Weston Cutter's Blog, page 17
October 16, 2013
We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy
WE KILLED by Yael Kohen
I can hardly remember a non-fiction piece that kept me as entertained as this book did. Starting with 1950’s comedic greats such as Phyllis Diller and Elaine May, the book, “A Very Oral History” as the cover says, covers the most important people in American comedy throughout the past 60 years, including the latest and greatest. Just a few of the big names of female (and male) actors, actresses and comediennes Kohen includes in the book: Joan Rivers, Mary Tyler Moore, Robin Williams, Margaret Cho, Lisa Kudrow, David Cross, Kristen Wiig, Lily Tomlin, Jay Leno, Maya Rudolph, Aubrey Plaza, and believe me, many many more.
Of course, the sheer amount of interviews, especially those from the major players themselves, are a major part of what make the book great, but what separates this from like anthologies is the way each chapter reads like a round table conversation. For instance, someone will say “Oh, we all learned jokes from her and learned to do things this way,” then someone will jump in, saying “That’s not at all where I got it from! Here’s what I really think!” or some producer/TV executive will go on about how difficult Roseanne was to work with, only to have Roseanne respond with a curt version of her own truth. It’s not a one-sided history, it’s a points of view collection.
Just stop, Sarah
Another great aspect of the book: Kohen’s romanticizing none of her subjects. After a spotlight section on Carol Burnett, for instance, she gives the disclaimer “Carol Burnett may have been a hilarious smash hit, but the broad style of comedy she performed on her show didn’t reflect the edgier sensibility that was bubbling underground.” Or after examining the rise of Sarah Silverman (who, in personal opinion, is cheap and god-awful), Kohen admits “ Silverman’s impact on female-driven comedy, in the meantime, has been profound, if not unfortunate… what is left is a sense that women are too focused on getting dirty and being raunchy than actually getting a laugh.” Of course, most women in the book are only applauded, as they should be. Maybe the most unbalanced character examined: Amy Poehler. Everyone seems to love and adore her, but then, who could blame them?
Too obscene for TV?
It’s fascinating to look back on women’s history in comedy from the people that saw behind the scenes. I mean, we can all check on the first seasons of Saturday Night Live on Netflix, but this book tells the story of sexist the writer’s room was during those years. For instance, interviewees point out numerous sketches that were supposed to included Belushi that the guy flat-out refused to do, simply because girls were the focus and he thought the girls weren’t funny. The book shows the struggles women are still facing in comedy, for instance, the fact that Tina Fey had to fight and graphically explain what old-school Kotex pads looked like before Lorne Michaels would trust her writing to go on air.
Don’t worry – the book doesn’t get into the too-far feminist, men-as-the-oppressor point of view. Women’s achievements are always put into context against men’s achievements, yet it doesn’t come off as a girls versus boys, it’s simply looking at the context of comedy as a whole. The times when they do criticize men are instances in which it’s hard to come up with a reverse argument – the guys really were assholes in the situation. Plus, with the inclusion of male comics (tons from Robin Williams, and generally on-the-point offerings from David Cross) who are praising female comics, it would be a hard fight to call this a girls-only tale.
The copy I read was Picador’s 2013 paperback issue, mostly the same as the 2012 original, plus a new introduction. The intro itself has more to offer than the typical author’s puff piece – Kohen points out the things everyone’s been thinking over the year (i.e. Tina and Amy’s hosting of the Golden Globes did laps around Seth McFarland’s Oscar performance), as well as reminding us of stupid things guys have said about female comediennes in the past. Still, the heart of the text is current as one could ever ask for, featuring interviews from rising female stars such as Ellie Kemper (Erin from The Office) and Aubrey Plaza (April from Parks & Rec and the star of the summer’s raunchiest film, The To-Do List).
I’m trying hard here to think of something to criticize. I mean, Kohen didn’t get interviews from Fey or Poehler (although you can bet she tried for weeks), although she still covers them both in detail. And she doesn’t talk about Lena Dunham, the country’s latest and greatest sitcom writer/director (seriously- did the first season of her show, Girls, not totally go a bit downhill after she gave up some of her creative freedom to work with Judd Apatow?), nor does she give Mindy Kaling her fair share of attention.
Really though, this book is fantastic. It’s hard to sit and read non-fiction for a long time, to learn as you’re entertained, but We Killed really masters the balance. It’s a great read.
October 10, 2013
Carrie Brown’s The Last First Day
THE LAST FIRST DAY by Carrie Brown
Carrie Brown, author of The Rope Walk and more, takes a personal look into a life in her latest novel, The Last First Day. Following the life, both beginnings and endings, of Ruth, the long-time wife of Peter, the head of a New England boy’s school, Brown captures the essence of a life in a beautiful way.
Rather than following typical birth-to-death narrative structure, Ruth’s story reveals itself in pieces, starting with some of the most memorable days and moments, going through early memories, hard moments, unwinding itself piece by piece. There’s flashes to the day Robert Frost gives a reading at the school, an event only arranged by Peter; flashes to the first time Ruth saw Peter, the first time she fell in love. There’s scenes from the days after Peter has to step down from his position in the school, days when the couple are forced to deal with his stroke and the after-effects, days when the two are young, still in schools of their own and have the whole world in front of them. There’s moments when Ruth reflects on what it means to have never known a mother, and moments when her and her father’s nomad lives seem like the only life Ruth could ever hope to have herself.
Fleshing out “the point” of this novel would be akin to pointing out a person on the street and asking what the point of their life is. You can learn what Ruth does: read the classics such as Wharton and Hardy, write her own novel and play, support her husband’s role in the school by filling in wherever she could help. You can learn about those to whom she is connected: family-wise, her mother remains unknown throughout her life; her father separated from her during her preteens after being locked away; friend-wise, the wise Dr. Wenning, an intellectual woman who acts as Ruth’s therapist, cheerleader and surrogate mother; love-wise, one man since 13, Peter. Scenes surrounding all mentioned make up the meat of the novel rather than a driving plot.
There’s plenty more hits and highlights I haven’t mentioned above, and three hundred pages of reason to read The Last First Day. Ultimately though, Brown’s prose is one you’ll have to experience first-hand, and Ruth’s life is a story you won’t want to pass up.
October 4, 2013
An Interview with Jen Michalski
Quick note about author Jen Michalski: She’s basically the sweetest person to interview ever. I called after reading her debut novel The Tide King, talked for over half-an-hour, then realized my audio recording crapped out after 10 minutes. She then re-answered all my questions over email (it’s cheap, but it’s foolproof), which is what you’re seeing written here.
Her kindness shouldn’t be too much of surprise; The Tide King is a novel that shows compassion and detail to even the grossest of characters and situations. The story starts with Stanley, a Polish young man, awkward enough before heading to the Second World War. There’s Calvin Johnson, his fellow soldier and the only friend he’s had in his life. When Johnson is hurt, on the verge of death, Stanley gives his friend a mysterious herb, after which, Johnson cannot die. He loses his leg at Normandy; it grows back. He suffers burns over his entire body before drowning in a lake; he awakes. He gets shot in the gut; the wound closes.
Johnson isn’t the only character that’s tasted the herb. Ela, a 9-year-old girl living with her mother in 19th century Poland, ingests a piece before being shot by soldiers. She survives this, later survives Nazis, and outlives everyone she knows.
It’s a story about loneliness, about the blessings and the curses of immortality and the struggle to fit in with the rest of the world. It’s less magical realism than plain-straight history with one change to the set of rules. Here’s a closer look, thanks to Jen:
What kind of research did you do for the novel? For instance, how did you write so realistically, even graphically, about Normandy Beach? How many events that you refer to in the story actually happened?
Well, once I had the sense of the principal players (Ela, in Poland, Stanley and Calvin in the European theater of World War II, Cindy and her journey to becoming a country music star), I was able to begin research. For Stanley and Calvin, I started out watching the miniseries Ken Burns’ “The War,” and then I tracked through his source material, reading memoirs from some of the veterans he interviewed (like Eugene Sledge’s In With the Old Breed, although he was part of the Pacific theater campaign). I read a lot of Stephen Ambrose’s books on World War II, and I did a lot of research on the Internet, finding out, for instance, how dead bodies and their personal effects were shipped home. For Ela, I used the Internet and also, strangely, James Michener’s Poland. The latter gave me a good sense of the politics of the partition era (and there really was a town, Reszel, in which the old Bishop’s castle burned). I also read The Girl in the Green Sweater for Ela because at one point I had her in hiding during the Holocaust (which she still does, but not in the sewage system, as the family in the memoir The Girl in the Green Sweater does). For Cindy, I read a lot about the country music sister-sister-brother trio, The Browns. One of the Brown girls wrote a memoir, Looking Back to See, and I also read a fictionalized account of the Browns called Nashville Chrome by Rick Bass. Finally, the fire Calvin helps to battle in Montana really happened, and it’s immortalized in Norman McLean’s nonfiction masterpiece Young Men and Fire.
So, in short, I did a lot of research for the book, much of which never made it into the story. I wound up writing 600 pages of very historical events, and only 300 I wound up using. But sometimes I’d find something out, like there had been a flood in the town in which the scene I was writing was taking place, and it would entirely alter the story, sometimes in a good, and sometimes in a not-so-good way. There’s 50 pages of backstory I cut how about how the herb literally came to America with Stanley’s mother, which ship, where they wound up in Baltimore, etc (it’s currently online as a four-part excerpt at Apt Journal). But I knew I wanted the book to be as historically accurate as possible because, in my mind, I was not writing a piece of magical realism in which the rules constantly changed at my whim.
In the novel, you make reference to another tale of the beautifully immortal (“The Picture of Dorian Gray”). What do you think the current trend of fantasy literature (I’m mainly talking Twilight Saga here) is doing to art like yours and Wilde’s – do you see it as belittling or just as a separate type of work?
I wasn’t really thinking about vampires or zombies or any of that when I was writing the book–I just wanted to explore the consequences of living forever, and the curse it would be. Thematically, I was interested in loneliness. As you mentioned, many of the characters are on the periphery, outside looking in, and ironically the only one who goes on to achieve any type of fame is Cindy the country music star, who is a midget. But, when I was speaking to a class at American, it hit me that Ela is some ways–a grown-up girl in a nine-year-old’s body–is very much like Claudia in Interview with a Vampire. She becomes an adult mentally but is never able to experience puberty or the joys–and sorrows–of becoming a woman. So I think my reading of Anne Rice in college must have informed the story a little bit, at least subconsciously.
Michalski and her puppy
What’s the story behind the title?
It’s based on King Cnut, whom Johnson’s love interest, Kate, is writing a paper on in school when they meet. Cnut was the king of England from 1016-1035, and there is a story about how he set up his throne on the shore and ordered the tide to halt before his feet. When it didn’t, he was recorded as saying “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name.” So he is, in effect, The Tide King, and so is Johnson, because he has this great power of immortality that is completely useless. I think it’s a theme that resonates with me in this day and age because we’re a society obsessed with being young, living forever, and I wanted to literally examine the consequences of that. Those who live forever in The Tide King are kind of ghosts on earth, living in the shadows, never aging, watching their friends and lovers die. There’s no closure.
You asked me about the ending, and whether I wanted the reader to view it as sad or hopeful. I think the ending is sad, but I also think it’s hopeful. Because, mortal or immortal, all we really have is our hope to move us forward, whether it’s hope that we’ll find a cure for immortality, in Calvin and Ela’s case, or whether we’ll fall in love, or whether we’ll be happy. So I tried to end on the character’s hopes, no matter how slim those hopes were. It seemed the most realistic ending in what I felt was a very realistic book.
Finally, can you tell me more about the Baltimore lit scene? Why do you choose to live/write there?
I was born in Baltimore and always thought I would leave, but I wound up here many years ago after school and am still here, and, no longer to my surprise, I might die here, too. The scene is not too big and insular like New York; it’s just right. There are a lot of writers here, and they’re very supportive of each other. It’s not as cutthroat or isolated. We’re a very social group that run reading series and play together on softball teams, and you’ll find many of us at dinner on the weekends. Many of us teach at local colleges. Baltimore is the best little town in America, by the water, with steamed crabs and snowballs, and no one I know who comes here ever leaves. It’s like flypaper.
October 1, 2013
Nick Offerman’s Guide to ‘Delicious Living’
PADDLE YOUR OWN CANOE by Nick Offerman
First off, I’m a huge fan of Nick Offerman’s comedy. I firmly believe “Parks & Rec” is the smartest show currently on TV with its amazing character cast, including Offerman’s libertarian-gun-loving man’s man Ron Swanson. His character is hilarious- take some internet meme proof:
I’ve also seen Offerman live while he was touring/premiering an independent film he directed/starred in while in Chicago. Guy’s a hoot in person, too, albeit less right-winged, more mussy-hair and unbuttoned flannel-shirt than his Swanson character. So when I saw Offerman was putting out an autobiography-slash-guide to “fundamentals for delicious living,” I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it.
The nicest way I can put it: Offerman should really just stick to acting and the occasional stand-up show. I tried really hard to enjoy this book, and for about the first 25, maybe 30 pages, I was really digging it. How his autobiography/guideline works is Offerman spends the first half of each chapter telling a story about his life (growing up in Minooka, a suburb of Chicago’s suburb Joliet; working hard outdoors; being an outstanding athlete; landing early acting jobs; etc.) and the second half giving ‘advice.’ I put ‘advice’ in a quote because I didn’t exactly want to say lecture (but really, I want to say lecture).
There’s this part of one of David Foster Wallace’s novels (I want to say The Pale King, but I’m not 100% on that) where the character looks back on when he was younger and how he had a way of always painting himself as the hero of every story he told and now that he’s older, has come to hate the way he did that. That’s the problem I have with the first part of every single chapter of Offerman’s book: In every single story, he’s the hero.
I get the concept of an autobiography is that one is always going to be writing themself in the position of protagonist – I have no problem with that aspect. What I’m saying is the best protagonists, the ones that really stick with you, really cause you to connect, are the ones that show vulnerability, the ones that show weakness along with strength. Offerman never does this. In every story, he’s the cool guy and everyone who isn’t with him is a loser. Granted, he admits in some stories that he was immature, a buffon or an asshole in the scenario, but he’s only using that admittance in the first part of sentences like generally go something like: “At this point, I was a completely ignorant asshole, BUT STILL. Did they have to be like that?” Like, didn’t these people KNOW he was the protagonist of the story?
Still, it’s not as bad as the second half of each chapter. It’s weird – Offerman tries to borrow the same humor as his character, yet, he doesn’t commit fully-heartedly. He’s just a guy using the authoritative character he hides behind as a shield to put all his own views out there. Like Swanson, Offerman stands firm to each and every one of his opinions or guidelines to life, but is somehow ruder about saying people who are doing it another way are idiots. Probably the biggest for-instance is his 8-page tirade against Christians shoving their beliefs down the throats of others. I get it, Christians can be the worst, especially the Westboro-types. Still, the way Offerman attacks the group as a whole, then asks that they let people believe what they want doesn’t balance out. (In a later chapter, he makes the exception that everyone should pretend to be a Christian if it means you can bang a hot Christian girl, as he did for the last years of high-school, all the while knowing better than the bullshit that was his youth group).
In the big bathroom mirrors of my college dorm, girls put up decorated papers filled with quotes from Tina Fey’s Bossypants. Other girls wrote thesis essays on humor using the same book as a primary source. I doubt anyone but maybe a few male college froshes will be quoting from this book. Unfortunately for us all, it’s going to be a few years before Fey writes another memoir or Amy Poehler gets crackin’ on her own, but if you’re looking to Paddle Your Own Canoe to help in the meantime, I’d have to suggest your time can be better spent elsewhere.
September 27, 2013
Two New Non-Fics and a Reprint of an Old
Besides being non-fiction, released in the same month, written by experts in their respective fields and being completely worth your time if you’re slightly interested in either topic, these two new books have really nothing in common. The first, The Urban Bestiary by Lyanda Lynn Haupt, is a biological and fantastical look at tracking, caring for and living with the most common mammals and birds found on city streets; the second, Average Is Over by Tyler Crowen is about money, work and the future of business economics. I’m an expert in neither, yet both were accessible and entertaining, as I’m sure they will be to you as well. Then, there’s Joyce Maynard’s “At Home in the World,” 15 years old, yet relevant still.
THE URBAN BESTIARY: Encountering the Everyday Wild by Lyanda Lynn Haupt
I know, I know the old adage, but really, I was into this book because of it’s cover, and the insides did not disappoint. I’ve always considered myself to be an animal-lover – I could never hook a fish despite growing up in a MN family that loves the sport; I thoroughly enjoyed freaking out other girls at the lake by picking up/kissing frogs I found; etc – but my love, as I’m willing to bet yours, is nothing compared to Haupt’s. This girl is reaching Zooey-Deschanel-levels of adorkability when it comes to caring for critters. Seriously – in a chapter about pigeons, she shares a story about a homemade concoction she made to feed abandoned pigeon chicks that she raised in her home.
Her bestiary contains chapters on coyotes, moles, bears, owls, pigeons, sparrows, crows, trees, chickens and more, with most chapters holding the same sorts of info: how common these animals are where; the trouble they can cause; the good they do; how relatively cute/ugly the animal is and why; common misunderstandings about the animals along with ancient folklore (these are gorgeous stories, like one about the hummingbird being created from a ball of leftover decorations, or the coyotes feeling sorry for furless humans and striving to keep them warm); anatomical specifications and tracking signs.
Some of the info is horrifying, for instance, the fact that there’s apparently a substantial coyote population thriving in Chicago (like great, now when I walk home at night I have to watch out for guns, rapists AND coyotes). Some is comforting: coyotes have only killed one adult in recorded history; that rumor that there’s one rat for every human living in a city is an over-exaggeration. Maybe the most interesting is urban myths most of us believe about animals most of us wrongly believe, i.e. birds cannot “smell a human” on chicks we touch and abandon them, that bats are a type of bird or that owls can turn their heads 360 degrees.
Sure, some of the information is a little more than most of the population needs, for instance, that recipe for baby-pigeon food (which, she never really explained Why) or drawn specifics on the difference of footprints between sparrows and swallows or foxes and coyotes. At times, it seems like this book would make way more sense if I lived in Portland- especially the chapter on pigeons, in which she says “urban chickens are so hip they’re almost passé.” Yeah, baby chicks are cute, but whose landlord is gonna go for that? (Note: it’s not even a big-city thing; when I was writing for a small-town Iowa newspaper, even the city councils in small-town Iowa had strict limitations on who could keep chickens on their property).
Still, this book is adorable, practical, magical and totally worth a read. Even if you’re not crazy about rats or, in my case especially, pigeons, this book shows ways to deal with the animals best, keep them safe and out of your space and live in peace. On the other side, if you’re looking to spot a coyote or a hawk, there are great tips for that as well. Heck, if you are even ambivalent about animals, this book’s a great read and will make you appreciate the critters in your city even more.
AVERAGE IS OVER by Tyler Crowen
It’s not as doom-and-gloom as the title would lead you to believe. In fact, many parts of economist Tyler Crowen’s latest book made me feel a lot better about myself, even feel better about my generation’s future. I mean, EVERYONE is telling us Social Security is gonna run out, Medicare is basically going to kill anyone currently less than 40 and I’ll be the rare exception if I ever have a job I love. Crowen doesn’t say the opposite, exactly, but he does explain why it’s all going to be okay.
The quick and dirty take-away to future success, according to Crowen: Learn computers. Make them your buddies. Think of them less as tools, more as teammates. It makes sense, really. Even in today’s college, basically everyone is now taking some kind of computer-training class (if not a direct Computer Science course, they’re doing something like “Technology in the Classroom” for Education Majors, “Digital Marketing” for PR kids and requiring Art majors take a stab at graphic design and Photoshop), because, as we’ve heard over and over, the only advantage we have over the already-established working class is our knowledge and embrace of the technical. Instead of marketing ourselves by what we can bring to the team, Crowen believes we’re going to have to market ourselves by how well we get along and are willing to work with computers.
Actually, the book’s more about computers than anything average or high or low. It’s about how the people with the best command of computers and technology are going to be the upper class, the people with a good-enough grasp and acceptance will get by and a large group of people will be stuck doing the mundane jobs computers won’t be able to perform in a cost-effective manner. That “average” American life – Family of Mom, Dad, 2.5 kids and Fido living in their own home, white picket-fence – may be harder to reach in the future, especially for kids majoring in Liberal Arts and other things not so intertwined with machines.
Redemption comes when you add in the advantages of the next digital age, however. Education costs are going to go down with the rise of online classes; folks are going to be spending less on housing, choosing instead to live in more modest settings; it’ll be more like the “85%” doing less fighting against the super-wealthy, because fun is going to be cheaper, and with less job stress, we’re going to have more time for it. Some of Crowen’s theories seem a bit far-fetched, more hypothesis than actual data-driven predictions, but for the most part, the world he’s envisioning seems fast-paced, fun and exciting for anyone willing to risk that white fence and embrace the future.
AT HOME IN THE WORLD by Joyce Maynard
Fifteen years after its first printed edition, Joyce Maynard’s memoir is as haunting as ever. Seriously – it’s almost unbelievable how creepy this story is. At times, I swore it couldn’t be real; people can’t really get away with this kind of thing and girls can’t become functioning people capable of writing after all she’s been through.
For those of you who haven’t had the chance to read “At Home In The World” yet (which I suggest you change immediately), here’s the gist: Joyce Maynard has been through hell and back. From an early age, she learned how to handle and care for an alcoholic father and take the pressures of a severely controlling mother who noticed every pound gained and minute wasted. It wasn’t all bad—her folks fostered creativity, imagination and supported her drive to success. Still, there were those 6 dark hours of her father’s worst alcoholic states (which her mother calculate to be only about 3% of her week, using this figure as a retort to a negative passage Joyce wrote in her diary).
Joyce grows up successfully, gets accepted at Harvard, Princeton and her ultimate choice, Yale. As a freshman, she lands the cover story of The New York Times Magazine with an autobiographical article called “An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back On Life,” and it’s all awesome, especially when she begins receiving encouraging letters from J.D. Salinger, in the height of popularity following Catcher In The Rye. Joyce and J.D., or Jerry, as she earns the delight of calling him, begin to write daily, then call daily, enjoy extended visits, fall in love, and then, early in her sophomore year, Joyce leaves Yale to move in with Salinger.
It sounds wonderful. Seriously, 18-year-old me would have been all like THIS IS THE BEST THING THAT HAS EVER AND WILL EVER HAPPEN TO ME. So here’s the part that sucks: Salinger is a monster. I mean, more than the fact that he’s 53 while she’s 18 (Joyce is only 2 years older than his own daughter), he’s controlling, demanding and keeps Joyce so separated from the rest of the world, she’s not even supposed to give publishers her phone number. He tells her what to think, what to like (Lawrence Welk music over Joan Baez), what to hate (ice cream, Coke, pizza) and who to be. He makes himself the center of her life, then, after a year together, sends her away. No explanation necessary. Oh, and then later in the story, Joyce finds out she wasn’t alone in this: Salinger wrote and seduced other girls, often when they were 18.
It’s terrifying, especially for a girl not that much older than Joyce herself was when it all went down. We’re not old enough to have been more than one or maybe two serious relationships, we’re not old enough to know the warning signs of a relationship going wrong or even fully be aware of the way a man is supposed to treat us. It’s horrifying to think Salinger, the man who wrote about Holden Caulfield trying to scrub out graffiti so kids don’t read it, wanting to catch running children and keep them safe could go on to exploit girls like this.
In Picador’s latest release, the story’s the same (as it should be: Joyce wrote it perfect the first time), only difference is a new preface offering new insight into how the girl’s doing. Also included in the back is that essay that started it all, “An Eighteen-Year-Old…”, which I’d suggest reading before you get into the story – it sets a great context for the times.
Here’s the thing: I’m so glad this book is back out, back in the spotlight. There’s a whole generation of girls just like me that haven’t heard her story – it’s been buried under our college-years of discovering “Nine Stories” and “Franny and Zoey” while this memoir holds much greater lessons about life, love and endurance.
September 24, 2013
Jhumpa Lahiri’s THE LOWLAND
Born in Calcutta only 15 months apart, brothers Subhash and Udayan are inseparable. Although they are nearly identical, the brothers couldn’t be more different – elder Subhash is loyal, serious and obedient to the rules placed upon him, choosing to move to America to separate himself from the turmoil tearing through 1960s India; younger Udayan is adventurous, idealistic and charismatic, staying in his homeland and fighting with rebel forces against his own corrupt government. Their bond spans decades, continents, lasting even after death in Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest novel, The Lowland.
It’s the type of book you can’t get out of your head – better to finish it right away than leave the next page unread. Yet, Lahiri’s writing is so gorgeous, it’s hard to move on to the next sentence before fully savoring the last. On every page, you would feel satisfied if it were the last, the story would feel intricate and complete at the conclusion of each paragraph, yet you’re thankful there is more to know, more of these lives to see in upcoming chapters.
Although the events in Calcutta, the terrifying and true stories of this time in India’s story, are what set in the story in motion, this is not a story of war or a story of a foreign land. It’s a story that you’ll see as your own, not as a whole, not in the specifics, but in a small part, in one sense or another.
The brothers part ways – Udayan going to school in India, meeting the love of his life Gauri while getting more and more involved with the revolutionary movements, Subhash earning advanced degrees in America, living in his own pattern – until Subhash receives news from home that his brother has been killed, official punishment for his actions. Subhash returns home and makes the decision that when he goes back to America, Gauri, now pregnant with Udayan’s child, must come with him. Marrying Gauri is the only way he can keep her safe and grant her freedom.
There’s heroes in this book – Subhash, for sacrificing his own right to a marriage and children of his own in order to fulfill the role left vacant by his brother, caring for Gauri and Bela, Udayan’s daughter for as long as they both let him; Udayan, for his sacrificing all for his ideals – yet, there are no villains. We cannot fault Subhash even as Udayan feels abandoned by his brother leaving for America, cannot fault Gauri for being unable to fully love Bela, the only remaining piece of Udayan she has left, and cannot fault Bela for turning cold and guarded at 12, when her mother leaves for good, heading to the opposite American coast to live her own life.
I don’t know what else to say. This book is Gorgeous. I savored each sentence then hungered for the next. Here’s a for instance: When I HAD to put this book in my backpack and get off the subway, I pouted a little, knowing it would be at least fifteen more minutes before I could pick the novel up again. It sounds silly, but start reading this book and you’ll see. You’ll feel just the same.
September 18, 2013
Four New-ish
(A quick note: new poetry of mine’s in the new/great Collagist and in the equally new/great Banango Street; also, here are reviews of Lindsay Hunter’s DON’T KISS ME and Alissa Nutting’s TAMPA)
I was not part of the cult of Special Topics—I don’t know why I missed it, but I did, and so Pessl’s sophomore outing didn’t mean all that much to me—it was just a book that was gonna get some attention. It’s easy, after reading this, to get why the book was so anticipated, and it’s clear that Pessl’s got more than enough talent to pull of some great, great things in narrative.
However: holy hell is this an overdone book. It’s not *bad* at all: it’s just (as PTAnderson shouted) Too fucking too! The book’s long by at least a hundred pages, and there’s a handholding going on, from author to reader, that’s frustrating hugely: things are made clear as shitty crystal, to the point that whatever minor satisfactions could’ve been offered to the intrepid, putting-things-together-on-her-own reader are totally gone, sacrificed for the sake of Big, Obvious Constructed Narrative. The specifics matter to a degree: there’s a filmmaker who apparently harmed the people on his movie sets, and his horror films are so shocking, so horrific, they’re screened clandestinely. Fine enough. And the filmmaker’s being investigated by a writer whose professional life was destroyed after he made unsupportable accusations about said director. And now the writer’s trying to Get The Story, and so the whole thing’s this big detective ploy, but it’s underwhelming as stale, lukewarm coffee: the novel’s not even bad so much as eh. Whole sections are skippable. Any ‘surprises’ are so whatever-ish you almost feel bad. It’s a watery mess, Night Film. Here’s to hoping next time out Pessl’s edited down to diamond—there’s a potentially good story here, but it’s so larded you’d be forgiven for not even being able to tell.
Holy shit read this book. Read this book. Here’s how good the book is: I’m a 34 year old college professor and this thing’s about 17 year old high school cheerleaders and the dark jockeying done among young women and I couldn’t get enough of this thing. Couldn’t read it fast enough. The story’s superb, sure, but the writing, my god: if Megan Abbott’s next book isn’t splashed everywhere and made as big a deal of as, say, Gone Girl, I want my money back (you hear me book industry!??!?). This fucking thing’s merciless. The details hardly matter: just get it and read it. If this isn’t the year’s most propulsive read, I’ll eat my boots whole.
The Mushroom Hunters by Langdon Cook
Guy follows foraged-for mushrooms from the folks who pick them illegally to the middle-men who get them to restaurants. It’s really, really good, and if you care about 1) mushrooms, 2) foraging for food, or 3) the odd ways in which regulations affect damn near everything, do it. The book’s really good, honestly (Cook’s an admitted fungi-freak, and his enthusiasm keeps this thing hustling where a drier, more disinterested guide would be just lost), but you’ve sort of got to love the specifics (mushrooms and the woods they grow in) to fall for the thing (maybe not, honestly: there’s a little bit about the middle-men, the providers of weirdly-sourced food and how that food makes its way to high-end restaurants, and it’s worth it for that as well). Anyway: good.
Marking Modern Times by Alexis McCrossen
I’m a softie for most things horological, so this one was right in my wheelhouse, but the real coolness of what McCrossen’s doing here is addressing the moment at which the table for modernism was set by standardizing time. It’s a weird notion to even wrap your head around (as McCrossen points out right at the start), given that we live at a time in which we’re surrounded by (arguably) too many devices telling us the time—weird to consider the historical moment at which time not only wasn’t necessarily standardized but wasn’t all that public (to say nothing of the fact that time being so minutely [ha ha!] divided up is a recent-ish thing: did a 38-day trek into unknown territory in 1826 really necessitate knowing the instant one arrived at the Pacific?).
What McCrossen does best in Marking Modern Times is address this wonderful and interesting historical moment in which public clocks—all those old glorious relics on buildings in downtowns—became Things, became How Things Were Done, and then what they were eclipsed by, and how and why that moment has passed (consider the fact that measuring accurate time mechanically was a hell of a feat, and that the modern equivalent—some huge-faced thing with digital guts as boringly accurate as my iphone—can’t hold a candle, inspiration-wise). It’s a riveting, nostalgia-inducing read: I happen to have my share of mechanical watches, but if I didn’t, this book would be all the inducement necessary to prompt the purchase of a score of them.
Four New-ish Ones
I was not part of the cult of Special Topics—I don’t know why I missed it, but I did, and so Pessl’s sophomore outing didn’t mean all that much to me—it was just a book that was gonna get some attention. It’s easy, after reading this, to get why the book was so anticipated, and it’s clear that Pessl’s got more than enough talent to pull of some great, great things in narrative.
However: holy hell is this an overdone book. It’s not *bad* at all: it’s just (as PTAnderson shouted) Too fucking too! The book’s long by at least a hundred pages, and there’s a handholding going on, from author to reader, that’s frustrating hugely: things are made clear as shitty crystal, to the point that whatever minor satisfactions could’ve been offered to the intrepid, putting-things-together-on-her-own reader are totally gone, sacrificed for the sake of Big, Obvious Constructed Narrative. The specifics matter to a degree: there’s a filmmaker who apparently harmed the people on his movie sets, and his horror films are so shocking, so horrific, they’re screened clandestinely. Fine enough. And the filmmaker’s being investigated by a writer whose professional life was destroyed after he made unsupportable accusations about said director. And now the writer’s trying to Get The Story, and so the whole thing’s this big detective ploy, but it’s underwhelming as stale, lukewarm coffee: the novel’s not even bad so much as eh. Whole sections are skippable. Any ‘surprises’ are so whatever-ish you almost feel bad. It’s a watery mess, Night Film. Here’s to hoping next time out Pessl’s edited down to diamond—there’s a potentially good story here, but it’s so larded you’d be forgiven for not even being able to tell.
Holy shit read this book. Read this book. Here’s how good the book is: I’m a 34 year old college professor and this thing’s about 17 year old high school cheerleaders and the dark jockeying done among young women and I couldn’t get enough of this thing. Couldn’t read it fast enough. The story’s superb, sure, but the writing, my god: if Megan Abbott’s next book isn’t splashed everywhere and made as big a deal of as, say, Gone Girl, I want my money back (you hear me book industry!??!?). This fucking thing’s merciless. The details hardly matter: just get it and read it. If this isn’t the year’s most propulsive read, I’ll eat my boots whole.
The Mushroom Hunters by Langdon Cook
Guy follows foraged-for mushrooms from the folks who pick them illegally to the middle-men who get them to restaurants. It’s really, really good, and if you care about 1) mushrooms, 2) foraging for food, or 3) the odd ways in which regulations affect damn near everything, do it. The book’s really good, honestly (Cook’s an admitted fungi-freak, and his enthusiasm keeps this thing hustling where a drier, more disinterested guide would be just lost), but you’ve sort of got to love the specifics (mushrooms and the woods they grow in) to fall for the thing (maybe not, honestly: there’s a little bit about the middle-men, the providers of weirdly-sourced food and how that food makes its way to high-end restaurants, and it’s worth it for that as well). Anyway: good.
Marking Modern Times by Alexis McCrossen
I’m a softie for most things horological, so this one was right in my wheelhouse, but the real coolness of what McCrossen’s doing here is addressing the moment at which the table for modernism was set by standardizing time. It’s a weird notion to even wrap your head around (as McCrossen points out right at the start), given that we live at a time in which we’re surrounded by (arguably) too many devices telling us the time—weird to consider the historical moment at which time not only wasn’t necessarily standardized but wasn’t all that public (to say nothing of the fact that time being so minutely [ha ha!] divided up is a recent-ish thing: did a 38-day trek into unknown territory in 1826 really necessitate knowing the instant one arrived at the Pacific?).
What McCrossen does best in Marking Modern Times is address this wonderful and interesting historical moment in which public clocks—all those old glorious relics on buildings in downtowns—became Things, became How Things Were Done, and then what they were eclipsed by, and how and why that moment has passed (consider the fact that measuring accurate time mechanically was a hell of a feat, and that the modern equivalent—some huge-faced thing with digital guts as boringly accurate as my iphone—can’t hold a candle, inspiration-wise). It’s a riveting, nostalgia-inducing read: I happen to have my share of mechanical watches, but if I didn’t, this book would be all the inducement necessary to prompt the purchase of a score of them.
September 16, 2013
A Bobcat With No Bite
A review of Bobcat by Rebecca Lee
I
tried with this one, man. I really did.
Considering that a lot of the reviews I’ve posted over the past year have been especially prickish (not intentionally; I mean, I don’t set out with the intention of disliking a book, it just sort of happens, and this year it has happened a lot), I tried to engage with Rebecca Lee’s Bobcat as much as I could, to understand why critics were so keen on it–why, for example, the NYT’s Robin Romm claimed that “these seven long tales demonstrate Lee’s prodigious talent for creating not just great lines but intricately structured, impressively plotted worlds.” But in the end I determined that I must be much more of a philistine when it comes to literature than I thought, because despite my best efforts, I couldn’t find much praiseworthy about this book.
I will agree with Romm that the prose is lovely–crisp, precise, thoughtful. Lee’s sentences are florid and demonstrate an excellent sense of control and rhythm. Beyond this, however, there’s isn’t much to take away from the book; the stories themselves unravel unceremoniously, the characters all based on the same tired template–white middle-class academics who are good at thinking about stuff, but not much else.
The book opens with the title story “Bobcat,” in which friends gather for a dinner party hosted by a New York lawyer, during which the tenuousness of their relationships–maybe even relationships in general? wink wink!–is exemplified through a number of subtle exchanges that make it clear this is going to be a book about ideas, not necessarily about stuff happening. Which is perfectly fine.
The problem, however, is that from here on out it is the same idea, or iterations of it, over and over again. In six of the seven stories, the main characters are either students or professors at liberal arts universities, facing the kinds of pseudo-dilemmas that only academics–namely tenure-track humanities folks–have the time or energy to care about: a student debates whether or not to present a plagiarized paper at a symposium; members of a disciplinary committee discuss the fate of a radical (translation: only slightly more eccentric than your average NPR listener) econ professor; a young woman discusses the pros and cons of psychotherapy with her Romanian boyfriend. The narrators of each story are more or less interchangeable, as are inexcusably large pieces of plot: roughly half of the major conflicts in this collection, for instance, derive from cultural miscommunications between American narrators and their international counterparts. Problem is, it’s almost always the same miscommunication.
The bigger problem here, though, of which this might be a symptom, is the author’s obsessive need to constantly remind us of how worldly and well-educated her characters are. Actually, this isn’t really a problem in itself, except that it is done to such a degree that after a while the characters are hardly relatable anymore. Or, for that matter, interesting. Why, for example, would the narrator of the title story always be reminded of a quote from the famous archeologist Ernest Becker at the end of a meal? Or consider this line from “World Party”:
“Just the night before, the Nobel Prize had gone to the Bulgarian writer Elias Canetti for his book Crowds and Power, which I happened to have read…but it was a lesser play of his–called Their Days Are Numbered–that I recall when I think back to that day…”
I’m not sure why we need to know that the narrator has read this particular book, especially if it’s not even the focus of the reference. Nonetheless, Lee does this a lot; each story is littered with literary, art, and philosophy allusions, none of which ever illustrate any overarching points or carry us anywhere we need to go in the story but instead serve as reminders that these are some brainy motherfuckers we’re reading about here.
I realize, of course, that’s I’m probably coming across as a bitter philistine here, and that may very well be the case. But I think part of the issue here is that I work in academia, as does Lee herself, and as such I don’t get the sense that what she’s doing in Bobcat requires much vision. On the word level, she comes across as immensely capable, but in terms of plot and structure she seems disinclined to take any risks, to step out of a pretty well-tread comfort zone. This isn’t to say that you can’t write about your profession. Of course you can. Write what you know, as the adage goes. But something needs to happen in whatever it is you’re writing, and that’s just not the case here. Bobcat may aspire to be a book about ideas, but it doesn’t take a literature scholar to know that some ideas are just really, really dull.
September 12, 2013
Mass Poetry Roundup
(Elsewhere: here’s a poem of mine recently at Verse Daily, which is always rad, and I recently won the Burnside Review Chapbook Contest, which is thrilling and I’m super pumped and pleased as hell that Ed Skoog was the judge and that it’s coming out through such a rad press [they're publishing Matthew Lippman's next one, just fyi]. Also, here’s a review of Sara Peters’s 1996.)
It’s been a great, great year for poetry, and I’ve realized of late the coverage here at Corduroy’s been terribly small. Hicok’s new one, sure, but otherwise it’s been thin (I didn’t even mention the amazing Jennifer Boyden’s The Declarable Future, which should’ve been heralded—if you didn’t catch it, attend to that). To rectify, here’s a poetry purge of sorts: books that’ve been kicking around the desk for the last good while. All of these are excellent and worth much time and energy on your part.
Laird’s last collection On Purpose was pretty amazing dynamite—a hard-edged glimpse of the beauties and payments of coupledom and domesticity. Go Giants feels, unsurprisingly, deeper into the same thicket he was before exploring: these are poems of fatherhood, poems which attempt to frame the vagaries and banality of the day-to-day into something Bigger, something With Meaning. There’s an epic reach to these (epic comes up in the blurbs, and one wishes almost to evade using the term, but it’s apt)—the last chunk of the book is taken up by “Progress,” a long multi-titled work which tries to scope in on the term and what it presently might mean or be, given all possible subtractions. “Progress” is certainly incredible, in its way, but Laird’s work hits hardest in smaller moments, like in “Talking in Kitchen” when he writes
When Michael has left we head upstairs
and the baby’s asleep and we’ve talked ourselves out
and we feel as we feel every day of the year
like nobody knows how we feel and it’s fine,
because our secrets live near the secrets of others,
and our wants are not so mean.
The chattiness is almost a sham: what Laird’s doing is uncovering and examining the lasting aspects of days gorgeously.
Thresherphobe by Mark Halliday
I’m new to Halliday, frustratingly, though am glad to have gotten on board now (plus he wrote a great essay on Tony Hoagland for the latest Green Mountains Review). It’s easy to chalk Halliday in a similar terrain as Laird and say he’s writing about domestic stuff, but Halliday’s is more rambling, more basic: there’s sorrority softball, recollections of football in youth, Playboy playmates, the works. Shot through all of that, however, is death, the creep of mortality and how the awareness of the creep colors everything. For instance, in “Yvette Vickers,” the poem about the playmate, Halliday starts
Suppose you hold in one hand the Jily 1959 Playboy
in which the Playmate was Yvette Vickers
boyn Yvette Vedder in Kansas City in 1928
and in the other hand the New York Times of May 5, 2001,
with an article entitled “Mummified Body Found
in Former Actress’s Home”—
The poem doesn’t ultimately try to force these diametrics into something *larger* than their existence, which is a weirdly cool trick: poetry in the vein of what Halliday does can often try (and faily) to make Grand Sweeping Claims about simple/small things (too many examples to list). Instead, the poem ends up acknowledging the difficulty of squaring such things: “what do you have? Insight? Something fresh to say? / What you have is evidence that Time is a creep— / but you knew that.” There’s a grim feeling in the book—a way in which the corrosion of time’s passing spikes the punch of all experience—but what Halliday’s going at his best here is trying to wrest or discover some way not even to sweeten it, but to acknowledge it, to treat and feel the plus and the minus, whatever that might mean.
The Year of What Now by Brian Russell
Oh man, this one’s a hard, hard book. Gorgeous and amazing in lots of ways, but damn hard. The book is a collection of poems all centered around living through medical trauma, specifically the narrator/husband living through the medical trauma of his wife. The book is in its way traumatic itself (maybe not: I’m deeply superstitious, and I can’t even say certain words in sentences which include the names of any of my beloveds, and this book kicks that door right down, obviously). The poetry is beautiful and jagged, in the way the best poetry will have to be when written from the point of view of someone watching their beloved suffer: uselessness comes into view, but not just the personal sort: not what can the husband do, but what can any of us do in the face of the fact of decline, the way “what you don’t know can hurt you”. This book should be on every shelf, though it’s a hell of a hard read.
This is a gorgeously thick and complex book of poetry which, for my money, has to be among the most difficult to speak about among books released this year: Darst’s DANCE has such an involved and specific structure to it that speaking of individual poems or moments in the poetry feels a bit akin to speaking about certain orchestral moments in symphonies. The work that’d be required to make the potential reader understand the significance of the first line on page 70 (“I’m the one who’s always right: the Author. Now I’ll burn you; you’ll feel little bites.”) is almost hard to even process, at least for me. Very briefly, Darst is using found sources (magazines, tarot cards) for both language and structural purposes, and the result is a multi-channel (in all senses) half-montage, half-overwhelm. It’s always sort of easy to peg work as difficult-but-worth-it, and I hate to do it, but here we are. Try it. (Also: Coffee House Press is kicking ass at weird books: this, the new Dan Beachy-Quick novel, Travis Nichols’ The More You Ignore Me [an entire novel written as a Facebook posting]; these guys are firing on all cylinders).
The banal/easy way with this one would be to say it’s about a young woman discovering/figuring out the world around her—femininity, beauty, Truth, etc. It’s a paltry summation of a book that’s trying with more ferocity than many to tackle such subject matter. There’s a sharpness to Edwards’s stuff that’s disarming, shocking: she presents things in ways that feel exploded, reconfigured, made essentially strange. Here’s her “I Know No Ceremony”:
for Christmas Eve dinner
for one. Should I summon
my mother’s sugar cookie recipe,
roll out the precise dough
of my childhood, cut it into
Santas and evergreens
to eat with Thai delivery
and the dregs of gifted wine?
Should I adopt a church
with a children’s pagean
and off-key singing? Maybe
walk far into the deep cold
until I hear a voice like
God telling me to go back
home—kiss the scratched
wood floor for being mine
and there and covered
in my very own dust?
That searching aspect animating things here—the drive to intuit or unearth a larger schematics or system—runs through Edwards’s stuff, which is the glory: though the book focuses on specifics, the hunger humming beneath is so yes-inducing and true-feeling you’re swept the whole thing in hours, glad. Expect+hope for more soon from her.
Here’s the Chelotti poem I fell for first:
I am looking out over
one of the first real gray
days of autumn listening
to a podcast in which
these two men are talking about
the phenomenon of ball lightning.
I love ball lightning because (still)
no photographic evidence exists.
It was because of ball lightning
that before everyone carried cameras
I carried a camera hoping
someone would ask me why
I was carrying a camera.
No one ever did, but now,
older, I am grateful to find
that my loneliness
accommodates my desire, and not,
as it used to be, vice versa.
There are quite a few more Chelotti poems for your perusal just a search away, and certainly you should get to them, but you should very seriously consider purchasing X promptly, because the magic of Chelotti’s poems, as evidenced by the above, ends up being infinitely more powerful when it’s cumulative. The above poem’s representative: Chelotti’s often chatty-ish, and often basically observational, but the trick of his that’s so cool is the number of turns he makes: a lesser poem would’ve taken the off-ramp offered by talking merely about the significance of unphotographed phenomena, or maybe even about the sort of nice synchronous aspect of hearing strangers talk about something you yourself care deeply about, but Chelotti gets deeper, gets into the animating aspects of why all this stuff matters and has happened to him. X feels like a tremendous gift for exactly this reason: the details covered are interesting enough, sure, but how Dan Chelotti works with them, how he torques things toward addressing deeper aspects of wanting and connecting, that’s the magic here. It’s a hell of a great book (and gorgeous to book, because McSweeney’s). Here’s another young writer to hope for much more from.
