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Very good story. Like other Japanese authors I’ve read, the prose is very direct and matter-of-fact. Which is even more interesting given it’s a story of four women cutting up a body of a man they murdered. It’s not a traditional crime mystery in the sense that we already know whodunit…we’re just interested to know if they get away with it, and if we want them to.

The main character Masako is very likeable, despite her darkness. Truly, all the characters are likeable, detestable, pitiable, and enviable, all in different ways.

It’s also well paced. My only complain is I tend to feel Japanese authors could drop 1 out of every 3 sentences and still get everything across beautifully. But perhaps that’s part of the charm of the way it builds in suspense. Everything is very clear, both details of setting and the individual motivations. Emotions are facts just as the color of bricks. Both are very realistic. As the cover states, it is indeed a "literary" crime thriller. 

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Zoetrope All-Story Vol. 12, #2

Gorgeous design as usual, this time by Mark Mothersbaugh. Here’s a breakdown of the stories:

The Invisibles, by Marissa Perry: Good storyteller. This one, and the one in Tin House, are both about kids coming of age and stealing things – but it moves very fluidly and feels quite honest.

Rumors About Me, by Yasutaka Tsutsui: I feel a tonal similarity (syntax, surreality) with Murakami. Farcical take on news and celebrity. And it’s a great farce which throws you right into it.

The Alternate, by Sara Krasikov: Pretty nice. Good sets of lines around an odd meeting of two people. Eastern Europe vs America.

A Small Haunting, by Shaena Lambert: I though this was incredibly boring. Another story about a woman with a family and a monthly menstrual cycle. Nothing new here, nothing clever, the writing good but not memorable, fucking boring. Sorry Shaena. And I’m a bit disappointed in Zoetrope for having it here considering every other literary journal in the country is already filled with these kinds of stories. You can do better guys.

Vacation ’58, by John Hughes: This original short that became the Chevy Chase classic actually has a more entertaining forward about its conception than the story itself. Hughes’ descriptions of being an editor and writer, and about the idea of suburban family psychosis is rather riveting. The story itself is ok. More cute than funny in its absurdity, but maybe I’m biased because I can’t help but think of the movie. It reads very simply, almost like a children’s story. It does still remain poignant as a look at suburbinites, even now.

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The Sun, issue 392

As usual, boo to the fiction, but kudos to the interviews (and photo essays). Specifics:

What They Taught Me, by Ethan Hubbard: Very nice international character sketches.

Ponchatoula, by Louis E. Bourgeois: Very similar to another issue’s story. No-armed man with direct (almost too direct) Holden Caufield-esque narrator. Nice suspenseful end.

Table for Six Billion Please, by David Kupfer: Great interview with Judy Wicks, despite David not being a very good interviewer. Very clear perspective on sustainable local communities which elevates well above hippydom.

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Eric Myers lent me this one to check out. His comment was that it contains the most vile prose he’s ever read. I think that’s close to spot-on. It is a grotesque, vicious, putridly poetic self-conscious and masochistic play-by-play of wealthy debauchery. In a well-meaning way (for a while), if that’s even possible. (spoiler ahead) Also features a great twist with a character that is built up as one you love so much that you never see it coming. And it’s a vicious one.

It also has great use of language, colorful and inventive, playful (very playful), and yes even sparkling as the back cover hesitates to add, even while often being over the reader’s head with colloquialism and jargon, kinda like Clockwork Orange, which is definitely part of the author’s point. Good show.

On a thematic level, it’s also a very nice social commentary on art, sex, generationalism, youth, etc, all the good stuff…basically the end of the world, and what’s after. Some old and some new thrown in. There’s a particularly great scene of the characters watching a "prude" porn, where they’re surprised to find themselves hooting and hollering (at least some) over the prudishness of the visuals and characters, as if they’re watching a porn from the 1950s with a girl having to actually unlock a bra. The fact that this is what gets them going after having seen and done and tried the limits of voyeuristic depravity and become, well, bored, is just hilarious and another nice note on contrast and what’s sexy and what happens when you’ve reached the limit of something but still need to go further. Great scene.

Oh, and the closing line is one of my favorites. Its just okay until you read it in context of the character, in which case, it sparkles, oh yes, it sparkles. "His green eyes flashed into the dawn like wild, dying suns."

 

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This has been on my shelf for a while, and though I’ve read a few other collections by Calvino (some comprising my favorites), I have never apparently read these. I admittedly couldn’t get into the first story, but the second two are great:

Smog: A man settling into a city with a sense of unsettlement, preoccupied by dirt, comparing people and observing their equilibrium with themselves and the hypocrisies they support. He observes. He finds an apartment, gets a job, has an affair, makes acquaintances, and eats meals. He finds the place things become clean for the city.

Highlight quote: “Would the saints change their lives, if they knew heaven didn’t exist?”

Argentine Ant: Similar to smog in settling into a new place by finding an equilibrium…well, not an equilibrium, but a counterbalance of hope among the paranoid factors. The factors in this story were much more real and external though: watching neighbors deal with the ants in different ways. Through them you get a sense of these people’s society. A common trope used here to perfection.

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Just finished the first issue of my Tin House subscription (V9 #3)…and props to these guys! This is the first literary journal I’ve read whose stories were all enjoyable. That’s saying a lot. The content was generally still modern day and naturalistic, but they were all fun and they took some risks. I think some of my stories could find a home here. Maybe even Elbina. Highlights below.

Allan Gurganus’ Fetch: Clever, “distant” narration.
Alice Fulton’s A Shadow Table: Usual relationship subject, but enjoyable and with natural execution.
Ehud Havazelet’s Bill and Arlene: For Raymond Carver.
Adam Johnson’s Hurricane Anonymous: Good characters, description, a good story well told about a UPS driver post-Katrina.
Helen Schulman’s Parent’s Night: Short infidelity.
Keith Lee Morris’s Dart League King: Misanthrope. Dark tale, well done.
Marisa Perry’s Trespassing (new voice): Nice girls tale, a la Cherry by Mary Carr.
Paul Feldman’s Specialists (new voice): Futuristic, but only in the details. Otherwise, an ok story. Not much, but I like the futuristic setting, and it’s good to see that in a journal.
Good essays and interviews with Frank Bidart (poet, friend of Robert Lowell whoever the hell that is), Leonard Micheals, Elizabeth Hardwick, and MFK Fisher.

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McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #27

Notes:

The Crack, by Mikel Jollet – great voice, particularly for me to use in the Wigglepussy story, being very Vurt-like, Crab-like, featuring four doomed characters crawling under the city.

A Very Tight Place, by Stephen Kin – an okay story by Mr. King.

Bird Feed, by Ashlee Adams – an okay story about bad marraiges, cheating wives, and a woman who misses her mom and doubts her motherhood abilities. Exactly…same ‘ol "literary" bullshit I’ve read in 40-50 of the stories published in the journals I’ve read. It’s pretty well done, but if I have to read another story about a girl who is doubting her motherhood imperative, I might start a support group for "Writers Who Think Writing is Therapy Anonymous".

Tight Like That, by Larry Smith – a well-played mafioso tale centered on a crazy pawn in the game. He sells the crazy well, and he talks the talk. Violent with a touch of sweet.

Classical Scenes of Farewell, by Jim Sheppard – I was expecting a lot since this guy’s got a lot of hype in the editor’s notes. It had a great opening page about demons and possession, but got hyper-boring and tedious after the first couple pages when it quickly digressed into old-timey boy-priest sodomy. Do we really need that from our literature? Does this open minds and hearts, or just exploit something that anyone reading this will already know is terrible? It’s religious snuff, no matter how fancy the prose.

Sod Turned Spring, by Liz Mandrall – Hmmm…a parallel between two lovers and the Earnest movies? Interesting. Pulled off?  Yeah, pretty much.  A bit hard to follow, but clever.

Overall – a good installment, not great. McSweeneys continues to confound me by its pendulum motion between wonderful originality and banal treachery. Of course, the box it was packaged within is beautiful, as is the artwork, and the two mini-books it comes with, particularly the one about cartoon art. I concede: well done. But you can push it more on the stories too.

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Great book I just finished. I had read one of his previous ones back in college and loved it. Nothing like the strangeness of truth. Wait…someone said that better. The book is a series of case studies of people with neurological conditions that all revolve around music. 

The highlights are contained in the book which is now half red with pen marks, but here’s some notes and thoughts it inspired enough to cause them to be writ:

How much of outer body experiences are culturally interred, how much is raw neurosci?

Musicophilic flood of raw music & temporal lobe seizures.

What if our strange neurological syndromes became the norm? What would we induce?

Fear of music and epileptic triggers (great character trait).

Kleine Nacht musik > sensing by reading and creating experiences in your head.

Brainwork sufferer. "Ohrwurm", composer Slonimsky. Check out the Twain story. 

What if you had to find the music playing in your mind?

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» Wikihistory by Desmond Warzel – as featured on Abyss & Apex.

This is pretty neat way to do a story – an adaptation of the journal trope.

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Glimmertrain #67 highlights:

Blood Rush by Paul Carroll – Love that Irish/British diction. So yesteryear. Solitary without annoyance. A bum, a blind bum, a girl, and the lifeline of books and stories and reading.

Interview w/ Michael Parker – Rhythm & syntax versus the importance of plot. Challenge and toy with readers’ expectations. The landscape of a story.

Furniture by Laura Valeri – Wandering, good immigrant story. Tight, discrete passages. No circularity. Great metaphors (paper thin, bum’s petal hands).

Killer Heart by EB Johnson – Good bee buzzing throughline.

Therapist by Carol Bly – Quite funny. More style than the "punch" of the baby-related narrative which can be rather boring and typical.

Interview w/ Eli S. Evans – Excellent. Revisiting and reshaping the past. Writing with no revision and being accountable to what you previously wrote. The sword about to fall, the soccer ball about to be kicked. Why is the narrator telling us this? Invention and discovery. Translation and the vagueness of sentences. System of resonances and echoes…and the existance of episodic parts. Writers with a map versus writers with a compass. 

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A few very good articles in this issue:

 - A set of interviews on the creative mind, previously mentioned.

 - An analysis of split corpus callosum patients.

The article states it looks at the origins of consciousness, but that’s a stretch. It addresses the emergent properties of consciousness, and it suggests that the left-brain’s constant hypothesis-formation given sequences catalogued by the right-brain can help explain the singularity, but it drops off there and doesn’t go for the gold, which to me would be suggesting that consciousness is simply the relative percentages of activity at each moment, and that even without a left-brain, wouldn’t we still experience that as a singularity? I would also be curious to know what a person with only a right brain would feel.

 - A look at epigenetics and mental disease.

I’ve never heard the term epigenetics before, but the article was great. Epigenetics looks at the expression of genes that modulate synaptic transmission and hormonal binding, and really, anything else related to the brain’s functioning within a single lifetime and subject to changes in experience. In rats, they looked at nurturing and bullying effects on emotional resilience through the modulation of stress and anxiety pathways (hypothalamus > corticotropin-releasing hormone > pituitary > adrenocorticotropic hormone > adrenal gland > cortisol > feedback to hypothalamus to turn off the reaction).

Epigenetics, at this point, is based on the methylation or acetylation of histones near the genes in question. Since the genes are wrapped tight around the histones, the addition of methyl or acetyl groups prevents or promotes the binding of enzymes that then promote transcription and expression of those genes (which then create the proteins that do the dirty work). They also looked at the nucleus accumbens, which is central in our pleasure pathway, and found that the neuronal branching there was much greater in cocaine addicts, and that the histone at the Cdk5 gene that codes for this had 4x as many acetyl groups as those rats who just snorted saline (or whatever…i’m no scientist).  

"Future drugs might, for example, be designed to scrube DNA to eliminate the molecular alterations that led to the slide into schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, or drug addiction." A histone deacetylase inhibitor, or something similar. "A methylation antagonist blocker might help reduce the frequency or severity of post-traumatic stress disorder in rape and trauma victims. It might even be able to limit the psychological effects of combat in soldiers. That is awesome in possibility and fictionalization. The future is here, and without a real understanding, we are grasping at incredibly powerful straws.

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Zyzzyva Spring ’08

Very good literary journal. I enjoyed most of what was in this issue. It was definitely on the naturalistic side, but there were some funky things done with form, and the writing and storytelling overall was high quality.

Specific thoughts:

Jeffrey Higa "Wooing Elizabeth" – Hawaiian memoir, with two good characters and a young narrator in-between. Read more like a good story than a memoir. 

Briandanial Oglesby "Family Kleenex" – A running list of Kleenexes used in a house, outlining a drama in a family with tragedy and frustration. Well done, it doesn’t get old or trite.

Tori Malcangio "Coveting Stucco" – A couple shops for new model homes. I’d never think I’d enjoy reading this, but I did.

Did not like the Hitler/Stalin piece, but made note of the "notes" people include for their work, in lieu of an explanation.

Bucky Sinister’s strange poems. I don’t normally like most poetry, but these were short and sweet and fun, almost like Shel Silverstein pieces.

Naomi J Williams "Sunday School" – Choose your own adventure. Also very well done. 

 

Also, this cover image gave me an idea for a scene for Washer Woman.

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The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. Love it. Clean, direct, quick, brutal. No added emotional drama, but oh man there are some absolutely gorgeously poetic lines poking out of the gray desolation.

Some notes:
Top of p21, about pilgrims
Love the intercut of raw/sparse/real with the gorgeously poetic
p23, about dreams
The view of a child born in a different world, with different meaning
Omniscient narrator, but close to the man
p153, about hell
p213, the passage of time in place and action

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I went to a reading by Michael Chabon today at Stacey’s Books in San Francisco. He’s the author of the Yiddish Policeman’s Union (which is a fantastic read), amongst others. His most recent, pictured here, which I purchased and had him sign, is a collection of non-fiction essays and articles, which he read from. Twas a most enjoyable and enlightening read.

Also, as the picture indicates, the book design is beautiful. No surprise considering McSweeney’s put it out.

Cheers Mike! 

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Someone finally wizened me up to reading Watchmen. It’s amazing how some things can just pass you by when they’d be so right up your alley. Anyway, fantastic. The quick weaving of stories, with a completely satisfying ending. I love realism, particularly psychological realism, in my fantasy, and that’s what Watchmen is all about. A simple premise to give you a thread to then show you fantastic characters.

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McSweeney’s Vol. 26 (comes in two parts!), themed after war-time, pocket-sized books made for troops. Neat. Actually, quite nice, the packaging.

As for content, mixed, per usual. The quality is always great, but I find I like about 50% of the stories and glaze over and skim the rest.

My favorites:

How Jesus Comes, by Michael Gills
Black Shaman, by Dana Mazur
Arkansas, by John Brandon
Sleep, by Amanda Davis
Charity, by Wayne Harrison

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