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Days Without Weather
Has all the first edition points. A clean, unmarked and unclipped copy with a tiny jacket spine nick protected by the Mylar plastic dust jacket cover.
250 pages, Unknown Binding
First published December 1, 1982
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 17, 2025
There are two things that defy sublimation into one of the generally recognized Arts—stand-up comedy and sex. I’ve yet to come across a book, movie, painting, piece of music, et. al. that are mimetically successful in capturing these two, if different, physical engagements. There could be some overlap between the them, depending on how serious you take your sex or stand-up, I guess. For filmic evidence, look no further than the Hanks-Fields car crash that was Punchline. Checkmate on that one. Painful memories linger from that theater-going experience, a traumatized child me.
For sex—what? Last Tango? Nin? 'Songs About Fucking?' Miller? 8 ½ Weeks? Erotica? The Brown Bunny? Porn?!? If you think any/all of the above aren’t synthetic reenactments of an intimate physical process—yes, especially porn—then we agree to disagree; opinion/taste is eye/beholder, etc. But, to me, anything about fucking OUTSIDE of sex as a lived, impermanent experience just lands flat, can’t but fail rendering in a 2-D world what is a sensorial overload that needn’t an artistic analogue. Also, and I know I’ve said this many times in other reviews, reading about fucking is fucking boring. Cecil Brown slathered his previous heartstopper, Mr. Jiveass, with the juices of sex as a brilliant and populist feint: sex-as-vehicle to explore the impossibility of escaping into hedonistic oblivion as a longitudinal survival strategy. It is a heavy brilliance. And funny. But the brilliance wasn’t in the quixotical fucking or the funny—it's in the tragedy. His gambit here, to foreground comedy's implicit tragedy by literalizing it as stand-up surrogating trauma—(sigh)—works as best as that impossible proposition can. The rating reflects the only failure of the book: it isn’t funny and it’s not entirely aware that it isn’t. This would be less of a factor were so much of the book not taken up with, essentially, pages of stand-up rendered in print. Just…no. The greatest comics to ever do it, your Carlin and Pryor (head & heart) and Chappelle (the conscience) and Hicks and Norm and R Foxx and Newhart and Murphy, Wright, Martin, etc etc, ARE the medium. Remove them, remove the genius. While Brown writes a good amount about critical shit in this, especially about the sick necessity of commodifying pain into commerce, his decision to practice the novel as an open mic night trips up in its own great intentions. 'Why’ that is: Pretty simple math: Everyone can fuck, a good amount even fuck standing up, but hardly anyone can do fucking stand-up. I speak from experience.
For sex—what? Last Tango? Nin? 'Songs About Fucking?' Miller? 8 ½ Weeks? Erotica? The Brown Bunny? Porn?!? If you think any/all of the above aren’t synthetic reenactments of an intimate physical process—yes, especially porn—then we agree to disagree; opinion/taste is eye/beholder, etc. But, to me, anything about fucking OUTSIDE of sex as a lived, impermanent experience just lands flat, can’t but fail rendering in a 2-D world what is a sensorial overload that needn’t an artistic analogue. Also, and I know I’ve said this many times in other reviews, reading about fucking is fucking boring. Cecil Brown slathered his previous heartstopper, Mr. Jiveass, with the juices of sex as a brilliant and populist feint: sex-as-vehicle to explore the impossibility of escaping into hedonistic oblivion as a longitudinal survival strategy. It is a heavy brilliance. And funny. But the brilliance wasn’t in the quixotical fucking or the funny—it's in the tragedy. His gambit here, to foreground comedy's implicit tragedy by literalizing it as stand-up surrogating trauma—(sigh)—works as best as that impossible proposition can. The rating reflects the only failure of the book: it isn’t funny and it’s not entirely aware that it isn’t. This would be less of a factor were so much of the book not taken up with, essentially, pages of stand-up rendered in print. Just…no. The greatest comics to ever do it, your Carlin and Pryor (head & heart) and Chappelle (the conscience) and Hicks and Norm and R Foxx and Newhart and Murphy, Wright, Martin, etc etc, ARE the medium. Remove them, remove the genius. While Brown writes a good amount about critical shit in this, especially about the sick necessity of commodifying pain into commerce, his decision to practice the novel as an open mic night trips up in its own great intentions. 'Why’ that is: Pretty simple math: Everyone can fuck, a good amount even fuck standing up, but hardly anyone can do fucking stand-up. I speak from experience.
August 6, 2014
would give it six stars if possible
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews