Tag: I Read Odd Books

D.D Murphry, Secret Policeman by Alan M. Clark and Elizabeth Massie

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Book: D.D. Murphry, Secret Policeman

Authors: Alan M. Clark and Elizabeth Massie

Type of Book: Fiction, themed short story collection

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Because the whole book is based on the delusions of a seriously mentally ill man.

Availability: Published in 2009 by Raw Dog Screaming Press, you can get a copy here:

Comments: I’ve been thinking about the mentally ill a lot lately. I technically have mental illness, but given my recent methods of fighting back as well as the relative mildness of my condition, I am getting very close to being The Sanest Person You Know. Earlier this year I read Pete Earley’s book, Crazy: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness, a sickening and sobering look at the mental healthcare system nationwide, but especially in Florida. When the face-eating cannibal case hit the headlines, my first thought was, “I bet he was a schizophrenic.” News said it was bath salts but the autopsy said all the face-eater had in his system was marijuana. I looked it up and sure enough – Rudy Eugene had a rich history of untreated schizophrenia, resulting in many assaults and several arrests.

It is with Earley’s book and the recent graphic example of the mental health care system failure in Florida in mind that I am writing this discussion. There is a lot that is funny in this book. Clark and Massie wove a mentally-ill conspiracy so well that it is pure genius – at times I wondered, briefly, if the conspiracy was real, that perhaps Murphry was ill but was also being used as a pawn by a malevolent force. So strongly does Murphry believe the truth of the misfires in his brain that the reader, even with strong clues that this is indeed a mentally disturbed man acting out what is happening in his mind, cannot help but think there is some truth to such energetic and labyrinthine delusions.

It is impossible to discuss the structure and plot of this book in much depth because to do so would utterly spoil the book. So I plan to give a bare-bones plot synopsis and then discuss the parts of chapter one that resonate with me. D.D. Murphry is a mentally ill, mostly homeless man. When a social worker helped him get on disability or some sort of Social Security, he interpreted that as having been hired by the “True Government” to spy on and take action against the “False Government.” His interpretations of various situations, as filtered through his damaged mind, range from the hilarious to the deeply disturbing, often depending on how it is he decides to react. He believes a librarian named Kate, who fears and loathes him, is his secret bride, given to him by the “True Government.” He believes her nasty reaction to him is a facade assumed to throw off others and he longs for the day he can finally consummate their marriage. Kate inadvertently provided a large source of fuel for Murphry’s delusions, as she taught him to use a computer and access e-mail. Murphry sees spam as secret communications from the True Government and Clark and Massie really shine when they show how he manages to find real life corollaries in the simplest things that match the messages he thinks he received in the e-mails. Murphry careens from humorous misinterpretation to grave acts of utter mayhem as he tries to make the world a better place for the True Government and foil the actions of the False Government.

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South Congress Books, Austin, Texas

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So, I’ve been lax where discussing independent book stores is concerned. Amazon has made me completely unwilling to leave my house and risk encountering crappy selections, deal with parking and endure as kids half my age sneer at my selections because I’m obviously too pedestrian for them to waste their time bothering to make eye contact with me as I spend Mr. Oddbooks hard earned cash on the very things that permit them to have a job in the first place. (Yeah – I hate shopping at BookPeople. There! I said it. Most arrogant, unpleasant staff ever. If I wanna be mocked by weird kids with poor taste, I’ll review another Tao Lin book.)

But Mr. Oddbooks and I decided the best way we could spend our Fourth of July would be to go a bookstore and we chose South Congress Books.
South Congress Books, Austin, Texas

Oh, I very much like this store.
South Congress Books, Austin, Texas

You know how bibliophiles talk about loving the smell of books? And you go into a book store and all you can really smell is dust? Used book stores, I fear, have come to represent the smell of old books – musty dustiness. In South Congress Books, you get to smell that gorgeous aroma of books, of softened pages, crisp mylar, and a vague under note of vanilla, possibly nutmeg – something sweet and edible. The real smell of beloved, pre-read books, not the smell of mustiness.

The store is also a huge departure from most used book stores. Sometimes you want a store that is a hot mess because you want to dig through piles in the hopes of finding an under-priced gem. But sometimes you want a store that has done the work for you and separated the wheat from the chaff. South Congress Books is a small store and gorgeously arranged. So organized that my inner organizational pedant wept. One of the reasons it can be so organized is because this store is particular in what they stock. You go into a used book store and you expect to see the usual shelves of Stephen King, Tom Clancy, Dean Koontz and endless copies of the same romance novel. Not at South Congress Books. Here, if there is a King on the shelves, it is because it is a first edition, not because dozens of people decided to get rid of their copies of Duma Key at roughly the same time. Their eye to selective book acquisition means one could spend hours in this small store because every title is worth picking up and flipping through.
South Congress Books, Austin, Texas
I did not see a single copy of Eat, Pray, Love in the entire store, not even in the signed books. It felt good.

I’m not kidding. The selection is astonishing. Guys, the cats here at Chez Oddbooks have had a rough couple of months. Kidney failure, thyroid problems, urinary tract infections, a weird spell of sneezing blood that we never got figured out despite numerous vet visits. That kind of devotion to elderly and defective pets costs money, money that in a just and decent world would be spent on books. I had to tell Mr. Oddbooks we had to go before he was really ready and I studiously avoided certain sections of the store (the metaphysics section would have wrecked me financially had I looked in serious depth) once I ascertained there were titles I really wanted and had to put back on the shelves because I chose to keep the cats comfortable. And the cats are totally not grateful and there were, like, seven books I had to leave behind. Goddamn cats.
South Congress Books, Austin, Texas
So, instead of owning this copy of Dr. Johnson’s Doorknob, I just have to go to bed at night knowing that Cicero Cat’s metabolism is working well again. If you want a good look at all the books I had to leave behind, here’s my small Flickr set of the pics I took that day.

South Congress Books, Austin, Texas
This is Sheri, one of the co-owners. She told me about a strange series she read by Andrey Kurkov. She hooked me up with the second book in the series, which is awesome because it will remind me to order the first book. If it’s odd enough, I am sure to discuss it here. She also worked at Half-Price Books and listened calmly as I shared the horrors I faced at the Round Rock store, what with all the bats, rats, urine soaking from the men’s bathroom into the break room and that black stuff that may have been mold but was probably something far worse. Most frightening building I’ve ever worked in. But enough about me…

Here’s what we ended up with that magical day:
Kings of the Road: A Cartoonumentary of a Life on the Road by Ragnar
Penguin Lost by Andrey Kurkov
Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr by Jean-Paul Sartre
The Murder of Marilyn Monroe by Leonore Canevari, Jeanette van Wyhe, Christian Dimas and Rachel Dimas with foreword by Brad Steiger (this one is gonna get discussed here for sure)
Oval Office Occult: True Stories of White House Weirdness by Brian M. Thomsen
Dessous: Lingerie as Erotic Weapon by Gilles Neret
Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries by Dennis Cooper

And of course, our selections are in no way representative of the bulk of the books in the store. The art and photography sections, in particular, were amazing.
South Congress Books, Austin, Texas

The only drawback I found to the place is that being on South Congress there were a lot of looky-loos wandering around, which happens when a shop is located on a street with a lot of foot traffic, and it happens even more in the heat of the Texas summer when people are looking for a place with sweet, merciful air conditioning as they make their way to the BBQ and beer trailers. And if one has to discuss the traffic of people who just wanted to look around in order to find a drawback, then that means there probably isn’t one.

Next time I go I will have a large wad of cash with me. Mark my words, I will not go back into South Congress Books without some serious bank because it was just too painful to leave behind books that were so clearly meant to come home with me. Sigh…

Gardens of Earthly Delight by George Williams

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book:  Gardens of Earthly Delight

Author:  George Williams

Type of Book:  Fiction, bizarro (sort of), short story collection

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd:  It’s hard to put into words…

Availability:  Published by Raw Dog Screaming Press in 2011, you can get a copy here:

Comments:  The title of this book references the Hieronymus Bosch painting, The Garden of Earthly Delight and it is in reference to Bosch that I can best explain how it is that Williams is odd.  Williams clearly structured his stories in various manners so as to hark back to that famous triptych – man in paradise, man in sin, man in Hell. In fact, the cover of this book is a fragment of the center panel of The Garden of Earthly Delight – my favorite part of the painting – and is why I decided I would read this book when RDSP contacted me regarding some of their newer titles last year. The cover features, in the midst of extraordinary and intense revelry, a naked couple, reminiscent of Adam and Eve before the Fall. They are sitting in a glass bubble, separated from the chaotic carnival around them, but the bubble is cracking. Before long they will be in the world, no longer in a safe place of innocence.

With a cover like this, I had certain expectations of the stories within the book and Williams delivers. He writes stories that indeed mimic the progression from paradise into hell.  But there was an element to his writing that recreated the cracked glass bubble in a manner I could not have expected. Williams is a minimalist writer, his words echoing the simple, uncomplicated affection the two naked souls in the glass bubble expressed in the midst of sexual revelry.

Additionally, Williams has a muffled quality to his writing that ordinarily would have irritated the hell out of me, but somehow worked well with his subject matter and overall style. There is a remove in his writing, a distance between not only the reader and the story, but the writer and the story as well. Williams writes without using any sort of conversational punctuation, a style I loathe, and Williams is a writer whose minimalist approach definitely keeps the reader focused on the surface of the story.  I never once felt a deep kinship with any of the people in this book because I was observing, not absorbing.  Minimalism as a rule does not interest me much, but Williams’ style is so in keeping with Bosch’s theme conveyed via the couple in the cracked bubble that I want to read more of his work and see if this was a happy accident or quite deliberate.  I hate to invoke his name because he comes up too often as a reference every time anyone reads minimalism, but there is a definite Raymond Carver feel to these stories

Actually, if I think about it, this collection is a Raymond Carver/Flannery O’Connor hybrid.   You can best see that confluence in the story I liked best in the collection, “Dickson.”  In “Dickson,” an unnamed couple have an undetonated nuclear missile that had washed ashore for them to find, despite the Air Force’s frenzied attempts to locate it.  They show it in small towns in Tennessee, charging a fee to look at it. They meet up with a Pentecostal preacher who persuades them to let him use the bomb to show in his sermons in exchange for 20% of the tithes the preacher takes in.  Whether or not the bomb is real will spoil the story but even avoiding spoilers still leaves plenty to discuss.

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You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Yes, yes, I know. It’s a cliche to discuss the search strings that show up in your user stats as people search for random things online. But everything’s a cliche these day. Calling things a cliche is sort of a cliche. So here we are.

“graveyard dirt sat on a roast while menstruating”
Two people this month thus far have landed on this site with this search string. Is it really that odd, that a woman sat naked on a roast? Maybe it is. I mean, I haven’t done it and feel no urge but I think this would be odder if she had sat on a dog while naked and menstruating, or on your grandpa, or a stranger’s fully loaded Toyota Camry. But alas, while I have discussed Ms Graveyarddirt over here, I cannot help you get to the pictures of her most notorious act.

“8 yod girls want sex”
So… Anyone have any idea what this is about?  Is this motherfucker asking if 8 year old girls want sex?  What the hell? Fuck you, no they don’t.  Thanks for coming to me so we could clear that up together.

“adderall addiction paranoid boyfriend. heating”
I sort of sense that period followed by an H is a mistype and the searcher likely meant “beating.” Oh this world…

“better word for collection of short stories”
Anthology. Glad I could help.

“do they have book about cannibals”
Indeed, they do.  They have lots of them.

“half shirts fucking movies”
No idea what this could mean. None whatsoever.

“if you spend every day chopping up meat on a slab and selling it”
You will likely be called a butcher? I don’t know. I am mostly appalled that I immediately knew which entry I wrote caused this lost soul to come to IROB – Leopold Stein’s frightening treatise on the female patients who terrified him because women with mental illness are ABSOLUTE EXAMPLES OF HUMAN EVIL, Loathsome Women.

“ireadoddbooks adam parfrey”
“ireadoddbooks jim goad”
“ireadoddbooks parfrey”
“ireadoddbooks tethers”
Holy crap, this means people specifically searched for books on this site. Like there was a pre-existing awareness that IROB is here. Like maybe they read my discussions and felt the need to search for them again. Oh my ego!

“is it legal to read fiction bestiality”
God, I hope so or we’re all gonna do time.

“list of zoophilia fiction”
“sexy write-ups on bestiality(horse)”
James Steele, are you reading this? Your touching novella of a horse dildo is why search strings like this happen. You man. It’s all you.  And yet I still somehow feel it’s all my fault.

“science fiction book where the main character gets an anal probe”
You’re gonna have to narrow it down.

“what was the bird-serpent war in history”
I don’t know but I do know it happened around the time the poles shifted.  If you find out, come back and tell me.

“the evil gringo blogger”
Evil Gringo, what the fuck have you been doing? You have a blog? Why did I not know of this?

“what happens if you shoplift from american apparel”
You end up with a book deal and slavering fans who continue to this day to dog the hell out of people who found your prose lacking. That’s what happens if you shoplift from American Apparel.  Also your dick falls off.

“lesley ann downey photos”
“lesley ann downey ian brady photos”
“lesley ann downey ian brady audiotape”
These particular strings come up a lot. Guys, you’re not gonna find her autopsy photos, or any of the photos and audio recordings Myra and Ian took of this child here on the public Internet. If they are out there you are gonna have to search the deep web and you may want to think about it before you take that step to find images of a tortured, murdered child and the sounds she made when begging for her mother.  Not moralizing here.  I’ve searched for terrible things.  But I’ve also found some stuff online that, once I found it, left a stain my soul that can never wash away.  Just throwing it out there that maybe you don’t want to see or hear these things if you know it may haunt you forever.

“rubbed a pregnant belly (horror fiction)”
From your keyboard comes much truth, anonymous web surfer.

These are the highlights from May and June. For all those who landed here hoping to find horse porn and tapes of murdered children, sorry to have misled you. Alas, I feel this is my curse for refusing to take SEO seriously.

So much about to happen

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Seriously, I have got some awesome stuff in the pipeline.   Look for the following in the very near future:

–Two books from Raw Dog Screaming Press, both very interesting reads;

–A new Bizarro Week in July, with the book giveaways that always accompany one of my themed weeks (it has been over a year since I had a themed week – why you people continue to read here is beyond me and I thank you for sticking around);

–Two comics from Glenn Danzig’s imprint, one he wrote himself, both very adult and very gory.  There is much blood and boobs, which I sense is pretty much what one would expect from Glenn Fucking Danzig.  Did you guys know he had branched out into comics, like, at least a decade ago?  Even Mr. Oddbooks knew.   It’s like the whole world knows stuff I don’t and I really wish the bunch of you would share;

–And finally, the discussion I sense many of you are waiting for.  I sense this because I keep getting e-mails about it.  I will finally be discussing Jim Goad’s ANSWER Me! collection, which includes issues 1-3.  Also, I will be discussing issue 4, the infamous “Rape” edition, which Goad was kind enough to send me to me.  Actually, the bulk of the discussion will be about the rape ‘zine and, believe me, if I manage to pull this off without bringing the entire extreme left-wing, feminist blogosphere down on me, I will kiss the ground and praise Dog.  I seriously have a bad feeling in my gut about the potential reaction to this one, but the stuff that worries me the most are generally the articles people like the best, so fuck my nausea.

So that’s what’s pending.  If anything as awesome as a Glenn Danzig comic book imprint has come across your radar, please share in comments.  It can also be less awesome as long as it’s horrible, strange or odd.  Or interesting.  Or anything really.  I’m easy like that.

Biblio-Curiosa, issues 1 & 2, by Chris Mikul

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Zine: Biblio-Curiosa

Author: Chris Mikul

Availability: Chris is in Australia and does not have a merchant website, but you can contact him at chris.mikul88@gmail.com – he charges $8 per issue, postage included.

Comments: This is not technically a book review, but my usual off-topic title of “This is Not an Odd Book Discussion” does not apply either. This is very much going to be a discussion of odd books. Chris Mikul noticed I had read his book about cults last year (and I still plan to discuss it here though it’s now been a year since I read it, and, also, same as it ever was) and sent me the first two copies of his ‘zine Biblio-Curiosa. He later also sent me issues of another ‘zine of his, Bizarrism and a copy of his book, Tales of the Macabre and Ordinary. Please do not misinterpret my delight in receiving these items as a tacit admission that I am going to discuss a lot of Mikul in the future because I am easily bought. I read and eventually discuss everything people send me. But Mikul may have jumped the line a little bit because he is an incredible writer and I didn’t want to sit on these until they came around in the review queue.

I think Biblio-Curiosa is what I wish IROB could be when it grows up, if it grows up. Mikul’s analysis of the strange books and odd authors he encounters manages to be both scholarly and entertaining, a skill borne from years of authoring non-fiction books about the strange among us. I would do well to exercise some of his organizational skills when I write. I’ve always said I resent being inspired but there is something about Mikul’s ‘zines that make me want to be a better writer. I sense my innate verbosity and inability to focus will prevent any emulation transformation but I can always hope.

Biblio-Curiosa‘s subtitle is “Unusual Writers/Strange Books” and covers both with equal ease. The breadth of his interests and the scope of the topics he discusses puts to shame my passive procurement of odd books. Mikul has access to a huge mountain of strangeness most of us would never know about. I know when I see pulp paperbacks from the ’50s, I often look at the lurid covers and think, “I bet my dad would have read that and liked it.” Mikul’s perspective on the pulp paperbacks from before either of us were born showed me how very wrong I am to dismiss such books because even the pulpiest of them may have interesting mysteries behind them for those astute enough to look for them.

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Goodbye, Mr Bradbury

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

It seems fitting that a once-in-a-lifetime author would die on the day of a once-in-a-lifetime astrological event. Whatever called you home, be it the Venus transit or just reaching the end of your body’s usefulness, your life was spent creating words paralleled by none, worlds more fantastic and horrifying than we left here can create, and you deserve a nice, long rest. Godspeed, sir.

Fractal Paisleys by Paul Di Filippo

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: Fractal Paisleys

Author: Paul Di Filippo

Type of Book: Fiction, short story collection, science fiction, proto-bizarro

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Pia Zadora as a magical Queen of the Pixies. I shit you not. Di Filippo’s id is a magnificent place.

Availability: Published by Four Walls Eight Windows in 1997, the book appears to be out of print. However, you can get a used copy online at various locations:

Comments: Paul Di Filippo was recommended to me by a woman I have a passing acquaintance with in LiveJournal political communities. Once upon a time an author I discussed invoked my mental health and acted really creepy.  The author is on LJ and is a peripheral part of the conservative community there, so when the unpleasantness happened of course my discussion of his book came up several times. Whenever my site is discussed in non-odd-book quarters, invariably people recommend books to me. Generally the recommendations are along the lines of, “Have you read American Psycho?” or “That Chuck Palahniuk is really weird – you should read him.” Which is cool – Bret Easton Ellis and Palahniuk are both diving boards into the pool that is weird literature so I’m glad they are on peoples’ radars, but neither are particularly helpful to me at this point.

But this time I was recommended a truly whacked-out writer and I am the richer for it. Though I suspect Di Filippo is as famous in his own right as Ellis and Palahniuk, not being a fan of science fiction means Di Filippo is completely new to me and his whacked out writing is a thing of beauty. Di Filippo is a very fluid writer and you can read his works very quickly and easily come back to them after interruptions. That came in handy when I found myself stuck at my hematologist’s office for two hours one day. I read the bulk of this book sitting in a cold office waiting to discuss my platelets. Good times! And I cop to the fact that because Di Filippo rescued me from hours of boredom I may be positively inclined toward him on that merit alone. However, I also think this collection of short stories has enough odd merit to stand tall on its own weirdness.

Di Filippo’s book forced me to create a new category – proto-bizarro. While he is not bizarro, per se, he comes the closest to being a bridge between pulp sci-fi and the current batch of hardcore, horror-infused weirdness that I have read. Basic, (mostly) Earth-bound sci-fi blended with pop culture references, fringe culture, high weirdness and elaborate plots – if Di Filippo’s book had included more gore I would consider it bizarro outright.

Most of Di Filippo’s plots can be described thusly: A person finds a thing. The thing is magical. The Magical Thing is used. There are unintended consequences when using the Magical Thing. The Lone Sane Person tries to set things straight, with varying success rates. Di Filippo definitely has a formula and while formulas can be trite, Di Filippo’s formula is sort of comforting. In the midst of high weirdness, having something familiar to fall back on isn’t a bad thing. Besides, formulaic writing is why I read writers like Stephen King. Formula is all that separates fringe from genre sometimes and while some condemn it, I don’t. If one can write well within a formula, that’s what is important, and Di Filippo can write very well within his formula.

But that brings me to an interesting situation with Di Filippo that I have not faced in a long time: There is not a single passage I want to quote here. Weird, right? I am the Queen of Long-Ass Quoted Passages. But Di Filippo is not a writer who is going to wow you with the power of his prose (or perhaps I should say his writing in this book will not wow you). These stories have consistent characters whose behaviors sort of blend into each other. The power of Di Filippo comes from the insanity of his plots. His stories are exercises in fine lunacy, so fine that his smooth, contemporary prose, his characters whose traits span the distances between urban dumbasses to southern-culture-on-the-skids clods without much delineation between the two, fade into irrelevance.

These are some seriously amazing plots. So intricate I am actually afraid to read a novel by this man for fear of what one of his book-length plots would do to my brain. The plots are worth the cost of admission. Plots so fabulous they are works of art.

But excellent plots seldom leave much to quote. So I’ll just synopsize the plots without spoiling them.

Continue Reading “Fractal Paisleys by Paul Di Filippo”

This Is Not an Odd Book Discussion: Three Interesting Broads

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Thematically, all I have to tie this post together are X-chromosomes, so, you know, don’t look for much in the way of commonalities. But at the same time, this site is often a sausage festival in terms of discussion. Most of the books I read are by men, most of my commenters are men, most of the people who send me amusing, annoying and frightening e-mails are men, and I feel I need to diversify a bit. So here are three women whose websites I love and whose approach to their craft or lives I find deeply interesting.

Let me begin with Bonnie Strange. Bonnie is a stunningly beautiful and completely insane German model and fashionista. Since fashion for me entails making sure to match my shoes, I did not discover Bonnie because of her fashion contributions. I found her looking for vegetarian recipes. I landed on her recipe for Jesus Fries. The perfect remedy for hangovers, it involves onions, sriracha sauce, bagged fries and so much American cheese I got acid reflux just looking at the picture. But her lunatic sense of humor and hilarious photography sucked me in.

I found especially amusing her entries about her visit to Greece, her disgusting recipe for Caesar Salad (as her “cat” Peter says, “Oh fuck!”), and her short treatise on going out (“DRUNK HUMANS EASILY GET AGRESSIVE”) clad in what appears to be panty hose, granny panties, a half-shirt declaring “SEX” and a blonde side ponytail.

Bonnie is that elusive perfect package – lovely, whimsical, interesting and intelligent while being completely insane. She is so awesome that I imagined my long-time commenter Ted from Romania marrying her, having icy-blue-eyed, completely deranged offspring with her. But alas she has a boyfriend. She also has a FUCKYEAH Tumblr.

The next interesting broad’s, whose name I do not know, is a witch living in Scotland. She refers to herself on her sites as Ms Graveyarddirt so that is what I will call her. I found her because people on a Christian watchdog site I frequent from time to time were bitching about her sitting naked on a roast (I’m too tired to find the picture but if you want I’m sure you can find it). I am unsure how she lost control of her main site, but she did and it hasn’t been updated in months. It gives one of those “this site may be compromised” blurbs when you search for it but I read the entirety of it and I’m fine, but bear that in mind.

While, like most Americans, I am squeamish about menstrual blood and semen in general, let alone when they are used in food, if the people consuming it don’t care, it’s no skin off my back. But that’s where so much of the negative reaction to Ms. Graveyarddirt comes from – a disgust borne from her lack of disgust. She uses her menstrual blood in food, mostly offerings to the gods she worships, especially one she calls Papa. (I don’t begin to understand because, heathen that I am, I have a serious block where such things are concerned, but I can appreciate sincerity when I see it, and this woman is quite sincere.) Ms. Graveyarddirt has a relationship with her body and the natural world that makes tidy Westerners nervous (she is an an American of Ukrainian descent living in Scotland so it’s not like she wasn’t conditioned with the rest of us – she just chose to transcend it). She eats fresh roadkill, she gathers mountains of fresh mushrooms, and she is teaching herself taxidermy, using the less fresh roadkill she finds. She casts spells. She makes elaborate shrines. She works harder than anyone I think I have encountered in cyberspace and it’s a little inspiring to me because though I lack any sort of religious or spiritual conviction beyond a sort of primitive “the universe responds directly and in kind to the way we behave” sense of the world, her genuine endeavor to forge a unique path is in and of itself unique.

She is not a Llewellyn Books kind of witch. She lives her life instinctively, doing what feels right to her, respecting the earth and her beliefs in a way that eschews the dogma that accompanies even witchcraft. She sneers at ideas like the Law of Threes, that what you put out there comes back to you threefold, because her experiences don’t prove it and how can a spiritual tenet come from a dogmatic belief repeated over and over. Christ, Mary and other elements of more “traditional” religion make their way into her belief system. It really is hard to describe, which is why I spent two months reading her main blog. For those worried about her site, she also has a LiveJournal, a Tumblr and a Facebook fan page.

I find her a refreshing change of pace from so many blogs I read. Genuinely interesting people are few and far between. And she’s an accomplished cook and baker – pictures of her bread are genuine food porn (phallic loaves for the win). She may not be everyone’s cup of tea but I really dig her approach to life, her work ethic, and her intellectual honesty. You don’t have to like her or to agree with her to find her work ethic admirable and her mind unique. I hope to buy one of her taxidermy projects one day. She doesn’t have anything up on her ETSY store at the moment but when she does, I will be all over it, I assure you.

The last amazing broad I would like to refer you to today is Sarah Proud and Tall. A humorous writer with a delightful yet trenchant outlook on the political world (and decidedly liberal, so all my con and Libertarian readers may wanna give her a miss if they think a writer posing as a 92-year-old woman in a nursing home for the violently senile will provoke them too much), Sarah came to my attention via Mr. Oddbooks. He sent me a link to her now famous article, “In which the vengeance of God is justly meted out on earth,” which was so funny it gave me a really bad case of the hiccups, I was laughing so hard. The story Sarah tells is of her and a young Gloria Vanderbilt besting Ayn Rand at a Christmas party hosted by Bitsy Trump. Here’s a small sample:

She was never content with just the Pool Room or just the Grill Room, so she always booked the whole place. Whenever she did, she’d pay the staff extra to leave the doors open, and then when people came in to ask for a table they had to say, “Yes, we are open, but there is no table for you. Off you fuck.” It did wonders for that place’s reputation. Two weeks after Bitsy’s first Christmas party, the Four Seasons was shooing the punters off with sticks, and there was a two week waiting list just to be sneered at by the maître d’.

“There is no table for you. Off you fuck!” is what people now see when they are banned from this site. Well, the one person banned saw it and he’s now unbanned so no one sees it but act up and there it’ll be, I promise you.

I would be remiss in not letting you know Sarah also writes for Balloon Juice. There you can read her discussion of viewing the movie based on Ayn Rand’s book, Atlas Shrugged, entitled “By the incompetent at the expense of the stupid.” Again, one of the funniest things ever on the Internet:

Making a movie from the rancid scribblings of that vile and termagant shrew – a woman who never met a circumlocution she didn’t like and whose idea of character development was to have someone rape someone else – was never going to be a great idea.

And then there’s this:

Ayn Rand may have been an evil old ferret with a heart of frozen poison and the morals of a tapeworm – in person, she may have made your palms itch with the urge to strike her and keep on striking her until she fell down – but at least she wasn’t boring.

This movie, on the other hand, is the only experience I have ever had which is more tedious than actually reading Atlas Shrugged. I haven’t been that bored since Andy Warhol asked Joe Dellasandro to hock up a loogie on the ground, filmed it for three hours and then made all of us at the Factory watch it in slow motion.

I’ve been to funerals that had a better script, livelier action and a happier ending.

But don’t think my beloved Sarah is a one-note writer. She spends her days mocking others too. I loved her evisceration of that pantload, Jonah Goldberg. Bonus English usage lesson in that article as well – never say Sarah doesn’t have your back. Sarah is such a deft writer that she managed to lampoon Michele Bachmann and the Catholic Church in one entry.

I adore Sarah. She really is a good old broad.