Weston Cutter's Blog, page 22

RAGE IS BACK + FREE BOOK

There’s a good chance Adam Mansbach’s name might be familiar to you if you’re a consumer of popular culture, and that reason is this:

So, be appraised: that’s what this guy most recently got attention for, but you should know that, prior to (presumably) WTF fame for Go the F to Sleep, Mansbach was writing award-winning fiction. I’m frustrated that I didn’t know this, which frustration has nothing to do with the very clever/funny GTFTS kids book (which book I only recently began to realize the utility of, given that I’ve only now got a three month-old child) and everything to do with the fact that Adam Mansbach’s the writer of what’ll absolutely be one of 2013′s most engaging and fun and nostalgic books, Rage is Back.

Likely you’ll be hearing lots about Rage is Back—if there’s justice, it’ll garner a good wedge of the attention-pie that Mansbach’s last publication did. Before getting into much else, I want to highlight Michael A White’s comments from Amazon (I’m typing this up at 10:10pm on Sunday, January 13th, at which point MAWhite’s review is one of 4 at Amazon): “a novel written in “Blackface” by a white adult Jewish author narrated in second person by a “mulatto” inner city teenager ……skip this confusing book by an author who should stick to telling HIS OWN STORIES”

Let’s be real clear: MAWhite’s comments contain some accuracy: Rage is second-person, and the narrator, Dondi, is biracial. That’s 100% true. Mansbach’s author photo sure make him seem white, but I’m not gonna guess on his religion. So that’s all that. The thing Mr White needs to be tangled with has to do with his f-you sign off, that Mansbach’s got to tell HIS OWN STORIES. Let’s return to this in a few graphs.

Rage has, at its heart, Dondi Vance, 18 year-old biracial Brooklynite, as up-to-datedly self-aware as the most sees-every-angle-and-hates-the-phonies Holden C of yore. Dondi is a 100% appealing and interesting guy, steeped in in both high-culture smarts (he attends Whoopty Whoo Ivy League We’s A Comin Academy and quotes movies and books of moderate esotericism) and street-level pick ups (read: he deals pot to his white classmates), and his dad’s been gone since he was a kid. His dad is Billy Rage, a legendary graffiti writers, part of The Immortal 5, a crew that towered in the heydays of bombing trains in NYC in the 80′s (all that sounds stiff and fake as I write it because I’m familiar with all that stuff only through secondary or tertiary cultural stuff). Billy took off shortly after Dondi’s birth because one of the Immortal 5, a guy who went by AMUSE, was killed by a guy named Anastacio Bracken, and Bracken was on the hunt for Billy. So Billy split.

We catch up to the story, though, in present tense-ish (2005), and Dondi’s been kicked out of his mother’s apartment, and also school, and the novel opens with one of the remaining Immortal 5 telling Dondi that there’s been a hint of a rumor that maybe RAGE, Dondi’s dad, is back.

It’s weird, trying to staple the story out sideways, spread it narratively. It’s not, ultimately, a book that’ll blow your mind with some crazily intricate plot: Billy comes back as, coincidentally, Bracken’s making a run at the mayorship of NYC, and the book’s big push comes in the form of Billy getting the gang back together and hitting every train in NYC, tagging each AMUSE in honor of Billy’s fallen friend and in incrimination of Bracken. To say if the good guys pull it off isn’t really to hit any main point of the book—you’ll be able to tell, on reading the thing, about 20 pages in if the good guys’ll pull it off. I should note, before leaving the plot stuff, that Dondi’s mom, Karen, is a massive and great presence, and her relationship to her husband and his friends is excellent, and there’s also some heavy psychotropic substances, and there’s a staircase in a building in DUMBO which, if one walks all the stairs, transports the climber 24 hours into the future (which staircase sounds odd and sort of…cutesy, but actually works just awesomely and is a totally nailed and valid thing here).

But none of that’s the reason you’re reading Rage is Back: the reason you’re reading this is because Mansbach’s made this fantastic narrative voice in Dondi, which brings up back to good old Michael White’s Amazon comments (and I apologize for beating this point to death: I don’t imagine Mr. White’s views are gonna in any way be broadly representative, but it’s worth trying to head off at the pass the bullshit he’s trying to sling), about Mansbach telling HIS OWN STORIES. Because here’s the thing: far as I can tell, Mansbach’s 100% telling his own stories. He’s of an age (judging exclusively by author photo) that marks him as having been of crucial age during the heyday of graffiti, he’s got Pharoah Monch blurbing his book, he thanks graffiti writers (and not, it feels, in a researchy way, like he’s never met these folks and is thanking them now simply because he had this idea for a book), and, if one’s inclined to go scan the About tab on Mr Mansbach’s site, one’ll discover “he founded, edited and published the pioneering 1990s hip hop journal Elementary and spent several years traveling as a drum technician with the Elvin Jones Jazz Machine.” Meaning: Rage is Back is absodamnlutely one of HIS OWN STORIES, and I’d be tempted to just leave it at that and not keep pushing at this tiny point, but the thing is that Mansbach’s Rage is just seething with an author’s love of its subject. Read enough books and you can tell, and Mansbach’s got some deep deep wells of feeling for this era and topic he’s covering.

Anyway: the novel’s a satisfying blast of fiction, and you’ll be sucked into its propulshion before you can blink twice (I’m not kidding: I opened this just sort of meh-ing it up and was 100 pages deep like that), and you need to get and read this thing fast, and to help with that, I’ve got a feww copy of the thing to give away. Drop me an email at wlcutter(at)hotmail(dot)com and I’ll put yr name in a drawing I’ll hold at midnight, 1/14/13.

End of Year Attempted Catch Up

Now that it’s five seconds from the new year there are, as always, suddenly these books I meant to cover yet which went uncovered. It happens every year; my surprise is as constant as there being no need for it. Anyway, for the next couple weeks: catch-up on books that should’ve been covered here, books that were read and relished but for whatever reason got missed.

 

Waging Heavy Peace by Neil Young

Bruce by Peter Ames Carlin

Both Flesh and Not by Wallace

 

1. You should purchase and read these books. Maybe. I’m not sure.

2. I have a harder and harder time with music books, at least those trying to be fairly direct. The Wallace we’ll get to further below. Also a harder and harder time with books that are ultimately trying to cartograph a fairly known person.

3. Here’s the thing: what do you want to know about Neil Young or the Boss? Or equally: why do you want to know about Young/Boss? I’m not remotely the first person to ask these questions; maybe everyone asks, and I’m just getting to it. But for real: would reading anything make “Helpless” or “Rosalita” or whatever different?

4. I love Paul Westerberg and the Replacements, love Big Star, love the Roots, love Stan Getz. I’m trying to think who else. Love Wilco’s first four, hugely. Love Gillian Welch. I’m just trying to list stuff here. You’ve got your own list, certainly.

5. But here’s the thing: The more I’ve read about any of those bands and people, the less I end up feeling. I’d like to unread most of what I know about folks who make art I like. There are exceptions—Lyle Lovett getting his leg busted seems important to have known. If I didn’t know Westerberg was from Minnesota, I’d want to know that. But otherwise I’m more and more aware that the music either is or isn’t, and that’s it. Is this what happens when one enters his or her mid-30s? I mean that honestly: if you have an answer, please leave a comment.

6. (Wallace said something along these lines in his intro to Best American Essays, about how he wished he knew less about celebrities than he already does. Smart and astute, but I think he meant in an exhausted, I-can’t-escape-celebrity-culture way, which isn’t this).

7. Take your favorite song. Here’s mine: “I Am the Cosmos” by Chris Bell. Read more about it wherever (JJSullivan wrote a cool essay on Bell awhile back, which I regret not asking him about, but whatever). Here’s how much I like that song: I know he had it mixed be Geoff Emerick, the guy who engineered the Beatles’ stuff. I know it was released as a 45 on some vanishingly small run by Car Records, and I know that, rarely, copies of the 45 hit ebay, and some of us pay for them (I bought mine for 1/7 the cheapest price I’ve seen recently, which data I include here only to make myself feel better). I know lots about all of this—that Chris Bell’s brother put together what ended up being Bell’s lone full-length (titled I Am the Cosmos, released by Ryko in the 90′s), that Bell killed himself/died in a car crash in 78, that he found heroin and Jesus, that he’s in It Came from Memphis. I know that his keening, pleading voice at the song’s very end, when he sings “Really want to see you again” puts a fucking knife in my throat almost every time I hear it, and that the song was covered by the Posies/Big Star on the Live at Columbia disc from ’94, etc. etc. etc. This isn’t me proving bona-fides or something: I’m trying to say that I’ve dug into the song pretty thoroughly (I’m sparing all sorts of less important shit that can’t possibly be interesting to more than maybe four dozen folks).

8. Here’s the thing: all of that above about Bell doesn’t change a lick of “Cosmos,” and when you hear the song it will either melt you as it should or it won’t. No amount of data can change that, no matter the sort of data.

9. All of which is to say: Bruce and Waging Heavy Peace are fine for what they are, but if you, like me, find yourself in a place in which you’d rather just listen to the damn song, whatever the song is, than read about every last aspect of it, these books might drag. I love Neil Young, and I looooooooooooooove Springsteen, and I now know more about how Young bought his place in northern California, and the sort of vehicle he drives there, and I now know that Springsteen’s been on antidepressants for awhile, and that he was a sort of colossal jackass to an old girlfriend way back. I know these things. Okay.

10. It’s complicated. I don’t think there’s an answer. I’d buy these two books, honestly. I would. I’ve read so many fucking books on music it’s not even funny—that great thick Willie Nelson one from ’08, all G Marcus’s stuff, the bulk of the Dylan tomes (including the ones about specific albums, specific songs), all sorts. Just endless. I can’t help it. When someone writes the story of any band that’s helped build my insides, I can’t help it. I have, upstairs at present, a book which literally details what the Beatles did every day from their start to the day they broke up. No joke. I used to have certain dates memorized, for reasons eclipsing imagination or recollection. Music books are shocking draws. Fucking Our Band Could Be Your Life—need I say more?

11. But what’s weird, at least for me, is that, ultimately, all I want to do is just listen to the music. I’ve never read a word that’s made one note of “Born to Run” or “Here Comes a Regular” or anything better. Do I care that Springsteen worked on “Born to Run” as long and hard as he did? Sure. Does knowing his background—how he grew up in New Jersey, his relationship to his dad—do anything to the music? Not really. Good to know? Hard to say. What I’m trying to say is: sure, read the books, but nothing’s gonna make “Old Man” or “Tunnel of Love” suddenly sound even better.

 

Obvious q: what could possibly do that anyway?

 

A. Wallace’s Both Flesh and Not is, sure, of course, worth having. Some of us have this stuff already, downloaded it back when it was available on Howling Fantods, and some of us have been passing to friends, for years, old .doc files of “The Nature of the Fun” or “Fictional Futures” or whatever, but it’s nice to finally have these things in book form.

A. And of course it’s a sort of b-sides/outtakes LP, this book. None of these save the Federer piece seem like things Wallace would’ve used in a next collection of essays (aside from the Federer one, unless I’m mistaken, all these pieces are old enough that Wallace in fact chose against including them in either Lobster or Fun). The pieces here feel alternately like watching a slugger take BP, or like watching a VHS tape of some phenom’s junior-high years. If you’re like me, you’ll eat this shit up—again, I’ve had most of these (including, yes, the “Twenty-Four Word Notes”) for a good while.

A. But the impulse behind the book, akin to the impulse behind the Springsteen and Young books, has something to do with an imagined equation balancing Total Knowing or Exposure with Getting Genius. Or something like that. Look, we listen to every single last Beatles (or Radiohead, or Indigo Girls, or whoever: pick your music) outtake because we believe something’s there. Either 1) the outtakes by the best bands are better than the perfectly polished takes by everybody else (sometimes true), or 2) we want to more fully understand the steps that got the band/artist to the moments we fell for. If you believe the first statement, then stuff like this Wallace book are fine—and the writing is good, even the toss-off stuff (that piece that ran in Might about AIDS seems to hold up least well). If you believe the second thing, there’s trouble.

A. To whit: on the old VHS of the Beatles visiting Ed Sullivan, there’s a moment in which John, in their hotel room, plays a mouth piano thing, and he plays the intro to “Strawberry Fields Forever.” You see it and you just….get sort of undone in time. If you like cultural things, books/music/movies, your life’s parceled by them in ways, delineated: there’s life before you listened to Pet Sounds, and there’s life after. And there’s of course this fascination for those of us whose lives have been changed by experiencing these things, a fascination about where this thing came from. Almost like there’s a faith that if we could understand the ingredients that led to the thing that gave us this experience, we’d…I don’t know. Feel it more? Believe it more?

A. Here’s the thing: that’s sort of bullshit. Nothing will get us, those who experience the art, to the process by which the art was made—or, better, we can get there, but it’s fucking dull, and the art is what ultimately obtains and lasts. This Wallace is fine (this is being written by a guy who literally has every published thing, all the books of the last few years, the Considerations and Interviews and etc.). I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me. It sucks that Wallace is dead. It sucks that there’s not gonna be more writing from him. It’s fascinating that he’s now this thing folks can sit around and attempt to decode and decide about. I can say this: in all of what I’ve read since his death, not one thing’s changed how I felt originally reading “Good Old Neon,” the echoey blast that thing had on my a night in like October of ’02, ot how the thing still hits. Nothing’s gonna change how it felt to walk around, winter of 2000, reading my crappily printed-off (from the Dalkey site) copy of the big Larry McCaffery interview, saying to myself again and again, just to feel it on my tongue, “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.” If you want to be a completist: get the book. If you believe there’s more of Wallace to ‘discover,’ or that knowing more about him’s gonna do anything for how his genius work actually hits you, find a different book.

Damnit

Jake Adam York died Sunday of a stroke, aged 40. If you read contemporary poetry, you know the man; if you’ve read my stuff anywhere, you’ve felt some pull of his gravity (I’ve dug his stuff for years, was thrilled that he agreed to blurb a book this year, was proud he took work of mine for Copper Nickel, was glad whenever we had the chance to email or grab the annual AWP beer). This is just shitty. Nothing good to say. Goddamnit. Remembrances here and here, but nothing’s gonna come close to the loss of the the man+his singing for a hell of awhile. Read his books.

Covering the Almost-Missed: Ware, McLane, Hass

Now that it’s five seconds from the new year there are, as always, suddenly these books I meant to cover yet which went uncovered. It happens every year; my surprise is as constant as there being no need for it. Anyway, for the next couple weeks: catch-up on books that should’ve been covered here, books that were read and relished but for whatever reason got missed.

Building Stories by Chris Ware

This really is as stunning and book-redefining as everyone claims (this RMoody review is especially nail-hittingly good). You know the couple McSweeney’s issues that came in odd formats—the stack of mail, the guy’s head? Those were ultimately really really cool, but not necessarily cohesively cool—they didn’t feel like the form was following any function other than to impress and dazzle. That’s not a knock—the McSwys stuff was and is gorgeous + cool, it’s just that it felt ultimately like play, like a what-if. Not so Chris Ware’s Building Stories: the thing’s crammed with detritus, and is itself a mess of a story, edgeless (or, better, edge-running-over), human, the antithesis of neat or tidy. If you’ve read Ware before, you have some sense of what this is about—it’s stuffed with ennui, a sort of daily despair, a bleakness that never actually feels bleak because it feels, ultimately, so generously done (the characters are not happy, but it’s hard not to love them simply for how closely Ware obviously holds them, and how transparently human they are)—but what’s riveting about this delivery system, this $50 box with all these artifacts, this wilderness of narrative, is that, strangely, it sticks harder and more than singly-bound books. It feels like I imagine McSweeney’s was hoping the stack-of-mail issue would feel—something less published than exposed, or made vulnerable. The lack of anything like causality—the fact that you can just pick up any of these books in any order—is mesmerizing as well: you wend yr way through the reading experience realizing that ’cause’ and ‘effect’ are deeper and less clear than we’d hoped. One feels tantalizingly invited into this fantastic world Ware’s made with these true human characters fighting each other and themselves to try to find happiness. It is absolutely accurate and perfect that this book is or will be on damn near every year-end list: in an otherwise fairly plain year, this thing’s like lightning, like the invention of color (both in format and in content). Hyperbole comes nowhere close: get it fast.

 

My Poets by Maureen McLane and What Light Can Do by Robert Hass

You need both of these books, no matter what you think. McLane’s established herself with great rapidity as a national treasure: if there’s any decency, she’ll be the new critic we all bow to. She’s maybe the most compellingly gentle reader I’ve read—one can feel, reading her stuff, how closely and seriously she cares about the work she’s addressing (I defy anyone to claim being able to feel anything similar in some of the other big critics who’ll here remain nameless). McLane’s two books of poetry (here and here) are each fantastic, but this, My Poets, may be her strongest yet: it’s an imaginative autobiography, an an intellectual/emotional autobiography through books and authors, and the thing’s just a shocking shine for that fact: even if only one of the chapters worked (which is not the case: they all do, covering Jarrell and Bishop and Stein and etc. etc. etc.), the book’d be worth it. As is: this is an embarrassment of riches (if you need more convincing, check McLane’s interview here and just revel in it). And What Light Can Do—look, you likely need Hass in your life, the same as you need some Albert Goldbarth in your life, the same as you need lots of Charles Wright in your life. There’s a pace and patience to this man’s thinking that, at least for this reader, changes the way sensate reality thereafter feels—literally, after reading his chapter on Stevens, I ended up (apologies in advance for the Romance language) feeling sort of awakened to something, made aware of a rhythm to things it’s fairly easy to forget about. Here’s the corollary: if you’ve read the first 50 or so pages of Percy’s The Moviegoer, and if you fell in love with the sort of intimate, casual metaphysics going on, Hass’s What Light Can Do. I’ve now hopelessly screwed this review, so let’s be done.

The Hardest Working Band in Pissing You Off

Self Entitled by NOFX

I confess that I have no idea how to review a punk album. I mean, like, none. Really, how do you critique a music genre whose very existence is a form of rebellion against the entire idea of criticism? No other form of music–except for maybe gangsta rap–has proven to be such a pain in the ass for reviewers.

I will say, though, that I’ve never heard a punk band (and I’m talking real punk bands here, not the Fallout Boys and Blink 182s and Good Charlottes of the mainstream world; I mean those scuzzy don’t-give-a-fuck SoCal dudes) that didn’t sound like it enjoyed what it was doing. Case in point: NOFX. The California-based quartet, fronted by the amusingly profane Fat Mike, has been going strong for 30 years now, and yet if Self Entitled (Fat Wreck Chords) is any indication, they haven’t lost a step.

Nor have they aged artistically, which in the punk genre is a very good thing (generally). The album finds the band doing what they do best–being NOFX: loud, raunchy, obscene, childish, and undeniably fun. The album starts off with “72 Hookers,” a tongue-in-cheek criticism of Islamic fundamentalism. The solution isn’t war, Fat Mike suggests, it’s loosening the sexual restrictions on jihadists:

How many million men have been killed in foreign wars/ We need to reinstate the draft, enlist a million whores.

Start with sororities and all the spring breaks/ Ship the Girls Gone Wild to Afghanistan, they’ll gladly blow the sheiks.

Of course, lampooning religion is nothing new for NOFX (see also “Xmas Has Been X’ed”), nor are their hostile criticisms of conservative politics (“Ronnie and Mags,” “Secret Society”). As with most punk bands, this is sort of their refrain, and while Fat Mike’s lyrical talents have always been outfuckingstanding (check out “Don’t Call Me White” on 1994′s Punk in Drublic), it doesn’t get a bit stale. It’s often hard to tell if a band if genuinely interested in a call to action or if they’re just trying to be bratty and subversive and eyebrow-raising; this is sort of where I’m at with NOFX.

The weird thing though is that the band’s brief attempts at sincerity and openness usually outshine their snotty veneer. On their previous album Coaster, this was “My Orphan Year,” in which Fat Mike discusses his mother’s lengthy battle with cancer and his father’s struggles with demensia. On Self Entitled, it’s “I Got One Jealous Again, Again,” a slow and somewhat lurchy tune in which the vocalist recounts, with uncustomary earnestness, a breakup by detailing which of his CDs he was able to keep and which ones he was forced to give up:

Take your Guns’N'Roses with the Robert Williams cover/ and I’ll take the Fugazi picture disc.

Nineteen or twenty years ago I labeled my slip covers/ that was a union I wasn’t willing to risk.

The thing is, I have no doubt that Fat Mike really did lable his slip covers all those years ago and that he still has those CDs. I have no doubt that these guys really are the way they seem on their albums. And I think this is what accounts for a large part of NOFX’s success, their unabashed honesty. They live their music in that badass punk rock sort of way that those of us who have ever played in a band wish we could. NOFX really likes being NOFX, and it shows in their music. Like most of their contemporaries, they realized early on what they were good at, and that’s really all they’ve been doing the past 30 years, nothing more. If you’re looking to broaden your horizons, for substance, for something new, then Self Entitled is not for you. But if you’re looking for a band that is perfectly content with the small piece of punk territory it occupies and seeks nothing more, then you’ve come to the right place.

Everything’s Not Alright in the Suburbs…Again.

In Between Days by Andrew Porter

I remember this one lit theory course I took in grad school in which someone once argued that John Cheever had established the private-and-more-than-likely-self-induced-problems-of-middle-class-white-Americans-living-in-the-burbs trope as its own sort of fiction subgenre. I’m not sure if this is true or not, if Cheever was ultimately responsible for this, but I think we can all agree that this subgenre does indeed exist and that a lot of writers, both excellent and terrible, have gotten a lot of economy out of it. That’s not to say that this is altogether “bad” territory; it is, after all, the wheelhouse of folks like Phillip Roth and Tom Perrotta. But for a lot of lesser writers, this seems to be a kind of go-to motif, a comfort zone that, because most of their readership would likely live in these placid little worlds, aren’t worth stepping out of.

Now, I am reticent to lump Andrew Porter’s In Between Days into this category: I truly did enjoy reading it. Porter’s prose is crisp and controlled, and his devotion to his characters, to giving them each their own unique presence, is admirable if not a little heavy-handed. But these aren’t exactly mold-breaking characters. In a lot of ways, they are dangerously familiar. There’s Elson, a forty-something architect who, having separated from his wife, is now involved in a dubious relationship with a much younger woman. His wife Cadence has also sought out new mates, though we get the sense that, like Elson, these are mostly time-killers, ways of filling some kind of void. Richard, their son, spends his days waiting tables and his nights at ad hoc poetry workshops led by a professor at Rice whose interest in his work is questionable. And then there’s Chloe, the youngest child, who finds herself embroiled in a potentially murderous fiasco while away at college.

The real story begins when Chloe, accompanied by her boyfriend Raja–the supposed perpetrator of the crime in question–returns to Houston, where Richard arranges for the two of them to be smuggled into Mexico. Upon catching wind of their daughter’s return to town and her plans to flee, Elson and Cadence find themselves coming together in hopes of salvaging their family.

The real crux of the book, however, is the way that each character continuously gets in his/her own way, sabotaging his or her own plans, making unforgivably stupid choices. This is In Between Days’ book’s biggest problem, I think, the way it clobbers us over the head with the very notion of character fallibility. Because here’s the thing: there is no reaon for these people be so feckless other than the fact that there would be no story without it.  That’s what this particular subgenre does, it reassures us that all those outwardly happy, easily mockable suburbanite families are really just as fucked-up and miserable as the rest of us. Very few–if any–of the problems this family faces are brought about by anything other than their own naivety and/or selfishness. And after a while it gets hard to sympathize.

This is not to say that the obstacles a character faces can never be self-imposed. Hell, look at Hamlet, Willy Loman, or almost anything by Poe. Self-destructive characters can be a lot of fun–when there’s a reason for them to self-destructive, that is. In the case of In Between Days, however, we seem to be reusing a well-worn Desperate Housewives-ish template that assumes characters are only as interesting as the problems they cause for themselves. The book is a good read, maybe even great in some places (the creepy professor character is particularly fun, although this may be the disgruntled MFA grad in me talking), but there is very little to take away, which is a shame because it’s clear from Porter’s prose that he’s capable of so much more.

Updates + Nate Silver + Neruda + David Skinner: yessing through November.

So, briefly: there’s this, which is always cool, and also this, which was super cool, and this, which I’ve been excited to see into print for a year now—as you’d imagine/guess, Helen’s fun as hell, and ‘lively’ (read: she is mercifully bullshit-free), and it’s super rad to have something in the Believer. Thus concludes the updates part of the program.

 

The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver

 

Had I been smarter I’d've reviewed this before election day, given the drumbeat re: his prognostication abilities. Fortunately for him (and math, and the country), 538 was, as most of us could’ve guessed, tremendously accurate, and you’ve got to imagine that Penguin, now, is even more thrilled to have published this: imagine how quickly the thing would’ve been remaindered had his modeling shat the bed. Regardless of what you think about Silver and 538 blog, the dude’s a master at math and statistics. Indeed, for some of us who love almost nothing (at the abstract level) more than the calm, satisfying beauty of arithmetic, statistics is the most glorious manifestation of the art: interesting and slightly abstract but still grounded in the numbers one first learns in Kindergarten.

The Signal and the Noise is, I think, as good as Thinking, Fast and Slow, and perhaps would be a good buddy book for that one: between the two, the reader’s all but forced to consider and contend with certain blind spots—in the case of Thinking, it’s confirmation bias; in Signal, it’s the trickiness of numbers, and how (to use John Allen Paulos’s term) innumerate most of us are. For instance: we get pissed about the weather forecast being wrong, but forecasting is getting better—and, for it to get way, way better, to get it to the ways we want it to be, it’s an uphill fight against exponential difficulties (literally: it’s not a 1:1 thing of, well, there’s more info, we should have better info: forecasters, to make even modestly better predictions than the present ones, need massive amounts of data). Silver’s book tackles weather, tackles earthquakes, tackles baseball, and offers what’s gotta be one of the most stomach-churning chapters ever in anything, which is about a professional gambler. We know this stuff intuitively already: that something with better-than-50/50 odds is something which, in the long run, is worth taking a gamble on, yet imagine dropping six-figure sums on games in which yr chance of winning is close to 65%: a good bet? Sure, technically, but, still, almost four times in ten you’ll be out yr cash.

There was plenty written on this book when it came out, of course, as there should have been: it should be required reading for this math-challenged country in these math-fearful times. That Silver’s a commie liberal bastard[1] at the NYTimes doesn’t matter in the slightest: he’s a hell of a statistician, and this is a hell of a book.

 

All the Odes by Pablo Neruda

 

This is exactly as the title claims and explains: all the odes. It’s a curious book—good, certainly, and worth existing, and certainly seeing all of Neruda’s odes in one mammoth collection offers something, if nothing else that he was awesomely devoted to a form and took it for rides and workouts that helped the rest of the 20th century make better use of it. Which is great. But the completist aspect of all the odes is kind of weird, and there are weak and strong odes in here, plus there’s the fuck-the-greatest-hits aspect of any “collection,” no matter how complete: you can, for instance, through purchasing two multi-disc box sets, own the entire output of Led Zeppelin, but most of us’d contend that knowing Led Zeppelin III as an actual album’s crucial (fill in the band of yr choice there: Beatles, Stones, Springsteen, Devo, whatever). The odes were originally in other books—ones Neruda chose and gathered, and there’s something (at least to this reader) to that, something important. Maybe it’s just me. Who knows. It’s a fine book, certainly, but promise that if you buy it, you’ll also buy one of his individual collections from, say, New Directions.

 

The Story of Ain’t by David Skinner

 

This is a bio of a moment and movement and book, the book being Webster’s Third, which book you may, given that yr reading this on a nerdy book review site, know something about. If you’re like lots of folks, the entirety of what you know re: this book comes from having read Wallace’s “Tense Present”—this is the dictionary that came out and laid the groundwork for what Wallace termed the usage wars, the split between de- and prescriptivists (descriptivists: folks who think that anything used in common American speech/vernacular is suitable for dictionary inclusion; prescriptivists: folks who believe English is a threatened glory under assault from mouth breathers who say “impacted” and who use borrow where they should use lend and etc. etc. etc.). It’s a fairly great book, honestly—funny and lively and contextualizing, making clear how this moment of ain’t was arrived at to begin with.

[1] (As, for the record, am I: that’s out of affection.)

Danielewski + Slinkachu: tricksters both

The Fifty Year Sword by Mark Z Danielewski

 

There may be no book I felt more powerfully about than Danielewski’s House of Leaves: released in 2000, when I was 21, it was one of those books that seemed to me just infinite, endless magic. 12 years later I still think it was great, but I wonder, now, if I wouldn’t have simply loved anything right then: I was falling in love with reading right then. Certainly HoL had and has lots going for it, from typography to creepiness to the fantastic tri-nature of the narrative; however, it seems increasingly clear that, for those of us waiting for Danielewski do attempt similar magic, we’re simply never gonna get it. Ever. Since 2000, he’s released Only Revolutions (somehow a finalist for the National), a book that’s far more interested in structural symmetry than storytelling; The Whalestoe Letters, which is seemingly just a cash-grab (it only works if you read Leaves); and, now, The Fifty Year Sword (though note that this title was released in the Netherlands in ’05 [yes, I'm that obsessive fan: I've got that version as well, though why I haven't already just sold it for the usual ebay price is unclear]). First things, and most basically: this is a cool as hell story about a birthday party in East Texas, and the story’s told by different narrators who are represented solely by language and color-coded quotes (which is a fairly cool conceit, if, in this case, it doesn’t feel like it matters all that much: I can’t imagine this’d read differently without the futzed-with narration). The book’s worth purchasing, absolutely. Danielewski is, it’s becoming clear, interested almost exclusively in stories which are, ultimately, haunted: it’s less that he’s dark (though he’s that) but that there’s this…absence built into the heart of his work. In Leaves, the house literally had a labyrinth spiralling out right at its center; here, the title sword is, in fact, nothing more than the hilt of a sword: the blade’s gone. Here’s the corollary: the scariest part of a scary movie is not the monster’s arrival, it’s the door open to the darkness, the scrittering jittery camera-panning that doesn’t capture the monster. Ditto Danielewski’s books: they are, ultimately, sort of thin in the sense that he’s telling something like ghost stories in fantastically satisfying and artsy ways (the reason this is a $26 hardcover is because there are these beautiful textile art pieces in it—not textiles actually in the book, but full-color photos of someone’s pretty fantastic art), except they’re not even ghost stories, not really: what he does, again and again, is posit this empty thing at something’s center, let characters consider that absence, and then build a conclusion onto what happens after that consideration or exploration’s run its course. I’m not knocking it: I’ll read Danielewski forever, and, to a degree, gladly. But I can’t imagine I’m alone in hoping he does something magnificent again soon, something as good as Leaves—or maybe not even as good, but something ultimately as generous and with the reader in mind as that (and I don’t mean ‘generous’ in the sense of offering a copy of yr latest book in a limited, signed edition for almost 4x the book’s regular price—generous in a sense that doesn’t feel like gimmickry).

 

Global Model Village by Slinkachu

 

I had never heard of this guy before, and I’m thrilled I now have. Here’s a fantastic book about which I can be mercifully brief: you need to own this book because it is, ultimately, a book which’ll force you to see the world as ultimately stranger and more interesting, all the time, than you’re likely to without its nudging. Go to Slinkachu’s  website. Poke around. That’s one of his photos, above. I can’t even believe how cool it is. I think the longest I’ve gone without cracking this book, just in sort of amusement and amazement, since getting it is three days. I dare you to go longer (and as a quick going-away note: it’s another fantastic release from Blue Rider Press, which, out of basically nowhere, has just come ass-kickingly into great view: the Neil Young bio, the Damien Echols bio, the Leanne Shapton swimming thing, this book, THE NEXT JEAN THOMPSON: these folks can’t miss).

James Meek’s Absolutely not-at-all-meek The Heart Broke In

            James Meek’s The Heart Broke In is a fantastic, fantastic book—I read it on the heels of reading two unfun novels back-to-back[1], and Heart read lots like last year’s excellent Three Stages of Amazement by Carol Edgarian: massive of heart and empathy, tight of plot (with, maybe, one twist too many), and, more than anything, smart, emotionally and intellectually smart, the sort of book one closes and feels as if one’s been ultimately respected instead of condescended or pandered to.

Meaning what, specifically? Meaning The Heart Broke In is attempting to address fairly large topics in adults ways here, and is doing so with what I’d call the bare minimum of melodrama and bullshit: the difficulties of siblings and the families we come from, the frustrations of maintaining and not suffocating within the families we create, to say nothing of fame (see: fleeting, authenticity vs. cheap), medicine (see: values of various lives + diseases [meaning: a cure for cancer'd be sexy as hell, but far more folks die of malaria][plus also: how much bad is anyone willing to put up with for a cure to something else? What's the balance between cure and disease?]), and various valences of shame. That’s all abstract hooey. Here’s what’s up: Richie Shepherd’s the host of a teeny-bopper TV show (this is all set in Britain, by the by), a former rock star, and a married father of two. He’s also, at book’s start, involved (that way) with an underage beauty who was on his TV show. He is never, not once, an easy character to love, and maybe the book’s only weak spot might be that Richie’s never given much chance to do much other than be loathed. No matter.

Then, there’s Bec, his sister, who high-tailed in the opposite direction from her brother: books, medicine, science. She’s researching a cure for malaria, and has found a cure that’s got a hell of an asterisk: discovered as an antibody in certain populations, it doesn’t work 100% of the time, and it can cause bouts of blindness. So there’s that. Around this bro/sis pair is a constellation of other folks—an old pal of Richie’s who, after trying and failing to impregnate his wife, reconnects with and falls for Bec (and she him); there’s his uncle, the dying head of a cancer research institute; there’s his oafish brother. Most crucially, behind and underneath all these other folks, is culture itself (again, for real: Meek’s swinging big bats, and is gathering a whole hell of a lot in the nets he’s casting), specifically the culture of celebrity and too-much info. Through the character of Val, a publisher and Bec’s old boyfriend, the contents of the entire novel are, like an aerosol can, put under pressure: he blackmails Richie about the underage romance, gives him a year to find juicier dirt with which to save himself, and, for the rest of the novel (the confrontation between Richie and Val comes 70 pages in), we wait to see how this crucial aspect will resolve: will Richie save himself by selling out his sister, or will he allow his life and self to be smeared but, in so doing, spare making anyone else’s indiscretions public.

I don’t know how enthralling that set-up sounds. I don’t know what I was expecting when I started this thing, but I know that when I got to I think 200 pages the rest of the evening was foregone, and I finished this thing in a gulpy, breathless early-a.m. haze in the guest room, sparing my wife not only the light but whatever noises of assent, excitement, frustration or whatever I may’ve been producing. It’s that sort of a book: forgive the silliness but it’s a chewy book, one in which there are very cool, very real things going on, and not an once, not an inch of it feels fake or forced: the complications that drive the plot (and *drive* is too kindly geriatric a word: *rockets* might be better, though part of the perceived speed of this thing’s got to do with the fact that there are lots of very brief chapters–a page or two–which jack the hell out of the internal pageometer) are, one recognizes, put there by a single dude who’s writing the whole thing, but they feel 100% authentic, real: this book feels like a record of something that could very easily happen, and, through that naturalness, exposes weirdly large issues re: society and exposure (it takes no imagination to conceive of a book which uses big issues to drive a story, a book which would, I’d guess, feel false as Halloween’s worst gas-station mask).

I don’t know if it’s been a bleak year, fiction-wise. I’ve got a stack here I’ve been meaning to review, among them Powers’s Yellow Birds which, yes, is as good as everyone says, and Eggers’s Hologram for the King, which is also just as good as the hype (and, coincidentally, both of those are up for the National, and they’re both excellent, and either would be a great, great pick as winner), and I know there’ve been other good reads this year, but I’m hard pressed in trying to think of a more satisfying novel than this. It’s just fantastic–propulsive and confident, hopeful and messy, smart enough to be entertaining and entertaining enough to get away with being damn smart, The Heart Broke In is just fucking excellent, and you’re a fool to let the year close without giving it your time.

[1] Tempting as it is to flay those novels (Robin Sloan’s Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore and Scott Hutchins’s A Working Theory of Love), I can’t seem to work up the requisite critical apparatus to do so. I squirmed my way through 2000 words in consideration of them together, and it doesn’t…I don’t want to be pissed. Read the books if you want—Sloan’s is satisfying, loose and jaunty, a first-person thing set in SF and revolving around a mysterious book-reading club; Hutchins’s is a first-person plod of a first novel that’s bloodless and boring as the fourth rerun of a shitty sitcom; Sloan’s book, weirdly, does a far better job of addressing Actual, Real matters despite being fantastical; Hutchins’s novel’s stuffed with characters you’ll at best loathe, at worst want to throttle; both books feature a) first-person white-dude narrators in San Francisco involved in computers, and b) a shocking lack of actual self-awareness on the part of those narrators, moreso in Hutchins’s: his narrator’s a fucking navel-gazing pro but seems stupidly clueless about who he actually is (and, fine, maybe that’s an ‘authentic’ character or whatever, but how many fucking clueless white-dude narrators does one need to brush literarily up against before just chucking the fucking towel?). I’ll add in closing that both books trample mercilessly over the rules regarding subjective/objective first-person pronouns: both books are terrible in using “me” when “I” should be deployed. A small part of me believes this is significant, but I really just can’t work up the juice to grouch about it: Sloan’s book was fun enough, and had spirit galore, and Hutchins’s book just made me sad, made me wish he’d just written a better book to begin with, made me wish we expected more from books—there’s nothing scarier than considering the idea that we get the books we deserve.

The Branches, the Axe, the Missing by Charlotte Pence

            I’ll admit that this book took me quite a bit of time and/or energy to get into, and in restrospect I’m not entirely sure why. Pence’s poetry is pretty dazzling stuff—this book is, after all, the Black River Chapbook winner from Black Lawrence Press—but for whatever reason, I couldn’t really hang in there. What ended up happening, ultimately, was that I found myself bouncing like some echoing sound between two poems in this book—poems I’d here offer the titles of except Pence’s poetry, at least in this book, all goes title-less, each preceded by a little hollow box at page’s top. Maybe this is why I had such a hard time find my way into this system. What system? The book’s a narrative, ultimately, and it’s (as I read it) the narrative of a female, and it’s about love and commitment, and it’s about fathers and lovers, and it’s about the ways in which a treebranch can be either a dead thing blocking a drive or something chopped into pieces and fed into a fire by which we see a bit more into dark. These two poems I’m thinking of: both are blocks-o-poetry with aspiration, each are given tabs and unique spacing, and the first, which is the book’s fourth poem, ends with “But w/ everything gained, there is loss. What / is the equation for this? Simply:    1+1 is no longer one? / With   taming fire / what was    lost?” (please know: you need to see the thing on the page: she’s got a very specific lineation going on, and I’m dishonoring it here), and the second of which begins with “We, and no other animal, understand how to / start fire” and ends with “the dog who / sniffs / the same candle flame and whines.      Circles / three times,     then lies    back down.” What I’d like to here submit is that Ms Pence’s weirdly intruiging, come-backly-tugging book is fixated on is this light/heat source we’re drawn toward and, simultaneously, whatever we traded for the clarity or shine of fire-light. Period. It’s ultimately a book of rigorous measurement, a thin chapbook attempting in its way to consider something like transaction—wildness or elemental aspects for the ordered clarity that comes with taming chaos, the ambiguous could-be of the unknown for the fenced-in boundariness of definition. It’s a weirdly masterful little book, well worth your time and energy even if you have to read it once, ditch the thing, and come crawling back like a confused animal drawn for reasons passing comprehension to the site of a fire you can’t shake.