incacat

My Favorite books

Public Notes

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  Joe M says

  Hey there! How are you doing? :) Thinking of you, hope everything is going well!
  Best, Joe

  Posted 3 years ago. ( send a note )

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  Joe M says

  Hey Incacat! How are you doing? Wanted to write and wish you a happy holiday!!
  I know it's been a while, but thinking of you and hoping everything's going great!
  I sent an email to you, but it bounced back :( ...
  Best, Joe

  Posted 3 years ago. ( send a note )

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  Ahimaaz says

  Hai incacat. How are you? I see that you've transformed into your true self, haven't you. I am reminded of A Dream of a Thousand Cats from Sandman tales!
  
  The darker the better. I should have Cages down soon. I haven't seen any of his short films. I should. Name them to me, so that I can look for them. I liked what he did with Mirror Mask. I was browsing through Wolves in the Wall and it had me on my toes! How's Mr. Punch? Thinking about browsing Stardust, reminded of Vess' work in the third tale in Books of Magic, I must grab the former too.
  
  Have you read Moore's Light of thy Countenance?

  Posted 4 years ago. ( send a note )

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  Maggie Stiefvater says

  whOOO!!! So exciting that it's starting to go out into the world. I hope you love it!!

  Posted 4 years ago. ( send a note )

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  Joe M says

  Thank you for the info! I will certainly have to find their work (and the others you have mentioned, not familiar with any of it), it sounds pretty cool. I have not seen Frida yet--yes, another glaring omission. :) Re: Exterminating Angel, hmmm, I think you might like it... Though as you said with Strings, I don't want to reveal too much--it's one of those films where it's best to just watch it and enjoy, going in with as little as possible. Hope you had a great weekend, and will talk more soon...Thanks again!

  Posted 4 years ago. ( send a note )

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  Joe M says

  No, I am not familiar with that...please tell me more...

  Posted 4 years ago. ( send a note )

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  Joe M says

  Your fave is L'Age d'Or...oh my. :) "Sex, violence, anarchy"--and sometimes all at once. "Quelle joie....quelle joie d’avoir assassiné nos enfants!"...as the Liebestod plays. (My favorite is "The Exterminating Angel")

  Posted 4 years ago. ( send a note )

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  Joe M says

  Okay, topic du jour: given the interest in Surrealism, have you seen any Bunuel films? If so, any particular favorites? You can tell **a lot** about a person by their favorite Bunuel movie. (All right, I made that up. :) )

  Posted 4 years ago. ( send a note )

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  Ahimaaz says

  I don't mean to be accusatory. One needn't be if it isn't healthy.
  
  The dancing thunderclaps slap and the feeders trip. After two days of recurring blackouts, the city is back on its clay feet. Politicians shout the country is shining and the status quo whispers the opposite thing.
  
  An angel is demon to one and angel to another. Yes, they would seem to change their shapes. It's in the eye of the beholder.
  
  I had a nightmare and in it I was passive observer; I had clear foresight of what was coming, the rain of beings crashing down on earth, and stood there pleased there were survivors. I will close my eyes and open mind's eye.
  
  I remember in What Dreams may Come the husband venturing through his wife's perceived hell. It's sad we can be trapped in our own mind. It's good we can be released in the same.

  Posted 4 years ago. ( send a note )

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  Joe M says

  p.s. Thank you for your kind words in your message. :)

  Posted 4 years ago. ( send a note )

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  Joe M says

  Hi there,
  Sorry for the delay in response, it has been quite a hectic weekend for me--I do hope to write to you in greater length in the near future. Last Friday I went to a poetry reading of Aime Cesaire, poet from Martinique--was thinking of you, as I recall avid (?) interest in Surrealism (e.g., Andre Breton, Dali) from your shelf/writings (would love to hear more about what draws you to this, what about it you find appealing). Cesaire incorporated elements of surrealism to his work, and he was friends with Breton, who wrote the introduction to Cesaire's epic poem "Notebook of a Return to the Native Land." Some wonderful lines: "we sing of venemous flowers flaring in fury-filled prairies; the skies of love cut with bloodclots; the epileptic mornings; the white blaze of abyssal sands..." "Sun, Angel Sun, curly Angel of the Sun for a leap beyond the sweet and greenish treading of the waters of abjection!" "in the glance of disorder there is this swallow of mint and broom which melts away to be rebon in the tidal wave of your light (Calm and lull oh voice the child who does not know that the map of spring is always to be drawn again)..."
  Best, Joe

  Posted 4 years ago. ( send a note )

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  Ahimaaz says

  Dogmas are curse ten-fold. Why would I be looking for one? I am not. If I dive, it's for the extraction of self-evident non-confirming mysteries. Then again, it's my own business :x
  
  Vertigo's angels are witnessed to pass their cross to mortals, and Saint of Killers makes a bloody colorful character than good-old Angel of Death. Seasons of Mist brings pantheon of gods under one roof. It also suggests the irredeemable Dark Angel can be redeemed, if willed. It's spin-off Lucifer penned by Mike Carey quenches my wanting for more. All dreams aren't expressions of unconcious and all dreams aren't supplementing of the said. Is there a tool to discern what is what?

  Posted 4 years ago. ( send a note )

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  Ahimaaz says

  Monsoon Wedding, I hear, is a special non-mainstream work. I haven't been switched to the mode to watching it yet. Deepa Mehta and Aparna Sen's works are good in the same vein. Beware, they're sans dance and colors. Mainstream-ward, Dil Chahta Hai, Rang De Basanti, Bombay are some good ones though they're wannabe-beyond-two-dimensional culprits. I grow tired real soon if there's'nt true character study in the narration. Besides, nonsensical songs are big plot-killers.

  Posted 4 years ago. ( send a note )

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  Ahimaaz says

  Isn't it funny speaking of forgetfulness, I forget collective consciousness! For a reminder, the rest of the world isn't Jungian like it isn't Darwinian. There are too many schools of thought in idea-space, to swim in it is to be lost. Then again, isn't what is lost always found? A long deep dive and then the emergence with handpicked idea-gems.
  
  Promethea must be fascinating! You mean with a child's curiosity and a human's thirst I be prepared?
  
  How do you like Sandman: Season of Mist? Lucifer giving up hell's rule for a piano bar. How essential is inversions of mythology?

  Posted 4 years ago. ( send a note )

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  Ahimaaz says

  You bet.
  
  Fountain is worth a shot. Bollywood movies! There you go, the phenomenon hasn't left a corner untouched, has it? Well, you might as well like it since you seem to know what you're looking for in them. There are some good flicks ni them for sure. I, for one, is exasperated by its monotonousness.
  
  Speaking of metafiction, I want to start Moore's Promethea. Sophie's World was quite a pleasure. Do we not exist in a Book as we are? There are things we would be better off not believing, the so-called truths. The poor Devil, for one, is victim number one. When comes to it, it's a blessing, we are bestowed with selective amnesia. Sadly, things we would be better off believing meets the same fate, doesn't it? Beings of perceptions we are, we wake to forget and sleep to forget, we grow numb to imagination and content just to be. Yes, then, it is hard indeed.

  Posted 4 years ago. ( send a note )

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  Joe M says

  Dear Incacat,
  Thanks for your message…sorry for the delay in response, I have been trying to post this message, but problems uploading it for some reason. Anyway…
  
  It is so good to hear that your job brings fulfillment to yourself, as well as it surely must bring happiness to the kids and their parents. I think it is important to do work that brings us a sense of meaning and purpose. Hmm, Lexington sounds like it probably wouldn’t be my kind of place…but you are so right to not give up your rarity! I do believe, based on viewing the books in your shelf, that you can and will use your strengths to be a role model and support to others in this town, to those who are hungering for creativity and artistic discovery…you can be a force to facilitate their own explorations, their own sense of individual expression.
  
  In looking at your last message, for some reason the word that prominently leaps out to the fore in my conscious—why exactly, I don’t know, going with intuition— is “labyrinthine.” While with all of our recent talk perhaps I should next be thinking of Daedalus or other Greek figure, in fact I am thinking of Jorge Luis Borges, that dealer in myths and metaphysics, perhaps because I have recently been reading his work (I see “Book of Imaginary Beings” on your Shelf, that is one I plan to read someday), having been introduced to him by my other amazing, dear, quite indispensable Shelfari friends…the labyrinth as a recurring symbol in his stories (in fact, one ‘Greatest Hits’ collection of his stories is entitled “Labyrinths”)…the mystery of “Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth”…or the poetic cruelty and symmetrical inversion which juxtaposes the puny machinations of man against the impassivity of Nature (I think of a phrase: 'illustre et sage, dans l'indifference,' 'illustrious and wise in indifference') in “The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths”...
  
  Yes, as reflected in your words and writing, you do burn quite noticeably…a good thing!!

  Posted 4 years ago. ( send a note )

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  Ahimaaz says

  That's a nice picture!
  
  I was watching Waltz with Bashir sometime back - an animated biographical docu. The characters' body movements were puppet-like and I thought it was intentional. The surrealist war-day nightmares had a tone of its own. It suggested me I was watching a graphic novel come to life on screen. Toward the end, the nightmare blurs into reality, there are the real-life women lamenting the massacred civilians, and the reality is nightmare!
  
  The Fountain has an arcane beauty to it and gets better with each viewing.
  
  I sort of quit watching movies with a gang. There is a touch of warmth in the air when reading when it's just me and the spell of a story.

  Posted 4 years ago. ( send a note )

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  Ahimaaz says

  It owes it to you then. Mindscape of Alan Moore isn't an adaptation of any sort. Moore is physically there giving his autobiographical account. He gives voice to lines of Rorschach and V which is creepy cool. In the second half of it, he switches to leading the viewer through his realm of ideaspace and the like. It is in-and-out of place.
  
  It would be wise to avoid films that are adaptations of books since even the best of them sadly cannot redeem themselves beyond its limitations ending up a poor adaptation.
  
  I was listening to The Moon and Serpent kind of on the run. I rather think I should give it a listen headphones on. I won't complain if I had nightmares the same night.

  Posted 4 years ago. ( send a note )

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  Joe M says

  Hi Incacat!
  Thank you for your message. Ha ha, well I think I have to cut my losses with the Greek Mythology for my friend's son, as like his old man he is more into Nascar and guitars nowadays :) ...though then again who knows, Percy Jackson and the Olympians might be his speed by now, for he has also grown into a terrific photographer with a sensitive eye for capturing beauty in nature. In fact, I took a bunch of his still life photos and recently made two video collages out of them, setting them to two Kenneth Patchen poems that I love ("Fall of the Evening Star" and "The Sea Is Awash with Roses")...oh, would so much like to share these with you (given what I detect to be an interest in Patchen), though these are only uploaded onto my Facebook page right now. For myself, I could more than understand what you say re: the Greek tradition, as it is more than fascinating and is a rich source of imagination and passion, an ocean one could swim in forever. I am finishing up on Mircea Eliade's "Myth and Reality", where he talks in the last chapters about the secularization and 'demythification' of Greek religion and mythology, as oral tradition gave way to the revolution of writing and it being absorbed into Western cultural expression by poets, artists, philosophers.
  So, I have been looking at your shelf a bit more, and really like it--you are certainly the kind of person I keep a look out for on this site. I would say you have more than a touch of the poet's soul in your writing, which I have enjoyed reading. I think you said you work at an independent bookstore in Lexington (what is Lexington like, by the way? I have only been to Kentucky once, in Louisville, a long time ago when I was a boy), with a special knowledge for younger people's books. It's funny, one of my best friends from high school just published a young adult book, it is called "The Big Splash", sort of a detective Noir set in childhood...Jack (his name) is such a great guy, very funny and talented...
  Hope you had a great weekend, and hope to talk more soon and “Emplis les boudoirs de poudre de rubis brûlante…” (“Fill bedrooms with the burning powder of rubies...”)--Rimbaud
  Best, Joe

  Posted 4 years ago. ( send a note )

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  Ahimaaz says

  Kids are a fascinating sneaky lot!
  
  Just saw Watchmen Friday. It's boring save some moments. The Black Freighter and Under the Hood are DVD released as companion pieces, which says the story is unfilmable. Yes, it is just oooooookay!
  
  He is totally out of place and his presence is a visitation; the mindscape or Moore!

  Posted 4 years ago. ( send a note )