Selling, souls, etc.

Soul-selling, in various permutations, has been saturating my reading and listening. Not as a result of any plan of mine, of course, but it's been all bargains and hunger and figuring out what is worth it. While the traditional idea of the soul is not compelling, the concept that an individual has something precious that can be lost or taken is complicated and true and nestled right next to my heart right now.

NYPL Image ID: 833476  Down among the mashers. (c1892) by Art Young

In the suburban wilds of Duplex, a minor character disappears as a child and comes back changed. There is another character that seems to be missing a soul, certainly missing something, and he is the most dangerous of all. I feel pulled along through Duplex--I am enjoying the ride and looking forward to finding out what comes of all the negotiations. This book is on sale right now from the publisher and you should buy it.

In the story “Daedalum, the Devil’s Wheel” written by E. Lily Yu, and read by Kate Baker at Clarkesworld Magazine, a demon torments a cartoonist during a fever dream. It is not just just the promise of money and success, there is something more intimate happening between the demon and the sleeping man. In exchange for his dreams and his body, he is also being released from something, but what? This is one of those stories where the reading makes it, so let Kate Baker take you away.


"Ha! That was also a joke! Why flinch? You used to appreciate the soft, surreal psychosis of cartoons. Mallets and violence! Bacchanals, decapitations, shotguns, dynamite! That’s my sense of humor.

I don’t give, darling. I take. Sometimes I negotiate. It’s always unfair."

^^^

I've talked before about comics subscriptions and how they help lazy people like me get new comics and discover new artists. The joy of packages in the mail is a part of it too. I tend to only subscribe to projects that pay their authors and artists, but will make exceptions, like Rumpus Letters in the Mail.

Today I subscribed to Ryan Sands' Youth in Decline because of Sam Alden's work and the roster of new translated comics. The chance to read translated comics is a huge part of why I subscribe to the Latvian anthology kuš! and stories from around the globe are also featured in The Cartoon Picyaune, to which I also subscribe.

Subscribing to your favorite art, be it comics or podcasts or whatever, gives the publishers a way to plan future projects and figure out how to pay contributors. Important stuff.

2009 is over?

This was a good year for reading. I read 48 books, not including stuff I read for reviews and stuff I forgot to put on this list.

My favorites, in no order, were:
* Lucinella by Lore Segal
* How Far is the Ocean From Here by Amy Shearn
* Ghost Comics edited by Ed Choy Moorman
* Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall
* The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns
* The Withdrawal Method by Pasha Malla
* St. Lucy's School for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell
* The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas
* The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis
* Capacity by Theo Ellsworth
* Pinnocchio by Carlo Collodi
* Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters
* Labrador by Kathryn Davis

I guess I'd better hurry up and review them.

The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns

I picked up this book at Housing Works a few months ago during one of their epic sales. It was attractive not only for its publisher, NYRB, but because of the introduction by Kathryn Davis, a writer that I love and whose work I’ve plowed through in the past two years.

Though the introduction is a bit too straightforward and quotes too heavily from Comyn’s own introduction, I’m glad to have read it because Davis uses the perfect word to describe the voice of the book’s main character, Alice: spellbound. Thought the prose is not as eerie as the book’s copy would have you think, especially not for a reader of magic realism or science fiction or new wave fabulism or or or, the voice used feels barely connected to earth and though Alice is quite observational and insightful, her thoughts seem to brush daintily on the grotesqueries of her life and not leave a mark: “It was after breakfast, and I went into the dining-room to clear away the remains of Father’s kippers. The sun came slanting in through the window an touched the mantelpiece, where the monkey’s skull used to lie.”

The story has the structure of a fairy tale with its dead mother and evil stepmother, unpleasant chores and threatening monsters, its hints at uncertain parentage and ladies locked away. But still, there are dogs to be walked, friends to visit and cooking to do and Comyns strikes a good balance between the fantastic and the mundane, moving the story along with believable actions by believable characters. Alice seems like a real young woman, but living in a time long before the 1959 publication, giving the story an otherworldly setting for a modern reader.

My favorite thing about The Vet’s Daughter is the sense of place that Comyns seems to effortlessly set in each phase of the book. Dreamlike, the story leads you through the rooms that Alice inhabits and hint strongly of the characters within. Her father’s house changes from oppressive and horrible while he is there, to curious and comfortable when he is not. Her protector’s house if full of Christmas novelties and cheery but cheap things, but ultimately proves unable to contain Alice’s strangeness. IN a place that is a refuge for Alice, the steel skeleton of the house hints at the sad and strange history of the inhabitants. The detail of Alice’s steps ringing out as she goes down the stairs in that house is mentioned off the cuff, but hints at the hard-to-keep secrets that live there.

I also enjoyed all the natural details Comyns uses. Naming the woodlouse and the cricket, feeling the sun, or lack of it, in every setting and hearing the cries of a deranged parrot or the scratching of a Cochin hen through Alice give her a connection to the earth that is never explicit but contrasts greatly with that of her looming, uncaring and violent veterinarian father. It’s a subtle touch and I really appreciated it.

Hell by Kathryn Davis

I picked this up in Austin at Half Price Books. Luckily for me, it seems that Austinites actually like to read, so the pickings were good for fiction.

Hell is like a fever dream. Reading it feels like dropping into the stream of consciousness of a desperately lost ghost, one that uncontrollably flitting through space-time and doing the best it can to cope. After awhile this restlessness got tiring for me. While I loved the idea of hell as a horrible confusion instead of a fiery pit, there was one to many elements jostling for attention in the story to make it work for me.

The POV shifts between several characters: a young girl in the 50s, dollhouse dolls, a nineteenth- century chef and a Civil War bound-to-be widow named Edwina. The chef voice is overblown and food obsessed, and was a dissonant element. The whole cooking thing didn't really fit in with the details of the other sections and I wish had been left out. Edwina’s story is a lead weight on the narrative and I couldn’t wait to get through her chapters. Even with all these, a bit of a mystery story emerges, involving the aforementioned young girl and the murder of her frenemy, and that’s the story I really wanted to read. That her loss of innocence is not exactly as it seems was quite compelling; I love how Davis writes about girls and women. Her Hell is fueled by the unspent energy of the lives these women could have lived.

Bonus: Hell mentions both the neighborhood I grew up in and spends a good bit set near the creek where I have spent countless hours having fun, both mild and wild.

Last night I came home to an apartment so hot that all the chocolate and toiletries melted. I also began reading Kathryn Davis' Hell.

Coincidence? Only you can tell me, tryharderlanders.

The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf by Kathryn Davis

Because of a long ago suggestion from Amy Ambulette, I decided to pick up a book by Kathryn Davis. One aborted library loan and seven dollars later I had a compact hardcover from the Strand in my hands. I was facing a diner alone after I bought it and it ended up to be a very good thing because once I read the first page I was unfit for company.

The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf manages to successfully be four books in one:
a) an exploration of small town life that is entirely without cliché
b) a mystery involving an unfinished manuscript that keeps you on the edge throughout the dense narrative
c) a character study of a wild woman grown old, Helen Ten Brix, that manages to not descend into caricature and provides a ton of material for reflection
d) an exercise in POV that manages to make dizzying time and place shifts seem seamless and effortless, all with a first person narrative

Here is a quote from early in the book that accidentally got me where the getting is good because it describes a feeling I have been trying to describe for a long time:
“I was wretched, heartsick, inconsolable. I cried and cried as you sometime do for the whole sorry universe, for the inexplicable machinery that set it in motion and then kept chugging away without regard for all of the tender shoots, as forlorn as these [aforementioned] green onion sprouts that lived and died in it.”

I loved this book and it made me wish I knew something about music since the narrative is obviously structured in a form that likely jumps out to those in the musical know. When you read it, and you really, really, should, you may feel that the moment that the story unravels from is a little too grand, a little crazy, but I feel that it fits perfectly as an action of Brix, a woman who spends her whole life trying to create another world and then finds that she can’t really escape it, even for true emotion.

I love how dense and delicious the book is. It certainly merits a reread in a cold month.