As it often does, thanks to my usual subscriptions, the generous staff at a couple of literary journals, and friends with Amazon accounts, the new year brought me ample reading material. But as the year bringeth, the year taketh away.
Returning to what passes for a workforce has robbed me of my prime reading time over the past two months, so I’ve had to do some jury-rigging to my schedule in order to keep up. Not that I mind all that much, in retrospect; the shake-up has led me to write more short-form posts for this blog and a great deal more poetry, which, in turn, freed some of my writing hours for reading, instead. After a period of adjustment, I’m reading less than before I took up the mantle of pot-scrubber, but still managed to read the nine books I’ve reviewed here.
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Don DeLillo, White Noise
Some of the white noise that fills DeLillo’s incandescent comedy of horrors:
How did I make it this far in life before reading
White Noise? How many benighted years! What a pity.
Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
Chuck Palahniuk novels are like M. Night Shyamalan movies: read any one and you’ll have a good idea of what to expect when you pick up the next. But I like Palahniuk’s formula — the invented almost-credible-sounding facts and figures; the demented archetypal characters bent on self-destruction; the chains of revelations, one after another after another, until readers have discovered so much shocking information they can scarcely tell anymore which way is up. Fiction that disorients can be instructive, a fact that Palahniuk all but writes on his books’ covers.
“Our real discoveries come from chaos,” says Brandy Alexander, Queen Supreme, in
Invisible Monsters, a madhouse of a novel by the same man who brought us the eminently filmable
Fight Club and
Choke, as well as a slew of other anarchic romps that have yet to be made into movies. And discoveries certainly abound in this one, most of them of course meant to shock. Imagine if Shyamalan’s interests turned to making queer soap-opera camp; this book is sick and twisty. It’s also fun in ways you’ll be ashamed to admit lapping up.
Jhonen Vasquez, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: Director’s Cut
On a park bench, fourteen years ago, my friend Anna handed me an issue of the
Johnny comic book series and said, “You
have to read this. It’s
soooo funny.”
I did, and, in the most questionable way, it was. And that was that, until, a couple of years later, I started dating a girl who shoved a hardcover edition of the collected
JTHM into my hands, saying, “If we’re going to get serious, you have to read this first.” I liked her, so I spent a week reading the whole series in that one volume, chuckling intermittently and wondering what was wrong with me that I found Johnny’s existential torment so amusing.
At least I was not alone in having a twisted sense of humor — the
JTHM comics first published in the ‘90s are still in print today; though, Slave Labor Graphics could just be churning out reprints to pile in landfills, in some diabolical scheme to destroy the environment in one of the most tasteless ways possible. Rereading
Johnny now, well into adulthood, was a deliberate effort to remember my friend Anna (it worked, and she’d smile that little sideways smile to know this is how I did it) and of the wonderful long-ago I spent with that so-serious girl I fell in love with (she may find this funny, if she ever reads these words). Jhonen Vasquez, Johnny’s creator, surely never intended ‘Nny to rouse sweet, mushy, hug-hug feelings in readers, so learning that it did might freak him out. Possibly, his head could explode, then he’d do a headless spite jig at me and I would be sad again.
Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
There is a recipe for this kind of participative journalism that I’m apparently incapable of resisting. Mild-mannered reporter Foer writes here of his immersion in the peculiar subculture of mental athletes, where he learned and practiced their memory-enhancement techniques — techniques pioneered by the ancient Greeks and still employed today — to ready himself for entry into the US Memory Championships.
Moonwalking is heavy on anecdotes, not on the boring how-to approach implied by the book’s misleading subtitle, so it’s better than it sounds. Foer’s history lessons and digressive fact-finding along the way make for an entertaining jaunt reminiscent of Stefan Fatsis’s journey through the wilds of tournament SCRABBLE competition,
Word Freak, which I read a decade ago and also recommend.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
In his elegant 2009 book,
The Black Swan, Taleb expounded on how unexpected events shape our lives, teaching valuable lessons about the ludic fallacy, the dangers of implied narratives, and false pattern recognition. Writing
The Black Swan, he came to realize how well his thought process lent itself to constructing aphorisms — pithy, self-contained bits of ostensible wisdom — and so pieced together
The Bed of Procrustes, a notebook’s worth of thoughts, an empiricist’s bathroom reader. Morning constitutionals could only be enhanced by musing over propositions like these: “Half the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears”; “Don’t talk about ‘progress’ in terms of longevity, safety, or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness”; and “They read Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall on an eReader but refuse to drink Chateau Lynch-Bages in a Styrofoam cup.” Very clever. The rest of the pages can be torn out to improve your bathroom time in other ways.
Philip K. Dick, The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories
PKD was nothing if not a prolific writer, authoring, in addition to his many novels, what I suspect are hundreds of short stories in the sci-fi genre, and, as with his longer works, many of these stories resonate at frequencies that penetrate the reader’s mind like radiation, quietly mutating the gray matter to delayed but significant effect. The upshot is that the story on which you later reflect stands out not for its hard technical data (Dick was no technologist; he expertly obfuscated the science in his science fiction) but for its paranoia, delirium, or isolation — the themes he dealt with best. Standout stories in this generous collection of early PKD include the haunting time-travel tale “Captive Market,” the title story that was adapted into Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster movie, and the Kafkaesque “What the Dead Men Say.”
Just as in all near-future SF, it’s easy enough to point out the ways in which the author’s speculation about a future thirty, fifty, or even ninety years away failed. Dick didn’t predict the Internet, DNA forensics, the uninhabitability of Venus, Soviet Russia’s demise…. However, we still watch
Twilight Zone episodes whenever Syfy reruns them, and suspend our disbelief for classic SF cinema, such as
This Island Earth. There’s a timeless je ne sais quoi in black-and-white futurism, on the screen or on the page, which has nothing to do with anything as pedantic as accuracy.
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
For how many English lit courses is this 1898 novella required reading, I wonder. I’ve encountered its title, and James’s name generally, for years and years, without having a clue to what the book is about (and even less interest in finding out). Had I known it to be a ghost story — and my reading leaves little doubt about the paranormal nature of the malevolence with which the tale concerns itself, never mind the rhetoricians who think it’s a case of hysteria, delusion, or whatever else — I’d have gotten around to it earlier.
As it happened, I was several chapters into
A Rhetoric of the Unreal (see below) before I realized that three whole chapters of that book are devoted to analysis of
The Turn of the Screw. In a sense, then, this became required reading for my self-administered, ongoing course in English literature. Posthaste, a friend went online and ordered a cheap paperback edition for me.
In the simplest synopsis I can give, it’s the story of a governess charged with caring for a wealthy bachelor’s orphaned niece and nephew. She takes the job in “a big, ugly, antique, but convenient house, embodying a few features of a building still older, half-replaced and half-utilized,” only to be seized by dread at the appearance of two sinister apparitions — former employees of the bachelor, it seems. The governess maintains, externally, the utmost poise and decorum, spending the remainder of the novella quite privately losing her shit. Keeping her composure becomes all the more challenging once the angelic children are implicated in a conspiracy of knowing what’s really happening. It’s all very dramatic and suspenseful, if a tad fusty.
Although the dusty syntax of a century-old book takes some getting used to, once I grasped James’s style, immersing myself in his cinematic plot was as easy as tumbling from a ramshackle manse’s widow’s walk. (I’m merely illustrating a point; there is actually no such fall in this story. Sorry to disappoint you.)
The Turn is very episodic, and I kept envisioning its scenes like those of a movie, probably a BBC affair, on par with
Downton Abbey, as far as production values go, and wondering if a film version was ever made. If not, why not? I’d watch.
Christine Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic
Education options for the incarcerated are few. My discovery of this fact occurred around nine years ago, when I was in the doldrums, awaiting the circuit court’s decision on my direct appeal — an awful period in which I sought only distraction, in the form of crossword puzzles, games of SCRABBLE, and all the literary classics I could get my hands on. When I thought to make more edifying use of my time, I considered reapplying myself to formal education by way of a correspondence course. Doing so would have many benefits, I thought, not least of which were better job options (if certain crucial improvements to my circumstances were also made, that is) and my casting off of the label “high-school dropout” that’s clung to me like a scarlet letter ever since I opted to forgo three more years — of teachers who couldn’t engage me, classmates who couldn’t tolerate me, and schedules that couldn’t accommodate me — in favor of a GED and the honest, well-intentioned goal of enrolling at a two-year college sometime before I turned seventeen. So, locked in a prison cell, seven years after clearing the books and the M.C. Escher postcard out of my locker, I wrote away for information on schools.
When the stacks of brochures, pamphlets, and course catalogs arrived, though, my enthusiasm diminished in inverse proportion to the volume of data provided. These days, nearly all of the correspondence involved in taking a correspondence course is web-based, with a few that require students to at least have e-mail. But yours truly lacks
any computer access. My options were therefore narrow: (a) business management or (b) nothing. If you remember those midday and late-night TV ads from the ‘80s — the ones in which Sally Struthers flogged courses in gun repair, locksmithing, TV/VCR repair, shoegazing, saw sharpening… “or you can major in business management or accounting” — you’ll understand why I went with option
b. Call me elitist, but I could never subject myself to a class I’d seen hyped during a commercial break from
Night Court. Deciding against a correspondence course ultimately proved practical, because my direct appeal was quickly denied, reducing me to a braindead mourner, too wrapped up in suffering to devote brainpower to anything more academic than my navel.
Eventually I came back around. I also changed my mind about formal education. For me, given what I want to do with my life, whether or not it’s ever fully restored to me by the State, earning a degree would largely be a waste of money and time. (Establishments of higher learning, take note: I will still happily accept any honorary diplomas you see fit to offer me.) My middle name might as well be Autodidact, considering how rigorously I pursue the self-instruction that works so well to cram information into my miswired brain. And it’s books like this one,
A Rhetoric of the Unreal, that allow me to get knowledge and understanding at the speed I prefer, by the terms I dictate.
Friends agree that my taste in reading material sometimes skews to the masochistic. The friend who ordered me this book from
my Amazon wish list did so because, in his words, no one else would. He was probably right: people tend to get me the books they themselves would like to read, and I don’t imagine there’s much demand for in-depth rhetorical analyses of sci-fi, fantasy, or other written works that make use of fantastical elements, among you who read this blog. But I was challenged (pleasantly so) by Christine Brooke-Rose’s semiotic studies of works ranging from James’s
The Turn of the Screw (as I mentioned above) to LeGuin’s
The Left Hand of Darkness, stories from Poe’s “The Black Cat” to Lem’s “The Twentieth Voyage,” and style exercises from Reed’s
Yellow Black Radio Broke-Down to Pynchon’s
The Crying of Lot 49, in dense, imposingly titled sections (e.g., “The Fantastic as Theoretical Genre: The Three Requirements,” “Ambiguity as Distancing,” or “Metafiction and Surfiction: A Simpler Formal Approach”). I can understand how this kind of thing might put a purely pleasure-seeking reader off his or her breakfast. Me, though? I ate it up.
Davy Rothbart, My Heart Is an Idiot
When you know the author, it’s basically impossible to critique a book objectively. When an author has written about you in that book, it’s more difficult still. Davy Rothbart is my friend, and in his collection of autobiographical essays is a piece about how he and I got to know each other after he learned about my wrongful conviction for first-degree murder. How could I review
My Heart Is an Idiot fairly?
I can’t. Instead, I’ll just use this space to effuse about my friend’s newest book.
Davy is a phenomenal entertainer whose adventurous spirit leads him through one bizarre circumstance after another, and these situations make for very amusing story-fodder. I laughed — actually laughed out loud — twice before reaching page ten. Davy’s such an adroit storyteller because he embeds his idiotic heart in every one of these essays — sometimes in ways that make you think you should be embarrassed for him, sometimes in ways that make you want to curl up in a corner and hide under a blanket, but always in ways that make you
feel something.
He wrote “The Strongest Man in the World” about how his research into my case led him to know me and a few of the people who most fervently believe in my innocence. Certain individuals who make a profession of reviewing books for major media outlets have called this, the book’s longest piece, its best. I personally preferred “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Pee on the Wall,” which didn’t leave me despondent beneath the aforementioned blanket. You know what they say about opinions, though.
Buy a copy of Davy Rothbart’s book right now and develop your own unique scent.
