i’ve been reading them. i have not updated my list of books here in a long time. i have not written about a book in a long time. but i have read them, 40 last year. the most interesting and exciting and new of them all were probably the ones by juan emar. i say ‘new’ but they were written in the 30s. and yet there is simply nothing like them, before or after. these stories are written in an utterly insane and yet intensely captivating way. one such story begins with a character riding a horse across a field to another town and noting “Two things above all contributed to the splendor of that morning: 1) the temperature; 2) the rural perfumes” and then goes on for the next twenty pages (i do not exaggerate) to describe the temperature and smell of the air in a very precise and specific yet meandering and wild way that somehow is completely riveting. “A hundred kinds of weeds grow among the myrtles, and in these weeds live a hundred kinds of arachnids and insects. This total of two hundred kinds gives off a uniform smell, calm and clumsy…” In other stories he describes the color of every object and piece of clothing and wall or patch of floor with extreme and loving detail, using the most wild hallucinatory descriptors such as ‘skull blue’ or ‘the hue of paper soaked in salt water’ or ‘somewhere between the color of semen and cooling lava’ – the most wonderful, lovely thing about them though, was their unpredictability. their capability to go anywhere at any time. i am so sick of the shape of stories, of ‘characters overcoming obstacles’ or whatever one is supposed to write about. I am so very tired of knowing from the first sentences everything that can and cannot happen in a story. how these stories can have been written nearly a century ago and yet still be more ‘fresh’ than a million things written today is nearly incomprehensible. reading them is like suddenly breathing a crystalizingly icy breath of arctic wind while dying of boredom in a sauna.