I’m all for blogs—clearly.

But there is, when all is said and done, something about a book. You can bring a book on a train! You can read it in bed or on the couch or in the tub. You can love it up and pass it along. And while I’m delighted when people find my online presence, and even more delighted when they pass it along, it’s just not the same. I can’t—you know—sign it with a Sharpie or anything.

Besides, this is not some short-time romance. As a girl, I’d always imagined the books I’d write someday as my offspring. I could see them in my mind’s eye far more clearly than I could some bucket of DNA with a pink or blue bib around its neck. So despite all the very smart things my pal, Michael Blowhard, has to say about the folly of book writing, I’m down with it. Or up for it. Or whatever it is the kids aren’t saying these days.

I have no delusions about the wild fame or fortune that will be mine when I corral the genius that is communicatrix into a 6″x9″ stack of dead tree guts. It’s a foregone conclusion that I’ll be self-publishing, via Lulu, perhaps, or, if I’m feeling particularly daring, ordering up a stack to keep in my garage. Which, since I don’t have a real garage, would be my living room.

I spent my weekend among a small sample of the millions who believe they have a book—or two, or seven—in them. Sitting amongst them, I’m even more certain: both of the pointlessness of my writing a book and the absolute necessity of it…

xxx
c

Image by Cade via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

TOPICS: communicating, reviews/books, writing.

I was introduced to Hubert Selby, Jr. via the movies, specifically the 1989 film adaptation of his debut novel, Last Exit to Brooklyn. Politely put, that movie beat the crap out of me. As I staggered out of the theater, my faux-cosmopolitan self reduced to a sorry tangle of nerve endings, I remember thinking this probably wasn’t the best movie to have suggested for a sunny Saturday outing with Dad. The joke, however, was on me: Dad had known exactly what he was getting into; he’d read Last Exit when it came out, in 1964. When I was three.

I felt the same way—jangly, tense, vaguely ill—after seeing the 2000 film version of Requiem for a Dream—so much so that it took five years and running into a $1 used-paperback copy of the book at a thrift store to get me to give it a maybe. Because that’s what I do with the "maybes"—stick them on an ever-growing, three-dimensional "to read" list somewhere near the bed. Mostly, they molder away unread until they’re trundled back to the mouth end of the thrift store (or sometimes, the used-book store, where they pay me in more books I’ll never have time enough to read). But this kept nagging and nagging at me; what sort of source material inspires a director to do that on the screen? How do you make despair and addiction and wild-eyed, groundless hope so real on the page that someone else can translate it so perfectly into a completely different medium?

Or is Darren Aronofsky just a total, fucking genius?

Aronofsky knows his way around a camera, alright, but everything in the movie is, amazingly, on the page. And unlike the filmmaker’s language of jump shots, pace, music, film stock, the novelist’s language is just…language. Selby dispenses with pesky, confining rules of grammar and punctuation, using crazy, run-on sentences and run-on paragraphs and sometimes run-on pages to lay bare the urgent, non-stop hum of desperate junkymind. You clock the descent even you’re drawn into the story, with the result that each step downward, while horrifying, makes perfect sense.

Like any language vastly different from our current one, it takes some will and effort to get into Requiem. I liken it to Shakespeare, where, even if the actors are really great and the production top-notch, the first 10 minutes can feel like a bunch of well-dressed chimps nattering on in some imaginary, improvisitory language with too much sound and fury: they might as well be hurling poop at the audience to communicate their feelings. Then, once your give yourself over to the experience, your ears adjust and it’s almost like were listening to things at the wrong speed before the curtain rose.

It’s a difficult journey, this trip into the heart of despair. I didn’t need to read it for the cautionary tale, either: I grew up with a healthy fear of addiction and the idea of using needles for sport is anathema. The capacity for self-delusion, though, is a thing it never hurts to be reminded of. Especially in these times of wild-eyed lying by them what’s in charge (and willful looking away by them what’s not), it’s good to dip into some serious truth via this grim, almost-30-year-old paean to it.

xxx
c

TAGS: reviews, Hubert Selby Jr, Requiem for a Dream

TOPICS: reviews, reviews/books.

Home Land is filled with great characters, their sharply-observed characteristics and film-worthy comic exchanges. There is no end, apparently, to Sam Lipsyte’s invention, and dude not only has an eagle eye for the bullshit we try to pass off as character, he can turn a phrase like a fine (albeit filthy) woodworker turns a fancy-ass chair leg.

Oh, and final disclaimer: while I did laugh in many parts of this sharply-written comic novel, I suspect I am too dumb to get some of the jokes, as (a) The Boyfriend, who is demonstrably smarter than yours truly, laughed far oftener (and more heartily) than yours truly and (b) I had to look up several words in my handy, bedside, pocket-Oxford dictionary, which will kill a joke faster than you can say "A piece of string walks into a bar."

So maybe I’m jaded or maybe I’m stoopit or maybe a little of both, but I felt like Home Land, while undeniably smart and clever and funny and, to an extent, true, had the same fragmented feel of so much postmodern fiction written by authors raised on TV and film.

Briefly, it’s the story of a too-smart fringe dweller who ramps up to his high school reunion by submitting a cavalcade of submissions to the alumni newsletter cataloguing the sad truths of his loser life. Sad, funny truths. Funny, cinematic truths.

I have nothing against imagery that leaps off a page, and I’m not some freaky purist who rails against the corruption of sacred text by the evil cinema. To the contrary, I actually think that occasionally, the movies do a better job of telling the story than their source material. But I can’t help but feel as though, more and more, smart, funny writers are writing novels with an eye to how their material will play out on the screen. It’s been awhile since I read a new book that read…well, like a book. And I’m old and curmudgeonly enough to miss ‘em.

xxx
c

TOPICS: reviews, reviews/books.

It’s hard for me to believe that Main Street was ever a groundbreaking work of fiction, but then, it’s hard for me to believe that I ever thought 256MB was a lot of RAM.

Was there ever a time when we (America, not the royal "we") weren’t aware of our dissatisfaction with the status quo? Of the stultifying, enervating, soul-killing small-mindedness of small-town American life? And really, even way back when, were 500+ pages what it took to get the point across? I mean, if the definitive book on English grammar and structure can clock in at just over a hundred, how much space need be devoted to descriptions of uninspired home decor, gorgeous Minnesota in the raw and the dialectic journey of a main character who is more stock mouthpiece than compelling, flesh-and-foible heroine?

On the other hand, given the current state of domestic affairs, I can easily imagine some fellow American "a-yup"ing his or her way through Main Street, thumping the denizens of Gopher Prairie for being tasteless, visionless rubes before heading out in the Suburban to grouse about the ridiculousness of gay marriage and the righteousness of those who condemn it over an MGD and a blooming onion at The Outback. So there’s probably still a need for Main Street, or something like it.

I’m casting my vote for the latter. It takes a level of determination (or insomnia) for me to slog through Sinclair Lewis that, say, Theodore Dreiser doesn’t require. (I’m just 50 or so pages into Babbitt now, and granted, it’s more engaging than the obvious polemic that is Main Street, but it’s still…well, windy.) Jane Austen wrote scathing social commentaries that still stand up as ripping good yarns. Even Dickens crafted a more compelling read than Lewis and he took at least twice the ink to do it in.

What’s most irksome to me is that I used up credit at my favorite used book store to buy a crumbling, yellowed copy when I could have purchased an EZ-on-the-old-eyes Dover Thrift Ediition for just $3.50. Or better yet, read it online or even downloaded as an eBook, for free. It’s not bad idea to revisit the classics once or twice in a lifetime and I’m glad someone’s preserving copies so I can do so, but good authorial intentions—and Nobel Peace Prize— notwithstanding, I just don’t see Main Street as a wise allocation of precious bookshelf real estate.

xxx
c

TOPICS: reviews, reviews/books.

I blather on quite frequently about The Truth and my devotion to it, but I’m starting to think I should either start writing graphic novels or get down with being forever relegated to the piker scrap heap of truth-telling history.

This revelation courtesy of Clumsy, Jeffrey Brown’s first graphic novel. It chronicles in gorgeous, embarrassingly painful detail the rise and fall (and rise and fall and rise and plummet) of Brown’s year-long relationship with a woman whom he initially writes off as a sort of "dirty hippy."

One night in the close proximity of a shared sleeping bag blows that perception to smithereens (I’m starting to see why the kids like their camping); immediately, the two are off to the races on their long-distance love journey to madness and back again.

To me, the most interesting aspect of Clumsy (other than its blatant honesty) is that the story is told out of sequence. Brown opens the book with the strip "My First Night With Theresa" and immediately follows it with "My Last Night With Kristyn"; having those writing-on-the-wall, it-tolls-for-thee panels of doom of the latter butt up against sunny optimism of the former the casts an interesting, grayish pall over the proceedings. I felt forced to look at this relationship with a more analytical than voyeuristic eye. (Or maybe that’s just me being nutty—it’s been known to happen.)

The fascinating thing about Brown is his dichotomy. I was struck over and over not only by his fretting over the state of the union and his poignant longing for the phone to ring, but by his boundless courage in laying it all out there like that. In an interview, Brown discusses the separation from character that he goes through to write—basically, he backs away from his characters and goes into author mode, which allows him to get the distance he needs to best tell the story.

Brown has even made sport of (and additional cash off of) his own sensitivity by releasing Be A Man, a parody edition of his own work several years later where he retells the Clumsy story from a more traditional, macho-boy perspective.

The communicatrix is kinda cheap and all (she checked out Clumsy from the glorious deliciousness that is the BHPL), but for three bucks, I think I can let my curiosity get the better of me just this once.

Besides, sensitivity is sexy and worth a visit, but sensitivity coupled with crazy-ass bravery? That’s where I wanna live, baby; you gotta support that shit.

xxx
c

P.S. Lots more cool stuff at Jeffrey Brown’s website, which he shares with some other great illustrators.

ADDITIONAL TECHNORATI TAGS: graphic novels, Clumsy, Jeffrey Brown

TOPICS: reviews, reviews/books.