SOUNDTRACK: ONE RING ZERO-As Smart as We Are (2004).

I had this CD sitting around my house for about 4 years.  I had received it as a promo disc from Soft Skull Press (along with several other books on CD) and I just never put it on.  Then one day I was going through all these promos to see if any were books I wanted to listen to.  It was then that I actually read the disc label and saw that it was a band with lyrics written by some of my favorite authors.

I liked the disc so much I wound up buying it because the packaging is truly cool.  It’s a little booklet and it features an interview with the band and some really cool insights into how the songs came about, how they got the writers to submit lyrics, and the cool fact that One Ring Zero became McSweeney’s house band, accompanying writers during their weekly readings.

One Ring Zero is comprised of two guys (and guests).  And for this disc they split the tracks in half and one of them wrote melodies for 8 songs and the other guy wrote melodies for the other 8.  I’m not sure that I could tell the song writers apart by their styles, though.

But sure, the lyrics are probably great, but what does the band sound like?  Well, in the introduction, they are described as specializing “in the sort of 19th century, gypsy-klezmer, circus-flea-cartoon music you mainly hear in your dreams.” And, yep, that is a good summary of things.  The band uses water pipes, claviola, slide whistle and a theremin (among other homemade instruments).

And so, as with other McSweeney’s things, I’m going to list all of the lyricists with their titles.  But lyrically it’s an interesting concoction.  The authors were asked to write lyrics, but not necessarily songs.  So some pieces don’t have choruses.  Some pieces are just silly, and some pieces work quite nicely.  But most of them are really poems (and I can’t really review poems).  They’re fun to read, and it is fun to see what these authors made of this assignment.

PAUL AUSTER-”Natty Man Blues”
A rollicking opening that lopes around with the nonsensical lyrics, “There ain’t no sin in Cincinnati.” This one feels like a twisted Western.

DANIEL HANDLER-”Radio”
A supremely catchy (and rather vulgar) song that gets stuck in my head for days.  “Fucking good, fucking good, fucking good…”

DARIN STRAUSS-”We Both Have a Feeling That You Still Want Me”
A Dark and somewhat disturbing song that is also quite fun.

RICK MOODY-”Kiss Me, You Brat”
A delicate twinkly piece sung byguest vocalist Allysa Lamb *the first female vocalist to appear) .  Once the chorus breaks in, it has an almost carnivalesque tone to it.  This is the only song whose lyrics were written after the music.

LAWRENCE KRAUSER-”Deposition Disposition”
A twisted song that works as a call and response with delightful theremin sounds.  It has a very noir feel.

CLAY McLEOD CHAPMAN-”Half and Half”
This is a sort of comic torchy ballad.  Lyrically, it’ a bout being a hermaphrodite (and it’s dirty too).  Vocals by Hanna Cheek.

DAVE EGGERS-”The Ghost of Rita Gonzalo”
This has a sort of Beach Boys-y folky sound (albeit totally underproduced).  But that theremin is certainly back.

MARGARET ATWOOD-”Frankenstein Monster Song”
This song begins simply with some keyboard notes but it breaks into a very creepy middle section.  It’s fun to think of Margaret Atwood working on this piece.

AARON NAPARSTEX-”Honku”
This song’s only about 20 seconds long.  It is one of a series of haikus about cars, hence honku.

DENIS JOHNSON-”Blessing”
The most folk-sounding of all the tracks (acoustic guitar & tambourine).  It reminds me of Negativland, somehow.  It is also either religious or blasphemous.  I can’t quite be sure which.

NEIL GAIMAN-”On the Wall”
A tender piano ballad.  The chorus gets more sinister, although it retains that simple ballad feel throughout.  It’s probably the least catchy of all the songs.  But lyrically it’s quite sharp.

AMY FUSSELMAN-”All About House Plants”
An absurdist accordion-driven march.  This is probably the most TMBG-like of the bunch (especially when the background vocals kick in).

MYLA GOLDBERG-”Golem”
This song opens (appropriately) with a very Jewish-sounding vibe (especially the clarinet).  But once that intro is over, the song turns into a sinister, spare piece.

A.M. HOMES-”Snow”
This song opens as a sort of indie guitar rock song.  It slowly builds, but just as it reached a full sound, it quickly ends.  The song’s lyrics totally about twenty words.

BEN GREENMAN-”Nothing Else is Happening”
This song has more of that sinister carnivalesque feel to it (especially when the spooky background vocals and the accordion kick in).  The epilogue of a sample from a carnival ride doesn’t hurt either.

JONATHAN AMES-”The Story of the Hairy Call”
This song has a great lo-fi guitar sound (accented with what sounds like who knows what: an electronic thumb piano?).  It rages with a crazily catchy chorus, especially given the raging absurdity of the lyrics.

JONATHAN LETHEM-”Water”
This track is especially interesting. The two writers each wrote melodies for these lyrics.  So, rather than picking one, they simply merged them. It sounds schizophrenic, but is really quite wonderful.  The two melodies sound nothing alike, yet the work together quite well.

[READ: Some time in 2004 & Summer 2009] Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans

This was the first collection of McSweeney’s humorous stories/pieces/lists whatever you call them.  Some of the pieces came from McSweeney’s issues, but most of them came from McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

The humor spans a great deal of categories, there’s some literary, some absurd, some nonsensical and, most amusingly, lists.  The back of the book has an entire selection of lists, but there are also some scattered throughout the book as well (I don’t know what criteria was used to allow some lists to be in the “main” part).

As with the other McSweeney’s collections, I’m only writing a line or two about each piece.  For the lists, I’m including a representative sample (not necessarily the best one, though!)

Overall, I enjoyed the book quite a lot (which is why I re-read it this year).  There are puns, there are twisted takes on pop culture, there are literary amusements (Ezra Pound features prominently, which seems odd).  It spans the spectrum of humor.  You may not like every piece, but there’s bound to be many things that make you laugh.

TIM CARVELL-”A Brief Parody of a Talk Show That Falls Apart about Halfway Through”
Many times, the titles tells you the whole story.  This is one of those cases.  It’s not the strongest piece, and seems like an odd one to open with.

KURT LUCHS-”The Spirit of Christmas”
This hilarious piece shows the dark side of charities asking, begging then threatening for money.

STUART WADE-”The Briefing: A Play in One Act”
A fantastic example of a press conference in which nothing is revealed (reminds one of presidential press secretaries).

J.M. TYREE-”On the Implausibility of the Death Star’s Trash Compactor”
Hilarious pseudo-academic look at how the Death Star’s Trash Compactor could not work within the laws of physics.

JEFF JOHNSON-”Preview of Summer Camps”
Sample brochures from summer camps!

ANDY RATHBUN-”Comments Written on Evaluation of My Speech on Needle-Exchange Programs”
A brief one-note joke, that is pretty funny.

BRODIE H. BROCKIE & R.J. WHITE-”The Newest from Jokeland”
Undermining a lot of “classic” jokes (bar joke, polish joke, farmer’s daughter joke).

ARTHUR BRADFORD-”Excerpts from My Speech on Forest-Fire Prevention”
He’s a very impassioned young man.

JOHN MOE-”As A Porn Movie Titler, I May Lack Promise”
ie., O Brother, Where Art Thou Doing It?

BRIAN KENNEDY-”I Know What You Did Two Moons Ago (The Revenge)”
Reviewed here.  From McSweeney’s #2

STEPHANY AULENBACK-”Words That Would Make Nice Names for Babies If It Weren’t for Their Unsuitable Meanings”
ie., Uvula.

T.G. GIBBON-”Reviews of My Daydreams”
With titles and evaluations.

JASON ROEDER-”Insomniacs! I Bring Words of Hope and Wisdom”
More wisdom than hope.

GREG PURCELL-”The Ten Worst Films of All Time, as Reviewed by Ezra Pound over Italian Radio”
It’s all filthy!  I don’t know Pound that well, so this one is lost on me.

CHRISTOPHER MONKS-”Group Mobilization as a Desperate Cry for Help”
A hilarious send up of flash mobs (remember those).  This one designed with the sole purpose of revenge on a girlfriend. Very funny.

JOHN HODGMAN-”Fire: The Next Sharp Stick”
Reviewed here. From McSweeney’s #2

JOSHUA WATSON-”Not Very Scary Movies”
ie., Friday the 11th.

ALYSIA GREY PAINTER-”Candle Party”
A very detailed candle party at that.

TOM RUPRECHT-”It’s Not Actually a Small World”
Several examples of people meeting non-coincidentally.

JEFF ALEXANDER & TOM BISSELL-”Unused Audio Commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, Recorded Summer 2002, for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring DVD (Platinum Series Extended Edition), Part One”
Lengthy and humorous political comments about TLOTR.

JOHN MOE-”Canceled Regional Morning TV Shows”
ie., Shame on You, Denver! (one of the longer lists in the book).

GREG PURCELL-”A Letter from Ezra Pound to Billy Wilder, 1963″
Sarcastic and nasty.

KEITH PILLE-”Journal of a New COBRA Recruit”
Hope you know your G.I. Joe.

JOHN HODGMAN-”A Logic Puzzle and Hangover Cure”
Funny plays on math word problems.

MICHAEL IAN BLACK-”Some People Don’t Like Celebrities”
Online insults directed at M.I.B.

R.J. WHITE-”Tips from Jokes and How to Tell Them, Published in 1963″
I’m not sure that the date is relevant, they’re just cliched bits (but funny in this context).

JAKE SWEARINGEN-”How Important Moments in My Life Would Have Been Different If I Was Shot in the Stomach”
Birth, First Day of School, etc.

JIM STALLARD-”No Justice, No Foul”
One of my favorite McSweeney’s pieces.  Reviewed here. From McSweeney’s #2.

T.G. GIBBON-”Actual Academic Journals Which Could Be Broadway Shows If They Had Exclamation Points Added!”
ie., Zygote!

CHRIS BACHELDER-”My Beard, Reviewed”
Various people chime in on its quality.

STEPHANY AULENBACK & SEAN CARMAN-”The Name Game”
You’ve done Porn Star name?  What about Witness Protection Program Name?

PETER FERLAND-”Circumstances Under Which I Would Have Sex with Some of My Fellow Jurors”
ie., #6: You notice me.  The rest are longer and quite funny.

ARTHUR BRADFORD-”The Bet”
Details the bet that he can make Fred throw up by punching him in the stomach.

TIM CARVELL-”The Dance Lesson”
Step #15:  I’m sorry I didn’t mean to laugh.

MARK O’DONNELL-”Attack of the Fabulons!”
Reviewed here.  From McSweeney’s #1.

KEVIN SHAY-”Pirate Riddles for Sophisticates”
Whom did the pirate vote for in the Haitian election? ARRRistide

TODD PRUZAN-”A Short Fictional Passage Entitled ‘Drift Nets’ in Which Several Enterprising Characters Troll the High Seas, Exploring Abandoned Trade Vessels for ‘Pirated’ Goods, and Learn to Cope with Distinct Personalities in a Close-Knit, High-Stress Environment”
Reviewed here.  From McSweeney’s #1.

DAN KENNEDY-”Ineffective Lines Deleted from Final Revisions of Violent Box-Office Hits”
Hilariously bad lines that a bad guy might say.

ZEV BOROW-”A Graceland for Adolf”
Reviewed here.  From McSweeney’s #2.

NEAL POLLOCK-”Trinity”
These stories are part of the Neal Pollack Anthology if American Literature.

SEAN CONDON-”Pop Quiz”
Answering the rhetorical questions that pop songs ask.  Like, “Are You Experienced?”

JEFF JOHNSON-”Bad Names for Professional Wrestlers”
ie., El Wusso!

DAN KENNEDY-”Evidently, It was Live Then”
A look back, with the writers who were there, at the difficulties of live TV, because, you know, there isn’t any now.

PAUL TULLIS-”Upcoming Titles from Gavin Menzies, Author of 1421: The Year the Chinese Discovered America“
Not just a list, there are summaries of books like: 1939: The Year Brazil Landed on the Moon

ROSS BARNES-”Good Westerns, Not Porn”
ie., Between Men

KEVIN GUILFOILE-”Norse Legends Reference Page”
Separate Norse faktum from fiksjon.  An odd concept, but very funny.

JIM STALLARD-”Goofus, Gallant, Rashomon”
Looking at Goofus and Gallant from different perspectives. “That freak belonged to the cult of manners.”  Also in The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes.

TIM BLAIR-”Not-Good Titles for Romantic Films”
ie., The Horse Renderer

BEN GREENMAN-”Black, Gray, Green, Red, Blue: A Letter from a Famous Painter on the Moon”
Letters to his beloved as he goes batty.

LISTS
Some of the funniest things in the books are the lists, so here’s a few more.

JOHN MOE-”Possible Follow-Up Songs for One-Hit Wonders”
ie., “Bust an Additional Move”

DANIEL ARCHER, PETER McGRATH, JENNY TRAIG-”Thirty Good Names for a Dance Troupe Including Five That Are Already Taken By Actual Dance Troupes, and Two That Are Taken By Cheeses”
ie., Jazzturbation

PETER WARD BROWN-”Ways This One Project Manager Replies to My Replies to Her E-mailed Questions About Documentation”
ie., Thanks.

JIM BEHRLE-”First Lines to Books I Won’t Write”
ie., Michael Kindness slept.

JEFF HURLOCK-”Things NYC Cab Drivers Yelled at Me While I Crossed the Street”
ie., Move it, you hump

SEAN CARMAN-”Lessons Learned from My Study of Literature”
ie., Children have the capacity to both frighten and delight

BRIAN McMULLEN-”All of Chewbacca’s Dialogue in the Comic Book Version of The Empire Strikes Back“
ie., Waark!

AMY L. STENDER-”Capitalized Words and Phrases Appearing in The Official Sea-Monkey Handbook”
ie., HAPPEN

JIM RULAND-”Bad Names for Boats”
ie., Sea Pinto

BLAKE WIRTH-”Actual User Comments in the “Fat Cats” Photo Gallery at Cutecats.com”
ie., I have seen fatter.

ELIZABETH BUTLER-”Ineffective Ways to Subdue a Jaguar”
ie., Hit him with a sock of pennies

JOHN MOE-”Music Industry Trends Not Yet Overexposed”
ie., Trance tuba

And Many many more.  If your list didn’t make my list, let me know and I’ll add you.  I’m just too tired to type any more of the 40 or so that are left.

ALTERNATE TITLES PROPOSED FOR THIS BOOK
Yet another (and the final) list.
ie., A Child’s Garden of McSweeney’s Erotica

SOUNDTRACK: TOPLESS WOMEN TALK ABOUT THEIR LIVES soundtrack (2006).

I learned about this soundtrack from a very cool article in The Believer (the beginning of which is online here).  In the piece, the author claims to have never seen the film (he was given the soundtrack by a friend) and he doesn’t want  to change his associations with the music by watching the film.  And now, I too can say I have never seen the film, and likely never will.  And I really enjoy the soundtrack too.

The soundtrack is sort of an excuse to showcase a bunch of bands from New Zealand’s Flying Nun record label.  Featured artists are The 3DS, The Bats, The Clean, Superette, Snapper, The Chills, Straightjacket Fits, and Chris Knox.

It’s nigh impossible to give an overarching style to these songs.  Even when the bands have multiple songs on the soundtrack, they are not repetitive at all.  Even trying to represent a genre would be difficult.  The opener “Hey Suess” is almost a surf-punk song, while Chris Knox’s gorgeous “Not Given Lightly” is a stunning ballad.  There’s a cool shoe-gazer song “Saskatchewan,” and some great simple indie rock (a bunch of other tracks).

The only thing these bands have in common is that they’re all from New Zealand.  And as with any large body of land, no two bands are going to sound alike.  Nevertheless, all of the bands fall under the indie rock umbrella.  It’s a great collection of songs that many people probably haven’t heard.  It’s worth tracking down for the great collection of tunes and, if all you know about New Zealand is The Flight of the Conchords.

[READ: September 24, 2009] Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

After finishing Infinite Jest I wasn’t sure just how much more DFW I would want to read right away (of course, seeing as how I have now read almost all of his uncollected work, that is a rather moot point).  But when I saw that John Krasinski (of TV’s The Office) was making a film of this book, I had to jump in and read it again.

Obviously, there are many questions to be asked about this film ().  Is it going to be based on all the stories in the book?  (Surely not, some are completely unrelated).  Is it going to be just the interviews? (Probably, and yet there’s no overall narrative structure there).  And, having seen the trailer, I know structure is present.  I’m quite interested in the film.  In part because I didn’t LOVE the stories.  Well, that’s not quite right.  I enjoyed them very much, but since they weren’t stories per se, just dialogue, I’m not afraid of the stories getting turned into something else.  The text isn’t sacred to me, which may indeed make for the perfect set-up for a film.

Anyhow, onto the stories.

The obvious joke is that the author of Infinite Jest has created a book with “Brief” in the title!  But indeed, many of these stories are quite brief.  Some are only a couple of paragraphs (which true, from DFW that could still be ten pages).  But, indeed, most of the interviews in the book are brief too (except the final one in the book, which is nearly 30 pages).  

There are a couple of very long pieces, most of which follow DFW’s now-signature roundabout style.  But it’s these new short pieces that are quite a change of pace.  And I have to say I’m mixed on them.  Most of them feel like sketches: a scene or two but little more.  And while plot is not essential to every story, it often feels like these are experiments in writing shorter pieces.

The title stories (the Brief Interviews) (some of which appeared in Harper’s and one of these Harper’s stories (the first one (#16)) does not appear in the book) are indeed brief interviews.  They are scattered throughout the book in seemingly random order.  But I’ll look at them in numerical order.

The basic conceit here is that each hideous man is being interviewed by an unamed interlocutor whose questions remain unseen.  Most of the questions regard sexuality or women (although some deviate).  And the men have different perspectives on situations (some of them offensive, but most of them offer an insight that is almost shocking in its frankness).  Nealy all of the men are “educated” which means they get to use interesting terms, either literary or psychological.  And one or two have even studied feminism, it would seem.

I’m not going to review each B.I. because that would be silly.  The stories don’t really “do” anything beyond giving a picture of a man.  There’s not necessarily a plot (although some do have a plot) and there’s no real resolution to most of them.  And yet I found them all quite engaging (some more than others, obviously).

But so here is a one-line summary of the context of each B.I.   There is no indication that the gaps in numbers mean there were other interviews.

B.I. #2:  “Honest” explanation of how he can never fall in love with you.
B.I. #3: A dialogue about a man “assisting” a woman at the airport whose fiancee was not on the flight.
B.I. #11: Man is leaving the questioner (this seems to break the mold of the B.I. set-up, as the questioner does not appear to be the same one and I wonder how the film will address it).
B.I. #14: Man screams inappropriate things upon orgasm (very funny).
B.I. #15: Bondage with relation to parent issues.
B.I. #16: (Harper’s only) Dad laughs when son is too impetuous (quite funny and worth clicking on the link for).
B.I. #19: I like you cuz yer smart.
B.I. #20: Not brief at all.  This is the tour de force interview about a man who falls for a woman only when she relates the story of her abduction.
B.I. #28: Intellectualized dialogue between two men about how difficult it is to be a woman (no specific interlocutor here).
B.I. #30: He marries her because she has a good body.  Anything wrong with that?
B.I. #31: The selfishness of the Great Lover vs the honesty of the selfish lover.
B.I. #36: Self-help is good.
B.I. #40: Man with deformed arm.
B.I. #42: Man whose father worked as a bathroom attendant.
B.I. #46: Rape could be a meaningful experience, like the Holocaust (features my favorite New Jersey-ism “Alls I’m sayin’”).
B.I. #48: Third date=asks to tie her up=sexing a chicken (innuendo laden & hilarious).
B.I. #51: Fear of “what if I can’t?”
B.I. #59: Masturbation fantasies ruined by physics (very funny!).
B.I. #72: Weird twist ending (to the whole series?).

Another “series” in this book is “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders.”  This book collects numbers VI, XI and XXIV.

VIII appeared in McSweeney’s #1 (in 1998) and again in Oblivion as “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature”.
VI appeared in McSweeney’s #3.
I have no idea if others were written or were published.

These are all very short pieces (about 2 pages) and they work more as sketches than actual stories.  They don’t even work as flash fiction.  After the length and detail of Infinite Jest and even many of the pieces in this collection, it’s hard to know what DFW was doing with these short pseudo-stories.  I enjoyed VI and XXIV but not so much XI.  VIII, which appeared in Oblivion but not here was very long and convoluted and quite enjoyable, very different in almost every way from the ones here.

As for the rest of the book, there are several very short pieces here (and one seems to have once had the “Yet Another…” title but has been changed for the collection.  These short pieces include:

“A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life”
Two paragraphs about the effects of introducing people.

“Death is Not the End”
A Poet Laureate sits poolside, ruminating.

“The Devil is a Busy Man” (there are actually two stories with this title)
The first one (“Plus when he got…”) was originally called “Yet Another Instance of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XII)” and reveals how you can’t give things away for free…you’ve got to charge something even if it’s worth nothing.

“The Devil is a Busy Man”
The second one (“Three weeks ago…”) examines how revealing the secret of a good deed can actually make the deed evil.

“Think”
A story of infidelity which changes dramatically, unexpectedly.  Despite its unspecific information, it’s still a powerful story.

“Signifying Nothing,”
Here is a weird one for you.  That’s how the story opens and that is what it is.  In it, a man recounts a time when his father wagged his dick in front of him.  The incident is never mentioned again. The story ends with a strange family reunion in which the incident is, indeed, not mentioned.

“Datum Centurio“
A lengthy definition of the word “date.”  It is written as a very expansive definition, and the definitions do get funnier as they go along, although really this is sort of a lexicographer’s joke.

“Suicide as a Sort of Present.”
This story is the most complete story of these little vignettes, depressing at is may be.  It is also rather unsettling.

In general, I’m not that big a fan of these shorter pieces.  There’s nothing wrong with them per se, they just don’t do a lot for me.

That leaves these longer pieces:

“Forever Overhead”
This is a pretty great piece about a boy climbing to the top of the tall diving board at the community pool.  It is one of Wallace’s great, detail-obsessed pieces.  You can feel yourself on the ladder with the young boy.

“The Depressed Person”
Another of Wallace’s tour de force pieces. This story is quite long for what all happens in piece.  However, its recursive nature and its attention to details perfectly encapsulates the mindset of a depressed person, trying desperately to reach out to friends that she has reached out to far too often already.  A very moving piece.  (It was published (I think a little differently) in Harper’s and is available here).

“Octet”
This piece is weird for many reasons.  It is a footnote-fueled set of ostensibly eight pieces.  However, the footnotes explain why there are not actually 8 pieces and why the whole piece has failed in its original intent.    The pieces are designed as sort of pop quizzes, and yet as the footnotes explain, some of the original questions were just bad.  And one question was reworked but the original version had to stay in for the rework to make sense.  It’s a very meta- piece of fiction and is fairly fascinating.  Although, what its point is is anyone’s guess.  And, one gets the feeling that the footnotes are all true, and yet there is no way to know if this whole exercise is as DFW intended or was just a fun experiment.

“Adult World (I & II)”
This two-part story concerns the same characters.  In the first part, we meet the young wife, a few years after she got married.  She comes to the realization that her husband’s sexual proclivities have nothing to do with her.  And that for the first few years of their marriage, she was foolish to be so self-deprecating. As is DFW’s way, the story wends it way around several different focal events but eventually curlicues around itself to get to the heart of the matter which is fully revealed in Part II.

Part II of the story (although actually Part 4) is designed in an entirely different format.  It continues the story from where it left off, but it seems as if it is a rough draft for a skit or play.  Strangely, this style increases the dramatic aspect of the story and makes it climax a lot faster.

It’s certainly a weirdly designed piece, and yet as experimental fiction it works quite well.

“Church Not Made with Hands”
This is one of my least favorite DFW pieces.  I simply could not connect to anything that was going on.  It is set up in several different “chapter” segments, but the surrealness of the story combined with the peculiar storyline never meshed for me.

“Tri-Stan:  Sold Sissee nar to Ecko”
But this piece is probably my least favorite DFW piece of everything I’ve read by him.  The conceit revolves around mythical characters trying to create shows for TV.  I got a lot of the jokes and references in the story (Sissee Nar, etc).  Even the title, Tristan & Isolde, I see a lot of what’s going on.  And yet the whole conceit seemed simultaneously painfully obvious but also far too obscure.  So I don’t know if I’m missing something crucial or if the conceit is just not well founded. I still haven’t figure out who Agon M. Nar is supposed to be (as it doesn’t conform to the Narcissus inversion style or even the Herm ‘Aprho’ Dite jokey style).  Anyhow, this piece degenerates into a protracted (dream sequence?) attempt to sell a story about Narcissus’ beauty.  This is also one of the few cases where I feel that DFW’s circuitous style fails him.  The “metaphor” (or whatever it is) is working too hard to compete with the detail obsessed style, meaning you’re too busy thinking of two different aspects of the story to allow it to do what I think it wants to do.  It’s also well known that DFW had a love/hate relationship with TV, and it seems like he is just taking potshots at TV as well.

“On His Deathbed Holding Your Hand, the Acclaimed New Young Off-Broadway Playwright’s Father Begs a Boon”
This is another very lengthy piece that doesn’t really go anywhere.  And because of its very subject, I at first found it hard to bear.  Basically the story is of a father on his deathbed relating how much he has always detested his son.  Because yes, as a father there are things that your kids do that drive you crazy, but to hear someone this hateful and spiteful  made me very uncomfortable.  However, at about the midway point, the story really comes to life building to a fascinating twist at the end.  I think you could lop off the first ten or so pages and make this an even more successful story.  This is one of those rare cases where the repetitions and circles were just too circuitous.  Not to say that that opening information wasn’t important.  I just feel it was too much.

So, overall, I found this collection to be somewhat mixed.  The strong stories were really great.  The Brief Interviews were fun and interesting as character studies.  And some of the short pieces were enjoyable as sketches.  And yet, I can’t help but think that the short story is really not DFW’s strongest suit.

SOUNDTRACK: The Best Albums of the Year

Andrew Womack, fellow Infinite Summer player and founder of The Morning News has begun retroactively listing The Best Albums of the Year for each year since 1978.  This is a project that I have often thought about doing myself, yet never had the time to sift through all the music I have.

I was delighted to see how much I not only knew, but also agreed with his decisions.  Although if I’m honest, my list would have more metal and less new wave in it.  But the overall tenor is pretty on par with my feelings.

But, imagine my surprise to see that on the 2004 list I barely knew any of the discs at all!  I wonder what happened to make us diverge so much in that one year.

Anyhow, it’s a noble, well, not noble so much as worthwhile pursuit.  One that we can all enjoy.

[READ: Week of July 27] Infinite Jest (to page 434)

In the August 2009 issue of Wired, they have a little scroll across the bottom of one of the pages that lists  “Word Counts”.  King James Bible: 784,806; Where the Wild Things Are: 338; Infinite Jest: 483,994.  So, at almost halfway done we’ve read over 240,000 words!

Also, I haven’t sufficiently acknowledged some of my fellow Infinite Summer bloggers.  So I want to send a shout out to Infinite Tasks.  I especially enjoyed this post which takes a decidedly more philosophical approach than I did about a section that I found really enjoyable.  And Chris Forster, who gives a lovely discussion about Eschaton.  And I would be remiss if I did not mention Infinite Zombies, just because he may have written a letter here but his posts always get sucked up into spam, so I’ll never know.  (And because the posts are really thoughtful and worth reading too).

But enough back patting, onto the book.

It was a fun place to pick up reading.  At the small paragraph where I left off, we learn that the Statue of Liberty’s book now advertises that year’s Subsidizer.

On a couple of occasions there is the suggestion that the year 2000 is the first year of Subsidization, as they talk about things being different in the new millennium.  Although Matthew Baldwin’s argument here is very convincing which would make Subsidization begin in 2002.

And then we return to A.A.

And if I thought the previous look into the White Flag meeting was harrowing, this section is borderline unbearable.  Two speakers get prominent attention.  This first is a woman who details her history.  The White Flag group disapproves of her because she ascribes Causes for what happened to her, rather than just Accepting what happened.

Her history is pretty appalling.  She was adopted, and her adoptive parents had a naturally born child who was, essentially, a vegetable. But the parents made the adopted child room with and then socialize with the vegetable child (It). She was made to bring It with her, and when she turned 15, she was told she could only date if It went along with her.

This is all sad and horrifying, and it grows even worse when we find out that the adoptive father was, in fact, molesting It, and even went so far as to put a Raquel Welch mask on her, and even went so far as to do it in the room while the adoptive girl was there.  And but the final straw is that the adopted girl would sometimes clean up for the father, out of fear of being next on the molesting list.  And then one night–well, I can’t repeat the event that sent the adopted girl out of the house, running away into the night to become a Stripper.  For that you’ll have to read the book.

And unbelievably, that horror story pales in comparison to the other story of the woman who chose to get high all through her pregnancy.  To the point of getting high while she was going into labor, and being high while she gave birth to her stillborn child.  Again, details are far too gruesome to list here, but her Denial was so strong that she carried around this stillborn baby as if it it were alive.  For several months. In the summer.  You see where this is going.  She was eventually forced into help from Child Services

Even the crocodiles in the back are moved by her speech.

Good grief.

I need to clear my head after that.

A quick return to Marathe Steeply reveals that Marathe is aware that Steeply is going undercover as a female journalist to do a piece on Orin to learn more about Jim and the Entertainment.  A few pages later we learn that she has also been granted access to E.T.A. ostensibly for publicity for the school.

Returning to that very discussion, in Endnote 145, Orin answers a lot of Helen’s technical questions about Jim’s films (there’s also another Sad/Mad Stork slip up). But this leads Orin to talk about Found Drama, a genre of filmmaking which is meant to be so real, so honest, that even those who previously hated Jim’s work thought it was brilliant.  The joke, of course, is that Jim made the whole thing up.  He got a few critics to go along with it and even made some grant money off of what was basically revenge on the critics.  Found Drama seems to involve sending a dart at a White Pages page and imagining what the darted person is doing for 90 minutes.  And then writing critical pieces about it.

This all comes to light because of Mario’s own film, which is shown every Interdependence Day at E.T.A. at the big celebration.  Interdependence Day is mandatory R&R, and the kids are allowed, for this one day, to pig out on sweets and other delicacies.  (And we lean that Avril knows about the Eschaton debacle (and that some of the participants’ careers are pretty much over), but C.T. and Schtitt were away and haven’t been appraised of the situation yet.)

Mario’s film is something of a  children’s version of Jim’s own The ONANtiad. It is a parody/ biography/puppet show of President Gentle.  And from this film we learn that President Gentle was a third-party spoiler who swept into power just as Americans were sick of everything.  He promised to clean up America, literally (he was a major germaphobe, like Howard Hughes times 10).  He was a combination of Rush Limbaugh and Hilary Rodham Clinton, and he appealed to both the left and the right.  His Clean United States Party (or C.U.S.P.) cleaned up in the elections, under his promise that he would simply shoot our garbage into space.  And his even bigger promise was that no one would have to fret about tough decisions, because he would decide for everyone.  He’s the first U.S. President to swing his microphone during an inaugural address (for yes, this is Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner, now politician and Your President), and the first to say “Shit” on television (on purpose). And as Mario’s film continues we learn that this simple little film is, basically a [one-sided] look at the formation of O.N.A.N.

I also learned that I don’t really understand the extent of Mario’s illness.  For while it is said that people helped him with the scripts, if Mario actually created all of this story mostly by himself, then he is pretty smart and sophisticated.  And yet he didn’t understand what was happening with the U.S.S. Millicent Kent.  He also knows when NOT to talk about things to Hal, even though he almost compulsively talks to Hal while they are falling asleep.  So I’m a little unclear about exactly what the status of Mario is, intellgencewise.

But back to his film, which is quite funny.  We learn that the Prime Minister of Canada and the President of Mexico are being subsumed into the O.N.A.N.  Gentle will be the Chair and the P.M. of Canada and the P of Mexico being Vice Chairs.

We also learn a great deal about the concavity.  (Syracuse NY to Ticonderoga NY to Salem MA).  It was created because there was a large nuclear “accident” in New Hampshire (many people report seeing men in white coats with the O.N.A.N. logo emblazoned on them at the site of the accident BEFORE the accident happened).  Further accidents were reported in Maine and Syracuse.  Conspiracy theories suggest that these “accidents” coincide with the fact that New Hampshire and Maine left the C.U.S.P. party off their ballots.  These accidents caused lots of babies to be born with no skulls and many other nuclear horror stories, and eventually everyone was evacuated (although any talk of “refugees” was strictly verboten).

There was then a closed-door meeting which Mario re-creates stating first that it is not so much Gentle that is pulling the strings, it is Rodney Tice.  There is no evidence to suggest this to be true, but it is Mario’s take on it (even Jim in The ONANtiad doesn’t point the finger at Tice as much as Mario does).  We also learn that Rodney Tine had an illicit affair with a Quebecker known as Luria P______.

This meeting  is told in spinning newspaper headlines.  Some of them make sense if you re-read them after the next section. But some of the best jokes being the comments about the headlines themselves–like the type of Paper they are (NY tabloid), or the headline writer/meth addict who writes headlines that are far too long and keeps getting booted from one paper to another, or the fact that a worker was killed while trying to install a Whopper onto the Statue of Liberty.

This is alink to someone's Google Map of the Concavity

The imagined meeting of the future heads of O.N.A.N. also has Gentle essentially forcing Canada to take the concavity (a before/after map shows most of New England looking like a bite was taken out of it.  It also sounds as if the whole Concavity has been secured by a glass wall.

The garbage is hauled into the concavity because it was too expensive to send it into space (all new NASA ships seemingly just fall over and break anyhow, which just creates yet more garbage).  And, since the whole Concavity was, shall we say, garbage anyhow, well….

Canada, logically says, no thanks, we don’t want irradiated, useless land added to our territory, but thanks for offering.  Gentle insists.  And the final straw of the meeting is that Gentle has all of the nuclear warheads in New England turned upside down and threatens to blow them up (and basically all of the U.S. and Canada with it) if Canada does not accept the Concavity.

This threat is fictional (and comes from a clearly homemade headline).  It is a tribute to Eric Clipperton and the Clipperton Brigade.  Eric Clipperton is a tennis player.  He showed up at a regional tournament, unaffiliated with any school (his school is listed as “Ind”).  He’s an okay player, and in his first match he is losing to Ross Reat.  A fter the second set he produces a beautiful Glock 17 with a chamber full of bullets.  He announces from the referee’s seat, in a move that surely would have gotten him removed from any kind of play, to one and all, that he will shoot himself in the head with said Glock if he loses.

The Clipperton Brigade consists of everyone who was assigned to face him on the court. Because, to a man, they intentionally lose (some by talking on cell phones, other by just standing there) and take the match as a kind of r&r, or maybe they practiced aspects of their game that were giving them trouble.  Because, naturally none of them wanted to be the cause of Clipperton blowing his brains out.  No one took any of these losses seriously, and Clipperton was never ranked.

All the players all also gave him a wide berth, but Mario actually became friendly with Clipperton.  Mario was fascinated by him and found him very funny, hence this little tribute in his film.

While this film is going on we see that some of the kids (as they do many nights) sneak down to the gym, have a sauna, get all sweaty, and then speak to Lyle.  Younger kids can’t figure out why Lyle’s there at all, especially at night when the gym is locked up, but the older ones know. Yes, they do.

We also learn that Jim and Lyle would have nightly confabs with Jim drinking Wild Turkey and Lyle Drinking his Caffeine Free Diet Cokes.

But let’s look at some of the kids’ fears and freakouts.

Lamont Chu wants fame (and to appear in a glossy magazine) desperately.  Anton Doucette is worried about the mole under his nose, which he is convinced has everyone calling him “booger.”  And, my favorite: Ortho “The Darknesss” Stice is weirded out because he goes to sleep with his bed on one side of the room and wakes up with it on the other side altogether.  He is, of course, convinced it is a prank, so he booby traps his room, only to wake up and find that his bed is “against the chair by the door at an angle he didn’t care for one bit” and the tennis ball cans that he set as an alarm were stacked pyramidically where his bed was.  He concludes logically that 1) He is telekinetic, but only in his sleep; 2) That someone else at E.T.A. is telekinetic and has it in for him; or 3) he’s doing it in his sleep and is a several fucking somnambulist, which means Lord only knows what else.   [BOY I hope the truth is revealed on this one].

Lyle is steadfast and listens attentively to all fears and concerns, sucking in his cheek when he is really engrossed.  He speaks of how the world is very old.  And in a nod to the premise of Wallace’s This is Water [the commencement speech], he tells Lamont that he is in a cage and the first thing Lamont must do is become aware of the cage.  He also alludes back to the hilarious bricklayer story that was passed around some time ago when he tells two people that they should not “let the weight they pull to [themselves] exceed [their]own personal weight.”

Lyle also tells Ortho about the man who goes into a bar and bets that he can lift a chair that he is standing on.  The man stands on a chair, grabs the back of the chair and proceeds to lift the chair off the ground.  Lyle says it is because he is aware of objects.  No punch line comes with this story, and I don’t get it either.

While Hal is watching the film (and thinking about tobacco), he reflects back on how Mario’s film is is so indebted to The ONANtiad, and then, more generally about how Mario was (naturally) influenced by Jim’s work.

And, delightfully, we get a detailed look at two of Jim’s less popular films: The Medusa v. The Odalisque (Medusa turns people to stone when they see her face while Odalisque is so beautiful she turns people into gems when they stare at her).  In the film, we are in Ford’s Theater watching people watching a stage play of Medusa and Odalisque fighting.  The two are attacking each other with weapons and mirrors trying not to look at each other (the choreography is amazing), and slowly as the mirrors flash around, each member of the audience is turned into stone or gem until they are all gone.

Those of us watching the film, however, never really get a look at anyone, least of all Medusa or Odalisque and so it is a very frustrating film to watch.

This film was not nearly as badly received as The Joke.  On marquees, the film was promoted as “THE JOKE: You Are Strongly Advised NOT To Shell Out Money To See This Film.”  This hilarious practical joke, which took Jim and Mario from Cambridge MA to Berkeley CA and back for showtimes, was set up so that Jim and Mario were standing at opposite sides of the theater with cameras rolling.  People paid their ticket prices and got their accoutrement and adjusted themselves, wondering what these two were doing there with cameras, particularly the guy in the corner propped up by a police lock.  When the film started, they realized that the film on the screen was actually them, the audience, looking up at themselves, live.  The film lasted as long as people were willing to sit there and look at themselves getting angrier and angrier about being ripped off.  Fantastic!  The longest shows were about 20 minutes as critics studied themselves studying themselves taking notes with endless fascination.

And then Hal’s wandering mind turns to the advertising.  And this section struck me as  delicious.  Mostly because I am an anti-advertising guy (even though Advertising was my declared major in college and even though “classic” ads often run through my head and I quote them at any “relevant” (and therefore hilarious) moment.  Or maybe it’s because now that I’ve a TiVo and when people say, “you know that ad where” I can look blankly (not smugly, just blankly) at them and say, “No I don’t.”  Whatever the reason, I found myself writing down several quotes that I found too wonderful not to write down.

Like, “it did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”

The section also seemed very prescient to me.  I’ve been noticing this throughout the book, about how technologically savvy DFW was.  We can assume he was writing this book around 1994 (that seems to jibe with how long it would take to edit the monster and finally get it published in 1996).  He used phrases like “killer app” which although it had been around since the 1980s was really gaining in popularity around 1994–so he was either prescient or just using the lingo of the time, I guess.  Again, HDTV was field tested in 1994.  It didn’t take Nostradamus to see that HDTV would be the wave of the future, but still, you’d have to be reading Wired pretty regularly at this time (published first 1n 1993) to be really aware of these things.  And finally, this entire advertising section is based around a video on demand system (thank you TiVo).  A similar system had been tested in 1994 (that year again) and even in 1988 in the UK, but it didn’t become commercially viable until 2005.  DFW could read the writing on the wall, I guess.

And so on to the discussion.

The Big Four Networks (this was pre UPN/WB/CW, so DFW missed that one, at least) have seen declining ad revenues because of the proliferation of cable channels.  Enter Viney & Veal (who are mentioned in Mario’s film as not being responsible for the bomb threats at ABC (read on)).

Viney & Veal advertising decided to make really cheap ads for local companies. And in the hilariously grotesque Endnote 162, we get a detailed look at the ad campaign for Nunhagen Aspirin (it’s back!).  The campaign was cheap and simple. They got the Enfield-based National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation to sponsor an art exhibit.  All the painters had crippling cranio-facial pain and painted pictures of people experiencing cranio-facial pain.  The TV commercials would show one picture for 30 seconds with a soothing Nunhagen Aspirin logo in the corner.  There were many, and it seemed that most viewers were disturbed by at least one of them.

People were so freaked by the ads that it actually made them use their atrophied thumbs to click the remote and change the channel.  Obviously, sales for Nunhagen skyrocketed.

The problem was that Neilsen ratings for ads showed that people kept not only turning off the Nunhagen ad, but they would also skip the ads that followed.  This was not too good for the Networks, as advertisers complained, but since Nunhagen was doing so well, they could also pay more for their spots.  And thus, network greed started to kill itself.

This ad was followed by a series for LipoVac liposuction.  But the fantastic nail on this coffin was the campaign for Fond du Lac’s (Wisconsin) NoCoat Inc tongue scraper.

I find this particularly fun because it was right around 1996 that my dentist was trying to convince me of the merits of this very thing.  I’d always heard of brushing your tongue, but this scraping thing really freaked me out…probably having a lot to do with the literal phrase “tongue scraping.”  So, in any case, the NoCoat Inc ads show vividly and in slow motion “an extended tongue that must be seen to be believed, coat-wise” as it went to lick an ice cream cone.  It so freaked people out (as it would me if I saw it) that people turned away in droves (and, perversely spawned a whole craze in tongue scraping, which, reminds Hal that “the sink-and-mirror areas of public restrooms were such grim places to be.)”

People turned away from the networks and advertisers followed.  And when these cable channels got the rights to major sporting events, well, that put the Big 4 on the ropes.  Cable channels had always advertised on Network channels  trying to woo people away from the Big Four toward the CHOICES available on cable (which I am personally aware of them doing and I remember thinking it was weird that the Networks would accept the ads).

Soon, 3 of the 4 Networks folded and all that was left was ABC showing nearly infinite repeats of Happy Days (with subsequent bomb threats to ABC and personal threats to Henry Winkler who gets a minor thrashing here, ((which I probably enjoyed at the time, but since he’s been on Arrested Development I’m not as nasty anymore).  And, actually his Hank Zipzer book series for kids is not only quite good but gets me out a jam when kids ask for a book “for 4th grade”.)

And then came InterLace.  Noreen Lace Forché had also seen the writing on the wall and started buying all of the networks shows for her little company called InterLace TelEntertainment which essential became TV on demand.  (And yes, TP stands for teleputers). The selling point of course, why let other people tell you what to watch and when to watch it.  (I have to wonder if the DVR people used any of this section in their own advertising years later).  People bought in and were able to watch shows on cartridge or via modem.  This created an advertising-free zone.  Which led to, in one of my favorite quotes, “No more Network reluctance to make a program too entertaining for fear its commercials would pale in comparison.”

This more or less put advertisers totally out of business (including Viney & Veal, one of whom (Viney) committed suicide before Veal was seduced by Lace to make ads for this new InterLace, and ultimately for the Gentle campaign). And but so other forms of advertising sprouted up all over the place, billboards on the highways like in the scene from Brazil (an image which I always feared would come true (and which I cannot believe I can’t find online)), and magazine pages virtually exploded with ads.

The final attempt was to locate ads on cars, “an idea that fizzled as U.S. customers in Nike T-shirts and Marlboro caps perversely refused to invest in ‘cars that sold out.’”  Genius.

Back to Marathe Steeply and what is becoming the moral center (centre?) of the book.  Their argument continues about the U.S.A. pursuit of Happiness (and Steeply’s defense of same raised a swell of pride for me) vs the reality that nobody wants delayed gratification.  The example of the Habitant can of pea soup nicely illustrates (by Marathe however it was convoluted by Steeply) that if two people want the same thing someone is going to get bonked on the head.

And so the underlying question from Martahe: why would the U.S.A. ban the Entertainment when each individual has the right to choose whether to watch it or not.  Why should the U.S.A. ban a choice that any adult should be wise enough to make?  Steeply argues that the Entertainment isn’t like beer or candy, where the mistakes are minor, to which Marathe replies, It’s still a choice.  “Sacred to the viewing self, and free? No? Yes?”

Oh, and just when you think that you’ve heard all you will about Eric Clipperton, he reappears briefly.

At the dawn of O.N.A.N. the U.S. T.A. was reorganized as the O.N.A.N.T.A., which became continent-wide rather than just countrywise.  This new system led to new rankings, and since the new person in charge was from Mexico and didn’t know anything about Clipperton’s Glock-inspired wins, he believed that the string of undefeated wins automatically located him at #1.

Several days later Clipperton turned up at E.T.A. looking completely horrible.  But it is strictly forbidden to allow non-students into the academy, but they relented.  And, seeing as how desperate Clipperton was, Mario pleaded with Himself to speak to the poor kid (and laws provided that the encounter be filmed since he was not authorized to be there).  And, seeing as how bad off Clipperton was, Jim then called in Lateral Alice Moore and even Lyle from the weight room to talk to him.

But before they could get there, Clipperton pulled out the glock, pressed it to his temple and went through with what he threatened to do on the court.  And Mario insisted that he, and he alone, be allowed to clean the room.

What a way to end a week.

Conclusions:

Despite the major downers in this week’s reading, it also offered some incredible high points. It’s also funny how all this talk about addiction makes me think that I may be addicted to the book.  I really don’t want to put it down, I think about the characters when I’m not reading the book, and I even find myself sneaking peeks into the book after I’ve finished my reading for the week.  Worse yet, I find myself relating bits of the book to my poor wife who has patience for me, but little interest in the book.

Me: “Hi my name is Paul and I’m an Infinite Jest addict.”

You: “Hi Paul.”

SOUNDTRACK: THE TRAGICALLY HIP-We Are the Same (2009).

I first heard of The Hip when I saw their video for “Nautical Disaster.” This is back in the day when I first got Canada’s MuchMusic on my Brighton, MA cable system, and when I actually watched Music channels. Anyhow, the song was intense and very cool and it built to a great climax, and I was totally hooked.

I got their back catalog and continued to get their new releases.  Since then they’ve released some really good songs, and some pretty good discs.  It almost feels like since their live disc they decided to switch from intense songwriting to more simple, straightforward rock. This is a little disappointing to fans of their intense stuff, and yet if you accept the change in style, the music is quite solid.

So this disc seems to be shooting for an even broader, more commercial appeal.  And, in the first half, at least, they emphasize a more folksy/country feel.  All of this should make me flee from the disc, and I think longtime fans are pretty disappointed by it.  And yet, I can’t get over how much I like it. There’s something slightly off about the Tragically Hip that keeps them from being overtly commercial.  So that even when they release a disc like this, which is quite mellow in places, it still sounds alternative.  Maybe it’s Gord Downie’s voice, maybe it’s something in the melodies; whatever it is, it keeps this disc from being blah.

The final track, Country Day” seems to sum up the overall feel of the disc: meandering country roads.  And “Queen of the Furrows” is about farming.  The opening few songs have a Neil Young folkish feel, since “Morning Moon” and “Honey Please” have big catchy choruses with folky verses

“Coffee Girl” actually reminds me of a serious Barenaked Ladies type song, which is disconcerting coming from the Hip, but could possibly become a hit (it’s probably their most overtly commercial song I can think of since “My Music at Work”).  Actually, I take that back, one of the final tracks on the disc, “Love is  a Curse” sounds like it’s their last ditch attempt to have a big hit in the States.  And if they were a more well known (or on a bigger label) it would be a huge hit.  It rocks pretty hard and screams radio friendly.

The Hip of old do surface on two songs though: “Now the Struggle Has a Name” is one of those great sounding Hip songs:  as you’re singing along to the swelling chorus you wonder why they aren’t huge down here, and then you realize the song is 6 minutes long and will never get on the radio.   There’s also a 9 minute song, and the good news is that it doesn’t get boring (no mean feat).

The second half of the disc has more loud guitars.  The cool riff of “The Exact Feeling” is pretty great.  While “Frozen in My Tracks” is probably the weirdest track on the disc, with a very cool, off-sounding chorus.

So yeah, the disc has horns and strings and is maybe a little too polished and produced.  But the songwriting is still stellar.  I’m sure that if I had heard these songs now without knowing the Hip, I wouldn’t be all that impressed.  Maybe as I get older I’m less critical, or maybe I’m just happy to mellow out a bit more.

[READ: Week of July 20] Infinite Jest (to page 367)

Even though last week I said I would keep to the Spoiler Line Page, I am breaking the promise already.  I just couldn’t stand the thought of leaving a passage unfinished, so I just continued to the section break of Gately’s A.A. meeting.

When I first read IJ way back in 1996 I, like most Americans, didn’t really think too much about Canada.  I liked a lot of Canadian music and The Kids in the Hall were awesome, but beyond that I was pretty oblivious to our neighbors to the north.  Since then, I have become something of a Canuckophile.  I did Curling for two years and have visited up North a number of times.  We even had a Canadian satellite dish where we watched most of our TV (like Corner Gas and The Rick Mercer Report) until that moderately legal company was sued out of business.  Now I subscribe to The Walrus which keeps me well informed. Anyhow, this is all to say that I have a greater understanding of Quebec separatists and the state of US border relations.  This makes this whole Marathe-Steeply section more interesting to me this time around.  I sort of went from Hal (apolitical) to a quarter of the way to Avril in my understanding.

But before we get to that, lets get into the book and learn about Orin.

The first section of the week’s reading is devoted to Orin (and Uncle Charles).  Orin was a decent tennis player at E.T.A., but he peaked around age 13.  From there he sort of drifted off the rankings (which, we are told is quite relative) and despite being in the mid #70s ranking-wise (and therefore not making the Top 64 of most tournaments) was still heavily courted by colleges (ranking being relative and all).

He decided to go to college rather than going pro (and we get a lengthy look at Avril’s aggressive campaign to have absolutely no impact on Orin’s decision, going so far as to leave a room when he enters it).   Orin ultimately settled on Boston University for its feeling of being away from home without actually being very far from home (and for the free ride, room and board and living expenses he received.)

Uncle Charles was somewhat instrumental in arranging this windfall.  But, as he himself magnanimously puts it (on every occasion he gets to speak in public) he didn’t come down here from Canada for Thank Yous.  He came down to E.T.A. from New Brunswick and the tiny Throppinghamshire Provincial College to be there for his family, to fill in where he was needed, for how could Avril possibly take over as headmaster (and be called a what? a (gasp)  headmistress) when she has to think about academics and about keeping her house clean and blah blah blah. It’s quite a funny speech (given in the middle of the open tennis courts where he is often drowned out by fans and flying garbage).

When we return to Orin’s story we learn that he decided freshman year to give up tennis and switch to football.  And the reason was two-fold.  He had literally burned out on tennis.  But he had also fallen head over heels for a baton-twirling, pep squad cheerleader.  Not a single college male, senior footballers included, had the courage to speak to this young woman, so gorgeous was she.  Some might say she was the Prettiest Girl of All Time.  For yes, it was Joelle van Dyne who won Orin’s heart and made him want to switch sports (to one where they actually had baton-twirling, pep squad cheerleaders).

But it turned out he was not suited for football (since he had a natural aversion to getting hit).  That is, until the accidental maiming of the team’s current punter gave Orin a chance to kick a football back to the coach (something he had never done before).  And he was magnificent.  We had learned earlier that Orin’s tennis game was almost exclusively based on a killer lob.  And what is a punt but a killer lob.  Once he learned to place his 60-70 yard punts (he was able to hit his staggering tennis lobs onto a coin at the opposing baseline 3 out of 4 times) at the “coffin corner,” he was a local sensation.

DFW details his football passage with as much loving attention as he gives to the tennis section.  He also has some nice references to how the U.S. has been divvied up, with several of the upstate New York schools no longer in existence (and more references to New New York).

It was actually the P.G.O.A.T. who approached him first.  For an autograph for her own Personal Daddy [and, no I have not figured out what this phrase means yet.  In the earlier movie theater section where her own Personal Daddy is mentioned, I found the hands in laps bit to be a little uncomfortable.  Am I the only one who thought that?].  Orin and Joelle hit it off immediately, meeting each others’ parents and generally falling in capital L love.

When Joelle decided to switch majors to Film-Cartridge Theory, Orin tried to introduce her to indie films rather than the films that she liked which were ones where they “blow shit up.”  This inevitably led to a meeting with Himself.  James found her intriguing, and asked her to be in his films.  And soon she was spending the bulk of her time with Jim.  It was only that Orin believed she was not interested in acting that he didn’t flee this awkward relationship.

During this time, Joelle was also learning the fine art of filming.  She was using better quality cameras, moving from b&w to color and even to sound.  Her main subject was Orin, while he was punting.  As their relationship grew strained, Orin would watch footage of himself, by himself, over and over, delighting in everything that he could see.

[This leads to the second thing that I remember so distinctly about the book.  The first reference to the Storrow 500 (albeit it is only one line so far)].

We move, briefly, to a very disturbing passage about Poor Tony Krause.  After stealing a woman’s heart (nice callback!), he can no longer dress Fine.  And he is wearing cast offs and other disgusting clothes.  He is also wanted by Emil Minty (of the Ennet House section and, woah, see a few paragraphs down).  All of his connections have abandoned him (or he’s afraid of them)–even Bridget Tenderhole has been shipped away by her pimp.  We go step by step through Poor Tony’s Withdrawal from heroin: his life in a dumpster (literally) and then living in a stall at the Watertown Library (although I must disagree here–certainly they have a cleaning staff in the bathrooms every, or every other, morning?).

There’s a lot of Zuckung (twitch) in this section.  Finally, Poor Tony, planning to go to the same Nucks who sold Pemulis the DMZ (the Antitois) has a seizure on the Gray Line and, I believe, dies.

At this point, I decided to go back and re-read the Clenette and yrstruly sections.  And they made more sense.  So, for my own peace of mind:

Clenette is the half sister of Wardene.  Wardene is dating Reginald.  Wardene’s mom (who is crazy) thinks that she is seducing her stepfather/mother’s boyfriend Roy Tony and so beats her with a wire hanger.  Roy Tony is Wardene’s real father’s brother.  Reginald promises Wardene that he will beat up Roy Tony, but Roy Tony has already killed a man, so he’s pretty badass.  He killed Columbus Epps over Clenette’s mom in an act of passion.  Clenette herself is friends with Dolores Epps (Columbus’ daughter), and they play together in front of their apartments.

Meanwhile, in the yrstruly section: yrstruly, Poor Tony and C (who we learn in the later section is actually Bobby C (I don’t THINK we have a full story about him yet).  We are also introduced to Susan T. Cheese and Lolasister (who later cannot be trusted). And we learn that Stokely Darkstar has AIDS (and dies soon thereafter).  Bobby C dies from laced heroin [I mentioned the rest of that section in the previous week's write up].

But the important thing about going back is that this later Poor Tony section reveals that Emil Minty is yrstruly who has left the street and has been unseen for months (because he is is Ennet House).

This sad sequence is followed by one of great humor back at E.T.A.  We learn a few things about some of the prorectors and the Saturday classes that they are forced to teach.  Most of the classes are a joke, although some students develop  a fondness for the insanity.  Schacht takes every crazy class offered by Mary Ellen Thode who once tried to form a tennis organization that would be organized, run, played and ultimately watched only by members of the Female Objectification Prevention and Protection Phalanx.  I adored the title of her class: “Toothless Predators: Breast Feeding as a Sexual Assault.”  As well as her request that you “Keep Your Answers Brief and Gender Neutral”

During a quiz that Schacht is taking, Troeltsch [and yes, I have a hard time keeping some of these kids straight with all the "ch's" in their names] is announcing the results of the PWTA debacle over the schools PA system.  This section gets increasingly funny as Troeltsch becomes more and more graphic with his synonyms for “beat” and “was beaten by.”  This clearly goes on for a long time (in E.T.A time) as there are so many players.   And just when you think he’s done with all of the players and the crazy flourishes, another paragraph-full comes along.  Troeltsch gets to do the sports announcing because he practically begged to be able to do it (visions of Troeltsch trying on his blue blazers and practicing into his hand crop up a lot).

Another prorector is (saluki-faced) Thierry Poutrincourt.   Hal is taking her [isn't Thierry a boy's name?] “Separatism and Return: Quebecois History from Frontenac through the Time of Interdependence.”  (Interdependence Day being November 8th).  Hal is basically apolitical and doesn’t care much about Quebec Separatism either way.  However, having some background in French speaking (and a Quebecker mom) Hal has become rather intrigued by this class, and actually finds it a challenge (although that is mostly because of the guttural Quebecker French Poutrincourt speaks).

This section about Poutrincourt contains the infamous Endnote 110, which is 14 pages long. The first part is a letter from Avril to Orin (care of the New Orleans Saints) which is very funny in what she says, and in the footnotes attached to the Endnotes.  I was particularly amused that her Greeting to Orin is “Dear Filbert”, which gets an a footnote. You then flip through several pages looking for the end of Endnote 110 to finally find the small a and the footnote says “Don’t ask.”

We also get a nice look at Avril’s grammarian side as she is trying to get all of the supermarket chains to change their Express Line signs from 10 Items or Less to the grammatically correct 10 Items or Fewer. [I can remember reading this back in 1996 and then noticing that in Bread & Circus (bought by Whole Foods in 1992), the express lines did, in fact, say Fewer.  And I wondered if maybe DFW changed the world a little.  I have not consciously noted whether other stores have changed.]

Avril gets a form letter (and a photo of Orin) as a reply.  (Which the later conversation between Hal and Orin reveals is actually sent by Orin himself, and not Jethro Bodine, as the note is signed).

The Endnote also contains another hilarious phone exchange between Orin and Hal.  In his first answering machine message to Hal, Orin notes that all Emily Dickinson poems can be sung to the “Yellow Rose of Texas” (which is not true….  I assume that DFW didn’t come up with this connection first, but I can’t find an origin for it).  When Hal calls back, Orin gives him Speedy Seduction Strategy #7 for picking up women (wear a wedding band).

The phone call eventually gets around to what is really bothering Orin, which is a question regarding Quebec separatists and their sudden change of protocol.  Historically, Quebec separatists protest against Ottawa, yet now they are attacking O.N.A.N. instead.  If they want independence from Canada, why should they care about the state of O.N.A.N.?  And but really, all of the Quebec attacks on O.N.A.N. have been quite minor up until now.  There’s the mirrors on I-87 in New New York which make motorists think that a car is coming towards them so they veer off a cliff.  But that’s minor terrorism, along the lines of draping fleur de lis on statues.

Couldn’t, Orin asks, Quebec offer to annex the Concavity (or Convexity depending on which country you are in) and say, we’ll take this burden from you if you let us be independent?  There is a whole lot more to this endnote, but that’s the nutshell.

And so why does Orin suddenly care about all this?  Well, his interviewer Helen Steeply is positing these ideas, possibly in relation to Jim– (just as we get to the really crucial part of the phone call, Pemulis hangs up the phone so they can go smoke a DuBois in the parking lot).

Orin also asks for a definition of samizdat, which Hal supplies as a form of Soviet underground propaganda.  This word pops up conveniently enough in the forthcoming Marathe/Steeply section as well.

After this section we get a touching (and a little disgusting) look at just what Mario Incandenza looks like (poor guy).  Suffice it to say that he is physically a wreck in every conceivable and many inconceivable ways, and yet mentally, he is not that bad.  Just a little slow on the uptake.  And, despite occasional taunting, he is generally quite well regarded at E.T.A. and beyond.  He brings his specially outfitted camera with him on his many walks and has even had some of his photos placed in local shops.

And although Hal feels that Moms has more love/respect for Mario than him (which is untrue), Hal clearly loves his brother, feeling that he, Mario, is truly brave and amazing for everything that he has been through.  And, Hal also once told the guy from the U.H.I.D. (who was trying to recruit Mario) to get lost.

The endnotes in this Mario section were fascinating for saying things like: “overshot the place to mention…” as if he (who?) were writing too quickly to include the note.  Man these endnotes are great!

And speaking of Avril.  We get an occasional glimpse into her behavior with her sons.  She seems to love them without question and tries very hard not to let her personal beliefs or opinions influence them in any decision they make.  She tries to leave Mario alone, so as not to  seem like an overly concerned mother, and we already saw how she acted with Orin.  This all comes across as slightly flaky, and probably a but too hands-off in terms of parenting.  But it seems like her heart is in the right place.

And from the Mario section, when he is helping out Jim with the films, we learned that Joelle had a veil on back then as well, so the veil has nothing to do with Jim’s death or IJ (V) evidently.

On to Marathe and Steeply (its been a while!).  They are still on the mountainside, discussing the virtues/vices of freedom in the U.S.A.  And their argument boils down to yes, even though the Entertainment is American made, it was disseminated by the Wheelchair Assassins as an attempt to show how complacent and childish Americans are.  The plot thickens.

And then, we finally learn about Eschaton (coming from Eschatology, the study of the end of the world).  Eschaton is a tennis based game in which 8-12 players take up various spots (coinciding with countries on the map) across 4 tennis courts.  Each of 400 balls is considered a bomb.  Players make up different countries, with articles of clothing representing tactical locations.

In this explanation of the game, we get the notorious Endnote 123.  This Endnote is probably the first thing in the book that I did not fully comprehend and will not investigate further as it is a Pemulis’ high tech math formula for calculating Mean Value w/r/t Eschaton.  And yet, don’t skip the footnote because despite the math, it is very funny.  It is “dictated” by Pemulis to Hal and is consequently written in Pemulis-speak, with digressions and (sic)s included.  It also has the funny note that graph b is called HALSADICK.  But, more important than that, this Endnote seems to give light to my enduring question of who is writing this book.  Pemulis laughs that Hal is trying to write the endnote in third person.  And since most of the notes are in third person, is it safe to assume that Hal is the one writing them?  Is Hal the author of the entire piece?  This would also explain the highfalutin language since Hal is an OED guru….  And yet….

Click here for fun!

The full Eschaton game passage is very lengthy and very convoluted so I’m not even going to attempt to summarize it.   Suffice it to say that the game is meant to simulate real-world end-of-the-world situations as best as possible and that there are rules that must govern play.  Prior to each game, the circumstances of the end of the word scenario are broached and sides are drawn up.  I will mention a few key players in today’s match, though: Ann Kittenplan (another great name) who is a beefy young girl with a mustache better than Hal’s; Todd “Postal Weight” Possalthwait; and the ever-hated Ingersoll are awaiting a decision from Otis P. Lord (who is playing the role of God).

The beginning of this passage is dull and very technically detailed (as is the game itself). As the game degenerates, the pacing gets faster but the details never subside.  And things gets funnier as they get more manic.  [And anyone who enjoyed the "seeing everything at once" writing style of this section should totally read DFW's story "Mr. Squishy"].  For instance, we learn that Pemulis hates the Penn family (J.J. Penn is also on the court) because his older brother called him “penisless” and convinced him that if he pushed on his belly button his ass would fall off.

As snow falls (and as Hal, Pemulis, Trolescth, Schatch and Axford (who we learn is missing one and a half fingers, as of exactly 3 years ago this Interdependence Day (do we assume it is firework related?)), watch (with a  DuBois in hand), Ingersoll decides to throw the rulebook out the window and hits a ball right at Kittenplan’s head.  Pemulis goes berserk because this will undermine the entire concept of the game (people are not valid targets).  Lord switches from a white beanie to a red beanie (which means Utter Global Crisis).  While words are exchanged, and tempers flare, Kittenplan escapes her holders and fires (what the narrator humorously notes is) an already spent warhead at Ingersoll. This encourages others to do the same and mayhem ensures.  The final insult of the mayhem is that two kids crash into the serving cart which houses the computer that Lord uses to calculate the day’s game.  As Lord tries to catch the flying PC, he trips over Lamont Chu and crashes headfirst into the laptop’s monitor.

There are bound to be serious repercussions for this amount of carnage.

Oh, and the whole time there was a green Ford with advertising for Nunhagen Aspirin idling behind the courts (only Troeltsch noticed it).

Incidentally, all of this Eschaton takes place on Interdependence Day (the only time when the kids have required R&R).  The Interdependence Day chapter headings are subtitled Gaudeamus Igitur.  [According to this site:  James J. Fuld notes: "Gaudeamus Igitur" is regarded as the oldest student song and as the embodiment of the free and easy student life.  There's an audio file of the song here.]

The final section (and the one that drifts into possible spoiler-type areas) is an in-depth look at a Boston A.A. meeting.  This section is (surprise) impossibly detailed.  And it begins with a simultaneous Talk by John L. about his experiences and a third person explanation of the trials of an addict and how low he has to get before he can Come In to A.A.  And, of course, a very funny talk from an Irishman about having his first solid turd in years.

As the meeting progresses we get more and more details about Don Gately.  And he gets more and more likable as he Relates to the new people.  We meet his sponsor Ferocious Francis G, a crocodile that Gately had the nerve to talk to.  We also hear of the first time he spoke at an A.A. meeting where he told everyone there that they were fake and the whole thing was bullshit (and how everyone nodded, and appreciated that he had the guts to be so honest).

And, in a Very Special Endnote, we learn that Joelle was not successful in killing herself and that she has been practically Fed Exed to Ennet House under close supervision of Pat.  And as the section continues (and we are definitely in spoiler area for this week here), we get to see all of the folks from Ennet House accompanying Gately to this White Flag meeting:

Ken Erdedy (he’s back!) is there, (he’s a yuppie and is in rehab for pot).
Kate Gompert (she’s back!) is there (she admits that she is in for pot, too) and is still on suicide watch.
Tiny Ewell, Nell Gunther, Wade McDade, Chandler Foss, Jennifer Belbin, Emil Minty, Geoffrey Day and Bruce Green are all there.
And (fanfare) Clenette (who gets a last name) Henderson is now in Ennet House too.  It’s like something of a touching reunion at this point.

And then we get a crack in Gately’s armor, and this is how I know I like him.  When Joelle criticizes the Program’s cliche of “There but for the Grace of God” as subjunctive and meaningless (which on a linguistic scale I totally agree with), the fact that he has to look at her veil and not her face, and the fact that he completely shuts down and actually fears that his silence means that he will definitely get high again was really wrenching for me.  For how do you know what to say to someone when you can’t see their expression?  It’s worse than email because the person is right there and can see you!  I can feel the bottom drop out from under him.

And it’s scary.

And I think that this A.A. section could be used as the best argument to anyone to stay straight, because the A.A. meetings sound like the worst possible kind of hell that you could end up in.  And like Joelle, I would be very sad if my life took me to a place like that (even if the program did work, I would still be pretty bummed about my life).

But, the fact the Erdedy thinks Joelle is hot because he can’t see her face was pretty fun.

Observations:

I’ve noticed that I hadn’t been paying very close attention to the dates assigned to each section.  This is a bad habit picked up from not knowing the chronology at all.  It hasn’t had too much of an impact, although I can see that a few things would be good to keep straight time-line-wise.  So, I may have to go back and do a little recon work on that.  I noted that the Marathe-Steeply section takes place in April, while the Eschaton is in November.

I also have this weird overarching feeling like no more great revelations will be coming–as if we have settled down from the manic intensity of the first 100 or so pages and now the book is just going to fill in the gaps.  The Eschaton and AA sections, while detailed, were so leisurely paced, that they seemed to calm the whole book down.  Of course, then I realize that we’re less than half way through the book and that there’s a LOT more to come.

And I’m pretty excited about that.

SOUNDTRACK: THE REPLACEMENTS-Hootenanny (1983).

This is the second full length from The Replacements.  For a band that just released two punk albums (one’s an EP), naming your new one Hootenanny is pretty ballsy.  As is the fact that the first track sounds like, well, a hootenanny (even if it is making fun of hootenannies.)

However, the rest of the album doesn’t sound like hootenannies at all.  In fact, the rest of the album is all over the place.  I don’t want to read into album covers too much, but the design has all 16 titles in separate boxes in different colors.  It suggests a little bit of stylistic diversity inside.

Just see for yourself:  “Run It” is a one minute blast of some of the punkiest stuff they’ve done. (It’s about running a red light).  Meanwhile, “Color Me Impressed” marks the second great alt-rock anthem (after “Go”) that Westerberg has put on record.  “Willpower” is a sort of spooky ambient meandering piece that, at over 4 minutes is their longest piece yet.  “Take Me to The Hospital” is a punky/sloppy guitar song.  “Mr Whirly” is sort of an update of the Beatles’ “Oh Darlin.’”  “Within Your Reach” is technically the longest Replacements song to date.  It starts with a cool flangy guitar sound that swirls around a fairly mellow vocal track (this song was featured in the end of Say Anything.  John Cusack cranks the song up past the red line).  “Buck Hill” is an (almost) instrumental.  “Lovelines” is a spoken word reading of personals ads over a bluesy backing track.  “You Lose” is the first song that sounds like another one…a sort of hardcore song.  “Hayday” is a fast rocker like their first album.  And it ends with “Treatment Bound” a sloppy acoustic number that sounds like it was recorded in a tin can.

As you can see, this album is all over the place, and almost every song sounds like they may not make it through to the end.  Yet, despite all of the genres represented, the band sounds cohesive.  The disc just sounds like a band playing all the kinds of music that they like, and the fact that there are a couple of really lasting songs on the disc makes it sound like more than just a bar band.

I feel as though not too many people even know of this disc (it was the last one I bought by them, as I couldn’t find it for the longest time).  But in reading reviews, I see that people seem to really love this disc.  I enjoyed it, and, like other ‘Mats discs, it’s certainly fun, but I don’t listen to it all that often.

[READ: June 9, 2009] McSweeney’s #31

The latest issue of McSweeney’s has a totally new concept (for this journal, anyhow):  They resurrect old, defunct writing styles and ask contemporary writers to try their hands at them. I had heard of only two of these defunct styles, so it was interesting to see how many forms of writing there were that had, more or less, disappeared.

Physically, the issue looks like a high school yearbook.  It’s that same shape, with the gilded cover and the name of the (school) on the spine.

Attached to the inside back cover is McSweeney’s Summertime Sampler. As far as I know this is the first time they have included a sampler of multiple upcoming works.  There are three books sampled in the booklet: Bill Cotter’s Fever Chart; Jessica Anthony’s The Convalescent & James Hannaham’s God Says No. I enjoyed all three of the pieces.  Fever Chart has stayed with me the most so far.  I can still feel how cold that apartment was.  The Convalescent begin a little slow, but I was hooked by the end of the excerpt. And God Says No has me very uncomfortable; I’m looking forward to finishing that one.

As for #31 itself:

The Fugitive Genres Recaptured (or Old Forms Unearthed) include: pantoums, biji, whore dialogues, Graustarkian romances, nivolas, senryū, Socratic dialogues, consuetudinaries, and legendary sagas.  Each genre has an excerpt of an original writing in that style.  Following the sample is the modern take on it.  And, in the margins are notes in red giving context for what the author is doing.  I assume these notes are written by the author of the piece, but it doesn’t say.

I’m going to give a brief synopsis of the genre, but I’m not going to critique either the old piece or whether the new piece fits into the genre exactly (suffice it to say that they all do their job very well).

PANTOUM

A poem composed in quatrains.  They key is that the second and fourth line of the first stanza reappear as the first and third line of the second stanza and so on.  At the end, the first and third lines of the first stanza then reappear as the second and fourth line of the final stanza. Manipulation of the repeated lines is encouraged.  Hard to explain but easy to see once you start reading.

ORIGINAL PANTOUMS:   The example is from an anonymous author (circa 1440 AD) from Malaysia.

I am not a fair critic of poetry.  So I’m just going to say what I thought of them.  As you can imagine, it’s challenging to make these interesting with all that repetition.  And I have to say that the repetition sometimes makes it hard to keep everything straight.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT-”Circus”
I was confused by this one.

BEN JAHN-”Milltown Auspice”
I rather enjoyed this one.

TONY TRIGILIO-”Jack Davis”
This is about Jack Ruby, Oswald and JFK.  It is fascinating to see this historical information (along with, I assume, made up details) done in this style.  Pretty cool.

BILL TARLIN-”Panteentoum”
I was able to follow this one quite easily.  Maybe the simplistic threats and violence promised at senior prom were easy to relate to.

TROY JOLLIMORE-”Gate”
Lyrical and pretty, but I got lost in the meaning.

JOEL BROUWER-”Direct”
A weird poem that kept reasserting ice cream and feces.

NICKY BEER-”Crackpot Arctic Octopus”
A surreal portrait of an underwater carousel.

WALKER PFOST-”The Most Natural Thing in the World”
Again, the violent ones are so easy to follow.  This one is about how the joy of killing people, about 70 in total, is infectious; soon everyone is doing it.

WHORE DIALOGUE

An early type of erotic writing, combining bawdy tales of sexuality with an educational veneer.  The dialogue is usually between a young virgin (often just before her wedding night) and an experienced older, married friend.  There’s usually a section for before and after the wedding, as well.

ORIGINAL WHORE DIALOGUE by NICOLAS CHORIER-”A Dialogue Between a Married Lady and a Maid” (1660 AD). [excerpt]

I was surprised at just how explicit this was!  For even though he typed C–t and P—k, he left in clitoris.  And when Octavia says she can almost thrust her whole hand in, well, imagine my surprise!

MARY MILLER-”A Dialogue Between Two Maids in the Twenty-First Century, One of Whom is Skeezy”
This was really funny and very enjoyable.  It was funny to think of a 21st Century version of this story since the original is written in such an archaic style.  But indeed, they mention Sarah Jessica right away, so you’re pretty assured of the time period.
Ashley has signed a pledge not to have sex till she and Brian are married, but she needs to know from Marci what the dealio is.   The original story’s dialogue seemed stiff (heh heh) and formal, while this one seemed like it could be an actual dialogue between friends.  The middle part discusses Ashley’s new rabbit vibrator.  In the end: The sex is okay, and will no doubt get better.  Despite the discussion of anal sex, the 17th century story was actually more explicit!

LEGENDARY SAGA

Written several hundred years after the events, these sagas chronicled famous Scandinavian adventurers of the tenth century.  They included mythology and cosmic hyperbole.  The lust for fame and glory often comes at the loss of their own life, but that’s a small price to pay, right?

ORIGINAL LEGENDARY SAGA: This excerpt is from an anonymous Icelandic author circa 1310 AD.  It is based on historical figures.

Although I have never read a historical saga before, I knew what to expect: honor, bloodshed and familial pride.

WILL SHEFF-”Black Metal Circle Saga”
The inspiration for this Saga is the Norwegian black metal scene.  In real life, Euronymous of the band Mayhem was stabbed twenty-three times allegedly by Count Grishnackh from the band Barzum.  There were also several church burning around Norway.
The tale is told in several sections, with many of the section having heavy metal titles: War Pigs, Raining Blood etc.
This relates the story of several generations of men who reigned over Vingulmork.  The saga is one of death and revenge.  It would be far too long to recount, but it felt very authentic.  It doesn’t make me want to read more Sagas, but I did enjoy this one.  The supernatural elements were all pretty cool.

BIJI

Biji is sort of a notebook, which contains legends, anecdotes, scientific notes and local wisdom.  Accounts of everyday life mix with travel narratives as well as lists.  It is meant to represent a picture of the culture at the time of writing.

ORIGINAL BIJI (written in China from 220-1912 AD): by DUAN CHENGSHI-”Youyang Zazu”  [excerpt].

Its hard to imagine that this is a “style,” it’s such a mishmash of item.  But at the same time, it’s hard to imagine that ever went out of favor.  The various elements meld together to tell a good story.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND-”Survivor”
Coupland is the ideal writer for this format as, frankly, I think of his work as already very Biji-like.  He throws in excerpts from various things in all of his books: snippets of online code or pictures or other factual elements that place his work at a particular moment in time.
“Survivor” is the story of a man who is part of the film crew for Survivor that’s set on the Kerguelen Islands.  The story was hilarious.  It skewers reality TV, especially as seen from the camera crew (a viewpoint you don’t get too often).  Some of the factual things thrown in include Traveler’s Alerts for diseases, Menus on the CBS Yacht and actual urls for Survivor-type YouTube videos (which are funny to see written out in a story).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWIBp0IrXEE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AzYmJiVDqU (no longer available)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__srsDMKo9k
And when you think that the story is just going to be about the contestants on survivor things take a turn for the worse: A serious disaster hits the outside world, closing airports and rendering everyone helpless.  Will the Survivors survive?  What about our camera crew?  The story turns dark very quickly.

NIVOLA

These seem to have been written exclusively by Miguel de Unamuno.  According to him, a nivola has no plot (or an existential one, anyway) and that it makes itself up as it goes along.  And, really it’s the characters who are doing the work themselves: rebelling against their creator.

ORIGINAL NIVOLA: by MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO-”Mist” (1914 AD) [excerpt].

Surrealness in writing.   I wonder if anyone bought his books.

JOY WILLIAMS-”Saved”
This was a weird (no kidding) piece that I enjoyed quite a lot even if it had no plot to speak of.  Cinnabar’s mother, Snow, [I'm not calling you that name, mother] is an intellectual in town for a conference about Chester Owens.  It’s at the Chester Owens estate although he won’t be in attendance as he is sick.  Lots of platitudinal nonsense is spewn about by intellectuals.  This is, in turn mocked both by Snow and several other characters.

Example: Snow said to no one in particular, “Darwin initially though fish designed their own eyes.”
“Gosh,” someone said, “that fits right in with the talk I’ll be giving after lunch.”

I’m not sure how popular existential novels will ever be.  But as for this one, if you don’t care where it goes, this is an interesting story.

SENRYŪ

These are short unrhymed poems similar to haiku.  They are three lines long and no more than seventeen syllables.  They address human nature rather than the physical world (which is the domain of haiku).

ORIGINAL SENRYŪ: circa 1700s, all anonymous.

Why should haiku
get all the fame?
Senryū are fun too!

NICKY BEER, DAN LIEBERT, DOUGLAS W. MILLIKEN, BYRON LU and CHRIS SPURR all write enjoyable Senryū.  I won’t bother reviewing them, though.

SOCRATIC DIALOGUE

These are discussions between students and a learned elder.  They covered many topics and were set in a place where small talk would be common.

ORIGINAL SOCRATIC DIALOGUE:  by Plato “Republic” (380 BC) [excerpt].

I was a philosophy major, and I studied Plato very thoroughly. I always enjoyed the Socratic dialogue.

DAVID THOMPSON-”After Citizen Kane”
This is a very funny dialogue set in an urban square in the world to come.  In it, Susan Sontag, Franz Kafka, Charlie Chaplin, Virginia Woolf  and Ernest Hemingway discuss that in 2012, Sight & Sound magazine will ask critics and filmmakers to vote for the ten best films ever.  The debate centers around Citizen Kane (and there’s a cameo near the end from Orson Wells).  The discussion is fast and furious, with gentle ribbing and cleverness all over the place.  Thompson a has a great sense of the voices of each of these people.  Charlie Chaplin feels under-represented in the contest; Virigina Woolf always votes on American Idol.  Hemingway thinks Fed Astaire lacks substance.  It’s very enjoyable.

GRAUSTARKIAN ROMANCE

This was a brand of adventure writing set in an around invented countries.   Ruritania was the first but  Graustark was the most popular, with many different authors setting books there.  Despite being written in the early 20th century, they featured Victoria nostalgia with monarchies, princes and damsels in distress.

ORIGINAL GRAUSTARKIAN ROMANCE: by GEORGE BARR McCUTCHEON–”Beverly of Graustark” (1904 AD) [excerpt]

I am fascinated that this fictional world would be used by multiple people.  It would be like setting your new novel in Hobbiton but not getting sued by the estate of Tolkien.

JOHN BRANDON-”Feasts and Villains”
There were two story lines in this piece, and I fear that I got lost with one of them (in fact it seems like that one story line drops of entirely, unless they merge and I missed it). But regardless, I enjoyed this surreal tale. One of the qualities of Graustark (or in this story Graustork) is that only certain people are allowed to go there.  Meaning that nature will keep people away who do not belong.  Dunne is en route there for a very special financial deal.  On the plane he meets Beverly, a young man with no fixed destination who takes a shine to Dunne (much to Dunne’s dismay) and decides to tag along.  Dunne is constantly prevented from completing his travels: the plane is grounded, the bus breaks down, they try on horseback.  He even gets into a duel!
A surprise twist throws a new light onto everything that’s been happening, making this story not only weird but also wonderful.   I don’t imagine this style ever getting fully resurrected but it would be interesting to see what other authors might do with it.

CONSUETUDINARY

These were kept by monasteries in the Middle Ages.  They are detailed instructions for day-to-day life.  They listed everyone’s specific duties; they also kept a record of everything that was to go on in the monastery.

ORIGINAL CONSUETUDINARY: From The House of St. Swithin in Winchester, England (1349 AD)

There’s a reason this style went out of fashion, and why no one would every write one of these today, unless they were in a cloistered monastery.  This was my least favorite genre, and it took me ages to finish.

SHELLEY JACKSON-”Consuetudinary of the Word Church, or the Church of the Dead Letter”
I just could not get into this piece.  Jackson states that she had started the Shelley Jackson Vocational School for Ghost Speakers and Hearing-Mouth Children. The purpose of this school is to talk to the dead.  The consuetudinary covers all of the specific details of this School/Church and all of the various things one must do while in attendance.  It includes a calendar of activities as well as ritual and exercises.  The exercises mostly consist of  eating paper and creating spitballs.  If this was meant to be a parody, it wasn’t terribly funny. If it was meant to be deep, I missed the point.  It was kind of a shame to end with this one, since so many of the other ones were more enjoyable.  But at the same time, it was a thankless challenge to take on this task and try to make it interesting.

Overall, this issue was a lot of fun.  I always like getting introduced to new things (even if they are old things).  I doubt there will be a resurgence of any of these genres anytime soon, but I just flew through the entire book.  This was a cool change of pace from the usual collection of stories.

For searching purposes I include: senryu

SOUNDTRACK: COLIN MELOY-Colin Meloy Sings Live! (2008).

Colin Meloy is the lead singer and songwriter for the Decemberists.  This is a recording of Meloy’s solo acoustic tour from 2006.  The recording is from several venues on the tour, although it is mixed as if it were one concert.

Meloy is a great frontman, and this translates perfectly into the solo atmosphere.  He is completely at ease, telling stories, bantering with the crowd, and generally having a very good time.

The set list includes some popular Decemberists songs as well as a track from Meloy’s first band Tarkio (whom I have never heard, but figure I’ll get their CD someday).  Meloy also adds a couple of covers, as well as snippets of songs added to his own (Pink Floyd’s “Fearless” gets a couple of bars, as well as a verse from The Smiths’ “Ask.”)

This disc is not going to win anyone over to the Decemberists, as Meloy’s distinctive voice is a love it or hate it deal.  However, if you’re on the fence about them, hearing these songs solo can only convince you of what great songs they are.  The Decemberists add a lot of arrangements to their songs.  You get a lot of interesting and unusual instruments.  Which I like a great deal.  But to hear that these songs sound great with just an acoustic guitar is testament to Meloy’s songwriting.

The intimacy of the venues also really lets these songs shine.

[READ: May 29, 2009] McSweeney’s #4

This is the first time that McSweeney’s showed that it might be something a little different. #4 came, not as paperback book, but as a box full of 14 small, stapled booklets. Each book (save two, and more on those later) contains a complete story or non-fiction piece.

There is something strangely liberating about reading the stories in this format. It gives me a sense of accomplishment to finish a book and put it down, so having 14 makes it seem like I’ve accomplished a lot.
This was also the first issue that I’m certain I didn’t read when it originally came out, for whatever reason. So, it’s all new to me.

DIGRESSION: When I was looking up publications for my Wikipedia page about McSweeney’s publications, I kept encountering records for these individual booklets.  This was rather confusing as I couldn’t find any other records or ISBNs for these booklets.  Rest assured they are all collected here.

SUBSCRIBER AGREEMENT
This one page item (complete with a graph on the front which contains many sections that say only the word “Forget” is a lengthy contract that one must agree to in order to subscribe. Some terms include: I agree that $36 is not all too much to pay for a subscription to McSweeney’s. In fact, I agree that I am being given a deal. A deal I scarcely deserve, considering my many faults and sins.”

The booklets include:

NOTES AND BACKGROUND AND CLARIFYING CHARTS AND SOME COMPLAINING
This booklet contains all of the usual copyright information.  It also offers their new motto: “We Do Not Want What You Cannot Give Us.”  The price of subscriptions has increased from $20 to $28 to $30 and now $36 (that’s an increase in each issue).  There are new addresses for correspondence.  And new submission guidelines.  (You’re more likely to get published if you want it online).  There’s several charts/drawings in this publication (which they attribute to the fact that they didn’t have to think of covers themselves… more on that in a moment).  A lengthy list of subject matters encouraged for submitting includes: land whales, and anything at all about people named Lucy, Isabelle, Paulina, Geoffrey or Will.  Style changes are noted, especially concerning em dashes, and that Wednesday will now be called “Hump Day.”
We then get into the “meat” of this issue.  It is not a theme issue, because those are never good; but rather, they had a policy for this issue regarding covers.  Each author (except Murakami who could not be reached in time) was asked to submit his or her own cover for her booklet [If you click on the covers they will go to a Flickr page...note that all covers are copyright McSweeneys and/or the authors.] There follows a lengthy explanation as to why this was done and what a good idea it is for the artist/writer.

Then there is a lengthy Bill of Rights for the author and book enjoyer at least insofar as the book jacket is concerned.  This list includes: “5) The influence over jacket-creation process, between the designer, illustrator or photographer (whichever applicable), the editor, and the author, with the input of the above players working out roughly to: 10%,10%,10% an 70%.  And there is no room for the input of what is known as, in parlance, as ‘the sales force.’”
It also includes: “25) The cover should choose personality over style” and
“27) For a happy author makes a good books (sic).”

And I agree with this Bill of Rights.

The last bit includes conditions in Iceland as of printing and the cause of the delay (finding the correct thickness of cardboard for the box).

RACHEL COHEN-”A Chance Meeting”
This is the last in a series of analyses of historical meetings by Cohen (this is the first published by McSweeney’s). Cohen cites a piece by Katherine Anne Porter who expresses regret that she never met Willa Cather, even though they were somewhat contemporary and living in the same city at the time (Cather was established while Porter was a new writer). Cohen looks into the lives of Cather and Porter and how they differed. A very interesting piece. I’m curious about the other pieces in the series, too.

PAUL COLLINS-”Symmes Hole: A Man from Ohio, and the Distinct Possibility of a World Within This World”
Paul Collins returns to the world of unheralded geniuses/lunatics with this fascinating look at John Cleves Symmes.  Symmes was a decorated military veteran from the early 1800s.  After his service, rather than settling into a veteran’s lifestyle, he became convinced that the earth was hollow.  But beyond hollow, he believed that there were entrances to this hollow earth at each of the Poles (the poles had not been “reached” yet and were impassable due to ice).  Not only all of that, but inside the earth were a series of concentric rings. And, best of all, inside the earth, on the rings, was an Edenic paradise of beautiful weather and all manner of heavenly splendor.
Symmes went on lecture tours where he was soundly mocked.  However, over the course of his life, he was able to garner a few prominent believers including Edgar Allen Poe and Jules Verne (Journey to the Center of the Earth was inspired by Symmes).  Despite his being discredited by science, his hometown of Hamilton Ohio has erected a  monument to the man. Fascinating!

LYDIA DAVIS-”A Mown Lawn”
A piece of Flash fiction, I suppose.  This is a paragraph-long piece that plays on the words and letter combinations of “a mown lawn.”  I’m not sure it works as a logical piece, but it is fun with pronunciation and letters.

SHEILA HETI-”The Middle Tales”
I reviewed Heti’s book of the same title a little while ago.  I didn’t enjoy it all that much.  This is a collection of five short pieces, three of which are in the book of The Middle Tales and two which are not.  The three stories from the book are probably the three best from that book. And the two others included here are also pretty good.  These stories are not as negative overall, although they take a rather twisted look at things. Heti is not my favorite author, but these stories are some of her best.

JONATHAN LETHEM-”K is for Fake”
This story is listed as a “cover version” of The Trial by Franz Kafka.  I have not read that book, so I can’t comment on it.
This short story is, I have to use the word, Kafkaesque.  Lethem includes quotes from various sources that impact the story.  The first one is a discussion about forged paintings of waifs with large eyes. Margaret Keane sued her husband Walter Keane because he took credit for her paintings.  At the trial, she painted a waif in front of the court to prove they were hers.   Walter declined to paint because of a sore shoulder.
In Lethem’s story, the surreal nature starts from the beginning when K, an artist, gets a phone call explaining that he is to be put on trial. No other information is given.  As he heads to the gallery, a big eyed waif takes him to the back room of the gallery where he meets the person from the phone call  (who turns out to be Orson Wells).   At the gallery, K is asked to sign paintings of a deceased artist so that they will sell for more (if they have his name on it).  When the trial finally comes, he is accused of forgery.  It is very hard to summarize this story because there are so many facets.  In fact, I fear I may be giving away too much as it is.  Yet the story is so surreal, that that is the joy of reading it.  Don’t let my disjointed summary keep you from reading this cool piece.

BEN MILLER-”Dar(e)apy”
Dar(e)py is a type of therapy in which you push yourself to do something about half as extreme as your evil impulses want you to.  So, rather than say running with a knife in your mouth, you run with a straw.  Or, rather than setting yourself on fire with gasoline, try cooking oil.   This therapeutic technique is used….
Wait, this is fiction.  That summary is accurate for the story, by the way.  The narrator’s sister has created this sort of therapy designed around a feeling of catharsis.  In the story, the narrator’s sister has doused herself with canola oil and is holding a match.  She is sitting across the street from the narrator’s catering job.  The story tackles the narrators defense of her sister as she performs this therapy as well as her own dealings with her coworkers.  The conclusion of the book shows a perfect example of dar(e)apy in action.
This story has something that I haven’t seen in a story for a while (and maybe it’s being ten years old has something to do with it): a totally postmodern attitude.  From the parenthetical title to the stream of consciousness/beatniky prose employed, to the made up lingo, it was an almost nostalgic use of something that was pretty out-there at the time.

DENIS JOHNSON-”Hellhound on My Trail”
At 76 pages, this is the longest piece in this collection.  It is a Play in Three Acts.  Each act consists of a dialogue between two characters.  Two of the six are related, all of whom are talking about the same events.
The play concerns events of Marigold Cassandra and her brother regarding  those who are monitoring the cleanliness of a jam factory.  An event is mentioned in which a traumatic experience has happened.  I can’t decide if, through the course of the play all of the details are revealed and I just missed them, or if the information is vague enough to show a degree of trouble without giving explicit details.  The First Act, “An Exploration of the Colorado River” has Marigold Cassandra being interrogated by Mrs May.  Ms Cassandra has been accused of explicit sexual behavior to a coworker, and of accusing her supervisor of being a homosexual menace.  In The second Act “Head Rolling and Rolling” Kate Wendell and Jack Toast discuss the situation, specifically Ms Cassandra.  (Wendell is the homosexual maniac of Act I).  In Act III, “Hellhound on My Trail” Mark “Cass” Cassandra (Marigold’s brother) gets in a heated discussion with Mr Salazar who may or may not be an FBI agent.  He also may or may not be the head of a splinter group from the Jehovah’s Witnesses trying to retrieve the drugs that Cass discovered in his hotel room.  Cass thinks he has been on a bender for several days, but Salazar claims otherwise.  The three pieces are quite gripping, and yet it was tough going trying to wring all of the details out of the people.  I’m sure seeing it performed would be more rewarding.

PAUL MALISZEWSKI-”Paperback Nabokov”

This non-fiction article starts with the observation that Nabokov was very critical of the covers of his books, especially the paperbacks.  In Nabokov’s saved letters he had criticized the covers of his books throughout his life. Nabokov eventually asked that his son provide covers for the books.The piece then details what typically went into the painting of a paperback book cover: usually the artist submitted a design based on the ideas of the publisher, and then had a week to provide the finished product.  Typically, the artist did not read the book.
The centerfold includes 44 examples of the covers that Nabokov’s books have had.  It details which he liked, which he hated and which he had input into.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the article is the inclusion of the full letters that Nabokov wrote to his publishers concerning his covers.  If you are a Nabokov fan, which I am, these offer a cool insight into the meticulous nature of the man.

In the “Notes” booklet they claim that this article had nothing to do with the idea of letting all of the authors use their own cover ideas.

RICK MOODY-”The Double Zero”
This story is listed as a “cover version” of “The Egg” by Sherwood Anderson.  I have not read that story so I can’t comment on it, but I see that it is available here, so I will endeavor to read it shortly.
This short story is told in the vernacular, as they say. It is set in The Buckeye State, where the narrator grew up. His father, after a series of letdowns in life, marries a woman who is, shall we say, disappointed in him. She convinces him to take part in a variety of money-making schemes: selling yew trees or Angora rabbits. They finally settle on ostriches. The description of the ostriches themselves, as well as the narrator’s derision for them is quite hilarious. When this scheme inevitably fails, the family leaves town and opens a diner in a nearby town. In addition to home-cooked meals, they display the freaks from their ostrich farm (two headed babies and the like) and they proudly display their leftover eggs, which are the size of footballs. When the narrator’s dad’s short temper combines with a snack food that he finds indigestible, chaos and hilarity ensue. Despite the comic story parts, there is an overwhelming sadness to the story. Very good stuff.

HARUKI MURAKAMI-”Dabchick”
Before reading this I was sure that “dabchick” was some kind of Jewish word.  Imagine my surprise to find that it isn’t.  I have enjoyed Murakami before.  In fact, I’m going to be reading The Wind Up Bird Chronicle very soon.  This story is another in his surreal exercises.  The narrator is arriving for his first day at a new job.  The directions are wrong; he is wandering through an endless corridor (that is viscerally described) until he finally arrives at the door.  And this is where “dabchick” comes in. The epilogue is about as surreal as the rest of the story.  Weird but cool.

GEORGE SAUNDERS-”Four Institutional Monologues”
Of the four monologues, the final one: “(93990)” appears in In Persuasion Nation and concerns monkeys receiving lethal doses of a drug which causes renal failure.  They monitor all of the monkeys who quickly die except one who thrives.  It keeps getting higher and higher dosages but seems to be unaffected.  The piece is written in complete science-ese making the detachment even more horrible than the actions described.
The funniest one is “A Friendly Reminder” which is indeed just that, a reminder that the people who work  in the Knuckles department of the abattoir don’t like all the negativity or nicknames from the other departments.
The second one “Design Proposal” is a headache-inducing proposal for an architecture design which in intended, as far as I can tell, to make people angry.
And the first piece, “Exhortation” is a plea from the CEO of Judson Associates to buck up and work harder.  As the story progresses you realize that their work is rather unsavory.  Although it is never explicitly stated what they do, there seems to be some mental anguish felt by the workers.
The greatness of all of these documents is the perfection of the formal, detached, mechanical style.  Except for “Friendly Reminder” which is written in an uneducated and vulgar style, perfectly mirroring the employees of  the workplace.

LAWRENCE WESCHLER-”Threadworkers of the Seventeenth Century: Two Further Convergences”
Two more convergences from Weschler. Both of these are available in his book, Everything That Rises. The first is an interesting comparison of Valasquez’ painting “The Spinners” and the myth it is based upon (The Fable of Arachne). In this myth, Arachne weaves beautiful tapestries. The tapestries are so beautiful she boasts that she is better than the goddess Minerva (Athena in the Greek version). Valasquez paints a scene from this fable, but the focus of the story is actually the women in the foreground who are spinning the thread that Arachne uses to make the tapestries. By inverting the emphasis of the story he showcases laborers to the patrons of the art who are typically anything but.
The second piece compares Vermeer’s “Lacemaker” with a poem by Wislawa Szymborska (called “Maybe All This”), which sheds new light on the painting.
Although neither of these Convergences works like his previous ones, they are both welcome art analysis.

VARIOUS-”Shorter Stories”
This booklet contains the letters column, as well as some short pieces.

THE LETTERS:

CHRISTOPHER P. RILEY-ZALENIEV
Writes four letters seeking assistance from McSweeney’s readers for four upcoming books about: a biography of Charles W. Burbaggery; the working conditions “on the floor” in U.S. potato-chip factories 1960-present; the Great Big Book of Human Regrets; and a memoir of his own formative years.

SARAH VOWELL-”Nationalism Roundup”
Vowell submits four episodes of Nationalism in action.  1) Uncomfortableness at a Midwestern University after a discussion of Bosnia 2) The word “Absolutely” has negative connotations (see Napoleon).  3) A tour of Washington Irving’s house reveals the phrase “enslaved Africans” which is a euphemism for “slaves” and does a disservice to the horrible conditions that slaves underwent.  As if “enslaved” was an adjective not what they were. [I'm not sure I agree with this].  4) a woman walked out in front of a speeding ambulance (!); Sarah hopes she gets hit by another ambulance someday.

SEAN WILSEY-”Do You Know What Seaweed Is?”
An amusing tale about a man’s Aunt.  His Aunt is in her 70s, recently remarried, and something of a dangerous driver (she seems to crash a Cadillac once every 5 years, often blaming the other person).  But the crux of the story is that even though she is not at all senile, she treats the narrator as if he were eight-years old.  Including asking him the titular question and seeming disappointed when he says yes.

ARTHUR BRADFORD
A story from the author about working in the Texas School for the Blind.  He was in charge of Jarvis, a blind and deaf boy who was hard to work with.  One day Jarvis hurt himself though the author’s negligence.  He was reassigned to other boys.

THE STORIES:

JOHN WARNER-”On the Set”
This is a surreal look at working with a difficult film director.  Somehow hyenas enter into the picture.  I was rather lost by this one.

DAN POPE-”In the Cherry Tree”
This is a fast-paced, weird little story about kids in a cherry tree.  They have nicknames for each other as well as the boy who wants to join them in their tree. The nicknames keep changing as they will do with little boys, so it’s rather confusing.  However, the initiation of sticking a bicycle pump up your butt until you have a fart explosion was pretty darn funny.

RALPH WORSEY-”Bad Luck”
A series of things that are bad luck, most of which are nonsense.

GABE HUDSON-”The Size of My Heart”
His heart is dead, and is the size of a raisin.

MARCY DERMANSKY-”Cow Juice”
A fight between a girl and her sister, Theresa.  Theresa is a vegetarian and is disgusted that the narrator is dating a boy who has introduced her to the joys of eating cows.  The titular cow juice is used as an aphrodisiac, but it’s not quite as disgusting as it sounds.

AMY FUSSELMAN-”Journal”
An encounter with a overly friendly dry cleaner and his journal.

JOSHUAH BEARMAN-”In a Little Valley in West Jerusalem”
This looks at the machinery that is being used to “read” parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls which are so damaged they can not be read by the human eye.  The first section is brief narrative about the success of the spectroscopy.  The second part is an interview by the author with his dad who does the spectroscopy of the Scrolls.  His dad is impatient with the silly questions he asks.  A very funny interview.  I have no idea if any of this is true.

J. ROBERT LENNON-”Idea”
A stream of consciousness page about a young woman who has a great idea for a millennial piece of art: a 40 x 50 grid of cubes representing each year of the century.  She has this idea while she is listening to her friend complain about her mom. The friend realizes she was daydreaming. Good flash fiction.

Two Stories About Dee Dee Myers

These two stories are weird and mildly amusing.  But they seem to point to larger issues. Dee Dee Myers was press secretary for President Clinton.

STEVE FEATHERSTONE-”Dee Dee Myers Has No Comment”
Dee Dee Myers feels hounded by her life as press secretary.  She rails out at a man shouting in the streets under her window

DAVID PACHECO-”Dee Dee Myers in the Morning”
Dee Dee Myers has retired from being press secretary and is simply wandering the streets healing people.

JASON EATON-Three Picture Deal
This was easily my favorite piece in this booklet.  The conceit of it is that a studio is calling an artist to offer him a three picture deal.  But rather than it being about films, it is about painted art.  To hear art talked about in terms of mass marketing and reaching a wider demographic is very funny.  If you like art, and I do, this is a winner.

NICHOLAS LAUGHLIN-”Various Dangers”
Examples of the dangers inherent in: Intercontinental Travel; The Parcel Post; Linguistic Inadequacy; Reading Poetry; Nominal Egoism.  Each is a paragraph of fairly unusual concerns.

We end with Notes on Contributors (the order is not clear).

And finally, the back page has: The Sister Herschel Series.  The fourth installment of the Meg McGillicuddy series of books.  Sister Herschel fights crime, saves souls and keeps kosher.   (Sorry, Sister Herschel Confesses All! is Out of Stock).

Although the content of this issue isn’t that different from the other three: a few non-fiction, a few stories, letters, and general nonsense, the packaging of this issue really opened up the journal to a lot of possibilities.   And, indeed, I feel that the writing has improved.  The stories all seem tighter and more focused.

SOUNDTRACK: WRSU 89.7 FM.

Coming straight out of Rutgers University in New Brunswick (my grad school alma mater), this was the first station that I happened upon while I was scanning the lower numbers on the radio station.

The brief set that I heard was amazing.

I heard the end of a song that I didn’t know, but which I found very intriguing. It was followed by Les Claypool’s new track “Mushroom Men” (which was wonderful) and then the 180-Gs doing an a capella rendition of Negativland’s “Christianity is Stupid.” I had heard about this band but never heard one of their recordings.  First, if you’ve never heard Negativland, then you’re missing out.  They are a surreal band of audio collagists, playing with sounds and samples and all kinds of weird things.  To have an a capella rendition of a five minute song, the bulk of which is a spoken loudspeakered voice saying “Christianity is Stupid” goes beyond bizarre into the sublime. I have tuned to this station from time to time and each DJ plays his or her own weird and often wonderful thing. What a great experience.

[READ: May 14, 2009] Alphabet Juice

My mother-in-law gave me this book for Christmas because she heard about it on NPR and thought I’d like it. And boy was she right.

I hadn’t heard of this book, although actually I’m sure I had–but I ignored it.  Roy Blount Jr is on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me, NPR’s news quiz, almost every week.   We love the show because it is funny and it tests your awareness of what’s going on in the world (both serious and ridiculous).  And we try our best to get our kids to let us listen to it each week.  After stating who that week’s panelists are, Peter Sagal says what his or her latest book is.   I know I heard them say this title after I received the book, but that’s a different matter all together.

And yes, I want Carl Kasell’s voice on my answering machine.

So what is this incredibly long-titled tome?

This book is a loving look at words.  All kinds of words.  And the origins of said words.  It is like a dictionary in that it is alphabetical, but this is a dictionary that is not only education, it is fun to read (although Blount admits to reading the American Heritage Dictionary to see if he is cited in it.  He isn’t.  Although many other famous writers are, and I am compelled to find this edition of the dictionary and check it out.)

Blount chooses words that he finds interesting, peculiar or criminally misused.  He gives an etymological explanation (always accurate, definitely funny) of the words, and often gives a clever example (including original poetry) to show proper usage.

Blount himself, as anyone who has listen to Wait Wait will know is very funny.  And this book displays his talents very well.  He revels in wordplay, and delights in what he calls the sonicky nature of words.  Sonicky is a neologism for a word that “sensuously evoke[s] the essence of the word [like] queasy or rickety or zest or sluggish.”  He has a great affinity for these words, relishing the way the words feel in your mouth as you say them.

He also enjoys correcting common misuse of words.  He especially hates people who use “myself” for “me” or “my,” as if they feel that myself sounds more proper.  He states that, If

you refer to yourself as myself instead of I (as in “Can Trudy and myself go dig in the sandbox, now?”), I have to tell you that you’re making a spectacle of yourself. Not an entertaining spectacle, but rather the kind of spectacle that makes people think to themselves, “Oh Jeez.”

Blount is also a sports writer of some sort (I could look up exactly what, but I won’t).  He enjoys quoting famous sports personalities and their abuse of language, with mixed metaphors being just the tip of the pool of verbal swill.

Blount is also a big fan of (and a contributor to) Urban Dictionary.com

I must have read about two dozen items in this book to Sarah, and now that I’ m looking for them to sample, I cannot find them anywhere. More’s the pity.  Except that you’ll have to take my word for it and read it for yourself.

This is  definitely a dip-in book. I would read a few pages a day and get my fill, then put it aside for something with a plot.  But by the end I couldn’t wait to see what he would do with the next letter of the alphabet.  Even the paragraphs about the letters themselves were fascinating.

Blount has over 20 books out which is daunting.  I think I’d like to read more.  I wonder if I will.

DIGRESSION: Dip-in books make perfect gifts.  It seems that every book I get for Christmas is a dip-in book.  Not that I mind at all, especially since I’m unlikely to buy them for myself.  But they do seem like the perfect gift: you don’t labor someone with a plot they may not like; rather, you give them something to sample for several months afterwards.

DIGRESSION PT 2: I am intrigued to find that people who bought this book on Amazon also bought 2666: A Novel by Robert Bolano.  If only because I understand it to be a very difficult but rewarding read.  Which this book was not (difficult, but it was enjoyable).

SOUNDTRACK: PEARL JAM-Binaural (2000).

Binaural bursts forth with the rampaging “Breakerfall” and “God’s Dice.”  The latter pauses only briefly for a chorus break.  They are followed by “Evacuation,” a song that sounds a bit off kilter in this studio version but which blasts off on the live version. It’s got a great shouty chorus too.

“Light Years” is another wonderfully singalongable PJ track. The verses are delicate and, while the choruses don’t build, they are still very catchy.  “Nothing as It Seems” is a haunting track that is dark and fantastic.  The opening guitar riff sounds like it’s coming from the middle of a desert, and the rest of the song is great and great sounding too.  “Thin Air” is another mid- tempo song that doesn’t wear out its welcome, and is fun to sing along to as well.

“Insignificance” is one of the great stop/start songs in PJ’s history. The staggered guitar work builds and stops, builds and stops and just gets better as it goes along.  “Of the Girl” is one of those moody pieces that on previous discs sounded kind of throwaway, and yet this song has enough interesting nooks in it that it never gets dull.  It doesn’t really ever bust out into big chorus, but the subtle changes are just as powerful.  “Grievance” is also fantastic. Another staggered type of song with powerful lyrics and rocking verses and choruses. And when played live, this song is a behemoth.

“Rival” is one of those weird little songs that PJ throws in.  An experiment that works more than some of t heir others.  Followed by “Sleight of Hand” one of their more impressive ballads.  Even though the chorus isn’t dramatically different, it’s still very powerful. “Parting Ways” is one of their best album enders in a long time. It’s another slow one, yet it doesn’t meander. There’s some nice guitar interplay that keeps the song interesting.

And then there’s “Soon Forget” a little number played on a ukulele.  For another band this would be a gimmick yet Eddie’s sincerity pulls it off quite nicely. There’s also a hidden track at the end (evidently called “Writer’s Block”) which is the sound of a typewriter typing.

This was the disc that got me back into Pearl Jam, and it really is a great album. Most of their first barrage of live discs came from this tour, which may explain why I like these songs so much (I heard them all about 70 times, right?), but it’s a great place to start for latter-day Pearl Jam.

[READ: April 2007] The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

I read this book a long time ago, in college, based on the recommendation of my friend Gene.  I really enjoyed it and found it quite funny.  Then, last year, I watched Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, which is sort of a film adaptation of Tristram Shandy.  A post about this movie could be just as long as the movie itself, but the short version is that the hilarious Steve Coogan is an actor in a production of the film of Tristram Shandy.  As they are filming Tristram Shandy, the camera follows Coogan, the actor, as his neuroses get the better of him in both his professional and personal life.  This Coogan stuff has absolutely nothing to do with the book, making the whole proceeding weird and wonderful.

Tristram Shandy is a pretty unfilmable book, as it is meta- beyond virtually anything else.  But the movie was very funny, and the few scenes that are actually from the book were well done, and it inspired me to read the book again.  The Gillian Anderson cameo was pretty sweet as well.

But I have to say that this time I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did the first time.  I’m guessing this is due to two things.  The first is that I had a lot more free time to sit and get absorbed by the book then.  And the second is that when I read it the first time, I was an English major, and had been reading more difficult works, so my frame of mind was more attuned to this sort of complex story.

And difficult and complex this story is.

As the lengthy title explains, this is the life’s story of Tristram Shandy, gentleman.  Shandy himself has set about to write his own autobiography, and in order to be fully detailed, he is going to start from the moment of his birth.  And yet, as he tries to fill in all these details, he finds himself telling the story of the day of his birth.  And he realizes how much Walter–his father–and his Uncle Toby play a role in his birth too.  As such, he doesn’t even get to his actual birth until Chapter III.  He makes a point of wondering how long it will take him to finish the book at this rate.

And so, we find ourselves encountering a number of other fascinating characters.  Walter and Uncle Toby spend a lot of time talking while his mother is actually giving birth to him.  Walter is an intense, easily aggravated man, while Toby is a gentle soul.  The discussions are convoluted and often at odds with each other.  Another major character is Toby’s servant Trim, who attempts to help Toby in all of his endeavors.  One such endeavor is a hilarious flashback to Toby’s labored pursuit of an eligible lady (in the film Gillian Anderson professes to love this part of the story).

As you can tell from this set up, Tristram has a hard time getting to the point.  And that, more than anything else, is the central joke of the book.  Tristram the narrator is easily sidetracked, often spending page after page on a digression.  He always finds his way back, eventually, but at much expense to the narrative itself.  Some of these digressions concern noses, names, and siege warfare.

The digression about his name is particularly funny because it impacts his entire life.  While Tristram is being born, Walter tells Toby about his philosophy that a man’s name is the most important thing about him. He wishes to name his son Trismegistus, in honor of his favorite philosopher (Hermes Trismegistus).  Unfortunately, when he tells Susannah, the maid, that “Trismegistus” is to be his son’s name, by the time she gets to the clergyman to present the name, she forgets exactly what it is.  She stumbles with the name until the clergyman, whose name is Tristram, convinces her that the name the father meant was, in fact,  Tristram.  It is with utter horror that Walter learns of  his son’s given name, which he considers to be the worst name imaginable and which can only bring bad luck.  And such is the life of Tristram Shandy.

And this is the kind of thing that Sterne does so well.  Utter nonsense, stretched out into preposterous situations.  All for comic purpose.  The only thing is, well, the two things are: the book was written over two hundred years ago, so the language is a little difficult, and Sterne was trying to obfuscate the story as much as possible, so the language is a little difficult.  What I’m saying is that it’s not an easy read.   And it may not be very enjoyable for most contemporary readers.  Which is a shame as the humor is very funny, and more than a little bawdy.  In one unfortunate incident, when a chamber pot can not be found, Susannah encourages a five year old Tristram to “**** *** ** *** ******.”  And then “slap came the [window] sash like lightning upon us. ‘Nothing is left’ cried Susannah!”

There is also a lot of humor about the physical process of writing itself.  He messes around with people’s ideas of what a book is.  I’m going to quote this passage from the Glasgow University Library because it summarizes things better than I could:

Other oddities scattered throughout the volumes include the black page when Yorick dies… parallel texts in Latin and English, one sentence chapters, misplaced chapters and missing chapters – as in volume 4, where the pagination jumps from page 146 to 156 on account of missing chapter 24…. Such peculiarities draw attention to the appearance of the page and highlight the novel’s lack of conventional form; indeed, although written in a conversational style, the enjoyment of the book very much depends upon the reader experiencing it as a physical object.

So, there’s a lot going on with this book.  It’s daunting, but if you’ve got time to appreciate the book, it’s definitely worth the read.  In fact, just writing this makes me want to re-read it again more slowly so I can really appreciate it.

For a really good summary of all the parts of the book, check out this from English Online.

Astonishingly, the whole book is also available online in a cool interactive format here at tristramshandyweb.  This is the most fascinating book website I have ever seen, and it’s an cool way to see the book as it was originally published.

I encourage you to read this book, if you’ve the inclination.
http://ecl.dukejournals.org/cgi/pdf_extract/27/1/72

I finally decided I had something worthwhile to add to Wikipedia.  Since I have been writing so extensively about McSweeney’s Books, I decided to create a more or less comprehensive list of all of the books that they have published.  (I once asked a McSweeney’s rep if he had a list and he said he didn’t think anyone there did, which was somewhat surprising).  Anyhow, I used my librarian access and knowhow to create the chart on THIS WIKIPEDIA PAGE.  I’ve never felt such POWER!!

If you see any errors, please correct them!

Eartha Kitt died yesterday.  And, yes, I trashed her song “Santa Baby” just days ago.  Andrew pointed out in a comment to that post that, no doubt, it was the last thing she read, and it was the end for her.  And for that I am truly sorry.  It also explains why I have had the song stuck in my head for two days.  It seems that everywhere I go for the last two days…even though I have listened to about a dozen different Christmas CDs without that song on it…it keeps coming back.  To haunt me.  Eartha, I meant no offense.  Please rest easily, and allow me to as well.

Oh geez, and Harold Pinter died, too.  I wasn’t plagued by Pinter, but he was influential to a lot of the authors I enjoyed.  And he was an amusing punchline in Red Dwarf.