Three Sentence Reviews for Your Edification

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Andrew

I’ve had this stack of books here on my desk for days.  Weeks.  Months.  Years, even.

These books have all been read, fool!

Okay, maybe not these books, exactly, but books nonetheless.  See, it’s hard for me to read books purely for pleasure.  I mean, I read purely for pleasure, but when I’m done with the book I feel like something needs to have come from it, grown flower-like from the compost of my mind.  That’s where the whole idea behind the Shortcuts came from (and we see how that turned out), an attempt to prove myself useful, probably fueled by years of academic-induced guilt for never really having done all my reading in classes.  Do you forgive me now, Mrs. Trimble?  Mrs. Fripp?

However, as you may have noticed, the Shortcuts have dwindled from a trickle to dried-up stream bed.  But the books have remained, piling up and staring at me with their beady little eyes.  Megan suggested that I trot out haiku-like responses to each.  And while such a terse judgment may not convince you of the book’s worth, or what I love about each, it’ll at least get the books off my desk and onto the shelves where they belong because, as books do when uncased, they have begun to make demands.  They have begun to order pizza.  They have begun to watch American Idol.  They have begun to shed letters and sentences and paragraphs and soon they will be the shadow of themselves, but all the more beautiful (or so they think).

The Apothecary by Maile Meloy

Meloy creates a historical fantasy that lives and breathes, taking your breath away in order to do so.  Janie, a young girl recently relocated to London because her script-writing parents are running from the House Un-American Activities Committee, finds herself embroiled in espionage as alchemists around the world try to counter nuclear weapons.  The writing is beautiful, though I prefer the book before the actions ramps up, when the focus is on character and the haunting mystery has yet to be given shape (at which time it becomes, by necessity, much less mysterious).

The Great Mortality by John Kelly

Here is your one-stop shop for all you ever needed to know about The Great Mortality, i.e. The Black Death, i.e. when Eurasia was depopulated by millions, by 33%-60%, when the world was thrown back into darkness and isolation.  The amount of detail and research trotted out by Kelly is stunning, but he manages to keep the creeping of the plague across Europe a narrative, a story, rather than burying the reader under barren facts.  It’s true that the descriptions of how cities succumbed begin to run together, yet if you are fascinated by human behavior in the face of extremes, as I am, then this is a must read.

The Ticking is the Bomb by Nick Flynn

I love Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, but I was afraid of this book because I thought it’d be more polemic than exploration, more politics than art, more diatribe than dialogue.  But Flynn is nothing if not dialogic: with himself, with the world, with us, with genre.  The beauty that threaded through Suck City is here, woven through all the confusion and pain and responsibility; in fact, the beauty is the confusion and pain and responsibility (and love.  Did I mention love?  No?  Okay, then: Love).

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On Things I Do Not Believe

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Andrew

At the top of the list would be this video:

Actually, all of the Wendy’s training videos.   These are the products of a demented executive.  I ask you, what is going on here?  Are they serious?  Who are they?  And why do they think I want to work at Wendy’s?

(Full disclosure: I’ve worked at Pizza Hut and at a KFC/Taco Bell, so I am not completely without sin.)

Megan pointed out that what these videos imply is that the makers know that working at Wendy’s is mind-numbingly boring and so they are going to try and simply entertain you instead.  Which, I must admit, they succeed at doing, though perhaps not in the way they mean.

It is hard to believe that anyone took these things seriously.  Even if the goal was to entertain the employees, it’s unlikely that they learned from raps or songs any better than they did from experience.

Which is all to say that these videos are the silliest serious things I’ve seen in a long time.  It was the 1980s, sure, but the videos reek of someone trying to be hip when, for the most part, an employee would prefer to skip the videos altogether and just work.  At least I know I wanted to.  I watched training videos when I started working at Pizza Hut that explained how to deliver pizzas.  I was nineteen, and, so, young, and, so, might not have been able to figure it all out on my own.

All I can say is thank God for training videos!  Otherwise, how would you learn how to pour ice tea?

At least, you wouldn’t learn it so musically.

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Poetry strikes again

Posted on December 17, 2011 by Andrew

I’m sitting at Black Hole today with two goals in mind.  1) I will read the next chapter of GOD’S TEETH, the chapter that I’ll start actually revising tomorrow.  2) I’ll write a poem in my John Carpenter series.

Instead of doing either of those two things, at the moment I’ve been reading Michael Burleigh’s Moral Combat: Good and Evil in World War II, one of the books I picked off the corpse of Borders.  It’s good.  In fact, all the books that I bought which I’ve read so far have been good.  (Yes, there were some problems with Across the Universe, mainly involving a lack of, well, science that is somewhat criminal for a science-fiction novel, but it was an engrossing read nonetheless.)

Burleigh’s book is dense.  He tosses names at you as though assuming you already have an in-depth knowledge of history (which I don’t), and though context provides all the information you need, reading his account of World War II can get a little dizzying.

Perhaps that’s why I was startled into emotion by this.

Hitler yells on the wireless,
The night is damp and still
And I hear dull blows on wood outside my window;
They are cutting down the trees on Primrose Hill…
They want the crest of this hill for anti-aircraft,
The guns will take the view
And searchlights probe the heavens for bacilli
With narrow wands of blue.

This is poem (a fragment of a poem?) by the Northern Irish poet Louis MacNeice, who was living in London when Britain went to war.    I’ve heard MacNeice’s name before, but that’s it.  I’ve read nothing by him, know nothing about him, and have no opinions about his writing in general, but this….

My feelings about the fragment are partly from being in the midst of reading about World War II, my mind set in an atmosphere of fear and guilt.  Partly, it’s that the poem is set in meter and rhyme, and in the present day it’s easy for me to forget how powerful such tools can bee.  But for the most part, I think my feelings are brought forth by the matter-of-fact language and description in the beginning (anti-aircraft in a poem?  It’s such an unmusical word) versus the almost magical transformation in the last three lines: the guns become aware, a sickness invades the sky, and light becomes physical, medical.

Is that wrong?  Making beauty out of fear, out of war?  Does it destroy the horror at the base of what’s happening around him (around us)?  Hell, in poetry, I feel like this is all I’m doing, leveling the beautiful with the horrible, and finding the beautiful in the horrible.

 

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Politics vs. Art: Lemony Occupies Wall Street

Posted on November 21, 2011 by Andrew

I know very little about the Occupy Wall Street movement, and for this I feel guilty.  What I know is that it’s a non-violent protest movement addressing (in part, at least) the vast inequalities between the rich and the poor in this country.  What I also know is that I fully endorse such a protest (even if I haven’t taken part), and I have little sympathy with those who are trying to silence and/or undermine the protest.

But what can I do?  I could certainly go out and protest, but I’m not going to (at least at this moment).  I suppose I’m not sure my one warm body would add all that much (but, of course, democracy is just a bunch of warm bodies sticking together) and I suppose that I’m also not sure of what I, exactly, would be protesting (in truth, I’d just be showing solidarity with those already protesting).

I could write, of course, in support, bring my written words into line with my politics (assuming I could straighten out my politics enough to make my words clear).  What’s stopped me in the past is the idea (preconceived notion) that art in service to politics ceases to be art and, instead, is propaganda.

Lemony Snicket (alter-ego of Daniel Handler) is one of my favorite writers, and you can find his take on the whole OWS affair here.  And the reason I’m writing this piece now is his piece, and my belief that it manages to be a work of art while speaking to the politics of the moment.  Lemony gives a scathing judgement of those judging OWS while still keeping the subject universal and without losing his trademark wit.  It’s what I’d like to do (and would, if I had an alter-ego with such a well-defined voice and could come up with what is, essentially, a modern parable).

And maybe I will.

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Teaser Park: Revisionist Edition

Posted on November 15, 2011 by Andrew

Revising is my nemesis.  It is the bane of my existence.  It is the friend I never invite over because he will never leave.  Draw the curtains, turn off the lights, and don’t answer the phone.  Nobody’s home.

When will I stop revising?  When I’m done.

But how will I know when I’m done?

Honestly, that’s the common critique of revising.  It can go on forever.  I always think of the man in Camus’ The Plague who has reams and reams of paper in his house, all of them filled with endless versions of his novel’s opening line.

Someday, this will be me. Except with a different title, different author's name, and different cover.

I know that revising makes things better (for the most part), but my real fear is that I’ll end up destroying whatever good it was that I had in the first place.  My writing is so organic (what follows is determined by what came before, and if what came before is changed, then how can what follows follow?) that I feel any little shift may destroy the skeleton of the whole.

And yet, I’ve tried small scale revision — changing lines, adjusting words, adding and/or deleting scenes.  Each revision improves the book(s), but it doesn’t solve the larger problem: Namely, that there are some sections, some entire chapters, that don’t work.

But I can’t just cut them, because the details in those sections are integral to the plot.  So far, my response has been to dance around these problem areas, hoping that if I redress their surroundings then the problem will disappear.

This has not worked.

So now I’m trying something I’ve been loathe to do.  Taking Tracy Jo’s advice, I’m rewriting the problem areas without looking at the original version.  And, because it was her advice to begin with, and because my first novel is the one I have the most problems with (though I’m still in love with the idea), and because it’s her favorite of my novels, I’m rewriting the opening chapters of GOD’S TEETH.  The original opening you can find here.

I’m including the first 250 words (okay, 262) since that’s about a page of text, and also what The Authoress uses in her various agent-oriented contests.  The question:  Would you read on?

Darren stood to the side of the wagon’s makeshift stage and watched his master Mikal call forth a ghost between his outstretched hands.  The ghost was nothing more than a concentration of the air’s moisture, a creation that in any other context would be called fog, but this fog was shaped into the face of a man.

A man in the crowd cried out in shock.  “Father?”

The floating head nodded, then began to speak in a slow, stentorian voice that Darren thought was needlessly ghostly.  The voice echoed.  It reverberated.  It faded in and out as it told facts about both the father and his son, a farmer in small town of Settler’s Dale.  For the big finale, the ghost revealed where he had buried a small crop of coins on the son’s farm, a revelation that conveniently left out the fact that Darren had buried the coins there the night before at Mikal’s direction.  The information about the farmer and his dead father had been gathered a few days before by Anton, a guard for Gatrindor’s Panoply of Wonders who also served as a location scout for the carnival.  The only thing about the performance that was real was the substance of the ghost itself, a truly magical manipulation of the air, but a trick that Darren had seen so many times he had lost his sense of wonder.  The only tension in the show for Darren was wondering whether or not the front rows of the audience would notice the stench of alcohol that wafted from Mikal in waves.

Well, would you? (Read on.)

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What has really been annoying me in advertising

Posted on October 30, 2011 by Andrew

Dear Poets & Writers,

Please stop pretending that we’re friends.

Please stop pretending that what we shared that one time late at night at our mutual friend’s party was anything other than a drunken hook-up.  You know it, I know it, and I know that you only keep bringing it up because you’re hoping, for the briefest of moments, that my mind will be thrown back to that hormone-laden moment and I’ll think that, Yes, maybe something could have happened then, if I’d only let it, and maybe something will happen now if only I work hard enough, passionately enough, and ignore the evidence before my eyes.

But that’s not going to happen.

The truth is that I’ve had a subscription to you for many years.  You’re the best and easiest way to keep up to date on all the contests and awards and fellowships etc. that I know are coming up, as well as all those I’ve never heard of.  There’s no real risk that I’ll stop subscribing because, well, I’m lazy, and you’re a good resource and, every once in a while, you pull me out of a writerly funk (even as you put me in another one with your endless lists of what I have not read, won, or been published in/by).

The truth is that, as an organization, Poets & Writers does a lot for writers and (dare I say it) poets.  I’ve benefited several times from the grants you give out, and I appreciate — more than I can say — your support of the arts.  Even if you callously choose to separate those who write into writers or poets.

But the truth also is that you’ve been playing me (and perhaps many of your subscribers — it’s okay, I’m not jealous, I knew what sort of relationship I was getting into) (and now, with that aside we’ve lost the rhetorical power of this sentence) — well, you’ve been playing us for fools.

When our subscription nears its end (granted, I started getting these announcements more than four issues ago) you  bombard us with requests to RE-ENLIST!  MORTGAGE YOUR MORTGAGE!  IT’S A DEAL, BUT ONLY FOR RIGHT NOW!  HURRY!

But all that’s a lie.  I’ve kept track.  The deals you spin my way through the mail are couched in the language of love and care, perhaps even with a dash of awareness for being a continuing subscriber, but the truth is (there’s that word again) that the deal you offer is worse than the one you offer online.

Here’s the evidence.  In my hand I have the offer for $5 more, the offer that was mailed to me direct, the offer that, like a love letter from an ex- found just after the break-up, has a bitter taste.

The rub is this: Why not just be honest?  Tell me that you like fresh meat more than leftovers?  Or, and here’s the honorable option, why not just treat us both the same?  Don’t worry, if I see him in the Kroger, I’m not going to start a fight over which one of us you love more.

Because, the truth is, it’s not a problem between us.  It’s a problem with you.  And you need to admit it.

Love,
Andrew

p.s. please find my check enclosed.

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And so, to continue the story, I have won a residency

Posted on October 28, 2011 by Andrew

Those of you who know me in person might already be aware of this, but if not, here it is: Last week I found out that I’ve been awarded a Jentel Artist Residency for 2012.  What that means is that from March 15th to April 13th I will be incommunicado in Wyoming, working on my poetry, communing with (cold) nature, and generally being an “artiste”.

That is how you pronounce artist, right?

Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway), I’m really excited.  While there I’ll be working on a new manuscript that pits Poems on Bugs against Poems on People.  For example, an “Ode to the Human Bot Fly” vs. “Phineas Gage”, the first being a fly that lays its eggs in human skin, where they grow into grubs, then worm around until they finally break through the skin to fly away and infect another, and the second being a man who had a three-foot-long metal rod shot through his skull and lived to tell the tale.

The Jentel Foundation sent a lot of helpful information my way, including a press release.  As you might now (or will soon), I’m a horrible self-promoter.  I have no media contacts and no newspapers clamoring (like clams?) for my stories.  I do, however, have you.

Yes, you.

Witness my Press Release and Despair.

—

Writer Awarded Fellowship by the Jentel Artist Residency Program

Andrew Kozma of Houston, Texas, has been awarded a fellowship by the Jentel Artist Residency Program.  Jentel is located in a rural setting on a working cattle ranch in the Lower Piney Creek Valley approximately 20 miles southeast of Sheridan, Wyoming. Kozma will be among the award recipients focusing on their own creative projects at this working retreat for artists and writers.  A panel of arts and literary professionals review samples of art work and manuscripts before making final recommendations for residency awards.

[INSERT A PARAGRAPH HERE about yourself, your project, your professional involvement in your community, and any information of interest to connect you with the respective media community, etc.]

ATTEMPT #1: As a child in Germany, Andrew Kozma feared that aliens were destined to take over his school.  As an adult, Andrew Kozma only hoped for such an occasion.

ATTEMPT #2: Andrew Kozma is a writter. He has long been a ritter.  Three’s Company!

ATTEMPT #3: Andrew Kozma abandons all hope, ye who enter here.

ATTEMPT #4: As a bartender in his community, Mr. Kozma (he insists on being called either Master or Doctor in deference to his degrees) serves drinks.  To his community.

ATTEMPT #5: Those to whom Andrew Kozma owes debts will not be able to find him in Wyoming during the time allotted for his fellowship.  Instead, interested parties should try Montana.

During the four week long residency, Jentel provides communal spaces  designated for research, recreation, food preparation, and dining.  Each artist and writer is offered a private comfortably furnished accommodation and a light airy workspace.  Each resident receives a stipend to help defray living expenses during the program.  Here artists and writers experience unfettered time to allow for thoughtful reflection and meditation on the creative process in a setting that preserves the agricultural and historical integrity of the land.

The Jentel Artist Residency Program offers a spectacularly beautiful place to peacefully work and achieve personal artistic goals in a remarkable environment.  The program residents enjoy interaction with peers and the extended community. For any artist in whatever media, protected time from the day-to-day necessities of living to examine and reflect upon work and the creative process is essential as a catalyst for artistic development.  For more information, visit www.jentelarts.org.

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Shortcut #65: Boneshaker

Posted on October 27, 2011 by Andrew

I admit it.  I’m late to the whole Steampunk vapor-driven, rail-riding transportation mechanismo.  No need to rub my face in it (which, by the way, would probably hurt a lot.

And, yes, it’s true that I read The Difference Engine ages and ages ago, but that was before Steampunk was, you know, a thing.

But a thing it is, as thingie as YA Dystopian novels, a genre made out of a larger genre that pretends to be just as large as what came before.  But unlike speculative fiction, which claims to (and pretty well does) cover every eventuality, every permutation of text, Steampunk is more like Western in scope.  And, in this case, the American version is exactly that.

At least this American version is.

Shortcut #66: Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker

Okay, from here you can read the Westerfeld blurb on the cover, and I must tell you that everything he says is true.  The beautiful cover of the book does not lie.  If you come to this book looking for adventure and mad science and heartfelt characters working their way out of dire situations that are as much their own making as bad luck or moustache-twirling villains, then you will not be disappointed.

But, I suppose I quibble with one point of aforesaid blurb.  The problem is that saying Boneshaker is “A steampunk-zombie-airship adventure of rollicking pace and sweeping proportions” implies that the novel’s action is continent-spanning, an epic a la Tolkien, an implication that elides one of my favorite aspects of the novel: That it takes place entirely within the Seattle of 1880.

What I love about this novel is it’s seeming confined scope.  This is a steampunk novel, yes, but it is centered in the Old West and though the world at large is hinted at, we are firmly and resolutely in the world of this alternate Seattle alone.  There are hints of how airships are being used in the Civil War (still going on, apparently) and how steampunk technology has altered the world, but we are only concerned with Seattle and, mainly, two people who live in it: Briar Wilkes and her son Ezekiel.

Sixteen years previous, a mad scientist’s experiment destroys the city (isn’t that always the case) and releases a gas from the ground that turns people into, well, zombies.  There isn’t much in the way of explanation for how the gas works or how the science works, in general, but it’s not necessary.  The world is described so carefully and in such bright details that it lives and breathes, and the science-fantasy on display is in service to the story and the world and, more importantly, it’s internally consistent.

(All of which I’m pointing out because, in the fragment of one review I read, Priest was being brought to task for her zombifying gas and the science, or lack thereof, at work in her book.  But to hell with that guy.  It’s a good book, and that, to me at least, is what finally matters when, well, judging a book.)

Briar is the widow of the mad scientist who destroyed Seattle, and is shunned as a result.  But when her son enters into the old city (walled off in order to keep the gas contained) in order to find evidence that his father is innocent of Seattle’s destruction, she’s forced to confront her past in her quest to save her son.   Okay, that’s a summary (a logline?) of the book designed to pique your interest, but it’s also the heart of the novel.

Sure, Boneshaker is filled with strange inventions and interesting characters.  This alternate Seattle is engrossing, especially when, inside the old town, we’re given a vision of ghost town that is still stubbornly inhabited by those unwilling to give up their homes (or who have to escape the law).  But what kept me clawing forward through the book, page after page, chapter upon chapter, was Briar’s story, a story that was only so riveting because Priest makes her so real: so bitter, so brave, so inventive, and so willing to risk everything for those she loves.

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On Giving Up All Pretense

Posted on October 23, 2011 by Andrew

For example, keeping this blog regularly updated.

It’s true, I managed to pound out a post a day for a year and so one would think (wouldn’t one?) that writing a post a week (at the least) would be relatively easy.  I thought so.  And it looks like I thought wrong.

This crawfish also thought wrong. And is in my belly.

The problem is that when I was writing a post a day, that was a project, an experiment, a dedicated test of both my sticktoitiveness and my imagination.  And, after finishing said experiment, I realized that the amount of blog wordage was equivalent to three novels.

There are blogs that I read where the writer is dedicated to giving others advice (especially on the YA blog circuit) or to entertaining or to making themselves a noted expert on a subject or to giving voice to their own thoughts and/or arguments.  Frankly, Frank, I’m not interested in doing any of those things.  As with my writing, I’m most interested in experimenting, and I long for the days (most evident in My Months In Poland) when my blog was simply an outgrowth of that, each post a foray into a word forest I was uncertain of ever finding my way out of.

Blogging became so regimented in my A Year of Living Bloggily days, and afterwards I tried to keep up.  Why?  Because people like regularity.  They want to know what they’re getting (and what they’re getting themselves into).  But I don’t know what you’re getting into.  Hell, I don’t know what I’m getting into.  Knowing bores me (and if you’re a dedicated reader of this blog, hopefully it bores you, too).

(By the way, listening to a band called Subfocus, their song “Rock It”, and I like.)

(Shit.  Now you know.  And knowing is boring.  BORING!)

So I’m backpedaling on making any sort of regimen for this blog.  I’m going to dive into my novel, my poems, my plays, and when I come up for air you might find me here.  If you’re here when I do, then say “Hi.”

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Shortcut #64: Shambling Towards Hiroshima

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Andrew

Morrow is one of my favorite writers.

Every time I say that, I feel like I’m in the midst of this conversation:

Adult: What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?
Child: All of them!

[Morrow is your favorite flavor of ice cream? -Ed.]

No, that’s not the point.

[What is your point? -Ed.]

That I have a lot of favorite writers.

[That's not a very interesting point. -Ed.]

Aha!  But this is an interesting book!

[Good comeback.  I have been put in my place. -Ed.]

So… um.  James Morrow?

Shortcut #64: James Morrow’s Shambling Towards Hiroshima

James Morrow was one of the first authors who I sought out deliberately.  Who I hunted down.  Who I wrapped up and took back home and put on the shelf.

His books, I mean, of course.

Morrow is a science-fiction satirist (a satirist who uses science-fiction as his medium) whose stories deal with things Biblical, taken literally or to their (il)logical extreme.  Of course, the fact that Shambling Towards Hiroshima doesn’t deal with a Biblical theme (except, by allusion, from the title) somewhat destroys my theory.  Just take it as established that most of Morrow’s books fall into line, such as Towing Jehovah, a novel about the mile-long corpse of God being towed to the Arctic. (In case there is any doubt in your mind, you should read that book.)

Morrow’s novels are about morality, which is why all the Bible-inspired stories make sense.  For the West, at least, the Bible is still the great foundation for the general morality of society and those in it.  The morality in these books isn’t as simple as proponents of the Bible would make it appear — Morrow’s world’s aren’t ones of black and white, but of infinite shades of grey, though his own sense of morality comes through rather clearly.  What matters most is how you treat other people, how you take their person-hood into account.

All of this (almost) makes Morrow sound rather borrowing, but he is one of the wittiest writers I know, his ideas funny and his writing funnier.  In Shambling Towards Hiroshima, Morrow moves away from the strict Bible version of morality to take on the morality of war and weapons of mass destruction, in this case (if you haven’t guessed already by the title) the atom bomb.  Now how is this funny?  How about if, concurrent with the Manhattan Project there was also a Knickerbocker project that focused on creating a biological weapon: In this case, Godzilla (or his progenitors)?  And in order to convince the Japanese that this horror, if unleashed, would destroy their country, a B-horror movie actor is hired to inhabit a rubber suit and destroy a scale model in the hopes that the simulated destruction will convince the Japanese to surrender?

Of course, all the above is tied in with a snapshot of the film industry (horror side) in the thirties and forties as well as descriptions of horror films that were never made.  One of the things Morrow loves to do is to create fake works of art inside his novels, fleshing them out enough so that you can picture the whole and feel that the world is lesser for them never having been created.

Formally, the story is a written account by Syms Thorley, the actor who ends up rubber-suiting it, detailing the failure of the project and the destruction of his acting career on this last night on Earth.  To be specific, after he finishes telling his tale, he’s going to kill himself.

The novel is a dark tale of the destruction that is wrought by the necessity of war, of professional jealousy, of the attempt to do good and the failure to achieve it.  But it’s the attempt that matters.  And all the darkness is told with such a sense of the absurd that the novel, though wreathed in darkness, never stops dragging you along to the next laugh, the next small bite of hope because, just like in real life, sometimes that’s all that keeps us going.

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