Catharsis that left me shaking

Wrote what may be the angriest poem I've written to date today. Went to Cup O' Joe after work to build on what I scratched out between processing books, then formulated more of it in the car while waiting for a train to go by. Sometimes the thoughts and the process turns up my adrenaline so high. It was hard to catch my breath. It may be a piece of junk, we'll see, but the experience of writing it was intense.

Read a couple of books. One of them is the worst fiction I've finished this year. It's about the Arbuckle murder trial. I was unimpressed with the author's locker room talk. Then found out he was a college football player at Auburn. Which may explain that but not all the misogyny. He tried to be clever by inserting Dashiell Hammett into the plot. It does make historical sense as he was a Pinkerton operative and worked on the case. While that was the most interesting part of the book, the graphic and unnecessary violence toward women put me off. Even the solving of the murder, and the placement of a certain newspaper citizen mogul and his paramour into the solution was weak. Heck, I hated this book which is another work of fiction on Arbuckle and still found it more entertaining than this piece of dreck.

The new book by Michel Faber is a bit more satisfying.



It's a slim volume, well anything of his is slim in comparison to The Crimson Petal and the White, which you should all have read by now. In The Fire Gospel a down on his luck linguist discovers a set of manuscripts in a bombed out statue in an Iraqi museum. He smuggles them out, translates them and discovers they are the work of Malchus, a man who was actually witnessed the crucifixion of Jesus and reveals some information that changes the course of Christianity. But this is no Da Vinci Code (and hey, Dan Brown's new one is coming out in September) and Faber uses a lot of dark wit and situations to form a quick, but ultimately blase conclusion. I enjoyed the book, but it's a trifle. I really need to find something I can sink my teeth into right now. Because changes are a coming.