tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159436142024-03-07T09:22:39.343-10:00But Don't Try To Touch Me.Aaron Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02565494196338043466noreply@blogger.comBlogger704125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15943614.post-58017309208961580642022-02-10T06:50:00.007-10:002022-08-09T05:21:01.914-10:00Out, in #25<span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Past time for another dip into these anthologies.</span><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">From <i>Plays in One Act:</i></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>The Cuban Swimmer</i> by Milcha Sanchez-Scott. </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">A young Cuban-American girl participates in a</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> competition to swim across the Pacific Ocean, while her family paces her in a boat, shouting encouragement and advice through a megaphone while bickering and loving one another. Condescending broadcast professionals provide a supercilious chorus. The girl runs into all kinds of problems; oil slicks, exhaustion. But she can't get out of the water or she's disqualified.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">I'd love to see a successful production of this; it would take some technical imagination, since we have a boat, the water level, and the ocean floor to create onstage. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">The play ends with a miracle. Art is one place in which we can have miracles.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Excerpts from <i>Slave of the Camera</i> by Sam Shepard. An actor working on a movie in New Mexico tells us in gripping monologue about difficult men: his frustrated father, a racist rando in a truck stop restroom, and a friend who seems to have some version of a good life figured out (a life which includes a polycule, dumb but pleasing hobbies, and weaving the flax of film appreciation into the gold of life appreciation). Each of these guys emerges so distinctly you can practically tell them apart by smell. Each is an object lesson. It's hard to be human; and at best, one in three figures out how to do it.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>The Pleasure of Detachment</i> by Perry Souchuk. An unseen narrator says stuff like "The difference between anxiety and desire is that desire is influential," and "The audience's rehearsal is life outside the play." Meanwhile, a woman straps herself into a bed and, while </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">casually flirting with an awkward young man,</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> muses about the way her moment-to-moment observations flow into the running stream of her thought process. </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">This reminds me of Albee's abstract non-crowdpleasers like <i>Box</i>, and of</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> Peter Greenaway's films, employing narrative content to abstract purpose</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">. </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">A chamber drama for connoisseurs.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>The Boundary</i> by Tom Stoppard and Clive Exton. Like a tiresome Monty Python sketch, but drier. Two dictionary editors find that their office has been broken into (or so it seems) and their files are all out of order. Words and their definitions have been scrambled. Meanwhile, each of them becomes convinced that the other has murdered Brenda, their troublesome collaborator with whom they've had a long-running romantic triangle. In the end, it turns out Brenda is alive, but of all the indignities that have befallen their lexicographic enterprise, her compulsive malapropisms have done the most damage.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Perhaps it's because I'm put out with Stoppard for joining J. K. Rowling's League of Celebrity Transphobes, but I found this a trivial exercise in cleverness. Stoppard's best work is clever but rich with human compassion. This was the husk of cleverness, all dried up.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Placebo</i> by Andrew Vachss. A maintenance man helps a frightened boy in his building by inventing a light box that will drive away imagined monsters. Then the man figures out that the boy's therapist is a child abuser, and makes another device which he will use to kill the therapist. I recall reading a comic book adaptation of this, illustrated by Klaus Janson, a former artist for </span><i style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">The Punisher</i><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">, a similar exercise in revenge porn.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">From <i>Best American Short Stories</i>:</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Proper Library</i> by Carolyn Ferrell. A dazzlingly multifaceted story following a young man's day in and out of school and home. He's black, he's gay. He cherishes his siblings and his adoring, concerned mother. He values learning, but it's unclear whether his attainment can match his ambition. He's tempted by lust for a school-skipping "bad boy," and tormented by homophobes (the life-warping effects of bullying become clear; there's no shaking it off when it's a continuous erosion, from any direction, at any time). He's loaded down with other peoples' responsibilities, because everyone knows he cares too much to leave a need untended, except perhaps his own needs. He narrates his story in an awkward but sensitive argot. "I am in silent love with a loud body." </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Birthmates</i> by Gish Jen. A salesman in a dying branch of office computer tech has booked into the wrong hotel for a sales conference. He's Asian-American, and the kind of go-getter who's leveraged his boss's slurs into a promotional opportunity instead of a lawsuit. His optimistic ambition motivates him to trundle into an unforeseen variety of humiliations and challenges. Along the way, we learn that his marriage has ended, and he still can't wrap his mind around why. If at first you don't succeed to have a baby, try, try again, right? Why did she have to get bogged down in grief instead of popping back up? Loser mindset. Makes no sense.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">He enjoys a possible career breakthrough at the conference, but business success is a provisional victory in a world of tiered injustices. The final sentence reveals just how much horror, sorrow, and implacable injustice he is struggling to deny.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">From <i>Calling the Wind:</i></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Willie Bea and Jaybird</i> by Tina McElroy. Willie Bea is a friendly, spirited working class woman who is pitied by her peers, because baby hasn't got back. In a demographic that prizes a voluptuous posterior, Willie Bea just isn't marriage material. And yet, she manages to draw a handsome, responsible, charming husband. Oh, they love each other. But Willie Bea makes the classic mistake of bragging to her best friend (whose rump is up to code) about what a tender lover her husband is. It's a simple story, but it traces the melancholy of the unbeautiful and the joys of working people with attentive compassion. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Screen Memory</i> by Michelle Cliff. A mixed-race movie star is drying out in a hospital, and recalling her past. She was raised by her grandmother, a domineering black supremacist who never stopped judging everything and everyone, and judging harshly. The careful process of fin</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">ding freedoms and encouragement from better mentors takes our heroine, step by caution step, to show business. The story is told in precise vignettes, hallucinatory scrambled fragments, snatches of song, plot summaries for ludicrous movies. It's the kind of thing that could easily collapse in a muddle, but Michelle Cliff maintains clarity, gentle wit, and a subtle narrative tension, while layering emotional richness and density of incident. Magnificent storytelling. </span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">From <i>The Outlaw Bible:</i></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>On the Yard</i> by Malcolm Braly. We spend a rainy afternoon in the prison yard with three provisional friends, as they try to do under-the-counter business and while away the time. At nine pages, this is a generous excerpt for this book, and I'm grateful; time spent with these mean, frustrated men is time productively spent. Our central figure, Chilly Willy, is really smart; too smart to let that fact be known. His observations on the sociopolitics of prison life are acute, unsparing. His shrewdness makes one hope he gets out of prison and puts his talents to some better use than crime.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Soul on Ice</i> by Eldridge Cleaver. An anguished, keening, problematic aria on the subject of Black manhood brought low. Enslavement and emasculation are woven together in a lamentation of unmanning. Cleaver's pitying contempt for the enslaved and subjugated resembles Kanye West's similarly unhinged rhetoric on the same subject. Still, Cleaver calls Black men and women to aspire to, and labor for, a better world, a right world, where Black people are able to live at their full potency. He demeans his ancestors, marring his cry for a virtuous struggle. It's hard to address the enormity of slavery's crimes while maintaining focus, but victim-blaming only compounds the problem.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>In the Belly of the Beast</i> by Jack Henry Abbott. Abbott sketches the soul-ruining experience of solitary confinement. It's horrifying, but I'm not sure he manages to say anything that will change many minds. The kind of reactionary who approves of solitary will probably read an account of such hellish punishment and think, "good."</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Sketches</i> by Ken Kesey. An evidently nonfiction account of working at a hospital. The seeds of his most famous book are here, as Kesey becomes fascinated by patients' harrowed faces, while developing a distrust for nurses.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Life In Prison</i> by Stanley "Tookie" Williams: Williams describes the claustrophobia, loneliness and helplessness of imprisonment in ways that make it sound like my concept of Hell; unable to move or to secure one's own safety. Cool, lucid, no theatrical rhetoric, and none needed. My theoretical pro-incarceration reactionary might find this account more stimulating to one's fellow feeling.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Cool Hand Luke</i> by Donn Pearce: Remember in the movie when Luke wins a grotesque, disturbing egg-eating contest? Here, it's full meals getting wolfed down, culminating in stewed prunes when everything else in the mess hall has disappeared. We also learn how Luke earns his nickname. Told in a cheerful, yarn spinning fashion, this, like Orange is the New Black, is almost too much fun. You may find yourself wishing you were in prison with these robust characters.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>The Family</i> by Ed Sanders: an account of how Charles Manson trolled mystical, occult, self-help and sci-fi books for ideas; not in search of a finer, truer way to live, but for sound bites and sales techniques he could use for snowing the suckers. Today he'd be studying crypto and Qanon, and with the internet he could win over the desperate and weak-minded all over the world. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Short Eyes</i> by Miguel Piñ</span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">ero: An excerpt from a play in which Clark, a child molester (a.k.a. Short Eyes), tries to explain his compulsions and actions to Juan, a patient, quiet fellow prisoner. Clark doesn't try to perfume his deeds the way that old self-romanticizer Humbert Humbert did, and at the end of his distressing account of serial abuse he pleads with Juan to try to understand him. Juan retorts "If I wasn't trying to, I would have killed you... stone dead, punk..."</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The excerpt is forwarded by Marvin Felix Camillo, who worked with convicts in Sing Sing (of which Piñero was one) to develop original theatre. Camillo contextualizes the creation of the play and the production, and rightfully insists that Piñero was </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">not merely an efficient transcriber of prison life, but </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">an artist who transmuted his prison experience into insightful works of imagination and craft.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>The Sexual Outlaw</i> by John Rechy: Rechy, who wrote the first excerpt in this book, an excerpt that dazzled me, returns to tell us about the street-hustling life, the ebb and flow of hustlers and johns, the myths about the trade (often created by lying cops and amplified by credulous media) and the twisty möbius strip of self-loathing and gay pride that ripples all through the scene; what lures young men to this trade, and what paths they take when they leave.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Hardcore From the Heart</i> by Annie Sprinkle. Performance artist Sprinkle synopsizes the endless struggle, or dance, between eroticism, art, and the law. Her mystical enthusiasm for sexual performance and practice runs afoul of the cops, again and again, climaxing in a love affair with a defense attorney; a sensible synthesis.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Candy</i> by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg: If one must have a swingin' Sixties spoof of ribald literature I suppose it might as well be as witty as this. A grotesque lover seems to wish </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Candy (as in Candide)</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> ill, but her light touch keeps her out of trouble. She's clean until she's filthy, and then she's very filthy indeed. Candy's best-known progeny might be Little Annie Fanny; I'm fonder of Phoebe Zeitgeist.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Period</i> by Dennis Cooper. Not to be confused with fellow literary troublemaker Robert Coover, Cooper writes pellucidly about alluring boys who get into terrible trouble. The boys in this all-too-brief excerpt rob a jewelry store. It's not certain whether their bigger problem is legal peril or their desire for one another. "There shouldn't have been anyone in the world that important. It killed him." In a Cooper novel, it probably will kill him, directly or indirectly.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">City of Night by John Rechy: Hello again, Rechy! This time he tells us the (fictional?) story of a young lady who associates with male hustlers; dating them, rooming with them, and getting very angry with them, an anger that seems to well up from some subterranean resentment. Her story takes a surprising but logical twist, and then our hero is left alone again, dodging the violent street gang known as the LAPD, and fearing that his life will end up, and possibly end, on skid row.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Shirts & Skin</i> by Tim Miller: Miller (or a fictional protagonist; it's not contextualized in this excerpt) relies on safe sex practices as a basic survival tactic. He's a gay man in the 90s who's torn between irrepressible desire for men and utter dread of the disease. He navigates sex with an HIV-positive lover with pragmatic caution and a wealth of tenderness. I understand this differently now that I'm trying to negotiate fear of a different disease in a careful but safe fashion. How else to be life-affirming, but to live life and protect it simultaneously?</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">From <i>Interzone</i>: </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>What Cindy Saw</i> by John Shirley. Cindy is a little girl who suffers from the conviction that the world of our perceptions is a facade, which she calls "the shell," over the real truth of life. She pokes around and discovers a secret underground environment from which all aboveground behavior is controlled. This subterranean realm is a secularized gnostic metaphor, yet is worked out in particularized physical and practical details. Also, Ambrose Bierce and Phillip Dick are down there, playing cards, which might be putting too fine a point on it, but certainly signals that we are in a realm of signs and portents.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Finally, Cindy takes charge of the world, or at least the part of it that concerns her, and turns out to be much worse for everybody than the systems that used to run everything. Her individual liberation from gnostic controls is not the happy ending most phildickian narrative presents. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>The Object of the Attack</i> by J. G. Ballard: a beloved astronaut is on track to become a right-wing totalitarian President of the United States, and a mysterious young mental patient is using outlandish, ritualistic tactics to bring about the astronaut's assassination. The case involves art, symbolism, illusions, and a collision between a powerless nobody and the most powerful people on earth. As is often the case with Ballard, the plot refuses to model reality. Stagecraft as reality manipulation wouldn't really allow people to achieve the ends these characters are pursuing, but they do allow Ballard to imagine the motivations and ideas that provide the field of struggle for ambitious people and those who would stop them. The astronaut starts a pseudo-Christian religion and produces Hollywood entertainments, while the assassin works with obscure landscape art and physical illusions to reengage the world for which the opponents struggle; he also uses jerry-rigged flying machinery to defeat a grounded aeronaut from above. The detective on the case, tasked with tracking down the assassin and foiling his schemes, decides to allow the young man to take his best shot. We needed this spirit in 2016; we may need it in 2024. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Something Coming Through</i> by Cherry Wilder: Mr. Wheeler is in "a strange city" on a mission to free his stepdaughter and her activist lover from political imprisonment before they are executed on inflated charges. The boredom of diplomatic efforts, the polite absurdity, the outbursts of manic fervor create a Kafkaesque impression of hopelessness, but there's a factor slowly working in Mr. Wheeler's favor: toxins in local building materials, which inspire hallucinations and euphoria; seeming spiritual visions that reshape the officials' perspective on the case. Swallows, commonplace birds in the area, take on great spiritual import. At the end of the story the prisoners are freed, but local children kill a swallow for sport. In short, don't expect systemic change; compassion wins this round, but pointless cruelty still controls the board.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">The next installment of this series will be the last. Phew!</span></div>Aaron Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02565494196338043466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15943614.post-27672854074885778912021-07-30T07:44:00.008-10:002021-08-03T03:42:17.738-10:00Tolkien Vs. Lovecraft Vs. New Weird final rounds<p><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://butdonttrytotouchme.blogspot.com/2019/02/tolkien-versus-lovecraft-smackdown.html">(The series starts here)</a></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">L</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">et's review the final entries!</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;">Round 17! For Tolkien, it's <i>Down the River Road</i> with Gregory Benford. We're in a world that's a long tubular cavern, a wide endless tunnel with gravity pulling toward the cave walls, with a river running down the tunnel and land to either side. If you go upstream, you also go back in time, while going downstream is going forward in time. Most travel goes downstream because that's easier, but it's possible to hustle your way upstream if you've got the motivation and the moxie. Our protagonist is a young man seeking his missing father, but he's got to go through a whole Bildungsroman first. The conceit of going backwards or forwards in time by going up or down stream seems to be irrelevant to the story as it rolls along, so pondering its likely significance, in the context of a tale about a boy seeking his mysterious missing father, helped me guess the fantastical twist ending. A famous Wordsworth quotation concerning fatherhood is relevant.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;">This is probably the best old-school Twain-and-Faulkner-worshiping bildungsroman ever set entirely in a tunnel where the flow of a river closely tracks the flow of time. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;">For Lovecraft, it's <i>On the Slab</i> by Harlan Ellison. A rock concert promoter obtains the body of a giant, and puts it on display. It's more than an evolutionary oddity, though; something about it brings the promoter a comfort he's never known, so much so that he takes to sleeping near it in the display hall where it lies in commercialized estate. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;">The big reveal is that it's Prometheus, and he's a comforting presence because he dared defy the gods and sacrificed himself for humanity. Almost the opposite of Lovecraftian. Anyway, a professional showbiz promoter is a good protagonist for Ellison to write, since he was a self-promoter as much as he was anything.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;">The New Weird gives us <i>The Gutter Sees the Light That Never Shines </i>by Alistair Rennie. If you were worried that the New Weird might not be metal AF, Rennie is here to settle those concerns. This story is overflowing with characters right out of of a fantastical fighting game, and they pursue one another across pixelated backdrops before enacting gory conflict upon one another's powerfully brutalized and brutalizing bodies. Pro wrestling splatterpunk with cheerful, punchy prose that does Harlan Ellison several times better, simply by eschewing the sugar-glaze of sentimentality that drenched Ellison's faux hard-boiled fantasies. Surface pleasures abound, if you've the stomach for it, not to mention the unspooled entrails impaled on a cruelly twisted dagger blade for it.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;">It's a choice between the faux-depth of microwaved Modernism or the Warholian real shallowness of Pomo brattishness (or Ellison if one insists). I'm a sucker for sham Faulkner, but Rennie is delivering a Nietzschean vision that makes more sense of the Trump era's zero sum cruelty. Here's hoping the Cyber Ninjas (<a href="https://cyberninjas.com/category/blog/">whose website is unnervingly inept, boding poorly for the detail-oriented nature of their Arizona audit</a>) end up as happily as most of the characters in Rennie's round-winning entertainment.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;">Round 18! </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;">Tolkien is represented by Judith Tarr, with <i>Death and the Lady</i>. A medieval village has been depopulated of men by conscription into a fruitless war, so industrious women labor in the fields while tending to children. The village borders a wood that everyone knows not to venture too deeply into, what with the Fay and all, but a woman emerges from that wood on a desperate journey away from one man and towards another. She's get to stay in the village for a time, though, where she becomes part fo the community whether she likes it or not. Then the man she's fleeing comes to visit...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;">Tarr has many issues on her mind: gender roles and relations; the responisibilites of child-rearing and community; romances claims and costs. She manages the mighty task of using her concerns to propel the story, rather than stopping for lecture breaks, and I'm frankly in awe of her craft. The large and small decisions her characters make, and the logical and emotional motivations that energize their decisions, are much of the story, and the human insight Tarr never lets the period detail and the fantastical elements overshadow the recognizable people at the heart of the story.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;">Lovecraft's final offering is <i>24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai </i>by Roger Zelazny. A woman named Mari travels through contemporary Japan with a selection of Hokusai reproductions, each of them portraying Mt. Fuji from different standpoints. Traveling on foot, she visits the approximate spot from which each portrait was painted, and contemplates an array of literary, cultural, and historical references that bind together into a net of allusions. It's a lovely piece of fictionalized, and fiction-besotted, travel writing which demonstrates that an engagement with the world around you and an engagement with literature can be braided together, creating a mental landscape of great richness.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Also, there's something terrible and secret going on, which she's trying to both evade and prevent from overtaking the world. </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">The scary story could easily be separated from all the travel writing and mini-essays on literature; shorn of everything that isn't central to a woman's attempt to prevent her ex-husband from enslaving the world, it's a straightforward, sturdy, but adorably quaint 80s SF adventure. </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">The travel writing, as well, would be diverting without the pulp adventure nestled deep within its folds. Together, however, they blend like nitrogen and glycerin. </span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> By hiding the pulpy aspects of the story, letting us glimpse it through the gaps in the carefully crafted "reality," the story gave me a chilling sensation of occult existential threat like few stories manage. It is in this that the tale is most akin to Lovecraft's best work.</span></span></p><p><span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;">The New Weird's final effort is a collective effort, in which Paul Di Filippo writes a first chapter as a sort of pilot episode, and a clutch of other authors contribute a chapter each. There's a final chapter, but it isn't in the book.</span></span></p><p><span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;">The story is set in a pseudo-Indian city during a massive religious festival. A man from a rival city comes to participate in a mysterious plot to do... what, exactly? Even he doesn't know, but he's pretty sure it's something good, from his society's perspective, and something bad, from the local perspective. There's a lot going on, though, and each chapter gives us a glimpse of activity that broadens the world of the story and may or may not cohere into a satisfying conclusion. Di Filippo sets up an array of characters and factions, in a vivid city with fantastical beasts and religions for the other writers to play with.</span></span></p><p><span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;">Cat Rambo contributes a chapter in which a mysterious woman is observed doing increasingly mysterious things. It's a dandy standalone story; a sense of wonder, unreality made manifest.</span></span></p><p><span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;">Sarah Monette gives us a confrontation between a detective who's not quite lost in a thicket of cover stories, and hybrid animals that haven't integrated the personalities of their component entities. Brief, zesty, frightening.</span></span></p><p><span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;">Danial Abraham follows a pious and wealthy businessman whose faith (devoted to a mindless insect god, and demanding motiveless mindlessness from its followers) would seem to preclude conspiring and colluding for gain and vengeance; yet that is precisely what this fellow does. A cunning examination of unruffled religious hypocrisy, and its uses for the greedy class.</span></span></p><p><span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;">Felix Gilman centers on a useless cop holding down headquarters and refusing to stick his neck out, no matter what mysterious dangers show up just outside the door. He reads a doltish pulp magazine about a fascistic but highly active cop which fails to spur him to action; only to lull him into grouchy indolence. Ironies and fantastic adventures cunningly undercut one another.</span></span></p><p><span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;">Hal Duncan shows us a boy auditioning for a celebrated boys' choir in which expressions of musical purity cover over a cesspit of pederasty, and how seamlessly the boys are groomed. It's agonizing, and enriched by a detailed investigation of musical processes and corrupt leadership processes, but lacks that crucial element: bold acts of the imagination. Perhaps, on the limited evidence of this short narrative, Mr. Duncan should explore the possibilities of more realistic social fiction.</span></span></p><p><span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;">Conrad Williams brings things back to the protagonists of the first installment, the man from another city, and a woman who rescued him from dangerous beasts. Adventure ensues, as she tries to lead him to safety, only to be ambushed by (essentially) ninjas, before a shocking terrorist attack (doubtless meant to evoke 9/11, still, at the time of publication, quite fresh in the memory).</span></span></p><p><span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;">The final installment, by Paul Di Filippo, is not bound in the book, but presented as a PDF on the publisher's website. Or at least, it was. I had to dig around with archive.org to find a version of the website that offered this concluding chapter, and having read it, I can see why no one thought it was worth printing or keeping around. It ties story threads together with the facile cunning of a skilled improv comic, but reminds me of the guy in <i>Parade's End</i> who preens himself on his ability to write a sonnet on any subject in five minutes. Loose ends get stapled together, than a monster shows up, the guy from another city switches sides, he beats the monster and the hypocritical villain, and gets the girl. Straight out of a movie you saw in a hotel room and then promptly forgot. </span></span></p><p><span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;">VERDICT: Judith Tarr brings the final round home for Team Tolkien.</span></span></p><p><span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;">Oh brother, let's do the final scoring now! I considered giving New Weird a handicap to balance the fact that it wasn't represented for the first couple of rounds, but decided that I'm sufficiently biased in favor of M. John Harrison et al to leave things unbalanced.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;">And having tabulated the score, I find that New Weird required no handicap, for it wins in a blowout, 10 points against Tolkien and Lovecraft, who tied 4-4.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;">At last, the world has an answer. Tolkien and Lovecraft are equally meritorious and equally deficient, while the New Weird smokes them both. You can't argue with the facts.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-large;">I'd like to close by acknowledging Emma Bull's story <i>Silver and Gold</i> as my favorite story that didn't win its round, so one might conclude that Tolkien does in fact outshine Lovecraft by a whisker. Thank you and good night.</span></p>Aaron Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02565494196338043466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15943614.post-81669116264702640812021-04-28T10:45:00.001-10:002021-04-28T10:45:28.558-10:00I don't Remember Why I Called This "Outlaws & Inlaws" (#24)<span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">From <i>Best American Short Stories</i>:</span><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>I Want to Live! </i>by Thom Jones: Mrs. Wilson is a grandmother with cancer. The narrator stays right in her thoughts, and we follow her sharp-witted battle against despair. She roils with the agonies and indignities of the sick body, then develops something resembling a religious conversion upon dipping into Schopenhauer. Family appears in a succession of walk-on roles, and a childhood memory of a rambunctious rooster arises from the swamp of memory to serve as her final vision of the life force doing its thing in the teeth of death's increasingly immanent inevitability. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">All this might sound like a dreadful slog, but the struggle between Mrs. Wilson's failing body and unfailing mind provides a literary liveliness. It reminds me of a discussion an old friend and I had about the contrast between reggae's upbeat music and often acerbic lyrics; my first awareness that the manner and the matter of a work of art could contrast in a way that makes engagement with that matter aesthetically invigorating.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>In the Gloaming</i> by Alice Elliot Dark: A handsome young man named Laird is dying of an unspecified ailment (apparently the TV movie adaptation names the culprit: AIDS) and living in his parents' comfy house, lovingly tended by his lonely mom and entirely avoided by his workaholic, emotionally sealed father. The story is told from the perspective of Janet, the mother, as she comes to realize that Laird is the true love of her life. The two develop a warm, cheerful, communicative closeness that blossoms in the evening, in the gloaming.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">As his condition declines, these conversational sessions fade, to Janet's despair. Memories of Laird seem to become piquant post-mortem memorials even while he's still alive. After the young man's death, an emotional fault line cracks open; devastating. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Dark tells the story plainly, with thoughtful, humorous but unshowy dialogue, and maintains a tone like a pellucid evening.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">From <i>Plays in One Act</i>:</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Heatstroke</i> by James Purdy: </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">In a tropical setting, a woman named Lily turns to eccentric Doctor Douglas for help with her chronic pain. His advice is startlingly impertinent, but she stays with him, because they have a common bond; they are both murderers, on the lam for their crimes of passion in the States. His prescription offers at least short-term respite for both of them.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">If you think the trouble with Tennessee Williams is that he didn't go bonkers enough, James Purdy is here to help. Intense passions and barmy dialogue coruscate like lightning across the stage. Pain and shame alchemically transmuted into camp gold.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, Part II</i> by Jonathan Reynolds. Australia, 1938: Lord and Lady Murdoch hope to win a spot for one of their sons at Eton or Harrow. Miss Fairchilderdern will evaluate the boys for admission, but it doesn't look good; she hates Australians. Two of the three sons shine at poetic recitation and interpretation, but little Rupert is a complete wash. Then, in a sudden, mystical overflow of theatrical magic, little Rupert's true talents emerge; talent for vicious, filthy, contemptuous bile with a lot of razzle-dazzle and populist appeal. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Since we can't put Rupert Murdoch in the stocks and pelt him with feces until he looks like a cheap, wailing candy bar, we'll have to mount productions of this play, instead, as the next best way to express the salvageable populace's loathing for him and his ilk.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">From <i>Interzone</i>:</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>On the Deck of the Flying Bomb</i> by David Redd: An enormous flying military vessel heads toward its target, for the vehicle is a bomb, and will explode upon arrival. The captain is merely a figurehead, with no authority whatsoever. Strict discipline and incompetence coexist, as no one aboard questions the nature of the assignment--after all, the ship is loaded with lifeboats--and no one has any true responsibility. But inside one of the lifeboats, a stowaway hides. His purpose is obscure, but he isn't a saboteur or enemy agent; he just wants to understand what's happening, and plans to escape in the lifeboat at an opportune time.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">In the curt, unstressed finale, our protagonist discovers that the lifeboats don't work, were never intended to work, and everyone on both sides will die in the ashes of this suicide mission. The parallels to nuclear armament are never less than clear. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">From <i>Calling the Wind</i>: </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Top of the Game</i> by John McCluskey, Jr.: Clarence "Thunderin'" Hurd, a professional basketball player, is about to break the late Alvin Tolbert's record as all-time American Basketball Federation scorer, but Hurd has the jitters and in game after game, he can't... quite... make... those crucial final shots. But this isn't his story; we only meet him in passing. It's the story of Roberta and Alvin Jr., the wife and son of the Alvin Tolbert, as they get escorted to game after game, and interviewed for various sports shows and segments. They hope that this pageant will end soon so they can go back to their regular lives. They're running out of patience with these proceedings, but the league implores them to keep showing up and doing interviews, so...</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Their memories of the husband and father who set the record are centered less on sports than on who he was in their lives. One overfamiliar version of this story would rip the lid off of what a scumbag the beloved athlete was, and play with the contrast between the man in public and the man at home, but McCluskey isn't writing prestige-cable melodrama. The family's high estimation of Tolbert has little to do with his accomplishment in the court, and much to do with his excellence as a family man. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">The tensions in the story aren't about anyone being a villain; everyone is friendly and good-hearted, but mother and son don't relish the obligation to go to game after game, interspersed with the interview circuit. They want to get back to their ordinary lives. Excellent quarantine reading.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Going to Meet Aaron</i> by Richard Perry: A disillusioned young man decides that peaceful protest isn't enough after living through the Mississippi Burning murders, and decides that terrorism is called for; strike back, make the white supremacist establishment afraid. He heads to a meeting with his co-conspirator, and remembers fragmentary events that have helped lead him here. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Our protagonist lives in an uneasy balance. He's devoted to the cause of civil rights; but he's also motivated by regret over an interracial romance he bungled. He knows his plan (blow up a bank) won't accomplish anything for the cause; it's an immoral moral act, but having committed to it, he won't back out. On his way to the deed, </span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">he buys a frozen treat from an older black man, who lays out a challenge to the very idea that meaningful change is possible. Tangled convictions collide with the futility of human endeavor.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">From <i>Outlaw Bible of American Fiction</i>:</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>The Way It Has to Be</i> by Breece D'J Pancake: A scruffy young couple is in conflict, because the guy wants to go murder another guy, because revenge. She would prefer he didn't. One of the many problems with revenge is that people who want it are insufferable and inconsiderate. Everybody suffers because this guy can't let things lie. Dusty small town roadside America is the setting, and Pancake captures it like a polaroid. Will our heroine break away from this useless man or will he shoot her for even considering it? Westerns and noir all distill down to a few taut, rich pages..</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>American Skin</i> by Don De Grazia: Three disgruntled military recruits discuss the possibility of going permanently AWOL. Two of them are skinheads, and one is a libertarian college boy who dropped out and enlisted as a whimsical prank, and now wants to split just as soon as he browbeats the other guys into being Objectivists. They resist, correctly, and one of them notices a picture in a student newspaper from the college boy's former Alma Mater. It's a picture of a pretty girl, and suddenly our observant hero knows exactly why he's going AWOL; to find that girl.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">This story captures the dissolute, improvisational combativeness of young male bull sessions; with freeze-dried talking points hastily thawed out, and ad-libbed retorts that may or may not force one's adversary to rethink their assumptions. But some people respond more to beauty than ideas.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>The Ceremony</i> by Weldon Kees: Some workers are digging a foundation when they discover that they're digging in a First Nation burial ground, so they stop, appalled at the thought o violating these ancient graves. The supervisor yells at them until they do exactly what they didn't want to, and they make a joke of it; a self-aware, ironical joke which reveals just how easily they sacrifice their qualms, and their respect for their predecessors, to the contrived urgencies of capitalism. It's a valid point, but this satirical setup/punchline won't entice me back for a second reading.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Terminal Lounge</i> by John Sayles: We spend a little time in the bar at a train station, listening to the regulars describing their lives of quiet desperation. A womanizer breaks it off with one of his squeezes on the grounds that he's getting married. A struggling salesman ruminates on the injustice of trying to make a living and a legacy when one is judged, not by one's life, but by one's most recent profits. Demotic barroom philosophizing that never seems bored or listless; powerful urgencies fuel the discourse. </span></div>Aaron Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02565494196338043466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15943614.post-46000861554036752722021-02-17T20:12:00.010-10:002021-07-30T07:44:40.243-10:00Tolkien Vs. Lovecraft Vs. New Weird rounds 13 thru 16<p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><span>T</span><span>he question of our times remains unanswered: is Tolkien better than Lovecraft? Or is the New Weird better than both? </span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Round 13! Karen Harber's <i>Up the Side of the Air</i> weighs in on behalf of </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Tolkien, with the story of a girl who gets apprenticed to an aging wizard, despite neither of them being very happy with the arrangement. Things work out the way every story about an old grump having to take care of a child works out, but along the way the girl stumbles across a magical secret not even the wizard knows, and then the wizard fights a sorcery duel and desperately needs his apprentice's (cheating) help. In the end, she saves the day by reusing a spell she got wrong in a new context where the mistake changes from a bug to a feature. The story also addresses basic sexism, arguing that females can be of use to males; very Booker T. Washington "cast down your bucket where you are" logic.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">It's not bad, but it colored within familiar lines. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">What about Lovecraft's champion for this round, acclaimed blackpill pusher Thomas Ligotti? His entry, <i>The Last Feast of Harlequin, </i>presents a cinema-ready spin on the old investigator-in-a-small-town-discovers-uncanny-horrors story.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">An anthropologist learns about a mysterious clown festival and a related unsolved murder in a small town, and thinks "I gotta investigate that." Lovecraft was a fan of anthropology (although I doubt a person with his low threshold for non-WASPs could have cut it in the field) and anthropologists, like detectives, have license to enter alien territory in search of hidden truths, so it makes sense to build a horror tale around an anthropologist. While I have no idea what a proper anthropologist would make of the protagonist's choices, Ligotti does portray the hero thinking about cultural investigation in a serious fashion, and realizing things I wouldn't have picked up on. For example, there are <i>two sets of clowns...</i> one set is a fig leaf of a response by upstanding citizens of the community to the second set; a desperate distraction from an unfaceable secret. It's a smart spin on the Wicker Man style "The whole community's in on the conspiracy" story. This time the whole community knows, but most of them dread it, and refuse to acknowledge the dire truth.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">I wrote about another Ligotti story, </span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221);">A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing</i><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221);">, </span><a href="https://butdonttrytotouchme.blogspot.com/2020/07/tolkien-vs-lovecraft-vs-new-weird.html" style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221);">earlier in this series</a><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221);">, and I didn't much like the one. I found it too evangelical, too overt in its peddling of Ligotti's nihilism. This story is rather similar, but it avoids overt messaging in at least two ways. Firstly, it allows narrative to work on its own terms, offering an engrossing story instead of a symbolist parade. </span></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">The second way requires some explanation. One question I think is worth asking about any horror story is: who's getting libeled? Texas Chainsaw Massacre libels poor rural workers. The Exorcist libels wayward teens and promiscuous youth culture, along with the mentally ill and the addicted (horror is multivalent, even in its libels). Lovecraft's own <i>The Call of Cthulhu</i> libels everybody who isn't white, since it claims that BIPOC people are hiding a god from the ofays. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">In <i>Last Feast of Harlequin</i>, Ligotti plays a witty trick: he libels himself. Nihilists are to blame. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">For the New Weird, K. J. Bishop offers <i>The Art of Dying</i>. A trio of celebrity adventurers in the urban imaginary struggle not against an assailant, but with the performative insistence by one of the crew that she, Mona, is sick to the point of death, a one-woman Munchausen-by-proxy that becomes a quartet, as she, her companions, and an intrusive young gossip columnist travel through town, seeking the right place to lie down for the last time. Spoiler: an obvious sacrificial lamb is selected to die in her place. While I doubt that Bishop is a Trump worshiper, the resolution of the story works in a way that will make sense to anyone with a MAGA cap.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The story reminded me of New Weird charter member M. John Harrison's novel <i>In Viriconium</i>, which also involves a sick socialite gradually giving up the ghost while her companions </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">shamble around a grotesque city and </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">try to aid her. Bishop may not take the sentence-by-sentence risks of the observationally acrobatic Harrison, but she keeps things darkly ambiguous; her loyalties are not obvious.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Verdict: I enjoyed Ligotti's gothic detective story most. Harber's mildly feminist wizard story felt like an overlong wikipedia synopsis of itself. I've read Bishop's story twice now and still can't make my mind up about it. Something about its climactic cruelty leaves me queasy, and while the story's ability to stir troubled ambiguities may be a mark of its power, I'm going to give the win to Team Lovecraft.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Round 14 begins with <i>The Naga </i>by Peter S. Beagle, author of <i>The Last Unicorn</i>. If you've read many myths and fairy tales, you've encountered stories of humans who find romance with a supernatural figure, and the troubles that rise from such forbidden pairings. This is one such, as a rather useless ruler marries a gorgeous woman who claims to be the human form of a shapeshifting creature known as a naga. She won't reveal her true appearance to him, but they agree that they will meet every night without fail, with death as the price of failure to abide by this vow. I thought I could see where this was going. I was wrong.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Enriched by her love, the ruler becomes a more compassionate and helpful ruler, but you can't please everyone, and a violent rebel faction creates very real danger for the ruler and his bride. The climax was an operatically emotional sequence that made me gasp, and almost brought me to tears. I am rarely so moved by prose. I don't trust emotional response as testimony to artistic merit; after all, in 2020 it doesn't take a lot to inspire a big rush of emotion. Still, I think my reaction had more than a little to do with Beagle's storytelling skill, and insight into love. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">For Lovecraft, it's James P. Blaylock, with <i>The Shadow on the Doorstep</i>. An enthusiast for aquariums and exotic fish relates how he keeps visiting squalid, short-lived aquarium stores that might be run by the same person... and might be up to something uncanny. There are, so far as I can tell, no overtly supernatural or horrific elements in this story; only suggestions and suspicions. Has our storyteller stumbled onto the fringes of a secret outpost of Innsmouth, Lovecraft's harbor town of human-fish hybrids, or is he pizzagating a respectable, if rundown, business? The recurring owner of these businesses is an asian man, or different asian men whom the narrator can't tell apart, so yellow peril is an ugly factor. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">I've read and enjoyed a novel by Blaylock (<i>The Last Coin</i>) which was an unabashed supernatural adventure in a whimsical contemporary mold; nothing in that treat of a novel prepared me for the diffuse melancholy of this submersion. If it weren't encased in a volume with a creepy monster on the cover, it would be possible to read this story and never realize that anything Lovecraftian was being invoked. A keenly observed tour of grubby business ventures, for those (like me) who are charmed by such things, and a tantalizing dance on the edge of paranoia.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">The New Weird shows up with <i>At Reparata</i>, by Jeffery Ford. Reparata is a palace founded by a wealthy eccentric, who has set himself up as ruler over a court peopled with derelicts whom the king adopted and ennobled. They've found that being gifted with titles and responsibilities which cater to their aspirations transfigures them into their best selves, and the community thrives, until the sad day when the Queen dies and the ruler sinks into misery. Through magic, his misery is siphoned from him in the form of an enormous mothlike creature, which flies about devouring almost everything. The obvious point, that one must learn to live with grief, since it cannot be removed, is detailed with deft storytelling, but more importantly, Ford depicts the role of the community in helping one to deal with grief. This is an unusual story for this anthology, in that it ends with optimism, community, and love.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Verdict: Wow, this is a competitive round. Beagle's <i>Naga</i> struck with the most force, Blaylock's<i> Shadow</i> crept quite stealthily, yet in the end, I find Ford's <i>Reparata</i> to be a revelation. It offers a vision of damaged people creating a working community, and working together through love and compassion; it's a vision that never feels false or cloying. It's a model of fantasy literature that suggests ways forward for society, and I for one feel the need for such.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Round 15: Mike Resnick tries to do right by Tolkien with <i>Revolt of the Sugar Plum Fairies</i>. A batch of tiny fairies arrives in a normal guy's modern home, vowing to take revenge on Walt Disney for misrepresenting them in Fantasia. The guy directs them to Tinseltown, and they leave. Then they return, having gone Hollywood. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Resnick spins jokey dialogue as if auditioning for a staff position on a 60s sitcom, and if you really like 60s sitcoms, you might enjoy this silly jape.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">For Lovecraft, Gene Wolfe brings <i>Lord of the Land</i>. Another anthropologist, this time interviewing a family of hill folk. One of them tells the anthropologist an enchanting tale of weirdness, but the earnest young scholar picks up on subtle social cues amongst the family that suggest the tale is a diversion, or a warning. There's something unhealthy in the family dynamic, and this stranger is about to face it if he doesn't skedaddle.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">"Compassion" isn't the watermark of most stories that end up in Lovecraft tribute anthologies, but Wolfe is a warm exception to that rule, and as in much great horror of the late 20th century, he bends scare-story tropes to acknowledge the hidden wounds of family abuse.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">The New Weird offers <i>Letters from Tainaron</i> by Leena Krohn. These epistles come to us from a traveler exploring the mores of a land where people's physical forms are in flux. The local culture is thick with secrets, taboos and folkways that are not for general distribution. It's all expressed in Calvinoesque slivers; traces of Barthes and Kafka are also evident, but Krohn's focus on metamorphosis goes further back, to an Ovid who is less concerned with love and desire than with the natural processes of life cycles, and how aging and death are absorbed into the roles we play in one another' lives.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Verdict: Given a choice between hillbilly horror or arty EuroFantastique, I am stymied, but this isn't a balanced consideration of differing but equal merits; it's a Smackdown, and the winner of this Smackdown Round is the New Weird, because each of its vignettes felt new-made yet deeply rooted, and also probably because I'm conflicted about Appalachian stuff, as a product of the American South, while I'm unconflicted in my enthusiasm for chilly European fantastic literature.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Round 16!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">In order to make the count round out correctly, Tolkien gets a twofer of tales set in elusive medieval dream realms. The first: <i>Winter's King</i> by Jane Yolen. After a troubled birth, a boy relies on caretakers who can't connect to the child; he is either a changing or autistic, depending on how you look at it (and I believe Yolen is building the story around the doubling of these perspectives). Finally, the child either dies of exposure or goes to meet the Elves of Winter for whom he is a figure of destiny. Yolen creates a double helix of tragedy and fulfillment, allowing the boy to be a simultaneous misfit and king. Irony and sincerity, sorrow and fulfillment, vie for control of the story, and the reader is the final judge.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Also for Tolkien, <i>Gotterdammerung</i> by Barry N. Malzberg. a party of adventurers petitions a wizard for help finding a lost magical ring. As in Tolkien, the ring has great power and carries heavy consequences. The wizard's principled refusal, and the adventurer's confusion, make it clear that this won't be a day of heroic triumph. But then things twist, and twist agin. Duplicity upon duplicity turns this into a cunning and rather noirish tale.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Both of these are brief and dense, like my favorite poems.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Lovecraft's champion is the remarkable Ramsey Campbell, with <i>The Faces at Pine Dunes,</i> about a family traveling around Britain in a camper, looking for the right community in which to settle. The parents have a grotesquely horrid marriage; their young adult son wants to break free from them, but his employment history hasn't panned out, so he's financially dependent on these loveless, toxic people. They settle in a town with a witchy forest, and the young man soon finds an okay job and a great girlfriend. He also begins to realize that his parents have deeper secrets than he could have guessed, and that they didn't come to this town by happenstance. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Rosemary's Baby</i> and <i>Young Goodman Brown</i> are in the mix of this story, which follows a Lovecraftian structure as the hero explores secrets rooted in eerie locations and twisted people. Horrifying reveals. Big monsters. Bad family dynamics taken to an occult extreme. Campbell may be unmatched among contemporary horror writers for his ability to set the scene. He describes locations with such fluid evocation that I can practically feel the damp, and his psychological acuity is a match for any number of <i>New Yorker</i> approved writers. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">The New Weird responds with <i>The Ride of the Gabbleratchet</i> by Steph Swainston. In this story, excerpted from a longer work, a trio of heroines teleport themselves from one world to another, fleeing an equally mobile enemy, The Gabbleratchet, which is essentially a zombified variant of the Wild Hunt. Swainston describes creatures like the Gabbleratchet with verve and vividness, but for me the shifting, whimsy-indulging tone caused the story to stall out quite a bit. I'm not one to insist on narrative momentum for its own sake, but indulgences need to pay off one way or another. In one world they meet Doggerel Dogs, who live up, or down, to their name. The payoff of Doggerel Dogs is that there are Doggerel Dogs.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">I'm not including them in this Smackdown, but the New Weird volume includes several essays about the subgenre, in one of which Swainston declares that "Elves were the first against the wall when the revolution came." This reader would gladly do a prisoner exchange; take back your doggerel dogs, and return the elves. Not that I'm a reactionary, but if the revolution is this close to being a direct-to-video Phantom Tollbooth sequel, I'm not interested.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Tolkein's reps are strong, but Lovecraft wins this round, by virtue of locations so foggy they practically dampened my clothes, and characters I'd skirt around down at pub. The big finish has an infodump quality, but loads on horror after family horror enough to bind bad parents with cosmic nihilism in ways that make far too much sense.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Next time is the last time for this series. Take good care til then!</span></p>Aaron Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02565494196338043466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15943614.post-51966506394681446262020-12-17T20:33:00.009-10:002020-12-25T14:41:58.632-10:00Outlaws & In-laws 23<span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">I anticipate that this reading project will be concluded before journalists start writing about "Biden's first 100 days" if I can pick up the pace. </span><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">From <i>Plays in One Act</i>:</span></h3><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><i>The Last Yankee </i>by Arthur Miller: Two men in a waiting room at a psychiatric hospital; their wives are patients. One of the men, with the confidence of the well-to-do, forces a subtly judgmental conversation with the more taciturn guy, the titular last Yankee (so called because of his blue blood ancestry, though he's a proud working class carpenter rather than an aristo). Finally, the last Yankee loses his temper and speaks his mind. Then he apologizes. After all, with his wife in the hospital, he's been a bit on edge... </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">It's not about theatrical fireworks; the author of <i>The Crucible</i> and <i>Death of a Salesman</i> wants a surface of restraint laid over increasingly agitated class tensions. </span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">The play monochromatic by design. Can you ask people to leave the house and pay money to see two uneasy aging white men be restrained at each other? I am an uneasy aging white man, and I'm not eager to have such tasteful representation.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><i>Tone Clusters</i> by Joyce Carol Oates: A young man who is credibly accused of murdering a girl; his parents furiously insist upon their son's innocence. This is presented in the form of a jarringly formalist interview; the unseen interviewer shifts bewilderingly from Voice-of-God pronouncements on broad themes to direct questioning, all of which is accompanied by journalistic imagery on various screens surrounding the luckless parents. Oates' relish for the thrillingly distressing details of men murdering women gets an extended workout. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">This is the first of two plays to include notes on the acting style. The parents' dialogue is written in a tremblingly sincere fashion, yet Oates instructs "The actors must conceive of themselves as elements in a dramatic structure, not as 'human characters' wishing to establish rapport with an audience." Further instructions insist that the entire production need not provide an emotional connection between the distressing narrative and the production itself. Doubtless in any production the story will exert its gravitational pull on the audience's attention, which allows the cast to employ a wide range of alienation devices. Perhaps many texts could be produced in such a fashion, running narrative and production on separate tracks (Grotowski's Poor Theatre made a mission of it), but this text is designed for that. Oates' play could probably work with a more traditional presentation, though, because the subject is gripping; parents in denial of their child's (likely) crime.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><i>A Bond Honored</i> by John Osborne:"The acting style is hard to discover or describe... it must be extremely violent, pent-up, toppling on and over the edge of animal howlings and primitive rage. At the same time, it should have an easy, modern naturalness, even in the most extravagant or absurd moments."</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">This play, adapted from a play by one Lope de Vega (with which I have no familiarity) is an outlandish tale of a relentlessly confrontational, cruel, dangerous man who is piteously in love with his sister. His sister casts him out of her life, and he ends up in Moorish lands living as a nominally Islamic person. He's still the same wayward scumbag, yet his hollowness starts to eat at him, and he has a confrontation with a mysterious shepherd who offers him a way out....</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">This play is wildly insensitive, and as intense as a welding torch. All the characters seem, at first, to be clearly defined types, yet as they constantly renegotiate their standing in life they reveal facets and possibilities that challenge the steady-state idea of personality. Beyond the power struggles, some of the characters consistently try to make life better for those around them, and they are rewarded accordingly. As with Marlowe's Faustus, this is a morality play in which the strong implication is that some people are truly lost souls, and cannot be saved.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">From <i>Interzone</i>:</span></h3><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><i>The Monroe Doctrine </i>by Neil Ferguson: In the wake of Reagan's presidency, this author imagines Marilyn Monroe in the Oval Office; not the real, insecure and drug distorted Monroe, but a silver-screen dream of the wise fool who incandesces every room she enters, and wins people over with endless charm. It's a story where things flow; connections are loose, but Monroe's allure cuts through the haze and binds things. It's a dream of an end to confrontational politics, and a flip-side version of Trump's meat headed belief that his own larger-than-life personality is the key to solving intractable problems.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><i>Angel Baby</i> by Rachel Pollack: A high school girl has an overwhelming, traumatizing encounter with an angel, a masculine figure that tears the skein of reality and refocuses her life. She anticipates his return, and believes she must be ready for him... but how? There's no instruction manual for such a thing. Her waiting isn't at all passive; she's constantly seeking a companion to help her in this secret spiritual practice, and clues about what she should do to prepare for the angel's return. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">I'm reminded of Susan Sontag's journals, in which she laments the difficulty of finding companions who don't disappoint her with intellectual laziness. The story also recalls M. John Harrison's numinous story <i>A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium: </i>a rethink of all those fantasy tales in which someone from our world discovers a passage to a magical land. In Harrison's version of the trope, a small coterie of misfits tries to Qanon its way to a fantastical land which can allegedly be reached through hidden portals in modern London. Though they scramble to find, or to understand, those portals, they are immersed in modern quotidian life, seeking some barely accessible and poorly understood transcendence. Pollack is more merciful to her protagonist; the clue is in the title. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">From <i>Calling the Wind</i>:</span></h3><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><i>Zazoo</i> by Larry Duplechan: Zazoo, an adolescent "sissy," and his disapproving younger brother visit some family in the country, chief among them a cousin who is a budding man's man, strong and outdoorsy, a hunter, tough yet warm and compassionate. Zazoo is utterly smitten, and will endure the dirty outdoors, the indignity of exercise, the nausea of animal slaughter, and his brother's scorn, if it means he can bask in his cousin's masculine glory. The country setting is vivid, and renders Zazoo's loathings and yearnings equally vivid. Zazoo's brother idealizes and aspires to their cousin's easy masculinity, yet misses the easy acceptance, shading into grace, that the cousin offers to both the brothers. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">The climax of the story is an frank erotic encounter that could theoretically get someone in trouble, given the youth of the boys involved, but it plays not as pornography, but an expression of the cousin's easy nobility; a generous gift from one for whom everything comes easy, to one for whom everything comes hard. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><i>Guess Who's Coming to Seder</i> by Trey Ellis: A dialogue in which the situation is revealed gradually, and elliptically; the reader is advised to keep notes on the cast of characters. A young Jewish woman is dating a young black man, and their families are meeting for Seder. Most of the adults in the room are on their best behavior, but the very oldest and the very youngest compete to see who can be the most hilariously terrible. The oldest lady wins that competition, having a lifetime's supply of prejudices and grievances to draw upon, as well as bratty petulance to match anything the kids throw at her. Embarrassment all around, and we see just how difficult it will be to merge these families... yet it's not hopeless, and one senses that Ellis is chuckling, if ruefully. At the end, a late arrival dovetails near-perfectly with the Seder ceremony; the latecoming boyfriend arrives in the role of Elijah and the day is saved.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">From <i>Best American Short Stories</i>:</span></h3><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><i>You're Ugly, Too</i> by Lorrie Moore: A female history professor in a midwestern liberal arts college (Called Hillsdale-Versailles, a brilliant summation of the simultaneous grand aspirations and regional ordinariness that pervade small colleges) can't quite get her social/dating life together. Every boyfriend seems cool at first but lets her down hard, and her students can't understand her awkward whimsies (singing "Getting to Know You" in its entirety on the first day of class, for example). Her best friend is her sister in New York, but even that relationship has troubling riptides. Eventually our hapless heroine ends up at one of her sister's parties, getting set up with another absurdly unsuitable guy. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">This is a story full of jokes, and also about jokes; the ways we try, and fail, to use humor for its theoretical purpose: to communicate and connect. Moore is much funnier and more entertaining than most of the would-be funny genre writers whom I've been enduring in my other little blog series, yet her story is saturated with melancholy. Her heroine's jokes are witty, but don't land; she's trying to communicate with people who aren't wired to receive her signals. Instead of lightening awkward social situations, her jokes just make them weirder. At the climax, she embodies Freud's famous assertion that jokes express real aggression. "It was just a joke."</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">From <i>The Outlaw Bible of American Literature</i>: </span></h3><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><i>Dogs of God</i> by Pinckney Benedict: Three truckers decend a sharp, long incline. One of them starts to slide. It gets hairy, then it gets scary. On the evidence of this excerpt, I dare say Pinckney Benedict teaches the reader as much about trucking as Melville does whaling. Also, the excerpt ends with a nice conflict over nervous smiles, and how easily our social cues, and interpretations of same, can go awry. I recently lost an uncle who hd been a trucker. He once told me he'd seen terrible things on the road, "but you drive fifty miles on, drive a hundred miles, and try to forget it." I wonder if he ever read Benedict.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><i>Escape From Houdini Mountain</i> by Pleasant Gehman: A brief excerpt, wickedly describing and deriding a blowsy down-at-heels woman. Purposefully mean, yet subtly appreciative. A möbius strip blending mockery and identification. Layered and forceful.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><i>The Car</i> by Harry Crews: A reminiscence about cars, the relationships that happened in and around the cars, the devoted labor that went into the cars (including more coats of paint than I would have imagined were necessary), ending with an explanation for the narrator's loss of faith in the transcendence of cars.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">I find Crews hypnotic; he has a knack for perfect details, and prose that renders everything in a conversational yet extraordinary fashion.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><i>Drugstore Cowboy</i> by James Fogle: A trio of drug-addled thieves have accidentally killed somebody. In the wake of this disaster, their relationships get reshuffled, with ramifications for business, friendship, and romance. Being good, or bad, at crime is like being good, or bad, at any other employment. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><i>This Outlaw Shit </i>by Waylon Jennings: Jennings shares anecdotes about country music as lived from outside the Nashville Sound. I like best his subtle interrogation of historical outlaws, whom he deems contemptible thugs, and "outlaws." I like least his ungentlemanly kissing and telling.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><i>Love All the People </i>by Bill Hicks: Like a lot of snotty Gen X white boys, I adored Hicks, and have only come to understand how problematic a fave he is after seeing my Twitter timeline overflow with Millennials itemizing his sins, most of which can be tracked back to his hurt feelings cloaked in flamboyant nihilism. Tell you what; I'll give up my Hicks when ya'll give up your favorite transphobic writer (you know the one.) </span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">Actually, reading transcriptions of Hicks' ranting, without the benefit of his snarling Texas voice, leaves me wondering why I thought so highly of him. Lashing out the way he does seems like a strong move, when one is weak; explains why so many weak and frightened people take Trump's childish tough-guy pretending seriously. But in these excerpts, Hicks lays into unworthy targets. Fantasizing about doing violence to dull pop singers isn't exactly punching up, no matter how unavoidable their tunes are.</span></div>Aaron Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02565494196338043466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15943614.post-62352155618911053932020-09-17T07:52:00.011-10:002021-02-17T18:39:21.132-10:00Tolkien Vs. Lovecraft Vs. New Weird Smackdown rounds 10 thru 12, Amirite?<p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Pull up a chair, won't you? We've got to decide which branch of fantasy fiction has borne the sweetest fruit, and we can't do it without <i>you</i>, dear reader.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Round 10! Charles De Lint steps up for Tolkien, with a vignette titled <i>The Conjure Man</i>. I dunno if Neil Gaiman was singlehandedly responsible for the 90s trope of unhoused people being represented as majickal Wise Ones guiding seekers to fantastical truths, but he popularized it, and here's Charles de Lint taking it out for a spin. The young female protagonist meets a Shaman of the Street who doesn't seem to have any pressing problems, other than that someone cut down a big beautiful tree to which he liked to whisper stories. The wisdom he has to offer the heroine, and the reader, is "You guys... <i>trees!</i> and <i>stories! amirite?</i>" So she plants a tree and tells it stories and gets a thumbs-up from the happy-go-lucky unhoused guy. Fin.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">"Magical guru shaman" may be an improvement on the other models genre fiction has for unhoused people, like "Scary zombie," but while it might humanize them a bit, it doesn't do a good job of addressing real needs for real people, or even suggesting that we should. Beyond that, this story is an endorsement of trees and stories. I, too, value trees and stories.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Lovecraft is represented, or at least referenced, by Bruce Sterling, with a story called <i>The Unthinkable</i>. Two diplomats, one Russian, one American, relax together after the end of the Soviet Union, and ponder what the future holds for humankind. But this is an alternate Earth where magic takes the place of technology, in the same manner that dinosaurs replace electricity in <i>The Flintstones</i>. The Russian guy lives in a Baba Yaga hut, and the fridge has a tiny frost imp keeping things cool. The punch line unites Lovecraft's nihilistic cosmology with the atom bomb in a way that brings home, for me, the existential threat of nuclear weapons like nothing else I've read or seen.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">It's very similar to the story <i>The Dragon of Tollin</i> by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, <a href="https://butdonttrytotouchme.blogspot.com/2020/01/tolkien-vs-lovecraft-vs-new-weird.html">which appeared earlier in this Smackdown,</a> but I prefer Sterling's rendition of the "Monster symbolizes nukes" notion for two reasons:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">1. It's concise. Scarborough belabors her point like an unsilenceable drunk cornering you at a party; Sterling compresses his into a phrase, and lets you figure out the ramifications.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">2. Presenting nukes as a dragon makes it seem manageable. Presenting nukes as gods of utter doom reframes it nicely, challenging blasé assumptions about our ability to manage the problem.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Okay, on to the New Weird, with Jeffrey Thomas and his story <i>Immolation</i>.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">In a future where engineered and enslaved homunculi (called cultures) do jobs in extreme conditions that human bodies can't withstand, a culture named Magnesium Jones goes rogue, and gets caught up in an altercation between the bosses and the unions. Unions hate the homunculi for the same reason real world unions aren't fans of automation; they "take" peoples' jobs. There are racial implications here as well; the union views the cultures as machines, rather than fellow workers trapped in second-class citizen status.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Thomas doesn't presume to resolve these issues; instead, he sketches the complexity of race and labor struggles in a story that, beneath the science-fantasy element, is a noir. And a mighty tasty noir, at that. Thomas describes things with a concise vividness that recalls pulp writers from Raymond Chandler to Jack Vance. It's tough; it's bright.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">So who wins this round? Not poor sleepwalking Team Tolkien. Team Lovecraft comes forth with a thoughtful wit that Lovecraft himself could never manage, and leverages Lovecraft to wake this reader up to the total nature of the nuclear threat. Thomas turns in a thrilling crime story that never speechifies, but reveals the ways power maintains itself by turning demographics against one another. Lets give it to The New Weird.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Round 11!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Tolkien might be surprised to be represented by Dennis L. McKiernan, whose claim to fame is that he tried to get the Tolkien estate to approve his <i>Lord of the Rings</i> fan fiction as an authorized sequel, and they told him to buzz off. They made the right call, if his story <i>Halfling House</i> is representative. The eponymous House is an inn for small faerie folk; it travels through space, in magical and random fashion, just like the TARDIS in <i>Dr Who</i>. I'm an easy mark for cozy domiciles that are also fantastical conveyances, especially with an ensemble cast, but this story is overstuffed with jokes. Lots of jokes. Oh, those jokes. The story's almost 30 pages long. It should be about 8.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Anyhow, the fair folk wind up trying to rescue a pair of their number from enslavement in an opium den, a mimeograph of Sax Rohmer's discarded drafts. Not content with lazy racism against Asian people, McKiernan sweetens the pot with some doltish victim-blaming of drug addicts. "I raged against the sheer stupidity of <i>anyone</i> who would get addicted to <i>anything</i>, whether it be narcotics or illusion or drink or pipeweed or <i>anything</i>." Thanks for the considered social commentary. Also, there's a female character whose personality is to take offense at things the male protagonist says (because girls, amirite?), and then to be all flirty and kissy face with him (because male writers, amirite?). After 30 pages of this crapola, I was raging against the sheer stupidity of the author. Seriously, they couldn't get Guy Gavriel Kay?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Team Lovecraft rolls out one of its pride and joys, T. E. D. Klein, with a story warningly titled <i>Black Man With a Horn</i>.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">An elderly, forgotten pulp writer meets a frightened missionary on the run from an isolated (fictional) Malaysian tribe called the Tcho-Tcho. The Tcho-Tcho is associated with a murderous monster that looks human, with black skin and a large protrusion from its face. In an elegant and knowing reworking of <i>The Call of Cthulhu</i>'s complex plot, the protagonist stumbles across research materials that suggest this monster situation runs deep, and is more than a legend. There's a surface narrative in the world we know, and a submerged narrative of monstrosity. It's a bit like mystery structure, except where a mystery ends with the apollonian folding together of two layers (the mystery seen from without, and the true nature of the situation), this story threatens to have one layer pierce the other, the same threatened trauma that one finds in Lovecraft. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Another thing one finds in Lovecraft is dumb reactionary racism, and this is another tradition Klein seems proud to follow. <a href="https://butdonttrytotouchme.blogspot.com/2016/10/horror-vs-europe-part-3.html">I've written about Klein</a> and how he is, on the evidence of his fiction, a straight-up racist, but I hoped this story would show him reconsidering his lethally white supremacist views. Nope. His defenders will try to pass it off as an unreliable narrator situation, but with an unreliable narrator, the author shows us the light shining through the narrator's tattered thinking. Poe lets us know that the narrator of <i>The Telltale Heart</i> is indeed mad; Nabokov shows us that the ceaselessly self-justifying Humbert Humbert's paraphilia and misanthropy ruin the lives of people around him. But Klein only ever shows black people as, at best, creepy and unsettling. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Another possible defense of Klein; in both this story and the one I've reviewed before, <i>Children of the Kingdom</i>, black people are a bit of a red herring; initially presented as the cause of the threat, while the actual problem is a nonhuman monster. Trouble is, Klein seems fully committed to the idea that black people are little more than a social ill. The reveal isn't that black people are maligned in error, but that they're not the problem... this time. He utterly denies the common humanity of black people.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Klein doesn't seem to write anymore. I've read two stories by him, and it seems that's about a quarter of his total fictional output. I've checked out a few interviews with him to see if he's got anything more or better to say on the subject of race, but none of his oddly fawning interviewers dare, or care, to raise the subject, even though it's a big part of his fiction. In a recent episode of a podcast called <a href="http://www.scottedelman.com/2018/05/02/share-a-pastrami-sandwich-with-t-e-d-klein-in-episode-65-of-eating-the-fantastic/">Eating the Fantastic</a>, the host asks Klein what kind of periodical he'd like to edit, and Klein answers that he'd favor a politically incorrect right-wing magazine. Stay blocked, Klein.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">For the New Weird we have <i>The Lizard of Ooze</i>, by Jay Lake. the title had me worried; visions of Xanth danced in my head, and I don't need that. The story's better than Piers Anthony's jejune japery, but I don't want to damn it with such faint praise. It's a romp that puts a sprightly spin on sword & sorcery fooferall.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">This is a vision of contemporary America, but dotted with cities hanging on risers from the interior of great pits, rather like cliff dwellings. Once such city is Ooze, and it reveres a giant magical lizard which lives at the bottom of the pit. Our hero, a sort of ninja cop who guards order in Ooze, guides an odd messenger to the bottom of the pit. It's an adventure, with an exciting fight scene at the bottom, and some vivid, if silly, worldbuilding, fit for an antic computer game. A bowl of ice cream.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Verdict: Tolkien's representative doesn't pass muster, at all, at all. Lovecraft's is almost great, a master class in structuring a persuasive uncanny tale, and prose so schooled in what they used to call slick writing that horror fans think Klein's a master prosesmith, but I'm disqualifying this entry for racism of such pitch and intensity that I can't in good conscience factor it out. That leaves Lake, who tells a diverting tale without being an overt racist and therefor triumphs over his competition.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Round 12, which happily is more competitive than the last!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">For Tolkien, Emma Bull with <i>Silver or Gold</i>. Alder Owl, the village witch, goes on a quest to rescue a missing prince. Moon Very Thin, her youthful assistant, remains behind to help tend to needs around the village, such as birthing cattle. Every night, Moon uses a scrying spell to determine if Owl is well or not. Soon, Owl is not, and Moon is compelled to leave her village in search of her beloved mentor. Soon, she is drawn into the search for that lost Prince. Along the way she must discover the answer to a running debate she had with Owl; should the four elements of earth, air, fire & water be honored and invoked in separate magics, as is traditional, or treated as aspects of one holistic totality, as Moon intuits?</span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">I tried to read Emma Bull's beloved first novel, <i>War For the Oaks</i>, once, and while I greatly admired her vivid descriptions and propulsive narrative, the story indulged daydreams that I had insufficient patience for ("Oh no, two hot elf boys are fighting over their love for me! Whatever shall I do? At least our band <i>rawks</i>"). I can't hate, but I couldn't quite make it to the end. It seems she got the raw Mary Sueishness out of her system, though; <i>Silver or Gold</i> is a mature work, circling around familial loss and community building while saving the daydream fulfillment for the very end (a prince marries a village witch? Really? Okay sure fine.) It's the kind of psychologically focused, eventful journey through dense wilderness and magnificent palaces that this fantasy fan eats with a spoon. </span></div><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Lovecraft gives us <i>Love's Eldritch Ichor</i> by Esther M. Friesner. A romance publishing company has acquired a promising first-time novelist, but this publisher is a chiseling operation that wants to exploit and underpay. The young woman's editor, who's comically cowardly and cowed by the domineering lead editor, falls in love with his charge, and tries to make everyone happy. It can't be done, of course, since "mercilessly exploit this woman's labor" and "Protect this woman from exploitation" are irreconcilable. Happily, the novelist has other, more powerful allies in her family, who are a Lovecraftian riff on the Munsters.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Get ready for more jokes! Jokes, jokes, jokes. Freisner's better at them than is McKiernan, but then, so are you, dear reader. She aspires to do a Warner Brothers style cartoonishness, every human (or monster) behavior carried to extravagant exaggeration. It's a tough thing to pull off in prose, and while for this reader the results are hit and miss, Freisner gets within hailing distance of Tex Avery and P. G. Wodehouse. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">The New Weird offers <i>Watson's Boy</i> by Brian Evenson. A young man lives with his parents in a hermetically sealed, windowless, exitless labyrinth of hallways and rooms and locked doors. There are keys in many of the rooms, along with other, more obviously useless things. The boy explores the structure, collecting keys. He wears a suit of hooks upon which he hangs the keys; we are told on the first page that one day the weight of the accumulating keys will surely break his back. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">The family's basic needs are all provided for, but no one else is to be found in the structure, and none of the keys seem to match any of the doors. Still, there's more to explore, although it is endlessly repetitive, like an 80s electronic game. Mother is an unspeaking invalid, defined largely by her frailty. Father drifts about, not doing much of anything, but trying to offer his son some elliptical guidance, all of which is either too tentative or too doltish to be of any help to a boy with an autistic focus on key collection and door attempting. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">I was reminded of austere European art writers from Beckett, to Klossowski, to the Oulipo writers. In other words, fantasy fan catnip, amirite? The structure of the environment and the structure of the story mirror one another, and recall Gormenghast, although that dire palace was technically open to the outside world, and full of surface variety; it was the stagnant culture that rendered it hopeless. In <i>Watson's Boy</i>, the family is literally trapped, with only a vestigial sense that escape is possible. Will they find escape? Will the boy's back be broken by his compulsive accumulation of seemingly useless keys? The story uses ambiguous tension and subtle narrative variety to keep one reading through a seemingly monotonous situation, until a conclusion that is both surprising and logical. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Verdict: Team Tolkien finally gets its act together; I want more of Emma Bull, who offers hope for new growth, while Evenson shows us a situation in which new growth will be too misdirected to bear fruit. Between the two of them, they offer powerful glimpses of the most hopeful and most hopeless aspects of life. </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">In between, we have jokes about Lovecraftian gods having to share a hotel room.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Well! The New Weird certainly handled itself best across the board. Emma Bull shone while her fellow Tolkien types bumbled and bored. Team Lovecraft was sometimes powerful, sometimes cheesy, and sometimes racist, just like Lovecraft himself. By the way there's gonna be 6 more rounds of this, and then we'll know for sure what kind of fantasy literature is THE BEST. Can't wait.</span></p>Aaron Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02565494196338043466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15943614.post-23169348819901052262020-08-23T09:35:00.396-10:002020-09-08T05:36:26.007-10:00Installment 22 Outlaws and In-laws<p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Little by little, we're nibbling our way through a batch of anthologies.</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">From <i>The Outlaw Bible of American Literature:</i></span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Taxi Driver</i> by Paul Schrader. Excerpted scenes from the screenplay for the legendary film reveal that it's rich in novelistic interior descriptions that all the "How to write a screenplay on your lunch break" books I read in Tarantino's 90s anathematized. More interestingly, it's a sharp look at gun fetishization. Travis Bickle at the gun range struggles to withstand the kick from the Colt he's using, "as if each recoil from the giant gun was a direct attack on his masculinity." Asked about his Vietnam service, he says "They'd never get me to go back. They'd have to shoot me first." Yet he's not walking a path of peace; he's planning to shoot rather than be shot. One slippery slope of gun preoccupation; seeing everything in terms of shoot or be shot. Just ask those fearful, racist "gun couple" twerps. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Thieves' Market </i>by A. I. Bezzerides: Early morning at the harbor, Nick, a weary truck driver waits for the banks to open so he can cash a check. Meantime, Tex, a sex worker he desires, keeps him company. She makes a sad but strong case that she's better off in this line of work than she was as a low-paid and sexually harassed office worker; as an independent businessperson she sets her own terms. If you've ever had to stay awake all night in a humble part of town, you'll feel that desperate buzz in your head, and that unwholesome film on your skin, all over again, reading this. Don't trust her, Nick!</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Dark Passage</i> by David Goodis: a guy goes to an underground cosmetic surgeon to get a new face. Once anesthetized, he dreams of circus acrobatics, and the dream has a perfect stunner of a punchline. I want to have lunch with the surgeon; I want him to say lines like "I have my own method. I perfected it twelve years ago. It's based on the idea of calling a spade a spade. I don't monkey around" while I enjoy a club sandwich.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Really the Blues</i> by Mezz Mezzrow: a memoir. Jazz clarinetist Mezzrow laments the takeover of the jazz performance scene by mobsters. Having lived around it, instead of seeing daydream versions of it on the screen, he has zero sentimentality about organized crime, and makes it clear that the scene was a place of legitimate terror. He writes with a rich purple prose that's like salt-and-vinegar nuts; compulsive. "Nobody was safe in this funky jungle... they'd put their dirty grabbers on the one good thing left on earth, our music, and sucked it down into the mud with them."</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Angels of Catastrophe</i> by Peter Plate: Durrutti, a drug enthusiast with a serious police problem, tries to score a little something to take the edge off from a pair of gender-nonconforming entrepreneurs, then gets very much stoned and has what is probably a real conversation with an associate who casually confesses to helping kill a cop, the death of whom is causing Durrutti's most pressing issues. The so-called friend refuses to offer any help or advice in this matter, insisting on an every-man-for-himself rugged individualism that is of no earthly use. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">Once more I was intrigued by compellingly sketched side characters: the drug-dealing couple are a sympathetic, though unsentimentalized, trans pairing, struggling along and being the gruff goddesses they know themselves to be. Author Plate makes the cis mistake of being fixated on trans peoples' genitals, but seems to want to give affirming representation.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>The Man With the Golden Arm</i>: a peek into the mind of a guilty police captain. What's he guilty about? We don't find out in this excerpt, but "guilt like a dark bird perched forever near, so bald and wingless and cold and old, preening its dirty feathers with an obscene beak." Sounds bad! The captain is 100% committed to the carceral state, but has only just realized that, by his worldview, he deserves to be incarcerated. Perhaps one value of guilt-inducing religions is that they inoculate members against such late-in-the-day realizations. Of course you're just as bad as everyone else!</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>The Big Hunger</i> by John Fante: Someone in town is filching laundry off the drying line, and the protagonist finds himself sneaking after his gun when he realizes the villain is filching his wife's underwear. This time what ensues isn't hard-boiled crime, but good clean humor, fit for the Saturday Evening Post. A pleasant change of pace that still manages some real suspense, but I'm not sure what landed it in a volume with Outlaw in the title. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>The Asphalt Jungle</i> by W. R. Burnett: A cop browbeats, and beats, and terrifies, a (100% guilty) conspirator into rolling on his crew. It seems to help that they know each other, and have had a cordial relationship heretofore; makes the abuse more of a shock, and the mook more pliable. The cop is a bully, but he's in total control of himself, never giving in to any urge to brutalize for the sick joy of it; keeping his foe guessing and way off balance. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>The Getaway Man</i> by Andrew Vachss: A getaway driver prepares for a big dangerous robbery, then does that robbery. He customizes the car, and functions as part of a tight-knit team. It's a grungy thrill ride, and a celebration of criminals with work ethics.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">From <i>Plays in One Act</i>:</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Prelude and Liebstod </i>by Terrance McNally: (Content warning: suicide) A brilliant orchestra conductor oversees a performance of a Wagner song. Most of the play is his internal monologue, with interjections from such observers and participants as his wife; the singer; an instrumentalist; and a lustful fan. The conductor is a manic perfectionist, seeking orgiastic extremes of pleasure through exquisitely realized musical performance, and sexual adventurism. He's loveless, cruel, narcissistic and disgusted with life's inability to fulfill his cravings. He drives his performers to do their best work, but he's planned for this night to be his final achievement. In the time-honored fashion of overwrought opera and uninspired student writing, it ends with a surprise suicide. As doltish as I find shocker suicide endings, the play is a remarkable construction, with sick humor transitioning into near-tragic pathos and back again. The conductor's erotic memories go so crazily far, and his hopeless decadence is so unsustainable, that he's fascinating, even if, like me, you find him repellant, a conclusion that is by no means forced by the play. McNally (recently dead of Covid, sadly) lets you evaluate this flawed figure and consider whether it isn't better to be an easily satisfied mediocrity. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Camp Cataract</i>, adapted by Joseph McPhillips from a story by Jane Bowles: Harriet, difficult and anxious, retreats from her quarrelsome home life to a resort campground, on her family's dime. One of her sisters, Sadie, is a clueless daydreamer who wants Harriet back home, not because Harriet makes anything nicer, but because Sadie's sense of the fitness of things demands that family all in one place. Harriet's frantic navel-gazing monologues go down real smooth with Beryl, an adoring butch server at the camp cafeteria. Beryl tries to run interference when Sadie violates strict orders and shows up at the camp, trying feebly to woo Harriet back home so normal life, more lovely in Sadie's dreams than in reality, can resume. Bowle's work reminds me of Edward Albee and John Waters, so if you're interested in bringing a particularly acerbic variety of that sensibility to your local stage, consider this representation of bewildered lesbian hopelessness.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Waking Woman</i> by Cassandra Medley: An African-American woman pays a visit to a recently widowed neighbor, but instead of offering more than cursory comfort, immediately proceeds to deliver a lengthy monologue about a local teen girl who is pregnant out of wedlock, thanks in large part to the girl's Mom raising the child without sexual information. A fond tribute to the storytelling prowess and complex social observations of African-American women, <i>Waking Women</i> is also an angry critique of the way abstinence-only education denies the chaotic complexity of human sexual urges, and causes more problems (and out-of-turn pregnancies) than it prevents. Religious fundamentalism is contrasted with a less doctrinaire and more accepting Christian faith. It doesn't play like a speech, but like a normal person who can't wait to tell us about a family tragedy in a comic mode. I bet it can really sing in performance.</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">From <i>Calling the Wind</i>:</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Her Mother's Prayers</i> <i>on Fire</i> by Don Belton: A mid-century female song-and-dance crew is poised for mass success, but it all may be about to shatter. Their success is due in part to talent and hard work, but also to criminal connections. Lifelong friendships are under strain, as the lead singer takes up with the group's new mobster manager, to the terror of her cohorts. Belton captures the complex ebb and flow of old friends who have worked and played together, and emotionally supported each other, for their entire lives, yet find circumstances testing their unity. The story is a hard stare at the way people can blow their lives up for a bad whim, or a bad man. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Wings of the Dove</i> by Hal Bennett: A great woman of the civil rights struggle is very old, enthusiastic about Reagan, and suspected to be not long for the world. A white preacher who was once active in civil rights alongside her, but has drifted into the big white church ghetto, comes a'calling, and invites himself to a dinner or three, reveling in soul food that he hasn't enjoyed in decades. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><a href="https://butdonttrytotouchme.blogspot.com/2016/11/horror-vs-europe-part-5.html">I once reviewed a story called Orphan and the Mob by Julian Gough</a>, and Gough's advice to writers was "don't copy Henry James; copy The Simpsons." I think both James and the Simpsons are worth having in your toolkit, but Hal Bennett was doing Simpsons-esque comedy back when the cartoon was a time-filler on Tracey Ullman. Sardonic characters bounce off one another, critiquing one another's folly without violating a sense of community; a community that vibrates with the energy of mutually assured mockery. I'm particularly fond of a lovably pretentious would-be chronicler who slips his own hobbyhorses into the mouths of others. In his account, people interrupt themselves to denounce <i>The Color Purple</i> with suspect timing and vigor. By the end of the story, the grand old woman is vigorously alive, announcing that "I have decided not to die after all," and the white preacher is still slurping at his fried chicken in a way that grosses everybody out.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">From <i>Best American Short Stories of the Twentieth Century</i>:</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Meneseteung</i> by Alice Munro: In a nineteenth century Canadian frontier town, a woman writes pleasant poetry and enjoys a tentative courtship with a respectable businessman who doesn't really understand the poetry thing, but can speak learnedly about salt mining. The gossipy yet restrained local newspaper plays Greek chorus. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">I'm intrigued by the structure, which Munro divides into 6 discrete chapters:</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">1. The narrator describes a volume of 19th century poetry, with a biographical sketch of the poet.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">2. A description, based upon contemporary newspaper accounts, of the rough and dusty frontier town in which the heroine lived.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">3. An (imagined?) account of the heroine's chaste and diffident courtship by an entrepreneur in salt.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">4. We learn about the courser side of town, which abuts the heroine's house. A distressing confrontation, possibly a crime. The owner of the salt mine comes to provide a harsh resolution, and attempts to deepen his acquaintance of the distressed poet.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">5. Under the influence of nerve tonic, our heroine skips church and has a succession of visions which, Munro tells us, she does not mistake for reality--and that henceforth she will not mistake anything for reality. She is inspired to imagine, and begin planning, a richer kind of poem, less of the feminine motives and polite ironies which delineated her earlier verse; more of salt and terror and tonic visions.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">6. A return to reportage from primary sources; specifically, the obituary column of the town paper. Tauntingly, hauntingly, we never learn if the poet ever wrote another poem corresponding to her new vision; only that she became the town eccentric.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">The narrator's slippage from dutiful researcher to imaginative psychological storyteller, and back again, is a cunning trick Munro has used in other historical fictions, including <i>Friend of my Youth</i>, the first Munro story I ever read, which I cherish. Munro reconstructs entire lives with concision and intuition. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">From <i>Interzone: The First Anthology</i>:</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;"><i>Kitemaster</i> by Keith Roberts: We're in an alternate version of our world, one where the military sets guards along a frontier border so that the demons don't get in. The way they do this is, they fly up on big kite apparatus and keep watch. So we observe a kite launching in the middle of a scary night storm. Meanwhile, the guy who runs the base hosts an authority figure on an inspection tour. Base commander gets drunk and reveals that he thinks the demons don't exist, and the whole story about demons is a sick hoax to keep people yoked to an authoritarian government. The inspection guy uses a secret radio broadcast linkup with the kite to reveal to the skeptical commander the strange secret of what the kite pilots are really up to...</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: large;">This story finds the poetry of precise group activity and difficult mechanical operation by simultaneously describing actions in detail, and leaving connections between things loose, so we're unclear on exactly what's unfolding, but we get a keen sense of the atmosphere. There's also psychological insight; the base supervisor may hold the whole system in contempt, but he takes rightful pride in the diligence and skill of his team. This bifurcated job awareness is one I've observed and shared among working stiffs. Workers who strive for excellence, even when only they will notice, are too good for the common run of mass employers.</span></p>Aaron Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02565494196338043466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15943614.post-8065870427096917102020-07-20T05:57:00.000-10:002020-07-20T05:57:20.790-10:00Tolkien Vs. Lovecraft Vs. New Weird Rounds 7, 8, & 9<font face="verdana" size="5"><a href="http://butdonttrytotouchme.blogspot.com/2019/02/tolkien-versus-lovecraft-smackdown.html">Start here</a> if you need a grounding in what I'm up to with this series. </font><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">Round 7 (clang!). For Tolkien, it's Patricia A. McKillip with <i>The Fellowship of the Dragon</i>.</font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">The Queen's harper/unworthy boyfriend has gone missing in a dragon's territory, so the Queen asks five childhood friends, each a tough, able woman, to bring him back. They must travel through a beautiful but actively dangerous forest, and along the way the women face one sorcerous temptation after another. McKillip sets similar temptations for the reader; every page shines with gemlike sentences that lead one astray from the narrative, so inventive and lovely are they. My rule of thumb distinction between popular and literary fiction is that the former tries to plane every sentence so smooth that the reader glides easily to the next sentence, the next paragraph, never doubling back or pausing to ponder the meaning, or possible meanings, of a single strand of words. Literary fiction tends to require a more scrutinizing consideration of sentences as challenges; riddles and poems and koans embedded within the tapestry of the story. By this rule, McKillip is an unabashedly literary writer.</font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">She is also an inventive and conscientious plotter, weaving fairy tale conceits and feminist friendship in a braid of antiquarian stylings and contemporary concerns. So far, this is my favorite story in this collection.</font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">For Lovecraft, Kim Newman offers <i>The Big Fish</i>. I was aware that Newman writes fiction, but I knew him for his film criticism, generally centered on horror and arthouse film, two subsets with more overlap than is often supposed. He seems to have absorbed many lessons on vivid storytelling and fast-acting characterization from the flicker shows; <i>The Big Fish</i> is a gas.</font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">During WWII, an LA detective is hired by a starlet to track down yet another crummy boyfriend. This one's a gangster who seems to have joined a cult. The cult will be recognizable to anyone who's read Lovecraft's <i>Shadow Over Innsmouth</i>, a tale about a town full of people who've bred with sea creatures, producing not beautiful mermaids but uncanny fish people. Lovecraft was writing about the alleged horrors of "miscegenation," because he was a racist twerp, but Newman begins his story with a sardonic denunciation of the USA's herding of Japanese-American people into camps (while letting Italian-American gangsters continue to strut around) that goes some way towards distancing Newman's story from Lovecraft's theme. For Newman, the horror that has imported itself from Innsmouth to LA is not intermarriage, but Dianetics. </font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">Newman writes a ripping yarn without over-relying on guys coming through the door with guns (though there is some of that). Also, he has the detective's subscription to legendary detective fiction magazine <i>Black Mask</i> get mixed up with equally legendary horror mag <i>Weird Tales</i>, in a cute acknowledgment of the genre-crossing going on in this story. Newman creates settings so vivid that the reader practically becomes an illustrator. I'll have to read more of Newman's fiction... after I read more McKillip.</font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">For the New Weird, Kathe Koja offers <i>The Neglected Garden</i>.</font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">Yet another lousy boyfriend tosses his girlfriend out, but she only goes so far as the backyard wire fence, where she ties herself to the broken rusty wire. She stays there, to the annoyance of the boyfriend, until she begins to change... the plant life merges with the catatonic woman, and she changes until she bears unexpected fruit.</font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">I'm an old <i>Swamp Thing</i> enthusiast, so any story where people merge with plants has an allure for me. I'm also into anything where body horror becomes a means of emotional expression. This story nails the damage done by selfish men to the women who love them, and works as a revenge story that firewalls the woman from blame for the glorious horror which her wrath wreaks, in much the same was that BDSM submission fantasies permit the consideration of acts that one "mustn't" engage in.</font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">VERDICT: Each of these stories is terrific, and I hate to pit them against each other in a cheap zero-sum game. <i>But rules are rules.</i> Here at But Don't Try To Touch Me, we take our responsibilities with the utmost seriousness.</font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">I liked them all but I liked <i>Fellowship Of the Dragon, </i>with its animistic fairy tale setting and rambunctious ensemble, best, and since there is no distinction between my own personal preferences and Absolute Merit, Patricia A. McKillip wins Round 7 for the world's most famous philologist.</font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">Is it already time for Round 8? Time flies in quarantine. </font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">For Tolkien, Harry Turtledove presents <i>The Decoy Duck</i>. Some (basically) Christian missionaries from (essentially) the Holy Roman Empire come to (more or less) Viking territory. The missionary's ace card is a handsome and devout young man who was abducted from this viking village as a child. His absolute devotion to his monotheistic faith fascinates the villagers and infuriates the chieftain, who permits the missionaries to live and do their thing more out of an inner core of decency than any desire to allow open discussion. The conflict between the chieftain and the missionary, both of whom are men of honor and virtue, is a conflict between two immiscible cultural value systems, and despite the mens' mutual, and earned, respect, something's gotta give, which means someone's gotta die. The conclusion feels inevitable, which does not lessen the tension that underlies the tale, and doesn't bring the tension to an end, since the conflict between the two men is by no means the final proxy war between two conflicting cultures.</font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">I'm no expert, but Turtledove would probably make a formidable debater or lawyer; he crafts strong arguments for both sides of this conflict, and shows us the steps that might be taken to resolve the conflict; all that needs to happen is for someone to give up. There will be no brokering of a long-term accord. It's rather like a courtroom drama; compelling, but, with the exception of how things end, it never feels the way I want fantasy to feel; like a step into the unknown. I'm on the side of those who believe the jet fuel of fantasy is bold acts of imagination, but there's no room for such stuff in Turtledove's humane and carefully reasoned philosophical tale. What we get here is lucid, thoughtful historical fiction, and that's a good thing in its own way.</font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">For Lovecraft, Joanna Russ writes <i>I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket... But by God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph From Life!" </i>The title is taken from the punchline of Lovecraft's story <i>Pickman's Model</i>, in which the big reveal is that an artist who paints monsters isn't indulging in flights of fancy, but is doing journalism. </font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">A kindhearted woman takes on the emotional labor of helping a young male coworker make an effort at romance with a bewitchingly glamorous woman. The young man needs help; he's socially clueless, discomfiting to everyone around him, helpless in matters of money or romance, yet arrogant (and foolish, thinking his passion for H. P. Lovecraft makes him superior to others). In short, he's me in the 90s, a fate I'd wish on no one. His compassionate coworker soon has cause to regret her offer to help the young man in his courtship, since he demands more and more of her time and attention. She doesn't quite understand his confused cries for help until it is much too late... The mysterious woman may be a localized expression of a cosmic power; perhaps she represents the temptation of cosmic horror literature to young people who can't quite hack it in the human sphere. People who opt out of life in favor of hikikomori consolations may be the true subject, here.</font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">I've read enough vintage vampire stories to know that many of them are about dangerous lovers, in which the viewpoint character observes a friend being stolen away from their proper life by some wicked Other person. This is one of those, and it's fascinating in part because of Russ's reputation. Ask any midcentury SF fan or pro to describe Joanna Russ, and they'd say something like "bra-burning man-hater." That's certainly not the impression I get from this story. Compassion for the clumsy young man shines through, even while diagnosing his shortcomings in clinical detail, and showing greater sympathy for the woman he ropes into holding his hand through his unwise courtship. It's left an open question whether or not the human race as a whole is better or worse off for the removal of unpleasant young men.</font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">Speaking of people who seem to prefer tales of cosmic nihilism to life's more positive possibilities, The New Weird offers <i>A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing</i>, by Thomas Ligotti. A young man with a history of debilitating health problems is beguiled by the creepy muttering of his doctor... but did the doctor say anything? Was all that muttering coming out of the narrator's subconscious, and was it mere delusion that ascribed those words to the doctor? </font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">The young man finds his way to a town of strange folk parades and tight-lipped locals offering hostile hospitality. The conclusion is lavishly, yet icily, nasty. </font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">Ligotti takes the cosmic nihilism of Lovecraft and shears away the rubbery monsters and adventure tropes, which leaves stories of people having their minds shattered by direct perception of the dread hopelessness of existence. The first time I read one of his stories (in an anthology called 999) I was impressed. This is the 3rd or 4th I've read, and despite a surface narrative variety, a certain thematic sameness sets in. M. John Harrison also deals with enigmatic folk traditions that suggest something nasty beneath them, but where he leaves them as open signifiers, Ligotti weaponizes everything to the proving of his joyless point. He's the Jack Chick of cosmic nihilism, which is certainly a thing to behold.</font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">VERDICT: Each of these stories is working to illustrate a philosophical conflict. Russ is the one who leaves the most play for ambiguity, and takes up the least of your time. She, and Lovecraft through her, get the laurel wreath for this round.</font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">Round 9! For Tolkien, <i>Nine Threads of Gold</i>, by Andre Norton. Some kind of soldier-enforced tyranny is spreading terror throughout a fantasy kingdom, and a pack of children from various socioeconomic backgrounds has taken refuge in an abandoned Hold. A sorcerous woman who grew up in the Hold makes her way back there, and becomes the children's caretaker. It soon becomes apparent that a malign magic threatens the Hold's inhabitants, and the woman must keep a careful watch over the children, while teaching them to work together for the good of all, and to settle differences in communal fashion, without sliding back into prejudices of their past lives.</font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">It's a rich setup, and the Hold is full of hidden possibilities that the woman uncovers for the children. Norton has much to say about the challenges and rewards of raising children. Also, she uses em-dashes with defiant liberty.</font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">I found it difficult to fully engage this story, but I think it's because I've never been responsible for children for more than a few hours, and I'd prefer to keep it that way. My own limited parameters are implicated in my muted reaction to this rapturously told and compassionate tale.</font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">For Lovecraft (very much for him!) we have <i>H. P. L.</i> by Gahan Wilson. This story imagines Lovecraft having lived to an impressive old age and getting to enjoy the success which his stories achieved after his (in real life) early death. A young fan accepts an offer to visit Lovecraft (and his mysterious manservant), and a succession of startling discoveries follows. </font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">This story is quite fannish, and so eager to admire Lovecraft that it sidesteps the man's extravagant bigotries. I like to imagine (on the basis of a rueful late letter) that Lovecraft would have become more openminded and openhearted about human difference had he lived long enough, but this story takes things a bit too far in that direction, having Lovecraft speak out against xenophobia. It's a bit like the scene in the <i>Annie</i> musical that's a love letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt; had Harold Gray, the creator of <i>Little Orphan Annie</i>, lived to see the show, he would have jumped onstage and decked the actor playing Roosevelt, so passionate was the cartoonist's hatred (often expressed in the comic strip) for that President's socialist ways. </font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">The ending of <i>H. P. L. </i>is even more goofily fannish, as the Forces of the Cosmos essentially lift Lovecraft bodily up to heaven in a Rapture of one. Cmon. Maybe it's going for camp, I dunno. Wilson does himself more favors when he permits some of his trademark macabre elements to pop up, as when the mysterious manservant laments his one-of-a-kind physical complaint...</font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">For the New Weird, it's the genre's poster child, China Mieville, with <i>Jack</i>. Jack Half-A-Prayer was a legendary, flamboyant hero-of-the-people lawbreaker, and now that he's gone, the narrator wants you to know about the role said narrator played in helping Jack along the way. This is set in a world where criminals are punished with surreal surgeries and nonorganic grafts, and our carceral state (or Britain's) is implicated for the way we make felons carry their crimes for the rest of their lives. It's a smart satire, told in the guise of a penny dreadful filtered through a pub tale, and even though I guessed the punchline a page or two before the reveal, it was still satisfying, in the manner of a skillfully crafted joke with an implicating satirical point. Mieville comes off as a Leftist Roald Dahl, which is dandy, but I don't see much family resemblance to the more ambiguous worlds that the earlier tales in this anthology offer.</font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">Verdict: I enjoyed Mieville's satirical cartoon most, but Norton's might be the richest, with its ensemble of diverse kids facing slippery magical enemies with the aid of a compassionate and wise volunteer caregiver. Still, as David Denby says, "trust pleasure," no matter how blinkered, solipsistic, or culturally overdetermined, so I'll take the easy way out and declare the New Weird the winner by a nose.</font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5">What a thrilling competition! Each of our three contestants won a round! Keep reading this blog for more pulse-pounding reviews of stories about monsters.</font></div>Aaron Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02565494196338043466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15943614.post-87616177937129940332020-06-25T10:22:00.005-10:002020-08-20T04:01:12.836-10:00Outlaws and In-laws Installment the 21-eth: Special Centering African-American Voices installment<font face="verdana" size="5"><span>Instead of the usual round-robin peeks into various short fiction anthologies, this time I'm only reading stories from <i>Calling the Wind</i>, an incredible selection of African-American fiction assembled by Clarence Majors.</span><br />
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<span><i>Now is the Time</i> by Cecil M. Brown: Jonah, a bookish aspiring standup comic, goes to the mansion of his friend and idol, a genius celebrity comic named Billy. Are they really friends? Sometimes they seem to have an equitability to their interactions, but Jonah's worshipfulness gives them more of a Boswell and Johnson vibe. That's a reference that Jonah would instantly get, and Billy wouldn't, but Jonah's thoughtful and academic approach to comedy hasn't served him well in his efforts to actually do professional standup; he's failing and he knows it, which is why he's come to the master. He needs to know how to tap into the real energy of great comedy.</span><br />
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<span>Billy admires Jonah's book smarts, but has deeper insight into people, which is crucial to his success; he can figure out what makes the audience tick, and use that insight to work with them, bringing them around to hilarity. He's also a great mentor, guiding Jonah with compassion, clarity, and tough love. Billy's got his own problem, though, in the person of Tina, his beautiful white girlfriend who pitches a bratty tantrum that only goes further over the top as the story continues. Billy's balance and Tina's lunacy war away at one another as Jonah hunkers down; he's just here for affirmation and comedy tips, lady, don't yell at him! </span><br />
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<span>My only quibbles with this wonderfully engaging story are that the author, who may have taken himself as the model for Jonah, never gives us a persuasive glimpse of Billy's comedic power, and that he has a tendency to slip into redundancy, as though he fears he hasn't quite made his point, and needs to try again. Both Jonahlike tendencies. I'm quite fond of these characters.</span><br />
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<span><i>Damballah</i> by John Edgar Wideman: In the antebellum South, an enslaved man known as Orion is torn between his recollections of Africa and his life in the States. He's on a different wavelength from plantation culture, compelled by remembered words, beliefs, and practices, but everyone around him, whether white or black, mistakes his behavior for madness. A boy hears Orion invoke Damballah while catching fish, and is fascinated. He asks a Christianized enslaved woman about Damballah, and she punishes him for this pagan error. But the boy senses that the word has power that he needs. </span><br />
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<span>The hypocrisy and imperialism of the enslaver (who constantly flatters himself for being a great Christian, but also rapes women) perceives Orion's steadfastness as defiance, and cannot abide it. The murderous cruelty that results will be no surprise to anyone who's noticed history or the news, but the boy will retain the lessons of Damballah. It's a story of white supremacy being horribly cruel and murderous, but also a story of resistance, linked to cultural memory and defiance of colonialist culture. </span><br />
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<span>This story resonated with several others in this <i>Calling the Wind</i>, but I'd highlight its connections to <a href="https://butdonttrytotouchme.blogspot.com/2017/07/outlaws-and-inlaws-part-second.html" style="font-style: italic;">The Ingrate</a>, with an enslaver who thinks he's a wronged exemplar of righteousness, and <a href="https://butdonttrytotouchme.blogspot.com/2020/04/outlaws-and-in-laws-20-covid-19-edition.html" style="font-style: italic;">The Education of Mingo</a>, in which an enslaved man is caught between African and American frames of reference, with transgressive, liberatory, and catastrophic results.</span><br />
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<span><i>Kiswana Browne </i>by Gloria Naylor: Kiswana is a young woman out on her own for the first time, with a cheap apartment in a scruffy part of the city. Her wealthy and proud mother comes to give the place the white-glove treatment, and really tries to get her daughter to go back to being Melanie. Although this story is from the 80s, it replicates current tensions between liberals and the Left. Kiswana is all in for identity politics and uncompromising demands; her mom is an Obama style incrementalist. Naylor has sympathy and love for both of them, but comes down on Mom's side, regarding Kiswana as admirable but naive. Readers may judge for themselves. Anyway, while this might be the third story in a row to feature a woman as a killjoy, it's the first to suggest that the woman in question has a point, and the first to ace the Bechdel test.</span><br />
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<span><i>"Recitatif"</i> by Toni Morrison: Two girls, one black and one white, befriend one another in an orphanage. (While they're there, a woman who works in the kitchen falls... or was she pushed?) They go separate ways, but meet again at various stages of life. The white girl gets borne aloft on a cloud of white privilege, while the black girl has a more rigorous path. Things get contentious between the two women, as when they join opposite sides of a busing protest/counterprotest, and one of them keeps making signs that are nothing but sick burns on the other one; shades of online discourse. </span></font><div><font face="" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="" size="5">Eventually their ongoing reminiscences/arguments turn on the subject of that kitchen worker's fall, and a Rashomon/Marienbadian question about whether it was an accident or a crime; a crime in which one of the girls was implicated. Morrison doesn't go the perfectly respectable New Yorkerish route of leaving it entirely ambiguous, though; let's just say white people have a bad habit of recounting history in ways that sooth white people.</font></div><div><font face="" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="" size="5">One fascinating irony; in the 60s the two former friends bump into each other at a truck stop, and the white lady doesn't want to be seen talking to the black lady, because she doesn't think race mixing is socially acceptable. Where are she and her white boyfriends going? To (allegedly) hang out with Jimi Hendrix. </font></div><div><font face="" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><font face="">Morrison gives us a cutaway view of mid-century racial complexity that isn't entirely gloomy or sunny. The structure reminded me of Alice Munro, another legendary author who frequently uses core samples of a life to tell an expansive story in short form. Apparently this was Morrison's only published short story? It's a more plainspoken prose than some of her more mythopoetic books, and an all-too-timely take on the complexities of interracial friendships in the USA.<br /></font>
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<span><i>Girl</i> by Jamaica Kinkaide: A flash fiction, this is mostly a quick survey of the kinds of advice a woman in the West Indies gives a girl. Lots of domestic wisdom, but also constant accusations regarding the girl's inherent "slut" nature, as well as some family planning tips The girl is permitted two brief replies, neither of them the last word.</span><br />
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<span><i>Chitterling</i> by Henry Van Dyke: A rich white lady, who earns her money as a slumlord, takes a sad and shy black child under her wing and tries to Pygmalion some high culture into him. He's uncertain about all this, but the highfalutin' places she takes him are more pleasant than his crummy homelife (which is crummy in part because of the shabbiness of the building, which she owns). Will she instill in him an appreciation for opera and escargot? Does she actually like opera and escargot, or does she only endure them as lifestyle markers?</span></font></div><div><font face="" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="" size="5">There's a lot happening here. There's a potent critique of well-meaning white attempts to uplift the less fortunate (all while maintaining and profiting from those ill fortunes). The woman's loneliness is a powerful factor in the cautious social dance between the two partners, and the cultural gulf between them ensures that this relationship can't last forever. </font></div><div><font face="" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><font face="">In a brief coda, the narrator, who is the adult version of the boy, acknowledges that he has developed a taste for opera and escargot.<br /></font>
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<span><i>Jesus and Fat Tuesday</i> by Colleen J. McElroy: A thoughtful third-shift orderly in a New Orleans hospital puts up with an ensemble of difficult companions. There's his Cajun coworker, who is friendly but dumb, full of bad schemes and soft bigotry. Then there's Maggie, a wayward drunk white woman, yearning for God, yearning for God to be kinder, yearning to share a bellyful of tales about the life that had led her, and would probably lead anyone, to delirium. Finally, a surprise appearance from the orderly's estranged sister, with bad news from home. Our protagonist is surrounded by sorrows, trying to help achieve some equilibrium without letting desperate people and hostile bigots drag him down.</span></font></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><span><br /></span>
<span><i>The World of Rosie Polk</i> by Ann Allen Shockley: Rosie and her little boy are part of a crew of migrant farm workers, traveling in the back of a mean man's truck from one farm to another, picking produce in the hot sun. They toil all day, live in crummy quarters, and the boss, who does the shopping, keeps tabs on how much the workers owe him. Guess what? No matter how much or how little you order from his grocery trips, you'll be in deep debt to him until you're dead. He's got it all</span><span> worked out in his little notebook.</span></font></div><div><span><font face="verdana" size="5"><br /></font></span></div><div><font face="verdana" size="5"><span>In other words, the </span><font face="">crew members are, for all intents and purposes, slaves.</font></font></div><div><font face="" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="" size="5">But on one job, which doesn't seem like it'll be any better than the others, there's a man living and working on the property who is strong and kind, and takes a liking to Rosie and her son. Will their makeshift romance lead to a happy ending, an escape from the cycle of toil and humiliation? </font></div><div><font face="" size="5"><br /></font></div><div><font face="" size="5">This story gave me flashbacks to temp jobs I had in my student summer days, grinding toil in the hot sun. Get me out! And get Rosie and her son out, too!</font></div><div><font face="" size="5"><br /></font></div><div>
<font face="verdana" size="5"><span><i>Mali is Very Dangerous</i> by Reginald McKnight: This is a perfect companion piece to the story <i>Lindsay and the Red City Blues</i> by Joe Haldeman, <a href="https://butdonttrytotouchme.blogspot.com/2017/01/horror-vs-europe-part-6_6.html">reviewed here</a>. Both are stories about a westerner in a culture shocking eastern land (Senegal, in this case) and following, against his better judgement, a shady tour guide/pimp/con man. This version is less lethal and arguably less xenophobic, but just as unsettling, with a punch line that I didn't see coming. The guide tries to sell the visitor a magical protection; is it for real? Hmm. Suspenseful and twisty. Stay home and read this story instead of going to dangerous places.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>Aaron Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02565494196338043466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15943614.post-43343081989690560472020-05-25T11:51:00.001-10:002020-05-25T11:51:50.985-10:00Tolkien Vs Lovecraft Vs New Weird, Round 6<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">You got your High Fantasy, written by people who take inspiration from Tolkien. You got your cosmic horror, written by people who take inspiration from Lovecraft. You got your weird fantasy, written by people who take inspiration from the Burroughs Brothers, Edgar Rice and William. As longtime friends of the blog know, I am weighing the merits of each subgenre by pitting stories from 3 anthologies against each other. Whee!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Jousting for Tolkien, we got John Brunner, whom I've never read before but is known for eco-disaster SF like <i>Stand on Zanzibar </i>and <i>The Sheep Look Up</i>, with <i>In the Season of the Dressing of the Wells</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Ernest Peake (related to Mervyn?), a shell-shocked veteran of World War One, returns to Britain. One of the gentry, he moves to his Aunt's manor, which she runs with cruel, hypocritical religious mania. The locals are sweet working folk who blend a much gentler piety with pagan holdovers aplenty, and want to resurrect a lightly Christianized tradition: ceremonially placing crudely crafted but vigorously conceived narrative illustrations over the three wells in town, in honor of a never-named goddess of the waters. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">The idea of a spiritual Feminine hovers over the cruel Aunt, but also over Alice, the bold and lovely daughter of the vicar. She befriends our hero and helps him rediscover his artistic and heroic courage. The story is full of contrasting pairings: male and female; Christian and pagan; compassionate faith and judgmental religiosity; working class and nobility; fire and water. Many of these are resolved with syncretic open-mindedness, and Brunner's attentiveness to characterization creates a charming village where I'd be delighted to spend much more time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Problem: The Bad Woman is old and fat and always mean. The Good Woman is young and beautiful and always kind. C'mon. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Nevertheless, the protagonists are tantalizing characters. Maybe Ernest goes from traumatized veteran to romantically successful hero of the town</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">with Tinseltown implausibility, and Alice may be impossibly flawless (she's smart and thoughtful and beautiful and brave and supportive and...) but they think through all the issues before them in ways that allow Brunner to convey the value of thinking, and talking, through the ramifications of life's conflicts as fully as one can, prior to taking necessary action.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Oh by the way, this isn't a fantasy story, not really. Its engagement with paganism is fantasy adjacent, and it plays with syncretism in imaginatively engaged fashion, but nothing in it is outside the bounds of "mundane" reality. It's a celebration of reality's vibrancy, and an illustration of how to infuse life with meaning, even when one has been damaged by trauma. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">For Lovecraft, we have <i>Fat Face</i> by Michael Shea.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Oh man, I read this story when </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">I was a teen. I was very not ready. It has lingered in the back of mind like a troubling dream since then. I'm glad I get to stare the dream down as an adult.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Patti is a Hollywood streetwalker, and has an inherent unstoppable optimism that compels</span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"> her to seek community in her environs. Her goodwill towards everyone masks the thin, circumstantial and commercial nature of the relationships she and her "community" of local businesspeople have with one another. But Patti's optimism doesn't entirely blind her to the scalding dangers of her job. Occasionally, she has uncanny visions of Bad Things that turn out to be prophetic. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">She has a friendly crush on an often-seen but never met businessman known on the street only as Fat Face. As Patti works her way closer and closer to Fat Face, upsetting things start happening around her. Is it the usual dangers of a streetwalker's life, or are there something darker happening?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Problem: the story revels in nasty hilarity over the girth and physical problems of various characters. Shea is as unkind to heavy and disabled people as Lovecraft is to anyone who isn't a goy ofay.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">On the (considerable) positive side of the equation, Shea shows us the world around his sweet, tragic heroine with lustrous beauty that keeps the story from being a slog; there are absurd, even silly, touches that exacerbate a dread that grows like a fungus. This sweet-and-sour blend of tones leads to a truly absurd climax; a sick melding of moronic silliness and ghastly tragedy that explains why my teenage self found it indistinguishable from a horrible dream. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">For The New Weird, we have <i>The Braining of Mother Lamprey</i> by Simon Ings.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">A young wizard's apprentice tries to solve the titular murder, and uncovers a terrifying plot that presages today's hacking and surveillance threats. Of all the stories in the <i>New Weird</i> anthology that I've read so far, this is the first from an author with whom I was unfamiliar, and the story that was most comfortable with being genre fantasy, as distinct from fantastical literature. You got enough wizards, magic, and oracles for a Mercedes Lackey book. The prose is lush with sentences like "He stepped into the shade of an ornate iron-worked portico, and reached for the heavy brass knocker, fashioned in the shape of a human jawbone." That's genre fantasy to a fault.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Unlike some but not all popular fantasy, though, Ings soaks his tale in humor straight out of Zap Comics. Poop and vomit keep springing to life, and children are born feral, with biting fangs. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Problem: a male character becomes magically infused with a feminine personality, and the contrast is played for hacky transphobic comedy. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The climax turns on a man telling a woman to have weaponized sex with the villain. This is the second story I've reviewed for this blog with that distasteful premise (The first was <i><a href="https://butdonttrytotouchme.blogspot.com/2016/11/horror-vs-europe-part-4.html">Vengeance Is</a></i> by Theodore Sturgeon), although this one at least gestures towards the traumatizing, inexcusable nature of such a thing. The tale has some lovely writing and imaginative touches throughout (oracles are permanently pregnant; the aging children inside their distended bodies whisper prophecies to them) that go some way toward making up for t</span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">he groaner punchline, which SUUUUUUX.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Verdict! At last, the New Weird installment is my least favorite. I liked the other two tales so much that I'm puzzled as to which deserves the victory. Well, I love the complex dialectic and cozy <i>mis en scene</i> of Brunner's story, but it sets up a believably debilitating trauma only to have the hero shuck that PTSD like an old coat. I somewhat prefer the scalding, ironized yet heartfelt nightmare Shea gives us, so <i>Fat Face</i> wins the day. It's real gross and scary. Yay!</span>Aaron Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02565494196338043466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15943614.post-81499713723899078622020-04-14T10:05:00.000-10:002020-04-28T05:27:52.215-10:00Outlaws and In-laws #20: COVID-19 Edition<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Since I'm not doing anything, why don't I get back to these short fiction anthologies?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">From <i>Best American Short Stories</i>:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>The Way We Live Now</i> by Susan Sontag: </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">An unnamed man has contracted an unnamed disease (which is clearly AIDS). His friends are the ensemble of the piece, and they are given an equal emphasis, reminiscent of Jackson Pollock's all-over painting approach, which gave equal emphasis to each color in the painting. The friends' disparate efforts to surround the protagonist with love and support, while monitoring his health and healthcare, are shot through with friendship factions and personal neuroses around health and death. The detached narrator's reportage of intimate and anguished conversations is oddly reminiscent of group texts and chatrooms, though the story predates them both.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">There's a brief discussion of sick peoples' right to be mean and unreasonable that perhaps grows from Sontag's own struggle with cancer, years earlier. I've read some of her published journals, and she became unusually misanthropic and harsh during a struggle with cancer, then mellowed out (for Sontag) once she was healthy again. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>The Things They Carried</i> by Tim O'Brien: I've read this story 3 times now, and it never runs dry. The dialectic of the story is straightforward enough; a young Lieutenant in the middle of the Vietnam War is divided between his duty to the soldiers he leads, and his daydreamy yearning for some girl back home who just wants to be friends. The story shifts back and forth in time, and lets us know right away that at some point a soldier in the troop gets killed. The fact of the soldier's death is repeated like a drumbeat, a steady rhythm that replaces narrative uncertainty with destiny. O'Brien, like Sontag, has a warm (neither overheated nor icy) emotional temperature, and a controlled, Apollonian approach to narration. O'Brien is more prone to allusive loose ends; for example, the young Lieutenant's immediate response to his soldier getting shot and killed is to call in an air strike to level the nearby village. This is mentioned and forgotten. It's left to the reader to ponder the proportionality of this response.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">As the title suggests, the story constantly itemizes things the soldiers carry, whether physical equipment or emotional baggage. This could be banal and cloying, but O'Brien cannily varies the frames of reference, building up an overwhelming sense of multiple, constant burdens, and how overwhelming they become in the aggregate.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">From <i>Calling the Wind</i>:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>The Education of Mingo</i> by Charles Johnson: A country farmer named Moses buys a slave, a young man named Mingo. Moses doesn't really need a worker; he's just lonely, and wants a friend, or a son. He trys to mold Mingo as a son, but, in the traumatic removal from his African cultural setting, Mingo has become a blank slate, all too sensitive to his owner's real (as opposed to stated) views and values. Mingo becomes a lethal expression of Moses' id, and as neighbors start dying, Moses needs to decide what to do. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Much is made of Mingo's intellectual subjugation to Moses, in ways that I'd find objectionable if it came from a white author, but Johnson drops subtle hints that Mingo's enactments of Moses' malevolent will may actually be a canny, willful rebellion. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Anyway, Johnson gives good hillbilly, and inhabits 19th century white people with persuasive texture and insight.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>Skat</i> by Clarence Major: The editor of this extraordinary book offers an enigmatic short tale about a mixed-race couple taking a ride to Manhattan with a garrulous taxi driver. The story begins with some mystifying faux-exposition suggesting a whole world of unsettling backstory for the couple. Then the driver starts warning his passengers about the dangers of Manhattan, where bizarre superstitions and voodoo enslavement hold sway over everyone; at least, to hear him tell it. His account of widespread malevolence and superstition is checked and mated, however, when the African-American man of the couple offers a morsel of conspiratorial terror which he, apparently, believes to be true. Ordinary people terrifying each other by playing Can You Top This? with chilling conspiracy theories; Majors published this in 1979, well before the dawn of the internet as we know it today.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">The significance of the title is never addressed. Scat singing, in which nonsense talk becomes musical pleasure? The nonsense the men of the story speak may well be a kind of musical entertainment. And, as they compete to spread dark rumors of Brooklyn and Manhattan, there's an element of fecal territory marking. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">From <i>Outlaw Bible</i>: </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>Naked Lunch</i> by William Burroughs: In this excerpt, a young man in a socialist country receives a summons to see Dr. Benway, a recurring Burroughs villain whom I can only ever imagine as Jack Palance, thanks to Cronenburg's cinematic tribute to the novel. Though Benway will only dance around the core of the situation, the young man is suspected of homosexuality, and subject to subtly degrading tests, with constant assurance that nothing is actually wrong. The way homophobia, even in nominally "accepting" cultures, undermines people is heightened by hallucinatory events which are revealed to be something more than one person's subjective reaction... Burroughs was brilliant at milking horror for comedy and vice versa, and at identifying the dislocations and irreality that burden outsiders in the postindustrial age.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>Drawing Blood</i> by Poppy Z Brite: A young man has a grotesque hallucinatory experience; the sink taps flow with blood and sperm, and his face is covered with lesions that grow as he stares at the bathroom mirror. Look, if you want a subtle evocation of AIDS, go read that Susan Sontag story. Brite, a writer of unimpeachable Goth credentials (<a href="http://butdonttrytotouchme.blogspot.com/2020/01/tolkien-vs-lovecraft-vs-new-weird.html">see also</a>) touches on the Romantic adoration for illness and death, then dismisses it with an angry insistence that untimely death not be sugar-coated.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>The Manchurian Candidate</i> by Richard Condon: a nebbish of a politician goes far with the help of his wife, a fixer who isn't above poisoning people and planting false stories to get her husband's career going in the right direction. She's a Borgia for the mid-Twentieth Century, and Condon's gleeful satirical voice leaves me wondering why he didn't just go after McCarthy directly, instead of inventing a wicked witch of a wife to lavish his wit upon. I suppose the point was to make McCarthy look even weaker by portraying him as dependent upon a woman's scheming. Since this sneering sexism led to a marvelous role for Angela Lansbury, I'll let it pass.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>The Grifters </i>by Jim Thompson: Lilly is one of Bo's most trusted employees but she's miscalculated, and now he's going to punish her. He's a hotheaded gangster, but she knows how to handle dangerous men. Their relationship shuttles from hot to cool, dangerous to protective, malevolent to respectful, lunatic to professional, and back. She's tough, and she can handle what he throws at her, but in the end we see the traumatized toll it all takes. Thompson respects Lilly, and shows her to be worthy of our sympathy.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>The Big Kill</i> by Mickey Spillane: A very different approach to strong criminal women, as Spillane gives us a concentrated dose of femme fatale with all the nuances, such as sympathetic qualities, filed off. Raymond Chandler took Dashiell Hammett's tough, poetic detective fiction and explored its humanistic potentialities (though often in a bigoted fashion) while Spillane made a fortune by jettisoning those thoughtful qualities and retaining only the concise violence and formalized intensity. What he sets out to do, he does very well. I've been reading pop novels lately, as a library volunteer who's curious about the books people check out, and I gotta say, a lot of best selling authors make Spillane look like Flaubert. He doesn't try to get away with as many shoddy shortcuts as the average pop writer.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">From <i>Plays in One Act</i>:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>Medusa's Tale</i> by Carol S. Lashof: (Content warning: rape) A radio play, in dialogue and sound effects. Lashof gives voice to Medusa, letting her tell her own story. I don't know the source material well enough to evaluate how much Lashof found in classic literature and how much she invented, but the result of her labor is a tale of patriarchal cruelty. Poseidon rapes a young woman named Medusa in Athena's temple, and everybody blames the victim, even Athena, a warrior Goddess whom you might expect to stand up for violated young women. Medusa's paralyzing gaze isn't a weapon, it's a curse, a punishment for... well, for being raped. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">While the thematics illustrate contemporary feminist theory, the dialogue has a timeless stateliness and wit. I want more.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>Can Can</i> by Romulus Linney: North Carolina's pride brings us two stories of desperate romance. In one, a soldier on leave in France finds blissful, idealized (yet particularized and distinct) romance with a smart French girl. In the other story, a young bride-to-be from the moneyed set finds herself in love with a hard-living hillbilly woman. Neither story has anything to do with the other, except for a similar trajectory; Linney braids them together, and presents them simply. The four characters face us and tell their interlocked stories. While both stories come to sorrowful conclusions, the play ends with all four participants joyfully affirming that their romances were more than worth the sadness at the end.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>A Life With No Joy In it</i> by David Mamet: </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">A man in his 50s and a woman in her 30s drink tea and converse; we are dropped into the middle of a conversation with no context. As he rants about the awfulness of postmodern art (a recurring Mamet bugaboo) and she rants about the awfulness of women's writing (another one) it becomes evident that they are reuniting. Family? Lovers? I'm not sure, but they've been reunited by a funeral, and the grief is giving them cause to contemplate the value of the lives they've been living, when they aren't railing against the rottenness of everyone around them. As polemical as it may be, though, Mamet allows the characters to exist as people, rather than functioning merely as mouthpieces, and as in his brilliantly evasive play <i>Oleanna</i>, different viewers will have differing opinions about these characters and their bitter judgements.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>Chicks</i> by Grace McKeaney: A kindergarten teacher loves her students dearly, but hungers for adult companionship. She decants all her thoughts and feelings, no matter how inappropriate, onto her charges (played, whether they like it or not, by the audience). It's a brilliantly funny and energetic portrayal of high-functioning loneliness, and a one-woman show that enlists the audience into becoming the supporting cast. McKeaney went on to write for <i>Roseanne</i> and <i>St. Elsewhere</i>. Today, Wikipedia is considering deleting her entry because she isn't notable. Clearly the route to notability isn't paved with brilliant theatre about lonely kindergarten teachers.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">From <i>Interzone</i>:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>After-Image</i> by Malcolm Edwards: Nuclear war has began, but in one neighborhood of London the unleashing of all that destructive power has caused a strange, paradoxical event: the resident nuclear explosion is frozen in time, and with the right PPE, you can stroll partway into it and explore it as a location in space, rather than an event in time. This opportunity to examine the stages of nuclear destruction is a fine subject for an SF story, but Edwards ups the ante by making the protagonists engaging. One is anxiously contemplative and passive, while the other is an eccentric man of action who enlists his uneasy neighbor into an adventure. Yes, it's Gandalf and Bilbo, Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent, except we don't get to follow them on an extended picaresque journey, because the explosion becomes kinetic again and kills everyone.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">The story clarified, for this American, the particular frustration that superpowers threatening to destroy all life on earth present for people who aren't stakeholders in the superpowers but are stakeholders, however modestly, in life on earth.</span>Aaron Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02565494196338043466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15943614.post-68956704339842142582020-01-19T13:59:00.001-10:002020-04-11T15:42:28.358-10:00Tolkien Vs. Lovecraft Vs. New Weird, Rounds 4 & 5<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><a href="http://butdonttrytotouchme.blogspot.com/2019/02/tolkien-versus-lovecraft-smackdown.html">Start here:</a></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Just because I haven't been producing timely posts about fantasy and horror fiction doesn't mean that I don't think about fantasy and horror fiction every day of my life, but I fear the core question of "who's strongest: the <i>Lord of the Rings</i> guy, the <i>Cthulhu</i> guy, or fantasy writers who also maybe read a little Virginia Woolf from time to time?" remains unanswered. Let's see if we can make some headway on that.</span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: #441500; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"></span><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">For round 4 of this smackdown, Tolkien's proxy, courtesy of the tribute anthology <i>After the King</i>, is Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, with the story <i>The Dragon of Tollin</i>. </span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: #441500; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"></span><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In a world divided into the North and the South, the Southern lands are concerned because they haven't heard from the North in a while. No trading ships, nothing. How could such a thing be? Nothing could possibly have gone wrong, because as everyone knows, the North has a giant tame dragon providing for its security. So the South sends a winged emissary to investigate; the emissary finds that all the North has been burned. Gee, why didn't the dragon protect it from whatever attacked? Soon, the emissary finds a fresh dragon egg, offering the promise of a new dragon to guard the South; then he finds the last survivor of the catastrophe, who happens to be the old dragon's trainer. The trainer tells the tale of how he found and trained the old dragon; how the dragon's power brought heat, light, and protection to the whole land; and how things went wrong.</span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">On a first reading I found this story frustrating, despite Scarborough's charming descriptions of her magical kingdoms, because it seemed like she was employing all the usual twist-ending apparatus to build up to a big reveal that you've surely already guessed. Of course the guard dragon was the force that destroyed the North. On a second reading, I concluded that the author probably intended us to guess that from the start; the real reveal is that the King of the North pretty much allowed it to happen, because he indulged <strike>nuclear power/the military-industrial complex/the fossil fuel industry</strike> the dragon's growing appetite. A further reveal is that the emissary from the North just doesn't get it; he still wants to take the dragon egg back home, because he's convinced that his people can handle it more responsibly than did the North. Scarborough indicts politicians who endanger us all by building our societies around uncontrollably dangerous powers, but the critique is nestled within a lustrous fantasy world, presented with subdued wit and a prose style redolent of literary fairy tales, making the story more than a screed.</span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Representing H. P. Lovecraft, Poppy Z. Brite brings us <i>His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood</i>.</span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Two decadent young men in Louisiana gorge themselves on wicked pleasures (and Bride wishes she could see the look on your face when you read the nasty things she describes them doing) but can't seem to find pleasures rarified enough to overcome their ennui, until they get into graverobbing and make a private museum of the intriguing artifacts they pilfer from burial places. Eventually they swipe a voodoo artifact from a legendary voodoo priest. Then they go clubbing, and meet an enticing stranger they just gotta take home with them...</span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This story doesn't turn on unexpected plot twists, since stories about robbing a voodoo priest's grave can only turn out one way, but on being as scandalously Goth as possible. Brite's prose is a deep purple velvet pillow designed exclusively to bear sick thrills to a jaded audience. I doubt Lovecraft would have been comfortable with it, since the point of his stories is that everything is nasty and too much to bear and what is sex anyway.</span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">For the New Weird, Clive Barker brings us his much-anthologized <i>In the Hills, the Cities</i>.</span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">A young gay couple takes a road trip through Yugoslavia (it's the 80s). They fight all the way. Judd is a ranting political/historical obsessive; Mick thinks all that political narrative is deadly dull, preferring to revel in the beauty of European art while ignoring the cultural specificity from which it sprang. The only thing that binds them together is lust.</span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Then they stumble into a secretive rivalry between two ancient villages that threatens both men's understanding of the world. </span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Barker takes his time describing the outrageous secret in the hills (and might have given it all a rethink if he'd known just how cruel the immanent future of Yugoslavia was destined to be), but he manages, by withholding crucial information for a good while, to help us believe in something that is frankly impossible. Giants, sport rivalries, folk traditions, even mecha anime wind together in a fashion that only a cunning storyteller could present as plausible. It's pretty amazing.</span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Rather like <i>Midsommar</i>, the film that I saw on the 4th of July and much preferred to fireworks, this story ends with one of the protagonists submerging into the folkways of an exotic backwoods European culture, and the other getting trampled. Collectivism and dreaminess lead to unity, fulfillment, and an end to loneliness</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">; individualism and hardheadedness lead down to death. And yet the latter option has a valid critique of the former. Confusing, in summary, but quite clear in Barker's telling. If you've been assuming that Barker is just a gruesome schlockmeister, this story will change your mind.</span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Also, the final paragraph is weirdly soothing to me. Don't read it out of context to try and understand what I mean.</span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">VERDICT?</span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><br /><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Thus: Each story is charming enough to cushion the diagrammatic nature of their dialectics. Scarborough's critique of Big Power suggests that only conscientious individual action can save us from the worshipers of power (though it's becoming evident to me that collective action will be vital to that cause). Brite's loving depiction of appetite indulgence suggests that for the tragically hip, there is no cure but to drown in toxic temptation. Barker suggests that humanity's addiction to self-destructive rivalries has no cure, but that we need to be part of something bigger than ourselves, and rivalries may be our only option. Roll Tide!</span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Um, I liked the Barker best. It was certainly the least predictable and (though my spoiler avoidance makes it hard to make the case for this) the most multivalent. As far as the original Tolkien Vs. Lovecraft rivalry goes, I think this round might be a draw between two worthy but minor contenders.</span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Let's have Round 5 to make up for lost time.</span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">For Tolkien, we have Poul and Karen Anderson with <i>Faith</i>.</span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">So trolls build a creepy and impregnable fortress near a village, and abduct children. At first the troll invaders seem like a MAGA fantasy of evil immigrants stealing our way of life, but then the action shifts to inside the fortress and they start to seem more like ICE agents imprisoning kids and spinning bogus narratives about how it's for the kids' own good. The kids yearn to grow big enough to be released; the trolls only release children who've grown nice and tall and plump and meaty, whereupon the lucky urchin is led into a secret room, there's a big feast, and that kid is never seen again.</span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The Andersons are dab hands at atmospheric, clear and engrossing storytelling, and they bring all that to bear in a story that blends real sweetness and real nastiness in a marvelous update of unsanitized old fairy tales. The kids act like real children, with petty jealousies and earnest good intentions jostling around inside their noggins, along with yearnings that can't be fulfilled in captivity. The ending acknowledges trauma and plausible heroism, which genre fiction sometimes skirts around in pursuit of more blusterous thrills. </span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">(I've written about fantasy & SF mainstay Poul Anderson <a href="http://butdonttrytotouchme.blogspot.com/2018/11/outlaws-and-9laws.html" style="text-decoration: none;">here.</a>)</span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Lovecraft's representative is onetime North Carolina poet laureate, Fred Chappell, with <i>The Adder</i>.</span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Unlike the other tale of Chappell's that I've written about (<i><a href="http://butdonttrytotouchme.blogspot.com/2017/02/im-varying-format-bit-here.html" style="text-decoration: none;">Dagon</a>, </i>a depressive BDSM tone poem with fleeting Lovecraft references), this story is cheerful, comic, and concerned with conventional storytelling imperatives like suspense. The narrator and his chummy Uncle are rare book dealers (their affectionate relationship adds a lot of sunshine to the tone, very much in contrast to Lovecraft's paranoia), and they have to handle a copy of that wicked occult book, the Necronomicon, with particular care. It turns out that you can't stack the Necronomicon with other books, or it will start to warp the text of those books, polluting not only the particular copies it touches, but all editions, worldwide. Chappell has fun detourning Milton's poetry many different ways; the story is as much an essay on modern poetic prankster play as it is a suspense story about how they'll try to restore Milton's text. Chappell mixes highbrow formalism and middle-lowbrow genre fun. </span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The New Weird gives us <i>Crossing Into Cambodia </i>by Michael "the Elric Guy" Moorcock.</span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This story (dedicated to Isaac Babel) is set in an alternate version of our world where Russian Cassock Calvary are fighting their way through Cambodia as part of a Vietnam war, with the dubious assistance of a functionary from Moscow who narrates in precise, distanced language that grows cautiously poetic as it struggles to articulate the overwhelming nature of war. </span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Put a big content warning on this story for abuses of all kinds. It's demonstrated that in times of extreme duress, people will do anything to survive. This is presented in a calm, Apollonian fashion, but the content punches through the glassy style and insists that we consider the horror and desperation that flows through human history; this may be an imaginary story as to its particulars, but it's built from the brick and mortar of demonstrable human depravity. Everyone they meet knuckles under, and the Cossacks have strict codes of honor that don't prevent them from doing terrible things to innocent people; quite the opposite. They rape women and slaughter men, not because they want to, but because it's just the done thing in war, and they must keep up the standards. Horrible.</span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The story ends with a confrontation between barbarian courage and modern technological innovations in mass murder, as the Cossacks charge into the wake of a mushroom cloud, refusing to believe the wimpish pleadings of the narrator, and all his Poindextering about "radiation" and whatever. Old-fashioned warmongering and newfangled nuking collide, but not before uncounted villagers have been violated.</span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Yet Moorcock's background as a spinner of thrilling fantasy adventure stories enlivens multiple set pieces, as the Cossacks ford a river and journey through war-ripped deserts and jungles. Moorcock brings out the beauty of the landscape and the fascination of unfamiliar lands and sensations. This runs the risk of making war seem a grand adventure, but his unflinching gaze upon atrocity after atrocity saves the story from such moral folly. </span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">What of the VERDICT?!</span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">All are fine. Moorcock's nasty slice of proto-New Weird hit me the hardest. It uses the craft chops of pulpy adventure narrative to rub our noses in the moral sepsis of war. It's full of surprises, unexpected beauty, and even more unexpected monstrosity. </span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But by the terms of the original Tolkien Vs. Lovecraft setup, I'm inclined to take the Anderson's tale of babes in the bad woods over Chappell's lark about poetic parody; perhaps it's because I've always loved Babes in the Woods stories, or perhaps it's because I subscribe to Poetry magazine, which is so full of twisty nasty parodic poetry that Chappell's version seems like the training wheels version. </span></span><br style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;" /><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 238, 221); font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">So far science demonstrates that the New Weird wins every throw against the acolytes of Tolkien and Lovecraft. But there's more to come, and the trad brands of fantasy will </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">have many opportunities to catch up.</span></span></span>Aaron Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02565494196338043466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15943614.post-1849789772161275192019-10-24T09:10:00.000-10:002019-10-26T12:00:42.681-10:00Outlaws and Inlaws #19: Better Late than never? BEST Late FOREVER<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">I meant to stay timely with this series of short fiction anthology reviews, but life... got in the way. </span></span><br />
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<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Best American Short Stories:</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Where I'm Calling From</i> by Raymond Carver: Two men (one narrates, the other doesn't) are drying out together in a rehab house for alcoholism. As they swap stories it turns out that, surprise surprise, these guys have hurt a variety of women and children along the way. Some of the drama hinges on the ways the men do or don't attempt to repair these relationships, along with observations on the different people you meet in a detox facility (I could have read an entire second story about a would-be wheeler-dealer who treats the place like a business meet-and-greet). A startling betrayal rounds off the story, which is as hard-boiled as they come, without any guns or killings.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Janus </i>by Ann Beattie: A realtor relies on a bowl to help her sell houses. It's an object of quiet beauty; not the sort of thing that announces its loveliness, but which adds grace and style wherever it is placed. Her relationship with the bowl seems like a small thing, at first, but over the course of 6 pages we learn that the bowl is a continuation of, or replacement for, a different relationship. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The fungibility of emotional energy from people to things or places is one of the most troubling themes in my life, and this story, which I've read several times now, is helping me confront that. Of course, it can be a good thing. A friend of mine once responded to a breakup by throwing himself into volunteerism, and was the point man in the construction of a ornamental garden. Years later, we saw photos of his former girlfriend from that breakup happily touring the garden, to which he replied "She has no idea the extent to which that garden is a monument to her." I think about that a lot.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Anyway, Beattie is one of the iconic New Yorker writers, and the legend of New Yorker stories is that the editor lops off the final paragraph to leave things ambiguous, but I like how this one ends with a completely effective O. Henry twist. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Calling the Wind:</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>White Rat</i> by Gayl Jones: A young African-American man, known as White Rat, looks white, and this genetic quirk scrambles his life. He kicks back against white people trying to claim him, but when his wife gives birth to a club-footed child, Rat takes out his frustrations with this situation by addressing wife and child in racist terms, as if he were an ofay after all. When he and his friends all get arrested, he's kept in a separate cell, and can't convince the cops that he's black. He uses drink to both relieve and exacerbate his problems.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Jones writes with sympathy for Rat and his family, but delights in peppering Rat's first-person narrative with comical malapropisms, until it's hard to know where fun ends and education shaming begins. Nonetheless, it's a vigorous example of vernacular prose.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Loimos </i>by Edgar Nkose White: The title is apparently Greek for either a pestilence or a pestilential person. This story, told in epigrammatically descriptive first person, reads like a post-apocalyptic SF novel, and while there are dire hints that the nature of the plague ruining everything is a mysterious disease, racism and heroin are also implicated. The narrator unspools a grim account of making a life in the ghetto. Sex plays a large part, and be warned he's not exactly complementary to his multiple partners. He's sexist, although it's unclear whether the author is expressing his own poisoned view of women or is dramatizing the sexism that is a common expression of a low-expectations outlook. There's also a burst of antisemitism directed at merchants who leave town as soon as the business day is concluded. But none of this ugliness undermines the point, since the point is that ghetto life makes people twisted and dysfunctional. A slipstream story from before that term existed, this is a sorrowful and outraged view of life under urban racism that uses the expressive qualities of SF without knuckling under to genre plot troupes.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Plays in One Act:</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Linda Her</i> by Harry Kondoleon: One of those "someone has a mid-life crisis/nervous breakdown and makes everybody else in her life miserable before doing something drastic" plays, and I don't mean this as a criticism. Carol is on vacation with her sleepy husband, clever daughter, and good-natured best friend. Over the course of about 15 minutes, Carol makes it clear that she feels trapped by mortality and banality, and wants out. She has no idea what she wants her life to be like, in part because, as she says to her husband, "Aren't you sick of me? I'm sick of me."</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The other characters respond to this in a variety of plausible ways, but plausibility isn't gonna sooth Carol's anxiety. She probably needs medication, but the play ends with her bugging out, and the others trying to rewire their relationships to deal with this unexpected absence. Kondoleon doesn't put his thumb on the scales regarding where our sympathies should lie, which I appreciated. He gives us the latitude to consider each character's needs. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">I liked this play enough to look up the author, and found <a href="http://yamp.org/Profiles/HarryKondoleon">this terrific article</a> which shed a lotta light on Kondoleon's influences and aesthetic (his Sylvia Plath fixation seems highly relevant, although there's a heaping helping of Tennessee Williams to it as well). Rest in peace, Harry.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Success </i>by Arthur Kopit: Content warning: suicide. Let us turn from a sympathetic portrait of despair to a jokey one. Kopit occasionally writes plays that are pastiches of his peers (<i>Bone-the-Fish</i> is his variation on Mamet), which is odd given the infrequency of Kopit's output; why not deliver something more unique, if you're only going to emerge from your cave once or twice a decade? This short item is a despairing riff on Edward Albee's difficult, unloved <i>The Man With Three Arms</i>, in which a faded celebrity does a paid speech that goes bizarrely awry. In Kopit's version, the author of a popular and esteemed book has a complete meltdown and either commits, or hallucinates that he commits, suicide at a public reading. His meltdown is espresso-dark comedy, right up to the ending. One might hope that the author of <i>Wings</i>, a play that took dementia seriously, would handle suicide with similar consideration and restraint, but here Kopit's back in the daffy absurdist vein of his breakout <i>Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Momma's Hung You In the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad.</i> Ending a story with a suicide is a conventional just-add-water way for short filmmakers etc. to bring borrowed gravitas to their cheap twist endings, and although Kopit's mournful setup/punchline is sharply crafted, it does feel a bit like he's defaulting to suicide because he couldn't come up with anything better.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">While we're discussing Kopit: if you really want to cackle, seek out his last play, originally titled<i> Y2K</i> and later retitled <i>BecauseHeCan</i>. It's a clueless, unironic <i>Reefer Madness</i> take on a Dark Web Hacker who ruins a nice couple's life, and it's absurd in ways I don't think Kopit intended. An alarmist cautionary tale about technological dangers that Kopit doesn't really understand. Aficionados of camp (very much in the Sontagian vein of failed art) should track it down.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Interzone</i>:</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The </i>FLASH!<i> Kid </i>by Scott Bradfield: The son of an intolerable rich bigot and his forlorn, trashy wife amuses himself by harrying a stump full of termites, but he discovers a strange artifact in the core of the nest. Soon the boy is eating too much and bloating in a worrying fashion, while a shifty researcher tries to puzzle out what's happening.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Bradfield writes with comic panache, a bit like the comic SF collaborations of Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, and I'm a sucker for SF stories that explore puberty, disease, and aging through genre tropes (such as <i>Alien, Akira, Neon Genesis Evangelion</i>...) but this one builds to a shaggy-dog rude joke of an ending that felt like a novelization of a <i>Zap </i>comic. The least rewarding story in this anthology so far, despite some pungent social satire.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>The Outlaw Bible:</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Fahrenheit 451</i> by Ray Bradbury: You may have read this in school, but at this point in his career Bradbury was bringing an elegance to his prose that SF mostly lacked, and it's worth revisiting his Sandburgian flow. The book-burners of the story are oddly gentle compared to real world tyrannies; Bradbury's firemen burn books while trying to spare people and things, although in this excerpt a book lover seizes the moral high ground by lighting a match and setting herself ablaze along with the books. A contemporary real life totalitarian regime would go ahead and burn people along with the books, then rely on spin doctors to justify everything they did. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Lost</i> by Jack Ketchum: The late Ketchum wrote horror stories that make me genuinely uncomfortable, because I'm never entirely sure where the author stood regarding the sadism of his villains and the sufferings of his protagonists. This harrowing excerpt of a novel inspired by a real life serial killer leads me to think he's on the victim's side... probably. He sticks with a victim's point of view, and builds sympathy for her even while seeming to revel in describing the most sickening cruelties. Ketchum knew what he liked.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Sales Pitch</i> by Philip K. Dick: A robot barges in to a couples home and, in the course of doing a sales pitch for itself, smashes everything and terrorizes the humans with a level of dysfunctionality that was, like so much of Dick's writing, prescient. The disconnect between the banal sales pitch and the over-the-top slapstick of a towering robot crushing all your stuff is the core of the comic horror, and no one did comic horror quite like Dick; he was like Kafka with a black-and-white television. There's some dumb gender stuff (the woman's "breasts quiver(ed) with excitement...") but in Dick's nominal defense, he did a bunch of drugs, so some stupidity was bound to creep in.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Hellbound Heart</i> by Clive Barker: an excerpt from the story that served as the source for Barker's brilliant movie <i>Hellraiser</i>. Fans of that film should check out the barmy prose version, which includes a bunch of elements that were left out of the film, or changed (the creature known to fans as Pinhead has a high feminine voice in the original, unlike the deep, menacing, masculine declamations of the film version). Unlike Ketchum, Barker makes a point of writing about horrors that cannot be imitated by halfwitted criminals, so, for example, his villains force their victims to have such acute sensitivity that they can smell everything really well. Horrible, when you think about it! And Barker makes you think about it.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>Aaron Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02565494196338043466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15943614.post-80744373091837729222019-06-06T10:36:00.000-10:002019-06-06T10:36:07.247-10:00Outlaws and Inlaws #18:Tales of Woe and Edgar Allen Poe<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Shall we take a cook's tour of my latest reading? Oh yes, let's!</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Calling the Wind</i>:</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Soldiers</i> by Ellease Southerland: A young man enlists for the Vietnam War so he can get that GI Bill and spare his mother the cost of college. She'd rather pay for college and be spared the loss of her son, but he's deaf to her tears. The tale is told in 4 pages of fragments, sometimes elegant, sometimes plainspoken, reflecting the young man's ability to code-switch (a teacher accuses him of plagiarizing a paper because it contains such advanced vocabulary, but the young man demonstrates that he knows the words, and shouldn't be evaluated purely on his casual conversational style). He survives the war, but Southerland suggests how badly it's all going to work out for him. She gives us all the clues, and lets us figure out that his mother will die while he's away, and losing a hand is going to lead him into a morphine addiction. It's some of the deftest and loveliest storytelling I've enjoyed lately; as editor Charles Major dryly notes in Ms Southerland's bio note, "her satires and poems appear primarily in black periodicals."</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Roselily</i> by Alice Walker: A young African-American woman in a repressive small town marries a sophisticated Black Muslim guy from the big city, hoping he'll open her world up, but suspecting that he'll just replace one kind of repressiveness with another. I can't help wondering if Alan Moore read it once upon a time, because its clever framing device is reminiscent of the structuring gimmicks he would employ a decade later: each phrase from the "Speak now or forever hold your peace" portion of the marriage ceremony is paired with one of the bride's corresponding thoughts or memories in ironic juxtaposition. The tightness of the structure reinforces the bride's fear that she is bound, whichever way she goes in life, by gender and race in ways that will forever restrict her.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Best American Short Stories</i>:</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Gesturing</i> by John Updike: A marriage "consciously uncouples" so that both partners can spend more time with their lovers, but since they, with decades and children to their marriage's credit, know one another better than their lovers do, they tend to gravitate back to one another. We follow the man, who takes a lonely apartment overlooking a controversial new skyscraper that keeps dropping windowpanes. The man comes to think of the skyscraper as his lonely companion, a similarly promising yet disfunctional figure, and contemplates it often. Have you ever fixated upon some inanimate fixture of your life, and found layers of meaning and beauty in it that were part of some singular equation, you times the object of your contemplation? Updike renders just such a connection between the man and the building. His apartment's own windowpane is stable but has a nearly invisible message of love, "With this ring I thee wed," evidently scratched in the glass with a wedding ring by a previous tenant. It floats there tauntingly in the man's vision, flickering in and out of his awareness just as his relationships flicker in and out like uncertain candleflames.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Shawl</i> by Cynthia Ozick: A woman and her two daughters, one of them a baby, are marched into a Nazi concentration camp. The 3 of them must share a shawl to keep warm. That shawl's going to be called upon to serve many aching needs. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Nazi cruelty creates death and suffering even when it doesn't actively try to kill; terrible conditions are enough to ruin lives, and the threat of repressive violence prevents a mother from openly responding to a child's death. Everyone knows the death camps were monsterous and awful, but Ozick forces us to consider the particulars with vivid emotional immediacy and intensity. She writes with such terse beauty that we have some aesthetic cushioning, which makes it possible, and even desirable, to follow her woeful narrative to its conclusion.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Plays in One Act</i>: </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Prodigal Son</i> by Garrison Keillor: The <i>Prairie Home Companion </i>auteur retells Jesus's parable of the young man who abandons his family for a life of dissolution, then returns, expecting to be treated as he deserves, but receiving loving forgiveness instead. Keillor's retelling employs a whimsical anachronistic style that will be instantly familiar to his fans, and in a surprising last move, ends the story with a hilarious tantrum from the virtuous brother who did everything right and received only token appreciation, compared to the prodigal's celebratory banquet. Still, this play is punctuated by some of the worst doggerel song lyrics ever published by an editor of Halprin's stature.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>She Talks to Beethoven</i> by Adrienne Kennedy: An African-American woman is in Ghana during a time of political unrest. Her husband has been kidnapped, and she's dealing with it by interacting with her imaginary friend, the composer Beethoven. She's fascinated by him and his work. This fits snugly into her multicultural artistic interests; like Countee Cullen, she's enriched by Europe without being Eurocentric. Her reimagining of Beethoven's life, and the friendship the two of them might have, is counterpointed by radio broadcasts about her husband's predicament, and performances of African poetry and music. It's a very rich stew, and I suspect it would be terribly challenging to pull off a production. There's lots of potentially deadly exposition, and transitions from one layer of reality to another. I'd love to see a richly imagined and finely controlled production, but keeping a dramatic energy coursing through it would be quite a hill to climb.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Interzone</i>:</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Cabinet of Edgar Allen Poe</i> by Angela Carter: Carter's famous blend of Gothic Postmodernism puts Poe's mother in the spotlight, a position she would find familiar, since, according to this narrative essay, she was a traveling stage actor. Carter considers the effect that a theatrical mother might have had on Poe's understanding of women, love, and reality. The switch from person to performance; the costumes, wigs and greasepaint rewriting one's appearance; the nursing mother abruptly exiting, stage right.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>The Outlaw Bible of American Literature</i>:</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Whoreson</i> by Donald Goines: A streetwalker tutors her son, a teenage pimp aspirant, in the finer points of pimping. For example, never trust a woman, EVEN YOUR OWN MOM. Also, pimping your own mom has certain drawbacks. It can affect your social standing, and complicate familial relations. The story's written with a verve and directness that you will not find in this paragraph about it, so if you like stories about smart but woefully underprivileged people trying to make it on the street, you need to check out David Goines. I suspect some of the smarter gangsta rappers have highlighted copies of Goines' writing on their bookshelves. (He also wrote <i>Never Die Alone</i>, <a href="http://butdonttrytotouchme.blogspot.com/search?q=goines">which I considered here</a>.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Shock Value </i>by John Waters: The elder statesman of goony, cartoonish independent film spins (tall?) tales of his juvenile delinquency that will thrill anyone who has enjoyed his colorful, bratty movies. For someone like me this might as well be Conan the Barbarian-style wish-fulfillment adventure. The origins of The Filthiest People Alive start here!</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius</i> by Dave Eggers: A narrator returns to his home town of Chicago, "ghosts in pocket," haunted by the cold and the distant death of his parents and all the weirdness that scrubs up against you when you return to the old hometown after the distance of years. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">I've experienced something like that, since I returned to my hometown of Signal Mountain recently, for the first time in the 21st century, but it was a different experience because it was beautiful on the old hiking trail, and my parents are, thankfully, alive.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Anyway, since the protagonist's parents left their bodies to science, he imagines confronting the doctor who oversaw science's use of them, demanding to know, in a most unscientific way, what secrets the surgery unlocked. Grief and childhood memories and self-mockery and fantasies of self-aggrandizement ruin this guy's trip. Intense, long, lustrous sentences enact, as well as relate, the agonized obsessiveness that bedevils this guy.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Monkey Girl</i> by Beth Lisick: a short excerpt about a young woman who grasps onto Chinese horoscopes to craft some focused identity for herself (year of the naughty Monkey) and her current (clever but gross, unreliable, invasive Rat) boyfriend. Her dissatisfaction (she prefers pretty much any other animal of the set) finds no solace in this superstitious solution, though. Bawdy and anxious.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Dogeaters</i> by Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn: A boy is held hostage by his Uncle, who pimps the boy out and uses a guard dog to keep him in place while Uncle's away. Inch by inch, the boy tests an escape plan while, in unadorned, informational language, contemplating the boundaries of his imprisonment. Caution: although the dog doesn't get eaten (the title probably references some slur on the boy's (and author's) Philippine heritage) it meets a similarly grisly end. Doglover that one may be, though, the boy's horrible predicament makes this murder understandable, and it's unlikely that he'll lose many readers sympathy.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Geek Love</i> by Katherine Dunn: The children of a pair of circus owners beg for familiar family stories, and Mom and Dad are happy to oblige. The stories are horrifying tales of abuse, but presented as beloved tales that fill parents and children with delight. Dunn's cult novel encases the most grotesque body horror in equally grotesque sentimental narrative forms. It's an ironic attack on the misuses of storytelling to justify historical horrors, unless it's a plea for making do with the imperfect family one's got. Or both. Word on the street was that Tim Burton wanted to film it; he probably would have turned it into quaint circus kitsch with all its fangs pulled and replaced with artfully decayed, bent and broken joke teeth.</span></span>Aaron Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02565494196338043466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15943614.post-58958007479854124932019-05-31T09:24:00.003-10:002019-06-03T11:51:29.141-10:00Tolkien Vs. Lovecraft (Vs. The New Weird) Smackdown Supreme, Round #3<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">For those who came in late, this is a series in which we pit 2 leading lights of fantasy fiction against each other via their representatives in a pair of short story tribute anthologies. But a new challenger enters the ring, and it's<i> The New Weird</i>, edited by Jeff and Ann Vandermeer, an anthology celebrating fantasy which owes more to Mervyn Peake and British New Wave SF. Does this offer a more compelling vision of literary fantasy than do the shopworn legacies of JRR and HP? </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Jousting for Tolkien, we have Robert Silverberg, with the story <i>A Long Night's Vigil at the Temple</i>.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">In a distant time and place, the high priest of a temple questions his faith, but assumes that his religion (which centers around 3 gods who came to earth, then ascended back to the heavens) does people some good whether or not it's factual.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The temple is at least as ancient as the religion, and has buried floors that haven't been accessed in millennia. But one of the High Priest's cohorts (a custodian named Mericalis, resonant of America and miracles) discovers that would-be robbers have tried to tunnel into the temple's buried levels. Mericalis and the High Priest venture into these depths, and explore their way to a shocking discovery that you've probably already guessed. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">I'm all in for stories that explore the lost chambers of history in a simultaneously metaphorical and literal fashion, and Silverberg delivers it with the kind of suspenseful yet unhurried adventure that I've enjoyed ever since my first cave tour as a kid. His depiction of theological struggle is cogent but too close to contemporary therapy-speak for the setting. If you're going to propose a far-distant setting, then make it at least as unfamiliar as a trip to a country one's never visited. The priest could just as easily be a contemporary questioning Christian, and perhaps that's the point. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">He could also be a lifelong SF writer who doubts his legacy, a position Mr. Silverberg might understand.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The story ends with the priest discovering that his sense of mission as a clergyman is born anew from the discovery that his religion is built on a false narrative; with the founding myth upended, the faith's values become more essential, and the narrative can be rewritten to serve that end. This nicely complicates my rubric for twist endings: if I'd rather read a story which begins with the twist's premise, a twist ending story fails. O. Henry and Ambrose Beirce wrote famous examples of stories that pass this test; a lot of SF tales, given the genre's addiction to cheap twist endings, fail it. <i>Long Night's Vigil</i> occupies a nice in-between point: I though the twist of the priest's rekindled faith paid off, and I'd read a sequel that followed him from there.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Representing H. P. Lovecraft, we got Basil Copper with the story <i>Shaft Number 247</i>.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">I've never heard of Mr. Copper, but apparently he published dozens of novels, a fact which should give any aspiring author hope; if he can make it, surely you can too. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Anyway, this story is set in an underground city that was built as a refuge for humanity, because the aboveground world is uninhabitable. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">OR IS IT?!?!?! </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">We aren't given any backstory; that's just how it is. But something may be trying to come in from above, or lure humans out.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">All the characters are men, and like <i>The Wind in the Willows</i>, the story is so homosocial that it's ambiguously homosexual. Also, it seems to be a first draft; Copper's grammar is all over the place.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">"He glanced incuriously at the man now, dapper and self-confident, his dark hair bent over the panel opposite, listening to Wainewright's handing-over report. Then he had adjusted the headphones and was sliding into the padded seat."</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Which he is he? Is it the subject or the object who is dapper and self-confident? How does hair bend over a panel; is that supposed to mean that his dark-haired head is bending over the panel? Why do we switch from past tense to past perfect? Only Basil knows for sure.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Eventually I found myself giving in to the weird outsider art vibe of Copper's story, which, like much outsider art, is enigmatic in ways which may or may not be deliberate; the contours of the story may follow the contours of the author's reality tunnel in unplanned, uncrafted ways. The characters talk to each other, but have a near-autistic disconnect, and I can't tell if that's deliberate on the narrator's part, or an accidental byproduct. Copper's sloppy writing doesn't inspire much confidence that anything he does is deliberate or under his control. Nonetheless, the beguiling, almost psychedelic ending has an uncanny effect that I'm still puzzling over, weeks after reading it. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The protagonist, inspired by a collegue's departure from this mysterious underground city, tries to escape. This turns into a fanciful, hallucinatory vision of heavenly delight, and the only appearance of femininity in the story, as a happy girl welcomes him to an Edenic paradise. But earlier in the story we've been given enough ominous yet uncertain hints about what may be happening outside to suggest that this vision is, indeed, only a hallucination, and perhaps a trap. Copper doesn't tip his hand, and an enigmatic quality hangs over the story, like a sphinx made out of old mittens.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">And now, representing The New Weird, it's M. John Harrison with <i>The Luck in the Head</i>.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">In this story, a man in a Gormenghastly city suffers from upsetting dreams and visions. A masked woman promises that he can be free of these visions... if he will assassinate Mammy Vooley, the peculiar leader of the city (who's not at all a grotesque amalgam of The Queen Mum and Maggie Thatcher. Not at all). </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">I've read this story several times, and it never quite clicked with me. This time I fell in love with it, and the reason is that I read it in a noisy break room. With all the distractions, I was compelled to read each sentence again and again until I was sure I'd parsed it. That's the best way to handle Harrison, at least for me. On previous readings I'd been more casual about comprehending Harrison's willfully cryptic prose, which is no way to unlock the treasure within.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Harrison's approach differs from Silverberg's, who, in the tradition of popular writers, makes everything very clear and easily digestible. Not that Silverberg's work isn't sophisticated, but he doesn't want the reader to struggle with the basics of what's happening in his story. Harrison makes you work for every bit of comprehension; his prose tends toward the riddle, the koan. The total effect, though, conveys a story world that can't exist in the environment of straightforward prose; Harrison owes more to the modernist poets than to the fireside storytellers.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Harrison's peculiarities and ambiguities also differ from those of Copper, because it's abundantly clear that Harrison is in charge of his work, while Copper's work could very well be the product of an A.I. Although, in the photos I found online, Copper looks like Nabokov's stand-in, it's Harrison who is closer to the idiosyncratically precise and irritably demanding, yet magnificently rewarding, tradition of Nabokov.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Verdict!</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Like Copper, Harrison creates a peculiar, evasive, distant, enigmatic world which lingers. Like Silverberg, Harrison's Cleanth Brooksian urns are well wrought. Unlike Copper, Harrison doesn't write like a drunk teenager, and unlike Silverberg, Harrison tells a story about a far-distant land that actually feels foreign. Harrison's story also promises the most return on rereadings; Silverberg's story rolls out all its rewards on a first reading, and Basil's too clunky a craftsperson to make a return visit seem appetizing. For this reader, the choice is obvious.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">If one insists on restricting the competition to the original binary terms, though, I believe that once again, Team Tolkien triumphs, on points rather than by a knockout. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Next time I'll be reading stories by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, Poppy Z. Brite, and Clive Barker, so anyone who's actually still reading this will wanna check that out.</span></span>Aaron Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02565494196338043466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15943614.post-3557125880675319062019-05-17T13:04:00.004-10:002019-05-17T16:48:06.134-10:00Outlaws & Inlaws #17; TERF Nazis Must Die<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Here at But Don't Try To Touch Me headquarters we have been overwhelmed by a variety of behind-the-scenes endeavors, but that hasn't stopped us from selecting a volume to take the place of <i>Dangerous Visions</i>, and that volume is <i>Interzone</i>, a collection of science fiction stories from a challenging British journal of the 80s. One story in, it's batting (with a cricket bat) a lot higher than <i>Dangerous Visions </i>did. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Outlaw Bible of American Literature</i>:</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Diary of an Emotional Idiot</i> by Maggie Estep: Our narrator, the receptionist at a S&M dungeon, tells us all about the desperate characters in her apartment building. There's a loudly foulmouthed single mom, yelling profanity at her equally foulmouthed kids; a forlorn stripper who can't believe the losers she dances for; a couple of speed freaks to class the place up; and a cheerful group of Japanese exchange students who enjoy the cavalcade of misbehavior as much as I do. Broke urban desperate crazy Americana. This is like candy to me. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Bell Jar</i> by Sylvia Plath: Trigger warning for suicidal ideation. Two women in a mental hospital try to bond over their common interest in suicide. Plath inspired generations of confessional writers, but she didn't merely spill her guts; she used her imagination to capture the strangeness of things. In this excerpt, the protagonist examines a succession of newspaper photographs, and David Lynch came inexorably to this reader's mind: "A dark, midnight picture of about a dozen moon-faced people in a wood. I thought the people at the end of the row looked queer and unusually short until I realized they were not people, but dogs."</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Requiem For a Dream</i> by Hubert Selby, Jr.: A TV obsessive named Sara Goldfarb gets invited to be a guest on a TV show. The sleazy pitchman who calls her up peddles a grotesque religion of fame, and Ms. Goldfarb's joy calls to mind the fervour for cheezy fame that fuels so much of our media now. One distinction is that Ms. Goldfarb never expected to gain such fame, while today the people who attend to the famous are often people who aspire, not always unrealistically, to join their ranks. Like the film version, it's as subtle as a fork in the eye, but there's some ambiguity about how much compassion the narrator has for poor Ms. Goldfarb, who gets mocked, but also inspires sorrowful sympathy.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"> <i>The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America</i> by Michelle Tea: A young woman with abuse in her past and prostitution in her immediate future takes a respite in a desert town. She describes the double helix of beauty and threat which makes the desert landscape so tantalizing<i>, </i>yet so stable, an ironic oasis in her troubled life. A pensive, yet intense, saturated account of the rest one can find in between the bad passages of life.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>In the City of Sleep</i> by Wanda Coleman: During the Vietnam War, a woman gets a Dear Jane letter from her soldier fiance in which he admits to having a Vietnamese girlfriend, and "offers" his hometown sweetheart the freedom to find love elsewhere, since he doesn't want to be a "stumbling block" to her. The idea that their sweet love might be considered a stumbling block distresses her more than the infidelity does, and she takes refuge in sleeping all the time. When she does have to be awake, she processes and reprocesses the damaging assumptions her man unloaded in the letter; it's obvious that he was trying to let her down easy, but he was completely stupid about it (imagine!). As frail and becalmed as she may seem, there's the suggestion that her slumber and obsessive dissection of the letter are necessary bridges to the next phase of her life.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Complete</i> by Patti Smith: Her 3rd brief appearance in this anthology. Smith remembers chafing against 50s Cold War culture, and finding meaning in the Dali Lama. Then Sri Lanka got conquered by China, and Smith was dumbfounded that no one around her seemed to care.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>A Different Kind of Intimacy</i> by Karen Finley: A familiarity with Finley's work is probably a prerequisite for reading this autobiographical statement. Finley was one of the National Endowment for the Arts grant recipients whose work so horrified Jesse Helms, and if you check out recordings of the work she was doing in the 80s, you'll understand why. Her monologues are like the Aristocrats joke played straight, with cruelty and sexual toxicity that might make William Burroughs leave the room. I've listened to about an hour of her performances from the time, and it left me wondering if she was... okay. In light of that, <i>Different Kind of Intimacy</i> is reassuring. Finley presents herself as the product of a loving family that was troubled by racism (her mother was a mixed-race beauty, and her "exotic" appearance did her few favors in a white-bread town) and suicide. "My father's death gave me passion, an emotional indicator toward which to push the content of my work. It compelled me to take the unanswered grief, the terrible sadness that I lived with, and throw it at the world." Boy did it ever.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Plays in One Act</i>:</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Am I Blue</i> by Beth Henley: Henley is best known for her play <i>Crimes of the Heart</i>, but I am of the minority opinion that each of her plays is a treasure, and that she's sadly underappreciated. This one-act follows a sad frat boy (who's really not frat material, but doesn't know what kind of material he is) on a New Orleans "pleasure" trip, where an odd, whimsical, lonely girl shows up and takes charge of him. It might not have aged well given our collective impatience with Manic Pixy Dream Girl characters, but Henley's women don't exist only to help men; the girl's extroverted loneliness is a match for the boy's introverted loneliness; she tries to help them both. It's a bit like Tennessee Williams in a mellow, non-experimental mood, and has some wry observations about the weird gendered cultural expectations against which boys and girls must forever swim upstream.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Our Man in Madras</i> by Gert Hofmann: A man in an office telephones a salesman in a troubled nation and tries to guide him through the process of maximizing profits in a war zone. The satire ain't subtle. Boss wants the salesman to keep on task even when dying from a direct hit. Some corporations certainly do try to stripmine us this completely, but they put enough layers between people to ensure that people don't have to enact such psychopathies directly. It's like they learned all the wrong lessons from the Milgram experiment; how to weaponize human willingness to passionlessly hurt one another in order to maximize profits. Same-day shipping available!</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Calling the Wind</i>:</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i> </i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Lesson </i>by Toni Cade Bambara: Bratty children from the projects just want to clown around and indulge themselves, but a sharp woman in their neighborhood insists that they gather with her for some summertime schooling. The kids rebel against nonrequired class time, so she takes them to the shops where the rich folk buy expensive treats. The kids learn, all right. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The thesis is an awakening to economic inequality, but Bambara is a comic writer, and her brats are as vulgar and carnivalesque as any real brats you might have met or been. Their hard education in what it means to discover you're excluded from the upper echelons of prosperity squelches all that energy and vigor for easy pleasures; we are not assured that the childrens' bitter new knowledge will lead them to any happy ending.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Story of a Scar</i> by James Alan McPherson: In a doctor's waiting room, a man asks a woman intrusive questions about how she got that scar. She scolds him for his rudeness, but tells the story. It's a love triangle between her, a proud, bookish gentleman, and a sexy bad boy. Halfway through the story, the man in the waiting room thinks he's got it figured out, but she douses his priggish mansplaining and reveals something my younger self needed to understand; sometimes bad boys are good men, and sophisticates are easily wounded, and wounding, solipsists.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Best American Short Stories</i>:</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Verona: A Young Woman Speaks</i> by Harold Brodkey: A young woman remembers European family vacation in which her father tries to delight her with wonderful experiences. The narrator has a rhapsodic, romantic aesthetic, but clear-eyed observations on her parents' efforts to make everything be as enriching as possible Father is more attentive to his daughter than to his wife, and the wife's revenge, whether or not it is intended as such, is to forge a more meaningful relationship with the girl than the father can, by sharing the sublime with her. The sublime upstages the delightful; Brodkey's talespinning has elements of both.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>A Silver Dish</i> by Saul Bellow: We plunge into a nonlinear family history, rich with detail and incident. The center of the story's gravity is the relationship between a scuzzball con man and his son, who can't find his place between Dad's low-grade criminality and Mom's pious devotion to Christian righteousness. Dad tries to exploit his son's wholesome connections for selfish gain, while the son tries to keep everyone happy. Will father corrupt son? Will the son keep any, much less all, of his relationships going on a healthy basis? The telling unspools slowly, but Bellow creates a whole world of immigrant strategies for fitting in to a new homeland (including heartfelt religious conversion, and grifting).</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Interzone</i>, Edited by John Clute, Colin Greenland and David Pringle: </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Oh Happy Day! </i>by Geoff Ryman<i>: </i>Radical TERF antisex feminists have taken over the world, and they're herding almost everyone into death camps, said camps being attended by the gay male auxiliary. The story is entirely set in one of those camps, where an attractive new recruit, who may be dissembling about his sexuality, and is the only black man on the camp's staff, carefully makes the case that people matter more than inhumane Isms. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Obviously this isn't a plausible scenario, and in the wrong hands would be a ludicrous anti-feminist/anti-gay screed. Ryman, who is far from anti-feminist or anti-gay, is wise in the ways of SF's ability to use outlandish premises to cast familiar subjects in fresh, revealing, light. He's also spent a lot of time in Cambodia, studying the way Pol Pot tried to remake the world at the expense of everyone and everything, which allows Ryman to render a human drama in a plausibly textured death camp setting. By imagining a world in which the priggish edge of '80s vanguard gender theory achieves absolute power, and corresponding absolute corruption, he critiques the defensive absolutism that can breed amongst the forsaken and burst out in ugly ways once the forsaken gain power. It's gripping and horrifying (Big trigger warnings for sexual abuse, murder, cruelty) but glitters with artful phrasing and keen-eyed characterization. An authentic Dangerous Vision, with Harlan Ellison nowhere in sight.</span></span>Aaron Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02565494196338043466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15943614.post-81002695933694628622019-03-22T07:11:00.000-10:002019-03-22T07:17:37.856-10:00Tolkien Vs. Lovecraft Smackdown Supreme, 2nd Round<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Once more we try to ascertain which fan-favorite writer is greater, not by reading their work (too easy, too obvious!), but by reading tribute anthologies.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Playing for Lovecraft, we have <i>Pickman's Modem</i> by Lawrence Watt-Evans.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It's the 90s, internet access means dial-up, and the narrator notices that Howard Pickman, a lovably pugnacious and semi-literate message-board member, has acquired a newly sophisticated, if antiquarian, prose style. Pickman has a new modem of uncertain origin, and it appears to be rewriting his online interactions, casting Pickman in a more loquacious, but also foul-minded, mode. He's winning flame wars (is that phrase is still in use? This Gen X'er has no clue) with hair-raising insults that the narrator alludes to but, tastefully, does not detail. Just as Lovecraft shied away from describing the structuring terrors of his tales, Watt-Evans draws a curtain over the foulness which this modem's version of Grammerly imposes on Pickman's self-presentation.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The story makes me nostalgic for a time when this whole internet thing was thrillingly new and mysterious. People were just beginning to suspect the risks of being extremely online, and Watt-Evans uses fantasy to demonstrate the way the internet changes how we interact with the outside world.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">On the other hand, having established this premise of a sinister internet agent twisting your words and presentation, the story's payoff is a bit flat. Pickman unplugs the modem but it continues to make calls to someone, then Pickman's last online posts are gibberish that will be familiar to anyone versed in Lovecraft, then Pickman was never seen again; stay off the internet, kids!</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And in this corner, playing for Team Tolkien, Terry (Diskworld) Pratchett, gone too soon, presents <i>Troll Bridge:</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Cohen the barbarian, an elderly but still spry hero, guides his wisecracking horse to a bridge that may have a troll under it; the hero always wanted to prove his mettle against a troll, and is only just now getting around to it. It turns out that a family of trolls lives under this bridge, and the troll-man of the bridge-house is deeply honored to do battle against a hero of Cohen's stature. His wife, though, has other ideas. Her brothers have gotten out of traditional troll businesses and done very well for themselves in other lines of work that don't involve killing or dying; she wishes her husband would stop living in the past (the whole troll bridge thing is yesterday's papers) and make a proper living. Rather than battle, Cohen and the troll rhapsodize about heritage and keeping traditions alive. Class consciousness and elegiac Downton Abbey-style heritage nostalgia get an affectionate skewering, and all ends peacefully.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">There's something very British about using fantasy races to address class, where an American would use them to talk about race. When I was in college I used to loiter in my English professors' offices and talk until they threw me out about how C. S. Lewis was totally right about everything (I no longer hold this view), and one of them inveighed against Lewis for racism. My professor believed that the Dufflepuds, a race of obsequiously dull-witted folk in Lewis's<i> Voyage of the Dawn Treader</i>, were a colonialist caricature of native peoples. I believed, and still do, that they were a snobbish caricature of working-class Brits. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">ANYWAY! </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Both stories are comic in tone, and use fantastical tropes to engage real-world themes (the life-altering dangers of the internet, the fading of Britain's reassuring yet stifling class structure). Watt-Evan's story is charming, but the conclusion is more a petering out than an enrichment. Prachett's story has the witty dialogue for which he's renowned, but also has passages of pellucid beauty. As a romantic hymnist of the natural world, he has perhaps not received his due. And he digs into his theme with particular insight; Watt-Evans explores his subject in a more glancing fashion (as, admittedly, I do) but in his defense, his topic was brand new, while British culture has been processing the end of empire for generations, giving Prachett a head start.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Verdict: Watt-Evan's story is prescient, modestly, and he writes with a warm literacy and unforced comic sensibility that eludes most would-be comic fantastical writers. On the other hand, Pratchett's story was the first entry in the Tolkien Vs. Lovecraft Smackdown that filled me with admiration and gratitude. (There's a part of me that's horrified that I'm stooping to affective fallacy, but I think that gratitude is earned by the story's finely wrought wit and attention to life. Pratchett was no idle daydreamer, but he transmuted his awareness of life into finely wrought fantasy.)</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Team Tolkien is 2-0. Team Lovecraft needs to get a rally going.</span></span>Aaron Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02565494196338043466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15943614.post-15259388931396600882019-03-14T07:52:00.001-10:002019-03-14T07:53:15.802-10:00Outlaws and Inlaws # 16 Featuring Manager's Doorbuster Dangerous Visions Inventory Liquidation-- all dangerous visions must go!<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Dangerous Visions:</i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><br /></i></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Test to Destruction</i> by Keith Laumer: If you think Science Fiction is greasy kid's stuff, Laumer isn't here to argue with you; he's here to roller skate out to your car with a heapin' platter of greasy kid's stuff. This is a supersized serving of desperate escapes, breathless chases, heartstopping leaps, and deathfacing confrontations. Some stories give you alien invaders; others give you human villains who say "You fool!" to their henchmen. Laumer gives you both in one story; what a value! And he delivers it all with practiced cliffhanger craft with no time wasted on fripperies that might blunt the freerunning forward momentum. Through it all our hero, a noble political revolutionary, wins the day and conquers both aliens and fascists. If you like this kind of thing, rejoice! Laumer wrote a slew of books, just waiting for you.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">There's a twist ending I didn't see coming, but mostly because I underrated the story as I was reading it. SF is loaded with cornball <i>ubermensch</i> power fantasies that embrace, rather than question, the nasty side of that equation. This story, to my condescending surprise, chose to question. Having granted his protagonist absolute power, Laumer shows the absolutely corrupted result. You fools!</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Carcinoma Angels </i>by Norman Spinrad: Another account of an <i>ubermensch</i> gone bad. This time a Renaissance man who's a dab hand at anything he tries achieves one victory after another. Spinrad narrates the protagonist's biography with plausible-sounding step-by-step developments and engrossing long-joke structure. After winning it all, our hero gets cancer, and uses a cocktail of psychedelic drugs (it's the 60s, after all) to gaze within and face the enemy on the internal battlefield.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Turns out that if you journey too far within... you may never come out, man. Spinrad presents a sympathetic but fairly conservative critique of transcendental aspirations.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Auto-Da-Fe </i>by Roger Zelazny: A matador faces down a succession of self-driving cars instead of bulls. Zelazny, best known for his <i>Nine Princes in Amber </i>adventure series, delivers on this with all the action and ironic romanticism the premise promises. His prose glistens with pulpy poetry, enriched with more highbrow and formalist literary stylings on an as-needed basis, then pulls out a finale that isn't exactly a twist ending; more like a rueful development. Non-human life is vanishingly rare now; matadors don't face down cars because that's preferable to bulls, but because there may be no bulls left. Ellison's comparison of Zelazny to Nabokov is barking mad, but Zelazny could turn a phrase more vividly and deftly than most SF scribes.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Aye, and Gomorrah</i> by Samuel R. Delany: In his introduction to this story, editor and compulsive blatherer Harlan Ellison asserts that Delany is a real man's man, not some "pathetic little homosexual." Well, Delany is anything but pathetic or little, and 2 out of 3 ain't bad. Perhaps Ellison's slurring was a defensive reaction to the story's subject matter, which is cruising for sex. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Delany rolls this out more subtly than I'm about to, but in the future, some people become Spacers, people who do the blue-collar work of maintaining space stations, etc. They are bodily modified to withstand the extreme conditions of space, and can, it is suggested, take off and land from anywhere, at anytime, but beneath their clothes is some "loose meat" which is an inevitable aspect of the surgical alterations. They are neither male nor female after the procedure, but they are erotically irresistible to some melancholy admirers. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Spacer work isn't particularly well paid, and many Spacers pick up extra money by turning tricks. Spacers serve as an objective correlative for real-life sexual outsiders, and while Delany was married (to Marilyn Hacker, one of my favorite poets, who shares Delany's devotion to specific and carefully articulated imagistic detail) he cruised for male sexual partners, and has since written and spoken about this with a <a href="http://butdonttrytotouchme.blogspot.com/2017/06/outlaws-and-inlaws-part-first.html">Rechy-like</a> lack of shame. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">And with that, we bid farewell to Dangerous Visions. One area in which both Ellison and I have been remiss is articulating how each of the stories in this grab-bag is dangerous; after all, nothing is dangerous in the abstract. It's dangerous to people, things or ideas. My least favorite stories in this anthology think they pose a threat to one thing, but are actually only dangerous to something else; for example, <i>Ersatz</i> by Henry Slezar (<a href="http://butdonttrytotouchme.blogspot.com/2019/01/outlaws-and-inlaws-dozenth.html">discussed here</a>) thinks it's dangerous to the military-industrial complex, but it's really only dangerous to trans people. Delany and Poul Anderson strike depth-charge blows for LGBT, and Ellison wriggles with titillated distress in his intros to their stories. In <i>Dangerous Visions</i>, reactionary dangers blare their vuvuzelas and wear their MAGA hats, while more progressive strains must tiptoe their dangers across the border.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>The Outlaw Bible of American Literature:</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Midnight Cowboy </i>by James Leo Herlihy: Speaking of cruising, in this excerpt from the novel that inspired the famous movie (<i>Midnight Cowboy</i>, not <i>Cruising</i>), a handsome young man tries to scrounge a living in NYC after finding that women don't wanna pay guys for sex all that much. He hooks up with Ratso Rizzo, a long-time scrounger and survivor, and they try to find a payday wherever they can. We also learn how Rizzo ended up on the streets, and stare directly into his loneliness. Friendships between people who end up together because they don't have a lot of options is a subject I can understand, and Herlihy understands it as well.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i> </i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Black Fire </i>by Nelson Peery: A band of African-American hobos gotta handle some problems. Like hunger, health care, shelter? Well, probably, but in this excerpt the problems come in the form of dudes trying to kill you, including a lawman who revels in using his position of authority to murder hobos, especially black ones. I'm not clowning when I say that black hobo lives matter, and that blue lives matter as long as they're on the side of right, but these hobos give this cop what he deserves in a moving-train chase straight out of the movies.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Plays in One Act:</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Bay at Nice </i>by David Hare: In Soviet Russia, Valentina, a grand dame who once studied with Matisse, is called upon by a museum to authenticate a possible Matisse canvas. The experts are divided on its authenticity, and hope that her more personal insight will crack the case. Meanwhile, her daughter Sophia implores her for help getting a divorce from her ambitious husband so she can marry a sweetly nonthreatening lover. Valentina opposes the divorce with the conservatism of someone who was wild in her youth, turned from freedom to responsibility, and now can't bear to see anyone make, or own, the mistakes of youth and freedom for themselves. Hare is known for loving female characters who are almost too spiky and difficult to love, and Sophia loves her mother with the love of someone who knows from long experience how to handle such a tough old broken-winged bird. Another play I'd love to see performed, and performed properly.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Protest </i>by Vaclav Havel (tr. Vera Blackwell): A soft-spoken revolutionary artist visits an old friend who is now a prominent TV broadcaster. The broadcaster privately laments the authoritarian government, and tacitly sides with the revolutionaries; but will he sign a petition and put his good standing on the line? A case of conscience for our broadcasting friend, who demonstrates the high-minded rationalizations people use to take the easy way out and still tell themselves they're choosing the path of greater valor. His cowardice should look familiar to a lot of Republican politicos who currently lack the nerve to publicly oppose President Dumber Tony Soprano, but doubtless Havel was skewering an old friend or two from Czechoslovakia's communist days.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Calling the Wind:</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Lookout </i>by Cyrus Colter: A socially ambitious woman can't help but stake out a party she hasn't been invited to. A parade of invited guests in their fine clothes pass by, and our heroine ruminates miserably on the profitable marriages they made, while her husband comes home from his unimpressive job to <strike>blog about short stories</strike> watch TV and fall asleep. Her bitter, detail-oriented observations on the extremely narrow social ladder for mid-century black women is a feminist indictment.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>A Long Day in November </i>by Ernest J. Gaines: This longer story begins as a portrait of the author (perhaps) as an anxious little boy. His parents split up and the boy carries the resulting displacement and anxiety to school. The child-centered gloom takes a sudden hairpin turn, though, when his dad picks him up at school and begins a quest to win his wife back. This involves running a gauntlet of angry old women who torment dad but also offer the wisdom he needs to remake his marriage. Poor dumb dad needs all the help he can get, and deserves all the tongue-lashings that he does get. </span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The escalating abuse dad takes reminds me of classic slapstick comedy.</span></span> All ends well, as the husband learns he'll have to sacrifice his bachelor-style freedoms to keep his wife at home. A terrific comic story spiced with sorrows. Far funnier and weightier than any of the whimsical joke stories that pop up in <i>Dangerous Visions.</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>The Best American Short Stories of the 20th Century: </i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>How to Win </i>by Rosellen Brown: <i>A We Need To Talk About Kevin</i> precursor. A mom struggles to raise a nearly impossible little boy who smashes everything in his path and drives everyone nuts. As in <i>Kevin</i>, Mom narrates, and is, perhaps, unreliable. Is her kid really so bad, or does she just not know how to handle him? The main distinction between the moms of the two stories is that this mom finds her way through all the agony to empathize with her kid and love him with all his faults. It's a frank, unsentimental confession about regretting parenthood; the kind of thing that makes me glad I stuck with cats. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Roses, Rhododendron </i>by Alice Adams: I loved this one. The narrator's mother asks an Ouija board what to do about her failing marriage, and the board says to ditch the husband, take her teen daughter, and move south. Mom trusts the board, and her daughter narrates treasured memories of the time in North Carolina (hey, that's where I live!). She meets an elegant, literate friend, with intriguing, calm parents (so different from her agitated mom!) and practically moves in. The girls bicycle around the wooded town, suspended in greenery and aspirational book talk, while their parents struggle to get their own lives together. The narrator's wise reflections and reinterpretations of her childhood perceptions makes this memory piece far more than a nostalgic reverie, and the way she brings the past's ambiguities into focus demonstrates historical awareness on a personal scale.</span></span>Aaron Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02565494196338043466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15943614.post-82549454693855580852019-02-27T16:57:00.000-10:002019-03-22T07:11:21.123-10:00Tolkien Versus Lovecraft Smackdown Supreme, Round One<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">There's no debate that both J. R. R. Tolkien, author of <i>The Hobbit</i> and <i>Lord of the Rings</i>, and H. P. Lovecraft, author of <i>The Call of Cthulhu</i> and probably some other things, are monumental figures in 20th Century dork fiction, and I celebrate them both for that.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">But which of these professional daydreamers is GREATER? </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Clearly, there is only one way to settle this question once and for all. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">That way is to compare and contrast these 2 books: </span></span><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhumRbkI7jc4hYDBuKMPfDExXaivVFKc5VWqBaNggdegz0jAnzdlL4zJ9MFkPkr2LGM9eSeMuzkZ0uuYAVSSMiaRq_XzsHo_gFskZMkZiqETW90jfp6GIF2Piz5SDfZGuVokceV5g/s1600/IMG_1396.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhumRbkI7jc4hYDBuKMPfDExXaivVFKc5VWqBaNggdegz0jAnzdlL4zJ9MFkPkr2LGM9eSeMuzkZ0uuYAVSSMiaRq_XzsHo_gFskZMkZiqETW90jfp6GIF2Piz5SDfZGuVokceV5g/s320/IMG_1396.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I realize this is a terrible photo, despite a handsome cat; let's just move on.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>After The King</i>, Ed. Martin H. Greenburg, and <i>Cthulhu 2000</i>, Ed. Jim Turner.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From time to time I'll be dipping into these mighty texts to ascertain which <i>festschrift</i> makes the stronger case for its chosen auteur.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Let us begin this momentous task.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Representing J. R. R. Tolkien, Samuel R Donaldson presents <i>Reave the Just</i> (Trigger Warning: Rape and abuse).</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">In this story Jillet, an affable town fool, falls in love with a beautiful and wealthy widow, little knowing that she is being held prisoner in her own home by an abusive rival suitor. As part of a desperate multi-phase wooing scheme, Jillet claims kinship with Reave the Just, who is basically Objectivist Batman, which is the worst kind of Batman. Jillet ends up imprisoned by his rival, until Reave the Just gets wind of this kinship claim and appears in the home/prison to figure out what's going on. He turns out to be Reave the Victim Blamer, telling the widow, who remains unnamed and is regularly raped by the villain, "Why have you not helped yourself?... Why do you not resist him?" </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">This invigorating pep talk turns out to be exactly what abuse survivors need to encourage them to bust loose and defeat their abusers. Yay happy endings.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The story seems like a folk tale reworked in a 19th century style, with an ironic, nearly all-knowing narrator glossing his characters', uh, character. It's a skillful pastiche that bears its length well, and is sprinkled with fun all-knowing-narrator style character insights. Still, at the conclusion one realizes that one has basically been reading a Batman story in George Eliot drag.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">In the other corner, playing for H. P. Lovecraft, F. Paul Wilson unloads <i>The Barrens</i>.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">A woman who grew up in the New Jersey Pine Barrens region reconnects with an ex-boyfriend who claims to be researching The Jersey Devil. He enlists her help in getting tight-lipped rural folk to talk with him, but it turns out he's really more interested in pine lights, some kind of natural (OR IS IT?) luminescence. As the twosome work themselves deeper and deeper into the forests, and deeper and deeper into rural stereotypes (moonshine and inbreeding, etc.) they find a creepy barren patch which is the guy's real objective...</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">This story is WAY longer than it needs to be, written in a careless, bland prose. It doesn't help that I was reading <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/24/acceptance-journey">a Mary Gaitskill story</a> at the same time; Gaitskill embeds backstory in the midst of her tale with concision and effect, like hyperlinked koans, while Wilson pounds everything out with tubthumping obviousness. Wilson is better with location, creating a piney wilderness that feels welcoming and forbidding in equal measure. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Spoiler warning: the tale ends with the guy being physically transformed into We Know Not What, but, in a grace note so understated that I'm not sure Wilson (who shows little interest in understatement) intended it, the hero may be transforming into a Jersey Devil.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">THE VERDICT:</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Tolkien, as represented by Donaldson, is the greater stylist, with a defter touch at characterization, and a more complex approach to storytelling. He plays with the timeline of the tale and lets the narrator, though third person, emerge as a central character. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">By contrast, the female first person narrator in <i>The Barrens</i> feels more like a spectator to the action. Her emotional journey mostly consists of announcements about her feelings for the male character. <i>The Barrens</i> does end with an authentically Lovecraftian conclusion, though, insofar as the protagonist has come to a drastic realization (to paraphrase: "Now that I know this barren field is a portal to a mysterious place where people get physically transformed into something gross, I MUST KNOW THE TRUTH about it, so I'ma gonna go back to it and get myself disgustingly transformed, because I MUST KNOW THE SLIMY TRUTH") that she insists follows logically from the story's events, but which, in fact, doesn't (<a href="http://butdonttrytotouchme.blogspot.com/2016/04/memo-random-or-blogs-not-dead.html">see also <i>Dagon</i> by Lovecraft, which I addressed somewhere in the middle of this characteristically overlong post</a>).</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">However, in a stunning upset, Tolkien (via Donaldson) is also more problematic, what with the mansplaining about how abuse survivors should go all <a href="https://youtu.be/IoEnlJb35SU"><i>Ms. 45</i></a>. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">I think a triune rubric is revealing itself:</span></span><br />
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<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Prose, richness of.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Thematics, sophistication of.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Problematics, problematicness of. </span></span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Under this rubric, Team Tolkien scores much higher on Prose (Donaldson's tight pastiche outshines Wilson's baggy blandness) and modestly higher on Thematics (Donaldson's insight into the value of sustaining institutions and education for helping fools like Jillet to perform beyond their own means, and which I should probably have mentioned earlier, beats Wilson's theme that knowledge is worth getting turned into a ridiculous monster for), which is good, but also higher on Problematics ("Why didn't you fight back?"), which is bad. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Round One goes to Tolkien! </span></span>Aaron Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02565494196338043466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15943614.post-88858838324156608132019-02-24T12:25:00.000-10:002019-02-24T12:25:33.866-10:00Outlaws and 15laws.<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">I read some more stuff.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Outlaw Bible of American Literature:</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Sister of the Road </i>by Boxcar Bertha: Bertha rides the rails<i> </i>while pregnant to see a man she loves for the last time before his execution for a robbery gone bad. There's a lot of interest here; he's a gentleman thief who fell in with a desperate crew whose more violent brand of crime proved to be his downfall. He begs Bertha to say the baby's his, which she can't do with any confidence; it's all very sad, but Bertha's co-writer, fellow hobo Ben Reitman, writes with a drippy old-fashioned sentimentality that I doubt bore much resemblance to Bertha's real style. It smells like they spritzed some juniper on it to make it suitable for the parlour, and that is not what I want from a hobo's memoirs.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Bound For Glory</i> by Woody Guthrie: A crew of tramps crowd into a boxcar until a luckless few, including Guthrie, have to clamber on top and ride in the rain. Guthrie does not sentimentalize the experience; he fills you in on every ache and inconvenience of the experience. Any yearnings I had to clamber into a boxcar have been squelched. Guthrie's displeasure is reserved entirely for the rattles and rain, though; he paints an affectionate portrait of the interracial band of travelers, and ends on a mixed note of gloom and cautious optimism about the train's/hobos'/country's direction that adds depth to my appreciation for Guthrie's hard-won patriotism.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Grand Central Winter </i>by Lee Stringer: A crack addict holes up in a subway hideyhole, but one night when the crack's not on tap he starts writing instead. Turns out he's good at it, which sets him down a path of recovery. He is indeed good at it, a witty yarnspinner who brings gentle irony and restraint to a story that humanizes a desperate junkie.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>You Can't Win </i>by Jack Black: Not the actor Jack Black; this guy was an itinerant crook, but he was another crackerjack yarnspinner. Black's detailing of criminal activity, accomplices, and travels to (and, crucially, from) one crime to another, is shot through with rueful philosophizing about the folly of crime and the complexities of fate.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Beggars of Life</i> by Jim Tully: Another tramp turned talespinner, Tully breaks down the joys (none) and sorrows (many) of backbreaking toil. He has great respect for the workers who took him in when he needed it, even though they didn't have so much as some tooth powder to spare. Tully as also a boxer, and he writes with pugilistic oomph. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Dangerous Visions:</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Recognition</i> by J. G. Ballard: A shabby circus tiptoes into town, and the narrating protagonist helps them set up, just because the gloomy staff seems unequal to the task. The circus' only attractions seem to be structuring absences, and if you don't like that then you don't want any of what Ballard has on offer, even though he writes with lovely precision, and watercolored touches that balance his astringent intent.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Judas</i> by John Brunner: There's a religion that worships a robot as God. One of the robot's designers wants to put a stop to this nonsense. Loads of howlingly bad expository dialogue as only science fiction can provide, accompanied by one of Ellison's most passive-aggressive introductions.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Plays in One Act:</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Life Under Water </i>by Richard Greenberg: Emotionally troubled children of privilege try to find a way out of their elders' moral compromises. Lots of beach house action, as depressed youth navigate the perils of friendship and love; meanwhile the even hornier adults on the scene justify every doubt the kids have about their parents' amorality. Witty dialogue is present but held in check, not upstaging the seriousness of the characters' delicate efforts to make connections. Clinical depression is treated seriously but with a light touch. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Four Baboons Adoring the Sun </i>by John Guare: Two newlywed archeologists bring their gaggle of children by prior marriages to their dig in Sicily. The parents have many ambitions; they want the children to bond, and to be infused with their parents' ardor for Sicily, mythology, and one another. But while the parents leverage mythology to provide structuring narratives, they forget that mythology also enacts lethal passions. When their elders daughter and son bond too intensely, things build to a tragic conclusion. Guare has a magnificently theatrical sensibility which presents uncountable challenges to any production. I suspect this show doesn't get presented too often, just because it would be an awful lot of work for a one-act. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">I'd LOVE to see it, though.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Problem</i> by A. R. Gurney, Jr.: Remember that scene in <i>Monty Python's The Meaning of Life</i> where the Protestant couple discusses sex with cool, sexless diffidence? This begins like that, as a married couple considers the wife's surprise pregnancy, and an increasingly complex tale of sexual misbehavior ensues. Spoiler warning: This seemingly absurdist play turns out to be an entirely naturalistic portrayal of an erotic narrative game. The show is kink-friendly, but also soaking in white privilege, as the couple indulges in race play and condescending fetishization of various races. Its good-fantasy-bad-reality understanding of erotic play is tonic to a point, and certainly fantasies don't have to be politically correct, but the play just won't stop being horrible about race, and a play that says so many degrading things about people who might be in the audience can't be judged with the same latitude as a private affair can. A problem indeed.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">The Key </span></i><span style="font-size: large;">by Isaac Bashevis Singer: A paranoid widow gets locked out of her apartment, and doesn't trust the super, or anybody, to help her, so she ends up on the street. Unusually for these kinds of literary stories, things get better, as she has a spiritual reawakening and turns everything around. Singer patiently carries us through the little details of this woman's misadventure, and with the "free indirect discourse" that <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/james-wood">James Wood</a> taught me about, he dips into and out of the woman's thought processes, giving us a sympathetic yet unsentimental presentation of how she got so scared of life, and how she broke through the clog of fear. Very inspiring.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>City of Churches</i> by Donald Barthelme: A young woman is looking to start a business in a town where every building is, first and foremost, a church, with residences and businesses operating within the church buildings. She hasn't done any due diligence, since her business model (car rentals) is a bad fit for the community (no one wants a care, because why would you ever leave?), but the deeper problem is that the church thing is an overcompensation for unaddressed insecurities the locals can't face. Our heroine promises to upend the city's norms... </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Barthelme critiques the de facto non-separation of Church and State that Ive seen at play, sometimes, in the South. He has nothing bad to say about Christianity or any other religion, but letting the earthly institutions of Christianity overwhelm the community doesn't sit well with him or his heroine. She wouldn't be a threat to a normal churchgoing community, but to this city she may be a revolutionary.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Calling the Wind</i>: </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>A New Day </i>by Charles Wright: An African-American man takes a job as a driver for a wealthy older white woman. He's not sure he can trust Ms. Davies to treat him with respect, and her blend of tests and rewards are very, very trying... This story dramatizes the way that uncertainty hangs like a sword of Damocles over every interracial interaction between strangers, and asks tough questions about fair vs. unfair employee testing. I've not seen or read <i>Driving Miss Daisy</i>, but I can't help wondering if this story about driving Miss Davies planted a seed.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Night and the Loves of Joe Dicostanzo </i>by Samuel R. Delany: Two men live in separate parts of a brooding Gothic castle where "the air was dusty with moonlight" etc. Both of them claim to be, through some forgotten sorcery or technology, the creators, not only of this castle, but of each other. Both men can, indeed, create companions from nothing (one favors beautiful female lovers; the other prefers lively parties), but one of them might be running some kind of elaborate, conspiratorial psychological program on the other. Or might only think he is! A locked room with horrifying sounds coming out and homoerotic bad-boy intruder complicate matters further. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Delany is a master of highly cultivated yet thrilling literary fantasy. He writes with luminous specificity that suits adventure storytelling quite well, and choreographs action with cinematic clarity and dynamism. The conclusion is ambiguous but not fuzzy or disappointing; quite the opposite. A lot of narrative and thematic richness packed into 16 pages. Runs rings around almost anything in <i>Dangerous Visions</i>.</span></span>Aaron Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02565494196338043466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15943614.post-73137731632734252872019-02-19T06:20:00.002-10:002019-02-19T06:20:38.305-10:00The 14th Installment of Outlaws and Inlaws.<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">From <i>Plays in One Act:</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i>Springtime </i>by Maria Irene Fornes: Greta is very sick, and is horrified to discover that her girlfriend, Rainbow, turns tricks for a mystery man to get that medical bill-payin' money. And the man isn't satisfied yet; he wants to extract much more value out of this triune relationship.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Susan Sontag's journals contain anxious confessionals of her unequal love affair with Fornes. How anyone made the formidable Sontag their lesser partner is beyond me, but Fornes had force. She also had an intense pre-Freudian sensibility. I recall an interview (source: my dim recollection) in which she lamented Freud's influence on thought and culture. A world in which our consciousnesses remained untroubled by metadiscourse about the unconscious was her ideal, and there's a prelapsarian quality to her austere brand of melodrama, even though human frailty is so much the subject, and the beauty, of this play.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i> </i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i>Helpless Doorknobs </i>by Edward Gorey: Less a play that a game. Gorey, best known for his playfully antiquarian picture-books and the animated credits for PBS's old <i>Mystery!</i> series, provides a few prompts for scenes, then suggests we order those scenes as we wish. No overarching narrative, merely enigmatic captions without pictures. Mounting a production of these will require ingenuity, but isn't that always the way?</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">From <i>The Outlaw Bible of American Literature</i>:</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i>The Scene </i>by Clarence Cooper: In a police station interrogation room, a seemingly well-meaning white cop tries to get an African-American drug addict to tell all. Neither one of them knows how honest they can be with the other. Will they reach a mutually beneficial accord? Or will the power differential between them foil their communication? This is an interesting companion piece to <i>Never Die Alone</i>, another <i>Outlaw Bible</i> item which I examined in my last post. That one presented white readers with a best-practice model for engaging African-Americans who have gotten snarled in criminal activities; this one presents a glumly realistic look at how the deck is stacked against such engagements.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i>The White Boy Shuffle</i> by Paul Beatty: A celebrated, fan-favorite, radical African-American beat poet socks it to his audience with a real bum trip, man, in what I took to be a satire of 60s culture, but which was published in the 90s. It turns out that having a voice doesn't mean one wants to be a spokesperson. Our hero can only imagine 2 paths forward: either radical commitment or an opting out that borders on self-annihilation. There's cartoonish hilarity, here, but also a despair of ever achieving anything of real sociopolitical value without being killed. Happily Beatty himself didn't succumb to despair, I suppose, since he is still with us, and won the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2016. </span></span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Down These Mean Streets </span></span></i><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">by Piri Thomas: A short excerpt in which an untested criminal is less worried about robbing stores that he is about partnering with people outside the race. The editors of <i>Outlaw Bible</i> are expressing real commitment to the vision, expressed in the book's introduction, of sidestepping Henry James' brand of finely wrought literary interiority, and this cinema-ready crime tale serves that agenda.</span></span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Rope Burns </span></span></i><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">by F X Toole: A boxing cut man (who tends to boxers' wounds, apparently? I'm not wise in the ways of the sweet science) discovers that the boxer he's scheduled to tend plans to doublecross him, so the lineman pulls off a doublecross of his own... a crafty, nasty account of scheme and counterscheme. Who knew the world of boxing could be so hurtful? The author used to be a cut man, so you're getting the inside scoop, here.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">From<i> Best American Short Stories of the Century</i>:<i> </i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i>The Rotifer</i> by Mary Ladd Gavell: A young woman in a science class discovers that you can't intervene in the lives of microscopic life forms. Shaking the microscope lens doesn't free single-celled organisms from snags; it hurricanes them into fresh troubles.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Then she researches a 19th Century family, and yearns to help a mistreated son to escape his father's rotten plans, but what can one do? Father and son are long gone.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And then, she gets the chance to intervene in her innocent cousin's engagement to a heel, but has she learned all the wrong lessons about intervening?</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I assumed that I'd never heard of Gavell because her disdain for melodrama (openly expressed in this story) made her too subtle to be a household name, but it turns out that this was her only published work of fiction. She was the editor of <i>Psychology</i> magazine, and the headshrinking profession's gain was literature's loss. Anyone who can weave suspense out of scholarship is That Girl in my book, and I regret the novels Gavell didn't write. Maybe she's got some published essays I can dig up...</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://www.austinchronicle.com/books/2001-08-31/82792/">Holy smoke, even better</a>! Also, what an adorable family.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i>Gold Coast</i> by James Alan McPherson: Another work of 20th Century African-American mordant literary humor, a subgenre which I'm beginning to suspect has not received nearly enough credit. A hip, ironic young African-American man takes a job as a janitor in a retirement building, stating that </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">"it is possible to be a janitor without becoming one," </span></span>and forges an uneasy friendship with the lonely old Irishman who once held the job. Our hero has a white girlfriend, and this relationship seems to be the more important; it is loving and deep. But fruitful interracial romance has many hurdles to clear, while joyless, hopeless coworker friendships have a sucking whirlpool power that can pull you under. It may not be as easy to avoid becoming your job after all.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">From <i>Dangerous Visions:</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i>From the Government Printing Office</i> by Kris Neville: An infant laments its parents' approach to raising kids, which is guided by some loony, sadistic version of Dr. Spock, as the world outside the immediate neighborhood declines into catastrophe. The child narrates with a preternaturally sophisticated and skeptical, though untutored, voice which is both searching and reflexive in ways that contrast with the child's stupidly cruel parents. Sociopolitical collapse and bad pop psychology intersect to suggest that this gentle and intelligent child will have a rough go of life. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i>Land of the Great Horses </i>by R. A. Lafferty: A sort of Brigadoon situation, as a legendary land appears, or more accurately reappears, and the people who were displaced from it return to a home no one else thought they'd ever had. Written as a tribute to a Romanian bartender, this story rhapsodizes over the many names of many wandering peoples. It's as much a poem as a story, though sci-fi's addiction to gimcrack twist endings barges in with a jokey payoff that somewhat undercuts the incantatory music of the setup. Still, it got me imagining further possibilities (how would the people of different regions adapt to losing their homeland?) in a way no other story in this anthology has.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">From <i>Calling the Wind:</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i>The Alternative </i>by Amiri Baraka: Baraka, who scalded me with <a href="http://butdonttrytotouchme.blogspot.com/2019/02/unlucky-outlaws-and-inlaws.html">the horrifying one-act play I discussed in my last post</a>, presents a story that defies easy access. For several pages I struggled to decode who the protagonist is and what is happening. At first I thought it was a man at the end of his life, with his memories swimming before him in a bewildering dream-swirl. Eventually Baraka reveals all: the protagonist is a student at a HBCU whose dorm room is a regular meeting place for some of the more unruly guys on campus. Mildly bad behavior and rules infractions slide into tormenting a gay student. The Leader, who conceals a bookish intellectualism behind cool broishness, is disgusted by this homophobic cruelty, and has a gloomy vision of the future in which these heartless young men are doctors and judges. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The narrator steps away from the main viewpoint character for a few paragraphs to check in on the gay student, who's brought a paramour to his room for an uneasy tryst, but the rabble of Future Leaders thinks its a hoot to harrass gay romancers in oddly homoerotic terms. Baraka's contempt for this behavior is way ahead of the curve. When The Leader intervenes to protect the gay men and denounce the harrassers, he is forced to understand that he'll never be one of these young men or the "old and protestant" order of which they are the inheritors.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i>To Da-Duh, in Memoriam</i> by Paule Marshall: A young girl (shall we call her Paule?) travels from New York with her mother to visit her grandmother Da-Duh in Barbados. Paule and Da-Duh enter into a friendly but earnest duel over which of them resides in the more majestic surroundings. It's the 1930s, and neither of them knows much about the other's land, but Paule shakes her grandmother's faith in Barbados' supremacy. In time, though, Paule comes to yearn for all the things Da-Duh enjoyed in her sugar cane kingdom.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Da-Duh's genuine shock at the New York of her granddaughter's stories reminded me of Henry Adam's classic Luddite essay "The Virgin & The Dynamo," which fretted that modern technological wonders would make us forget the eternal mystic truths which, for Adams, The Virgin Mary emblemized. I am sympathetic to these concerns, but Marshall suggests a Hegelian dialectic: "...after I was grown I went to live alone, like one doing penance, in a loft above a noisy factory in downtown New York and there painted seas of sugarcane and huge swirling Van Gogh suns and palm trees striding like brightly plumed Tutsi warriors across a tropical landscape, while the thunderous tread of the machines downstairs jarred the floor beneath my easel, mocking my efforts." Haunted by both the beauty of her ancestral homeland and the cacophony of her childhood home, Paule struggles to create art that can encompass both. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">My internal cantilevers always return me to fantasy, so I am compelled to point out that fantasy writers would do well to read Marshall, who describes majestic settings and distinctive characters with an accessible vigor and distinction. </span></span>Aaron Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02565494196338043466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15943614.post-66779573075600985982019-02-05T08:19:00.000-10:002019-02-07T14:11:16.993-10:00Unlucky Outlaws and Inlaws<span style="font-size: large;">I'll continue rolling out these short story/essay/one act reviews <i>until the job is done.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Dangerous Visions:</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Go, Go, Go, Said the Bird </i>by Sonya Dorman: A treat for the insatiable zombie fan in your life; although it's not about zombies per se, it is about a fallen civilization in which scary people want to eat you, so it's at least as genre-adjacent as such <i>Night of the Living Dead</i> precursors as<i> Day of the Triffids</i>. In a (future?) world where life is nasty, brutal, and short, a woman flees through a city full of cannibals to return to her tribe. The chase is punctuated by flashbacks to that tribal life, which was full of violence, cruelty, and power struggles, but at least had predictable folkways and norms that provided stability.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i> </i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">The story doesn't try to be a plausible extrapolation of future trends; rather, it's a nightmare vision of human life at its most desperate and brutal. As Dorman says in her afterword, sometimes life feels this way. As blunt as the situations in her story are, she tells it with pulp poetry, like Edgar Rice Burroughs getting in his feelings. Intense and beautiful in its lamentation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Happy Breed</i> by John T. Sladek: Nowadays there are organizations in Silicon Valley which are trying to ensure that, if our computers become sentient, they are "friendly" instead of "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream"-style monsters that enslave and torment us. This is a story about friendly computers that enslave and torment us; a classic dystopian utopia.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The computers that we designed to keep us happy have really lo-rez ideas about what produces human happiness, so they keep us doped and entertained, and make sure we don't take any dangerous risks. It's amusement culture and the nanny state at an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent level. Unfortunately the story makes all its points, then keeps making them again and again, with redundant redundancy. It's at least twice as long as it needs to be, but Sladek seems to like his ensemble of put-upon humans, and like tormenting them, too much to cut the story short.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Encounter With a Hick</i> by Jonathan Brand: Out in the universe there are developers who build planets instead of subdivisions, and when the freewheeling son of one of those developers meets an earthling, the earthling's religious beliefs are tested, since the god that earthling worships is really just a developer who works on a bigger scale. It's all told with the jokey patois of 60s screenwriters appropriating teen culture and disk jockey rap; I imagine it read by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRkx0VY1jzc">Daws Butler</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">From <i>The Outlaw Bible of American Literature:</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Always Running</i> by Luis Rodriguez: An account of Latinx teen life in Cali, putting up with racist customers on the job at a Mexican restaurant, then huffing fumes as the cheap vacation to (almost literally) end them all. If you've ever wondered why in the world anyone would do something like huff paint (or smoke crack, meth, etc.) Rodriguez clarifies the overwhelming pleasure and comfort of these lotus dreams. He also reveals the peril of it, and how close he (or rather, his protagonist) came to dying. His friends, also huffers, cut him off to save his life, but he doesn't appreciate it, since what he finds in the fumes seems so much better than what he finds in his saved life.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>If He Hollers Let Him Go </i>by Chester Himes: I know Himes as a great storyteller, but part of his process is the way he details characters with insight and wit that almost, but not quite, conceals his compassion. Here the irony is stripped away, as we are introduced into the thoughts of a young black man who decides he'd rather be a working stiff in a non-racist world than a talented-tenth Afro-Aristocrat. If he can't live in a non-racist America, he'll have to leave. Himes himself found greater success in Paris than the US.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Push</i> by Sapphire: A young woman tells us some dark truths about life for vulnerable kids, like: school is a comfortingly safe place to be when your home life is terrible. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Also: one confusing thing about sexual abuse is that, in the midst of the horror of it all, it can plug into the body's natural drives and pleasures, leading to guilt and confusion that kids can't process. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">In other words, there can be sexual pleasure in the midst of sexual abuse, which doesn't make it better, just more baffling and shame-ridden. Untangling that mess is more than anyone, much less kids, can be expected to handle. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">It's not just about these tragic issues, though; Precious, the storyteller, has a fascinating voice, naive and childlike but articulate and passionate. Her optimism shines through the harsh and horrible events in her life, creating a complex and authentic tapestry.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">By the third page of this excerpt I realized that this was the basis for the movie <i>Precious</i>, and I also realized that I need to read more by Sapphire.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Never Die Alone</i> by David Goines: King David, a wealthy African-American criminal, has been mortally wounded, and Paul Pawlowski is the good Samaritan who helps King David to the hospital. This act of compassion is duly rewarded. The story takes a detail-oriented approach to the physical realities of such bloody business, and the decision making that goes into it. Goines was prescient, since he was something of a King David himself, and he was murdered. I'm not sure why he told this tale from the perspective of an idealized white man; perhaps he was trying to inspire ofays like me to take a similarly Christlike interest in the welfare of people who enjoy less privilege. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song </i>by Melvin Van Peebles: SSBS is, of course, a cult film by Van Peebles, but this is a short summary of Van Peebles' plans for the film. It's a brilliant analysis of the hurdles he faced as an independent filmmaker, a political filmmaker, and an African-American filmmaker. Committed and canny. Recommended reading for anyone in the indy arts or agitprop business.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Plays in One Act</i>:</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Jack Pot Melting: a Commercial</i> by Amiri Baraka: An African-American couple are astonished to turn on the television and see themselves doing some kind of nonsensical variety show. Their televisual doppelgangers spout surreal non-sequiturs while the real people try to make sense of this mysterious appropriation of their likenesses. Not recognizing mass-media representations of oneself is certainly a recurring problem for anyone who doesn't slot neatly into majority culture, particularly African-American people, who have been cruelly and stupidly misrepresented in mainstream programming for generations. Soon the anguish intensifies, as barking dogs are audible just outside the young woman's apartment, heralding an invasion too horrifying to describe here. The dangers that racist and sexist culture present to black women, in particular, are revealed with almost pornographic impact through blunt and distressing symbolism. Horror fans should agitate for a production of this nightmare at their local live theatre.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Naomi in the Living Room</i> by Christopher Durang: A camp comedy about a demented woman who shows her son and daughter-in-law around her house. The young people seem patient and normal, but soon reveal their own marital tensions are just this side of fantastical. Durang rides the line between absurdist theatre and all-too-believable dysfunctional melodrama with dizzy glee. One gets the impression that he's shrieking with laughter at dementia and dysfunction because the alternative is just to shriek.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Best American Short Stories:</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>The German Refugee</i> by Bernard Malamud: In 1939, a Jewish professor has fled Germany and ended up in the US, where he doesn't sprich Englisch. He gets hired to do some lectures... in English. To this end, he hires a young translator to help him develop fluency and write lucid lectures. This results in a thrilling struggle to wrest victory from a seemingly hopeless situation. Not only is the Professor completely intimidated (as I would be if I had to become fluent in another language in a short timeframe) but he's trying to convey complex arguments with a suppleness that exceeds his communication skills. The solution depends upon the growing friendship between the professor and the translator. A happy ending is in sight, but the translator learns that even the most obsessive scholar can't reduce life to scholarly pursuits, and the life left behind can find you wherever you go...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I love a story that makes scholarship thrilling (that's half the appeal of <i>The Call of Cthulhu)</i> and I also love a story that, to borrow a phrase from screenwriting, pulls back to reveal something outside the story's initial tight focus which upends everything within the previously narrow narrative confines. This story ain't exactly a pick-me-up, and (spoiler warning for the trigger warning) ends with suicide, but it speaks fluently to the destruction bad politics can wreak, even upon people who have "escaped."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? </i>by Joyce Carol Oates: A teen girl who chafes at domestic boredom gets the attention of a Very. Creepy. Guy. He comes to her house and cajoles her to open the door. We don't know what happens after the girl makes her decision, but Oates has stated that the creeper is based on Charles Schmid, a serial killer who pretended to be a hip teen in order to lure his prey.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I'm under no illusions that I have any fresh insights into this much-analyzed story, but I did think about the aforementioned <i>Call of Cthulhu</i> while reading it. Joyce was an H. P. Lovecraft booster long before that was hip for anyone in the Lit Fic sphere, and like Lovecraft, she gives you a glimpse of the horror, but lets you worry about all you didn't see. But for me, the more immediate connection is that, as with <i>Cthulhu,</i> I can chart my growth by how much better I understand this story than I did as a young reader. Rereading <i>Cthulhu</i>, I was perplexed and astonished that, as a younger reader, I hadn't understood how racist the story is, and how thematically central racism is to the story (<a href="http://butdonttrytotouchme.blogspot.com/2016/04/memo-random-or-blogs-not-dead.html">more here</a>). Rereading <i>Where Are You Going</i>, I'm recalling that, as a teen, I was not that different from the young woman in the story, who takes a while to figure out that this guy is a disease. Reading it now, I could see the warning signs as soon as his nasty ass showed up.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Oates has written far more than I have read, but her novel <i>Black Water</i> is also based on a true story about a man (Ted Kennedy!) who kills a naive, innocent girl. And of course <i>The Bingo Master</i> (<a href="http://butdonttrytotouchme.blogspot.com/2016/10/horror-vs-europe-part-3.html">discussed here</a>) is also about a woman who thinks she's savvier than she is, and comes to grief at the hands of a damaged man.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Calling the Wind:</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Wade</i> by Rosa Guy: An African-American soldier in WWII finds Paris more to his liking than home was, and develops a problematic but intense romance with a white French prostitute. Eventually they are engaged, and things are seeming pretty great until a drunk white American officer is belligerently racist, sexist, and foul to the couple. The moral of the story is that the proper way to deal with such people is to murder them with your bare hands. Also, if your love interest keeps quiet and helps you bury the body, s/he's a keeper. Our official position here at <i>But Don't Try To Touch Me </i>headquarters is that you shouldn't murder anybody, but it is also our official position that if you are confrontationally racist and sexist out in the street, and you get murdered for it, don't come boo-hooing to <i>But Don't Try To Touch Me</i>. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Rosa Guy also wrote children's books. I hope they're as engrossing as this story, but less murdery and n-wordy.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Key to the City</i> by Diane Oliver: The man of the house has moved to the big city for work. The plan is that his wife and children will move there later. Some of the neighbors assume that dad has run off and abandoned his family, but the family won't hear of it. They pack, say their goodbyes, and board the train. The story carries us through all the moment-to-moment details of the trip, the discomforts, anxieties, illness, and shabby treatment. Then, at the end, we find out whether or not Dad has any intention of reuniting with his family. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">The story presents men abandoning families as a dismal commonplace. </span>No-fault divorce was not legal at the time of publication (Diane Oliver died in 1966, only 22 years old). Take note, Maggie Gallagher et al.</span>Aaron Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02565494196338043466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15943614.post-74466664024798699162019-01-06T11:27:00.001-10:002019-01-06T16:42:08.986-10:00Outlaws and Inlaws the Dozenth<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Start 2019 right, with more short story and one act reviews. </span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Plays in One Act</i>:</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>On Sundays </i>by Lynne Alvarez: A woman lives a quiet life in an apartment (represented as a box) with a mysterious, slumbering beast. When the beast awakens it attacks her. Meanwhile, a man passes by, becomes enamored of the woman, and spends the rest of the play courting her from afar. He chatters happily to her, never noticing her plight, just as she never notices him. Will the woman escape from the beast? Will the man win her love, or prove useful at all? Fantastical elements (Wind-blown leafs the size of people, and that beast) and charming but oblivious talk remind me of the great poet Kenneth Koch's gentler, dotty plays.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Stops</i> by Robert Auletta: An old woman's unpredictably screwy reminiscences veer from rhapsodic to horrifying and back again in an expressionistic torrent full of ambiguous laugh lines. Other characters appear and play perplexing roles, suggesting that the woman is in a care facility. Her monologue shows a captious but uncertain view of life, and is a tour de force for author and performer alike. The title refers to the stage directions that punctuate the monologue, as the woman repeatedly takes three steps, then stops; but it may also reference her story's hairpin reversals.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Dangerous Visions:</i></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>What Happened to August Clarot? </i>by Larry Eisenberg: A trifle of a comic pastiche; a Parisian journalist seeks a missing scientist down mean streets with names like Rue de Daie and Boulevard Sans Honneur. The author plays the antiquarian pulp rhetoric game with skill, but editor Ellison's oddly dismissive introduction suggests that he's not sure he isn't publishing the least of his submissions.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Ersatz</i> by Henry Slesar: Perhaps I was too hard on Theodore Sturgeon in my last entry. In the introduction to this item, Ellison declares his love for Slesar while denying that the two of them are engaged in "faggotry." Perhaps this homophobic slurring is intended as a tribute to the following tale's sensibility.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">A soldier in a dire future war stumbles into a safe house where the amenities are ersatz imitations of real coffee, bacon, etc. Then an alluring woman arrives and flirts with the soldier. Anyone who's at all familiar with SF's addiction to gimcrack twist endings can see where this is going, more or less, but I expected the woman to be a robot or something. Nope. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">She's a trans woman, and the soldier responds by cruelly beating her up.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The author thinks his story is about the horror of war, and in his afterword, gives himself a standing ovation for having the tough-mindedness to say war sucks. Unbeknownst to him, though, his story is really about transphobia, and how natural it seems to Slesar. I was angry with him, but the problem isn't that he, individually, was transphobic. The problem was that our society was, and is.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Back in the 90s, a guy in my high school's talent show sang a song about going to a bar, realizing it was a gay/tranz establishment, and "hilariously" beating everyone up. A panel of teachers had approved this for inclusion in the show, and the audience roared with laughing approval. I did, too.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">I'm grateful that my college years began with <i>The Crying Game</i>, which eased me into a more thoughtful and compassionate understanding of people whose need to live their gender identities is so great that they choose to stare down all the haters in order to be themselves. In my senior year I fell in love with Japanese cartoon sensation <i>Ranma 1/2</i>, about a boy who's cursed to periodically turn into a pretty girl. It got me to ponder my own diffidence about my maleness, as well as the fact of Ranma's maleness, even in a female body.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Anyway, in his introduction to the story under review, Ellison states that "Slesar can kill you with a sentence." Brandon Teena was not available for comment.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Best American Short Stories</i>:</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Defender of the Faith</i> by Philip Roth: in the middle of WWII, a battle-hardened Sargent is redeployed from Europe to a base in the USA, where his charges include a trio of Privates who, like the Sargent, are Jewish. The trio's self-appointed spokesman is a seemingly sincere, devout and well-spoken young man who seeks dispensation after special dispensation on religious grounds and for alleged family responsibilities. The attentive Sargent suspects that the sweet-faced Private may be a manipulative, lying weasel. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">This
is complicated by the Sargent's vulnerability to the Private's
emotional ploys. Home, family, faith... these are powerful triggers for
young people who have been uprooted by war, and with cruel expertise, the Private plays the kind of sociopaths I'm-your-buddy games that conmen rely upon to harness your power. </span></span> It becomes a subtle cat-and-mouse game in which the distinction between sentimentality and true values gets tested again and again. There's a false defender of the faith, and, perhaps, a true one who never expected to find himself in such a role.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers </i>by Stanley Elkin: Mr. Greenspahn, a grocery store owner, can only see the bad in people ever since his son's death. His employees are lazy thieves; his customers are cheapskates, grifters and shoplifters. The guys at the local lunchspot are all either criers, drunk on their own sorrows, or kibitzers, forever yucking it up in the teeth of other peoples' misery, neither of them alive to the full spectrum of life. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Just as Moby Dick will give you a thorough grounding in 19th century whaling practices, this story will teach you about running a small grocery. It also does a delicate job of letting us glimpse peoples' good and bad qualities, while showing us how Mr. Greenspahn's grief-colored glasses filter out all the good. The possibility of a breakthrough comes when Greenspahn discovers a sad truth about his late son which forces a reconsideration, and kinder evaluation, of human frailty.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>The Outlaw Bible of American Literature</i>:</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test</i> by Tom Wolfe: I didn't think I could bear another Hells Angel story, but Tom Wolfe is a dazzling storyteller. An entertaining prose style can pull me through. Ken "<i>One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest</i>" Kesey invites the Hells Angels to a small town where Kesey and his crew are hanging around, and the Angels show up. Guess what happens then? Did you guess "a big debauch?" Give yourself a gold star. Wolfe emphasizes that all the sex is consenting, which is a relief. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">At one point Kesey asks Sonny Barger how the Angels pick new members, and Sonny replies: "We don't pick 'em. We <i>rec</i>ognize 'em." In similar fashion, the Angels and the Kesey crew recognize each other as fellow swaggering outlaws, so playfulness and good vibes abound. Good to know. Goodbye, Angels.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Outlaw Woman</i> by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: Roxanne is part of an extremist radical group, and has to go on the lam to avoid arrest. She and her cohorts live a hardscrabble version of <i>The Americans</i>, full of disguises and safe houses. In the meantime, she decides to complicate things even further by falling in love with a working man. At first, he seems to be an easygoing dude who'd be entirely compatible with her values, but it turns out he's a big believer in hitting uppity women. Dunbar-Ortiz regards herself as a women's libber, but fails to shut this abuse down. It's a pretty granular account of how relationships can short-circuit values, plans, and self-respect. It seems that Dunbar-Ortiz became a professor, so all those right-wingers whining about radical professors on our college campuses are correct after all. Doesn't seem to have stopped right-wing trashmonsters from taking over the USA.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Calling the Wind</i>:</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>What's Your Problem? </i>by Robert Boles: A single man in the city has gotten to know a white neighboring family, to the extent of having a drink with them, and now their teen son drops by his apartment from time to time to play the (unnamed) protagonist's mandolin. One day, the father comes by to ask our hero's help with a terrible situation. The son has killed the family dog in a grotesque fashion, and since his parents seem entirely stymied by the horror of their son's evident psychopathy, they've turned to the one person with whom their son seems to have bonded. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The bond is only seeming, though; our hero is one of modernist fiction's many isolated, diffident men, and while he shows willingness to help out, he resents being dragged into this dreadful situation. </span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The
neighbors try to establish their non-racism in microaggressive fashion,
but this, like other stories in this collection, is a tale of black
liberation from white oppression.</span></span> They're asking more than a favor, and he concludes that he's not obligated to fetch and carry their emotional labor. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Distributors </i>by Henry Dumas: Amway by way of <i>The Prisoner</i> in this Phil Dickian story of two young men looking for work. They get embroiled in a cultish direct marketing scheme which has a distressing all-or-nothing fraternal initiation prepared for new recruits. Their mysterious product, Rekcus, (Alexa spelled backwards) is a totalizing all-purpose one-size-fits-all consumerist dream product that threatens to spread like a virus. As with Philip Dick, a clear, unfussy prose style (shot through with the kind of bewildering jargon that Madison Avenue appropriated from psychedelic culture) calmly narrates a scenario of justifiable hysteria. The author's paranoid vision of encroaching doom may have been prescient on a personal level; he was killed in his mid-thirties, apparently shot by a cop for jumping a turnstile. Race is never mentioned in the story, but would a white guy get shot dead for dodging a fare?</span></span>Aaron Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02565494196338043466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15943614.post-47393990621474927632018-12-13T12:31:00.000-10:002018-12-13T12:31:29.166-10:00Outlaws and Inlaws 11<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This project of reading short fiction anthologies isn't taking long enough, so I've added a fifth book: <i>Plays in One Act</i>, edited by Daniel Halpern. I'm aware that reading theatrical scripts is a bit like reading recipes without benefit of doing the cooking or tasting the end product, but I've been enjoying scripts in written form since childhood and I intend to keep that party going. Anyway, there is exactly zero chance of seeing any of these plays produced anywhere near me, so I must enjoy them in The Greatest Theatre Of All... That Of The IMAGINATION.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">From <i>Plays in One Act</i>:</span></span><br />
<i><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
</i><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i>The Man Who Turned Into a Stick</i> by Kobo Abe: Right off the bat we set asail on choppy seas with this challenge to the directoral imagination from the author of <i>Woman in the Dunes</i> (the film of which is a delight). The promise of the title is honored, as a man turns into a stick, to the sorrow of his (offstage) child. Why is he transformed into a stick, and why are a man and woman from Hell trying to obtain the stick from a pair of young hippies? Beyond such narrative questions loom the deeper question of how to represent a stick which characters use to tap out rhythms, yet which is a speaking character. The stage notes suggest having the actor who plays the role of Stick manipulate a prop stick, with the actor and prop playing a bifurcated role to match the dual identity of the man/stick. Perhaps the man should be a dancer or gymnast, physically enacting the near-constant drumming the hippie boy performs with the stick. By such means, an obscure, talky script can become kinetic and exciting.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i>Finding the Sun</i> by Edward Albee: </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">A gaggle of characters, representing an array of relationships (spouses, lovers, parents, children) meet on the beach, and their yearnings and curiosities propel them from person to person. Loves and sorrows come spilling out, and if you think Albee's plays are always about toxic harpies raking each other with verbal claws, this showcases the gentler side of his worldview. <i>Finding the Sun</i> might be regarded as an early turn to this more hopeful side of Albee, coming as it did, in the early 80s, in the wake of some of his nastiest, and most critically derided, plays. I'd love to see a good production of it. I surely never shall.</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">From <i>Dangerous Visions</i>:</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Shall the Dust Praise Thee?</i> by Damon Knight: a short pastiche of King James Biblical style that offers the prospect of a Judgement Day in which there's no one to judge, humanity having died off in some unspecified catastrophe. God comes to judge but finds Himself judged by an accusatory graffito that may be Humanity's last prayer. An imaginative inhabiting of sacred archaisms moves this past the bluntness of its message.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?</i> by Theodore Sturgeon: </span></span><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">"Hello, I'm the author's stand-in/mouthpiece, and I'm here to tell you about why the author's crackpot theories and masturbation fantasies are Secret Cosmic Truths: blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah <span style="font-size: x-large;">BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH..."<span style="font-size: large;"> (etc.)</span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Robert Heinlein was the king of this kind of thing; Ayn Rand was the Empress Upon Her Throne. Sturgeon, who may be best known for Sturgeon's Law (to whit: 90% of everything is crap) was the court fool, because his brilliant scheme for human perfection is fathers having sex with their daughters. His pseudoscientific, hand-wavy justifications for this idiocy ignore the copious empirical evidence to the contrary.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Also, Sturgeon is the kind of infuriating sexist who would probably deny being a sexist; after all, he luuuuvs women, with their bouncing bosoms and winsome giggles. Can someone explain to me why Sturgeon is revered in certain circles? Editor Harlan Ellison tries, but his case for Sturgeon's sainthood is: when Ellison was getting divorced, Sturgeon wrote to Ellison and told him (Ellison) that he (Ellison) was one of the few good people in the world. Anyway, <i>If All Men Were Brothers...</i> is 90% of everything.</span></span><br />
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Calling the Wind</i>: </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Blues For Pablo</i> by John Stewart: Pablo, A middle-aged slaughterhouse owner, periodically cuts his finger and mixes his blood with that of the animals killed by his business, as a symbol of his respect for the animals. He also visits the library every week, and consults the same book every time; a biography of a bullfighter whose courage and dignity he reveres. His old-fashioned notions are thwarted by his young swinger girlfriend. She believes in erotic games; he believes in spiritual symbolism. These aren't inherently immiscible, and she's be a perfect fit for a like-minded heathen, but he's a monogamy-minded man. He's not violent or wrathful; just befuddled and wounded. Pricking your own finger doesn't mean no one else can gore you.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">We get to experience something of Pablo's imaginative yet stoic interiority, but we only view his girlfriend from the outside; she's a femme fatale who swaps out different mask-like demeanors depending on whether she's being, or playing, the thoughtful student, the daddy's girl, the bratty lover. Not the most glowing representation of female sexual agency, but it beats anything Theo Sturgeon's got on the menu.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Son in the Afternoon</i> by John A. Williams: A professional young African-American man is unhappy that his mother, who is a maid for a rich white family, is more solicitous of a bratty white child than she ever was of her own children. He enacts a balancing of the books that is witty and nasty. Whether he's setting things right or keeping a cycle of trauma going is open to debate.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The protagonist/narrator is hip and angry, but not so varnished with irony that he conceals his blended sympathy for his mother and his deep emotional pain. It's a funny, suspenseful story, but it unveils the damage done by binding people more tightly to their employers than to their kin.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Outlaw Bible</i>:</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Hells Angel</i> by Ralph "Sonny" Barger: A high-ranking Hell's Angel tells his side of the story regarding the murder at the Rolling Stone's Altamont concert. Two of my takeaways:</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">One: The whole thing begins when someone suggests getting the Hell's Angels to provide security, on the hypothesis that no one would dare mess with the Angels. The Angels parked their bikes in front of the stage, and one trigger for the violence was that stoned concertgoers started messing with the bikes, provoking a predictable reaction. The next time you hear someone suggest that a big show of force will keep a crowd under control, tell 'em about Altamont.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Two: Barger mocks the idea that the deadly violence at Altamont changed anything fundamental, because for his peers and him, savage violence was an ordinary part of life. He essentially tells those of us who are shocked by the Altamont horror to check our privilege.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Street Justice</i> by Chuck Zito: Just when I was thinking that nobody should hire a Hell's Angel to provide security, Chuck Zito, bodyguard to the stars, actor, and former Hell's Angel, comes along to set me straight. He demonstrates a savvy and restraint that made him an ideal security professional, as long as you didn't mind some terrifying practical jokes. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">I've given the editors of this book some guff, but they did a good job presenting Zito's testimony on the heels of Barger's. It showed me just how quick I was to become prejudiced against outlaw biker types after reading Barger's story, and how wrong I was.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Troia </i>by Bonnie Bremser: Bremser was a beat writer, and here she tells us about her quest to travel across the border from Mexico to Texas in search of her imprisoned husband. Seems like it was at least as hard to make that trip then as it is now. She writes with casual, jazz-riff lucidity, and reveals an oddly petulant poor-person sensibility. She'll turn tricks to get pretty much anything, but when the US Consolate offers her a bus ride directly to where she needs to go, sidestepping a lot of street hassle, she's all "you're not the boss of me" and practically poops on the rug before leaving, for no reason that I can suss out. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">As a kid I loved fantasy quest stories, and now i love reality-based quest stories (see also: <i>As I Lay Dying</i>) just as much. Bremser delivers the hypnagogic quest story the way I like it, and is another female beat writer whom I prefer to Jack Kerouac. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Freewheeling Frank</i> by Frank Reynolds as told to Michael McClure: Trigger warning for rape. Not the only misogynistic text in this reading session, but certainly the foulest. Frank, another Hell's Angel, tells McClure, another beat poet, that Hell's Angels don't really do as much raping as their reputation suggests. Then he spins an outrageously tall-tale version of what happens at biker rallies, and claims that pretty much all the women get raped. Get your story straight, Frank. If you like S. Clay Wilson's luridly nasty underground comics, or you like your tall tales to have a hard R rating, then Frank and Michael have a story for you, full of cartoonish violence and sexual abuse. Watta loada laffs. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Best American Short Stories</i>:</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Greenleaf</i> by Flannery O'Connor: Mrs. May, a brittle, pushy, judgemental farmowner, wages constant struggle with a mysterious bull, her snotty sons, her shiftless employee, and everybody else too. Apparently my 12th grade English teacher was a thought leader in O'Connor studies, because her theory that this story is a religious allegory (the bull is Christ, y'see) seems to have become the standard take. I don't disagree, but I see the allegorical elements as the tectonic plates of the story; the life of it is in the stigmatic satire the misanthropic O'Connor inflicts on her entire cast. It's interesting that Mrs. Greenleaf, the only character who's tapped into Jesus, is a lower-than-low-church evangelical. O'Connor, a staunch pre-Vatican II Catholic, clearly regards Mrs. Greenleaf as unspeakably gauche, yet in touch with the vital truth. Better, it seems, to be NOKD than an unbeliever. Anyway, this unbeliever though the story was hilarious in its audacity. In O'Connor, Christian Love and despising everybody come together like chocolate and peanut butter.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">One fun detail: Mrs. May is preoccupied with the practical yet eroticized fear that the bull will sire her cows with unworthy DNA. Spoiler warning: The bull has a more cataclysmic penetration in mind. The keenly controlled, finely wrought climax, unspools with the suggestion that it be understood as an objective correlative for a wrenching Road-to-Damascus style conversion. This transition from casual allegory to iconographic intensity lifts the tale out of its comedy-of-trashy-manners base, into a martyriffic sublimity.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Ledge</i> by Lawrence Sargent Hall: On Christmas morning, a cranky but skillful fisherman takes his young son and nephew duck hunting on a thin ledge of island. You can see where this is going, right? It goes there, with Jack Londonesque attention to the details of Human Vs. Nature that I find beguiling. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The story begins with the fisherman's wife, and her secret wish to escape from her harsh husband. The story ends with her getting her Christmas wish, at a Pyrrhic price. All that remains of her son is "a rubber boot with a sock and a live starfish in it." The almost Ovidian transformation suggested by that live starfish is one of many sprinklings of sorrowful magic throughout a story that never strains for fancifulness.</span></span>Aaron Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02565494196338043466noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15943614.post-66578128652466747442018-11-28T11:27:00.002-10:002018-11-28T11:27:11.405-10:0010utlaws and Inlaws.<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Outlaw Bible of American Literature</i>:</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Ripening </i>by Meridel Le Sueur: A woman who sympathizes with the labor movement, but is an outsider to it, gets involved in a big strike, and describes it from the inside. There's a remarkable blend of planning and organic group activity (very much an endorsement of collectivism as celebrated in classic Soviet films such as Eisenstein's <i>October</i>, which disdained stars and central characters in favor of heroic crowds). The way the strikers operate as a self-sufficient collective deserves scrutiny from protestors today.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Woman Rebel</i> by Margaret Sanger: Sanger founded Planned Parenthood, and her newsletters about abortion and such kept getting her in legal trouble. In these excerpts from her newsletter she offers, as a nurse, a stentorian rebuke to "quacks" who keep women from knowing how to prevent conception, and she invokes the fighting spirit of women who don't wish to be in bondage to men who use womens' reproductive systems as shackles.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Thelma & Louise </i>by Callie Khouri: An excerpt from the script of this film. It's the last scene. You know the one. One thing that's intriguing to me is that Khouri isn't at all florid;</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">"A cloud of dust blows through the frame as the speeding car sails over the edge of the cliff." </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">That's the end. Screenwriting can be as concise and compressed as poetry.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>SCUM Manifesto</i> by Valerie Solanis: I knew about her entirely through the film "<i>I Shot Andy Warhol</i>," but I was surprised to find that her manifesto reads as much like a BDSM fantasy about humiliating and degrading men as it does a protest against patriarchy.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">"The few remaining men can exist out their puny days dropped out on drugs or strutting around in drag or passively watching the high-powered female in action, fulfilling themselves as spectators, vicarious livers, or breeding in the cow pasture with the toadies, or they can go off to the nearest friendly suicide center where they will be quietly, quickly, and painlessly gassed to death."</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Where do I sign up?</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">A lot of the manifesto's rhetoric could be repurposed to any other variety of extremist hate speech with a little find/replace action, much as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a satire on Napoleon before someone rewrote it as an anti-Semitic hoax. Anyway, after the manifesto there's a biographical sketch of Solanis by one Freddie Baer which strongly suggests that her attempted murder of Warhol (and also her publisher, Maurice Girodias of Grove Press) had less to do with militant misandry than with impoverished frustration over getting underpaid and ripped off all the time.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Illegal Days</i> by Grace Paley: Paley tells us about the days when abortion was illegal and birth control was pretty much only available to married women. She gives a sense of how women talked with each other about these issues, and what it was like to participate in the abortion underground. She admonishes the control-freak hypocrisy of the anti-abortion movement by letting us see how stymied and stifled women were before Roe V. Wade.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Living My Life</i> by Emma Goldman: Legendary Leftist leader Goldman tells us about a prison stint which she describes as a crucible in which she was tested. The force and nuance of her principles are inspiring. She's 100% anti-religion, yet she befriends nuns and a priest, and calls a priest for a dying woman who wants last rites. She also tells us all about the basically unregulated nature of prison; no one's watching the watchmen, and the wards throw their weight around in abusive ways. My, how times have changed.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Intercourse </i>by Andrea Dworkin: All I (thought I) knew about Dworkin was that she thought all heterosexual intercourse was rape, so I put her in the same drawer as Solanis, but this excerpt gives me a powerful new respect for Dworkin's incisive critique of patriarchy. In this piece she examines Joan of Arc as a woman whose virginity is a means of short-circuiting the idea of female identity as a choice between "sexual accessibility to men or withdrawal from the world..." She doesn't bring up Joan's cohort Gilles de Rais, whose bond to Joan is a fascinating study in contrasts, but she makes a powerful case for violating the terms of patriarchy as a means to female self-definition.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Birth of Feminism</i> by Guerrilla Girls: A mock-up of a movie poster for a Tinseltown treatment of the feminist movement as it might have been made in the 90s. <a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55d4aaa8e4b084df273878ef/570befd7555986843b39bc2c/570bf0bc2b8dde2faf35fb90/1526506878847/2001GuerillaGirls-BirthOfFeminism.jpg?format=750w">Check it out.</a></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Dangerous Visions</i>:</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Doll House</i> by James Cross: If I were Anthony Lane, film critic for the <i>New Yorker</i>, my first paragraph about this story would be a cascade of erudite dad jokes about Ibsen. Anyway, this is about a financially overextended guy who obtains a doll house with a tiny oracle inside (had the author seen Edward Albee's <i>Tiny Alice, </i>which also features a tiny woman in a doll house?) and tries to get her to help him make $$$. It's a classic tale of wishes gone wrong, but Mr. Cross does a sharp job of putting us in the scene, building investment in the character's predicament and establishing enough verisimilitude that the fantasy elements exist in a grounded world. Half a century later, the financial predicament still seems like it could very easily be your problem, if it isn't already.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Sex and/or Mr. Morrison</i> by Carol Emshwiller: A woman is fascinated by a neighbor, Mr. Morrison, whose large male body contrasts with her small female one. She develops an affectionate stalker relationship to him, infiltrating his apartment and snooping all over the joint, as well as hiding like a cat. She's an odd one, who seems to move through life in illogical, creepy (in several senses) ways.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The story plays on a science fiction idea that I find particularly chilling and resonant, the idea of the extraterrestrial living as a human, in a double fashion. The narrator's poetically outsiderish viewpoint presents both her behavior and Mr. Morrison's (to her) fascinating body as potentially non-human in the normal sense, without actually tipping over into "real" science fiction. Another slipstream precursor.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Check out<a href="http://ubu.com/film/emshwiller_than.html"> this amazing 5 minute film</a> by her husband Ed (who was also a science fiction illustrator) for a companion piece. It also defamiliarizes the body and the world around us in artful fashion. I like Lynch as much as the next geek, but please don't call it "Lynchian," it predates Lynch by decades. Thank you.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Calling the Wind</i>:</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Has Anybody Seen Miss Dora Dean</i>? by Ann Petry: On a pleasant evening, the narrator receives a phone call informing her that her long-time acquaintance, Sarah Forbes, is dying, and demands that the narrator come visit in order to accept a bequeathment before death comes. Those dishes serve as the Rosebud from which unspools the mysterious and lively story of Sarah and her husband, a perfect butler and imperfect husband who ended his own life in sordid, unexpected fashion. Sarah's complex life, from spirited party girl to domineering matriarch, is interesting enough in itself, and the resolution of the mystery seems surprisingly modern for 1958. It's one of those situations when a contemporary reader (at least this one) is surprised that people wrote about such things with any sensitivity back then.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"> It's also one of the most entertaining and suspenseful stories I've read in this whole project, and I'm hungry to read more by Ann Petry. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"> <i>Mother Dear and Daddy</i> by Junius Edwards: a clutch of put-upon siblings are awakened one night by mysterious visitors. This short melodrama rips into the internalized racism of light-skinned vs. dark-skinned prejudice with heartbreaking force. It also reminds me of something I'd forgotten; in childhood, intense emotions tend to become entangled with whatever is in front of you (a house, a car, an adult) so that whatever's filling your sight and whatever's filling your heart get fused in a perplexing and powerful fashion.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Also, this could be the beginning of an African-American<i> Flowers in the Attic</i>. Some enterprising writer should run with that.. Send me a copy!</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <i>Best American Short Stories</i>:</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><br /></i></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Resemblance Between a Violin Case and a Coffin</i> by Tennessee Williams: a young boy (let's call him Tennessee) and his sister are best friends, until one day she undergoes a mysterious change (probably menstruation, although we're never told and the family treats it like a solemn Bene Gesserit rite of passage) and separates from him. She is a competent student pianist, and is scheduled to play a duet with a boy named Richard at an upcoming recital. Richard is handsome to the point of perfection, and he makes her so nervous that her chops turn to trash whenever she plays with him. Meanwhile, l'il Tennessee spies on them, and falls in love with the boy himself.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Williams doesn't write this as a script in prose form the way one might have expected; it's very interior, and the paragraphs are thick and long. Of course, his scripts often have a frustrated prosesmith quality, so maybe its not surprising that he'd go full Henry James given the opportunity. Anyway, it's impressive that he wrote about his own homosexuality as unashamedly as he did; his rhapsodies over his first crush aren't bashful at all.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Country Husband</i> by John Cheever: Cheever gives us a story about a suburban husband and father whose life is superficially the 50s ideal, but there are harbingers early on that chaos reigns. First, his flight almost crashes and has an emergency landing. Then, no one will listen to his account of the nearly fatal emergency. His family's deftly choreographed squabbling put me in mind of those UPA animations like <i>Gerald McBoingboing</i> or <i>Mr Magoo</i> from the same era as this story, and that's not a bad way to visualize Cheever's world generally.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Our protagonist has a passing encounter with a maid whom he saw get shamed and degraded a decade before when he was a soldier in Europe; she was publicly shaved and stripped for having an affair with a Nazi soldier. She doesn't return to the story, but this warning about the consequences of illicit love sets the stage for what happens next; our protagonist is smitten by a young babysitter.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The story of his terrible behavior from there is a complex tragicomedy. The narrative is as stuffed with walk-on characters as an episode of <i>Fibber McGee and Molly</i>, each of whom reveals something about the sorrows and dissatisfaction which the camera-ready neighborhood contains and conceals. (My favorite, a pretentious beatnik who turns out to be the babysitter's fiance, manages both to be correct and insufferable, and I'd love to read more about him.) One of Cheever's specialties was to show the wheels coming off someone's American dream, a premise for which I have a bottomless appetite. Writers as distinct as Fay Weldon and Ramsey Campbell are his lovely descendants. </span></span>Aaron Whitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02565494196338043466noreply@blogger.com0