A Man’s Gotta Do: Cold in July by Joe Lansdale

Cold in July 

by Joe R. Lansdale 

Tachyon Publications 

General Fiction (Adult) , Mystery & Thrillers

Ann hears a noise and wakes her husband, a young father, to listen. He hears the sliding glass door open, so he grabs his .38 and ventures downstairs to greet his uninvited guest, who is passing a flashlight over the walls including a cheap landscape painting, which the narrator cover a Picasso (probably a joke since the subject doesn’t come back up).

When the two men meet, face to face, the narrator freezes and the burglar gets the first shot, missing the narrator which finally wakes him to action, putting a bullet in the burglar’s head.

The cops investigate the scene and recognize the burglar as Freddy Russel, who like his father, has been in and out of prison. They take the narrator down to get his and his wife’s statements. They assure him it’s an easy case of self-defense.

Ann and the narrator clean up the mess back home. The narrator struggles with guilt that even the temptation of snuggling with his wife can distract him from.

 

Even through the next day, guilt plagues him, despite the kudos he receives from the locals who all already know. Thinking of the burglar’s sparsely attended funeral, he drives to the cemetery to watch, despite the police chief warning him not to. The burglar’s father is there, none too pleased. He makes veiled threats about the narrator’s son, Jordan, kicking off the next series of crises where the narrator has to do what he can to protect his family.

Joe Lansdale described his novel, Cold in July, as having come from a dream. It doesn't feel exactly dreamlike, but it does have an unusual structure (I described Dan Braum's short novel as having a similar shifting structure over here but this one doubles Braum’s).

It’s a story of manhood: what it is, what a man has to do. By the end, it becomes less and less clear of the necessity of the narrator''s involvement although some might claim that, yes, he needs to be involved, yet the novel has to work to justify this involvement. That, though, may only make the investigation of what makes a man all the more interesting.

To some extent, manhood is always under the microscope in a Lansdale tale, but I have yet to read a more thorough investigation by Lansdale.

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What follows becomes less of a review than a discussion of the work itself. If you read the novel, consider that a pass key to the rest of the discussion. If you haven’t read the novel, note that the literary police are watching you on your computer cameras and will raid your house if you read on.

Warning: Spoilers (to an extent)

The novel’s structure is unusual. That it works, throws into question structural plots. We open with a thriller, followed by a mystery, and end with a vigilante justice tale. Other plots, such as psychological (guilt about killing, guilt over fatherhood), might be thrown in as well. What holds the novel together is the question of manhood. What is it? This is what I love most about the novel. It isn’t just blind acceptance or total questioning of what manhood is, yet to some extent it expects us to accept some manhood justifications that should be questioned if not necessarily jettisoned.

When they find out Freddy Russel isn’t Freddy Russel, the protagonist has less and less reason to be in the novel. In fact, the novel focuses more and more on the other men. The protagonist does gain a lost father, perhaps finds his own fatherhood (if it was ever in question—which maybe it is since he has taken off, leaving his son, to go on an adventure he doesn’t have to take).

In this regard (not in the excitement department, which doesn't flag), the novel is flawed yet so is manhood. So maybe that’s all right.

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I didn’t realize at first that this had been made into the movie. The movie departs in that the narrator isn’t justified in shooting an unarmed burglar and he slips on the trigger, which may be a more interesting question—something that could trigger more guilt (although the question of guilt melts away in both book and movie as soon as the narrator has to protect his son).

In both the novel and movie, the narrator discovers that Freddy isn’t Freddy, but the movie lacks motive for literally throwing Russel Sr. on the train tracks. The perpetrators have no call to do so and aren't challenged for doing this (although that does make it easier to make the narrator and Russel Sr. sudden allies, which makes less sense in the novel).

The movie has a more visceral motive to launch the boys into a vigilante story. The protagonist and I had to turn our heads. Still, for the most part, the narrative and themes are intact. Both are worth checking out.

How to Fracture a Fairy Tale 

Jane Yolen 

Tachyon Publications 

SF & Fantasy, Teens & YA

How I feel about Jane Yolen’s How to Fracture a Fairy Tale has a lot to do with the book’s title. It is what drew me to the book, as a reader and as a writer. I started at the beginning and was reading through. The first couple of essays and stories caught my attention, but my interest started to flag. Maybe because I’ve read so many fairy tales and rewritten fairy tales, they lose their shininess after a few. A writer really has to alter the fairy tale significantly or remove the traces of the fairy tale in an updated telling. It isn’t enough to wave politics to reflect today’s mores (unless this is your first book of revised fairy tales).

I skipped to the poetry to see how those fared and found what I was looking for in the title. The commentary and poems show the writer’s mind at work. The writer herself said the poems were written to go with the stories, so I wondered why they were so separated from their story pairings. Maybe some people don’t like commentary. Maybe some don’t like poems, but the design should at least stand the poems beside the stories if not the commentary as well. Let those who only like stories turn one page instead of making everyone else—who is intrigued by the interplay between works, the way a fairy tale can be reconstructed in different ways—flip to the end of the book to read together what was intended to go together.

To me, the ordering affects how I’d rate the book. As it stands, it’s fine with some interesting retellings. If it were ordered as it seemed intended from the title and from the commentary, I’d recommend readers mob the book. At least, my mind became more engaged when I reordered.

The highlights of the collection include “Snow in Summer” (a Snow White retelling with a down-home voice) and “The Bridge's Complaint” (a bridge tells his version of the troll and the billy goats, mostly for the surprising perspective), “Great-Grandfather Dragon's Tale” (this describes an unusual “man raised by wild animals” tale—dragons, no less—interesting for its frame structure and the emotion evoked by a simple symbol). In “Cinder Elephant” Cinderella is overweight and can speak in the language of birds.

Even if the stories aren’t stunning, they contain intriguing aspects such as “Happy Dens; or, A Day in the Old Wolves' Home” where wolves in a nursing home get to tell their side of the story (a curious and ambiguous ending). There’s a nice wish-fulfilment one where the prophet, Elijah, saves Jews from concentration camps while another tells of a mother who’s died to return as a vampire.

A few, like the thrilling novelette “One Ox, Two Ox, Three Ox, and the Dragon King,” could have been improved by updating the fairy-tale-ness a little further, perhaps modernizing the language a little more or erasing more of the fairy-tale tracks.

The collection is definitely worth investigating. Maybe you agree with the present ordering, or maybe you can try it as the book seems to suggest it wants to be. Either way, turning the page isn’t too hard a chore to get the book that you want. I, for one, want How to Fracture a Fairy Tale.

A Birthday Lunch by Martin Walker

A Birthday Lunch 

by Martin Walker 

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group 

Vintage 

Mystery & Thrillers

"When not solving mysteries in his beloved little town of St. Denis, Bruno, the chief of police, likes to cook and share his meals with local guests and dear friend."

That's opening line to this little ebook, the size of a short story or novelette. By the tags and the word mysteries in the blurb and the police chief protagonist, I thought this would be a mystery, but I guess the dependent clause was a clue that it wan't a mystery. If Walker normally writes mysteries, readers might be disappointed in this offering which is, simply, a man who gets a gift, makes dinner, and gives his gifts.
The dinner is so detailed one imagines that one might be able to recreate them based on their descriptions, so fans who like to cook will enjoy that part.

The readers for this longish vignette is specialized: those who want to learn more about the character Bruno, those into cooking, and those who like French archaeology and culture. 

Dining on Irreverence in Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems

This post is maybe PG-13 or so. Not too bad. Some language and irreverence. It may bother some religious brothers, so stop now or read to the end.

John Ashbery calls what Frank O'Hara does as "free-associating.... speculative rumination." As one example, Ashbery points out "in 'Mary Desti's Ass,' a title whose meaning, I discovered accidentally in a bookstore, namely a book called Isadora Duncan's End by Mary Desti." But Ashbery doesn't see that as necessary to appreciating the poem, just demonstrating O'Hara's process.

O'Hara's irreverence knows [almost] no bounds. Reality, meaning, punctuation (and sentence structure), and God--even what he's doing (poetry) gets little reverence in terms of structure or titles. He could have left many without titles, but instead he titles several simply "Poem"--taking out the solemnity of the practice of poetry: homogenizing and abstracting.

From "On Rachmaninoffs Birthday": "Quick! a last poem before I go / off my rocker." With a heavy dose of humor, he makes the poems sound dashed off and even insults what he is doing as a measure of insanity (or maybe just himself).

Here's a typical attack on logic:

the final fatal hour of turpitude and logic demise
is when you miss getting rid of something delouse
is when you don't louse something up

and on morality (strangely, more stringent now than then):

oh shit on the beaches so
what if I did look up your trunks and see it

--the last two from "For the Chinese New Year & for Bill Berkson."

He does love his pop culture references although he is merciless to it, too: "never argue with the movies" ("Fantasy"), "Lana Turner has collapsed!" ("Poem"),

About the only thing he takes seriously is art, honoring it in his own peculiar fashion. From "The Day Lady Died": "she whispered a song along the keyboard / to Mal Waldreon and everyone and I stopped breathing" and from "A Step away from Them": "My heart is in my / pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy."

The poem I'd like to dissect is one of the shortest: one of the dozen or so "Poem" poems. It begins, "Wouldn't it be funny" which many of his poems implicitly begin this way. It continues, "if The Finger had designed us" which calls up God with its capitalization and "finger" (a thing representing the whole) does appear in Exodus with Pharoah and the writing of the ten commandments as well as numerous uses regarding the manner one conducts sacrifices to God. A finger directs, points, and accuses. But there's another use of the finger that will be medically useful for people with the problem I'll describe below.

What if people, O'Hara speculates, don't poop for a week? (Now you may surmise what the finger is for.) People get fatter until Sunday morning and "ploop!" Of course, churches would be larger, noiser and smellier facilities although many would no doubt put the incense to good use.

You could stop there, but it has broader significance. That is what some do, is it not? We go to be cleansed once a week, thinking that's good enough for the rest of the week.

If you read the letters between Frank O'Hara and his publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, you'll note that O'Hara had little to do with the selection and ordering of the poems in his book although he gently insisted (without "insisting") on "Personal Poem" and "For the Chinese New Year & for Bill Berkson." He wasn't even sure about the book title, which Ferlinghetti went with. So the book runs a temporary, working title that had more to do with their construction than any unifying theme. And maybe processs is what should be highlighted in O'Hara's work.

I'll conclude with passages from various poems about life and death. One critic opined that O'Hara's death was no accident. Here are some passages that suggest that may have been a possibility. Remember, though, that these are extracts that happen to form a pattern--not intentionally, but "all jumbled / together like life is a Jumble Shop" ("A Little Travel Diary"):

I only need one bullet preferably silver
if you can't be interesting at least you can be a legend

--Yesterday down at the Canal

willow trees they remind me of Desdemona
I'm so damned literary
and at the same time the waters rushing past remind me of nothing 

I'm so damned empty
what is all this vessel shit anyway
we are all rushing down the River Happy Times...
and we arrive at the beach
the chaff is sand
alone as a tree bumping another tree in a storm
that's not really being alone, is it, signed The Saw

--Poem en Forme de Saw

I just want to go on being subtle and dead like life

--"For the Chinese New Year & for Bill Berkson."

I can't even find a pond small enough
to drown in without being ostentatious

--"Memoir of Sergei O..."

"this various dream of living"
I am alive with you

--"St. Paul and All That"

oh god it's wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much

--"Steps"

I've never felt so wide awake

--"At Kamin's Dance Bookshop"

we are all happy and young and toothless
it is the same as old age
the thing to do is simply continue
is that simple
yes, it is simple because it is the only thing to do
can you do it
yes, you can because it is the only thing to do....
we shall be happy
but shall continue to be ourselves everything continues to be possible
Rene Char, Pierre Reverdy, Samuel Beckett it is possible isn't it
I love Reverdy for saying yes, though I don't believe it.

--"Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul"

I was initially dubious of the claim (whose, I cannot find now) since O'Hara was struck by Jeep on a beach (and O'Hara wrote of dying on the beach), but who knows. Interesting though. I have another essay somewhere on his more famous poems (different computer).

Sense and Sensibility: Movie vs. book, 1995 vs.1811

I rewatched Sense and Sensibility. Yes, I'd read the book, but it's been awhile, so I compared a pivotal moment of the movie to the book. (Yes, this is a spoiler.)

Here is Elinor Dashwood speaking to her sister Marianne, revealing that she, too, has been broken-hearted for months but said nothing.

Movie (1995): 

“What do you know of my heart? What do you know of anything but your own suffering? For weeks, Marianne, I've had this pressing on me without being at liberty to speak of it to a single creature. It was forced on me by the very person whose prior claims ruined all my hope. I have endured her exultations again and again whilst knowing myself to be divided from Edward forever. Believe me, Marianne, had I not been bound to silence I could have provided proof enough of a broken heart, even for you.”

Book (1811):

"I understand you.—You do not suppose that I have ever felt much.—For four months, Marianne, I have had all this hanging on my mind, without being at liberty to speak of it to a single creature; knowing that it would make you and my mother most unhappy whenever it were explained to you, yet unable to prepare you for it in the least.— It was told me,—it was in a manner forced on me by the very person herself, whose prior engagement ruined all my prospects; and told me, as I thought, with triumph.— This person's suspicions, therefore, I have had to oppose, by endeavouring to appear indifferent where I have been most deeply interested;—and it has not been only once;—I have had her hopes and exultation to listen to again and again.— I have known myself to be divided from Edward for ever, without hearing one circumstance that could make me less desire the connection.—Nothing has proved him unworthy; nor has anything declared him indifferent to me.— I have had to contend against the unkindness of his sister, and the insolence of his mother; and have suffered the punishment of an attachment, without enjoying its advantages.— And all this has been going on at a time, when, as you know too well, it has not been my only unhappiness.— If you can think me capable of ever feeling—surely you may suppose that I have suffered NOW. The composure of mind with which I have brought myself at present to consider the matter, the consolation that I have been willing to admit, have been the effect of constant and painful exertion;—they did not spring up of themselves;—they did not occur to relieve my spirits at first.— No, Marianne.—THEN, if I had not been bound to silence, perhaps nothing could have kept me entirely—not even what I owed to my dearest friends—from openly shewing that I was VERY unhappy."

Obviously, the first is short and pithy--truly memorable. Jane Austen was clearly not worried about a short-attention-span public. But there is a major difference.

Part of what makes it memorable is that she tells Marianne off. We love those speeches where someone has the right words at the right time to put someone in their place. Here are the relevant, little digs in the movie: "What do you know of my heart?" [This is subtle, suggesting Marianne's selfishness.] "What do you know of anything but your own suffering? For weeks.... even for you.”

Now those are clear insults. The movie dodges the insults be having Marianne not react, but they are there.

If you look in the book, there are no insults.  Even "You do not suppose that I have ever felt much" which seems to parallel the opening movie sentence, has that "not" in there, tempering the impact of the sentence, which is further tempered by "I understand you," which is to say that Elinor states she knows where her sister is coming from. There is a hint, too, that this is one-directional understanding, but the insult is deeply buried and one could dodge that it is an insult. 

Even to Lucy she pays compliments (but then--in the guise of someone else's opinion--raises herself higher):

"Edward will marry Lucy; he will marry a woman superior in person and understanding to half her sex; and time and habit will teach him to forget that he ever thought another superior to her."

The book maintains Elinor's cautious character, but the movie drops Elinor's character in order to slam Marianne, to get us to cheer Elinor: "You go, girl!"

Each has its merits--one slyly enlists our emotion while the other is more honest. I, too, fell into the trap of loving Elinor's slam, and only curiosity yielded the difference. I suspect this is particularly damning of our culture that we desire this dig, the insult. Elinor achieves her desired result, perhaps with the necessary extra words that may or may not work on the screen, but perhaps we should feel a little shame that we fall in love with the insult over caution.

I just looked up who wrote the screenplay: Emma Thompson. Thompson, by the way, cannot be blamed for giving us the contemporary audience what we wanted.

One thing I didn't get (and maybe I need to reread the book) is why Robert Ferrars still gets the fortune if he marries Lucy, instead of Edward. It seems a matter of plot convenience: Oh, sweet Eddie's available, after all!

The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination: Original Short Fiction for the Modern Evil Genius, edited by John Joseph Adams

In preparing to review this John Joseph Adams anthology, I grappled with what it means to be a "mad scientist." The quintessential anthology was Stuart David Schiff's Mad Scientists. From these and from scientific ethics (at least that was why the subgenre originally arose), I distilled the quintessential elements of the sub-genre--that is, a scientist believes himself working for the greater good though he may not be. It seems that now, at least in reading the anthology under review, we have lost sight of the original point of the trope, which is both good and bad: good, in that we trust scientific endeavors (no questions asked); bad in that science, to be rigorous, requires that we ask questions, not just to challenge our assumptions bound to be behind any study but also to probe our own ethics.

I pointed to this story as the basis of the Mad Scientist trope. (I have other thoughts on the use of the trope here). Some stories just have a scientist doing something crazy, like Arthur C. Clarke's "Big Game Hunt" which has a scientist try to control a giant squid, but it lacks the dynamo that makes the sub-field fascinating.

Most famously, we have Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the scientist who wanted to create life. What was his motivation: to bring back loved ones? to spawn new creatures? to play God? Whatever his motive, I think we can understand it at least to an extent, so long as we isolate his original motive from the outcome. Frankenstein's sin may be his lack of follow-through, or maybe just the attempt itself if you believe the movie versions. Whatever his motive and whatever his sin, it is their contrast that powers Shelley's famed novel. Otherwise, the mad-scientist tale comes off flat.

Some narratives contrast two ethical stances, one or both of which may be problematic (who is the mad or madder scientist?) Sometimes the mad one isn't even the ostensible mad scientist. While the narrator isn't always "mad" or a scientist, the ones who aren't problematic is some fundamental manner dull the narrative.

Many feature unreliable narrators, but that need not necessarily be as we witness in Frankenstein. As you can tell by the title of this anthology, the stories can run from humorous to the serious, but still a contrast between one's goal and ethical outcome make stronger stories. If it's just a gag, the story will fall flat.

• Professor Incognito Apologizes: An Itemized List • short story by Austin Grossman

This is an apology told in the mad scientist's voice, which is this story's primary strength. It feigns at the mad scientist trope to talk as a metaphor for the failure of relationships.

• Father of the Groom • short story by Harry Turtledove

This literalizes a common joke about bad brides. 

• Laughter at the Academy: A Field Study in the Genesis of Schizotypal Creative Genius Personality Disorder (SCGPD) • short story by Seanan McGuire

Interesting thought-piece on the creation of mad scientists.

• Letter to the Editor • short story by David D. Levine

This is a kind of tour-de-force critique of Superman (or Ultimate man) with a call to action. What makes this succeed is the switch on whom we should root for. The ending doesn't carry the same weight, but as a letter-to-an-editor format, it's still impressive for those limitations. 

• Instead of a Loving Heart • short story by Jeremiah Tolbert

A robot, who serves a mad scientist, has to contemplate his existence against the impending arrival of something more intelligent and more powerful than anything that has existed before.

• The Executor • short story by Daniel H. Wilson

A mad scientist has set up a legacy for his descendants, but in order to get it, someone has to answer the riddle within five seconds.

• The Angel of Death Has a Business Plan • short story by Heather Lindsley

The protagonist works with mad scientists on their monologue. Cute.

• Homo Perfectus • short story by Dave Farland

Damien uses pheromones to get in with Asia, but as he approaches what he thinks he wants, he recognizes a subtler and more accurate approach.

• Ancient Equations • short story by L. A. Banks

A mad scientist need not use science but call up Kali, for more than one reason.

• Rural Singularity • short story by Alan Dean Foster

A reporter finds a young girl capable of miracles--scientific ones--but he doesn't quite buy into what he's told. Interesting but ends still questing for significance.

• Captain Justice Saves the Day • short story by Genevieve Valentine

A good secretary is needed to keep these guys in line--not that they'll ever notice.

• The Mad Scientist's Daughter • novelette by Theodora Goss

This was a runner-up for the Locus award. It has inherent drama just from the scenario: a bunch of mad scientists' daughters gather to tell their stories. They are neglected and abused but from so great a remove that the narrative gears are absent. Interesting concept, though.

• The Space Between • novella by Diana Gabaldon

While this sounded interesting, it may require knowledge of the series, which I have yet to explore. It seems interesting, but probably not a good entry point into the series.

• Harry and Marlowe Meet the Founder of the Aetherian Revolution • short story by Carrie Vaughn

Carrie Vaughn gives a thrilling episode in her series with. Although the story can be appreciated alone, it would help the reader to be versed in the background of this dynamic duo. Their relationship seems to be developed elsewhere.

• Blood & Stardust • short story by Laird Barron

Laird Barron has an ugly henchwoman who was been raised as the mad scientist's child but steps out (see also Goss's work, albeit a bit more dynamic)

• A More Perfect Union • short story by L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

L. E. Modesitt, Jr., more than most of the writers here, really works on the trope in "A More Perfect Union" and takes it into an interesting direction: political science. Unfortunately, the writer must have had constraints for the tale isn't as engagingly told as it could be.

• Rocks Fall • short story by Naomi Novik

Naomi Novik's "Rock Fall is more of superhero comic-book villain, but the scenario is the setup is unique. The follow-through didn't fully click.

• We Interrupt This Broadcast • short story by Mary Robinette Kowal

Mary Robinette Kowal's place us empathetically in the mind of a true mad scientist who makes devastating miscalculation. Solid work.

• The Last Dignity of Man • novelette by Marjorie M. Liu

Marjory M Liu's "The Last Dignity of Man" has a similar slipstream which flips Ford's situation (opening and development are fascinating, the closing not so much). 

• The Pittsburgh Technology • short story by Jeffrey Ford

A handful of works don't really engage the trope but still provoke thought. Jeffrey Ford's "The Pittsburgh Technology" tackles a familiar set-up: a loser looks for a better life and is given the opportunity (arguably slipstream--the opening isn't strong, but that ending zings).

• Mofongo Knows • short story by Grady Hendrix

Grady Hendrix's "Mofongo Knows" is really the highlight of the anthology. It takes you inside the decline and "fall" of a dynamic superhero Steve Savage and his foe, the "Gorilla of the Mind, Mofongo," who can influence people and things through the power of his mind. However, Mofongo has been captured by Savage and they've been a sideshow ever since. Mofongo seems to exist merely to have someone to taunt and be taunted by. When Savage passes, the course of Mofongo's life will change--for good or for ill. It starts humorous and becomes surprisingly moving.

• The Food Taster's Boy • short story by Ben H. Winters

The collection closes with strong work by Ben H Winters. A mad scientist conducts a cruel experiment just to witness cinematic results that don't quite pan out as he expected. Interesting (since it's intentionally problematic) thought piece.

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes

While I did both the audiobook and the book, the audiobook helped draw attention to items I might not have noticed otherwise. It repeats one poem and leaves out another. I suspect this is an accident that may be rectified later on.

First, each sonnet is titled "American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin." When I got the book, I just assumed that it was the book title repeated on each page. No, that's the name of every poem. This presents a number of possibilities.

Is this just one poem? The second item (also noticed via the audiobook--discussed below) will appear to bolster this idea. And the acknowledgements don't mention "poems." However, the book title is American Sonnets, plural. Maybe someone forced that title on him? Or maybe the multiple sonnets work as one.

Is each sonnet a revision? You'd think the sonnets would be closer in alignment where the poet got closer to the thing he wanted to write.

A third possibility is that each poem has a generic title as a way of untitling, but clearly it'd be easier to have no title if he'd wanted them untitled.

The fourth and possibly best possibility is that he wants this title to apply seventy different ways to seventy sonnets. I'm not sure that they do except in a few cases. It'd be easier to apply if it didn't insist on the duality of "Past and Future" in each. Maybe it isn't intended to fully apply, but then he could have left out "Past and Future" entirely.

The second thing one notices via the audio (although some may have noticed without the nudge) is that the first-line index is presented as a series of five sonnets, but listed and read as one poem. It's certainly interesting although I'm not yet convinced it works except as a grab-bag of interesting lines. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, of course. It might be a good cue that this series is meant to be read as one poem (see above).

According to the back matter, this was "Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency," which suggests political subject matter, which that is here, but there is also variety--from the personal to the political. Also the tone shifts as well.

The first poem sets the stage for poetry that may not fully recognize what it is or where it's headed:

"The black poet would love to say his century began
With Hughes...but actually
It began with all the poetry weirdos & worriers, warriors....
skittery, [Sylvia Plath] thought her poems were ordinary.
What do you call a visionary who does not recognize
Her vision? Orpheus....
meant I am blind without you. She thought he meant
I never want to see you again. It is possible he meant that, too.

So accident, chance lead the poet to meanings he meant and meanings he didn't know he meant. This may explain the index--a happy experiment of first lines tossed in a stew to see what comes about. It helps that some of those opening lines repeat (regarding "black male hysteria" which is a quote he says in the notes he may be misremembering).

A handful of poems do attack Trump head on. If you're okay with attacking Obama, then you should be fine with attacks on Trump. And vice versa. (Of course, it rarely works that way. It's great when the leaders of opposite party are attacked. Politics is heroin.)

I'm just interested in aesthetics (sound, imagery, line breaks), not the politics. Here are some good lines (or bad ones if you like Trump):

Are you not the color of this country's current threat
Advistory?...
Color of the quartered cantaloupe
Beside the tiers of easily bruised bananas cowering
In towers of yellow skin? And of Caligula's copper-toned
Jabber-jaw jammed with grapes shaped like the eyeballs
of blind people?...
Pomp & pumpkin pompadour,
Are you not a flame of hollow Hellos & Hell nos

The sonnets here (as the last) do not necessarily have turns or voltas. Hayes writes the "Voltas [are] of acoustics, instinct & metaphor. It is not enough."

That last line ends "To love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed." This is the kind of volta that appears here. You might suppose that the "you" is Trump. It may or may not be. It may be the reader. It may be the author. In fact, you might suppose that Trump and past America are the assassins, but later, we learn that the speaker's self may be also involved. This complexity adds the necessary layer of richness to the poem(s):

I tend to repeat my mistakes. I'm a camera
With no cameraman, my own personal
Assistant & assassin.

and

He sings "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note"...
Leroi Jones
Wrote the night before Baraka put a bullet in him.

Note: LeRoi Jones is Amiri Baraka, hence the "song" he sings.

"You assassinate..." is a litany in one sonnet and concludes "You will never assassinate my ghosts." "Probably," he writes in a later sonnet, "our ghosts are allergic to us.... / This bitter earth is a song / Clogging the mouth before it is swallowed or spat out."

He does talk about Christianity and gets the details and essence wrong, but hey, he's mad-libbing to the profit of his poems: "Christianity... / is the story / Of a son whose father is a ghost." Later, he writes, "After blackness was invented / People began seeing ghosts.

The current culture conspires to perpetuate the past, however subtly and unintentionally:

Even the most kindhearted white woman...
may find her tongue...
Chanting n-words... inwardly
Softly before she can catch herself...
what is inward, is absorbed.

Hayes himself uses the term, albeit usually the phonetic version:

It feels sadder when a black person says Nigga...
one whose master has no Lord....
You will always be my nigga, I say to the mirror

The best poem is "In a parallel world where all Dr. Who's / Are black." (I'll link to it if I can find it online.... Not found. You'll have to look it up. It's toward the end.)

Review: The Serpent's Shadow by Daniel Braum

Daniel has constructed a story (call it a "half-novel") that is both simple and exceedingly strange. It opens with this to set the stage and tone which gains significance later):

"My sister’s voice eclipsed whatever it was I had been thinking of. Something about space. And the stars. An image of opal green scales faded from my memory. Regina was right. I was staring out our balcony doors at the Mayan ruin on the shore and I…I must have nodded off. I shifted my head and all I saw was glare and the reflection of our fancy hotel room in the glass."

Dave and his sister, Regina, fly with their parents to Mexico over Christmas to vacation anong the Mayan ruins. Dave runs into Anne Marie, a Guatemalan from Albany, attending SUNY but visiting Mexico like Dave. Dave is immediately smitten:

"a tall girl in blue jean cut-offs and a tight shirt. The shirt was one of those black t-shirts with the white sleeves.... She was wearing one of those palm hats from the guy at the curb and unruly dark curls stuck out in all directions from beneath it.... I couldn’t look away even though she was looking right at me and was totally going to notice. She looked over her shoulder as if expecting someone to follow through the exit. Then she glanced around the crowd, smiled and walked in my direction. I guessed she was about my age but something about the confidence with which she carried herself made her seem so much older than everyone milling about, jostling for position in line and the crowd."

They hook up and travel with her sister and fiance to the Mayan ruins where they meet a guide whose ideas of contemporary and ancient Mayans are mystical.

This is where it gets strange. The story primes us for horror. We're given Love Story A, which slides into Horror Story A, and morphs into Horror Story B (and possibly Love Story B). This isn't to say that Horror Story B wasn't lurking in the background all along, but I, at least, was surprised where the story lead.

The flavor of the tale is very much Lucius Shepard at his best (the 80s and early 90s) when Shepard used Latin America as a dark, inexorable, supernatural thrum, edging his readers closer to the ineffable.

This tale could have been tighter with more character development although the characters are etched with deft strokes: "Regina made that exasperated look she reserved for Mom and Dad’s more embarrassing parental displays such as blatantly hoarding extra bags of peanuts on the plane ride down here."

Overall, it's a satisfying read. Horror fiends will be pleased.

An Emotionally Complex Grief: The Father by Sharon Olds

I brought this book with me to read while I cared for my father but couldn't get through it, at first, since I didn't want her concept of her father to interfere with mine--she wrote in the opening poem, "The Waiting":

he knew he was dying,
he seemed to approach it as a job to be done

and

he had
a way of holding still to be looked at,
as if a piece of sculpture could
sense the gaze which was running over it

In a few lines, Olds captures her father's character--impassive, perhaps unobtainable, statuesque, even godlike with the final overture to the Biblical book of Genesis. While vivid, hers shared little with mine, so I set hers aside until I'd finished my own set.

She has a quirky motif of her being inside her father, and her father inside her. In one, it reads as if she saw herself as a homunculus riding in her father's gonads; later, it's half of herself. The best of these is "Nullipara" which Kindle readers highlighted as well. She points out how her father stops a conversation to cut dangling string from her nightie. She closes:

He knows he will live in me
after he is dead, I will carry him like a mother,
I do not know if I will ever deliver.

"The Pulling" ends similarly--"as if my father could live and die / safely inside me"--although this one is emotionally strange and more complex. His various loss of functions somehow makes her God. The God is another odd motif ringing in these pages.

There's a submerged, lingering sense that she may not fully know her father. He puts a hand over her mouth when she's sobbing and she equates this with an Electra-complex image. Perhaps more is going on or has gone on than is presently on these pages, and maybe Freud hit the mark for some, but it certainly creates an alien vibe. It's hard to tell if it's meant as a metaphor, literal desire, desire consummated, or stirring the pot (although the those doesn't really suggest the lattermost). To keep this blog post PG instead of PG-13 or so, I'll leave off quoting other passages (not graphic, just odd--although maybe this is common).

Touching moments dot the book, especially when he's passing and just passed. She has a whole poem dedicated to "His Smell" and "The Dead Body" mirrors some of the attachment I still felt toward my father: "I hated it, after he died, that we would sometimes/leave him alove in the room." From "The Last Day":

I
moved his head to set it straight on the pillow,
it moved so easily, and his ear
gently crushed for the last hour,
unfolded in the air.

Although mixed feelings appear, towards the end, hate rears. It seems leavened with love, later, but these raw patches come up where anger flares. Note, though, in "Letter to My Father at 40,000 feet" this is just after she sees a salesman on a plane who looks like her father, whom she wants to hug:

when I'm dead I will be
facing you, my non-self
aiming this ardent non-love
steadily toward you. I guess I am saying
I hate you, too

"Waste Sonata" discusses more of this in terms of waste: "I love the terms of foulness. I have learned / to take pleasure from speaking of pain."

I saved the poem I had the most complex reaction to for last--"Death and Morality"--because it so angered me I put the book down. Was I still too close to my own father's death then? I'm not sure. After waiting a few month, I was able to read it.  It begins "My father's dying is not evil. / It is not good and it is not evil." I had to inhabit it awhile to figure out my initial agitation. It could have been me, of course, but who suggested that some morality was involved? Is the poem an indictment of those who are angry when a loved one dies? angry at God, at doctors, at whatever or whomever? I'm not sure. Anyway, what was interesting to me was my own reaction. Does this make the poem good or bad, evil or indifferent? Read it for yourself and decide.

One Way through Grief: Without by Donald Hall

Having recently lost a loved one and tried to capture it, I turned to anthologies and other poets to see how they handled it. The single poems in anthologies often inadequate, so it was in books I found the greater satisfaction. Hall's Without captures some of the magnitude and breadth of it. Sharon Old's The Father is another one which I intend to discuss which holds yet another perspective. There seem to be as many ways to confront grief as there are poets and those beloveds who pass before them.

One of the best short poems is probably the title poem, which lists all the things the speaker is now without now that he has lost his wife. It is conveyed without capitalization or punctuation--a long breathless (apart from line breaks) rattling of loss:

hours days weeks months weeks days hours
the year endured without punctuation
february without ice winter sleet
snow melted recovered but nothing
without thaw although cold streams hurtled
no snowdrop or crocus rose no yellow
no red leaves of maple without october

It's as though the speaker struggles describe the thing he cannot describe by describing the absence in a compressed jumble of thought. As you can see here, there's even a sense of compressed or rapid time.

The other strong short poem is "Blues for Polly"--Polly being the speaker's mother-in-law who is dying at the same time as his wife is dying. It has great scope running from an impoverished but culturally rich background, to their last meeting, to a photograph found when she passed away:

Polly was singing
with a band in a Chicago nightclub--
eighteen years old, pretty,
the minister's ambitious daughter
just out of high school, excitement
and terror enlarging her eyes
as she made her sorrowful noise
to the Lord in a smoky room
of gamblers, gangsters, and girls.
She sang blue: soulful, erotic,
skeptical, knowing everything
turns out bad in the end.

The word "ambitious" plays a larger role with its root origin "to go around" which joins it to other ambi- words like ambiguous and ambidextrous and we see a woman here who is stretching into what some might see as opposing territories and ends "knowing everything" (which of course gets twisted to an entirely different meaning by the last line).

Grief in Hall's book cuts from a fragmentary cloth, stitched together at lengths. The best piece, if it is a piece, is the patchwork known as "Her Long Illness" which is labeled as being "continued at intervals"--that is, if I follow correctly, the long poem is broken up by other poems. The clue seems to be a kind of fuzzy asterisk or pollen that precedes each unnamed poem. But then, "Last Days" has the same preceding image. You could argue either way, but for me, "Last Days" is similar in tone and presentation, so it's more of a marker or demarcation within "Her Long Illness."

There's nothing especially powerful about any one part. In fact, each part might feel like an interesting if weak poem, such as the wife spelling out "L E U K E M I A" with the refrigerator magnets. Some pieces don't seem to fit like the speaker's dream of choking his wife, which one can read into in a number of ways (anger at her imminent departing), but for me it captures an honest attempt at rendering the irrational grasping our minds make in that state. A rational reason for the dream's placement in the book may not exist. What glues the work together is this continuous piece of grief broken when other parts enter the picture and returns again and again until it's finally over.

I read the book in paper and on my Kindle. The latter is a great tool to find out what lines stuck out for other readers. They loved the passages where the speaker tries to do something for his wife but cannot: "Inside him / some four-year-old / understood that if he was good... / she would not leave him." Another was realizing that he should have been contented before the diagnosis, so he should be contented now before her death. And "Dying is simple.... / What's worst is... the separation." "Letter with No Address", "Letter in the New Year", "Midwinter Letter" and "Letter after a Year" also had several passages readers wanted to remember. Sometimes these lines are memorable, sometimes imagistic, but almost always emotionally potent even if it's something that's been said before. Whether they should do this or not is a matter of a different debate, but writers can lose sight of what's important to readers.

Quick Notes on Shakespeare and (Re)interpretations

A few thoughts I had on rewatching the famed dramaturge. These aren't Cliff Notes, but maybe there's an idea for an essay in here.

MacBeth

I looked up Lady MacBeth to find an actress and got "Movies about marriage." Hmm. I don't recall the MacBeths being marriage role models. They are very devoted to each other in terms of their careers.

Strangely, I have always loved and hated MacBeth. So many wonderful things marred by the MacBeths' too quick surrender to insanity.

King Henry V

• Great lines
• moving and intriguingly devised scenes (king moves disguised to hear what his troops think)
• yet an amazingly dull play. That doesn't seem possible, but it is so. Seems likely a large-scale structural issue. Basically a guy goes to war and wins. Hmm.
• There's a "meta" frame story where it talks about itself as a play. Methinks this is merely to set the stage. I don't see how it adds to the story to talk about itself as a play. Change my mind.
• You can woo a stranger to marry within a day? Maybe it helps if you're a conquering king

Much Ado about Nothing

• Fantastically well constructed
• Re: the Title few today would find the lack of virginity an impediment (although the night before a marriage is poor timing), but really, even just a 100 years ago, wouldn't it have been an impediment still for many?
• As such, with changing mores, will this story be outdated one day soon? viewers unable to connect?

Taming the Shrew 

Shakespeare isn't progressive and no progressive should read him. Clearly he should be kicked out of the cannon. He writes about the 1% and favors the subjugation of women. Fie on him! Hopefully, word about this criminal will spread so we can stop reading him and watching this no-talent word-smythe.

I suspect he isn't racist although it's hard to say. He often sets plays in different countries and not as a mockery.

Where do people in England come from when they pronounce "nothing" as "nuffin"? They are exceedingly difficult to understand. I canna unnerstan nuffin dey say. We non-Englanders need translators.

Cymbeline

A tragedy where the main characters don't die? Maybe Shakespeare was rebelling against form. Nice change. Surely, I read it before as I thought I'd read all of Shakespeare's tragedies. Surely, I'd seen the movie as well. Somehow I didn't remember them.

Good line: "Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered."

The movie takes liberties. One line I misheard at first was "Of God we ask one favor that we may be forgiven from what we presumed to know," which fits the movie. The line is actually Emily Dickinson's, which fits her poem better than Shakespeare. I have no idea why it's in the movie as it doesn't seem to be questioning God as Dickinson is. Here's Dickinson's poem:

Of God we ask one favor,
That we may be forgiven --
For what, he is presumed to know --
The Crime, from us, is hidden --
Immured the whole of Life
Within a magic Prison
We reprimand the Happiness
That too competes with Heaven.

Hamlet

One thing I didn't remember was that Hamlet didn't want his uncle to go to heaven, so he waited to kill him. It seems strange to ponder. Today people want to kill people in church. Does that send them to heaven? Is the murderer trying to do the victims a favor, or does that make today's murderers nonbelievers? On the other hand, how strange to think that if we die one moment one might make it to heaven and in another moment, not. Actually, I don't think most believers think that, do they?

Maybe I read this passage and didn't fully understand what the big deal was--just Hamlet being wishy-washy about whether he was going to do it or not. Fascinating quandary though. I can't recall a similar concern in the literary arts.

Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead  (Tom Stoppard)

Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead is so closely related to Hamlet that I think you'd have to watch the latter then the former. In fact, to be played well, you'd have to have Hamlet actors who'd just done Hamlet do Stoppard's RAGAD for it to feel the most natural since there'd be a tendency to play the characters as if the formerly primary characters as if they were secondary, but they can't be if we are to intrude upon Rose and Guild in the Hamlet play as they do. I expected to love Stoppard's play more than I did. But there are some good lines. My favorite is this:

"There must have been a moment at the beginning where we could have said no. But somehow we missed it."

Poetic Reframing in Tony Hoagland's Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty (analysis)

Tony Hoagland often takes an event and flips our understanding of it as he writes in "Big Grab":

We live in that time that he predicted.
Nothing means what it says,
and it says it all the time.

One of my favorites, "Confinement", presents a series of reframings. The first is a turbaned dictator replaced by a suited dictator, which talking heads claim as better. Presented here are not only the confinement of the dictator's people, but also our own culture's perspective.

Then we follow the speaker to a brother-in-law's funeral where the speaker is still attached to his wife--at least enough that he attends her brother's funeral and there's a wonderful line that shows the emotional complexity/confinement:

a man I would like to call
her future second ex-husband.

Why he says this isn't exactly clear. He has a "ridiculous urge" to "tell her again that it wasn't [his] fault." Does he still long for her then, confined by his longing to be with her again? Or is he wishing this other husband free of his confinement? Or the ex-wife to free from the confinement of husbands?

The poem ends with watching protesters TV:

I thought that I could understand

what they were protesting about,
what had made them so angry:

they wanted to be let out of the TV set;
they had been trapped in there, and they wanted out.

This isn't just a superficial reframing of people on TV as if they were literally trapped inside the TV, but also the confinement of one's own perspective as well as the speaker on the page who is also protesting.

Another favorite is "The Story of the Father" where a father gets home from the funeral of his son who committed suicide. The father burns the son's pictures to the sadness and anger of his wife and daughter. The reframing takes the poem into unexpected territory:

it is the old intelligence of pain
that I admire:

how it moves around inside him like smoke;

how it knows exactly what to do with human beings
to stay inside them forever.

"I Have News for You" and "Dialectical Materialism" both reframe poems to take intellectualism to absurd lengths. Respectively: "There are people who do not see a broken playground swing / as a symbol of ruined childhood" and "I was thinking about dialectical materialism at the supermarket."

However, the same kind of over-intellectualizing occurs in "At the Galleria" where commercialism leads to Americans loneliness. There might be a case to be made, but the poem has left the logic chasm too wide to leap (which isn't to say that some might be predisposed to agreeing and loving the leap, nonetheless).

Two rather moving reframings are "My Father's Vocabulary" and "Rhythm and Blues". The first follows some shifts in vocabulary over time ("I was conceived in the decade / between 'Far out' and 'Whatever' ") to talk about the startlingly effective demonstration of how our parents can go intellectually retrograde in time.

The set up in "Rhythm and Blues" is the strangeness of "sitting in [Rolf Jordahl's] backyard / after his funeral last year." They are dividing his belongings and the speaker gets a shirt to remind himself of his friend. Hoagland makes the unfortunate use of "touch myself" which I don't think is meant to be sexual. In fact, I think this final moment suggests that he switches from thinking of his friend's to his own mortality--however, I'm not sure the poem fully sets this up.

Two poems treat class and poverty, but only one was effective. "The Allegory of the Temp Agency" may have truth, but it stands at too far of a remove. The natural question is "well, what do you know of it?" "Sentimental Education", however, grounds the speaker immediately in his father's showing how to eat worms found under the bark of a tree. This takes off into the unexpected direction of the working world:

you were right! I ate a lot of stuff
far worse than bug."

And I was eaten, I was eaten,
I was picked up
and chewed
and swallowed

This may not be the most effective ending, but it works.

Note: this final section discusses poems that deal with"the birds and the bees" in rather generic, PG terms. 

In "Not Renouncing" Hoagland's speaker does not renounce his urge to imagine himself in procreative encounters:

I am not bragging
and I'm not renouncing....

I thought I had to change my life or give up,
but I didn't.

Lucky for Hoagland, he has passed away as he might be convicted for thought-crimes.

In "Romantic Moment" the obvious contrast is what animals and insects do to attract mates and engage in the procreative urge, which has little to no bearing on how humans go about it, yet it inspires them to do just that, but that's not the only reframing here although it's certainly the obvious one.

she remarks that in the relative context or tortoises and iguana, 

human males seem to be actually rather expressive.

This seems to suggest the female lover thinks men rather unexpressive, but maybe viewing them through the lens of other species, they are. The speaker's response is almost a non-sequitur and represents a mini-reframing all by itself:

And I say that female crocodiles really don't receive 

enough credit for their gentleness.

Of course, we'd see a crocodile as violent and the speaker asks us to see their violence as gentle. That this generates the response it does--her invitation to the bedroom--suggests she does find his gentle violence as a pique, perhaps a challenge and compliment.

But the final lines suggest the final reframing is not quite what either claimed: It is "personal, hidden, and human."

What's to love in "The Boys"?

Why did I watch the first season and look forward to the next? Moral ambiguity.

Spoilers follow, but as few as possible.
Hughie Campbell, average John Doe of the tech world, is standing at the curb with his ordinary girlfriend, making their next big move in their relationship when A-Train zips by. Hughie is holding his girlfriend's hands. Nothing more.

A-Train tells the cameras that he had to prevent a robbery, but it turns out that is incorrect, according to a Fed, Billy Butcher, who learns that Hughie has not yet signed his non-disclosure worth $45,000. So a major superhero, who is supposed to be good, kills an innocent bystander and lies about it.

He has a reason, which we learn a little at a time. Meanwhile, Hughie joins forces with Butcher to learn more about what happened, which gets Butcher and Hughie embroiled in their own moral quandaries although Butcher has been at this for quite a while.

Madelyn Stillwell, the manager of "The Seven" superheroes, has to maintain not just the reputations of the superheroes, but also to enhance them financially.

Starlight, the newest addition to The Seven, learns that her childhood idols aren't so squeaky clean. Somehow she manages to dodge all of the moral ambiguity mud slung around. It will be interesting to see if they will hose her with moral ambiguity or leave the too shiny cellophane on.

Besides the religion angle that should be more realistic or cleaned off, my only gripe about the show is that there are only eight episodes.

The show is available on Amazon Prime.