The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

While browsing internet, I came across a link to this website in the discussion of some comics. I rather liked the guy and his little impressionistic reviews. I spent an entire evening reading up on them. While I was reading through them, I stumbled upon this review of a comic called Miss Don’t Touch Me. I clicked on the link to Amazon, assuming it would be some expensive hardcover thing. But it wasn’t. I snapped it up for 10 dollars and gave it a read.

Basically, the story does some very interesting things, as alluded to in the review, if you read it. It starts out as a story about Blanche ending up going undercover, almost by accident, to attempt to solve the mystery of her sister’s murder. However, as the story progresses, it’s obvious that Blanche is not up to the job. She’s become high-profile in a bad way, and is too impulsive and emotional to deal with this problem. However, Miss Jo, a prostitute of questionable gender (Jo certainly seem much happier in the female role, as she never leaves it, but she could just be a crossdresser. It’s never completely explained, though everyone treats her like a woman, for the most part.) soon figures out what Blanche is up to and has the disconnect from the subject matter and the connections to make the investigation come together. It’s this switch of protagonists that’s so shocking. The story is, almost completely, from Blanche’s perspective, but suddenly, Jo steals the show, and becomes the focus of what’s going on while we wonder what might have happened to Blanche. It is in some ways a break of the general trust of the reader/author relationship, but at the same time, it makes perfect sense. Following Blanche would no longer have given us anything useful. Someone else had to step up before she made a horrible mistake, and so someone does.

The characters in the story are fairly well fleshed-out. Most of Blanche’s nature is completely believable, being so uncomfortable in her new role as well as completely excellent at it. She’s funneling a hatred towards men and her sister’s murder into her dominatrixing, and it makes perfect sense and works out well. Similarly, Annette’s submissive, loving attitude and Jo’s sisterly devotion and willingness to use her importance to get things done is completely believable as well. They all feel like real people, and that is certainly nice.

At the same time, I can’t call the book a must read. It’s… missing something. I don’t know what it is. It leaves you with a feeling of melancholy, like something just didn’t click quite right. It could be the situation of the main characters at the end of the story, but I don’t really think that’s the case. There’s always a little something off in the tale, and I could never pin down exactly what it is. Still, it’s a good enough time, and solid storytelling. I don’t regret my purchase one bit. But I’d say, borrow it from me if you can, instead of buying a copy of your own? It may not be the sort of story worth owning, but it’s worth reading.

After reading Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour, I found myself constantly thinking up scenarios that would have been more fulfilling and a more fitting end to the series than what I had just read. In the end, though, this kind of thought process is really useless. The series ended the way it did, and it ended… with a disappointment. And now I’m going to ramble about it a bit.

A majority of Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour is a fight with Gideon. This is a fight that, for the most part, didn’t need to be in the story. It had basically been written out by the end of book 5. The reason I’ve always loved Scott Pilgrim is that it is, in some ways, a musical. The fights come in places of emotional intensity, and they represent emotion. For the most part, the characters don’t seem to react to the fights as real things. Not only is there very little emotional intensity involved in fighting Gideon, it’s the first fight that really gets treated like an actual fight, which just draws a lot of things into question, like “Has Scott Murdered 7 People?”

In an attempt to make this fight with Gideon relevant, many, many completely stupid things are retconned into the plot, like Gideon somehow having some kind of memory altering ability and having created subspace and all kinds of shit that I don’t really feel make much sense. It just helps to emphasize the fact that, for the most part, the fight served no purpose.

All of the big character moments in this book are Ramona’s. Scott gets nothing out of any of the events in the book, except, I guess, a girlfriend again. He doesn’t really grow as a person. Only Ramona does that. The problem is, she’s such a non-entity in the story for a lot of it, that giving the climax of the story to her just seems… completely stupid. There’s no reason for it, and it just leaves Scott having changed not at all, and us having complete proof of that in the end. I’m not saying Scott has to be fundamentally not Scott in the end. But there’s literally nothing about him that’s changed, besides the fact that he’s employed now, I suppose. It tries to not be a story about him at the very end, where it’s inescapably a story about him.

This book had a lot of awesome to live up to, and while I wasn’t expecting it to be super amazing perfect, I was expecting something better than this. It is a disappointment, to be sure. Thankfully, it hasn’t ruined my enthusiasm for the movie or game, so I’m sure I’ll still get plenty of awesome Pilgrim in the near future. Just wish it would have been good enough. Oh well.

Keeping the poetry hits rolling! I read The Wild Iris, by Louise Gluck. This one won a Pulitzer prize!

I didn’t get much out of it.

Okay, that’s not completely true? There were three poems that really, really spoke to me. I stuck pieces of paper in the book to save them for later, for rereading and re-thinking. The title is the final lines of one of those poems, which seriously was like a big explosion “woah!” kind of moment when I read it, and I had to go back and re-read the entire thing, knowing what I now knew. Those sorts of poems in the book were fantastic. The rest, the vast majority, were… okay? But also very confusing. Mostly because of the use of the word “You.”

One thing I tried really hard in my book to do is to make sure that the reader always knows who “you” is referring to at any time. In the first half of the book, it is always the Deleter. In the second half, it is always the Repeater. The idea is that this builds up the idea of dialog I am going for, and also keeps from confusing the story.
There’s none of that in this book. I kept being very confused. Was “you” the gardener? The gardener’s wife? God? The flowers? It changed from poem to poem. Every one used “you” and the “you” seemed very different in each one. That’s not depth to me. That’s just confusion for no reason. There is a plot arc of sorts going through the poems. I know it’s there. I can feel inklings of it. But it simply isn’t clear, because I just don’t know who is being spoken to at any time.

This is only compounded by the fact that I also don’t know who is speaking at any time. Many poems have the exact same title. I deduced at some point that these were less titles so much as the names of the speakers in the poems. This would work, except that there are other poems that seem to be by other speakers than who is named. I’ll read a poem, and think it has to be by the wife, but it’s not titled with the wife’s name. I’m just confused even more.

I must also admit that, since this is a very nature-oriented book of poetry, I also got lost in the nature imagery quite a bit. That just isn’t my bag. I am all about humanity, fabrication, and artificiality. I am not one that walks out and enjoys the splendidness of nature. Those images just don’t move me as much as the true, human sort of conversation like I saw in Enough Said.

I feel like I can take something away from this book, but it’s mostly a list of things about how not to set up my narrative. I don’t want my work to be this obtuse. I’m sure it’s a great book, and as I said, there were some amazing poems in there. But this just isn’t for me, and I don’t want my own work to turn out this way.

Karen gave me a list of books of poetry that may be relevant to my interests based on what she knew about my own book I was looking at. I didn’t really know what to expect: she hadn’t really see the fairly… sexual side of the book yet. However, if I was going to make this my thesis, I needed to be able to place it in the conversation of poetry. I needed to read more, and her list seemed a good place to start. I ordered up used copies of the more interesting ones on Amazon, to check them out.

Well, I just finished reading Enough Said: a Poetry Dialog Between Father and Son by Michael and Kiev Rattee, and it was pretty fantastic.

There are definite things about it that make it very different from what I am trying to accomplish. My book is two characters, and these are two actual people. This works in a back and forth style, and my book gives all of one side, and then the other. But when I opened up the strangely-built book (the back says that only 250 of these were created, by hand, with a weird printing press, and I would believe it. The texture of the pages is really weird and wonderful, and you can see where it is actually sewn together in the middle. It’s pretty cool.) and read the first poem, “Big Things,” I completely saw glimmers of what I was trying to do in it. It was filled with direct conversation with the other party spliced with poetic images and ideas, and it was just fantastic. I was in love.

From there, the book deviates from that feeling. Michael and Kiev seem to play off of the key image or idea in each other’s work, giving their own spin, and keeping a conversation going. It’s really interesting, though I admit that I missed the direct contact between the two after the first. The conversation turned almost completely to poetic metaphor, with figures standing in for the authors and whatnot. There was nothing wrong with that, really. Many of them were completely excellent poems. But the ones that resonated more with me were poems that more directly expressed their connection, such as “The Sky Is Full” which ends with the lines “as I should have said / I guess at the beginning” which just feels so… real to me. It establishes a connection that I just love seeing, and also works with the theme of the poem, which is talking about how the sky tricks, and Michael is admitting that how he lays out the poem also tricks away from the real meaning. It’s very open and heartwarming. It’s a real emotion there. It means a lot. I loved seeing that throughout the book.

It also spikes near the end, where Kiev apparently was slow in responding, and we get a gentle poetic prod, followed by a lovely poem by Kiev called “Silence,” which is just a perfect end to his side of the conversation. “I’ve talked all evening / with it caught in my throat” Fucking perfect. You can fill the air, but it’s not necessarily with substance. It’s the silence that’s important, at times, and you can’t get it out in the right way.

I feel like I need to read it again to really “get” everything completely? But good poems work that way. To really dig into them, you need to read them multiple times. But the truly good poems still leave you with a strong feeling that first time, and most of this book does this. It’s pretty great.

Makes me look forward to digging into what else Karen suggests for me.

I wrote an actual professional review of the book, and I was just going to cross-post it, but then I’m like, wait, that’s stupid. If I post the full text here, then I can’t put it up elsewhere. Therefore, you get the very casual review version. Lucky you.

I had to read a book of short stories for my short story class. The press constantly gets review copies of books, so I always just assumed I’d grab one from the review shelf and use that. Susan tends to use the reviews for class in Big Muddy anyway. So, a few weeks ago, I grabbed a copy of the first short story collection on the shelf that seemed halfway interesting, and was soon in possession of a copy of Fugue State by Brian Evenson.

First off, I highly recommend clicking on that link up there, or these next links, and it seems like my favorite story from the collection, “Younger,” is available online in audio and text forms. It might give you some idea of what I’m talking about.

“Younger” really sums up what I did like about this book, and I did like it. It’s filled with psychological horror, the sort that isn’t connected with monsters or anything supernatural, but is just powered by characters having internal conflicts that make things creepy. I’m not a horror person, but this kind of character struggle is something I love in stories, and Evenson does a fantastic job of it, when he puts his mind to it. The majority of the stories play out in a form similar to “Younger.” I don’t feel they’re as successful, but, you know, they’re still fairly entertaining and, if nothing else, are based on a very entertaining idea.
The rest of the stories are split between a dark humor and what I would call more standard horror fare. You have stories that are just humorous in the tale of a editor who wants to publish literary work but ends up publishing trashy mystery novels with names like “Never Been Bjorn” about a detective who’s a swede, because that’s the hook. You have stories about a woman fucking a mime because “it would be a good story to tell at parties” who is haunted by the act ever since. These are just really clearly meant to be humorous. Then you have stories like the title story, “Fugue State,” which work with a supernatural threat. Still, even the supernatural stories are very character-driven, which is good. At least in my opinion.

The main issue I had with the book is that many of the stories have endings that fall completely flat. I know endings are hard. Endings are very hard. But it’s just a shame when you get a published work with so many failed endings in it. So many stories have such great premises, but once that premise has run its course, the story just stops, without any sort of satisfying conclusion. The previously-mentioned “Invisible Box” is probably the worst offender in that regard, being so entertaining, funny, and slightly creepy all the way up to the ending, which just seems completely phoned in.

Still, as I said, I certainly enjoyed the book overall. There were some very good stories in there. At least read “Younger” for me, hm? If you like that, and think you’d like a little more, even if it isn’t quite up to that quality, then Fugue State is almost certainly a book for you to check out. It’s pretty solid stuff.

So, David Foster Wallace was a name I had heard of, vaguely, before. I knew I’d heard of him from somewhere. But I got into a conversation with Airek at the office, and he gives me this note, telling me to go watch this Youtube video of him. I put it in my pocket, set it on my desk, and promptly forget about it.
A week or so later, I find the note and, having nothing in particular to watch while I eat, I used the information to pull up this video.

About, oh, 28 minutes and 2 seconds later, I’m on Amazon, ordering every book of essays by him I can find.

I fucking LOVE a good essayist, and especially if you watch that video, you’ll know that David Foster Wallace was one. Those little tidbits are so fun, and so well realized, I can’t help but love them.

A couple days later, I go up to Airek and I thank him for telling me to watch that, because it was awesome. And then he tells me David Foster Wallace killed himself.
That kind of put a damper on things. It’s a shame. He had skills. One would assume he could have paid bills with them. But yeah… sad.

Anyway, we’ll see how me reading those books goes. I’m excited! But I also suck at the whole “Reading books” thing. So we’ll see how well it all goes.

There was this one time when the internet went out for a whole 10 minutes, and I got so mad that I went to Barnes and Noble. Once there, I spent too much money on books. One of the books I bought was Civilwarland in Bad Decline by George Saunders, because I seriously, seriously did like that story “Jon”, and wanted to read more.
Then, I read the book.

I’ll admit that this is the first book I’ve read solely for fun in… fuck, I have no idea. Since the last Harry Potter? (No, actually, I bet it was When You Are Engulfed In Flames by David Sedaris) And that was really more out of an obligation at that point, since the series had gotten so bad. I am such a horrible English Major… no, wait… English Grad Student now, I guess.
One of the reasons I felt like I could read this book for fun is because it’s a really small book. It’s not even 200 pages, and it’s not like the text is tiny of anything. One of the reasons I rarely read, besides not being willing to invest the time into a book I won’t like and then not knowing what I will and won’t like, is because it FEELS like this huge time commitment. Which I know is a lie, especially because I read so fast. But I dunno. Having a small book of short stories just felt right for my own entertainment, so I went for it.

The book itself consists of a few short stories and then a novella. The main theme of the whole thing seems to be “amusement parks.” The only story that doesn’t really fit this theme is “The 400 lb. CEO,” but it can almost count because they go to this crazy theme restaurant. Sort of. When I say “amusement parks,” though, think places much more surreal and fucked up. We’re talking the kind of places that would have “SafeOrgy” rooms and exhibits where an actual plate glass window is installed into a living, breathing cow so kids can see the insides. Those kinds of amusement parks.

I feel that nothing in this collection was anywhere near as good as “Jon,” which is a shame. That one just came together on such excellent conceptual and character arc levels. These stories tend to be of the same quality in concept, but seem to lack the extremely strong character arc that pays off in the end. The ideas and strange worlds are mostly worked through, but the characters showing us these worlds rarely get a satisfying conclusion. The best in this regard was probably “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz,” but it was also the story with, perhaps, the least strange setting, so maybe that had something to do with it.
I did learn, however, that a lot, though not all, of the qualities that make the writing in “Jon” so offbeat are more elements of Mr. Saunders’ style than elements of Jon’s voice. Not that Jon doesn’t have a distinct voice, but it was simultaneously neat and kind of sad to learn he just normally writes like that. I love his voice! It’s neat! But it was also cooler when it was a very specific thing he adopted just for one story, you know?
I also learned Mr. Saunders really likes the work Milquetoast. Seriously, he used it like.. at least 4 times in this book. That’s rather a lot for a word like that.

Still, George Saunders is a really good writer. He’s great at creating internal monologue and has that excellent voice and neat ideas. I find myself coming away from the book a little frustrated, but that’s simply because so much of his work is so high quality that the flaws stand out. His characters in this book, especially in the novella at the end, really never get proper closure. The ride, however, is completely fun for all of them. You have a good time reading them. But it just feels like such a waste when, for example in the novella “Bounty” (Are novellas in quotes or italics? I’ll have to look that up sometime) the huge road trip that showed so much about this nearly apocalyptic world is ended in about a page and a little change. The main character makes it to his goal, but nothing really becomes of it. It was still a fun read, but it’s frustrating, because it would have been a significantly greater read still if it had paid off better.

I guess that’s essentially what I think about this book. Many great ideas that certainly could have paid off better, but was still fun enough to experience. I’m sure if you weren’t the kind of person who cares so deeply about characters above all else, like I am, you’d probably be in heaven with the world building of these stories, especially the novella. If it sounds interesting, certainly give it a read. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. But I’m not going to go crying out all over the place that you should check it out, either.

I bought another one of his collections, too, called Pastoralia. Maybe that one will be stronger? I suppose we’ll see sometime soon. I’m sure I’ll let you know when I read it.

Speaking of World Building, you should read this story. It’s “Jon” by George Saunders, and it’s long, but it’s awesome. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

- – -

What did you think? Awesome, right? Well, actually, maybe you won’t think as such. People outside of my short story class, which is where I first encountered this story, haven’t liked it so far. Maybe it’s too “english major-y?” Is that even a thing? I dunno.

Mainly, though, this is just a poster child for what I’m going to talk about in my previously mentioned paper. The story does an AMAZING job at building a world with no exposition whatsoever. It’s really quite neat. You know more about Jon’s world in the first couple of paragraphs where he shows us “all what he is saying” than you do in multiple pointless paragraphs of back story in a fantasy novel.

I dunno. I loved it. LOVED IT. And I wanted to share. So there.

The semester is winding down. That means I’m almost out of novels from my novels class! One more after this! But I finished the second-to-last one, The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier. And now I will blog about it.

If I were to describe the concept of this novel to you, you would be all “woah, what a great idea.” That’s because it is a DAMN good idea. Basically, souls of people that are remembered personally (aka met them in real life, not read about in a book or saw on TV) by those still alive go to a “City” where they live out their afterlives. However, the world is ending. There’s only one person left alive. This City is then populated by only people whom this last living human knew, and the book follows them as well as the last bits of the last human’s life. That is a damn compelling idea.

However, it never really works. There’s nothing particularly bad about the writing in this novel. Mr. Brockmeier likes his tangents, and the story often goes that way, but at the same time, it’s a tale of memory and remembering, so it fits the novel. The main problem is the lack of an overall narrative.
The story of Laura, the last person left alive, has a complete arc, but it has to end tragically. There’s little meaning to it. We struggle with her in the really harsh conditions she finds herself in, and we can sympathize with her, all alone, in the ice and snow. It’s beyond her to find sense in her situation, though. She’s just trying to survive a catastrophe she had no part in. She can’t make it mean anything, and I don’t expect her to.
No, it is the people in the City, who are looking on these events with much more knowledge from beyond the grave, who should be making all of this make sense. It should be in them, who are trying to figure out what to do with the knowledge that the only thing keeping you here is likely about to die, and what to do with what little time you have left in this second life, that gives the book an overall meaning and significance. However, it completely fails to do that. The chapters dealing with the City jump from character to character. Some people show up again and again, but we only get little slivers about what these people are thinking and worrying about before they are gone. They all have completely different goals, even when dealing with the same thing. I would normally be all for these different perspectives, but these perspectives completely fail to give any meaning to the events. The significance of their actual situations as souls in waiting really doesn’t matter to them at all. The fact that they are all about to be “evacuated” seems to matter even less. No attempt is made to tie a unified theme throughout, I suppose. That’s what I want. Maybe class discussion will help me find one, but I sort of doubt it.

It doesn’t help that the book ends so abruptly. Yes, it makes sense that the world will end not with a bang but with a whimper, but again, it just feels like a distinct lack of planning. The book just ends, with absolutely no guidance into what I should think about that or what to take away from it. Once could argue that perhaps that’s the point of the whole book. The whole idea is that death is ultimately meaningless, even after having lived through it once. But that’s giving the book a whole lot of credit, and it’s so much more likely that it just wasn’t put together well, wasn’t it? If that was the point, I should have felt it, right? I think so.

In any case, I can’t really recommend the novel. It’s not bad. You could read it and I wouldn’t stop you. Again, the idea, the concept, is amazing. I would have liked to have read a really good book based on that concept. I just don’t think that The Brief History of the Dead is that book.

So, continuing on our “Things with two word titles that have to do with places for walking” theme week here at the blog (not actually a theme week) I think it’s about time that I talk about The Road by Cormac McCarthy, the latest book in my novels class. This book apparently got a Pulitzer Prize for some reason, and is going to be a movie in theaters in November. Both of those things actually make little sense to me. I think this book is going to translate pretty horribly to the screen without major edits, which of course will happen, and then it won’t be the same story. I also don’t think it’s crazy award-winning material. That said, it is a pretty darn good novel, and was worth my time to read.

The story itself is a post-apocalyptic setting. America is destroyed somehow. There’s ash in the air. Somehow. You never really find out what happened or anything, and frankly, that is just fine by me. Because although this seems like a book, at first, about surviving in this harsh climate, it’s totally not. It’s a book about a father and a son, and how they grow over the course of attempting to get to the ocean. I’m pro-character focus, so I was all about this.

The book makes some odd narrative choices. The main characters are only referred to as “the man” and “the boy,” giving the whole thing a very removed feeling. Also, for no apparent reason, the book refuses to use quotation marks. Most dialog is just a list of short sentences, back and forth between the boy and the man. It, I suppose, just shows how useless the quotation mark is in these situations, because it was only really confusing when there was dialog in the middle of a paragraph, and that happened rarely. However, at the same time, I have absolutely no idea WHY you would just leave out the quotation marks. Nothing was gained by the choice, as far as I could see. It was just made arbitrarily, or via extreme hatred of the punctuation mark. It was odd.

None of the action in the book is particularly surprising for the setting. They deal with finding food, being starving, having to deal with cannibals and road gangs and whatnot. Again, this is all just a setting to drive the character interaction. That’s where the real meat of the book is.
You’ve got the man, who is all alone with his son. His son is the only reason he’s fighting so hard, and doing so much to keep them alive. At the same time, he’s developed a horrible cough. He knows his days are extremely numbered. He’s unsure what he’s going to do, so he stays positive, lies, keeps pushing forward. What else can he do? Meanwhile, you have the son, who is becoming an adult. He’s no longer buying the man’s stories of how great the world used to be and how it will soon be that way. He’s seeing more and more horrible things as the book goes on, and he realizes how the world works. He isn’t sure he doesn’t want to just die. He isn’t sure he wants to push on. He’s looking for a reason to, much like how he is the reason the man pushes on.
You’ve got this constant back and forth of the boy looking for answers and the man not knowing how to deal with the fact that he has exactly zero answers. It’s a compelling bit of character interaction, and it’s basically the whole book, so it’s good that it is.

I’m going to talk about the ending now.
—This is the spoilarz line—

The ending is expected, but I don’t know if it’s particularly effective or not. It’s a questionable thing. The man dies. The boy meets a family on the road and joins them, living on. You can see this as a fairly positive thing. The boy finds something to live for, his dad’s memory, and finds the “more people” and a kid his age that he’s been wanting through the whole book. The man died, but accomplished his mission of sorts. At the same time, you could look at it as a failure. This new family is too good to be true, and appears at exactly the right time. The boy abandons much of what his father taught him when interacting with them, though he does follow a few rules. (Not letting them have the gun, for instance) Perhaps the man didn’t succeed to making the boy into a man after all. He’s still helpless and needs a guardian, and those guardians might be planning on doing bad things to him. I don’t know. Would it be better having left the story right when the man died, and not knowing what would have happened to the boy? I don’t know. I do hope Mr. McCarthy tried that way, though.

Anyway, this isn’t some life-changing piece of fiction, but it’s an extremely solid and entertaining piece of fiction. I have no trouble recommending it. Whether the extremely slow pace and subtle character interactions survive on the big screen, though, remains to be seen.