decaf, with book

[arguchik]

today is my second day without coffee, without caffeine even, save for the trace amounts in the small pieces of dark chocolate i have ingested. really, it's not much. i'm talking about one little square of a chocolate bar.

i'm a little spacey-wonky, and have taken a nap both days (yesterday's was like 2 hours long; today's only 45 minutes or so)...but surprisingly not headachy. and today, my heart-dance seems a bit more regular. i might be imagining it, but i don't think so. it has beaten irregularly here and there, but seems to be more regular than irr.

i'm almost done with shelley jackson's half life, about nora, a conjoined twin whose other half, blanche, has been asleep for 15 years. (these twins are of the dicephalus, dibrachius type--two heads, one body, two arms, two legs--like the real-life conjoined twins abigail and brittany hensel, who live in minnesota and are about 16 years old now.) anyway, nora decides it's time to have her sister's head amputated, and hears about a mysterious doctor in britain who will do the job in secret. it's a brilliant novel, textually interesting, doubling and tripling back on itself in a much tamer (therefore more believable) way than mark danielewski's house of leaves. here's what jonathan lethem has to say about it, in a blurb on the back of the book:

Ingenious, sensual, gleeful--as well as sinister and perverse--Shelley Jackson's first novel crackles with Nabokovian verbal fireworks and thrums with Borgesian philosophical implications. It demands of its readers only imagination, and rewards them with hilarity, terror, and marvels.

Comments

[ms-violet.livejournal.com]

I think I'm going to have to read that.

[arguchik.livejournal.com]

it's definitely worth the time. it's not fantasy, or horror/sci-fi or whatever you might want to call house of leaves (which i loved, even though i found it a bit full of itself at times). it's a more humorous/sarcastic kind of hallucinatory, intertextual prose than that. it's not magical realism exactly; but it's not straight-up realist fiction either. definitely not. you're never quite sure what to believe. her book of short stories, the melancholy of anatomy is similarly fascinating, though that work dips a lot more into surreal/ridiculous territory. apparently she also has a hypertext novel called patchwork girl (here (http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/PatchworkGirl.html) is a blurb about it) that i haven't checked out yet. and a novel in tattoos inked onto many peoples' bodies.