Under the Bleachers: Northanger Abbey and the Teen Film

There are many things wrong with the film adaption of Pride & Prejudice which stars Kira Knightly, the most obvious of which is tone. Though Austen is often mistaken for a high Romantic, thrown in with the Brontës with their wild passions and Gothic styles, rainstorms and moors are not Austen’s purview. Her plots and characters are based on social realism or caricature; her sensibility is of the satirist. Darcy does not stride out over the morning grass with his coat unbuttoned, and Elizabeth would never smirk her way through their engagement, finding it hard even to meet his eyes in the book. 

However, Joe Wright – the filmmaker – does get several things right in the adaption, my favorite being the hat-tip he makes to teen movies. There’s a scene where Elizabeth and her friend Charlotte are talking shit about Darcy after he’s snubbed Elizabeth within her earshot, and it reads like an under-the-bleachers scene in some Regency John Hughes film. Though Elizabeth and Charlotte are in their 20s, they are in a long adolescence: living at home, going to dances. When the scene has them making their cat talk and then clasping hands and laughing at how mean they are, how clever, it was a pretty perfect capture of the tone of that section of the book. 

The beginning of Northanger Abbeyis so very much a John Hughes film. Catherine is much younger than Charlotte or even Elizabeth, a tender farm-bred 17. She heads to the resort town of Bath, and it’s either a summer camp movie, or a new girl in school movie, or elements of both. Catherine has chaperons, but they are so mild and unobservant that Catherine may as well be one her own, a fact that troubles Catherine occasionally – why did you not tell me I was doing the wrong thing? Catherine is a good girl though, sweet and either dumb or innocent, because it’ s difficult to tell them apart sometimes. The narrator – and Mr. Henry Tilney, Love Interest – make great fun of Catherine’s wide-eyed inability to picky up on innuendo. There are whole pages of conversations where he is saying one thing, and she is understanding another, and only you and Henry are in on the fun. 

Oh, speaking of the narrator! Once I noticed the narrator in Persuasion, I have been in love with Austen’s narrators. Lord, they are strong voices: often wry, occasionally sarcastic, always smoothly barbed. This is the first of Austen’s novels, likely never re-written by her and published posthumously, and it reads like a first novel. The narrator gets out of hand at points, clumsily commenting on the state of the novel, addressing the reader directly. This is (a bit) charming, because it makes you think about how Austen was writing these novels primarily to amuse her family. There’s a long section bitching about the sorts of people who can be found on a Sunday at a certain intersection in Bath, and it has the ring of the inside joke, which is totally freaking adorable. But like most inside jokes, it’s not especially amusing to those of us not in on it, and comes off as a well-written traffic report. 

And speaking of early novels, this one is bisected into two discreet sections that have only the shakiest of thematic overlap. The early part of the book has Catherine meeting two sets of siblings, the Tilneys and the Thorpes. She meets Isabella Thorpe first, who is a classic mean girl, the hot girl who knows it. But Catherine is too naïve and good natured to understand Isabella’s bitchiness. Isabella’s brother is even better: cussing all the time, crude, prone to wild exaggerations and criticisms of people and events, which can be altered to their opposite with just a little prodding. This is the best coach in the world! It is about to fall apart! etc. Then Catherine meets the Tilneys. The sister is a bit of a cypher, sort of Georgeanna Darcy-ish in her mildness, but Henry is a total babe. Not because he’s super hot, but because he takes the time to talk about muslin with Catherine’s chaperon and tease her mercilessly. Interest and attention go a long was towards affection. Naïve Catherine slowly learns how to navigate a tricky social terrain based mostly in frivolity; why, yes, high school, I remember you well. 

The second half is a funny take-down of the Gothic novel, Catherine gone to visit the Tilneys in their abbey. Being a somewhat silly girl who has read too many Gothic novels, she starts imagining all sorts of fell deeds, partially helped along by Henry’s gentle teasing. The most memorable sequence has Catherine approaching a spooky old piece of furniture within her room with trembling hands, looking through all the drawers until she finds a roll of papers! What horrors will this manuscript enumerate? What dire deeds of yore!? Omg!!1!! Then, it turns out the papers are laundry lists. The plot from the first half of the novel intrudes, but somewhat distantly – there is a scandal, but it is learned about in letters, and then discussed at the breakfast table. In Pride and Prejudice, Lydia’s elopement, which learned about in letters as well, was much better played. The drama of Lydia’s scandal is acted out in the Bennet household breaking into activity – Mrs. Bennet screaming about duels, that great speech by Mr. Bennet about his culpability. Here it was just less interesting to watch.

The end? Well, the end is abrupt and unsatisfying, the plot resolved only in the most mechanical way. Catherine is turned out of the Tilney house by the father for no good reason anyone can discern. (We do learn the reason, and it doesn’t have any relationship to the earlier scandal or the first part of the book, so it feels like a lost opportunity.) The section of her going home – the cruelty of turning a 17 year old out onto the roads with no servant or pin money, forcing her to ride the Regency Greyhound back 70 miles to her house – this was a nice bit of writing. Seeing how beholden to the male head of a family everyone – but especially women – are, this was honestly freaky, and freakier than the Gothic spookings that had Catherine jumping at her shadow. It’s a pretty sly commentary on horror fictions – no, the father didn’t kill the wife, but he certainly has the very real power to make everyone miserable, put them into real danger, and destroy their lives. Watch the birdy, because the real horror is in the everyday. Nice. And just a stray thought – I loved the portrait of General Tilney – this twitchy, overbearing asshole who clearly has OCD; kind enough if you are in his good graces, and a monster if you are not. 

I’m not even going to put under spoiler that everything works out in the end, but this was mostly truncated and distant in its recounting. The narrator becomes obnoxious, relating everything and enacting speeches in a bald manner, ending with a Law & Order style dun dun – but at what cost?? I feel very affectionately towards this novel, but this is mostly because I love Austen enough to want to read this twice, just to see her grow and change as a writer. Also because when I first read it, I had much less experience with the Gothic novel. I said this before somewhere else, but for the writers we love, sometimes the failures are as interesting as the successes. (And this isn’t a full-on failure, just uneven.) Watching an author’s voice develop, from the first rough coughings to the later arias, this can be a joy to read for the beloved author. So, reader beware, this is not a smart book to start with if you’ve never read any Austen, or you don’t particularly like Austen’s more assigned readings. For me, it was an excellent October read. Spooooooky. 

Incredible Change!

I’m usually too cranky to do this sort of thing, but I’m totally giving Incredible Change-Botsby Jeffrey Brown five-stars just for making me laugh my ass off. I went to a local indy comic expo yesterday, which I was a little nervous about, because I’m a little old and with children to descend into what I imagined to be the belly of hipsterism like that. Some of the people manning booths – good lord, do you even have to shave??? But it was a nice crowd, I got to meet the author of some of my favorite kids books, and Richard found this book.

There’s probably a pretty narrow demographic of people who are going to enjoy the humor in here, because it’s an exhaustive riff off the Transformers cartoon, the one from the 80s. No aspect of the cartoon is left unfunny, from various jokes about the names: two Awesomebots named Wheeee and Balls, Balls being a golf cart, natch; the human who first meets Big Rig remarking how coincidental that he’s named Big Rig, when he looks exactly like big rig on Earth. (The continuing Balls jokes are especially nice, change-bots just shouting his name when something goes wrong. Balls! Yes?) There’s endless comic potential in the illogic of Saturday morning cartoons: the robot who says, “I forget how fragile you humans are…actually, I don’t, because my memory recall is perfect.” “Why didn’t you just radio us instead of running all the way back to base?” (These aren’t quotes, but paraphrases – too lazy to look it up.)

The story begins back on the Change-bot home planet, Electronocybercurcuitron. The Change-bots are bickering about election fraud, which has allowed the Fantasticons to win. The Fantasticons are the bad guys, and it’s a running joke how there’s absolutely no difference in their motivations or speeches. But good gravy, do not make this sound highfalutin. The Awesomebots rally together, “We’ll go to the Fantasticon Chamber of Commerce in peaceful protest…an extremely well-armed peaceful protest!” Thus begins the war that destroys their planet, after which they come to an agreement, build a rocket, and then crash-land on Earth, restarting hostilities.

Honest to God, have no idea why I’m giving you the plot. This is a scaffold of one-liners that connects with other short jokes to blend into a giant metallic body of a colossal mechajoke, which goes chee cha chu chee when it transforms. Bew! Bew! The art is a perfect match with the subject, kinda all-caps spaz art favored by young boys.

A lot of this humor is on well-traveled ground, like the romantic scene between what appears to be the only girl-Change-bot, Siren, who is a police car, and um, some other guy. It fades to black, and then you see the next panel, dark, with clank clank, then the next with clank clank clankclankclankclank. Robot Chicken has more or less run this joke into the ground with the recurring sketch of a robot humping a washing machine. Whatever. Still funny.

I read this straight through to the sequel, Incredible Change-Bots Two, which might have been even better. (That one has an extended riff on putting together Lego sets which had me crying – “Does anyone have a red, flat, four-piece?” “Don’t use your teeth.”) The later seasons/sequels to this kind of show always get so much more convoluted and weird – characters showing up out of nowhere, people returning from the dead without an explanation, time travel! Just totally my kind of stupid humor.

Secrets, Monsters, And Magic Mirrors: Middle School Comics with Bite

I found  Secrets, Monsters, and Magic Mirrorsat the Indy Comics Expo here in Minneapolis, considered at a table staffed by very nice folk before I returned an hour later, this book appealing enough to stick in my memory and have me return with the requisite cash. I’m hovering between three stars and four, the way you do. Not that anyone cares, but I have a lot of problems rating stuff aimed at children, because my enjoyment and theirs are often…not at odds…but not convergent either. 

There’s not a lot here that’s truly surprising, The retellings are pared down and hew closely to the originals. This collection is pretty Hans Christian Andersen-heavy, with three out of the five stories coming from his literary fairy tales – The Snow Queen, The Princess and the Pea, and Thumbelina. Beauty and the Beast and Rapunzel round out the collection. I know I’ve made this distinction before, but it’s worth noting: Andersen’s stories are not folk tales like Rapunzel; they are the literate cousin, forged in a single pen, in a single mind. They may afterwards slip their origins and run wild, the way stories do, but there is a single creation point, not the indistinct utterances of nurses and parents through many ages and countries. I’m not sure that matters in assessing these tellings, but I just had to say it. 

So. To the individual stories. 

Rapunzel by Stephanie Peters. I like this version, though it was shyer than I prefer in certain aspects of the tale. Rapunzel is true Märchen, a folk tale with many versions, and there are several ways the witch finds out about the prince’s nightly assignations with Rapunzel. One is that she exclaims to the witch – you are so much heavier than the prince! The other is that she complains that her dress has gotten tight on her belly, which alerts the witch she is pregnant. This went with the first, which is a choice that makes sense, given how young this is aimed, etc. The art is perfect: dusty black and whites cut with bright colors only for effect: the rapunzel, her hair, the hair of her daughter. Everyone had the pin-prick black eyes of a Dave McKean illustration, and I liked the creepifaction. Rapunzel is a sad story in some ways – it starts with lost parents, and never finds them again, except in the most oblique way. This did that justice, though the prince’s lederhosen were slightly distracting. 

Thumbelina by Martin Powell. Coming hard on the heels of Rapunzel, I could see the narrative similarity between the two, but Thumbelina is a weird ass story. It starts with the same baby fever as Rapunzel, Thumbelina’s mom begging the local witch for a child, and then getting one as small as a thumb. Thumbelina ends up on adventures that keep threatening her sexually, which freaks me out a bit, but, let’s face it, Andersen was a weird dude. The art was goofy and fun, and I liked it, and it took the sting out of some upsetting situations. 

Snow White by Martin Powell. I hated the art so much on this one, I could barely appreciate the twist Powell took on the story, one that I thought was cool. Everyone looks like freaking Bratz dolls, however, and that is hard to forgive. Anyway, Snow White’s prince has been enchanted to be the mirror, and his escape from enchantment, and his involvement in the familial psychodrama beyond the usual showing up and kissing aspects were pretty cool. Seriously ugly illustrations though. Blech. 

Beauty and the Beast by Michael Dahl. This one was in the middle, as my son would say. The story felt truncated, and the illustrations reminded me of Second Life avatars, but not really in a bad way. But, like Rapunzel, this story is so often retold, and so varied, that this streamlined version wasn’t a bad addition to the narrative river. (Even though Beauty & The Beast is one of the salon-born literary tales, like Anderson’s work.)  Plus the Beast reminded me of Domo Kun, which I find adorable. 

The Princess and the Pea by Stephanie Peters. This story will never be one of my favorites, but this did the best it could. I’m just never going to love a story of royal exceptionalism, bound up with the concept of the “true princess”. Just, barf. But I liked the Edwardian anime sense of the art, and the comic rapid-dating of the middle section, which is something.

I know I have complained before about not being able to find good comics for the middle-grade set – the library seems to have craploads of Scooby Doo, Jughead, and Scrooge McDuck (why?) and not much else. This collection hits a sweet spot for the kiddies, and my daughter bugged me all day Sunday until I read the whole thing to her, one story at a time. Comics are cool for the pre- or just-literate; they bridge a gap usually filled by tv. So, I’m going with a solid recommendation, ‘specially for kids, just because this was so perfectly pitched for my daughter. Us grown-ups likely won’t be amazed, but amazement has ages like anything else.

Ghosts of Exile: Finnikin of the Rock

I don’t think I’m ever going to be up for talking about Finnikin of the Rock, so I’m just going to ramble. Two glasses of wine and the worst day for a while I’ve had under my belt, and maybe I’m up for some raw blithering.

There’s a joke among SFF nerds that what makes a fantasy novel a fantasy novel is the maps. Open any fantasy novel worth its salt – and most of them not worth anything – and you will be confronted by a map of an imagined geography – rivers and towns, mountains and names. The land is a character – often the most important one, when you get right down to it. There’s a lot of boring in Tolkien – oh hai, I’ve invoked him; how could I not? – but when he gets going about landscape, about the feel of the earth and the sense of history in the soil, you best go for the hankie. That’s when he goes for your throat, if you have any throat to go for. 

Here comes a digression. Many years ago I painted for an Episcopal priest who ministered to a parish in downtown St Paul. Because of the make-up of the neighborhood, many of the parishioners were Ethiopian or Somali, emigrants from the mixed conflicts and starvation that were going on in their home countries. Most were newish immigrants, only in this country for a few years, five at the most. He spoke one day to us about a funeral he had just officiated for an Ethiopian teen who was killed in a car accident. Like for most that die young, the funeral was packed, standing room only. But, said the minister, it wasn’t just that he was young. It was also that this was the first member of the community to be buried on American soil. Until someone dies, and you have to put them in the ground thousands of miles from what you think of as home, you’re just visiting. The dead are an anchor; their graves are what makes a country a home. 

Holy shit. 

Ten years before the start of this book, the country of Lumatere suffered a violent upheaval – the royal family dead, an ugly reprisal of a religious minority, a curse on the land that cut the country off from its neighbors. Many are living in exile in a gossip of countries. Here’s where my grousing comes in – the character of these outer countries is too fractured for me, too many, too unresolved. I like the idea of the complexity – this is no Manichean us-versus-them, no bother of a simple exiled experience – but the way the characters moved so easily from this country or that, all with their own languages and cultures which were only hastily sketched, I spent more time confused than was necessary. And, speaking of Tolkien, there was too much godamn walking for me to be comfortable. 

So. Our Finnikin is the son of the (murdered) King’s Guard who meets with a girl of unexplained occult power. She is hard and silent, the kind of girl I like to meet in my fantasy novels. They begin questing, circling one another, trying to find their meaning in this exile. Is our homeland with the dead, in the soil of exile? Or is it in the soil we ran from in those ugly days of upheaval? Should we even want to go back? I’ve said before that the power of fantasy is in nostalgia, and that is front and center here – the exiles evoking their lost homeland. But Marchetta is savvy enough to understand that nostalgia is often tinged with survivor guilt, so that evocation is in whispers. Do you remember? Do you even want to anymore? What good is memory? 

They do return to lost Lumatere, and here’s where the blood really flows. The people trapped within have been living their own exile, on their own soil, a catalog of horrors.I have a friend who builds schools in Ethiopia because he lost his fiancee, an Ethiopian, to a car accident here in the US, and I thought of him a lot while I read this. His love, and his loss, and the building and rebuilding he does in her name, in the name of girls just like her growing up in a country just on this side of the border from a conflict so ugly it doesn’t seem like it’s ever going to end. I don’t have words for it. I don’t even know what it is. It’s a tale told in gestures, between people who have forgotten a common language. It’s a hand holding a child’s hand, a child who was born out of the worst thing there is. It’s a country of the unspeakable, spoken. 

Holy shit. 

Still. In stillness, I recoil from parts of this denouement. Although I don’t know if that’s just because recoil is part of the rebuilding game, or the realization of the horrors before. Love, can you mend this? I’m old and cynical enough that I don’t think so – love is never enough, not by half. But, still, still, I find hope in these ashes. If love is enough to spur action, then maybe. Maybe. We shall see. At least we still have eyes for seeing, and the anchor of our loved ones buried in this country, and the ones outside its borders. Our homeland is exile and vice versa.

A Book of Tongues and Cussing, My Favorite Kind.

There’s going to be some swearing in this essay. If you don’t like swearing, you will not like A Book of Tongues.  

This book was pitched to me as “gay Deadwood”. That’s not wrong – there is a bona fide San Francisco cocksucker here in the mix – literally! And like the book that inspired the rec for this book, the action takes place in the complicated mess that is the post Civil War Old West – the odd mix of ex-Confederate soldiers and Pinkertons, Mexicans and Native Americans, slugging it out in the harsh Southwestern terrain and the shitty main streets that play at civility on the edge of this thing and that. And this thing and that aren’t that well defined anyway, so each place is a hinge to another place that’s a hinge. Hot damn. 

And like Deadwood, the style here is absolutely killer, written in its own vernacular that’s somewhere between cliché and profanity, tactile and personal. Files is an author to watch – she’s got words that are strong as hell, a style with force and power. But, and I hate to say this, as a first novel, there are some serious lapses in pacing and exposition. After a pretty boring opening, punctuated by impossibly complex Aztec backstory, the central section ramps up into a fury of action and character sketches that are absolutely joyful to read. The story concerns hexes – magic workers – who are by needs solitary, because two hexes in the same place will try to suck each other dry, even if they don’t want to. The main hex is a man called Reverend Rook, who gained his power when he was hanged by the Confederate Army for fragging his lieutenant. He didn’t frag his lieutenant – that was the San Francisco cocksucker – but he swung anyway. 

So Rook, San Francisco cocksucker, and a covert Pink (this is the Pinkertons, semi-Federal militia who did shit like put down strikes and shoot people for whomever had enough green) work their way through the west, destroying and coming to terms with their own badness. And if this had been the thrust of the story, I might have given this more stars, but there’s a lot of weirdness involving an Aztec cosmology that doesn’t make any sense to me, isn’t well explained, and doesn’t go anywhere I give a shit about. 

Karen was the one who asked me to read this, because she was immune to its charms and wanted to know why it tasted like olives to her when, to so many others, it didn’t, or maybe they liked olives, or something. Honestly, I think the olives metaphor is a good one, because while I liked this, I can see where the things I enjoyed, the things I respected, might not be enough to forgive other narrative lumpiness for other people. I happen to like olives. I like them a lot. The olives here for me were a spectacular sense of profanity and a baroque prose style, but even while I enjoy olives, there were some teeth cracking pits when it came to pacing.

That middle section ramps to a confusing, but still compelling, magical meeting in an Aztec hell, the principles in our crazy love triangle – and don’t think this is some kind of coy fuckless love triangle that has a gormless girl in the middle, but a love triangle with a bunch of stone killing veterans, guys all three – existing in a dream state of blood and death. Then…we jump to a chatty month later, and the aftermath is recounted in flashback. I have serious problems with this, and with how the characters in the final section talk around their characters and what their actions mean. The middle section sketches some of the finest characters I’ve seen in a while – not because they are likely characters, but because they are burning with their impossiblities, completely understandable in the world they inhabit. But the end, blah, stop talking. 

There’s too much weird here, which may be the problem. I’m willing to take on the idea of magic workers – hexes – and their parameters, but this Aztec cosmology business is too much for me. I get the impression that this cosmology is all worked out, and will make sense at some point, but that point is no where in this book, and so I’m left wondering what the fuck. The magical confrontations skew metaphorical in a way I find hard to grasp, and, this is just total bitchiness from me as a reader, it makes me fucking insane when characters talk in both bold and italics . Bold has no place in body text except as a titling element, and it is beyond distracting to see large blocks of dialogue in bold. And if you are going to bold something in body text, don’t you dare mix it with italics. Both are emphatic typography, and it goes beyond shouting to use them together. (A better solution would be to use ALL CAPS in emphatic dialogue. I have seen that done well, like in A Prayer for Owen Meany or Perdido Street Station, though has to be approached cautiously to work.)

Anyway, but I’m complaining too much. I drink this olive. I drink it up. I don’t think I can put better why you don’t like this, Karen, beyond your very smart perception that sometimes a book is an olive to a palate that doesn’t like olives. There are problems here that will not overcome the olive, if you don’t like them – not the least of which is an ending that dot-dot-dots to the sequel in a way that is seriously annoying. I still haven’t decided whether I’ll take on the next book. These characters – they are so fucking good – but these places they are in, where they are going – I don’t know if I care. Either way, once Files is done with this series, I’ll be reading the shit out of her next books. She’s good – she’s got something – and once this is over, I’m jazzed to see what she does next.

After the Apocalypse

After the Apocalypse managed to hit all of my sweet spots for a short story collection: a meta-subject that I have more than just a passing interest in; an album-like exploration of related themes that has a casual, unshowy mastery of narrative voice; an emphasis on character over more precious concerns like making a novel-in-disguise or other spring-loaded plot devices. (Not that there is anything wrong with this, that is just not as interesting to me.) These stories are not about the apocalypse, but after. I’ve tried to figure how to work this quote in without being hamfisted, but it was not meant to be. Wallace Stevens once said, in a poem entitled “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”:

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

This is the kind of after in this book; the beauty of innuendoes after. 

The end of the world, in fiction, seems to lend itself to the long shot, the slow pan over the ruined landscape, the chatty multiplicity of point of view characters that by needs winnows through the crisis, a sort of moral attrition. These stories, other than their multiplicity, belie that. These are characters nowhere near the center of things, on the phone to someone yelling, “Get me Washington!” The opening story, “The Naturalist”, is an interesting case, almost out of place in its science fictional aspects – most of these stories are depressingly plausible, occurring in Americas ruined by economics, dirty bombs, or more inexplicable declines. (If they occur in America at all, and if they occur in obviously post-apocalyptic environs, which is actually more depressing, because it makes you see how shitty things are just right now.) 

“The Naturalist” is a zombie story, married to an Escape from New York/LA prison environment, and it is almost a spoiler that I describe it this way – there are very few action-story histrionics to be found here. Cahill is dumped off by a bus into the prison enclosure of Cincinnati, Ohio, cataloged by a narrator who says things like, “As far as Cahill could tell, there were two kinds of black guys, regular black guys and Nation of Islam”; a narrator who talks prison tattoos and slang. Cahill in turn catalogs the zombies, moving mostly singly through this rust belt environment, casually hating the people in whose houses he is squatting, lighting fires so the zombies come and they themselves observe the flames. We watch him watch them. 

Next up is “Special Economics”, a story about economic slavery set in China. (Although, when I say economic slavery, it’s not like there is another kind – slavery is always good for the bottom line, and anyone who says that slavery was on its way out in the antebellum American South is shitting themselves and you. Just to be inflammatory.) I can’t assess the truth of the way China is portrayed, but this story has that from-the-ground perspective I find really compelling in the other stories, so I’ll just assume McHugh isn’t making shit up. The way she layers the generational perspectives – the Mao quotes from the grandparents, cut with all the pro-capitalist bullshit about theft – and Walmart! – this felt good to read. 

“Useless Things” – In the whatever days since I finished reading this, I keep circling around like a cat trying to lie down to find my favorite. This one keeps coming back. Taking place outside Albuquerque, a place I have a passing familiarity with, this is one of the stories that occur in one of those depressing familiar, not-so-far-from-where-we-are-now places. A woman lives alone on the edge of the desert, making life like dolls for the few people who can still afford them. My little eyes turned to hearts when McHugh started talking about hobo symbols (something written about with an obsessive, Scandinavian in-depthness in Dictionary of Symbols). Also, there’s a kind of anticlimax that I really enjoyed, looking out over the desert in its immobile beauty. 

“The Lost Boy: A Reporter at Large” – So here’s where I talk about narrative voice. So far, this collection has been a mix of first and third persons, in a mix of snark level and credulity. This has that long-form reporter’s voice, the warm kind, the kind that muses in a journalistic way about the nature of things, but without revealing the self-reporter too much. A boy walks away from his family after a dirty bomb in Baltimore, claiming amnesia. He’s found again 5 years later, and the “article” charts the various famous cases of amnesia, the aftermath of the attack on Baltimore, the work life of the amnesiac boy. The last few lines kill. 

“The Kingdom of the Blind” – Probably not one of my faves, but this one deals with emergent AI in a way that didn’t make me irritated. (And it’s pretty easy to irritate me when it comes to AI.) It’s more about geek culture, programmer culture, watching an emergent AI from the perspective of a tokenistic girl and the dudes she works with running medical software. There’s a lot of geek hat tips in this story, like the name of one of the programs being SAMEDI – Gibson much? But that’s almost so self-referential that I laugh. Of course you reference geek shit in a geek story, because geek culture is almost exclusively about referencing geek stuff to geeks. Geek. 

“Going to France” – This story made no sense to me, and yet it completely filled me with dread. People who can fly go to France. Some other people want to go, but then they don’t. Seriously, it’s totally creepy. 

“Honeymoon” – Sadly, this has turned into drunk book review, because I went off and hung out with friends I haven’t seen in like a year, and I have to do shit in the morning, so sad. Anyway, “Honeymoon” killed me. This is one of those that that takes place in rust belt America, in a setting that isn’t necessarily post-apocalyptic except for the personal metaphors. A woman gets married and then divorced because she realizes that the getting married was more important than the marriage, if you see what I mean. Then she moves to another rust belt town, and tries to go on vacation. Many of these stories have a sensitivity to the lives of the working poor without being condescending, and this one pinnacles that. Shit. The girl in the bathroom, in Cozumel or wherever she is – I bleed. 

“The Effect of Centrifugal Forces” – The narrative voice on this one slayed me again – classic stream of consciousness that shifts from person to person, leaving the reader breathless and confused in the best way. The reason the match is lit and thrown on the pile that is reality is so personal that it doesn’t reside in any one person. I’m not sure that makes sense. Also, the world will end because of Chicken McNuggets. 

“After the Apocalypse” – Here we go, titular story. This one, damn, it felt The Roadish, but in this absolutely backwards way, like a call-and-response, like a jazz riff. A woman and her daughter walk through a burning America, on their way to a place that gossip says will be better. (See it? See it? It’s the smartest reversal possible, really.) The mother, she (or the narrator) she gives voice to the frustration of parenting, the oh-god-why-are-you-a-child. She makes ugly choices, she decides things that will decide some other things. And she leaves it hanging in the best way, in the end. She will survive. Maybe even her daughter will too. Or not. Who fucking knows? 

Here we (or I) grope for the drunken coda. I loved the shit out of this book. I keep turning it over in my mind, trying to find the convergences between these stories, trying to make it all work out. What I love best about this collection is how personal it is, how grounded in character, how little. How that none of these situations can be extrapolated. How they are these tiny lives in the sweeping innuendo that is the end of it all. And that after the end, we still are. Shit yeah, here we go.

Gods of the Jungle Planet are Jealous and Incontinent Gods

I don’t even know how to rate this. Gods of the Jungle Planet by esteemed nonagenerian Vernon. D. Burns is a terrible book, defying just about every rule known to novel making – character, plot, continuity, sense. But hey, I’ve been reading way too many good books this year – seriously, I think my rating average is hovering towards 5 since the year’s start – and sometimes you just need to read some kibble so you can appreciate the blue cheese in butter sauce. Or whatever you love best to eat. 

Here’s the part where I tried to type out a plot description. That was a bad idea. 

A friend of mine wrote a book called Unsafe on Any Screen, where he collected the reviews he’d written for trash cinema, the kind of movie with boobies, blood, and maybe a monster. His reviews have two metrics: how many oiled gorillas he’d wrestle to get to the movie, and how many scotches you need to get through it. That’s the kind of metric needed to rate this book, not this bloodless “it’s ok” “it was amazing” stuff. I mean, really? It’s ok? Wtf am I supposed to do with that? 

So, I’d wrestle a thousand gorillas. And then I would crack up laughing when it turned out the gorillas were turning into humanoids with stingers on their heads, and naked mole rats, and dromaeosaurids, which is like my favorite word. And a homosexual biologist named Caris who is also a homosexual, which you might have missed had it not been mentioned googleplex times. But I’d only drink maybe two scotches, because I would want to be frosty in case there was a continuity error I missed. And believe me, there’s about a hundred of them. 

So I got thinking about pulp fiction. It seems to me that maybe there’s two kinds, and, I should probably note, there’s some scotch talking here. One is worried about style, like the stuff that’s read too much Conan Doyle and, um, name me one of those noir motherfuckers, you know, the kind that talks about molls in the hard light of the streetlamp and stuff. Then there’s the other, which goes for lurid kicks, doesn’t give a shit about punctuation, and rolls sloppily from one scene to the other, spurting blood and semen and meatloaf. 

This book is pretty much the second. It’s the kind of thing that is a parody so hard, so deep, that it will puncture your kidneys. It is almost indistinguishable from its source material, but for the odd, inobtrusive wink. There’s not going to be much verbal vorpal snicker-snack to hang onto here if you claim to dig this – this is not about style – so if you dig this, you have to admit you just dig this. It’s a tautology and a hieratic truth. Which is the coolest thing ever, to me. 

So, yeah, this isn’t good, whatever that means. I don’t recommend it to the squeamish and the sensible. But I laughed out loud – or in the parlance of our times, lol’d – more often than was wise. Fuck wisdom when you’ve got sex scenes this gross, misogyny this dense, or assholes this flaming. Life is a continuity error, baby. Gimme some sugar. 

Things Go Bad For Me When I Read After Things Went Bad

After Things Went Bad: Three Tales of the Near Future by Renee Harrell is the evidence of my learning curve with my new eReading thingy. I’ve had it since Christmas, just kind of poking at it, reading random articles or books people I know have written, and only shelling out for stuff I really wanted and was on sale or something. But then I found free stuff on Amazon! Look! Free stuff! And the library! More free stuff! Overdrive! I hate you!

When I was in the 9th grade, my English teacher in our creative writing unit – jeez, what an idea: creative writing unit – bade us write a story about how we all were to wake up and find ourselves transformed into animals. (Presumably she was making reference to Kafka, and drinking heavily.) We all chose different animals – I believe I wrote about becoming a quail, a choice you are free to psychoanalyze – but every single last one of us ended our tales with waking up in bed the next day, human. And then, after we had all decided our animal adventures were just a dream, we would find a feather or some evidence of our transmogrification. DUN DUN DUN END OF STORY.

When I go to compare these stories to that 9th grade class’s herd-like output, I do not mean it to sound as cruel as it does. These are not badly written, in the sense that the sentences flow and the prose isn’t clunky or embarrassing. But they don’t ever go anywhere, ending in one of those lamely obvious twist/cliches. It’s entirely possible that I’m all spoilt after reading After the Apocalypse earlier this year, which is a collection of short stories unified by their apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic settings just like this. I thought that was just grand.

The titular story is the best of the three stories here, taking place in a blasted America with one of those vicious, lonesome girls as its protagonist. There were some nice observational touches, but then it ends long before the story is over. I think I’m supposed to be shocked by the ending, but let me tell you, the choice made by the girl in the end is a mainstay of post-apocalit, and you better bring me something more than OMG HINTED CANNIBALISM. Just about every wasteland book I’ve read mentions cannibalism, if it isn’t shoving your teeth right in the gore. So, I remain unshocked.

“At Home on Winterbury Circle,” the second story, really isn’t worth mentioning; more a situation than a conflict. An old woman is kept company by her ad-spewing digital assistant while watching through split blinds as roving gangs of teens murder people in the street. I give you three guesses how this ends. The third, “Mister Tinker,” is more interesting, but mostly because information central to the robot’s nature is withheld. A man and his robot go to the circus, which is a fun set-up, I admit. But then the revelation about the robot is delivered in a DUNDUNDUN I found irritating. And like the first tale, the story just ends before that information can be examined any further. Situations, not stories.

So, thank you free/cheap ebooks, but I should probably show some restraint and read reviews or something before I download all the things. The writing here is solid, so maybe the “author” – really a husband/wife team – is just unsuited to writing short fiction. Likely someone who was less obsessed with post-apocalyptic fiction would not read these as cliche as I did, but then I wonder why someone like that would ever pick this up. I’m swinging on the end of the long tail here, and I should probably make a knot and start climbing up.

A Feast of Creatures: I Get My Anglo-Saxon On.

Oh man, A Feast of Creatures: Anglo-Saxon Riddle-Songsis so cool. An exegesis of the Exetor Book – one of the four surviving major manuscripts of Anglo-Saxon poetry – the other three being the Vercelli Book, the Junius Manuscript, and Beowulf. The ninety-odd poems that survive from that manuscript – and the object itself shows signs of surviving at least one fire, being used as a cutting board, and storing gold leaf sheets like an unimportant cabinet – are all riddlic poems – word games that use their lines to catch the creatures of meaning and being. The poem-smiths themselves have all been hammered into anonymity, a name here and there with no referent. Sometimes the riddles themselves are unsolvable, the millennium between their inception and our reception an unbreachable gap. Oh em gee, it makes me want to crawl under the table and freak out for an hour. Unsolvable tenth century Anglo-Saxon riddles!!!1!!

Craig Williamson is one of those scholarly dreamboats who steers his craft with a poet’s oar, but balanced with a nerdy, exacting taxonomy that keeps his prose from spinning out into fancy. (Like you do.) He drops more names than a telephone book, but only if the telephone book were full of Classical and Medieval scholars, poets, and translators. (He does have a tumescence for Whitman that I can’t entirely embrace, but we’ll chalk that to age difference. I may to his December.) I am not disparaging Williamson here – translation and interpretation is a tricky business – the source material fixed in unknowable history – the target reader a moving bullseye that is best hit with the steadying arms of those who have tried before. Reading his list of the varying translations of a single riddle-poem was like reading a sudoku puzzle where this word changed and that, but the equations strove to the same sum. My eyes turned into little hearts. 

The book is split into three sections: an opening of headings and footings that both set and sink these poems, the poems themselves, and then a section of individual gloss on the riddles, one by one. The opening is less an argument or a logic chain, that sets to strangle meaning out of these words, but more a string of related insights that bead up like breath on glass. Apparently, Williamson published a translation in the late-70s, though that was more concerned with translation, the text broken by gloss on gloss. Kinda made me think about how Post-Modernism moves easily from Classicism, with its historically broken, rended texts broken even more by the footnote; meaning this elusive thing in a sea of contextualization. Dag, yo. 

Undoubtedly Tolkien knew of these riddlic poems when he wrote The Hobbit – Bilbo’s riddle match against Gollum where he wins the Ring of Power – but from what I can tell with my deep understanding of having read one book, those were more Latin riddle-poems stripped of their titles. The Latin riddle-poem is titled by the thing it riddles, and then the poet shows off how clever he is in an almost-epigram. (And, believe me, I love the epigram, so I’m not complaining.) The Anglo-Saxon riddle-poem is much more personal than this. The poet takes on the persona of the thing, the creature, and tells the tale of how the inkhorn and the lost twin live in the same house, eat the same food. It both collapses the Self and the Other, and sets them vibrating like a plucked string of being. When Williamson talks of Grendel himself as a riddle-poem – how this monster is in the same mead-hall, at the same feast, with the same needs as the baleful Beowulf, growling from the edge of the heart-fire, “Say who I am.” Good lord, blew my mind. (And another mind-blow happened with a riddle-poem of the cross that Christ was nailed to and its metaphorical accountings, but I am not getting into theology here on the Internets. But still, it moved.) 

But, I don’t want this to sound like not-fun, with my talk of monsters and Christ-nailed trees. The Anglo-Saxons were some bawdy folk, and even though (because) these writers were mostly monks or priests, there’s a ton of obscenity if you’re into that sort of thing. (And I am.) Most of the obscene riddles are double entendres, with a naïve meaning, and a more that’s what she said interpretation, so the riddle riddles the solver: how dirty is your mind? I clutch my pearl necklace in horror that you thought the term pearl necklace meant anything but pearl necklace! Check this:

I am the hard punch and pull of power,
Bold thrusting out, keen coming in,
Serving my lord. I burrow beneath
A belly, tunneling a tight road.
My lord hurries and heaves from behind
With a catch of cloth. Sometimes he drags me
Hot from a hole, sometimes shoves me
Down the snug road. The southern thruster
Urges me on. Say who I am.

Cough cough, right? I’m going to assume you booksters are of the dirty mind, so I’ll note that the more parent-safe interpretation is something like a belt or a cinch. If you can’t think of the dirty reading, I can’t help you, friend. Good luck with that. 

Howl’s Moving Castle

I’ve never read Diana Wynne Jones before. I know! 

Another ride to the cabin, another audiobook. I’ve discovered the young adult section, which is better suited to listening while driving. The length coincides with the time it takes to drive up and back, and it’s just lighter thematically so I won’t concentrate too hard and drive off the road. The reader for the audiobook had an accent that bugged me at first, but I eventually got over it because I liked how she said the word “logs”. Plus, you just get used to accents after a while. I loved the way she read Howl with one of those drawling, lazy-sounding Welsh accents that I wish I could imitate but can’t. 

This is the story of an eldest sister – my favorite kind, for purely selfish reasons – who is cursed by a witch to become an old woman. Sophie sets out not to make her fortune – she knows, the way the bookish young do, that the eldest sister is doomed to be a cautionary tale in the stories of younger sisters. The story trades in the parallelisms and structures of a fairy tale, but loosely so – for example, she meets three creatures on the road on the way to Howl’s castle – a man, a scarecrow, and a dog – and while you expect certain things from these interactions – here comes the clobbering plot – the actualities end up being…stranger than the expectations. 

Sophie ends up in the employ of the wizard Howl – roughly; it is more that she pushes her way in and refuses to leave – and the story is mostly the domestic happenings of Howl and Sophie’s families and familiars. The characters all continue the theme of expectations not conforming to reality – Howl is a clothes horse and shirker, in addition to being a competent and feared wizard; Calcifer is a fire demon, and also something sweeter and lightly tragic. Sophie’s sisters enact a plot that owes something to The Importance of Being Earnest with its doubling and trebling of Letties and mistaken identities, which I found charming and not horrifyingly sit-com-like. (And probably without a gay subtext, but I didn’t give it much thought.) 

I wasn’t enamored of the ending, which takes all these sprawling threads that have been weaving in and out around each other without much urgency and ties them in a slip knock and ends. I complained to Richard about this a little, and he quoted a nursery rhyme at me:

Ride a cockhorse to Banbury Cross
To see a fine woman upon a white horse.
With rings on her fingers and bell on her toes,
Ahhh! There she goes! 

My parents always went with the more traditional ending line of, “and she will have music wherever she goes”, but his folks would recite this while giving a horsey ride to the child on their laps, at the end of which the seat would be rescinded and the child dumped onto the floor. (But, you know, in a nice way – the kid knowing this was coming and grinning madly before the end.) And when the bridge bended, the story was ended! I take his meaning: this story is more about the journey than the destination, and grumbling too loudly about endings doesn’t really credit the ongoingness of the story, even at the supposed end. 

Lastly, I was hugely fond of old-yet-young Sophie. I went to a wedding of some youngens this weekend – people a dozen or more years my junior – and was struck by how earnest these young people were, how incredibly serious. I don’t mean they are joyless or anything – and they seem a very happy couple – just that they are so serious about their adulthoods. There was this conversation at one point about subjects not fit for young adult book reviews, and the groom expounded some opinions that made most of us smug marrieds, including some eavesdropping women, laugh until we almost barfed. He looked a little abashed, but earnestly so, and will not be softening his youthful opinion, I’m sure, until he has any experience at all to measure against his carefully theoretical knowledge. 

I remember being like this – not in terms of opinions held, because lol – but believing things in this manner, believing in the inevitability of narratives, the trajectory of story. I mean, I’m probably still believing things like this, and my folks are busy laughing themselves sick about some opinion I’ve espoused about being older. So Sophie in her old skin because she’s bought the line about eldest sisters not amounting to anything, because she is squandering her youth on being responsible in a way that serves no one but an ideal, that was lovely. And it gave me licence to steal some glasses from the reception, because you’re only young once, even if you aren’t that young anymore. And being not that young anymore is liberating as all get out.