Cast In Doubt by Lynne Tillman

Right now I am reading Absence Makes the Heart, a short story collection by Lynne Tillman. It’s really great so far and brings into perspective what I find compelling about Tillman’s work: She crawls inside of fictional people and seems to channel her first person characters. You forget that you are reading the work of an author. The main characters of the books I’ve read so far are experts of some kind, which shapes the kind of self-talk done by the characters.

In Cast In Doubt the protagonist is a seventy-something American expat named Horace living in a small town in Greece. He becomes obsessed with a young American woman, Ruth, who rents a rotting house across from him. He ruminates on his interactions with her, obsessed with his obsession, weaving in and out of memories of his past and observations of his present. He is also writing a book about his ancestors that is just not getting done, whereas ideas for his moneymaking project, a detective series, just keep popping up. I like Horace best when he is being catty about others in clever ways, just like a good elder-gay should.

Horace’s voice is strong and his history is rock solid—when he laments the repressed yet sexually charged forties you do too, even if it is with a little eye roll for the psychic indulgences of a privileged old man. And when the story gets turned about a bit there is shock and questions. Mostly Cast In Doubt made me want to drink gallons of the cold white wine so sensually described by Horace.

I liked the book, but feel a tepidness towards it, most likely because I cared less for Horace than I did for American Genius’s skin-obsessed inmate.

*No picture because I returned this ages ago. No library jail for me!

One, two, three things

Sarah Oleksyk is talking about artist envy, intimidation and inspiration over at her blog. Because she is such a great artist and writer I was initially surprised that she finds herself at the bottom of the self-work-hate hole, that embarrassing secret all creative people have. & Eryn Loeb is a thought provoking, smart and funny writer. The fact that she no longer writes the Girl, Interrupting column at bookslut sucks, but she is doing regular blogging at her own site. & In the face of the categories I've devised for my sidebar it can be difficult to decide where to put blogs that have excellent writing but don't have discrete topics. So, often instead of deciding where to put something, I just forget that the blog exists for several months, or, in the case of mimi smartypants, several years.

Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner

What if a story about a Victorian lady dropped all that does-he-love-her jibber jabber and took our rulebound heroine from walking her grounds, recreating her own childhood, to her children (“They had sloping shoulders, both of them.”) and their blistering, raving deaths from small pox to gay Paris, literally and matter-of-factly.Well, then that book would be this:



Precisely written and a bit autobiographical (according to the introduction by Warner’s biographer Claire Harman), Summer Will Show is a political novel, a love story and actually quite funny. The main character, Sophia Willoughby, after finding out that her decorative but none too useful husband Frederick has hooked up with a wild woman in Paris, must then decide how she is going to live the rest of her life. Will she take to books or embroidery or maybe hump around a bit herself? In the end she decides to go to France to confront Frederick and ends up in the infuriating situation of having to reconcile with someone much less interesting than Minna, the woman he left her for.

So, Sophia falls in love.

Some of the Parisian parts drag a bit with Sophia’s observations of Minna’s revolution-obsessed life, but it is well worth the trip. Between this and the even more fun Lolly Willows, I can’t wait to read some more Warner.

An aside: Though it was written well after Queen Victoria left the throne, there are some exoticizing/straight-up racist thoughts thunk by Sophia about Minna and others are interesting with respect to how bigotry sounds today.

Six

Some things I did today:

1) Wrote about leggings and big rigs
2) Had several dreams about phone calls that never happened
3) Saw this:


4) Planted a second round of basil and fennel seeds
5) Forgot several things several times
6) Practiced my cursing

What about you?

Several banal thoughts led me to this exciting conclusion: I miss interviewing people. Here on try harder, I've only managed three interviews over the years and that is a double order of stupid.

So, who would you want to see Q and Aed here?

Wide Eyed by Trinie Dalton

This is what summer feels like. Hot, sticky, a little raw, the stories in Wide Eyed, are first person West Coast tales—20-something wandering lit with rocknroll and a little bit of magic thrown in. The cover, by Dalton as well, tells you something about the inside:

If you read these stories all in a row, you might feel like you are experiencing several late nights in the same woman’s life: the boyfriend is always named Matt, animals are always important and L.A. is where it’s at or where it’s been. The woman is searching for a remedy for the things that aren’t right: In ‘Hummingbird Moonshine’ it’s a series of physical hurts, in ‘The Tide of My Mounting Sympathy’ it’s a lurking mentally ill sort-of friend. Even the structure of some stories recall list making or the organizing power of prayer by presenting thoughts on a top in several numbered parts. ‘Faces’ is the best of these; most of the others, though enjoyable, feel underdone.

My favorite story, ‘Animal Story,’ contains several talismans against loneliness. The main character is out in the desert, alone, her cat having been eaten by a coyote, and she is deciding how and when to rejoining society. In the meantime, she hosts parties for spiders and ants and plays Nintendo:

“Playing Burgertime gives you this false sense of staying busy, as if you are personally responsible for delivering meat to mankind. Staving off starvation of the masses is an overwhelming task that requires total dedication. Catching the stuff on the bun takes on religious significance, as if it’s manna flowing from heaven. Don’t fuck up and drop the lettuce crooked on the burger or it will drift off the cliff beside you. As you read this you think, Who cares about Burgertime? But when you are awake all night because it’s too quiet and there’s no cat the wiggle your foot on, your deluded brain mistakes the Chef’s duties for your own. You’ll be making burgers all night sometime—just watch.”

Most of these stories are sneaky like that. Yes, Marc Bolan, Freddy Krueger and unicorns make appearances, but Dalton doesn’t use them as emotional shortcuts. Many of the stories include dreams and memories, who better to guide us through than the figures that create and inhabit those spaces?

Last night, at the urging of the always awesome Zane Grant, I went to the release party for abort! #23, a lit zine, at Williamsburg's book thug nation. This issue was SF-themed and several of the authors were present to do readings of the stories--their own or otherwise. I enjoyed all the readings, with the minor exception of the first, by the zine's editor, Jonathan Spies. He was reading someone else's material and kept laughing (surely at an in-joke?), and it was jarring and a little bizarre.

I loved the rest of the readings which included an AC story in a strong Boston accent, some autobio poetry and a looping, wild, alternate-past NYC tale. The last I loved--the reading and the story, while one of my companions enjoyed the reading but didn't care for the story. I read my copy of the zine on the train, and while the story, 'The Slarnax and the Six Train,' by Jessie Gray Singer, was good, it lost the hypnotic quality with which the author's reading imbued it. My favorite story in abort! #23, Laura Waldman's 'The One with the Insides,' worked on the page and in the ear though each was different.

This experience got me thinking about how the experience of a story can change drastically depending on the medium. As you may know, I listen to a ton of audio fiction, all of it coming from the Escape Artists podcasts. They have consistently good stories and rarely have a bum reading. (Though there was this one guy who loved to render female characters in a grating falsetto. But that is another post.) Often I am entranced by stories on there that have problems that would sink them on the page because the readings are done with great skill, drawing out the best in the story. And somehow, somehow, somehow, hearing about dragons or elves or alchemists is fine to listen to, but impossible for me to read. Because I semi-regularly read SF in online venues, I occasionally encounter a story on the casts that I've read before and marvel at how hearing it can transform it, or even more amazing, when the reader seems to channel the sound of the story right out of my brain. However, when Maureen F. McHugh's 'Ancestor Money' (I review the collection here) popped up in my 'tunes, I deleted it right away, not wanting to supplant the drawl of the main characters voice in my head with anyone else's.

I rarely go to readings because so many of them are charged with anxiety. The readers are hoping for sales, or at least attentiveness, and the audience is praying the evening won't require more than two drinks to enjoy. Last night was a relaxed affair and I look forward to checking out more abort! and more book thug nation, where the dollar book rack beats any in town.

back of my neck gettin dirt(y) and gritty

Cecil and Jordan in New York: Stories by Gabrielle Bell

“But then, I’ve never felt so useful.”

The title story of this collection, first published in Kramer’s Ergot 5, is one of my favorite comic stories. Cutting sharp-eyed realism with fantasy, it showcases the unique cruelty that New York dishes out to newcomers, as well as the wearing effect romantic relationships can have on their participants. Bell has a keen ear for dialog in her fictional stories and here it serves to give us just enough back story to make the main character, Cecil, situation heartbreaking. The story is also in vibrant color and this adds a nice liveliness to the story.

The rest of the book is a mix of fiction and autobio stories with main characters that are like Cecil—underappreciated and harassed by life. However, none of the rest of the stories resonate with me. An overwhelming bleakness pervades much of Bell’s work, including this collection. Although I love the way she draws and her ability to tease out a telling detail I don’t enjoy spending time with her characters. The desire to give them all a violent shake is too distracting!

*photo from drawn & quarterly because I already returned this to the library

i've been meaning to tell you

1) L. Nichols (whom you may remember from her contest win) is making some great garden comics right now. I must confess to envy, over here with my unhappy cucumbers and stunted greens.

2) "Were I asked (and I never have been), I would have to say that William Gibson is my favorite science fiction author, mostly likely my favourite "genre" author of all time, across all genres not labeled "literary", though I think that after Pattern Recognition, anyone trying to keep his work in the science fiction ghetto is a fool." August C. Bourré is writing about William Gibson's work--all of it, which is making me think it might be about time for a long reread.

3) Mary Phillips-Sandy is right, as usual, about why we love books about "humdrum objects." Aren't you glad she started blogging again?

4) Speaking of tumblrs, Ira Marcks' Morning in the Atelier is a great photo blog that takes place entirely in his studio. Ink water spill, pen's-eye-view and more.
photo by ira marcks, of course

Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan

I loved the colors of Exit Wounds. All that red contrasted with muted Ikea colors really suctioned my eye to the page.

The story--a man, Koby, is contacted by a young woman, Numi, who claims his absent father was killed in a cafeteria bombing and convinces him to go on a reluctant journey to find the truth—had its weaknesses, especially in the character development and plotting areas, but it moved along swiftly and I kept wanting to know what happened next.

For an outsider, Exit Wounds gave some insight into Jewish life in Israel through characters’ casual conversation. There is a running gag throughout the book about bombings—where the Hadera bombing that that two are investigating keeps getting confused with a larger one in a town called Haifa-- that shows the way a culture accommodates regular, extreme, violence into everyday life by becoming matter-a-fact about it. We also peek into the food, topography and customs of Israel, including a very unusual scene, to my American sensibilities, in which a man identifies his father, a bombing victim, by his ears over CC tv, then requests a video of the body for his mother.

Sometimes Modan’s detailing of faces in Exit Wounds veers towards cartoon-y, which undermines the character work she does, especially with the women in Numi’s family. This jars with the serious tone of the work and pulled me right out of the story in some cases.

I borrowed Exit Wounds from the library, and based on it, would check out more of Modan’s work in the same way.

*photo from drawn & quarterly

no more hellos

On the train I saw a young man that looked like my brother. Shock, then sickening hope followed by a forced numbness—the same nauseating drill. I repeatedly tried not to look at him, to not think that thought. And, of course, I hated him.

I hated his face that echoed my brother’s sharp features. I wanted to punch in his gnarly teeth because they weren’t braces-straight. His lack of style was repulsive to me, and his clothes didn’t hide the body that was not my brother’s strong, young one. I hated him for existing when my brother doesn’t. I moved my seat so I wouldn’t have to see him, but I couldn’t get away from his (thankfully) New York-accented voice, saying stupid things, my beautiful, dead brother would never say.

On nights like this, I want to kill that part of me that is always searching for him because it will always be treacherous, waiting to ambush me.

I've been here the whole time

I am awaiting a desk. A beautiful desk, already owned by my family, is as impatient as I to meet, I imagine, but logistics get in the way. In the meantime I am butt-on-the-floor, contorted, not writing.



The rapidly swelling sidebar shows what I have been doing--well, the part that doesn't involve a love affair with my new video store. The Jansson and Tillman books I'm in or just out of are summery and run in shallow and deep currents, as appropriate to my recent moods. Even the Kathryn Davis book I abandoned in its last chapter a few months ago had a seasonal feel.

Despite what should be inspiration, my resolve to write is as weak as a melted water ice.

Is anyone else twisting in the summer breeze?

Check out my review of Chuck Forsman's Wolf over at inkstuds.

learn and relearn, library science style

1) I do not like reference all that much, but I love reader's advisory--obviously.

2) Metadata is really, really interesting. I'd like to sign up for its newsletter.

3) Butler Library at Columbia provides an intoxicating atmosphere of old money, untold secrets and intellectual vigor. No wonder all those undergrads want to hump in its stacks.

4) Poster-making is inexplicably considered a valuable thing for a graduate student to do.

5) The NYPL offers so many free services like reference chat, access to databases and old-timey eye candy that is feels like I are getting way with something every time I use their site.

6) Group projects suck baboon ass.

7) Librarians are geniuses.
Rest assured that its ass is angry about my comment, too. Image via the NYPL, of course

A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews

Reading A Complicated Kindness reminded me a lot of reading Geek Love for the first time. It is fast paced, strewn with pain and humor and told in a captivating first-person narrative that makes the form seem easy. Though not set in the freak show circuit like GL, ACK does follow life in, in the words of the 16-year-old narrator Nomi, a “secret town” of Mennonites in Canada called East Village. She spends a lot of time considering her place in the Village, and the flow of her thoughts is very true: “That I belong in the frightful fresco of this man’s dream unnerves me. I wonder exactly happened in Menno’s world that made him turn his back on it…The mark of the beast? Streets paved in gold? What? Fuck off. I dream of escaping into the real world. If I’m forced to read one more Narnia series book I’ll kill myself.”


Nomi is angry, defeated, self-destructive, but mostly just sad. Both her sister and her mother have disappeared from town, leaving her with her good-hearted but befuddled father and a bad reputation. She has a plan to leave town too, like we all did at 16, and it is equally possible and fantasy. The main thing keeping her is her lovely dad, Ray, whose own depression at the loss of the other half of the family. I love the character of Ray; his unfunniness and Dadliness are dead-on renderings by Toews and his treatment shows the depth of her understanding of the heartbreak of living in both a faith bound society and in the world, the real world as Nomi would have it, at once when all you want to do is be a good person and have a good life.

The specter of excommunication, a concept that seems especially cruel to me, hovers over this story, and that is especially sinister since Nomi’s frothing uncle is the town’s religious head. As we learn more about the family’s history we can decide to see Uncle Hans as a damaged individual with a poor choice of coping mechanisms or just a complete asshole, or both. Hans shows well the unfortunate arc a life can take when a person chooses to transform an incidence of pain into a grudge against the world and how potent and scary that transformation can be in a religious context.

Women in East Village have it noticeably worse than the men and Toews engages this subtly. The fine line between being a child and being an adult is especially perilous in East Village, and I like that Toews exploits this by having Nomi left by her mysterious, vibrant mom at age thirteen (still a kid) and telling this angry, revelatory story as an outraged teen, near the age when her outrageous sister took off. Other women who can’t or won’t leave go sick like Nomi’s religious best friend, get drunk like her grandma or just go dead like her aunt, extreme reflections of the options available to women everywhere who can’t conform but can’t leave.

All this sounds depressing, but A Complicated Kindness is funny and vibrant too. Though she feels stuck, you know that something is happening with Nomi. All that teenage energy comes busting through the pages, and it is an inspiration and a warning at once.

Good

*Click to enbiggen*

this...

turned into this

The roof is actually even more potty than this now that I've begin to thin and repot seedlings. Besides the vegetables you see here I am growing some sunflowers for B, and some zinnias for me. Between the two is nasturtium; I have several pots of those grown from seed. Will they actually flower?

&&&
From my parents' basement...
It shoots popcorn! It jazzes up the counter with its wild lettering! It only smells a little like burning wires! Bonus: giving it to me makes my parents seem less like hoarders.

&&&
This week was a bad one for stress, but a good one for art. My friend Pete not only brought his bad self to visit, he brought a housewarming painting with him:
One Day by Esther Pearl Watson
I keep going back and looking at it over and over. Especially the little socks.

&&&
More art arrived with Eva today. I commissioned a set of portraits for B's birthday awhile ago from Simon, and she graciously lugged them from Vienna to Brooklyn. They look so much like us that I had to redact! I thought that we'd put them in the bathroom so guests feel safe knowing that we are always watching.

nice lettering

Any letterers out there? How about form fetishists?

Check out this event at Columbia's Butler Library on April 20:

Notes of an Alphabetical Fetishist: Lettered in Rome

"Russell Maret will discuss his recent alphabetical investigations and experiments conducted while a fellow of the American Academy in Rome. Russell's initial intention in Rome was to document and analyze lettering in the catacombs. Upon arrival, however, he was quickly diverted by the great variety of classical lettering styles; and what began as an inquiry into non-Imperial lettering developed into a more playful study of diverse alphabetical "themes." Join Russell for a tour of what he found in Rome and what he made as a result."

If I wasn't mired in work, etc., etc.

#ohcrap

"a better life for everybody"
Eleanor Davis on inkstuds. She is such a great thinker--I love hearing her perspectives on the importance of children's literature, the complicatedness of life, gender politics and why you should have bought her mini comics already. Robin also briefly talks about his struggle with sane presentation of women on his show, which was quite interesting to me as a listener.

nunununununun

Did you know that the Library of Congress just acquired every tweet ever? Now that all those messages about nausea and disappointment (just me?) will be available to researchers of the future I feel a little chastened.

nunununununun

Among the many things I can't do because of school crunch time is this:

Lectures on the Dime Museum, head hunting and automata--what more could you ask for?

Sorry to disappear so soon after MoCCA but between the end-of-the-semester-crazies, being back at work and trying to juggle some other obligations, blogging has slipped down the list of priorities.

I have a couple of reviews in the works, both for here and inkstuds, and I can't wait to get them to you.