Quick Reviews

I was a dick about my Summer Reading Reviews that I planned. I'm sorry, blog. Here's what I've read and finished since my last update (in no particular order):

Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones
Sebold's debut novel, which a few years ago was the IT book, stayed far from my radar for a long while. The reason is this: when I was in high school, I saw at least six girls do terrible dramatic re-enactments of the book's first chapter, which describes the rape and murder of the 14-year old narrator, Susie Salmon. Rape is a tough thing to read and to watch, not because it's a horrifying subject (it always is), but because sometimes it's just so poorly done. Sebold, to her credit, writes it with enough balance between description and discretion to not make me throw the book across the room. The rest of the novel deals with Susie's friends and family attempting to cope with the aftermath of her murder; their attempts to find her killer, her family falling apart, and Susie's adjustment to her new heaven, where she watches helplessly, and often joyfully, time pass for those she left behind. Sebold's greatest gift in this novel is a damn good narrative voice. Her Susie is sweet and tragic, loving and regretful, and it is her feelings towards her family that carries the greatest feeling, more so than what her family actually experiences. I was disappointed in the secondary characters in the novel, the rest of the Salmon family and a few more of Susie's friends, as well as her killer; they are convincing but never seem to flesh out or develop; the third act of the book was almost boring for me. Once again, it seems, I picked up the novel that everyone and their mother raved about, and was disappointed. Damn my Bachelor's degree.


Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Now THIS is more like it! Check it out: in Soviet Moscow, the Devil and his companions (a naked girl, a hunchback, a man in a checkered suit and a giant talking cat) pay a visit to wreak a little havok. Bulgakov's take on the Faustus myth is darkly funny and compellingly intelligent; not for the weak of mind but oh so worth it. With reckless abandon, the Devil causes a fair amount of death and destruction so that he might throw a good party, and saves the love of the titular Master and Margarita, an impovershed writer whose manuscript on the religious figure of Pontius Pilate has been destroyed, and the woman who willingly gives her soul to be with him. The novel not only deals with religion in a unique and arguably perfect way, but criticizes a society that refuses to accept the existence of either God or the Devil. Oh, and the cat's name is Behemoth, and he loves shooting things.


Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

I feel like I can't write that much about this novel, only because it would be too difficult. Invisible Man is dense, no doubt, but that does not mean that it is impossible. Ellison has crafted a sort of African-American Ulysses, a voyage from the impoverished South to the well-to-do yet hypocritical University and finally to the bustling world of 1920s-1930s Harlem. Ellison's nameless narrator seeks his identity through them all, finally settling on being, more or less, the titular Invisible Man. Though a strong and powerful criticism of American racism, Ellison's prose wanders so often into the experimental that one forgets to think in terms of political statements and instead delves into the allegorical factors surrounding race and the way we see each other, the hypocrisy inherent in all people, and the overwhelming and never answered question of the human condition. If there really is a greatest American Novel ever written, this must be close to #1.


H.P. Lovecraft, At The Mountains of Madness

Lovecraft's weird fiction has avoided me for some time, and finally I got around to it, picking up "The Call of Cthulu" as well as some other stories, one being his novel, At The Mountains of Madness. The story follows an Antarctic expedition that stumbles upon the ruins of an ancient inhuman civilization that inexplicably causes the deaths of several members of the crew. Lovecraft's gift is for horror, and unfortunately it does not shine here as it does in stories like "The Call of Cthulu" or "The Colour of Outer Space". Though the civilization that Lovecraft creates and describes is well-formed in the prose, the narrative delves too much into scientific musings pertaining to geological history or mathematical distance, and there are too many moments where Lovecraft tries to build suspense, but eventually is just tiring. How often can you almost describe something, and then say "but I am too afraid to speak of it!" We know you're going to. There's no way that you won't. Also, the novel is missing that Lovecraftian sense of doom, where mankind is unable to cope with the scale of the unknown universe, that nihilistic sensibility that really makes for the best sort of horror.


Glen David Gold, Sunnyside

Ah yes, Sunnyside. I loved Carter Beats the Devil, Gold's first novel, and his follow-up was about Charlie Chaplin and the beginnings of Hollywood, so you know I would be on board. Gold is far more ambitious with this novel, he does not only follow Charlie Chaplin, but others as well, notably two men who seem to have little to nothing to do with Hollywood at all. The stories all revolve around the First World War, in and out of the trenches. Gold's Chaplin is a man filled with both ambition and indecision, full of love and a good touch of self-pity. Chaplin's motivations are sometimes hard to figure, but I'm just along for the ride, and Gold's prose is practically sparkling. Be warned, though: just because it's about Charlie Chaplin doesn't mean that it's all fun and games. But anyone who's seen Chaplin's better films – The Kid, City Lights, Modern Times – knows that humor is to be found in tragic circumstances, in fact, it must be found in order to survive. Gold's novel, then, is much like life itself: sometimes funny, often tragic, but mostly beautiful and, really, always worth it.

Generically speaking

I've been writing for a long time. Not professionally, since I still feel unprepared for that, but even so, I've been making up stories for as long as I could think, and when I was in second grade I had an assignment to write about sailors and pirates, and I wrote about a girl who dressed up as a boy so she could be on a ship and run away from home. I never finished the story, thinking that it was going to be a novel, which is for the best, I suppose. Turns out that around the same time, Neil Gaiman had written Sandman #53, which was of a similar theme, only infinitely better written. Though I've always had dreams of being a performer onstage, writing has always called back to me; and I've realized that my mission in life is to spin stories, since it's the only thing that I'm really good at doing. Whether that makes me good on a broader spectrum remains to be seen.

But what to write? In every artistic profession, it makes sense to be well-versed in all genres and forms of expression; or at least most of them. I could, if I put myself into it, write romance, horror, mystery, or drama. I could work my pen into period fiction or sci-fi or fantasy. But I don't necessarily enjoy all of those; one of the hardest parts of writing a novel right now is that I'm trying to defy genre, and so am combining romance, historical fiction, stream of consciousness, magical realism, with dashes of suspense, fantasy, and plenty of drama. I have to change my voice between characters! It's so much harder than I anticipated!

Still, though, it's a challenge that I'm happy to meet. I'm working on it sparingly, but I'm not giving up on it by any stretch.

Still, I don't think that I was meant to be a novelist. When I sit down and I write for the sake of writing, when I have an idea that grabs me around the neck and pulls me into it, it isn't really anything like what I'm writing in The Clockwork Mouse. As a matter of fact, they tend to be one of two things:
Erotic Poetry or Folklore.

Does that seem strange to anyone else? It is to me. Here's why I think either thing happens:



Erotic Poetry:

Let me be frank ("Hi, Frank!"). I'm not a fan of most erotica. It has too much of a tendency to be fetishist and crude and, while I know that being explicit can turn plenty of people on, it too often lacks the compelling beauty of sex that I love so much. I don't mean that in a sentimental way; I don't think that love is necessary for a sexual relationship to be good, and boy oh boy can it be good. Sex, to me, is magnetism, it's losing your thoughts and succumbing to what you're meant to do, it's the base and essence of feeling. It's really beyond love, because it's beyond emotion. Still, sex doesn't have to be dirty. One thing that I always want to do when I write is to never explicitly explain what's going on (though you'd know, of course, if you read it), in the dozen or so poems that I've kept (I've written plenty more but some aren't good at all), I only say the word "fucking" once. What I'm trying to express is that sex isn't about getting respect, or being mature, or being in love, or being angry, or being selfish, or being dominated or dominating. It's about wanting someone, wanting an experience, wanting to forget yourself entirely, to be something that isn't a single solitary person for just a moment. I'm also fascinated by the physicality of sex, something that I think sprung out of seeing too many Egon Schiele paintings in Vienna. What do the bones do? It follows the idea of the soul being connected to the body, not separate from it: our soul seeps out from our pores, it runs through our veins and our marrow. Sex is just as transcendant as prayer, but that doesn't make it holy. It's just personal and real and spontaneous, and nothing to be ashamed of. Anyway, this is how I write it:

the tense changes
life is not a moment
now it is skin shivering as it is exposed
small breathy laughs from you
trying to get the shirt over my head
or unhook
unbutton
and now it is not that difficult, now
my new atmosphere is in your mouth.

and if the lights are on or off it does not
matter
you are soft electricity, you glow
like an island far from the coast,
a lighthouse that i am swimming to
desperately.

i do not need to see you to touch you
to know where and how
and why does not matter now
whys are for the afternoon where there is nothing else to do.

but now i pound with tidal love,
i grip with soft and terrible force.

There it is, just an excerpt of a longer poem, of course. I've been debating putting any of this stuff up here, but then, if it's going to be what I might publish someday, I shouldn't be so withholding, yes? I suppose you could call what I write romantic poetry, too, since there's nothing explicit about it, but damn, guys. Have you ever read E.E. Cummings' dirty stuff? How often does the word "cock" appear? Talking dirty is just a cop-out for those who can't write beautifully. Also, capitalization: yes or no?



Folklore

This one's a little more easy to talk about, since it's been on my mind longer. Why Meg, you ask me, how does someone write folklore? Folklore is, after all, not the product of a single person, but rather of an entire cultural history. Well, Invisible Person, that's where I'm trying to do a few unique things. I've already used this Blog as a sounding board for the Archer Almanac, my big, huge, 366-story long anthology that I'm determined to finish before I die. Since I'm too lazy to link back to it, here's the basic idea: the citizens of the fictional town of Archer, which exists somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, create an almanac that, instead of predicting the events of the coming year, documents tales from the town's history, one for every day of the year, meaning that every day of the year is set aside as a holiday. It's sort of like Saint's Days, only there are more of them. Here's a bit from one of the stories that explains what tends to happen with each account:

Before this story continues, we must advise the reader of the Archer Almanac that we are now entering into the realm of unproven fact, one that relies only upon word of mouth and diary entries and nothing whatever upon official records or photographs. Testimony is often given enough credibility to be taken as historical fact, but we must remember that the people of Archer and quite used to the unusual, and keen to imagine it as part of the everyday. This either means that our town is either a place of unequivocal magic, or a place of unequivocally excitable people.

So it's a shitload of magical realism, which I totally dig. American magical realism! Hurrah! What I want to do, more than anything, is to reflect in my storytelling what I feel when I travel around the country, or when I imagine history unfolding. Much like the towns created by authors like Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Archer is surrounded by magic, that may be real, or might be warped by history and the human imagination; but isn't our power to imagine beautiful, magical things just as great as if they were real? I want to create a landscape where Tall Tales and myths are real, even if they are only so in the hearts of people. Too often, I think, folklore and fairy tales are dismissed somewhere after fifth grade, only for level two readers. Well, no more! I worship at the altar of the human imagination. Here is my offering.

So there you have it, my fortés. Erotic poetry, Folklore. If you happen to know anyone who's in the market for either, please direct them to me. I'm sure there must be someone.

You might as well get on the school intercom and tell everyone that I'm half Dracula

So a coupla years ago I wrote a horror-esque story on Halloween (I don't remember if I wrote it on Halloween on purpose) which I faithfully posted here, if you wanna check it out. It's surreal, more or less, and I think that, looking back, there's a lot to it that I find funny. Funny ha-ha, sort of, but also funny sad: this is something that I wrote before I went off to England to actually take a workshop on writing, so it's pretty untested and definitely has potential. But enough blubbering! Read it, I hope you like it.

Anyway, I was considering doing it again, maybe making a few sketches or short stories that are more horror or ghost story-ish. Knowing me, that really means that this is the only one that I'll write, though I do have a ghost story in the back of my head. The waaaaaaay back.

I've also been reading a lot of Lovecraft lately, so maybe that'll leak through. At The Mountains of Madness, for those of you who haven't read it, is basically "science fact science fact science UNSPEAKABLE HORROR science science I AM GOING INSANE fact fact fact airplane." It is a page-turner.

So what's the big thing to write horror stories about these days?

Vampires!

Oh, wait, no. Vampires are the new Sweet Valley High, I forgot (except in the case of True Blood, wherein Vampires are just every pulp novel ever). The fact is, the Vampire horror genre is pretty much dead, at least in popular fiction. It is no secret that I loathe the Twilight series (don't take it personally, Twihards, it's only because I have a brain and it's a good one), and am hoping that it fades out like Nano Babies. But what if it doesn't? What if people forget what being a Vampire is all about?


Well, huddled masses, I have a solution. True, I wrote it in a few short minutes, and it's only a few hundred words, but if Vampires are going to be something, let them be this. I give you a character sketch of Dracula:

We have lived forever. We have been in every thing.

We are in the vines that strangle the sunlight from trees in the jungle. We are in the spores that drive insects mad. In the grass that starves the cattle with disease, the clouds that make the sun red. We have drunk your blood. We have made our way into your minds. You think of murder in the Subway. We are there. Every disturbed thought. Every broken window. Every orgy and rape, every hit and run, every child that throws another child down, we are there.

You may call us Vampires. I am of the We, though I have no name. Long ago I had one, I was wealthy. My castle was framed by mountains and sleet. And then–what does it really take to become like me? I drank no blood as part of a ritual. I took no vow and did not sleep upon the earth. I have slept since then, but it is not to dream or to rest. I forsake life, but refused death. In that moment, in that singular thought (which you shall never have, for you are too weak for it) I became what I would be forever, a creature on the edge of life, of death, of humanity. I was still human, on the outside, and I fed on the weakness, the goodness, in others. Some say I drank blood. I drank it in goblets, yes, but I also tore out kidneys and ate them raw, made armor for myself out of the skulls of my enemies. A mistress refused me and I ate her heart while it was still beating, in front of an entire court, her torn ribcage scratching my undead skin. And they feared me, then, with my robes saturated in the whore's blood, and called me "vampire" and "demon" and "dragon."

They say I am evil, but I am not. Did I sin? If there had been a God to forsake, then I forsake Him. I became the negative of humanity, I tore where they built, killed while they whelped, but I did not hate and I did not love. I did not desire, I only was.

Years after I changed I forsake my human form and became a wolf or a bat (as the stories go) but also a tiger, a shark. I became other things–sharp-toothed and nameless things that are made of the night, sucking the air out of newborn's lungs and taking women in their sleep. I became the wind and lightning, and when I was tired of that I came again in the likeness of a man, and walked the streets, and felt the delicious tremble of terror that followed me. As centuries passed, I would meet some of my own kind; we would regard each other with respect or perhaps disdain. At times we would fight like dogs over a bone and wars would be stirred under our rage. These times gave me some satisfaction. Neither would ever be defeated, save for the broken mortal lives that were strewn in our wake. We would stand in the mire and smile with fangs exposed and walk away, over mountains and oceans and decades.

I am here, now, in your mind. I do not need a solid form to survive. I am what compels you, perhaps, to swing a hammer into your father's skull, to burn down a forest, to break your lover's neck so that you may keep her forever, or to take her again and again until you are both bloody, and then to lap up what is left of yourselves. We are that chaos. You taste us every day. Do not bother to wonder if I love or care. If I find a beautiful man or woman to feed me, they will feed me, and their corpse will be strewn across the street. If there are evil men in the world, let them be so. They are as weak as you are, they will die, or stop, hesitate with their fingers on the trigger. There is no need for hesitation. There is no need for death or love, there is only us, the strong, and you, the weak, and we prey on you, in your sleep, until you are nothing but dust.