One of the things I’m noticing lately is that I’m, I think not just a little sick, but completely sick of narrative video games. Or at least I am sick of games that have big, ambitious narratives.

Because I’m sick of big, ambitious narrative video games, I’ve found myself playing discrete-narrative, gameplay-centric little indie games. And old games.

So that’s why I’ve been thinking about Chaser 2 again. READ MORE >

Super Natural
by Tracey McTague
Trembling Pillow Press, Jan 2013
116 pages / $15  Buy from Amazon or SPD

Composed in three sections – “Thirst,” “Ancestor Midden,” and “Contagion” —Tracey McTague’s new volume of poems hinges on an exploration of prophecy and vision, and the correlations of these with history, science, magic, and (mis-)fortune.  This playful, satiric collection explicitly samples its sources in folklore, myth, and history, even as its subjects are the quotidian world of war, environmental collapse, sex, and children, “replete with nudie magazines / tarot cards, and dirty jokes.”  McTague, riffing on language’s cadences and sounds, plumbs both the longing for divine sight and the absurd state of the human-wrought world in the early 21^st century, wielding parody and satire with a language tempered by music and a rich reading of the human past.

Super Natural opens with a quote from Chogyam Trungpa articulating the Buddhist notion of Drala: “the unconditioned wisdom and power of the world that are beyond any dualism….There is no fundamental separation or duality between you and your world.” This explicit rejection of the Western separation of humankind from the rest of the world serves as the fundamental premise of the collection. The poisoning of the oceans, mass extinctions, “this age / of fever and ague / veiled black smoke / bottled for poison,” these are the fuel for the fire burning at the heart of these poems – the human socio-religio separation from the world we inhabit and the chaos which has ensued. Of our carbon- and consumption-fueled “bender,” McTague invokes a crow song—bird of death and prophecy—for us, trapped in a “straight-jacket  [nightmare] of our own making.”

Reading the present as much as the future, McTague’s poems serially invoke the raven/crow, as the poet charts the “super” natural catastrophes spiraling around us. “Above” and “beyond” nature, humankind is the super in the title of McTague’s book, our blind destruction of the one reality, this world.  Invoking vision—“macula witness”—she parodies both the human impulse for redemption and its blind traveling companion the capacity for contagion and destruction, even as she riffs on the Bard: “too hot the eye shines / but too numb to worry / as well-washed nun whispers / ‘Get thee to a summary of want.’” What we think we want and how we end up wanting—for a world.

“Thirst”, the book’s first section, plays on the correspondences between envy and sight and the evil eye, and the interwoven associations of tip/tipple, toasting and drinking as antidotes to ill omens: “The evil eye is thought to cause a withering sickness.” In this section, the crow/raven figures as both a harbinger of what we have wrought and a means of access to knowing/vision: “swig Burton’s bourbon / to speak bird / light foretold in future.” Just as thirst is her theme, the pollution of the oceans, the monstrous debris-tangles caught in its eddies, and the collapse of its fisheries figure centrally. Invoking Aquinas’ assertion that “…a song is the exultation of the mind dwelling on eternal things, bursting forth as voice,” McTague takes up her charge with withering satire and jubilant word play, strewing as she goes images of our strange, lovely, disintegrating world.

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Black God
by Ben Spivey
Blue Square Press, November 2012
144 pages / $6.00  Buy from Blue Square Press or Amazon (ebook)

 
“There’s something black in that place like it was untouched by God himself…or herself…”

*

Black God envelopes and overwhelms: to read it is to surrender to death and despair’s stark seduction, evoked by Spivey’s terse lyricism and brutal plot.

Cooper O’Rourke, protagonist, narrates his erasure from reality. He’s resigned himself to the New American Dream (his words): “keep working, don’t die.” The same can’t be said for his wife, an ex-architect with a malignant brain tumor. She’s just as resigned but to dying, kept alive nightly by a bedside respirator.

In a way, the couple live together:

“We were nearing retirement age—it would be overly simple to say that things never get easier…The same two cars were parked in the driveway. The same two cats leaped and slept—they’d loop infinity symbols between our legs…We tunneled around our home in paths to places that only we knew—a home is where we keep our secrets.”

The anemia of daily life ends with the wife’s articulation of her dying wish: for Cooper to assume guardianship of a home that isn’t theirs. He carries out her request—but the house harbors something too dark inside, and Cooper is enticed out of reality and into another world, half fugue state, half fever dream.

*

Summarizing Black God does it a disservice. Reiteration of its plot leaves the book’s essence—its languorous stasis—uncaptured. This stasis lurks in the subtext of Cooper’s narrative, and proves difficult to quantify. Its source seems to be traumas continually suffered by the protagonist, both in waking and dreaming life.

At first Cooper’s traumas manifest in the everyday—most aspects of life get the better of him, particularly the accumulation of age and time’s elusiveness:

“How much older we were…Change was expected, of course, but at the same time unexpected, rather creeping it seeped through all of the distractions: work, commute, religion, bills, sleep, health—we don’t always notice how we change…Myself as a boy would not recognize myself as a man. Might not recognize myself from dinner to dinner. Winter to winter.”

Cooper makes multiple mentions of this preoccupation with time, and it begins to appear as more than a simply anxiety. I call it a trauma because of its concrete effect on narrator, as shown in his narrative. Language could easily be added to Cooper’s list of seeped-through distractions: Each mention of change, of time or age, informs the compressed nature of Cooper’s story, and begins to suggest itself as the actual cause:

“ A clock ticked. The noise droned long after the hand moved onto the next second. That noise sustained too and the ticking (thickening) continued one onto another, another—the sounds and seconds stacked over each other, enveloping, encapsulating…”

For Cooper, time does not simply pass. His heightened description of a clock merely ticking suggests time as a solid substance, capable of thickening, enveloping—perhaps suffocating.

Of course, Cooper never points to the effects of his traumas. He simply observes them along with the reader, “How it seemed one day [he] slept and woke again married and older.”

Cooper also struggles with a lack of marital intimacy. Although lack of love isn’t implied, Cooper and his wife are clearly estranged—their house is full of secrets, of paths that only they know about, respectively.

Cooper’s narration places his wife at a distance, as does his failure to call her by name. His perception of her suggests continual unfamiliarity. He constantly looks at his wife as if seeing her for the first time. Otherwise she resembles something inhuman, or unfamiliar—while lying next to her he compares her twitching muscles to “hummingbird wings or piano strings.”

As Black God progresses, Cooper’s traumas begin to manifest outside of language, become physical repercussions. On a walk home, Cooper goes deaf and begins bleeding from every orifice, after hearing the sound of a “disoriented…reverberating clock.” He returns home unable to articulate what’s happened to his wife, nor can he hear a word she says. “My wife held her mouth open for a long time,” he observes. “She was either screaming or hinging it agape.”

*

Cooper’s quotidian traumas are soon replaced by those of his dreams. Observing the house inexplicably draws images from his dreams into reality—sporadic anachronisms. After entering the house, Cooper is submerged entirely, transported to a beach from which he’ll never return.

If a dream harbors the dreamer’s secret yearnings, Cooper’s reveals a deep-seated masochism. His is not the expected conventional idyll: instead of an alternative to his harsh reality, Cooper’s dreamscape hosts its own variety of trauma, specifically acute corporeal harm. Although Cooper’s dream afflictions are more severe than real life’s, their repercussions aren’t negative. Dream-trauma either resolves the problems of waking life, or leads to a transcendent, nirvana-like experience.

The dream hosts several reunions between Cooper and his wife. They find an intimacy, impossible in their own lives, through mutual corporeal harm, inflicted upon them by the forces of nature or by each other. Their limited conversation no longer reflects an inability to communicate, but the futility of verbal communication:

“When the stones were stacked…she pushed my left hand…between the friction of the stones. I felt the stinging salt air filling the new cuts. I felt the sun’s warmth…[she] thrust my shoulder, and shoved my waist into the stone’s cracks…You’re almost there, she said…Lastly she pulled my tongue from my mouth, she kept it balled in a fist. With all of my body reaching…like pieces of ribbon, twisted in the new breeze…She too filtered through the stones, falling over, and into the ocean…”

Although Cooper’s body is put through excruciating violence (and at his wife’s hands), the event is just as transcendent and intimate as it is traumatic. His wife comforts him while harming his body; he feels the sun’s warmth—a pleasant sensation. The event is both better and worse than anything from their reality. The couple suffers more than they did in reality, but it leads them to an higher state unattainable in life.

*

Although trauma is only one of Black God’s multiple threads, Spivey primarily deals in the aesthetics of suffering. He takes a common artistic preoccupation to the extreme, casts light on the darkest parts of the psyche without compromising their shadows.

You might consider Spivey a sentimental pioneer, a revealer of a despair better left untouched—or he may expose something you strive to forget, a dark matter that could have only been extracted from your nightmares.

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Kara Clark (@karaaclark) is a writer from Connecticut.

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(Blue Square Press is currently working on relaunching their site, so please note that the URL may change at time. For updates, find them on Facebook.)

Hill William
by Scott McClanahan
Tyrant Books, Nov 2013
200 pages / $14  Buy from Amazon

There’s a moment in John Fante’s The Road to Los Angeles wherein his protagonist, Arturo Bandini, has taken all the photographs of beautiful Hollywood starlets he ritualistically masturbates to in the closet into the bathtub with him to drown them, so to speak, and attempt to move on with his life. In a matter of three or four pages it distills the awkwardness and hilarity of growing up into a beautiful, imaginative vision of this young man thrashing around in the tub with photographs surrounding him, their faces beginning to run. Around halfway through Scott McClanahan’s newest work, Hill William, I realized that I’d felt the same sense of awkwardness and hilarity for the past 80 pages, only subsiding briefly when one tale reaches its close, and the next begins.

Fans of McClanahan are well aware of his ability to convey these qualities through a multitude of works. Be it his early collections of Stories, The Collected Works from Lazy Fascist, or the recent Crapalachia, I’m hard pressed to think of any writer working today who so seamlessly blends the horrific with the heartfelt, or small town American mania with the universal notion of comedy, and a desperate search for meaning.

Hill William, for me, feels a bit like the perfect blend of his early short fiction with the all-too-real tales of Crapalachia, while transcending anything thus far and reading like Geronimo Rex-Barry Hannah got into a bareknuckle boxing match with Person-Sam Pink. (This was another comparison that immediately came to mind, if you’ll pardon my digressive tendency.)

Hill William is McClanahan’s first novel, and yet it functions more like a novel-in-stories, the protagonist presenting the reader with any number of characters from his youth like Gay Walter, a “sissified” young man with a pet hamster named Hardees, or Derrick Anger, a boy who introduces young Scott to masturbating via a “1970s’s style dirty book that didn’t even have any pictures in it really but just these drawings of people having sex and these little dirty stories to go along with them.” With each chapter heading comes a new interior landscape wherein the narrator confronts some element of growing up, and yet for all the coming-of-age apparent in Hill William there’s just as much obsession with the surrounding community and the idea of taking on new lives and personalities to pass the time.

Early on, in “Rainelle,” the narrator says “I looked out over the continentals on the street below me and in these houses were people walking around in the lights they just turned on. I sat and felt so lonely because I was only one person and couldn’t be each of them.” This, by itself, got me thinking about McClanahan’s status as a sort of modern day Carver or even Faulkner, in his ability to sit down and narrate quick glimpses into such a wide range of lives. Some of that curiosity about this range of lives explored in his former stories seems to come out again in this urge to embody the whole community while telling one character’s life.

Later, Gay Walter begins singing Alabama’s “Roll On,” when the narrator observes “he was no longer Gay Walter but someone else. He sang and we watched and listened and he was no longer on a porch in the mountains, but he was on a stage somewhere. He was no longer lip synching to the radio, but he was our own private superstar. He was singing our song and we were singing along.” Suddenly the middle of nowhere becomes the center of the universe and it’s due to a mixture of McClanahan’s intimate prose and the unobstructed sight of a child. No longer are we as a reader in the mountains of Appalachia but traveling above it all with a gang of strange perverted nobodies desperate to feel comfortable. The microcosm quickly becomes the microcosm, the particular the general.

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