A Fan's Notes

A quick snapshot of an author and his only (good) novel (memoire):

Frederick Exley published his first and only (good) novel A Fan's Notes in 1968 which detailed the chaotic life and experiences of a man named "Fred Exley", whose struggles with alcohol (as well as his erratic behavior) landed him in psychiatric institutions more than once. The novel's misfit antihero is fixated on football, and obsesses over Frank Gifford to the point of institutionalization. A Fan's Notes was initially intended to be published as an explicitly autobiographical piece however the publishers considered the format of the novel to be more financially viable, so it was dubbed "a Fictional Memoir" on the front page to fit within the standards of the narrative. It's a fairly ironic rhetorical turn on their part, I'd say. Regardless of it's placement within the library stacks, this is probably the best novel you've never heard of.

Exley did manage to write another 2 books after A Fan's Notes but both were unlikely sequels to his tour-de-force first effort. His most significant piece of work besides A Fan's Notes was a series of interviews he conducted with Gloria Steinem, published in Playboy in July of 1974 titled "Saint Gloria and the Troll". Frederick Exley died in June of 1992 in virtual anonymity.

If you like boozy and cerebral man-lit, this is some of the best.

Again Returning Again

After another haitus, I think I'll try to do this again. First, I'd like to clear my chest of a few things. Number 1: I really hate the word "blog". It's awful. It's flat, and contains both the sound Blah (as in BLAH-BLAH-BLAH) as well as the word "Log". It also has an abrupt end to it- that g'uh sound. But besides the phonetic blunders, the blog really is a remarkable thing. It's like having your own publishing house to print your shitty, uneducated points of view and, theoretically, that's pretty great. So, with those two things aside, I'd like to give this shit another try. Hopefully I can get into some other topics besides the medium itself and eventually (maybe-just-maybe) I'll tackle that final flaw within the blog structure... the complete absence of readers.

So, before I sign off, I'd like to make an official post on a topic other than this blog:

Today I went to a diner to have breakfast. It's the kind of diner that's slightly retrofitted with vinyl seats and a bar with swivel seats. And yes, it's a little bit cool in the worst way... but only a little bit. Anyway, I'm sitting at the bar (there were no booths available) and in walk these three people (2 guys and a girl). And they are also the worst way of cool. And just as they walk in, one of the guys remarks "Ya know, I don't remember Toronto having so many diners..." ... ... Okay. The first thing that came to mind was "Are you fucking retarded?" Is that even a thought? First of all, where has this guy been? Montreal, Paris, New York, Beijing? Obviously Toronto has a shit load of diners, it's the biggest city (by like 2 million) in the country. And second, people like to eat and not do dishes. So yes, there are diners here. But the worst part was how he said it... it wasn't some sort of comment on urban development or small business practice or something like that. It was completely him saying "Wow! Where I live now (a place obviously cooler than this) we have loads of cool diners and this one is also cool. It's cooler than I thought they had here in Toronto." Okay. Thank you for your almost-commentary on something, you mental defective. Now please leave and go back to wherever you came from, so you can say things like "D'you know what I love about this city (a cool city of your choice)?... The culture."

That's nearly a thought.

#shitregularpeoplesay