Holiday Gift Ideas
Holiday Gift Ideas From Buzz Callaway
Books. If you are looking for that special book for that special reader in your life this holiday season then look no further, Last Bender has just what you need.
This year I will make 4 suggestions:
A ship is torpedoed and the five people must survive on a lifeboat. The one sailor on board knows if they are to survive the most important thing is that they not go insane. Intense action, beautiful descriptions, a hard boiled protagonist, a machine-gunning and a whale. Published in 1941. Hanley had been a sailor, among other things. A great neglected writer.
Gert Ledig: Stalin Organ and Payback
Gert Ledig wrote these two war novels in the 1950’s, when no one in Germany wanted to read about the war, and no one in the world wanted to read about it from a German soldier’s perspective. The first is about the Russian Front, and has no named characters, just ceaseless brutality and nihilism. Mud, blood, no fucking glory.
Ledig was injured on the Russian Front and sent back to Hamburg where he witnessed the allied firebombing. Payback recounts the firebombing from the point of view of several groups of people, including two American bomber pilots who have the misfortune of being shot down before the firestorm begins. Unbelievable human depravity, lack of bravery or heroism, no hope here. For war lovers everywhere.
Stanley Elkin: Stanley Elkin’s Magic Kingdom
If you read no other book about terminally ill children this holiday season, read this one. By turns hilarious, poignant and savage, Elkin brings to the English language the blood it used to have when Joyce, Barnes and Nabokov were hammering it out. Plus, there are drug taking homosexuals dressed up like Mickey Mouse.
The rare photo on your blog. A wreath made of wine corks?
Yes, the winecork wreath may be the most depressing craft project i can think of. i saw one made on the home and garden channel about 16 years ago and it impressed me so much that when i had to condescend to finding an objective correlative for the feeling of alienation and malaise the christmas season always evokes, it came immediately to mind. And The Google, as always did not fail.
I’m grateful for the winecork wreath. It means I no longer have to mourn the loss of the beercan pulltab necklace.
I still haven’t read Gert Ledig despite your ravings, but shall put it on the list for novus annus. Magic Kingdom is an impossible book: how do you write comedy about the death of children, about mourning the death of your own child, and not fall to the saccharine? I have no idea how he pulled it off. In an alternative universe, I am Mary Cottle.
I’ve got to hand it to you mary Cottle, as usual your finger is on the button.