A Questionable Shape
by Bennett Sims
Two Dollar Radio, May 2013
242 pages /  $16.50  Preorder from Amazon or Two-Dollar Radio

This ain’t your granddaddy’s zombie-apocalypse. Everything in Bennett Sims’s stunning debut courts a topographical and invasive examination of the human condition through our inverse. The architecture of zombie-logic is rewired, and the undead become symbolic for what it means to exist in all its physical and existential, its beauty and brutality.

Post-Katrina. Docile shapes fringe the horizon of greater Baton Rouge. Hurricane season looms yet again, threatening the security of Mississippi barges that quarantine thousands of zombies. If the barges breach, a second epidemic is likely. A Questionable Shape follows Vermaelen over one week as he helps his friend, Matt Mazoch, search for his undead father, retracing “haunts” Mr. Mazoch might return to in his zombified state. But hurricane season is also dwindling the window of opportunity to find him.

Sims escalates the psychological state of the undead, giving them, essentially, purpose. Reanimated, these zombies pursue places from memories. Reanimation, thus, becomes a kind Resuscitation. What the genre formerly defined as a vacant shell of rudimentary desire, Sims infuses with recollection, humanizing the traditionally dehumanized.

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Jordan Castro and Noah Cicero in “Shoplifting from American Apparel” (2012).

1. This is a review of the recent film adaptation, not the book, although I’ll also say a few things about the book.

2. I saw the film on 14 March at the Logan Theatre in Logan Square, Chicago. It was a special event. About 70 people were in attendance.

3. The director, Pirooz Kalayeh, was there, and I spoke with him before and after the screening. Brad Warner, who plays Tao Lin (or “‘Movie’ Tao Lin”), was also in attendance.

4. Pirooz gave me a poster and a button and a DVD copy of the film. Thank you, Pirooz!

5. I’ve read Shoplifting maybe half a dozen times. I’ve also taught it twice. It’s my favorite of Tao’s books and I consider it something of a masterpiece.

6. Some people persist in thinking Tao isn’t a stylist, but I think he’s a brilliant stylist. Although maybe people are nowadays more convinced of this? I don’t know.

7. As Tao himself has pointed out (see here for instance), all of his books are written in different styles, something that I think obvious when one really looks at them.

8. I suspect some people really aren’t looking at them.

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Anathemas and Admirations
by E. M. Cioran
Arcade Publishing, Nov 2012
272 pages / $14.95  Buy from Amazon

E.M. Cioran’s work indicates the caustic philosophical consequences of sleepless rumination upon insignificance and failure. It is thick with anxiety, but retains buoyancy, the sick humour of sneering into the abyss. For a generation allied by smug cynicism and chic nihilism, to encounter a space of understanding free of the sour stench of complaint might be palliative! It could correct the posture, provide iron to the will, destroy some friendships, and it might well be a taste of joy, a flicker of warmth… at the very least, it might mortify those prone to complaint…

Cioran was a Romanian born philosopher mystic who honed his craft in French, known for sharp edged aphorisms, fragments, recalling Nietzsche’s Daybreak. His was the bleak philosophy of insomnia, horrific laboring through late hours, candid lamentations of his very birth, his eyes drooping down his skull, a cigarette sizzling against an open sore. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche states “the thought of suicide is a strong consolation; one can get through many a bad night with it.” Cioran’s entire oeuvre can be seen as exploring this sentiment.

In 2012, a number of his books were published in fine editions. Anathemas and Admirations collects two of his books, Exercise d’admiration and Aveux et anathèmes. The resulting combination allies a series of literary essays – the admirations of a wide range of writers including Borges, Beckett, Fitzgerald – alongside clusters of confessional aphorisms:

“To have nothing more in common with men than the fact of being a man!”

“One can imagine everything, predict everything, save for how long one can sink.”

Cioran’s admirations offer intimate curmudgeonly affection on other writers, and are exemplary accounts of his method and approach. For instance, in Some Meetings, Cioran offers moments of intimacy with Beckett which reveal as much about Beckett’s saintly detachment as Cioran’s brooding disgust: “he disparages no one, unaware of the hygienic function of malevolence.” For reference points on other literary admirations, Henry Miller’s love letter to himself in the guise of a study of Rimbaud and Nick Land’s deranged engagement with Bataille both come to mind in the sense that they eschew the deft theoretical engagement of masters like Blanchot for a biographical confession of obsession and ruin.

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Here and Now: Letters 2008-2011
by Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee
Viking, 2013
248 pages / $27.95 buy from Amazon

1. As the title suggests, this book documents the correspondence between Asturias Prize winner Paul Auster and Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee from 2008-2011.

2. According to my calculations there are 79 letters, though some letters include emails explaining a fax machine is broken or low on ink.

3. It is not revealed if either titan of world literature had to dial a 9 before faxing.

4. There is no editor’s note, introduction, epilogue or index. Peculiar for a book of letters. There are footnotes but only sometimes: a biography of Kafka is footnoted while Pierre Clastres’ Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians is not.

5. 11 letters were exchanged in 2008, 30 in 2009, 25 in 2010 and 13 in 2011. The 2008 and 2011 exchanges are high-spirited, covering topics ranging from why men enjoy watching sports to the film director William Wyler.

6. On the 24^th letter they perfect their flow: “Thank you for yesterday’s fax. I feel that we have finally hit upon a workable system. A slow letter across the seas from America to Australia and then a quick, electronic transmission of paper from a room in a house in Adelaide to a room in a house in Brooklyn.”

7. I would’ve liked to have been a fly on the whiteboard when Viking Press gave the green light to the title. I could’ve squashed myself.

8. Coetzee is why I wanted to read this book.  I thought I’d never read a book by Auster. Halfway through I realized I have read several of his books, years ago, but I still don’t remember reading them. Is not reading a book and not remembering reading a book the same thing? Scrolling for Auster I found James Wood’s mean-spirited article  from 2009. Whenever James Wood decides someone is a bad writer they deserve a closer look.

9. “The emboldened critic,” Coetzee says in letter 42, “becomes like the child lobbing pebbles at the gorilla in the zoo, knowing he is protected by the bars.” Auster on James Wood:  “I mustn’t complain, least of all about a man whose name suggests that one day he will be eaten by termites.”

10. This book made me miss my grandfathers. READ MORE >