Really Quick Thoughts About What I’ve Been Reading Lately, So Ya Know, Ya Know? (Part I)

Posted on May 20, 2013 by Andrew

Life Begins at Incorporation by Matt Bors
I got this book through a Kickstarter, which is where I’ve been finding a lot of my entertainment ephemera lately.  I was taken by the first comic you see in the sales-spiel, regarding non-white babies.  Why?  I don’t know.  Anyway, I bought into the hype.

(Back when I worked in the York County Library reshelving books, I was infatuated with the yearly collections of political cartoons I found.  Most of them I didn’t really understand, because I didn’t really follow the news, but something about the attempt to capture an entire argument in only a few panels really struck me.  I’m an easy sell for, I think, for strong opinions under a wedding veil of humor.  And, no, don’t ask me who’s getting married.)

The book is about half cartoons and half essays, each essay framing one of Bors’ main concerns in the world today and thereby neatly dividing the book.  Also, the essays are funny.  Hell, I’d read just a book of his essays, minus the cartoons.  Granted, I’d also read a book of his cartoons, minus the essays.  So a win?  Yes.

I don’t always agree with his opinions, but it doesn’t matter (and I don’t really want to read someone parroting my own thoughts) because he’s honest, cutting, unbending, and funny.  Especially that last part.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Of course, you already know that last part.  The Burgess part.

(By the way, did you know that Anthony Burgess wrote a novel called The End of the World News?  Did you know that it is awesome and you should read it right away?  Yes.  Well, then… good.  Good for you, you know-it-all.)

I have seen the movie version, and it was harrowing.  Reading the book is a little more harrowing, because you are in Alex’s mind all the time, and you never escape the fact that he’s fifteen and his droogie friends are only a year or so older (a fact that’s easy to escape with Malcolm McDowell as the lead, clearly old enough to be vicious in a way that’s harder to forgive in a child/teenager).

It took me a long time to get to the book, though not because I didn’t like Burgess (see above) and not because I wasn’t interested.  Hell, the creation of a new language was enough to intrigue me (though I didn’t find it as difficult to slip into the new vocabulary as I expected).  I think it was that the book was so talked about, so pedestaled, that I was afraid.  Afraid of what?  I don’t know.

O my brothers, I don’t know, because the book is glorious.  Violent as it is, as pessimistic as it is (and despite what Burgess may tell you in the introduction, the last chapter that was excised in the original American version does not make everything sunshine and roses), the book is seductive, and beautiful, and it is the language that makes it so.

Of course, I’m a poet by training, so maybe that’s to blame.  YMMV.  But probably not.

 

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Blammity Blam!

Posted on April 23, 2013 by Andrew

So I’ve been going through the blog archives of Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! and have been finding some awesome stuff.  Awesome, in this case, means funny.  Also, horrifying.  See below:

The reason I showed you that was to show you this:

Which I think is a perfect example of how to interpret, analyze, and reformat a genre to one’s own ends.

Also, it’s funny.

As I’ve just warned Megan, my new form of exclamation from now until eternity will be Blammity blam!

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Another YA Novel I am Probably Never Going to Write

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Andrew

Okay, picture this.

It’s called THE SCARLET SCHOOL FOR PROSTITUTES.

I’ve got you hooked right there, right?  Right.  But wait, there’s more.

In a world different from our own, either the future or the past, or on another planet entirely, there has been a disaster.  The population has been reduced to the bare minimum.  And so–

Wait, I’m going about this all wrong.

In a world where no one can love who they want, one girl rises up!  Um…

Okay, so here’s the situation: In this world (or city — we’re not picky), we’ll call it Plantagenet, only a very few people have true rights.  If you are a girl, then there is a chance — a very small chance, mind you — that when you grow up you’ll be chosen by a man of means to be his wife.    If you’re a boy, you are pretty much out of luck.  As soon as you are old enough to leave school, fully trained and in the flush of your youth, you are sent to tame the wilderness, or to complete menial, dangerous jobs, and you will probably die in a few years.  Though their are rumors that not all the boys who disappear die…

In The Scarlet School for Prostitutes, the girls are taught everything they might need to know in life if they are chosen to marry, i.e. how to be a lady.  But they are also taught the skills necessary to living in the Scarlet Schools, because that is where most of them will end up: first aid, diplomacy, self-defense, and midwifery, especially.  Because there is no birth control, the Scarlet School become baby factories.

But one girl (who doesn’t have a name yet, because I haven’t gotten that far — okay, let’s call her Johanna) doesn’t want the life she’s been born to.  She’s made friends with a boy, and when he’s sent away to the wilds or to clear the sewers of ravenous beasts, she begins to plan.  She’ll seduce a man into choosing her for a wife, because then she’ll have the power to save her friend, but she ruins everything by getting pregnant, because if you become pregnant than you and your baby become property of the Scarlet School.

And that’s as far as I’ve gotten.  What happens next?  I don’t know except that it’s the end of the world as Johanna knows it.

Would you read it?

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Teaser Park: Persephone

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Andrew

For the first time in a long time, I am doing a teaser.  Why have I been so long away from teasing?  Mostly because I’ve been revising an older novel and writing a new one.  I took a long break from the on-line writing world (Hi, Absolute Write) because my last novel struck out with agents and I decided to hole up and write something that would absolutely knock their socks off!

This is assuming that agents regularly wear socks.  And that socks can, indeed, be knocked off which, now that I consider the phrase logically, seems unlikely unless you were to take the food with the sock.  And I’m not sure anyone would appreciate that.

So, for your reading pleasure today, I have the opening paragraphs to my young adult science-fiction novel Persephone.  Unlike most of my other work, there is no fantasy in this book, no breaks into unexplainable magic-like interludes (except of the Arthur C. Clarke variety of “sufficiently advanced technology”).  It was a strange challenge for me since inexplicable events are part of what allow me to keep going in a book once I get stuck.  But here I had to use actual science!  Mad science, perhaps, but science all the same.

These are the things I remember: the weight of my cat curled up on my chest; the honest-to-goodness last fast food hamburger I ever had; the rancid-sweet smell of Houston after a rainstorm; the girl who tried to befriend me the first day of kindergarten, and who I made fun of for her crappy haircut.

These are the things I don’t remember: what chocolate cake tastes like; the particular feel of being outside on a sunny day; my parent’s faces.

And it’s not even quite that I don’t remember them.  If I really didn’t remember these things, that would be fine.  I wouldn’t remember that I didn’t remember them, so I wouldn’t be bothered by the lack of memory.  What I feel, though, is infinitely worse.  I can sort of remember these things, but I know that my memory isn’t accurate.  My parents’ features change.  The sunny day becomes confused with exercising in the sun room.  Chocolate cake becomes just another form of flavored tofu.

Maxwell, my wrist computer says, my own voice coming from its speakers, get a grip.  There’s no point in obsessing over what you can’t change.

My name, for example.  Maxwell Clerk MacLeod.  Can’t change that and, despite what you might think, there is no good feminine version of either of those names.  Maxie?  Tried that for a micro-second in fifth grade and it took years for the echoes of Maxi Pad to die.  And Clerk isn’t even a name, it’s the sound a chicken makes with marbles in its mouth.

Stop being stupid, Maxwell.

I’m sitting in an air vent near one of the outer rings of the Exploration-Class Spaceship Santa Maria.  Spread around me are all my possessions in the world, everything that is irretrievably mine.  A backpack full of food.  A wood-handled brush.  A mirror.  A kitchen knife honed to a razor-sharp edge.  A barely-working wrist computer.

Everything is silent around me, except that it isn’t.  Nothing is silent on the Santa Maria.  Just like you don’t pay attention to your own breathing unless it’s brought to your attention, unless you’ve been running as fast as you can to escape the grasping hands of someone you had thought was your friend, all the sounds of the ship normally go unnoticed.  A thousand beeps and creaks, the constant whoosh of circulating air, the subtle whirring of the cleaning robots as they slowly, inexorably scour the ship, all of it was as much a part of my body as the pulsing of my blood.

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So I’ve given up all hope

Posted on March 18, 2013 by Andrew

of saying anything really important anymore on this blog.  If I think too much about it — whether “it” is writing, thoughts about a book, movie, etc., or people (you know who you are) — then I write nothing.

Instead, here is this:

Which is to say that I mostly pretty much love the Scissor Sisters. Their videos end up (again, mostly) being strange and expressive and experimental and interesting. It doesn’t hurt that they often have good hooks (or that the band members, when in the video, are awesome to watch).

This video interests me because it is pretty much clearly defined to be uncomfortable (in a way that the song it’s illustrating was never meant to be). Who are these kids, where is this school, and who thought this would be a good idea? (The answer: Clearly the woman playing the piano.) Of course, I say that, but I would’ve loved to be in a school where this is the sort of theatrical presentation that was put on. And I say that partly because the whole exercise is so overtly theatrical. Look at that blood! The car! We’re watching anti-realism! Brecht and Artaud are alive and well and in elementary school.

Lastly, even though a large part of what charms me about this video is the clear awkwardness of the kids (and the clear fun they are having) that one kid in the back near the end clearly knows how to dance.

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Space Cat Makes a Deal

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Andrew

That is the title I’ve given to this picture (actual title unknown):

Hannes Bok

Hannes Bok

I found out about the writer (and artist, see above) Hannes Bok through Lin Carter’s book on the history of fantasy Imaginary Worlds.  I’d bought that book to read during my seclusion in Wyoming last year because I was trying to enhance my “academic” background for all the SF&F reading that I do.

No, that’s not it.  The reason I was reading it was because I am fascinated with critical studies and reviews, especially of genres that are typically on the fringe of those being critically studied and reviewed.  Even more so, I’m fascinated by such studies and reviews that are written by authors in said genres (such as the glorious The Jewel-Hinged Jaw by Samuel R. Delany, Damon Knight’s In Search of Wonder, James Blish’s criticism written under the pseudonym William Atheling, Jr., and the book I have yet to read (having just received it) by Michael Moorcock titled Wizardy & Wild Romance).

Lin Carter’s book is not a very rigorous or even very critical study of fantasy, history or otherwise.  And yet it is a wonderful resource for fantasy that you may have never heard of  from the late 19th c. through the early 20th c.  Some of that fantasy is deservedly unknown — the writing is poor and the characters weak and etc., etc. — but all of it is interesting when taken as a history, of each novel being a step in the evolution of the genre (evolution in this case meaning transformation rather than a “getter-better-ness”).  For example, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land is amazing in so many ways — even if reading through the central part of the novel is a struggle — partly because of the way it is told, and partly because of the world Hodgson creates, so mysterious and epic and, well, reading just past the first chapter will show you why Lovecraft admired the book so much.

Hannes Bok’s The Sorcerer’s Ship is not a greatly written novel, but it has a lot that a student of fantasy can take from it.  The world that Bok creates is deliberately small, almost minor in both scope and creative breadth (especially when he gets into describing the cities), but the way he approaches that world is what makes the book interesting.  At various points he ends up trying to explicate what is going on, but the explanations provided simply make the story all the stranger.

Maybe that’s evident in his artistic work, such as the drawing above.  The human sailor grounds the picture in some sort of reality, but what reality?  Everything that is recognizable about the drawing makes the story its telling as a whole less comprehensible.  And is that what I want out of writing?  Incomprehension?

No, I want the wonder.  I mean, how can you not look at the expressions on the man and the cat and not wonder?  And that wonder, more so than any answer Bok could give us as to what they’re discussing, that’s what makes a story live.

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I want your soul, and so does everyone else

Posted on November 16, 2012 by Andrew

There’s a show called Off the Air.  You should watch it.  Watching it is quite easy.  All the episodes are available in ten-minute chunks on YouTube.  Ten-minute chunks because that is how long they are.  The episodes.

I’m not sure why I’m talking like this.  Perhaps it is because I am in need of a soul.

Anyway.  This show on YouTube that is also on TV somewhere.  I don’t know where because I don’t have TV.  I have a TV.  Somehow, it isn’t the same.

Anyway.  This show is strange.  It is many different elements stitched together by a madman.  Or a scientist.  Or a brilliant child.  Watching Off the Air is mind-threatening.

On that show there was a clip of a music video.  That music video was so arresting that I was compelled to search it out.  The results of that search are below.  Watch them.  Watch it.  Realize that you are both the consumer and the consumed.

I am a producer of things to be consumed.  I am trapped in an infinite loop.  I do not like the beach.  There is no hope for me.

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