a minute that critical work could work like this and it can and does, and is brilliant and beautiful and terrifying. Like makes me creep closer to the conspiracist camps kind of terrifying. Paranoiac Camps where people still fear language is the Intelligence lording us. And where we're getting no say in how it organizes or pushes or breaks us like wooden toys. 

Gunslinger by Ed Dorn. Total blast. 

Rubble Paper Paper Rubble, Paul Klinger. It's not all surface like I thought it was going to be when I first flipped through. More suggestions of a conspiring of letter forms. And Klinger might just be its roadie-stenographer. 

Vice's Tiny Comedians Series. 

Vice sends Dennis Rodman to North Korea. Thrice. 

Louis C.K. Season 3. 

Craig Dworkin wrote the missing chapter to Tristam Shandy and it's insanely good. Should be out soon, binding is nearly done. Red Butte Press.

Took me forever but finally spent time with Joni Mitchell. Live at BBC 1970 esp. 

Alice in Wonderland, illus. Barry Moser, facsimile edition put out by HBJ. I won it in a raffle (only thing I've ever won) and I'll end up reading this once every six months or so till my heart stops. 

Found an English language edition of a Russian SF book (Crew of the Mekong) published by Mir, a company that, as of 1974, had not switched to Linotype machines. Still hand setting. (!!) Crooked baselines and little a's missing their tails for page after page. (Started buying trade books this year for layout and production more than anything else).

The last track on that Caroline Shaw album. 

The Self Beyond Itself, Heidi M Ravven, 2013. She's a holocaust scholar revisiting the American obsession with freedom and free will. Says she's got neuroscience to show us Spinoza was right all along. I haven't finished it yet, but her chapters on moral education models are heart sickening. 

EBPS for life! Katie Bohenc, from DC and her love letters. And another reading months later, I can't remember the actors' names. A skit with a couple getting ready to go to the reading we were all already at. Side splitting, and way incisive. All the laughter was nervous or wasn't laughter.

Bio: I'm 26, living in SLC and part way through a working year of wilderness therapy for bad teenagers in the NE Utah oilfield-desert. This, after finally digging myself from a three year academic k-hole, wherein, I think, I was reading, redacting and writing and making letterpress books. At least that's what the proofs point to.