Gabe Durham's Blog, page 5

Joeseph Riipi Reviewed FUN CAMP in Heavy Feather Review + Interviewed Me and Adam Robinson

From the review:

Like adolescence, too, the pieces in Fun Camp run a superlative range. Durham gives us moments of mind-blowing insight and moments of devastating heartbreak … it’s like a dark blue water balloon coming at you at nighttime.

And then instead of excerpting myself, I’m going to excerpt an interpretation Joe Riipi formed-and-sorta-abandoned while reading the book:

Here’s a long question, but I think an important one. On my first read, I thought of “fun camp” as an allegory for social networking. What struck me, especially in the first sections, was this phenomenon that occurs at camp (and, I think, in a lot of life) in which a person must create a kind of avatar of him or herself. There’s a piece toward the front called “Summer After Summer of Love” in which the voice is trying to reconcile the “this summer” self with a “past summer” self. There’s a key difference between a self at camp and a self in real life—a vacation, really—which made me think of the escape to “fun camp” in general as an escape onto the Internet. On Facebook and Twitter, people can choose to project an “ideal” of themselves, just like they can at camp. For instance, in telling how to perform publicly in a nightly skit, you write: “Act well, using method techniques like drawing from memories of some of the more intense emotional experiences you had in the last hour. Try to be complex and cathartic and redemptive.” Then there are notes of encouragement and compliments that campers publicly share with another along a clothesline—the “warm fuzzies” you call them—which are so much like posting on another’s Facebook wall or Tweeting “at” someone. Do you see the fun camp you created as a reflection of life as it is, how it should be, or how it shouldn’t?

Thanks, Joe, for putting the whole post together, and to HFR who has been awesome and recently published part of the book in a print issue.

Book be here.

Open Season

What I want to say, just before FUN CAMP becomes a Public Thing, is this:

If you dislike my book, you are welcome to say so publicly.

Even if you know me. Even if you like me. Even if I’m a nice guy you’re pulling for.

We are too careful not to hurt each others’ feelings and so we default to praise. Me too sometimes.

But when I reviewed Confessions from a Dark Wood, I paid Eric Raymond’s book the respect of criticizing it. I took the book seriously enough to point out opportunities I thought the book missed. (Even though I  really liked it.)

I’ve tried to do the same with my upcoming review of Tom Whelan’s The President in Her Towers, another book I very much like and respect.

Because here’s the thing: The #1 indicator that a book is a “real book,” from my standpoint, is that people argue about its merit.

If I am investigating a new book and nobody is arguing and the reviews are glowing to the point of embarrassing, my takeaway basically amounts to, “This writer’s friends sure like him.”

Universal acclaim is the great arouser of suspicion. Takedowns beg to be contended with.

What’s a book “everybody loves”? Jesus’ Son, how about. Even Jesus’ Son has 124 one-star ratings and 361 two-star ratings on Goodreads.

When I gave myself two stars on Goodreads last week, it was both an easy joke and an attempt to break the seal on the lower tier. Since then, my publisher Adam Robinson has done me one better. Because we’re marketing GENIUSES.

Since most of us agree that indifference stings more than hate, I’ll take it a step further: If you are just kinda whatever about my book, you are welcome to say so publicly.

Ideally, as with all criticism, the discussion would stay on the book itself instead of the personal (“Gabe Durham is clearly just a pathetic sixteen-foot janitor gorilla with nothing better to do than hock oysters at SUVs”), since that’s the point at which criticism becomes trolling. But what can you do? Some people is dicks.

By the way: Everyone who really does like FUN CAMP and has said so–I believe you! I’m already really pleased with how this book has been connecting with people I know and people I don’t. I just don’t think you yeasayers need to be the only ones speaking up.

All this has been said better before. But since the personal and professional are now so muddled, it seems unfortunately necessary for each writer to define the terms of how he or she will react to criticism. So here’s me saying: I won’t sic the dogs on you.

At my best, I am a big boy.

Let’s together see what I can handle.

New Essay @ The Weeklings: The BP Oil Spill of Fashion

One week away from FUN CAMP RELEASE DAY and I am debuting stuff from the next project. Now up at The Weeklings: My essay on the UARS satellite, murderer Amy Bishop, the TVA, straw feminists, and why some people don’t like to shake my hand.

Liz, a seller of documentaries with titles such as The Purity Myth: The Virginity Movement’s War Against Women and The Bro Code: How Contemporary Culture Creates Sexist Men, was much better-versed on this topic than I was, but I was learning, and I am told that in the Jean Kilbourne lecture film Killing Us Softly 4, I can be seen laughing appreciatively in several audience reaction shots, likely my greatest contribution to feminism thus far.

Coming soon is another of these in The Weeklings, and one more in The Collagist. Special thanks to Sean Beaudoin for trimming the fat on this thing and making it more of an essay.

FUN CAMP + lookin good made me Origami Zoo’s Writer Crush of the Week

I just doublechecked and it looks as if they actually forgot to mention my looks at all.

From the post:

Durham essentially wrote the book I wanted to write before I could do it … These small stories are all funny and punch-sad. The prose is tightly-coiled. Every last line of every monologue and lecture and warm fuzzy and frantic letter home makes you miss the taste of blackberries, the incomprehensible hodgepodge of what it feels like being a teenager at a pretty weird summer camp.

Niiiice. Thanks so much, O.Z. I’m glad you guys got an early copy.

Pre-order FUN CAMP here.

 

Gabe Durham and Jack Christian Present: THE FAMILY CAMP TOUR

Attention EAST COAST. Please join Jack and I as we make our way down your coastline.

Many of the Facebook invites are already up:

FAMILY CAMP NYC: Gabe Durham, Jack Christian, Jonathan Callahan, Chris Cheney

FAMILY CAMP NYC: Gabe Durham, Jack Christian, Bianca Stone, Ben Pease, Greg Gerke

FAMILY CAMP Boston: Jack Christian, Gabe Durham, Brian Foley, Matthew Salesses

Gabe Durham and Friends Present: FUN CAMP (w/ Mike Young)

FAMILY CAMP Richmond: Jack Christian, Gabe Durham, Allison Titus

Joe Sacksteader’s review of FUN CAMP is up at Tarpaulin Sky

Sacksteader uses the review mostly to talk about how a Creative Writing teacher might use FUN CAMP in the classroom, and how he’s used parts of the book in the past. (I would love for some teachers to take him up on the idea.) I’m really grateful to him for writing it, and to Tarpaulin for putting it up.

If you want to write a review of FUN CAMP, get in touch with me or my publisher, Adam Robinson, and we will set you up with a copy. Otherwise, order it here if it feels right to do it.

Wigleaf Top 50

An excerpt from FUN CAMP was selected for the Wigleaf Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions of 2013.

Thanks, Wigleaf! And thanks to Lauren Becker for originally publishing the piece in Corium.

Fun Camp Review Roundup

On here I created a permanent FUN CAMP tab, which I’ll keep updated with info, links, blurbs, and reviews as they roll out in the coming weeks. Here’s what we’ve got so far.

*

Mike Young has kicked things off with a very nice preview/review of FUN CAMP, generous with excerpts: Gabe Durham’s FUN CAMP: “Anything that doesn’t send you to the showers isn’t worth laughing at.”

FUN CAMP has the skinniest low voice. FUN CAMP has the most earnest eye width. FUN CAMP is tall and kind and stalwart and genuinely funny, sweetly so, like the difference between a blackberry and corn syrup … I mean, there are parts of this book that are literally better than Wet Hot American Summer. Yeah. For real. I’m not blowing watermelon relays up your ass. It’s not hard to read this book at all—this book is fucking entertaining.

Holy WHAS comparison!!! Thanks, Mike.

*

Meanwhile, editor J.A. Tyler of the recently-closed Mud Luscious Press, had this to say:

I read thousands and thousands of book manuscripts for Mud Luscious Press, and none were ever like FUN CAMP. Durham’s debut is a novel but not a novel, a story collection but not a story collection, witty though not all about the clever, a kind of funny rippled with sadness: FUN CAMP is the perfect amalgamation. From now on, when someone asks me what it means to grow up, to run away into our future selves, I will hand them this book.

J.A. helped me edit the content of the book, and it’s the better for it.

*

Then, today at HTMLGIANT, an anonymous reviewer gives the book an 8.8, makes some sharp observations about what the book is up to, and also takes an autobiographical approach that seems only natural with a book like this:

My thirteen year-old self was hesitant, shy, and apt to disengage at sleep-away camp, but after I let myself go and gave into the fun, I didn’t want to leave. Fun Camp struck me the same way. Give yourself over to its silliness, its slick po-mo, and like a camper, you won’t want to leave when it comes to an end.

*

Thanks to everyone who has written or will write something about this book. It all takes time and you have lives! And thanks to everyone else for helping me spread the word. As with all books but especially indies, I’m relying on friends and colleagues and bloggers and tweeters and family members and distributors and bookstore owners and dogs and babies and robots to help make the book known.

Exactly one month to go. Soon there will be a cover because there has to be.

Pre-order FUN CAMP here. Cheap, cheap, cheep.

FUN CAMP is Now Available for Pre-Order Through Publishing Genius

My original publisher for FUN CAMP, Mud Luscious Press, has closed. It’s a sad, weird thing that all happened really fast. My book had been contracted with them for just over two years, and it had only another month to go before the book was to come out.

But. I was really lucky to have a bunch of good people immediately come to my aid and we quickly arrived at a solution: FUN CAMP would be put out by Publishing Genius.

This worked out so well. I love the books PG puts out, and I already really like and respect the man at the helm, Adam Robinson.

A thing about Adam: He works fast. The book is now available for pre-order.

$9 is the very limited edition pre-order price, way down from a list price of $15.

Please feel encouraged to jump on it.

 

Info:

Told in monologues, speeches, soliloquies, sermons, letters, cards, and lists, FUN CAMP is a freewheelin’ summer camp novel smashed to bits. Spend a week with the young inhabitants of a camp bent on molding campers into fun and interesting people via pranks, food fights, greased watermelon relays. Along the way, you’ll meet Dave and Holly, totalitarian head counselors who may be getting too old for this, Bernadette, a Luddite chaplain with some kids to convert, Billy, a first-timer tasting freedom, and Tad, a shaggy dude with a Jesus complex.

“FUN CAMP is a beautiful flight of tragic-comic prose, so sharply realized it would actually be upsetting, if Gabe Durham weren’t so root-for-able in every way. Come for his astonishing & repeatably funny turns of phrase, stay for his furtive romanticism. Durham is lousy with wit and soul. I loved this book and did not want it to end.”

—Julie Klausner, author of I Don’t Care About Your Band and host of “How Was Your Week?”

“A less adept writer would flatten summer camp into mere nostalgic idyll or slapstick farce, but Gabe Durham is alive to the tonal complexity of his subject. I celebrate this book for its formal inventiveness, its rich humor, its exuberant language, its genuine spirituality, and most of all for its tender and abiding regard for the oversized feelings of adolescence. Durham knows his pranks, but he is not a prankster. He’s the real thing.”

—Chris Bachelder, author of Bear v. Shark and Abbott Awaits

FUN CAMP was a semi-finalist for the Lake Forest/&Now 2011-2012 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize.

 

Everything anyone says about Spring Breakers is interesting

** A couple weeks ago, I had to write a sample on some recent pop culture news for a thing I was applying for. This roundup is what came out–basically a review of everything but the movie itself. **

According to Spring Breakers‘ divisive Rotten Tomatoes page, the movie is either a nasty, garish, incredibly boring, unintentionally laughable, irredeemably toxic mess, or it is “the most unforgettable movie of the year so far,”  “an authentically cracked expression of the crazy, conflicting signals bombarding today’s teenagers” that is “loaded with sharp, telling dialogue,” featuring a James Franco performance that is “nothing short of great.”

But every now and then, the trivia around a movie is so interesting that even the movie’s haters have to admit that they’re sorta glad the movie exists.

To review:

We now know that Gucci Mane appears in the film because Harmony Korine called him in prison and said, “I have a part for you. As soon as you get out of jail, I’ll be waiting, just make sure you don’t reoffend,” that for Gucci’s sex scenes, Korine knew Gucci liked thick girls and found some at “crazy black strip clubs” on the outskirts of Tampa, and that Gucci fell asleep while filming a scene in which one of those strippers fucks him.

We know Korine wrote a draft of Spring Breakers during spring break in Panama City in a hotel filled with dwarves, and that when Korine asked the receptionist why all the dwarves, she told him it was because Hulk Hogan was filming a reality show.

We know that Korine’s favorite metaphors for the experience of watching Spring Breakers are: chemical reaction, video game, stew, liquid narrative, pop poem, and beach noir.

We know Korine sees Britney Spears as “more than a person– she’s like an energy.“

We know Korine was banned from promoting the movie on Letterman because David Letterman once caught Korine going through Meryl Streep’s purse.

We know that during filming, real spring breakers showed up everywhere (“Some gnarly jocks were trying to hump up on the girls,” Korine said), which created a clusterfuck Korine alternately tolerated and encouraged.

We know the hotel scenes were filmed at an abandoned hotel that was going to be torn down anyway, and that after the shoot was done the hotel “looked like Berlin after the war.”

We know the robbery reenactment scene was thought up by Korine on the spot and largely improvised by the girls.

We know James Franco stayed in character on set, that Selena Gomez did not feel as if she’d really met James Franco until they started promoting the film, and that to prepare Franco for the role of Alien, Korine would “show  Franco a videotape of girls in a gas-station parking lot getting in a fight at 3 a.m. on the side of the road, and say, ‘That’s the way I want this scene to feel.’”

We know Franco’s performance was inspired by Dangerruss, Max Cady in Cape Fear, and RiFF RAFF, and that when RiFF RAFF saw the movie, his primary criticisms were (1) Franco stole some of his quotes (but they were old quotes so Franco could have them) and (2) “It needs more Spring Breakers 2.” That’s right: When you’re RiFF RAFF, you get to compare a movie to its nonexistent sequel.

Meanwhile, critics have begun to indulge in interpretations that will hopefully spin further out over the decades until Spring Breakers is ready for the Room 237 treatment.

Anisse Gross of the Rumpus calls the ending “an obvious metaphor for white suburban consumption of hip hop culture,” and in the damning article “Why Spring Breakers is the only American movie that matters right now” (sorry G.I. Joe: Retaliation), Sarah Nicole Prickett writes that Ashley Benson and Vanessa Hudgens fall for Alien, they “do not fall in love with Alien, or with Alien’s money, but with the realization that they are money.”

This is a great start, but let’s hope the critical conversation gets hijacked by the sort of obsessives who’ll watch the movie on repeat until they begin to involuntarily whisper “spring break forever” in their sleep. We already know Korine’s good with it. “There can be all those types of interpretations, it’s all part of it,” he told the A.V. Club’s Sam Adams. “I enjoy it.”

Here are a few questions to get the weirdos going: Why the civil rights lecture at the beginning? What does the phrase “I want penis” really mean? Is the whole second half of the movie a dream Selena Gomez has on the bus home? What does Alien’s illegal (and nontaxable) line of work say about immigration? How come Skrillex and Harmony Korine are never in the room at the same time? And: Is that a fucking wedding they’re robbing?

Let this be a lesson to psychologists everywhere: If you’re bored with the answers patients offer when you give them a Rorschach test, make sure your ink blots resemble bikini-clad Disney starlets.