Tag: Carmen Machado

Reading 2015: February

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Travel and illness slowed me down a bit this month. I had a lovely trip back to Iowa City, several less lovely trips to doctors’ offices and med labs, and a fully unlovely bout with strep throat and fever. As such, a lot of my downtime was spent on mentally undemanding television rather than books. Thanks to having read nine books last month, and by leaning towards graphic novels and shorter collections, I’m still on pace for 100 for the year. But I’ll have to pick it up in March (which was my best month last year).

  1. Tenth of December by George Saunders – As I expected from how celebrated it was when it came out, this collection is Saunders at the height of his incomparable game. The standout story for me was “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” a science fiction tale with as nuanced a look at poverty as any I’ve read. Other memorable pieces were “Escape from Spiderhead,” which I’ve previously quoted on this blog, and the titular “Tenth of December,” which I had read before on it’s initial publication in The New Yorker. I also found myself tearing up occasionally, notably during the story “Exhortation,” which adopts the voice of an abusive person in power exhorting propriety when the request itself is really a plea for absolution, one that carries with it the sense that, just by making the plea, absolution is earned. The subtext, “I’m hurting you, but I know I’m hurting you and I feel bad about it, so that makes it sort of okay, right?” is one that reminds me of some of the more severe times I have found my trust misplaced, and so his fictional evocation of it hit hard.
  2. The Sculptor by Scott McCloud – There are few things I enjoy more than huge, trope-aware graphic novels that use narratives of waxing and waning interpersonal relationships to explore complex, clever themes. Books like Alex Robinson’s Box Office Poison, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, Jeff Lemire’s Essex County, and David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp. This new book by McCloud, his first fiction in 20 years, hits somewhere near the center of that aesthetic target. The main character is David Smith, a down-and-out, nothing-left-to-lose sculptor offered a deal by the personification of death: he can have the power to perfectly sculpt anything in the world using just his imagination and bare hands, but he will die in 200 days. What follows is a story of an artist interrogating what he values about art and life, and how his answers change when their relation to mortality is concrete rather than abstract. The story frequently seems only a step or two away from being overwrought, but for me it avoided ever tumbling over that edge. The art is a consistent pleasure, the story heartfelt. This is a completely earnest book, which redeemed narrative moves that I might have found cliched from another author.
  3. Get In Trouble by Kelly Link – I had read four of the nine stories in this collection before, because I am nowhere near patient enough to wait until the books come out to read Kelly Link. I’ve bought entire anthologies just because they contained a new short story of hers. It’s hard to pick standout stories from this one, because everything Kelly writes is so weird and fascinating. But “The Summer People” is a rare treatment of fairies that I don’t find annoying, “Secret Identity” and “Origin Story” are superhero fiction like nothing you’ve ever read before, and “Light” is basically what Welcome to Night Vale would be if it were exactly as crazy and yet somehow subtle at the same time. This is fiction to get lost in and come back changed. (A funny thing: I write these little capsule reviews after I finish the book, and post them at the end of the month. Since I wrote the preceding, my friend Carmen Machado has published a much more in-depth review for the Los Angeles Review of Books, in which she expressed an almost identical sentiment to my last one.)
  4. The Deep by John Crowley – Earlier this year I started reading Crowley’s World Fantasy Award-winning novel Little, Big. I got about 80 pages in, and thought the writing was great but the story mildly irritating. It seemed coy, like it was likely to be 500 pages of tiny glimmers of fairyland shining through the worn fabric of the mundane world, which I was not in the mood for. (As mentioned previously, fairies are a hard sell for me.) I’ll likely revisit it someday soon, but decided instead to go back to Crowley’s first novel, something more SFnal and thus more aligned with my aesthetic preferences. My copy of The Deep carries a glowing blurb from Ursula Le Guin, which makes sense; it has a lot structurally in common with Left Hand of Darkness. The writing is crisp and frequently lyrical, and the plot skips along at great velocity. Political schemes and reversals of fortune that would unfurl over 200 pages in, say, Game of Thrones happen in mere paragraphs, and the whole book is less than 200 pages long. Crowley also does a fascinating thing where early in the novel we are introduced to what strikes the reader as a primitive cosmology destined to be overturned by the visitor from space, but in the end, this cosmology is basically correct, and it’s the reader’s assumptions that are unfounded. But while I found this book intellectually interesting, I remain somehow passive to it. I feel the same way about a lot of Le Guin’s work, too: clearly brilliant, inspires great admiration, but fails to enflame my imagination the way my favorite fiction does.
  5. The Wilds by Julia Elliott – I was not previously familiar with Julia Elliott, but this was recommended by Janalyn Guo, who’s a fan of her stories. As am I, now. This is an excellent collection, and one that seems to be mostly off the radar of the Spec Fic community, despite many of these stories being science fiction. (I’d say entirely off the radar except the VanderMeers did publisher her in the inaugural Best American Fantasy.) It’s very “literary” science fiction, by which I mean that these are interiority-driven stories with ambiguous endings that resist plot resolution–cadences that are more common to realist fiction than SF. But here’s an incomplete list of the speculative conceits in this book: powered exoskeletons for the elderly, nanotechnological cures for dementia, urban society overrun by wild dogs, a biological regeneration spa that medicinally afflicts clients with suppurating infections, a mutated form of toxoplasmosis that causes internet addiction, a robot subjected to iterated biochemical simulations of love as its language database is constantly upgraded. She has a novel coming out soon, The New and Improved Romie Futch, which I’ll definitely be reading.
  6. Mail Order Bride by Mark Kalesniko – This graphic novel was bad in ways that make it tempting to psychoanalyze the author. The titular mail order bride is a Korean woman who moves to Canada to marry a 39-year-old, comic book store owning, geek loving, jock hating, virginal manchild. Obviously, he has an Asian fetish too, and spends two-thirds of the book volubly exoticizing her and complimenting her on stereotypical Asian traits she doesn’t actually possess. While his racist fetishizing and disinclination to learn anything personal about his new wife is positioned as a character flaw and the main driver of the book’s conflict, this criticism is undercut by the fact that the narrative never reveals any of his wife’s actual identity. This might work if the story was from the husband’s point of view, but it’s primarily from hers, and while she grows to hate her husband’s blunt objectification, “Doesn’t enjoy being objectified” is very nearly the only thing the reader learns about her that her husband doesn’t. In the end, after a violent confrontation, they are both too cowardly to leave each other, and persist in a loveless marriage. This unambitious, repetitive story is perpetrated at such length and with such little subtlety that I came away feeling like the whole thing was an act of self-flagellation. Looking around online, most of the contemporary reviews of this book are positive, which I can attribute only to the OGN readers of 2001 being so eager to celebrate the “literary” within the medium that even a work this meager–but with nudity and without triumphalism–would be feted as mature.
  7. Trash by Dorothy Allison – I had read about half of this before, and finally finished it. It’s a largely autobiographical collection of stories about poverty, abuse, and 1980s-era lesbian culture. The first story, “River of Names,” about how differences of class and traumatic history separate two women in love, was among the more memorable assigned in my first college creative writing class. My other favorite one was “Violence Against Women Begins At Home,” about schisms within progressive communities and how people grow apart. Some of the stories didn’t strongly grab me narratively, though I understood their importance as part of the thematic and autobiographical project of the whole. Tonally, I was more able to appreciate what Dorothy Allison was doing by having read Alison Bechdel’s Dykes To Watch Out For, the early parts of which depict a contemporaneous community similar to the ones in Trash (and were also published by Firebrand Books).
  8. Arcadia by Tom Stoppard – I’ve now read this book every year for the last three. I guess I like it.

Read My Clever Friends

I have many of them, and they just keep on writing things you should read. Also I’m instituting an new tag, My Friends Write Things, to link all these posts together. I’ve propagated it back through my archives, so clicking that will lead you to a trove of work from my most-loved people.

Fiction

  • The Husband Stitch” – Carmen Machado, one of the best fantasists writing today, in Granta with a gorgeous story inspired by Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.
  • Mothers” – Carmen Machado again, because she is a force of nature. This time in Interfictions, with a story about two women in a broken relationship who make a baby. Carmen has put personal experience at the service of fiction with astonishing force and efficacy. You can read a little about the writing of this story on her blog.
  • Becoming” – Anna Noyes in Guernica with a story from the point of view of a chimpanzee being raised as a human. I was lucky enough to see an early draft of this memorable story in workshop, and am thrilled it’s found a home.
  • Quality of Descent” – Megan Kurashige in Lightspeed with a story about a man meeting a woman who definitely has wings, and may or may not be able to fly.
  • Ideal Head of a Woman” – Kelly Luce in Midnight Breakfast with a story about a museum employee who has an unusual relationship with a piece of sculpture.

Nonfiction

  • The Gospel of Paul” – Ariel Lewiton writing in the LA Review of Books with a profile of bookseller and new author Paul Ingram. In addition to being a gorgeous portrait of a fascinating man, this is also the best record of the culture of Iowa City that I’ve read.
  • Did Eastern Germany Experience an Economic Miracle?” – Ben Mauk writing in the New Yorker about regional economic variations in Germany 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
  • Freedom to Fuck Up” – Thessaly La Force interviewing Merritt Tierce about her novel Love Me Back, discussing pregnancy, abortion, and sex in fiction.
  • Reconciliation” – Monica Byrne on the need for reconciliation between the United States and Iran, and how that can begin with connection between individuals. If you’re an American and her article makes you want to visit Iran yourself, she’s also written a how-to for U.S. citizens on her blog.

Poetry

The First Twenty Books of 2014

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As previously mentioned, graduate school was hell on my reading. To get back in the groove I resolved that this year I would read at least one book a week. Twelve weeks in, I’m ahead of schedule. Here are the first twenty books I’ve read this year. (Collage above made with this online tool.)

  1. The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. This one failed to impress me, and I doubt I will read any other books in the series.
  2. Solaris: The Definitive Edition by Stanislaw Lem (audiobook). This is the new translation direct from Polish released in 2008. I’d tried to read the previous translation once, which was actually a retranslation from French, and found it unimpressive. I loved the direct translation, though, and can see why it’s held in such esteem among Lem’s works.
  3. Tuf Voyaging by George R. R. Martin. This is a reread, inspired by the book’s presence on Kevin Brockmeier’s list of his 50 favorite SFF books. I thought it delightful fun the first time, and I still feel that way about it. It’s a collection of linked short stories, but both times I’ve read it in a single sitting.
  4. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. This is really a gorgeous, ambitious book. Carmen Machado loves it, and had been recommending it for a few years. The novel’s formal conceit is that it is narrated by Death, and while this is achieved with great sensitivity and beautiful language, my own lack of affection for Cartesian dualism means I found it less affecting than I otherwise might. I suspect that’s why I merely really liked it rather than loving it.
  5. Superman/Shazam: First Thunder by Judd Winick and Joshua Middleton. I was inspired to read this by Justin Pierce, who posted to Facebook a page from it in which Superman is furious when he learns that Captain Marvel is a transformed child. That scene was probably the best thing in the book, but it was fun.
  6. The Genocides by Thomas Disch. This is another one from Kevin’s list. It’s one of the bleakest books I’ve ever fully enjoyed. Humanity is uncomplicatedly eliminated as unseen aliens turn the planet into a monoculture for a genetically engineered crop. As unremitting an apocalypse as I’ve ever read.
  7. Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. This, as is obvious if you’ve clicked the very first link in the first paragraph, is a reread. I bought a bunch of copies of the play and threw a table reading party. We all drank mulled wine and hammed it up.
  8. Options by Robert Sheckley. After Van Choojitarom challenged people to come up with a novel odder than Voyage to Arcturus (which I still need to read), I offered this as a possibility. When I was 16 it seemed to me merely a memorably enthusiastic work of metafiction. Reading it now, though, it strikes me as an absurdist take on the difficulties of the creative process. Reading it makes me feel like I do when I’m struggling at the keyboard, and yet it’s entertaining. It’s also short enough that despite the overt metafictional elements, it doesn’t wear out its welcome. Might be my favorite Sheckley now. (Note if you’re planning to give it a shot, I’m pretty sure the opening few chapters intentionally read as terribly-written. Which is to say, I think they are well written, but in intentionally bad prose.)
  9. Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke. Yet another from Kevin’s list. I read it as a kid and didn’t find it terribly impressive then, by Kevin’ and Jo Walton’s appreciation for the book convinced me to give it another chance. They were right. It’s really an excellent book, for all the reasons Jo outlines. Also, I realize I must have been under ten years old the last time I read it, because I remember thinking that if the events in the book were to happen, I would have been among the posthuman cohort.
  10. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm. I’d never read one of her novels, and this one won the Hugo award in 1977, so seemed a good place to start. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I wanted to. I liked the opening section well enough, and the writing is good throughout, but I found culture of the clone generations unconvincing.
  11. Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler. I love everything by Fowler I’ve ever read, which is several short stories and now three novels. This one is now my second favorite, behind We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, my favorite novel I read last year. Sarah Canary is lyrical and brilliant. Also, this is yet another one from Kevin’s list, which has yet to lead me astray.
  12. The Steps of the Sun by Walter Tevis. This is the last of Tevis’s science fiction novels that I hadn’t read, after reading The Man Who Fell to Earth and Mockingbird last year. I have yet to read anything by Tevis I don’t find engrossing, but this is a weird one. The opening I loved so much it seemed on pace to become a favorite, but toward the end the book takes a turn that I’m still trying to figure out my feelings toward. I still liked it, but I think less than the previous two.
  13. Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill. I’d read a few of these stories before, such as “Secretary” (the basis for the movie) and “A Romantic Weekend”(a favorite of mine), but never the whole collection. It’s good. Completely unsentimental psychological realism, full of obsessions and kinks. I’ve got another Gaitskill collection on deck for later.
  14. The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang. This was a reread that I assigned my science fiction writing class, in advance of Ted doing a Skype visit. I think this book is perfect.
  15. Hawkeye vol. 1 by Matt Fraction and David Aja. This was a gift from Matt when I visited Portland. It’s great fun, deserving of all the superlatives on the cover. Each issue is a tiny, clever action movie, the cleverest one from the point of view of a dog.
  16. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 2009 by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. After Portland I find myself on a bit of a comics kick. This is the third of the Century volumes, and I didn’t enjoy it that much. Harry Potter as the antichrist was fun enough, but at this point LoEG seems more about enacting its conceit than about telling a story. Still, there were some nice tender scenes between Orlando and Mina.
  17. Weapons of the Metabarons by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Travis Charest, and Zoran Janjetov. A fairly forgettable addendum to an unforgettable series. I bought an omnibus collection of the original Metabarons series in Portland and will probably reread it soon.
  18. The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier. Kevin’s writing is beautiful. This book is about a city populated by everyone who is dead but still remembered by someone alive, and what happens to that city when everyone on Earth starts to die.
  19. Fourth Mansions by R. A. Lafferty. I bought this book on the strength of its chapter titles, which are things like “Now I will dismember the world with my hands” and “But I eat them up, Frederico, I eat them up.” This book was…strange. Not bad, but not good either. I’m not convinced that it is about anything except itself. It’s an internally consistent system of symbolism that doesn’t necessarily have any relevance to the real world. The language was very entertaining, but it’s verbal fireworks bursting above an insubstantial landscape.
  20. Nemo: Heart of Ice by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. I liked this more than Century: 2009, because it’s more strongly narrative and because I enjoyed the H. P. Lovecraft and John Campbell references. Still a minor work, though.

Recent Writing by Friends of Mine

My friends are talented and prolific! Look at their things!

NONFICTION:

  • Luxury Shopping, From The Other Side of the Register” – In December Carmen Machado wrote for the New Yorker about what it’s like to be working retail during the busiest shopping days of the year.
  • Bummed Out and Ugly” – Alice Sola Kim with a beautiful and personal remembrance of Philip K. Dick.
  • Crossroads and Coins: A Review of Naomi Mitchison’s Travel Light” – Amal El-Mohtar writing for NPR, another quite personal piece. Having recently read the book myself, I can confirm that it is as delightful as Amal claims.
  • Scattered Leaves” – Ben Mauk writing for the New Yorker about the current practice of dismembering ancient manuscripts and selling individual pieces of them on eBay, as well as the long history of “book breaking.”
  • To Flip a Flop” – Also in the New Yorker, Elizabeth Weiss writes about the economics of the broadway show, using the example of the largely unsuccessful Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark.

FICTION:

  • The Glitch” – Rebekah Frumkin shows off her talent for claustrophobic interiority and familiarity with 64-bit Zelda games in this story at Granta.
  • The Engineers” (pdf link) – Rebecca Rukeyser with a story in the Massachusetts Review of expatriate courtship in South Korea.

Tabclosing: Historical Racism, Modern Racism, Poverty, Mindgames, and Murderers

Today’s links are a heavy bunch.

  • I Married A Jew – A 1939 article in The Atlantic in which Gertrude, a Christian women of German descent, writes at length about her “mixed race” marriage to a Jew. She’s not just using race as a metaphor; she, her husband, and their respective families view their union as a risky crossing of racial lines. While professing love for her husband, she explains how if the Jews ever really want to be accepted they need to sensibly abandon any cultural distinctions and assimilate. My friend Carmen aptly compares it to a Modern Love column, calling it “affable apologetics for an odious position, but told in a way that implies balance/consideration because of the relationship (plus ‘my Jewish husband’ in the way someone says ‘my black friend.’)” Her tone of condescending moderation leads to a surreal, inverse-Godwin’s Law moment when she gets around to sharing her views on Hitler:

But it is hard for Ben to take the long view. He looks upon Hitler as something malignantly unique, and it is no use trying to tell him that a hundred years hence the world will no more call Hitler a swine for expelling the Jews than it does Edward I of England, who did the same thing in the thirteenth century—an expulsion that remained in strict effect until the time of Cromwell, because a hundred years hence another country will be having its Jewish problem, unless…

  • ‘I Wish I Were Black’ And Other Tales of Privilege – Angela Onwauchi-Willing writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education about the growing phenomenon of white students who view being a racial minority as nothing but an unfair advantage for scholarships and admissions. This isn’t quite the same pathology of racism as the previous link. Whereas Gertrude above sees racism as inherently benign, these students presumably do view racism negatively. Certainly they are willing to inveigh against perceived racial discrimination against themselves. But they see racism as a fixed thing; both in the sense of “racism is when black people have to stand at the back of the bus,” and in the sense of “racism is not a problem anymore.” As the article points out, this blindness to one’s own privilege is, itself, a kind of privilege.
  • The Logic Of Stupid Poor People – And, of course, privilege blinds people to issues of class just as much as issues of race. Here Tressie McMillan Cottom explodes the notion that poor people who use their money to buy status symbols do so because they are vain or stupid. Rather, they are making the rational choice to assume the trappings of wealth in an attempt to be taken seriously by people who actually have it.
  • Why Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment Isn’t In My Textbook – And then we have the famous Stanford prison study, which shows that if you create a system where one group has power over another group, they will naturally turn into monsters and toadies respectively. Except, it doesn’t. Dr. Susan Krauss Whitbourne explains how the experiment was methodologically flawed in a way that trivially undermines its so-called conclusions.
  • I Met A Convicted Serial Killer, And He Made Me Feel More Loved Than Anyone Else In My Life – Which is not to say that monsters don’t exists. Here we have former Marine sniper Jay Roberts reviewing his harrowing encounter with a man he would, years later, discover was serial killer Randy Kraft. In retrospect he realizes that the techniques Kraft used on him were not dissimilar to those he was taught to use as a sniper in identifying and isolating targets. He is, decades later, still emotionally shaken by how effectively a psychopath was able to gain his complete trust. I also find this story interesting because I’d never heard of Randy Kraft before. I’ve heard of and would recognize by name maybe a dozen other American serial killers who killed fewer people, but they all preyed on women or children. It’s hard not to suspect the reason Randy Kraft doesn’t get talked about as much as, say, Ted Bundy is that his story doesn’t serve an easy narrative of the strong preying on the weak nor the heteronormativity of the armed forces.

New Writing: Ted Chiang, Ben Mauk, Carmen Machado

New things for you to read!

“Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU” by Carmen Machado

The best new thing on the internet today is this novella by Carmen Machado. I saw a draft of this story in workshop when she wrote it, and have been waiting impatiently ever since for the day when I could share my enthusiasm for it with everyone else. It’s a hypnotic and haunting look at the cultural reception of sexual violence, and structured to make reading it feel like you are on a secret Netflix binge. It’s brilliant. No familiarity with the show is required.

Read “Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU” at the American Reader.