Weston Cutter's Blog, page 5

The Last (Great) Horror Novel

��Brian Allen Carr’s THE LAST HORROR NOVEL IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD

The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World is so much harder to pin down than that. Part prose, part poetry, part flash and fully experimental, it���s hard to call this a ���novel��� at all. And as far as horror? The whole thing evens itself out with how fantastically beautiful Carr���s words run together.

Set in Scrape, Texas, a town near the Mexican border, we first meet the characters of the town, people whom we are given no indication on whether they are the heroes or the villains, saints or sinners. Old Burt the drunk old racist and his black friend Tyler. Mindy, the girl who���s slept in half the beds in town. Teddy and Scarlett who just keep having sex. Characters named things like Blue Parson and Rob Cooder.

It starts safe and boring, the people buying cigarettes, sweating, drinking outside and lasting another day. Then, the static starts. Lights go out. Power shuts off. Electronics stop working. No one can explain it. No one bothers too much, until the screaming begins.

It���s terrifying, wakes them up, lets them know it���s not a normal day.

Somewhere around here, we are introduced to the central horror story in the piece, the tale of La Llorna, the woman who, abandoned and cheated on by her husband, drowns her children so that he can never get to the, a Mexican retelling of Medea. The people in town, so close to the border, recognize the legend coming alive as soon as the screaming ghost of children come into town.

They try to stop the kids, dead in the eyes, blue, but it���s clear, the kids aren���t anything human, anything ever seen before.

There���s more horrors to come. An army of dismembered hands crawling across the earth like thick spiders. The devil himself.

Never have I ever read an apocalyptic tale so beautiful as this. I don���t understand how he does it ��� Carr balance terror with beauty, pairing the grotesque so neatly in almost poetic lines, sentences describing something utterly terrifying are somehow balanced in his writing. The tone floats in and out of first-person from different characters, into third person, into legends. Literary mechanisms are used left and right. The book is an experiment in being everything all at once, inside about 100 pages.

This book is short, swift, packed with a punch and yes, horror. I haven���t read anything yet to disprove this is the last great horror novel after all.

ArtmeetsLove :: WAGSTAFF: BEFORE AND AFTER MAPPLETHORPE

��Philip Gefter’s WAGSTAFF: BEFORE AND AFTER MAPPLETHORPE

In all honesty, I had little knowledge of Sam Wagstaff coming into this book. My eye stuck on the ���Mapplethorpe��� in the title, the cover���s photo of the young man so loved in Patti Smith���s Just Kids, her hippie soul twin, and immediately wanted to see another side of Robert Mapplethorpe���s life, another person on whom Robert acted as less of a foil than another half of a heart. Anyway, even if Mapplethorpe was the draw, I���m so glad I picked up this book / finally opened my eyes to the major cultural and art-world shifter that was Sam Wagstaff.

Brought up in wealth, luxury and almost ushered straight into the inner circle of suits, maybe nothing���s more impressive about the direction Sam took in life than the fact that, so easily, he could have taken a direction centered on money, summer homes and the typical white male checklist. But instead, bored by the corporate life of advertising he tried out in his younger years��� and really, this is the ���Mad Men��� life in the few years before the ���Mad Men��� time ��� Sam studied extensively in art history, preferring the scenes on the street to those lived in the big business skyscrapers.

It���s easy to imagine the man fitting in with the counter- cultures circles at the time, despite (or maybe because of) his handsome looks. Andy Warhol took to the man, we���d hope in mutual admiration, mutual friendship created over an intense love of art, but more likely, because Sam was a handsome chiseled face Andy wanted to surround himself with.

His days in the 60s sound so idyllic, at least in my mind. Floating through art fairs, buying up small paintings, prints, and almost unusually, photographs, Sam stocked the stuff, still covered in paper around his mainly bare apartment. He wandered deeper into circles other art historians would shake their heads at, making himself a part of art history to come rather than an admirer of the past.

Enter Robert Mapplethorpe, the bold young artist, a photographer whose portraits (especially those of his college-girlfriend, then-roommate Patti Smith) are still haunting today. It���s weird to think about today, when ���Photos of the Year��� win Pulitzers, but in their days, photography was thought of less as an art form, more of a utilitarian tool to capture an image. Despite the boy being a compulsive photographer, collage-maker, and having little to no involvement in the ���true��� arts of the time like painting, or drawing, Wagstaff took Mapplethorpe under his wing, serving as Robert���s patron, and soon, his lover.

Patti Smith, Mapplethorpe���s first love, is quoted in the book giving advice to the many men that tried to make Robert fall in love with him ��� to win Robert���s heart, you must love his work. Wagstaff, Patti and the author believe, was the only one to truly understand this.

It doesn���t last (spoiler alert), their lives as patron and artist continue, the tension of their relationship there throughout much of both of their respective careers. Yet, their love for one another helped shape the art world immensely. Wagstaff, with the money and the wealth and the power to collect and curate based on his own taste, was undoubtably shaped and influenced by the power of Mapplethorpe���s photographs and his passion for the medium. And of course, Mapplethorpe, without the help and financial support of Wagstaff would most likely have remained a side note to the story of Patti Smith.

Wagstaff, it should forever be known, was one of the most influential collectors and art appreciators that pulled photography up into the top rings of art society, and anyone who thinks otherwise, anyone interested in how he did it, or anyone interested in art and love, must read this book.

Year End Graphic Novel(ish) Write-Ups: Cho, Collins and Fitzgerald&MacNaughton

��SHOPLIFTER by Michael Cho

Michael Cho���s first graphic novel, Shoplifter, centers on the life of Corinna Park, a young woman one immediately misplaces as middle-aged thanks to the dark lines under her eyes and the stress wrinkles she���s already inducing. Stuck in an advertising job (the story starts with her trying to come up with a slogan for a perfume marketed towards 9 to 12 year old girls), Corinna contemplates other ways she thought her future could lend to, satisfies her stuck-in-a-rut moods by stealing magazines from the local convenience store. Bouncing between being treated like nothing from her absent-minded coworkers, her cat and guys she���s crushing on, eventually Corinna realizes: no one can give her the future she wants except herself. Walking a fine line between mundane, almost tedious and exhilarating, Shoplifter is a quiet work depicting the trapped life struggle between financial freedom and daily happiness too many of us understand.

��THE GIGANTIC BEARD THAT WAS EVIL by Stephen Collins

A little disappointingly, the beard is not, in fact, that evil. It doesn���t really kill people, which is kind of what I was picturing when I saw the cover of this book. The beard is evil in more subtle ways: On an island in which the men and clean shaven, the women���s hairs never fly away and the curls fall just so, Dave���s gnarly, unruly beard is symptomatic of a chaos the people of the island cannot control. The story is simple enough: one day, Dave cannot shave / cut / pluck his beard without it growing back stronger, and soon, he���s left carrying his beard in his hands. Soon, it outgrows his house. Before long, it���s looming over the entire island. The beauty lies not in the complexity of the story, but in the sheer gorgeousness of Collin���s drawings. Hair is seldom a beautiful thing to be drawn, but Collins attends to the mountains of hair with a Van Gogh-like attention to each strand. This is one of the few cases in which letting half the plot fall on illustrations to explain is a good, good thing.

��PEN & INK: TATTOOS & THE STORIES BEHIND THEM

Not really a graphic novel, Pen & Ink is a curated collection of drawn depictions of real people���s real tattoos and the stories about what they are and why the people needed them there. Wearing tattoos, especially visible ones, strangers are constantly asking about them, why you would get them and what they mean. Often, when people ask about mine (mostly, the small heart on the inside of my elbow, right where you���d get blood drawn), it���s hard to tell a stranger what it means in a way that���s not too personal but doesn���t sound too shallow and also doesn���t take so long the person regrets even asking about it in the first place, so I���ll chicken out and just say I got it on impulse (which is half-true as well). The great thing about this book is that it allows the individuals a space to talk about their tattoos, get the whole story out in as many or as few words as they please. And the people they included? Phenomenal. There���s everyone from Roxane Gay talking about the many tattoos she���s put all over her arms at 19 in order to ���be able to look at my body and see something I didn���t loathe,��� to Thao Nguyen (of Thao & The Get Down Stay Downs) letting you know what the little ���Sullivan��� on her wrist means, as well as just rad everyday people like this warehouse manager who got the letters of ���Pizza Party��� written across his toes and is probably now my hero.

Sister Golden Shines

��SISTER GOLDEN HAIR by Darcey Steinke

Sister Golden Hair knocked me away with subtle magic. Set so deep in a specific time ��� the early 1970s ��� the story���s star, 12-year-old Jesse embodies a generation, a feeling, a society on the edge of change.

1972. As her father abandons his position as minister, Jesse and her family move to Virginia, into a life of less luxury, less glory and less direction than anyone in the group is used to. Jesse���s mother idolizes the Kennedys, the rich, those still in the plush of society while her father moves from one spirituality to the next, cruising thoughts of Buddhism, burial rites and more.

As for Jesse, her idols come in the form of the women who surround her. First, there���s Sandy, a neighbor that lies outside bathing in the sun, removing her bikini top to get the perfect line, and spends the nights with her boyfriend. To Jesse, this woman is her idol of a new kind of sexual freedom ��� a woman with no shame in her body, a woman who dates and loves and moves outside of the circles of traditional marriage.

Next, there���s Jill, the girl with a flaky mother who becomes Jesse���s first best friend. The girls start out as every other best 12-year-old friends do, until Jill���s mother disappears. Soon, Jill is begging Jesse for advice on how to get a god to like her family again, asking her to sneak cans of food to her so she can feed her brothers and sisters, getting Jesse to help her escape neighbors or child protection agencies from figuring out that���s she���s become responsible for her younger sibling. Unlike most 12-year-old best friendship���s endings, Jesse and Jill don���t grow apart naturally; Jill is forced to leave when the authorities find out what���s going on.

In need of a new best friend, Jesse sets her sights on the beautiful and popular Shelia, a girl on the decline of the social scale just as Jesse begun making her way up. Jesse slowly courts the attention of Shelia, mimicking her trends and fashions neither too late nor too soon, listening to her gossipings to gain the knowledge she needs to make friends. Shelia gives in, inviting Jesse into her home after school to watch the soap operas that consume her imagination and ideas of love.

Jesse worries her obsession with these girls, her neighbors, her friends and other beautiful creatures in the new town borders on something like lesbianism; we know her fascination has far less to do with sexuality, far more to do with the glimpses of the freer, more beautiful lives she longs to live, the images of women she wants to become. With each girl she clings to, Jesse learns a piece more about the feminism and freedoms that defined her time, the world outside her mother���s own idolizations and her father���s spiritual wanderings. As her obsessions with girls in town shift and her eyes lean toward the pop culture heroes like the new singers David Bowie and Elton John, Jesse forms an identity all her own, a mixtures of her obsessions and the new theories she���s seen.

Littered with pop culture, verging on the edge of danger, Jesse���s story in Sister Golden Hair is a mirror not just of a girl growing up in the 1970s, but of what it���s like to grow and change and try to comprehend a whole new world of influences. It���s the story of every daughter born from 1970 on.

Year End NonFic Wrap-up: Dwyer, Howley, Kipnis

More Awesome Than Money by Jim Dwyer

 

There’s a lot of books that should be in your head as you read this, maybe chief among them You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier, a book in which Lanier argues (it was the first place I’d seen the argument made so clearly and devastatingly) that Facebook doesn’t *do* anything in terms of money-generation aside from get info about its users: it is, at best, a venue on which folks share stuff and, for that privelege, they transform from users or consumers to the actual products advertisers pay Facebook to gain access to. I don’t have Lanier’s book handy and I’m sure I’m garbling his argument, but it’s along those lines.

And, sure, Facebook’s an awfully easy target, but that doesn’t make it any less significant to actually target it. Dwyer, in both the intro and the first chapter, make it clear why Facebook’s a danger: for a relatively small number of assets or tools, users allow it total access to personal stuff we wouldn’t, in any other context, allow. “‘I will give you free web hosting and some PHP doodads, and you get spying for free, all the time.’ And it works” This, from chapter one, comes from the lips of Eben Moglen, a technologist and lawyer whose speech on a Friday night at NYU opens the book. Whta’s the solution to Facebook? What’s the way forward?

Four students at NYU came up with Diaspora, an open-source Facebook that’d allow folks to own their profiles and the resultant info about themselves. In other words: damn the advertisers and get back to the social networking part of things. Dwyer tracks the group’s efforts as it has one of those magic Kickstarter fundraisers that gulls the sails fully with air and then���of course���works to keep the original intent and idea behind the endeavor front-and-center. We’ve all read plenty of watch-how-practicality-kills-the-initial-optimistic-promise books, world-vs-imagination things, but More Awesome Than Money is infinitely better than that mereness: it’s a smart and sad but hopeful book about ways in which we may yet make the internet more than just a place of pop-up ads and spying. It’s hard not to read the thing and finish it with a fair amount of hope; that’s either a warning or promise, depending on your outlook, I suppose.

 

Thrown by Kerry Howley

 

Oh dear lord is this thing great. Look, Ms. Awesome herself (K Dunn) reviewed the thing for the NYTimes what a month or so back, and she’s plenty on the money throughout. Story is: an academic woman (grad student in philosophy) named Kit is at a conference in Iowa when she gets bored enough to wander from the presentation she’s at and, in wandering, comes upon an MMA match at which she watches Sean Huffman and has a transcendent experience (“It was as if someone had oil-slicked my synapses, such that thoughts could whip and whistle their way across my mind without the friction I’d come to experience as thought itself. I felt an immense affection for the spectacle before me, but it was as if the affection were not emanating from anywhere, because I had dissolved into a kind of mist and expanded to envelop the entire space that held these hundred men.” If you’re wondering that’s page five: Howley’s very much unafraid to dunk yr head very quickly and very intensely into the waters of her gripping, torqued poetry [more? Page 6: “My experience echoed precisely descriptions handed down to us in the writings of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Artaud, in which a disturbing ritual���often violent���rendered each of their senses many times more acute, as if the dull blunt body were momentarily transformed into a tuning fork, alive, as Schopenhauer put it, ‘to sensations fine and fleeting.’ Some have called the feeling ecstasy. I believed in this spectacled-provoked plenitude of sensation as one believes in Pangea and plundering Huns, but until that night in Des Moines I associated that state with antediluvian rites not accessible to modern man. Around midnight on an Iowa highway surrounded by that deep darkness only cornfields can conjure, I thought ‘This exhibition, whatever it may be, has ushered ecstatic experience back into the world.'”). She follows Sean���a fighter with a fondness for smoking pot and telling himself he should be working out instead of working out (which is to say he’s hugely compelling despite not being a Fighter one imagines is gonna take over the world) and also a fighter named Eric Koch, a much younger and more dedicated (in ways) fighter than Sean.

With these two fighters set up as polarities (or at least far-markers of MMA-types: an older guy who allows his body to be just brutalized and can sort of hump through it vs a younger guy who’s all grit and muscle and tendony ferocity) for her and our consideration, Kit (who is not, to be clear, Kerry Howley���it’s a fictionalized nonfiction book, a genre-bending only the most fussy fuddy-duddies will allow themselves to be uptight about) follows each fighter, describing scenes and fights with a vividity that will induce clenching while also describing personal/emotional stuff in each fighter’s life (in Sean’s, a child with questionable paternity; in Eric’s, a schism with his brother and the group of friends through whom he got into MMA). Everyone’s personal life is of course interesting enough if written well, and here’s where to note Howley’s writing’s so fucking brutally good you’d be impelled to read thousands of words of hers on I’d venture damn near anyone, but the other thing that actually happens is���and maybe this is a function of having a fictionalized narrator���Kit herself is exposed in her pursuit as well. This is a book in which each major character���Sean, Eric, and Kit���has pursuits of some sort, which may not seem to be saying much (what book lacks such?) but the way it’s resolved is actually, totally, truly astonishing. Look again at the language Kit uses on page 5 to describe the rush and release visited upon her on witnessing her first fight: she spends the rest of the book, obviously, seeking the same hit and high. How could she not? And in that process, by the end, everyone in Thrown is variously used and hurt and pulped in some way by these pursuits, and���in an act that sure reads like something kin to grace���Howley lets kit be the one who is in some ways worst by the end: she’s the one with this unquenchable urge to see more fights, more transcendant physical beauty, and, because of that, neither Eric nor Sean can ultimately fulfill her. She has to keep moving, keep���like the fighters���searching for the next chance for such a high, and the ending’s sadder than anything I could’ve imagined. It’s a multivalently devastating book and worth every inch of praise that’s been heaped on it.

 

Men by Laura Kipnis

 

To be clear: you’re a fool not to read Kipnis, always, everywhere, any chance you get. I was first suckered for her through her Against Love, but her subsequent ones (How to Become a Scandal and The Female Thing, to which Men serves as something of a counterbalance) are dazzling books so keenly observed and engaging it’s almost tiring. I mean that: reading Kipnis has, for me, always induced this feeling of like she can’t keep doing this, can she? It’s like eating too much rich food, six pounds of something you’re supposed to only have tastes of. She’s clever as hell and writes such sharp sentences it feels like reading a hummingbird or sprinter, and then you go how can she keep up a whole book like this? Here’s what I mean: “Avoiding self-delusion: here’s a useful life lesson for all of us, though easier said than done, self-delusion being pretty much the definition of the human condition.” That’s from page 33, opened to at random, from the chapter “The Con Man,” which chapter focuses on the old Mamet film “House of Games,” and I’m not kidding: Kipnis writes constantly with that much precision and verve and insight, which precision and verve and insight here going toward examining types of men, at ways in which men operate in the world. It’s weird: this isn’t some ha-ha taxonomy, yet the chapters are fascinatingly set-up as such (The Scumbag, The Lothario, Gropers). What happens, though, early on���maybe even in “The Scumbag,” a chapter that, in considering Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, Kipnis praises his authentic scumminess over the sanitation job given his image after the Woody Harrelson movie���is that the reader understands quickly that Kipnis is examining men in relation to men and women and society at large (which is a huge relief, the reader soon finds). All of this boils down to the fact that this book and The Female Thing could and maybe should come packaged together and should have titles that switch randomly, one being called Action and one being called Equal and Opposite Reaction. What I’m trying to say is that Kipnis isn’t doing some bloodless examination of men, or the male condition: she’s interested in the sweaty, bloody, gnarly real way actual real men really are (like most of the folks I’ve read who’ve reviewed this book [Kerry Howley did a pretty incredible one here], I find the “Men Who Hate Hillary” essay both monumentally hilarious and discomfittingly clear-eyed in an open-secret sort of way). I can’t imagine what honest dude doesn’t read this book with the more-than-occasional knowing nod, and it’s impossible to imagine a smarter book this funny, or a funny book this smart, or what the fuck ever: read the thing. Read.

Year End Fiction Wrap-up: Beha, Lish, Faber

Arts & Entertainents by Chris Beha

I think I didn’t write about Chris Beha’s phenomenally good Arts & Entertainments when it was released simply because of Twitter and the echo it offers, the sense that (at least in my own life/experience) whatever it is you’re excited about is already generally, obviously known. Lots of folks, anyway, that I read on Twitter were talking about the book already, and so it seemed silly to���as if at some bonfire���just toss another It’s Great! Read It! log on the who-could-miss-it-fire.

But it’s been several months since the book’s release, and it’s still not only a phenomenally good book but, now, a lasting one: it’s a story of Eddie Hartley, “Handsome” Eddie Hartley, an early-30s drama teacher at the private/posh boys academy he himself graduated from 15 yrs back, but Eddie’s there because of a fall: he’d expected a career as an actor, a career his ex-girlfriend Martha has gone on to great success in (as the title character in a hugely popular TV show Dr. Drake) while Eddie has married Susan and sort of fumbled along, gathering debt (as Manhattanites seem impelled to) and trying to get by. The book snaps into its (awesomely constructed) plot at the introduction of two things: 1. Eddie and Susan hve fertility issues (which, for those unversed, means $) and 2. Eddie’s got let’s call it ‘compromising’ video of Martha, from before she was famous. So, obviously: problem and solution, right?

In lesser hands, maybe that’s the book’s entirety: Eddie (who���like Susan and Martha and Morgan [the old friend Eddie sells his ex’s sex-tape to] and everyone in this book���is just exceptionally well-rendered: Beha’s an editor at Harper’s, so it’s not *that* surprising that the book’s sharply written and engaging [plus he’s got a previous novel and book of nonfiction, meaning: dude’s run the track well before], but one’s day-job means nil re: one’s capacity to draw such full-of-blood characters, a talent Beha’s just lights-out good at) leaks the tape, conflicts ensue, eventually everything resolves. In the broadest strokes this is what happens in Arts and Entertainments, but in the process Beha engages the reader in awesomely uncomfortable ways, namely: what is it we want from our stories? That’s the deepest question he’s working here, but there’s a raft of others, from the demands we make upon the actors we’re transfixed by, to the ugly sin-and-redemption split-story driving so much contemporary entertainment to���for me the meatiest part���the toxically entertaining hellhole of reality television. Here’s where Beha shines most, I think���Handsome Eddie ends up in a reality TV show centered on his own life, as does his wife, and the machinations behind the shows are not only plenty believable but sort of gutting (at least for those of us entertained enough by reality TV to know off-hand, for instance, that the next season of The Bachelor starts January 5th), plus also humiliating: we’re so easy.

That, weirdly, is the humbling and heartening take-away from the book, I’d argue: we’re so easy, all of us. We want story. We want conflict and resolution, sin and redemption, and we’re willing to suspend all manner of disbelief and shoulda-known-better hunches to get our dosage of such, and Beha’s masterful Arts & Entertainments is as much a good story leavened well with the usual key and great ingredients as it is an astonishing mirror reflecting right back at us, showing us ourselves in all our silly hopeful wanting and yet���amazingly���not faulting us for wanting it all, for wanting to see it all but still believe.

��

Preparations for the Next Life by Atticus Lish

Is it time to saint Giancarlo DeTrapano yet? Seems like it. Check the dude’s track record: Scott McClanahan’s Hill William and Kimball’s Us and Butler’s Sky Saw and Calloway’s shuts-down-a-printing-press-because-maybe-obscenity what purpose did i serve in your life and now Preparations for the Next Life which has been heralded by damn near everyone, Garner earlier and Clancy Martin in some wknd’s NYTimes and have you read this fucking thing? Have you read this gorgeous book? The adjectives run out fairly quickly: lots of reviews emphasize the sentences, which is legit and great, the propulsive writing or whatever, but mostly what it feels like is an almost perfect scenario: writing that’s entirely without fat in service of a story that’s achingly, tenderly wandering. Which isn’t to say the sentences are brutally brief or anything. Here’s at random (p124): “He was from a place called Shayler, which he described as pretty basic. There were bars, Lutheran churches, and a 7-11. When he said home, he pronounced it hoeme. The houses went up a hill, like a mining hill, close to West Virginia. Under the highway going into town were mountains of gray gravel. A lot of bars, a lot of drinking. Steel Town football was big. People were pretty racist. But they were open about it. They could be friends with anyone. That’s just how they were.” That music, that totality, that far-reach+apologyless full painting: that’s why you can’t put Preparation for the Next Life down. Skinner and Zou Lei are glorious, and their story’s gorgeous and heart-expanding.

The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber

I’d never read Faber before, and then this novel hit this autumn and it seemed like you couldn’t avoid mention of it, plus the fact that, in the writing of this book (about distance, loss, religion and science, forgiveness), Faber actually lost his beloved wife, and here’s the thing: The Book of Strange New Things is among the most expansive and beautiful homes of a book of I’ve ever read, and not only that, but the thing’s so open, so honest: among the very first scenes, Peter and his wife Bea pull over and have sex in their car on their way to the airport, from which Peter’s about to depart for a long, long while. It’s not some porny moment: it’s a husband and wife attempting to hit that flint of intimacy again, but Peter is struck wondering by their encounter, afterward, fearful he didn’t satisfy his wife, anxious of what such a let-down (according to him: she waves off his anxieties when he airs them, but that’s hardly enough) portends. What’s most startling about this very (to me; maybe I’m just not reading enough) startling opening is that, in grounding the book in the banalities and tiny dramas of domesticity and love, Faber eventually presents an outer-space drama, replete with aliens and interstellar travel, as more understandable���or maybe not more but equally, certainly���than the small-scale stuff of each of our lives. Think of that. The best books should make your insides feel sudden, surprising, fragile amazements you overlook too often (should make whats outside feel that way too, I suppose, but the outside world’s offering plenty of evidence regular re that), and Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things does just that, plus more: it actually, hand-on-my-heart, makes you glad to be alive + opens you wide to wonder. Good lord, what a book.

That Kind of Girl

��Lena Dunham’s NOT THAT KIND OF GIRL: A YOUNG WOMAN TELLS YOU WHAT SHE’S “LEARNED”

Whether or not you���re going to like this book depends entirely on whether or not you agree that Lena Dunham is the voice of her generation (���or at least, a voice of a generation). So many have already written her off as a privileged, minimally talented case of nepotism, unfairly, without doing much study of her talent at all.

And then, there are those who are looking to make this book into a scandal. Did it seem inevitable to anyone else that, of course, someone was going to find a controversy in its pages? Of course, the specific essay people did take problem with (which, oddly enough, I read before the book even published in a fashion magazine��� people seemed to not notice it���s problems at that point), the story of Dunham���s little sister Grace growing up and coming out, in which Dunham makes a joke about being like a ���sexual predator,��� is the story you���ll hear about before anything else.

It���s messy, and nobody has officially, at least on the Internet level of settling an argument, deemed Dunham completely innocent or completely guilty. You can, and I do, take this as reason enough to move beyond the controversy: feminist writer Roxane Gay has continued to support Dunham, even defend her on Twitter in spite of allegations. I think, really, Gay did the once-and-done defense of Dunham and her Girls-created world in this 2012 essay, ���Girls Girls Girls.��� TL;DR, Gay questions the impossibly high-standards we have set for Dunham, begging for more acceptance of the strengths of her writing rather than focusing on shortcomings.

Dunham herself, actually, puts it greatly in Not That Kind of Girl. While describing talks at her alumna mater and questions about don���t-you-feel-terrible-for-being-so-white-privileged?, her simple response ���There are worse people than me��� seems to fit well. It���s with that caveat that, yes there are flaws, yes there are missing pieces and maybe too-far of jokes, BUT, the strengths way more than make up for the weaknesses that I move forward discussing the book.

Another thing Gay���s touched on- this book is not your typical TV-star memoir where the thing gives mild advice all the while trying to hard to be a written-out comedy show. It���s an actual collection of essays drafted and written and edited like any other writer���s. Plus, little doodles on the page for visuals, like a 16 year old���s diary, making it all the more endearing.

Dunham���s writing style is surprisingly far from the writing of Girls. Jokes are not the main pursuit; wisdom, heart, and a touch on the truth we can���t quite put into words are the goals. Reading the whole thing, I couldn���t help but think about Judy Blume despite the fact that even now, I can���t tell you one solid reasons I connected their writing besides the fact both authors stories would be useful guides to blossoming women. Like her idol, Nora Ephron, Dunham���s style is feminine in the best ways: cheeky, wise, written with an air that, ���this girl knows something I���d love to learn about life.���

It really sucks that people only know about the essay about her sister. There are so many more supremely powerful, girl-uplifting think pieces in the mix that we should be focusing on instead. There���s Dunham���s account of her disordered eating, of her various stages from a happy teen chowing on prosciutto sandwiches to her days as a vegetarian, her young desires to eat only pies and fluffy things, to, as a young women, her struggles with bulimia, binging and purging to the extreme.

There���s the story of a hazy night, a night that left bruises, black moments; one Dunham still struggles to piece together and determine whether or not what happened during that night was rape.

There���s the story of her mother, a kick-ass artist that would take nude self-portraits in her prime, her desire only to preserve the way her skin looked, the way her fat folded and knees stacked at that present moment.

There���s the story of her first years out of college working retail, struggling to piece together the life of art and opportunities her parents had that her generation seemed to fail to be able to ever hope to find for themselves.

Basically this: Know the controversial story is not the only story. Know that there are worse people than Lena Dunham. Know that whether or not you read her fucking book, the girls going to keep doing her own thing her own way, not giving a fuck what the people think, as she always has.

YES PLEASE, and THANK YOU Amy Poehler

��YES PLEASE by Amy Poehler

I���ve been waiting for this book to come out for so long. Seriously ��� I mention how much I���m craving Amy Poehler���s book in this review from last year (at which point, I had no idea she was currently working on Yes Please). Is it lying to say I���ve kind of been waiting for this since Tina Fey���s Bossypants in which Poehler���s ���work wife���/best friend outlines how kickass and amazing the blonde comedian is?

Anyway, whatever, IT���S HERE. And it���s everything you could hope for.

I���m at the point where I���m so deep in Amy Poehler fandom that I have maybe almost compartmentalized Amy into two different women: (1) The comedy savant, blonde-hair-don���t-care queen of characters and improv, the SNL star and Weekend Update host, and (2) The all-powerful girl-power feminist leader, the creator of Amy Poehler���s Smart Girls and star of the ���Ask Amy!��� video series. I almost have to mentally remember that this awesome, ONE woman is at once so funny and so smart and so wise while carrying such a big big heart.

Why that matters: For anyone else who often has trouble understanding how much of Amy Poehler is a comedy act / how much is scripted / how much humor does she balance with heart OFF-screen ��� This book is your answer.

I���m sure 86,000 reviews of this book will tell you ���Amy Poehler���s Yes Please excels in it���s perfect blending of humor and heart,��� as if there is a chapter that is funny, the next chapter serious and thoughtful. This is wrong. For Amy, there is no difference between the love and the laughter. The girl���s just got this huge huge heart that takes equal joy in making people smile, crack up, or feel empowered. Every sentence is dripping with heart and humor, never categorized away separately. (Except when maybe she is talking about how great her ass is. No, you know what?, not even then. She���s teaching it���s okay for a woman, no longer size 2 to be proud of her butt. Go Amy again).

Like, let���s take this story about the first night she spent with her current significant other, comedian Nick Kroll: ���On one of our first nights together I woke up apologizing for my snoring and he pulled out the two earplugs he had worn to bed so that he could hear what I was saying. It was one of the most romantic gestures I have ever seen.���

There are a thousand more lines that funny and that powerful. This book is stocked.

Of course, there are the obligatory chapters about childhood and her family (who really truly sound as wonderful and supportive as most memoirs try to make their parents seem). There���s the obligatory chapter about drugs, which is literally called ���Obligatory Drug Stories, or Lessons I Learned on Mushrooms.��� There are the stories about moving up from doing improv in Chicago to forming the Upright Citizen Brigade comedy troop to making a living off of comedy to joining Saturday Night Live. All the stuff you expect, I assure you, are in there.

It���s the stuff most authors would want to brush over that Amy includes that should really impress you. The woman talks about the only sketch she has truly been ashamed of and apologetic for, a sketch that was meant to mock how adult Dakota Fanning���s projects always are that ended up making a disabled girl the butt of the joke, and the path she took to making amends. She talks about not just how lucky she is (like we all hear and are all so sick of, because we all hate sitting around waiting for it to be our turn to get lucky), but about how must of her ���luck��� is the result of WORK and making really meaningful connections. She talks excessively about those connections and how thankful she is to all of them and how she doesn���t even think she���d be half of what she is without them. ALL of this sounds, on paper, like a humble brag, but I promise you it���s not.

It���s just Amy. She gives great advice. She opens up her heart. She���s fuuny. She���s vulnerable. Because, as she has said before, ���vulnerability is the key to happiness. Vulnerable people are powerful people.“

Two More from Graywolf

I���ve been stupid busy with my other blogs lately (shameless self promotion here), but there are books I will always make time for. Of course, many of these come from Graywolf Press. Weston���s already trumpeted a good number of their fall releases, but there are two more you really shouldn���t miss:

J. Robert Lennon’s SEE YOU IN PARADISE

���������������������� A lot of short stories collections are funny but easy. It���s very simple to get a story out in 10 to 15 pages ��� you set up a scenario, get people to care about the characters and then hit them with the ironic twist. And a lot of the time, that���s enough. Until, that is, you read a short story collection like J. Robert Lennon���s See You in Paradise.

This thing is irony plus. Sure, he follows the basic formula, sets the scene, makes you care, etc. etc., but THEN, the magic happens when Lennon delivers the ironic kicker and the story KEEPS GOING. It���s soo easy to end the joke or the story on the punchline. It���s so much harder to do what Lennon does, to keep people focused after that, to get to the place where the story really makes them laugh and think.

Let���s take my favorite story, ���Zombie Dan,��� for example. It starts with a major medical discovery in which people are now able to pay to bring their loved ones back from the dead in a process called ���revivification.��� A man returns with the rest of his high-school day���s crew to greet their newly revived friend Dan, be supportive during this fragile time in his (second?) life and maybe even help teach him to talk again.

Then the twist comes in: Bringing Dan back from the dead has given him the ability to know things the real Dan shouldn���t know. Suddenly, he knows what people were thinking or doing years ago, events the real living Dan never saw happen, things the real Dan would never know.

Right there ��� so many writers would stop the story in a Goosebumps or ���Tales of the Crypt���-esque kicker, thinking ���It���s a short story, it���s just meant to entertain, right?��� Lennon goes on to use the narrator as a vehicle for philosophical ponderings on the ethics of killing zombies, the ethics of mercy killing and just deep deep shit you���d never touch if not framed first with the tale of this zombie kid. It���s so so funny, but more than that, it���s so so wise.

Eugen Ruge’s IN TIMES OF FADING LIGHT

Probably a better indicator of a good book than that famous Oprah-book-club sticker (does she still run a book club? Probably) is that little cover line mentioning ���Translated from the X language by X.��� That little indicator is almost as fool-proof as the Graywolf logo on the spine. ((I promise once and for all, Graywolf in no way sponsors these posts. We just really really like them)). So, when In Times of Fading Light had both, I knew it was something I had to read.

Told in a non-linear collection of stories, the tale of the Umnitzer family, torn as well as tied together by the rise of fall of East German communism, takes place. To be completely fair ��� I know nothing really about East German communism other than, as I learned in high school history class, it was bad and there was the Berlin Wall and people on the wrong side often had food shortages ��� that���s it. It doesn���t matter ��� this book isn���t about politics (even though members of the family discuss and fight over them), it���s about the heart and strength that unites people, their desire to stay together no matter whatever other allegiances its members chose to have. It���s a powerful read, filled with tragic stories, pain and the truth any family drama is lucky to touch.

It ain’t a Fall if it’s a Bow

 THE FALL: A Father’s Memoir in 424 Steps by Diago Mainardi

I don’t know how Other Press does it. They just find these books that, in like 10,000 words, less than 200, digest-size pages, rip me to my gut. They’ve done it again with Diago Mainardi’s The Fall: A Father’s Memoir in 424 Steps.

You can’t even call it heart-breaking, just gut-twisting full of emotions. It’s the story of a father and his hero, his muse, his son, Tito, a boy born with Cerebral Palsy after the hospital made a mistake during his birth. It’s less a guide from Mainardi on how to deal with raising a kid with this condition, never a whine that his kid isn’t normal, but truly, a celebration and not-so-humble brag about why this little guy who has never walked more than 424 steps at a time without falling down is the best kid ever.

The story does, I guess, start off sad. The first steps – and the whole book is like this, pieced off into paragraphs that make up “steps” instead of chapters, filled loosely with photographs and pictures – outline his wife’s pregnancy, the bad jokes Mainardi made as she went into labor about never having a kid that could rival the architecture of that hospital, the mistakes nurses and doctors made by not delivering Tito as they should have, thus causing his Cerebral Palsy. More than anyone, though, Mainardi blames himself for Tito’s condition. He blames his bad jokes, he blames the things he said (the same things that any father might say), even blames the destiny of all history leading up to this point. Despite all the early blame, though, you can tell Mainardi doesn’t actually care about the circumstances; he’s a thankful bastard he’s got the son he has today.

Maybe mid-way through begins just the best gushing/fawning over a kid in modern literature. Doctors say his kid will never learn to talk; Mainardi writes about the genius of his son who created his own secret language that his whole family can crack like their special code. Doctors say his kid will never learn to walk; Mainardi counts the steps his son can take in a row before “the fall,” which is inevitable. Practicing on the beach, Tito learns slowly, taking a few steps at a time before landing in the sand, giggling as if a joke rather than getting stumped by the defeat. The number grows and grows, Tito gets farther before falling down (never losing the attitude that it’s okay to fall over). Eventually this kid, this little wobbly boy that nobody expected to move on his own or communicate, takes 424 steps. It’s a marathon. It’s a hell of a lot.

Basically this: If you’ve got a kid, you’ll know what it’s like to be so proud of them, from the first time they throw up and don’t get it all over your shirt to the first time they count to ten, and you’ll relate to the gushing-dad in Mainardi. If you don’t, and you know anyone with anything setting them back, anyone who’s overcome anything everyone talked against, your face is gonna glow with the same pride while reading this. And, if you’re not in either of those groups, you’re gonna need to read this book anyway, because it’s time you see some of the beauty this world’s got.