The Persistence of Crows 
by Grant Maierhofer
Tiny TOE Press, 2013
173 pages / $12  Buy from The Open End

 

 

 

 

 

 

Coming of age narratives are usually as riddled with tropes as low-budget horror films. Sure, there are a few outstanding novels in the genre like Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero and Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, but the list of must-reads grows at the speed of stalactites. Grant Maierhofer’s The Persistence of Crows, from Tiny TOE Press, has joined that short list with a story full of depression, too-beautiful moments, and kind of soul crushing realness.

Henry Alfi is a young man who’s recently stopped using drugs and alcohol. Sadly, his new unaltered state of consciousness has him feeling bored, lonely, and profoundly disenchanted by the people and institutions that surround his life in the Midwest: AA, friends, college, family, the women he dates, etc. One of the few things Henry enjoys is writing, so a trip to New York with his college newspaper seems like the perfect opportunity to get away from everything for a while and ponder the future. Surprisingly, the trip turns out to be more than an escape and Henry finds himself ready to move, eager to discover the world, sure that he wants to pursue a career in writing, and falling quickly in love with a woman who shares his view of the world.

The Persistence of Crows starts out as an unimpressive narrative about a young man about to embark on a trip to NYC. Despite the lack of an exciting start, Maierhofer manages to set the hooks in via his use of language and character development. The strategy is risky, but he pulls it off. The prose has a unique, somewhat offbeat rhythm and the dialogue is sharp. Also, he establishes early on that his main character is deeply flawed but also thought-provoking and the kind of individual you want to learn more about:

“It felt better to be walking by myself. I didn’t feel unsafe when I was alone. I didn’t care if some bum crept up to me. I would fight and what would happen would happen. It was when I was with others that I got nervous. It’s far easier for me to imagine defending myself than it is protecting the life of somebody else. Their life can be completely abstract even if they’re standing right next to you.”

Henry is the poster child for the broken/dissatisfied/irritated/Google generation. He feels alienated, gloomy, and deracinated despite being home. His life on drugs and alcohol was bad, but his life without them isn’t better. The story seems to be a character study for a few chapters because the dark past, recent troubles, and disturbed state of mind are all in place, but it changes drastically once Henry lands in New York. A bit of dark humor and pervasive dreariness quickly switch to a beautiful homage to the Big Apple in which Maierhofer’s knack for language and imagery take center stage:

“The rain beat down on all of us. These youthful faces soaked in the same Hudson River breeze as the old folks arm in arm enjoying the bright lights of the city. I was surprised to see that even in the afternoon the lights shone as brightly as all of the photographs I’d seen of the city at night. When I turned the corner, all breath was taken out of me. Any worry I had ever felt in my entire life up until that point turned into a sense of power as I stood there staring at the gray and red and silver world encircling me.”

The homage to NYC saturates the narrative for most of the middle third of the novel, which contains a few odd encounters between Henry and locals that deserve to be in film, and eventually bleeds into the brief but magical time Henry spends with Sara Lee Poe, a fellow journalist he meets at a panel. The duo allows the city to filter everything they experience together and they weave a cocoon of shared ideas and passion that blinds them from their imperfections. As soon as their time together is over, reality comes crashing in and Maierhofer uses it to destroy both everything Henry built and readers’ emotions.

The Persistence of Crows switches between a romance, a bizarre comedy, and something that pulls from most of Woody Allen’s early work. It is an exploration of loneliness, addiction, the construction/obliteration of love (or at least a reasonable facsimile), and disconnection. Maierhofer’s Henry thinks trying to pay attention to what others have to say can only lead to suicide, but he ends up contemplating suicide because of things that were left unsaid. Stories about falling in love in oh-so-magical New York are as old as the city itself, but Maierhofer has updated the premise to offer the honesty and ugliness that fans of authors like Tao Lin, Ana Carrete, and Sam Pink demand, and the result is worth a read.

***

Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, and book reviewer living in Austin, TX. He’s the author of Gutmouth (Eraserhead Press) and a few other things no one will ever read. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Verbicide, The Rumpus, HTMLGiant, The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, Z Magazine, Out of the Gutter, Word Riot, and a other print and online venues. You can reach him at gabinoiglesias@gmail.com.

 

GO TO WORK AND DO YOUR JOB. CARE FOR YOUR CHILDREN. PAY YOUR BILLS. OBEY THE LAW. BUY PRODUCTS.
by Noah Cicero
Lazy Fascist Press, 2013
188 pages / $12.95 Buy from Amazon

 

 

 

 

 

 

Noah Cicero wrote a new book in 2013.

It’s called GO TO WORK AND DO YOUR JOB. CARE FOR YOUR CHILDREN. PAY YOUR BILLS. OBEY THE LAW. BUY PRODUCTS.

But I’m going to call it GO TO WORK.

GO TO WORK is a political thriller about a man who gets a job at a prison-treatment-center called NEOTAP (you never find out what this means btw) and, pretty much, wow—after that, things start to get crazy.

It’s like: WAITING FOR GODOT meets the second season of the television series LOST meets DAVID LYNCH meets BLAIR WITCH PROJECT meets the book 1984 meets IT’S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA meets the movie CUBE meets BRAVE NEW WORLD meets SVU meets ARCHER meets the book ANTHEM meets FIREFLY meets the play NO EXIT by Jean-Paul Sartre meets THE TRIAL by Franz Kafka meets the movie WHITE LIGHTNING meets the book THE POSSESSED meets LOCK UP.

There are two main characters: Michael Scipio and Monica Whitten.

The book is told in the first-person and third-person past tense in two parts: Part One and Part Two.

Part One is Michael. First person.

“I was nervous. I was wearing a nice pair of slacks and a button-down, long-sleeved dress shirt with a tie. The tie looked great. I looked great. Everything seemed wonderful. I was a man interviewing to get a job working for the government, but I was nervous.”

Also.

“I called my parents and told them I got the job. They were excited for me. They told me to come over and they could get pizza and cake. My parents were very big into positive reinforcement. When I scored my first goal in soccer when I was seven, they bought me pizza and cake. When I was in the eighth grade talent show, playing guitar very badly, they bought me pizza and cake. When I got straight A’s on my report card, I was for sure going to get pizza and cake. Pizza and cake are the ways Americans celebrate triumphs.”

Then Part Two. Monica. Third person.

“Monica walked into NEOTAP. She went into the office and said hi to Lawrence and Imad. She didn’t know Imad and Lawrence like Mike did. She didn’t have to interact with them on a power basis. She would say hi to everyone, have small talk about sports, computers, or random life things. Everyone knew that Monica loved Arby’s and would eat Arby’s at least three times a week. Sometimes people called her Arby’s girl.”

And.

“Monica considered herself a troubleshooter. Her life was about fixing problems. Her dad had taught her the joy of solving problems. When something broke, they fixed it together. When the care broke, they fixed it together. When the roof leaked, they fixed it together. When the water heater needed to be replaced, they took it out and replaced it together.”

Semi-spoiler alert: After Part One, Michael goes missing—disappears—and Monica becomes the main character because she decides she needs to find out what happened to Michael.

Kind of interesting.

The book is set in 2011 and it’s about what it means—what it’s like—to live in the real world. In America. The United States. Right now. It’s about being young. About needing to find a job. About finding that job. About needing that job so you can have access to healthcare. About falling in love. About betrayal. About deception. Needing healthcare. About following orders. About forgetting what you’re supposed to be doing sometimes. About feeling like you need healthcare real bad. About wondering if what you are doing is the right thing. About meeting people’s parents for the first time. Healthcare. About doing something crazy because maybe you think you are in love. About taking prescription drugs because they make you feel good. H-E-A-L-T-H-C-A-R-E. And about disappearing too.

It’s a lot about disappearing.

In the chapter ‘Under a Bed,’ a NEOTAP resident, who is Mexican, disappears, and no one seems to care.

“I went to Imad’s office and closed the door. I said to Imad, ‘Armando disappeared.’

Imad looked at me. He didn’t have a facial expression. He listened like I was explaining something that didn’t matter to him.

Finally, he said, ‘Okay, I’ll fix it.’

I left the office. Armando disappeared and no one cared. I saw Imad leave his office and walk to Heidelberg’s office. No one rushed around. Everyone moved without purpose, without a sense of urgency. A human had disappeared and no one cared. What kind of job did I have?”

GO TO WORK is a departure, basically, from everything [else] Noah Cicero out there. It’s got, like, a  plot. And two main characters.

Remember: this is a political thriller by a guy who is known for writing alt lit!

There are so many beautiful characters and so many different layers to everything and so many cool things that happen; and so much super-philosophical stuff about life—it’s everything you love and know about Noah Cicero and the way he writes.

But GO TO WORK is also a very scary book. Or, I guess, if you want to look at it as something that can be scary—it’s scary. Noah Cicero discusses several important real-world issues. He looks at how things right now have changed from how they were in the recent past (and the ancient past). How things right now are probably going to become very bad very soon. How things are probably not going in the right direction for the world and the environment and the people in the world. How there are some people, right now, out there in the world, who are willing to do whatever it takes, basically, to change the world. And others, who want to keep the world the way it is, no matter what, at any cost. Noah Cicero also looks at how sometimes, where you work, you may not like where you work. How sometimes, you really don’t know what’s going to happen in the end. And how really, the world is just a scary place to be.

All these themes are pretty much classic Noah Cicero.

On Facebook, Noah Cicero said it might take 6 hours to read GO TO WORK. I agree. GO TO WORK—you could read all in one sitting. And everything is written in that very-easy-to-follow Noah Cicero prose.

“Criminal Thought #1. I want to get a woman pregnant. I will find the fattest stupidest woman I can find. I don’t care what race she is, probably white. If you have been to prison, fat white girls are easy. All you gotta do is show them some prison tats and a fat white trash girl will fuck you. I will get the nastiest woman I can find. A woman I know for sure will not be responsible for the child. She won’t even talk to the child, she won’t even take the child to the park… she will scam the government out of every dollar she can… I won’t pay child support. I will do lots of drugs and never see my kid. It will be really funny.”

 

READ MORE >

When I first tried to review Personae, I did a bad job, in that I couldn’t do anything but say complicatedly positive things about it. I kept asking myself, what results from praise heaped onto the author, in conversation or in the internets? Does this put food in anyone’s mouth? Does it save a human life? Does it even make a life incrementally better? Certainly not mine. In turn, I find myself asking, what is the goal of a review? To just ‘manically implore’ people to read the book? To provide the critical nuance that distances and individualizes my reading from that of others? To just geek out for a long time and ‘raise awareness’ of an author who my tiny mind thinks merits attention? I hope not any of the above, but I’m left without a good answer. All I want is to point at some facts about my affinity for Sergio de la Pava’s first two novels.

I think his first two books can be presented together despite their glaring differences in tone, form, and narrative approach, and that presenting them together makes them more than the sum of their parts. Much like Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, where a pair of volumes give both sides of the same moral problematic two faces of the common currency of life in our epoch. Towards the end of A Naked Singularity, an exchange is punctuated by a memo from a jail is perhaps the most infuriating and heartrending moment in the book, and betrays a deeper interest in form. The text of the letter has been copied, re-used, and had names of inmates impersonally inserted into it’s sentences on countless occasions, leaving them incarcerated even after their deaths, in the forms which serve as the only record of their existence.

Seeing the final form-letter, without even reading the words there, opened a valve inside me – I cried the entire day and wasn’t even finished with the book. Some summer campers observed me as a curiosity, weeping and furiously turning pages. Though I would go on to the end of the book, everything else seemed to swirl around that exasperating moment of intrusion. What I can say about Personae is that it is indeed a novel, but comprised of stories, plays, allegories, and translations, and with a plot that hovers above the text itself. Together they exhibit some of the superstructure of an epochal conflict between positivist and skeptical thought, one that has gone on much longer than the war on drugs. Since I am not in a position to review it, I decided to ask Sergio for an interview, which he granted.

Read the interview below:

***

CJ Morello: Hi there. So i heard the PEN Talking Transitions panel the other night where writers and other folks were given the chance to give recommendations to the incoming administration of NYC about how to ensure that NYC remains at the center of the scene of literary production. Your response was distinctly out of keeping with other answers, and you addressed the problem of incarceration. Would you like to elaborate on that a little bit?

Sergio de la Pava: Look, I like art, I like poetry, I love the novel, I love literature,I wouldn’t have devoted a substantial portion of my life to creating novels if I didn’t, but in that context, if I am nominally, allegedly addressing an incoming administration, that is a political situation. That is not an appropriate time for me to ignore what is the plight of indigent and marginalized members of New york City. I don’t think I was talking out of score in the sense that I warned them, look, if you’re going to invite me to this thing, I know that the subject of the evening is supposed to be encouraging the artistic prominence of New York City or whatever, that’s not what I’m going to address in any way.  I’m going to address specifically what I made reference to, that crime has declined significantly in this city and really throughout the entire country, and I mean serious crime, burglary, robbery, has gone down drastically in this city and in many other places. Somehow contemporaneous with that fact, arrests rose 20% during the Bloomberg administration. So the idea was to hopefully begin a dialogue, though in that limited context there was no way to address such a complex issue, other than to bring up that anomaly in the hopes that you might cause some people to wonder how exactly we can justify such an inapposite result.

CJ: I hope some people did. There are some crimes we do want to see curtailed and prosecuted, especially violent crimes with deadly weapons. I grew up in Chicago, and there we have more problems than we can reliably handle, especially on the south side. So how do you explain that?

SP: Well I think with the Chicago situation you’re probably not even seeing decrease in crime, you’re seeing the result of decades of the evisceration of these communities through these draconian laws and the selective enforcement of drug laws. So what you’re seeing in Chicago, I’m not a sociologist, I’m not a criminologist, but what you’re seeing is the result of decades of neglect and even worse, active brutalization of these communities. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if you’re incarcerating an incredibly high percentage of people who look a certain way and live in certain neighborhoods, the effects on those neighborhoods are going to be stark. That’s not what were seeing in New York City, we’re seeing a massive decline in things like homicides, and gun-related offenses. So what we are seeing in New york City is certainly different than Chicago, in that what we have going on is the redefinition of the very concept of crime. So the attitude that policing has taken in this city has been to keep arresting as many people as and bring down the barrier to what constitutes a crime. The problem with that is, no matter what ultimately happens with the case, it turns out it’s a really bad thing to be arrested. It is really bad for your ‘career’ lets call it, it’s really bad for your status in society. Even if you never spend more than a day in jail before your release, it’s a really bad thing to end up with a criminal record. That’s pretty clear-cut. And there’s been a movement recently to essentially ban the asking of that question when you’re applying for jobs and things like that. The bottom line is once you get tagged with a criminal record in our society, it’s an uphill battle. And if you have a criminal record and you happen to be a minority, the research shows, there’s basically two strikes against you and it’s going to be difficult to overcome. So Chicago and New York seem to be on two different sides of the coin. What you are seeing in Chicago is basically a consequence of what you have happening in new york.

CJ: So we’re ahead of the curve.

SP: Unfortunately.

CJ: To cap off the violence section of the interview, you’ve said you’re a fan of boxing but also that UFC is something you enjoy less. I never really watched many fights growing up but recently I was introduced to UFC through some friends in California.  So what do you think the salient differences are in the two sports and where does your boxing allegiance come from?

SP: It seems to me that the average UFC fight ends much faster than the average boxing match. I think that the fights have a maximum of? Three or four? The championships go five. And the average boxing match can go on for twelve… I mean when you say I’m a huge fan of boxing, I’m very much intrigued by it, I have an ambivalent view towards boxing as well. In that I don’t like to see people get hurt, and that can become a substantial part of boxing. It certainly seems to be a substantial part of UFC. It could just be the prejudices of what you grew up watching, I grew up watching boxing, there was no such thing as UFC. I trained in martial arts before it was called UFC, when you picked an actual martial art. I understand that there can be beauty in UFC too, I guess what I like about boxing is the ebb and flow, and the prolonged dance between two athletes that will eventually tell me something about those two individuals. It seems to be harder to find in UFC, but I have many people who tell me I’m crazy, that UFC is far better. I agree that from a spectacle standpoint, UFC seems like it’s more likely to yield the kind of spectacular visuals that you might only see in boxing once every ten fights. So you may see a higher instance of those spectacular visuals, but thats not what I come to boxing for, I come to boxing to see the struggle of two wills, and though I recognize that is part of UFC too, the brevity of it, the sheer violence of it, for me makes me difficult to enjoy.

CJ: You said in another interview that we want the novel to be a highlight reel, not every play. The distillation or condensation of the elements that are important.

SP: So I think that context, the question was asking about what responsibility a novel has to ape life. And I think it has very little responsibilities to that. Take dialogue. If I tried to create dialogue that replicated the way people spoke, it would be intensely boring, a lot of um, it would be a lot of how’s the weather. Right off the bat a certain amount of the heightening of life is going to be necessary in something like A Naked Singularity. So the question becomes why you’re doing that and what effects it is you’re seeking to create. So I don’t take it as criticism when people tell me for example “The way people talk in your books isn’t the way they talk in real life.” So it’s like, do you find the way people talk in real life to be so enthralling? Well then you don’t need to pick up a novel. You have people taking to you all the time in real life.

[pause]

SP: In other words when I sit down to write a novel, mimicing life perfectly, well it is not a documentary. And we know even a documentary really doesn’t do that. And whatever a novel is, and I don’t have the firmest grasp on what it is I’m trying to do, I think really low on the list of those things is replicating quotidian existence. And the flip part is, whenever I try to make a definitive statement related to this thing called the novel, I always find myself contradicting myself. And the truth of it is, there are parts in ANS that deal with the criminal justice system that really do attempt that, that strip away the artifice and the heightening, that really do give a view, a pretty accurate account of what it’s like to unmediatedly come into contact with a trial. But that’s about ten percent of it at most.

READ MORE >

Have
by Marc Gaba
Tupelo Press, 2011
72 pages / $16.95  Buy from Amazon or Tupelo Press

 

 

 

 

“I wanted the head, as it were, to be more like another limb,” says Lucian Freud, and by doing so shifts expression from the face to the entirety of the body. “I wanted the head, as it were, to be more like another limb,” so by epigraph begins Marc Gaba’s Have. We can begin a reading with this quote from Freud, and in doing so offer a reading that does not evaluate, but shifts the expression, in a way that a book becomes among many possible books, each one possible through the subjectivity that expresses it. But in the hope that what we have is not mere reader response, which as a false utopia can mean that given many-ness, then everything is valid. As Jean-Luc Godard says, “This is not a just image, this is just an image,” distilling the many meanings of “just” connoting validity (reasonable, proper, exact, precise) into “simply,” that is, one among many. It is to acknowledge not many “valid” things, but many-ness itself, the Deleuzian multiplicity.

My practice,” Gaba writes in his exhibition notes to Where or When “is a continual exploration of how the relation between the virtual and the actual might be configured and rendered.” How apt then to study lines and colors, when after Manuel de Landa (a redoubtable reader of Deleuze) we take the actual as “extended and differentiated in space and time,” and the virtual as “intensive and formless.” We find in Gaba “threads for whom color stashed from/all innocence” after material and experiential lines and pieces of color such as “betrayal white,” “subtitle white”, “glass black.” Sarah Gridley, in the book’s blurb, writes of Gaba’s attention to the line, and notes that in Gaba “lineation is both a form and a subject,” and of “the physical-metaphysical ‘fold’ [as] conjured through a painstaking attention to line as ultimate paradox: that which joins in the very act of dividing.”

But a line, Deleuze writes, more than this binary opposition of joining and dividing, is also “a line [that] does not [only] go from one point to another, but passes between the points, ceaselessly bifurcating and diverging.” Lines of flight which flow and leak, moving from the actual to the virtual:

In Exodus Diptych (shown here as one spread, printed in the book as verso and recto pages, pp. 16 – 17), the ‘narrative’ line moves from the ‘land of passage’ to the ‘eyed world ‘ from the verso page to the recto page, from the dimension of the TV to the ‘actual’ dimension, from the story of Moses to a comedy show. One plane of sensibility leaking unto the next; “Believe” folded with “Be loved,” the pleating made visible by the vertical bar (“|”) deterritorialized from the areas of logic and typography, and reterritorialized into the area of prosody:

In Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz and Foucault, Simon Sullivan notes of the fold, in his entry in the “The Deleuzian Dictionary,” as that which names the relationship of oneself to one self. In Leibniz, “subjectivity is a question of mastery – a kind of Nietzschean mastery – over the swarm of one’s being […] To ‘have’ is to fold that which is outside inside”

READ MORE >

Black Candies: See Through: A Journal of Literary Horror
Edited by Ryan Bradford and Jay Wertzler
SSWA Press, 2013
141 pages / $13  Buy from So Say We All

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The 1978 John Carpenter film Halloween opens with the camera serving as the viewpoint of a child. The audience watches the boy spy on his sister from an outside window, then put on a clown mask, pick up a meat cleaver, and climb the stairs. We, as the audience, then see from (who we learn later to be) a young Michael Meyers’s perspective as he surveys his topless sister and then proceeds to stab her.

There is little to no blood in this iconic murder scene. In fact, the only real blood is a relatively small dab on the knife as Myers stands in his clown costume on the front lawn awaiting his parents in the following shot. And yet, this is one of the tensest scenes in the movie as it blends a creepy synthesized score, eerie lighting, and that mask over the camera effect to create an unnerving sequence. What’s particularly intriguing about Halloween is that this scene of the film has so little outright gore more because of a shoe string budget and restrictions with child actors than for any consideration of taste or propriety.

Those who are familiar with the rest of the Halloween franchise know that only Carpenter’s original pulls off the lack of blood effectively. In fact the rest of the series, especially the Rob Zombie reboot of 2007, amps up the blood by the gallon—mainly because they lack Carpenter’s subtle, directorial hand.

There is a proliferation of gore in horror film franchises. Compare, for example, the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which does begin the film with disinterred corpses and uses a shot of the actress Marilyn Burns really being cut by Gunnar Hansen, but never explicitly shows anything much worse to later iterations. Rather, in the 1974 film, Tobe Hooper only suggests girls being impaled by meat hooks with close up shots of dangling feet and a squishing sound effect or being chopped up with the eponymous piece of hardware. However, later iterations of the film, especially the 2013 3D extravaganza that features the same hook scene with the hook pointing out the other side of hapless Kenny’s gut followed by a slow grinding in half via chainsaw thanks to Leatherface added, add far more gore, but at the cost of the plot and ambience of the films.

Wes Craven’s 1977 The Hills Have Eyes is one of my favorite of the late 70s New Horror films because it depicts a stranded family beset upon by inbred hill people. There is little to no suggestion that these folk eat baby flesh for any other reason than because they are crazy, and the final scene in which the father takes his revenge on the clan leader with a knife repeatedly to his chest is par excellence, but this was all undone with the 2006 remake which replaced Michael Berryman with giant radioactive horrors with oozing tumescence.

In many ways, horror fiction is subject to these same issues. Zombie novels and backwoods killers are all depicted with such heavy-handedness. Black Candies, on the other hand, is a journal of literary horror which strives to feature horror fiction that features a little more panache. It’s a relief to see a journal trying to push for quality horror writing, especially writing from women (who are woefully underrepresented in the genre at large). As a result of these efforts, the very best selections in the most recent issue (with all selections reacting to the theme “See Through” ) operate under the same principle as the best horror films of the seventies—that less is more.

In “I’m Pogo,” Lindsay Hunter uses the reader’s previous knowledge of John Wayne Gacy and the touchstones of pedophile clowns spawned by his crimes to build dread. There’s no outright violence in her story, rather repeated phrases like “tourniquet, tourniquet …” and sentences like “You know, tremblefleshed wifebound line cooks jailed for sodomy learn quick how not to be jailed the next time. The word is pederast.” In many ways, this is more terrifying for her readers than a direct description of pedophiliac rape.

Jac Jemc’s story “Angles” also builds upon haunted house tropes, but uses the affectless phrasing, “maybe it was the neighbor children who rang the doorbell that night or maybe it was just some faulty wiring or maybe the faint ring we heard was something else entirely: a thing we would only recognize later,” which increases in intensity as the story progresses as the narrator later says, “maybe I find a body and it’s hard as diamonds or maybe I find the body and it’s just a pile of soft bones and teeth or maybe it’s a body whose nails have screamed themselves free of absent fingers. What will a rat eat first?” The story becomes scary more because of the narrator’s refusal to acknowledge the strange goings on rather than because of actual ghosts or guts.

In other stories Aaron Burch uses the familiar frustrations of hotel life to depict a man driven too far by a dog, and Ken Bauman’s “Lathe” meditates on the real-life horror that is surviving the death of loved ones to make something chilling and beautiful.

Not all mainstream horror is heavy-handed. Ti West’s contribution to the film V/H/S is one of my favorite recent horror movies and Joe Hill and Benjamin Percy are frequently producing quality horror novels and short fiction, but the best of the best of the genre remains see through to the general public. Maybe this is because, on a base level, audiences don’t actually want to be scared. They just need something to watch on a date which encourages squeezing hands and not much further thought. Mainstream horror is populated by zombies, maniacs, and sharktopi which require little headspace—they’re spooky, but they don’t affect people in the real world, whereas literary horror inhabits the subtle, everyday terror that pervades people’s lives. After all, the scariest horror is that which we cannot see. In “This is a Ghost Story,” a ghost asks the narrator of Juliet Escoria’s story “What are you so afraid of?” She responds “Everything, … it’s everything in this world that scares me…”

***

Quincy Rhoads teaches English composition at Austin Peay State University. He lives in Clarksville, TN with his wife and their son. His writing has been featured online in Everyday Genius, The Fiddleback, and Unicorn Knife Fight.

Use of Weapons (Culture Series)
by Iain M. Banks
Orbit; Reprint edition, July 2008
512 pages / $15.99  Buy from Amazon

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Culture series by Iain M. Banks just keeps on getting better and in Use of Weapons, the narrative takes on added complexity in a two-pronged narrative that intertwines the tale of a hunter, Zakalwe, who has left the Culture and a woman, Sma, who still works for them. I’d go so far as to say this is one of the most experimental works by Banks, or for that matter, any science fiction writer, particularly in light of the ending. Because of its added intricacy, I (PTL) invited Joseph Michael Owens (JMO) and Kyle Muntz (KM) to collaboratively review the book and share/debate/spur our thoughts in a “cultural” exchange.

 

Peter Tieryas Liu: What was your take on Zakalwe and Sma in the pantheon of Culture characters?

Joseph Michael Owens: To be honest, Cheradine Zakalwe and Diziet Sma are probably two of my very favorite Culture characters overall, and I’m currently reading the last book in the series. The chemistry between them is truly fantastic. It’s hard to explain without giving away major spoilers, but you’ve got a really fantastic setup where you can see there is a great detail of history between them and it’s 100% believable. You can feel that they know each other incredibly well and, in some situations, they’re really the only ones that can handle each other.

Banks is also good with layering characters’ roles, and you get the feeling that both Zakalwe and Sma have done and seen a lot that doesn’t necessarily have to do with their current occupations, which I love. I think it adds an extra human element to the characters, these two specifically, because we’re shown that they exist — and have existed — outside of this single narrative. And since they feel like people and thus read like people.

The ending is . . . it’s just wow. . . .

Kyle Muntz: I’m not sure I can add too much to Joe’s comments (since I think that’s totally on-base and right), but in retrospect, I’d say Diziet Sma in particular has really stuck with me. The Culture series has a lot of strong female characters, but Sma is definitely one of the most interesting and best realized. For me, one thing the experimental elements of the novel call attention to (by telling Zakalwe’s story forwards and backwards at the same time) is how broad life is; and how separate different episodes in it can be. Especially when the chronology is destabilized. The novel gives glimpses of the same people, years apart–and each time they seem different, sometimes almost unrecognizable. And that’s life.

Use of Weapons is the last Culture novel to focus on a small cast of characters. After this, it becomes a sequence of vaguely Pynchonian ensemble pieces, and while I love the broader scope that brings to the series, it makes me appreciate the more intimate characterizations of the earlier novels, especially this and Player of Games. Characterization wise I think Banks is in top form here. In general, every Culture novel is unique, but formally none of them stand apart as strongly as Use of Weapons.

PTL: One of the most interesting chapters is when Banks’ describes Zakalwe’s first time aboard a Culture ship, Size Isn’t Everything. It’s our first real exposure from the eyes of a newcomer to how different the Culture is from everything we know, particularly with a post-scarcity economy in which anyone can do what they want.

One of the dialogues I remember is a waiter who talks about what’s important in life and why he enjoys wiping tables when he can do anything he wants: “I could try composing wonderful musical works or day-longer entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyways, people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead?” What do you guys think about the Culture? Things you like and dislike?

JMO: I remember Banks saying once that he modeled the Culture off of his ideal utopia, which is kind of cool because that’s an example of the power of writing and creativity: you can literally create your own world, and then go play in it! There’s really nothing I dislike about the Culture; I’m like the ultimate Culture fanboy. The way I’ve read it since book 1 (Consider Phlebas) is that a pan-human race created AIs that were able to perpetuate and evolve themselves into the Minds we know and love in current Culture novels. The AIs basically take care of all the mundane activities for humans so that humans can dedicate themselves to whatever they want: art, recreation, education, various experiences in general. Disease has been eradicated in the biological citizens, and people can augment themselves any number of ways they desire for utility or for fun. This sounds totally like a place I’d want to live!

KM: There’s a certain amount of tension within the novels about the Culture, mostly questioning how such a powerful, secular, completely free, post-violence, post-scarcity society (controlled entirely by machines) should interact with violent, oppressive, warfaring societies who rule themselves and do a terrible job of it. But I think the Culture is objectively pretty perfect.

I read the series over a year ago now, but it was the setting that kept me coming back: the Culture, endless, unchanging, as a place to live and way of life to be explored. Genre fiction tends to treat society as something to be moved: societies fight war, are saved from corruption, whatever. Which I’ve always thought was boring, and pushes me away from series like Song of Ice and Fire. Instead, the Culture is basically incorruptible and one of the most intellectually sound utopias in fiction. (Another good example is Triton by Samuel Delany.) There are elements of the setting I still think about pretty regularly, and in retrospect even echo through a novel I wrote called The Holy Ghost, which was about a utopian-ish society that did have to deal with scarcity.

Another main tension is always going to be that the Culture isn’t run by people — it’s run by machines infinitely smarter and, yes, more humane than we’ve ever been. This isn’t something I’d want to dive too deeply into, other than to say: I don’t really see the problem.

PTL: The contrast between the Federation (e.g.) in Star Trek and the Culture is fascinating in that while both are postscarity, the latter embraces human nature to an extreme while the Federation espouses a future in which human nature is transcended. Sma is casual about her sexual liaisons with crew members and all hints of traditional morality are banished, whereas in the Federation, conservative values are still very prevalent. But the biggest difference is that the Minds run the Culture whereas the Federation has a council that is susceptible to corruption. So in that sense, the Culture could not exist if it weren’t for the Minds and Artificial Brains that are in control. Beychae, the target of Zakalwe’s chase, poses an interesting thought: “The Culture believes profoundly in machine sentience, so it thinks everyone ought to, but I think it also believes every civilization should be run by its machines.” Zakalwe replies: “I have no idea whether they’re the good guys or not… They certainly seem to be, but then who knows that seeming is being? I have never seen them be cruel, even when they might have claimed they have an excuse to do so. It can make them seem cold, sometimes. But there are folks that’ll tell you it’s the bad gods that always have the most beautiful faces and the softest voices.”

In some ways, these “Artificial” Minds are the future gods, albeit quirky and eclectic ones. Do you think there’s an assumption by Banks that humans can’t achieve this totally peaceful society by their own means and need someone else in control? For all practical matters, if there were a master species of aliens that were also benevolent, they could easily take the place of the Minds in the fiction (though that probably would have been harder to swallow for human readers who would equate it to human slavery).

JMO: I like the Minds-as-future-gods idea because to us, they would be, especially given that they (i.e. the Culture) are a level 8 civilization. However, there are also level 9 and 10 civs out there (10 being those civs that have Sublimed, if I recall), who are ostensibly gods even to the Culture and other level 7-8 civs. This is something you are even given an example of in the final Culture novel, The Hydrogen Sonata, when one Mind talks to another that has actually returned to “the Real” from the Sublime (something that is almost unheard of).

Also, I got this from a wiki: “Also significant within the Culture novel cycle is that the book shows a number of Minds acting in a decidedly non-benevolent way, somewhat qualifying the godlike non-corruptibility and benevolence they are ascribed in other Culture novels. Banks himself has described the actions of some of the Minds in the novel as akin to “barbarian kings presented with the promise of gold in the hills”.”

I think the idea is that, once Sublimed, you are fully actualized within the greater universe. One of the feelings you get, however, is that Subliming is something civilizations also do when they — for lack of a better term — get bored, and decide simply to “retire.”

To go with your main question, I think as long as there is a sense of “us” and “them,” or more specifically, “the other” — and as long as there are resources that are not available to everyone — it will be incredibly hard for humans to achieve such a totally peaceful society by their own means. Humans are inherently opportunistic, even when they have the best intentions. As long as someone else has something you want, you’ll likely experience some level of envy. Oftentimes the sense of envy will be manageable, but what happens when it’s not, i.e. in situations where what you want involves feeding starving people? Of course that’s a base need versus simple want, but when resources become scarce, the line gets blurry.

READ MORE >

The Parable of You
by Tony Wolk
Propeller Books, November 2013
90 pages / $12  Buy from Propeller Books or Amazon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The 17 stories in the 90-page The Parable of You feel like vignettes in the true sense of the word.

“The Nameless Ones”: A purposefully obscure Cinderella figure doesn’t wake up one day. The narrator arrives to wake her from her slumber. The story ends.

“The Shipwrecked Sailor”: The story’s namesake finds a house with a small door on an otherwise abandoned island. He enters, and finds that the contents of the room he has stepped into shift and disappear. The story ends.

“The Jogger”: Abraham Lincoln sets out on a run. He reflects on “The first time ever that he had traded Vulcan’s boots for the moccasins of Mercury and took to the countryside.” The story ends

At first I was a little hard on these stories. I used my newly acquired workshop language to diagnose them: “Not fully realized,” I penned in my notebook. “Linguistically cumbersome.” But the stories toward the end of the collection began to win me over. In “The Minkfarm,” for example, a young narrator visits a fur-coat farm with his reticent father. It is a longer story, relative to the rest of Parable, and by the end the boy watches a horse tied to a series of posts and shot.

I saw the horse shudder and go limp, its head slack. The four ropes kept it from falling. Then, with the shot still reverberating in the nearby trees, I realize that father’s hand was on my shoulder, gripping me tightly, holding me close.

This is good stuff, and fully realized indeed. It is just approached from the side, through the point of view of a man who now has his own children, thinking about his own childhood. A different writer might just tell the story. Tony Wolk doesn’t. He weaves a frame for the nostalgia, a specific man on a specific night—“the half-moon is waxing”—to recall the substance of the story. It is only a paragraph on either side of the piece that provides this frame. Still, such insertions are strange to see. It is not out of necessity that Wolk has written them. It is out of something else.

What I’ve come to understand is that, instead of being not-good, The Parable of You reads like literature in translation. The feeling I had in reading Wolk is similar to how I felt when I read Cortázar’s Hopscotch for the first time, and his Historias de cronopios y famas (the latter of which I made the mistake of trying to read in Spanish): as if I had encountered something very interesting and probably great, but didn’t quite have the tools or cultural logic to appreciate it for what it was.

There even seem to be different conventions here in the choice of subjects. Like Wolk’s three novels in the last ten years about a time-traveling Abraham Lincoln, two stories in the collection take on Abe as their subject. It’s almost like some weird American fetishism, except for the fact that it’s undertaken by an American. It seems wildly uncool to me to write prospectively indie fiction about the namesake of one of Bill O’Reilly’s most recent books, but I can’t imagine that Wolk cares much at all.

Even the title of his collection seems bizarrely straightforward and genuine. This is not what we expect from a young, indie press in Portland. But the story that gives The Parable of You its name is an awesome one, based on the problem of the drunken sailors. It ends with the spatial equivalent of Shakespeare’s typewriting monkey: even if you’re set out, blindfolded, to wonder the universe forever, you will eventually make your way back to the lightpost where you began. The story, and the book, end:

Your hand traces the familiar scoring, the X, the series of grooves, your name. You remove the blindfold. You are on the corner again. The universe is finite. In time, you will always come home. Always.

READ MORE >

Bleed Through
by Michael Davidson
Coffee House Press, Dec 2013
256 pages / $17.95  Buy from Coffee House or Amazon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Perhaps having power is like having images.” If the concentration of images behaves gravitationally, then may we be approaching a point of collapse? Sure are a lot of pictures out there these days. The basic law of structure formation in the universe is collapse. And perhaps ‘having’ images is an affliction linked to memory, that trick of consciousness which allows humans to substitute pronouns like me and I, us and you, into the visions that bubble up during the increasingly rare moments during which one is not in a state of interface. It seems we have ever more such ‘moments’ to cope with. One inverse outcome of the surveillance state is we now have a population which is pumping images into circulation as never before. Michael Davidson’s career retrospective Bleed Through resists this proliferation as a collection and yet accedes, on a poem-to-poem basis, to the idea that even an initially smooth distribution of matter will fall in upon itself. Images are conflated with words, and disintegrate from line to line, blurring across the sparsely punctuated sentences, as in Ready to Hand:

Davidson is well aware of a kind of useful violence latent in the process of reference as a professor of English, but in his poetry he seems to allow himself a moment of reflection. The title suggests that whatever is released by trying to grasp a scene, thing, or person is vital residue, but that the writing itself is in one sense confinement of the energy that suffuses the subject. Confinement here is a communal condition, and materializes as poetry, as criticism, and as image, in ways that are transparent about leaving something out. The ‘leaving something out’ is critical to allowing the subjects room to breathe an air of impossibility, which is what makes these poems semblances of life as a professor. A group of new poems is called ‘Bad Modernism’, scenes ‘between rationalism and whatever is left out’. The subjects that dwell here, in the most recent poems, generally resist being totalized, by way of their gentle intrusions into, and unexplained exits from, the world of each poem. While Davidson’s poetry is often grouped with the language movement, this is probably a bit inaccurate. While sometimes upending grammarians and often explicit about the pitfalls of language, a lyric relationship is still often present, if immaterial. His major output has been criticism, not poems, over the last decade, and this collection, although this collection is hailed as ‘A book we have needed for a very long time‘. I don’t think there’s any literature vital to our survival as a species, but I’m a pessimist unlike Ron Silliman. A grouping of things –systems, signs, speakers– will eventually not exert enough pressure outwards in aggregate to support its superstructure, and this is when collapse is imminent.

The collection spans thirty-five years of poetry, and narrows the work down to a single volume, so it is a well-contained environment. The distribution of the pronouns he uses changes as the reader moves from the older to the newer books, and recently the second-person singular has populated like wildfire in zones that used to be by and large by a first-person, and permutations of the third person. One of Davidson’s new and previously unpublished poems, The Friend, closes when “even the pronoun is laced with lime / as you pack it, ball and powder, / into a long gun, fire / and the report knocks you dead.” The friend in question turns away from the I, and dances gavottes on his back with his wife, turning the narrator into a piano of doubt. But the piano starts to sound like the same melodic register after some time. The same philosophical problems are sounded out via collage. Sometimes sounds of the program of inclusivity and access, sometimes reports that knock someone dead, but always the distant thunder of personal catastrophe bound up with the language of violence and questions about reference, as in the chilling ‘Before the Event’:

This poem displays a high correlation between sexual violence and some of the essential components of anglo-american language philosophy which has risen to power in the academy in the aftermath of Wittgenstein. Davidson’s objections to the way of living prevalent in the current academic labor force are present in different ways throughout the collection, although he has been affiliated with UC-San Diego in some capacity for over 30 years. Language poetry at its worst draws attention to its own ineffability while lording the power of the maker in a snide, academic way.There exists no image that contains the pain of having one’s home ravaged by a storm. But one can have so-called ‘philosophical’ interests and admit to being powerless before them. Language poetry at its best seems to perform a collapse of the rules of its system for a user of the language. Davidson’s work is filled with such moments of open vulnerability before the operations of the various systems. After one listens to so much loud music, deafness falls, but once everything is pictured what will become of the shadows?

READ MORE >

News Of The Haircut
by Peter Bergoef
Greying Ghost Press, Originally published 2007 / Republished 2013 as part of Greying Ghost Archive Series (#1)
$5 / Buy from Greying Ghost Press

 

 

 

News of the Haircut is a chapbook by writer Peter Bergoef, published by Greying Ghost Press, as part of their Archive series. First published in 2007, this chapbook seems to touch on themes, such as love, loss, sadness, and the all too common feelings that are often described as an existential crisis, explored via a vague narrator like approach, giving the poems a somewhat personal feeling to them. These poems, which appear abstract at first, give the reader a series of images within images, presenting a version of themselves within the pages that one all too often tries to ignore.

What I notice here is an idea of a shared helplessness, which is shared through our connection and inhabitance of the internet. Transmitting maths through satellites, victims running their mouths, and being handcuffed to the chair, all give one the image of people who both need the internet, whether they want to admit it or not, and are afraid of their reliance on the internet. This seems to be a common theme among writers who interact with the online world, like Heiko Julien, Megan Boyle, or Tao Lin, writers who have become identified through the internet, and have also talked about loneliness and isolation through this medium. These writers seem to all depend on, and are sometimes repulsed by, the life led online, which reveals itself through their writing through the use of concrete and stark imagery. I think this is, in a way, become a reimagining of what existentialism posits, that life is absurd and meaningless, and that the only way for one to ‘break free’ from this crisis is to accept that life is absurd. So possibly, the contradiction of living ‘irl’ online is the absurdity that these writers are trying to accept.

Here he uses the images of birth, and the image of a straightjacket, implying being locked away in an asylum of sorts, to create an interesting juxtaposition between what “normal” is, and how one persons normal can be another’s “crazy.” The use of all lower caps is interesting as well, as it gives the poems a passive voice, sharing with the reader a feeling of hopelessness that comes from the non direct quality of the lines. In effect, the messages are both passive and active in the way they are structured and interpreted, which I find very interesting in all of the pieces.

Bergoef’s central theme, however, seems to be one of helplessness, or loneliness, and is again shown in the poem Awake. The use of short, simple lines, combined again with the lack of capitalization, combines to create an image that I can only describe as being “depressing,” but still not an unknowable image.

READ MORE >