Fragmentary Utterances

I'm too busy at the moment to write at any length about a bunch of things I'd like to write at length about, so instead I will make fragmentary utterances and hope that they suffice for the moment...

Fragmentary Utterance #1: I've been reading through some of the stories in Elizabeth Hand's new collection, Saffron and Brimstone, and they are the sorts of stories that make me feel like all my adjectives are inadequate: evocative, lovely, beguiling, masterful -- yes, they are all that, but more, and differently, and not exactly, and... The collection is subtitled "strange stories" and I think it's both perfect and wrong, because it's not that they're just strange, or that strange encapsulates all that they are. Instead, it's more a kind of placeholder, a way of saying "this, at least, is something", and it's true, because they are strange, but marvelous, too, and...

Fragmentary Utterance #2: The new 3-CD album from Tom Waits, Orphans, is full of treasures and oddities, and though I've been listening to it continuously for a week, I am only beginning to get a grasp of my reaction to it, because it's just so full of, for lack of a better descriptor, stuff. I'm a sucker for Waits's ballads especially, so the middle disc, titled "Bawlers", is the one I find, on the whole, most compelling, but there are unique and addictive songs on the other two discs, "Brawlers" and "Bastards". The album as a whole is worth listening to simply for the variety of material it contains -- everything from experiments with sound to covers of such songs as "Sea of Love" and "Goodnight, Irene" (and two from the Ramones) to spoken-word pieces. It's a grab-bag, sure, and the entire collection is likely to appeal only to those of us who find just about anything Waits does to be at least vaguely interesting, but there are a good number of songs here that are just so beautiful they should have a wider appeal than much of the other material: "Tell it to Me", "Long Way Home", "Fannin Street", "Home I'll Never Be", and at least a few others. I'm particularly pleased to have the two songs Waits created for the soundtrack album to Dead Man Walking on a Waits album, because they are among my favorites from his entire career, and for reasons I can't quite pinpoint, I've always wanted them to be surrounded by other Waits tunes.

Fragmentary Utterance #3: I watched the movie Sophie Scholl: The Final Days last night, and have mostly conflicting feelings about it. For one thing, I've read just about everything in English about Scholl and the White Rose group, and even wrote a short play about them when I was in college, and this knowledge makes me hypercritical of any fictional representations of the people and events, because they're easy to turn into sentimental hooey. I haven't watched Michael Verhoeven's 1982 film about the subject in many years, but my memory of it is of a movie that is mostly accurate historically, but that emphasizes the action-adventure elements of the story. Sophie Scholl has this tendency as well, and I'm not sure it's a bad tendency -- there are certainly adventurous moments in the story -- but the newer film changes tone so much that it becomes jarring. Moments of excitement with kitschy dramatic music alternate with truly powerful, intimate scenes. Many of the characters come across as caricatures, but Julia Jentsch as Sophie is often excellent. Some of the interest in the movie stems from its script's use of transcripts of interrogations discovered in East Germany in the early 1990s, but the re-enactment of these scenes seemed to verge on the tasteless, because something in me screams against having actors pretend to be particular people in particular historical situations such as this -- perhaps I'm too much of a Brechtian at heart to ever be satisfied with historical dramas that don't admit their artificiality. And the ending, in which the executions are re-enacted, seemed as grotesque and wrongheaded to me as the wretched sequence in Munich where a sex scene is intercut with the killing of the kidnappers. There is no intercutting as Sophie gets guillotined, but the filmmakers would have achieved so much more if they had shown a bit of restraint in what they chose to represent.

Fragmentary Utterance #4: What SF writers would you recommend to the Library of America? Oh, I don't know. The suggestions Ron Hogan got from various folks mostly seem sensible to me. A Carol Emshwiller retrospective. Alfred Bester's first two novels, plus most of his short stories. A selection of Theodore Sturgeon short stories and some of the novels. Cordwainer Smith. Damon Knight's selected stories and criticism. Tiptree's collected stories. Delany, definitely. (If I were selecting Delany, I'd choose some of the short stories, "Empire Star", Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection, Nova, Trouble on Triton, and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand for one big volume; Dhalgren, and Hogg for another; all the Neveryon books for another; Heavenly Breakfast, The Motion of Light in Water, Atlantis: Three Tales, and various interviews for another; and as much of the remaining nonfiction as possible for another. Yes, a 5-volume set of Delany for The Library of America. A fine thought. [Yes, somebody is procrastinating working on his thesis about Delany again....])

Popular posts from this blog

"Stone Animals" by Kelly Link

If Kelly Link isn't the best short story writer in the U.S., then she's the equal of whoever is. I first came to this conclusion a couple of years ago when I read her story "Lull" in Conjunctions: 39 , and I am absolutely certain of it now that I have read "Stone Animals" in Conjunctions: 43 . (Of course, I've also read her collection Stranger Things Happen , but, much as I admire it, nothing in that book is as breathtaking as the stories she has written since it appeared, particularly the two Conjunctions stories.) "Stone Animals" both employs and parodies the basic elements of suburban psychological realism, the sort of scaffolding John Cheever and so many other writers hung their words and laundry on: a family buying a house and moving into it, a father commuting to a desultory job in the city, a pregnant wife who is uncertain about her marriage, suspicions and allegations of adultery, existentially anxious children, a controlling b
Read more

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

If you expect Never Let Me Go to be about cloning, you will be disappointed. If you expect to be able to read it as a logical science fiction novel, one that extrapolates an alternate world that makes sense, you will find much to grumble about. You will not be satisfied. You will be annoyed, even bored. You will have missed the point. Cloning is a MacGuffin that Kazuo Ishiguro uses to create symbolic situations and characters that coalesce in a powerful vision of life. The symbolism doesn't quite reach the level of allegory, because it's difficult to assign definite meanings to each scene and person, but nonetheless it quickly becomes difficult not to think about certain themes: mortality, love, fate, memory, art, nature. Each paragraph either illustrates or expands one of these themes. In the first half of the book, the ideas the novel personifies do not gain a lot of emotion, but by the second half of the book the characters have become familiar, their personalitie
Read more

The Penny Poet of Portsmouth by Katherine Towler

     Dawn again, and I switch off the light. On the table a tattered moth shrugs its wings.      I agree. Nothing is ever quite what we expect it to be. —Robert Dunn Katherine Towler's deeply affecting and thoughtful portrait of Robert Dunn is subtitled "A Memoir of Place, Solitude, and Friendship". It's an accurate label, but one of the things that makes the book such a rewarding reading experience is that it's a memoir of struggles with place, solitude, and friendship — struggles that do not lead to a simple Hallmark card conclusion, but rather something far more complex. This is a story that could have been told superficially, sentimentally, and with cheap "messages" strewn like sugarcubes through its pages. Instead, it is a book that honors mysteries. You are probably not familiar with the poetry of Robert Dunn , nor even his name, unless you happen to live or have lived in or around Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Even then, you may not
Read more

"Loot" by Nadine Gordimer

I've intended to write about Nadine Gordimer's very short story "Loot" for years, ever since I first read it in The New Yorker , and for some reason I actually thought I had written a post here about it.  I recommended the story to a friend a few days ago and intended to include a link to my post about the story when, after a bit of searching, I realized I'd never written the post.  Now I will fix that mistake. From the first sentence, "Loot" is a story about time and history, about legends and imagination.  "Once upon our time," it tells us, there was a Great Event -- the greatest earthquake every recorded, the greatest of all measured "apocalyptic warnings".  Not only is it a Great Event (indeed, the Greatest of such events), but it is ours: we possess it. The second paragraph details the effects of this greatest event of ours.  Most giant earthquakes at sea produce floods and tsunamis, but not ours -- our special earthquake d
Read more

Reflections on Samuel Delany's Dark Reflections

At the Los Angeles Review of Books , I have a new essay about Samuel R. Delany's 2007 novel Dark Reflections , which is about to be released in a new and slightly revised edition by Dover Books . Here's a taste: In many ways,  Dark Reflections  is a narrative companion to Delany’s 2006 collection of essays, letters, and interviews,  About Writing . In the introduction to that book, Delany says that its varied texts share common ideas, primary among them ideas about the art of writing fiction, the structure of the writer’s socio-aesthetic world both in the present and past, and “the way literary reputations grow — and how, today, they don’t grow.” The book is mainly, though not exclusively, aimed at aspiring writers. It provides some advice on craft, but it circles back most insistently to questions of value, and especially to questions of the difference between  good writing  and  talented writing  — and what it means, practically and materially, for a writer to shape a li
Read more

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell's debut novel What Belongs to You  is one of the most celebrated and successful gay novels of 2016. Its success seems to me both odd and gratifying. It is a book that garnered the attention of the literati, and not just the gay literati, though it certainly has that (Edmund White blessed it with a blurb). It received praiseful notice from nearly all the major literary institutions in the U.S. (and elsewhere). It is a remarkable novel, but were I a literary agent or publisher, much of what makes the novel remarkable would have caused me to assume it would not sell very well and would find, at best, a niche audience. (This is perhaps reason #28,302 that it's good I'm neither a publisher nor an agent!) I don't know the sales figures for What Belongs to You , but it hit the LA Times  bestseller list for a couple weeks, got tremendous review coverage, and often seemed to be among the books of the moment — I traveled a lot during 2016, and nearly everyw
Read more

The Snowtown Murders

The Snowtown Murders  (aka Snowtown ) inevitably draws comparisons to another brutal and disturbing Australian crime movie, Animal Kingdom , with which it shares some general plot elements and stylistic moves (both films were shot by Adam Arkapaw ). But where  Animal Kingdom  shows one young man's struggle to stay innocent in a family of thieves and murderers, Snowtown  depicts the power of a small-time messiah to employ hatred as an excuse for torture and murder. Both films focus their narrative on a quiet (eventually traumatized) adolescent surrounded by monsters, but Animal Kingdom,  for all its virtues, is primarily a drama of demons and angels fighting for a soul, whereas Snowtown  is less allegorical, less schematic, and more deeply disturbing. (A more meaningful comparison than with Animal Kingdom  would be with  Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer .) Though in some ways Snowtown  is the story of how Jamie Vlassakis goes from being an apparently gentle and unassuming t
Read more