Good stuff.

Have you watched The Story of Stuff yet?

It’s well worth your time.

Check it out!

It’s a pretty brutal work with stories that feature rape, drug abuse, spouse abuse, prostitution, and a whole bunch of other bad things.

The book is a compilation of stories that each feature Brooklyn, New York as the location. Some of the characters from one story appear in the other stories; however, each new story’s focus is on a new character or a new set of characters.

Dialogue isn’t written in the traditional manner with line breaks, quotations, and clear attribution to a speaker. Different speakers’ dialogue flows as a part of one paragraph or paragraphs. In the first story I was thrown off a bit because of this, but it’s not that big of a problem, and I actually enjoyed it.

It’s a very fast read. There weren’t any passages where I had to stop and reread in order to understand what was going on. Nor were there any passages that I wanted to stop and reread again because of their beauty.

The only time I thought the book dragged was the dream sequence is the story Strike. For me it didn’t really add anything to the story. Selby could have summed up the dream in one paragraph and that would have been sufficient. Move on. Also the story And Baby Makes Three should have been excluded from the collection. Each story is filled with hopelessness and despair except for And Baby Makes Three. While it’s an interesting story and a good read, it just doesn’t fit well with the other stories.

On the front cover of the edition I have, The New York Times Book Review calls the work “a vision of hell so stern it cannot be chuckled or raged aside.” And that’s pretty much true. The book offers no hope at all. At the end of each story none of the characters have changed in any way really except that maybe they have delved deeper into their own despair and hopelessness.

I recommend Last Exit to Brooklyn to anyone who likes any of the Beats’ work, especially Jack Kerouac, or anyone who likes books that focus on “harsh realities.” It’s basically a “bad” book about people who do “bad” things. Be prepared for passages that will make you cringe and make your stomach churn.

Cool song. Cool video.

Read this book!

It’s available for free in pdf format right here. Just click “Read Online” on the left.

I just love this.

Maybe I like this song so much because it reminds me of my favorite Christmas song.

I started to reread Charlotte Joko Beck’s book Nothing Special.

It’s a really great book.

Her other book Everyday Zen is really great too.

They’re two of my favorite Zen books. I really love her style of teaching.

Definitely check them out for an intro to Zen or for just a nice read.