Dune & My Heart Is A Chainsaw
or, is it bad that I basically only read when going to bed
Ok fine I’m finally reading Dune is every other man I’ve ever talked to happy now
Dune: Part Two was when it all finally clicked for me and I thought hang on what if I do like this. I saw Dune: Part One in 2021 and did not feel that way. I’ve seen David Lynch’s Dune and, although I suppose that has infamously never gotten anyone Into Dune, did not feel that way. But Part Two was where I finally thought, huh, this seems interesting/THAT’S why they cast Timothée Chalamet????
So I have finally picked up a ~600-page book I’ve had kicking around from apartment to apartment to apartment to apartment to apartment and then lived at my girlfriend’s apartment for a while because her roommate wanted to read it. And I am basically exclusively reading it before going to bed. When I’m sleepy. Ideally, I even fall asleep while reading it. Which is nice, except it does make it harder to follow the book, and while Dune is a notoriously dense book, I do feel like I am setting myself up for a compromised opinion on whether it has too much stuff going on to easily follow.
By this point, there are two flavors of what I write for ReadOnly. It’s either a “these two dissimilar things have a surprising similarity, and the answer Will Shock You”-type post or it’s a post that asks “should I feel weird that I do X?” and answers it with “no. nothing matters. no one needs to do anything”. I’m less interested in somehow finding something new to say about Dune than I am in finding something to say about the physical act of sitting down with a surprisingly small ~600-page paperback in time and space amidst the interlocking and interdisciplinary demands and pains of living in the present world. I just think it’s kinda neat that it took three feature-length films of this book – all compelling enough to give the next one a shot even though I hadn’t felt like I “got it” – for me to finally feel motivated to pick up a book I already had a copy of, purchased by law I suppose, and read it and sometimes have to google who a character was and why they were doing what they were doing because, as an added complication to the interweaving internal motivations and external needs of the narrative’s many actors, I was often sleepy.
I am bouncing much more heavily off of My Heart Is A Chainsaw, which I am also reading basically exclusively when in bed but not asleep, doing the same dance of “is this actually hard to follow, is this just not for me, should I just be more awake when I do this?” The novel is disappointing me for reasons that also disappoint me: the teenage narrator has a real bad noise ratio, her slasher obsession comes across as less of the slasher genre deconstruction I was expecting and more like Ready Player One cred flaunting, and I’m halfway through and feel like I’ve been reading it for a million years and it’s yet to subvert or deconstruct anything. Huge bummer because Stephen Graham Jones’s other horror novel The Only Good Indians blew me away, made me believe horror novels could be For Me for the first time in a long time, made me think wow this is so good should I try my hand at writing horror sometime?
But also I do keep falling asleep while reading it and maybe that’s not “a fair shake”.
I have been thinking more recently about a persistent expression of my anxiety, a certain type of restlessness I get during “free time”, feeling like there’s something I should be doing. Not even necessarily something I should be working on, or even errands I’ve forgotten to do, but like there’s even some kind of lesiure I need to do that has escaped my attention. It’s been pointed out to me lately that it’s very Sunday Scaries–esque, which I bristle a bit at because wow what an infantilizing pop pysch term for something with an underlying hyperawareness of one’s mortality. But then there is something not not infantilizing about a routine pause in leisure time prompting a getting-older panic about how I will die before I read every book I have on my reading list, own, and/or have been instilled with a sense that I “should” read it. Doubly so when you include movies or video games.
I am also thinking about how when my book club met to read Pedro Páramo (of yet another Matthew side-project fame) and then discussed what book to read next, every single person in the room said that they mostly read before bed.
Standard Plugs Zone
I have returned to my book recap blog roots. wtf is Pedro Páramo is a section-by-section reading, guide, and explanation of the novel Pedro Páramo. It’s not too late to join the club; we’re literally only 7 pages in.
If you’re based in NYC, my band Good Cry is playing our next show TONIGHT. June 12 at Rubulad in Brooklyn. Advance tickets are maybe still available here idk how it works day of. Doors at 7.
If you’ll be based in NYC a week and a half from now, my band is playing our next next show at Bar Freda in Queens. A matinee from 4-7:30, which honestly is a huge relief for my aging body in a world in which every concert means you get home around midnight for some reason.
Expanding the standard plugs zone, realizing it doesn’t have to be about me all the time lol, the NYC indie DIY show paper Gunk (which I do distribution for) has GROWN UP into a whole-ass zine with PAGES. It’s rad as hell.
Friend of the blog Lucy Faye Rosenthal has a short story “Better Beauty” recently published by Joyland. I met Lucy though a mutual friend who I know because I keep running into him at concerts and started recognizing each other, and she told me she has a short story coming out soon about two women throwing a joint birthday party. It is indeed the delightful social minefield I aniticpated it would be.
A friend’s gal pal Hammie has a newly blossoming career as a vtuber, seemingly overnight, shocking me and my friend whose reactions were basically “that happens????” She’s a variety streamer splitting time between cozy games and surreal, story-rich games.