Bad Goodreader.

I never post to my GoodReads account (because I am a slothful person, I guess), but I was asked recently to describe my “ideal bookcase” and below is what I wrote.

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Bookcase.

Oddly - or perhaps not - my ideal bookcase is not significantly different from my actual bookcase. For several years now I have been engaged in a life project of minimizing what I own and this has led me to a place where I’ve downsized my library by more than half. So when I sit at my table writing, I can glance up and see them peering back at me, the books. My living room is dominated by several of those cheap black Ikea honeycomb shelf cubes. They’re low and flat and I don’t put anything on top of them. The long bare line of the top of the bookcases helps make the room seem tidy, it makes the ceiling seem high, and it helps to create a sense of calm which brings me a lot of joy. Depending on what I’m writing, I will rearrange the books on the shelves nearest to me. Much like the lighting design of a theater, I like to design the creative radiation coming at me from the nearest books. This would be my ideal design:


Amnesiascope, Steve Erickson. For the longest time this was my favorite book. It is strange and sexy and meandering and not really about anything, but also kind of about everything.


Still Life with Woodpecker, Tom Robbins. For my money this is just about the most perfect and beautiful small novel.


Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Aimee Bender. Basically just the best collection of stories ever.


The Godfather, Mario Puzo. Despite the book’s pulpy reputation and the movie(s) overshadowing it, this is a huge and epic novel that deals with everything from Medieval history to Vegas showbiz politics in the 1950s. I’m shocked that it isn’t read more.


House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski. There is something darkly magical about this book. When you read it, it invades your life and hides in all the dark places. I have never read anything else that is as much of an experience as this weird, weird, weird book.


One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. So cliche, I know! But it is only about 400 pages long and yet seems to contain within it everything.


Collected Stories, Carol Shields. Shields is a talented writer, but I own this collection because it contains her story “Various Miracles” which is one of the best things I have ever read.


Said the Shotgun to the Head, Saul Williams. This is the “book” that first made me question the differences between poetry and narrative, fiction and nonfiction, text and graphic design. This book is still a big deal to me and I think about it WAY more than is reasonable.


The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, Lydia Davis. Does it get better than Lydia Davis? I love not just her writing but also the way that she will write something and say, “Here world, I wrote this. You figure it out, I’m busy writing the next thing.”


The World Without Us, Alan Weisman. This is the nonfiction book that everybody was reading on airplanes several years ago. It simply imagines what would happen on Earth if all humans suddenly disappeared. Such a simple idea, but it is fascinating.


All in the Timing, David Ives. This collection of one-act plays contains the seminal work “Variations on the Death of Trotsky” which is not just absurd, but brillant.


Sixty Stories, Donald Barthelme. For the better part of a decade I have been haunted by the story in this collection “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning”. I cannot figure out what makes this story work. When I don’t know what to write, I take this book to a bar and try to crack that story.


Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands, Judith Schalansky. This is literally a tiny book of maps of remote islands. Accompanying each map, there are two pages describing something about the island. It is oddly heart-breaking in a way that I have never been able to properly describe.

Horn of Desire.

Book Review:

Unicorn: Horn of Desire: Unicorn Pleasures Book 1

We live in strange times, or so said Plato - sort of - and he didn’t even live long enough to know the Bermuda Triangle, the internet, or The Ovipositor (which if you are unfamiliar with, please do not Google, or, at least, remember later that I warned you). If you’re like me then you probably consider the Greeks to be kind of charmingly quaint. The way a teenager girl thinks of her grandfather’s dating advice. So, on your behalf dear reader, I went looking for some strange. Something we can stuff in our knapsacks before climbing into the Wayback machine, something we can wave in Plato’s face as we say, “So you think that you lived in strange times?”

So what are we shoving into our knapsacks (that BTW, sounds dirty enough to be a crude euphemism, but I checked Urban Dictionary and it is not)? I’ll give you a hint: I hope you like unicorns - like - really like unicorns.

So here is how we got to unicorns: A Methodology.

We all know that the combination of cost-free e-publishing and internet anonymity has given rise to an entire Amazon digital distribution center of writing too lowbrow to be embraced even by those who make a game out of embracing the lowbrow, which is to say that we simply assume the writing is bad. And yet, people buy this stuff. Case in point, crime thriller author Mark Dawson has sold of 300,000 e-books in his series about the assassin named John Milton. This is actually a great example of what is going on out there: “John Milton” is of course a cutesy nod at John “Paradise Lost” Milton, which is an acute enough reference that even your uncle who didn’t finish high school can get it and say, “Hey, I understand that this is a reference to something else!” The elitist in me wants to say that this is sort of intertextuality for dummies. It is a way of plugging the intellectual parking meter.

So get this: our book dear reader, is called Unicorn: Horn of Desire: Unicorn Pleasures Book 1 written by Cecilia Chase, which is not her real name. Guess what this book is about. I dare you.

As for plugging the meter (which it turns out is also not a euphemism) the opening scene of the book takes place on a warm summer day in a barn on the ranch where our narrator Serena works with her “cherry bomb” best friend Mo. The girls are helping ranch owner Mr. Fullerton and fit, blonde, former rodeo champion ranch hand Brett Nilson to collect semen from a horse by using what is called a “phantom mare”, which is basically a sort of barrel the horse is coaxed into fucking. Serena ends up inside the phantom mare holding the jug into which the horse is furiously ejaculating. This, dear reader, is to be understood as a guiding metaphor. If you somehow miss that, I’m sure the author will send a telegraph to your house which will read: HOW DID YOU MISS THAT? STOP.

The book behaves as one would expect from a standard Harlequin romance, and yet also manages to be unexpected. When Serena observes Mo and Brett having sex in a hayloft, the latter surprises the former with an uninvited foray into anal sex, which of course Mo discovers that she loves. When Serena masterbates, it isn’t enough that she simply masterbate, but rather that she has to completely fist herself in order to reach orgasm. There is a sort of psychosexual bar being moved here. Or rather, Horn of Desire is participating in a bar moving that is already taking place in our culture. Here I will make the obligatory mention of Fifty Shades of Grey, itself originally published as an ebook and originally conceived of as dirty Twilight fanfiction. That’s not the only thing though; I think that for the generation raised on reading Harry Potter novels, one can draw a straight line to Harry’s lackluster successor Twilight, on to Fifty Shades of Grey and straight on to the weirdly rapey porn work of James Deen and to the “monster erotica” of which Horn of Desire is a kind. There are other kinds, in case you’re curious. Christine Simms (not her real name) writes a series of books about women (usually abducted women) having ravishing sexual relations with various types of dinosaurs. Her book Taken by the Pterodactyl includes a scene where the virgin protagonist is aroused by the tenderness with which the creature pecks off her clothes.

It is easy to chuckle at all of this, but it just may be that there is a larger question here and one which Plato is sure to ask us: What the fuck is going on here?

There are two things here worth noting.

The first: Chase’s writing in Horn of Desire is fine. It isn’t great, but she does what she needs to do. The book functions. Characters have traits. The unicorn is described. It all functions, and more than just that, Chase is always winking at her audience. She knows why they are reading this thing. She knows that we are all living our lives in a world where actual beastiality is - let’s say - generally considered unerotic, but that at the same time people will shell out in excess of $150 for a Bad Dragon dildo (again, don’t blame me if you Google that). Chase knows that she is threading the needle and her readers know it too. While the writing in Horn of Desire may lack some tension, there is still tension. These books are high-wire acts because it would be so easy for the “erotic” to tip over into the “that’s fucking disgusting” and that tension is part of their joy.

The second: If we consider what Steve Erickson wrote in Amnesiascope about how “sex is the last subversive act”, and we consider a mainstream publishing industry which may have contracted to such a degree that it simply can’t afford to be truly subversive, then maybe - just maybe - what we are seeing in these weird texts being written and read in the shadowy literary hinterlands of digital publishing is something akin to Obi-Wan Kenobi hiding out in the deserts of Tatooine, far enough from the madding crowd that he can do what he wants without anyone killing him. As much as it will pain me to have to explain this to Plato, there is some value in the works of our culture that simply aspire to be what they are, rather than to be winners of the Man Booker Prize.

I suppose that there is a third thing to consider …

The third: it is also possible that some people just like to get off on reading relatively high-quality erotica about hot interspecies action. And so, you know, Plato shrugs, whatever.  

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Penthouse Letters Mad Libs.

I mentioned on here awhile ago that I was reading a weird ass little book called “Doggy Bag” by a weird ass man named Ronald Sukenick. Well I finished that awhile ago, but it has stayed on my mind. It is not a book for everyone. I would even be hesitant to recommend it to people who like weird ass books by weird ass little men, but I’m comfortable enough to say that I enjoyed it (or, more honestly, I occasionally really enjoyed it, but generally I appreciated it as a sort of post-modern exercise. When I say “book” I am saying that it was an artifact with a front cover and a back cover and some pages in between and on those pages was printed some text which had originally been written by a man named Ronald Sukenick. The thing wasn’t a novel and it wasn’t a collection of short stories and it wasn’t essays or poetry or travelogues. It was all just a whole bunch of writing. It was occasionally SUPER PRETENTIOUS and occasionally it was boring as all fuck, and occasionally it was needlessly confusing, and occasionally it was just a waste of time. However, when it wasn’t those things, it was great. It is the kind of “book” that starts with what seems like the travel thoughts of the author but then it becomes too weird to be real and then later somehow morphs into this allegorical detective story about “vampires” trying to cure the disease of “zombie-ism”, but really that is about capitalism and how consumerism breeds thoughtless ness (the pun-y wordplay in this section is really lame). Then there was a whole middle section that seemed to be a story that moved between different tellers randomly. One of the latter sections was this ... (I’m choosing my words carefully here) … well-crafted section that is complicated to explain. Essentially it is about this young couple that has a lot of sex and then starts getting into some kinkier stuff (strangers on airplanes, group stuff at fancy tropical resorts, you know the usual) only the writing itself is fragmented. Like, the sentences themselves are fragments. They are not complete. It functions sort of like a dirty, sexy fill-in-the-blank, except once you get the hang of it and you start to think, “Oh, cool, this is just sort of like a Penthouse Letters Mad Libs ...” then some very weird and not-at-all-cool stuff starts to happen. Only it still has all of these broken spots and gaps, so you (the reader) become complicit in this really weird way, with the things that are “happening”. It was a strange and intense read and I don’t think anything I’ve ever read has been that dirty (and occasionally revolting) while simultaneously describing so little. The words that actually appear on the page are not remarkable or dirty at all. They wouldn’t even push a movie into PG-13 territory. All that being said, I’m not sure if that is just a neat trick, or if there is a deeply meaningful lesson there about how our brains construct stories. This is the basic premise behind all of the really good horror movies, right? Show the monster as little as possible, let the audience fill the dark with whatever frightens them. I will say that the “book” has made me think about it quite a lot. I guess that is a good thing. If you ever come across it - maybe in your friendly neighborhood independent bookstore - you should pick it up and hold it in your hand and remember that it is the book I told you about. I am not comfortable recommending that you read it. Let’s be clear about that; you’d can’t come back to me and be all like, “Why did you make me make my brain go through that?!”...

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City of Thieves.

Last night I finished reading “City of Thieves” by David Benioff. I know I’m coming late to the party because everybody else fell in love with this book like two years ago, but - you know - I’ve been busy …

It takes place during the Nazi siege of Leningrad during World War II. I happened to watch a documentary about that siege recently and found it was strange and interesting and just then I snapped my fingers and sat up straight and said to myself, “Hey, I should read that one book that everybody fell in love with like two years ago!” So I did.

It really is quite good. Probably one of the best novels I have read in a long time (and not just because I haven’t been reading a long of novels lately)!

I’m not giving anything away by telling you that it is about two young Russian men who are thrown together by chance and given the opportunity to save themselves from execution by finding a dozen eggs for the wedding cake of the daughter of a powerful NKVD colonel.

The ridiculousness of that fool’s errand (remember that Leningrad was under blockade for nearly three years and most of its residents starved to death) plays out against the incredibly bleak and otherworldly setting in a fascinating way. If this were an English class we’d talk about the “binary opposition” here. The whole novel functions like that and the author is incredibly skilled at moving between the abject horrors of that city, that time, that war, and the humanity of the characters; their humor, their hopes, their own lives.

Some of the moments are so ghastly that I feel strange describing the book as funny, although it certainly is funny. It just also happens to be occasionally soul-wrecking.

Better men than me have written better reviews than this, but I’m not trying to critique the thing. I just want to put it on your radar: IT IS A VERY GOOD BOOK AND YOU SHOULD READ IT!

I have one or two complaints about it, mostly just that it is a precision cut piece of writing. It is a little TOO clean and a little TOO perfect. (If you’ve seen the movie “(500) Days of Summer” then you know what I mean; a perfectly told story …  a little too perfectly told.) But that is a very small complaint and one that I would be happy to get as a writer (though no one will EVER say such a thing about me, because I ramble on with nary a single verbal filter, just coma after coma after coma, which - in my head at least - means that I am giving the reader a moment to take a breath while reading because I understand how exhausting some of my sentences can be to read).

To say much more about how and why “City of Thieves” is so good would give too much away, however I do want to mention that in addition to being very good, it does take the time to slow down and give us several small and moving moments that don’t advance the plot, they don’t fill in the characters, they don’t do much of anything but simply haunt the reader. There is a night when the two men pause in the street because they hear someone playing a piano in one of the empty, blacked-out buildings. They just stand there and listen to the ghostly sounds as snow falls around them and German shells echo in the distance. And then when the mysterious piano player finishes, our two heroes keep on walking. That’s all. There are several little moments like that which I appreciated greatly. I think the difference between a writer who is technically good and a writer who is transcendently good is often the patience to present us with the strange absurdities which fill up our lives but not always our literature.

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How to Cross a Desert.

Several days ago I went to the local bookstore because that is something I like to do sometimes. I like to buy a small coffee drink and wander around touching all of the books. I do this at the library sometimes too, but at the Barnes and Noble they have cookies!

So several days ago I went and did this and I came across a slim book called “Vagabonding” by Rolf Potts. It is subtitled, “An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel”.

Several things about this that are immediately interesting: I recognized the photo on the cover (from behind, a man with a big backpack walking away from the camera along the ridge of a small sand dune and with an endless desert stretched out before him) from having seen it on numerous ultralight backpacking blogs. Also interesting because: I like it when nouns get used as verbs and as far as I know “vagabonding” is not a real word, but “vagabond” is. (My friend Mike The Director likes to tell a story that requires him to say, “... elephanting around ...” that’s why we’re friends). Also interesting because: this dude Rolf Potts is clearly the kind of guy I would cross a busy street to punch in the face because he is living the sort of life that I would have enjoyed living. Also interesting because: the subtitle is so audacious that it makes one go a little, “what the fuck are you talkin’ about Willis?”

I flipped through it a little bit that day and discovered quickly that it is not a travel book exactly and not a travelogue exactly, but more it is a book about the idea of travel. And maybe a little bit about how to experience the world. It is a book that understands people like me will be buying it for the fantasy quota and so it is thoughtfully but insistently encouraging. It is a book that not only encourages one to travel, but to travel well; to enter the world on the world’s terms. This is not a book suggesting that you take a prepackaged Carnival Cruise to Mexico (although that has become a much darker sort of adventure in the past year or so), this is a book that is begging us to go out there and be part of the wider world and to maybe even learn from it.

Well I did not buy the book that day (because I have placed myself on a pre-unemployment budget that I am calling the “Do-Not-Buy-Anything-Ever-Again-Budget”) but it has been in my brain since that night. That is how I know something is worth buying; it rides around in me like a dark passenger for awhile.

This morning I woke up and discovered that Barnes and Noble had emailed me a coupon while I was asleep. I took it as a sign and after work I went to the bookstore and made my B-line straight to the travel section and straight to the one copy that they had. I took it straight up to the register and the woman there (who was about my age) took the book and looked at it and said - in a way that I’m not sure I was meant to hear - “Oh, I want to do that.”

And so I told her, “I am quitting my job. I think that’s why I’m buying this.”

And she looked at me and said, “Are you really? Quitting your job?”

And I said, “I have two weeks left.”

And she said, “Me too! I just gave my two-weeks notice! I just need to move on and do something else.”

And I agreed and said, “Yeah, it is good for the soul.”

And she said, “Yes! The soul needs to be rejuvenated!”

And in my brain I went, calm the hell down hippie, but I said, “That’s the idea,” and I pointed at the book she was selling to me.

After she gave me the receipt and a big kindred spirit sort of smile she said, “Well good luck, I know you’ll be fantastic!”

And I said something like, “You too. Good luck!”

I’m not going to make too big of a deal about what a small and wonderful little moment of destiny all of this was, but I just want to take a moment to step back and appreciate that the moment occurred at all.

So thank you Destiny and Mister Rolf Potts and LAdy at the Barnes and Noble. That was a great - small, but great - and random moment of authentic human connection and understanding. Those are sadly few and far between in the real world and so I try to appreciate them when they occur. And what a perfectly elegant harbinger when one is buying a book about how to make one’s way forward in the world and across that wide desert before us.  


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