Grape Lights

What are the chances that I would be reading about Michael Jackson in Lipstick Traces on the day he died? It freaked me out a little. Typically, the only time anyone reads about Michael Jackson nowadays is when he is in the news for having done something terrible. Just a weird coincidence, then, but still. What follows is a chunk from the book that especially stood out. Read on: By 6 July 1984, when the Jacksons played the first show of their "Victory" tour, in Kansas City, Missouri - thirty years and a day after Elvis Presley made his first record in Memphis, Tennessee - Jacksonism had produced a system of commodification so complete that whatever and whoever was admitted to it instantly became a new commodity. People were no longer consuming commodities as such things are conventionally understood (records, videos, posters, books, magazines, key rings, earrings necklaces pins buttons wigs voice-altering devices Pepsis t-shirts underwear hats scarves gloves jackets - and why...

My mind has been a pile of mush for almost a year now due to a serious misfortune that unfolded in my life. Consequently I stopped reading regularly like I had been since my teens. I don't remember completing a novel or any nonfiction since maybe last year. I don't even remember the last few books I completed. Actually, I had read most of Memoirs of My Nervous Illness at some point last year, though, but that's the only exception. Just recently a friend of mine recommended that I take a look at an excerpt from Janet Frame’s posthumously published 1963 novel Towards Another Summer . Here's a little of what I read: "Yet here, in the attic, Grace decided, little effort or encouragement would be needed to draw aside the curtains of the secret window, to smash the glass, enter the View; fearful, hopeful, lonely; disciplining one's breath to meet the demands of the new element; facing again and again the mermaiden's conflict – to go or stay; to return through th...