2011zies

• Follow Me Down by Kio Stark
• Freddy Stories by Melissa Mendes
• Under the Poppy by Kathe Koja
• Black Glass by Karen Joy Fowler
• After the Apocalypse by Maureen F. McHugh
• Some Day This Will be Funny by Lynne Tillman
• Fair Play by Tove Jannson
• Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas
• A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
• The Monkey's Wedding and Other Stories by Joan Aiken
• House of Fear by Leonora Carrington
• Haunted Houses by Lynne Tillman
• Inverted World by Christopher Priest
• The Third Bear by Jeff VanderMeer
• trash sex magic by Jennifer Stevenson
• Perfect Circle by Sean Stewart
• Daddy's Girl by Debbie Dreschler
• Another Glorious Day at the Nothing Factory by Eroyn Franklin
• Our Spoons Came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns
• Bonk by Mary Roach
• What I Didn't See by Karen Joy Fowler
• Breathers by Justin Madsen
• Half the Day is Night by Maureen F. McHugh
• Inbound 6: The Food Issue
• Freewheel 1 & 2 by Liz Baillie
• Pump 6 and other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi
• The Ends of the Earth by Lucius Shepard
• You Were Wrong by Matthew Sharpe
• Watch Your Mouth by Daniel Handler
• The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
• The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington
• Overqualified by Joey Comeau
• The Skin Chairs by Barbara Comyns
• The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
• True Deceiver by Tove Jansson
• Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker
• Make Me A Woman by Vanessa Davis

Freddy Stories by Melissa Mendes

On a recent late night I saw a Melissa Mendes tweet that said “I remember those days.” She wasn’t talking about her new book of comics, Freddy Stories, but those four words are a good introduction to her work as any. Freddy Stories is a collection of quiet, subtly chronological moments in a girl’s life told with minimal dialogue that makes the reader slow down into kid-time for the duration of each story.

It is that sense of time in Freddy Stories that really sets it apart from other kid stories that I’ve read recently. Instead of nostalgic, they are without that boring, overwrought adult wistfulness; Freddy’s days are long and full of small things, anti-adventures really, that nevertheless feel like complete narratives. Most of the pages are six panels and Mendes stretches moments across them. In stories like “Mom” and “Frank,” both one-pagers, show panels that repeat with very little change, making the small changes count and giving us time with each character, Freddy and Frank respectively, and teaching us something about them. Both are wordless too, which highlights another of Mendes’ time-twisting tools. By being sparing with the dialogue, Mendes creates a sense for the reader of being inside Freddy’s head and experiencing things along with her, things like divorce, making potions and winning at pinball.

 

Freddy is really the cutest thing in a hoodie. Just look at that cover image! Even if your ovaries aren't bursting, Freddy is charming because even though she craves comfort and fun like the rest of us, she knows when yelling is the best policy. Peanuts fans will find a lot to love in Mendes’ characterization, as well a hint of Schulziness when the Freddy and her buddy Steven are funning around in profile. I really like it when we get to see her imagination run wild, like in the brother/werewolf page (left), just because it’s not only funny, but it shows one of the essential differences between adults and kids. We know werewolves don't come from eating a mud and dogshit potion, but what if it did? What if it did and your teenage brother ate it and got even hairier and angrier? WHAT IF IT WERE ALL YOUR FAULT????? (It will better in the morning.) See, I just sent you back in time. Neat, huh?

Being a kid is weird and serious business and Freddy Stories is both a great reminder of that and a call to pay attentions, play harder and yell when necessary.

As always, click to big up all the pics.

Reading House of Fear & Tales from Down Below by Leonora Carrington

This book, as I've mentioned before, seems to be the only borrowable copy of Leonora Carrington's fiction in the five boroughs that is not the delightful The Hearing Trumpet. The collection is made up of several short stories and a memoir of her time in a Spanish asylum in the 1940s. The memoir section, dictated in French, three years after her incarceration, is called Down Below or Notes from Down Below. Let me say here that there is no question that Carrington suffered from mental illness. Reading Notes from Down Below reminded me of a lost summer I spent in the company of someone going into a manic phase and how that could have easily slid into psychosis. Even though I have no connection to the mystical and religious figures that populate her delusions, it's the kind of reading that gives me a growing sense of dread because it makes me feel a little crazy too.

Besides that effect, and despite the actual illness that it depicts, this memoir also gives a good picture of what it was (is) like to be a creative person, to create towards sanity, in a uncreative world. This quote breaks my heart with truth: "I gave little thought to the effect my experiments might have on the humans by whom I was surrounded, and, in the end, they won."

To the left is a map, a drawing made of the boundaries of Carrington's prison. It shows how hard she was trying to make a story out of the terrible things happening to her. It freaks me out with its details--the same reality as the clandestine cigarettes and paralyzing injections, but not the same at all.

How others view her sanity or insanity is totally informed by her femaleness, and this comes through in how she is treated and mistreated. Everybody just wants her to be quiet, maybe get better, maybe not. I wish I had some more quotes for this, but the library police were breathing down my neck... The second section of the memoir, all about the time shortly after the institution, is shocking in its clarity about the concessions one has to make for safety in wartime and how shitty it is to have a family that cares more about propriety than your health and happiness. There is much more to say about Notes from Down Below—it demands a reread some time when I can think about it more.


### The stories in the collection were not as interesting to me as the memoir. They play with dimensions and time, as surrealist fiction does, and nothing is as it appears. Horses appear over and over. Everything has many adjectives odd attached to it, but all come off as flat and juvenile. I wish I could get at more of her later fiction. Why must I to be constantly thwarted by my monolingualism?

hit submit; the library; Shiga's Empire State

I submitted my first flash story to [redacted] today—my first fiction pitch ever. Though I know that I won't hear anything about it for several months, I still feel very excited about the whole thing. I know that the story will be a tough sell, but I am hopeful.

///\\\

When it became clear that more time in front of the computer wasn't going to be good for me, I went to the library. I finally returned some books I've had for months and headed to Fiction for something to distract. As I wandered the stacks, composing a post about how browsing in the BPL Central branch is not pleasurable because there are so few books by the authors I am interested in and many, many copies of Lauren K. Hamilton novels, I ran across two small press books in the New Fiction section that I was drawn to: Isle for Dreams by Keizo Hino, published by The Dalkey Archive Press and Follow Me Down by Kio Stark, published by Brooklyn's Red Lemonade. I remembered that there was a Karen Joy Fowler story collection from the 1990s, Black Glass, which was of course not on the shelf in Fiction or SF, but in the basement stacks. After filling out the slip I sat down to read a comic and wait for it to appear on the shelf in the Popular Library.

///\\\

I read Empire State by Jason Shiga.  The first thing I noticed was the book's color pallet, matte shades of red and blue, done digitally by John Pham. The story skips back and forth through time and the colors help place the reader in time. While this worked well as a narrative strategy, the colors felt drab to me and sapped the settings, such as the library, Lake Merritt(?), and NYC, of strength. Since this book is so much about the contrast between places, and the connection between where we choose to live and the way we live our lives, the coloring choice ultimately reduced the power of the story. The book begins in Oakland, CA and follows the main character, a homebody named Jimmy, on an impulsive, love-fueled Greyhound trip to New York to visit Sara, Jimmy's best friend and crush. He convinces himself that the trip is a step towards adulthood, but from the moment he arrives in New York, wide-eyed and Greyhound-stinky, it becomes clear just how much growing up he has to do. Overall, Empire State, while cute, felt too slight for the treatment—more like a mini than a book. More time spent fleshing out the days and nights on the bus and how naive Jimmy responded to them would have served to make the book more satisfying.

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington

The Hearing Trumpet was ohmygod 100% fucking amazing. I've been in this mode of reading about repressed and oppressed British ladies in surreal circumstances, and that describes this book, but only superficially. The main character, Marian Leatherby, is really old, living in a Mexico-type land, hanging with her outrageous and wonderful friend Carmella and essentially enjoying herself despite deafness and neglect. "Every week brings a certain amount of mild enjoyment; every night, in fine weather, the sky, the stars, and of course the moon in her season. On Mondays, in clement weather, I walk two blocks down the road and visit my friend Carmella." Marian's useless son ends this quiet life and puts her in a home at the urging of his terrible, also British, wife. How terrible to be in such a lush land and surrounded by prune-faced Brits! In the home, run by unsurprisingly avaricious and suspectly religious twits, Marian meets up with several other old ladies, all of whom are interesting, if not all benign. Conditions at the home degrade until Christian mysticism, murder and good, old-fashioned collective action shake things up, then down, down, down.

Besides just stewing in the wonderfulness of Carrington's sentences and delighting in her weird, but not one-dimensional characters, what I liked most about this book were its portrayal of old age as a high-stakes adventure where one's past is more than dead weight and friendship as not only a superficial past time, but a lifesaving relationship. I would trade all the snow in Lapland for a friend like Carmella...

Despite all I've said, subtlety reigns in this book. Marian is a mild and mostly passive observer and she tells this story with a sweetness that may distract from the author's absolute dissection of ideas of propriety, femininity, the body, human worth and the past. Her reality is not questioned by the book, though throughout the story several people deem her "senile" or vice-ridden or mad. If you read the intro to the book, or any other biographics on Carrington, it becomes clear why this theme is so important, but I urge you to wait until you've read the book and not let the facts fuck up the fictional truth.

I wish I could show you more of Carrington's writing, but the book has gone back to the library and Google-Booking around for quotes is agitating. Perhaps if everybody who reads this buys a copy from Exact Change we can pressure them into reprinting more of her work.

Overqualified by Joey Comeau

My rides to work and school on the subway now seem to comprise all of my current reading time. I prefer something absorbing and a little escapist for these rides, as the train is sometimes crowded, loud and/or smelly and I need something that pulls me in.

So, the other day I pulled Overqualified, by one of my favorite comics writers and birthday twin, off of the unread shelf and ran to the train. When I finally settled into my molded plastic seat, I expected to get a little jolt of work-sucks catharsis before I hit the office.

Instead I got hit with a dead-brother story—a grief story—told in increasingly desperate and bizarre cover letters to companies. Despite the profusion of profanity so loved by my generation, including this bookending gem: "'Live for today, you retarded little shit. The end is near,'" I found the story touching, if a little slight. The main character, Joey Comeau, yes, Joey Comeau, goes through many of the stages of grief I remember: self-destruction; the desire to experience everything; the desire to experience nothing; anger; mythologizing; flailing regret; etc..

His degeneration is somewhat comic, which is where the book trips a little, but the book also contains lines that mirror the kind of thoughts that both anchor us to the past and give us some path for the future. "I love the feeling of running down stairs. It's an activity the body was made for, something that feels perfect and correct." The letter to Absolut Vodka is probably my favorite. It ends like this:" I am applying for a job, because I don't think you understand what to means to be cool or strong or invincible. You of all people should know. That is what alcohol does. It makes you strong. You can fight anyone. You can seduce anyone. You can drive faster than death." I don't think this is by accident, so I wish Comeau had whittled away at some of the bombast and deepened his main character a little.

ECW Press's treatment of the book is lovely. The paper is thick and the cover art by Comeau is striking. And the letter on the cover is dated with my brother's birthday.

Bonus: A shout out to a web comic-er Ryan North and his penis are included in a letter to Yahoo.