Actually Mr Blood hasn't been out of town he’s been at home; since I work at a school I get the week between Christmas and New Year's off. However my computer is far too weak to post to the Bar, so I have to write my postings at home and then actually upload them from work. So now today on New Year's Day I'm writing at home and I'll post it from work tomorrow, Tuesday, which would be today to the reader or perhaps even yesterday or last week. I've spent my week reading, walking the dog, binging first on Atlantic r-&-b and then on James Brown and eating cheese, since my sister-in-law sent me a big box of cheese for, we'll say, the holidays. I went into San Francisco a couple of times, including once with my sixteen-year-old niece, with whom I saw Casablanca at the Castro Theater, the Brattle Theater of the West. The only other time I've seen the movie on the big screen was at school, when Arthur Kungle stood up and sang along with “Le Marseillaise”. I also did some stuff to sell my house in Woodland which, huh-uh (Tracy-like sigh), we still haven't sold after six months, though we're in contract and should close soon. That will be quite a relief, as I'll then be able to buy a working computer which will not only be able to upload posts to the Spartan Bar but will also perhaps replace the four-track as the primary Brothers Twain recording device.

I don't specially have any New Year's resolutions, though I have already started the sort of project one resolves to at New Year's, viz. studying Hebrew. My goal is to be able to read the Bible, which I suppose needs no further justification to any Johnnie. I've already hobbled through the first two sentences of Genesis, which takes me up to the big breath brooding over the waters.

I’d like to mention a few books I've read recently (in addition to Berlin Alexanderplatz—thanks again to Lee Preston). The Obscene Bird of Night, by Jose Donoso, is the sort of nightmarish and compelling vision I thought modernist novels were supposed to be before I'd actually read many. Not only does the narrative voice switch throughout, the main narrator appears to be different characters, or who knows maybe they're all the same, and at the end of the book he gets written out of the book like the last Hanukkah candle going out.

I've also been trying to find translations of all the books of Juan Carlos Onetti; The Shipyard and Body Snatcher are probably the easiest to find. The book jacket calls him the Uruguayan Camus, a comparison that for once seems ever so slightly apt, that is if you subtract the programmatic existentialism. The books mix European modernism with James M. Cain hard boiled-ism for a kind of feverish tough-guy nightmare, kind of reminiscent of later Orson Wells.

Finally I just re-read Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo, and that would be my strongest recommendation, since it combines greatness with brevity. It's about a man who goes to a small town in search of his father, whom he learns is dead. The man then finds out that everyone in the town who's telling him stories is dead too, and somewhere in the middle of the book he disappears as well and there are only these stories being told by ghosts blowing around on the page. That hardly does it justice; go read it yourself.

Let me join Papa in his commitment to the Spartan ideals of peace, love and magic, not forgetting of course to offer libations to the gods and Ace Shadow. Here's to better things ahead in '07.