Category: postmodern-a-go-go

In the Shadow of No Towers: The Personal is the Political

Somewhere on the shelf where I store all the family photo albums, the high school year books, a stuffing of letters and other ephemera, is a copy of the New Yorker published on September 24, 2001. I find it whenever I’m digging around looking for some artifact of my family’s life, and never know what to do with it but slip it back into the jumble. I can’t throw it out.

It came in the mail nearly two weeks late, the entire publishing machine run to an absolute standstill as we wept in our living rooms in front of a 24 hours news cycle that broke to gossip and conjecture, half watched while we called and called and called, hoping this time I would get through to my sister who I last heard right after the first plane on the lower east side and before the second. Marco. Polo. I wrote emails on emails to this person and that, forwarded messages, called moms. Pete was supposed to be in the station just below the towers that day, but due to a series of choices and accidents, was 15 minutes late. My sister walked out on the Brooklyn Bridge as the ash fell. Some of her Jewish co-workers, upon seeing the buildings fall, fell to the floor screaming. It’s happening again. Oh no no no.

[the famous cover of the first post-9/11 New Yorker, which was black on black with an image of the towers. The black of the towers was different from the the black of the background only by a shiny film]

Art Spiegelman created this image. He’s been affecting my long slow digestion of that event from before I even knew he was. The first of the periodicals coming in was the beginning of the return to normalcy – that most American of coinage, put forth first by the President Warren G. Harding, an embarrassing failure who had the good sense to die in office. I was hungry in those days for something with editing, something not just reiteration and conjecture, and that first New Yorker was a sign we might be able to start doing something other than crying and freaking out. And speaking of tears, the periodical I was really waiting for was The Onion, which, as you may already know, is a satirical humor site. What could possibly be funny in all of this? After a quick google so I could write this review, I scrolled through the edition I read first and only two weeks after 9/11. Irony wasn’t dead, but it was crying its eyes out.

[How have we spent the last two weeks?
1. Crying
2. Staring at hands.
3. Feeling guilty about renting video.
4. Calling loved one.
5. Thinking about donating blood.
6. Watching TV for nine hours, finally getting up, going to the corner store for Cheez Doodles, eating Cheez Doodles, realizing Cheez Doodles aren’t helping, throwing Cheez Doodles away.]

In the Shadow of No Towerswas written in the weeks and months after 9/11, not so much a critical examination as a reaction in the wobbling search for meaning in the first normalcy after that event. Spiegelman is best known for his graphic novel Maus, which, if you’ve only read one graphic novel, this is probably the one. I read it at 15 or 16, probably because it was assigned in class, but maybe because it was ambient at the time. Maustells the story of the Holocaust in the medium of the paneled comic, but what I remember most is the the ways Spiegelman wrote himself into the narrative, worried about his father and mother, Holocaust survivors, their stories and feelings, the audacity of telling a story as serious as the Holocaust in a format called comics.

I’ve lost much of the story in the intervening decades – godamn it, decades – but I know it’s brilliant, using both the latent didacticism and implicit spectacle of the comics medium to both instruct and – and I am aware how loaded this word is – entertain. Little Artie drawing himself as a mouse, at the knee of his father who then speech balloons a narrative so awful that it makes irony cry. The political cartoon is a longstanding form – hundreds of years – but it was mostly a single panel – a caricature, a punchline – not a moving vaudeville of the brutal slap-stick of how the political intersects with the personal. To make the political cartoon move, that’s a stroke of genius.

I mention Maus because it’s probably not possible to come at In the Shadow of No Towerswithout knowing who Art Spiegelman is and what he has written. This is Art Spiegelman’s story of 9/11, raw and only barely filtered. He deliberately echoes Mausat points, his cartoons of himself morphing into the mouse-self of his story of the Holocaust. That Spiegelman is a Jew, and the child of Holocaust survivors himself is a vital part of how he reacts to this event. My father always said the smell of the smoke in the camps was indescribable. Now I understand what he meant. That he is a New Yorker is another; the revelation that he is not a rootless cosmopolitan, like he always fancied himself to be. He’d learned to keep his bags packed from his parents, but in the event, he realized he had more invested than he thought in that most cityest of cities. I understand now why some Jews did not leave leave Berlin, even after Kristallnacht. 

I read it today on the couch while my daughter played Barbies and bugged me. “That book is for kids,” she said, gesturing to the over-large board book format.

“No,” I said. “It really isn’t.”

“If it has pictures, it’s for kids,” she retorted, decisively. Five is a very certain age.

The sparse panels of this sparse book were intended to be a weekly output, but the ways of trauma and its aftermath would not run on a timetable. Weeks would pass, and Spielgelman would smoke a thousand cigarettes and watch a thousand hours of the news cycle and the images and their attendant words would be unwritten. Nothing runs linearly in this book, it’s just or essentially a series of narrative snapshots, the kind that are absolutely and completely impossible years after the event. There’s a moment somewhere where he talks about reading Philip K. Dick in the aftermath, and I totally felt what he was about, the feeling I had of alternate history at the time. This cannot be so. When Spiegelman would write himself as the mouse character from Maus, this doubly, triply third person, even while the I is all over this book, I don’t even have a verb to contain this clause.

This book ends more in gesture than in conclusion, a final essay on the comic form as developed in the days when Hearst and Pulitzer went after each other in the Sunday Special. It made sense to me how this ended in backward-looking cataloging of the form, made so uneasy by all these events we humans keep enacting on one another. I’ve been waffling on how to assign a star rating – certainly, this isn’t perfect by any stretch, but as an imperfect reflection of a time that has been digested down to a sleek narrative that we’re not going to talk about – it’s perfect. It’s perfect because it’s so decidedly personal, the kind of personal that gets where it is coming from, and has no idea where it’s going.

On 9/11/01 time stopped. On 9/12/01 clocks began to tick again. But everyone knew it was the ticking of a giant time bomb

The other shoe has yet to drop.

Perdido Street Station: Race/Race

Despite having declared Mr. Miéville my literary boyfriend some time ago, I have to come out and admit I’ve only read one (1) book by him. I’ve read his foray into YA, Un Lun Dun, which thumbs the touchstones of his writing: urban spaces, a bunch of weird ass shit, and literary genres ground through the pulper of his baroque writing. But, being YA, the profanity and sheer globbing fuckallery of his writing was dampened a bit. No so, here. And dag, yo, that’s some stuff.

Man, I don’t even know what to say here now. I guess I could get into the plot, but you can go consider the mechanics of who did what where in other places. Despite this being a tumbling, active book, I’m not sure that will give you anything. Something about this book kept reminding me of Light by M. John Harrison, and has strangely convinced me to go back and give that book another star. I didn’t get what Harrison was doing there, how he sliced open the childhood teddy bear and sewed it back together inside out and upside down. I looked at that ravaged bit of stuffing with the black zig-zags of thread, and thought, what the fuck are you doing? That is wrong, and possibly gross.

There’s a lot in New Crubuzon that is wrong and possible gross, and I feel like I’m too close to the end the my read to articulate the totality of what exact teddy bear Miéville vivisected. Here’s one little stuffed arm I can grope toward: race. We use the term race in daily life to mean different kinds of people, different ethnicities, different colors, what have you. (I’ve found I’ve lost all the nomenclature for talking about race, so sorry. Like profanity, I can’t describe it succinctly, but I know it when I see it, and so do you. And like profanity, we’re going to define it differently. This parenthetical comment is getting out of hand.) Fantasy uses the term to mean different species, although this term is a little off because fantasy doesn’t pretend toward scientific rigor, and the term “species” implies that a bit. Although Prof Tolkien has warned us against allegory, I think we can safely say that often, and maybe even always, the fantastic races are symbolic chits of our racial discomfort. No, an orc isn’t exactly, allegorically a Black Man, or an Arab, or whatever racial boogey we’ve got, but an orc is a biologically determined creature who holds inherent moral worth, or worthlessness, as you will. Race is deterministic, so is race.

Perdido Street Station opens to a pair of lovers working through their morning languor. It’s a sweet, slow-moving, romantic coupling and decoupling, two beings who love each other sweet-talking though their morning, but the sweet-talk is familiar and clouded with the near-conflicts and innuendo of couples who have been together a long time. Of course, one of the pair has a beetle for a head, and the other is a walrusy, wheezing human scientist. They are different races, and their love is shot through with their sense of perversion and transgression. The beetle-headed artist, having shucked her kepri community, can more or less openly admit the two are lovers; the human scientist has a lot more to lose, as humans are less understanding of bug-fuckery. Their love is tense, an open secret, complicated because of the paradox of that term.

Let’s now think about a similar scene with Aragon and Arwen. First off, I’m pretty sure there was no pre-marriage post-coitus for those two. Second, the elves were, yes, totally skeeved that Arwen wanted to marry a human, but the embodied disgust is so coded, so reified. Instead of “Omaigawd, I can’t believe you’re banging that mortal meat-sack”, it’s “Marrying him will take away your immortality.” And ultimately, thirdly, there is no disgust at the bodies themselves. Aragon is rough and unattractive, but he is understood to be imbued with the power of his rule, his sentience. Arwen and he meld their minds, the Platonic forms of themselves, their love arches over the dirty business of knocking boots, carefully ignoring the cat-ears of Arwen’s that fire the lusts of so many readers. I am not bagging on this; it is nice work if you can get it.

Hmm, I want to say I’m not after Tolkien here at all, but I can’t help falling back on his stuff because it’s so much more memorable than a lot of the fantastic twaddle that gets written in his loooong shadow. And this book isn’t high fantasy either, it’s…well, who the fuck knows what it is. Like New Crubuzon, it’s a patchwork of stuff, steam-punk arms, magical boxes, science-y glass tubes, natural philosophy with wings pinned to cotton, the horror of the flying death, in their non-discreet neighborhoods, throwing grappling hooks over one another, building up and digging down, heaping trash from one genre to another, running shit and blood and cables through the whole mess, throwing a switch and cackling, EEETS ALIIIVE. Still though, I think there’s something in the story of the lovers that is about the difference between miscegenation and bestiality in the slash between the terms race/race, and how both of those terms are pretty gross.

I’m kind of flailing here with the stitching and the stuffing, but I was honestly, genuinely, purposely affected by the strange, quiet love story between the human and the kepri. I love the ways the various races were cataloged as having this set of characteristics or that, but almost no one hewed to those characteristics, a constant sly denial of race/race; one that doesn’t pretend there isn’t a perverse glimmer in bug-fucking, or banging the mortal meat sack; one that isn’t about love as a moral force, tied to our moral bodies, but a social one, a plank thrown between neighborhoods where we construct our racial identities and have them constructed for us. Occasionally people walk that creaking tightrope from one side to the other, their arms outstretched, and it is a dangerous, scary, heart-pounding thrill.

There’s more in this book, a lot more stuffing and wires that I’m sure my brain will sift through in the coming months, and I really like that about it, how it’s this this baffling, active monster slaying quest on one hand, and then this lazy walk through a bazaar on another. (I see I have failed to mention completely that the main plot is about hunting down and killing some badass killer moths who are much scarier than the term “killer moth” might imply. So. Now I have mentioned it.) I guess I also feel like I should mention that Miéville’s writing style is likely a love-it or hate-it proposition. He does not use 5 words when 50 will do, and 5 of them will be made up, and another 5 will be thesaurus words, and another 5 will be profanity. I like all of these things, but you may not. So, yeah, that’s what I’ve got for now.

Sharp Teeth: Domestic God and Dogs

Barlow takes the Homeric fire, tosses on a bunch of kerosene, toasts a couple of marshmallows until they bubble blackly, and then eats them with a grin. Then he throws on a couple of tires for good measure and leans back for a long, slow pull on a hip-flask. Man. I’ve been doing the sputtering flail whenever I try to describe Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow to people: it’s a free verse novel! about werewolves! an L.A.! Quit backing away like I’m a crazy person because I’m totally for serious and so is Barlow.

I’m the kind of dork who flips out when I read in one of the blurbs for this book that says it’s written in blank verse. Godamn it, blank verse has meter, my friends, and this does not. This is free verse. I’m also the kind of dork who has an opinion about free verse, generally, which goes something like this: free verse is for the lazy. No, no, calm down; I’m also enough of a dork to defend e. e. cummings with my dying breath for relying on other, cooler, more chthonic prosodic stylins. Sure, he’s kind of responsible for a bunch of lamers thinking it’s okay to just write crap all over the page and call it poetry, but that’s like blaming [some historical figure] for [later, sucky historical movements]. You know what I mean. (And I’m not talking about [Ayn Rand] and [Objectivism], for the record.)

The dorkiness will keep on coming when I try to relate my feelings about the Epic. I’m no Classics major; that train of inquiry more or less ended when a history prof in my freshman year gave the following question as a mid-term exam: Compare the Fall of Greece to the Fall of Rome. Um, does “fuck you” count as an answer? So, my relationship with the Epic begins with John Milton and then terminates in Alexander Pope. It’s been a while since I’ve sung this tune, but let’s see if I can hit the high notes: Milton translated the Epic into the vulgar language of English, and much like the translation of the bible into the vulgar language of English, both ended in a profoundly local sense of divinity and identity. Milton grappled with a Mediterranean God/form in his own tongue, and it changes that form, the God, and the tongue in ways that cannot be counted. 

Pope tootles along almost a century later, and knowing he couldn’t be Milton, broke his Epic musings into two things: he translates Homer’s epic into fucking heroic couplets, which is, like, the most insane thing ever, trust me, and then writes what he calls a “mock epic”:The Rape of the Lock. I don’t really know what to say about The Rape of the Lockother than it makes me seriously nuts on several levels. It’s goofy; it’s in absolutely more heroic couplets; it uses the word “rape” in an already (at the time) archaic sense that means “theft”. It’s been a while since I’ve hefted this tome, but I do know that a thousand proverbs in English come out of The Rape of the Lock. It’s catchy as hell. You can dance to it, even though it kind of pisses you off. So, your English prof would say at this time, the Epic is dead. Long live the Epic.

So. Then. Well. *cough cough* The epic didn’t really die there, and then English got itself transported to America and hit the Pacific ocean and sat down on the California coast and thought, “Oh, fuck, man”. There’s The Golden Gateby Vikram Seth which is a sort of prose poem/epic Tales of the City. Fantastic, and worth a looksee, seriously. It’s funny; it’s light; it’s written in the Onegin stanza which has a kind of loosey-goosey conversational style to it, despite being rhymed-and-metered. The opening: 

To make a start more swift than weighty 
Hail Muse. Dear Reader, once upon 
A time, say, circa 1980, […:]

Ha! Milton may have invoked the wrong muse when he began Paradise Lost, and Seth just sketched her briefly, but Sharp Teeth takes this a step farther. 

Let’s sing about the man there
at the breakfast table

No muse. Let’s just sing. Let’s just boogey it out on this California coast in the twisting idiom of supernatural Noir, which is both tired tired tired like the detritus of the American Dream and open open open like the frontier that ends at the Pacific ocean and breaks into the thousand ethnic neighborhoods. The epic at its heart cares and is concerned about God in its many guises; Sharp Teeth is no different. But since Pope elevated the silly to the profound, the epic in English can throw in the kitchen sink, and Barlow does, in spades. 

I say there are werewolves, but this isn’t the kind of genre fiction that gives a shit about silver bullets and the lame specifications of rule-bound supernaturalism. People become animals. They become these sleek, domestic beings because they are beaten until they change or they share the blood of another werewolf, or because they break with grief after an act of kindness shatters the darkness they have cultivated so closely. There’s a lot here about love, and kindness, about cruelty, about the prime mover and his ineffable indifference and old Wile E. Coyote who lopes into the grand creation and arranges a thousand coincidences that arrange themselves into the doofy haphazardness of our lives. 

I’m in love. I still won’t release my unease with free verse; that’s the fur on my hackles that I simply won’t shave off. This isn’t tight prose, but I like the shaggy dog of its looseness, which says things like:

The secret must stay
and – according to the scientists – 
the love will live.
The heart is quite comfortable with secrets.
After all, its home is a dark wet place
tucked in among all the other organs
who aren’t talking either. 

I’ve run off the end of the cliff. Love is the anvil that will hit me when I drop. Hail Muse. 

Slightly Irregular Steampunk

I snapped The Slightly Irregular Fire Engineup at a local used bookseller because I’m kind of obsessed with steampunk, and a weird-ass kid’s book from the 70s that seems to have a steampunk aesthetic is right up my alley. The idea of Victorian futurism imagined by contemporary writers makes me all hot and bothered, but I’m often disappointed and/or enraged by how stilted the writing is, how fawning the depictions of Victoriana, or just how dumb. The Difference Engine, by Bruce Sterling & William Gibson, one of the very first full-blown steampunk novels, is pretty emblematic of my problem. The ideas are straight-up OMFG brilliant, but wrapped up in some fish-paper of boring and going-nowhere. (It’s not a huge surprise I feel this way: I heart Gibson for all his failings, but pretty much everything Sterling does makes me cringe. This includes Burning Man, Bruce, you douche.)

One of the more fascinating things about steampunk, as a cultural movement thingee, is that there’s huge disconnect between the literary branch and the Maker movement. Maker types build things, raise chickens in Brooklyn, try to master archaic technologies, and generally keep RadioShack in business. The more cosplay end dresses up in top hats, corsets, and goggles. I still haven’t bridged the gap between the lit and the doings, partially because the lit hasn’t bridged the gap between the costume and the ideas. The worst of the genre fetishizes Victorian reserve (or our imaginings of that reserve), blathering about “a simpler time” while totally ignoring class/race/colonialism, blah blah, you know. 

Anyhoo, now that I’ve gone off on a random digression, this book is arguably not steampunk at all – it’s too early – but it definitely clarified a lot of my somewhat useless ditherings about the genre. Barthelme takes a series of (often bizarre) Victorian etchings, mixes them up like Tarot cards, and divines an odd little tale out of the mix. It feels like one of those patched-up stories that gets written in that little game where one person writes a section, covers up everything but the last line, and then passes it to the next person, who writes a section, and so on. (Do you know the game I mean? That was great fun at summer camp.) 

The art is cool, but it’s clunkily done, simply not altered enough, or done with enough visual style, to be interesting. They read like cut-outs, which is what they are, but they lay as still as a game of Solitaire. The language, however, whoo-boy, this is nice. More please. A girl, Mathilda, wakes up to find a pagoda growing in her yard. She enters, looking for a fire-engine. Djinns, pirates, and other wackiness ensues. It’s winking, post-modern (amusingly, almost archaically post-modern at this point, which is something of a trip), and clever without making you feel dumb. Like this:

“Would you like to have an escapade?” the djinn asked. “We can arrange that. Escapades come in two styles – fancy and more fancy.” 

“What is an escapade” Mathilda asked. 

“An escapade is something you didn’t expect,” the djinn said, “which surprises you, pleases you, and frightens you, all that once.” 

“Like a good dream,” Mathilda said. 

“Or you could be something,” the djinn suggested. “You could be a grown-up tennis-playing hat-wearing woman, or a one-man band–”  

“The one-man band doesn’t look too happy,” Mathilda observed. 

“He began as a piccolo player,” the djinn said.

Hahahaha! Phew. I had to google this Barthelme cat, and I was pretty much entraced by what I found. Writer of micro-fiction, inveterate post-modernist, regular contributor to this and that fancy (and extra fancy) periodical. The bastions of wiki said he wasn’t much for the whole narrative thing, but there is one here, even as it winks and smirks. 

Maybe I find steampunk so fascinating because it’s a post-modern attempt to leapfrog back to before Modernism even questioned, well, anything: the Nation, the Psyche, the Individual, the Narrative, back before when you could capitalize those things and not look like you were a Jerk-Face who was making A Point. ZOMG. What origami! Instead of taking the mismatched deck and building a house, steampunk folds and cuts the cards into something that casts the shadow of the house, but looks like an absolute mess straight-on. The ones I dislike tend to be really perfunctory narratives dressed up in high boots and cleavage, or anti-(post)-modernist claptrap that totally doesn’t get where it’s coming from. Fascinating pedigree, this steampunk stuff has. 

So, I would start my rating for this with three stars, because I liked it, take one off for the art, add one for the steampunk flavor, and then add another just because it blew my mind a little bit. Yes!

The Ravishing of Being Really French

Well, this review turned out to be a whole helluva lot harder to write than I thought when I was snorting my way through Ravishing of Lol Stein. This was chosen as a group read for a romance reading group, out of list of capital-L Literature books that are read primarily for their sexual content, stuff like The Story of O and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. And my experience ended up being similar to my read of Wifey, another book read primarily for its sexual content, but hoo boy, not because either is romantic in any way. But are stories of unfulfilled housewives, both were unpleasant for me to read, both were chilly and distant, shot through with voyeurism and infidelities of all kinds, and both ended up being much more interesting to consider than to read. 

I’ve got a thing for the housewife in literature, I admit. I notice her and watch her, the way she is constructed and commented on. She’s not a component of any romance I can think of, almost the anti-romance in her bones: the foregone conclusion, the morality tale, the warning. (Though maybe remarriage comedies come close – but no, that’s not quite right.) She is inert and motionless, not part of the decisive world of love, but its frusty, decaying aftermath. No romance starts with a housewife, though it may end with one in the oblique. (And, quick aside – this is interesting too. I don’t know the truth of this, but the housewife is the imagined reader of romance novel, who we allude to when we talk about who consumes wish-fulfillment exercises about the domestic. I’ve said this elsewhere, but I think some of the attacks on Twimoms are ad hominem – Twilight is bad, because the readership is bad. You ladies should grow up.) 

It’s true that I find her fascinating because if you squint right, I am a housewife. No, yes, of course, I work, and don’t feel defined exclusively by my husband or my family, but the work of child-rearing and house-keeping is still a major component of my personality at this point in my life. I regularly self-define myself as a housewife though, often disingenuously, just because I know it pisses my friends and husband off. No, you’re not a housewife, they eyeroll, you’re smarter than that. Which is the thing to me, ultimately. An almost inextricable part of the definition of housewife is her passivity and lack of intellectual life; hers is an emotional life, protecting the hearth fires so that men, and later (boy) children, can venture out into the important and active world and do important and active things. She looks within so others can act without. She is the font of compassion like Mrs. Ramsay from To The Lighthouse, telling James his bedtime stories so that Mr. Ramsay can contemplate the movement from P to Q. And ultimately, she has no self. She is a role cut out from society and watched like a kettle. Maybe watching will keep it from boiling. 

Which is the thing with this novel. This book takes on all of the voyeurism inherent in the housewife narrative – the neighbors watching, the husband watching, the male gazing – and makes it manifest, everyone peeping out from their houses, into windows, imagining observers and observing observers and mirror mirror mirror memory observation mirror mirror. As an intellectual or literary exercise, this book is some bang up stuff. The narrator reads like a man gossiping about himself, and the unsettling shifts to quoted narratives, between the first and third person, between the felt self and observed self were artfully done. The distance this creates, though intentional, is yawning and chilly. There is so much art, there is very little life. 

Interesting, I think to myself, how often the narrative of the housewife hinges on voyeurism. Sandy, in Wifey, watching a masturbating motorcyclist watching her window in the first scenes; Carol, from Main Street, the most squirmingly accurate portrayal of a housewife to me, fighting the blind-holding gossips; and the most tactile voyeur of them all, Humbert Humbert, watching like a pov slasher killer Delores Haze and her immortal daughter, Lolita, from inside the house, like the murderer he was. I felt the fingerprints of Lolita all over this story, down to Lola’s own name. But there’s other things as well: the road trip, the beach where Lol’s insanity is born mirroring Humbert’s beach side dalliances that he (partially, lyingly) blames for his derangement, the endless descriptions of Lol’s slenderness, the repeated phrase that she is a “grown-up schoolgirl”. Lol is a collapsed character, melding both Delores Haze and her daughter Lolita, with annihilating results. There is no center to hold here, no self beyond the observed one, no housewife but the one seen from without. And, speaking from the inside, maybe that’s the only place where one can see her, can see me. I, we housewives exist in observation. Without it, we are only ourselves, and that is nothing at all. 

Hot damn, I have been infected by all this glacial unknowing. Because hear this: I laughed through this book. There’s a lot here that feels stupid and dated, calculated, deliberately unreal. The narrator regularly refers to himself in the third person: Jack Hold did this; Jack Hold did that. I had this annoying friend who would refer to himself as Hershel Walker, who I think was a football player for the Vikings, because Hershel Walker did that all the time. Hershel Walker threw the game. Hershel Walker gives 110%. Hershel Walker does not use the first person because Hershel Walker is too important for that. So when Jack does it, I laugh. Lol Stein’s name unfortunately reads to me as LOL Stein, which is an accident of history, I know. Lol! Then there is the dialogue, which is art film wankery up the ass all day. There is no person on earth who talks like this, let alone a gaggle of them speaking past each other. I wanted to shake them all, shake them until their necks snapped, pour blood on the dining room table, scream. Bunch of fucking phonies. 

I also thought of the Gothic novel, that panic of the domestic, the castle rotting from within by secrets kept and marshaled by women even if they are perpetrated by men. These books of the housewife write the details of their enclosures as closely as they do the housewives themselves; the housewife as landscape; the housewife as nature documentary. There’s an epic catalog of her houses in literature: Mrs. Ramsay’s closed doors and open windows, Mrs. Haze’s petty bourgeois taste, Carol’s failed parties in a Chinese theme, Mrs. Dalloway’s narrow bed and her famous flowers, Sandy’s chart documenting the shits of her dog. (I’m leaving off Oedipa Maas, because I’m not sure she’s a woman.) Maybe we will learn something from her furniture, from her gardens, but then it turns out the gardens and draperies are for show, just like everything else. They are cultivated for observation. Look, look, look. Fuck, I don’t know. This book has defeated me with its distance, all this talk of love by people who are liars. Liars! Almost nothing said by anyone about any feeling at all made sense to me. Aliens. 

So, yeah, I’m glad I read it, but I’m equally happy to be done with it. Oh, and far as sex writing goes, this is a cold affair, the erotic of the oblique, and very little of it stirred me. There were a few scenes with Lol sleeping in a rye field below the hotel window where her friends were enacting their dubious love affair that were beautiful, but every time someone kissed someone else, I recoiled. Gross. Maybe you either watch or touch, maybe you look but don’t touch, that old saw about women not being visually oriented in their desires. Maybe not.

Blueprints of the Afterlife. No, Seriously.

It’s possible I’ll append the original review to this here new shiny one I’m writing, but that may not happen. The future’s not written, right? It’s something I can affect? Well, we’ll see either way.

I seriously don’t mean to disappear up my own reviewing asshole, but the first attempt I made to review I was in this just painfully emotional place, and it embarrasses me, because that’s not really what this book is about. Blueprints of the Afterlife is – and I don’t mean this statement to be reductive – just a mordantly funny genre exercise that’s got its cool philosophical fingerprints around the throat of popular culture, futurism, and the American tendency towards apocalypse. The plot is…nothing that can be encapsulated with ease, more a series of very interrelated vignettes that stack themselves up into a, what?, Venn diagram? Something squishier? Our societal and metafictional guts? Then it knocks them all down and starts over again.

It’s coughcough years into the future – more than 50 but less than 150 – a futuristic period that seems to be a fallow area for science fiction writers at the moment. Even my main man William Gibson who used to write in this period has decamped to closer futures (i.e. the Bigend trilogy). On the other side, there’s a ton of dudes (mostly dudes) writing in the far-future post-human expanses of space and ti-ee-eye-eee-ime. Some of this is the post-post-apocalyptic bent of this novel – this is not a survivalist’s manifesto, one of those musings about the order of society in crisis and whatnot, not the Individual’s Search for Meaning in an Age of Fucked Up Shit – but about our tendency to imagine Fucked Up Shit as a future in the first place.

But then also a ton of other stuff. The science fictional ideas/commentary/whatever of this book are tossed off with a frequency and casualness that belie their fucking awesomeness, and there are at least a half dozen ideas here that could warrant their own freaking novel. I don’t mean to imply that Boudinot is giving anything short shrift here though – these ideas are all of a piece, and they fit together like one of those boxes of shapes you get from the Science Museum, and there’s 20 little flashcards of the way those shapes might make a larger pattern, and you flip over the card and go! Put it together! Now take it apart! Go! Make a different shape! Go go go!

This review is turning into the same godamn mess my first one was, only different. Which is perfect in a way. If you split a hologram in half, you get two perfect holograms, like an earthworm, but more technological. I can’t even pretend to understand how that works – both the hologram and the earthworm. The central metaphor here is blueprints, those imaginings of the future written on a scaled, engineered map which may or may not give rise to the fact of buildings, in whose habitable spaces we may, or may not, live out our lives. It’s just..it’s just the godamn shit to read when you’re a cracked and leaking emotional disaster – as I was when I read this, not to make it about you– this elegant, beautifully written puzzle that contemplated the ends beyond the ends, or the middles beyond the middles, or all permutations of continuation and cease. Which, fuck yeah.

And in the spirit of fuck yeah, I’m going to post the original review, but I’m not proud of it, and it (as I said before) kinda embarrasses me. Not because my emotional vulnerability is an embarrassment, but because I don’t think it does this book justice. The earlier review was dealing with the hard edge of grief, the emotions I feel as I can see the end coming. That’s not what this book is about, and I don’t want to mischaracterize. This is 50 to 150 years past that fucked up shit, which is just one of the reasons I loved it so. The end is still coming, but I’m still in the middle of the middle, still.

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Original review:

I don’t even mean to be like one of those cryptic facebook updates that people drop when they are looking for attention, but emotionally I am in no place to review this. Which might be the perfect place to be emotionally to review this? My beloved grandmother is dying. I read this fast like fever in the car to and from emotional upheavals that I haven’t even begun to sort into something resembling sense.

So yeah, this is one of those reviews. Be warned.

I picked this up because of Josh’s tumescent review. And because – I can be honest about my shallowness – this is just a fantastic cover. After I finished my read, I popped back onto Goodreads to reread Josh’s review with knowing eyes. I was bolted to the floor when I saw he references Lars von Trier’s Melancholia in the first few sentences.

Before I left for my visit with Grandma who is dying, on a slow Saturday, my husband pulled me down onto the couch and made me watch that film. Not all. In sections as I ran the dishwasher or packed that forgotten thing or talking on the phone to a distraught family member, imagining the family ugliness that is inevitable once she’s gone. We’re all considering the end, mapping out alternate futures of the end and after her end. I’ve had my problems with von Trier in the past that aren’t worth getting into, but Melancholia was a series of images that burned me quietly, this end of the world that is both metaphor and fact. Science fiction stories can be a lot of different things, but the ones that get me scrying my own overturned guts are the ones about our personal universes as alien planets, the hard gravities of our emotions and what we tell ourselves are our emotions. The way Melancholia ran this apocalypse through a series of family connections, bright loosely connected images, the hovering close-ups and near-static tableaus – ah ah ah ah.

I spent the weekend trying to be present, trying to feel Grandma’s lips when I kiss her, or her hands in mine, watching my step-mom write a list on a napkin. Presence is a difficult thing, and I’m no Taoist; my mind does not let things run as they are. My mind chews on the future. I prognosticate, therefore I am. There’s a certain philosophical aridity that appeals to my presence-avoiding mind in these pages, though I admit I have close to zero interest or background in straight philosophy. Arid is maybe the wrong word. As is philosophy.

Folklore of the future?

I’m not sure that this plot can be spoiled, dealing as it does with a roving glacier of various time periods, persons, non-persons, and battling visions of the future. Sad as I am, superimposed as I am between present and future, this story, this collection of elegant, funny, wigged out, careful sentences washed me over and washed over me. I could read this forever. This could go on and on, but it ends. If I were less emotional and messy, I could catalog the influences and hat-tips, from the obvious PKD and Gibson, to the more muted Star Wars and UKL. When I talked about this with my husband, he asked what it would be like to be someone other than George Orr in The Lathe Of Heaven, someone changed subtly or largely in someone else’s sleep. It will be hours before I know she’s gone — this is the way of things; the phone-tree is long and branching — and in those hours will she continue as if that end hadn’t happened? Will she be gone in those hours? There’s questions like that everywhere here.

This book probably deserves a less sloppy reader, one that isn’t leaking at the seams. My dad did all the sodoku puzzles from the last two weeks of the paper; I read this. I was fully absorbed in the intellectual puzzle of end-times and the after-end, a game of futures. I can’t unbind my emotions from the end of it all, the end of her all. But the blueprints lay down blue and bloodless. They make me think. They make me wonder — in that old school awestruck sense. And I know that absolutely none of this makes sense, which is why it is such a comfort.