S. Scott Whitaker's Blog, page 13
August 8, 2015
Ugly Duckling Presse's Lyric Hunter and Robert Fitterman double down on challenging #poetry, #review
Ugly Duckling Presse designs kick-ass poetry chapbooks. The chapbook, in my humble opinion, is the album, the record, the proper format for poets to collect poems; a short cyclic collection of work in the same key. And Ugly Duckling Presse generates sharp, collectible books that reward the reader visually, textually, and graphically. They print the kind of books critics of electronic books should champion. Seriously, go look at them. Order them at your local bookstore to feel them in your hands. The printing rewards the buyer. The binding, the feel of the books, the graphics, the varying sizes of the book elevates the content.
Lyric Hunter’s Swallower ($12) is a gorgeous little chapbook, three inches wide and six inches long and printed with a lovely vine graphic. Swallower is set in Paris, the most delicious and sensuous of literary cities, and part of what makes Swallower a success is Hunter’s eye and ear focuses on the city’s penchant to digest beauty and grotesqueness; it’s ability to gobble everything up and make it its own. The same could be said of the poet, a throat of the world, swallowing all and pushing it all back out with a breath.
Swallower is essentially about language, language as a garden of words, memes, phonemes, and meaning that grows, dies, returns to the earth and grows up again. The opening poem “Gare de Lyon” opens with “piss at the mouth...their toilet paper/comes from the Relay at the entrance...found tucked/under old papers/lost bears and scarves/in a scarred phone booth.” The train station depicted as a haven for the lost and found, the unwanted, the harried and hurried; I’ve been to Paris several times and can vouch for the smell of piss blossoming from some of the city’s most beautiful and grotesque places, and Hunter shows us that within the amidst some of the cities oldest and most beautiful streets, stations, and city wonderments, mankind’s waste is a flower waiting for someone to sniff, pick, or pause at its lonely beauty. Sometimes it’s memory, sometimes history, and sometimes a detail from the speaker’s external and internal life, and in the end the city, like the poem, swallows it all.
“Gare de Lyon,” the opening poem, condenses Swallower’s motifs of language and history into a long imagistic (how appropriate for a poem about Paris, no?) meditation on swallowing. The throat is a metaphor for the station, it’s high ceilings, the long airy halls where the trains pull to a stop, the milling of travelers moving in, about, and out of the city of lights. Hunter hears the music, the white noise of the station and beyond as the speaker moves through the rain, “I am/an extra e/extra feminine/ an echo a double/Paris twins/repeat.” There are moments within the poem, and within the cycle of poems where narrative is lost, or is excerpted for image, and meme. The bare language leaves holes in places, as if poet is cataloguing the associations. Language, bubbling out of the throat, is what the poet collects, and identifies with.
And language, sound, can be a political weapon, a sly motif in Swallower, from the Algiers man in the Jardin des Plantes, to the children speaking “Parrot English” behind a wall, to the Nazi occupation during World War II. Paris is an appropriate setting for a throat that swallows language, memory, history, violence and beauty and survives on the diet, even flourishes. Language invades. It permeates. It flowers in the throat. Hunter does not make commentary, or philosophize, she presents language in the mode of breath and allows the reader to see the garden as it is, as it sounds.
Hunter does not always stay in Paris, the speaker moves between Wisconsin, moves through the American South via blues riffs, moves through Rome, but Paris, and French remain the soul of Swallower, and Hunter’s speakers feel both at home in Paris, as well as separated; a happy wanderer of the city, whose eye and ear swallow up the sights and sounds be it hate, “to spit is to symbol/an aversion of spirit” (from “La Hargne”) or the “quiet way/ we leave an old and famous church” (from “Le Pâques”).
The chapbook ends with “A Garden” and Hunter buries her hands in it, the “garden catalogue...the garden is a mess of things” a wet damp place where what has died has come up again. I imagine the garden to be a city garden, not the country garden of my rural south, but a garden behind a fence and a gate, the city not far beyond the edges of the humped up earth. The kind of place a city wanderer might discover upon a new route home from the cafe. By the end of the garden meditation the poet cannot speak, has been rendered mute by the wealth of compost. The poet ends the book by saying “everything I want/to say I swallow,” and the poet has become like the train station in the opening of the book and like the garden at the end of the book; transformed by experience, enriched and humbled in the language rich world.
Robert Fitterman’s No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself ($16) is a long song of woe. Fitterman’s speaker, who by the way is not Robert Fitterman but a personae, has bottomed out emotionally. The speaker’s lonely mind is laid bare in this beautiful complicated book. The simple cover is bare of graphics, and the title is printed in scrawling black against ochre, and the almost 80 pages of poetry within is printed upon a hearty stock that rewards the skin as you read it.
No, Wait. is constructed as a single poem of, for lack of a more accurate description, unrhymed couplets that build and shrink and build again as the poem lurches forward in it’s loneliness. But aside from the crafting of the lines there’s not much “poetry” here. No, Wait is composed with the subtle music of performance poetry that can be lost upon the reader as the reader “reads” the lines across the page. Hearing No, Wait “performed” is probably a scream, for the humor is sly, dark, and subtle. What would soar in the breath of gifted reader does not necessarily soar on the page. Glide certainly, but not soar. The language is frank, and laden with pop culture and literary references and homages. This is a choice by the poet, to speak frankly and with modern idiom about loneliness, sadness, depression, and self-loathing. And Fitterman is successful. This removal of artifice allows the reader to walk into the speaker’s loneliness (technically major depression or at least cyclothymic depression) but as poetry, the work does not do so much in terms of creating music, or harvesting image, or employing other tools of the trade. Not that it has to; Fitterman chooses to step away from poetry, to be anti-poetic. Which by my book is a valid choice. There are more poets publishing today than in all of history combined, and certainly there is room for the anti-academic, the anti-establishment, and the good old-fashioned expression of feeling, which is really what No, Wait is, an expression of despair. Perhaps rhyme, meter, rhetoric and elegiac imagery would make No, Wait come off as phony, or silly, or over the top, and Fitterman seeks to craft a personae that is an authentic spokesman for the lonely, the depressed, the dejected. At times No, Wait reads like an addicted mind rationalizing the need for substance abuse to numb the boredom of loneliness. The speaker is bored with himself, with his lonely existence, which has led to self-loathing. The poem’s motifs: loneliness for sex and companionship, numbing the pain with booze and pot, the skull shattering heartbreak of rejection repeat and vary, repeat and vary, and layer the poem in a knot. But here’s the catch: the speaker doesn’t want to get better, or doesn’t know how. Often times the speaker is choosing not to. “I used to blow off everyone who wanted to talk/or hang out at school/Now look at me! Now I’m the one nobody wants/ to talk to!...If I actually go out /It’s a miracle”...and I figure I’ll be that crazy cat person/Soon that everyone sees on the news.” The speaker later bemoans, “I know rejection like the back of my hand...or I feel so sad/ all the time.” This bruised center of self is the one gift the speaker has been given, “it’s my super power. I’m like a comic-book hero with/a double life. By day I go about my business and by night/I sit at home and disappear by myself.” No, Wait is not without humor, a black, dark, sour humor that no doubt leaps from the page when Fitterman performs this howl of woe for an audience. It isn’t lost on the reader either, but it is buried within the litanies of woe.
And that’s what weighs down No, Wait, not the emotion, not the exigency of the poem, but rather the poet’s delivery. It is poetry by name, not by construction, as it is written No, Wait would be as successful in prose. It isn’t poetry by reduction. It is an expansive emoting of the ego, of the I. Is it experimental? Maybe. Is it post-post-modern? Maybe. It certainly has emotional resonance, but I’m not so sure it has the intended effect. If Fitterman intends for the reader to sympathize, many will, but just as many will find the speaker whiny and spoiled. After all, the speaker here has everything to live for. He has his plusses, and his minuses appear to be both pathological and created by choice. By the end of the poem the speaker is in his room, his sad little room that is a bastion of safety against the world. But will the reader care? Will the reader empathize? I’m not so sure. It’s sad for sure, heartbreakingly so, but my internal reader couldn’t help but wield the hammer of judgment. After a point, I kept thinking of Denis Leary’s bitter stand-up show, No Cure for Cancer, where the character in the monologue goes to a shrink and the shrink tells him to just “Shut the fuck up,” pain is everywhere, deal with it. But maybe that’s what Fitterman’s speaker is railing against, that very voice of judgement that tells the depressed, the lonely, the consciousness-fatigued to just deal with it. Because some people in this world cannot deal with pain, they are super sensitive to it in all of its manifestations, and these are the very people Fitterman gives a voice to. No, Wait is challenging in that regard, and it bludgeons the reader with sadness. And as poetry, as it is constructed, as a machine of language, No, Wait shares the theatre and dramatics with poetry, but leaves the other vestiges aside.
Lyric Hunter’s Swallower ($12) is a gorgeous little chapbook, three inches wide and six inches long and printed with a lovely vine graphic. Swallower is set in Paris, the most delicious and sensuous of literary cities, and part of what makes Swallower a success is Hunter’s eye and ear focuses on the city’s penchant to digest beauty and grotesqueness; it’s ability to gobble everything up and make it its own. The same could be said of the poet, a throat of the world, swallowing all and pushing it all back out with a breath.
Swallower is essentially about language, language as a garden of words, memes, phonemes, and meaning that grows, dies, returns to the earth and grows up again. The opening poem “Gare de Lyon” opens with “piss at the mouth...their toilet paper/comes from the Relay at the entrance...found tucked/under old papers/lost bears and scarves/in a scarred phone booth.” The train station depicted as a haven for the lost and found, the unwanted, the harried and hurried; I’ve been to Paris several times and can vouch for the smell of piss blossoming from some of the city’s most beautiful and grotesque places, and Hunter shows us that within the amidst some of the cities oldest and most beautiful streets, stations, and city wonderments, mankind’s waste is a flower waiting for someone to sniff, pick, or pause at its lonely beauty. Sometimes it’s memory, sometimes history, and sometimes a detail from the speaker’s external and internal life, and in the end the city, like the poem, swallows it all.
“Gare de Lyon,” the opening poem, condenses Swallower’s motifs of language and history into a long imagistic (how appropriate for a poem about Paris, no?) meditation on swallowing. The throat is a metaphor for the station, it’s high ceilings, the long airy halls where the trains pull to a stop, the milling of travelers moving in, about, and out of the city of lights. Hunter hears the music, the white noise of the station and beyond as the speaker moves through the rain, “I am/an extra e/extra feminine/ an echo a double/Paris twins/repeat.” There are moments within the poem, and within the cycle of poems where narrative is lost, or is excerpted for image, and meme. The bare language leaves holes in places, as if poet is cataloguing the associations. Language, bubbling out of the throat, is what the poet collects, and identifies with.
And language, sound, can be a political weapon, a sly motif in Swallower, from the Algiers man in the Jardin des Plantes, to the children speaking “Parrot English” behind a wall, to the Nazi occupation during World War II. Paris is an appropriate setting for a throat that swallows language, memory, history, violence and beauty and survives on the diet, even flourishes. Language invades. It permeates. It flowers in the throat. Hunter does not make commentary, or philosophize, she presents language in the mode of breath and allows the reader to see the garden as it is, as it sounds.
Hunter does not always stay in Paris, the speaker moves between Wisconsin, moves through the American South via blues riffs, moves through Rome, but Paris, and French remain the soul of Swallower, and Hunter’s speakers feel both at home in Paris, as well as separated; a happy wanderer of the city, whose eye and ear swallow up the sights and sounds be it hate, “to spit is to symbol/an aversion of spirit” (from “La Hargne”) or the “quiet way/ we leave an old and famous church” (from “Le Pâques”).
The chapbook ends with “A Garden” and Hunter buries her hands in it, the “garden catalogue...the garden is a mess of things” a wet damp place where what has died has come up again. I imagine the garden to be a city garden, not the country garden of my rural south, but a garden behind a fence and a gate, the city not far beyond the edges of the humped up earth. The kind of place a city wanderer might discover upon a new route home from the cafe. By the end of the garden meditation the poet cannot speak, has been rendered mute by the wealth of compost. The poet ends the book by saying “everything I want/to say I swallow,” and the poet has become like the train station in the opening of the book and like the garden at the end of the book; transformed by experience, enriched and humbled in the language rich world.
Robert Fitterman’s No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself ($16) is a long song of woe. Fitterman’s speaker, who by the way is not Robert Fitterman but a personae, has bottomed out emotionally. The speaker’s lonely mind is laid bare in this beautiful complicated book. The simple cover is bare of graphics, and the title is printed in scrawling black against ochre, and the almost 80 pages of poetry within is printed upon a hearty stock that rewards the skin as you read it.
No, Wait. is constructed as a single poem of, for lack of a more accurate description, unrhymed couplets that build and shrink and build again as the poem lurches forward in it’s loneliness. But aside from the crafting of the lines there’s not much “poetry” here. No, Wait is composed with the subtle music of performance poetry that can be lost upon the reader as the reader “reads” the lines across the page. Hearing No, Wait “performed” is probably a scream, for the humor is sly, dark, and subtle. What would soar in the breath of gifted reader does not necessarily soar on the page. Glide certainly, but not soar. The language is frank, and laden with pop culture and literary references and homages. This is a choice by the poet, to speak frankly and with modern idiom about loneliness, sadness, depression, and self-loathing. And Fitterman is successful. This removal of artifice allows the reader to walk into the speaker’s loneliness (technically major depression or at least cyclothymic depression) but as poetry, the work does not do so much in terms of creating music, or harvesting image, or employing other tools of the trade. Not that it has to; Fitterman chooses to step away from poetry, to be anti-poetic. Which by my book is a valid choice. There are more poets publishing today than in all of history combined, and certainly there is room for the anti-academic, the anti-establishment, and the good old-fashioned expression of feeling, which is really what No, Wait is, an expression of despair. Perhaps rhyme, meter, rhetoric and elegiac imagery would make No, Wait come off as phony, or silly, or over the top, and Fitterman seeks to craft a personae that is an authentic spokesman for the lonely, the depressed, the dejected. At times No, Wait reads like an addicted mind rationalizing the need for substance abuse to numb the boredom of loneliness. The speaker is bored with himself, with his lonely existence, which has led to self-loathing. The poem’s motifs: loneliness for sex and companionship, numbing the pain with booze and pot, the skull shattering heartbreak of rejection repeat and vary, repeat and vary, and layer the poem in a knot. But here’s the catch: the speaker doesn’t want to get better, or doesn’t know how. Often times the speaker is choosing not to. “I used to blow off everyone who wanted to talk/or hang out at school/Now look at me! Now I’m the one nobody wants/ to talk to!...If I actually go out /It’s a miracle”...and I figure I’ll be that crazy cat person/Soon that everyone sees on the news.” The speaker later bemoans, “I know rejection like the back of my hand...or I feel so sad/ all the time.” This bruised center of self is the one gift the speaker has been given, “it’s my super power. I’m like a comic-book hero with/a double life. By day I go about my business and by night/I sit at home and disappear by myself.” No, Wait is not without humor, a black, dark, sour humor that no doubt leaps from the page when Fitterman performs this howl of woe for an audience. It isn’t lost on the reader either, but it is buried within the litanies of woe.
And that’s what weighs down No, Wait, not the emotion, not the exigency of the poem, but rather the poet’s delivery. It is poetry by name, not by construction, as it is written No, Wait would be as successful in prose. It isn’t poetry by reduction. It is an expansive emoting of the ego, of the I. Is it experimental? Maybe. Is it post-post-modern? Maybe. It certainly has emotional resonance, but I’m not so sure it has the intended effect. If Fitterman intends for the reader to sympathize, many will, but just as many will find the speaker whiny and spoiled. After all, the speaker here has everything to live for. He has his plusses, and his minuses appear to be both pathological and created by choice. By the end of the poem the speaker is in his room, his sad little room that is a bastion of safety against the world. But will the reader care? Will the reader empathize? I’m not so sure. It’s sad for sure, heartbreakingly so, but my internal reader couldn’t help but wield the hammer of judgment. After a point, I kept thinking of Denis Leary’s bitter stand-up show, No Cure for Cancer, where the character in the monologue goes to a shrink and the shrink tells him to just “Shut the fuck up,” pain is everywhere, deal with it. But maybe that’s what Fitterman’s speaker is railing against, that very voice of judgement that tells the depressed, the lonely, the consciousness-fatigued to just deal with it. Because some people in this world cannot deal with pain, they are super sensitive to it in all of its manifestations, and these are the very people Fitterman gives a voice to. No, Wait is challenging in that regard, and it bludgeons the reader with sadness. And as poetry, as it is constructed, as a machine of language, No, Wait shares the theatre and dramatics with poetry, but leaves the other vestiges aside.
August 7, 2015
Sharon Erby's linked fiction, Parallel, weaves together working class lives, #fictionreview
Sharon Erby’s linked short fiction collection Parallel, from Harvard Square Editions, weaves together the lives of men and women who struggle to make ends meet in the mountains of south-central Pennsylvania. The characters of Parallel come from various backgrounds, but all of them are tied to the land, tied to the mountain, and tied to the real estate of the human heart. Erby makes good use of setting to illustrate the spiritual connection between the characters who make up the human landscape of these stories. The men and women are combat veterans, academic transplants, poor working class mothers, the Amish, and children dealing with their parents shortcomings. The characters of Parallel possess a restless anxious energy that comes from having to scrape ends together, compromising hopes and dreams to just get by. They are looking for peace, for “the still and always,” a serenity matched and reflected by the landscape of the wilderness around them.
Erby’s work belongs to a rich tradition in American fiction, telling the broad story of a place through a myriad of voices. It’s rewarding work for the reader who can follow the protagonists as they appear throughout the stories. One of the main characters is Brenda, a hard working mother, who might as well be single since her husband is more concerned about drinking than being responsible. And Brenda doesn’t take her problems lying down, she’s a fighter, willing to do whatever it takes to survive. She even finds the love she needs on the side with fellow garbage collector Eddie, who has his own demons. From the outside the reader can see that Eddie is only a tick better than her husband, but Brenda doesn’t seem to mind, or care. She’s looking out for herself so she can be a mother to her sons, and a friend to her loved ones. Erby tells the story of people, and refuses to moralize, regardless of how easy it would be to do so. Her characters are deeply flawed and hurt, but Erby resists the urge to preach, or even present a series of characters who are perfect models. Erby’s interested in the dark, dense matter of humanity, which means pain, heartache, and characters who fuck-up over and over again.
Of particular interest to Erby is the outsider. The outsider is woven into the DNA of these stories from the outset. A Vietnam vet, Martin, struggles with the loss of his leg, and then his progressing alcoholism. His leg, and his alcoholism, are enough to make him an outsider, but its when he comes home drunk one night, ears pricked for the sound of hunting on the mountains that his otherness hits home: “I’m goin’ up,” he said randomly, then, pushing away from Grace to open the door of the old truck. “This time I’m goin’!” But he never does, and you get the sense he never will, having to rely on Grace’s to get him through the night, and life. It’s symbolic of his limitations, of his leg, of how he is stuck in the past. It’s a theme which Erby plays with, exploring the limitations of Brenda, Martin’s daughter, and Brenda’s children, and the other people who live near them. Just how far can one get when you are cut off from the world? The characters live far away from high paying jobs, new industry, or well connected schools. There’s only so much you can do, regardless if you are a disfigured veteran, a pill-head, or a single, pretty Amish woman who wishes for love. And of course, Erby’s characters aren’t just isolated from the larger world, they are isolated from themselves, from their own needs and wants. In one story, Eddie, Brenda’s garbage man lover, tells her what she’s thinking about him, and about her decisions in life, trying to ease her anxiety about their affair, and her lot in life: “ you’re full of it, Mr. Edward Diffenderfer, if you think you can figure out what’s really right—any more than the rest of us morons who are just tryin’ to get through the day. But, B, ya know—it’s all about takin’ things away and findin’ out what’s left. And what’s left is what’s right.” Like most of us, these characters have to suffer through their problems before they find direction, even if it is too late.
The characters of Parallel suffer from poverty of the heart, either from want, or from giving. Erby reminds us that it isn’t money or class that fulfills us, it’s our relationship with people. Patrick the clinical psychiatrist, and his wife Clare, are the only middle class characters in the stories, and neither one is happy in the most basic sense. Both are frustrated with their own stagnancy. Patrick eventually begins to troll the Amish farm stands, and fins a glimmer of innocence, or purity, some kind of love that goes beyond what his wife Clare, or his brother, or even his children can give him, in Anna. As an outsider, he begins flirting with Anna, a single Amish woman who is more than a little curious about Patrick and passionate love, “her heart wanted second-definition love. Second-definition love would bring pleasure, too, but it was pure....So what if she would never know this sort of love?...Besides, Anna rationalized finally, too much is made of the notion of love anyway.” Patrick, the outsider, intrudes upon Anna, but not in an exploitative soap-opera way. This isn’t Witness, and Erby shows us that all it takes is a kiss, and a simple touch to upset our inner lives. Anna is much like Martin, the Vietnam vet from the opening story. Both characters respond profoundly to simple gestures of kindness and love, a touch of a hand, or finger, an invitation to dinner. And both characters remain empty, aching for something larger than the life they are living.
Parallel is full of tension, the slow boiling kind of realism that acts as a mirror to our own consciousness. These characters and these stories are about how to live a life, how to be awake in the world, and how to be connected to it. Erby doesn’t provide any answers, and her characters leave messy endings behind them in their wake. In the end the stories here parallel our own American lives, our fragile human hearts.
Erby’s work belongs to a rich tradition in American fiction, telling the broad story of a place through a myriad of voices. It’s rewarding work for the reader who can follow the protagonists as they appear throughout the stories. One of the main characters is Brenda, a hard working mother, who might as well be single since her husband is more concerned about drinking than being responsible. And Brenda doesn’t take her problems lying down, she’s a fighter, willing to do whatever it takes to survive. She even finds the love she needs on the side with fellow garbage collector Eddie, who has his own demons. From the outside the reader can see that Eddie is only a tick better than her husband, but Brenda doesn’t seem to mind, or care. She’s looking out for herself so she can be a mother to her sons, and a friend to her loved ones. Erby tells the story of people, and refuses to moralize, regardless of how easy it would be to do so. Her characters are deeply flawed and hurt, but Erby resists the urge to preach, or even present a series of characters who are perfect models. Erby’s interested in the dark, dense matter of humanity, which means pain, heartache, and characters who fuck-up over and over again.
Of particular interest to Erby is the outsider. The outsider is woven into the DNA of these stories from the outset. A Vietnam vet, Martin, struggles with the loss of his leg, and then his progressing alcoholism. His leg, and his alcoholism, are enough to make him an outsider, but its when he comes home drunk one night, ears pricked for the sound of hunting on the mountains that his otherness hits home: “I’m goin’ up,” he said randomly, then, pushing away from Grace to open the door of the old truck. “This time I’m goin’!” But he never does, and you get the sense he never will, having to rely on Grace’s to get him through the night, and life. It’s symbolic of his limitations, of his leg, of how he is stuck in the past. It’s a theme which Erby plays with, exploring the limitations of Brenda, Martin’s daughter, and Brenda’s children, and the other people who live near them. Just how far can one get when you are cut off from the world? The characters live far away from high paying jobs, new industry, or well connected schools. There’s only so much you can do, regardless if you are a disfigured veteran, a pill-head, or a single, pretty Amish woman who wishes for love. And of course, Erby’s characters aren’t just isolated from the larger world, they are isolated from themselves, from their own needs and wants. In one story, Eddie, Brenda’s garbage man lover, tells her what she’s thinking about him, and about her decisions in life, trying to ease her anxiety about their affair, and her lot in life: “ you’re full of it, Mr. Edward Diffenderfer, if you think you can figure out what’s really right—any more than the rest of us morons who are just tryin’ to get through the day. But, B, ya know—it’s all about takin’ things away and findin’ out what’s left. And what’s left is what’s right.” Like most of us, these characters have to suffer through their problems before they find direction, even if it is too late.
The characters of Parallel suffer from poverty of the heart, either from want, or from giving. Erby reminds us that it isn’t money or class that fulfills us, it’s our relationship with people. Patrick the clinical psychiatrist, and his wife Clare, are the only middle class characters in the stories, and neither one is happy in the most basic sense. Both are frustrated with their own stagnancy. Patrick eventually begins to troll the Amish farm stands, and fins a glimmer of innocence, or purity, some kind of love that goes beyond what his wife Clare, or his brother, or even his children can give him, in Anna. As an outsider, he begins flirting with Anna, a single Amish woman who is more than a little curious about Patrick and passionate love, “her heart wanted second-definition love. Second-definition love would bring pleasure, too, but it was pure....So what if she would never know this sort of love?...Besides, Anna rationalized finally, too much is made of the notion of love anyway.” Patrick, the outsider, intrudes upon Anna, but not in an exploitative soap-opera way. This isn’t Witness, and Erby shows us that all it takes is a kiss, and a simple touch to upset our inner lives. Anna is much like Martin, the Vietnam vet from the opening story. Both characters respond profoundly to simple gestures of kindness and love, a touch of a hand, or finger, an invitation to dinner. And both characters remain empty, aching for something larger than the life they are living.
Parallel is full of tension, the slow boiling kind of realism that acts as a mirror to our own consciousness. These characters and these stories are about how to live a life, how to be awake in the world, and how to be connected to it. Erby doesn’t provide any answers, and her characters leave messy endings behind them in their wake. In the end the stories here parallel our own American lives, our fragile human hearts.
August 6, 2015
Rachel Adams' chapbook What is Heard is a beautiful debut, #poetryreview
Rachel Adams' debut chapbook, What is Heard, from Red Bird Chapbooks, is a fine collection, a gathering of poems rooted in time and place. Like most poets writing in the United States, during a decadent time for poetry, Adams primary mode is the poet of loss. These poems are in a quiet key, often whispers, often full of ache and want, taking in the sounds and images of the world; she does not speak to us from an academic tower, or from the hipster coffee house, but rather from a point between the two. Adams poems balance lyric sensibility with fine narrative detail.
The finer moments of What is Heard offer lyrical narratives, another modern American mode; It’s not lyric enough, or formal, for verse, nor narrative enough for rhetorical devices, or plot. It’s not a judgement, or a critique, rather a statement of fact. Consider “Sleepwalking” where the character, “As a boy, he would swing his nightshirted/body over the fence--feet bare/and eyes filmy, flat as concrete--”. There’s music in these lines, the opening three syllables soft vowels with long notes give way to the mnemonic swing, perhaps a nod to musicians, or Hart Crane’s subway riders from the harrowing “The Tunnel” as the character “swing his body over the fence,” unaware of his voyage, unaware that he walks out of his house and into his mother’s anxiety. Adams could be talking about American poetry in these lines, the arcane way our nation of poetry governs and views itself, our “bare feet”, “flat hard” free verse. But never you mind, Adams is showing us a sleepwalking boy, and giving us a feast of sounds as he “paus in vast cargo-ship silhouettes,/face turned toward the smokehouse steeples.” The boy is ultimately more in tune with his sleep self, his true self. He needs no guidance, and perhaps that’s what the mother fears most, the day when her boy will turn away from her. The sleeping boy’s impulse remains, lingers at the end of the poem, suggesting that most of us sleepwalk through our lives, unaware of where our body or our mind is guiding us.
Adams’ poems dig, in much the way Seamus Heaney’s poems have always dug, “There are stories in the ground,” the poet writes in “Sedimentary,” “in the low layers” and the poet in this manner is historian, and seeker, working deep within to get to the root of her voice, the history of her heart, so to speak.
And for a book entitled What is Heard, the poems read like a travelogue as well as a soundscape, as the poet tramps and travels to places, recording what she hears in the clacking and keying of syllable against syllable. Adams is a poet of setting, tethered here and there, Cooper River, in a lonely hospital room, up on Harvey Mountain, or watching a deer ghost out from the fog and return to wildness in a turn of birds. Often what teases out from these places, is a seer poet, a poet working towards a vision, perhaps one of history, of place, but of also the spirit. The speaker in “Kinetic,” “Harvey Mountain Sound Walk,” and “Northerly” the poet speakers seeks sounds, as if recording the music of spaces could answer some deep question of the spirit. “Tell me the sound of one hand moving...” she writes in “Northerly” and “We note, like fastidious scientists, what is heard” in “Harvey Mountain Sound Walk,” a poet who not only gathers her history, but collects sounds as if they were gems.
“Deer Dream” the final poem in the chapbook offers up a vision of the poet seer, “a mound of earth talismans” a sense of loss and of more loss coming, of belonging with the earth and her strange turns. Adams is young enough to have great work ahead of her, what kind of poems she will dig for, or craft from air and sound remain to be seen, and give us something to look forward to.
The finer moments of What is Heard offer lyrical narratives, another modern American mode; It’s not lyric enough, or formal, for verse, nor narrative enough for rhetorical devices, or plot. It’s not a judgement, or a critique, rather a statement of fact. Consider “Sleepwalking” where the character, “As a boy, he would swing his nightshirted/body over the fence--feet bare/and eyes filmy, flat as concrete--”. There’s music in these lines, the opening three syllables soft vowels with long notes give way to the mnemonic swing, perhaps a nod to musicians, or Hart Crane’s subway riders from the harrowing “The Tunnel” as the character “swing
Adams’ poems dig, in much the way Seamus Heaney’s poems have always dug, “There are stories in the ground,” the poet writes in “Sedimentary,” “in the low layers” and the poet in this manner is historian, and seeker, working deep within to get to the root of her voice, the history of her heart, so to speak.
And for a book entitled What is Heard, the poems read like a travelogue as well as a soundscape, as the poet tramps and travels to places, recording what she hears in the clacking and keying of syllable against syllable. Adams is a poet of setting, tethered here and there, Cooper River, in a lonely hospital room, up on Harvey Mountain, or watching a deer ghost out from the fog and return to wildness in a turn of birds. Often what teases out from these places, is a seer poet, a poet working towards a vision, perhaps one of history, of place, but of also the spirit. The speaker in “Kinetic,” “Harvey Mountain Sound Walk,” and “Northerly” the poet speakers seeks sounds, as if recording the music of spaces could answer some deep question of the spirit. “Tell me the sound of one hand moving...” she writes in “Northerly” and “We note, like fastidious scientists, what is heard” in “Harvey Mountain Sound Walk,” a poet who not only gathers her history, but collects sounds as if they were gems.
“Deer Dream” the final poem in the chapbook offers up a vision of the poet seer, “a mound of earth talismans” a sense of loss and of more loss coming, of belonging with the earth and her strange turns. Adams is young enough to have great work ahead of her, what kind of poems she will dig for, or craft from air and sound remain to be seen, and give us something to look forward to.
August 5, 2015
Raganto's The Author or The Characters Short Living Story is a surreal reality show, #fictionreview
Facundo Raganato’s surrealistic novel, The Author or The Characters Short Living Story, from Harvard Square Editions is a metaphysical exploration of the meaning of life, and the trappings of reality. The Author is in the great tradition of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, an absurdist play where the characters seek meaning from their director, and question their reality. This kind of surrealistic philosophical romp plays well on stage. The one act play, “The Script” by Kamron Kiltgaard, another recent permutation of the same idea, features characters discovering the script of their lives (for that afternoon, anyway) and debating the philosophical ramifications. The Author begins in a similar way, when Henry, Violet, Leo, Kimberly, Joe, Lisa find themselves in a “spiritual Twilight Zone” with the clothes on their back, and few resources. They spend most of the novel coming to grips with who they are, debating, and navigating a fantastical world with no exit.
The Author’s premise is very much like a surreal reality show, as the characters begin to play off each other immediately, and they discover very quickly that their surroundings do not obey the laws of physics. Writing erases off of walls, wood floors tear in half, etc. This is also happening for reader as well, as the authorial voice interjects narration among the story’s dialogue. Raganato’s premise is to strip away the pretense of the author, and in a show of meta-ness, reveal the clockwork behind the story. “I, The Author, am willing to open my characters’ minds with ‘Why’s’ as they ask themselves our questions, and you ask yourself theirs.” The authorial voice pops up regularly, offering explanations for his choices, and explanations of the construct of the story as it unfolds.
And Raganato clearly enjoys playing with both the reader and the characters as he manipulates the situation. Eventually, the author of The Author appears, in his own story, in the mazed darkness to further obfuscate our already bewildered characters. It’s all in good fun. The author banters with his characters and explains the construct of the narrative, all the while philosophical questions are raised, but never answered. Here the author is god, or is an allegory for God, and like all good religions, raises more questions than answers.
The characters, inescapably drawn into the author’s trappings, seek the key to their escape, and even briefly, hold the truth of their existence in their hands. The setting is reminiscent of a Saturday matinee fantasy world, dark halls, expansive libraries, mysterious tunnels, locked sewer grates, mysterious portraits. None of it is menacing, nor is it meant to be. For the reader, The Author is a comic novel full of pratfalls, irony, and meta-humor. For the characters in The Author the story is a frustrating, and tragic adventure in the dark, a discovery of the self. And the twist, of course, is eventually the author, the great cause of their suffering, is found, isolated and typing out the story as it happens. It is then The Author reaches its inevitable conclusion, where the reader, the author, and the characters experience blur into a philosophical miasma of possibilities.
Raganato’s imaginative puzzle is available as an ebook through Harvard Square Editions.
The Author’s premise is very much like a surreal reality show, as the characters begin to play off each other immediately, and they discover very quickly that their surroundings do not obey the laws of physics. Writing erases off of walls, wood floors tear in half, etc. This is also happening for reader as well, as the authorial voice interjects narration among the story’s dialogue. Raganato’s premise is to strip away the pretense of the author, and in a show of meta-ness, reveal the clockwork behind the story. “I, The Author, am willing to open my characters’ minds with ‘Why’s’ as they ask themselves our questions, and you ask yourself theirs.” The authorial voice pops up regularly, offering explanations for his choices, and explanations of the construct of the story as it unfolds.
And Raganato clearly enjoys playing with both the reader and the characters as he manipulates the situation. Eventually, the author of The Author appears, in his own story, in the mazed darkness to further obfuscate our already bewildered characters. It’s all in good fun. The author banters with his characters and explains the construct of the narrative, all the while philosophical questions are raised, but never answered. Here the author is god, or is an allegory for God, and like all good religions, raises more questions than answers.
The characters, inescapably drawn into the author’s trappings, seek the key to their escape, and even briefly, hold the truth of their existence in their hands. The setting is reminiscent of a Saturday matinee fantasy world, dark halls, expansive libraries, mysterious tunnels, locked sewer grates, mysterious portraits. None of it is menacing, nor is it meant to be. For the reader, The Author is a comic novel full of pratfalls, irony, and meta-humor. For the characters in The Author the story is a frustrating, and tragic adventure in the dark, a discovery of the self. And the twist, of course, is eventually the author, the great cause of their suffering, is found, isolated and typing out the story as it happens. It is then The Author reaches its inevitable conclusion, where the reader, the author, and the characters experience blur into a philosophical miasma of possibilities.
Raganato’s imaginative puzzle is available as an ebook through Harvard Square Editions.
August 4, 2015
The Richard Peabody Reader is pure gold, #poetryreview, #fictionreview
The Richard Peabody Reader was a great cabin fever read this winter; the anthology gracefully covers Peabody’s range, depth, and humor. The Reader, compiled by Lucinda Ebersole is a mix tape of greatest hits from the Washington writer’s long career. Peabody is also a publisher of writers, the founder of Gargoyle literary magazine and Paycock Press, and organizer of regional readings and events. Along the way Peabody befriended Jamie Brown, the Broadkill’s editor, which is to say, dear reader, how I came to Facebook with Peabody, and this winter read and review his work. Full disclosure: I don’t know the man personally, but have a social media friendship with him, a smendship if you will. I reviewed his short fiction for the BKR some years ago, so the work within the collection was more or less all new for me. It’s a weekend of deep cuts, the collection is, a great reveal of humanity’s follies. The poetry collected here is the easy-peasy-lemo- squeezy free verse style that novelist and fiction writers do so well. That’s not a diss, either. Think Raymond Carver. Simple, direct, no fuss to it all; graceful and direct, but something verse-heads and formalists might dismiss as prosey. Consider “Good Hope Road” from the Read & Writing section, “his sharp features//like kudzu swallows Carolina red clay, “ or the opening line to “Folding Laundry in My Dreams” where Peabody speaks for almost every spouse or partner in any relationship when he says “I could fold laundry every day/for one thousand years/and never satisfy the women in my life.”
Peabody’s short fiction is a delight. Nothing’s too long for the commute (save for maybe “Sugar Mountain, a triptych”--which if you are fan of Neil Young is a delight to read), and Peabody nails suburban boredom, the kind that spirals into affairs, overblown pride, addiction and human stupidity. Peabody embraces violence, in the uber creepy “Peppermint Schnapps” a sleazy car salesman gets his just desserts, when a vengeful father and widow murders him out of long buried resentments surrounding his daughter’s pregnancy and suicide.
Family lies at the heart of Peabody’s work, those tangled, sticky, often unwanted relationships we nurture, starve, and nurture again, often leaving the reader on the emotional hook. That’s the beauty about short fiction, the reader gets one ending, but not the whole story. In “Walking on Gilded Splinters” it is only via the threats of a once homeless woman that drive the anti-hero back to his wife and family, and we feel that the marriage will fail, we almost want it too, because Wilson can’t control his libido or his ego, but we don’t get the luxury of finding out. Likewise in “Dresden for Cats” Uncle March is such an interesting personality, building cities for cats on his farm, allowing his cats to compose music, that we aren’t expecting his wife to turn up nuts, to turn the narrative upside down and end with a destroyed farm and stunned narrator, “You can pour all your love into somebody who’s mentally ill but they are big black holes, and you’ll never have enough love.”
The collection is gathered into sections; the thematic organizations allows for readers to experience Peabody of varying ages in each grouping; in a manner of speaking the reader can experience Peabody’s growth and breadth as a short fiction writer and poet in nearly every section. And what strikes me is his consistency as a writer, from his chosen subject matter to the clean line. I also love the pop culture references, which many writers cannot do well. Peabody’s up there with Stephen King, and Nick Hornby; who write about how movies, television, and music, especially music, affect our lives, and affect our reading of the story. Peabody knows when he conjures up, say The Grateful Dead, or Neil Young, or Nick Cave, that fans of the music will bring with them trunk loads of associations that enlarge the emotional narrative. Music and pop culture are as important as the time and place of the setting; cue-cards for the characters who often struggle to maneuver through the both the emotional and temporal setting of the story.
Peabody shows it all here, tragedy, humor, joy, wit, and irony, and speaks for a generation of adults who are still trying to figure it out in our age of decadence.
Peabody’s short fiction is a delight. Nothing’s too long for the commute (save for maybe “Sugar Mountain, a triptych”--which if you are fan of Neil Young is a delight to read), and Peabody nails suburban boredom, the kind that spirals into affairs, overblown pride, addiction and human stupidity. Peabody embraces violence, in the uber creepy “Peppermint Schnapps” a sleazy car salesman gets his just desserts, when a vengeful father and widow murders him out of long buried resentments surrounding his daughter’s pregnancy and suicide.
Family lies at the heart of Peabody’s work, those tangled, sticky, often unwanted relationships we nurture, starve, and nurture again, often leaving the reader on the emotional hook. That’s the beauty about short fiction, the reader gets one ending, but not the whole story. In “Walking on Gilded Splinters” it is only via the threats of a once homeless woman that drive the anti-hero back to his wife and family, and we feel that the marriage will fail, we almost want it too, because Wilson can’t control his libido or his ego, but we don’t get the luxury of finding out. Likewise in “Dresden for Cats” Uncle March is such an interesting personality, building cities for cats on his farm, allowing his cats to compose music, that we aren’t expecting his wife to turn up nuts, to turn the narrative upside down and end with a destroyed farm and stunned narrator, “You can pour all your love into somebody who’s mentally ill but they are big black holes, and you’ll never have enough love.”
The collection is gathered into sections; the thematic organizations allows for readers to experience Peabody of varying ages in each grouping; in a manner of speaking the reader can experience Peabody’s growth and breadth as a short fiction writer and poet in nearly every section. And what strikes me is his consistency as a writer, from his chosen subject matter to the clean line. I also love the pop culture references, which many writers cannot do well. Peabody’s up there with Stephen King, and Nick Hornby; who write about how movies, television, and music, especially music, affect our lives, and affect our reading of the story. Peabody knows when he conjures up, say The Grateful Dead, or Neil Young, or Nick Cave, that fans of the music will bring with them trunk loads of associations that enlarge the emotional narrative. Music and pop culture are as important as the time and place of the setting; cue-cards for the characters who often struggle to maneuver through the both the emotional and temporal setting of the story.
Peabody shows it all here, tragedy, humor, joy, wit, and irony, and speaks for a generation of adults who are still trying to figure it out in our age of decadence.
August 3, 2015
Rick Peabody skewers up the suburbs in Blue Suburban Skies, #fictionreview
Richard Peabody's newest short story collection, Blue Suburban Skies, is tight collection of satire, masculine existential crises, and strong females popping with sexual energy. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon, eh? Peabody whisks up winks amid sometimes violent acts uncovered among suburbanites, who for better or for worse, represent most of what's left of the middle class portrayed and skewered in Peabody's breezy read.
Blue Suburban Skies is entertaining as it is serious, and kept reminding me of movies from the 1970s and 1980s. Keep in mind, friends, my boys are eight and five and movies in my life tend to be of the Disney and Big Budget Family variety, and the imagery Peabody uses, and the tragic and comic circumstances the characters find themselves meandering through, reminded me of those days when studio pictures reflected real life rather than pallets for CGI and big concepts. Entertainment can reflect our innermost selves, and when it does we tend to call it art.
The suburban landscapes tie the stories together, but Peabody isn't interested in so much at poking fun of the suburbs, but rather uncovering the faulty cracks in the people who have been born, raised, and work there. And the stories aren't so much about the suburbs, anyway, they are merely the landscape, as are the commodities the characters consume. Perhaps Anchor Steam beer, and Grateful Dead tracks fix the story in time, perhaps they allow the stories to transcend time, but they are, in some cases, objects of desire. Objects of circumstance.
Many of the stories collected here are stories about writers, or artists, and these characters aren't so much above the masses, as they are on the outskirts, just as incapable of living with their spouses and communicating with the real world as so called regular people who are afraid of showing their fear. Peabody's characters don't just sit around and ponder aesthetics, they save people's lives in the most unheroic ways, or blunder around another person's heart, and even protest conservative politics.
Blue Suburban Skies is entertaining as it is serious, and kept reminding me of movies from the 1970s and 1980s. Keep in mind, friends, my boys are eight and five and movies in my life tend to be of the Disney and Big Budget Family variety, and the imagery Peabody uses, and the tragic and comic circumstances the characters find themselves meandering through, reminded me of those days when studio pictures reflected real life rather than pallets for CGI and big concepts. Entertainment can reflect our innermost selves, and when it does we tend to call it art.
The suburban landscapes tie the stories together, but Peabody isn't interested in so much at poking fun of the suburbs, but rather uncovering the faulty cracks in the people who have been born, raised, and work there. And the stories aren't so much about the suburbs, anyway, they are merely the landscape, as are the commodities the characters consume. Perhaps Anchor Steam beer, and Grateful Dead tracks fix the story in time, perhaps they allow the stories to transcend time, but they are, in some cases, objects of desire. Objects of circumstance.
Many of the stories collected here are stories about writers, or artists, and these characters aren't so much above the masses, as they are on the outskirts, just as incapable of living with their spouses and communicating with the real world as so called regular people who are afraid of showing their fear. Peabody's characters don't just sit around and ponder aesthetics, they save people's lives in the most unheroic ways, or blunder around another person's heart, and even protest conservative politics.
August 2, 2015
DFW's The Pale King is a fascinating heart break, #fictionreview
From the Broadkill Review Archives:
The Pale King: Absurdity and Anxiety: David Foster Wallace’s comedic and paranoid voice
I first read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest while I lived in Brighton, a borough of Boston, MA, where most of the novel's action occurs, and at the time I worked as a registrar/teacher at a small immersion English language school for rich foreign kids and corporate big-Whigs who needed a tune up on their idioms before undertaking university or new business campaigns, and the school, located near St. Elizabeth’s hospital where Wallace’s bodily Tennis academy lies with its giant inflated lung, and being a pedestrian, spent hours walking the novel's map, through the copper autumn. I've revisited the novel twice since, and I’ve taught sections, and led students to his essays, his short fiction. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again was required reading for my college composition course. Wallace can be challenging (the packaging of IJ does not help...the book is big, not at all beach tote friendly, unless you’re carrying a suitcase) but if you've read any long work, say It, The Stand, then you know that 500 pages into the thing, the author of your long work or trilogy (or Mr. King) hasn't even laid all the traps yet, and the field is wide and deep, and some players still lurk on the edge of the narrative. 500 pages into a 1000+ page book is like looking at the business end of a giant’s fingernail, barely able to perceive the digit its attached to, much less the body it works for. You know it’s there, but it hasn’t come into focus yet.
So a 500 plus page unfinished novel is a tease, a card trick, even for a writer as talented as Wallace.
DFW is lumped in with the intellectual writers of his generation, and it is a deserving lump, but I’ve always thought of DFW with a heart, albeit an emotionally stunted, sometimes paralytic heart, but a heart that likes to laugh. He's damn funny. That’s why I read him, because he cracks me up. The forward to The PK is an acrobatic wink, and I imagine him laughing his ass off as he rips sentences into his notebooks. He sets the story up as truth, and backs over it again, and double talks his way around his pseudo-memoir. And paired with his absurd sense of humor, is his gift of taking you into the abject horror of anxiety and compulsive thinking, and in his newest, unfinished work, The Pale King, the master of absurdity and anxiety is at it again.
The prose has Wallace's keen eye and ear for obsessive compulsive living. The characters suffer boredom and tedium, and many of the characters live transient lives in a large organism that is the IRS. Again Wallace explores how extreme female beauty is a type of deformity, or at least isolation. Like the Prettiest Girl of All Time in Infinite Jest, The Pale King features Meredith Rand, a beauty so intimidating she is an island, and only the most mundane, however also the most gifted, IRS agent can reach her (there’s a great section where Rand tells her convoluted story about her dying husband to the boring agent, Drinion, who is so concentrated on her that he begins to levitate in the bar where the agents blow off steam).
What Wallace would have done with the unfinished story lines one can only guess, and in his notes Wallace states that something awful threatens but never transpires. Which isn’t that surprising, after all Infinite Jest’s chronological ending is its beginning; and one has to re-read the first chapter to figure out what happens to the main characters after the novel’s final flashback. The Pale King, as it stands, reads like a novel whose plot arc is not as nearly as important as the tropes and characters that are hung there, suffering and living on the fringe. There is an intriguing tender relationship between two devout Christians that remains unexplored, an almost Coen-Brothersesque sub-plot involving feuding IRS administrations (one can almost hear Paul Newman sneering in his pinstriped corporate suit), a plot to assemble psychic agents, such as Claude Sylvanshine, the main character who has the ability to psychically “collect” random data about people near him, phantoms and their affect on the agents, a poor man who sweats too much, and even DFW as himself, who is mistaken for another DFW, a high ranking agent, no doubt. There are moments in The Pale King where the slap-stick fun of The Broom of the System flows, and there are moments, chapters, in fact, that tax code, tax jargon and politics pile up, all, one would assume, placed in the narrative flow to mimic the cognitive atmosphere of the characters, or perhaps even the soul crushing boredom his characters deal with day to day. The central thesis, if there is one, is that real heroes suffer tedium every day, and that it goes unnoticed. The tax speak reminded me of how in the Jest Pemulis’ Eschaton physics lingo goes over most people’s heads (it’s a tennis game designed to mimic nuclear annihilation, with dozens of algorithms and computer programs created to track the games minutiae), or the dense film criticism of Himself’s (the nickname of the ghostly father figure who is at the alcoholic, and emotional center of the plot) work, developed to imitate and capture the cognitive aspects the films captured. Wallace is winking at us of course, the tax code and jargon are distracters that do not detract from the narrative, but are there for us to encounter as objects. We can choose to read them or skim them, and Wallace allows us to choose. If we choose we are subjected to the hell of boredom experienced day to day by the agents, whose loneliness and despair form the novel’s core heart. If not, we save a few minutes of reading, and are better for it.
His famous footnotes are there, but unlike reading the Jest, where one has to flip to the back of the tome, and require two bookmarks, these footnotes are thankfully at the bottom of the page for our entertainment ease.
The notes Wallace left about the novel are just as fascinating as the fragments themselves, as Wallace envisioned the novel like a tornado, coming at us with shreds of narrative debris, long arms of whipping narrative wind. He didn’t leave enough behind to connect the plots or the threads in any satisfying manner, but they are there, at the edge of a corn field, outside of Peoria, Illinois, awaiting some final wind to send them on their way.
The Pale King: Absurdity and Anxiety: David Foster Wallace’s comedic and paranoid voice
I first read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest while I lived in Brighton, a borough of Boston, MA, where most of the novel's action occurs, and at the time I worked as a registrar/teacher at a small immersion English language school for rich foreign kids and corporate big-Whigs who needed a tune up on their idioms before undertaking university or new business campaigns, and the school, located near St. Elizabeth’s hospital where Wallace’s bodily Tennis academy lies with its giant inflated lung, and being a pedestrian, spent hours walking the novel's map, through the copper autumn. I've revisited the novel twice since, and I’ve taught sections, and led students to his essays, his short fiction. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again was required reading for my college composition course. Wallace can be challenging (the packaging of IJ does not help...the book is big, not at all beach tote friendly, unless you’re carrying a suitcase) but if you've read any long work, say It, The Stand, then you know that 500 pages into the thing, the author of your long work or trilogy (or Mr. King) hasn't even laid all the traps yet, and the field is wide and deep, and some players still lurk on the edge of the narrative. 500 pages into a 1000+ page book is like looking at the business end of a giant’s fingernail, barely able to perceive the digit its attached to, much less the body it works for. You know it’s there, but it hasn’t come into focus yet.
So a 500 plus page unfinished novel is a tease, a card trick, even for a writer as talented as Wallace.
DFW is lumped in with the intellectual writers of his generation, and it is a deserving lump, but I’ve always thought of DFW with a heart, albeit an emotionally stunted, sometimes paralytic heart, but a heart that likes to laugh. He's damn funny. That’s why I read him, because he cracks me up. The forward to The PK is an acrobatic wink, and I imagine him laughing his ass off as he rips sentences into his notebooks. He sets the story up as truth, and backs over it again, and double talks his way around his pseudo-memoir. And paired with his absurd sense of humor, is his gift of taking you into the abject horror of anxiety and compulsive thinking, and in his newest, unfinished work, The Pale King, the master of absurdity and anxiety is at it again.
The prose has Wallace's keen eye and ear for obsessive compulsive living. The characters suffer boredom and tedium, and many of the characters live transient lives in a large organism that is the IRS. Again Wallace explores how extreme female beauty is a type of deformity, or at least isolation. Like the Prettiest Girl of All Time in Infinite Jest, The Pale King features Meredith Rand, a beauty so intimidating she is an island, and only the most mundane, however also the most gifted, IRS agent can reach her (there’s a great section where Rand tells her convoluted story about her dying husband to the boring agent, Drinion, who is so concentrated on her that he begins to levitate in the bar where the agents blow off steam).
What Wallace would have done with the unfinished story lines one can only guess, and in his notes Wallace states that something awful threatens but never transpires. Which isn’t that surprising, after all Infinite Jest’s chronological ending is its beginning; and one has to re-read the first chapter to figure out what happens to the main characters after the novel’s final flashback. The Pale King, as it stands, reads like a novel whose plot arc is not as nearly as important as the tropes and characters that are hung there, suffering and living on the fringe. There is an intriguing tender relationship between two devout Christians that remains unexplored, an almost Coen-Brothersesque sub-plot involving feuding IRS administrations (one can almost hear Paul Newman sneering in his pinstriped corporate suit), a plot to assemble psychic agents, such as Claude Sylvanshine, the main character who has the ability to psychically “collect” random data about people near him, phantoms and their affect on the agents, a poor man who sweats too much, and even DFW as himself, who is mistaken for another DFW, a high ranking agent, no doubt. There are moments in The Pale King where the slap-stick fun of The Broom of the System flows, and there are moments, chapters, in fact, that tax code, tax jargon and politics pile up, all, one would assume, placed in the narrative flow to mimic the cognitive atmosphere of the characters, or perhaps even the soul crushing boredom his characters deal with day to day. The central thesis, if there is one, is that real heroes suffer tedium every day, and that it goes unnoticed. The tax speak reminded me of how in the Jest Pemulis’ Eschaton physics lingo goes over most people’s heads (it’s a tennis game designed to mimic nuclear annihilation, with dozens of algorithms and computer programs created to track the games minutiae), or the dense film criticism of Himself’s (the nickname of the ghostly father figure who is at the alcoholic, and emotional center of the plot) work, developed to imitate and capture the cognitive aspects the films captured. Wallace is winking at us of course, the tax code and jargon are distracters that do not detract from the narrative, but are there for us to encounter as objects. We can choose to read them or skim them, and Wallace allows us to choose. If we choose we are subjected to the hell of boredom experienced day to day by the agents, whose loneliness and despair form the novel’s core heart. If not, we save a few minutes of reading, and are better for it.
His famous footnotes are there, but unlike reading the Jest, where one has to flip to the back of the tome, and require two bookmarks, these footnotes are thankfully at the bottom of the page for our entertainment ease.
The notes Wallace left about the novel are just as fascinating as the fragments themselves, as Wallace envisioned the novel like a tornado, coming at us with shreds of narrative debris, long arms of whipping narrative wind. He didn’t leave enough behind to connect the plots or the threads in any satisfying manner, but they are there, at the edge of a corn field, outside of Peoria, Illinois, awaiting some final wind to send them on their way.
These Foolish Things: W.M. Rivera's The Living Clock celebrates life's "mini odysseys", #poetryreview
W.M. Rivera's The Living Clock, a chapbook of poems looking backwards towards loss and forwards towards a sunny hazy future, recognizes that sweet death just around the corner. Rivera's poems are smartly romantic, and he has a lyrical wonderful way of swooping into a poem with a narrative wing and dropping the reader into the world of the poem. His poems skip across landscapes, the globe, and the unmapped human heart.
The collection opens with "A Gift," a double helix narrative about an absent father, and the Belgian poet Emile Verhaerhen's relationship with a poem. It manages to be a personal poem about an irresponsible parent, and a poem about a creator and his creation. Both strands of the story serve as an examples of the countless emotional adventures one experiences in a lifetime.
The Living Clock celebrates life's "mini odysseys" that show up whether the speaker is considering a washer-woman on her knees or the myriad of consciousness in a "parade of bodies" crossing the Charles Bridge in Prague. Rivera's a lyric poet, and plays with rhyme while juggling our existential landscapes in his capable hands. Death, and love are not our only pitfalls, and Rivera's poems examine our more mundane fralities as well, lust, jealousy, failure, and aging.
The title poem, dedicated to his grandmother, encapsulates the poetic exigency of the collection, "It also gnaws at me, this/presence/absence; nothing that is/not nothing." It is here in Rivera's dialogue with Wallace Stevens, in his dialogue with his grandmother, and in his dialogue with his own spirit that expresses what has become so essential in American letters, loss. That intangible, sometimes romantic, sometimes sad, sometimes painful inbetween place in our inner lives.
Rivera's poems tease us, not in a mischeivous way either, but in an honest, earnest way, as if he is saying, what do I know of our "diminishment?" In the poem of the same name Rivera's voice reminds us that he too cannot "work it out." But he is, like us dear reader, willing to wonder is age and loss illuminates our spirit, our inner lives. "Why else invent these reveries?"
The collection opens with "A Gift," a double helix narrative about an absent father, and the Belgian poet Emile Verhaerhen's relationship with a poem. It manages to be a personal poem about an irresponsible parent, and a poem about a creator and his creation. Both strands of the story serve as an examples of the countless emotional adventures one experiences in a lifetime.
The Living Clock celebrates life's "mini odysseys" that show up whether the speaker is considering a washer-woman on her knees or the myriad of consciousness in a "parade of bodies" crossing the Charles Bridge in Prague. Rivera's a lyric poet, and plays with rhyme while juggling our existential landscapes in his capable hands. Death, and love are not our only pitfalls, and Rivera's poems examine our more mundane fralities as well, lust, jealousy, failure, and aging.
The title poem, dedicated to his grandmother, encapsulates the poetic exigency of the collection, "It also gnaws at me, this/presence/absence; nothing that is/not nothing." It is here in Rivera's dialogue with Wallace Stevens, in his dialogue with his grandmother, and in his dialogue with his own spirit that expresses what has become so essential in American letters, loss. That intangible, sometimes romantic, sometimes sad, sometimes painful inbetween place in our inner lives.
Rivera's poems tease us, not in a mischeivous way either, but in an honest, earnest way, as if he is saying, what do I know of our "diminishment?" In the poem of the same name Rivera's voice reminds us that he too cannot "work it out." But he is, like us dear reader, willing to wonder is age and loss illuminates our spirit, our inner lives. "Why else invent these reveries?"
@emptyoakszine inaugural issue features my #Shakespeare inspired #sci-fi tale "The Play's The Thing"
Up on Empty Oaks is my Shakespeare inspired sci-fi tale, "The Play's The Thing". Follow the link and download, or email.
The story is from my Streamworld cycle of stories, and takes place post de-privatization.
...from my commentary in issue one:
The world depicted in “The Play’s The Thing” is a futuristic, over-populated, over teched world. This world government has outlawed many things, including live theater, and Shakespeare. In "The Play's the Thing" a couple (consisting of two female grad students--we are post-gay in this world, btw) nearing the end of their romantic contract, stumble across an underground staging of Shakespeare. The magic of Shakespeare intrigues them, and one of the girls falls in love with a fellow audience member, much to her lover and her father's dismay. She risks her relationships, and possibly her freedom to be with this man, and to continue seeing the underground, illegal plays, whose alien language holds her in thrall. The title is taken from a line from Hamlet; the dark prince is plotting to lay a trap for his Uncle Claudius.
"The Play's The Thing" was inspired by overheard conversations between friends who were discussing how they stalk potential romantic partners via Facebook and Twitter. In the story, the characters exist in a world where there is no privacy. The world is crowded, expensive, and held together by "the stream," which essentially the internet, or what a future permutation of the internet. To be "out of stream" is to commit treason. When you are out of stream the government assumes you are up to nefarious deeds and villainy. Hackers, instead of trying to infiltrate systems and infrastructures, are trying to keep the infrastructure from infiltrating private life. In this futuristic world (dare I say dystopia?) everyone is directly rooted into the stream. When you get close enough to someone you can read their feed. For example you walk to the store to buy milk, and if you choose, you can "see" what everyone you come into contact is doing, thinking, feeling (by way of biometrics), and reading, who they are interacting with, what kind of web activities they are into and up to, etc. It's not explicitly stated, but this feed can be seen without the use of wearable tech. It's hardwired into you. You are the stream. This is a world without secrets. Everything is out in the open, your political leanings, your sexual fetishes, your private particulars can be accessed by anyone. All for the better good, eh? Be careful what you google.
August 1, 2015
Katie Cotugno's How to Love, is a teenage crush fest that turns serious, in a snap, #fictionreview, #YA
Katie Cotugno's debut, How to Love, is a teenage crush fest that turns serious, in a snap, as the main characters juggle love, sex, babies, prescription pill abuse, drunk driving, and other hot button issues that hang on their peer group like mosquitoes in the hot Florida summer.Cotugno nails teenage love/lust for the technology native set. The protagonist Reena (short for Serena) Moreno has been in love with childhood friend, Sawyer LeGrande, since the two shared playpens while their parents dreamed of owning and running resturants in the jazz piano night. In fact, the two are almost star-crossed, as Reena's father doesn't trust Sawyer, and Sawyer's posh mother doesn't recognize Reena as remotely anything resembling a person. The back and forth narrative device Cotugno uses is perfect for pulling romantic tension tight. The novel begins in the present, in the "After," as Reena discovers her long lost friend/lover at the Slurpee machine, and poor old Reena is once again suckered by Sawyer's charms, his comfortable scent, his cheesy grin. Sawyer's not a bad guy; he's a troubled guy trying to figure out how to be a man, and he spends most of the present tense proving to those around him that he has changed.How he has changed remains shrouded in mystery at first, but is uncovered as Cotugno unwraps the layers of novel's onion.Sawyer is very much like his name. He evokes boyish charm, and smarts like Tom Sawyer, and has a rakish past like ABC's Lost's Sawyer, and everything about him, for Reena and other teenager girls, is larger than life. He's got groupies, already, and plays in a band, and manages to come up with all the right things to say. Throw in his half-silver moon necklace, the way he stands behind the bar at work, how he takes jazz piano lessons from Reena's stubbornly silent father, and Cotugno's got herself a boho hunk in the making.The main conflict is between Sawyer and everybody else as he tries to get back with Reena, and her daughter, his daughter, Hannah, a byproduct of "Before," which is the recent past of Reena's final two years of high school when life became sudden, serious, and present. The feelings the adults have about Sawyer are mixed, and mostly of the protective variety. Reena has suffered much in the years Sawyer has been away. She takes community college classes, juggles chores as a single mom living with her parents, and even has a nice non-pushy boyfriend, the kind that you know will get the proverbial hatchet once Sawyer has settled back into the muggy Florida nights.The prose is lyrical and tense, and Cotugno has a way of making you dig your nails in as the characters move closer and closer together. It's teenage love written as if National Security is on the line, and you can't help but root for Reena, AP takin'-graduatin'-early-avoidin'-drama hero, balancing friends, a job at the family resturant, and her obsession with Sawyer LeGrande.That is until drama finds her.What's great about this debut is that the reader knows more or less what is going to play out between the two characters. But that's not the point. Cotugno tells us in the first chapter that Sawyer and Reena hook up, at least once, and conceive a beautiful baby. The point is the journey of love. How it takes you places where you never thought you'd go. For Reena that means reaching an emotional bottom that she can't really see out of, and is maybe, just maybe, crawling out of it when Sawyer shows up and kicks her back to the bottom again. The pleasure and joy is watching this romance blossom from a secret romance to a family scandal and finally into a portrait of modern family life in America. Cotugno's secondary characters carry a lot of the load, issue-wise, and in this way Reena is connected to the coming out drama of her new best friend, the ramifications of her old BFF's drunk-driving accident, her father's heart troubles, and even Sawyer's addiction. True, many of the issues Cotugno's characters face do not drive the plot, and even resolve themselves a little too nicely, but the real story here is between two characters who live and breathe each other, even when they don't want to. Even with all that life throws at them, the real focus here is on the relationships, on the heart, as the characters learn how to love after everyone that they care about has hurt them terribly.
