Bedside Manner: The Tao of Riddley

So, a day late and a dollar's snort, here's the second in this new series called Bedside Manner, in which your toilers at Austin's Favorite Altweekly take a snapshot of what readables happen to be next to their bed when they wake from whatever dreams complicated their headspace on the Sunday night just passed.

This is what's on mine:

Shoplifting from American Apparel by Tao Lin, yes, because 1) the man's got interesting things to say & says them well, whether in fiction or whatever, 2) he grew up in Orlando, which is always a point of note for me, because I flailed away in The City That Is Disney's Bitch for several years myself, 3) this is one of those books that are sent in, promotionwise, to the Chronicle & can be ganked by those staffers who are ever-vigilant and fleet of fingers, 4) this is also part of the prettily-packaged novella series from Melville House, so now I've got two from the series ~ the other is A Happy Man by Hansjorg Schertenleib ~ and that makes me, as a helpless collector of printed matter, a happy man.

And there's Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, which I'm re-reading after many years, because Austin's Trouble Puppet Theatre Company is currently working on a fully staged version of the ~ brilliant, reality-shifting ~ novel, and Trouble Puppet's head honcho Connor Hopkins collaborating directly with Hoban, and so I'll be writing about the process of this fierce endeavor: for both the Chron and my own small-press imprint called Minerva's Wreck. I bought this copy off Ebay about a month ago; it's got Notes and a short Glossary in the back; and who doesn't like a bright picture of Mr. Punch greeting them before the dreamtime cobwebs fully disperse?

And, yeah, that's a small tin of Bacon Mints there near the bottom of the booktray. Which wouldn't be worth mentioning aside from its value as modern kitsch (and, maybe, because ~ unexpectedly ~ the contents taste both like mints and like bacon and ~ this is the unexpected part ~ they taste real good) ... but, no, it's also worth pointing out because, if you consider the conceptual arrangement just a bit cockeyed first thing in the pre-coffee morning, it occurs to you, hell, those Bacon Mints are a perfectly resonant link between the world of Shoplifting from American Apparel and Riddley Walker.

No, for real.