Of Books

This is a couple days old, but it seemed an interesting footnote to the whole question of Krystian Bala's murder-in-a-novel. It turns out he's not the first to fictionalize a real killing.

Published for the first time, 60 years after it was written, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs' "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks," turns out to be an account of a murder committed by a friend of the writers who confessed to them and asked for their help to escape the law. Both Kerouac and Burroughs were arrested for it.

In other (somewhat unrelated) words, I think I may have discovered a new favorite author: Samuel Beckett. Though his play "Waiting for Godot" is now a classic, I am surprised no one has shoved one of his books into my hands before now. I had to read his short story "The Calmative" for class, and was shocked at what seems to me the most convincing narrative portrayal of dreaming. Though the character himself seems to question, and disregard, that possibility, the entire story shifts from one hazy locale to another, with a slew of significant and ghostly characters and symbols wandering through the night. Something that immediately struck me, and was confirmed through an evening of academic research, is that Beckett might employ what I consider an example of pyschogeography: the use of locations that are reflective of the narrator's consciousness more than being real places, much the way that the odd corridors and towers of dreams seem to be landscape of the internal workings of the mind.