Notes from Normalcy

Perhaps the most interesting book I have ever read.

2012-02-08T10:42:00.000-08:00

'free zine offer' update, and another promotion idea

2011-12-16T16:42:00.000-08:00

Turns out the Kindle Select service I mentioned in a previous post isn't really an opportunity to read "The ElectroLive Murders" for free. To get access to Kindle Select, you have to pay for Amazon Prime service--and that costs $79 a year. If you're already paying for Amazon Prime, and you want a free copy of Map of Fog 3, the offer I mentioned in that previous post is still available to you. But if you're not paying for Prime service, and you still want to get a copy of Map of Fog 3 for free, check this out:

Contact me at "mcmfs at yahoo dot com" and I'll email you a PDF of the novelette. Read the novelette, post a review on the Amazon page for "The ElectroLive Murders", and then send me an email with your address. I'll mail you a free copy of Map of Fog 3. I've still got 19 free copies left.

(I suppose that even if you went ahead and bought a copy of "The ElectroLive Murders", then reviewed it and contacted me for your free copy of Map of Fog 3, you'd still be getting a deal of sorts. I normally sell Map of Fog 3 for $3, and going the buy-ElectroLive-and-then-review-it route would only cost 99 cents.)

Also, following up on this post, I've put another 'out of the box' promotion into effect. Several printing companies offer free business cards, though you have to pay shipping and the company puts its own contact info on each card's back. So I ordered mock business cards for a character from "The ElectroLive Murders", with a description of the genre of the novelette and instructions on how to find it. You can see a picture of one of the cards at the top of this post.

Originally I figured I'd give the cards to people I saw reading from Kindles, but now I figure that people who are absorbed in a story probably don't want some weirdo breaking the spell in order to hand them a business card. So now I'm trying to think of other ways to distribute the cards, like slipping them into Sci-Fi books at the library, or something.

Of course, hardcore Kindle users probably aren't heavy library users, so that particular plan might not be too successful. Hopefully I'll think up something better, but in any case, it only cost me $5.35 to get 250 cards (the cards were free, but shipping was $5.35), which is just about the amount of money I've earned from ElectroLive sales so far, so technically this promotion idea hasn't cost me anything. Except, of course, for time (which I'm continually squandering anyway), and maybe a little more self respect (bah! who needs it?).

THE ILLUMINATIONS, by Arthur Rimbaud (translated by Donald Revell)

2011-12-14T08:48:00.001-08:00

There are certain writers whose fame owes more to their myth than to their writing. I'd put Arthur Rimbaud in that group, though I know that doing so is inviting attacks (Rimbaud enjoys cult-hero status amongst those with bohemian inclinations). Perhaps the classic example of the enfant terrible, Rimbaud scandalized the Parisian literary scene with his decadence. As a teenager he embroiled himself in a homosexual affair with an older (and married) man, and indulged in raucous behavior and uninhibited drug use.

His body of work is relatively small, composed almost entirely during his teenage years (by 21 he'd given up on writing all together). Amongst his most lauded works is THE ILLUMINATIONS, which is also some of the last writing he produced (other than letters to acquaintances, which have also been collected and published). It reads more as a series of prose-sketches than a cohesive work. I wonder whether Rimbaud ever considered it a book, or whether its creation and publication resulted primarily from other people raiding his notebooks.

Despite the legions of admirers, THE ILLUMINATIONS did little to inspire me. Here and there a sentence stood out, but the only piece that interested/satisfied me through all of its sentences was "City", and my interest/satisfaction came more from amusement at Rimbaud's humorous scorn (he was talking about London) than from any deep-passions. Anyway, here it is (as translated by Donald Revell):

"City"

I am a temporary and not unhappy citizen of a metropolis generally deemed modern because, in all of its furnishings and facades, and even in its overall city-plan, good taste has been scrupulously avoided. Here you will not find the slightest trace of any monument to superstition. In brief, language and morality have been reduced to their minims! These millions of people, all strangers to one another, pursue their educations and occupations and decripitude so uniformly that their life spans seem many times shorter than those statistically ordained for ordinary Europeans. From my window, I can see new specters rolling through thick, everlasting fumes--our forest shade, our summer night!--my cottage is my homeland and my whole heart because it is just like all the others, and out front, a whole new breed of Furies is arising,--Death without tears (our priceless housemaid), hopeless Love and pretty Crime puling in the gutter.

Free Zine offer

2011-12-08T15:22:00.000-08:00

I got a form email from Amazon saying that Kindle's starting a new service called Kindle Select, and that I had the option to make my novelette The ElectroLive Murders available through that service. Basically, what it means for Kindle users is that they can 'borrow' books on the Kindle--get access to the book for a limited time for free. So I signed The ElectroLive Murders up for that service, which means you can read it without having to pay.

And, as an added bonus, and as part of my renewed interest in trying to promote the book, I'm offering the readers of my blog (yes, all one dozen of you!) extra incentive: if you read The ElectroLive Murders, and put up a review for it on Amazon, I'll send you a free copy of the newest issue of my zine Map of Fog. Just email me (mcmfs at yahoo dot com) your mailing address once you've done it.

(I'm not sure if anyone reading this will feel motivated enough to actually read and post and then email me, but in the extremely unlikely case that I get a totally unexpected flood of emails, I'm limiting the free zines to 20 in number. I'll be sure to put up a post on this blog if I'm getting close to that cap.)

Map of Fog 3 in Maximum RocknRoll #343

2011-12-08T08:43:00.000-08:00

The third issue of my zine Map of Fog was chosen as one of the top ten zines in this month's issue of Maximum RocknRoll. They give it a positive review, too, saying the zine reads like something Studs Terkel would have written.

sticker design #1

2011-12-07T16:12:00.001-08:00

approaches to translation

2011-12-06T15:41:00.000-08:00

Just finished reading William O'Daly's translation of Aún, by Pablo Neruda, and it left me thinking about the different ways people approach the process of translation. You can either stray toward translating the literal meaning of the words, or toward an artistic translation that aims to communicate your interpretation of the deeper meaning.

For example, a common spoken farewell in Spain is "Hasta luego." In English, you might translate that to "See you later", which is a common spoken farewell in the United States, and which means pretty much the same thing. Or you could translate it to "Until later", which is more literal, and still understandable, but which might strike some as awkward.

O'Daly seems to favor the latter approach, but sometimes he sways in the other direction. One example is his version of the poem's title: Still Another Day. A more literal translation of "aún" would be the adverb "still", as in "I'm still breathing" ("aún respiro"). If O'Daly wanted to make sure the reader didn't read that "still" as the adjective "still" (as in "motionless") he could have translated the title to "Even Still," or something like that, which is closer to the literal meaning of the word. But he went for, instead, Still Another Day, which draws from the meaning of the poem (which deals thematically with the passage of days) to add meaning that the original Spanish title doesn't have.

Why did he do this? My guess is that he'd explain it as an artistic decision. He might tell you "Still Another Day" sounds more elegant than "Even Still". He might argue that Neruda's Spanish version of the poem is elegant, and that the elegance itself is something that should be preserved, instead of sacrificed by a more literal--and probably more awkward--translation.

And he might be right.

But personally, I almost always favor the more literal approach, and part of the reason for my preference relates specifically to that greater awkwardness. I think there is value in being reminded, while reading, that what you are reading is a translation. Awkwardness can help with that reminding.

Why is it important to remember that you are reading a translation? Because there is more to language than just the meaning of the words. Language, and the differences between languages, reveal differences in the minds of people. And if we abandon the literal approach, and translate not just the words but the sense of 'elegance' we get from a piece, if we translate it so it sounds like an American wrote it, then we lose something essential to the piece itself--we lose what it reveals about the mind that produced it.

beating a dead horse

2011-12-06T14:29:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year I threw my hat in the ereader self-publishing ring by putting a novelette up on Kindle. Not much happened as a result--about 15 downloads in the first three months (mostly from family and friends), and nothing for the next several months after. But the number of people who own Kindles continues to grow, and now that they've dropped the price to $79 (it sold for $399 when it first came out, four years ago), it's likely that those numbers will fatten heartily this Christmas season. Meanwhile, my little novelette continues to sit there, earning too little to pay.

Anyway, since the work of putting the book up for sale is already done, I've been thinking recently about trying to continue promoting it. My past promotion attempts consisted of trying to get it reviewed by bloggers--and in the end that turned out to be a lot of work for almost no results. This time I'm trying to think of more out-of-the-box methods of promotion, especially promotion that engages the curiosity of potential buyers. The story is a murder mystery, a genre favored by people who like to put clues together, and I figure those types of people might appreciate a more intriguing hook.

The first promotion attempt I've thought of is writing about the story on dollar bills. Here's what I've been thinking of writing: "Who killed Franklin Moore? Kindle Search: 'electrolive murders'."

I'm not sure if doing this is risky or not. I haven't heard of any laws that specifically prohibit writing on paper currency, but some people seem to think it's illegal. Also, I suppose it's possible someone will get a bill and think it relates to a real murder, and try to contact the police. I'm hoping that won't happen. It seems like it would take less effort to search for 'electrolive murders' than to contact the police, and hopefully anyone who bothers to search the term will realize from the results that the murder relates to a fictional story.

Oh well. For now I'm planning on moving ahead with the idea. We'll see if anything results from it.

listen to Leonard when you feel happy

2011-12-03T18:14:00.000-08:00

Listen to Leonard Cohen when you feel happy. Don't listen to him when you feel sad. Don't listen to him when you're home alone on a Saturday night, four beers through a sixer, too drunk to go anywhere (and nowhere to go, anyway), but not drunk enough to have your own emotional misery blotted out by physical discomfort.

Maybe listen to Beyonce instead.

ESPAÑA EN EL CORAZÓN, by Pablo Neruda

2011-11-30T13:23:00.000-08:00

One of the things I didn't mention in yesterday's post about the SPANISH CIVIL WAR entry in the Simple History Series is the effort Gerlach makes to maintain a perspective that doesn't favor either side. It's difficult to do that in any account of war, and probably especially difficult for this war in particular. While I certainly appreciate the objective viewpoint in most informative writing, for this particular topic there's a lot to be learned by going beyond the objective. And while that might not be appropriate in the scheme of Gerlach's Simple History Series, the interested reader has a wealth of subjective information to explore, assuming they want to transcend the very simple.

A good place to start, in my mind, is Pablo Neruda's poetry collection ESPAÑA EN EL CORAZÓN. Written and printed while the war was still going on, Neruda's work captures some of the passion felt by those defending the Spanish Republic, and some of the atrociousness of the actions committed by Franco's forces. To those who prefer their poetry jaded and blasé in tone, Neruda's collection might come across as excessive. He seemed to recognize that himself, and addresses it in the closing stanzas of his poem Explico Algunas Cosas (I Explain a Few Things):

Preguntaréis por qué su poesía
no nos habla del sueño, de las hojas,
de los grandes volcanes de su país natal?

Venid a ver la sangre por las calles,
venid a ver
la sangre por las calles,
venid a ver la sangre
por las calles!

(here's a translation:)

You all will ask why my poems
don't talk of sleep, of leaves,
of the large volcanoes of my native country.

Come and look at the blood in the streets,
come and look
at the blood in the streets,
come and look at the blood
in the streets!

Simple History Series: the Spanish Civil War

2011-11-29T13:38:00.000-08:00

Microcosm has taken over the publishing of John Gerlach's Simple History Series, with the volume covering the Spanish Civil War being the second they've printed. I picked up a copy on Sunday, and read through it that afternoon.

One of the first questions that came to mind, while reading this zine, was: how simple is too simple? Gerlach has stripped the topic down to the point where it offers less information than you'd find in the Wikipedia article on the same subject (I'm obliged to mention here that I found Gerlach's work easier to read than the Wikipedia article, and simplification might be part of why). At what point do the benefits of simplification founder under the weight of its drawbacks?

Another question: can the potential benefit of covering this topic in Gerlach's series be quantified? I've got the feeling that a fair amount of the people who pick up this zine might have never read anything about the Spanish Civil War otherwise. Sure, the topic has a special place in the hearts of a lot of revolutionary-minded people because of the radical political forces involved (conservatives/fascists vs. communists/anarchists/progressives), but for all of those 'revolutionaries' who identify as intellectual and love diving into books and articles, you've got plenty more who wouldn't touch a thick tome with a ten-foot pole, but might actually read a zine (especially if that zine is promoted by Microcosm, which has a pretty large audience).

A third question, less about this title itself and more about the topic covered: what would it take for a similar war to take place here in the United States? The Spanish Civil War came about because of the failure of Spain's political system to satisfy the demands of a people that had been dramatically polarized into the haves and the have-nots (to boil things down to even simpler terms than those found in Gerlach's zine). With the outrageous disparity of wealth in this country (1, 2), and with the dissatisfaction felt by so many people here (as evidenced by the Occupy movement, amongst other things), today's USA has a lot in common with Spain in the 1930s. And yet, it's pretty hard for me to imagine our populace actually taking up arms.

FINE ABSENCE, by Anne Bauer

2011-11-23T09:49:00.000-08:00

Just finished reading FINE ABSENCE, a poetry chapbook by Anne Bauer. It is excellent, nearly every poem a knockout. But what it leaves me ruminating on now, in these moments following two consecutive read-throughs, is the question of Writing About Personal Topics, and especially Intending for Those Topics to be Read by an Audience.

FINE ABSENCE takes as its general theme the gap that death creates in the lives of those left living. More specifically, many of the poems Bauer includes in this collection are written about, and in the wake of, her father's passing. They are beautiful poems, remarkable for the intimacy of emotion they reveal. And that's what makes me wonder, now, what it means to write of a real, specific, intimate relationship in a forum meant for the public, for an amorphous mass of people you'll never know personally.

I suppose it's possible that the publication of FINE ABSENCE was a sort of accident, that it entailed no effort on the part of Bauer, that she submitted the collection to the Pavement Saw Press chapbook competition (which she won, which is why the collection was published) merely on a whim, that it was accepted and published so quickly and smoothly that Bauer never really had the time or inclination to consider the concept of an audience. Or, I suppose, it's also possible that someone else submitted the collection on her behalf, that it was accepted and published without any effort or desire on her part (that's what happened with Emily Dickinson, after all). But from what I know about poetry publication, these hypothetical scenarios are pretty unlikely. In almost every case, getting a collection of poetry published demands a significant level of committed effort from the author.

Of course, in this particular case I am grateful that Bauer made the effort, because otherwise I'd never have had a chance to read it. But still I wonder: what does it mean to write about the intimately personal and then make efforts to share that writing with an impersonal mass of people you'll never know?

And of course, I write poetry too, and until the last year I worked at getting my poetry published. Even now that I've lost interest in the submission process, when I write poems there is always, at some level, the idea that the poem is an effort to communicate with other people. I'm not just jotting down thoughts for my edification--there is always, to some extent, the goal to produce something with potential value to a greater audience than just my own self.

Why? Why do poets mine their personal lives for material to be presented to a public (a public which, it must be said, really isn't actually clamoring for poetry)? Why are poets driven to present their private selves to an anonymous crowd? Does it boil down to needy egos?

whatever happened to the outrage?

2011-11-16T14:49:00.000-08:00

Remember a while back, maybe ten years, when sweatshops were a big topic? People were protesting Nike, the GAP, and other big brands; Kathie Lee Gifford broke down in tears when her clothing company was exposed as relying on child labor; 60 Minutes and 20/20 and Hard Copy were running exposes on human-rights violations in third world production factories. Sweatshops were utterly gruesome, and people were outraged to learn they were supporting sweatshop labor by buying overpriced Levis.

Ten years later, the sweatshop situation is even worse, and yet you don't seem to hear much about it. The big brands are more profitable than ever, and the smaller brands that sprang up specifically to offer sweatshop free clothing are struggling, or going out of business (SweatX and Just Garments shut down; No Sweat seems like its on the ropes; even American Apparel--which owed its initial popularity in large part to the anti-sweatshop movement--is starting to look like a short-lived fad, with stock prices that peaked at $15 a share currently trading for 75 cents).

So what's up? Does the public not care anymore? Has their horror been lacquered over by the gloss of a decade's worth of billion-dollar big-brand ad campaigns?

Well, one dude who's still outraged is Charles Kernaghan. Here's a speech he gave last year at the International Association of Fire Fighters. It starts with the American economy and then segues into sweatshops, and it goes on for more than 30 minutes, but if you watch even ten minutes you'll probably start to feel outraged about sweatshops all over again. So watch it.

leaving banks behind

2011-11-16T13:32:00.000-08:00

World's fucked up today, and banks are a big part of why. I'd opened up a credit union account almost a year ago, but it's only recently that I decided to take all my money out of for-profit banks and shut down those accounts. It's an idea that's been gaining attention recently, and there's lots of good reasons for it. I won't bother to list those reasons here, as they're already all over the net, but if you haven't considered switching, I recommend that you do.

utopian

2011-10-24T18:00:00.000-07:00

nothing is more utopian
than trusting the ruling class
to redress the grievances
caused by their own dominance

Sweet Schlitze

2011-10-10T11:17:00.000-07:00

Recently saw the movie 'Freaks' for the first time. One of the characters that stands out in the film is Schlitze the Pinhead, because of a remarkable sweetness and charisma he conveys on camera. I wonder if one of the reasons Schlitze was so often presented as a female, despite his actual male gender, relates to people generally feeling more comfortable dealing with sweetness coming from girls. In any case, I'm definitely not the only one Schlitze charmed: throughout his life he was cared for by a variety of people, despite his severe handicaps. Well-loved among the sideshow community, Schlitze was even legally adopted by a circus animal trainer. He lived to the age of 70--a remarkably long life for a person with microcephaly--and continued to inspire goodwill even after his death. For example, a group of members of the find-a-death forum tracked down his burial site (he was buried in an unmarked 'paupers' grave) and pooled funds to buy him a headstone. Here's a picture of the stone. Schlitze finally got his hat "with a long feather on it."

SELECTED UNPUBLISHED BLOG POSTS OF A MEXICAN PANDA EXPRESS EMPLOYEE, by Megan Boyle

2011-10-05T11:35:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I got an email asking if I'd like a galley copy of muumuu house's new book: selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee, by Megan Boyle. I said sure. They sent me a copy of the book about a week ago. I read the book. Here are some thoughts I had about it.

First of all, it's written in an emotionally flat, consciously unnatural style that I associate very much with Tao Lin. Contractions are often avoided ('i am' is used in place of 'i'm', 'there is' is used in place of 'there's', etc); emotional states are mentioned unemotionally and without great detail ('some acquaintances sat at the table next to me and i felt uncomfortable. they ate in silence and i felt more comfortable.'); sentence structures are basic and show little variation, are even sometimes purposefully repetitive ('i just took an online quiz in my head and found out [...] i just took another online quiz in my head and discovered [...]'). Obviously, writing in such an affected way produces specific effects on the reader. What interested me, in this case, is how that effect differs when similar styles are used by different people.

With Tao Lin's RICHARD YATES this style furthers my perception of the narrator as socially dissociated to the point of exhibiting traits of Aspergers syndrome. The Haley Joel Osment character notes the emotional state of the Dakota Fanning character, but seems to lack any sense of empathy with her. When the HJO character is moved out of emotional neutrality by the DF character, what he feels is irritation and disappointment that the DF character has not lived up to his expectations. He doesn't seem very interested in supporting her; his interests lie, instead, with his personal goals: writing, pushups, things he wants to achieve. The stylistically-affected tone I describe in the previous paragraph seems to further that narrator's character by displaying distrust of, or disinterest with, emotions and emotional-connection/interaction with other people.

Boyle's character, on the other hand, seems highly interested in other people's emotions, or at least in the way that those emotions relate to her. She wants people to like her, to find her attractive and interesting. Again and again she makes statements like 'i felt scared about not having enough time to make myself look attractive for the person i was getting a beer with [...]'; or 'one of my primary goals is to not take myself seriously, or at least to convey that attitude socially...'; or 'i'm having good thoughts today, all seem interesting. i wonder if that would be interesting to read, or too self-indulgent [...]'; or 'eventually i think i made enough funny/relevant comments that i 'broke even,' or maybe exceeded and moved into 'well-liked.'. She obsesses about her weight, mentioning it more than maybe any other topic. She fantasizes about people falling in love with her ('maybe someone will fall in love with me and make me want to stay.').

The pairing of the personality revealed by these statements with the emotionally flat, consciously unnatural style this text is written in gave me a sense of internal contradiction and conflict that seemed mildly tragic, but also illuminating of difficulties faced by the 'internet generation.' To put the conflict into basic terms: she seems to want other people's approval, but she also seems to feel that approval is basically pointless; if it weren't for everything else being pointless too, she probably wouldn't be so obsessed with other people's approval.

I wonder how much of this attitude relates to, specifically, coming of age in an era where a large amount of social-interaction takes place on the internet--a medium in which true intimacy is very difficult to achieve. One reaction could be to start to doubt the potential of human interaction all together, and to come around to a sort of narcissistic/self-obsessed perspective in which the meaning of your own existence is both dwarfed by the internet--because you're only one person in an arena populated by billions of other people (as opposed to being one person in a small town, where you see the same people--even strangers--on a regular basis)--and seduced by the internet--because you have potential access to vastly more people than you'd otherwise have access to. Or to put it in words that Boyle might use, because of the internet 'our generation is fucked.'

Of course, the limits of human interaction and the dehumanizing affect of crowds on the individual are things people had to deal with before the internet ever existed, and the rise of the internet might potentially just have put those things into more immediate perspective. But if that's true, it's probably also true that the internet has brought with it a potential for distraction far greater than any we've faced before, which likely results in individuals having less presence of mind with which to contemplate these things that they've always dealt with.

Boyle's book shows that distracted state of mind--it never goes too deeply in the abstract, it limits itself instead to the very simple, to the very immediate, to concepts like 'i like touching people when i'm drunk'. Often times she writes of things that seem meaningless, or at least not very important--'five employees attended my works christmas party at a bar/ i ate peanuts and tried to hear what people were saying'--which brings to mind that old Miranda July quote about Tao Lin writing 'from moods that less radical writers would let pass—from laziness, from vacancy, from boredom [...]'. A lot of Boyle's book is coming from those moods. A lot of what she writes seems pretty meaningless, seems like words put onto a blog just for the sake of producing words, of saying something, of making noise in an arena of billions--not to communicate anything important, just to keep from disappearing in the crowd.

the deluded poor

2011-09-13T14:51:00.000-07:00

On my lunch break from work today, as I walked to my normal hiding place, I overheard a conversation taking place between two girls walking on the opposite side of the street. They were young--probably college freshman--with dyed blonde hair and surfer-styled fashion, which made me assume they'd come here from Southern California (like more than half of the out-of-town kids at this school). At one point, I heard one of the girls say "Obama wants to take our money, because we're rich, and use it to help give poor people jobs. He's so stupid!" The other girl agreed vociferously.

It's an interesting statement for a lot of reasons, but the thought that leaped out at me when I heard it was: what makes these girls think they're rich?

San Francisco State University, where I work, is one of 23 universities in the CSU system. It's a school largely funded by state money, and the current budget crisis in California has lead to drastic cuts in that funding. This year alone, Governor Jerry Brown plans on cutting back at least 18% of the CSU total budget. What that means is classes have been cut, lecturers have been dismissed, services have been minimized, and tuition has been raised. It's so hard to get the classes you need here that it's now practically impossible to graduate in four years. Current average graduation time is closer to 6 years.

In all honesty, the only reason I can think of as to why people would come to this school at all is that they're either not willing or not able to spend the money to go somewhere else. In other words, they're not rich.

So what makes these girls think they're rich? I'm guessing they think they're rich because they're white and their parents aren't on welfare. Their lifestyles don't fit their concept of poverty, so they assume that they aren't poor. If they aren't poor, then they think they must be rich.

In a certain sense, they're right. This country is still a rich country. Even the poor people in America have a lot more money than people in lots of other countries. These girls probably come from families that own houses, have cars, have extra money to spend on unnecessary things like blonde hair dye. If the house comes with an extortion-rate mortgage, if the cars were bought on loan, if that extra money is balanced by ten thousand dollars of personal debt, they don't know about it. Their parents don't talk with them about finances.

The truth is, only very few Americans still qualify as "rich," assuming you're using the word "rich" to describe the people Obama's plan aims to tax (i.e. people who earn more than $250K a year). In fact, more than 90% of the people in this country earn a salary of around $31K a year, which is about one-eighth of what Obama's "rich" people earn.

And my guess is people in that upper echelon of wealth don't send their kids to state-funded schools, especially when those schools are going down the toilet.

ElectroLive update: First Review

2011-05-23T14:53:00.000-07:00

So, the banging-my-head-against-the-wall process of submitting The ElectroLive Murders to a bunch of Book Review Blogs, which I was complaining about in a recent post, wasn't totally fruitless. One of the twenty sites I queried actually reviewed my ebook on goodreads, and it's a great review. The reviewer, Wenj of Black Lagoon Reviews, had a lot of good things to say, but didn't let her enthusiasm for the book stop her from pointing out a few of its shortcomings, too. It's gratifying to know that an honest reviewer liked my story, and I encourage anybody reading this blog to check out Black Lagoon, which is definitely a lot more professional, and better designed, than anything I've managed to put online.

E.M. Forster's THE LONGEST JOURNEY

2011-05-19T08:46:00.000-07:00

During my college years I inadvertently signed up for a class in Modernist British Novels (the class schedule had abbreviated the course as Modern British Novels, and I had hopes it would be covering writers like Irvine Welsh and Will Self; because of those three missing letters my expectations were off by almost 100 years). Besides one nonfiction book to familiarize ourselves with the atmosphere of the late 19th century, the class reading consisted of nearly all the works by two authors: Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster. It was a demanding schedule, which resulted in us racing through a new novel almost every week. At such a pace the pleasures of a novel can hardly be noted--it's rather like passing through a city on a train, with only a few vivid glimpses retained despite the ground covered.

Though Woolf's work fascinated me, it also felt laborious and difficult. Forster, on the other hand, connected with me in a personal way (this personal sense of connection, of intimacy and camaraderie and not feeling alone, is one of the great gifts that art sometimes gives). But, racing through his works as we did, I had no time to gain any real satisfaction from them, nor to explore what it was that they made me feel. I noted THE LONGEST JOURNEY and PASSAGE TO INDIA as two novels to return to later, and then I moved on to other study-related distractions.

Nearly ten years have passed since that semester, and only very recently have I found the occasion to return to Forster's work. Earlier this year I stumbled across a mildewed copy of THE LONGEST JOURNEY in the free box of a used book store here on campus. The copyright page states that the book I found was printed in 1922, in full compliance with the Wartime Paper and Other Material Preservation Requirements. The spine is cracked, the pages discolored, but the text remains intact.

The book sat on a shelf awaiting me, for several months, as I read through dozens of other books--books that succeeded in distracting me from where I was and what I was doing, escapist books meant to kill time, to turn our consciousness away from the monotony of our daily lives. I felt urges, now and again, to reread THE LONGEST JOURNEY, but new books kept getting in my way, seducing me with their novelty. Finally, bored of the shallow distractions of all these pulp novels, I picked up THE LONGEST JOURNEY, and started to read it again.

It has been, without a doubt, the most fulfilling reading experience I've had in years. The only other book I can remember reading recently that fulfilled me as much as this book has is MISS LONELYHEARTS, by Nathanael West.

Part of the satisfaction comes from the sentence-level eloquence Forster wields. He puts together words artfully, with great invention and wit, and yet maintains a clarity of story that keeps things moving along. Though it is true his approach is often oblique, rather than direct, it's still easy to know what he means, and to see things clearly. Also, an element of precociousness and idealism is worked into every sentence, which masterfully resonates the story's theme.

The theme, too, is something wonderful to me. Imagine if all of the idealism you felt as a teenager was actually your purest state, and if the later abandoning of such idealism for the conventions of the adult world, a process generally labeled "growing up," was actually a descent into perversion and hollowness. It's an ironic take on the "coming-of-age" novel, in which the character is wiser at the start, and degenerates from there. Rather iconoclastic, but Forster makes it work incredibly well. Plus it's very funny.

I'm not one who often thinks of turning books into movies, but the joy I felt with this book made me fantasize about putting it into a format with a potentially larger audience. The characters are so vividly realized, too--real people who come together in ways that show different elements of their reality--that it's fun to think of which actor would best portray each role. Perhaps:

Rickie: Elijah Wood
Ansell: Philip Seymour Hoffman
Stephen: Jack Black
Agnes: Keira Knightley
Mrs. Failing: Meryl Streep
Herbert: Steve Carell
with a soundtrack by The Smiths

Kindle Swindle Update: Still Broke

2011-05-11T11:30:00.000-07:00

Amazingly, my plan to become instantly rich by putting a book up on Kindle has not yet proven successful. In fact, I've hit a bit of a bump in the road. Turns out Kindle only pays you if you've earned more than $10. After seven weeks online, 12 copies of the ElectroLive Murders have sold, which (at 35 cents a copy coming my way) equates to $4.20 (420 bro!). Unfortunately, the Kindle Direct page only seems to keep track of the past six weeks of transactions, so the copies that sold in the first week are no longer showing up in the total. Probably they've got records somewhere, and will eventually pay me if the cash ever gets above $10. Or maybe this is a perfect plan to screw all the low earners out of cash. Who knows?

In any case, $4.20 in seven weeks is hardly a path to riches, and since I've got a short attention span, I've already lost most of my interest in promoting ElectroLive. The instant ubiquity my book was SUPPOSED to earn through blog reviews has yet to materialize, and my attention deficiency makes me pretty uninterested in continuing to bang my head against that wall. I probably contacted around 20 book review blogs, and got responses from 12 of them. How many reviews has that resulted in so far? Not one.

I'm not sure what accounts for this lack of success with review blogs. The one person who actually got back to me after reading ElectroLive told me she wouldn't review it because she doesn't review "short stories." (ElectroLive is a little more than 9K words, which is about a third of the typical novel length. I always refer to it as a 'novelette' in my review queries.) Maybe other reviewers feel the same resistance. In any case, I thanked her for reading it, and left it at that.

Another idea as to why the review-bloggers haven't responded is: maybe they've just got so much stuff coming they're way that they aren't bothering to keep up with all of it. I know I'm not the only lazy idiot to jump on the Kindle-Direct-Publishing bandwagon in hopes of easy cash. This country is full of lazy idiots hoping for easy cash! Maybe every book-review blogger in the country has been totally flooded with review requests after Amanda Hocking's much publicized success, and they're picking and choosing who they bother to review.

Oh well. I'm sure I'll come up with another pie-in-the-sky scheme for easy money sometime soon. In the meantime, it doesn't cost anything to leave ElectroLive up. I might as well let it keep on earning me too little to get paid.

Self Promotion

2011-04-06T09:52:00.001-07:00

Having completed the first step of my scheme to become independently wealthy and then quit my job--said step being putting a book up on Kindle--it's time to proceed to the second step: getting people to buy it. I've already started working on this step on a micro-level--hassling friends and family--but for this scheme to work I'll need sales on a much larger scale. (The book only pays me 35 cents per copy sold.) It's time to go MACRO!, and crank up the self-promotion machine.

Now, historically I've been pretty averse to self-promotion. I've never wanted to work toward establishing any sort of "internet presence," never wanted to set up a Facebook page, never even wanted to get too personal on this blog (which is why I often revert to book reviews as a topic). I think this aversion relates to the superficial nature of the internet, and a feeling that I am diminishing myself by being involved with it. But in order to sell books I'm going to need to, at the very least, get the word out about the book I'm trying to sell. Which means I've got to get used to a certain degree of self-exploitation.

Fortunately, having published the book under a pen name, I'm afforded a level of separation from its "author". I can pretend I'm promoting another person, instead of myself. Ridiculous as that may sound, it actually grants me some comfort.

The first steps I took were followed from an email Amazon sends out to people who have recently published on Kindle. They recommended setting up an Amazon Author's page, so I did. It isn't much, just a picture and brief bio attached to a list of books available on Amazon (only the one, at this point). I used a picture that's nearly a decade old, and I fabricated certain aspects of the bio itself (I'm not actually "especially fond of gypsy jazz and celtic-inflected punk," for example), in order to differentiate Don Broma from my own person, and to throw out some tidbits that the genre-reading kindle owners might connect with (which might reveal ignorance on my part as to what constitutes a regular "genre-reading kindle owner"; I figured they'd be middle-class, young-ish, white people from the non-coastal states, and aren't those sorts of people into romanticized European ethnic groups and popular music?).

I also put up a five star review for The ElectroLive Murders on the books Amazon page. This is another point where publishing under a pen name has its benefits--if I blurb the book with my own name, the average Joe won't realize the blurb is from the author itself. And I've seen more than one source emphasizing the importance of those Amazon Book Reviews. In fact, I'm even considering asking friends to let me post a review of my book with their Amazon accounts, to put up even more 5 star reviews. I doubt I'm the only person wily enough to attempt this sort of subterfuge. I wonder how many reviews are actually fake?

Accidental Subsistence

2011-03-22T13:20:00.000-07:00

I got The Social Network through Netflix, watched it on Sunday. Interesting in that it seems to be a movie about a company (Facebook) instead of a movie about a character. There are several characters that the movie follows, but they seem to take peripheral importance to the development of the company. Scenes with the characters are generally truncated, dialogue limited, development minimal. Lots and lots of micro scenes used to show the developing plot, but not really to establish a relationship between the viewer and the character.

Most interesting to me was the idea that the company could go from a vague concept to a 25 billion dollar company in just a few years. 25 billion dollars is an incredible amount of money. It's large enough that the main character, Mark Zuckerberg, is encouraged to pay a settlement of 65 million dollars to people who really don't seem to have much cause to sue him. 65 million is considered negligible when compared to 25 billion.

Another way to look at it: 25 billion is almost twice as much money as it would take to completely rebuild Haiti. Remember Haiti? It's still fucked, nearly a year after the earthquake. Almost 10 million people squatting in tents, dying of starvation and cholera, and Mark Zuckerberg could cash out his Facebook stock (51% ownership of the 25 billion dollar company) and single-handedly save all those people without even needing to fund-raise a dime.

And it's not like Facebook, this monstrously valuable company, actually produces any vital product. It doesn't have any direct connection to survival, ie food water shelter. It probably won't even be around in another decade or so, fading away just like Friendster and Myspace and all the rest.

A while back Mother Jones magazine published a series of charts meant to visually illustrate the disparity of wealth in the United States. Here's one chart from that series:

So 1% of the population have 34.6 percent of all the money. (Actually, the chart uses data from 2007, and the situation has worsened since then.) When one guy (Zuckerberg) can make 12 billion dollars in five years by creating a company that doesn't even do anything crucial (ie related to survival), during a time in which the average American income is less than $35 thousand a year, it's easy to see how that disparity arises. And with every coming year, the number of people who have all the money shrinks, and the number or people who don't grows.

Here's another way to look at it: Our grandparents earned enough from their jobs to afford a house in a few years. Our parents earned enough to qualify for a 15 or 30 year mortgage, which meant that with a regular job they could afford a house in 15 to 30 years. For our generation, even with a regular job, it is no longer possible for many people to afford a house or mortgage at all in their lifetimes. You just can't earn enough, anymore. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg comes up with one unnecessary, soon-to-be-outdated idea, and he makes 25000 times more in five years than the average American will earn in a lifetime of work (assuming 30 years of earning around $35K a year).

Which means that there isn't really any point in trying to maintain a traditional career anymore.

Considering that, maybe this is a better strategy: work as little as possible, just enough to earn money to cover your basic (food/shelter) needs. If you're ever going to claw your way out of poverty, it'll be from coming up with that lucky idea (like Facebook was for Zuckerberg), or from winning the lotto or something. You can't work your way out of the poorhouse anymore (if you ever really could).

Mass scrilla here we come!

2011-03-21T18:15:00.000-07:00

In a recent post I gushed about authors making big money by self-publishing on Kindle. The fact that people are doing away with the traditional process of getting published, not even bothering to let their stuff be considered by publishing houses, and actually selling more stuff than they probably ever would otherwise, got me so excited that I wrote some drivel about heart palpitations or something. Anyway, to follow up on that post, I've actually gone through the process of putting a book up on Kindle myself. It took around three hours to do it, and the only significant bump in the road related to my dumb-ass failure to read the size requirements for the cover image. After actually reading it, I got my brother to send me an appropriately sized image of a cover design he threw together for me, and presto! 24 hours later (after Amazon reviewed and approved the book) that shit's online. Here's the cover image:

Any readers that are actually paying attention might notice that the name on the book cover is not my name. I decided to use a pen-name because this book is a sort of multi-genre thriller, rather than the honest and earnest and limp-wristed 'self-expression' shit I normally publish under my real name. Since the goal was to write a 'for-fun' book, instead of a book expressing my pathetic feelings/whatever, I'm putting it up with a pen name, so that if I ever achieve my dream of publishing the sorry stuff I actually care about most (i.e. my poems) I can use my real name for that. In other words: two types of writing + two different goals = two different names.

The only other tidbit I'm motivated enough to mention is that the book is actually not long enough to qualify as what most people would consider book-length. The whole story is only around 9K words, which prints out at like 35 pages or something. But since Kindle doesn't set size limits, and since it allows the publisher to set the price, I figured I'd throw the book online with a cheap (actually, the cheapest that Amazon allows) price of 99 cents. In some ways, the size brings to my mind the sort of story length you'd see in the golden days of weird fiction, when writers wrote little 'novelette's' and sold them to pulp magazines like "Black Mask" or "Amazing Stories"--back when writers could steadily crank out short pieces that would earn them enough money to pay that month's bills. Nowdays publishing is more like working on a novel for years and then hoping to hit the lotto.

Well, the other problem is that I don't actually know anyone who owns a Kindle, except for my dad, so I don't really have a group of people to guilt-trip into buying a copy of my book. If you, dear reader, own a Kindle or know someone else who does, buy a copy, homey! It's only 99 cents, and if you don't like it, you can write a bad review or something.

New Testament - Gideons' Version

2011-03-17T09:13:00.000-07:00

I've been given three of these miniature bibles in the course of my life. Maybe you've been given one too. According to the text in the front of my copy, The Gideons International have passed out more than 1.5 billion of them. They're more common than colds.

But I've never actually got around to reading through any of the copies people gave to me. I might have flipped them open here and there, and read a passage or two, and that's it. Eventually, they disappeared or got lost. The copy I've got now has been sitting on my desk for months, untouched since the day it was handed to me.

If people keep giving me a book, why haven't I ever bothered to read it? There are a couple of reasons. First of all, I'm averse to Christian evangelists. Secondly, I'm pretty lazy, and I haven't ever found the bible to be stimulating reading. I did get started on the Old Testament once, figuring I'd work my way through to the New, but I couldn't make it past Exodus. Too boring.

Well, today is a new day. St. Patrick's day, actually. And I've got this untouched copy of the New Testament sitting on my desk. And I'm thinking I'll try reading it, and blogging about the experience.

I don't know what's going to happen if I read this. Probably nothing. Probably I'll stick with it for a few days, and get bored, and give up. I'm not desperate to be saved, or anything. I'd be more interested in Buddhism, or something, if I were. And a while back I read the Bhagavad Gita, also pushed as one of those life-changing spiritual tomes, and it didn't do much for me.

But who knows? Right here in this Gideons copy I have, it says "The Bible contains the mind of God," and the Gideons seem to think it's powerful enough on its own--they seem unique amongst evangelists because they just hand out copies and leave the preaching to the book. How can my puny, lazy, mortal brain resist the power of God's Mind, especially if he wants me to be led by his light?

DOWN ALL THE DAYS by Christy Brown

2011-03-16T14:44:00.001-07:00

ANGELA's ASHES does a better job of conveying the "Dublin Slum Childhood" sort of story, because it's more coherent, but Christy's book has moments of hallucinatory brilliance, and awesome empathy. The writing is wild, sometimes ridiculously indulgent (especially when Christy runs through a series of alliterative adjectives), but it stumbles into brilliance often enough to merit fighting through the rest.

Take this, for example: "Happiest were the children [...] their small bones sang in the earth forever."

Or this: "her eyes like hard coal diamonds swimming in sperm."

Or this: "the fleck of blood [...] burning like a geranium petal at sunset."

indie writers hit gold with epublishing

2011-03-03T17:49:00.001-08:00

I came across this article on NOVLR talking about writers self-publishing books on ereaders. It focuses on Amanda Hocking (here's her blog), a writer who has never been published in the traditional sense--i.e. by a publishing house. She's put out 9 books, all on her own, and is currently selling more than 100,000 electronic copies each month. (According to USA today, she sold more than 450,000 copies in the month of January 2011.) The books sell for about a buck each, of which Amazon keeps 30 cents. In other words, she's making at least $70K a month without ever having had any other person decide her stuff is worth publication. In other words, HOLY FUCKING SHIT!

The NOVLR article also lists the other top 25 authors self-publishing books on the kindle, the lowest selling number of which is 2,500 copies a month. At seventy cents (or more, in most cases) per book, 2,500 copies a month is a good living.

After reading all of the above, I'm practically having heart palpitations. There's plenty of arguing that could be done to lessen the significance of this ebook selfpublishing revolution, but at first blush this makes the idea of earning a living as an author seem like an actual possibility again. The very thought is like lightning in my veins, and I'm super charged up on trying to figure out how to get into it myself.

independent journals

2011-02-28T15:52:00.001-08:00

About two weeks ago I got a check for $300 from Autumn Letters for winning their Best of Word 2010 contest. The check didn't bounce--these guys are for real. You should go to their site, spend some time there, and send them some of your best stuff.

Recently I've been thinking about how my literary 'career' has been most helped along by independent journals and publications. I did have a few early pieces published in university journals, but it's the indie journals that actually seemed to care about my work. Quick Fiction, for example, gave me my first break. And Fogged Clarity, nominated a story of mine for the Pushcart, then did me the additional honor of resurrecting it from their archives for a spot in their first print edition. Instant City spent hours working with me on the story they published--they offered a lot of insightful suggestions, and respected my decision not to follow all of them--and then gave me stage time at a reading a few weeks later. And now Autumn Letters has actually paid me for a poem, which feels like some sort of miracle in this day and age.

I've also found indie journals to be generally more interesting reading than the university affiliated stuff. Not sure why this is, but I think it might have to do with the fact that university journals are often edited by groups, instead of one or a few individuals. That 'group-think process' often leads to a sort of milquetoast selection. Even with uni journals that have a single editor at the top of the pile, those editors are still beholden to other folks in the university--they almost never get true independence in their decision-making.

My experience working for a uni journal--SFSU's Transfer--sure didn't leave a good taste in my mouth. The selection process consisted of a group of fifteen people arguing over what made it in and what didn't. I don't think that any of those people had actually published work of their own, and they consistently settled on pieces that showcased some frivolous quirk, like a second-person point of view. We had one story that I blew me away, and I fought like hell for it, but the group rejected it because they thought it too 'traditional.' I was embarrassed to have my name appear on the staff list of the final product.

Obviously, I'm grateful to anyone who publishes my stuff, and I've come across some incredible work in uni journals. But I think it's especially awesome that that there are journals that follow their own singular taste, and somehow find a way to do it without third-party funding.

new poem up at The Scrambler

2011-02-16T11:38:00.001-08:00

The Scrambler's February 2011 issue is out, and it features my poem drink from the skull cup. Read it, and BLOW YOUR MIND!

(photo by Aaron Dailey)

notes on Humble Pie

2011-01-26T11:31:00.001-08:00

Obvious similarities to Napoleon Dynamite, especially in its fetishism of small-town life. Doesn't quite manage to generate the intrigue of Napoleon though, probably because the characters don't feel as eccentric or boldly comfortable with their own eccentricity. Watching Napoleon Dynamite you feel impressed with how awesomely awkward the characters are; in Humble Pie you just feel sorry for the characters (with the possible exception of Billy Baldwin's character, who manages a bit of swagger).

Also makes me think of Todd Solondz films in that many of the characters are extremely vulnerable, and the plot makes them suffer. Solondz goes so far over the top that it manages a sort of absurd black humor (though I personally can't say I enjoy Solondz films). Humble Pie is not so ruthless, and rarely does it manage to be funny.

You can see the writer's hand often in the dialogue. You can imagine him thinking "I'll make Tracey mean to the handicapped woman in order to create internal conflict in the character, to make him complicated and real instead of uniformly likeable and too simple." Feels contrived. In an early scene Tracey talks with a co-worker about "being a somebody," and says he thinks passing the driving exam (which he has failed several times) would make him a somebody. Blatant cliche dialogue to get to overly simplistic character motivation.

The scene where Tracey comforts himself with a junk-food binge, after having been slighted by a character he idolizes, is actually very sad. Him trying to trick the cashier into thinking he's ordering for two people works toward achieving the sadness, but it's really the shot of him in a dark lot, wolfing down food from the tray balanced on top of a trash can, that drives the knife into your heart.

The plot development sometimes feels a bit flat footed. There's a scene about midway through that involves Tracey having a gun pressed to his temple. Near the end of the movie Tracey faces off with the same character who threatened him with the gun, and Tracey challenges him, and the only consequence is a punch in the face and a few weak kicks. If you've got a gun-to-temple early on, you can't reduce the physical stakes at the climax without it disappointing the viewer.

NOTES ON THE ACTOR'S COMMENTS, IN THE DVD BONUS FEATURES SECTION

Billy Baldwin tries to distance himself from the narcissism of the character he plays, but his prominent fashion "flair" (rings on several fingers and on his thumb, a funky ethnic-looking necklace, hair with so much gel in it that it looks shellacked) make it hard to believe him.

When Kathleen Quinlan talks about her excitement for "Indie films," she sounds like what she's actually excited about is the idea of being a big fish in a small pond.

SPARTINA by John Casey

2011-01-20T09:37:00.001-08:00

One of the most satisfying novels I've read in the last year. I initially felt drawn to it for the direct, esoteric nautical information, and the vividness of the characters. Sort of feels like a working-class struggle-to-claw-out-of-misery story, like Upton Sinclair's THE JUNGLE. About a hundred pages in it veers into the subject of adultery, which brings about more ambiguity in the language and description (a good example of the sort of pretentious literary wordplay attacked by B.R. Myers in his A READER"S MANIFESTO), and get's so "deep" that it's hard at first to even gather that any sexual act has been committed. Kind of disappointed me when it took that turn, but it managed to maintain the characters vividness, and the plot continued to involve the sea-faring stuff that first pulled me in, and eventually the ambiguity of the writing about love and desire and infidelity developed into a tone that felt appropriate for the complexity and mystery of human psyches. Also, the book brings a happy sort of resolution that feels difficult enough to not be cheap.

One of the most interesting aspects of SPARTINA is the narration: told in third person but intimately, inseparably connected to the consciousness of the protagonist. The sentences capture his gruffness, his focus on the practical (despite the book's eventual wandering into the mists of human-relationships), but also show his intelligence and thoughtfulness. To create an intelligent character without giving any whiff of academia to him, it's a unique achievement.

Another interesting thing, related to this narrative approach, is that we are often given statements as if they are definitive, and then later we are given statements (with the same level of authority) that contradict the initial statements. A little confusing at first (I'm used to third person narration being 'infallible'), but unique in how it further reveals the mind of protagonist--he comes up with a perspective that is presented as if it's a golden truth, the sort that book's often hinge upon as their climax (an epiphany moment), but later that golden truth is replaced by a different one. The protagonist is wise, but fallible.

"Democracy is not freedom. Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch." - Marvin Simkin

2011-01-13T10:38:00.001-08:00

Best of 2010 Winner

2011-01-03T13:20:00.000-08:00

I just found out that Autumn Letters chose my poem "sick fish" as their "Best of 2010" in the Word Section! This is one of the highest accolades I've received for my poetry, and I'm very proud and grateful for the honor.

the internet makes you depressed

2010-12-16T10:42:00.000-08:00

"In 1998, a controversial Carnegie Mellon University study found that people who spend even a few hours on the Internet each week suffer higher levels of depression and loneliness than people who use the Net infrequently." --Richard Louve, from his book LAST CHILD IN THE WOODS

new poems up at Autumn Letters

2010-12-09T13:32:00.000-08:00

Autumn Letters has published two of my poems, and I think a third will be appearing there later this week.

the San Bruno fire

53¢

UPDATE 12/15/10

The third poem is up: sick fish

loafing

2010-12-01T18:35:00.001-08:00

Starting to fantasize about quitting my job, not getting a new one, just loafing around. I used to quit one job and take another, always thinking the next job would be better. Sometimes they were better, sometimes they weren't, but none of them have failed to overwhelm me with a desire to quit before the end of a year. This current job is, by my count, at least the 18th job I've had in the past 19 years. I've been a tree-farmer, a bartender, an able-bodied seaman, a shelf stocker, a cashier, a carpenter, a janitor, a teacher-of-english-as-a-foreign-language, a hostel-front-desk-receptionist, an audio-visual technician, and more. All of those positions offered me more money than I needed to live a simple life, but none of them felt like fair compensation for my time.

I wish my boss would fire me so I could get unemployment.

"I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,
And accrue what I hear unto myself ... and let
sounds contribute toward me." --Walt

"Mind if I do a J?" --the Dude

self-obsessed-white-guy novels

2010-11-23T15:51:00.000-08:00

After years of hearing "historic-significance"-style hype about Henry Miller, I've finally gotten around to picking up one of his books: SEXUS. I'm only about 60 pages in so far, and I'm liking it better as I get deeper in, but since about page 3 I've found myself comparing it to certain other novels I've read, such as:

THE STRANGER by Albert Camus
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT by Fyodor Dostoevsky
ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac
THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by J.D. Salinger
MISS LONELYHEARTS by Nathanael West
HUNGER by Knut Hamsun
POST OFFICE by Charles Bukowski
ASK THE DUST by John Fante

What makes all of these books feel similar, in my mind, is a sort of close-focus on a young, white, self-obsessed protagonist, a close-focus that results in a plot principally driven (or at least significantly affected) by the protagonist's personality. That probably sounds like a pretty vague criteria for grouping these novels together, and the honest truth is that I'm just starting to work this over in my mind and I haven't really got much of a thesis worked out, but I'm intrigued enough at this point to start trying to put thoughts into words, in hopes of coming to a few more solid conclusions.

Perhaps I could better state what makes these books feel related by using the term "existentialism," though certain books in this group (like HUNGER) were written prior to the invention of the term, and certain other books in the group haven't been academically recognized as "existential." What I mean when I use the term "existential" in relation to these books is that all of the books seem focused on the protagonist dealing with mundane, day-to-day existence, and it's that focus on the protagonist's reaction to the mundane day-to-day (though it sometimes pushes the plot into extraordinary situations, as in CRIME AND PUNISHMENT and THE STRANGER) that drives the plot.

A sense of "reacting to the mundane" might be key to this feeling of similarity I get from the above-mentioned books. For example, JOURNEY TO THE END OF the NIGHT, written by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, though it follows one self-obsessed protagonist very closely, though it was written within a decade of THE STRANGER by another Frenchman, doesn't feel as similar to THE STRANGER as SEXUS does, and I think it's because JOURNEY's plot is continually affected/directed by war, a phenomena that by it's very nature renders day-to-day existence as fundamentally strange, and not at all mundane.

George Stephanopoulos discussing his spin response to video footage capturing Bob Kerrey telling Bill Clinton a dirty joke, from ALL TOO HUMAN

2010-11-10T14:36:00.000-08:00

"What Governor Clinton has said is that he and Bob Kerrey are good friends...." The opening phrase sends a double message: Not only is the story old news, but it's not even important enough for Clinton to make his own statement. "Good Friends" is a signal to Kerrey's people that we won't go out of our way to hurt him, which is not to say that we will go out of our way to help him.

"Senator Kerrey clearly thought it was a private conversation, and Governor Clinton is going to respect that...." This is Senator Kerrey's problem; Clinton is merely a forgiving observer. Our guy just listened to the joke, as opposed to the poor sap who told it. But we do "respect" Senator Kerrey's right to lose sight of the fact that he's in the middle of a presidential campaign, where everyone knows there's no such thing as a private conversation.

"There were a lot of bad jokes flying around that auditorium... some more tasteless than others." We're not saying Clinton's never told a bad joke; you press guys probably have one on tape. But yes, if you insist, Kerrey's joke was worse. It was--and this is the key word, the most vivid word in the statement, the one that turns the knife--"tasteless."

references to cunnilingus in Leonard Cohen's BOOK OF LONGING, the bulk of which was written while he resided in a Buddhist Monastery

2010-11-03T18:22:00.000-07:00

When I can wedge my face
into the place
and struggle with my breathing
as she brings her fingers down
to separate herself,
to help me use my whole mouth
against her hungriness,
her most private of hungers-
why should I want to be enlightened?
--p. 19

This is it
I'm not going down
on your memory
I'm not rubbing my face in it any more
--p. 28

need your hand
to pull me out
need your juices
on my snout
--p. 105

I love to sing to Him and her
and to my baby's lower fur
which is so holy
that I want to crawl on my knees
--p.112

It wounds me as I part your lips
--p. 192

go independent

2010-10-26T11:41:00.000-07:00

On Saturday I was talking with a financially successful (as in, the money she makes from her book sales and from teaching about writing are enough to support her) Bay Area poet who has just finished a memoir. She said she's hoping that her agent can find a publisher for the memoir that will offer her enough of an advance to pay off the money that she owes to her last publisher. She owes money to the last publisher because they signed her to a two book deal, paid an advance, and then rejected the second book. She'd spent the advance by the time the second book was rejected, and didn't have enough money to repay it.

I found this to be an eye-opening detail. I didn't realize that major book publishing houses are as shady as major record companies. It made me think of an article by Steve Albini (famous music engineer who recorded Nirvana's In Utero) in which he does the math and discovers that a typical major label deal, in which the band produces a gold record, will still result in the band being $14,000 in debt.

So, if you write or if you make music, go independent.

poetry videos

2010-10-04T18:33:00.000-07:00

YouTube, because of its monstrous size, is actually an interesting place to visit when trying to hear old recordings of poetry as read by the poets themselves. There's a lot of potential in the simple blending of audio and video, and poetry is an art that fits well into this format. Here are two favorite examples of what can be done.

Lorca's "Adam"

2010-09-21T13:38:00.000-07:00

I'm reading the New Directions Selected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca, and I'm feeling pretty unimpressed with the translations. The book first came out in 1955, and most of the translations sound like they've been done by English Literature professors from Ivy League schools, who don't actually speak Spanish. Roy Cambpbell's translation of Lorca's "Adam" in particular feels flatfooted and wooden. He contorts the lines in order to make them rhyme, but then he doesn't bother to follow the rhyme scheme Lorca set's forth. To me, it seems like making it rhyme matters less than maintaining a power of image, and a level of elegance. Let's see if I can do any better.

*

"Adan" (Lorca's Version)

Arbol de sangre moja la manana
por donde gime la recien parida.
Su voz deja cristales en la herida
y un grafico de hueso en la ventana.

Mientras la luz que viene fija y gana
blancas metas de fabula que olvida
el tumulto de venas en la huida
hacia el turbio frescor de la manzana.

Adan suena en la fiebre de la arcilla
un nino que se acerca galopando
por el doble latir de su mejilla.

Pero otro Adan oscuro seta sonando
nuetra luna de piedra sin semilla
donde el nino de luz se ira quemando.

*

"Adam" (translated by Roy Campbell)

The morning by a tree of blood was dewed
and near to it the newborn woman groans.
Her voice left glass within the wound, and strewed
the window with a diagram of bones.

Meanwhile the day had reached with steady light
the limits of the fable, which evades
the tumult of the bloodstream in its flight
towards the dim cool apple in the shades.

Adam, within the fever of the clay,
dreams a young child comes galloping his way,
felt in his cheeks, with double pulse of blood.

But a dark other Adam dreaming yearned
for a stone neuter moon, where no seeds bud,
in which that child of glory will be burned.

*

"Adam" (translated by Marcos Soriano)

A tree of blood wets the dawn
where the newborn woman moans.
Her voice leaves glass in the wound,
and in the window, a graphic of bone.

Meanwhile, the light comes steady, gaining
fabled white goals, which forget
the tumult of veins in flight
toward the turbid chill of the apple.

Adam dreams, in the fever of clay,
of a boy who comes galloping near
by the doubled pulse in his cheek.

But another, darker Adam is dreaming
a neutered, stone moon without seeds
where the boy of light will go burning.

wordle

2010-09-02T11:39:00.000-07:00

Pretty cool program online called Wordle. You paste any block of text into their program, hit go, and they turn it into a "word cloud," with the most often used words appearing biggest. You can customize the image in certain ways, change font and color and alignment of the words and stuff like that. The above image resulted from my story "Jumper at the Hyatt," first published in Instant City #5.

Poem up at Word Riot

2010-08-16T08:27:00.001-07:00

Word riot has published my poem "object" in their August issue, which went online today. They've included an audio file of me reading the piece.

FLOOD SONG, by Sherwin Bitsui

2010-08-13T08:56:00.001-07:00

At first these poems seem pretty accessible. They're mostly composed of standard subject verb object sentences, a familiar form, and often each line is a separate clause:

He wanted to hold back gas-soaked doves with a questioning glance;
he wanted the clock to tick downwind from this gavel and pew
(page 22)

I started reading and felt comfortable with the format. The rhythms were like rhythms from normal prose, only slightly exaggerated by the use of line breaks.

But as I continued reading, I realized something: I wasn't taking very much in. My eyes would flow over the words in each line, the lines on each page, and I'd finish one page and go on to another. Ten pages later I'd pause and realize I'd noticed hardly any of what I'd just read. A few disjointed images here and there, maybe the product of a dozen words. The rest completely failed to penetrate.

I started looking at the poems more closely. The superficially familiar structure lulled me, I decided. It made me read at a normal pace, but what I read wasn't familiar enough for my mind to absorb it at that rate. Despite my fluency in the form, the actual content is pretty foreign.

Part of this stems from, I think, a less linear, less event-oriented subject matter than what I am familiar with. FLOOD SONG isn't like, for example, Frost's "The Road Not Taken," in which we've got a definite subject (the narrator) in a definite place (a fork in a path) doing a definite action (considering which way to go). At first FLOOD SONG might seem that way, because so many of the lines have subjects performing actions. But Frost's poem keeps us grounded in one place, and we follow along as one thing is done. It's a reality-based sort of narrative. Bitsui, on the other hand, might give us someone doing something in one line, but the next line could be (and probably will be) someone else doing something else. And the things that are being done don't make logical sense.

Sometimes this becomes really complex:

In a cornfield at the bottom of a sandstone canyon,
wearing the gloves of this song tightly over closed ears;
the bursting sun presses licks of flame
into our throats swelling with ghost dogs
nibbling on hands that roped off our footprints
keeping what is outside ours tucked
beneath the warmth of their feet cooling to zero
(page 56)

What's happening here? First, in the first line, we're given a location: a cornfield at the bottom of a sandstone canyon. Then, in the next two lines, we're given a subject (the bursting sun, which is wearing 'the gloves of this song' over closed ears), and the subject is doing something (pressing licks of flame into our throats). But as soon as we're given that--a thing doing an action in a place--the next line further complicates the concept by having the thing that is being done to (our throats) also doing something (swelling with ghost dogs). And then the ghost dogs are doing something (nibbling on hands), and then the hands have done something (roped off our footprints), and then something else (I'm not sure what) is keeping what is outside ours (and what does 'ours' refer to?) tucked beneath the warmth of their feet (not the feet themselves, but the warmth of those feet) as they are cooling to zero.

Huh?

Anyway, it's complicated. We've got concepts stacked inside of concepts stacked inside of other concepts, like the proverbial Russian nesting dolls, and if we just read over it at a regular pace we're not going to have a chance in hell of understanding, or even noticing, everything that's going on. Actually, even if we read slowly and deliberately, and break things down line by line, we still can't really come up with anything solid.

So reading for literary meaning doesn't really work with FLOOD SONG. What then are we supposed to harvest from this book? I didn't really find a lot of strong, descriptive language, so the poems didn't offer me vivid imagery. I might have noticed a mild tone of melancholy, but it didn't feel pronounced enough to really compel me to keep reading, so the poems don't communicate much emotion. Obviously, the poems yield a bit more if the reader puts work into the reading. But is what they yield worth the effort?

Not to me.

Maybe this reflects a shortcoming on my part, as a reader. Maybe I'm just not getting it, or maybe I'm too lazy. But in the end, no one is paying me to read poetry (or anything else, for that matter). I read for pleasure, I read to imbue my life with meaning. There are more books of poetry out there than I'd ever be able to read, so I might as well choose to read the books I find most rewarding. FLOOD SONG is not one of those books.

Makes me think of Bukowski's drunken speech at the start of POETRY IN MOTION. I'm often leery of Buk's macho posturing, and I'm not one to pronounce another's work as value-less. But from a personal perspective, I can relate to what he's saying.

Poetry Books

2010-08-05T14:02:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a lot of poetry books recently. The library branch near my house has a decent selection. Libraries are really awesome, you know.

FIELD GUIDE by Robert Hass. I liked the nature aspects, but generally didn't connect with this book. Finished reading it only two weeks ago, and already its only remnant in my mind is the few lines describing the cabezone fish.

SELECTED POEMS OF ANNE SEXTON. A big book. I've only gotten through the first section, which is primarily drawn from her first collection: TO BEDLAM AND PARTWAY BACK. There's power in the imagery and the subject matter, but Slyvia Plath's ARIEL hits the same targets with more power. Many of the poems use rhyme schemes that at first you might not notice, but then when you do notice them they feel distracting. Also seems like she's letting her need for a rhyming word steer her poems for her, and that often results in poems that don't really go to the marrow. Her free verse poems are generally better.

THE BLIZZARD VOICES by Ted Kooser. Easy reading poems that look like, basically, transcriptions of quotes from folks recounting a really big blizzard that happened in 1888. Interesting from a story-perspective, but I'm not sure much is gained by putting them into 'poem' format. Really, all Kooser seems to have done is take quotes and break them up into lines on a page. Also raises questions in my mind about authorship; one could argue that Kooser's role is more editor than poet. Brings to mind Anna Deavere Smith's work. Regardless of these questions, I found it to be comparatively more rewarding to read than either of the first two books mentioned in this post.

THE DUMBBELL NEBULA by Steve Kowit. Probably one of the top five poetry books I've ever read. Maybe even one of the top three. Witty, eloquent, 'poetic' use of language, but still easily accessible and solidly grounded. Because of that ease of entry, and the emotional power Kowit wields, these poems remind me in some ways of Bukowski. But Kowit is a very different character than Bukowski, with a very different perspective: a sort of innocent, boyish exuberance and playfulness, but also an incredible empathy and capacity to communicate sorrow. Kowit also feels more daring than Bukowski, to me--while Bukowski hides behind an armor of machismo, Kowit's willing to really show his vulnerabilities, and he's not afraid to play the fool. Does raise some questions though, like "what the hell is poetry, anyway?" With just minor tweaking, a lot of these poems could probably pass into prose form.

Rattle 32

2010-07-23T09:14:00.000-07:00

Here's a notion: poets are more interested in having their own work published than in reading poetry written by other poets. Same can be said of literary writers in general. That means that the number of people who will actually pay money to buy your literary journal will always be dwarfed by the number of people who will submit to it. Most writers will flood the market with submissions, but never buy copies of most of the journals they're sending their precious work to. Kind of funny, isn't it?

And literary journals seem to be catching on to this idea. More and more competitions keep showing up, and a new twist to these competitions is the inclusion of a subscription to the journal with your entry fee. In a certain light, it looks like a way to trick people into subscribing.

Rattle is one of the journals that uses this technique. Honestly, the only reason I've ever read an issue of Rattle is because I entered their competition last year. I didn't win anything, but now I've got a one year subscription.

Actually, I still haven't ever really read an issue of Rattle. I've been trying to read the first issue I got, #32, for more than a half a year now. I get a few poems in, and they're generally decently good, but decently good poems aren't enough to keep you going for long. Especially when you're faced with so many of them.

There are probably around 100 poems in this issue. Of those 100 poems, I've forced myself through more than half of them. And of those 50+ poems I've read, only three made enough of an impression for me to actually write down the authors names': Bob Hicok, Ralph James Savarese, David Hernandez. Actually, thinking about it right now, the only poem that I can even remember clearly is the Hicok poem.

But instead of going into the significance of all that, I want to mention something else. Besides all the poems, Rattle also has interviews, and even an essay. I just finished reading the essay. It's what made me want to write this post.

The essay is by T.S. Davis. It concerns the literary establishments general disregard for prosody (prosody means, I learned in this essay, "rhythm, rhyme, meter, stress, and language") and preference for free verse. It's a good essay for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the feeling of intelligent contemplation that comes across in the writers observations.

But I'm not going to get into all of that. Blog posts are supposed to be short in length and brief in scope, and my posts never seem to manage to be either. This post is already getting too long as it is. So I'm going to limit the rest of it to an inclusion of two paragraphs from Davis's essay. They concern the general shift, from confidence to uncertainty, that seem to accompany aging. It's something I've noticed in myself. It's something that came to mind while I read Dolly Freed's POSSUM LIVING, and compared the tone of the afterword (written while Dolly was in her late 40s) to the tone of the rest of the text (written when Dolly was 18).

Here are the two paragraphs:

When I was a young man, I was much more confident about my ideas of the world and the impact I intended to have on the world. I had no doubt that my art, obscure as it was at the time, would one day take its place in the great canon of literature. I had all the time in the world to make it so. But now, at the age of sixty, I no longer have that time, and I certainly haven't received the level of accolade that as a young man I had anticipated would automatically follow the recognition of what I naively thought was my undeniable talent. [...]

But looking back, I also realize I didn't have much to say then in my poetry that wasn't just an extension of my fairly rigid ideology. The older I got the less confident I was and the more I understood how little I knew about the world and how little my work is likely to influence the world. Paradoxically, now I seem to have more to say and I'm a better writer than I've ever been, though less well known than I once was. Somehow one needs to know less to know more.

How true, Davis, how true.

POSSUM LIVING, by Dolly Freed

2010-07-21T10:52:00.001-07:00

Sometimes how-to books are worth reading not because they're particularly informative, but because they're encouraging. I often use literature as a sort of prescribed propaganda, reading certain books and articles not to learn, but to feel less alone in my interests, and less marginalized in my desires.

This book is a great example of all that. Really, Dolly Freed doesn't give much information that you couldn't come up with yourself, and what she does teach are the sorts of things you really need practice doing to actually learn. But the book is great because it serves as a voice telling you that yes, you actually can do this.

The 'this' that you can do is pointed out pretty plainly by the book's subtitle: 'how to live well without a job and with (almost) no money'. Basically, Dolly's advice can be boiled down to Do It Yourself instead of paying someone else to do it for you, and only pay someone if it's dirt cheap. First and foremost, Doing it Yourself means producing the food you eat, which Dolly does by gardening and by raising rabbits for slaughter. Her diet is also supplemented by wild caught game, mostly fish and turtles and pigeons, and also by occasionally scavenged food (wild mushrooms and plants, roadkill, produce discarded by the grocery store, etc).

Food-related information makes up the bulk of the book, and it makes sense that it would, since food is one of the basic necessities of life. Another basic necessity is shelter, and Dolly delves into that primarily by exploring ways to buy property cheap, which pretty much boils down to purchasing a foreclosed property. I'm not sure how informative her information is in this department, though, because POSSUM LIVING was written in 1978, and it's likely that foreclosure procedures have changed.

Incidentally, a lot of what makes this book interesting relates to what you can read between the lines. It reveals little hints and clues about the cultural climate of 1978, and it gives a sense of what daily life is like for Dolly, who quit school in seventh grade and grew up in the care of her eccentric father. These elements become even more profound with the inclusion of an afterword by the author, written for this re-release of POSSUM LIVING, thirty years after the book first hit the shelves. A lot of people who read the first book grew very curious about Dolly's later life. Now their curiosity can be satisfied (though frankly I found Dolly's current place in life to be a bit of a letdown, considering where she was while writing the first edition).

THE BLUE BEAR, by Lynn Schooler

2010-07-19T11:10:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed some of the nature-oriented passages, mostly because they engage my interests, but in the end this book felt contrived. It tries to wrap itself around a central topic--the author's friendship with a nature photographer--but the topic is too lightweight to support a whole book. The relationship in question is based on just a few shared trips, with more details of the natural events witnessed than of interpersonal bonding between the two main characters, and the author comes across more believably as a solitary man than as a man very profoundly connected to his friend. Solitary men can write good memoirs, but in this case the 'friendship' topic--typical memoir fare--feels unsuitable, and the author's effort feels fake. The memoir market is becoming a victim of its own success, with its increasing reliance on glib cliches and worn-out approaches, and this book is a memoir-formula casualty.

How to land a $500K book contract at 17 years of age

2010-07-15T08:55:00.000-07:00

Commit plagiarism.

And similarities with McCafferty's work weren't the end of it, either. Unusual similarities were also found with books by four other authors, including Salman Rushdie! A few days after this story broke, Little, Brown and Company issued a statement that they "[would] not be publishing a revised edition of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life by Kaavya Viswanathan, nor will we publish the second book under contract." All shelf copies of OPAL MEHTA were eventually recalled and destroyed.

For more information, see Wikipedia.

poem up at The Scrambler

2010-07-06T15:29:00.000-07:00

The Scrambler has published a poem of mine in their July 2010 issue.

When I first got interested in writing, back when I was 16, I wrote poetry. After a few years my interest had shifted to prose, and I hardly wrote poetry at all for more than a decade. Now, nearly 15 years later, I've come back to poetry, and that's most of what I've been writing for the past year. This poem in the Scrambler is actually the first poem I've had published since 1996.

FROWNS NEED FRIENDS TOO, by Sam Pink

2010-07-01T11:33:00.001-07:00

I've been a big fan of Sam Pink since I first heard about him back in 2008. I've followed his online publications, ordered his first chap book (YUM YUM I CAN'T WAIT TO DIE), even contemplated starting a publishing company to put out his first book (I AM GOING TO CLONE MYSELF THEN KILL THE CLONE AND EAT IT), and later bought a copy of that book after Paper Hero Press released it. Sam Pink seemed to have something special about his writing, some sort of unique angle on the world that seemed just a little more clever, and more pointed, than the norm.

But YUM YUM was a chap, limited in it's scope and in the attention it received. And CLONE was a first book by a press that came into existence specifically in order to publish Sam Pink's first book (I wasn't the only fan excited about the idea of putting out Pink's book debut, Barry Graham started Paper Hero for the same reason). It sort of felt cobbled together--comprised of a handful of disparate stories and 'poems' and plays--not as sharp as it could have been, not as cohesive.

So I was eager to get my hands on FROWNS. Pink had described frowns on his blog as a poetry collection, giving me hope that it would be more cohesive in feel. He also stated that it's the favorite thing he's done. And it was being put out by an established press (Afterbirth Books) that has published 20 other books and has been around for a several years. I anticipated a more solid tome, better edited and better built. I was excited.

Unfortunately, the excitement I felt died while I read this book. For me, the freshness of Sam's writing has started to feel stale.

I don't mean to say that the book doesn't have its moments. You'll still find evidence of Sam's sharp wit in FROWNS. There were a few lines that actually made me laugh out loud, and there also were spots of darkness that made me feel, for a moment, sort of depressed. The words still hold some power. But that power comes like glass shards on the beach, something sharp and shining here and there, and a lot of dull sand otherwise.

Sam's poetry, as always, consists mostly of numerous lines of prose gathered together under titles. The individual lines sometimes relate to each other, but it's also common for a poem to have several unconnected lines. One of Sam's more effective techniques is to sort of lull the reader with a few lines, and then drop in something so absurd or outrageous that it shocks ("Do the splits on my face."). But in FROWNS he seems to do more lulling than shocking.

Part of what skews this ratio toward the boring side of things is another technique Sam seems to overuse in FROWNS. This technique consists of following one line with another, or with a few more, that transposes or minimally alter the first. I don't have the book with me now--I'm writing this review at work, instead of actually working, and my copy of FROWNS is at home--but here's an approximate three-line example:

It's okay if boring people come in to my office because they are people in my office and I am not alone while they are here.

It's okay if people are boring.

In my office I am not alone it's okay.

In certain cases Sam uses this technique to good effect, giving a spin to what we've just read, making us feel familiarity and estrangement both at once. But he does it again and again in FROWNS, and it becomes a tired technique.

Another technique Sam uses is a sort of breaking apart of language at its more basic levels, often by putting into print turns of phrase that we're familiar with hearing but unfamiliar with reading. Here's a two-line example building on the example used above.

Is okay if people are boring.

Is very okay.

It's not a real earthshaking technique, but it can be pretty amusing. Makes me think of phrases that come out of the mouths of people who speak English as a second language, and because Sam's other writing is obviously first-language level, when he does this sort of thing it almost sounds like he's putting on an absurd voice. Absurd voices can be funny.

He also uses this same vocally familiar, visually unfamiliar writing in other ways, and sometimes they're a bit distracting/annoying:

I want to uh kill myself.

We hear plenty of 'uh' sounds in normal speech, and mostly block them out. But seeing them in print in a non-dialogue format, especially when the statement is more serious in nature, sort of takes the punch out of the statement. It's a technique that provokes an effect, but removing power is generally the wrong effect to provoke, I think.

In any case, Sam continues to explore what words can do, and he continues to discover interesting things with his explorations. I'm not as love with his writing now as I used to be, but I'm still looking forward to his next work.

iPhone Lines

2010-06-24T08:14:00.000-07:00

As I rode my bike to work today I passed by the front of the Stonestown Mall in San Francisco. There was a line stretching from the front entrance to the Macy's building, a distance of at least two hundred yards. Several hundred people waiting outside in the drizzling fog, at 7:45 in the morning. I didn't have to ask what they were waiting for; I've seen such lines here whenever Apple releases something.

I know from the media blitz that the product they're waiting for is the new 4th generation iPhone. I know this despite the fact that I don't watch TV, don't read a major periodical, and don't listen to the radio. Apple's advertising tactics are so ubiquitous, and their actions so closely monitored by most major news sources, that it's practically impossible to remain in the dark of a new Apple gadget release.

Even though I've seen this same phenomenon several times during the past few years, it continues to surprise me. Why do people get so excited about an overpriced, unnecessary gadget that costs them well over a thousand dollars a year? And why are they willing to get up early and stand in line in the rain? And why do they keep doing this each and every time Apple releases a new product (which seems to be every eight months or so)?

Fogged Clarity 1 in print

2010-06-17T11:36:00.000-07:00

The online art (literature-music-painting-photography-film-etc.) site Fogged Clarity has finally released its first print edition, and it looks beautiful. I've received the great honor of having my story "Donald Mathison's Heart" included in this premier issue, and it might be the publication I'm most proud of in all my writing career. Fogged Clarity's editor Ben Evans has shown a remarkable level of dedication to the site, releasing a new issue online every month for the past 18 months, and I've got the feeling that this first print edition is a first step in a new area of achievement. I'm glad to be a part of it.

From the press release:

Whether it is Bruce Smith walking us through air thick with nostalgia, Benjamin Percy evoking compunction’s sting, Terese Svoboda posing a poignant question, Joe Meno exploring the remoteness of youth, Michael Tyrell decoding memories of origin, or Marcos Soriano appraising love and fragility, each one of the enclosed compositions tune the intricacies of existence to a resonant frequency. I believe them all to be reflections of the spirit in which Fogged Clarity was born and now breathes.

BHAGAVAD GITA update

2010-06-14T16:50:00.001-07:00

I'm still working on the Bhagavad Gita. I've given up on reading Prabhupada's "Purports" and have noticed that I am enjoying the work more because of that. The virtue of apathy/indifference seems to be a key concept.

Map of Fog 2

2010-05-18T18:07:00.000-07:00

More true stories about life in San Francisco. Role-Playing nerds, Critical Mass assholes, sticker vandals, desperate slackers hanging on to life in the city, punk and ghetto child alliances, and a section profiling some of the weird houses in the city's suburbs.

San Francisco is a city of nerds. It's also a city of yuppies, homeless people, hippies, immigrants, political radicals, gang bangers, punk rockers, and pretty much anyone else you can imagine. But it's the nerds that are growing in numbers every day, and it's the nerds who will inherit this city once the hippies die of old age, and the yuppies go broke and can't afford to live here anymore.

The nerd takeover started in the nineties with the dot-com boom, and it continues today with the local tech/internet businesses like Google and Yahoo dominating the job sector. Tech companies pay good money, and being a nerd is practically a prerequisite for employment. So the nerds get the cash, and the nerds drive up the cost of living, and everyone else can fuck off and move to Oakland.

Available for $2 cash, shipping included. Wrap $2 in a few pieces of paper, stick it in an envelope, and mail it to the following address (or keep your money and send a copy of your own zine or chapbook in trade). Make sure you include the address you want your copy mailed to somewhere on or within your envelope.

Marcos Soriano
P.O. Box 27252
San Francisco, CA 94127
U.S.A.

Or you can pay with PayPal by clicking the button below (PayPal charge is $3).

existentialist

2010-05-09T21:38:00.000-07:00

My mom loves me. My girlfriend loves me. My brother loves me. These three people, I am sure, sincerely love me and care about my well being, and think about my well being on a regular basis. And then I've got friends and family, co-workers, acquaintances, etc., who like me well enough and probably wish me at least a modicum of satisfaction in life. And then there are the countless billions who honestly don't give a shit about me at all. Of those billions, there's probably a fair number who would, at some level, feel gratified if I suffered in some way. For some of them they'd like me to suffer in a small way--like having me stuck with shit-pay job's that I hate for the rest of my days--so that they'd feel better about their own lives. And there are probably a decent number of people who'd actually be amused by greater suffering--they'd laugh at a youtube clip of me getting beat up in a bar fight, or run over by a truck.

How am I supposed to get on with life, knowing that?

Five Million is a Failure

2010-05-06T17:51:00.000-07:00

I just logged out of my email account and saw an article on the yahoo web page discussing TV shows at risk of cancellation. It mentions certain shows, like Cold Case, which average as much as 10 million viewers a week. And by industry standards, that's a failure!

I knew there was a disparity in the size of audiences drawn by books and television, but frankly I had no idea that the difference in audience size was that large. The List of best-selling books on Wikipedia only lists a few hundred titles that have managed to sell upwards of 10 million copies. In other words, only a few hundred different books IN THE HISTORY OF PRINT have managed to capture audiences of the size captured by a failing television show EACH WEEK!

I realize that numbers sold doesn't equate to numbers of people who have read a book--especially when you consider books bought by libraries and then potentially read by dozens of people--but I also feel like there are plenty of copies that sell and then aren't actually ever read. The Bible, for example, is the greatest selling book of all time, but I'm pretty sure that the number of copies that are sold and then actually read cover to cover is comparatively small. I also realize that one episode of a TV show isn't easily equated to one book--books generally take longer to get through than an hour. Even with those thoughts in mind, these numbers are boggling.

BHAGAVAD GITA AS IT IS, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

2010-04-28T15:45:00.001-07:00

Some monk dude gave me this, and I've been curious about the Hare Krishnas ever since my hardcore days (anyone remember Shelter?), so I figured I'd give it a try.

First impression: Krishna is sort of like a Hindu Christ, and this book in many ways apes Christianity. I'm not a big fan of Christianity, and (big surprise) I'm already having ideological problems with this book.

The first and most serious problem I'm having so far is with the whole blind faith mandate. Prabhupada, the guy behind the version I'm reading, states in his introduction that "the person who is trying to understand the BHAGAVAD-GITA should [...] at least theoretically accept Sri Krsna as the Supreme Personality of Godhead, and with that submissive spirit we can understand," (page 7). Every time I've gotten into a conversation with a Christian, I've been told the same thing: don't rely on rational thought; you have to have faith, you have to believe. But if I'm supposed to blindly put my faith in something in order to understand it, how am I supposed to know what I should put my faith in? Most of the major religions want you to make a choice--you can't hedge your bets, you've got to choose just one. But which should I choose? Should I listen to the Christians and have faith in Christ, or should I listen to the Hare Krishnas and have faith in Krsna? Or what about the Muslims? Why shouldn't I have faith in Allah?

It's sort of a catch 22: you have to choose, but you can't think about your choice. Because if you really think about it, none of this stuff makes any sense. For a lot of people, intellect is a major tool in the choice-making process, but intellect is anathema to faith.

How do you make your choice then, if not with intellect, if not with some rational decision? Are you supposed to just intuitively feel that one religion is the right one? For me, so far, my intuition has always told me to trust my intellect, and my intellect has always told me that none of this stuff makes sense.

Another similarity I'm noticing between the BHAGAVAD-GITA and the Bible is that both books seem chock full of contradictions. In the Bible, which is comparatively a much larger work, the contradictions are chock-a-block. I'm only 70 pages into the BHAGAVAD-GITA so far (which is a little less than a tenth of the way through the book), but I've already come across a few contradictions in it, too. The one that stands out right now relates to compassion and willingness to kill.

See, the BHAGAVAD-GITA is set up like this: two opposing armies are on a battlefield, preparing for war. One army has God (Krsna) on it's side, working as a charioteer for the warrior Arjuna. Just before the start of the fight, Arjuna has Krsna drive him out to the middle of the battlefield, where he is struck by the fact that people he loves are in both armies, and family and friends are going to die no matter who wins. He tells Krsna he doesn't want to fight, and then Krsna lays the whole meaning of life, the universe, and everything else on him, which constitutes the bulk of the text. After that, Arjuna realizes it's his duty to fight, despite the fact that he'll be fighting with people he loves.

The contradictions come in because Arjuna's compassion, and his unwillingness to fight, are viewed as both a supreme virtue and also a sign of unworthiness. Krsna wasn't looking for just any random dude to deliver the universe's secrets to; he chose Arjuna, out of every living person on the planet at the time, because Arjuna was special. One of the reason's he was special, and worthy of Krsna's knowledge, is because of the ambivalence he feels when confronted with the notion of killing people from the opposite army. And yet he is given Krsna's sermon in part to provoke him to kill, because to not fight in the war is "degrading impotence" and a "petty weakness of heart" (page 67).

WTF?

Death Year

2010-04-21T08:57:00.000-07:00

It's turning out to be a bumper year for death. Since my last post, two other people I knew have died. Both of them were acquaintances made through my last job: working as a groundskeeper for an apartment complex. The first death was a suicide. An old guy who lived in one of the apartments, who's wife had died the year before, found out he had cancer. He lay down in his bed and shot himself. I'd only seen him once since I left my last job. Normally he was a very friendly, chatty personality; the sort of fellow you liked having around, but also kind of dreaded seeing--he'd talk your ear off if you let him. The last time I saw him he walked right past me and didn't even seem to notice me; like he was lost in a haze. When I heard he'd killed himself, that last encounter took on a whole new meaning.

The other death was accidental. One of the boiler-room workers burned to death in his own home. He'd been scheduled to go in for knee surgery the next day. I don't know if his knee problems contributed to him not being able to escape the fire, but his death caught everybody by surprise. He was only in his 40s, and in good health other than his knee problems.

Also, yesterday I learned that author Howard Zinn died recently, and so did emcee Guru of Gangstarr. I haven't heard much about Zinn's death, but Guru's--which only happened Monday--has received decent publicity. He died at 43, from cancer. From his hospital bed, shortly before his death, he wrote a letter for the public, much of which has since been made available online. The letter seems like a bitter-sweet mix of gratitude for the life he's lived and for the friendship of his business partner Solar, and contemptuous furtherance of his desire to not be associated with DJ premier, the other half of Gangstarr. Interesting, and kind of sad, that he'd hold on to his grievance even at death's door.

Murdered Friend

2010-04-13T09:17:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I got an email with a bunch of old photos from a childhood friend's birthday party like 20 years ago. In the photos me and my old friends are running rampant, fighting, wrestling, mouths open yelling, arms flung out wildly. The friend who originally posted the pictures did so because one of the kids in that group, who appears in the far left of the picture above, was murdered on March 16. Apparently he'd become a member of the SD chapter of one of the big 1%er biker gangs. He died of multiple stab wounds to the head, neck, and chest.

I've been in a funny state of mind since seeing those pictures, and learning about the murder. I drifted away from that group back in our early teens (when a lot of them started playing at being gangsters) and I hadn't heard anything about the murder victim since high school. Now that I've learned of his death, my mind is flooding with thoughts of those childhood times. I've been musing over the different paths we take, and how far from each other those paths take us.

It's stunning to think of the importance childhood choices have on our eventual fates. It's even more stunning when you think about how wild and ill-prepared for serious decisions we are as children. In the picture above you can see some of the kids flashing gang signs. We probably didn't even have any body hair yet, and already some of us were showing fascination with gangs. For my recently deceased friend, that fascination led to a lifestyle that resulted in his early death.

spider

2010-04-07T09:36:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, as I was eating lunch, a spider started building a web between the bench I was sitting on, and my head. At first I didn't notice at all--the spider had anchored one end of his web in my hair, behind my right ear, and I couldn't see it out of my peripheral vision. I did notice, sort of subconsciously, a very minor sensation on my right cheek once or twice, when the breeze blew and web tendrils dragged across my skin. Finally, with a larger gust, the spider's web bowed into the edge of my vision, and I saw the gossamer shine in the sun. It still didn't occupy a lot of my attention, I just sort of brushed it away. Then I felt something crawling on my neck. I batted at that with my hand, and caught a glimpse of the spider crawling along my upper arm, seeking shelter in the folds of my jacket. The spider started toward my face, and since I didn't want to risk a bite, I flicked it off of me. The wind blew again while the spider was airborn, and carried it a good seven or eight feet away. I saw it land on the bricks off to my right, a tiny little speck on the red.

The spider didn't move for a few moments, and I got up to look at it, hoping I hadn't hurt it. When I got near, I actually saw it lift its head to look up at me. It was such a tiny little thing--probably less than a half centimeter long--that the idea of it regarding me--so massive in comparison--made me wonder about the spider's thoughts. How would it's brain grapple with being confronted by another living thing so immense? What would go through my mind if I were face to face with some living thing as much larger than myself as I was to the spider? Is there even anything alive on earth that could match that scale?

The spider started crawling in little circles, as if to get his bearings. All his legs seemed to work fine, though he dragged his abdomen in a way that didn't seem very spider-like to me. He was an example of the type of spider we called "Jumping Wolfs" when I was a kid, and looked sort of like a very very tiny tarantula, his body stocky and hairy, his legs thick and blunt. I saw him lift his head to look at me a few more times as he circled his landing spot.

I went back to the bench and sat down. The spider seemed to watch me as I left, but I didn't really feel confident that he could see me at any distance. If you're that tiny, wouldn't your eyes also be set up for seeing things on a smaller scale?

But, as I continued to eat my lunch, the spider continued to walk toward me. Remember that I said the thing was only a half a centimeter long, so seven feet was comparatively a massive distance. It kept on toward me, stopping every now and then, veering slightly to the left or the right as it walked, but showing remarkable orienting abilities.

When the spider got within twenty inches of my feet, he changed his walk. Where before he had crawled along six inches at a time or so, then seemed to rest and re-orient, now he began stopping every inch, stopping stock still for a millisecond, and then moving again. The stops seemed to happen at random points in his gait, so that different legs would sometimes be caught in the air, and he changed from moving to still so completely with each stop that it looked like nothing any human could do. The best way I can describe it is to compare it to watching a film in which every tenth frame has been tripled, so that the image in the tenth frame freezes for just a flash.

Eventually, the spider crawled right between my feet, lifted his head again, and looked at me.

The thing was too tiny for me to feel frightened, so none of the experience struck me as creepy, but it certainly was uncanny. My emotional mind toyed with the idea that the spider wanted my company, even my camaraderie. Another part of my mind wondered if the thing had left an egg-sac on me, and wanted to return to its young. In either case, it seemed too unerring in its path to have arrived back at my feet by coincidence.

By this time my lunch hour was nearly over--the spider's walk had taken nearly twenty minutes--so I left the bench and went back to my office. Today, though, I've been thinking about returning to the bench, to see if the spider is still about. It seems impossible that he would be, and yet all of the experience yesterday seemed impossible, too.

LYNEE BREEDLOVE'S ONE FREAK SHOW

2010-04-05T13:59:00.000-07:00

Basically, this is an attempt to put Breedlove's comedy show into book format, but it doesn't quite manage to totally bridge the gap between the live and printed forms. For example, the cover makes me think that Lynn's puppet skits--in which he uses stuffed animals to act out interactions between various identities within the queer community--are a highlight of the stand-up act, but they come across as one of the weakest parts of the book. There are a couple of songs in the book that are sort of lame, too. I bet the songs and puppetry would be pretty funny live, where they'd have Breedlove's voice and body-gestures to help them float, but they're not that funny on page, and they don't give the impression of having been modified to play to the strengths of the printed word. On the other hand, there are a few parts of the book that do manage to provoke a laugh, like the "Wrong Bathroom" section, and I definitely appreciate the light-hearted approach to topics that often get people all up in arms. At its best, this book can be thought-provoking too, like when it touches on the complications that arise when lesbian-feminist outlooks meet with transman identities ("When we had feminism, we could blame men for all the lousy things...now we're all becoming men..."). In the end, though, I'd probably recommend using your cash to see Lynn Breedlove live, instead of using it to buy this book

writer myths

2010-03-23T15:06:00.000-07:00

I recently picked up a mildewed copy of Emily Dickinson's poems, and the first thing that struck me about the book was the emphasis put on the author's reclusive nature. The dust jacket blurb, the author bio, the introduction, the preface--literally all the text in the book that wasn't actually written by Emily Dickinson--spends as much time discussing the poet's reclusive nature as it does her actual poetry.

Here's how the dust jacket blurb starts: "Known as a recluse by her New England neighbors, Emily Dickinson fashioned in private a body of verse unmatched in its vision and understanding."

Here's the first paragraph in her author's bio: "Emily Dickinson was born into a prominent family in Amherst, Massachusetts. Sociable as a child, she grew increasingly withdrawn; she discouraged visitors, and in later years rarely left the grounds of her family's home."

Here's the start of the introduction: "Now celebrated as one of America's greatest poets, Emily Dickinson is also famous for her quiet, private life. [...] she confined her activities to the grounds of the family home. She traveled out of Amherst only a handful of times, and did not marry. Later in her life she dressed all in white and acquired a reputation as an eccentric recluse."

And this is from the book's original preface: "A recluse by temperament and habit, literally spending years without setting her foot beyond the doorstep, and many more years during which her walks were strictly limited to her father's grounds, she habitually concealed her mind, like her person, from all but a very few friends..."

Why is it, I wonder, that the authors of these words are so determined to drive home the idea of Emily Dickinson as a recluse? Why can't the focus be on her poetry itself, instead on her unusual habits, her unorthodox lifestyle?

The best answer I can come up with is this: it sells books.

For some reason, building up the myth of an author seems to provoke greater interest in that author's work. It's almost as if a portion of the reading public won't feel eager to engage with writing unless they feel that the writing is the product of an interesting person. The weirder or more tragic the author's life, the greater the interest shown in their work.

Take Sylvia Plath's ARIEL, for example. It came out two years after her suicide, and you can bet the fact of her suicide was made widely known during the marketing of the book. In fact, so much attention is paid to Plath's life and untimely demise that I'm sure most people know more about her death than her poetry. And I bet you'd be hard pressed to find someone who had read even a single Plath poem without knowing anything about the author.

Personally, I'm a bit uncomfortable with this idea. I think ARIEL is a great book of poems, a book that would definitely be able to stand on its own without any accompanying author-suicide hype. But the reader is never really given a chance to directly engage with the poems without first having their reading experience 'informed' by knowledge of the author's life and death. Somehow, that feels like a lost opportunity to me.

24/7 RELENTLESS CAREERISM, by Jim Behrl

2010-03-08T13:12:00.000-08:00

Ran across a very funny article on the Poetry Foundation's website. The author, Jim Behrl, hits a remarkable number of key points. The following passage in particular stood out to me, because of it's mention of "most poets in America [having] boring office jobs in which they are screwing around on the Internet most of the time," which makes me think of the some of the thoughts I mentioned on this blog while considering the potential merits of publishing online instead of in print. Here's Jim Behrl, putting it in his own words:

"How can you become the most important poet in America by tomorrow? It’s not as hard as you think. Poets used to have to pass out poetry-reading flyers by hand, one at a time, or publish poems one at a time in magazines, slowly building a career. But technology has changed all that. Now you can spam every poet in America with every new poem. Start a fan page for yourself and your books on Facebook. Blog about your every thought—they don’t even have to be astute thoughts. Most poets in America have boring office jobs in which they are screwing around on the Internet most of the time. Just mention the names of as many contemporary poets as you can in all your blog posts. You will catch all the self-googlers self-googling. Self-promotion is the only kind of promotion left. Without poetry reviewers to rely on, only you can spread the word about your product. And if you spread it suddenly, relentlessly, brutally, then you’ll have name recognition from here to Hawaii . . . and that’s all you need, because there are two kinds of poets: those you’ve heard of and those you haven’t. Almost all of us fall into the latter category, but not you! If only you take my advice."

regarding poor reviews of unknown authors, and whether such reviews should be written

2010-03-04T09:25:00.000-08:00

A long while back I wrote a review on this blog about a linked-short-story collection published by an author I've had classes with and done a reading with. My review basically stated that reading the book exacerbated feelings of ennui I often suffer from, that the book was so boring it made me feel like the effort of writing might not even be worth it, especially since certain other reviews called the book 'ground-breaking.' My feelings about the book are pretty much the same now as they were then. Even so, I now regret publishing the post because I did a Google search for the author a few days ago, and my review came up as the third search result. I don't like the idea that people searching for information on this relatively unknown author will have such a discouraging view as one of their first search results. Trashing a big-name millionaire like Dave Eggers is one thing, but hampering a young unknown's chances is another. So I tried to edit the old post in a way that removed any identifying details about the author. Unfortunately, even though I changed the post's title, the author's name and book title still showed up in the address bar when the link was clicked on. In the end I deleted it. My post still comes up as one of the first Google hits for now, and you can still read it in Google's cache, but I imagine it will disappear before too long.

For me, this whole process has made me think about the act of publicly reviewing your peers' work. On the one hand, I do believe that in the end any review is a good thing because it can help raise awareness of the work. And I also think it's pretty ridiculous to feel bad about not liking something, or to apologize for having an opinion. On the other hand, trashing someone's writing, or giving it a poor review, can hurt people's feelings, and I don't like hurting people's feelings.

Writers in particular seem susceptible to hurt feelings, and they often closely associate criticism of their work with criticism of themselves. When I think of the late Norman Mailer, for example, what comes to mind more than his works are his continual attacks on all those who dared give his books poor reviews. Even a somewhat objective approach to something relating to an author can inflame that author's ego. A personal experience I had with this came at the start of this blog, in which I published a tongue-in-cheek post referring to my stumbling across an author I'd found online who had a lengthy publications list full of pieces featured in places I'd never heard of, most of them online. I quickly found out that several of the editors of the sites publishing this author's work had in turn been published by the author on his own literary website, or had their personal blogs linked to by the author, and I delivered that information on my blog in the form of a facetious conspiracy theory. The author took it seriously, or at least seemed to be upset that I'd post a viewpoint relating his publications to anything other than actual merit, and he responded by lampooning me on his own website. I also got a series of comments from friends of his, defending him. Then I myself got touchy about it and responded with another snarky post of my own. It was all pretty passive aggressive and childish, and the ironic thing is that I never meant the first post as a personal statement relating to the author or his ability as a writer in the first place. I mentioned him as a 'key' to my unlocking of this 'conspiracy,' and the 'conspiracy' was the primary subject.

In any case, I'm not sure if the fellow whose book I mentioned at the start of this post even ever saw my review. I have noticed that in the times when I've been in the same room with him since I posted the review, he's avoided eye-contact with me, and hasn't spoken to me. Maybe he just doesn't remember who I am, or maybe he's harboring negative feelings for me. In either case, I meant him personally no ill will, even if I didn't like his book.

THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE AND OTHER STORIES, by Robert Louis Stevenson

2010-02-17T17:21:00.000-08:00

Been working on this book for ages. I remember loving TREASURE ISLAND, though it's been years since I read it, but the stories in this collection sure aren't holding my attention. Worse, forcing through a few pages of this and then giving it up for something else, I find that whatever else I turn to also fails to engage. Or maybe I'm just a bit burned out on reading.

With the new job I'm sitting at a desk for ten hours a day, four days in a row each week. A good portion of that time is spent reading. I get an hour for lunch each day, too, and spend some of that hour in a book. Maybe I'm just cloying my reading energies.

Leads me toward thinking about 'too much of a good thing.' I feel like American Society encourages a sort of 'all or nothing' approach to life. You're supposed to find what you love doing and then spend all your time doing it, especially if what you profess to love is art/music/writing. I know of an author who spends 40 hours a week writing, bare minimum, every week. Recently he's broken through with book publications, and now his backlog will flood forth, but for a while he pinned it all on writing and trusted to fate (and his parent's support, I'm guessing) to cover his expenses.

Even if I didn't have to support myself, I doubt I could dedicate that much time to writing. In the busy spurts I've experienced, the most I've managed is three or so hours a day for a few weeks. Then I get bored, or glutted, or disinterested. Whatever it is I'm doing--writing or reading or sleeping or eating or whatever--loses its appeal when I get too much of it.

Makes me hesitant to define myself as a 'writer,' or anything else. I can't fit myself all-together into one pursuit, or one interest. About the one thing I can imagine myself doing all the time is this:

not fucking working.

Of work I'm sure I've had enough.

THE LONG VALLEY, by John Steinbeck

2010-02-11T08:29:00.000-08:00

I've been working my way through Steinbeck's famous short story collection THE LONG VALLEY, and one of the thoughts I've held in my mind throughout is how different the literary landscape was at the time these stories were written. A few of the pieces in this book--'The Chrysanthemums' being a prime example--have been embraced as canonical literature. Their focus on character, and their effort to reveal character subtly through action and description, seem intrinsic to our contemporary concept of 'literary' writing (a concept pounded into my head during four years of college English). But at the time these stories were written--in the early 1930s--such concepts weren't nearly as established and universally dominant. 'Literature' just wasn't as tightly nailed down as it is today. And because of that we have stories we know consider 'literary' published side-by-side with stories that feel decidedly 'non-literary.' Steinbeck dips his pen into styles we'd now label 'pulp,' or 'genre' fiction. His piece 'The Snake,' for example, makes me think of the Weird Fiction being written by H.P. Lovecraft and other authors of the time; and Steinbeck's 'Flight' feels like classic Western.

Another question that comes to mind while reading this collection is whether or not such a book could have any chance of success in today's market if Steinbeck was an author just trying to break through now. My gut tells me no. Everything I've heard or read about the short story market today tells me that it's incredibly difficult to get anybody to buy a collection of short stories, which consequently makes it incredibly difficult to get anyone to consider publishing one. In order for a short-story book to be considered it needs to be chock-a-block with Pushcart Prizewinners, or dressed up with some kind of gimmick that makes it look like a novel (like all these 'novel in stories' you see coming out, Amy Tan's JOY LUCK CLUB being an early success), or written by a bestselling novelist. A book like THE LONG VALLEY, with its haphazard collection of stories written by an at-the-time unsuccessful author...it's hard to picture that appearing on bookshelves fresh today.

Then again, it didn't show up on the shelves just after being written, anyway. Steinbeck's first commercial success, TORTILLA FLATS, paved the way for THE LONG VALLEY's later publication. Steinbeck was already a bestseller by the time these early stories ever saw a mass audience. Maybe they wouldn't have made it to press back then, either, if he gave up after writing them, and never got around to the breakthrough book.

Hello Again

2010-02-01T11:25:00.000-08:00

Nearly a year has passed since my last post, and now that I've probably lost whatever minuscule audience I'd built for this blog, I'm ready to post again. The dark period this blog just went through pertained to a change in employment--I went from an office job to a labor job with no regular access to computers--but I've just recently changed jobs again, and now I'm back indoors and back near a computer.

Not really all that much writing news to catch up on, anyway. The main publications to mention are two short shorts in the fiction section of January 2010's Fogged Clarity. I've added links to them in the Stories Online section to the right--the pieces are called "Love" and "A Prayer for Becky Sims." As an added bonus, Fogged Clarity also published audio files of me reading each piece--the first time a literary journal has ever asked me to do this.

I submitted those pieces to Fogged Clarity after receiving notice from editor Ben Evans that he nominated my story "Donald Mathison's Heart" for a Pushcart. Since he liked my writing enough to nominate it, I figured I'd send him more, which led to the two short shorts just published. My thanks to him for the encouragement.

Only other news is that a second Map of Fog is in the works. I'm hoping to have it in print within the next few months. If you want details, feel free to email me.

A CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

2009-03-26T17:48:00.001-07:00

My reading swerves off into another direction, yet again. From the awkward, plain-spoken tones of Ellen Kennedy, to Lawrence Ferlinghetti at his most exuberant. This book originally hit paper more than fifty years ago, just three years after Allen Ginsberg's HOWL--and its subsequent obscenity trial--brought the Beat Generation into mainstream consciousness, but it doesn't feel particularly aged or particularly "beatnik" in the cliche sense of the word (spacey poets dressed in black, with berets and goatees and Bebop jazz accompaniment). In fact, Ferlinghetti seemed aware of the cliches even then, and mocked them in the language used in poem "5": "[...] a kind of carpenter/from some square-type place/like Galilee/and he starts wailing/and claiming he is hep". The rest of the poems are written in language little different from what we use today (with the exception of "9," which sort of mixes beat-speak with prohibition-mobster snideness), and they focus on topics we still worry about, especially America's incredibly rapid growth, development, consumerism, and the burdens of assimilation and conformity such development entails for the people. You get it right from the get go, with the first poem in the book, "1":

They are the same people
only further from home
on freeways fifty lanes wide
on a concrete continent
spaced with bland billboards
illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness
The scene shows fewer tumbrils
but more maimed citizens
in painted cars
and they have strange license plates
and engines
that devour America

Another aspect of Ferlinghetti's poetry shown in the above sample is his use of alliteration (concrete continent, illustrating imbecile illusions), and other sound-based techniques. These poems are designed to be read aloud, and when you do so you tap into an energy and exhilaration that might be missed if you silently read words on a page. One of the ways that Ferlinghetti provokes that energy, that sense of desperation and exhilaration, is by masterfully controlling line lengths. We get plenty of lines that are stripped of punctuation or internal pauses, lines that race us along by tacking clauses together with 'and'. And then, every once in a while, the poem brings us to a crashing stop, as it does here in poem 11 from the book's third section:

Yes the world is the best place of all
for a lot of such things as
making the fun scene
and making the love scene
and making the sad scene
and singing low songs and having inspirations
and walking around
looking at everything
and smelling flowers
and goosing statues
and even thinking
and kissing people and
making babies and wearing pants
and waving hats and
dancing
and going swimming in rivers
on picnics
in the middle of summer
and just generally
'living it up'

Yes
but then right in the middle of it
comes the smiling
mortician

One of the interesting visual results of Ferlinghetti's vocal approach to poetry is the way the lines appear on the page. (Unfortunately, I'm incapable of demonstrating such line placement with Blogger, but you can see it for yourself by clicking here and then scrolling down.) Instead of being all left justified (with every line starting at the left side of the page), Ferlinghetti scatters the lines all over the place. I'm guessing that he does this because of the way it affects the reader's pace--if you finish one line and then drop down directly to the next line immediately below it, instead of having to crank your eyes back over to the left side of the page, it eliminates the momentary pause entailed by cranking your eyes back. The motion of the eyes might seem fast enough for this to be a trivial difference, but it has a definite effect, and the effect becomes more pronounced as it compounds.

In the end, a lot of these things I'm mentioning (the racing pace, the focus on sound, the tones of exuberance and concern, even the subject matter itself) had another significant effect on me: they made the book a lot of fun. I especially liked the first section, and I'd recommend giving it a go.

Pequin

2009-03-16T22:00:00.000-07:00

Another story up, this one on Pequin. It's one of the last things I wrote while at college. Pequin pairs a story with a picture, and they've published some beautiful work. Check out their archives.

SOMETIMES MY HEART PUSHES MY RIBS, by Ellen Kennedy

2009-03-04T17:27:00.000-08:00

Because I feel that book reviews should focus on the book being reviewed, I'm going to try not to write very much about Muumuu House (the publishing company behind this book) or Tao Lin (the founder of Muumuu House). Having said that, I must admit that writing about SOMETIMES MY HEART PUSHES MY RIBS without focusing on Muumuu House or Tao Lin seems like a daunting task for two reasons: first of all, the significance of this book being Muumuu House's first release outweighs, in my opinion, the significance of the book itself; and secondly, the writing that appears in SOMETIMES MY HEART PUSHES MY RIBS often feels thoroughly colonized by, or blatantly derivative of, Tao Lin's own style.

If you're wondering who Tao Lin is, I encourage you to go to his blog and read some of what appears there. For the purpose of this review, all you really need to know is that I--the person writing this review--consider Tao Lin a significant author because I think he's developed an original voice that has the capacity to "speak" for a population (that population being Gen Y hipsters). Muumuu House's significance, in my own biased mind, reflects Tao Lin's significance because he's running it and because it could possibly become a sort of venue for a vanguard group in a new literary movement, a movement comprised of Gen Y hipsters who write about social-awkwardness and loneliness in a plain-spoken, nearly autistic tone that further emphasizes their themes of social-awkwardness and loneliness. Unfortunately, in the case of SOMETIMES MY HEART PUSHES MY RIBS, it's hard to tell if Ellen Kennedy really has a voice of her own to add to that group, or if she's just a 2nd rate Tao Lin.

Probably the best way to further flesh out the above ideas, and also to get started on an actual review of the book itself, is to give you a sample of Kennedy's writing. Here's a paragraph from the first piece in the book, titled "Eoody Mobby":

Woody Allen lies down on the bed. Ned Vizzini lies down next to Woody Allen. Woody Allen's room has white walls. There aren't any posters or pictures hung on the wall. Woody Allen kisses Ned Vizzini's mouth. Ned Vizzini pushes his tongue into Woody Allen's mouth and licks Woody Allen's tongue. Ned Vizzini licks Woody Allen's teeth. Woody Allen pushes his hand against Ned Vizzini's crotch. Ned Vizzini does the same. Ned Vizzini unbuttons Woody Allen's dress while Woody Allen touches Ned Vizzini's face and looks at his eyes and his nose. Ned Vizzini takes off Woody Allen's underwear with his foot and then takes off his pants. Woody Allen unbuttons Ned Vizzini's shirt and touches his chest. Ned Vizzini has sex with Woody Allen. They make noises but are quieter than most couples Woody Allen thinks. Woody Allen is sometimes louder than Ned Vizzini.

Immediately obvious is Kennedy's conspicuous inclusion of cult-status celebrities (Tao Lin does the same in his works; his forthcoming novel, for example, is titled RICHARD YATES). In this instance the celebrities are represented only by name--the characters in the piece are not intended to be Woody Allen and Ned Vizzini; the names are used only as pseudonyms. In the last piece in the book Kennedy writes about Norm Macdonald, and the celebrity himself serves as the actual character. In both cases the use of celebrity names adds an element of absurdity (why would Woody Allen be wearing a blue dress, kissing Ned Vizzini's mouth?). This element of absurdity is also cultivated in other ways: random desires (like Ned Vizzini's desire for a "small yellow apple" later in the story), bizarre thoughts (like Woody Allen's feeling of being "safe like a walnut" that a "squirrel buries [...] but not too deep in the soil so the possibility of escaping to avoid being buried alive is still there."), and out-of-the-blue occurrences (like a bear headbutting the author's window in the poem "I Want to Write a Poem With You"--and doesn't Tao Lin feature out-of-the-blue bears in some of his own works, like EEEEE EEE EEEE?).

Also apparent in the above passage is the awkward, nearly autistic (in its impaired emotional comprehension) tone Kennedy employs, which is in itself reminiscent of Tao Lin. And Kennedy uses a lot of Tao Lin techniques to provoke that awkward tone. She almost never uses pronouns, instead repeatedly referring to characters by their full names (Woody Allen, Ned Vizzini--rarely "him" or "her" or even just "Woody"). She diverts the readers attention away from what most people would focus on (as above, when she sets up the sex scene between Woody Allen and Ned Vizzini, and then detours into a sentence describing Woody's blank walls when what we're expecting is a focus on the characters' actions). She describes things in a plain-spoken way that feels especially incongruent with generally emotional moments (such as sex-scenes) and emotional states (especially loneliness and depression--she uses Tao Lin terms like "neutral facial expression" for that sort of stuff). She also describes things so literally that what we think is familiar (a kiss) feels foreign ("Ned Vizzini licks Woody Allen's teeth.")

It's true that this awkward tone works well in its illumination of isolated, socially-awkward individuals. Kennedy introduces us to people who are more apt to stand in each others' rooms and stare at things than engage in conversation, people for whom even intimate moments of connection with others (like sex) feel strange and uncomfortable, people who are more likely to think about shallowly buried walnuts than to tell each other how they feel. She does a good job of actualizing that mindset. But the flipside of her intimacy with this "lack of human intimacy" is a shallowness of characterization. The only personality that approaches roundness is that isolated, socially awkward individual that serves as the protagonist in every story. When another character is given any mind-time, they come across as nearly identical to that protagonist. Any distinctions in lesser characters are shallow and limited--a cranky mother, a less-socially-awkward friend. Not exactly a rich palette.

The same tones that come across in the three prose pieces in the book are also apparent in the poetry, but where the prose has elements of plot, the poetry concerns itself more with craft. Kennedy's poetry isn't much like the lyrical, sound-oriented poetry I've reviewed recently (like HALF LIFE OF MEMORY, by Lizz Huerta)--it's closer to the other end of the spectrum, and a lot of the sentences in the poems would probably feel pretty at home in prose (no conspicuous meters, rhythms, alliteration or other sound play to make them harder to blend in to a story). But it's distinct from her fiction because of its use of line breaks, its greater variety of sentence types, and (perhaps most importantly) its occasional moments in which the socially-awkward, emotionally autistic tone (which feels so Tao Lin-like) gives way to another voice.

Those first two distinctions (line breaks and sentence types) are well illustrated in Kennedy's poem "I Want to Write a Poem With You". Here's the first half:

I cried three times today

One time I was with a group of people and one of the people was so quiet and sad that when I went home I cried in bed

I tapped my fingers on my pillow and pretended that a stampede of wild hamsters was coming to destroy everything I own

A bear headbutted my window and its head broke through and I went in the kitchen and got antiseptic and went to the bear with the antiseptic and the bear bit my hand and I went back to my bed and stared at the bear

I used my bloody hand to draw a picture of a salmon on my sheets to attract the bear but my tears ruined the picture and the lines ran together and then the bear lost interest and walked away and then my cry elevated to a more sob-like heaving

The first sentence is a simple, short, declarative sentence that stands on its own line. Each sentence from there on also exists as a separate stanza, and each stanza grows in length and pace and pressure, using "and" to tie together more and more clauses. By the end the pace runs along with an effect reminiscent of a breathless child telling some sort of story, and then it comes to an abrupt stop, jamming two sentences together on one line. It's a fun little trick.

In other poems Kennedy uses line breaks in other ways, sometimes stretching one sentence out over several lines. You can see it here in the first half of her poem "Poem":

I'm violently stuffing
the void in my life
with cute toys
from fifty-cent machines

The shorter lines create an emphasis on the accented syllables (I'm VI-lently STUFF-ing/the VOID in my LIFE) which adds a ponderous weight and violence to the words, which lends an emotional quality to the poem that makes it stand out from a lot of the rest of the book. Instead of the declarative, unpassionate tone (which sounds so much like Tao Lin) that Kennedy uses to talk ironically about depression and hopelessness, this poem actually feels angry and hopeless. There are a few other poems in the book which also take on this distinctly emotional voice (though the emotions aren't usually as fierce as what we see here--"How to Hold a Person" feels more wistful; another piece, also titled "Poem," touches on vulnerability as it relates to body images, and it really does feel vulnerable), and these are the poems that interested me most in the book. I'm not sure if this more emotionally poignant perspective comes from a time before she encountered, and was so influenced by, Tao Lin, or if these poems are the result of her developing craft, her exploration of new terrain that can be more uniquely her own. My hope is, of course, that the latter is the case.

Fogged Clarity

2009-03-01T20:28:00.000-08:00

Ben Evans runs an internet literary journal called Fogged Clarity, and he's featuring a story of mine in this month's issue. Go on over and check it out.

HALF LIFE OF MEMORY, by Lizz Huerta

2009-02-18T12:52:00.001-08:00

My first impression was this: Some of the hardest-edged "love" poetry I've read. On second and third reads I became more aware of the tender moments, but the first read felt a bit like an eloquent punch in the guts. Lizz Huerta writes about subjects common to verse--such as love and femininity--and she uses lyrical language that recalls a classic approach, but the tones of these poems are often cynical, sometimes even savage: "hate-fuck me in the morning so I am reminded the rest of the day/ suck the knuckle lover, we'll lick the blade clean" (from "love like a dirty, dirty switchblade"). Read the second line aloud and you'll notice the way it inhabits the mouth, the exaggerated way it animates your tongue and your lips. The words are brutal, but they also carry a sensuous sonic-resonance. It's an interesting juxtaposition that comes up again and again throughout the course of the chapbook.

A nameless ex-lover often serves as the focus, as if the poems are being directed at him in a chronicle of memory, but rarely is he the recipient of the narrator's harshness. In fact, Huerta's tenderness (which I noticed more the second time around) is often offered to those who have jilted her. Sometimes the tenderness is pure: "I would note the shape of your mouth as you slept and knew// knowing as I did the intricacies of your distaste, what bells were ringing/ what the day would bring, and woman as I have been and cunning// would place my body into our mouth to bring about forget, turn you suckling" (from "pacifier"). Sometimes the tenderness is coupled with a wry twist: "Despite these reasons and the others we adhere ourselves to I ask that you/ stay well knowing that even when another is in my mouth, you are in my heart" (from "the new fidelity"). In either case, it's remarkable to go from scathing to gentle states so rapidly, so completely, and yet to have both tones feel at home in one volume.

And how is it that the book manages both tones, and others as well? I think it might come, in part, from a certain rejection of cliches. Huerta writes "not so long ago I was done so hard that when I stood up all of the romance fell out/ of my body and because of all the blood, I never noticed." (from "little song for dissatisfaction"). It's a revealing statement of lost innocence, or lost naivete. But people who reject the romantic side of love sometimes drift into other cliches, and other over-simplifications. Huerta also resists that path. For example, Huerta often portrays her sexual self as acquiescent ("my place, it seems, is beneath you," also from "little song for dissatisfaction"). By the end of the chapbook the reader might feel like they've got her figured out. And then, in the second to last poem ("antediluvian") we read: "see it there, at the edge, how her hand beckons like a fist, curled into a gesture/ that at a glance, looks submissive."

Too quick to judge her as one thing--submissive--we might fail to notice she's actually getting ready to knock us on our asses. With good writing, things are seldom as simple as they seem.

EREMITE, by Scott Cairns (from Poetry, January 2009)

2009-02-10T12:49:00.000-08:00

Thirteen years ago, when I first became interested in writing as an art, it was poetry that drew me in. At the time I responded most to poems focusing on ideas and poems that had plot. I read a lot of Bukowski. Eventually those same interests--expression of ideas, storytelling--lead me into prose, and for a long time the only 'poetry' I paid attention to was hip hop, especially the verse of emcees like Mr Lif and Jus Allah:

Headline: Bush steals the presidency
He needs the backing of the media what could the remedy be?
The country's headed for recession reminiscent of the Great Depression
Are lives worth a world of power? Easy question
Planes hit the towers and the Pentagon
Killing those the government wasn't dependent on
It's easy to control the scared so they keep us in fear
With their favorite Middle Eastern demon named Bin Laden this year
--Mr Lif

The power that I hold in my hand
could fold a frying pan,
the air and sand do as I command.
And if I want the night to last,
across the sky mass
clouds don't even allow light to pass.
--Jus Allah

I even wrote some of my own rhymes. But for the most part, my writing focused on prose--initially memoir and eventually fiction. The fiction writing reached a peak about a year ago, when I began work on a novel. I wrote about 25,000 words, which I estimated as a third of what I'd need to tell the story, and then I became overwhelmed by the mass of the work. I didn't know how to move ahead. It felt like too much weight to carry. And I didn't want to work on any other fiction because I didn't want to abandon the novel. I spent several months without writing much creative work at all.

And then I started looking at poetry again. A few words would come to me, and I'd feel fascinated by the way they fit together, the rhythms produced by accented and unaccented syllables, the way repeated sounds can bend the speaker's mouth. I became intrigued by the challenge of fitting meaning into such a sonic form, and I started jotting down little word-compositions in a notebook. I could focus on the minuscule, an entire piece comprised of less than two dozen lines. It served as an excellent antidote to the poison my novel had become for me. I was writing again. Poetry.

On a whim I decided I'd try to read a bit more poetry, to see what other people where doing with it. The January 2009 issue of Poetry Magazine, which is shown above, was one of the first things I picked up. I bought it because it was cheap (less than $4), because I'd heard of it before, and because I recognized some of the contributor's names.

So far, the poem that set the deepest hook in me is EREMITE, by Scott Cairns (on page 309). Here's the first half:

The cave itself is pleasantly austere,
with little clutter--nothing save
a narrow slab, a threadbare woolen wrap,
and in the chipped-out recess here
three sooty icons lit by oil lamp.
Just beyond the dim cave's aperture,
a blackened kettle rests among the coals,
whereby, each afternoon, a grip
of wild greens is boiled to a tender mess.

The rhythms, and especially the sounds, strike me as beautiful, and I am especially intrigued by the clever usage of internal rhyme.

I went to the POETRY magazine website, and saw that they're offering a valentine's special subscription rate: something like $17.50 for a year (11 issues). I signed up for it. It's the first literary journal I've ever subscribed to.

THE GAP IN THE LETTER C, by Kate Small

2009-02-06T10:22:00.001-08:00

The San Francisco State University Creative Writing Department runs an annual fiction chapbook competition, and prints the winner in a limited run. The results range from good (THE TILT, by Robin Romm) to not so good (DESERT STORIES, by Coby Hoffman). In the case of THE GAP IN THE LETTER C, by Kate Small, I'd say the results are pretty close to excellent. (At least so far. I've only gotten a quarter of the way through.)

A lot of the intrigue inherent in C comes from the way Small cultivates disjunction. Here's an example, from the first story in the book: "five full immersions".

I pull back from the regional manager but there's nowhere to go. He steps forward. We freeze, his name tag tangles in mine. It's awkward, like something happening to shy people at a party. I turn my face to the side, my ear pressed to some fake woodgrain on a cupboard. I think of Heng-Jin's statue of the Virgin next to Trung's plug-in Buddha, maybe two feet away from my head on the other side of the wall. Heng-Jin used to light candles, Trung used to give them oranges. I hear my breath come out in squishes; I see parts of me, a hip, an elbow...

I've seen other authors use this sort of thing before, usually in tense moments, to heighten the sense of a character's confusion, to reveal the way the mind scatters its thoughts, focusing on disconnected details here and there. Kate Small does it all the time, in moments of stress and moments of relative calm. The result is a world seen through a prism, each cell of which is a close-up on one feeling, one visual detail, one thought or sound. Instead of a panoramic, in which the reader is given a wider view, Small compels us to piece together the larger picture from its smaller parts. And the parts she gives us don't fit together easily, or in a familiar way--we have to read between the lines, to interpret, to deduce. Small makes the reader an active participant, instead of a passive observer.

In my ever-evolving definition of "literature," I often include a clause relating to the idea that it rewards extended involvement, it continues to give something on the second and third read. Small's writing achieves this by giving clarity in fragments, and asking the reader to take part in the assemblage of story. It's an enjoyable process. It merits participation.

Black Gods

2009-01-27T18:20:00.000-08:00

We were seated in what looked like a stadium for one of those dolphin/porpoise shows, but the seats were in the water, instead of up above it. The water had that vibrant blue color that's closer to sky than ocean. Two young white girls, dressed in full body wetsuits, came riding into the area in front of us. They wore their hair in pulled-back ponytails; their teeth glowed pure white. They rode on giant figures like Hellenic statues, but with hair and eyes and skin all onyx black. Living statues of ancient gods, each large enough to carry a girl on one shoulder, or cradle a girl's torso in the palm of a hand. As they neared the crowd, each black god pushing white froth before it, I looked up and saw another, larger giant reaching down from the sky--this one so big that a single finger matched an average human's size. A vaporous cloud blocked the behemoth's face, but I remember its massive hand reaching down. I remember the ridges of its finger prints, and the skin as dark as a tar-dyed corpse.

Map of Fog

2008-11-25T18:36:00.000-08:00

I just got the copies of my zine Map of Fog back from the printer. I'm selling them for $2 each, shipping included. If you've got a zine or a chapbook and you send me a copy of it, I'll send you a copy of Map of Fog in trade.

Map of Fog is an attempt to show San Francisco from my perspective. It's got five non-fiction stories in it. One story is about a suicide's corpse I had to cover up while I worked at a fancy hotel in the Financial District. Another story describes a man going into a seizure on the subway, and the reactions of the people around him. There's an article about a few sites in my neighborhood, the Sunset--generally one of the most ignored and overlooked parts of the city. There's an interview with a friend of mine who got stabbed three times, which put him in the emergency room with a collapsed lung, a sliced eye, and nerve damage in his leg. And there's the written result of me eating a half-eighth of psychedelic mushrooms and then sitting down at a computer to type about the experience.

Here's an excerpt from the suicide story:

It takes about fifteen seconds to get from the back of the ballroom to the front of the hotel, if you’re in a hurry. I must have had a hundred different thoughts during those fifteen seconds: what would the body look like?; would there be blood?; would I faint or throw up?; would we have enough equipment to be of use?; should I take advantage of the option Ron had granted me, so long ago, to refuse to be a part of the whole operation? While my mind raced, my body seemed to be shifting somehow, too. My heartbeat grew to fill my ears with heavy pulsing, so that all the sounds around me came piercing through a wash of dull noise. I could feel the wind against my face, as if the air had thickened and I was physically pushing my way through it. The world around me seemed to slow a little. I felt almost like I was walking under water.

The zine has 24 pages, 18 pictures, and more than 10,000 words. It'll probably give you about an hour's worth of reading time, depending on how fast you absorb text.

If you want a copy, please wrap $2 in a few pieces of paper, stick it in an envelope, and mail it to the following address (or keep your money and send me a copy of your own zine or chapbook). Make sure you include the address you want me to mail it to somewhere on or within your envelope.

Marcos Soriano
P.O. Box 27252
San Francisco, CA 94127
U.S.A.

Or you can use PayPal by clicking the link below (PayPal charge is $3).

YUM YUM I CAN'T WAIT TO DIE, by Sam Pink

2008-11-01T22:58:00.004-07:00

I ordered a copy of YUM YUM I CAN'T WAIT TO DIE from the Jaguar Uprising Press back in July. Months went by, and I never heard anything about it or about the five bucks I paid for it through paypal. Then, after a period of self-imposed internet abstinence, I went to Sam Pink's blog and read that he'd printed up a limited number of copies of the chapbook on his own, and was mailing them free to anybody who'd email him their address. I emailed him my address, but I wasn't sure if I'd emailed in time to get a copy. Then I read on Bradley Sand's blog that TTB had posted a warning about ordering from the Jaguar Press Website. I went to TTB's blog and saw the post, which also recommended emailing him directly about Sam Pink's chapbook. So I emailed TTB. I still hadn't heard back from Sam Pink, and I figured he'd already sent out all of his copies and wouldn't have a copy to send to me. I asked TTB to send me a copy.

And then, on Halloween, I got two packages in the mail. One was from TTB, and the other (post-marked a week earlier) had no return address. My first thought was that the anonymous package held more hate mail from Fred Woodworth--maybe he was sending me another burned-out lightbulb or something--but when I tore it open, I found a copy of YUM YUM I CAN'T WAIT TO DIE inside. After months of doubting whether I'd ever get my hands on a single copy of YUM YUM I CAN'T WAIT TO DIE, I suddenly had two copies. I was excited.

Essentially, both versions are the same. The Jaguar Uprising Press version shows more human-effort in its construction--the cover is a glued-together construction-paper flag, and the binding is hand-stitched--but the Sam Pink copy is on higher quality paper, printed instead of photo-copied, and looks generally cleaner. I also noticed a few typos in the Jaguar Uprising version that had been corrected by the time Sam Pink printed his own.

Probably nobody really cares all that much about that stuff, though, anyways, so I'll limit the rest of this post to a review of the text--which is almost exactly the same in both versions.

DISCLAIMER: If you're the type of person who thinks that analytical reviews of literature somehow lessen the pleasure of reading, you might want to stop reading this review now. Also remember that this review merely reflects my own interpretations, and I don't really know shit about anything.

For anyone familiar with Sam Pink's blog, YUM YUM I CAN'T WAIT TO DIE is more of the same, but better. It's better because it feels more cohesive, more polished, more focused. The edge apparent in the writing on the blog is sharpened, honed like a razor.

For those not familiar with Sam Pink, this chapbook is an excellent introduction. Sam runs through the gamut of emotional tones common in his work, and explores a lot of his favorite themes. His writing, to me, feels like masterful satire. I say that because his writing seems inherently confrontational--it attacks things we hold in reverence--but it's generally handled in a light-hearted way, more of a "poking of fun" than a "scathing condemnation".

Oftentimes the attack incorporates juvenile humor, especially humor of the "toilet" variety:

Today I went out to a restaurant and got some coffee.
A girl walked by and went to the bathroom.
I could hear her peeing.
It turned me on and I felt weird about it--weird because I hardly knew her.
And getting turned on by someone urinating is a special thing--something that should be reserved for marriage.

And also, a lot of the time, the writing focuses on violent subject matter:

The next time we have sex I am going to rub my facial hair into your neck and chest until red lines form and then I'll connect the lines so they make a pretty picture and remember that I am only going to be alive for another thirty-fifty years and in the meantime I will change everything into something that retains the marks of my intervention.

In most cases, Sam hones in on something our culture considers sacred (in both of the above cases, I see the sacred object as "romantic intimacy"), and skewers it. What makes this skewering entertaining, is the generally affable (and if not always "affable", then rarely darker than "neutral") tone it's delivered in. We don't get the sense that the narrator is malicious, despite the often macabre actions he describes. We get the sense that the narrator is a nice guy, somehow, even when he is describing violent action. In the latter example above, we'd probably feel less attachment to the narrator if he used more aggressive language: The next time we FUCK I'm going to GRIND my STUBBLE into your neck and chest until red WELTS form...

But just when we're tempted to dismiss Sam's narrator as a nice, if somewhat troubled, guy, we get glimpses of a deeper, less dismissable pathos:

Sometimes I have to go to the bathroom or a private place when I am public so I can clench both of my fists and grind my teeth and kneel down and press my face against the ground until the energy goes away.

And that element of earnest pathos keeps the stakes higher in this world. It is the yin that balances the yang of Sam's humorous satire.

Speaking of yin yang, YUM YUM often drifts into a philisophical tone that reads like something from a taoist poetry book:

Wherever I stand the world feels my weight.
The world pushes back.
Wherever I stand the world holds its breath.
Because my hand is around its windpipe.
I am meditating on the idea of a cleaved earth.

But he balances that deep tone with silly absurdities:

Some people are such assholes that saying, "Look, again, I'm sorry I cut off my thumb and glued it to your baby's head because I thought you'd like him better as a unicorn" means nothing to them.

Hopefully my gratuitous inclusion of quotes is also helping you get an idea of the format of the book. This is no narrative, there is no plot. It's closer to an amalgamation of thoughts, and the writing reflects that by stripping down its delivery, leaving out excessive prose. Because of that stripped-down nature, YUM YUM feels very dense with ideas. I've read the book three times now, and I still find new gems each time I pick it up and flip to a random page. In fact, I think the nature of this chapbook encourages a more "dip in and out" approach--if you sit down and read it straight through you'll probably finish it in half an hour, but you won't be able to absorb a quarter of its brilliance. I wonder if the sparse print on each page is Sam's attempt to deal with this possibility--lessen the "words on the page" ratio to make people slow down, to increase the frequency of the pauses for page-flipping that the reader must take. When I first saw YUM YUM I thought it was just an example of un-economic layout (I'm a total cheapskate myself, and I'm about to publish a zine with an average word-to-page ratio of 400 to 1, while YUM YUM is probably closer to 100 to 1), but after spending time with the book, I'm beginning to realize that the openness of the text might be an example of form-following-function.

In the end, all of this analysis is peripheral to the point of the book for me, anyway. YUM YUM I CAN'T WAIT TO DIE is worth reading because it's compelling and disturbing and fun. If you're interested in getting a copy, try following the links at the start of this post, to TTB or Sam Pink's blog. Maybe they've got a few spares lying around. If you like it as much as I did, you might find yourself thinking about it and trying to understand why it works so well, which is what I've been doing for the bulk of this review. Chances are you'll be able to come up with better answers than me, but before you think you've got it all figured out, keep in mind these words from Sam Pink himself:

The message is always the same.
I am not trying to solve anything or help in any way.
The message is always the same.

JAR OF FOOLS, by Jason Lutes

2008-11-01T22:30:00.000-07:00

Before reading Jason Lutes's Jar of Fools, I'd always thought of magicians as showy, desperate nerds... like Criss Angel. This book put magicians in a new light for me, a light shared by con men, cafe workers, and other down-and-outs, which is actually a pretty big step up in my mind. The principal magician-type dude in this story is Ernie, aka the Amazing Ernesto. He's a depressed alcoholic trying to cope with a broken heart--the heartbreaker being his ex-girlfriend Esther, a disgruntled, depressed cafe barrista. Ernie's also plenty messed up by what happened to his older brother, an escape artist who drowned during his last attempt (which is, depending on how you look at it, either a failed escape, or the most final and successful escape possible). Al Flosso, or Flosso the Magnificent (he's a magician too), serves as Ernie's main friend, but only when he manages to remember who Ernie is. The rest of the time Flosso dwells in geriatric senility; usually forgetfulness, but sometimes vivid memories that temporarily supplant reality. A homeless confidence man and his daughter round out the rest of the cast.

Jason Lutes says his work has been most influenced by European and French comics, and that's apparent on every page of Jar of Fools--this book is a lot closer to Tintin and Snowy than Batman and Robin. That means, among other things, you get more panels per page, and a generally slower pacing, than what you'd find in the typical superhero piece. And that's a good thing for this type of story. It gives little incidences the chance to sink in, to reach greater emotional depths than they would otherwise be able to reach. In conversations the reader gets to watch as a character hears something, thinks about it, and then responds; this opens up the idea that the characters are cognizant, capable of thought, aware of and affected by the world around them. On the bottom half of page 52, for example, you get seven panels, only three of which include dialogue. The other panels, the one's lacking words, provide dead-air, space that reveals the sense of disconnectedness provoked by what has been said.

The artwork itself, a meticulous blend of cartoon simplicity and surprising realism, is also more in line with European comics. The settings are lavishly detailed and very real looking when shown, but that's probably less than half the time (if an average page has 10 panels, maybe four will include background). The rest of the panels focus on the characters, which are often drawn in pretty simple terms, especially in the beginning of the comic. During moments of stress or high emotion, a character's face receives extra attention--frown lines, tendons standing out in the neck, bags under the eyes, etc.--which heighten the drama for the reader. Another technique used to this effect is the inclusion of character shading--in most panels a character's face shows no shadows whatsoever, but in especially poignant moments the shadow-work is elaborate. Usually this works pretty well, but sometimes it feels a little heavy-handed (page 40 panel 4, for example).

Despite the similarities with European comics, much of what Lutes draws is marked by novel little details that seem like they've been pulled straight from the real world: the way rainwater slides down the outside of a window (page 13 panel 10), the way light coming through a rain-wet window paints the figure of a person inside (page 30 panel 6), the way thick glasses refract and distort the image of the eyes behind them, the way creases run across the bulby end of a nose when the nose is wiped (page 139 panel 6). The art is chock full of these visual authenticities, which make the world Lutes draws a richer place. It shows that he's a talented observant, as well as a talented artist.

Despite Lutes's skill at translating visual aspects of the real world to his page, each page also reflects the artist's hand--you are very aware, throughout the book, that every image was drawn by a human being. Again and again Lutes chooses to draw multiple panels in which one character remains static, and you can see how the image inadvertently changes in tiny little ways despite the fact that the person is intended to be perceived as constant. Pass through at a normal reading pace and you might not note it, but if you pause and look, it reveals the meticulous dedication the artist had for his subject.

The plot differs from traditional American comics, too; if anything, it's bohemian. These are characters who are defined by their inability to succeed in conventional society--they are united by the fact that they can't successfully conform. That can be tricky to portray without resorting to, or stumbling up against, cliche, but Lutes does a good job of sidestepping the stereotypes. Each character feels fully fleshed out, actualized. Their responses to the world around them are consistent, and reveal a lot about who they are as individuals. Of course, Lutes doesn't pick the most varied group of people to work with--they're all white, they're all members of the underclass, they're all depressed or vulnerable in some way. The two who stand out most from these unifying characteristics are Al Flosso and Claire, the con man's kid. But even these two are largely defined by the same thing: their longing for lost relationships.

In the end, the solidity Lutes gives to his characters stands as both the greatest strength, and the most notable weakness, of the work. The characters compel us to follow them, to watch them, and to be interested in them; they drive the story. But the story is split amongst so many solid characters that Lutes feels compelled to wrangle closure for all of them in the final pages, and he doesn't manage to do it. The way he twists the plot to accommodate the entire cast feels contrived, and a bit disappointing when compared to the quality of the rest of the work.

FURIES OF CALDERON, by Jim Butcher

2008-10-29T10:32:00.000-07:00

Another book lent to me by a friend, with strong endorsement. I resisted it for the first 200 pages, somehow uncomfortable with a world in which every character (save one: the protagonist) possesses magic powers. I also had a bit of difficulty engaging with Butcher's prose; it felt a bit lifeless to me in the start. But by the time I got to the first major encounter, the first encounter to bring together all of the principle characters, I was hooked. I finished the last 250 pages in two days, devouring chapters ravenously, at times so wrapped up in my own mind's view of the events that I ceased to be aware of the actual world around me. It was almost like a hypnotic state, the story blooming within my mind so vividly that I saw specific images from the book more clearly than I saw the book itself, clutched before my blurring eyes. Every few dozen pages I'd snap out of my trance, and see the words on the page, so tiny that I had trouble reading them. And then I'd sink back into the story, completely unaware of the act of reading, which had seemed so strenuous just a moment before. I can't remember another reading experience like it.

I think that FURIES OF CALDERON serves as an excellent example of writing that garners its power from plot and character, more than from artistic use of language. There are 7 central characters, and each of them is vividly realized, especially in regards to their motivations. Butcher does such a good job of this that he is able to pit certain characters against other, to bring them into harrowing conflict with one another, and still have the reader sympathize with each and every one of them. It leads to an unusual mind-state for the reader, because the reader doesn't really feel disdain or contempt for any main character--the reader doesn't really want any of the characters to suffer--and yet the characters are attacking each other ruthlessly. Who do you root for in a situation like that?

Butcher is also good at writing battle, and physical struggle. When I read an R.A. Salvatore book a few weeks ago I remember feeling impressed by that author's handle of physical altercation. Butcher is just as good. He's got a rich imagination to pull from, and it yields a varied harvest, so that you never really feel like you're seeing an action repeated. Each sword thrust feels unique.

Butcher's imagination serves him well with his handling of magic, too. Furies--basically elemental spirits--are key to the world where this novel takes place. Individual furies bond with people--every civilized person except the protagonist has at least one fury--and give them powers relating to the element they represent. Water furies, for example, have powers relating to healing, to scrying (seeing and hearing things going on in a removed location), and perception of the emotional states of others. Furies can also manifest themselves in physical form, and therefore be used as attack animals of sorts. Also, a person's ability to interact with their fury is affected by the presence of the element--deprive a water-bonded person of liquid, and they can't call upon the powers of their fury. It's a concept with a satisfying sense of logic, and a lot of imaginative potential. At the same time, it seems to offer so much potential that it can be hard for Butcher to control the plot; the possibilities are so blown open that it's hard to introduce meaningful difficulty for the characters to strive against. Butcher deals with this problem in two main ways: by endowing certain furies with greater powers, so that certain people are more powerful than others; and by setting limitations on a character's ability to call upon his or her fury--summoning the fury is physically draining. Even with these controls, the power and capacity of the furies sometimes undermines the sense of tension needed to make the story compelling. In the climatic battle, for example, a principle character (Bernard) never really brings his power to bear. Butcher tries to make the battle compelling by making it seem desperate for the protagonist's side, but the reader is left feeling like the stakes aren't really as high as they seem to be, because Bernard's power isn't being used. Butcher tries to explain Bernard's lack of involvement by showing him as exhausted, but the level of exhaustion he suffers seems to come too quickly, and too conveniently, to feel believable (generally, though, physical exhaustion, injury and exertion, are another aspect that Butcher handles really well; he really makes it seem like the characters are going through excruciating physical tests in the course of the story, and that they are really being driven to call upon all of their internal fortitude and determination in order to continue).

After I finished this book, I did a little research on Jim Butcher. The most interesting thing about him, for me, is how hard he had to work to get his career as a fantasy writer going. This is a New York Times best-selling author, arguably the type of author who can command the most attention from the mainstream publishing industry, and yet he had to struggle for years to get his first book in print. In the end, after submitting his first novel far and wide for two years, and receiving nothing but rejections, Jim started studying the industry, and attending conventions, and trying to make personal connections with agents and publishers. Finally, he engaged an agent in a conversation, and she agreed to handle his book--even though she'd rejected it earlier when he sent it to her through the mail. That book went on to become a best-seller, and still he had to struggle to keep his career going. It boggles my mind how hard it is to get your shit published in this industry, and it blackens my mood to hear that so much of what results in you getting published has to do with schmoozing, instead of your actual writing.

THE ROAD, by Cormac McCarthy

2008-10-15T11:32:00.000-07:00

I started reading this book late one night, got through a dozen pages before going to bed. The next day I read while at work, and then after work I went to a park and kept reading, and that evening I finished it off. It's an easy book to get through in a day, partially because it's not very long (the version I had was 256 pages, but the font is big and it seems to be double spaced), but also because the writing is very stripped down and easy to take in. Quotation marks, commas, and other punctuation marks are almost nonexistent; descriptions are kept short and simple; the text doesn't dip into too many intangibles or abstract ideas, and when it does it makes little attempt to elucidate. It might take a reader a few pages to get accustomed to McCarthy's style, but if you can get through those first few pages you can get through the rest of the book without problems--McCarthy is as unchanging as stone.

Except for a few awkward and ridiculous 'literary' moments--the flashback scene where the man has his last conversation with his wife before she commits suicide, for example--McCarthy wields his words with unquestionable authority; there are no signs of faltering or a weak grip on the plot. He manages this, in my mind, through an iron-fisted dedication to just a few types of sentences. He never loses his authority because he never takes risks; every sentence McCarthy writes sounds like every other sentence he writes; there is no change in tone or approach; moments of tension result from what is happening in the plot, not from a different use of words. The good thing about this is that the reader feels confident in McCarthy as a storyteller, and is willing to give himself over to McCarthy's story. We have little cause, for the most part, to question why he is using the words he is using, and because we don't question we don't step out of the the world he is creating. (Another book that works in this way, which stands out in my mind, is POST OFFICE, by Bukowski.)

I think this concept is a good one to keep in mind for my own writing. I'm working on a novel now, and I end up struggling, sometimes, with decisions relating to how much information the reader needs in order to go along with the book. My novel is about a kid who joins a wrestling team, and it's often difficult for me to gauge how much the reader needs to know about the rules of wrestling in order to appreciate the story. That leads to moments where I'm trying to explain too much, which weakens the narrative flow, which pulls the reader out of the story. McCarthy's writing hardly ever has this problem because he hardly explains anything; his words are focused instead on describing action. With THE ROAD it becomes a little monotonous at times, because the actions are so limited in scope (searching for food, hiding, and not much else), but the story is short enough that the monotony doesn't have much time to develop. Maybe that's a rule I should apply to myself: when in doubt, err on the side of action instead of explanation.

THE THOUSAND ORCS, by R.A. Salvatore

2008-10-02T12:21:00.000-07:00

After my recent disappointment with the DRAGONS OF AUTUMN TWILIGHT, I felt tempted to give up on the Dungeons and Dragons world all together. But I still find myself primarily interested in adventure-oriented stories (after all those literary texts in college), and I can't forget how much I enjoyed reading fantasy novels when I was a kid. So the other day, killing time in Aardvark Books, I wandered over to the used paperback sci-fi and fantasy section, and came across THE THOUSAND ORCS, by R.A. Salvatore. I bought it, and read it, and liked it a lot better than the Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman novel I'd been so bored with this summer. (One quick aside: the Weis and Hickman novel was their first, while THE THOUSAND ORCS comes after Salvatore's been writing a book a year for more than a decade, so the comparison isn't really fair.)

One of the things that Salvatore does really well, and which Hickman and Weis didn't manage in their book, is maintain a sense of connection between all of the different scenes. I remember reading DRAGONS and feeling like it was just one thing after another without a logical progression, sort of like a series of unrelated events in random order. With Salvatore, the plot flows in a cohesive way. There are different groups in different areas doing different things, but they're doing those things during the same time span, in the same world, and their actions affect each other, their paths eventually cross.

Come to think of it, this technique of multiple inter-related story lines seems pretty common in page-turner novels. It's a format that lends itself to cliffhangers--one chapter brings a certain character to the brink of some important event, like a shocking discovery or potential disaster, and then the next chapter takes up with a different character, so you plow through that chapter to find out what happens to the first character in the following chapter. Cliffhangers make the pages turn.

Another thing Salvatore does well is action, especially battle. He's got a great imagination for sword fights, and huge skirmishes, and he makes each one compelling and unique.

But probably the most standout aspect of Salvatore's writing, what really seemed interesting and unique, was his handling of different races (in the fantasy context, race refers to dwarf, elf, halfling, human, etc.). Especially with dwarves. You get the sense of a distinct living beings, with a distinct culture and way of behaving, a distinct view of the world. There are individuals within that race--they're not all the same--but their individual personalities exist within a larger cultural context. This race-related sensibility allows Salvatore an angle that brings a lot of interest to his character interaction, especially because of the variety of races comprising the principle group. It's fascinating to watch how the characters form bonds outside of their own groups.

Despite all the good things about the book, I don't see a R.A. Salvatore binge in my near future. ORCS was a good fantasy book, and it reminded me of why the fantasy genre had captured my imagination as a kid, but I don't think I could sustain the same level of interest in another such novel right now. I get the feeling that they've got too much in common, that they're even pretty formulaic, to keep me interested forever. I guess that's true of most pulp, adventure-based books. I can't imagine myself subsisting on a diet of detective fiction alone, either.

TRAVELS by Michael Crichton, and THE FRANK BOOK by Jim Woodring

2008-09-25T11:06:00.000-07:00

There's a funny connection between two of the books I read most recently: THE FRANK BOOK and TRAVELS. On the surface they're quite different, and they're pretty distinct at a deeper level too, but both books share a fascination with perception and with the act of observing, especially with how these things relate to the mind. TRAVELS, which is a collection of writings about events in Michael Crichton's life, starts out focusing on the author's tourist trips to foreign locations, but the latter half of the book becomes increasingly concerned with the author's experiences with psychic phenomena, such as seeing auras and visiting the astral plane. FRANK chronicles the events of an anthropomorphic cartoon who lives in a bizarre, often hallucinogenic world, a world populated by only a few distinct individuals, each of whom possesses a dramatically different vision of the things around them. In TRAVELS Crichton discusses what he learns about himself by visiting exotic places--he has a frightening accident while scuba diving, he comes face to face with an elephant--he sees things and experiences things and they change his perception of himself. In FRANK the same 'change through experience' thing happens, but on a different level. We see the title character go through experiences--falling into a mystic, eye-ringed well; playing with a devil's toy--that physically change the shape and appearance of his head, and his mind within it. In TRAVELS the change is mental, and explicitly described; in FRANK the change is physical, and shown to us rather than told; but in both situations the characters radically change their heads because of defined experiences.

One thing worth noting about this is that TRAVELS, being autobiographic and word-based, is an author talking about himself, describing his experiences; while FRANK, being a fantastical comic, is an author drawing pictures of a fictional character that is 'other' than the author. In one book the author explains and tells, in the other the author shows. In one work the author's presence is blatant, un-ignorable, even to the point of irritation (Crichton often comes across as self-obsessed and neurotic, effete and intellectually-snobbish), in the other the author is rarely considered, but his presence, his preferences and what they reveal about his personality, can still be discerned if carefully watched for (if only in the preference he shows to certain characters, the way he makes the cards come up for them).

It's funny how similar themes can appear in such radically different forms.

Comics Smorgasbord

2008-09-18T11:28:00.000-07:00

I've been reading more and more during the last few weeks. It's gotten to the point where I stay up late reading, and the first thing I want to do when I wake up the next morning is grab a book. I've even been late to a few appointments because of this, and I've been putting off writing, and I've been sitting indoors a lot more than normal. I think it springs from boredom and some dissatisfaction with my life, and a desire to escape. Sort of like a substance abuser, with books as the substance.

Yesterday I wanted to get out into the city, to visit some places I used to frequent, and do some people watching. Sort of an attempt to get me outside and away from books. So I jumped on the downtown train right after work, planning on getting off on Powell. Instead I got off at Civic Center, wandered over to the Main Branch of the San Francisco Public Library, and checked out ten graphic novels.

In some ways, graphic novels are like a more potent "escapist" substance. They're easier to engage with than prose form writing, because of the pictures, and they're shorter than novels--jump into a new story a finish it in less than an hour. Instead of taking a day off from the vice, I was going on a bender.

The first comic I read was A MAN CALLED KEV, by Garth Ennis. I read it standing in the aisles, before I even got to the check out desks. Ennis's PREACHER series was one of the best of the VERTIGO line, I think. KEV has a lot of similar aspects to it, including extreme violence and crude humor, but it's missing a lot of what made PREACHER great. First of all, the topic is more mundane. PREACHER had all kinds of religious and metaphysical wierdness going on, with a Texas Tough Guy angle, and an old Western feel. KEV is just a black comedy, with lots of gore, about a retired S.A.S agent with incompetent enemies. PREACHER had its share of crude humor too, but it also had some poignancy to it, especially in its portrayal of the friendship between Custer and Cassidy. KEV is noticeably lacking in anything poignant, its just blood and sex jokes.

After finishing A MAN CALLED KEV, and shoving it back on the shelf, I went to the check out with the other ten books, and then got out on the street. It's kind of ironic that San Francisco's Civic Center, with so many of its grand structures (like the library and City Hall), is surrounded by some of the sleaziest streets in the downtown area. I left the library, with its natural light and clean-lined architecture, and its massive selection of books, and the first thing I saw on the street was a young pimp-wannabe trying to hit on some fat hooker while she threw her trash out into the street.

From there I went on up Market, and then took a right on Powell. Smack in the middle of one of San Francisco's tourist epicenter. While I walked up Powell I crossed in front of Rasputin music, which brought to mind COMETBUS 51, a stellar issue giving a history of some of the local Bay Area businesses, such as Rasputin. Apparently, the guy who started the business is a real wacko.

Up at Union Square I took a seat and cracked open DUNGEON, by Joann Sfar. I'd seen it around in a few places before, but never picked it up. On the back cover there's a blurb saying the series has been a "best seller in several countries." I wonder which countries those are. In any case, it was a pretty good read. The cover art made me think it might be oriented toward a young audience--it even seemed a bit sloppy to me at first, not nearly as sophisticated as the some of the stuff you see other artists produce, but as I worked my way through the comic I came to appreciate the Sfar's whimsical style, and the obvious care she puts into her backgrounds--but the comic had enough substance to keep me interested. Like PREACHER, DUNGEON hits a few poignant notes relating to friendship, and like PREACHER it often uses violence for humorous effect, but in most ways you couldn't find two more different comics. I also give the series credit for embracing so wholeheartedly a setting generally ignored by the market.

Once I'd turned the last page of DUNGEON, I put it back in my pack and started up Stockton, the market street for Chinatown. I stayed on that all the way through to Columbus, in the Little Italy section, and stopped in at Buster's for a cheese-steak sandwich. While I ate my sandwich, I read the first volume of A JEW IN COMMUNIST PRAGUE, by Vittorio Giardino.
The copy I'd picked up from the library was the most battered book on the shelf, and that combined with the look and tone of the comic made me assume it was an older work. Turns out Giardino published it in the 90s, not so old after all. AJICP is pretty classic in its feel. The art is meticulous and the story's delivery makes me think of a few European literary novels, like CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, but not as dark. I also found the story compelling: imagine that the government is set on making things hard for you, that you've been singled out for no real reason, and with no way to control it. One day, out of the blue, there's a knock at your door. Your father opens the door and police rush in, accost him, and ransack your house. All of your mother's attempts to find out what's going on are met with scornful indignance on the part of the authorities. Meanwhile, she's fired from her job and not allowed to pursue work. Two years later you find out that your father has been declared guilty, without trial, of counter-revolutionary activities, and sentenced to a ten years in prison. Meanwhile you're prohibited from continuing your studies, and forced to earn money for your family, at the age of 13. It all might sound like some cold-war propaganda story about communist countries in the 50s, but keep in mind that the exact same things are happening today, and that the American government is doing them. We've got prisoners in Guantanamo who have been detained for more than six years now, and still haven't had charges made against them. It's the same fucking thing.

I finished the first volume of A JEW IN COMMUNIST PRAGUE in Buster's, and then went to Washington Square to read the second. Giardino is masterful in his artistry, especially in his depiction of the protagonist growing older, though I did feel like he overdid it with the protagonist's mother. I also felt like the art might have been a little overdone--we don't need a full background for every shot--and it sort of feels like it outweighs the story in points. The second volume sort of reminded me of the movie Les Quatre Cents Coups.

The North Beach Branch of the SF Public Library system is just a few blocks down from Washington Square. I walked up to it and dropped off the comics I'd already read, and then I found a coffee shop and started reading THE LIVING AND THE DEAD, by Jason.
I've read a few other comics by Jason, like THE LEFT BANK GANG, and I really like his work. He's got a very simple art-style, drastically different from Giardino, but it works well for his subject matter: finding relationships in the city. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD takes that "finding-relationship" theme into the realm of zombie horror, but does it in a pretty light-hearted and humor based way. Jason is clever, but not in an overly showy way. His books are good stories, nice to read. I finished THE LIVING AND THE DEAD, and then read I KILLED ADOLF HITLER while riding public transit home.

When I finally got home, I started reading IT'S A GOOD LIFE, IF YOU DON'T WEAKEN, by Seth. If this was a true memoir, I'd call it one of the best memoirs I've ever read. Instead it's an account of Seth's life, including his quest for meaning and his battles with loneliness, bent around a fictional plot-line of him researching a failed cartoonist from the fifties. A lot of the story is delivered in monologues as Seth walks around his city, or in staged dialogues with his friend Chet. That sort of "neurotic/hyper-aware/depressed artist" stuff can be a pretty tedious, ego-driven form of solipsism, but Seth manages to defray such effects by imbuing his character with genuine appreciation for his friends and the other good things in his life. In the end, he brings the book to a profound and masterfully understated moment of resolution, in which we're given reason for an optimism tempered by our acknowledgment of life's difficulty. The art-style in the book, a distinct nod toward strip-art from the 50s, also works as an interesting second-layer of meaning by paralleling the art the author has found so heartening. Great book.

NEVERWHERE, by Neil Gaiman

2008-09-10T11:26:00.001-07:00

Neil Gaiman made his name with the Vertigo comic series SANDMAN, a dream-centered epic that inflected traditional mythologies with 90s goth culture. In the end SANDMAN ran for 75 issues, later collected into 10 graphic novels, and it was celebrated by everyone from Norman Mailer to Stephen King. I've got friends that are crazy about Sandman, but my own experience with the series has teetered between mildly entertained and just plain bored, and I quit slogging through it after the 8th graphic novel. The fact that I spent so much time with the title character "Dream," and then gave up in the story that concerns his death, shows how tedious the series had become for me--all that time together, and I couldn't even finish for the sake of closure.

Since SANDMAN, Gaiman has gone on to work in novels, and he's had a lot of success in this field as well. I'd been curious to see how the man stood up on his own, in a less collaborative medium than comics (which is often a baby shared by a writer and artist), and I got my chance to read NEVERWHERE, Gaiman's first novel, when a co-worker started reading it in the office, and raving about it daily. Once he'd finished the book, he handed it off to me.

One of the things I found most interesting about NEVERWHERE was how much it reminded me of SANDMAN. I'd assumed there'd be significant differences between Gaiman on his own, working with words alone, and his collaborations with artists in a visual format, but I was wrong. Part of this might arise from the fact that Gaiman rarely worked with one artist for very long; excepting Dave McKean, who did the covers, SANDMAN saw a new artist every few issues. That might mean that the artists had less involvement in the story or the characters--the artists might have dressed SANDMAN up in different clothes, but it remained Gaiman's baby alone. Another thing that might be responsible for the similarity is Gaiman's rudimentary use of words; he's hardly a stylist, more of an idea man who uses words simply, in order to express those ideas. The final thing that really draws the two works together is the fact that so many of the ideas in the novel are the same as those in the comic. Both works, for example, show an adoration of female characters, often presenting them as powerful and mysterious while the male character's are either inept or wily. Both works portray reality as a mere illusion, and those who can't see past that illusion are shown as vulnerable and weak. Both works feature villains that munch on rats. It goes on and on.

Also interesting about the similarities between SANDMAN and NEVERWHERE are what they reveal about Gaiman himself. We get the sense, from reading these stories, that Gaiman likes to play a bit rough--he's not afraid to kill a character, even a central one, with little explanation or compensation. I get the feeling that this is one of the things that his fans like about him--they see this as evidence that Gaiman doesn't pull punches. Gaiman also uses clever humor as a tool, or an easy way out: "Varney connected his crowbar with the dwarf, who instantly stopped bouncing and darting, and instantly began lying insensible."

One notable difference between SANDMAN and NEVERWHERE is that as the novel progressed, it became more interesting, while the comic completely lost me by the end. I think that part of this comes from Gaiman's passage concerning "the ordeal" that Richard (the protagonist) has to go through, which is a passage that carries a lot more power than much of the rest of the book that preceded it. Before this passage Richard comes across as a bit of a lovable buffoon, endearing but not especially interesting. After the passage he becomes more than that--he's faced a truly harrowing experience, an experience the reader can relate to with more emotion than a cleverly described blow with a crowbar. We actually respect him, and feel like he merits our concern.

Maybe this improvement toward the latter half of the book relates to the fact that NEVERWHERE started out as a television program that Gaiman later adapted into the novel. In the start he was mucking about, playing with a new medium, establishing the story and the characters. In the middle it loses its sense of direction. But by the end Gaiman had a stronger idea of where to take the story, and he gave us more meaningful plotting.

RANT, by Chuck Palahnuik

2008-08-21T13:49:00.001-07:00

This is the second Palahnuik book I've read--the first being CHOKE--and I see a lot of similarities between the two. Both focus on counterculture individuals, and their rebel friends, who are notable for some quirky behavior or activity they engage in. In the case of CHOKE the protagonist cruises Sex Addict Anonymous support groups for casual partners, and gains money by staging choking incidents in restaurants, and then taking advantage of the compassionate feelings provoked in those who save him. In RANT the main character has a penchant for receiving bites from animals, especially from venomous spiders and rabid mammals. The book also incorporates and expounds upon an underground activity group, known as Party Crashers, who participate in a modified form of demolition derby that takes place on public streets.

Acknowledging the possibility that some of his other books are different in nature, I'm coming to the conclusion that Palahnuik is an idea man. The allure of his writing doesn't lie in eloquent diction, richly fleshed-out characters, or a well-crafted plot--all of which are generally considered synonymous with good writing--it lies in the innovative ideas he generates. In RANT this is particularly apparent--the book is chock full of ideas, but the plot is pretty sparse, and the characterization of the protagonist is so nebulous that you never get a very clear image of him, only a glimpse of his animal-bite scarred arms and his tar-blackened teeth.

Part of the reason RANT reads more like an idea log than a novel results from the way the story is told. Instead of a conventional narration, RANT is written as an oral biography--in other words, the text is broken up into multiple first-person accounts, snippets taken from fictional interviews. A few chapters are just one person's voice, uninterrupted, describing an event, and these are invariably the chapters that work best, that have the most time and space to develop into something intriguing, and to occasionally approach profundity. The bulk of the rest of the novel is short little paragraphs--one person saying one or a few sentences, immediately interrupted by another person with their own line or two--in an approximation of an interview-heavy documentary. Palahnuik tries to use this delivery to unique effect, by alternating between two sources describing two separate events for example, but the overall result of this approach is a general cheapening of the reading experience. At its best it feels like a gimmick, at its worst it feels empty and repetitive--it actually blocks you from engaging with the story.

(Other authors have attempted the multiple-person narrative with greater success--Irvine Welsh's breakout novel TRAINSPOTTING is an excellent example, with each character's tone immediately recognizable, unique, and authentic. Palahnuik, in contrast, relies on lame little tricks to endow his accounts with individuality--like Neddy Nelson speaking in a relentless stream of questions--and rather than achieving a group of voices, he only reinforces the contrived feel of the novel.)

Beyond exposing the cardboard nature of his characters, Palahnuik's oral-biography approach also succeeds in sabotaging the book's sense of plot. There isn't any one narrator in the book that was present for all of the events, except the protagonist Rant Casey, and he's only allowed one sentence. What we do get is a bunch of people talking about Rant's country childhood, and a bunch of other people talking about Rant's time in the city later on. Unfortunately, the former section, dealing with Rant's childhood, feels more comprehensive and important than the latter section, in which the events that purportedly make Rant significant enough to warrant a biography occur. The outcome of this is that the reader is given an inflated expectation of who Rant is, and then there's no payoff, no significant achievement as an adult to satisfy that expectation. It feels unbalanced, and poorly connected. Also confounding is the fact that the incidents from Rant's childhood seem to be more easily traceable in time than the incidents in his later life, despite the fact that the childhood is deeper in the past and therefor harder to remember. The people repeat each other, but don't manage to build much on each other's statements, and we're left with a satisfying sense of who young Rant was, and what he did as a child, but only a vague and frustrating idea of who Rant was as an adult, and what he did then. If I pause and think about what happens in the book, I wind up with a paltry amount of events to use as the basis for a novel. As if he became aware of this during the writing of the novel itself, Palahnuik throws in some crazy time-travel stuff near the end, seemingly just to stretch the plot out a bit more.

Despite its faults, RANT is still a decent read, owing largely to the wealth of ideas Palahnuik packs into it. From using spider venom as a erectile aid, to dividing society into separate daytime and nighttime populations, to leaving behind traditional media in favor of direct brain-boosted experiences, RANT is chock full with intriguing notions. If only he'd had more than a paper-thin story to wrap around those ideas, this could have been a much better book.

WOLF MOON, by Charles de Lint

2008-08-14T11:33:00.001-07:00

An interesting book. It's a high-fantasy story, but it draws its power from familiar sources, namely a person's need to be loved, and their fear of rejection. The main character harbors a dark secret--he's a werewolf--which has kept him on the run for most of his adult life. His running leads him to an inn where he's accepted and cared for, and where he finds love. The story's antagonist, fueled by a fascistic arrogance and a hatred of werewolves, and aided by a magical ability to manipulate people, exposes the man and frames him, leading to his rejection by the inn folk, and his betrayal by his lover. The scene in which that betrayal happens was remarkably well realized--it actually affected my heart rate, got me all stressed out.

I suppose that the idea of using mundane issues as the core for Fantasy and Sci-Fi is nothing new, but it does seem like certain books (the DRAGONS OF AUTUMN TWILIGHT book I read a few months ago comes as a good example) don't subscribe to that approach, and suffer because of it. And there are different levels of weight that you can give to the mundane factor, too. In WOLF MOON it dominates the story. You could very well tell the story in a different setting, completely omitting werewolves and magic, and have it work equally well.

Another interesting thing about WOLF MOON is the level of attention it gives to relatively few events. I've read books that come across as a string of separate events, each event influencing the others to a certain extent, with the final sum of events reaching the double digits. In WOLF MOON only a few things happen, but they're explained in rich detail that fills pages. At times, especially when de Lint focuses in on character thoughts, the level of detail becomes bothersome, boring. But for the most part, it's rewarding to have each event thoroughly envisioned.

THE VIRGIN AND THE GIPSY, by D.H. Lawrence

2008-08-07T12:59:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading THE VIRGIN AND THE GIPSY. It's the first D.H. Lawrence book I've read, and here's what I noticed about it.

Lawrence writes in a fussy sort of way that brings to mind other English authors of his era, especially E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf. His focus on women and their relationships with men, especially with how those relationships are tempered by social mores, also makes me think of Jane Austen (though Austen writes a tighter noose of propriety, and her dialog is much sharper). The vagueness of his descriptions, their allusion to something larger and more abstract, seems characteristic of Modernist British writing. Here's an example:

"Yvette went pale, and very distant. Her pride, that frail, precious flame which everybody tried to quench, recoiled like a flame blown far away, on a cold wind, as if blown out, and her face, white now and still like a snowdrop, the white snowflower of his conceit, seemed to have no life in it, only this pure, strange abstraction."

From this passage you can see how Forster uses multiple adjectives, and makes several small passes at whatever thing he is trying to describe. By doing that he lessens the force of individual words--they aren't allowed to hold as much weight as a word used by itself, and therefor they seem less forceful. It's like impressionist painting, in which several loose brush-strokes are used, resulting in a looser and less distinct representation of an object. Oftentimes whatever is being described is left conspicuously ambiguous, like the "abstraction" in the above paragraph--we never really learn what comes to replace the pride in Yvette's face.

Another thing the passage reveals is Lawrence's stitched together writing style, in which a comma is dropped in after every few words. You rarely get a straight-ahead sentence; usually you're jolting over all these little speed bumps. It reminds me, in a way, of the later writing of Celine, with it's two or three word clumps divided up by ellipsis. Celine uses the technique to create a strobing series of glimpsed images, while Lawrence seems to use it for the impressionistic brush strokes mentioned above, but the feeling the reader gets while reading them is somewhat similar. And Lawrence seems to use the resultant rhythm of this constant self-interruption as a way to advance the writing itself. Another example:

"And thence, for a long time, they stayed in the mud and dark and dampness of the valley, often with sheer rock above them; the water brawling on one hand, the steep rock or dark trees on the other./Till, through the darkness of overhanging trees, they began to climb, and Leo changed the gear."

It seems to me that Lawrence is using the repetition of "dark" and "trees" deliberately, as a way to connect one paragraph with the other. We hear it in the las sentence of the first paragraph, hear it in a disjointed, interrupted, repeated way, a way that goes back and restates part of what has already been said, which makes the words stand out in our minds. Then, in the next paragraph, the words are repeated again (though "dark" becomes "darkness"), provoking in our minds a small sense of familiarity, a recognition, that makes the connection between one paragraph and the next more explicit than proximity alone.

Another passage:

"She was truly simple in what she said. It was just what she thought. But it gave no hint of the very different feeling that also occupied her: the feeling that she had been looked upon, not from the outside, but from the inside, from her secret female self."

The narrator's intimate knowledge of the internal workings of his characters, which the characters themselves don't consciously know (as is illustrated above), is another one of the things that stands out to me about Lawrence's writing. The protagonist in this book, Yvette, is a rather dizzy girl, which makes it less surprising in regards to her, but it holds true for all the other characters too. Lawrence's creations are motivated by feelings and compulsions they have no awareness of, and no control over. They are the pawns of their own secret desires. I'll end this post with another passage showing this, specifically in the context of a man bound by social mores, and resentful of those less worried with propriety. It's one of the most compelling, in my opinion, found within the entire book:

"The rector looked at her insouciant face with hatred. Somewhere inside him, he was cowed, he had been born cowed. And those that are born cowed are natural slaves, and deep instinct makes them fear with prisonous fear those who might suddenly snap the slave's collar around their necks./ It was for this reason the rector had so abjectly curled up, who still so abject curled up before She-who-was-Cynthia: because of his slave's fear of her contempt, the contempt of a born-free nature for a base-born nature.:

Thieves Jargon

2008-08-01T13:15:00.001-07:00

I've had another story published, this time by Thieves Jargon. It's currently at the top of the homepage for their 171st issue, but they update the site every Friday so you'll have to look in the archives if you don't make it there before the week's over. Thieves Jargon is a cool site, and they've published a lot of compelling, hard-edged writing. I only found out about them a month or so ago, when they had issue 168 up. Rachel Hale Drew's "The Goat," from that issue, enslaved my mind for the time it took to read it (beware if you're tender-hearted--it's a brutal story). They also feature a cool piece of art by a different artist each week, which is more of an art-connection than a lot of literary journals have.

Gardening Books

2008-07-31T12:04:00.001-07:00

With all the environmental, economic, and social damage that our hyperconsumerist capitalist system has caused, I'm coming to believe that the best way to resist the system is to reduce our dependence on it. Perhaps the most effective way to do this is to try and take control of our most basic needs, food being one of them. With that in mind, growing vegetables might be the most radical action we can commit in America today. In an effort to act on that belief, I've started mucking about with vegetables in my own meager backyard.

I live in a building in San Francisco's Sunset District. Before this area was covered over with asphalt and concrete, it consisted primarily of sand dunes, which don't support much plant life. Couple the poor soil quality with the general lack of sunlight--this area is notorious for its fog and cold, especially in the summer--and you've got very challenging conditions for agriculture. A few months ago I planted a few broccoli and tomato plants, only to reap meager crops. Hoping to gain whatever advantages I could, and thereby improve my yield, I've started reading books on gardening for growing tips. The two books pictured here are the first I've finished.

THE ORGANIC HOME GARDEN: HOW TO GROW FRUITS & VEGETABLE NATURALLY, by Patrick Lima, details the author's experience with organic agriculture. The bulk of the book is informational in its focus, but you get enough tidbits here and there to piece together an idea of the author's life, and it's a pretty interesting story. He mentions living in a city with his partner (who happens to be the guy who took the pictures for the book) working as a waiter and just getting buy. On a whim, Lima plants a few things in his backyard, and he becomes so excited by the concept of growing his own food that both he and his partner go out to the country and squat on some land. They don't have a car, or a house, or even a tent, and they end up passing the snowy winter by living off dried beans and rice in a canvas dome, reading gardening books all the while. When the summer comes they clear land and start planting. Twenty years later, they're still there, still growing food. That's a pretty radical story for a book aimed at a mainstream audience.

A lot of the information in the book concerns itself with soil quality. You get the feeling that turning organic matter into compost, and using it to improve the soil, has made up the majority of his life's work. And it's interesting to read about such a long-term pursuit, especially when our modern lives seem to be shrinking our attention spans into shorter and shorter sections. I get impatient when I have to wait 15 minutes for a bus, but Lima's spent days, weeks, months, for Twenty Years, just helping things rot.

There's also a lot of info on individual plants, how to plant them and care for them, how to work with the seasons. Most of it doesn't apply to me, cause the Sunset doesn't have a summer, or a winter either. Just continual fog and cold.

The other book, CROPS IN POTS by Bob Purnell, takes the fertilizer and pesticide approach to growing things. I'd originally been interested in the idea of growing things in pots because I saw it as a way to get around my soil quality issues--just fill the pots with decent soil and you're ready to go--but this book states that a plant will use all the nutrients in a pot full of soil in just a month or so, while its growth period might last a lot longer. Purnell's solution is to dump in fertilizer, which doesn't appeal to me because doing that causes the very environmental damage, and dependence on our economy, I'm trying to minimize by growing some of my own food. The book spends more time on arranging for visual appeal than it does on growing for food purposes. In the end, it was a waste of my time.

DESPITE EVERYTHING: A COMETBUS OMNIBUS

2008-07-24T10:34:00.001-07:00

After I finished high school, I spent a few years bumming around, riding greyhound and hitchhiking, picking up disposable jobs and crashing in flophouses/communes/hostels. Eventually, it got kind of boring. Without committing to a location, you limit the sorts of things you can experience and achieve. Picking up and leaving every few months makes it hard to get beyond a shallow relationship with a place and the people living there. That's the conclusion I came to, anyway, and so I decided to drop anchor in San Francisco, and see what I could build.

Aaron Cometbus, who's been writing the Cometbus zine for more than 25 years now, doesn't seem to feel the same way. He's spent the bulk of the last three decades as a perpetual roadrunner, and Cometbus is largely dedicated to the chronicling of his experiences. This huge tome (600+ pages) collects selections from Cometbus 24-43, plus a smattering of stuff from the earlier issues.

At it's best, Cometbus makes for compelling reading, and I'd even go so far as to say that certain issues represent for me the pinnacle of zine or other periodical achievement--you couldn't put together a better magazine. At its worst (like "The week I rode the bus a lot: a greyhound hell journal" from issue 27, in which Aaron spends almost every hour, for a week long period, either sitting on a bus or waiting in a greyhound station) the zine feels monotonous, pointless, and utterly boring; similar to what aimless traveling had become for me, and why I gave it up. The whole book is kind of a grab bag, with certain issues that I really enjoyed, and other issues that came across as Aaron just feeling obligated to put something out, and raking together a pile of crap for that purpose.

One of the things that I love about Cometbus (and this might seem strange given my general lack of interest in fashion and tv and other mediums focused on visual communication) is the sense of design it showcases. A lot of punk zines are ashy nightmares, just a bunch of crappy pictures/text pasted together and poorly xeroxed. Cometbus shows a more sophisticated visual ascetic. Admittedly, part of the superior visuals in Cometbus relates to the fact that the zine is pressed instead of photo-copied, which means the pictures are pretty clear and not the gritty headaches you get when you xerox a color shot. But it goes beyond mere print quality. Aaron often laid articles out in a way that reflected the article's topic--a visual echo of the textual meaning. For example, a lot of the first-person anecdotes are handwritten, which further enhances the idea that we're reading about a personal experience--how one unique individual (unique down to his handwriting, which reflects individuality more than a uniform computer/typewriter font ever could) experienced one event. Aaron also uses borders and inserts and graphic approaches to tie an article together over the course of several pages, to help you know you're still on the right piece when you flip the page. And sometimes Aaron uses creative visual approaches to completely break away from the orthodox left to right, up to down way we read a story, like in his account of Greenday's first tour (in issue #25), which starts in the lower left corner of the page and snakes around a map of the United States, visually taking us along on the journey. All of it's done in a way to make the most out of the black-and-white format.

Another interesting thing about Cometbus is its representation of the punk culture. This book starts with an issue in which Aaron decided to stop focusing on music (no band interviews, no show reviews) and instead start focusing on the lifestyle. By doing that, he ends up framing punk-life in a broader way, a way that can be recognized as similar to other counter-culture movements (like the lost generation and the beats and the hippies). There are certain things that I view as more-or-less unique to the punk ascetic, like its appreciation of obnoxiousness and irreverence, its affection for childhood interests (sugary cereals and toys), its fascination with urban grit (dumpstering and homeless people), but there are a lot of other things that you'll find in any culture that arises as a conscious response to the mainstream. Instead of communes you get punk-houses; they look different but are pretty much the same thing. As Aaron travels from place to place, he meets up with like-minded people and experiences things with them. In the end, this fostering of a sense of community might be the most important thing about Cometbus.

Part of the community aspect in Cometbus comes from Aaron's travel accounts, but another part comes from his inclusion of columnists and guest writers. A few people turn up again and again, in issue after issue, and they add a lot to the zine. Anna Joy comes across as a cynical genius in some of her pieces; very funny and entertaining, and appreciated for her feminine (in a hard-edged way) input. Richie writes clever weirdness that brings to mind modern favorites of mine, like Sam Pink but not as dark. Here's a Richie poem, to give you a taste:

"birds"
a sunny summer's morn
the birds twitter prettily
so
i go inside
and
get my gun
and
kill them

Some of the one-shot contributors are great, too. The piece on train-hopper graffiti ("Who is Bozo Texino" in issue #27) comes to mind.

All in all, I'm really enjoying this book. It's been a chance to see some of the older Cometbus gems I missed out on, and I've still got several hundred pages to go. There's some crap in here, to be sure, but when it's good Cometbus gives you something that no big-budget book or magazine can offer: the purest (editor-free) connection with a stranger that writing can offer.

It's even got me thinking of putting together a zine of my own. I'll post info on this blog if I manage to get anything together.

RONIA, THE ROBBER'S DAUGHTER, by Astrid Lindgren

2008-07-16T11:19:00.000-07:00

As I read this book, I found myself comparing it to THE REPTILE ROOM, another book aimed at children which I read only a few weeks ago. THE REPTILE ROOM is a product of today, while RONIA feels like it comes from a different time. Technically, RONIA isn't all that old--it was first published in 1981--but it comes from the pen of a woman born in 1907, and it reflects certain values and interests, and an approach to children, that aren't in keeping with our current mores.

For one thing, RONIA is written with a harder hand than THE REPTILE ROOM. That book, second in A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS, is rather maudlin in tone, a mimicry of Victorian tragedy. The tragedy in this book, the level of pathos it deals with, is decidedly more sincere. RONIA, which tells a sort of friendship-based Romeo and Juliet story with two people drawn together despite their warring families, is unflinching in its portrayal of how a parent's prejudices can hurt children. When turmoil unsettles the relationship between Ronia and her father, it is real turmoil. The emotional pain is not handled with kid-gloves; it is given raw and red.

Part of the reason the pain feels so much sharper in this book than in THE REPTILE ROOM relates to the solidity of the characters in each work. Ronia and her companions feel more complicated, more rounded, and more real than the three Baudelaire children and Count Olaf, which are so simple that their identities are basically explained by a single repeated action (for example: the oldest Baudelaire kid is a girl who likes to invent and ties her hair up with a ribbon when doing so, and that's pretty much all you need to know about her). The conflict Ronia experiences isn't simple, it doesn't have any truly easy answers, and its eventual resolution feels believable but not cheap.

I'm tempted to think that this reveals something about the changing nature of our relationships with children. Astrid Lindgren gives the impression, in RONIA, that children are capable of handling authentic difficulty and tragedy. She gives them credit that Daniel Handler doesn't really give to his audience with the Lemony Snicket books. The fear of being rejected by a parent because of the parent's deep-seated prejudices, which comprises the conflict in RONIA, is a real fear for a lot of kids, and Lindgren allows her audience to face that real fear. She doesn't protect them from it; she gives it to them straight, no pandering. It shows a lot about what she thought kids were capable of, and it reveals a respect for children that I think we might be losing.

DRAGONS OF AUTUMN TWILIGHT, by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

2008-07-08T12:58:00.000-07:00

Back before I reached my teenage years, when I started concentrating on punk rock and being cool, I read a lot of fantasy novels. I was particularly fond of the Dragonlance series, based on the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game. Dragonlance was huge in scope, with a new book coming out every few months (eventually passing 190 in number), and story-arcs usually playing out over three or more books. The very first book, the one that started it all, was DRAGONS OF AUTUMN TWILIGHT.

It's been at least fifteen years since I've read anything from Dragonlance, or even thought much about it, but I've recently become somewhat nostalgic for the old days before I turned into a grumpy old loser. I decided to pick up a copy of DRAGONS OF AUTUMN TWILIGHT, in hopes of revisiting a part of my youth. The library didn't have a copy, and I couldn't find one in any of the used book stores in town, so I was compelled to do something I almost never do: I went to the bookstore and bought a copy new.

I read the book over the course of the last week, and reading it has shown me that you can't go home again.

To put it plainly, the book isn't very good. It consists of an overabundant series of events, one after another after another, cobbled together in a way that doesn't give much sense of significance to their order. It's like the authors came up with a bunch of scenarios, and then rolled dice to decide on their chronology. Within a few dozen pages I was bored, and my level of interest wavered between bored and mildly interested for the next 440+ pages.

The writing itself is far from artful, too. Generally the description is plain, and limited. Most of the prose focuses on action, and the action rarely amounts to anything exciting. Here's the first fight, for an example:

"The goblin dove at Flint, hoping to knock him down. Flint swung his ax with deadly accuracy and timing. A goblin head rolled into the dust, the body crashing to the ground."

Ho hum, right? There isn't any spice to the writing, or any compelling imagery. In fact, the actions are described in a fairly vague way: Flint swings his ax and a goblin head rolls. We aren't shown the ax as it makes contact with the goblin's neck. We aren't given details relating to what the ax looks like, how heavy it feels in Flint's hand, what it feels like when it makes contact with the enemy. We aren't even given a description of the goblin, here or before, that gives us any developed idea of what it looks like. It seems to me that the writing is relying on the reader's familiarity with scenes of this type, a familiarity gathered from reading other books and watching movies. The book depends upon the reader's previous knowledge to supply a mental image of the goblin. If we've never heard of a goblin before, we're not going to learn what it is from this book.

And that's the main beef I've got with the writing in general. It's a bare bones, stripped down account of a series of actions. It's like a basic script, and we're expected to use the script to make a full movie in our minds. But if we're just going to imagine things on our own, with only flimsy prompting on the part of the book, why use the book at all? Why not turn to a better book, one that gives us the mind-movie already fully produced?

So I'm done with Dragonlance. I'll leave it to my past. I still haven't given up on fantasy fiction altogether, though. I remember enjoying some of the Conan stories, so maybe I'll see if my current mind still likes them. Or maybe I'll give the HOBBIT a go.

A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS #2: THE REPTILE ROOM, by Lemony Snicket

2008-06-26T12:48:00.000-07:00

I tried reading the first Harry Potter book a few years ago, and didn't take to it. The other recent series to be aimed at kids but embraced by a wider audience is this one, A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS by Lemony Snicket. I found a copy of THE REPTILE ROOM, the second book in the series, abandoned with a box of books on a street corner near my house, and took it home. Yesterday I cracked it open at work, and two hours later I was finished. All in all I liked it, and I'll probably read others if they find their way into my hands, but I'm not really planning on hunting them down.

Still, I'm interested by this whole adults-reading-kids-books phenomena, and I had that in mind while I read it. It's been years since I've read another book aimed at kids. What is it that makes them catch on with older readers? What is it about kid's books that sets them apart from adult fare? I'm not sure if I know everything that defines or typifies a kid's book, but I noticed the following in THE REPTILE ROOM:

Simple Characters and a simple plot: The principle characters in this series seem to be the three Baudelaire children, their banker Mr. Poe, and their nemesis Count Olaf. Each of these characters is identifiable by just a few key things: the oldest kid is a girl who likes to invent and ties her hair up with a ribbon when doing so; the middle child is a boy who wears glasses and likes to read; the youngest is a baby with four sharp teeth, who likes to bite things and participates in conversations by spouting gibberish. That's pretty much all there is to them, and the plot is designed in a way that continually touches on and reinforces these basic traits.

Narrator who is a character: The aforementioned Lemony Snicket, who tells the story, also interacts directly with the reader. Usually, this interaction consists of warning the reader about the depressing nature of the book, and recommending that the reader put the book down and not read it at all. His narration generally borders on conversational, and he segues away from the plot here and there to explain a word or phrase, or describe a related-but-uninvolved situation. The narrator also speaks in a rather prim, archaic tone which brings to mind the narrators from Victorian novels by authors like Charles Dickens.

Repetition: Much of what happens, and much of the way those happenings are described, follows patterns that repeat throughout the book. Usually this repetition is focused on things that don't hold overriding importance to the plot, but rather affect the mood and feel of the story. For example, the three children often discuss what's happening and what they should do about it, and the baby always participates in these discussions by blurting a single multi-syllable word of gibberish, which the narrator interprets for the reader (example: "'Meeka!' Sunny said, which probably meant...").

There's more to note, but I'm clocking out from work now, so I'll end this post here.

THE LADY IN THE LAKE, by Raymond Chandler

2008-06-24T13:20:00.000-07:00

I was very impressed with the other Chandler book I've read--THE BIG SLEEP. With this one, not so much. The plot is a little too convoluted, the descriptions a little weak, Marlow's thoughts a little strange at times, and the conclusion more than a little disappointing. It was still a decent read, but I had high hopes for this book, and it didn't measure up.

In all honesty, THE BIG SLEEP didn't have the most airtight plot either. That book felt to me like it wrapped up the story halfway through, fumbled around for a bit, and then worked the preceding events into a continuing story. But it was still a joy to read, and the bulk of that joy comes from Chandler's descriptive style, and his clever use of simile. He manages it at points in LADY IN THE LAKE, with lines like "The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips," but the quality of his simile isn't consistent throughout--a lot of other similes in the book are left reaching, they don't really grab hold.

What is consistent, what really does hold up throughout this book like it did in the other, is the quality of the dialogue. Chandler crafts conversations that are better than anything you'd hear in real life, and it leaves you wishing people were as witty as they are in his books. Here's a favorite example of mine from LADY: "I thought they cleaned this town up," I said. "I thought they had it so that a decent man could walk the streets at night without wearing a bullet proof vest."/"They cleaned it up some," he said. "They wouldn't want it too clean. They might scare away a dirty dollar."

What really works against this book, as I've already mentioned, is the plot and the conclusion. A lot of what I've come to admire about good detective fiction is the power of logic, and the ability to act logically, that so many of these detectives possess. But Marlowe doesn't strike me as completely logical in this book, especially toward the end. A lot of the time I was left guessing about why he was doing things the way he did. The decision that brings the story to the lake for its final scene is a good example. It left me with a bad taste in my mouth after I turned the final page.

Neighborhood Life

2008-06-19T12:09:00.001-07:00

I recently wrote an article for a website called Neighborhood Life, and it just went online this week. I've published a few other journalism pieces here and there, but this was the first piece I pitched, researched, contacted and interviewed sources, wrote, and got paid for. The best thing about it was having an excuse to talk with people involved in a project I was interested in. I'm planning on pitching other stories to neighborhoodlife.net, and maybe I'll try to get motivated enough to pitch to other places too. If nothing else, it's a way to stay busy and make a little cash.

Walking

2008-06-17T13:31:00.000-07:00

For a little over a week now I've been walking to and from work every day. I started walking because of a flat tire on my bike, which I still haven't gotten around to patching, and I've kept walking because I'm really enjoying it. I've always liked walking; it's my favorite way of getting around. I like having the time to think, and to take in my surroundings. Sometimes I wonder if the human mind is better suited to walking speed, and if we diminish its capacities when we exceed a walking pace. In a car, the world blurs by and we take in only a fraction of what surrounds us. Walk the same block you normally drive, and you'll notice a million things you'd never notice while sitting behind a wheel. Many of those things will seem big and obvious--that house is painted purple; they've got a tombstone in their front yard, etc. Even the speed of a bicycle cuts down on what you can see. And because walking is such a basic ability--we learn to walk far before we learn to ride a bicycle or drive a car--it demands less attention from the mind, leaving you free to observe more and think more.

Another good thing about walking is that it's great exercise. I honestly think that our sedentary lifestyles cause tremendous harm to our bodies, and walking is a way to limit that damage. Sixty years ago most of the human race depended on hours and hours of physical activity as a regular part of its life, and our bodies need that activity to maintain proper functioning. By removing that activity, by reducing the physical effort used in getting around and acquiring food and all that, we've removed an essential component to the maintenance of good health. Eating a salad for dinner and going on a half hour run three times a week is not going to do it; we need to be more active more of the time. Walking is a great way to reclaim some of our lost physical activity.

People think they're wasting time by walking, or that walking takes too long, but the truth is walking generates time. The more you walk, the healthier you'll be and the longer you'll live.

THE THIN MAN, by Dashiell Hammett

2008-06-05T13:16:00.001-07:00

I've only read one other novel by Dashiell Hammett, THE MALTESE FALCON, but I liked it so much that it (along with THE BIG SLEEP by Raymond Chandler) threw me right into the pulp-mystery reading binge I've been on for the last few months. Unfortunately, most of the books I've read since those first two haven't been nearly as much fun, and I'm starting to think I got confused at the start: it's not that I love mystery writing (in fact, I'm hardly interested in figuring out who-dunnit by the end of the book), it's just that I love Hammett's writing.

So I finally came back to Hammett with THE THIN MAN, his last novel, and I savored every blessed page. While I read I found myself wondering what it was that Hammett does with words that makes those words so fun to read. By the time I turned the last page, I had a few ideas.

First of all, Hammett is clever. His descriptions are always unique, unprecedented. He somehow finds a way to say something, in simple language, in a way it hasn't been said before. And on top of that, he says it in a way that feels more accurate, more perceptive and true, than the bulk of what most other people manage. He isn't using any special arsenal, any esoteric vocabulary, but the way he uses his words is masterful.

Here's an example, in which he's describing a dog's feelings, that sort of gets at what I'm trying to explain: "Asta liked Macaulay because when he patted her he gave her something to set her weight against: she was never very fond of gentleness."

Now, most people who spend time with dogs probably know that a lot of dogs are like this--they like to lean against you hard, to feel solid contact. Noticing this is not in itself especially clever, though it does seem (at least to me) especially true. But Hammett's way of phrasing it--"something to set her weight against"--is clever. I don't think many people would express the idea in this way. They might say "Dog's like to lean on you," but they probably wouldn't phrase it "they like something to set their weight against." They might say "dog's like to roughhouse," but they probably wouldn't come up with "they aren't fond of gentleness." Hammett manages to say what many know, and that those who don't know can still recognize as probably accurate, in a way that most wouldn't think to say it.

Another great thing about Hammett's books is the characters he peoples them with. The protagonists are especially compelling, and Nick Charles (from THE THIN MAN) is the best I've read so far. He's exceedingly competent and smart, yet still tough enough to dodge bullets and throw punches. And he's got a sense of humor, which makes him more like-able than Sam Spade (from THE MALTESE FALCON, who comes across as a little too eager to give the Limp-Wristed Levantine a slapping).

Because of these great characters, we get a lot of great dialog. Hearing Charles navigate conversations away from what he doesn't want to tell, seeing him drop hints for other characters to pick up, and hearing him cajole and tease his wife, is where a lot of the fun in book comes from. Hammett peppers his dialog with subtle innuendo and charm so effectively that it makes real-life talking dull by comparison.

I could go on about Hammett's story pacing; his short, punchy chapters; his stripped down, lean prose--all of that deserves mention, but it's time for me to clock out of work, and go home.

Titular Journal

2008-06-03T13:49:00.001-07:00

Following up on my May 20th post, I've started submitting a few things to Internet Literary Journals. Last week I had my first acceptance, a piece called "The Mosquito Coast," which has been published on Titular. Titular is a site dedicated to publishing works that take their titles from movies, novels, and TV shows. It might seem like a strange premise, but it's resulted in some pretty intriguing stuff (check out Blake Butler's piece, "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me").

My experience with Titular brings to mind two more benefits offered by online journals. The first benefit is incredibly quick response times. I submitted "The Mosquito Coast" to Titular by email at 10 o'clock at night. When I checked my email the next afternoon, there was an acceptance letter in my inbox. For a literary journal in general, such a response time is astounding. For a print based journal, with the traditional postal submission process, such a response time is impossible. The fastest acceptance I've had for a mailed submission to a print journal was around three weeks (for my short-short "grace" which appeared in Quick Fiction #9). The slowest acceptance I've ever had, for my short memoir "Jumper at the Hyatt" which appeared in Instant City #5, took eight months. The average acceptance would be closer to 10 weeks. When you take account of the fact that most stories are rejected multiple times before finding a home, every week of waiting compounds the total lag from writing to publication. You often end up with a story hitting print years after it was originally written.

The second benefit I've thought of, after this acceptance, relates to the greater possibilities in story types that online journals can offer. The Mosquito Coast is a story that probably wouldn't be suitable for very many journals. It's a straight-forward, un-funny, gimmick-free account of a man hunting and killing a mosquito. The subject matter is modest, the scope brief. The value in the story lies, as I see it, in the clarity and honesty of the prose, and in how that prose serves the subject (in my mind, even a story as simple as a man killing a mosquito can be interesting when written well). I think it's a good story, a nice story, but I can't imagine that many print journals would consider it. When every page is costing money, the editor is compelled to look for stories that make more noise, that have a more dramatic emotional impact. That's why we end up with so many "epiphany" stories--it's the emotional equivalent of the dynamite blast.