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.

Albums To Listen To, If You Really Want To Get Me: Part One

Ever wonder what music really makes me tick? What would be the best songs to quote in front of me to get me to go home with you? Well, look no further. Here's the first four of an eventual ten albums which I will talk way too much about, all the while begging you with sad puppy eyes to listen to, in the dark, on your headphones, when all the world is asleep and it's just you and your mind, waiting for that perfect moment, somewhere around Track 4, where you think, "I am so damn glad that I'm listening to this right now, there's nothing better in the world worth doing."


Okkervil River:
Black Sheep Boy/Black Sheep Boy Appendix

I don't know where I would be without Will Sheff's lyricism, or the endless perfection of this album (the so-called "Appendix" is more or less fitted onto the end of the album, and in my opinion is more or less inseparable from it), a rousing, growling mixture of folk, punk, and folklore. Though it has never been introduced as such, Black Sheep Boy is more or less a concept album: the trials and tribulations of the titular Black Sheep Boy, a character taken from a Tim Hardin song, which the album quietly opens with:

"Here I am back home again, I'm here to rest.
All they ask is where I've been,
knowing I've been west.
I'm the family's unowned boy,
Golden curls of envied hair,
Pretty girls with faces fair
See the shine in the black sheep boy.
If you love me, let me live in peace,
Please understand that the black sheep
Can wear the golden fleece,
And hold the winning hand."

From there Sheff takes this small whisper of a social outcast and fills him with regrets and anger, love won and lost, and the over-riding, disturbing image of missing children; taken from their homes, and those who grow up to become almost half-adults. The Black Sheep Boy, it seems, is a patron saint for such victims, as he tries to connect to them, as in "Black":

"Baby daughter on the road, you're wrapped up warm in daddy's coat. And I can still see the cigarette's heat. I can't believe all that you're telling me, what is cutting like the smoke through your teeth as you're telling me "forget it." But if I could tear his throat, and spill his blood between my jaws, and erase his name out for good, don't you know that I would? Don't you realize that I wouldn't pause, that I would cut him down with my claws if I could have somehow never let that happen? Or I'd call, some black midnight, fuck up his new life where they don't know what he did, tell his brand-new wife and his second kid."

The album, even if you don't take into account the plot that I, after years of listening to it, have assigned to it, is more or less a love song between the misfits of misfits; the people who have had terribly fucked-up lives and who want to find normalcy but can't, because in the end you can't escape your past, and you can't deny the darker side of your heart, no matter how afraid of it you are. The Appendix ends, with "Last Love Song For Now":

"But in last love dreams, the lost and passed out of this world are softly sighing. They're trying to decide if they should leave the things that keep them crying. And some will rise and keep on living with open eyes, with minds forgiven."




Joni Mitchell:
Blue

In all fairness, this should be Court and Spark, because my mother practically raised me on that album, but I also grew up listening to Hits, one of the first Joni Mitchell compilations, and it didn't surprise me, when I first got Blue, that the album was made up of many of those hits that I'd loved so dearly: "River", "Carey", "Case of You", "California". If there's an album that I need to bring with me when, some day, I have a "Getting away from it all" road trip, this is probably it. The songs are, mostly, love songs, but to give them that simplification takes far too much away from the truth behind Mitchell's profound skill. It's how you would want to sound if you poured your heart out, it's longing and open but never, under any circumstances, hopeless. IT's about being in love with the wrong person who is still the right person, and the quiet realization that you, too, might be the wrong person. Or, as Mitchell herself declares in "Case of You":

"You're in my blood like holy wine,
You taste so bitter, and so sweet,
Oh, I could drink a case of you, darling,
Still I'd be on my feet,
I would still be on my feet."

And later, in the heart-choking "River":

"I'm so hard to handle,
I'm selfish, and I'm sad
Now I've gone and lost the best baby that I've ever had,
Oh, I wish I had a river
I could skate away on."

That last lyric, "I wish I had a river I could skate away on" is such a universally wonderful feeling to me; the longing to be alone in order to accept life as it is, to accept loneliness when it comes, to accept the love lost, or ruined, or given away. Mitchell's troubled character is different from the self-loathing or suicidal singer-songwriters we know too well: she's self-aware, but never stops of pauses, never tries to cover her problems up with falsehoods, rather, she openly admits them, as she asks in "California": "Will you take me as I am, strung out on another man?"

And, of course, there's just such beauty in the words that I really can't get over it:

"All good dreamers pass this way, some day,
Hiding behind bottles in dark cafés"




Leonard Cohen:
Various Positions

I suppose at this point I should mention what it is that makes "good music" for me. As much as I love having a perfect auditory expereince, nothing really beats a beautifully written verse. Makes sense, given that I'm such a bibliophibian. Anyway, Various Positions is Leonard Cohen's best album. And Leonard Cohen is, along with Joni up there, the best songwriter living today, and maybe of all time (this is my own opinion, of course. But you know what? Not that crazy about Dylan). The music of Various Positions is slightly hokey; Cohen relies too much on synthesizers and other jangly instruments, and the backing vocals - though beautiful, at times - often give the impression that Cohen has stumbled into low-key dinner theater. But that means nothing to me. Why does it mean nothing to me? Because, in only nine songs, you find some of the best poetry that's been composed in the past fifty years. Hands fucking down.

Various Positions opens, for example, with "Dance Me To The End Of Love", which at first seems like a well-written love song, but is so much more - it isn't just love, it's crumbling, blissful, perfect, inescapable love. Many of Cohen's love songs have this strain, that love comes out of a physical requirement, a hungry necessity:

Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon
Show me slowly what I only know the limits of
Dance me to the end of love "

This idea is more or less like Mitchell's "you are in my blood like holy wine" idea, but where Mitchell's bemused heartbreak is soulfully sweet, Cohen's warble is pained, carnal, and almost regretful. But there's no regret in love; love, quite possibly, is beyond regret, after all: it just is. Though Cohen sings "All the senses rise against coming back to you", he is irrevocably drawn, over and over again ("My heart's like a blister from doing what I do/If the moon has a sister, it's got to be you").

And the whole thing isn't just heartbreak; there's a fantastic amount of worldly poetry, as in "Night Comes On" and "Hunter's Lullaby"; music inspired by Cohen's involvement in conflict between Egypt and Israel. The deepest side to Cohen's lyricism, however, is his writing that deals with religion, with faith, with mythology. In "The Captain", the titular character muses

"Complain, complain, it's all you've done,
Ever since we lost
If it's not the crucufixion,
Then it's the Holocaust."

There's more there, of course: there's the rousing borken-hearts-club-band "Heart With No Companion", and the terrifylingly powerful "If If Be Your Will", but I can't talk about this album without mentioning its centerpiece, the original version of "Hallelujah".

There's a story about the song; that Jeff Buckley wanted to cover it, and called Cohen asking for the lyrics, and when he got to his apartment, there were dozens of pages of fax paper (remember fax machines?) laying about the floor. Cohen is famous for spending months on his songs, and this is possibly the best example. If you were to listen to the version that Buckley eventually compiled and recorded, alongside the verses Cohen chose for Various Positions, you would notice a marked difference between the songs. Buckley's version (probably the more familiar one) is a tattered love song, probably one of the best out there ("All I ever learned from love was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you"), and it's still Cohen's verses, anyway. But what shows up on Various Positions is something less from a broken lover and more from a descendent of Cain, a haunting search for spiritual understanding from a secular man, from someone who identifies with scripture and such but still is alone, who tries to understand the darkness around him:

"You say I took the name in vain,
I don't even know the name.
And if I did, well really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light in every word,
It doesn't matter which you heard:
The holy or the broken Halellujah."

The first time I heard the song was, for some reason, amidst holiday anthems on one of those Starbucks Christmas compilations. I didn't know what to make of it, at first; but then I realized: it sort of works for me. I mean, here I am, not really a religious person by any stretch, feeling a lift in my spirits during that time of the year, feeling something closer to spirituality than I usually know, and even if it isn't necessarily dogmatic, even if it's not a by-the-book Holiday Sensation, there's something I'd want to say, and it would be something along the lines of:

"I did my best, it wasn't much,
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch,
I told the truth, I didn't come to fool you.
And even though it all went wrong,
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Halellujah."




Neutral Milk Hotel:
In the Aeroplane over the Sea

One day, Jeff Mangum read The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. Not long after that, he and his band, Neutral Milk Hotel, recorded one of the most perfect records of the past 20 years. Haunting and beautiful and frightening, lo-fi and orchestral, simple and nuanced, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea is a thousand wonderful things at once. Mangum's lyrics are like a modern-day John Donne crossed with William Blake, but with a hint of Hieronymous Bosch's imagery. And, above all, it's sort of fucking weird. I mean, these are the opening lyrics to the album:

"When you were young you were the king of carrot flowers
And how you built a tower tumbling through the trees
In holy rattlesnakes that fell all round your feet"

What the hell does that mean? I still don't know. But when you hear the song; which is nothing more than Mangum's shouty, folky monotone and an acoustic guitar, you realize that what he's singing isn't nonsense, it's just childlike and fantastical, the spirit of someone younger and confused, dealing with a broken home and life, who turns to the moving and fluid world around them for insight and hope, who slowly grows up and into puberty while their life crumbles:

"And your mom would stick a fork right into daddy's shoulder
And your dad would throw the garbage all across the floor
As we would lay and learn what each other's bodies were for"

And so on. In the album's title track, Mangum simply and kindly surmises

And one day we will die
And our ashes will fly
From the aeroplane over the sea
But for now we are young,
Let us lay in the sun
And count every beautiful thing we can see"

The songs exist between life and death, between love and loathing. Mangum sings about re-incarnation, about being enamored with a two-headed fetus in a jar, about bodily contact, which is either dissection or sex: "They'll be placing fingers through the notches in your spine", or "How he'd love to find your tongue in his teeth". Yet it's never truly unnerving, I remain fascinated by each and every song; the dreamlike and surreal imagery that is so perfectly meshed with pure human emotion that, even when he's saying something like "the only girl I've ever loved was born with roses in her eyes", or "semen stains the mountaintops", you know, you know exactly what he means. And what is that? I'm not quite sure I can explain it. What I get from the album is a quiet profoundness, despite the jarring quality of the sound, it, like Mangum's lyrics, makes chaos into beauty, without getting rid of the joyful confusion of it all.


Coming soon!
Tom Waits: The Black Rider
Neko Case: Blacklisted
Elvis Costello: When I Was Cruel
Rilo Kiley: The Execution of All Things
Bright Eyes: LIFTED or The Story is In The Soil, Keep Your Ear To The Ground
The Fiery Furnaces: Bitter Tea

Yeah, you know what: I'm going there

I'm currently laid-up with ridiculous lady-pains (seriously, fellas, when we say "you couldn't handle menstruation", it isn't just so you'll shut the hell up. It's because you couldn't handle menstruation), and my thoughts have wandered over to something that I've wanted to address for a while now, but have been wary of, well, addressing:



I AM SO WORRIED ABOUT THIS, YOU GUYS.

As of late, the entire goddamn world seems to think that this film adaptation of one of the greatest children's books ever (and don't you dare say it isn't) will be a beautifully done, masterful retelling, a creative expansion by some of the best in the business, director Spike Jonze (Adaptation, a shitload of music videos) and writer Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and the script for Away We Go). I mean, Maurice Sendak is one of the producers, how could it be bad? Well, did you watch the trailer? Did you ever read the book? Let's compare the opening of each:

THE BOOK:
The day Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another, his mother called him "Wild Thing!" and Max said "I'll eat you up!"

THE TRAILER:
Wild Thing: You must have a family.
Max: Yes, I have one of those, but...
Wild Thing: Did you eat them?
Max: No! I have no plans to eat anybody.

Do you see? Do you SEE? From what the trailers have seemed to attest, the story hasn't just been watered-down, it's been desperately altered. Where the Wild Things Are is a book about childhood, about anger and the need to be wild. Being wild doesn't mean wearing a wolf suit, it means being disobediant, loud, obnoxious, angry, and uncontrollable. It's a bit like the original idea of Mardi Gras, how people would have one day to act absolutely insane before bowing into the penance of Lent. The idea is catharsis, which is what happens a lot in childhood. It's what kids get away with that grown-ups can't: kicking and screaming and letting it all out. Max, as the 5-8 year old that he appears to be in the novel, is on the cusp of young adulthood. He could be going back to school, or having to give himself a bath, or do chores. He's having to grow up, and the place where the Wild Things are is his little-boy Neverland, where anger can be let out, where chaos can rule, and where he can be the king of all the Wild Things.

The Wild Things, by the way, aren't the shmaltzy, surrogate-family that the movie makes them out to be. They're the Wild Things, for pete's sake: they roar their terrible roars, they gnash their terrible teeth, they roll their terrible eyes, they show their terrible claws!! I see none of that in the trailer. Once again, they're only wild in that they're furry.

Where Sendak's book is a proper mirror for the frustration and happy chaos of childhood, what Jonze's film seems to be presenting is, to put it bluntly, the ideal Hipster child: Max appears to be quiet, dishevled, precocious, well-spoken, slightly wild but not so much that he forgets to be sad in a totally adorable way. It's what everyone assumes thoughtful artists were when they were kids (or what people who think they're artists were as a kid). But children are hardly like that, and certainly, I would hope, not those who grow up to be the INFP type: children are Wild Things. They're supposed to be. So far, I'm not seeing Max make ANY type of mischief: I'm seeing Max build snow forts and searching for meaning with his big, soulful eyes.

The truth is that I'll never know the quality of the movie itself until it comes out, at which point I'll see it, of course, and then duly report a proper review. What disturbs me the most is that it seems like the epitome of the hipster-ization of certain entertainment. It's no surprise that Sendak's iconic book, which I'm sure most people of my generation had read to them as children, has stayed, lovingly in their hearts. It's something, for example, that you would find under "books" on a Facebook page that isn't so much about how much Where The Wild Things Are influenced said person's lifestyle, but rather as a means of being ironically endearing. But that doesn't mean that the legions of the Hip have any right to claim Where The Wild Things Are as theirs to mold and re-fashion. Changing the central theme, the basic idea behind Sendak's illustrated ten-sentence book, even if you throw an Arcade Fire song on top of it, is a big no-no. Remember when Ron Howard took How the Grinch Stole Christmas and turned it into a big-budget, over-plotted wreck of a movie? Yeah, this could be the same thing, just with a different tint.

My mother gets The New Yorker weekly, and in this issue, the fiction installment is called "Max at Sea", an excerpt from the book that Dave Eggers has written based on his screenplay for the film. This, to me, is an unneccesary amount of convolusion, and I'm wondering how much of that has to do with Egger's hubris, or if the book is actually the novelized equivalent of Sendak's (not, of course, that you'd need an expanded edition. The best thing about Where The Wild Things Are is that it's so short but so damn good despite that, having an expanded edition is like wrapping the most delicious cake in the world with eight feet of bland Reddi-Whip). Anyway, I'll read the story, and hopefully that'll give me a better idea of just what these Hipsters are doing. If it's anything like this:

then we're in some serious trouble.

Good god, where did July go

I have no idea, but it took me with it.

What's been happening lately...well, I got a job at Oak's Park, which is where I worked two summers ago. I was terribly reluctant before I came to work, but then after the past couple weeks, it's been pretty tolerable, and almost fun. There are more people my age there this year, and most of the really scary employees are either gone or working at other places in the park. It's still minimum wage (not that I should be complaining, minimum in Oregon is $8.40 an hour, which is one of the highest in the nation), but if I pull in a little under 40 hours a week, then that comes out to something under $300, which is enough from now until October to get me to Austin, move me in, and have some left over for funzies. If I can finish the summer with $2000 in savings, I should be set to go.

Also, I managed to get (I seriously hope) everything worked out for graduation at UBC. Once that's in, I just have to apply and pay off my debt! Will I go to my graduation? Eh, probably not at this point.

Reading has been slow lately due to being so exhausted at work. My writing time has been cut down to almost nothing as well. Novels I have managed to get in? I started and finished Vox, Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name, and The Great Gatsby.

Vox, by Nicholson Baker, is about phone sex. That's the best way to say it. It is a conversation that a man and a woman have over the phone, regarding sex. It is also a well-written and sweet account of human loneliness and connection; it is both absurd and believable, touching and, well, arousing. In any case, it's the classiest erotica that I've read (and no, I haven't read a lot), and since there's nothing dirty in the title, you can read it in the bus without being suspected (I hope that other people are as turned on by that idea as I am).

Vendela Vida's novel Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name only took me a night to read, but that doesn't mean that it's a simple or easy read. When her father dies, Clarissa Iverton learns that he was not her father at all, a fact that her mother, who disappeared when Clarissa was a teenager, never bothered to mention. Clarissa's hunt takes her away from her happy life with her fiancé into the foreign territory of northern Lapland, a journey that is fueled as much by Clarissa's slow-burn depression as it is her desire to know the truth about herself–a truth that is buried further than you'd expect, and which, when revealed, holds more answers than what Clarissa had hoped for. The novel is written with a strong understanding of honesty and mysticism, and even though some themes become a bit too frequent (hint: rape), Vida gives us a likeable and relatable heroine, which is harder to find than you'd think these days.
The Great Gatsby was a re-read. Guess what, the book is still amazing. Fitzgerald's tragic retelling of the American Dream is his most famous work. However, when looking into what the best F. Scott Fitzgerald works were, the next arrow seemed to point directly at Tender is the Night, a book which I know best as being Scott's version of what Zelda wrote about in Save Me The Waltz. After reading and studying and loving the hell out of Save Me The Waltz, I have this to say about Tender is the Night: shut up, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Get over yourself. I don't care about how pretty the second half of the book is supposed to be, I really couldn't take any more of the first part, which seems to be nothing more than rich people jaunting around southern France, all caught up in their own petty issues. I mean, you named the character based on yourself Dick Diver? And his only fault seems to be that he's too nice to his crazy wife? And everyone falls in love with him for no other reason than, I don't know, he's clever? Shut the fuck up, F. Scott Fitzgerald. It isn't enough to ruin The Great Gatsby for me, but that was nuanced and had a shitload of flawed characters, the first part of Tender is the Night is like a shitty Robert Atlman via 1990s A&E movie.

Other than those books, I'm still working my way through Invisible Man (it's worth taking my time, this might be the best novel I've read since The Sound and the Fury or The Brothers Karamazov). I'm also reading stories from Karen Russel's collection, St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves, and that's pretty damned fun. So far, the stories have all been about children living in or around the Everglades and the islands off the coast of Florida, where they encounter supernatural, uncanny, or simply enlightening changes in themselves, those around them, and the land itself. The stories make me nostalgic for the 'glades, and for Florida in general; it's Hans Christian Anderson via Southern Gothic, and I love it.


What else what else what else....music!

I have three new releases for you to check out. Let's do them in chronological order: first up is Mos Def's new LP, The Ecstatic. I haven't really listened to much other Mos Def than the awesome The New Danger, but that doesn't mean that I'm behind on this, nor that I'm at all disappointed in The Ecstatic. Mos Def has to be one of the best acts in Hip Hop out there, simply because he's so un-stereotypical, he's the opposite of Flo Rida or Lil' Jon. He's fucking classy, and it makes you listen to what he's saying. When everything these days is about getting Timbaland to produce your new single, you have to give it up for the guy who puts Malcom X on instead.



And hey, look at that: a new Fiery Furnaces album! It really is nice to see the Freidburger siblings putting out something relatively normal (compared to their fifty-something track live CD, that time they put their grandmother on the record, or their new idea, a so-called "silent album"). Compared to something like Window City or the crazier parts of Bitter Tea, I'm Going Away is a return to the blues-psych-rock of something like Gallowsbird's Bark. This album is less about weird narratives and more about detached love songs, it might be the most accessible Fiery Furnaces album to date. That doesn't make it bad, of course, it's a well-tuned and summery record, and I am rather enjoying it. Rather.



Finally, we have The Dead Weather. The Dead Weather is a band invented by professional band inventor Jack White, including a couple dudes from other groups like Queens of the Stone Age and The Raconteurs, and vocalist Alison Mosshart ("VV" from The Kills). This is evidence enough to make me apprehensive. I mean, yes, Jack White is a very talented musician, and a pretty decent lyricist, and every time he does something he has the music community eating out of his hand. Does anyone else notice that? Every year and a half or so, there's just a period of Jack White Zomibiism, where every god damn music journalist raves about how perfect Jack White's music is. And you know what? I'm not buying it. I mean, there's plenty from The White Stripes that I loved, but Get Behind Me Satan was sort of retarded. I never got what was so great about The Raconteurs, they seemed to be nothing more than a vanity project. And now there's The Dead Weather, brimming with reasons for me to hate them: I mean, look at these guys! leather jackets and cigarettes and wayfarer shades? VV from the Kills? Making everything grainy and dark on their website? God damn it, you guys. This seems sort of like a joke, one of those overly-pretentious hipper-than-thou groups that will be flaunted by every boy with tight pants and a patchbeard until, about six months later, people seem to forget that they even existed (like, oh, I dunno, THE KILLS?).

And you know what the really sad part is? It's a pretty damned good album, even if it is called Horehound (blech). I mean, it's tightly good. Alison Mosshart is more or less the girl version of Jack White, which means that she can take all his creepy songs and make them a little sexier. The music and production is top-notch (as you would expect it to be), and it seems like White has found a nice outlet for the Detroit blues and Southern rock sound that he's worked for years to find. Do I admit that I like them? Eh, I suppose. Will I pay $30 to see them in concert this month? Probably not. I can see Will Sheff for $15, and that's a much better idea to me.

Anyway, judge for yourself. Jack white has a marshmellow butt:



And on one last music note, I now own one of these:
Ahahaha, it is so fun. Although, a word of warning if you want one: you have to have a little patience. And know how to make a decent playlist. But I'm enjoying it.

Call it overhaul, call it nothing better to do

Well look at that. There's a posh new layout to this place.

This change in appearance comes on one of those days that I deem my "time to update my life on the internet!" days. This also mean that I spiffed up my Facebook profile and will be putting up a few new pieces on Deviant Art. The art will probably be put around here too.

I should also note that this is more or less something to keep the darkness at bay; I got a call back from Oaks Park today and they asked me to come and work on Saturday. After doing the things that make me happy, I'm going to search the hell out of the mall and call Budget and do everything I possibly can to cancel working at Oaks. The place is the equivalent of a big rotting wooden sign that says "You Have Failed" in the middle of a parking lot in the middle of the desert. If I only have to work there for three weeks or less before something else comes along, I'll be happy. But I work hard to earn a BA just so that I could go right back to cleaning up puke on amusement park rides. The idea that it's the only thing out there for me is insulting.

Okay, on to the makeover. First of all, the quotation in the top is by E.E. Cummings, from a fake interview that he did with himself for an edition of The Enormous Room. The quotation is important to me because I agree with it; but I should explain what that means. I think that people who aren't artists are people who never try and see past their own nose, who never find ways of expressing themselves or the world around them, and who have no respect or real interest in those that do. These are not the people that I want to surround myself with. These are not the people who mean something. I think that everyone is capable of being "deep", as they say, but there are too many who seem to think that they don't have to, that they're above that or better than it, or they choose to be ignorant. This is not the way to live your life, people. Negation will become of you.

Second, you'll notice that the page has been flipped, and that I've taken off the Bookshelf as well as the Turntable boxes. I did this for a couple reasons; first, that I don't really have the time or interest to change either of those whenever I start listening to/reading something different, second, that the Shelfari application, despite being neat to look at, was a poor representation of the books on my shelf (not to mention that I couldn't ever get it to display them randomly, it was just the same alphabetical books), and third, I don't want this site to be defined by any sort of specific "tastes" that I have. I think that literature, music, film, television, et cetera are things that can be enjoyed to a great and somewhat consuming extent, but I've gotten so annoyed with the laundry-listing that people do of what they Listen To or Read or Watch or whatever that it stops seeming like a way to describe yourself and it starts to seem like bragging. Honestly, I think that Hipsters use their long lists of bands, movies, or books like bikers soup up their hogs. In the end I think it's a way to give yourself a boner and alienate people with your Superiority. If I'm going to do that, I can probably find better ways than by talking about the latest Fleet Foxes EP.

Finally, on my own personal writing: unless this blog becomes an overnight sensation (it won't), I can't see why anyone passing through the interwebs would be interested in my extended character outlines or what have you, so I think that for the time being I'll keep most development-style writing about whatever novel or story I'm working on off of here. Also, I should at least keep some of it a secret. If anything amazing does happen, I'll let you know.

So that's where we stand with Arts Deux at the time being. I'm going to hopefully dedicate more of this blog to book reviews, film reviews, and other ramblings that I think fit into what it's all about. And you'll be hearing from my personal life soon enough, I'm sure; I do have thirty or so jobs to apply to today.

To the Resumobile, Robin!